Nell, of Shorne Mills Part 21

"Look here, Miss Nell," he said; "it is true that I have lost some money, but I'm not quite a pauper, and, if I were, the least I could do would be to share my last crust with--with your people for their amazing goodness to me."

"A diamond bracelet and an expensive gun are not crusts," she said, shaking her head.

"Oh, dash it all!" he retorted impatiently. "The stupid things only very inadequately represent my----Oh, I'm bad at speech making and expressing myself. And don't you think you ought to be very grateful to me?"

She frowned slightly in the effort to understand.

"Grateful! I have just been telling you that I think you ought not to have spent so much. Why should I be grateful?"

"That I didn't buy something for you," he said.

She colored, and looked away from him.

"I--I should not have accepted it," she said.

"I know that," he blurted out. "If I thought you would have done so--but I knew you wouldn't. And so I've got a grievance to meet yours. After all, you might have let me give you some trifle----"

"Such as a diamond bracelet, worth perhaps a hundred pounds?"

"To remember me by. After all, it's only natural I should want to leave something behind me to remind you of me."

"We shan't need such gifts to--to remind us," she said simply. "I think we had better luff."

The sail swung over as she put the helm down; there was silence for a moment or two, then he said:

"I'm sorry I've offended you, Miss Nell. Perhaps it was beastly bad taste. I see it now. But just put yourself in my place----" He slid over the thwart in his eagerness, and coiled himself at her feet. "Supposing you had broken your confounded arm--I beg your pardon!--your arm, and had been taken in and tended by good Samaritans, and nursed and treated like a prince for weeks, and had been made to feel happier than you've been for--for oh, years, would you like to go away with just a 'Oh, thanks; awfully obliged; very kind of you'? Wouldn't you want to make a more solid acknowledgment? Come, be fair and just--if a woman can be fair and just!--and admit that I'm not such a criminal, after all!"

She looked down at him thoughtfully, then turned her eyes seaward again.

"What do you want me to say?" she asked.

"Oh, well; I see that you won't change your mind about these things, so perhaps I'd better be content if you'll say: 'I forgive you.'"

A smile flitted across her face as she looked down at him again, but it was rather a sad little smile.

"I--I forgive you!" she said.

He raised his cap, and took her hand, and, before she suspected what he was going to do, he put his lips to it.

Her face grew crimson, then pale almost to whiteness. It was the first time a man's lips had touched her virgin hand, and----A tremor ran through her, her eyes grew misty, as she looked at him with a half-pained, half-fearful expression. Then she turned her head away, and so quickly that he saw neither the change of color nor the expression in her eyes.

"I feel like a miscreant who had received an unexpected pardon," he said lightly, and yet with a touch of gravity in his voice, "and, like the miscreant, I at once proceed to take advantage of the lenity of my judge."

She turned her eyes to him questioningly; there was still a half-puzzled, half-timid expression in them.

"I want to be rewarded--as well as pardoned--rewarded for my n.o.ble sacrifice of the desire to bestow a piece of jewelry upon you."

"Rewarded?" she faltered.

He nodded.

"Yes. After the awful rebuke and scolding you have administered, you cannot refuse to accept some token of my--some acknowledgment of my grat.i.tude, Miss Nell. See here----"

He felt in his waistcoat pocket, then in those of his coat, and at last brought out a well-worn silver pencil case.

"I want you to be gracious enough to accept this," he said. "Before you refuse with haughty displeasure and lively scorn, be good enough to examine it. It is worth, I should say--shall I say five shillings? That, I should imagine, is its utmost value. But, on the other hand, it is a useful article, and I display my natural cunning in selecting it--it's the only thing I've got about me that I could offer you, except a match box, and, as you don't smoke, you've no use for that--because you will never be able to use it, I hope and trust, without thinking of the unworthy donor and the debt of grat.i.tude which no diamond bracelet could discharge."

During this long speech, which he had made to conceal his eager desire that she should accept, and his fear, that she should not, Nell's color had come and gone, but she kept her eyes fixed on his steadily, as if she were afraid to remove them.

"Are you going to accept it--or shall I fling it into the sea as a votive offering? It would be a pity, for it is useful, a thing of sorts, and has been my constant companion for many a year. Yes, or no?"

He held the pencil up, as if he were offering it by auction.

Nell hesitated, then she held out her hand without a word. He dropped the battered pencil case into it, and his bantering tone changed instantly.

"Thank you!" he said gravely, earnestly. "I--I was afraid that you were going to refuse, and--well, that would have hurt me. And that would have hurt you; for I know how gentle-hearted you are, Miss Nell."

Her hand closed over the pencil case tightly until the silver grew warm, then she slipped the thing into her pocket.

"Please observe," he said, after a pause, during which he lit a cigarette, "that I am not in need of any token as a reminder. I am not likely to forget--Shorne Mills."

He turned on his elbow and gazed at the jetty and the cottages which straggled up from it in the narrow ravine to the heights above, to the unique and quaint village upon which the still hot sun was shining as the boat danced toward it.

"No. I shan't find it difficult to remember--or regret."

He stifled a sigh. A sigh rose to her lips also, but she checked it, and forced a smile.

"One does not break one's arm every day, and it is not easy to forget that," she said; "and yet, I dare say you will remember Shorne Mills. I don't think you will see many prettier places. Isn't it quite lovely this evening, with the sun shining on the cliffs and making old Brownie's windows glitter--like--like the diamonds in mamma's bracelet?"

She laughed with a girlish mischievousness, and ran on rapidly, as if she must talk, as if a pause were to be averted as a peril.

"I've heard people say that there is only one other place in the world like it--Cintra, in Portugal, isn't it?"

He nodded. He was gazing at the picturesque little place, the human nests stuck like white stones in the cleft of the cliffs; and something more than the beauty of Shorne Mills was stirring, almost oppressing, his heart. He had stayed at, and departed from, many a place as beautiful in other ways as this, and had left it with some little regret, perhaps, but never with the dull, aching feeling such as weighed upon him this evening.

"And at night it's lovelier still," went on Nell cheerfully, after a s.n.a.t.c.h of song, just sung under her breath, to show how happy and free from care she was at that moment. "To sail in on the tide of an autumn evening when the lights have been lit, and every cottage looks like a lantern; and the blue haze hangs over the village, and the children's voices come floating over the water as if through a mist; then, on nights like that, the sea is all phosph.o.r.escent, and the boat leaves a line of silvery light in its wake; and one seems to have all the world to oneself----"

She stopped suddenly and sighed unconsciously. Was she thinking that, when that autumn night came, and Drake Vernon was not with her, she would indeed have all the world to herself, and that all the world is all the nicer when one has a companion? He lowered his eyes to her face.

"That was a pretty picture," he said, in a low voice. "I shall think of that--wherever I may be in the autumn."

Nell laughed as the boat ran beside the jetty slip, and she rose.

"Do you think you will? Perhaps you will be too much amused, engrossed with whatever you are doing. I know I should be, if--if I were to leave Shorne Mills, and go into the big world."

"You do yourself an injustice," he said, rather curtly; and she laughed, and flushed a little.

"I deserve that," she said. "Of course, I should not forget Shorne Mills; but you----Ah, it is different!"