"Ay, that is her work, and she'll do it effectually.—But I don't see the Driver!"
"She's dead ahead sir," answered Greenly, smiling; "her orders being rather more difficult of execution. Her station would be off yonder to windward, half a league ahead of us; but it's no easy matter to get into that position, Sir Gervaise, when the Plantagenet is really in earnest."
Sir Gervaise laughed, and rubbed his hands, then he turned to look for the Active, the only other vessel of his division. This little cutter was dancing over the seas, half the time under water, notwithstanding, under the head of her main-sail, broad off, on the admiral's weather-beam; finding no difficulty in maintaining her station there, in the absence of all top-hamper, and favoured by the lowness of her hull. After this he glanced upward at the sails and spars of the Plantagenet, which he studied closely.
"No signs of de Vervillin, hey! Greenly?" the admiral asked, when his survey of the whole fleet had ended. "I was in hopes we might see something of him, when the light returned this morning."
"Perhaps it is quite as well as it is, Sir Gervaise," returned the captain. "We could do little besides look at each other, in this gale, and Admiral Bluewater ought to join before I should like even to do that."
"Think you so, Master Greenly!—There you are mistaken, then; for I'd lie by him, were I alone in this ship, that I might know where he was to be found as soon as the weather would permit us to have something to say to him."
These words were scarcely uttered, when the look-out in the forward cross-trees, shouted at the top of his voice, "sail-ho!" At the next instant the Chloe fired a gun, the report of which was just heard amid the roaring of the gale, though the smoke was distinctly seen floating above the mists of the ocean; she also set a signal at her naked mizzen-top-gallant-mast-head.
"Run below, young gentleman," said the vice-admiral, advancing to the break of the poop and speaking to a midshipman on the quarter-deck; "and desire Mr. Bunting to make his appearance. The Chloe signals us—tell him not to look for his knee-buckles."
A century since, the last injunction, though still so much in use on ship-board, was far more literal than it is to-day, nearly all classes of men possessing the articles in question, though not invariably wearing them when at sea. The midshipman dove below, however, as soon as the words were out of his superior's mouth; and, in a very few minutes, Bunting appeared, having actually stopped on the main-deck ladder to assume his coat, lest he might too unceremoniously invade the sacred precincts of the quarter-deck, in his shirt-sleeves.
"There it is, Bunting," said Sir Gervaise, handing the lieutenant the glass; "two hundred and twenty-seven—'a large sail ahead,' if I remember right."