Brady frowned. "I don"t like it," he said. "She"s too pretty, with those little curly rings of hair round her pale face, and with those big blue eyes. Why don"t they send some old maid on such errands?"
"Because they want to sell their papers," answered Miss Standish, dryly.
The talk around the fire had gone on so eagerly that the attention of the group was utterly absorbed; and every one started as if an apparition had appeared in their midst, when a slim figure in a dark dress, against which her face looked doubly white, glided noiselessly into the room. With eyes fixed in almost trance-like far-sightedness, she moved towards Brady, and laid her hand upon his sleeve.
"My brother," she said, "it is you have risked your life to save mine.
G.o.d gave you back both. What will you be doing with your share?"
"I--I--I"m awfully sorry, don"t you know!" stammered Brady, terribly embarra.s.sed; "but it wasn"t I who did it."
"Here is the man, Miss Costello, to whom you owe your life," said the Doctor, who dearly loved a "situation," turning as he spoke, with a little flourish, to the place where Flint had stood; but that gentleman had taken advantage of the mistake to bolt into the bed-room behind him. He would have bolted into the pond, rather than submit to be thanked publicly in this fashion.
"He"s gone!" exclaimed Dr. Cricket, in disappointment.
"Ah!" said Nora Costello, with a quick, sympathetic smile, "it"s verra natural. He did not wish to be thanked. Perhaps he is right. After all, it is to the good G.o.d himsel" that our thanks are owing."
She knelt on the rug, as simply as she would have taken an offered chair, and spoke to some invisible presence, as naturally as she would have spoken to any of those in the room. Brady was shocked at first, at the conversational tone. It was so realistic that he opened his eyes, half expecting to see the Someone--the Something--so evidently apparent to the girl herself.
Having once opened his eyes, he forgot to close them again. The actual so pursued him, that he ceased to seek the spiritual presence. The firelight, playing over the girl"s face, threw strange lights, and shadows half unearthly. She seemed a spirit, of whom no ordinary restraints of the familiar social life were to be expected.
When her prayer was finished, she rose as simply as she had knelt, though now two large tears stood on the long fringe of her eyes.
"Good-night, friends!" she said with a confiding glance around. "I think I shall be able to get the sleep now. G.o.d bless you all!"
When she was gone, the hush was unbroken for several minutes. At last Winifred spoke.
"I don"t know how the rest of you feel, but somehow I have a sensation of being a lay figure in the shop-window of life, and having all of a sudden seen a real woman go by."
"Jove! what eyes she has!" said Brady, continuing thoughts of his own, rather than answering Winifred"s speech.
"Really," said Ben Bradford, "it wasn"t unpleasant at all."
"Unpleasant!" exclaimed his aunt. "Well, I should say not, unless heaven is unpleasant, and angels, and the Judgment Day, which I daresay it will be for you, Ben Bradford, unless you mend your ways.
Good-night! I"m going up to see that the child has a hot-water bag to her feet, and a mustard plaster on her chest. The Salvation Army needs an efficient ambulance corps."
"Hm!" said Dr. Cricket, as Miss Standish disappeared. "Mary may have chosen the better part; but I pity the household that"s all Marys.
Give me a Martha in mine every time!
"That reminds me," he added briskly, "that I must look after my patient, and not let him pitch himself into that bed, which has not been aired for a week; and n.o.body in this house knows the difference between damp sheets and dry ones. Do you know, Mr. Brady," he continued, as he rose from his chair with a little rheumatic hitch, "I have taken a great shine to that queer friend of yours. I don"t know how it is, but I suspect it is because he is such a contrast to most folks. It"s a comfort to meet a man who keeps his best foot back."
"Oh, Flint is a brick!" said Brady, with enthusiasm. "I have known him to do the nicest things. There was a fellow once in college--he was rather pushing socially, and n.o.body liked him--but he was "a dig,""
and he got sick from studying too much. None of the rest of us ever fell ill of that trouble; but he did, and he was so poor he didn"t want to let any one know about it, for fear he would be obliged to send for a doctor. It was found out though; and one day a doctor and nurse turned up at the fellow"s room,--said they"d been asked not to say who sent them; but they stayed and pulled him through. He never knew who his benefactor was; but I did, and you may judge of my surprise, when the fellow got about, to see Flint cut him on the street.
""What in thunder did you do that for?" I asked, for I was dumfounded to see him do it.
""Because the fellow is a cad, and would be taking all sorts of advantages. Better ignore the acquaintance at the start."
""Then why did you do what you did for him?"
""I don"t know, I"m sure!" Flint answered.
"That"s just the sort of fellow Flint is. He may seem crusty, but in any emergency he is a man to tie to."
"If life were a series of emergencies," said Winifred, reflectively, "Mr. Flint would be invaluable; but in every-day existence, one does not quite know what to do with him."
"I can put up with a great deal," said Ben Bradford, "from a chap like that, who shows real sand and pluck when a crisis comes. I mean to tell Mr. Flint to-morrow that I think he"s a daisy, and go down on my marrow bones for the things I have thought and said about him before."
"I wouldn"t, if I were you, Ben," observed Winifred, with an amused smile; "for I doubt if Mr. Flint has ever had the dimmest idea that you have not been thinking well of him all along."
CHAPTER X
FLYING POINT
"We"ll maybe return to Lochaber no more."
Far up the pond, at no great distance from the spot where "The Aquidneck" had met her untimely and ignominious end, Flying Point thrust out its tongue of land into the rippling water, which stole in and out between its tiny coves so gently that scarcely a murmur could be heard, except when a northeaster lashed the pond into a mimic sea; and then the teapot tempest was so outdone by the giant waves outside the bar, that it pa.s.sed unnoticed, like the fury of a child beside the rage of a grown man.
The Point took its name from the flights of ducks which pa.s.sed over it in vast numbers in the spring and autumn, their dark, irregular squadrons black against the intense blue of sea and sky. Its low bluff of gleaming sand was crowned by a grove of tall pines, through which purled a tiny brook perpetually prattling to the sea of its little inland life. Below the bank, stretched out a rod or more of level beach where fires might be lighted and cloths spread by those who wished to return to the gypsy habits of their forebears and sit down as Nature"s guests, to simple fare of their own cooking and serving.
A midsummer pilgrimage to Flying Point was a regular feature of the season with the dwellers at the White-House; and it was a point of honor for the old-timers to declare that last year"s expedition was in every way more successful than that of the present season. Newcomers endured this superiority in silence, consoled by the prospect of enjoying the same triumph themselves next summer.
Several times the date of this year"s expedition had been set, and as often changed. The last date had been fixed for the eighth of July; but the excitement of the wreck, and the reaction of la.s.situde which followed that catastrophe, put to flight, for a time, all thoughts of amus.e.m.e.nt, and a fortnight elapsed without an apparent ripple on the calm of existence at Nepaug.
On the second day after the wreck, Angus Costello and his sister took their departure for New York,--he to collect the insurance on the ill-fated "Mary Ann," she to report again for duty in the Army. With the going of the Costellos, quiet settled down once more; but the dwellers on the Point found themselves impatient of the very repose for which they had sought Nepaug. Rest had turned to inanimation, quiet to dulness, peace to stagnation.
Flint, usually unaffected by environment, found himself incapable of any intellectual or physical exertion. He could not work. He could not even loaf alone. Brady was an indifferent companion, subject to fits of absence of mind,--more unsocial than absence of body.
There was only one resource left; the young men betook themselves to the White-House. Life there could not be wholly dull, while a perpetual sparring match was going on between Miss Standish and Dr.
Cricket, while Professor Anstice smoked his pipe serenely on the corner of the piazza, and Ben Bradford openly adored Winifred, heedless of outside observation or amus.e.m.e.nt.
Ben himself was an endless source of entertainment to Flint, so vividly did his demeanor recall the rapidly receding days of his own youth, when he too had felt the constraint which is born of the a.s.surance that all the world is fixing its gaze upon us and our actions.
Ben never dreamed that he could be taken humorously. He regarded himself with a deep seriousness, and planned innocent little hypocrisies with a view to their effect on the public. He was anxious to be supposed to handle a large correspondence, and took pains to sort his mail in public, fingering a number of letters in his leather case with a reflective air, as if he were considering what replies they demanded, although their worn envelopes revealed them to the most casual observation as at least a fortnight old.
He had the sensitiveness of youth, and spent much useless effort in the endeavor to discover what people meant by their words and deeds; when, nine times out of ten, they meant nothing at all, but were only striving to fill up the gaps of life with idle observations or diversions. He himself was fond of side remarks, intended to be satirical, but falling rather flat, if dragged out into the prosaic light of general conversation, as sometimes happened when Miss Standish caught a word or two and exclaimed aloud: "What was that, Ben? Won"t you give us all the benefit of that last observation?"
Ben loved his aunt; but he did not like her.
She interfered sadly with his pose as a man of the world, by relating anecdotes of his infancy, and stating the precise number of years which had elapsed since the occurrence.
On the occasion of one of the daily visits of Flint and Brady, they were made aware of unmistakable signs of a domestic unpleasantness.
They were no sooner seated, than Ben picked up again the grievance which their arrival had compelled him to drop.
"You have told that story four times already this summer, Aunt Susan,"