Sheila of Big Wreck Cove Part 45

"I--I can't tell you," stammered the boy. "I promised not."

A promise is a promise, especially to a small boy who scorns to "snitch." Tunis thought a moment.

"Show me," he said, and his voice had in it that tone which made the foremast hands jump to obey when a squall was coming.

The boy got promptly off the wall.

"All right," he said gruffly. "But don't you tell her I showed you, Cap'n Tunis Latham."

"Trust me," agreed the captain of the _Seamew_, and followed after little John-Ed with such tremendous strides that the latter had to run to keep ahead of him.

Tunis was led to that point on the bluff from which a curl of smoke from the cabin chimney could be seen. He halted almost in horror--stricken to the heart when he understood.

"Alone?" he muttered.

"Yep," was the reply. "She's playing she's a castaway. n.o.body but me knows it."

Then, fearing he had said too much, John-Ed ran away.

Tunis descended the bluff by a perilous path--he would not delay to go around by the cart track--and came in plain view of the cabin.

The door hinge had been repaired, and the door now swung freely. A strip of cotton cloth had been tacked over the gaping window. There was that neatness about the abandoned cabin which must always be a.s.sociated in his mind with Sheila Macklin, even had he not seen her sitting pensively upon a driftwood timber by the door.

The ax had been doing good service, for there was a great heap of wood cut into stove lengths. The fragrant odor of something--chowder, perhaps--simmering on the stove, floated through the open door.

It was the coa.r.s.e sand crunching under his boots which aroused her.

She did not start at his approach, but raised her eyes languidly. He wondered if she had expected him. She must have seen the _Seamew_ pa.s.s several hours earlier as they headed in toward the channel.

"My G.o.d, Sheila!" he exclaimed with bitterness, but without anger.

"You can't stay here."

"I must--for a while. No. Don't talk about it, please, Tunis." Her gesture had a finality to it which silenced the objections rising to his lips. "Nothing you can say will change my determination. And you must not come here again."

"What will people say?" he gasped.

The violet eyes blazed suddenly while she surveyed him. This was not the girl he had known before. At least, she was not the same as when he had seen her last. Even at that previous interview her look and manner had not so reminded him of the girl he had sat beside on the bench on Boston Common.

She was alone again. The flower of her nature that had expanded while she lived her all too brief and happy life with the b.a.l.l.s was now withered. She was hopeless again; she had become once more the Sheila Macklin that he had met under such wretched circ.u.mstances at that past time. But in spite of her helplessness and her wretchedness, there was something in the girl's expression which convinced Tunis Latham before he again spoke that nothing he could say would in any degree change her determination.

"That confounded girl never should have been allowed to come back to the house up there," he cried almost wildly. "Why did Elder Minnett want to interfere? It was not his business! No one need have known the truth."

"Don't you see, Tunis, that just because it was the truth it was sure to become known? At least, the main points in the whole matter were sure to come out. But if you are careful, if you are wise, n.o.body need know more of your share in the transaction than I have told already."

"Cap'n Ira asked me if it was true. He told me what you said.

Sheila, you ruined your own reputation with the old folks to save me. Girl--"

"Did I have any reputation to lose, Tunis?" she interrupted, yet speaking softly. "I could not save myself. I have tried to save you.

Don't be ill-advised; don't be foolish. Say nothing, and it will all blow over--for you."

"You think I'll accept such a sacrifice on your part?" he demanded fiercely.

"I am making no sacrifice. Nothing I can do or say; nothing you can do or say; nothing anybody can do or say; will change my situation.

We need not both be ruined in the eyes of the community. Soon I will get away. They will forget me. It will all blow over. You need not suffer."

"What do you think I am?" he cried again. "Am I the sort of a fellow, you think, to shelter myself behind you?"

"Shelter your Aunt Lucretia. Shelter your business prospects.

Shelter the good name of your mother's son. You can do me absolutely no good by telling any different story from the one I was forced to tell. Let it be, Tunis."

She said it wearily. She dropped her eyes again, looking away from him. But when he would have stepped nearer and caught her to him, she leaped up and with look and tone warded him away.

"Don't touch me! Be at least so kind, Tunis. Make it no harder for me than you can help."

"You are breaking my heart, Sheila!"

"Mine is already broken," she told him. "And I do not blame you, Tunis. It is the punishment for my own sins. I attempted to escape from my overwhelming troubles in a wrong way. I see it now. I know it to be so. I must go somewhere else and build again--if I may. But never again upon a foundation of trickery and deceit. Oh! Never!

Never!"

She stepped around the big block on which she had been sitting, entered the cabin, and closed the door behind her. She left him standing there hopeless, miserable, almost distraught by all the entanglements of this tragedy that had come upon them.

CHAPTER x.x.x

THE STORM

Captain Tunis Latham, pacing the deck of the _Seamew_, had come to a conclusion which was by no means complimentary to his own self-respect. During his manifold duties and the business bothers connected with the sailing of the undermanned schooner, his mind had seized upon and grappled with a train of ideas which brought him logically to the decision that he was playing a weak and piffling part.

Strong in most things, Tunis Latham had allowed his better sense to be throttled and his purpose balked in the thing which meant more to him than the schooner, his business success, or anything else in life. The broader the rift grew between Sheila and himself, the clearer he saw that without her he was a ship without a rudder and that nothing could come of his life save wreck and disaster.

She had renounced him for his own good, as she believed, and he had tacitly consented to her ruling. He might be slow of thought regarding such things, but once having made up his mind--and it was made up now--he was of the kind that obstacles do not frighten.

Not only did he realize that by bowing to the girl's will he had been weak, but he was determined to take matters in the future into his own hands. He should not have allowed Sheila, in the first place, to shoulder the responsibility of handling the emergency of the appearance of the real Ida May Bostwick at Big Wreck Cove.

Sheila, in an attempt to save his reputation, to save his self-respect in the eyes of the home folks and of the world in general, had uttered a direct falsehood and cut herself off from him and from those who loved her. This was too much for any decent man to stand. Was he a coward? Would he shelter himself--as he had told her--behind her skirts?

Tunis believed that Cap'n Ira and Prudence, when once the shock of the girl's revelation was past, loved her so dearly that they would forgive Sheila if they knew all the truth--if they knew the girl as he knew her. He was not so sure of Aunt Lucretia. He had feared to tell her the night before that Sheila had gone to live in the old fisherman's cabin, in spite of the sympathy Lucretia had previously shown him. But he believed his silent aunt fully appreciated the better qualities of the girl she had seen on but one occasion, and that she would, in time, admit that Sheila was more than worthy of her nephew's love.

In any event he had his own life to make or mar. Without Sheila he knew it would be utterly fruitless and without an object. Rather than lose Sheila he would sell the schooner, cut himself off from friends and home, and, with her, face the world anew. He was determined, if Sheila left Big Wreck Cove, that he would go with her. n.o.body--not even the girl herself--could shake this determination now born in the mind of the captain of the _Seamew_.

Sheila had borne his reputation upon her heart from the beginning, but he should have at first thought of her good name and the opinion the world must needs hold of Sheila Macklin. She had been unfairly accused. She had been abused, ill-treated, punished for a sin which was not hers. It was not enough that he had tried to help her hide away from those who knew of her persecution. The only right thing to do--the only sane course, and the one which should have been pursued from the start--was to attempt to disprove the accusation under which the girl had suffered and set her right not only before Big Wreck Cove folk, but before the whole world.

The poignant feeling of sin committed, with which Sheila herself was now burdened, did not influence Tunis Latham. It was the logic of the idea which convinced him that they had been totally wrong in what they had done. He should have married Sheila on the night they had met in Boston and set about first of all tracing back her trouble and disproving the flimsy evidence which must have convicted her of stealing from Hoskin & Marl's.

He told himself it was not piety, but hard common sense which suggested this as the only and practical way to handle the matter.

It was, in truth, the awakened hope in a loving heart.