I am sure that he did not mean it. What he hated was the fact that the child had for the moment held Nancy from him. It was as if, looking forward into the future, he could see like moments, and set himself against the thought of any interruption of what might be otherwise an untrammeled and independent partnership. He had, I think, little jealousy where men were concerned. He was willing to give Nancy the reins and let her go, believing that she would inevitably come back to him. He was not, perhaps, so willing to trust her with ties which might prove more absorbing than himself.
If I had not had Olaf"s letter, I might not have weighed Anthony"s att.i.tude so carefully, but against those burning words and their comprehension of the divinity and beauty of my Nancy"s nature, Anthony"s querulous complaint struck cold.
I think it was then, as we walked toward the inclosure, that I made up my mind to let Nancy hear what Olaf had to say to her.
She stayed out late that night--there was a dinner and a dance--and Anthony brought her home. I confess that I felt like a traitor as I heard the murmur of his voice in the hall.
But when he had gone, and Nancy pa.s.sed my door on her way to her room, I called her, and she came in.
I was in bed, and I had the letter in my hand. "I want you to read it,"
I said. "It is from Olaf Th.o.r.esen."
She looked at it, and asked, "When did it come?"
"Two months ago. The day that he left."
"Why haven"t you shown it to me?"
"I couldn"t make up my mind. I do not know even now that I am right in letting you see it. But I feel that you have a right to see it. It is you who must answer it. Not I."
When she had gone, I turned to the chapter in my book where Becky weeps crocodile tears over poor Rawdon Crawley on the night before Waterloo.
There is no scene in modern literature to match it. But I couldn"t get my mind on it. Nancy was reading Olaf"s letter!
I kept a copy of it, and here it is:
"I knew when I first saw her in the garden that she was the One Woman. I had wanted sea-blood, and when she came, ready for a dip in the sea, it seemed a sign. One knows these things somehow, and I knew. I shan"t attempt to explain it.
"When you told me of her lover, I felt that Fate had played a trick on me. I could not now with honor pursue the woman who was promised to another. Yet I permitted myself that one day--the day on my boat.
"I learned in those hours that I spent with her that she had been molded by the man she is to marry and that in the years to come she will shrink to the measure of his demands upon her. She is feminine enough to be swayed by masculine will. That is at once her strength and her weakness. Loving a man who will love her for the wonder of her womanhood, she will fulfill her greatest destiny. Loving, on the other hand, one who aspires only to fit her into some attenuated social scheme, she will wither and fade. I think you know that this is true, that you will not accuse me of being unfair to any one.
"And now may I tell you what my dreams have been for her?
"I am not young. I mean I am past those hot and early years when men play--Romeo. The dream that is mine is one which has come to a man of thirty, who, having seen the world, has weighed it and wants--something more.
"I have told you of my house in that hidden land which is washed by the sea. I want to spend the rest of my days there, and I had hoped that some woman might be found whose love of life, whose love of adventure, whose love of me, might be so strong that she would see nothing strange in my demand that she forsake all others and cleave only to me.
"By forsaking all others, I mean, literally, what I say. I should want to cut her off entirely from all former ties. To let any one into our secret, to reveal that hidden land to a gaping world, would be to destroy it. We should be followed, tracked by the newspapers, written up, judged eccentric--mad. And I do not wish to be judged at all. My separation from my kind would have in it more than a selfish whim, an obsession for solitude. I want to get back to primitive civilization. I want my children to face a simpler world than the one I faced. Do you know what it means for a man to inherit money, with nothing back of it for two generations but hard work, although back of that there were, perhaps, kings? It means that I had, unaided, to fit myself into a social scheme so complex that I have not yet mastered its intricacies. I do not want to master them. I do not want my sons to master them. I want them to find life a thing of the day"s work, the day"s worship, the day"s out-of-door delights. I want them to have time to think and to dream. And then some day they shall come back if they wish to challenge civilization--young prophets, perhaps, out of the wilderness--seeing a new vision of G.o.d and man because of their detachment from all that might have blinded them.
"I have a feeling that your Nancy might, if she knew this, dream with me of a new race, rising to the level of the needs of a new world. She might see herself as the mother of such a race--sheltered in my hidden land, sailing the seas with me, held close to my heart. I think I am a masterful man, but I should be masterful only to keep her to her best. If she faltered I should strengthen her. And I should make her happy. I know that I could make her happy. And for me there will never be another.
"I am leaving it to you to decide whether you will show her this. I want her to see it, because it seems to me that she has a right to decide between the life that I can offer her and the life she must live if she marries Anthony Peak. But it all involves a point of honor which I feel that I am not unprejudiced enough to decide. So to-morrow I shall go away. I shall sail far in the two months that I shall give myself before I come back. And when I come, you will let me know whether I am to turn once more to the trackless seas, or stay to find my happiness."
This letter when I had first read it had stirred me profoundly, as I think it must have stirred any man or woman who has yearned amid the complexities of modern existence to find some land of dreams. Even to my island, comparatively untouched by the problems of existence in crowded centers, come the echoes of discord, of social unrest, of political upheavals, of commercial greed. In this hidden land of Olaf"s would be life stripped of its sordidness, love free from the blight of cynicism and disillusion--faith, firm in its nearness to G.o.d and the wonder of His works. I envied Olaf his hidden land as I envied Nancy her opportunity. My blood is the same as Nancy"s, and I love the sea. And as we grow older our souls adventure!
When Nancy came in to me, she had put on her white _peignoir_, and she had Olaf"s letter in her hand.
"Ducky," she said, and her voice shook, "I have read it twice--and--I shouldn"t dare to think he was in earnest."
"Why not?"
"I should want to go, Elizabeth."
"And leave the world behind you?"
"Oh, I haven"t any world. It might be different if mother were alive, or daddy. There"d be only you, Ducky, my dear, dear Ducky." She caught my hand and held it.
"And Anthony--"
"Anthony would get over it"--sharply. "Wouldn"t he, Elizabeth? You know he would."
"My dear, I don"t know."
"But I know. If I hadn"t been in his life, Mimi Sears would have been, just as Bob Needham would have been in my life if it hadn"t been for Anthony. There isn"t any question between Anthony and me of--one woman for one man. You know that, Elizabeth. But with Olaf--if he doesn"t have me, there will be no one else--ever. He--he will go sailing on--alone--"
"My dear, how do you know?"
She flung herself down beside me, a white rose, all fragrance. "I don"t know"--she began to cry. "How silly I am," she sobbed against my shoulder. "I--I don"t know anything about him, do I, Elizabeth--? But it would be wonderful to be loved--like that."
All through the night she slept on my arm, with her hand curled in the hollow of my neck as she had slept as a child. But I did not sleep. My mind leaped forward into the future, and I saw my world without her.
Nancy stayed with me through September. Anthony"s holiday was up the day after the garden party, and he went back to Boston, keeping touch with Nancy in the modern way by wire, special delivery, and long-distance telephone.
It was on a stormy night with wind and beating rain that Nancy told me Anthony was insisting that she marry him in December.
"But I can"t, Elizabeth. I am going to write to him to-night."
"When will it be?"
"Who knows? I--I"m not ready. If he can"t wait--he can let me go."
She did not stay to listen to my comment on her mutiny--she swept out of the library and sat down at the piano in the other room, making a picture of herself between the tall white candles which illumined the dark mahogany and the mulberry brocades.
I leaned back in my chair and watched her, her white fingers straying over the keys, her thin blue sleeves flowing back from her white arms.
Now and then I caught a familiar melody among the chords, and once I was aware of the beat and the swing of the waves in the song which Olaf had once sung.
She did not finish it. She rose and wandered to the window, parting the curtain and looking out into the streaming night.
"It"s an awful storm, Ducky."
"Yes, my dear. On nights like this I always think of the old days when the men were on the sea, and the women waited."
"I"d rather think of my man on the sea, even if I had to wait for him, Ducky, than shut up in office, stagnating."
The door-bell rang suddenly. It was a dreadful night for any one to be out, but Anita, undisturbed and crisp in her white ap.r.o.n and cap, came through the hall. A voice asked a question, and the blood began to pound in my body. Things were blurred for a bit, and when my vision cleared--I saw Olaf in the shine of the candles in the room beyond, with Nancy crushed to him, his bright head bent, the sheer blue of her frock infolding him--the archway of the door framing them like the figures of saints in the stained gla.s.s of a church window!
I knew then that I had lost her. But she did not yield at once.