CHAPTER XXX.
JOAN TELLS HER STORY.
And we are Homeward Bound.
Mr. Bob Sawyer, I believe, expressed his opinion upon a famous occasion that there was no medicine in all the world half so efficacious or so infallible as rum punch—to which axiom he added the rider that if any man had ever failed to derive benefits from this nectar, it was because he had not taken enough of it. Such a doctrine, for my part, I find incontrovertible. There is no cure for an overdose of cold water so swift and certain as the remedy the excellent Robert has prescribed. There is assuredly none so rarely declined or so readily sampled by the patient.
I am an exceedingly strong man—and, despite the assertions of my dear sister Harriet, my constitution is of iron. No common exercise tires me; I can walk all day and be the better for my walk at bed-time. I have swum five miles in the sea on two occasions, and defied all the faculty after a wetting more times than I care to remember. If it be foolish to boast overmuch of such a catalogue of physical merits, I set them down here that I may speak of the hours following upon my rescue with that brevity they deserve, and spare the reader any pedantic account of them.
It had been Okyada’s hand which dragged me from the sea, and Larry himself who steered the boat which discovered me. Despite the fog, that lynx-eyed captain of mine had dogged every movement of the Diamond Ship, had stood so close to her throughout the adventure that he could sometimes have tossed a biscuit to her decks. When the rabble chased me to the bridge, his keen ear had detected the commotion. He heard me leap for my life, and guessed instantly the nature of the situation which drove me to this extremity. His express commands had kept the long boat in the sea from the beginning, and in the sea she swam when I had most need of her. They told me afterwards that a crew had manned her and was away before you could have counted twenty. It must have been so, as the outcome shows.
Now, these good fellows, dragging their prize by the head and the heels as seamen will in bursts of nautical ecstasy, bundled me into the boat and the blankets almost by one and the same movement; and rowing swiftly to the yacht, they fought their way through the little knot of anxious men, and had me rubbed down like a dog and safely in my own bed almost before I realised that they were my friends at all, or that their vigilance had saved me from the sea. For my own part, I suffered them as one suffers a man who insists upon an exhibition of his goodwill and is not to be repulsed. I had no pain, be it said, no sense of weakness, no symptom either of exhaustion or of extreme cold. Whatever emotion agitated me was chiefly the emotion of friendship, and of the sure knowledge that Joan Fordibras was on the ship, that she moved and breathed near by me, and, with God’s help, would remain my prisoner to the end of my days. For, be assured that, despite old Timothy, who roared for the hot water and the lemons in a voice that could have been heard in the truck, little Joan had taken as proud command of that cabin five minutes after I entered it as any commander of a ship who hoists his pennant at Portsmouth. Nor had anyone the right to drive her thence or to take that place she occupied so gracefully.
How gentle is a woman’s hand in the hour of our misfortunes; how unmatched her sympathy and unwearying her patience! These old truths we know as copybook maxims, and yet there are few who understand them truly until illness is their master and captivity their lot. I was not ill—bed was no proper place for me—and yet I lay there watching Joan, afraid almost to speak, wistful of her care, gratitude as surely in my heart as though this had been a house of sickness, and she had been its ministering angel! How silently, how deftly, she moved! There was grace in every movement I thought, grace and sweetness and light. And she was my Joan of Dieppe again. The shadow of the Valley House no longer dwelt upon her childish face.
I suppose it would have been early in the new day when Joan took charge of me, and old Timothy brewed the punch and Larry came and went from the cabin to the bridge as a man full of anxieties, and yet in some sense content that it should be so. These foolish nurses of mine had so far told me nothing, nor did they hear me talking with equanimity. An immersion in the sea is often regarded by a sailor, of all men, as a dreadful tragedy. Few of this trade can swim, nor does a sailor ever look upon the water as other than an enemy. So now Larry would have kept me to my bed, smothered in blankets, and dosed like an old salt with Timothy’s rum. It is little wonder that I became almost angry at their solicitude.
“Why do you do all this, Joan?” I asked her, when half an hour of it had passed. “Am I a child to be petted and spoiled because its pinafore is wet? Tell Captain Larry that I am coming up to the bridge. You cannot suppose that I shall be content to lie here now. Tell him I am coming up at once. It is nonsense to make such a fuss.”