“I am used to rough things,” said the girl. “I dread the smooth. Captain Bontemps, for one who has done for me everything should I dread anything? And a little roughness, what is that to freedom and the life I have learned to love with the man I love? For I love Raft, Captain Bontemps, just as I know he loves me. Oh, do not mistake me, it is not the sort of thing they call love here amongst houses and streets, it is not a woman that is speaking to you but a human being.”
He understood her. To his broad and simple mind the thing was simple; she did not want to part with the man who had saved her and fought for her and who had been “chucked out” of a hotel because he was a rough sailor, and marvellously well he understood that when she said she loved Raft she did not mean the thing that the dock side called Love. No Paris poet could have understood her. The old fisher captain did.
But he was a practical man. He struck himself a blow on the head.
“I have what you want,” said he, “La Belle Arlesienne, no, it is no use, I have something better, a good cruising boat—you say money is no object.”
“None.”
“Then come with me, you two.”
He led the way followed by Raft and the girl to a wharf where a tug lay moored and by the tug a fifty ton yawl.
“There’s your boat,” said Bontemps, “built by Pinoli of Genoa for an American. She has even a bath-room—a main cabin with two cabins off it, your man could berth in the fo’c’sle which is big enough for twenty like him. Follow me.”
He led the way on to the deck of the yawl.
The girl went over it down below into the main cabin with two little sleeping cabins off it. She peeped into the tiny bath-room, examined the pantry well-stored with crockeryware, there was everything even to the bunk bedding, sheets and towels, she went to the fo’c’sle; compared with the fo’c’sle of the Albatross it was a little palace.