The passengers, and the first officer, across the bridge canvas, watched all this with curiosity. They knew something but they did not know all. They did that night when she had told them as best she could.
After that she met him often on deck, giving him a word or stopping for a chat, and it was now that she began to think and make plans as to the future.
Raft had become part of herself, they were bound together as perhaps no two such contrary beings had ever been bound. The idea of Love, the idea of Marriage, all conventional ideas as between grown-ups of opposite sex were as absurd in relation to them as they would have been in relation to two children who had grown attached one to the other.
As regarded one another they were in fact two children, for Raft had never been anything but a child and Kerguelen and Raft combined had awakened the primitive and the child in her, giving her the power of affection that makes a little child throw its arm round the neck of a dog.
But the world could not understand that, and Raft to the world was a rough sailor man, and she, to the world, was Cléo de Bromsart.
She would lie awake at night listening to the pounding of the screws and thinking of this—contrasting the figure of Raft with the world she knew and the world she knew with the figure of Raft.
Madame de Brie, her nearest relation, would pass before her mind’s eye with her gold eye glasses, and the Comtesse de Mirandole and a host of others; and the queer thing was that the vaguest feeling of antagonism tinged her mind towards these estimable people. They seemed forgeries, impudent forgeries of the handwriting that had first written the word Man on the earth. She had seen the original writing.
She felt also towards them the antagonism of the child to the grown up, and of the person who can’t explain to the person who stands waiting for an explanation.
Then she would laugh quietly to herself, for no woman, surely, was ever in a similar position. Then, casting her mind back, she would sometimes choke a little with tears in her throat, tears for herself, dying of loneliness, and for the hand that had brought her back from death.
They passed the entrance of the straits and Gibraltar, and one bright blue winter’s morning they entered the harbour of Marseilles, with Marseilles before them blazing in the sun and the bugles of Fort St. Jean answering the crying of the gulls and the drums of Fort St. Nicholas.