John was the riddle that I could not read. Among my last actions of this day was one that had been almost my earliest, and bedtime found me staring at his letter, as I stood, half undressed, by my table. The calm moon brought back Udolpho and what had been said there, as it now shone down upon the garden where Hortense had danced. I stared at John’s letter as if its words were new to me, instead of being words that I could have fluently repeated from beginning to end without an error; it was as if, by virtue of mere gazing at the document, I hoped to wring more meaning from it, to divine what had been in the mind which had composed it; but instead of this, I seemed to get less from it, instead of more. Had the boy’s purpose been to mystify me, he could scarce have done better. I think that he had no such intention, for it would have been wholly unlike him; but I saw no sign in it that I had really helped him, had really shaken his old quixotic resolve, nor did I see any of his having found a new way of his own out of the trap. I could not believe that the dark road of escape had taken any lodgement in his thought, but had only passed over it, like a cloud with a heavy shadow. But these are surmises at the best: if John had formed any plan, I can never know it, and Juno’s remarks at breakfast on Sunday morning sounded strange, like something a thousand miles away. For she spoke of the wedding, and of the fact that it would certainly be a small one. She went over the names of the people who would have to be invited, and doubted if she were one of these. But if she should be, then she would go—for the sake of Miss Josephine St. Michael, she declared. In short, it was perfectly plain that Juno was much afraid of being left out, and that wild horses could not drag her away from it, if an invitation came to her. But, as I say, this side of the wedding seemed to have nothing to do with it, when I thought of all that lay beneath; my one interest to-day was to see John Mayrant, to get from him, if not by some word, then by some look or intonation, a knowledge of what he meant to do. Therefore, disappointment and some anxiety met me when I stepped from the Hermana’s gangway upon her deck, and Charley asked me if he was coming. But the launch, sent back to wait, finally brought John, apologizing for his lateness.
Meanwhile, I was pleased to find among the otherwise complete party General Rieppe. What I had seen of him from a distance held promise, and the hero’s nearer self fulfilled it. We fell to each other’s lot for the most natural of reasons: nobody else desired the company of either of us. Charley was making himself the devoted servant of Hortense, while Kitty drew Beverly, Bohm, and Gazza in her sprightly wake. To her, indeed, I made a few compliments during the first few minutes after my coming aboard, while every sort of drink and cigar was being circulated among us by the cabin boy. Kitty’s costume was the most markedly maritime thing that I have ever beheld in any waters, and her white shoes looked (I must confess) supremely well on her pretty little feet. I am no advocate of sumptuary laws; but there should be one prohibiting big-footed women from wearing white shoes. Did these women know what a spatulated effect their feet so shod produce, no law would be needed. Yes, Kitty was superlatively, stridently maritime; you could have known from a great distance that she belonged to the very latest steam yacht class, and that she was perfectly ignorant of the whole subject. On her left arm, for instance, was worked a red propeller with one blade down, and two chevrons. It was the rating mark for a chief engineer, but this, had she known it, would not have disturbed her.
“I chose it,” she told me in reply to my admiration of it, “because it’s so pretty. Oh, won’t we enjoy ourselves while those stupid old blue-bloods in Kings Port are going to church!” And with this she gave a skip, and ordered the cabin boy to bring her a Remsen cooler. Beverly Rodgers called for dwarf’s blood, and I chose a horse’s neck, and soon found myself in the society of the General.
He was sipping whiskey and plain water. “I am a rough soldiers sir,” he explained to me, “and I keep to the simple beverage of the camp. Had we not ‘rather bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of’?” And he waved a stately hand at my horse’s neck. “You are acquainted with the works of Shakespeare?”
I replied that I had a moderate knowledge of them, and assured him that a horse’s neck was very simple.
“Doubtless, sir; but a veteran is ever old-fashioned.”
“Papa,” said Hortense, “don’t let the sun shine upon your head.”
“Thank you, daughter mine.” They said no more; but I presently felt that for some reason she watched him.
He moved farther beneath the awning, and I followed him. “Are you a father, sir? No? Then you cannot appreciate what it is to confide such a jewel as yon girl to another’s keeping.” He summoned the cabin boy, who brought him some more of the simple beverage of the camp, and I, feeling myself scarce at liberty to speak on matters so near to him and so far from me as his daughter’s marriage, called his attention to the beautiful aspect of Kings Port, spread out before us in a long white line against the blue water.
The General immediately seized his opportunity. “‘Sweet Auburn, loveliest village of the plain!’ You are acquainted with the works of Goldsmith, sir?”
I professed some knowledge of this author also, and the General’s talk flowed ornately onward. Though I had little to say to him about his daughter’s marriage, he had much to say to me. Miss Josephine St. Michael would have been gratified to hear that her family was considered suitable for Hortense to contract an alliance with. “My girl is not stepping down, sir,” the father assured me; and he commended the St. Michaels and the whole connection. He next alluded tragically but vaguely to misfortunes which had totally deprived him of income. I could not precisely fix what his inheritance had been; sometimes he spoke of cotton, but next it would be rice, and he touched upon sugar more than once; but, whatever it was, it had been vast and was gone. He told me that I could not imagine the feelings of a father who possessed a jewel and no dowry to give her. “A queen’s estate should have been hers,” he said. “But what! ‘Who steals my purse steals trash.’” And he sat up, nobly braced by the philosophic thought. But he soon was shaking his head over his enfeebled health. Was I aware that he had been the cause of postponing the young people’s joy twice? Twice had the doctors forbidden him to risk the emotions that would attend his giving his jewel away. He dwelt upon his shattered system to me, and, indeed, it required some dwelling on, for he was the picture of admirable preservation. “But I know what it is myself,” he declared, “to be a lover and have bliss delayed. They shall be united now. A soldier must face all arrows. What!”
I had hoped he might quote something here, but was disappointed. His conversation would soon cease to interest me, should I lose the excitement of watching for the next classic; and my eye wandered from the General to the water, where, happily, I saw John Mayrant coming in the launch. I briskly called the General’s attention to him, and was delighted with the unexpected result.
“‘Oh, young Lochinvar has come out of the West,’” said the General, lifting his glass.
I touched it ceremoniously with mine. “The day will be hot,” I said; “‘The boy stood on the burning deck.’”
On this I made my escape from him, and, leaving him to his whiskey and his contemplating, I became aware that the eyes of the rest of the party were eager to watch the greeting between Hortense and John. But there was nothing to see. Hortense waited until her lover had made his apologies to Charley for being late, and, from the way they met, she might have been no more to him than Kitty was. Whatever might be thought, whatever might be known, by these onlookers, Hortense set the pace of how the open secret was to be taken. She made it, for all of us, as smooth and smiling as the waters of Kings Port were this fine day. How much did they each know? I asked myself how much they had shared in common. To these Replacers Kings Port had opened no doors; they and their automobile had skirted around the outside of all things. And if Charley knew about the wedding, he also knew that it had been already twice postponed. He, too, could have said, as Miss Eliza had once said to me, “The cake is not baked yet.” The General’s talk to me (I felt as I took in how his health had been the centred point) was probably the result of previous arrangements with Hortense herself; and she quite as certainly inspired whatever she allowed him to say to Charley.
As for Kitty, she knew that her brother was “set”; she always came back to that.
If Hortense found this Sunday morning a passage of particularly delicate steering, she showed it in no way, unless by that heightened radiance and triumph of beauty which I had seen in her before. No; the splendor of the day, the luxuries of the Hermana, the conviviality of the Replacers—all melted the occasion down to an ease and enjoyment in which even John Mayrant, with his grave face, was not perceptible, unless, like myself, one watched him.
It was my full expectation that we should now get under way and proceed among the various historic sights of Kings Port harbor, but of this I saw no signs anywhere on board the Hermana. Abeam of the foremast her boat booms remained rigged out on port and starboard, her boats riding to painters, while her crew wore a look as generally lounging as that of her passengers. Beverly Rodgers told me the reason: we had no pilot; the negro Waterman engaged for this excursion in the upper waters had failed of appearance, and when Charley was for looking up another, Kitty, Bohm, and Gazza had dissuaded him.
“Kitty,” said Beverly, “told me she didn’t care about the musty old forts and things, anyhow.”
I looked at Kitty, and heard her tongue ticking away, like the little clock she was; she had her Bohm, she had her nautical costume and her Remsen cooler. These, with the lunch that would come in time, were enough for her.
“But it was such a good chance!” I exclaimed in disappointment
“Chance for what, old man?”
“To see everything—the forts, the islands—and it’s beautiful, you know, all the way to the navy yard.”
Beverly followed my glance to where the gay company was sitting among the cracked ice, and bottles, and cigar boxes, chattering volubly, with its back to the scenery. He gave his laisser-faire chuckle, and laid a hand on my shoulder. “Don’t worry ‘em with forts and islands, old boy! They know what they want. No living breed on earth knows better what it wants.”
“Well, they don’t get it.”
“Ho, don’t they?”
“The cold fear of ennui gnaws at their vitals this minute.”
Shrill laughter from Kitty and Gazza served to refute my theory.
“Of course, very few know what’s the matter with them,” I added. “You seldom spot an organic disease at the start.”
“Hm,” said Beverly, lengthily. “You put a pin through some of ‘em. Hortense hasn’t got the disease, though.”
“Ah, she spotted it! She’s taking treatment. It’s likely to help her—for a time.”
He looked at me. “You know something.”
I nodded. He looked at Hortense, who was now seated among the noisy group with quiet John beside her. She was talking to Bohm, she had no air of any special relation to John, but there was a lustre about her that spoke well for the treatment.
“Then it’s coming off?” said Beverly.
“She has been too much for him,” I answered.
Beverly misunderstood. “He doesn’t look it.”
“That’s what I mean.”
“But the fool can cut loose!”
“Oh, you and I have gone over all that! I’ve even gone over it with him.”
Beverly looked at Hortense again. “And her fire-eater’s fortune is about double what it would have been. I don’t see how she’s going to square herself with Charley.”
“She’ll wait till that’s necessary. It isn’t necessary to-day.”
We had to drop our subject here, for the owner of the Hermana approached us with the amiable purpose, I found, of making himself civil for a while to me.
“I think you would have been interested to see the navy yard,” I said to him.
“I have seen it,” Charley replied, in his slightly foreign, careful voice. “It is not a navy yard. It is small politics and a big swamp. I was not interested.”
“Dear me!” I cried. “But surely it’s going to be very fine!”
“Another gold brick sold to Uncle Sam.” Charley’s words seemed always to drop out like little accurately measured coins from some minting machine. “They should not have changed from the old place if they wanted a harbor that could be used in war-time. Here they must always keep at least one dredge going out at the jetties. So the enemy blows up your dredge and you are bottled in, or bottled out. It is very simple for the enemy. And, for Kings Port, navy yards do not galvanize dead trade. It was a gold brick. You have not been on the Hermana before?”
He knew that I had not, but he wishes to show her to me; and I soon noted a difference as radical as it was diverting between this banker-yachtsman’s speech when he talked of affairs on land and when he attempted to deal with nautical matters. The clear, dispassionate finality of his tone when phosphates, or railroads, or navy yards, or imperial loans were concerned, left him, and changed to something very like a recitation of trigonometry well memorized but not at all mastered; he could do that particular sum, but you mustn’t stop him; and I concluded that I would rather have Charley for my captain during a panic in Wall Street than in a hurricane at sea. He, too, wore highly pronounced sea clothes of the ornamental kind; and though they fitted him physically, they hung baggily upon his unmarine spirit; giving him the air, as it were, of a broiled quail served on oyster shells. Beverly Rodgers, the consummate Beverly, was the only man of us whose clothes seemed to belong to him; he looked as if he could sail a boat.
While the cabin boy continued to rush among the guests with siphons, ice, and fresh refreshments, Charley became the Hermana’s guidebook for me; and our interview gave me, I may say, entertainment unalloyed, although there lay all the while, beneath the entertainment, my sadness and concern about John. Charley was owner of the Hermana, there was no doubt of that; she had cost him (it was not long before he told me) fifty thousand dollars, and to run her it cost him a thousand a month. Yes, he was her owner, but there it stopped, no matter with how solemn a face he inspected each part of her, or spoke of her details; he was as much a passenger on her as myself; and this was as plain on the equally solemn faces of his crew, from the sailing-master down through the two quartermasters to the five deck-hands, as was the color of the Hermana’s stack, which was, of course, yellow. She was a pole-mast, schooner-rigged steam yacht, Charley accurately told me, with clipper bow and spiked bowsprit.
“About a hundred tons?” I inquired.
“Yes. A hundred feet long, beam twenty feet, and she draws twelve feet,” said Charley; and I thought I detected the mate listening to him.
He now called my attention to the flags, and I am certain that I saw the sailing-master hide his mouth with his hand. Some of the deck-hands seemed to gather delicately nearer to us.
“Sunday, of course,” I said; and I pointed to the Jack flying from a staff at the bow.
But Charley did not wish me to tell him about the flags, he wished to tell me about the flags. “I am very strict about all this,” he said, his gravity and nauticality increasing with every word. “At the fore truck flies our club burgee.”
I went through my part, giving a solemn, silent, intelligent assent.
“That is my private signal at the main truck. It was designed by Miss Rieppe.”
As I again intelligently nodded, I saw the boatswain move an elbow into the ribs of one of the quartermasters.
“On the staff at the taffrail I have the United States yacht ensign,” Charley continued. “That’s all,” he said, looking about for more flags, and (to his disappointment, I think) finding no more. For he added: “But at twelve o’c—at eight bells, the crew’s meal-flag will be in the port fore rigging. While we are at lunch, my meal-flag will be in the starboard main rigging.”
“It should be there all day,” I was tempted to remark to him, as my wandering eye fell on the cabin boy carrying something more on a plate to Kitty. But instead of this I said: “Well, she’s a beautiful boat!”
Charley shook his head. “I’m going to get rid of her.”
I was surprised. “Isn’t she all right?” It seemed to me that the crew behind us were very attentive now.
“There is not enough refrigerator space,” said Charley. One of the deck-hands whirled round instantly; but stolidity sat like adamant upon the faces of the others as Charley turned in their direction, and we continued our tour of the Hermana. Thus the little banker let me see his little soul, deep down; and there I saw that to pass for a real yachtsman—which he would never be able to do—was dearer to his pride than to bring off successfully some huge and delicate matter in the world’s finance—which he could always do supremely well. “I’m just like that, too,” I thought to myself; and we returned to the gay Kitty.
But Kitty, despite her gayety, had serious thoughts upon her mind. Charley’s attentions to me had met all that politeness required, and as we went aft again, his sister caused certain movements and rearrangements to happen with chairs and people. I didn’t know this at once, but I knew it when I found myself somehow sitting with her and John, and saw Hortense with Charley. Hortense looked over at Kitty with a something that had in it both raised eyebrows and a shrug, though these visible signs did not occur; and, indeed, so far as anything visible went (except the look) you might have supposed that now Hortense had no thoughts for any man in the world save Charley. And John was plainly more at ease with Kitty! He began to make himself agreeable, so that once or twice she gave him a glance of surprise. There was nothing to mark him out from the others, except his paleness in the midst of their redness. Yachting clothes bring out wonderfully how much you are in the habit of eating and drinking; and an innocent stranger might have supposed that the Replacers were richly sunburned from exposure to the blazing waters of Cuba and the tropics. Kitty deemed it suitable to extol Kings Port to John. “Quaint” was the word that did most of this work for her; she found everything that, even the negroes; and when she had come to the end of it, she supposed the inside must be just as “quaint” as the outside.
“It is,” said John Mayrant. He was enjoying Kitty. Then he became impertinent. “You ought to see it.”
“Do you stay inside much?” said Kitty.
“We all do,” said John. “Some of us never come out.”
“But you came out?” Kitty suggested.
“Oh, I’ve been out,” John returned. He was getting older. I doubt if the past few years of his life had matured him as much as had the past few days. Then he looked at Kitty in the eyes. “And I’d always come out—if Romance rang the bell.”
“Hm!” said Kitty. “Then you know that ring?”
“We begin to hear it early in Kings Port,” remarked John. “About the age of fourteen.”
Kitty looked at him with an interest that now plainly revealed curiosity also. It occurred to me that he could not have found any great embarrassment in getting on at Newport. “What if I rang the bell myself?” explained Kitty.
“Come in the evening,” returned John. “We won’t go home till morning.”
Kitty kissed her hand to him, and, during the pleased giggle that she gave, I saw her first taking in John and then Hortense. Kitty was thinking, thinking, of John’s “crudity.” And so I made a little experiment for myself.
“I wonder if men seem as similar in making love as women do in receiving it?”
“They aren’t!” shouted both John and Kitty, in the same indignant breath. Their noise brought Bohm to listen to us.
This experiment was so much a success that I promptly made another for the special benefit of Bohm, Kitty’s next husband. I find it often delightful to make a little gratuitous mischief, just to watch the victims. I addressed Kitty. “What would you do if a man said he could drown in your hair as joyfully as the Duke of Clarence did in his butt of Malmsey?”
“Why—why—” gasped Kitty, “why—why—”
I suppose it gave John time; but even so he was splendid.
“She has heard it said!” This was his triumphant shout. I should not have supposed that Kitty could have turned any redder, but she did. John buried his nose in his tall glass, and gulped a choking quantity of its contents, and mopped his face profusely; but little good that effected. There sat this altogether innocent pair, deeply suffused with the crimson of apparent guilt, and there stood Kitty’s next husband, eyeing them suspiciously. My little gratuitous mischief was a perfect success, and remains with me as one of the bright spots in this day of pleasure.
Vivacious measures from the piano brought Kitty to her feet.
“There’s Gazza!” she cried. “We’ll make him sing!” And on the instant she was gone down the companionway. Bohm followed her with a less agitated speed, and soon all were gone below, leaving John and me alone on the deck, sitting together in silence.
John lolled back in his chair, slowly sipping at his tall glass, and neither of us made any remark. I think he wanted to ask me how I came to mention the Duke of Clarence; but I did not see how he very well could, and he certainly made no attempt to do so. Thus did we sit for some time, hearing the piano and the company grow livelier and louder with solos, and choruses, and laughter. By and by the shadow of the awning shifted, causing me to look up, when I saw the shores slowly changing; the tide had turned, and was beginning to run out. Land and water lay in immense peace; the long, white, silent picture of the town with its steeples on the one hand, and on the other the long, low shore, and the trees behind. Into this rose the high voice of Gazza, singing in broken English, “Razzla-dazzla, razzla-dazzla,” while his hearers beat upon glasses with spoons—at least so I conjectured.
“Aren’t you coming, John?” asked Hortense, appearing at the companionway. She looked very bacchanalian. Her splendid amber hair was half riotous, and I was reminded of the toboggan fire-escape.
He obeyed her; and now I had the deck entirely to myself, or, rather, but one other and distant person shared it with me. The hour had come, the bells had struck; Charley’s crew was eating its dinner below forward; Charley’s guests were drinking their liquor below aft; Charley’s correct meal-flag was to be seen in the port fore rigging, as he had said, red and triangular; and away off from me in the bow was the anchor watch, whom I dreamily watched trying to light his pipe. His matches seemed to be bad; and the brotherly thought of helping him drifted into my mind—and comfortably out of it again, without disturbing my agreeable repose. It had been really entertaining in John to tell Kitty that she ought to see the inside of Kings Port; that was like his engaging impishness with Juno. If by any possible contrivance (and none was possible) Kitty and her Replacers could have met the inside of Kings Port, Kitty would have added one more “quaint” impression to her stock, and gone away in total ignorance of the quality of the impression she had made—and Bohm would probably have again remarked, “Worse than Sunday.” No; the St. Michaels and the Replacers would never meet in this world, and I see no reason that they should in the next. John’s light and pleasing skirmish with Kitty gave me the glimpse of his capacities which I had lacked hitherto. John evidently “knew his way about,” as they say; and I was diverted to think how Miss Josephine St. Michael would have nodded over his adequacy and shaken her head at his squandering it on such a companion. But it was no squandering; the boy’s heavy spirit was making a gallant “bluff” at playing up with the lively party he had no choice but to join, and this one saw the moment he was not called upon to play up.
The peaceful loveliness that floated from earth and water around me triumphed over the jangling hilarity of the cabin, and I dozed away, aware that they were now all thumping furiously in chorus, while Gazza sang something that went, “Oh, she’s my leetle preety poosee pet.” When I roused, it was Kitty’s voice at the piano, but no change in the quality of the song or the thumping; and Hortense was stepping on deck. She had a cigarette, her beauty flashed with devilment, and John followed her. “They are going to have an explanation,” I thought, as I saw his face. If that were so, then Kitty had blundered in her strategy and hurt Charley’s cause; for after the two came Gazza, as obviously “sent” as any emissary ever looked: Kitty took care of the singing, while Gazza intercepted any tete-a-tete. I rose and made a fourth with them, and even as I was drawing near, the devilment in Hortense’s face sank inward beneath cold displeasure.
I had never been a welcome person to Hortense, and she made as little effort to conceal this as usual. Her indifferent eyes glanced at me with drowsy insolence, and she made her beautiful, low voice as remote and inattentive as her skilful social equipment could render it.
“It is so hot in the cabin.”
This was all she had for me. Then she looked at Gazza with returning animation.
“Oh, la la!” said Gazza. “If it is hot in the cabin!” And he flirted his handkerchief back and forth.
“I think I had the best of it,” I remarked. “All the melody and none of the temperature.”
Hortense saw no need of noticing me further
“The singer has the worst of it,” said Gazza.
“But since you all sang!” I laughed.
“Miss Rieppe, she is cool,” continued Gazza. “And she danced. It is not fair.”
John contributed nothing. He was by no means playing up now. He was looking away at the shore.
Gazza hummed a little fragment. “But after lunch I will sing you good music.”
“So long as it keeps us cool,” I suggested.
“Ah, no! It will not be cool music!” cried Gazza—“for those who understand.”
“Are those boys bathing?” Hortense now inquired.
We watched the distant figures, and presently they flashed into the water.
“Oh, me!” sighed Gazza. “If I were a boy!”
Hortense looked at him. “You would be afraid.” The devilment had come out again, suddenly and brilliantly:
“I never have been afraid!” declared Gazza.
“You would not jump in after me,” said Hortense, taking his measure more and more provokingly.
Gazza laid his hand on his heart. “Where you go, I will go!”
Hortense looked at him, and laughed very slightly and lightly.
“I swear it! I swear!” protested Gazza.
John’s eyes were now fixed upon Hortense.
“Would you go?” she asked him
“Decidedly not!” he returned. I don’t know whether he was angry or anxious.
“Oh, yes, you would!” said Hortense; and she jumped into the water, cigarette and all.
“Get a boat, quick,” said John to me; and with his coat flung off he was in the river, whose current Hortense could scarce have reckoned with; for they were both already astern as I ran out on the port boat boom.
Gazza was dancing and shrieking, “Man overboard!” which, indeed, was the correct expression, only it did not apply to himself. Gazza was a very sensible person. I had, as I dropped into the nearest boat, a brisk sight of the sailing-master, springing like a jack-in-the-box on the deserted deck, with a roar of “Where’s that haymaker?” His reference was to the anchor watch. The temptation to procure good matches to light his pipe had ended (I learned later) by proving too much for this responsible sailor-man, and he had unfortunately chosen for going below just the unexpected moment when it had entered the daring head of Hortense to perform this extravagance. Of course, before I had pulled many strokes, the deck of the Hermana was alive with many manifestations of life-saving and they had most likely been in time. But I am not perfectly sure of this; the current was strong, and a surprising distance seemed to broaden between me and the Hermana before another boat came into sight around her stern. By then, or just after that (for I cannot clearly remember the details of these few anxious minutes), I had caught up with John, whose face, and total silence, as he gripped the stern of the boat with one hand and held Hortense with the other, plainly betrayed it was high time somebody came. A man can swim (especially in salt water) with his shoes on, and his clothes add nothing of embarrassment, if his arms are free; but a woman’s clothes do not help either his buoyancy or the freedom of his movement. John now lifted Hortense’s two hands, which took a good hold of the boat. From between her lips the dishevelled cigarette, bitten through and limp, fell into the water. The boat felt the weight of the two hands to it.
“Take care,” I warned John.
Hortense opened her eyes and looked at me; she knew that I meant her. “I’ll not swamp you.” This was her first remark. Her next was when, after no incautious haste, I had hauled her in over the stern, John working round to the bow for the sake of balance: “I was not dressed for swimming.” Very quietly did Hortense speak; very coolly, very evenly; no fainting—and no flippancy; she was too game for either.
After this, whatever emotions she had felt, or was feeling, she showed none of them, unless it was by her complete silence. John’s coming into the boat we managed with sufficient dexterity; aided by the horrified Charley, who now arrived personally in the other boat, and was for taking all three of us into that. But this was altogether unnecessary; he was made to understand that such transferences as it would occasion were superfluous, and so one of his men stepped into our boat to help me to row back against the current; and for this I was not unthankful.
Our return took, it appeared to me, a much longer time than everything else which had happened. When I looked over my shoulder at the Hermana, she seemed an incredible distance off, and when I looked again, she had grown so very little nearer that I abandoned this fruitless proceeding. Charley’s boat had gone ahead to announce the good news to General Rieppe as soon as possible. But if our return was long to me, to Hortense it was not so. She sat beside her lover in the stern, and I knew that he was more to her than ever: it was her spirit also that wanted him now. Poor Kitty’s words of prophecy had come perversely true: “Something will happen, and that boy’ll be conspicuous.” Well, it had happened with a vengeance, and all wrong for Kitty, and all wrong for me! Then I remembered Charley, last of all. My doubt as to what he would have done, had he been on deck, was settled later by learning from his own lips that he did not know how to swim.
Yes, the sentimental world (and by that I mean the immense and mournful preponderance of fools, and not the few of true sentiment) would soon be exclaiming: “How romantic! She found her heart! She had a glimpse of Death’s angel, and in that light saw her life’s true happiness!” But I should say nothing like that, nor would Miss Josephine St. Michael, if I read that lady at all right. She didn’t know what I did about Hortense. She hadn’t overheard Sophistication confessing amorous curiosity about Innocence; but the old Kings Port lady’s sound instinct would tell her that a souse in the water wasn’t likely to be enough to wash away the seasoning of a lifetime; and she would wait, as I should, for the day when Hortense, having had her taste of John’s innocence, and having grown used to the souse in the water, would wax restless for the Replacers, for excitement, for complexity, for the prismatic life. Then it might interest her to corrupt John; but if she couldn’t, where would her occupation be, and how were they going to pull through?
But now, there sat Hortense in the stern, melted into whatever best she was capable of; it had come into her face, her face was to be read—for the first time since I had known it—and, strangely enough, I couldn’t read John’s at all. It seemed happy, which was impossible.
“Way enough!” he cried suddenly, and, at his command, the sailor and I took in our oars. Here was Hermana’s gangway, and crowding faces above, and ejaculations and tears from Kitty. Yes, Hortense would have liked that return voyage to last longer. I was first on the gangway, and stood to wait and give them a hand out; but she lingered, and; rising slowly, spoke her first word to him, softly:—
“And so I owe you my life.”
“And so I restore it to you complete,” said John, instantly.
None could have heard it but myself—unless the sailor, beyond whose comprehension it was—and I doubted for a moment if I could have heard right; but it was for a moment only. Hortense stood stiff, and then, turning, came in front of him, and I read her face for an instant longer before the furious hate in it was mastered to meet her father’s embrace, as I helped her up the gang.
“Daughter mine!” said the General, with a magnificent break in his voice.
But Hortense was game to the end. She took Kitty’s-hysterics and the men’s various grades of congratulation; her word to Gazza would have been supreme, but for his imperishable rejoinder.
“I told you you wouldn’t jump,” was what she said.
Gazza stretched both arms, pointing to John. “But a native! He was surer to find you!”
At this they all remembered John, whom they thus far hadn’t thought of.
“Where is that lion-hearted boy?” the General called out.
John hadn’t got out of the boat; he thought he ought to change his clothes, he said; and when Charley, truly astonished, proffered his entire wardrobe and reminded him of lunch, it was thank you very much, but if he could be put ashore—I looked for Hortense, to see what she would do, but Hortense, had gone below with Kitty to change her clothes, and the genuinely hearty protestations from all the rest brought merely pleasantly firm politeness from John, as he put on again the coat he had flung off on jumping. At least he would take a drink, urged Charley. Yes, thank you, he would; and he chose brandy-and-soda, of which he poured himself a remarkably stiff one. Charley and I poured ourselves milder ones, for the sake of company.
“Here’s how,” said Charley to John.
“Yes, here’s how,” I added more emphatically.
John looked at Charley with a somewhat extraordinary smile. “Here’s unquestionably how!” he exclaimed.
We had a gay lunch; I should have supposed there was plenty of room in the Hermana’s refrigerator; nor did the absence of Hortense and John, the cause of our jubilation, at all interfere with the jubilation itself; by the time the launch was ready to put me ashore, Gazza had sung several miles of “good music” and double that quantity of “razzla-dazzla,” and General Rieppe was crying copiously, and assuring everybody that God was very good to him. But Kitty had told us all that she intended Hortense to remain quiet in her cabin; and she kept her word.
Quite suddenly, as the launch was speeding me toward Kings Port, I exclaimed aloud: “The cake!”
And, I thought, the cake was now settled forever.
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