Nelson flourished a salutation. Lucy sank in a curtsy that was almost the same as kneeling. Most girls have a favourite hero, and Nelson was her's, and had been her's ever since he came into renown on the glorious St Valentine's Day. Had her father not been fascinated by the figure on the Victory, he might have witnessed the almost magical art with which his daughter had alarmed Mr Lawrence into releasing her, by a brief study of her face as she gazed at the little figure on the deck of the Victory, with his untenanted sleeve secured to his breast, and a smile of acknowledgment on his pale and worn face, seamed about the mouth with wrinkles such as are sometimes seen in persons deformed in the back, or suffering from spinal complaint.,
She listened to him with the immobility of a ship's figurehead. No astonishment at his extraordinary revelation of intention varied the expression of her face which remained as it was when she shrank from him. Truly a wonderful face, the face of an actress of[Pg 255] supreme genius, the face of the inheretrix of the surprising, most excellent art of her mother, the famous Kitty O'Hara. Still did she keep bare her beautiful teeth, still did the tension through the elongation of her sweet lips hold them bloodless, her eyes had lost in their expression their lovely quality of brooding. They stared, and the stare was that of madness. Her colour was gone. Apparently this delicate, fascinating, lovable, gentle girl, possessed powers of will and intellect which dominated Nature herself in her; and even as it is known of some, that they have been capable of arresting the pulsation of their heart and yet live, so obviously in this lady was an influence, a passion, a very wizardry of determination, which suffered her to drive the blood from her cheek, to narrow the eyelid till the eye had lost its familiar seeking and dwelling look, till the mouth took the form that was to convey the intention of the artist.,
The Aurora's boat was swept alongside the brig, and Captain Acton and the Admiral clambered over the side up a short flight of steps, and in an instant Lucy was clasped in the devouring embrace of her father. Such an old-world scene taxes the highest gifts of the pen or the brush. This Louisa Ann was about fifty years old; she was nearly as broad as she was long. Her fore-mast was stepped far in the bows; her decks were stained and grimy; the paint had faded out of the inside of her bulwarks. Her sails were patched and so dingy that they might have been coloured as a smack's. Her rusty sides were lined with yawning seams amid which three little circular windows were merged with no accentuation from the dirt-shrouded glass which prevented the sea from entering the blistered, worn, mani-coloured hull. Her sailors looked as though[Pg 359] they were shipwrecked: long-haired, bearded, sallow, in clothes considerably tattered, in aspect melancholy and dejected with lack of nourishment, dullness of sailing and ceaseless motion: for here was the tub wallowing like a buoy in a popple upon a smooth sea, and the frightful weather she would make off Cape Horn or in a gale of wind the imagination of a sailor could readily picture by witnessing her motions now..
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