Within her, her soul was crying out to him. It was as if there was a tide there, as fierce and passionate as the waves around her, all bearing, straining to him, and this with a struggle and flow so resistless, that she could neither remember the past, nor measure the future, but only feel herself carried on, beaten and tossed upon these great waters, like a helpless wreck.
"I trust you are well attended to," began the man constrainedly again. "I fear you will have to endure much discomfort. I had reckoned——." Here he halted galled by the thought of what it was he had reckoned upon, the thought of the watchful love that was to have made of the little ship a very nest for his bride, of the exquisite joy it was to have harboured! And he set his teeth at fate.
She played for a while with her little finger tips upon the rail, then turned her gaze, full and bold, upon him.
"I do not complain," she said.
He bowed gravely. "We will do our best for you, and if you will take patience, the time will pass at last, as all time passes. I have a few books, they shall be brought into your cabin. In three days we shall be in St. Malo—There, if you like——" he hesitated, embarrassed.
"There!" echoed Lady Landale with her eyes still fixed upon his downcast face—"If I like—what?"
"We could leave you——"
Her bosom rose and fell quickly with stormy breaths. "Alone, moneyless, in a strange town—that is well and kindly thought!" she said.
Whence had come to her this strange power of feeling pain? She had not known that one could suffer in one's heart like this; she, whose quarrel with life hitherto had been for its too great comfort, security and peace. She felt a lump rise to her throat, and tears well into her eyes, blurring all the sunlit vision and she turned her head away and beat her sound left hand clenched upon the ledge.
"Before heaven," cried Jack, distressed out of his unnatural stiffness, "you mistake me, Lady Landale! I am only anxious to do what is best for you, what Adrian would wish. To leave you alone, deserted, helpless at St. Malo, you could not have thought I should mean that? No, indeed, I would have seen you into safe hands, in some comfortable hotel, with a maid to wait upon you—I know of such a place—Adrian could not have been long in coming to fetch you. I should have had a letter ready to post to him the instant we landed. As to money," flushing boyishly, "that is the least consideration—there is no dearth of that to fear. If you prefer it I can, however, convey you somewhere upon the English coast after we quit St. Malo; but that will entail a longer residence for you here on board ship; and it is no fit place for you."