And, glancing up at Brown, she smiled.
What that smile did to Brown he did not clearly comprehend at the moment; a confused sense of the girl’s nearness, of her youthful and delicate vigour, of a dewy sort of freshness in the air, invaded him.
“T-thank you,” he stammered; “I won’t dig any more. I didn’t know it was a graveyard.”
She shrugged her shoulders:
“If it is a graveyard I do not know,” she said. “Possibly these two — the Spaniard and the Indian — are buried here. We have not supposed that anything had been buried.”
Brown gazed at her in troubled fascination.
“Do you mind,” he asked, “if we camp here on Owl’s Head?”
She smiled and made a peculiarly graceful gesture.
“What is ours is yours, sir. When my father returns from Fort Coquina our house shall offer itself to you — and to your friend.”
She turned, passed lightly through the dead grass, sprang into a canoe which floated there, knelt down, and, swinging her pole, drove the frail craft out into the lake.
“Good-bye,” she said, looking over her shoulder.
“Good-bye,” said Brown.
And that might have ended it had she not looked back once more. Which settled the matter once and for all, as far as Brown was concerned.
Gibb, lugging in a brace of blue-bill duck and a limpkin, found Brown sitting in the edge of the excavation, vacant-eyed, gazing at nothing.
“Well?” he demanded.
“Nothing doing. The owner of this island came over and stopped my digging.”
“Damn!” said Gibb, hurling the dead ducks to the right, the limpkin to the left.
Then he sat down and listened to what Brown told him. And Brown told him everything except that the girl was beautiful and that she had smiled at him. Also, he neglected to acquaint Gibb with the state of his mind and heart, and further refrained from detailing and analyzing any of the strange, amazing, bewildering, and delightful sensations which had invaded him, and to which he was at present a prey.
“When her father gets back,” said Gibb, “we’ll try to make an arrangement with him. He’s probably some slothful, shiftless old cracker who’d be glad enough to sell us his interest in the island for a few dollars. And I think it’s a good gamble; don’t you?”
Brown, plucking the ducks, sat as though in a daze, gazing across the lake. He scarcely heard what his comrade was saying.
It was the same after dinner; Gibb’s stories and jests interested him not at all. He gazed at the big, yellow stars in silence until his friend, disgusted, rolled into his blanket with a grunt, and presently disturbed the welkin with his snores.
In the morning Gibb took to his canoe, heading northward in quest of the Carolina parroquet, and also of any edible game that might wander within shot.
As for Brown, he forced himself into his canoe and squatted there taking soundings and observations and making notes in his notebook until he could fix his mind on his business no longer.
And when he comprehended that he could no longer keep his attention on what he was doing, he ceased to do it. To the southeast he saw the saw-grass waving across the sparkling water; beyond it green palms cut the horizon.
Somewhere among those palms dwelt the most extraordinary, the most wonderful, the most fascinating, the most interesting, the most beautiful, the most inexplicable specimen of femininity that he had ever beheld.
He was, normally, a clear-headed young man. He had a fairly lucid idea of what her smile had done to him. Whether or not the injury was to be a permanent one he did not know. The chances were, he felt, that he had been crippled for life. And he decided to go and find her and learn for himself exactly how hard he had been hit.
So he headed his canoe across the mile of water, following the path her canoe had taken as well as he could remember; and presently came to the edges of the sawgrass barrier.
For nearly two hours he wandered along that impassable barrier, lured into false leads, poling though alluring channels that ended abruptly, leaving him to pole back again, perplexed and exasperated.
Somewhere there must be a lead; somewhere in those accursed and poisonous green thickets a narrow thread of water led to the palm-shaded shore beyond.
But he couldn’t find it, and he tried scores.
At last, weary, scarred, baffled, and furious, he ceased to search. Hope died: he sat floating in his canoe outside the cruel, green, fairy jungle, staring at it, aware that it had him beaten. And presently another canoe came gliding along the edges of the grass.
He did not see it until she hailed him in a sweet and tranquil voice; and the ungodly start he gave nearly capsized him.
“I saw you through the sea-glass,” she said. “Are you looking for the lead?”
Before he answered he looked at her. Then realizing that his injury was permanent, he got very red and said that he was looking for the lead.
“Were you coming to call on us?”
He said that had been his intention.
“Didn’t I say to you that my father is away at Fort Coquina?”
He sustained the smiling inquiry of her eyes, irresolutely:
“I believe you did tell me,” he muttered.
There was a short silence.
“Perhaps,” she said, “I might as well show you the lead.... So you will know it when you come to call on — my father.... If you will follow me—”
She swung her canoe: after her he poled in silence, entering the saw-grass in her wake through an aperture so narrow and which turned so suddenly that it might have deceived a Seminole or an otter, or even a miserable limpkin.
For a quarter of a mile this lead ran parallel with the grass which scarcely screened it from the waters of the lake; then it widened abruptly, became a broad, clearly outlined channel, curving through the high, green thickets until, above his head, Brown heard the wind in the palms, and their moving shadows fell over his canoe.
The girl had beached her own craft: he drove his up beside hers.
“Now,” she said gravely, “you know the lead. I am sorry that my father is not here.”
Still seated in his canoe he looked up at her where she stood, the thick, lustrous hair framing her face, the scarlet kerchief binding it above the brows. And when she met his eyes she smiled.
“Would you tell me a little about yourself?” he asked in a low voice.
She opened her velvet eyes in surprise:
“About myself? Why, there’s nothing to tell.”
“What you have already told me is enough to make a hundred romances and fill the nostrils of the pretentious with pride indescribable. I’m thinking,” he added smilingly, “of various Colonial and Revolutionary descendants.”
“Yes, I’ve heard of them,” she said with a shrug. “So you’ve been to school?”
She laughed:
“Of course. I went to the school at Fort Coquina first; then to Miami.”
“And then?”
“Our money gave out,” she said simply.
“So you came back to Iris Lake?”
“Naturally.”
He sat gazing out through the palm forest, but could see nothing of any houses.
“It is strange,” he said, “that a family such as yours should have lived in this one isolated spot for so many, many generations.”
“Always,” she said, “there has been a son in the family. And that son goes out into the world and marries a wife, and brings her here. Thus are the generations continued on Iris Lake.... I have a brother. He is now somewhere out in the world, searching for the girl he could love and marry.”
“And he will bring her here?”
“Yes.”
“And what will you do then?”
“I?” She shrugged. “What is there to do? Grow old here, I suppose.”
“You will never marry?”
“Who is there to marry, here?”
She laughed lightly, leaning against the slend
er, silvery trunk of a palm and looking down at him. “Besides, I am too poor.”
“Who cares how poor a girl may be — if she is loved!” he said.
She gazed at him curiously:
“Don’t men care?”
“Not real men.”
“Oh,” thoughtfully.
“Not any man worth tying your shoestrings!” he added with warmer emphasis.
She looked down at her pretty, bare feet:
“I have no shoestrings,” she remarked. And glanced up, and laughed.
Then her face grew serious:
“I’ve thought of it,” she said. “But I haven’t any money to go away where young men may be seen. We have nothing — nothing except that old tower house of coquina. — it was a small Spanish fort in the olden days, I believe — that, and our oranges and bananas and guavas, and a Seminole garden where beans and peas and tomatoes and melons and strawberries grow the year round. We can make no money by selling fruit or vegetables or timber; we are too far from the coast. The only money father has is what he earns by trapping otter and other animals. That is why he has gone to Fort Coquina.... So you see there is very little chance for me.... And after all it is my brother’s children, not mine, who will have the family name and continue to live here.... So” — she shrugged— “it is unimportant what happens to me, I suppose.”
“You are not happy,” he said.
“Yes, I am,” with a quick smile.
“Is it not lonely?”
“No.... Yes, perhaps, when my thoughts turn to young men.... But,” she added naively, “that is not very often: more often in early spring.... After May I seldom think of love.”
“Then you sometimes do think of it?”
“What girl does not?” she asked, opening her splendid eyes.
“None, I suppose. Few are frank enough to admit it.”
“Oh, well,” with a shrug— “I admit it. When the moon is big and round and very red over the lake, and the April winds come from the jasmine and magnolia thickets, then I take my canoe into the golden path that the moon makes on the water, and there I drift and wonder and think and — wish — for love.” She lifted her eyes and gazed wistfully out across the water, then, glancing at him again, a winning smile broke out, and she nodded:
“You see: I do admit it. What is there in all the world to compare with what a girl dreams that love must truly be?”
That night he had no appetite for limpkin or duck, nor for the palm cabbage lugged into camp by the omniverous Gibb.
“Hell!” remarked the latter. “You’re such a dainty creature. What’s the matter with you? Are you ill?”
“No; I’m not hungry, that’s all.”
“So I notice,” mumbled Gibb, munching away. “Did the old cracker come back? Have you seen that girl again?”
“Yes, I saw her.”
“What did she say?”
“Nothing. Her father hasn’t returned.”
“Well, when he comes back we’ll get to him. It’s my opinion that there’s treasure under ground on this island.”
“Really,” said Brown, languidly indifferent.
Gibb stared at him:
“Doesn’t it interest you any longer?”
“Not much.”
“Why not?”
“Possibly because I’ve other and more interesting and more important things to think of.”
“Plain living breeds high thinking in your case, doesn’t it?” said Gibb sarcastically. “Well, let me tell you that this living, plain and scanty as it is, hasn’t interfered with my material desire for several millions of dollars. That’s as low as I am, Brown.”
“What would you do with it if you got it?”
“Oh, Lord! What a thing to say!”
“But you and I are independently well off—”
“As though that made anybody less keen about what somebody else has hidden in the ground! Why, Brown, if it’s only ten cents’ worth of Spanish gold, I want it, and I’d spend ten hundred dollars to dig it up!”
“I wouldn’t.”
“Now, you bet your life you would! Don’t tell me!
The first sight of a copper coin in that excavation would drive you crazy. It isn’t the actual value of what you dig up — it’s that you among all men on earth are clever enough to find what the whole world always falls for — buried treasure!”
“I’ve found it,” said Brown, slowly.
“What!”
“Oh, I haven’t been digging. Whatever was in the ground is still there.”
“What do you mean by saying you have found buried treasure, then?”
Brown let his eyes wander vaguely over his comrade’s countenance:
“You wouldn’t understand if I told you, Gibb,” he said listlessly.
With a hitch and a grunt, Gibb turned over in his blanket. That night he groaned in his sleep. The limpkin was getting in its work.
All the next day Gibb remained away exploring distant waterside forests for parroquet and flamingo. In the morning Brown took soundings and measured currents; in the afternoon he took his canoe and poled over to the southeast.
It took him some time to discover the narrow lead, but at length he found it, and after half an hour’s steady poling his canoe touched the shore under the whispering palms. He drew up his canoe, and stepped upon the beach.
She was not there. A path ran inland through the palm woods, but he did not feel at liberty to take it.
Save for the murmur of the palm fronds, nothing was stirring in the woods except a great gold and black butterfly that kept fluttering persistently around him.
For a long time he sat there, sunlight and shadow playing over him, the big, velvety butterfly hovering ever above him.
At the end of the first hour he suspected he was in love; at the end of the second he knew he was. At the end of the third hour she came.
She said:
“I saw your canoe: I am sorry I am late. But I had sewing to do for father — a new shirt I am making for him.... Besides, I was not sure you had come to — to call on me.”
“Are you sure now?”
She glanced up at him, then the faint carmine tint in her cheeks spread and deepened.
“Yes.”
After a moment she went down to the shore and seated herself on the thwart of his beached canoe. He followed and sat down on the next thwart.
“I want to tell you a little about myself,” he said, irrelevantly. “I want you to know everything. I have a very fine father and mother: I’ll begin wherever you say — with my babyhood if you like—” He was becoming a little incoherent, and she looked up at him out of her beautiful, dark eyes.
“I’m in love — deeply and s-suddenly in love,” he stammered, “ — and I’ll come to that in a few minutes, but first I want you to know all about me—”
“Why?”
“B-because I’m in love!” he repeated, rather wildly.
“With — whom?”
“Why, with you!”
“With me!”
“Wait, please. I’ll tell you about my earliest infancy—”
“No; tell me about — the other, first.”
“Don’t you want to know about me — who I am—”
“I know enough. I have eyes and ears. I don’t want to hear about your earliest infancy. I want to hear about your being in love,” said the girl, looking at him under lowered lashes.
“Then — it happened, practically, at once.... As soon as I saw you.”
“Really?”
“Just about. Perhaps two or three seconds later. Anyway, as soon as you spoke — and smiled.... And when you looked back at me from the canoe — that finished me.... I love you very, very dearly; Pm terribly excited about it — not very clear in explaining — but I would like to ask you if you think you could ever care enough for me to marry me.”
The girl sat there, her small sunburned hands clasped in her ragged lap, looking past him out over the sunny water.
And her still, enraptured gaze saw nothing but a blinding and rosy glory, like that celestial burst of light radiating from the abode of the blessed.
For before her youthful and dazzled eyes the very gates of Paradise had opened: harmonies immortally exquisite filled her senses; she heard his voice and words as in a dream, and answered as dreamers answer to their names, still sleeping, mechanically precise:
“Yes; I could care for you — marry you.”
“Could you love me?”
“I — don’t know.... Yes, I think so.... if you will let me try—”
“Let you!”
“In my own way, I mean.... Don’t say anything more to me, now, will you? I am trying to think.”
He remained silent: she passed her slim hand over her brow, clearing it of the hair.
“It is so wonderful, so wonderful,” she said under her breath. “It does not seem real — that you are here — that you tell me you love me — that you are here at all.... Once at Miami I saw you.”
“What?”
“I was a child; you were in white. You came to the school. Do you remember?”
“Good Lord! Were you there?”
“Yes. They told us that a naturalist from Washington was stopping at the hotel, and that he was coming to the school. We were greatly excited. They told us that you would talk to us about the birds and fishes and animals of Florida. And you did come — in your beautiful white clothes — so wonderfully young and — and smiling — and you did talk to us.... And when you ended your lecture, and bowed to us all — and after the teachers had thanked you — do you remember a little girl who offered you a spray of white jasmine?”
“Was it your “Yes.... Don’t say anything more. Let me tell you what happened.... How I never forgot you.... So that even I dreamed of you — in your white clothes — and how I seemed often to hear your voice — pleasantly — and see your kind eyes.... That is what nearly killed me when there was no more money and I had to leave the school — fearing that you might return some day, and I not see you.... I — have been — very loyal — to that memory.... And when I saw smoke on Owl’s Head, and when I went there and saw you! — I nearly died — of happiness.... And I asked God to let me win you.... That is why I looked back at you.... That is why I brought you here. That is why I am here now.... To tell you — yes; I care for you — as I did when I was a child at school — not more so, for that couldn’t be: but — differently — as a woman cares—” she bent her head, trembling— “loves,” she added in a whisper.
Works of Robert W Chambers Page 1196