Читать книгу The Mate of the Good Ship York; Or, The Ship's Adventure онлайн

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"Is there no place for me in that ship?" she said. She looked at him piteously, though her natural grace of coquetry broke through all the same, with the planting of her hands upon her hips, and the way she side-dropped her head at him.

"We carry no stewardess, no females, no passengers," he answered. "The captain is a stranger to me. No, my ship is of no use to you," he continued, after a pause. "You must call with me upon some shipping people. There may be a vacancy for a stewardess. But suppose the ship is sailing for India?"

She gazed at him a little vacantly.

"We shall find some means of getting abroad," he went on, running a note of cheerfulness into his voice, for he thought by the look in the girl's eyes that she was beginning to bend on signals of distress, which would be hoisted in a pearly downpour presently. "At all events, you can't be worse off than you are, and somebody says that when you are at the bottom of the wheel the next revolution must hoist you."

They talked in this strain until they had supped, then Hardy, not seeing a bell, opened the door and shouted to Miss Bax to clear away. When the door was opened they could hear voices in the back room beyond, and a gush of Cavendish tobacco smoke came in. Some friends of Bax had called in a casual way by the back entrance, across the fields, which meant several drinks, clouds of tobacco, and all the gossip of the social sphere which Bax and his friends adorned. When Miss Bax had cleared the table she placed a bottle of whisky upon it at the request of Hardy, also cold water and glasses. She then said there was no hurry to go to bed. Father did not go to bed until eleven, and she left them with a smile as though they were a young married couple spending their honeymoon in Bax's farm, instead of one of them being an honest, generous-hearted young sailor intent on doing his dead best to rescue a young English lady from bitter privation, and perhaps from miserable disgrace; and the other of them being a broken-hearted girl hurrying from a home of tyranny and drink, a home of one base nature, and of one spiritless one (which is likewise a baseness), with a future as dark as the night that lay outside, in whose funeral tapestries her imagination alone could have beheld the stirrings of the life that was to give her content and liberty, in whose impenetrable depths she found no more than a minute gleam of light from Hardy's strange and chanceful encounter with her while she lay in a swoon deep as death.