“Please, sir, she came after me as far as the beginning of the pier,” returned the porter; “and there, as I happened to look round, I saw her speaking to two men. I went on—looked round again, and could see nothing more of her.”
“This is most extraordinary!” exclaimed Hatfield.
“I cannot comprehend it,” observed Perdita: then, suddenly struck by the idea that Charles might propose to land and search after the old woman, she added hastily, “But we need not alarm ourselves: if any thing has happened to detain my mother a short time, she will doubtless follow us by the next boat.”
At this moment the huge paddle-wheels began to turn—Charles hastily tossed the porter half-a-crown—and the man leapt on the pier in company with several others of his own calling,—while the steamer moved away with stately steadiness of pace.
Perdita and Charles Hatfield paced the deck, arm in arm, and conversing on the unaccountable disappearance of Mrs. Fitzhardinge. The latter could conjecture no possible key to the mystery: nor did Perdita offer any suggestive clue—although she thought it probable that her mother, having lost her despotic authority, had withdrawn, in a moment of ill-temper, from the company of those whom she could not hope to reduce to the condition of slaves. But the young woman said to herself, “She will soon repent of her folly and rejoin us;”—while to Charles she expressed an uneasiness and an apprehension lest any accident should have befallen her mother.
On sped the steamer: the harbour is cleared—and now she enters upon the expanse of green water, over which she walks “like a thing of life,”—the huge paddles raising a swell, which, covered with foam, marks the pathway of the gallant vessel.
On—on she went;—and now the white cliffs of Albion diminish and grow dim in the distance,—while, still far ahead, the coast of France, like a long brown streak in the horizon, appears in view!
And, oh! may that green sea never waft a hostile navy from one shore to the other;—may the peace which now subsists between the two greatest nations in the universe, remain undisturbed! Let France and England continue rivals,—not in the art of war,—but in the means of developing every element of civilisation and progress. Such a striving—such a race between the two, will be glorious indeed; and the whole world will experience the benefit.
Shame, then, to those alarmists who are now endeavouring to spread terror and dismay throughout the British Islands, by their calculations of the facility with which the French may invade us, and by their predictions of the consequences of such an invasion.
Well aware are we that were France to entertain the project, its realization would be easy;—for with our navy dispersed over the world, our coast-defences so few and far-between, and our totally insufficient army, we have no means of resisting an invading force of eighty or a hundred thousand men so admirably disciplined as the soldiers of France.