Play the Game! Part 9

"Oh," said Honor, gasping, pushing him away with her hands against his chest--"you wouldn't have had _time_!"

"I could have dropped Spanish or Math'," he grinned. "Come on,--let's go further up the coast. Some of those kids will be tagging after us, or Carter."

"Not Carter. Stepper's reading to him. He won't let him come."

"One peach of a scout, Stephen Lorimer is," said the boy, warmly. "Best scout in the world."

"He's the best friend we've got in the world, Jimsy," she said gravely.

"I know it. Your mother's pretty much peeved about it, Skipper."

"Yes, she is, just now. Poor Muzzie! I'm afraid I've never pleased her very much. But she gets over things. She'll get over it when--when she finds that we _don't_ get over it!" She held out her hand to him and he took it in a hard grip, and they swung along at a fine stride, up the twisting sh.o.r.e road. They came at last to the great gate which led into the Malibou Ranch and they halted there and went down into a little pocket of rocks and sand and sun and sat down with their faces to the shining sea.

He kissed her again. "No; you can't go to Italy, Skipper. That's settled."

"Then--what are we going to do, Jimsy dear?"

"Why, we'll just get--" his bright face clouded over. "Good Lord, I'm talking like a nit-wit. We've got to wait, that's all. What could I do now? Run up alleys with groceries? Take care of gardens?"

"Not _my_ garden! You don't know a tulip from a cauliflower!"

"No, I'll have to learn to do something with my head and my hands,--not just my legs! I guess life isn't all football, Skipper."

"But I guess it's all a sort of game, Jimsy, and we have to 'play' it!

And it wouldn't be playing the game for our people or for ourselves to do something silly and reckless. This thing--caring for each other--is the wisest, biggest thing in our lives, and we've got to keep it that, haven't we?"

He nodded solemnly. "That's right, Skipper. We have. I guess we'll just have to grit our teeth and wait--_gee_--three years, anyway, till I'm twenty-one! That's the deuce of a long time, isn't it? Lord, why wasn't I born five years before you? Then it would be O. K. Loads of girls are married at eighteen."

"You weren't born five years before me because then it would have spoiled everything," said Honor, securely confident of the eternal rightness of the scheme of things. "You would have been marching around in overalls when I was born, and when I was ten you would have been fifteen, and you wouldn't have _looked_ at me,--and now you'd be through college and engaged to some wonderful Stanford girl! No, it's perfectly all right as it is, Jimsy. Only, we've just got to be sensible."

"Well, I'll tell you one thing right now, Skipper, I'm not going to wait five or six years. I'm going to go two years to college, enough to bat a little more knowledge into my poor bean, and then I'm coming out and get a job,--and get you!" He ill.u.s.trated the final achievement by catching her in his arms again.

When she could get her breath Honor said, "But we needn't worry about all of it now, dear. We haven't got to wait the four--or six years--all at once! Just a month, a week, a day at a time. And the time will fly,--you'll see! You'll have to work like a demon----"

"And you won't be there to help me!"

"And there'll be football all fall and baseball all spring, and theatricals, and we'll write to each other every day, won't we?"

"Of course. But I write such bone-headed b.o.o.b letters, Skipper."

"I won't care what they're like, Jimsy, so long as you tell me things."

"_Gee_ ... I'm going to be lost up there without you, Skipper."

"You'll have Carter, dear."

"I know. That'll help a lot. Honestly, I don't know how a fellow with a head like his puts up with me. He forgets more every night when he goes to sleep than I'll ever know. He's a wonder. Yes, it sure--will help a lot to have Carter. But it won't be you."

"Jimsy, have you told--your father?"

He nodded. "Last night. He was--he's been feeling great these last few days. He was sitting at his desk, looking over some old letters and papers, and I went in and--and told him."

"What did he say?"

"He didn't say anything at first. He just sat still for a long time, staring at the things he'd been reading. And then he got out a little old leather box that he said was my mother's and unlocked it and took out a ring." Jimsy thrust a hand deep into a trouser pocket and brought out a twist of tissue paper, yellowed and broken with age. He unwrapped it and laid a slender gold ring on Honor's palm.

"_Jimsy!_" It was an exquisite bit of workmanship, cunningly carved and chased, with a look of mellow age. There were two clasped hands,--not the meaningless models for wedding cakes, slim, tapering, faultless, but two cleverly vital looking hands, a man's and a woman's, the one rugged and strong, the other slender and firm, and the wrists, masculine and feminine, merging at the opposite side of the circle into one. "Oh ..."

Honor breathed, "it's wonderful...."

"Yes. It's a very old Italian ring. It was my great-grandmother's, first. It always goes to the wife of the eldest son. My Dad says it's supposed to mean love and marriage and--and everything--'the endless circle of creation,' he said, when I asked him what it meant, but first he just said, 'Give this to your girl and tell her to _hold hard_. Tell her we're a bad lot, but no King woman ever let go.'"

Suddenly and without warning, as on the day when Stephen Lorimer had first read the Newbolt poem to them, Honor began to cry.

"Skipper! Skipper, _dearest_--" she was in the young iron clasp of his arms and his cheek was pressed down on her hair. "What is it? Skipper, tell me!"

"Oh," she sobbed, clinging to him, "I can't bear it, Jimsy! All the years--all those splendid men, all those faithful women, 'holding hard'

against--against----"

He gathered her closer. "My Dad's the last of 'em, Skipper. He's the last 'Wild King.' It stops with him. I told him that, and he believes me. Do you believe me, Skipper?"

She stopped sobbing and looked up at him for a long moment, her wet eyes solemn, her breath coming in little gasps. Then--"I do believe you, Jimsy," she said. "_I'll never stop believing you._"

He kissed her gravely. "And now I'll show you the secret of the ring."

He took it from her and pressed a hidden spring. The clasped hands slowly parted, revealing a small intensely blue sapphire. "That's for 'constancy,' my Dad says." He put it on her finger. "It just fits!"

"Yes. And it just fits--us, too, Jimsy. The jewel hidden ... the way we must keep our secret. Muzzie won't let me wear it here, but I'll wear it the minute I leave here,--and every minute of my life. It was wonderful for your father to let us have it--when we're so young and have so long to wait!"

"He said--you know, he was different from anything he's ever been before, Skipper, more--more like his old self, I guess--he said it would help us to wait."

"It will," said Honor, contentedly, tucking her hand into his again.

They sat silently then, looking out at the bright sea.

CHAPTER VII

Honor was surprised and pleased to find how little she minded living abroad, after all. They had arrived, the boy and herself, in the months between their secret understanding and their separation, at the amazed conclusion that it was going to be easier to be apart until that bright day when they might be entirely and forever together. At the best, three interminable years stretched bleakly between them and marriage; they had to mark time as best they could. She liked Florence, she liked the mountainous _Signorina_, her stepfather's friend, and she liked her work. If it had not been for Jimsy King she would without doubt have loved it, but there was room in her simple and single-track consciousness for only one engrossing and absorbing affection. She wrote to him every day, bits of her daily living, and mailed a fat letter every week, and every week or oftener came his happy scrawl from Stanford. Things went with him there as they had gone at L. A.

High,--something less, naturally, of hero worship and sovereignty, but a steadily rising tide of triumph. He chronicled these happenings briefly and without emphasis. "Skipper dear," he would write in his crude and hybrid hand, "I've made the Freshman team all right and it's a pretty fair to middling bunch and I guess we'll stack up pretty well against the Berkeley babes from what I hear, and they made me captain.

It seems kind of natural, and I have three fellows from the L. A.

team,--Burke and Estrada and Finley."

He was madly rushed by the best fraternities and chose naturally the same one as Carter Van Meter,--one of the best and oldest and most powerful. He made the baseball team in the spring, and the second fall the San Francisco papers' sporting pages ran his picture often and hailed him as the Cardinal's big man. Honor read hungrily every sc.r.a.p of print which came to her,--her stepfather taking care that every mention of Jimsy King reached her. It was in his Soph.o.m.ore year that he played the lead in the college play and Honor read the newspapers limp and limber--"James King in the lead did a remarkable piece of work." "King, Stanford's football star, surprised his large following by his really brilliant performance." "Well-known college athlete demonstrates his ability to act." Honor knew the play and she could shut her eyes and see him and hear him in the hero's part, and her love and pride warmed her like a fire.

She had not gone home that first summer. Mildred Lorimer and Carter's mother managed that, between them, in spite of Stephen's best efforts, and, that decided, Jimsy King went with his father to visit one of the uncles at his great _hacienda_ in old Mexico. Mrs. Van Meter and her son spent his vacation on the Continent and had Honor with them the greater part of the time. She met their steamer at Naples and Carter could see the shining gladness of her face long before he could reach her and speak to her, and he glowed so that his mother's eyes were wet.

"Honor!" He had no words for that first moment, the fluent Carter. He could only hold both her hands and look at her.