Young Tom Bowling | Page 4

see you again--aye, and looking so hale and hearty, too, old shipmate!"
"So am I to see you, sir," rejoined father, resting on his oar, while the two exchanged a good grip of their fists; I also stopping pulling, of course, and grinning in sympathy. "Why, I were only talking about you last pension day to Bill Murphy--You remembers Bill; don't you, sir? He wer' cap'en of the foretop in the Blazer with us, Mr Mordaunt--a little chap with ginger hair."
"Oh yes, I recollect Murphy well enough. He was a mad Irishman, always full of fun and mischief," rejoined the other, smiling at the remembrance of some joke in which the chap of whom they spoke had part. "But you must put a handle to my name, Bowling; I'm posted now."
"Beg pardon, cap'en, I didn't know it, in course, or wouldn't have forgot my manners," said father, raising his hand in salute; and then, gripping the loom of his oar, he started a long steady stroke towards the pontoon at the foot of the railway jetty, on the Portsea shore, abreast of the old Victory; I following suit, of course. "You won't mind an old seaman, sir, 'gratulatin' you, sir, on getting your step so young? Ship my rullocks, why, it do seem but t'other day when you were a mite of a middy along o' me!"
"Time flies, my man; and if youth were the only bar to our promotion we'd soon be all admirals of the fleet," said the other, laughing again. "Why, it's more than twenty years ago, Bowling, since we were in the old Blazer together."
"Aye, I knows that, Cap'en Mordaunt," replied father, in his dry way; "an' I knows, too, that there's many a youngster o' yer own standing as ain't got further than liftenant yet, sir! It's only the smart officers like yerself that gits promoted."
"Well, well, we won't argue about that, Bowling; `kissing,' you know, sometimes `goes by favour,'" said father's old friend, smiling; and then, to turn the current of conversation from this rather personal theme, Captain Mordaunt, as I afterwards found out for myself when I sailed with him, being of a singularly modest and retiring disposition, he abruptly asked, "This your son, eh?"
"Yes, sir--Cap'en Mordaunt, I means, sir," replied father. "I've got one darter as is older; but he's my only son."
"How old is he now?"
"Fifteen years an' ten months," said father, after careful consideration and much counting on his fingers. "He'll be sixteen next April, on `Primrose Day,' as they call it."
"Another Tom Bowling, eh?"
"Yes, sir," said father. "He's `young Tom,' an' I'm the `old un' now!"
"Humph! He's a fine grown young chip for his age. What are you going to make of him? He ought to be a sailor and serving the Queen by now, like his father before him!"
Father `hummed' and `hawed,' not knowing what to answer to this; while I burned all over with joy at having so potent an advocate coming to my aid in this unexpected way.
Captain Mordaunt saw this: though anybody could have seen it from one glance at my face; for if I grinned `like a Cheshire cat eating green cheese' on ordinary occasions, as father used to say, why, I must have looked now as if I had bolted all the cheese in one lump, and it had stuck in my throat, keeping my mouth open on the stretch!
So, noticing this, father's old friend put the question to me point- blank.
"I think, youngster, you've pretty well made up your mind already in the matter, if I'm not very much mistaken," said he to me, as I unshipped my oar and stood up in the bow of the wherry, ready to fend her off from the pontoon as we ran up alongside, right under the stern of one of the Ryde steamers that was just backing out from the railway pier above us. "You'd like to go to sea, young Tom, I'm sure, eh?"
"There's nothing I should like better, sir," I answered glibly enough, catching hold of one of the piles of the pier with my boathook and bringing up the wherry easily to the landing-stage. "I only wish you'd coax my father, sir, to let me be a sailor!"
"Now, Bowling, my old friend," said this new ally of mine, who, it struck me, would turn out to be a very important factor in this decision anent my future destiny, "the matter rests entirely with you. `Toby or not Toby,' as Hamlet says in the play. Is your son, young Tom here, to go to sea or not?"
Father took off his hat with his right hand and scratched his head deliberately and deliberatively with his left, `humming' and `hawing' over this crucial question.
"Well, sir--Cap'en Mordaunt that is, begging your pardon, sir, ag'in," said he--"as