Beached Keels/Blue Peter/Chapter 3
III
The pillow and the counterpane were damp when he awoke, late, after a night of worried tossing. Fog, white and cold, filled the chamber as with smoke, and drifted so thickly past the window that he could see only the dim outlines of a little garden below; a few shrubs, a soft-colored tangle of sweet peas, and the high heads of golden glow shining through the white obscurity. Out of the fog came the smell of seaweed and the faint noise of waves.
Quickly putting on his damp clothes, he hurried downstairs, in some disquietude as to the time of day. No one met him in the little hall of the butternut paneling. A breakfast table still waited, white and shining, beside a fire that roared in the wide chimney; and in the corner a tall clock beat heavily toward the hour of ten. He waited, glad of the chance to warm himself before the crackling birch logs.
At last a little door opened under the stairs, and the tall old woman looked in, smiling, to wish him a good-morning.
"Miss Helen said," she announced, "that you must n 't mind eating alone, sir. She and Mr. Powell won't be down till later." Something in the situation had fluttered and embarrassed this good creature, who nearly spilled the coffee when she brought it in. So at an excellent breakfast he found himself alone, and vastly disappointed. All the morning he sat about, watching by turns the fire within doors, the white void without, and fidgeting more than he had ever believed possible. At one time a voice overhead somewhere continued steadily as in reading aloud; he could only hope that if Helen was helping her father to pass the forenoon, she did not do it too willingly. When the voice stopped, and still no one came downstairs, he flung outdoors in disgust, and wandered down the little path in a misty profusion of bright flowers. Smoking his pipe, he watched the sun burn away the fog, which lifted enough to show that the house, a comfortable building of the native red stone, faced the shore from a beautiful hollow field which curved as wide and graceful as the long arc of pink sand-beach below. Headlands north and south were blotted out, but the base of the great red walls stretched along between the green, heaving water and the white, slow-rising mist. The voice of the sea, vague, widespread, and hushing; the heavy air, a tepid mingling of fog and sunshine; the sense of lonely heights obscured,—and this was the island where a young girl, radiantly alive, must wear out her years with a tippler who studied the crumbling of time!
When he returned to the house, the sunshine had already conquered; and in the hall father and daughter were awaiting him,—the former very white and evasive, the latter a little tired, and not beautiful as by candle-light, but brown-eyed, winning, a gracious young white-robed mistress of the house.
"Good-morning," she cried, with honest gladness, and came quickly forward to meet him. Her hand was a funny little tanned thing to be shaking his hard paw.
Just what happened during lunch he could never recall, except that his host's hands trembled slightly, and that he himself could look at Helen over a bowl of poppies,—"astonishing how late they lingered in this salt air," remarked the scholar,—and that he willingly did most of the talking, when he found that to a pair of shining eyes his two years of sordid knocking about appeared rich as an Odyssey. Once, when he happened to speak of a burial at sea, the eyes were troubled; but Mr. Powell, pricking up his ears, demanded particulars. Then came a tedium of sitting about while the scholar talked, kindly but feebly. At last, however, he declared:—
"Helen has promised to show you about. I 'll not spoil your young enjoyment by going.—No, no," he chirped, as Archer would have feigned to protest, "I'm not well to-day. And to tell the truth, Mr. Archer, I cannot care so much for nature as I did. I see the changing of the seasons, rather than the seasons themselves. But go you on, you two."
And so Archer found himself outdoors in the sunshine with the girl, talking and laughing, while her father, from the door, looked mournfully after them down the little flowering path.
Their escape led them southward along the curve of the hollow field, high above the shining water, and toward the steep ascent of the southern cliffs. The short, yellow-bleached grass of autumn was already dry and slippery underfoot, its tiny spears quivering in the warm breeze that had sprung up since the vanishing of the fog.
"I'm glad you came here," she said, looking up happily. Walking beside him, brown-faced, bareheaded, she had changed into a creature of the sunlight and sea air, a light-footed huntress of the island heights.
"There is our vegetable garden," she said, pointing to some green rows behind the house. "My father and I work there a great deal."—He laughed to hear the young huntress deliver such prosaic words.—"If you do that to things I'm proud of, perhaps you won't think much of what I was going to show you," she threatened. "I forgot—such a traveler as you are"—
"No, indeed," he laughed. "I never saw anything I liked better." He had been looking down at the back of her head, and her hair, wind-blown, that gleamed like newly weathered bronze. "Show me everything. That 's a landing-pier down on your beach. Do you sail?"
"No," she confessed. "My father won't go on the water. We had a rowboat, but it went adrift last spring."
"But in case of sickness or anything?" he wondered. "Can you telephone to the mainland?"
"Why, no," replied the girl, in surprise. "I don't believe he ever thought of that. The boat brings us over all we need, every Saturday. Oh, and in such weather! In winter it's larks to wade down through the snow and help them land. And sometimes there's a letter from my uncle Morgan. And sometimes it's too rough for the men to go back, and they stay and talk. I like them very much, though my father does n't."
Her happiness was truth itself. She had forgotten whatever troubles the night before or the morning might have contained.
Far below in the cove lay the long red curve of the beach, with a thin black line of dead seaweed drawn as if by a compass along the high-water mark. The tide was beginning to ebb, but near the shore a "back eddy" moved toward them, and with it a strange multitudinous plashing, like continual waves among myriads of tiny rocks.
"Oh, look!" she cried, plucking him by the sleeve. "See the herring!" Familiarity could have made the sight no less beautiful to her.
Where the spurs of the cliff sprang upward from the cove, the turmoil was working toward them over the water. Countless tongues of silver flame leapt up, fell, leapt, and advanced with the same continuous plashing; here and there the curved flash of little bodies wove swiftly in and out of water, pliant threads of white fire. It was like a squall of silver pieces blown along the surface of the tide, with the noise and the upward-leaping drops of a ponderous, concentrated, and invisible shower.
"There 'll be good fishing to-night for those poor fellows over the hill," said Helen, "if these greedy herring-gulls don't eat it all."
Sure enough, a white flock of the lesser terns came wheeling, on bent, sickle wings, along the red face of the crags, and with mournful cat-calls pursued the shoal, poising, swerving, diving under water, to stagger into the air again, each with a glitter in its bill and a sprinkling of bright spray from its wings.
"I never liked them very much," she said, "since I read a fairy story, when I was a little girl, where they were persons transformed by a wicked queen. They 've always seemed uncanny. Is n't it queer? But they are really very white and clean; and, poor creatures, they live round these cold rocks, and their cries are so lonely."
The two had stood close together, frankly sharing their happiness in the sight, frankly glad of each other's company, like old friends. Shyness and constraint were beneath the nature of this girl, who had the clear self-possession which comes from a life lived rightly alone, or which a young person receives from association with an old one.
"Did you have any playmates here when you were a little girl?" he asked.
"No," was the answer, possibly with a tinge of sadness. "Arthur was so much older"— She paused, looking absently after the wheeling gulls, and the shoal now black in the distance. Then, as she started walking again: "But I had many games," she said brightly. "You would think them silly. Why, this field that we 're crossing: I used to walk from end to end of it all day, alone and perfectly happy, tapping the ground with a forked hazel stick my father cut for me, and playing I was a witch, divining. It was the happiest day in my life when I came tapping along into this—see"—
The rise of the hill had become more abrupt, as they neared the ascent to the high land above the cliffs. In the deepest of the slope, smooth-curved as an amphitheatre, sheltered, and facing the warmth of the southwest, the grass lay greener than elsewhere, and there grew a clump of alders. Toward this she led him, and pointed proudly to a tiny spring of clear water, with a bottom of pink sand. A song-sparrow, surprised in his bath, flitted into the bushes, leaving the water all a-quiver.
"Was n't that good divining for an inexperienced witch?" she asked, elated. "I found it the first day. Afterward I tried to find gold and silver, but never did; and so I played more round this spring, and made up things about it. Some of them I made up so hard that I believe them even now,—like this, that whoever drinks of it must come back to the island before he dies."
Archer flung himself down, bent his shining head, and drank deep of the cool water. He rose, laughing, but more than half in earnest.
"I'm glad you did that," said Helen, in the same spirit. And they moved away, silent, along the slope of the amphitheatre.
"Now here," she suddenly declared, stopping, "here I'm going to ask you two questions. You 'll never guess them. The second depends on the first. It's a test. You can't ever guess them. But if you don't," she laughed, "I shall be disappointed and shan't like you."
Archer forbore to make the complimentary retort. With her, it would have been silly. "I 'll try my best," he replied.
"Now, first," she said, with a pretty air of pedagogy, "my father and I call this hollow the Marathon field, sometimes. Why is that?"
Archer rubbed his brows and frowned.
"Now it is n't Byron. I hate him," said his examiner. "I 'll give you a clue. What is this underfoot? You 'll never find it growing so far north again."
They were standing in a little patch of feathery green stuff, with a few belated yellow flowers. A faint aromatic smell came to the aid of his memory.
"Fennel!" he cried joyfully. "I know—it's what old Pan gave to what-was-his-name?—the runner: and the Greeks fought in a field of it."
"Good, good!" she cried, in unconcealed astonishment. "I never expected you to. But you won't answer the second right. What is the happiest kind of death?"
His honest brown. face clouded. Here, he thought, the poison of her father's spirit worked in her. Yet her bright eyes showed only interest in the game.
"Of course you can't. I 'll give you another clue," said this Ariadne. "The second answer is in the same story, and it is n't about fighting the Persians. Now what is it?"
"What is the happiest kind"—he reflected. This time he really gave thought to the question. "Why," he said at last, with conviction, "the way this same fellow in the poem died, running into Athens with the news of victory, among them all—still young"—
The slim white-gowned figure almost danced in the patch of fennel. "You 're wonderful!" she cried, clapping her hands. "That was it—
"'Like wine through clay,
Joy bursting his heart, he died—the bliss!'
Now you know just what this place always makes me think of, and you thought of it, too, nearly all by yourself."
It was idle to pretend that this simple game had not established a bond between them. The world might have been young again, or they might have known each other since Marathon itself. For a moment they stood in the warm sunlight, with faces shining on each other, undisguised; then they began to climb toward the bare skyline of the heights, slipping on the yellow grass, scrambling, helping each other up the steep bank, happy as the encircling sunshine. The warm breeze followed them, sweet with pennyroyal crushed underfoot.