“I won’t do it, Sam,” I said, when I had draped his dress-coat on me toga fashion. “Who am I to have clothing to spare, like this, when many a poor chap hasn’t even a cellar door to cover him. I won’t do it; I’m selfish, but not that selfish.”
“Lord,” he said, wiping his face, “how you’ve kept your figure! I can’t wear a belt any more; got to have suspenders.”
He reflected over his grievance for some time, sitting on the side of the bed. “You could go as you are,” he said finally. “We do it all the time, only to-night happens to be the annual something or other, and - ” he trailed off into silence, trying to buckle my belt around him. “A good six inches,” he sighed. “I never get into a hansom cab any more that I don’t expect to see the horse fly up into the air. Well, Allie isn’t going either. She turned down Granger this afternoon, the Annapolis fellow you met on the stairs, pigeon-breasted chap - and she always gets a headache on those occasions.
He got up heavily and went to the door. “Granger is leaving,” he said, “I may be able to get his dinner coat for you. How well do you know her?” he asked, with his hand on the knob.
“If you mean Dolly - ?”
“Alison.”
“Fairly well,” I said cautiously. “Not as well as I would like to. I dined with her last week in Washington. And - I knew her before that.”
Forbes touched the bell instead of going out, and told the servant who answered to see if Mr. Granger’s suitcase had gone. If not, to bring it across the hail. Then he came back to his former position on the bed.
“You see, we feel responsible for Allie - near relation and all that,” he began pompously. “And we can’t talk to the people here at the house - all the men are in love with her, and all the women are jealous. Then - there’s a lot of money, too, or will be.”
“Confound the money!” I muttered. “That is - nothing. Razor slipped.”
“I can tell you,” he went on, “because you don’t lose your head over every pretty face - although Allie is more than that, of course. But about a month ago she went away - to Seal Harbor, to visit Janet MacLure. Know her?”
“She came home to Richmond yesterday, and then came down here - Allie, I mean. And yesterday afternoon Dolly had a letter from Janet - something about a second man - and saying she was disappointed not to have had Alison there, that she had promised them a two weeks’ visit! What do you make of that? And that isn’t the worst. Allie herself wasn’t in the room, but there were eight other women, and because Dolly had put belladonna in her eyes the night before to see how she would look, and as a result couldn’t see anything nearer than across the room, some one read the letter aloud to her, and the whole story is out. One of the cats told Granger and the boy proposed to Allie to-day, to show her he didn’t care a tinker’s dam where she had been.”
“Good boy!” I said, with enthusiasm. I liked the Granger fellow - since he was out of the running. But Sam was looking at me with suspicion.
“Blake,” he said, “if I didn’t know you for what you are, I’d say you were interested there yourself.”
Being so near her, under the same roof, with even the tie of a dubious secret between us, was making me heady. I pushed Forbes toward the door.
“I interested!” I retorted, holding him by the shoulders. “There isn’t a word in your vocabulary to fit my condition. I am an island in a sunlit sea of emotion, Sam, a - an empty place surrounded by longing - a - ”
“An empty place surrounded by longing!” he retorted. “You want your dinner, that’s what’s the matter with you - ”
I shut the door on him then. He seemed suddenly sordid. Dinner, I thought! Although, as matter of fact, I made a very fair meal when, Granger’s suitcase not having gone, in his coat and some other man’s trousers, I was finally fit for the amenities. Alison did not come down to dinner, so it was clear she would not go over to the club-house dance. I pled my injured arm and a ficticious, vaguely located sprain from the wreck, as an excuse for remaining at home. Sam regaled the table with accounts of my distrust of women, my one love affair - with Dorothy; to which I responded, as was expected, that only my failure there had kept me single all these years, and that if Sam should be mysteriously missing during the bathing hour to-morrow, and so on.
And when the endless meal was over, and yards of white veils had been tied over pounds of hair - or is it, too, bought by the yard? - and some eight ensembles with their abject complements had been packed into three automobiles and a trap, I drew a long breath and faced about. I had just then only one object in life - to find Alison, to assure her of my absolute faith and confidence in her, and to offer my help and my poor self, if she would let me, in her service.
She was not easy to find. I searched the lower floor, the verandas and the grounds, circumspectly. Then I ran into a little English girl who turned out to be her maid, and who also was searching. She was concerned because her mistress had had no dinner, and because the tray of food she carried would soon be cold. I took the tray from her, on the glimpse of something white on the shore, and that was how I met the Girl again.
She was sitting on an over-turned boat, her chin in her hands, staring out to sea. The soft tide of the bay lapped almost at her feet, and the draperies of her white gown melted hazily into the sands. She looked like a wraith, a despondent phantom of the sea, although the adjective is redundant. Nobody ever thinks of a cheerful phantom. Strangely enough, considering her evident sadness, she was whistling softly to herself, over and over, some dreary little minor air that sounded like a Bohemian dirge. She glanced up quickly when I made a misstep and my dishes jingled. All considered, the tray was out of the picture: the sea, the misty starlight, the girl, with her beauty - even the sad little whistle that stopped now and then to go bravely on again, as though it fought against the odds of a trembling lip. And then I came, accompanied by a tray of little silver dishes that jingled and an unmistakable odor of broiled chicken!
“Oh!” she said quickly; and then, “Oh! I thought you were Jenkins.”
“Timeo Danaos - what’s the rest of it?” I asked, tendering my offering. “You didn’t have any dinner, you know.” I sat down beside her. “See, I’ll be the table. What was the old fairy tale? ‘Little goat bleat: little table appear!’ I’m perfectly willing to be the goat, too.”
She was laughing rather tremulously.
“We never do meet like other people, do we?” she asked. “We really ought to shake hands and say how are you.”
“I don’t want to meet you like other people, and I suppose you always think of me as wearing the other fellow’s clothes,” I returned meekly. “I’m doing it again: I don’t seem to be able to help it. These are Granger’s that I have on now.”
She threw back her head and laughed again, joyously, this time.
“Oh, it’s so ridiculous,” she said, “and you have never seen me when I was not eating! It’s too prosaic!”
“Which reminds me that the chicken is getting cold, and the ice warm,” I suggested. “At the time, I thought there could be no place better than the farmhouse kitchen - but this is. I ordered all this for something I want to say to you - the sea, the sand, the stars.”
“How alliterative you are!” she said, trying to be flippant. “You are not to say anything until I have had my supper. Look how the things are spilled around!”
But she ate nothing, after all, and pretty soon I put the tray down in the sand. I said little; there was no hurry. We were together, and time meant nothing against that age-long wash of the sea. The air blew her hair in small damp curls against her face, and little by little the tide retreated, leaving our boat an oasis in a waste of gray sand.
“If seven maids with seven mops swept it for half a year Do you suppose, the walrus said, that they could get it clear?”