Down in the waist of the ship the men had perceived the change of helmsman, and nudging one another, and pointing, they laughed up at her, calling to one another in the Breton patois she could not understand, while their captain stood beside her, his hands deep in the pockets of his long coat, his lips framed in a whistle, his eyes searching the seas ahead.
"So there is one thing," he said at last, "that my cabin-boy can do by instinct."
"What is it?" she asked, her hair blowing over her face.
"He can sail a ship."
And laughing, he walked away, leaving her alone with La Mouette.
For an hour Dona stood her trick at the wheel, as happy, she thought to herself, as James would be with a new toy, and finally, her arms tiring, she looked over her shoulders to the helmsman she had relieved, who stood by the wheel watching her with a grin on his face, and coming forward he took the wheel from her again, and she went below to the master's cabin and lay down upon his bunk and slept.
Once, opening an eye, she saw him come in and lean over the charts on the table, jotting down calculations on a piece of paper, and then she must have fallen asleep again for when she woke the cabin was empty, and rising and stretching herself she went on deck, aware, with a certain sense of shame, that she was hungry again.
It was seven then, and the ship was drawing near the coast with the Frenchman himself at the wheel. She said nothing, but went and stood by him, watching the blur of the coast on the horizon.
Presently he called out an order to his men, and they began to climb the rigging, little lithe figures, hand over hand, like monkeys, and then Dona saw the great square topsail sag and fall into folds as they furled it upon the yard.
"When a ship comes in sight of land," he said to her, "the topsail is the first thing that shows to a landsman ashore. It is still two hours to dusk, and we do not wish to be seen."
She looked towards the distant coast, her heart beating with a strange excitement, and she was seized, even as he and his men were seized, with the spirit of superb adventure.
"I believe you are going to do something very mad and very foolish," she said.
"You told me you wanted Godolphin's wig," he answered.
She watched him out of the tail of her eye, intrigued by his coolness, his quiet, steady voice, just the same as it was when he went with her fishing on the river. "What is going to happen?" she said. "What are you going to do?"
He did not answer immediately. He called a fresh order to his men, and another sail was furled.
"Do you know Philip Rashleigh?" he said after a while.
"I have heard Harry speak of him."
"He married Godolphin's sister - but that is by the way. Philip Rashleigh is expecting a ship from the Indies, a fact which came to my ears too late, otherwise I should have taken steps to meet her. As it is, I presume her to have arrived at her destination within the last two days. My intention is to seize her, as she lies at anchor, put a prize crew on board, and have them sail her to the opposite coast."
"But supposing her men outnumber yours?"
"That is one of the risks I take continuously. The essential thing is the element of surprise, which has never failed me yet."
He looked down at her, amused by her frown of perplexity, and her shrug of the shoulder, as though she considered him crazy indeed.
"What do you suppose I do?" he said, "when I shut myself in my cabin and make my plans? Do I stake everything on a turn of luck? My men are not idle, you know, when I seek relaxation in the creek. Some of them move about the country, as Godolphin told you, but not with the intention of causing women to be distressed. The distress is a minor detail."
"Do they speak English?"
"Of course. That is why I choose them for this particular work."
"You are exceedingly thorough," she said.
"I dislike inefficiency," he countered.
Little by little the line of the coast became distinct, and they were entering a great sweeping bay. Away to the west she could see white stretches of sand, turning to shadowed grey now in the gathering dusk. The ship was heading north, sailing towards a dark headland, and as yet there seemed to be no creek or inlet where a vessel could lie at anchor.
"You don't know where we are going?" he asked.
"No," she answered.
He smiled, saying nothing, and began to whistle softly under his breath, watching her as he did so, so that at last she looked away, knowing that her eyes betrayed her, and his also; they were speaking to each other without words. She looked out over the smooth sea towards the land, the smell of it came to her with the evening breeze, warm cliff grass, and moss, and trees, hot sand where the sun had shone all day, and she knew that this was happiness, this was living as she had always wished to live. Soon there would be danger, and excitement, and the reality perhaps of fighting, and through it all and afterwards they would be together, making their own world where nothing mattered but the things they could give to one another, the loveliness, the silence, and the peace. And then, stretching her arms above her head and smiling, and glancing back at him over her shoulder she said to him, "Where are we bound then?"
"We are bound for Fowey Haven," he told her.
CHAPTER XII
The night was dark, and very still. What breeze there was came from the north, but here, under the lee of the headland, there was none of it. Only a sudden whistle in the rigging now and again and a ripple across the face of the black water told that a mile or two off-shore the breeze still held. La Mouette lay at anchor on the fringe of a little bay, and close at hand - so close that you could toss a pebble onto the rocks - rose the great cliffs, shadowy and indistinct in the darkness. The ship had come stealthily to her appointed place, no voices were raised, no commands given as she bore up into the wind to drop anchor, and the chain that dropped through the padded hawser gave a hollow muffled sound. For a moment or so the colony of gulls, nesting in hundreds in the cliffs above, became restive and disturbed, and their uneasy cries echoed against the cliff face and travelled across the water, and then, because there was no further movement, they settled again, and the silence was unbroken. Dona stood against the rail on the poop-deck watching the headland, and it seemed to her that there was something eerie in the stillness, something strange, as though they had come unwittingly to a land asleep, whose dwellers lay under a spell, and these gulls that had risen at their approach were sentinels, placed there to give warning. She remembered then, that this country and these cliffs which were another part of her own coast, must be for her, this night at any rate, a hostile place. She had come to enemy territory, and the townsfolk of Fowey Haven, who at this moment were sleeping in their beds, were alien too.
The crew of La Mouette were gathered in the waist of the ship, she could see them standing shoulder to shoulder, motionless and silent, and for the first time since she had started on the adventure she was aware of a tiny prick of misgiving, a feminine chill of fear. She was Dona St. Columb, wife of an English landowner and baronet, and because of impulsive madness she had thrown in her lot with a pack of Bretons, of whom she knew nothing but that they were pirates and outlaws, unscrupulous and dangerous, led by a man who had never told her anything of himself, whom she loved ridiculously without rhyme or reason, a thing which - if she stayed to consider it in cold blood - would make her hot with shame. It might be that the plan would fail, that he and his men would be captured, and she with them, and the whole band of them would be brought ignominiously to justice, and then it would not be long before her identity would be established, Harry brought hotfoot from London. She could see in a flash the whole story blazed over the country, the horror and the scandal it would cause. A sordid tarnished air would cling upon it, there would be smutty laughter in London amongst Harry's friends, and Harry himself would probably blow his brains out, and the children be orphaned, forbidden to speak her name, their mother who had run away after a French pirate like a kitchen-maid after a groom. The thoughts chased themselves round her head, as she gazed down at the silent crew of La Mouette, seeing, in her mind, her comfortable bed at Navron, the peaceful garden, the safety and normality of life with the children. And then, looking up, she saw that the Frenchman was standing beside her, and she wondered how much he could read in her face.