The Lady Sleuths MEGAPACK TM(153)
Day after day passed, and we steamed through the Straits and neared the Channel. Our thoughts began to assume a home complexion. Everybody was full of schemes as to what he would do when he reached England. Old Bradshaws were overhauled and trains looked out, on the supposition that we would get in by such an hour on Tuesday. We were steaming along the French coast, off the western promontory of Brittany. The evening was fine, and though, of course, less warm than we had experienced of late, yet pleasant and summer-like. We watched the distant cliffs of the Finistere mainland and the numerous little islands that lie off the shore, all basking in the unreal glow of a deep red sunset. The first officer was in charge, a very cock-sure and careless young man, handsome and dark-haired; the sort of young man who thought more of creating an impression upon the minds of the lady passengers than of the duties of his position.
“Aren’t you going down to your berth?” I asked of Hilda, about half-past ten that night; “the air is so much colder here than you have been feeling it of late, that I’m afraid of your chilling yourself.”
She looked up at me with a smile, and drew her little fluffy, white woollen wrap closer about her shoulders. “Am I so very valuable to you, then?” she asked—for I suppose my glance had been a trifle too tender for a mere acquaintance’s. “No, thank you, Hubert; I don’t think I’ll go down, and, if you’re wise, you won’t go down either. I distrust this first officer. He’s a careless navigator, and to-night his head’s too full of that pretty Mrs. Ogilvy. He has been flirting with her desperately ever since we left Bombay, and to-morrow he knows he will lose her for ever. His mind isn’t occupied with the navigation at all; what he is thinking of is how soon his watch will be over, so that he may come down off the bridge on to the quarter-deck to talk to her. Don’t you see she’s lurking over yonder, looking up at the stars and waiting for him by the compass? Poor child! she has a bad husband, and now she has let herself get too much entangled with this empty young fellow. I shall be glad for her sake to see her safely landed and out of the man’s clutches.”
As she spoke, the first officer glanced down towards Mrs. Ogilvy, and held out his chronometer with an encouraging smile which seemed to say, “Only an hour and a half more now! At twelve, I shall be with you!”
“Perhaps you’re right, Hilda,” I answered, taking a seat beside her and throwing away my cigar. “This is one of the worst bits on the French coast that we’re approaching. We’re not far off Ushant. I wish the captain were on the bridge instead of this helter-skelter, self-conceited young fellow. He’s too cock-sure. He knows so much about seamanship that he could take a ship through any rocks on his course, blindfold—in his own opinion. I always doubt a man who is so much at home in his subject that he never has to think about it. Most things in this world are done by thinking.”
“We can’t see the Ushant light,” Hilda remarked, looking ahead.
“No; there’s a little haze about on the horizon, I fancy. See, the stars are fading away. It begins to feel damp. Sea mist in the Channel.”
Hilda sat uneasily in her deck-chair. “That’s bad,” she answered; “for the first officer is taking no more heed of Ushant than of his latter end. He has forgotten the existence of the Breton coast. His head is just stuffed with Mrs. Ogilvy’s eyelashes. Very pretty, long eyelashes, too; I don’t deny it; but they won’t help him to get through the narrow channel. They say it’s dangerous.”
“Dangerous!” I answered. “Not a bit of it—with reasonable care. Nothing at sea is dangerous—except the inexplicable recklessness of navigators. There’s always plenty of sea-room—if they care to take it. Collisions and icebergs, to be sure, are dangers that can’t be avoided at times, especially if there’s fog about. But I’ve been enough at sea in my time to know this much at least—that no coast in the world is dangerous except by dint of reckless corner-cutting. Captains of great ships behave exactly like two hansom-drivers in the streets of London; they think they can just shave past without grazing; and they do shave past nine times out of ten. The tenth time they run on the rocks through sheer recklessness, and lose their vessel; and then, the newspapers always ask the same solemn question—in childish good faith—how did so experienced and able a navigator come to make such a mistake in his reckoning? He made no mistake; he simply tried to cut it fine, and cut it too fine for once, with the result that he usually loses his own life and his passengers. That’s all. We who have been at sea understand that perfectly.”