The Pilot and his Wife | Page 4

in high dudgeon. When he came again the old man was very
snappish to him, and he found it so unpleasant in the house that he
made all the haste he could to get his business done. While he was thus
occupied, the little girl told him all about the Naiad, and the part her
grandfather had taken in the action. Salvé, who was ruffled, and
thought the old man had been an ill-mannered old dog, followed the
relation from time to time with a sneering remark, which in her
eagerness she didn't notice, or didn't understand. But when he had
finished what he had to do, he gave vent to his feelings in a way she did
understand,--he laughed incredulously.
"Old Jacob there on board the Naiad! This is the first time anybody
ever heard of it."

The individual in question unfortunately came out at the moment to see
the boat off, and turning, to him, red with anger, she cried--
"Grandfather! he doesn't believe you were on board the Naiad that
time!"
The old man answered at first as if he didn't deign to enter upon any
controversy on the subject--
"Oh, I suppose it's only little girls' prattle again."
But whether it was wounded vanity, or a sudden access of irritation
against the lad, or that his eye fell upon his granddaughter standing
there, so evidently incensed and resentful, he flared up the next moment,
and thrusting his huge fist under the youngster's nose, burst out--
"If you want to know all about it, you young swabber, I may tell you I
stood on the Naiad's gun-deck with better folk than you are ever likely
to come across"--he stamped his foot here as if he had the deck under
him--"when, with one broadside from the Dictator, the three masts and
bowsprit were shot away, and the main deck came crashing down upon
the lower;"--the last sentence was taken from 'Exploits of Danish and
Norwegian Naval Heroes,' and the old man was as proud of these lines
as he would have been of a medal.
"When the crash came," he pursued, always in the same posture, and in
the manner of the sacred text, "he who stands here and tells the tale had
but just time to save himself by leaping into the sea through a
gun-port."
But he threw off then the trammels of the text, and continued in propriâ
personâ, violently gesticulating with his fists, and steadily advancing
all the time, while Salvé prudently retreated before his advance down to
the boat.
"We don't deal in lies and fabricate stories out here like you, you young
whipper-snapper of a ship's cub; and if it wasn't for your father, who
has sense enough to rope's-end you himself, I'd lay a stick across your

back till you hadn't a howl left in you."
With this finale of the longest speech to which he had given vent for
thirty years perhaps, he turned with a short nod to the father, and went
into the house again.
Elizabeth was miserable that Salvé should go away like this, without so
much as deigning to say good-bye to her. And her grandfather was
cross enough himself; for he was afraid that he had done something
foolish, and broken with the lighterman.
CHAPTER III.
Salvé came out to the rock again the next autumn, after a voyage to
Liverpool and Havre.
At first he was rather shy, although his father and old Jacob Torungen
had in the interval, in spite of that little affair of the previous year, been
on the best of terms. The white bear, however, as he called him, seemed
to have altogether forgotten what had passed; and with the girl he was
very easily reconciled--she had learnt now not to tell everything to her
grandfather.
Whilst the lighterman and old Jacob enjoyed a heart-warming glass
together in the house, Salvé carried the things up to the cellar, Elizabeth
following him up and down every time, and the conversation
meanwhile going round all the points of the compass, so to speak. After
she had asked him about Havre de Grace, where he had been, and about
America, where he had not been,--if his captain's wife was as fine as a
man-of-war captain's; and then if he wouldn't like one day to marry a
fine lady,--she wanted at last to know, from the laughing sailor lad, if
the officers' wives were ever allowed to be with them in war.
Her face had of late acquired something wonderfully attractive in its
expression--such a seriousness would come over it sometimes,
although she continued as childlike as ever; and such eyes as hers were,
at all events in Salvé's experience, not common. At any rate, after this,
he invariably accompanied his father upon these expeditions.

The last