“I have no plans,” answered Jack. “I shall make a fresh start as soon as I am sold up. I must do as other shipwrecked men, I suppose—go before the mast, or take a third-mate’s berth, and work up to a fresh command—if it’s in me.”
“That’s all very well in its way. I admire pluck and independence; but without capital it’s a long, weary business.”
“How have the other men fared?” demanded Jack. “I am not the first who has been left without a shilling, but with health, strength, and—well—some part of one’s youth remaining, it is a disgrace to such a man, in this country above all others, to lie down or whine for assistance at the first defeat.”
“Granted, my dear fellow; though I confess I take your proposition to apply more strictly to the labourer proper than to him who starts weighted with the name and habits of a gentleman. There is no track open to him that he could not travel with tenfold greater speed with the aid of capital to clear the way.”
“That I cannot have without laying myself under obligations to friends or relatives, and nothing would induce me to ask or accept such help,” quoth Jack, with unwonted sternness. “I have lost a fortune and the best years of my life—as I believe by no fault of my own. I will regain it, as I have lost it, without help from living man; or the destiny which has robbed me of all that makes life worth having may take a worthless life also.”
“It strikes me that you are hardly just, not to say generous,” rejoined Mark, “to speak of your life as entirely worthless; but I am not going to preach, old fellow, to a man in your hurt and wounded state. I have been near enough to it myself to understand your chief bitternesses. Now listen to me, like a good fellow, as if I were your elder brother or somebody in the paternal line. You know I am a heap of years older, besides having the advantage of being a spectator, and a very friendly one, of your game.”
Jack nodded an affirmative, while Stangrove, refilling his pipe, sent forth a contemplative cloud and recommenced:
“When a man is ruined—and I have seen a whole district cleared out in one year before now—one thing, almost the chief thing, he has to guard against is, a wild desire springing mainly from mortification, wounded pride, and a kind of reactionary despair, to get away from the scene of his disaster and from his previous occupation, whatever it may be. Now this feeling is perfectly natural. All the same it should not be indulged. When a man has done nothing worse than the unsuccessful, he should calmly review his position, and above all take the advice of his friends. If he have plenty of them—as you have—he may rest assured that their verdict as to his plans and prospects is far more likely to be correct than his own. When he disagrees with the whole jury of them, he generally is in the position of the proverbial person who found eleven most obstinate jurymen entirely opposed to his way of thinking.”
“But surely a man must know his own capacity, and can gauge the measure of his own powers more correctly than any number of friends,” pleaded Jack.
“I am not sure of that. I believe in several heads being better than one, especially where the latter has just come out of the thick of the conflict, and has not escaped without a hard knock or two. To pursue my lecture on adversity—don’t take it so seriously, Redgrave, or I must stop. A good fellow, with staunch friends, is invariably helped to one fresh start, often to two. So you may look upon it as a settled thing. Sheep are cruelly low now——”