Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
titles and estates—the infant real duke was ignored. I am the lineal
descendant of that infant—I am the rightful Duke of Bridgewater; and
here am I, forlorn, torn from my high estate, hunted of men, despised
by the cold world, ragged, worn, heart-broken, and degraded to the
companionship of felons on a raft!”
Jim pitied him ever so much, and so did I. We tried to comfort him, but
he said it warn’t much use, he couldn’t be much comforted; said if we
was a mind to acknowledge him, that would do him more good than most
anything else; so we said we would, if he would tell us how. He said we
ought to bow when we spoke to him, and say “Your Grace,” or “My Lord,”
or “Your Lordship”—and he wouldn’t mind it if we called him plain
“Bridgewater,” which, he said, was a title anyway, and not a name; and
one of us ought to wait on him at dinner, and do any little thing for
him he wanted done.
Well, that was all easy, so we done it. All through dinner Jim stood
around and waited on him, and says, “Will yo’ Grace have some o’ dis or
some o’ dat?” and so on, and a body could see it was mighty pleasing to
him.
But the old man got pretty silent by-and-by—didn’t have much to say,
and didn’t look pretty comfortable over all that petting that was going
on around that duke. He seemed to have something on his mind. So, along
in the afternoon, he says:
“Looky here, Bilgewater,” he says, “I’m nation sorry for you, but you
ain’t the only person that’s had troubles like that.”
“No?”
“No you ain’t. You ain’t the only person that’s ben snaked down
wrongfully out’n a high place.”
“Alas!”
“No, you ain’t the only person that’s had a secret of his birth.” And,
by jings, _he_ begins to cry.
“Hold! What do you mean?”
“Bilgewater, kin I trust you?” says the old man, still sort of sobbing.
“To the bitter death!” He took the old man by the hand and squeezed it,
and says, “That secret of your being: speak!”
“Bilgewater, I am the late Dauphin!”
You bet you, Jim and me stared this time. Then the duke says:
“You are what?”
“Yes, my friend, it is too true—your eyes is lookin’ at this very
moment on the pore disappeared Dauphin, Looy the Seventeen, son of Looy
the Sixteen and Marry Antonette.”
“You! At your age! No! You mean you’re the late Charlemagne; you must
be six or seven hundred years old, at the very least.”
“Trouble has done it, Bilgewater, trouble has done it; trouble has
brung these gray hairs and this premature balditude. Yes, gentlemen,
you see before you, in blue jeans and misery, the wanderin’, exiled,
trampled-on, and sufferin’ rightful King of France.”
Well, he cried and took on so that me and Jim didn’t know hardly what
to do, we was so sorry—and so glad and proud we’d got him with us, too.
So we set in, like we done before with the duke, and tried to comfort
_him_. But he said it warn’t no use, nothing but to be dead and done
with it all could do him any good; though he said it often made him
feel easier and better for a while if people treated him according to
his rights, and got down on one knee to speak to him, and always called
him “Your Majesty,” and waited on him first at meals, and didn’t set
down in his presence till he asked them. So Jim and me set to
majestying him, and doing this and that and t’other for him, and
standing up till he told us we might set down. This done him heaps of
good, and so he got cheerful and comfortable. But the duke kind of
soured on him, and didn’t look a bit satisfied with the way things was
going; still, the king acted real friendly towards him, and said the
duke’s great-grandfather and all the other Dukes of Bilgewater was a
good deal thought of by _his_ father, and was allowed to come to the
palace considerable; but the duke stayed huffy a good while, till
by-and-by the king says:
“Like as not we got to be together a blamed long time on this h-yer
raft, Bilgewater, and so what’s the use o’ your bein’ sour? It’ll only
make things oncomfortable. It ain’t my fault I warn’t born a duke, it
ain’t your fault you warn’t born a king—so what’s the use to worry?
Make the best o’ things the way you find ’em, says I—that’s my motto.
This ain’t no bad thing that we’ve struck here—plenty grub and an easy
life—come, give us your hand, Duke, and le’s all be friends.”
The duke done it, and Jim and me was pretty glad to see it. It took
away all the uncomfortableness and we felt mighty good over it, because
it would a been a miserable business to have any unfriendliness on the
raft; for what you want, above all things, on a raft, is for everybody
to be satisfied, and feel right and kind towards the others.
It didn’t take me long to make up my mind that these liars warn’t no
kings nor dukes at all, but just low-down humbugs and frauds. But I
never said nothing, never let on; kept it to myself; it’s the best way;
then you don’t have no quarrels, and don’t get into no trouble. If they
wanted us to call them kings and dukes, I hadn’t no objections, ’long
as it would keep peace in the family; and it warn’t no use to tell Jim,
so I didn’t tell him. If I never learnt nothing else out of pap, I
learnt that the best way to get along with his kind of people is to let
them have their own way.
CHAPTER XX.
They asked us considerable many questions; wanted to know what we
covered up the raft that way for, and laid by in the daytime instead of
running—was Jim a runaway nigger? Says I:
“Goodness sakes, would a runaway nigger run _south?_”
No, they allowed he wouldn’t. I had to account for things some way, so
I says:
“My folks was living in Pike County, in Missouri, where I was born, and
they all died off but me and pa and my brother Ike. Pa, he ’lowed he’d
break up and go down and live with Uncle Ben, who’s got a little
one-horse place on the river, forty-four mile below Orleans. Pa was
pretty poor, and had some debts; so when he’d squared up there warn’t
nothing left but sixteen dollars and our nigger, Jim. That warn’t
enough to take us fourteen hundred mile, deck passage nor no other way.
Well, when the river rose pa had a streak of luck one day; he ketched
this piece of a raft; so we reckoned we’d go down to Orleans on it.
Pa’s luck didn’t hold out; a steamboat run over the forrard corner of
the raft one night, and we all went overboard and dove under the wheel;
Jim and me come up all right, but pa was drunk, and Ike was only four
years old, so they never come up no more. Well, for the next day or two
we had considerable trouble, because people was always coming out in
skiffs and trying to take Jim away from me, saying they believed he was
a runaway nigger. We don’t run daytimes no more now; nights they don’t
bother us.”
The duke says:
“Leave me alone to cipher out a way so we can run in the daytime if we
want to. I’ll think the thing over—I’ll invent a plan that’ll fix it.
We’ll let it alone for to-day, because of course we don’t want to go by
that town yonder in daylight—it mightn’t be healthy.”
Towards night it begun to darken up and look like rain; the heat
lightning was squirting around low down in the sky, and the leaves was
beginning to shiver—it was going to be pretty ugly, it was easy to see
that. So the duke and the king went to overhauling our wigwam, to see
what the beds was like. My bed was a straw tick better than Jim’s,
which was a corn-shuck tick; there’s always cobs around about in a
shuck tick, and they poke into you and hurt; and when you roll over the
dry shucks sound like you was rolling over in a pile of dead leaves; it
makes such a rustling that you wake up. Well, the duke allowed he would
take my bed; but the king allowed he wouldn’t. He says:
“I should a reckoned the difference in rank would a sejested to you
that a corn-shuck bed warn’t just fitten for me to sleep on. Your
Grace’ll take the shuck bed yourself.”
Jim and me was in a sweat again for a minute, being afraid there was
going to be some more trouble amongst them; so we was pretty glad when
the duke says:
“’Tis my fate to be always ground into the mire under the iron heel of
oppression. Misfortune has broken my once haughty spirit; I yield, I
submit; ’tis my fate. I am alone in the world—let me suffer; I can bear
it.”
We got away as soon as it was good and dark. The king told us to stand
well out towards the middle of the river, and not show a light till we
got a long ways below the town. We come in sight of the little bunch of
lights by-and-by—that was the town, you know—and slid by, about a half
a mile out, all right. When we was three-quarters of a mile below we
hoisted up our signal lantern; and about ten o’clock it come on to rain
and blow and thunder and lighten like everything; so the king told us
to both stay on watch till the weather got better; then him and the
duke crawled into the wigwam and turned in for the night. It was my
watch below till twelve, but I wouldn’t a turned in anyway if I’d had a
bed, because a body don’t see such a storm as that every day in the
week, not by a long sight. My souls, how the wind did scream along! And
every second or two there’d come a glare that lit up the white-caps for
a half a mile around, and you’d see the islands looking dusty through
the rain, and the trees thrashing around in the wind; then comes a
_h-whack!_—bum! bum! bumble-umble-um-bum-bum-bum-bum—and the thunder
would go rumbling and grumbling away, and quit—and then _rip_ comes
another flash and another sockdolager. The waves most washed me off the
raft sometimes, but I hadn’t any clothes on, and didn’t mind. We didn’t
have no trouble about snags; the lightning was glaring and flittering
around so constant that we could see them plenty soon enough to throw
her head this way or that and miss them.
I had the middle watch, you know, but I was pretty sleepy by that time,
so Jim he said he would stand the first half of it for me; he was
always mighty good that way, Jim was. I crawled into the wigwam, but
the king and the duke had their legs sprawled around so there warn’t no
show for me; so I laid outside—I didn’t mind the rain, because it was
warm, and the waves warn’t running so high now. About two they come up
again, though, and Jim was going to call me; but he changed his mind,
because he reckoned they warn’t high enough yet to do any harm; but he
was mistaken about that, for pretty soon all of a sudden along comes a
regular ripper and washed me overboard. It most killed Jim a-laughing.
He was the easiest nigger to laugh that ever was, anyway.
I took the watch, and Jim he laid down and snored away; and by-and-by
the storm let up for good and all; and the first cabin-light that
showed, I rousted him out and we slid the raft into hiding quarters
for the day.
The king got out an old ratty deck of cards after breakfast, and him
and the duke played seven-up a while, five cents a game. Then they got
tired of it, and allowed they would “lay out a campaign,” as they
called it. The duke went down into his carpet-bag, and fetched up a lot
of little printed bills and read them out loud. One bill said, “The
celebrated Dr. Armand de Montalban, of Paris,” would “lecture on the
Science of Phrenology” at such and such a place, on the blank day of
blank, at ten cents admission, and “furnish charts of character at
twenty-five cents apiece.” The duke said that was _him_. In another
bill he was the “world-renowned Shakespearian tragedian, Garrick the
Younger, of Drury Lane, London.” In other bills he had a lot of other
names and done other wonderful things, like finding water and gold with
a “divining-rod,” “dissipating witch spells,” and so on. By-and-by he
says:
“But the histrionic muse is the darling. Have you ever trod the boards,
Royalty?”
“No,” says the king.
“You shall, then, before you’re three days older, Fallen Grandeur,”