Well, on the following week, my sweetheart went to Sunderland, and I felt as widowed as though I had been his wife and he had died. He crossed from Sunderland to Liverpool, and was absent a fortnight. From Liverpool he wrote to tell me that he was very well satisfied with the Arab Chief, and had agreed with her owners, who did business in Liverpool, to take command of her and purchase a share to the value of three thousand pounds.
The influence of his love was very strong upon me while he was away. He had hinted, but gently, that he thought my aunt right in objecting to my old love of rambling—I mean to the excursions I used to make down the river and to other parts, often sleeping out for a night or two at a time, as you have heard; and during his absence I went nowhere, save to my aunt’s or to the houses of some of my particular friends.
Meanwhile you will not suppose that I saw nothing of Mr. Stanford. We lived in the same house, and were, therefore, bound to meet, not, indeed, in our separate apartments, but upon the staircase or in the passages. When Tom had been gone about a week, my stepfather knocked upon my door one morning as I sat at breakfast. I bade him enter, and he sat down at the table.
‘I met Mrs. Johnstone yesterday,’ said he, ‘and she gave me a piece of news. Allow me to congratulate you,’ and he inclined his head.
I bowed slightly in return, keeping silence.
‘I am aware that I have no claim upon you, Miss Johnstone,’ said he.
‘None whatever,’ I cried.
‘But I am your stepfather, and, as a matter of courtesy, not to say more, you should, I think, have favoured me from your own lips with the news of your engagement.’
‘My affairs have nothing to do with you, Mr. Stanford.’
‘Miss Marian, I am not here to quarrel, but to congratulate you,’ he said. ‘Our relations have long been uncomfortable. I should have quitted this house some time ago, but for the difficulty I find in meeting with one equally suitable. My practice is of the utmost importance to me not for my sake only; it is my duty to make a provision for your mother’s child.’
‘She is your child!’ I cried, hotly.
‘I do not need to be told that, Miss Marian. It is very painful to me to reflect that your antipathy should have no other basis than your lamented mother’s love for me. Your mother, I hope and trust, was dear to you, Miss Marian, and it is most regrettable that there is nothing in her memory to soften your violent prejudice.’
‘I beg you will not speak to me of my mother.’
He eyed me askant; he had a way of looking at you with his head half turned. ‘I am here primarily to congratulate you,’ said he. ‘It is your pleasure to be reticent, and I will therefore not trouble you with any questions about your fiancé. But one inquiry you will forgive—it is a matter of business. When, pray, are you to be married?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You will probably settle in this house with your husband?’
‘When he is my husband he shall live where he pleases, and I’ll live with him.’
‘This end of London is not to everybody’s taste,’ he said, with an acid smile. ‘It has occurred to me that your husband might wish to live in the west of the town. If so, I should be glad to arrange with him or with you to take this house off your hands.’
I answered coldly that I had no intention of parting with the house. It had belonged to my father, and whatever belonged to my father I held in veneration; and this I said with so much bitterness that he rose, without another word, and left the room. I was glad to see his back. I cannot tell you how I hated the man.
Tom returned at about the expiration of a fortnight, and now I was one of the happiest of women. We were together day after day. We visited many old-fashioned resorts in the neighbourhood of London, not one of which is probably now in existence. His influence did me a world of good. It was the most shaping, elevating, I had almost said, ennobling influence any girl could have come under. The power of his love over me was a godsend to such a character as mine. I had lived so uncontrolled a life, I was by nature so defiant, quick-tempered, and contemptuous of the opinion of others, that in many directions I did not really know the right thing to do. No mother could have more wisely directed her child than Tom governed me.
‘You are a rich garden,’ he would say, ‘but overrun; the sweets are too crowded, Marian, and here and there, my love, is a bit of snake-like habit that needs to be uncoiled from the beautiful plant it has got foul of.’
I well remember, soon after he returned from Liverpool, that he saw me to my house. It was six o’clock in the evening. I asked him to walk in.
‘No, dear,’ said he.
‘“No, dear!” Why not, Tom? You are tired and I am alone. Come in.’
‘It is because you are alone that I will not come in.’
‘I am always alone here,’ said I. ‘I live alone. You know that.’
‘Yes, I know that.’
‘And I am never to see you at my house because I am alone!’
‘Dearest, I will fetch you to-morrow at eleven, and then we can have a talk on the subject of men’s visits to their sweethearts who live alone.’
He pressed my hand and left me.
Next day he talked to me as he had promised. I listened with love and interest, though I secretly thought it no more than a sort of hair-splitting on the part of society to insist that a girl should not receive her sweetheart alone in her own house. I was alone with Tom now. I had been alone with him at the Brunswick Hotel. What was the difference between my being alone in the streets with him and my being with him at my rooms at home? Yet he said there was a difference, and, of course, he was right. I listened to him deferentially, with my head hung. Had it been my aunt who uttered the opinions he delivered, I should have argued with her, flashed my most spirited looks upon her, flung from her, and, had it been possible, proved myself right by doing the very thing which she declared the world thought improper.
Friends who had known me earlier would have believed that love had taken the spirit out of me; but the truth was in Tom I had found my master. We were constantly together. Scarcely a day passed whilst he was in London without our meeting. I made him sit to a painter of miniature portraits in Regent Street, and the same artist took my likeness for my sweetheart to carry away to sea with him. They were both beautiful little pictures. My eyes seemed to glow out of the ivory, and Tom’s face was to the life, happy, careless, loving.
It was settled by this time that we were to be married on his return. He hoped that he might not have to go to sea again after next voyage. If he went, he would take me with him. The scheme provided for my being at his side, as his wife, in any case. But he owned that, though he had recommended a sea voyage to me, and though he had said he would take me as his wife to sea with him, he had far rather that I kept on dry ground. The sea was no place for woman. It was hurdled with perils. It was a ceaseless jump of risks from one port to another. Here, then, was one reason for our not being married until he returned.
But another and more controlling one, though he never betrayed it in words, was his desire that I should have plenty of leisure to reflect upon the step I had consented to take. I could not now but see things as he did, and, indeed, I hope I could never have been so unmaidenly as to give the smallest expression to my secret wishes; but in my heart of hearts I was more vexed than I can express by this delay, which I attributed largely to my uncle’s influence with Tom. When two people are in love, and are to be married, there will be impatience. Whether the man or the woman is or should be the more impatient, I don’t know. I own that deep in my heart I was bitterly impatient. Tom would not sail till August; we had plenty of time to get married in; several months must pass before he could return, and, like a child, I wanted my toy at once. I wanted to feel that he belonged to me; that, though he was absent, an invisible bond united us. I was jealous of him. I said to myself: At the place he is sailing to he may meet with some woman whom he will think fairer and discover to be richer than I. Are not sailors faithless? All the songs and stories about them represent them so. Then I thought of my father, and abhorred myself for being visited with such thoughts, and cried like a fool to think how mean was my heart, that loving, nay, I may say adoring my Tom as I did, I could yet suppose when out of sight he would forget me.
Well, the time came round when the Arab Chief was nearly ready, and when my sweetheart must go to Sunderland to carry her to the Mersey, there to load for Rio Janeiro. I never could understand business, least of all the business of the sea, and would listen to him whilst he talked about his venture, vainly endeavouring to grasp his meaning in the full. But I gathered from his conversations with my uncle that he was very sanguine, and that, in any case, there could be no risks, as he had taken care to insure considerably in excess of his stake. I recollect, on one occasion, when we were dining at my aunt’s, my uncle, in talking with Tom about his venture, suggested that he erred by insuring so high above the value of the risk.
‘But why?’ said Tom. ‘At all events, I pay handsomely for the privilege of protecting myself up to the hilt.’
‘True,’ said the lawyer, ‘but always in case of loss there is something in over-insurance that vitiates—perhaps to one’s prejudice only, mind—the well-seeming of this act of self-protection.’
‘The underwriters have it in their power to satisfy themselves,’ said Tom.
‘What are your firms?’ asked my uncle.
‘The Marine, the Alliance, and the General Maritime Insurance.’
‘That’s cover enough, captain,’ said my uncle, laughing.
‘Yes, and I mean to go to the Neptune for a policy on the freight. I have a considerable share in the barque, and I intend that my proportion of the freight shall be safe. I am not of those who believe in keeping their money in a purse; I carry mine in my pockets. If the purse is lost, all is gone. Who’s to assure me of the solvency of an insurance office? I mean that this voyage shall enable me to stay at home with my wife,’ said he, looking fondly at me. ‘Let another take charge of the barque next time. I’ll make enough to own the half of her.’
‘You shall own all of her, if you will, Tom,’ said I.
‘That’s as your trustees shall decide,’ said my uncle.
‘My money is my own, and I shall do what I please with it,’ I answered.
‘Yes; and with your knowledge of business, Marian, you shall go into partnership with your husband as a shipowner and land the firm in the Fleet.’
‘All in the Downs the Fleet lay moored,’
and so with a laugh changed the subject.
It was towards the close of the month of August when my sweetheart bade me farewell on his departure to Liverpool to take command of the Arab Chief. I had passionately desired to go with him; but my aunt could not accompany me, and I was without a friend of my own sex able just then to leave home. My wish was overruled by my uncle and aunt. Tom himself did not favour it, though his longing for me to be with him to the last was as keen as mine, and so I took my farewell of him in my uncle’s home. He held me in his arms whilst I cried till I thought my heart would break. He kissed me again and again, bade me keep up my spirits, to consider that that day a year I should have been his wife some months. He begged me to remain faithful to him, and told me there never would be a minute when I should be out of his thoughts; and solemnly asking God to look down upon me, to guard me against all evil and sickness, to look down upon him, to protect and bring him back in safety to me, he pressed a last lingering kiss upon my lips and left me alone with my tears and my memories.
I received several letters from him whilst he was at Liverpool. He wrote in good spirits, called his ship a beauty, and said that of her kind she was the most admired of anything that had been seen in the Mersey for years. There was but one drawback. The mate of the barque was a Mr. Samuel Rotch. Tom had met this man some five or six years before in South America, and had had an unpleasantness with him there. He did not tell me what that trouble was. Afterwards Rotch had served under him, and there was a further difficulty.
Mr. Rotch, he said, was a man of his own age, soured by professional disappointments, but a shrewd, intelligent person, and an excellent seaman. He had rather that the owners had appointed any other man as mate. But he believed that there was some sort of distant relationship between Rotch and one of the firm; and as the man had once before got into trouble in consequence of his representations, and was poor, with a wife and two children to support, he had resolved to leave matters as he found them.
I showed this letter to my uncle, and asked him if he thought that Mr. Rotch had it in his power to make Tom unhappy or the voyage uncomfortable. He laughed, and answered:
‘Your Tom will have gone to sea with irons and bilboes, depend on ’t. Do you know that the power of the shipmaster when at sea is greater than that of any despot in the world, from the czar down to the shirt-maker’s sweater? I have always contended that legally the master mariner is much too much empowered. He can flog, he can starve, he can iron the devils under him, and justify any atrocity by an entry in the log-book and the testimony of one or two witnesses who would poison their mothers for a bottle of rum. How, then, should this Mr. Samuel Rotch be able to disturb the peace of your sweetheart? Your anxiety puts the boot on the wrong leg, my dear. It is for Mrs. Rotch to be uneasy.’
The next letter I received from Tom was dated at sea a few leagues from the Scilly Islands. He had brought his topsail to the mast, he wrote, to send his letter by a little coasting schooner that was inward bound. He blessed me, and sent me many messages of love, and wrote in high spirits of his ship and crew. Rotch was very civil and alert, he said, his crew as willing and active a body of men as ever he had had charge of, and his barque was a clipper, the swiftest fabric that was ever bowed by a breeze of wind.
‘I don’t mean to spare her,’ he wrote, ‘and she knows it. If there’s virtue in sail-cloth, my beloved, she shall walk. She shall whiten old ocean for your sake, my darling, though it should come to my holding on with my royals when we ought to be under double reefs.’
I laughed when I read his sea-terms, for I understood them; yet I pouted, too, for I was fool enough to feel jealous of his admiration for his barque. He ought to admire nothing living or dead but me, I thought to myself. He may go and fall in love with his ship, and think her mistress enough for him, and then I kissed his letter and read it again and yet again, and counted how many days had gone since he had left me, and how many weeks must pass before he would return.
Much about this time aunt received a letter from her son Will. This, too, was addressed from sea. We had heard from him from Plymouth—a few brief lines—and not since. He wrote that they had met with fearful weather in the Channel, and he believed that he had mistaken his calling; he would swap all his fine notions of starting on a career and seeing the world for one hour of the comfortable parlour near the Tower and a good dinner of roast beef and cauliflower.
‘It’s a dog’s life,’ said he. ‘The captain is stern and like a sentry. You mustn’t speak to him. The second mate is a bit of a bully, big, strong, and noisy. You never saw such beef as they serve out in all your life! The oldest sailor on board swears he never recollects worse pork, and they say that before we’re up with the Cape the bread for ship’s use will be all alive—oh!’
‘All first voyagers write like that,’ said my uncle, returning the letter to his wife; ‘before Will is a fortnight at home he’ll be making our lives a burden with his regrets and lamentations that his ship doesn’t sail sooner.’