THE BEGINNING OF TRAGEDY
While Jane and Mabel sat in the sun leaning comfortably against the
friendly dune, a group of people came towards their retreat from the
crowded bathing beach.
“Goodness, I wish they would stay away from here,” grumbled Mabel.
“I’m still panting for breath and I certainly don’t want to move.”
“I reckon they won’t bother us if we don’t bother them,” suggested
Jane. “It looks like a swell bunch.”
“That’s what I’ve got against them. How can a body eat before such
elegance and Charlie and Breck will be back soon with food, I am
thinking. That’s a pretty girl in the Vanity Fair bathing suit and
scarlet cap--and look at the old gent in yachting togs! He must be
postmaster general of all the railroads or something grand. He looks
as though he owned the island and was thinking about annexing the
ocean.”
“He doesn’t seem to take much pleasure in his possessions,” laughed
Jane. “He looks sad to me.”
The gentleman in question was a powerfully built man of about sixty,
with iron gray hair, piercing blue eyes, a high Roman nose that seemed
to flaunt its aristocratic lines and a mouth and jaw of such force and
determination that Jane wondered at the impertinence of a wave that,
having leaped on the back of one of its brothers, came tumbling in all
out of order, wetting the immaculate white shoes of the nabob. He
looked indignant but evidently felt it to be beneath his notice.
Behind him trooped a crowd of young people, five girls and two young
men. The old gentleman was the only one not in bathing costume.
“This is a good place to go in, Father,” said the pretty girl in the
Vanity Fair suit. “I simply could not have gone in with that common
crowd up there.”
“Humph!” whispered Mabel, “that must be the princess.”
“Of course not! Such persons!” spoke up one of the other girls.
“No one knows them,” from another.
“Well, hardly!” drawled one of the young men who seemed to be dancing
attendance on the pretty girl Mabel had designated as “the princess.”
“I hope they can swim and know something about undertow and getting
‘boiled’,” murmured Jane.
“The snobs! It might do them good to get a good drubbing on their
stuck-up persons,” answered Mabel, looking at the interlopers with
round wondering eyes.
The interlopers in turn paid not the least attention to either Jane or
Mabel. If they had been sand fleas or skates’ eggs, their presence
could not have been more completely ignored.
“Sorry you won’t go in, sir,” said one of the young men to the older
man.
“I never learned to swim,” he answered with a certain haughty
indifference of tone which put the polite young man along with the
impertinent wave, the sand fleas, the skates’ eggs, Jane and Mabel,
among the things to be ignored.
“Strange! Your daughter is a beautiful swimmer--”
“Yes, beautiful!” chorused the girls who seemed to be bent on
flattering the pretty daughter.
“She does everything well,” said one of them.
“And your son is--” but what his son was Jane and Mabel could not
hear, as the gentleman turned on his heel and walked off up the beach
puffing vigorously at a long black cigar that Mabel insisted smelt as
though it might have cost a dollar.
“Lorna, darling, I hate for you to get your pretty bathing suit wet,”
said one of the girls, whose manner was even more fawning than the
rest.
“Oh, Lord!” groaned Mabel. “Just listen!”
“Lorna! Lorna!” Jane said to herself. “Could these be Breck’s people?”
Looking after the retreating figure of the impatient old gentleman,
she saw unmistakable lines of resemblance. He could be none other than
the father of the man she had promised to marry.
“Poor Breck! They are certainly difficult,” she said to herself. “But
the father looks sad. I believe he has been suffering, and the girl is
sweet looking and mighty pretty. It is just this lot of flatterers and
sillies that are ruining her. Look at the men! They haven’t a chin
between them and the girls ought to have a good strenuous course in
Camp Fire training to knock the foolishness out of them.”
She said nothing to Mabel about the possibility of their being the
Breckenridges. Mabel was not a marvel of tact and Jane felt that here
was a situation that must be handled delicately. She hoped something
would detain Breck and she could warn him that his father and sister
were on the beach. It might be hard on him to come upon them unawares.
She felt assured, however, that her Breck was equal to any emergency.
“I wish I could get my wind back,” said Mabel. “That ‘boiling’ has
done me up for the day. I wanted to go in the water again but I fancy
I’d better not.”
“You are panting, you poor dear,” said Jane sympathetically.
“I was scared about Charlie. I believe that did me up more than all of
the fancy somersaults I turned.”
“Why don’t you cuddle down and take a nap?” suggested Jane.
“I believe I will,” Mabel curled herself up in the sand and in a
moment was fast asleep.
Jane, glad to have quiet for her thoughts, directed her attention to
the bathers. The pretty Lorna had dived through the breakers and was
riding the waves like a veritable mermaid. She was a good swimmer and
seemed perfectly at home in the surf.
“Isn’t she wonderful?”
“Did you ever see anyone so beautiful?”
The flatterers were forced to shout their compliments in loud tones so
that the pretty Lorna could hear them above the noise of the breakers.
“Come in!” she commanded. The young men looked rather ruefully at the
curling waves and the girls took tentative steps in the direction of
their princess. But tentative steps are fatal on a beach like that
with a heavy uncertain sea. The “boiling” that Mabel and Charlie had
just undergone was nothing to the one that the timid young men and
maidens now were subjected to. It was the fault of one young man who
hesitated and was lost. Over he went and clutching wildly grasped the
arm of one of the girls, who in turn pulled down another and then the
merry war went on.
“Help! Help!” they shrieked.
“I reckon they can help one another,” said Jane grimly.
Just as one victim would stagger to his feet, another would clutch
wildly at his legs and over he would go. In the midst of this
confusion another cry rang out shrill and sharp above the rush of the
waters and the squeals of those being “boiled.”
“Help! Oh, help! I’m giving out!”
Jane sprang to her feet. In her amusement over the laughable
predicament of the unwary she had forgotten all about Lorna. Now she
could plainly see that the girl was in distress. Evidently she had
tried to come in to shore and was being carried out by the undertow.
She had lost her head and was struggling wildly. For a moment her head
with the gay cap and handkerchief went under, a huge wave breaking
over her.
Jane dived through the breakers. She was conscious of the fact that
the father was near her. He had turned and walked back towards the
beach, arriving near the friendly dune just as his daughter’s cry for
help rang out.
“My God! It’s Lorna!” he gasped. “Here!” he cried, grabbing one of the
struggling young men out of the breakers just as he was being thrown
up on the sands by a playful wave. “Here, you! My daughter is
drowning!”
“So am I!” gasped the chinless youth.
“You can swim--go get her! Get her man! I can’t swim a stroke.”
The frantic father was rushing up and down like a raging lion. By that
time, all of the party had come out of the boiling with no bones
broken but with rueful countenances.
“A nawsty beach!” announced the other young man.
“But my Lorna! She is drowning!” bellowed the father.
“Lorna! Lorna!” wailed the girls and the youths shivered and tried to
make up their minds to go in after her but the waves seemed to have
redoubled in force and fury. They rose up like walls and broke on the
shore as though determined to smash anything that dared approach them.
“A rope! A rope! Get a rope!” commanded Mr. Breckenridge. But nobody
seemed to know where to get a rope, so nobody got one. “Will none of
you go in and get my girl? Cowards!”
He beat the trembling young men on their cringing backs and tried to
shove them into the water.
“My God! My God! Why did I never learn to swim?”
The shrieks of the distracted friends of Lorna had at last attracted
some of the people from the regular bathing beach and the crowd began
to surge towards the scene of the disaster.
In the meantime Jane with sure eye and steady stroke had cut under the
combing breakers and reached the spot where last she had seen the
drowning girl. She trod water for a moment and peered through the
clear green waves. Ah, there was a flash of the pretty crimson cap and
handkerchief! Without a moment’s hesitation, Jane dived and came up
bearing a limp trophy.
“I reckon it’s a good thing she’s lost consciousness,” thought Jane.
“She can’t struggle and I have some chance of getting in with her.”
She looked back on the beach as a huge wave raised her aloft with her
burden, and wondered if she could make it. It seemed a great way off.
“Of course you can, Jane Pellew! Keep your mouth shut and breathe
through your nose; don’t fight the waves but let them take you in.
Think of the skates’ eggs that are thrown up on the sands, how fragile
they are and still safe. Think of Breck! Think of Father and Jack and
poor Aunt Min! Think of Lorna and what it will mean to Breck’s father
to have his child safe. Poor man!”
Holding Lorna’s head above water as much as possible, she began her
perilous trip ashore. She must time each wave and endeavor to ride it
instead of being overcome by it. Many times she and Frances had
played the game of saving each other and she was thankful for the
skill she had acquired. But she found it quite a different thing
saving Frances who inadvertently helped herself somewhat and saving
this poor limp girl who flopped so piteously and whose head was so
hard to keep above water.
“If Breck would only come!” her heart cried out.
Among the crowd that gathered on the beach there were many good
swimmers but, as sometimes happens in a crowd, a strange panic had
seized them. The run in the loose sand from the bathing beach proper
had winded most of them too and men and women stood shuddering and
watched the black-eyed girl make her fight.
“She will win! She will win!” they comforted themselves by saying.
“Lord! what pluck!”
“Who is it--the drowned girl?”
“Preston Breckenridge’s daughter. He’s the multimillionaire from
California.”
“Money won’t help him much now.”