A few minutes more, while the steam blew off with a roar, and the Rotterdam was moored alongside the great Quai Van Dyck. On one side lay the city, with all its vast wet docks; on the other the green, receding Tête de Flandres; between them a river, in size far exceeding the Thames at London; and far in the west the shadowy isles, with which the eye, from the spire, may see that the mouth of the Scheldt is crowded.
Barring all passage shoreward, at the end of the gangway, about which the passengers were crowding impatiently with their travelling-bags and portmanteaus, stood a douanier, or custom-house officer, in blue uniform, with the inevitable kepi (worn by every official in Antwerp, from the general commanding the garrison to the milk and butterman), bearded, grim, impassive, and, like all Belgian under-functionaries, disposed to insolence, dilatoriness, and to annoy the traveller, thereby contrasting singularly with the punctuality and politeness of similar officials in France and Austria.
Bevil Goring's baggage, a simple portmanteau, had been opened, examined, passed, and marked with the usual cabalistic figures in white chalk, and the steward, in expectation of a small fee, was re-strapping it, when he suddenly drew Bevil's attention to a remarkably beautiful little vessel, cutter-rigged aft and brig forward, with a breach in her bulwarks, on which a gang of riggers were setting up a new foretopmast and foretopgallant mast, with their hamper, cross-yards, and so forth. She lay alongside the quay, and just astern of the steamer.
Impatient only to get ashore and drive to the railway for Rotterdam, Bevil was about to hurry up the gangway, when the steward said,
'That's the yacht as you were asking about, sir.'
'Lord Cadbury's—the Firefly!'
'Yes.'
'Then she was not sunk?'
'Sunk; no, she couldn't have been, for there she lies, as the Flushing pilot has just told me. She sunk the lugger off the mouth of the Scheldt, and was towed up here to re-fit. And a regular beauty she is.'
Bevil Goring felt his heart leap, and, giddy with many emotions, forced his way rather unceremoniously up the gangway, and, with his portmanteau in one hand and his roll of railway-rugs in the other, leaped from the quay on the deck of the yacht.