“Well, sir, look in your sea-chest, and you’ll find gingerbread and physic, darning-needles and tracts, ‘bitters’ and Bibles, peppermint and old linen rags, and opodeldoc. Pshaw! I was more of a man than you are when I was nine years old. Your mother always made a fool of you, and that was entirely unnecessary, too, for you were always short of what is called common sense. You needn’t tell the captain you went to sea because you didn’t know enough to be a landsman; or that you never did any thing right in your life, except by accident. You are as like that ne’er do well Jack Halpine, as two peas. If there is anything in you, I hope the salt water will fetch it out. Come, your mother has your supper ready, I see.”
Mrs. Low’s hand trembled as she passed her boy’s cup. It was his last meal under that roof for many a long day. She did not trust herself to speak—her heart was too full. She heard all his father so injudiciously said to him, and she knew too well from former experience the effect it would have upon his impetuous, fiery spirit. She had only to oppose to it a mother’s prayers, and tears, and all-enduring love. She never condemned in Will’s hearing, any of his father’s philippics; always excusing him with the general remark that he didn’t understand him. Alone, she mourned over it; and when with her husband, tried to place matters on a better footing for both parties.
Will noted his mother’s swollen eyelids; he saw his favorite little tea-cakes that she had busied herself in preparing for him, and he ate and drank what she gave him, without tasting a morsel he swallowed, listening for the hundredth time to his father’s account of “what he did when he was a young man.”
“Just half an hour, Will,” said his father, “before you start; run up and see if you have forgotten any of your duds.”
It was the little room he had always called his own. How many nights he had lain there listening to the rain pattering on the low roof; how many mornings awakened by the chirp of the robin in the apple-tree under the window. There was the little bed with its snowy covering, and the thousand and one little comforts prepared by his mother’s hand. He turned his head—she was at his side, her arms about his neck. “God keep my boy!” was all she could utter. He knelt at her feet as in the days of childhood, and from those wayward lips came this tearful prayer, “Oh God, spare my mother, that I may look upon her face again in this world!”
Oh, in after days, when that voice had died out from under the parental roof, how sacred was that spot to her who gave him birth! There was hope for the boy! he had recognized his mother’s God. By that invisible silken cord she still held the wanderer, though broad seas roll between.
Letters came to Moss Glen—at stated intervals, then more irregularly, picturing only the bright spots in his sailor life (for Will was proud, and they were to be scanned by his father’s eye.) The usual temptations of a sailor’s life when in port were not unknown to him. Of every cup the syren Pleasure held to his lips, he drank to the dregs; but there were moments in his maddest revels, when that angel whisper, “God keep my boy,” palsied his daring hand, and arrested the half-uttered oath. Disgusted with himself, he would turn aside for an instant, but only to drown again more recklessly “that still small torturing voice.”
“You’re a stranger in these parts,” said a rough farmer to a sun-burnt traveller. “Look as though you’d been in foreign parts.”