After dinner the ladies tried to get a nap, but such of them as
re-appeared on the piazza later agreed that it was perfectly useless.
They tested every corner for a breeze, but the wind had fallen dead,
and the vast sweep of sea seemed to smoulder under the sun. “This is
what Mr. Barlow calls having it cooler,” said Mrs. Alger.
“There are some clouds that look like thunderheads in the west,” said
Mrs. Frost, returning from an excursion to the part of the piazza
commanding that quarter.
“Oh, it won’t rain to-day,” Mrs. Alger decided.
“I thought there was always a breeze at Jocelyn’s,” Mrs. Scott
observed, in the critical spirit of a recent arrival.
“There always is,” the other explained, “except the first week you’re
here.”
A little breath, scarcely more than a sentiment of breeze, made itself
felt. “I do believe the wind has changed,” said Mrs. Frost. “It’s
east.” The others owned one by one that it was so, and she enjoyed the
merit of a discoverer; but her discovery was rapidly superseded. The
clouds mounted in the west, and there came a time when the ladies
disputed whether they had heard thunder or not: a faction contended for
the bowling alley, and another faction held for a wagon passing over
the bridge just before you reached Jocelyn’s. But those who were
faithful to the theory of thunder carried the day by a sudden crash
that broke over the forest, and, dying slowly away among the low hills,
left them deeply silent.
“Some one,” said Mrs. Alger, “ought to go for those children.” On this
it appeared that there were two minds as to where the children
were,—whether on the beach or in the woods.
“Wasn’t that thunder, Grace?” asked Mrs. Breen, with the accent by
which she implicated her daughter in whatever happened.
“Yes,” said Grace, from where she sat at her window, looking seaward,
and waiting tremulously for her mother’s next question.
“Where is Mrs. Maynard?”
“She isn’t back, yet.”
“Then,” said Mrs. Breen, “he really did expect rough weather.”
“He must,” returned Grace, in a guilty whisper.
“It’s a pity,” remarked her mother, “that you made them go.”
“Yes.” She rose, and, stretching herself far out of the window,
searched the inexorable expanse of sea. It had already darkened at the
verge, and the sails of some fishing-craft flecked a livid wall with
their white, but there was no small boat in sight.
“If anything happened to them,” her mother continued, “I should feel
terribly for you.”
“I should feel terribly for myself,” Grace responded, with her eyes
still seaward.
“Where do you think they went?”
“I didn’t ask,” said the girl. “I wouldn’t,” she added, in devotion to
the whole truth.
“Well, it is all of the same piece,” said Mrs. Breen. Grace did not ask
what the piece was. She remained staring at the dark wall across the
sea, and spiritually confronting her own responsibility, no atom of
which she rejected. She held herself in every way responsible,—for
doubting that poor young fellow’s word, and then for forcing that
reluctant creature to go with him, and forbidding by her fierce
insistence any attempt of his at explanation; she condemned herself to
perpetual remorse with even greater zeal than her mother would have
sentenced her, and she would not permit herself any respite when a
little sail, which she knew for theirs, blew round the point. It seemed
to fly along just on the hither side of that mural darkness, skilfully
tacking to reach the end of the reef before the wall pushed it on the
rocks. Suddenly, the long low stretch of the reef broke into white
foam, and then passed from sight under the black wall, against which
the little sail still flickered. The girl fetched a long, silent
breath. They were inside the reef, in comparatively smooth water, and
to her ignorance they were safe. But the rain would be coming in
another moment, and Mrs. Maynard would be drenched; and Grace would be
to blame for her death. She ran to the closet, and pulled down her
mother’s India-rubber cloak and her own, and fled out-of-doors, to be
ready on the beach with the wrap, against their landing. She met the
other ladies on the stairs and in the hall, and they clamored at her;
but she glided through them like something in a dream, and then she
heard a shouting in her ear, and felt herself caught and held up
against the wind.
“Where in land be you goin’, Miss Breen?”
Barlow, in a long, yellow oil-skin coat and sou’wester hat, kept
pushing her forward to the edge of the cliff, as he asked.
“I’m going down to meet them!” she screamed.
“Well, I hope you _will_ meet ’em. But I guess you better go back to
the house. Hey? _Wunt?_ Well; come along, then, if they ain’t past
doctorin’ by the time they git ashore! Pretty well wrapped up, any
way!” he roared; and she perceived that she had put on her waterproof
and drawn the hood over her head.
Those steps to the beach had made her giddy when she descended with
leisure for such dismay; but now, with the tempest flattening her
against the stair-case, and her gossamer clutching and clinging to
every surface, and again twisting itself about her limbs, she clambered
down as swiftly and recklessly as Barlow himself, and followed over the
beach beside the men who were pulling a boat down the sand at a run.
“Let me get in!” she screamed. “I wish to go with you!”
“Take hold of the girl, Barlow!” shouted one of the men. “She’s crazy.”
He tumbled himself with four others into the boat, and they all struck
out together through the froth and swirl of the waves. She tried to
free herself from Barlow, so as to fling the waterproof into the boat.
“Take this, then. She’ll be soaked through!”
Barlow broke into a grim laugh. “She won’t need it, except for a
windin’-sheet!” he roared. “Don’t you see the boat’s drivin’ right on
t’ the sand? She’ll be kindlin’ wood in a minute.”
“But they’re inside the reef! They can come to anchor!” she shrieked in
reply. He answered her with a despairing grin and a shake of the head.
“They can’t. What has your boat gone out for, then?”
“To pick ’em up out the sea. But they’ll never git ’em alive. Look how
she slaps her boom int’ the water! Well! He _doos_ know how to handle a
boat!”
It was Libby at the helm, as she could dimly see, but what it was in
his management that moved Barlow’s praise she could not divine. The
boat seemed to be aimed for the shore, and to be rushing, head on, upon
the beach; her broad sail was blown straight out over her bow, and
flapped there like a banner, while the heavy boom hammered the water as
she rose and fell. A jagged line of red seamed the breast of the dark
wall behind; a rending crash came, and as if fired upon, the boat flung
up her sail, as a wild fowl flings up its wing when shot, and lay
tossing keel up, on the top of the waves. It all looked scarcely a
stone’s cast away, though it was vastly farther. A figure was seen to
drag itself up out of the sea, and fall over into the boat, hovering
and pitching in the surrounding welter, and struggling to get at two
other figures clinging to the wreck. Suddenly the men in the boat
pulled away, and Grace uttered a cry of despair and reproach: “Why,
they’re leaving it, they’re leaving it!”
“Don’t expect ’em to tow the wreck ashore in _this_ weather, do ye?”
shouted Barlow. “They’ve got the folks all safe enough. I tell ye I see
’em!” he cried, at a wild look of doubt in her eyes. “Run to the house,
there, and get everything in apple-pie order. There’s goin’ to be a
chance for some of your doctor’n’ now, if ye know how to fetch folks
to.”
It was the little house on the beach, which the children were always
prying and peering into, trying the lock, and wondering what the boat
was like, which Grace had seen launched. Now the door yielded to her,
and within she found a fire kindled in the stove, blankets laid in
order, and flasks of brandy in readiness in the cupboard. She put the
blankets to heat for instant use, and prepared for the work of
resuscitation. When she could turn from them to the door, she met there
a procession that approached with difficulty, heads down and hustled by
the furious blast through which the rain now hissed and shot. Barlow
and one of the boat’s crew were carrying Mrs. Maynard, and bringing up
the rear of the huddling oil-skins and sou’westers came Libby, soaked,
and dripping as he walked. His eyes and Grace’s encountered with a
mutual avoidance; but whatever was their sense of blame, their victim
had no reproaches to make herself. She was not in need of restoration.
She was perfectly alive, and apparently stimulated by her escape from
deadly peril to a vivid conception of the wrong that had been done her.
If the adventure had passed off prosperously, she was the sort of woman
to have owned to her friend that she ought not to have thought of
going. But the event had obliterated these scruples, and she realized
herself as a hapless creature who had been thrust on to dangers from
which she would have shrunk. “Well, Grace!” she began, with a voice and
look before which the other quailed, “I hope you are satisfied! All the
time I was clinging to that wretched boat. I was wondering how _you_
would feel. Yes, my _last thoughts_ were of you. I pitied you. I didn’t
see how you could ever have peace again.”
“Hold on, Mrs. Maynard!” cried Libby. “There’s no, time for that, now.
What had best be done, Miss Breen? Hadn’t she better be got up to the
house?”
“Yes, by all means,” answered Grace.
“You might as well let me die here,” Mrs. Maynard protested, as Grace
wrapped the blankets round her dripping dress. “I’m as wet as I can be,
now.”
Libby began to laugh at these inconsequences, to which he was probably
well used. “You wouldn’t have time to die here. And we want to give
this hydropathic treatment a fair trial. You’ve tried the douche, and
now you’re to have the pack.” He summoned two of the boatmen, who had
been considerately dripping outside, in order to leave the interior to
the shipwrecked company, and they lifted Mrs. Maynard, finally wrapped
in Grace’s India-rubber cloak, and looking like some sort of strange,
huge chrysalis, and carried her out into the storm and up the steps.
Grace followed last with Mr. Libby, very heavy-hearted and reckless.
She had not only that sore self-accusal; but the degradation of the
affair, its grotesqueness, its spiritual squalor, its utter
gracelessness, its entire want of dignity, were bitter as death in her
proud soul. It was not in this shameful guise that she had foreseen the
good she was to do. And it had all come through her own wilfulness and
self-righteousness. The tears could mix unseen with the rain that
drenched her face, but they blinded her, and half-way up the steps she
stumbled on her skirt, and would have fallen, if the young man had not
caught her. After that, from time to time he put his arm about her, and
stayed her against the gusts.
Before they reached the top he said, “Miss Breen, I’m awfully sorry for
all this. Mrs. Maynard will be ashamed of what she said. Confound it!
If Maynard were only here!”
“Why should she be ashamed?” demanded Grace. “If she had been drowned,
I should have murdered her, and I’m responsible if anything happens to
her,—I am to blame.” She escaped from him, and ran into the house. He
slunk round the piazza to the kitchen door, under the eyes of the
ladies watching at the parlor windows.
“I wonder he let the others carry her up,” said Miss Gleason. “Of
course, he will marry her now,—when she gets her divorce.” She spoke of
Mrs. Maynard, whom her universal toleration not only included in the
mercy which the opinions of the other ladies denied her, but round whom
her romance cast a halo of pretty possibilities as innocently
sentimental as the hopes of a young girl.