There are maids to be loved, no doubt, and ’tis very nice to love them, because they are maids, fashioned in a form most lovely by the good Lord, given a heart most childlike and true and loving and tenderly dependent, so that, in all the world, as I know, there is nothing so to be cherished with a man’s last breath as a maid. I have loved a maid and speak with authority. But there is also a love of ships, though, being inland-born, you may not know it. ’Tis a surpassing faith and affection, inspired neither by beauty nor virtue, but wilful and 179 mysterious, like the love of a maid. ’Tis much the same, I’m thinking: forgiving to the uttermost, prejudiced beyond the perception of any fault, savagely loyal. ’Twas in this way, at any rate, that my uncle regarded the Shining Light; and ’twas in this way, too, with some gentler shades of admiration, proceeding from an apt imagination, that I held the old craft in esteem.
“Dannie,” says my uncle, presently, as we walked homeward, “ye’ll ’blige me, lad, by keepin’ a eye on the mail-boat.”
I wondered why.
“You keep a eye,” he whispered, winking in a way most grave and troubled, “on that there little mail-boat when she lands her passengers.”
“For what?” I asked.
“Brass buttons,” says he.
’Twas now that the cat came out of the bag. Brass buttons? ’Twas the same as saying constables. This extraordinary undertaking was then a precaution against the accident of arrest. ’Twas inspired, no doubt, by the temper of that gray visitor with whom my uncle had dealt over the table in a fashion so surprising. I wondered again concerning that amazing broil, but to no purpose; ’twas ’beyond my wisdom and ingenuity to involve these opposite natures in a crime that might make each tolerable to the other and advantage them both. ’Twas plain, at any rate, that my uncle stood in jeopardy, and that of no trivial sort: else never would he have employed his scant savings upon the hull of the Shining Light. It grieved me to know it. ’Twas most 180 sad and most perplexing. ’Twas most aggravating, too: for I must put no questions, but accept, in cheerful serenity, the revelations he would indulge me with, and be content with that.
“An’ if ye sees so much as a single brass button comin’ ashore,” says he, “ye’ll give me a hail, will ye not, whereever I is?”
This I would do.
“Ye never can tell,” he added, sadly, “what’s in the wind.”