No Name, Wilkie Collins [reading the story of the TXT] 📗

The days passed, and the time grew longer and longer which the doctor allowed her to spend in the front room. She was soon able to dispense with the bed on the sofa⁠—she could be dressed, and could sit up, supported by pillows, in an armchair. Her hours of emancipation from the bedroom represented the great daily event of her life. They were the hours she passed in Kirke’s society.

She had a double interest in him now⁠—her interest in the man whose protecting care had saved her reason and her life; her interest in the man whose heart’s deepest secret she had surprised. Little by little they grew as easy and familiar with each other as old friends; little by little she presumed on all her privileges, and wound her way unsuspected into the most intimate knowledge of his nature.

Her questions were endless. Everything that he could tell her of himself and his life she drew from him delicately and insensibly: he, the least self-conscious of mankind, became an egotist in her dexterous hands. She found out his pride in his ship, and practiced on it without remorse. She drew him into talking of the fine qualities of the vessel, of the great things the vessel had done in emergencies, as he had never in his life talked yet to any living creature on shore. She found him out in private seafaring anxieties and unutterable seafaring exultations which he had kept a secret from his own mate. She watched his kindling face with a delicious sense of triumph in adding fuel to the fire; she trapped him into forgetting all considerations of time and place, and striking as hearty a stroke on the rickety little lodging-house table, in the fervor of his talk, as if his hand had descended on the solid bulwark of his ship. His confusion at the discovery of his own forgetfulness secretly delighted her; she could have cried with pleasure when he penitently wondered what he could possibly have been thinking of.

At other times she drew him from dwelling on the pleasures of his life, and led him into talking of its perils⁠—the perils of that jealous mistress the sea, which had absorbed so much of his existence, which had kept him so strangely innocent and ignorant of the world on shore. Twice he had been shipwrecked. Times innumerable he and all with him had been threatened with death, and had escaped their doom by the narrowness of a hair-breadth. He was always unwilling at the outset to speak of this dark and dreadful side of his life: it was only by adroitly tempting him, by laying little snares for him in his talk, that she lured him into telling her of the terrors of the great deep. She sat listening to him with a breathless interest, looking at him with a breathless wonder, as those fearful stories⁠—made doubly vivid by the simple language in which he told them⁠—fell, one by one, from his lips. His noble unconsciousness of his own heroism⁠—the artless modesty with which he described his own acts of dauntless endurance and devoted courage, without an idea that they were anything more than plain acts of duty to which he was bound by the vocation that he followed⁠—raised him to a place in her estimation so hopelessly high above her that she became uneasy and impatient until she had pulled down the idol again which she herself had set up. It was on these occasions that she most rigidly exacted from him all those little familiar attentions so precious to women in their intercourse with men. “This hand,” she thought, with an exquisite delight in secretly following the idea while he was close to her⁠—“this hand that has rescued the drowning from death is shifting my pillows so tenderly that I hardly know when they are moved. This hand that has seized men mad with mutiny, and driven them back to their duty by main force, is mixing my lemonade and peeling my fruit more delicately and more neatly than I could do it for myself. Oh, if I could be a man, how I should like to be such a man as this!”

She never allowed her thoughts, while she was in his presence, to lead her beyond that point. It was only when the night had separated them that she ventured to let her mind dwell on the self-sacrificing devotion which had so mercifully rescued her. Kirke little knew how she thought of him, in the secrecy of her own chamber, during the quiet hours that elapsed before she sank to sleep. No suspicion crossed his mind of the influence which he was exerting over her⁠—of the new spirit which he was breathing into that new life, so sensitively open to impression in the first freshness of its recovered sense. “She has nobody else to amuse her, poor thing,” he used to think, sadly, sitting alone in his small second-floor room. “If a rough fellow like me can beguile the weary hours till her friends come here, she is heartily welcome to all that I can tell her.”

He was out of spirits and restless now whenever he was by himself. Little by little he fell into a habit of taking long, lonely walks at night, when Magdalen thought he was sleeping upstairs. Once he went away abruptly in the daytime⁠—on business, as he said. Something had passed between Magdalen and himself the evening before which had led her into telling him her age. “Twenty last birthday,” he thought. “Take twenty from forty-one. An easy sum in subtraction⁠—as easy a sum as my little nephew could wish for.” He walked to the docks, and looked bitterly at the shipping. “I mustn’t forget how a ship is made,” he said. “It won’t be long before I am back at the old work again.” On leaving the docks he paid a visit to a brother sailor⁠—a married man.