The Nymph and the Lamp

  The brown men on the beach stared at the slender figure coming out of the sea with a wet dress clinging to her legs. But Captain O’Dell was looking past her. Carney stood at the beachhead by the pile of stores, where the little group of island women had gathered after their custom. Like most of the island men he had stripped to trousers and sea boots for the work and his skin gleamed like new bronze after the summer’s exposure. Beside the figures of the women he seemed to tower, a sculptor’s study posed before the lesser figures of a symbolic group. From the girl running up the beach came a single cry.

  “Matthew!”

  O’Dell saw Carney start, and throw up a hand to shield his eyes from the water glare. And in that attitude, with the clipped golden beard and hair gleaming in the sun, he looked—yes, by Jove, he looked like one of those Norse kings, right out of the Heimskringla! You sought for the winged helmet and the long war ax and saw nothing but the bit of gold, Ran’s tribute, slung by the cord upon his breast. He gazed blankly towards the swiftly approaching figure of the woman. When she was almost up to him suddenly the frown dissolved and became a look of wonder, of incredulous delight. Then she was sobbing against his breast, held in those great bronze arms as if he feared the sea might take her back again.

  “A fathom’s length,” muttered Captain O’Dell, “and not another inch,” as if it were a matter of great moment, something that ought to be marked on the chart. “And noon—full light.” He turned away, swallowing. He was a man who abhorred emotion and he summoned all his cynicism for a final judgment on this affair. Women! What strange creatures! All outward passion, all tears and kisses, all craving ease and pleasure and yet all morbid readiness for sacrifice and martyrdom. And yet—and yet who knew what lay at the bottom of their secret hearts?

  Isabel Carney was not what you’d call pretty but she was rather nicely made. She had the ripe attractiveness which comes to slender women in their early thirties, she was at her best, you might say, and she knew it. And could she fail to know, this intelligent young woman, that in the days to come when Carney could see her no more he would go on thinking of her as he saw her now? Could she fail to realize that for Carney she would always be young, her hair would never be anything but that softly shining brown, her skin always fair, her eyes that clear gray, her figure that of a nymph running out of the sea? By Jove, what woman wouldn’t chuck up the world for love in a desert on terms like that?

  And having satisfied himself with this pronouncement Captain O’Dell startled the gaping boatmen with a shout.

  “Look alive, there! D’ye think I’ve got all winter to drag my hook off this beach?”