Not a word of this trouble, which Captain Glew must have known was
charged with one of the deadliest of all ocean menaces, reached Mr.
Vanderholt.
'I'll not have him worried,' said Glew to the mate. 'If you sent them a
Mansion House tuck-out, the fiends would growl, tell you it wasn't
Galapagos turtle, and that they'd hooked better salmon out of cans. I'm
responsible for the stores. I knew what I was about when I ordered them.
Surely you know Humph Lyons, the ships' chandler in Dock Street,
Limehouse? He's shipped for me before, and he's likewise shipped for my
owners, and I've never heard a murmur against him.'
'Was that the Lyons an action was brought against for selling condemned
Admiralty stores as good food for merchant sailors?' said Mr. Tweed,
with a grin.
'It was his brother,' said Captain Glew. 'A man can't be responsible for
his relations.'
'As to relations,' said Mr. Tweed, 'a man may try his darned hardest to
be all that's right, and in conformity with the law and piety, and still
find himself adrift at the end. I remember a skipper saying to me: "It's
all very well to say, 'Honour thy father and thy mother,' but I knew a
man who all his life did his fired best to honour his father, and when
his mother lay dying she told him, with the tears running over her
cheeks, that the man he'd been a-honouring all his life had never been
his father at all!"'
Here the groggy little man set up so loud a laugh that Captain Glew
walked away, and the conversation came to an end.
The days passed. The _Mowbray_ broke the seas of the Bay clothed to her
royal yard. Blue sky was over her, and sunshine bright as that of the
English June lighted up the rolling ocean. By this time Mr. Vanderholt
was perfectly recovered, and had ceased to apologize to Captain Glew for
being sea-sick. He smoked his long pipe. He stalked the deck arm-in-arm
with his daughter. He repeatedly asked her and Captain Glew how they
thought he was looking; and Captain Glew swore that in all his life he
had never seen any gentleman pick up so surprisingly fast.
'I'm quite sure,' the captain said, 'Miss Vanderholt will agree with me,
sir, when I say that you're looking ten years younger this same day than
at the hour of your starting.'
Miss Violet smiled, and Vanderholt stroked his beard, and grinned till
his eyes faded into little wrinkles.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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