"Man," said Dalhousie, with the same labored slowness, "comes before gen"leman. An" the regrets--will be yours. I"ve come--to have a talk."
In the momentary silence, the drip, drip from his bathing-suit became very audible. The lad leaked like a sieve, all over her boat. Miss Heth glanced swiftly and vexedly from him, over the unchanged panorama. Empty water lapping empty beach; no one watching. Only now, in the sky over the station, there hung a haze of train-smoke....
Her eyes came back: and now she observed with some girlish anxiety the young man"s unwonted solemnity, the strange brilliance of his eyes. A certain nervousness began to show through her cold calm: her unconscious hand wound the taut sheet round and round the tiller, an injudicious business in view of the gusty breeze. How to be rid most quickly of the interloper?... She might, of course, put ash.o.r.e with him: but she particularly did not care to do that, and have all the piazza loungers and gossips see her in his somewhat too gay company. Most particularly she did not care to have her mother glance out of her upstairs window and be stunned by the same sight, with apoplectic cross-examination to follow ...
"Jack," said Carlisle Heth, hurriedly, in rather a coaxing sort of voice, "if you will leave me now, I will--I promise to see you in town next week."
A flicker touched Dalhousie"s eyelid; but he said huskily, after a pause: "Promise? What"s your promise worth? You"ve promised me before.
You said--you loved--"
"I can"t talk now. But on Monday afternoon--in the park--or at my house--whichever you prefer ... I--I"ll explain. I give you my word of honor--"
"No! You"ve done that before--too. Explain! Howc"n you explain? Go on.
Try now. Why"ve you--refused to see me? Why--"
Red stained the girl"s cheeks.
"Then you"ll force me to put in immediately," she said, with an angry reversal of tactics,--"and subject me to the humiliation of being seen with you. What a coward!"
"Humiliation!" Dalhousie repeated, flushing vividly. "You say that?"
"Can"t you understand that it would be? Are you really so stupid?
Haven"t you learned yet that I don"t ever want anything more to do with you?..."
Such remarks brought action and reaction. The lad"s look must have warned Miss Heth that all this went rather far. In fact, she began a sort of retraction, a hurried little soothing away of her impolitic and fairly conclusive remarks. But Dalhousie interrupted her, rising unsteadily in the boat, his young face quite strange and wild.
Who would scrutinize the dying flickers of last summer"s flirtation? All that mattered was only too well seen from the sh.o.r.e.
It was the smallest of the rickey-drinkers who bruited the mishap abroad, his eye having happened to stray through a slit between a cottage-side and a boat-house. At this time, with the approach of evening coolness, the hotel piazza was filling up a little; and at the man"s word, the place was instantly in a turmoil.
There started, in fact, all the horrid rigors of amateur rescue work: of which the least said the soonest mended. It was presently noted by some coolhead that the renter of boats, having seen the disaster first, had already put out for the scene of trouble, rowing l.u.s.tily. n.o.body could beat him to his garlands now; that was clear; clear, too, that there really wasn"t much peril, after all. So the motley gathering of idlers became content to stand upon the edge of the boat pavilion, gazing most eagerly, gossiping not a little....
The bystander, like the Athenian, ever desires to see or to hear some new thing. And really this spectacle was new enough to satisfy the most exacting.
Perhaps a mile over the water, a hundred yards or so from sh.o.r.e, the little boat Lady Jane lay side up on the sea. To it clung a young girl, well above water; near her appeared the head of a young man, a swimmer.
So far, so good. But there was something wrong about this swimmer, something grossly discordant in his position in the picture. It developed upon close examination that the interval between him and the overturned boat was not decreasing. It was widening indeed; widening quite steadily.... Yes, there it was; unfortunately no longer open to doubt. The man was pulling for the sh.o.r.e and safety, leaving the girl to sink or swim as she preferred.
The sight was a strange one, resembling a defiance of established law.
It staggered the eye, like the sight of water running uphill. People had seen the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and kissed the Pope"s toe; but they had never seen anything like this.
A nasal, hawk-nosed individual in eye-gla.s.ses voiced the sentiments of all: "If that"s your Southern chivalry, Warlow, the less I see of it the better."
Another spoke more sympathetically, yet with unchanged point: "Poor Dalhousie--born to trouble! Rye whiskey an" marryin" cousins--that"s what"s killed him."
A third, an elderly woman, with a rich voice, said: "I wonder what there was between those two...."
The actual rescue proved a tame affair. Suddenly attention was diverted from it by the cry of a certain winsome young thing, who, when the alarm was raised, had been among the first to scream.
"Oh, _look_ at that little man. He _hit_ him!"
"Where?--Who?--Oh!"
"Serves him ri--Ah-h!"
It proved as the screamer said. The smallest rickey-drinker, not content with sounding the alarm, had gone brilliantly bolting down the beach.
Taking his stand there at a given point, he had flung himself upon the youth who had so ably saved his own skin, as the latter waded ash.o.r.e, and struck him savagely in the face. It was observed that the man from the sea seemed surprised by this attack. He stared at his small a.s.sailant in a confused sort of way; and then with pa.s.sionate swiftness plucked hold of him by two favorite points of vantage, and threw him bodily into the water. This movement, as it chanced, turned his gaze seaward. The youth was seen to stand an instant, rigid as a bather in marble, staring out over the water he had traversed ...
Then he turned, heedless of the brandishings of the little man behind him, and went away toward his bath-house in the manner that is best described as a slink.
III
How Carlisle screamed, when the Boat upset, or else didn"t, as the Case might be; also of Mrs. Heth, who went down Six Floors to nail Falsehoods, etc.
Miss Carlisle Heth sat cold and proud in the approaching lifeboat, picking at her sopping skirts. She ignored, hardly hearing, the conversation of her rescuer, hinting broadly that she should reveal these mysteries to him. Revelation, as she understood herself, was the contrary of her desire. The occurrences of the last quarter of an hour had actually dazed her; but the net result of them was sufficiently manifest. Her purpose had been to detach herself unnoticed from Dalhousie"s gay fame. And now:--_Look at the boat pavilion_....
It was the bitterest moment of Miss Heth"s well-sheltered young life. Of notoriety, of a vulgar sensation such as this, of malicious gossip, of all that was cheap and familiarizing, she had a deep-seated horror. Of the moment of reckoning with her mother, whose objections to noisy rumor rather surpa.s.sed her own, she felt a wholesome dread. There was also the matter of her personal appearance, which she conceived to be repulsive: she was confident that she looked a hideosity and a sight. Her eyes fastened from afar upon the staring faces on the pavilion. She saw hungry curiosity stalking there, naked and unashamed, and the sight sickened her.
For these faces, as individual faces, she felt indifference and contempt. But in the ma.s.s they seemed to a.s.sume the enormous importance of good or ill repute. What these people were saying of her and Dalhousie to-day, the world would say to-morrow.
To know what this was, she would have given on the spot all the money she possessed (eight thousand dollars, birthday and Christmas presents, in United States bonds). But to run the gauntlet of those questioning faces was just a little more than she could endure. She was quick in action. She said:
"Land me here, Mr. Wedge. And you must walk with me to the hotel."
As she directed, so it was done. They landed there, and Carlisle and Mr.
Wedge struck out hurriedly up the strand for the main entrance of the hostelry. When the cunning ruse became plain to the staring gallery, it was practically too late to do anything about it. You could not have caught the escaping pair without a sprint. However, each man promised himself to be the first to interview the boatman ...
After the humiliating cut-and-run, which stretched out interminably, Carlisle found herself, at length, in the haven of the brilliantly lighted elevator. Water dribbled from her skirt"s edge; she was aware of the elevator boy"s African side-glances. If she had been a different sort of girl, she could no longer have refrained from bursting into tears. Fine ending to her rosy journey this!--a sensational "scene"
played out before a house of loafers, and now the babel of thousand-tongued gossip, linking her name amorously (so she suspected) with the red-painted ne"er-do-well. Charming background, indeed, for a remeeting with the heir of the Cannings.
Her plight was crushing to the distracted girl; but her anger, the wild resentment of a high spirit feeling itself abominably mistreated, made it impossible for her to be crushed. She would not lie down tamely and be trampled upon by malicious mischance. She would _not_ ...
Mrs. Heth, just risen from her refreshing nap, heard the sounds of arrival in the adjoining room and opened the door between. Then she leaned back against the door-frame, her ladylike eyes starting from her head.
"_Carlisle!_... Oh, merciful heavens! What?--_What on earth"s happened?_"
Miss Heth, already beginning to free herself of her soaking clothes, braced for the explanatory ordeal. Having no plan of procedure except to put herself in as praiseworthy a light as possible (thus avoiding a useless scene), she began in a hard, dry voice:
"I went out for a little sail. I thought it would be a nice thing to do, the sea was so smooth and calm. A--a man was out swimming near me, and he climbed into my boat. I ordered him out, and--and he jumped out, and--I upset. He swam off--leaving me in the water--and the boatman had to come out and bring me in. Oh, mamma!--_I"m the talk of the place!_"
Mrs. Heth took two swift strides into the room. She came like a cat, claws out, ready to pounce. Her splendid hair hung loose about her head, revealing the birthmark upon the temple, a round spot the size of a silver half-dollar. Ordinarily dull pink, this spot was slowly mottling in blues and purples: though evidently not with reference to the perils of the deep, so narrowly escaped by her only child.
"The talk of the place!--what do you mean?" she asked in a voice that sounded dangerous. "A man!--what man? Speak? What right did he have to get into your boat?"
"Of course he had _no_ right to get into my boat, mamma," said Carlisle, dribbling water. "None whatever. That is what I told him, from the beginning. His name is Dalhousie. I--that part makes no dif--"