Charlie to the Rescue

“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.”

For once Mrs Leather’s knitting-needles came to a sudden stop, and she looked inquiringly at her young friend. So did May.

“Have you accepted it?”

“Well, yes. I have.”

“I’m so sorry,” said May; “I don’t know what Shank will do without you.”

At that moment a loud knocking was heard at the door. May rose to open it, and Mrs Leather looked anxiously at her son.

A savage undertoned growl and an unsteady step told all too plainly that the head of the house had returned home.

With sudden interest in worsted fabrics, which he was far from feeling, Charlie Brooke turned his back to the door, and, leaning forward, took up an end of the work with which the knitter was busy.

“That’s an extremely pretty pattern, Mrs Leather. Does it take you long to make things of the kind?”

“Not long; I—I make a good many of them.”

She said this with hesitation, and with her eyes fixed on the doorway, through the opening of which her husband thrust a shaggy dishevelled head, with dissipation stamped on a countenance which had evidently been handsome once.

But Charlie saw neither the husband’s head nor the poor wife’s gaze, for he was still bending over the worsted-work in mild admiration.

Under the impression that he had not been observed, Mr Leather suddenly withdrew his head, and was heard to stumble up-stairs under the guidance of May. Then the bang of a door, followed by a shaking of the slimly-built house, suggested the idea that the poor man had flung himself on his bed.

“Shank Leather,” said Charlie Brooke, that same night as they strolled on the sea-shore, “you gave expression to some sentiments to-day which I highly approved of. One of them was ‘Speak out your mind, and fear nothing!’ I mean to do so now, and expect that you will not be hurt by my following your advice.”

“Well!” exclaimed Shank, with a dubious glance, for he disliked the seriousness of his friend’s tone.

“Your father—” began Charlie.

“Please don’t speak about him,” interrupted the other. “I know all that you can say. His case is hopeless, and I can’t bear to speak about it.”

“Well, I won’t speak about him, though I cannot agree with you that his case is hopeless. But it is yourself that I wish to speak about. You and I are soon to separate; it must be for a good long while—it may be for ever. Now I must speak out my mind before I go. My old playmate, school-fellow, and chum, you have begun to walk in your poor father’s footsteps, and you may be sure that if you don’t turn round all your hopes will be blasted—at least for this life—perhaps also for that which is to come. Now don’t be angry or hurt, Shank. Remember that you not only encouraged me, but advised me to speak out my mind.”