Rosa Mundi by Ethel May Dell (e books free to read .TXT) 📖

soon the crowd on the shore was swallowed up and the great vessel was heading for the mouth, of the harbour and the wide loneliness beyond.
Sybil Denham hid her face in her hands for a moment and shivered. There was something terrible to her in the thought of those thousands of miles to be traversed alone. It cowed her. It appalled her.
Yet when she looked up again her eyes were brave. She stood committed now to this great step, and she was resolved to take it with a high courage. Whatever lay before her, she must face it now without shrinking. Yet it was horribly lonely. She turned from the deck-rail with nervous haste.
The next instant she caught her foot against a coil of rope and fell headlong, with a violence that almost stunned her. A moment she lay, then, gasping, began to raise herself.
But as she struggled to her knees strong hands lifted her, and a man's voice said gruffly:
"Are you hurt?"
She found herself in the grasp of a powerful giant with the physique of a prize-fighter and a dark face with lowering brows that seemed to wear an habitual scowl.
She was too staggered to speak; the fall had unnerved her. She put her hand vaguely behind her, feeling for the rail, looking up at him with piteous, quivering lips.
"You should look where you are going," he said, with scant sympathy. "Perhaps you will another time."
She found the rail, leaned upon it, then turned her back upon him suddenly and burst into tears which she was too shaken to restrain. She thought he would go away, hoped that he would; but he remained, standing in stolid silence till she managed in a measure to regain her self-control.
"Where did you hurt yourself?" he asked then.
She struggled with herself, and answered him. "I--I am not hurt."
"Then what are you crying for?"
The words sounded more like a rude retort than a question.
She found them unanswerable, and suddenly, while she still stood battling with her tears, something in the utterance touched her sense of humour. She gulped down a sob, and gave a little strangled laugh.
"I don't quite know," she said, drying her eyes. "Thank you for picking me up."
"I should have tumbled over you if I hadn't," he responded.
Again her sense of humour quivered, finally dispelling all desire to cry. She turned a little.
"I'm glad you didn't!" she said with fervour.
"So am I."
The curt rejoinder cut clean through her depression. She broke into a gay, spontaneous laugh.
But the next instant she checked herself and apologized.
"Forgive me! I'm very rude."
"What's the joke?" he asked.
She answered him in a voice that still quivered a little with suppressed merriment.
"There isn't a joke. I--I often laugh at nothing. It's a silly habit of mine."
His moody silence seemed to endorse this remark. She became silent also, and after a moment made a shy movement to depart.
He turned then and looked at her, looked full and straight into her small, sallow face, with its shadowy eyes and pointed features, as if he would register her likeness upon his memory.
She gave him a faint, friendly smile.
"I'm going below now," she said. "Good-bye!"
He raised his hat abruptly. His head was massive as a bull's.
"Mind how you go!" he said briefly.
And Sybil went, feeling like a child that has been rebuked.


II

"Do you always walk along with your eyes shut?" asked Brett Mercer.
Sybil gave a great start, and saw him lounging immediately in her path. The days that had elapsed since their first meeting had placed them upon a more or less intimate footing. He had assumed the right to speak to her from the outset--this giant who had picked her up like an infant and scolded her for crying.
It was a hot morning in the Indian Ocean. She had not slept during the night, and she was feeling weary and oppressed. But, with a woman's instinctive reserve, she forced a hasty smile. She would not have stopped to speak had he not risen and barred her progress.
"Sit here!" he said.
She looked up at him with refusal on her lips; but he forestalled her by laying an immense hand on her shoulder and pressing her down into the chair he had just vacated. This accomplished, he turned and hung over the rail in silence. It seemed to be the man's habit at all times to do rather than to speak.
Sybil sat passive, feeling rather helpless, dumbly watching the great lounging figure, and wondered how she should escape without hurting his feelings.
Suddenly, without turning his head, he spoke to her.
"I suppose if I ask what's the matter you'll tell me to go to the devil."
The remark, though characteristic, was totally unexpected. Sybil stared at him for a moment. Then, as once before, his rude address set her sense of humour a-quivering. Depressed, miserable though she was, she began to laugh.
He turned, and looked at her sideways.
"No doubt I am very funny," he observed dryly.
She checked herself with an effort.
"Oh, I know I'm horrid to laugh. But it's not that I am ungrateful. There is nothing really the matter. I--I'm feeling rather like a stray cat this morning, that's all."
The smile still lingered about her lips as she said it. Somehow, telling this taciturn individual of her trouble deprived it of much of its bitterness.
Mercer displayed no sympathy. He did not even continue to look at her. But she did not feel that his impassivity arose from lack of interest.
Suddenly:
"Is it true that you are going to be married as soon as you land?" he asked.
Sybil was sitting forward with her chin in her hands.
"Quite true," she said; adding, half to herself, "so far as I know."
"What do you mean by that?" He turned squarely and looked down at her.
She hesitated a little, but eventually she told him.
"I thought there would have been a letter for me from Robin at Aden, but there wasn't. It has worried me rather."
"Robin?" he said interrogatively.
"Robin Wentworth, the man I am going to marry," she explained. "He has a farm at Bowker Creek, near Rollandstown. But he will meet me at the docks. He has promised to do that. Still, I thought I should have heard from him again."
"But you will hear at Colombo," said Mercer.
She raised her eyes--- those soft, dark eyes that were her only beauty.
"I may," she said.
"And if you don't?"
She smiled faintly.
"I suppose I shall worry some more."
"Are you sure the fellow is worth it?" asked Mercer unexpectedly.
"We have been engaged for three years," she said, "though we have been separated."
He frowned.
"A man can alter a good deal in three years."
She did not attempt to dispute the point. It was one of the many doubts that tormented her in moments of depression.
"And what will you do if he doesn't turn up?" proceeded Mercer.
She gave a sharp shiver.
"Don't--don't frighten me!" she said.
Mercer was silent. He thrust one hand into his pocket, and absently jingled some coins. He began to whistle under his breath, and then, awaking to the fact, abruptly stopped himself.
"If I were in your place," he said at length, "I should get off at Colombo and sail home again on the next boat."
Sybil shook her head slowly but emphatically.
"I am quite sure you wouldn't. For one thing you would be too poor, and for another you would be too proud."
"Are you very poor?" he asked her point blank.
She nodded.
"And very proud."
"And your people?"
"Only my father is living, and I have quarrelled with him."
"Can't you make it up?"
"No," she said sharply and emphatically. "I could never return to my father. There is no room for me now that he has married again. I would sooner sell matches at a street corner than go back to what I have left."
"So that's it, is it?" said Mercer. He was looking at her very attentively with his brows drawn down. "You are not happy at home, so you are plunging into matrimony to get away from it all."
"We have been engaged for three years," she protested, flushing.
"You said that before," he remarked. "It seems to be your only argument, and a confoundedly shaky one at that."
She laughed rather unsteadily.
"You are not very encouraging."
"No," said Mercer.
He was still looking at her somewhat sternly. Involuntarily almost she avoided his eyes.
"Perhaps," she said, with a touch of wistfulness, "when you see my _fiance_ you will change your mind."
He turned from her with obvious impatience.
"Perhaps you will change yours," he said.
And with that surly rejoinder of his the conversation ended. The next moment he moved abruptly away, leaving her in possession.
III
It was early morning when they came at last into port. When Sybil appeared on deck she found it crowded with excited men, and the hubbub was deafening. A multitude of small boats buzzed to and fro on the tumbling waters below them, and she expected every instant to see one swamped as the great ship floated majestically through the throng.
She had anticipated a crowd of people on the wharf to witness their arrival, but the knot of men gathered there scarcely numbered a score. She scanned them eagerly, but it took only a very few seconds to convince her that Robin Wentworth was not among them. And there had been no letter from him at Colombo.
"They don't allow many people on the wharf," said Mercer's voice behind her. "There will be more on the other side of the Customs house."
She looked up at him, bravely smiling, though her heart was throbbing almost to suffocation and she could not speak a word.
He passed on into the crowd and she lost sight of him.
There followed a delay of nearly half-an-hour, during which she stood where she was in the glaring sunshine, dumbly watching. The town, with its many buildings, its roar of traffic; the harbour, with its ships and its hooting sirens; the hot sky, the water that shone like molten brass; all were stamped upon her aching brain with nightmare distinctness. She felt as one caught in some pitiless machine that would crush her to atoms before she could escape.
The gangways were fixed at last, and there was a general movement. She went with the crowd, Mercer's last words still running through her brain with a reiteration that made them almost meaningless. On the other side of the Customs house! Of course, of course she would find Robin there, waiting for her!
She said it to herself over and over as she stepped ashore, and she began to picture their meeting. And then, suddenly, an awful doubt assailed her. She could not recall his features. His image would not rise before her. The memory of his face had passed completely from her mind. It had never done so before, and she was scared. But she strove to reassure herself with the thought that she must surely recognize him the moment her eyes beheld him. It was but a passing weakness this, born of her agitation. Of course, she would know him, and he would know her, too, mightily though she felt she had changed during those three years that they had not met.
She moved on as one in a dream, still with that nightmare of oppression at her heart. The crowd of hurrying strangers bewildered her. Her loneliness appalled her. She had an insane longing to rush back to her cabin and hide herself. But she pressed on, on into the Customs house, following her