“A common complaint, my dear! But now ye ha’ touched on a thing which is maybe only too true, for I could ’most allow my uncle is feared o’ death in the water—not that his fear is aught to be ashamed on.”
“Not if a man be modest about hisself!”
“Uncle Whinn used to be modest enough, and careless enough, too, about what happened to him,” said David. “But when I was on board wi’ him, this mornin’, I see a thing so queer and strange, it makes me creep yet.”
“David, I knew there was something wrong!”
“And ’twas only a simple matter, after all,” he proceeded. “’Twas all about a life belt hangin’ above his bunk, in the chart room, where he berths nowadays. ’Twas an ordinary, everyday life belt, but all the time we was settin’ there smokin’ an’ chattin’, I noticed he never hardly took his eyes off o’ it. And at last I gets up and goes over, just to see if there was anything extra about it. Well, he was after me like a tiger! ‘Don’t ye put finger on that, my lad!’ he says, not so much as if he was angered as feared. And then he draws me back to the table, and says, as if he was a bit ’shamed o’ hisself: ‘Ye’ll excuse me, David, but I can’t bear to see that there life belt touched. T’other day, I was as near as near to killin’ the cook—the poor sinner said it needed dustin’. ’Tis my foolishness, no doubt, but we’ve all got our fancies, and I don’t want the belt to be missin’ or unhandy when the time comes. So there it hangs, an’ I’ll thank ye for your word, here and now, David, that ye won’t never touch it.’ Of course I give him my word, but wi’ no great feelin’ o’ pleasure. . . . What do ye think about it, Esther?”
“’Tis terrible that a great big man should be so feared. Now I’m sort o’ sorry for him. I daresay he needs ye badly on his ship, and so I’ll say no more about it, David.”
“Ye always see things right, once ye let your kind heart go,” he said tenderly. “And I can’t think that Uncle Whinn’ll play the coward if ever he’s really up against it. . . . And now, what about us two gettin’ married on my next leave?”
The Hesperus sailed a couple of days later. The outward voyage was completed without mishap or adventure, and she was within a day’s run of the home port when her end came.
After a brief but havoc-working bombardment, her helpless skipper gave orders to abandon ship, and signaled the enemy accordingly. There were two lifeboats,—the third had been smashed,—and in the natural course of things David would have been in charge of one of them. But Captain Whinn decreed otherwise.
“I want ye wi’ me,” he said to his nephew, as they came down from the tottering bridge. “Cast off!” he bawled at the boat whose crew included the second mate.