The Dog Star, by Joseph C. Lincoln
I
IT commenced the day after we took old man Stumpton out codfishin’. Me and Cap’n Jonadab both told Peter T. Brown that the cod wa’n’t bitin’ much at that season, but he said cod be jiggered. “What’s troublin’ me jest now is landin’ suckers,” he says.
So the four of us got into thePatience M.—she’s Jonadab’s catboat—and sot sail for the Crab Ledge. And we hadn’t more’n got our lines over the side than we struck into a school of dogfish. Now, if you know anything about fishin’ you know that when the dogfish strike on it’s “good-by, cod!” So when Stumpton hauled a big fat one over the rail I could tell that Jonadab was jest ready to swear. But do you think it disturbed your old friend, Peter Brown? No, sir! He never winked an eye.
“By Jove!” he sings out, starin’ at that blamed dogfish as if ’twas a gold dollar. “By Jove!” says he, “that’s the finest specimen of a Labrador mack’rel ever I see. Bait up, Stump, and go at ’em again.”
So Stumpton, havin’ lived in Montana ever sence he was five years old, and not havin’ sighted salt water in all that time, he don’t know but what there is sech critters as “Labrador mack’rel,” and he does go at ’em, hammer and tongs. When we come ashore we had eighteen dogfish, four sculpin and a skate, and Stumpton was the happiest loon in Ostable County. It was all we could do to keep him from cookin’ one of them “mack’rel” with his own hands. If Jonadab hadn’t steered him out of the way while I sneaked down to the Port and bought a bass, we’d have had to eat dogfish—we would, as sure as I’m a foot high.
Stumpton and his daughter, Maudina, was at the Old Home House, at Wellmouth Port. ’Twas late in September, and the boarders had cleared out. Old Dillaway—Ebenezer Dillaway, Peter’s father-in-law—had decoyed the pair on from Montana because him and some Wall Street sharks were figgerin’ on buyin’ some copper country out that way that Stumpton owned. Then Dillaway was too sick, and Peter, who was jest back from his weddin’ tower, brought the Montana victims down to the Cape with the excuse to give ’em a good time alongshore, but really to keep ’em safe and out of the way till Ebenezer got well enough to finish robbin’ ’em. Belle—Peter’s wife—stayed behind to look after papa.
Stumpton was a great tall man, narrer in the beam, and with a figgerhead like a henhawk. He jest enjoyed himself here at the Cape. He fished, and loafed, and shot at a mark. He sartinly could shoot. The only thing he was wishin’ for was somethin’ alive to shoot at, and Brown had promised to take him out duck shootin’. ’Twas too early for ducks, but that didn’t worry Peter any; he’d a-had ducks to shoot at if he bought all the poultry in the township.
Maudina was like her name, pretty but sort of soft and mushy. She had big blue eyes and a baby face, and her principal cargo was poetry. She had a deckload of it, and she’d heave it overboard every time the wind changed. She was forever orderin’ the ocean to“roll on,” but she didn’t mean it; I had her out sailin’ once when the bay was a little mite rugged, and I know. She was jest out of a convent school, and you could see she wasn’t used to most things—includin’ men.
The fust week slipped along, and everything was serene. Bulletins from Ebenezer more encouragin’ every day, and no squalls in sight. But ’twas almost too slick. I was afraid the calm was a weather breeder, and sure enough, the hurricane struck us the day after that fishin’ trip.
Peter had gone drivin’ with Maudina and her dad, and me and Cap’n Jonadab was smokin’ on the front piazza. I was pullin’ at a pipe, but the cap’n had the home end of one of Stumpton’s cigars harpooned on the little blade of his jackknife, and was busy pumpin’ the last drop of comfort out of it. I never see a man who wanted to git his money’s wuth more’n Jonadab. I give you my word, I expected to see him swaller that cigar remnant every minute.
And all to once he gives a gurgle in his throat.
“Take a drink of water,” says I, scared like.
“Well, by time!” says he, p’intin’.
A feller had jest turned the corner of the house and was headin’ up in our direction. He was a thin, lengthy craft, with more’n the average amount of wrists stickin’ out of his sleeves, and with long black hair trimmed aft behind his ears and curlin’ on the back of his neck. He had high cheek bones and kind of sunk-in black eyes, and altogether he looked like “Dr. Macgoozleum, the Celebrated Blackfoot Medicine Man.” If he’d hollered: “Sagwa Bitters, only one dollar a bottle!” I wouldn’t have been surprised.
But his clothes—don’t say a word! His coat was long and buttoned up tight, so’s you couldn’t tell whether he had a vest on or not—though ’twas a safe bet he hadn’t—and it and his pants was made of the loudest kind of black-and-white checks. No nice quiet pepper-and-salt, you understand, but the checkerboard kind, the oilcloth kind, the kind that looks like the marble floor in the Boston post office. They was pretty tolerable seedy, and so was his hat. Oh, he was a last year’s bird’s nestnow, but when them clothes was fresh—whew! the northern lights and a rainbow mixed wouldn’t have been more’n a cloudy day ’longside of him.
He run up to the piazza like a clipper comin’ into port, and he sweeps off that rusty hat and hails us grand and easy.
“Good-mornin’, gentlemen,” says he.
“We don’t want none,” says Jonadab, decided.
The feller looked surprised. “I beg your pardon,” says he. “You don’t want any—what?”
“We don’t want any ‘Life of King Solomon’ nor ‘The World’s Big Classifyers.’ And we don’t want to buy any patent paint, nor sewin’ machines, nor clothes washers, nor climbin’ evergreen roses, nor rheumatiz salve. And we don’t want our pictures painted, neither.”
Jonadab was gittin’ excited. Nothin’ riles him wuss than a peddler, unless it’s a woman sellin’ tickets to a church fair. The feller swelled up until I thought the top button on that thunderstorm coat would drag anchor, sure.
“You are mistaken,” says he. “I have called to see Mr. Peter Brown; he is—er—a relative of mine.”
Well, you could have blown me and Jonadab over with a cat’s-paw. We went on our beam ends, so’s to speak. A relation of Peter T.’s; why, if he’d been twice the panorama he was we’d have let him in when he said that. Loud clothes, we figgered, must run in the family. We remembered how Peter was dressed the fust time we met him.
“You don’t say!” says I. “Come right up and set down, Mr—Mr.——”
“Montague,” says the feller. “Booth Montague. Permit me to present my card.”
He dove into the hatches of his checkerboards and rummaged around, but he didn’t find nothin’ but holes, I jedge, because he looked dreadful put out, and begged our pardons five or six times.
“Dear me!” says he. “This is embarrassin’. I’ve forgot my cardcase.”
We told him never mind the card; any of Peter’s folks was more’n welcome. So he come up the steps and set down in a piazza chair like King Edward perchin’ on his throne. Then he hove out some remarks about its bein’ a nice morning’, all in a condescendin’ sort of way, as if he usually attended to the weather himself, but had been sort of busy lately, and had handed the job over to one of the crew. We told him all about Peter, and Belle, and Ebenezer, and about Stumpton and Maudina. He was a good deal interested, and asked consider’ble many questions. Pretty soon we heard a carriage rattlin’ up the road.
“Hello!” says I. “I guess that’s Peter and the rest comin’ now.”
Mr. Montague got off his throne kind of sudden.
“Ahem!” says he. “Is there a room here where I may—er—receive Mr. Brown in a less public manner? It will be rather a—er—surprise for him, and——”
Well, there was a good deal of sense in that. I know ’twould surprisemeto have such an image as he was sprung on me without any notice. We steered him into the gents’ parlor, and shut the door. In a minute the horse and wagon come into the yard. Maudina said she’d had a “heavenly” drive, and unloaded some poetry concernin’ the music of billows, and pine trees, and sech. She and her father went up to their rooms, and when the decks was clear Jonadab and me tackled Peter T.
“Peter,” says Jonadab, “we’ve got a surprise for you. One of your relations has come.”
Brown, he did looked surprised, but he didn’t act as he was any too joyful.
“Relation ofmine?” says he. “Come off! What’s his name?”
We told him Montague, Booth Montague. He laffed.
“Wake up and turn over,” he says. “They never had anything like that in my fam’ly. Booth Montague! Sure ’twa’n’t Algernon Coughdrops?”
We said no, ’twas Booth Montague, and that he was waitin’ in the gents’ parlor. So he laffed again, and said somethin’ about sendin’ for Laura Lean Jibbey, and then we started.
The checkerboard feller was standin’ up when we opened the door. “Hello, Petey!” says he, cool as a cucumber, and stickin’ out a foot and a ha’f of wrist with a hand at the end of it.
Now, it takes consider’ble to upset Peter Theodosius Brown. Up to that time and hour I’d have bet on him against anything short of an earthquake. But Booth Montague done it—knocked him plumb out of water. Peter actually turned white.
“Great——” he began, and then stopped and swallered. “Hank!” he says, and set down in a chair.
“The same,” says Montague, wavin’ the starboard extension of the checkerboard. “Petey, it does me good to set my lamps on you. Especially now, when you’re the reel thing.”
Brown never answered for a minute. Then he canted over to port and reached down into his pocket. “Well,” says he, “how much?”
But Hank, or Booth, or Montague—whatever his name was—he waved his flipper disdainful. “Nun-nun-nun-no, Petey, my son,” he says, smilin’. “It ain’t ’how much?’ this time. When I heard how you’d rung the bell the first shot out the box and was rollin’ in coin, I said to myself: ‘Here’s where the prod comes back to his own.’ I’ve come to live with you, Petey, and you pay the freight.”
Peter jumped out of the chair. “Livewith me!” he says. “You Friday evenin’ amateur night! It’s back to ‘Ten Nights in a Barroom’ for yours!” he says.
“Oh, no, it ain’t!” says Hank, cheerful. “It’ll be back to Popper Dillaway and Belle. When I tell ’em I’m your little cousin Henry and how you and me worked the territories together—why—well, I guess there’ll be gladness round the dear home nest; hey?”
Peter didn’t say nothin’. Then he fetched a long breath and motioned with his head to Cap’n Jonadab and me. We see we weren’t invited to the family reunion,so we went out and shut the door. But we did pity Peter; I snum if we didn’t!
It was ’most an hour afore Brown come out of that room. When he did he took Jonadab and me by the arm and led us out back of the barn.
“Fellers,” he says, sad and mournful, “that—that plaster cast in a crazy-quilt,” he says, referrin’ to Montague, “is a cousin of mine. That’s the livin’ truth,” says he, “and the only excuse I can make is that ’tain’t my fault. He’s my cousin, all right, and his name’s Hank Schmults, but the sooner you box that fact up in your forgetory, the smoother ’twill be for yours drearily, Peter T. Brown. He’s to be Mr. Booth Montague, the celebrated English poet, so long’s he hangs out at the Old Home; and he’s to hang out here until—well, until I can dope out a way to get rid of him.”
We didn’t say nothin’ for a minute—jest thought. Then Jonadab says, kind of puzzled: “What makes you call him a poet?” he says.
Peter answered pretty snappy: ”’Cause there’s only two or three jobs that a long-haired image like him could hold down,” he says. “I’d call him a musician if he could play ’Bedelia’ on a jews’-harp; but he can’t, so’s he’s got to be a poet.”
And a poet he was for the next week or so. Peter drove down to Wellmouth that night and bought some respectable black clothes, and the follerin’ mornin’, when the celebrated Booth Montague come sailin’ into the dinin’ room, with his curls brushed back from his forehead, and his new cutaway on, and his wrists covered up with clean cuffs, blessed if he didn’t look distinguished—at least, that’s the only word I can think of that fills the bill. And he talked beautiful language, not like the slang he hove at Brown and us in the gents’ parlor.
Peter done the honors, introducin’ him to us and the Stumptons as a friend who’d come from England unexpected, and Hank he bowed and scraped, and looked absent-minded and crazy—like a poet ought to. Oh, he done well at it! You could see that ’twas jest pie for him.
And ’twas pie for Maudina, too. Bein’, as I said, kind of green concernin’ men folks, and likewise takin’ to poetry like a cat to fish, she jest fairly gushed over this fraud. She’d reel off a couple of fathom of verses from fellers named Spencer or Waller, or sech like, and he’d never turn a hair, but back he’d come and say they was good, but he preferred Confucius, or Methuselah, or somebody so antique that she nor nobody else ever heard of ’em. Oh, he run a safe course, and he hadherin tow afore they turned the fust mark.
Jonadab and me got worried. We see how things was goin’, and we didn’t like it. Stumpton was havin’ too good a time to notice, goin’ after “Labrador mack’rel” and so on, and Peter T. was too busy steerin’ the cruises to pay any attention. But one afternoon I come by the summerhouse unexpected, and there sat Booth Montague and Maudina, him with a clove hitch round her waist, and she lookin’ up into his eyes like they were peekholes in the fence ’round paradise. That was enough. It jest simplycouldn’tgo any further, so that night me and Jonadab had a confab up in my room.
“Barzilla,” says the cap’n, “if we tell Peter that that relation of his is figgerin’ to marry Maudina Stumpton for her money, and that he’s more’n likely to elope with her, ’twill pretty nigh kill Pete, won’t it? No, sir; it’s up to you and me. We’ve got to figger out some way to git rid of the critter ourselves.”
“It’s a wonder to me,” I says, “that Peter puts up with him. Why don’t he order him to clear out, and tell Belle if he wants to? She can’t blame Peter ’cause his uncle was father to an outrage like that.”
Jonadab looks at me scornful. “Can’t, hey?” he says. “And her high-toned and chummin’ in with the bigbugs? It’s easy to see you never was married,” says he.
Well, I never was, so I shet up.
We set there and thought and thought, and by and by I commencedto sight an idee in the offin’. ’Twas hull down at fust, but pretty soon I got it into speakin’ distance, and then I broke it gentle to Jonadab. He grabbed at it like the “Labrador mack’rel” grabbed Stumpton’s hook. We set up and planned until pretty nigh three o’clock, and all the next day we put in our spare time loadin’ provisions and water aboard thePatience M.We put grub enough aboard to last a month.
Just at daylight the mornin’ after that we knocked at the door of Montague’s bedroom. When he woke up enough to open the door—it took some time, ’cause eatin’ and sleepin’ was his mainstay—we told him that we was plannin’ an early-mornin’ fishin’ trip, and if he wanted to go with the folks he must come down to the landin’ quick. He promised to hurry, and I stayed by the door to see that he didn’t git away. In about ten minutes we had him in the skiff rowin’ off to thePatience M.
“Where’s the rest of the crowd?” says he, when he stepped aboard.
“They’ll be along when we’re ready for ’em,” says I. “You go below there, will you, and stow away the coats and things.”
So he crawled into the cabin, and I helped Jonadab git up sail. We intended towin’ the skiff, so I made her fast astern. In ha’f a shake we was under way and headed out of the cove. When that British poet stuck his nose out of the companion we was abreast the p’int.
“Hi!” says he, scramblin’ into the cockpit. “What’s this mean?”
I was steerin’ and feelin’ toler’ble happy over the way things had worked out.
“Nice sailin’ breeze, ain’t it?” says I, smilin’.
“Where’s Mau—Miss Stumpton?” he says, wild like.
“She’s abed, I cal’late,” says I, “gittin’ her beauty sleep. Why don’tyouturn in? Or are you pretty enough now?”
He looked fust at me and then at Jonadab, and his face turned a little yellower than usual.
“What kind of a game is this?” he asks, brisk. “Where are you goin’?”
’Twas Jonadab that answered. “We’re bound,” says he, “for the Bermudas. It’s a lovely place to spend the winter, they tell me,” he says.
That poet never made no remarks. He jumped to the stern and caught hold of the skiff’s pointer. I shoved him out of the way and picked up the boat hook. Jonadab rolled up his shirt sleeves and laid hands on the centerboard stick.
“I wouldn’t, if I was you,” says the cap’n.
Jonadab weighs pretty close to two hundred, and most of it’s gristle. I’m not quite so much, fur’s tonnage goes, but I ain’t exactly a canary bird. Montague seemed to size things up in a jiffy. He looked at us, then at the sail, and then at the shore out over the stern.
“Done!” says he. “Done! And by a couple of ‘come-ons’!”
And down he sets on the thwart.
“Is there anything to drink aboard this liner?” asks Booth Hank Montague.
*****
Well, we sailed all that day and all that night. Course we didn’t reelly intend to make the Bermudas. What we intended to do was to cruise around alongshore for a couple of weeks, long enough for the Stumptons to git back to Dillaway’s, settle the copper bus’ness and break for Montana. Then we was goin’ home again and turn Brown’s relation over to him to take care of. We knew Peter’d have some plan thought out by that time. We’d left a note tellin’ him what we’d done, and sayin’ that we trusted to him to explain matters to Maudina and her dad. We knew that explainin’ was Peter’s main holt.
The poet was pretty chipper for a spell. He set on the thwart and bragged about what he’d do when he got back to “Petey” again. He said we couldn’t git rid of him so easy. Then he spun yarns about what him and Brown did when they was out West together. They was interestin’ yarns, but we could see why Peter wa’n’t anxious to introduce CousinHenry to Belle. Then thePatience M.got out where ’twas pretty rugged, and she rolled consider’ble, and after that we didn’t hear much more from friend Booth—he was too busy to talk.
That night me and Jonadab took watch and watch. In the mornin’ it thickened up and looked squally. I got kind of worried. By nine o’clock there was every sign of a no’theaster, and we see we’d have to put in somewheres and ride it out. So we headed for a place we’ll call Baytown, though that wa’n’t the name of it. It’s a queer, old-fashioned town, and it’s on an island; maybe you can guess it from that.
Well, we run into the harbor and let go anchor. Jonadab crawled into the cabin to git some terbacker, and I was for’ard coilin’ the throat halyard. All to once I heard oars rattlin’, and I turned my head; what I see made me let out a yell like a siren whistle.
There was that everlastin’ poet in the skiff—you remember we’d been towin’ it astern—and he was jest cuttin’ the painter with his jackknife. Next minute he’d picked up the oars and was headin’ for the wharf, doublin’ up and stretchin’ out like a frog swimmin’, and with his curls streamin’ in the wind like a rooster’s tail in a hurricane. He had a long start ’fore Jonadab and me woke up enough to think of chasin’ him.
But we woke up fin’lly, and the way we flew round that catboat was a caution. I laid into them halyards, and I had the gaff up to the peak afore Jonadab got the anchor clear of the bottom. Then I jumped to the tiller, and thePatience M.took after that skiff like a pup after a tomcat. We run alongside the wharf jest as Booth Hank climbed over the stringpiece.
“Git after him, Barzilla!” hollers Cap’n Jonadab. “I’ll make her fast.”
Well, I hadn’t took more’n three steps when I see ’twas goin’ to be a long chase. Montague unfurled them thin legs of his and got over the ground somethin’ wonderful. All you could see was a pile of dust and coat tails flappin’.
Up on the wharf we went and round the corner into a straggly kind of road with old-fashioned houses on both sides of it. Nobody in the yards, nobody at the windows; quiet as could be, except that off ahead, somewheres, there was music playin’.
That road was a quarter of a mile long, but we galloped through it so fast that the scenery was nothin’ but a blur. Booth was gainin’ all the time, but I stuck to it like a good one. We took a short cut through a yard, piled over a fence and come out into another road, and up at the head of it was a crowd of folks—men and women and children and dogs.
“Stop thief!” I hollers, and ’way astern I heard Jonadab bellerin’: “Stop thief!”
Montague dives headfust for the crowd. He fell over a baby carriage, and I gained a tack ’fore he got up. He wa’n’t more’n ten yards ahead when I come bustin’ through, upsettin’ children and old women, and landed in what I guess was the main street of the place and right abreast of a parade that was marchin’ down the middle of it.
Fust there was the band, four fellers tootin’ and bangin’ like fo’mast hands on a fishin’ smack in a fog. Then there was a big darky totin’ a banner with “Jenkins’ Unparalleled Double Uncle Tom’s Cabin Company, Number 2,” on it in big letters. Behind him was a boy leadin’ two great, savage-lookin’ dogs—bloodhounds, I found out afterward—by chains. Then come a pony cart with Little Eva and Eliza’s child in it; Eva was all gold hair and beautifulness. And astern of her was Marks, the Lawyer, on his donkey. There was lots more behind him, but these was all I had time to see jest then.
Now, there was but one way for Booth Hank to git acrost that street, and that was to bust through the procession. And, as luck would have it, the place he picked out to cross was jest ahead of the bloodhounds. And the fust thing I knew, them dogs stretched out their noses and took a long sniff, and then bu’st out howlin’ like all possessed. The boy, he tried to hold ’em,but ’twas no go. They yanked the chains out of his hands and took after that poet as if he owed ’em somethin’. And every one of the four million other dogs that was in the crowd on the sidewalks fell into line, and such howlin’ and yappin’ and scamperin’ and screamin’ you never heard.
Well, ’twas a mixed-up mess. That was the end of the parade. Next minute I was racin’ across country with the whole town and the Uncle Tommers astern of me, and a string of dogs stretched out ahead fur’s you could see. ’Way up in the lead was Booth Montague and the bloodhounds, and away aft I could hear Jonadab yellin’: “Stop thief!”
’Twas lively while it lasted, but it didn’t last long. There was a little hill at the end of the field, and where the poet dove over t’other side of it the bloodhounds all but had him. Afore I got to the top of the rise I heard the awfullest powwow goin’ on in the holler, and thinks I: “They’re eatin’ him alive!”
But they wa’n’t. When I hove in sight Montague was settin’ up on the ground at the foot of the sand bank he’d fell into, and the two hounds was rollin’ over him, lappin’ his face and goin’ on as if he was their grandpa jest home from sea with his wages in his pocket. And round them, in a double ring, was all the town dogs, crazy mad, and barkin’ and snarlin’, but scared to go any closer.
In a minute more the folks begun to arrive; boys first, then girls and men, and then the women. Marks come trottin’ up, poundin’ the donkey with his umbrella.
“Here, Lion! Here, Tige!” he yells. “Quit it! Let him alone!” Then he looks at Montague, and his jaw kind of drops.
“Why—why,Hank!” he says.
A tall, lean critter, in a black tail coat and a yaller vest and lavender pants, comes puffin’ up. He was the manager, we found out afterward.
“Have they bit him?” says he. Then he done jest the same as Marks; his mouth opened and his eyes stuck out. “Hank Schmults, by the livin’ jingo!” says he.
Booth Montague looks at the two of ’em kind of sick and lonesome. “Hello, Barney! How are you, Sullivan?” he says.
I thought ’twas about time for me to git prominent. I stepped up, and was jest goin’ to say somethin’ when somebody cuts in ahead of me.
“Hum!” says a voice, a woman’s voice, and toler’ble crisp and vinegary. “Hum! it’s you, is it? I’ve been lookin’ foryou!”
’Twas Little Eva in the pony cart. Her lovely posy hat was hangin’ on the back of her neck, her gold hair had slipped back so’s you could see the black under it, and her beautiful red cheeks was kind of streaky. She looked some older and likewise mad.
“Hum!” says she, gittin’ out of the cart. “It’s you, is it, Hank Schmults? Well, p’r’aps you’ll tell me where you’ve been for the last two weeks? What do you mean by runnin’ away and leavin’ your——”
Montague interrupted her. “Hold on, Maggie, hold on!” he begs. “Don’tmake a row here. It’s all a mistake; I’ll explain it to you all right. Now, please——”
“Explain!” hollers Eva, kind of curlin’ up her fingers and movin’ toward him. “Explain, will you? Why, you miser’ble, low-down——”
But the manager took hold of her arm. He’d been lookin’ at the crowd, and I cal’late he saw that here was the chance for the best kind of an advertisement. He whispered in her ear. Next thing I knew she clasped her hands together, let out a scream and runs up and grabs the celebrated British poet round the neck.
“Booth!” says she. “My husband! Saved! Saved!”
And she went all to pieces and cried all over his necktie.
And then Marks trots up the child, and that young one hollers: “Papa! papa!” and tackles Hank around the legs. And I’m blessed if Montague don’t slap his hand to his forehead, and toss back his curls, and look up at thesky, and sing out: “My wife and babe! Restored to me after all these years! The heavens be thanked!”
Well, ’twas a sacred sort of time. The town folks tiptoed away, the men lookin’ solemn but glad, and the women swabbin’ their deadlights and sayin’ how affectin’ ’twas, and so on. Oh, you could see that show would do bus’nessthatnight, if it never did afore.
The manager got after Jonadab and me later on, and did his best to pump us, but he didn’t find out much. He told us that Montague b’longed to the Uncle Tom’s Cabin Company, and that he’d disappeared a fortni’t or so afore, when they were playin’ at Hyannis. Eva was his wife, and the child was their little boy. The bloodhounds knew him, and that’s why they chased him so.
“What was you two yellin’ ‘Stop thief!’ after him for?” says he. “Has he stole anything?”
We says: “No.”
“Then what did you want to get him for?” he says.
“We didn’t,” says Jonadab. “We wanted to git rid of him. We don’t want to see him no more.”
You could tell that the manager was puzzled, but he laffed.
“All right,” says he. “If I know anything about Maggie—that’s Mrs. Schmults—he won’t git loose ag’in.”
We only saw Montague to talk to but once that day. Then he peeked out from under the winder shade at the hotel and asked us if we’d told anybody where’d he been. When he found we hadn’t, he was thankful.
“You tell Petey,” says he, “that he’s won the whole pot, kitty and all. I don’t think I’ll visit him again, nor Belle, neither.”
“I wouldn’t,” says I. “They might write to Maudina that you was a married man. And old Stumpton’s been prayin’ for somethin’ alive to shoot at,” I says.
The manager give Jonadab and me a couple of tickets, and we went to the show that night. And when we saw Booth Hank Montague paradin’ about the stage and defyin’ the slave hunters, and tellin’ ’em he was a free man, standin’ on the Lord’s free soil, and so on, we realized ’twould have been a crime to let him do anything else.
“As an imitation poet,” says Jonadab, “he was a kind of mildewed article, but as a play actor—well, there may be some that can beat him, butInever see ’em!”
GOD planned me for a butterfly,But I was marred i’ the making;What is it that old Omar saysOf the Potter’s hand a-shaking?Ah, no, not that, the colors ran,The form turned out awry,And so I’m what they call a manWho’d be a butterfly.Farringdon Davis.
GOD planned me for a butterfly,But I was marred i’ the making;What is it that old Omar saysOf the Potter’s hand a-shaking?Ah, no, not that, the colors ran,The form turned out awry,And so I’m what they call a manWho’d be a butterfly.Farringdon Davis.
GOD planned me for a butterfly,But I was marred i’ the making;What is it that old Omar saysOf the Potter’s hand a-shaking?Ah, no, not that, the colors ran,The form turned out awry,And so I’m what they call a manWho’d be a butterfly.
Farringdon Davis.
The Tears of Undine, by Edith Macvane
I
IN the morning young Glyn lost his steamer, so he was forced to spend the whole day at Pemaquid; in the afternoon he lost his heart, so he was forced to stay there for his entire vacation.
This is the way it happened.
After luncheon he went out to sit all by himself on the end of the pier, with a book on “Recent Developments in Dairy Machinery”; for Glyn was a young patent lawyer, a very rising one, in the city of New York; and, as he had failed to find one familiar face in this far-away Maine resort, it seemed to him that he could do nothing better with his time of waiting than devote it to his business. So he sat deep in study, lifting an eye occasionally to the granite cliffs, the dark, ancient fir trees, and the bay with its distant rim of purple-shadowed hills; while the old fisherman beside him smoked his pipe placidly, and the noisy crowd of bathers in by the shore splashed one another with screams of mirth. The student sighed occasionally, for, though a lawyer and a good one, he was still young; then he reproved himself for his sighing, for he aimed to be rather superior, and was also, as a matter of fact, rather shy.
Suddenly a shower of scattering drops fell cold upon his neck and glittered upon the page before him. He started and looked up; the sky was blue and cloudless, his ancient neighbor as placid as the day itself. Then it seemed to him that he heard a laugh, the merest tinkle of a laugh, from somewhere below the wharf; and, starting to his feet and looking downward, he beheld a mermaid floating in the water beneath him.
She lay slim and green upon the gentle harbor swell, her white arms outstretched, her eyelids closed, her wet, upturned face framed by the floating wreaths of dark hair that coiled and rippled in the water about her. Suddenly she threw up her hands and sank slowly, vanishing with a cloud of little bubbles. Glyn started back, horror-smitten. He was not much of a swimmer, even in the warm waters of the Sound; and this North Atlantic water chilled his very eyes with its icy-green transparency.
Nevertheless, under the racial impulse of the life-saver, he threw off his coat and swung his arms preparatory to a jump. Suddenly the hoary and languid old sea dog by his side reached out a slow, restraining hand.
“Don’t go wettin’ yourself for nothing young fellah! That girl, she’s a fish. Watch and see her come up again.”
In a cold perspiration of anxiety the young man waited for a fulfillment of these words. The suspense seemed endless, till suddenly, and at an amazing distance, the waters heaved and parted, and the swimmer’s sleek dark head emerged like a seal’s. Back she came to the wharf, swimming with strokes like those of an oarsman—easy, long and sure. At the end of the pier she paused and clung to the foot of the slippery green steps that ran down the side of the piles, and, resting her chin upon her clasped arms, she glanced up at the two men above her like a severe and dripping cherub. The oldfisherman returned to his line, but the student, flinging away his book, ran down the oozy staircase to meet her.
“May I—may I be of any assistance to you?” he inquired, with eager politeness.
She continued to look up at him with the same disapproving air. “You didn’t jump in after me, did you?” she observed, suddenly.
“Well, no,” returned Glyn, somewhat dazed at this greeting. “You see, I was told that you could swim.”
She glared up at the unobserving fisherman. “That was Ben—old tattle-tale!” she hissed; then, turning back to the young man, she inquired, with sudden pathos: “And how should you have felt if I had never come up again?”
“Like a murderer,” replied Stephen Glyn, solemnly. The answer seemed to please her, for she relaxed her frown. “Oh, well, you are all right, anyway,” she was good enough to observe, as she loosed her hold upon the step and swam slowly away to the shore.
So when the afternoon steamer left Pemaquid, one hour later, it left without Stephen Glyn.
He told himself that the air of this sea-girt promontory was just the thing for him: good chance to learn to swim; quiet place, capital chance to study and get at the bottom of those dairy implements. As for the girl—she was pretty to look at, to be sure, with her big green eyes and the glancing motions of her long white hands beneath the water. But still what did the prettiness of a passing girl matter to a prosaic fellow like him? “Besides,” as Stephen added, wisely, to himself, “I’m too old for nonsense, and too young for business—so what’s the use?”
And so, being in this indifferent frame of mind, he spent an hour in putting on his newest English flannels and the very latest thing in pale green shirts, and then, upon descending to the dining room, he bribed the waiter to give him a seat at the next table to his casual acquaintance of the pier; merely, as he told himself, out of curiosity to see how she looked with her hair dry.
In spite of all this indifference, there was a distinct sinking at Glyn’s heart when at last she came, passed by him, seated herself at her table without even a glance in his direction. She seemed in high spirits, she ate with a remarkable appetite, and she talked and laughed incessantly with the large, pink-faced lady on her right and the jolly youth in a blue necktie on her left. All Glyn’s honest Harvard blood rose and boiled within him at the sight of that blue necktie—merely, he assured himself, at the thought of recent football scores. As for the girl, what did it matter to him if she let a dozen Yale men tell her jokes and crack her lobster claws for her?
It must be confessed, however, even by the most disapproving and indifferent critic, that she was charming to look upon, with her thick hair—yellow with greenish lights—and her warm, white skin, tanned by the sun to the pale brown of coffee with cream in it. So after dinner, when a half dozen other youths had dispossessed the Yale man of his monopoly, Glyn strolled up to him and inquired whether he had not seen him at New London the month before.
The Yale man replied to these overtures of friendship with the offer of his cigarette case, his name and the secrets of his heart. “I’m Martin, ’05,” he confided. “Ever been in New Haven? Best place on earth! I say, how do you like Pemaquid—how long are you going to stay? There are some ripping girls here. At least, there’s Elfie May, that girl I sat next to at the table. Notice her? A queen, isn’t she? And you just ought to see her swim! But she throws a fellow down so. I guess I’ll go home to-morrow.” The blithe face drew down into sudden sadness—ah, poor little Yale man!
“The girl that sat next to you at dinner,” mused Glyn. “Ah, yes. I think I noticed her—rather good-looking, yes. New York girl?”
“No, Boston. Want me to introduce you?”
“If you will be so kind,” returned Glyn, with elation, and a sudden softening of his heart toward the blue. Martinwent over to the far end of the piazza, where Miss May sat trailing her indifferent gaze across her little court of admirers, and laughing lazily at their witticisms and their compliments. As the Yale man spoke to her, Glyn saw her glance flash for a brief instant in his direction, and he started forward to meet his new friend halfway upon his return. But oh, disappointment! “I’m so sorry,” said the pleasant little chap from New Haven, “but she says no! I don’t know why, but she said it, just like that—no!”
“It doesn’t matter in the least,” returned Glyn. “And thank you so much for taking all that trouble.” He spoke gayly, but his hand trembled as he tried to strike a light upon the side of his match case. “Here, let me give you some fire, old chap,” cried his new acquaintance, genially.
That night Glyn did not sleep very well. Not that he cared one scrap for a snub from a disagreeable, spoiled child! But deep down he recognized what it was—the regretful ache, the yearning, baffled tenderness that had newly filled his heart. He writhed in recollection of the repulse he had received, and then forgot the pain in delight as that glance came back to him, those eyes raised to him from the water, eyes so thickly fringed, with dark irids rimmed in clear sea green.
Dawn broke early and brilliant; after that there was no sleep for the restless newcomer, and suddenly it occurred to him that the best plan—the most enjoyable and the most independent—would be to hire a craft and go out for a day’s deep sea fishing, far from the jars and distractions of the hotel. For though, like many sailors, he had but little skill in swimming, he was excellent at managing a boat, and fishing was one of his favorite sports. A descent to the pier, in the long-shadowed quiet of the early morning, proved this plan easy of fulfillment. Old Ben, the fisherman of the day before, was there clearing out his tiny sloop, theFried Cod. For a mildly exorbitant sum he agreed to let the boat to the New York man for the day, provide tackle, throw in bait, and give all necessary directions to the fishing grounds.
So Glyn had a day of long-shore sport, of long waiting, of rolling in a hot and oily sea, finally of hauling in fat, plobby fish—cod and hake, which lacked blood to make even a decent fighting struggle for their lives. Then in the calm of the sunset theFried Coddrifted back with the tide into the little harbor on the nose of the rocky promontory. Her skipper worked lazily at the sweeps, keeping a dazzled eye out ahead over the glassy reflection of the golden west which fronted him. Suddenly, as he floated in between the breakwaters, it seemed to him that he saw the head of a swimmer silhouetted blackly against the sunlit water, approaching him from the shore in a wake of fire.
“Sloop ahoy!” called a slow, soft voice. Glyn jumped up, his heart beating, and with a few more vigorous side strokes the swimmer shot to the side of the little craft and blinked two clear wet eyes up at its skipper.
“Please, may I come aboard for a moment?”
Glyn forgot all past injuries as he bent over the side of the boat, beaming upon the face upturned to him from its aureole of ripples.
“Oh, I can climb up all right,” she cried, in answer to his offers of aid, and with a quick, vaulting motion she swung herself up over the gunwale of the little sloop. Seating herself upon the thwart, she threw back her long, wet locks from her face, and shot a glance, half serious and wholly sweet, at the young man before her.
“I’ve been waiting for you all day,” she said, plaintively. “Why didn’t you come in sooner?”
Glyn regarded her in amazement.
“Well, you could hardly expect me to believe that I was wanted,” he retorted, in a slightly aggrieved tone, remembering his wrongs of last night.
She began to laugh softly—a long, noiseless chuckle that moved even Glyn’s watchful dignity to a smile. “Oh, you mean last night.” Glyn noticed that her voice was deep and smooth, with just the faintest suspicion ofhoarseness, and deep, mellow tones and overtones that vibrated richly through its inflections. “Last night, you see, is just what I want to explain,” she went on. “You see, that little Martin thing has such a funny way of dropping his jaw when one says no to him, that I just couldn’t resist. And, besides, you see, I didn’t want to have him introducing us—little calf! So, if you don’t mind, I’ll just introduce myself: Elfrida May, that’s my name.”
Glyn looked at her seriously as he set his tiller for a course to the anchorage near the pier. “Thanks very much,” he returned, “but, if you don’t mind, I should rather make believe it was Undine.”
“Undine!” she cried. “Who was Undine?”
“You don’t know about poor little Undine? Very well, then, I’ll tell you her story some time. Now you must let me introduce myself, too.”
“Oh, I know your name, Mr. Glyn,” she cried, artlessly, and, extending her wet hand, she gave him a hearty grip, like a man’s.
Suddenly her eye roved to the floor of the little cockpit, and her face took on suddenly its severe lines of the day before. “Ah, they are dead!” she whispered, in a kind of horrified way; then stooping, she picked up one of the fish—a small cod, curved in a rigid bow from nose to tail. She stroked its slippery back tenderly. “Poor little thing!” she mourned.
Glyn stared at her bewildered. “Don’t you approve of fishing?” he asked.
“No, I don’t!” she replied, with vehemence. “I won’t eat them, even canned! I’d feel like a cannibal! Poor things! To drown in the lovely green water—that wouldn’t be bad. But to be pulled out of the sea, and drown in the air, think how horridly unpleasant! Do you mind if I put them back again, please?” she asked, anxiously.
“Certainly not,” replied Glyn, though, as a matter of fact, he was particularly fond of fresh boiled cod, and also proud of his morning’s catch.
One by one the tender-hearted pirate dropped the motionless things softly into the sea; they sank heavily, and then rose, floating with white bellies upturned. Her eyes, as she regarded them, were surprisingly soft and tender. “Poor things,” she murmured, “they can’t swim any more, but I am sure that they must rest easier so. Thank you, Mr. Glyn, for giving them back to me.”
And so their friendship began, in bewilderment and mutual good will.
Now, much can happen in a month, and as July drew near to a close Stephen no longer tried to disguise from himself the change that had come into his life. The question that unceasingly knocked at his brain was no longer “Do I care for her?” but “Does she, oh, can she possibly, care for me!” The very intensity with which he put this question to himself made him delay, from day to day, the crucial test of putting it to the only person that could decide it for him. So he relieved his feelings by sending every week to Maillard’s for a huge box wrapped in silver paper; and every morning he waited with impatient heart upon the pier for the coming of that slim and dancing figure with the long green silk legs, the cream-white arms and the flying strands of pale yellow hair, that fell to the hem of the short green petticoat.
Her skill in the water was to him a constant wonder, a constant delight. His own attempts at diving and swimming he soon gave up, finding this northern water too cold for him; and so, in spite of Elfrida’s gibes, he sat on the dock and watched her as she took backward somersaults and dead-man dives and went down below in search of sinking clam shells. Her high jump from the piles, holding up her little skirt with a dainty hand, and winking blithely as she descended, was a thing long to be remembered for sheer mirth, for frank, childish joy. Yet it was then that Stephen sighed as he regarded her. After all, was it a woman he loved, with a warm human heart to respond to his own; or a careless mermaid, a cold creature, whose sole joy was thus dancing, plunging, flashing through the foam of the white, curling waves?
So far as he could judge, there was no real affection in her heart except this for her friend, the sea. Toward her mother, a heavy, placid woman with literary pretensions, Elfrida was kind in an impersonal, far-off sort of way; to the other girls in the hotel—who respected her for her high dives and hated her for her monopoly of the few men at Pemaquid—she seemed indifferent, with a kind of mocking politeness; while toward her little court of admirers she showed a capricious tyranny, at times almost savage. To these things even the adoring eyes of Stephen Glyn could not be blind; and one day when, owing to a severe headache of her mother’s, she was obliged to forego her swim, and appeared at dinner a muttering thundercloud, it was impossible for even the most ardent of adorers to pass by these signs without a sigh.
True, she had shown a tender heart toward the lifeless cod and hake; and sometimes, as she looked at the sea, in the uproar of a summer squall or in the silvery silence of a fog, Glyn would be startled by the look that suddenly crept into her eyes.
“Ah!” she breathed one evening, as they sat together watching the sunset from the pier. “Ah, it wouldn’t be hard to die, would it, if one could lie at the bottom of the sea?” Glyn grunted uncomfortably in answer, and tried to look as though he agreed with this sentiment.
The next day, when they were out canoeing together, Elfrida surprised him by reverting suddenly to one of the first conversations of their acquaintance. “You said you were going to tell me about Undine,” she said, “but you haven’t—not a word.”
Glyn sighed as he regarded her. She had been unusually tantalizing, not to say aggravating, that afternoon, and his honest heart was sore within him. But what better mood, what better occasion, for relating the story of the unfortunate water nymph, from the time she first appeared in the hut of the old fisherman, a light-hearted, soulless child, to the unhappy hour when, abandoned by the man she loved, she vanished silently into her native element—“a woman gifted with a soul, filled with love and heir to suffering.”
It was but recently that Stephen had read the story, and he told it well, for, though a lawyer, he was in love, and he had a poetical soul. Elfrida listened in silence, her face turned away, her hand trailing in the still water beside her. After the story-teller had finished, there was a pause.
“Well,” said Stephen, disappointed, “didn’t you like it?”
Elfrida glanced up at him—a quick, irresolute glance, quite unlike her usual frank gaze. She seemed about to speak, but to Glyn’s disappointment she turned away her head again, so that her face was hidden from him. With her trailing hand she drew a long, dripping spray of brown seaweed from the water.
“What did Undine gain, after all,” she said, “by leaving the sea?”
“She learned how to love, and she won a soul,” responded Stephen, leaning toward her. “Don’t you think that she was the gainer, after all?”
She suddenly flung away the seaweed. “No, I don’t!” she cried, passionately. “In the sea she had freedom and happiness! But love—what did she find it, after all, but a miserable slavery? And she got her heart broken in the end. No, indeed, you can’t make me pity her—she was just silly, your Undine!”
Nothing more was spoken as they paddled to the shore. Glyn was hurt, disappointed; and Elfrida kept her face still turned away.
The next morning, however, Glyn was more disappointed than ever; for when he came down to breakfast he failed to find the one face that he desired to see. From Mrs. May he learned that Elfrida had gone out for a day’s sail with young Martin and two or three others. So he moped about all day, smoking and trying to read his “Dairy Machinery,” now sadly rusty. And from time to time he was drawn unwillingly into the universal discussion on costumes for the coming dance and masquerade.
Toward evening Elfrida and her companions returned. In spite of her day’samusement, her face wore its severe expression, and she glanced at him without a smile as she passed him on the piazza.
“You’ve been here all day, I suppose,” she said, with an inflection of resentment in her tone. “Just think, a great big man like you afraid to go into the sea!”
Before Glyn could open his mouth to defend himself she was gone. But after dinner she came to him with a shy, suspicious air, and a touch of mystery that was explained by her first words.
“See here,” she said, softly, “this masquerade. I’ve been thinking it over, and I think if I can manage it, I want to go as Undine, you know.”
Stephen was filled with delight. “And you’ll let me help plan your dress?” he cried.
Elfie nodded, and offered her ideas on the subject to the approval of his authority. The young man listened, offered suggestions here and there, and then, with a sudden backward thought, he remembered a trinket in his possession—a little pearl bracelet, a trifle, but beyond anything appropriate to the costume in hand. Within himself he resolved to send home immediately for it, and to present it to Elfrida on the night of the dance.
In the days that followed it seemed to him that he saw strangely little of her, and the little that he did see was less than satisfactory. Her absence from the piazza, and her refusals to go paddling with him, she excused on the plea of being busy with her new costume. But even on the pier at the bathing hour she seemed to shun him, or noticed him only with jeers and gibes at what she called his laziness.
“Ah, can anybody have a soul that is afraid of the sea?” she cried. “Come, Mr. Martin, let us race over to the monument!” With a splash and a flounce the two set out together, the green bathing dress and the triumphant blue; while Glyn sat alone on the wharf with a leaden heart and rage at his soul.
This state of affairs had very little altered when at last the day of the dance arrived. A hundred times in the interim had Stephen resolved to give up the whole affair and go home; but then he decided to wait and see this new Undine in the flesh. To his anxiety, the bracelet had not yet arrived; nor did it come until the last post on the evening of the dance, after everybody had gone upstairs to dress. In joyful relief, Stephen slipped the little box in the pocket of his improvised admiral’s costume, and ran downstairs to the hall to wait for the coming of his Undine.
Elfrida did not appear till late, when the room was filled with whirling harlequins and Pompadours and Swiss peasant maidens. The admiral stood by the door, waiting for her, his little box in his hand and his heart in his mouth. Finally, as though she had been on the watch to avoid him, he saw her enter the hall by one of the long windows opening from the veranda without. In spite of his vexation, he could not but smile with sheer pleasure at the sight of her, as her eyes and her white teeth flashed a smile upon the room. In her pale, sea-green draperies, dragging heavily at the hem with a fragile border of urchin shells, her creamy neck and shoulders bare, her flowing yellow hair bound and wreathed with strands of dark, wet seaweed—oh, she was pretty, indeed! Stephen sprang forward.
“Good-evening, Undine! Here—I have something for you, will you let me give it to you? A little ornament to complete your costume.”
“You may give it to me later,” she replied, with an indifference that chilled and baffled him; and he watched her miserably as she swung off into the two-step with a tall, sunburned youth from Boston—a conceited-looking pup, Glyn told himself, in a vain attempt at consolation.
The evening was half over before he managed to get near her again. “Our dance, Mr. Glyn,” she cried, taking his arm and smiling up at him. Her eyebrows, which, in spite of her fair hair, were black and thickly ridged, were arched high in the mocking expression that he hated to see upon her face. She was in wild spirits, gay with the evening’s success, fluttered with areckless and inconsequent laughter that set the fibers of her lover’s heart quivering painfully.
“Let’s go down on the breakwater,” she said, “instead of dancing. It’s so hot here.” Bewildered and obedient, Stephen followed her, and a few moments later they were sitting side by side at the end of the moonlit pier.
“Doesn’t the water look nice?” cried Elfie, bending over it lovingly. “For two cents, I’d jump into it this very moment.”
“Please don’t!” expostulated Stephen, in alarm. She turned her bright eyes toward him.
“What did you say you had for me?” she said.
Half shamefacedly, Stephen drew from his pocket the little box that he had received a few hours before. “Just a trifle,” he said, “that I picked up in Swabia a few years ago. See!” He opened the cover and took out a slender string of fresh-water pearls set in silver, some milk-white, some shimmering prismatically in the moonlight.
“Oh, how lovely!” cried Elfie, with artless delight. “And they’re for me?”
“If you’ll take them,” replied Stephen, hurriedly. “You see, they are perfectly valueless little things—but the reason I wanted you to wear them was because, you see, they really belong to you. These pearls are found in one of the headwaters of the Danube, in Undine’s own country. The peasants say they are the drops that Undine wept after she had returned heartbroken to her water world. And so they call these pearls the tears of Undine. Will you have them, Undine?”
He bent toward her tenderly, and she held out her hand with a constrained gesture. “This Undine doesn’t intend to shed any tears of her own,” she answered, “and so, I suppose, that these drops will save her a lot of trouble. Thanks! Yes, do clasp it on. Thank you very much.” She tried to pull her hand away, but Stephen retained it in his own.
“I love you. Don’t you care a bit for me, Elfie?” he blurted, desperately. “Elfie, will you be my wife?”
She snatched her hand away this time, and scrambled to her feet. “Oh,” she cried, “don’tbe silly,don’tbe sentimental—here by the lovely, sensible sea, too!” Stephen rose and stood staring at her, and she went on with a hurried laugh: “Thank you very much, Mr. Glyn, and now that I have had a proposal, I shall always be a bachelor-lady, and shan’t ever have to worry about being an old maid. And the pearls are lovely, but I never intend to marry anyone—and now, oh,dolet’s go into that dear black water.”
She stood, a lovely, pale figure in the moonlight, embarrassed, half-laughing, while her green eyes shot out and streamed a reckless gleam at the young man standing dejected before her. “Do you dare me?” she cried.
Stephen saw that in her present daredevil mood she was equal to anything. “No, please don’t!” he cried. “This time of night, in all those long draperies, it wouldn’t be safe—please don’t!”
“Not safe for Undine?” she laughed, defiantly. “Pooh, who’s afraid?” Stephen put out his hand to restrain her, but she laughed again—one of her long, silent chuckles. “Such a grand chance to show off. I’m not going to miss it!” she cried, and, eluding Stephen’s touch, she sprang like a long, silvery streak over the edge of the breakwater into the phosphorescent blackness beneath. In wrath and anxiety, the young man waited until her head emerged in a whirlpool of silvery fire.
“You are quite safe, Elfie?” he called, anxiously.
Her wild, careless laughter answered him. “Come in, the water’s fine. Come in; oh, come in! I dare you! I dare you!”
She swam off toward the moonlight with powerful side strokes, hardly diminished by her encumbering drapery. “I dare you!” she cried again.
No flesh and blood, not even of the most prudent young lawyer in New York, could withstand such a challenge. Heedless of consequences, Stephen flung himself over into the dark. The water was cold, his clothes were heavy;but he struck out valiantly. “Come on, oh, come on!” called the voice, far away on the surface of the water, and he strained every tendon to follow. A canoe drifted out slowly from somewhere—he didn’t know where—then it seemed to draw nearer, or else to disappear—he didn’t know which. The water was icy cold, his breath drew thick, his limbs, unaccustomed either to the cold or to the unwonted strain, were wrenched with a sudden muscular agony, and seemed to pass from his ownership and his control. Still, in the white moonlight before him, the black streak that he was following moved steadily along. He cursed himself as an effeminate monkey—“beaten by a girl!”
Then girls and Undines, farming implements and crystal palaces, whirled and shimmered dimly before his eyes. All he wanted was to rest—just a chance to rest! And, throwing out both arms, he gave himself up helplessly to the water.
It was late the next morning when Martin thrust his cheerful little face in at the door of Stephen Glyn’s room at the hotel.
“Well, how are you to-day?” cried the newcomer. “Gee, that was a narrow squeak you had last night, and no mistake!”
Stephen woke with a start, and turned in a dim and growing amazement at the stiffness of his limbs, the painful heaviness of his breath. Slowly, as the little Yale man sat chattering by his bed, the troubled events of the night before came back to him—the foolhardy plunge from the breakwater, the interval of blank nothingness, the agonized struggle back into life, the hands working at his chest and his limbs; then the slow opening of his eyelids under the frightened face of young Martin, bending over him.
“Yes, I did make an ass of myself, and no mistake,” he mused, aloud, in a hoarse and broken voice.
“Nonsense!” cried Martin. “A cramp—why, that’s likely to come over anybody. No one could laugh at you for having a cramp; though Miss May——” he stopped short, with a half-embarrassed laugh.
“What about Miss May?” asked Stephen, trying to conceal the agitation he felt.
“Why, nothing. Only, I met her just now going out to sail with some of the fellows. They all stopped to ask how you were. She didn’t say a word—stood there looking queer, somehow. So I told them you were feeling better this morning with all the water pumped out of you; and she began to laugh; didn’t say a word, just stood and laughed, till, upon my word, I thought she was going to cry. She’s a funny one and no mistake—half fish, I call her.”
Glyn was silent. So this was the way that his narrow escape from drowning appeared to Elfrida—to her for whom he had risked not only his life, but his dignity as well.
“Can I do anything for you, old chap?” asked the other, with good-natured solicitude.
“Thanks, I think you have done quite enough for me already.”
“Pshaw!” cried Martin, rising in the alarm of approaching thanks. “It was nothing. And now I’ve got to be going downstairs. As for you, my boy, you’d better lie still to-day. You don’t want to get pneumonia out of this, do you?”
But in spite of timely warnings, in spite of aching limbs and a dizzy head, it was not very long after this that Stephen rose, dressed himself and went slowly downstairs. From the few people sitting about on the piazza waiting for lunch—ladies with toy poodles, old gentlemen with newspapers—Glyn received congratulations on his escape, and remarks of a more or less trying facetiousness. Of course Elfrida was not there; of course she had not yet returned from her sail. And even if she had, what difference should it make to him?
So he strolled down on the rocks toward the breakwater with a rather slow and uncertain step. His heart was sore within him. The future was dim; inthe present, one fact only stood out with dreary distinctness—he had given the best love of his life where return was not only denied, but, from the nature of things, impossible. As well toss a rose in a monkey cage as bestow a living heart on a perverse and freakish child like Elfrida, who regarded the gift merely as the means of a moment’s amusement, to be picked to pieces and then tossed to the ground. After all, was she a woman, or, as Martin had said, a wild creature, half human and half fish, for the possession of whom it was useless to contend with her cold and tempestuous lover, the sea?
He caught himself almost shaking his fist in a helpless rage of jealousy at the little green waves that lapped at his feet. “Rubbish!” he said to himself, in scorn at the fanciful absurdity of his notion. But then, as the scene of last night came back to him, he shook his head in mournful bewilderment.
A light clatter of stones on the breakwater above his head roused him from his reverie. Looking up, he saw a white figure hurrying silently along. “Good-morning,” he called, with a wild hope that his thoughts had translated themselves into the wild, living embodiment. There was no answer. “Miss May, is that you?” he called again.
There was a moment’s pause, then Elfrida’s face, white and severe, appeared over the stone coping. “I didn’t intend that you should hear me pass,” she said, frowning. “It was these hateful old stones that gave me away.”
Glyn’s heart contracted. Was his presence so disagreeable to her, then, that she chid the very stones that betrayed her presence to him? Then concern for his own pain was lost in sudden concern for the unsteadiness of her position.
“Take care, please! Those stones are loose where you are standing, I can see from below here.”
She smiled willfully. “Thank you, Mr. Glyn, I am quite secure. You see, this breakwater is a friend of mine. It would never go back onme.”
In her words, as in her smile, Glyn found an echo of that laughter with which earlier in the day she had greeted Martin’s story of his narrow encounter with death. “Yes,” he replied, with a bitter sinking of the heart, “I did make rather an ass of myself last night, didn’t I?”
She laughed abruptly, but made no reply. Glyn stood looking up at her as she stood on the barrier of loose stones above his head—shading her eyes with the book that she held in her hand, looking out over the sea. A sense of his own helplessness rocked Glyn’s soul in a sudden rage. He wanted her, oh, he wanted her, as she stood there, cold and immovable, defended at every point by her own scornful ignorance of common human emotion, unassailed even by the twin lords of mankind, Love and Death, which had so newly brushed closely past her.
Suddenly she started and turned to meet his gaze with half-startled, inscrutable eyes. “The tide is on the turn,” she said, in a quick-breathed undertone—then the stone under her foot slipped and settled, she flung out her arms to steady herself, and barely recovered her balance as she swayed for an instant on the edge of the rough stone parapet. In wild anxiety Glyn sprang forward, heedless of her book, which fell fluttering past his head.
“Take care!” he cried. “Take care!”
She smiled down at him, her lips a little white, but otherwise perfectly composed. “It’s too bad,” she said. “From the first day I met you, I am always frightening you to death, Mr. Glyn.”
Was she thinking of his failure of the night before? Glyn’s heart quivered with mortification. “Yes,” he said; “it’s easy to frighten me, you see.”
She laughed again—a little, quick, troubled laugh. “But I didn’t come down here to see you, you know, Mr. Glyn,” she said. “I was going out on the end of the breakwater to read for a little while, till lunch time—I didn’t expect to see you, you know.”
Why need she disclaim so eagerly any wish to see him? thought Glyn to himself. Not much danger of his flattering himself to the contrary. So hebowed with as much composure as he could muster.
“Certainly,” he replied; “and I am very sorry to have intruded upon your solitude. But let me see, your book—it fell past me just now, I think.”
He turned to search among the bowlders which lay strewed about him. Suddenly Elfrida’s voice came to him, strained and high.
“Mr. Glyn,” she said, “please don’t take any trouble about my book.”
He paused, perplexed. “It’s no trouble, Miss May, I assure you. Look! I can see it there between the bowlders in the seaweed—a new book, isn’t it? Here, let me give it to you.”
He took a step toward it. “Mr. Glyn!” cried Elfrida. “You mustn’t—you mustn’t! I forbid you to touch my book!”
Glyn turned and gazed up at her. She was leaning down toward him from the rough masonry above, her hands stretched out, her face flushed to a bright crimson, her eyes sparkling, wide open, filled with anger and with something else besides—misgiving and something that was almost like fear.
“Mr. Glyn!” she repeated, violently. “Please go away now, please! And let me come down and pick up my book myself!”
Glyn looked up at her, at her face, wild, beautiful and threatening, bent down toward him. So her scorn for him was so deep, her detestation so entire, that he was not to be permitted to touch so much as the book that had fallen from her hand.
Now, at last, beyond a doubt, he had his answer. He stood silent for a moment, looking dumbly first at the half-soaked volume almost hidden among the seaweed, then at the head above him, so lovely and so carelessly terrible, bright and golden against the blue background of the sky.
“Miss May,” he said, “believe me, I had no intention of intruding on you. I beg your pardon, and—good-by, Elfie!”