With haggard young faces two drew, leaving the third lot to the Scottish boy.
"Thank Heaven!" cried the first, wiping his brow as he saw that his, at least, was not a short lot. "It's yours, Watty, old boy," he said to the middy from north of the Tweed.
"My God! what will my dear old mother say?" groaned the poor boy, with face grey as his own Border hills in a November drizzle. "Promise me, on your honour, both of you, to keep this miserable business a dead secret for ever…. Well, I've got to face it. Bring the woman in, and let's have it over and get aboard."
Watty Scott was a scion of a good Scottish Border family, a youth careless and harum-scarum as the most typical of middies, but a gentleman, and popular alike with officers and men. He was about eighteen, had already distinguished himself in more than one brush with the enemy, and was looked on as a most promising officer. But now…!
"Oh, little did my mother ken,
The day she cradled me,"
(might he have wailed), in what dire scrape the recklessness inherent in her boy would land him.
"I thought you'd take my terms," said the landlady, when she came into the room. "Faith! an' I've got the pick o' the basket! Well, come along, my joker; we'll be off to the parson. But you'll take my arm all the way, d'ye see!—as is right an' nat'ral for bride and bridegroom. You ain't agoin' to give me the slip afore the knot's tied, I can tell you. Not if I knows it, young man."
Broken clergymen, broken by drink or what not, ready to go through anything for a consideration, were never hard to find in those days in a town such as Portsmouth, and all too soon the ceremony, binding enough, so far as Watty could see, was over. Then the new-made wife insisted, before the three lads left her, that she should stand them a good dinner, and as much wine as they cared to drink to the health of bride and bridegroom.
"An' now," she said to her husband ere the youngsters departed, "I aint agoin' to send my man to sea with empty pockets. Put that in your purse!"
But Watty would have none of the five guineas she tried to force on him.