"Sailed away from a sinking wreckWith a—something—something—on her deck,"
"Sailed away from a sinking wreckWith a—something—something—on her deck,"
"Sailed away from a sinking wreck
With a—something—something—on her deck,"
he quoted diabolically.
"Hush!" warned Jaffrey Bretton.
"I had my own life to consider!" flared Claudia Merriwayne.
"You had your own life to consider," bowed Jaffrey Bretton.
"My people were very poor!" flared Claudia Merriwayne. "They had made great sacrifices to educate me! Already, even then, my chances of future academic distinction were the sole topics in my home!"
"Already," acquiesced Jaffrey Bretton, "your chances of future academic distinction were the sole topics in your home! . . .
"So you see, Daphne," he turned and readdressed his little girl suddenly, "so you see that, even across a mistake likethat, people may yet achieve real honors and much usefulness!"
Like a man a little bit weary, his arms dropped down to his194sides again, but his figure still blocked the doorway.
"That is all, Clytie," he bowed. "And you may rest assured, of course, that neither Daphne nor Mr. Kaire nor I will ever repeat the little anecdote which I have just quoted—unless Daphne herself shall contend that Richard Wiltoner should know. . . . Mr. Burnarde, of course, needs no guarantees, having already proved with fearless courtesy that your interests are his."
With frank cordiality he swung about and held out his hand to Burnarde.
"The best of luck to you, Burnarde! in all things!" he smiled. "If Fate had ordained you to marry my little girl, you certainly would have made a fine Friend-in-Law for me as well as an honorable lord and master for Daphne! . . . And after the first haste of the honeymoon was over what good times we would have had together—you and I! Winter nights and an open fire!—our books—our pipes—a plate of apples—a jug of cider—and the Classics! With Daphne sitting low—somewhere on a little stool— just a little bit off, somehow, on the edge of it all? Very195beautiful? Very miraculous? Very soul-satisfying to the eye— service of your senses? Darning your stockings, perhaps? Or freshening up your second-best dress suit? With her little bright head cocked ever so slightly to one side, listening, yearning, starving for the 'Pipe of Pan' which neither you nor I, Burnarde, will ever hear again nor recognize, probably, if we did. . . . You chaps, Burnarde, whose hearts grow in the shape of Books—you chaps who mix the best ink-knowledge of the world with your own good blood—you love very purely, very ideally. No man could fail to trust you. But, Youth, Burnarde, brooks no rivals, either of work or play. And in the decision between two women—which more men have to make than any woman, thank God, ever guesses—you have chosen, I think—very wisely!"
Crackling with starch Miss Merriwayne swung sharply around.
"I consider it exceedingly impertinent," she affirmed, "for you to link my name with Doctor Burnarde's in any way at just this time! There is not the slightest excuse for it, not the slightest justification."
"It was Doctor Burnarde's—mother that I referred to," smiled196Bretton, and bowed both the Dean and the President from the room.
If the little gasp that slipped from his lips expressed relaxation as did Daphne's sharp sigh, or Kaire's somewhat breathy grin, such relaxation was at least quite mutually curtailed. Without any hesitancy whatsoever the cabin door closed very definitely behind Miss Merriwayne, and from the clicking lock Jaffrey Bretton extracted the key and threw it down on the mahogany table.
"Now for—you, Sheridan Kaire!" he said.
"I am all here," grinned Kaire. "Also—incidentally, there are other keys to the cabin door."
"Why, of course there are other keys to the cabin door," conceded Bretton with perfect good humor. From his own pocket as he spoke he drew forth a bunch of keys, freed them from their controlling ring, and tossed them in confused and confusing muddle after the cabin key. "Any of us can get out of this cabin in two minutes," he confided. "But it is not my intention that anybody should bolt from it in much less time than that. Many a197man has cooled his original purposes in the time that it takes to fit an unfamiliar key to a perfectly familiar lock. Also, while we are rating incidental things, it does not seem best to me that, with Lost Man and Alliman waiting in the launch, we should run any risk of being rushed from outside. If one of us should sneeze, for instance—or raise his voice in any special emphasis?—Alliman is so deplorably impulsive with his shot-gun."
"I get you!" said Kaire. "There is not to be any fuss."
"You get me perfectly," bowed Bretton. "Now for the—the discussion." Quite casually he walked over to the mahogany table, sat down, took a single interested glance at the blue prints and swept them all aside. "Let's all be seated," he said.
Very reluctantly Daphne came forward into the light and slid down into the chair opposite him.
"I—I look so funny," she deplored.
"You certainly do," said her father. "Yet I would be willing to wager," he smiled quite unexpectedly, "that of all the variant ladies who have been entertained in this room there has never198been a lovelier one or—one more tempting."
"Sir?" bridled Kaire. With the dark flush rising once again to his cheek-bones he sprang forward to the table and perched himself on the edge of it with a sinister sort of nonchalance. "Sir?" he repeated threateningly.
"Oh, don't concern yourself for a moment with my daughter's tender sensibilities," begged Bretton. "Their conservation—you must understand—is still in my hands."
Somberly for a moment each man concerned himself with the lighting of a fresh cigarette.
Then Bretton jerked back his chair.
"Just what was your plan, Kaire?" he asked.
"I had planned," said Kaire, without an instant's hesitation, "to take Daphne to the first port we could make and marry her any old way she wanted to be married."
"Why?" asked Bretton.
"Why?" snarled Kaire. "Why? Well, what an extraordinary question! Why does any man marry any woman?"
"For so many different reasons," said Bretton, "that it rather199specially interested me to hear just what yours were."
"Why, I'm crazy about her!" flushed Kaire. "Utterly mad! Never saw anything in my life that I wanted so much!"
"Well—you can't have her!" said Bretton.
"By the Lord!—Iwillhave her!" cried Kaire. "Why—why shouldn't I have her?" he demanded. "Fate fairly threw her into my arms just now, didn't it? I didn't know you people were here! I didn't know where in thunder you people were!—or how I was going to find you with your blooming old dog! Sitting on the beach I was, all in the dark—and—and the girl comes crawling right into my arms! 'Most shot her, I did!—thought she was some kind of a varmint! Thought——"
"Daphne——" said her father.
With an impetuous gesture Kaire flung the interruption aside.
"She'd have run away with someone!" he cried. "Not to-night, of course! But soon! Next week! Next month! She was all primed for it! And you can't stop 'em when they once get started!—not the200high-spirited ones!—not when they're hurt and mad, too! And she might have done a heap sight worse than run away with me! I'm going to worship her! I'm going to give her everything she wants! I'm going to take her every place she wants to go! Why, six months from now she won't even remember that she went to the damned old college! Six months from now she'll think that being expelled from college was something she read in a comic paper! And I'm—going—to take—her," he said, with a suddenly lowered and curiously sinister positiveness, "whether you like it or not!—because she has given me her word!"
"Is that true, Daphne?" asked her father.
Like a little white whirlwind Daphne jumped to her feet.
"Why, of course it's true, Old-Dad!" she stormed. "Live or die, sink or swim, I have given Mr. Kaire my solemnest word that I will marry him!"
"An absolutely—unconditional word?" probed Bretton.
"On one condition only!" triumphed Daphne.201
"And that condition——" drawled her father.
"Is a matter of confidence between your daughter and me," interposed Kaire hastily.
"I respect the confidence," said Bretton. "But only a fool could fail to make half a guess of what that condition was. . . . You are keeping unconscionably sober."
"What I keep is my own business!" snapped Kaire.
"Per—haps," conceded Bretton. Quite casually, as one whom neither Time nor Circumstance particularly crowded, he picked up an ivory paper cutter from the table and studied it with some intentness before he spoke again.
"Just what—were you doing on Martha's Island to-night, Kaire?" he asked.
"What were you doing yourself?" quizzed Kaire.
"Do you trade your answer for mine?" smiled Bretton.
"Certainly!" said Kaire.
"I was there because Martha sent for me," said Bretton. "I thought she was in some sort of trouble. I had no idea it was about you and the dog. . . . You were a brick about the dog,202Kaire!" he brightened abruptly. "And I sha'n't soon forget it!But you can't have my daughter!"
Unflinching eye for unflinching eye, Sheridan Kaire answered the challenge.
"I most always look Martha up when I'm down this way," he confided informationally. "I knew Martha in Paris twelve years ago."
"And loved Martha in Paris twelve years ago?" murmured Bretton.
"Everybody loved Martha in Paris twelve years ago, you know!" shrugged Kaire.
"No, I didn't know," said Bretton. "I was in New Zealand about that time. It was at an insane asylum in Chicago that I first saw Martha."
"At an insane asylum?" frowned Kaire. "I knew she'd gone queer, but I never knew it was as queer as that."
"It was quite as queer as that," said Bretton, a bit dryly. "Right in the midst of one of her best vaudeville acts, it seems, she went into hysterics because a man in the front row had on a red tie—and on the way home to her hotel she fainted in her carriage at a scarlet hat in some brilliantly lighted203shop window. So they shut her up. And a medical friend of mine was quite a bit interested in the case. Most extraordinarily simple his explanation was. No Indian massacres involved, no hidden Bluebeard Chambers. Something as trivial, perhaps, as a kitten's cut foot bleeding across a child's first white dress—a nervous injury so trivial that no one had stopped to investigate it. . . . But thirty years afterward, when Life got ready to smash her, it went back thirty years and smashed her there! Seems sort of too bad though," mused Bretton, "to have to be shut up just because you can't digest red. Some people, you know, can't digest oysters. And at least two friends of mine experience an almost complete mental stoppage at the very mention of Suffrage. Yettheyare still at large! . . . So we got Martha out of the asylum," he quickened, "and reinvested her life and her fortunes in an all-green jungle, where, except for a curious impression that I am her benefactor, and the unspoken but doubtless persistent apprehension that she may even yet sight the crimson of a gay yacht-cushion or the flare of a204tourist's sweater and revert to chaos again, she seems to me perfectly normal." With a little grim smack of his lips he seemed to bite off the end of his narrative. "And that, Sheridan Kaire," he snapped, "is the full and complete account of my acquaintance with Martha. . . . But yours——" he attested very slowly, very distinctly, "was not the full and complete account of yours!"
With his voice as quiet as a knife Kaire swung round from his table corner.
"Since when, Mr. Bretton," he asked, "has it been considered healthy for one man to call another a liar?"
"Whatever worry you have about the healthiness of anything," smiled Bretton, "should concern yourself, I think—rather than me. . . . No one will ever shutmeup," he smiled, "because, like poor Martha, I also am just a little bit color-mad! 'Seeing red' though isn't what bothers me, you understand?—it's seeingyellow!"
"You think I have a yellow streak?" flushed Kaire.
"Most of us have," smiled Bretton. "But yours—at the moment—205looks to me unduly broad!"
"Why, Old-Dad!" flamed Daphne. "How can you speak so to—to the man I'm going to marry?
"But you see—you're not going to marry him!" smiled her father.
"I tell you I am!" flamed Daphne. "I have given my word!"
"And she'll keep it, too!" triumphed Kaire. "High-strung kids always do, somehow! Whatever else they smash—china, hearts, laws—they never seem to break their words!—not before they're twenty, anyway!" he grinned with sudden diablerie. "And Daphne is only eighteen!"
"Hanged if you're not rather an amusing cuss!" admitted Bretton. Very coolly he narrowed his eyes to the insolent young face before him. "I—I recognize your charm! Two parts devil to one part imp—and all the rest of it. The mysterious fascination of your scar with every emotion you feel in the World traveling up and down its white track—in an open car! Truly, I'm sincerely sorry about your health!"
"Oh, quit twitting about my lungs!" snarled Kaire.206
"Lungs?" questioned Bretton with faintly raised eyebrows. "Lungs? Oh, dear me—there are several other things about your looks—besides lungs—that I don't like!" Mercilessly, but not maliciously, he jumped up and crossed to a spot directly confronting Kaire. "With your waggish humor," he said, "and your inherently sportsmanlike instincts, you might have made a pretty good lad if you'd only started earlier." Piercingly his eyes probed into Kaire's. "But my little girl," he said, "isn't— going—to pay—because you didn't start earlier!"
With an oath Kaire sprang to his feet.
"I'm not the only man in the world who's been wild!" he cried. "And you know it—if anybody does!"
"You're the only man I think of at the moment," said Bretton, "who isn't pretty sorry about it when it comes to offering his stale hand to the first real woman of his life."
"Is—that—so?" sneered Kaire.
"It's—so," said Bretton very quietly. With a single glance at207Daphne he turned to Kaire again, struck another match, lit another cigarette. "Love isn't an overcoat, you know, Kaire," he said. "It's underclothes! The White Linen of Life! And there seems to be something—peculiarly and particularly offensive to a fastidious body—in being proffered personal linen which still retains even the scent—let alone the sweat of a previous relation . . . . The Almighty, our Mothers, and our Ministers, may forgive us our slovenly dinginess or our careless laundrying, being all of them more or less Museum Collectors and interested inherently in our historical values or the original fineness of our weave-or the ultimate endurance of our warp and woof. But the Almighty—and our Mothers—and our Ministers—don't have towearus, Kaire! Not next to their skins! Don't have to sleep with us—wake with us—live with us—die with us!" The hand that held the cigarette trembled very slightly, the eyes that glanced back again at Daphne were dark and poignant with pain. "You are perfectly right, Kaire! No man knows better than I the mess that a chap may make of his life—nor how poor the fabric that I, personally—in the common208experience of men—will have to offer the woman I love . . . . very worn it will be, very frayed!—but at least it has been cleansed in the bitter tears of regret!"
"Is that—so?" sneered Kaire.
"It is—so," persisted Bretton. "And God knows that neither Piety nor Wit nor anything in the world but sheer Good Luck pulled me ashore in time. But, like other half-drowned men, I suppose, I had neither wit nor time to choose my landing. Rocks, sands, valleys, mountains, all looked like miracles to me. So, mistaking austerity for purity, and severity for integrity, I married a woman to whom the slightest caress was a liberty, and marriage itself a sacrilege. In being sorry for myself I have not altogether, I trust, failed to be sorry for her. We are made as we are made. But it is only natural I suppose—that I should like my daughter to be a Good Lover. I believe in Good Lovers. But no one can make a good lover who is mated to a poor one!"
"I'll risk the kind of Lover I am!" cried Kaire.
"I won't! affirmed Bretton.
"There are also some things that I won't do!" grinned Kaire. "I209won't release your daughter from her promise!"
"She doesn't love you, you know?" warned Bretton. "Even granting perfectly frankly that you have excited her wonderment, 'wonderment' isn't love. We're all of us put together on a more or less hasty plan, I suppose, but just because some forgotten basting thread gives us an odd tweak now and then doesn't mean, you know, that the actual seams of our existence are ripping any."
"I don't care what anything means," said Kaire, "as long as Daphne has given me her promise to marry me."
"But the promise is so hysterical," argued Bretton. "The sublime adolescent idiocy of the Boy on the Burning Deck, with fame for one generation and caricature for eternity."
"I'm not interested in eternity," said Kaire.
"What are you interested in?" asked Bretton.
"In—myself!" said Kaire.
Very soberly for a moment Bretton frowned off into space.
"Kaire," he resumed at last rather quickly, "you are making a210brutal mistake. Listen! There is a lad up North who was made for Daphne!—a fine lad!—a clean lad! With young energies to match her young energies! And young mysteries to mate her young mysteries! And young problems to steady her young problems! Across the mutual innocence of their little disaster it is absolutely inevitable that each should have received a peculiarly poignant sex-image of the other. Except for you— except forthis—who knows but what——"
"There will be time enough for that when I am through," said Kaire. "Six months—ten—a year at the most."
"When you are through?" said Bretton very quietly. "The tender soul of a young girl who marries a man like you—is not over-apt to survive the experience."
Defiantly and unscrupulously Kaire delivered his ultimatum.
"It is not my responsibility," he said, "where any train goes after I get off!"
"That is your last word?" asked Bretton.
"It is my last word," grinned Kaire.
"And yours, Daphne?" quizzed her father.
"I will not break my word!" persisted Daphne. "I will not! I211will not!" Her cheeks were raging red as though with fever, her eyes oddly aglint. "I will not! I will not!" she repeated.
"All right then, Kaire," said Jaffrey Bretton. "I'm going to smash you!"
"Oh, no, you won't!" laughed Kaire. "That's the limitation of good men like you! You'll think you're going to smash me!— you'll have every intention indeed of smashing me!—push me way to the edge!—but never quite over! Something won't let you! Honor, I believe you call it."
"I—am—going—to push you—over the edge," said Bretton. "I am going to send for Martha."
"Martha?" cried Kaire. His face was suddenly ashy gray. Then abruptly his laugh rang out again.
"There hasn't been power in heaven or earth for ten years," he scoffed, "that could bring Martha out of her green jungle when even so much as the smoke of a yacht showed on her horizon! Even212if she could slip by her attendant!" he scoffed, "or her Chinese cook!—or——"
"Martha is in the passageway—just outside," pointed Bretton. "About three feet, I should think, from where you are standing!"
"What?" staggered Kaire.
"And I am going to push Martha to the edge and over," said Bretton very quietly. "And you to the edge and over—and jump in after you with every wallowing truth I know—if by so doing, the little girl I begot in bewilderment and ignored in indifference— but have found at last in love and understanding remains on the safe side!"
With eyes half crazed Daphne stood staring from her father's grim face to Sheridan Kaire's blanching features.
"Do you mean——" she gasped, "that there is another woman? Someone who has a—a claim? Someone who——"
"We will let Martha tell her own story," said Jaffrey Bretton. Very softly he stepped to the table and began to rummage among the loose keys. "I have tried not to act impulsively," he said. With unmistakable significance he glanced back at Kaire. "It213will take me at least a minute, Kaire," he said, "to fit a key to this door. . . . As I have remarked once before—many men have found time to change their minds in a minute."
"I have better things to do in a minute than change my mind!" boasted Kaire. As stealthily as a cat he slipped round the table to Daphne and took her in his arms while Jaffrey Bretton tinkered with the lock.
"Oh, my little beautiful!" he implored her. "My white—white darling! My lily girl! The only sweet—the only decent love I've ever known! You won't fail me now, will you? I have not failedyou! I never claimed," he besought her, "that there had never been any other women! Surely you're not going to hold any silly Past against me? You, my good angel! My——" Unconsciously his excited voice slipped from its whisper. "From to-day on!" he vowed. "From——"
"From what time to-day on?" asked Bretton a bit dryly.
Vaguely through the opening door loomed the white figure of a woman with her elbow crooked across her eyes. Except that the214lamp in the cabin was not unduly bright she might have been any normal person shielding her dark-attuned optic nerves from some unexpected glare. Yet the tropical pallor that gleamed both above and below the crooked elbow was oddly suggestive of floridness, and the faded muslin gown of a skirt-and-sleeve fashion ten years outlawed, molded her sumptuous figure with all the sleek sensuousness of satin.
"Martha," said Jaffrey Bretton very gently, "this cabin is hung with crimson, cushioned with crimson, carpeted with crimson! Will you still come if I ask you to?"
"It ees as I have said, Mr. Bret-ton," answered the faintly foreign voice.
Then Kaire with a cry sprang forward and slammed the door in the woman's wincing face.
"Stop! Stop, Bretton!" he begged. "Just a minute! Just a minute!—give me one tiny little more minute to think!" His forehead was beaded with sweat his hands shaking like aspens.
"I have one more minute I will be very glad to give you," said Bretton.
Like a person distracted, Kaire stood staring all around him.215Half askance from over his shoulder his glanced flashed back at Daphne, wavered an instant, and settled again on her face with a curious sort of gasp.
"Do—do youstillhold to your word?" he stammered.
Fevered, frightened, strangling back her sobs as best she could, Daphne lifted her strained but indomitable little face to his.
"I—will—not break my word!" she smiled.
On Sheridan Kaire's incongruous, dissolute face, a smile as tortured-sweet as hers quickened for a single unbelievable instant and was gone again. As one puzzled only, he turned back to Bretton, and stood staring almost vacantly into the older man's impatient eyes. Then quite abruptly he turned and started toward the door.
"I—I feel a little faint," he said. "A little queer. . . . I will be back in a moment!"
With a sharp bang the door shut behind him. In the passage outside they heard a single rough word, a woman's imperious protest, the soft thud of feet on a thick carpet, and a cabin boy's shrill call.
On the carved mahogany shelf in the cabin the clock went on216about its business—one minute—three—five—ten. Through the open portholes a faint breeze sucked at the crimson silk curtains, and ripple to creak, and creak to ripple, the houseboat yearned to the tide and the tide to the houseboat.
Daphne's eyes never left the clock. Weirdly exultant, excitantly heroic, she kept the ill-favored tryst.
Blurred in the smoke of his cigarette, Jaffrey Bretton's vivid white head merged like a half-erased drawing into the big shimmering mirror behind him. It was just as well, perhaps, that the twist of his mouth was hidden from Daphne's eyes.
There was no sound of voices in the outer passageway to herald Sheridan Kaire's return: just a little stumble on the edge of a rug—an unwonted fumble with the door handle. It wasn't defiance that backed him up now against the support of the wainscoating, but a very faint uncertainty in his legs. There was nothing uncertain, however, about his face. Geniality, not to say,217jocularity, wreathed it from ear to ear and from brow to chin.
"Sorry to have kept you waiting so long, dear—dear people," he beamed. "But a Host has so many responsibilities . . . . Overseeing the pantries and the—the libraries and the ladies!" he beamed. "Why—why, I can't help my way with the ladies!" he turned and explained with half-mocking anxiety to Jaffrey Bretton's absolutely inscrutable face. "Always, ever since I was a little boy," he deprecated, "I've been the Village cut-up! So was my father before me, and his father before—before me. Too bad, isn't it?" he questioned sharply. "Such a nice family! And so lively!" At an unexpected glimpse of his face in the mirror he turned back to meet Daphne's staring face. "Now this scar of mine, darling—darling," he confided dramatically, "you want to know where I got it? All the ladies always want to know where I got it! Just as soon as a lady gets up her courage to ask me about it," he chuckled, "then I always know she's really beginning to think of me! You asked if I got it in a 'brave218war,'" he chuckled. "Sure I got it in a brave war. Only the brave—deserve affairs," he parodied lightly. "It was in Smyrna," he confided, "when I was eighteen. I—I made a little poem about it:
"'There was a young Princess of Smyrna,Of love I endeavored to learn her,But her father in hate cleft a seam through my pate,Now wasn't that the deuce of a turn-a?'"
"'There was a young Princess of Smyrna,Of love I endeavored to learn her,But her father in hate cleft a seam through my pate,Now wasn't that the deuce of a turn-a?'"
"'There was a young Princess of Smyrna,
Of love I endeavored to learn her,
But her father in hate cleft a seam through my pate,
Now wasn't that the deuce of a turn-a?'"
Precipitately and without the slightest warning he plunged down into a chair and began to whimper maudlinly while with one uncertain finger tip he traced and retraced the twitching, zig- zagged scar. "It—it isn't nice, is it?" he babbled idiotically. "And I was such a pretty boy? . . . Ladies shouldn't ask such questions," he babbled. "Not just as you're going to kiss 'em. It—it makes dead faces floating between! It—isn't nice! Oh, Daphne darling—darling——"
But with a little scream of release Daphne's hand was already on the door knob.
"Oh, come quick, Old-Dad!" she cried. "It'sall over! It's all canceled! He's brokenhispromise! He's——"
In a single bound her father was at her side.219
"Oh, I hope I haven't said anything that I shouldn't have!" babbled Kaire. With a desperate effort he struggled to his feet and raised his arms after the manner of one who is just about to lead a cheer. "Now, all together, ladies and gentlemen!" he cried.
"There was a young lady from Smyrna,Of—of Smyrna——"
"There was a young lady from Smyrna,Of—of Smyrna——"
"There was a young lady from Smyrna,
Of—of Smyrna——"
Across his flaccid mouth the odd little smile tightened suddenly in a single poignant flash of bewilderment and pain. "Oh, you Little Good Works Business!" he grinned. "You—you——"
Then, before their startled eyes, he pitched over headlong on the table, gave a queer twitch of his shoulders, and lay very quiet, with a little flush of blood spreading redder and redder from his lips.
But before Jaffrey Bretton could snatch Daphne from the sight, her overtaxed brain had collapsed into delirium. Dodging down the narrow passageway with the dreadful little burden in his220arms he stumbled almost immediately on Martha's crouching figure.
"Martha!" he cried. "There's something redder than curtains in the cabin back there! Run and get Kaire's man!"
"Kaire'sman?" scoffed the woman shrilly. Robbed in that single instant of all her inhibition she turned and sped madly for the reddest thing that she would ever know, every thought in her awakened brain, every flash of her jeweled hands keyed suddenly to service.
Close behind her a cabin boy came hurrying. Champagne and crystal glasses were on his tray.
Roused from a half-completed nap Kaire's man came running to the scene.
Like an old hound scenting disaster Lost Man himself loomed unexpectedly in the doorway. With his great tunic-swathed height, his sharply dilating nostrils, he seemed bristling suddenly with some strange new sort of authority. For a single instant his beetling brows glowered to the stark, startled faces around him. Then out of—God knows what stained-glass memories— out of God knows what chanceled associations he burst forth221resonantly into the opening lines of the Episcopal burial service.
"'I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord. He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live. And whosoever liveth——'"
With a gasp from his own frazzled nerves Jaffrey Bretton pushed mercilessly past him.
"Oh, cut it out, Lost Man," he cried. "This isn't death—yet! Kaire's man knows just what to do, and has got a chance to do it—probably—even one or more times yet! Go get the launch ready, you and Alliman! If there's nothing here we can do, we'll goquick!"
"Where?" stared Lost Man.
"Back to our own island, you idiot!" snapped Bretton. "And pack up everything we've got! And catch that coast steamer in the morning! We're going North," he paled, "as fast as we can get there! I want a brain specialist for my little girl!" Stumbling along after Lost Man with his babbling burden in his arms, he stepped down into the waiting launch.
Already with his gnarled calloused hands Alliman the outlaw was222wringing strange cries from the reluctant engine. Up from a somber shadow in the bow the brown khaki lady lifted a startled but unquestioning face.
"Let me hold her!" insisted Lost Man. "I know how to hold 'em—the little lambs!" Like some vaguely parodied picture of "The Good Shepherd" the old man gathered the little limp figure into his arms, and retreated to the stern of the boat.
Half resentful, half relieved, Bretton hesitated an instant and then merged himself into the shadowy bow.
With a grunt of triumph Alliman started the launch gulfward. With creaks and groans and puffy sighs the old engine rallied to the task. Except for the chop of waves against the bow, the trickle of tides at the stern, no other sound broke the black silence except Lost Man's crooning monotone.
"There—there—there—there—there," crooned Lost Man. "There— there—there—there—there!" When he wasn't saying "There— there—there," he seemed to be trying to sing. Very laboriously,223very painstakingly, word by word and note by note he was straining very evidently to dig up something from his memory.
"Bring to—little children (he struggled)Visions—sweet—of Thee,Guard the sailors tossing (he quavered)On the—the deep blue sea."
"Bring to—little children (he struggled)Visions—sweet—of Thee,Guard the sailors tossing (he quavered)On the—the deep blue sea."
"Bring to—little children (he struggled)
Visions—sweet—of Thee,
Guard the sailors tossing (he quavered)
On the—the deep blue sea."
Along the whole dark shadowy length of the launch, the Outlaw's face alone shone wanly bright and reasonably clear-featured in the flare from the engine. Bloodless as the salt-pork that he fed on, dank-haired as the swamps and glades that encompassed him, brooding on Heaven knows what Past or what Future—a single convulsive tremor passed his pipe-clenched lips.
"Say, Boss," he said, "on them home runs of Baker's, was they straight-away hits? Or did they go over some fence?"
224
IT WAS the Northern March—very cold, very snowy, very blustery, when Daphne woke from her last bad dream.
Brisk, bleak, absolutely literal, the frosted roofs and gables of a pleasant suburban landscape gleamed sociably at her through every casement window.
No squawking pelicans screeched like steam-whistles into her splitting eardrums. No interminable flights of sea gulls dragged their sharp-feathered wingpoints across her naked eyeballs. On the slime and stench of a dead shark's body her little foot had forever stopped slipping.
"Why—why, how—perfectly extraordinary!" woke Daphne.
It seemed to be a pretty room. A little too neat, perhaps, a little too impersonal, to be one's very own. But by no means as plushily impersonal as a hotel, and by no means as poison-neat as a hospital.
"Wherever—in—the world—am I?" puzzled Daphne.225
Very cautiously, very experimentally, she began to investigate her most immediate surroundings.
"I am at least in a very pretty—pale blue—wadded silk wrapper," she discovered with eminent satisfaction. "Also, on an astonishingly comfortable couch with at least a hundred pillows . . . . Oh—I hope the bow on my pigtail matches my pale blue wrapper!" she quickened expectantly. But there was no pigtail. Shockingly to her uplifted hands her short-cropped head loomed round and crisp and fluffy as a great worsted ball. "Oh, dear— oh, dear—oh, dear!" she gasped. "If I am dead and born again—I am a boy!" Wilting down discouragedly into her "hundred pillows" one slender hand dropped weakly to the floor. "Life is very empty," she said. "Everything in life is very empty—everything." Along her sluggish spine a curious little thrill passed suddenly. "There is a nose in my hand!" she gasped. "Alovin'nose!226Creep-Mouse!" she cried out desperately. "Is it—possible that it's your lovin' nose?"
"Perfectly possible!" thudded Creep-Mouse's essentially practical tail. "Perfectly possible," swished and fawned the bashful little fur body.
"This is certainly very extraordinary," struggled Daphne. "Instead of being anything that I thought it was, it is quite evidently some sort of a bewitchment. I am a boy! But Creep-Mouse is still Creep-Mouse! I who went to sleeprealhave waked up in a Fairy Story! ButwhatFairy Story?" she shivered. "Andwhatpage?"
Quite inadvertently her eyes strayed to the little white table at the head of her couch. In the middle of the table shone a silver bell.
"It would be interesting," mused Daphne, "to ring that bell and see who comes! If it's the 'Hunch-Backed Pony'—then I'll know, of course, that I'm in the Russian Fairy book. And if it's Snow White—" very cautiously she struggled up from her pillows and reached for the silver bell. "But I must ring you very—little-y," she faltered in her weakness. "So that whatever comes will surely be very little." Then with an impetuous wilfulness that227surprised even herself she grabbed up the bell with both hands and rang it and rang it andrangit!
In the corridor somewhere a door slammed and footsteps came running—running! Her doorhandle turned! A portiere wrenched aside!
"It's the seven bears story—life size!" she screamed. And opened her eyes to Richard Wiltoner. Like a silver bomb the bell whizzed by his head. "Get out of my room!" she screamed. "Get out of my room before I'm expelled again!"
"Silly!" laughed Richard Wiltoner. "I'm visiting in your house! They told me to answer your bell!"
"My house?" collapsed Daphne. "Don't blame this house on me! I don't even know where I am!"
"Why, you're in your own home!" laughed Richard Wiltoner. "Just wait a minute and I'll call your people. . . . Everybody rushed outdoors to help a horse that fell on the ice."
"Fell on the ice? How nice," mused Daphne. "Why—why, I can rhyme again!" she exulted suddenly with softly clapping hands.228"Why, I'd forgotten all about it!" Then a little bit bewilderedly the white brow clouded. "Richard," she asked, "you—you said 'everybody' rushed out. What do you mean—'everybody'?"
"Why, your father, Mr. Bretton," said Richard, "and Mrs. Bretton."
"'Mrs. Bretton?'" jumped Daphne. Very limply she sank back into her pillows again. "Oh, I knew it," she said. "I've waked in the wrong story!" Quite severely she seemed to hold Richard responsible for the mistake. "Oh—no, Richard," she corrected him. "In the story I belong in there's no Mrs. Bretton. Just Mr. Bretton!—Mr. Jaffrey Bretton!—a tall man," she endeavored to illustrate, "with snow-white hair!"
"The very lad," laughed Richard, "and Mrs. Bretton. She's a brick! She's got red hair. Oh, I didn't mean to be funny!" he apologized hastily.
"Funny?" flamed Daphne. Flushing, paling, flushing again—a dozen conflicting emotions seemed surging through her brain.229"Richard?" she questioned. "Have you ever lost anything?"
"I've lost both my parents," said Richard, "and three sisters— and I don't remember any of them."
"Haven't you anything left?" asked Daphne.
"I've got one brother," said Richard. "The crippled brother, you know? And my horse, Brainstorm."
"Do you love them?" questioned Daphne.
"I love Brainstorm," said Richard.
"I've had trouble, too," sighed Daphne. "I've lost my father and my hair."
"Someone seems to have found your father," laughed Richard in spite of himself. "But whatever in the world have you done with your hair?"
"That's just it, Richard," said Daphne. "Will you look in the top bureau drawer?"
Flushing forty colors Richard opened the top bureau drawer. He was handsome enough when he wasn't embarrassed. But under embarrassment he glowed like stained glass with a light behind230it. "There are ribbons here," he pawed. "And—and things! But no hair!"
"Oh, isn't it—awful?" shivered Daphne. "Well, is there a hair brush? I would so like to look all right when my—my stepmother comes."
"Just as though she hadn't seen you looking all kinds of wrong for weeks and weeks!" scoffed Richard. But very obediently he brought the hair brush.
"Just where do you think you'd better begin?" worried Daphne.
"I?" stammered Richard. "I?" With a wild little lunge he commenced the attack.
"My! But you're bumpy!" winced Daphne. "Don't you think that maybe it would be better to use the bristly side of the brush?"
"Oh, I say!" apologized Richard, "Iamrattled!" With reconstructed acumen he resumed the task.
"Oh,that'snice," purred Daphne. "In a book I was reading there was the funniest thing—the husband in it was always brushing his wife's hair."
"How funny!" acquiesced Richard.
"Oh—awfully funny," purred Daphne. "I guess there's a good deal231more to this marriage-business," she observed sagely, "than some of us had supposed."
"Very likely," admitted Richard.
"Less nonsense, I mean," reflected Daphne. "But more hair- brushing—and putting away winter clothes, and——"
"Oh, I wish I had a wife," hooted Richard, "to put away my winter clothes!"
"I wish you had!" laughed Daphne. For the first time her mind went back to her little college tragedy with purely historical interest instead of pain. "Oh, I wish you had! That dress suit you bumped my nose against smelled so strong of camphor—I couldn't get it out of my nostrils all winter! Why, we're both laughing!" she exclaimed with sudden astonishment.
"Why shouldn't we?" argued Richard Wiltoner. In the midst of the reflection a most curious expression flashed across his eyes.
"Wouldn'tit have been funny," he said, "if youhadmarried me—that time I asked you?"
"We'd have fought like cats and dogs, I suppose," said Daphne.232
"But at least," laughed Richard, "you would have been putting away my winter clothes—just about now."
"And you—" retaliated Daphne.
"I'm already—brushing your hair!" laughed the boy.
"Let's never marry anybody," suggested Daphne. "Not for years!"
"I can't!" said Richard. "Not for years and years and years!— not to make a girl comfortable, I mean! There won't be any money. . . . There's my brother, you know; and I've got so many animals. . . . It's queer about animals," he stammered, "you— you can't fail the old ones when they're old, and you can't fail the young ones when they're young. It's like any other kind of family, I suppose," he smiled. "All fun and all responsibility! But never any time! And never any money!" Quite furiously he resumed the hair-brushing. "Oh, after all," he remarked, "thisisn't so awfully different from getting the snarls out of Brainstorm's mane. Only Brainstorm's mane is brown. And yours?" With a cry of sheer joy he stood off and surveyed his handiwork.233"And yours—" he laughed, "looks like a bunch of short-stemmed jonquils!"
"Oh, how—awful!" cried Daphne.
"No, it's cunning," flushed Richard.
A little bit teased by the laugh, Daphne met her own embarrassment with a fresh command.
"Oh, please—run quick now," she begged, "and tell my people as you call them—that a Lady-Who-Has-Been-Long-Away—sends her love and is home again!"
"You're too slow with your invitation," called her father's voice from the doorway. "We've already arrived!" With a most curious merge of excitement and serenity Jaffrey Bretton and the Intruding Lady walked into the room.
"How do you do?" said Daphne, with the faintest possible tinge of formality.
"Why, very well indeed," said her father, a bit casually. "How's yourself?" His more immediate attention at the moment seemed fixed on Richard and the waving hair brush.
"Oh, I'm all right," drawled Daphne very evenly. Then, with all the sudden tempestuous intensity of a child, she threw her arms in the air. "Only, I don't see—even yet," she cried, "just what234Richard Wiltoner is doing here."
With a quite unexplainable laugh her father dropped down on the edge of her couch.
"Why it's—it's about potatoes!" he laughed. "Richard is getting to be some farmer! He's written a magazine article about some new potato scheme of his. It's very interesting! I like experiments! I'm going to finance it. Not much, you know, but just a little. Just enough to take the strain off—and leave the push on. We'll go over in the spring when it's planting time," he began to laugh all over again, "and see that the experiment is started properly."
Quite severely Daphne drew back into her pillows. "I don't think it's very nice of you, Old-Dad," she said, "to laugh so at Richard's farming. Farming is a very—very noble profession, I think."
"It certainly is," conceded her father.
"And have you rabbits, Richard, as well as potatoes?" she235questioned with unbroken gravity. "And will there be jonquils? And new pigs?"
"There's liable to be 'most everything by that time," admitted Richard.
"Oh, all right then," brightened Daphne. "I think I'll come, too! I've thought a good deal about potatoes, myself!" With a little sigh, half fatigue, half contentment, she glanced up at her father just in time to intercept the glance of "white magic" that passed between him and the Intruding Lady. In an instant her little spine stiffened again. "Only—Richard," she smiled up bravely, "we unmarried people must surely stand by each other! Even after you go away maybe you'll write me about the rabbits and things? It's just a little bit lonely sometimes," quivered the smile, "to be the only unmarried person in the house."
With a perceptible quiver of her own smile the Intruding Lady came forward and dropped down on the couch just in front of Old- Dad.
"Oh, Little Girl," she said, "don't you think you're ever—ever going to like me any?"236
"Why, I like you now," whispered Daphne.
"And I'd like to like you—lots—only——" A bit worriedly the fluffy head turned and re-turned on its pillows. "Only—I don't understand," fretted Daphne, "about your having so many honeymoons."
"So many 'honeymoons?'" smiled the Intruding Lady. "Why, I'm thirty-two years old! And this is the very first honeymoon I've ever had in my life!"
"Why—why, you said you were on a honeymoon—down South!" frowned Daphne.
"So I did!" laughed the Intruding Lady. "And so I was! But I never said it wasmyhoneymoon!"
"Old-Dad—thought it was your honeymoon!" accused Daphne.
"Yes—I meant him to!" laughed the Intruding Lady. "Just for a little while I meant him to! . . . We'd had such a quarrel—ever since the winter before! Love at first sight it seemed to be!— and quarrel at first sight too!"
"Oh, dear me—dear me," worried Daphne. "The more I hear about237this 'Love' the more complicated it seems. There's even more study to it—I believe—than going to college."
"Oh, a great deal more study to it than going to college!" attested the Intruding Lady.
"Butwhosehoneymoon—was it?" persisted Daphne.
"Why, it was the honeymoon," mused the Intruding Lady, "of a very silly little chorus girl and an unduly wise New York magnate. He was very much pleased with everything about her, it seemed, except her Grammar—so I was brought along to mend the Grammar. Now wasn't that a perfectly idiotic thing to do?" she turned quite unblushingly to ask Old-Dad. "Where there are so many perfectly beautiful things to learn on a honeymoon to waste any time learning Grammar? Oh, of course, I know perfectly well"—she returned a bit quickly to Daphne—"that it was very wrong indeed of me to run away from them—that it caused the old magnate, at least, a considerable amount of anxiety. Only, of course, I never dreamed for a moment," she acknowledged, "that the yacht would go off without me! I merely thought," she238blushed, "I merely heard," she blushed, "that that was Jaffrey Bretton's Island."
"And you found him with me!" giggled Daphne, "all cuddled up in the sand."
"Yes," blushed the Intruding Lady.
With the cloud still on her brow Daphne studied the Intruding Lady's face with an entirely brand-new interest.
"But, how ever in the world," she demanded, "could anybody quarrel with my father?"
As though wanting to give full consideration to the question, the Intruding Lady glanced back at her husband before she essayed to face Daphne again.
"Why, really," she answered, "don't you suppose—that perhaps— it's because he's so tall?"
"Hardly," said Daphne.
"Well, then—maybe," mused the Intruding Lady, "it's because he's so—so funny?"
"Not at all," said Daphne.
"Well—just possibly—of course," smiled the Intruding Lady, "it's because I have red hair!"
"Now you're talking!" said Jaffrey Bretton.239
But no smile ruffled Daphne's gravity.
"Were you a—a sort of a teacher?" she questioned.
"Yes, a sort of a teacher," admitted the Intruding Lady.
"Where?" asked Daphne.
"Oh, on houseboats and yachts and things," smiled the Intruding Lady. "Just a sort of traveling teacher. That's why I didn't quite understand your father at first—I suppose," she acknowledged. "Our lives were so far apart."
"Do you think you understand me?" whispered Daphne.
"Oh, I understand you perfectly," smiled the Intruding Lady.
"Then what are you going to teach me?" quivered Daphne. "There are so many things I want to know! Who Lost Man was! Why people like the Outlaware! Did—did Sheridan Kaire—break his word on purpose to free me?"
From the Intruding Lady's merry eyes a most astonishing tear rolled suddenly.
"First of all, Little Girl," she said, "I'm going to try very—240very hard to teach you to love me!"
"I'm—I'm enjoying my first lesson very much thank you," smiled Daphne faintly.
"Heaven bless my soul!" cried her father quite abruptly, "I'd forgotten all about smoking!" Adroitly with match and cigarette he proceeded to remedy the omission, brooding thoughtfully all the while on his daughter's wistful young face the positive, generous womanliness of his own chosen mate the splendid clean- limbed, clean-souled promise of the young lad before him. With more emotion than he cared to show he bent down suddenly and gathered Creep-Mouse into his arms. "There—there isn't a man in the world," he affirmed, "who has as good a—as good a dog as I have!"
"'Dog?'" deprecated Richard Wiltoner quite unexpectedly. "'Family I guess is what you mean!'"
"But even yet," questioned Daphne worriedly of the Intruding Lady, "everything's been so sudden and queer—even yet I don't quite seem to realize just how you figure in my story?"
"Why, I don't suppose I figure at all," smiled the Intruding241Lady very modestly, "except in so far as I do my bit towards making a Happy Ending.
"'Happy Ending?'" quickened Jaffrey Bretton. "Why this—is just the Happy Beginning!"