“And for that way of doing nothing, how is one paid?”

“One hundred guineas a year.”

“And thou wouldst trouble me for that much?”

“It is enough to live upon.”

“Like a beggar.”

“As it becomes one of my sort.”

“One hundred guineas!  It’s a bagatelle.”

“What keeps you for a minute, keeps us for a year.  That’s the advantage of the poor.”

“Thou shalt have the place.”

A week afterwards, thanks to Josiana’s exertions, thanks to the influence of Lord David Dirry-Moir, Barkilphedro—­safe thenceforward, drawn out of his precarious existence, lodged, and boarded, with a salary of a hundred guineas—­was installed at the Admiralty.

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 one thought—­to revenge himself on her.  When we add that Josiana was beautiful, great, young, rich, powerful, illustrious, while Barkilphedro was ugly, little, old, poor, dependent, obscure, he must necessarily revenge himself for all this as well.

When a man is made out of night, how is he to forgive so many beams of light?

Barkilphedro was an Irishman who had denied Ireland—­a bad species.

Barkilphedro had but one thing in his favour—­that he had a very big belly.  A big belly passes for a sign of kind-heartedness.  But his belly was but an addition to Barkilphedro’s hypocrisy; for the man was full of malice.

What was Barkilphedro’s age?  None.  The age necessary for his project of the moment.  He was old in his wrinkles and gray hairs, young in the activity of his mind.  He was active and ponderous; a sort of hippopotamus-monkey.  A royalist, certainly; a republican—­who knows? a Catholic, perhaps; a Protestant, without doubt.  For Stuart, probably; for Brunswick, evidently.  To be For is a power only on the condition of being at the same time Against.  Barkilphedro practised this wisdom.

The appointment of drawer of the bottles of the ocean was not as absurd as Barkilphedro had appeared to make out.  The complaints, which would in these times be termed declamations, of Garcia Fernandez in his “Chart-Book of the Sea,” against the robbery of jetsam, called right of wreck, and against the pillage of wreck by the inhabitants of the coast, had created a sensation in England, and had obtained for the shipwrecked this reform—­that their goods, chattels, and property, instead of being stolen 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 High Admiral; but—­and here was revealed the importance of the place asked for