My Danish Sweetheart: A Novel. Volume 3 of 3

by William Clark Russell

He viewed her as though she were a picture that cannot be held in a new position without disclosing a fresh grace.

'You are too good and kind to be cruel,' said he, regarding her with deepening admiration, as it seemed to me. 'The Samaritan played his part fairly well yesterday, I believe?' He blandly bowed to her with a countenance of exquisite self-complacency. 'He is still on board, my dear young lady, with a character in essentials unchanged, merely enlarged.' Here he spread his fingers upon his breast, and expanded his waistcoat, looking at her in a very knowing sort of way, with his head on one side. 'Now that we have sent our message home, there is no hurry. Our little cruise,' he exclaimed, pointing over the bow, 'is almost entirely tropical, and there is no reason at all why we should not find it delightful!'

I caught Helga's eye, and exhorted her by a glance to keep silent. She fixed her gaze upon the deck, with a lip lightly curled by disgust, and I stepped aft under a pretence to look at the compass, with so much more contempt and anger than I could hold between my teeth that I dared not speak.

The breeze slackened as the sun sank, and at supper, as the Captain persisted in calling the last meal, the ocean fell calm and the old broad-bowed barque rolled sleepily, but with much creaking of her rheumatic bones, upon a long-drawn polished swell flowing out of the north-east. Her canvas beat the masts and fetched reports out of the tall spars that penetrated the little cuddy like discharges of musketry.

For a long while the Captain gave Helga and me no opportunity for a quiet talk. At table he was more effusive than he had been, distressingly importunate in his attentions to the girl, to whom he would address himself in tones of loverlike coaxing if she happened to say No to his entreaties to her to drink a little wine, to try a slice of ham, and the like. He begged us to make ourselves thoroughly at home; his coloured cook, he said, was not a first-rate hand, but if Miss Helga ever had a fancy, she need but name it, and it would go very hard with the cook if he failed to humour her.

'We are not a yacht,' said he, pulling a whisker and looking around, 'but, most fortunately, gaudy mirrors and handsome carpets and the ginger-bread ornamentations of the pleasure craft need never form any portion of human happiness at sea. The sun looks as brightly down upon the Light of the World as upon the most stately ship afloat, the ocean breeze will taste as sweetly over my bulwark-rails as on the bridge of the gallantest man-of-war that flies the crimson cross;' and thus he went on vapouring as usual in fathoms of commonplace, yet with a bland underlying insistence always upon our being his guests, upon our remaining with him and being happy, as though, indeed, we had cheerfully consented to stop, and were looking forward with great enjoyment to the voyage.

I was as cold and distant as I could well be, answered him in monosyllables, ate as if with aversion, and as though I constrained myself to devour merely to keep body and soul together. But he did not seem to heed my manner in the least; I could swear, indeed, that he did not observe it. He was wholly engrossed in contemplation of Helga, and in the enjoyment of enlarging his waistcoat, and delivering, more or less through his nose, with a fixed smile and somewhat leering eye, the dull, trivial, insipid contents of his mind.

He asked the girl to play draughts with him when Punmeamootty had cleared the table. On her declining, he fetched from his cabin the volume of Jeremy Taylor—it was that divine's 'Holy Living and Dying,' I think—and asked permission to read a few pages aloud. She could not refuse, and I see that extraordinary shipmaster now, standing under the lamp, holding the portly volume up with both hands, smiling upon the page, pausing at intervals to look over the top of the book at the girl with a nod to serve as a point of admiration, and reading nasally without the faintest inflection, so that at a little distance his delivery must have sounded like a continuous groan. He then begged her to read to him.

'What greater treat could we have,' said he, looking at me, 'than to hear the rich, noble, impressive words of this great Bishop pronounced by the charming lips of Miss Helga Nielsen?'

But she curtly refused; and, after hovering about her for another half-hour, during which I could notice a growing air in him that was a distinct intimation, in its way, of his entire satisfaction with the progress he was making, he withdrew to his cabin.