The terror had not left her eyes, and she glanced astern to where the ugly shape was burying itself in the gloom. She was an impressionable girl, and that loathsome object, rising as it were out of the bottom of the deep, clanking, sighing, brought to her an epitome of all the fear and mystery of the great, dark, silent waste. And she looked at the Captain with new interest. Here was one of the men who brave these things, who brave great big problems, who face the unknown and a future as full of mystery, as fraught with evil possibilities as when the first mariner put out to the Beyond in a boat hollowed from a tree. In a flash that derelict taught her to read Dan better; gave her a better insight into the look that she sometimes caught in his steely, inscrutable eyes, and the grave lines in his sun-bronzed face. And in the light of this knowledge her soul went out to this man, this type of man, so strange, so utterly foreign to a girl brought up in an environment where such types do not exist.
She held out her hand.
"I am going to my stateroom now, Captain. Good-night. We are going to be better friends, aren't we?"
"Thank you," said Dan; and he watched her tall, white form as it disappeared down the deck. He gazed moodily out at the dark horizon. Friends! He searched himself thoroughly, and he could not deny the truth as formulated in his mind. Friends! How hollow the word sounded! He knew how hollow it would seem all through his life.
Better it should be nothing. Yes, far better, instinct told him that. Miss Howland had come into his existence, radiant, pure, beautiful, and so utterly feminine; as a meteor flashing across the night pauses for a brief instant in the sky before shivering to nothingness. This simile occurred to Dan, who, though no poet, was at least a sailor and as such a student of the heavenly bodies. Yes, a meteor which had illumined his life.
He had never permitted himself to think in this way before. It is doubtful if before to-night he could have felt as he now did. It had all come over him suddenly with a rush. When he talked with her at the hotel in San Blanco he was filled with thoughts of his future, and assumed as granted his footing upon her plane. How absurd, how ridiculous this seemed now!
Why, why was it, he asked himself, that society or convention or whatever it was had drawn the grim chevaux de frise between those who had accomplished, or whose forebears had accomplished for them, and those who were yet to accomplish; with hosts eager to applaud the achievements of finality, but who had no adequate encouragement for those who had yet to achieve their mission, who fought their battles in the dark and won them in the glorious light, or losing, sank back into that oblivion out of which they had striven to emerge?
If fate had been different—yet if fate had been different he would never have seen her, perhaps. Yes, he should be satisfied; he had seen his star. And when it faded, as fade it must, in the vastness of the dark—why, what then? Well, at least he had seen his star; even this much is denied many. So, he would live it out and be thankful he had been permitted to feel the great thrill—to know that at least he had the heart for the greatest passion the world knows. Poor consolation, he told himself with a grim smile. And yet he who hitches his chariot to a star might well be content with less.