Long Odds

CHAPTER IV

THE SUMMONS

The month Ormsgill spent at Las Palmas was a time of some anxiety to Mrs. Ratcliffe. He had, as she complained to her brother, no sense of the responsibility that devolved upon a man of his means, and was addicted to making friends with all kinds of impossible people, grimy English coaling clerks, and the skippers of Spanish schooners, and, what was more objectionable, now and then bringing them to the hotel. He expressed his regret when she pointed out the undesirability of such proceedings, but, for all that, made no very perceptible change in his conduct.

Major Chillingham as a rule listened gravely, and said very little, for his sister was one who seldom welcomed advice from anybody, and though not a brilliant man he was by no means a fool. On the last occasion he, however, showed a little impatience.

"Well," he said, "he seems to have got hold of a few first-class people, too. There is that Ayutante fellow on the Governor's staff, and the Senhor Figuera, the little, quiet man with the yellow hands, is evidently a person of some consequence in his own country. You can't mistake the stamp of authority. After all, it's no doubt just as well he and the girl have gone. Tom seemed on excellent terms with them."

Mrs. Ratcliffe looked indignant. "A Portuguese with a powdered face, and no notion of what is fitting!"

"An uncommonly good-looking one," and the Major grinned. "A woman with brains enough to get the thing she sets her mind on, too, and I have rather a fancy that she was pleased with Tom. Still, that's not the question, and anyway she's back again in Africa. Now, if you'll take advice from me you'll keep a light hand on him, and not touch the curb. If you do he's quite capable of making a bolt of it."

"That," said the lady, "would be so disgraceful as to be inconceivable – when Ada has waited more than four years for him."

Her brother's eyes twinkled. "In one way, I suppose she did. Still, of course, Urmston didn't get the Colonial appointment he expected, and, one has to be candid, young Hatherly seemed proof against the blandishments you wasted on him."

"A marriageable daughter is a heavy responsibility," said Mrs. Ratcliffe with a sigh.

"No doubt," said the Major. "That is precisely why I recommended the judicious handling of Tom Ormsgill. If he hasn't quite as much as you would like, it's enough to keep them comfortably, and in several ways he's worth the other two put together. The man's straight, and quiet. In fact, I'm not sure I wouldn't prefer him with a few more gentlemanly dissipations. They act as a safety valve occasionally."

His sister raised her hands in protest, and Chillingham withdrew with a chuckle, but she was rather more gracious to Ormsgill than usual that day, and during the next one accompanied him with her daughter and one or two acquaintances in a launch he had borrowed to look at the wreck of a steamer which had gone ashore a night or two earlier. The unfortunate vessel afforded a somewhat impressive spectacle as she lay grinding on the reef with the long yeasty seas washing over her, and the little party spent some time watching her from the launch which swung with the steep, green swell.

It was, however, very hot and dazzling bright, and no protests were made when Ormsgill, who it seemed knew all about steam launches, leaned forward from the helm and started the engines. The little propeller thudded, and they slid away with a long, smooth lurch across the slopes of glittering water that were here and there flecked with foam, for the beach they skirted lies open to the heave of the Atlantic. The Trade breeze fanned their faces pleasantly, and Ada Ratcliffe sat almost contented for the time being at Ormsgill's side. It was refreshing that hot day, to listen to the swish of sliding brine, and there was a certain exhilaration in the swift smooth motion, while she realized that the man she was to marry appeared to greater advantage than he did as a rule in the drawing room of the big hotel.

He was never awkward, or ill at ease, but she had noticed – and resented – the air of aloofness he sometimes wore when he listened to her companions' pointless badinage and vapid conversation. Now as he sat with a lean brown hand on the tiller controlling the little hissing craft he seemed curiously at home. There was also, as generally happened when he was occupied, a suggestion of reserved force in his face and attitude. He was, she realized, a man one could have confidence in when there were difficult things to be done. This however, brought her presently a vague dissatisfaction, for she felt there were certain aspects of his character which had never been revealed to her, and she was faintly conscious of the antagonism to and shrinking from what one cannot quite understand which is not infrequently a characteristic of people with imperfectly developed minds.

The fresh Trade breeze which blew down out of the harbor from the black Isleta hill was, however, evidently much less pleasant to the Spanish peons who toiled at the ponderous sweeps of an empty coal lighter the launch was rapidly drawing level with. She was floating high above the flaming swell, and the perspiration dripped from the men's grimy faces as they labored, two of them at each of the huge oars. Indeed Ormsgill could see the swollen veins stand out on their wet foreheads, and the overtaxed muscles swell on their half-covered chests and naked arms, for the barge was of some forty tons, and it was very heavy work pulling her against the wind. She had evidently been to a Spanish steamer lying well out beyond the mole, and there was, as he noticed, no tug available to tow her back again, while the sea foamed whitely on a reef close astern of her. It was only by a strenuous effort that the men were propelling the big clumsy craft clear of the reef, and there were signs that they could not keep it up much longer.

He glanced at the little group of daintily attired, soft-handed men and women on board the launch, to whom the stress of physical labor was an unknown thing, and then looked back towards the coal-grimed toilers on the lighter. As yet they worked on stubbornly, with tense furrowed faces, under a scorching sun, taxing to the uttermost every muscle in their bodies, but it seemed to him that the lighter was no further from the reef. He flung an arm up, and hailed them, for he had acquired a working acquaintance with several Latin languages on the fever coast.

"You can't clear that point," he said. "Have you no anchor?"

"No, señor," cried one of the peons breathlessly. "The tug should have come for us, but she is taking the water boat to the English steamer."

Ormsgill turned to his companions. "You won't mind if I pull them in? They're almost worn out, and it will not detain us more than ten minutes."

One of the men made a little gesture of concurrence which had a hint of good-humored toleration in it, but Mrs. Ratcliffe appeared displeased, and Ada flushed a trifle. One could have fancied she did not wish the man who belonged to her to display his little idiosyncrasies before her friends.

"One understands that all Spaniards avoid exertion when they can," she said. "Perhaps a little hard work wouldn't hurt them very much."

There was a slight change in Ormsgill's expression. "I fancy the men can do no more."

Then he waved his hand to the peons. "Get your hawser ready."

He was alongside the lighter in another minute, but she rolled wildly above the launch, big and empty, and the sea broke whitely about her, for now the men had ceased rowing she was drifting towards the reef. The hawser was also dripping and smeared with coal dust when Ormsgill, who seemed to understand such matters, hauled it in, and while the sea splashed on board the launch, streams of gritty brine ran from it over everything. Then he stirred the little furnace with an iron bar before he pulled over the starting lever, and a rush of sparks and thin hot smoke poured down upon his companions as the little craft went full speed ahead. Ada, perhaps half-consciously, drew herself a little farther away from him. There was coal grit on his wet duck jacket, and he had handled hawser and furnace rubble like one accustomed to them, in fact as a fireman or a sailor would have done. That was a thing which did not please her, and she wondered if the others had noticed it. It became evident that one of them had.

"You did that rather smartly," he said.

Ormsgill's smile was a trifle dry. "I have," he said, "done much the same thing before professionally."

There was a struggle for the next few minutes. Launch and lighter had drifted into shoal water while they made the hawser fast, and the swell had piled itself up and was breaking whitely. The little launch plunged through it with flame at her funnel and a spray-cloud blowing from her bows, and as she hauled the big lighter out yard by yard a little glint crept into Ormsgill's eyes. Ada Ratcliffe almost resented it, for he had never looked like that at any of the social functions she had insisted on his taking a part in, but her forbearance was further taxed when they crept slowly beneath the side of a big white steam yacht. A little cluster of men and daintily dressed women sat beneath the awning on her deck, and one or two of them were people her mother had taken pains to cultivate an acquaintance with.

One man leaned upon her rail and looked down with a little smile. "Have you been going into the coal business, Fernside?" he said. "Considering the figure they charged Desmond it ought to be a profitable one."

The man in the launch he addressed laughed, and Ormsgill towed the lighter on until at last he cast the tow rope off, and a very grimy peon stood upon her deck. He took off his big, shapeless hat, and as he swung, cut in black against the dazzling sea, there was in his poise a lithe gracefulness and a certain elaborate courtesy.

"Señor," he said, "our thanks are yours, and everything else that belongs to us. May the saints watch over you, and send you a friend if ever your task is too heavy and the breakers are close beneath your lee."

Ormsgill took off his hat gravely, as equal to equal, but he smiled a little as the launch swept on.

"Well," he said, "after all, I may need one some day."

They were back in the hotel in another half-hour, and Mrs. Ratcliffe took him to task as they sat on the shady veranda. Ormsgill lay back in his big Madeira chair, with half-closed eyes, and listened dutifully. He felt he could afford it, for the few minutes of tense uncertainty when he had hauled the lighter out of the grasp of the breakers had been curiously pleasant to him.

"There was, of course, no harm in the thing itself," she said at last.

"No," said Ormsgill with an air of deep reflection, "I almost think that to save a fellow creature who is badly worn out an effort he is scarcely fit to make isn't really very wrong. Still, the men were certainly very dirty – I suppose that is the point?"

The lady, who looked very stiff and formal in the black she persisted in wearing, favored him with a searching glance, but there was only grave inquiry in his steady eyes.

"The point is that things which may be commendable in themselves are not always – appropriate," she said.

"Expedient – isn't it?" suggested Ormsgill languidly.

"Expedient," said Mrs. Ratcliffe with a little flush in her face. "In this world one has to be guided by circumstances, and must endeavor to fit oneself to that station in life to which one has been – appointed."

"I suppose so," said Ormsgill. "The trouble is that I really don't know what particular station I have been appointed to. I was thrown out of the Colonial service, you see, and afterwards drove a steam launch for a very dissolute mahogany trader. Then I floated the same kind of trees down another river with the niggers, and followed a few other somewhat unusual occupations. In fact, I've been in so many stations that it's almost bewildering."

His companion got away from the point. She did not like having the fact that he had been, as he expressed it, thrown out of the Colonial service forced upon her recollection.

"One has, at least, to consider one's friends," she said. "We are on rather good terms with two or three of the people who came out with Mr. Desmond, whom I have not met yet, in the Palestrina. In fact, Ada is a little anxious that you should make their acquaintance. You will probably come across them in England."