Works of Robert W Chambers

by Robert W. Chambers

  “What the devil are you laughing at, Haltren?” asked the major, tartly.

  “Was I laughing?” said the young man. “Well — now I will say good-bye, Major Brent. Your yacht will steam in before night and send a boat for you; and I shall have my lagoons to myself again.… I have been here a long time.… I don’t know why I laughed just now. There was, indeed, no reason.” He turned and looked at the cabin skylights. “It’s hard to realize that you and Darrow and — others — are here, and that there’s a whole yacht-load of fellow-creatures — and Mrs. Van Onderdonk — wobbling about the Atlantic near by. Fashionable people have never before come here — even intelligent people rarely penetrate this wilderness.… I — I have a plantation a few miles below — oranges and things, you know.” He hesitated, almost wistfully. “I don’t suppose you and your guests would care to stop there for a few hours, if your yacht is late.”

  “No,” said the major, “we don’t care to.”

  “Perhaps Haltren will stay aboard the wreck with us until the Dione comes in,” suggested Darrow.

  “I dare say you have a camp hereabouts,” said the major, staring at Haltren; “no doubt you’d be more comfortable there.”

  “Thanks,” said Haltren, pleasantly; “I have my camp a mile below.” He offered his hand to Darrow, who, too angry to speak, nodded violently towards the cabin.

  “How can I?” asked Haltren. “Good-bye. And I’ll say good-bye to you, major—”

  “Good-bye,” muttered the major, attempting to clasp his fat little hands behind his back.

  Haltren, who had no idea of offering his hand, stood still a moment, glancing at the cabin skylights; then, with a final nod to Darrow, he deliberately slid over-board and waded away, knee-deep, towards the palm-fringed shore.

  Darrow could not contain himself. “Major Brent,” he said, “I suppose you don’t realize that Haltren saved the lives of every soul aboard this launch.”

  The major’s inflamed eyes popped out.

  “Eh? What’s that?”

  “More than that,” said Darrow, “he came back from safety to risk his life. As it was he lost his boat and his gun—”

  “Damnation!” broke out the major; “you don’t expect me to ask him to stay and meet the wife he deserted four years ago!”

  And he waddled off to the engine-room, where the engineer and his assistant were tinkering at the wrecked engine.

  Darrow went down into the sloppy cabin, where, on a couch, Mrs. Castle lay, ill from the shock of the recent catastrophe; and beside her stood an attractive girl stirring sweet spirits of ammonia in a tumbler.

  Her eyes were fixed on the open port-hole. Through that port-hole the lagoon was visible; so was Haltren, wading shoreward, a solitary figure against the fringed rampart of the wilderness.

  “Is Mrs. Castle better?” asked Darrow.

  “I think so; I think she is asleep,” said the girl, calmly.

  There was a pause; then Darrow took the tumbler and stirred the contents.

  “Do you know who it was that got us out of that pickle?”

  “Yes,” she said; “my husband.”

  “I suppose you could hear what we said on deck.”

  There was no answer.

  “Could you, Kathleen?”

  “Yes.”

  Darrow stared into the tumbler, tasted the medicine, and frowned.

  “Isn’t there — isn’t there a chance — a ghost of a chance?” he asked.

  “I think not,” she answered— “I am sure not. I shall never see him again.”

  “I meant for myself,” said Darrow, deliberately, looking her full in the face.

  She crimsoned to her temples, then her eyes flashed violet fire.

  “Not the slightest,” she said.

  “Thanks,” said Darrow, flippantly; “I only wanted to know.”

  “You know now, don’t you?” she asked, a trifle excited, yet realizing instinctively that somehow she had been tricked. And yet, until that moment, she had believed Darrow to be her slave. He had been and was still; but she was not longer certain, and her uncertainty confused her.

  “Do you mean to say that you have any human feeling left for that vagabond?” demanded Darrow. So earnest was he that his tanned face grew tense and white.

  “I’ll tell you,” she said, breathlessly, “that from this moment I have no human feeling left for you! And I never had! I know it now; never! never! I had rather be the divorced wife of Jack Haltren than the wife of any man alive!”

  The angry beauty of her young face was his reward; he turned away and climbed the companion. And in the shattered wheel-house he faced his own trouble, muttering: “I’ve done my best; I’ve tried to show the pluck he showed. He’s got his chance now!” And he leaned heavily on the wheel, covering his eyes with his hands; for he was fiercely in love, and he had destroyed for a friend’s sake all that he had ever hoped for.

  But there was more to be done; he aroused himself presently and wandered around to the engine-room, where the major was prowling about, fussing and fuming and bullying his engineer.

  “Major,” said Darrow, guilelessly, “do you suppose Haltren’s appearance has upset his wife?”

  “Eh?” said the major. “No, I don’t! I refuse to believe that a woman of Mrs. Haltren’s sense and personal dignity could be upset by such a man! By gad! sir, if I thought it — for one instant, sir — for one second — I’d reason with her. I’d presume so far as to express my personal opinion of this fellow Haltren!”

  “Perhaps I’d better speak to her,” began Darrow.

  “No, sir! Why the devil should you assume that liberty?” demanded Major Brent. “Allow me, sir; allow me! Mrs. Haltren is my guest!”

  The major’s long-latent jealousy of Darrow was now fully ablaze; purple, pop-eyed, and puffing, he toddled down the companion on his errand of consolation. Darrow watched him go. “That settles him!” he said. Then he called the engineer over and bade him rig up and launch the portable canoe.

  “Put one paddle in it, Johnson, and say to Mrs. Haltren that she had better paddle north, because a mile below there is a camp belonging to a man whom Major Brent and I do not wish to have her meet.”

  The grimy engineer hauled out the packet which, when put together, was warranted to become a full-fledged canoe.

  “Lord! how she’ll hate us all, even poor Johnson,” murmured Darrow. “I don’t know much about Kathleen Haltren, but if she doesn’t paddle south I’ll eat cotton-waste with oil-dressing for dinner!”

  At that moment the major reappeared, toddling excitedly towards the stern.

  “What on earth is the trouble?” asked Darrow. “Is there a pizen sarpint aboard?”

  “Trouble!” stammered the major. “Who said there was any trouble? Don’t be an ass, sir! Don’t even look like an ass, sir! Damnation!”

  And he trotted furiously into the engine-room.

  Darrow climbed to the wheel-house once more, fished out a pair of binoculars, and fixed them on the inlet and the strip of Atlantic beyond.

  “If the Dione isn’t in by three o’clock, Haltren will have his chance,” he murmured.

  He was still inspecting the ocean and his watch alternately when Mrs. Haltren came on deck.

  “Did you send me the canoe?” she asked, with cool unconcern.

  “It’s for anybody,” he said, morosely. “Somebody ought to take a snap-shot of the scene of our disaster. If you don’t want the canoe, I’ll take it.”

  She had her camera in her hand; it was possible he had noticed it, although he appeared to be very busy with his binoculars.

  He was also rude enough to turn his back. She hesitated, looked up the lagoon and down the lagoon. She could only see half a mile south, because Flyover Point blocked the view.

  “If Mrs. Castle is nervous you will be near the cabin?” she asked, coldly.

  “I’ll be here,” he said.

  “And you may say to Major Brent,” she added, “that he need not send me
further orders by his engineer, and that I shall paddle wherever caprice invites me.”

  A few moments later a portable canoe glided out from under the stern of the launch. In it, lazily wielding the polished paddle, sat young Mrs. Haltren, bareheaded, barearmed, singing as sweetly as the little cardinal, who paused in sheer surprise at the loveliness of song and singer. Like a homing pigeon the canoe circled to take its bearings once, then glided away due south.

  Blue was the sky and water; her eyes were bluer; white as the sands her bare arms glimmered. Was it a sunbeam caught entangled in her burnished hair, or a stray strand, that burned far on the water.

  Darrow dropped his eyes; and when again he looked, the canoe had vanished behind the rushes of Flyover Point, and there was nothing moving on the water far as the eye could see.

  About three o’clock that afternoon, the pigeon-toed Seminole Indian who followed Haltren, as a silent, dangerous dog follows its master, laid down the heavy pink cedar log which he had brought to the fire, and stood perfectly silent, nose up, slitted eyes almost closed.

  Haltren’s glance was a question. “Paddl’um boat,” said the Indian, sullenly.

  After a pause Haltren said, “I don’t hear it, Tiger.”

  “Hunh!” grunted the Seminole. “Paddl’um damn slow. Bime-by you hear.”

  And bime-by Haltren heard.

  “Somebody is landing,” he said.

  The Indian folded his arms and stood bolt upright for a moment; then, “Hunh!” he muttered, disgusted. “Heap squaw. Tiger will go.”

  Haltren did not hear him; up the palmetto-choked trail from the landing strolled a girl, paddle poised over one shoulder, bright hair blowing. He rose to his feet; she saw him standing in the haze of the fire and made him a pretty gesture of recognition.

  “I thought I’d call to pay my respects,” she said. “How do you do? May I sit on this soap-box?”

  Smiling, she laid the paddle on the ground and held out one hand as he stepped forward.

  They shook hands very civilly.

  “That was a brave thing you did,” she said. “Mes compliments, monsieur.”

  And that was all said about the wreck.

  “It’s not unlike an Adirondack camp,” she suggested, looking around at the open-faced, palm-thatched shanty with its usual hangings of blankets and wet clothing, and its smoky, tin-pan bric-à-brac.

  Her blue eyes swept all in rapid review — the guns leaning against the tree; the bunch of dead bluebill ducks hanging beyond; the improvised table and bench outside; the enormous mottled rattlesnake skin tacked lengthways on a live-oak.

  “Are there many of those about?” she inquired.

  “Very few” — he waited to control the voice which did not sound much like his own— “very few rattlers yet. They come out later.”

  “That’s amiable of them,” she said, with a slight shrug of her shoulders.

  There was a pause.

  “I hope you are well,” he ventured.

  “Perfectly — and thank you. I hope you are well, Jack.”

  “Thank you, Kathleen.”

  She picked up a chip of rose-colored cedar and sniffed it daintily.

  “Like a lead-pencil, isn’t it? Put that big log on the fire. The odor of burning cedar must be delicious.”

  He lifted the great log and laid it across the coals.

  “Suppose we lunch?” she proposed, looking straight at the simmering coffee-pot.

  “Would you really care to?” Then he raised his voice: “Tiger! Tiger! Where the dickens are you?” But Tiger, half a mile away, squatted sulkily on the lagoon’s edge, fishing, and muttering to himself that there were too many white people in the forest for him.

  “He won’t come,” said Haltren. “You know the Seminoles hate the whites, and consider themselves still unconquered. There is scarcely an instance on record of a Seminole attaching himself to one of us.”

  “But your tame Tiger appears to follow you.”

  “He’s an exception.”

  “Perhaps you are an exception, too.”

  He looked up with a haggard smile, then bent over the fire and poked the ashes with a pointed palmetto stem. There were half a dozen sweet-potatoes there, and a baked duck and an ash-cake.

  “Goodness!” she said; “if you knew how hungry I am you wouldn’t be so deliberate. Where are the cups and spoons? Which is Tiger’s? Well, you may use his.”

  The log table was set and the duck ready before Haltren could hunt up the jug of mineral water which Tiger had buried somewhere to keep cool.

  When he came back with it from the shore he found her sitting at table with an exaggerated air of patience.

  They both laughed a little; he took his seat opposite; she poured the coffee, and he dismembered the duck.

  “You ought to be ashamed of that duck,” she said. “The law is on now.”

  “I know it,” he replied, “but necessity knows no law. I’m up here looking for wild orange stock, and I live on what I can get. Even the sacred, unbranded razor-back is fish for our net — with a fair chance of a shooting-scrape between us and a prowling cracker. If you will stay to dinner you may have roast wild boar.”

  “That alone is almost worth staying for, isn’t it?” she asked, innocently.

  There was a trifle more color in his sunburned face.

  She ate very little, though protesting that her hunger shamed her; she sipped her coffee, blue eyes sometimes fixed on the tall palms and oaks overhead, sometimes on him.

  “What was that great, winged shadow that passed across the table?” she exclaimed.

  “A vulture; they are never far away.”

  “Ugh!” she shuddered; “always waiting for something to die! How can a man live here, knowing that?”

  “I don’t propose to die out-doors,” said Haltren, laughing.

  Again the huge shadow swept between them; she shrank back with a little gesture of repugnance. Perhaps she was thinking of her nearness to death in the inlet.

  “Are there alligators here, too?” she asked.

  “Yes; they run away from you.”

  “And moccasin snakes?”

  “Some. They don’t trouble a man who keeps his eyes open.”

  “A nice country you live in!” she said, disdainfully.

  “It is one kind of country. There is good shooting.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Sunshine all the year round. I have a house covered with scented things and buried in orange-trees. It is very beautiful. A little lonely at times — one can’t have Fifth Avenue and pick one’s own grape-fruit from the veranda, too.”

  A silence fell between them; through the late afternoon stillness they heard the splash! splash! of leaping mullet in the lagoon. Suddenly a crimson-throated humming-bird whirred past, hung vibrating before a flowering creeper, then darted away.

  “Spring is drifting northward,” he said. “To-morrow will be Easter Day — Pasque Florida.”

  She rose, saying, carelessly, “I was not thinking of to-morrow; I was thinking of to-day,” and, walking across the cleared circle, she picked up her paddle. He followed her, and she looked around gayly, swinging the paddle to her shoulder.

  “You said you were thinking of to-day,” he stammered. “It — it is our anniversary.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “I am astonished that you remembered.… I think that I ought to go. The Dione will be in before long—”

  “We can hear her whistle when she steams in,” he said.

  “Are you actually inviting me to stay?” she laughed, seating herself on the soap-box once more.

  They became very grave as he sat down on the ground at her feet, and, a silence threatening, she hastily filled it with a description of the yacht and Major Brent’s guests. He listened, watching her intently. And after a while, having no more to say, she pretended to hear sounds resembling a distant yacht’s whistle.

  “It’s the red-winged blackbirds in the reeds,” he said. “Now will yo
u let me say something — about the past?”

  “It has buried itself,” she said, under her breath.

  “To-morrow is Easter,” he went on, slowly. “Can there be no resurrection for dead days as there is for Easter flowers? Winter is over; Pasque Florida will dawn on a world of blossoms. May I speak, Kathleen?”

  “It is I who should speak,” she said. “I meant to. It is this: forgive me for all. I am sorry.”

  “I have nothing to forgive,” he said. “I was a — a failure. I — I do not understand women.”

  “Nor I men. They are not what I understand. I don’t mean the mob I’ve been bred to dance with — I understand them. But a real man—” she laughed, drearily— “I expected a god for a husband.”

  “I am sorry,” he said; “I am horribly sorry. I have learned many things in four years. Kathleen, I — I don’t know what to do.”

  “There is nothing to do, is there?”

  “Your freedom—”

  “I am free.”

  “I am afraid you will need more freedom than you have, some day.”

  She looked him full in the eyes. “Do you desire it?”

  A faint sound fell upon the stillness of the forest; they listened; it came again from the distant sea.

  “I think it is the yacht,” she said.

  They rose together; he took her paddle, and they walked down the jungle path to the landing. Her canoe and his spare boat lay there, floating close together.

  “It will be an hour before a boat from the yacht reaches the wrecked launch,” he said. “Will you wait in my boat?”

  She bent her head and laid her hand in his, stepping lightly into the bow.

  “Cast off and row me a little way,” she said, leaning back in the stern. “Isn’t this lagoon wonderful? See the color in water and sky. How green the forest is! — green as a young woodland in April. And the reeds are green and gold, and the west is all gold. Look at that great white bird — with wings like an angel’s! What is that heavenly odor from the forest? Oh,” she sighed, elbows on knees, “this is too delicious to be real!”