“Shipped himself all aboard of a ship,
Some foreign countries for to see.”
A solitary little figure, he stood on the deck where his mother had left him after “seeing him off,” somewhat doubtfully received and considered by the captain of the said ship as a sort of package, labelled, and needing speedy transit—and as he saw the white cliffs of England recede, his heart was heavy as lead, and his soul full of bitterness. Not for his mother or father were his farewells—but for Miss Letty. To her he sent his parting thoughts,—to her he silently breathed the last love, the last tenderness of his innocent childhood. For his trust in her remained unbroken. She would have answered his letter, he knew, if she had received it. He felt instinctively certain that it had never been posted,—and when once this idea took root in his young mind, it bore its natural fruit,—a deep distrust, which was almost scorn, of the mother who could stoop so low as to deliberately deceive him. The incident made such a strong impression upon him, that it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that it “had aged him.” He had never been able to respect his father,—and now he was moved to despise his mother. Hence his good-byes to her were cold and lifeless—the kiss he gave her was a mere touch—his little hand lay limply in hers—while she, in her sublime self-conceit, thought that this numb and frozen attitude of the child was the result of his grief at parting from her.
“See that he has a good dinner, please!” she said to the captain, in whose care she had placed him, heaving her large bosom expansively as she spoke—“Poor, dear little fellow! He’s so terribly cut up at parting from me,—we have been such friends—such close companions! You will look after him, won’t you?”
The captain grunted a brief assent, thinking what a remarkably stout woman she was,—and Boy smiled—such a pale, cold little smile—the first touch of the sarcasm that was destined to make his pretty mouth into such a hard line in a few more years. And the ship plunged away from the English shore through the grey-green foam-crested billows—and Boy leaned over the deck rail, and watched the churning water under the paddle-wheels, and the sea-birds swooping down in search of stray scraps of food thrown out from the ship’s kitchen,—and he remembered what Rattling Jack had said about them—“Born and bred in a hole of the cliffs, they’ve got to larn to fly—and larn they do—and when they flies, they flies their own way—they takes it an’ they keeps it!”
And moved by an odd sense of the injurious treatment of an untoward Fate, he took out from his pocket the precious “tiger’s tooth” the old sailor had given him as a talisman, and dropped it in the waves.
“For it’s evidently not a bit of use,” he said to himself; “Jack said it would take me through difficulties, but it hasn’t. It has been no help to me at all. It’s a humbug, like—like most things. And as for the sea-gulls, I’m sure the world is a better place for birds than boys. I wish I’d never been a boy.”
But youthful wishes, like youthful hopes, are often vain, and doomed to annihilation through the cross-currents of opposing influences; and heedless of Boy’s aching little heart, so full of crushed aspirations and disappointments, the ship went on and bore him relentlessly away from everything in which he had the faintest interest. And while he was on his journey to France, his estimable “Muzzy” sat down at home, and in high satisfaction and importance, wrote two letters. One was to the Master of the “skool” at Noirville, as follows:—
“Dear Sir,
My son has left England to-day so that he will arrive in time to meet your representative at St. Malo, where I understand you will send to receive him. I have no further instructions respecting his education to give you, except to ask you to kindly supervise his letters. He has a young friend named Alister McDonald, son of Colonel McDonald, who is of very good family, to whom he may wish to write, and I have no objection whatever to his doing so. But there is an elderly person named Miss Leslie, who has an extremely unfortunate influence upon his mind, and I shall be obliged to you if you will intercept any letters he may attempt to write to her and forward them to me.
Mes meilleurs compliments!
Amelia D’Arcy-Muir.”