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The craft was not a regular Indiaman that is to say, she was not one of the Honourable East India Company's ships, but, for all that, she was a very handsome and comfortable vessel, and her cuddy was most luxuriously fitted up with crimson velvet sofas, capacious revolving armchairs screwed to the deck alongside the tables, a very fine piano, with a quantity of loose music on the top of it, some very handsome pictures in heavy gold frames screwed to the ship's side between the ports, a magnificent hanging lamp suspended from the centre of the skylight, with a number of smaller lamps, hung in gimbals, over the pictures, a handsome fireplace, with a wide tiled hearth, now filled with pots of plants, a capacious sideboard against the fore bulkhead, a handsome carpet on the deck, and, in fact, everything that could be thought of, within reason, to render a long sea voyage comfortable and pleasant.
I sat on the coping, looking into the room. Broad and lofty it was, its walls hung with a fair blue paper. A handsome tapestry, looped up a little on one side, masked the tall double doors, and in the far corner stood a great tiled stove for burning wood. From the ceiling was hanging a basin of alabaster an electric fitting, really.
He pointed successively to the fine wire at which his sister was working, and to another roll of wire, similar to the ordinary iron wire, hanging against the wall close to the vise; then going down on all fours, he picked up, beneath the wooden screen which covered the tiled floor of the work-room, a piece of waste, a tiny fragment resembling the point of a rusty needle.
Then they left the gardens and went into a fine, big reception hall, where rich rugs were spread upon the tiled floors and the furniture was exquisitely carved and studded with jewels. The King's chair was an especially pretty piece of furniture, being in the shape of a silver lily with one leaf bent over to form the seat.
The refreshment booths and the other rooms at the back and underside of the five-shilling stand had been thrown together, except the barber's shop, which was being converted into an operating chamber; and, what with its tiled walls and high sloped ceiling and glass front, the place made a first-rate hospital.
But portions of the old battlements are interspersed with the line of homely chambers and tiled house-tops. Within the wall the town is very compact, and above its roofs rises a rock, the sheer, precipitous bluff on which stands the upper town, whose foundations impend over the highest roof in the lower.
On the stands and tables were bowls full of clear-coloured spring flowers early primrose, jonquil, and narcissus. A wood-fire burned upon the blue-and-white tiled hearth. And on the sofa, drawn up at right angles to it, Katherine sat, wrapped in a gray, silk dressing-gown bordered with soft, white fur. She flushed slightly as her brother came in, and spoke to him with an air of playful apology.
You must go across by the bridge." He is vexed, as a dramatic author is vexed when he sees his audience talking during his great work. Next moment he thinks no more of it. The tiled floor is no longer the sea. He is lying down on it, stretched full-length, with his chin on the tiles, humming music of his own composition, and gravely sucking his thumb and dribbling.
When she came back into the kitchen once more, the children were safely tucked in bed, and her husband was seated by the kitchen door with his chair tipped back against the wall, smoking his evening pipe. Mother Van Hove cleared the table, washed the dishes, and brushed the crumbs from the tiled floor.
There is a long delay, then, with infinite caution, the door is opened a few inches, and another lifted light shines faintly on lustrous tiled walls, and on the face of a woman slave who quickly veils herself. Evidently the master is a man of standing, and the house well guarded.
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