Читать книгу The Cruise of the Shining Light - Duncan Norman - Страница 8

25

“ ’Twill do un no harm, Nick,” says Cap’n Jack. “You just dose un well when you gets un back t’ the Tickle.”

“I will,” says my uncle.

He did. …

And we made a jovial night of it. Cap’n Jack would not let me off his knee. Not he! He held me close and kindly; and while he yarned of the passage to my uncle, and interjected strange wishes for a wife, he whispered many things in my ear to delight me, and promised me, upon his word, a sailing from St. John’s to Spanish ports, when I was grown old enough, if only I would come in that basket of a Lost Hope, which I maintained I never would do. ’Twas what my uncle was used to calling a lovely time; and, as for me, I wish I were a child again, and Cap’n Jack were come in from the rain, and my uncle tipping the bottle of Long Tom (though ’twere a scandal). Ay, indeed I do! That I were a child again, used to tap-room bottles, and that big Cap’n Jack had come in from the gale to tell me I was a brave lad in whom he found a comfort neither of the solid land nor of water-side companionship. But I did not think of Cap’n Jack that night, when my uncle had stowed me away in my bed at the hotel; but, rather, in the long, wakeful hours, through which I lay alone, I thought of Tom Bull’s question, “Where’d ye get them jools?”

I had never before been troubled––not once; 26 always I had worn the glittering stones without question.

“Where’d ye get them jools?”

I could not fall asleep: I repeated the twenty-third psalm, according to my teaching; but still I could not fall asleep. …

27