With the first streak of day Paul was on deck. The blow-off of the
donkey, which he had set at a low pressure a couple of hours before,
roused him from the berth he had stretched along the carpenter's bench.
Custom trains seafarers as it does soldiers on campaign to live by a
broken sleep which the average workaday citizen thinks would kill him.
Although Paul had been up at intervals during the night, with an eye for
the weather and any chance lights, he was filled with an eager
freshness. A stirring was coming out of the northwest. There was a tang
in it which promised a whole sail breeze. It put a song in his heart,
and a little while later Emily was awakened by his clear voice ringing
through the morning air, "The Chanty of the Rio Grande."
"'Where are you going to, my pretty maid?
_O away Rio!_
Where are you going to, my pretty maid?
_We are bound to the Rio Grande._
_O away Rio,_
_O away Rio,_
_O fare you well, my bonny young girl,_
_We are bound to the Rio Grande._'"
When Emily got forward to the galley she found breakfast waiting.
"Why didn't you call me, Paul?" she asked in a tone of protest, and she
waited archly in expectancy of a kiss, but he did not seem to notice
this. "Partners must play fair."
"Never mind, Emily. I can do so little for you. From now on it will be
watch and watch and there will not be much that I can do for you."
The bending of a new fore upper topsail and straightening out the tangle
of running gear about decks occupied most of the forenoon. It was not
until after luncheon that the _Daphne_, with Emily at the wheel, lifted
away to the eastward before a fresh northwesterly breeze.
Paul ran aft as the bark entered upon her task and stood for a moment
beside Emily. The intoxication which she had first experienced alone at
the wheel was again upon her. The breeze was dusting loose wisps of her
hair into a halo which the sun burnished with fire. Bosom heaving, eyes
alight, her whole virgin being alive, a-thrill with love and the
sensation of the _Daphne's_ motion, she presented a figure which would
have given fame to any brush that could have limned it. She might have
been Daphne herself, not fleeing from, but hastening with her fresh
treasures to meet Apollo.
Paul felt that he dare not speak. He put his hand on the wheel to haul
the bark half a point closer to the wind. As he drew it away Emily
touched it impulsively.
"Good strong, honest man's hand," she murmured.
Their eyes met in a flash in which her soul called to his and trembled
when echo only seemed to answer it.
Paul turned abruptly away to stray the patent log over the taffrail.
Then he went forward in silence. When he found himself a few minutes
later staring out over the weather bow he wondered how he had gotten
there. And the gold woman, watching him until he disappeared, kissed the
wheel spoke his hand had touched and even again in the sweet agony of
her love when she saw that it was flecked with the blood of his storm
travail.
That evening Paul established the rule by which he thought it best to
work the ship. Emily would stand a watch and trick at the wheel of two
hours and have three hours below. His watch would be three on deck and
two below.
"It isn't fair, Paul," the gold woman protested when he explained it to
her.
"It is fair, Emily. I wish I might spare you every bit of the coarse
hard things you have to do."
"That's just it. You are always thinking of sparing me."
"Take your orders or go to your room," he said with a pretended
seriousness. Emily started with a gasp. Her thoughts leaped to
McGovern's story of what had happened on the bridge of the _Yakutat_.
This was what Graham had said to Paul that fateful night.
"I--I will take my orders," she answered in a low voice.
"Why, dear, what is the matter? I didn't mean to frighten you. I'm a
ruffian. Do forgive me."
"No, you should forgive me. I had no right to question what you said.
You know best."
She drew in beside him on the lee side of the wheel.
"I've been away from civilization so long that I imagine that I've
forgotten how to speak decently to white folk."
"Then I should like to send ever so many men that I know at home where
you have been."
"Bravo! But 'ever so many men'?"
"Well, they wear trousers."
"You are cynical."
"No, observant."
"I'm afraid you are a new woman."
"I am. I have just been reborn. Oh, Paul, I have never lived until now.
I have never known what life meant. I have lived as one blind,
incompetent, thoughtless. Like most of those I knew before you came into
my life I had just a vague notion that the earth was round. You know the
kind."
"Yes. Take the fiction of civilization away from them and every nine
hundred and ninety-nine would perish overnight."
"I saw them in extremity aboard the _Cambodia_. How many knew one end of
a boat from the other? They were all thinking of living, crying to live,
and hardly one out of ten knew what to do to save their most precious
possession--life."
"There is a big thought behind what you say."
"You started it in me."
Paul looked over his shoulder at the sea. After a considerable silence
he said:
"I wonder how many came through?"
The question was addressed to the sea as much as it was to Emily. She
shuddered.
"Here!" he exclaimed brusquely. "What are we doing? There is Polaris up
there smiling at you, my lady."
His face was lit with a wonderful smile as he spoke. It drove the gloom
from her mind which their reference to the _Cambodia_ had produced. Soon
they were off on an expedition to the stars, each in turn naming one and
identifying its bearings. Paul had introduced Emily to this "game" the
second night on the island, and then as now they lost themselves in it
in a childish delight. His mental equipment was forever startling the
gold woman. Where he had found the time to garner the store of knowledge
that was his and to keep abreast of the times, leading such a life as he
had for ten years, was a marvel to her.
"Ha! Ha!" Paul laughed suddenly as the cabin clock, which he had moved
into the lounge, struck two bells. The laugh broke the spell of the
stars which held Emily, only to weave her immediately in another.
"'I have shot back to Paris!'"
Paul laughed and made a pretense of dusting himself.
"'Come--pardon me--by the last waterspout,
Covered with ether,--accident of travel!
My eyes still full of star-dust, and my spurs
Encumbered by the planets' filaments!
Ha! on my doublet! A comet's hair!'"
As he finished this snatch from Cyrano de Bergerac's sky-traveling tale,
Paul pretended to pick a comet's hair from his sleeve.
"Oh, my beloved 'Cyrano'!" exclaimed Emily, identifying the lines. "Do
go on," and in answer Paul went through the entire scene between Cyrano
and De Guiche.
"And I will applaud--I will pay you thus," and the gold woman reached up
and kissed the helmsman on brow and lip.
Thus they both came back from across the world and the four centuries
whither the magic of the romantic lines had transported them.
"Come, Emily, didn't you hear two bells strike? You have let me waste
nearly an hour of your watch below. Turn in."
"It has been an hour of magic."
She held her mouth up to be kissed. His lips barely touched hers and
flashed away, and as she went through the lounge door, he murmured,
still in the words of his Gascon hero, "'I soon shall reach the moon.'"
* * * * *
Fifteen days later the gold woman was at the wheel again, having
relieved Paul to permit him to make his noon observations. It was a
Sunday. She watched him tremulously, and strangely troubled, where he
worked at the chart table in the lounge.
The days that had passed had been those of which sea-singers make their
happiest, bravest songs--by sunlight azure, cloudless sky, and
wind-flecked, gem-shot, purple sea; by night an ermine-tipped deep,
mirroring the star jewels and planet studdings of mystic, violet
heavens. Through these halcyon days the _Daphne_ had been winging her
way ever eastward; flinging long sea leagues behind under the impulse of
a driving, northwesterly wind. It had been as constant as a mother's
love; with never a pause the bark had sped as she was speeding now, not
as a hand-made fabric of steel and iron and wood and canvas and brass,
but like a living, sensate thing into which her maker had breathed a
soul. The crispness of Spring was in the air--air which whipped the
blood like young wine.
"Only a thousand miles more!" called Paul suddenly.
As he spoke Emily saw him rise quickly from the table and come toward
her. The mask of joyousness which he wore was but a mask to her. It
might have deceived anybody else, but this girl had come to understand
him and read him as not even the woman who had borne him could have
done. There was a constraint upon him. With each noon's tale of a
shortening journey a relentless tide had seemed to carry him further and
further away from her. After the first flush of the homeward flight he
had sung no more of his sea songs unless she asked him. He had a guard
up. A secret fear seemed to be gnawing at his heart. By instinct alone
she read that he loved her; not by external signs.
"This is a smart little packet," Paul went on. "Just think of it--one
thousand nine hundred and eighty miles in fifteen days! That's moving
with nothing above a crippled mainto'-galluns'l on her! We did eleven
knots for a stretch when that puff struck us at dawn this morning."
"'She's a saucy wild packet; she's a packet of fame,
She belongs in New York and the _Dreadnaught's_ her name.'"
With this couplet, singing it in her rich voice, as she had learned it
from Paul, Emily made her answer. She did it with a bravery and pretense
of light-heartedness which she was far from feeling.
"At this rate we'll not be spending another Sunday aboard the _Daphne_,
partner. Eh?"
"No," she said and she kept her eyes averted as he took the wheel from
her. She looked out over the lee rail and across the sea. Just over the
end of the spanker boom, where it wheeled low down on the southwestern
horizon, a white glint fixed her gaze. For a second she thought it was a
large bird. Guiltily she held her breath as she discovered it to be a
sail. She closed her eyes and afterwards she believed that in that
moment she had prayed that Paul might not see it. But he had followed
her gaze. Her heart went cold as she heard him cry: "Sail ho!"
A second later the _Daphne_ was shaking in the wind.
"Here, Emily, take the wheel! Keep her shaking just as she is!"
Paul drew Emily to the wheel as he spoke and ran to the rail.
"It's a ship! Those are her skys'ls or royals we can see! She's bound
this way!"
Emily's hands faltered. The wheel rolled through them. The _Daphne_
clawed up in the wind until she was nearly aback forward.
"Hard up! Hard up!" cried Paul in alarm.
Blindly Emily recovered herself and put the helm up. The _Daphne_ fell
off before the wind and her skipper turned again to the strange sail.
"No," he said. "She's outward bound--going the other way. We could never
overtake her." He took the wheel again. "Better look at her, partner.
It's a full-rigged ship. Not many of 'em left. Pretty soon the sea will
know them no more. They'll be gone--like--like the dreams of yesterday."
In a few minutes the outward-bounder dipped out of sight, but even
before she went a mist had shut her from Emily's vision. "Dreams of
yesterday," her thoughts kept repeating.
Although the _Daphne_ had been lying along in a beaten track of vessels
for more than two weeks, this was the first sail to be sighted from her
decks--the first vessel to come within her ken since the four-master
with the painted ports had "arrived out."
"Don't feel badly, Emily," Paul said as the gold woman faced him. "Any
hour may bring us up with a homeward-bounder."
"I do not feel badly," she answered, and her pride helped her mask her
feelings. "But if we are going to be home by next Sunday we are going to
have one more 'picnic.'"
With that she went forward to the galley. The preceding Sunday she had
prepared a luncheon for both of them and they had eaten it at the wheel
together. They had prepared for it a day ahead, talking childish
make-believes of what they would wear and of the good things they would
have to eat. Paul had stolen the time to shave. Emily had found a bit of
pink ribbon and put it in her hair. This had been their change of
apparel. Such a meal as the cheap, sea-sour provisions of the _Daphne_
afforded had been the "picnic" luncheon of their fiction.
But Saturday of this week had slipped by and neither had spoken of a
repetition. Emily had waited for Paul to say something. He had waited
for her. Yet now he noted as she went forward that there was a bit of
ribbon in her hair. And she had observed that morning when he had come
on deck to relieve her at 10 o'clock that he was freshly shaven.
Of a sudden Emily paused in the midst of her "picnic" preparations, her
mind stumbling upon the strangest thought that had yet come to her of
Paul's inexplicable mood.
"Can there be another woman in his life?" whispered this thought.
Instantly there came to her mind the night on the Isle of Hope when she
had heard him murmur in unconsciousness of a woman to whom he would soon
come home.
She remembered that she had even prayed for this woman.
"_Cherchez la femme._" Nothing was truer than that. Always the woman.
Her thoughts went wild. They began picturing the sort of woman who might
have come into his life and who might be coming back into it. No; she
would never come back into it, for if she had let him go when the blow
fell, he was not the kind to let her back. Still love moved men in
strange ways.
It was a sorry picnic that was spread on the _Daphne's_ deck. It came to
an end at 2 o'clock when Paul turned the wheel over to Emily and started
forward with the dishes they had used.
"I think I shall break out some coal for the donkey," he announced.
"But it's Sunday, you know," said Emily, making a brave effort to smile.
There was an invitation in her glance for him to remain, but he would
not see it.
"And you've forgotten your sailor's litany," he answered:
"'Six days shalt thou work, doing all that thou art able; and on the
seventh, holystone the decks and stow away the cable.'"
He smiled as he quoted the sea-grimed lines which the first shell back
on the Ark must have turned. Then slowly he put down the dishes and
irresistibly--a powerful magnet might have been controlling him--he was
drawn aft to the gold woman. He took her face between his hands and
kissed her as he had kissed her that day in the lounge. She dropped the
wheel and staggered.
"My lover," she murmured.
"Darling," he whispered.
Just as the _Daphne_ was striking aback the madness which was upon
Lavelle passed from him and he seized the wheel. As he sent her off
before the wind again the back draught of the shaking sails wafted to
him a sulphurous odor which chilled the last drop of blood in his veins.
"Emily, take the wheel. Keep her full--as she is."
"Paul, dear, what----"
The pallor of death was in his face. Another scent of gaseous warning
struck him.
"My God, we're afire!" he cried and sprang forward.