The Last Entry. William Clark Russell
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take any friends with you?'
'Not even a dog,' answered Mr. Vanderholt.
'Then it will be dull!' exclaimed his daughter. 'Nothing but sea and sky and novels. Why not ask Mr. Allan Kinnaird? He is a very amusing man.'
'I do not agree with you. Kinnaird is amusing for about half an hour. Kinnaird and I never could get on at sea, locked up together as we should be. He is always objecting to what I say, and he listens to my jokes merely with the intention of enlarging upon their points so as to defraud me of the laugh.'
'Will you carry a doctor?'
'I have thought over that. No; we will ship a medicine chest instead, and a book treating of every disease under the sun. We do not go to sea to be ill. A doctor will be in the way. He will be neither with us nor of us. He might begin to bore you with his attentions, and you would only think of him as a man who believes that he is under an obligation to be agreeable.'
'But the Mowbray has not been afloat for two or three years,' said Miss Vanderholt.
'She has been well looked after. I have always liked the boat, and would not sell her, though I have not used her of late,' said Mr. Vanderholt, leaning back in his chair to contemplate to advantage the beautiful picture over the sideboard. 'She is French built, and about twenty years old. The French are better ship-builders than the English—infinitely more choice in their lines and curves, and so scientific that you seldom hear of a disaster in their experiments. Look at that vessel as she rushes at you. How perfect is her entry! How insinuating the swell of her bow, running into a beautiful roundness and plumpness of sides instead of the up-and-down walls which the British yachtsman, who loves to admire his yacht from the shore, conceives to be the one element which gives a vessel stability! The more they narrow, the more they blunder. You must have stability if you want seaworthiness. And in all the years that I was at sea I never knew a crank ship a fast ship.'
It was easily seen by the expression of Miss Vanderholt's face that she was thinking of George. Finding her father had ceased to speak, she exclaimed:
'Who will be the captain?'
'I shall ask my friend Fairbanks to recommend a man to me. He, of all the shipowners that I am acquainted with, is certain to know of a good man.'
'Will he belong to the Royal Navy?'
'No.'
'Then, he will not be a gentleman?'
Vanderholt looked at her intently. His face relaxed. He combed down his beard, and said:
'He will be a sailor; and if he is a sailor, he will be a man. Combine these two things, and you produce an illustration of human existence beyond the achievement of the most illustrious lineage and the most ancient college.'
Miss Vanderholt was used to her father's views, and continued her breakfast with a distant, listening air, which promised no further expression of opinion upon this proposed voyage to the Equator. A stranger listening at that table to Vanderholt would have guessed that he was a man of hot temper, a Dutchman at root in his views and prejudices, not a man, perhaps, of many friends, spite of his wealth. He fixed his little eyes upon his daughter, and, after gazing at her for some time, with a look of anxiety, he said:
'You know, Vi, I should not care to go without you.'
'No, father; nor should I wish to be left alone at home.'
'You will be happy in the old Mowbray. We will lay in a stock of good things. We will make a fine holiday jaunt of it. Perhaps I shall be able to show you some of the wonders of the deep. We will teach our crew to sing litanies to break the spell of that demon the waterspout. We will hook on to a whale, and thunder through it with foam to the figure-head, with the velocity of the meteoric storm. We shall be at liberty to shift our course as often as we please, and settle some marine problem for good and all; not the sea-serpent—no. Who would defraud the newspapers of that joke? But I am strongly of opinion that there is a distinct difference between the dugong and the mermaid. The old idiots of the fifteenth century no doubt confounded them; and the mermaid, shocked by the hideous misrepresentation—for think of comparing some golden-haired angel of an English girl with a New Zealand native woman, frightful with the hues of her sky, and horrible with devices of the needle!—I say the disgusted mermaid may have sunk into the ooze, resolved never again to give man a sight of her face. Best of all, Vi, the voyage will do me good, will do you good, and delightfully shorten the time of your waiting for George.'
'It is the only feeling I have in the matter,' answered the young lady.
And now, having breakfasted, they arose and quitted the table.
Miss Violet Vanderholt, being acquainted with her father's character, and knowing that he rarely changed his mind, went to her room, where in peace she occupied a full hour in writing a long letter to George.
And who was George? One had but to peep over the girl's shoulder to discover. 'My own darling George,' she began; and this sort of thing is commonly accepted as the language of love. Captain George Parry was an officer in the Honourable East India Company's service. When he was last at home he had met Miss Violet, haunted her closely, and exhibited himself in a variety of ways as deeply in love with her. Wonderful to relate, Mr. Montagu Vanderholt took a fancy to the young man, and when Ensign Parry called to ask his leave to consider himself engaged, he was astounded by the cheerful 'Certainly, with pleasure, if you are both satisfied,' which greeted him. A few questions and answers followed. Mr. Vanderholt knew very little about the army, though he had two sons in it. How long would Ensign Parry have to wait for his promotion? How long was the engagement going to last? For his part, he did not like long engagements: they made people ill. Many girls were hurried to their graves by procrastination—that thief of sleep, the ice-cold 'lubbar fiend' that bestrides women's hearts and keeps them shivering.
The interview terminated to the satisfaction of both gentlemen. In due time, Ensign Parry returned to India, and now, as Captain Parry, he was expected home in June; but in one or two of his letters to Violet he had expressed a hope that he would be able to get home by an earlier date. It had been settled that they should be married soon after his arrival in England. And this was the posture of affairs as regarded Captain Parry and Miss Vanderholt. The young lady, seating herself, dipped her pen and wrote.
She wrote fast, and often with a flushed cheek when she underlined, or doubly underlined, a word or a sentence. Her letter consisted mainly of endearing expressions, such as, when read aloud in court after a couple have quarrelled, excite merriment. She informed her sweetheart in this letter that her father had made up his mind to go on a cruise for his health as far as the Equator, in the old Mowbray. She was going with him alone. George would know where she was, therefore, until her return to England, which could not be delayed beyond February. She dared not hope that George would arrive before the Mowbray reached England. If this should happen, then he might, perhaps, never receive this very letter which she was writing. To provide against this, she said that before she sailed she would write a second letter, and leave it with the housekeeper.
On the afternoon of this same day Mr. Vanderholt entered his carriage and drove into the City. He alighted at the offices of a firm of shipowners in Fenchurch Street, and was immediately confronted by the very person he had called to see. They shook hands.
'I want ten minutes with you, Fairbanks.'
'As long as you please, Mr. Vanderholt. Always happy to be of service to you.'
It was plain that Mr. Vanderholt was not a skipper or a mate in search of a situation on board one of the ships owned by this firm. They walked through an office full of scribbling clerks; the walls were decorated with pictures of ships in full sail, and odd configurations on glazed yellow cloth, signifying cabin accommodation—first, second, and 'tween decks. They reached a small back-room, and when Mr. Fairbanks closed the door they were private.
Mr. Vanderholt was rendered a little uneasy by Mr. Fairbanks' look of expectation, and began somewhat in a hurry, lest his friend's anticipation should grow.
'It is a very trifling matter I have called to see