“Isobel, how little you know him!” Thus spoke Elsie, after fourteen days. Truly there is much enlightenment in a hug!
Monsieur le Comte Edouard de Poincilit, to his intense chagrin, found that a ship’s captain has far-reaching powers when he chooses to exert them. Rather than enter a Montevidean jail, where people have died suddenly of nasty fevers, he not only restored the missing documents but submitted to a close scrutiny of his own belongings, which resulted in the pleasing discovery that he was not a French count, but a denizen of Martinique—most probably a defaulting valet or clerk. No one troubled to inquire further about him. His passage money was refunded and he was bundled ashore. Courtenay’s view was that he had heard, by some means, of Isobel’s intended departure from Valparaiso, and deemed it a good chance of winning her approval of his countship, seeing that such titles are not subjected to serious investigation in South America. Suarez took his Fuegian bride up country, where Mr. Baring and Dr. Christobal established them on a small ranch.
Isobel renewed her voyage somewhat chastened in spirit. But her volatile nature soon survived the shocks it had received. By the time the Kansas put her ashore at Tilbury, to be clasped in the arms of a timid and tearful aunt, she was ready as ever for the campaign of glory she had mapped out in London and Paris.
And she was a success, too. Her father’s victory over the copper ring, her own adventures, which lost nothing in the telling, and her vivacious self-confidence, carried her into society with a whirl. Recently, her engagement to an impecunious peer was announced.
* * * * * *
Captain Courtenay, R.N., and his wife are not such distinguished personages, but their romance had a sequel worthy of its unusual beginning. They were married quietly a week after the Kansas reached London. There was some war scare in full blast at the moment, and a Lord of the Admiralty who deigned to read the newspapers thought it was a pity that a smart sailor should not risk his life for his country rather than in behalf of base commerce. So he looked up Courtenay’s record, and found that it was excellent, the young lieutenant’s reason for resigning his commission being the necessity of supporting his mother when her estate was swept away by a bank failure. The Sea Lords made him a first-rate offer of reinstatement in the service, at a higher rank, without any loss of seniority, and they went about the business with such dignified leisure that Dr. Christobal had time to find out, through men whom he could trust, that Elsie’s small estate in Chile contained one of the richest mines in the country. He secured a bid of many thousands of pounds for it, and advised Mrs. Courtenay to accept half in cash and half in shares of the exploiting company.
Hence, there was no need for Courtenay to decline a new career in the magnificent service which Mr. Boyle once sniffed at, and Elsie became a prominent figure in that very select circle which clusters around the ports mostly favored by his Majesty’s ships.
It was not unreasonable that Gray should go back to Chile to take charge of Elsie’s mine, nor that Mr. Boyle should become captain and Walker chief engineer, of the Kansas, but there was one wholly unexpected development which fairly took Elsie’s breath away when she heard of it.
She was with her husband in London. While passing the National Gallery one day, she remembered the picture by Claude which deals with the embarkation of Saint Ursula and her Eleven Thousand Virgins. A painter herself, Elsie had an artist’s appreciation of the vanity which led Turner to bequeath his finest canvasses to the nation with the proviso that they should be placed cheek by jowl with those of his great rival, the Lorrainer. So a fat fox-terrier was given in charge of a catalogue seller, and they passed up the steps.
It was a students’ day, and the galleries were crowded with embryonic geniuses. Courtenay waxed sarcastic anent the rig of Claude’s ships; he was laughing at the careless grace with which several of the Baozan maidens were standing in a boat just putting off from a wharf, when a lady cried sharply: