‘You need a stepfather to understand my unhappy state.’
‘No very unhappy state, surely,’ said he, looking at the table, and then round the well-furnished room.
‘I think I shall go a voyage some of these days, Will,’ said I.
‘Sail with me, Marian,’ he answered.
‘Where’s your ship bound to?’
‘Sydney, New South Wales—a splendid trip. Three months there, three months back, three months to see the country in.’
‘And you give me a fortnight to make up my mind!’ said I, laughing. ‘Don’t they send the convicts to Sydney? I can’t fancy that country. ’Tis seeing nothing to meet one’s transported fellow-countrymen. There are plenty of such folks walking past this house at this minute. Who would leave Stepney for Sydney?’
My cousin asked what trade the Arab Chief would be in. Captain Butler answered that he believed she was to trade to the West Indies and eastern South American ports.
‘There’s a big world for you that way, Marian,’ said Will. ‘Down there the wind’s full of bright parrots, every tree writhes with monkeys. Robinson Crusoe lived all alone somewhere in those parts, that’s if the great river of Oroonoque’s where it was in Friday’s time. The home of the great sea serpent is in the Caribbean Sea, and if you kick up an old stone by chance you stand to unearth a mine of precious metal.’
I ended this by rising, and we soon afterwards left the house. It was a clear, cold afternoon, with a bright blue sky for London. We took a coach to Limehouse and then a boat. There is no change in the East India Docks in all these years. I went down to them for memory’s sake not very long ago, and all was the same, it seemed to me, saving the steamers. The basins were full of ships of many sizes and of all rigs; the air was radiant with the flicker and tremble of scores of flags; strange smells of distant countries loaded the atmosphere—sweet oils and spices, wool and scarlet oranges and scented timber. When I was a child my father had sometimes brought me to these docks when he came to them on business; I thought of him as I looked, and felt a little girl again with the odd wonderment and delight of a child in me as I stared at the shipping and the complicated heights of spar and rigging, at the grinding cranes heavily lifting cargo in and out, as I breathed the odours of the littered quays, as I hearkened to the shouts, to the songs of the seamen at the winch or capstan, to the voices of the wind in the gear, soft in the fabric of the taller ships as the gay whistlings of silver pipes heard afar.