I said, “This is home, at last. It is all over”; and she stood by me on
the deck. She pushed the heavy black cloak from over her head, and her
white face appeared above the dim black shadow of her mourning. She
looked silently round her on the mist, the groups of rough men, the
spatterings of light that were like violence, too. She said nothing, but
rested her hand on my arm.
She had her immense griefs, and this was the home I offered her. She
looked back at the side. I thought she would have liked to be in the
boat again. I said:
“The people in this ship are my old friends. You can trust them--and
me.”
Tomas Castro, clambering leisurely over the side, followed. As soon as
his feet touched the deck, he threw the corner of his cloak across
his left shoulder, bent down half the rim of his hat, and assumed the
appearance of a short, dark conspirator, overtopped by the stalwart
sailors, who had abandoned Manuel to crowd, bare-armed, bare-chested,
pushing, and craning their necks, round us.
She said, “I can trust you; it is my duty to trust you, and this is now
my home.”
It was like a definite pronouncement of faith--and of a line of policy.
She seemed, for that moment, quite apart from my love, a thing very
much above me and mine; closed up in an immense grief, but quite
whole-souledly determined to go unflinchingly into a new life, breaking
quietly with all her past for the sake of the traditions of all that
past.
The sailors fell back to make way for us. It was only by the touch
of her hand on my arm that I had any hope that she trusted me, me
personally, and apart from the commands of the dead Carlos; the dead
father, and the great weight of her dead traditions that could be never
anything any more for her--except a memory. Ah, she stood it very well;
her head was erect and proud. The cabin door opened, and a rigid female
figure with dry outlines, and a smooth head, stood out with severe
simplicity against the light of the cabin door. The light falling on
Seraphina seemed to show her for the first time. A lamentable voice
bellowed:
“Señorita!... Señorita!” and then, in an insinuating, heart-breaking
tone, “Señorita!...”
She walked quietly past the figure of the woman, and disappeared in
the brilliant light of the cabin. The door closed. I remained standing
there. Manuel, at her disappearance, raised his voice to a tremendous,
incessant yell of despair, as if he expected to make her hear.
“_Señorita... proteccion del opprimido; oh, hija de piedad...
Señorita_.”
His lamentable noise brought half the ship round us; the sailors fell
back before the mate, Sebright, walking at the elbow of a stout man in
loose trousers and jacket. They stopped.
“An unexpected meeting, Captain Williams,” was all I found to say to
him. He had a constrained air, and shook hands in awkward silence.
“How do you do?” he said hurriedly. After a moment he added, with a
sort of confused, as if official air, “I hope, Kemp, you’ll be able to
explain satisfactorily...”
I said, rather off-handedly, “Why, the two men I killed ought to be
credentials enough for all immediate purposes!”
“That isn’t what I meant,” he said. He spoke rather with a mumble,
and apologetically. It was difficult to see in him any trace of the
roystering Williams who had roared toasts to my health in Jamaica, after
the episode at the Ferry Inn with the admiral. It was as if, now, he had
a weight on his mind. I was tired. I said:
“Two dead men is more than you or any of your crew can show. And, as far
as I can judge, you did no more than hold your own till I came.”
He positively stuttered, “Yes, yes. But...”