Brydell had learned something about how money went, and he stopped, startled at the idea of how much skimping and saving his father must have done to give him the money. He fell into a passion of remorse.
“Poor dad—poor dad!” was all he could think, and “dad” was so young—barely thirty-six, and did not look a day over thirty. “I dare say,” thought poor Brydell, with the ghost of a smile, “that’s why it was he never married again. I was squandering his pay.”
Brydell was too generous a fellow to reproach his father, except to himself in his first angry mood, and knowing the lieutenant would hear about the examination anyway, he sat down and wrote his father frankly and fully, admitting his failure, and his determination, if he could get another chance, to do better. But the lieutenant was far away in the Pacific and it would be months before he could get the letter, and perhaps other long months before Brydell could get an answer.
Then he wrote the admiral in the same strain. The admiral, who happened to have shore duty then, got the letter. He was sitting on the piazza, facing the salt sea, and when he had finished reading it he brought his fist down with a thump on the arm of his chair and shouted:—
“By!”
The admiral always held that expletives were vulgar; but when much wrought up he took refuge in “By,” which might mean any and every thing.
“Just like the dog when he was about as big as a cockchafer, and took the whole blame of cutting up my turf, when there were six older boys aiding and abetting him. Bowline! here, sir!” and in a few minutes Billy Bowline came trotting along the hall.
“Bring me my portfolio and the ink,” said the admiral. “That little scamp of a Brydell has failed in a competitive examination for an appointment to the naval academy, and how his father could expect anything else, I can’t see, taking him to Europe, putting him at school one day and taking him away the next, and giving the boy no chance at all, simply because he was too soft-hearted to say no! And now the young fellow behaves like a man and shoulders it all. I say, Bowline, we can’t afford not to have that young fellow in the service.”
“No, sir, we can’t!” said Billy very seriously. “We’re ’bleeged to have him, sir, in the sarvice.”
“And how is it to be done, you old lunkhead?” bawled the admiral.