“Ah, Bess,” he said, taking her into his arms and kissing her, “why didn’t you give me a chance before?”
Half an hour later Bessy Inigo went forward to peel potatoes for dinner, while Stukeley slept upon the locker-top till the steward roused him at one bell.
He went on deck, when he was called, to get a breath of air before dinner. He found Olivia at work with her little balls of silk, while Perrin, on the lee side of the skylight, was drawing for her a ship upon canvas. Perrin was talking to Olivia, asking her questions about her work. At the break of the poop Captain Cammock stood, waiting with his quadrant to take the height of the sun.
Olivia looked up with a smile as Stukeley stepped on deck. She was still in that rapturous first stage of marriage in which all men, save the husband, are regarded as hardly living, as being, at best, but necessary cumberers of the earth, mere lifeless interruptions. In the early days of the voyage she had learned, from one of Captain Cammock’s stories, that people shut up in ships together cannot always bear the strain, but become irritable, quarrelsome, apt to suspect and slander. She had determined that her married love should not decay thus, and so, for some weeks past, she had contrived to avoid her husband for several hours each day, greatly to the delight of Perrin. On this particular day she felt that Providence had rewarded her but meanly for her loving self-sacrifice. All men, save Tom, were nothing to her, but Perrin, in the morning, in one of his dull moods, when unrelieved by Margaret, was less than nothing. She had always been a little shy of Perrin, perhaps because Perrin’s shyness was a bar to equal intercourse. Her own nature was full of shy refinements. She could give nothing of herself to one who could not win upon her by some grace or gallantry. Perrin meant well; he was even her devoted slave; but he was heavy in the hand with ladies, until their sympathy had raised his spirit. Olivia was not in the mood to give him even that simulated sympathy by which women extract their knowledge of men. Her own fine instincts told her, or rather suggested to her, all that could be known of Perrin. In a vague way she had the idea of Perrin in her mind, the true idea; but vague, without detail, an instinctive comprehension. He was a blunted soul to her, broken somehow. She felt that he had been through something, some vice perhaps, or sickness, with the result that he was blunted. He was quite harmless, she thought, even sometimes pleasant, always well-meaning, and yet dwarfed, made blunt, like his shapeless hands. She never could bring herself to treat him as a human being. Yet he interested her; he had the fascination of all mysterious persons; she could never accept her husband’s contemptuous estimate. Possibly she felt the need for the society of another lady, and hesitated to condemn Perrin, as being the nearest thing to a lady in the ship. Thus Robinson Crusoe on his island unduly valued a parrot.
About half an hour before her husband came on deck, Olivia had seen Perrin coming down from aloft, where he had been engaged with a seaman in fitting new spunyarn gaskets to all the yards on the mainmast, so that the furls might look neat when they made Virginia. He enjoyed his work aloft until he grew hot, when he soon found a pretext for leaving it. On reaching the deck, he went aft to Olivia (who smiled her recognition), and sat down at her side, content to stay still, to cool. The sight of Olivia’s beauty so near to him filled him with a kind of awe. Like a schoolboy impressed by some beautiful woman who is gracious to him, perhaps merely from that love of youth which all women have, so did Perrin imagine heroisms, rescuing that dear head, now bent with a shy sweetness over her mat.
“Olivia,” he said at length, about a minute after the proper time for the request, “will you show me what you have done?”
She looked up from her work with a smile that was half amusement at his serious tone.
“I’ve not done very much,” she said, showing her canvas, with its roses, surrounded by a garland of verbena leaves, still little more than outlined. “Did you ever try to make mats?” she added.
“I can make daisy-mats with wool, on a frame with pins,” he answered. “Can you make those? You cut them, and they show like a lot of daisies.”
“I used to make them,” she said, “when I went to stay with my aunt Pile, at Eltons. You were at Eltons, too, were you not? I think you stayed there?”