‘How long will it take you to arrive at Toulon?’ I asked.
Again Captain Regnier, when this inquiry was translated, shrugged his shoulders and answered that it was a question for the wind.
‘I will fetch the chart,’ said Alphonse, ‘and madame shall remark our situation for herself.’
He arose and walked to the forward part of the living room. I had supposed that that part was wholly walled off from the other portion of the ship. But the young Frenchman, putting his hand upon a ring in the middle of the wooden wall, drew open a sliding door. Captain Regnier said in broken English: ‘My cabin is there.’
In a few minutes Alphonse returned with a large map or chart, which he unrolled upon a part of the table that he cleared to receive it. It was too dark, however, to read the small print on the chart, and Captain Regnier, breathing short and heavily with the exertion of moving his vast shapeless form, lighted the lamp. My feebleness would not suffer me to rise and bend over the chart, and perceiving this the two Frenchmen held open before me the wide sheet of cartridge paper.
‘There,’ said Captain Regnier, pointing to a part of the chart with a large fat forefinger on which glittered a thick silver ring, ‘there,’ said he, ‘is the situation of Notre Dame de Boulogne at the present moment.’
‘That point of land,’ exclaimed Alphonse after translating, ‘is Finisterre. The brick then is off Finisterre. Does the name of Finisterre give you any ideas?’
I continued to think, with my eyes rooted to the chart, and then I answered, ‘None.’
‘Here is Toulon,’ said Captain Regnier, ‘and this is the course of the vessel to that port,’ and he ran his fat finger down the chart, past the coast of Spain and through the Straits of Gibraltar to the Gulf of Lyons.