The Young Trawler by R. M. Ballantyne (i read books txt) 📖

your other side, stands a grief-stricken mother trying to say farewell to a son whose hollow cheeks, glittering eyes, and short cough give little hope of a meeting again on this side the grave. Above all the din, as if to render things more maddening, the tug alongside keeps up intermittent shrieks of its steam-whistle, for the first bell has rung to warn those who are not passengers to prepare for quitting the steamer. Soon the second bell rings, and the bustle increases while in the excitement of partings the last farewells culminate.

“We don’t need to mind that bell, having our boat alongside,” said the missionary to Captain Bream, as they stood a little to one side silently contemplating the scene. “You see that smart young officer in uniform, close to the cabin skylight?”

“Yes.”

“That’s the captain.”

“Indeed. He seems to me very young to have charge of such a vessel.”

“Not so young as he looks,” returned the other. “I shall have to get his permission before attempting anything on board, so we must wait here for a few minutes. You see, he has gone into his cabin with the owners to have a few parting words. While we are standing you’ll have one of the best opportunities of seeing the passengers, for most of them will come on deck to bid relatives and friends farewell, and wave handkerchiefs as the tug steams away, so keep your eyes open. Meanwhile, I will amuse you with a little chit-chat about emigrants. This vessel is one of the largest that runs to Australia.”

“Indeed,” responded the captain, with an absent look and tone that would probably have been the same if his friend had said that it ran to the moon. The missionary did not observe that his companion was hopelessly sunk in the sea of abstraction.

“Yes,” he continued, “and, do you know, it is absolutely amazing what an amount of emigration goes on from this port continually, now-a-days. You would scarcely believe it unless brought as I am into close contact with it almost daily. Why, there were no fewer than 26,000 emigrants who sailed from the Thames in the course of last year.”

“How many hogsheads, did you say?” asked the captain, still deeply sunk in abstraction.

A laugh from his friend brought him to the surface, however, in some confusion.

“Excuse me,” he said, with a deprecatory look; “the truth is, my mind is apt to wander a bit in such a scene, and my eyes chanced to light at the moment you spoke on that hogshead over there. How many emigrants, did you say?”

“No fewer than 26,000,” repeated the missionary good-naturedly, and went on to relate some interesting incidents, but the captain was soon again lost in the contemplation of a poor young girl who had wept to such an extent at parting from a female friend, then in the tug, that her attempts to smile through the weeping had descended from the sublime to the ridiculous. She and her friend continued to wave their kerchiefs and smile and cry at each other notwithstanding, quite regardless of public opinion, until the tug left. Then the poor young thing hid her sodden face in her moist handkerchief and descended with a moan of woe to her berth. Despite the comical element in this incident, a tear was forced out of Captain Bream’s eye, and we rather think that the missionary was similarly affected. But, to say truth, the public at large cared little for such matters. Each was too much taken up with the pressing urgency of his or her own sorrows to give much heed to the woes of strangers.

“People in such frames of mind are easily touched by kind words and influences,” said the missionary in a low voice.

“True, the ground is well prepared for you,” returned the captain softly, for another group had absorbed his attention.

“And I distribute among them Testaments, gospels, and tracts, besides bags filled with books and magazines.”

“Was there much powder in ’em?” asked the captain, struggling to the surface at the last word.

“I don’t know about that,” replied his friend with a laugh, “but I may venture to say that there was a good deal of fire in some of them.”

“Fire!” exclaimed the captain in surprise. Explanation was prevented by the commander of the vessel issuing at that moment from the cabin with the owners. Hearty shakings of hands and wishes for a good voyage followed. The officers stood at the gangway; the last of the weeping laggards was kindly but firmly led away; the tug steamed off, and the emigrant vessel was left to make her final preparations for an immediate start on her long voyage to the antipodes, with none but her own inhabitants on board, save a few who had private means of quitting.

“Now is our time,” said the missionary, hastening towards the captain of the vessel.

For one moment the latter gave him a stern look, as if he suspected him of being a man forgotten by the tug, but a bland smile of good-will overspread his features when the former explained his wishes.

“Certainly, my good sir, go where you like, and do what you please.”

Armed with this permission, he and Captain Bream went to work to distribute their gifts.

Most of the people received these gladly, some politely, a few with suspicion, as if they feared that payment was expected, and one or two refused them flatly. The distributers, meanwhile, had many an opportunity afforded, when asked questions, of dropping here and there “a word in season.”

As this was the first time Captain Bream had ever been asked to act as an amateur distributer of Testaments and tracts, he waited a few minutes, with one of his arms well-filled, to observe how his companion proceeded, and then himself went to work.

Of course, during all this time, he had not for an instant forgotten the main object of his journey. On the contrary, much of the absence of mind to which we have referred was caused by the intense manner in which he scanned the innumerable faces that passed to and fro before him. He now went round eagerly distributing his gifts, though not so much impressed with the importance of the work as he would certainly have been had his mind been less pre-occupied. It was observed, however, that the captain offered his parcels and Testaments only to women, a circumstance which caused a wag from Erin to exclaim—

“Hallo! old gentleman, don’t ye think the boys has got sowls as well as the faimales?”

This was of course taken in good part by the captain, who at once corrected the mistake. But after going twice round the deck, and drawing forth many humorous as well as caustic remarks as to his size and general appearance, he was forced to the conclusion that his sister was not there. The lower regions still remained, however.

Descending to these with some hope and a dozen Testaments, he found that the place was so littered with luggage, passengers, and children, that it was extremely difficult to move. To make the confusion worse, nearly the whole space between decks had been fitted up with extra berths—here for the married, there for the unmarried—so that very little room indeed was left for passage, and exceedingly little light entered.

But Captain Bream was not affected by such matters. He was accustomed to them, and his eyesight was good. He was bent on one object, which he pursued with quiet, unflagging perseverance—namely, that of gazing earnestly into the face of every woman in the ship.

So eager was the poor man about it that he forgot to offer the last armful of Testaments which he had undertaken to distribute, and simply went from berth to berth staring at the females. He would undoubtedly have been considered mad if it had not been that the women were too much taken up with their own affairs to think much about any one with whom they had nothing to do.

One distracting, and also disheartening, part of the process was, that, owing to the general activity on board, he came again and again to the same faces in different parts of the vessel, but he so frequently missed seeing others that hope was kept alive by the constant turning up of new faces. Alas! none of them bore any resemblance to that for which he sought so earnestly!

At last he returned to the place where his friend was preaching. By that time, however, the crowd was so great that he could not enter. Turning aside, therefore, into an open berth, with a feeling of weariness and depression creeping over his mind and body, he was about to sit down on a box, when a female voice at the other end of the berth demanded to know what he wanted.

Hope was a powerful element in Captain Bream’s nature. He rose quickly and stopped to gaze attentively into a female face, but it was so dark where she sat on a low box that he could hardly see her, and took a step forward.

“Well, Mr Imprence, I hope as you’ll know me again,” said the woman, whose face was fiery red, and whose nature was furious. “What do you want here?”

The captain sighed profoundly. That was obviously not his sister! Then a confused feeling of incapacity to give a good reason for being there came over him. Suddenly he recollected the Testaments.

“Have one?” he said eagerly, as he offered one of the little black books.

“Have what?”

“A Testament.”

“No, I won’t have a Testament, I’m a Catholic,” said the woman as she looked sternly up.

Captain Bream was considering how he might best suggest that the Word of God was addressed to all mankind, when a thought seemed to strike the woman.

“Are you the cap’n?” she asked.

“Yes,” he replied absently, and with some degree of truth.

“Then it’s my opinion, cap’n, an’ I tell it you to your face, that you ought to be ashamed of yourself to put honest men an’ wimen in places like this—neither light, nor hair, nor nothink in the way of hornament to—”

“Captain Bream! are you there, sir?” cried the voice of his friend the missionary at that moment down the companion-hatch.

“Ay, ay, I’m here.”

“I’ve found her at last, sir.”

The captain incontinently dropped the dozen Testaments into the woman’s lap and went up the companion-ladder like a tree-squirrel.

“This way, sir. She’s sittin’ abaft the funnel.”

In a few seconds Captain Bream and his companion stood before a pretty-faced, fair-haired woman with soft gentle eyes, which suddenly opened with surprise as the two men hurried forward and came to a halt in front of her. The captain looked anxiously at his friend.

“Is this the—” he stopped.

“Yes, that’s her,” said the missionary with a nod. The captain turned slowly on his heel, and an irrepressible groan burst from him as he walked away.

There was no need for the disappointed missionary to ask if he had been mistaken. One look had sufficed for the captain.

Sadly they returned to the shore, and there the missionary, being near his house, invited Captain Bream to go home with him and have a cup of tea.

“It will revive you, my dear sir,” he said, as the captain stood in silence at his side with his head bowed down. “The disappointment must indeed be great. Don’t give up hope, however. But your clothes are wet still. No wonder you shiver, having gone about so long in damp garments. Come away.”

Captain Bream yielded in silence. He not only went and had a cup of his hospitable friends’s tea, but he afterwards accepted the offer of one of his beds, where he went into a high fever, from which he did not recover for many weary weeks.