Even the half-pay officer, so long the hero of the club,
was soon silenced by him; and the quiet burghers stared with wonder at
seeing their inflammable man of war so readily and quietly
extinguished.
And then the tales that he would tell were enough to make a peaceable
man's hair stand on end. There was not a sea fight, or marauding or
free-booting adventure that had happened within the last twenty years
but he seemed perfectly versed in it. He delighted to talk of the
exploits of the buccaneers in the West-Indies and on the Spanish Main.
How his eyes would glisten as he described the waylaying of treasure
ships, the desperate fights, yard arm and yard arm - broadside and broad
side - the boarding and capturing of large Spanish galleons! with what
chuckling relish would he describe the descent upon some rich Spanish
colony; the rifling of a church; the sacking of a convent! You would
have thought you heard some gormandizer dilating upon the roasting a
savory goose at Michaelmas as he described the roasting of some Spanish
Don to make him discover his treasure - a detail given with a minuteness
that made every rich old burgher present turn uncomfortably in his
chair. All this would be told with infinite glee, as if he considered
it an excellent joke; and then he would give such a tyrannical leer in
the face of his next neighbor, that the poor man would be fain to laugh
out of sheer faint-heartedness. If any one, however, pretended to
contradict him in any of his stories he was on fire in an instant. His
very cocked hat assumed a momentary fierceness, and seemed to resent
the contradiction. - "How the devil should you know as well as I! I tell
you it was as I say!" and he would at the same time let slip a
broadside of thundering oaths and tremendous sea phrases, such as had
never been heard before within those peaceful walls.
Indeed, the worthy burghers began to surmise that he knew more of these
stories than mere hearsay. Day after day their conjectures concerning
him grew more and more wild and fearful. The strangeness of his
manners, the mystery that surrounded him, all made him something
incomprehensible in their eyes. He was a kind of monster of the deep to
them - he was a merman - he was behemoth - he was leviathan - in short,
they knew not what he was.
The domineering spirit of this boisterous sea urchin at length grew
quite intolerable. He was no respecter of persons; he contradicted the
richest burghers without hesitation; he took possession of the sacred
elbow chair, which time out of mind had been the seat of sovereignty of
the illustrious Ramm Rapelye.
