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When the election-day came round, however, I found that by some accident there was only one Frederic Ingham's name on the voting-list; and, as I was quite busy that day in writing some foreign letters to Halle, I thought I would forego my privilege of suffrage, and stay quietly at home, telling Dennis that he might use the record on the voting-list and vote.
The next night we were at Ingham's. He unlocked a ravishing old black mahogany secretary he has, and produced a pile of parchment-covered books of different sizes, which were diaries of old Captain Heddart's.
Then there was Mrs. Merriam's boarding-school. If you will read the chapter on travelling you will find about one of the vacations of her girls. Mrs. Merriam was one of Mr. Ingham's old friends, and he is a man with whom I have had a great deal to do. Mrs. Merriam opened a school for twelve girls. I knew her very well, and so it came that I knew her ways with them.
That old English gentleman, whom I just remember, when Ingham first went to sea, as the model of mild, kind old men, at Ingham's mother's house, then he went to sea once himself for the first time, and he had a mother himself, and as he went off, she gave him the best album-book that Thetford Regis could make, and wrote this inscription in ink that was not rusty then!
"He is an old friend of mine," said Gamble; "he told me all about it. It began in Paris some newspaper woman tried to blackmail him, and he had her put in jail for three months. And when she got out again, then the papers at home began to get stories about poor Ingham's cutting up. And the public went wild, and they made him resign just imagine it!"
When the election day came round, however, I found that by some accident there was only one Frederic Ingham's name on the voting-list; and, as I was quite busy that day in writing some foreign letters to Halle, I thought I would forego my privilege of suffrage, and stay quietly at home, telling Dennis that he might use the record on the voting-list and vote.
"But he made no secret of it when we passed-mids dined at the Anchor. "A jolley time we had! I slept there." With these words, Denis Duval vanishes from the Diary. Of course, as soon as we had begged Ingham's pardon, we turned back to find the battle with the Bon Homme Richard. Little enough was there. The entry reads thus, this time rather more in log-book shape. "At 1 P.M. beat to quarters.
Ingham's and beg pardon for disturbing the Sunday school, you are so glad it is done, that everything seems nice and quiet and peaceful, just as when a thunder-storm is really over, only just a few drops falling, there comes a nice still minute or two with a rainbow across the sky. That's what Miss Winstanley means, and that's what I am going to say."
Accordingly, a few days after, he sent me a yellow old letter on long foolscap sheets, in which the old gentleman had written out his recollections for Ingham's own benefit, after some talk of old times on Thanksgiving evening. It is all he has ever found in his grandfather's rather tedious papers about the battle, and one passing allusion in it drops the curtain on Denis Duval. Here it is.
And I, meanwhile, who had before been losing caste among my friends, as holding myself aloof from the associations of the body, began to rise in everybody's favor. "Ingham's a good fellow always on hand"; "never talks much but does the right thing at the right time"; "is not as unpunctual as he used to be he comes early, and sits through to the end." "He has got over his old talkative habit, too.
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