The tiller was in charge of an old man with peering pale-blue eyes and tremulous siccated hands. Yet he had an astonishingly potent voice, and issued orders, in tones like the grating of metal edges, to a loutish youth in a ragged shirt and bare legs. The cabin, partly covered, was filled with bagged bales; a small space had been left for the steersman, and forward the deck was littered with untidy ropes and swab, windlass bar and other odds.
Elim Meikeljohn moved forward to assist Rosemary on to the sloop, but she evaded his hand and jumped lightly down upon the deck, Indy, grumbling and certain of catastrophe, was safely got aboard, and Elim helped the youth to push the craft's bow out into the stream. The grimy mainsail rose slowly, the jib was set, and they deliberately gathered way, slipping silently between the timbered banks, emerging from the thin pungent influence of the smoking ruins.
Behind them the sun transfused the veiled city into a coppery blur that gradually sank into a tender-blue dusk. Indy had arranged a place with the most obtainable comfort for Rosemary Roselle; she sat with her back against the mast, gazing toward the bank, stealing backward, at the darkening trees moving in solemn procession.
After the convulsed and burning city, the uproar of guns and clash of conflict, the quiet progress of the sloop was incredibly peaceful and withdrawn. Elim felt as if they had been detached from the familiar material existence and had been set afloat in a stream of silken shadows. The wind was behind them, the boom had been let far but, the old steersman drowsed at his post, and the youth had fallen instantly asleep in a strange cramped attitude.
Elim was standing at the stern—he had conceived it his duty to stay as far away from Rosemary Roselle as her wish plainly indicated; but, in this irrelated phase of living, he gradually lost his sense of responsibility and restrained conduct. He wanted extravagantly to be near Rosemary, to be where he could see her clearly. Perhaps, but this was unlikely, she would speak to him. His desire gradually flooded him; it induced a species of careless heroism, and he made his way resolutely forward and sat on a heap of rope at a point where he could study her with moderate propriety and success. She glanced at him momentarily when he took his place—he saw that her under lip was capable of an extremely human and annoying expression—and returned to her veiled scrutiny of the sliding banks.
An unfamiliar emotion stirred at Elim's heart; and in his painstaking introspective manner he exposed it. He found a happiness that, at the same time, was a pain; he found an actual catch in his throat that was a nebulous desire; he found an utter loneliness together with the conviction that this earth was a place of glorious possibilities of affinity. Principally he was conscious of an urging of his entire being toward the slight figure in black, staring with wide bereft eyes into the gathering evening. On the other side of the mast, Indy was sleeping with her head upon her breast. The feeling in Elim steadily increased in poignancy—faint stars appearing above the indefinite foliage pierced him with their beauty, the ashen-blue sky vibrated in a singing chord, the river divided in whispering confidences on the bow of the sloop.
Elim Meikeljohn debated the wisdom of a remark; his courage grew immeasurably reckless.
“The wind and river are shoving us along together.” Pronounced, the sentence seemed appallingly compromising; he had meant that the wind and river together, not—
She made no reply; one hand, he saw, stirred slightly.
Since he had not been blasted into nothingness, he continued: