CHAPTER V
AFLOAT
Fifteen days had passed since Madame de Carlsberg, in spite of her promises, her resolutions, her remorse, had confessed her passion to Pierre Hautefeuille. The date fixed for the cruise of the Jenny had arrived, and he and she were standing side by side on the deck of the yacht, which was bearing also the Marquise Bonnacorsi toward her fantastic marriage, and her confidante, Miss Marsh, and pretty Madame de Chésy and her husband for the entertainment of the Commodore. That was the nickname given by his niece to the indefatigable Carlyle Marsh, who, in truth, scarcely ever left the bridge, where he stood directing the course of the boat with the skill of a professional sailor.
This Marionville potentate would have had no pleasure in a carriage unless he drove it, or in a yacht unless he steered it. He said himself, without boasting:—
"If I should be ruined to-morrow I know twenty ways of making a living. I am a mechanic, coachman, carpenter, pilot."
On this afternoon, while the Jenny sailed toward Genoa, he was at his post on the bridge, in his gold braided hat, glass in hand, his maps open before him, and he directed the course with an attention as complete and scrupulous as though he had been occupied all his life in giving orders to sailors. He had to a supreme degree that trait common to all great workers,—the capacity for giving himself always and wholly to the occupation of the moment. And to him the vast sea, so blue and soft, whose calm surface scarcely rippled, was but a racecourse upon which to exercise his love of contest, of struggle, the one pleasure of the Anglo-Saxon. Five hundred yards to the right, ahead of the Jenny, was a low, black yacht, with a narrower hull, steaming at full speed. It was the Dalilah, of Lord Herbert Bohun. Farther ahead, on the left, another yacht was sailing in the same direction. This one was white, like the Jenny, but with a wider beam. It was the Albatross, the favorite plaything of the Grand Dukes of Russia. The American had allowed these two yachts to leave Cannes some time before him, with the intention, quickly perceived by the others, of passing them, and immediately, as it were, a tacit wager was made by the Russian prince, the English lord, and the American millionaire, all three equally fanatical of sport, each as proud of his boat as a young man of his horses or his mistress.
To Dickie Marsh, as he stood with his glass in his hand, giving orders to the men, the whole scene reduced itself to a triangle, whose corners were marked by the three yachts. He was literally blind to the admirable horizon that stretched before him; the violet Esterel, with the long, undulating line of its mountains, its dark ravines and jagged promontories, the port of Cannes and the mole, with the old town and the church rising behind it, all bathed in an atmosphere so transparent that one could distinguish every little window and its shutters, every tree behind the walls, the luxuriant hills of Grasse in the background, and along the bay the line of white villas set in their gardens; then the islands, like two oases of dark green, and suddenly the curve of another gulf, terminated by the solitary point of the Antibes. And the trees on this point, like those of the islands, bouquets of parasol pines, all bent in one direction, spoke of the eternal drama of this shore, the war of the mistral and the waves. But now the drama was suspended, giving place to the most intoxicating flood of light. Not a fleck of foam marred the immense sweep of liquid sapphire over which the Jenny advanced with a sonorous and fresh sound of divided water. Not one of those flaky clouds, which sailors call cattails, lined the radiant dome of the sky where the sun appeared to expand, dilate, rejoice in ether absolutely pure. It seemed as though this sky and sea and shore had conspired to fulfil the prophecy of the chiromancer, Corancez, upon the passage of the boat that was bearing his clandestine fiancée; and Andryana Bonnacorsi recalled that prediction to Flossie Marsh as they leaned on the deck railing, clothed in similar costumes of blue and white flannel—the colors of the Jenny's awning—and talked while they watched the Dalilah drawing nearer and nearer.
"You remember in the Casino at Monte Carlo how he foretold this weather from our hands, exactly this and no other. Isn't it extraordinary, after all?"
"You see how wrong you were to be afraid," replied Miss Marsh; "if he saw clearly in one case, he must have done so in the others. We are going to have a fine night on sea, and by one o'clock to-morrow we shall head for Genoa."
"Don't be so confident," said the Italian, extending her hand with two fingers crossed to charm away the evil fates; "you will bring us bad luck."
"What! with this sky, this sea, this yacht, these lifeboats?"