Coming down from aloft, where he had gone immediately after dinner to
reef and furl the topgallant sails as best he could, Emily met Paul with
the news that the derelict seemed to be recovering a glimmer of
consciousness.
"When I carried a cup of beef extract to him just now he was awake," she
told Paul. "He seemed not at all surprised to find a woman attending
him. He thinks he is in a hospital somewhere--that I am a nurse. When I
asked him his name he answered: 'Number 19--cot 19, nurse.'"
"Did you ask him anything about the _Daphne_?"
"Yes; but neither the vessel's name nor Captain McGavock's nor any of
those you told me were in the log book meant anything to him. His only
answer to all my questions was, 'Nurse, if the captain comes in before
"lights out" tell him I'd like to see him.' He's an Irishman, I should
say--a kind sort of an old soul, with a rare, musical brogue."
"A very broth of a bhoy, eh?" laughed Paul.
"If he is one of the _Daphne's_ crew, I am sure--I am certain that he
had nothing to do with the mutiny."
"And that is the woman of it. Come. I'll go in to see him. Let me get a
lantern out of the engine room."
"There is a lamp in his room. I filled it the way I saw you filling the
sidelights."
"You'd make a great pioneer, Emily. Come."
Thus praise always came from him quickly for the doing of a helpful
thing. She could imagine men working their fingers to the bone under his
mastership.
Together they went aft, Emily preceding Paul through the alleyway to the
derelict's door. The light in the lamp, which hung in gimbals against
the forward bulkhead of the room, was low. Emily went in and turned it
up.
"Are you feeling better?" she asked cheerily.
"Yes, nurse, easier--much easier," came his answer rather thickly. His
face was toward the inside of the berth. He turned over painfully, his
eyelids fluttering. "Has the cap--the Ould Man----"
His lips froze as he discovered Paul Lavelle in the doorway. He started
up on his right elbow. His eyes bulged wildly. His jaw went loose. He
made a vain effort to lift his left hand to his brow in a salute. He
tried to speak, but his tongue clicked in his throat like a twig
crackling. With a weird, eery cry he fell back in the berth senseless.
The time of a breath embraced the strange scene.
"Oh, Paul, Paul, he knows you!" exclaimed Emily in a tense whisper.
"I never saw him to my knowledge until we pulled him aboard this
afternoon," said Paul, recovering from his surprise. "He has mistaken me
for somebody else. Poor devil is out of his head."
"Are you sure you have never seen him?"
"I'm quite sure. But it's uncanny. Please bring the lamp over here so
that I can take a good look at him."
Emily carried the light to the side of the berth and Paul bent over the
stranger. He searched every feature of the weather-beaten face and his
own memory at the same time. He was positive he had never seen the
derelict before.
"Just out of his head, little woman--that's all. I never saw him--I
don't know him, although his own mother wouldn't recognize him now."
As he spoke Paul timed the unconscious man's pulse and laid an ear to
his breast. Emily caught an uncertain shake in Paul's head as he
straightened.
"Is--is he going to get better?" she whispered.
Paul answered her with a shrug of doubt.
"We can't do any more for him than we are doing now."
He added this as he saw her wince and the glint of pitying tears come
into her eyes.
"His heart is very weak," he went on, after a slight pause. "He seems to
be in a bad mooring ground. He's burnt up as if he had been through a
fiery furnace. It may sound strange to hear one speak of the sea as a
fiery furnace, but it is. It can burn a man's soul out of him just as it
can freeze it out. And--mock him with bitter waters he cannot drink."
There was a world of bitterness in his tone as he finished speaking and
left the room to go aft to the medicine chest. He returned with some
spirits of nitre to find Emily placing a wet pack across the derelict's
forehead. He mixed a dose of the tincture in a tumbler of water and
dropped some of the fluid between the cracked lips.
"This will help to pull the fever down," he explained. "It's all I
could find back there--this nitre. He will need watching and attention
to-night. If this calm holds I will slip in here now and again."
A low moan escaped from the stranger.
"Come, little woman. Let us leave him now."
Paul put up a hand to turn down the light.
"No, I am going to stay and do what I can for him, Paul."
"But, Emily, this--this is no work for you. You----"
"Paul Lavelle, it is my work," the gold woman said firmly. "I've been a
loafer--an idling nothing--a leaner all my life. I've never helped until
now. You've taught me how. You can't unteach me. If my hands can aid
this poor old man to keep a hold upon life they are going to do it. If
they can make his going out any easier they are going to do it. My God,
the thought--that it might be you--and a woman would turn away
from--from you----"
Her voice broke. Tears choked her. She put an arm against the bulkhead
and buried her face in it, away from Paul's sight. Her nobility of soul
chastened his spirit. It exalted him. In silence he went out into the
night. Strangely there lingered in his brain as he went about the ship
two sentences Emily had uttered with unwonted fire: "You've taught me
how. You can't unteach me."
There was much for the _Daphne's_ new skipper to do. While the calm gave
no sign of breaking and the lounge barometer held steady for fair
weather, still the longer he contemplated the task of handling the
_Daphne_ the bigger it grew in his sight. He could not afford to let any
precaution which suggested itself pass unembraced. So he turned to work
on the theory that it is easier to let out a reef in a breeze than it is
to furl a sail in a gale. He cut his coat according to the cloth he had.
He double-reefed the foresail and the topsails and, with the donkey
engine's aid, found it not such a hard task as he had imagined it might
be. Steam hauled the blocks of the reef tackles closer together than
sailor hands could ever have brought them. The best he could do with the
mainsail was stopper it with gaskets. It would have been vain and futile
to have tried to roll the heavy canvas up on its yard. He knew if it
should come on to blow that the wind would take care of it as he left
it, but he could not help it.
The last thing he did forward was to put the hatch covers on and bar
them down. The tarpaulin had been burned or thrown overboard by the
mutineers, but Paul felt certain that little water could enter the
_Daphne_ there.
As he went aft he was surprised to see a light in Elston's room. Peering
through the port under the gangway ladder leading to the poop he saw
Emily writing at the dead boy's desk. She stirred slightly as his eyes
rested on her and as if conscious of another presence. A sense of guilt
startled Paul and he hastened aft to reef down the spanker.
With the finishing of that task the skipper leaned wearily against the
wheel and surveyed the things he had done alow and aloft. The moon,
which, twenty-four hours gone, he had never expected to see rise again,
presently caught him in its spell. It was now nearly two hours high over
the bark's starboard quarter. In its beams the _Daphne_ seemed but the
delicate tracery of a ship o' dreams. It powdered the vessel with a
silvery dust; enveloped her in a mystic, spiritual splendor. The gilded
trucks gleamed like true gold. Masts and spars, shrouds and stays and
running gear were invested with a fairy grace. The coarse, heavy sails
had become gossamer in their fineness--butterfly wings at rest. The
night, as if for the very beauty of the scene, wept upon the fabric in
dewy tears of pearl and opal and sparkling diamond.
Emerging from the lounge Emily was caught in the moonlight's
enhancement. For a second it swept from her mind what had brought her
seeking Lavelle. Paul, staring aloft, did not see her nor did he hear
her footfall. A hiss of steam from the donkey boiler's safety escape,
which had been set at a very low pressure, broke the spell.
"It seems helpless--weak to say that words fail one in expressing a
thought--an impression," said the gold woman. "But all I can say--I must
say the trite thing: How wondrously beautiful!"
Her words but expressed the thought that had leaped into Paul's mind at
discovering her and which he had bravely denied utterance.
"The sea has no fairer sight to give men than this--unless it is a
square-rigged vessel like the _Daphne_, 'a towering cloud of canvas,'
driving along over the deep in such a light. But how is the stranger?"
The question brought a serious eagerness into Emily's face.
"Are you positive, Paul, that you have never seen this man before?"
"I have searched my memory to place him. He is not in it. Why?"
"He was quiet for perhaps an half-hour after you left. I went into the
room next door--the mate's--to--to write something. Suddenly I heard him
call your name, 'Lavelle.'"
"Impossible!"
"No; I heard the name, 'Lavelle'; just as distinctly as that. I was
shocked. I stole in very softly and stood beside him. His eyes were
closed, but he kept mumbling, 'That night at Apia----'"
"Apia? Apia?" Paul repeated with interest. "Yes, go on. What else did he
say?"
"That was as far as he seemed able to get. I thought he was trying to go
over some oft-told story. At last he sank back in exhaustion. I did not
dare to speak to him. He has slept ever since and his fever is down.
What is Apia? Where is it? What do you think he meant?"
"Apia--in the Samoan Islands. My father was lost there twenty-five years
ago in a hurricane which trapped three naval squadrons. He was about my
age at the time. Only a little while ago mother wrote me that a
photograph I sent her might have been father's. This old fellow must
have served under him. He mistook me for him when he saw me so
unexpectedly in the doorway. This explains it. The way he attempted to
salute when he saw me made me think he was a man-o'-war's man."
A strange, unreasonable hope which had sprung into Emily's heart died.
"The sea plays strange pranks, doesn't it, my friend?" Paul asked after
a pause. The question drew Emily's gaze back from the satiny blue deep.
His manner of address chilled her. "'My friend! My friend'?" her brain
echoed. He averted his gaze sadly.
"Yes," she assented. "It does play strange pranks."
In the words a meaning was veiled that did not reach him. She was
thinking of the barrier that had been building itself between them all
day. No sooner did one wall go down than another rose in its place.
Strangely, as she watched him staring over the deep to the southward, a
feeling of contrition filled her. With the truest sympathy she said:
"I am sorry. Perhaps I shouldn't have told you what this man said. It
has stirred unpleasant memories--sad ones."
"No. The finest memory I have is my father--the finest memory any son
ever had."
As he spoke he seemed to go still further away from her. In silence she
watched him enter the lounge and return to the deck with his sextant. He
took an observation of Polaris and then went in to the chart table to
work it out. With a feeling akin to shame Emily sensed that he did not
wish her near him and she started below.
"We should try to get as much sleep as possible while this calm lasts."
He said this coldly and without looking up from the book from which he
was taking a set of logarithms.
"I know--I understand," she answered, fighting for control of herself.
"A breeze may come at any time and we'll need every bit of strength we
can muster to work the ship."
The gold woman could stand the uncertainty no longer.
"Paul, tell me frankly--have I done or said anything to hurt you? What
is it? What I said down there in the stranger's room--is it that?"
The words were no sooner away from her lips than anger at herself swept
her. Where was her pride?
"No, no. Of course you have not said anything. Of course not. All's
well, little woman." His answer came quickly, but not without an
embarrassment that she failed to understand. He bent his head over his
work again. "Don't forget you are to call me at the first sign of a
breeze; anyway not later than 11:30."
They had planned at dinner that she was to keep the watch for the first
part of the night.
"No; I shan't forget," she answered bravely and groped down the
companionway from his sight. Nor could she dream what pain it cost the
lonely man at the chart table to let her go from him.