"There are two plates; you hold them on the top of the stove to warm--that"s it! And now you fill the kettle--oh! I see you"ve thought of that. It will boil while we eat the fish."
She helped him to some, and they ate in silence for some minutes. Only they who have eaten mackerel within a few minutes of their being caught, and eaten them while reclining in a boat, with a blue sky overhead and a sapphire sea all around, can know how good mackerel can taste. To Vernon, who possessed the appet.i.te of the convalescent, the meal was an Olympian feast.
"No more?" he said, as Nell declined. "Pray don"t say so, or I shall, from sheer decency, have to refuse also; and I could eat another half, and will do so if you will take the other. You wouldn"t be so heartless as to deprive me of a second serve, surely!"
Nell laughed and held out her plate.
"I consent because I do not think the recently starving should eat too much at first. Didn"t you say that you had been in Egypt fighting? You are in the army, then?"
He nodded casually, and she looked at him thoughtfully.
"Then we ought not to call you "Mr.,"" she said. "What are you--a colonel?"
He laughed shortly as he picked the fish from the bones.
"Good heavens! do I look so old? No, not colonel. I"m a captain. But I"m not in the army now. I left it--worse luck!"
"Why did you leave it?" she asked.
He looked a little bored--not so much bored, perhaps, as reluctant.
"Oh, for a variety of reasons; the most important being the fact that a relative of mine wished me to do so."
His face clouded for a moment or two; then he said, with the air of one dismissing an unpleasant topic:
"This water"s boiling like mad. Now is my time to prove my a.s.sertion that I am capable of making coffee. I want two jugs, or this jug and the tin will do. The coffee? Thanks. I"m afraid I"ll have to get you to hold the tin. This is the native method: You make it in the tin--so; then, after a moment or two, you pour the liquid--not the coffee grounds--into the jug, then back, and then back again, and lo! you have cafe a la Francais, or Cairo, or Clapham fashion."
"It"s very good," she admitted, when it had cooled sufficiently for her to taste it. "And that is how you made it on the battlefield?"
"Scarcely," he said. "There was no jug, only an empty meat can; and the water--well, the water was almost as thick, with mud, before the coffee was put in as afterward, and the men would scarcely have had patience to wait for the patent process. Poor beggars! Some of them had not had a drop past their lips for twenty-four hours--and been fighting, too."
Nell listened, with her grave gray eyes fixed on his face.
"How sorry you must have been to leave the army!" she said thoughtfully.
"Does warfare seem so alluring?" he retorted, with a laugh. "But you"re right; I was sorry to send in my papers, and I"ve been sorrier since the day I did it."
Nell curled herself up in the bottom of the boat like a well-fed and contented cat, and Vernon, having washed the plates by the simple process of dragging them backward and forward through the water, stretched himself and felt in his pockets. He relinquished the search with a sigh of resignation, and Nell, hearing it, looked up.
"Are you not going to smoke?" she asked. "d.i.c.k would have his pipe alight long before this; and, of course, I don"t mind--if that is what you were waiting for. Why should I?"
"Thanks; but, like an idiot, I"ve forgotten my pipe. I"ve got some tobacco and cigarette paper."
"Then you are all right," she remarked.
"Scarcely," he said carelessly. "This stupid mummy of an arm of mine prevents me rolling a cigarette, you see."
"How stupid of me to forget that!" she said. "Give me the tobacco and the paper and let me try."
He produced the necessary articles promptly; and showed her how to do it.
"Not quite so much tobacco"--she had taken out enough for ten cigarettes, and spilled sufficient for another five--"and--er--if you could get it more equal along the paper. Like this--ah, thanks!"
In showing her, his fingers got "mixed" with hers, but Nell seemed too absorbed in her novel experiment to notice the fact.
"Like that? Rather like a miniature sausage, isn"t it? And it will all come undone when I let go of it," she added apprehensively.
"If you"ll be so good as just to wet the edge with your lips," he said, in a matter-of-fact way.
She looked at him, and a faint dash of color came into her face.
"You won"t like to smoke it afterward," she said coolly.
He stared at her, then smiled.
"Try me!" he said succinctly.
She gave a little shrug of the shoulders, moistened the cigarette in the usual way, and handed it to him gravely.
"I"ll try to make the next better," she said. "I suppose you will want another?"
"I"m afraid I shall want more than you will be inclined to make," he said, "and I shouldn"t like to trespa.s.s on your good nature."
"Oh, it"s not very hard work making cigarettes," she said. "I"d better set about the next at once. How is that?" and she held up the production for inspection.
"Simply perfect," he said. "You would ama.s.s a fortune out in the East as a cigarette maker."
She looked up at him, beyond him, wistfully.
"I wish I could ama.s.s a fortune; indeed, I"d be content if I could earn my living any way," she said, as if she were communing with herself rather than addressing him. "If I could earn some money, and help d.i.c.k!"
Her voice died away, and she sighed softly.
He regarded her dreamily.
"Don"t think of anything so--unnatural," he said.
She raised her eyes, and looked at him with surprise.
"Is it unnatural for a woman--a girl--to earn her own living?" she said.
"Yes," he said emphatically. "Women were made for men to work for, not to toil themselves."
Nell laughed, in simple mockery of the sentiment.
"What nonsense! As if we were dolls or something to be wrapped up in lavender! Why, half the women in Shorne Mills work! You see them driving their donkeys down to the beach for sand--haven"t you seen them with bags on each side?--and doing washing, and making b.u.t.ter and going to market. Why, I should have to work if anything happened to mamma. At least, she has often said so. She has--what is it?--oh, an annuity or something of the kind; and if she died, d.i.c.k and I would have to "face the world," as she puts it."
He said nothing, but looked at her through the thin blue cloud of his cigarette. She looked so sweet, so girlish, so--yes, so helpless--lying there in the sunlight, one brown paw supporting her shapely head, the other--after the manner of girls--dabbling in the water. A pang of compa.s.sion smote him.