5
PRESENTLY they were on deck. They found Quentin with Lychnis and Ruby (in cloaks of emerald and rose respectively, with glimmering shoes), showing off his bushy beard and his heroic figure in the light of a yellow rose-leaf moon. The ship was moving gently in the foam-flowering fields of the sea. Above them, against a swaying almond-tree of stars, could be seen the head of a seaman looking over the canvas of the navigating bridge. There was no sound but the sound of the sea and Quentin’s rich voice and the girls’ laughter.
“Five-and-twenty past nine, Lychnis,” said Fulke.
“Oh, bother!” She frowned. But the thought of the calculations, once planted in her consciousness, began to attract her. “I’ll come,” she said; and chose to descend to the lower deck by an iron ladder that the sailors used in passage from foc’s’le to bridge. She vanished into the darkness like some faint emerald emanation.
“And your mother wants you, Ruby,” said Ambrose.
The rose emanation went slowly and sulkily after the emerald, and Ambrose delivered his message on the subject of mutiny with a gesture towards a light that outlined a door in the swaying foc’s’le.
“Well, I’ll take ’em on single-handed, in defence of virginity,” said Quentin, “though chastity requires no defence, for, as Judas Thomas tells us, chastity is an athlete who is not overcome. How beautiful is the story of Perpetua, the virgin martyred at Carthage, and of Thekla, for whom the lioness fought with other beasts in the arena! No, Ambrose. Purity is absolute. The pure virgin cannot be defiled, for her heart is not in the work. And that is why we need have no scruples regarding her.”
“Thekla?” asked Ambrose. “I am not acquainted with that story. I must look it up.”