Quaint Courtships Part 29

"Oh, if it comes to the negative virtues, you haven't been so disagreeable yourself to-day as you might have been. I'm under obligations to you. It _was_ rather nice to meet an old acquaintance."

The tone was formal, and put Payne ten thousand leagues away from her.

"Thank you," he said, with mock grat.i.tude. "_I'm_ under obligations for your courtesy, madam." She dropped her handkerchief as she arose, and he picked up the trifle and gave it to her. Their fingers met, and he withdrew his hand with a quick gesture.

"You must allow me to see you safely to your room," he urged. "Or else to your deck chair."

"Thank you. I'll go on deck, I think, and you may call the boy to go for my rug."

He put her on the lee side, and wrapped her in a McCallum plaid, and brought her some magazines from his own stateroom. Then he stood erect and saluted.

"Madam, have I the honor to be dismissed?"

She looked up and gave a friendly smile in spite of herself.

"You are very good," she said. "I am always remembering that you are good, and the thought annoys me."

"Oh, it needn't," he responded, in a philosophic tone, looking off towards the jagged line of the horizon, where the purple waves showed their changing outline. "If you are wondering why it is that you dislike me when you find nothing of which to disapprove in my conduct, don't let that puzzle you any longer. Regard does not depend upon character. The mystery of attraction has never been solved. Now, I've seen women more beautiful than you; I know many who are more learned; as for a sense of justice and fairness, why, I don't think you understand the first principles. Yet you are the one woman, in the world for me. Now that you've taken love out of my life, this world is nothing more to me than a workshop. I shall get up every morning and put myself at my bench, so to speak, and work till nightfall. Then I shall sleep. It is dull, but it doesn't matter. I have been at some trouble to convince myself of the fact that it doesn't matter, and I value the conviction. Life isn't as disheartening as it would be if it lasted longer.

"'Tis but a Tent where takes his one day's rest A Sultan to the realms of Death addrest; The Sultan rises, and the dark Ferrash Strikes, and prepares it for another guest."

Miss Curtis sat up in her chair, and her eyes were flashing indignation.

"I won't listen in silence to the profanity of that old heathen," she cried.

"You refer to my friend Omar?" inquired Paine, quizzically, dropping his earnestness as soon as she a.s.sumed it.

"I consider him one of the most dangerous of men! Once you would have been above advancing such philosophy! The idea of your talking that inert fatalism! It's incredible that you should admire what is supine and cowardly--"

Payne's eyes were twinkling. He lit his pipe with a "By your permission," and between the puffs chanted:

"Ah, Love! could thou and I with Fate conspire To grasp this sorry scheme of Things entire Would we not shatter it to bits--and then Remould it nearer to the Heart's Desire!"

"Even that is blasphemous impertinence!" the lady protested, knowing that she was angry, and rejoicing in the sensation.

"You think so?" cried Payne, not waiting for her to finish. "Why did you complain, then, of taking up the burden of common things? Do you want to be reminded of what you told me? You said that the roving life you had been leading in Europe for the past two years had unsettled you. You said you wanted to live among the old things and the dreams of old things. You liked the sense of irresponsible delight, and weren't prepared to say that you could ever a.s.sume the dull domestic round in a commonplace town. You considered the love of one human creature altogether too small and ba.n.a.l a thing to make you forego your intellectual incursions into the lands of delight. You were of the opinion that you loved many thousand creatures, most of them dead, and to enjoy their society to the full it was necessary for you to look at the cathedrals they had builded, to read the books they had written, or gaze upon the canvases they had painted. You were in a poppy sleep on the mystic flowers of ancient dreams. Wasn't that it? So I, a mere practical, every-day fellow, who had shown an unaccountable weakness in staying away from home a full year longer than I had any business to, was to go back alone to my work and my empty house, and console myself with the day's work. You were to go walking along the twilight path where the half-G.o.ds had walked before you, and I was to trudge up a dusty road fringed with pusley, and ending in a summer kitchen. Isn't that about it?"

She spread out the folds of her gown and looked down at them in a somewhat embarra.s.sed manner, seemingly submerged by this flood of protesting eloquence.

"You were afraid to look anything in the face," he went on, not giving her time to recover her breath. "You thought you could live in a world of beauty and never have any hard work. I suppose if you had seen the gardener wiping the sweat off his brow you would not have picked any of the roses in that garden at Lucerne. I suppose not! Well, let me a.s.sure you of one thing-there's commonplaceness everywhere. Probably some one had to wash those white dresses Sappho used to wear when she sat beside the sea. Maybe Sappho did them up herself, eh?"

He stopped and gave way to his bathos, throwing back his head and laughing heartily.

"Well, well, I'm through with railing at you. But I left you eating lotus, hollow-eyed and steeped in dreams. You were listening to the surf on Calypso's Isle. I was hearing nothing but the sound of your voice.

Now I've stumbled on a soporific philosophy, and am getting all I can out of the anaesthesia, and you are reproaching me. It's like your inconsistency, isn't it?"

She put up one hand to stop him, but he went on, recurring once more to the poet:

"The Worldly Hope men set their Hearts upon Turns Ashes--or it prospers; and anon, Like snow upon the Desert's dusty Face Lighting a little Hour or two, is gone."

She tried to speak, but he lifted his hat and left her, and going to the other side of the deck, paced up and down there swiftly, and thought of a number of things. For one thing, he reflected how ludicrous was life!

Here was Helen Curtis, fleeing from the recollection of him; here was himself, fleeing from the too-sweet actuality of her calm face and lambent eyes; and they were set down face to face in midocean! Such a preposterous trick on the part of the Three!

"I suppose happiness is never anything more than a mirage," he said to himself as he paced. "It is bright at times and then dim, and at present, for me, it is inverted. The business of the traveller, however, is to tramp on in the sun and the sand, with an eye to the compa.s.s and giving no heed to evanishing gleams of fairy lakes and plumelike palms.

Tramping on in the sand isn't as bad as it might be, either, when one gets used to it. The simoon is on me now, but I'll weather it. I've _got_ to. I _won't be_ downed!"

He put his head up and tried to think he was courageous. The gloom of the night was about him now, and the strange voices of the sea called one to the other. He tried to turn his thought to practical things. He would go home to the vacant old house where he had been born; he would make it livable, let the sunshine into it, modernize it to an extent, and then get some one under its roof. While there were so many homeless folk in the world it wasn't right to have an untenanted house. Then he'd get down to business, good and hard, and bring the thing up. It was a good business, and it had an honorable reputation. He had been too unappreciative of this fine legacy. Well, there were excuses. At school he had thought of other things--and the life of the fraternity house had been a gallant one! Then came his wander year--which stretched into two.

And now, having eaten of the apples of Paradise and felt them turn to bitterness in his mouth, he would go back to duty.

He wished he had never seen her again--after that night when she belied her long-continued kindness to him with her indifferent rejection of his devotion. He devoutly wished he had not been forced to feel again the subtle fascination of those deep eyes, and hear the thrilling contralto of that rich voice! She was unscrupulous in her cold selfishness--

A sudden, inexplicable trembling of the whole great ship! A frightened quivering, a lurch, a crash!

The chug-chug ceased. No--it couldn't! Nothing like that ever happened to a ship of the line on a comparatively quiet night! Of course not!

Of course not--but for all of that, they were as inert as a raft, and the pa.s.sengers were beginning to skurry about and to ask the third officer and the fourth officer what t' d.i.c.kens it meant. The third officer and the fourth officer did not know, but felt convinced--professionally convinced--that it was nothing. The first engineer? He had gone below. Oh, it was nothing. The captain? Really, they could not say where he was.

Chalmers Payne strode around the after-cabin, and then ran to the spot where he had left Helen Curtis. She was still there. She sat up and put both her hands in his.

"I knew you'd be here as soon as you could, so I didn't move! I didn't want to put you to the trouble to look for me!"

He held her hands hard.

"I don't think it is much of anything," he said. "It can't be. There's no smell of fire. The sea is not heavy. At the very worst--"

"Be sure, won't you, that we're not separated? One of us might be put in one boat and one in another, you know, if it should really be--be fire or something. Then, if a storm came up and--"

People were running with vague rumors. They called out this and that alarm. It was possible to feel the panic gathering.

"Remember," Helen Curtis whispered, "whatever comes, that we belong together."

"We do!" he acquiesced, saying the words between his teeth. "I have known it a long time. But you--"

"Oh, so have I! But what made you so sure? What was there about your home and your work and yourself to make you so perfectly sure I would be interested in them all my life? You didn't lay out any scheme for me at all, or act as if you thought I had any dreams or aspirations. I was to come and observe you become distinguished--I was to watch what you could do! Oh, Chalmers, I was willing, but what made you so sure?"

"Then you loved me? You loved me?" She looked white and scared, and he could feel her hands chill and tremble.

"How ready you are to use that word! I'm afraid of it. I always said I wouldn't speak it till I _had_ to. It frightens me--it means so much. If I said it to you I could never say it to any one else, no matter how--"

"Not on any account! Say it, Helen!"

"I wish to explain. I--I couldn't stand the aimlessness of life after you left. I began to suspect that it was you who made everything so interesting. I wasn't so enamoured with the ancients as I thought I was; but I was enamoured with your contemplation of my pose. Oh, I've been dissecting myself! Should I really have cared so much for Lucerne and Nuremberg if you hadn't been with me? I concluded that I should not.

Well, said I to myself, if he can make the Old World so fascinating, can he not do something for the New World, too?"

An alarmist rushed by.

"They are going to lower the boats!" he cried. "Better get your valuables together."

"There's a panic in the steerage," another cried.