He fell to wondering, among other things, what the spell was that drew him toward Jude and held him.
Was it the indefinable attractive quality that had made her mother a “nacheral calamity” where men were concerned, or just the power of youth? Scarcely the latter. He had met lots of youth in his time, and it had not attracted him much; besides, when you have only to look into the looking-glass to see youth, it is at a discount.
Puzzling over the matter, he came to the bedrock fact that Jude, in some extraordinary way, had the power to make him feel more alive than he had ever felt before.
Leaving other things aside, there were an honesty, faithfulness, and simplicity about Jude that removed her from the category of bifurcated beings and raised her to the level of a dog.
Instinct told him that this compound quality was worth more than all the gold lying under the hatches of the Nombre de Dios, more than all the diamonds in the Rand, when combined with that other quality speaking in her level gaze,—steadfastness, the something that would make her keep the wheel in all weathers.
But these excellencies would have been nothing without the impossibilities with which they were allied,—social and conventual impossibilities. The one reacted on the other, making an irresistible whole combined with the something else that was Jude.
He remembered the queer little laugh with which she had freed herself from his hand round her waist—then he fell asleep and dreamt that he and Jude and a lot of larrikins were lying in wait by a harbor blue as the sea off Jamaica, to clod bathing nigger girls; then he was chasing Jude round and round a tree, only to catch her and find that she was Carquinez.
When he got on deck next morning he found the ship deserted. The others were away on the sandbank, and he amused himself by fishing till they returned.
Jude showed no traces of the tears of the last night, and Satan was elated. He had been examining the wreck-wood, and his experienced eye backed the declaration of Jude. It was the foretop of a ship, right enough, and, a hundred to one, so he declared, the foretop of the Nombre.
Ratcliffe, wondering vaguely why he seemed so pleased over the find, considering the sand conditions, asked him the chances of raising her. Then said Satan, seeming to turn his gaze inward upon his awful and profound knowledge of the sea and its ways: