We sailed straight away out, and tacked round an island, and there was a lumpy bit of a sea on. But auntie steered part of the way, much to her own delight and the admiration of Bill and Joe. Sometimes the boat gave a jump or fell down with a jerk into the trough of a sea, and the sail would tighten and the sheet would strain, and perhaps a feather of a wave would skim across the boat and hit us all; but nothing disturbed the equanimity of our bold Aunt Serapheema.
She shook hands so prettily, too, with the men and with Nancy, who curtseyed so low, that she looked like a brig under full sail settling down by the stern.
The men lifted their hats, and I’m sure each had something in his hand that auntie had left there; then away we came, and Jill and I jumped on lumps of seaweed to crack the little bladders all the way home, and auntie didn’t mind a bit.
“It would do you good, mamma,” she said to mother at dinner that day, “to go out for a sail now and then; I must say it has made me feel quite young again.”
The pointer did not strike one o’clock on Jill’s knuckles or mine all next forenoon, so of course we wished that auntie would always go out a-sailing.
But it was when telling my brother and me stories of a winter’s evening by the fire, or upstairs on the balcony in the sweet summer-time that auntie was at her very very best. Then the angel came out in earnest, and neither Jill nor I were ever a bit afraid of her. We would sit close up by her knee, and even lean across her lap, or toy with her mitted hands as we listened entranced to every word she said.
They were mostly stories of the ocean wave, and of far-away lands and climes beyond the setting sun. Indeed what else could a sailor’s daughter, whose father had gone down with his ship in the stormy Bay, speak to us about, secularly?
But she had the gift of telling Bible stories well also. The wonderful adventures of Joseph and his brethren quite enthralled us, and often after we went to bed I used to try to tell it in the same way and same words to Jill, but never so entrancingly, though he liked it so much that he often went to sleep before I had finished.
I said my mother was delicate, and this is the reason why auntie took such charge of us; but mother invariably came to our room after Sally had done with us, and would sit by our bedside sewing for an hour together sometimes. It was to her we said our prayers. No, we did not say them, for mother taught us to think and pray the prayer—to wish what we said, as it were; and we got into that habit, Jill and I, so that at any time when praying, with our hearts wandering, as it were, we believed the good angels never could hear that prayer, and never bear it away to the good Father on the great white throne of grace.
I dare say few boys love their mother so much as we loved our beautiful mother, but then one always does think just in that way about one’s own love. None other can be like it.