Part 32 (2/2)

”s.h.i.+p,” said the mate.

It was the one word of English that he knew. Raft was about to shout and run to the cabin hatch to call the girl. Then he held himself back. It might be a false hope. Yet if he had thought he might have known that a s.h.i.+p in the east meant a s.h.i.+p right across their course, here, where there were no trade tracks north and south.

Then above the sea-line and clear of smoke he saw her hull.

He pointed to the halyards and the mate understood. The mate was evidently desperately anxious to be quit for good of his self-invited pa.s.sengers, for when Raft came on deck again with the girl they found the barque under bare poles rolling to the swell and a Chinese flag half-masted flicking in the wind.

Also, away across the sea, sheering towards them and making to cross their bows a mile away a two funnelled steamer whose funnels closed to one as she s.h.i.+fted her helm to get within speaking distance of them.

She was the _Carca.s.sonne_, a seven thousand ton freighter carrying pa.s.sengers, a French boat, bound from Sydney to Cape Town and Ma.r.s.eilles.

Raft, the day before, had taken the Chinese mate down to the cabin and shewed him Chang's money and had presented it to him and the crew in pantomime.

It was honesty. It was also a good stroke. There was no trouble when the _Carca.s.sonne_, her huge bulk rolling gently to the swell, dropped a boat, though indeed had the companions of Chang wished to raise trouble they would have found themselves seriously handicapped, dumb as they were in every language but their own.

Chang had been their linguist as well as their leader. They had literally lost their tongue.

PART VI

CHAPTER x.x.xV

Ma.r.s.eILLES

On board the _Carca.s.sonne_ the girl had broken down as though all the exhaustion she had defied had waited for that moment to fall upon her.

But the energy that had held her above defeat and had given her hope when things seemed hopeless was there, undestroyed, and when the turning point came she rallied swiftly. She came on deck one morning where Bathurst lay a point invisible beyond the blue sea to starboard and sitting in a deck chair made friends with the other pa.s.sengers.

It seemed to her almost impossible that the same world should hold Kerguelen and at the same time this paradise of azure blue sky and tepid wind.

Raft had told her story before reaching Cape Town and the loss of the _Gaston de Paris_ was now old news in Europe, and the fact that of all the _Gaston's_ crowd only the beautiful Cleo de Bromsart had been saved.

Raft had joined the crew of the _Carca.s.sonne_, sleeping in the foc's'le, where there were several English speaking sailors, and as much out of his element as a man used only to masts and spars can be on a steamboat. However, he swabbed decks and did odd jobs without a grumble and he was swabbing the deck on the morning she came up; he dropped the business for a moment to take the two hands she held out to him.

All through that time below she had been wanting Raft and his big hand to pull her through. Satisfied, knowing he was on board and all right, but wanting him all the same.

On the old barque once or twice had come the stray thought of how Raft's figure would accommodate itself against the background of the world she knew.

Well, here was the world she knew, or part of it; a deck, clean as a ball-room floor and as s.p.a.cious, pa.s.sengers in deck chairs, reading novels, and a manicured French surgeon ready to talk art or philosophy to her, polished, but rather narrow of shoulder.

And against all that stood Raft, rough and in the clothes he had worn on the beach, for there was not a man on board whose clothes would have fitted him comfortably.

Well, he was not incongruous with this background, simply because he destroyed it. In a ball-room it would have been the same. He carried with him his background of high black cliffs and miles of beach and flying gulls and breaking sea, and in a flash came to her the fact that he dwarfed and belittled the other people around just as nature dwarfs and belittles art.

She held both his hands for a moment, managing to pat them, somehow, as she held them, asking him what on earth he was doing with the swab he had just dropped. She had an idea that the s.h.i.+p people had put him to work, but before the idea had risen to indignation heat he rea.s.sured her.

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