Stephen looked at him very attentively, but said nothing.
‘You knew I was a Catholic?’ said James.
‘No,’ said Stephen. ‘I was aware that some of your family were, of course; but as for you. .
. Do you not find it puts you in a difficult position?’ he asked, hesitantly. ‘With that oath. . .
the penal laws. . .
‘Not in the least,’ said James. ‘My mind is perfectly at ease, as far as that is concerned.’
‘That is what you think, my poor friend,’ said Stephen to himself, pouring out another glass to hide his expression.
For a moment it seemed that James Dillon might take this further, but he did not: some delicate balance changed, and now the talk ran on and on to friends they had shared and to delightful days they had spent together in what seemed such a very distant past. How many people they had known! How valuable, or amusing, or respectable some of them had been!
They talked their second bottle dry, and James went up on deck again.
He came down in half an hour, and as he stepped into the cabin he said, as though he were catching straight on to an interrupted conversation, ‘And then, of course, there is that whole question of promotion. I will tell you, just for your secret ear alone and although it sounds odious, that I thought I should be given a command after that affair in the Dart; and being passed over does rankle cruelly.’ He paused, and then asked, ‘Who was it who was said to have earned more by his prick than his practice?’
‘Selden. But in this instance I conceive the common gossip is altogether out; as I understand it, this was the ordinary operation of interest. Mark you, I make no claim of outstanding chastity – I merely say that in Jack Aubrey’s case the consideration is irrelevant.’
‘Well, be that as it may, I look for promotion: like every other sailor I value it very highly, so I tell you in all simplicity; and being under a prize-hunting captain is not the quickest path to it.’
‘Well, I know nothing of nautical affairs: but I wonder, I wonder, James, whether it is not too easy for a rich man to despise money – to mistake the real motives. . . To pay too much attention to mere words, and -,
‘Surely to God you would never call me rich?’
‘I have ridden over your land.’
‘It’s three-quarters of it mountain, and one quarter bog; and even if they were to pay their rent for the rest it would only be a few hundred a year – barely a thousand.’
‘My heart bleeds for you. I have never yet known a man admit that he was either rich or asleep: perhaps the poor man and the wakeful man have some great moral advantage.
How does it arise? But to return – surely he is as brave a commander as you could wish, and as likely as any man to lead you to glorious and remarkable actions?’
‘Would you guarantee his courage?’
‘So here is the true gravamen at last,’ thought Stephen,
and he said, ‘I would not; I do not know him well enough. But I should be astonished, astonished, if he were to prove shy. What makes you think he is?’
• ‘I do not say he is. I should be very sorry to say anything against any man’s courage without proof. But we should have had that galley. In another twenty minutes we could have boarded and carried her.’
‘Oh? I know nothing of these things, and I was downstairs at the time; but I understood that the only prudent thing to do was to turn about, to protect the rest of the convoy.’
‘Prudence is a great virtue, of course,’ said James.
‘Well. And promotion means a great deal to you, so?’
‘Of course it does. There never was an officer worth a farthing that did not long to succeed and hoist his flag at last. But I can see in your eye that you think me inconsistent.
Understand my position: I want no republic – I stand by settled, established institutions, and by authority so long as it is not tyranny. All I ask is an independent parliament that represents the responsible men of the kingdom and not merely a squalid parcel of place-men and place-seekers. Given that, I am perfectly happy with the English connexion, perfectly happy with the two kingdoms: I can drink the loyal toast without choking, I do assure you.’
‘Why are you putting out the lamp?’
James smiled. ‘It is dawn,’ he said, nodding towards the grey, severe light in the cabin window. ‘Shall we go on deck? We may have raised the high land of Minora by now, or we shall very soon; and I think I can promise you some of those birds the sailors call shearwaters if we lay her in towards the cliff of Fornells.’
Yet with one foot on the companion-ladder he turned and looked into Stephen’s face. ‘I cannot tell what possessed me to speak so rancorously,’ he said, passing his hand over his forehead and looking both unhappy and bewildered. ‘I do not think I have ever done so
before. Have not expressed myself well – clumsy, inaccurate, not what I meant nor what I meant to say. We understood one another better before ever I opened my mouth.’
Chapter Six
Mr Florey the surgeon was a bachelor; he had a large house high up by Santa Maria’s, and with the broad, easy conscience of an unmarried man he invited Dr Maturin to stay whenever the Sophie should come in for stores or repairs, putting a room at his disposal for his baggage and his collections – a room that already housed the hortus siccus that Mr Cleghorn, surgeon-major to the garrison for close on thirty years, had gathered in countless dusty volumes.
It was an enchanting house for meditation, backing on to the very top of Mahon’s cliff and overhanging the merchants’ quay at a dizzy height – so high that the noise and business of the harbour was impersonal, no more than an accompaniment to thought. Stephen’s room was at the back, on this cool northern side looking over the water; and he sat there just inside the open window with his feet in a basin of water, writing his diary while the swifts (common, pallid and Alpine) raced shrieking through the torrid, quivering air between him and the Sophie, a toy-like object far down on the other side of the harbour, tied up to the victualling-wharf.
‘So James Dillon is a Catholic,’ he wrote in his minute and secret shorthand. ‘He used not to be. That is to say, he was not a Catholic in the sense that it would have made any marked difference to his behaviour, or have rendered the taking of an oath intolerably painful. He was not in any way a religious man. Has there been some conversion, some Loyolan change? I hope not. How many crypto-Catholics are there in the service? I should like to ask him; but that would be indiscreet. I remember Colonel Despard’s telling me that in England Bishop Challoner gave a dozen dispensations a year for the occasional taking of the
sacrament according to the Anglican rite. Colonel T- , of the Gordon riots, was a Catholic.
Did Despard’s remark refer only to the army? I never thought to ask him at the time.
Quaere: is this the cause for James Dillon’s agitated state of mind? Yes, I think so. Some strong pressure is certainly at work. What is more, it appears to me that this is a critical time for him, a lesser climacteric – a time that will settle
him in that particular course he will never leave again, but will persevere in for the rest of his life. It has often seemed to me that towards this period (in which we all three lie, more or less) men strike out their permanent characters; or have those characters struck into them. Merriment, roaring high spirits before this: then some chance concatenation, or some hidden predilection (or rather inherent bias) working through, and the man is in the road he cannot leave but must go on, making it deeper and deeper (a groove, or channel),
until he is lost in his mere character – persona – no longer human, but an accretion of qualities belonging to this character. James Dillon was a delightful being. Now he is closing in. It is odd – will I say heart-breaking? – how cheerfulness goes: gaiety of mind, natural free-springing joy. Authority is its great enemy – the assumption of authority. I know few men over fifty that seem to me entirely human: virtually none who has long exercised authority. The senior post-captains here; Admiral Warne. Shrivelled men (shrivelled
in essence: not, alas, in belly). Pomp, an unwholesome diet, a cause of choler, a pleasure paid too late and at too high a price, like lying with a peppered paramour. Yet Ld Nelson, by Jack Aubrey’s account, is as direct and unaffected and amiable a man as could be wished. So, indeed, in most ways is JA himself; though a certain careless arrogancy of power