“No, indeed! And if I can only get a chance on the Cumbermede, I should be proud to be even the shadow of the captain, for I tell you what it is, I don’t believe a finer officer ever stepped the quarter-deck! But he wont notice me, not for a year at least. It would be beneath him, of course.”
“Well, I’ll tell you who will notice you, and not think it beneath him, either, and that is the Great Captain, and you know what he is; all the hosts of heaven call him glorious. You can study him and study with him and wear his colors, and get closer to his standard every year, and not be very much of a prig either.”
“And is that what you call being a Christian? I thought it was all in drawing down your face and quoting Scripture, and never doing anything to have a good time.”
“I don’t believe you thought any such thing,” said Aleck, “you have too much sense for that. A Christian is a follower of the Lord Jesus Christ, and nothing more or less, except that you can’t very well follow him without believing in him first and loving him afterwards.”
“Well, a fellow might look at it that way, and not be a milksop, after all; and I’ve got to get hold of something or other that will carry me a peg beyond where I was that day we got the professor into such a rage. It wasn’t the rage I cared for, but I did feel so contemptibly mean; and an idea came across me that there must be some different rule a fellow could work by; but I don’t know as I should ever have seen it any plainer if you hadn’t given me a lift.”
“You’ll want more lifts than I can give you,” said Aleck; “it’s only the Commander-in-chief that can take raw recruits like us and bring them up to the ranks; but he’ll never think it beneath him to help the lowest of us, you may be sure of that.”
A week from that day the Cumbermede weighed anchor, and Carter, regularly shipped as ordinary seaman, stood on her deck, the desire of his heart accomplished.
“Good-by, old fellow, I shall take that sermon along!” were his last words to Aleck; and Aleck, after watching the vessel towed well out into the stream, turned and made his way back to town, and presented himself for his own enrolment behind the counter at his Uncle Ralph’s. He could hardly realize he was there at first; it seemed more like a joke played off for the day than a life-long decision, and he could not quite persuade himself that he had set sail for a longer voyage than Carter’s. But as the day wore on, the earnest way his uncle took of setting him to work at this and that, and the occasional quiet glance of pleasure that he cast towards him, began to make him feel that it was a real thing to one party at least, and would soon become so to the other.
“I tell you what it is, Nelly,” he said, when business hours were over at last, and he was at home once more, “I feel as if I had taken a flying leap somewhere, and hadn’t quite found out what sort of ground I was going to strike yet. It’s a pretty different thing from old times, anyhow.”
“And different from what we thought new times were going to be, once,” said Nelly, looking up half regretfully from her work.