Читать книгу American Captain - Эдисон Маршалл - Страница 30
3
ОглавлениеSo we came into Valletta, and got out of the carriage not far off the Strad Reale; then we made our way down the half-mile staircase to the harbor. A short and breezy sail brought us alongside the Vindictive; and since she was no great ship o’ the line, Sophia needed no Jacob’s-ladder to gain her deck. I handed her up; Storky Wilmot’s long lean arms reached down. After the light hoist, he touched his cap to her and vanished in the fo’c’sle.
“She’s not as big as I thought,” Sophia said, looking fore and aft.
“No, you can pitch a stone from knightheads to taffrail.”
“She’s very low to the water.”
“Yes, the Yankee traders have low freeboard, which makes her get wet decks when the green seas roll, but helps her spank along in fair weather.”
Sophia looked up. “She’s quite tall.”
“That she is. Foreigners say that Yankees carry too much sail.”
“Does ‘foreigners’ include the English?”
“I reckon it does—until they come to live in America.”
I showed her all parts of the ship that were fitting for her to visit, and told her the use and meaning of the gear. Lastly, I led her to my cabin and lighted the lantern bracketed to the wall.
She saw a room about six feet by five, containing a bunker cot with my chest pushed underneath, a bench, a washbasin hung on a nail, and a draw bucket. The dead light gave plenty of air on cool nights like this, and in tropic heat I could open the hatch. I could stand erect, although Storky Wilmot would have to bend his head. The room smelled clean, and there were no bugs in the bed, roaches in the boards, or rats in the walls.
“Is this all?” Sophia asked with round eyes.
“Yes, but it’s as big as the cap’n’s cabin on a ketch.”
“I must say it’s snug.”
“I must say it isn’t Lepanto Palace or the mansion—your mother’s old home—Celtburrow—in Cornwall.”
“The bed’s wide enough for two.”
“Plenty wide for you and me.”
“Could two people cross the ocean in this little cabin?”
“I know of nothing to stop us but your will. We’d be on deck most of the time. We’d mess with cap’n and Mr. Hedric.”
“To America?”
“Where else?”
The time had come to tell her about the Baptist mission and how we could go there any time tonight. It was a far cry from any scene of marriage she might have dreamed—as different from that as this cubby from the captain’s cabin on a great ship of the line. Yet if people did not want to be married in a strange and empty church, and their own homes were out of reach and no friend’s home was open to them, they were glad to come to the small, cheaply furnished parlor with its tiny organ, and the plain-faced, plainly dressed minister who officiated there. If we went there, I would have a witness whom the minister would believe, and our passports would show our age and, to any sensible man’s satisfaction, our eligibility for marriage.
“You want to take me there tonight?” Sophia asked in low tones, her eyes on mine.
“Yes.”
“Hold me a little while and don’t kiss me, and I’ll try to decide.”
I sat on the bed with Sophia in my arms. Her mouth lay against my throat, so that her breathing seemed part of mine. Her eyes closed, and I thought she dropped to sleep. I kept vigil over her, careful not to waken her, although I did not keep the letter of her injunction. In a short while she woke with a start.
“I thought you’d gone,” she said.
“No. Can I kiss you now?”
“Wait a moment. I want you to think of something. I met you only five days ago counting today. You count them up and see. Isn’t that too soon for you to expect me to make a decision changing my whole life? Suppose when your ship is ready to sail, I’ve almost decided to go with you but need a little more time. Will you give it to me?”
“I wish I could, but I can’t.”
“Together we—or you alone—could go to America on another ship. You could get a berth, or I’d pay the way. Our way—or your way.”
“I must stick to my ship.”
“Is it because you promised Papa so? You wouldn’t have to keep a promise he got you to make through trickery.”
“I wouldn’t think he would have told you.”
“He didn’t. He didn’t tell me the other either—about your pay. The truth is, he hasn’t mentioned you since you left. I made it up.”
“Then how did you know?”
“I sneaked up the stairs when he took you to what he calls his cabin, and listened at the latch.”
“Will you tell me why you did?”
“Yes, I was afraid you might take him and kill him.”
“That wouldn’t seem very likely, would it?”
“You Yankees went to war with your own king when he wouldn’t give you what you thought were your rights. You killed the soldiers sent to put down your rebellion. Why wouldn’t you kill Sir Godwine Tarlton, far more kingly than plain old George—indeed as kingly as the cruel kings of the Middle Ages—when he wouldn’t give you what you thought were your rights?”
“Did you want me to kill him?”
Her eyes shot wide open. “No.... No. I’m not even sure I want him dead. But go on and answer me. If I can’t decide tonight, will you stay a few days more?”
“I can stay only until my ship leaves.”
“Then I must decide tonight?”
“It’s come to that.”
“If I go with you, what will I leave that I love?”
“You know, I don’t.”
“I love my old nurse, Melissa. Papa wouldn’t let her come here. I could come to love Harvey, because he’s in the same boat with me, but not passionately and wildly as I love you. I love pearls out of the sea. Those I wear are his, and I couldn’t take them. I love beautiful clothes. I love old pictures and statuary and wonderful things of all kinds.”
She paused. “A few rich merchants in Boston have some, but not many,” I told her. “There are almost none in Bath.”
“Sometimes great men come to dinner. Lord Nelson came once. They stop at Malta, and Papa entertains them. In London, married to Harvey, I would meet many prominent men—soldiers, statesmen, poets, and actors. Whom would I meet in America?”
“Well, a few like Cap’n Phillips. There are great leaders in our cities, but mighty few come to Bath.”
“That’s all right. People must pay for what they get. If you need me as much as I need you, I’d never be sorry I went.”
“I reckon I need you a whole lot more.”
“Haven’t you plenty of others?”
“The ship and the men, and that’s all.”
She leaned out in my arms and searched my face. Her eyes looked depthless in the lanternlight.
“Where are your parents and your brothers and sisters? You haven’t mentioned them—I thought you had had trouble with them—or maybe were ashamed of them.”
“I had no sister. I haven’t mentioned the others because I couldn’t—my throat filled every time I started to, I don’t know why. I can give you the main fact. My two brothers and my parents went down with my father’s ship, the Eagle of Maine.”
“The Eagle—of Maine...”
“It was a good name. It fitted her.”
“How long ago?” She spoke quickly now.
“Five years.”
“You were younger than I am now.”
“Yes.”
“Where were you when it happened?”
“On the beach watching.”
Her hand came up and caught mine. “Tell me about it! Will you? Confide in me, Homer—no one ever has. I’ll bear it with you, whatever it is. It’s a terrible thing—I can see it in your face—and I think it will set me free.”
I did not understand all that she meant, but I began to tell her of the wreck. Sophia saw the sparkling bay and the ship making too much leeway. She heard Captain Phillips and Captain Starbuck talking in low tones and watched their faces. I must not hide from her the sight of the ship striking and her men falling down and then her last hurtling from reef to reef until one of them gored her and held her fast. At last only four people clung to the steeply listed deck, and it seemed to me they were trying to join hands. Then another sea smote her, and they, too, were gone.
I felt Sophia’s tears on my cheeks and tasted their salt in my mouth. Then the wreck of the Eagle of Maine withdrew gently into the past; it could not happen again because it had already happened; it belonged to a chapter that had closed. Sophia and I were back in my little cabin in the warm, still night, facing the days unborn.
“I love you, Homer.”
“I love you, Sophia.”
“I want to be with you always, and you to be with me.”
“Then let’s have it so.”
“I want to go with you to the mission parlor, but I’m afraid.”
“There’s nothing to be afraid of.”
“Nothing that I can tell you or even explain to myself. If only I were yours already and we were far at sea——”
My heart began to bound.
“If you were mine already—if we belonged to each past all doubt so no one could separate us—would you still be afraid?”
She lay still a minute, then shook her head.
“Will you, Sophia?”
“It’s so with many lovers who go to the priest,” she whispered, her lips moving eagerly against my ear. “Why can’t it be with us?”
“Afterward you’ll go with me to the little parlor and—stand up with me?”
I had almost shrunk from the expression used by so many plain folk in America, but as it came forth, I saw how fitting and strong it was.
“If my gift to you means enough. Will it count any less than if we’d waited? You see, I have waited until now—waited for you.”
“I’ve waited for you, too.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Just what you mean.”
“Is that true? I see by your face it is.”
“I guess it’s not true. I didn’t want any of the harbor girls.”
“That makes it true enough. I wouldn’t have minded—but I’m so glad.”
She rose up out of my arms and turned the lantern low. In the pale glimmer that remained, she took the pins from her dusky hair and shook it down about her shoulders. Her preparations for her bridal adventure went unhurriedly forward, but I could not keep my own hands from flying. Before long, the tresses were more beautiful than before, their dark waves set off by a dim and secret luster of naked flesh. I became aware of beauty in its realness, beyond fancy’s reach. All men who have loved woman know a like moment of revelation, of breathless unbelief, and those who have not loved woman cannot know it, because their eyes are dim.
“Be gentle with me, Homer,” she told me as we lay side by side.
Passion came upon me as a gale upon a ship, gathering and rushing, so strong that it seemed an exterior force rather than one expression of my own strength, but when I remembered it was no more or less than that, that I was its master and it could not master me, her trembling ceased and the fear went out of her eyes. Then the storm within me shook me no more. Sometimes I had dreamed of sailing wide, still waters of infinite depth, and I half-remembered that dream, and instead of tumult I knew mystery and bliss.
She was giving me her beauty in mysterious ways. Bliss came upon us both, rising and growing until it seemed to pass all bounds, but it was not an unworldly dream from which we would wake; it was real as the lantern’s glimmer. Like a long wave rolling under the moon it broke at last.
In that ecstasy and its warm and lovely aftermath, I could not doubt that we were joined forever.
