The moonbeams shone on Jack alone now; his sister had stolen into the shadow to hide her blushes.
“Good-night again,” she whispered, and so went gliding away like a beautiful ghost.
CHAPTER VIII.
ON BOARD THE SAUCY “TONNERAIRE.”
“O’er the wide wave-swelling ocean,
Tossed aloft or humbled low—
As to fear ’tis all a notion—
When duty calls we’re bound to go.”—Dibdin.
Tonneraire lay at anchor just off the Hoe in Plymouth Sound, as pretty a craft as any sailor need care to look at. Plymouth was an amphibious sort of a place even in those days; and there was not a landsman who had ever been in blue water that, having once caught sight of the saucy Tonneraire, did not stop to stare at and admire her as he crossed the Hoe. Some, indeed, even sat quietly down and lighted up their pipes, the better to consider the bonnie ship. Long and low and dark was she, and though a frigate, the poop was not high enough to interfere with her taking lines of beauty. She carried splendid spars, and from their tapering height it was evident she was built either to fight or to chase a flying Frenchman. But her maintop-gallant masts were at present below, for the ship was not quite ready for sea. She seemed impatient enough, however, to get away. The wind blew pretty high, right in off the Channel, and the frigate jerked and tugged at her anchors like a hound on leash that longs to be loose and away scouring the plains in search of game. Everything on board was taut and trim and neat: not a yard out of the square, not a rope out of place, the decks as white as old ivory, the polished woodwork glittering like glass, the brass all gold apparently, the guns like ebony, and the very lanyards pipeclayed till they looked like coils of driven snow.
Post-Captain Mackenzie was walking to and fro on the poop-deck all alone, but casting many an anxious glance shorewards, or upwards at the evening sun that soon would sink over the beautiful wooded Cornish hills.