Part 18

How extraordinary it was, she thought, sitting all together, as close as she could get to herself. They were like two children lost in the woods,--two people, both of whom had been able to buy the earth, played a trick upon and shown that the earth was no more theirs than any other man's,--two people cut off, brought all the way down the great ladder with a run, to the desire for charity,--two people, young and wilful and proud and vain, who had come together by a lie, been kept together by a condition of nature against which they, for all their money, and youth and supreme confidence, were utterly impotent,--two people mutually aware of being man and woman drifting together in a new life to death, perhaps....

"_Galatea, Galatea_, ahoy."

She gave a little cry of wonder and fright.

In an instant he was bending over her. "What can I do?"

"Nothing else," she said, smiling up at him.

"You're shivering."

"Oh, no. I'm only--cool. That's all."

He flung open the locker. There was nothing in it but his bathing suit. He had left a big, thick towel on the rocks to dry. He seemed to have left everything on the rocks,--including his wits. There was nothing to put round her.

"_Galatea,--Galatea_, ahoy."

He was an hour making up his mind what to do. During that time, listening hard for any near signal or answering call, he shouted and kept up a jerky conversation, talking to Beatrix as though she were a child, trying to make her laugh with futile jokes that he would have sworn he couldn't have remembered. Like a Trojan she played up and duly laughed with chattering teeth and many times whipped in quickly with an "Ahoy" herself to help him out.

Suddenly she began to whimper. She couldn't help it. She was so cold and so frightened and to her it seemed as though this were the end of everything.

And that decided him. He picked her up and sat down, put her in his lap, wound his arms round her and put his cheek against her cheek. This girl-child must have all his warmth. He was responsible for this inefficient business. The fool engine had beat him.... She was no longer in his blood. She was a beautiful human thing who must be kept from crying, kept warm, kept alive. The sex in him was utterly dormant. The desire to preserve had conquered it. He was a worried, anxious man with a delicate lovely thing on his hands and it was his fault, curse him, that she was whimpering and chilled and horribly uncomfortable and up against death perhaps. At any moment they might be run down,--at a loose end, out there among the veils. And he held all her softness tight to him and presently began to rub her,--shoulders and arms and legs, to make her blood circulate, to stop her from whimpering, saying the sort of things that men always say to children who have hurt themselves, silly, little, queer things, over and over again.

It was wonderful.... He was so strong and fine, and she cuddled up to his big chest and put her arms about him and gave herself up, wholly, without a qualm. With the same regularity he threw up his head and shouted and she heard the rumble of his voice, and for a long time he held her and rubbed, never letting her blood stop, only cutting into his murmur of comfort by shouting:

"_Galatea,--Galatea_, ahoy."

The boat was drifting. The water gave it no more than a gentle rock. She shut her eyes and smiled. She had retained the mind of a woman with the body of a child. It was brilliantly clear to her that out there, then, in that drifting boat, all among those closely hung veils of damp web, the spirit of this man was alight, and that in his hands, that had been so hot and eager to touch, there was now the supreme tenderness that is without passion. It was wonderful. It was not happening. This was not earth. He, such a man, who had kissed her foot and put his cheek against her breast, and she, who had exulted in her power to stir and draw on. It must be Heaven. Their clashes and outbursts were over. They had died together and met again in spirit. She had never dreamed of anything like this.

"_Galatea,--Galatea_, ahoy," yelled Franklin. It was the pit-pit of an engine that came to his tired brain.

"Ahoy to you."

It was not Heaven. It was earth and they were alive and that was Jones's voice. She cuddled closer and her heart began to thump. She didn't want to be taken away.

"At last," said Franklin. "Steady, Jones," he called out. "We're drifting. Slide up alongside and take us on. We're cold.... Well played, little girl," and he kissed her on the mouth.

That night he insisted upon her having dinner in bed. Ah, how good that steaming, hot bath had been.

Afterwards, strained and very, very tired, she fell asleep at once, and went back to the little beach with its vague patterns of sea-weed on yellow sand, and they swam again and dried in the sun, and talked and laughed, and he lay at her feet, brown and clean-cut, with burning eyes,--but when he picked her up this time and carried her to the cave she held him tight and found his lips and lay with him on the warm sand....

It must have been midnight when she woke suddenly and put her hand out to touch his face.

It was not true. She was alone,--and she loved him so!

*XXXIV*

It was exactly half-past nine the following morning when Jones rapped at the door of the Captain's stateroom. The dancing sailor registered the note of irritation in the shout of "Come" with a comic grievance and went in to find McLeod struggling to remove a recalcitrant beard with a very disagreeable razor. There was, God knows, every reason for a touch of temper mixed with that sort of amazement that a man feels when an old and true friend goes back on him. Shaving at the best of times is a penance, at the worst a catastrophe. The Captain was a clean-shaven man in the middle forties and although, as one of the Esau tribe, he had used a razor since he was eighteen; he had failed to understand the peculiar psychology of steel and to appreciate the fact that the blade of a razor is just as temperamental and just as much affected by the vagaries of liver as the average human being. He made no allowances.

"What is it, Jones?"

"Sorry ter disturb you, sir, but there's a launch comin' up on the port side with Mr. Fraser aboard. Thought you'd like ter know, sir."

"Have you told Mr. Franklin?"

"No, sir. Considered it my duty ter report it ter you, sir."

"Well, nip round to Mr. Franklin and tell him, will you? I don't see what M.F. wants to trail us for unless it's something important."

And so Jones nipped, little knowing that Malcolm's unexpected visit was to bring about a new crisis in the lives of Franklin and Beatrix.

Only just dressed, Franklin followed Jones out in time to see Malcolm come aboard. "Why, hello, my dear fellow," he called out with immense cordiality, "you're just in time for breakfast." It seemed an age since he had seen his friend.

The sky was clear again, the sun warm and gracious, the sea just lively enough to make the yacht dance. The fog which had come from nowhere for no reason had gone back in the same mood. Franklin had slept in one solid, dreamless piece. All was well with the world.

There was a whimsical smile on Malcolm's cherubic face. "I wasn't quite sure that I should be welcome," he said, dying to know how things were going. "The word breakfast never sounded so well to me. I'm ravenous. Where's Beatrix?"

"Not up yet. Come to the dining saloon." He took Malcolm's arm and led him off, delighted to see him.

"Just a second," said Malcolm. "I think you'd better tell McLeod to turn the yacht about at once. It'll save time."

Franklin drew up. "Turn the yacht about? Why?"

"I have a good reason for breaking in on your triumphant isolation," said Malcolm, "little as you appear to suspect it, and if you----"

He stopped speaking. Beatrix was coming towards them. His heart turned at the sight of her. Never in his life had he seen her looking so radiant and lovely and like a rose with all its sweetest leaves still folded, and in her expression there was something so new in its sunny peacefulness that he caught his breath with surprise.

"Malcolm," she cried out, and put her hands on his shoulders and kissed him like a sister. He had expected to see a caged bird beating her wings and to be rushed at as one who brought a reprieve. His curiosity nearly forced him into personalities.

"How nice of you to look us up," she said, taking his other arm. "You're just in time for breakfast."

The word breakfast used by them both struck the most intimate note. It is the most domestic of all words. The first stab of jealousy that Malcolm had ever felt made him, before he could master himself, break their astounding atmosphere of contentment, this elysium of peace.

"Mrs. Keene is very ill," he said, sharply. "Ida Larpent and I have done what we could for two days but she's crying continually for you. I drove along the coast as fast as I could and unless you come back with me I don't know what may happen."

Beatrix turned and looked at Franklin. He read in her eyes an appeal to put her quickly at the side of the little lady whose devotion was dog-like. He was wrong. The look she gave him was full of anguish at the thought of leaving him and the sort of half-hope that he would play the tyrant and the bully and refuse to let her go.

"Jones," he sang out.

"Sir?"

"Ask Captain McLeod to see me at once."

"Very good, sir."

"Malcolm, take Beatrix into the dining saloon. I'll join you in about five minutes."

And as Beatrix went on with Malcolm, all her appetite for breakfast gone, she said to herself with the inevitable unreasonableness of a woman in love, "He doesn't care, he doesn't care. Any pretty girl would do as well. He's glad to let me go."

Franklin met McLeod. "Mrs. Franklin must go ashore as soon as you can get her there. Mrs. Lester Keene is very ill. Mr. Fraser has a car waiting and he will drive my wife back to where we landed the party the other day,--Jones in charge. I can't be trusted with an engine now, y'know. I shall drive with them and come aboard again when you turn up, which you will do with best possible speed. Get that?"

"Yes, sir."

"Right." He waved his hand and went below to his own sanctum. His valet was busy in the bedroom. "Moffat, pack things for me for a couple of days, and tell the stewardess to do the same for Mrs. Franklin. Sharp's the word. We're leaving the yacht in half-an-hour."

Then he went to breakfast, having set things on the move in his characteristic way. Beatrix and Malcolm were talking generalities in a rather strained manner. The thoughts of both were busy. It was very obvious to Malcolm that something had happened to Beatrix. Her whole attitude, as well as her expression, had changed. She even seemed to be dressed differently in some subtle way. She was, too, he thought, less young, less confident, less on the defensive, less consistently brilliant, less all-in-the-shop-window,--more like the little girl who had tucked herself into his heart.

"What happened?" asked Franklin, doing more than justice to a liberal helping of scrambled eggs a Ludovic.

He'd never be able to eat so well if he cared, thought Beatrix.

Malcolm's eyes were clear again. He was less than the dust to the heroine of his boyhood and he had prayed that she might be won by Pel. After all, he was a poet.

"Well," he said, "that kind, good soul began by having hysterics on the quay. She was the first to realize, presumably because of a long course of novel reading, that we had been emptied away like rubbish and that the _Galatea_ had turned seawards with Beatrix."

Franklin nodded and drank deeply of strong coffee.

Beatrix respected him for drinking strong, black stuff with breakfast, but she would have given days of her life to have had just one smile from him then.

"I knew the one-eyed place on which we had been dumped, took charge of the three women--saving Mrs. Keene from a watery grave--and drove to the one possible inn. Quite by accident I had some money on me. Helene and I did what we could to soothe Mrs. Keene but she took to bed and sprang a high temperature. The local doctor attended her and called it a nervous breakdown and that's what, being in the confidence of you both, I believe it is. Mrs. Larpent surprised me by being very kind and sympathetic, which shows how foolish it is to judge a woman by her jewelry and the way she does her hair. We have had a very worrying time. Finally I made up my mind to hire a car and drive along the coast until I came level with you. I started before daybreak and here I am. Mrs. Keene never ceases to call for Beatrix and I promised to bring her back. You will both help me to keep my promise, I know."

"Well, of course," said Franklin.

"Well, of course," echoed Beatrix. Conceive it, Beatrix,--an echo! Love plays strange tricks upon humanity.

Franklin went on eating. "We leave on the big launch in twenty minutes. We shall drive back in your car and stay at the inn until the _Galatea_ anchors off the quay."

"Thank you," said Malcolm. "The sight of Beatrix will do Mrs. Keene more good than buckets of medicine."

Beatrix turned to Franklin. "Does 'we' include you?" she asked, with what Malcolm thought was a most curious and startling note of humbleness.

"Rather," said Franklin.

Whereupon Beatrix began to eat.

Sitting in the shade of the veranda of the inn Ida Larpent killed time with a new sense of hope.

*XXXV*

It was nearly four o'clock that afternoon when the dust-covered car arrived at Malcolm's one-eyed place some miles from Charleston, South Carolina. It was a long, tedious, hot drive through country which Beatrix called untidily picturesque. The telegraph posts along the roads leaned at rakish angles. Everywhere there were cotton fields with irregular lines of plants from which the blossoms had fallen, dilapidated shacks with piccaninnies playing about them and uncorseted colored women squatting on the stoops. Strange washing hung out to dry with great frequency and every now and then there was a fine Colonial house with a garden alight with flowers.

The inn, or hotel, as it insisted on being called, was the only building in the settlement which seemed to have received a coat of white paint for many moons and it was obviously the centre of attraction. Three rather carelessly treated Fords were parked near its main entrance and two drummers were rocking on the unwashed stoop with soft damp cigars tucked into the corners of their mouths. Little families of chickens ran after their conscientious mothers around the building and several turkeys stalked aimlessly here and there like actors out for a walk. Numerous outhouses leaned against each other for support,--one or two of them showing an ingenuity in repair that was almost Irish. On the walls of several were pasted glaring bills of motion picture plays then being shown in Charleston, and one was entirely given up to the glorification in large letters of a certain small pill. There was, indeed, a curious intimacy, a sort of who-cares-a-whoop air about the whole place. You could tease the turkeys, scatter the chickens, grin at the Fords and spit with the drummers. It was Carolina and hot and the cotton was coming on. What the deuce, anyway!

From the beginning of the journey to the end of it Franklin hardly opened his mouth. Watched surreptitiously by Beatrix, he sat silent and peculiarly distrait, like a man who was either working out an engrossing problem or bored to extinction. After several dogged attempts to get him to talk, Malcolm gave him up and for some miles devoted himself entirely to Beatrix. To her he told everything funny that he had ever heard or invented without winning a smile. She too was as far away and as unresponsive as Franklin. And so, giving them both up, Malcolm joined the sphinxes and let his imagination run loose. When this unsociable party halted for lunch at a wayside inn the conspiracy of silence was broken, but only as it would have been by three people who were total strangers thrown together briefly. The few necessary commonplaces were said. Franklin and Beatrix went on thinking and Malcolm continued to imagine what they were thinking about. The driver of the hired car, a middle-aged man who had married an argumentative woman in his youth, gave a great deal of slow consideration to the matter. His sense of beauty pulled his sympathy towards Beatrix, but his sense of brotherhood impelled him to stand by Franklin in what he decided must be a matrimonial bust-up, and so he remained neutral as far as they were concerned and concentrated pity upon Malcolm, to whom, luckily, sleep eventually came.

Franklin was suffering from inevitable reaction. He had returned to earth from a dream. He had come back to a very practical world from the land of make-believe. He had fallen from the unnatural height of a sublime, passionless love to the natural level of a man whose passion pounded on the walls of his heart and ran like electricity through his veins. Out of the brief mist which had shut out the truth of things he stared to find that Beatrix was as far away from him as ever. He was in the pit of depression, especially as he had a feeling that any chance he might have had to win Beatrix was gone now that she had left the yacht. It seemed to him that she had escaped.

As for Beatrix, who had felt the beat of Franklin's heart against her breast and would smilingly have gone beyond the outpost of eternity in his arms, reaction came with a shock that left her with no other desire than to cry. Suddenly to have found herself and the meaning of life; suddenly, out there in the fog, to have seen the sense and sanity of things and burgeoned into a woman under the warmth of love and dreamed all night of its fulfilment and then to waken to _this_,--a man who neither looked at her nor spoke, who hustled her from the yacht and would probably leave her with her friends and go his way. If he had loved her as well as been stirred by the attraction of her sex he must have told her so that morning. This was the end of all her arguments. Having her at his mercy he let her go, she told herself bitterly. Probably he had escorted her to shore to renew his flirtation with Ida Larpent. Ah! That was it. Malcolm had said that she had remained at the hotel. She wouldn't be a bit surprised if the Larpent woman had bribed Malcolm to come to the yacht with his tale of woe ... and when, as the car drew up, Ida Larpent sauntered out wearing one of her most enigmatical smiles and a very becoming frock the hitherto unknown demon of jealousy seized Beatrix in his burning grasp and for the first time in her life she became the little sister of all womankind, a girl whose wealth had turned to ashes and whose autocracy fell about her like dead leaves.

"How's Brownie?" She ignored Mrs. Larpent's hand and cheek, and passed into the house without waiting for an answer. The screen door went back with a clang.

"Good Lord," said Franklin, summing up the whole place in one rapid glance, "what a filthy hole!"

Malcolm pointed to the chickens. "But look at these," he laughed, refreshed.

"Welcome," said Ida Larpent, not so much clasping Franklin's hand as embracing it. She had the knack. "It's good to see you again. Life has its compensations."

"Thanks."

"Quite a good sort, after all," thought Franklin. "Ripping hat. Always makes me feel like a man who goes behind the scenes after the last act."

A white-haired, chatty negro led Beatrix up two flights of carpetless stairs, along a narrow echoing passage to a door almost at the end of it.

"Don't knock," said Beatrix, and paid him with a smile.

The room was bare and large and barn-like. Its three large windows were screened. Its stained floor was rubbed and almost colorless. There was a cheap writing desk of yellow wood, a glass-topped dressing table to match, a stand with a water bottle on it and a shiver-inspiring white cuspidor beneath, several strips of thin-worn string matting and a lamp hanging from the centre of a none too clean ceiling.

Mrs. Lester Keene was lying on a bed with brass knobs which sagged perceptibly in the middle. Beatrix tip-toed to it and went down on her knees and put her arms round the little lady's shoulders. "Brownie dear, I've come," she said.

There was a great maternal cry, and a passion of tears.

"That's right. Weep, Brownie, my dear little Brownie, it will do you good. You were frightened for me, weren't you? The others wondered what was the matter with you, but you and I know, don't we? There are no secrets between us and now you'll get well, won't you? I'm so sorry!"

And the little woman clung weakly and fondly and stroked the face of the beautiful girl who meant so much to her and for whom she liked to think that she was responsible. "Oh, my dear, my dear," she cried, "you don't know what agonies I've been through, or how dreadful it was to see the yacht going away and you alone and unprotected with that man."

"Was it possible that _I_ called him 'that man' then?" thought Beatrix.

"I've been nearly distraught to think of all the indignities that you have had to suffer. I could not close my eyes for fear of seeing unspeakable pictures, though at night I thought I could hear you calling to me to come and help you and you so young and proud and fine and helpless. Oh--oh! and are you all right? Will you swear that you're all right?"

"Yes, Brownie dear, I'm all right. Can't you see that I'm all right?" But there were tears on her cheeks and a pain at her heart because she was so much all wrong. Couldn't he have said just one word all day, just one, to show her that she meant more to him than a mere woman,--after all that they had been through between life and death? Couldn't he have given her one look to show that he was something besides merely a man and that he had held her so perfectly in his arms and kept her warm to love and comfort and hold always, always?

"Then why are you crying?" demanded Mrs. Keene, sharply.

"You make me cry, Brownie, to see you like this."

"I make you cry? _You!_" The voice was incredulous, skeptical, amazed. The elderly companion whose dog-like devotion and affection had not blinded her to the faults of this gold-child, this artificial flower born and reared in a house of egregious wealth, helped herself up in the bed and peered into the girl's face. "There is something wrong! I hardly know you. Tell me, tell me!" Her voice was thin and shrill from anxiety and fear.

The girl's eyes fell a little and a sob shook her shoulders.

"_Oh, my God! What has that man done to you?_"

Beatrix put a finger on her lips but the old note of command had gone. "Hush, Brownie, hush," she said gently. "Don't cry out like that, dear. You'll make yourself ill again."

The little woman's face grew whiter. "Oh, my darling!" she blurted out, conscience-stricken, "if only I had been able to look after you, if only I had been strong enough to refuse to leave you! You don't know what you mean to me. I know I've been useless and weak. I know I've never really been able to direct or guide you but I've done my best, darling, and it will kill me to think that you, _you_, who have seemed to me like a princess in a fairy tale, so pure and fine, have been hurt by this man. Oh, my dear, what has that man done to you?"