"This is the passenger for whom I engaged the cabin. She will, by your leave, take possession of it at once." So saying, he led her gently forward and disappeared at the companion-way, conducted by the captain.
Every face on deck had grown pale, and every heart throbbed with the conviction that we had just beheld the consummation of a most desperate and bloody deed. It was evident the girl had been snatched suddenly from the harem of some palace, probably from the royal seraglio itself, off which we had been lying. And the horror depicted on her face, as well as the stains of blood on her abductor, told with what ruthless violence. Here then, I thought, in all human probability, was the royal maiden I had summoned; here was the wildest vagary of my imagination realized. But how different from the bright fancy was the woful reality!
Soon the captain returned on deck, pale and excited like the rest of us, and ordered a rash amount of sail to be set. The mate, a bluff, powerful man, swore an oath that we should first understand the meaning of what had just transpired.
"I know no more about it than you do," avowed the captain, "except that it's a piece of business very likely to bring all our heads to the block unless we show a clean pair of heels for it. So now avast jawing, and obey orders!"
"Never! boys," I said, "till we are assured of that girl's safety. What's done cannot be helped; but if she suffers further wrong in our midst, we ought all to be hanged as cowardly accessories to it."
"Dismiss your uneasiness in that regard," said a voice behind us, at whose sound there was a general start. "To keep her safe and inviolate is more my right and interest than yours, and it must therefore be my especial duty to do so; but if I fail in it, I care not though you make my life the forfeit, nor by what mode you exact it."
So saying, he took his place at the helm, a press of sail was set, and the ship fairly rent her way through the sea of Marmora before the tempest. But the ship, like all around, seemed to acknowledge his controlling power; and when I turned in with my watch, my sleep was undisturbed by any fear of wind or water, though it was full of troubled dreams. Now a lovely form in royal vesture beckoned to me from a lattice; anon the gleam of a lantern flickered across the terribly familiar face of a gnome, bearing out of a dark cavern an armful of the most precious jewels, which had a wild appealing in their light that puzzled me; while the roaring of the sea pervaded it all with a kind of dream harmony.
After a time, the fury of the tempest abated; but the ship still fled onward before strong gales, through those famous seas we had cruised so often in youthful fancy with the Greek and the Trojan, and the fear of pursuit ceased to haunt us.
Meanwhile we saw no more of our lovely passenger. Her strange guardian kept a watch beside her cabin door as vigilant as that of a sentinel at his post, or a saint before his shrine. His eye never swept the horizon behind us with an anxious gaze, as ours did, while we looked for the smoke of a pursuing steamer. Neither did it kindle at sight of the famous landmarks that measured our rapid course, each of which we hailed with delight as another harbinger of safety. He had ceased to perform the duties of a seaman, and devoted himself entirely to the care of the Invisible Princess, as we grew to call her. But though invisible to our eyes, hers was the pervading presence of our thoughts. Not a wave rocked the ship, not a cloud overshadowed it, not a morning breeze came fresh from the sea, or an evening breeze brought fragrance from the shore, but was thought of in some relation with her. There was none like her, we said, in the broad continents to right of us, to left of us, or before us; and we doubted if there was her like in the lands of enchantment we had left behind. Her wondrous beauty, the flashing of the jewels that encrusted her belt, and that seemed to gleam and sparkle all over her picturesque attire, the haunting look of those great, lustrous eyes, all the reminiscence of that eventful night,—how fondly we recurred to them again and again in the forecastle or the night-watch, and with what pleasure we recognized the first indications that her trance of terror had passed, and that she had resumed a living interest in the strange world around her.
First the open window of the cabin gave evidence that the balmy air and the pleasant shores we skirted were no longer indifferent to her; then came flitting glimpses of bright garments and brighter eyes quickly withdrawn from observation into the depths of the fairy grotto she inhabited; and finally, one beautiful moonlight evening, while most of the crew were on deck watching the lurid peak of Etna and the pavement of golden waves stretching toward it, and listening not to premonitions of Scylla or Charybdis, but to the song of the nightingales from the dim shore, or to tales of Enceladus and the Cyclops from Fred, and whimsical comments from Mike, she came hesitatingly forth, arousing an excitement and curiosity among us as intense as if she were a ghost arising from the tomb. Her dress was the same in which she had been brought among us, without addition of yashmak or veil of any kind,—excepting the mistiness of the moonlight,—to conceal her face, though there was a shy drawing down of the tasselled cap or turban she wore, that shadowed it somewhat.