On the morning following the breaking of his water cask John Woolfolk
saw the slender figure of Millie on the beach. She waved and called,
her voice coming thin and clear across the water:
"Are visitors--encouraged?"
He sent Halvard in with the tender, and as they approached, dropped a
gangway over the _Gar's_ side. She stepped lightly down into the
cockpit with a naïve expression of surprise at the yacht's immaculate
order. The sails lay precisely housed, the stays, freshly tarred,
glistened in the sun, the brasswork and newly varnished mahogany
shone, the mathematically coiled ropes rested on a deck as spotless as
wood could be scraped.
"Why," she exclaimed, "it couldn't be neater if you were two nice old
ladies!"
"I warn you," Woolfolk replied, "Halvard will not regard that
particularly as a compliment. He will assure you that the order of
a proper yacht is beyond the most ambitious dream of a mere
housekeeper."
She laughed as Halvard placed a chair for her. She was, Woolfolk
thought, lighter in spirit on the ketch than she had been on shore;
there was the faintest imaginable stain on her petal-like cheeks; her
eyes, like olive leaves, were almost gay. She sat with her slender
knees crossed, her fine arms held with hands clasped behind her head,
and clad in a crisply ironed, crude white dress, into the band of
which she had thrust a spray of orange blossoms.
John Woolfolk was increasingly conscious of her peculiar charm. Millie
Stope, he suddenly realized, was like the wild oranges in the
neglected grove at her door. A man brought in contact with her
magnetic being charged with appealing and mysterious emotions, in a
setting of exotic night and black sea, would find other women, the
ordinary concourse of society, insipid--like faintly sweetened water.
She was entirely at home on the ketch, sitting against the immaculate
rim of deck and the sea. He resented that familiarity as an
unwarranted intrusion of the world he had left. Other people, women
among them, had unavoidably crossed his deck, but they had been
patently alien, momentary; but Millie, with her still delight at the
yacht's compact comfort, her intuitive comprehension of its various
details--the lamps set in gimbals, the china racks and chart cases
slung overhead--entered at once into the spirit of the craft that was
John Woolfolk's sole place of being.
He was now disturbed by the ease with which she had established
herself both in the yacht and in his imagination. He had thought,
after so many years, to have destroyed all the bonds which ordinarily
connect men with life; but now a mere curiosity had grown into a
tangible interest, and the interest showed unmistakable signs of
becoming sympathy.
She smiled at him from her position by the wheel; and he instinctively
responded with such an unaccustomed, ready warmth that he said
abruptly, seeking refuge in occupation:
"Why not reach out to sea? The conditions are perfect."
"Ah, please!" she cried. "Just to take up the anchor would thrill me
for months."
A light west wind was blowing; and deliberate, exactly spaced swells,
their tops laced with iridescent spray, were sweeping in from a sea
like a glassy blue pavement. Woolfolk issued a short order, and the
sailor moved forward with his customary smooth swiftness. The sails
were shaken loose, the mainsail slowly spread its dazzling expanse to
the sun, the jib and jigger were trimmed, and the anchor came up with
a short rush.
Millie rose with her arms outspread, her chin high and eyes closed.
"Free!" she proclaimed with a slow, deep breath.
The sails filled and the ketch forged ahead. John Woolfolk, at the
wheel, glanced at the chart section beside him.
"There's four feet on the bar at low water," he told Halvard. "The
tide's at half flood now."
The _Gar_ increased her speed, slipping easily out of the bay, gladly,
it seemed to Woolfolk, turning toward the sea. The bow rose, and the
ketch dipped forward over a spent wave. Millie Stope grasped the
wheelbox. "Free!" she said again with shining eyes.
The yacht rose more sharply, hung on a wave's crest and slid lightly
downward. Woolfolk, with a sinewy, dark hand directing their course,
was intent upon the swelling sails. Once he stopped, tightening a
halyard, and the sailor said:
"The main peak won't flatten, sir."
The swells grew larger. The _Gar_ climbed their smooth heights and
coasted like a feather beyond. Directly before the yacht they were
unbroken, but on either side they foamed into a silver quickly
reabsorbed in the deeper water within the bar.
Woolfolk turned from his scrutiny of the ketch to his companion, and
was surprised to see her, with all the joy evaporated from her
countenance, clinging rigidly to the rail. He said to himself,
"Seasick." Then he realized that it was not a physical illness that
possessed her, but a profound, increasing terror. She endeavored to
smile back at his questioning gaze, and said in a small, uncertain
voice:
"It's so--so big!"
For a moment he saw in her a clear resemblance to the shrinking figure
of Lichfield Stope. It was as though suddenly she had lost her fine
profile and become indeterminate, shadowy. The grey web of the old
deflection in Virginia extended over her out of the past--of the past
that, Woolfolk thought, would not die.
The _Gar_ rose higher still, dropped into the deep, watery valley, and
the woman's face was drawn and wet, the back of her straining hand was
dead white. Without further delay John Woolfolk put the wheel sharply
over and told his man, "We're going about." Halvard busied himself
with the shaking sails.
"Really--I'd rather you didn't," Millie gasped. "I must learn ... no
longer a child."
But Woolfolk held the ketch on her return course; his companion's
panic was growing beyond her control. They passed once more between
the broken waves and entered the still bay with its border of
flowering earth. There, when the yacht had been anchored, Millie sat
gazing silently at the open sea whose bigness had so unexpectedly
distressed her. Her face was pinched, her mouth set in a straight,
hard line. That, somehow, suggested to Woolfolk the enigmatic
governess; it was in contradiction to the rest.
"How strange," she said at last in an insuperably weary voice, "to be
forced back to this place that I loathe, by myself, by my own
cowardice. It's exactly as if my spirit were chained--then the body
could never be free. What is it," she demanded of John Woolfolk, "that
lives in our own hearts and betrays our utmost convictions and
efforts, and destroys us against all knowledge and desire?"
"It may be called heredity," he replied; "that is its simplest phase.
The others extend into the realms of the fantastic."
"It's unjust," she cried bitterly, "to be condemned to die in a pit
with all one's instinct in the sky!"
The old plea of injustice quivered for a moment over the water and
then died away. John Woolfolk had made the same passionate protest, he
had cried it with clenched hands at the withdrawn stars, and the
profound inattention of Nature had appalled his agony. A thrill of
pity moved him for the suffering woman beside him. Her mouth was still
unrelaxed. There was in her the material for a struggle against the
invidious past.
In her slender frame the rebellion took on an accent of the heroic.
Woolfolk recalled how utterly he had gone down before mischance. But
his case had been extreme, he had suffered an unendurable wrong at the
hand of Fate. Halvard diverted his thoughts by placing before them a
tray of sugared pineapple and symmetrical cakes. Millie, too, lost her
tension; she showed a feminine pleasure at the yacht's fine napkins,
approved the polish of the glass.
"It's all quite wonderful," she said.
"I have nothing else to care for," Woolfolk told her.
"No place nor people on land?"
"None."
"And you are satisfied?"
"Absolutely," he replied with an unnecessary emphasis. He was, he told
himself aggressively; he wanted nothing more from living and had
nothing to give. Yet his pity for Millie Stope mounted obscurely,
bringing with it thoughts, dim obligations and desires, to which he
had declared himself dead.
"I wonder if you are to be envied?" she queried.
A sudden astounding willingness to speak of himself, even of the past,
swept over him.
"Hardly," he replied. "All the things that men value were killed for
me in an instant, in the flutter of a white skirt."
"Can you talk about it?"
"There's almost nothing to tell; it was so unrelated, so senseless and
blind. It can't be dressed into a story, it has no moral--no meaning.
Well--it was twelve years ago. I had just been married, and we had
gone to a property in the country. After two days I had to go into
town, and when I came back Ellen met me in a breaking cart. It was a
flag station, buried in maples, with a white road winding back to
where we were staying.
"Ellen had trouble in holding the horse when the train left, and the
beast shied going from the station. It was Monday, clothes hung from a
line in a side yard and a skirt fluttered in a little breeze. The
horse reared, the strapped back of the seat broke, and Ellen was
thrown--on her head. It killed her."
He fell silent. Millie breathed sharply, and a ripple struck with a
faint slap on the yacht's side. Then: "One can't allow that," he
continued in a lower voice, as if arguing with himself; "arbitrary,
wanton; impossible to accept such conditions----
"She was young," he once more took up the narrative; "a girl in a
tennis skirt with a gay scarf about her waist--quite dead in a second.
The clothes still fluttered on the line. You see," he ended, "nothing
instructive, tragic--only a crude dissonance."
"Then you left everything?"
He failed to answer, and she gazed with a new understanding and
interest over the _Gar_. Her attention was attracted to the beach,
and, following her gaze, John Woolfolk saw the bulky figure of
Nicholas gazing at them from under his palm. A palpable change, a
swift shadow, enveloped Millie Stope.
"I must go back," she said uneasily; "there will be dinner, and my
father has been alone all morning."
But Woolfolk was certain that, however convincing the reasons she put
forward, it was none of these that was taking her so hurriedly ashore.
The dread that for the past few hours had almost vanished from her
tones, her gaze, had returned multiplied. It was, he realized, the
objective fear; her entire being was shrinking as if in anticipation
of an imminent calamity, a physical blow.
Woolfolk himself put her on the beach; and, with the tender canted on
the sand, steadied her spring. As her hand rested on his arm it
gripped him with a sharp force; a response pulsed through his body;
and an involuntary color rose in her pale, fine cheeks.
Nicholas, stolidly set with his shoes half buried in the sand,
surveyed them without a shade of feeling on his thick countenance. But
Woolfolk saw that the other's fingers were crawling toward his pocket.
He realized that the man's dully smiling mask concealed sultry,
ungoverned emotions, blind springs of hate.