"I have a good reason for breaking in on your triumphant isolation,"
said Malcolm, "little as you appear to suspect it, and if you----"
He stopped speaking. Beatrix was coming towards them. His heart turned
at the sight of her. Never in his life had he seen her looking so
radiant and lovely and like a rose with all its sweetest leaves still
folded, and in her expression there was something so new in its sunny
peacefulness that he caught his breath with surprise.
"Malcolm," she cried out, and put her hands on his shoulders and kissed
him like a sister. He had expected to see a caged bird beating her
wings and to be rushed at as one who brought a reprieve. His curiosity
nearly forced him into personalities.
"How nice of you to look us up," she said, taking his other arm.
"You're just in time for breakfast."
The word breakfast used by them both struck the most intimate note. It
is the most domestic of all words. The first stab of jealousy that
Malcolm had ever felt made him, before he could master himself, break
their astounding atmosphere of contentment, this elysium of peace.
"Mrs. Keene is very ill," he said, sharply. "Ida Larpent and I have
done what we could for two days but she's crying continually for you. I
drove along the coast as fast as I could and unless you come back with
me I don't know what may happen."
Beatrix turned and looked at Franklin. He read in her eyes an appeal to
put her quickly at the side of the little lady whose devotion was
dog-like. He was wrong. The look she gave him was full of anguish at
the thought of leaving him and the sort of half-hope that he would play
the tyrant and the bully and refuse to let her go.
"Jones," he sang out.
"Sir?"
"Ask Captain McLeod to see me at once."
"Very good, sir."
"Malcolm, take Beatrix into the dining saloon. I'll join you in about
five minutes."
And as Beatrix went on with Malcolm, all her appetite for breakfast
gone, she said to herself with the inevitable unreasonableness of a
woman in love, "He doesn't care, he doesn't care. Any pretty girl would
do as well. He's glad to let me go."
Franklin met McLeod. "Mrs. Franklin must go ashore as soon as you can
get her there. Mrs. Lester Keene is very ill. Mr. Fraser has a car
waiting and he will drive my wife back to where we landed the party the
other day,--Jones in charge. I can't be trusted with an engine now,
y'know. I shall drive with them and come aboard again when you turn up,
which you will do with best possible speed. Get that?"
"Yes, sir."
"Right." He waved his hand and went below to his own sanctum. His
valet was busy in the bedroom. "Moffat, pack things for me for a couple
of days, and tell the stewardess to do the same for Mrs. Franklin.
Sharp's the word. We're leaving the yacht in half-an-hour."
Then he went to breakfast, having set things on the move in his
characteristic way. Beatrix and Malcolm were talking generalities in a
rather strained manner. The thoughts of both were busy. It was very
obvious to Malcolm that something had happened to Beatrix. Her whole
attitude, as well as her expression, had changed. She even seemed to be
dressed differently in some subtle way. She was, too, he thought, less
young, less confident, less on the defensive, less consistently
brilliant, less all-in-the-shop-window,--more like the little girl who
had tucked herself into his heart.
"What happened?" asked Franklin, doing more than justice to a liberal
helping of scrambled eggs a Ludovic.
He'd never be able to eat so well if he cared, thought Beatrix.
Malcolm's eyes were clear again. He was less than the dust to the
heroine of his boyhood and he had prayed that she might be won by Pel.
After all, he was a poet.
"Well," he said, "that kind, good soul began by having hysterics on the
quay. She was the first to realize, presumably because of a long course
of novel reading, that we had been emptied away like rubbish and that
the _Galatea_ had turned seawards with Beatrix."
Franklin nodded and drank deeply of strong coffee.
Beatrix respected him for drinking strong, black stuff with breakfast,
but she would have given days of her life to have had just one smile
from him then.
"I knew the one-eyed place on which we had been dumped, took charge of
the three women--saving Mrs. Keene from a watery grave--and drove to the
one possible inn. Quite by accident I had some money on me. Helene and
I did what we could to soothe Mrs. Keene but she took to bed and sprang
a high temperature. The local doctor attended her and called it a
nervous breakdown and that's what, being in the confidence of you both,
I believe it is. Mrs. Larpent surprised me by being very kind and
sympathetic, which shows how foolish it is to judge a woman by her
jewelry and the way she does her hair. We have had a very worrying
time. Finally I made up my mind to hire a car and drive along the coast
until I came level with you. I started before daybreak and here I am.
Mrs. Keene never ceases to call for Beatrix and I promised to bring her
back. You will both help me to keep my promise, I know."
"Well, of course," said Franklin.
"Well, of course," echoed Beatrix. Conceive it, Beatrix,--an echo!
Love plays strange tricks upon humanity.
Franklin went on eating. "We leave on the big launch in twenty minutes.
We shall drive back in your car and stay at the inn until the _Galatea_
anchors off the quay."
"Thank you," said Malcolm. "The sight of Beatrix will do Mrs. Keene
more good than buckets of medicine."
Beatrix turned to Franklin. "Does 'we' include you?" she asked, with
what Malcolm thought was a most curious and startling note of
humbleness.
"Rather," said Franklin.
Whereupon Beatrix began to eat.
Sitting in the shade of the veranda of the inn Ida Larpent killed time
with a new sense of hope.
*XXXV*
It was nearly four o'clock that afternoon when the dust-covered car
arrived at Malcolm's one-eyed place some miles from Charleston, South
Carolina. It was a long, tedious, hot drive through country which
Beatrix called untidily picturesque. The telegraph posts along the
roads leaned at rakish angles. Everywhere there were cotton fields with
irregular lines of plants from which the blossoms had fallen,
dilapidated shacks with piccaninnies playing about them and uncorseted
colored women squatting on the stoops. Strange washing hung out to dry
with great frequency and every now and then there was a fine Colonial
house with a garden alight with flowers.
The inn, or hotel, as it insisted on being called, was the only building
in the settlement which seemed to have received a coat of white paint
for many moons and it was obviously the centre of attraction. Three
rather carelessly treated Fords were parked near its main entrance and
two drummers were rocking on the unwashed stoop with soft damp cigars
tucked into the corners of their mouths. Little families of chickens
ran after their conscientious mothers around the building and several
turkeys stalked aimlessly here and there like actors out for a walk.
Numerous outhouses leaned against each other for support,--one or two of
them showing an ingenuity in repair that was almost Irish. On the walls
of several were pasted glaring bills of motion picture plays then being
shown in Charleston, and one was entirely given up to the glorification
in large letters of a certain small pill. There was, indeed, a curious
intimacy, a sort of who-cares-a-whoop air about the whole place. You
could tease the turkeys, scatter the chickens, grin at the Fords and
spit with the drummers. It was Carolina and hot and the cotton was
coming on. What the deuce, anyway!
From the beginning of the journey to the end of it Franklin hardly
opened his mouth. Watched surreptitiously by Beatrix, he sat silent and
peculiarly distrait, like a man who was either working out an engrossing
problem or bored to extinction. After several dogged attempts to get
him to talk, Malcolm gave him up and for some miles devoted himself
entirely to Beatrix. To her he told everything funny that he had ever
heard or invented without winning a smile. She too was as far away and
as unresponsive as Franklin. And so, giving them both up, Malcolm joined
the sphinxes and let his imagination run loose. When this unsociable
party halted for lunch at a wayside inn the conspiracy of silence was
broken, but only as it would have been by three people who were total
strangers thrown together briefly. The few necessary commonplaces were
said. Franklin and Beatrix went on thinking and Malcolm continued to
imagine what they were thinking about. The driver of the hired car, a
middle-aged man who had married an argumentative woman in his youth,
gave a great deal of slow consideration to the matter. His sense of
beauty pulled his sympathy towards Beatrix, but his sense of brotherhood
impelled him to stand by Franklin in what he decided must be a
matrimonial bust-up, and so he remained neutral as far as they were
concerned and concentrated pity upon Malcolm, to whom, luckily, sleep
eventually came.
Franklin was suffering from inevitable reaction. He had returned to
earth from a dream. He had come back to a very practical world from the
land of make-believe. He had fallen from the unnatural height of a
sublime, passionless love to the natural level of a man whose passion
pounded on the walls of his heart and ran like electricity through his
veins. Out of the brief mist which had shut out the truth of things he
stared to find that Beatrix was as far away from him as ever. He was in
the pit of depression, especially as he had a feeling that any chance he
might have had to win Beatrix was gone now that she had left the yacht.
It seemed to him that she had escaped.
As for Beatrix, who had felt the beat of Franklin's heart against her
breast and would smilingly have gone beyond the outpost of eternity in
his arms, reaction came with a shock that left her with no other desire
than to cry. Suddenly to have found herself and the meaning of life;
suddenly, out there in the fog, to have seen the sense and sanity of
things and burgeoned into a woman under the warmth of love and dreamed
all night of its fulfilment and then to waken to _this_,--a man who
neither looked at her nor spoke, who hustled her from the yacht and
would probably leave her with her friends and go his way. If he had
loved her as well as been stirred by the attraction of her sex he must
have told her so that morning. This was the end of all her arguments.
Having her at his mercy he let her go, she told herself bitterly.
Probably he had escorted her to shore to renew his flirtation with Ida
Larpent. Ah! That was it. Malcolm had said that she had remained at
the hotel. She wouldn't be a bit surprised if the Larpent woman had
bribed Malcolm to come to the yacht with his tale of woe ... and when,
as the car drew up, Ida Larpent sauntered out wearing one of her most
enigmatical smiles and a very becoming frock the hitherto unknown demon
of jealousy seized Beatrix in his burning grasp and for the first time
in her life she became the little sister of all womankind, a girl whose
wealth had turned to ashes and whose autocracy fell about her like dead
leaves.
"How's Brownie?" She ignored Mrs. Larpent's hand and cheek, and passed
into the house without waiting for an answer. The screen door went back
with a clang.
"Good Lord," said Franklin, summing up the whole place in one rapid
glance, "what a filthy hole!"
Malcolm pointed to the chickens. "But look at these," he laughed,
refreshed.
"Welcome," said Ida Larpent, not so much clasping Franklin's hand as
embracing it. She had the knack. "It's good to see you again. Life
has its compensations."
"Thanks."
"Quite a good sort, after all," thought Franklin. "Ripping hat. Always
makes me feel like a man who goes behind the scenes after the last act."
A white-haired, chatty negro led Beatrix up two flights of carpetless
stairs, along a narrow echoing passage to a door almost at the end of
it.
"Don't knock," said Beatrix, and paid him with a smile.
The room was bare and large and barn-like. Its three large windows were
screened. Its stained floor was rubbed and almost colorless. There was
a cheap writing desk of yellow wood, a glass-topped dressing table to
match, a stand with a water bottle on it and a shiver-inspiring white
cuspidor beneath, several strips of thin-worn string matting and a lamp
hanging from the centre of a none too clean ceiling.
Mrs. Lester Keene was lying on a bed with brass knobs which sagged
perceptibly in the middle. Beatrix tip-toed to it and went down on her
knees and put her arms round the little lady's shoulders. "Brownie
dear, I've come," she said.
There was a great maternal cry, and a passion of tears.
"That's right. Weep, Brownie, my dear little Brownie, it will do you
good. You were frightened for me, weren't you? The others wondered
what was the matter with you, but you and I know, don't we? There are no
secrets between us and now you'll get well, won't you? I'm so sorry!"
And the little woman clung weakly and fondly and stroked the face of the
beautiful girl who meant so much to her and for whom she liked to think
that she was responsible. "Oh, my dear, my dear," she cried, "you don't
know what agonies I've been through, or how dreadful it was to see the
yacht going away and you alone and unprotected with that man."
"Was it possible that _I_ called him 'that man' then?" thought Beatrix.
"I've been nearly distraught to think of all the indignities that you
have had to suffer. I could not close my eyes for fear of seeing
unspeakable pictures, though at night I thought I could hear you calling
to me to come and help you and you so young and proud and fine and
helpless. Oh--oh! and are you all right? Will you swear that you're
all right?"
"Yes, Brownie dear, I'm all right. Can't you see that I'm all right?"
But there were tears on her cheeks and a pain at her heart because she
was so much all wrong. Couldn't he have said just one word all day,
just one, to show her that she meant more to him than a mere
woman,--after all that they had been through between life and death?
Couldn't he have given her one look to show that he was something
besides merely a man and that he had held her so perfectly in his arms
and kept her warm to love and comfort and hold always, always?
"Then why are you crying?" demanded Mrs. Keene, sharply.
"You make me cry, Brownie, to see you like this."
"I make you cry? _You!_" The voice was incredulous, skeptical, amazed.
The elderly companion whose dog-like devotion and affection had not
blinded her to the faults of this gold-child, this artificial flower
born and reared in a house of egregious wealth, helped herself up in the
bed and peered into the girl's face. "There is something wrong! I
hardly know you. Tell me, tell me!" Her voice was thin and shrill from
anxiety and fear.
The girl's eyes fell a little and a sob shook her shoulders.
"_Oh, my God! What has that man done to you?_"
Beatrix put a finger on her lips but the old note of command had gone.
"Hush, Brownie, hush," she said gently. "Don't cry out like that, dear.
You'll make yourself ill again."
The little woman's face grew whiter. "Oh, my darling!" she blurted out,
conscience-stricken, "if only I had been able to look after you, if only
I had been strong enough to refuse to leave you! You don't know what
you mean to me. I know I've been useless and weak. I know I've never
really been able to direct or guide you but I've done my best, darling,
and it will kill me to think that you, _you_, who have seemed to me like
a princess in a fairy tale, so pure and fine, have been hurt by this
man. Oh, my dear, what has that man done to you?"
"Listen, Brownie. That man has made me come all the way down to earth.
That man has taken everything from me,--pride and scorn and shallowness,
the desire to experiment, the impatience of possession, and put there
instead something that makes me want to go and sit down at the side of
women with children and hold their hands. That man has brought me up to
truth and reason. He has made me human and humble and jealous and eager
for his touch. He has made me love him and need him and want to serve
him. Look at me, Brownie, look at me and see it for yourself!"
She held up her lovely, tear-stained face, the face that Malcolm had
described, the picture of which was locked up in his heart. And Mrs.
Keene, speechless, looked and saw and wondered.
And suddenly the golden head was crushed against the childless bosom.
"Brownie, Brownie, he doesn't love me, he doesn't love me, and I wish I
were dead."
Could this be Beatrix,--this?
*XXXVI*
Finding that Franklin had left the bedroom that had been allotted to him
after washing and changing his clothes,--the others had been flung about
the barrack-like room,--Malcolm went downstairs and out to the veranda.
Ida Larpent was sitting in front of a tea-table like Patience on a
monument, dodging mosquitoes.
"Where's Pelham?" she asked, raising her eyebrows.
"I was going to ask you."
"And Beatrix?"
"In with Mrs. Keene, I think."
Mrs. Larpent heaved a little sigh. "Poor old thing! She'll get well
now, and we, I take it, can go our ways in peace. I don't ever want to
go through this experience again."
Malcolm laughed. "Well, I've rather enjoyed it," he said, "apart, of
course, from the fact that Mrs. Keene has suffered."
"Enjoyed it?" There was a note of anger in Mrs. Larpent's clear voice.
"Such food, such beds, such cockroaches, such service, such an appalling
place?"
"I've been studying the beautiful unselfishness of the mother hen," said
Malcolm. "It's a revelation to me."
Mrs. Larpent shrugged her shoulders impatiently. "I've known one or two
other poets in my time," she said, "but I've never been able to make out
whether their childishness was a pose or mere stupidity. It requires no
study to know that the mother hen is not unselfish. Like other mothers
she is the creature of overwhelming circumstances, the slave of nature.
However, what's the news? What is to happen next? Is the _Galatea_ to
deliver us back to New York or do we find our own way back?"
"Don't ask me," said Malcolm, who wouldn't have said anything else if he
had known it. Mrs. Larpent was one of the few women of his acquaintance
whom he really disliked. He found her hard and without an ounce of
idealism or imagination. She believed in nothing that didn't carry a
certificate of proof, in no one who was not duly entered in "Who's Who,"
looked upon faith as a sort of patent medicine, hope as a form of mental
weakness and charity as a sharp way of getting rid of people who either
made street noises or had pathetic stories to tell. He and she had not
got on at all well.
To the great relief of both Franklin came up. "We're waiting tea for
you," said Mrs. Larpent.
"I'm so sorry. I've been along to the post-office. I thought I'd better
wire this address to the Vanderdykes as we shall be here till the
_Galatea_ lies off. They had our next place of call for letters." He
sat down rather heavily. "Yes, tea's a good idea."
There was nothing of happiness about this man, Mrs. Larpent told herself
in a spirit of self-congratulation. He had obviously gained nothing by
carrying off Beatrix except a little line between his eyebrows. Serve
him right. She was glad to see it. She could have made him happy if
the party had continued on the yacht.
Tea came but no Beatrix. Mrs. Larpent poured out, and as she did so her
spirits rose. Things looked good. She had never been able to find a
reason for their sham honeymoon, puzzle as she might. It remained an
inscrutable mystery, and all her cunning endeavors to trick Mrs. Keene
and Malcolm into confession had failed. She argued that they
knew,--Malcolm because he brought Beatrix to the yacht and Mrs. Keene
because of her extraordinary nervous breakdown. In any case that
business failed to be of interest now. The point was how much, if at
all, was Franklin in love with or physically attracted by Beatrix. If
he was in love with her and had been turned down,--his whole appearance
and attitude proved that,--her opportunity to catch him on the rebound
was most excellent. In her large experience men committed matrimony or
undertook obligations immediately after being refused. If he had been
physically attracted merely, and had met with no success,--which was
patent,--the same argument applied. How glad she was that she had seen
the wisdom of staying in that abominable shack, ostensibly to look after
the woman who got so completely on her nerves. Her room was next to
Franklin's, too. Could luck have been kinder?
"Have you sent any tea up to Beatrix?" asked Franklin, suddenly.
"No," said Mrs. Larpent. "She'll order it herself if she wants any,
don't you think so?"
Franklin got up. "Excuse me," he said, and stalked into the hotel,
asked the comatose clerk the number of Mrs. Keene's room, waved away a
gymnastic colored boy who volunteered to show him and went upstairs two
at a time. Sooner or later he would be obliged, he had come to the
conclusion, either to put as many thousand miles between himself and
Beatrix as the map of the earth allowed or treat her as a sister. All
the day's thinking had proved this to him, who knew so little about
women.
He knocked on the door, waited and knocked again.
It was opened by Beatrix, who was still in her dust-covered clothes and
hat. He saw at once that she had been crying and resented it as much as
though he had seen her arm in a splint.
"Have you had tea?" he asked bluntly, because he wanted to kiss her
beyond description and hadn't the right.
"No," said Beatrix.
"Shall I send some up?"
"Will you? I'd love it. I'm so tired."
"Yes, of course you are. Why didn't you ring and make this rotten hotel
run about?"
"I forgot. It's awfully nice of you to have bothered about me."
Franklin swallowed a rush of words, nodded, made small work of the
echoing stairs and stood in front of the unoffending clerk with eyes
black with unexplainable anger. "Why the devil haven't you sent tea up
to Mrs. Franklin? Don't argue. Get it done at once or I'll pull this
barn down board by board. For two, with hot buttered toast. Quick!"
Two colored boys who had overheard these words and caught the clerk's
eyes went off like demented athletes. Left standing, the clerk pulled
himself together. He felt as though a cart load of bricks had fallen on
his head. What was the matter with this man? Anyone would think he'd
bought the darned earth!
Ida Larpent and Malcolm did most of the talking while Franklin drank
three cups of tea and ate all the toast. Malcolm knew that before long
he would be marched off somewhere to listen to his old pal's troubles
and so he waited with his characteristic patience and all his sympathy
on the boil, determined not to permit his curiosity to lead his
imagination into any further maze. It seemed to him to be disloyal. Ida
Larpent concentrated her strategic knowledge upon a plan of action to be
carried into effect during the night. She must act quickly because
Franklin, like Beatrix, went off at sudden tangents. He might take it
into his head to leave the place at a moment's notice and she might not
see him again for months.
"How are you going to kill time until the so-called dinner?" she asked,
looking at Franklin. "Can I suggest anything?"
"No, thanks," he replied. "Malcolm and I are going to explore the quay,
if there is such a thing."
She laughed softly. He could do what he liked with all the hours till
midnight. The others at the beginning of a new day would be hers, if
she knew anything of men and life. She opened a book.
Franklin got up, pushed the table away, dragged up a chair for Mrs.
Larpent's feet, made a mental note of the fact that she was a good sort
and took Malcolm's arm.
"Come on, old son," he said. "Let's get out of this."
Turkey and chickens made way for these tall creatures, the two drummers
at the other end of the veranda concentrated a united gaze on Mrs.
Larpent's ankles, a Ford went off with a harsh rattle carrying two men
in their shirt sleeves, and a ragamuffinly kitten gave a marvelous
imitation of a bucking horse and bolted up a tree.
As they faced the Atlantic Franklin squared his shoulders and drew in a
long, grateful breath. The line went out of his forehead and his mouth
relaxed. Here at any rate was an element that he understood in all its
moods, rough and smooth.
"Malcolm, will you come to Europe with me?"
"Any time," said Malcolm.
"Right. To-morrow night, then. I wish to God I had an aeroplane. We'd
get away sooner."
He looked round impatiently. The so-called quay might have been made
away back before the Great Wind and carelessly patched together after
it. It ran out into a small bay for the use of perhaps a dozen
cat-boats, a couple of nice yawls, a very spruce shoal-draught sloop
just in, a well put together lark and a number of dirty little power
boats belonging to the negro fishermen. Several bankrupt-looking sheds
added to the general neglected appearance of the whole scene, which was
heightened by three carcasses of dead dories with all their ribs
sticking out lying up on the beach and all among dry seaweed and
rubbish.
"What's the particular hurry?" asked Malcolm.
Franklin turned upon him. "I'm sick of myself, sick of life, sick of
the whole blessed show," he said. "I want to get right away. I want to
put all the sea there is between myself and Beatrix. If anybody had
told me before I went to the Vanderdykes that a bit of a girl was going
to turn me into a first-class fool I'd have called him a sentimental
crank."
"I know," said Malcolm. "It all depends on the girl, though. All wise
men, all men who fathom the fact in time that life means nothing if it's
selfish, fall over each other to be made first-class fools of by the
right girl. Besides, who says you've been turned into a first-class
fool? You love Beatrix without success. So do I. That doesn't make us
fools, either of us. I hold that we have to thank our stars to have met
her. The fool part of it would be in not having loved her. That's my
view of it. And look here, Pel, old man, don't be quite so ready to
call people sentimental cranks who talk about love. What are we here
for? What's the use of living without it? Clubs are built for men who
have missed the one good thing there is to win in this queer little
interlude between something we can't remember and something we're not
intended to know."
Franklin listened to this unexpected outburst with a sort of boyish
gravity. Malcolm had the knack of saying things that were true, and
this that he had just said, with uncharacteristic heat, was dead true.
Franklin knew that. Moreover he had the honesty and the courage to say
so.
"Quite right, old son. I was talking through my hat as usual. But the
difference between you and me is this. You're a poet and when you're
turned down you have the safety valve of verse. You can write about it.
I'm only a common or garden sporting cove who has to grin and bear it.
And when you've got a girl like Beatrix in your blood there isn't much
grinning, believe me. Come on. Let's walk and I'll put you up to
date."
And away they went arm in arm along the shore while the sun went down.
And up in her bare bedroom Beatrix gave herself eagerly into the hands
of her maid. "If I look my best," she thought, "perhaps----"
Men and women and history,--repetition, that's all!
*XXXVII*
Dinner was fairly good. The word had been taken to the kitchen that
Franklin might stalk in and kill the chef. That dark mass of humanity
outdid himself in consequence. Life was very dear to him.
One of the waiters at Franklin's table had been fifteen years in the
hotel. The other twelve. They mutually agreed behind the screen that
there had never been two such beautiful ladies in its dining-room in
their time. They too were on their mettle.
Beatrix played up. She had bathed and slept a little and poured out her
heart to Brownie and felt better from the fact that her presence had
done her old friend so much good. Besides, she had grit and the courage
of a thoroughbred. She was not going to let anyone see that there was a
pain in her heart if she died for it. And so she set the ball rolling
and kept the table merry. It was well done.
Malcolm did his share and brought tears of laughter from everybody by
describing a scandal-mongering conversation between two turkeys. The
younger of the two waiters nearly had a fit. Ida Larpent was in
excellent spirits and Franklin as cheery as he could always be when he
tried.
Afterwards they adjourned to a ludicrously-furnished room called the
drawing-room decorated with tortured wood and chairs which had obviously
been designed by plumbers. Everything in it was the color of Virginia
tobacco,--the epitome of biliousness. Here they played Bridge while the
proprietor's over-plump daughter with a huge white bow on the top of her
head giggled and whispered to several girl friends in the sun parlor and
presently set a Victrola going. Between the tunes, which were redolent
of Broadway, the click of billiard balls could be heard. Frogs in a
nearby pond croaked their inevitable chorus.
At the end of the third rubber Beatrix rose. "I can't go on," she said.
"There are so many distractions. It's almost like being in a railway
accident. Take me down to look at the sea, Pelham."
Franklin led the way. He would have liked it better if she had been
angry with him and there had been an excuse for quarreling. He might
then have had a reason for blazing at her and losing his self-control.
To be treated like a brother,--it was better than nothing, he supposed,
but it made him feel like a man with his arms roped to his sides.
They went along the sandy road lined with curious stunted trees to the
quay. A full moon dominated a sky that blazed with stars. There was
not even the tail-end of a cloud. The lazy sea plopped heavily against
the stanchions and made the small craft wobble from side to side. Ropes
creaked and quivered. There was hardly any wind. On the tip of the quay
a girl was sitting with her head on a man's shoulder. One of his arms
was round her waist. Their legs dangled over the edge. It was a night
for love.
Beatrix said nothing for several minutes. She stood hatless, with her
hands behind her back and her shoulders square. She looked dangerously
young, Franklin thought, and far too precious to be unguarded. But with
another look he corrected himself,--so young that her confidence was a
better guard than an armed man. He wondered what she was thinking
about.
"You've never had a sister, have you?" she asked suddenly.
"No," said Franklin.
"What a pity."
"Why?"
"She would have been a lucky girl."
"There you are," thought Franklin. "Nothing but a brother, you see."