he cried, "and then I sha'n't mind pressing you for an answer to what I dared to ask you on the North Foreland."
There was a silence in the little clearing among the young pines. Only near at hand the hum of insects, and in the distance a cloud of cockatoos shrieking the sun into the sea, and the sea itself faintly booming upon the base of the sandstone cliffs. Before either spoke there was indeed one other sound, but it fell on ears doubly deaf; for Nan had flung back her dark-gold ringlets in a way of hers, and from the bold pose of her head none could have imagined the warm bloom upon her cheeks, or the tender film that dimmed the hazel eyes.
"Suppose I prefer to give you your answer first?"
"Nan! Nan! I would have you think it over, and over, and over again!"
"But suppose I refused you after all?"
"I would sooner that than be accepted in haste and – and repented of – you know!"
It was as though he was maintaining his balance for a bet, and near the end of his endurance even so. Nan watched him with a smile touched by the last beams of the setting sun, but as she rose the red glory beat full upon her.
"Very well!" said she. "Then if you won't come to me for your answer, I must bring it to you."
Night falls like an assassin in that country, but the purple tints were only beginning when in his very ear she implored him not to leave her any more, and he held her closer, but said he must. It would not be for long. Others were growing rich in a day; he would make one more. He knew it; something told him; and again, something else told her.
Yet she was vexed with herself for her impulsive appeal against a decision to which she had felt reconciled but the moment before; and vexed with him for scarcely listening to her appeal, unpremeditated as it was, unreasonable as it might be. He might have wavered; she would not have had him yield. His resolution was fine, heroic; she only wondered whether it was quite human, and wondering, lost the thread of his defense.
"Think, think!" he urged. "Think what it would be for me to go home in this ship and marry you as I am, on my poor captain's certificate and nothing else; and then, only think, if I followed in a few months with a few thousand of my own behind me! You may say I ought to have thought of this before. But I did. I told your father so a few minutes before the wreck. I wanted you to wait for me – I was selfish enough for that from the beginning!"
The disparaging epithet pricked Nan to interrupt him and take it on herself. But Denis persisted without a smile.
"Darling, I am selfish about it still; for if I am not worth waiting for, I am not worth having; but if you can wait only a few months – not a day more than a year – I will come to you as I should come if it is to be – but come I will, rich or poor, if I am alive! Nan, darling, I have everything to gain, only these few months to lose; but I will gain all the world in them. I will, I will, I will!"
She could not but be infected with his confidence, his enthusiasm, and his ideal. There in the dusk were the eager Irish eyes glistening and burning into hers, but there also was the strong north-country jaw set for success as the needle to the pole. And yet – and yet – she was weeping on his shoulder as the purple turned to deepest blue.
"I could have helped you, dearest," came her broken whispers. "But no, not here. It's an awful country. It will break my heart to think of you in it. I thought, if you loved me … after all we have been through … you would never, never leave me again! But, dearest, I do believe in you, and I will wait, for you know best."
So after all it was a brave face, bright as her will could make it, though still wet with tears, that she held away from him, for Denis to look upon it for the first time as his own. But it was a very terrible face that hovered over the same spot but a minute later, when Ralph Devenish came crashing through the young pines to curse the very ground where they had stood, and the sea that had not swallowed one or both.
CHAPTER VIII
COLD WATER
The Merridews sailed for England about the middle of October. They had been less than a fortnight on dry land; and it was with a heavy and uneasy heart that Denis watched their new vessel to a speck from the highest point commanding Corio Bay.
With all his candour, there were one or two things that he could not hide from himself, but that he had hidden from the girl to whom he was now engaged. He was a very young man. He loved adventure for its own sake, and though he had been through much, he felt to the very bone that he was only on the threshold of an exciting and successful career. There could scarcely have been a more sanguine temperament, or a character with more right to one. But the young man's confidence in himself was neither blind nor overweening, and in his heart he was under no illusion as to his own motives. It grieved his soul to see the ship sailing away with all he loved on earth, yet he knew how bitterly he would have felt sailing in her, with never a sight of Bendigo or of Ballarat. Then he was inordinately independent. It was in the blood. He must make his own way. And here he was frank, yet not so frank as to tell his Nan that her father had definitely offered to put him in a position to make his way quietly at home; and the father was not so incontinent.
A little incident had contributed to Denis's depression; and he was not one to make much of little incidents. But the first person he had encountered on the Memnon, when he had gone on board to see the last of them, was another survivor of the North Foreland– a diseased being named Jewson, who had shipped in her as chief steward, only to be disrated for an incompetent sot before the voyage was a month old. The disrating had been largely due to the second officer, who did not hesitate to ask the fellow in what capacity he saw him now.
"Captain Devenish's servant," was the answer, with a grin that maddened Denis, but it was the fact that rankled. He had said no more. It was too late; and the man had been saved, he deserved a fresh start; but that Devenish, of all people, should give him one, in that vessel of all vessels! It was a sign of more than Denis had time to realize until Corio Bay lay blue and bare at his feet, and the tiny sail on the horizon had vanished forever from his view.
He sat in the sun with his face hidden in his hands. His heart had filled with prayer, his eyes with tears; he dug his knuckles into them, and missed the bloodstone signet-ring that he had worn since his father's death. There had been no time for an engagement ring, but Nan was to wear this one until they met again. And she had given him one of hers – a ruby, a diamond, and a sapphire – that jammed in the middle of his little finger nail; but he was to wear it day and night about his neck instead, on a tiny lanyard that she had plaited for it out of her own warm hair. Denis could not trust himself to look at it yet; he could only press the ring to his heart until it hurt, as holy sinners press the scapular, but that was enough to nerve him. He could even smile as he remembered the absurd injunction which had accompanied this sweet talisman. Still smiling he looked down again through the sunshine upon the empty bay; but now the first thing Denis saw was a separate shadow on the grass.
"Cheer up, mister! All board! It's getting on for fifty knots to Melbourne, and the Lord knows how many bells!"
Jimmy Doherty was standing over him, and his dark skin beamed as he rolled the nautical phrases on his tongue. Denis got up without a smile.
"Don't remind me of the sea, Jimmy; help me to forget about it. And as for Melbourne, we shall never see it to-night."
"Sha'n't we though!"
"What! Fifty miles between midday and midnight?"
"It's not so much, and I've got us a lift half-way."
"But we can't afford that, Jimmy."
A
