They found a boat at Suez and went on board at once. Mr. Fay writes a line to his father-in-law to tell him that they are safe thus far: a grandiose little line:
Some are now very ill, but I stood it as well as any Arabian in the caravan, which consisted of at least five thousand people. My wife insists on taking the pen out of my hands.
She takes it, to the following effect:
My dear Friends—I have not a moment’s time, for the boat is waiting, therefore can only beg that you will unite with me in praising our Heavenly Protector for our escape from the various dangers of our journey. I never could have thought my constitution was so strong. I bore the fatigues of the desert like a lion. We have been pillaged of almost everything by the Arabs. This is the Paradise of thieves, I think the whole population may be divided into two classes of them: those who adopt force and those who effect their purpose by fraud.... I have not another moment. God bless you! Pray for me, my beloved friends.
It is not clear when the Fays had been pillaged, or of what; perhaps they had merely suffered the losses incidental to an Oriental embarkation. The ship herself had been pillaged, and badly. She had been connected with the earlier caravan—the ill-fated one—and the Government had gutted her in its vague embarrassment. Not a chair, not a table was left. Still they were thankful to be on board. Their cabin was good, the captain appeared good-natured and polite, and their fellow-passengers, a Mr. and Mrs. Tulloch, a Mr. Hare, a Mr. Fuller, and a Mr. Manesty, seemed, together with poor Mr. Taylor from the caravan, to promise inoffensive companionship down the Red Sea. Calm was the prospect. But Eliza is Eliza. And we have not yet seen Eliza in close contact with another lady. Nor have we yet seen Mrs. Tulloch.
IV
The beauty of the Gulf of Suez—and surely it is most beautiful—has never received full appreciation from the traveller. He is in too much of a hurry to arrive or to depart, his eyes are too ardently bent on England or on India for him to enjoy that exquisite corridor of tinted mountains and radiant water. He is too much occupied with his own thoughts to realize that here, here and nowhere else, is the vestibule between the Levant and the Tropics. Nor was it otherwise in the case of Mrs. Fay. As she sailed southward with her husband in the pleasant autumn weather, her thoughts dwelt on the past with irritation, on the future with hope, but on the scenery scarcely at all. What with the boredom of Alexandria, what with her fright at Cairo, what with the native dress that fanaticism had compelled her to wear (“a terrible fashion for one like me to whom fresh air seems the greatest requisite for existence”), and finally what with Suez, which she found “a miserable place little better than the desert which it bounds,” she quitted Egypt without one tender word. Even her Biblical reminiscences take an embittered turn. She forgets how glad Jacob had been to come there and only remembers how anxious Moses and Aaron had been to get away.
Content to have escaped, she turns her gaze within—not of course to her own interior (she is no morbid analyst) but to the interior of the boat, and surveys with merciless eyes her fellow-passengers. The letter that describes them exhibits her talent, her vitality, and her trust in Providence, and incidentally explains why she never became popular, and why “two parties,” as she terms them, were at once formed on board, the one party consisting of her husband and herself, the other of everyone else. The feud, trivial at the time, was not to be without serious consequences. “You will now expect me, my dear friends,” she begins, “to say something of those with whom we are cooped up, but my account will not be very satisfactory, though sufficiently interesting to us—to being there.”
The grammar is hazy. But the style makes all clear.
The woman Mrs. Tulloch, of whom I entertained some suspicion from the first, is, now I am credibly informed, one of the very lowest creatures taken off the streets in London. She is so perfectly depraved in disposition that her supreme delight consists in making everybody about her miserable. It would be doing her too much honour to stain my paper with a detail of the various artifices she daily practises to that end. Her pretended husband, having been in India before and giving himself many airs, is looked upon as a person of mighty consequence whom no one chooses to offend. Therefore madam has full scope to exercise her mischievous talents, wherein he never controls her, not but that he perfectly understands to make himself feared. Coercive measures are sometimes resorted to. It is a common expression of the lady, “Lord bless you, if I did such or such a thing, Tulloch would make no more ado, but knock me down like an ox.” I frequently amuse myself with examining their countenances, where ill-nature has fixed her empire so firmly that I scarcely believe either of them smiled except maliciously.