IN THE SOLENT.
The dinner was exquisitely cooked, and as perfectly ordered a repast
as the most fastidious could devise or desire; but very little was
said, mainly, I suspect, because our thoughts were filled with the one
subject we could not refer to whilst the attendants hung about us. What
fell was the merest commonplace, but I noticed that whilst Wilfrid ate
little he offered no objection to the frequent replenishing of his
glass with champagne by the melancholy chap who stood behind him.
By-and-by we found ourselves alone.
‘That is very honest port; you need not be afraid of it, Charles,’ said
my cousin. ‘Do you understand gunnery?’
‘I believe I could load a piece and point it,’ said I, smiling, ‘but
beyond _that_----’
‘Have you seen the gun on the forecastle?’
‘Just the outline of a cannon,’ I answered, ‘under a smother of
tarpaulin. What is called a Long Tom, I think.’
‘You will have guessed the object of my mounting it?’ said he, with a
frown darkening his face to one of those angry moods which would sweep
athwart his mind like the deep but flitting shadows of squall clouds
over a gloomy sky sullen with the complexion of storm.
‘Yes; Miss Jennings explained,’ I answered, glancing at her and meeting
her eye, in which I seemed to find the faintest hint of rebuke, as
though she feared I might be laughing in my sleeve. ‘What’s the
calibre, Wilfrid?’
‘Eighteen pounds,’ he answered.
‘An eighteen-pounder, eh! That should bring the “Shark’s” spars about
their ears, though. Let me think: the range of an eighteen-pounder will
be, at an elevation of five degrees, a little over a mile.’
‘If,’ cried my cousin--lifting his hand as though to smite the table,
then bringing his clenched fist softly down, manifestly checked in some
hot impetuous impulse by the sense of the presence of the girl, who
regarded him with a face as serious as though she were listening to
a favourite preacher--‘if,’ he repeated, sobering his voice with the
drooping of his arm, ‘we succeed in overhauling the “Shark,” and they
refuse to heave her to, my purpose is to wreck her aloft, and _then_,
should they show fight, to continue firing at her until I sink her.’
There was a vicious expression in his eyes as he said this, to which
the peculiar indescribable trembling or quivering of the lids imparted
a singular air of cunning.
‘Is the “Shark” armed, do you know?’ said I.
‘She carries a couple of small brass pieces, I believe, for purposes of
signalling. Pop-guns,’ said he, contemptuously. ‘But I fancy she has
an armoury of her own. Lord Winterton was constantly cruising north on
shooting excursions, and it is quite likely that he let the weapons
which belong to him with the yacht.’
‘If Colonel Hope-Kennedy’s programme,’ said I, ‘includes a ramble
amongst the South Sea Islands, you may reckon upon his having equipped
himself with small arms and powder enough, if only with an eye to
man-eating rogues. But to revert to your Long Tom, Wilfrid. It should
not be hard to sink a yacht with such a piece; but you are not for
_murdering_ your wife, my dear fellow?’
‘No, no,’ said he slowly, and speaking to me, though he kept his eyes
fixed upon his sister-in-law, ‘have no fear of that. It is I that am
the murdered man.’ He pressed his hand to his heart. ‘Rather put it
thus: that when they find their vessel hulled and sinking they will get
their boats over and be very willing to be picked up by us.’
‘But your round shot may knock their boats into staves,’ said I, ‘and
what then?’
‘Our own boats will be at hand to rescue them,’ said he, now looking at
me full with an expression of relish of the argument.
‘But, my dear Wilfrid,’ said I, ‘don’t you know that when a craft
founders she has a trick of drowning most of the people aboard her,
and amongst the few survivors, d’ye see, who contrived to support
themselves by whatever lay floating might _not_ be Lady Monson!’
He took a deep breath, and said, so slowly that he seemed to articulate
with difficulty, ‘Be it so. I have made up my mind. If we overhaul the
“Shark” and she declines to heave to, I shall fire into her. The blood
of whatever follows will be upon their heads. This has been forced upon
me; it is none of my seeking. I do not mean that Colonel Hope-Kennedy
shall possess my wife, and I will take her from him alive if possible;
but rest assured I am not to be hindered from separating them though
her death should be the consequence.’
Miss Jennings clasped her fingers upon her forehead and sat motionless,
looking down. For a little I was both startled and bewildered; one
moment he talked as though his wish was that his wife should not
be harmed, and the next, in some concealed convulsion of wrath, he
betrayed a far blacker resolution than ever I could have imagined
him capable of. Yet in the brief silence that followed I had time to
rid myself of my little fit of consternation by considering, first
of all, that he was now talking just as, according to my notion, he
was acting--insanely; next, that it was a thousand to one against our
falling in with the yacht; and again, supposing we came up with her, it
was not very probable that the crew of the ‘Bride’ could be tempted,
even by heavy bribes, into a measure that might put them in jeopardy of
their necks or their liberty.
It was new dark, and the cabin lamps had been for some time lighted.
The evening looked black against the portholes and the skylight, but
the cheerfulness and beauty of the cabin were greatly heightened by
the sparkling of the oil-flames in the mirrors, the swing-trays, the
glass-like surface of the bulkheads, and so on. Miss Laura’s golden
loveliness--do not laugh at my poor nautical attempts to put this
amber-coloured, violet-eyed woman before you--showed, as one may
well suppose of such a complexion and tints, incomparably perfect,
I thought, in the soft though rich radiance diffused by the burning
sperm. I wondered that she should listen so passively to Wilfrid’s
confession of his intentions should we overhaul the ‘Shark.’ My gaze
went to her as he concluded that little speech I have just set down;
but I witnessed no alteration in as much of her face as was visible,
nor any stir as of one startled or shocked in her posture. Possibly
she did not master all the significance of his words; for how should
a girl realise the full meaning of plumping round shot out of an
eighteen-pounder into a vessel till she was made a sieve of? Or it
might be that she was of my mind in regarding the expedition as a
lunatic undertaking, and in suspecting that a few weeks of this ocean
hunt would sicken Wilfrid of his determination to chase the ‘Shark’
round the world. Or mingled with these fancies, besides, there might be
enough of violent resentment against her sister, of grief, pain, shame,
to enable her to listen with an unmoved countenance to fiercer and
wilder menaces than Wilfrid had as yet delivered himself of.
These thoughts occupied my mind during the short spell of silence that
followed my cousin’s speech. He suddenly rang a little handbell, and
his melancholy servant came sliding up to him out of the after cabin.
‘Tell Captain Finn I wish to see him--that is, if he can leave the
deck.’
The fellow mounted the steps.
‘What is the name of that gloomy-looking man of yours, Wilfrid?’
‘Muffin,’ he answered.
‘Have I not seen somebody wonderfully like him,’ said I, ‘holding on
with drunken gravity to the top of a hearse trotting home from the last
public-house along the road from the graveyard?’
Miss Laura laughed; and there was a girlish freshness and arch
cordiality in her laughter that must have put me into a good humour,
I think, had it been _my_ wife instead of Wilfrid’s that Colonel
Hope-Kennedy was sailing away with.
‘Maybe, Charles, maybe,’ he answered, with a dull smile; ‘he may have
been an undertaker’s man for all I know; though I doubt it, because
I had him from Lord ---- with a five years’ character, every word of
which has proved true. But I knew you would have your joke. The fellow
fits my temper to a hair; he has a hearse-like face, I admit; but then
he is the quietest man in the world--a very ghost; summon him, and if
he shaped himself out of thin air he couldn’t appear at your elbow more
noiselessly. That’s his main recommendation to me. Any kind of noise
now I find distracting; even music--Laura will tell you that I’ll run a
mile to escape the sound of a piano.’
At this moment a pair of pilot breeches showed themselves in the
companion-way, and down came Captain Finn. As he stood, hat in hand,
soberly clothed, with nothing more gimcrack in the way of finery upon
him than a row of brass waistcoat-buttons, I thought he looked a very
proper, sailorly sort of man. There was no lack of intelligence in his
eyes, which protruded, as from a long habit of staring too eagerly to
windward, and trying to see into the inside of gales of wind. He was
remarkable, however, for a face that was out of all proportion too
long, not for the width of his head only, but for his body; whilst his
legs, on the other hand, were as much too short, so that he submitted
himself as a person whose capacity of growth had been experimentally
distributed, insomuch that his legs appeared to have come to a full
stop when he was still a youth, whilst in his face the active principle
of elongation had continued laborious until long after the term when
Nature should have made an end.
‘A glass of wine, captain?’ said Sir Wilfrid.
‘Thank your honour. Need makes the old wife trot, they say, and I feel
a-dry--I feel a-dry.’
‘Put your hat down and sit, Finn. I want you to give my cousin, Mr.
Monson, your views respecting this--this voyage. But first, where are
we?’
‘Why,’ answered the captain, balancing the wine-glass awkwardly betwixt
a thumb and a forefinger that resembled nothing so much as a brace
of stumpy carrots, whilst he directed a nervous look from Wilfrid to
me and on to Miss Laura, as though he would have us observe that he
addressed us generally; ‘there’s Yarmouth lights opening down over
the port bow, and I reckon to be clear of the Solent by about three
bells--half-past nine o’clock.’
‘The navigation hereabouts,’ said I, ‘needs a bright look-out. The
captain may not thank us for calling him below.’
‘Lord love ’ee, Mr. Monson, sir,’ he answered, ‘the mate, Jacob Crimp,
him with the one eye slewed--if so be as you’ve noticed the man,
sir--he’s at the helm, and I’d trust him for any inshore navigation,
from the Good’ens to the Start, blindfolded. Why, he knows his
soundings by the smell of the mud.’
‘How is the weather?’ inquired my cousin.
‘Fine, clear night, sir; the stars plentiful and the moon arising; the
wind’s drawed a bit norradly, and’s briskening at that; yet it keeps a
draught, with nothing noticeable in the shape of weight in it. Well,
your honour, and you, Mr. Monson, sir, and you, my lady, all I’m sure I
can say, is, here’s luck,’ and down went the wine.
‘Captain,’ said Sir Wilfrid, ‘oblige me by giving Mr. Monson your views
of the chase we have started upon.’
Finn put down the wine-glass and dried his lips on a pocket
handkerchief of the size of a small ensign.
‘Well,’ he began, with a nervous uneasy twisting about of his legs and
feet, ‘my view’s this: Fidler isn’t likely to take any other road to
the Cape than the one that’s followed by the Indiemen. Now,’ said he,
laying a forefinger in the palm of his big hand, yellow still with
ancient stains of tar, whilst Wilfrid watched him in his near-sighted
way, leaning forward in the posture of one absorbed by what is said,
‘you may take that there road as skirting the Bay o’ Biscay and
striking the latitude of forty at about fifteen degrees east; then a
south by west half west course for the Canaries; the Equator to be cut
at twenty-five degrees west, and a straight course for Trinidad to
follow with a clean brace up to the South-east trades. What d’ye think,
sir?’
‘Oh, ’tis about the road, no doubt,’ said I, for whatever might have
been my thoughts, I had no intention to drop a discouraging syllable
then before Finn in my cousin’s hearing.
‘But,’ said the captain, eyeing me nervously and anxiously, ‘if so be
as we should have the luck to fall into that there “Shark’s” wake, you
know, we shan’t need to trouble ourselves with the course to the Cape
south of the Equator.’
‘Of course not,’ exclaimed Sir Wilfrid.
‘By which I mean to say,’ continued the captain, giving his back hair a
pull as though it were some bell-rope with which he desired to ring up
the invention or imagination that lay drowsy in his brain, ‘that if we
aren’t on to the “Shark” this side the Line it’ll be better for us to
tarn to and make up our mind to crack on all for Table Bay to be there
afore her, without further troubling ourselves about her heaving in
sight, though, of course, the same bright look-out’ll be kept.’
‘Good,’ said Wilfrid with a heavy emphatic nod; ‘that’s not to be
bettered, I think, Charles.’
‘I suppose,’ said I, addressing Finn, ‘that, though your hope will be
to pick up the “Shark” any day after a given period, and though you’ll
follow the scent of her as closely as your conjecture of Fidler’s
navigation will admit, you will still go on sweating--pray pardon this
word in its sea sense, Miss Jennings--your craft as though the one
business of the expedition was to make the swiftest possible passage to
the Cape of Good Hope?’
‘Ay, never sparing a cloth, sir, and she’s something to jockey, Mr.
Monson. You don’t know her yet, sir.’
‘The “Shark”’s a fore-and-aft schooner?’
‘Yes,’ he answered.
‘She carries a square sail, no doubt?’
‘Ay, a big ’un, but good only for running, and we ain’t without that
canvas, too, you must know,’ he added with the twinkle of humour in his
gaze that I had observed in him when Wilfrid had first made him known
to me. ‘Enough of it, Mr. Monson, to hold wind to serve a Dutchman
for a week, not to mention a torps’l and a t’gallants’l fit for a
line-o’-battle ship to ratch under.’
This was vague talk, but it pleased Wilfrid.
‘Square yards are very well,’ said I; ‘but surely they don’t allow a
vessel to look up to it as though her canvas was fore and aft only?
I merely ask for information. My marine experiences were limited to
square rigs.’
‘There’s nothen to prevent the “Bride” from looking up to it as close
as the “Shark,”’ answered Finn. ‘The yards’ll lie fore and aft; what’s
to hinder them? There ain’t no spread, sir, like what you get in ships
with your futtock rigging and backstays and shrouds in the road of
the slings elbowing their way to channels big enough for a ball-room.
Besides,’ he added, ‘suppose it should be a matter of a quarter of a
pint’s difference, we need but stow the square cloths, and then we
ain’t no worse off than the “Shark.”’
‘True,’ said I, thinking more of Miss Jennings than of what Finn was
saying: so perfect a picture of girlish beauty did she happen to be
at that instant as she leaned on her elbow, supporting her chin with
a small white hand, her form in a posture that left one side of her
face in shadow, whilst the other side lay bright, golden, and soft in
the lamplight over the table. She was listening with charming gravity,
and a countenance of sympathy whose tenderness was unimpaired by an
appearance of attention that I could not doubt was just a little
forced, since our sailor talk could not but be Greek to her. Besides,
at intervals, there was a lift of the white lid, a gleam of the violet
eye, which was like assuring one that thought was kept in the direction
of our conversation only by constraint.
I was beginning to feel the want of a cigar, and I had been sitting
long enough now to make me pine for a few turns on deck, but I durst
not be abrupt in the face of my cousin’s devouring stare at his skipper
and the pathetic spectacle of the contending passions in him as he
hearkened, now nodding, now gloomily smiling, now lying back on a
sudden with a frown which he made as if to smooth out by pressing his
hand to his brow.
‘The “Shark,”’ said I, ‘has five days’ start of us. Give her a hundred
miles a day, for the mere sake of argument; she should be, at that,
well in the heart of the Bay.’
‘By Heaven! within arm’s length of us, when you put it so!’ cried
Wilfrid, extending his hand in a wild, darting, irrelevant gesture, and
closing his fingers with a snap as though upon some phantom throat he
had seen and thought to clutch.
‘Five hundred miles,’ exclaimed Finn, apparently giving no heed to the
baronet’s action. ‘Well, sir, as a bit of supposing, there’s no harm
in it. It might be more. _I_ should allow less. There’s been no weight
of wind down Channel. What’s happened then to blow her along? But
there’s no telling. Anyhow,’ said he, picking up his cap and rising,
‘there’s nothing in five hundred miles, no, nor in a thousand, to make
us anxious with such a race-course as lies afore us. ’Tain’t as if we’d
got to catch the craft before she’d made Madeira.’ He paused, looking a
little irresolute, and then said, addressing Wilfrid, ‘I don’t know if
there’s anything more your honour would like to ask of me?’
‘No, not for the moment,’ answered my cousin dully, with the air of a
man languid with a sudden sense of weariness or exhaustion following
some internal fiery perturbation; ‘it is just this, Finn. Mr. Monson
served in the Royal Navy for a few years, and I was anxious that he
should be at once made acquainted with your views, so that he and you
could combine your experiences. You have chased in your time, Charles,
no doubt!’
‘Not very often, and then always something that was in sight,’ I
answered with a slight glance at Finn, whose gaze instantly fell whilst
he exclaimed:
‘Well, sir, any suggestion you can make I’ll be mighty thankful to
receive. But it’ll be all plain sailing, I don’t doubt; it’ll be all
plain sailing,’ he repeated, rumbling out the words in a stifled
hurricane note, and, giving us a bow, he went up the steps.
Wilfrid gazed at me vacantly when I proposed a cigar on deck.
‘What do you think of Finn?’ he asked.
‘He seems as honest a man and as practical a seaman as needs be. But he
has had command of this yacht since you bought her?’
He nodded. ‘Well then, of course, you know all about him. He has
clearly been a merchant Jack in his day, and has all necessary
experience, I dare say, to qualify him for this charge. But I say,
Wilfrid, let us go on deck, my dear fellow. Miss Jennings, I am sure,
will not object to the scent of a cigar in the open air.’
‘Nor down here either,’ she exclaimed.
‘I shall remember that,’ said I gratefully. ‘Now, Wilfrid, won’t
you----?’
‘No,’ he interrupted; ‘I am drowsy, and thank Heaven for a sensation
that threatens to become a novelty. If I get no rest to-night it will
be my eighth of sleeplessness, and I must humour myself; yes, I must
humour myself,’ he repeated, talking in a sort of muttering way, and
rising.
I advised him by all means to withdraw if he really felt tired, and
further recommended a boatswain’s caulker of whisky to top off the
champagne and port he had been swallowing.
‘How will you amuse yourself, Laura?’ he exclaimed, turning to her. ‘It
will be dull work for you, I fear.’
‘No, no,’ cried I blithely, ‘why need Miss Jennings be dull? It must be
our business to keep her lively.’
‘I can sit and read here,’ said she, ‘till it is time to go to bed.
What is the hour, Mr. Monson?’
‘Just on the stroke of eight,’ said I.
She made a pretty little grimace, and then burst into one of her
refreshing cordial laughs.
‘A little early for bed, Wilfrid,’ she exclaimed.
He smothered a yawn and responded: ‘I will leave you to Charles. Would
to Heaven I had his spirits! God bless you both--good night.’
He rang for his valet and stalked with hanging arms and drooping head,
in the most melancholy manner picturable, to his cabin. I asked Miss
Jennings to accompany me on deck.
‘There is a moon in the air,’ said I; ‘you may see the haze of it
through this porthole; but I must not forget that it is an autumn
night so let me beg you to wrap yourself up warmly whilst I slip on a
pea-coat.’
I fancied she hung in the wind an instant, as a girl might who could
not promptly see her way to walking the deck of a yacht alone with
a young man on a moonlight or any other night, but she assented so
quickly in reality that I dare say my suspicion was an idle and
groundless bit of sensitiveness. Five minutes later we were on deck
together.
The yacht was floating through the dusk--that was tinctured into
glimmering pearl by the broad face of the silver moon, which had
already climbed several degrees above the black sky-line of the Isle of
Wight--without the least perceptible stir or tremor in her frame. The
wind was well abaft the starboard beam; the great main boom overhung
the port quarter; the white sail rose wan to the moonshine with a large
gaff topsail above it--for those were the days of gaffs--dimming into
a space of airy faintness to the masthead, above the white button of
whose truck you caught the icy gleam of a metal vane as though it was a
piece of meteoric scoring under the dust of the stars that hovered in
the velvet gloom like a sheet of undulating silver glooming out into
hollows in places. Light as the breeze was, and following us besides,
it held the canvas asleep; but that every cloud-like cloth was doing
its work, too, the ear quickly noted in the pleasant fountain-like
sounds of running waters over the side, with a cool seething noise in
the wake and a fairy tinkling of exploding foam-bells. The land to port
loomed black against the moonshine, save where some slope or other
catching the slanting beam showed the faint green of its herbage or
wooded growths in a very phantasm of hue, like some verdant stretch of
land dyeing an attenuated veil of vapour witnessed afar upon the ocean.
Over the port bow I caught sight of a light or two a long way down the
dusky reach, as it seemed, with a brighter gleam to starboard where
the land, catching the moonlight, came in visionary streaks and breaks
to abeam and on past the quarter where it seemed to melt out into some
twinkling beacon--off Calshot Castle, maybe, so far astern it looked.
I spied the sturdy figure of the mate standing beside the wheel, no
longer steering, but manifestly conning the yacht. The skipper was
abreast of the skylight, leaning over the rail with his arm round a
backstay; there were figures moving forward tipping the gloom there
with the scarlet points of glowing bowls of tobacco, but if they
conversed it was in whispers. The stillness was scarce imaginable. It
was heightened yet even to my fancy presently when, growing used to the
light, I spied the phantom figure of what was apparently a large brig
clouded to her royals with pale canvas stemming the Solent, outward
bound, some half a mile distant.
‘There is no dew,’ said I; ‘the moon shines purely, and is full of
promise so far as fine weather goes. Well! here we are fairly started
indeed. It is almost a dream to me, Miss Jennings, d’ye know?’ I
continued, staring about me. ‘Three days ago I had no notice of
anything having gone wrong with my cousin, and therefore little
dreamt, as you will suppose, of what I was to enter upon this blessed
afternoon. Three days ago! And now here am I heading into God knows
what part of this mighty globe of ocean as empty of all theory of
destination as though I were bound in a balloon to the part the poets
call interstellar space. How is it all to end, I wonder?’
She was pacing quietly by my side.
‘You think the pursuit a silly one, Mr. Monson?’
‘Yes, I do, and Wilfrid _knows_ that I do. If he were not----He is my
cousin, Miss Jennings, and a dear friend, and you are his sister-in-law
and dear to him, too, I am sure, and so I dare be candid with you. If
it were not that he--’ (I touched my forehead) ‘would he embark on such
a quest as this?’
‘Yes,’ she replied, with just enough of heat or temper, or whatever you
like to call it, in her voice to render her utterance distinct with
unconscious emphasis; ‘he adored his wife. Can a man tear his love into
pieces in a day, as though it were no more than a tedious old letter?
He thinks he hates her; he does so in a sense, no doubt; but in a
sense, too, he still worships her. Mad! that is what you mean.’
I was beginning to protest.
‘Yes, it _is_ what you mean, and you are right and wrong. If he does
not pursue her, if he does not recover her, she is lost for ever. She
is lost now, you will tell me. Ay,’ she cried with a little stamp,
‘lost so far as her husband’s heart goes, so far as her honour is
concerned; but not so utterly lost as she will later be if she is not
rescued from that--that man, who must be so served, Mr. Monson, as to
render it impossible for him ever again to trouble the peace of another
home, to break the heart of a noble-minded creature and rob a little
infant of its mother. Hate him! Oh, girl as I am, I declare before my
Maker I would shoot him with my own hand!’
There was nothing in the least degree theatrical in her way of
speaking. The words came in a hurry to her lips from her indignant
heart, and I heard the sincerity of them so clearly in the mere
utterance, I did not doubt for an instant that, put a pistol in her
hand and set up the figure of the Colonel in front of her, she would
have sought for his heart, if he had one, with the barrel of the weapon
without so much as a sigh at having to kill him. I felt abashed; her
sincerity and resentment were overwhelming; her strength of feeling,
too, won a peculiar accentuation from the character of airy delicacy,
of tender fragility, the moonlight gave to her fair and golden beauty.
It was like listening to a volume of sounds poured forth by a singing
bird, and wondering that such far-reaching melody should be produced by
so small a creature.
‘I fear,’ said I, ‘you don’t think me very sincere in my sympathy with
Wilfrid----’
‘Oh, yes, Mr. Monson,’ she interrupted; ‘do not suppose such a thing.
It is not to be imagined that you should take this cruel and miserable
affair to heart as he does, or feel it as I do, who am her sister.’
‘The truth is,’ said I, ‘it is impossible for a bachelor not to take
a cynical view of troubles of this sort. A man was charged with the
murder of his sweetheart. The judge said to him, “Had the woman been
your wife, your guilt would not have been so great, because you would
have no other means of getting rid of her save by killing her; but
the unhappy creature whose throat you cut you could have sent adrift
without trouble.” What I mean to say is, Miss Jennings, that a husband
does not merit half the pity that is felt for him if his wife elopes.
He is easily quit of a woman who is his wife only by name. I am for
pitying _her_. The inevitable sequel--the disgrace, desertion, and
the rest of it--is as punctual as the indication of the hands of a
clock.... But see how nimbly the “Bride” floats through all this
darkness and quietude. We shall be passing that vessel shortly, and yet
for canvas she might really be one of the pyramids of Egypt towing down
Channel.’
We went to the rail to look, I, for one, glad enough to change the
subject, for it was nothing less than profanity to be arguing with so
sweet a little woman as this--in the pure white shining of the moon,
too, and with something of an ocean freshness of atmosphere all about
us--on such a gangrenous subject as the elopement of Lady Monson with
Colonel Hope-Kennedy. Out of all my sea-going experiences I could not
pick a fairer picture than was made by the brig we were passing, clad
as she was in moonlight, and rising in steam-coloured spaces to mere
films of royals motionless under the stars. She was a man-of-war; the
white of her broad band, that was broken by black ports, gleamed like
the ivory of pianoforte keys; her canvas was exquisitely out and set,
and trimmed as naval men know how--one yardarm looking backwards a
little over another, the rounded silent cloths, faint in the radiance
with a gleam as of alabaster showing through a delicate haze, and high
aloft the tremor of a pennant like the expiring trail of a shooting
star. All was as hushed as death upon her; her high bulwarks concealed
her decks; nothing was to be seen stirring along the whole length of
the shapely, beautiful, visionary fabric that, as we left her slowly
veering away upon our quarter, looked to lose the substance of her
form, as though through the gradual absorption of the light her own
white canvas made by the clearer and icy radiance of the soaring moon.
‘To think now,’ said I, ‘of the thunder of adamantine lips concealed
within the silence of that heap of swimming faintness! How amazing the
change from the exquisite repose she suggests to the fierce crimson
blaze and headlong detonations of a broadside flashing up the dark
land and dying out miles away in a sullen roar. But, d’ye know, Miss
Jennings, I shall grow poetical if I do not light another cigar. Women
should encourage men to smoke. Nothing keeps them quieter.’
We exchanged a few words with Captain Finn, who, together with the
mate, was keeping a bright look-out, and then resumed our walk, and
in a quiet chat that was ended only by a small bell on the forecastle
announcing the hour of ten by four chimes, Miss Laura gave me the story
of my cousin’s introduction to her family, described the marriage,
talked to me about Melbourne and her home there, with more to the same
purpose, all very interesting to me, though it would make the merest
parish gossip in print. Her mother was dead; her father was a hearty
man of sixty who had emigrated years before in dire poverty, ‘as you
will suppose,’ said she, ‘when I tell you that he was the son of a
dissenting minister who had a family of twelve children, and who died
without leaving money enough to pay for his funeral.’ Mr. Jennings had
made a fortune by squatting, but he had lost a considerable sum within
the past few years by stupid speculation, and as Miss Laura said this
I could see, by hearing her (to use a Paddyism), the pout of lip; for,
bright as the moonlight was, the silver of it blended with the golden
tint of her hair without defining any feature of her clearly saving
her eyes, in which the beam of the planet would sparkle like a diamond
whenever she raised them to my face. She told me her father was very
proud that his daughter should become a lady of title, and yet he
opposed the marriage, too. In short, he saw that Wilfrid’s mind was
not as sound as it should be, though he never could point to any act
or speech to justify his misgivings. But this was intelligible enough;
for, to speak of my cousin as I remembered him in earlier times, the
notion you got that he was not straight-headed, as I have before said,
was from his face, and the suspicion lay but dully in one, so rational
was his behaviour, so polished and often intellectual his talk; till on
a sudden it was sharpened into conviction on your hearing that there
was insanity in his mother’s family.
‘What had Lady Monson to say to your father’s misgivings?’ I inquired.
‘She accepted him, and insisted upon marrying him. He was wonderfully
fond of her, Mr. Monson.’
‘And she?’
I saw her give her head a little shake, but she made no reply. Perhaps
she considered that this trip we had started on sufficiently answered
the question. She said, after a brief pause, ‘I myself thought my
father a great deal too critical in his estimate of Sir Wilfrid. No
one talked more delightfully than your cousin. He was a favourite with
everybody whom he met at Melbourne. He was fresh from his travels,
and was full of entertaining stories and shrewd observations; and
then, again, he had much to say about European capitals, of English
university life, of English Society--you will not need me to tell you
that we Colonials have little weaknesses in regard to lords and ladies
and to the doings of high life, from which people in England are quite
exempt, and for the having which I fear we are slightly sneered at and
a good deal wondered at.’
I caught the sparkle of her lifted eye.
‘And pray, Miss Jennings,’ said I, ‘what would your papa think if he
were to know that you had embarked on what, I must still take the
liberty of calling, a very queer voyage?’
‘Oh,’ she cried quickly and almost hysterically, ‘don’t ask me what he
would think of what I am doing! What will be his thoughts when he gets
the news of what Henrietta has done?’
She turned her head away from me, and kept it averted long enough to
make me suspect that there was a tear in her eye. It was then that a
sailor forward struck the forecastle bell four times.
‘Ten o’clock!’ she exclaimed, knowing as an ocean traveller how to
interpret sea time. ‘Good-night, Mr. Monson.’
I handed her down the companion-steps, and went to my own cabin, and
was presently in my bunk. But it was after seven bells, half-past
eleven, before I fell asleep.
The breeze had freshened--had drawn apparently more yet to the
northward; and the yacht, having hauled it a bit now that we were out
of the Solent, was leaning over a trifle with a sputtering and frisky
snapping of froth along her bends and a quiet moaning sounding down
into her heart out of the hollows of her canvas, whilst an occasional
creak, breaking from one knew not what part of the structure, hinted
at a taut drag of tacks and sheets, though there was no motion in the
water, over whose surface our keel slided as steadily as a sleigh over
a snow-covered plain.
It was one thing on top of another, I suppose; the fancies put into me
by the oddness of this adventure; the memory of the long gun forward;
Wilfrid’s tragic intentions, the darker to my mind because it was so
easy for me to see how grief, wrath, a sense of dishonour, bitter
injury, with impulses not imaginable by me which every recurrence to
the motherless little baby at home would visit him with, had quickened
in him of late the deadly seminal principle that circulated in his
blood. Then again, there was Miss Laura’s beauty, if beauty be the
proper term to express a combination of physical charms which a brief
felicitous sentence like a single line from some old poet would better
convey than fifty pages of description; her conversation; her sympathy
with the motive of this trip; her apparent heedlessness as to the time
to be occupied by it; her indifference as to the magnitude of the
programme that Wilfrid’s resolution to recover his wife might end in
framing, if Table Bay should prove but a starting-point--I say it was
one thing on top of another; and all reflections and considerations
being rendered acute by the spirit of life one now felt in the yacht,
and that awakened the most dormant or puzzled faculty to the perception
that it was all grim, downright earnest, small wonder that I should
have lain awake until half-past eleven. Indeed that I should have
snatched a wink of sleep that first blessed night is a mystery only
to be partially resolved by reflecting that I was young, heedless,
‘unencumbered’ as they say, a lover of adventure, and in no sense
dissatisfied by the company I found myself among.