The lady simply acknowledged Messrs. White's communication, and Seaton breathed again.
Wardlaw had made Miss Rolleston promise him faithfully to sail that month in his ship, the Shannon. Now she was a slave to her word and constant of purpose; so when she found she could not sail in the Shannon, she called again on Messrs. White, and took her passage in the Proserpine. The essential thing to her mind was to sail when she had promised, and to go in a ship that belonged to her lover.
The Proserpine was to sail in ten days.
Seaton inquired into the state of the Proserpine. She was a good, sound vessel, and there was no excuse for detaining her.
Then he wrestled long and hard with the selfish part of his great love. Instead of turning sullen, he set himself to carry out Helen Rolleston's will. He went on board the Proserpine and chose her the best stern cabin.
General Rolleston had ordered Helen's cabin to be furnished, and the agent had put in the usual things, such as a standing bedstead with drawers beneath, chest of drawers, small table, two chairs, washstand, looking-glass, and swinging lamp.
But Seaton made several visits to the ship, and effected the following arrangements at his own cost. He provided a neat cocoa-mat for her cabin deck, for comfort and foot-hold. He unshipped the regular six-paned stern windows, and put in single-pane plate glass; he fitted venetian blinds, and hung two little rose-colored curtains to each of the windows; all so arranged as to be easily removed in case it should be necessary to ship dead-lights in heavy weather. He glazed the door leading to her bath-room and quarter gallery with plate glass; he provided a light easy-chair, slung and fitted with grommets, to be hung on hooks screwed into the beams in the midship of the cabin. On this Helen could sit and read, and so become insensible to the motion of the ship. He fitted a small bookcase, with a button, which could be raised when a book might be wanted; he fixed a strike-bell in her maid's cabin communicating with two strikers in Helen's cabin; he selected books, taking care that the voyages and travels were prosperous ones. No "Seaman's Recorder," "Life-boat Journal," or "Shipwrecks and Disasters in the British Navy."
Her cabin was the after-cabin on the starboard side, was entered through the cuddy, had a door communicating with the quarter gallery, two stern windows and a dead-eye on deck. The maid's cabin was the port after-cabin; doors opened into cuddy and quarter-gallery. And a fine trouble Miss Rolleston had to get a maid to accompany her; but at last a young woman offered to go with her for high wages, demurely suppressing the fact that she had just married one of the sailors, and would have gladly gone for nothing. Her name was Jane Holt, and her husband's Michael Donovan.
In one of Seaton's visits to the Proserpine he detected the mate and the captain talking together and looking at him with unfriendly eyes—scowling at him would hardly be too strong a word.
However, he was in no state of mind to care much how two animals in blue jackets received his acts of self-martyrdom. He was there to do the last kind offices of despairing love for the angel that had crossed his dark path and illumined it for a moment, to leave it now forever.