‘I can see that in your face,’ said I.
‘Oh, I hope it is not, and yet I want it to be the “Shark” too. Wilfrid must recover Henrietta. But it makes my heart stand still to think of our meeting. Oh, her shame! her shame! and then to find me here. And what is to happen?’
‘Best let that craft turn out to be the “Shark” though,’ said I. ‘Here we are with a programme of rambles that threatens the world’s end if we don’t fall in with the Colonel. Keep your heart up,’ said I gently. ‘What have you to fear? It is for the galled jade to wince. Why t’other night you would have shot Hope-Kennedy had he stood up before you.’
She tried to smile, but the movement of her lips swiftly faded out into their expression of grief and consternation.
‘I will play my part,’ she exclaimed, twisting her ring upon her finger. ‘If my sister refuses to leave Colonel Hope-Kennedy I have made up my mind not to leave her. Where she goes I’ll go.’
‘I hope not,’ I interrupted, ‘for it might come, Miss Jennings, to my saying that where you go I’ll go, and the Colonel may have rather curious views on the subject of guests.’
‘You said you were too excited to talk,’ she exclaimed with a little colour mounting. ‘It may be that I am stupidly influenced by old memories. I was always afraid of Henrietta. She had an imperious manner, and an old lord whom I met at your cousin’s—I forget his name—told Wilfrid that her eyes made him think of Mrs. Siddons in her finest scenes. I fear her influence upon me when I begin to entreat her. I know how she will look.’
‘All this is mere nervousness,’ said I. ‘You thought of these things before, yet you are here. Besides, the sense of wrong-doing will mightily weaken the genius of wizardry in her—her power at least of exercising it and subduing by it—subduing even you, the tenderest and gentlest of girls; or depend on’t she’s no true member of your sex, but one of those demon-women whom Coleridge describes as wailing for their, or rather in her case for new, lovers.’
She made no reply. Shortly afterwards the breakfast bell summoned us below.
At table Wilfrid spoke little, but his manner was collected; whether it was that excitement was languishing in him or that he had managed to master himself, what he said was rational, his words and manner unclouded by that hectic which was wont to give the countenance of a high fever to all he said and did when anything happened to stir him up. He was stern and thoughtful, and it was easy to see that he accepted the vessel ahead as the ‘Shark,’ and that he was settling his plans. I was heartily grateful for this posture in him. I never knew anyone so fatiguing with his restlessness as my cousin. Half an hour of his company when he was much excited left one as tired, dry, and hollow as a four hours’ argument with an illogical man. He was too much preoccupied to notice how pale and subdued and scared Miss Laura was, struggle as she might in his presence to seem otherwise. I talked very cautiously for fear of provoking a discussion that might heat him. Once he asked me in an angry, twitting way, as though to the heave-up within him of a sudden mood of wrath with a parcel of words atop which were bound to find the road out, whether I felt disposed now to challenge his judgment, whether I was still of opinion that the ocean was too wide a field for such a chase as this, and so on, proceeding steadily but with rising warmth through the catalogue of my early objections to the voyage, but instead of answering him I praised the bit of virgin corned beef off which I was breakfasting, wondered why it was that poultry was always insipid at sea, and so forced him back into his dark and collected silence or obliged him to quit his subject.