Michael and Magda stood together on the deck of the crippled yacht which now rocked idly on a quite placid sea. Dusk was falling. That first glorious, irrecoverable hour when love had come into its own was past, and the consideration of things mundane was forcing itself on their notice—more especially consideration of their particular plight.
“It looks rather as though we may have to spend the night here,” observed Quarrington, his eyes scanning the channel void of any welcome sight of sail or funnel.
Magda’s brows drew together in a little troubled frown.
“Marraine and Gillian will be frightfully worried and anxious,” she said uneasily. It was significant of the gradual alteration in her outlook that this solicitude for others should have rushed first of anything to her lips.
“Yes.” He spoke with a curious abruptness. “Besides, that’s not the only point. There’s—Mrs. Grundy.”
Magda shrugged her shoulders and laughed.
“Well, if it’s to come to a choice between Mrs. Grundy and Davy Jones, I think I should decide to face Mrs. Grundy! Anyway, people can’t say much more—or much worse—things about me than they’ve said already.”
Quarrington frowned moodily.
“I’d like to kick myself for bringing you out to-day and landing you into this mess. I can’t stand the idea of people gossiping about you.”
“They’ve left me very little reputation at any time. A little less can’t hurt me.”
His eyes grew stormy.
“Don’t!” he said sharply. “I hate to hear you talk like that.”
“But it’s true! No public woman gets a fair chance.”
“You will—when you’re my wife,” he said between his teeth. “I’ll see to that.”
Magda glanced at him swiftly.
“Then you don’t want me to—to give up dancing after we’re married?”
“Certainly I don’t. I shall want you to do just as you like. I’ve no place for the man who asks his wife to ‘give up’ things in order to marry him. I’ve no more right to ask you to give up dancing than you have to ask me to stop painting.”
Magda smiled at him radiantly.
“Saint Michel, you’re really rather nice,” she observed impertinently. “So few men are as sensible as that. I shall call you the ‘Wise Man,’ I think.”
“In spite of to-day?” he queried whimsically, with a rueful glance at the debris of mast and canvas huddled on the deck.
“Because of to-day,” she amended softly. “It’s—it’s very wise to be in love, Michael.”
He drew her into his arms and his lips found hers.
“I think it is,” he agreed.
Another hour went by, and still there came no sign of any passing vessel.
“Why the devil isn’t there a single tug passing up and down just when we happen to want one?” demanded Quarrington irately of the unresponsive universe. He swung round on Magda. “I suppose you’re starving?” he went on, in his voice a species of savage discontent—that unreasonable fury to which masculine temperament is prone when confronted with an obstacle which declines to yield either to force or persuasion.
Magda laughed outright.
“I’ll admit to being hungry. Aren’t you? . . . It’s horribly unromantic of us, Michael,” she added regretfully.
Quarrington grinned.
“It is,” he assented. “All the same, I believe I could consume a tin of bully beef and feel humbly grateful for it at the present moment!”
Magda had a sudden inspiration.
“Michael! Let’s forage in the locker! There’s almost sure to be some biscuits or chocolate there. Marraine nearly always has things like that put on board. And there may be something left from the last supply.”
A brief search brought to light a half-tin of biscuits and some plain chocolate, and off these, with the addition of a bottle of soda-water, also discovered, they proceeded to make an impromptu meal. It was a somewhat thin substitute for the perfectly appointed little dinner of which they would have partaken in the ordinary course of events at the Hermitage, but when you have been a good many hours without food of any description, and spent the greater part of the time in “saving your own life at sea,” as Michael put it, even biscuits and chocolate have their uses.
When the improvised feast was over, Quarrington explored the recesses of the tiny hold and unearthed a lantern, which he proceeded to light and attach to the broken mast. It burned with a flickering, uncertain light, momentarily threatening to go out altogether.
“We’re not precisely well-equipped with lights,” he remarked grimly. “But at least that’s a precaution—as long as it lasts! It may—or may not—save us from being run down.”
Twilight deepened slowly into dark. The lights of Yarmouth sprang into being, a cluster of lambent orange points studding the dim coast of the Island. One by one the stars twinkled out in the dusky sky, and a waning moon, thin and frail like a worn sickle, flung a quivering ribbon of silver across the sea.
It was strangely still and quiet. Now and again the idle rudder creaked as the boat swung to the current. Once there came the long-drawn hoot of a distant siren. Beyond these fitful sounds only the gurgle of water lapping the sides of the boat broke the silence.
“We’re here till morning,” said Quarrington at last. “You may as well go to bed.”
“To bed?”
“Well, there’s a cabin, isn’t there?”—smiling. “And a more or less uncomfortable bunk. Come down and see what you can make of it as an abiding-place for the night.”
“And—and you? Can’t we rig up anything for you?” Magda looked round her vaguely.
“I shan’t sleep. I’ll do sentry-go on deck”—laughing. “It wouldn’t do for us both to go comfortably asleep and get run down without even having a shot at making our presence known!”
“Then I’ll keep watch with you,” said Magda.
“You’ll do nothing of the sort. You’ll go down to the cabin and sleep.”
“Let me stay, Michael. I couldn’t bear to think of your watching all through the night while I slept comfortably below.”
“You won’t sleep comfortably—if my estimate of the look of that bunk is correct. But you’ll be out of the cold. Come, be sensible, Magda. You’re not suitably attired for a night watch. You’d be perished with cold before morning.”
“Well, let us take it in turns, then,” she suggested. “I’ll sleep four hours and then I’ll keep a look-out while you have a rest.”
“No,” he said quietly.
“Then we’ll both watch,” she asserted. Through the starlit dark he could just discern her small head turned defiantly away from him.
“Has it occurred to you,” he asked incisively, “what a night spent in the open might mean to you? Rheumatism is not precisely the kind of thing a dancer wants to cultivate.”
“Well, I’m not going below, anyway.”
She sat down firmly and Quarrington regarded her a moment in silence.
“You baby!” he said at last in an amused voice.
And the next moment she felt herself picked up as easily as though she were in very truth the baby he had called her and carried swiftly down the few steps into the cabin. The recollection of that day of her accident in the fog, when he had carried her from the wrenched and twisted car into his own house, rushed over her. Now, as then, she could feel the strength of his arms clasped about her, the masterful purpose of the man that bore her whither he wished regardless of whether she wanted to go or not.
He laid her down on the bunk and, bending over her, kept his hands on her shoulders.
“Now,” he demanded, “are you going to stay there?”
A faint rebellion still stirred within her.
“Supposing I say ‘no’!”—irresolutely.
“I’m not supposing anything so unlikely,” he assured her. “I’m merely waiting to hear you say ‘yes.’”
She recognised the utter futility of trying to pit her will against the indomitable will of the man beside her.
“Michael, you are a bully!” she protested indignantly, half angry with him.
“Then you’ll stay there?” he persisted.
“You don’t give me much choice”—twisting her shoulders restlessly beneath his hands.
He laughed a little.
“You haven’t answered me.”
“Well, then—yes!”
She almost flung the word at him, and instantly she felt him lift his hands from her shoulders and heard his footsteps as he tramped out of the cabin and up on to the deck. Presently he returned, carrying the blankets which he had wrapped round her earlier in the course of their vigil. Magda accepted them with becoming docility.
“Thank you, Wise Man,” she said meekly.
He stood looking down at her in the faint moonlight that slanted in through the open door of the cabin, and all at once something in the intentness of his gaze awakened her to a sudden vivid consciousness of the situation—of the hour and of her absolute aloneness with him. Their solitude was as complete as though they had been cast on a desert island.
Magda felt her pulses throb unevenly. The whole atmosphere seemed sentient and athrill with the surge of some deep-lying emotion. She could feel it beating up against her—the clamorous demand of something hardly curbed and straining for release.
“Michael——” The word stammered past her lips.
The sound of her voice snapped the iron control he had been forcing on himself. With a hoarse, half-strangled exclamation he caught her up from where she lay, crushing her slim, soft body in a grip that almost stifled her, kissing her fiercely on eyes and lips and throat. Then abruptly he released her and, without a word, without a backward look, strode out of the cabin and up on to the deck.
Magda sank down weakly on the edge of the narrow bunk. The storm of his passion had swept through her as the wind sweeps through a tree, leaving her spent and trembling. Sleep was an impossibility. Ten minutes, twenty passed—she could not have told how long it was. Then she heard him coming back, and as he gained the threshold she sprang to her feet and faced him, nervously on the defensive. In the pale, elusive moonlight, and with that startled poise of figure, she might well have been the hamadryad at bay of one of her most famous dances.
Michael looked rather white and there was a grim repression about the set of his lips. As he caught sight of her face with its mute apprehension and dilated eyes, he spoke quickly.
“You should be resting,” he said. “Let me tuck you up and then try to go to sleep.”
There was something infinitely reassuring in the steady tones of his voice. It held nothing but kindness—just comradeship and kindness. He was master of himself once more. For her sake he had fought back the rising tide of passion. It had no place while they two were here alone on the wide waters.
He stooped and picked up the blankets, laying them over her with a tenderness that seemed in some subtle way to be part of his very strength. Her taut nerves relaxed. She smiled up at him.
“Good-night, Saint Michel,” she said simply. “Take care of me.”
He stooped and kissed the slim hand lying outside the blanket.
“Now and always,” he answered gravely.
When Magda awoke, seven hours later, the sunlight was streaming into the cabin. She could hear Michael moving about the deck, and she sprang up and proceeded to make such toilette as was possible in the circumstances, taking down her hair and dressing it afresh at the tiny looking-glass hung on the wall. She had barely completed the operation when she heard Michael give a shout.
“Ahoy! Ahoy there!”
She ran up on deck. Approaching them was a small steam-tug, and once again Quarrington sent his voice ringing lustily across the water, while he flourished a large white handkerchief in the endeavour to attract the attention of those on board.
Suddenly the tug saw them and, altering her course, came fussing up alongside. Quarrington briefly explained their predicament—in the face of the Bella Donna’s battered appearance a lengthy explanation was hardly necessary—and a few minutes later the tug was steaming for Netherway harbour, towing the crippled yacht behind her.
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