"What a shame!" murmured Marcella, waving frantically to the doctor while from the tender came the deep, gay voices of the students who had cheered Louis singing "We want more Beer" to the tune of "Lead Kindly Light."
The wake of the tender widened out, lapped against the side of the Oriana and rippled away; it was no longer possible to distinguish anything but a blurred mass of pinkish faces and dark clothes, splashed by a crest of white handkerchiefs. Good-byes rang out to the undersong of "We want more Beer." Marcella turned away and looked right into the face of Louis Farne. It was a very red face, unnaturally red and distorted; the brown eyes were bright with tears.
She stared at him in amazement; he really was a phenomenon to her—the first young man she had ever seen, with the exception of the peasant lads. She blinked her own dry eyes and frowned at him reflectively.
"Did it hurt you as much as that? Anyway, I'm very sorry," she said.
"D'you think I'm blubbing for that, idiot?" said the boy in a jerky voice, and, bending almost double, darted down the companion-way.
She stared at him, and turned to the ship's rail again, drowning in surprise. She was surprised at Tilbury now that she had time to look about her. It was so utterly unromantic ashore—docks, wharves, miserable buildings and brown fields, very distant. She remembered that Queen Elizabeth had reviewed her troops at Tilbury when she was getting ready for the Armada to land; she had expected that the glamour of that ancient pageant would hang about Tilbury. And there was no glamour at all—except, perhaps, in the ships that lay at anchor and the barges that glided by; they were glamorous enough with their aura of far lands and strange merchandise.
She became aware that the girl with the consumptive sister was looking at her, and must have heard the boy's remark.
"People here seem very rude," she remarked.
"That they are! Saying she had consumption—I know it was consumption though they wrote it down in funny words. Other folks said she had consumption too—sauce! And now she's all alone there, and I'm here."
"What made you come," asked Marcella, "if you didn't want to leave her?"