A Hero of Romance
Copyright© 2025 by Richard Marsh
Chapter 20: Exit Captain Tom
When they returned to the deck the boat was preparing to continue her journey. The fruit vendors--and with what delicious fruit the Guernsey men board the Jersey boats!--were preparing to take their leave, and those passengers who had gone to stretch their legs with a saunter on the jetty were returning to the steamer.
The rest of the voyage was uneventful. Jersey is not very far away from Guernsey, and for a considerable part of the distance the passengers were in sight of land. The breeze began to freshen, and as they steamed round Jersey towards St. Heliers it began to dawn upon not a few that enough of this sort of thing was as good as a feast. There is such a very striking difference between steaming over a tranquil sea and being tossed and tumbled among boisterous waves. It was fortunate they were so near their journey’s end. Several of the travellers were congratulating themselves that, when they reached dry land, they would be able to boast that they had voyaged from Southampton to Jersey without experiencing a single qualm. Had the journey been prolonged much further, that boast would have been cruelly knocked on the head. When they drew up beside the pier at St. Heliers, coming events, as it were, had already cast their shadows before. They were saved just in the nick of time.
Bertie and the captain were among the first on shore; and, not unnaturally, the young gentleman supposed that their journeying was at an end. But he was wrong.
“Step out! We have no time to lose! We have to catch another boat, which is due to start.”
Bertie stepped out. He wondered if the other boat was to take them back to England. Did the captain mean to pass the rest of his life in voyaging to and fro?
The disappointed flymen, to whom the arrival of the mail-boat is the great event of the St. Heliers day, let them pass. The hotel and boarding-house touters touted, so far as they were concerned, in vain. The captain gave no heed to their solicitations. He evidently knew his way about, for he walked quickly down the jetty, turned unhesitatingly to the left when he reached the bottom, crossed the harbour, and down the jetty again upon the other side. About half-way down was a fussy little steamer which was making ready to start.
“Here you are! Jump on board!”
If Bertie did not exactly jump, he at any rate got on board.
What the boat was Bertie knew not, nor whither it was going. Compared to the Ella, which they had just quitted, it was so small a craft that he scarcely thought it could be going back the way the mail had come.
As a matter of fact it was not.
Two or three times a week a fussy little steamer passes to and fro between Jersey and France. The two French ports at which it touches are St. Malo and St. Brieuc. One journey it takes to St. Malo, the next to St. Brieuc. On this occasion it was about to voyage to St. Brieuc.
St. Brieuc, as some people may not know, is the chief town of the department of Cotes-du-Nord, in Brittany--about as unpretending a chief town as one could find. That Captain Loftus had some preconceived end in view, and had not started on a wild-goose chase, not, as might have at first appeared, going hither and thither as his fancy swayed him, seemed plain.
A more roundabout route to France he could scarcely have chosen. Had he simply desired to reach the Continent, fast steamers which passed from Southampton to Havre in little less than half the time which the journey had already occupied, were at his disposal. Very many people, some of them constant travellers, are ignorant of the fact that a little steamer is constantly plying between Jersey and Brittany. It is dependent on the tides for its time of departure. Only in the local papers are the hours advertised. Captain Loftus must have been pretty well posted on the matter to have been aware that on this particular day the little steamer, La Commerce, would be starting for St. Brieuc about the time the mail-boat entered Jersey.
He must have had some particular object in making for that remote corner of Breton France. No sooner did the boat enter the little harbour than he made a dash for the railway station.
Bertie seemed to have passed into another world. He had not the faintest notion where he was. He was not even sure that they had reached Jersey. He heard strange tongues sounding in his ears; saw strange costumes before his eyes. In his then state of bewilderment he would have been quite ready to believe anybody who might have chosen to tell him that he had arrived in Timbuctoo.
Some light was thrown upon the subject when they reached the station. The captain took some money out of his pocket and held it out to Bertie.
“Go and ask for the tickets,” he said.
Bertie stared. If he had been told to go and ask the man in the moon for a lock of his hair he could not have been more puzzled.
“Do you hear what I say? Go and ask for the tickets.”
“Tickets? Where for?”
The captain hesitated a moment, then said:
“Two first-class tickets for Constantinople.”
He handed Bertie some silver coins.
“Two first-class tickets for Constantinople.”
Bertie stammeringly repeated the words. Could the captain be in earnest?
“I want to catch the train; look alive, or----”
The captain touched the pocket where the revolver was.
Bertie doubtfully advanced to the booking office, gazing behind him as he went to make quite sure that the captain had meant what he said. There was an old lady taking tickets, so he waited his turn.
“Two first-class tickets for Constantinople.”
“Comment?”
He stared at the booking-clerk, and the booking-clerk stared at him, each in complete ignorance of what the other meant.
“Do you mean to say you can’t speak French?”
The captain came to the rescue, speaking so gently that his words were only audible to Bertie’s ears.
“No--o.”
“Do you mean to say you don’t know enough to be able to ask for two first-class tickets for Constantinople?”
“No--o.”
“How much French do you know?”
“No--one.”
The captain evidently knew a great deal, for he immediately addressed the booking-clerk in fluent French--French which that official understood, for two tickets were at once forthcoming. But whether they were for Constantinople, or for Jericho, or for Kamtchatka, was more than the boy could tell. He was in the pleasant position of not being able to understand a word that was said; of being without the faintest notion where he was, and of not having the least idea where he was going to.
It may be mentioned, however, that the captain had not asked for tickets for Constantinople--which at St. Brieuc he would have experienced some difficulty in getting--but for Brest.
They had not long to wait before the through train from Paris entered the station. They got into a first-class carriage, which they had for themselves, and in due time they were off.
The state of Bertie’s mind was easier imagined than described. He had been in a dream since he had started on his journey to the Land of Golden Dreams; and dreams have a tendency to become more and more incoherent.
His adventures up to the time of leaving London had been strange enough, but he had at least known in what part of the world he was. Now he was not possessed of even that rudimentary knowledge. The continued travelling towards an unknown destination, the unresting onward rush, as though the captain meant, like the brook, to “go on for ever”--and this in the case of a boy who had never travelled more than twenty miles from home in his life--had in itself been enough to confuse him; but the sudden discovery that he was in an unknown country, in which they spoke an unknown tongue, put the climax to his mental muddle. Had the captain, revolver in hand, then and there insisted on his informing him which part of his body as a rule was uppermost, he would have been wholly at a loss to state whether it was on his head or heels he was accustomed to stand.
Something strange, too, about the railway carriage, about the country through which they passed, about the people and the very houses he saw through the carriage window made his muddle more.
The names of the roadside stations at which they stopped, which were shouted out with stentorian lungs, were such oddities. They came to one where the word “Guingamp” was painted in huge letters on a large white board. Guingamp! What was the pronunciation of such a word as that? And fancy living at a town with such a name! He was not aware that, like a conjurer’s trick, it was only a question of knowing how it was done, and Guingamp would come as glibly to his tongue as Slough or Upton.
And then Belle-Isle-en-Terre and Plouigneau--what names! The educational system which flourished at Mecklemburg House had tended to make French an even stranger tongue than it need have done. He saw the letters on the boards, but he could no more pronounce the words which they were supposed to form than he could fly.
Throughout the long journey--and it is a long journey from St. Brieuc to Brest--not a word had been exchanged. The captain had scarcely moved. He had stretched his legs out on the seat, and had taken up the easiest position which was attainable under the circumstances; but he had not closed his eyes. Bertie wondered if he never slept; if those fierce black eyes remained always on the watch.
The captain looked straight in front of him; and, although he seemed to pay no heed to what the boy was doing, Bertie was conscious that he never moved without the captain knowing it. What a life this man must lead, to be ever on the watch; to be ever fearful that the time of the avenger had come at last; that the prison gates were about to close on him, and, perhaps, this time for ever.
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