Part 33 (1/2)

”I must be doing,” said Raft. ”Not that there's much to be at in this old kettle. You've got your legs back, well, that's good. I had it out with that doctor chap and he told me how you were going from day to day, but I've been wanting the sight of you.”

He put his hand on her shoulder as he might on a pal's, then he crossed his arms. ”And well you look,” said he.

”Doctor Pet.i.t,” said the girl, speaking in French, ”this is Raft, the bravest and best man in the world as you will know when I tell you all.

Shake hands with him.”

The doctor shook hands.

The pa.s.sengers, and the first officer, across the bridge canvas, watched all this with curiosity. They knew something but they did not know all.

They did that night when she had told them as best she could.

After that she met him often on deck, giving him a word or stopping for a chat, and it was now that she began to think and make plans as to the future.

Raft had become part of herself, they were bound together as perhaps no two such contrary beings had ever been bound. The idea of Love, the idea of Marriage, all conventional ideas as between grown-ups of opposite s.e.x were as absurd in relation to them as they would have been in relation to two children who had grown attached one to the other.

As regarded one another they were in fact two children, for Raft had never been anything but a child and Kerguelen and Raft combined had awakened the primitive and the child in her, giving her the power of affection that makes a little child throw its arm round the neck of a dog.

But the world could not understand that, and Raft to the world was a rough sailor man, and she, to the world, was Cleo de Bromsart.

She would lie awake at night listening to the pounding of the screws and thinking of this--contrasting the figure of Raft with the world she knew and the world she knew with the figure of Raft.

Madame de Brie, her nearest relation, would pa.s.s before her mind's eye with her gold eye gla.s.ses, and the Comtesse de Mirandole and a host of others; and the queer thing was that the vaguest feeling of antagonism tinged her mind towards these estimable people. They seemed forgeries, impudent forgeries of the handwriting that had first written the word Man on the earth. She had seen the original writing.

She felt also towards them the antagonism of the child to the grown up, and of the person who can't explain to the person who stands waiting for an explanation.

Then she would laugh quietly to herself, for no woman, surely, was ever in a similar position. Then, casting her mind back, she would sometimes choke a little with tears in her throat, tears for herself, dying of loneliness, and for the hand that had brought her back from death.

They pa.s.sed the entrance of the straits and Gibraltar, and one bright blue winter's morning they entered the harbour of Ma.r.s.eilles, with Ma.r.s.eilles before them blazing in the sun and the bugles of Fort St.

Jean answering the crying of the gulls and the drums of Fort St.

Nicholas.

Cleo was dressed in the same clothes she had worn on her escape from the _Gaston de Paris_. She had borrowed a hat from one of the ladies on board and stockings and other things from another lady; but she still wore round her waist the leather belt with the empty knife sheath.

As she stood on deck, now, waiting whilst the _Carca.s.sonne_ berthed at the wharf alongside a great Messagerie steamer, she carried over her arm the oilskin coat and, by its elastic band, the sou'wester. They were old friends.

Then when the hawsers had been pa.s.sed and the gang plank was being run out she saw amongst the crowd on the wharf Monsieur de Brie and Madame de Brie, also a number of well-dressed people, Parisians some of them.

Then she was being embraced by Madame de Brie and trying at the same time to acknowledge the salute of Monsieur Bonvalot, her lawyer and man of affairs, a stout pale man with long Dundreary whiskers who had come from Paris to receive her.

All this crowd had not come purely on account of Cleo. Beside the people interested in her there were several friends and relations of Prince Selm, also his lawyer.

”I have taken rooms at the Hotel Noailles,” said Madame de Brie, ”and I have brought you some clothes. Oh, my poor child, what you must have suffered. But why did the people on board not lend you some better things?”

”Oh, my clothes are all right,” said Cleo, ”people wanted to lend me things, but I am quite comfortable in these.”

She was looking about in search of Raft who was nowhere to be seen.

Then she was seized by the rest, by the Comtesse de Mirandole, by Madame de Florey, and several others who had stopped at Ma.r.s.eilles--on their way to Monte Carlo--to meet the _Carca.s.sonne_ and greet the girl who had alone survived the wreck of the _Gaston de Paris_, some of these people knew her only slightly, but once a person becomes famous or notorious it is astonis.h.i.+ng how slight acquaintances.h.i.+p blossoms into full friends.h.i.+p.