But the next morning she had sailed down to ten o’clock breakfast in her very smartest trousseau gown, nipped her hostess’ patronage in the bud with finality but no discourtesy, flattered her host, put the servants in their places by the very carriage of her head and the quality of her smile, and even got London itself into focus as a mere town that derived its present importance from the fact that Marianne Le Patourel was now the central point of its activity.
For the rest of the period of her stay, though inwardly astonished to the point of stupefaction, she had maintained the most perfect outward nonchalance. She had driven in the park in a purple bonnet with pink roses in it, sublimely unimpressed. She had attended the opera in green gauze with gardenias in her hair, elegantly tolerant of Verdi’s music. She had shopped in a lace-trimmed visite of peach-colored satin, and been dissatisfied with the wares submitted for her approval. She had attended divine service in Westminster Abbey in a casaweck of Prussian blue, and yawned just a little in the sermon. The one and only time that her sharp-eyed hostess had been able to detect the slightest sign of emotion in her had been when she first caught sight of Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament, when she had produced her smelling bottle and applied it to her sharp little nose. And the only moment when she had failed in the slightest degree to behave as a gentlewoman should was when she had flatly refused the customary attendance of a servant in her drive to the docks. She had even refused the loan of her host’s carriage; she had chosen to make the journey alone in a hackney coach from Park Lane to the Green Dolphin. “I’ll not be spied on,” she had said to herself. “If, when I see the Green Dolphin, I behave like a little girl of six arriving at her first party, there shan’t be a soul to see.”
Fortunately her driver knew the way to the docks even when in liquor. Marianne let down the window beside her and looked out eagerly at cobbles glistening with silver after a spring shower, at great warehouses, at ships, ships, and more ships, a whole forest of masts towering against a shining mackerel sky, hulls so tightly packed that one could scarcely see the sheen of water between them. But one could hear the slap of the tide, the cry of the gulls, the rattling of hawsers, and smell tar, and seaweed, and spices, and tallow, and rum, and wet wood and canvas, and even the authentic salty smell of the sea.
“The Green Dolphin?” shouted the driver.
“Ay, ay, the Green Dolphin,” an old shellback shouted in answer, and pointed out the way.
They rocked and jolted on over the cobbles, and then they rocked to a standstill, and Marianne jumped out like a little girl arriving at her first party and jerked her veil aside. Yes, there she was, the lovely Green Dolphin, incomparable as ever. She might be old now, but she was no whit less beautiful; indeed, like all fine characters, she seemed to have grown in dignity and grace with the passing of the years. Hastily paying the driver and leaving her luggage to look after itself, clutching only her reticule, umbrella, and parrot, she made her way up the gangplank with rustling skirts and swinging crinoline, and like William at the Chinese port ran straight to Captain O’Hara’s cabin.
He was there, standing by the teak table with a letter in his hand. “Captain O’Hara! Captain O’Hara!” she cried, dropped Old Nick and ran straight into his arms. It was an outrageous thing for the prim, elegant, self-controlled Mademoiselle Le Patourel to do, but she was no longer Mademoiselle Le Patourel, she was a little girl at a party. She would have kissed him if she could have reached up as far as his round, red, astonished countenance. As it was she stood on tiptoe with her arms round his neck and laughed up into his face.
He held her with appreciation, for she was a smart little woman in her orange and green, exquisitely perfumed, tiny and dainty as a Dresden figure, and with the light in her eyes and the color in her cheeks she was almost pretty, but he had no idea who she was until suddenly he saw the greenstone earrings swinging in her ears. Then he roared with laughter, picked her up and kissed her with great smacking kisses one upon each cheek.
“So it’s you, me dear!” he shouted. “Begorra, if it isn’t the little green enchantress after all!”
“Who did you think it was?” she asked him.
“Your husband-to-be, me dear, that great, stupid fellow William Ozanne, had not the time to tell me much about ye before I left New Zealand. His horse fell lame on the road to Wellington, an’ when he reached the harbor he’d only time to fling me the letter for ye, an’ shout out a few instructions before I sailed. ‘Is it the little green enchantress?’ I shouted to him as he went off down the gangplank. ‘No,’ he shouted back. ‘The more fool you,’ said I. ‘You’ve not the sense ye were born with.’ But here ye are after all, me dear.”
“He’d not have known whom you meant by the green enchantress,” laughed Marianne. “But I’m the girl to whom you gave the earrings, Captain O’Hara. Who else could be William’s wife? You and I and William and the Green Dolphin—we’re all bound up together. And Nat. Where’s Nat?”
“Aboard,” said Captain O’Hara. “Polishin’ your cabin for the nine hundredth and ninetieth time, bedad. ’Tisn’t every day o’ week the Green Dolphin has a lady passenger. There’s a second one, too, a Mrs. Dunbar who’s to be your chaperon, God help you. The crew’s as nervous as a pack o’ cats.”
They were sitting one on each side of the teak table now, appraising each other. Old Nick, in spite of his muffling cover, poured out a volley of nautical oaths from his position on the floor, and squawked and fluttered in a frenzy of delight, For he knew quite well that this was not a frail craft like the packet that had brought him to England, but a real ship, a deep sea ship, that would sail on and on for week after week. He was a real old shellback, no landsman, and, like Marianne, he was only himself when he could smell the sea.
Captain O’Hara was now an old man, Marianne noticed with something of outrage, for it struck her as preposterous that old age should dare to lay its hand upon anything so superbly vigorous as the man she had first seen twenty years ago in the harbor of St. Pierre. His face was as round and red as ever, but covered with a network of fine wrinkles like the markings on a shriveled apple. His great china teeth did not fit as well as they had and were apt to fall out suddenly. His huge old-fashioned wig, a little too big for him now, fell sideways when he laughed, and there was in his eyes a look of bewilderment, as though the slight failing of his tremendous strength had taken him by surprise and he did not quite know what one did about it. Marianne put out a small hand impulsively and laid it on his, and wished with all her heart and soul that old age would be merciful to him.
Captain O’Hara took her hand and considered her with kindness but considerable gravity. Her little-girl mood had died away now and he saw her for what she was, a prim little middle-aged spinster, elegant but deucedly plain, not at all the sort of woman whom he could imagine a young man like William fancying as a wife. For he could see that she had developed a very considerable will of her own, and something of a temper, and a sharp, hard brilliance that might be smart but would be damnably uncomfortable to live with. No, not at all the sort of woman whom he would have expected the easygoing William to fancy as a wife. He could only come to the conclusion that either this woman had changed immeasurably since William last saw her, or else that the boy had far more good horse sense than he had given him credit for. For there was no denying, thought Captain O’Hara, that this woman with her wiry little body and her resolute will was just the type to endure without breaking the hard life that lay before her, and just the type to keep that fellow William with nose to the grindstone and unwilling feet glued firmly to the path of virtue. But he was sorry for William, God help him, and he was sorry for Marianne too, who as she talked to him of her bridegroom seemed to have entirely forgotten, or never to have realized, that between the boy she had last seen and the man she was to marry there stretched ten years of pioneer existence. She had no conception of what that was, of course. He looked at her exquisite but most unsui
table clothes, and her smooth little hands unscarred by any toil, and he said very soberly, because in spite of her sharpness he liked the little woman, “God bless ye, me dear. It’s meself that’s proud to have you on the Green Dolphin.”
Chapter III
1
He liked her increasingly as the days went by, and so did the crew. Fastidious in her dress and person though she was, and primly correct in her behavior, she was yet entirely without squeamishness. She took the rough with the smooth, made no complaints, and adjusted herself to rough speech and rough ways with grace and tact. The presence of Nat, who did not become more handsome as the years went by, seemed in no way repulsive to her; indeed she welcomed his doglike devotion and let him potter about her cabin in the capacity of lady’s maid to his faithful heart’s content. Almost she seemed to love the little man. “You see,” she said to Captain O’Hara, when he told her to kick out Nat as soon as she could stand him no longer, “I have always loved the poor, but this is the first time they have loved me.”
“The poor?” ejaculated Captain O’Hara. “Begorra, I have it to me certain knowledge that Nat has as tidy a fortune stowed away in an old stocking as any miser could wish for. He don’t squander it on his person. Hasn’t bought himself a stitch of clothin’ for a hundred years. Had that nightcap in his cradle, bedad.”
“I did not mean that quite literally,” said Marianne, with slow consideration. “When I say I love the poor, I mean—at least I think I mean—that I love that which can take what I have to give, and be made by it, and in return let me see myself stamped upon it as a king sees his own head upon the little bit of metal that he has commanded shall be a coin of the realm.”
“Ay,” said Captain O’Hara reflectively. “That’s what we love, me dear. Take meself, now. Fightin’ a storm takes every ounce that I am, an’ when I’m victor, when the sea takes me imprint, then I love it. Faith, you might say it is God to me, surely.”
Old Nick, basking in his cage in the sunshine of the deck, squawked explosively, and a dolphin tumbling along beside the ship turned a derisive somersault. So these two arrogant mortals thought they could set their seal upon God, did they? They thought a great deal of themselves, no doubt, but to the dolphin and the parrot they were merely comic.
“Take a dose of castor oil and get it out of the system,” advised Old Nick.
“Be quiet!” snapped Marianne, and put his cover on him. But her snappishness was immediately melted out of her again by the heavenly sunshine. She leaned back in the old rocking chair which had been provided for her benefit and took up her sewing. Captain O’Hara, leaning against the bulwarks, looked at it curiously. It was a scrap of white linen exquisitely embroidered with little daisies.
“What the divil is it?” he asked.
“A baby’s cap,” said Marianne.
“God bless me soul!” he ejaculated. “Bit premature, ain’t ye?”
“I am always premature,” said Marianne severely. “I make my plans a very long way ahead.”
“I believe ye,” chuckled Captain O’Hara. “Girl or boy?”
“A boy, of course,” said Marianne. “I have no use for little girls.”
A month of the four or five months’ voyage was now behind them and they were sailing through halcyon seas, the Atlantic in the friendliest possible mood, giving Marianne no hint at all of what it could do to her if it felt so inclined. The past month had been almost the happiest of her life. The rough seas of the Channel and the Bay had not upset her at all, for she was an excellent sailor, and she scarcely knew what physical fear meant. She had sat below undismayed by the sliding, tilting floor of her cabin, the eerie creaks and groans of the woodwork, the gurgling and chuckling of bilge water and the roar of wind and waves. She had been allowed on deck again just in time to enjoy a moment of experience that was one of the most thrilling of her life—the departing from her of the coast of Europe. It had been at sunset. The light had swung away the dark clouds overhead on lifted spears and poured over the sea in a steadily advancing arc of gold, and in the perfect circle thus hollowed out of the darkness there had appeared a vision of blue hills, a white-walled town, a froth of silver foam on the rocks; a vision out of a picture book, a fairy-tale vision of childhood like that vision of St. Pierre in the dawn. She had looked long, her pulses throbbing. . . . Europe, mother of her race. Europe, old and lovely, good-by, good-by. Fairyland of childhood, good-by. I’ll not see you again till life comes round full circle and the gate that a child came out of will be the gate where an old woman enters in. . . . The golden spears had fallen; a sweeping rainstorm had blotted out the vision. Now at last she was fully launched on her adventure; nothing whatever could pluck her back.
“You’re livin’ in a fairy tale,” chuckled Captain O’Hara one day. “You don’t know what the sea is yet, my girl, you’ve not a notion, God help you. You thought it was a hurricane we met a couple of weeks back—it was just a good, fresh, steady breeze.”
“I know there’s worse to come,” said Marianne imperturbably. “But I’m not afraid. I know the Green Dolphin will bring me safe to William.”
Captain O’Hara left her and strolled off to talk to his other two passengers, a dour elderly Scotsman from Leith and his even dourer wife. They were bound for South Island, New Zealand, where the Scottish colony was rapidly growing; illness had kept them from joining the last colonists’ ship that had sailed from the Firth of Forth, and condemned them to the chaperonage of Marianne upon the Green Dolphin. But to Captain O’Hara’s amusement Marianne and the Dunbars made no further contact with each other than that demanded by civility. The elderly couple disapproved of Marianne with her smart, gay clothes, her blasphemous parrot, her friendliness with the crew, and her flirtations with the Captain. And she, deeply conscious of her own rectitude, resented their disapproval. Moreover, there was between them that great gulf fixed that separates good sailors from bad sailors. Marianne’s imperturbable health was a source of outrage to the suffering Dunbars, and their unfortunate prostration, continued even in fine weather when the ship’s roll was no more than the soothing rock of a cradle, struck Marianne as very distressing evidence of an infirmity of will that she could by no means approve. So they sat apart on the deck, the Dunbars with closed eyes and suffering faces, and Marianne sometimes rocking and sewing, and singing snatches of songs to herself, and sometimes sitting quite still with hands folded in her lap, drinking in every detail of a heavenly experience that might never come again.
And so the days and weeks went by, rounded and perfect like pearls upon a chain, with so little to differentiate one from another that it seemed they must continue so for always. Marianne rocked and lazed and watched the crew busy upon fine-weather tasks: patching sails, polishing brasswork, spinning rope yarn, cheery and contented as the rolling porpoises and the fishes she could see when she leaned upon the taffrail and looked down into the limpid depths of tranquil water. The fine-weather tasks were little tasks, seeming all the smaller and busier because over and around them there brooded the blue vastness of the sky, the limitless stretch of the slow-breathing, slow-moving, entranced, entrancing ocean. There were days when Marianne knew that this sense of secure continuance was nothing but a spell cast by the sea upon their senses, and that their little activities were a sort of defiance in the face of danger, a beating of the drums before the fight. The sea was just waiting. When at night Nat scraped out a tune upon his fiddle, and the men sang doggerel sea chanties in the light of the moon, they were accompanied by a low yet powerful humming of wind in the sails and rigging over their heads, a slow, booming surge of the sea that, when one stopped to pay attention to it, seemed to die away. Captain O’Hara laughed when one night he found Marianne standing stock-still in the moonlight, before she went to bed, turned a little sideways to the sea, one hand to her throat, listening.
“Not yet,” he told her. “But you’ll come on deck one morning an’ see grey skies, an
’ a grey sea that’ll ruffle suddenly, like a bird’s wing, yet there won’t be no cause for the ruffle, that ye can set eyes on. An’ then, maybe, in an hour or two, maybe longer, you’ll see white horses gallopin’ astern. Good night.”
But it did not happen quite like that, for what Marianne first noticed was what she thought was the dim shape of a range of mountains, so far away that it was no more than a blue smudge on the horizon. It was Sunday morning, and crew and passengers were gathered before Captain O’Hara on the poop, listening to his terrific voice issuing his orders to his God in prayer and psalm. “O eternal Lord God, Who alone spreadest out the heavens and rulest the raging of the sea . . . receive into Thy Almighty protection the person of us Thy servants, and the ship in which we sail. Amen.”
The words were humble, yet the tone in which he addressed the Almighty was, she thought, more dictatorial than usual, if that were possible, and the tail of his eye was on that mountain range.
It was astern of them, yet oddly enough, as the day went on, it seemed to draw nearer, and by evening the blue smudge was grape-colored, serrated with strange peaks lit with gold. She had not the slightest idea where they were on the wide ocean, and she wondered vaguely if it was Africa or South America. “What country is that?” she asked Nat, who was coming behind her in his capacity of faithful retainer, carrying her book and workbox. She could understand, now, the strange noises that passed with him for speech. The actual words she could not always distinguish, but their significance was always clear to her mind.
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