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Chapter Twenty Eight. The Conclusion.
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The trouble, and worry, and annoyance that the sum of 2000 pounds gave to Captain Dunning is past all belief. That worthy man, knowing that Glynn Proctor had scarcely a penny in the world, not even his “kit” (as sailors name their sea-chests), which had been lost in the wreck of the Red Eric, and that the boy was about to be cast upon the world again an almost friendless wanderer—knowing all this, we say, Captain Dunning insisted that as Glynn had been the first to strike the whale, and as no one else had had anything to do with its capture, he (Glynn) was justly entitled to the money.
Glynn firmly declined to admit the justice of this view of the case; he had been paid his wages; that was all he had any right to claim; so he positively refused to take the money. But the captain was more than his match. He insisted so powerfully, and argued so logically, that Glynn at last consented, on condition that 500 pounds of it should be distributed among his shipmates. This compromise was agreed to, and thus Glynn came into possession of what appeared in his eyes a fortune of 1500 pounds.
“Now, what am I to do with it? that is the question.”
Glynn propounded this knotty question one evening, about three weeks after the trial, to his friends of the yellow cottage with the green-painted door.
“Put it in the bank,” suggested Aunt Martha.
“Yes, and live on the interest,” added Aunt Jane.
“Or invest in the whale-fishery,” said Captain Dunning, emitting a voluminous cloud of tobacco-smoke, as if to suggest the idea that the investment would probably end in something similar to that. (The captain was a peculiarly favoured individual; he was privileged to smoke in the Misses Dunning’s parlour.)
“Oh! I’ll tell you what to do, Glynn,” cried Ailie, clapping her hands; “it would be so nice. Buy a cottage with it—a nice, pretty, white-painted cottage, beside a wood, with a little river in front of it, and a small lake with a boat on it not far off, and a far, far view from the windows of fields, and villages, and churches, and cattle, and sheep, and—”
“Hurrah! Ailie, go it, my lass!” interrupted Glynn; “and horses, and ponies, and carts, and cats, and blackbirds, and cocks and hens, and ploughmen, and milkmaids, and beggars, all in the foreground; and coaches, and railroads, and steamboats, and palaces, and canals, in the middle distance; with a glorious background of the mighty sea glittering for ever under the blazing beams of a perpetually setting sun, mingled with the pale rays of an eternally rising moon, and laden with small craft, and whale-ships, and seaweed, and fish, and bumboats, and men-of-war!”
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