Courtenay returned to the stairway. At the top stood Elsie, looking eagerly for his reappearance. A sense of unutterable anguish shook him for a second as he saw the sweet face, instinct with life and beauty, gazing down at him. How monstrous it was to think of such a fair woman being battered out of recognition against the rocks. He bit his lip savagely, and it is to be feared the words he swallowed were not those of supplication. But his eyes were calm and his voice well under control when he said:
“Dr. Christobal is captain below there, Miss Maxwell, and he absolutely vetoes your presence. He was exceedingly distressed at being compelled to send you such a message. However, he will soon explain matters to you in person, as he is coming aft almost at once.”
Elsie was disappointed. She dreaded the return to the saloon, with its queerly assorted company. When she quitted them, they were in a state of indescribable distress. Gray and the Englishman were helping the chief steward to adjust life-belts; but Isobel was in a frenzy of despair, her maid had fainted, de Poincilit and the Spaniards were muttering alternate appeals to the saints and oaths of utter abandonment, and Mrs. Somerville was almost unconscious, while her husband knelt by her side and wrung his hands in abject misery. Anything was better than to go back to that woful assembly, yet she choked down a protest and said quietly:
“I am ready. I am afraid I have been a bother to you, Captain Courtenay.”
“Say, rather, you have given me hope. I think Heaven has work for you to do in the world. Let me go out first. Never mind Joey. He can struggle along behind. Steady now. Head down and lean well against the wind.”
Elsie found, to her amazement, that there was less sense of danger in facing the wind than in being driven along before it. Moreover, she had greater confidence during this second transit over the exposed portion of the deck. She felt Courtenay dragging her on irresistibly until they gained the lee of the smoking-room. He let her rest there, beneath the ladder leading to the bridge. Then a strange revulsion of feeling came to him. He experienced an overwhelming desire not to be parted from her; he had a sickening fear that he might never see her again; so he shouted, very close to her cheek:
“Would you like to sit in my cabin a little while, if I bring Miss Baring?”
She thought that would be splendid. Courtenay, if any one, would succeed in calming Isobel. In order to make herself heard she, in turn, had to put her lips quite near to Courtenay’s face.
“Yes,” she cried, “I shall be only too pleased. But be patient with her; she is very frightened.”
There is no accounting for the workings of a man’s mind. Courtenay, at no time a lady’s man, most certainly had other matters to attend to just then. Yet here he was thinking only of a woman’s comfort. His dismal forebodings were banished by a rush of absurd delight at the thought that he would have an opportunity of speaking to her occasionally. What a brave girl she was! What a wife for a sailor! In truth, these were mad notions that jostled in his brain when his life and her’s were not worth an hour’s purchase. He drew her to the foot of the ladder.