"You are right there, Dot," broke in a deep voice, as a stout, red-faced old man in the uniform of a captain in the navy came strolling out upon the beach from behind a clump of rocks.
"Captain Venour!" exclaimed the young officer, starting back in dismay.
"Oh, grandfather, you have been listening! How shocking!" cried Dorothy.
"Listening!" snorted the old man, contemptuously, with a nice mixture of metaphors; "why, this young calf here has been roaring out his love like the bulls of Bashan."
"Sir--sir!" exclaimed Maurice, flushing painfully, "I love your granddaughter----"
"Stale news, lad. Everybody within half a mile of this knows it now,"
said the old man. "Why, the smack of your----"
"Grandfather!" interrupted Dorothy, promptly, emulating her lover"s blush.
"And I want to marry her, sir, with your permission."
"Marry her!" shouted Captain Venour. "On the pay of a midshipman! You young----"
"I"m a pa.s.sed midshipman now, sir," interrupted Maurice, "and I"m sure to be a lieutenant when I come back from this cruise to the West Indies,--and she says she loves me and that she will wait; didn"t you, Dot?"
"Miss Venour, sir!" roared the old man, "in my presence! Did you make any foolish promises to this young man, Dorothy?"
"I--ye--es, sir; I said I--I"d--I"d wait," answered Dorothy, reluctantly.
"Yes? Well, you will; you"ll wait until he gets to be a captain. A man isn"t fit to be married until he has had command of a ship and three or four hundred men; he doesn"t know how to manage a wife. Look at me!
I married when I was a midshipman and--and--I know."
"But, sir, it will be fifteen years before I am a captain! Why, you weren"t a captain yourself until you were forty, and I can never hope to equal your record."
"No more you won"t," said the old man, somewhat mollified by the adroit compliment.
"Oh, grandfather, not forty years! We couldn"t wait until then! Why, I"m only seventeen now, sir, and James--Mr. Maurice--is only nineteen.
Please, sir----"
Dorothy dropped on her knees on the sand before him, and at a motion of her hand Maurice did likewise.
"Get up, get up, you young fools!" said the old man; "suppose some one should see us!"
"No, sir," said Dorothy, grasping the skirts of his coat tightly; "not until you modify your terms. You know he loves me, and--and--and I am so sorry for him," she added, ingenuously.
"Well," said the captain, to whom Dorothy was as the apple of his eye, "I"ll knock off a little. He can marry you when he has command of a ship. If he is lucky, he might be made a lieutenant-commandant in five years. Now, up with you!"
The young people struggled to their feet and looked sadly at each other.
"Five years!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed the midshipman, mournfully.
"It"s better than twenty, Jim," said Dorothy, cheerfully. "Can"t you wait?"
"Wait! I will wait forever, Dot, I love you so----"
"Waugh!" roared the old captain, "are you going on with these proceedings before my very eyes, at my age? It"s indecent! There," he added, turning his back to them and walking away a few steps, at the same time pulling an old silver watch from his pocket, "I"ll give you just five minutes; and take my advice, youngster, when you cut out a prize under convoy of a ship-of-the-line, don"t make so much noise about it."
"I"ll get a command inside of a year, Dot darling, or die in trying,"
whispered the young man.
"I would rather have you alive without a command than dead with one, Jim," remarked Dorothy through her tears as the old captain came back toward them.
"Now, I take it, you have just about time to make the harbor around yonder point where your ship is waiting for you," he said. "You"ve said your good-bys, and you"ve got your answer, so you"d better up anchor and make a run for it. I"ll take care Dot keeps her word, and mind you keep yours! Good-by and good luck to you. If you are half as impudent in the face of the enemy as you have been to me here, you will get the ship in a week."
The young midshipman clasped the proffered hand of the retired old sea-captain, wrung it warmly, looked longingly at Dorothy dissolved in tears on her grandfather"s shoulder, and then turned and made his way slowly down the beach toward the town and the harbor.
II.--THE UNDERTAKING
H. B. M."s ship-of-the-line _Centaur_, 74, Captain Murray Maxwell, flying the broad pennant of Commodore Samuel Hood, was cruising to and fro off the island of Martinique, in front of Fort Royal Bay, to blockade the port and capture in- and out-bound vessels. One afternoon in the month of January, 1804, the commodore and the captain were standing at the break of the p.o.o.p discussing a problem. They had just been in chase of a fast-sailing French frigate, which had escaped them by boldly running under the lee of Diamond Rock, whither, through ignorance of the channel and want of pilots, they dared not follow.
The thing had happened half a dozen times in the past month, and the commodore naturally was exasperated.
The rock itself was a huge ma.s.s of naked stone, about a mile in circ.u.mference at the base, and towering out of the water to a height of some six hundred feet, in shape resembling a rounded haystack. On the southward side the rock, sloping precipitously down to the water"s edge, was absolutely unscalable. The east and southwestern sides were so broken as to be equally inaccessible, and the breakers, smashing with tremendous force on the western end, made landing difficult or impossible. The officer of the watch that afternoon, who happened to be our quondam midshipman, James Wilkes Maurice, who had, by a series of fortunate accidents and some gallantry as well, been appointed a lieutenant a month since, could not help overhearing the conversation.
"It"s too bad!" said the commodore. "The scoundrels get under the lee of that rock every time and make a harbor, and I don"t see how we can prevent it unless we get a battery of heavy guns up on the rock; but there appears to be no way up."
"If you please, sir," said Maurice, turning about and saluting in great trepidation, for the junior lieutenant was a very small man indeed beside the commodore, "there is a way up, sir. When I was a reefer on the _Cerberus_ she was cruising around here, and one calm day a party of us received permission to go ash.o.r.e on that pile of stone, and we managed to reach the top."
"Oho!" exclaimed the commodore, his eyes brightening. "And could you take a gun up?"
"Not the way we went, sir."
"Well, then, I am afraid your experience will not be of service."
"But, sir, if I might make so bold, sir----" continued the junior lieutenant, hesitatingly.
"Heave ahead! Out with it!" said the commodore.
"In calm weather, sir, there is no surf on that point, and it would be quite possible, I should think, to take the _Centaur_ in close to the sh.o.r.e, and then with a hawser and a traveller from the main-topmast head we might make shift to land some guns."
"Capital!" exclaimed the commodore. "What do you think of it, Maxwell?"
"It is for you to say, sir," replied the cautious captain. "The weather is fine enough to-day, and we might try it. It will be risking His Majesty"s ship, though, sir," he remarked, gravely.
"Fetch me a gla.s.s," said Sir Samuel, turning to the midshipman of the watch. When it was brought to him he took a long look at the base of the cliff, observing a little stretch of sandy beach, upon which the breakers usually tumbled with tremendous fury. This morning, fortunately, it seemed calm.
"I will answer, sir, that there is deep water under the cliff,"
ventured Maurice at this moment.
"Will you answer for the flag-ship, too, sir?" asked the commodore, keenly.
"No, sir, I----"
"I shall have to answer for that myself," he continued. "We"ll try it, Captain Maxwell; the wind"s off sh.o.r.e, the sea smooth as a mill-pond.