"I'm only sorry I haven't been able to get rid of Captain Dove right away, but it won't be long now till—You needn't worry any more about him. I'll see that he behaves better.
"If there's anything else I can do for your comfort, you must let me know. And now, I'll leave you to your own devices until it's time to start on our travels. Better get a rest while you can, eh? We've a very busy week ahead of us."
She saw that he did not intend to tell her any more in the meantime, and was glad to see him go. Then she called Ambrizette in for company, and sat down by the window again, to try to sort out for herself the bewildering tangle that life had once more become within a few hours.
Gazing out across the familiar sea with wistful, far-away eyes, she mused for a time over what Captain Dove had told Mr. Jobling of her history, and strove to piece together with that all she herself could recall of that dim and always more mysterious past out of which she had come to be Captain Dove's property, bought and paid for, at a high price, as he had repeated several times.
Her own earliest vague, disconnected, ineffectual memories were all of some dark, savage mountain-country; of endless days of travel; of camp-fires in the cold, and hungry camels squealing for fodder; of the fragrant cinnamon-smell of the steam that came from the cooking-pots.
Before, or, it might have been, after that, she had surely lived on some seashore, in a shimmering white village with narrow, crooked lanes for streets and little flat-roofed houses huddled together among hot sandhills where the suddra grew and lean goats bleated always for their kids.
Then, as if in a very vexing dream, she could almost but never quite see, through the thickening mist of the years, once-familiar faces—white men, with swords, in ragged uniforms, and big brown ones with wicked eyes and long, thin guns, glaring down at her over a high wall, through smoke and fire, and fighting, and the acrid reek of powder....
And there remembrance grew blank altogether, until it connected with Captain Dove, on the deck of a slaving-dhow far out of sight of any land. She had been only a little child when he had carried her up the side of his own ship in his arms, while she laughed gleefully in his face and pulled at his shaggy moustache, but she could still remember some of the incidents of that day.
She had lived on board his successive ships ever since. And ever since, until recently, he had always been very good to her, in his own queer, gruff way. He had always treated her as though she were a child of his own, shielding her, in so far as he could, from even the knowledge of all the evil which he had done up and down the world. She had grown up in the belief that his despotic guardianship was altogether for her good and not to be disputed.
But now—she was no longer a child. And all her old, unquestioning faith in his inherent good intentions, toward her at least, was finally shattered. She knew now that he really looked upon her as a mere chattel, with a cash value—just as if she had been one of the hapless cargo of human cattle confined in the pestiferous hold of the dhow on whose deck he had found her at play. She knew now that he had bought and paid for them as well as her, and sold them again at a fat profit, far across the seas—all but the dumb, deformed black woman whom he had picked from among them to act as her nurse.