In Kedars Tents | Page 7

but still had his hand over his face.
'Got any money, Geoff?' he asked.
'Yes, I have twenty pounds if you want it,' answered the other in a hoarse voice.
'I do want it--badly.'
The journalist had taken up his hat and stick. He moved slowly towards the door, and, there pausing, saw Horner pass the bank-notes to Conyngham.
'You had better go too,' said the Irishman. 'You two are going in the same direction, I know.'
Horner rose, and, half laughing, Conyngham pushed him towards the door.
'See him home, Blake,' he said. 'Horner has the blues to-night.'
CHAPTER III.
LIKE SHIPS UPON THE SEA.

'No one can be more wise than destiny.'
'What are we waiting for? why, two more passengers--grand ladies as they tell me--and the captain has gone ashore to fetch them,' the first mate of the 'Granville' barque, of London, made answer to Frederick Conyngham, and he breathed on his fingers as he spoke, for the north-west wind was blowing across the plains of the Medoc, and the sun had just set behind the smoke of Bordeaux.
The 'Granville' was lying at anchor in the middle of the Garonne river, having safely discharged her deck cargo of empty claret casks and landed a certain number of passengers. There are few colder spots on the Continent than the sunny town of Bordeaux when the west wind blows from Atlantic wastes in winter time. A fine powder of snow scudded across the flat land, which presented a bleak brown face, patched here and there with white. There were two more passengers on board the 'Granville,' crouching in the cabin--two French gentlemen who had taken passage from London to Algeciras in Spain, on their way to Algiers.
Conyngham, with characteristic good-nature, had made himself so entirely at home on board the Mediterranean trader that his presence was equally welcomed in the forecastle and the captain's cabin. Even the first mate, his present interlocutor, a grim man given to muttered abuse of his calling and a pious pessimism in respect to human nature, gradually thawed under the influence of so cheerful an acceptance of heavy weather and a clumsy deck cargo.
'The ladies will be less trouble than the empty casks, at all events,' said Conyngham, 'because they will keep below.'
The sailor shook his head forebodingly and took an heroic pinch of snuff.
'One's as capable of carrying mischief as the other,' he muttered in the bigoted voice of a married teetotaller.
The ship was ready for sea, and this mariner's spirit was ever uneasy and restless till the anchor was on deck and the hawser stowed.
'There's a boat leaving the quay now,' he added. 'Seems she's lumbered up forr'ard wi' women's hamper.'
And indeed the black form of a skiff so laden could be seen approaching through the driving snow and gloom. The mate called to the steward to come on deck, and this bearded servitor of dames emerged from the galley with uprolled sleeves and a fine contempt for cold winds. A boy went forward with a coil of rope on his arm, for the tide was running hard and the Garonne is no ladies' pleasure stream. It is not an easy matter to board a ship in mid-current when tide and wind are at variance, and the fingers so cold that a rope slips through them like a log-line. The 'Granville,' having still on board her cargo of coals for Algeciras, lay low in the water with both her anchors out and the tide singing round her old- fashioned hempen hawsers.
'Now see ye throw a clear rope,' shouted the mate to the boy who had gone forward. The proximity of the land and the approach of women-- a bete noire no less dreaded--seemed to flurry the brined spirit of the Granville's' mate.
Perhaps the knowledge that the end of a rope, not judged clear, would inevitably be applied to his own person, shook the nerve of the boy on the forecastle--perhaps his hands were cold and his faculties benumbed. He cast a line which seemed to promise well at first. Two coils of it unfolded themselves gracefully against the grey sky, and then Confusion took the others for herself. A British oath from the deck of the ship went out to meet a fine French explosion of profanity from the boat, both forestalling the splash of the tangled rope into the water under the bows of the ship, and a full ten yards out of the reach of the man who stood, boathook in hand, ready to catch it. There were two ladies in the stern of the boat, muffled up to the eyes, and betokening by their attitude the hopeless despair and misery which seize the southern fair the moment they embark in so much as a ferry boat. The fore part of the heavy craft was piled up with trunks and other