Charlie to the Rescue. Robert Michael Ballantyne
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an adventurous life on the sea. There’s no accounting for taste, Captain!”
“Right you are, sir,” replied the Captain, with an approving nod. “That’s what I said only this mornin’ to my missus. ‘Maggie,’ says I, ‘salt water hasn’t a good taste, as even the stoopidest of mortals knows, but w’en a man has had to lick it off his lips at sea for the better part of half a century, it’s astonishin’ how he not only gits used to it, but even comes to like the taste of it.’ ‘Pooh!’ says she, ‘don’t tell me you likes it, for you don’t! It’s all a d’lusion an’ a snare. I hates both the taste an’ the smell of it.’ ‘Maggie,’ says I, quite solemn-like, ‘that may be so, but you’re not me.’ ‘No, thank goodness!’ says she—which you mustn’t suppose, sir, meant as she didn’t like me, for she’s a true-hearted affectionate creetur—though I say it as shouldn’t—but she meant that she’d have had to go to sea reg’lar if she had been me, an’ that would have done for her in about six weeks, more or less, for the first time she ever went she was all but turned inside—”
“If you’re going citywards,” interrupted Mr Crossley, again pulling out his watch, “we may as well finish our talk in the street.”
As Captain Stride was “quite agreeable” to this proposal, the two left the house together, and, hailing a hansom, drove off in the direction of the City.
Chapter Four.
Drifting on the Rocks
On the sea-shore, not far from the spot where the brig had been wrecked, Charlie Brooke and Shank Leather walked up and down engaged in earnest conversation soon after the interviews just described.
Very different was the day from that on which the wreck had taken place. It seemed almost beyond possibility that the serene sky above, and the calm, glinting ocean which rippled so softly at their feet, could be connected with the same world in which inky clouds and snowy foam and roaring billows had but a short time before held high revelry.
“Well, Charlie,” said his friend, after a pause, “it was very good of you, old boy, and I hope that I’ll do credit to your recommendation. The old man seems a decent sort of chap, though somewhat cross-grained.”
“He is kind-hearted, Shank; I feel quite sure of that, and hope sincerely that you will get on well with him.”
“‘With him!’” repeated Leather; “you don’t seem to understand that the situation he is to get for me is not in connection with his own business, whatever that may be. It is in some other City firm, the name of which he has not yet mentioned. I can’t myself understand why he is so close!”
“Perhaps because he has been born with a secretive nature,” suggested Charlie.
“May be so. However, that’s no business of mine, and it doesn’t do to be too inquisitive when a man is offering you a situation of two hundred a year. It would be like looking a gift-horse in the mouth. All I care about is that I’m to go to London next week and begin work—Why, you don’t seem pleased to hear of my good fortune,” continued Leather, turning a sharp look on his friend, who was gazing gravely at the sand, in which he was poking holes with his stick.
“I congratulate you, Shank, with all my heart, and you know it; but—I’m sorry to find that you are not to be in connection with Mr Crossley himself, for there is more good in him than appears on the surface. Did he then make no mention of the nature of his own business?”
“None whatever. To say truth, that mysteriousness or secrecy is the only point about the old fellow’s character that I don’t like,” said Leather, with a frown of virtuous disapproval. “‘All fair and above-board,’ that’s my motto. Speak out your mind and fear nothing!”
At these noble sentiments a faint smile, if we may say so, hovered somewhere in the recesses of Charlie Brooke’s interior, but not the quiver of a muscle disturbed the solemnity of his face.
“The secrecy of his nature seems even to have infected that skipper with—or rather by—whom he was wrecked,” continued Leather, “for when I asked him yesterday about the old gentleman, he became suddenly silent, and when I pressed him, he made me a rigmarole speech something like this: ‘Young man, I make it a rule to know nothin’ whatever about my passengers. As I said only two days past to my missus: “Maggie,” says I, “it’s of no use your axin’ me. My passengers’ business is their business, and my business is mine. All I’ve got to do is to sail my ship, an’ see to it that I land my passengers in safety.”’
“‘You made a pretty mess of your business, then, the last trip,’ said I, for I was bothered with his obvious determination not to give me any information.
“‘Right you are, young man,’ said he, ‘and it would have been a still prettier mess if your friend Mr Brooke hadn’t come off wi’ that there line!’
“I laughed at this and recovered my temper, but I could pump nothing more out of him. Perhaps there was nothing to pump.—But now tell me, how is it—for I cannot understand—that you refused all offers to yourself? You are as much ‘out of work’ just now as I am.”
“That’s true, Shank, and really I feel almost as incapable of giving you an answer as Captain Stride himself. You see, during our conversation Mr Crossley attributed mean—at all events wrong—motives to me, and somehow I felt that I could not accept any favour at his hands just then. I suspect I was too hasty. I fear it was false pride—”
“Ha! ha!” laughed Leather; “‘pride!’ I wonder in what secret chamber of your big corpus your pride lies.”
“Well, I don’t know. It must be pretty deep. Perhaps it is engrained, and cannot be easily recognised.”
“That last is true, Charlie. Assuredly it can’t be recognised, for it’s not there at all. Why, if you had been born with a scrap of false pride you and I could never have been friends—for I hate it!”
Shank Leather, in saying this, had hit the nail fairly on the head, although he had not intelligently probed the truth to the bottom. In fact a great deal of the friendship which drew these young men together was the result of their great dissimilarity of character. They acted on each other somewhat after the fashion of a well-adjusted piece of mechanism, the ratchets of selfishness and cog-wheels of vanity in Shank fitting easily into the pinions of good-will and modesty which characterised his friend, so that there was no jarring in their intercourse. This alone would not, perhaps, have induced the strong friendship that existed if it had not been coupled with their intimacy from childhood, and if Brooke had not been particularly fond of Shank’s invalid mother, and recognised a few of her good characteristics faintly reproduced in her son, while Shank fully appreciated in Charlie that amiable temperament which inclines its happy possessor to sympathise much with others, to talk little of self, to believe all things and to hope all things, to the verge almost of infantine credulity.
“Well, well,” resumed Charlie, with a laugh, “however that may be, I did decline Mr Crossley’s offers, but it does not matter much now, for that same worthy captain who bothered you so much has told me of a situation of which he has the gift, and has offered it to me.”
“You don’t say so! Is it a good one?”
“Yes, and well paid, I’m told, though I don’t know the exact amount of the salary yet.”
“And have you accepted?”
“I have. Mother agreed, after some demur, that it is better than nothing, so, like you, I begin work in a few days.”
“Well now, how strangely things do happen sometimes!” said Leather, stopping and looking out seaward, where the remains of the brig could still be distinguished on the rocks that had fixed her doom. “But for that fortunate wreck and our saving the people in her, you and I might still have been whistling in the ranks of the Great Unemployed—And what sort of a situation is it, Charlie?”
“You will smile, perhaps, when I tell you. It is to act as supercargo of the Walrus, which is commanded by Captain Stride himself.”
Young