A Dozen Ways Of Love Part 16

They bought a bit of the beach for a trifle of money. They built a boat-house, of which the upper half was one long dormitory, with a great balcony at the end over the water which served as kitchen and dining-hall. The ground floor was the lake itself, and each man who could buy a boat tethered it there. The property, boats excepted, was in common. By and by they bought a field in which they grew vegetables; later they bought two cows and a pasture. The produce of the herd and the farm helped to furnish forth the table. This accretion of wealth took several years; some of the older men grew richer, and took to themselves wives and villas; the ranks were always filled up by more impecunious bachelors. The bachelors called themselves 'The Syndicate.'

The plan worked well, chiefly because of the fine air and the sunshine, the warm starry nights, and, above all, the witchery of the lake, which is to every man who has spent days and nights upon it like a mystical lady-love, ever changeful and ever charming. Then, too, there was the contrast with the hot city; the sense of need fulfilled makes men good-natured. The one servant of the establishment, an old man who made the beds and the dinners, was not a professional cook; the meals were often indifferent; yet the Syndicate did not quarrel among themselves.

Some outlet for temper perhaps was needful. At any rate they had one outside quarrel with an old Welshman named Johns, a farmer of great importance in the place, who had sold them the land and tried, in their opinion, to cheat them afterwards about the boundaries. Their united rage waxed hot against Johns, and he, on his side, did nothing to propitiate. The quarrel came to no end; it was a feud. 'Esprit de corps,' like the fumes of wine, gives men a wholly unreasonable sense of complacence in themselves and their belongings, whatever the belongings may happen to be. The Syndicate learned to cherish this feud as a valuable possession.

The Syndicate, as has been seen, had one house, one servant, and one enemy. It also had one Baby. The Baby was the youngest member of the community, a pretty boy who by some chance favour had obtained a bed in the dormitory at the hoyden age of nineteen. He had a tendency to chubbiness, and his moustache, when it did come, was merely a silken whisp, hardly visible. He did some f.a.gging in return for the extraordinary favour of adoption. The Baby from the first was entirely accustomed to being 'sat upon.' He had no unnecessary independence of mind. At twenty-one he still continued to be 'Baby.'

All the affairs of the Syndicate flourished, including the feud with the neighbouring landowner. All went well with the men and their boats and the Baby, until, at length, upon one fateful day for the latter, there came a young person to the locality who made an addition to the household of Farmer Johns.

'Old Johns has got a niece,' said the bachelors sitting at dinner, as if the niece had come fresh to the world as babies do, and had not held the same relation to old Johns for twenty-five years. Still, it was true she had never been in the old man's possession before, and now she had arrived at his house, a sudden vision of delight as seen from the road or on the verandah.

Now Helen Johns was a beauty; no one unbia.s.sed by the party spirit of a time-honoured feud would have denied that. She was not, it is true, of the ordinary type of beauty, whose chief ornament is an effort at captivation. She did not curl her hair; she did not lift her eyes and smile when she was talking to men; she did not trouble herself to put on her prettiest gown when the evening train came in, bringing the bachelors from the city. She was tall--five foot eight in her stockings; all her muscles were well developed; there was nothing sylph-like about her waist, but all her motions had a strong, gentle grace of their own that bespoke health and dignity. She had a profession, too, which was much beneath most of the be-crimped and smile-wreathed maidens who basked in the favour of the bachelors. She had been to New York and had learned to teach gymnastics, the very newest sort; 'Delsart' or 'Emerson,' or some such name, attached to the rhythmic motions she performed. The Syndicate had no opportunity to criticise the gymnastic performance, for they had not the honour of her acquaintance; they criticised everything else, the smooth hair, the high brow, the well-proportioned waist, the profession; they decided that she was not beautiful.

There were, roughly speaking, two cla.s.ses of girls in this summer settlement, each held in favour by the Syndicate men according as personal taste might dispose. There were the girls who in a cheerful manner were ever to be found walking or boating in such hours and places as would a.s.suredly bring them into contact with the happy bachelors, and there were those who would not 'for the world' have done such a thing, who sedulously shunned such paths, and had to be much sought after before they were found. Now it chanced that Helen Johns was seen to row alone in her uncle's boat right across the very front of the Syndicate boat-house, at the very hour when the a.s.sembled members were eating roast beef upon the verandah above and arriving at their decisions concerning her, and she did not look as if she cared in the least whether twenty-four pair of eyes were bent upon her or not. To be sure, it was her nearest way home from the post-office across the bay, and the post came in at this evening hour. No one could find any fault, not even any of the bachelors, but none the less did the affront sink deep into their hearts. It added a new zest to the old feud. 'We do not see that she is beautiful,' they cried over their dinner. 'We should not care for Helen of Troy if she looked like that.'

The Baby dissented; the Baby actually had the 'cheek' to say, right there aloud at the banquet, that he might not be a man of taste, but, for his part, he thought she looked 'the jolliest girl' he had ever seen. In his heart he meant that he thought she looked like a G.o.ddess or an angel (for the Baby was a reverent youth), but he veiled his real feeling under this reticent phrase.

One and all they spoke to him, spoke loudly, spoke severely. 'Baby,'

they said, 'if you have any dealings with the niece of Farmer Johns we'll kick you out of this.'

It was a romantic situation; love has proverbially thriven in the atmosphere of a family feud. The Baby felt this, but he felt also that he could not run the risk of being kicked out of the Syndicate. The Baby did sums in a big hot bank all day; he had no dollars to spare, there was no other place upon the lake where he could afford to live, and he had a canoe of his own which his uncle had given him. Hiawatha did not love the darling of his creation more than the Baby loved his cedar-wood canoe. All this made him conceal carefully that mysterious sensation of unrestful delight which he experienced every time he saw Miss Helen Johns. This, at least, in the first stage of his love-sickness.

Fate was hard; she led the Baby, all cheerful and unsuspecting, to spend an evening at a picnic tea in a wood a mile or more from the sh.o.r.e.

Mischievous Fate! She led him to flirt frivolously until long after dark with a girl that he cared nothing at all about, and then whispered in his ear that he would get home the quicker if in the obscurity he ran across the Johns' farm. Fate, laughing in her sleeve, led him to pa.s.s with noiseless footsteps quite near the house itself; then she was content to leave him to his own devices, for through the open window he caught sight of Helen Johns doing her gymnastics. Her figure was all aglow with the yellow lamplight; she was happy in the poetry of her motions and in the delight that the family circle took in watching them.

The Baby was in the dark and the falling dew; he was uncomfortable, for he had to stand on tiptoe, but nothing would have induced him to ease his strained att.i.tude. The pangs of a fierce discontent took possession of his breast.

Art was consulted in the gymnasium in which Miss Johns had studied; the theory was that only that which is beautiful is healthful. Sometimes she poised herself on tiptoe with one arm waved toward heaven, an angel all ready, save the wings, for aerial flight. Sometimes she seemed to hover above the ground like a running Mercury. Sometimes she stood, a hand behind her ear, listening as a maid might who was flying from danger in some enchanted land. Often she waved her hands slowly as if weaving a spell.

A spell was cast over the soul of the Baby; he held himself against the extreme edge of a verandah; his mouth remained open as if he were drinking in the beams from the bright interior and all the beautiful pictures that they brought with them. It was only when the show was over that he noiselessly relaxed his strained muscles, and crept away over the dew-drenched gra.s.s, hiding under the shadow of maple boughs, guilty trespa.s.ser that he was.

After that, one evening, Farmer Johns and his niece had an errand to run; at a house about two miles away on the other side of the bay there was a parcel which it was their duty to fetch. They had started out in the calm white light of summer twilight; a slight wind blew, just enough to take their sail creeping over the rippled water, no more. The lake within a mile of the sh.o.r.e was thickly strewn with small yachts, boats, and canoes. Upon the green sh.o.r.e the colours of the gaily painted villas could still be seen among the trees, and most conspicuous of all the great barn-like boat-house of the Syndicate, which was painted red. By and by the light grew dimmer and stars came out in the sky; then one could no longer distinguish the outline of the sh.o.r.e, but in every window a light twinkled, like a fallen star.

Helen sat in the side of the tiny ship as near the prow as might be; her uncle sat at the tiller and managed the sails. They were a silent pair, the one in a suit of tweeds with a slouch hat, the other in a muslin gown with a veil of black lace wrapped about her head.

The sailing of the boat was an art which Helen had not exerted herself to understand; she only knew that every now and then there was a minute of bl.u.s.ter and excitement when her uncle shouted to her, and she was obliged to cower while the beam and the sail swung over her head with a sound of fluttering wind. When she was allowed to take her seat after this little hurly-burly the two lighthouses upon the lake and all the lights upon the sh.o.r.e had performed a mysterious dance; they all lay in different places and in different relation to one another. She had not learned to know the different lights. When dusk came she was lost to her own knowledge. She only knew that the sweet air blew upon her face and that she trusted her uncle.

The moonless night closed in. Now and then, as they pa.s.sed a friendly craft, evening greetings were spoken across the dark s.p.a.ce. By the time they got to the place for which they were bound they were floating almost alone upon the black water.

Johns descended into a small boat and secured the sailing-boat to the buoy which belonged to the house whither he was going, or rather, he thought that he secured it.

Helen heard the plash of his oars until he landed. The sh.o.r.e was but twenty yards away, but she could hardly see it. The sail hung limp, wrinkled, and motionless. She began to sing, and there alone in the darkness she fell in love with her own voice, and sang on and on, thinking only of the music.

Her uncle was long in coming; she became conscious of movement in the water, like the swell of waves outside rolling into the cove. She heard the sound of swaying among all the trees on the sh.o.r.e. She looked up and saw that the stars of one half the sky were obscured, that the darkness was rolling onward toward those that were still shining.

She stopped her own singing, and the song of the waters beneath her prow was curiously like the familiar sound when the boat was in motion. She strained her eyes, but could not see how far she was from the near sh.o.r.e. She looked on the other side and it seemed to her that the lights on the home-ward side of the bay were moving. That meant that she was moving, at what speed and in what direction she had no means of knowing.

She stood up, lifted her arms in the air and shouted for help; again and again her shouts rang out, and she did not wait to hear an answer. She thought that the masters of other boats had seen the storm coming and gone into sh.o.r.e.

She was out now full in the whistling wind and the boat was leaping. Her throat was hoa.r.s.e with calling, her eyes dazzled by straining.

When she turned in despair from scanning the sh.o.r.e she saw a sight that was very strange. At the tiller where her uncle ought to have been, and just in the att.i.tude in which he always stood, was a slight white figure. A new sort of fear took possession of Helen; at first she could not speak or move, but kept her eyes wide open lest the ghostly thing should come near her unawares.

This illusion might be a forerunner of the death to which she was hastening, the Angel of Death himself steering her to destruction!

Then in a strange voice came the familiar shout, the warning to hold down her head. The sail swung over in the customary way; every movement of the figure at the helm was so familiar and natural that comfort began to steal into her heart. Plainly, whoever had taken command of the drifting craft knew his business; might it not be an angel of life, and not of death?

Now in plain sober reality, as her pulses ceased to dance so wildly, Helen could not believe that her companion was angel or spirit. One does not believe in such companionship readily.

She scrambled to her knees and steadied herself by the seat. 'Who are you?' she asked.

The figure made a gesture that seemed like a signal of peace, but no answer was given.

The lights upon her own part of the sh.o.r.e were now not far distant. She looked above and saw breaks in the darkness that had hidden the stars; the clouds were pa.s.sing over.

The squall that was taking them upon their journey was still whistling and blowing, but she feared its force less as she realised that she was nearing home.

She desired greatly to work herself along the boat and touch the sailor curiously with her hand, but she was afraid to do it, and that for two reasons: if he was a spirit she had reason for shrinking from such contact, and if he was a man--well, in that case she also saw objections.

The man at the helm dropped the sail; for a minute or two he stood not far from Helen as he busied himself with it.

'Who are you?' she asked again, but she still had not courage to put out her hand and touch him.

There was a little wooden wharf upon the sh.o.r.e, and to this the sailor held the boat while Helen sprung out. Her feet were no sooner safe upon it than the boat was allowed to move away. She saw the black mast and the white figure recede together and disappear in the darkness.

Johns had to walk home by the sh.o.r.e, and in no small anxiety. When he saw that his niece was safe he chuckled over her in burly fashion.

'Then I suppose,' he said, 'that some fellow got aboard her between the puffs of wind. I hope it was none of those Syndicate men; they're a fast lot. What was his name? What had he to say for himself?'

'She was flying far too fast for any one to get aboard,' a.s.serted Helen.

'I don't know what his name was; he didn't say anything; I don't know where he went to.'

Then the uncle suggested toddy in an undertone to his wife. The aunt looked over her spectacles with solicitude, and then arose and put her niece to bed.

When Helen was left alone she lay looking out at the stars that again were shining; she wondered and wondered; perhaps the reason that she came to no definite conclusion was that she liked the state of wonder better. Helen was a modern girl; she had friends who were spiritualists, friends who were theosophists, friends who were 'high church' and believed in visions of angels.

In the morning Johns' boat was found tethered as usual to the buoy in front of his house.

Long before this the Syndicate had suspected the Baby's attachment. The strength of that attachment they did not suspect in the least; never having seen depths in the Baby, they supposed there were none. They had fallen into the habit of taking the Baby by the throat and asking him in trenchant tones, 'Have you spoken to her?' The Baby found it convenient to be able to give a truthful negative, not that he would have minded fibbing in the least, but in this case the fib would certainly have been detected; he could not expect his G.o.ddess to enter into any clandestine parley and keep his secret.

Had the Baby taken the matter less to heart he would have been more rash in a.s.serting his independence, but he meditated some great step and 'lay low.' What or when the irrevocable move was to be he had no definite idea, the thought of it was only as yet an exalted swelling of mind and heart.

There was a period, after the affair of the boat, when he spent a good deal of time haunting the sacred precincts of the house where Helen lived. The precincts consisted of a dusty lane, a flat, ugly fenced field where a cow and a horse grazed, and a place immediately about the house covered with thick gra.s.s and shaded by maple trees. There were some shrubs too, behind which one could hide if necessary, but they were p.r.i.c.kly, uncomfortable to nestle against, and the unmown gra.s.s absorbed an immense quant.i.ty of dew. In imagination, however, the Baby wandered on pastoral slopes and in cla.s.sic shades. At first he paid his visits at night when the family were asleep, and he slipped about so quietly that no one but the horse and the cow need know where he went or what he did.

At length, however, he grew more bold, and took his way across the maple grove going and coming from other evening errands. Trespa.s.sing is not much of a fault at the lake of St. Jean. The Baby became expert in dodging hastily by, with his eyes upon the windows; the dream of his life was to see the gymnastics performed again; at length it was realised.

The thing we desire most is often the thing that brings us woe.

The Baby caught sight of Helen practising her beautiful att.i.tudes. He hung on to a rail of the verandah, and gazed and gazed. Then he took his life in his hand, as it were, and swung himself up on the verandah; he moved like a cat, for he supposed that the stalwart Johns was within.

From this better point of view, peeping about, he now surveyed the whole interior of the small drawing-room. What was his joy to find that there was no family circle of spectators; Helen was exercising herself alone!

He hugged to himself the idea that the gracious little spectacle was all his own.