The Beach of Dreams Part 37

The girl went over it down below into the main cabin with two little sleeping cabins off it. She peeped into the tiny bath-room, examined the pantry well-stored with crockeryware, there was everything even to the bunk bedding, sheets and towels, she went to the fo'c'sle; compared with the fo'c'sle of the _Albatross_ it was a little palace.

Then she turned to Raft.

"This is your new home," said she, "there is room for your parrot here."

Then turning to Captain Bontemps. "Well, that is settled and now I only want a crew and a captain--fishermen. I will have no yachtsmen on my boat. I have had to do with yachtsmen, Captain Bontemps."

"Oh, my faith," said the old fellow, "you will easily find a crew."

"Yes, but I won't easily find a captain. I want you."

The Captain laughed.

"And how about _La Belle Arlesienne_?" asked he.

"You must leave her behind you to be sold. In my service money is no object. Now as to this boat, who is the agent from whom I can buy her?"

"Latour and Company," replied the old fellow, for the first time in his life in the powerful grip of wealth and not knowing exactly whether the great golden hand was holding him heels or head up.

"How far is Latour's from here?"

"Not far."

The girl stood for a moment looking round her at the white deck, the masts, the rigging, and as she looked some hand seemed to draw aside a veil revealing the stupid immovable houses of the land filled with stupid immovable people bound and tied up by soul-killing conventions--and on the other hand the old mystery of ships, those homes of Freedom on the road that has no boundaries.

Then she turned to Bontemps.

"Come," said she, "let us go to Latour's."

"Cleo," said the distracted Madame de Brie, writing to a friend, "Cleo must always have been as mad as her aunt De Warens. Fishermen, it seems, are the only honest people, and she and her cargo of fishermen, with an old man named Bontemps, are now heaven knows where since I met them at Portofino.

"She calls them her children and when I last saw her she was coming along the little quay at Portofino helping that big red bearded man to carry provisions.

"The times are revolutionary, that's the truth, and women are not what they were, and I am old, I suppose, and cannot see things as I ought to see them--and the grief is she might have married any one, she might have married Royalty itself, and I told her so and she laughed in my face. She said she never intended to marry any one, that she already had a family of 'children' and that the great bearded man Raft was the smallest of them all, that she was teaching him to read and write and to talk French so that he could converse with the rest of her family.

"She has made Portofino her headquarters, it seems, and she is the lady bountiful of the fishing folk there, sits in their cottages and talks to them, taking up her quarters at the little _auberge_ and sometimes living on board her boat.

"A strange life, and yet she seems happy, like that poor Mademoiselle La Fontaine, whom I last saw at the Maison de Sante of Doctor Schwanthaller, seated with a straw crown on her head and imagining herself a queen."

There ended the letter of Madame de Brie, and here ends the story of Cleo de Bromsart, a woman of energy and mind who learned from Kerguelen that Life is an endless striving, not a peaceful drifting, and that of all things high the highest is the soul of a child.

THE END