The old lady appealed to Captain Keeling. He was looking somewhat dubiously round the horizon when the lieutenant broke in; then Colledge indulged in a flourish, and though I can’t trace the steps of it, nor recollect the talk, somehow or other a little later on the three of us were in the boat, a bag of letters on a thwart, the lieutenant picking up the yoke-lines as he seated himself, the bow-oar thrusting off, with a vision through the open rail of the poop of old Captain Keeling stiffly sawing the air with his arms, in some effort, as I took it, to console Mrs. Radcliffe, who flourished a handkerchief to her face as though she wept.
CHAPTER XVII
THE ‘MAGICIENNE’
The corvette looked a mighty long distance away from the low elevation of the boat’s gunwale—almost as far as the horizon, it seemed to my eyes, though from the height of the deck of the Indiaman the sea-line showed something above the bulwarks of the man-of-war. One hardly noticed the movement in the sea on board the Countess Ida, so solemn and steady was the swing of the great fabric, a movement stealing into one’s thoughts like a habit, and leaving one unconscious of it; but the heave was instantly to be felt in the boat, and I own that I could not have believed there was so much swell until I felt the lift of the noiseless polished fold and marked the soft blue volume of the water brimming to the hot and blistered sides and green sheathing of the Indiaman.
A huge lump of a ship she looked as we were swept away from her; her masts soaring in three spires with the flash of a vane above the airy gossamer of the loftiest cloths; groups of passengers watching us from the violet-tinted shadow under the awning, heads of seamen at the rail, or figures of them upon the forecastle near the huge cathead that struck a shadow of its own into the water under it. The great bowsprit went tapering to the delicacy of the flying-jib-boom end marshalling the flight of white jibs; a stream of radiance floated in the water under each large window. Inexpressible is the effect she produced taken along with the dwindling of her to the impulse of our oars, with the fining down into thinnest notes of the voices of the people, and with the soft and still softening sounds of her canvas lightly swaying.
‘A grand old ship,’ exclaimed the lieutenant.
‘I had no idea she owned such a handsome stern,’ said Colledge; ‘quite a blaze of gilt, I do protest, Miss Temple. How gloriously old Keeling’s cabin-window sparkles amid the gingerbread magnificence of decoration.’
‘What is there in the art of painting to reproduce such a picture as that?’ exclaimed Miss Temple, with her dark eyes glowing to the mood of delight raised in her by the beautiful spectacle. ‘It is like looking at an image in a soap-bubble. What brush could fling those silver-bluish daintinesses of tint upon canvas, and make one see the ship through this atmosphere filled with ocean-light?’
‘Ocean-light!’ exclaimed the lieutenant, viewing her with an air of profound admiration; ‘that is the fit expression, madam. Light at sea is different from light on shore.’