The Call of the Cumberlands Part 19

"Not this afternoon," she smiled. "Watch for the boom! I'm going to bring her round."

The young man promptly ducked his head, and played out the line, as the boat dipped her masthead waterward, and came about on the other tack. When the sails were again drumming under the fingers of the wind, she added:

"Besides, I'm not sure that harmony is what I want."

"You know you'll have to marry me in the end. Why not now?" he persisted, doggedly. "We are simply wasting our youth, dear."

His tone had become so calamitous that the girl could not restrain a peal of very musical laughter.

"Am I so very funny?" he inquired, with dignity.

"You are, when you are so very tragic," she a.s.sured him.

He realized that his temper was merely a challenge to her teasing, and he wisely fell back into his customary att.i.tude of unruffled insouciance.

"Drennie, you have held me off since we were children. I believe I first announced my intention of marrying you when you were twelve. That intention remains unaltered. More: it is unalterable and inevitable. My reasons for wanting to needn't be rehea.r.s.ed. It would take too long. I regard you as possessed of an alert and remarkable mind--one worthy of companionship with my own." Despite the frivolous badinage of his words and the humorous smile of his lips, his eyes hinted at an underlying intensity. "With no desire to flatter or spoil you, I find your personal aspect pleasing enough to satisfy me. And then, while a man should avoid emotionalism, I am in love with you." He moved over to a place in the sternsheets, and his face became intensely earnest. He dropped his hand over hers as it lay on the tiller shaft. "G.o.d knows, dear," he exclaimed, "how much I love you!"

Her eyes, after holding his for a moment, fell to the hand which still imprisoned her own. She shook her head, not in anger, but with a manner of gentle denial, until he released her fingers and stepped back.

"You are a dear, Wilfred," she comforted, "and I couldn't manage to get on without you, but you aren't marriageable--at least, not yet."

"Why not?" he argued. "I've stood back and twirled my thumbs all through your _debut_ winter. I've been Patience without the comfort of a pedestal. Now, will you give me three minutes to show you that you are not acting fairly, or nicely at all?"

"Duck!" warned the girl, and once more they fell silent in the sheer physical delight of two healthy young animals, clean-blooded and sport- loving, as the tall jib swept down; the "high side" swept up, and the boat hung for an exhilarating moment on the verge of capsizing. As it righted itself again, like the craft of a daring airman banking the pylons, the girl gave him a bright nod. "Now, go ahead," she acceded, "you have three minutes to put yourself in nomination as the exemplar of your age and times."

CHAPTER XV

The young man settled back, and stuffed tobacco into a battered pipe.

Then, with a lightness of tone which was a.s.sumed as a defense against her mischievous teasing, he began:

"Very well, Drennie. When you were twelve, which is at best an unimpressive age for the female of the species, I was eighteen, and all the world knows that at eighteen a man is very mature and important.

You wore pigtails then, and it took a prophet's eye to foresee how wonderfully you were going to emerge from your chrysalis."

The idolatry of his eyes told how wonderful she seemed to him now.

"Yet, I fell in love with you, and I said to myself, 'I'll wait for her.' However, I didn't want to wait eternally. For eight years, I have danced willing attendance--following you through nursery, younger-set and _debutante_ stages. In short, with no wish to trumpet too loudly my own virtues, I've been your _Fidus Achates_." His voice dropped from its pitch of antic whimsey, and became for a moment grave, as he added: "And, because of my love for you, I've lived a life almost as clean as your own."

"One's _Fidus Achates_, if I remember anything of my Latin, which I don't"--the girl spoke in that voice which the man loved best, because it had left off bantering, and become grave with such softness and depth of timbre as might have trembled in the reed pipes of a Sylvan Pan--"is one's really-truly friend. Everything that you claim for yourself is admitted--and many other things that you haven't claimed. Now, suppose you give me three minutes to make an accusation on other charges. They're not very grave faults, perhaps, by the standards of your world and mine, but to me, personally, they seem important."

Wilfred nodded, and said, gravely:

"I am waiting."

"In the first place, you are one of those men whose fortunes are listed in the top schedule--the swollen fortunes. Socialists would put you in the predatory cla.s.s."

"Drennie," he groaned, "do you keep your heaven locked behind a gate of the Needle's Eye? It's not my fault that I'm rich. It was wished on me. If you are serious, I'm willing to become poor as Job's turkey.

Show me the way to strip myself, and I'll stand shortly before you begging alms."

"To what end?" she questioned. "Poverty would be quite inconvenient. I shouldn't care for it. But hasn't it ever occurred to you that the man who wears the strongest and brightest mail, and who by his own confession is possessed of an alert brain, ought occasionally to be seen in the lists?"

"In short, your charge is that I am a shirker--and, since it's the same thing, a coward?"

Adrienne did not at once answer him, but she straightened out for an uninterrupted run before the wind, and by the tiny moss-green flecks, which moments of great seriousness brought to the depths of her eyes, he knew that she meant to speak the unveiled truth.

"Besides your own holdings in a lot of railways and things, you handle your mother's and sisters' property, don't you?"

He nodded.

"In a fashion, I do. I sign the necessary papers when the lawyers call me up, and ask me to come down-town."

"You are a director in the Metropole Trust Company?"

"Guilty."

"In the Consolidated Seacoast?"

"I believe so."

"In a half-dozen other things equally important?"

"Good Lord, Drennie, how can I answer all those questions off-hand? I don't carry a note-book in my yachting flannels."

Her voice was so serious that he wondered if it were not, also, a little contemptuous.

"Do you have to consult a note-book to answer those questions?"

"Those directorate jobs are purely honorary," he defended. "If I b.u.t.ted in with fool suggestions, they'd quite properly kick me out."

"With your friends, who are also share-holders, you could a.s.sume control of the _Morning Intelligence_, couldn't you?"

"I guess I could a.s.sume control, but what would I do with it?"

"Do you know the reputation of that newspaper?"

"I guess it's all right. It's conservative and newsy. I read it every morning when I'm in town. It fits in very nicely between the grapefruit and the bacon-and-eggs."

"It is, also, powerful," she added, "and is said to be absolutely servile to corporate interests."

"Drennie, you talk like an anarchist. You are rich yourself, you know."

"And, against each of those other concerns, various charges have been made."

"Well, what do you want me to do?"

"It's not what I want you to do," she informed him; "it's what I'd like to see you want to do."