On this bright evening off Queenstown Ronny was in a condition of special glee. Jacynth had put in the sweepstakes on the day’s run a sovereign in the name of Ronny, and Ronny had won the stake.
“Good gracious!” cried Jacynth, holding him at arm’s length, “what on earth is a little mite like you going to do with £50?”
“I know,” said Ronny, his eyes beaming with delight. “I remember when we were staying at Harrogate having a ride in a donkey chaise. It was very nice, but mother told me that the donkeys here are nothing like what grow in the streets of Cairo. When she was there she had two white donkeys as tall as a horse, with beautiful ears as long as my arm, and great brown eyes that look at you as if they wondered whether you could be so cruel as to want them to trot through dusty streets on a hot day. Mother often said she would like to have a pair of donkeys like she had in Cairo. ‘Pharaoh’ and ‘Rameses’ were their names, together with a little carriage to hold her and me. I’ll buy her the whole turnout with my £50, and we’ll go driving about all by ourselves through Jersey, Guernsey, Alderney, and Sark.”
“Well, that’s pretty selfish of you,” said Jacynth, who keenly realized the joys of the situation as pictured by the boy, only he would liked to have rearranged the company behind “Rameses and Pharaoh.” They were all and always thinking of a woman waiting and watching in Guernsey. Lord Francis, with wistful eyes, thought of love, Jacynth with dumb, gnawing pain, Ronny with eager desire to see her smile, hear her voice, and feel her arms sheltering him, Lord Castleton having some doubt as to whether she was worthy of it all, and Mme. de Vigny——
Well, Mme. de Vigny did not talk of the direction her thoughts took.
It was so near the dinner hour that it had been decided to postpone dinner till the mails and passengers bound for Queenstown had left. The tender was close in sight, rolling and pitching in a manner that seemed inscrutable to the throng leaning over the taffrail. The magnificent Danic stood immovable as a stone pier on the rolling tide. The tender was speedily freighted with innumerable bags containing the mails, some thirty passengers followed amid hearty farewells from newly-made friends left behind, and many appointments were registered to meet again in London or Paris. With the last group there stepped toward the gangway a tall figure, a woman closely veiled, carrying a small bag in her hand. Just as she was stepping on the gangway the tender gave a lurch that dislodged the railed plank. Two passengers already on it narrowly escaped the disaster. They had just managed to skip on to the paddle-box of the tender, when, amid loud cries of “Stand back,” addressed to the group pressing forward on to the Danic, half a dozen ready hands hauled the gangway out of its aslant position, and made things smooth again. Once more the tall veiled figure pressed forward, when one of the steerage passengers roughly gripped her by the shoulder and thrust her back. “Not this journey, madame,” he said, seizing her wrist with a grip of iron. “Your passage is booked all the way to Liverpool, and we may as well make the most of the journey.” The woman turned on her captor with the fury of a trapped lioness. For a moment it seemed as if she would grapple with him, and since she was nearly his height it would have been a desperate conflict, probably ending with a death grip under water.
For a moment the idea flashed over the mind of Mme. de Vigny. She felt her game was up; wearied with the squalor of her unused condition, she did not care how soon she handed in the checks.
But she remembered that she had still one card to play, over which she had brooded in the dead, unhappy night as she lay wide awake in her narrow berth.
“Perhaps you’d better have let me go,” she said to the man, whose plain clothes disguised his vocation of police sergeant. Then she sauntered slowly back, conscious that among the crowd on the hurricane deck curiously watching this episode was the man she really began to love with desperate affection now that her charms no longer lured him, and he was restlessly counting every mile that separated him from the white-curtained, rose-garlanded cottage in Guernsey where his wife awaited his coming.
“Jacynth, I wish I was certain to live for ten years or even for three,” said Lord Francis Onslow, in the low, nerveless voice that had recently become habitual to him. The two friends were walking up and down the deck smoking their last cigar. Four bells had sounded and they had the deck pretty much to themselves, save for the ghostly figures of the watch that moved with noiseless footsteps to and fro. When they came on deck after dinner the moon was shining, and far away on the starboard bow they could clearly discern the coast of Ireland, lying like a dark shadow on the moonlit water. Even as they walked and talked the scene changed. It had not at any time of the day been perfectly calm, as the passengers on the tender found as they made their way into Queenstown Harbor. Now it was blowing pretty fresh from the southwest, bringing up angry-looking clouds that from time to time hid the moon, promising presently finally to obscure its light. They were drawing up to Carnsore Point, and were soon in the race of the channel. By this time they had found their sea legs, and though the wind played havoc with their cigars, as they paced about, and they gave up the attempt to keep pace in walking, they held on, Jacynth’s spirits rising with the boisterous breeze.