Mermaid, hurrying down the street from school, did not notice a boy
coming out of the side street on which young Dick Hand lived. The boy
was walking along with a most unboyish air. His head was down and he
looked up too late to avoid a collision. It nearly knocked Mermaid’s
breath out of her. When she could talk she accepted his confused
apology, and smiled.
“You’re Guy Vanton, aren’t you?”
He was a short boy with very black hair, a snub nose, and a pale face.
His eyes, which were brown, had something uncanny about them; Mermaid
was struck with their resemblance to the eyes of wild animals. She had
seen deer with eyes like that. The boy stood before her with his cap
in his hand; he was somehow not in the least like Dick Hand or Tommy
Lupton or any of the other Blue Port boys. He seemed to have very good
manners and to be politely exercising them. Mermaid unconsciously
assumed her own.
“Guy Vanton, yes, _mademoiselle_.” The French word aroused Mermaid to
a high pitch of curiosity, and the immediate effect of her heightened
curiosity was to make her still more polite.
“I--I beg your pardon,” the boy repeated. “It was all my fault. I was
not looking where I was going, _mademoiselle_.”
She noticed that he spoke English without the Blue Port twang, but also
without a foreign accent; his speech was like that of one or two of the
schoolteachers she had had.
He seemed about to replace his cap and hurry away. He made a little
bow to her--from the waist. Mermaid had seen the bow before. Dickie
Hand had learned it in a children’s dancing class at Patchogue. She
smiled at young Mr. Vanton, who was so eager to get along. She had no
intention he should go until they were fairly acquainted.
“You speak French?”
“_Mais oui, mademoiselle!_” His uncanny eyes fixed her for a moment and
his pale face flushed a little.
“Oh, I don’t speak it,” Mermaid explained, hastily, whereupon he looked
down at the ground, as if he had lost interest. “What was that you just
said?”
“I said: ‘But yes!’”
“I wish I knew it,” she exclaimed. “I should love to study it, but I
don’t think they teach it even in High School at Patchogue.”
He said, without looking at her: “I learned it in Paris. I--we used to
live there. My mother----” He stopped.
Mermaid said, sympathetically: “She’s an invalid, isn’t she?”
“Oh, that isn’t--I mean--why, why, yes. She is--she has to walk with
a crutch. And then, only a little.” His confusion was so evident that
Mermaid felt sorry for him. With true feminine instinct she decided
that he must suffer some more so that ultimately she might help him.
She knew he did not go to school, she knew that he lived all alone,
shut up in that expensive house, surrounded by gloomy evergreens, which
must be as sunless as Miss Smiley’s front parlour had been once on a
time. He lived there with a crippled mother and a formidable father,
a retired sea captain who was undoubtedly a stern disciplinarian. He
was pale and undersized. Mermaid had heard stories of sea captains all
her remembering life and knew them to be a peculiar race of men. Her
imagination worked rapidly on the problem presented by Guy Vanton, and
she concluded, perhaps somewhat rashly, that his father had spent most
of his money on the mahogany and teakwood of the parlour and fed his
boy on ship’s biscuits and water. At any rate, he looked it. But his
eyes fascinated her. Considering briefly the means of further advancing
their acquaintance she decided that he should teach her French. In
turn, she would ask him home with her to supper, and see that he got a
square meal.
“I wonder if you wouldn’t teach me French?”
Guy Vanton looked surprised, but then an expression of pleasure came
into the brown eyes. He nodded. Mermaid continued: “I could come over
in the afternoon, sometimes, when I haven’t to help Miss Smiley clean
house. We could be very still and not bother your mother. And sometimes
you could come to our house. I’m sure Miss Smiley wouldn’t mind. I
bring Dickie Hand there and she gives him cookies though she hates his
father like anything.”
They were walking along the street together. Young Mr. Vanton had got
his cap back on his head at last, but he walked stiffly, a little
deferentially, his body half turned toward the girl. Mermaid chattered
along easily on whatever themes came into her head, occasionally
punctuating her talk with a question calling for no answer more
elaborate than a “Yes” or a “No.” She was much gratified when Dick Hand
and Tommy Lupton stopped their regular afternoon pastime of punching
each other’s heads to stare across the street at her escort. She heard
Dickie say to Tom: “Well, will you look? Girls make me sick!”
As if this were the very effect she desired to produce, Mermaid was
remarking to the Vanton heir: “That’s Dick Hand over there, and Tommy
Lupton. You know them, don’t you? Dick is thirteen and Tommy’s fifteen.
I’m only eleven, but I’m as big as either of them. You’re fifteen,
aren’t you?”
“I’m seventeen,” he divulged. Mermaid stood still in her astonishment.
“Seven-teen!” she gasped. “Why, but you’re no bigger than
Dickie--though you know French and he doesn’t, and you know a lot more
than he does and are lots--lots nicer,” she added, by way of retrieving
her blunder. “But you won’t want anything to do with me,” she said with
honest candor. “You’ll think I’m only a little girl. I suppose I am.”
He did not seem ready to cast her off as infantile and beneath his
notice.
“I am too small,” he admitted. “I was not so small in Paris--I mean,
the boys at school there were not so large as fellows of the same age
here. I was average height. Here I’m a little--runt.”
“What a lot you must have seen,” Mermaid marvelled. “I hope you’ll tell
me all about it. You can do that and teach me French that way, can’t
you? I’ve never been anywhere except here and on the beach. You know I
came ashore in a shipwreck.”
She told him about the wreck, what she had heard of it from her Dad and
other men of the Lone Cove Station; of her home with Keturah Smiley,
and of life on the beach. Then she spoke of Captain John Hawkins and
the clipper ship _China Castle_.
“You know your father commanded her afterward.”
Guy did not seem to know it. “He never talks about his ships,” the boy
explained. With the help of some questions from Mermaid, he told her
about himself.
He had been born in San Francisco and had lived there for some years.
In the Presidio section of the city. As he talked of the town Mermaid’s
face took on a puzzled look.
“It’s the funniest thing,” she declared. “Do you know, I have a feeling
that I lived there once on a time. It seems as if it came back to me,
as if I just sort of half-remembered----You know the _Mermaid_, the
ship I was aboard, came from San Francisco.”
After they left San Francisco, the Vantons had gone to live in Paris.
Guy’s father had then given up definitely all idea of going to sea
again.
“He had really never had a ship since I was born,” the boy explained.
“But he kept thinking, up to the time we went to Paris, that he would
take another command. My mother----” he hesitated, with a trace of the
confusion he had shown before in speaking of her, and then went on:
“We had plenty of money, and so there was no need for him to go, but in
San Francisco he kept thinking of it, and every day he would walk down
to the foot of Market Street and along the waterfront and look at all
the ships. Sometimes he would go aboard them and talk to the captains.
He used to take me with him. It was very interesting. Ships from all
over the world--British, Japanese, American, German, French, Norwegian,
Russian and a lot more. He would take me on board the square-riggers
and teach me the ropes. ‘This,’ he would say, ‘is the fore t’ gallant
halyard. This is the fore royal sheet. This is the fore topmast stays’l
sheet. Now what is this?’ I always got it wrong and it used to make
him terribly angry. Then he would tell me to go aloft. I liked that,
because you could always get such a splendid view of San Francisco Bay
and the city, built on hills, and the mountains over in Marin County,
with Oakland and Alameda and all the other places spread out before
you.”
“Weren’t you dizzy?” Mermaid asked.
“Only the first time.”
They had reached Keturah Smiley’s house. Mermaid invited little, old
Mr. Vanton in. She gave him crullers and coffee, made him acquainted
with Miss Smiley, and then said good-bye to him at the gate. It was
agreed that they should meet the next afternoon _pour parler Français_.
As the French instructor hurried homeward he lit a cigarette. This was
observed by the Messrs. Hand and Lupton, who were considerably dazed.
“And I called him a sissy,” murmured Mr. Hand.
“D’ye know what I think?” exclaimed his side partner. “He’s a
foreigner, that’s what he is, a cigarette-smoking foreigner. Mermaid
ought not to have anything to do with a fellow like that,” Tommy
concluded, virtuously, and with the sense of the protecting male.