“Well, ma’am, you may call it what you please,” he replied shortly, with some little heat, putting on his hat again and jamming it down on his head firmly, using a good deal of force as if expending in that way his latent caloric. “But, cockleshell or no cockleshell, she’s big enough for me!”
“But, Captain dear, isn’t there room enough for me, too?” asked Nell coaxingly, seeing that he was vexed, and sliding her little hand into his, as if to show that she at all events was not joining in the fun against him. “Won’t you take Bob and me?”
Her touch somehow or, other banished his pettishness, enabling him to see that Mrs Gilmour was only joking, and that he had but played into her hands, as he said to himself, by losing his temper over it.
“I tell you what,” he now exclaimed, without a single trace of ill-humour. “You shall see that I’m not ashamed of my little craft, for I’ll have the Zephyr brought over from Gosport to-morrow. What is more, too, the whole lot of you shall go out for a sail in her—by Jove!”
The Captain was as good as his word, the yacht being towed across the following afternoon from Haslar Creek, where she had been lying, ever since the last yachting season, on the mud flats that there exist.
The little craft, which was a dapper cutter with an oyster-knife sort of bow and a clean run aft, as if she could race well when heeling over and show a good deal of her copper sheathing, did not exceed the tonnage mentioned by the Captain.
But, in spite of her smallness of size, she appeared to have the making of a good sea boat in her, and gained many admirers amongst the Southsea watermen as they surveyed her at her new moorings; the little craft being anchored off the coastguard-station and placed now under the charge of Hellyer, when the Captain was not immediately looking after her himself.
Mrs Gilmour, however, remained obdurate; for, though satisfied now that the “yacht” really was an actual fact instead of merely a creation of her old friend’s fancy, being somewhat averse to adventuring her life on the deep save in large vessels, and even of these she confessed feeling rather shy since the wreck of the Bembridge Belle, she, very aggravatingly, declined going out in the cutter—a want of taste on her part shared by her sister-in-law, whose weak nerves supplied a more reasonable pretext for not accepting the Captain’s usual invitation to make the little vessel’s better acquaintance.
Bob’s father, however, exhibited no such reluctance; and, as for Bob himself, he and Nellie and Dick were all in the seventh heaven of delight when, a morning or two afterwards, there being a nice nor’-westerly breeze blowing, which was good both for working out to sea and running home again, the Captain took them for a sail, managing single-handed the smart cutter as only a sailor, such as he was, could.
Thenceforward, Bob’s holidays were all halcyon days.