“I’m going to marry Jude!”

The fantastic fact embodied in those words appeared to him folly only next day at one o’clock, with the sky to northward breathing hot on Havana Harbor like the mouth of a blue oven, flags fluttering to the wind, the drum and fife band of an American training ship coming over the water, and the Dryad being towed to her moorings half a mile shoreward.

The blushing bride-to-be of last night, hiding her nose on Ratcliffe’s shoulder, as they sat together on the couch before Satan, while he taunted her with the fact that now she’d have to get into skirts, had turned back into Jude.

She was busy getting the dinghy ready to row her fiancÉ off to the Dryad.

She was over the side in her, busy and humming a tune as she worked, baling out water, fixing the cushions, and so on, while Satan watched her in a brooding manner over the rail.

A ghastly fear was working in the heart of Satan, the fear that Skelton might want the dinghy returned.

“Now, mind you,” said Satan, “and bring the boat back. I’d sooner lose me head than that boat. If you come back without her, I’ll chuck you in the harbor! I’m talking straight.”

Ratcliffe, who had just come on deck dressed for the occasion, came to the rail. Jude looked up at him and laughed.

He had seen her laughing before, he had seen her surly, meditative, brooding, weeping, flushed with anger, grumbling; but he had never seen her with a look like this,—happy.

Since last night something had come into her eyes that made her, when her eyes met his, beautiful. It was as though a lamp had been suddenly lit inside her, and the magical thing was the knowledge that he himself was the lamplighter.

He had created this new something that spoke to him right out, right to his heart, right to his soul!

He got into the dinghy, nodded to Satan, and they started, Jude at the sculls, her trousers rolled half-way up to the knees and her old panama on the back of her head.

“Go slow,” said he, “there’s lots of time.” Then, when they were out of hearing and he was alone with her at last:

“Jude!”

“What?”

“D’you remember yesterday you asked me if I was going away, now the anchor was down?”

“Yes.”

“What would you have done if I had?” “I’d a drowned myself in the harbor,” said Jude without a moment’s hesitation. “What’s the good of asking?”

“When did you begin to care for me a bit?”

“D’you remember the sandspit?” asked Jude. “I dunno—maybe it was beyond then—remember the cache?”

“When I chased you round the tree and—”

Jude screwed up her lips.

“You gave me an awful bang on the head.”

“You frightened the gizzard out of me,” said Jude, “and I wasn’t the same after—that night.”

“I remember, I heard you telling Satan that hants were chasing you.”

“You were the hants.”

“But you didn’t care for me then. Remember you said derricks were only good for hoisting fools off ships with.”

“I reckon it was a sort of caring turned inside out,” said Jude. She turned her head to see if they were making for the Dryad.

“You’re letting her off her course,” said she, “unless you’re making for that brig.”

“I’d just as soon make for her as anywhere else,” said he, altering the course, “unless it was the sandspit—Jude!”

“Yep.”

“Imagine if we were alone on the sandspit, you and I, just as we were that day, instead of in this rotten old harbor—let’s go there!”

“I’m willing.”

“When?” “Soon’s you like.”

“We can get a tent and grub, and Satan can take us there and come back for us. Damn! here’s the Dryad!”

The first officer of the Dryad was leaning over the rail watching them. The stage was down, and Jude brought the dinghy alongside.

Then on the stage he watched her rowing off. He waved his hand to her, and she replied.

Then, when he reached the deck, he found Skelton also at the rail.

“’Morning,” said Ratcliffe. “That’s Satan’s sister.”

“Which?” asked Skelton. “That—er—person in the boat?”

“Yes. But you saw her on deck down at Palm Island, didn’t you?”

“I had forgotten,” said Skelton, dismissing the subject.

There were no guests. Ponsonby was to have come, but he was indisposed; yet the luncheon was just as formal an affair as though a dozen had been present instead of two.

Half-way through the meal, however, Ratcliffe’s spirits began to brighten under the influence of Perrier Jouet and the harlequin thought that began to dance in his head, “I am going for a honeymoon to the sandspit with Jude!”

He laughed occasionally at nothing in particular, and Skelton thought his manner strange, heady, queer, and began to thank his stars that Ponsonby was indisposed. He noticed also that Ratcliffe’s hands, despite scrubbing, bore the evidence of hard work not dissociated with tar. There was also something queer about his hair.

There was! Satan had barbarized it down at Cormorant with the pair of scissors he used on Jude.

Skelton, in asking Ratcliffe on board to luncheon, had considered himself a most forgiving individual. Leaving aside their little quarrel at Palm Island, remained the fact that Ratcliffe had left his ship, deserted him for the company of those Yankee “scowbankers,” and, to make matters worse, Ratcliffe seemed to have enjoyed the exchange.

Now, in closer company with the delinquent, he was beginning to regret his forgiveness. “The man had deteriorated!”

As a result of this impression his manner had stiffened; he felt irritated and bored.

The steward had withdrawn, having placed the dessert on the table, and Skelton was in the act of carving a pineapple in the only way a pineapple ought to be carved,—that is to say by tearing it into pieces with two forks,—when Ratcliffe, who had been staring at the fruit as though hypnotized, suddenly broke into a chuckle of laughter.

The pineapple, connecting itself, maybe, with canned pineapples robbed from the store room of the Haliotis, had suddenly brought up the vision of Satan.

Satan in a new guise—Satan as a matchmaker!

All sorts of things, some almost half-forgotten, rushed together to clothe Satan in this new garment. He remembered Satan’s solicitude for Jude’s future, Satan’s complacency when he and Jude had gone off to the sandspit together, his conversations about Jude, the complete absence of surprise with which he had taken the business of last night,—a hundred things, and all pointing in the same direction and to the fact that Satan had wished the business, just as he had wished the dinghy away from Skelton, just as he had wished Ratcliffe on board of the Sarah Tyler.

He, Ratcliffe, was part of the sea-pickings of this gipsy, part and parcel with bunches of bananas, pots of paint, sailcloth, mainsheet buffers, cringles, and so on! He was annexed to fit Jude just as the mast-winch of the Haliotis was annexed to fit the Sarah!

Jude herself had declared that Satan had brought him on board because he “wanted him.”

Skelton paused in his operation on the pineapple and stared at the other.

“I beg your pardon,” said Ratcliffe, “but something has just struck me so horribly funny I couldn’t help laughing—anyhow, the joke is against myself. Look here, Skelton, I want to tell you something—I’m—m—going to marry a girl.”

“Indeed—but what is there horribly funny about that?”

“Nothing—it’s not that, it’s something else; but let’s start with that. I’m going to marry that girl who rowed me over here today, Satan’s sister.”

Skelton laid down his fork. All his starch had vanished. Surprised out of his life, he seemed suddenly to grow younger and more natural looking. “Good God!” said Skelton, staring at the other. “You don’t mean—”

“I do. I don’t know why I am telling you, but there it is. You can’t understand in the least—couldn’t hope to make you.”

Now Skelton with his starch off and in an emergency was a sound man, with a heart as good as any ordinary mortal’s.

He had an eye that no little detail ever escaped. He had seen Jude at Palm Island, he had heard her speak, he had seen her half an hour ago, and Ratcliffe’s manner left him in no doubt as to his absolute earnestness.

The man was about to commit suicide, social suicide. He had seen men do the same thing often in different ways.

He pushed the pineapple away and rose from the table.

“Come into the smoke room,” said he.

In the smoke room he rang for coffee. Not a word about Jude. Dead silence.

Then, when the coffee was brought and the door closed, he turned to the other.

“Ratcliffe, you can’t do this thing. I know. Let me speak for a moment. You are your own master, free to do as you choose; but I must speak. I like you. Our temperaments are dead different, and we don’t make good companions; but you have many sterling qualities, and I don’t want to see you come a mucker. You can do a thing like this in two minutes; but two hundred years won’t get you out of it, once it’s done. (Take sugar in your coffee? Yes, I remember.) See here! I had a young brother once who was going to do just the same,—absolutely ruin himself. I managed to stop it, saved his future and his name.”

He picked a cigar out of a box and, coming to a dead stop in his remarks, cut the end off.

“My dear fellow,” said Ratcliffe, before he could continue, “I know absolutely and exactly how you feel on the subject and what you would say. I’ve felt it myself and said it to myself.

“I began to get fond of her almost from the first. If you’d been in my shoes, you would have been just the same. No one could help getting fond of her. Then after awhile I found how I was drifting, and I said to myself, ‘It’s absurd!’ I pictured all my female relations and so forth and my position in the wonderful thing you call Society.”

“Don’t sneer at Society,” said Skelton gravely. “That’s the easiest sort of cant that ever folly put into a man’s mouth. Go on.”

“You’re right,” said Ratcliffe. “All the same Society galls one at times when the thought of it comes up against something alive and fresh and free from snobbery like Jude. Well, things went on and on. I hadn’t much time for thinking, underhanded as we were; and that was the fatal thing, for I absorbed her without thinking,—not her face or body, but her character. You know that, underhanded and close together on a tub like the Sarah, character is the thing that shows and counts, and at every hand’s turn hers showed up and got a tighter grip on me. It wasn’t a character all jam, either, but it was a thing to count on and real as the sea—you can’t understand.”

“I can,” said Skelton, humoring the other, “a fine character.”

“Oh, Lord, no!” said Ratcliffe. “Don’t get away with things. Real, that’s the word!”

“But, my dear man—”

“I know what you are going to say. She can’t speak King’s English—well, I’m going to teach her. She’s dressed like that—well, I’m going to dress her properly after awhile.”

Skelton suddenly showed a flash of irritation.

“Come up to the point,” said he. “Are you, after what I’ve said, still fixed in your purpose? Are you going to marry her?”

“As soon as ever I can get a priest off to the old Sarah,” replied Ratcliffe.

“That is your last word?”

“Yes.”

“Very well,” said Skelton. His manner changed. He had done what he could: it was useless. Ratcliffe was no relation of his, and now, contemplating the thing with as much detachment as though it were a losing horse race or boxing encounter on which he had no bet, he lit the cigar, which he had been holding unlighted in his fingers, and became almost amiable.

“Very well,” said he, “go ahead. After all, it’s not my affair; but I’ll be interested to know how you get on. By the way, I have some gear of yours on board.” “Take it back, will you, like a good chap,” said the other, “and leave it with the yacht people at Southampton? I’ll pick it up there when I return.”

“You are coming back?”

“Oh, rather; but not for a year or so, maybe. I’ve a lot to do, and when you see us next maybe you’ll agree—” He stopped short and relit his cigar, and they hung silent, each engaged in his own thoughts.

Now; on the warm sea-scented air entering through the open ports, came a voice.

It was the voice of the second officer, addressing someone over-side.

“Hi, there! Bring her round to the quarter-boat davits; she’s to come aboard.”

“That’s the dinghy,” said Skelton. “I told them to bring her aboard. I’ll send you back in the pinnace.”

Again came the voice.

“Hi, there! Are you deaf? Bring her round to the quarter-boat davits; she’s to come aboard.”

Then Jude’s fresh young voice:

“Gar’n! She’s ours; old Popplecock gave her to Satan. Whacha talking about?”

“Very well,” came the other’s. “You wait till Sir William comes on deck.”

Skelton with a grim smile turned to the door. He pointed to the clock on the bulkhead.

“I’m going on deck,” said he. “See that clock—promise me to stick here for two minutes by it and think right over the matter for the last time. Don’t let anything I have said weigh with you.” He went on deck and, keeping clear of the rail, entered into conversation with the first officer.

Three minutes passed, and Ratcliffe’s head appeared at the saloon hatch.

“Going?” said Skelton.

“Yes,” said Ratcliffe.

“Right! You can keep the dinghy—it’s a wedding present. Luck!”

“Same to you!” said Ratcliffe.

He gripped the other’s hand, and the grip was returned. The two men had never been so close to each other before, never would be again.

Two hours later the Dryad, queening it over the satin-smooth harbor, dipped her flag to the humble little Sarah, and the Sarah dipped her flag to the Dryad, and someone in the Wedding Present lying alongside the Sarah waved a hat.

Skelton, at the after rail, fixed his binoculars on the hat-waver. It was Satan.

THE END