The _Vesta_ isn"t a Cunard Liner. Not even a pa.s.senger boat. No luxuries. I hope you understand."
"Hilary has been telling me just what I"m to expect," said Liosha.
"We"ll do our best for you, ma"am," said Captain Maturin; "but you mustn"t expect too much. I suppose you know you"ll have to sign on as one of the crew?"
"And if you disobey orders," said I, "the Captain can tie you up to the binnacle, and give you forty lashes and put you in irons."
"I guess I"ll be obedient, Captain," said Liosha, proud of her incredulity.
"I don"t allow my ship"s company to bring many trunks and portmanteaux aboard," smiled Captain Maturin.
"I"ll see to the dunnage," said Jaffery.
"The _what_?" I asked.
"It"s only pa.s.sengers that have luggage. Sailor folk like Liosha and me have dunnage."
"I see," said I. "And you bring it on board in a bundle together with a parrot in a cage."
Earnest persuasion being of no avail, I must have recourse to light mockery. But it met with little response. "And what," I asked, "is to become of the forty-odd _colis_ that we pa.s.sed through the customs this morning?"
"You can take "em home with you," said Jaffery. He grinned over his third foaming beaker of dark beer. "Isn"t it a blessing I brought him along? I told him he"d come in useful."
"But, good Lord!" I protested, aghast, "what excuse can I, a lone man, give to the Southampton customs for the possession of all this baggage?
They"ll think I"ve murdered my wife on the voyage and I shall be arrested. No. There is the parcel post. There are agencies of expedition. We can forward the luggage by _grande vitesse_ or _pet.i.te vitesse_--how long are you likely to be away on this Theophile Gautier voyage--"_Cueillir la fleur de neige. Ou la fleur d"Angsoka_"?"
"Four months," said Captain Maturin.
"Then if I send them by the Great Swiftness, they"ll arrive just in time."
I love my friends and perform altruistic feats of astonishing difficulty; but I draw the line at being personally involved in a nightmare of curved-top trunks and green canvas hat-containing crates belonging to a woman who is not my wife.
There followed a conversation on what seemed to me fantastic, but to the others practical details, in which I had no share. A suit of oilskins and sea-boots for Liosha formed the subject of much complicated argument, at the end of which Captain Maturin undertook to procure them from marine stores this peaceful Sunday night. Liosha, aglow with excitement and looking exceedingly beautiful, also mentioned her need of thick jersey and woollen cap and stout boots not quite so tempest-defying as the others; and these, too, the foolish and apparently infatuated mariner promised to provide. We drifted mechanically, still talking, into the interior of the Cafe-Restaurant, where we sat down to a dinner which I ordered to please myself, for not one of the others took the slightest interest in it. Jaffery, like a schoolboy son of Gargamelle, shovelled food into his mouth--it might have been tripe, or bullock"s heart or chitterlings for all he knew or cared. His jolly laugh served as a ba.s.s for the more treble buzz and clatter of the pleasant place. I have never seen a man exude such plentiful happiness. Liosha ate unthinkingly, her elbows on the table, after the manner of Albania, her hat not straight--I whispered the information as (through force of training) I should have whispered it to Barbara, with no other result than an impatient push which rendered it more piquantly crooked than ever. Captain Maturin went through the performance with the grave face of another cla.s.sical devotee to duty; but his heart--poor fellow!--was not in his food. It was partly in Pinner, partly in his antediluvian tramp, and partly in the prospect of having as cook"s mate during his voyage the superbly vital young woman of the stone-age, now accidentally tricked out in twentieth century finery, who was sitting next to him.
Captain Maturin took an early leave. He had various things to do before turning in--including, I suppose, the purchase of his cook"s mate"s outfit--and he was to sail at five-thirty in the morning. If his new deck-hand and cook"s mate would come alongside at five or thereabouts, he would see to their adequate reception.
"You wouldn"t like to ship along with me, too, Mr. Freeth?" said he, with a grip like--like any horrible thing that is hard and iron and clamping in a steamer"s machinery--and athwart his green-grey eyes filled with wind and sea pa.s.sed a gleam of humour--"There"s still time."
"I would come with pleasure," said I, "were it not for the fact that all my spare moments are devoted to the translation of a Persian poet."
If I am not urbane, I am nothing.
He went. Liosha bade me good-bye. She must retire early. The rearrangement of her luggage--"dunnage," I corrected--would be a lengthy process. She thanked me, in her best Considine manner, for all the trouble I had taken on her account, sent her love to Barbara and to Susan, whose sickness, she trusted, would be transitory, expressed the hope that the care of her belongings would not be too great a strain upon my household--and then, like a flash of lightning, in the very middle of the humming restaurant filled with all the notabilities and respectabilities of Havre, she flung her generous arms around my neck in a great hug, and kissed me, and said: "Dear old Hilary, I do love you!"
and marched away magnificently through the staring tables to the inner recesses of the hotel.
Puzzledom reigned in Havre that night. English people are credited in France with any form of eccentricity, so long as it conforms with traditions of _le flegme britannique_; but there was not much _flegme_ about Liosha"s embrace, and so the good Havrais were mystified.
There was no following Liosha. She had made her exit. To have run after her were an artistic crime; and in real life we are more instinctively artistic and dramatic than the unthinking might suppose. Besides, there was the bill to pay. We sat down again.
"That little chap never seems to have any luck," said Jaffery. "He"s one of the finest seamen afloat, with a nerve of steel and a d.a.m.nable way of getting himself obeyed. He ought to be in command of a great liner instead of a rotten old tramp of fifteen hundred tons."
I beamed. "I"m glad you call it a rotten old tramp. I described it in those terms to Liosha."
"Oh!" said Jaffery. "Precious lot you know about it." He yawned cavernously. "I"ll be turning in soon, myself."
It was not yet ten o"clock. "And what shall I do?" I asked.
"Better turn in, too, if you want to see us off."
"My dear Jaff," said I, "you have always bewildered me, and when I contemplate this new caprice I am beyond the phenomenon of bewilderment.
But in one respect my mind retains its serene equipoise. Nothing short of an Act of G.o.d shall drag me from my bed at half-past four in the morning."
"I wanted to give you a few last instructions."
"Give them to me now," said I.
He handed me the key of his chambers. "If you wouldn"t mind tidying up, some day--I left my papers in a deuce of a mess."
"All right," said I.
"And I had better give you a power of attorney, in case anything should crop up."
He called for writing materials, and scribbled and signed the doc.u.ment, which I put into my letter case.
"And what about letters?"
"Don"t want any. Unless"--said he, after a little pause, frowning in the plenitude of his content--"if you and Barbara can make things right again with Doria--then one of you might drop me a line. I"ll send you a schedule of dates."
"Still harping on my daughter?" said I.
"You may think it devilish funny," he replied; "but for me there"s only one woman in the world."
"Let us have a final drink," said I.
We drank, chatted a while, and went to bed.
When I awoke the next morning the _Vesta_ was already four hours on her way to Madagascar.
CHAPTER XX
I have one failing. Even I, Hilary Freeth, of Northlands in the County of Berkshire, Esquire, Gent, have one failing, and I freely confess it.
I cannot keep a key. Were I as other men are--which, thank Heaven, I am not--I might wear a pound or so of hideous ironmongery chained to my person. This I decline to do, with the result that, as I say, I cannot keep a key. Of all the household stowaway places under my control (and Barbara limits their number) only one is locked; and that drawer containing I know not what treasures or rubbish is likely to continue so forever and ever--for the key is lost. Such important doc.u.ments as I desire to place in security I send to bankers or solicitors, who are trained from childhood in the expert use of safes and strong-boxes. My other papers the world can read if it choose to waste its time; at any rate, I am not going to lock them up and have the worry of a key preying on my mind. I should only lose it as I lost the other one. Now, by a freak of fortune, the key of Jaffery"s flat remained in the suit-case wherein I had flung it at Havre, until it was fished out by Franklin on my arrival at Northlands.
"For goodness" sake, my dear," said I to Barbara, "take charge of this thing."