Directly she had disappeared Mr. Langham locked the piano and threw the key through the scuttle into the sea.
When the Ringdove came back she brought six weeks' mails, and that was the first thing that really cheered us up. We were quite happy.
I had six long letters from my mother, the first I had had since leaving home, and I sat on my chest in a corner by myself and read them, and it was very jolly to hear all that had happened at home; but they made me miserable, for although she tried to write cheerfully, I knew that she was really very worried. You see, my father would put all the little money he had into silly swindly things which he saw advertised in the papers, and my mother often told me that some of the religious papers had more swindling advertisements in them than ordinary daily papers, and of course my father, being a parson, often saw these. I don't know much about it, but she used to tell me that if he saw an advertisement telling anyone to send, say, five pounds to a man and he would be sure to make it into ten or twenty pounds in a week—by some certain plan he had invented for dealing in stocks and shares—my father would nearly always do it, if he could manage to scrape any money together.
I know that my mother often cried about it, and I've often heard him say, "Well, my dear, they seem to know what they are talking about. They can't be all swindlers, or else the editors wouldn't print their advertisements, so I'll just try, this once."
He always lost his money, and I know, for a fact, that my mother only had one new dress all the time I was on the Britannia, so as to have enough money to pay for me there.
I know that this is rather a "sniffy" chapter, but I can t help it, and I'm telling you just what happened, and how I felt about everything.
The Captain sent for me before I had read my letters more than twice, and I shoved them into my chest and ran aft to his cabin.
He was sitting at his knee-hole table in his shirt sleeves, smoking a cigar, with heaps of letters all around him, and "Blucher's" head close to his elbow.
"Good news from home, I hope, Ford? Here's something for you from my girl Nan," and he gave me a folded-up piece of notepaper with "Dick" scrawled across it.
I was running out again when he gurgled: "Arm all right? Let me see you move your fingers. Umph. You'll be all right. Umph! I wrote to the missus to tell her you'd shot that chap who tried to cut me down; wrote to your mother too, to tell her you were going on well—told her about it as well. Umph!"