Chapter Seven.
A South-Easterly Gale.
“Oh, Nell!” cried Bob to his sister the same evening, some time after dinner, which, through their explorations on the beach, was somewhat later than usual—“I do wonder what that mysterious ‘something’ is the Captain keeps promising us for ‘to-morrow.’ Can he be thinking of taking us for a trip on the sea in his yacht, or what?”
“I wonder,” was all Nellie could say in reply to her brother’s remark, echoing, so to speak, his own words—“I do wonder—what he is going to do, Bob?”
Their anxious curiosity, however, availed them naught; the old sailor keeping provokingly silent and being as mute as the Sphinx on the subject, in spite of their wistful looks and watchfulness.
Throughout the evening the Captain only opened his lips to say to Mrs Gilmour, with whom he was playing one of those post-prandial games of cribbage which it had been his wont to indulge in before the advent of Bob and Nellie on the scene to interrupt their regular routine, “Fifteen four and two for his heels,” or “I’ll take three for a flush, ma’am,” as the case might be. He only made use of such-like technical phraseology common to cribbage players, limiting his conversation to the game alone; without leaving a loophole for either of the impatient listeners in the comer, who were turning over picture-books and otherwise diverting themselves, equally silently, till bedtime, to get in a word edgeways.
It was positively exasperating to Bob; especially as, the moment the old sailor chanced to notice one or other of the children eyeing him more attentively than usual on his looking up from the cards before him, he would smile knowingly and nod his head in the most waggish fashion.
“I don’t think he means anything in particular at all,” said the restless Master Bob a little later on to Nellie again. “See how funny he looks! He’s only ‘taking a rise’ out of us, as he calls it.”
“No, Bob,” said Nellie, catching another quizzical look from the Captain just at that moment, “I don’t think that. I’m sure he means something from that way he winked at us. Besides, Bob, he promised, and you know that Captain Dresser never breaks his word!”
Presently the report of the nine o’clock gun rolled through the night air, its echoes reverberating fainter and fainter until lost in the distance to seaward.
“By Jove!” exclaimed the Captain, throwing his cards on the table and rising from his seat,—“It’s time for me to say good-night, or I shan’t get any beauty sleep!”
“It’s not so very late,” said Mrs Gilmour, rising and going towards the open window looking over the Common. “What a lovely night it is!”
“Aye,” replied the old sailor, following her, “the sky is bright and clear enough, certainly.”
“Yes, what myriads of stars are out! I can see the ‘milky way’ quite plain, can’t you, children?”
“Where, auntie?” asked Nellie behind her, while Bob stepped out on to the balcony the better to see. “I don’t see it.”
Mrs Gilmour showed them the forked pathway leading up from the south and east to the zenith, looking as if powdered with the dust of stars which ‘Charles’s wain,’ as country people term the constellation, had crushed in its lumbering progress through the heavens.
Away beyond this golden ‘wake’ of starlets the more majestic planets shone in stately grandeur; while the evening star twinkled in the immensity of space, still further away to the westwards.
“But the more you look at them, the further away they appear to go,” put in Nellie. “Though, strangely enough, they don’t seem to get any smaller.”
“Aye, aye,” acquiesced the Captain. “It is awful to think of the millions of miles they are separated from our globe, and that yet their light reaches us! Why, it is wonderful for us to reflect on this!”
“Hark! I hear a church bell ringing,” cried Bob suddenly at this point. “It sounds as if it came from the sea out yonder.”
“So it does, my boy,” answered the Captain; “but not from any church. It is the bell on the Spit buoy that you hear ringing away to the southward. It is a bad sign for to-morrow, denoting as it does a change of wind to a rainy quarter?”
“Oh dear!” exclaimed Bob, in such lugubrious tones that even Nellie laughed, although sharing his feelings about the prospect of a wet day, with the more than probable contingency of their being confined to the house. “What shall we do?”
“Cheer up, my lad, it may not be so bad after all,” cried the Captain heartily. “But, really, I must be going now; for, it is close on ten o’clock and I shall lose all my beauty sleep, as I said before. Where is young Dick?”
“Down in the kitchen with Sarah,” replied Mrs Gilmour to this question, ringing the bell as she spoke. “He’ll soon be ready if you insist on taking him away with you.”
“Humph!” ejaculated the other, “as he’s going to be my valet or factotum by the agreement we made to-day, I don’t think we’ll be able to tell whether we suit each other, ha-ha! if he remains in one house and I in another, eh?”
“Perhaps not,” said Mrs Gilmour, smiling in response with the chuckle he indulged in at the recollection of his old joke on his way home from the dockyard; and Dick entering the room at the same moment, with a broad grin on his face as if he knew what they were talking about, she added—“Sure, here he is to spake for himself! Are you ready to go home with the Captain, Dick?”
“Yes, mum,” answered the lad promptly. “Sarah told me as how the good gentleman allers went away sharp at nine o’clock, and so I comes up as the bell rung.”
“That’s right, sharp’s the word and quick’s the motion; so we’d better be off,” said the old sailor, taking his hat and stick which the housemaid, Sarah aforesaid, brought in from the hall. “Good-night, ma’am,—good-night, chickabiddies!”
“Good-night!” replied Mrs Gilmour, Nellie echoing her aunt’s adieu with a parting injunction of her own. “Pray be sure and bring back Dick to-morrow morning, Captain!”
“Perhaps, too, you’ll tell us then what you are going to do if we are good?” said Bob entreatingly, “though you would not to-night.”
“We’ll see how the cat jumps!” replied the Captain with his cheery chuckling laugh as he marched out of the hall and down the steps with Dick after him; their retreating footsteps gradually dying away until they rounded the corner of the parade, the last sound heard being that of the ferrule of the Captain’s malacca cane as it rang on the pavement, keeping time to the rhythm of his tread, and his voice repeating in the distance his quizzing rejoinder, “we’ll see how the cat jumps!”
The ‘cat’ evidently did not ‘jump’ properly the next day, or, if it jumped at all, it executed that movement most decidedly in the wrong direction; for, when morning broke, much to Bob and Miss Nell’s disgust, they found that a stormy south-easterly gale had set in, accompanied by smart showers of rain, which very unpleasant change in the aspect of the weather put all ideas of their going out entirely out of the question.
During the night, the wind, which had veered more to the eastwardly, rose considerably, drowning the clanging knell of the Spit buoy bell and rattling the windows and doors, like some desperate burglar on thoughts of plunder bent trying to effect a forcible entry.
Not satisfied with this alone, ‘Rude Boreas’ sent one of his imps down the chimney to frighten poor Nellie, who lay trembling in bed, by flapping up and down the register of the grate; while another would every now and then boldly rush up and grip hold of the house, shaking it viciously and causing it to rock from roof to basement—the rebuffed rascal then sailing away with a shriek of disappointed spite and rage, moaning and groaning like a creature in pain as it went off to vent its malice elsewhere!
Ere long the sea, unable to keep its temper under the bad treatment it received from the wind, which blew in its face most insultingly and kept continually ‘pitting and patting it,’ baker-man fashion, in a very aggravating way, began to boil up in anger, lashing itself into a passion and roaring with fury; while the noise Neptune made by and by deadened the roar of his assailant as he flung himself aloft in his struggles to grapple his nimble foe, and, missing his aim, rolled onward his boiling waves until they broke on the beach with the shock of an earthquake, amid a hurricane of foam!
The awesome sound of wave and sea combined kept Bob awake nearly all night, the same as it did poor Nellie; the noise being so strange to their London ears, although, in some respects, somewhat similar to that of the street traffic of the metropolis.
Not only did it keep him awake, but the battle of the elements made Master Bob get up much earlier than usual; for he came down to the drawing-room before Sarah had time to finish dusting the furniture.
Here he was soon afterwards joined by Nellie, who was equally ‘spry’ in her movements; and the pair amused themselves till breakfast was ready in looking out of the windows at the busy scene which the offing presented, so different to that of the previous evening, when all was quiet and calm, with Neptune gone to sleep and Boreas speaking but in a whisper!
The whilom glassy surface of the deep was now, however, a mass of short choppy waves, the sea king’s ‘white horses’ leaping up friskily in every direction and chasing each other as they rolled in landward, throwing aloft clouds of feathery spray in their sport, as if champing it from their bits. Such was the scene far as the eye could span away to the eastward, where the sky was lit up by a stray gleam or two from the long-since risen sun, who, though trying to hide himself behind a bank of blue-black clouds, was not quite able to conceal his whereabouts.
Out at sea opposite, facing south and almost on the horizon line, a lot of vessels could be seen scudding down Channel, under short canvas but outward bound, just coming in sight beyond Saint Helen’s to make sure of their landfall and then disappearing the next moment behind the Isle of Wight, which shut them out from view; while, to the left, snugly sheltered under the lee of the Ryde hills, several others had run in and anchored off the Motherbank, waiting for a change of wind before proceeding on their voyage up, along the coast, to the river—‘the river’ of the world, the Thames!
As Bob and Nellie gazed out, taking in all these varied details of the scene by degrees, they could not help being pleased, everything was so novel; but, they saw something else beyond the prospect which cast ‘a damper’ over their spirits, theoretically as well as practically.
This was the rain, which came in squalls, the smart showers hurtling down in pattering intensity, momentarily shutting out the sea and its surroundings from sight; while the swollen raindrops dashed against the window-panes like hail, trying, like the whirling storm-blast, to force a passage into every nook and cranny that lay open to attack.
“Oh dear!” sighed Bob dismally, his nose pressed like a piece of putty against the glass. “It’s awful rain, Nell; I don’t think it will ever stop!”
“Oh dear!” sighed Nellie, in responsive echo; but, just then their aunt bustled into the room, her face the picture of good-humour, in marked contrast to theirs, and she caught the mournful exclamation—“Oh dear!”
“Why, what’s the matter?” asked Mrs Gilmour, in a cheerful tone, on their turning round as she entered. “To look at you both, one would think that something dreadful had happened!”
“It’s raining,” said Bob, in a melancholy tone. “It’s raining, auntie!”
“So I can see,” retorted Mrs Gilmour. “Haven’t I got eyes of my own, sure, me dear?”
“But we shan’t be able to go out, auntie,” cried Nellie, in the most broken-hearted way. “We shan’t be able to go out!”
“You need not be so disconsolate about that, dearie,” said the other smiling. “It may not rain all day; and, if so, you’ll be able to get out between the breaks when it holds up. But, there’s Sarah ringing the bell, so, children, let us go downstairs now to the parlour; perhaps by the time we have finished breakfast it will have cleared up and be quite fine.”
These cheery words, combined possibly with a savoury odour of frizzled bacon and hot coffee that came up appetisingly from below, had the effect, for a while at least, of banishing Bob and Nellie’s gloom, and without further ado they accompanied their aunt to the breakfast-room downstairs.
Here, stretched on the hearthrug before the grate, in which a bright cosy little fire was blazing and looking uncommonly cheery, although it was now summer, lay Rover.
Without rising, he lazily greeted them by flopping his heavy tail, albeit he lifted his nose in the air and sniffed, as if in anticipation of sharing the coming meal with the welcome guests who so opportunely appeared.
“Well, I declare!” cried Mrs Gilmour, “I hope you make yourself at home, sir?”
Rover only flopped his tail the more furiously at this, his appealing brown eyes saying, as plainly as dog could speak, that he was hungry, and that if she meant to be kind he would prefer actions to words.
After breakfast, as the rain still continued, Bob got grumpy again and Nellie mopey from not being able to go out on the beach as both longed to do.
In this emergency, their aunt suggested that the unhappy children should occupy themselves in sorting and arranging in an old album, which she gave them, some of the best bits of seaweed they had collected the previous afternoon, the good lady advising them first to soak the specimens in a bowl of fresh-water, so as to get rid of the salt and sand and other impurities, besides enabling the specimens to be laid flatter in the book for subsequent pressing.
By this means, the time passed so pleasantly that Master Bob and Miss Nell were much surprised when Mrs Gilmour, who had meanwhile been busying herself about household matters, came to tell them, anon, that they must clear their things off the parlour-table on account of Sarah wanting to lay luncheon.
“Why, auntie,” cried Bob, looking up from the basin in which he was busy washing the last lot of seaweed, “we’ve hardly begun yet!”
“You’ve been a long time beginning then, sir,” replied Mrs Gilmour. “Do you know that it is past one o’clock; so that you’ve been more than three hours at your task? See, too, my dears, the rain has cleared off, and it looks as if it were going to be fine for a bit.”
“How nice, aunt Polly!” said Nellie, the neat-handed, carefully lifting up the album out of Sarah’s way so that she might spread the cloth. “I declare I never thought once of looking out of the window to see if it were still wet. Did you, Bob?”
“No,” he answered, “I was too busy helping you, Nell.”
“Ah, my dearies,” interposed Mrs Gilmour, taking advantage of the opportunity to point a moral, “you see what it is not to be idle and having something to do! If you had not both been so engrossed with your task, you, Master Bob, would have been ‘Oh-ing’ all over the house and going to each window in turn to see if the rain had stopped, looking like a bear with a sore head; while you, Miss Nell, would probably have shed as many tears as would have floated a jolly-boat, as Captain Dresser would say in his sailor language!”
“Oh, auntie!” exclaimed Bob impetuously, “I never say ‘Oh’ like that, do I?”
“Sure you’ve answered the question yourself!” replied Mrs Gilmour, speaking in her racy brogue. “That’s just what I should have had to listen to all the morning but for my thinking of that album, which I’m glad has amused you both, my dears, so well. Ah, children, children, there’s nothing like having something to do. I’ll tell you something one of the poets, Cowper I think, has written about this in his homely verse:—
“‘An idler is a watch that wants both hands;
As useless as it goes as when it stands!’
“What d’you think of that, me dears, for an illustration of a person without occupation for mind or body—does the cap fit anybody here, eh?”
Bob was silent; but Nellie took the lesson to heart.
“Yes, auntie, I know it’s true enough,” she replied. “I like those lines; papa taught them to me when I was a tiny little girl. I wonder if he learnt them first from you?”
“No, dearie,” said Mrs Gilmour, drawing her towards her with an affectionate caress. “Our father, your grandpapa that was, taught that little verse to us years ago, when your papa and I were of the same age as Bob and yourself; and I have never forgotten them, as you see, dearie. But, sit down now and have your luncheon. Bob, come to the table; Bob! What on earth are you staring so out of the window now for, I wonder? Bob, I say!”
This repetition of his name in a louder key made the delinquent jump; and he turned round in a hurry.