“We’ve left Bassingham, you know, Mr Wagram. My father died soon after you went, and we couldn’t stop on at Siege House. So we went up to London, and—well, things were not easy.”
“I didn’t know; I have had no news from Hilversea for a long, long time—have been so on the move, you know.”
“How you must long to get back. Dear old, beautiful Hilversea!”
The bright spirits and former lightheartedness seemed to have left her. Her voice was sad. The other made a mental note of it, and deduced that they had fallen upon hard times. Well, that he would certainly do his best to remedy by some means or other. Then she told him about herself; how her other sister—not Clytie—had married in Australia, married very fairly well, too, and had got her out there on a visit. But they had not got on—she did not tell him that the other had conceived a jealousy of her from the very first—and so she was returning to England.
They talked on until even the other passengers, who, by twos and threes, had been passing through the saloon in quite unusual numbers to catch another glimpse of the castaway, had disappeared, and the stewards were rolling up the carpets.
“Good-night, Mr Wagram,” said the girl as they parted. “I can’t tell you how glad I am to see you again, and what a happiness it is to think that the ship I was on board of was the one to rescue you. To-morrow you must tell me your adventures in full. You will—won’t you?”
He promised, with some reservations, and they parted. But Delia found that sleep utterly refused to come her way—and she wanted to sleep, wanted to look her best in the morning. Her cabin mate, an elderly lady, was fast asleep, but she herself seemed doomed to night-long wakefulness. The scuttle was open and she lay with her face to it, watching the dark sky with its twinkle of misty stars, half lulled by the rush and “sough” of smooth water from the sides of the liner. What wonderful workings of Fate had thrown this man here? And he would not have been here but for her. But for her persistence he would have been miles and miles behind, left to perish miserably on the lonely deep. The other passengers had treated her statement with good-humoured ridicule; the captain himself would hardly be persuaded to put back—and what if he had not? But he had—and it had been entirely due to her that he had. She had saved Wagram’s life—as surely as any life ever had been saved—she and she alone.
The sweetness of the thought began to soothe her, and sleep seemed to be coming at last. Then, through it, something—perhaps the sight of the smooth sea through which the great liner was rushing on even keel—brought back to her mind certain words uttered on a woodland road in the dusk of a winter afternoon; weird words about green seas, smooth and oily, and a battered ship, and terrors—and, perhaps, death, but, if not death, then great happiness. The croakings of the old gipsy came back now—and, good heavens! what coincidence was this? Here were all the conditions—the smooth seas and the battered hulk—the terror gone through—terrors of every kind, up to that of being left on the derelict—the agony of seeing this ark of safety recede from reach of call. “Perhaps death?” He had been snatched from death at that moment, snatched from it by her, as surely as though by her own hand. “But, if not death, then great happiness.” In the hot, thick stillness of the night Delia’s brain was busy. The prediction had been directed to herself, not to him. And then it seemed to merge into a joint prediction, but—great happiness? Well, was it not? She had rescued him from death—she alone. Was not that a great happiness? Further, it would be nearly a fortnight ere they reached England, and during that time she would see him daily, talk with him, under conditions of which a week was equivalent to a year under the old state of things. Would not that be “great happiness?”
And then she remembered not only the prediction, but the scorn and contempt with which he had treated both it and its utterer, extending just an overflow ripple of it to her. And with a smile at the recollection she fell into a quiet sleep. Nearly a whole fortnight of happiness—great happiness—lay before her.
In the event so it proved. From the next morning, when they met—he clothed and barbered, and looking exactly as she remembered him in the dear old days of yore—“clothed, and in his right mind” as he smilingly told her in his old, dry, humorous way—pacing the deck in the cool hours, or seated in some snug, shady corner in roomy deck-chairs, talking about home—they two were nearly always together; and the home-sick wanderer felt at home already, and the girl forgot for the time her own dreary prospects, with the struggle for life all opening out before her, to be begun and gone through again. He would go back to luxury and his high estate, while she—? Yet even this she forgot in those sweet, dreamy, sunny days which would soon—only too soon—be over.