CHAPTER VII.
BARKILPHEDRO GNAWS HIS WAY.
There is one thing the most pressing of all: to be ungrateful.
Barkilphedro was not wanting therein.
Having received so many benefits from Josiana, he had naturally but onethought--to revenge himself on her. When we add that Josiana wasbeautiful, great, young, rich, powerful, illustrious, while Barkilphedrowas ugly, little, old, poor, dependent, obscure, he must necessarilyrevenge himself for all this as well.
When a man is made out of night, how is he to forgive so many beams oflight?
Barkilphedro was an Irishman who had denied Ireland--a bad species.
Barkilphedro had but one thing in his favour--that he had a very bigbelly. A big belly passes for a sign of kind-heartedness. But his bellywas but an addition to Barkilphedro's hypocrisy; for the man was full ofmalice.
What was Barkilphedro's age? None. The age necessary for his project ofthe moment. He was old in his wrinkles and gray hairs, young in theactivity of his mind. He was active and ponderous; a sort ofhippopotamus-monkey. A royalist, certainly; a republican--who knows? aCatholic, perhaps; a Protestant, without doubt. For Stuart, probably;for Brunswick, evidently. To be For is a power only on the condition ofbeing at the same time Against. Barkilphedro practised this wisdom.
The appointment of drawer of the bottles of the ocean was not as absurdas Barkilphedro had appeared to make out. The complaints, which would inthese times be termed declamations, of Garcia Fernandez in his"Chart-Book of the Sea," against the robbery of jetsam, called right ofwreck, and against the pillage of wreck by the inhabitants of the coast,had created a sensation in England, and had obtained for the shipwreckedthis reform--that their goods, chattels, and property, instead of beingstolen by the country-people, were confiscated by the Lord High Admiral.All the _debris_ of the sea cast upon the English shore--merchandise,broken hulls of ships, bales, chests, etc.--belonged to the Lord HighAdmiral; but--and here was revealed the importance of the place askedfor by Barkilphedro--the floating receptacles containing messages anddeclarations awakened particularly the attention of the Admiralty.Shipwrecks are one of England's gravest cares. Navigation being herlife, shipwreck is her anxiety. England is kept in perpetual care by thesea. The little glass bottle thrown to the waves by the doomed ship,contains final intelligence, precious from every point of view.Intelligence concerning the ship, intelligence concerning the crew,intelligence concerning the place, the time, the manner of loss,intelligence concerning the winds which have broken up the vessel,intelligence concerning the currents which bore the floating flaskashore. The situation filled by Barkilphedro has been abolished morethan a century, but it had its real utility. The last holder was WilliamHussey, of Doddington, in Lincolnshire. The man who held it was a sortof guardian of the things of the sea. All the closed and sealed-upvessels, bottles, flasks, jars, thrown upon the English coast by thetide were brought to him. He alone had the right to open them; he wasfirst in the secrets of their contents; he put them in order, andticketed them with his signature. The expression "_loger un papier augreffe_," still used in the Channel Islands, is thence derived. However,one precaution was certainly taken. Not one of these bottles could beunsealed except in the presence of two jurors of the Admiralty sworn tosecrecy, who signed, conjointly with the holder of the jetsam office,the official report of the opening. But these jurors being held tosecrecy, there resulted for Barkilphedro a certain discretionarylatitude; it depended upon him, to a certain extent, to suppress a factor bring it to light.
These fragile floating messages were far from being what Barkilphedrohad told Josiana, rare and insignificant. Some times they reached landwith little delay; at others, after many years. That depended on thewinds and the currents. The fashion of casting bottles on the surface ofthe sea has somewhat passed away, like that of vowing offerings, but inthose religious times, those who were about to die were glad thus tosend their last thought to God and to men, and at times these messagesfrom the sea were plentiful at the Admiralty. A parchment preserved inthe hall at Audlyene (ancient spelling), with notes by the Earl ofSuffolk, Grand Treasurer of England under James I., bears witness thatin the one year, 1615, fifty-two flasks, bladders, and tarred vessels,containing mention of sinking ships, were brought and registered in therecords of the Lord High Admiral.
Court appointments are the drop of oil in the widow's cruse, they everincrease. Thus it is that the porter has become chancellor, and thegroom, constable. The special officer charged with the appointmentdesired and obtained by Barkilphedro was invariably a confidential man.Elizabeth had wished that it should be so. At court, to speak ofconfidence is to speak of intrigue, and to speak of intrigue is to speakof advancement. This functionary had come to be a personage of someconsideration. He was a clerk, and ranked directly after the two groomsof the almonry. He had the right of entrance into the palace, but wemust add, what was called the humble entrance--_humilis introitus_--andeven into the bed-chamber. For it was the custom that he should informthe monarch, on occasions of sufficient importance, of the objectsfound, which were often very curious: the wills of men in despair,farewells cast to fatherland, revelations of falsified logs, bills oflading, and crimes committed at sea, legacies to the crown, etc., thathe should maintain his records in communication with the court, andshould account, from time to time, to the king or queen, concerning theopening of these ill-omened bottles. It was the black cabinet of theocean.
Elizabeth, who was always glad of an opportunity of speaking Latin, usedto ask Tonfield, of Coley in Berkshire, jetsam officer of her day, whenhe brought her one of these papers cast up by the sea, "Quid mihiscribit Neptunus?" (What does Neptune write me?)
The way had been eaten, the insect had succeeded. Barkilphedroapproached the queen.
This was all he wanted.
To make his fortune?
No.
To unmake that of others?
A greater happiness.
To hurt is to enjoy.
To have within one the desire of injuring, vague but implacable, andnever to lose sight of it, is not given to all.
Barkilphedro possessed that fixity of intention.
As the bulldog holds on with his jaws, so did his thought.
To feel himself inexorable gave him a depth of gloomy satisfaction. Aslong as he had a prey under his teeth, or in his soul, a certainty ofevil-doing, he wanted nothing.
He was happy, shivering in the cold which his neighbour was suffering.To be malignant is an opulence. Such a man is believed to be poor, and,in truth, is so; but he has all his riches in malice, and prefers havingthem so. Everything is in what contents one. To do a bad turn, which isthe same as a good turn, is better than money. Bad for him who endures,good for him who does it. Catesby, the colleague of Guy Fawkes, in thePopish powder plot, said: "To see Parliament blown upside down, Iwouldn't miss it for a million sterling."
What was Barkilphedro? That meanest and most terrible of things--anenvious man.
Envy is a thing ever easily placed at court.
Courts abound in impertinent people, in idlers, in rich loungershungering for gossip, in those who seek for needles in trusses of hay,in triflers, in banterers bantered, in witty ninnies, who cannot dowithout converse with an envious man.
What a refreshing thing is the evil spoken to you of others.
Envy is good stuff to make a spy. There is a profound analogy betweenthat natural passion, envy, and that social function, espionage. The spyhunts on others' account, like the dog. The envious man hunts on hisown, like the cat.
A fierce Myself, such is the envious man.
He had other qualities. Barkilphedro was discreet, secret, concrete. Hekept in everything and racked himself with his hate. Enormous basenessimplies enormous vanity. He was liked by those whom he amused, and hatedby all others; but he felt that he was disdained by those who hatedhim, and despised by those who liked him. He restrained himself. Allhis gall simmered noiselessly in his hostile resignation. He wasindign
ant, as if rogues had the right to be so. He was the furies'silent prey. To swallow everything was his talent. There were deafwraths within him, frenzies of interior rage, black and brooding flamesunseen; he was a _smoke-consuming_ man of passion. The surface wassmiling. He was kind, prompt, easy, amiable, obliging. Never mind towhom, never mind where, he bowed. For a breath of wind he inclined tothe earth. What a source of fortune to have a reed for a spine! Suchconcealed and venomous beings are not so rare as is believed. We livesurrounded by ill-omened crawling things. Wherefore the malevolent? Akeen question! The dreamer constantly proposes it to himself, and thethinker never resolves it. Hence the sad eye of the philosophers everfixed upon that mountain of darkness which is destiny, and from the topof which the colossal spectre of evil casts handfuls of serpents overthe earth.
Barkilphedro's body was obese and his face lean. A fat bust and a bonycountenance. His nails were channelled and short, his fingers knotted,his thumbs flat, his hair coarse, his temples wide apart, and hisforehead a murderer's, broad and low. The littleness of his eye washidden under his bushy eyebrows. His nose, long, sharp, and flabby,nearly met his mouth. Barkilphedro, properly attired, as an emperor,would have somewhat resembled Domitian. His face of muddy yellow mighthave been modelled in slimy paste--his immovable cheeks were like putty;he had all kinds of ugly refractory wrinkles; the angle of his jaw wasmassive, his chin heavy, his ear underbred. In repose, and seen inprofile, his upper lip was raised at an acute angle, showing two teeth.Those teeth seemed to look at you. The teeth can look, just as the eyecan bite.
Patience, temperance, continence, reserve, self-control, amenity,deference, gentleness, politeness, sobriety, chastity, completed andfinished Barkilphedro. He culumniated those virtues by their possession.
In a short time Barkilphedro took a foothold at court.