The Last Entry

by William Clark Russell

'I'll not have him worried,' said Glew to the mate. 'If you sent them a Mansion House tuck-out, the fiends would growl, tell you it wasn't Galapagos turtle, and that they'd hooked better salmon out of cans. I'm responsible for the stores. I knew what I was about when I ordered them. Surely you know Humph Lyons, the ships' chandler in Dock Street, Limehouse? He's shipped for me before, and he's likewise shipped for my owners, and I've never heard a murmur against him.'

'Was that the Lyons an action was brought against for selling condemned Admiralty stores as good food for merchant sailors?' said Mr. Tweed, with a grin.

'It was his brother,' said Captain Glew. 'A man can't be responsible for his relations.'

'As to relations,' said Mr. Tweed, 'a man may try his darned hardest to be all that's right, and in conformity with the law and piety, and still find himself adrift at the end. I remember a skipper saying to me: "It's all very well to say, 'Honour thy father and thy mother,' but I knew a man who all his life did his fired best to honour his father, and when his mother lay dying she told him, with the tears running over her cheeks, that the man he'd been a-honouring all his life had never been his father at all!"'

Here the groggy little man set up so loud a laugh that Captain Glew walked away, and the conversation came to an end.

The days passed. The Mowbray broke the seas of the Bay clothed to her royal yard. Blue sky was over her, and sunshine bright as that of the English June lighted up the rolling ocean. By this time Mr. Vanderholt was perfectly recovered, and had ceased to apologize to Captain Glew for being sea-sick. He smoked his long pipe. He stalked the deck arm-in-arm with his daughter. He repeatedly asked her and Captain Glew how they thought he was looking; and Captain Glew swore that in all his life he had never seen any gentleman pick up so surprisingly fast.

'I'm quite sure,' the captain said, 'Miss Vanderholt will agree with me, sir, when I say that you're looking ten years younger this same day than at the hour of your starting.'

Miss Violet smiled, and Vanderholt stroked his beard, and grinned till his eyes faded into little wrinkles.

One fine hot morning, when the Mowbray was far to the southward of the Madeira parallels, Mr. Vanderholt and his daughter came on deck from the breakfast-table, and seated themselves under the shelter of a short awning. The young lady held a novel. Mr. Vanderholt smoked his immense and richly-coloured pipe. Captain Glew passed them in short to-and-fro look-out excursions; and forward the little ship carried a busy face, with seamen at work on the hundred jobs which, fair or foul, a vessel exacts from her crew at sea. A soft wind blew. The sky was capacious with the clarity of the horizon, and wondrous lofty with light cloud, resembling froth that dries in curls upon a beach.

A ship was in sight on the starboard quarter, going away north-west, under square yards. Her spires trembled in the moist, rich distance, as though they were rays of starlight, twisting, burning, dying. She had been too far off to signal, nor did Mr. Vanderholt seem particularly anxious that the safety and whereabouts of his little ship should be reported at home.