Fiction > Serialisations > London, 1896-1897 - St. Ives > Volume 13

ST. IVES. 255
We contemplated it from the height of six hundred feet— or so Byfield
asserted after consulting his barometer. He added that this was a mere nothing :
the wonder was the balloon had risen at all, with one-half of the total folly of
Edinburgh clinging to the car. I passed the possible inaccuracy and certain
ill-temper of this calculation. He had (he explained) made jettison of at least
a hundredweight of sand ballast. I could only hope it had fallen on my cousin.
To me, six hundred feet appeared a very respectable eminence. And the view
was lavishing.
The Lunardi, mounting through a stagnant calm in a line almost vertical, had
pierced the morning mists, and now swam emancipated in a heaven of exquisite
blue. Below us, by some trick of eyesight, the country had grown concave, its
horizons curving up like the rim of a shallow bowl — a bowl heaped, in point of
fact, with sea-fog, but to our eyes with a froth delicate and dazzling as a whipped
syllabub of snow. Upon it the travelling shadow of the balloon became no
shadow, but a stain : an amethyst (you might call it) purged of all grosser
properties than colour and lucency. At times, thrilled by no perceptible wind,
rather by the pulse of the sun's rays, the froth shook and parted ; and then
behold, deep in the crevasses, vignetted and shining, an acre or two of the earth
of man's business and fret — tilled slopes of the Lothians, ships dotted on the Forth,
the capital like a hive that some child had smoked — the ear of fancy could
almost hear it buzzing.
I snatched the glass from Byfield, and brought it to focus upon one of these
peepshow rifts : and lo ! at the foot of the shaft, imaged, as it were, far down in
a luminous well, a green hillside and three figures standing. A white speck
fluttered ; and fluttered until the rift closed again. Flora's handkerchief ! Blessings
on the brave hand that waved it ! — at a moment when (as I have since heard,
and knew without need of hearing) her heart was down in her shoes, or, to speak
accurately, in the milkmaid Janet's. Singular in many things, she was at one
with the rest of her sex in its native and incurable distrust of man's inventions.
I am bound to say that my own faith in aerostatics was a plant — a sensitive
plant — of extremely tender growth. Either I failed, a while back, in painting the
emotions of my descent of the Devil's Elbow, or the reader knows that I am a
chicken-hearted fellow about a height. I make him a present of the admission.
Set me on a plane superficies, and I will jog with all the insouciance of a rolling
stone : toss me in air, and, with the stone in the child's adage, I am in the hands
of the devil. Even to the qualified instability of a sea-going ship I have ever
committed myself with resignation rather than confidence.
But to my unspeakable relief the Lunardi floated upwards, and continued to
float, almost without a tremor. Only by reading the barometer, or by casting
scraps of paper overboard, could we tell that the machine moved at all. Now
and again we revolved slowly : so Byfield's compass informed us, but for ourselves
we had never guessed it. Of dizziness I felt no longer a symptom, for the
sufficient reason that the provocatives were nowhere at hand. We were the only
point in space, without possibility of comparison with another. -We were made
one with the clean silences receiving us ; and, speaking only for the Vicomte Anne
de St. Yves, I dare assert that for five minutes a newly bathed infant had not
been less conscious of original sin.
" But look here, you know " — it was Byfield at my elbow — " I'm a public
character, by George ; and this puts me in a devilish awkward position."
" So it does," I agreed. " You proclaimed yourself a solitary voyager ; and
here, to the naked eye, are four of us."