A FRIEND IN NEED
That one more shock of surprise could overtake the returning castaways
before the final landing could be accomplished would have seemed
incredible to either Grenville or Elaine--and yet it came.
They had spent a number of wretched days--days far more miserable and
hope-destroying than any their dire experience had brought into being,
as the mere result of that final scene enacted in the moonlight by the
rail.
The steamer had touched in the night at some unimportant, outlying port
of call to which no one had paid the tribute of interest usual on the
sea. A single male passenger had boarded.
The man was Gerald Fenton. The message dispatched from Colombo had
fetched him, post haste, to this midway ground for the meeting. But
the meeting occurred in a manner wholly unexpected.
Like the wholly considerate gentleman he was, Fenton had made all
preparations for removing the startling elements from the fact of his
presence on the boat. Like so many of life's little schemings,
however, the plans went all "aglee."
Elaine not only did not linger in her stateroom in the morning late
enough to receive his note from the stewardess, but, when she hastened
up to the topmost deck for her early morning exercise before the more
lazy should appear, she literally ran into Fenton's arms at the head of
the narrow stairs.
Her surprise could hardly have been greater. She recoiled from the
contact automatically, before she had time to see who it was with whom
she had collided. Then a note of astonishment broke from her lips as
she halted, leadenly.
"Why--Gerald!" she managed to stammer, without the slightest hint of
gladness in her tone. "Here?"
"Well, little girl!" he answered, smilingly; and, coming to her in his
quiet way, he took her hands to greet her with a kiss.
A note of uncertainty forced itself to audible expression as she
slightly retreated from his proffered caress and received it on her
cheek.
"Well! well!" Fenton continued, "you're certainly fit--and brown! You
couldn't have had the note I sent to break the news. I tried to give
you warning."
"No," she said, constrainedly, "I've had no word. How did you get
here--come aboard? I don't see how---- It took me so by surprise."
"I'm sorry," he said, his smile losing something of its brightness. "I
boarded at midnight, when the steamer touched at Fargo. When I got
Sid's wholly incredible wire that you were both safe and well and
coming home---- But how is the good old rascal?"
Elaine's constraint increased.
"Quite well, I believe--as far as I know."
"Isn't he with you, here on the boat, going home?"
"Oh, yes, he's on the steamer."
Fenton was groping, without a woman's intuitions, through the something
he felt in the air.
"Don't you like him, Elaine?" he asked her, bluntly. "What's wrong?"
"Why--nothing's wrong," she answered, unconvincingly. "It's just the
surprise of meeting you like this."
"I'm sorry," he said, as he had before, his eyes now entirely
smileless. "I might have managed it better, I suppose---- Aren't you
a little bit glad to see me?"
Elaine attempted a smile and a manner more cordial. "Of course--I'm
delighted! But it takes me just a minute or so to realize it's really
you."
"Never mind. Take your time," he told her, indulgently. "Perfect
miracle, you know, that you and old Sid should have come through the
wreck of the 'Inca'--the sole survivors of the accident--and lived out
there--somewhere--on an island, I hear--and now be nearing home. I'm
eager to hear the story."
"Yes," she agreed, "it doesn't seem real to me, now. It's more like a
long, strange dream."
"I have only heard a little from the captain," he continued, forcing a
conversation which he felt was wholly unspontaneous and hardly even
congenial.
"Naturally, all his information----"
She saw his eyes quickly brighten as his gaze went past her to the
stairs.
"Sid!" he cried, moving swiftly forward; and Grenville appeared on the
deck.
His face was suddenly reddened, beneath the veneer of tan. But the
boyish joy with which he rushed for Fenton was a heartening thing to
see.
The two simply gripped, with might and main, and hammered each other
with one free hand apiece, and laughed, and called one another
astonishing names till it seemed they might explode.
"You savage! You tough old Redskin!" Fenton finally managed to
articulate, distinctly. "If it isn't yourself as big as life! And I
want you to know I haven't made your fortune--not exactly--yet--but
it's certain at last. And how about your winning my little girl?
Speak up, you caveman of the---- Oh, Elaine!"
But Elaine had fled the scene.
That moment began the tug at the ties of friendship and the test of the
souls of the three. It was not a time of happiness that thereupon
ensued. Elaine avoided both the men as far as possible. Grenville
alone seemed natural, and yet even his smiles were tinged with the
artificial.
He was glad to relate their varied adventures--the tale of the perils
through which they had finally won. But how much of it all Gerald
Fenton really heard no man could with certainty tell.
Fenton was neither a self-conceited person nor a blind man, groping
through life. Through the stem of his finely colored calabash he
puffed many a thought, along with his fragrant tobacco fume, and
revolved it in his brain.
Between certain lines of Grenville's story he read deep happenings.
That Sidney had saved and preserved Elaine, and battled for her comfort
and her very life, against all but overwhelming odds, was a fact that
required no rehearsal.
Mere propinquity, as Fenton knew, has always been the match-maker
incomparable, throughout the habited world. Add to the quite
exceptional propinquity of a tropic-island existence a splendid and
unfaltering heroism in Grenville, together with a mastery of every
situation, months of daily service and devotion, and the rare good
looks that Sidney had certainly developed--and what wonder Elaine
should be changed?
The change in her bearing had struck him at once at the moment of their
meeting by the stairs. He had never got past that since. When at
length his course was clearly defined and his resolution firmly fixed,
it still required skillful maneuvering on Fenton's part to manage the
one little climax on which he finally determined.
But night, with her shadows, her softening moods, and her veiling ways
of comfort, was an ally worthy of his trust. When he finally
engineered the unsuspicious Grenville to the upper deck, where Elaine
had already been enticed, evasion of the issue was done.
"It's amazing," said Fenton, in a pleasant, easy manner, "how I am
becoming the talker of the crowd, when both you fond adventurers should
be spilling out lectures by the mile. However, such is life." He
paused for a moment, but the others did not speak.
"The genuine wonder of it all," he presently continued, "is seeing you
both come back thus, safe and sound. I underwent my bit of grief when
the news of the monstrous disaster finally arrived, as, of course, did
many another. I thought I had lost the dearest friend and the--well,
the dearest two friends--the dearest two beings in the world to me, in
one huge cataclysm."
He paused once more and relighted his pipe. The flame of his match
threw a rosy glow on the two set faces on either side of his position,
as well as on his own. No one looked at anyone else, and the two still
failed to answer.
"Well--here you both are!" the smoker resumed, crushing the match and
throwing it away. "If I were to lose your love and friendship now----
But never mind that--I sha'n't! You were dead to me, both of you, all
those months, and mourned rather poignantly. That's the point I want
you both to understand--that I had accepted the fact of losing you
both, forever."
Grenville slightly stirred, but did not speak. Elaine was clasping her
hands in her lap and locking her fingers till they ached.
"Naturally," Fenton told them, quietly, "I conformed my thoughts to
your demise, at last, as we all must do in actual cases. I adjusted my
heart-strings, when I could, anew. Nobody else came into my life, to
occupy your places, for nobody could. Yet I did adjust things as I've
said. Well--now that brings us up to the point."
Grenville sank back against his seat, but restlessly leaned forward as
before. Elaine alone remained absolutely motionless, rigid with
attention, if not also with suppressed excitement at something she felt
impending. Fenton thumbed at the glowing tobacco in his pipe.
"It appears to me," he continued, "all the circumstances I have
mentioned being taken into consideration, that you two friends that I
love so well have so many times saved one another's lives that no one
living has the slightest right to think or to act as might have been
the case if you had not passed so entirely from his ken, and his plans,
and daily existence. His claims to your resurrected selves
are--different, let us say, or secondary."
The silence that fell for a moment became acutely painful.
"That's all I'm really driving at, after all my long and labored
preamble," Fenton concluded, deliberately rising and facing about to
confront the pair on the bench. "I recognize certain inevitable
things--and I know they're right--and the way the Almighty intended....
Don't let me lose my friends again.... Let's all be sensible.... I
don't ask or expect to be loved the way you love one another--but I'd
like to be old Gerald to you both."
He turned and went slowly down the narrow stairs, and his pipe trailed
a spark behind him.
* * * * *
After a time, when Grenville moved over and placed his arm about
Elaine, she struggled for a moment, feebly.
"I don't--I don't love you in the least!" she protested. "I hate
you--as I always have--and the way I always shall!"
Her arms went swiftly about his neck, however, in a passionate, fierce
little hug. She was laughing and crying together.
"All right," said Grenville, calmly. "That's the kind of hate I want."
He kissed her once on her upturned lips for every hour they had
suffered.
THE END