She looked up at him wistfully. "You'll be good to me, won't you, Joel?"
He patted her shoulder.
They were married in the big old white church, and every pew was filled.
Afterwards they all went down to the piers, where Asa Worthen had spread
long tables and loaded them so that they groaned. Alongside lay the
_Nathan Ross_, her decks littered with the last confusion of preparation.
Joel showed Priscilla the lumber for the cabin alterations, ranked along
the rail beneath the boathouse; and she gripped his arm tight with both
hands. Afterwards, he took Priscilla up the hill to the great House of
Shore. Rachel had prepared their wedding supper there....
At a quarter before ten o'clock the next morning, the _Nathan Ross_ went
out with the tide. When she had cleared the dock and was fairly in the
stream, Joel gave her in charge of Jim Finch; and he and Priscilla stood
in the after house, astern, and looked back at the throng upon the pier
until the individual figures merged into a black mass, pepper-and-salted
with color where the women stood. They could see the handkerchiefs
flickering, until a turn of the channel swept them out of sight of the
town, and they drifted on through the widening mouth of the bay, toward
the open sea. At dusk that night, there was still land in sight behind
them and on either side; but when Priscilla came on deck in the morning,
there was nothing but blue water and laughing waves. And so she was
homesick, all that day, and laughed not at all till the evening, when the
moon bathed the ship in silver fire, and the white-caps danced all about
them.
The _Nathan Ross_ was in no sense a lovely ship. There was about her none
of the poetry of the seas. She was designed strictly for utility, and for
hard and dirty toil. Blunt she was of bow and stern, and her widest point
was just abeam the foremast, so that she had great shoulders that
buffeted the sea. These shoulders bent inward toward the prow and met in
what was practically a right angle; and her stern was cut almost straight
across, with only enough overhang to give the rudder room. Furthermore,
her masts had no rake. They stood up stiff and straight as sore thumbs;
and the bowsprit, instead of being something near horizontal, rose toward
the skies at an angle close to forty-five degrees. This bowsprit made the
_Nathan Ross_ look as though she had just stubbed her toe. She carried
four boats at the davits; and two spare craft, bottom up, on the
boathouse just forward of the mizzenmast. Three of the four at the davits
were on the starboard side, and since they were each thirty feet long,
while the ship herself was scarce a hundred and twenty, they gave her a
sadly cluttered and overloaded appearance. For the rest, she was painted
black, with a white checkerboarding around the rail; and her sails were
smeared and smutty with smoke from burning blubber scraps.
Nevertheless, she was a comfortable ship, and a dry one. She rode waves
that would have swept a vessel cut on prouder lines; and she was
moderately steady. She was not fast, nor cared to be. An easy five or six
knots contented her; for the whole ocean was her hunting ground, and
though there were certain more favored areas, you might meet whales
anywhere. Give her time, and she would poke that blunt nose of hers right
'round the world, and come back with a net profit anywhere up to a
hundred and fifty thousand dollars in her sweating casks.
Priscilla Holt knew all these things, and she respected the _Nathan Ross_
on their account. But during the first weeks of the cruise, she was too
much interested in the work on the cabin to consider other matters. Old
Aaron Burnham, the carpenter, did the work. He was a wiry little man,
gray and grizzled; and he loved the tools of his craft with a jealous
love that forbade the laying on of impious hands. Through the long, calm
days, when the ship snored like a sleep-walker through the empty seas,
Priscilla would sit on box or bench or floor, and watch Aaron at his
task, and ask him questions, and listen to the old man's long stories of
things that had come and gone.
Sometimes she tried to help him; but he would not let her handle an edged
tool. "Ye'll no have the eye for it," he would say. "Leave it be." Now
and then he let her try to drive a nail; but as often as not she missed
the nail head and marred the soft wood, until Aaron lost patience with
her. "Mark you," he cried, "men will see the scar there, and they'll be
thinking I did this task with my foot, Ma'am."
And Priscilla would laugh at him, and curl up with her feet tucked under
her skirts and her chin in her hands, and watch him by the long hour on
hour.
The task dragged on; it seemed to her endless. For Aaron had other work
that must be done, and he could give only his spare time to this. Also,
he was a slow worker, accustomed to take his own time; and when Priscilla
grew impatient and scolded him, the old man merely sat back on his knees,
and scratched his head, and tapped thoughtfully with his hammer on the
floor beside him.
"We-ell, Ma'am," he said, "I do things so, and I do things so; and it
takes time, that does, Ma'am."
Now and then, through those days, Priscilla's enthusiasm would send her
skittering up the companion to fetch Joel to see some new wonder--a
window set in the stern, or a bench completed, or a door hung. And Joel,
looking far oftener at Priscilla than at the object she wished him to
consider, would chuckle, and touch her shoulder affectionately, and go
back to his post.
In the sixth week, the last nail had been driven, and the last lick of
paint was dry. In the result, Priscilla was as happy as a bride has a
right to be.
Across the very stern of the ship, with windows looking out upon the
wake, ran what might have been called a sitting room. It was perhaps
twenty feet wide and eight feet deep; and its rear wall--formed by the
overhanging stern--sloped outward toward the ceiling. Against this slope,
beneath the three windows, a broad, cushioned bench was built, to serve
as couch or seat. The bench was broken in one place to make room for
Joel's desk, and the cabinet wherein he kept his records and his
instruments. Priss had put curtains on the windows; and she had a lily,
in a pot, at one of them, and a clump of pansies at another. Joel's cabin
opened off this compartment, on the starboard side; hers was opposite.
The main cabin, with its folding table built about the thick butt of the
mizzenmast, had been extended forward to make room for the enlargement of
this stern apartment; and the mates were quartered off this main cabin.
The galley and the store rooms were on the main deck, in the after house,
on either side of the awkward "walking wheel" by which the ship was
steered; and the cabin companion was just forward of this wheel.
There were aboard the _Nathan Ross_ about thirty men, all told; but the
most of them were not of Priscilla's world. The foremast hands never came
aft of the try works, save on tasks assigned; and the secondary
officers--boat-steerers and the like--slept in the steerage and kept
forward of the boathouse. Thus the after deck was shared only by
Priscilla and Joel, the mates, the cook, and old Aaron, who was a man of
many privileges.
This world, Priscilla ruled. Joel adored her; Jim Finch gave her the
clumsy homage of a puppy--and was at times just as oppressively amiable.
Old Aaron talked to her by the hour, while he went about his work. And
the other mates--Varde, the sullen; and Hooper, who was old and losing
his grip; and Dick Morrell, who was young and finding his--paid her the
respect that was her due. Young Morrell--he was not even as old as she
was--helped her on her first climb to the mast head. He was only a
boy.... The girl, when the first homesick pangs were past, was happy.
Until the day they killed their whale, a seventy-barrel cachalot cow who
died as peaceably as a chicken, with only a convulsive flop or two when
the lances found the life. Priscilla took a single glimpse of the
shuddering, bloody, oily work of cutting in the carcass, and then she
fled to her cabin and remained there steadfastly until the long task was
done. The smoke from the bubbling try pots, and the persistent smell of
boiling blubber sickened her; and the grime that descended over
everything appalled her dainty soul. Not until the men had cleaned ship
did she go on deck again; and even then she scolded Joel for the affair
as though it were a matter for which he was wholly to blame.
"There just isn't any sense in making so much dirt," she told him. "I've
had to wash out every one of my curtains; and I can't ever get rid of
that smell."
Joel chuckled. "Aye, the smell sticks," he agreed. "But you'll be used to
it soon, Priss. You'll come to like it, I'm thinking. Any case, we'll not
be rid of it while the cruise is on."
She was so angry that she wanted to cry. "Do you actually mean, Joel
Shore, that I've got to live with that sickening, hot-oil smell for
th-three years?"
He nodded slowly. "Yes, Priss. No way out of it. It's part of the work.
Come another month, and you'll not mind at all."
She said positively: "I may not say anything, but I shall always hate
that smell."
His eyes twinkled slowly; and she stamped her foot. "If I'd known it was
going to be like this, I wouldn't have come, Joel. Now don't you laugh at
me. If there was any way to go back, I'd go. I hate it. I hate it all.
You ought not to have brought me...."
They were on the broad bench across the stern, in their cabin; and he put
his big arm about her shoulders and laughed at her till she could do no
less than laugh back at him. But--she assured herself of this--she was
angry, just the same. Nevertheless, she laughed....
Joel had put the _Nathan Ross_ on the most direct southward course,
touching neither Azores nor Cape Verdes. For it was in his mind, as he
had told Asa Worthen, to make direct for the Gilbert Islands and seek
some trace of his brother there. That had been his plan before he left
port; but the plan had become determination after a word with Aaron
Burnham, one day. Joel, resting in the cabin while old Aaron worked
there, fell to thinking of his brother, and so asked:
"Aaron, what is your belief about my brother, Mark Shore? Is he dead?"
Aaron was building, that day, the forward partition of the new cabin,
fitting his boards meticulously, and driving home each nail with hammer
strokes that seemed smooth and effortless, yet sank the nail to the head
in an instant. He looked up over his shoulder at Joel, between nails.
"Dead, d'ye say?" he countered quizzically.