Rodney Stone | Page 3

more
than once, but your mother is your first and your last. Cherish her, then,
whilst you may, for the day will come when every hasty deed or
heedless word will come back with its sting to hive in your own heart.
Such, then, was my mother; and as to my father, I can describe him
best when I come to the time when he returned to us from the
Mediterranean. During all my childhood he was only a name to me, and
a face in a miniature hung round my mother's neck. At first they told
me he was fighting the French, and then after some years one heard less
about the French and more about General Buonaparte. I remember the
awe with which one day in Thomas Street, Portsmouth, I saw a print of
the great Corsican in a bookseller's window. This, then, was the arch
enemy with whom my father spent his life in terrible and ceaseless
contest. To my childish imagination it was a personal affair, and I for
ever saw my father and this clean-shaven, thin-lipped man swaying and
reeling in a deadly, year-long grapple. It was not until I went to the
Grammar School that I understood how many other little boys there
were whose fathers were in the same case.

Only once in those long years did my father return home, which will
show you what it meant to be the wife of a sailor in those days. It was
just after we had moved from Portsmouth to Friar's Oak, whither he
came for a week before he set sail with Admiral Jervis to help him to
turn his name into Lord St. Vincent. I remember that he frightened as
well as fascinated me with his talk of battles, and I can recall as if it
were yesterday the horror with which I gazed upon a spot of blood
upon his shirt ruffle, which had come, as I have no doubt, from a
mischance in shaving. At the time I never questioned that it had spurted
from some stricken Frenchman or Spaniard, and I shrank from him in
terror when he laid his horny hand upon my head. My mother wept
bitterly when he was gone, but for my own part I was not sorry to see
his blue back and white shorts going down the garden walk, for I felt,
with the heedless selfishness of a child, that we were closer together,
she and I, when we were alone.
I was in my eleventh year when we moved from Portsmouth to Friar's
Oak, a little Sussex village to the north of Brighton, which was
recommended to us by my uncle, Sir Charles Tregellis, one of whose
grand friends, Lord Avon, had had his seat near there. The reason of
our moving was that living was cheaper in the country, and that it was
easier for my mother to keep up the appearance of a gentlewoman
when away from the circle of those to whom she could not refuse
hospitality. They were trying times those to all save the farmers, who
made such profits that they could, as I have heard, afford to let half
their land lie fallow, while living like gentlemen upon the rest. Wheat
was at a hundred and ten shillings a quarter, and the quartern loaf at one
and ninepence. Even in the quiet of the cottage of Friar's Oak we could
scarce have lived, were it not that in the blockading squadron in which
my father was stationed there was the occasional chance of a little
prize-money. The line-of-battle ships themselves, tacking on and off
outside Brest, could earn nothing save honour; but the frigates in
attendance made prizes of many coasters, and these, as is the rule of the
service, were counted as belonging to the fleet, and their produce
divided into head-money. In this manner my father was able to send
home enough to keep the cottage and to pay for me at the day school of
Mr. Joshua Allen, where for four years I learned all that he had to teach.
It was at Allen's school that I first knew Jim Harrison, Boy Jim as he

has always been called, the nephew of Champion Harrison of the
village smithy. I can see him as he was in those days with great,
floundering, half-formed limbs like a Newfoundland puppy, and a face
that set every woman's head round as he passed her. It was in those
days that we began our lifelong friendship, a friendship which still in
our waning years binds us closely as two brothers. I taught him his
exercises, for he never loved the sight of a book, and he in turn made
me box and wrestle, tickle trout on the Adur, and snare rabbits