“We’ll teach him to look aloft, any how,” said the lieutenant, striving to be original.
“A well-built young dog,” said the former, looking at me, approvingly.
“Who is he, may I ask?” said the latter, in a most sonorous aside.
“Mum,” said Captain Reud, putting his finger to his nose, and endeavouring to look very mysterious, and full of important meaning; “but when I get him in blue water—if he were the king’s son—heh! Farmer?”
“To be sure. Then he is the son of somebody, sir?”
“More likely the son of nobody—according to the law of the land,—whoever launched him: but I’ll never breathe a word, or give so much as a hint that he is illegitimate. I scorn, like a British sailor, to do that by a sidewind, Farmer, that I ought not to do openly; but there are two sides to a blanket. A popish priest must not marry in England. Norman Will was not a whit the worse because his mother never stood outside the canonical rail. Pass your wine, Farmer; I despise a man, a scoundrel, who deals in innuendos;—O it’s despicable, damned despicable. I don’t like, however, to be trusted by halves—shall keep a sharp look-out on the joker—with me, a secret is always perfectly safe.”
“O, then there is a secret, I see,” said Mr Farmer. “You had better go now, Mr Rattlin, and attend to the captain’s orders to-morrow.” The word mister sounded sharply, yet not unpleasingly, to my ear: it was the first time I had been so designated or so dignified. Here was another evidence that I had, or ought to, cast from me the slough of boyhood, and enact, boldly, the man. I therefore summoned up courage to say that I did not perfectly understand the purport of the captain’s order, and solicited an explanation.
“Yes,” said he; “the service has come to a pretty pass, when the youngest officer of my ship asks me to explain my orders, instead of obeying them.”
“I had better give him a note to the commanding officer, for I may not happen to be on board when he arrives.”
A note was written, and given me.