Chapter II

Two Persons of More Importance, and why they went to the
Beach in October; Miss Carlisle Heth, and how she met an
unwelcome swain at Sea; how this Swain could swim enough
for one.

Mr. Heth perused the Severe Arraignment of himself about nine o'clock, over his second cup of coffee. He perused with indignation; but, being long since trained to keep a neat partition between downtown and uptown, he did not divulge his sentiments to the breakfast-table, and even carried the paper off with him to the office. By such demeanor, he abdicates our present notice. Mrs. Heth, hours later, bought a copy of the "Post" from a uniformed newsboy, to see what they had to say of the Associated Charities meeting on the evening preceding, and of her remarks in accepting the office of First Vice-President. Absorbed by this particular piece-in-the-paper,--for so the good lady named all journalistic efforts, from dry-goods advertisements to leading editorials on Trouble in the Balkans,--it was past three-thirty o'clock, post-meridian, or well after luncheon, before her eye chanced to alight on the Dabney House's winged words.

At this hour the ladies sat at ease in their private sitting-room on the seventh floor of the great handsome caravansary by the sea. For to-day, as it falls out, the House of Heth, just as we have it so firmly fixed on Washington Street, had split and transplanted itself; all that mattered of it, the soul and genius of the House, having flitted off seventy miles to the Beach for an over-Sunday rest.

It was the 29th of October, which should have meant grate-fires. On the contrary, two windows in the rented sitting-room were open, and Miss Carlisle Heth, laying down "Pickwick Papers," by Dickens, the well-known writer, now rose and flung wide the third.

"Whew!" said she, just as an ordinary person might have done. "It's stifling!"

Her mother, a lifelong conservative, presently replied:

"It isn't the heat, it's the humidity."

Carlisle looked out over the sunny sea, and wondered if her mother were never going to take her nap. She was twenty-three years old, and, Hun or no Hun, was certainly not displeasing to the fleshly eye. Also, she much desired to pass the time with a little sail, having already privately engaged a catboat for that express purpose. There was no reason whatever why she shouldn't have the sail, except that her mother was opposed on principle to anything that looked the least bit adventurous.

"There are cinders on me yet, in spite of my bath," added Mrs. Heth, whisking through the less interesting pieces in the "Post."... "Willie's train arrives at four-thirty, I believe?"

Miss Heth confirmed the belief.

"I wonder, really," mused the dowager, not for the first time, "what attraction the place can offer Mr. Canning. Men are strange in their choice of amusement, to say the least."

"He's tired of the hermit life, and wants to let down his bars and have a little fun."

"He could have all the fun he wants in town, Cally. He has only to make a sign--"

"Of course!--and be snowed under with invitations which would be odious to him, and probably roped in for something by Helen and Sue Louise Cheriton, say. He can have fun here, without its leading to anything."

She added, with perverse merriment: "At least he thinks he can, not knowing that two enterprising strangers are camping right across his little trail."

Mrs. Heth frowned slightly. She was a slim, rather small lady, and her fair face, at first sight, suggested an agreeable delicacy. To herself she acknowledged with pleasure that she was "spirituelle." To the observer, after a glance at her attractive upper face, the thick jaw and neck came as a surprise: so did the hands and feet. The feet, seen casually in a company, were apt to be taken for the belongings of some far stouter woman, sitting near. They were Mrs. Heth's, however; and she had also a small round birthmark on her left temple, which a deft arrangement of the hair almost concealed, and a small dark mustache, which was not so fortunately placed. She was sane and sound as to judgment, and her will had raised the House of Heth as by a steam derrick.

Miss Heth, gazing down at three or four hardy bathers, who splashed and shouted at the hotel float, said, laughing:

"Truly, mamma, what do you suppose the Cheritons would have given Willie for the splendid tip?"

Mrs. Heth's frown at her newspaper deepened; otherwise she made no response. She learned with difficulty, like a Bourbon; but many years' experience had at last convinced her that her daughter's occasional mocking mannerism had to be put up with. Conceivably there were people in the world who might have liked this mild cynical way of Carlisle's, seeing in it, not indeed a good quality, but, so to say, the seamy side of a good quality; the lingering outpost of a good quality that had been routed; at least the headstone over the grave of a good quality that maybe was only buried alive. But of these people, if such there were, Mrs. Heth was positively not one....

And Carlisle's next remark was: "What would you wear to-night, for the occasion?... Oh, there's a big motor-boat going by like the wind."

For though she might sometimes jeer aloud over processes, the daughter was known to be quite as serious at heart as her mother, over the great matters of life. Otherwise, look you, she might not have been at the Beach at all to-day. The fact was that she and mamma had not _positively_ decided on this recuperative excursion (though they had _practically_ decided) until after the arrival of Cousin Willie Kerr's notelet at breakfast: in which notelet Willie mentioned laconically that he and Mr. Canning were themselves going Beachward by the three o'clock train, and concluded his few lines with _verbum sap_, which is a Latin quotation.

Standing idly at the window, the girl had indeed been thinking of Mr. Canning before her mother spoke; and thinking with most pleasurable speculations. Truly he was worth a thought, was Mr. Canning, proud stranger within the gates--"house-guest," as the society column prefers it--for whom, if reports were true, many ladies fair had sighed, sickened, and died. And she, alone in her maidenly coterie, had already met the too exclusive metropolitan--four days ago, by the lucky fluke of turning in at the Country Club at an out-of-the-way morning moment, when she might have motored straight on home, and had been within an ace of doing so. An omen, wasn't it? Five minutes she and Mr. Canning had talked, over so-called horses' necks provided by his sedate host, and before the end of that time she had perceived an interest dawning in the young man's somewhat ironic eyes. With the usual of his sex one could have counted pretty definitely on the thing's being followed up. However, Mr. Canning, the difficult, had merely saluted her fascinatingly, and retired to re-maroon himself in the rural villa of his kinsmen, the Allison Paynes, where he halted for a week or two on his health-seeking progress southward.

It looked like a parting forever, but wasn't, owing to that help which comes ever to those who help themselves....

To the sensible query, Mrs. Heth, lightening, replied: "Of course, the gray crêpe-de-chine."

"I think so, too. Only there's a rip at the bottom. I'm sure Flora hasn't touched it since Mr. Avery put his large foot straight through it."

Having turned from the window, Carlisle yawned and glanced at the clock. The two ladies conversed desultorily of draped effects, charmeuse, and why Mattie Allen imagined that she could wear pink. Mrs. Heth ran on through the "Post." Carlisle put up "Pickwick," by Dickens, sticking in a box of safety matches to keep the place. Then she examined herself in the mirror over the mantel, and became intensely interested in a tiny redness over her left eyebrow. She thought that rubbing in a little powder, and then rubbing it right off, would help the redness, and it did.

"I asked Mattie why she said such long prayers in the mornings. That was what made me late for breakfast. Her feelings were quite hurt. Isn't her devoutness quaint, though?"

"She uses my house," murmured Mrs. Heth, "like a hotel. One would think it might occur to her that if she _must_ mummer like a deacon she ought to get up--"

She broke off, her wandering eye having just then fallen upon the Arraignment.

"She didn't like our packing her off right after breakfast a bit either.... I'm devoted to her," said Carlisle, gently rubbing off the powder, "but there's no denying there's a great deal of the cat in Mats."

"Hmph!... Why, this is outrageous! I never read such a thing!"

"What is it?" said the daughter, not turning, clearly not interested.

"Here's a man saying he visited the Works with the Labor Commissioner, and that conditions there are _homicidal!_ I never! Mmm-m-m. Here! 'I speak particularly of the Heth Cheroot Works, but all four stand almost equally as burning blots upon the conscience of this community'--"

Carlisle's attention was not diverted from her eyebrow. "The Works! He's crazy.... Who is the man?"

"A piece in the paper here--let me see. Yes, here's his name. Vivian. _V. Vivian_! There's no such man!..."

"Oh," said the girl, absently, "it's only some notoriety-seeking nobody.... Like the man who threw the brick at papa that election night."

"But nobodies haven't any right to publish such untruths!" said Mrs. Heth, more grammatical than she sounded. "They ought to be punished, imprisoned for it. 'Public opinion is the grandfather of statute-book law.' Where's the sense in that?..."

"It's probably one of those Socialistic things.... They said the man who threw the brick at papa was a Socialist."

"'Shameless egoists of industry--grow rich by homicide!' I'm greatly surprised at Mr. West for printing such fanatical stuff. I trust your father did not see this. He gave forty dollars to the tuberculosis fund, and this is his reward."

She fumed and interjected awhile further, but her daughter's thought had dreamed far away. From her childhood days she had carried a mind's-eye picture of the dominant fourth member of the family, the great Works, lord and giver of her higher life, which completely refuted these occasional assaults from socialists and failures. Their malicious bricks flew high over her girlish head. Presently Mrs. Heth rose, looking about for her novel, which was a glittering new one, frankly for entertainment only, and not half-cultural like "Pickwick." The two ladies moved together for the bedrooms.

"You had better get a little nap, too," said Mrs. Heth, "to be fresh for the evening."

"It's so early now. Perhaps I may stroll down for a few minutes first."

"Well--it's so quiet I feel as if we had the place to ourselves. But come up in plenty of time for a nap before dinner.... You're here to get two days of good rest."

"I'll shut the door between," said Carlisle.

Before long, from the mother's side of the door so shut, certain sounds arose indicating that after the morning's fitful fever she slept well. Carlisle, on her own side, quickly donned a white boating-dress, a blue fillet for her hair, and white doeskin shoes with rubber soles. That done, she went out through the sitting-room, shot down in the lift, traversed the forsaken lobby, and emerged upon the long empty boating pavilion which ran from the hotel's side-entrance well out over the water.

"The bell-boy gave you my message, Mr. Wedge?" said she, to the weather-tanned renter of boats. "How do you do? I'm late. How's the little Lady Jane?"

"How you, Miss Heth? Glad to see you back again, Miss. Lady Jane's trim as ever. Yes'm. And there's a little sou' breeze coming up--puffy, but just suit her."

"Bring her up a little more."

"Yes'm--there now! Feels most like summer, don't it?"

"But it doesn't _look_ like it!" smiled Miss Heth, and glanced about at the emptiness of things.

"You'd ought to of seen her afore the hot spell," replied Mr. Wedge, with artificial hilarity....

Then the light air took the little sail and Carlisle slid away with the sunshine on her hair.

For half a week the breath of summer had confounded October, mid-autumn plucking a leaf from July's best book. Now, with the half-holiday at hand and a Sabbath to follow, a few others beside the Heths and the Willie Kerr select party had deemed it worth while to go down to the sea where the breezes blow. Only a few, though: the desolate quiet of a summer place out of season yet clung and hung over all. In a solitary corner of the vast piazza four coatless men sat idly drinking the rickeys of summer. These, indeed, watched the embarkation of the girl with interest, and when she stood a moment to get a knot out of the sheet, revealing the figure of the Huntswoman (though she was by no means one of your great Amazons), one of them might have been heard to say:

"Well, she can have _me_ any time.... And, by crackey, she can _sail_!"

The remark betrayed the hypnotic influence: for she really could not sail very well. No athlete this lady; she had even let her saddle-horse go after the purchase of the second car; the sail now stood as her sole sporting activity, and that but lately taken up. However, she handled her bark with a tolerable efficiency. Keeping prudently inshore, yet feeling delightfully venturesome, she skimmed along by the row of shut-up cottages, and was soon lost to the stare of the rickey-drinkers, of whose interest she had been quite unaware, or, let us say, practically unaware....

Not for the eyes of anonymous transients or liberal-minded drummers had Carlisle Heth donned this charming boat-dress and put out upon the bounding blue. Not just to break the tedium of the afternoon, either; not even exclusively for the vast exhilaration of sailing, though undoubtedly she thrilled to that. But the interesting coincidence, giving a peculiar point to it all, was that the three o'clock train from town was due within the half-hour, and her present course lay dead across the line of the street from the station.

Travel-worn young men; desolate Beach; chagrin at coming; and then, presto, upon the jaded vision:--blue, sunny water, white-sailed boat, beautiful nymph. Great heavens, what a tableau!...

We well know how resistlessly the male of humankind is drawn to the female, at the mere glimpse of her flinging aside the tools of his trade, whatever it may be, and furiously pursuing to the ends of the earth. And we know, too (for the true poets of all ages have told us), how the female of our species goes her innocent ways full of artless fancies and sweet girlish imaginings, all unaware that an opposite and uproarious sex is in headlong pursuit. And how she springs up startled from her other-worldly dreams, to hear the thundering feet behind....

Yet we do know also of cases everywhere which make familiar principles not merely out of place, but fairly grotesque. You are hardly to conceive Miss Heth's pretty tableau as staged for, her prospecting journey to the Beach as concerned with, some ordinary male, of whom one could expect that he would pursue even extraordinary maids in an ordinary way....

The nymph sailed gayly, stimulated by agreeable anticipations. The minutes danced by with the skipping waves. A gust of wind slapped the solitary little canvas, and Carlisle's small but not incapable hand tightened upon the sheet. Her eye went dreamily over water and strand. Far down the shore, boys were swimming with faint yells, but the hotel bathers had tired and gone in. She seemed to have the great Atlantic to herself, and the fact seemed nice to her, and refined....

The years had passed since Carlisle Heth had formulated the careering importance, even the nobility, of marrying high above her. Aspiration, not your ditchwater cynicism, was the mainspring of her real being, as her mother well knew; and this supreme fulfilment had long glittered ahead as the ultimate crown, not of triumph only, but of happiness consummate. A little too long, perhaps: waiting princesses grow discontented. Vague dissatisfactions possessed the girl at times, for all her large blessings; mild symptoms stewed and simmered from her which surprised her in reflective moments, and her mother at all moments. These things, she knew well, came all from a single want. Her reach far exceeded her grasp. Her sighs were Alexander's.

Now, in the smiling and anticipatory afternoon, a limpid brook of girlish imaginings beguiled her with enchanting music, while realer water lapped her shallop, and the substantial breeze whipped her glorious hair about her yet more glorious face. This face, it is time to say plainly, attracted more than rickey-drinkers. Good men might here read their dearest dreams come true; had so read them. The fact deserves capitals, being enormously important. With one half the world only, as all know, is character destiny: the rest is bent and twisted, glorified or smashed, by Physiognomy, the great potter.

And this girl's destiny was obviously magnificent. Experience had long since convinced her, personally, of that. Hoarse testimonials from the pursuing sex she had had in superabundance from her fifteenth year. Yet, while these were duly valued as indicating the strong demand, she had waited, stanch to her destiny. Were not Alexandrine sighs her right? One so endowed could hardly be asked to rest content with the youth of the vicinage....

The cottage row was now well astern; the long string of empty bathhouses slid by, water foamed under the swelling sail. Gliding with the bark, dreamy retrospect met and joined hands with solider prospect. Carlisle threw round a measuring eye, and perceived that she had covered more distance than she had thought; had passed the limits of the board-walk and the beach, which was quite far enough, considering. She luffed cleverly, having a splendid blowy time of it, and put about. This done, she permitted herself to glance for the second time over the purview.

No cloud of smoke stood upon the horizon stationward, no human being appeared within such view of the strand as the cottages and bath-houses left to her. The train, evidently, was late. Well, as far as that went, there was no special hurry about getting back to the hotel. Mamma could only scold a little, as usual.

Carlisle smiled to herself, rather tickled by the thought of the brilliant march she and mamma had stolen upon the world. In five minutes, under stiff Mr. Payne's eye at that, she had indubitably interested Mr. Canning. And now, thanks chiefly to Willie Kerr's loyal enterprise, ...

Her returning eye fell upon a bobbing object in the water, very near her, and her heart missed a beat. Her lips moved soundlessly. _Jack Dalhousie!_...

The bobbing object, in fact, was the head of a man of the sea; a youthful swimmer who had come up on her unseen--behind her till she had put about. The lad was swimming rapidly, though with a curious waste of motive power, and was so close that Miss Heth seemed to herself to be staring full into his face. His course was laid dead across her bows; for other reasons, too, his piratical intentions were instantly obvious to the girl in the boat.

How did he dare!--after all these months ...

For an exciting second she plotted escape by flight, but the impulse was all but still-born. He would be on her before she could put about. The girl sat entirely still, regarding the swimmer in a kind of fascinated silence. The irony of fate, indeed, that, at a moment when her whole mind and heart were toward the rose-pink future, this scapegrace ghost from her only "past" should have risen out of the sea upon her. To dream of a Canning, and be entrapped by a Dalhousie!...

The youth sloshed alongside, laid hold of the boat's nose, and methodically and with some difficulty pulled himself in. The weight of his ingress tipped the gunwale to the water's edge, but Carlisle made no outcry. She was clear of head; and the heart of her desire was to be free of this misadventure without attracting attention from the shore.

She said in a sharp, clear voice: "Mr. Dalhousie, are you perfectly crazy?"

Dalhousie, in his swimmer's suit, sat stiffly forward, sluicing water into the bottom. He was a big and well-built boy, with a face that had no viciousness; but his dark eyes, with their heavy silken lashes, were hardly meant for a man. Neither was his mouth, for all that he sought to set it so firmly now.

"Mr. Dalhousie," he repeated with elaborate distinctness. "When d' I--draw that--title?"

The girl sat eyeing him with frosty calm: a look which covered rage within, not unmingled with perturbation....

He was a neighbor of hers, this audacious youth, though not of Washington Street; impecunious, and hence negligible; moreover somewhat notorious of late for a too vivid behavior: the distant bowing acquaintance of many years. This till the moment of indiscretion last May; when, encountering his dashing attractions in the boredom of a dull resort, far from her mother's restrictive eye, she had for an idle fortnight allowed the relation between them to become undeniably changed. Foolish indeed; but really she had thought--or now really thought she had thought--that the impossible youth took it all no more seriously than she. Not till her return home last month had he revealed his complete untrustworthiness: presuming, as she termed it, making claims and advances, putting her to trouble to keep her vernal unwisdom from her mother. Still, she _had_ thought she had disposed of him at last....

Now there sat the unwelcome swain, her boarder, so close that she could have touched him. And her gaze upon him was like arctic snowblink: an odd look in pretty young eyes.

"You've no right to force yourself upon me in this way," said she. "You must get out of my boat at once."

"Oh, no, I mustn't, Carlisle. That's where you make--mistake. You've put me off--too often. Now--the time's come."

"You must be out of your senses. This is outrageous. I insist--I demand that you get out of my boat _immediately_."

"When d' ju--listen when I--demanded?"

His heavy resoluteness reduced her suddenly to the weakness of saying: "A gentleman wouldn't do such a thing.... You will regret this."

"Man," said Dalhousie, with the same labored slowness, "comes before gen'leman. An' the regrets--will be yours. I've come--to have a talk."

In the momentary silence, the drip, drip from his bathing-suit became very audible. The lad leaked like a sieve, all over her boat. Miss Heth glanced swiftly and vexedly from him, over the unchanged panorama. Empty water lapping empty beach; no one watching. Only now, in the sky over the station, there hung a haze of train-smoke....

Her eyes came back: and now she observed with some girlish anxiety the young man's unwonted solemnity, the strange brilliance of his eyes. A certain nervousness began to show through her cold calm: her unconscious hand wound the taut sheet round and round the tiller, an injudicious business in view of the gusty breeze. How to be rid most quickly of the interloper?... She might, of course, put ashore with him: but she particularly did not care to do that, and have all the piazza loungers and gossips see her in his somewhat too gay company. Most particularly she did not care to have her mother glance out of her upstairs window and be stunned by the same sight, with apoplectic cross-examination to follow ...

"Jack," said Carlisle Heth, hurriedly, in rather a coaxing sort of voice, "if you will leave me now, I will--I promise to see you in town next week."

A flicker touched Dalhousie's eyelid; but he said huskily, after a pause: "Promise? What's your promise worth? You've promised me before. You said--you loved--"

"I can't talk now. But on Monday afternoon--in the park--or at my house--whichever you prefer ... I--I'll explain. I give you my word of honor--"

"No! You've done that before--too. Explain! Howc'n you explain? Go on. Try now. Why've you--refused to see me? Why--"

Red stained the girl's cheeks.

"Then you'll force me to put in immediately," she said, with an angry reversal of tactics,--"and subject me to the humiliation of being seen with you. What a coward!"

"Humiliation!" Dalhousie repeated, flushing vividly. "You say that?"

"Can't you understand that it would be? Are you really so stupid? Haven't you learned yet that I don't ever want anything more to do with you?..."

Such remarks brought action and reaction. The lad's look must have warned Miss Heth that all this went rather far. In fact, she began a sort of retraction, a hurried little soothing away of her impolitic and fairly conclusive remarks. But Dalhousie interrupted her, rising unsteadily in the boat, his young face quite strange and wild.

Who would scrutinize the dying flickers of last summer's flirtation? All that mattered was only too well seen from the shore.

It was the smallest of the rickey-drinkers who bruited the mishap abroad, his eye having happened to stray through a slit between a cottage-side and a boat-house. At this time, with the approach of evening coolness, the hotel piazza was filling up a little; and at the man's word, the place was instantly in a turmoil.

There started, in fact, all the horrid rigors of amateur rescue work: of which the least said the soonest mended. It was presently noted by some coolhead that the renter of boats, having seen the disaster first, had already put out for the scene of trouble, rowing lustily. Nobody could beat him to his garlands now; that was clear; clear, too, that there really wasn't much peril, after all. So the motley gathering of idlers became content to stand upon the edge of the boat pavilion, gazing most eagerly, gossiping not a little....

The bystander, like the Athenian, ever desires to see or to hear some new thing. And really this spectacle was new enough to satisfy the most exacting.

Perhaps a mile over the water, a hundred yards or so from shore, the little boat Lady Jane lay side up on the sea. To it clung a young girl, well above water; near her appeared the head of a young man, a swimmer. So far, so good. But there was something wrong about this swimmer, something grossly discordant in his position in the picture. It developed upon close examination that the interval between him and the overturned boat was not decreasing. It was widening indeed; widening quite steadily.... Yes, there it was; unfortunately no longer open to doubt. The man was pulling for the shore and safety, leaving the girl to sink or swim as she preferred.

The sight was a strange one, resembling a defiance of established law. It staggered the eye, like the sight of water running uphill. People had seen the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and kissed the Pope's toe; but they had never seen anything like this.

A nasal, hawk-nosed individual in eye-glasses voiced the sentiments of all: "If that's your Southern chivalry, Warlow, the less I see of it the better."

Another spoke more sympathetically, yet with unchanged point: "Poor Dalhousie--born to trouble! Rye whiskey an' marryin' cousins--that's what's killed him."

A third, an elderly woman, with a rich voice, said: "I wonder what there was between those two...."

The actual rescue proved a tame affair. Suddenly attention was diverted from it by the cry of a certain winsome young thing, who, when the alarm was raised, had been among the first to scream.

"Oh, _look_ at that little man. He _hit_ him!"

"Where?--Who?--Oh!"

"Serves him ri--Ah-h!"

It proved as the screamer said. The smallest rickey-drinker, not content with sounding the alarm, had gone brilliantly bolting down the beach. Taking his stand there at a given point, he had flung himself upon the youth who had so ably saved his own skin, as the latter waded ashore, and struck him savagely in the face. It was observed that the man from the sea seemed surprised by this attack. He stared at his small assailant in a confused sort of way; and then with passionate swiftness plucked hold of him by two favorite points of vantage, and threw him bodily into the water. This movement, as it chanced, turned his gaze seaward. The youth was seen to stand an instant, rigid as a bather in marble, staring out over the water he had traversed ...

Then he turned, heedless of the brandishings of the little man behind him, and went away toward his bath-house in the manner that is best described as a slink.