The Captain from Connecticut

Chapter XVI

PEABODY came back on board the Delaware just at sunset. He looked round the familiar decks, and at the familiar faces, out at the red sun sinking in the blue Caribbean, and aloft to where the men were just finish­ing their work for the day. It was all so real, so ordinary, that for a moment he felt that the situation he had left behind at the Governor's house was an unreal one. It called for all his common sense to act normally in a world where at one moment he could have Anne's soft lips against his own, and at the next could be putting the Delaware into shape for her last fight.

"Mr. Hubbard," he said, as his first lieutenant lifted his hat, "we'll heave her over tomorrow. Run the even-numbered starboard-side guns over to larboard — that ought to be enough. You'll double-breech the others, of course. That'll bring her over by a couple of strokes and you can get at those shot-holes."

"Aye aye, sir," said Hubbard.

"I am going to get married tomorrow, Mr. Hubbard," went on Peabody.

"I didn't understand you, sir?"

Peabody repeated his words, but even so they did not convince Hubbard for a minute or two. "Who is the lady, sir?" asked Hubbard, swallowing, and eyeing Peabody with some anxiety.

"Mamselle Anne de Villebois," said Peabody, and then he grinned. "And the sooner she's Mrs. Peabody, so that we don't have to try to say that name any more, the better."

Hubbard's swarthy saturnine face grinned in response as the little human touch about the joke thawed him completely.

"She's a lovely lady, sir," he said. "I wish you joy, sir, and happiness, and prosperity."

"Thank you, Mr. Hubbard. Now what about that second-best suit of sails? What did the Committee of Inquiry decide about them?"

There was a great deal to be done — there never was any ship yet in which a great deal did not have to be done, even when there was not the additional prospect of having to fight for her life within the week. Peabody went round the ship with his heads of department, his first lieutenant and his carpenter, his boatswain and his cooper and his purser and his gunner. The ship was noisy with the return at sunset of the tipsy liberty men, whose last stragglers had been swept up from the grogshops and the brothels by Atwell and a small party, but Pea­body like a sensible man turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to the strange sights and sounds around him. His petty officers were the pick of all America, who could be relied upon not to incite trouble and to suppress it as soon as it showed; he paid no attention to the drunken figures which were being lashed into their hammocks like giant cocoons that could hurt neither themselves nor anyone else.

"Washington was far more trouble than any drunken sailor; Peabody snapped the news at him as sternly and as unemotionally as he knew how, but that did not pre­vent the talkative Negro from indulging in a long orgy of sentiment. That pose of old family retainer was mad­dening to Peabody; so long had he been solitary, so long dependent on his own sole exertions that he resented bitterly Washington's continual attempt to establish himself in his intimacy; equally irritating was Wash­ington's bland self-deception as he deliberately tried to make a god out of his master. Washington was uncomfortable without someone to worship, and paid small at­tention to Peabody's discomfort at being worshiped.

"Shut your mouth, you fool, and let's see those shirts," growled Peabody.

"Yessir, yessir, immejately, sir," protested Washing­ton. "Pity we haven't got a shirt of Chinee silk for the wedding, sir. And I haven't never seen the lady yet, sir, and — "

"Shut your mouth, I said!"

A little more of it and Washington would completely unsettle him — already Peabody was holding onto his self-control with a drowning man's grip. He had been two nights without sleep, and a third would leave him fit for nothing tomorrow, he told himself as he lay down on his cot in the sweltering night. He called up all his self-control, all his seaman's habits, to try to make cer­tain of sleeping as soon as his head touched the pillow, grimly emptying his mind of all thoughts in the manner which up till now had proved infallible. Yet tonight sleep did not come at once. He turned over, once, twice, in his bath of sweat, fighting down the images which awaited their chance to flood into his mind like hungry wolves. He heard six bells strike, and seven, and it was Nature who decided the struggle in the end. At eight bells she asserted herself, struck him unconscious as though with a club, as she demanded her rights, her usurious repayment for the demands Peabody had made on her during the last forty-eight hours — forty-eight hours without sleep, of ceaseless activity, of continual mental strain of every possible kind. Once he was asleep his seaman's habits reasserted themselves to the extent of giving him every ounce of benefit from the six hours granted him.

So his hand was steady when he shaved next morn­ing, and his eyes had not fulfilled their threat of being bloodshot, and he could listen without attention to Washington's ecstatic maunderings. He was as unob­trusively well clad a figure as heart could desire as he went down the ship's side and took his seat in the stern of the gig along with Jonathan and Murray, and Provi­dence was kind, for the prodigious midsummer rain of Martinique held off during the short passage to the quay, although they were hardly inside the carriage which awaited them there when it roared down upon the roof thunderously enough to drown speech.

It was a pretty compliment which his men were paying him. The watch which had come on shore a few minutes earlier had resisted the temptation of drink and women — after eighteen weeks at sea! — and were waiting for him. They ran shouting and yelling beside the clattering carriage, whooping and capering in the rain, scaring the colored girls who put their heads out of windows. Cheering, they thronged the carriage when it halted, so that Peabody, smiling, had to push his way through them. Their cheerful antics directed the vast crowd of Martinique, of all ages, colors, and attire, who had come hurrying at the amazing news of the immediate mar­riage of the Governor-General's daughter. They crowded the vast audience hall, and their cheerful babble rose to a deafening height, to die away magically when everyone peered on tiptoe to catch a glimpse of Anne in white when she entered. The Marquis asked Peabody and Anne grave questions, first in French and then in English, as, in his capacity as magistrate, he carried through the civil ceremony.

Things grew vaguer and vaguer in Peabody's mind — he was only conscious of the warmth and perfume of Anne beside him, and then, with a slight shock of sur­prise, that Anne's brows were straight and level, black above the blue. It puzzled him that he had not realized before how straight they were.

There were more ceremonies; there was the signing of documents, there was a half-formal procession into the big room which he had last seen cleared for dancing. There were toasts and then there was laughter. There were endless presentations. There was a brief moment when he saw Jonathan across the room, wineglass in hand, laughing boisterously with Madame Clair.

It all passed, and he was back in the carriage with the rain thundering on the roof again, but this time Anne was beside him, and he was more delirious with happiness than ever before, even at his most drunken moments. There was a small house — what house it was he had no idea — where there were eager colored servants who giggled excitedly when Anne spoke to them in their queer tongue. There was a bedroom with a mosquito net hung over the bed in the vastest dome Peabody could ever remember seeing, and Washington was there, unpacking things and chattering feverishly about a variety of sub­jects, from his master's future happiness to the surprising differences between colored girls in New York and in Martinique — an endless flow of babble which only ceased when Peabody turned on him and hurled him from the room like Adam from Eden.

Anne came to him, and came to his arms like a child. Time was brief; life was short, and happiness was there to be grasped, as elusive as an eel and as hard to retain once caught. The little French words which Anne used were elusive too, and no drink he had ever drunk was as madly intoxicating. An hour before dawn he had, he knew, to start his preparations for leaving Anne for the day. He wanted to be on the deck of the Delaware at the first peep of daylight to attend to the work of the ship.