"I make quick decisions," he said when they were alone again, "and I have decided that you are a man who can be trusted. Now about that delivery to New York—"
"Anything," Adam said grandly.
"You will be paid a hundred pounds for the service, if this is satisfactory?"
Adam, who had been sipping, almost choked.
It was customary for the planter, after exacting a promise to make a delivery as part of the bargain, to offer to pay for this service, which offer it was customary for the skipper to refuse. No sum was ever mentioned. Certainly no sum like a hundred pounds was even dreamt of.
What was he being asked to tote—the crown jewels?
In any event, and rocked though he was, Adam had not the slightest intention of refusing the offer. The money would be his, not to be shared with any of the crew or with the owners; for this sort of service, by clear agreement, was one of the skipper's prerogatives.
"It'll be enough," he said casually.
"It would be more convenient to pay you here, leaving it to your honor, in case delivery could not be made, to return the money."
He was not buttering Adam. He did trust him, though until a few hours earlier, when Adam had put into this little cove on the north side of Jamaica, these two men had never before seen one another.
"I'll deliver it all right."
"This is a passenger," Treadway said.
"Oh."
That did not make the matter any clearer. Adam assumed that it was a slave he was to transport—a courtesy gift, somebody with some special talent for making something, or doing something, which would appeal to the New York acquaintance. Well, he could be put into the hold, where the incoming molasses would not take up as much room as the outgoing eels had. But what black in all this world would any man be ready to pay one hundred pounds transportation for?
"I have every confidence, though," Treadway added, "that you will get her there."
"Her?"
"Yes," said Treadway.
Now here was something out of a different bag entirely. Sure, it still could be some fat old black hag who happened to be an expert seamstress, say, or a celebrated cook; but something told Adam that the passenger was younger. A cast-off doxy? Some seductive coffee-colored mustee or mustefino whom it was advisable for private reasons to get plumb out of this part of the world? It sounded like that.
Not that for one hundred pounds Adam Long would have refused to carry her if she had been Satan's own sister, complete with horns and tail. It was the matter of discipline he was thinking of. Excepting Seth Selden, the hands, he believed, were of tolerably good character; but all the same, a loose woman in the listless heat of the horse latitudes—
"Is she in good condition? Reason I ask, it might be advisable to keep her below and have the hatch battened down, the whole trip."
"The person we are talking about," said Horace Treadway, "is my cousin, the Honorable Maisie de Lynn Treadway-Paul."
In those days politeness was not obligatory, but it was advisable. Adam leapt to his feet.
"Say, I'm sorrier'n all outside I—"
Treadway tossed a languid handkerchief.
"It is nothing." He rose. "Ah, here she comes now."
And Adam turned, and saw her, and his heart stopped.
It was not only that the lady was lovely: it was that she was alive. Most of the white females you saw here in Jamaica looked as if the climate had them licked. They looked pale, drawn, like persons who are suffering inwardly. Nothing stood out about them, everything drooped. The sheen of sweat on their upper lips and on the backs of their hands might have been unavoidable, granted, but assuredly it was not becoming. In short, you felt sorry for them but not impelled toward them. Likely enough they hadn't been any great punkins to start with.
This lady now was as alive as lightning, darned near as dazzling, too. She had a roundish face, perhaps slightly thick across the cheekbones for the most precious taste, but good, a clean face, and exquisitely tinted. She had a small nose washed with faint freckles. Her eyes were light brown with specks of green in them. Most dizzying of all was her hair. It was not powdered, though it was piled high in the formal fashion and surmounted by a huge "commode," a tower made up of rows of plaited muslin stiffened with wire, one above the other. The hair was dark red. It danced. It glistered. Never for an instant was it still, for its colors shifted constantly, so that it fascinated you like a fire in the fireplace, or the sea.
"I'm sure you two will get along well together," the planter said.
Maisie Treadway smiled; and the sun stood still a moment, ashamed.
"Oh, I'm sure we will," she said.
PART THREE. Dangerous Waters
She interfered with his prayers. Adam Long was not one of your foul-weather supplicators. He preferred to pray whenever he just happened to feel like it and got the chance. He liked to pray alone, prayers made up as he went along: set prayers he regarded as Romish, and anyway how could you expect the Lord to listen when all you did was recite words somebody else had written down for you? Adam would pray in adversity but he preferred to pray in prosperity, where maybe it meant more. By himself he prayed somewhat as a Quaker might; and it was true that he'd long had a sneaking admiration for that sect; but he was seldom moved to pray aloud, in public places. He would join in the Amens at meeting house but he was not a faithful goer. He insisted upon the service each morning on deck rather for the sake of the immortal souls of the others than for any personal spiritual benefit. Regularity in prayer might well have a good effect on the men, he thought. His own greatest satisfaction was derived from prayers that no one else heard, about matters just between himself and his Maker.
What's more, he did not like to have anybody see him when he prayed. He was not one to mutter a hasty Our Father behind his teeth in a moment of danger. He didn't even like to pray while lying flat in his bunk. He liked to get right down on his knees, the way a man should.
In the cabin this had been easy. He and Forbes kept it clean, and not often had they both been there at the same time.
In the forecastle, matters were different. It was a small forecastle in the first place, and Jethro Gardner, Eb Waters, John Bond, Carl Peterson, Abel Rellison, and Eliphalet Mellish had filled it before the unexpected arrival of Seth Selden. Now Captain Long and Mate Forbes were added to this company.
True, Peterson and Waters for the time being were on deck, for that's where the irons were; but even so, their chests remained in the forecastle.
The men took it well, at first. They even seemed amused by the spectacle of skipper and mate turned out of their quarters.
It was all a lark for the lady, and she sought to win the hands to her by circulating and smiling among them; and for a while she did.
Most of them had never seen anything like her, no more than had Adam Long. Her hair, the flecks of green in her brown eyes, the swift-striking warmth of her smile, the clothes she wore—these, even without her affability, would have dizzied the hands. She was obviously eager to please them, an attitude that flattered. "Lady Maisie" they called her. It could be that a shadow of gawkiness about her, as though she had not yet got used to the length of her own legs, touched their hearts. It certainly touched Adam's. What was she doing here? What was the matter with her friends, that they let her go off to a strange wild land alone? Why did Horace Treadway officer such a thumping sum when he booked passage for her on a small smuggling vessel whose skipper he had only just met? Now and then Adam would catch her when she was not smiling at anybody, not chatting, or even conscious that she was being watched: she'd stare out across the sea, not necessarily toward England, not back over the way she had come, but anywhere, and there would be an expression of unutterable loneliness in her face. She'd look so lost! She shouldn't be here. She ought to be back in London, dancing at a rout, pirouetting, flirting, not zigzagging in the company of colonial louts through some of the most dangerous waters in the world.