The Pilot and his Wife: Chapter 26

Chapter 26

Gjert was now ten years old; and whilst his father was sitting over his
glass in Mother Andersen's parlour, he used generally to amuse himself
out in the harbour with a number of the Arendal boys with whom he had
struck up an acquaintanceship, and who understood very little about
differences of social position.

The brown-haired, brown-eyed little lad, with his sharp, intelligent
face, was the wildest of them all, and enjoyed a certain consideration
among them at the same time as his father's son--an honour which he
evidently thought it incumbent upon him to maintain by every kind of
break-neck exploit. His proper business, of course, was to look after
his father's boat in his absence; but as it was safely moored, and could
be seen just as well from any of the yards in the harbour, he used
generally to wait in some such conspicuous position till his friends
came streaming down to the quay from school, and throwing their books
down, sailed out in some punt or other to join him. Most of the boys had
been expressly warned by their mothers against the reckless
Kristiansen's son, but cross-trees and mast-heads became thereby only
the more attractive.

Old Beck's grandson, Frederick, who was going to be a naval cadet, had
fancied one day that he would escape observation from the windows at
home by climbing up to join his friend at the mast-head, on the other
side of the mast; but the slender spar was not sufficient to protect him
from the master-pilot's keen eye, and the latter came himself on board
in full grandfatherly indignation against the skipper for allowing such
pranks to be played on board his craft, thrashed Gjert for being the
cause of his grandson's disobedience, and told him that it was very
clear what he would come to some day--that he came of a bad stock, and
took after it. His own little scion, although a couple of years older
than Gjert, escaped punishment altogether--the other lads, however,
determining among themselves that he should have it the next time they
met. And he would have had it, if Gjert, who should have been the one
more particularly to desire revenge, had not unexpectedly taken his
part.

It was only as they were sailing the cutter home that the pilot heard
how Beck had thrashed his son, and cast his horoscope. His smurched face
grew white as a sheet. But when Gjert went in to tell him how, all the
same, he had taken Frederick Beck's part, his father looked at him in
surprise, and then muttered something about "telling this to his
mother."

Elizabeth had seen the boat pass Merd� for Arendal the day before, and
she was sitting indoors now expecting her husband, having commissioned
their youngest and only other son, Henrik, to keep a look-out, and come
and tell her when he saw his father coming. Henrik, however, had
entirely forgotten her injunctions in the more interesting occupation of
catching shrimps in one of the salt-water pools which a recent high tide
had left among the rocks; and there, in the bright afternoon, over the
blue and gold sea, dotted with sails, was the boat with its stripe and
number already close by, standing straight in for the harbour with a
flowing sheet.

With all her deep love for her husband, Elizabeth always awaited his
return now with a certain dread; and as she sat there by the window with
her work, in her rather foreign, Dutch style of dress, with the rays of
the evening sun streaming in upon her through the geraniums, she did not
look a happy woman. She was pale, and from time to time leaned her cheek
for a moment on her hand, and closed her eyes with a wearied look, and
then went on again determinedly with her sewing. When she heard his
voice unexpectedly outside the door, she jumped up hurriedly, but
stopped then with a half-frightened look, hesitating whether to go out
and meet him or not.

While she hesitated the door opened, and her expression changed at once
to one of cheerfulness, and apparently glad surprise.

"Well, mother, how goes it?" he cried, as he entered, in a light and
cheery tone, which took in a moment a weight off her heart; "and where
is the 'bagman'?"--a pet name he had for his youngest son, when he was
in good humour.

Gjert's adventure with Beck's grandson had made him a different man
to-day, and had immeasurably lightened for the time his wife's task; but
she was very careful not to let him see that she found him any different
from usual. Still, as she helped him off with his pilot-coat he noticed
that her hand trembled. His attention was diverted, however, at the
moment by the appearance of Henrik in the doorway, looking very
frightened and conscious, and with his trousers still tucked up over his
bare legs, and with the tin cup, in which he had his shrimps, in his
hand.

Gjert came in now with some of the things for the house which his father
had bought in Arendal, and impressing the doleful-looking "bagman" into
the service, took him down with him to the boat to help him to bring up
the rest. He had only given his mother a hurried kiss, as he had seen at
a glance that all was right this time. When it was otherwise, he always
kept by her, and, in look and manner, gave her all the help he could. He
had seen from his childhood, and comprehended so much of the unhappiness
of her relations with his father, that he had constituted himself her
friend and support, although, at the same time, he was devoted to his
father. When Gjert was in the boat, Elizabeth had a sort of security
that Salv� would at all events not be absolutely reckless; and Gjert
always took care that she should have news of them by other pilots or
fishermen from Merd�, from the different places they put in to. If the
boy was not with his father she would sometimes send him in to Arendal
to look for him.

This time the pilot made a long stay at home, and during the whole time
not a single domestic jar occurred. For a couple, indeed, who had been
married as long as they had, such unbroken harmony would, under any
circumstances, have been remarkable. Little Henrik had even had his
father as a companion on one of his shrimping expeditions; and much of
Salv�'s time had since been taken up in rigging a little brig for his
delighted son.

The only point upon which a harmless little difference occurred was the
question of Gjert's schooling. They were very fairly well-to-do people
for their position, and his mother had one day, as if the idea had
suddenly occurred to her, asked why they should not send him to school
in Arendal; he would be able to lodge with her aunt there, she said. His
father, however, would not hear of it, and dismissed the subject very
shortly by saying that when Gjert was old enough, he intended him to go
to Tergesen's rigging-loft in Vraangen and learn to rig.

His mother could not, however, so easily dismiss the ambitious scheme
from her mind, and it became, a few days after, the occasion of the most
violent scene which had ever yet put her strength of purpose to the
test, but from which there ensued eventually the very happiest results.

A man-of-war had lately come up to Arendal from a cadet cruise to the
Mediterranean, and Gjert had been allowed to go over with one of the
other pilots to see her.

Apart from the sensation which her lofty rig, the shining brass stoppers
protruding from her gunports, her swarm of sailors, and the sound of the
shrill whistle and occasional beat of drum on board, suggestive of
man-of-war discipline, created, curiosity had been further excited by
some rumours which were in circulation about her cruise having been a
flogging cruise; and among Gjert's friends, and indeed among the harbour
people generally, she was so much the object of awe, that whenever the
whistle sounded, it would darkly suggest the thought that another
flogging was going to take place, and any boats that were near at the
moment would sheer off to a more comfortable distance. There was just so
much truth in all this that there was one very hot-tempered officer on
board who was very much hated by the crew, and who had been unfortunate
enough to single out for flogging just the man whom, if he had been
better advised, he would have left alone--the song-maker, namely, of the
ship. The result had been that ever since a mystic refrain, sufficiently
significant, however, had been sung at the capstan, and had found its
way on shore, where it was in the mouth now of every boy about the
harbour.

Gjert's curiosity about everything connected with the vessel was
unbounded, and Frederick Beck, with whom he had established a close
friendship since that little affair with the other's grandfather, when
Gjert had saved him from punishment, could not tell him half enough.
"Fancy," he thought, "to be able to go about in a uniform all covered
with gold like the officers there on board!" He could think and talk of
nothing else all the time they were sailing home next day.

The wind had risen to half a gale, and they had three reefs in the
mainsail. His father, who for some days past had been wandering with
increasing frequency up to the flag-staff, or down to the quay, where he
would stand with his hand behind his back alone, and look about him in
an eager, restless way--sure signs that he was getting tired of being on
land--had been up several times to look out for the boy, and was now
sitting in the house, pasting together an old chart, as his son came up
from the quay shouting out the new song at the top of his voice against
the wind. He stopped in the porch to collect his breath to give the last
stanza with effect, and husband and wife as they listened exchanged
glances.

It was easy to see when he came in that he was bursting with the
consciousness of having all sorts of wonderful things to relate. His
mother had just laid the table for their evening meal, and as he greeted
them in an off-hand sort of way, he drew a chair over to the table at the
same time, that he might be ready to fall to the moment the food was set
down.

"Well, Gjert," said his mother, after he had sat and looked round him
for a moment or two, evidently expecting to be invited to gratify their
curiosity, "were you on board?"

"Not myself; but I talked to others who had been. For that matter I saw
everything that was to be seen," he assured them with a self-conscious
nod, reaching over at the same time for a crust of bread--"from the
topmast of the Antonia, a schooner that was lying close alongside. She
barely reached up to the Eagle's bulwarks; she would just about make a
long-boat for her--"

"If she was a good deal smaller," said his father, drily, completing the
sentence for him, as he went over and placed the chart upon the top of
the small cupboard in the corner.

Gjert began then, addressing himself to his mother, to support his
assertion by a comparison of the height out of the water of the
schooner's hull and of the corvette's, by assuring her that the vane at
her mast-head had not reached higher than the man-of-war's mainyard,
&c., but he was interrupted by his father--

"What song was that you were singing out there?"

"Oh, it was the one about the flogging cruise."

"It really was one then?" said the pilot, with a searching look at his
son. He did not easily give credence to gossip of the kind.

To be addressed by his father in this interested tone was highly
flattering to Gjert's self-love. It was this, in fact, that he had been
eager all the time to tell them about; and he burst out now with the
deepest conviction in his manner--

"That it was, father! Some say six, others nine; but that they were all
flogged within an inch of their lives and put in irons down in the
Mediterranean is as certain as--as," he looked about him eagerly here
for something that should be duly emphatic, and when no other more
striking illustration suggested itself, had to wind up finally with this
rather lame one--"as that the cuckoo is standing up there on the clock."

The intelligence had the effect of bringing his mother to a seat, with
the plate on her lap, while she looked apprehensively from her son to
her husband. There was nothing, however, in the aspect of the latter to
justify her apprehension.

"Who did you hear this from, Gjert?" she asked.

"Who did I hear it from? From everybody."

But bethinking him then that in his incredulous home "everybody" would
be reckoned about as valuable an authority as "nobody," he continued--

"From Frederick Beck. He had talked himself with one of the sailors who
was in charge of the officers' gig down by the landing-stairs while his
chief was on shore; and that wasn't all he heard, but a lot of other
queer things besides." Here he looked round him evidently with a
satisfied feeling that he must have convinced them this time at any
rate.

"He seems to have been a credible kind of a chap, that sailor," observed
his father with a mild irony, which escaped his son, however; while his
mother looked at him in some anxiety lest he should be going to sit
there and make a fool of himself. "Well, and what further did he tell
him?"

"Oh, lots of things."

"Let us have them."

"He said they had had such a hurricane down there, that they came across
a whole town that had been blown away drifting out in the middle of the
sea, with a minister praying in the midst of it;--then, that they had
run so close in to the land in beating up the Straits of Gibraltar, that
they had taken a palm-tree on board on the end of the bowsprit with a
whole family of negroes sitting in it, whom they had afterwards to put
ashore."

Gjert would have delivered himself of still another curious incident if
he had not been brought up by the laughter of his parents. The "bagman"
too, was laughing, because he saw the others doing so, and received a
crushing look accordingly from Gjert, who drew in his horns at once.

"Perhaps you don't think it's true?"

"Do you know what it is to spin a yarn, my boy? That lad down in the gig
has been spinning you a fine one," said his father, as he sat down to
the table.

Gjert continued to talk all through the meal, and when it was over,
while his mother came in and out of the room, and his father sat over at
the window, partly listening and partly looking out at the weather. He
described everything he had seen with such life and vividness,
particularly all that concerned the officers and the cadets, that his
mother sat down to listen, and his father, when there was a moment's
pause, observed with a quiet laugh--

"I daresay you would have liked to have been one of the cadets yourself,
Gjert?"

"Yes," said his mother, beguiled for a moment by the dazzling thought.
"If he were only to go to school in Arendal no one knows what might
happen. The clerk says that nothing is any trouble to Gjert."

Something in this observation must have struck discordantly upon her
husband's ear, for he changed colour and replied shortly after, somewhat
sarcastically--

"It's my opinion that Gjert is not too good for his father's station,
and that we are not going to make interest with anybody to hoist him up
into the company of his betters, as they call themselves."

Gjert's previous animation had been very much heightened by the picture
which such a glittering prospect presented to his fancy, and he cried
now, without taking warning by his father's changed tone--

"Mother was saying, though, the other day, that if I were to be a cadet
I should cut a better figure in the world than as an ordinary common
sailor."

It was as if a match had been thrown into a gunpowder-magazine. His
father's hard face flushed up wildly, and he threw over at his wife a
look of inexpressible, cold scorn. Turning savagely away, he said in a
cutting tone, that seemed to go through her--

"Do you also despise your father's station, my boy?"

When Gjert blundered out then in his eagerness--

"Frederick Beck is going to be a cadet," it was followed simply by--

"Come here, Gjert!"--and he received a blow that sent him staggering
against the table. A second was about to follow, when his father
happened to look up at his wife. She had sprung a couple of steps
forward, as if to take Gjert from him, and was standing now before him
with crimson face and flashing eyes, and with a bearing that made him,
at all events, lower his hand. She then turned away at once, and went
out into the kitchen.

Salv� stood for a moment uncertain how to act. Then he went to the
kitchen door, and announced, shortly and sharply, that he and Gjert were
going to sea that evening--they would want provisions.

The wind and rain beat wildly against the black window-panes while
Elizabeth was carrying out his orders; but when she presently came in
with the ale-jar and what else they were to take with them, not a trace
of anxiety, or of her former emotion, was to be detected. Her face was
pale, and stony-calm; and there was something almost humble in her
bearing towards her husband. But when, for a moment, she and Gjert were
left alone together in the house, drawing him hastily towards her, she
whispered, in a voice choked with repressed emotion--

"Never let your father see that you are afraid, my boy."

She bade her husband farewell at the door; and there was foul weather
both within and without the pilot as he put to sea that evening.

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