Works of Robert W Chambers

by Robert W. Chambers

  “I’m afraid it is,” he assented, smiling. “What do you do in that case, Miss Herold?”

  “Go to sleep in the blind,” she admitted, with a faint smile, the first delicate approach to anything resembling the careless confidence of camaraderie that had yet come from her.

  “See the ducks!” she said, as bunch after bunch parted from the water, distantly, yet all around them, and, gathering like clouds of dusky bees, whirled away through the sky until they seemed like bands of smoke high drifting. Presently she turned and looked back, signaling adieu to the shore, where her brother lifted his arm in response, then turned away inland.

  “That’s a nice boy,” said Marche briefly, and glanced up to see in his sister’s face the swift and exquisite transformation that requires no words as answer.

  “You seem to like him,” said he, laughing.

  Molly Herold’s gray eyes softened; pride, that had made the love in them brilliant, faded until they grew almost sombre. Silent, her aloof gaze remained fixed on the horizon; her lips rested on each other in sensitive curves. There was no sound save the curling of foam under the bows.

  Marche looked elsewhere; then looked at her again. She sat motionless, gray eyes remote, one little, wind-roughened hand on the tiller. The steady breeze filled the sail; the dory stood straight away toward the blinding glory of the sunrise.

  Through the unreal golden light, raft after raft of wild ducks rose and whirled into the east; blue herons flopped across the water; a silver-headed eagle, low over the waves, winged his way heavily toward some goal, doggedly intent upon his own business.

  Outside Starfish Shoal the girl eased the sheet as the wind freshened. Far away on Golden Bar thousands of wild geese, which had been tipping their sterns skyward in plunging quest of nourishment, resumed a more stately and normal posture, as though at a spoken command; and the long ranks, swimming, and led by age and wisdom, slowly moved away into the glittering east.

  At last, off the starboard bow, the low, reedy levels of Foam Island came into view, and in a few minutes more the dory lay in the shallows, oars, mast, and rag stowed; and the two young people splashed busily about in their hip boots, carrying guns, ammunition, and food into the blind.

  Then Molly Herold, standing on the mud bank, flung, one by one, a squadron of wooden, painted, canvasback decoys into the water, where they righted themselves, and presently rode the waves, bobbing and steering with startling fidelity to the real things.

  Then it came the turn of the real things. Marche and Molly, a struggling bird tucked under each arm, waded out along the lanes of stools, feeling about under the icy water until their fingers encountered the wire-cored cords. Then, to the leg rings of each madly flapping duck and swan and goose they snapped on the leads, and the tethered birds, released, beat the water into foam and flapped and splashed and tugged, until, finally reconciled, they began to souse themselves with great content, and either mounted their stools or swam calmly about as far as their tethers permitted.

  Marche, struggling knee-deep in the water, his arms full of wildly flapping gander, hailed Molly for instructions.

  “That’s a mated bird!” she called out to him. “Peg him outside by himself!”

  So Marche pegged out the furious old gander, whose name was Uncle Dudley, and in a few minutes that dignified and insulted bird, missing his spouse, began to talk about it.

  Every wifely feeling outraged, his spouse replied loudly from the extreme end of the inner lane, telling her husband, and every duck, goose, and swan in the vicinity, what she thought of such an inhuman separation.

  Molly laughed, and so did Marche. Duck after duck, goose after goose, joined indignantly in the conversation. The mallard drakes twisted their emerald-green heads and began that low, half gurgling, half quacking conversation in which their mottled brown and gray mates joined with louder quacks. The geese conversed freely; but the long-necked swans held their peace, occupied with the problem of picking to pieces the snaps on their anklets.

  “Now,” said Molly breathlessly, as the last madly protesting bird had been stooled, “let’s get into the blind as soon as we can, Mr. Marche. There may be ducks in Currituck still, and every minute counts now.”

  So Marche towed the dory around to the westward and drew it into a channel where it might lie concealed under the reeds.

  When he came across to the blind he found Molly there, seated on the plank in the cemented pit behind the screen of reeds and rushes, laying out for him his cartridges.

  There they were, in neat rows on the rail, fives, sixes, and a few of swanshot, ranged in front of him. And his 12-gauge, all ready, save for the loading, lay across the pit to his right. So he dropped his booted feet into the wooden tub where a foot-warmer lay, picked up the gun, slid a pair of sixes into it, laid it beside him, and turned toward Miss Herold.

  The wool collar of her sweater was turned up about her delicately molded throat and face. The wild-rose color ran riot in her cheeks, and her eyes, sky tinted now, were wide open under the dark lashes, and the wind stirred her hair till it rippled bronze and gold under the edge of her shooting hood. She, too, was perfectly ready. A cheap, heavy, and rather rusty gun lay beside her; a heap of cheap cartridges before her.

  She turned, and, catching Marche’s eyes, smiled adorably, with a slight nod of comradeship. Then, the smile still faintly curving her lips, she crossed her legs in the pit, and, warming her hands in the pockets of her coat, leaned back, resting against the rail behind.

  “You haven’t a foot-warmer,” he said.

  “I’m not cold — only my fingers — a little — stooling those birds.”

  They spoke in low voices, under their breath.

  He fished from his pocket a flat Japanese hand-warmer, lighted the paper-cased punk, snapped it shut, and passed it to her. But she demurred.

  “You need it yourself.”

  “No, I’m all right. Please take it.”

  So she shyly took it, dropped it into her pocket, and rested her shapely little hand on it. “How delightful!” she said presently, shifting it to the other pocket. “Don’t you really need it, Mr. Marche?”

  “No. Does it warm you?”

  “It is delicious. I was a little chilled.” She drew out one bare hand and looked at it thoughtfully. Then, with a little sigh, and quite unconscious of his gaze, she touched her lips to the wind-roughened skin, as though in atonement for her maltreatment of herself.

  Even as it now was the shape and beauty of the hand held Marche fascinated; it was so small, yet so firm and strong and competent, so full of youthful character, such a delicately fashioned little hand, and so pathetic, somehow — this woman’s hand, with its fineness of texture and undamaged purity under the chapped and cruelly bruised, tender skin.

  She pocketed it again, looking out from under the wind-blown hair clustering from the edge of her shooting hood. “Blue-bird weather,” she said, in her low and very sweet voice. “If no birds swing in by ten o’clock we might as well sleep until four.”

  Marche leaned forward and scanned the water and sky alternately. Nothing stirred, save their lazily preening decoys. Uncle Dudley was still conversing with his wife at intervals; the swans and the cygnets fed or worried their leash snaps; the ducks paddled, or dozed on the stools, balanced on one leg.

  Far away, on Golden Bar, half a thousand wild geese floated, feeding; beyond, like snowflakes dotting the water, a few wild swans drifted. There were ducks, too, off Starfish Island again, but nothing flying in the blue except a slow hawk or some wandering gull, or now and then an eagle — sometimes a mature bird, in all the splendor of white head and tail, sometimes a young bird, seemingly larger, and all gray from crest to shank.

  Once an eagle threatened the decoys, and Uncle Dudley swore so lustily at him, and every duck and goose set up such a clamor, that Molly Herold picked up her gun for the emergency. But the magnificent eagle, beating up into the wind with bronze wings aglisten, suddenly sheered off; and, as he pa
ssed, Marche could see his bold head turn toward the blind where the sun had flashed him its telegraphic warning on the barrel of Molly’s lifted gun.

  “Fine!” he whispered. “Splendid! I’m glad you didn’t kill him.”

  “I’m glad I didn’t have to,” she said.

  “Do you think you could have?”

  She turned toward him, wondering whether he might be serious; then smiled as he smiled.

  At the same instant, coming apparently from nowhere, four canvasbacks suddenly appeared over the clamoring decoys, so close in that, as they came driving by the blind and rose slightly, wings bowed, Marche could almost see their beady little eyes set in the chestnut red of the turning heads. Mechanically his gun spoke twice; rap-rap, echoed Miss Herold’s gun, and splash! splash! down whirled two gray-and-red ducks; then a third, uncertain, slowed down, far out beyond the decoys, and slanted sideways to the water. The fourth went on.

  “Duffer that I am,” said Marche good-humoredly. “That was a clean double of yours, Miss Herold! — clean-cut work.”

  She said, slightly knitting her straight brows: “I should have crossed two of them and killed the one you missed. I think I’d better get the boat.”

  “No, I’ll go out after that kicker,” he said, ashamed of his slovenly work.

  Five minutes later he returned with his kicker and her two ducks — great, fat, heavy canvasbacks, beautiful in their red, black, and drab plumage.

  “What about blue-bird weather, now?” he laughed.

  But she only smiled and said, “I’m very much afraid.”

  For a long while they sat there, alert behind their wall of rustling reeds, watching sky and water. False alarms were not infrequent from their decoys. Sometimes the outbreak of quacking and honking was occasioned by some wandering gull, sometimes by a circling hawk or some eagle loitering in mid-heaven on broad and leisurely wings, reluctant to remain, unwilling to go; sometimes to a pair or two of widgeon or pintails speeding eastward high in the blue. But the sparkling, cloudless hours sped away, and no duck or goose or swan invaded the vicinity. Only one sly old black duck dropped into the reeds far back on the island; and Marche went after him with serious designs upon his fraudulent old life.

  When the young man returned, twenty minutes later, perfectly innocent of duck murder, he found the girl curled up in her corner of the pit, eyes closed, tired little head cradled in the curve of her left arm. She waked as he slid into the blind, and smiled at him, pretending not to have been asleep.

  “Did you get him?”

  “No. He went off at two hundred yards.”

  “Blue-bird weather,” she sighed; and again they exchanged smiles. He noticed that her eyes had somehow become exceedingly blue instead of the clear gray which he had supposed was their color. And, after her brief slumber, there seemed to be a sort of dewy freshness about them, and about her slightly pink cheeks, which, at that time, he had no idea were at all perilous to him. All he was conscious of was a sensation of pleasure in looking at her, and a slight surprise in the revelation of elements in her which, he began to decide, constituted real beauty.

  “That’s a quaint expression— ‘blue-bird weather,’” he said. “It’s a perfect description of a spring-like day in winter. Is it a local expression?”

  “Yes — I think so. There’s a song about it, along the coast” — she laughed uncertainly— “a rather foolish song.”

  “What is it?”

  “If I remember” — she hesitated, thinking for a moment, then, with a laugh which he thought a little bashful— “it’s really too silly to repeat!”

  “Please sing it!”

  “Very well — if you wish.”

  And in a low, pretty, half-laughing voice, she sang:

  “Quiet sea and quiet sky,

  Idle sail and anchored boat,

  Just a snowflake gull afloat,

  Drifting like a feather —

  And the gray hawk crying,

  And a man’s heart sighing —

  That is blue-bird weather: —

  And the high hawk crying,

  And a maid’s heart sighing

  Till lass and lover come together, —

  This is blue-bird weather.”

  She turned her head and looked steadily out across the waste of water. “I told you it was silly,” she said, very calmly.

  III

  Blue-bird weather continued. Every day for a week Marche and Molly Herold put out for Foam Island under summer skies, and with a soft wind filling the sail; and in all the water-world there was no visible sign of winter, save the dead reeds on muddy islands and the far and wintry menace of the Atlantic crashing icily beyond the eastern dunes.

  Few ducks and no geese or swans came to the blind. There was nothing for them to do except to talk together or sit dozing in the sun. And, imperceptibly, between them the elements of a pretty intimacy unfolded like spring buds on unfamiliar branches; but what they might develop into he did not know, and she had not even considered.

  She had a quaint capacity for sleeping in the sunshine while he was away on the island prowling hopefully after black ducks. And one morning, when he returned to find her asleep at her post, a bunch of widgeon left the stools right under her nose before he had a chance to shoot.

  She did not awake. The sun fell warmly upon her, searching the perfections of the childlike face and throat, gilding the palm of one little, sun-tanned hand lying, partly open, on her knee. A spring-like wind stirred a single strand of bright hair; lips slightly parted, she lay there, face to the sky, and Marche thought that he had never looked upon anything in all the world more pure and peaceful.

  At noon the girl had not awakened. But something in John B. Marche had. He looked in horrified surprise at the decoys, then looked at Molly Herold; then he gazed in profound astonishment at Uncle Dudley, who made a cryptic remark to the wife of his bosom, and then tipped upside down.

  Marche examined the sky and water so carefully that he did not see them; then, sideways, and with an increasing sensation of consternation, he looked again at the sleeping girl.

  His was not even a friendly gaze, now; there was more than dawning alarm in it — an irritated curiosity which grew more intense as the seconds throbbed out, absurdly timed by a most remarkable obligato from his heart.

  He gazed stonily upon this stranger into whose life he had drifted only a week before, whose slumbers he felt that he was now unwarrantedly invading with a mental presumption that scared him; and yet, as often as he looked elsewhere, he looked back at her again, confused by the slowly dawning recognition of a fascination which he was utterly powerless to check or even control.

  One thing was already certain; he wanted to know her, to learn from her own lips intimately about herself, about her thoughts, her desires, her tastes, her aspirations — even her slightest fancies.

  Absorbed, charmed by her quiet breathing, fascinated into immobility, he sat there gazing at her, trying to reconcile the steadily strengthening desire to know her with what he already knew of her — of this sleeping stranger, this shabby child of a poor man, dressed in the boots and shooting coat of that wretchedly poor man — his own superintendent, a sick man whom he had never even seen.

  What manner of man could her father be — this man Herold — to have a child of this sort, this finely molded, fine-grained, delicate, exquisitely made girl, lying asleep here in a wind-stirred blind, with the Creator’s own honest sun searching out and making triumphant a beauty such as his wise and city-worn eyes had never encountered, even under the mercies of softened candlelight.

  An imbecile repetition of speech kept recurring and even stirring his lips, “She’d make them all look like thirty cents.” And he colored painfully at the crudeness of his obsessing thoughts, angrily, after a moment, shaking them from him.

  A cartridge rolled from the shelf and splashed into the pit water; the girl unclosed her gray eyes, met his gaze, smiled dreamily; then, flushing a little, sat up straight.r />
  “Fifteen widgeon went off when I returned to the blind,” he said, unsmiling.

  “I beg your pardon. I am — I am terribly sorry,” she stammered, with a vivid blush of confusion.

  But the first smile from her unclosing eyes had already done damage enough; the blush merely disorganized a little more what was already chaos in a young man’s mind.

  “Has — has anything else come in to the stools?” she asked timidly.

  “No,” he said, relenting.

  But he was wrong. Something had come into the blind — a winged, fluttering thing, out of the empyrean — and even Uncle Dudley had not seen or heard it, and never a honk or a quack warned anybody, or heralded the unseen coming of the winged thing.

  Marche sat staring out across the water.

  “I — am so very sorry,” repeated the girl, in a low voice. “Are you offended with me?”

  He turned and looked at her, and spoke steadily enough: “Of course I’m not. I was glad you had a nap. There has been nothing doing — except those stupid widgeon — not a feather stirring.”

  “Then you are not angry with me?”

  “Why, you absurd girl!” he said, laughing and stretching out one hand to her.

  Into her face flashed an exquisite smile; daintily she reached out and dropped her hand into his. They exchanged a friendly shake, still smiling.

  “All the same,” she said, “it was horrid of me. And I think I boasted to you about my knowledge of a bayman’s duties.”

  “You are all right,” he said, “a clean shot, a thoroughbred. I ask no better comrade than you. I never again shall have such a comrade.”

  “But — I am your bayman, not your comrade,” she exclaimed, forcing a little laugh. “You’ll have better guides than I, Mr. Marche.”

  “Do you reject the equal alliance I offer, Miss Herold?”

  “I?” She flushed. “It is very kind of you to put it that way. But I am only your guide — but it is pleasant to have you speak that way.”

  “What way?”