Part 50 (2/2)
”There's just enough truth in what you say to make a dispute quite profitless. Besides, I don't feel like single combat; I'm too glad to have you here.”
Standing there--fairly swimming--in the delicious upper-air currents, she looked blissfully across the rolling moors, while the sunlight drenched her and the salt wind winnowed the ruddy glory of her hair, and from the tangle of tender blossoming green things a perfume mounted, saturating her senses as she breathed it deeper in the happiness of desire fulfilled and content quite absolute.
”After all,” she said, ”what more is there than this? Earth and sea and sky and sun, and a friend to show them to... . Because, as I wrote you, the friend is quite necessary in the scheme of things--to round out the symmetry of it all... . I suppose you're dying to dangle those flies in Brier Water to see whether there are any trout there. Well, there are; Austin stocked it years ago, and he never fishes, so no doubt it's full of fish... . What is that black thing moving along the edge of the Golden Marsh?”
”A mink,” he said, looking.
She seated herself cross-legged on the hill-top to watch the mink at her leisure. But the lithe furry creature took to the water, dived, and vanished, and she turned her attention to the landscape.
”Do you see that lighthouse far to the south?” she asked; ”that is Frigate Light. West of it lies Surf Point, and the bay between is Surf Bay. That's where I nearly froze solid in my first ocean bath of the year. A little later we can bathe in that cove to the north--the Bay of Shoals. You see it, don't you?--there, lying tucked in between Wonder Head and the Hither Woods; but I forgot! Of course you've been here before; and you know all this; don't you?”
”Yes,” he said quietly, ”my brother and I came here as boys.”
”Have you not been here since?”
”Once.” He turned and looked down at the sea-battered wharf jutting into the Bay of Shoals. ”Once, since I was a boy,” he repeated; ”but I came alone. The transports landed at that wharf after the Spanish war. The hospital camp was yonder... . My brother died there.”
She lifted her clear eyes to his; he was staring at the outline of the Hither Woods fringing the ochre-tinted heights.
”There was no companion like him,” he said; ”there is no one to take his place. Still, time helps--in a measure.”
But he looked out across the sea with a grief for ever new.
She, too, had been helped by time; she was very young when the distant and fabled seas took father and mother; and it was not entirely their memory, but more the wistful lack of ability to remember that left her so hopelessly alone.
Sharper his sorrow; but there was the comfort of recollection in it; and she looked at him and, for an instant, envied him his keener grief. Then leaning a little toward him where he reclined, the weight of his body propped up on one arm, she laid her hand across his hand half buried in the gra.s.s.
”It's only another tie between us,” she said--”the memory of your dead and mine... . Will you tell me about him?”
And leaning there, eyes on the sea, and her smooth, young hand covering his, he told her of the youth who had died there in the first flush of manhood and achievement.
His voice, steady and grave, came to her through hushed intervals when the noise of the surf died out as the wind veered seaward. And she listened, heart intent, until he spoke no more; and the sea-wind rose again filling her ears with the ceaseless menace of the surf.
After a while he picked up his rod, and sat erect and cross-legged as she sat, and flicked the flies, absently, across the gra.s.s, aiming at wind-blown b.u.t.terflies.
”All these changes!” he exclaimed with a sweep of the rod-b.u.t.t toward Widgeon Bay. ”When I was here as a boy there were no fine estates, no great houses, no country clubs, no game preserves--only a few fishermen's hovels along the Bay of Shoals, and Frigate Light yonder... . Then Austin built Silverside out of a much simpler, grand-paternal bungalow; then came Sanxon Orchil and erected Hitherwood House on the foundations of his maternal great-grandfather's cabin; and then the others came; the Minsters built gorgeous Brookminster--you can just make out their big summer palace--that white spot beyond Surf Point!--and then the Lawns came and built Southlawn; and, beyond, the Siowitha people arrived on scout, land-hungry and rich; and the tiny hamlet of Wyossett grew rapidly into the town it now is. Truly this island with its hundred miles of length has become but a formal garden of the wealthy. Alas! I knew it as a stretch of woods, dunes, and old-time villages where life had slumbered for two hundred years!”
He fell silent, but she nodded him to go on.
”Brooklyn was a quiet tree-shaded town,” he continued thoughtfully, ”unvexed by dreams of traffic; Flatbush an old Dutch village buried in the scented bloom of lilac, locust, and syringa, asleep under its ancient gables, hip-roofs, and spreading trees. Bath, Utrecht, Canarsie, Gravesend were little more than cross-road taverns dreaming in the sun; and that vile and noise-cursed island beyond the Narrows was a stretch of unpolluted beauty in an untainted sea--nothing but whitest sand and dunes and fragrant bayberry and a blaze of wild flowers. Why”--and he turned impatiently to the girl beside him--”why, I have seen the wild geese settle in Sheepshead Bay, and the wild duck circling over it; and I am not very aged. Think of it! Think of what this was but a few years ago, and think of what 'progress' has done to lay it waste! What will it be to-morrow?”
”Oh--oh!” she protested, laughing; ”I did not suppose you were that kind of a Jeremiah!”
”Well, I am. I see no progress in prostrate forests, in soft-coal smoke, in noise! I see nothing gained in tr.i.m.m.i.n.g and cutting and ploughing and macadamising a heavenly wilderness into mincing little gardens for the rich.” He was smiling at his own vehemence, but she knew that he was more than half serious.
She liked him so; she always denied and disputed when he became declamatory, though usually, in her heart, she agreed with him.
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