Old Simeon Cross, the master-shipman, was standing by the long tiller, shouting orders at the seamen to the accompaniment of a string of expletives uttered in half a dozen different tongues.
"Yarely, now, yarely with the cable! Dick, do you attend to the vang; Tom, thou rapscallion, haul handsomely on yonder brace. Avast heaving there! Now she feels it!"
Before the steady north-westerly breeze the Grâce à Dieu bore rapidly down the Emsworth Channel; the low-lying islands of Thorney and Hayling were quickly passed, and, after a buffeting on the wind-swept bar, the staunch vessel was curtseying to the long, heavy swell of the English Channel.
Ere noon the Sussex Downs were but a low, indistinct line of blue against the northern sky, while the rounded hills of the Isle of Wight were fading away on the starboard quarter.
Then, having given the helmsman the course by means of the lodestone that did duty for a compass, Simeon went below to rest, since he must needs be on deck throughout the coming night.
"The English shore is well-nigh lost to view," remarked Oswald. "Ere morning we ought to see the coast of France, an this wind hold."
"Aye, an we are not molested by any of the sea rovers that infest the Channel," added Gripwell. "Now, young sirs, I'll wager that old Simeon will descry the French coast ere either of your young eyes can do so."
"I have heard it said that a shipmaster's vision is better by far than a landsman's," replied Richard Ratclyffe. "Yet I call to mind a device that my master, Sir Thomas, purchased from a monk of Limoges. It was but a tube of wood filled with sundry pieces of glass, yet one could distinguish a man's features a league away."
"By St. George, Master Ratclyffe," exclaimed Gripwell, "thou art trying to befool us, saving thy presence. See a man's face a league off, forsooth! Certes, next thou'lt say that it is possible for a person in England to clap a trumpet to his mouth and speak to another in France. Go to, Master Ratclyffe, Arnold Gripwell is not to be caught by such reports."
"Yet such is the truth, Gripwell," replied the squire.