“Then you didn’t ’ear as the bottle was filled with seltzer or some such stuff ’stead o’ champagne?” she asked excitedly.
“No,” I answered, “but I don’t see what difference that could make.”
“Sailors would,” she returned darkly. “An’ besides, the bottle didn’t break an’ ’ad ter be smashed afterwards.”
“Belinda Ann,” I exclaimed severely, “how can you be so wicked? Don’t you know that it’s very wrong to take notice of omens and to be superstitious and to believe in luck and chance?”
She screwed up her mouth and pouted her lips in a way she had when not convinced and too polite to say so (which latter was not often!), and then said doggedly, “Then why was it all those people were thrown into the water by the back-wash, an’ lots on ’em drownded?” which was the first intimation I had of what turned out to be a terrible accident.
I regret to say that on this occasion (the first time I had tried to get in “a word in season”) Belinda apparently got the best of it, but for once she bore her victory modestly, being too subdued by the catastrophe and the danger which had approached me to be very jubilant or to triumph openly.
Now I understood her flight, for she was afraid lest more horrors were to come, and, regarding me as a precious piece of costly treasure in her care, she had never rested till I was landed in comparative safety.
She had even shielded me from the sight of it all, and the chivalrous soul, who would never have known fear on her own account, had yielded to panic for my sake.
Thus I was made aware of another characteristic of my East-Ender, namely, the vein of superstition which underlay the practical matter-of-fact front she presented to the workaday world.
There was a deep-seated belief in her mind in such things as luck and chance, as I now found out, and when she left me that night she was still firmly convinced that the ship we had seen launched that day would never come to any good!