It is sad to chronicle the fact that, on the way back to the _Shark_,
Captain Bell's language was not such as a maiden's ears should hear.
But it is doubtful if Cécile's ears did hear it, such paternal
explosions being somewhat too common of occurrence to command
attention. On the other hand, the treatment which she had just
received at the hands of the poet was an entirely new experience,
and, in consideration of what Wood had told her, one that puzzled her
mightily. There was naturally no way of poor Cécile's knowing that
the poet took her for her sister Hermione, and was working off a
little artistic pique, due to the return of verses, which had cost
him gallons of tea and many pounds of macaroons.
Bell was going off at intervals, like an automatic fog-horn.
"The ---- fool!" he stormed, to the expressionless delight of his
crew, which pulled away with stony faces. "Is he a wild ass of the
desert, or does he think I am, or both? What in thunder did he mean
by all that rot about Hermione shooting the keeper and he standin' by
to bury him in the sand? Was the fool tryin' to josh me, I'd like to
know? And all that slush about percussion somethin' and poetic
interpretation by an æolian harp crackin' on ... Did you ever see
such a cub-faced, swab-headed guillemot? Soul-talk! I want a
drink..."
These and other winged words were lost upon Cécile. She was trying
to hit on some solution of Applebo's treatment of herself. Certainly
there had been some hidden meaning in the looks which he had turned
upon her; something which suggested a motive for his peculiar
behaviour. Cécile, who found it quite impossible to construe any
situation as unflattering to herself, decided that the behaviour of
the poet was nothing less than sheer "bluff." Either he was trying
to disguise some deep, inner emotion, or else he had wished to
mislead Captain Bell as to the true reason for his constant
attendance. Cécile did not for an instant take seriously Applebo's
sentimental effusions about the effect upon his poetry produced by
the propinquity of the _Shark_. She was quite convinced that there
was a very deep and subtle method underlying his apparently foolish
pose. Heretofore she had been divided as to whether he must be
considered as a really smitten lover or merely as a sort of
half-witted loon, which, like all of its species, was quite at home
on the wave. She had even thought it possible that he might be a
fool of whimsical ideas who had actually attached himself to the
_Shark_ from sheer lacking objective. This theory had been
overturned by Wood's revelations, and she had accompanied her father
to call on Applebo with the secret determination of discovering what
was really underneath his eccentric behaviour.
The sleepy quick-wittedness; the supine manner of attempting to
disguise a fierce forcefulness beneath; the deep, resonant voice,
silky and warm; the inscrutable, leonine face with its mane of tawny
hair; the _tout ensemble_, had deeply impressed Cécile, though she
was not yet conscious of how deeply. But she knew that Applebo was
very far from being the pilot-fish which he claimed to be. A chunk
of pork on a hook, perhaps, but a pilot-fish ... no! Cécile had a
vague instinct that she was shortly to be more fully informed in the
matter.
Notwithstanding which, she arrived at the schooner in a state of
extreme irritation, while her father had subsided into a sub-acute
exasperation expressed by grunts and growls. A certain curiosity had
backed up the real motive for the call aboard the _Daffodil_, and
this curiosity had been politely but effectually flouted, and both
father and daughter much resented it. Especially the daughter, as
much trifling with the affections of many young men is a poor way for
a girl to get in training to have a young man treat her with _lèse
majesté_.
On coming alongside of the schooner they found a boat from the
_Arcturus_, and Cécile's temper was not improved at hearing the gay
laughter from the deck, where Hermione, Paula, Huntington Wood, and
Mr. Poole were having a very good time. Cécile was one of those
girls who grow restive at the sight of attractive men in the
possession of other girls, so she proceeded at once to break up the
_partie carrée_, taking Wood away from Paula as one might deprive a
child of some object with which it was too young to play.
All were curious to hear about the call upon Mr. Applebo, however,
especially as the red and belligerent expression of Captain Bell's
face showed that it had not been in all ways agreeable.
"Your friend Applebo," said Cécile to Wood, "is, without exception,
the rudest man I ever met."
Hermione raised her eyebrows. Wood, always loyal to the absent,
protested.
"Oh, no!" said he, "odd and eccentric and all of that, but not really
rude...."
"Call it what you like," said Cécile. "We had to board his nasty
little boat practically by force, after which he did nothing but sit
there and make sneering remarks."
"That was the only way he managed to keep awake," growled Bell, who
was pacing up and down his quarter-deck with short, impatient steps.
"Apparently," said Cécile, "he was trying to be witty at our expense.
You should have heard what papa said about him coming back...."
"We did ... from the time you left the yawl," said Hermione.
Cécile gave a mirthless little laugh. "Fancy your being so silly as
to say that he was in love with me!"
"Huntington never said that," observed Hermione. "He merely said
that Applebo was in love with somebody aboard the _Shark_."
There was a laugh, which was quickly checked, for Cécile's face
became suddenly crimson. She bit her lip, and her grey eyes actually
filled with tears of sheer mortification. Wood went quickly to her
rescue.
"Up to this time," said he, "Harold has probably fancied himself in
love with an Ideal. Now that he has seen the Real, we may look for
rapid developments."
"Huh..." grunted Captain Bell, whose promenade had brought him within
earshot, "he's a balm, that's what's the matter with him. Said it
wasn't Hermione he rescued, but the gamekeeper. Said Hermione was
about to assassinate him, and that if she had he would have dug a
hole in the sand and shoved him in ... huh ... h'm ... balmy as a
spring dream...."
"He's quite capable of it," said Wood, and glanced at Hermione.
There was a vivid red splash in either of the girl's cheeks, and her
eyes were like sapphires.
"By Jove..." Wood laughed. "Look at Hermione! I believe she would
have helped him! What a pair of savages!"
Bell stopped in his beat and threw one arm around Paula. He made no
secret of the fact that she was his favourite daughter; a preference
which aroused no jealousy in the hearts of the other girls, as both
appreciated fully Paula's sweetness of disposition and invariable
unselfishness. She was, in a way, the mean between the extremes of
Cécile's calculating and Hermione's impetuous nature; also she acted
as a sort of fender between her sisters and their father. On the
whole, the family was an affectionate one, but high spirits and
diverse dispositions made the offices of a peace advocate
indispensable.
"D'ye know what I think?" snapped Bell. "I think that the scoundrel
is secretly in love with Paula, and he ain't man enough to step up
and say so!"
"What makes you think that?" Wood asked.
"Logical exclusion. Here he has performed a service for Hermione,
and lets it drop there, and Cécile goes aboard his boat and he sits
there and jollies her. What was it he said ... that about the idle
amusement he furnished bein' a fair exchange for the use of our minds
... eh ... what was it, Cécile...?"
"Some rubbish ... I don't know..." Cécile turned away, angrily.
"Besides," continued Bell, "Paula is the only one he has ever sighted
close aboard. All right, old man" ... he glanced toward the
_Daffodil_ ... "we'll see how much of a test you can stand. Wait
'til I romp you up and down the coast from St. John's, Newfoundland,
to Hatteras a few times!" He glanced at Wood. "Come with us,
Huntington. You'll see some sport. The beggar means to follow, if
he can."
Wood hesitated. Cécile was looking at him, ready to give a little
sign of affirmation, but to her extreme surprise, Wood glanced, not
at her, but at Paula. Cécile's eyes followed his. Paula was looking
at Wood, and as he hesitated, her face grew suddenly pale.
"Do you all want me?" asked Wood, smiling.
"Of course we do," answered Hermione. "Do come."
Paula echoed the invitation, a little faintly, and Cécile, in a cool,
indifferent way. She was wondering at the peculiar expression she
had caught in Paula's eyes as they met those of Wood.
"Then I'll go with great delight," said Wood. "But I don't think
that the chase will last very long, when it comes to offshore work.
You can hardly expect a little yawl like that to keep up with a
schooner of this size."
"I'll back him," said Hermione. "The _Shark_ is about as speedy as
an oyster-float."
"Just the same," snapped Bell, "I'll make you a bet, young lady, that
we will have lost our pilot-fish at the end of ten days."
"For what...?" asked Hermione.
"For a month's allowance. Double or none. Come now, do you take me?"
"Done with you!" said Hermione, promptly.
Huntington Wood was giving a dinner party ashore that night, and
Cécile, according to her custom when dining out, spent the late hours
of the afternoon in repose. Her room aboard the _Shark_ was as big
and luxuriously furnished as though it had belonged to a modern
country-house, and she slept in a brass bed securely bolted to the
deck. Adjoining was a boudoir and bath.
In a flowered kimono, her bright hair unconfined, Cécile was taking
her beauty-rest and turning in her mind the events of the day.
Piqued as she had been at Applebo's behaviour, she was by this time
angry ... and a little startled to find how insistently his
personality occupied her thoughts. She would have resented this more
had it not been that this retrospect was by no means disagreeable.
The startling feature of this obsession was the vividness with which
she could recall every detail. Cécile had only to close her eyes to
see again the big-framed, loosely-held figure, the sleepy, leonine
face with its mane of wavy hair, sun-bleached on top of the head to
the colour of old oakum, but holding rich, coppery tints in its
depths. Facial features were shockingly vivid; the high, wide
cheekbones, the cheeks themselves cut out to a degree which gave the
mouth an appearance of being slightly pushed out, the upper lip
slightly raised in the middle. Most distinct was the set of the
eyes; the leonine "bumps" with the bushy eyebrows, the eyes
themselves of a clear, deep amber and fringed about with lashes that
looked black, but were not.
She thought, with a gust of irritation, of the poet's blinking,
indifferent expression and of the sudden gracious change in the
cat-like face when he smiled. The smile humanised him, it was so
kind. And it reassured one, in revealing teeth that were straight
and white and even, and not feline. The recollection to most stir
Cécile's pulse was that of the deep, resonant purring voice, which
seemed to have left its echoes in her ears, as the voice of the sea
leaves its murmur in a conch-shell.
"If it weren't for that catty, mocking pose," thought Cécile, "how
attractive he would be!" She pictured him as open and frank and
sincere ... looking into her eyes with no veil across his own ...
Cécile's heart beat furiously. She wondered if she were going to
make a fool of herself and fall in love with the only man who had
ever treated her with disrespect.
Perhaps the factor which made Applebo's memory so intrusive was his
enigmatical position. From thinking of him Cécile would ponder,
until her head ached, upon what could be his real motive. She was
now convinced that his attendance was not aimless. She was also sure
that if it were due to a sentimental emotion toward herself she would
very soon know of it, now that they had met. There had certainly
been some deep meaning, some understanding in those, regards which he
had given her.
Thinking of these things she fell into a doze, only to be pursued by
vague images of her waking thoughts. Then, just before fully
awakening, she saw, as in a camera-obscura, the face of Applebo
regarding her with a lazy, ironical smile. This was not fancy, but
an actual vision, which faded slowly as she awoke.
"Bother the man!" cried Cécile, fiercely to herself. "One would
think that I were an ingenue of eighteen, haunted by visions of my
first beau!"
Many men had called Cécile cold, unfeeling, heartless ... all of
which terms were, from the man's point of view, quite correct. From
Cécile's, they were wrong. As she saw it, love was a game in which
one must realise, just as in football, the possibility of getting
hurt. A coward or cry-baby had no right to play it. If any man
could hurt her, as she was said to have hurt others, he was quite at
liberty to go ahead and do it. It was, perhaps, in the hunt for the
person who could do this that she had ruthlessly vivisected so many
hearts. Cécile felt instinctively that she possessed no lack of deep
feeling, if the right man were to claim it.
But Cécile knew quite well that she was not "in love at first sight."
She was momentarily fascinated, perhaps, but mingled with her
sentiment there was not the least trace of sympathetic or tender
interest. On the contrary, the thought of Applebo exasperated her.
She felt that she would like to wake him out of his lethargy with a
hat-pin or the butt-end of an oar. Something in his sleek, smooth
complacency aroused the desire to do him a damage.
Tired at length of the changeless object of her fancy, she tried to
put it from her mind, but in vain. Then, finding herself unable to
stem the tide of her imaginings, she tried drifting with them, to
arrive ultimately at the startling knowledge that she was quite wild
to see the poet again. She was also forced to admit, for however
much she might deceive others Cécile was always candid with herself,
that, were he to exert his magnetic potentialities toward that end,
it was very possible that she might wind up by falling very
desperately in love with Mr. Harold Applebo.
Hardly had she arrived at this rather humiliating conclusion when the
maid entered, handed her a note, and went out again. The post-mark
was a local one, and the handwriting of the copy-plate regularity
which one associates with bills. Nevertheless, Cécile's heart beat
with a sudden increased force as she tore open the letter. Inside
was a single sheet of corn-coloured note-paper covered by a fine
regular calligraphy, which Cécile recognised at a glance as being
identical with that in which some of Hermione's letters had been
addressed. She held it to the waning light from her port-hole, and
read as follows:--
TO CÉCILE
_Lips oft sing loudest when the heart is numb;
'Tis when Love enters there, though all unseen,
These scarlet courtiers, bowing to their Queen,
Knowing their hollowness, are stricken dumb._
_Thus, ere Love reached me with his tiny dart,
Clamoured I vainly. Many a lover's moan
And sigh proclaimed a love I ne'er had known,
Vaunted a passion alien to my heart._
_My soul has met with thine. Though I did wrong,
These lips are stilled. No slightest sigh is heard,
And all my poesy is prisoned in a word:--
"I love thee, Sweet." Herein lies all my song.
The Pilot-fish._
Cécile read the verses twice through, then flung herself back amongst
the pillows with a burning face.
The solution was not long in coming. Apparently, the poet had
previously sent verses, from time to time, to Hermione. Cécile had
seen the envelopes. It was very wrong of Hermione to have received
them and said nothing to her about it. Cécile would reprove her for
that later on ... not just at present.
It was probable, she thought, that Applebo had seen Hermione at some
time, found her attractive, and being himself of a sentimental and
poetic nature, had fancied himself in love with her. Then, in their
meeting of that morning he had, no doubt, been disillusioned, found
Hermione a mere child and a bit of a hoyden. Later on, seeing
herself, Cécile, he had been completely vanquished.
Certain parts of the verses appeared to bear this out. The theme of
the poem, as a whole, was that formerly, when he really had felt
nothing, he had been doing a lot of singing. Hence the verses which
Hermione had from time to time received. But now that he had really
fallen in love, he found himself deprived of expression.
Cécile put away the verses, rang for her maid, and proceeded to
dress. At the dinner that night everybody who knew her agreed that
she had never been so radiantly lovely.
"Lucky dog!" said Poole to Huntington Wood. "You'll win her before
this wild-goose chase is over!"
Wood smiled, and his eyes followed Paula as she crossed the room to
speak to an acquaintance.