They had no conversation together,no intercourse but what the commonest civility required.Once so much to each other!Now nothing!There _had_ been a time,when of all the large party now filling the drawing-room at Uppercross,they would have found it most difficult to cease to speak to one another.With the exception, perhaps, of Admiral and Mrs Croft,who seemed particularly attached and happy,(Anne could allow no other exceptions even among the married couples),there could have been no two hearts so open,no tastes so similar, no feelings so in unison,no countenances so beloved. Now they were as strangers;nay, worse than strangers,for they could never become acquainted.It was a perpetual estrangement.
When he talked, she heard the same voice,and discerned the same mind.There was a very general ignorance of all naval matters throughout the party;and he was very much questioned,and especially by the two Miss Musgroves,who seemed hardly to have any eyes but for him,as to the manner of living on board, daily regulations,food, hours, &c., and their surprise at his accounts,at learning the degree of accommodation and arrangement which was practicable,drew from him some pleasant ridicule,which reminded Anne of the early days when she too had been ignorant,and she too had been accused of supposing sailors to be living on board without anything to eat, or any cook to dress it if there were, or any servant to wait, or any knife and fork to use.
From thus listening and thinking,she was roused by a whisper of Mrs Musgrove’s who,overcome by fond regrets, could not help saying—
“Ah!Miss Anne, if it had pleased Heaven to spare my poor son,I dare say he would have been just such another by this time. ”
Anne suppressed a smile, and listened kindly,while Mrs Musgrove relieved her heart a little more;and for a few minutes, therefore,could not keep pace with the conversation of the others.
When she could let her attention take its natural course again,she found the Miss Musgroves just fetching the Navy List (their own navy list,the first that had ever been at Uppercross),and sitting down together to pore over it,with the professed view of finding out the ships that Captain Wentworth had commanded.
“Your first was the Asp, I remember;we will look for the Asp.”
“You will not find her there.Quite worn out and broken up.I was the last man who commanded her.Hardly fit for service then.Reported fit for home service for a year or two,and so I was sent off to the West Indies.”
The girls looked all amazement.
“The Admiralty,” he continued,“entertain themselves now and then,with sending a few hundred men to sea,in a ship not fit to be employed.But they have a great many to provide for;and among the thousands that may just as well go to the bottom as not,it is impossible for them to distinguish the very set who may be least missed. ”
“Phoo!phoo!” cried the Admiral,“what stuff these young fellows talk!Never was a better sloop than the Asp in her day.For an old built sloop, you would not see her equal.Lucky fellow to get her!He knows there must have been twenty better men than himself applying for her at the same time. Lucky fellow to get anything so soon, with no more interest than his.”
“I felt my luck, Admiral, I assure you;” replied Captain Wentworth, seriously.“I was as well satisfied with my appointment as you can desire.It was a great object with me at that time to be at sea;a very great object, I wanted to be doing something.”
“To be sure you did.What should a young fellow like you do ashore for half a year together?If a man had not a wife,he soon wants to be afloat again.”
“But, Captain Wentworth,” cried Louisa,“how vexed you must have been when you came to the Asp,to see what an old thing they had given you.”
“I knew pretty well what she was before that day;” said he, smiling. “I had no more discoveries to make than you would have as to the fashion and strength of any old pelisse, which you had seen lent about among half your acquaintance ever since you could remember, and which at last, on some very wet day, is lent to yourself. Ah!she was a dear old Asp to me. She did all that I wanted.I knew she would. I knew that we should either go to the bottom together,or that she would be the making of me;and I never had two days of foul weather all the time I was at sea in her;and after taking privateers enough to be very entertaining,I had the good luck in my passage home the next autumn,to fall in with the very French frigate I wanted.I brought her into Plymouth;and here another instance of luck.We had not been six hours in the Sound,when a gale came on, which lasted four days and nights,and which would have done for poor old Asp in half the time;our touch with the Great Nation not having much improved our condition.Four-and-twenty hours later,and I should only have been a gallant Captain Wentworth,in a small paragraph at one corner of the newspapers;and being lost in only a sloop,nobody would have thought about me.” Anne’s shudderings were to herself alone;but the Miss Musgroves could be as open as they were sincere,in their exclamations of pity and horror.
“And so then, I suppose,” said Mrs Musgrove,in a low voice, as if thinking aloud,“so then he went away to the Laconia,and there he met with our poor boy. Charles, my dear,” (beckoning him to her),“do ask Captain Wentworth where it was he first met with your poor brother. I always forgot.”
“It was at Gibraltar, mother, I know.Dick had been left ill at Gibraltar,with a recommendation from his former captain to Captain Wentworth. ”
“Oh!but, Charles, tell Captain Wentworth,he need not be afraid of mentioning poor Dick before me,for it would be rather a pleasure to hear him talked of by such a good friend. ”
Charles, being somewhat more mindful of the probabilities of the case,only nodded in reply, and walked away.
The girls were now hunting for the Laconia;and Captain Wentworth could not deny himself the pleasure of taking the precious volume into his own hands to save them the trouble, and once more read aloud the little statement of her name and rate, and present non-commissioned class, observing over it that she too had been one of the best friends man ever had.