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At her very best he would never have tacked the word beauty on to her; a buxom, rotund, beady-eyed young female would have made the word beauty spring to his lips Cléo de Bromsart, never. But she was getting more pleasant looking and her eyes were getting over their "stiffness" which was something, and he felt pleased.
There was nothing to do, and these men blunt to life and sea-hardened so that to them all things came in the hour's work, nodded off, La Touche curled up in the bow, Bompard with his grizzled head on the breast of Mademoiselle de Bromsart. The girl was not dead as Bompard imagined, she had been stunned and had passed from that condition into the pseudo-sleep that follows profound excitement.
She was one of the old nobility, without dilution, yet strangely enough with money, for the Bromsarts, without marrying into trade, had adapted themselves to the new times so cleverly that Eugène de Bromsart the last of his race had retired from life leaving his only daughter and the last of her race wealthy, even by the standard of wealth set in Paris.
One might have fancied oneself in Paris but for the vibrations of the propeller, the heave of the sea, and the hundred little noises that mark the passage of a ship under way. Later Mademoiselle de Bromsart found herself in the smoking-room alone with her host, Madame de Warens having retired to her state-room and the others gone on deck.
Cléo de Bromsart had fascinated him, grown upon him, compelled him in some mysterious way to ask her to marry him. He had sworn after his disastrous first experience never to marry again. He had attempted to break his oath. Was he in love with her? He could scarcely answer that question himself.
Raft had told her story before reaching Cape Town and the loss of the Gaston de Paris was now old news in Europe, and the fact that of all the Gaston's crowd only the beautiful Cléo de Bromsart had been saved.
But the world could not understand that, and Raft to the world was a rough sailor man, and she, to the world, was Cléo de Bromsart. She would lie awake at night listening to the pounding of the screws and thinking of this contrasting the figure of Raft with the world she knew and the world she knew with the figure of Raft.
"Simply, madame, that the ship which one looked at as a structure of canvas and wood, once seen by Mademoiselle de Bromsart, has become part of her mind, just as it has become part of yours and mine, a logical and definite part of our minds; now, mark me, there was also the sunset and the storm clouds, those objects also became part of the mind of Mademoiselle de Bromsart, and the reasons interlying between all these objects produced in her a definite and painful impression.
Her face was beautiful but she did not love it, it was herself, she could not view it from an independent standpoint, but she could view her hair almost as impartially as a dress and she loved it with the strange passion that women have for things of texture. The hair of Cléo de Bromsart had been waited upon like a divinity by many a priestess in the form of a maid.
"Well, Mademoiselle de Bromsart proposed to me at dinner that we should alter our course, the idea came to her that some misfortune might happen to us off Kerguelen and, as you know, I am always anxious to please my guests well, I called a quarter-master down. I was going to have sent for you." "To alter our course?" "Yes, but Mademoiselle de Bromsart altered her mind.
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