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While the rest of the squadron returned to Jamaica, one vessel was left to cruise off the island, on the chance of Pearson and his followers, should they have been concealed on it, attempting to make their escape. When Jack arrived on board the "Venus," he found the two young midshipmen, Hawke and Lovatt, and the old quarter-master Burridge, who welcomed him warmly.
This was a favourite phrase of Sneyd's, which Peake never heard without a faint secret annoyance. "At the bottom of your mind you mean to give that hundred. It's your duty to do so, and you will. You'll let them persuade you." "I'll bet thee a shilling I don't." "Done!" "Ssh!" murmured Mrs Lovatt, "I'm ashamed of both of you, betting on such a subject or on any subject," she added.
Like many warm-hearted, impulsive and generous men, James Peake did not care that his generosity should be too positively assumed. To take it for granted was the surest way of extinguishing it. The pity was that Mrs Lovatt, in the haste of her zeal for the amelioration of divine worship at Bursley Chapel, had overlooked this fact. Peake's manner was final.
"Eh, Auntie Lovatt," he went on, greeting her, "we'd given ye up." Mrs Lovatt usually visited the Peakes on Saturday evenings, but she came later than her husband. "Eh, but I was bound to come and see you to-night, Uncle Peake, after your visit to the great city. Well, you're looking bonny."
His two young midshipmen Dick Lovatt and Ned Hawke had become particularly-attached to him, while Will Burridge, the old quarter-master, would have gone through fire and water to serve him. On one occasion, Burridge, whether he had had too much Jamaica rum on board or not it was difficult to say, managed to fall overboard into the harbour swarming with sharks.
"Father's just come along " They were swallowed up into the manager's parlour. It might have been a court of justice, or a dentist's surgery, or the cabinet of an insurance doctor, or the room at Fontainebleau where Napoleon signed his abdication anything but the thing it was. Happily Mr Lovatt had a manner which never varied; he had only one manner for all men and all occasions.
"Now, Nan, you'll talk to James," said Mrs Lovatt, when they all stood at the front-door bidding good-night. "Nay, I've nothing to do with it," Mrs Peake replied, as quickly as at dinner she might have set down a very hot plate. In some women profound affection exists side by side with a nervous dread lest that affection should seem to possess the least influence over its object.
"Oh, I'm not interested in the Jacobites and Wolfe and things of the past," interrupted Eleanor. "I want to live my life full in the present." "Aye; an' 'tis because y're a Fraser-MacDonald of the Lovatt clan that ye want t' live a full present!
"I've made summat on you to-night, Lovatt," said Peake, with his broad easy laugh, as he reckoned up Lovatt's counters.
"Your name was mentioned at the trustees' meeting, wasn't it, Enoch?" "Yes," said Lovatt, "it was." "And dost mean to say as they thought as I 'ud give 'em a hundred pound towards th' new organ?" said Peake, dropping into dialect. "Why not?" returned Mrs Lovatt, her spirit roused. "I shall. Enoch will. Why not you?" "Oh, you're different. You're in it."
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