"Alexander Green - Crimson Sails" - читать интересную книгу автора (Green Alexander)

whole of her previous life.
"I recognized you instantly, my darling, my baby!"
And Gray indeed ceased being grown-up. He listened to her tale of his
father's death and then told her about himself. She heeded him without
reproach or protestation, but to herself--in everything he contended was
the essence of his life,-- she saw but toys her boy was playing with. These
playthings were the continents, oceans and ships.
Gray spent seven days in the castle; on the eighth day, having taken
along a large sum of money, he returned to Dubelt and said to Captain
Hop:
"I thank you. You've been a good friend. Farewell now, my mentor." He
sealed the word with a handshake as fierce as an iron vice. "From now on
I'll be sailing alone, on a ship of my own."
The blood rushed to Hop's head, he spat, yanked his hand away and
stalked off, but Gray overtook him and put his arm around his shoulders.
And so they went to a tavern all together, twenty-four of them, counting
the crew, and drank, and shouted, and sang, and ate, and downed
everything there was in the bar and in the kitchen.
But a short while later the evening star flashed above the black line of a
new mast in the Port of Dubelt. It was the Secret, a
two-hundred-and-sixty-ton, three-masted galliot Gray had purchased.
Arthur Gray sailed it for four more years as the owner and captain until
chance brought him to Liss. However, he had remembered for always that
short burst of throaty laughter that had greeted him at home, and so twice
a year he visited the castle, leaving the silver-haired woman with an
uncertain conviction that such a big boy might perhaps be able to handle
his toys after all.




III. DAWN

The stream of foam cast off by the stern of Gray's Secret crossed the
ocean as a white streak and faded in the glow of the evening lights of Liss.
The ship dropped anchor near the lighthouse.
For the next ten days the Secret unloaded tussore silk, coffee and tea;
the crew spent the eleventh day ashore, relaxing in alcoholic fumes; on the
twelfth day, for no good reason, Gray was blackly despondent and could
not understand this despondency.
He had barely come awake in the morning when he felt that this day
had begun in a black shroud. He dressed glumly, ate breakfast
half-heartedly, forgot to read the newspaper and smoked for a long while,
plunged into an inexpressible mood of futile tension; among the vaguely
emerging words unacknowledged desires roamed, destroying each other
through equal effort. Then he got down to work.
Accompanied by the boatswain, Gray inspected the ship and ordered
the guy ropes tightened, the tiller rope loosened, the hawse cleaned, the
tack changed, the deck tarred, the compass wiped and the hold opened,
aired and swept. However, this did not dispel his dark mood. Filled with