“I know that, my friend,” said the other. “I could have caught one of them the following week. This would not have suited my purpose, however, sir. I wished to proceed direct to Brest, for I could get easily on to Paris, where I intended placing my little Elsie at school in the convent of L’enfant Jesu, at Neuilly, under the guardianship of some good nuns, by whom her poor mother was educated and brought up. It was a promise, my friend, to the dead.”
“I see, colonel,” rejoined the skipper apologetically, lighting his cigar again, having allowed it to go out while listening to the other; “I see, sir. Go on; I’m all attention.”
“Well, then,” continued the colonel, “these preliminaries being all arranged, Elsie and I went aboard the Saint Pierre, a full-rigged sailing ship of some eight hundred tons, the morning of the twenty-eighth of last month; and on the evening of the same day, as I have already told you, we made sail and quitted the anchorage where the ship had been loading—abreast of San Miguel, a port that guards the roadstead to the eastward, where it is open to the sea.”
“Aye, I know La Guayra well, colonel,” put in the skipper at this point, showing that he was following every detail. “I was in the Royal Mail Line when I was a nipper, before joining my present company.”
“I recollect the night we sailed,” resumed the other, paying no attention to Captain Applegarth’s remark, but speaking with his eyes fixed, as if in a dream and seeing mentally before him the scenes he described. “The moon was shining brightly when we got under way, lighting up the Trinchera bastion and making the mountains in the background seem higher than they were from the deep shadows they cast over the town lying below. This latter lay embosomed amid a mass of tall cocoanut trees and gorgeous palms, with other tropical foliage, and had a shining beach of white sand immediately in its front, stretching round the curling bay, on which the surf broke in the moonlight, with a phosphorescent glow and a hollow sound as if beating over a grave. Heavens! It was the grave of all my dearest hopes and plans, for that, sir, was one of the few last peaceful nights I have of late known, and very probably ever shall know again!”
“Faith, don’t say that now, sir,” cried out Garry at this. “You’ll have a peaceful one to-night, sure, or I’m no prophet. Begorrah, though, I niver was, so far as that goes!”
The skipper grinned at this sympathetic interpolation, and the colonel’s sombre face lighted up a bit as he turned his pathetic eyes on the speaker, as if wishing to share his hopefulness.
“Ah, doctor, you do not know what grief and anguish are like!” he said mournfully. “But to go on with my story. I may tell you that, had our voyage progressed like our start, I should have nothing to deplore, for, the land breeze filling our sails, we bore away buoyantly from the Venezuelan coast, the ship shaping a course north by west towards the Mona passage, as the channel way is called, from a rock in its centre, lying between Hayti and Puerto Rico. This route is held to be the best, I believe, for passing out into the open Atlantic from the labyrinthine groups of islands and innumerable islets that gem the blue waters of the Caribbean Sea. It is a course, too, which by its directness and the northerly current and westerly wind there to be met, saves a lot of useless tacking about and beating to windward, as you, no doubt, captain, very well know.”
The skipper nodded his head.
“You’re quite a sailor, colonel,” he said approvingly. “Where did you manage to pick up your knowledge of navigation and sea-faring matters, if I may ask the question, sir?”