In the storm and darkness, only fitfully broken by the firelight, we ate our supper under what shelter the low cliff afforded. Our boyish spirits were much subdued and awed by the peril we had passed through and the sombre scene about us.
The meal being finished, we made some preparations for the night, fastening the sail, by the weight of large stones laid on one edge of it, to the top of the rock, and then bringing its other edge, the boom side, to the ground and steadying it there with pegs. In that way we constructed a kind of tent, in which we piled a bedding and covering of dry seaweed.
The Captain stood by the fire, smoking his pipe and watching our arrangements. When they were completed, and we boys, gratified with our success, began to declare our situation “rather jolly,” he interrupted us somewhat abruptly in this way:—
“You chaps always say your prayers before you sleep, I dare say. If so, you’ll not forget them to-night—will you?”
“No, sir,” we answered.
“Young shipmates, you remember how Mr Clare talked to you one day in the Clear the Track—eh? Well, then, for the first time in nigh forty years—think of that, nigh forty years—I said my prayers, the only ones I ever said, that my—mo—ther taught me; and somehow they came so clear to me that I felt like as if my—mo—ther was kneeling beside me. I ran away to sea, like the young fool that I was, when I was eleven years old. It was going on four years before I came back to my old home. I had forgotten my prayers. I tried hard to remember them, too, then, and some of the Scripture stories and lessons my—mo—ther used to teach me; for she was—gone.”
His voice did not tremble, but he spoke very slowly, as if he wanted to speak out to us, and yet wished to do it without betraying the deep feeling that the events of the evening had intensified. Each time before he spoke the words “my mother,” he took the pipe from his mouth and hesitated a moment, as if to steady himself. Somehow the old Captain’s voice was softer, I thought, than I had ever heard it before—it may have been fatigue and the noises of the storm that made it sound so. His face, too, looked to me as if it had lost its hard lines and roughness—perhaps the firelight caused that to seem so. And those bold, sharp eyes of his were as gentle as my little sister Aggie’s. He continued:—
“Hard times a youngster often has at sea, not in all ships, but in many, I tell you, and bad companions on every side. No gentle looks or kind words, but knocks and oaths. No time to read, and all that; hardly a chance to think. Well, I was a bad one, and worse when I went back again, and had my—mo—ther no longer to love me, and no one anywhere in the world to care a button for Rowly,” (his Christian name was Roland). “I was a pretty reckless, hearty, devil-me-care fellow, I tell you. I could rough it and fight my way with the strongest, and never thought further ahead than the moment I was living in. So, for thirty years and more I knocked about the world, coming scot-free through a thousand dangers. Yes, and I got ahead all the time and prospered, thinking mighty well of myself, my good luck, clear head, and tough arm. I never thought of God. I don’t know but that I had almost forgotten that there was a God; at any rate, if I thought of Him, it was with doubt and indifference. Yet, boys, in all that time, ‘He cared for me, upheld me, blessed me.’”
His words grew hurried and thick, his head was turned so I could not see his face, and the old black pipe had fallen from his fingers to the ground. Ugly walked around and snuffed at it in amazement. But the Captain went on:—
“Now I feel it all—how I feel it—since I heard Mr Clare that day. Nearly forty years deaf, but I hear God’s voice within me now, louder and louder every day; and what has He done for us to-day? How He has spoken! Ah! boys, you’ll never be the old sinner I have been. ‘Remember thy Creator in the days of thy youth.’ Part of the only hymn I can remember, of my mother’s, has come again and again to my ear to-night—that—