Volume One—Chapter Thirteen.
On the Voyage.
In these busy days of rail and steam, supplemented by their quick young brother electricity, time seems to go so fast that before the parties to this story had thoroughly realised the fact, another month had slipped by, another week had been added to that month, the Channel had been crossed, then France by train, and at Marseilles the travellers had stepped on board one of the steamers of the French company, the Messageries Maritimes, bound for Alexandria, Aden, Colombo, Penang, and then, on her onward voyage to Singapore and Hong Kong, to drop a certain group of her passengers at the mouth of the Darak river, up which they would be conveyed by Government steamer to Sindang, the settlement where Mr Harley, her Britannic Majesty’s Resident at the barbaric court of the petty Malay Rajah-Sultan Murad had the guidance of affairs.
It was one of those delicious, calm evenings of the South, with the purple waters of the tideless Mediterranean being rapidly turned into orange and gold. Away on the left could be seen, faintly pencilled against the sky, the distant outlines of the mountains that shelter the Riviera from the northern winds. To the right all was gold, and purple, and orange sea; and the group seated about the deck enjoying the comparative coolness of the evening knew that long before daybreak the next morning they would be out of sight of land.
There were a large number of passengers; for the most part English officials and their families returning from leave of absence to the various stations in the far East; and as they were grouped about the spacious quarter-deck of the sumptuously-fitted steamer rapidly ploughing its way through the sun-dyed waters, the scene was as bright and animated as painter could depict.
Gentlemen were lounging, smoking, or making attempts to catch the fish that played about the vessel’s sides without the slightest success; ladies were seated here and there, or promenading the deck, while other groups were conversing in low tones as they drank in the soft, sensuous air, and wondered how people could be satisfied to exist in dull and foggy, sunless England, when nature offered such climes as this.
“In another half-hour, Miss Perowne, I think I shall be able to show you a gorgeous sunset, if you will stay on deck.”
The speaker was a tall, fair man by rights, but long residence in the East had burned his skin almost to the complexion of that of a Red Indian. He was apparently about forty, with high forehead, clear-cut aquiline features, and the quick, firm, searching look of one accustomed to command and master men.
He took off his puggree-covered straw hat as he spoke, to let the cool breeze play through his hair, which was crisp and short, but growing so thin and sparse upon the top that partings were already made by time, and he would have been looked upon by every West-end hair-dresser as a suitable object to be supplied with nostrums and capillary regenerators galore.