"I mean with Betty Fessenden, of course."
"O-oh!"
"I'm dreaming now of sailing on and on with her. The other night I
dreamed that she put 'dear' after my name, and that if we could only
sail and sail long enough she might do it again."
His half-closed lids hid the warmth in his eyes, but his voice shook
with the passion he struggled to control. She shrank a little.
"You needn't," he said. "Please don't. You can trust me absolutely. I--I
was merely dreaming, you know."
"I didn't mean to hurt you, Bob White--dear. Trust you? My presence here
shows that I do--you know that." Her fingers touched his hair so
fleetingly that he hardly dared believe she had meant it for a caress.
Presently she relinquished the wheel to him and took his place among the
cushions.
He noticed how round her throat was, and how deliciously white. The
rose-tipped chin and red mouth held him fascinated, until the glint of
bayonets in the eyes warned him to control his glances.
"You're the most adorable skipper I ever saw," he declared.
"I've a confession to make, Boatswain."
"Confess then, Nancy Lee."
"My ankle wasn't hurt that day in the brook. I didn't really stumble."
"What!"
She nodded contritely. "No. I did it on purpose. Wasn't it perfectly
shameless?"
"I've had a far-away feeling that you made a miraculous recovery from
that strain. But why did you pretend?"
"Just as a game. I wanted to see what the--the good-looking stranger
would do."
"You found out."
"Goodness, yes, didn't I!" They laughed together at the thought.
"Madge and Charlie Danton," she went on--"do you think they're really in
love? I mean, do you think their love will last?"
"Don't you?"
"Ye-es, I do. She has just enough _esprit de diable_ to hold him. It is
'infinite variety' that pleases him, I fancy, and Madge is twenty women
in one."
"You're a philosopher. By the way, where did you learn French? Do they
teach that in the 'little red-roofed schoolhouse' in Maryland?"
"Haven't I told you about my teacher? And I went to a very good school
in Baltimore, if you please."
"That reminds me that I know hardly anything about my own wife--only
that her name was Betty Landis. You once told me that your mother was
well-connected, Betty. Who was she?"
The mainsail sheet, which she had been carelessly handling, at that
moment slipped through her fingers, and the boom went flying out. He was
barely able to keep the sloop from jibing.
"Be careful, child," he warned. "Take a turn or two around that cleat
there."
"Bob White," she said, when affairs were again in order, "I've been
thinking--of what you must be giving up in marrying _me_. I don't mean
only your bachelor freedom, although I know that's precious to a man.
But you are giving up--everything."
"I'm lucky to get the chance."
"Perhaps I've spoiled your career."
"Nonsense!"
"It may not be nonsense. You are a man of a different world from the
country one you found _me_ in. It was only an hour ago we were married,
but I can see already that I was perfectly mad and unutterably selfish
to let you sacrifice yourself for me. A braver girl--a better
girl--wouldn't have cared what silly society might say. I was wicked to
marry you!"
"Tut! tut!"
"I'm perfectly serious--miserably serious."
"Then I'll be serious, too. I admit that you and I ought to be
different, but we aren't. I don't know why it should be so, dear, but we
both 'belong.' We're the same sort. You must feel it as well as I."
All that golden afternoon they sailed, and all the afternoon they
talked. Her mind played with a hundred fancies, grave and gay, and
Fessenden heard her with delight, and with ever-renewed wonder. She
seemed to him a sort of Admirable Crichton, possessing heaven-sent
intuition of all that was rare and charming and useful.
At dusk they lowered all sail, let go the anchor, and made the sloop
secure for the night.
Then, with his respectful help, Betty cooked the dinner, and served it
on a camp-table in the cockpit.
That dinner was Olympian. A sirloin steak, deliciously broiled--"I
intend to give you a _man's_ dinner," she had declared; French fried
potatoes, as hot as the flames they came hissing from; coffee, as clear
as amber; and fresh tea-biscuits which one was allowed to dip in Kitty
Hawk honey.
When the dinner things had been cleared away, they sat under the stars
and watched the lights twinkle here and there from lonely cabins
along-shore. Now and then Betty's fingers strayed over the guitar she
had borrowed from the West Wind. The light breeze sighed an answer
through the cypress and tamarack trees of the swampy cape near-by.
Betty pointed dreamily shoreward. "The 'swampers' down here are a wild
lot. During the war my uncle was attacked by them--on the way down to
his district."
"His district?"
"He commanded the Eastern Military District of North Carolina, you know,
and--and--" She broke off abruptly. "Oh, dear! My foot's
asleep--terribly! Will you put a cushion under it for me?"
"One minute," he said. "I don't quite make this out. If your uncle
commanded a military district here during the war, he must have been a
Federal general, a man of distinction, yet you--"
"My foot's asleep, and prickles dreadfully."
"Just a moment." She could feel the growing fixedness of his glance.
"I--remember--this sort of thing has happened before. On the
island--Rincoteague--when I asked you what you knew about Madge Yarnell,
you suddenly discovered that it was raining. This morning, too,
something was said about your mother, and somehow the sail got adrift at
that very moment. You had hold of it. And just now your foot falls
asleep in the nick of time. Betty, I don't like this sort of thing! I've
had enough confidence in you to marry you--to marry you very much in the
dark. Isn't it fair you should have confidence in me, a little?"
She was listening with half-averted face and a smile that baffled him.
As he watched her, a score of confusing recollections rushed through his
mind like fiery phantoms: Madge Yarnell's recognition of the envelope
received from White Cottage; her determined effort to accompany him
thither the next day; her theatric assault upon them, whip in hand, on
the road from Jim George's--even yet he found it hard to believe that
they had narrowly escaped a tragedy!
Harry Cleborne, Fessenden had then imagined, had warned him against his
pursuit of an innocent country girl, and had puzzled him by obscure
reference to another man, and on top of this had denied all knowledge of
Betty Landis.
He recalled a hundred reticences and reservations on the part of Betty,
natural enough at the time, but now possessed of a disturbing
significance. Her knowledge of the world; her voice and bearing; the
words she had let slip of her mother, of her Baltimore friends and
school, of her uncle, the Union general! What did these things mean?
Light began to break upon him. Madge had not pressed upon them that day
because she had discovered only him where she had expected to find
Danton. Cleborne had really babbled of Danton and the Other Lady. Danton
himself, in their talk on the beach at Kitty Hawk, had said that the
Other had been in seclusion--hiding from his pursuit of her--in a
farmhouse on the Eastern Shore.
He towered over Betty in sudden fury. "What! What _is_ all this? Who are
you? Who are you, I say?"
The smile died from the girl's lips, and she shrank before his white
face and fierce eyes.
Shame and rage so choked him that his words were almost incoherent, but
they were the more terrible for that. She cowered away from him to the
very limits of the gunwale.
"Oh, please!" she said. "Don't! Don't! Oh, please!"
The tenderness he had lately felt for her came over him in a wave as he
looked down at the shrinking figure.
"I--I beg your pardon," he said. "I lost my head. Don't be afraid--it's
all over now. I beg your pardon."
Without another word or look he turned and sought his room in the
forecastle.
Half an hour later, as he lay staring into the darkness, he heard a
muffled beat, as of a drum. Betty was playing her guitar in her room.
Gradually the drum-beat increased and quickened until it grew into a
continuous roll, a throbbing cadence that thrilled through and through
him. The roar of the wind and the mutter of the sea were in the
shattering roll of the drum.
At the very height of its clamor--while he strove in vain to catch its
meaning--it passed abruptly into silence. He was left staring into the
dark.