It was a bleak, dark November day when we started; a strong wind blew, and the sky was thick and near with rolling snow-clouds. We passed along Southampton Water in a squall of sleet, and though imagination was never an inactive quality in me, yet then, more keenly than at any previous time, was I able to realise the significance of Wall's story of the dismasted hull, the high foaming seas of the great ocean past the Horn, the mountains of ice rocking their lofty summits in the smoke of flying flakes.
It was blowing fresh in the open, clear of the Isle of Wight; the little steamer pitched and sprang and made vile weather of the spiteful snap of that November Channel surge. She drove the most of us to our berths, and for four days I was a prisoner, stupidly sick and helpless. Then I stepped forth feeling well again, and making my way on to the poop found a fine day, a swelling sea, a rattling breeze astern, before which the vessel, with bladder-like canvas swelling hard from her yards and black funnel pouring smoke over the bows to the horizon ahead, was bowling and rolling, with an occasional kick up astern which drove a shock and vibration of exposed screw through the length of her.
Abreast on the right was a little ship under full sail braced sharp up, tearing through the seas; the red flag of England stood like a board at her mizzen peaks. She was apparently bound home. The water swept in sheets from her steering stem, and every flash of the white brine was magically spanned by a rainbow. She was painted black, and to my land-going eye exactly resembled the 'Lady Emma,' though the practised nautical glance would doubtless have witnessed plenty that distinguished her from the other. I watched her with fascinated gaze, and in deep melancholy, as she swept through the brilliant curls of sea, clouding her path as she dived and scoring the rolling blue astern of her with an arrow-like line of light.
Just such sailing as that had Marie described in the fragment of journal we had received. She had named the sails, flung with dexterous pen the very sheen of the lustrous rounds of canvas upon the vision of the mind, painted the picture of the deck, the dark wet length of plank gleaming along the sobbing scuppers at every roll, sailors hanging in the rigging with marling-spikes and coils of small stuff, or stitching on spaces of canvas in the sun, the mate walking the weather side of the deck, her own dear self seated under a short awning talking with her old nurse about the home she was leaving, about the countries she was to visit. I caught my breath with a spasm and turned from the beautiful picture.