"Paul Lavelle, it is my work," the gold woman said firmly. "I've been a loafer—an idling nothing—a leaner all my life. I've never helped until now. You've taught me how. You can't unteach me. If my hands can aid this poor old man to keep a hold upon life they are going to do it. If they can make his going out any easier they are going to do it. My God, the thought—that it might be you—and a woman would turn away from—from you——"
Her voice broke. Tears choked her. She put an arm against the bulkhead and buried her face in it, away from Paul's sight. Her nobility of soul chastened his spirit. It exalted him. In silence he went out into the night. Strangely there lingered in his brain as he went about the ship two sentences Emily had uttered with unwonted fire: "You've taught me how. You can't unteach me."
There was much for the Daphne's new skipper to do. While the calm gave no sign of breaking and the lounge barometer held steady for fair weather, still the longer he contemplated the task of handling the Daphne the bigger it grew in his sight. He could not afford to let any precaution which suggested itself pass unembraced. So he turned to work on the theory that it is easier to let out a reef in a breeze than it is to furl a sail in a gale. He cut his coat according to the cloth he had. He double-reefed the foresail and the topsails and, with the donkey engine's aid, found it not such a hard task as he had imagined it might be. Steam hauled the blocks of the reef tackles closer together than sailor hands could ever have brought them. The best he could do with the mainsail was stopper it with gaskets. It would have been vain and futile to have tried to roll the heavy canvas up on its yard. He knew if it should come on to blow that the wind would take care of it as he left it, but he could not help it.
The last thing he did forward was to put the hatch covers on and bar them down. The tarpaulin had been burned or thrown overboard by the mutineers, but Paul felt certain that little water could enter the Daphne there.
As he went aft he was surprised to see a light in Elston's room. Peering through the port under the gangway ladder leading to the poop he saw Emily writing at the dead boy's desk. She stirred slightly as his eyes rested on her and as if conscious of another presence. A sense of guilt startled Paul and he hastened aft to reef down the spanker.
With the finishing of that task the skipper leaned wearily against the wheel and surveyed the things he had done alow and aloft. The moon, which, twenty-four hours gone, he had never expected to see rise again, presently caught him in its spell. It was now nearly two hours high over the bark's starboard quarter. In its beams the Daphne seemed but the delicate tracery of a ship o' dreams. It powdered the vessel with a silvery dust; enveloped her in a mystic, spiritual splendor. The gilded trucks gleamed like true gold. Masts and spars, shrouds and stays and running gear were invested with a fairy grace. The coarse, heavy sails had become gossamer in their fineness—butterfly wings at rest. The night, as if for the very beauty of the scene, wept upon the fabric in dewy tears of pearl and opal and sparkling diamond.
Emerging from the lounge Emily was caught in the moonlight's enhancement. For a second it swept from her mind what had brought her seeking Lavelle. Paul, staring aloft, did not see her nor did he hear her footfall. A hiss of steam from the donkey boiler's safety escape, which had been set at a very low pressure, broke the spell.
"It seems helpless—weak to say that words fail one in expressing a thought—an impression," said the gold woman. "But all I can say—I must say the trite thing: How wondrously beautiful!"
Her words but expressed the thought that had leaped into Paul's mind at discovering her and which he had bravely denied utterance.
"The sea has no fairer sight to give men than this—unless it is a square-rigged vessel like the Daphne, 'a towering cloud of canvas,' driving along over the deep in such a light. But how is the stranger?"