“You never saw anyone so astonished as Mrs. Smith when I went in and ordered all those things. Her eyes opened wider and wider as I went on, and when I offered her the gold I thought she would have a fit. She took it and bit it to make sure that it was good, and then said: ‘Have you found it, Mrs. Hammond, or what good fortune have you had?’
“ ‘The best of fortunes, Mrs. Smith,’ says I. ‘My boy [pg 206]Will has come back from the wars a grand officer, with his pocket lined with gold, so you will find I’ll be a better customer to you than I have been.’
“ ‘You don’t say so, Mrs. Hammond!’ says she. ‘I always thought he was a nice boy, well spoken and civil. And so he is an officer, is he? Only to think of it! Well, I am mighty pleased to hear it,’ and with that I came off with my basket full of provisions. The whole village will be talking of it before nightfall. Mrs. Smith is a good soul, but she is an arrant gossip, and you may be sure that the tale will gain by the telling, and before night people will believe that you have become one of the royal family.”
In half an hour a meal was ready—tea, crisp slices of fried bacon, and some boiled eggs—and never did three people sit down to table in a more delighted state of mind.
“My life,” the old woman said, when at last the meal was finished, “just to think that we’ll be able to feed every day of the year like this! Why, we’ll grow quite young again, John; we sha’n’t know ourselves. We had five shillings a week before, and now we’ll have six-and-twenty. I don’t know what we’ll do with it. Why, we didn’t get that on an average, not when you were a young man and as good a fisherman as there was in the village. We did get more sometimes when you made a great haul, or when a cargo was run, but then, more often, when times were bad, we had to live on fish for weeks together.”
“Now, missis, clear away the things and reach me down my pipe from the mantel, and we’ll hear Will’s tales. I’ll warrant me they will be worth listening to.”
When the table was cleared the old woman put some more [pg 207]coal on the fire and they sat round it, the old folk one on each side, with Will in the middle. Then Will told his adventures, the fight with the French frigate, the battle with the three Moorish pirates, how he had had the luck to save the first lieutenant’s life and so obtained his promotion, and how the next prize they took was recaptured, but that he and a portion of the crew again overcame the Moors. Then he related how he had had the good fortune to obtain the command of a prize, with forty men and another midshipman under him, and gave a vivid account of the adventures he had gone through while cruising about in her.
“Well, well!” John Hammond said, when he brought his story to a conclusion, “you have had goings-on. To think that a boy like you should command a vessel and forty men, and should take three pirates.”
“But the most awful part of it all,” the old woman said, “is about them black negroes that carried you off and were going to burn you alive. Lor’, I’ll dream of it at nights.”
“I hope not, missis,” John said. “You dream more than enough now, and wake me up with your jumps and starts, and give me a lot of trouble to pacify you and convince you that you have only been dreaming. I am sorry, Will, that you told us about those niggers. I know I’ll have lots of trouble over it. Generally all she has had to dream about has been that my boat was sinking, or that the revenue officers had taken me and were going to hang me; but that will be nothing to this ’ere negro business.”