He was somehow disappointed, yet relieved. That they should go down into the cabin at his bidding was victory; that they should go at hers—It robbed him of this much of conquest. Also, she was not afraid of him. He wanted her to be afraid; he wanted to see panic fear in her eyes and to hear her cry out with fright. But—there was no fear in her—for him.
“I’m going to put you to bed,” she said, “and make you comfortable, and put you to sleep. You’re almost sick, Cap’n Pawl. You are sick, only you’re so strong it takes a long time to beat you down.”
“I’m needing no nurse,” he said sullenly. The initiative was out of his hands. He was trying to recapture it, but he was strangely and utterly helpless.
“Oh, yes, you do,” she said laughingly. “Men never know they’re sick till they drop; they never want to give in. I know. My mother—My mother was—good in sickness. She knew how to take care of sick people. And so do I. You’ll see.”
The man thought, with a jarring abruptness, of another woman who had known how to tend the sick. He remembered, on that voyage she had taken with him, he had been ill—the only real sickness in his life. And she had tended him; and the memory of those attentions had been bittersweet to him through all these years. He thought of her, as he submitted unconsciously to Ruth’s guidance.
She led him into his own cabin. “Lie down, on your bunk,” she said. And when he hesitated, with a pretty air of command: “Do as I say, sir.”
He sat on the edge of the bunk, and stretched his length upon it. Then he twisted upright, abruptly. The girl was taking off his heavy shoes. He said harshly: “Here! Don’t you—”
“Sh-h-h!” she told him. “Be still.”
This was not what he had planned. But he lay still. She unlaced his shoes, but she could not pull them off his feet. They were stiff and hard. She said, panting with the exertion of it: “You’ll have to pull them off, I’m afraid. I can’t.”
How slight was her strength compared to his! He could break her between the fingers of one hand. Yet she was not afraid of him. He hated her, even while he submitted to her ministrations. Helplessness possessed him. Let her have her way; he would have his in the end.