'I thought,' said the captain, 'that I would just keep him, in tow, like, and promised to give him a guinea if he deserved it.'
'You're a simpleton—a downright simpleton!' answered the merchant angrily. 'He's wide-awake enough to read the meaning of that; and if he isn't his father is. Guessing that you fear something, he'll be ready to suspect much. You've the mate and the cook on your side, and if you don't put down that young fellow he'll be too much for you. Begin to give, and you'll always be in his power, depend upon it. In a case like this, either you must let the truth right out, or you must deny the truth right out. To go in the middle is to make yourself suspected, and halter yourself with your own hands. You must make short work with him, Stauncy. The promise of a good rope's end for going below without leave would serve him right, and serve you most.'
The captain saw the force of these remarks; but, had he consulted his wife before acting on them, he might have doubted their applicability in Jim's case. She would have suggested, in her wisdom, that the prentice's notion of wealth extended no further than the promised guinea, and that it would be more than unwise to provoke bad feeling by violating an engagement which had filled the boy's mind with such bright hopes. Acting, however, in accordance with the merchant's wishes, the captain treated the 'prentice in a way that his honest nature revolted against, and, like many another who has begun to do evil, condemned himself whilst carrying it out.
With a smiling face, which might have caused the merchant himself to relent, and a shyness of manner which betokened a sense of unworthiness, Jim Ortop presented himself the next day at the captain's door, and quietly said that he came about the guinea.
'I told you,' the captain remarked, assuming a ruffled manner, 'that you should have it if you behaved yourself; but now I come to think it over, it would be paying you for neglecting your duty. You know what you deserve, Jim, and be thankful to carry a whole skin. You shall have a guinea when you've earned it.'
So stunned was the boy by this reception that he stood speechless, and when Stauncy bid him begone, the shock was too much for him, and he burst into tears.
CHAPTER VIII.
'Severity,' said Dr. Johnson, 'may be the way to govern men, but it is not the way to mend them,'—a sentiment which the wife of Stauncy mentally endorsed, as she listened to her husband's hectoring; and when he had closed the door on the 'prentice, she said, 'That was not like you, James. I never saw you act so unkindly before, nor so unwisely; for people are very much as they are treated. To disregard the finer feelings is to weaken them, and to be unjustly severe is to create an itching for that course which deserves it. You have smitten on the head some feeling that might have contributed to right character, and helped to make the boy reckless as well as hostile. Did you really promise him a guinea, James? Why, think, then, how he has been nursing the idea; what a hold it must have got on him; how he has been revelling in the prospect; and, all at once, you not only extinguish hope, and injure his feelings deeply, but you falsify your word, and make yourself unworthy of his confidence.'
'I would I were as wise as you, Mary,' replied Stauncy who had acted unnaturally, and whose conscience upbraided him; 'I should keep free from trouble; but I thought it best to act as I did.'