'I wonder Mr. Fairbanks should tell that yarn of me,' continued Captain Glew. 'If my wife gets to hear of it—and there's trouble enough in married life without lies——'
'So the bubbles break as quickly as they are blown,' said Mr. Vanderholt. 'But I confess I never would have thought it of you, Captain Glew.'
After dinner the father and daughter patrolled the deck, warmly wrapped. Mr. Vanderholt smoked an immense pipe that curled from an amber tip at his lips into a richly-bronzed and glowing bowl in his hand. It was early night. The wind was gone, the stream of tide softly shaled along the bends of the schooner in the note of surf washing on shingle heard at a distance. How dismal, flat and gaunt looked the treeless Tilbury shore in that sad light! The very stars shining over it seemed to tremble with the spirit of mud and cold desolation. Shadowy shapes of ships went by, sometimes to a sound of music, as of concertinas and the like; tall phantasmal shapes, lifting spires as delicate as needles to the stars, loomed anear and afar. In the main, silence lay upon that river, with its burden of living freights.
The crew loafed about the schooner's deck forward, and the grumble of their voices came aft, along with the scent of tobacco-smoke. They slept in a deck-house, with three windows of a side, and spikes of light shot from those windows, occasionally glancing on the figure of a passing man, and falling in streams of radiance upon the bulwarks. Besides this deck-house, the schooner owned a small forecastle, containing three or four bunks.
'I don't know how it may be with you, Vi,' said Mr. Vanderholt, pressing his daughter's arm affectionately against his side, 'but I give you my word I feel better already.'
'That's a good thing,' exclaimed the young lady. 'I wish George were with us.'
'George is not two men. He can't be in India and here at the same time.'
'He ought to be here, by my side,' said Miss Vanderholt. 'Oh, how delicious the voyage would then be! I should not object to your sailing round the world.'
'Make the youngster give up the army. He's got means of his own, and you'll be pretty well off, I hope,' said Mr. Vanderholt. 'If you go out to India I shall be alone, and you'll die of some distemper, engendered by what is there called "a station." No good in titular dignity. The land teems with captains and colonels; and a time may come when a man will be respected because he is not a major-general. It would be different if George was in the Dutch army.'