“Oh, thank you. I am sure you are very good,” he laughed; “but we are none of us connoisseurs, nor do I think any of us have a weakness for any one particular kind of wine more than another. If you can undertake to give us a good sound claret every day for dinner, with a bottle of decent champagne now and then, we shall be perfectly content. And now, what is the longest possible time you can allow us in which to get together our outfit for the voyage?”
“We are advertised to sail to-morrow three weeks,” I replied.
“Very well,” he said. “That is rather brief notice for the ladies; but I have no doubt they will be able to manage when once they are given to understand that it must be done. As for me, I shall have no difficulty whatever. I shall be obliged, however, if you will give me a hint or two as to the different climates we shall encounter on the voyage, so that we may prepare accordingly.”
I did so, Sir Edgar jotting down a few memoranda in his note-book meanwhile; and then, with another hearty shake of the hand, my visitor left me.
The succeeding three weeks passed uneventfully away, the cargo, during the first fortnight, coming alongside very slowly; but there was quite a rush at the last, and on the night before the day on which we were advertised to sail, I had the satisfaction of seeing the hatches put on and battened down over a full hold, with the barque down to within an inch of her load-mark.
Meanwhile, private stores in considerable quantities had come on board, bearing Sir Edgar Desmond’s name upon them, and these I had had carefully stowed away by themselves. This had been a busy day for me; for there were the articles to be signed, the ship to clear at the Custom House, bills to pay, and a hundred other little matters to attend to—among them the giving up of my lodgings, and the removal of my mother and myself with our dunnage to the ship—but when I turned in that night, in my own comfortable state-room, it was with the feeling that my business of every kind had been satisfactorily concluded, and that henceforth, until our arrival in Hong Kong, I should only have the ship to look after. Moreover, the whole of my crew, with two exceptions, had faithfully kept their promise to be on board before the dock-gates closed that night, so that I might reasonably hope to go out of dock with a tolerably sober crew in the morning.
We unmoored at seven o’clock next morning, and half an hour later—the two absentees from the forecastle scrambling on board as we passed out through the gates—were clear of the dock and in the river, with the tug ahead and the first of the ebb to help us on our way. We made a pause of half an hour off Gravesend, to pick up Sir Edgar Desmond and his party—who had spent the night at an hotel there—and then, pushing on again, found ourselves, about six o’clock that evening, off the North Foreland, with a light northerly air blowing, which, when we had got the barque under all plain sail, fanned us along at a speed of about five knots.