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Perhaps it was as well. Some weeks later he walked up to the Carlings' house one Sunday afternoon, and saw that it was closed, as he had expected. By an impulse which was not part of his original intention which was, indeed, pretty nearly aimless he was moved to ring the doorbell; but the maid, a stranger to him, who opened the door could tell him nothing of the family's whereabouts, and Mr.
Captain Israel Pellow, and Captain William Swaffield, of his Majesty's ship Overyssel, who was at dinner with him and the first lieutenant, were drinking their wine; when the first explosion threw them off their seats, and struck them against the carlings of the upper deck, so as to stun them.
To make sure that whatever strength is taken out by cutting is restored in some other way, and that the exposed deck which has to resist the strains put upon the structures built into it is specially reinforced, the most careful provision must be made for the mast-holes; for the hatchways with their coamings fore and aft on carlings that reach from beam to beam; for the riding bitts, which are posts to hold the cable when the vessel is at anchor, and which must therefore be immensely strong; for the windlass, which in the merchant service often did the double duty of the bitts and capstan; and for a multiplicity of other parts.
Captain Pellow, however, had sufficient presence of mind to fly to the cabin windows, and seeing the two hawsers, one slack in the bit and the other taut, threw himself with an amazing leap, which he afterwards said, nothing but his sense of danger could have enabled him to take, upon the latter, and by that means saved himself from the general destruction, though his face had been badly cut against the carlings, when he was thrown from his seat.
Carling followed him, saying to John as she bade him good night: "Do come, Mr. Lenox, whenever you feel like it. We are very quiet people, and are almost always at home." "Thank you, Mrs. Carling," responded John, with much sincerity. "I shall be most glad to. I am so quiet myself as to be practically noiseless." The hall of the Carlings' house was their favorite sitting place in the evening.
And then, too, the prospect of half or three-quarters of an hour in Miss Blake's company, the Carlings notwithstanding, was a temptation to be welcomed.
Muskets, blunderbusses, pistols, sabres, half-pikes, &c., were fixed to the beams and carlings, or were made to serve as ornaments against the different bulkheads, in a profusion that plainly told they were there as much for use as for show.
"If you are sure I shall not, I shall be glad to be taken as far as Madison Avenue and Thirty-third Street, for I suppose that will be your route." "Quite sure," she replied, seconded by the Carlings, and so it happened that John went directly home instead of going first to his father's office.
The Carlings went away some ten days later, and she did, in fact, send another note to his house address, asking him to see them before their departure; but John had considered himself fortunate in getting the house off his hands to a tenant who would assume the lease if given possession at once, and had gone into the modest apartment which he occupied during the rest of his life in the city, and so the second communication failed to reach him.
Carling had on the russet shoes, and wondered if they pinched him. In fact, though he couldn't have said exactly why, he rather hoped that they did. He had just that sympathy for the nerves of two-and-fifty which is to be expected from those of five-and-twenty that is, very little. When he went in to dinner the Carlings and Miss Blake had been at table some minutes.
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