“Jack? Oh, no; Jack’s asleep.”
Eve quivered at the name.
“Are you cold?” said Cicely. “We’ll start as soon as that hissing boat gets off. I hope you don’t mind riding behind a mule? Oh, look!” and she seized her companion’s arm. “Uncle Abram is shocked that your maid—what did you call her—Fields?—should be carrying anything—a white lady, as he supposes; and he is trying to take the bag away from her. She’s evidently frightened; Pomp and Plato haven’t as many clothes on as they might have, I acknowledge. Oh, do look!”
Eve, still quivering, glanced mechanically in the direction indicated.
A short negro, an old man with abnormally long arms, was endeavoring to take from Meadows’s grasp a small hand-bag which she was carrying. Again and again he tried, and the girl repulsed him. Two more negroes approached, and lifted one of the trunks which she was guarding. She followed the trunk; and now Uncle Abram, coming round on the other side, tried to get possession of a larger bag which she held in her left hand. She wrenched it from him several times desperately, and then, as he still persisted, she used it as a missile over the side of his head, and began to shriek and run.
The noise of the hissing steam prevented Miss Bruce from calling to her distracted handmaid.
Cicely laughed and laughed. “I didn’t expect anything half so funny,” she said.
The little Altamaha now backed out from the pier into rough water again, and the hissing ceased. Besides the dark heaving waves, the tall light-house, and the beach, there was now nothing to be seen but a row of white sand-hills which blocked the view towards the north.
“This is the sea-shore, isn’t it?” said Eve. As she asked her question her voice had in her own ears a horribly false sound; she was speaking merely for the sake of saying something; Cicely’s “I didn’t expect anything half so funny” had hurt her like the edge of a knife.
“Oh, no; this isn’t the sea; this is the Sound,” Cicely answered. “The sea is round on the other side. You will hear it often enough at Romney; it booms dreadfully after a storm.”