CHAPTER XLVIII
ENTER CAPTAIN HORN
It was less than a week after the tumbling match in the street between Banker and Mok, and about eleven o'clock in the morning, when a brief note, written on a slip of paper and accompanied by a card, was brought to Edna from Mrs. Cliff. On the card was written the name of Captain Philip Horn, and the note read thus:
"He is here. He sent his card to me. Of course, you will see him. Oh, Edna! don't do anything foolish when you see him! Don't go and throw away everything worth living for in this world! Heaven help you!
This note was hurriedly written, but Edna read it at a glance.
"Bring the gentleman here," she said to the man.
Now, with all her heart, Edna blessed herself and thanked herself that, at last, she had been strong enough and brave enough to determine what she ought to do when she met the captain. That very morning, lying awake in her bed, she had determined that she would meet him in the same spirit as that in which he had written to her. She would be very strong. She would not assume anything. She would not accept the responsibility of deciding the situation, which responsibility she believed he thought it right she should assume. She would not have it. If he appeared before her as the Captain Horn of his letters, he should go away as the man who had written those letters. If he had come here on business, she would show him that she was a woman of business.
As she stood waiting, with her eyes upon his card, which lay upon the table, and Mrs. Cliff's note crumpled up in one hand, she saw the captain for some minutes before it was possible for him to reach her. She saw him on board the Castor, a tall, broad-shouldered sailor, with his hands in the pockets of his pea-jacket. She saw him by the caves in Peru, his flannel shirt and his belted trousers faded by the sun and water, torn and worn, and stained by the soil on which they so often sat, with his long hair and beard, and the battered felt hat, which was the last thing she saw as his boat faded away in the distance, when she stood watching it from the sandy beach. She saw him as she had imagined him after she had received his letter, toiling barefooted along the sands, carrying heavy loads upon his shoulders, living alone night and day on a dreary desert coast, weary, perhaps haggard, but still indomitable. She saw him in storm, in shipwreck, in battle, and as she looked upon him thus with the eyes of her brain, there were footsteps out side her door.
As Captain Horn came through the long corridors and up the stairs, following the attendant, he saw the woman he was about to meet, and saw her before he met her. He saw her only in one aspect—that of a tall, too thin, young woman, clad in a dark-blue flannel suit, unshapely, streaked, and stained, her hair bound tightly round her head and covered by an old straw hat with a faded ribbon. This picture of her as he had left her standing on the beach, at the close of that afternoon when his little boat pulled out into the Pacific, was as clear and distinct as when he had last seen it.
A door was opened before him, and he entered Edna's salon. For a moment he stopped in the doorway. He did not see the woman he had come to meet. He saw before him a lady handsomely and richly dressed in a Parisian morning costume—a lady with waving masses of dark hair above a lovely face, a lady with a beautiful white hand, which was half raised as he appeared in the doorway.
She stood with her hand half raised. She had never seen the man before her. He was a tall, imposing gentleman, in a dark suit, over which he wore a light-colored overcoat. One hand was gloved, and in the other he held a hat. His slightly curling brown beard and hair were trimmed after the fashion of the day, and his face, though darkened by the sun, showed no trace of toil, or storm, or anxious danger. He was a tall, broad-shouldered gentleman, with an air of courtesy, an air of dignity, an air of forbearance, which were as utterly unknown to her as every thing else about him, except his eyes—those were the same eyes she had seen on board the Castor and on the desert sands.
Had it not been for the dark eyes which looked so steadfastly at him, Captain Horn would have thought that he had been shown into the wrong room. But he now knew there was no mistake, and he entered. Edna raised her hand and advanced to meet him.
He shook hands with her exactly as he had written to her, and she shook hands with him just as she had telegraphed to him. Much of her natural color had left her face. As he had never seen this natural color, under the sun-brown of the Pacific voyage, he did not miss it.
Instantly she began to speak. How glad she was that she had prepared herself to speak as she would have spoken to any other good friend! So she expressed her joy at seeing him again, well and successful after all these months of peril, toil, and anxiety, and they sat down near each other.
He looked at her steadfastly, and asked her many things about Ralph, Mrs. Cliff, and the negroes, and what had happened since he left San Francisco. He listened with a questioning intentness as she spoke. She spoke rapidly and concisely as she answered his questions and asked him about himself. She said little about the gold. One might have supposed that he had arrived at Marseilles with a cargo of coffee. At the same time, there seemed to be, on Edna's part, a desire to lengthen out her recital of unimportant matters. She now saw that the captain knew she did not care to talk of these things. She knew that he was waiting for an opportunity to turn the conversation into another channel,—waiting with an earnest ness that was growing more and more apparent,—and as she perceived this, and as she steadily talked to him, she assured herself, with all the vehemence of which her nature was capable, that she and this man were two people connected by business interests, and that she was ready to discuss that business in a business way as soon as he could speak. But still she did not yet give him the chance to speak.
The captain sat there, with his blue eyes fixed upon her, and, as she looked at him, she knew him to be the personification of honor and magnanimity, waiting until he could see that she was ready for him to speak, ready to listen if she should speak, ready to meet her on any ground—a gentleman, she thought, above all the gentlemen in the world. And still she went on talking about Mrs. Cliff and Ralph.
Suddenly the captain rose. Whether or not he interrupted her in the middle of a sentence, he did not know, nor did she know. He put his hat upon a table and came toward her. He stood in front of her and looked down at her. She looked up at him, but he did not immediately speak. She could not help standing silently and looking up at him when he stood and looked down upon her in that way. Then he spoke.
"Are you my wife?" said he.
"By all that is good and blessed in heaven or earth, I am," she answered.
Standing there, and looking up into his eyes, there was no other answer for her to make.
Seldom has a poor, worn, tired, agitated woman kept what was to her a longer or more anxious watch upon a closed door than Mrs. Cliff kept that day. If even Ralph had appeared, she would have decoyed him into her own room, and locked him up there, if necessary.
In about an hour after Mrs. Cliff began her watch, a tall man walked rapidly out of the salon and went down the stairs, and then a woman came running across the hall and into Mrs. Cliff's room, closing the door behind her. Mrs. Cliff scarcely recognized this woman. She had Edna's hair and face, but there was a glow and a glory on her countenance such as Mrs. Cliff had never seen, or expected to see until, in the hereafter, she should see it on the face of an angel.
"He has loved me," said Edna, with her arms around her old friend's neck, "ever since we had been a week on the Castor."
Mrs. Cliff shivered and quivered with joy. She could not say anything, but over and over again she kissed the burning cheeks of her friend. At last they stood apart, and, when Mrs. Cliff was calm enough to speak, she said:
"Ever since we were on the Castor! Well, Edna, you must admit that Captain Horn is uncommonly good at keeping things to himself."
"Yes," said the other, "and he always kept it to himself. He never let it go away from him. He had intended to speak to me, but he wanted to wait until I knew him better, and until we were in a position where he wouldn't seem to be taking advantage of me by speaking. And when you proposed that marriage by Cheditafa, he was very much troubled and annoyed. It was something so rough and jarring, and so discordant with what he had hoped, that at first he could not bear to think of it. But he afterwards saw the sense of your reasoning, and agreed simply because it would be to my advantage in case he should lose his life in his undertaking. And we will be married to-morrow at the embassy."
"To-morrow!" cried Mrs. Cliff. "So soon?"
"Yes," replied Edna. "The captain has to go away, and I am going with him."
"That is all right," said Mrs. Cliff. "Of course I was a little surprised at first. But how about the gold? How much was there of it? And what is he going to do with it?"
"He scarcely mentioned the gold," replied Edna. "We had more precious things to talk about. When he sees us all together, you and I and Ralph, he will tell us what he has done, and what he is going to do, and—"
"And we can say what we please?" cried Mrs. Cliff.
"Yes," said Edna, "to whomever we please."
"Thank the Lord!" exclaimed Mrs. Cliff. "That is almost as good as being married."
On his arrival in Paris the night before, Captain Horn had taken lodgings at a hotel not far from the Hôtel Grenade, and the first thing he did the next morning was to visit Edna. He had supposed, of course, that she was at the same hotel in which Mrs. Cliff resided, which address he had got from Wraxton, in Marseilles, and he had expected to see the elderly lady first, and to get some idea of how matters stood before meeting Edna. He was in Paris alone. He had left Shirley and Burke, with the negroes, in Marseilles. He had wished to do nothing, to make no arrangements for any one, until he had seen Edna, and had found out what his future life was to be.
Now, as he walked back to his hotel, that future life lay before him radiant and resplendent. No avenue in Paris, or in any part of the world, blazing with the lights of some grand festival, ever shone with such glowing splendor as the future life of Captain Horn now shone and sparkled before him, as he walked and walked, on and on, and crossed the river into the Latin Quarter, before he perceived that his hotel was a mile or more behind him.
From the moment that the Arato had left the Straits of Magellan, and Captain Horn had had reason to believe that he had left his dangers behind him, the prow of his vessel had been set toward the Strait of Gibraltar, and every thought of his heart toward Edna. Burke and Shirley both noticed a change in him. After he left the Rackbirds' cove, until he had sailed into the South Atlantic, his manner had been quiet, alert, generally anxious, and sometimes stern. But now, day by day, he appeared to be growing into a different man. He was not nervous, nor apparently impatient, but it was easy to see that within him there burned a steady purpose to get on as fast as the wind would blow them northward.
Day by day, as he walked the deck of his little vessel, one might have thought him undergoing a transformation from the skipper of a schooner into the master of a great ship, into the captain of a swift Atlantic liner, into the commander of a man-of-war, into the commodore on board a line-of-battle ship. It was not an air of pride or assumed superiority that he wore, it was nothing assumed, it was nothing of which he was not entirely aware. It was the gradual growth within him, as health grows into a man recovering from a sickness, of the consciousness of power. The source of that consciousness lay beneath him, as he trod the deck of the Arato.
This consciousness, involuntary, and impossible to resist, had nothing definite about it. It had nothing which could wholly satisfy the soul of this man, who kept his eyes and his thoughts so steadfastly toward the north. He knew that there were but few things in the world that his power could not give him, but there was one thing upon which it might have no influence whatever, and that one thing was far more to him than all other things in this world.
Sometimes, as he sat smoking beneath the stars, he tried to picture to himself the person who might be waiting and watching for him in Paris, and to try to look upon her as she must really be; for, after her life in San Francisco and Paris, she could not remain the woman she had been at the caves on the coast of Peru. But, do what he would, he could make no transformation in the picture which was imprinted on the retina of his soul. There he saw a woman still young, tall, and too thin, in a suit of blue flannel faded and worn, with her hair bound tightly around her head and covered by a straw hat with a faded ribbon. But it was toward this figure that he was sailing, sailing, sailing, as fast as the winds of heaven would blow his vessel onward.