Ruth Lytton was sick with unhappiness for the sake of Black Pawl. She
was sorry for him because his son was false; she was sorrier for him
because Black Pawl was false to himself. He was drinking more and more;
there was an ugly note in his voice, and an ugly devil in his eye. If
she could have hated him, she would not have been unhappy; but since in
spite of herself she had a tender liking for the man, she was miserable.
She found her only release from this unhappiness in the occasional hours
she spent with Dan Darrin; yet she did not at first understand the
significance of this. Love needs to be recognized. His counterfeit is
never modest, never hidden; but love may slumber, and love may hide.
Ruth Lytton’s discovery of the fact that she loved Dan Darrin came about
quite simply, in this fashion:
It was in the late afternoon; she and Dan were together on the quarter.
The wind had fallen at noon; it was so near a flat and dead calm that
the schooner’s sails were not drawing. The sun was going down in a blaze
of crimson, hot and still. Dan had sent men aloft to tar the rigging
here and there; and one of these men was working on the main yard, above
the quarter where they stood. Dan and the girl had been talking about
the weather. It did not matter what they talked about, what words they
spoke. They had come to that point where even silence is a rich
communion. Nevertheless, it chanced they were talking about the weather,
and specifically, about the approaching sunset.
Then the man on the yard, high above them, had occasion to shift his
tar-pot; and in the shifting let it slip and fall. He bellowed down his
warning: “’Ware below.” Ruth looked up swiftly and saw the heavy bucket
falling.
According to the laws of physics, a falling object drops sixteen feet in
one second, sixty-four in two--in a vacuum. The man on the yard was
perhaps forty, perhaps fifty feet above the deck. So, even allowing for
the resistance of the still, hot air, it was no more than two seconds
between the time the bucket started to fall and the time it would reach
the deck. Nevertheless that space of time was for Ruth Lytton as long as
eternity. She looked up at the man’s cry, and saw the bucket half way
down, descending with a ponderous and deadly majesty, slowly, inevitably
as doom itself. Dan Darrin had not yet looked up; his nerves and his
muscles were slower tuned than hers. He would not have time to look up
before the bucket dropped upon his head.
Ruth, in that instant of time, saw the whole tragedy of it. The tar-pot
was heavy with tar; it would strike Dan squarely; it would surely crush
in his head, destroy him. And her heart went so sick within her that she
could not stir. She could not breathe; she could only watch that black
bucket like doom descending. Dan Darrin would be killed before her eyes;
it were better that she herself should die. Why? Why? She knew the
answer--and all within that space of two seconds or less. Why was she
sick at heart at his peril? Because she loved him! That was why.
Then the bucket struck a line, and was deflected, and fell upon the
deck six feet from Dan; and the world swam before her. She saw Dan look
up to the white face of the man on the yard, and bawl: “You swipe! Come
down and scrub away that mess. And sharp!” And the man came tumbling
placatingly down the stays, and dropped to the deck, and Dan cuffed him
to his task. By that time Ruth had her life back again; her cheeks were
still white, her lips still and trembling, but--she could live, for Dan
was safe.
And she loved him!
He was going right on with their talk, where he had let it fall when the
man’s cry came down to them.
“Yes,” he said, “the sunset’s all you say. Beautiful enough.
But--there’s no life in it, no pith. It’s quiet, calm. It’s sleep, or
death--the death of the day. Give me the rising sun, when the world
takes fire from it. It spurs you, and drives you. When the sun sets, I
want to go to bed.” He smiled at his own words. “When it’s rising, I
want to drink, or fight, or make love to a woman.” And his cheeks
reddened at that.
Ruth wanted to get away from him. She could not trust her tongue; it
would betray her. She said huskily: “Then I’m going to come up and see
the sun rise in the morning. Will you let me come?”
He said: “Of course. I’ll be on deck then, too.”
She fled from him, so swiftly that he was concerned, and wondered if he
had hurt her. But she, face down on her bunk in her cabin, was thinking:
“He said it made him want to make love to a woman. And I said I’d come
up and see it with him. Oh, will he think I meant he must make love to
me?”
She was disturbed and unhappy over that, until she began to wonder how
he knew he wanted to make love to women as the sun rose. Had he ever
done it? Who was the woman? And--how dared the man have done this thing?
“I won’t go on deck in the morning,” she told herself.
But she did.
The sunrise was what Dan had promised her it would be. The calm had held
through the night; and the sea was burnished like bronze, over its blue,
when the first light stole across the water. Dan on the quarter wondered
whether the girl would come. Probably not. She would sleep through it
all, drowsily warm and soft. He smiled as he thought of her, sleeping.
But she was not asleep. She was awake, telling herself she would not go
up to the deck, and dressing as swiftly as nimble hands could manage her
garments. Before the first gray of the sky had begun to warm with rose,
Dan saw her at the top of the companion, a white shadow in the white
light of morning.
He called to her softly. “You did come. I thought you would sleep
through.”
She said: “Yes, I came.”
“And in time, too! The best of it is before the sun comes clear of the
sea.”
She looked to the east. “How long will that be?”
“Twenty minutes--or maybe half an hour.”
“Then I needn’t have hurried.” She was managing a steady voice. But she
was so full of the thing she had discovered yesterday that she could
hardly breathe. They moved together to the after rail, where they could
look out between the starboard and the stern boats. She caught his eye,
once, in a sidewise glance; and he was smiling. Why? She became
furiously crimson. He was laughing at her; he had remembered! He thought
she had come for that.
He said: “When there’s one low cloud, a dark one, it’s finer. To-day the
line of the sea is like the line of a knife’s blade.”
She nodded, looking off to that blue-bronze line against the warming
colors of the sky. He was watching her, not the sky. She pointed up to
where a star still gleamed; and they saw its cold light wiped out by the
warm brush of the coming sun. “You see,” she told him, “your sunrise is
death too--death of the stars, and of the night.”
He shook his head. “No; the night is death, and the stars are ghosts.
When the sun comes, the night wakes into life, and forgets the stars.”
She said, watching him: “I never heard you talk like that. You
are--quiet, when others are around.”
“I told you the sunrise did things to me,” he laughed. And something
trembled in her. Was he beginning? Would he never begin? There was no
reservation in the flooding tide of the love she had for him. Now that
she knew it for what it was, she could not hold it back. And--his eyes
were hers. She was in them; she could see herself in them. It was not
that he did not care.
“You’re cold,” he said, looking at her in a way she could not
understand. She shook her head.
“No, no, don’t talk about me,” she answered. Her guards were down with
that; she felt that she had laid herself open. She had betrayed herself
by that appeal. She dared not look at him.
Dan watched her; and then he said huskily: “I want to talk about you.”
She could no longer think, no longer wonder, no longer fight. She could
only hold her tongue, pray that he might not guess she wished him to go
on. Whether he guessed or not, he did go on. “Will you let me? Don’t
be--angry, if I do.”
She said through stiff lips: “See! There’s the sun!”
He did look where she pointed, long enough to glimpse the first red rim
above the distant sea. Then his eyes swept back to her. He said:
“Please!”
She was furiously impatient with him. Why was the man so slow? “Please
what?” she asked.
He had one of her hands; she had not known that. He kissed it, in a
hurried, fumbling, unskilled way. She said: “Oh, you said you liked to
do this to women--when the sun--That’s all it is.”
She thought she was very cool and unmoved, and that he would be crushed.
She wanted him to be crushed. But--he heard her voice trembling; and he
swept an arm about her. “Ah!” he cried, laughing softly. “It was you.
I--Just you!”
She pressed her hands against him, straining away from him. “Who were
the women you liked to--make love to?” she demanded.
That was surrender; and he knew it, and so did she. “You! Always just
you. I’ve known I wanted to; but there never was a woman before you.”
When he had kissed her, and she had kissed him, she began to cry against
the rough shirt that covered his broad chest. And her tears conquered
him, so that he pleaded with her to wipe them all away. So she knew she
was mistress of the situation, and she looked up at him, laughingly. She
said, like a little girl reciting a lesson: “My mother told me to trust
a man named Dan.”
Then her arm went around his neck; and they were thus when Black Pawl
stepped out on deck from the companion.
They heard him and turned; and Black Pawl stared at them with frowning
brows, and asked:
“Well, Ruth, shall I thrash this one for you, too?”
She said softly: “No, Black Pawl. For--I love this one.”
Black Pawl still stared, till she was a little afraid of him in spite of
the boast she had made; then he wrenched his eyes away from her, and
swept them around the horizon, and spoke to Darrin.
“There’s wind coming, Dan,” he said. “Get the stuff on her; we’ll be
moving on.”