“Ay! when I’ve gone to my last muster,” growled out the old fellow huskily, in a sad tone, which sent a responsive chill to my heart. “But, that won’t be your fault, Vernon. Thank you, my lad, I know you’re not talking soft solder, so as to get to wind’ard of me, like those fellows in there. Longshore lubbers like those never recollect what a man may have done for his country in times gone by. They live only in the present; and, if a chap chances to make a mistake, as the best of us will sometimes, they fall on him like a pack of curs on a rat, and worry him to death, by George!”
“The idle gossip of the clubs need not affect you, sir,” replied my father consolingly. “Not a man in England of any sense is ignorant of the fact that it is none of your fault that the Baltic Fleet was sent out on a wild-goose chase and failed to capture Cronstadt and annihilate the Russian ships inside that stronghold; though, I believe, you would have astonished old Nick if you had been allowed a free hand!”
“Humph! I don’t know about that, Vernon, but I’d have tried to,” said the Admiral, smiling. The next minute, however, he knit his shaggy eyebrows and looked so fierce that the thought occurred to me that I would not have liked just then to be in the position of defaulter brought up before him on his quarter-deck and awaiting condign punishment; for, he went on growling away angrily, as the recollections of the past surged up in his mind. “By George! it makes my blood boil, Vernon, as I think of it now. How could I succeed out there when those nincompoops at home in the Ministry did not want me to do anything but play their miserable shilly-shally game of drifting with the tide and doing nothing! I was told I wasn’t to do this and I wasn’t to do that, while all the time that cute old fox the Czar Nicholas was completing his preparations. Why, would you believe it, Vernon, there wasn’t a single long-winded despatch sent out to me by the Cabinet that did not countermand the one that came before?”
Dad laughed cheerily, trying to make the old sailor forget his wrongs.
“Even the immortal Nelson would have been unable to do anything under such conditions, Sir Charles,” he said, as the Admiral paused to take breath, sniffing up another handful of snuff with an angry snort. “Those jacks in office at home are always interfering with things they know nothing about. How can they possibly have the means at their command like the man on the scene of action, one whom they themselves have selected for his supposed capacity? But, they will interfere, sir. They have always done so; and always will, I suppose!”
“Gad, you put it better than I could, Vernon. I didn’t think you such a smart sea lawyer,” said the old Admiral, rather grimly, not over-pleased, I think, at Dad’s taking up the burthen of his grievances. “Know nothing, you say? Of course they know nothing, the government, hang it! was a cabinet of nincompoops, I tell you—Aberdeen, Graham and the whole lot of ’em! If they could have mustered a single statesman amongst ’em who had pluck enough to tell Russia at the outset that if she laid hands on Turkey we should have considered it an ultimatum, there would never have been any war at all—the Emperor Nicholas confessed as much on his death-bed. It was all want of backbone that did it—not of the English nation, thank God! but of the government or ministry of the time. Some governments we’ve had, ay, and since then, too, Vernon, have been the curse of our country!”
“Ay, Admiral,” responded my father, heartily, “I know that well!”
“Yes, they were all shilly-shally from first to last,” continued the old sailor, warming up to his theme. “Why, when the Russians actually fired on our flag—the Union Jack of England, sir, that had never previously been insulted with impunity—they actually blamed me for returning the fire, and recalled me for it! I tell you what it is, Vernon, they were all a pack of pusillanimous time-servers, frightened at their own shadows; and, between you and me and the bedpost, that chap, Jimmy Graham, our precious late First Lord of the Admiralty, knew as much about a ship as a Tom cat does of logarithms, by George!”
Dad smiled at his vehemence, and I chuckled audibly; the Admiral’s simile seeming very funny to me.
The old sailor patted me on the head approvingly.