Burgo's Romance

by T. W. Speight

Marchment had a deck chair brought for her, and she sat for upwards of an hour, drinking in the briny life-giving air and enjoying the novelty of the scene and its surroundings.

In the afternoon the long-threatened rain began to fall, and they seemed to have got into one of those cross seas which are apt to make non-sailors feel somewhat qualmish. Marchment and the crew had donned their oilskins.

In the dusk of the afternoon Burgo again went on deck and found a sheltered nook abaft the funnel where his pipe would not be put out by the rain. They were now well within sight of land again, and in point of fact were leisurely skirting, at a distance of three or four miles, a rocky picturesque-looking coast which stretched as far as the eye could reach nearly due north and south of their course.

Some hours later, long after night had fallen, the screw of the Naiad ceased to revolve, an intermission which Miss Roylance, at any rate, did not fail to appreciate. Then presently (as it appeared to those below) a boat seemed to put off from the yacht and other boats to put out to her from the shore. There was the tramp of many footsteps and a confused murmur of many voices, and to Burgo it seemed as if the contents of the hold, or part of them--whatever they might consist of--were being brought up by degrees and transferred to the boats; yet all was done with such an evident caution and such an absence of more noise than was absolutely unavoidable, that if there had been some one on board in extremis greater care could scarcely have been used. In less than an hour and a half the last boat left the yacht, and then, after a few minutes' interval, the screw began slowly to revolve.

While this mysterious business had been going forward all lights below deck had been extinguished. Marchment had apologised, almost humbly, for the necessity he was under of asking his guests to so far oblige him; but, as Mr. Brabazon told him, his guests would only have been too glad had they been called upon to oblige him in some matter of far greater moment than that.

When Burgo went on deck at an early hour next morning the Naiad was again out of sight of land. Presently he was joined by Marchment, who said, "I got rid of my business last evening, and am now my own master. Perhaps you will ask Sir Everard in the course of the morning what his programme is, provided he has one. If he would like a few days' cruise in the yacht, I and it are wholly at his service. On the other hand, if he would prefer to be landed at some port within, say, a couple of hundred miles of where we are, we are equally at his command."

"Marchment, you are weighing us down with obligations which we can never repay. But may I be permitted to ask whereabouts on the map of Europe we are just now?"

"It will perhaps be near enough to satisfy you if I tell you that we are within a score miles of the Mull of Galloway."

When the subject was mentioned to the baronet and he had taken time to think it over, he said that if it would not be inconveniencing Mr. Marchment too much, he should like to be landed at Ardrossan. He had an old friend living within a dozen miles of that place whom he had not seen for years, and who had lately acquired some very rare Byzantine coins which he, Sir Everard, was particularly desirous of examining.

Accordingly the yacht's head was put about and Ardrossan made in due course. There Marchment and his new-found friends took leave of each other, not without many expressions of hearty goodwill on both sides, one may be sure. As for Burgo and Marchment, they by no means intended to lose touch of each other in time to come.