Part 21 (2/2)

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 a.s.sured 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 a.s.sertion by a comparison of the height out of the water of the schooner's hull and of the corvette's, by a.s.suring 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 ill.u.s.tration 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 ”n.o.body,” 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 sh.o.r.e; 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 ash.o.r.e.”

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 crus.h.i.+ng 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--

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