The Amazing Marriage | Page 4

to be compared to a three-decker
entering harbour after a victory. He stood six feet four, and was
broad-shouldered and deep-chested to match, and walked like a king
who has humbled his enemy. You have seen big dogs. And so Countess
Fanny looked round. Kirby was doing the same. But he had turned right
about, and appeared transfixed and like a royal beast angry, with his
wound. If ever there was love at first sight, and a dreadful love, like a
runaway mail-coach in a storm of wind and lightning at black midnight
by the banks of a flooded river, which was formerly our comparison for
terrible situations, it was when those two met.
And, what! you exclaim, Buccaneer Kirby full sixty-five, and Countess
Fanny no more than three and twenty, a young beauty of the world of
fashion, courted by the highest, and she in love with him! Go and gaze
at one of our big ships coming out of an engagement home with all her
flags flying and her crew manning the yards. That will give you an idea
of a young woman's feelings for an old warrior never beaten down an
inch by anything he had to endure; matching him, I dare say, in her
woman's heart, with the Mighty Highnesses who had only smelt the
outside edge of battle. She did rarely admire a valiant man. Old as
Methuselah, he would have made her kneel to him. She was all heart
for a real hero.

The story goes, that Countess Fanny sent her husband to Captain Kirby,
at the emperor's request, to inquire his name; and on hearing it, she
struck her hands on her bosom, telling his Majesty he saw there the
bravest man in the king's dominions; which the emperor scarce
crediting, and observing that the man must be, then, a superhuman
being to be so distinguished in a nation of the brave, Countess Fanny
related the well- known tale of Captain Kirby and the shipful of
mutineers; and how when not a man of them stood by him, and he in
the service of the first insurgent State of Spanish America, to save his
ship from being taken over to the enemy,--he blew her up, fifteen miles
from land: and so he got to shore swimming and floating alternately,
and was called Old Sky- high by English sailors, any number of whom
could always be had to sail under Buccaneer Kirby. He fought on shore
as well; and once he came down from the tops of the Andes with a
black beard turned white, and went into action with the title of Kirby's
Ghost.
But his heart was on salt water; he was never so much at home as in a
ship foundering or splitting into the clouds. We are told that he never
forgave the Admiralty for striking him off the list of English naval
captains: which is no doubt why in his old age he nursed a grudge
against his country.
Ours, I am sure, was the loss; and many have thought so since. He was
a mechanician, a master of stratagems; and would say, that brains will
beat Grim Death if we have enough of them. He was a standing
example of the lessons of his own MAXIMS FOR MEN, a very curious
book, that fetches a rare price now wherever a copy is put up for
auction. I shudder at them as if they were muzzles of firearms pointed
at me; but they were not addressed to my sex; and still they give me an
interest in the writer who would declare, that 'he had never failed in an
undertaking without stripping bare to expose to himself where he had
been wanting in Intention and Determination.'
There you may see a truly terrible man.
So the emperor being immensely taken with Kirby's method of
preserving discipline on board ship, because (as we say to the madman,

'Your strait- waistcoat is my easy-chair') monarchs have a great love of
discipline, he begged Countess Fanny's permission that he might invite
Captain Kirby to his table; and Countess Fanny (she had the name from
the ballad
'I am the star of Prince and Czar, My light is shed on many, But I wait
here till my bold Buccaneer Makes prize of Countess Fanny':--
for the popular imagination was extraordinarily roused by the
elopement, and there were songs and ballads out of number), Countess
Fanny despatched her husband to Captain Kirby again, meaning no
harm, though the poor man is laughed at in the songs for going twice
upon his mission.
None of the mighty people repented of having the Old Buccaneer--for
that night, at all events. He sat in the midst of them, you may believe,
like the lord of that table, with his