'This motion,' he growled to Captain Glew, whilst he grasped a decanter of brandy by the neck, 'is not an honest heave. I am a good sailor in seas where the head and the stomach swing together, but when the stomach leaps at the head, and the head darts back from the stomach, leaving a sensation of brains in one's very toes, I give up.'
And so saying, he swallowed a glass of brandy, and lay down.
It was now that Miss Vi felt the want of a maid, or, at all events, of a stewardess to attend upon her. But Vanderholt had been dogged and Dutch in this matter when they had talked about the voyage at home. He would have no women, he said; they would be going forward among the men, and breeding trouble. Was it not good for Violet that she should learn to help herself? Could not she do her own hair? Then let her cut it off; it would be growing whilst they were away. These trifles illustrated Mr. Vanderholt's eccentricities as a rich man, and Violet's submissiveness as an only daughter.
However, the fine girl was not so ill but that she could manage for herself. Her nausea had left her, whilst her father still lay grunting, incapable of smoking, and gray as his beard. She waited upon him, and stood upright with ease upon a bounding deck by his side, holding on to nothing but her own hands. He rolled a languid eye of admiration over her.
'I did not bargain for this,' said he, 'or, as God is my witness, we would have joined the hooker at Plymouth.'
'Where are we now?'
'In the Chops, where the Channel always shows its teeth,' answered Mr. Vanderholt, with an ashy grin of nausea.
Vanderholt need not have been ashamed. Nelson, whilst rolling in the Downs, wrote with pathetic irritability to his Emma of his incessant sickness. A man has stepped ashore after a voyage to Australia. Would not you suppose him seasoned? Yet, on crossing the Channel in one of the small steamers, he was more violently sick than the most prostrate of the Frenchmen who lay in cloaks, with tureens by their sides, helpless about the decks.
'There is the Bay of Biscay to come,' said Miss Violet, with a lurking hope that, if her father's sickness continued, he would order Captain Glew to steer for home again.
'Yes, it is not far off, and I hope it may blow a hurricane when we get there, for then I shall be all right. I like a tall sea. Man and boy, I never could stand these rugged little Channel tumblers. Call for the steward, my dear. I want some tea.'