The boat drifted slowly with the flood-tide, and I, lying on the bottom, fell to thought of what the day had brought me. The setting sun touched the single spire of Christ Church, and lit up yellow squares of light in the westward-looking windows of the rare farm-houses on the Jersey shore. Presently I was aground on the south end of Petty’s Island, where in after-years lay rotting the “Alliance,” the remnant ship of the greatest sea-fight that ever was since Grenville lay in the “Revenge,” with the Spanish fleet about him. I came to ground amid the reeds and spatter-docks, where the water-lilies were just in bud. A noisy orchestra of frogs, with, as Jack said, fiddles and bassoons in their throats, ceased as I came, and pitched headlong off the broad green floats. Only one old fellow, with a great bass voice, and secure on the bank, protested loudly at intervals, like the owl in Mr. Gray’s noble poem, which my Jack loved to repeat.
At last he—I mean my frog—whose monastery I had disturbed, so vexed me, who wanted stillness, that I smacked the water with the flat of an oar, which he took to be a hint, and ceased to lament my intrusion.
I was now well on to twenty, and old enough to begin at times to deal thoughtfully with events. A young fellow’s feelings are apt to be extreme, and even despotic, so that they rule the hour with such strength of sway as may be out of proportion to the cause. I might have seen that I had no just cause to blame myself, but that did not help me. The mood of distressful self-accusation was on me. I had no repeated impulse to smile at what, in my father’s conduct, had appeared to me a little while ago odd, and even amusing. I could never please him. I had grinned as I always did when risks were upon me. He never understood me, and I was tired of trying. What use was it to try? I had one of those minutes of wishing to die, which come even to the wholesome young. I was well aware that of late I had not, on the whole, satisfied my conscience; I knew this quite too well; and now, as I lay in the boat discontented, I felt, as the youthful do sometimes feel, as if I were old, and the ending of things were near. It was but a mood, but it led up to serious thought. There are surely hours in youth when we are older than our years, and times in age when we are again young. Sometimes I wonder whether Jack was right, who used to say it may be we are never young or old, but merely seem to be so. This is the queer kind of reflection which I find now and then in Jack’s diary, or with which he used to puzzle me and please James Wilson. Of course a man is young or is old, and there’s an end on ‘t, as a greater man has said. But Jack has imagination, and I have none.
I asked myself if I had done wrong in what I had said. I could not see that I had. With all my lifelong fear of my father, I greatly honoured and respected him, finding in myself something akin to the unyielding firmness with which he stood fast when he had made up his mind.
That this proud and steadfast man, so looked up to by every one, no matter what might be their convictions religious or political, should have been humiliated by a woman, seemed to me intolerable; this was the chief outcome of my reflections. It is true I considered, but I fear lightly, my own misdoings. I made up my mind to do better, and then again the image of my father in his wrath and his shame came back anew. I turned the boat, and pulled steadily across the river to our landing.
My father was in the counting-house in his own room, alone, although it was full late. “Well?” he said, spinning round on his high stool. “What is it? Thou hast been absent, and no leave asked.”
“Father,” I said, “if I was wrong this morning I wish to ask thy pardon.”
“Well, it is full time.”
“And I am come to say that I will take the punishment here and now. I did not run away from that.”
“Very good,” he replied, rising. “Take off thy fine coat.”