The Great Quest Part 49

His blade sped through Gleazen's guard: Gleazen dropped his sword, staggered, and fell with a crash.

I heard Arnold say, "Sir, I am more clumsy than I knew. The rolling deck has saved your miserable life, since I cannot kill a wounded man. But if my hand were in practice, no ship that ever rolled would have turned that thrust."

Then a great uproar ensued, and I knew nothing more until I opened my eyes in the cabin, where a hot argument was evidently in progress, since oaths were bandied back and forth and there were hard words on all sides.

"As representatives of Josiah Woods, who owns this brig," I heard Arnold say, "Gideon North and I will not permit you, sir, or any other man, to ship such a cargo."

The reply I did not understand, but I again heard Arnold's voice, hot with anger.

"We will _not_ sail again to that den of pirates and slavers and the iniquitous of all the nations of the world, Havana. If you do not wish to go to Boston,--" he hesitated,--"we will use you better than you deserve. For a profitable voyage, we might compromise, say, on South America."

Of what followed I have no memory, for I was weaker than I realized, from loss of blood. The cabin went white before my eyes. The voices all dwindled away to remote threads of sound. I seemed to feel myself sway with the motion of the ship, and opened my eyes again and saw that I was being carried. Then I once more felt cool hands on my forehead, and leaning back, seemed to sink into endless s.p.a.ce.

I forgot Topham and all that had happened there; I forgot Africa and every event of our ill-fated venture; I even forgot the brig and the duel, and I almost forgot my own ident.i.ty. But as I existed in a sort of dream-land or fairyland somewhere between waking and sleeping, I did not forget the girl who had come with me out of Africa; and even when I could not remember my own name, I would find myself struggling in a curiously detached way to connect the name Faith, which persisted in my memory, with a personality that likewise persisted, yet that seemed a thing apart from all the world and not even to be given a name.

CHAPTER x.x.xII

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, pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.s. 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 pa.s.sing 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 grat.i.tude 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 pa.s.sage 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."