But now, as I saw myself once more approaching this pleasant spot so well known to me, I felt little of the old thrill of eagerness come over me. True, Edouard would be there, and the dogs, and the birds, and the horses, and the quiet welcome. True, also, I could, either in truth or by evasion, establish a pleasant and conventional footing for all my party—it would be easy to explain so natural and pleasant an incident as a visit during a yacht cruise, and to laugh at all that silly newspaper sensation which by now must fully have blown over. True, Monsieur Edouard would be charmed to meet the woman whose influence on my life he knew so well. Yes, I could tell him everything easily, nicely, except the truth; which was, that I was bringing to another man’s arms the woman whom he knew I loved. No, the blue loom of Manning’s Island gave me no joy now. I wished it three thousand miles away instead of thirty. I wished that almost anything might prevent my arrival—accident, delay.
And then, in the most natural way in the world, there were both! Without much warning, the pulse of our engine slackened, the throb of our single screw slowed down and ceased. Williams stuck his head up out of his engine-room and shouted something to Peterson, who methodically drew out his pipe and made ready for a smoke.
“It’s no use going any farther,” explained Williams when I came up. “That intake’s gone wrong again, and she’s got sand all through her. It’s a crime to see her cut herself all to pieces this way. We’ve just got to stop and clean her up, that’s all, and fix the job right—ought to have done it back there before we started in.”
“How long will it take, Williams?” I asked.
“Oh, I don’t know, sir. More than this afternoon, sure.”
“That’s too bad,” said I, with a fair imitation of regret. “We had expected to make Manning Island by night.”
“Yes, it is too bad, but it’s better to stop than ruin her, isn’t it, sir?”
“Certainly it is, and I quite approve your judgment. But I presume we can go a little way yet, until we find a good berth somewhere? There’s a deep channel comes in from the left, just ahead, and I think if we move on half a mile or so, we can get water enough to float even at low tide, and at the same time be out of sight of any boats passing in the lower part of the bay.”
“Oh, yes, sir, we can get that far,” said the engineer. Peterson was full of gloom, and though he thought nothing less than that we were going to be kept here a month, as one more event in a trip already unlucky enough, he gave the wheel to our Cajun pilot, and we crawled on around the head of a long point that came out into the bay. Here we could not see Manning Island, and were out of sight from most of the bay, so that, once more, the feeling of remoteness, aloofness, came upon me.
Not that it did me any present good. I despatched L’Olonnois as messenger to the ladies, telling them the cause of our delay, and explaining how difficult it was to say just when we would get in to the island; and then I betook myself to gloomy pacing up and down what restricted part of the deck I felt free for my own use. I wearied of it soon, and went to my cabin, trying to read.