Ainslee's Magazine/The Woman With a Past/Reward for Valor
VII.—REWARD FOR VALOR
... Untwine me from the mass
Of deeds which make up life, one deed
Power shall fall short in or exceed!—Pippa Passes.
BUT I want to play with the beautiful lady! She tellth thtorieth 'bout gob-o-linth an' thea therpents!”
The voice of Lucius Merton Camberwell, junior, rose in a crescendo that threatened a climatic yell. His mother, a soft-faced, wide-figured woman, with white, helpless hands, looked at him in dismay and disapproval.
“How can you be so silly, Lucius?” she said, in a tone rather plaintive than stern; and then, turning to the third occupant of the little veranda:
“Mother, how do you suppose that woman got such a hold over him in such a short time?”
The third occupant was a very old lady, with a black false front, and a nutcracker profile. No one knew why she wore the false front, for she made no secret of her eighty-odd years, and, indeed, was wont to dig into unbelievably remote days, and gleefully unearth ancient scandals, which were as startling to others as they were savory to herself. A very witty and wicked old woman was Mrs. Merton, and it is doubtful if she had ever recovered completely from the shock of bearing anything so gentle and virtuous as her daughter Alicia, now Mrs. Camberwell.
She rarely paid Alicia the compliment of listening to what she said, but in this instance she did glance casually in the direction of her grandson, and remarked:
“Lucius is a male being, even if he is only six. He doesn't like being bored. Doubtless, the lady amused him. You don't amuse him. Pass me my glasses, my dear, and the Assiette du Beurre.”
Mrs. Camberwell flung her mother a reproachfully indignant look, as she complied.
“Really,” she burst out, as she placed the disreputable French paper in the singularly steady and delicate old hands, “how you can read such things, mother! Why, I just glanced through it once! Of course, I couldn't understand half of it.”
The bad old lady chuckled behind the crackling sheet.
“Naturally you wouldn't, my love!” she said, and proceeded to read and digest.
Mrs. Camberwell sighed heavily, and took up her sewing. Her mother was a great trial to her.
The summer-morning stillness fell once more.
It was a very typical summer cottage, light of frame, and airy, with a high veranda that was almost a porch poised above the beach. Behind the house the dunes of Long Island rolled off to the west; in front was the sea. Rythmical, majestic, and yet cajoling as a great tiger cat, it lay and slept or moved caressingly under the touch of the wind.
On the board walk below were invalid chairs by the dozen, with pale convalescents and tremulous, nervous wrecks, drinking in the magic salt of the air. Old people with lined and fretful faces, young people fighting off some ravaging trouble or illness, children romping madly in the midst of it all—it was just such a mixed and restless scene as may be seen on any summer morning at a seaside resort.
Old Mrs. Merton more than once glanced from behind her shameless paper to note the kaleidoscopic mass of humanity. With all her cynicism, she found it pathetic.
Not so Mrs. Camberwell.
“The worst of these little rented cottages,” she complained, with a sniff, “is that one is so on the top of people!”
“Well,” said Mrs. Merton, after smothering a chuckle at a highly spiced French witticism, “it's better than having them on top of us! Where's Agnes?”
“Here,” said a very gentle voice, and her granddaughter came out on the veranda. She was the oldest of Mrs. Camberwell's several children, and very like her mother. Indeed, it seemed as if her mother's softness and helplessness had become set, and, as it were, solidified.
She was so mild, so amiable, so feminine, so useless, that one seemed to feel again in her the pale sweetness of the early Victorian heroines. You could no more have endured hurting her than you could have hurt a small and rather weak bird. And she was pretty—undeniably so—with mouse-colored hair, parted gravely and gathered into a heavy, soft lump at the back of her head; large, sweet, gray eyes, and a rather plump, but not ungraceful, little body.
The absolute dew of the morning was still upon Agnes Camberwell, insipid and stupid as she was. She was the “sweet girl” who has figured in a thousand pleasing love stories. Her freshness, her goodness, her sincerity, and her prettiness were facts as clear and true as her own charming complexion.
“Where's Theo?” asked her mother, as the girl sat down in a wicker chair and reached for a palm-leaf fan.
Agnes flushed faintly. Theo was her fiancé.
““He—he's gone in swimming with—Mrs. Carpenter,” she said, with some slight hesitation.
At the name, Lucius, who had been sulking in a corner for ten minutes, burst into a wail. “My beautiful lady,” he lamented, “that tellth the lovelietht thtorieth 'bout”
“Lucius, be silent!” commanded his mother, with rather feeble dignity. She turned to her mother for sympathy.
“That woman again!” she exclaimed. “What evil genius ever brought her to this place?”
Mrs. Merton laid down her infamous Assiette du Beurre and exchanged her reading glasses for a more becoming lorgnon.
“I should like to see the creature,” she observed. “You all talk about her as if she were a monster—Medusa at the very least! Yet all I can find out about her is that she has told fairy stories to Lucius—who sadly needs them, poor little lad! You never had the least imagination, Alicia!—and takes Theodore out walking or in swimming, which” She paused with a twinkle.
“You may just as well go on, grandmother,” said Agnes, with as sharp an intonation as her gentle voice could be capable of. “You meant to say, 'Which Theodore needs as sorely as Lucius does the fairy tales!' I know. I can't go wandering up and down the board walk, or over the sand dunes, for hours, quoting poetry, and I don't know how to swim!”
She paused with a little catch in her breath. Her sweet temper was utterly ruffled,
“If you really want to see—her,” she said abruptly, “there she is, just coming out of that farther bathhouse.”
Mrs. Merton gazed long through her lorgnon. Suddenly she turned to her daughter and granddaughter with a most surprised face.
“Why,” she declared, “the woman is a witch! And I vow she's worth knowing. I think I shall cultivate her acquaintance!”
Far up the beach, where there were no more bathhouses or board walks, Philippa Carpenter and Theo Farnham sat on the sand to rest after a long swim. The splendid sun of midsummer and morning flooded them, and seemed to strike fire even to their very blood. It had tinged Pippa's smooth skin with tints of most exquisite ivory, and shot a more dazzling luster into her red hair. Even her eyes were more purple, and her wonderful mouth more red. And her lovely body in the wet black bathing dress was as perfect in line and curve as was ever a sculptor's dream.
She was laughing at her companion as she leaned back, with one elbow buried in the hot, soft sand.
“We are out to swim, and enjoy nature,” she reminded him, with a merry, chiding note in her voice, “not to exchange compliments!”
Theo Farnham was lean and handsome in an undeveloped, boyish way. He had the soul of a dreamer, and yearned to the open—to the sea, and all free, wind-swept places; yet his was a spiritual rather than a physical love of out-of-door life. There was something sensitive and shrinking—something almost timid about him. Such boys get termed mollycoddles at school; and, doubtless, that is what they are, among other things—yet they have potentialities. Sometimes they go down under a pitiful load of practical burdens with which they are unable to cope; but occasionally they become poets.
At present Theo was huffed.
“I suppose,” he said haltingly, “that you're like all nice women. You don't like a fellow to pay you compliments.”
Pippa could hardly help laughing.
“Well—not as a general thing!” she rejoined. “However, if there was anything particularly nice that you had in mind” She laughed outright.
But Theo appeared to be in earnest.
“I never could see why not,” he resumed, quite seriously. “No one thinks it silly or common, impertinent, or that, to say that a sunset's lovely, or a rose, or”
“But,” Philippa hastened to interpose, “those are obviously beautiful things.”
“So,” said Theodore simply, “are you.”
Mrs. Carpenter regarded him in frank and interested amusement. “You are a very queer boy,” she remarked, after a while.
“I know,” said Theo, rather wearily. “I've been called queer since I was five. I guess I was born so.”
He was not looking at her—but out to sea, with a frown between his dark eyes. Cloudy eyes they were, she noticed, full of shadows—not the eyes of a happy, healthy-hearted lad. He worried her vaguely, for it was Philippa Carpenter's peculiarity that even when she felt no sentiment herself, she was exquisitely tender of sentiment in others, and had an abiding maternalism for the piteous world at large. An impulse made her say suddenly:
“What a very pretty girl Miss Camberwell is!”
Theo frowned a shade more deeply.
“Yes,” he said. A pause, then: “She hasn't much opinion of me,” he added.
“I thought Pippa hesitated. “I heard you were engaged.”
“So we are,” replied the boy, still frowning, “in a way.” Suddenly he burst out: “Agnes never understands. She wants me to settle down to some business, and stop reading, and writing poetry, and” He checked himself with a visible effort. “She doesn't understand,” he went on, in a quieter key. “She wants me to be what she calls 'strong,' and 'manly,' and I don't see what she ever saw in me to begin with. I'm not a bit her sort.”
Pippa paused a moment looking into the handsome, gloomy young face, then laid her hand very lightly on his arm.
“Do you—love her?” she asked gently.
Theo, with knitted brow, and troubled dark eyes, considered her question.
“Yes,” he said finally, “I think I do--I Oh, yes, I'm sure I do—in one way.”
“In what way? There ought to be only one way to love.”
“Oh, how can you say a silly thing like that?” blazed the boy wrathfully. “You know there are a hundred—a million ways of love.” Again he controlled himself. “I love you, in one way Are you angry?”
“No,” said Pippa, though her heart was a little sore.
“I love you,” he went plunging on, “only—differently. I love you as I love the wind, and the sky, and the sea, and the big things. I love Agnes as I would love a—a garden.”
“That is a very beautiful way to love,” said Pippa gently. “If I were a girl, I should like some one to love me like—a garden.”
She clasped her hands about her knees and stared out to sea.
Theo was already far from the subject.
“Do you ever wonder what it's like down there?” he asked, pointing to the tumbling waves. There was an odd look in his eyes, something that suggested to Pippa a bird charmed by a snake.
“Why, yes!” she rejoined quickly. “And I'm sure it's a real Hans Christian Andersen place! Don't you remember the wonderful sea kingdom where the little mermaid lived?”
The boy shivered a little.
“I always think of the kraken,” he said, and,
“Full fathoms five thy father lies,
Of his bones
He broke off and shuddered. “Horrible!” he said.
“But, 'Sea nymphs hourly sing his knell!'” struck in Pippa. “Doesn't that make it less horrible?” In a moment she added quietly: “I thought you loved the sea.”
“I do love it!” the boy cried vehemently. “But—I'm afraid of it! I—I don't understand the feeling myself—but sometimes when I'm swimming, the thought of its strength and cruelty gets me by the throat, and—I have to come in.”
He drooped his head, as if he were ashamed of the confession.
“Agnes says I'm a coward,” he wound up. “And I guess I am.”
Into Pippa's mind came a composite mental vision of the few glimpses she had had of Agnes Camberwell. Of course, such a girl was utterly incapable of understanding this moody young soul sitting there in the sand beside her. And yet—might not just such a gentle, domestic influence be the one thing needed to balance Theo's erratic imagination and supersensitive nerves?
Pippa found her sympathies going out almost equally to both the young people. Yet she could not help them. Mrs. Camberwell had snubbed her too crudely for that. Mrs. Carpenter was no longer of the world that can afford to take umbrage at small slights. Yet she had registered a vow to punish Agnes Camberwell's mother for sundry small discourtesies.
The crowning injury had been the snatching away of Lucius in the middle of a fairy story that had absorbed the teller quite as much as the listener. Pippa loved children with her whole soul, and little Lucius, with his great eyes and rosy cheeks, his passionate attention and adorable lisp, had filled her heart with quivering delight. She had never told fairy stories before, and had been surprised to find how easily they came. Well—they had killed the spell.
The magical mood of the splendid morning brought music to Pippa's lips, and she began to sing. She had no very remarkable voice, but, like everything about her, it was true, and it was charming. Naturally, it was a contralto, but without the heavier tones of most low voices. It was soft and a bit veiled—full of sound shadows and tender cadences that seemed to well from some hidden spring of tears.
Something in the wild blue-green magic of the tossing billows before them recalled to her an old song that she had once known and loved. She remembered only that it had been called “The Wave,” and could not even trust her memory for the accuracy of what she recollected:
“It comes from the sea's great heart of blue,
And winning a warmer, purple hue,
In eddies prismatic its colors whirl,
From brown to amber, and then to pearl.
Till it finally ends in a thin line of spray—
Is wrecked into nothing, and floated away.
“And the color changes, to one who passed,
Seemed changes like Life's sea—surges vast.
Surges that foam from the deep to the spray—
And then on the Great Sands are floated away.”
The melody, minor and soft, died away in a gust of salt wind. The boy beside her drew a deep breath.
“There, you see!” he said. “Agnes would never understand that!”
It was just then that a wild patter of little feet sounded on the sand behind them.
The next moment Lucius, irresistible in a blue bathing suit that left visible nearly all of his plump little pink person, hurled himself into Mrs. Carpenter's arms.
“I'm to be let go bathing for ter-wenty minuth,” he announced, with stormy exultation. “An' pleathe, may I go with you an' Theo?”
Mrs. Carpenter hugged the small, warm body close to her in a sort of clandestine burst of self-indulgence, then sprang up, and gayly led the way into the surf.
The breakers looked quiet and tractable enough just now. They gave no warning of the treacherous undertow chuckling at their heels. Theo Farnham, with his curious double nature, shuddered at the sucking back rush of the water even at the moment that he could not resist plunging into it.
A fresh wind had sprung up—not wild enough to trouble the ocean, but strong enough to whip a sting of recklessness into the heart. It seemed to Pippa that she had never enjoyed a dip half so much. Every splash of spray in her mouth made her drunk with exhilaration; every tingling wave against her body thrilled her like an electric shock. The burning blue sky above, the blazing sun, the gusty wind, the indescribable, great, rough kiss of the water like the. caress of some gigantic lover—all these things intoxicated her, maddened her.
She was one of those rare souls whose enjoyment must always be threefold—mental, imaginative, and sensuous. To-day she seemed to plumb the fathoms of all three. She forgot Theo, she forgot Agnes Camberwell, she forgot her own troubled life, which awaited her somewhere back on land; she forgot herself. She even forgot—the child.
Then she awoke to the awful reality—a very faint, choking cry from what seemed a long way off. With the ease of a practiced swimmer, she swung herself over in the water, plunging toward the tiny voice. A great wave nearly took her breath away; like a nightmare, she saw the face of little Lucius, no longer rosy, but dead white beneath a film of wicked green water.
Then—for such flashes come greatly and in entirety, no matter how brief the moments—she saw Theo Farnham, his face as white as the child's, convulsed, agonized—swimming away from where Lucius was sinking!
While she worked against the undertow to reach the little boy, certain phrases rang clamorously in her ears: “The thought of its strength and cruelty gets me by the throat, and—I have to come in!” And, “Agnes says I'm a coward—and I guess I am.”
Farther from shore than ever Oh, God, stop the undertow for just a moment! Oh, God! Oh, God!
Was there ever a soul in stress that did not pray just so, blindly, unreasoningly, unconsciously? Pippa had not prayed for years, but as her pulses began to pound in her ears, and her eyes grew dim and dimmer with the effort she was making, she found her lips shaping themselves to old, simple petitions graven in her brain in some bygone child day.
The sky seemed almost black by the time she had caught the limp, cold little form in her left arm, swung it to her shoulder, turned on her side, and started to swim in. How easy to let go! How blessedly easy! But there was the child. The mist across her eyes had shut out everything now; she only swam on doggedly, holding up the little body with one arm, and striking out in stiff and labored strokes with the other.
She was quite dazed by now; the pounding of her heart had grown so vast that it pulsed through sea, and sky, and life itself; it seemed to throb even into outer space. Then Pippa had no further knowledge or sensation. Only she still struck out, vaguely, with her right arm, and still held the child with her left.
It was Theo Farnham's face that first came to her gaze as she drifted out of the darkness. He was white as death, and tears were pouring down his cheeks. “What a child he is!” she thought idly, and fainted again.
In a little while she was awake again, and, being gifted with abounding vitality and energy, was able to get dizzily to her feet, and help him with little Lucius, who was still unconscious.
“Oh, my God!” she heard Theo whisper, as if to his own soul. “I could have been the one to save him! And I—wasn't—I wasn't!”
She pulled her scattered and broken faculties together, and caught his arm in a convulsive grip—the boy could feel those cold, tense fingers for years after.
“Listen!” she said, speaking sharply, because she had not as yet much breath to spare. “You did save him! Do you understand? I shall tell them so!”
A sort of white terror came into his face as he grasped her meaning, but before he could answer, the Camberwell household, notified by a beach attendant, were upon them.
“Oh, Theo!” sobbed Agnes, though her smooth, mouse-colored hair remained unruffled. “I have so wretchedly misjudged you! Can you ever forgive me? I truly thought you were a—coward! And now—now” She dissolved into tears.
Mrs. Camberwell had some tearful, maternal sentiments to voice also. Every one seemed disposed to treat Theo as a hero, and, to Pippa's faint disgust, he seemed more and more disposed to accept the homage. The white shrinking that had been on his face at first had passed, giving place to a sort of shamefaced gratitude that any one might readily accept as the attitude of mind appropriate to modest heroism.
Only Mrs. Merton, sitting calmly in a wheel chair, made no comment, and offered no plaudits. She looked often at Mrs. Carpenter. Philippa stood aside during the whole scene, wishing wearily that they would disperse and give her a chance to go home and get to bed. People put to her occasional queries, but she answered so vaguely that her questioners decided she really knew nothing about the matter.
She felt remote and detached, save for one brief moment when little Lucius came to himself. Then her heart leaped with almost a mother's pang, and she felt a wild sense of exultation in the secret knowledge that it was she who had saved his life.
Then, as they carried Lucius toward the Camberwell house, and Theo and the girl he loved as he would a garden followed, she turned away with dragging feet toward the bathing houses.
“One moment—madam!” Old Mrs. Merton's voice rang out sharp and authoritative, and Pippa paused.
The old lady was sitting bolt upright in her wheel chair, and there was a curious, intent look in her shrewd face.
“Will you come here one moment?”
Pippa obeyed, and stood white and rather drooping beside the chair. Mrs. Merton stared steadfastly into her face for a moment; then the keen eyes shifted to the green-and-white ocean.
“They are all fools,” she said abruptly. “They don't know—but I know. I come from an age in which courage was an everyday matter, not an occurrence, as it is now. I am from the South, and, my dear, Southern women knew something about bravery, take my word for it! And I was in Paris during the riots, and the flight of the emperor and empress. And”—the fine old voice broke a trifle—“I merely want to say that—you are the bravest woman I have ever known!”