I may add, by the way, to make an end of these explanations, that Jane Pengelly had married her first cousin on the father’s side, as the matter was once elaborately made plain to me; consequently, she was not compelled, as most ladies are, to “change her name” when she wedded Teddy’s sire, and still retained after marriage her ancestral patronymic—which was sometimes sported with such unction by her brother, when laying down the law and giving a decided opinion.
Partings are sad things, and the sooner they are over the better. So Sam thought too, no doubt, for he presently hailed us both to come down-stairs, as time was up, and a man besides waiting with a hand-truck to trundle my chest down to the quay in the Cattwater, off which Sam’s little schooner was lying.
Thereupon, Jane giving me a final hug, my chest was bundled below in a brace of shakes, and Sam and I, accompanied by the man wheeling the truck, were on our way down the Stoke Road towards Plymouth—a lingering glance which I cast behind, in order to give a farewell wave of the hand to my second mother, imprinting on my memory every detail of the little cottage, with its clematis-covered porch, and the bright scarlet geraniums and fuchsias in full bloom in front, and Jane Pengelly’s tearful face standing out amidst the flowers, crying out a last loving “good-bye!”
We reached the schooner in good time so as to fetch out of the Sound before the tide ebbed, and, after clearing the breakwater, as the wind was to the northward of east, Sam made a short board on the port tack towards the Eddystone, in order to catch the western stream—which begins to run down Channel an hour after the flood, when about six miles out or so from the land, the current inshore setting up eastwards towards the Start and being against us if we tried to stem it by proceeding at once on our true course.
When we had got into the stream, however, and thus had the advantage of having the tideway with us, Sam let the schooner’s head fall off; and so, wearing her round, he shaped a straight course for the Lizard, almost in the line of a crow’s flight, bringing the wind nearly right aft to us now on the starboard tack as we ran before it. We passed abreast of the goggle-eyed lighthouse on the point which marks the landfall for most mariners when returning to the English Channel after a foreign voyage, close on to midnight—not a bad run from Plymouth Sound, which we had left at four o’clock in the afternoon.
It was a beautiful bright moonlight night, the sea being lighted up like a burnished mirror, and the clear orb making the distant background of the Cornish coast come out in relief, far away on our western bow. The wind being still fair for us, keeping to the east-nor’-east, Sam brought it more abeam, bearing up so that he might pass between the Wolf Rock and the Land’s End, striking across the bight made by Mount’s Bay in order to save the way we would have lost if he had taken the inshore track, like most coasters—and, indeed, as he would have been obliged to do if it had been foggy or rough, which, fortunately for us, it wasn’t.
By sunrise next morning we had fetched within a couple of miles of the Longships; when, bracing round the schooner’s topsail yard and sailing close-hauled, with the wind nearly on our bow, we ran for Lundy Island in the British Channel.
I never saw any little craft behave better than the schooner did now, sailing on a bowline being her best point of speed, as is the case with most fore and aft rigged vessels. She almost “ate into the wind’s eye;” and, although the distance was over a hundred miles from the Longships, she was up to Lundy by nightfall, on this, the second day after leaving home.
From this point, however, we had to beat up all the way to Cardiff, as the easterly wind was blowing straight down the Bristol Channel, and consequently dead in our teeth, as soon as we began to bear up. It was a case of tack and tack about—first a long leg over to the Mumbles on the starboard tack, followed by a corresponding reach towards Dunkery Beacon on the port hand; backwards and forwards, see-saw, turn and turn about, until, finally, we rounded Penarth Heads, arriving at our destination on the afternoon of our fourth day from Plymouth.
We got to Cardiff none too early, either.