Part 9

Olivia looked up with a smile as Stukeley stepped on deck. She was still in that rapturous first stage of marriage in which all men, save the husband, are regarded as hardly living, as being, at best, but necessary cumberers of the earth, mere lifeless interruptions. In the early days of the voyage she had learned, from one of Captain Cammock’s stories, that people shut up in ships together cannot always bear the strain, but become irritable, quarrelsome, apt to suspect and slander. She had determined that her married love should not decay thus, and so, for some weeks past, she had contrived to avoid her husband for several hours each day, greatly to the delight of Perrin. On this particular day she felt that Providence had rewarded her but meanly for her loving self-sacrifice. All men, save Tom, were nothing to her, but Perrin, in the morning, in one of his dull moods, when unrelieved by Margaret, was less than nothing. She had always been a little shy of Perrin, perhaps because Perrin’s shyness was a bar to equal intercourse. Her own nature was full of shy refinements. She could give nothing of herself to one who could not win upon her by some grace or gallantry. Perrin meant well; he was even her devoted slave; but he was heavy in the hand with ladies, until their sympathy had raised his spirit. Olivia was not in the mood to give him even that simulated sympathy by which women extract their knowledge of men. Her own fine instincts told her, or rather suggested to her, all that could be known of Perrin. In a vague way she had the idea of Perrin in her mind, the true idea; but vague, without detail, an instinctive comprehension. He was a blunted soul to her, broken somehow. She felt that he had been through something, some vice perhaps, or sickness, with the result that he was blunted. He was quite harmless, she thought, even sometimes pleasant, always well-meaning, and yet dwarfed, made blunt, like his shapeless hands. She never could bring herself to treat him as a human being. Yet he interested her; he had the fascination of all mysterious persons; she could never accept her husband’s contemptuous estimate. Possibly she felt the need for the society of another lady, and hesitated to condemn Perrin, as being the nearest thing to a lady in the ship. Thus Robinson Crusoe on his island unduly valued a parrot.

About half an hour before her husband came on deck, Olivia had seen Perrin coming down from aloft, where he had been engaged with a seaman in fitting new spunyarn gaskets to all the yards on the mainmast, so that the furls might look neat when they made Virginia. He enjoyed his work aloft until he grew hot, when he soon found a pretext for leaving it. On reaching the deck, he went aft to Olivia (who smiled her recognition), and sat down at her side, content to stay still, to cool. The sight of Olivia’s beauty so near to him filled him with a kind of awe. Like a schoolboy impressed by some beautiful woman who is gracious to him, perhaps merely from that love of youth which all women have, so did Perrin imagine heroisms, rescuing that dear head, now bent with a shy sweetness over her mat.

“Olivia,” he said at length, about a minute after the proper time for the request, “will you show me what you have done?”

She looked up from her work with a smile that was half amusement at his serious tone.

“I’ve not done very much,” she said, showing her canvas, with its roses, surrounded by a garland of verbena leaves, still little more than outlined. “Did you ever try to make mats?” she added.

“I can make daisy-mats with wool, on a frame with pins,” he answered. “Can you make those? You cut them, and they show like a lot of daisies.”

“I used to make them,” she said, “when I went to stay with my aunt Pile, at Eltons. You were at Eltons, too, were you not? I think you stayed there?”

“Yes. I stayed there. What a beautiful old place it is. Have you been there lately?”

“No. Not for two or three years now. I was very gay the last time I was there. I think I went to a dance every night. My poor brothers were alive then. We used to drive off together. I’ve never been there since.”

“Ah,” said Perrin. He paused for a moment, so that his brain might make the picture of the woman before him sitting in the gloom of the carriage, with all her delicate beauty warmly wrapped by the two young men now dead. “Furs,” he muttered to himself. “Furs, and the lamps shining on the snow.” Then he looked at Olivia, noting the grey and black dress, the one gold bracelet round her wrist, and the old pearl ear-rings against the mass of hair.

“What jolly clothes women wear,” he said, meaning (like most men who use such phrases) “How beautiful you look there.”

“This?” she asked. “This is my oldest frock.”

“Is it? I didn’t remember it. How do you get your clothes?”

“I tell my dressmaker.”

“I wish you’d let me design you a dress.”

“I should be very pleased. What sort of dress would you design for me?”

“I would have you in a sort of white satin bodice, all embroidered with tiny scarlet roses. And then a little black velvet coat over it, with very full sleeves, slashed, to show an inner sleeve of dark blue silk. And the lining of the velvet would be dark green; so you would have green, blue, white, and red all contrasted against the black of the velvet.”

“That would be costly. And what skirt? A black skirt, I suppose?”

“A very full black skirt. What do you think about a belt? Would you wear that belt of yours? The one with the Venetian silver-work?”

“I don’t know about a belt. I thought you were going to design everything?”

“Not a belt, then. And black shoes, with small, oval, cut-steel buckles.”

“I should think that would be very pretty.” Her thoughts were wandering in England, down a lane of beech trees within sound of the sea, to a hillock of short grass, cropped by the sheep, where sea-pinks and sea-holly sprouted.

“What are the sailors like?” she asked. “I saw you working up aloft with them. What are they like to talk to?”

“Oh. They’re all right.”

“I think they’re dreadful people.”

“Why?” said Perrin. “What makes you think they’re dreadful?”

“No nice man would take such a life. Oh. It must be dreadful. I shudder when I see them. What do they talk of, among themselves?”

“They’re not very refined, of course. That man up on the yard there was once a slave in Virginia. You see he was transported for theft. He says he used to cry, sometimes, half through the night. He was so homesick.”

“Oh, that’s terrible. But what home had he to be sick for?”

“The ash-heap near a glass-house furnace. Somewhere in Chelsea, I think he said.”

“And are the others all thieves, do you suppose?”

“That ugly-looking dark fellow with the crooked eyes was once in a pirate’s crew, so the man on the yard said.”

“Was he really? I don’t think that man is quite sane. He seems to glare so. Oh, ships are dreadful, dreadful.”

“They’re beautiful, though. All---- Yes. Don’t you think all beautiful things seem to gather vileness about them?”

“No, I don’t think so. Vileness? In what way, vileness?”

“I think they do. You see ships with sailors, and pictures with picture-dealers, and tragedies---- Well. Tragedies with all sorts of people.” He ran on glibly, though with some confusion. The thought had occurred to him first in a moment of jealous anger that Olivia, so beautiful and sweet, should be a prey to the vile Stukeley. He blushed and stopped, thinking that she would read his thought.

“Oh. But I don’t think that at all,” she said. “You ought to say that vileness gathers about beautiful things. A beautiful thing is a vigorous form of life, and all forms of life have parasites. The parasites don’t attach themselves to the things you speak of because the things are beautiful.”

“No. I suppose not. Of course not,” he answered, rather puzzled, still thinking of Stukeley.

“And you wouldn’t say that the really beautiful things, such as love is, say, to a woman like myself. No vileness gathers about that?”

“N-no,” he answered, with some hesitation, wishing that he had never started his mild little rabbit of an epigram. He looked away, at the sky-line, for a moment. Then, with sudden desperation, he charged her to change the subject, his face still red from his former rout.

“Olivia,” he said. “If I drew you a ship, would you embroider it, or make a mat of it?”

“Yes,” she said. “Draw the _Broken Heart_. I could work it for Tom’s birthday. I should be very glad of it, after I’ve finished this.”

Perrin helped her to cut a square of canvas from a little roll she had obtained from the sailmaker. He settled himself down to draw. Olivia stitched with her silks.

“It is so curious,” she said at last, “that you should have known my husband--that you knew him years ago, when we stayed at Eltons together. Before I knew him.”

“Yes. I’ve thought that, too. And now we’re all here together. And Eltons is still going on, behind us there. Rooks in the elms. And your aunt Pile in her chair.”

She seemed to reflect for a moment, as though thinking of the beautiful house, where life moved so nobly, like a strain of music. Perrin knew that she was thinking of Stukeley. “Oh, you women,” he said to himself. “You give everything for a pennyweight of love, and even that is never paid to you.” He would have given much, poor moth, to be back at Eltons, young and handsome, with the shy, gauche girl who had since become Olivia. “I didn’t know then,” he said to himself, “and you couldn’t guess. And now we’re driving to it. Shipwreck. Shipwreck. And I should have been so happy with you.”

“What was Tom like then?” said Olivia.

“Who? Oh, your husband. You see I didn’t know him well,” said Perrin in confusion. “He was--I think he was a lot thinner than he is now.”

“How did he look in his uniform?”

“His uniform?” said Perrin. “You see. I didn’t see him in his uniform. You see it was after he’d been kicked---- After he’d---- You know what. What is the word? After he’d been----”

Stammering and blushing, he managed to get out of his difficulty. Olivia thought that he had been afflicted by that impediment in his speech, or partial aphasia, which sometimes checked his conversation. She pitied him, while feeling that his companionship was painful. He himself turned very red, and bit his tongue. He thought that the six weeks at sea should have taught him the guard for all such sudden thrusts.

“After he’d left the army?” she said kindly.

“Yes. Yes. It was,” he answered. He turned again to draw the image of the _Broken Heart_, as he had seen her from without, some seven long weeks before. Olivia gave him a moment’s grace to recover his natural colour. Captain Cammock caught her eye, and saluted as he took his stand with his quadrant. She was smiling back at him when her husband’s head appeared on the poop ladder. Perrin looked up quickly.

“I’d better hide this, Olivia,” he said. “If it’s for your husband’s birthday. Shall I hide it?”

As she nodded a swift answer her husband stepped on to the poop.

Stukeley advanced rapidly and kissed his wife, with some show of fervour, for policy’s sake. Then with a quick snatch he caught Perrin’s drawing, lying half hidden upon the skylight seat under one of Olivia’s wraps.

“Look at little Pilly’s cow,” he said. “Look, Olivia. Did you draw this, little Pilly?”

“He was drawing it for me,” said Olivia.

“Were you going to teach him to embroider it? Little Pilly, was he going to have his little needle, then? And his red and blue silk. Eh? You know, Olivia, I saw little Pilly here, down in the cabin one hit me, playing with some red and blue silk spools. Ah, little Pilly; it’s a shame to tease him. He must have his little dollies, then?”

“You put down that drawing,” said Perrin, snatching at it.

Stukeley held him aside with one hand, dangling the drawing from the other.

“No, no, little Pilly,” he said. “Manners, little boy. Manners before ladies.”

“Don’t, Tom dear,” said Olivia. “Don’t spoil the drawing.”

“That would be a shame,” he answered. “Little Pilly draws so beautifully. Which is the tail, Pilly?” he asked. “Which of these prongy things is the tail?”

Perrin did not answer; but again attempted to snatch the canvas.

“Why don’t you take it, little Pilly?” said Stukeley.

“Damn you, give it,” said Perrin, white with passion. He snatched the canvas from him, smote him a sharp slash across the eyes with it, and flung it overboard.

Stukeley made a rush at him, but became involved with one of Olivia’s wraps. Cammock stepped between the disputants with his quadrant at his eye.

“Woa, blood,” he said. “Don’t knock my ship overboard. Make eight bells there, will you, Mr. Perrin? Mr. Stukeley, will you please step and tell the steward to set the clock right?”

“Do your own dirty work,” said Stukeley.

The helmsman sniggered audibly. Cammock raised his hat about an inch from his head.

“Quite right, sir,” he said, as Perrin made eight bells. “Quite right to remind me, sir. I forgot you was only a passenger.”

“Steward,” shouted Perrin. “Oh. Mrs. Inigo. Just tell the steward to set the clock right.”

“De clock am set, seh,” said the steward, coming to the break of the poop to ring the bell for dinner.

“Tom dear,” said Olivia, conscious that the man she loved had made but a poor show. “Tom dear. You weren’t very kind. I mean. I think you hurt Captain Cammock. And you made Edward angry. He can’t bear to be teased. He’s not easy-tempered like you, dear. I think sometimes you forget that, don’t you, Tom? You won’t be cross, Tom?”

“Oh, nonsense, Polly,” he said, as he took her arm to lead her below. “Nonsense, you old pretty-eyes. I can’t resist teasing Pilly; he’s such an old hen. As for Cammock, he’s only an old pirate. I’m not going to be ordered about by a man like that. He’s no right to be at liberty.”

Olivia was pleased by the reference to her eyes, so she said no more. She wondered, during dinner, why Captain Margaret ate so little and so silently, and why Perrin never spoke until addressed. Cammock was affable and polite. His attention to Stukeley’s needs was almost oily.

VI. A SUPPER PARTY

“But here comes Glorius, that will plague them both.” John Donne.

“I’ll make ’em dance, And caper, too, before they get their liberty. Unmannerly rude puppies.” _Wit Without Money._

After dinner, Captain Cammock took tobacco on the poop alone. He liked to be alone after dinner; because his mind was then very peaceful, so that he could “shift his tides,” as he said, walking up and down, remembering old days at sea. He had had an adventurous life, had Captain Cammock. Like most men who had lived hard, he lived very much in his past, thinking that such a thing, done long ago, was fine, and that such a man, shot long since, outside some Spanish breastwork, was a great man, better than the men of these days, braver, kindlier. So he walked the deck, sucking his clay, blowing out blue smoke in little quick whiffs, thinking of old times. One thing he was always proud of: he had sailed with Morgan. He had memories of Morgan on the green savannah, riding on a little Spanish horse, slunk forward in his saddle somehow, “a bit swag-bellied, Sir Henry,” with his cigar-end burning his moustache. And all of those men crowded round him, surging in on him, plastered with mud, gory with their raw-meat meal; they were scattered pretty well; they would never come in on the one field again. On the Keys, it had been fine, too; all of that blue water had been fine. A sea like blue flame, and islands everywhere, and the sun over all, making bright, and boles of cedar among the jungle like the blood-streaks in porphyry. And graceful, modest Indian women, glistening with oil, crowned with dwarf-roses. And then one or two nights by the camp-fires, with old Delander standing sentry, and Eddie Collier singing; it was none of it like this; this was responsible work; this turned the hair grey. He felt this the more strongly, because the _Broken Heart_ was not a happy ship; she was wearing him down. Stukeley made him grit his teeth. He had to sit at table with him, conscious of the man’s mean malice at every moment. There would be some slight sound, an intake of the breath, some muttered exclamation, a request to repeat the offending phrase, when he, a rough seaman, made some mispronunciation, or slip in grammar. And to stand that, till one’s veins nearly burst, knowing that the man was a cast criminal, flying for his life. And to have to pretend that he was a guest, an honoured guest, a fit mate for the woman there. And to have to defend him, if need be, in Virginia. It made him check his walk sometimes to shake a belaying-pin in the fife-rail, till the passion passed. It was lucky for Stukeley that he was a man with a pretty tight hold on himself. A lesser man, a man not trained in the wars, would have laid Stukeley dead, or taken it out of the hands. He was too just a man to work it off on his hands. At this point he checked himself, sharply, putting all evil thoughts aside, remembering how a shipmate, Balsam Dick, the Scholerd, who ladled out soft-polly of a Sunday, old Balsam Dick it was, had told him that was the thing to do. “Let it go or make it go,” that was how to work a passion. There was no sense, only misery, in keeping it by one, poisoning oneself. Besides, he was glad he’d come this cruise. He had been for six weeks shut up in a ship with Olivia. He would never be thankful enough for that. She was so beautiful, so pure, so gentle and kind, so delicate a lovely thing, he could hardly bear to think of her. When he thought of Olivia, he would lean over the taffrail, somewhere above her cabin, wondering at the powers which had made him what he was, a resolute, rough seaman, beaten into clumsy toughness. And yet those powers had shaped her, too, making her very beautiful, very wonderful. And now the powers had shoved her into a ship with him; and he would never be quite the same towards women, whatever happened. But, then, there was Stukeley, that intolerable, mean bully, worrying all of them in the same ways, day after day, with a maddening monotony of insult. Perrin, who was half Welsh, had once hit off Stukeley in an epigram upon the English. “Dull,” he had said, goaded by some school-bully boorishness, repeated for the hundredth time. “The English dull? Of course they are dull. They’re so dull that they can’t be inventive even in their cruelty.” Cammock would repeat this phrase, reading “Stukeley” for “English” so many times daily that “he tokened his pasture.”

While Cammock walked the deck, thinking and smoking, Olivia sat in her state-room writing letters, feeling sure that she would be able to send them home from Virginia in one of the tobacco-ships, and anxious to be ready in case they should speak one at sea. Margaret and Perrin sat in Captain Cammock’s cabin together, working out the sights, and talking in a low voice of Stukeley. The cabin door was open, so that they could look across the alleyway to the closed door of Mrs. Inigo’s state-room, once the sail-locker. They noticed that Mrs. Inigo came to her door every now and then, to glance down the alleyway, with an anxious face. They supposed that she was waiting for Olivia to call her. Once, indeed, she asked them if Mrs. Stukeley had called.

“Well, Charles,” said Perrin. “I told you how it would be. You see now what you’ve done.”

“Yes,” said Margaret. “I admit I was wrong. I made a great mistake.”

“I don’t blame you,” said Perrin. “But what are you going to do when we land?”

“Call him out.”

“No, sir. I’m going to call him out.”

“Aren’t we both talking nonsense? How can either of us call him out, with Olivia on board? And then they’re my guests.”

“Well. I think we ought to get rid of them.”

“We can’t, with Olivia.”

“There may be letters ordering us to give him up.”

“Then we shall have to cut and run for it.”

“Now why go in for these heroics?”

“Because--I don’t know. When I was a young man I framed a certain scheme of life, I suppose. There it is.”

“We’re only putting off the evil day.”

“Why? What makes you think that?”

“Supposing we do cut and run for it. What are you going to do? How about your merchandise? Where are you going to take them? Olivia must know some day. They can’t go back to England. It’s only merciful to tell her.”

“Who is to tell her? Who is to go to her and say, ‘Olivia, your husband’s a forger.’ It’s impossible, Edward.”

“Well, I think we ought to tell her.”

“Very well then. Go in and tell her. You can’t.”

“I will.”

“No. Sit down. Look here. I used to know Howard, the present Governor, years ago. Suppose this. Suppose I could get him to waive the arrest. That is, if we find an arrest has been ordered. And we could persuade. I want to spare that poor girl. He might get them to settle, give him an appointment--anything. Make him his secretary.”

“And what sort of life would Olivia have?”

“A better one than on the Main, surely.”

“It’s a difficult row to hoe.”

“It is.”

“Let’s make a sangaree. Will you have some if I make some?”

“No. Let’s go into this with clear heads. It might be better to tell Olivia. But it’ll break her heart.”

“She’s got to suffer some day. And her heart won’t break.”

“My God, though, Edward, do think what she is, think of her life. Think what. To have her husband driven in a cart and hanged.”

“Yes. But it’s surely a worse tragedy for him not to be hanged, and to go on living with her.”

“I know. It is. But she loves him.”

“Comic devils, women. Aren’t they?”

“I don’t understand you.”

“Well. Look here. I suppose he would be hanged?”

“I shouldn’t think there’s a doubt of it.”

“And the question is, how to get rid of Stukeley and spare Olivia?”

“No. How to spare Olivia. Settle them in Virginia, I say.”

“In the first place, the Governor might not allow it. And in the second place, my dear man, you simply can’t leave Olivia in a land where---- Well. A savage land.”

“What do you know of the land?”

“I don’t know anything of the land.”

“What makes you think it to be savage?”

“It’s common talk. The sailors.”

“What do the sailors say about it?”

“They say it’s ‘the hell of a place.’ ‘The last place God made, and He forgot to finish it.’”

“What do they know of Virginia?”

“They’ve been there.”

“Yes. But what do sailors know of any country?”

“They go ashore.”

“What for?”

“To load and unload their cargoes.”

“To roll casks in the sun?”

“Well. Yes.”

“Do they like that?”

“No.”

“What else do they do when they go ashore?”

“They go exploring.”

“What? The brothels?”

“Yes. And the country, too.”

“Are there any roads?”

“Well, anyway, they’ve been there, and that’s what they say. And some of them. That Bill Adams fellow in my watch. He was there for five years, and he said it was hell.”

“What was he doing?”

“Working in the tobacco fields.”

“As a slave?”

“No. A redemptioner.”

“Kidnapped?”

“No. Transported.”

“I think we’d better wait till we see Virginia for ourselves. This is my plan, Edward. We had better do this, I think. I’ll explain things to Howard, and get him to give Stukeley a place.”

“And compromise himself?”

“Not necessarily. Then they had better stay in Virginia. And perhaps I’ll give up the Darien scheme and go home, find out what sort of a mess he is in, and see if I can make some sort of a composition with his prosecutors.”

“You can’t. You’re wanted in England yourself. We’re all outlaws, Charles. We’re flying with ropes round our necks.”

“Yes. I suppose we are. Well. Shall we all stay in Virginia?”

“Till we’re taken and sent home?”

“Till my committee of merchants procure our pardons.”

“We shall get no pardons till our Darien scheme is a big success.”

“That’s true, too.”

“Old Cammock was saying that Carolina is a good place. They call Charleston Puerto Franco; everybody’s safe there, he says.”

“God deliver Olivia from a place so lawless that every one is safe there.”

“Yes. My word, yes.”