“Then come,” she said. “Let us be first too. I don’t want to lose a minute.”
Antony followed in her wake. Her sentiments most assuredly were his. It was not a day of which to squander one iota.
Ten minutes later they were on their way to the shore. Behind them the Fort Salisbury loomed up large and black from the limpid water; before them lay the land of possibilities.
The other passengers in the boat kept up a running fire of comments. A stout gentleman in a sun-helmet, which he considered de rigeur as long as he was anywhere at all near the regions of Africa, gazed towards the shore through a pair of field-glasses. At intervals he made known such objects of interest as he observed, in loud husky asides to his wife, a small meek woman, who clung to him, metaphorically speaking, as the ivy to the oak. Her vision being unaided by field-glasses, she was unable to follow his observations with the degree of intelligence he demanded.
“I don’t think I quite—” she remarked anxiously now and again, blinking in the same direction as her spouse.
“To the left, my dear, among the trees,” he would reply. Or, “Half-way up the street. Now don’t you see?” Or, removing the field-glasses for a moment to observe the direction of her anxious blinking, “Why, bless my soul, you aren’t looking the right way at all. Get it in a line with that chimney over there, and the yellow house. The yellow house. You’re looking straight at the pink one. Bless my soul, tut, tut.” And so forth.
A small boy, leaning far over the side of the boat, gazed rapturously into the water, announcing in shrill tones that he could see to the very bottom, an anxious elder sister grasping the back of his jersey meanwhile. A girl with a pigtail jumped about in a manner calculated to bring an abrupt and watery conclusion to the passage, till forcibly restrained by her melancholy-looking father. A young man announced that it was going to be, “Deuced hot on shore, what?” And a gushing young thing of some forty summers appealed to everyone at intervals to know the hour to the very second it would be necessary to return, since it really would be a sin to keep the ship waiting. While the remarks from an elderly and cynical gentleman, that, in the event of unpunctuality on her part, it would be more probable that she would find herself waiting indefinitely at Teneriffe, caused her to giggle hysterically, and label him a naughty man.
“It is a matter for devout thankfulness,” said the Duchessa some ten minutes later, as she and Antony were walking across the square, “that the Fort Salisbury is large enough to permit of a certain separation from one’s fellow humans. I do not wish to be uncharitable, but their proximity does not always appeal to me.”
Antony laughed, and tossed some coppers to a small brown-faced girl, who, clasping an infant nearly as large as herself, jabbered at him in an unknown but wholly understandable language.
“You’ll be besieged and bankrupt before you see the ship again, if you begin that,” warned the Duchessa.