He wished to add, "You're much too pretty," but restrained himself. Just then the breakfast gong sounded and they went down to the Dining Saloon. Brentham rather masterfully strode to near the top of the long table as though knowing he was the most important person on board, and placed himself next but one to the Captain's seat and Lucy on his right, with a wink at the same time to the Chief Steward as though to say "Fix this arrangement."
A moment after another lady with gold hair and a dazzling complexion glided up and nimbly took the seat on Brentham's left hand. The Captain was absent and intimated that they needn't expect him till the Jeddah was away from Plymouth and out of the Channel. The other lady passengers were breakfasting in the Ladies' Saloon. As soon as they were seated and porridge was being offered, the lady on Brentham's left introduced herself as the wife of a colleague: "My husband is Spencer Bazzard, the Vice-Consul at Unguja—I dare say you've heard about him at the F.O.? He's a friend of that dear Bennet Molyneux's, to whom we're both devoted.... Such a grasp of African affairs, don't you think so? My husband already knows Unguja through and through. I'm sure he'll be glad to put you up to the ropes. I've never been there before. Spencer thought he ought to go out first and make a home for me, so I've been a forlorn grass widow for over a year. However, we shall soon be reunited. And I understand we're to look on you as our chief till the Consul-General returns. Spencer's been Sir James's right-hand man. Thank you. Toast, please. No, I won't take butter: it looks so odd. Like honey! Ugh!"
After breakfast, Brentham escorted Lucy to the upper-deck, got her a folding chair and secured it in a sheltered corner, made her comfortable, lent her a novel and a rug, and then resumed his pacing of the deck or occasional study of a language book—he was trying, he told Lucy, to master Swahili by doing Steere's exercises in that harmonious tongue. Mrs. Bazzard commandeered a steward and a deck-chair and established herself close to Lucy with a piece of showy embroidery, bought at Liberty's with half the embroidery done. In a condescending manner she set herself to pump Lucy about Brentham.... Did she know him well? Didn't she think him good-looking? Mrs. Bazzard thought of the two her husband was the finer-looking man. He had longer moustaches and they were a golden brown, like Mrs. Bazzard's hair; he wasn't perhaps quite so tall; but how she was looking forward to reunion with him. He was a paragon of husbands, one of the Norfolk Bazzards. His elder brother, a person of great legal acumen, had from time to time tendered advice of signal value to Mr. Bennet Molyneux.... It was thus they had got "in" with the Foreign Office, and if Mrs. Bazzard were not pledged to inviolable secrecy (because of Spencer's career) there were things she knew and things she could tell about Lord Wiltshire's intentions regarding Africa—and Spencer.... However.... Did Miss—she begged pardon—she had not caught Lucy's name.... Josselin? any connexion of Sir Martin Josselin? Oh, Josling.... Did Miss Josling come from Captain Brentham's part of the country? Not a relation? No, of course not.... Well, did she think him clever? Some—in the Foreign Office—regarded him as superficial. It was his good looks that had got him on, and the friendship of a great lady ... but then what scandal-mongers men were! And how jealous of one another! Mrs. Bazzard's husband had got his commission through sheer, outstanding ability, yet at the time people said the most horrid things, both of him and her.... But Lord Wiltshire had remained unshaken, knowing Spencer's value; and undoubtedly held him in view for a very important post in Africa as soon as he should have inducted Captain Brentham into his duties.
Lunch came in due course and was eaten in better appetite by most of the passengers. It was served with coarse plenty, on a lower-middle-class standard of selection and cuisine.
It was a sunny afternoon when the Jeddah anchored in Plymouth harbour. The passengers were informed they might spend four hours on shore, so Captain Brentham proposed to Lucy and to Mrs. Bazzard that he should take them under his escort and give them their last chance of eating a decent dinner at an English hotel. Mrs. Bazzard accepted with a gush of thanks and a determination to commence a discreet flirtation with the acting Consul-General, who was undoubtedly a handsome man. Lucy assented simply to the proposition. She was still a little dazed in the dawn of her new life. But as she went off with the others in the tug she put aside as an unreasonable absurdity any idea of flight to the railway station and a return home. It was a great stay to her home-sickness that there should be on board some one she knew who almost shared her home country, who had actually met people she had met, and who would carry this home knowledge out with him to the same region in Africa as that she was going to. This removed the sting of her regret and remedied her sense of utter friendlessness in the wilds. Was he not actually to be her Consul?
These reflections caused her to sit down in the Hotel Writing Room, whilst dinner was being got ready, and Mrs. Bazzard was titivating, and dash off a hasty letter to "dearest mother" informing her of the brighter outlook. Her mother, overjoyed at this silver lining to the cloud of bereavement, spread the news; and so it reached Englefield, where Lord Silchester was spending the Easter recess. He retailed it to Sibyl ... who stamped her foot on the library carpet and said: "There! Didn't I predict it? I said he'd fall in love with a missionaryess!"
"And why not, my love?" replied Lord Silchester. "What if he does?"
A little tossing on the Bay of Biscay sent Mrs. Bazzard to her cabin, and made more scanty the public attendance at meals. But Lucy proved as good a sailor as Brentham, and a great solace to him. For he had his unacknowledged home-sickness too. You could not spend nine months in the best of English country life and the most interesting aspects of London without a revulsion of feeling when you found yourself cut off from all communication with those scenes of beauty, splendour and absolute comfort, and before high ambition had been once more aroused, and the unexplored wilderness had again beckoned her future ravisher. Lucy might be merely a farmer's daughter, a little better educated than such usually were at that period, still an unsophisticated country chit (as Mrs. Bazzard had already summed her up to the tall thin lady); yet she could talk with some slight knowledge about the Silchesters—her mother had been maid to Lord Silchester's mother, and her father was Lord Silchester's tenant. Colonel Grayburn was—or tried to be—a gentleman farmer within a mile of Lucy's home; she had seen Sibyl occasionally during the three years in which the Grayburns had lived in Aldermaston parish. Lucy had never been so far afield as Farleigh Wallop, but she knew Reading, Mortimer, Silchester, Tadley, and even Basingstoke. Merely to mention names like these consoled them both as the steamer ploughed her twelve knots an hour through the "roaring forties."
And when the Jeddah turned into the Mediterranean, with a passing view of the Rock of Gibraltar, and entered upon calm seas, blue and dazzling, their camaraderie increased under Mrs. Bazzard's baleful gaze and interchange of eyebrow-raisings with the thin bony-nosed lady of Lucy's cabin.
The Jeddah anchored off Algiers. The thin lady, who here passes out of the story—-I think she was the wife of a British Chaplain—had invited Mrs. Bazzard to lunch with her on shore. Mrs. Bazzard had hastened to accept the invitation, the more willingly since Captain Brentham seemed to have forgotten her existence; except at meal times, when he was obliged to pass the mustard and the sugar. Brentham and Lucy went off together into the picturesque white city, rising high into the half-circle of the hills. They lunched at the Café des Anglais and dined at an hotel near the quay. They climbed the ladder-like streets of the Arab quarter, bought useless trifles, and had a drive out into the country which was gay with genista in full bloom, with red-purple irises and roses, and dignified by its hoary olives, sombre cypresses and rigid palms.