XXIROGER WINS
La Provencewas due to sail in twenty minutes. One whistle had blown; one of the gangways was casting off. Roger, with a suppressed excitement more effective than any shouting or waving of fists, was superintending the taking of his luggage from the ship. “There’s still one piece to come ashore—the old leather trunk with brass nails,” he said to the polite chief steward. “It must be found. Double your efforts and I’ll double your fee.” He turned, found himself squarely facing Beatrice Richmond.
The color flamed in his face; it vanished from hers. “You got my note?” she said. “And you are sailing anyhow?”
“I did not get your note,” replied he. “But I am not sailing.... One moment, please.” Then to the chief steward: “There is also a note for me. I must have it.”
“Parfaitement, Monsieur.” And the chief steward raced up the gangway.
Roger and Beatrice stood aside in a quiet place, a calm in the surging crowd of the voyagers andtheir friends. Beatrice looked at him with that fine, frank directness which had been her most conspicuous trait in all her dealings with him. Said she: “In my note I asked you to take me on any terms or on no terms. All I wish is to be near you and to love you.”
She spoke the words without any trace of emotion in either tone or manner—spoke them with a certain monotonous finality that gave them all the might of the simply genuine. And he answered in much the same way. “I am not sailing,” said he, “because—because to love you and to have you—that’s life for me. The rest isn’t worth talking about.”
“Not worth talking about,” echoed she. “I don’t know whether we’ll be happy or not, but I do know it’s my only chance to be anything but miserable.”
“I don’t know whether I could get over you or not,” was his matching confession, “but I do know that I don’t want to—and won’t.”
A moment’s silence, with the two gazing up at the towering steamer through the great doors in the pier shed. Then his eyes turned to her, to look at her with an intensity that made her feel as if she had been suddenly seized in strong yet gentle arms and were being borne by mighty wings up and up and still up.
“Chang,” she said between laughing and sobbing, “I must have been crazy yesterday to refuse you.”
“No—you’re crazy to-day. So am I. That is, I’m normal again—what’s been normal for me ever since I knew you. And I hope the day’ll never come when I’ll be sane.”
“Are you happy now?”
“Delirious.”
“As we used to be when we were together by the cascade?”
“Like that—only a thousand times more so.” And they gazed at each other with foolish-fond eyes, and from their lips issued those extraordinary sounds that seem imbecile or divine, according as the listening ears are attuned.
“Your father was right,” said Roger. “Love is master.” Again she was seeing the new and more wonderful and more compelling Chang. “I found that everything was going to stop stock-still if I went away from you.”
The chief steward, bearing the note, and his assistants who had been collecting Roger’s luggage around him, now appeared. Roger tore open the note, read its one brief sentence of unconditional surrender. Then he dismissed the men with fees so amazing to them that they thanked him with tears in their eyes. “But you really must be careful,” cautioned Beatrice. “You know we’ve got no money to throw away.”
Roger gave her a look that dazzled her. “I see you understand,” said he. “Well, we may be happy in spite of all—all the difficulties.”
She laughed. “I don’t think, dear,” said she, “that you’re so weak as you fear, or I so foolish.... Maybe you’d like me to keep on with the dressmaking?”
He frowned in mock severity. “I don’t want ever to hear of it again.”
“Then you never shall,” replied she with mock humility. “You want a meek slave—and you shall have one.” Her lips moved with no sound issuing.
“What are you saying there?” demanded he.
“What Ruth said to Naomi.” She gazed at him with ecstatic, incredulous eyes. “Have Ireallygot you?” she said.
He looked at her with an amused smile. It died away slowly, and his gaze grew solemn. “That will depend on—you,” he said.
She saw there was more than the surface meaning in the words; then she saw their deeper meaning—saw as clearly as an inexperienced girl may see, but only so clearly, the hidden reality of the man she had been striving to win, and would ever have to strive to keep. And beautiful was the light in her eyes as she murmured: “Love will teach me!”
He half turned away to hide the wave of emotion that almost unmanned him. When he spoke it was to say in a queer, husky voice: “Let me see the expressman about this luggage—then—we’ll go to lunch somewhere.”
“Let’s go—in—” She halted, eyes dancing.
“In a cab?”
She blushed and laughed. “Isn’t it about time?” said she, eyes full of that charming audacity of hers. “How well we understand each other! How congenial we are!”
“Wonderful, isn’t it?” cried he. “I hope there have been other cases like ours—lots of ’em. But I doubt it.”
She waited while he negotiated the return of the baggage to Deer Spring. When he rejoined her—or, rather, gave her his undivided attention, for he had not let her get so much as three feet away from him—she said: “Now I must telephone father.”
“Oh, why hurry about that?”
“I must tell him not to engage passage for next Wednesday,” explained she.
And they both burst out laughing.
THE END