CHAPTER SEVENTEENCOBWEBS

CHAPTER SEVENTEENCOBWEBS

The mats were drawn at the windows and the lamp was lighted in their “parlour.” It was a night of warm nervous wind, and, though the pounding of the surf produced a roar which neither rose nor fell, the jungle, stirred by shifting gusts, seemed full of nocturnal caprice, and sounded a broken note oftempo rubato—as so often it did, only to make the dreamy stillness of the following dawn more poignant.

It was a quiet evening at home. King had been enjoying a glass of after-dinner brandy, and, as was apt to be the case at such times, the exuberance of his mood brought a soft shine to Stella’s eyes. Just faintly of late it had been necessary to brush aside vexing little cobwebs that seemed, in spite of her, weaving question and debate about the edges of her romance.... But tonight she saw how unfounded were any quavers she might entertain—the kiss that had brought a frown—Tsuda’s sombre disclosures.... No, she would never let her mind drift into a web of ephemeral doubts again; she was done with morbid “premonitions” for ever—they were intruders.

Every marriage, she reasoned, must call for certain adjustments—concessions, if one preferred phrasing it that way. Whenever her husband seemed brusque or abstracted, inclined to forgetfulness of her, she would remind herself that he had a new business on his hands. How foolish to grope, ever; to feel perturbed, unequipped! And she would only laugh when a curious phrase of his came back to her: “Just imagine whatit would have been like if I had come here alone...!” An oddly impersonal note it was, which had given her a jolt; though now she told herself it was because she had been in a mood of hyper-sensitiveness. Without realizing it, she softly laughed aloud, her thoughts playing in rumination.

“Tell us the joke, peaches!” he suggested in his bluff, magnetic way.

“Nothing,” she replied, her eyes still shining. “I was only thinking how wonderful it all is!”

And she drew her arms gently about her husband’s neck.

A sudden gust of wind whipped one of King’s papers off the table where he sat figuring opium problems. It went skimming across the floor, and Stella thrust out a foot to intercept its flight: a spontaneous act which set her husband musing in a rather odd way.

“You’ve a remarkably narrow foot, haven’t you Stella?” he said. “I noticed it even that first time we met in the street.”

“Have I?” she laughed, fluttering a little—a mannerism her husband still possessed the magic potency to inspire.

He seemed to be studying her foot with an abrupt and quite absorbed interest.

“It’s not very often—” He broke off and glanced up with a rather furtive smile. “I mean—you must wear about a double A, don’t you?”

“How did you guess?” she laughed. She adored Ferdinand in this sort of personal, gently intimate mood. It somehow, very subtly, compensated for the splendours not yet come to pass....

King eyed her shoe attentively. There was even something trancelike in his gaze. When he spoke again it was with a touch of far-away dreaminess. “Double A,” he half chanted, “with a short instep—yes—and one of those Standish heels they’re using such a lot now....” He glanced up again, this time with a faint start, and found Stella gazing at him amused, perplexed a little.

“That’s just what the man at the shoe store said,” she smiled. “You’re terribly clever!” And when her husband, a look still detached and a shade self-conscious in his round blue eyes, had taken possession of the sheet of paper she had rescued, and had returned to his work at the table, Stella sat meditating. But ever, quaintly, through her reverie, like a whimsical refrain, ran the thread of King’s words: “Double A—with one of those Standish heels....”

Suddenly, as she looked at him, it seemed to Stella that he was an utter stranger—she had never seen him till now—they had notreallymarried and come out here to this mysterious unknown island. Just as abruptly the sensation passed; but the girl still felt in her heart a shiver of nervous excitement, and, in brooding mood, got up and roamed restlessly about the house.

The wind romped outside with nervous starts and stops, each gust strangely impelling her to fresh question and uninvited quandary.

At length, impelled by a wave of romantic tenderness, Stella paused in her roaming and leaned up against her husband, so deeply absorbed in his task—acreage, crops, the problem of irrigation. “Ferd, dear,” she murmured after a little. “Ferd, dear—I keep feeling as though I’d have to wake up. I know it’s foolish of me, but the strangeness doesn’t seem to wear off. Does it ever come over you that way?”

“What?” he muttered, obviously only half conscious she had spoken at all.

Stella caressed her husband’s hair, and, working one little finger into his lapel buttonhole, coaxed: “Ferd—whydidwe come to Hagen’s Island?”

He looked up at her then, a somewhat troubled expression in his face. “Well,” he said slowly, his lips, so like a tender cupid’s bow, touched with a smile of faint irony, “I guess it was what one would have to call a case of grabbing up the first thing in sight!”

“But—” Her look was a little troubled.

“Oh, I give you my word,” he laughed, “I’d have preferreda good many places to this, despite its very superior cocoanuts and sunsets—some place a trifle less remote. I’m sure I never listened to such a lot of silence all at once in my life! But here was the chance, and it had to be this or—well, something a great deal more prosaic. Unfortunately,” he added, “a man has to work for his living in this hard and unfeeling world!”

Her finger fell out of his buttonhole. “Oh...!” she half cried, and in such an odd, overturned tone that, still smiling in his princely way, he demanded: “You didn’t think I was made of money did you, little lady?”

Hurriedly Stella shook her head, a bit alarmed for just a moment lest she had placed herself in an unfortunate light. Yet somehow shehadalways more or less associated Ferdinand with at least the romantic abstract idea of money. The illusion had been established upon the occasion of her first glimpse of him, bursting like a bright symbol into her drab life, his hand full of travel guides. Money—not for itself, but the things it could do and the dreams it could realize.... Her returning smile seemed to crack a little, as her eyes, with still their faintly troubled look, met his, then unconsciously avoided them. It was, to some indefinite extent, a moment of readjustment for her. The evening seemed all athrill with intangible revelation....

“Look here,” he said, a suggestion of bravado in his voice, “speaking of Hagen’s Island and the business, you were responsible yourself, Stella, for a whole lot of the soft pedaling.”

“I?” she asked, amazed, wondering at the drift.

His smile possessed elements of dryness. “The Captain believes to this day you knew the essential facts beforehand. But,” and her husband laughingly seized both her cheeks, “after that day you said you liked having everything mysterious—well, I didn’t have the heart to break in on any of your dreams just then....

“I see,” she said, a shade doubtfully. Her cheeks trembled a little where his fingers had pinched.

“The Captain even tried to talk me out of getting married,” pursued King, almost chattily. “The Captain always insisted this was a man’s job. But that was all the good it did! Why you dear little girl,” he went on, his tone warming and deepening to considerable passion, “how could I ever get along without you?”

But somehow those other words of his—those words unconsciously yet so hauntinglyimpersonal—seemed ringing in her ears instead: “—what it would have been like if I’d come here—alone....”

“I know,” he admitted after a little pause, “time seems to lag a bit. But after all, what’s six months?”

“Or even a year?” she bravely supplemented, catching somewhat the spirit of his easy nonchalance.

It was, as a matter of fact, a trifle in the air: the Captain’s was a complicated life. “If I’m not here—h’m?—by the fifteenth of August,” he had told them, “or within a week of that time—h’m?—you’ll know I’m not to be looked for until February again.” But they refused to be dismayed.

“Yes, even a year,” King echoed her gaily. “A year’s gone in no time. And then,” he laughed, “if wecan’tstand it any longer, why off we go, to some place more lively—maybe where we can live in a cheerful, noisy little two-by-twice flat with a dumb waiter and—”

“But you said—the rue de la Paix,” she reminded him, a look of groping alarm in her eyes.

“Ah, so I did.” He sighed a cheerful capitulation; and then, with an odd effect of pulling himself together and getting romantically “under way” once more, noisily pushed back his chair, got up, and poured out some more brandy. “You’re right, lady-bird. I’d forgotten about the hats. All right—it’s really quite the same. We’ll go to Paris! And after that—perhaps the Tyrol you’re always talking about. Or—I’ve got it! We’ll saunter up the coast of Africa, through the Suezcanal, into the blue Mediterranean. Maybe you’ll want to go on to Spain....”

He strode to a window and brushed back the mat roughly, seeming, as he stood there, to drift miles away, while the blow outside waned, and the jungle hushed itself beneath warm stars.

The troubled look returned to Stella’s eyes. “Oh, don’t stop—please!” she urged. And it came to her dimly that this was really the first time she had had, consciously, to prod his grandeur.

Next morning it was still and sunny. Silence drifted softly in from all sides through the aching beauty of this tiny empire.

Breakfast finished, King prepared to depart for the day, turning at the door and nodding easily: “Don’t you worry, little girl. As for such details as balls and theatres, it’s true they’re not very plentiful. For your sake I wish we could import some—it would be jolly. But don’t let your dear little head forget,” he went on a trifle pompously, “that Hagen’s Island is only a beginning. If I happened to be flush we’d be taking a smashing honeymoon trip all over the globe—hitting nothing but the high spots...!” His eyes flashed magnetically. “But whatever your dreams are,” he continued, slightly magisterial by virtue of his virile earnestness, “they’re going to come true, later on. However high they sail—I don’t care. You leave everything to me, little lady.I’ve got a hunch!”

His regard strayed a little, although his words rang with real fervour; and following his gaze Stella saw a young Ainu woman passing swiftly by along a path which soon lost itself in the steaming tropical maze. King watched her out of sight with a look of glancing interest.

“That’s the great chief Cha-cha-kamui’s Small Wife,” he muttered, a smile breaking. “Tsuda explained it the other day. It seems there’s an official Great Wife; but she’s old andugly, and—well, after all,” he laughed, “the world’s one piece when it comes to that.”

He was hurrying away, and had mounted a pony when Stella called to him, her voice faltering with a little shrill of unhappy emotion.

“Oh Ferd—don’tgo without a kiss!”

“There you are,” he smiled, bending down chivalrously from the saddle to reach her lips.

At the crest of the tiny hillock he turned to wave again.

Back to IndexNext