FLYING POINT
"We'll maybe return to Lochaber no more."
Far up the pond, at no great distance from the spot where "The
Aquidneck" had met her untimely and ignominious end, Flying Point
thrust out its tongue of land into the rippling water, which stole in
and out between its tiny coves so gently that scarcely a murmur could
be heard, except when a northeaster lashed the pond into a mimic sea;
and then the teapot tempest was so outdone by the giant waves outside
the bar, that it passed unnoticed, like the fury of a child beside the
rage of a grown man.
The Point took its name from the flights of ducks which passed over it
in vast numbers in the spring and autumn, their dark, irregular
squadrons black against the intense blue of sea and sky. Its low bluff
of gleaming sand was crowned by a grove of tall pines, through which
purled a tiny brook perpetually prattling to the sea of its little
inland life. Below the bank, stretched out a rod or more of level
beach where fires might be lighted and cloths spread by those who
wished to return to the gypsy habits of their forebears and sit down
as Nature's guests, to simple fare of their own cooking and serving.
A midsummer pilgrimage to Flying Point was a regular feature of the
season with the dwellers at the White-House; and it was a point of
honor for the old-timers to declare that last year's expedition was in
every way more successful than that of the present season. Newcomers
endured this superiority in silence, consoled by the prospect of
enjoying the same triumph themselves next summer.
Several times the date of this year's expedition had been set, and as
often changed. The last date had been fixed for the eighth of July;
but the excitement of the wreck, and the reaction of lassitude which
followed that catastrophe, put to flight, for a time, all thoughts of
amusement, and a fortnight elapsed without an apparent ripple on the
calm of existence at Nepaug.
On the second day after the wreck, Angus Costello and his sister took
their departure for New York,--he to collect the insurance on the
ill-fated "Mary Ann," she to report again for duty in the Army. With
the going of the Costellos, quiet settled down once more; but the
dwellers on the Point found themselves impatient of the very repose
for which they had sought Nepaug. Rest had turned to inanimation,
quiet to dulness, peace to stagnation.
Flint, usually unaffected by environment, found himself incapable of
any intellectual or physical exertion. He could not work. He could not
even loaf alone. Brady was an indifferent companion, subject to fits
of absence of mind,--more unsocial than absence of body.
There was only one resource left; the young men betook themselves to
the White-House. Life there could not be wholly dull, while a
perpetual sparring match was going on between Miss Standish and Dr.
Cricket, while Professor Anstice smoked his pipe serenely on the
corner of the piazza, and Ben Bradford openly adored Winifred,
heedless of outside observation or amusement.
Ben himself was an endless source of entertainment to Flint, so
vividly did his demeanor recall the rapidly receding days of his own
youth, when he too had felt the constraint which is born of the
assurance that all the world is fixing its gaze upon us and our
actions.
Ben never dreamed that he could be taken humorously. He regarded
himself with a deep seriousness, and planned innocent little
hypocrisies with a view to their effect on the public. He was anxious
to be supposed to handle a large correspondence, and took pains to
sort his mail in public, fingering a number of letters in his leather
case with a reflective air, as if he were considering what replies
they demanded, although their worn envelopes revealed them to the most
casual observation as at least a fortnight old.
He had the sensitiveness of youth, and spent much useless effort in
the endeavor to discover what people meant by their words and deeds;
when, nine times out of ten, they meant nothing at all, but were only
striving to fill up the gaps of life with idle observations or
diversions. He himself was fond of side remarks, intended to be
satirical, but falling rather flat, if dragged out into the prosaic
light of general conversation, as sometimes happened when Miss
Standish caught a word or two and exclaimed aloud: "What was that,
Ben? Won't you give us all the benefit of that last observation?"
Ben loved his aunt; but he did not like her.
She interfered sadly with his pose as a man of the world, by relating
anecdotes of his infancy, and stating the precise number of years
which had elapsed since the occurrence.
On the occasion of one of the daily visits of Flint and Brady, they
were made aware of unmistakable signs of a domestic unpleasantness.
They were no sooner seated, than Ben picked up again the grievance
which their arrival had compelled him to drop.
"You have told that story four times already this summer, Aunt Susan,"
he remarked truculently; "and I don't think it is of great interest to
the public at any time to know that I took a bite out of each one of
the Thanksgiving pies when I was five years old."
"I have _not_ told it before, and you were _six_ when it happened,
which was fourteen years ago next November," Miss Standish answered.
Winifred Anstice, foreseeing a battle, made haste to the rescue. She
called out from her hammock:--
"When are we going to Flying Point? I think we all need change of air
for our--ahem!--nerves."
Woe to the person who undertakes to divert the lightning from meeting
thunder-clouds; unless he be well insulated, he is sure to fall victim
to his own well meant efforts.
"Winifred, my dear," sniffed Miss Standish, "you may remember that it
was only this morning when _I_ asked when we were going to Flying
Point that you answered, 'Never, I hope--I detest picnics.'"
"Did I?" laughed Winifred; "well, it's true, and I cannot deny it."
"I must agree with you there," said Ben. "A picnic is an occasion
when all the food is picked and all the china nicked."
"A picnic," said Winifred, "is a place where you can accumulate an
indigestion without incurring an obligation. In this, it is an advance
upon a tea-party."
"Picnicking with people you know is a bore, Picnicking with people you
don't know is a feat of endurance," echoed Flint.
"Professionally, I am in favor of them," threw in Dr. Cricket. "I
often feel like saying, with the old Roman, 'This day's work shall
breed prescriptions.'"
"Oh, come now!" said Brady, "you're all trying to be clever. This is
only talk. I think a picnic is great fun, especially a tea-picnic,
where you boil coffee, and light a camp-fire, and perch about on the
rocks over the water. You would appreciate that last privilege, if you
lived out on the prairies, where there is no water, and the rocks are
all imported."
"Bully for you!" shouted Jimmy Anstice, who had been sitting by with
his hands clasped over the knees of his stockings to conceal the holes
from his sister's observant eye, but none the less eagerly following
the conversation. "You're a peach; and why can't we go to-night?"
"That boy is all right," said Brady, smiling. "He knows enough to
take the current when it serves. Off with you, Jim, while the tide is
out, and dig your basket of clams! Come on, Flint, and we will join
them at the Point! How will you go, and when?"
"I think we'd better go up in the Whites' sail-boat. There'll be room
for one of you," said Miss Standish, looking meaningly at her nephew,
for she had not yet forgiven Flint's indifference.
"That's good," Flint said cheerfully. "You take Brady. He's better
ballast; and I'll row up in my dory."
"A good excuse for coming late and leaving early," said Winifred,
mockingly.
Flint bowed and smiled imperturbably, without troubling himself to
offer a contradiction.
Miss Standish swept past him with her Plymouth Rock manner. "I will go
and look after the supper," she remarked, and added, as she reached
the door, "however much people may sniff, there's nobody, so far as I
know, who is superior to food."
Nepaug picnic suppers had been reduced to scientific principles under
Miss Standish's rule. There was a picnic coffee-pot and a
picnic-dipper, a set of wooden plates and a pile of Japanese paper
napkins. All these went into one basket, together with cups and
glasses and knives and forks. Another, still more capacious, held the
sandwiches and biscuit, the cake and coffee, the pepper and salt,
beside the jar of orange marmalade, and the pies surreptitiously
borrowed from the pantry, where they were reposing upon the larder
shelf, tranquilly awaiting the morrow's dessert. Everything was neatly
stowed away,--no crowding, no crumbling. Miss Standish was willing to
take any amount of trouble; all she asked was to be appreciated.
Flint certainly did not appreciate her. Her particularity he found
"fussiness," her energy annoyed him, and her well-meant interest in
others appeared to him insufferable busy-bodyism. More than once that
afternoon he remembered her with a sense of irritation. "A confounded
old maid," he called her to himself as he pushed off his dory from the
beach below the inn.
But no matter how irritable the frame of mind in which he started, he
could not help being soothed by the tranquillity of the scene around
him as he went on. The west was one sheet of orange. The brilliancy of
the sunset had faded to a tenderer tone. The spikes of the pointed
firs on the mainland stood dark against it. Over in the east, the moon
was rising, pale and spectral, with all her ribs showing like a
skeleton leaf. Jupiter shone out more clearly as the darkness
deepened and the shadows fell more heavily along the strip of shore.
"The gray sea and the long black land;
And the yellow half-moon, large and low,"
Flint quoted to himself. "What is it that comes
next? Something about
"'A mile of warm sea-scented beach.'
Must have been curiously like this. Where is Flying Point anyhow? Oh,
yes; there's the camp-fire."
"Here comes Flint," cried Brady, as he heard the grating of the prow
of the dory on the gravel.
"I should think it was time," grumbled Miss Standish, who had been
making great sacrifices to keep the coffee hot. For some inscrutable
reason, all the people with whom Flint came in contact felt impelled
to do their best for him, let their opinion of him be what it would.
"Well, we thought you must be lost!" called Brady from the height of
the rocks. "We have all had supper; but we have kept some for you."
"Thanks," answered Flint, from below, "I am sorry you had the trouble,
for I took mine at the tavern before I started."
This was more than the descendant of Miles Standish could bear. With
a bang, she emptied the coffee-pot and knocked out the grounds, as her
ancestor had shaken the arrows out of the snake-skin to replace them
with bullets. Henceforth, she was implacable; and yet Flint never
dreamed that he had given offence. Imperfect sympathies again!
Winifred Anstice, whose misfortune it was to be peculiarly sensitive
to disturbances in the atmosphere, jumped up from under the pine where
she had been sitting with Brady. "Come," she said, "let's all sit down
around the fire. I want Leonard to recite for us. Will you, Leon?"
Flattered, yet embarrassed, the young fisherman rose from his
occupation of tying up the baskets, and drew nearer. As he stood in
front of the fire, Flint looked at him with a thrill of æsthetic
admiration. His red shirt, open at the throat, showed a splendid chest
and a neck on which his head was firmly and strongly poised. His hair,
curling tightly, revealed the well-shaped outline of the skull, and
the profile was classic in its regularity. "And that little fool
doesn't know enough to fall in love with him!" thought Flint.
"What'll you have, Miss Fred?" asked Leonard.
"Whatever you like."
"Wal, then, ef you'd jes ez lief, I'll say 'Marmion.' I was learned
it at school." Throwing off his cap and striking a dramatic pose, he
began:--
"The Douglas round him drew his cloak."
It is marvellous, the power of strong feeling to communicate itself
through all barriers. True emotion is the X-ray which can penetrate
all matter,--yes, and all spirit too.
The hackneyed words burned again with the freshness of their primal
enthusiasm. Again Douglas spurned, and Marmion flung him back scorn
for scorn. It was not acting. Leonard Davitt could never have thrown
fire into a rôle which did not appeal to him; but this lived. He put
his soul into it, and he drew out the soul from his audience.
"I must go now," he said, when he had finished, having ducked his head
shyly in response to the applause, and picked up his cap. "I'm goin'
off at sunrise."
"Where are you going, Leon?" queried Winifred Anstice, coming up to
him where he stood not far off from the spot where Flint, in dead
shadow, leaned against the trunk of a giant pine.
"Goin' off bars-fishin' for a week with the men from the Pint,"
Leonard answered, and then added in a lower tone, "you won't forget
your promise, Miss Fred."
"No, I will not forget; but you must try not to cherish hard feeling."
"Oh, I don't say it's his fault. Mebbe it's hers."
"Perhaps it's nobody's, and perhaps there's no harm done after
all,--at any rate, none that can't be undone."
"Yes, there is," Leonard answered gloomily. "The past can't never come
back, and things won't never be the same."
"Oh, cheer up!" Winifred answered more hopefully. "Your going away is
the best thing under the circumstances, and I'll do what I can for
you; but I wish it were anything else."
"Thank you, marm, and good-bye!" With another shy duck, Leonard let
himself down over the rocks and sculled out into the strip of rippling
moonlight which stretched across the bay.
The moonlight fell also upon Winifred Anstice's face as she stood
looking after him, and showed a pathetic little quiver about the
mouth. An instant later, she dashed the back of her hand across her
eyes, and exclaimed, half aloud, "It's too bad; I've no patience with
him."
"What a clear night it is!" said Flint, stepping out from the shadows.
Winifred started a little. "I thought you were sitting by the fire,"
she said rather abruptly.
"Indeed," Flint answered. It was one of his peculiarities never to be
drawn on to the explanations to which most people are driven by the
mere necessity of saying something. After all, he had as good a right
to the place where he was as Miss Anstice herself. Miss Anstice
perhaps was thinking the same thought, for she made no response, only
stood twisting and untwisting a bit of lawn handkerchief which bade
fair to be worn out before it reached home. At length, with the air of
one nerving herself to a difficult task, she turned about and faced
Flint. Lifting her clear gray eyes full to his, she began
hesitatingly:--
"Mr. Flint."
"Yes, Miss Anstice."
"Will you do me a favor?"
"Assuredly."
"No, not an 'assuredly' favor, but a real favor."
"If I can."
"Will you do it blindly?"
"No, I will do it with my eyes open."
"You cannot."
"Try me!"
The girl shifted her eyes from his face to the path of moon beams in
which Leonard's boat floated far off like a dark speck against the
ripples of light. When she went on, it was in a lower tone, with a
note in her voice which Flint had never heard there before,--the note
of appeal.
"I am going to ask you a very strange thing," she said; "I would not
ask it if I could see any other way."
"Surely, Miss Anstice, you cannot doubt my willingness to oblige you
in any way. You have only to command me."
"But it is not to oblige me. It is--oh, dear! I can't explain, but I
want you to go away."
Flint rose instantly.
"No, no, not away from this spot, but from Nepaug. That's it," she
went on insistently; "I want you to leave Nepaug."
Flint stared at her for a moment, as if in doubt whether to question
her sanity or her seriousness. The latter he could not doubt, as he
looked at her eager attitude, her hands tightly interlaced, her head
bent a little forward, and a spot of deep red sharply outlined on
either cheek. Suddenly the meaning of her conversation with Leonard
flashed across his mind; but it brought only further puzzlement. He
motioned Winifred to sit down upon the great tree which lay its length
on the earth, overthrown by the last storm, and with stones and
upturned dirt still clinging to its branching roots.
"Are you sure," he said gravely, as he took a seat beside her,--"are
you sure that you are doing right to keep me in the dark?"
"I think so; I hope so."
"Of course I know you would not ask such a thing if there were not
something serious back of it all; and since it so nearly concerns me,
it seems to me I have a right to know it."
Dead silence reigned for some minutes. Then Winifred said, speaking
low and hurriedly:
"Yes, you are right; I ought to tell you,--I know I ought; but it is
so hard. Why isn't it Mr. Brady! He would understand."
"Perhaps if you would explain," Flint began with unusual patience.
"Well, then, it is about Tilly Marsden, who has been engaged these two
years to Leonard Davitt; and now she refuses to marry him, and he
thinks it is because she is in love with someone else. _Surely_ you
understand _now_."
"No, upon my soul, I don't. You can't mean that the little
shop-girl--the maid-of-all-work at the inn--is--thinks she is in love
with--"
"With you; exactly."
"But I have hardly spoken to her."
The silence which followed implied that the situation was none the
less likely on that account. The implication tinged Flint's manner
with irritation.
"I suppose I am very dull; but I confess I don't understand these
people."
"Have you ever tried to understand them?" returned Winifred, with a
sudden outburst of the indignation which had long been gathering in
her heart against the man before her.
"Haven't you always thought of them only as they ministered to your
comfort, like the other farm animals? Is it really anything to you
that this narrow-minded girl has conceived a very silly, but none the
less unhappy, sentiment for you?"
"I--" began Flint, but the flood would have its way.
"Oh, yes, it annoys you, I dare say. You feel your dignity a little
touched by it; but does it move your pity, your chivalry? If it
does--Oh, go away!"
Flint would have given much to feel a fever heat of anger, to flame
out against the audacity of the girl with an indignation overtopping
her own; but he only felt himself growing more cold and rigid. He told
himself that she had misunderstood him hopelessly, utterly. There was
a certain aggrieved satisfaction in the thought. He had risen, and
stood leaning against a tree. Winifred wondered at her own courage, as
she saw him standing there stiff and haughty.
"I shall go, of course," he said at length. "My absence seems to be
the only sure method of producing universal content. But let me ask
you one question before I go. Do you consider me to blame in this
unlucky business?"
Winifred parried the question by another.
"Why should I tell you, when you don't care in the least what I
think?"
"If I did not, I should not ask you, and I think I have a right to
demand an answer."
"I can hardly answer you fairly. Is ice to blame for being ice and not
sun? We cannot say. We only know that we are chilled. I always have
the feeling that with those you consider your equals, you might be
genial and responsive; but the joys and sorrows of the great world of
uninteresting, commonplace people about you have no power to touch
your sympathies. Of course, in a way, it is not your fault that you
never noticed Tilly Marsden's manner--"
"I am not a cad who goes about investigating the sentiments of--of
women like that. But you have your impressions of my character fully
formed, and I shall not be guilty of the folly of trying to change
them. To-morrow, I shall relieve Nepaug of my objectionable presence,
and, I hope, you will cease to fear me as a disturbing element when I
am far away at my office-desk."
"You are going back to New York?" echoed Winifred, uncertainly,
realizing all of a sudden what it was that she was sending him away
from, and to what she was consigning him.
"Yes, of course," Flint answered a little impatiently.
"I am sorry," the girl began lamely. It was just dawning upon her that
it was not so easy to control the destinies of other people, as she
had fancied.
"Oh, that is all right!" her companion responded more cheerfully; "New
York in summer is not half so bad as you people who never stay there
probably imagine."
"I don't know," said Winifred; "to me it seems dreadful to be shut up
inside brick walls, or walking on hot paving-stones, when one might be
sitting under green trees, or by rolling waves, breathing in the fresh
country air. But I suppose I feel so because while I was growing up I
never lived in a large city."
"Indeed! How was that? I should think your father's profession would
have kept him in the city."
"Oh, it does now, of course; but for years after my mother's death he
was so broken down that he could not bear to mix with people at all,
and he chose to bury himself out on a Western ranch, and there I grew
up with no more training than the little Indian girls who used to come
to the house with beads and things to sell. It was a queer life for a
girl; but it was great sport."
Winifred had almost forgotten her companion for the moment in her
thoughts of the past; but as he rubbed his hand across his forehead in
the effort to recall something, she mistook the gesture for a sign of
weariness, and reproached herself for her egotistical garrulity.
"I do wish," she said hastily, "that there were some way out of this
unlucky matter,--some way which would not send you back so
unseasonably."
"Never mind that," Flint answered; "my vacation was almost at an end,
anyway. I am really needed now at the office of the 'Trans-Continental.'"
"The 'Trans-Continental'?" echoed Winifred. "Do you work on that
magazine?"
"Yes, I do a little writing for it occasionally."
"Then perhaps you know the editor--the chief editor, I mean."
"Yes, he is a friend of mine."
"I envy you the privilege of calling such a man your friend. Oh, you
may smile if you choose, but perhaps, after all, you do not know him
as well as I do. I have never seen him, I don't even know his name,
and yet I have a clear picture of him in my mind. And he has been so
kind--so good to me. His letters have helped me more than he will ever
know." Here a sudden thought seemed to strike the girl, and she
lifted beseeching eyes to his face.
"You won't try to make him dislike me, will you? I know you never did
like me. I saw it the first time we met, when I was driving that
wretched colt, and we ran over your fishing-rod, and then, the next
day on the pond, and ever since, things have steadily kept going wrong
between us. So, of course, it would be quite natural for you to talk
about it all to him; and then he would never like me any more, and I
do want him to."
For an instant Flint felt a mad desire to keep up the illusion; but he
himself was too much shaken to have played his part if he would.
"Miss Anstice," he said, "_I_ am the editor of the
'Trans-Continental.'"
Without another word, he swung himself down by the pine-bough to the
gravelly beach, and, pushing off the dory, slipped out over the same
moonlit course which Leonard had travelled. Winifred watched him till
his boat had rounded the Point; then she turned back to the camp-fire
in a daze. Do what she would, she could not shake off the spell of
those last words: "_I_ am the editor of the 'Trans-Continental.'"