She went into the room with a fear and wildness in her manner, stopped to lean upon the table and look at her husband, and in that pause I see her now, though it did not pass beyond the space of a few heart-beats. She was about thirty-five years of age, a very fine figure of a woman indeed, with a vast profusion of yellow hair, of which she was exceedingly vain, often changing the fashion of wearing it two and three times in a week. The firelight was upon her face, and she showed like marble as she gazed at father with a hand under her left breast. Then running up to him she looked close, cried out, and fell in a swoon upon the floor. Will and I were horribly frightened, and screamed together. This brought the servants and the sewing-woman to us. A doctor was sent for, and when he arrived and examined father he pronounced him dead.
It was characteristic of my mother that she should faint when she looked at my father and believed him dead, though for all she knew he might have been in a fit, wanting instant attention to preserve him from death. She was a tender mother, and, I believe, did her best to be a good wife; but she had not strength of character; she was pretty and thought herself beautiful, and was more easily to be cheated by flatterers than any woman I ever met in my life. Her weakness in this way was the cause of much unhappiness to me, of many a bitter secret tear some years after my father’s death, as I will explain a little way farther on.
CHAPTER II
HER MEMORIES
I missed my father out of my life as though the sun had gone out of the heavens. I had been far more of a companion to him than my mother. I had venerated him as something superior to all created beings; which, I dare say, was not a little owing to his stories of the sea, to the various wonders he was able to recount, and to his descriptions of distant lands, as remote as the stars to my young imagination. The company he kept was nearly wholly composed of sailors, sea captains, either retired or actively employed. My mother would often be out visiting, passing an evening at a card party, or at a dance at some neighbour’s when our parlour, which was long and wide, but low-ceiled, like a ship’s cabin, would be half-full of father’s nautical friends. I’d sit and listen then to their talk; for mother being absent there’d be nobody to bid me go to bed—as to father, he would have let me sit until he went to bed himself. Thus it was I heard so much talk of the sea, that I was able to discourse on ships and rigging, on high seas and gales of wind, on icebergs, whales and uncharted shoals, as though I had never lived out of a forecastle. Indeed, I knew too much. I was often pert, lifted up my shrill voice in correction of some old captain, and so would raise a very thunder of laughter and applause in the room.
Again, I was often my father’s companion in the trips he made in his own coasters down the river. Those excursions were the golden hours of my childhood. We’d row on board a little brig weighing from the Pool, and stay in the ship till we were off Gravesend, where we’d land. Mother never joined us. When the wind caused the vessel to lay over she said it made her sick. I dare say it did.
Father’s little fleet was mainly composed of coasters, as I have said, grimy of deck for the most part, with a strong smell of the bilge in the atmosphere of their darksome cabins, wagons in shape and staggerers in their gait, with a lean and coaly look aloft as they heeled, black and gaunt, from bank to bank of the river over the smooth stream of ebb or flood. But those trips made choice hours to me, and are sweeter than the memories of sport in the summer grass and of hunts in the rank growths of ditches and the country hedge.
I remember that during one of these trips we nearly ran down a large boat when we were not very far from Woolwich, lying over with the wind ahead and the water spitting briskly at our forefoot. I went to the side to look; she was a big boat with soldiers in her, and full of strange-looking men in gray clothes and a sort of Scotch cap. I saw the irons upon those men as the boat swept close past and heard the clank of the chains as the wretches shrank or started in terror at the sight of the mass of our bare, black hull, rolling like a storm-cloud almost right over them. Father was below. I asked Mr. Smears, the master of the brig, who stood close alongside of me in a tall, rusty hat and a stout coat that descended to within a foot of his heels, what boat that was.
‘A convict boat, missy,’ he answered.