The reports received from the training ship went far to reconcile him. These invariably described Edmund as “obedient and keen.”
I am always glad to reflect that my poor father’s anxiety and perplexity about this well-beloved child were thus allayed before he very unexpectedly died, and Edmund and I were left alone as regards relatives.
For of our cousins of the senior branch in Ireland we knew hardly anything. They wrote kindly and respectfully about my father, but did not offer to come to the funeral.
Shortly after this Edmund went to sea as a gentleman apprentice. He was away some five months and returned “in irons.” I learned that he had broached cargo in order to obtain extra rum for his mess. He explained to me that “everybody was in it, and a fellow couldn’t stand out. I should have been horribly ragged if I had, and it would have been a damned unsporting thing to do. We drew lots for who was to get the stuff, and of course it fell to me. Just the damned family luck. I didn’t want the beastly stuff myself, for the simple reason that I don’t drink rum—anything else you like, but not rum. It makes your breath smell beastly.”
I was convinced that his tale was true and felt that on the whole he had behaved well.
Of course one could not expect the magistrate to take the same view. This old gentleman enjoyed himself tremendously with such an unusual text to preach about. However, when he had worked off the last of his platitudes, he announced that he had decided to give Edmund the benefit of the First Offender’s Act. He said he was influenced largely by the fact of the punishment already undergone by the prisoner through his having come home “in irons.” I believe the poor old thing imagined that this expression involved actual fetters.
As a matter of fact Edmund’s colleagues and the cook had combined to ensure his having a fairly comfortable time. He said himself “they didn’t even get ratty about my having no work.”
So Edmund left the Court not without a stain on his character, and saddled with certain responsibilities as to reporting to the police which he described in terms so blasphemous that even to hear him made me feel unfrocked, like Stevenson’s maiden lady when she overheard the Jongleurs’ repartee.
Of course Edmund’s indentures were cancelled, and the problem of his future became to me a very anxious one.
It did not at all worry Edmund. He regarded the world as his oyster.