At the cheery whizzing of champagne corks old Doctor Thorne aroused himself from a comfortable siesta he had been enjoying in the bows, and came aft. The sight of Linda’s husband, a tumbler of Moet in his hand, his puggareed hat pushed back from his sun-shrivelled Indian visage, brought back the thought of Linda Thorne to the general mind.
‘Mrs. Thorne! Shall Mrs. Thorne not have champagne sent to her?’ cried Gaston, who was reclining, a picture of virtuous contentment, beside his wife. ‘Or, better still, now that we have a smooth deck, Doctor, shall Mrs. Thorne not come up into the light of day?’
The old Doctor shook his head as he accepted a goodly plate of lobster salad from the steward’s boy.
‘Poor girl! My poor dear Lin! A typically severe case of mal de mer always. Stop a bit—no hurry—just give me a trifle more of the dressing. I have collected a mass of data about sea-sick persons,’ observed the Doctor, draining down his champagne, with relish, ‘and I am wholly against any attempt at nourishing them. Quite a mistake to administer stimulants. (Thank you, Lord Rex, you may give me another quarter of a tumbler of your excellent Moet.) A mistake to imagine persons as sea-sick as my poor wife can digest anything.’
‘I think you are disgracefully heartless, Doctor,’ cried Rosie Verschoyle, in her thin, gay accents. ‘Mrs. Thorne and dear mamma must require wine much more than all we well people. I declare it is positively shameful to think how we have been enjoying the voyage while they were in misery. Now, who will help me carry something to our poor martyrs below?’
‘Who,’ of course, meant Lord Rex Basire. Following the airy flutter of Rosie Verschoyle’s dress, Lord Rex dutifully assisted in conveying biscuits, champagne, and sympathetic messages to the martyrs—as far as the cabin door. Though the deck was smooth, Linda showed coyness as to returning thither. Her belief in human nature, especially in Gaston Arbuthnot’s human nature, was, I fear, frailish. The livid cheeks, pale lips, and sunken eyes of recent sea-sickness were tests to which Linda, under no conditions, would have dreamt of exposing a sentimental friendship!
‘Mrs. Thorne is quite too good—the dearest, most unselfish creature living!’ Rosie Verschoyle announced these little facts before all hearers, on her return to upper air. ‘Doctor Thorne, I hope you are listening to my praises of your wife. Mrs. Thorne is not ill, not very ill herself, but she will not leave my poor frightened mother for a moment. I call that real, quiet heroism. In glorious weather like this to remain shut up in the cabin of a steamer for another person’s sake!’
‘Our good Smeet! She knows so well to efface herself.’
There was a twinkle in Gaston Arbuthnot’s shrewd eyes. Possibly, as Rosie Verschoyle spoke, the words of Madame Benjamin’s eulogy came back to him.
A league or two beyond Barfleur a French pilot was signalled for, the pilotage from the Point to Langrune being tortuous and difficult. Does the reader know the fairness of that little-visited strip of Norman coast? Fairness at its zenith, perhaps, in April, when the orchards bordering the shore are heavy with white pear, or rose-pink apple bloom; when the black-thorn blossoms so lavishly that, if the wind be south, you may distinguish whiffs of the wild, half-bitter aroma far out at sea. But exquisite, too, on a late June day like this, the yellow colza in full harvest, the barley-fields ready for the sickle, the Caen-stone spires and homesteads standing out in white relief against the level horizon-line of sky.