Letters полностью

It was this last touch, I believe, that persuaded Barlow in the 1st instance (who now hugg’d and waltzt about the room with me again, to the amazement of our Algerine house-servants) & Bacri in the 2nd, who did indeed drag his heels in indecision & astonishment at the audacity of our proposal, but at last agreed & took it upon himself to point out to the Dey that five percent of his hostages had succumb’d already to the plague. Mirabile dictu, the stratagem workt, with a celerity that startled even us: not 48 hours from the time we hatcht the plan, the prisoners were ransom’d with the Dey’s own gold & waiting aboard the ship Fortune (leased from Bacri, but crew’d & captain’d by themselves) for a fair southwesterly to carry them to Leghorn!

“Andrew Burlingame Cook the Fourth,” said Barlow, who had taken to teasing me with my full name, “you must go with them.” In one bold stroke, he declared, I had accomplisht the chiefest part of his mission. He himself must linger on until the gold arrived & the treaty was concluded. But much as he wisht my company & counsel, he wisht even more my being out of reach of the pest, & charged me now with a mission of more moment to him than his own welfare: I was to stop in Leghorn to ascertain that Bacri’s office there had received the letter of credit from Humphreys in Lisbon (we’d learnt, aghast, that Humphreys had sent it by the regular post instead of by express courier!) & to make sure that it was promptly negotiated & the specie shipt before Napoleon, who had open’d his great campaign against the Austrians in northern Italy, should close the port. I was then to go to his Ruthy in the rue du Bac, deliver to her his last will & testament along with letters of an equally intimate but less lugubrious character, assure her that she had no rivals amongst the pantaloon’d ladies of Algiers, & assure him, by return post, that she was similarly faithful. That is (he regarded me meaningly here: no libertine, he was no monk either, & had not been perfectly celibate all these months), that whatever shifts she might have devised to assuage her loneliness, they posed no threat to her love for him.

“And this inquiry you are to discharge with perfect tact,” he concluded, “as only you — or your father — could.” Except that, should the impulse take me, I was to consider myself free to stay aboard of the Fortune & visit the country to which I had just render’d a considerable service, perhaps even seeking out “Henry Burlingame IV” & settling once for all in my heart whether he was my father. For if he was not, or if no face-to-face accounting could justify his behavior to me, then he, Barlow, would be pleased to regard me officially as he regarded me already in his heart: as his own son.

I was much toucht, & much confused in my own heart — but enough surfeited with pestiferous Algiers to delight in putting it behind me. I went, not to Philadelphia, but to Leghorn & thence back to dear Paris. But to appease my conscience both for leaving good Joel as the Dey’s sole American hostage, in effect, & for declining that invitation to be his son (I didn’t want a father, I began with some excitement to understand), I perform’d him one final service ere I went, as important in my history as in his.

Our diplomatic successes in the cause of the U. States, remember, like most successes in international affairs, were at the expense of other governments, inasmuch as the Dey’s chief revenue was still the prizes taken by his corsairs. What game our treaty pledged him to forgo, he bagg’d elsewhere. In consequence, while Barlow was currently the envy of the Algerine consular community, he was also the prime target of their cabals. Nothing would have more pleased the Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, & Venetian consuls than the default of our treaty payments & a resumption of Algerine piracy against U. States merchantmen. Thus far they had been content to asperse privily, to the Dey, Barlow’s character & intentions: he was a sodomite, they insinuated; a Christian cleric; a closet poet. But on the eve of the Fortune’s departure, when my belongings were already packt & shipt aboard, Barlow came to my chambers much concern’d that a graver move against him might be afoot.