The Last Entry

by William Clark Russell

'He will be a sailor; and if he is a sailor, he will be a man. Combine these two things, and you produce an illustration of human existence beyond the achievement of the most illustrious lineage and the most ancient college.'

Miss Vanderholt was used to her father's views, and continued her breakfast with a distant, listening air, which promised no further expression of opinion upon this proposed voyage to the Equator. A stranger listening at that table to Vanderholt would have guessed that he was a man of hot temper, a Dutchman at root in his views and prejudices, not a man, perhaps, of many friends, spite of his wealth. He fixed his little eyes upon his daughter, and, after gazing at her for some time, with a look of anxiety, he said:

'You know, Vi, I should not care to go without you.'

'No, father; nor should I wish to be left alone at home.'

'You will be happy in the old Mowbray. We will lay in a stock of good things. We will make a fine holiday jaunt of it. Perhaps I shall be able to show you some of the wonders of the deep. We will teach our crew to sing litanies to break the spell of that demon the waterspout. We will hook on to a whale, and thunder through it with foam to the figure-head, with the velocity of the meteoric storm. We shall be at liberty to shift our course as often as we please, and settle some marine problem for good and all; not the sea-serpent—no. Who would defraud the newspapers of that joke? But I am strongly of opinion that there is a distinct difference between the dugong and the mermaid. The old idiots of the fifteenth century no doubt confounded them; and the mermaid, shocked by the hideous misrepresentation—for think of comparing some golden-haired angel of an English girl with a New Zealand native woman, frightful with the hues of her sky, and horrible with devices of the needle!—I say the disgusted mermaid may have sunk into the ooze, resolved never again to give man a sight of her face. Best of all, Vi, the voyage will do me good, will do you good, and delightfully shorten the time of your waiting for George.'

'It is the only feeling I have in the matter,' answered the young lady.

And now, having breakfasted, they arose and quitted the table.

Miss Violet Vanderholt, being acquainted with her father's character, and knowing that he rarely changed his mind, went to her room, where in peace she occupied a full hour in writing a long letter to George.

And who was George? One had but to peep over the girl's shoulder to discover. 'My own darling George,' she began; and this sort of thing is commonly accepted as the language of love. Captain George Parry was an officer in the Honourable East India Company's service. When he was last at home he had met Miss Violet, haunted her closely, and exhibited himself in a variety of ways as deeply in love with her. Wonderful to relate, Mr. Montagu Vanderholt took a fancy to the young man, and when Ensign Parry called to ask his leave to consider himself engaged, he was astounded by the cheerful 'Certainly, with pleasure, if you are both satisfied,' which greeted him. A few questions and answers followed. Mr. Vanderholt knew very little about the army, though he had two sons in it. How long would Ensign Parry have to wait for his promotion? How long was the engagement going to last? For his part, he did not like long engagements: they made people ill. Many girls were hurried to their graves by procrastination—that thief of sleep, the ice-cold 'lubbar fiend' that bestrides women's hearts and keeps them shivering.

The interview terminated to the satisfaction of both gentlemen. In due time, Ensign Parry returned to India, and now, as Captain Parry, he was expected home in June; but in one or two of his letters to Violet he had expressed a hope that he would be able to get home by an earlier date. It had been settled that they should be married soon after his arrival in England. And this was the posture of affairs as regarded Captain Parry and Miss Vanderholt. The young lady, seating herself, dipped her pen and wrote.