"You are very good, Shirley."
"I would be very good if you would let me. I have every disposition to be good. It is my misfortune and habit, I know, to think of myself paramount to anybody else; but who is not like me in that respect? However, when Captain Keeldar is made comfortable, accommodated with all he wants, including a sensible, genial comrade, it gives him a thorough pleasure to devote his spare efforts to making that comrade happy. And should we not be happy, Caroline, in the Highlands? We will go to the Highlands. We will, if you can bear a sea-voyage, go to the Isles—the Hebrides, the Shetland, the Orkney Islands. Would you not like that? I see you would.—Mrs. Pryor, I call you to witness. Her face is all sunshine at the bare mention of it."
"I should like it much," returned Caroline, to whom, indeed, the notion of such a tour was not only pleasant, but gloriously reviving. Shirley rubbed her hands.
"Come; I can bestow a benefit," she exclaimed. "I can do a good deed with my cash. My thousand a year is not merely a matter of dirty bank-notes and jaundiced guineas (let me speak respectfully of both, though, for I adore them), but, it may be, health to the drooping, strength to the weak, consolation to the sad. I was determined to make something of it better than a fine old house to live in, than satin gowns to wear, better than deference from acquaintance and homage from the poor. Here is to begin. This summer, Caroline, Mrs. Pryor and I go out into the North Atlantic, beyond the Shetland, perhaps to the Faroe Isles. We will see seals in Suderoe, and, doubtless, mermaids in Stromoe.—Caroline is laughing, Mrs. Pryor. I made her laugh; I have done her good."
"I shall like to go, Shirley," again said Miss Helstone. "I long to hear the sound of waves—ocean-waves—and to see them as I have imagined them in dreams, like tossing banks of green light, strewed with vanishing and reappearing wreaths of foam, whiter than lilies. I shall delight to pass the shores of those lone rock-islets where the sea-birds live and breed unmolested. We shall be on the track of the old Scandinavians—of the Norsemen. We shall almost see the shores of Norway. This is a very vague delight that I feel, communicated by your proposal, but it is a delight."
"Will you think of Fitful Head now when you lie awake at night, of gulls shrieking round it, and waves tumbling in upon it, rather than of the graves under the rectory back-kitchen?"
"I will try; and instead of musing about remnants of shrouds, and fragments of coffins, and human bones and mould, I will fancy seals lying in the sunshine on solitary shores, where neither fisherman nor hunter ever come; of rock crevices full of pearly eggs bedded in seaweed; of unscared birds covering white sands in happy flocks."
"And what will become of that inexpressible weight you said you had on your mind?"
"I will try to forget it in speculation on the sway of the whole great deep above a herd of whales rushing through the livid and liquid thunder down from the frozen zone—a hundred of them, perhaps, wallowing, flashing, rolling in the wake of a patriarch bull, huge enough to have been spawned before the Flood, such a creature as poor Smart had in his mind when he said,—
'Strong against tides, the enormous whale
Emerges as he goes.'"