A Soldier of the Legion Part 5

"I suppose you'll think it's dreadful of me," she faltered, "but--I wish you _needn't_ go. I've never been on the real sea before since I was a baby: only getting from England to Ireland the shortest way, and on the Channel. This is the first storm I've seen. I never thought I was a coward. I don't like even women to be cowards. I adore bravery in men, and that's why I--but no matter! I don't know if I'm afraid exactly, but it's a dreadful feeling to be alone, without any one to care whether you drown or not, at night on a horrible old s.h.i.+p, in the raging waves. The sea's like some fierce, hungry animal, waiting its chance to eat us up."

"It won't get the chance," Max returned cheerfully. He was standing now, and she was looking up at him from the hard little pillow lately pressed by his own head. "I shouldn't wonder if the old tub has gone through lots of worse gales than this."

"It's comforting to hear you say so, and to have a human being to talk to, in the stormy night," sighed the girl. "I feel better. But if you go--and--where _will_ you go?"

"There are plenty of places," Max answered her with vague optimism.

Just then the _General Morel_ gave a leap, poised on the top of some wall of water, quivered, hesitated, and jumped from the height into a gulf. Max held the girl firmly in the berth, or she would have been pitched on to the floor. Involuntarily she grasped his arm, and let it go only when the wallowing s.h.i.+p subsided.

"That was awful!" she whispered. "It makes one feel as if one were dying. I can't be alone! Don't leave me!"

"Not unless you wish me to go," Max said with great gentleness.

"Oh, I don't--I can't! Except that you must be so miserably uncomfortable."

"I'm not; and it's the finest compliment and the greatest honour I've ever had in my life," Max stammered, "that you should ask me to--that it should be a comfort to you, my staying."

"But you are the kind of man women know they can trust," the girl apologized for herself. "You see, one can _tell_. Besides, from the way you speak, I think you must be an American. I've heard they're always good to women. I saw you on deck, and afterward at dinner. I thought then there was something that rang _true_ about you. I said 'That man is one of the few unselfish ones. He would sacrifice himself utterly for others.' A look you have about the eyes told me that."

"I'm not being unselfish now," Max broke out impulsively; then, fearing he had said an indiscreet thing, he hurried on to something less personal. "How would it be," he suggested in a studiously commonplace tone, "if I should make myself comfortable sitting on my suitcase, just near enough to your berth to keep you from falling out in case another of those monsters. .h.i.t the s.h.i.+p? You could go to sleep, and know you were safe, because I'd be watching."

"How good you are!" said the girl. "But I don't want to sleep, thank you. I don't feel faint now. I believe you've given me some of your strength."

"That's the brandy," said Max, very matter of fact. "Have a few drops more? You can't have swallowed half a teaspoonful----"

"Do you think, if I took a little, it would make me warm? I'm so icy cold."

"Yes, it ought to send a glow through your body." He poured another teaspoonful into the miniature silver cup, and supported the pillow again, that she need not lift her head. Then he took the two blankets off the upper berth, and wrapped them round the girl, tucking them cozily in at the side of the bed and under her feet.

"If you were my brother," she said, "you couldn't be kinder to me. Have you ever had a woman to take care of--a mother, or a sister, perhaps?"

"I never had a sister," Max answered. "But when I was a boy I loved to look after my mother."

"And now, is she dead?"

"Now she's dead."

"My mother," the girl volunteered, "died when I was born. That made my father hate the thought of me, because he wors.h.i.+pped her, and it must have seemed my fault that she was lost to him. I haven't seen my father since I was a little girl. But I'm going to him now. I've practically run away from the aunts he put me to live with; and I'd hardly any money, so I was obliged to travel all the way second-cla.s.s."

"That's exactly what I thought!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Max.

"Did you think about _me_, too?" she asked, interest in their talk helping her to forget the rolling of the s.h.i.+p.

"Yes, I thought about you--of course."

"That I'd run away?"

"Well, you were so different from the rest, it was queer to see you in the second-cla.s.s."

"But so are you--different from the rest. Yet you're in the second-cla.s.s."

"I'm hard up," exclaimed Max, smiling.

"You, too! How strange that we, of all the others, should come together like this. It is as if it were somehow meant to be, isn't it? As if we were intended to do something for each other in future. I wish I _could_ do something for you, to pay you for to-night."

"I don't need pay." Max smiled again, almost happily. "It's you who are being good to me. I was feeling horribly down on my luck."

"I'm sorry. But it's helped you to help me. I understand that. Do you know, I believe you are one whose greatest pleasure is in doing things for those not as strong as yourself."

"I never noticed that in my character," laughed Max.

"Yet there's something which tells me I'm right. I think you would, for that reason, make a good soldier. My father is a soldier. He's stationed at a place called Sidi-bel-Abbes."

"But that's where the Foreign Legion is, isn't it?" The words slipped out.

"He's colonel of the First Regiment. Oh, I believe it's half dread of what he'll say to me, that makes me so ill and nervous to-night. The only two men in the world I love are so strong, so--so almost terrible, that I'm like a little wreath of spray dashed against the rocks of their nature. They don't even know I'm there!"

Suddenly Max seemed to see the two framed photographs in the open bag: an officer in French uniform, and Richard Stanton, the explorer, the man of fire and steel said to be without mercy for himself or others. Max felt ashamed, as if inadvertently he had stumbled upon a secret. "Strong men should be the tenderest to women," he reminded her.

"Yes, on principle. But when they want to live their own lives, and women interfere? What then? Could one expect them to be kind and gentle?"

"A man worth his salt couldn't be harsh to a woman he loved."

"But if he didn't love her? I'm thinking of two men I know. And just now, more of my father than--than the other. I've got no one to advise me. I wonder if you would, a little? You're a man, and--and I can't help wondering if you're not a soldier. Don't think I ask from curiosity. And don't tell me if you'd rather not. But you see, if you _are_ one, it would help, because you could understand better how a soldier would feel about things."

"I have been a soldier," Max said. There was no reason why he should keep back the truth from this little girl for whom he was playing watchdog: the little girl who thought him as kind as a brother! "But I'm afraid I don't know much about women."

"The soldier I'm thinking about--my father--doesn't want to have anything to do with women. My mother spoiled him for others. I believe their love story must be the saddest in the whole world. But tell me, if you were old, as _he_ is, nearly fifty, and you had a daughter you didn't love--though you'd been kind about money and all that--what would you say if she suddenly appeared from another country, and said she'd come to live with you?"

"By Jove!" exclaimed Max. "Is that what you're going to do?"

"Yes. You think my father will have a right to be angry with me, and perhaps send me back?"

"I don't know about the right," said Max, "but soldiers get used to discipline, you see. And a colonel of a regiment is always obeyed. He might find it inconvenient if a girl suddenly turned up."

"But that's my only hope!" she pleaded. "Surprising my father. Anyhow, I simply _can't_ go back to my aunts. I have some in Dublin--they were my mother's aunts, too: and some in Paris--aunts of my father. That makes them my great-aunts, doesn't it? Perhaps they're harder for young people to live with than _plain_ aunts, who aren't great. I shall be twenty-one in a few weeks and free to choose my own life if my father won't have me. I'm not brave, but I'm always trying to be brave! I can engage as a governess or something, in Algeria, if the worst comes to the worst."

"I don't believe your father would let you do that. _I_ wouldn't in his place."

"After all, you're very young to judge what he would do, even though you _are_ a soldier!" exclaimed the girl, determined not to be thwarted. "I must take my chance with him. I shall go to Sidi-bel-Abbes. If there's a train, I'll start to-morrow night. And you, what are you going to do?

Shall you stop long in Algiers?"

"That depends," answered Max, "on my finding a woman I've come to search for."

The girl was gazing at him with the deepest interest. "You have come to Algiers to find a woman," she murmured, "and I, to find a man. Do you--oh, don't think me impertinent--do you _love_ the woman?"

"No," said Max. "I've never seen her." And then, the power of the storm and the night, and their strange, dreamlike intimacy, made him add: "I love a woman whom I may never see again."

"And I," said the girl, "love a man I haven't seen since I was a child.