The Veiled Lady, and Other Men and Women Part 23

"'Get ready to shove off!'

"Hardly had the words left his lips when there came another dull, m.u.f.fled roar, and a sheet of flame licked the whole length of the deck.

Then she fell over on her beam.

"'My G.o.d!' I cried; 'left that dog to die!'"

For a moment the first officer did not answer. Then he raised his eyes to mine and said in a voice full of emotion:

"Yes; there was nothin' else to do. It's against orders to take animals into life-boats. They take room and must be fed, and we hadn't a foot of s.p.a.ce or an ounce of grub and water to spare, and we had two hundred miles to go. I begged the captain. 'I'll give Bayard my place,' I said.

I knew he was right; but I couldn't help it. 'Let me go back and get him.' I know now it would have been foolish; but I'd have done it all the same. So would you, maybe, if you'd known that dog and seen his trusting eyes lookin' out of his scorched face and remembered what he'd just done.

"The captain never looked at me when he answered. He couldn't; his eyes were too full.

"'Your place is where you are, sir,' he said, short and crisp. 'Shove off, men.'

"He will never get over it. That dog stood for the girl he'd lost, somehow. That's the captain's bell. I'm wanted on the bridge.

Good-night."

Again the cabin door swung free, letting in a blast of raw ice-house air, the kind that chills you to the bone. The gale had increased.

Through the opening I could hear the combers sweeping the bow and the down-swash of the overflow striking the deck below.

With the outside roar came the captain, his tarpaulins glistening with spray, his cap pulled tight down to his ears, his storm-beaten face ruddy with the dash and cut of the wind. He looked like a sea t.i.tan that had stepped aboard from the crest of a wave.

If he saw me--I was stretched out on the sofa by this time--he gave no sign. Opening his tarpaulins and thrashing the water from his cap, he walked straight to the cage, peered in, and said softly:

"Ah, my little man! Asleep, are you? I just came down to take a look at the chart and see how you were getting on. We're having some weather on the bridge."

MUGGLES'S SUPREME MOMENT

I

A most estimable young man was Muggles: a clean-shaven, spick-and-span, well-mannered young man--particular as to the brushing of his hat, the tying of his scarf and the cut of his clothes; more than particular as to their puttings-on and puttings-off--sack-coat and derby for mornings; top hat and frock for afternoons; bobtail and black tie for stags, and full regalia of white choker, white waistcoat and swallowtail for smart dinners and the opera.

He knew, too, all the little niceties of social life--which arm to give to his hostess in escorting her out to dinner; on which side of a hansom to place a lady; the proper hours for calling; the correct thing in canes, umbrellas, stick-pins and cigar-cases; the way to balance a cup of afternoon tea on one knee while he toyed with a lettuce sandwich teetering on the other--all the delicate observances so vital to the initiated and so unimportant to the untutored and ignorant. Then Muggles was a kind and considerate young man--extremely kind and intrusively considerate; always interesting himself in everybody's affairs and taking no end of trouble to straighten them out whether importuned or not--and he seldom was.

This idiosyncrasy had gained for him during his college days the t.i.tle of "Mixey." This in succeeding years had been merged into "Muddles" and finally to "Muggles," as being more euphonious and less insulting. Of late among his intimates he had been known as "The Goat," due to his constant habit of b.u.t.ting in at any and all times, a sobriquet which clings to him to this day.

His real name--the one he inherited from his progenitors and now borne by his family--was one that stood high in the fashionable world: a family that answered to the more dignified and aristocratic patronymic of Maxwell--a name dating back to the time of Cromwell, with direct lineage from the Earl of Clanworthy--john, Duke of Ess.e.x, Lord Beverston--that sort of lineage. No one of the later Maxwells, it is true, had ever been able to fill the gap of a hundred years or more between the Clanworthys and the Maxwells, but a little thing like that never made any difference to Muggles or his immediate connections. Was not the family note-paper emblazoned with the counterfeit presentment of a Stork Rampant caught by the legs and flopping its wings over a flattened fish-basket; and did not Muggles's cigarette-case, cuff-b.u.t.tons and seal ring bear a similar design? And the wooden mantel in the great locked library, and which was opened and dusted twice a year--the books, not the mantel--did it not support a life-sized portrait of the family bird done in wood, with three diminutive storklets clamoring to be fed, their open mouths out-thrust between their mother's breast and the top edge of the fish-basket, enwreathed by a more than graceful ribbon bearing the inscription, "We feed the hungry"--or words to that effect?

None of these evidences of wealth and ancestry, it must be said, ever impressed the group of scoffers gathered about the wood fire of the "Ivy" in his college days, or about the smart tables at the "Magnolia Club" in his post-graduate life. To them he was still "Mixey," or "Muddles," or "Muggles," or "The Goat," depending entirely upon the peculiar circ.u.mstances connected with the mixing up or the b.u.t.ting in.

To his credit be it said the descendant of earls and high-daddies never lost his temper at these onslaughts. If Bender, or Podvine, or little Billy Salters pitched into him for some act of stupidity--due entirely to his misguided efforts to serve some mutual friend--Muggles would argue, defend and protest, but the discussion would always end with a laugh and his signing the waiter's check and ordering another one for everybody.

"Why the devil, Muggles, did you insist last night on that Boston girl's riding home from the theatre in the omnibus, you goat?"

thundered Podvine one morning at the club, "instead of letting her--"

"My dear fellow," protested Muggles, "it was much more comfortable in the omnibus, and--"

"--And broke up her walk home with Bobby, you idiot! He had to take the owl train home, and she won't see him for a month. Didn't you know they were engaged?"

"No--"

"Of course you didn't, Muggles, but you could have seen it in her face if you'd looked. You always put your foot in it clean up to your pants'

pocket!"

"You've been at it again, have you, Muggles?" burst out Bender that same night "Listen to the Goat's last, boys. Jerry wanted to buy that swamp meadow next his place on Long Island and had been d.i.c.kering with the old fellow who owns it all winter, telling him it would be a good place to raise cranberries if it was dug out and drained, and they had almost agreed on the price--about twice what it was worth--when down goes Muggles to spend the night and Jerry blabs it all out, and just why he wanted it, and the next morning Muggles, to clinch the deal and help Jerry, slips over to the hayseed and tells him how the Sunnybrook Club are going to buy Jerry's place, and how they wanted the swamp for a hatchery--all true--and that the hayseed oughtn't to wait a moment, but send word by HIM that the deal was closed, because the club-house being near by would make all the rest of his land twice as valuable; and the old Skeezicks winked his eye and shifted his tobacco and said he'd think about it, and now you can't buy that sink-hole for twenty times what it's worth, and the Sunnybrook is looking for another site nearer Woodvale. Regular clown you are, Muggles. Exactly like that fellow at the circus who holds up one end of the tent and then, before the supes can reach it, drops it for the other end."

When the results of this last well-intentioned effort with its disastrous consequences became clear to the Goat, that spotless gentleman leaned back in his chair, threw hick his shoulders, shot out his cuffs, readjusted his scarfpin and replied in an offended tone:

"All owing, my dear fellow, to the stupidity of the agricultural cla.s.s.

I told the farmer he would regret it, and he will. As for myself, I was awfully disappointed. I had planned to run all the way back to Jerry's and tell him the good news before he went to sleep that night, and--"

"Disappointed, were you? How do you think Jerry felt? Made a lot of difference to him, I tell you, not selling his place to the club. Been a whole year working it up. It's smothered now under a blanket--about ninety per cent of its value--and the Sunnybrook scheme would have pulled him out with a margin! Now it's deader than last year's shad.

What the club wanted was a hatchery built over a spring, and that's why that swamp was necessary to the deal. Oh, you're the limit, Muggles!"

It was while smarting under these criticisms that the steward one morning in June brought him his letters. One was from Monteith--Cla.s.s of '9l--a senior when Muggles was a freshman--and was postmarked "Wabacog, Canada," where Monteith owned a lumber mill--and where he ran it himself and everything connected with it from stumpage to scantling.

"There is a broad stream that runs into the lake, ... and above the mill there are ba.s.s weighing ten pounds, ... and back in the primeval forest bears, ... and now and then a moose--" So ran the letter.

Muggles had spread it wide open by this time and was reading it aloud--everybody knowing Monteith--and the group never having any secrets of this kind from each other.

"Come up, old chap," the letter continued, "and stay a week--two, if you can work it--and bring Bender, and little Billy and Poddy, and three or four more. The bungalow holds ten. Wire when--I'm now putting things on ice."

Muggles looked around the circle and sent interrogatory Marconigrams with his eyebrows. In response Podvine said he'd go, and so did Billy Salters. Bender thought he could come a day or two later--the earning of their daily bread was not an absorbing task with these young gentlemen--their fathers had done that years before.

Muggles ran over in his mind the list of his engagements: he was due at Gravesend on the tenth for a week, to play golf; at his aunt's country-seat in Westchester on the eleventh for the same length of time, and on the twelfth he was expected to meet a yacht at Cold Spring Harbor for a cruise up the coast. He had accepted these invitations and had fully intended to keep each and every one. Monteith's letter, however, seemed to come at a time when he really needed a more virile and bracing life than was offered by the others. Here was a chance to redeem his reputation. Lumber camps meant big men doing big things--things reeking with danger, such as falling trees, forest fires and log jams. There might also be hair-breadth escapes in the hunting of big game and the tramping of the vast wilderness. This dressing three times a day and spending the intermediate hours. .h.i.tting wooden b.a.l.l.s, or lounging in a straw chair under a deck awning, had become tiresome. What he needed was to get down to Nature and hug the sod, and if there wasn't any sod then he would grapple with whatever took its place.

Muggles dropped his legs to the floor, straightened his back, beckoned to a servant, motioned for a telegraph blank--exertion is tabooed at the Magnolia--untelescoped a gold pencil hooked to his watch-chain and wrote as follows:

"Thanks. Coming Tuesday."

II

Wabacog covers a shaved place in a primeval forest which slopes to a lake of the same name. Covering this bare spot are huge piles of sawed lumber--Monteith's axe-razors did the shaving--surrounding an enormous mill surmounted by a smokestack of wrought iron topped with a bird-cage spark arrester, the whole flanked by a runway emerging from the lake, up which climb in mournful procession the stately bodies of fallen monarchs awaiting the cutting irony of the saw. Farther along, on another clearing, stands a square building labelled "Office," and still farther on, guarded by sentinel trees and encircled by wide piazzas, sprawls a low-roofed bungalow, its main entrance level with a boardwalk ending in the lake. This was Monteith's home. Here during the winter's logging he housed himself in complete seclusion, and here in summer he kept open house for whoever would answer in person his welcoming letters.

Anything so rude and primeval, or so comforting and inviting, was beyond the experience of Muggles and his friends. This became apparent before they had shed their coats and unpacked their bags. There was a darky who answered to the name of Jackson who could not only crisp trout to a turn, but who could compound c.o.c.ktails, rub down muscular backs shivering from morning plunges in the lake, make beds, clean guns, wait on the table, and in an emergency row a canoe. There were easy chairs and low-pitched divans overspread with Turkey rugs and heaped with piles of silk cushions; there were wooden lockers, all open, and each one filled with drinkables and smokables--drinkables with white labels, and smokables six inches long with cuffs halfway down their length; there was an ice-chest sampling a larger house in the rear; there was a big, wide, all-embracing fireplace that burst its sides laughing over the good time it was having (the air was cool at night), and outside, redolent with perfume and glistening in the sunshine, there was a bed of mint protected by a curbing of plank which rivalled in its sweet freshness those covering the last resting-places of the most hospitable of Virginians.

And there was Monteith!

Some men are born rich; some inherit a pair of scissors fitted to strong thumbs and forefingers, some have to lie awake nights wondering what they will do next to help their surplus run to waste, and some pa.s.s sleepless hours devising plans by which they can catch in their empty pockets the clippings and drippings of all three. Muggles's host was none of these. What he possessed he had worked for--early, late and all the time. His father had stood by and seen the old homestead in his native Southern State topple into ashes, Only the gaunt chimney left; the son had worked his way through college, and then with diploma in one hand and his courage in the other--all he owned--had shaken the dust of civilization from his shoes and had struck out for the Northern wilds: Wabacog was the result.

All these years he had kept in touch with his college chums, and when the day of his success arrived, and he was his own master, with the inborn good-fellowship that marked his race, he had unb.u.t.toned his pocket, shaken out his heart and let loose a hospitality that not only revived the memories of his childhood, but created a new kind of joy in the hearts of his guests. Hence the bungalow--hence Jackson--hence the lockers and the ice-chest, and hence the bed quilt of mint.

"This is your room, Muggles--and, Bender, old man, yours is next Podvine, you are across the hall," was his welcome. "Breakfast is any time you want it; dinner at six. Now come here! See that line of lockers and that ice-chest? Don't forget 'em, please! Step up, Jackson--take a look at him, boys. That darky can mix anything known to man. He never sleeps, and he's never tired. If you don't call on him for every blessed thing you want day or night, there'll be trouble."