He made two voyages in this ship, when a sick and dying second mate left a vacancy, and this vacancy was filled by Bridge, who had attracted the captain's attention by his intelligence and energy. An officer now, his progress was more rapid. He reached farther, laying in for private use magazines and standard works of the world's literature, and gave himself that quiet self-confidence so valuable in conversation, and so difficult for a seaman to acquire. His voice, while losing none of its power to be heard against the wind, became softer and evenly modulated. Few could have told, from his manner and personality that he had not gone through the usual course of an English apprentice, with a capital of good home influences to start with, and a protection from bad as he advanced. No captious shipowner's wife would have said he was not a gentleman.
In seven years from the birth of his ambition, with an English master's certificate and an American ocean license to his credit, he shipped first mate of a large sky-sailyard American ship at New York, and at the orders of the agent who had engaged him took her down to the Horseshoe to await the captain, who was also the owner, he said, and was to join her on the day of sailing. The captain came on the tug that was to tow them to sea, and stepped aboard, brisk, bewhiskered, and peppery, and with him was a young woman who, as Bridge was introduced, he said was his daughter, who would make the voyage with them.
Bridge, after seeing them below, went forward to the windlass, with his brain reeling as it had reeled on the forecastle deck of the liner. The captain was the breezy person who had noticed him scrubbing paint, the daughter the child that had come to him on lookout—whom he still imagined as a child, but now grown to womanhood, and with the same pure, clean-cut face, the same wealth of golden hair, and dark wondering blue eyes—the living, breathing, matured, and perfected image of the little girl that had gone to the angels twenty years ago. He felt, as he supervised the weighing of the anchor, as he had felt when this little girl had come forward to sing to the school, the glorified sense of recognition, and, added to it, the uplift of victory and achievement, the content that comes of long search and the finding of the thing sought. He knew this woman, knew her well, though she had not spoken a word. He knew her now as part of himself, that he had missed, and found. And she was here, in the same ship with him! He would see her daily!
But, as a matter of fact, he saw very little at first. He was a watch officer, who slept part of each day; and a suspicious and peppery father, with an eye out for good looks in an otherwise efficient and valuable first mate, saw to it that she took her meals with him in his own after cabin, and also that she took her daily exercise on deck when Bridge was asleep and the ship in charge of the second mate, an unbeauteous and beauty proof old sea dog. In the exercise of this watchful function of fatherhood, the old man grew more and more peppery in his manner toward Bridge and his crew, and finally took no pains to conceal an actual dislike for the first mate, which no amount of professional care and forethought on his part could offset.
And it was all wasted energy as far as Bridge was concerned, for a more inoffensive and non-progressive lover never loved. Try as he might, he could not bring himself to address her when they occasionally met, unless she spoke to him first. She seemed to carry in her personality an inhibition on his thought, speech, and action that prevented an overture. And this continued until the ship had rounded the Cape of Good Hope and sailed along the fortieth parallel to the vicinity of St. Paul, by which time the father, having worried himself into insomnia, was compelled to relax his vigilance by the physical necessity of sleeping as long as he could, night or day, whenever sleep came to him, and the daughter, intent upon matters far removed from love and lovers, unconsciously placed herself in the way of a better acquaintance with Bridge.
She came on deck alone one night in the first watch, when the ship was tearing along before a quarterly breeze that she could barely carry the kites under, and from the break of the poop watched Bridge on the main deck giving the last orders toward the setting of a main royal staysail; then, as he mounted the poop steps, she accosted him.
"Mr. Bridge," she said, holding up her father's sextant, "will you please point out to me the Magellan Clouds and the Coal Sacks?"
"Why, certainly," said Bridge, all his shyness vanishing. "Come around to the lee quarter, Miss Munson. I've noticed you before with the sextant. Studying navigation?"
"Yes, as I can. Father has tutored me, and I've got as far as meridian observations and chronometer time; but I want to go farther, and father is a bad teacher. He's somewhat cross, and, Mr. Bridge, do you know I think I'm going beyond him!" She smiled a little roguishly.
"That ought to be easy," answered Bridge. "You are young, with a fresh mind. It is hard for men to study."