Ratcliffe nodded.
At that moment Jude came on deck blinking and hitching up her trousers. She had washed her face and made herself a bit more tidy,—perhaps because she had remembered it was Sunday or perhaps because company had come on board. She had evidently put her whole head into the water. It was dripping, and as she stood with the old panama in her hand and her cropped hair drying in the sun Ratcliffe observed her anew and thought that he had never seen a more likable figure. Jude would never be pretty, but she was better than pretty,—healthy, honest and capable, trusting and fearless, easily reflecting laughter, and with a trace of the irresponsibility of youth. It was a face entirely original and distinctive. Dirty, it was the face of a larrikin; washed, a face such as I have attempted to describe; and the eyes were extraordinary,—liquid-gray, with a look of distance, when she was serious, a look acquired perhaps from life among vast sea spaces.
“Where’s Satan?” asked Jude.
Ratcliffe pointed.
Jude, shading her eyes, looked. Then she laughed.
“Thought he was up to somethin’,” said she. “He’s gone to kid that officer man out of some more truck.”
In a flash Ratcliffe saw the reason of Satan’s activities, and in another flash he saw again, or seemed to see, in Satan and Jude a pair of gipsies of the sea. A gipsies’ caravan camped close to a neat villa,—that was the relationship between the Sarah Tyler and the Dryad,—and Satan was the caravan man gone round to the villa’s back door to return an empty portmanteau and blarney the servants out of scraps and old odds and ends not wanted, maybe to commandeer a chicken or nick a doormat—heaven only knew! He remembered the fancy Satan had taken to the dinghy. And he, Ratcliffe, had thrown in his lot with these people! Fishing cruise! Rubbish! Gipsy patter, sea thimblerigging, wreck-picking, and maybe petty larceny from Guadaloupe to dry Tortugas,—that was what he had signed on for. Why, the Sarah Tyler, could she have been hauled into any law court, would have stood convicted on her very appearance! Jude was honest enough in her way; but her way was Satan’s way, and she had owned up with steadfast, honest eyes to the plundering of a brig and the caching of the plunder. They were “passons to what Pap had been,” but they were his offspring, and the law to them was no doubt what it had been to him,—a something to be avoided or outwitted, like a dangerous animal.
All these thoughts running through his head did not disturb him in the least. Far from that! The reckless in him had expanded since he had cut the cable connecting him with the Dryad, and not for worlds would he have changed the Sarah into a vessel of more conventional form, or altered Satan from whatever he might be into a figure of definite respectability.
He reckoned that if Satan broke the law he would be clever enough to avoid the consequences. His tongue alone would get him out of most fixes, and just this touch of gipsiness in the business gave a new flavor to life,—the flavor boys seek when they raid orchards and hen-roosts and go pirating with corked faces and lath swords.
“He’s goin’ aboard her,” said Jude.