And my father must have known her character much better than I did! Undoubtedly it had been very hard for mother to endure the cramped circumstances of those first two years of her married life. It must have been a great deal harder for Dr. Webb to bear it, knowing that she suffered for lack of the luxuries and ease to which she had been used.
I could imagine that the situation when my grandfather died and left his peculiar will, would have pretty near maddened Dr. Webb. It would not be strange if he contemplated self-destruction as a means of putting my mother and myself positively beyond the reach of poverty. He had rowed out to White Rock. He had left the old watch—I had the heirloom in my pocket now—for the boy who was yet to grow up and bear his name. The fog and the Sally Smith had appeared together and offered him means of escape.
It would be fifteen years the coming spring that my father had disappeared. Tom Anderly had hit the time near enough. Had there been any man named Carver who had suffered such an accident off Bolderhead Neck as the old seaman told of, I would have heard the particulars, knocking about among the Bolderhead docks as I had for years.
The story seemed conclusive. I had never for a moment believed that my father had wickedly made way with himself. But that he was alive—that he had gone out into the world, possibly with the hope of finding a fortune and sometime coming back to mother and me with a pocketful of money—Yes! I could believe that, and I did believe it with all my heart!
Chapter XIV
In Which I Hear for the First Time the Whaler’s Battle-Cry
So impressed was I by the imaginings suggested by Tom Anderly’s story, that I opened my letter to old Ham Mayberry and asked him if he had ever heard of a man named Carver who had gone through the experiences Tom had related of the man who had swum to the Sally Smith from the direction of Bolderhead Neck?
It was the very next day, and a fortnight after I had boarded the whaling bark, that I got a chance to send off the letters. The wind lulled and we crossed the course of a steamship hailing from Baltimore and touching on the West Coast of Africa; Captain Rogers sent the letters aboard the steamship. There was no use in my trying to get passage on her, however; I would have gained nothing by such a move.