Charlie to the Rescue

Chapter Four.

Drifting on the Rocks

On the sea-shore, not far from the spot where the brig had been wrecked, Charlie Brooke and Shank Leather walked up and down engaged in earnest conversation soon after the interviews just described.

Very different was the day from that on which the wreck had taken place. It seemed almost beyond possibility that the serene sky above, and the calm, glinting ocean which rippled so softly at their feet, could be connected with the same world in which inky clouds and snowy foam and roaring billows had but a short time before held high revelry.

“Well, Charlie,” said his friend, after a pause, “it was very good of you, old boy, and I hope that I’ll do credit to your recommendation. The old man seems a decent sort of chap, though somewhat cross-grained.”

“He is kind-hearted, Shank; I feel quite sure of that, and hope sincerely that you will get on well with him.”

“‘With him!’” repeated Leather; “you don’t seem to understand that the situation he is to get for me is not in connection with his own business, whatever that may be. It is in some other City firm, the name of which he has not yet mentioned. I can’t myself understand why he is so close!”

“Perhaps because he has been born with a secretive nature,” suggested Charlie.

“May be so. However, that’s no business of mine, and it doesn’t do to be too inquisitive when a man is offering you a situation of two hundred a year. It would be like looking a gift-horse in the mouth. All I care about is that I’m to go to London next week and begin work—Why, you don’t seem pleased to hear of my good fortune,” continued Leather, turning a sharp look on his friend, who was gazing gravely at the sand, in which he was poking holes with his stick.

“I congratulate you, Shank, with all my heart, and you know it; but—I’m sorry to find that you are not to be in connection with Mr Crossley himself, for there is more good in him than appears on the surface. Did he then make no mention of the nature of his own business?”

“None whatever. To say truth, that mysteriousness or secrecy is the only point about the old fellow’s character that I don’t like,” said Leather, with a frown of virtuous disapproval. “‘All fair and above-board,’ that’s my motto. Speak out your mind and fear nothing!”

At these noble sentiments a faint smile, if we may say so, hovered somewhere in the recesses of Charlie Brooke’s interior, but not the quiver of a muscle disturbed the solemnity of his face.

“The secrecy of his nature seems even to have infected that skipper with—or rather by—whom he was wrecked,” continued Leather, “for when I asked him yesterday about the old gentleman, he became suddenly silent, and when I pressed him, he made me a rigmarole speech something like this: ‘Young man, I make it a rule to know nothin’ whatever about my passengers. As I said only two days past to my missus: “Maggie,” says I, “it’s of no use your axin’ me. My passengers’ business is their business, and my business is mine. All I’ve got to do is to sail my ship, an’ see to it that I land my passengers in safety.”’

“‘You made a pretty mess of your business, then, the last trip,’ said I, for I was bothered with his obvious determination not to give me any information.

“‘Right you are, young man,’ said he, ‘and it would have been a still prettier mess if your friend Mr Brooke hadn’t come off wi’ that there line!’

“I laughed at this and recovered my temper, but I could pump nothing more out of him. Perhaps there was nothing to pump.—But now tell me, how is it—for I cannot understand—that you refused all offers to yourself? You are as much ‘out of work’ just now as I am.”

“That’s true, Shank, and really I feel almost as incapable of giving you an answer as Captain Stride himself. You see, during our conversation Mr Crossley attributed mean—at all events wrong—motives to me, and somehow I felt that I could not accept any favour at his hands just then. I suspect I was too hasty. I fear it was false pride—”

“Ha! ha!” laughed Leather; “‘pride!’ I wonder in what secret chamber of your big corpus your pride lies.”

“Well, I don’t know. It must be pretty deep. Perhaps it is engrained, and cannot be easily recognised.”

“That last is true, Charlie. Assuredly it can’t be recognised, for it’s not there at all. Why, if you had been born with a scrap of false pride you and I could never have been friends—for I hate it!”

Shank Leather, in saying this, had hit the nail fairly on the head, although he had not intelligently probed the truth to the bottom. In fact a great deal of the friendship which drew these young men together was the result of their great dissimilarity of character. They acted on each other somewhat after the fashion of a well-adjusted piece of mechanism, the ratchets of selfishness and cog-wheels of vanity in Shank fitting easily into the pinions of good-will and modesty which characterised his friend, so that there was no jarring in their intercourse. This alone would not, perhaps, have induced the strong friendship that existed if it had not been coupled with their intimacy from childhood, and if Brooke had not been particularly fond of Shank’s invalid mother, and recognised a few of her good characteristics faintly reproduced in her son, while Shank fully appreciated in Charlie that amiable temperament which inclines its happy possessor to sympathise much with others, to talk little of self, to believe all things and to hope all things, to the verge almost of infantine credulity.

“Well, well,” resumed Charlie, with a laugh, “however that may be, I did decline Mr Crossley’s offers, but it does not matter much now, for that same worthy captain who bothered you so much has told me of a situation of which he has the gift, and has offered it to me.”

“You don’t say so! Is it a good one?”

“Yes, and well paid, I’m told, though I don’t know the exact amount of the salary yet.”

“And have you accepted?”

“I have. Mother agreed, after some demur, that it is better than nothing, so, like you, I begin work in a few days.”

“Well now, how strangely things do happen sometimes!” said Leather, stopping and looking out seaward, where the remains of the brig could still be distinguished on the rocks that had fixed her doom. “But for that fortunate wreck and our saving the people in her, you and I might still have been whistling in the ranks of the Great Unemployed—And what sort of a situation is it, Charlie?”

“You will smile, perhaps, when I tell you. It is to act as supercargo of the Walrus, which is commanded by Captain Stride himself.”

Young Leather’s countenance fell. “Why, Charlie,” he said, “that means that you’re going away to sea!”

“I fear it does.”

“Soon?”

“In a week or two.”

For some little time Leather did not speak. The news fell upon him with a shock of disagreeable surprise, for, apart from the fact that he really loved his friend, he was somehow aware that there were not many other young men who cared much for himself—in regard to which he was not a little surprised, for it never occurred to him that egotism and selfishness had anything to do with the coolness of his friends, or that none but men like our hero, with sweet tempers and self-forgetting dispositions, could by any possibility put up with him.

“Who are the owners of the Walrus, Charlie?” he asked, as they turned into the lane that led from the beach to the village.

“Withers and Company of London.”

“H’m—don’t know them. They must be trustful fellows, however, to take a captain into their employ who has just lost his vessel.”

“They have not taken him into their employ,” said Charlie. “Captain Stride tells me he has been in their service for more than a quarter of a century, and they exonerate him from all blame in the loss of the brig. It does seem odd to me, however, that he should be appointed so immediately to a new ship, but, as you remarked, that’s none of my business. Come, I’ll go in with you and congratulate your mother and May on your appointment.”

They had reached the door of Shank Leather’s house by that time. It was a poor-looking house, in a poor side street or blind alley of the village, the haunt of riotous children during the day-time, and of maddening cats at night. Stray dogs now and then invaded the alley, but, for the most part, it was to children and cats that the region was given over. Here, for the purpose of enabling the proverbial “two ends” to “meet,” dwelt a considerable population in houses of diminutive size and small accommodation. A few of these were persons who, having “seen better days,” were anxious to hide their poverty and existence from the “friends” of those better days. There was likewise a sprinkling of individuals and families who, having grown callous to the sorrows of earth, had reached that condition wherein the meeting of the two ends is a matter of comparative indifference, because they never met, and were never more expected to meet—the blank, annually left gaping, being filled up, somehow, by a sort of compromise between bankruptcy, charity, and starvation.

To the second of these the Leather family belonged. They had been brought to their sad condition by that prolific source of human misery—the bottle.

To do the family justice, it was only the father who had succumbed. He had been a gentleman; he was now a sot. His wife—delicate owing to bad treatment, sorrow, and insufficient nourishment—was, ever had been, and ever would be, a lady and a Christian. Owing to the last priceless condition she was still alive. It is despair that kills, and despair had been banished from her vocabulary ever since she had laid down the arms of her rebellion and accepted the Saviour of mankind as her guide and consolation.

But sorrow, suffering, toil had not departed when the demon despair fled away. They had, however, been wonderfully lightened, and one of the brightest gleams of hope in her sad life was that she might possibly be used as the means of saving her husband. There were other gleams of light, however, one of the brightest of them being that May, her only daughter, was loving and sympathetic—or, as she sometimes expressed it, “as good as gold.” But there was also a very dark spot in her life: Shank, her only son, was beginning to show a tendency to tread in his father’s steps.

Many golden texts were enshrined in the heart of poor Mrs Leather, and not a few of these—painted by the hand of May—hung on the walls of their little sitting-room, but the word to which she turned her eyes in seasons of profoundest obscurity, and which served her as a sheet-anchor in the midst of the wildest storms, was, “Hope thou in God, for thou shalt yet praise Him.” And alongside of that text, whenever she thought of it or chanced to look at it, there invariably flashed another: “Immanuel, God with us.”

May and her mother were alone when the young men entered; the former was at her lessons, the latter busy with knitting-needles.

Knitting was the means by which Mrs Leather, with constant labour and inexhaustible perseverance, managed to fill up the gap between the before-mentioned “two ends,” which her dissolute husband failed to draw together. She could read or assist May with her lessons, while her delicate fingers, working below the table, performed miraculous gyrations with steel and worsted. To most male minds, we presume, this is utterly incomprehensible. It is well not to attempt the description of that which one does not understand. The good lady knitted socks and stockings, and mittens and cuffs, and comforters, and other things, in absolutely overwhelming quantities, so that the accumulation in the press in which she stored them was at times quite marvellous. Yet that press never quite filled up, owing to the fact that there was an incurable leak in it—a sort of secret channel—through which the products of her toil flowed out nearly as fast as she poured them in.

This leak in the worsted press, strange to say, increased wonderfully just after the wreck described in a previous chapter, and the rivulet to which it gave rise flowed in the direction of the back-door of the house, emptying itself into a reservoir which always took the form of a little elderly lady, with a plain but intensely lovable countenance, who had been, perhaps still was, governess in a family in a neighbouring town where Mrs Leather had spent some of her “better days.” Her name was Molloy.

Like a burglar Miss Molloy came in a stealthy manner at irregular intervals to the back-door of the house, and swept the press of its contents, made them up into a bundle of enormous size, and carried them off on the shoulders of an appropriately disreputable blackguard boy—as Shank called him—whom she retained for the purpose. Unlike a burglar, however, Miss Molloy did not “bolt with the swag,” but honestly paid for everything, from the hugest pair of gentlemen’s fishing socks to the smallest pair of children’s cuffs.

What Miss Molloy did with this perennial flow of woollen work, whom she came from, where she went to, who discovered her, and why she did it, were subjects of inquiry which baffled investigation, and always simmered in the minds of Shank and May, though the mind of Mrs Leather herself seemed to be little if at all exercised by it. At all events she was uncommunicative on the point, and her children’s curiosity was never gratified, for the mother was obdurate, and, torture being illegal at that time in England, they had no means of compelling disclosure. It was sometimes hinted by Shank that their little dog Scraggy—appropriately named!—knew more than he chose to tell about the subject, for he was generally present at the half-secret interviews, and always closed the scene with a sham but furious assault on the ever contemptuous blackguard boy. But Scraggy was faithful to his trust, and revealed nothing.

“I can’t tell you how glad I am, Mrs Leather, about Shank’s good fortune,” said Charlie, with a gentle shake of the hand, which Mr Crossley would have appreciated. Like the Nasmyth steam-hammer, which flattens a ton of iron or gently cracks a hazel-nut, our Herculean hero could accommodate himself to circumstances; “as your son says, it has been a lucky wreck for us.”

“Lucky indeed for him,” responded the lady, instantly resuming her knitting, which she generally kept down near her lap, well hidden by the table, while she looked at her visitor and talked, “but not very pleasant for those who have lost by it.”

“Pooh! mother, nobody has lost by it,” said Shank in his free-and-easy style. “The owners don’t lose, because of course it was insured; and the Insurance Companies can’t be said to lose, for the value of a small brig will be no more felt by them than the losing of a pin would be felt by yourself; and the captain won’t lose—except a few sea-garments and things o’ that kind—for he has been appointed to another ship already. By the way, mother, that reminds me that Charlie has also got a situation through this lucky wreck, for Captain Stride feels so grateful that he has offered him the situation of supercargo in his new ship.”