WESTWARD BOUND
At the time I did not know whether it was two days or ten that I lay
in that borderland of consciousness. But as I emerged from it into a
clearer, more real world, I saw now the girl, now Arnold, now Gideon
North, passing before me and sometimes pausing by my berth. One day
I found myself eating broth that someone was feeding to me. The
next, I saw that the girl was my nurse. The next, I asked questions,
but so weakly that I could no more than murmur a faint protest when
she smiled and turned away without answering.
So it went until a time when my voice was stronger and I would not
be put off again. Seizing her sleeve and feebly holding it, I cried
as stoutly as I was able, "Tell me--tell me where we are and all
that has happened."
What she saw through the open port, I could only guess; if it was
possible to judge by her face, she saw more than mere sea and sky,
with perhaps a wandering sea bird; but she turned and quietly said,
"We are at sea, now, and all is going well, and when you are
stronger, I'll tell you more."
"Tell me now!" I demanded.
I would have said more, but I felt that my voice was failing and I
did not wish her to perceive it.
She hesitated, then impulsively turned.
"Just this: you are getting well fast, and he is getting well
slowly. We have gone from the coast and the Gulf of Guinea, and are
off for South America."
Then she went away and left me, and I was troubled by the sadness
of her face, although she had had enough, heaven knew! to make her
sad.
"So," I thought, "we have really abandoned the trade at last! And so
Arnold brought down Gleazen! And what of the trader and Pedro? And
what are our prospects of profit from a voyage to South America? And
what of Seth Upham and--"
Then it all came back to me, a thousand memories bursting all at
once upon my bewildered brain, and I lived again those days from the
hour when I first saw Neil Gleazen on the porch of the inn, through
the mad night when we left Topham behind us, through the terrible
seasickness of my first voyage, through the sinister adventure in
Havana, through all the uncanny warnings of those African witch
doctors, up to the very hour when Seth Upham threw wide his arms and
went, singing, down to die by the spring. I remembered our wild
flight, the battle in the forest, the race down the river, the fall
of the mission, and again our flight,--the girl was with us
now!--the affair of the cruiser, the quarrel, the duel, and the
voices that I heard as I lay on deck. Then I came to a black hiatus.
Memory carried me no further and I wearily closed my eyes, having no
strength to keep them open longer.
Next I knew that good Gideon North was standing over me, his hand on
my pulse; there was a sharp throbbing pain in my shoulder where
Gleazen's sword had struck home; I was vaguely aware that the girl
was sobbing.
Now why, I thought, should anything trouble her? It was not as if
she, like me, had come up against a wall that she could not pass. I
seemed actually to throw myself at that black rigid barrier which
cut me off from every event that followed and--my delirious
metaphors were sadly mixed--left me balanced precariously on a
tenuous column of memories that came to an end high up in a dark
open place, like the truck of a ship in a black, stormy night.
I heard Gideon North speaking of fever and my wound; then the
picture changed and the girl alone was sitting beside me. She was
singing in a low voice, and the song soothed me. I did not try to
follow the words; I simply let the tune lead me whither it would.
Then I went to sleep again, and when I woke my memory had succeeded
in passing the barrier that before had balked every effort.
Now I remembered things that had happened while I lay in my berth in
my stateroom. I put together things that had happened before and
after my duel. It was as if I reached out from my frail mast of
memories and found accustomed ropes and knew that I could go
elsewhere at will. I felt a sudden new confidence in my power to
think and speak, and when the girl once more appeared, I cried out
eagerly, even strongly, "Now I know what, who, and where I am."
At my words she stepped quickly forward and laid her hand on my
forehead. The fever had gone. With a little cry she turned, and I
heard her say to someone in the cabin, "His face is as cool as my
own!"
In came Gideon North, then, and in the door appeared Arnold.
"Bless me, boy!" Captain North cried, "you're on the mend at last."
"I think I am," I returned. "What happened to me?"
"Happened to you? A touch of African fever, my lad, on top of a
dastardly stab."
"Where's Neil Gleazen?" I cried.
"Oh, he's getting along better than he deserves. Our friend Lamont,
here, spitted him delicately; but he escaped the fever and has had
an easier time of it by far than you, my lad."
He once more counted my pulse. "Fine," he said in his heartiest
voice, "fine enough. Now turn over and rest."
"But I've been resting for days and days," I protested. "I want to
talk now and hear all the news."
"Not now, Joe. Well go away and leave you now. But I'll have cook
wring the neck of another chicken and give your nurse, here, the
meat. She has a better hand at broth, Joe, my boy, than ever a
man-cook had, and I'll warrant, two hours from now, broth'll taste
good to you."
So I went to sleep and woke to a saner, happier world.
In another week I was able to be up on deck and to lie in the open
air on cushions and blankets, where the warm sunshine and the fair
wind and the gentle motion of the sea combined to soothe and restore
me. It was good to talk with Arnold and Captain North, and with Abe
Guptil, who, at my request, was ordered aft to spend an hour with me
one afternoon; but why, I wondered, did I see so little now of Faith
Parmenter?
She would nod at me with a smile and a word, and then go away,
perhaps to lean on the rail and watch for an hour at a time the
rolling blue sea, or to pace the deck as if oblivious to all about
her.
On that night at the mission weeks before, when neither of us even
knew the other's name, she had spoken to me with a directness that
had even more firmly stamped on my memory her face as I had first
seen it among the mangroves. On that terrible day when her father
had gone out from the mission house to die, when dangers worse than
death had threatened us from every side, she had cast her fortunes
with Arnold's and with mine; in all the weeks of my pain and fever,
she had tended me with a gentleness and thoughtfulness that had
filled me with gratitude and something more. But now she would give
me only a nod and a smile, with perhaps an occasional word!
Why, Arnold and even old Gideon North got more of her time and
attention than did I. I would lie and watch her leaning on the rail,
the wind playing with stray tendrils of her hair, which the sun
turned to spun gold, and would suffer a loneliness even deeper than
that which I felt when my own uncle, Seth Upham, died by the spring
on the side of the hill. Could there be someone else of whom she was
always thinking? Or something more intangible and deeper rooted?
More and more I had feared it; now I believed it.
To see Cornelius Gleazen, his right arm still swathed in many
bandages and his face as white almost as marble, eyeing me glumly
from his place across the deck, was the only other shadow on my
convalescence. With not a word for me,--or for my friends, for that
matter,--he would stroll about the deck in sullen anger, for which
no one could greatly blame him. He had no desire now to return to
our home town of Topham; his bolt there was shot. We had refused him
passage to the port of lawless men where no doubt he could have
plotted to win back the brig and all that he had staked. Little
grateful for the compromise by which he gained the privilege of
landing on another continent, he kept company with his thoughts--ill
company they were!--and with Matterson. But more than all else, it
troubled me to see him watching Faith Parmenter.
As I would lie there, I would see him staring at her, unconscious
that anyone was observing him. He would keep it up for hours at a
time, until I did not see how she--or the others--could fail to
notice it; yet apparently no one did notice it. The man, I now
learned, and it surprised me, had a cat-like trick of dropping his
eyes or looking quickly away.
As I grew stronger, I would now and then stand beside her, and we
would talk of one thing and another; but without fail there was the
wall of reserve behind which I could not go. She was always
courteous; she always welcomed me; yet she made her reserve so plain
that I had no doubt that it was kindness alone which led her to put
up with me. Only once in all that westward voyage did I feel that
she accepted me as more than the most casual of acquaintances, and I
could see, as I thought it over afterwards, that even then it was
because I had taken her by surprise.
It came one night just when the sun was setting and the moon was
rising. The shadows on deck were long and of a deep umber. The
mellow light of early evening had washed the decks and all the lower
rigging in a soft brown, while the topsails were still tinted with
lavender and purple. We were running before a southeast wind
and--though I incur the ridicule of old sailors by saying it--there
was something singularly personal and friendly about the seas as
they broke against our larboard quarter and swept by us one by one.
I know that I have never forgotten that hour at the end of a fair
day, with a fair wind blowing, with strange colors and pleasant
shadows playing over an old brig, and with Faith Parmenter beside me
leaning on the taffrail.
We had been talking of trivial things, with intervals of deep
silence, as people will, especially in early evening, when the
beauty of the great world almost takes away the power of speech. But
at the end of a longer silence than any that had gone before it, as
I watched her slim fingers moving noiselessly on the rail, I
suddenly said, "Why do you never tell me about your own life? In all
this time you have not let me know one thing about yourself."
As she looked up at me, there was a startled expression in her
eyes.
"Do you," she said, "wish to know more about me?"
"Yes."
She looked away again as if in doubt; then, with a little gesture,
which seemed for the time being to open a gate in that wall of
reserve which had so completely shut her away from me, she smiled
and spoke in a low, rather hurried voice.
"My story is quickly told. I was born in a little town in Dorset,
and there I lived with my father and my mother and nurse, until I
was sixteen years old. My mother died then. The years that followed
were--lonely ones. It was no surprise to me--to anyone--when my
father decided to give up his parish and sail for Africa. We all
knew, of course, how bad things were on the West Coast. People said
our English ships still kept up the wicked trade. But they were
ships from Brazil and the West Indies, manned, I believe, by
Spaniards and Portuguese, that gave us the most trouble. There were
Englishmen and Americans now and then, but they were growing fewer.
We thought we were done with them; then you came. Even after you had
come, I told my father that you were not in the trade; but my father
already had seen _him_,"--she moved her hand ever so slightly in the
direction of Gleazen, who likewise was leaning on the rail at a
little distance,--"and he would believe no good of you. If only he
could have lived! But you came. And here am I, with only you and an
old black servant."
She looked up at me with a sudden gesture of confidence that made my
heart leap.
"I am glad you came," she said.
Her hand lay on the rail beside mine, but so much smaller than mine
that I almost laughed. She turned quickly with an answering smile,
and impulsively I tried to cover her small hand with my larger one.
Deftly she moved her hand away. "Are you so silly?" she gravely
asked.
At that moment I was quite too shy and awkward for my own peace of
mind. She seemed suddenly to have stepped away from me as on
seven-league boots. I certainly felt that she was angry with me, and
I ventured no more familiarities; yet actually she merely moved her
hand away and stayed where she was. There was that about her which
made me feel like a child who is ashamed of being caught in some
ridiculous game; and I think now that in some ways I was truly very
much of a child.
For a long time we watched in silence the rolling seas, which had
grown as black as jet save for the points of light that they
reflected from the stars, and save for the broad bright path that
led straight up to the full moon. But when the moon had risen higher
and had cast its cold hard light on the deck of the brig, Cornelius
Gleazen edged closer to us along the rail.
"Good-night," she murmured in a very low voice, and gave a little
shudder, which, I divined, she intended that I should see. Then,
with a quick, half-concealed smile, she left me.
All in all, I was happier that night than I had ever been before, I
believe, for I thought that we had razed the wall of her reserve.
But lo! in the morning it was there again, higher and more
unyielding than ever; and more firmly than ever I was convinced that
she had not told me _all_ her story; that there was someone else of
whom she was thinking, or that some other thing, of which I knew
nothing, preyed upon her.