The E. Nesbit Megapack: 26 Classic Novels and Stories (188 page)

THE SMUGGLER’S REVENGE

The days went on and Miss Sandal did not return. We went on being very sorry about Miss Sandal being so poor, and it was not our fault that when we tried to let the house in lodgings, the first lodger proved to be a lunatic of the deepest dye. Miss Sandal must have been a fairly decent sort, because she seems not to have written to Father about it. At any rate he didn’t give it us in any of our letters, about our good intentions and their ending in a maniac.

Oswald does not like giving up a thing just because it has once been muffed. The muffage of a plan is a thing that often happens at first to heroes—like Bruce and the spider, and other great characters. Beside, grown-ups always say—

“If at first you don’t succeed,

Try, try, try again!”

And if this is the rule for Euclid and rule-of-three and all the things you would rather not do, think how much more it must be the rule when what you are after is your own idea, and not just the rotten notion of that beast Euclid, or the unknown but equally unnecessary author who composed the multiplication table. So we often talked about what we could do to make Miss Sandal rich. It gave us something to jaw about when we happened to want to sit down for a bit, in between all the glorious wet sandy games that happen by the sea.

Of course if we wanted real improving conversation we used to go up to the boat-house and talk to the coastguards. I do think coastguards are A1. They are just the same as sailors, having been so in their youth, and you can get at them to talk to, which is not the case with sailors who are at sea (or even in harbours) on ships. Even if you had the luck to get on to a man-of-war, you would very likely not be able to climb to the top-gallants to talk to the man there. Though in books the young hero always seems able to climb to the mast-head the moment he is told to. The coastguards told us tales of Southern ports, and of shipwrecks, and officers they had not cottoned to, and messmates that they had, but when we asked them about smuggling they said there wasn’t any to speak of nowadays.

“I expect they think they oughtn’t to talk about such dark crimes before innocent kids like us,” said Dicky afterwards, and he grinned as he said it.

“Yes,” said Alice; “they don’t know how much we know about smugglers, and bandits, and highwaymen, and burglars, and coiners,” and she sighed, and we all felt sad to think that we had not now any chance to play at being these things.

“We might play smugglers,” said Oswald.

But he did not speak hopefully. The worst of growing up is that you seem to want more and more to have a bit of the real thing in your games. Oswald could not now be content to play at bandits and just capture Albert next door, as once, in happier days, he was pleased and proud to do.

It was not a coastguard that told us about the smugglers. It was a very old man that we met two or three miles along the beach. He was leaning against a boat that was wrong way up on the shingle, and smoking the strongest tobacco Oswald’s young nose has ever met. I think it must have been Black Jack. We said, “How do you do?” and Alice said, “Do you mind if we sit down near you?”

“Not me,” replied the aged seafarer. We could see directly that he was this by his jersey and his sea-boots.

The girls sat down on the beach, but we boys leaned against the boat like the seafaring one. We hoped he would join in conversation, but at first he seemed too proud. And there was something dignified about him, bearded and like a Viking, that made it hard for us to begin.

At last he took his pipe out of his mouth and said—

“Here’s a precious Quakers’ meeting! You didn’t set down here just for to look at me?”

“I’m sure you look very nice,” Dora said.

“Same to you, miss, I’m sure,” was the polite reply.

“We want to talk to you awfully,” said Alice, “if you don’t mind?”

“Talk away,” said he.

And then, as so often happens, no one could think of anything to say.

Suddenly Noël said, “I think you look nice too, but I think you look as though you had a secret history. Have you?”

“Not me,” replied the Viking-looking stranger. “I ain’t got no history, nor jog-graphy neither. They didn’t give us that much schooling when I was a lad.”

“Oh!” replied Noël; “but what I really meant was, were you ever a pirate or anything?”

“Never in all my born,” replied the stranger, now thoroughly roused; “I’d scorn the haction. I was in the navy, I was, till I lost the sight of my eye, looking too close at gunpowder. Pirates is snakes, and they ought to be killed as such.”

We felt rather sorry, for though of course it is very wrong to be a pirate, it is very interesting too. Things are often like this. That is one of the reasons why it is so hard to be truly good.

Dora was the only one who was pleased. She said—

“Yes, pirates are very wrong. And so are highwaymen and smugglers.”

“I don’t know about highwaymen,” the old man replied; “they went out afore my time, worse luck; but my father’s great-uncle by the mother’s side, he see one hanged once. A fine upstanding fellow he was, and made a speech while they was a-fitting of the rope. All the women was snivelling and sniffing and throwing bokays at him.”

“Did any of the bouquets reach him?” asked the interested Alice.

“Not likely,” said the old man. “Women can’t never shy straight. But I shouldn’t wonder but what them posies heartened the chap up a bit. An afterwards they was all a-fightin’ to get a bit of the rope he was hung with, for luck.”

“Do tell us some more about him,” said all of us but Dora.

“I don’t know no more about him. He was just hung—that’s all. They was precious fond o’ hangin’ in them old far-away times.”

“Did you ever know a smuggler?” asked H.O.—“to speak to, I mean?”

“Ah, that’s tellings,” said the old man, and he winked at us all.

So then we instantly knew that the coastguards had been mistaken when they said there were no more smugglers now, and that this brave old man would not betray his comrades, even to friendly strangers like us. But of course he could not know exactly how friendly we were. So we told him.

Oswald said—

“We love smugglers. We wouldn’t even tell a word about it if you would only tell us.”

“There used to be lots of smuggling on these here coasts when my father was a boy,” he said; “my own father’s cousin, his father took to the smuggling, and he was a doin’ so well at it, that what does he do, but goes and gets married, and the Preventives they goes and nabs him on his wedding-day, and walks him straight off from the church door, and claps him in Dover Jail.”

“Oh, his poor wife,” said Alice, “whatever did she do?”

“She didn’t do nothing,” said the old man. “It’s a woman’s place not to do nothing till she’s told to. He’d done so well at the smuggling, he’d saved enough by his honest toil to take a little public. So she sets there awaitin’ and attendin’ to customers—for well she knowed him, as he wasn’t the chap to let a bit of a jail stand in the way of his station in life. Well, it was three weeks to a day after the wedding, there comes a dusty chap to the ‘Peal of Bells’ door. That was the sign over the public, you understand.”

We said we did, and breathlessly added, “Go on!”

“A dusty chap he was; got a beard and a patch over one eye, and he come of a afternoon when there was no one about the place but her.

“‘Hullo, missis,’ says he; ‘got a room for a quiet chap?’

“‘I don’t take in no men-folks,’ says she; ‘can’t be bothered with ’em.’

“‘You’ll be bothered with me, if I’m not mistaken,’ says he.

“‘Bothered if I will,’ says she.

“‘Bothered if you won’t,’ says he, and with that he ups with his hand and off comes the black patch, and he pulls off the beard and gives her a kiss and a smack on the shoulder. She always said she nearly died when she see it was her new-made bridegroom under the beard.

“So she took her own man in as a lodger, and he went to work up at Upton’s Farm with his beard on, and of nights he kept up the smuggling business. And for a year or more no one knowd as it was him. But they got him at last.”

“What became of him?” We all asked it.

“He’s dead,” said the old man. “But, Lord love you, so’s everybody as lived in them far-off old ancient days—all dead—Preventives too—and smugglers and gentry: all gone under the daisies.”

We felt quite sad. Oswald hastily asked if there wasn’t any smuggling now.

“Not hereabouts,” the old man answered, rather quickly for him. “Don’t you go for to think it. But I did know a young chap—quite young he is with blue eyes—up Sunderland way it was. He’d got a goodish bit o’ baccy and stuff done up in a ole shirt. And as he was a-goin’ up off of the beach a coastguard jumps out at him, and he says to himself, ‘All u. p. this time,’ says he. But out loud he says, ‘Hullo, Jack, that you? I thought you was a tramp,’ says he.

“‘What you got in that bundle?’ says the coastguard.

“‘My washing,’ says he, ‘and a couple pairs of old boots.’

“Then the coastguard he says, ‘Shall I give you a lift with it?’ thinking in himself the other chap wouldn’t part if it was anything it oughtn’t to be. But that young chap was too sharp. He says to himself, ‘If I don’t he’ll nail me, and if I do—well, there’s just a chance.’

“So he hands over the bundle, and the coastguard he thinks it must be all right, and he carries it all the way up to his mother’s for him, feeling sorry for the mean suspicions he’d had about the poor old chap. But that didn’t happen near here. No, no.”

I think Dora was going to say, “Old chap—but I thought he was young with blue eyes?” but just at that minute a coastguard came along and ordered us quite harshly not to lean on the boat. He was quite disagreeable about it—how different from our own coastguards! He was from a different station to theirs. The old man got off very slowly. And all the time he was arranging his long legs so as to stand on them, the coastguard went on being disagreeable as hard as he could, in a loud voice.

When our old man had told the coastguard that no one ever lost anything by keeping a civil tongue in his head, we all went away feeling very angry.

Alice took the old man’s hand as we went back to the village, and asked him why the coastguard was so horrid.

“They gets notions into their heads,” replied the old man; “the most innocentest people they comes to think things about. It’s along of there being no smuggling in these ere parts now. The coastguards ain’t got nothing to do except think things about honest people.”

We parted from the old man very warmly, all shaking hands. He lives at a cottage not quite in the village, and keeps pigs. We did not say goodbye till we had seen all the pigs.

I daresay we should not have gone on disliking that disagreeable coastguard so much if he had not come along one day when we were talking to our own coastguards, and asked why they allowed a pack of young shavers in the boat-house. We went away in silent dignity, but we did not forget, and when we were in bed that night Oswald said—

“Don’t you think it would be a good thing if the coastguards had something to do?”

Dicky yawned and said he didn’t know.

“I should like to be a smuggler,” said Oswald. “Oh, yes, go to sleep if you like; but I’ve got an idea, and if you’d rather be out of it I’ll have Alice instead.”

“Fire away!” said Dicky, now full of attention, and leaning on his elbow.

“Well, then,” said Oswald, “I think we might be smugglers.”

“We’ve played all those things so jolly often,” said Dicky.

“But I don’t mean play,” said Oswald. “I mean the real thing. Of course we should have to begin in quite a small way. But we should get on in time. And we might make quite a lot for poor Miss Sandal.”

“Things that you smuggle are expensive,” said Dicky.

“Well, we’ve got the chink the Indian uncle sent us on Saturday. I’m certain we could do it. We’d get some one to take us out at night in one of the fishing-boats—just tear across to France and buy a keg or a bale or something, and rush back.”

“Yes, and get nabbed and put in prison. Not me,” said Dicky. “Besides, who’d take us?”

“That old Viking man would,” said Oswald; “but of course, if you funk it!”

“I don’t funk anything,” said Dicky, “bar making an ape of myself. Keep your hair on, Oswald. Look here. Suppose we get a keg with nothing in it—or just water. We should have all the fun, and if we were collared we should have the laugh of that coastguard brute.”

Oswald agreed, but he made it a condition that we should call it the keg of brandy, whatever was in it, and Dicky consented.

Smuggling is a manly sport, and girls are not fitted for it by nature. At least Dora is not; and if we had told Alice she would have insisted on dressing as a boy and going too, and we knew Father would not like this. And we thought Noël and H.O. were too young to be smugglers with any hope of success. So Dicky and I kept the idea to ourselves.

We went to see the Viking man the next day. It took us some time to make him understand what we wanted, but when he did understand he slapped his leg many times, and very hard, and declared that we were chips of the old block.

“But I can’t go for to let you,” he said; “if you was nailed it’s the stone jug, bless your hearts.”

So then we explained about the keg really having only water in, and he slapped his leg again harder than ever, so that it would really have been painful to any but the hardened leg of an old sea-dog. But the water made his refusals weaker, and at last he said—

“Well, see here, Benenden, him as owns the Mary Sarah, he’s often took out a youngster or two for the night’s fishing, when their pa’s and ma’s hadn’t no objection. You write your pa, and ask if you mayn’t go for the night’s fishing, or you get Mr. Charteris to write. He knows it’s all right, and often done by visitors’ kids, if boys. And if your pa says yes, I’ll make it all right with Benenden. But mind, it’s just a night’s fishing. No need to name no kegs. That’s just betwixt ourselves.”

So we did exactly as he said. Mr. Charteris is the clergyman. He was quite nice about it, and wrote for us, and Father said “Yes, but be very careful, and don’t take the girls or the little ones.”

We showed the girls the letter, and that removed the trifling ill-feeling that had grown up through Dick and me having so much secret talk about kegs and not telling the others what was up.

Of course we never breathed a word about kegs in public, and only to each other in bated breaths.

What Father said about not taking the girls or the little ones of course settled any wild ideas Alice might have had of going as a cabin-girl.

The old Viking man, now completely interested in our scheme, laid all the plans in the deepest-laid way you can think. He chose a very dark night—fortunately there was one just coming on. He chose the right time of the tide for starting, and just in the greyness of the evening when the sun is gone down, and the sea somehow looks wetter than at any other time, we put on our thick undershirts, and then our thickest suits and football jerseys over everything, because we had been told it would be very cold. Then we said goodbye to our sisters and the little ones, and it was exactly like a picture of the “Tar’s Farewell,” because we had bundles, with things to eat tied up in blue checked handkerchiefs, and we said goodbye to them at the gate, and they would kiss us.

Dora said, “Goodbye, I know you’ll be drowned. I hope you’ll enjoy yourselves, I’m sure!”