Our Admiral would not hear of Mrs. Hardres going off until the storm abated. In those days regulations were not so hard-and-fast about the presence of ladies on board a man-of-war, and the men who had brought her were willing enough to stay. They had run down to the ship before the wind, and they knew what it meant beating back against that wind and that sea. Towards evening the sea fell a good bit, and the thick weather cleared off, though it continued to blow; and shortly before dark we made out an Admiralty tender, which proved to have our thirty men aboard. The Admiral was delighted, and making his excuses to Mrs. Hardres, went off to write despatches.
When he had written them and paraded the new draft, he stepped up to Mrs. Hardres and said:—
“You shall go back, madam, in the state that befits a gallant officer’s mother. Lieutenant Morris, of the tender, shall take charge of you,” and at the same time he gave the men who had brought her their golden guinea apiece, for bringing him luck.
“We shall have a change in the wind now, Berry,” he said, “within a day or two. I know that this lady’s coming is the sign I was waiting for.”
And dinner was then served, put forward for Mrs. Hardres. And then, after many protestations of the Admiral’s kindness, and a grim, silent leave-taking, with hardly-kept-back tears, from her boy, the gangway was let down again. As she was leaving the ship, she said, “You will take care of him, Sir Horatio?”
The Admiral looked at her in his way.
“I do not mean in the face of the enemy,” she said warmly, the pitiful mouth, for the moment, taking the proud curves of her son’s; “but I have only a slender purse,—his father was killed when he was a lieutenant.”
“As regards that last, my dear madam, you may be perfectly easy, for your son will be a very lucky fellow if he gets on shore twice in a year. And for the rest, I shall look after him as if he were my own son, and you know where I should wish my son to be in the moment of honour.”