He shrugged his accustomed shrug of resignation.
"Oh, I say--come, now----" he murmured, lighting a cigarette.
"What a horrid smash there would be if I didn"t make good, wouldn"t there, Stirrups?" She mused, her blue eyes resting on him, too coldly.
"Rather," he replied, comfortably settling his arms on the rail.
"It might happen, you know. Suppose I fell overboard?"
"Fish you out, ducky."
"Suppose I--ran away?"
"Ow."
"What would you do, Stirrups? Why, you"d go back to town and try to pick another winner. Wouldn"t you?"
He laughed.
"Naturally that is what you would do, isn"t it?" She considered him curiously for a moment, then smiled. "How funny!" she said, almost breathlessly.
"Rather," he murmured, and flicked his cigarette overboard.
The _Orange Puppy_ had disappeared beyond the thicket of palmettos across the point. The air was very warm and still.
Her father waddled forward presently, wearing the impressive summer regalia of a commodore in the Siwanois Yacht Club. His daughter"s blue eyes rested on the portly waistline of her parent--then on his fluffy chop-whiskers. A vacant, hunted look came into her eyes.
"Father," she said almost listlessly, "I"m going to run away again."
"When do you start?" inquired that facetious man.
"Now, I think. What is there over there?"--turning her face again toward the distant lagoon, with its endless forests of water-oak, cedar, and palmetto.
"Over there," said her father, "reside several species of snakes and alligators. Also other reptiles, a number of birds, and animals, and much microbic mud."
She bit her lip. "I see," she said, nodding.
Willowmere said: "We should find some shootin" along the lagoon. Look at the ducks."
Mr. Ca.s.sillis yawned; he had eaten too heavily of duck to be interested.
Very thoughtfully he presented himself with a cigar, turned it over and over between his soft fingers, and yawned again. Then, nodding solemnly as though in emphasis of a profound idea of which he had just been happily delivered, he waddled slowly back along the deck.
His daughter looked after him until he disappeared; gazed around her at the dawdling a.s.sortment of guests aboard, then lifted her quiet eyes to Willowmere.
"Ducky," she said, "I can"t stand it. I"m going to run away."
"Come on, then," he said, linking his arm in hers.
The Victor still exuded the Tango.
She hesitated. Then freeing herself:
"Oh, not with you, Stirrups! I wish to go away somewhere entirely alone.
Could you understand?" she added wistfully.
He stifled a yawn. American humour bored him excessively.
"You"ll be back in a day or two?" he inquired. And laughed violently when the subtlety of his own wit struck him.
"In a day or two or not at all. Good-bye, Stirrups."
"Bye."
The sun blazed on her coppery hair and on the white skin that never burned, as she walked slowly across the yacht"s deck and disappeared below.
While she was writing in her cabin, the _Chihuahua_ dropped her anchors.
Miss Ca.s.sillis listened to the piping, the thud of feet on deck, the rattle and distant sound of voices. Then she continued her note:
I merely desire to run away. I don"t know why, Mother, dear.
But the longing to bolt has been incubating for many years. And now it"s too strong to resist. I don"t quite understand how it came to a crisis on deck just now, but I looked at Stirrups, whose skin is too pink, and at Father, who had lunched too sumptuously, and at the people on deck, all digesting in a row--and then at the green woods on sh.o.r.e, and the strip of white where a fairy surf was piling up foam into magic castles and snowy battlements, ephemeral, exquisite. And all at once it came over me that I must go.
Don"t be alarmed. I shall provision a deck canoe, take a tent, some rugs and books, and paddle into that lagoon. If you will just let me alone for two or three days, I promise I"ll return safe and sound, and satisfied. For something has got to be done in regard to that longing of mine. But really, I think that if you and Father _won"t_ understand, and if you send snooping people after me, I won"t come back at all, and I"ll never marry Stirrups. Please understand me, Mother, dear.
CECIL.
This effusion she pinned to her pillow, then rang for the steward and ordered the canoe to be brought alongside, provisioned for a three days"
shooting trip.
So open, frank, and guileless were her orders that n.o.body who took them suspected anything unusual; and in the full heat and glare of the afternoon siesta, when parents, fiance, and a.s.sorted guests were all asleep and in full process of digestion and the crew of the _Chihuahua_ was drowsing from stem to stern, a brace of sailors innocently connived at her escape, aided her into the canoe, and, doubting nothing, watched her paddle away through the inlet, and into the distant lagoon, which lay sparkling in golden and turquoise tints, set with palms like a stupid picture in a child"s geography.
Later, the _Chihuahua_ fired a frantic gun. Later still, two boats left the yacht, commanded respectively by one angry parent and one fiance, profoundly bored.
IV
When Miss Ca.s.sillis heard the gun, it sounded very far away. But it irritated as well as scared her. She pushed the canoe energetically through a screen of foliage overhanging the bank of the lagoon, it being merely her immediate instinct to hide herself.
To her surprise and pleasure, she discovered herself in a narrow, deep lead, which had been entirely concealed by the leaves, and which wound away through an illimitable vista of reeds, widening as she paddled forward, until it seemed like a gla.s.sy river bordered by live-oak, water-oak, pine, and palmetto, curving out into a flat and endless land of forests.
Here was liberty at last! No pursuit need now be feared, for the entrance to this paradise which she had forced by a chance impulse could never be suspected by parent or fiance.
A little breeze blew her hair and loosened it; silently her paddle dipped, swept astern in a swirl of bubbles, flashed dripping, and dipped again.
Ahead of her a snake-bird slipped from a dead branch into the water; a cormorant perched on the whitened skeleton of a mango, made hideous efforts to swallow a mullet before her approach disorganized his manoeuvres.
So silently the canoe stole along that the fat alligators, dozing in the saw-gra.s.s, dozed on until she stirred them purposely with a low tap of her paddle against the thwarts; then they rose, great lumbering bodies propped high on squatty legs, waddled swiftly to the bank"s edge, and slid headlong into the water.