Libby’s friends had broken up their camp on the beach, and had gone to
a lake in the heart of the woods for the fishing. He had taken a room
at the Long Beach House, but he spent most of his time at Jocelyn’s,
where he kept his mare for use in going upon errands for Mrs. Maynard.
Grace saw him constantly, and he was always doing little things for her
with a divination of her unexpressed desires which women find too
rarely in men. He brought her flowers, which, after refusing them for
Mrs. Maynard the first time, she accepted for herself. He sometimes
brought her books, the light sort which form the sentimental currency
of young people, and she lent them round among the other ladies, who
were insatiable of them. She took a pleasure in these attentions, as if
they had been for some one else. In this alien sense she liked to be
followed up with a chair to the point where she wished to sit; to have
her hat fetched, or her shawl; to drop her work or her handkerchief,
secure that it would be picked up for her.
It all interested her, and it was a relief from the circumstances that
would have forbidden her to recognize it as gallantry, even if her own
mind had not been so far from all thought of that. His kindness
followed often upon some application of hers for his advice or help,
for she had fallen into the habit of going to him with difficulties. He
had a prompt common sense that made him very useful in emergencies, and
a sympathy or an insight that was quick in suggestions and expedients.
Perhaps she overrated other qualities of his in her admiration of the
practical readiness which kept his amiability from seeming weak. But
the practical had so often been the unattainable with her that it was
not strange she should overrate it, and that she should rest upon it in
him with a trust that included all he chose to do in her behalf.
“What is the matter, Mr. Libby?” she asked, as he came toward her.
“Is anything the matter?” he demanded in turn.
“Yes; you are looking downcast,” she cried reproachfully.
“I didn’t know that I mustn’t look downcast. I didn’t suppose it would
be very polite, under the circumstances, to go round looking as bobbish
as I feel.”
“It’s the best thing you could possibly do. But you’re not feeling very
bobbish now.” A woman respects the word a man uses, not because she
would have chosen it, but because she thinks that he has an exact
intention in it, which could not be reconveyed in a more feminine
phrase. In this way slang arises. “Isn’t it time for Mr. Maynard to be
here?”
“Yes,” he answered. Then, “How did you know I was thinking of that?”
“I didn’t. I only happened to think it was time. What are you keeping
back, Mr. Libby?” she pursued tremulously.
“Nothing, upon my honor. I almost wish there were something to keep
back. But there isn’t anything. There haven’t been any accidents
reported. And I shouldn’t keep anything back from you.”
“Why?”
“Because you would be equal to it, whatever it was.”
“I don’t see why you say that.” She weakly found comfort in the praise
which she might once have resented as patronage.
“I don’t see why I shouldn’t,” he retorted:
“Because I am not fit to be trusted at all.”
“Do you mean”—
“Oh, I haven’t the strength to _mean_ anything,” she said. “But I thank
you, thank you very much,” she added. She turned her head away.
“Confound Maynard!” cried the young man. “I don’t see why he doesn’t
come. He must have started four days ago. He ought to have had sense
enough to telegraph when he did start. I didn’t tell his partner to ask
him. You can’t think of everything. I’ve been trying to find out
something. I’m going over to Leyden, now, to try to wake up _somebody_
in Cheyenne who knows Maynard.” He looked ruefully at Grace, who
listened with anxious unintelligence. “You’re getting worn out, Miss
Breen,” he said. “I wish I could ask you to go with me to Leyden. It
would do you good. But my mare’s fallen lame; I’ve just been to see
her. Is there anything I can do for you over there?”
“Why, how are you going?” she asked.
“In my boat,” he answered consciously.
“The same boat?”
“Yes. I’ve had her put to rights. She wasn’t much damaged.”
She was silent a moment, while he stood looking down at her in the
chair into which she had sunk. “Does it take you long?”
“Oh, no. It’s shorter than it is by land. I shall have the tide with me
both ways. I can make the run there and back in a couple of hours.”
“Two hours?”
“Yes.”
A sudden impulse, unreasoned and unreasonable, in which there seemed
hope of some such atonement, or expiation, as the same ascetic nature
would once have found in fasting or the scourge, prevailed with her.
She rose. “Mr. Libby,” she panted, “if you will let me, I should like
to go with you in your boat. Do you think it will be rough?”
“No, it’s a light breeze; just right. You needn’t be afraid.”
“I’m not afraid. I should not care if it were rough! I should not care
if it stormed! I hope it—I will ask mother to stay with Mrs. Maynard.”
Mrs. Breen had not been pleased to have her daughter in charge of Mrs.
Maynard’s case, but she had not liked her giving it up. She had said
more than once that she had no faith in Dr. Mulbridge. She willingly
consented to Grace’s prayer, and went down into Mrs. Maynard’s room,
and insinuated misgivings in which the sick woman found so much reason
that they began for the first time to recognize each other’s good
qualities. They decided that the treatment was not sufficiently active,
and that she should either have something that would be more loosening
to the cough, or some application—like mustard plasters—to her feet, so
as to take away that stuffed feeling about the head.
At that hour of the afternoon, when most of the ladies were lying down
in their rooms, Grace met no one on the beach but Miss Gleason and Mrs.
Alger, who rose from their beds of sand under the cliff at her passage
with Mr. Libby to his dory.
“Don’t you want to go to Leyden?” he asked jocosely over his shoulder.
“You don’t mean to say _you’re_ going?” Miss Gleason demanded of Grace.
“Yes, certainly. Why not?”
“Well, you _are_ brave!”
She shut her novel upon her thumb, that she might have nothing to do
but admire Grace’s courage, as the girl walked away.
“It will do her good, poor thing,” said the elder woman. “She looks
wretchedly.”
“I can understand just why she does it,” murmured Miss Gleason in
adoring rapture.
“I hope she does it for pleasure,” said Mrs. Alger.
“It isn’t that,” returned Miss Gleason mysteriously.
“At any rate, Mr. Libby seemed pleased.”
“Oh, she would never marry _him!_” said Miss Gleason.
The other laughed, and at that moment Grace also laughed. The strong
current of her purpose, the sense of escape from the bitter servitude
of the past week, and the wild hope of final expiation through the
chances she was tempting gave her a buoyancy long unfelt. She laughed
in gayety of heart as she helped the young man draw his dory down the
sand, and then took her place at one end while he gave it the last push
and then leaped in at the other. He pulled out to where the boat lay
tilting at anchor, and held the dory alongside by the gunwale that she
might step aboard. But after rising she faltered, looking intently at
the boat as if she missed something there.
“I thought you had a man to sail your boat”
“I had. But I let him go last week. Perhaps I ought to have told you,”
he said, looking up at her aslant. “Are you afraid to trust my
seamanship? Adams was a mere form. He behaved like a fool that day.”
“Oh, I’m not afraid,” said Grace. She stepped from the dory into the
boat, and he flung out the dory’s anchor and followed. The sail went up
with a pleasant clucking of the tackle, and the light wind filled it.
Libby made the sheet fast, and, sitting down in the stern on the other
side, took the tiller and headed the boat toward the town that
shimmered in the distance. The water hissed at the bow, and seethed and
sparkled from the stern; the land breeze that bent their sail blew cool
upon her cheek and freshened it with a tinge of color.
“This will do you good,” he said, looking into hers with his kind, gay
eyes.
The color in her cheeks deepened a little. “Oh, I am better than I
look. I didn’t come for”—
“For medicinal purposes. Well, I am glad of it. We’ve a good hour
between us and news or no news from Maynard, and I should like to think
we were out for pleasure. You don’t object?”
“No. You can even smoke, if that will heighten the illusion.”
“It will make it reality. But you don’t mean it?”
“Yes; why not?”
“I don’t know. But I couldn’t have dreamt of smoking in your presence.
And we take the liberty to dream very strange things.”
“Yes,” she said, “it’s shocking what things we do dream of people. But
am I so forbidding?” she asked, a little sadly.
“Not now,” said Libby. He got out a pouch of tobacco and some cigarette
papers, and putting the tiller under his arm, he made himself a
cigarette.
“You seem interested,” he said, as he lifted his eyes from his work, on
which he found her intent, and struck his fusee.
“I was admiring your skill,” she answered.
“Do you think it was worth a voyage to South America?”
“I shouldn’t have thought the voyage was necessary.”
“Oh, perhaps you think you can do it,” he said, handing her the tobacco
and papers. She took them and made a cigarette. “It took me a whole day
to learn to make bad ones, and this, is beautiful. But I will never
smoke it. I will keep this always.”
“You had better smoke it, if you want more,” she said.
“Will you make some more? I can’t smoke the first one!”
“Then smoke the last,” she said, offering him the things back.
“No, go on. I’ll smoke it.”
She lent herself to the idle humor of the time, and went on making
cigarettes till there were no more papers. From time to time she looked
up from this labor, and scanned the beautiful bay, which they had
almost wholly to themselves. They passed a collier lagging in the deep
channel, and signalling for a pilot to take her up to the town. A
yacht, trim and swift, cut across their course; the ladies on board
waved a salutation with their handkerchiefs, and Libby responded.
“Do you know them?” asked Grace.
“No!” he laughed. “But ladies like to take these liberties at a safe
distance.”
“Yes, that’s a specimen of woman’s daring,” she said, with a
self-scornful curl of the lip, which presently softened into a wistful
smile. “How lovely it all is!” she sighed.
“Yes, there’s nothing better in all the world than a sail. It is all
the world while it lasts. A boat’s like your own fireside for
snugness.”
A dreamier light came into her eye, which wandered, with a turn of the
head giving him the tender curve of her cheek, over the levels of the
bay, roughened everywhere by the breeze, but yellowish green in the
channels and dark with the thick growth of eel-grass in the shallows;
then she lifted her face to the pale blue heavens in an effort that
slanted towards him the soft round of her chin, and showed her full
throat.
“This is the kind of afternoon,” she said, still looking at the sky,
“that you think will never end.”
“I wish it wouldn’t,” he answered.
She lowered her eyes to his, and asked: “Do you have times when you are
sorry that you ever tried to do anything—when it seems foolish to have
tried?”
“I have the other kind of times,—when I wish that I had tried to do
something.”
“Oh yes, I have those, too. It’s wholesome to be ashamed of not having
tried to do anything; but to be ashamed of having tried—it’s like
death. There seems no recovery from that.”
He did not take advantage of her confession, or try to tempt her to
further confidence; and women like men who have this wisdom, or this
instinctive generosity, and trust them further.
“And the worst of it is that you can’t go back and be like those that
have never tried at all. If you could, that would be some consolation
for having failed. There is nothing left of you but your mistake.”
“Well,” he said, “some people are not even mistakes. I suppose that
almost any sort of success looks a good deal like failure from the
inside. It must be a poor creature that comes up to his own mark. The
best way is not to have any mark, and then you’re in no danger of not
coming up to it.” He laughed, but she smiled sadly.
“You don’t believe in thinking about yourself,” she said.
“Oh, I try a little introspection, now and then. But I soon get
through: there isn’t much of me to think about.”
“No, don’t talk in that way,” she pleaded, and she was very charming in
her earnestness: it was there that her charm lay. “I want you to be
serious with me, and tell me—tell me how men feel when.”—
A sudden splashing startled her, and looking round she saw a multitude
of curious, great-eyed, black heads, something like the heads of boys,
and something like the heads of dogs, thrusting from the water, and
flashing under it again at sight of them with a swish that sent the
spray into the air. She sprang to her feet. “Oh, look at those things!
Look at them! Look at them!” She laid vehement hands upon the young
man, and pushed him in the direction in which she wished him to look,
at some risk of pushing him overboard, while he laughed at her ecstasy.
“They’re seals. The bay’s full of them. Did you never see them on the
reef at Jocelyn’s?”
“I never saw them before!” she cried. “How wonderful they are! Oh!” she
shouted; as one of them glanced sadly at her over its shoulder, and
then vanished with a whirl of the head. “The Beatrice Cenci attitude!”
“They’re always trying that,” said Libby. “Look yonder.” He pointed to
a bank of mud which the tide had not yet covered, and where a herd of
seals lay basking in the sun. They started at his voice, and wriggling
and twisting and bumping themselves over the earth to the water’s edge,
they plunged in. “Their walk isn’t so graceful as their swim. Would you
like one for a pet, Miss Breen? That’s all they’re good for since
kerosene came in. They can’t compete with that, and they’re not the
kind that wear the cloaks.”
She was standing with her hand pressed hard upon his shoulder.
“Did they ever _kill_ them?”
“They used to take that precaution.”
“With those eyes? It was murder!” She withdrew her hand and sat down.
“Well, they only catch them, now. I tried it myself once. I set out at
low tide, about ten o’clock, one night, and got between the water and
the biggest seal on the bank. We fought it out on that line till
daylight.”
“And did you get it?” she demanded, absurdly interested.
“No, it got me. The tide came in, and the seal beat.”
“I am glad of that.”
“Thank you.”
“What did you want with it?”
“I don’t think I wanted it at all. At any rate, that’s what I always
said. I shall have to ask you to sit on this side,” he added, loosening
the sheet and preparing to shift the sail. “The wind has backed round a
little more to the south, and it’s getting lighter.”
“If it’s going down we shall be late,” she said, with an intimation of
apprehension.
“We shall be at Leyden on time. If the wind falls then, I can get a
horse at the stable and have you driven back.”
“Well.”
He kept scanning the sky. Then, “Did you ever hear them whistle for a
wind?” he asked.
“No. What is it like?”
“When Adams does it, it’s like this.” He put on a furtive look, and
glanced once or twice at her askance. “Well!” he said with the
reproduction of a strong nasal, “of course I don’t believe there’s
anything in it. Of course it’s all foolishness. Now you must urge me a
little,” he added, in his own manner.
“Oh, by all means go on, Mr. Adams,” she cried, with a laugh.
He rolled his head again to one side sheepishly.
“Well, I don’t presume it _doos_ have anything to do with the
wind—well, I don’t _presume_ it doos.” He was silent long enough to
whet an imagined expectation; then he set his face towards the sky, and
began a soft, low, coaxing sibilation between his teeth. “S-s-s-s;
s-s-s-s-s-s! Well, it don’t stand to reason it can bring the
wind—S-s-s-s-s-s-s; s-s-s-s. Why, of course it’s all foolishness.
S-s-s-s.” He continued to emit these sibilants, interspersing them with
Adams’s protests. Suddenly the sail pulled the loose sheet taut and the
boat leaped forward over the water.
“Wonderful!” cried the girl.
“That’s what I said to Adams, or words to that effect. But I thought we
should get it from the look of the sky before I proposed to whistle for
it. Now, then,” he continued, “I will be serious, if you like.”
“Serious?”
“Yes. Didn’t you ask me to be serious just before those seals
interrupted you?”
“Oh!” she exclaimed, coloring a little. “I don’t think we can go back
to that, now.” He did not insist, and she said presently, “I thought
the sailors had a superstition about ships that are lucky and unlucky.
But you’ve kept your boat.”
“I kept her for luck: the lightning never strikes twice in the same
place. And I never saw a boat that behaved so well.”
“Do you call it behaving well to tip over?”
“She behaved well before that. She didn’t tip over outside the reef”
“It certainly goes very smoothly,” said the girl. She had in vain
recurred to the tragic motive of her coming; she could not revive it;
there had been nothing like expiation in this eventless voyage; it had
been a pleasure and no penance. She abandoned herself with a weak
luxury to the respite from suffering and anxiety; she made herself the
good comrade of the young man whom perhaps she even tempted to flatter
her farther and farther out of the dreariness in which she had dwelt;
and if any woful current of feeling swept beneath, she would not fathom
it, but resolutely floated, as one may at such times, on the surface.
They laughed together and jested; they talked in the gay idleness of
such rare moods.
They passed a yacht at anchor, and a young fellow in a white duck cap,
leaning over the rail, saluted Libby with the significant gravity which
one young man uses towards another whom he sees in a sail-boat with a
pretty girl.
She laughed at this. “Do you know your friend?” she asked.
“Yes. This time I do?”
“He fancies you are taking some young lady a sail. What would he say if
you were to stop and introduce me to him as Dr. Breen?”
“Oh, he knows who you are. It’s Johnson.”
“The one whose clothes you came over in, that morning?”
“Yes. I suppose you laughed at me.”
“I liked your having the courage to do it. But how does he know me?”
“I—I described you. He’s rather an old friend.” This also amused her.
“I should like to hear how you described me.”
“I will tell you sometime. It was an elaborate description. I couldn’t
get through with it now before we landed.”
The old town had come out of the haze of the distance,—a straggling
village of weather-beaten wood and weather-beaten white paint,
picturesque, but no longer a vision of gray stone and pale marble. A
coal-yard, and a brick locomotive house, and rambling railroad sheds
stretched along the water-front. They found their way easily enough
through the sparse shipping to the steps at the end of the wooden pier,
where Libby dropped the sail and made his boat fast.
A little pleasant giddiness, as if the lightness of her heart had
mounted to her head, made her glad of his arm up these steps and up the
wharf; and she kept it as they climbed the sloping elm-shaded village
street to the main thoroughfare, with its brick sidewalks, its shops
and awnings, and its cheerful stir and traffic.
The telegraph office fronted the head of the street which they had
ascended. “You can sit here in the apothecary’s till I come down,” he
said.
“Do you think that will be professionally appropriate? I am only a
nurse now.”
“No, I wasn’t thinking of that. But I saw a chair in there. And we can
make a pretense of wanting some soda. It is the proper thing to treat
young ladies to soda when one brings them in from the country.”
“It _does_ have that appearance,” she assented, with a smile. She kept
him waiting with what would have looked like coquettish hesitation in
another, while she glanced at the windows overhead, pierced by a skein
of converging wires. “Suppose I go up with you?”
“I should like that better,” he said; and she followed him lightly up
the stairs that led to the telegraph office. A young man stood at the
machine with a cigar in his mouth, and his eyes intent upon the ribbon
of paper unreeling itself before him.
“Just hold on,” he said to Libby, without turning his head. “I’ve got
something here for you.” He read: “Despatch received yesterday. Coming
right through. George Maynard.”
“Good!” cried Libby.
“Dated Council Bluffs. Want it written out?”
“No. What’s to pay?”
“Paid,” said the operator.
The laconically transacted business ended with this, the wire began to
cluck again like the anxious hen whose manner the most awful and
mysterious of the elements assumes in becoming articulate, and nothing
remained for them but to come away.
“That was what I was afraid of,” said Libby. “Maynard was at his ranch,
and it must have been a good way out. They’re fifty or sixty miles out,
sometimes. That would account for the delay. Well, Mrs. Maynard doesn’t
know how long it takes to come from Cheyenne, and we can tell her he’s
on the way, and has telegraphed.” They were walking rapidly down the
street to the wharf where his boat lay. “Oh!” he exclaimed, halting
abruptly. “I promised to send you back by land, if you preferred.”
“Has the wind fallen?”
“Oh, no. We shall have a good breeze:”
“I won’t put you to the trouble of getting a horse. I can go back
perfectly well in the boat.”
“Well, that’s what I think,” he said cheerily.
She did not respond, and he could not be aware that any change had come
over her mood. But when they were once more seated in the boat, and the
sail was pulling in the fresh breeze, she turned to him with a scarcely
concealed indignation. “Have you a fancy for experimenting upon people,
Mr. Libby?”
“Experimenting? I? I don’t know in the least what you mean!”
“Why did you tell me that the operator was a woman?”
“Because the other operator is,” he answered.
“Oh!” she said, and fell blankly silent.
“There is a good deal of business there. They have to have two
operators,” he explained, after a pause.
“Why, of course,” she murmured in deep humiliation. If he had suffered
her to be silent as long as she would, she might have offered him some
reparation; but he spoke.
“Why did you think I had been experimenting on you?” he asked.
“Why?” she repeated. The sense of having put herself in the wrong
exasperated her with him. “Oh, I dare say you were curious. Don’t you
suppose I have noticed that men are puzzled at me? What did you mean by
saying that you thought I would be equal to anything?”
“I meant—I thought you would like to be treated frankly.”
“And you wouldn’t treat everybody so?”
“I wouldn’t treat Mrs. Maynard so.”
“Oh!” she said. “You treat me upon a theory.”
“Don’t you like that? We treat everybody upon a theory”—
“Yes, I know”
“And I should tell you the worst of anything at once, because I think
you are one of the kind that don’t like to have their conclusions made
for them.”
“And you would really let women make their own conclusions,” she said.
“You are very peculiar!” She waited a while, and then she asked, “And
what is your theory of me?”
“That _you_ are very peculiar.”
“How?”
“You are proud.”
“And is pride so very peculiar?”
“Yes; in women.”
“Indeed! You set up for a connoisseur of female character. That’s very
common, nowadays. Why don’t you tell me something more about Yourself?
We’re always talking about me.”
He might well have been doubtful of her humor. He seemed to decide that
she was jesting, for he answered lightly, “Why, you began it.”
“I know I did, this time. But now I wish to stop it, too.”
He looked down at the tiller in his hands. “Well,” he said, “I should
like to tell you about myself. I should like to know what you think of
the kind of man I am. Will you be honest if I will?”
“That’s a very strange condition,” she answered, meeting and then
avoiding the gaze he lifted to her face.
“What? Being honest?”
“Well, no—Or, yes!”
“It isn’t for you.”
“Thank you. But I’m not under discussion now.”
“Well, in the first place,” he began, “I was afraid of you when we
met.”
“Afraid of me?”
“That isn’t the word, perhaps. We’ll say ashamed of myself. Mrs.
Maynard told me about you, and I thought you would despise me for not
doing or being anything in particular. I thought you must.”
“Indeed!”
He hesitated, as if still uncertain of her mood from this intonation,
and then he went on: “But I had some little hope you would tolerate me,
after all. You looked like a friend I used to have.—Do you mind my
telling you?”
“Oh, no. Though I can’t say that it’s ever very comfortable to be told
that you look like some one else.”
“I don’t suppose any one else would have been struck by the
resemblance,” said Libby, with a laugh of reminiscence. “He was huge.
But he had eyes like a girl,—I beg your pardon,—like yours.”
“You mean that I have eyes like a man.”
He laughed, and said, “No,” and then turned grave. “As long as he
lived”—
“Oh, is he dead?” she asked more gently than she had yet spoken.
“Yes, he died just before I went abroad. I went out on business for my
father,—he’s an importer and jobber,—and bought goods for him. Do you
despise business?”
“I don’t know anything about it.”
“I did it to please my father, and he said I was a very good buyer. He
thinks there’s nothing like buying—except selling. He used to sell
things himself, over the counter, and not so long ago, either.
“I fancied it made a difference for me when I was in college, and that
the yardstick came between me and society. I was an ass for thinking
anything about it. Though I didn’t really care, much. I never liked
society, and I did like boats and horses. I thought of a profession,
once. But it wouldn’t work. I’ve been round the world twice, and I’ve
done nothing but enjoy myself since I left college,—or try to. When I
first saw you I was hesitating about letting my father make me of use.
He wants me to become one of the most respectable members of society,
he wants me to be a cotton-spinner. You know there’s nothing so
irreproachable as cotton, for a business?”
“No. I don’t know about those things.”
“Well, there isn’t. When I was abroad, buying and selling, I made a
little discovery: I found that there were goods we could make and sell
in the European market cheaper than the English, and that gave my
father the notion of buying a mill to make them. I’m boring you!”
“No.”
“Well, he bought it; and he wants me to take charge of it.”
“And shall you?”
“Do you think I’m fit for it?”
“I? How should I know?”
“You don’t know cotton; but you know me a little. Do I strike you as
fit for anything?” She made no reply to this, and he laughed. “I assure
you I felt small enough when I heard what you had done, and
thought—what I had done. It gave me a start; and I wrote my father that
night that I would go in for it.”
“I once thought of going to a factory town,” she answered, without
wilful evasion, “to begin my practice there among the operatives’
children. I should have done it if it had not been for coming here with
Mrs. Maynard. It would have been better.”
“Come to my factory town, Miss Breen! There ought to be fevers there in
the autumn, with all the low lands that I’m allowed to flood Mrs.
Maynard told me about your plan.”
“Pray, what else did Mrs. Maynard tell you about me?”
“About your taking up a profession, in the way you did, when you
needn’t, and when you didn’t particularly like it.”
“Oh!” she said. Then she added, “And because I wasn’t obliged to it,
and didn’t like it, you tolerated me?”
“Tolerated?” he echoed.
This vexed her. “Yes, tolerate! Everybody, interested or not, has to
make up his mind whether to tolerate me as soon as he hears what I am.
What excuse did you make for me?”
“I didn’t make any,” said Libby.
“But you had your misgiving, your surprise.”
“I thought if you could stand it, other people might. I thought it was
your affair.”
“Just as if I had been a young man?”
“No! That wasn’t possible.”
She was silent. Then, “The conversation has got back into the old
quarter,” she said. “You are talking about me again. Have you heard
from your friends since they went away?”
“What friends?”
“Those you were camping with.”
“No.”
“What did _they_ say when they heard that you had found a young
doctress at Jocelyn’s? How did you break the fact to them? What jokes
did they make? You needn’t be afraid to tell me!” she cried. “Give me
Mr. Johnson’s comments.”
He looked at her in surprise that incensed her still more, and rendered
her incapable of regarding the pain with which he answered her. “I’m
afraid,” he said, “that I have done something to offend you.”
“Oh no! What could you have done?”
“Then you really mean to ask me whether I would let any one make a joke
of you in my presence?”
“Yes; why not?”
“Because it was impossible,” he answered.
“Why was it impossible?” she pursued.
“Because—I love you.”
She had been looking him defiantly in the eyes, and she could not
withdraw her gaze. For the endless moment that ensued, her breath was
taken away. Then she asked in a low, steady voice, “Did you mean to say
that?”
“No.”
“I believe you, and I forgive you. No, no!” she cried, at a
demonstration of protest from him, “don’t speak again!”
He obeyed, instantly, implicitly. With the tiller in his hand he looked
past her and guided the boat’s course. It became intolerable.
“Have I ever done anything that gave you the right to—to—say that?” she
asked, without the self-command which she might have wished to show.
“No,” he said, “you were only the most beautiful”—
“I am not beautiful! And if I were”—
“It wasn’t to be helped! I saw from the first how good and noble you
were, and”—
“This is absurd!” she exclaimed. “I am neither good nor noble; and if I
were”—
“It wouldn’t make any difference. Whatever you are, you are the one
woman in the world to me; and you always will be.”
“Mr. Libby!”
“Oh, I must speak now! You were always thinking, because you had
studied a man’s profession, that no one would think of you as a woman,
as if that could make any difference to a man that had the soul of a
man in him!”
“No, no!” she protested. “I didn’t think that. I always expected to be
considered as a woman.”
“But not as a woman to fall in love with. I understood. And that
somehow made you all the dearer to me. If you had been a girl like
other girls, I shouldn’t have cared for you.”
“Oh!”
“I didn’t mean to speak to you to-day. But sometime I did mean to
speak; because, whatever I was, I loved you; and I thought you didn’t
dislike me.”
“I did like you,” she murmured, “very much. And I respected you. But
you can’t say that I ever gave you any hope in this—this—way.” She
almost asked him if she had.
“No,—not purposely. And if you did, it’s over now. You have rejected
me. I understand that. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t. And I can
hold my tongue.” He did not turn, but looked steadily past her at the
boat’s head.
An emotion stirred in her breast which took the form of a reproach.
“Was it fair, then, to say this when neither of us could escape
afterwards?”
“I didn’t mean to speak,” he said, without looking up, “and I never
meant to place you where you couldn’t escape.”
It was true that she had proposed to go with him in the boat, and that
she had chosen to come back with him, when he had offered to have her
driven home from Leyden. “No, you are not to blame,” she said, at last.
“I asked to some with you. Shall I tell you why?” Her voice began to
break. In her pity for him and her shame for herself the tears started
to her eyes. She did not press her question, but, “Thank you for
reminding me that I invited myself to go with you,” she said, with
feeble bitterness.
He looked up at her in silent wonder, and she broke into a sob. He said
gently, “I don’t suppose you expect me to deny that. You don’t think me
such a poor dog as that.”
“Why, of course not,” she answered, with quivering lips, while she
pressed her handkerchief to her eyes.
“I was only too glad to have you come. I always meant to tell you—what
I have told; but not when I should seem to trap you into listening.”
“No,” she murmured, “I can believe that of you. I do believe it. I take
back what I said. Don’t let us speak of it any more now,” she
continued, struggling for her lost composure, with what success
appeared in the fresh outburst with which she recognized his
forbearance to hint at any painfulness to himself in the situation.
“I don’t mind it so much on my account, but oh! how _could_ you for
your own sake? _Do_ let us get home as fast as we can!”
“I am doing everything I can to release you,” he said. “If you will sit
here,” he added, indicating the place beside him in the stern, “you
won’t have to change so much when I want to tack.”
She took the other seat, and for the first time she noticed that the
wind had grown very light. She watched him with a piteous impatience
while he shifted the sail from side to side, keeping the sheet in his
hand for convenience in the frequent changes. He scanned the sky, and
turned every current of the ebbing tide to account. It was useless; the
boat crept, and presently it scarcely moved.
“The wind is down,” he said, making the sheet fast, and relaxing his
hold on the tiller.
“And—And the tide is going out!” she exclaimed.
“The tide is going out,” he admitted.
“If we should get caught on these flats,” she began, with rising
indignation.
“We should have to stay till the tide turned.”
She looked wildly about for aid. If there were a row-boat anywhere
within hail, she could be taken to Jocelyn’s in that. But they were
quite alone on those lifeless waters.
Libby got out a pair of heavy oars from the bottom of the boat, and,
setting the rowlocks on either side, tugged silently at them.
The futile effort suggested an idea to her which doubtless she would
not have expressed if she had not been lacking, as she once said, in a
sense of humor.
“Why don’t you whistle for a wind?”
He stared at her in sad astonishment to make sure that she was in
earnest, and then, “Whistle!” he echoed forlornly, and broke into a
joyless laugh.
“You knew the chances of delay that I took in asking to come with you,”
she cried, “and you should have warned me. It was ungenerous—it was
ungentlemanly!”
“It was whatever you like. I must be to blame. I suppose I was too glad
to have you come. If I thought anything, I thought you must have some
particular errand at Leyden. You seemed anxious to go, even if it
stormed.”
“If it had stormed,” she retorted, “I should not have cared! I _hoped_
it would storm. Then at least I should have run the same danger,—I
hoped it would be dangerous.”
“I don’t understand what you mean,” he said.
“I forced that wretched creature to go with you that day when you said
it was going to be rough; and I shall have her blood upon my hands if
she dies.”
“Is it possible,” cried Libby, pulling in his useless oars, and leaning
forward upon them, “that she has gone on letting you think I believed
there was going to be a storm? She knew perfectly well that I didn’t
mind what Adams said; he was always croaking.” She sat looking at him
in a daze, but she could not speak, and he continued. “I see: it
happened by one chance in a million to turn out as he said; and she has
been making you pay for it. Why, I suppose,” he added, with a
melancholy smile of intelligence, “she’s had so much satisfaction in
holding you responsible for what’s happened, that she’s almost glad of
it!”
“She has tortured me!” cried the girl. “But you—you, when you saw that
I didn’t believe there was going to be any storm, why did you—why
didn’t—you”—
“I didn’t believe it either! It was Mrs. Maynard that proposed the
sail, but when I saw that you didn’t like it I was glad of any excuse
for putting it off. I couldn’t help wanting to please you, and I
couldn’t see why you urged us afterwards; but I supposed you had some
reason.”
She passed her hand over her forehead, as if to clear away the
confusion in which all this involved her. “But why—why did _you_ let me
go on thinking myself to blame”—
“How could I know what you were thinking? Heaven knows I didn’t dream
of such a thing! Though I remember, now, your saying”—
“Oh, I see!” she cried. “You are a _man!_ But I can’t forgive it,—no, I
can’t forgive it! You wished to deceive her if you didn’t wish to
deceive me. How can you excuse yourself for repeating what you didn’t
believe?”
“I was willing she should think Adams was right.”
“And that was deceit. What can you say to it?”
“There is only one thing I could say,” he murmured, looking hopelessly
into her eyes, “and that’s of no use.”
She turned her head away. Her tragedy had fallen to nothing; or rather
it had never been. All her remorse, all her suffering, was mere farce
now; but his guilt in the matter was the greater. A fierce resentment
burned in her heart; she longed to make him feel something of the
anguish she had needlessly undergone.
He sat watching her averted face. “Miss Breen,” he said huskily, “will
you let me speak to you?”
“Oh, you have me in your power,” she answered cruelly. “Say what you
like.”
He did not speak, nor make any motion to do so.
A foolish, idle curiosity to know what, after all that had happened, he
could possibly have to say, stirred within her, but she disdainfully
stifled it. They were both so still that a company of seals found it
safe to put their heads above water, and approach near enough to
examine her with their round soft eyes. She turned from the silly
things in contempt that they should even have interested her. She felt
that from time to time her companion lifted an anxious glance to the
dull heavens. At last the limp sail faintly stirred; it flapped; it
filled shallowly; the boat moved. The sail seemed to have had a
prescience of the wind before it passed over the smooth water like a
shadow.
When a woman says she never will forgive a man, she always has a
condition of forgiveness in her heart. Now that the wind had risen
again, “I have no right to forbid you to speak,” she said, as if no
silence had elapsed, and she turned round and quietly confronted him;
she no longer felt so impatient to escape.
He did not meet her eye at once, and he seemed in no haste to avail
himself of the leave granted him. A heavy sadness blotted the gayety of
a face whose sunny sympathy had been her only cheer for many days. She
fancied a bewilderment in its hopelessness which smote her with still
sharper pathos. “Of course,” she said, “I appreciate your wish to do
what I wanted, about Mrs. Maynard. I remember my telling you that she
oughtn’t to go out, that day. But that was not the way to do it”—
“There was no other,” he said.
“No,” she assented, upon reflection. “Then it oughtn’t to have been
done.”
He showed no sign of intending to continue, and after a moment of
restlessness, she began again.
“If I have been rude or hasty in refusing to hear you, Mr. Libby, I am
very wrong. I must hear anything you have to say.”
“Oh, not unless you wish.”
“I wish whatever you wish.”
“I’m not sure that I wish that now. I have thought it over; I should
only distress you for nothing. You are letting me say why sentence
shouldn’t be passed upon me. Sentence is going to be passed any way. I
should only repeat what I have said. You would pity me, but you
couldn’t help me. And that would give you pain for nothing. No, it
would be useless.”
“It _would_ be useless to talk to me about—loving.” She took the word
on her lips with a certain effect of adopting it for convenience’ sake
in her vocabulary. “All that was ended for me long ago,—ten years ago.
And my whole life since then has been shaped to do without it. I will
tell you my story if you like. Perhaps it’s your due. I wish to be
just. You may have a right to know.”
“No, I haven’t. But—perhaps I ought to say that Mrs. Maynard told me
something.”
“Well, I am glad of that, though she had no right to do it. Then you
can understand.”
“Oh, yes, I can understand. I don’t pretend that I had any _reason_ in
it.”
He forbore again to urge any plea for himself, and once more she was
obliged to interfere in his behalf. “Mr. Libby, I have never confessed
that I once wronged you in a way that I’m very sorry for.”
“About Mrs. Maynard? Yes, I know. I won’t try to whitewash myself; but
it didn’t occur to me how it would look. I wanted to talk with her
about you.”
“You ought to have considered her, though,” she said gently.
“She ought to have considered herself,” he retorted, with his unfailing
bitterness for Mrs. Maynard. “But it doesn’t matter whose fault it was.
I’m sufficiently punished; for I know that it injured me with you.”
“It did at first. But now I can see that I was wrong. I wished to tell
you that. It isn’t creditable to me that I thought you intended to
flirt with her. If I had been better myself”—
“You!” He could not say more.
That utter faith in her was very charming. It softened her more and
more; it made her wish to reason with him, and try gently to show him
how impossible his hope was. “And you know,” she said, recurring to
something that had gone before, “that even if I had cared for you in
the way you wish, it couldn’t be. You wouldn’t want to have people
laughing and saying I had been a doctress.”
“I shouldn’t have minded. I know how much people’s talk is worth.”
“Yes,” she said, “I know you would be generous and brave about
that—about anything. But what—what if I couldn’t give up my career—my
hopes of being useful in the way I have planned? You wouldn’t have
liked me to go on practising medicine?”
“I thought of that,” he answered simply. “I didn’t see how it could be
done. But if you saw any way, I was willing—No, that was my great
trouble! I knew that it was selfish in me, and very conceited, to
suppose you would give up your whole life for me; and whenever I
thought of that, I determined not to ask you. But I tried not to think
of that.”
“Well, don’t you see? But if I could have answered you as you wish, it
wouldn’t have been anything to give up everything for you. A woman
isn’t something else first, and a woman afterwards. I understand how
unselfishly you meant, and indeed, indeed, I thank you. But don’t let’s
talk of it any more. It couldn’t have been, and there is nothing but
misery in thinking of it. Come,” she said, with a struggle for
cheerfulness, “let us forget it. Let it be just as if you hadn’t spoken
to me; I know you didn’t intend to do it; and let us go on as if
nothing had happened.”
“Oh, we can’t go on,” he answered. “I shall get away, as soon as
Maynard comes, and rid you of the sight of me.”
“Are you going away?” she softly asked. “Why need you? I know that
people always seem to think they can’t be friends after—such a thing as
this. But why shouldn’t we? I respect you, and I like you very much.
You have shown me more regard and more kindness than any other friend”—
“But I wasn’t your friend,” he interrupted. “I loved you.”
“Well,” she sighed, in gentle perplexity, “then you can’t be my
friend?”
“Never. But I shall always love you. If it would do any good, I would
stay, as you ask it. I shouldn’t mind myself. But I should be a
nuisance to you.”
“No, no!” she exclaimed. “I will take the risk of that. I need your
advice, your—sympathy, your—You won’t trouble me, indeed you won’t.
Perhaps you have mistaken your—feeling about me. It’s such a very
little time since we met,” she pleaded.
“That makes no difference,—the time. And I’m not mistaken.”
“Well, stay at least till Mrs. Maynard is well, and we can all go away
together. Promise me that!” She instinctively put out her hand toward
him in entreaty. He took it, and pressing it to his lips covered it
with kisses.
“Oh!” she grieved in reproachful surprise.
“There!” he cried. “You see that I must go!”
“Yes,” she sighed in assent, “you must go.”
They did not look at each other again, but remained in a lamentable
silence while the boat pushed swiftly before the freshening breeze; and
when they reached the place where the dory lay, he dropped the sail and
threw out the anchor without a word.
He was haggard to the glance she stole at him, when they had taken
their places in the dory, and he confronted her, pulling hard at the
oars. He did not lift his eyes to hers, but from time to time he looked
over his shoulder at the boat’s prow, and he rowed from one point to
another for a good landing. A dreamy pity for him filled her; through
the memories of her own suffering, she divined the soreness of his
heart.
She started from her reverie as the bottom of the dory struck the sand.
The shoal water stretched twenty feet beyond. He pulled in the oars and
rose desperately. “It’s of no use: I shall have to carry you ashore.”
She sat staring up into his face, and longing to ask him something, to
accuse him of having done this purposely. But she had erred in so many
doubts, her suspicions of him had all recoiled so pitilessly upon her,
that she had no longer the courage to question or reproach him. “Oh,
no, thank you,” she said weakly. “I won’t trouble you. I—I will wait
till the tide is out.”
“The tide’s out now,” he answered with coldness, “and you can’t wade.”
She rose desperately. “Why, of course!” she cried in self-contempt,
glancing at the water, into which he promptly stepped to his boot-tops.
“A woman mustn’t get her feet wet.”