He smothered a yawn and responded: ‘I will leave you to Charles. Would to Heaven I had his spirits! God bless you both—good night.’
He rang for his valet and stalked with hanging arms and drooping head, in the most melancholy manner picturable, to his cabin. I asked Miss Jennings to accompany me on deck.
‘There is a moon in the air,’ said I; ‘you may see the haze of it through this porthole; but I must not forget that it is an autumn night so let me beg you to wrap yourself up warmly whilst I slip on a pea-coat.’
I fancied she hung in the wind an instant, as a girl might who could not promptly see her way to walking the deck of a yacht alone with a young man on a moonlight or any other night, but she assented so quickly in reality that I dare say my suspicion was an idle and groundless bit of sensitiveness. Five minutes later we were on deck together.
The yacht was floating through the dusk—that was tinctured into glimmering pearl by the broad face of the silver moon, which had already climbed several degrees above the black sky-line of the Isle of Wight—without the least perceptible stir or tremor in her frame. The wind was well abaft the starboard beam; the great main boom overhung the port quarter; the white sail rose wan to the moonshine with a large gaff topsail above it—for those were the days of gaffs—dimming into a space of airy faintness to the masthead, above the white button of whose truck you caught the icy gleam of a metal vane as though it was a piece of meteoric scoring under the dust of the stars that hovered in the velvet gloom like a sheet of undulating silver glooming out into hollows in places. Light as the breeze was, and following us besides, it held the canvas asleep; but that every cloud-like cloth was doing its work, too, the ear quickly noted in the pleasant fountain-like sounds of running waters over the side, with a cool seething noise in the wake and a fairy tinkling of exploding foam-bells. The land to port loomed black against the moonshine, save where some slope or other catching the slanting beam showed the faint green of its herbage or wooded growths in a very phantasm of hue, like some verdant stretch of land dyeing an attenuated veil of vapour witnessed afar upon the ocean. Over the port bow I caught sight of a light or two a long way down the dusky reach, as it seemed, with a brighter gleam to starboard where the land, catching the moonlight, came in visionary streaks and breaks to abeam and on past the quarter where it seemed to melt out into some twinkling beacon—off Calshot Castle, maybe, so far astern it looked.
I spied the sturdy figure of the mate standing beside the wheel, no longer steering, but manifestly conning the yacht. The skipper was abreast of the skylight, leaning over the rail with his arm round a backstay; there were figures moving forward tipping the gloom there with the scarlet points of glowing bowls of tobacco, but if they conversed it was in whispers. The stillness was scarce imaginable. It was heightened yet even to my fancy presently when, growing used to the light, I spied the phantom figure of what was apparently a large brig clouded to her royals with pale canvas stemming the Solent, outward bound, some half a mile distant.
‘There is no dew,’ said I; ‘the moon shines purely, and is full of promise so far as fine weather goes. Well! here we are fairly started indeed. It is almost a dream to me, Miss Jennings, d’ye know?’ I continued, staring about me. ‘Three days ago I had no notice of anything having gone wrong with my cousin, and therefore little dreamt, as you will suppose, of what I was to enter upon this blessed afternoon. Three days ago! And now here am I heading into God knows what part of this mighty globe of ocean as empty of all theory of destination as though I were bound in a balloon to the part the poets call interstellar space. How is it all to end, I wonder?’
She was pacing quietly by my side.
‘You think the pursuit a silly one, Mr. Monson?’
‘Yes, I do, and Wilfrid knows that I do. If he were not——He is my cousin, Miss Jennings, and a dear friend, and you are his sister-in-law and dear to him, too, I am sure, and so I dare be candid with you. If it were not that he—’ (I touched my forehead) ‘would he embark on such a quest as this?’