And so they grew farther and farther apart in face, form, and disposition, Jack into a tall, straight, handsome and high-minded young gentleman, Jim into a shifty, cowardly, stoop-shouldered and cad-like sort of a youth, without friends, ambition, or ideals, whose backwardness in study brought him into the lowest class of the town's one high school as Jack entered the highest. In this year of schooling they met for the first time since the separation, but they met as strangers. They knew they were brothers, of course, but carefully avoided reference to the fact, and soon avoided each other. Between them there was no outward sympathy nor community of interest, the unwise but cast-iron pride of the mother finding expression in Jack's attitude, and the cowardice of the negative father in Jim's.
Jack graduated with honor, and, confronted with another four years of study at college, yet ardent, ambitious, anxious to begin life's battle as a man, chose a career that satisfied both conditions—a life in the navy. He arranged matters himself, secured an appointment to the Naval Academy, and left us. And on that day, Jim, friendless in school and stubborn, was dismissed from school for negligence in his studies. Then, as though his evil star were now at its zenith, his father, having lost all his inherited property in unwise speculation, took him away, where I could not learn; but a year later we read the list of lost in a coasting-steamship wreck, and in this list were the names of these two.
I now had to deal with a half-crazed woman, who spoke little and did not weep, but whose strained face and whitening hair told of the strength of that misplaced pride and outraged mother-love, suppressed for so many years. Nothing that I could say or do availed against the aroused craving for the neglected boy. She resisted my oft-repeated suggestions that Jim was gone, and that there was nothing to do but to make the best of it. She refused to be resigned, for she could not bring herself to believe that he was dead. She insisted that he was alive, and that some day he would come back.
This continued through the years, while her hair became whiter and her voice nearly silent, while Jack finished his course and sea term, to be then retired against his will because of the preponderance of officers in a wooden navy too small for them, and while my practice and my health left me under the strain of caring for the queenly woman I loved. Then Jack, a born free-lance who would have entered any navy in the world had a war been on, did the next best thing for him; he secured command of a large, new merchant ship, and made a successful voyage, perhaps the youngest and probably the best educated master in the merchant marine. When he returned my nerves were as bad as his mother's, my practice was gone, my future uncertain; and so we accepted his invitation to make a voyage with him, I with the listlessness of all neurasthenics, my wife with an avidity which surprised us. She brightened at once.
And now this story really begins.
II
She was a two-thousand-ton, double topgallant and skysail yard ship—one of the larger, slower type that succeeded the old Cape Horn clippers, but a ship that even a naval officer might feel proud to command; and Jack was certainly proud of her. And as we—his mother and myself—watched him pacing the poop-deck as sail was being made, giving an occasional quiet order to the helmsman or sending a brazen roar forward to the mate on the forecastle, we were frankly proud of him. Six feet tall to an inch, straight as a man may be, with a chest almost as deep as his shoulders were broad, sunburned and brown-eyed, with only a well-kept mustache to relieve the boyishness of his face, he presented a picture that brought light into the eyes and a smile to the face of that mother as she stood beside me. But a contrasting look of pain followed, and I knew the thought behind was of the other boy, of whom we never spoke.
The first mate was a huge, hairy, brutal sort of man, uneducated beyond the mechanical formulas of navigation, but with a large and healthy conception of his own value to the ship and her people. The second mate was like him to a lesser extent—not quite so big, nor brutal, nor profane, and with less of the art of navigation.
At eight bells of that first evening out the men were chosen into watches by the two mates much as boys choose sides in a ball game, and my wife and I drew amidships to witness the scene. They were an unkempt lot in the moonlight, mostly foreigners, and clad in greasy and tarry garments of nondescript pattern and shape. Each called out his name as he was chosen, moving to starboard or port, according to the watch he now belonged to, and when the job was half done Jack, smoking a cigar, joined us and critically scanned his crew.
"Relieve the wheel and lookout," said the mate, when the last man was chosen. "That'll do the watch."