SWEETHEARTS IN A DANDY
For my part I breakfasted with the avidity of a shipwrecked man.
Ashore it might have been otherwise, but the sea breeze is a noble
neutraliser of whatever is undesirable in the obligations which attend
an excess of sentiment and emotion.
The cabin made as pretty a little marine piece as ever the light of the
early sun flashed into. There were flowers of fragrance and of rich
colours; the small table sparkled with its hospitable furniture; the
polished bulkheads rippled with light, and the diamond-like glance of
the lustrous, dancing sea seemed to be swept by the blue air gushing
athwart the sky-light into the mirrors, which enriched this little
boudoir of a cabin. But it was the presence of Grace which informed
this picture with those qualities of sweetness, elegance, refinement,
perfume, which I now found in it, but had not before noticed. How
proudly my young heart rose to the sight of her! to the thought of her
as my own, one and indivisible, no longer the distant hope, which for
weary months past her aunt had made her to me, but my near
sweetheart--my present darling--her hand within reach of my grasp.
We sat together in earnest conversation. It was not for me to pretend
that I could witness no imprudence in our elopement. Indeed, I took
care to let her know that I regretted the step we had been forced into
taking as fully as she did. My love was an influence upon her, and
whatever I said I felt might weigh with her childish heart. But I
repeated what I had again and again written to her--that there had been
no other alternative than this elopement.
"You wished me to wait," I said, "until you were twenty-one, when you
would be your own mistress. But to wait for more than three years!
What was to happen in that time? They might have converted you--"
"No," she cried.
"And have wrought a complete change in your nature," I went on. "How
many girls are there who could resist the sort of pressure they were
subjecting you to one way and another?"
"They could not have changed my heart, Herbert."
"How can we tell? Under their influence in another year you might have
come to congratulate yourself upon your escape from me."
"Do you think so? Then you should have granted me another year,
because marriage," she added, with a look in her eyes that was like a
wistful smile, "is a very serious thing, and if you believe that I
should be rejoicing in a year hence over my escape from you, as you
call it, then you must believe that I have no business to be here."
This was a cool piece of logic that was hardly to my taste.
"Tell me," said I, fondling her hand, "how you managed last night?"
"I do not like to think of it," she answered. "I was obliged to
undress, for it is mam'selle's rule to look into all the bedrooms the
last thing after locking the house up. It was then ten o'clock. I
waited until I heard the convent clock strike twelve, by which time I
supposed everybody would be sound asleep. Then I lighted a candle and
dressed myself, but I had to use my hands as softly as a spider spins
its web, and my heart seemed to beat so loud that I was afraid the
girls in the next room would hear it. I put a box of matches in my
pocket, and crept along the corridors to the big salle-a-manger. The
door of my bedroom creaked when I opened it, and I felt as if I must
sink to the ground with fright. The salle-a-manger is a great, gloomy
room even in day-time; it was dreadfully dark, horribly black, Herbert,
and the sight of the stars shining through the window over the balcony
made me feel so lonely that I could have cried. There was a mouse
scratching in the room somewhere, and I got upon a chair, scarcely
caring whether I made a noise or not, so frightened was I, for I hate
mice. Indeed, if that mouse had not kept quiet after a while, I
believe I should not be here now. I could not endure being alone in a
great, dark room at that fearful hour of the night with a mouse running
about near me. Oh, Herbert, how glad I was when I saw your lantern
flash."
"My brave little heart!" cried I, snatching up her hand and kissing it.
"But the worst part is over. There are no ladders, no great black
rooms now before us, no mice even."
She slightly coloured without smiling, and I noticed an anxious
expression in the young eyes she held steadfastly bent upon the table.
"What thought is troubling you, Grace?"
"Herbert, I fear you will not love me the better for consenting to run
away with you."
"Is that your only fear?"
She shook her head, and said, whilst she continued to keep her eyes
downcast: "Suppose Aunt Amelia refuses to sanction our marriage?"
"She will not--she dare not!" I cried vehemently; "imprudent as we may
seem, we are politic in this, Grace--that our adventure must _force_
your aunt into sending us her sanction." She looked at me, but her
face remained grave. "Caudel," said I, "who is as much your guardian
as I am, put the same question to me. But there is no earthly good in
_supposing_. It is monstrous to suppose that your aunt will object.
She hates me, I know, but her aversion--the aversion of that old woman
of the world with her family pride and notions of propriety--is not
going to suffer her to forbid our marriage after this. Yet, grant that
her ladyship--my blessings upon her false front!--should go on saying
no; are we not prepared?"
"But if it has to come to my living with your sister, Herbert--"
"It will come to nothing of the sort," I whipped out.
"Would it not have been better for me," she continued, "to have
remained under Aunt Amelia's care until I came of age?"
"Aunt Amelia," said I, "in that sense means your Boulogne
school-mistress, and in much less than three years you would have been
pestered into changing your faith."
"You think I have no strength of mind. You may be right," she added,
looking at me and then around her and sighing.
"But remember, my darling, what you have written to me. What was the
name now of mam'selle's confessor?"
"Pere Jerome."
"Well, on your own showing, wasn't this Father Jerome ceaseless in his
importunities?"
"Yes. Mam'selle was repeatedly leaving me alone with him under one
excuse or another. He sent me books--I was taken to mass--only
yesterday morning mam'selle lost her temper with me, and quite made me
understand that her orders from Aunt Amelia were to convert me, _coute
que coute_--"
"Then," cried I, interrupting her once more, hot with the irritation
that had again and again visited me when I read her letters where she
complained of the behaviour of mam'selle and this Father Jerome; "is
there any mortal of our faith, I care not what may be his or her
theories of human propriety, who could pronounce against us for acting
as we have? My contention is, your aunt is not a proper guardian for
you. If it were your father or your mother--both Protestants, whose
spirits, looking down upon you, we are bound to believe, would wish you
to live and die Protestant to the heart as they were! But Lady Amelia
Roscoe!--the most wretched mixture that can be imagined, of bigotry and
worldliness, her head stuffed full of priests and dress, of beads and
balls--"
I broke off to kiss away a tear, and a little later she was smiling
with her hand in mine, as I led her up on deck.
The mistiness had gone out of the sunlight, the pearly, vaporous
curls--faint of hue as the new moon beheld in the day--which had given
a look of marble to the sky, had melted out or been settled by the
breeze over to the English coast, and now the heavens were a pale blue,
piebald with bodies of white vapour streaming up out of the south and
touching the green and creaming stretch of waters with shadows of
violet. There was more warmth in the sun than I should have looked for
at that time of the year, and I speedily made Grace comfortable in a
chair, a little distance from the tiller--in other words, out of
earshot of the helmsman; I snugged her in rugs, and Caudel further
sheltered her by what he called a hurricane house--a square of canvas
"seized" above the line of the bulwark rail.
She gazed about her out of the wraps which rose to her ears with eyes
full of childlike interest and wonder, not unmixed with fear, I saw her
eagerly watching the action of the yacht as the little fabric leaned to
a sea with a long, sideways, floating plunge that brought the yeast of
the broken waters bubbling and hissing to the very line of her lee
forecastle bulwark; then she would clasp my hand as though startled
when the dandy craft brought the weight of her white canvas to windward
on the heave of the underrunning sea with a sound as of drums and
bugles heard afar echoing down out of the glistening concavities and
ringing out of the taut rigging upon which the blue and brilliant
morning breeze was splitting.
She had not been sitting long before I saw that she was beginning to
like it. There was no nausea now; her eyes were bright, there was
colour in her cheeks; and her red lips lay parted as though in pure
enjoyment of the glad rush of the salt breeze athwart her teeth of
pearl.
We had a deal to say to each other as you may suppose, and so much of
the nonsense that lovers will utter went to our talk that I should be
sorry to record what was said. Caudel, conning the little ship, hung
about removed from us, but I would often catch his sea-blue eye
furtively directed at Grace as though he could not look at her often
enough. The boy Bobby came and went betwixt the forecastle hatch and
the companion; the fellow at the helm swung upon the tiller with an
occasional peep at the broad wake racing, fanshaped, from under the
counter into the troubled toss and windy distance, as though he wished
to make sure that he was steering straight; the other two of my crew
were at work forward on jobs to which, not being a sailor, I should be
unable to give a name.
Thus passed the morning. There was no tedium. If ever there came a
halt in our chat there were twenty things over the side to look at, to
fill the pause with colour and beauty. It might be a tall,
slate-coloured, steam tank, hideous with gaunt leaning funnel and
famished pole-masts, and black fans of propeller beating at the
stern-post like the vanes of a drowning windmill amid a hill of froth,
yet poetised in spite of herself into a pretty detail of the
surrounding life through the mere impulse and spirit of the bright seas
through which she was starkly driving. Or it was a full-rigged ship,
homeward bound, with yearning canvas and ocean-worn sides, figures on
her poop crossing from rail to rail to look at what was passing, and
seamen on her forecastle busy with the ship's ground tackle.
It was shortly after twelve that the delicate shadow of the high land
of Beachy Head showed over the yacht's bow. By one o'clock it had
grown defined and firm, with the glimmering streak of its white
ramparts of chalk stealing out of the blue haze.
"There's Old England, Grace!" said I. "How one's heart goes out to the
sight of the merest shadow of one's own soil! The _Spitfire_ has seen
the land; has she not quickened her pace?"
"I ought to wish it was the Cornwall coast," she answered; "but I am
enjoying this now," she added smiling.
"How close do you intend to run in?" I called to Caudel.
He rolled up to us and answered:
"No call, I think, sir, to haul in much closer. The land trends in
down Brighton and Worthing way, and there'll be nothen to see till
we're off St. Catherine's Point."
"Well, you know our destination, Caudel. Carry the yacht to it in your
own fashion. But mind you get there," said I, looking at Grace.
I was made happy by finding my sweetheart with some appetite for dinner
at one o'clock. She no longer sighed; no regrets escaped her; her
early alarm had disappeared; the novelty of the situation was wearing
off; she was now realising again what I knew she had realised
before--to judge by her letters--though the excitement and terrors of
the elopement had broken in upon and temporarily disordered her
perception; she was now fully realising, I mean, that there was nothing
for it but this step to free her from a species of immurement charged
with menace to her faith and to her love; and this being her mood, her
affection for me found room to show itself; so that now I never could
meet her eyes without seeing how wholly I had her dear heart, and how
happy she was in this recurrence of brightening out of her love from
the gloom and consternation that attended the start of our headlong
wild adventure.
I flattered myself that we were to be fortunate in our weather;
certainly all that afternoon was as fair and beautiful in its marine
atmosphere of autumn as living creature could desire. The blues and
greens of the prospect of heaven and sea were enriched by the looming,
towering terraces of Beachy Head, hanging large and looking near upon
our starboard quarter, though I believe Caudel had not sailed very deep
within the sphere in which the high-perched lantern is visible before
shifting his helm for a straight down Channel course. A lugger with
red canvas, the hue of which was deepened yet by the delicate
crimsoning of the sun that was now sloping into the Atlantic, gliding
betwixt us and the heap of land in the north, brought out the white
chalk of the heights into a snow-white brilliance that almost startled
the eye at first sight of it.
"I should imagine that a huge iceberg shows like that," said I to Grace.
"I wish I had my paint-box here," she answered, her eyes glistening as
she looked.
"Grace," said I, "I have an idea. We will spend our honeymoon in the
_Spitfire_. We will lay in a stock of paint-boxes, easels and lead
pencils, sail round the coast, heave our little ship to off every point
of beauty, and take our fill of English shore scenery."
"Do you mean to wait till next summer?" she asked, glancing at me shyly
through her lashes, though with a hint of coquetry too in the spirit of
her look.
I laughed out, seeing her meaning, for to be sure a coastal cruise in a
twenty-six ton dandy would hardly fit the winter months of Great
Britain, and by the time we should be prepared to enter upon our
honeymoon, this autumn that was now dying would, I fear, be entirely
dead.
"Then, it shall be Paris, Brussels, and Rome according to your own
programme," said I.
She coloured, and said something about there being plenty of time to
talk about such a matter as that, and went to the rail and leaned over
it, watching the distant noble mass of land in a reverie upon which I
would not intrude, so sweet did she look with her profile showing with
ivory-like delicacy against the green and blue of the east where the
tints were hardening to the gathering of the evening shadow there,
whilst her rich hair blown by the breeze seemed to tremble into fire to
the now almost level pouring of the red splendour in the west.
When the sun had fairly set I took her below, for the wind seemed to
come on a sudden with the damp of night in it, and a bite as shrewd in
its abruptness as frost. I had made no other provision in the shape of
amusement for our sea trip of three, four, or five days as it might
happen, than a small parcel of novels, scarcely doubting that all the
diversion we should need must lie in each other's company. And to be
sure we managed to kill the time very agreeably without the help of
fiction, though we both owned, when the little cabin clock pointed to
half-past nine, and she looking up at it, and yawning behind her white
fingers, exclaimed, that she felt tired and would go to bed; I say, we
both owned that the day had seemed a desperately long one--to be sure,
with us it had begun very early--and I could not help adding that on
the whole a honeymoon spent aboard a yacht the size of the _Spitfire_
would soon grow a very slow business in spite of crayons and
paint-boxes.
As we lingered hand in hand, she exclaimed, "What will mam'selle have
been saying all to-day?"
"The excitement," said I, "has been tremendous. Mam'selle fainted to
begin with. Father Jerome was sent for, and I can see him with my
mind's eye taking the ground as he makes for the chateau with the
strides of a pantomime policeman chasing the clown. What titterings,
what exclamations, what _Mon Dieux!_ and _quelle horreurs!_ among the
girls! How many of them would like to be you? When they find that
rope-ladder dangling--the burglarious bull's-eye lamp at the foot of
it--"
"How _could_ we have done it?" she interrupted, looking at me with a
pale face and a working lip.
When she had withdrawn I put on a pea-coat, and filling a pipe, stepped
on deck. The dusk was clear, but of a darker shade than that of the
preceding night; there was not more wind than had been blowing
throughout the day; but the sky was full of large swollen-clouds
rolling in shadows of giant wings athwart the stars, and the gloom of
them was in the atmosphere. Here and there showed a ship's light, some
faint gleam of red or green windily coming and going out upon the
weltering obscurity, but away to starboard the horizon ran black,
without a single break of shore light that I could see. The yacht was
swarming through it under all canvas, humming as she went. Her pace,
if it lasted, would, I knew, speedily terminate this sea-going passage
of our elopement, and I looked over the stern very well pleased to
witness the white sweep of the wake melting at a little distance into a
mere elusive faintness.
Caudel stood near the helm,
"This will do, I think," said I.
"Ay, sir," he answered; "she's finding her heels now. See that there
brig out yonder?" and his arm pointed out against the stars over the
horizon to a dim green light on the right of our wake astern. "She was
ahead of us half an hour ago, and I allow she was walking too--warn't
she, Job?"
"Warping, more like," answered the man in a grunting voice.
"You go and smoother yourself!" cried Caudel; "why, damme a heagle
can't fly if _you're_ to be believed."
"When are we to be off St. Catherine's Point at this pace, Caudel?"
said I.
"At this pace, sir--why, betwixt seven and eight o'clock to-morrow
morning."
"What a deuce of a length this English Channel runs to!" cried I
impatiently. "Why, it will be little better than beginning our voyage
even when the Isle of Wight is abreast."
"Yes, sir, there's a deal o' water going to the making of this here
Channel--a blooming sight too much of it when it comes on a winter's
night a-blowing and a-snowing, the hatmosphere thick as muck," answered
Caudel.
"There'll be a bright look-out kept to-night, I hope," said I. "Not
the value of all the cargoes afloat at this present instant, Caudel,
the wide world over, equals the worth of my treasure aboard the
_Spitfire_."
Here Job Crew took a step to leeward to spit.
"Trust me to see that a bright look-out's kept, Mr. Barclay. There'll
be no tarning in with me this night. Don't let no fear of anything
going wrong disturb your mind, sir."
I lingered to finish my pipe. The fresh wind flashed into the face
damp with the night and the spray-cold breath of the sea, and the
planks of the deck showed dark with the moisture to the dim starlight.
There was some weight in the heads of seas as they came rolling to our
beam, and the little vessel was now soaring and falling briskly upon
the heave of the folds whose volume, of course, gained as the Channel
broadened.
"Well," said I, with a bit of a shiver, and hugging myself in my
pea-coat, "I'm cold and tired, and going to bed, so good-night, and God
keep you wide awake," and down I went, and ten minutes later was
snugged away in my coffin of a bunk sound asleep, and snoring at the
top of my pipes, I don't doubt.
Next morning when I went on deck after nine hours of solid slumber, I
at once directed my eyes over the rail in search of the Isle of Wight,
but there was nothing to be seen but a grey drizzle, a weeping wall of
slate-coloured haze that formed a sky of its own and drooped to within
a mile or so of the yacht. The sea was an ugly sallowish green, and
you saw the billows come tumbling in froth from under the vaporous
margin of the horizon as though each surge was formed there, and there
was nothing but blackness and space beyond. The yacht's canvas was
discoloured with saturation; drops of water were blowing from her
rigging; there was a sobbing of a gutter-like sort in her lee scuppers,
and the figures of the men glistening in oilskins completed the
melancholy appearance of the little _Spitfire_. Caudel was below, but
the man named Dick Files was at the helm, an intelligent young fellow
without any portion of Job Crew's surliness, and he answered the
questions I put.
We had made capital way throughout the night he told me, and if the
weather were clear, St. Catherine's Point would show abreast of us.
"There's no doubt about Caudel knowing where he is?" said I, with a
glance at the blind grey atmosphere that sometimes swept in little
puffs of cloudy damp through the rigging, like fragments of vapour torn
out of some compacted body.
"Oh, no, sir, Mr. Caudel knows where he is," answered the man. "We
picked up and passed a small cutter out of Portsmouth about
three-quarters of an hour ago, sir, and he told us where we were."
"Has this sail been kept on the yacht all night?" said I, looking up at
the wide spread of mainsail and gaff topsail.
"All night, sir. The run's averaged eight knots. Night hand equal to
steam, sir."
"Well, you will all need to keep a bright look-out in this sort of
thickness. How far off can you see?"
The man stared, and blinked, and mused, and then said he allowed about
a mile and a quarter.
"Room enough," said I. "But mind your big mail boats out of
Southampton! There are German skippers amongst them who would drive
through the devil himself sooner than lose five minutes."
The promise of a long, wet, blank day was not very cheering. In fact,
this change in the weather was as damping to my spirits as it literally
was to everything else, and as I entered the companion way for shelter,
I felt as though half of a mind to order the yacht to be headed for
some adjacent port. But a little thinking brought back my resolution
to its old bearings. It is a hard thing to avow, but I knew that my
very strongest chance of gaining Lady Amelia's consent lay in this sea
trip. Then again, there might come a break at any moment, with a fine
day of warm sunshine and clear sky to follow. I re-entered the cabin,
and on looking at the barometer observed a slight depression in the
mercury, but it was without significance to my mind.
Somewhere about this time Grace came out of her berth. She brought an
atmosphere of flower-like fragrance with her, but the motions of the
yacht obliged her to sit quickly, and she gazed at me with laughter in
her eyes from the locker, graceful in her posture as a reposing dancer.
Her face lengthened, however, when I told her about the weather, that
in short there was nothing visible from the deck but a muddy, jumbled
atmosphere of vapour and drizzle.
"I counted upon seeing the Isle of Wight," cried she; "there has been
no land so far except those far-off high cliffs yesterday afternoon."
"No matter, my sweet. Let us take as long as possible in breakfasting.
Then you shall read Tennyson to me--yes, I have a volume of that poet,
and we shall find some of the verses in wonderful harmony with our
mood." She gave me a smiling glance, though her lip pouted as though
she would say, "Don't make too sure of my mood, my fine young fellow."
"By the time we have done with Tennyson," I continued, "the weather may
have cleared. If not, then we must take as long as possible in dining."
"Isn't it dangerous to be at sea in such weather as this?" she asked.
"No," said I.
"But the sailors can't see."
I feared the drift of her language and exclaimed, "It would be
dangerous to attempt to make the land, for we might blunder upon a rock
and go to pieces, Grace; and then farewell, a long farewell to the
passions, emotions, the impulses, the sensations which have brought us
together here," and I kissed her hand.
"But it would be pleasant to lie in a pretty harbour--to rest as it
were," she exclaimed.
"Our business is to get married, my darling," I rejoined; "and we must
hasten as swiftly as the wind will allow us to the parish where the
ceremony is to be performed, for my cousin can't publish the banns
until we are on the spot, and whilst he is publishing the banns we must
be treating with her ladyship, and, as the diplomatists would say,
negotiating a successful issue."
She sighed, and looked grave, and hung her head. In truth, she took a
gloomy view of the future, was secretly convinced her aunt would not
consent, was satisfied that she would have to reside with my sister
until she had come of age, and my lightest touching upon the subject
dispirited her. And, indeed, though I had talked big to Caudel, and to
my darling also, of my sister taking charge of her, I was not at all
sure--I ought undoubtedly to have asked the question of a lawyer--that
Lady Amelia Roscoe could not, as her guardian, claim her, and convey
her to school afresh, and do, in short, what she pleased with the child
until she was twenty-one years old. But all the same I felt cocksure
in my heart that it would never come to this. Our yachting trip I
regarded as a provision against all difficulties.
My mind was busy with these thoughts as I sat by her side looking at
her; but she loved me not less than I loved her, and so I never found
it hard to coax a smile into her sweet face and to brighten her eyes.