“Oh, yes, you may be thankful, you poor starving beings! Here, Mrs. Griggs! Accept, and do all you can! Here are eggs, and some milk and fresh water, four poulets, such as they are, and a huge monster of a crab; but all the bread is leavened, and you little guess what Ivy and I had to go through before we were allowed to buy anything. We were had up to the Mayor, and had to constater all manner of things about our ship, to prove that we were no smugglers.”
“I thought the fat old rogue would have come out to visit the yacht before he would have allowed us a morsel,” said Lord Ivinghoe.
“In which case you might have been found a skeleton, father, like Sir Hugh Willoughby! And as to our telegrams, they won’t go till the diligence gets to St. Malo, and what they will make of them there is another question. I did not dare to send more than one, for fear they should get mixed up.”
Vera heard the joyous chaff as it fluttered round her, not half understanding it any more than if it had been a strange tongue, and not always guessing the cause of the fits of laughter, chiefly at Lord Ivinghoe’s misadventures, over which his little sister and his father were well pleased to tease his correctness, and his young wife looked a little hurt at his being tormented. He could not remember that braconnier was a poacher by land, not by sea, and very unnecessarily disclaimed to the Maire being such a thing. His father, he said, “was gentilhomme anglais en—what’s a yacht?—yac. (Nonsense! that’s a long-haired ox. No!) Non point contrabandiste, mais galérien dans galère.” “And there I interposed,” said Phyllis, “for fear we should be boarded as escaped galériens.”
“Why, galley was a pleasure-boat sometimes,” said Ivinghoe, and his wife supported him with “Cleopatra’s galley.”
“Well done, Francie! To your oars for Ivy’s defence,” said Lord Rotherwood. “How did you defend us, Fly, from being towed into harbour at Brest as runaway convicts?”
“She gabbled away most eloquently to the Maire, almost as fluently as a born French-woman,” said Ivinghoe, “and persuaded him at last that it was not necessary to come on board to inspect us, nor even to detain us till he had sent for instructions to St. Malo.”
“As Ivy managed matters, I thought we might be kept as hostages,” said Phyllis.
“But, thanks to her blandishments, the solemn official vouchsafed to send off a messenger for us with a telegram.”
“I do not think he sent directions to pursue our suspicious galère,” added Phyllis; “but I own I shall be glad to be under the lee of old England again.”