Chapter XVII: Jack the Marine

There were no boats towing astern; all were, as I have said, on board, and at each tack the cutter was generally put about a mile or more distant from the land, on each side of the Firth. Even if I could have dropped from the side unseen, and escaped the fire of small arms that would certainly salute a fugitive from the watch on deck, I doubted my being able to swim so far as the shore. Moreover, I might only be able to make a part of the coast where inaccessible rocks rose sheer from the water. But as the night was coming on, and cloudily too, my heart began to lighten with a hope which was doomed to be crushed, when Mr. Cranky, at nine o'clock, after the night-watch was set, ordered all the pressed men below. He was too old a sailor not to know the tricks they were apt to play under favour of the darkness when a ship was near the shore. So we were all driven down like sheep into a fold. The lower-deck, about the ballast-port, was crowded by the strongest men, who, as the atmosphere of such a place in June was excessively hot, crept close to it, to inhale the freshening breeze that came into the estuary from the German Sea, while I was glad to content me by creeping close to the bulkhead-grating, outside which a sentinel was always posted.

He proved to be a marine, and hearing me moaning and communing with myself till he became tired, he looked through the grating and said, surlily,--

"Silence there, youngster; we've had enough of this nursery nonsense! All that take on as you do are sure to tumble off the yards in the first puff of wind, or to be knocked on the head in the first action. It aint lucky, not a bit; so haul in your slack while you can."

"I am sorry I disturb you," said I meekly.

"You seem a better sort of boy," resumed the marine; "far better than the roughs we get aboard this precious tub of a tender," he added, surveying me by the dim light of his horn lantern; "here, taste my flip, will you? it has just come piping hot from the cook's galley."

"Thank you," said I, taking a good draught from the can of hot ale and egg which he handed to me through the grating.

"That is better than a pull at the scuttlebutt, youngster," said he kindly.

"For where is the cutter bound?" I asked.

"Yarmouth Roads."

"Yarmouth?"

"Yes. Some of the North Sea fleet are there in want of hands. You'll soon be turned over to a ship, and in a few weeks may be off the Texel watching the lubberly Dutch."

"Oh, my God! oh, my mother!" I exclaimed.

"What, you have a mother, have you? Well, I had a mother too, once," said the marine thoughtfully. "Now, tell me how you came here, my little man?"

I related my whole story, to which he listened attentively, though I gave it at considerable length. The honest marine seemed much struck with the lawless manner in which I had been treated, and said "it was a d--ned shame that the son of any man who had borne the king's commission should be put upon thus by a canting thief of a lawyer." He added, that he was sorry for me; gave me some more flip, said he would look after me, and that if I wanted "anything at any time, to pass the word forward for Jack Joyce the marine." He then turned away, for the relief approached at that moment with a new sentinel.

I had imbibed a portion of this good fellow's flip in time, having been so long without food, that I was quite faint; and amid all my woes, my interior was beginning to cry (as honest Sancho phrases it) "cupboard," in spite of me. Thus, the effect of the hot flip, which was well mixed with a portion of the purser's rum, was to set me into a profound slumber; and, oblivious of all about me--in spite of the creaking of guns, timbers, and bulk-heads, the grating of blocks and cordage, as the cutter rolled more and more on approaching the river's mouth, I slept heavily on the hard deck--yet not so heavily as to prevent dreams and visions of the happy home from which I had been reft thronging thick and fast upon me.

I heard the voices of my mother and of Lotty. I heard in fancy the sabbath-bell of our little village church, tolling slowly and solemnly in its old and mossgrown spire, echoing along the wooded vale and over the hills of purple heath and yellow broom, as it called to worship those whose hearts (unlike those of the full-fed pharisees and pampered parvenus of the city) were earnest, prayerful and humble, like those of their sires of old, who put their broadswords to the grindstone, and when kings and prelates oppressed them, forsook all and went to the mountain side, to watch and pray and fight, and in the end to conquer!

In my sleep, the sound of this bell, which was so much associated with my home, came to my dreaming ear many times, with the murmur of the mountain bee, and the crispy rustle of the old oaks that shaded my widowed mother's cottage--the altar of my hopes and heart, which I never more might see!

With such tantalising visions still before me, I awoke by sunrise, to find the world of water around me, the cutter pretty far out at sea, as she had been in pursuit of a suspicious little craft which had escaped her; and as the breeze was freshening and now completely aft, she rolled heavily on the foam-flecked waves of the deep-green German Ocean.