The short June night drew to its close, and still the weather continued fair. The sky was full of stars, a solitary lambent planet quivered in the east. By the time the moon had sunk, with pale metallic glow, above the motionless Channel, a welcome point of fire was visible over the starboard bow of the vessel—the beacon of Castle Cornet lighthouse.
A little flutter ran through the groups of expectant people keeping watch together upon the deck of the Princess. It was well to have got back safely, and without fog. And still, whispered the younger ones regretfully, the most delightful picnic in the world had come to an end, all too soon! Even Mrs. Verschoyle, emerging with salts-bottle, with chattering teeth, from the cabin, conceded that, for a yachting expedition, and although L’Ancresse Common would have been a thousand times more reasonable, their misadventures had been few. How comforting, murmured the poor lady, with a shudder, if it were not for the cold—this curiously increasing cold—to keep one’s eyes on the familiar harbour light, to realise that in another hour-and-a-half at latest, they would be all warm and asleep in their beds!
But the cold increased still, and, for a midsummer night, was, undoubtedly, no common cold. It found its way through plaids and waterproofs, it got down throats, it caused fingers to become numbed. The mate was seen to button up his pilot jacket as he made his way with precipitate haste to the men on watch, the skipper moved from one foot to the other as he stood consulting his compass. Both skipper and mate glanced anxiously ahead, towards the west, where no horizon showed.
‘One would, scarcely have expected the stars to set so suddenly,’ observed Mrs. Verschoyle. In this lady’s youth it is probable that schoolgirls did not, as now, learn the exact sciences. ‘But depend upon it, the captain knows his way. The sailors are taking precautions, I heard the steward say so downstairs, by using the lead. And I remarked that they were seeing most attentively to the small boats. Besides, I have heard more than one gun fired. No sound so reassuring at sea as the report of a gun! A skilled old mariner like Ozanne would not be dependent on anything so chancy as the stars.’
‘But, mamma, the harbour lighthouse has set, too,’ cried Rosie Verschoyle, who stood shivering at her mother’s side. ‘Everything is setting. I don’t see our own funnel. I don’t see the flower in your bonnet as clearly as I did two minutes ago.’
‘I wish you would talk soberly, child. You know how much I dislike this kind of ill-timed chaff. Who ever heard of a lighthouse setting?’ observed Mrs. Verschoyle, with melancholy commonsense, ‘and why does the Princess go so slow? The skipper, no doubt, has his reasons, still he might remember we are not all as fond of the sea as he is. I was never less nervous in my life, and—Sailor! Sailor!’ Mrs. Verschoyle flung herself before a figure, wrapped up in tarpaulin, crowned by a sou’-wester which loomed with gigantic proportions through the thick air. ‘Would you say, if you please, why the steamer goes so slow? And are we in danger—off our track or anything? And why does one seem all at once to lose sight of Castle Cornet lighthouse?’
The sailor was a weatherbeaten old Guernseyman, possessing about twelve words of Anglo-Saxon in his vocabulary. Mrs. Verschoyle, however, in her agonised desire for truth, stretched her arms forth in the direction of the vanished red light. She also articulated the words Castle Cornet with tolerable distinctness. Her meaning had made itself clear.
The answer, proceeding from the depths of a gruff, tobaccoey throat, was incisive:
‘Brouillard!’
And brouillard it proved, clammy, ice-cold, yellow, after the manner of all mid-Channel fogs. At first every one affected to take this reverse of fortune as a jest, the little bit of mock danger that was needed to point a moral to the preceding day’s enjoyment. So providential, said the ladies, in pious but quavering chorus, that the Princess lay close on shore before the fog grew thick. The skipper’s duty, clearly, was to make straight for St. Peter’s harbour and land them. Only, why lose time? Why steam so slowly? What object could Captain Ozanne have in exposing them to this mortal cold a moment longer than was needful?
Mrs. Verschoyle, after a few minutes’ suspense, voted for independent action. She had, indeed, broached a project of creeping up to the men at the wheel and imploring them to ‘turn faster,’ when there came a general stir among the crew, followed by a rattling sound which most of the party had sufficient sea-going experience to recognise. The Princess was about to cast her anchor.
Just at this juncture appeared Lord Rex, fresh from hurried consultations with Ozanne and the boatswain. A suspicious unconcern was on Lord Rex Basire’s face, a note of forced cheerfulness in his tone.
‘Lucky we have got so near home, is it not, Mrs. Verschoyle? We are about two miles from shore, they say,—Ozanne, of course, knows every yard of water,—just within or without the Grunes, whatever the Grunes may mean. We shall only have to ride half an hour or so at anchor—awfully jolly sensation, I can tell you, with a south-west swell. And then, as the mist rises, we shall steam clean into Petersport.’
But this show of jauntiness misled no one. The De Carterets, Cassandra Tighe, Marjorie Bartrand, all understood their position better than did Lord Rex. And it was a position of the utmost gravity. The Princess was lying in dense fog, surrounded by shoals, across the very highway of the Channel night steamers. For an old and wary seaman like Ozanne to have been forced to anchor at such a strait did but render the fact of his helplessness more pointed.
‘What does it all mean? Are we not close to port, madam?’
The ladies were pressing together in groups. Dinah whispered the question across Cassandra Tighe’s shoulder.
‘Close to port—of one kind or another,’ answered Cassandra, vaguely unorthodox to the last. ‘As long as nothing runs into us we may do well enough. And dawn is at hand. At sunrise the fog may lift. Your husband ought to be here with you,’ she added, misinterpreting a certain vibration of Dinah’s voice.
‘I thank God that he is not! Alone, there is nothing to be frightened about. I thank God that Gaston is safe—warmly housed, away in Alderney!’
And, in truth, a reasonless, half-pleasurable excitement, the reaction after so much dull pain, had arisen in Dinah’s heart.
That a dark ‘Perhaps’ lay straight and immediately before them, became at each moment more plain. The continued firing of guns gave token that other vessels were in the same plight as the Princess—once, indeed, a steamer drifted so close that they could see the faint reflection of her signal lamps, could hear the beating of her gong. The dreary sound of the fog-horn, the muffled tramp of the men on watch, the lights burning aloft in the ship’s rigging, the partially lowered boats, the solemn faces of the skipper and the crew, all combined into one unspoken word—Danger.