And the same day-dawn found the _Angelique_, after a night of almost
perfect calm, off the mainland from which she had failed to get away,
although she had made sufficient northing to be midway between San
Antonio and the passages of Bocas del Toro and Cartago. These two
passages to the open sea still lay twenty-five miles away, and the
schooner truly slept on the mirror surface of the placid lagoon. Too
stuffy below for sleep in the steaming tropics, the deck was littered
with the sleepers. On top the small house of the cabin, in solitary
state, lay Leoncia. On the narrow runways of deck on either side lay her
brothers and her father. Aft, between the cabin companionway and the
wheel, side by side, Francis’ arm across Henry’s shoulder, as if still
protecting him, were the two Morgans. On one side of the wheel, sitting,
with arms on knees and head on arms, the negro-Indian skipper slept, and
just as precisely postured, on the other side of the wheel, slept the
helmsman, who was none other than Percival, the black Kingston negro.
The waist of the schooner was strewn with the bodies of the mixed-breed
seamen, while for’ard, on the tiny forecastlehead, prone, his face
buried upon his folded arms, slept the lookout.
Leoncia, in her high place on the cabin-top, awoke first. Propping her
head on her hand, the elbow resting on a bit of the poncho on which she
lay, she looked down past one side of the hood of the companionway upon
the two young men. She yearned over them, who were so alike, and knew
love for both of them, remembered the kisses of Henry on her mouth,
thrilled till the blush of her own thoughts mantled her cheek at memory
of the kisses of Francis, and was puzzled and amazed that she should
have it in her to love two men at the one time. As she had already
learned of herself, she would follow Henry to the end of the world and
Francis even farther. And she could not understand such wantonness of
inclination.
Fleeing from her own thoughts, which frightened her, she stretched out
her arm and dangled the end of her silken scarf to a tickling of
Francis’ nose, who, after restless movements, still in the heaviness of
sleep, struck with his hand at what he must have thought to be a
mosquito or a fly, and hit Henry on the chest. So it was Henry who was
first awakened. He sat up with such abruptness as to awaken Francis.
“Good morning, merry kinsman,” Francis greeted. “Why such violence?”
“Morning, morning, and the morning’s morning, comrade,” Henry muttered.
“Such was the violence of your sleep that it was you who awakened me
with a buffet on my breast. I thought it was the hangman, for this is
the morning they planned to kink my neck.” He yawned, stretched his
arms, gazed out over the rail at the sleeping sea, and nudged Francis to
observance of the sleeping skipper and helmsman.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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