LONG TOM.
When I awoke the morning was streaming a windy light through the
port-hole over my bunk. I lay a few minutes watching my coat and other
suspended garments swinging against the bulkhead, and listening to the
creaking and groanings of partitions and strong fastenings, and to a
muffled humming sound that was like the distant continuous roll of a
drum mixed with a faint seething that sent one’s fancy to the shingle
of the English shore, and to the panting respiration of the recoiling
breaker upon it; and then I guessed that there was a fresh breeze
blowing.
I tumbled out of bed and stood awhile, partly with the notion of
making sure of my sea-legs, and partly to discover if I was likely to
be sea-sick. Finding myself happily sound in all ways, I drew on some
clothing and looked out. Wilfrid’s melancholy man sat at the cabin
table, leaning his head upon his elbow, with his fingers penetrating
the black plaister of hair over his brow, so that he presented a very
dejected and disordered appearance. I called to him; he looked in my
direction with a wandering eye, struggled to get up, put his hand upon
his stomach with an odd smile and sat again. I entered the cabin to see
what ailed the fellow.
‘What’s the matter with you?’ said I. ‘Sick?’
He turned his hollow yellow face upon me, and I saw that he was in
liquor.
‘It’s here, sir,’ he exclaimed, pointing with an inebriated forefinger
to the lower button of his waistcoat; ‘it’s a feelin’, sir, as if I was
a globe, sir, with gold and silver fishes a-swimming round and round,
and poking of their noses against me to get out.’
He spoke respectfully, but thickly, with sundry little feints at
rising, as though very sensible that he should not be sitting whilst I
stood.
‘Try a dose of brandy,’ said I, satirically.
‘Do you think it will help me, sir?’ he inquired, pulling his fingers
out of his hair and clasping his hands upon his waistcoat, whilst his
lips went twisting into an intoxicated grin on one side of his nose, as
it looked. ‘I will try it, Mr. Monson, sir. There’s a something here as
wants settling, sir. I never was partial to the hocean, sir.’
He was proceeding, but just then the second steward came below, on
which I quitted the melancholy man, ordered a cold salt-water bath and
a hot cup of coffee, and was presently on deck. It was a windy-looking
morning, the sky high, grey, compacted; with here and there a dark curl
of scud in chase of some bald lump of sulphur-coloured cloud blowing
away to leeward like the first ball of powder smoke from a cannon’s
mouth ere the wind has had time to shred it. The water was green,
a true Channel sea with the foam of the curled ridges dazzling out
in times to the touch of a wet, pale beam of sunshine dropping in a
lance of light in some breathless moment through one of the dim blue
lines that here and there veined the dulness aloft. There was no land
to be seen; the haze of the sea-line ran the water into the sky, and
the green of the horizon went blending into the soft greyness of the
heavens till it looked all one with a difference of colour only.
The yacht was bowling through it at a noble pace; the wind sat as it
should for such a craft as the ‘Bride’; the sea had quartered her and
swept in hillocks of foam along her lustrous bends, sending an impulse
to her floating rushes with every pale boiling of it to her frame, and
the sputter and creaming all about her bows, and the swirl of the snow
over the lee rail, and the milk-white race of wake rising and falling
fan-shaped astern prismatic with the glint of chips and bubbles and
feathers of spume swept out of the giddiness by the rush of the wind,
might have made you think yourself aboard a ship of a thousand tons.
Upon my word it was as though the ‘Bride’ had got the scent and knew
that the ‘Shark’ was not far distant. Finn was not sparing her. He
was to windward, close beside the wheel, as I emerged, and I knew he
watched me whilst I stood a moment in the hatch looking from the huge
thunderous hollow of the mainsail to the yawn of the big square-sail
they had clapped upon her with the whole square topsail atop of _it_,
topgallant sail stowed, but the jibs yearning from their sheets taut as
fiddle-strings, as though they would bodily uproot the timber and iron
to which they were belayed.
Something of the exhilaration of a real chase came into one with the
glad roaring aloft and the saw-like spitting at the cutwater, and
the sullen crash of the arching billow repulsed by the cleaving bow;
and it was the instinct in me, I suppose, due to my early training
and recollection of the long pursuit of more than one polacre and
nimble-heeled schooner flush to the hatches with a living ebony cargo
that made me send a look sheer over the bows in search of some shining
quarry there.
There were three or four coasters in a huddle on the weather beam,
their outlines sharp, but their substance of a dingy black against
the yellowish glare of light over the water that way as though the
East were finding reflection in it; and to leeward, a mile off, a
full-rigged sailing ship on a bowline bound up Channel, and plunging
her round bows with clumsy viciousness into the green hollows with a
frequent lift of white water to above the cathead, where it blew in a
storm of crystals into the head canvas.
‘Good morning, captain.’
‘Good morning, sir,’ answered Finn, knuckling his forehead in the
old-fashioned style. ‘Nice little breeze of wind, sir.’
‘Ay, one could pray for nothing better,’ said I, crossing over to him.
‘You’ve got a fine craft here certainly, captain; no stint of beam, and
bulwarks stout and tall enough to serve the purpose of a pirate. And
how finely she rounds forward to the eyes! Hillo! getting ready with
your gun so soon?’
‘No, sir, only a cleaning of him,’ he answered with a grin.
They had removed the tarpaulin, and there stood the long piece, with a
couple of seamen hard at work furbishing it up.
‘D’ye think,’ said I, making a step or two towards the rail to bring us
out of earshot of the fellow who was standing at the wheel, ‘that Sir
Wilfrid really means to let fly at the “Shark” should we overhaul her,
if she refuses to heave to?’
‘I don’t doubt it, sir.’
‘But how about your crew? Will they be willing, think you, to fire
into a vessel that’s a yacht like their own ship, that hails from the
same port, and whose people may number amongst them acquaintances--old
shipmates of your own men?’
‘They’ll obey orders, sir,’ said he quietly, with an air of caution in
his long face.
‘Suppose it should come to our having to board the “Shark,” captain,
and she shows fight--are you going to get your men to hazard their
lives in the face of the pacific articles they, I presume, have signed?’
‘It’ll never come to a fight, Mr. Monson,’ he responded, ‘though I
don’t say it may not come to our having to fire at the vessel to stop
her; for you see if the Colonel commands Fidler to keep all fast and
take no notice of us there’ll be nothen for him but to obey: whilst
stop her _we_ must, do ye see, sir? But as to fighting----’ he shook
his head. ‘No, sir; when the time’s come for boarding they’ll be
willing to let us walk quietly over the side, no matter how much they
may consider their feelings injured by our shooting at ’em. In short
it’s like this; ne’er a man aboard the “Shark” but knows what the
Colonel and her Ladyship’s gone and done; a good many, I dessay, are
husbands themselves, not to speak of their being Englishmen, and ye may
take it that ne’er a hand of ’em from Fidler down is going to resist
Sir Wilfrid’s stepping on board to demand his own.’
‘You may be right,’ said I; ‘’tis hard to say, though. Do our crew know
the errand we are on?’
‘Bound to it, sir. In fact, the shipping of that there gun wouldn’t
allow the job to remain a secret. But the “Shark” was away first, and
if all Southampton had got talking of our intention it couldn’t have
signified, so far as consarns I mean their guessing at it aboard the
“Shark.”’
‘You must have pushed your equipment forward with wonderful expedition?’
‘Yes, sir; we worked day and night. Of course we was all ready for sea,
but there would be many things a-wanting for what might turn out a six
or seven thousand mile run with ne’er a stoppage along the whole road
of it.’
My eye was just then taken by something that glittered upon the
mainmast within reach of a man’s uplifted arm. I peered, imagining
it to be a little plate with an inscription upon it commemorating
something that Wilfrid might have deemed worthy of a memorial. I caught
Finn grinning.
‘D’ye see what it is, sir?’ said he.
I looked again, and shook my head. He walked to the mast, and I
followed him, and now I saw that it was a handsome five-guinea piece,
obviously of an old date--but it was too high to distinguish the
impress clearly--secured by a couple of little staples which gripped
without piercing or wounding it.
‘That piece of money,’ said Finn, ‘is for the first man that sights the
“Shark.”’
‘Ha!’ I exclaimed, ‘an old whaling practice. My cousin has not viewed
the world for nothing!’
It was but a trifling thing, yet in its way it was almost as hard a bit
of underscoring of my cousin’s resolution as the long grinning piece
they were cleaning forward, or the stand of arms against the bulkhead
below.
‘What’s the pace, captain?’
‘A full ten, sir, by the last heave of the log.’
I fell a-whistling--for it was grand sailing, surely--with a lift of my
eye to the topgallant sail that lay stowed in a snow-white streak with
a proper man-of-war’s bunt amidships on the slender black yard.
‘Well, sir,’ said Finn, taking it upon himself to interpret my
glance, ‘I know the “Bride,” and I’m likewise acquainted with a good
many vessels which ain’t the least bit in the world like her, and my
notion’s this, that a craft’ll do no more than she _can_ do. I’ve hove
the log to reefed canvas, and I’ve hove it in the same wind to whole
sails and found a loss. No use of burying what you want to keep afloat.
I might set that there little top-gallant sail without enjoying a hinch
of way more out of it. Then what ’ud be the good of straining the
spars?’
‘But you’ll be setting stun’ sails, I suppose, when a right chance for
running them aloft occurs?’
‘Ay, sir. There’s the boom irons all ready. But my notion is, in a
vessel of this sort, that it’s best to keep your stun’ sail booms out
of sight till your anchors are stowed. Once out of soundings, and then
let a man cut what capers he likes.’
As he said this, up rose my cousin’s long body through the companion
hatch. He stood a little looking about him in his short-sighted way,
but with an expression of satisfaction upon his face that gave a new
character to it. I saw him rub his hands whilst he grinned to the swift
salt rush of the wind. He caught sight of me, and instantly approached.
‘This will do! this will do, Charles!’ he cried, grasping my hand.
‘Don’t spare her, captain. These are slants to be made the most of. By
Heaven, but it makes a new man of me to see such a sight as _that_!’
pointing to the white torrent that was roaring past to leeward.
He stared with a sort of pathetic eagerness at the vessels which we
were passing as though they had their anchors down, afterwards shading
his eyes for another long yearning look over either bow.
‘It is fine, though! it is fine, though!’ he muttered with the spirit
of an unreasonable exhilaration working strong in every feature. ‘What
is it, captain? Twelve?’ Finn gave him the figure. ‘And what would be
the “Shark’s” pace supposing her yonder?’
‘Not all ours, Sir Wilfrid, not all ours,’ responded Finn, ‘though
it is a fine sailing breeze, your honour. A craft would have to be a
sawed-off-square consarn not to wash handsomely along this morning,
sir.’
‘How have you slept, Wilfrid?’ said I.
‘Well,’ he answered. ‘But I say, Charles, what do you think?’ said
he with a sudden boyish air that startled me with its suggestion of
stupidity in him. ‘Muffin is drunk.’
‘Drunk!’ cried I; ‘but who the deuce is Muffin?’ forgetting the name.
‘Why, my man,’ he answered; ‘my valet. It’s very odd. I thought at
first it was sea-sickness. He’s been crying. The tears, I give you my
word, streamed down his cheeks. He begs to be set ashore, and swears
that if he should choke with one of the fish that are swimming about
in him, his mother and two sisters would have to go to the Union. Do
you think he’s mad?’
‘Drunk, and sea-sick, too,’ said I. ‘Has he not been away with you on a
yachting trip before?’
‘No. This is a handsome vessel, don’t you think, Charles?’ he
exclaimed, breaking from the subject as though it had never been in his
mind, and following on his question with a curious fluttering smile and
that trembling of the lids I have before described; though his gaze
steadied miraculously as they rested upon the gun the fellows were at
work upon, and a shadow came into his face which was as good as telling
me that I need not respond to his inquiry, as his thoughts were already
elsewhere.
‘Let’s go and have a look at my cannon,’ said he with the same odd
boyish manner he had discovered a minute or two earlier.
We walked forward; the decks had been some time before washed down
and were sand dry, white as a tree newly stripped of its bark, with
a glitter all about them of the crystals of salt. The rigging was
everywhere neatly coiled down; whatever was of brass shone as though
it reflected a sunbeam; no detail but must have satisfied the most
exacting nautical eye with an indication of frigate-like neatness,
cleanliness, finish, and fore and aft discipline. The ‘Bride,’ after
the manner of many yachts of those days, carried a galley on deck abaft
her foremast. I peeped in as I passed and took notice of a snug little
interior, brilliant with polished cooking vessels, and as clean and
sweet as a dairy. A few of the sailors were standing about it waiting
(as I took it) for the cook to furnish the messes with their breakfast.
They had the air of a rough resolute set of men, with something of
the inspiration of the yachting business, perhaps, in their manner
of saluting Sir Wilfrid and myself, but with little of the aspect
of the seafarer of the pleasure-vessel of _these_ times. They were
bushy-whiskered hard-a-weather fellows for the most part, with one odd
face amongst them as yellow and wrinkled as the skin of a decayed lemon.
I asked Wilfrid carelessly if any of his crew had sailed with him
before. He answered that a few of them had; but that the others had
declined to start on a voyage to the end of which Finn was unable to
furnish a date, so that the captain had made up the complement in
a hurry out of the best hands he could find cruising about ashore.
So this, thought I, accounts for the absence of that uniformity of
apparel one looks for amongst the crews of yachts; yet all the sailors
I had taken notice of were dressed warmly in very good clean nautical
clothes, though I protest it made one think of the old picaroon and
yarns of the Spanish Main to glance at one or two of the dry, tough,
burnt, seawardly chaps who concealed their pipes and dragged a curl
upon their foreheads to us as we passed them.
Wilfrid stared at his eighteen-pounder as though he were some lad
viewing a toy cannon he had just purchased. He bent close to it in
his near-sighted way, and looked it all over whilst he asked me what
I thought of it. I saw the two fellows who were still at work upon it
chew hard on the junks in their cheek-bones in their struggle to keep
their faces.
‘Why,’ said I, ‘it seems to me a very good sort of gun, Wilfrid, and a
thing, when fired, I’d rather stand behind than in front of.’
‘I should have had two of them,’ said he with a momentary darkening of
his looks to the rising in him of some vexing memory, pointing as he
spoke to the bow ports, ‘but Finn thought one piece of such a calibre
enough at this end of the vessel, and it would have been idle to mount
a stern-chaser; for what we want to fire at--should it come to it--we
can always manage to keep yonder,’ nodding in the direction of the
jibboom.
I had no mind to talk with him in the presence of the two fellows, one
of whom I would see screw up his eye like the twist of a gimblet at us
whilst he went on polishing; so I stepped into the head to take a view
of the shear of the cutwater as it drove knife-like into each green
freckled and glass-smooth side of surge rolling transversely from us
ere shattering it into a snowstorm; but the bulwarks being too tall to
enable me to see all that I looked for, I sprang on to the bowsprit and
laid out to the jibboom end, which I jockeyed, holding on to a stay and
beckoning to Wilfrid to follow; but he shook his head with a loud call
to me to mind what I was about.
One may talk of the joy of a swift gallop on horseback when the man and
the animal fit like hand and glove, when all is smooth running, with a
gallant leap now and again; but what is a flight of that sort compared
with the sensations you get by striding the jibboom of such a schooner
as the ‘Bride’ and feeling her airily leap with you over the liquid
hollows which yawn right under you, green as the summer leaf or purple
as the violet for a moment or two, before the smiting stem fills the
thunderous chasm with the splendour of a cloud of boiling froth! It was
a picture to have detained me an hour, so noble was the spectacle of
the leaning yacht for ever coming right at me as it seemed, the rounds
of her canvas whitened into marble hardness with the yearn and lean
of the distended cloths to a quarter of the sea where hung a brighter
tincture of sky through some tenuity of the eastern greyness behind
which the sun was soaring. One felt a life and soul in the little ship
in every floating bound she made, in every sliding blow of the bow that
sent a vast smooth curl of billow to windward for the shrill-edged
blast to transform into a very cataract of stars and diamonds and
prisms! Lovely beyond description was the curtseying of her gilt
figure-head and the refulgence of the gold lines all about it to the
milk-white softness that seethed to the hawse-pipes.
I made my way inboards and said to Wilfrid, who stood waiting for me,
‘She’s a beauty. She should achieve your end for you if it is Table
Bay only you are thinking of. But yonder great horizon!’ I exclaimed,
motioning with my hand. ‘We are still in the narrow sea--yet look how
far it stretches! Think then of the Atlantic circle.’
‘We shall overhaul her!’ he exclaimed quickly, with a gesture that made
an instant’s passion of his way of speaking. ‘Come along aft, Charles,
and stump it a bit for an appetite. Breakfast can’t be far off now.’
Miss Laura did not make her appearance until we were at table. I
feared that the ‘Bride’s’ lively dance had proved too much for her,
and glanced aft for the maid that I might ask how her mistress did.
Indeed, though on deck one gave no heed to the rolling and plunging of
the yacht, the movements were rendered mighty sensible in the cabin by
the swift, often convulsive, oscillations of lamps and swing-trays,
by the sliding of articles of the breakfast equipment in the fiddles,
by the monotonous ticking-like noise of doors upon their hooks, the
slope of the cabin floor, sounds like the groanings of strong men in
pain breaking in upon the ear from all parts, and above all by sudden
lee-lurches which veiled the port-holes in green water, that sobbed
madly till it flashed, with a shriek and a long dim roar, off the
weeping glass lifted by the weather roll to the dull grey glare of the
day.
But we had scarcely taken our seats when the girl arrived, and she
brought such life and light and fragrance in her mere aspect to the
table, that it was as though some rich and beautiful flower of a
perfume sweetened yet by the coolness of dew had been placed amongst
us. She had slept well, she said, but her maid was ill and helpless.
‘And where is Muffin?’ she demanded.
‘He’s a lying down, miss,’ exclaimed the head steward; ‘he says his
blood-wessels is that delicate he’s got to be werry careful indeed.’
Wilfrid leaned across to her and said, in a low voice that the steward
might not hear him, but with the boyish air that I had found odd, and
even absurd, strong in him again, ‘Laura, my dear, imagine! Muffin is
_drunk_.’ He broke into a strong, noisy laugh. ‘Weepingly drunk, Laura;
talks of himself as a globe of fish, and indeed,’ he added, with a
sudden recovery of his gravity, ‘so queer outside all inspirations of
the bottle that I’m disposed to think him mad.’ Again he uttered a loud
ha! ha! peering at me with his short sight to see if I was amused.
A look of concern entered Miss Jennings’ face, but quickly left it,
subdued, as I noticed, by an effort of will.
‘I was afraid that Muffin would not suit you,’ she exclaimed, quietly.
‘I told you so, I remember. Those yellow, hollow men are miserable
sailors. He has all good qualities as a valet on shore, but----’ she
was proceeding when he interrupted her.
‘I say, Laura, isn’t this breeze magnificent, eh? Think, my dear--ten
knots an hour! We are sweeping through it as though we were in tow of a
comet. Why, if the devil himself were ahead we should overhaul him at
this pace.’
He dropped his knife and fork as though to rub his hands--an action
common to him when gratified--but his face darkened, a wild expression
came into it with a sudden savage protrusion of his projecting
under-lip to the bitter sneer of the upper one; he fell again to eating
in a hurry, breathing short and masticating viciously with now and
again a shake of the head, until all at once, ere he had half made an
end of what was before him, he pushed his plate violently away and lay
back in his chair, with his arms tightly folded upon his breast and his
gaze intently fixed downwards, in a way to make me think of that aunt
of his whom the old earl had pointed out to his father as she paced the
green sward betwixt two keepers.
With the easiest air imaginable, though it was impossible that she
could effectually blind to my sight the mingled expression of worry and
dismay in her eyes as she directed them at me, Miss Jennings, making
the breakfast upon the table her text, prattled about the food one gets
on board ship, seizing, as it seemed to me, the first common-place
topic she could think of.
I took an askant view of the stewards to see if they noticed Sir
Wilfrid, but could find nothing to interpret in their wooden, waiting
faces. After a little he seemed to wake up, coming back to his mind,
as it were, with a long, tremulous sigh, and a puzzled look round at
the table as though wondering whether he had breakfasted or not. Miss
Jennings and I chatted common-places. He called for a cup of tea, and
then, after listening with plenty of intelligence in his manner to a
little experience I was relating to Miss Laura concerning the recovery
of a captain’s pig that had been washed overboard in a sudden squall,
he described a gale of wind he had encountered off Agulhas whilst on
a voyage to India, during which the cuddy front was stove in, and an
immense sow and her young, along with a fine specimen of an English
cart-horse and a cow, washed bodily aft, and swept in thunder down
the broad staircase in the saloon that conducted to the berths and
living-room for what were then termed the steerage passengers. No story
was ever more graphically related. He described the panic amongst the
passengers, the horrible concert produced by the screams of the pigs
and the terrified moaning and bellowing of the cow, the uproar of the
cart-horse’s plunging hoofs against the resonant bulkheads, mingled
with the shrieks of the people who were in bed and imagined the ship
to be already under water; I say he described all this so well, with
so keen an appreciation of the humour, as well as of the horror of the
scene, with a delivery so free from all excitement, that it seemed
almost incredible he should be the same man that just now sat fixed
in the posture of a melancholy madman with a face, as I might have
thought, dark with the shadow of eclipsed reason.
Breakfast ended, he quitted the table to fetch his pipe.
‘I had better have come without a man, after all,’ said he, laughing;
‘one condition of sea-going should be that a fellow must help himself;
and, upon my word, it comes to it no matter how many servants he brings
with him. ’Tis the same ashore too, after all. It is the mistress who
does most of the waiting’; and thus pleasantly speaking he went to his
cabin.
Miss Laura made as if to rise.
‘An instant, Miss Jennings,’ said I. ‘I have seen nothing of Wilfrid of
late years. You, on the other hand, have been a good deal thrown with
him during the last three months. Tell me, then, what you think of his
manner and language just now--that piece of behaviour, I mean, from
which he started, so to speak, into perfect rationality?’
‘It was a sort of mood,’ she answered, speaking low, ‘that I have
noticed in him, but never before saw so defined.’
‘It was madness,’ said I, with a shake of the head.
‘The shadow of a passing mood of madness,’ said she. ‘Was he on deck
with you before breakfast?’
I answered yes.
‘Were his spirits good?’
‘Irrationally good, I thought. It was the sight of the flying schooner,
no doubt, the picture of the running seas, the sense of headlong speed,
with the black grin of the forecastle gun to quicken his wild craving
into a very delirium of expectation and hope. But that kind of glee is
quite as alarming as his melancholy.’
‘Yes, but you will find his melancholy strong as his spirits seem high.
Do I make myself understood, Mr. Monson?’
‘Quite. One moment, you mean, he is looking down upon this
extraordinary plan of his--this goose-chase, I must call it--with a
bounding heart from the edge of a chasm; the next he is at the very
bottom of the pit gazing upwards in an anguish of dejection. The deeper
the precipice the gloomier the depth where he brings up. Certainly I
understood you, Miss Jennings. But here is now a consideration that
is bothering me,’ I continued, sending a look aft, and up at the
open skylight and around, to make sure that we were unheard. ‘I am
his cousin. As his associate in this voyage I have a right to regard
myself as his best friend, for the time being anyway. Now what is my
duty in the face of a condition of mind whose capriciousness fills it
with menace? He brings me here as his right-hand man to help him, but
to help him in or to what? I seem to understand his programme, yet I
protest I cannot render it intelligible to my own common sense. Many
might think me “wanting” myself to be here at all; but I will not go
into that; what I mean is, is it not my duty to hinder him if possible
from prosecuting a chase which, in my humble judgment, by continuing
to irritate him with the disappointment of hope, may end in rendering
organic what is now, let us pray, merely functional and fugitive?’
‘You may try, but I do not think you will succeed,’ she exclaimed.
‘Indeed,’ she cried, raising her voice, but immediately and nervously
subduing it, ‘I hope you will _not_ try, for it is not hard to foresee
what must follow. You will merely make his resolution more stubborn by
rendering it angrier than it is, and then there might come a coolness
between you--indeed, something worse than coolness on his side; for in
such minds as your cousin’s it is impossible to imagine what dangerous
ideas opposition may provoke.’
I bowed in recognition of the truth of this, admiring in her a quality
of sagacity that, to the fancy at all events of a young man, as I then
was, would gather a new excellence from her graces. She looked at me
with a tremble of light in her gaze that vexed its serenity.
‘Besides, Mr. Monson, we must consider Henrietta.’
‘It is natural you should think wholly of her,’ said I.
‘Not wholly. But this pursuit _may_ end in rescuing her from Colonel
Hope-Kennedy. It gives her future a chance. But you would have her
husband sit quietly at home.’
‘Well, not exactly,’ I interrupted.
‘What would you have him do?’ she asked.
‘Get a divorce,’ said I.
‘He won’t do that,’ she exclaimed. ‘Marriage in his sight is a
sacrament. Do not you know his views, Mr. Monson?’
‘You see, I have long lost sight of him.’
‘Well, I _know_ he would not seek a divorce. He would be mad indeed,’
she cried, flushing to her brows, ‘to give my sister the liberty she
wants and Colonel Hope-Kennedy----’ She faltered and stopped, biting
her underlip, with the hot emotions which mounted to her face imparting
a sudden air of womanly maturity to her girlish beauty, whilst her
breast rose and fell to her ireful breathing. ‘This is no mad pursuit,’
she continued after a brief pause, speaking softly. ‘What is there
unreasonable in a man’s determination to follow his wife that he may
come as swiftly as the ship, the coach, the railway will permit him
between her and a life of shame and remorse and misery?’
As she spoke, my cousin arrived, holding a great meerschaum pipe in
his hand. She at once rose and left the table with a faint smile at me
and a glance on top of it that was as eloquent as a whisper of regret
at having been betrayed into warmth. Well, thought I, you are a sweet
little woman, and it is highly probable that before I have been a week
in your company I shall be head over heels in love with you. But for
all that, you fair and artless creature, I don’t agree with you in your
views of this chase. Suppose Wilfrid recaptures his wife--what is he
going to do with her? She is not a lunatic; he cannot lock her up--but
I broke off to the approach of my cousin, fetched my pipe, and went on
deck with him.
After all it was about time I should now see that, though we might
shape a course for the yacht and give the wind the name of the compass
points whence it blew, Chance was our skipper and helmsman, and the
regions into which he was leading us as blind and thick as smoke.
Throughout life, and in all things, it is the same, of course; we
sail with a fog that stands wall-like at the bows of our intentions,
receding inch by inch with our advance, and leaving the water clear on
either hand and astern, but ahead it remains for ever as thick as mud
in a wineglass. Anyhow, the chase was a sort of consolation to Wilfrid;
it had Miss Laura’s approval, and there was hope enough to be got out
of it according to her to render her trustful. But for my part I could
only view it as a yachting excursion, and I particularly felt this when
I stepped on deck with my cousin, spite of my quite recent talk with
his sweet sister-in law, and felt the sweep of the strong wind, and
caught the roar of the divided waters sounding a small thunder upon the
ears after the comparative calm of the breakfast-table below.