By a swift stroke or two he managed to propel their craft as far as the rock. They scrambled up on it, and then he tried to haul the boat around the miniature islet; but the more he hauled, the quicker the water seemed to run away, and the deeper the wretched thing stuck in the mud. He jumped in again, and made an effort to push her off with an oar; meanwhile Robinette nearly fell off the rock in her efforts to get the head of the boat around towards the current again, and making a frantic plunge into the ooze, sank above her ankles in an instant.
Lavendar caught hold of her and helped her to scramble back into the boat. "It"s all right; only my skirt wet, and one shoe gone!" she panted. "Now, what are we to do?" She spread out her hands in dismay, and looked down at her draggled mud-stained skirt, her little feet, one shoeless and both covered with mud and slime. "What an object I shall be to meet Aunt de Tracy"s eye, when, if ever, it does light on me again! Meanwhile it seems as if we might be here for some hours.
The boat is just settling herself into the mud bank, like a rather tired fat old woman into an armchair, and pray, Mr. Lavendar, what do you propose to do? as Talleyrand said to the lady who told him she couldn"t bear it."
Lavendar looked about them; the main bed of the river was fifty yards away; between it and them was now only an expanse of mud.
"It"s perfectly hopeless," he said, "the best thing we can do is to beget some philosophy."
"Which at any moment we would exchange for a foot of water," she interpolated.
"We must just sit here and wait for the tide. Shall it be in the boat or on the rock?"
"I don"t see much difference, do you? Except that the pa.s.sing boats, if there are any, might think it was a matter of choice to sit on a damp rock for two hours, but no one could think we wanted to sit in a boat in the mud."
They landed on the rock for the second time. "For my part it"s no great punishment," said Lavendar, when they settled themselves, "since the place is big enough for two and you"re one of them!"
"Wouldn"t this be as good a stool of repentance from which to confess your faults as any?" asked Robinette, as she tucked her shoeless foot beneath her mud-stained skirt and made herself as comfortable as possible. "I"ll even offer a return of confidence upon my own weaknesses, if I can find them, but at present only miles of virtue stretch behind me. Ugh! How the mud smells; quite penitential! Now:--
"What have you sought you should have shunned, And into what new follies run?"
"Oh, what a bad rhyme!" said Lavendar.
"It"s Pythagoras, any way," she explained.
Then suddenly changing his tone, Lavendar went on. "This is not merely a jest, Mrs. Loring. Before you admit me really amongst the number of your friends I should like you to know that--to put it plainly--my own little world would tell you at the moment that I am a heartless jilt."
"That is a very ugly expression, Mr. Lavendar, and I shall choose not to believe it, until you give me your own version of the story."
"In one way I can give you no other; except that I was just fool enough to drift into an engagement with a woman whom I did not really love, and just not enough of a fool to make both of us miserable for life when I, all too late, found out my mistake."
There pa.s.sed before him at that moment other foolish blithe little loves, like faded flowers with the sweetness gone out of them. They had been so innocent, so fragile, so free from blame; all but the last; and this last it was that threatened to rise like a shadow perhaps, and defeat his winning the only woman he could ever love.
Robinette stared at the stretches of ooze, and then stole a look at Mark Lavendar. "The idea of calling that man a jilt," she thought.
"Look at his eyes; look at his mouth; listen to his voice; there is truth in them all. Oh for a sight of the girl he jilted! How much it would explain! No, not altogether, because the careless making of his engagement would have to be accounted for, as well as the breaking of it. Unless he did it merely to oblige her--and men are such idiots sometimes,--then he must have fancied he was in love with her. Perhaps he is continually troubled with those fancies. Nonsense! you believe in him, and you know you do." Then aloud she said, sympathetically, "I"m afraid we are apt to make these little experimental journeys in youth, when the heart is full of _wanderl.u.s.t_. We start out on them so lightly, then they lead nowhere, and the walking back alone is wearisome and depressing."
"My return journey was depressing enough at first," said Lavendar, "because the particular She was unkinder to me than I deserved even; but better counsels have prevailed and I shall soon be able to meet the reproachful gaze of stout matrons and sour spinsters more easily than I have for a year past; you see the two families were friends and each family had a large and interested connection!"
"If the opinion of a comparative stranger is of any use to you," said Robinette, standing on the rock and sc.r.a.ping her stockinged foot free of mud, "_I_ believe in you, personally! You don"t seem a bit "jilty"
to me! I"d let you marry my sister to-morrow and no questions asked!"
"I didn"t know you had a sister," cried Lavendar.
"I haven"t; that"s only a figure of speech; just a phrase to show my confidence."
"And isn"t it ungrateful to be obliged to say I can"t marry your sister, after you have given me permission to ask her!"
"Not only ungrateful but unreasonable," said Robinette saucily, turning her head to look up the river and discovering from her point of vantage a moving object around the curve that led her to make hazardous remarks, knowing rescue was not far away. "What have you against my sister, pray?"
"Very little!" he said daringly, knowing well that she held him in her hand, and could make him dumb or let him speak at any moment she desired. "Almost nothing! only that _she_ is not offering me _her_ sister as a balm to my woes."
"She _has_ no sister; she is an only child!--There! there!" cried Robinette, "the tide is coming up again, and the mud banks off in that direction are all covered with water! I see somebody in a boat, rowing towards us with superhuman energy. Oh! if I hadn"t worn a white dress!
It will _not_ come smooth; and my lovely French hat is ruined by the dampness! My one shoe shows how inappropriately I was shod, and whoever is coming will say it is because I am an American. He will never know you wouldn"t let me go upstairs and dress properly."
"It doesn"t matter anyway," rejoined Mark, "because it is only Carnaby coming. You might know he would find us even if we were at the bottom of the river."
XIII
CARNABY TO THE RESCUE
At Stoke Revel, in the meantime, the solemn rites of dinner had been inaugurated as usual by the sounding of the gong at seven o"clock.
Mrs. de Tracy, Miss Smeardon, and Bates waited five minutes in silent resignation, then Carnaby came down and was scolded for being late, but there was no Robinette and no Lavendar.
"Carnaby," said his grandmother, "do you know where Mark intended going this afternoon?"
"No, I don"t," said Carnaby, sulkily.
"Your cousin Robinetta,"--with meaning,--"perhaps you know her whereabouts?"
"Not I!" replied Carnaby with affected nonchalance. "I was ferreting with Wilson." He had ferreted perhaps for fifteen minutes and then spent the rest of the afternoon in solitary discontent, but he would not have owned it for the world.
"Call Bates," commanded Mrs. de Tracy. Bates entered. "Do you know if Mr. Lavendar intended going any distance to-day? Did he leave any message?"
"Mr. Lavendar, ma"am," said Bates, "Mr. Lavendar and Mrs. Loring they went out in the boat after tea. Mr. Lavendar asked William for the key, and William he went down and got out the oars and rudder, ma"am."
"Does William know where they went?" asked Mrs. de Tracy in high displeasure. "Was it to Wittisham?"
"No, ma"am, William says they went down stream. He thinks perhaps they were going to the Flag Rock, and he says the gentleman wouldn"t have a hard pull, as the tide was going out. But Mr. Lavendar knows the river well, ma"am, as well as Mr. Carnaby here."
"Then I conclude there is no immediate cause for anxiety," said Mrs.
de Tracy with satire. "You can serve dinner, Bates; there seems no reason why we should fast as yet! However, Carnaby," she continued, "as the men cannot be spared at this hour, you had better go at once and see what has happened to our guests."
"Right you are," cried Carnaby with the utmost alacrity. He was hungry, but the prospect of escape was better than food. He rushed away, and his boat was in mid-river before Mrs. de Tracy and Miss Smeardon had finished their tepid soup.
A very slim young moon was just rising above the woods, but her tender light cast no shadows as yet, and there were no stars in the sky, for it was daylight still. The evening air was very fresh and cool; there was no wind, and the edges of the river were motionless and smooth, although in mid-stream the now in-coming tide clucked and swirled as it met the rush. Over at Wittisham one or two lights were beginning to twinkle, and there came drifting across the water a smell of wood smoke that suggested evening fires. Carnaby handled a boat well, for he had been born a sailor, as it were, and his long, powerful strokes took him along at a fine pace. But although he was going to look for Robinette and Mark, he was rather angry with both of them, and in no hurry. He rested on his oars indifferently and let the tide carry him up as it liked, while, with infinite zest, he unearthed a cigarette case from the recesses of his person, lit a cigarette, and smoked it coolly. Under Carnaby"s apparent boyishness, there was a certain somewhat dangerous quality of precocity, which was stimulated rather than checked by his grandmother"s repressive system. His smoking now was less the monkey-trick of a boy, than an act of slightly cynical defiance. He was no novice in the art, and smoked slowly and daintily, throwing back his head and blowing the smoke sometimes through his lips and sometimes through his nose. He looked for the moment older than his years, and a difficult young customer at that. His present sulky expression disappeared, however, under the influence of tobacco and adventure.
"Where the d.i.c.kens are they?" he began to wonder, pulling harder.
A bend in the river presently solved the mystery. On a wide stretch of mud-bank, which the tide had left bare in going out, but was now beginning to cover again, a solitary boat was stranded.
With this clue to guide him, Carnaby"s bright eyes soon discovered the two dim forms in the distance.
"Ahoy!" he shouted, and received a joyous answer. Robinette and Mark were the two derelicts, and their rescuer skimmed towards them with all his strength.
He could get only within a few yards of the rock to which their boat was tied, and from that distance he surveyed them, expecting to find a dismal, ship-wrecked pair, very much ashamed of themselves and getting quite weary of each other. On the contrary the faces he could just distinguish in the uncertain light, were radiant, and Robinette"s voice was as gay as ever he had heard it. He leaned upon his oars and looked at them with wonder.
"Angel cousin!" cried Robinette. "Have you a little roast mutton about you somewhere, we are so hungry!"