Martin Conisby

"D'ye grieve for your Joan--Damaris--yes?" she demanded suddenly.

"Nay--of what avail?"

"Then I do--from my heart, Martino, from my heart! For she had faith in me, she was kind to me, oh, kind and very gentle! She is as I--might have been, perchance, had life but proved a little kinder."

After this she lay silent a great while and I thought her asleep until she questioned me again suddenly.

"She is a great lady in England--yes?"

"She is."

"And yourself?"

"An outcast."

"And you--loved each other--long since?"

"Long since."

"But I have you at the last!" cried Joanna, exultant. "And nought shall part us now save death and that but for a little while! Dost curse thyself, Martino--dost curse thyself for saving me from the fire? But for this I had been dead and thou safe with thy loved Joan--dost curse thyself?"

"Nay, of what avail?"

Now, at this, she falls to sudden rage and revilings, naming me "stock-fish," "clod," "worm," and the like and I (nothing heeding her), turning to behold the gathering clouds to windward, met the glare of Resolution's fierce eye.

"Tell me," cried Joanna, reaching out to nip my leg 'twixt petulant fingers, "why must you brave the fire to save me you do so hate--tell me?"

"Yonder, as I judge, is much wind, Resolution!" said I, nodding towards a threatening cloud bank. Hereupon she struck at me with passionate fist and thereafter turns from me with a great sob, whereat Resolution growled and tapped his pistol butt.

"You were fool to save me!" cried she. "For I, being dead, might now be in happy circumstance and you with your Joan! You were a fool--"

"Howbeit you have your life," said I.

"Life?" quoth she. "What is life to me but a pain, a grief I shall not fear to lose. Life hath ever brought me so much of evil, so little good, I were well rid of it that I might live again, to find perchance those joys but dim remembered that once were mine in better life than this. And now, if there be aught of food and drink aboard, Resolution, let us eat; then get you to sleep--you will be weary, yes."

And surely never was stranger meal than this, Joanna and Resolution, the compass betwixt them, discussing winds, tides and weather, parallels of latitude and longitude, the best course to steer, etc., and I watching the ever-rising billows and hearkening to the piping of the wind.

Evening found us running through a troubled sea beneath an angry sky and the wind so loud I might hear nothing of my companions where they crouched together in the stern sheets. But suddenly Joanna beckoned me with imperious gesture: "Look, Martino!" cried she, with hand outflung towards the billows that foamed all about us. "Yonder is a death kinder than death by the fire and yet I do fear this more than the fire by reason of this my hateful woman's body. Now may you triumph over my weakness an you will, yet none can scorn it more than I--"