The effect upon me was very saddening, and, laying the glasses down upon the deck, I bowed my head and went back to my cabin, to brood over my misfortune and the disgrace that had come upon me.
The awful story that I had heard from the Kantoon greatly depressed me. Remembering the fairly courteous treatment that I had received at the hands of the Sargassons, I had hoped that a few of the ship’s company would have been spared; I had rather anticipated that the engineers and the baby-faced child in the cabin would be suffered to live; but now all such hopes were dashed.
I was utterly alone among a savage and unnatural people, who set no store on life themselves, and could not be expected to respect mine. It was not improbable that at any hour I might receive the notification that I, too, was to be accorded the “mercy of extinction.”
In this frame of mind I threw myself upon my cot and moaned myself into unconsciousness.
CHAPTER VIII.
FIDETTE.
I was aroused from my stupor by a voice whose accents I had not heard before. Its tone was tender and sympathetic, and instantly awakened in my heart the dormant love of life. Before looking in the direction of the doorway I knew I was in the presence of a friend—one who felt for me in my hour of dire despair.
The question of sex did not occur to me—so completely does misfortune destroy all the impulses of the human heart ordinarily aroused in the breast of a comparatively young man like myself in the presence of womankind. With no other thought than that of gratitude for a gentle word tenderly spoken, I raised my face from my hands and looked in the direction of the speaker.
Before me I beheld a creature so startlingly beautiful that I felt my senses leaving me at the apparition. She was a young girl, small in stature, but perfect in figure, with hazel-brown eyes, and her hair, radiant, reddish-brown in color, fell ’round her shoulders like a mantle. Her skin was aglow with health, and her smile disclosed a row of pearly teeth that glistened in the fading sunlight.
She was clad in a mantle of woven sea grass, of blue and gray, held together at her shoulders by sharks’ teeth. This robe was belted at the waist by a leathern girdle, studded with shells of rainbow hues, and fell loosely about her figure, much as does the costume of the Greeks, as I have seen it worn at the Piraeus and on the islands of the Aegean Sea. Her feet were uncovered, and of dainty size. Her pretty arms were extended toward me in a winning, beseeching way. In her left hand was a sprig of green and waxen-leafed rhododendron, the Sargasson emblem, as I divined at once, of a tender of affection. In her right hand was a small wicker tray of berries, resembling the wintergreen in color and size.