Whatever it might have been in detail, so much was proved against him that he was dismissed his ship, and his father was recommended to withdraw him from the service, as being disqualified by want of nerve. Also, it was added more privately, that such vicious tendencies needed home restraint. The big bully, his corrupter, bore witness against him, but did not escape scot free, for one of the captains spoke to him in scathing tones of censure.
Whenever my mother was in trouble, she always re-arranged the furniture, and a family crisis was always heralded by a revolution of chairs, tables, and sofas. She could not sit still under suspense, and, during these terrible days the entire house underwent a setting to rights. Emily attended upon her, and I sat and dusted books. No doubt it was much better for us than sitting still. My father’s letter came by the morning mail, telling us of the sentence, and that he and our poor culprit, as he said, would come home by the Portsmouth coach in the evening.
One room was already in order when Sir John Griffith kindly came to see whether he could bring any comfort to a spirit which would infinitely have preferred death to dishonour, and was, above all, shocked at the lack of physical courage. Never had I liked our old Admiral so well as when I heard how his chief anger was directed against the general mismanagement, and the cruelty of blighting a poor lad’s life when not yet seventeen. His father might have been warned to remove him without the public scandal of a court-martial and dismissal.
‘The guilt and shame would have been all the same to us,’ said my mother.
‘Come, Mary, don’t be hard on the poor fellow. In quiet times like these a poor boy can’t look over the wall where one might have stolen a horse, ay, or a dozen horses, when there was something else to think about!’
‘You would not have forgiven such a thing, sir.’
‘It never would have happened under me, or in any decently commanded ship!’ he thundered. ‘There wasn’t a fault to be found with him in the Calypso. What possessed Winslow to let him sail with Brydone? But the service is going,’ etc. etc., he ran on—forgetting that it was he himself who had been unwilling, perhaps rightly, to press the Duke of Clarence for an appointment to a crack frigate for his namesake. However, when he took leave he repeated, as he kissed my mother, ‘Mind, Mary, don’t be set against the lad. That’s the way to make ’em desperate, and he is a mere boy, after all.’
Poor mother, it was not so much hardness as a wounded spirit that made her look so rigid. It might have been better if the return could have been delayed so as to make her yearn after her son, but there was nowhere for him to go, and the coach was already on its way. How strange it was to feel the wonted glow at Clarence’s return coupled with a frightful sense of disgrace and depression.
The time was far on in October, and it was thus quite dark when the travellers arrived, having walked from Charing Cross, where the coach set them down. My father came in first, and my mother clung to him as if he had been absent for weeks, while all the joy of contact with my brother swept over me, even though his hand hung limp in mine, and was icy cold like his cheeks. My father turned to him with one of the little set speeches of those days. ‘Here is our son, Mary, who has promised me to do his utmost to retrieve his character, as far as may be possible, and happily he is still young.’
My mother’s embrace was in a sort of mechanical obedience to her husband’s gesture, and her voice was not perhaps meant to be so severe as it sounded when she said, ‘You are very cold—come and warm yourself.’