Time was when I had been much thrown with my cousin. I had served in the Royal Navy for a few years, as I have said, but abandoned it on my inheriting a very comfortable little fortune from my father, who survived my mother a few months only. I say I quitted the sea then, partly because I was now become an independent man, partly because I was comparatively without influence and so found the vocation unpromising, and partly because my frizzling equatorial spells of service had fairly sickened me of the life.
It was then that Wilfrid, who was a bachelor, and my senior by some ten years or thereabouts, invited me down to Cumberland, where I hunted and shot with him and passed some merry weeks. He took a great liking to me, and I was often with him, and we were much together in London. There came a time, however, when he took it into his head to travel. He thought he would go abroad and see the world; not Paris, Brussels, and Rome, but America and the Indies and Australia—a considerable undertaking in those ambling days of the tea waggon and the cotton kettle-bottom, when the passage from the Thames to Bombay occupied four months, and when a man who had made a voyage round the world believed he had a right to give himself airs.
Well, my cousin sailed; I went down to Gravesend with him[11] and bade him good-bye there. His first start was for New York, and then he talked of proceeding to the West Indies and afterwards to the Cape, thence to India or Australia, and so on. He was away so long that the very memory of him grew dim in me, till one day I heard some men in a club that I belonged to speaking about the beautiful Lady Monson. I pricked up my ears at this, for Monson is my name and the word caught me instantly, and, gathering from the talk that one of the group, a young baronet with whom I was well acquainted, could satisfy my curiosity about the lady, I waited till he was alone and then questioned him.
He told me that Lady Monson was my cousin’s wife; Sir Wilfrid had met her at Melbourne and married her there. She was the daughter of a squatter, a man of small beginnings, who had done amazingly well. She was exceedingly beautiful, my young friend assured me. He had met her twice at county balls, and had never seen her like for dignity, grace, and loveliness of form and face. He told me that she was very fond of the sea, so some friends or acquaintances of hers had informed him, and that, to gratify her taste in this way, Sir Wilfrid sold his cutter—a vessel of twenty tons, aboard which I had made one or two excursions with him—and replaced her by a handsome schooner which he had rechristened the ‘Bride.’ I understood from the young baronet that my cousin and his wife were then away cruising in the Mediterranean.
I had not before heard of Wilfrid’s marriage, and, though for the moment I was a little surprised, and perhaps vexed, that he had never communicated so interesting a piece of news as this to me, who, as a blood relation and an intimate friend, had a claim upon his candour and kindness, yet on reflection I judged that his memory had been weakened by separation as mine had; and then I considered that he was so much engrossed by his wife as to be able to think of little besides, whilst, though he had then been married many months, he had apparently spent with Lady Monson a good deal of his time out of England.
About six weeks before the opening of this story I met him in Bond Street. I was passing him, for time and travel had wonderfully changed him, and in his long hair and smooth face I must certainly have failed, in the hurry of the pavement, to have recognised the cropped and bewhiskered young fellow whom I had taken leave of at Gravesend, but for his starting and his peculiar way of peering at me. My rooms were conveniently near; I carried him to them, and a couple of hours passed whilst he told me of his adventures. I noticed that he said much less about his wife than I should have expected to hear from him. He referred to her, indeed; praised her beauty, her accomplishments, with an almost passionate admiration in his way of speaking, yet I remarked a sort of uneasiness in his face too, a kind of shadowing as though the having to speak of his wife raised thoughts which eclipsed or dimmed the brightness of the holiday memories he was full of. Still I was so little sure that when I came to think it over I was convinced it was mere fancy[12] on my part, or at the worst I took it that, though he was worth ten thousand a year, she might be making him uneasy by extravagance, or there might have been a tiff between them before leaving his home to come to London, the memory of which would worry a man of his temperament, a creature of nerves, and tainted besides, as you know. He told me he was in London for a couple of days on a matter of business, and that he had asked Lady Monson to accompany him, but she had said it vexed her to leave her baby for even a day, and that it was out of the question to subject the bairn to the jolting, risks, and fatigue of a long journey. He looked curiously as he said this, but the expression fled too nimbly from his face to be determinable.
What was I doing? When would it suit me to visit him? If I had no better engagement would I return with him? But, though I had missed nothing of the old cordiality in his greeting and in his conversation that had reference to our bygone jinks and to his travels, his invitation—if invitation it could be called—was lifeless. So much so, indeed, that it was as good or bad as his telling me he did not want me then, however welcome I might be by-and-by. We parted, and I did not see or hear of him again until he came, as I have related, to tell me that his wife had eloped with Colonel Hope-Kennedy.
I had now to decide how to act, and I was never more puzzled or irresolute in the whole course of my life. Had he proposed an ocean cruise as a mere yachting trip, I should have accepted the offer right out of hand.
The sea, as a vocation, I did not love; but very different from the discipline of a man-of-war’s quarter-deck, and the fever-breeding tedium of stagnant and broiling stations, was the business of navigating the blue brine in a large richly-equipped yacht, of chasing the sun as one chose, of storing one’s mind with memories of the glittering pageantry of noble and shining rivers, and green and sparkling scenes of country radiant and aromatic with the vegetation of tropic heights and distant sea-board cities, past the gleam of the coral strand with a scent of sandalwood in the offshore breeze, and boats of strange form and rig, gay as aquatic parrots, sliding along the turquoise surface to the strains of a chant as Asiatic as the smell of the hubble-bubble. No man ever loved travel more than I; only, unfortunately, in my time, when I had the right sort of health and spirit for adventure, journeys by land and by sea were tedious and fatiguing. Very few steamers were afloat: one might have sought in vain for a propeller to thrash one to the world’s end with the velocity of a gale of wind. I had often a mind, after Wilfrid had started on his voyage to various parts of the world, to follow his example; but I would shake my head when I came to think of the passenger ship, the chance of being locked up for months with a score or two of people, half of whom might prove disagreeable, not to mention indifferent food and a vile ship’s cook, with weeks of equatorial deadness, and everything to be gone[13] through again as one went from place to place by sea, and myself companionless the while.
But a yachting cruise was another matter, and I say I should have accepted Wilfred’s proposal without an instant’s reflection, even if I had had to be on board by noon next day, but for the extraordinary motive of the trip. It was very plain that he had no clear perception of his own programme. He talked as though everything that happened would correspond with his anticipations. He seemed cocksure, for instance, of overhauling the ‘Shark’ in mid-ocean, when in reality the possibility of such an encounter was so infinitesimally small that no man in his senses would dream of seriously entering it as an item in his catalogue of chances. Then, supposing him to miss the ‘Shark,’ he was equally cocksure of arriving at Table-Bay before her. The ‘Bride’ might be the swifter vessel, but the course was six thousand miles and more; the run might occupy two and perhaps three, ay, and even four months, and, though I did not make much of the ‘Shark’s’ five days’ start, yet, even if the ‘Bride’ outsailed her by four feet to one, so much of the unexpected must enter as conditions of so long a run and so great a period of time—calms, headwinds, disaster, strong favourable breezes for the chased, sneaking and baffling draughts of air for the pursuer—that it was mere madness to reckon with confidence upon the ‘Bride’s’ arrival at Cape Town before the ‘Shark.’ So that, as there was no certainty at all about it, what was to follow if my cousin found that the runaways had sailed from Cape Town without leaving the faintest hint behind them as to their destination!
Moreover, how could one be sure that the Colonel and Lady Monson would not change their minds and make for American or Mediterranean ports? Their determination to put the whole world between them and England was not very intelligible, seeing that our globe is a big one, and that scoundrels need not travel far to be lost to the eye. If Lady Monson discovered that she had left behind her the remarkable letter which Wilfrid had given to me to read, then it would be strange if she and the Colonel did not change their programme, unless, indeed, they supposed that Wilfrid would never dream of following them upon the high seas.
But these were idle speculations; they made no part of my business. Should I accompany my cousin on as mad an undertaking as ever passion and distraction could hurry him into? I was heartily grieved for the poor fellow, and I sincerely desired to be of use to him. It might be that after we had been chasing for a few weeks his heart would sicken to the sight hour after hour of the bare sea-line, and then perhaps, if I were with him, I might come to have influence enough over his moods to divert him from his resolution, and so steer us home again; for I would think to myself, grant that we fall in with the ‘Shark,’ what can Wilfred do? Would he arm his men and board her? Yachtsmen are a peaceful body of sea-farers, and before it could come to a boarding match and a hand-to-hand[14] fight, he would have to satisfy his crew that they had signed articles to sell their lives as well as work his ship. To be sure, if the yachts fell within hail and Sir Wilfrid challenged the Colonel, the latter would not, it may be supposed, decline the duel.
But, view the proposal as I might, I could see nothing but a mad scheme in it; and I think it must have been two o’clock in the morning before I had made up my mind, so heartily did I bother myself with considerations; and then, after reflecting that there was nothing to keep me in England, that my cousin had come to me as a brother and asked me in a sense to stand by him as a brother, that the state of his mind imposed it almost as a pious obligation upon me to be by his side in this time of extremity and bitter anguish, that the quest was practically so aimless—the excursion was almost certain to end on this side the Cape, or, to put it at the worst, to end at Table Bay, which, after all, would prove no formidable cruise, but, on the contrary, a trip that must do me good and kill the autumn months very pleasantly—I say that, after lengthily reflecting on these and many other points and possibilities of the project, I made up my mind that I would sail with him.
Next morning I despatched my man with a note—a brief sentence: ‘I will be on board to-morrow by four,’ and received Wilfrid’s reply, written in an agitated sprawling hand: ‘God bless you! Your decision makes a double-barrelled weapon of my purpose. I have not slept a wink all night—my fifth night of sleeplessness; but I shall feel easier when the clipper keel of the “Bride” is shearing through it in hot and sure pursuit. I start in a quarter of an hour for Southampton. Laura will be overjoyed to hear that you are to be one of us; from the moment of my determining to follow that hell-born rascal she has been exhorting me to choose a companion—of my own sex, I mean, but it would have to be you or nix. My good angel be praised, ’tis all right now! We’ll have ’em, we’ll have ’em! Mark me! Would to heaven the pistol-ball had the power to cause in the heart of a ruffian and a seducer the intolerable mental torments he works for another ere it fulfilled its mission by killing him!’ He signed himself, ‘Yours ever affectionately.’
Wild as the tone of this note was, it was less suggestive of excitement and passion and restlessness than the writing. I locked it away, and possess it still, and no memorial that I can put my hand on has its power of lighting up the past. I never look at it without living again in the veritable atmosphere and colour and emotions of the long-vanished days.
Being a bachelor, my few affairs which needed attention were speedily put in order. My requirements in regard to apparel for a voyage to the Cape I exactly knew, and supplied them in three or four hours. The railroad to Southampton had been opened some months, so I should be spared a long and tiresome journey by coach. By ten o’clock that night I was ready bag and baggage—a creditable performance in a man who for some years had been used[15] to a lounging, inactive life. I offered to take my servant, but he told me he was a bad sailor and afraid of the water, and was without curiosity to view foreign parts; so I paid and discharged him, not doubting that I should be able to manage very well without a man; and, leaving what property I could not carry with me in charge of my landlord, I next morning took my departure for Southampton.
I believe I did not in the least degree realise the nature of the queer adventure I had consented to embark on until I found myself in a wherry heading in the direction of a large schooner-yacht that lay a mile away out upon Southampton Water. She was the ‘Bride,’ the boatman told me, and the handsomest vessel of her kind that he knew.
‘A finer craft than the “Shark”?’ said I.
‘Whoy yes,’ he answered, ‘bigger by fourteen or fifteen ton, but Oi dunno about foiner. The “Shark” has the sweeter lines, Oi allow; but that there “Bride,”’ said he with a toss of his head in the direction of the yacht, sitting with his back upon her as he was, ‘has got the ocean-going qualities of a line-of-battle ship.’
‘Take a race between them,’ said I, ‘which would prove the better ship?’
‘Whoy, in loight airs the “Shark,” Oi daresay, ’ud creep ahead. In ratching, too, in small winds she’d go to wind’ard of t’other as though she was warping that way. But in anything loike a stiff breeze yonder “Bride” ’ud forereach upon and weather the “Shark” as easy as swallowing a pint o’ yale, or my name’s Noah, which it ain’t.’
‘The “Shark” has sailed?’
‘Oy, last week.’
‘Where bound to, d’ye know?’
‘Can’t say, Oi’m sure. Oi’ve heerd she was hired by an army gent, and that, wherever his cruise may carry him to, he ain’t going to be in a hurry to finish it.’
‘Does he sail alone? Or, perhaps, he takes his wife or children with him?’
‘Well,’ said the waterman, pausing on his oars a minute or so with a grin, whilst his damp oyster-like eyes met in a kind of squint on my face, ‘the night afore the “Shark” sailed Oi fell in with one of her crew, a chap named Bobby Watt; and on my asking him if this here military gent was a-going to make the voyage alone he shuts one oye and says “Jim,” he says, Jim being one of my names, not Noah, “Jim,” says he, “when soldiers go to sea,” says he, “do they take pairosols with ’em? and are bonnet boxes to be found ’mongst their luggage? Tell ye what it is, Jim,” he says, “they can call yachting an innocent divarsion, but bet your life, Jim,” says he, “’taint all as moral as it looks!” by which Oi understood,’ said the waterman, falling to his oars again, ‘that the military gent hain’t sailed alone in the “Shark,” nor took his wife with him neither, if so be he’s a wedded man.’
[16]
We were now rapidly approaching the ‘Bride,’ and as there was little to be learnt from the waterman, I ceased to question him, whilst I inspected the yacht as a fabric that was to make me a home for I knew not how long. Then it was, perhaps, that the full perception of my undertaking and of my cousin’s undertaking, too, for the matter of that, broke in upon me with the picture of the fine vessel straining lightly at her cable, whilst past her ran the liquid slope into airy distance, where, in the delicate blue blending of azure radiance floating down and mingling with the dim cerulean light lifting off the face of the quiet waters, you witnessed a faint vision of dashes of pale green and gleaming foreshore, with blobs and films of land beyond, swimming, as it seemed, in the autumn haze and distorted by refraction. It was the Isle of Wight, and the shore on either hand went yawning to it till it looked a day’s sail away; and I suppose it was the sense of distance that came to me with the scene of the horizon past the yacht, touched with hues illusive enough to look remote, that rendered realisation of Wilfrid’s wild programme sharp in me as I directed a critical gaze at the beautiful fabric we were nearing.
And beautiful she was—such a gallant toy as an impassioned sweetheart would love to present to the woman he adored. In those days the memory of the superb Baltimore clippers and of the moulded perfections of the schooners which traded to the Western Islands and to the Mediterranean for the season’s fruits, was still a vital inspiration among the shipwrights and yacht-builders of the country. I had never before seen the ‘Bride,’ but I had no sooner obtained a fair view of her, first broadside on, then sternwise, as my boatman made for the starboard gangway, than I fell in love with her. She had the beam and scantling of a revenue cutter, with high bulwarks, and an elliptical stern, and a bow with the sheer of a smack, but elegant beyond expression with its dominating flair at the catheads, where it fell sharpening to a knife-like cutwater, thence rounding amidships with just enough swell of the sides to delight a sailor’s eye.
The merest landsman must instantly have recognised in her the fabric and body of a sea-going craft of the true pattern. This was delightful to observe. The voyage might prove a long one, with many passages of storm in it, and the prospect of traversing the great oceans of the world; and one would naturally want to make sure in one’s floating home of every quality of staunchness and stability. A vessel, however, of over two hundred tons burthen in those times was no mean ship. Crafts of the ‘Bride’s’ dimensions were regularly trading as cargo and passenger boats to foreign parts; so that little in my day would have been made of any number of voyages round the world in such a structure as Sir Wilfrid’s yacht. It is different now. Our ideas have enlarged with the growth of the huge mail boat, and a voyage in a yacht driven by steam and of a burthen considerably in excess of many West Indiamen, which half a century ago were regarded as[17] fine large ships, is considered a performance remarkable enough to justify the publication of a book about it, no matter how destitute of interest and incident the trip may have proved. The fashion of the age favoured gilt, and forward and about her quarters and stern the ‘Bride’ floated upon the smooth waters all ablaze with the glory of the westering sun striking upon the embellishments of golden devices writhing to the shining form of the semi-nude beauty that, with arms clasped Madonna-wise, sought with an incomparable air of coyness to conceal the graces of her form under the powerful projecting spar of the bowsprit; whilst aft the giltwork, in scrolls, flowers, and the like, with a central wreath as a frame for the virgin-white letters of the yacht’s name, smote the satin surface under the counter with the sheen of a sunbeam. All this brightness and richness was increased by her sheathing of new copper that rose high upon the glossy bends, and sank with ruddy clearness under the water, where it flickered like a light there, preserving yet, even in its tremulous waning, something of the fair proportions of the submerged parts.
The bulwarks were so tall that it was not until I was close aboard I could distinguish signs of life on the yacht. I then spied a head over the rail aft watching me, and on a sudden there sprang up alongside of it a white parasol edged with black, and the gleam as it looked of a fair girlish face in the pearly twilight of the white shelter. Then, as I drew close, the man’s head uprose and I distinguished the odd physiognomy of my cousin under a large straw hat. He saluted me with a gloomy gesture of the hand, with something, moreover, in his posture to suggest that he was apprehensive of being observed by people aboard adjacent vessels, though I would not swear at this distance of time that there was anything lying nearer to us than half a mile. You would have thought some one of consequence had died on board, all was so quiet. I lifted my hat solemnly in response to Wilfrid’s melancholy flourish, as though I was visiting the craft to attend a funeral; the boat then sheered alongside, and, paying the waterman his charges, I stepped up the short ladder and jumped on deck.