“That and many more things you will learn, Miss Baldwin,” he said impressively. “You are beginning a new life. The new impulses you feel are the commands of your true spirit, stricken free of the bonds of civilization. Obey them. Remember, they are your true self; there can be for you no realization of the full possibilities of life save along the way they lead you. There is hidden country in all of us, and until we explore it we don’t know what it is to live.”
He sat back in his chair, smiling, satisfied.
“And now you must excuse me; my thirty minutes are up and I have promised Riordan thirty minutes to dine.” As he bowed and rose his glance went across the table to me. “Now, Mr. Pitt, I will wager, never has felt a call to be free—to explore any hidden country.”
I did not reply.
“No, Mr. Pitt is not one of us. But, Miss Baldwin,” he concluded, bending over her as he passed out, “you are. Your true life is about to begin.”
And she followed him with her eyes as he left the room, though there was that in her expression which suggested that she did so unwillingly.
“Ah!”
The faintest exclamation of relief escaped her lips as the captain disappeared. She sank back in her chair as if suddenly released. She looked around; our eyes met. She excused herself in a dazed sort of fashion and went to her room.
Hours afterward I was pacing the deck. It was another pitch-dark night, and to one fresh from the glare of New York, the darkness was well-nigh appalling. The Wanderer’s searchlight seemed only a thin knife-gash, parting the darkness before us. On either side of its beam the blackness of night stood like a wall. There were no stars to be seen above. East, north, south and west, naught but the dead night; below, only the hiss of unseen waters through which we were rushing toward—what?
I shuffled to and fro on the deck, caring neither where nor how I was going. The scene between Brack and Miss Baldwin at the dinner-table repeated itself again and again, each time with a new, sinister significance. I know what power lay within Brack’s eyes. Had they not roused me and thrilled me and made me fighting mad, which was exactly what Brack, in idle sport wished to do? What would be the effect of his will, gleaming through his glances, on a woman, on a young, inexperienced girl like Miss Baldwin? For after all, she was nothing but an inexperienced girl. Yes, I told myself, she was so inexperienced, so ignorant, through the sheltered life she had lived, that she did not know enough to recognize a distressing situation when she met it. She was brave because she didn’t have sense enough to be cautious.