Read Ebook: A Marriage at Sea by Russell William Clark

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Ebook has 963 lines and 63590 words, and 20 pages

right, keeping her between us. I spoke to her in hasty sentences, forever praising her for her courage and thanking her for her love, and trying to hearten her; for now that the first desperate step had been taken, now that the wild risks of escape were ended, the spirit that had supported her failed; she could scarcely answer me; at moments she would direct looks over her shoulder; the mere figure of a tree would cause her to tighten her hold of my arm, and press against me as though starting.

"I feel so wicked--I feel that I ought to return--oh! how frightened I am;--how late it is!--what will mam'selle think?--How the girls will talk in the morning!"

I could coax no more than this sort of exclamations from her.

As we passed through the gate in the rampart wall and entered the Haute Ville, my captain broke the silence he had kept since we quitted the lane.

"How little do the folks who's sleeping in them houses know, Mr. Barclay, of what's a-passing under their noses. There ain't no sort of innocence like sleep."

He said this and yawned with a noise that resembled a shout.

"I am too frightened to thank you, Captain Caudel," she exclaimed. "I will thank you when I am calm. But shall I ever be calm? And ought I to thank you then?"

"Have no fear, miss. This here oneasiness 'll soon pass. I know the yarn--his honour spun it to me. What's been done, and what's yet to do is right and proper, and if it worn't--" his pause was more significant than had he proceeded.

Until we reached the harbour we did not encounter a living creature. I could never have imagined of the old town of Boulogne that its streets, late even as the hour was, would be so utterly deserted as we found them. I was satisfied with my judgment in not having ordered a carriage. The rattling of the wheels of a vehicle amid the vault-like stillness of those thoroughfares would have been heart-subduing to my mood of passionately nervous anxiety to get on board and away. I should have figured windows flung open and night-capped heads projected, and heard in imagination the clanking sabre of a gendarme trotting in our wake.

I did not breathe freely till the harbour lay before us. Caudel said as we crossed to where the flight of steps fell to the water's edge:

"I believe there's a little air of wind amoving."

"I feel it," I answered; "what's its quarter?"

"Seems to be off the land," said he.

"There is a man!" cried Grace, arresting me by a drag at my arm.

A figure stood at the head of the steps, and I believed it one of our men until a few strides brought us near enough to witness the gleam of uniform buttons, showing by the pale light of a lamp at a short distance from him.

"But if he should stop us, Herbert?" cried she, halting.

"Sooner than that should happen," rumbled Caudel, "I'd chuck him overboard. But why should he stop us, miss? We ain't smugglers."

"I would rather throw myself into the water than be taken back," exclaimed my sweetheart. I gently induced her to walk, whilst my captain advancing to the edge of the quay and looking down, sang out:

"Below there! Are ye awake?"

"Ay, wide awake," was the answer, floating up in hearty English accents from the cold, dark surface on which the boat lay.

She stood at the table looking about her, breathing fast, her eyes large with alarm, excitement, I know not what other sensations and emotions. I wish I knew how to praise her, how to describe her. "Sweet" is the best word to express her girlish beauty. Though she was three months short of eighteen years of age, she might readily have passed for twenty-one, so womanly was her figure, as though, indeed, she was of tropic breeding and had been reared under suns which quickly ripen a maiden's beauty. But to say more would be to say what? The liquid brown of her large and glowing eyes--the dark and delicate bronze of her rich abundant hair--the suggestion of a pout in the turn of her lip, that gave an incomparable air of archness to her expression when her countenance was in repose--to enumerate these things--to deliver a catalogue of her graces in the most felicitous language that love and the memory of love could dictate, is yet to leave all that I could wish to say unsaid.

"At last, Grace!" I exclaimed, lifting her hand to my lips. "How is it with you now, my pet?"

She seated herself, and hid her face in her hands upon the table, saying, "I don't know how I feel, Herbert. But I know how I ought to feel."

"Wait a little. You will regain your courage. You will find nothing wrong in all this presently. It was bound to happen. There was not the least occasion for this business of rope ladders and midnight sailings. It is Lady Amelia who forces this elopement upon us."

"What will she say?" she breathed through her fingers, still keeping her face hidden to conceal the crimson that had flushed her on a sudden and that was showing to the rim of her collar.

"I can't. I am ashamed. It is a most desperate act. What will mam'selle say--and your sailors?" she murmured from behind her hands.

"My sailors! Grace, shall I take you back whilst there is yet time?"

She flashed a look at me over her finger tips.

"Certainly not!" she exclaimed with emphasis, then hid her face again.

I seated myself by her side, but it took me five minutes to get her to look at me, and another five minutes to coax a smile from her. In this while the men were busy about the decks. I heard Caudel's growling lungs of leather delivering orders in a half-stifled hurricane note, but I did not know that we were under way until I put my head through the companion hatch, and saw the dusky fabrics of the piers on either side stealing almost insensibly past us. Now that the wide expanse of sky had opened over the land, I could witness a dimness, as of the shadowing of clouds, in the quarter of the sky against which stood the unfinished block of the cathedral. This caused me to reckon upon the wind freshening presently. As it now blew it was a very light air indeed, scarce with weight enough to steady the light cloths of the yacht. There was an unwieldy lump of a French smack slowly grinding her way up the harbour close in against the pier on the port side, and astern of us were the triangular lights of a paddle-wheeled steamer, bound to London, timed for the tide that was now high, and filling the quietude of the night with the noise of the swift beats of revolving wheels.

"Mind that steamer!" I called out to Caudel, who was at the helm.

"What is the weather to be, Caudel?" I called to him.

"We're going to get a breeze from the south'ard, sir," he answered; "nothing to harm, I dessay, if it don't draw westerly."

"What is your plan of sailing?"

"Can't do better, I think, sir, than stand over for the English coast, and so run down, keeping the ports conveniently aboard."

"Do you mark the noise of the surf?"

"Ay, sir, that's along of this here ground swell."

I had hardly till this moment noticed the movement to which he referred. The swell was long and light, setting in flowing rounds of shadow dead on to the Boulogne shore, too rhythmically gentle to take the attention.

I re-entered the cabin, and found my sweetheart with her elbows on the table and her cheeks resting in her hands. The blush had scarcely faded from her face when I had quitted her; now she was as white as a lily.

"Why do you leave me alone, Herbert?" she asked, turning her dark, liquid eyes upon me without shifting the posture of her head.

"My dearest, I wish to see our little ship clear of Boulogne harbour. We shall be getting a pleasant breeze presently, and it cannot blow too soon to please us. A brisk fair wind should land us at our destination in three days, and then--and then--" said I, sitting down and bringing her to me.

She laid her cheek on my shoulder but said nothing.

"Now," I exclaimed, "you are of course faint and wretched for the want of refreshments. What can I get you?" and I was about to give her a list of the wines and eatables I had laid in, but she languidly shook her head, as it rested on my shoulder, and faintly bade me not to speak of refreshments.

"I should like to lie down," she said.

"You are tired--worn out," I exclaimed, not yet seeing how it was with her; "yonder is your cabin. I believe you will find all you want in it. Unhappily we have no maid aboard to help you. But you will be able to manage, Grace--it is but for a day or two; and if you are not perfectly happy and comfortable, why, we will make for the nearest English port and finish the rest of the journey by rail. But our little yacht--"

"I must lie down," she interrupted; "this dreadful motion!--get me a pillow and a rug; I will lie on this sofa."

I could have heaped a hundred injurious names upon my head for not at once observing that the darling was suffering. I sprang from her side, hastily procured a pillow and rug, removed her hat, plunged afresh into her cabin for some Eau de Cologne and went to work to bathe her brow and to minister to her in other ways. To be afflicted with nausea in the most romantic passage of one's life! I had never thought of inquiring whether or not she was a "good sailor," as it is called, being much too sentimental, much, too much in love to be visited by misgivings or conjectures in a direction so horribly prosaic as this.

I thought to comfort her by saying that if her sufferings continued we would head direct for Dover or some adjacent harbour. But, somehow, my scheme of elopement having comprised a yachting trip, the programme of it had grown into a habit of thought with me. For weeks I had been looking forward to the trip with the impassioned eagerness of a lover, delighting my mind with the fancy of having my sweetheart all to myself in a sense that no excursion on shore could possibly parallel. On shore there would be the rude conditions of the railway, the cab, the hotel, and all the vulgarity of dispatch when in motion. But the yacht gave my heart's trick of idealising a chance. The quiet surface of sea--I was too much in love to think of a gale of wind; the glories of the sunset; the new moon; the hushed night; we two on deck; our impassioned whispers set to music by the brook-like murmurings of waters alongside; the silken fannings of phantom-like pinions of canvas; the subdued voices of the men forward... Yes! It was of these things I had thought; these were the engaging, the delightful fancies that had filled my brain.

Nor, in this candid narrative which, I trust, will carry its own apology for our audacious behaviour as it progresses, must I omit to give the chief reason for my choice of a yacht as a means of eloping with Grace. She was under twenty-one; her aunt, Lady Amelia Roscoe, was her guardian, and no clergyman would marry the girl to me without her aunt's consent. That consent must be wrested from the old lady, and the business of wresting manifestly implies a violent measure; and what then, as I somewhat boyishly concluded, could follow our lonely association at sea for three or four days, or perhaps a week, but her ladyship's sanction?

A man, in describing his own passion, and in depicturing himself making love, cannot but present a foolish figure. Unhappily, this story solely concerns my elopement with Grace Bellassys and what came of it, and, therefore, it is in the strictest sense a tale of love: a description of which sentiment, however, as it worked in me and my dearest girl, I will endeavour to trouble you as little as possible with.

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