Kitabı oku: «The Militants», sayfa 11

Lindsay, "Why don't you pull your bowie-knife out of your boot, Governor? It looks like he's making fun of your wife, to me. Isn't anybody going to fight anybody?"

And then Mr. McNaughton would reprove her as a bloodthirsty Kentuckian, and the whole laughing tableful would empty out on the broad porch. At such a time the Governor, laughing too, amused, yet uncomfortable, and feeling himself in a false and undignified position, would vow solemnly that a stop must be put to all this. It would get about, into the papers even, by horrid possibility; even now a few intimates of the McNaughton family had been warned "not to kill the Governor's wife." He would surely tell the girl the next time he could find her alone, and then the absurdity would collapse. But the words would not come, or if he carefully framed them beforehand, this bold, aggressive leader of men, whose nickname was "Jack the Giant-killer," made a giant of Lindsay's displeasure, and was afraid of it. He had never been afraid of anything before. He would screw his courage up to the notch, and then, one look at the childlike face, and down it would go, and he would ask her to go rowing with him. They were such good friends; it was so dangerous to change at a blow existing relations, to tell her that he had been deceiving her all these weeks. These exquisite June weeks that had flown past to music such us no June had made before; days snowed under with roses, nights that seemed, as he remembered them, moonlit for a solid month. The Governor sighed a lingering sigh, and quoted,

 
"Oh what a tangled web we weave
When first we practise to deceive!"
 

Yes, he must really wait—say two days longer. Then he might be sure enough of her—regard—to tell her the truth. And then, a little later, if he could control himself so long, another truth. Beyond that he did not allow himself to think.

"Governor Rudd," asked Lindsay suddenly as they walked their horses the last mile home from a ride on which they had gotten separated—the Governor knew how—from the rest of the party, "why do they bother you so about your wife, and why do you let them?"

"Can't help it, Miss Lindsay. They have no respect for me. I'm that sort of man. Hard luck, isn't it?"

Lindsay turned her sad, infantile gray eyes on him searchingly. "I reckon you're not," she said. "I reckon you're the sort of man people don't say things to unless they're right sure you will stand it. They don't trifle with you." She nodded her head with conviction. "Oh, I've heard them talk about you! I like that; that's like our men down South. You're right Southern, anyhow, in some ways. You see, I can pay you compliments because you're a safe old married man," and her eyes smiled up at him: she rarely laughed or smiled except with those lovely eyes. "There's some joke about your wife," she went on, "that you-all won't tell me. There certainly is. I know it, sure enough I do, Governor Rudd."

There is a common belief that the Southern accent can be faithfully rendered in writing if only one spells badly enough. No amount of bad spelling could tell how softly Lindsay Lee said those last two words.

"I love to hear you say that—'Guv'na Rudd.' I do, 'sho 'nuff,'" mused the Governor out loud and irrelevantly. "Would you say it again?"

"I wouldn't," said Lindsay, with asperity. "Ridiculous! If you are a Governor! But I was talking about your wife. Isn't she coming home before I go? Sometimes I don't believe you have a wife."

That was his chance, and he saw it. He must tell her now or never, and he drew a long breath. "Suppose I told you that I had not," he said, "that she was a myth, what would you say?"

"Oh, I'd just never speak to you again," said Lindsay, carelessly. "I wouldn't like to be fooled like that. Look, there are the others!" and off she flew at a canter.

It is easy to see that the Governor was not hurried headlong into confession by that speech. But the crash came. It was the night before Lindsay was to go back home to far-off Kentucky, and with infinite expenditure of highly trained intellect, for which the State was paying a generous salary, the Governor had managed to find himself floating on a moonlit flood through the Forest of Arden with the Blessed Damozel. That, at least, is the rendering of a walk in the McNaughtons' wood with Lindsay Lee as it appeared that night to the intellect mentioned. But the language of such thoughts is idiomatic and incapable of exact translation. A flame of eagerness to speak, quenched every moment by a shower-bath of fear, burned in his soul, when suddenly Lindsay tripped on a root and fell, with an exclamation. Then fear dried beneath the flames. It is unnecessary to tell what the Governor did, or what he said. The language, as language, was unoriginal and of striking monotony, and as to what happened, most people have had experience which will obviate the necessity of going into brutal facts. But when, trembling and shaken, he realized a material world again, Lindsay was fighting him, pushing him away, her eyes blazing fiercely.

"What do you mean? What do you mean?" she was saying.

"Mean—mean? That I love you—that I want you to love me, to be my wife!" She stood up like a white ghost in the silver light and shadow of the wood.

"Governor Rudd, are you crazy?" she cried. "You have a wife already."

The tall Governor threw back his head and laughed a laugh like a child. The people away off on the porch heard him and smiled. "They are having a good time, those two," Mrs. McNaughton said.

"Lindsay—Lindsay," and he bent over and caught her hands and kissed them. "There isn't any wife—there never will be any but you. It was all a joke. It happened because—Oh, never mind! I can't tell you now; it's a long story. But you must forgive that; that's all in the past now. The question is, will you love me—will you love me, Lindsay? Tell me, Lindsay!" He could not say her name often enough. But there came no answering light in Lindsay's face. She looked at him as if he were a striped convict.

"I'll never forgive you," she said, slowly. "You've treated me like a child; you've made a fool of me, all of you. It was insulting. All a joke, you call it? And I was the joke; you've been laughing at me all these weeks. Why was it funny, I'd like to know?"

"Great heavens, Lindsay—you're not going to take it that way? I insult you—laugh at you! I'd give my life; I'd shoot down any one—Lindsay!" he broke out appealingly, and made a step toward her.

"Don't touch me!" she cried. "Don't touch me! I hate you!" And as he still came closer she turned and ran up the path, into the moonlight of the driveway, and so, a dim white blotch on the fragrant night, disappeared.

When the Governor, walking with dignity, came up the steps of the porch, three minutes later, he was greeted with questions.

"What have you done to Lindsay Lee, I'd like to know?" asked Alice McNaughton. "She said she had fallen and hurt her foot, but she wouldn't let me go up with her, and she was dignified, which is awfully trying. Why did you quarrel with her, this last night?"

"Governor," said Chuck, with more discernment than delicacy, "if you will accept the sympathies of one not unacquainted with grief—" But at this point his voice faded away as he looked at the Governor.

The Governor never remembered just how he got away from the friendly hatefulness of that porchful. An early train the next morning was inevitable, for there was a meeting of real importance this time, and at all events everything looked about the same shade of gray to him; it mattered very little what he did. Only he must be doing something every moment. He devoured work as if it were bread and meat and he were famished. People said all that autumn and winter that anything like the Governor's energy had never been seen. He evidently wanted a second term, and really he ought to have it. He was working hard enough to get it. About New-Year's he went down to Bristol for the first time since June, for a dinner at the McNaughtons'. Alice McNaughton's friendly face, under its red-gold hair, beamed at him from far away down the table, but after dinner, when the men came in from the dining-room, she took possession of him boldly.

"Governor, I want to tell you about Lindsay Lee. I know you'll be interested, though you did have some mysterious fight before she left. She's been awfully ill with pleurisy, a painful attack, and she's getting well very slowly. They have just taken her to Paul Smith's. I'm writing her to-morrow, and I want you to send a good message; it would please her."

It was hard to stand with eighteen people grouped about him, all more or less with an eye on his motions, and be the Governor, calm and dignified, while hot irons were being applied to his heart by this smiling girl.

"But, Miss Alice," he said, slowly, "I'm afraid you are wrong. I was unfortunate enough to make Miss Lee very angry. I am afraid she would think a message from me only an impertinence."

"Sir," said Alice, with decision, "I'm right sometimes, if I'm not Governor; and it's better to be right than to be Governor, I've heard—or something. You trust me. Just try the effect of a message, and see if it isn't a success. What shall I say?"

The Governor was impetuous, and in spite of all the work he had done so fiercely, the longing the work had been meant to quiet surged up as strong as ever. "Miss Alice," he said, eagerly, "if you are right, would it do—do you think I might deliver the message myself?"

"Do I think? Well, if I were a man! Faint heart, you know!"

And the Governor, at that choppy eloquence, openly seized the friendly young hand and wrung it till Alice begged, laughing but bruised, for mercy. When he came up, later, to bid her good-night, his face was bright, and,

"Good-night, Angel of Peace," he said.

Mary Mooney, who through the dark days had watched with anxious though uncomprehending eyes her boy's dejection and hard effort to live it down, and had applied partridges and sweetbreads and other forms of devotion steadily but unsuccessfully, saw at once and with, rapture the change when the Governor greeted her the next morning. Light-heartedly she packed his traps two days later—she had done it jealously for thirty-five years, though almost over the dead body of the Governor's man sometimes in these later days. And when he told her good-by she had her reward. The man's boyish heart went out in a burst of gratitude to the tireless love that had sought only his happiness all his life. He put his arm around the stout little woman's neck.

"Mary," he said, "I'm going to see Miss Lee."

Mary's pink cheeks were scarlet as she patted with a work-worn palm the strong hand on her shoulder. "Then I know what will happen," she said, "and I'm glad. And if you don't bring her back with you, Mr. Jack, I won't let you in."

So the stately Governor went off like a schoolboy with his nurse's blessing. And later like an arrow from a bow he swung around the corner of the snowy piazza at Paul Smith's, where Mrs. Lee had told him he would find her daughter. There was a bundle of fur in a big chair in the sunlight, dark against the white hills beyond, with their black lines of pine-trees. As the impetuous steps came nearer, it turned, and—the Governor's methods were again such that words do them no justice. But this time with happier result. Half an hour later, when some coherency was established, he said:

"You waited for me! You've been waiting for me!" as if it were the most astonishing fact in history. "And since when have you been waiting for me, you—"

Lindsay laughed, not only with her eyes, but with her soft voice. "Ever since the morning after, your Excellency. Alice told me all about it before I left, and made me see reason. And I—and I was right sorry I'd been so cross. I thought you'd come some time—but you came right slow," she said, and her eyes travelled over his face as if she were making sure he was really there.

"And I never dared to think you would see me!" he said. "But now!"

And again there were circumstances that are best described by a hiatus.

The day after, when Mary Mooney, discreetly letting her soul's idol get into his library before greeting him, trotted into that stately chamber with soft, heavy footsteps, she was met with a kiss and a bear's hug that, as she told Mrs. Rudd later, "was like the year he was nine."

"I didn't bring her, Mary," the Governor said, "but you'd better let me stay, for she's coming."

THE LITTLE REVENGE

Suddenly a gust of fresh wind caught Sally's hat, and off it flew, a wide-winged pink bird, over the old, old sea-wall of Clovelly, down among the rocks of the rough beach, tumbling and jumping from one gray stone to another, and getting so far away that, in the soft violet twilight, it seemed as lost as any ship of the Spanish Armada wrecked long ago on this wild Devonshire coast.

"Oh!" cried Sally distractedly, and clapped her hands to her head with the human instinct to shut the stable door after the horse is gone. "Oh!" she cried again; "my pretty hat! And oh! it's in the water!"

But suddenly, out of somewhere in the twilight, there was a man chasing it. Sally leaned over the rugged, yellowish, grayish stone wall and excitedly called to him.

"Oh, thank you!" she cried, and "That's so good of you!"

The hat had tacked and was sailing inshore now, one stiff pink taffeta sail set to the breeze. And in a minute, with a reckless splash into the dashing waves, the man had it, and an easy, athletic figure swung up the causeway, holding it away from him, as if it might nip at him. He wore a dark blue jersey, and loose, flapping trousers of a seaman.

"He's only a sailor," Sally said under her breath; "I'd better tip him." Her hand slipped into her pocket and I heard the click of her purse.

He looked from one to the other of us in the dim light inquiringly, as he came up, and then off went his cap, and his face broke into the gentlest, most charming smile as he delivered the hat into Sally's outstretched hands.

"I'm afraid it's a bit damp," he said.

All dark-eyed, stalwart young fellows are attractive to me for the sake of one like that who died forty years ago, but this sailor had a charm of manner that is a gift of the gods, let it fall to prince or peasant; the pretty deference of his few words, and the quick, radiant smile, were enough to win friendliness from me. More than that, something in the set of his head, in the straight gaze of his eyes, held a likeness that made my memory ache. I smiled back at him instantly. But Sally's heart was on her hat; hats from good shops did not grow on trees for Sally Meade.

"I hope it isn't hurt," she said, anxiously, and shook it carefully, and hardly glanced at the rescuer, who was watching with something that looked like amusement in his face. Then her good manners came back.

"Thank you a thousand times," she said, and turned to him brightly. "You were so quick—but, oh! I'm afraid you're wet." She looked at him, and I saw a little shock of surprise in her face. Beauty so striking will be admired, even in a common sailor.

"It's nothing," he said, looking down at his sopping, wide trousers; "I'm used to it," and as Sally's hand went forward I caught the flash of silver, and at the same moment another flash, from the man's eyes.

It was enough to startle me for the fraction of a second, but, as I looked again, his expression held only a serious respect, and I was sure I had been mistaken. He took the money and touched his cap and said, "Thank you, miss," with perfect dignity. Yet my imagination must have been lively, for as he slipped it in his pocket, his look turned toward me, and for another breath of time a gleam of mischief—certainly mischief—flashed from his dark eyes to mine.

Then Sally, quite unconscious of this, perhaps imaginary, by-play, had an idea. "Are you a sailor?" she asked.

The man looked at her. "Yes—miss," he answered, a little slowly.

"We want to engage a boat and a man to take us out. Do you know of one? Have you a boat?"

The young fellow glanced down across the wall where a hull and mast gleamed indistinctly through the falling night, swinging at the side of the quay. "That's mine, yonder," he said, nodding toward it. And then, with the graceful, engaging frankness that I already knew as his, "I shall be very glad to take you out"—including us both in his glance.

"Sally," I said, five minutes later, as we trudged up the one steep, rocky street of Clovelly,—the picturesque old street that once led English smugglers to their caves, and that is more of a staircase than a street, with rows of stone steps across its narrow width—"Sally, you are a very unexpected girl. You took my breath away, engaging that man so suddenly to take us sailing to-morrow. How do you know he is reliable? It would have been safer to try one of the men they recommended from the Inn. And certainly it would have been more dignified to let me make the arrangements. You seem to forget that I am older than you."

"You aren't," said Sully, giving a squeeze to my arm that she held in the angle of hers, pushing me with her young strength up the hill. "You're not as old, cousin Mary. I'm twenty-two, and you're only eighteen, and I believe you will never be any older."

I think perhaps I like flattery. I am a foolish old woman, and I have noticed that it is not the young girls who treat me with great deference and rise as soon as I come who seem to me the most charming, but the ones who, with proper manners, of course, yet have a touch of comradeship, as if they recognized in me something more than a fossil exhibit. I like to have them go on talking about their beaux and their work and play, and let me talk about it, too. Sally Meade makes me feel always that there is in me an undying young girl who has outlived all of my years and is her friend and equal.

"I'm sorry if I was forward, cousin Mary, but the sailing is to be my party, you know, and then I thought you liked him. He had a pretty manner for a common sailor, didn't he? And his voice—these low-class English people have wonderfully well-bred, soft voices. I suppose it's particularly so here in the South. Cousin Mary, did you see the look he gave you with those delicious dark eyes? It's always the way—gentleman or hod-carrier—no one has a chance with men when you are about."

It is pleasant to me, old woman as I am, to be told that people like me—more pleasant, I think, every year. I never take it for truth, of course, but I believe it means good feeling, and it makes an atmosphere easy to breathe. I purred like a contented cat under Sally's talking, yet, to save my dignity, kept up a protest.

"Sally, my dear! Delicious dark eyes! I'm ashamed of you—a common sailor!"

"I didn't smile at him," said Sally, reflectively.

So, struggling up the steep street of Clovelly, we went home to the "New Inn," to cold broiled lobster, to strawberries and clotted Devonshire cream, and dreamless sleep in the white beds of the quiet rooms whose windows looked toward the woods and cliffs of Hobby Drive on one side, and on the other toward the dark, sparkling jewel of the moon-lighted ocean, and the shadowy line of Lundy Island far in the distance.

That I, an inland woman, an old maid of sixty, should tell a story of sailing and of love seems a little ridiculous. My nephews at college beguile me to talk about boats, and then laugh to hear me, for I think I get the names of things twisted. And as for what I know of the other—the only love-making to which I ever listened was ended forty years ago by one of the northern balls that fell in fiery rain on Pickett's charge at Gettysburg. Yet, if I but tell the tale as it came to me, others may feel as I did the thrill of the rushing of the keel through dashing salt water, the swing of the great white sail above, the flapping of the fresh wind in the slack of it, the exhilaration of moving with power like the angels, with the great forces of nature for muscles, the joy of it all expanding, pulsing through you, till it seems as if the sky might crack if once you let your delight go free. And some may catch, too, that other thrill, of the hidden feeling that glorified those days. Few lives are so poor that the like of it has not brightened them, and no one quite forgets.

It is partly Sally Meade's Southern accent that has made me love her above nearer cousins, from her babyhood. The modulations of her voice seem always to bring me close to the sound of the voice that went into silence when Geoffrey Meade, her father's young kinsman, was killed long ago.

The Meades, old-time planters in Virginia, have been very poor since the distant war of the sixties, and it has been one of my luxuries to give Sally a lift over hard places. Always with instant reward, for the smallest bit of sunlight, going into her prismatic spirit, comes out a magnificent rainbow of happiness. So when the idea came that they might let me have the girl to take abroad that summer, her friend, the girl spirit in me, jumped for joy. There was no difficulty made; it was one of the rare good things too good to be true, that yet are true. She did more for me than I for her, for I simply spent some superfluous idle money, while she filled every day with a new enjoyment, the reflection of her own fresh pleasure in every day as it came.

So here we were prowling about the south of England with "Westward Ho!" for a guide-book; coaching through deep, tawny Devonshire lanes from Bideford to Clovelly; searching for the old tombstone of Will Cary's grave in the churchyard on top of the hill; gathering tales of Salvation Yeo and of Amyas Leigh; listening to echoes of the three-hundred-year-old time when the great sea-battle was fought in the channel and many ships of the Armada wrecked along this Devonshire coast. And always coming back to sleep in the fascinating little "New Inn," as old as the hills, built on both sides of the one rocky ladder street of Clovelly, the street so steep that no horses can go in it, and at the bottom of whose breezy tunnel one sees the rolling floor of the sea. In so careless a way does the Inn ramble about the cliff that when I first went to my room, two flights up from the front, I caught my breath at a blaze of scarlet and yellow nasturtiums that faced me through a white-painted doorway opening on the hillside and on a tiny garden at the back.

The irresponsible pleasure of our first sail the next afternoon was never quite repeated. The boat shot from the landing like a high-strung horse given his head, out across the unbordered road of silver water, and in a moment, as we raced toward the low white clouds, we turned and saw the cliffs of the coast and the tiny village, a gay little pile of white, green-latticed houses steeped in foliage lying up a crack in the precipice. Above was the long stretch of the woods of Hobby Drive. Clovelly is so old that its name is in Domesday Book; so old, some say, that it was a Roman station, and its name was Clausa Vaillis. But it is a nearer ancientness that haunts it now. Every wave that dashes on the rocky shore carries a legend of the ships of the Invincible Armada. As we asked question after question of our sailor, handsomer than ever to-day with a red silk handkerchief knotted sailor-fashion about his strong neck, story after story flashed out, clear and dramatic, from his answers. The bunch of houses there on the shore? Yes, that had a history. The people living there were a dark-featured, reticent lot, different from other people hereabouts. It was said that one of the Spanish galleons went ashore there, and the men had been saved and had settled on the spot and married Devonshire women, but their descendants had never lost the tradition of their blood. Certainly their speech and their customs were peculiar, unlike those of the villages near. He had been there and had seen them, had heard them talk. Yes, they were distinct. He laughed a little to acknowledge it, with an Englishman's distrust of anything theatrical. A steep cliff started out into the waves, towering three hundred feet in almost perpendicular lines. Had that a name? Yes, that was called "Gallantry Bower." No; it was not a sentimental story—it was the old sea-fight again. It was said that an English sailor threw a rope from the height and saved life after life of the crew of a Spaniard wrecked under the point.

"You know the history of your place very well," said Sally. The young man kept his eyes on his steering apparatus and a slow half-smile troubled his face and was gone.

"I've had a bit of an education for a seaman—Miss," he said. And then, after apparently reflecting a moment, "My people live near the Leighs of Burrough Court, and I was playmate to the young gentlemen and was given a chance to learn with them, with their tutors, more than a common man is likely to get always."

At that Sally's enthusiasm broke through her reserve, and I was only a little less eager.

"The Leighs! The real, old Leighs of Burrough? Amyas Leigh's descendants? Was that story true? Oh!—" And here manners and curiosity met and the first had the second by the throat. She stopped. But our sailor looked up with a boyish laugh that illumined his dark face.

"Is it so picturesque? I have been brought up so close that it seems commonplace to me. Every one must be descended from somebody, you know."

"Yes, but Amyas Leigh!" went on Sally, flushed and excited, forgetting the man in his story. "Why, he's my hero of all fiction! Think of it, Cousin Mary—there are men near here who are his great—half-a-dozen greats—grandchildren! Cousin Mary," she stopped and looked at me impressively, oblivious of the man so near her, "if I could lay my hands on one of those young Leighs of Burrough I'd marry him in spite of his struggles, just to be called by that name. I believe I would."

"Sally!" I exclaimed, and glanced at the man; Sally's cheeks colored as she followed my look. His mouth was twitching, and his eyes smouldered with fun. But he behaved well. On some excuse of steering he turned his back instantly and squarely toward us. But Sally's interest was irrepressible.

"Would you mind telling me their names, Cary?" she asked. He had told us to call him Cary. "The names of the Mr. Leighs of Burrough."

"No, Cary," I said. "I think Miss Meade doesn't notice that she is asking you personal questions about your friends."

Cary turned on me a look full of gentleness and chivalry. "Miss Meade doesn't ask anything that I cannot answer perfectly well," he said. "There are two sons of the Leighs, Richard Grenville, the older, and Amyas Francis, the younger. They keep the old names you see. Richard—Sir Richard, I should say—is the head of the family, his father being dead."

"Sir Richard Grenville Leigh!" said Sally, quite carried away by that historic combination. "That's better than Amyas," she went on, reflectively. "Is he decent? But never mind. I'll marry him, Cousin Mary."

At that our sailor-man shook with laughter, and as I met his eyes appealing for permission, I laughed as hard as he. Only Sally was apparently quite serious.

"He would he very lucky—Miss," he said, restraining his mirth with a respect that I thought remarkable, and turned again to his rudder.

Sally, for the first time having felt the fascination of breathing historic air, was no longer to be held. The sweeping, free motion, the rush of water under the bow as we cut across the waves, the wide sky and the air that has made sailors and soldiers and heroes of Devonshire men for centuries on end, the exhilaration of it all had gone to the girl's head. She was as unconscious of Cary as if he had been part of his boat. I had seen her act so when she was six, and wild with the joy of an autumn morning, intoxicated with oxygen. We had been put for safety into the hollow part of the boat where the seats are—I forget what they call it—the scupper, I think. But I am apt to be wrong on the nomenclature. At all events, there we were, standing up half the time to look at the water, the shore, the distant sails, and because life was too intense to sit down. But when Sally, for all her gentle ways, took the bit in her teeth, it was too restricted for her there.

"Is there any law against my going up and holding on to the mast?" she asked Cary.

"Not if you won't fall overboard, Miss," he answered.

The girl, with a strong, self-reliant jump, a jump that had an echo of tennis and golf and horseback, scrambled up and forward, Cary taking his alert eyes a moment from his sailing, to watch her to safety, I thought her pretty as a picture as she stood swaying with one arm around the mast, in her white shirt-waist and dark dress, her head bare, and brown, untidy hair blowing across the fresh color of her face, and into her clear hazel eyes.

"What is the name of this boat?" she demanded, and Cary's deep, gentle voice lifted the two words of his answer across the twenty feet between them.

"The Revenge" he said.

Then there was indeed joy. "The Revenge! The Revenge! I am sailing on the Revenge, with a man who knows Sir Richard Grenville and Amyas Leigh! Cousin Mary, listen to that—this is the Revenge we're on—this!" She hugged the mast, "And there are Spanish galleons, great three-deckers, with yawning tiers of guns, all around us! You may not see them, but they are here! They are ghosts, but they are here! There is the great San Philip, hanging over us like a cloud, and we are—we are—Oh, I don't know who we are, but we're in the fight, the most beautiful fight in history!" She began to quote:

 
And half of their fleet to the right, and half to the left were seen,
And the little Revenge ran on through the long sea-lane between.
 

And then:

 
Thousands of their sailors looked down from the decks and laughed;
Thousands of their soldiers made mock at the mad little craft
Running on and on till delayed
By the mountain-like San Philip that, of fifteen hundred tons,
And towering high above us with her yawning tiers of guns,
Took the breath from our sails, and we stayed.
 

The soft, lingering voice threw the words at us with a thrill and a leap forward, just us the Revenge was carrying us with long bounds, over the shining sea. We were spinning easily now, under a steady light wind, and Cary, his hand on the rudder, was opposite me. He turned with a start as the girl began Tennyson's lines, and his shining dark eyes stared up at her.