Down on the coast the world suddenly broadened and lifted into larger
spaces. In lieu of eight-feet strips of pavement to walk on, there were
the gray sweeps of sand, and great marshes stained with patches of color
in emerald and brown, rolling off into the hazy background: instead of the
brick and wooden boxes wherein we shut ourselves up with bad air in town,
there were the vast uncovered plain of the sea, shapeless ramparts of fog
incessantly rising and fading, an horizon which retreated as you searched
for it into opening sunlit space, refusing to shut you in. The very boats
and ships in which these people lived were winged, ready for flight into
some yet farther region.
"Are you glad to come out of doors, Bruno? I am," said Miss Swendon to her
dog as she stood looking at the sea; and then they sauntered away
together.
Her father and Mr. Neckart went down to the mouth of the Inlet, where some
fishermen were patching a boat which they had drawn up on a heap of
mussel-shells. One or two crabbers, standing on the bow of their little
skiffs and poling them along the edge of the water by the handles of their
nets, had stopped to watch the job, which was being done with rusty nails
and a bit of barnacle-moulded iron from a wreck instead of a hammer. When
the iron and nails broke they all sat down and talked the matter over,
with any other subject which happened to be lying loosely about on the
fallow fields of their minds. When Captain Swendon came up they shook
hands gravely with him, and made room for him on the bottom of an
up-turned, worm-eaten scow. They were all captains as well as he, and he
was hail, fellow! well met! with them as with everybody.
Mr. Neckart, who was formally introduced, nodded curtly, but did not sit
down.
"A good day for the perch, Sutphen," said the captain, handing round a
bundle of cigars.
"Yaas."
"But you ought to have been on the banks by daylight." Mr. Neckart's
sharp, irritable voice jarred somehow on the quiet sunshine.
"Yaas. But I lent my boat last week, and this here one's out of
repair.--Give me more of them nails, David."
"The boat could have been mended at night, and ready for use," in the tone
which a teacher might use to idle boys.--"It is singular, Captain
Swendon," turning his back on the men as on so many mud-turtles, "that the
sea-air begets improvident habits in all coast-people. You cannot account
for it rationally, but it is a fact. Along the whole immediate shore-line
of Europe you find the same traits. Unreadiness, torpor of mind and
body.--Ah! Captain Swendon and I wish to hire a boat for the day," turning
to the fishermen again. "Can any of you men furnish us with one?"
Sutphen lighted his cigar leisurely: "We always manage to provide Captain
Swendon with a boat when he wants it. We kin obleege him," with a slight
stress on the pronoun.
"At what rates?" sharply.
"Waal, we kin talk of rates when the day's over. The captain and us won't
disagree, I reckon."
"I never do business in that way. Bring out your boat and put a price on
it."
"Come, Neckart," said the captain, rising hastily, "we will walk up the
beach a bit.--I'll see you about the boat presently, Sutphen.--You don't
know these fellows, Bruce," when they had passed out of hearing and found
a seat in the thin salt grass. "They are not used to being dealt with in
such a prompt, drill-major fashion."
"I deal with all men alike. Order and promptness have been necessary to me
in every step of my way. I must have them from others. I pay to a penny,
and I exact to a penny. It is not the money I want: it is discipline in
the people about me. They must move as if they were drilled if they move
to further my ends."
The captain took his cigar out of his mouth and turned blankly on him:
"'Further your ends?' But, Bruce?--"
Neckart laughed: "Oh, no doubt they were created with some other object in
view than to serve my purposes. But that is the cognizance which I take of
them. Really, captain, if you were in public life, and saw with what
eagerness masses of men follow feeble leaders who know the trick of piping
to them, and how willing they are to be manipulated, you would soon come
to look upon the American public simply as a machine ready for your own
use when you had the skill to work it."
The captain's cigar went out in his fingers as he sat staring with dull
perplexity at Neckart. There was a certain nobility in the carriage of the
powerful figure and black shaggy head, an occasional fire in the deep-set
eyes, a humor in the fine smile, which argued a different order of man
from this scheming, selfish politician.
"I can't place you at all, Bruce. Now, I should have thought you would
have been a reformer--worked for humanity--that line, you know. You were a
sensitive lad, like a girl."
"I am quite too warm-hearted a fellow to be a philanthropist," laughed
Neckart. "The philanthropists I know work for principles, liberty,
education and the like: they don't care a damn for the individual Tom and
Jerry. The chances are, that your reformer is a cold-blooded tyrant at
home: he makes a god of his one idea: his god makes him nervous,
ill-conditioned--the last man in the world to choose for a friend or a
husband."
"You amaze me! I should have said that they were the wisest and purest of
men. Next to clergymen, of course. I don't go to church myself, but I
respect the cloth. But speaking of yourself, Bruce, you were a most
affectionate little fellow. Do you remember how you referred every new
idea to your mother? I recollect you told me once that you read your
lessons in your school classics to her to amuse her. You must have cleaned
the translation sometimes to make it fit for her ear."
"Yes."
"And I remember, too," regardless of the sudden silence which had fallen
on his companion, "how you watched my wife making a cap one day--she had
nice fingers in such work, Virginie--and how you saved your money to buy
lace and ribbon for her to make your mother a cap; and how anxiously you
sat watching every stitch as it went in, and carried it off triumphantly
when it was done."
"I remember quite well. Mrs. Swendon was very kind to me in the matter."
The captain did not reply: he glanced at Neckart with sudden alarm. What
was it that he had heard of Bruce's mother? Some wretched story that came
out at the time of her death: had she committed a crime or gone mad? He
could not recall it, but something in the silence of his companion told
him that he had blundered. He began to smoke violently in contrition of
soul, and remained silent, while Neckart lay still in the sand, his hands
clasped behind his head, looking at the surf.
It was not the surf he saw.
It was that little silly cap which he had held on his boy's chapped fist
delighted and proud. Twenty years ago! He had earned the money to buy it
by work after the other boys in the shop had gone home. He could see the
very pattern now that was worked in the lace, and the ribbon--a pale blue,
just the color of his mother's eyes. He had carried it home in the
evening, and smoothed the gray hair over the gentle little face, and tied
it on her before he would let her go to the glass. She was just as pleased
as he, and kissed him with her arms tight about his neck and the tears in
her eyes. An hour afterward he had found her tearing it into bits with an
idiotic laugh. A little later--
He shut his eyes, as if to keep out some real sight before him.
It seemed to him as if his whole boyhood had been made up of just such
nights as this one which he remembered.
It was not often that Neckart looked back at that early time. He was
neither morbid nor addicted to self-torture. He had carefully walled up
this miserable background of youth from his busy, cheerful, wide-awake
life. Why should he go back to it? Something, however, in the air to-day,
in the moan of the sea through the sunlight, brought it all before him,
more real than the stretch of water and sand.
The captain smoked out his cigar and began to talk. Gaps of silence were
so much wasted time in the world; and besides, he owed a duty to Bruce.
Here was a man going headlong to the devil by the road of ambition, a
sweet, high nature becoming soured and tainted, all for the lack of honest
direction from somebody of age and experience.
When Neckart roused himself enough to understand, the captain was in the
full swing of his dictatorial oration. "I don't want to intrude with my
opinion. But no man should live for himself," he said. "Now, if my
scissors had turned out as I expected, I should have been worth a million
to-day. I'd have spent a good share of it--let me see--on churches, I
think. Small churches--at corners in place of grogshops. Pure Gothic,
say--"
"Stained glass and gargoyles instead of whiskey? You must bid higher for
souls in back alleys than that, captain."
"Well, schools, then--colleges, asylums, soup-houses. I tell you, Bruce,
if I had your opportunities, if I could work political machinery, I'd lift
this festering mass below us up--at least to civilization and
Christianity."
"I thought you meant me," laughing. "Go on."
"Of course I can't give you detailed advice. Take me on pistons and
screws, and I'm at home; but I know only the broad outlines of political
economy. My view," ponderously, "is purely philosophic. Our politics need
reform, sir. An honest man who would come to the front just now would save
the country. The masses would follow him to honesty. The Americans are a
just people by instinct. I tell you, sir, if I had your chances--Talk to
Pliny Van Ness, Bruce. There's a keen man of the world, who is as pure and
lofty in his notions as an enthusiastic woman. He has a scheme just now
for bettering the condition of the children of the dangerous classes of
Pennsylvania. I wish you knew Van Ness."
"I've seen him;" adding, after a moment's hesitation, "He is as upright a
man, I believe, as you say--the very man to be inspired with your heroic
rage for reform, and to carry it into effect. I am not the same kind of
material."
"Bruce, you belie yourself. I knew you as a boy--"
"Then you knew an ordinary, not bad sort of a fellow, captain, but no
hero. I have had one or two qualities which have pushed me up--a
skill--craft with using words, as you have with tools, for instance, an
inflexibility of purpose, a certain tact in influencing large bodies of
men. I have never had any affection for them. I have two or three stanch
friends. Other men and women are part of the world's furniture to me.
Nothing more."
"But the power which these qualities have gained for you? How do you mean
to use it?"
"You press me closely," with an amused scrutiny of the captain's
monitorial face. "I shall use it, just now, to make money. That is the
thing of which I have had the least in the world, and which has yielded me
most substantial pleasure. When I am a rich man I can command knowledge,
power and whatever else I covet." His eye kindled at the last words. There
was a darkened background in his thoughts, to which Neckart, with all his
easy frankness, admitted no man.
The captain studied him with perplexity: then his face lightened: "I have
it! You must marry! A wife and children are the very influences you need
to soften and broaden your aims. Yes, I know I'm speaking plainly.
But--have you never thought of it?"
Mr. Neckart did not reply for a few moments. "It is impossible that I
should ever marry," he said gravely. "There is an obstacle which would
make it simply criminal in me. I never think of it."
The captain colored: "I beg your pardon, Bruce: I did not know--"
"You have not intruded: you have not hurt me in the least," laying his
hand for an instant on the captain's knee. "It is not a matter about which
I have any soreness of feeling. The obstacle arose from circumstances: I
am not in any sense guilty."
Captain Swendon nodded and occupied himself with rebuckling his shoes. He
could neither answer to the purpose nor rid his face of the shocked alarm
visible in it. To have been told that Neckart was dying would have
startled him less, and seemed not so pitiable to him as to know that he
was shut out for life from love and marriage.
Neckart read his thoughts. "There's a difference in men," he said,
concealing a smile. "It would not suit you, captain, to go through life as
an anchorite or a Catholic priest, but it really agrees with me very well.
I am not a domestic man by taste, nor susceptible to woman's influence. I
have met a few women, of course, beautiful, and with the intellect and
wealth which would make them desirable wives; and I have no doubt if I had
been differently situated I should have loved and married. But it never
cost me a second thought to pass them by."
"But this obstacle--it may some day be removed?" ventured the captain.
Mr. Neckart's features settled into the hard lines again. "Not while I
live," he said.
If there was one quality in himself on which the captain could build with
confidence, it was his keen insight into other men. He read Neckart's life
as an open book. "Bruce is married already," he said to himself. "He was
precisely the kind of lad to be taken in by some creature that is now a
secret burden on him. Drinks or chews opium, I've no doubt, or has gone to
the devil with one jump. Tut! tut! He would not be divorced. I know what
his opinion is on that head. But she'll die: that sort of women never live
long.--It will all come right, Bruce," he said aloud. "There's more ruling
of eternal justice in all of our lives than we give God credit for. But
this matter astonishes me. I've heard of your intimacy with certain women
in Washington--leaders of society. I always thought of you as a marrying
man."
"Because I cannot marry I have the more right to accept whatever
entertainment or friendship women can give me," falling into his ordinary
easy tone. "I have the keenest appreciation for an ambitious woman who has
intellect and culture, and is alive with energy and coquetry. I know such
women. They seem to be full of subtle flame. Certainly, I would make a
friend of such a one. Why not? I would marry her if I could."
A moment after he looked up the beach, and seeing the captain's daughter,
smiled to think what an absolute contrast she was to this ideal live,
brilliant woman. She was sitting on a log, the dog asleep at her feet, her
hands clasped about her knees, looking out to sea, and he could swear she
had sat there motionless as the stretch of gray sand about her for an
hour. Such torpidity revolted Neckart. Neither did it appease him that the
nobly-cut, dim-lighted face, the mass of yellowish hair rolling down from
its black band, the coarse brown dress which hung about her in thick
folds, all gave him pleasure. In the moment he had met her first he had
felt an odd repulsion to this girl. The women with whom he had fraternized
were akin to himself: Jane, child as she was, was antagonistic. He felt
for her the same kind of irritated dislike as that which Miss Fleming gave
to her, and which people of active brains are apt to give to any creature
whose animus is totally different from their own.
What did the girl sit there for, thinking her own thoughts? Young women at
her time of life blushed and fluttered and plumed themselves when a man
came near who was of the right age to love and marry. And so they ought,
so they ought! Neckart was used to see women of any age plume themselves
when he was in sight. It was simple admission of his position. They knew
their own capital of beauty or wit, and showed him the best of every
point, just as a pheasant turns every golden feather to the sun when a
passer-by comes near. He liked these radiant, self-asserting women, to be
sure, very much as he did the silly fowl or a Skye terrier conscious of
its beauty in every hair. But beauty was so much wasted material on this
daughter of Swendon's, who did not seem to know she had it.
Besides, Mr. Neckart had always been thrown into contact with women who
had careers and aims. Each one of them wished she had been born a man, and
did what she could to snatch a man's prerogatives. One wrote, another
painted, a third sang; this one strove for political power in the lobbies
of Congress, that for money, the majority for husbands: they were wits,
litterateurs, society women. But for a young girl to jog on from year to
year striving neither for knowledge nor lovers, making her world of the
whims and wants of a weak-minded old man, composedly building up every
day models which she knew would prove failures to-morrow,--here was a most
inane life.
Any eye which had grown used to the flash and flutter of brilliant
tropical birds in a cage would be apt to find the little dull-breasted
swallow sitting motionless by her nest a very insipid subject of study.
Probably no other man, as active and busy in the world as Neckart, would
have wasted so much thought on a chance young girl sitting on a log. But
women being forbidden fruit to him, he was morbidly curious about them
all. Old Chrysostom, barred into his cave by an impassable line, was much
more inquisitive about the princess asleep outside than if he had been a
hearty young fellow free to go out and kiss and make love to her.
Miss Swendon came up presently, the dog marching alongside. "Father," she
said, "you are spending the whole day with Mr. Neckart. You have not told
Sutphen the town news. I am afraid the old man will be hurt."
"That's a fact: I'll go over directly. You will like to be alone a while,
Neckart, at any rate.--Come, Jane."
Neckart rose: "You are not going over to those rough fellows, Miss
Swendon? There are no women there."
Jane laughed. "_I_ am a woman," with an arch little nod. "One queen-bee
makes the whole hive proper, conventionally."
"Of course. But really those men are vulgar and fishy to such a
degree--Nothing but a missionary spirit can take you to them?"
"On the contrary," gravely, "they are the best-bred men I know. Their talk
is fuller of adventure and sincerity than any book I ever read."
"Still, stay with me. I have feelings to consider as well as Sutphen."
"Very well.--I will come over presently, father. Tell the little boys to
make a fire clear enough to broil the fish for dinner." She sat down and
called Bruno to her feet. There was a grave, childish simplicity in her
motions which was a new study to Neckart.
"I believe," watching her keenly, "you would rather have gone. Sutphen
would have been a better companion than I?"
"I don't know as yet. I have never tried you. I do know Ichabod."
"Or perhaps the truer courtesy would be to leave you alone with the sea?
You were making a picture of it in your mind a while ago?"
"No," knitting her brows. "I could not do that. I know people who look at
the sea or mountains or sky as so much canvas and gamboge and burnt umber
and bits of effect. They are very tiresome."
"You have imagination rather than fancy, then? You hear the secret words
in that everlasting moan yonder? You know what the mountains say to you at
nightfall?" Neckart vaguely remembered the jargon of sentimental novels,
the heroines of which always keep their heads on Nature's breast. He did
not mean to chaff any woman, but he would gladly have proved this one
sentimental and weak to explain his strong antipathy to her.
"No, I never thought of those things. But one grows tired in
town--housekeeping, models and all of it. My work is very light, but I do
not like to work at all. And here--the beach is silent and the sky blue
and the sea rolls--rolls all day long: it is like coming home after one
has been out on the streets."
"About as keen comprehension of Nature as the tree yonder," thought
Neckart contemptuously. But, after all, the tree was warmed, and its sap
ran stronger, and it grew and broadened in the sun and air; and that was
more than he could say of painter or poet.
He lay at her feet, leaning on his elbow, for an hour or more. He had
meant to gauge her intellect, experience and character in a few minutes.
It was a recreation which had sometimes amused him when with women. As
soon as his curiosity was satisfied he was done with them. But the
discoveries he had made in those pretty little dwellings innocently
opening their doors to wandering hearts of marriageable men! The miserable
shams inside, the traps, the dark rooms full of all uncleanness! To-day he
forgot his system of exploration. He began to feel the physical effect of
coming from close streets and striving work into this vast open space--the
drowsiness which men experience on high mountains or by the sea, and which
has a subtle, lasting enchantment in it. The damp wind bent and whitened
the stretches of salt grass in the meadows behind him; brown clouds swept
from west to east overhead in endless procession; the great dun-colored
plane of the sea rose and fell steadily: for the rest, except the shrill
pipe of a fishhawk perched on a dead tree by its nest, there was silence.
He spoke to Jane now and then, but for the most part forgot her. She had
fallen into the motionless quiet which seemed habitual to her. Some of the
brilliant women he knew would have dug holes in the sand, or chattered
gossip, or interpreted to him with much intellectual force the meaning of
land and sky, or have taken their last love-affair or other private little
misery to give words to the complaint of the sea. This girl seemed only a
part of the shore, as much as sea or sand. The sun warmed, the air blew on
her as on them: if they gave her anything besides, she too kept their
secret.
Occasionally Neckart roused himself to talk briefly to her, and noticed
then a blunt directness in her speech that would have appalled an ordinary
hearer. It was her habit and choice to say nothing, but if pushed to the
wall what was there that she would not say?
The dog, lying at her feet watching him steadily, did not give up to him
the secret of its own being or its opinion of himself; but if it once did
speak it would do both, and with no white lies in the words either. "The
girl is like her dog," thought Neckart.
She rose at last, and went across the sands to her father. Neckart was
soon conscious of an uneasy change in everything about him. The atmosphere
of sunlit rest was broken. The clouds only meant rain, the sand was sand,
and the sea but a wet swash of water: he began to look at his watch and
think of the trains. The influence that had quieted him so unaccountably
had been in the girl, then? He shut his eyes and tried to recall the
erect figure, the fall of yellow hair, the clear Scandinavian face. He
felt the same strong repulsion from her, yet in their brief interview she
had certainly affected him uncontrollably--brought him back to old boyish
ways of thinking. It was perhaps, he thought, because he was unused to
such absolutely honest women.
He sauntered up the beach, and in five minutes wondered how he had based
such magniloquent ideas on a child out for a holiday. The fishermen on
this solitary beach apparently made a holiday whenever Swendon and Jane
came, and humored the latter in all her vagaries. No doubt they would have
preferred to eat properly in their own kitchens, but the cloth was spread
on the sand beside the fire. The captain, with the perspiration streaming,
was broiling ham at the end of a long stick; Sutphen cleaned the crabs;
Lantrim's wife cooked the perch, and Jane herself was making the coffee.
"Don't speak to me: I'm counting," as Mr. Neckart stopped beside her.
"Five, six, seven. You can't trifle when you make coffee," peering into
the pot with the gravity of a judge on the bench.
The smell of the broiling ham in the salt air suddenly brought back to
Neckart a day when he had gone fishing with his mother in the old place in
Delaware. How happy and hungry they were!
"Give me your stick, captain. You are burning up," he said, sitting down
on the log beside him.
"You've been on this beach afore, sir?" said Sutphen, who was his
neighbor, and felt it his duty to play host.
"Never but once, when the Argyle went ashore."
"You were here fur the Treasury Department?"
"Yes. Did you know anything about that case?" eying him with sudden
interest. "It was a muddled account that was sent up to Washington."
"Likely. Yes, I knew. I've been in the wracking and life-saving service
thirty years come June."
When Jane came to that side of the fire twenty minutes later, none of the
crabs were cleaned, and the ham and stick burned black together while
Neckart held them in the fire.
"I ought not to have allowed two men to sit together: I might have known
they would gossip," she said.
Mr. Neckart had just made up his mind that Sutphen and the two Lantrims
were as shrewd, common-sensed witnesses as he had ever examined. He was
hungry too, and as they ate together he borrowed Sutphen's clamp-knife,
and told some capital stories, and handed about his cigars when they had
all finished.
"I misjudged that black-a-vised fellow," said Ichabod to Lantrim. "He's
consid'able of a man."
Lantrim nodded ponderously. One story or slow monologue followed
another--of shipwrecks, frequent on that murderous coast, of rescues by
wreckers, of "vyages" down the coast or to India, Africa, with plenty of
sailors' superstition in it all. Neckart lay on his back smoking, his
hands under his head. It seemed as if he were the boy he was on that day's
fishing long ago. His blood quickened and heated at these tales of
adventure, just as it used to do when he pored over La Perouse or the
_History of Great Navigators_. The afternoon was darkening, raw and cold;
their fire was a mere ruddy speck in the indistinct solitudes; a wall of
gray mist moved down the marshes toward them.
Jane, he noticed, was uneasy, watching her father anxiously after the
dinner was over, until Sutphen proposed to have some music and begged the
captain to sing. Then she was quite happy, sat closer to him, taking his
hand, and as his cracked voice piped manfully out some ancient
drinking-song she nodded complacently and beat the time softly with his
hand upon his arm.
Mr. Neckart watched her furtively through his half-shut eyes. She was
wrapped in her cloak, her head rose in clear relief against the background
of fog. The men and their wives, he saw, looked upon her as a child, a
straightforward little girl, with whom they had fished or cooked crabs
for years: very different from the ladies who came down in summer, and
were a fearfully and wonderfully made species of human being. Neckart
would have analyzed these women at a glance as easily as he could impale a
butterfly on a pin: why should he watch Jane as though she were the
Sphinx? The dark-blue eyes that met his now and then were the most frank
and friendly in the world, but the naked truth in them irritated him as
though it had been the gleam of a drawn sword. He sat erect, thinking that
if there was anything repulsive to him in a woman, it was physical
indolence, and a strength of any sort greater than his own.
Old Sutphen presently asked him if he too wouldn't give them a song. Now,
Neckart never sang except when alone, as his voice was a very remarkable
baritone, and he had no mind to make a reputation on that sort of capital.
He could not afford to be known as a troubadour. But he sang now, a
passionate love-song, of which, of course, he felt not a word: the air was
full of fervor, with an occasional gay jibing monotone. The words in
themselves meant nothing: the music meant that whatever of love or
earnestness was in the world was a sham. The men nodded over their pipes,
keeping time: Jane held her father's hand quiet in her own, looking
straight before her.
"Thank you, sir. Very lively toon that," said Lantrim when it was ended.
"Kind o' murnful too," ventured his wife.
Jane, with the last note, rose and walked hastily down the beach, where
the fog was heavy. She did not return. Mr. Neckart smiled: he could only
guess the result of his experiment, but he did guess it.
"Miss Swendon did not ask me to sing again," he said to the captain.
"Well, no. The song hurt her somehow. Jane had always an unaccountable
dislike to music," apologetically. "I'm exceedingly fond of it myself:
it's a passion with me. I enjoy anything from an organ to a jewsharp. But
she does not. When she was a baby it seemed to rouse her. She's a very
quiet little body, you see.--Go, Bruno: bring your mistress back."
She came in a few minutes, as they were making ready to meet the train.
She hurried to her father, caught his arm, and when they were seated in
the train still held him close: "Stay with me, father. Mr. Neckart does
not need you. Don't leave me alone again: _I_ need you."
"But, dear child, that is hardly courteous. He is our guest."
"He need not have made himself a guest. He has spoiled our whole holiday.
He has spoiled the whole dear old place for me," her eyes filling with
tears. "I shall never hear the sea again without hearing that song in it."
"It was a very good song, I assure you, Jane. I do wish you had a better
ear. Why, Bruce has a voice of remarkable compass. I fancied he struck a
false note once, though."
"It was all false--false and cruel!" vehemently. "And why should he sing
it there, where you and I have always had such good times?"
"I am astonished, Jane! But you never had any perception of character.
Bruce is such a thoroughly good fellow, I fancied you would be friends."
"I never saw any one before whom I disliked so much," slowly, as if to
collect her verdict with certainty. "He seems to me like so much
unmitigated brute force."
"Tut! tut!" said the captain absently, looking out to see how the early
wheat was coming on.
She touched his arm presently: "Father, you said you thought we should be
good friends. I never had a man for a friend but you."
"Certainly not. Good Heavens! what are you thinking of?"
"Most girls do," gravely, her color rising. "Oh, I know all about the
world. Miss Fleming told me that when she was my age she had a dozen
chums--hearty, good fellows."
The captain hastily put his arm about her: "All very well for Cornelia
Fleming, child. She's a middle-aged woman. But not for you."
"When I am middle-aged, then," looking up at him anxiously, "if I have a
friend I know precisely what he will be. Of fair complexion, placid,
truth-telling--"
"Yourself duplicated," laughed the captain. "But here is Mr. Neckart."
The two men took the seat in front of her, and as night came on and the
lamps burned dimly, Jane wrapped her veil about her head and fell asleep.
Mr. Neckart remembered at last the purpose of his visit in the morning.
"Surely something can be done to compel Laidley to leave the property to
its rightful owners. Have you stated the case to him plainly?" he asked.
"I? State it? Now, Bruce, how could I? If I were not the one to be
benefited by it, I'd put it to him forcibly enough. But as it is--No, I've
not the moral courage for that."
"But for your daughter's sake--"
"I know. I've thought it all over. But Jane and I can keep on in the old
way a little longer. Scanty and happy-go-lucky, but, on the whole,
comfortable." He was silent a while, and then in a cautious whisper said,
"I'll explain to you, Bruce. I might have made Jane's life easier if I had
worked. I know that. I know our friends look on me as a lazy, selfish dog,
a dead weight on the child. But--you are the first person to whom I have
ever told this--I have had for many years a disorder, an ailment, which
must in any case make my life a short one. Confinement and continued
exertion would bring on a crisis at once. My physician told me that five
years ago. Now you know why I have indulged myself. I still hoped some of
the infernal patents--" He choked, and turned to look out of the window.
"But your danger is another reason why you should not be kept out of your
property."
"Of course. But it's my luck."
"Does your daughter know this story?"
"No. Don't tell her, for God's sake!"
Nothing more was said until the train rolled into the station.
"Come, Jane, child," the captain called briskly. She rose and took his
arm.
Mr. Neckart took leave of them under the flaring lamps outside. "You have
left all the life and color of your face down in the salt air, Miss
Swendon," he said. "You will not mark this holiday with a white stone, I
fear."
"No," she said, waiting until he was gone before she spoke again.--"We
shall go to Cousin Will's now, father. I wish to say good-night to him."
"Very well, my dear. I'll leave you to read to him while I run round to
see if any letters have come. I feel confident somebody will answer my
advertisement about the scissors."