– which was really quite an outburst of eloquence for Captain Seemann.
“If I couldn’t be captain,” Blythe announced, “I think I should choose to be lookout.”
“How is dat?” the Captain inquired.
“It must be the best place of all, away up above everything and everybody.”
“And you would like to go up dare?”
“Of course I should!”
“And you would not be afraid?”
“Not I!”
Upon which the Captain, in high good-humour, declared, “I belief you!”
After that he fell to speaking German with Mr. Grey, and Blythe moved to the end of the bridge, and stood looking down upon the steerage passengers, where they were disporting themselves in the sun on the lower deck.
They were a motley crew, and she never tired of watching them, as they sat about in picturesque groups, singing or playing games, or lay stretched on the deck, fast asleep.
Somewhat apart from the others was a woman with a little girl whom Blythe had not before observed. The child lay on a bright shawl, her head against the woman’s knee, her dark Italian eyes gazing straight up into the luminous blue of the sky. There was a curiously high-bred look in the pale features, young and unformed as they were, and Blythe wondered how such a child as that came to belong to the stout, middle-aged woman who did not herself seem altogether out of place in the rough steerage.
At this point in her meditations, a quiet, matter-of-fact voice struck her ear, and, turning, she found that Mr. Grey had come up behind her.
“The Captain says he will have the ‘crow’s nest’ lowered and let you go up in it if you like,” was the startling announcement which roused her from her revery.
“Oh, you are making fun!” she protested.
“I don’t wonder you think so, but he seems quite in earnest, and I can tell you it’s the chance of a lifetime!”
“I should think it was!” she gasped. “Oh, tell him he’s an angel with wings! And please, please don’t let him change his mind while I run and ask Mamma!” With which Blythe vanished down the gangway, her golf-cape rising straight up around her head as the draught took it.
We may well believe that such a prospect as that drove from her mind all speculations as to the steerage passengers, and that even the thought of the little girl with the wonderful eyes did not again visit her in the few hours intervening.
Yet when, that afternoon at eight-bells, she passed with Mr. Grey down the steep gangway to the steerage deck, which they were obliged to traverse on their way to the forecastle, and they came upon the little creature lying, with upturned face, against the woman’s knee, Blythe felt a sharp pang of compunction and pity. The child looked even more pathetic than when seen from above, and the young girl involuntarily stooped in passing, and touched the wan little cheek. Whereupon one of those ineffable smiles which are the birthright of Italians lighted the little face, and the small hand was lifted with so captivating a gesture that Blythe, clasping it in her own, dropped on her knees beside the child.
“Is it your little girl?” she asked, looking up into the face of the woman, whose marked unlikeness to the child was answer enough.
“No, no, Signorina,” the woman protested. “She is my little Signorina.”
“And you are taking her to Italy?”
“Si, Signorina; alla bella Italia!”
Then the lips of the little girl parted with a still more radiant smile, and she murmured, “Alla bella Italia!”
A moment later, Blythe and her companion had passed on and up to the forward deck where, climbing a short ladder to the railing of the “crow’s nest,” they dropped lightly down into this most novel of elevators. There was a shrill whistle from the boatswain, the waving of white handkerchiefs where Mrs. Halliday and Mr. DeWitt stood, forward of the wheel-house, to watch the start; then the big windlass began to turn, the rope was “paid out,” and the slow, rather creaky journey up the mast had begun.
It was a perfect day for the adventure. The ship was not rolling at all, the little motion to be felt being a gentle tilt from stem to stern which manifested itself at long intervals in the slightest imaginable dip of the prow. And presently the ascent was accomplished, and the “crow’s nest” once more clung in its accustomed place against the mast, – forty feet up in the air, according to Mr. Grey’s reckoning.
As they looked across the great sea the horizon seemed to have receded to an incalculable distance, and the airs that came to them across that broad expanse, unsullied by the faintest trace of man or his works, were purer than are often vouchsafed to mortals. Blythe felt her heart grow big with the sense of space and purity, and this wonderful swift passage through the upper air. Involuntarily she took off her hat to get the full sweep of the breeze upon her forehead.
Suddenly, a new sound reached her ear, – a small, remote, confidential kind of voice, that seemed to arrive from nowhere in particular.
“It’s the Captain, hailing us through his megaphone,” her companion remarked; and, glancing down, far down, in the direction of the bridge, Blythe beheld the Captain, looking curiously attenuated in the unusual perspective, standing with a gigantic object resembling a cornucopia raised to his lips.
“You like it vare you are?” quoth the uncanny voice, not loud, but startlingly near.
And Blythe nodded her head and waved her hat in vigorous assent.
The great ship stretched long and narrow astern, the main deck shut in with awnings through which the huge smokestacks rose, and the wide-mouthed ventilators crooked their necks. Along either outer edge of the awnings a line of lifeboats showed, tied fast in their high-springing davits, while from the mouth of the yellow ship’s-funnels black masses of smoke floated slowly and heavily astern. The Lorelei swam the water like a wonderful white aquatic bird, leaving upon the quiet sea a long snowy track of foam.
On a line with their lofty perch a sailor swung spider-like among the network of sheets and halyards that clung about the mainmast, its meshes clearly defined against the pure blue of the sky, while below there, on the bridge, the big brass nautical instruments gleamed, and the caps of the Captain and his lieutenants showed white in the sun. As Blythe glanced down and away from this stirring outlook, she could just distinguish among the dark figures of the steerage the small white face of the child upturned toward the sky; and again a sharp pang took her, a feeling that the little creature did not belong among those rough men and women. No wonder that the beautiful Italian eyes always sought the sky; it was their only refuge from sordid sights.
“I suppose the woman meant that the child was her little mistress; did she not?” Blythe asked abruptly.
“That was what I understood.”
“It’s probably a romance; don’t you think so?” and Blythe felt that she was applying to a high authority for information on such a head.
“Looks like it,” the great authority opined. “I think we shall have to investigate the case.”
“Oh, will you? And you speak Italian so beautifully!”
“How do you know that?”
