THE CONVICT SHIP

VOL. I.

NEW LIBRARY NOVELS.

UNDER SEALED ORDERS. By Grant Allen. 3 vols.

A LONDON LEGEND. By Justin H. McCarthy. 3 vols.

THE TREMLETT DIAMONDS. By Alan St. Aubyn. 2 vols.

THE DRIFT OF FATE. By Dora Russell. 3 vols.

BEYOND THE DREAMS OF AVARICE. By Walter Besant. 1 vol.

THE MINOR CHORD. By J. Mitchell Chapple. 1 vol.

HIS VANISHED STAR. By C. Egbert Craddock. 1 vol.

ROMANCES OF THE OLD SERAGLIO. By H. N. Crellin. 1 vol.

VILLAGE TALES AND JUNGLE TRAGEDIES. By B. M. Croker. 1 vol.

MADAME SANS-GÊNE. By E. Lepelletier. 1 vol.

MOUNT DESPAIR. By D. Christie Murray. 1 vol.

THE PHANTOM DEATH. By W. Clark Russell. 1 vol.

THE PRINCE OF BALKISTAN. By Allen Upward. 1 vol.

London: CHATTO & WINDUS, Piccadilly.

THE CONVICT SHIP

BY
W. CLARK RUSSELL
AUTHOR OF
‘THE WRECK OF THE GROSVENOR’ ‘MY SHIPMATE LOUISE’
‘THE PHANTOM DEATH’ ETC.

IN THREE VOLUMES—VOL. I.

London
CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY
1895

PRINTED BY
SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE
LONDON

CONTENTS
OF
THE FIRST VOLUME

THE CONVICT SHIP

CHAPTER I
HER FATHER’S DEATH

I was in my twenty-fourth year when I underwent the tragic and amazing experiences which, with the help of a friend, I propose to relate in these pages. I am now seventy-seven; but I am in good health and enjoy all my faculties, saving my hearing; my memory is brisk, and my friends find it very faithful, and what is here set down you may accept as the truth.

It is long ago since the last convict ship sailed away from these shores with her horrid burden of guilt and grief and passions of a hundred devilish sorts; I don’t know how long it is since the last of the convict ships passed down Channel on her way to colonies which were like to become a sort of shambles—for they were hanging half a score of men a day for murder in those times—if this horrid commerce in felons had not ended; when that ship had weighed and sailed she passed away to return no more as a prison craft. When she faded out of sight she was a vanished type, and when she climbed, moon-like, above the horizon under full breast of shining canvas, she was an honest ship again, never more to be debauched by opportunities to tender for the transport of criminals.

Before I lift the curtain upon my ship, the Convict Ship in which I sailed, I must hold you in talk concerning some matters which go before the sailing of the vessel; for I have to explain how it came about that I, a woman, was on board of a convict ship full of male malefactors.

I was born in the parish of Stepney in the year 1814. My father was Mr. Benjamin Johnstone, a well-known man—locally, I mean—in his day. He had been put to sea as a boy very young; had risen steadily and made his way to command, saved money with a liberal thriftiness that enabled him to enjoy life modestly and to hold the respect of his friends. He built a little ship for a venture, did well, bought or built a second, and at the age of forty-five owned a fleet of four or five coasters, all trading out of the Thames. He purchased a house at Stepney for the convenience of the district.

At Stepney in my young days lived many respectable families, and I don’t doubt that many respectable families still live at Stepney; but it is true that all that part of London has sunk since I was a little girl, and the sort of people who flourished in the east in the beginning of the century have now gone west with the jerry trowel and the nine-inch wall. My father’s house in Stepney might have been a lord’s in its time. It was strong as a fortress, cosy and homely, rich within doors with the colouring of age. It still stands; I visited it last year, but it is no longer a private house.

I was about twelve years old when my father died. The manner of his going was very sudden and fearful, and, old as I am, when I think of it I feel afraid, so haunting is youthful impression, the shock of it often trembling through the longest years into the last beats of one’s heart. My cousin, Will Johnstone, had been brought over from his house near the Tower to spend the afternoon with me. He was between six and seven years of age, a fine little manly boy, the only son of my father’s brother, William Johnstone, a lawyer, whose house and office were near the Tower. This little Will and I sat at the table in the parlour, playing at some game, and very noisy.

It was a November afternoon, the atmosphere of a true London sullenness; the fire burnt heartily, and the walls were merry with the dance of the flames, and the candle stood unlighted upon the mantelpiece. My father sat in an arm-chair close to the fire; he smoked a long clay pipe, and his eyes were fixed upon the glowing coals. He was a handsome man; I have his image before me. He had the completest air of a sailor that is to be figured. I seldom see such faces as his now. But then faces belong to times. My father’s belonged to his century; and you would seek for it there and not before nor after.

He sat with his legs crossed and his eyes upon the fire. Suddenly looking around, he cried, with some temper: ‘Not so much noise, little ’uns! not so much noise, or you’ll have to go to bed.’ Then his face relaxed, and I, with my child’s eyes, saw he was sorry for having spoken so sharply. ‘Little ones,’ said he softly, ‘let’s have a game. Let’s see who can go to sleep first and keep asleep longest;’ and dropping his hand so as to bring the pipe from his mouth, he sank his chin and shut his eyes, and snored once or twice as a make-believe.

I sank my head and closed my eyes as father had, and little Will shammed to be asleep. We were silent a minute or more. The pipe then fell from my father’s hand and lay in halves upon the floor. There was nothing in this. It was a common clay pipe, and father would break such things pretty nearly as often as he smoked them. I now peeped at Will; he was peeping at me. The child giggled, and burst into a little half-suffocated laugh.

‘Hush!’ said I; and now, being weary of this sort of sport, I looked at father and cried out: ‘I can’t sleep any longer.’

He never answered, so I stepped round the table to his chair to wake him up, and pulled him by the arm, and still he would not answer. I climbed upon his knee, and just then a bright gas flame spurted out of a lump of coal, and I saw his face very clearly. What was there in it to acquaint my childish sight with the thing that had come to him? I fell from his knee and ran to the door, and shrieked for mother. She was in the next room, or back parlour, talking with a woman hired to sew.

‘Mother,’ said I, ‘father can’t wake up.’

‘What do you mean, Marian? Where is he?’

‘We have been playing at sleep, and he can’t wake up,’ said I, and I began to cry.

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.

‘What are those people in her?’

‘Rogues all, missy—rogues all.’

‘Where are they going to?’ said I.

He pointed to a great wooden hulk that lay off Woolwich, the hull of a man-of-war, made hideous by a variety of deck erections, and by rows of linen fluttering betwixt the poles which rose out of her decks.

‘That’s where they’re going to,’ said Mr. Smears. ‘And shall I tell ’ee who’s the skipper of that craft? ’Taint no Government bloke—let ne’er a man believe it! The skipper’s name begins with a D and ends with a h-L. I’m not going to say more, missy. Father’ll supply ye with the missing letters. Yond skipper’s name begins with a D and ends with a h-L, and them livelies in gray,’ said he, nodding toward the boat we had nearly run down, ‘are his young ’uns, and they do credit to their parient, if looks ain’t lies.’

Then, starting up, he cried: ‘Ready about, lads!’ and a moment later the helm was put down and our canvas was wildly shaking, and then the brig heeled over and with steady sails ripped through the yellow lustrous surface of the river’s breast on her slanting course down Woolwich Reach.

I did not long look at the great hull of the old man-of-war and her hideous deck erections and her flapping prison linen. I was a child, with a child’s eye for beauty, and my gaze would quickly wander from the prison-ship which I was altogether too young to quicken and inform with the loathsome fascination one finds in all such abodes of human crime and miserable mortal distress; I say my eye would quickly turn from that horrible floating jail to the fifty sights of movement and colour round about; to the hoy with its cargo of passengers from Margate and a fiddle and a harp making music in the bows lazily stemming Londonward; to the barge going away with the tide, sending a scent of rich country across the wind from its lofty cargo of hay on whose summit lies a man on his back, sound asleep; to the large ship fresh from the other side of the world with sailors dangling aloft, and a merry echo of capstanpawls timing a little crowd of men running round and round her forecastle; the wife of the captain aft talking to a waterman in a wherry over the side, and the captain himself, baked brown by the suns of three or four great oceans, excitedly stepping from rail to rail in a walk of impassioned anxiety and impatience.

I have the words, you see! Does the language of the deep sound strange in the mouth of a woman? The wives and daughters of military men may deliver themselves in the speech of the barracks and nobody thinks anything of it. Why should not the daughter of a sailor and the wife of a sailor possess the language of her father and of her husband’s profession, and talk it whenever the need arises without raising wonder?

After my father’s death, his little fleet of ships were sold, in accordance with the direction of his will. The thing was bungled. My mother was a poor woman of business. She fell out with my uncle, William Johnstone, over the sale of the vessels, and put the business in the hands of a broker, who robbed us. Yet, when the estate was realised, we were pretty well to do. The freehold in Stepney was to come to me at the death of my mother. Under my father’s will there was a settlement that secured me three hundred pounds a year. The trustees were two sea-captains. My mother was well provided for; but one saw, by the terms of my father’s will, that he had no confidence in her. Yet he did not stipulate that she should not marry again; though, had I been older at the time, I should have looked for some condition of the sort, for he was very jealous. In fine, and what I have to relate obliges me to dwell upon these trumpery particulars, my father’s will gave me his house at my mother’s death, and secured three hundred pounds a year to me in any case when I should become of age or on my marriage, the interest meanwhile to grow and be mine; and then, at my mother’s death, a portion of what had been willed to her was to revert to me, and the remainder was to be distributed amongst two or three poor and distant relations and a few charities, all of them maritime.

Thus, at my father’s death, I might fairly have been described by a forward-looking eye as what you would call a tolerably fair match; and at the age of seventeen I deserved to be thought so, not only because of my money and the pleasant old house that would be mine, but because of my good looks. At seventy-seven there can be no vanity in retrospect. Moreover, since this story is to be told, you shall have the whole truth. At seventeen, then, I was a tall, strong, well-made girl, broad, but in proportion, and they used to tell me that I carried my figure with the grace of a professional dancer. I was exactly opposite to my mother in colour. My hair was black as the wing of a raven; my eyes very black and filled with a strong light, which brightened to a look of fever in times of excitement; my complexion was pale but clear; my teeth large, white, and regular, and I showed them much in talking and laughing. I’ll not deny that my charms—and handsome I truly was—inclined to coarseness; by which I mean that they leaned toward the manly rather than the womanly side. My voice was a contralto, and when I sang I would sink to a note that was reckoned uncommonly deep for a girl.

My father had been dead about five years, when, one afternoon, my mother came to me in my bedroom. She was in her bonnet and outdoor clothes, and I instantly noticed an agitation in her manner as she sat down beside the dressing-table and looked at me. I forget what I was about, but I recollect ceasing in it and standing up with my hands clasped, whilst I viewed her anxiously and with misgivings.

‘Marian,’ said she, with a forced smile, ‘I have come to give you a bit of news.’

‘What, mother?’

‘My hand has been asked in marriage, dear, and I have accepted.’

I felt the blood rush to my face, and then I turned cold, and, pulling a chair to me, sat down, but I did not speak.

‘Do you hear me, child?’

‘Your hand has been asked in marriage?’ said I. ‘By whom, mother?’

‘By Mr. Stanford,’ she answered, lowering her voice and sinking her eyes.

‘Mr. Stanford?’ I cried. ‘The doctor?’

‘Whom else?’ she replied, looking at me again and forcing another smile.

I was thunderstruck. Never for an instant had I suspected that there was more between them than such commonplace, matter-of-fact friendship as may exist between a medical man and those whom he attends. Mr. Stanford was the doctor one of the servants had run for when my father died. He had attended us during the preceding year, and he had prescribed for mother and me since, so that at this date we had known him six years. He was a widower and childless, and lived within ten minutes’ walk of our house. Occasionally he had looked in upon us, and sat during an evening for an hour or so; sometimes he had dined with us and we with him; but never had I observed any sort of behaviour in him or mother to hint at what was coming—at what, indeed, had now come.

I should be needlessly detaining you from my own story to repeat all that passed between my mother and me on this occasion. I was beside myself with anger, mortification, jealousy—for I was jealous of my father’s memory, abhorred the thought of his place being taken in his own house and in the affection of the wife whom he had loved, by such a man as Mr. Stanford. Nay, but it would have been all the same had Mr. Stanford been the greatest nobleman or the first character in Europe. I should have abominated him as an intruder, and have yearned for the hands of a man to toss him out o’ window should he dare to occupy a house in which my father was as real a presence to my heart as though he were still alive and could kiss me and make me presents and carry me away out of the gloomy streets into the shining holiday road of the river.

My mother reproached me, and pleaded and wept. The weakness of her poor heart, God rest her, was very visible at this time. She clung to me and held me to her, imploring me, as her only child, to consider how lonely she was, how sadly she stood in need of a protector, how good it would be for us both to have Mr. Stanford to watch over us! I broke away from her with a wet scarlet face and heaving bosom, and told her that if Mr. Stanford took my father’s place I would cease to love or even to think of her as my mother. We both cried bitterly, and raised our voices and talked together as most women would at such a moment, not knowing what each other said. I do not condemn myself. I look back and hold that I was right to stand up for the memory of my beloved father, even to rage as I did against my mother’s resolution to marry Mr. Stanford. I wondered at her; indeed, I was shocked. I was young and ardent and romantic, had a girl’s notions of the loyalty of love and the obligations of keeping sacred the memory and the place of one who had been faithful and tender, who had nobly done his duty to his wife and child.

CHAPTER III
HER MOTHER DIES

At the age of seventeen I considered myself qualified to form a judgment of men, and I was amazed and indeed disgusted that my mother should see anything in Mr. Stanford to please her. He and my father were at the opposite ends of the sex, as far removed as the bows from the stern of a ship. He was a spare and narrow man, pale as veal, in complexion sandy, the expression of his countenance hard and acid, his eyes large and moist and the larger and moister for the magnifying spectacles he wore. But my mother would have her way, and a week after she had given me the news of the doctor’s offer they were privately married.

My life from this date was one of constant and secret unhappiness. I could never answer Mr. Stanford with any approach to civility without a violent effort. He strove at first to make friends with me, then gave up and took no more heed of me than had I been a shadow at the table or about the house. Yet, sometimes, I would make him pretty rudely and severely feel that he was an intruder, an abomination in my sight, a scandalous illustration of my mother’s weakness of nature; and that was if ever he opened his lips about my father. I never suffered him to mention my father’s name in my presence. He might be about to speak intending to praise, designing every manner of civility toward the memory of the dead; I minded him not; if he named my father I insulted him, and on two or three occasions forced him to quit the table, so strong and fiery was the injurious language I plied him with. My mother wept, threatened to swoon, did swoon once, and our home promised to become as wretched and clamorous as a lunatic asylum.

As an example of my hatred, not so much of the man as of his assumption of my father’s place: he brought his door-plate and his lamp from his house, and when I saw his plate upon the door that my father used to go in and out of I ran to a carpenter who lived a few streets off, brought him back with his tools, and ordered him to remove the plate, which I threw into the kitchen sink for the cook to find and report to her master.

Well, at the end of ten months, my mother died in childbed. The infant lived. It was a girl. My mother died; and when I went to her bedside and viewed her dead face, sweet in its everlasting sleep, for the look and wear of ten or fifteen years seemed to have been brushed off her countenance by the hand of death, I thought to myself: if she has gone to meet father, how will she excuse herself for her disloyalty? And then the little new-born babe that was in the next room began to cry, and I came away from that death-bed with tearless eyes and sat in my bedroom, thinking without weeping.

I have spoken of my uncle, William Johnstone, a lawyer, who lived in the neighbourhood of the Tower, and whose office was in his own dwelling-house. He, like my father, had but one child, Will Johnstone, that little fellow who was playing with me when my father died. Mr. Johnstone’s was a very comfortable house; it afterward passed into the hands of a chart-seller. His clients were nearly wholly composed of sea-going people. He was said to be very learned in maritime law; he was much consulted by masters and mates with grievances, and at his house, as at my father’s formerly, you’d meet few people who did not follow the ocean or did not do business with seafarers.

Mrs. Johnstone was three or four years older than her husband. She was a plain, homely, thoroughly good-hearted woman, incapable of an ill-natured thought; one of those few people who are content to be as God made them. During my mother’s brief married life with her second husband I was constantly with my aunt, and I believe I should have lived with her wholly but for my determination that my stepfather, the doctor, should not flatter himself he had sickened me out of my own home. Will was at this time at the Bluecoat School, laying in a stock of Latin and Greek for the fishes; for the lad was resolved to go to sea. His father, indeed, wished him to adopt that calling, and would say: ‘What is the good of a cargo of learning the whole of which will be thrown up overboard the first dirty night down Channel?’

When mother died, my aunt entreated me to live with her and leave the doctor alone in his glory. My answer was: No, I should not think of leaving my own home if my stepfather were out of it, and I was not to be driven out because he chose to stay. I had the power to turn him out, and should have done so but for the baby. The little one was my mother’s; I could not have turned a child of my mother’s out of a home that had been my mother’s. So I continued to live in the home that had come to me from my father. I occupied a set of rooms over the parlour-floor and took my meals in my own apartments, where I was attended by a maid who waited upon me and upon nobody else.

The child was called after my mother, and her name was mine—Marian. If in passing up or down stairs I met the little creature in its nurse’s arms, I would take it and kiss it, perhaps, and toss it a moment or two and then go my way. God forgive me, I could never bring myself to love that child. I never could think of it as my mother’s, but as Mr. Stanford’s. The sight, the sound of it would bring all my father into my heart, and I’d fall into a sort of passion merely in thinking that the memory of such a man should have been betrayed.

I dare say you will consider all this as an excess of loyalty in me. But loyal even to exaggeration my nature was to those I loved. It is no boast—merely a saying which this tale should justify.

After the death of my mother, the money paid to me through my trustees rose to an income of hard upon five hundred a year. I rejoice to say that Mr. Stanford got not one penny. My mother had been without the power to will away a farthing of what my father had left her. Otherwise I don’t doubt the doctor would have come off with something more substantial than a ten-month memory and my sullen toleration of his plate upon the door.

The equivalent in these times of five hundred a year would in those be about seven hundred; I was, therefore, a fortune and a fine, handsome young woman besides; and you will naturally ask: Had I any sweethearts, lovers, followers? To tell you the truth, I never gave men nor marriage a thought. I had friends in the neighbourhood, and I went among them, and I was also much at my aunt’s, and not very easily, therefore, to be caught at home by any gentleman with an eye to a fine girl and an independency. Add likewise to my visiting, a great love of solitary rambling. I’d take a boat at Wapping and pass nearly a whole day upon the river, stepping ashore, perhaps, at some convenient landing-stairs or stage for a meal, and then returning to the wherry. Ah, those were delicious jaunts! They stand next in my memory in sweetness and happiness to those father had carried me on. I made nothing of being alone, and nobody took any notice of me. I was affronted but once, and that was by a Wapping waterman who claimed that I had promised to use his boat, which was false. He was a poor creature, and nothing but the modesty of my sex hindered me from beating him with the short stout stick, silver-headed, with lead under the silver, that I always carried with me when I went alone. Another waterman whom I employed came up while the low fellow was slanging me, whipped off his coat like lightning and in five minutes blacked up both his opponent’s eyes. This was punishment enough, and I was satisfied; and, as a reward, paid the chivalrous man double fare and made a point to hire his boat afterwards.

Or I would take my passage in a Calais steamer, land at Gravesend, or perhaps higher up, and wander about, perfectly happy in being alone, and with eyes and thoughts for nothing but the beauties of the country and the bright scene of the river. Often I was away for two and three days together; but on these occasions I always chose an inn where I was known, where I could depend upon the comfort of the entertainment and the security of the house; where the landlady would welcome me as a friend, and provide me for the night with such little conveniences as I had left my home without. Everything was caprice with me in those days. I did what I liked, went where I liked, knew no master. My aunt once or twice, in her mild way, questioned the propriety of a young woman acting as I did, but my uncle stood up for me, pointed out that my blood was full of the old roaming instincts of my father; that I was quite old enough and strong enough to take care of myself; that what I did was my notion of enjoyment, and that I was in the right to be happy.

‘Keep on the wing while you can,’ said he. ‘Some of these days a big chap called a husband will come along, with a pair of shears in his hand, and the rest will be short farmyard hops.’

On the other hand, my stepfather professed to be scandalised by my conduct. He marched into my room one day, after I had spent the night alone at Gravesend, and asked leave to have a serious talk with me. But, on his beginning to tell me that I was not acting with that sort of decorum, with that regard to social observances, which is always expected and looked for in a young lady, I walked out of the room. He then addressed a long letter to me. His drift was still decorum and social observances, and what would his patients think. I thought of my father and how he would deal with this fellow, who was daring enough to teach me how to conduct myself, and in a passion I tore the letter in halves, slipped the pieces into an envelope, on which I wrote, ‘Your advice is as objectionable as your company,’ and bade my maid put the letter on the table of the room in which he received his patients.

But this is not telling you whether I had lovers, sweethearts, followers, or not. I have no room to go into that matter here; yet, let me name two young gentlemen. The first was the son of one of my trustees, Captain Galloway, who lived at Shadwell. The youth was good-looking, and had a pleasant, easy manner; he had been well educated, and at this time held some post of small consequence in the London Docks. He hung about me much, contrived to meet me at friends’ houses, often called, and managed sometimes to discover whither I had gone on a ramble, and to meet me as though by accident. I never doubted that I owed a good deal of this lad’s attention to old Captain Galloway’s fatherly advice. I laughed in my sleeve at the poor boy, though I was always gentle and kind to him; and if I never gave him any marked encouragement, for his father’s sake I took care never to pain or in any way disconcert him; until one evening, happening to be at a quadrille party, to which he had been invited, though he did not attend, a pretty, sad-faced young creature was pointed out to me as a girl whom Jim Galloway had jilted so provokingly as to earn him a caning at the hands of the young lady’s brother. This was enough for me. I first made sure that the story was true, and when next I met my youthful admirer I took him on one side, and, having told him what I had heard, informed him that he was a wicked, dangerous boy, unfit for the society of ladies, and, affecting a great air of indignation, I asked if by his hanging about me he did not intend to make a fool of me too. What passed put an end to the young gentleman’s addresses; but I always regret that this affair should have occasioned a coolness between Captain Galloway and myself.

My second suitor, or follower, so to term the fellow, was no less a person than my stepfather’s nephew. I had been spending my twenty-first birthday at my aunt’s, and on my return home Mr. Stanford sent up word to know if I would see him. I was in a good humour, and told the maid to ask my stepfather up. His motive in visiting me was to get me to allow him to invite his nephew to stay in the house. He wished to make his nephew’s better acquaintance. The youth was studying medicine, and Mr. Stanford believed a time might come when it would be convenient to take him into partnership. I told him to ask his nephew and welcome.

‘What’s the gentleman’s name?’ said I.

‘Edward Potter,’ said he.

In two or three days’ time Mr. Edward Potter drove up in a hackney coach. He brought a quantity of luggage, insomuch that I reckoned the partnership might not be so far off as my stepfather had hinted. Mr. Potter was a very corpulent young man; his neck was formed of rings of fat, and his small-clothes and arm sleeves sheathed his limbs as tight as a bladder holds lard. Nothing remarkable happened for some time, and then I discovered that this pursy young man was beginning to pay me some attention. To be sure, his opportunities in this way were few; he dared not enter my rooms without being invited, and then again, as you know, I was much away from home. Yet he would contrive to waylay me on the stairs and hold me in conversation, and he once went to the length of snatching up his hat and passing with me into the street, and walking with me down the Commercial Road to as far as Whitechapel, where I managed to shake him off.

One afternoon, on going downstairs, I heard the sound of voices in the parlour. The door stood ajar; my name was uttered; and the sound of it arrested my steps. The voices within were those of Mr. Stanford and his nephew, who were still at table, lingering over their wine.

‘Yes, she has the temper of a devil,’ said my stepfather. ‘I love her so exceedingly that I’d like nothing better than to have her for a patient. But the wench’s constitution is as sound as her fortune. Why don’t you go ahead with her?’

‘She’s plaguy hard to get at,’ said Mr. Potter, in his strange voice, as though his mouth was full of grease.

‘You don’t shove enough,’ said his uncle. ‘A woman of her sort isn’t to be won by staring and breathing hard. Go for her boldly. Blunder into the sitting-room sometimes, follow her when she goes out and meet her round the next corner. It was the chance I spoke to your mother about and that you’re here for. She means five hundred a year and this house. You’ll need to kill or cure scores this way to earn five hundred a year.’

‘It’s like taking a naked light into a powder magazine to talk to her,’ said Mr. Potter. ‘Every look she gives one is a sort of explosion. I always feel like wishing that the road may be clear when I address her.’

‘You’re too fat for business,’ said his uncle. ‘I feared so. Give me a lean and hungry man for spirit. Cæsar knew Cassius, and I know you.’

I guessed it was Mr. Potter who thumped the table.

‘Give me some time and you’ll see,’ he said. ‘But in proportion as she troubles me on this side so I’ll give it her on t’other. Only let me get her, and for all your sneers at my figure I’ll have her on her knees to you and me within a month. Will you bet?’ and I heard him pound the table again.

He had used a word in this speech which I will not repeat—an odious, infamous word. I stepped in, flinging the door wide open and leaving it so. Mr. Potter started up from his chair, my stepfather lay back, his face drooped and very pale, and he looked at me under his half-closed lids. I stared Mr. Potter in the face for a few moments without speaking; I then pointed to the door with the silver-headed cane I invariably carried.

‘Walk out, sir,’ said I.

He began to stammer.

‘Walk out!’ I repeated, and I menaced him.

‘Where am I to walk to?’ he said.

‘Out of this house,’ said I.

‘You had no right to listen, miss,’ said my stepfather.

I looked at him, then stepped round the table to the bell, which I pulled violently. My own maid, guessing the summons was mine, answered.

‘Jane,’ said I, ‘go instantly for a constable.’

‘There is no need to fetch a constable,’ exclaimed Mr. Stanford, getting up, ‘my nephew will leave the house.’

On this, Mr. Potter went out into the hall, and whilst he fumbled at the hatstand, called out:

‘I suppose I may take my luggage?’

I was determined to humble the dog to an extremity, and told Jane to call in any two idle fellows she could see to remove Mr. Potter’s luggage. She fetched two men from a public-house, and I took them upstairs into Mr. Potter’s room and bade them carry his trunks below and put them on the pavement. When they had carried the trunks downstairs they returned for Mr. Potter’s loose, unpacked apparel, which, acting on my instructions, they heaped along with his unpacked linen on top of the boxes on the pavement. I paid the two men for their trouble, and violently slammed the hall-door upon Mr. Potter, who stood in the road, gazed at by a fast-gathering crowd, waiting for the arrival of a hackney coach, which was very slow in coming.

As I passed upstairs, panting and heart-sick, Mr. Stanford came into the hall, and called out: ‘You will ruin my practice.’ I paused to see if he had more to say, and I was very thankful afterward that he had thought proper to immediately retire on observing me stop.

CHAPTER IV
SHE MEETS CAPTAIN BUTLER

After this business you might suppose that Mr. Stanford made haste to remove his plate and his lamp to his old or another house. Not at all. He found it convenient to stay; and I contrived to endure him for the sake of the child, that was now between three and four years of age: a poor, feeble little creature, with but slender promise of life in its white face and thin frame.

A few weeks after the trouble with Mr. Potter had happened I went to my uncle’s house near the Tower to sup and spend the evening. As with Stepney, so with this part; it has sunk pretty low. Yet when I was a girl some very respectable families lived in the neighbourhood of the Tower. My uncle’s house, as I have said, included his offices. They had been the front and back parlours. In the front office sat a couple of clerks, and the back was my uncle’s private office, where he received his clients. The family occupied the upper part of the house, according to the good old fashion of trade, when men were not ashamed of their business. The rooms above corresponded with the offices below: the front room was furnished as a drawing-room; the back as a parlour.

I was as much at home in my uncle’s house as if I had been his child, and, passing the servants who opened the door, I went upstairs to my aunt’s bedroom to take off my bonnet and brush my hair. On the landing I heard voices in the drawing-room. I guessed my uncle had company, and hoped, unless there were others, that it was not old Mr. Simmonds, a ship-broker, a person to whom my uncle was always very civil and hospitable, as being useful in business, but who, to my mind, was the most wearisome, insipid, teasing old man that ever chair groaned under.

I removed my bonnet—you would laugh, were you to see the great, coal-scuttle-shaped contrivance it was—brushed my hair, viewed myself a little complacently, for it was an April day, the wind brisk, and my walk had put some colour into my cheeks, from which my dark eyes took a clearer fire, and went to the drawing-room. On entering I found my uncle sitting with a gentleman. The stranger was not Mr. Simmonds. My aunt stood at the window, looking out.

‘Why, here am I watching for you!’ said she. ‘Marian, my dear, Captain Butler.’

I dropped the stranger a curtsey of those times, and with a quick glance gathered him. Small need to call him captain to know he was a sailor. His weather-darkened face, the fashion of his clothes, the indescribable ocean-rolling ease of his manner of rising and bowing to me, were assurance enough of his calling. I took him to be a man of about thirty. His eyes were a dark blue, and full of good-humour and intelligence; his hair was auburn, curling and plentiful; no feature of him but was admirable—nose, mouth, teeth—all combined in a face of manly beauty. He stood about five feet eleven, and, though there was nothing of the soldier in his erect posture, his figure was without any hint of that rounded back and hanging-armed stoop which come to people who’ve had to pull and haul on a reeling deck for sour pork and creeping bread in their youth.

These and like points I did not notice all at once in that first glance; but before half an hour was gone I could have drawn a correct portrait of him from memory, so often, at every maidenly and modest opportunity, were my eyes upon him.

He had done business with uncle, and, having lately arrived in the Thames, had called and been asked to stay to supper and meet me. They had been talking about my cousin Will when I entered the room, and, after the introduction, continued the subject, my uncle seeming to be pretty full of it.

‘Oh!’ said I, catching up something that he had let fall. ‘So, then, you have settled upon a ship for Will?’

‘Yes,’ he answered, ‘and a fine ship she is.’

‘There’s no finer ship than the Childe Harold out of the Thames,’ said Captain Butler.

‘And her captain is a very good sort of a man, we are told,’ said my aunt.

‘I have heard him well spoken of. I don’t know him,’ said Captain Butler.

‘When does Will sail?’ I asked.

‘A fortnight to-day,’ answered my uncle.

‘You remember our compact?’ I said eagerly.

My uncle smiled slowly and shook his head.

‘But I say yes!’ I cried, starting up in my impetuous way. ‘Aunt, you know it was settled. Will was my playmate as a child. I love him as a brother, and I claim the right of giving him his outfit.’

‘She is a sailor’s child,’ said my uncle to Captain Butler.

They told me Will was out; he would return before supper. In a short time I discovered that Captain Butler had been two years absent on a trading voyage in the Pacific; that he was without a ship at present, but was looking for the command of a new barque of about six hundred and thirty tons, called the Arab Chief, in which he was thinking of purchasing a share. I admired him so much that I could not help feeling a sort of inquisitiveness, and asked him a number of questions about his voyage and the sea life. Indeed, I went further. I asked him where he lived and if he had any relatives. There was a boldness in me that was bred of many years of independence and of fearless indifference to people’s opinion. I was by nature downright and off-hand, and whenever I had a question to ask I asked it, without ever troubling my head as to the sort of taste I was exhibiting. All this might have been partly owing to my lonely, independent life; to my being unloved and having nobody to love; to my having been as much an orphan when my father died as though I had lost my mother at the same time.

And yet, though some of my own sex may have turned up their noses at my plain, bold questioning of Captain Butler, there is no man, I vow, who would have disliked my manner in me. Captain Butler warmed up, a fresh life came into his face with his frequent laugh, and he could not take his eyes off me. My uncle nursed his knee and watched us with a composed countenance. My aunt, who was a simple soul, followed the conversation as one who hears and sees nothing beyond what is said.

‘Captain Butler,’ said my uncle, presently, ‘ask Miss Marian why it is that she goes on living in the East when she has fortune enough to set up as a fine lady in the West?’

‘I was born in Stepney,’ said I. ‘My house is there. My father and mother lie buried there. I’ll not leave it.’

‘Who’s the wit,’ exclaimed Captain Butler, ‘who says that the further he goes West, the more convinced he is that the wise men came from the East?’

‘Pray, what is a fine lady?’ asked my aunt.

‘Ask the dressmakers,’ said Mr. Johnstone.

‘I hope my dear Marian will never change,’ said my aunt, looking fondly at me. ‘She is fine enough, I am sure. If she goes West she’ll be falling into company who’ll make her ashamed of her poor East-end relatives.’

We rattled on in some such a fashion as this. It was because I was not blind, and not because I was vain, that I speedily saw that Captain Butler admired me greatly. If I stepped across the room, his eyes followed the motions of my figure. If I spoke, his gaze dwelt upon my lips. Even my poor, dear, slow-eyed aunt noticed the impression I had made, as I gathered from her occasional looks at her husband. My uncle asked me to sing, and I went to the piano and sang them a simple, melodious sea-song which I used to hear my father sing without an accompaniment. My knowledge of music was slight, but I had a correct ear and a strong voice, and felt whatever I sang, because I chose to sing only what I could feel, and my poor attempts always pleased. Captain Butler stood beside me at the piano while I sang; he could not have praised me more warmly had I been a leading lady at the Italian Opera. I got up, laughing, and told him that the little music I had was by ear.

‘I think I was never properly educated,’ said I. ‘My father hated schools and believed that young girls thrown together made one another wicked. I was educated by governesses, and, really, to be able to read and write and to know the multiplication-table is a great deal to be thankful for.’

‘My brother was right,’ said my uncle. ‘I hate girls’ schools myself. Your finished school-miss knows all about Shakespeare and the musical classes, but she can’t tell how many ounces go to a pound of beef.’

While we chatted, Mr. and Mrs. Lorrimer were announced. Nobody expected them, but they were welcome. Old Mr. Lorrimer was a ship-chandler in a rather big way. He was a vestige of the dead century, and, saving the wig, went clothed almost exactly as his father had. I see him now with his frill, stockings, snuff-box, and the company smirk that was in vogue when he was a boy. He engaged my uncle in talk; my aunt and Mrs. Lorrimer drew chairs together, and Captain Butler and I paired at a little distance from the others.

I liked this man so much, I admired him so greatly; I had fallen so much in love with him, indeed, at the first sight of his handsome, winning face, that I found myself talking as freely as though we had known each other for years. I told him that I lived with my stepfather in the house that was my own, that my life was as dull as a sermon, that I found no pleasure in life outside my lonely rambles, which I described to him. I thought he looked grave when I told him I would be away from my home for two or three nights at a time.

‘Every girl wants a mother,’ said he.

‘And a father,’ said I; ‘but she can’t keep them.’

‘Why don’t you go a voyage?’

‘I have never thought of going a voyage.’

‘The world is a fine show,’ said he. ‘It is well worth seeing. You are rich, and should see the world while you are young enough to enjoy the sight.’

‘I have five hundred a year,’ said I.

‘You are rich, Miss Johnstone, nevertheless,’ said he; and his eyes made a very clear allusion to my face and figure—a more intelligible reference than had he spoken.

‘I have a good mind to go a voyage,’ said I. ‘I am sick of my life, I assure you. I hate my stepfather, and for all that I am rich, as you call it, I am as much alone as if I had been left to the parish. Oh, yes,’ said I, following his glance, ‘uncle and aunt are dear to me and I love them, but——’ And I lay back in my chair and yawned and stretched out my arms.

‘Come a voyage with me, Miss Johnstone,’ said he, laughing.

‘Where to?’ said I.

‘I can’t tell you yet, but you shall hear.’

‘Let me hear and you shall have my answer.’

‘Do you know anything about the sea?’

‘Do I know anything about the sea?’ I echoed, with a loud, derisive laugh that caused everybody to look at me. ‘I wonder if you could ask me a question about the sea which I couldn’t answer? Shall I put you a ship about? Explain what reefing topsails means? Shall I wear ship for you? Shall I snug you down a full-rigged ship, beginning with the fore-royal-studding-sail?’ And so I went on.

He laughed continuously while I talked. The others were now listening and laughing too.

Just then my cousin, Will Johnstone, came in, and I broke off my chat with Captain Butler to greet the lad. Will was at this time between fifteen and sixteen years of age. He was a manly-looking boy, easy and gentlemanly, fitter for the midshipman’s quarters of a man-of-war than an apprentice’s berth on board a merchantman. He had a look of my father, and I loved him for that. He was dressed in sea-going clothes, and though he had never been farther than Ramsgate in all his life, he carried his new calling so prettily, there was such a pleasantly-acted swing in his gait, you would have believed him fresh from a voyage round the world. He came to me eagerly when he had shaken hands with the others, took Captain Butler’s chair, and told me with a glowing face about his ship, the Childe Harold—what a fine ship she was, how like a frigate she sat upon the water, how that a fellow had told him she could easily reel out twelve upon a bowline.

‘She lies in the East India Docks. You must come and see her, Marian. When will you come? To-morrow—say to-morrow.’ Here he saw Captain Butler looking our way. ‘Will you come, too, sir? Will you come with my cousin?’

‘Come where?’ said Captain Butler.

‘Come to the East India Docks to-morrow to visit my ship, the Childe Harold?’

‘“My ship!”’ echoed my uncle.

‘At what hour?’ said Captain Butler.

Some talk went to this scheme; it was presently settled that Will and Captain Butler should dine at my house next day, and afterward we should visit the Childe Harold.

This was the merriest evening I had ever spent in my life. I sat at supper between Captain Butler and Will, and had never felt happier. My spirits were in a dance. I laughed even at poor old Mr. Lorrimer’s jokes. After supper Captain Butler sang a song, and I liked it so well that I begged him to sing another. Then I sang. The old people sat down to whist in a corner. Captain Butler, Will, and I chatted, and so slipped that evening away; till I was startled on lifting my eyes to the clock to see that it was almost eleven.

How should I get home? Should I walk or drive? I stepped to the window and parted the curtains and saw the stars shining.

‘It is a fine night,’ said I. ‘Will, give me your company, and I’ll walk. I hate your coaches.’

‘Your way is my way, I believe,’ said Captain Butler. ‘May I accompany you?’

I went upstairs to put on my bonnet. My aunt accompanied me. She lighted candles beside a looking-glass, and I saw that my cheeks were red and that my eyes shone like diamonds.

‘I believe that you have made a conquest to-night, my dear,’ said my aunt.

‘A conquest has been made,’ I answered. ‘He is a very handsome fellow. And now you shall tell me that he is married.’

‘No more than you are.’

‘Engaged to be married, then?’

‘I’ll not answer that. Sailors are sailors.’

‘I have thoroughly enjoyed myself,’ said I, kissing her.

‘Do you think, my dear, that it is quite in order you should ask Captain Butler to dine with you to-morrow?’

‘Quite in order, aunt. If I am not to do what I like I will drown myself.’

But I kissed her again after I had said this as an apology for the strength with which I had spoken, and went downstairs.

Will and Captain Butler saw me to my house. The streets were pretty full and flaring. The night fine. I took Will’s arm, and the three of us went along leisurely past the Mint into Leman Street, and so into the Commercial Road. No very romantic walk, truly, though in this great world the woods and groves of the poets are not the only haunts of emotion. There is sentiment in the East as well as in the West; and in what do the passions of Whitechapel differ from those of Tyburnia?

My maid was sitting up for me. Twelve o’clock struck soon after I reached home, so you will guess we had not hurried. For the first time for many a long night I could not sleep. I lay thinking all the time of Captain Butler. I had fallen in love with him, and I wondered at myself. No man that I had ever before met had made the least impression upon me. I knew my own heart well down to this moment—I had never given men nor their love a thought. In what, then, lay the magic of this man? I was so much in love with him that, had he stayed at my door after Will Johnstone had gone away and asked me to be his sweetheart and marry him, I should have consented. I was distracted with vexation and delight. All night long I lay thinking of him, and if I slept in snatches it was but to dream of him, so that, whether I was awake or slept, he was present to me. I felt that I must find out, and quickly find out, if he had a sweetheart. If so, why then I had not yet let go of the reins; but I must make haste, or the bit would be hard in the teeth and I should be run away with.

I thought of his suggestion to go a voyage with him, and pried close into it for an inner meaning; but the memory of his manner would not suffer me to find more than had met my ear. To fall in love in an hour, thought I! Well, it must run in the blood. Father fell in love with mother at first sight; that had been her fond memory—she had boasted of it in his life and after his death—till, to my grief and to the souring of the best sweetness that her heart held, she swallowed the mumping prescription whose plate was upon my door, and whose lamp glowed like a danger signal over the plate.

CHAPTER V
SHE VISITS THE ‘CHILDE HAROLD’

I rose early next morning, sent for the cook, and gave her certain instructions. The servants in our strangely ordered home were as much mine as my stepfather’s; I paid half their wages. But my own maid was at my own cost, and she waited upon me only.

Captain Butler and my cousin arrived shortly after half-past twelve, and at one o’clock we sat down to as dainty and elegant a meal as I and the cook and my maid could contrive among us. We drank champagne; my father’s silver was upon the table; in the middle was a rich hothouse nosegay, which had cost me a guinea and a half. My maid, a discreet, good-looking girl, waited admirably. My cousin stared, and asked me, boy-like, if I dined thus every day. I laughed and answered: ‘Off as good dishes, Will, but never so well, because I often dine alone when I dine at home at all.’

‘I should like to dine with you every day,’ said Will.

I had dressed myself with extraordinary care, but my eyes wanted the sparkle of the previous evening, my cheeks the rose of those merry hours. I wondered as I glanced at Captain Butler whether the thought of me had kept him awake all night. Somehow I could not look at him with the confidence of the previous evening. I felt shy; my eyes stole to his face and dropped on detection; my appetite was poor, and my laugh unnaturally loud with nerve. His own manner was a little constrained, and I saw, and my heart throbbed and leaped when I saw, admiration strong in his looks whenever he regarded, or addressed, or listened to me. Oh, thought I, what would I give now for sauciness enough to ask you downright: ‘Have you a sweetheart?’

During the course of the dinner I said to him: ‘Don’t you think my way of living strange?’

‘Not at all.’

‘You need a stepfather to understand my unhappy state.’

‘No very unhappy state, surely,’ said he, looking at the table, and then round the well-furnished room.

‘I think I shall go a voyage some of these days, Will,’ said I.

‘Sail with me, Marian,’ he answered.

‘Where’s your ship bound to?’

‘Sydney, New South Wales—a splendid trip. Three months there, three months back, three months to see the country in.’

‘And you give me a fortnight to make up my mind!’ said I, laughing. ‘Don’t they send the convicts to Sydney? I can’t fancy that country. ’Tis seeing nothing to meet one’s transported fellow-countrymen. There are plenty of such folks walking past this house at this minute. Who would leave Stepney for Sydney?’

My cousin asked what trade the Arab Chief would be in. Captain Butler answered that he believed she was to trade to the West Indies and eastern South American ports.

‘There’s a big world for you that way, Marian,’ said Will. ‘Down there the wind’s full of bright parrots, every tree writhes with monkeys. Robinson Crusoe lived all alone somewhere in those parts, that’s if the great river of Oroonoque’s where it was in Friday’s time. The home of the great sea serpent is in the Caribbean Sea, and if you kick up an old stone by chance you stand to unearth a mine of precious metal.’

I ended this by rising, and we soon afterwards left the house. It was a clear, cold afternoon, with a bright blue sky for London. We took a coach to Limehouse and then a boat. There is no change in the East India Docks in all these years. I went down to them for memory’s sake not very long ago, and all was the same, it seemed to me, saving the steamers. The basins were full of ships of many sizes and of all rigs; the air was radiant with the flicker and tremble of scores of flags; strange smells of distant countries loaded the atmosphere—sweet oils and spices, wool and scarlet oranges and scented timber. When I was a child my father had sometimes brought me to these docks when he came to them on business; I thought of him as I looked, and felt a little girl again with the odd wonderment and delight of a child in me as I stared at the shipping and the complicated heights of spar and rigging, at the grinding cranes heavily lifting cargo in and out, as I breathed the odours of the littered quays, as I hearkened to the shouts, to the songs of the seamen at the winch or capstan, to the voices of the wind in the gear, soft in the fabric of the taller ships as the gay whistlings of silver pipes heard afar.

We walked leisurely along the quays. Will’s ship lay in a corner at a distance, and he was for enthusiastically pressing forward to arrive at her. His ardent pace kept him ahead, and he often turned to invite us to come on. But I was listening to Captain Butler and was in no great hurry. At last we came to Will’s ship, the Childe Harold. Oh, my great God, when I think of it! When I think of standing beside Captain Butler and looking at that ship with my cousin at my elbow calling my attention to points of her with a young sailor’s pride!

She was a very handsome vessel of her kind, and a big ship according to the burden of those days. Though she was receiving cargo fast, her sides towered high above the wall; she had been newly coppered, and her metal glanced sunnily upon the soup-like water she floated on. Captain Butler took my hand, and we followed Will up the gangway plank and gained the ship’s deck. A man with a beard stood at the yawn of the great main hatch; Will touched his cap and whispered that he was the mate of the ship. Captain Butler went up and shook hands with him and rejoined us, saying that he had made the man’s acquaintance at Callao. A quantity of cases were being swung over the rail, and as they were lowered down the hatch I heard a noise of voices below—calls and yells, and the kind of language you expect to hear arising from the hold of a ship that is populous with lumpers. Will took us into the cuddy, which you will now call the saloon; a fine cabin under the poop-deck, with some sleeping berths on either hand. He then walked us forward to show us the apprentices’ quarters.

The ship had what is known as a topgallant forecastle, on either hand of which was a wing of cabin, a sort of deck-house, entered by a door that slid in grooves. The apprentices lived in the wing on the left, or port, or larboard side, as the expression then was.

‘How many of you are there?’ asked Captain Butler.

‘Three,’ answered my cousin.

The place was empty, and I entered it and looked about me to gather whether there was anything I could purchase to render the coarse, rude abode a little more hospitable to the sight.

‘This won’t be like being at home, Will?’ said I.

‘It will be seeing life, though, and starting on a career,’ he answered.

‘These are very snug quarters,’ said Captain Butler. ‘What sort of a forecastle have you, Johnstone?’

My cousin led us into a large, wooden cave. It was very gloomy here. We had to lift our feet high to enter the door. The huge windlass stood, a great mass of reddened timber and grinning ironwork, in front of the entrance to this forecastle; abaft it rose the trunk of the foremast, and behind, again, the solid square of the galley, or kitchen; the thick shrouds descended on both sides; and, though it was a bright day, the shadows of these things lay in a twilight upon the forecastle entrance, and I needed to stand awhile and accustom my eyes to the gloom before I could see.

‘This is a fine forecastle,’ said Captain Butler. ‘Few crews get better parlours.’

The interior was empty. Rows of bunks on both sides ran ghostly in the obscurity of the bows.

‘What hatch is this?’ said I, pointing to a small, covered square in the deck close to where I stood.

‘That’ll be the way to the fore-peak,’ said Captain Butler.

‘What sort of a place is that?’ said I.

‘The rats’ nursery,’ he answered, laughing.

‘Have you been into it, Will?’ said I.

‘No. They keep coal and broom-handles there; odds and ends of stores, cans of oil, and everything that’s unpleasant. I find things out by asking.’

‘Right, Johnstone,’ said Captain Butler. ‘Keep on asking on board ship. That’s the way to learn. How would you like to be an able seaman, Miss Johnstone, and sail before the mast and sleep in a place like this?’

‘This would not be my end of the ship if I were a man,’ said I.

We wandered aft on to the poop, whence we could command a view of the whole ship; and here we stood looking at the clamorous, gallant scene round about us, till the sun sank low across the river beyond Rotherhithe, and the shadow of the evening deepened the colours of the streaming flags, and hung a rusty mist out upon the farther reaches of the river, making the ships there loom dusky and swollen.

Captain Butler asked us if we would drink tea with him at the Brunswick Hotel. I was now liking nothing better in the world than his company, and gladly accepted, and the three of us walked to the hotel and took a seat at a table in a window, where we had a view of the shipping; and here we drank tea and ate some small, sweet white-fish and passed a happy hour.

Captain Butler must have been less than a man, and without eyes in his head, if he had not by this time guessed that I was very much in love with him. I was sure he admired me; indeed, his admiration was unfeigned. I had never been loved by a man, and could not guess what was in the mind of this handsome sailor by merely observing the admiration that softened and sweetened the naturally gay and careless expression of his eyes, but it filled me with sweet delight to know that he admired me. This was a full, rich cup for my lips for a first draught. I liked to feel that he watched me. I’d turn my head a little way and talk to Will, and continue talking that Captain Butler might go on looking at me.

‘I wish you were not sailing so soon, cousin,’ said I. ‘I’d plan more of these excursions. They make me forget I have a stepfather.’

‘I hope your stepfather does not ill-treat you!’ exclaimed Captain Butler, and some glow came into his face.

‘No, no!’ cried I, and I guessed that my eyes sparkled with a sudden heat of my spirits. ‘Ill-treat me, indeed! The fact is the house isn’t big enough for him and me. But I won’t turn him out. He’s the father of my mother’s child, and my home was my mother’s. But oh, I feel the gloom of it! I am alone. I can’t take to the little one. And must it be year after year the same?’ I cast my eyes down and breathed quickly; then, rounding upon Will, I cried with a loud silly laugh, ‘You shall take me on a voyage with you when you come home!’

‘I like these excursions,’ said Will. ‘Don’t you, Captain Butler?’

‘I’d like them better if they didn’t end so soon,’ he answered.

‘I have a fortnight!’ exclaimed Will. ‘Let’s go on a trip every day!’

Captain Butler’s eyes met mine.

‘You, of course, have something better to do?’ said I to him.

‘I have nothing to do.’

‘Where’s your ship?’

‘I have no ship,’ said he. ‘A barque, called the Arab Chief, is in course of completion at Sunderland. I may command her if I invest in her. I wish to consider. I am not rich, and I must see my way clearly before I venture all that I have.’

‘So you must. And I suppose you’ll go and live at Sunderland?’

‘No. I can do no good at Sunderland. Time enough to go to Sunderland when the ship is ready. She’s not building under my superintendence.’

‘You’ll visit your relatives in the country?’

‘I have relatives, but they don’t live in the country, and I shan’t visit them.’

‘Can’t we arrange for some more trips?’ said Will. ‘Let’s go sight-seeing every day.’

‘Give us a sketch of your fancies, Johnstone,’ said Captain Butler.

‘Well,’ he began, counting upon his fingers, ‘there’s a dinner at the Star and Garter; that’s good sight-seeing number one. Then there’s Greenwich yonder, and another dinner, number two. Then, what say you to Woolwich and a peep at the hulks? Call that job a day on the river, taking a boat at Billingsgate or the Tower. Number three.’

‘Keep in shore, my lad,’ said Captain Butler, laughing. ‘You’ll be having enough of the water soon.’

‘What do ye say to Hampstead and tea? Then a dinner at the King’s Arms at Hampton Court? And is Windsor too far off?’ So he rattled.

Yet the jolly young fellow’s proposals were very well to our liking, and before we rose to depart from the Brunswick Hotel we had schemed out a long holiday week. They saw me to my house, as on the previous night. Neither would come in. When they had left me, I felt very dull and lonely. I found a note on my table from a friend at Bow. She asked me to a card-party next night, but I was in no humour to accept any invitations to houses where I was not likely to meet Captain Butler. Indeed, I had come home from this jaunt to the docks as deeply in love as ever woman was with a man in this world. I slept, it is true, but I dreamed of nothing but my handsome sailor, as my heart was already secretly calling him. I went to sea with him in a number of visions that night, quelled a mutiny among the sailors, saved Captain Butler’s life at the risk of my own; and when he took me in his arms to thank and caress me, I looked in his face, and heavens!—it was my stepfather!

CHAPTER VI
SHE IS ASKED IN MARRIAGE

At the appointed time I was at my aunt’s next morning. Captain Butler and Will were there. We went to Richmond, and after we had arrived it rained for the rest of the day, but it was all one to me; indeed, I would rather have had it rain than sunshine, for it forced us to sit indoors, whilst Will, defying the rain, went out and left Captain Butler and me alone, which was just what I liked.

I will not catalogue these holiday trips; they made me feel as if I were living for the first time in all my life; they made me know that I was a girl with passions and tastes, yet easy to delight. I will not say that I enjoyed my liberty, because for years I had not known what restraint was; but I was sensible that my being able to go where I pleased and to do what I pleased was a prodigious privilege at this time, when I had lost my heart, and must have gone mad had I been withheld from the society of the man who had it.

Two days before Will sailed my aunt called upon me. Our holiday rambles had run out; that day was to be blank, and I was not to see Captain Butler again until Thursday—it was a Thursday, I remember—when we were going down to the docks to see Will off. I remarked a peculiar look in my aunt’s face, which prompted me, in my impetuous way, to say:

‘What’s brought you here? What have you come to tell me? Now don’t keep me waiting?’

‘Lor’, my dear, one would need the breath of a healthy giant to keep pace with your impatience. Give me leave to rest a minute.’

‘All’s well at home, I hope?’

‘Why, yes, of course, as well as it can be with a mother and father whose only child is leaving them, perhaps for ever, in a couple of days.’ Her eyes moistened. ‘But it is his wish, and it is his father’s wish, and that must make it right—yes, that must make it right; though I’d have been grateful, very grateful, if it hadn’t been the sea.’ She wept for a few minutes, and I held my peace. Then drying her eyes with a resolved motion of the handkerchief, she said: ‘You’ve been enjoying some lively days of late, Marian?’

‘Happy days. Poor Will!’ and now I felt as if I must cry, too.

‘You’re a strange creature, my dear. Whatever you do seems to me wrong. And yet, somehow, I can never satisfy my mind that your conduct’s improper. I believe you’d be the same were your mother living. Your father might have held you in, but you’d have had your way with your poor mother.’

‘What have I done?’ said I, bridling up and flushing in the face.

‘Nothing out of the ordinary,’ she answered mildly. ‘Of course, your going about so much with Captain Butler, often being alone with him, as Will has told us, is quite contrary to my ideas of good conduct. Do you want the man for a husband, Marian?’

I guessed by my temper that I looked hotly at her.

‘Do you, child, do you? You should answer me. If you do not answer me I will go, and I am sure that you will wish this house should be burnt down rather than that I should go.’

My temper went with this, and with it the blood out of my face.

‘What do you want me to say, aunt?’ I exclaimed in a faint voice.

‘Would you be content to marry Captain Butler?’

I looked down upon the ground and said softly:

‘I love him.’

‘He loves you. Do you know that?’

‘He has not told me so.’

‘He is a man of very gentlemanlike feelings, far above the average merchant sea-captain.’

‘Oh, don’t I know it!’ I cried.

‘Well, he loves you, and would be very glad to marry you. And I dare say he would,’ said my aunt, looking up and down my figure and then round the room, ‘but he’ll not offer marriage unless he is certain you’ll accept him. He spent last evening with us, and had a very long and serious talk with your uncle and me on the subject. He declines to recognise your stepfather, which is quite proper under the circumstances, and regards me and your uncle as taking the place of your parents. Now, my dear, he is very much in love with you, and his diffidence comes from your being well off. We had a very long and serious talk, and I am here to have a serious talk with you, if not a long one.’

I felt that my face was lighted up; I saw the reflection of its delight in her own placid expression. My heart bounded; I could have danced and sung and waltzed about the room. I sat down, locking my hands tightly upon my lap, and listened with all the composure I could summon.

She informed me that Captain Butler had been exceedingly candid, had exactly named his savings and his patrimony, which scarcely amounted to three thousand pounds, and that he was deliberating whether or not to invest all that he had in a share of the new barque, Arab Chief. Mr. Johnstone had advised him, supposing he should be so fortunate as to gain my consent to marry him, not to make me his wife until he had gone his first voyage and seen how his venture fell out.

‘Your uncle,’ said my aunt, ‘is strongly of opinion that a man has no business to go and marry a fine handsome young woman like you, then leave her after a week or a month, and not set eyes on her again till he returns home from round the world.’

‘I wish my uncle would mind his own business,’ said I, pouting, and feeling my face very long.

But my aunt insisted that my uncle was right. She added that Captain Butler cordially agreed with him. Captain Butler’s own wish was to betroth himself to me, then to make his voyage; then return and marry me and carry me away with him to sea.

My eyes sparkled, and I jumped up and walked the room greatly excited. But after this my aunt grew tedious. Was it imaginable that any sort of love fit to base so solemn an affair as marriage upon could exist between two people who had known each other a fortnight only? Here was I joyously avowing my love for Captain Butler and expressing the utmost eagerness to marry him. Did I know what I was talking about? Had I given a moment’s reflection to what marrying a sailor signified? I was rich, young, and handsome; I had a fine house of my own; I had liberty and health; I was without children to tease me, to pale me with midnight watchings, to burden my spirits with anxiety for their future. Should I not be giving myself away very cheaply by marrying a sea-captain, a respectable, good-looking man certainly, but poor, following a calling in which no one can make any sort of figure, an underpaid, perilous, beggarly vocation? She did not deny that Captain Butler came from a highly respectable stock. He had mentioned two members of his family whom Mr. Johnstone perfectly well knew by name. His father had been in the Royal Navy and had served under Collingwood and Lord Exmouth and had died a poor lieutenant.

‘Oh, he’s a gentleman by birth,’ said my aunt, ‘and superior to his position. There’s his calling, out of which, to be sure, he can get a living, so as to be independent of his wife, which must always be the first consideration with every man of spirit. And, then, you have plenty of money for both, and for as many as may come, should ever he find himself out of employment. But what do you know of each other? How can you tell that you will be able to live happily together? What! In a fortnight? Ridiculous! Why, I have lived one-and-twenty years with your uncle, and we don’t even yet understand each other. You have by no means a sweet temper. But what time do you give the poor fellow to find you out in? And he may be quite a fiend himself, for all you know. It needs not much wig to hide a pair of horns. A tail will lie curled up out of sight under a fashionable coat, and your cloven hoof fits any shoe, my dear.’

So she chatted and teased and worried me with her advice and old-fashioned precepts. And then she angered me, and we quarrelled awhile, and afterwards cried and kissed. However, when her visit was ended, I had promised her, in answer to her earnest, almost tearful entreaty, that, though I should consent to engage myself to Captain Butler, I would not marry him until he had returned from his next voyage, which, if he went to the West Indies and South America, would not keep him very long away from me, so that I should have plenty of time to judge of his character whilst he was ashore and abundance of leisure afterward to reflect upon my observations and prepare myself for the very greatest change that can befall a woman.

I did not see Captain Butler again until Thursday. In the brief interval I had made up my mind to accept him at once if he proposed. Oh, my few days of holiday association with him had filled my heart with a passion of love! Not my happiness only—my very life was in his power.

I went to my uncle’s house on Thursday, early in the morning. We were to see poor Will off. We all tried to put on a cheerful air, and Will talked big of the presents he would bring home for his mother and me; but his mother’s eyes were red with a night of secret weeping; and whenever the lad’s sight went to her face his mouth twitched and, if he was speaking, his voice trembled and broke. His father looked often at him.