a violent ringing of the ship's bell and emily calling him in a voice fraught with excitement aroused paul. for a second he imagined he was still dreaming.
"paul! paul! quick!"
he sprang out on deck.
"oh!" emily gasped in relief. "i thought you would never wake. but look!" she pointed forward. "a boat's there! right ahead! a man——there!"
rubbing his sleep-bewildered eyelids, paul made out a small white boat a point off the daphne's weather bow and not more than five ship's lengths away. yes, a man was standing up in it. he was beckoning wildly to the bark and to the sky in turn.
the boat was too far off to make out if the man were alone in it. paul had to depend on his sight. the bark had been robbed of her glasses.
the daphne was making about three knots an hour. while he had slept the breeze had lessened. the swell was practically gone.
"haul her up three points," said paul, facing the wheel. "keep an eye on me. every time i raise my right hand let her go off half a point. when i hold up my left: haul up half a point—luff!"
with this instruction snapped at emily, paul ran forward, leaving her alone, bewildered, fearful of making a mistake. but he was satisfied she would understand. he held responsibility to be as much the mother of capacity as necessity is of invention.
by instinct alone emily interpreted paul's orders. she brought the daphne to windward and until she could see the boat and its passenger's head just over the lee bow. she saw paul spring into the fore shrouds with a coil of rope. as he did so he raised his left hand. the boat disappeared. she was sure the daphne would run it down. paul raised his right hand. the helmswoman let the bark go off half a point.
paul, leaning over the rail at his last signal, tried to read a name on the stern of the little boat which came bobbing toward him. he failed.
an old man was standing up between the cockleshell's alter and second thwarts. he was babbling in delirium. his swollen tongue was protruding from his lips. he was bareheaded and his hairless crown seemed ready to burst open in fire. now the boat was close enough to see that the derelict was alone. his clothing consisted of a shirt and trousers—dungarees. he answered paul's hails with a leer of idiocy.
emily steered so finely that the daphne brought the boat alongside just abreast of the fore-rigging. as their sides touched, paul dropped a running bowline over the old man's head and shoulders and a minute later hauled him over the side. the boat overturned as its occupant was jerked out of it and paul regretfully saw it drift away.
the derelict crumpled in a heap at his rescuer's feet as he touched the deck. his face and neck and arms and feet were horribly sunburned. he was literally parboiled. it would have taken the woman who mothered him to recognize his pitiably swollen countenance. he was short and thick-set and between fifty-five and sixty years old. his horny nails and blunt work-worn fingers bespoke him a sailor.
paul carried him up on the poop as the best place to work over him and laid him down in the lee of the lounge house.
"oh, you poor, poor man!" emily cried in sympathy at sight of him.
"this is terrible, little woman. i'm afraid we can do little for him."
paul looked away from the stranger with a shudder. while he had been forward at the rescue and carrying the stranger aft the breeze had died away. all aloft was now idle.
"can't i leave here and help you?" asked emily. "we must try to save his life."
"it's a mighty unpleasant task for you."
"don't think of me as being helpless, paul. please. i know i can do so many things. i'm not the same woman you met back there."
she looked away to the westward as she spoke.
"come, then." he put the wheel in beckets. "forward——get some water out of the galley."
emily ran to do as she was bidden and paul went below to the medicine chest. the medical supplies provided some strychnine tablets and, tincturing a glass of water with this heart stimulant, the castaways took turn about forcing drops of the fluid between the cracked lips. emily discovered a jar of beef extract among the stores and made up a little of this for the sufferer.
after two hours of careful and unceasing attention the derelict opened his rheumy eyes and stared at the sky for a second.
"hello, stranger," said paul. "feeling better?"
the eyes closed again and the cracked lips muttered an inaudible blur of words. it was plainly an unconscious answer.
a little while later, as paul was taking another observation of the sun, emily thought she saw a gleam of consciousness in the faded gaze which found her face and held it.
"are you from the bark daphne—the daphne?" she asked.
both she and paul had discussed the possibility of this being so.
"he—walked—'tween—gyves——"
this was the strange whispered utterance that came from the cracked lips.
"paul, he is speaking."
lavelle laid down his sextant and knelt beside the stranger.
"i asked him," the gold woman explained, "if he belonged to the daphne. he——listen——"
the cracked lips were speaking again.
"he—walked—'tween—'tween with—with gyves——"
the stranger was repeating what he had said to emily.
paul ran the words over under his breath. they sounded familiar. they had a rhythm that touched some cell of memory. suddenly his mind groped upon discovery. emily uttered an exclamation in the same instant. both of them knew what the stranger was attempting to say.
"don't you remember hood's 'the dream of eugene aram,' paul?"
"yes," he said with a nod. "'and eugene aram walked between, with gyves upon his wrists.'"
the line, as he repeated it, had a startling weirdness.
"what can the poor brain be thinking? what is hidden back of this strange thought?" emily asked in a whisper.
"it may be as we have thought—that he belongs to the daphne's crew. perhaps in its disorder his brain is reflecting the crime committed aboard here in the words of hood's poem. yet one would imagine that if there is anything in the theory of crime suggesting crime that it would be something of the sea of which he would be thinking. eugene aram was a schoolmaster and he killed in the woods. this man is a sailor. there is no doubt about that."
"could he have been the one——"
emily shrank from the stranger at the thought which leaped into her mind.
"don't think that, emily. if he had a hand in what happened here——but let as not think of what's past."
paul carried the derelict below and put him in the room next to the mate's. he swathed his burns in carron oil and tied him in the bunk so that the rolling of the vessel would not turn him out. the man had become unconscious again immediately after mumbling the bit of "eugene aram" which emily had called paul to hear. lavelle left the derelict sleeping in apparent peace, but with a heart action that was extremely weak.
"if he lives he will be a godsend toward helping us work ship," paul told emily as they went aft together to the lounge.
"may be that is why it was given to us to pick him up."
paul smiled doubtfully.
"what time is it, emily?" he asked.
"only quarter past three," she said, looking at the silver watch which he had given her to carry when he put her at the wheel.
"didn't have much of a sleep, did i?"
"no, you didn't. please lie down again."
"will in a little while. got to. but first i must work out this observation—see where in this world or kingdom come we are."
he sat down at the chart table and in a few minutes, weary though he was, finished his calculations. the result checked and confirmed his noon reckoning.
emily stood beside him holding down the edges of the chart while he pricked off the daphne's position and ran a line to the southeastward. it ended at ocean island. he ran a second to midway; a third to honolulu. the woman watched his long fine fingers—wondrously fine for the rough, hard things of which she knew them to be capable—handling pencil and ruler and dividers with a fascinating deftness and certainty. he seemed oblivious of everything else. an eager stimulation seemed to be driving him. the mystery of the student was about him. a feeling of woful incompetence possessed her. she realized how narrow and little her life had always been until now; how little she actually knew of all the things there were to be known. her heart stirred of a sudden with a marvelous thrill at the thought of what a woman's triumph must be to suffer the giving of such a man as this to the world. her breath paused tremulously. what shanghai elsie had said to her in the boat flashed into her mind: "you were made for the mother of men—strong men—like him."
the navigator, glancing up from his work, beheld an expression in her beautiful face which was beyond his understanding. her glance dropped as it met his and a glow suffused her cheeks and thin, delicate ears that the dawn might have envied. a second later her eyes lifted to his again and in their expression and her smile he read elation. in his blindness he believed that she had been able to follow his work and that it was the prospect of an early deliverance which enlightened her countenance.
"there you are!" he exclaimed in a note of lively and natural pleasure. "look! only five hundred miles to the southeast——see that speck? that's ocean island. if we can't fetch that we'll try for midway. a cable station's there. if we can't make any of these islands we'll keep right on to honolulu. all the while we'll be lying along in the steamship track. isn't it wonderful, eh?"
"too wonderful to be true, paul."
the answer came in a whisper. tears glinted in her eyes. she was glad for his sake; glad that the stress which was upon him was so near an end. his escape, of course, meant hers and——intuitively she sensed that he was very far away from her; that he was slipping further and further away and she started to put out a hand to touch him; to hold him. her arm dropped as she raised it. this was not the man who had held her in his arms that morning. she heard his words dimly.
"if we can work to the south'ard and the eastward, by to-morrow noon we may begin to keep our eyes open for ships. with any kind of fair weather and a breeze from the westward land should be rising over the bows in three or four days. think of it! another twelve hours and you may be going over the daphne's side into a homeward bounder!"
emily's eyes overflowed. he winced at the tears.
"why——you mustn't be crying now. you must laugh! sing! the chief mate of the bark daphne would better be thinking of her shore-going togs! this is what we'll be singing in a very short time:
"i thought i heard the captain say,
leave her, johnny, leave her;
you may go ashore and touch your pay,
it's time for us to leave her.
"we'll sing. oh, may we never be,
leave her, johnny, leave her;
on a hungry ship the like of she,
it's time for us to leave her."
with a laugh and those snatches of the old chanty of "leave her, johnny" ringing from his lips in a clear, deep voice paul led the way out on deck.
"great old song that. ought to hear a gang of bullies at it."
"it must be fine," she managed to say with a pretense of enjoyment.
he turned from her and went forward to the standard compass. going and returning, he looked aloft and around at the silent plain of brine. the sails still drooped in idleness. there was the barest heave in the ocean. the bark was without steerage way.
"better lie down and take a nap," paul said as he came back and stood at the wheel for a second. "can't tell how long this calm will last. i'm going to try to steal a little sleep."
"please do. i will lie down presently."
he did not meet her gaze, and she turned toward the sea as if she hoped its purple heart would give her throbbing one an answer. she heard paul leave the poop and then a clang from the engine room told her he was there. it sounded like a door closing between them—a door that would never open again—and she went into the lounge to weep bitter tears which would not be stayed.
if she could have seen paul lavelle's face when he turned away from her and at the moment when she was giving way to her loneliness she would have understood that he was suffering, too.
after overhauling the fires under the donkey boiler, paul threw himself at full length across the main hatch. he was mind weary; body weary; at war with himself. staring up at the sky he brought his whole life in contemplation. another day, as he had told the gold woman, might see them delivered from their peril in the daphne. anyway he felt that the world—the world in which she belonged and must have her being—was not very far off. and she would be going out of his life forever. she must. a pariah like him could not say to her, "stay." the man who stood marked as he was could say to no woman, "stay." all day the past had lashed him. all day the fineness of him had arraigned the weakness which had permitted him to forget that he could never claim her love. all day the memory of his madness in daring to kiss her as he had had tortured him. he groaned in his agony of spirit.
"god," he prayed aloud with lips strange to prayer, "grant that i may finish 'what remains before us of the course without dishonor to ourselves or hurt to others.' for my soul's sake i ask this."
with this thought his mother's dear face smiled into his vision.
"mother mine, mother mine," he murmured, and his eyes closed in exhaustion.
it was dusk when emily awoke in the lounge. by the silver watch she saw that it was a quarter past six o'clock. all was quiet as when she lay down. the bark was in the same dead calm. the creaking of the gear overhead and the slatting of the idle sails were the only sounds in the stillness. she stole below, and on her way forward paused at the door of the derelict's room. he still slept. she tiptoed inside and wet his lips with a sip of water. he murmured in unconscious thankfulness. she hurried on then toward the engine room. paul must be there or in the galley. she came upon him lying across the main hatch. he was asleep, his head pillowed on his right arm. the light of a love that would never die came into her eyes as she stood for a second listening to his deep breathing of honest weariness.
the chill of the coming night was in the air. emily stole aft again on tiptoe and returned with a blanket. she spread it over the sleeper with a mother's gentleness. he did not move. sighing, she turned away and with the silence of a thief went to the galley to prepare the evening meal.
