I bade him sit down, pulled the bell for a glass of grog for him, and asked for news of the Spitfire. "Well, sir," he answered, "she's just what I've come to talk to ye about. She'd started a butt as I all along thought, otherwise she's as sound as a bell. There was a shipwright as came down to look at her, and he asked me what we was going to do. I told him that I didn't think the gent as owned her meant to repair her. 'I rather fancy,' I says, says I, feeling my way, 'that he wants to sell her.' 'How much do 'ee ask, d'ye know?' says he, looking at the little dandy. 'I'm sure I can't answer that,' says I, 'but dessay he'll accept any reasonable offer.' Says he, 'May I view her?' 'Sartinly,' I says, says I. He thoroughly overhauled her inside and out, and then, says he, 'I believe I knows a customer for this here craft. Suppose you go and larn what the gentleman wants, and let me know. You'll find me at—' and here he names a public-house."
"Get what you can for her, Caudel," I answered; "the more the better for those to whom the money will go. For my part, as you know, I consider her as at the bottom, but since you've pulled her through I'll ask you to pack up certain articles which are on board; the cabin clock, the plate, my books," and I named a few other items of the little craft's internal furniture.
Well, he sat with me for half-an-hour talking over the dandy and our adventures, then left me, and I went into the town to make a few necessary purchases, missing the society of my darling as though I had lost my right arm; indeed, I felt so wretched without her that, declining the landlord's invitation to join a select circle of Penzance wits over whom he was in the habit of presiding in the evening in a smoking-room full of the vapour of tobacco and the steam of hot rum and whisky, I went to bed at nine o'clock, and may say that I did not sleep the less soundly for missing the heave of the ocean.
Next morning shortly after breakfast Frank arrived to drive me over to ——. Until we were clear of the town he could talk of nothing but Grace, how sweet she was, how exquisite her breeding, how gentle. All this was as it should be, and I heard him with delight.
"But I want you to understand, Herbert, that my conscience never could have suffered me to countenance this elopement but for Lady Amelia's efforts—underhand efforts I must say—to procure her niece's perversion."
"Oh, I quite understand that," I exclaimed.
"She informs me that both her father and mother were Protestants."
"That is so."
"We have a right then to assume, as I put it to her in talking the matter over last night, that were they living they would still be Protestants and would wish their child to remain in our Church. She herself has not the slightest leaning towards Roman Catholicism. Undoubtedly her aunt's conduct is without justification. She was to be rescued, as I understood from your letter from a species of persuasion which a girl of her years and temperament might not long be able to resist. The remedy lay in this elopement. I am sorry to have to say it; but the case is altogether a peculiar one; and I, Herbert, speaking as a clergyman, cannot find it in me to pronounce against you both."
"If an elopement had made a Roman Catholic of her, her aunt would have been willing," said I.