“Land and beasts!  They sound like blessed things.  When next I go to church, I shall know what old Adam felt.  Go along, sir.  I shall break nothing in the house.”

“You won’t go, Jonathan?” begged the trembling spinster.

“Give him some of your tea, and strong, and as much of it as he can take—­he wants bringing down,” was Jonathan’s answer; and casting a glance at one of the framed letters, he strode through the doorway, and Aunt Anne was alone with the flushed face and hurried eyes of her nephew, who was to her little better than a demon in the flesh.  But there was a Bible in the room.

An hour later, Robert was mounted and riding to the meet of hounds.

CHAPTER XVIII

A single night at the Pilot Inn had given life and vigour to Robert’s old reputation in Warbeach village, as the stoutest of drinkers and dear rascals throughout a sailor-breeding district, where Dibdin was still thundered in the ale-house, and manhood in a great degree measured by the capacity to take liquor on board, as a ship takes ballast.  There was a profound affectation of deploring the sad fact that he drank as hard as ever, among the men, and genuine pity expressed for him by the women of Warbeach; but his fame was fresh again.  As the Spring brings back its flowers, Robert’s presence revived his youthful deeds.  There had not been a boxer in the neighbourhood like Robert Eccles, nor such a champion in all games, nor, when he set himself to it, such an invincible drinker.  It was he who thrashed the brute, Nic Sedgett, for stabbing with his clasp-knife Harry Boulby, son of the landlady of the Pilot Inn; thrashed him publicly, to the comfort of all Warbeach.  He had rescued old Dame Garble from her burning cottage, and made his father house the old creature, and worked at farming, though he hated it, to pay for her subsistence.  He vindicated the honour of Warbeach by drinking a match against a Yorkshire skipper till four o’clock in the morning, when it was a gallant sight, my boys, to see Hampshire steadying the defeated North-countryman on his astonished zigzag to his flattish-bottomed billyboy, all in the cheery sunrise on the river—­yo-ho! ahoy!

Glorious Robert had tried, first the sea, and then soldiering.  Now let us hope he’ll settle to farming, and follow his rare old father’s ways, and be back among his own people for good.  So chimed the younger ones, and many of the elder.

Danish blood had settled round Warbeach.  To be a really popular hero anywhere in Britain, a lad must still, I fear, have something of a Scandinavian gullet; and if, in addition to his being a powerful drinker, he is pleasant in his cups, and can sing, and forgive, be freehanded, and roll out the grand risky phrases of a fired brain, he stamps himself, in the apprehension of his associates, a king.