Complete Works of Bram Stoker (479 page)

(Signed) Giles Armer, Master Mariner, Formerly of Whitby.”

When I came near the end, Mary, who had been looking down the paper in advance of my reading, cried out; “Giles Armer! Why, that was my father!”

“Good God!” I cried out, as I jumped to my feet.

“Yes,” she said, excitedly; “didn’t you see me sign Mary Armer at the registry? We never spoke of the name because he had a quarrel with mother and deserted her, and after seven years she married my step-father, and I was always called by his name.”

“And was he from Whitby?” I asked. I was nearly wild with excitement.

“Yes,” said Mary. “Mother was married there, and I was born there.”

I was reading over the will again. My hands were trembling so that I could hardly read. An awful thought struck me. What day did he die? Perhaps it was too late - it was now the thirtieth of October. However, we were determined to be on the safe side, and then and there Mary and I put on our hats and wraps and went to the nearest police-station.

There we learned the address of a magistrate, after we had explained to the inspector the urgency of the case.

We went to the address given, and after some delay were admitted to an interview.

The Magistrate was at first somewhat crusty at being disturbed at such an hour, for by this time it was pretty late in the evening. However, when we had explained matters to him he was greatly interested, and we went through the necessary formalities. When it was done he ordered in cake and wine, and wished us both luck. “But remember,” he said to Mary, “that as yet your possible fortune is a long way off. There may be more Giles Armers than one, and moreover there may be some difficulty in proving legally that the dead man was the same person as your father. Then you will also have to prove, in a formal way, your mother’s marriage and your own birth. This will probably involve heavy expenses, for lawyers fight hard when they are well paid. However, I do not wish to discourage you, but only to prevent false hopes; at any rate, you have done well in making your Declaration at once. So far you are on the high road to success.” So he sent us away filled with hopes as well as fears.

When we got home we set to work to look for hidden treasures in the unfinished room. I knew too well that there was nothing hidden in the rooms which were finished, for I had done the work myself, and had even stripped the walls and uncovered the floors.

It took us a couple of hours to make an accurate search, but there was absolutely no result. The late Master Mariner had made his treasury in the other house.

Next morning I went to find out from the parish registry the date of the death of Giles Armer, and to my intense relief and joy learned that it had occurred on the 30th of September, so that by our prompt action in going at once to the magistrate’s, we had, if not secured a fortune, at least, not forfeited our rights or allowed them to lapse.

The incident was a sort of good omen, and cheered us up; and we needed a little cheering, for, despite the possible good fortune, we feared we might have to contest a lawsuit, a luxury which we could not afford.

We determined to keep our own counsel for a little, and did not mention the matter to a soul.

That evening Mr. Gradder called again, and renewed his offer of taking the house off my hands. I still refused, for I did not wish him to see any difference in my demeanour. He evidently came determined to effect a surrender of the lease, and kept bidding higher and higher, till at last I thought it best to let him have his way; and so we agreed for no less a sum than a hundred pounds that I should give him immediate possession and cancel the agreement. I told him we would clear out within one hour after the money was handed to me.

Next morning at half-past nine o’clock he came with the money. I had all our effects - they were not many - packed up and taken to a new lodging, and before ten o’clock Mr. Gradder was in possession of the premises.

Whilst he was tearing down my new wall papers, and pulling out the grates, and sticking his head up the chimneys and down the water tanks in the search for more treasures, Mary and I were consulting the eminent solicitor, Mr. George, as to our method of procedure. He said he would not lose an hour, but go by the first train to Littlehampton himself to examine Mrs. Compton as to dates and places.

Mary and I went with him. In the course of the next twenty-four hours he had, by various documents and the recollections of my mother-in-law, made out a clear case, the details of which only wanted formal verification.

We all came back to London jubilant, and were engaged on a high tea when there came a loud knocking at the door. There was a noise and scuffle in the passage, and into the room rushed Mr. Gradder, covered with soot and lime dust, with hair dishevelled and eyes wild with anger, and haggard with want of sleep. He burst out at me in a torrent of invective.

“Give me back my money, you thief! You ransacked the house yourself, and have taken it all away! My money, do you hear? my money!” He grew positively speechless with rage, and almost foamed at the mouth.

I took Mary by the hand and led her up to him.

“Mr. Gradder,” I said, “let us both thank you. Only for your hurry and persistency we might have let the time lapse, and have omitted the declaration which, on the evening before last, we, or rather, she, made.

He started as though struck.

“What declaration? What do you mean?”

“The declaration made by my wife, only daughter of Giles Armer, Master Mariner, late of Whitby.”

THE RED STOCKADE

We was on the southern part of the China station, when the “George Ranger” was ordered to the Straits of Malacca, to put down the pirates that had been showing themselves of late. It was in the forties, when ships was ships, not iron-kettles full of wheels, and other devilments, and there was a chance of hand-to-hand fighting - not being blown up in an iron cellar by you don’t know who. Ships was ships in them days!

There had been a lot of throat-cutting and scuttling, for them devils stopped at nothing. Some of us had been through the straits before, when we was in the “Polly Phemus,” seventy-four, going to the China station, and although we had never come to quarters with the Malays, we had seen some of their work, and knew what kind they was. So, when we had left Singapore in the “George Ranger,” for that was our saucy, little thirty-eight-gun frigate, - the place wasn’t in them days what it is now, - many and many ‘s the yarn was told in the fo’c’sle, and on the watches, of what the yellow devils could do, and had done. Some of us took it one way, and some another, but all, save a few, wanted to get into hand-grips with the pirates, for all their kreeses, and their stinkpots, and the devil’s engines what they used. There was some that didn’t mind cold steel of an ordinary kind, and would have faced cutlasses and boarding-pikes, any day, for a holiday, but that didn’t like the idea of those knives like crooked flames, and that sliced a man in two, and hacked through the bowels of him. Naturally, we didn’t take much stock of this kind; and many’s the joke we had on them, and some of them cruel enough jokes, too.

You may be sure there was good stories, with plenty of cutting, and blood, and tortures in them, told in their watches, and nigh the whole ship’s crew was busy, day and night, remembering and inventing things that’d make them gasp and grow white. I think that, somehow, the captain and the officers must have known what was goin’ on, for there came tales from the ward-room that was worse nor any of ours. The midshipmen used to delight in them, like the ship’s boys did, and one of them, that had a kreese, used to bring it out when he could, and show how the pirates used it when they cut the hearts out of men and women, and ripped them up to the chins. It was a bit cruel, at times, on them poor, white-livered chaps, - a man can’t help his liver, I suppose, - but, anyhow, there’s no place for them in a warship, for they’re apt to do more harm by living where there’s men of all sorts, than they can do by dying. So there wasn’t any mercy for them, and the captain was worse on them than any. Captain Wynyard was him that commanded the corvette “Sentinel” on the China station, and was promoted to the “George Ranger” for cutting up a fleet of junks that was hammering at the “Rajah,” from Canton, racing for Southampton with the first of the season’s tea. He was a man, if you like, a bulldog full of hellfire, when he was on for fighting; he wouldn’t have a white liver at any price. “God hates a coward,” he said once, “and under Her Britannic Majesty I’m here to carry out God’s will. Trice him up, and give him a dozen!” At least, that’s the story they tell of him when he was round Shanghai, and one of his men had held back when the time came for boarding a fire-junk that was coming down the tide. And with that he went in, and steered her off with his own hands.

Well, the captain knew what work there was before us, and that it weren’t no time for kid gloves and hair-oil, much less a bokey in your buttonhole and a top-hat, and he didn’t mean that there should be any funk on his ship. So you take your davy that it wasn’t his fault if things was made too pleasant aboard for men what feared fallin’ into the clutches of the Malays.

Now and then he went out of his way to be nasty over such folk, and, boy or man, he never checked his tongue on a hard word when any one’s face was pale before him. There was one old chap on board that we called “Old Land’s End,” for he came from that part, and that had a boy of his on the “Billy Ruffian,” when he sailed on her, and after got lost, one night, in cutting out a Greek sloop at Navarino, in 1827. We used to chaff him when there was trouble with any of the boys, for he used to say that his boy might have been in that trouble, too. And now, when the chaff was on about bein’ afeered of the Malay’s, we used to rub it into the old man; but he would flame up, and answer us that his boy died in his duty, and that he couldn’t be afeered of nought.

One night there was a row on among the midshipmen, for they said that one of them, Tempest by name, owned up to being afraid of being kreesed. He was a rare bright little chap of about thirteen, that was always in fun and trouble of some kind; but he was soft-hearted, and sometimes the other lads would tease him. He would own up truthfully to anything he thought, or felt, and now they had drawn him to own something that none of them would - no matter how true it might be. Well, they had a rare fight, for the boy was never backward with his fists, and by accident it came to the notice of the captain. He insisted on being told what it was all about, and when young Tempest spoke out, and told him, he stamped on the deck, and called out:

“I’ll have no cowards in this ship,” and was going on, when the boy cut in:

“I’m no coward, sir; I’m a gentleman!”

“Did you say you were afraid? Answer me - yes, or no?”

“Yes, sir, I did, and it was true!  I said I feared the Malay kreeses; but I did not mean to shirk them, for all that. Henry of Navarre was afraid, but, all the same, he - “

“Henry of Navarre be damned,” shouted the captain, “and you, too! You said you were afraid, and that, let me tell you, is what we call a coward in the Queen’s navy. And if you are one, you can, at least, have the grace to keep it to yourself! No answer to me! To the masthead for the remainder of the day! I want my crew to know what to avoid, and to know it when they see it!” and he walked away, while the lad, without a word, ran up the maintop.

Some way, the men didn’t say much about this. The only one that said anything to the point was Old Land’s End, and says he:

“That may be a coward, but I’d chance it that he was a boy of mine.”

As we went up the straits and got the sun on us, and the damp heat of that kettle of a place, - Lor’ bless ye! ye steam there, all day and all night like a copper at the galley, - we began to look around for the pirates, and there wasn’t a man that got drowsy on the watch. We coasted along as we went up north, and took a look into the creeks and rivers as we went. It was up these that the Malays hid themselves; for the fevers and such that swept off their betters like flies, didn’t seem to have any effect on them. There was pretty bad bits, I tell you, up some of them rivers through the mango groves, where the marshes spread away, mile after mile, as far as you could see, and where every thing that is noxious, both beast, and bird, and fish, and crawling thing, and insect, and tree, and bush, and flower, and creeper, is most at home.

But the pirate ships kept ahead of us; or, if they came south again, passed us by in the night, and so we ran up till about the middle of the peninsula, where the worst of the piracies had happened. There we got up as well as we could to look like a ship in distress; and, sure enough, we deceived the beggars, for two of them came out one early dawn and began to attack us. They was ugly looking craft, too - long, low hull and lateen - sails, and a double crew twice told in every one of them.

But if the crafts was ugly the men was worse, for uglier devils I never saw. Swarthy, yellow chaps, some of them, and some with shaven crowns and white eyeballs, and others as black as your shoe, with one or two white men, more shame, among them, but all carrying kreeses as long as your arm, and pistols in their belts.

They didn’t get much change from us, I tell you. We let them get close, and then gave them a broadside that swept their decks like a hail-storm; but we was unlucky that we didn’t grapple them, for they managed to shift off and ran for it. Our boats was out quick, but we daren’t follow them where they ran into a wide creek, with mango swamps on each side as far as the eye could reach. The boat came back after a bit and reported that they had run up the river which was deep enough but with a winding channel between great mud-banks, where alligators lay in hundreds. There seemed some sort of fort where the river narrowed, and the pirates ran in behind it and disappeared up the bend of the river.

Then the preparations began. We knew that we had got two craft, at any rate, caged in the river, and there was every chance that we had found their lair. Our captain wasn’t one that let things go asleep, and by daylight the next morning we was ready for an attack. The pinnace and four other boats started out under the first lieutenant to prospect, and the rest that was left on board waited, as well as they could, till we came back.