CHAPTER XIV

Archibald Lyndsay went down to the beach again, where Carington, not very happy, sat waiting on the stern of his canoe. He rose as his host came near.

“This way,” said Lyndsay. “And now”—as they walked to and fro on the upper shingles—“may I ask you to let me understand it all?”

Carington quietly related the scene on the shore, omitting nothing. When he had ended, Lyndsay said:

“I have probably to thank you for a life which is very dear to me. I have no words in which to say what I feel. We are very deep in your debt.”

“Oh, any one would—”

“No—I understand. You are a little like myself, I fancy. To have too much obliged another has its embarrassments. I won’t ask you now to let my wife say her own thankfulness; but come and breakfast to-morrow, and bring Mr. Ellett.”

“With pleasure.”

“By the way—and you will pardon me—what was all that about Fairfield and a bowman?”

“Simply, Mr. Lyndsay, that I am still, in my holiday \.pn +1 times, a bit of a foolish boy, and when Polycarp came up for a man and could get none, I supposed it was for you, and just as a frolic induced him to let me play bowman. I had, of course, not the remotest idea that it was for Miss Lyndsay. May I ask you to accept for her my most humble apologies?”

“I see,” said Lyndsay, laughing. “It has its amusing side.”

“Yes, but— Well, it ceased to be amusing when I realized the annoyance it might bring to Miss Lyndsay.”

“I dare say you will be able to make your peace,” said his host, as Carington took his hand. At the boat, to which he walked with the elder man, he paused:

“May I say a word to that boy of yours?”

“To Ned? Yes, certainly.” He called, “Ned! Halloa! Come here!” for the lad had gone up to the cabin with Rose.

“Coming,” cried Ned, from the porch, where, with Anne, he was trying to make a good case for Jack.

Meanwhile, as Lyndsay was ordering a boat up to Jack, Ned came down to the strand.

“Mr. Carington wished to see you,” said Lyndsay. “Good-by, and breakfast at half-past eight to-morrow”; and so, with ready tact, he went up the cliff, leaving Ned with Carington.

“I wanted to see you a moment, Ned, while the matter is fresh. I want to say that I saw the whole affair on the shore. I was but thirty yards away. Perhaps you won’t think it a liberty, my lad, if I say you behaved admirably, and kept your wits, too. 197You showed both good sense and courage.” He spoke as if he were addressing an equal.

Ned flushed with pleasure. “Oh, thank you!”

“That’s all. I think you and I shall be friends after this. You must come up and see me; we might kill a salmon. Good-by.” And he pushed off.

Ned stood a moment, in his thoughtful way, and then went back up the steps to Miss Anne, who was now at ease as to Rose, and well pleased with her dearest nephew.

“What was it?” she inquired.

“Oh, not much—nothing.”

“I think I know.”

“No!”

“Yes; he wanted to say you had behaved well.”

“Oh, bother, Aunt Anne! What’s the use of your asking, if you know? You always do know.”

Then Ned went away, and Archibald Lyndsay came out and strode uneasily up and down the porch.

“Archie,” said Anne. “Brother.”

“Well, what is it?”

“Are you troubled?”

“Yes, of course. How should I be other than troubled?”

“But why?”

“Why? Jack has behaved like a selfish, thoughtless—”

“No; he is not at bottom selfish. Thoughtless—yes; and he has the vices of his virtues. He is so bold, and so resolute in action—so enjoys the peril he creates. Can’t you see what such a character wants? 198You may rest assured, my dear Archie, that he is quite enough punished.”

“He is incidentally punished.”

“But—”

“I don’t want to hear any more, Anne. He has behaved like a blackguard.”

“No.”

“Confound the women!” he said, and walked away; but in an hour was at the shore to meet Jack, who landed a little dismayed, his grunting cub still expostulating in the only language known to juvenile bears.

“Well, sir! I have heard this agreeable story!”

“But, father—”

“I should think you might be fatigued!”

Now, a good kicking would have been preferred by any of these boys to the father’s sarcasm.

“Go up to the house, undress, and go to bed. I don’t want to see you for a day. No words, sir, or I shall lose my temper. Off with you—you are not fit to associate with gentlemen.”

Without a word more, Jack went up the steps and did as he was told; in consequence of which Margaret wept a little, and Anne, who thought on the whole that Jack had gotten off better than she expected, betook herself to her books, with a full determination to have it out with the boy in her own way, and at a later date.

It was well into the afternoon when Carington reached his camp, and found Ellett still away on the river.

199“I shall catch it!” said Fred, with a grin at the prospect. He made use of the interval to change his clothes and get rid of the stained garments, after which he ordered a smudge, pulled open the tent-flaps, and cast himself on the camp mattress, for the first time realizing that he was tired, or, at least, had that sense of languor which follows upon intense excitement. The tent-fly was up—the triangular space thus open to view framed prettily the beach, the men and canoes, the river, and the hills beyond. The smoke of the cedar-smudge at times dimmed the picture. At last, being absolutely comfortable, the cushions just right, the midge and black fly routed, he carefully filled and lit his pipe, reflecting, as he did so, on the varied value of tobacco, which he had never misused. Next he sought in one pocket after another, until he came upon a worn note-book. Among its scraps of verse and memoranda he found the well-known apostrophe of El Din Attar to the pipe. He read it with a smile.

“‘O wife of the soul, thou art wiser than any who bide in the harem. A maker of peace thou art and a builder of prudence between temptation and the hour of decision. Can anger abide with the pipe, or a gnat in the smoke of the tent-fire? Lo, wine is but wine for the simple, and a pipe but a pipe for the foolish; and what is a song to the dumb, or a rose to the eye that is blind? A bud of the rose findeth June on the breast of the dark-eyed; a song must be sung by the heart of the hearer. And thus are the pipe and the smoker. Also of it the king hath no more joy than the beggar, saith El Din Attar.’” 200“A pipe is a pipe, and a rose is a rose, be it prim or not,” said the happy young fellow, laughing. “There is no new wisdom. To think what Wordsworth would have said to that? If Hamlet could have played upon this pipe, would he have been nicer to Ophelia?” His own meerschaum had been a friendly counselor at times. “Gracious!” he laughed outright—a good sign of a man that he can soliloquize laughter—“if I should fall in love, and the woman hate tobacco!” He let his fancy wander, and began to reflect, lazily, and yet with some curiosity, on the person he had saved from a serious, if not fatal, calamity. “I got out of that comedy pretty well,” he said to himself. “But, by George! it is rather more awkward to put a person—a woman—under such an obligation as this. How I should hate it! I wonder, does she? I suppose she won’t be at breakfast. That, at least, is a comfort.” Then he reflected that, with people such as these, he would not be too absurdly overwhelmed with gratitude. At last he turned to a book, fully satisfied that, on the whole, he had the best of it, and that there was no need to growl at Fate.

In a minute or two he exclaimed, “In-door poetry, that”; and dropped the volume of too dainty verse. The substance beneath was not worth the polish on top. He was not in a book mood, or disposed to anchor. The hours slipped by without freight of urgent question or answer. He was in a dreamy state, and, liking the hazy indistinctness of its demands, invented for his use, with a smile of approval, the word, “Vaguearies.”

201Smiling, he made note of this verbal find, as Ellett came up the beach.

“What pleases you, Fred? And what is all this row the men are talking about?”

“One at a time. I was hoping that the woman I shall love will take generously to my pipe.”

“She will be a fool if she don’t. I always advise the women never to marry a man who doesn’t smoke. You see, if they fall out a bit, she can always say, ‘Well, just take a cigar, Fred, and think it over.’ I am sure the proportion of divorces must be smaller among the couples that include a smoker. Good notion, that!”

“It is on the heights of wisdom!”

“Isn’t it? And you haven’t been fishing?”

“Yes; I did fish, but I got no fish. I caught a mild little adventure.”

“Michelle began to tell me—”

“Michelle be hanged! These guides are always dramatic!”

“Well, and what was it happened? Tell me.”

“Talk to you about that by and by.” He was indisposed to have too much made of the incidents of the morning. Why, he could hardly have explained. He did not want Miss Lyndsay discussed. Perhaps this was what the doctors call a prodrome—of a malady known to man and maid. Love may, like other forces in life, assume many forms before it unmasks and we know it as love. The correlation of forces obtains in the world of the emotions as well as in that of matter.

“How confoundedly queer you are sometimes, Fred! I can wait, I suppose; but I don’t see why.”

202“Oh, because my mind is an absolute vacuum. That is a rather interesting thought, Oliver, quite worthy of Boston! Fancy an entire mental vacuum! Is it any more possible than a physical one? Don’t you think there may be a zero of thought, as of cold—or of heat, I should say?”

“Nonsense!” cried Ellett.

“Want to know? Do you? Well, I was seriously thinking that when we can get photographs in colors, it will be a delightful thing to collect sunsets.”

“I don’t care a continental malediction for sunsets, or thought-zeroes, either. What’s the matter with you? Michelle says you shot a bear, or a young woman—I am not sure which. He was a little mixed about it. But why you should—”

“I was only chaffing you, old man.” He was really, and like a child, putting off an inevitable annoyance. He knew he must talk of it all to his friend, and felt himself ridiculously unwilling either to make it seem grave or to treat it as a matter for jesting comment. Not to understand the cause of your own states of indecision is, for the habitually decisive, most unpleasant, and yet silence may make a thing seem important which is not.

“What happened, Oliver, was this.” And he quietly narrated the incidents of the morning.

“I congratulate you, Fred.”

“And why?”

“Well, if you are idiot enough to ask that in sober earnest, I am not fool enough to reply in kind. And so Miss Lyndsay knows who her bowman was?”

“Yes.”

203“Did she like it?”

“How the deuce do I know?”

“But I should think you could tell. I hope that girl lost her temper. Girls who can’t lose their tempers can’t lose their hearts. That’s pretty good, Fred!”

“Nonsense! Who wants her to lose her heart? You can judge for yourself, if you are curious—we are to breakfast with them to-morrow. Get any fish?”

“One—only ten pounds. The new run is up, Pierre says. Saw plenty of small fish leaping. But about these Lyndsays?”

“Let’s have supper. Hang the Lyndsays!”

“Both, with all my heart; and I will also suspend my opinions, if it suits you better. Wasn’t bad, that!” And then, as Fred walked away to stir up the cook, Ellett muttered, “What the mischief’s gone wrong with the man?” And so, being a kindly fellow and considerate, as far as he knew how to evolve in action this form of social wisdom, he dropped the subject for the evening, and, as Miss Anne used to say, “left time to pull the chestnuts out of the fire, when they were cool enough to be useful as diet.”