“Well, fire away,” said Repton, gloomily. “Here goes.”
And as he spoke he pulled the brown woollen shawl right off the basket with a violent wrench.
As he did so the wind and the violent action together caused a letter, which had been placed in the basket under the shawl, to flutter over the side of the vessel into the sea.
“There you are! What did I tell you?” cried Bayre, excitedly, making a wild grab in the direction of the missive that would have made all clear to them.
To the fresh consternation caused by this mishap there succeeded a wild desire to stop the boat and to secure the precious letter. But the captain would not listen to Repton’s loud expostulations on this subject, and the young man was driven half frantic between his own despair and the reproaches for his hasty action which his two companions did not hesitate to pour upon him.
In the meantime Southerley, partly out of bravado and partly out of real curiosity, had taken his turn at examining the child, and finally announced, with a great show of learning, that he knew from the shape of its headgear that it was a boy.
In his own mind, Bayre, who chose to keep his suspicions to himself, found this confirmation of his idea that the helpless creature who had been so unexpectedly entrusted to them was the heir to his uncle’s property. For he knew that his uncle’s child was a boy. At all hazards, then, the mite must be kept under his eye until he could find out what was the object of entrusting it to him and his companions in this mysterious manner. Once arrived in London he would write to Miss Eden and beg her to enlighten him upon the point.
If it was not the young girl herself who had contrived to send the infant in this manner to some place of greater safety than the cottage of the Vazons, she would at least be able to find out who had done so. As for the fact that she had given him no intimation of the strange commission, Bayre could not be surprised at it. For it was the sort of charge that a man might well have refused if he had known of it beforehand. So he reasoned with himself, and remembered at the same time that Miss Eden had spoken of some commission with which she thought of entrusting them.
In the meantime the child, having disposed of the opaque fluid in the bottle, struggled to sit up, and then to get on its feet and survey the new and rather astonishing world in which it found itself.
Surveying it with the calm scientific curiosity with which a young animal in the Zoo would have inspired him, Southerley drew the attention of his companions to this fact, and even made some solemn and ill-received attempts to conciliate the monster by duckings of the head and twiddlings of the fingers, at which the child stared with grave eyes.