A violent ringing of the ship's bell and Emily calling him in a voice
fraught with excitement aroused Paul. For a second he imagined he was
still dreaming.
"Paul! Paul! Quick!"
He sprang out on deck.
"Oh!" Emily gasped in relief. "I thought you would never wake. But
look!" She pointed forward. "A boat's there! Right ahead! A
man----There!"
Rubbing his sleep-bewildered eyelids, Paul made out a small white boat a
point off the _Daphne's_ weather bow and not more than five ship's
lengths away. Yes, a man was standing up in it. He was beckoning wildly
to the bark and to the sky in turn.
The boat was too far off to make out if the man were alone in it. Paul
had to depend on his sight. The bark had been robbed of her glasses.
The _Daphne_ was making about three knots an hour. While he had slept
the breeze had lessened. The swell was practically gone.
"Haul her up three points," said Paul, facing the wheel. "Keep an eye
on me. Every time I raise my right hand let her go off half a point.
When I hold up my left: Haul up half a point--luff!"
With this instruction snapped at Emily, Paul ran forward, leaving her
alone, bewildered, fearful of making a mistake. But he was satisfied she
would understand. He held responsibility to be as much the mother of
capacity as necessity is of invention.
By instinct alone Emily interpreted Paul's orders. She brought the
_Daphne_ to windward and until she could see the boat and its
passenger's head just over the lee bow. She saw Paul spring into the
fore shrouds with a coil of rope. As he did so he raised his left hand.
The boat disappeared. She was sure the _Daphne_ would run it down. Paul
raised his right hand. The helmswoman let the bark go off half a point.
Paul, leaning over the rail at his last signal, tried to read a name on
the stern of the little boat which came bobbing toward him. He failed.
An old man was standing up between the cockleshell's alter and second
thwarts. He was babbling in delirium. His swollen tongue was protruding
from his lips. He was bareheaded and his hairless crown seemed ready to
burst open in fire. Now the boat was close enough to see that the
derelict was alone. His clothing consisted of a shirt and
trousers--dungarees. He answered Paul's hails with a leer of idiocy.
Emily steered so finely that the _Daphne_ brought the boat alongside
just abreast of the fore-rigging. As their sides touched, Paul dropped a
running bowline over the old man's head and shoulders and a minute later
hauled him over the side. The boat overturned as its occupant was jerked
out of it and Paul regretfully saw it drift away.
The derelict crumpled in a heap at his rescuer's feet as he touched the
deck. His face and neck and arms and feet were horribly sunburned. He
was literally parboiled. It would have taken the woman who mothered him
to recognize his pitiably swollen countenance. He was short and
thick-set and between fifty-five and sixty years old. His horny nails
and blunt work-worn fingers bespoke him a sailor.
Paul carried him up on the poop as the best place to work over him and
laid him down in the lee of the lounge house.
"Oh, you poor, poor man!" Emily cried in sympathy at sight of him.
"This is terrible, little woman. I'm afraid we can do little for him."
Paul looked away from the stranger with a shudder. While he had been
forward at the rescue and carrying the stranger aft the breeze had died
away. All aloft was now idle.
"Can't I leave here and help you?" asked Emily. "We must try to save his
life."
"It's a mighty unpleasant task for you."
"Don't think of me as being helpless, Paul. Please. I know I can do so
many things. I'm not the same woman you met back there."
She looked away to the westward as she spoke.
"Come, then." He put the wheel in beckets. "Forward----Get some water
out of the galley."
Emily ran to do as she was bidden and Paul went below to the medicine
chest. The medical supplies provided some strychnine tablets and,
tincturing a glass of water with this heart stimulant, the castaways
took turn about forcing drops of the fluid between the cracked lips.
Emily discovered a jar of beef extract among the stores and made up a
little of this for the sufferer.
After two hours of careful and unceasing attention the derelict opened
his rheumy eyes and stared at the sky for a second.
"Hello, stranger," said Paul. "Feeling better?"
The eyes closed again and the cracked lips muttered an inaudible blur of
words. It was plainly an unconscious answer.
A little while later, as Paul was taking another observation of the sun,
Emily thought she saw a gleam of consciousness in the faded gaze which
found her face and held it.
"Are you from the bark _Daphne_--the _Daphne_?" she asked.
Both she and Paul had discussed the possibility of this being so.
"He--walked--'tween--gyves----"
This was the strange whispered utterance that came from the cracked
lips.
"Paul, he is speaking."
Lavelle laid down his sextant and knelt beside the stranger.
"I asked him," the gold woman explained, "if he belonged to the
_Daphne_. He----Listen----"
The cracked lips were speaking again.
"He--walked--'tween--'tween with--with gyves----"
The stranger was repeating what he had said to Emily.
Paul ran the words over under his breath. They sounded familiar. They
had a rhythm that touched some cell of memory. Suddenly his mind groped
upon discovery. Emily uttered an exclamation in the same instant. Both
of them knew what the stranger was attempting to say.
"Don't you remember Hood's 'The Dream of Eugene Aram,' Paul?"
"Yes," he said with a nod. "'And Eugene Aram walked between, with gyves
upon his wrists.'"
The line, as he repeated it, had a startling weirdness.
"What can the poor brain be thinking? What is hidden back of this
strange thought?" Emily asked in a whisper.
"It may be as we have thought--that he belongs to the _Daphne's_ crew.
Perhaps in its disorder his brain is reflecting the crime committed
aboard here in the words of Hood's poem. Yet one would imagine that if
there is anything in the theory of crime suggesting crime that it would
be something of the sea of which he would be thinking. Eugene Aram was a
schoolmaster and he killed in the woods. This man is a sailor. There is
no doubt about that."
"Could he have been the one----"
Emily shrank from the stranger at the thought which leaped into her
mind.
"Don't think that, Emily. If he had a hand in what happened here----But
let as not think of what's past."
Paul carried the derelict below and put him in the room next to the
mate's. He swathed his burns in carron oil and tied him in the bunk so
that the rolling of the vessel would not turn him out. The man had
become unconscious again immediately after mumbling the bit of "Eugene
Aram" which Emily had called Paul to hear. Lavelle left the derelict
sleeping in apparent peace, but with a heart action that was extremely
weak.
"If he lives he will be a Godsend toward helping us work ship," Paul
told Emily as they went aft together to the lounge.
"May be that is why it was given to us to pick him up."
Paul smiled doubtfully.
"What time is it, Emily?" he asked.
"Only quarter past three," she said, looking at the silver watch which
he had given her to carry when he put her at the wheel.
"Didn't have much of a sleep, did I?"
"No, you didn't. Please lie down again."
"Will in a little while. Got to. But first I must work out this
observation--see where in this world or Kingdom Come we are."
He sat down at the chart table and in a few minutes, weary though he
was, finished his calculations. The result checked and confirmed his
noon reckoning.
Emily stood beside him holding down the edges of the chart while he
pricked off the _Daphne's_ position and ran a line to the southeastward.
It ended at Ocean Island. He ran a second to Midway; a third to
Honolulu. The woman watched his long fine fingers--wondrously fine for
the rough, hard things of which she knew them to be capable--handling
pencil and ruler and dividers with a fascinating deftness and certainty.
He seemed oblivious of everything else. An eager stimulation seemed to
be driving him. The mystery of the student was about him. A feeling of
woful incompetence possessed her. She realized how narrow and little her
life had always been until now; how little she actually knew of all the
things there were to be known. Her heart stirred of a sudden with a
marvelous thrill at the thought of what a woman's triumph must be to
suffer the giving of such a man as this to the world. Her breath paused
tremulously. What Shanghai Elsie had said to her in the boat flashed
into her mind: "You were made for the mother of men--strong men--like
him."
The navigator, glancing up from his work, beheld an expression in her
beautiful face which was beyond his understanding. Her glance dropped as
it met his and a glow suffused her cheeks and thin, delicate ears that
the dawn might have envied. A second later her eyes lifted to his again
and in their expression and her smile he read elation. In his blindness
he believed that she had been able to follow his work and that it was
the prospect of an early deliverance which enlightened her countenance.
"There you are!" he exclaimed in a note of lively and natural pleasure.
"Look! Only five hundred miles to the southeast----See that speck?
That's Ocean Island. If we can't fetch that we'll try for Midway. A
cable station's there. If we can't make any of these islands we'll keep
right on to Honolulu. All the while we'll be lying along in the
steamship track. Isn't it wonderful, eh?"
"Too wonderful to be true, Paul."
The answer came in a whisper. Tears glinted in her eyes. She was glad
for his sake; glad that the stress which was upon him was so near an
end. His escape, of course, meant hers and----Intuitively she sensed
that he was very far away from her; that he was slipping further and
further away and she started to put out a hand to touch him; to hold
him. Her arm dropped as she raised it. This was not the man who had held
her in his arms that morning. She heard his words dimly.
"If we can work to the south'ard and the eastward, by to-morrow noon we
may begin to keep our eyes open for ships. With any kind of fair weather
and a breeze from the westward land should be rising over the bows in
three or four days. Think of it! Another twelve hours and you may be
going over the _Daphne's_ side into a homeward bounder!"
Emily's eyes overflowed. He winced at the tears.
"Why----You mustn't be crying now. You must laugh! Sing! The chief mate
of the bark _Daphne_ would better be thinking of her shore-going togs!
This is what we'll be singing in a very short time:
"I _thought_ I heard the captain say,
_Leave her, Johnny, leave her;_
You may go ashore and touch your pay,
_It's time for us to leave her._
"We'll sing. Oh, may we never be,
_Leave her, Johnny, leave her;_
On a hungry ship the like of she,
_It's time for us to leave her._"
With a laugh and those snatches of the old chanty of "Leave Her, Johnny"
ringing from his lips in a clear, deep voice Paul led the way out on
deck.
"Great old song that. Ought to hear a gang of bullies at it."
"It must be fine," she managed to say with a pretense of enjoyment.
He turned from her and went forward to the standard compass. Going and
returning, he looked aloft and around at the silent plain of brine. The
sails still drooped in idleness. There was the barest heave in the
ocean. The bark was without steerage way.
"Better lie down and take a nap," Paul said as he came back and stood at
the wheel for a second. "Can't tell how long this calm will last. I'm
going to try to steal a little sleep."
"Please do. I will lie down presently."
He did not meet her gaze, and she turned toward the sea as if she hoped
its purple heart would give her throbbing one an answer. She heard Paul
leave the poop and then a clang from the engine room told her he was
there. It sounded like a door closing between them--a door that would
never open again--and she went into the lounge to weep bitter tears
which would not be stayed.
If she could have seen Paul Lavelle's face when he turned away from her
and at the moment when she was giving way to her loneliness she would
have understood that he was suffering, too.
After overhauling the fires under the donkey boiler, Paul threw himself
at full length across the main hatch. He was mind weary; body weary; at
war with himself. Staring up at the sky he brought his whole life in
contemplation. Another day, as he had told the gold woman, might see
them delivered from their peril in the _Daphne_. Anyway he felt that the
world--the world in which she belonged and must have her being--was not
very far off. And she would be going out of his life forever. She must.
A pariah like him could not say to her, "Stay." The man who stood marked
as he was could say to no woman, "Stay." All day the past had lashed
him. All day the fineness of him had arraigned the weakness which had
permitted him to forget that he could never claim her love. All day the
memory of his madness in daring to kiss her as he had had tortured him.
He groaned in his agony of spirit.
"God," he prayed aloud with lips strange to prayer, "grant that I may
finish 'what remains before us of the course without dishonor to
ourselves or hurt to others.' For my soul's sake I ask this."
With this thought his mother's dear face smiled into his vision.
"Mother mine, mother mine," he murmured, and his eyes closed in
exhaustion.
It was dusk when Emily awoke in the lounge. By the silver watch she saw
that it was a quarter past six o'clock. All was quiet as when she lay
down. The bark was in the same dead calm. The creaking of the gear
overhead and the slatting of the idle sails were the only sounds in the
stillness. She stole below, and on her way forward paused at the door of
the derelict's room. He still slept. She tiptoed inside and wet his lips
with a sip of water. He murmured in unconscious thankfulness. She
hurried on then toward the engine room. Paul must be there or in the
galley. She came upon him lying across the main hatch. He was asleep,
his head pillowed on his right arm. The light of a love that would never
die came into her eyes as she stood for a second listening to his deep
breathing of honest weariness.
The chill of the coming night was in the air. Emily stole aft again on
tiptoe and returned with a blanket. She spread it over the sleeper with
a mother's gentleness. He did not move. Sighing, she turned away and
with the silence of a thief went to the galley to prepare the evening
meal.