Dead Men Tell No Tales | Page 5

pair I see more plainly as I write - the young girl with her
soft eyes and her sunny hair, or the old gentleman with the erect though
wasted figure, the noble forehead, the steady eye, the parchment skin,
the white imperial, and the eternal cigarette between his shrivelled lips.
No need to say that I came more in contact with the young girl. She
was not less charming in my eyes because she provoked me greatly as I
came to know her intimately. She had many irritating faults. Like most
young persons of intellect and inexperience, she was hasty and
intolerant in nearly all her judgments, and rather given to being critical
in a crude way. She was very musical, playing the guitar and singing in
a style that made our shipboard concerts vastly superior to the average
of their order; but I have seen her shudder at the efforts of less gifted
folks who were also doing their best; and it was the same in other
directions where her superiority was less specific. The faults which are
most exasperating in another are, of course, one's own faults; and I
confess that I was very critical of Eva Denison's criticisms. Then she
had a little weakness for exaggeration, for unconscious egotism in
conversation, and I itched to tell her so. I felt so certain that the girl had
a fine character underneath, which would rise to noble heights in stress
or storm: all the more would I long now to take her in hand and mould
her in little things, and anon to take her in my arms just as she was. The
latter feeling was resolutely crushed. To be plain, I had endured what is
euphemistically called "disappointment" already; and, not being a
complete coxcomb, I had no intention of courting a second.
Yet, when I write of Eva Denison, I am like to let my pen outrun my
tale. I lay the pen down, and a hundred of her sayings ring in my ears,
with my own contradictious comments, that I was doomed so soon to
repent; a hundred visions of her start to my eyes; and there is the
trade-wind singing in the rigging, and loosening a tress of my darling's
hair, till it flies like a tiny golden streamer in the tropic sun. There, it is

out! I have called her what she was to be in my heart ever after. Yet at
the time I must argue with her - with her! When all my courage should
have gone to love-making, I was plucking it up to sail as near as I
might to plain remonstrance! I little dreamt how the ghost of every
petty word was presently to return and torture me.
So it is that I can see her and hear her now on a hundred separate
occasions beneath the awning beneath the stars on deck below at noon
or night but plainest of all in the evening of the day we signalled the
Island of Ascension, at the close of that last concert on the quarter-deck.
The watch are taking down the extra awning; they are removing the
bunting and the foot-lights. The lanterns are trailed forward before they
are put out; from the break of the poop we watch the vivid shifting
patch of deck that each lights up on its way. The stars are very sharp in
the vast violet dome above our masts; they shimmer on the sea; and our
trucks describe minute orbits among the stars, for the trades have yet to
fail us, and every inch of canvas has its fill of the gentle steady wind. It
is a heavenly night. The peace of God broods upon His waters. No
jarring note offends the ear. In the forecastle a voice is humming a song
of Eva Denison's that has caught the fancy of the men; the young girl
who sang it so sweetly not twenty minutes since who sang it again and
again to please the crew she alone is at war with our little world she
alone would head a mutiny if she could.
"I hate the captain!" she says again.
"My dear Miss Denison!" I begin; for she has always been severe upon
our bluff old man, and it is not the spirit of contrariety alone which
makes me invariably take his part. Coarse he may be, and not one
whom the owners would have chosen to command the Lady Jermyn; a
good seaman none the less, who brought us round the Horn in foul
weather without losing stitch or stick. I think of the ruddy ruffian in his
dripping oilskins, on deck day and night for our sakes, and once more I
must needs take his part; but Miss Denison stops me before I