“Who else should I mean? My love for Miss Rose is so very decided and animated, I tell you, Madam Budd, that I will not answer for the consequences should you not consent to her marryin’ me.”
“I can scarce believe my ears! You, Stephen Spike, and an old friend of her uncle’s, wishing to marry his niece.”
“Just so, Madam Budd; that’s it to a shavin’. The regard I have for the whole family is so great, that nothin’ less than the hand of Miss Rose in marriage can what I call mitigate my feelin’s.”
Now the relict had not one spark of tenderness herself in behalf of Spike, while she did love Rose better than any human being, her own self excepted. But she had viewed all the sentiment of that morning, and all the fine speeches of the captain, very differently from what the present state of things told her she ought to have viewed them; and she felt the mortification natural to her situation. The captain was so much bent on the attainment of his own object, that he saw nothing else, and was even unconscious that his extraordinary and somewhat loud discourse had been overheard. Least of all did he suspect that his admiration had been mistaken, and that in what he called “courtin’ ” the niece, he had been all the while “courtin’ ” the aunt. But little apt as she was to discover any thing, Mrs. Budd had enough of her sex’s discernment in a matter of this sort, to perceive that she had fallen into an awkward mistake, and enough of her sex’s pride to resent it. Taking her work in her hand, she left her seat and descended to the cabin with quite as much dignity in her manner as it was in the power of one of her height and “build” to express. What is the most extraordinary, neither she nor Spike ever ascertained that their whole dialogue had been overheard. Spike continued to pace the quarter-deck for several minutes, scarce knowing what to think of the relict’s manner, when his attention was suddenly drawn to other matters by the familiar cry of “sail-ho!”
This was positively the first vessel with which the Molly Swash had fallen in since she lost sight of two or three craft that had passed her in the distance, as she left the American coast. As usual, this cry brought all hands on deck, and Mulford out of his state-room.
It has been stated already that the brig was just beginning to feel the trades, and it might have been added, to see the mountains of San Domingo. The winds had been variable for the last day or two, and they still continued light, and disposed to be unsteady, ranging from north-east to southeast, with a preponderance in favor of the first point. At the cry of “sail-ho!” every body looked in the indicated direction, which was west, a little northerly, but for a long time without success. The cry had come from aloft, and Mulford went up as high as the fore-top before he got any glimpse of the stranger at all. He had slung a glass, and Spike was unusually anxious to know the result of his examination.
“Well, Mr. Mulford, what do you make of her?” he called out as soon as the mate announced that he saw the strange vessel.
“Wait a moment, sir, till I get a look—she’s a long way off, and hardly visible.”
“Well, sir, well?”
“I can only see the heads of her topgallant-sails. She seems a ship steering to the southward, with as many kites flying as an Indiaman in the trades. She looks as if she were carrying royal stun’-sails, sir.”