“And,” stammered Bobbie, “is it—is it true then that you can’t get into the Navy if you’ve done anything wrong?”
“Devil a bit,” answered Coastguard. “Old Lady’d think it was a piece of impudence to try it on. Looey, my gell, whilst I’m havin’ my pipe jest give us a toon on the old harmonium.”
The large niece, seated at the harmonium, seemed, to the thoughtful Bobbie, more like an angel than ever; the music she produced helped to distract his troubled thoughts. Presently, however, the angel found a Moody and Sankey book and, having propped it on the ledge before her, picked out on the keys as with her foot she moved the pedals, a hymn that gave the boy memories. The Coastguard rolled his head to the rhythm; now and again taking his pipe from his mouth to growl a note or two and thus give his niece encouragement.
“Dare to be a Daniel,
Dare to stand alone,
Dare to—”
Bobbie sat forward in his chair, his eyes fixed on the broad bending back of the young lady at the harmonium, and thought of Ely Place. What a long way off Ely Place seemed now; Bat Miller, and Mrs. Bat Miller, and the Fright; all these were misty figures that for years had visited his memory infrequently. Bat Miller’s time would be up in a year or two. Bobbie shivered to think what he should do were Bat Miller’s face to appear suddenly at the window. For a few moments he dared not glance at the window, fearful that this impossible event might happen; when at the end of the hymn he nerved himself to look in that direction he felt almost surprised to find no face peering in.
“Gi’ us,” said the Coastguard cheerfully, “Gi’ us ‘Old the Fort.’ That’s the one I’m gone on. There’s a swing about ‘Old the Fort.’”
It seemed to the boy that already he had lived two lives; that the first had been broken off short on the day he turned out of Worship Street Police Court. He could not help feeling a vague admiration for that first boy because the first boy had been a fine young dare-devil, never trammelled by rules of behaviour; at the same time it was as well, perhaps, that the first boy had ceased to live, for he was not the kind of lad Bobbie could have introduced to the angel.
“And now,” said the Coastguard, “jigger my eyes if I mustn’t on with my jacket and find my spy-glass and see what’s going on outside. Where’s that young curate got to, I wonder?”
The Coastguard went presently, after telling Bobbie that he might call again at the Martello tower, and that if he behaved he should one day go out to the Coastguard Station and see, by aid of the telescope, the coast of France. Bobbie, alone with the angel, and allowed to seat himself at the end of the harmonium, behaved with a preciseness and a decorum that in any other lad would have been held by Bobbie as good justification for punching that boy’s head. The angel’s right hand remaining on the higher keys for a space in order to give full effect to a final chord, he bent and kissed it. The scent of brown Windsor soap ever afterwards reminded him of this first essay in affection.
“What ye up to?” demanded the angel.