The Rose of Delhi, Captain Tanerton, sailed out of port again, carrying also with her Mrs. Tanerton, the captain’s wife. And Aunt Dean was left to bemoan her fate, and wish she had never tried to shape out other people’s destinies. Better, as Alice said, that she had left that to God.
VIII.
GOING THROUGH THE TUNNEL.
We had to make a rush for it. And making a rush did not suit the Squire, any more than it does other people who have come to an age when the body’s heavy and the breath nowhere. He reached the train, pushed head-foremost into a carriage, and then remembered the tickets. “Bless my heart?” he exclaimed, as he jumped out again, and nearly upset a lady who had a little dog in her arms, and a mass of fashionable hair on her head, that the Squire, in his hurry, mistook for tow.
“Plenty of time, sir,” said a guard who was passing. “Three minutes to spare.”
Instead of saying he was obliged to the man for his civility, or relieved to find the tickets might still be had, the Squire snatched out his old watch, and began abusing the railway clocks for being slow. Had Tod been there he would have told him to his face that the watch was fast, braving all retort, for the Squire believed in his watch as he did in himself, and would rather have been told that he could go wrong than that the watch could. But there was only me: and I wouldn’t have said it for anything.
“Keep two back-seats there, Johnny,” said the Squire.
I put my coat on the corner furthest from the door, and the rug on the one next to it, and followed him into the station. When the Squire was late in starting, he was apt to get into the greatest flurry conceivable; and the first thing I saw was himself blocking up the ticket-place, and undoing his pocket-book with nervous fingers. He had some loose gold about him, silver too, but the pocket-book came to his hand first, so he pulled it out. These flurried moments of the Squire’s amused Tod beyond everything; he was so cool himself.
“Can you change this?” said the Squire, drawing out one from a roll of five-pound notes.