"I'll be dere, sah."
"It will give me time to think," said Captain Noble in an aside to me. "And come you and dine with us this evening, Mr. Portlack, will you?" I glanced down at my clothes. "Never mind about your dress," he continued. "We shall expect you at half-past six o'clock."
He stayed for another quarter of an hour, and then left the schooner.
Never had anything before, and I may say never has anything since, proved so memorable to me as that dinner with Captain and Lady Ida Noble and Miss Noble at the Albion Hotel, Ramsgate. The reason why it was memorable you shall hear in a minute. I found Lady Ida Noble very different from the individual I had supposed her to be, on the representations of Don Christoval. I expected to meet a tall, haughty, and forbidding lady, of an ice-like coldness of demeanor; instead, I found her an impulsive little woman, in a high degree nervous and emotional, possessed of a ready capacity of tears, resembling her daughter in face and figure in a sort of miniature way—for Miss Noble stood half a head taller than her mother—and a refined lady in all she said and did. She overwhelmed me with thanks, and seemed unable to make enough of me.
Miss Noble looked very well indeed; there was color in her cheek and fire in her soft dark eyes, and a quiet vivacity of good health in her bearing and movements. Indeed, her swift recovery, or rather, let me say, her emergence into health from the horrible disease of insanity and from her long death-like condition of catalepsy, impressed me then, as it impresses me still, as the most startling and extraordinary of all the incidents of our startling and extraordinary voyage.
When the ladies had left us, Captain Noble put a cigar-case upon the table, and said:
"I have been thinking about that negro boy. I have a relative in the West Indies, and I will send the lad out to him, if he is willing to go. I will tell my relative the story of my daughter's abduction, explain that I want the matter kept secret, and bid him have an eye to the lad."
"He is a good boy," said I, "and deserves a comfortable berth."
"He shall have it," said Captain Noble, "and I will put money in his pocket, too. I'll talk with him in the morning."