Captain Calamity Part 23

On reaching the cabin, Calamity shut the door and swung a chair round for her to sit upon.

"Now," he said, "just tell me what you want me to do. You say you have no home, and you object, apparently, to being placed in charge of the British Consul. What then?"

He spoke very quietly, almost gently, and because of this, perhaps, a feeling of utter hopelessness came over the girl.

"You must do as you think best," she answered in a voice from which all fire and spirit had gone.

"But just now you refused to let me do this."

"I know. I--I was foolish and unreasonable, I suppose."

Calamity remained silent for a minute or two, regarding her curiously.

He read her better than she guessed. When he spoke again she recognised a new quality in his voice. It made her feel as if they two, though so near, were yet miles apart. There was a note of pity in it which hurt her more than anything she had ever known before because it demonstrated so positively the distance between them.

"You and I, Miss Fletcher," he said slowly, "can never be friends; at least, not in the sense I am thinking of, for our paths lie wide apart.

If my a.s.sumption is wrong--and you have sense and discrimination enough to know what I mean by that--you must pardon me and put it down to lack of insight on my part, not to any presumption or vanity. If it is not wrong, you will understand without my saying more, why it is necessary that you should leave this ship for good at Singapore."

The girl was looking at him with large, startled eyes. What, she wondered, was that unnamable something about him which she had never observed before? Why was it that, of a sudden, he seemed to have a.s.sumed the guise of another cla.s.s--a cla.s.s about which she had read, but with which she had never come into contact? The bold, fearless sea-captain, the man of infinite resource, unscrupulous and even brutal, had disappeared. In his place was a quiet, self-contained gentleman, speaking in a low, kind voice; chiding her while he apologised for doing it.

In some subtle way he had made her feel pitifully small and ignorant; he awed her; but in a way she had never been awed before. It was impossible to resent this, because she did not know how to do so; it was something outside her experience. For the first time in her life she felt herself up against that indefinable power which for centuries has made the ma.s.ses of the world subject to the few. It was something more than the power to command, it was the power to be obeyed.

There was a long pause, and then the girl, too proud to deny her love for him, spoke.

"You have not misunderstood me," she said, with a frankness that lent dignity to her confession. "Without knowing it I have come to love you.

I think I would willingly and gladly have followed you to the uttermost ends of the earth; I would have suffered with and for you. I believed that I was meant for such as you; but you have made me see how foolish I have been. Don't think that I am ashamed you should know this. I'm not."

She stopped, her eyes fixed on his defiantly as though daring him to misunderstand her. In any other man but Calamity her words would have produced a deep impression, but he, to all appearances, was perfectly unmoved.

"We will forget all this," he said quietly. "The thing still to be settled is this matter of what's to become of you when we reach Singapore."

CHAPTER XVIII

DORA FLETCHER'S CHANCE

"From what you have told me, I a.s.sume you have no mother," Calamity went on. The note of pity had left his voice, and his manner, if not brusque, was cold and judicial.

"No," answered the girl, "my mother died when I was four years old." Her manner, too, had changed; all the heat and defiance had left it and she spoke in a subdued, colourless voice, as though these matters hardly concerned her.

"And you have no relatives living?"

"I have a couple of aunts in Sunderland. I stayed with them until I was eight years old. I--I hate them!" She made a pa.s.sionate gesture as though the very mention of these people aroused bitter memories. "It was not that they were unkind exactly; but--well, it doesn't matter now.

Soon after my eighth birthday my father took me away with him on a voyage to the East, and after that I went with him on nearly all his voyages. He educated me, too; taught me French, mathematics, navigation, and so on."

"Navigation, eh?" remarked Calamity with a note of surprise in his voice.

"Yes; if I had been a man I could have pa.s.sed for mate and got my master's ticket long ago. I'd pit my knowledge of seamanship against that of any man on this ship," she concluded defiantly.

"That wouldn't be a very hard test," answered the Captain with a cynical smile. "But what did your father intend you to be; surely he didn't suppose you would eventually command a ship?"

"I don't know what his intentions were; but the trip before this last one, he bought a fruit farm near Los Angeles, California, and I think he meant to settle down there when he retired from the sea."

"Probably he thought it might provide you with an occupation."

"Perhaps so; but he never spoke of it."

"Then he had no home of his own in England?"

"No. The house my aunts occupy and several others in Sunderland were his, but he never lived in any of them."

"He made a will, I suppose?"

"Yes, it's among those papers that I handed over to you. I know everything's left to me, because he told me so when he made his will."

"H'm, then you're not so badly off after all. I should strongly advise you to go to California and see what you can do with the fruit-farm.

It's both a healthy and remunerative occupation I've been told."

The girl nodded, but made no answer.

"What I propose to do is to take you to Singapore and place you under the protection of the British Consul, who, no doubt, will advise you concerning the proving of your father's will and so forth, for I know nothing of such matters."

"It's very kind of you," murmured the girl.

"Well now, I think that's all we can arrange for the present," said Calamity in a tone which intimated that the interview was at an end.

She rose, and, with a murmured "Good-night," left the cabin and mounted the companion-way to the deck. Slowly, as one in a dream, she made her way to her cabin, casting no glance at the unruffled sea with its millions of scintillating reflections. Her bold statement to Calamity, admittedly a declaration of love, had met with a rebuff which would have induced in most women a feeling of intolerable shame and, in all probability, inspired them with a lasting hatred of the man who had so humiliated them. But this was not the case with Dora Fletcher; she felt neither shame nor anger. Indeed, she would have been puzzled to say exactly what her feelings were, so incoherent and altogether strange were they. But she knew she had met a hitherto unrecognised force; that she had been awed not so much by a man as by a mysterious something inherent in him; by a quality rather than an individual.

During the next few days she avoided the Captain in every possible way.

Not that he ever attempted to seek her out, for, since that memorable interview he seemed to have forgotten her existence as completely as though she had ceased to be. He had again become the grim, taciturn, and mysterious individual she had first encountered. Yet, despite the girl's avoidance of him, there was gradually developing in her mind a desire to do something which would exalt her in his eyes. She wanted to bridge that vague gulf between them; to achieve something which would prove her worth. It was a delightfully ingenuous dream, only possible to a girl as unsophisticated and natural as this young Amazon of the Seas.

In due time and through no effort of her own, the hoped-for opportunity did occur and the girl was able to play the part she had so often pictured in her waking dreams. It came about, as such things usually do, in quite a fortuitous manner.

One day, about a week after her interview with Calamity, the weather, which had been remarkably fine since they left the island, showed signs of a change and before mid-day the sun had disappeared behind a curtain of sombre-tinted clouds. A wind sprang up and freshened as the day wore on, the sea became choppy, and a great bank of black clouds spread over the sky till there was barely sufficient light by which to read the compa.s.s on the bridge. Soon the _Hawk_ was rolling and pitching in a nasty fashion and shipping seas over her weather-bow every time she ducked her nose. In view of the approaching storm, hand-lines were rigged across the decks, the prisoner in the wheel-house was transferred to the hold, and a couple of men stationed at the hand steering-gear in case the steam-gear should break down at a critical moment.

Swiftly and with ever-increasing violence the hurricane swept down upon them. The seas, a turbid green, with great, foaming crests, had increased in fury and every moment grew higher, while the valleys between them, streaked and mottled with patches of foam, became deeper and more engulfing. In the midst of the _melee_ of raging waters, the _Hawk_ lurched and rolled and pitched, curveted and plunged as though she were on gimbals. Blacker and blacker grew the sky, higher and higher leapt the waves. Now they rose in front of the straining ship in solid walls of inky water, to plunge down upon the forecastle with a roar like thunder and a force which made her reel and stagger. Then a great wave would leap high above the weather-bow, and, rushing past her listing beam, descend with a mighty crash upon the starboard quarter, filling the wheel-house waist-deep with seething water.

Night came on, scarce darker than the afternoon which had preceded it, and with never a friendly star nor a rift in the solid blackness. Above the wild, devouring waste of tumbling seas the mast-head light tossed and circled--a dim, luminous speck in the fathomless darkness. The wind howled and shrieked and moaned like a chorus of lost souls in torment.

Throughout that seemingly endless night Calamity and Smith kept the bridge together, drenched and cold despite their oilskins; their faces whipped by the stinging wind, their eyes sore with the salt spray that was flung in ghostly eddies against them. Two bells struck--four--six--eight; the two relief quartermasters fought their way along the sea-swept for'ad deck and took over the wheel from the worn-out men who clutched it. Two--four--six--eight bells over again; another four hours had pa.s.sed, and another two quartermasters had come upon the bridge to take their "trick" and release the exhausted men at the wheel.

Soon after this--it was four o'clock in the morning--Calamity staggered up the inclined deck to the spot where Smith was standing.

"You'd better get below," he yelled above the roar of the gale. "You've been up here over twelve hours."

"I'm all right, sir," answered the second-mate, as he clung to the bridge-rail.