“Well, sor, the captain’s going to marry the young lady at four o’clock the day, unless somebody stops him. And the only way to stop him is to foight him. It’s a big man an’ a bad man he is, sor. Are ye game for it?”
Howard smiled. “Oh! yes. I’m game,” he declared.
“Then I’ll get ye out in good time. Tare and ’oun’s, but it’ll be a grand foight entoirely.”
XI
In accepting Captain Forbes’s invitation to supper Dorothy had taken it for granted that the other two survivors of the Queen were included, and was somewhat startled to find that they were not.
“Gallegher insisted on your friends eating with him,” explained Forbes, with a smile. “He declared that I might have the best, but that I shouldn’t hog everything, and I had to give in.”
Dorothy accepted the explanation, but her heart beat anxiously. Nor was her anxiety lessened by Captain Forbes’s attitude. Had she not been warned of his probable designs, she might have passed over his behavior as merely the would-be gallantry of an uncultivated man, and even then would have found it sufficiently offensive. But, in view of all she had been told, its import quickly became portentous. Between extravagant compliments, often so pointed as to cause her considerable embarrassment, Forbes sandwiched encomiums of the life on the wreckage, for support of which he appealed to Mother Joyce, declaring that Dorothy would soon submit to the inevitable, and settle down to remain there for life. All suggestions as to the possibility of escape he pushed aside.
“Our known history of life here goes back for more than fifty years,” he declared, “and in that time nobody has escaped. Nobody ever will. It’s impossible. You will fight against the idea for awhile, and then settle down to enjoy yourself.”
“Enjoy myself!”
“Why not? We have everything here that any one needs—all the necessaries, and far more of the luxuries than any except a very few favored people enjoy anywhere. We have a storehouse full of everything that delights a woman, and if it was destroyed to-morrow, we could easily fill it again. Duplicates of all its contents will drift in to us again sooner or later on some ship. Ask what you will, and it will be my delight to lay it at your feet.”