The Man Who Did the Right Thing: A Romance

Slowly the night wore away. Lucy as she lay awake stifled her regrets by vowing that when the steamer called at Plymouth she would instantly leave it and return home to her parents, and write to John telling him she was not fitted to be a missionary's wife. He would soon get over his disappointment as Ann Jamblin was going out by the next steamer. She would marry him like a shot....

In the small hours of the morning the sea calmed down and the ship rolled less. The passenger who had suffered most from sea-sickness--a poor tired-looking woman, mother of too many children--ceased to retch and groan and sank into exhausted repose. Even Lucy at last wove her troubled thoughts into dreams, but just as she had dreamt that this was only a dream and that in reality she was embracing her mother in a transport of happiness, she awoke with tears wet on her face and saw the cabin lit up with garish daylight streaming through the now open skylight. A fresh, exhilarating breeze was sweeping through the stuffy saloon and chasing the nasty odour of sea-sickness. She sat up in her bunk and gazed blankly round, trying to realize the difference between dreamland and reality.

"Would ye like a bath, Miss?" said the stewardess, a coarse-looking but kind-hearted Irishwoman, never quite free from a suspicion of spirit drinking: "Would ye like a bath? Becase if so, ye'd betther follow Mrs. Bazzard."

"I--I--don't know ... well, yes, I think I will," replied Lucy, wondering who Mrs. Bazzard was ... didn't the name come into John's letters? Just then the door leading out of the saloon towards the bathroom opened and presumably Mrs. Bazzard entered the Ladies' quarters, carrying towels and robed in a white lace-trimmed peignoir, and with her hair roughly piled on the top of her head and a lank fringe parted to either side. "Why, it must be the lady with the beautiful complexion," Lucy was saying to herself, when she saw on nearer approach that the rosy cheeks and blush tints had disappeared, and that the incomer, though otherwise resembling her acquaintance of yesterday, yet had a pale face, colourless and sad. "Poor thing!" thought Lucy, "_how_ she must have suffered last night." And so great was her compassion that it overcame her shyness, and she was about to condole with the lady, when Mrs. Bazzard swept by her abruptly without recognition.

When her toilet was finished, she felt ill-at-ease among the uncongenial inmates of the Ladies' Saloon, and they directed towards her at times a look of hatred as at one who was prying into the mysteries of their clothing and bedizenment; so acting on the advice of the stewardess "to get up a bit of appetite," she staggered along the corridor and climbed the slippery brass-bound stairway till she reached the upper-deck. Here she sank on to the nearest seat and derived her first pleasurable sensation on board the steamer from inhaling the sea-scented breeze in the sunshine of April. It was indeed a fine morning, one of the first emphatic days of spring. The sky was a pale azure in the zenith and along the northern horizon a thin film of pinkish mist veiled the distant line of coast. A man cleaning the brasswork told Lucy they were passing the Isle of Wight; yonder was Bournemouth and presently she would see Portland Bill looming up.

A tall man, smoking a cheroot, was gazing in the direction of Portland Bill. Presently he turned round in Lucy's direction, looked at her rather hard then began pacing the deck. "That," she reflected, "must be Captain Brentham, who lectured at Reading on that snow mountain.... How extraordinary! And he must be the man Mrs. ... Mrs. ... Bazzard said was to marry me to John when I arrived." She raised her eyes and they met his. On his next turn in walking the deck he paused irresolute, then raising his cap said: "Are you the young lady from my part of the country who is going out to Unguja to be married? The Captain told me about you--unless I have made some mistake and ought to be addressing another lady."

"I think it must be me," said Lucy. "I ... I've heard you lecture once at Reading. You're a friend of Lord Silchester's, aren't you? My father is one of his tenants. We live at Aldermaston." Her voice trembled a little in pronouncing the name of the place she now loved--too late--beyond any other.

"Aldermaston--_of course_ I know it, known it from boyhood. I rode over there several times last year to see my cousins, the Grayburns. One of them married Lord Silchester last July, and that's why I stayed at Englefield and gave the Reading lecture.... So you came and heard it?"

"I did; because, as I was going out to marry a missionary, I thought I ought to learn something about East Africa. Your ... your lecture made me want to go--awfully.... That wonderful mountain, those clumps of palms, the river and the hippopotami--or was it a lake?"

"Well, you'll see lots of such things if you are going up-country. Whom are you going to marry and where is he stationed?"

"Mr. John Baines, the East African Mission, Ulunga...."

"Oh" (rather depreciatively), "Nonconformist, Plymouth Brethren, or something of the kind. Now I think of it I went to a big meeting of theirs last year soon as I came back. Yes, I remember. They're a trading and industrial mission some distance inland, in the British as well as the German sphere ... good sort of folk, though their mouths are full of texts ... but they took me in once when I was half dead with fever and nursed me back to health. And I liked the way they set to work to make the best of the country and the people.... But it will be awfully rough for you; you don't look cut out for what they have to go through. I should have thought the Anglican Mission more your style, if, indeed, you went out as a Missionary at all."

He wished to add, "You're much too pretty," but restrained himself. Just then the breakfast gong sounded and they went down to the Dining Saloon. Brentham rather masterfully strode to near the top of the long table as though knowing he was the most important person on board, and placed himself next but one to the Captain's seat and Lucy on his right, with a wink at the same time to the Chief Steward as though to say "Fix this arrangement."

A moment after another lady with gold hair and a dazzling complexion glided up and nimbly took the seat on Brentham's left hand. The Captain was absent and intimated that they needn't expect him till the Jeddah was away from Plymouth and out of the Channel. The other lady passengers were breakfasting in the Ladies' Saloon. As soon as they were seated and porridge was being offered, the lady on Brentham's left introduced herself as the wife of a colleague: "My husband is Spencer Bazzard, the Vice-Consul at Unguja--I dare say you've heard about him at the F.O.? He's a friend of that dear Bennet Molyneux's, to whom we're both devoted.... Such a grasp of African affairs, don't you think so? My husband already knows Unguja through and through. I'm sure he'll be glad to put you up to the ropes. I've never been there before. Spencer thought he ought to go out first and make a home for me, so I've been a forlorn grass widow for over a year. However, we shall soon be reunited. And I understand we're to look on you as our chief till the Consul-General returns. Spencer's been Sir James's right-hand man. Thank you. Toast, please. No, I won't take butter: it looks so odd. Like honey! Ugh!"

After breakfast, Brentham escorted Lucy to the upper-deck, got her a folding chair and secured it in a sheltered corner, made her comfortable, lent her a novel and a rug, and then resumed his pacing of the deck or occasional study of a language book--he was trying, he told Lucy, to master Swahili by doing Steere's exercises in that harmonious tongue. Mrs. Bazzard commandeered a steward and a deck-chair and established herself close to Lucy with a piece of showy embroidery, bought at Liberty's with half the embroidery done. In a condescending manner she set herself to pump Lucy about Brentham.... Did she know him well? Didn't she think him good-looking? Mrs. Bazzard thought of the two her husband was the finer-looking man. He had longer moustaches and they were a golden brown, like Mrs. Bazzard's hair; he wasn't perhaps quite so tall; but how she was looking forward to reunion with him. He was a paragon of husbands, one of the Norfolk Bazzards. His elder brother, a person of great legal acumen, had from time to time tendered advice of signal value to Mr. Bennet Molyneux.... It was thus they had got "in" with the Foreign Office, and if Mrs. Bazzard were not pledged to inviolable secrecy (because of Spencer's career) there were things she knew and things she could tell about Lord Wiltshire's intentions regarding Africa--and Spencer.... However.... Did Miss--she begged pardon--she had not caught Lucy's name.... Josselin? any connexion of Sir Martin Josselin? Oh, Josling.... Did Miss Josling come from Captain Brentham's part of the country? Not a relation? No, of course not.... Well, did she think him clever? Some--in the Foreign Office--regarded him as superficial. It was his good looks that had got him on, and the friendship of a great lady ... but then what scandal-mongers men were! And how jealous of one another! Mrs. Bazzard's husband had got his commission through sheer, outstanding ability, yet at the time people said the most horrid things, both of him and her.... But Lord Wiltshire had remained unshaken, knowing Spencer's value; and undoubtedly held him in view for a very important post in Africa as soon as he should have inducted Captain Brentham into his duties.

Lunch came in due course and was eaten in better appetite by most of the passengers. It was served with coarse plenty, on a lower-middle-class standard of selection and cuisine.

It was a sunny afternoon when the Jeddah anchored in Plymouth harbour. The passengers were informed they might spend four hours on shore, so Captain Brentham proposed to Lucy and to Mrs. Bazzard that he should take them under his escort and give them their last chance of eating a decent dinner at an English hotel. Mrs. Bazzard accepted with a gush of thanks and a determination to commence a discreet flirtation with the acting Consul-General, who was undoubtedly a handsome man. Lucy assented simply to the proposition. She was still a little dazed in the dawn of her new life. But as she went off with the others in the tug she put aside as an unreasonable absurdity any idea of flight to the railway station and a return home. It was a great stay to her home-sickness that there should be on board some one she knew who almost shared her home country, who had actually met people she had met, and who would carry this home knowledge out with him to the same region in Africa as that she was going to. This removed the sting of her regret and remedied her sense of utter friendlessness in the wilds. Was he not actually to be her Consul?

These reflections caused her to sit down in the Hotel Writing Room, whilst dinner was being got ready, and Mrs. Bazzard was titivating, and dash off a hasty letter to "dearest mother" informing her of the brighter outlook. Her mother, overjoyed at this silver lining to the cloud of bereavement, spread the news; and so it reached Englefield, where Lord Silchester was spending the Easter recess. He retailed it to Sibyl ... who stamped her foot on the library carpet and said: "_There_! Didn't I predict it? I said he'd fall in love with a missionaryess!"