"Diaphenia, like the daffadowndilly,White as the sun, fair as the lily. . . ."
"Diaphenia, like the daffadowndilly,White as the sun, fair as the lily. . . ."
"Diaphenia, like the daffadowndilly,
White as the sun, fair as the lily. . . ."
With a single outcry, Daphne tossed back her head and shrieked her nerves into space.
"Good!" said her father. "Now you'll feel better!"
149
IT was dark when they sighted the yellow lantern light on Martha's Island. Darkness drops down so suddenly in the far south! It's rather spooky! Rather a nice spooky, though, if you happen to be a reasonably innocent Northerner looking for thrills. It's only poor souls like Lost Man and the Outlaw, and perhaps even Martha herself, to whom Darkness symbolizes a stab in the back, a shot from ambush, or God knows what!
To Daphne, this night, the darkness was all a-tingle with magic and pain. High overhead in ineffable crispness the blue-black dome of the sky seemed fairly crackling with stars. Close around her in murky mystery the great Gulf chuckled and prattled of coral and pearl. From the dark, huddled group in the stern of the boat not a face or a feature flared familiarly to hers. And drowned in the shuddering gasp and throb of the engine her150father's deep-voiced raillery, even the Brown Khaki Lady's light laughter, sounded like something from another world.
It was Daphne's own little world that concerned her most at that moment, a world in chaos!
"My father is false to me!" mutinied her wild little heart. "He has deceived me! And about a lady!" woke jealousy. "We didn'tneedanother lady! And what earthly reason could two people have for pretending to be strangers when they really were lovers? But how could two people possibly be lovers," she questioned suddenly with an entirely new stab of bewilderment and pain, "if one of them was already married to somebody else? If one of them indeed was actually on a honeymoon? Even though at the particular moment she might have run away from her honeymoon? Marriage was marriage, people said! You had to play it fair! Everybody had to play it fair! It was like a game! Even people who cheated in business wouldn't think of cheating in games! It wasn't good sportsmanship! It wasn't——" Feverishly her fancy quickened and raged at all its pulses. "If my father151isn't good," she tortured, "who is good? If my father isn't good, what is good? If my father isn't good—what's the use of anybody being good?"
Defiantly she lifted her eyes to the stars. And the stars laughed at her! Distractedly she turned her ear to the Gulf and heard the Gulf nudging the poor old launch in its ribs!
Then like the bumpy end of a dream, infinitely alarming, irresistibly awakening, the little launch snubbed its nose into wood in stead of a wave, and the voyage was over!
Gracing the upper step of a peculiarly water-logged and dilapidated looking pier the yellow lantern flared down its wan welcome to the voyagers' eyes. There was not a soul in sight, nor any sign of human habitation except the lantern and the ruined pier.
"Truly it must be very lonesome for a lantern—living all alone like this," observed the Brown Khaki Lady's faintly mocking voice.
Then suddenly out of the further shadows where pier and land presumably met, creeping low on its belly, and whimpering with152excitement, emerged a little dark body edging frenziedly toward them.
"Why—what the dickens?" cried Jaffrey Bretton. "Why, how in thunder? Well, I should think Marthahad'got something'! Why it's Creep-Mouse!" he shouted, and jumped ashore.
Scramblingly the Brown Khaki Lady followed after him.
"Here! Wait for me!" she begged.
As he swung round to help her a single phrase passed his lips.
"Pull down your hat-brim!" he ordered. "In this light your hair looks almost crimson!"
Then man, and woman, and dog faded into the shadow.
With a grunt of indifference, Lost Man and the Outlaw resumed their eternal job of tinkering with the engine. Shadows working on shadows!
"Oh, a lot anybody seems to care what be comes of me!" quivered Daphne. "Even Old-Dad didn't say 'Good-bye'. Even Creep-Mouse— didn't say Howdy! What's it all about?" she questioned tartly.153"What's—what's anything all about?" With a swift experimental impulse she slid over to the edge of the fore-deck and tested the shallow tide with one slender foot and ankle. In an other instant while the two men wrangled she had slipped over into the water and was speeding up the unknown beach. "I'll go find something of my own!" raged her wild little heart. "Something thatwillsay 'Good-bye' to me! Something thatwillsay 'Howdy!' Good—bad—living or dying—something all my own!"
Indifferent to the clogging sand, impervious to the scratch and snag, stumbling over wreckage, dodging through palmetto, unconscious of her breathlessness, unhampered by her loneliness, fired only by a strange sort of exhilaration, a weird new sense of emancipation, she sped on through the excitant dark, till tripping suddenly on some horrid slimy thing like the dead body of a shark she pitched over head-first into a tangle of beach- grass, and crawling out on all fours into the clean, sweet sand again, crawled into the spurting flash of a revolver shot whose bullet just barely grazed the wincing lobe of her ear.
Tight as a vise a man's arms closed around her!154
"My God!" gasped a man's voice, "I thought you were a panther or a bear—or something!"
Struggling to free herself Daphne snatched her small flash-light from her pocket and flamed it full on the man's face.
"Why—what the—the dickens?" she babbled hysterically. "Why— how in the world?" she rallied desperately. "Well—I should think Marthahad'got something!' Why—why, it's the—the Kissing Man!" she cried.
With widening eyes and a dropped jaw the man returned the stare.
"Y—you?" he stammered.
Fumbling round through the sand for his own larger lantern he flashed a steadier flare of light upon the scene.
"What—are—you—doing here—and crawling on your hands and knees?" he asked. His face was ashy gray.
"Why, I'm running away!" glowed Daphne. Her eyes were like stars, the flush in her cheeks flaunting and flaming like a rose-colored flag.
"Running away?" quickened the man. "From what?"155
"I don't know!" laughed Daphne.
"To—what?" questioned the man.
"I don't care!" laughed Daphne.
With another perceptible start the young man turned upon her.
"Don't you know it's not safe for you to be alone like this?" he stormed. "Don't you know how wild this country is? Don't you know there are bears and panthers and wild cats and snakes and——. And I almost shot you," he repeated dully. "Except for this— this infernal tremor in my right hand that everybody is trying to cure me of—I should probably have killed you."
"Do you really mean," cried Daphne with a fresh shock of excitement, "that except for just one little chance I might be lying here dead this very minute? Dead and all over, I mean? Tennis and parties and new hats and everything all over and done with? As dead and all over as—as Noah?" she gasped.
"Yes," acknowledged the man.
Solemnly for a moment in the poignant awe of it all the jaded worldly-wise face and the eager ingenuous young face measured156this matter of life or death in the depths of each other's eyes.
Then for sheer woman-nature the girl edged a little bit nearer to the poor man who had almost killed her. And for sheer man- nature the man put his arm around the poor girl whom he had almost killed. It was sheer Nature's nature though that blew a strand of the girl's bright, fragrant hair across the man's lips.
With a sound like a snarl the man edged off again.
"Whew, but my nerves are jumpy!" he said. In the flare of the lantern light the scar on his face showed suddenly with extraordinary plainness, and as though a bit conscious of the livid streak he brushed his hand casually across his mouth and cheek bone. "Tell a fellow again," he said, "about this running away business. What's the game?"
"It isn't a game at all," flared Daphne. "I tell you I'm running away!"
"But what about that stern parent of yours?" grinned the man.157
"My father is more interested in another lady!" cried Daphne. "He's all but forgotten my existence. Oh, of course I don't mean he's deserted me," she explained with hysterical humor. "It's merely that for the time being and for all time to come," she quickened suddenly, "I'vegotto have a life of my own!"
"It's an original idea," said the man.
At the faint tinge of mockery in the words all the hot, unreasoning anger surged back into Daphne's heart again.
"Oh, you needn't make fun of me!" she cried. "And you needn't try to stop me! I'm a Bretton, you know! And all the Brettons are wild! Oh, awfully wild! I read it in the paper! And I—I'm going to be the wildest of them all!"
"Just exactly—how wild—are you planning to be?" asked the man. Simultaneously with the question he lifted the lantern and flashed it like a spot-light on the girl's elfish beauty, the damp skirt moulding her slender limbs, the bright disheveled hair slipping out from the prim little tarn, the sailor-collared158blouse dragged down just a little bit too far from the eager, unconscious young throat! "Just exactly—how wild—are you planning to be?"
"Oh, as wild aswild!" gloated Daphne. "I'm going to have an aeroplane! I'm going to have a—a——"
With an odd little laugh the man jumped to his feet, and held out his hand to Daphne.
"Where I live," he chuckled, "aeroplanes grow on trees. You're just the little girl I'm looking for! Come along!"
"Come along where?" laughed Daphne, with her hand already in his.
"Oh, just 'along—along!'" urged the young man with a laugh that almost exactly duplicated her own. "For Heaven's sake never spoil a good start by worrying about a poor finish!"
"You talk just a little bit like my father," winced Daphne.
"Maybe I talk like him," laughed the young man, "but I don't walk like him! No more straight and narrow for me! You're perfectly right, little girl, about this game of being good!159I've tried it a whole month now—and believe me, there's— nothing in it! Why, even the gods don't intend you to be good!" he laughed. "When they proffer you sweets on a golden plate they certainly can't expect you to refuse 'em!"
"I never ate from a golden plate!" laughed Daphne, as snatching her little hand loose she jumped across the edge of a wave.
"Oh, please don't run away fromme!" entreated the young man. "Whoever you run away from—oh, please don't run away fromme!It isn't exactly fair, you know! It isn't——" Flashing his lantern aloft he stood for a single instant with his slender, fastidiously flanneled figure silhouetted incongruously against the wild, primitive background of cactus and wreckage. Then in a faint paroxysm of coughing, light and figure faded out.
"Oh, I forgot," cried Daphne. "Why, of course we mustn't run!" All the excitement in her turned suddenly to tears. "After all," she confided impetuously, "running away on an island isn't so awfully satisfying! No matter how far you ran it would always be160just 'round and round!'" Compassionately she turned back towards him.
"Oh, I don't know!" snapped the young man. "Some islands, you know, aren't quite as round and round as others! This one for instance——" With a spring he was at her side, his queer, fascinating face thrust close to hers, his vibrant hands thrilling her shoulders. "You—little—blessed baby!" he cried, "if you're really looking for an adventure—let's make one! But while we're about it—for Heaven's sake let's make it a whopper! Let's—let's pretend that you are a beggar maid!" he laughed excitedly, "and that I am a fairy prince!" Once again he flashed his lantern across her lovely disheveledness. "'Pon my soul," he exulted, "you look heaps more like a beggar maid than I do like a fairy prince! But if I could prove that I wasyourfairy prince——"
"Yes—if you could prove that you were my fairy prince——" laughed Daphne.
"Pumpkin coach—and all?" cried the man. His hands on her shoulders were like electric shocks.
"Pumpkin coach and all!" whispered Daphne. To save her soul she161could not have told just why she whispered.
With an odd little smile the young man released his hold on her shoulders and snatched her hand again.
"Then come quick!" he cried.
Maybe it wasn't "running," but it was very much like it! Zig-zag across the beach, up through the palmetto thicket, clattering across an unexpected pile of old tin cans, out into the soft sand again of a sheltered cove, a coral harbor, where blazing with lights like a Christmas tree a big house-boat lay at its moorings.
"There!" cried the young man, "the pumpkin coach!"
"Why—wherever in the world did it come from?" gasped Daphne. Her heart was beating so that she could scarcely speak. "Wherever—in the world?"
Swaying a little on her feet her shoulder brushed ever so slightly against her companion's, and she turned to find herself snatched into the steel-sinewed arms, the relentless dove-voiced urgency of the first passion she had ever seen! This was no162hoydenish tussle with an unnerved man who thought you were a panther! This was no snub-nosed smother against the breast of a boy who was trying to keep you from screaming! This was no idyl of the Class Room, no airy persiflage of the poets! But Passion itself! Raw Passion, too! A thing tender, terrifying, beyond her wildest dreams of tenderness of terror! The desperate, determinate, all but irresistible pleading of a man who was fighting if not for life itself, at least for the last joy that his life would ever know!
"Oh, little girl!" he pleaded, "I'm mad about you! Do you doubt it? Absolutely mad!" His question marks were kisses, his exclamation points, more kisses. "Ever since that night, only six weeks ago, was it, when I stumbled on you in the hotel? I was drunk then, wasn't I? Well, I'm sober enough now! But drunk or sober there hasn't been a minute since, day or night, when I haven't been trying to follow you! Give me your lips!"
"I won't!" said Daphne.
"I tell you I can't live without you," urged the man. "I won't live without you! Your father's quite right, I haven't got a163whole lot of time, but think how we'd pack it! Hawaii, Japan, the moon if you'd crave it! 'Eat, drink and be merry'—and to- morrow you still live! It's only I that have got to die! You shall love me, I say! Youshall! Merciful God! Am I to live like a spoiled child all my days and be robbed at this last of the only real thing I ever wanted?"
"My—my father——" struggled Daphne. It was a struggle of soul as well as body.
"Your father is a real man," conceded the vibrant, compelling voice, "but he's only a real man, and with a real man's needs. There's bound to be another woman sometime. There's another woman even now you say? What place then is left for you? But come with me, I say, and as long as there's breath left in my body you shall be first, last and only! And after that——" he shivered ever so slightly, "Mrs. Sheridan Kaire won't have to worry, I guess, overmuch about anything. Oh, I've been a devil, I know! I don't deny it! I——"
"You—you mean you've kissed other women?" cried Daphne, "Like— this?"
"Yes—several—other—women," winced the insatiate lips, "but164not like this! Or this! Orthis!"
"I won't give youmylips," said Daphne.
"You little spit-fire!" exulted the man. "You—you young panther!You blessed little pal! You and I together—and the world well lost!"
With a catch of his breath that was almost a sob he tilted her chin towards the light and stared deep into her young unfathomable eyes. His own eyes were hot with tears, and the scar across his cheek twitched oddly at the dimple.
"Wanted—to—be as wild as an aeroplane, did you?" he questioned with extraordinary gentleness. "And they crucified you for a wanton in the Halls of Learning! Also in the Sunday supplement next to the Comic Section!" At the answering shiver of her body something keener than tears glinted suddenly in his eyes. But his voice never lifted from its gentleness. "And they always will crucify you, little girl," he said, "in this fuddy-duddy boarding school world you've been living in! As long as you live, little girl, some prude will be mincing forward from time165to time to see if the nails are holding the cross itself still in the full glare. But the bunch I run with, little girl, would rate you as a saint! Call it a wild bunch if you want to, but wouldn't you rather be laughed at for a saint than spat at for a devil?"
"Y-e-s," quivered Daphne.
"Then come!" said the man.
Daphne did not stir.
Once again the vibrant fingers stroked along her pulsing wrist. "What you need," crooned the persuasive voice, "for what ails— you, is to whoop things up a bit, not whoop 'em down. Which statement," he grinned, "though it may not spell righteousness, remains at least the truth. So come!" he quickened. "And if you want to go wild, we'll go wild! And if you want to go tame, we'll go tame! Heaven or hell, I don't care—as long as it's together!"
From the glittering house-boat in the little bay a bell tolled out its resonant news that the hour was eight o'clock.
"Hurry up!" urged the man with the faintest possible rasp of anxiety in his voice. "For Heaven's sake if we're going let's go166while the going is good! No bungling! No fiasco! All I want from you," he turned and confided with sudden intensity, "is your promise that if we do start you'll see the thing through! My honor not to make a fool of you pledged against your honor not to make a fool of me! Girls are so unreliable."
"'Girls?'" winced Daphne.
From the glittering house-boat a woman's laugh rang out with curious congruity.
But when Daphne winced this time, she was in a lover's arms again, encompassed by a lover's tenderness, coaxed by a lover's voice.
"Oh, I don't pretend for a moment," crooned the persuasive voice, "that I've got just the crowd on board that I would have chosen for this particular sort of get-away. Nevertheless——" With a chuckle that would have been brutal if it had not been so exultant he bent down and brushed his lips across Daphne's throbbing temple. "Nevertheless," he chuckled, "of all the crowds that ever crowded anybody, this one represents perhaps the one most ready to eat from my hand. I haven't got much sense, it seems, nor yet a long life, but what I have got," he167laughed out suddenly, "I've got for fair! And that's money!" In a silence that was almost sinister he stood for an instant staring off at the house-boat's gay-lanterned outline against the dark fluttery palms. "Thought they'd yank me back from all this did they?" he questioned hotly. "Back to an old Board Meeting in a New York snow-storm? Not much! 'If you want your damned old library,' I wired 'em, 'come ahead down here and thrash it out where a fellow can argue without frost biting his tongue, and be catching a tarpon or two on the side at the same time.' Wired 'em tickets and everything, the whole damned outfit, architect and all! Heap-sight easier though than going back to New York! But if I don't want to give 'em the library," he grinned with sudden malice, "I don't have to, you know—even now! There's nothing in my father's will, I mean, that compels me to give it. My father's will merely suggests that I give it, advises me to give it, 'with such subsequent moneys,' he quoted mockingly, 'as may comprise my estate' at the time I cash in. But of all the big stiffs," he shuddered, "that I ever saw,168Claudia Merriwayne leads them all, not even excepting her new Dean or her Oldest Trustee!"
"Claudia—Merriwayne?" gasped Daphne.
"Oh, of course, in my day," persisted Kaire, "I have had grace at my table, and some disgrace now and then! But Greek? And Latin? and Doric columns? And the 'influence of concrete on young character?'Why where are you?" he turned and called suddenly through the darkness. Gropingly his arms reached out and snatched her to him again, and for the first time she yielded limply, and lay like a bruised rose against his breast. "Why, I can't even hear you breathing!" he cried. "Why, you might be dead, you are so still! And your little hands are like ice! And——"
"Did—you—say—that—that Miss Claudia Merriwayne—was on that boat out there—with you?" faltered Daphne.
"Why, yes," shrugged the man, "I think that's the lady's name. Why—why, shouldn't she be there? All the colleges are closed now, aren't they, for the Christmas holidays? Why, surely you169don't mean that you care?" he laughed. "That you don't like my having the dame?"
"Care?" hooted Daphne. Like a wraith suddenly electrified all the fire, the nerve, the sparkle, the recklessness came surging back to her!
Through every quiver of his overwrought nerves he sensed the strange almost psychic change come over her, a brighter gold to the hair, a deeper blue to the eyes, a quicker pulse in the slender throat. Every tender line of her thrown suddenly into italics, every minor chord crashing into crescendo! If she had been beautiful in the rompish escapade of the beach, and the single wistful silence of the moment before, her beauty was absolutely maddening to him now.
With a little quick cry that was almost like a challenge she reached up and touched him on the shoulder. It was her first caress.
"Oh, all right! I'll go with you!" she cried excitedly. "But on one condition only!"
"A hundred conditions!" quickened the man, "so long as you make them before we start!"
"It's about our 'start' that I'm making this one!" cried Daphne.170Her flesh was flaming with blushes but neither her heart nor her mind knew just why she blushed. "It's—it's about your drunkenness!" she flamed. "After we're man and wife, with my faults as well as yours, we'll have to do the best we can, think it out, fight it out, maybe we can get somebody to help us! But until we're man and wife, I must not be embarrassed—or humiliated! Badness that knows that it's badness, that's one thing! But silliness that doesn't know it's silliness, I just couldn't stand it, that's all!" Shrewdly her young eyes narrowed to his. "You're—you're quite right what you said on the beach just now! No one can guarantee his ending! But it's an awful goose, Sheridan Kaire, who doesn't guarantee his start! So if I pledge you, Sheridan Kaire," flamed the proud little face, "that once started Iwillsee the whole thing through, it is pledged on the understanding that you will protect the—the dignity of that start?"
Across the man's impatient face a dark unhappy flush showed suddenly.
"I get you!" he said. "I will be very careful about my drinking."171
"But as to a pledge from you," cried Daphne, "that you wouldn't back out and make a fool ofme—why, it just never would have occurred to me to ask it! It doesn't occur to me even now! Why— why should you make a fool of me?" she questioned. "Why, how could you make a fool of me? You love me, don't you?" she triumphed.
"I—love—you," said the man.
"Oh, all right, then!" cried Daphne. "'Nuff said! Let's go!"
Snatching a silver whistle from his white flannel pocket the man blew sharply once—twice—three times. Simultaneously with the signal a slight commotion was visible on the house-boat.
"They'll be over for us right away," said the man. "Just as soon as they can get the little boat launched."
With her small hand slipped into his, Daphne stood pawing the sand like a pony while she watched the operations.
"Will it be—myhouse-boat?" she thrilled.
"It will be your house-boat," smiled the man.172
"And my gay lanterns?" danced Daphne.
"And your gay lanterns," smiled the man.
"And my money?" cried Daphne. "And my library?"
"And youreverything," smiled the man.
With an absolutely elfish cry Daphne threw back her head and began to laugh.
"Oh, I'm not a bit afraid to go with you!" she laughed. "Maybe I ought to be! But I'm not! I'm not! Maybe it's because I'm too excited to be afraid! Maybe it's because," she flamed, "I am never going to be afraid of anything—ever any more! Oh, I'm an— awful kid," she paled and flamed again, "I don't even know just what marriage is! But—" Wild as the humor of nymph or faun the queer little cry burst from her lips again. "But I know I must never deceive you!" she cried. "I know that much at least! So— so maybe you won't want to take me," she cried, "when I tell you that Miss Claudia Merriwayne was the President who expelled me from college!"
"What?" snapped Sheridan Kaire. "The devil you say!What?173Oh, so that's why you were willing to come? Just to get even? Just to——Now I must have been some thick," he frowned, "not to have sized up that that was the bunch who expelled you from college. Thicker even than I thought I was! Seeing only your picture in the paper, sizing up only your name!" Then quite suddenly he put back his head and began to laugh. "Of all the comic operas!" he hooted. "Of all the Heaven-sent situations! We'll give them their old library or not just as you say," he hooted. "Well——" Then with a gesture that seemed to be all ardor and no gentleness he reached out and drew her back to him. "I don't care why you come," he cried, "as long as you come!"
"Oh, won't it be glorious," danced Daphne, "to surprise them so! I'm going to pull my hair way down over my face like this and this," she illustrated with eager fingers, "so that they won't know me at all until I'm ready—I'll look so wild!"
"Everything's going to be glorious!" said the man. "H-st! Here comes the launch!"
Like an excited child Daphne ran to meet it. Close at her174shoulder followed the man. Glancing back at him swiftly through the bright maze of her hair, a single challenge, half mischievous, half defiant, flashed from her lips and eyes.
"Glorious! Glorious!Glorious!" she laughed. "But I will— never give you my lips!"
All defiance and no mischief, the man's laugh answered the challenge.
"I sha'n't—care what—you give me," he said, "when I'm once fixed so that I can take what I want!"
With a swish of keel and sand the little launch landed at their feet.
The nattily uniformed sailor who manned the launch was too well trained in his master's service to show a flicker of surprise or curiosity concerning his master's errands. But a master's weakness being only too often the man's, the only blunder of his ten years service slipped now from his faintly alcoholic lips.
"Good evening, Dighton!" nodded his master.
"Good evening, sir!" saluted the man with punctilious formality.175
"Here, fix those cushions a little better!" pointed his master as he helped the vague white figure into the boat. "Here, Dighton, give the lady a hand!"
Lifting his eyes for the first time to the little lady's laughing face peering out half-affrighted from her bright disheveled hair, Dighton the man gave a purely involuntary gasp, and stumbled a bit clumsily over some shadowy obstacle.
"That's all right, Dighton," laughed his master. "She's got the looks to knock most any man over! Your new Mistress, Dighton!" he called out proudly.
"Your—your new Mistress?" bungled the man's addled lips.
Scarcely sensing the unhappy twist, but lashed like a whip by the single expletive and ghastly silence that followed it, Daphne curled up in her cushions and prattled her excitement into space.
"Oh, what a night!" she cried. "Oh, what tall cocoanut palms! Oh, what bright stars! Oh—oh—oh, whatever in the world shall I176do about clothes?" she questioned precipitously. Gayer and gayer her little laugh flashed from her lips. "Why, just for common humanity," she gloated, "Miss Merriwayne will have to lend me a nightie! And shoes and stockings! And a dress! Oh, won't I look funny in Miss Merriwayne's great big clothes?" Dismayed at the unbroken silence she turned and stared up wondering-eyed at the furious, frowning man beside her. "Why—what's the matter Sheridan Kaire?" she whispered. "You look so—sort of—as though your face hurt? Does it?" With her eyes drawn as though by some irresistible fascination to the pale zig-zagged outline of his scar, she asked the one childish question that was left on her lips. "Whoever hurt you so?" she questioned. "Was it in a—a brave war or something? How ever in the world could——"
"Hush!" snarled the man. "For God's sake, hush!" Then in passionate contrition he bent down through the darkness and touched his lips to her finger tips. "Forgive me," he pleaded, "my nervesarejumpy!"
Brightly the house-boat loomed up before them. In another moment177they would be alongside.
Once more the man bent down to the little figure beside him.
"Just once," he demanded, "from your own lips, I want to hear it! It wasn't I who incited you to run away—was it? It was your own idea, I mean? You'd already made up your mind for some sort of a running—before you stumbled on me? I'm simply the direction you decided to run in?" For a single instant across his worldly young face the question of his own responsibility flecked his lean features into an almost exaggerated asceticism. "I'm not specially anxious, you know, to pose as a seducer of the young."
"As a what?" questioned Daphne.
Then softly thudding into the big house boat's side the little launch finished its journey, and only the chance of laughter was left to either the man or the girl.
"Bang!" flew a little ladder to the launch. "Creak!" strained a rope. With a patter of soft-soled feet a half dozen white- sailored forms came running! A dark blue officer peered down from the deck! An extra lantern flashed! And another! And another!178From some far shadowed corner a piano and violin swept blithely into melody!
Then through hands and lips infinitely more discreet than Dighton's, but eyes not nearly so blank, the sparkling, spirited, utterly disheveled, utterly unexplainable little figure followed the master of the house-boat to the luxuriant, softly lighted cabin, where gathered round an almost priceless mahogany table two frowning, serious-minded women, and three frowning serious-minded men sat pouring over a great flare of blue prints.
"Nothing," affirmed President Merriwayne's clear, incisive voice at the moment, "nothing—I believe, so affects the human mind as a noble appearance."
With a laugh about as mirthless as a maniac's, but a humor fairly convulsed with joy, Sheridan Kaire took a single glance at Daphne, and drew her into the room.
"Behold, Ladies and Gentlemen," he announced, "my Pirate Queen! The future arbiter of my fortunes!"
From the priceless mahogany table five chairs jerked back as though by a single thud.
Five pairs of eyes flared suddenly on Daphne, lapped up the179beauty of her, the disheveledness, the audacity, and blinked their lids with astonishment.
"Is—is it dramatics?" quavered the older lady's fine patrician voice. "What a—what a child!"
"Dramatics?" bridled Miss Merriwayne. As though the unrecognized figure before her was deaf, dumb, blind, she lifted her lorgnette in frowning scrutiny. "Some of the poor whites down here are extraordinarily good looking," she conceded, "but don't you really think, Mr. Kaire, that your jest is just a little— little——"
"Jest?" said Sheridan Kaire.
From the deck just above their heads the thud of a dragging anchor rope sounded suddenly, and the sharp cry of orders passed from one sailor to another.
"In ten minutes at least," laughed Kaire, "or in five, Heaven knows if we can make it, we shallallbe off!" With a quite unnecessary air of diablerie he turned and chucked Daphne under the chin.
From the further side of the lamp, beyond the unmistakable180architect, beyond the unmistakable trustee, a figure not yet distinct, rose slowly into view. It was John Burnarde. Very courteously he advanced towards his host. Not a muscle of his face twitched, not an accent of his voice either lifted or fell.
"Truly, Mr. Kaire," he suggested smilingly as one might have smiled at a maniac, "don't you think perhaps it might be better to finish the discussion outside? No matter what a bachelor may contend his rights to be as regards his personal affairs with women, you will hardly insist, I think, on pursuing said affair while my mother and President Merriwayne remain your guests? Surely, tomorrow, when you are more yourself again——"
"I am not drunk!" flared Sheridan Kaire, "and what's more you haven't seen me drunk this whole week more than once! Or, at most, twice!"
"Drunk or sober," said John Burnarde quite unflinchingly, "I request that you do not involve us in any of your escapades!"
"Escapades?" scoffed Kaire. "You——"
From the shadow to which she had partly retreated, Daphne sprang181out, and brushed the bright hair from her eyes.
"Why John!" she cried, "don't you know me? It's Daphne! Daphne Bretton!"
"What?" staggered the new dean. "You? Why, Daphne! Why——"
"What difference is it to you who it is?" interposed Kaire a bit roughly.
But before anybody could answer the President herself had jumped to her feet.
"You, Daphne Bretton?" she gasped accusingly. "You? What— are—you—doing here? Isn't it enough that you have disgraced your college without adding this fresh escapade to your career? What—what wild, unprincipled doings are you up to now? Is there no shame in you? No——" With an imperious gesture she turned to her host. "Surely, Mr. Kaire," she implored him, "you are not in earnest about this girl? Are we really to understand for one moment that you contemplate allying yourself with this girl? Putting the stewardship of your great fortune in her hands? A girl with such a history? A girl with such a character?"
"Miss Bretton's character is not under discussion here," said182John Burnarde decisively.
"Once again," snapped Sheridan Kaire, "I ask what affair Daphne Bretton's character is to you?"
"It's this to me," began John Burnarde with his tortured eyes fairly raking the beloved young face before him. ('Whatwas shedoing here?' ached every pulse in his body. So lovely, so irresponsible, so strangely all alone with this notorious young roué.) "It's this to me," he repeated dully, glanced back for a single worried second at his frail mother's dreadful pallor, and crossed his arms on his breast. "Whatis it to me, Daphne?" he asked.
"It's this to him," said Daphne fearlessly. "He liked me a little, but when the trouble came, it had to stop. It wasn't his fault! My father said it wasn't his fault! There were merely other things—other people, that had to be considered. It's all right. It's quite all right!" Defiantly the little chin lifted. "Quite all right! I'm going—away—with Sheridan Kaire!"
With a piteously vain effort John Burnarde's mother struggled to reach her crutch and lapsed helplessly back into her chair183again. Only her white up-turned face betrayed her shock.
But for once in his life John Burnarde did not notice his mother.
"Oh, no—no!" he cried. "You don't know what you're doing! A lovely—lovely—young girl like you to give yourself to a man like Kaire with a reputation so notorious that——"
"I'm not too notorious—I notice—for you people—to beg libraries from," drawled Sheridan Kaire. Then quite suddenly he leaned back against the wainscoating of the cabin and began to laugh sardonically. "Jabber all you want to," he said. "It's a good way to pass the time! Just a minute more now and we'll be off, beating it for Key West or Galveston—or any other place where the parsons are thickest and quickest! Miss Daphne Bretton and Mr. Sheridan Kaire—heavily chaperoned by President Claudia Merriwayne! All the newspapers will lean heavily on that chaperone item! So square it any way you want to with your college, Miss Merriwayne!" he bowed. "Now that you have squared184it with Daphne!" More hilariously yet he yielded to his mirth, and called loudly for the Steward. "Champagne for everybody, to- night!" he ordered. "Guests, crew, cabin boys, everybody! If the cat won't drink it, drown him in it! Drat libraries!" he shouted lustily. "This ismy Bachelor Dinner!"
Swishing like a serpent's hiss, Miss Merriwayne started for her cabin. As she passed Daphne she drew her skirts aside with a gesture that would have been sufficiently insulting without any further action. But her tongue refused to be robbed of its own particular reprisal.
"As I have remarked once before," she murmured icily, "you—you little wanton!"
"Not so fast!" cried a new voice from the doorway. Towering, white head and brown shoulders over everybody, Jaffrey Bretton loomed on the scene.
"Oh—Hades!" sighed the master of the house-boat.
"Not so fast, anybody!" begged Jaffrey Bretton. If the smile on his face was just a little bit set it was at least still a smile. Quite casually above the spurt and flare of his185inevitable match and his inevitable cigarette his shrewd glance swept the gamut of startled faces. "What'sall the rumpus about?" he quizzed. Simple as the question was it seemed for some reason or other to put a queer sort of pucker into everybody's pulses.
("Oh, what a place!" shivered the oldest trustee. "Why did we ever come?") ("Oh, what a man!" quivered the architect. "I wish I had designed him!")
Ignoring all other pulses, Jaffrey Bretton turned to Miss Merriwayne. With sincere and unaffected interest he appraised the majestic if somewhat arrogant bloom of what had been only a mere bud of good looks and ambition twenty years before.
"You are certainly very handsome, Clytie," he affirmed.
"'Clytie?'" gasped the oldest trustee.
"C-Clytie?" stammered Daphne.
"Miss Merriwayne and I were boy and girl friends together," observed Bretton with unruffled blandness. "But for the moment it is not personal reminiscence that concerns me most." Towering, dominant, absolutely relentless, but still serene, he186blocked Miss Merriwayne's exit. "Just—what, Clytie," he asked, "were you calling my little girl?"
"You heard what I called her, Mr. Bretton!" said Miss Merriwayne. "I called her a wanton!"
Above the flare of a fresh match and a fresh cigarette Jaffrey Bretton restudied her face.
"And—do—you—find it convenient now to retract it?" he asked.
"I am not in the habit of retracting my statements," said Miss Merriwayne.
"S—o?" mused Jaffrey Bretton. As though by pure accident, his eyes strayed to the blue prints on the table. "What have we here?" he smiled, "building plans?"
Sardonically from his own particular silence Sheridan Kaire's laugh rang out.
"Those are the plans for the new library," he confided, "that your daughter and I are considering giving to her—to her Alma Mater!"
Humor for humor Jaffrey Bretton's laugh answered his. "Good stuff!" he said, "the one bright thought!"
"And you?" he addressed one stranger, "are the—the possible187architect?"
"I am," conceded the architect.
Very definitely Jaffrey Bretton drew back a little from the door and pointed to the passageway. "Trot along!" he smiled. "And you?" he asked the old gentleman.
"I am Miss Merriwayne's oldest trustee," asserted that dignitary with some unctuousness.
"Trot along!" smiled Jaffrey Bretton.
With punctilious courtesy he waved the Dean's lovely old mother after them. "For the moment," he begged her, "you will pardon my peremptoriness? The thing that remains to be said is said best to the least numbers."
"But I—I like—your little girl!" protested the frail but determinate aristocrat.
"So do I!" smiled Bretton, but nodded her out.
"Who are you?" demanded Bretton of the only man but Kaire who remained.
"I am John Burnarde!" said the man, quite invincibly.
"I thought so!" said Bretton.
"And as Miss Merriwayne's rather special representative at this188time," added John Burnarde, "I refuse to leave the room while she remains!"
"Oh, I likeyou!" said Bretton. "I've always rather liked you!
But whether I did or not!" he crisped, "you'vegotto stay! You and Miss Merriwayne, and Daphne, and myself!" With a toss of his white hair he flung a message to the master of the house- boat. "Sorry to bully your guests so, Kaire!" he said. "But not knowing the plan of your boat, and being too formal to rummage around very much," he added dryly, "this cabin seemed somehow the surest place for a rather private conversation. . . . Shall you still remain with us as our host?"
"I certainly shall!" snapped Kaire.
"You are perfectly welcome," smiled Jaffrey Bretton. "And you notice, perhaps—that the engine has not started?"
"I notice only too damned well," said Kaire, "that the engine has not started!"
Out of the shadowy curve of Sheridan Kaire's jealous arm Daphne sprang suddenly forward.
"Oh, Old-Dad!" she besought him, "please—Please—don't make189such a fuss! What's the good of it? What's the use? If I'm bad, I'm bad! And—unless I'm going crazy, too—what is there left butfun?"
"But you see you're all wrong," smiled her father. "You're not 'bad' at all! Without any question whatsoever you're the goodest person here!"
"Oh—Old-Dad!" scoffed Daphne.
"But I mean it," said her father. "The little fracas at college was only a mistake. Richard Wiltoner's mistake, indeed, rather than yours—except in so far as you dared him into the making of it. Oh, shucks!" shrugged her father. "Everybody makes mistakes!"
"Not mistakes like mine!" flared Daphne.
"Oh, yes, they do," smiled her father. "So, please, I beg of you don't go bad just on that account! Truly, you'd be surprised if you knew how many staid grown people of your acquaintance have made very similar mistakes. Now take Miss Merriwayne and myself, for instance. Twenty——"
With a gasp of horror Miss Merriwayne reached out and touched him on the arm. Her face was stark, but even now she did not190lose altogether the poise so long and laboriously acquired. "Some other time—some other day," she essayed desperately, "I will be very glad to—to discuss old days with you. But now— this moment—your remarks—your suggestions are—are ribald. Have you no—no honor?" she implored him.
"None—any—longer that conflicts with my daughter's honor," said Jaffrey Bretton. To the several pairs of startled eyes raised to his, Jaffrey Bretton gave no glance. Every conscious thought in his body was fixed at the moment on Daphne. "Come here, Honey," he said.
With embarrassment but no fear Daphne came to him.
"Let me pass!" ordered Miss Merriwayne.
"It is not convenient," said Jaffrey Bretton.
Across Daphne's tousled head, past Claudia Merriwayne's statuesque shoulder, he stared off retrospectively into space. "What I have to say," he confided, "will take only an instant . . . . Twenty years ago," he mused, "Miss Merriwayne and I were trapped in a situation quite astonishingly similar to Daphne's college tragedy. . . . Except that in our case there were four191thoughtless youngsters involved instead of two—and infinitely more kissing. . . . Let me see," he turned suddenly to Daphne. "In your case I believe there was no kissing?"
"I should think not!" raged Daphne.
"U-m-m-m," mused her father. "Well—there was certainlysomekissing in ours."
"This is outrageous!" cried Miss Merriwayne. "Let me pass!"
With a smile that would have been insolent if it had not been so brooding, Jaffrey Bretton spread his arms across the doorway.
"You are a bigger girl, Clytie, than you used to be," he said. "You can't slip out of this situation quite as easily as you slipped from the other."
With a shrug of his shoulders he turned and stared into space again. When he glanced back at his companions it was with just a little bit of a start.
"Oh, yes—I forgot," he said. "There was a door—that time, that wasn't blocked. And the other boy jumped through the window. . . . What possible haven was there left," he asked, "for the panic- stricken little room-mate except in my arms? She smelt of192violets, I remember," he mused, "and her throat was very white. Nobody ever knew about the presence of the other boy. And only the four of us knew about Cly—'Miss Merriwayne' I would say. But if Miss Merriwayne had come back," he quickened ever so slightly, "and acknowledged frankly that she, also, had been present, the school authorities, I suppose, would hardly have judged the unintentional tête-à-tête as harshly—as they did. . . . Even at the eleventh hour, if she had been willing to come back and acknowledge it or at the twelfth for the matter of that—or even at one o'clock or two, while the outraged Powers harangued on the case . . . . But by three o'clock, that timorous little room-mate, seeing no other exit, slashed a door through her little white throat and fled away.
"So you see, Daphne," he smiled, "that even across a mistake likethat——"
"You mean," blanched Daphne, "that——"
Like a man straining very slightly toward more air the new Dean's throat muscles lifted.
On Kaire's face alone the grin remained half a grin, anyway.193