Flint Part 17

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 acc.u.mulate 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 n.o.body, 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 j.a.panese paper napkins. All these went into one basket, together with cups and gla.s.ses 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 surrept.i.tiously 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 sh.o.r.e.

"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 embarra.s.sed, 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 aesthetic 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 cla.s.sic 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 role 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 n.o.body'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 circ.u.mstances, 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."