Armorel of Lyonesse. Walter Besant
for an instant. Then the boat crossed the bows of the other, and Armorel, as they passed, caught the rope that was held out to her.
One moment more and they were off the rocks, in deep water, towing the other boat after them.
Then Peter arose, lowered the sail, and took down his mast.
'Nothing,' he said, 'between us and Mincarlo. Now, gentlemen, if you will step into this boat we can tow yours along with us. So—take care, sir! Sit in the stern beside the young lady. Can you row, either of you?'
They could both row, they said. In these days a man is as much ashamed of not being able to row as, fifty years ago, he was ashamed of not being able to ride. Peter took one oar and gave the other to the stranger nearest. Then, without more words, he dipped his oar and began to row back again. The sun went down, and it suddenly became cold.
Armorel perceived that the man beside her was quite a young man—not more than one- or two-and-twenty. He wore brave attire—even a brown velvet jacket, a white waistcoat, and a crimson necktie; he also had a soft felt hat. Nature had not yet given him much beard, but what there was of it he wore pointed, with a light moustache so arranged as to show how it would be worn when it became of a respectable length. As he sat in the boat he seemed tall; and he did not look at all like one of the bawling and boastful trippers who sometimes come over to the islands for a night and pretend to know how to manage a boat. Yet——
'What do you mean,' asked the girl, severely, 'by going out in a boat, when you ought to have known very well that you could not manage her?'
'We thought we could,' replied this disconcerted pretender, with meekness suitable to the occasion. Indeed, under such humiliating circumstances, Captain Parolles himself would become meek.
'If we had not seen you,' she continued, 'you would most certainly have been killed.'
'I begin to think we might. We should certainly have gone on those rocks. But there is an island close by. We could swim.'
'If your boat had touched those rocks you would have been dead in three minutes,' this maid of wisdom continued. 'Nothing could have saved you. No boat could have come near you. And to think of standing or swimming in that current and among those rocks! Oh! but you don't know Scilly.'
'No,' he replied, still with a meekness that disarmed wrath, 'I'm afraid not.'
'Tell me how it happened.'
The other man struck in—he who was wielding the oar. He also was a young man, of shorter and more sturdy build than the other. Had he not, unfortunately, confined his whole attention in youth to football, he might have made a good boatman. Really, a young man whose appearance conveyed no information or suggestion at all about him except that he seemed healthy, active, and vigorous, and that he was presumably short-sighted, or he would not have worn spectacles.
'I will tell you how it came about,' he said. 'This man would go sketching the coast. I told him that the islands are so beautifully and benevolently built that every good bit has got another bit on the next island, or across a cove, or on the other side of a bay, put there on purpose for the finest view of the first bit. You only get that arrangement, you know, in the Isles of Scilly and the Isles of Greece. But he wouldn't be persuaded, and so we took a boat and went to sea, like the three merchants of Bristol city. We saw Jerusalem and Madagascar very well, and if you hadn't turned up in the nick of time I believe we should have seen the river Styx as well, with Cocytus very likely: good old Charon certainly: and Tantalus, too much punished—overdone—up to his neck.'
Armorel heard, wondering what, in the name of goodness, this talker of strange language might mean.
'When his oar broke, you know,' the talker went on, 'I began to laugh, and so I caught a crab; and while I lay in the bottom laughing like Tom of Bedlam, my oar dropped overboard, and there we were. Five mortal hours we drifted; but we had tobacco and a flask, and we didn't mind so very much. Some boat, we thought, might pick us up.'
'Some boat!' echoed Armorel. 'And outside Samson!'
'As for the rocks, we never thought about them. Had we known of the rocks, we should not have laughed——'
'You have saved our lives,' said the young man in the velvet jacket. He had a soft sweet voice, which trembled a little as he spoke. And, indeed, it is a solemn thing to be rescued from certain death.
'Peter did it,' Armorel replied. 'You may thank Peter.'
'Let me thank you,' he said, softly and persuasively. 'The other man may thank Peter.'
'Just as you like. So long, that is, as you remember that it will have to be a lesson to you as long as you live never to go out in a boat without a man.'
'It shall be a lesson. I promise. And the man I go out with, next time, shall not be you, Dick.'
'Never,' she went on, enforcing the lesson, 'never go in a boat alone, unless you know the waters. Are you Plymouth trippers? But then Plymouth people generally know how to handle a boat.'
'We are from London.' In the twilight the blush caused by being taken for a Plymouth tripper was not perceived. 'I am an artist, and I came to sketch.' He said this with some slight emphasis and distinction. There must be no mistaking an artist from London for a Plymouth tripper.
'You must be hungry.'
'We are ravenous, but at this moment one can only feel that it is better to be hungry and alive than to be drowned and dead.'
'Oh!' she said, earnestly, 'you don't know how strong the water is. It would have thrown you down and rolled you over and over among the rocks, your head would have been knocked to pieces, your face would have been crushed out of shape, every bone would have been broken: Peter has seen them so.'
'Ay! ay!' said Peter. 'I've picked 'em up just so. You are well off those rocks, gentlemen.'
Silence fell upon them. The twilight was deepening, the breeze was chill. Armorel felt that the young man beside her was shivering—perhaps with the cold. He looked across the dark water and gasped: 'We are coming up,' he said, 'out of the gates of death and the jaws of hell. Strange! to have been so near unto dying. Five minutes more, and there would have been an end, and two more men would have been created for no other purpose but to be drowned.'
Armorel made no reply. The oars kept dipping, dipping, evenly and steadily. Across the waters on either hand flashed lights: St. Agnes and the Bishop from the south—they are white lights; and from the north the crimson splendour of Round Island: the wind was dropping, and there was a little phosphorescence on the water, which gleamed along the blade of the oar.
In half an hour the boat rounded the new pier, and they were in the harbour of Hugh Town at the foot of the landing steps.
'Now,' said Armorel, 'you had better get home as fast as you can and have some supper.'
'Why,' cried the artist, realising the fact for the first time, 'you are bare-headed! You will kill yourself.'
'I am used to going about bare-headed. I shall come to no harm. Now go and get some food.'
'And you?' The young man stood on the stepping-stones ready to mount.
'We shall put up the sail and get back to Samson in twenty minutes. There is breeze enough for that.'
'Will you tell us,' said the artist, 'before you go—to whom we are indebted for our very lives?'
'My name is Armorel.'
'May we call upon you? To-night we are too bewildered. We cannot say what we ought and must say.'
'I live on Samson. What is your name?'
'My name is Roland Lee. My friend here is called Dick Stephenson.'
'You can come if you wish. I shall be glad to see you,' she corrected herself, thinking she had been inhospitable and ungracious.
'Am I to ask for Miss Armorel?'
She laughed merrily.