CHAPTER XV.
Examination-day passed off as it always did at the professor’s school, creditably, if not brilliantly, for teachers and scholars. Aleck was decidedly the star, but Carter and Davis both did well; and in the lower classes Hal and Tom came off with a very respectable score and some flying colors. Tom had kept out of Hal’s way as he would have avoided rocks and shallows if he had been putting to sea; and Hal was for once so entirely engrossed in keeping his own lookout, that he had no leisure to watch for slips in his neighbors, or to enjoy them if they happened to occur. There was enough for the boys to talk over for at least the first week of holidays, and Carter lost very little time in getting hold of Aleck for a talk about past, present, and future. The future had the best of it, though, and he was jubilant over the prospect that it gave.
“Isn’t that what you call pretty jolly?” he went on. “Carter & Co. have consented at last, and are going to give me a chance in life, instead of making me into a wooden thing mounted on a stool and doing short sums in arithmetic for them all day! Just imagine me standing on the quarter-deck and giving orders to every soul on board, and feeling my vessel bound over the blue waves as I direct!”
Aleck laughed.
“Do you expect to take command the day you go aboard?”
“Well, no, it must be confessed, that isn’t the usual way. I’ve got to share my mess with the roughest of them for a while, and work my way up; but I shall have a command just as soon as I am fit for it.”
“And when will that be?” asked Aleck.
“When I understand the ship and the ship’s work. A man isn’t fit to give orders until he knows how everything, to the very last twist of a rope, ought to be done, and how to do it himself, too.”
“And is that all?”
“I don’t know,” said Carter, a little puzzled; “that’s what the officers say. Shouldn’t you think that was about the whole of it?”
“It may be,” said Aleck; “but I was always taught that a man wasn’t ready to command others until he had learned to command himself.”
“Pshaw!” said Carter. “What a fellow you are to preach! I don’t believe I could tell you what time it is, that it wouldn’t give you a handle for a sermon or a lecture, whatever it may be. But the truth is, you hit the nail on the head so well that I can’t help liking it every time. I’ll treasure that up, and what you said the other day about making a man and a gentleman of myself.”
“By becoming a Christian!” said Aleck.
“Well, I suppose so, only it sounds so much like prigging to put it that way.”
“What sounds like prigging? If a ship-captain should offer to take you under his special instruction after you get aboard, and teach you all he knew, and make a first-rate officer of you, would you call it prigging if you were to try your best to learn, and come as near his own mark as you could?”
“No, indeed! And if I can only get a chance on the Cumbermede, I should be proud to be even the shadow of the captain, for I tell you what it is, I don’t believe a finer officer ever stepped the quarter-deck! But he wont notice me, not for a year at least. It would be beneath him, of course.”
“Well, I’ll tell you who will notice you, and not think it beneath him, either, and that is the Great Captain, and you know what he is; all the hosts of heaven call him glorious. You can study him and study with him and wear his colors, and get closer to his standard every year, and not be very much of a prig either.”
“And is that what you call being a Christian? I thought it was all in drawing down your face and quoting Scripture, and never doing anything to have a good time.”
“I don’t believe you thought any such thing,” said Aleck, “you have too much sense for that. A Christian is a follower of the Lord Jesus Christ, and nothing more or less, except that you can’t very well follow him without believing in him first and loving him afterwards.”
“Well, a fellow might look at it that way, and not be a milksop, after all; and I’ve got to get hold of something or other that will carry me a peg beyond where I was that day we got the professor into such a rage. It wasn’t the rage I cared for, but I did feel so contemptibly mean; and an idea came across me that there must be some different rule a fellow could work by; but I don’t know as I should ever have seen it any plainer if you hadn’t given me a lift.”
“You’ll want more lifts than I can give you,” said Aleck; “it’s only the Commander-in-chief that can take raw recruits like us and bring them up to the ranks; but he’ll never think it beneath him to help the lowest of us, you may be sure of that.”
A week from that day the Cumbermede weighed anchor, and Carter, regularly shipped as ordinary seaman, stood on her deck, the desire of his heart accomplished.
“Good-by, old fellow, I shall take that sermon along!” were his last words to Aleck; and Aleck, after watching the vessel towed well out into the stream, turned and made his way back to town, and presented himself for his own enrolment behind the counter at his Uncle Ralph’s. He could hardly realize he was there at first; it seemed more like a joke played off for the day than a life-long decision, and he could not quite persuade himself that he had set sail for a longer voyage than Carter’s. But as the day wore on, the earnest way his uncle took of setting him to work at this and that, and the occasional quiet glance of pleasure that he cast towards him, began to make him feel that it was a real thing to one party at least, and would soon become so to the other.
“I tell you what it is, Nelly,” he said, when business hours were over at last, and he was at home once more, “I feel as if I had taken a flying leap somewhere, and hadn’t quite found out what sort of ground I was going to strike yet. It’s a pretty different thing from old times, anyhow.”
“And different from what we thought new times were going to be, once,” said Nelly, looking up half regretfully from her work.
“Well, if you could just get one look at Uncle Ralph’s face, you’d think the difference was pretty good, and I’m sure papa would too. The only trouble is, Uncle Ralph hasn’t found out yet what a stupid fellow he has taken up. I declare I thought my poor head would be turned there to-day; chemistry and science went clear out of sight, and it was nothing but weights and measures and compatibilities and all the rest. But I assure you there’s some pleasure in seeing how the best doctors in the city hang by Uncle Ralph, Doctor Thorndyke among the rest.”
“Have you been to the doctor’s within a day or two, Aleck?”
“Yes,” said Aleck, with a sudden change of tone.
“No better yet, Aleck?”
“Oh, I suppose so; but it’s a horrid shame to see the way he is. He never had known a well day in his life till the doctor took hold of him; but he said there was no reason why he shouldn’t, and he went to work and did everything that could be thought of for six months or more, and had just got him where he was finding out what life was—of course not to be quite as strong as other people, but ready to feel pretty well and have a good time with the rest of the world; and now there he is, just able to creep about the house or look at a book now and then, the old pain ten times worse than ever, and what’s more, the doctor don’t believe he can ever bring him round to where he was again. It’s more than he had much hope of at one time to get him through at all. And that isn’t the worst of it, either; he behaves like a little man, but I don’t believe he’ll ever forget what happened an hour as long as he lives.”
“Oh, he must forget it, Aleck. Bring him up here, and see if we can’t make him.”
“I don’t know,” said Aleck, smiling. “I invited him once, but I don’t know as I can flatter you by telling you what objection he had.”
“Well, only once persuade him, and I’m sure we can find some way to make his objections vanish.”