Read The Ghost and Mrs. Muir for Free Online

her head in its wrath, like the thudding bass notes of an organ. “I went to sleep in front of that blasted gas fire in my bedroom, in my armchair, and I must have kicked on the gas with my foot in my sleep. It was a stormy night with a wind blowing half a gale from south-southwest right into my windows, and the rain ruining the curtains, so I shut the windows as any sensible man would, and the damn fools came in the morning and found me dead and brought it in as suicide, because my confounded charwoman gave as evidence that I always lived and slept with my window open, no matter the weather. And how the devil should she know! I never slept with her.”
    That proves it, thought Lucy blushing hotly, I could never have thought of that last speech.
    “Of course you couldn’t,” said Captain Gregg, “you’re anice-minded woman—too nice-minded—only half alive in fact.”
    “I’m not,” protested Lucy, “I’m far more alive than you are, and I wish you’d go away and leave me alone. I want to fill my hot-water bottle and go to sleep.”
    “Well, go to sleep,” snapped Captain Gregg. “I’m not stopping you though you have put all that feminine frippery on my good bed.”
    “It is not frippery,” retorted Lucy, “it’s the best hand-embroidered linen. I couldn’t sleep in anything but linen sheets, so I brought my own.”
    “If you had taken the forethought to look in my linen press you would find it filled with the finest Irish linen,” said Captain Gregg. “I bought it myself in Dublin, and as for only being able to sleep in linen sheets, I never heard of such highfalutin balderdash. What you need, young woman, is a trip round the Horn with a south-easter tearing the guts out of you and all hands on deck, with the sea coming over green for three nights and three days—then you’d sleep in sacking and be thankful.”
    “I shouldn’t,” said Lucy perversely.
    “Well, you slept very well in my old armchair before supper,” said Captain Gregg.
    “Oh, so it was you that opened the window and nearly froze me to death,” said Lucy.
    “You exaggerate like all women,” said Captain Gregg. “The fresh air was good for you, and it merely made your nose a little red.”
    “It didn’t,” said Lucy, and suddenly began to laugh.
    “What’s the joke?” asked Captain Gregg. “I like a good laugh myself, and God knows this house has heard little enough of laughter in these last twelve years.”
    “It seems so ridiculous that I should be arguing with aghost over a red nose,” said Lucy. “Such a music hall thing to do, I mean—and before supper I was terrified of you, scared nearly to death.”
    “We are always afraid of the unknown,” said Captain Gregg. “I was never more afraid than when I once took my ship into an unknown harbour without a pilot.”
    “I thought ships going into harbours always had pilots,” said Lucy.
    “They do,” replied the captain, “but on that occasion my pilot had a stroke, crumpled right up over the wheel. I was more frightened that time than when the cook went mad and tried to carve me up for the Christmas dinner—in the doldrums that was, with the temperature a hundred and twelve, and a cargo of raw hides that stank to high heaven.”
    “You must have had an exciting life,” said Lucy, “so many lands you must have seen.”
    “The lands never interested me as much as the seas,” said the captain. “To the landlubber all seas are more or less the same, salt and wet, rough or smooth. But every sea has its own characteristics, and I learned to know most of them.”
    “Why did you retire,” asked Lucy, “if you loved the sea so much?”
    “I was getting old by human standards,” said the captain, “short in the sight and wind, slower in thought and movement. You have to be master of yourself before you can be master of the sea, and with a ship there are too many lives at stake to risk being anything but complete master. So I went into dry dock of my