I have been at some pains to set down these impressions closely, for they stood to me for the bitter reckoning I must pay for the quest of Valentine Imroth and the ship he had commanded. Cast out there upon the black ocean, I had been a fool to believe that I merited any particular mercy of the Almighty which would repair my mistakes or pass by my imprudence. That I had escaped into the sea at all now seemed the greater wonder. I could depict the instant of fierce exclamation which had followed upon my plunge, the roar of voices, the loud report of vain pistols. These I had heard with my own ears, and it should have come to me that my own fellows had heard them also. Little good reasoning, however, may be looked for from a man cast down from a high deck into the Atlantic Ocean, and there left to battle with the surges in the shadows of the night. How long it was before the end came I shall never know. I recollect that I had the sense not to swim but merely to keep afloat as near as might be to the scene of my rashness. The intervening moments, as I say, brought me from a state of content to one of despair, and from that again almost to a state of insensibility—and I know only that a great rough hand took me from the sea at last, that white faces bent over me, and that, kindliest of them all, was the face of Joan Fordibras—my little Joan of the Valley House—who stooped and kissed my lips, and with a young girl’s tears expressed the welcome by her heart unspoken.
And so love was the Avenger after all—love set above the kingdoms of Death as love shall ever be.
CHAPTER XXX.
JOAN TELLS HER STORY.
And we are Homeward Bound.
Mr. Bob Sawyer, I believe, expressed his opinion upon a famous occasion that there was no medicine in all the world half so efficacious or so infallible as rum punch—to which axiom he added the rider that if any man had ever failed to derive benefits from this nectar, it was because he had not taken enough of it. Such a doctrine, for my part, I find incontrovertible. There is no cure for an overdose of cold water so swift and certain as the remedy the excellent Robert has prescribed. There is assuredly none so rarely declined or so readily sampled by the patient.
I am an exceedingly strong man—and, despite the assertions of my dear sister Harriet, my constitution is of iron. No common exercise tires me; I can walk all day and be the better for my walk at bed-time. I have swum five miles in the sea on two occasions, and defied all the faculty after a wetting more times than I care to remember. If it be foolish to boast overmuch of such a catalogue of physical merits, I set them down here that I may speak of the hours following upon my rescue with that brevity they deserve, and spare the reader any pedantic account of them.
It had been Okyada’s hand which dragged me from the sea, and Larry himself who steered the boat which discovered me. Despite the fog, that lynx-eyed captain of mine had dogged every movement of the Diamond Ship, had stood so close to her throughout the adventure that he could sometimes have tossed a biscuit to her decks. When the rabble chased me to the bridge, his keen ear had detected the commotion. He heard me leap for my life, and guessed instantly the nature of the situation which drove me to this extremity. His express commands had kept the long boat in the sea from the beginning, and in the sea she swam when I had most need of her. They told me afterwards that a crew had manned her and was away before you could have counted twenty. It must have been so, as the outcome shows.
Now, these good fellows, dragging their prize by the head and the heels as seamen will in bursts of nautical ecstasy, bundled me into the boat and the blankets almost by one and the same movement; and rowing swiftly to the yacht, they fought their way through the little knot of anxious men, and had me rubbed down like a dog and safely in my own bed almost before I realised that they were my friends at all, or that their vigilance had saved me from the sea. For my own part, I suffered them as one suffers a man who insists upon an exhibition of his goodwill and is not to be repulsed. I had no pain, be it said, no sense of weakness, no symptom either of exhaustion or of extreme cold. Whatever emotion agitated me was chiefly the emotion of friendship, and of the sure knowledge that Joan Fordibras was on the ship, that she moved and breathed near by me, and, with God’s help, would remain my prisoner to the end of my days. For, be assured that, despite old Timothy, who roared for the hot water and the lemons in a voice that could have been heard in the truck, little Joan had taken as proud command of that cabin five minutes after I entered it as any commander of a ship who hoists his pennant at Portsmouth. Nor had anyone the right to drive her thence or to take that place she occupied so gracefully.
How gentle is a woman’s hand in the hour of our misfortunes; how unmatched her sympathy and unwearying her patience! These old truths we know as copybook maxims, and yet there are few who understand them truly until illness is their master and captivity their lot. I was not ill—bed was no proper place for me—and yet I lay there watching Joan, afraid almost to speak, wistful of her care, gratitude as surely in my heart as though this had been a house of sickness, and she had been its ministering angel! How silently, how deftly, she moved! There was grace in every movement I thought, grace and sweetness and light. And she was my Joan of Dieppe again. The shadow of the Valley House no longer dwelt upon her childish face.
I suppose it would have been early in the new day when Joan took charge of me, and old Timothy brewed the punch and Larry came and went from the cabin to the bridge as a man full of anxieties, and yet in some sense content that it should be so. These foolish nurses of mine had so far told me nothing, nor did they hear me talking with equanimity. An immersion in the sea is often regarded by a sailor, of all men, as a dreadful tragedy. Few of this trade can swim, nor does a sailor ever look upon the water as other than an enemy. So now Larry would have kept me to my bed, smothered in blankets, and dosed like an old salt with Timothy’s rum. It is little wonder that I became almost angry at their solicitude.
“Why do you do all this, Joan?” I asked her, when half an hour of it had passed. “Am I a child to be petted and spoiled because its pinafore is wet? Tell Captain Larry that I am coming up to the bridge. You cannot suppose that I shall be content to lie here now. Tell him I am coming up at once. It is nonsense to make such a fuss.”
Joan shook her head as though, thus early, she had come to despair of me.
“Only a man would talk like that,” she exclaimed, and then—“only a man would be so ungrateful.”
“I demur to the charge. You set a great crowd of bullies on me to hold me down by violence, and then talk of ingratitude! Do you not see, my dear girl, that I must know what is going on? How can I lie here when there is so much uncertainty—when so many things may happen? Please do as I tell you, and let Captain Larry know at once.”
She came and stood by my bedside, and touching my fingers for an instant with her own—a gesture which thrilled me as though some strange current of a new life burned in my veins—she said very quietly:—
“There is nothing happening, Dr. Ean. If you went up to the bridge, you would see nothing but the fog. That is what Mr. McShanus is looking at now—at the fog and the punch bowl. We cannot see the others—we shall never see them again, I hope.”
It was calmly said, and yet what a tale of woe it voiced: days of her own agony among the ruffians, intolerable hours of suffering and distress! I thought her then one of the bravest of women—I think so to this hour.
“Joan,” I said, “how did you come here? Where did Okyada find you? I have thought much about it, and I believe that I know. But you must tell me yourself. You hid in one of the boats, did you not—one of the three boats the men lowered when they wished me to go on board this yacht. I thought it must be so. There was no other way.”
She had seated herself by this time in a girlish attitude at the foot of my bunk, her feet swinging together as though to express a sense of her indifference; her hands clasped, her eyes avoiding mine as though she feared I would read the whole truth therein.