Heart of Oak: A Three-Stranded Yarn (Complete‪)‬

I date the opening of this narrative, February 24, 1860.

I was in the drawing-room of my father's house on the afternoon of that day, awaiting the arrival of Captain Burke, of the ship 'Lady Emma,' and his wife, Mary Burke, who had nursed me and brought me up, and indeed been as a mother to me after my own mother's death in 1854; but she had left us to marry Captain Edward Burke, and had already made two voyages round the world with him, and was presently going a third.

My father sat beside the fire reading a newspaper. His name was Sir Mortimer Otway; he was fourth baronet and a colonel; had seen service in India, though he had long left the army to settle down upon his little seaside estate. He was a man of small fortune. Having said this, I need not trouble you with more of his family history.

I was his only surviving child, and my name is Marie; I have no other Christian name than that; it was my mother's. My age was twenty and my health delicate, so much so that Captain and Mrs. Burke were coming from London expressly to talk over a scheme of my going round the world in their ship for the benefit of my appetite and spirits and voice, and perhaps for my lungs, though to be sure they were still sound at that date.

Ours was a fine house, about a hundred years old; it stood within a stone's throw of the brink of the cliff; walls and hedges encompassed some seventy or eighty acres of land, pleasantly wooded in places, and there was a charming scene of garden on either hand the carriage drive. I stood at the window with my eyes fastened upon the sea, which went in a slope of grey steel to the dark sky of the horizon, where here and there some roaming mass of vapour was hoary with snow. It was blowing a fresh breeze, and the throb of the ocean was cold with the ice-like glances of the whipped foam. Presently it thickened overhead, and snow fell in a squall of wind that darkened the early afternoon into evening with smoking lines of flying flakes. The sea faded as the reflection of a star in troubled water. My father put down his newspaper and came to the window. He was a tall man, bald, high-coloured; his eyes were large and black, soft in expression, and steady in gaze; his beard and moustache were of an iron grey, he was sixty years old, yet still preserved the soldier's trick of carrying his figure to the full height of his stature.