“Poor dear mother, and sis Em’ly! It’ll go hard with them for a bit, grieving. But they’ll soon get over it. ’Tisn’t like I was leaving them never to come back. Besides, won’t I write mother a letter soon as I’m sure of getting safe off?”
A short interval of silent reflection, and then follow words of a self-justifying nature:
“How could I help it? Father would insist on my being a farmer, though he knows how I hate it. One clodhopper in the family’s quite enough; and brother Dick’s the man for that. As the song says, ‘Let me go a-ploughing the sea.’ Yes, though I should never rise above being a common sailor. Who’s happier than the jolly Jack tar? He sees the world, any way, which is better than to live all one’s life, with head down, delving ditches. But a common sailor—no! Maybe I’ll come home in three or four years with gold buttons on my jacket and a glittering band around the rim of my cap. Ay, and with pockets full of gold coin! Who knows? Then won’t mother be proud of me, and little Em too?”
By this time the uprisen sun has dispelled the last lingering threads of mist, and Henry Chester (such is the youth’s name) perceives, for the first time, that he has been sitting beside a tall column of stone. As the memorial tablet is right before his eyes, and he reads the inscription on it, again comes a shadow over his countenance. May not the fate of that unfortunate sailor be a forecast of his own? Why should it be revealed to him just then? Is it a warning of what is before him, with reproach for his treachery to those left behind? Probably, at that very moment, an angry father, a mother and sister in tears, all on his account!
For a time he stands hesitating; in his mind a conflict of emotions—a struggle between filial affection and selfish desire. Thus wavering, a word would decide him to turn back for Godalming and home. But there is no one to speak that word, while the next wave of thought surging upward brings vividly before him the sea with all its wonders—a vision too bright, too fascinating, to be resisted by a boy, especially one brought up on a farm. So he no longer hesitates, but, picking up his bundle, strides on toward Portsmouth.
A few hundred paces farther up, and he is on the summit of the ridge, there to behold the belt of low-lying Hampshire coastland, and beyond it the sea itself, like a sheet of blue glass, spreading out till met by the lighter blue of the sky. It is his first look upon the ocean, but not the last; it can surely now claim him for its own.
Soon after an incident occurs to strengthen him in the resolve he has taken. At the southern base of the “Downs,” lying alongside the road, is the park and mansion of Horndean. Passing its lodge-gate, he has the curiosity to ask who is the owner of such a grand place, and gets for answer, “Admiral Sir Charles Napier.” (See Note 1.)
“Might not I some day be an admiral?” self-interrogates Henry Chester, the thought sending lightness to his heart and quickening his steps in the direction of Portsmouth.
Note 1. The Sir Charles Napier known to history as the “hero of Saint Jean d’Acre,” but better known to sailors in the British navy as “Old Sharpen Your Cutlasses!” This quaint soubriquet he obtained from an order issued by him when he commanded a fleet in the Baltic, anticipating an engagement with the Russians.