CHAPTER XXXVI

THE CAPTAIN BEGINS HIS SIEGE

The morning after Captain Royal's advent, Ernie, going his round of the Third Floor, dropping boots at various doors, stopped outside No. 72.

The door was open; and Ruth stood at the window looking sea-wards.

It was early yet, scarcely seven, but clearly the Captain was already up and out. Ernie stood in the door, admiring the lines of the girl's big young figure, the curve of her neck and shoulders and the glossy black of her hair. He made a little whistling sound.

Ruth turned, saw who it was, and beckoned to him.

The window looked out over the lawns and foreshore on to the sea, brisk and broken in the sun.

The tide was brimming, and swinging in, green-hued, white-tipped, and splashed with shadows.

The bathing-raft was wobbling in the short chop. There were no bobbing heads about it now. It was too early in the season, too early in the morning, and the sea was too rough. But a figure, white in the sun, balanced on the unsteady raft, then shot arrow-wise into the sea.

Another moment and a black head bounced up out of the water. Then there was the flash of an arm, rising and falling swiftly, as the swimmer strode away for the horizon.

"Straight out to sea!" cried Ernie. "That's the Captain!--Buffet em!"

"I wish I was a man," mused Ruth. "Go in like that--just as you are."

She took up her duster, and resumed her work. The bed was already made.

"You're early at it," said Ernie, glancing round.

"Yes," answered Ruth. "I'm to do his room every morning while he's in the water. He's going to work up here after breakfast."

"Hot stuff!" said Ernie, trying to work up enthusiasm. "He'll command the old Battalion one day, the skipper will. Good old Hammer-men!"

Half an hour later the Captain was back. His hair still wet, was crisp still and very dark; while the brine crusted his handsome face. He had run up the stairs, three at a stride, too impetuous to await the lift. In flannels, a sweater with a broad collar, and white shoes, he looked cool and clean and strenuous as the water from which he just emerged. At the top of the stairs he met the shabby porter with his collarless shirt, his scrubby hair, and rough hands.

Ruth, coming down the corridor, marked the meeting of the two men.

"Mornin," said the Captain, brief as his own moustache.

"Morning, sir," grinned Ernie, rolling by, full of self-consciousness.

An hour later, he saw Ruth coming out of 72 with a tray.

Ernie stopped.

"Havin breakfast in his own room?" he asked.

"Yes," said Ruth quietly.

The monosyllable seemed to knock at Ernie's heart.

He hesitated a moment.

"I'm sorry you're leaving the Third Floor, Ruth," he said. "For me own sake like."

"Thank you," answered Ruth.

He noticed she was strangely curt.

A week later Madame sent for the girl.

"Ruth, are you still in any hurry to change your Floor?" she asked.

The girl looked down, colouring faintly.

"Think it over, vill you?" said Madame. "There is no hurry."

"Thank you, Ma'am," said Ruth, quivering.

She returned to her work. A bell was ringing. It was 72.

Ruth went.

The Captain was manicuring his nails at the window. He looked up as she entered.

"Shut the door!" he said.

She obeyed.

"Come here!" he ordered.

She went.

He looked at her, in his blue eyes a laughing sternness.

"What's this?" he asked.

"What, sir?"

"I hear you're thinking of deserting."

She stood before him, her bosom rising and falling.

"Ruth," he said gravely, "you've got to make a home for me while I'm here. I'm a pore lone orphan--no mother, or sister, or friends. You've got to mend me and mind me, as my old nurse used to say. D'you see? I look to you."

"Very well, sir," answered Ruth.

Whatever else Ruth might feel about Captain Royal, there was no doubt that she admired him. And to do the man justice, there was not a little to admire. In any company, except the best, he shone. And on the Third Floor, in that meretricious atmosphere of fat-necked Jews, dubious foreigners, and degenerate Englishmen, Royal with his strenuous ways of the public-school boy, his athletic figure, and keen walk stood out like a sword among gamps in an umbrella-stand.

He lived too with the deliberate speed of the man who knows his goal and means to get there.

There was no need to call him. He was up every morning at 6.15, and into the sea, rain or fine, rough or smooth, at 6.30. At 7 he was back again in his room, stripped, and doing physical exercises. At 8 Ruth brought his breakfast; and by 9 he had settled to his morning's work. After lunch he golfed; then to his crammer; and in the evening he relaxed over a billiard-table or in the card-room.

Sometimes he went off for the night to Town.

On the first of these occasions Ernie carried his bag to the taxi with a joy for which he himself could not account.

"What!--are you off, sir?" he asked gaily. "I thought we was going to keep you all your leave."

"Only for the week-end," answered the other, with his little hard laugh. "See me back on Monday."

Ernie's heart fell.

He went upstairs, saw Ruth, and feigned surprise.

"What, still here, Ruth?"

"Yes," the girl answered in her quiet way. "I shan't move now till the Captain's gone."

She said it quite simply. She was too great, too spiritual, to be provocative: Ernie knew that.

He stopped full. There was a sea of fire lifting his chest and lighting his eye.

"Ruth," he said.

She saw his emotion, and stayed with the courtesy natural to her.

"Will you walk out with me?"

She met his eyes with the courage, dark, flashing, and kind, he loved so much.

"I couldn't do that, Ernie," she said so gently that he loved her all the more.

"Why not then?"

"I'm afraid."

"What of?"

"Afraid you might ask me more'n what I can give."

"I'll run the risk!" cried Ernie. "I'm ready!"

She shook her head.

He took her hand.

"I'm a good man, Ruth," he said with the almost divine simplicity of the class to which he now belonged.

She overwhelmed him with tenderness.

"O, I know you are, Ernie!" she said in her purring voice of a wood-pigeon at evening. "But I'm not thinking of settling--not yet."

The love-passage relieved Ernie immensely. He would face defeat, face Captain Royal, face the future with confidence now.

Thereafter for some time he went about his work whistling, so that Don John, the Austrian, winked at his mates behind his back, and said,

"He thinks she's for him! No fool like an English fool!"

When he came back from his week-end away, Captain Royal went straight to Madame's private sitting-room, which was at the end of the Third Floor. As he came out and passed along the corridor he saw Ruth sitting on the window-sill in the passage, where Ernie had suddenly known himself in love with her.

He stopped. There was a bundle of mending beside her, and among it he recognized his own pyjamas.

Royal knew there was a sitting-room for the maids, called by the habitués of the Third Floor, "the Nunnery," and wondered.

That evening, when she came to put out his evening clothes, he said to her,

"You don't care about using the maids' sitting-room, Ruth?"

She did not answer.

"The other girls aren't your sort? too rowdy--what?"

Again she fell back on characteristic silence.

Each of the bed-rooms on the Third Floor had a dressing-room attached.

"Well, you know my hours," he continued. "You use my dressing-room to work in whenever you like. I never use it myself; and I know you've a lot to do for me."

Ruth thanked him; and after that in the afternoons, when he was out, and in the evenings, when he was at dinner, she would sit in his dressing-room and work.

One evening, as she sat beside the window, her dark head bent over her work, she was aware that he was standing over her.

He had come in on her very quietly from behind, not through his bed-room but through the door of the dressing-room that opened into the corridor.

She rose to go, gathering her work.

He put his hand upon her shoulder, and pressed her gently back into the chair. She trembled beneath his touch.

"No," he said. "Don't go. I like to have you there."

She glanced swiftly at the door behind her.

"That's all right," he laughed. "It's shut." Then he moved into the bed-room.

"I'm not going to close the door," he said, "because I like to see you there when I look up from my work."

She lifted her eyes to his, full of confidence and affection. He was not a man; he was a God--and to be treated as such: he could do no wrong.

He smiled at her friendly from his chair.

"I'm going to read Jomini," he said. "Ever hear of Jomini, Ruth?--nice name, isn't it? Joe-mine-eye."

After that Captain Royal was less regular in his attendance at the billiard-room after dinner.

He read in his bed-room; Ruth worked in the dressing-room; sometimes the door between the two rooms was open; and sometimes they talked.

One evening Ernie, descending from a higher floor in the lift, marked Céleste listening at the dressing-room door. She saw him, winked, and tripped away.

"It's a caise!" she whispered, making a hollow of her hand. "A h'iceberg's hot stuff once it begins to go."