The Filibusters by Charles John Cutcliffe Hyne (fiction novels to read txt) 📕

Briggs, of course, took the man quite earnestly. He had a faculty of doing this when he chose, and it gave him much of his power. He appreciated the fact that anyone may resent ridicule, but that many people are willing to pay in service for sympathy and appreciation; and being a wise man, he neglected no means which might tend to further his ends.

“You may rest assured, Mr. Davis,” he said, “that I shall not be forgetful in that respect. Hitherto the presidents of Sacaronduca have acted with the instincts of brigands, and their manners have been formed so as not to spoil the completeness of the part. They have been vulgar assassins and even more vulgar housekeepers. To my way of thinking these are both criminal errors in a ruler especially the latter of the two. The pomp and formalities of a court lend dignity to a State, and to neglect them is a piece of commercial fatuousness. More is done for a Government in the drawing-rooms of society than with all the rifles that were ever put into the field; and it is to help me in this respect that I have selected my officers, quite as much as for their other abilities.”

“I suppose, sir,” said Davis tentatively, ” you would hardly think it worth while to institute titles of nobility? At present, that is?”

“Why, to tell you the truth, Mr. Davis, the idea had not struck me before. But I admit that it has its good points. What do you say, Sir William?”

Carew was filling his pipe. He continued the operation as he spoke: ” Oh, as far as I’m concerned, damn titles. They don’t bring in half as much money as they help you to pay out, and they often make people stare at the precise moments when you don’t want to be looked at. But I believe some varieties of flats like wearing ‘em, and I don’t see they do any particular harm to anybody else. But I say, General, the prospect of never-ending afternoon teas isn’t quite what I look forward to for the balance of my declining years. And I don’t think I should find a succession of levees and State balls exhilarating even in Sacaronduca. I’ve got much more material ambitions. What I want to know is, where does the plunder come in? Hugh, I say, chuck me the matches. I’ve been in a state of stoney-broke ever since I couldn’t pay my tuck-shop bill at dame-school, and I don’t mind telling you (without the least ornamental trimming to the statement) that what I’m joining your racket for, is what I can make out of it. The titles, Davis may collect to his heart’s content; the honour and glory you may split amongst you; so long as I can get my cargo of dollars, I shall be entirely content. I’m not fastidious, ‘mon General.’ I’m the least careful man about my skin in all England, Fluellen not excepted; I’m not in the smallest bit squeamish about dirtying my fingers over the operation; but if I’m to turn soldier of fortune under your aegis, it is in return for a clear opportunity to loot.”

“Here,” said Coffin, ” are the matches. Light your pipe, Billy, and shut your mouth round the end of it. You are a most abominable pirate if one could believe what you say. General, don’t mind him: the creature isn’t half such a blackguard as he tries to make out.”

Briggs laughed. ” If we were entirely honest,” he said, ” wouldn’t we most of us have to confess that we were going into the business because we want to make something out of it? Some of us desire power; some excitement. Others aspire for position; others again for a money competency.” He glanced at Fluellen, and then turned his gaze rather ostentatiously away from him. “And,” he added, ” I can imagine, gentlemen, that more than one man will throw himself heart and soul into all the risks and strivings of our enterprise from no other motive than to make a series of entirely new interests, and to cut himself away from memories of unpleasant things which have gone before. So you can say we are none of us disinterested. Indeed, a man who came into an affair of this sort without some definite personal motive would be nothing short of an idiot. And,” the General concluded with a dry smile, ” I am not an idiot myself, neither do I offer employment to idiots.”

“By Jove,” said Coffin, “if this is to be a declared game, I suppose I shall have to save myself from being classed as an idiot by saying what I’m after, though on my soul I’d never thought of such a small trifle before. Better put me down for loot, too, General. Me family’s too old to take up a bran new title with a decent grace, and as for making me Governor-General of a province, or Prime Minister, or Master of the Horse, I’m afraid the regular hours wouldn’t suit at all. I like to take my occupations pretty highly spiced, and I like to take them in doses when the fancy comes upon me. So, General, dear, we’ll write it down that I’m after money. I’m not so broke as Billy here, and I seem to have worried along pretty comfortably on just double my income since I was twenty-one, and that’s eight years ago now; but if I could double what I have, why, then, I could quadruple what I spend, and have six times as high a time of it.”

The General laughed and nodded, and said he would remember, and I, sitting near him, mar- .velled within myself as to why he had made this cheery, irresponsible, whisky-drinking, sportadoring little Irishman into one of his principal officers. To my limited vision then, the man seemed a mere piece of laughing incompetence, possessed of a delicious untrustworthiness, and nothing else. But afterwards, when the fighting came, he turned out to be as clever and cunning and desperately brave an officer as any commander might wish to have, besides being a diplomatist of no mean order, and the best compounder of devilled anchovies inside the tropic of Cancer.