Part 31

"If she'll have me. I haven't asked her yet." He was fiddling with his bread and butter. Suddenly he burst out with: "If you knew how lonesome I used to get, and the things I was tempted to do to forget it!"

"A man doesn't need, son, to be entirely exiled from his family to believe that; but when you're married will you go to sea just the same?" I asked.

He did not answer.

I felt sorry for him. She looked to be a good girl, but I foresaw her troubles in a place like this while he would be away to sea. It would be a constant fight. She was possibly nineteen; she didn't look like a girl who had been tempered by temptation's long siege, and Lord knows what resisting power she would develop when so tempted.

From the fragments Drislane fed me with while she was coming and going, I learned that both her parents were dead, that she had been in the city only three months, that her uncle didn't seem to see anything strange in her employment in his place, and that Drislane was the first man who had shown an honest interest in her. "I take her to the theatre regularly," said Drislane. "I would to-night, only I want to sit in somewhere and have a long talk with her. You'd be surprised the things she doesn't know about the world."

"I wonder," I thought to myself, "if you realize the things you don't know about the world," and began to wish then for his own sake that he'd hurry up and take to looking at life through the same glasses other people used.

She was living in sordid quarters in a section where a woman was any man's who could get her, and on any terms he could get her; and she was of the type and at the age which has always been held most desirable by the primitive male; and it was to be doubted if she had had the religious or home training needful to an emotional nature. In a good home, in a community where a woman was respected because she was a woman, all would have been fine; but here--they married, and he most of the time at sea--I felt sorry for her as well as for him.

"Take her out of here when you marry," I said to him before parting.

He shook his head. "No, I had a scrap with my people leaving home. They're all right at home--the best--but they want me to get down on my knees to them."

"Better be on your knees of your own will to your own people than against your will to an enemy," I said, but it had no meaning to him; and I left him to his Rose, almost wishing that something would happen to him soon to shake him up, even if, shaking him up, it shook off a few of the purple blossoms that he thought so necessary to the tree of life. Thinking of him I almost talk like him in his absent-minded moments.

III

I left Drislane to go to the theatre with Captain Norman Sickles. The theatre over, he went with me to my hotel to get a few ship's papers I had for him. After that we sat in for a smoke and a chat.

Not that there was much chatting on Captain Norman's part. He never did have much to say of himself, nor too much of anybody else, though he could praise a man if he liked him. It was the first time I had ever spent more than an hour together with him except on pure business, and I was curious to know just what he thought of a lot of things; among others, of his cousin. I gave him two or three openings, but he didn't rush in. What he did have to say of him he said at one gulp. It was: "Where I was raised 'twas common talk that after you'd been getting naught but fair winds for a long course, it was then a good time to keep a watch out. The headwinds have to come some time, and the longer they be in coming the longer they'll stay with you when they does come. Oliver Sickles's been runnin' with a free sheet so long that I calc'late he's forgot there's such a thing as headwinds this side the Western ocean."

Even as Drislane, so did Captain Norman look like a terribly lonesome man at times. He probably was not yet over losing that girl who had been tricked into marrying his cousin. His cousin seemed to have got over it. There was gossip enough between Boston and Norfolk to hang more than a suspicion of that on--for that and the belief that not so much in marrying her as in getting the girl away from his cousin was where Captain Oliver had most likely achieved his main desire.

We talked until Captain Norman thought it was time for him to be getting back aboard his vessel and turning in. As he stood up to go, he said: "'Tis said you like a little sea trip now and again? Why don't you go home with me in the Sirius?"

I was pleased at that--he was known to be not over-free with his invitations--and I thanked him, but on my not saying yes or no at once he looked chagrined; seeing which, I explained that early that fall his cousin had invited me, if ever I cared to return to Boston by water, to take passage with him on the Orion.

He tried to smile. He was a whale of a man, bashful in his ways. He smiled like an overgrown boy who had done something there was no harm in but of which he was ashamed. "He always appears to be gettin' in ahead o' me, don't he?" he said, wistfully-like, after a moment, which hurried me into saying: "But I never said I'd go with him, captain, and he probably thinks he knows me too well to ask me now. I want to go with you, captain, and"--I made up my mind then and there--"I will--and proud to have you ask me."

"Good!" 'Twas a real smile now. "And if the Orion hauls out with us you may see a wet passage, and maybe a bit of excitement of one kind or another before we make Boston Light."

We shook hands on the hope of a fast run to Boston, and then, drawing from my suit-case a package of receipts, coal memoranda, and so on, I held them up. "For the Orion, captain. Where do you suppose I'll find your cousin this time of night to give them to him?"

"Where but the Tidewater where that girl is?"

I stopped to put one thing to another. "And he is after that red-haired Rose, too?"

"What else?"

"But doesn't she know, or doesn't her uncle know, that he's a wife in Boston?"

"Her uncle!" he snorted. "He's no more wit than my ship's cat."

"But Drislane knows--won't he tell her?"

"He don't seem to. A proud one, Drislane. Six months he's been with me now in the Sirius, and if she isn't sure she wants him above anybody else on this earth, then she needn't have him, that's all; or leastwise, that's how I sense him. He wouldn't take no odds of the devil, that lad."

I could believe that; and it set me to thinking.

"Maybe you're thinkin' now," he went on, "that she should be able to see for herself what my cousin is? But what training has she had to judge o' men? What other kind does she see aught of in her uncle's place? Indeed, with her bringing up and what brains the poor girl has, she's done very well, I'm thinkin', to ha' kept off the rocks as long as she has. A hundred to one you'll find my fine cousin at the Tidewater to-night. But I must be going. Good night to you."