Geoffrey Hamstead Part 14

"'And where was ye last night, might I axe?'

"'Where we axe now,' I said.

"'Faith, it was a big head that brought you into the nursery here before last night came on! More be-token, I have'nt had a dhry rag on me for tin hours, and divil a sail we've got widout a shplit in it the size of a shteam-tug. Bring it in a sody-bottle, darlint, and the Lord'll love ye if ye don't spoil it. Whisht, love! You drink my health in the sody and don't lave any in the bottle.'

"I came back and got him a soda-bottle of the genuine article, and while he drank it the rapidity of his tongue was peculiar. 'So you have been here before?' I asked.

"'Whisht, darlint! till the captain won't hear you. Been here before?

Begorra, this place has been a mine of goold to me many a time. For siventeen days at a slap I've laid here in Dicimber at four dollars a day, with nothin' to do but play checkers and sphlit wood for the shtove and pray for a gale o' wind down the lake till shpring-time.'

"This eloquence continued until I thought he would certainly fall off the bobstay.

"'Tell me, now,' he said, after I had got all the information I wanted, 'have ye a berth for an old salty aboard that craft?'

"I said we had not.

"'Faith, perhaps you're right. I kin see by the stow on yer mainsail and by the nate way yer heads'ls is drag-gen' in the wather that you're born and bled up to the sea and don't require no a.s.sistance.'

"With these sarcastic words he gave me his blessing, threw away the bottle, and disappeared again over the bow."

"I gather from your remarks that your friend was of Hibernian origin,"

said Margaret. "Perhaps a good dynamiter spoiled. But we will speak of him again. What I have been wanting for some time has been a trip in the canoe to the beach over there. I want to walk over the sand bar and get close to those great breakers rolling in on the shingle. Unhitch your canoe-string and bring the canoe alongside."

"Unhitch your canoe-string!" repeated Rankin contemptuously. "You must speak more nautically or I won't understand you."

"Well, what ought I to say?"

"Dunno. 'Cast adrift your towline' sounds well."

"It does, indeed," said Margaret, as Morry swung the light c.o.c.klesh.e.l.l into position and she descended into it with care. "'Cast adrift your towline' has a full, able-bodied seaman sort of sound; but it has not the charm of mystery about it that some expressions have. Now 'athwart your hawse' seems portentous in its meaning. I don't want to know what it means. I would rather go on thinking of it as of the arm that handed forth the sword Excalibur,' clothed in white samite--mystic, wonderful.'

Do you know I read all Clark Russell's sea stories, and drive through all his sea-going technicalities with the greatest interest, although I understand nothing about them. When he goes aloft on the main-boom and brails up his foregaff-bobstay I go with him. Sometimes he describes how small the deck below looks from the dizzy height when, poised upon the capstan-bars, he furls the signal halyards that flap and fill away and thunder in the gale; and then I see it all--"

"So do I, so do I!" cried Morry, as he paddled dexterously to the sh.o.r.e.

"You've got Clark Russell to a T. He goes on like that by the hour together. I read every word, and the beauty of it is I always think I understand. Why do we like his stories so much, I wonder?"

"One reason is because his heroes are manly men and have brave hearts,"

said Margaret confidently. "I think that is why they appeal to women; he always arouses a sentiment of pity for the hero's misfortunes. Few women can resist that." And Margaret, somewhat stirred, looked away over the broad sea. Almost unconsciously there flashed before her the image of a Greek G.o.d winning a foot-race under circ.u.mstances that aroused her sympathy. Again she saw him steering a yacht, keen, strong, active, determined, and calm amid excitement. A flush suffused her countenance, and her eyes became soft and thoughtful as she gazed far away. Ah, these rushes of blood to the head! How they kindle an unacknowledged idea into activity! A moment and, like a flash, a latent, undeveloped instinct becomes a living potent force to develop us. The admirer becomes a lover, the plotter a criminal, and the religious man a fanatic.

When the canoe pushed its way through the rushes and beached itself upon the soft sand the two jumped out and crossed over to the lake side, where the heavy ground swells of the last night's gale were still mounting high upon the shingle. The bar leading toward them from False Duck Island was a seething expanse of white breakers, and over the lake to the south and west, as far as the eye could reach in the now rarefied atmosphere a tumbling ma.s.s of bright-green waters could be seen, which grew blue in color at the sharply cut horizon. Not far off the "Bark Swaller" was buffeting her way to the southward, toward Oswego, and around the wooded island with the lighthouse on it, the mail steamer, twelve hours detained, was getting a first taste of the open water.

It was a morning that made the two feel as if it were impossible to keep still. The flat shingle, washed smooth by the high waves of the previous night, was firm under foot as they walked and trotted along between the wreckage and driftwood on one side and the highest wash of the hissing water on the other. An occasional flight of small plover suggested the wildness of the spot, and something of the spirit of these birds in their curving and wheeling flight seemed to possess the two young people--making them run and caper on the sands.

"You ought to be able to run a pretty good race," said Maurice, glancing at the shapely figure of his companion.

"So I am," said Margaret, as she sprang up on a large piece of driftwood. "I'll run you a race to that bush on the far point around the little bay. Do you see it?"

"I see it," said Maurice. "Are you ready? Go!"

Margaret sprang down from the stump and was off like an arrow. Morry thought it was only a sham and a pretense of hers, as he bounded off beside her. He soon found his mistake, however, as his unaccustomed muscles did their utmost to keep him abreast of the gliding figure in the dark-blue skirt and jersey. They rounded the curve of the bay, Maurice on the inside track. But this advantage did not give him a lead.

The distance to the winning point seemed fatal to his chances, but he hung on, hoping his opponent would tire. Again he was mistaken.

"Come on, Morry! Don't be beaten by a woman."

Her voice, as she said this, seemed aggressively fresh, and the taunt brought Rankin even with her again. He had no breath left to say anything in reply as they came to a small indentation filled with water where the sh.o.r.e curved in, making another little bay. Margaret ran around it, but Maurice, as a last chance, splashed through it, regardless of water up to his ankles. He gained about ten feet by this subterfuge. A few gliding bounds, impossible to describe, and Margaret was beside him again.

"That was a shabby advantage to take," she said as she pa.s.sed his panting form. "Now I'll show you how fast I _can_ run."

She left him then as he labored on. She floated away from him like a thistle-blossom on the breeze. He forgot his defeat in his admiration of that fleeting figure which he would have believed to move in the air had he not seen marks in the sand made by toes of small shoes. He could hardly comprehend how she could run away from him in this way. Yet there was no wings attached to the lithe form before him. No wings, but a bit of silk ankle which seemed far preferable.

Margaret stopped at the bush which was to be the winning post. Morry then staggered in exhausted and threw himself sideways into the yielding ma.s.s of the willow bush and fell out on the other side.

"Oh," he said, as he rolled over on his back with his head resting in his hands, "wasn't that beautiful?"

"The race--yes, indeed, it was splendid."

"No, I don't mean the race. That was horrible. I mean to see you run."

(Gasp.)

Margaret's face was sparkling with excitement and color, while her bosom rose and fell after her exertion.

"I can run fast, can I not?" Her arms were hanging demurely at her side again. She could run, but she never seemed to be at all masculine.

"I never ran a race with a man before," she said, laughing.

"And never will run another with this individual," said Rankin. "Nothing goes so fast as a train you have missed, just as it leaves the station, and yet I have caught it sometimes. You can go faster than anything I ever saw." (A breath.) "It is a good thing to know when one is beaten.

You will always be an uncatchable distance before me." (A sigh.)

"My shoes are full of sand," said Margaret ruefully, looking down at them.

"Mine are full of water," said Maurice. He did not seem to care. He was quite content to lie there and gaze at her without reservation. And, with his heightened color and excitement, he actually appeared rather good looking.

"I think the least you could do would be to offer to take the sand out of my shoes," said Margaret.

"If I don't have to get up I could do it. I won't be able to get up for about twenty minutes. But if you sit on that stump--so--I think I could manage it."

Resting on one elbow, he unlaced the shoes, knocked the sand out of them, and spent a long time over the operation. Then he wondered at their small size, and measured them, sole to sole, with his own boots while he chattered on, as usual, about nothing. Hers were not by any means microscopic shoes, but they seemed so to him, and he regarded them with some of the curiosity of the miners of Blue Dog Gulch, Nevada, when a woman's boot appeared among them after their two years' isolation from the interesting s.e.x. There was something in the way he handled them that spoke of exile--something that stirred the compa.s.sion one might feel on seeing the monks of Man Saba tend their canaries.

The left shoe was put on with great care, and then he sat looking over the lake for a while in silence before beginning with the second. It was a long, well-chiseled foot, with high instep, and none of those k.n.o.bs which sometimes necessitate long dresses, and in men's boots take such a beautiful polish. He pretended to brush some sand away, and then, banding over, kissed the silk-covered instep, and received an admonitory tap for his boldness.

"Fie, Morry! to kiss an unprotected lady's foot," said Margaret archly, as she took the shoe from him and put it on herself. "You have insulted me."

"Nay, Margaret, 'twas but the sign of my allegiance and fealty," said he, looking up with what tried to be an off-hand manner. "It is the old story," he said lightly; "the worship of the unattainable--the remnant, perhaps, of our old nature worship. If you were not better acquainted with the subject than I am, I could give you a discourse which would be, I a.s.sure you, very instructive as to how we have always striven after what we think to be good in the unattainable. We have been forbidden to worship the sun or to appease the thunders and lightnings, and, one by one, nearly all the objects of worship have been swept away, leaving a world that now does not seem to know what to do with its acquired instincts. One object is left, though, and I am inclined to think that men are never more thoroughly admirable than when influenced by the worship of the women who seem to them the best, that many thus come to know the pricelessness of good and the despair of evil, with quite as satisfactory practical results as any other creed could bring about."

"What, then, becomes of the search for the unattainable after marriage?"

asked Margaret practically.

"I imagine that the search would continue, that the greatest peace of marriage is the consciousness of approaching good in being a.s.sisted to live up to a woman's higher ideals. It seems as if the condition of Milton's idyllic pair--'he for G.o.d only, she for G.o.d _in him_'--has but little counterpart in real life, and that, in a thousand cases to one, the morality of the wife is the main chance of the husband."