He blustered and he bullied and he
insulted the young man shocking: but the sailor kept his temper very well,
and the quieter he was the fiercer old man Jimmy got. And Polly Fox wasn't
no better. She spit out her temper on Christie, and wanted to know how a
girl, brought up with the fear of God in her eyes, could think twice of a
common seafarer.
So seeing they were beyond reason, Masters took up his cap, and left.
"Keep your nerve, my gal," he said to Christie, "and bide my time. Let 'em
see we mean what we say; and next voyage I come along, I'll bring my
credentials, and if Mr. Fox knows a man with better, then I'll throw up
the sponge, but not before."
He took it in that calm and gentlemanlike fashion, but he didn't know his
company, or their ideas of proper behaviour; and he didn't know the power
her uncle had got over Christie, or the savage nature of the man, that
would stick at nothing if crossed.
When he was gone, Fox ordered his niece to her chamber, and when she
hesitated, he took her by the scruff of the neck, drove her upstairs to
the dormer attic that was hers, pushed her in and locked the door on her.
"And there you shall bide, and there you shall starve till you beg my
pardon and your aunt's pardon, and take Mr. Bassett, as we will for you to
do," he said.
Stunned and frightened out of her life, the girl very near fainted after
such treatment; but the night came and passed, and not a sound of her
people did she hear; and in the morning--Sunday--'twas Fox tramped up over
the stairs and opened her door and asked if she'd changed her mind.
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