Part 13 (1/2)
”What a fool you are, Fred!” Jimmy remarked, with family frankness.
”I am,” admitted Winifred. ”No one knows it better than I, except, perhaps, Mr. Flint.”
”I know nothing of the kind,” her companion answered with unwonted cordiality. ”Any one may be subject to a fit of dizziness, and to be minus an arm under such circ.u.mstances makes the situation really uncomfortable. We must try it again some day, to give you an opportunity to prove to yourself that it was only an affair of the moment.”
”Dear me!” thought Winifred to herself, ”why can't he always be nice like that! He seems to be a queer kind of stratified rock; you never know what you are going to strike next.”
Aloud, she said, ”I fancy, Jim, it must be past the White-House dinner hour, and papa has grown worried and sent out scouts to look for you and me. See, here is Ben Bradford!”
Looking down the road, Flint saw approaching them a tall, long-legged youth whom he dimly remembered among the group on the porch of the White-House the night before. His hair was parted in the middle, and thickly pomaded to restrain its natural inclination towards curling.
His ears were large, and set on at right angles to his face. His nose was Roman, and its prominence had rendered it peculiarly sensitive to sunburn. His manners were too frank to be polished. As he joined them now, he succeeded in making it evident at once that Flint's further presence was entirely superfluous. This juvenile candor would have had no effect, had not Winifred supplemented it by saying:--
”Mr. Bradford will take charge of me and my cape, Mr. Flint; I really cannot consent to trouble you further.”
Her manner was equivalent to a dismissal. Flint handed over the cape, as she bade him, to young Bradford's eager grasp, bowed, and turned his steps homeward. As he strolled along, he felt a curiously sudden change of mood, from the elation of the morning to a depression half physical, half mental.
”I wonder,” he said to himself, ”if this is not another phase of my inheritance from Dr. Jonathan. I remember the old gentleman used to complain that his const.i.tution was an unhappy one from birth, attended with 'flaccid solids, sizy and scarce fluids, and a low tide of spirits.' The description amused me in my youth; but I begin to have an uncomfortably sympathetic sense of his state of mind and body. I wonder, by the way, what _he_ would have done about that portrait. I never heard that he or any other Puritan gave away his property to any extent; and this portrait I regard as virtually mine. To be sure, I have not paid for it; but I had fully determined to purchase it, and--Yes, to all intents and purposes, it belongs to me. Now, to be expected to give it up, just because I happen to hear of some one else who wants it too, is asking a little too much. If I had avoided the girl, as I intended, I should never have heard of her search for her beloved great-grandmother. No, my mind is made up; I shall keep that picture--of course I shall. I am glad I put it into the closet before Brady came.”
CHAPTER VIII
THE MARY ANN
”Our deeds are like children that are born to us: they live and act apart from one's own will.”
The weather of the morning, with its golden clearness, was too beautiful to last. By noon the gold had paled. The high wind which had prevailed earlier in the day subsided; but the swelling waves, which broke with thud after thud upon the shelving beach, gave evidence of a gale still whirling somewhere off the coast. The clear-cut lines of the distant cliffs faded to dim, quiet ma.s.ses. Far out on the horizon rose a line of phantom hills,--a line which, as night drew in, moved slowly sh.o.r.eward, rising as it came, shutting out sail after sail, point after point, till at last it met the land and shut out the sea itself. There is something weird and uncanny about the approach of a fog, stealing thus unperceived out of the heart of suns.h.i.+ne and blue weather. It has in it a hint of death.
Flint felt the weight of it. His mind was shut in upon its own resources, and did not find them altogether satisfactory. Brady added little to the gayety of nations. He came in from his day on the water sunburned, tired, and as nearly cross as it lay in his genial disposition to be. He swallowed his supper, and made haste to stow himself away in bed, leaving Flint to choose between a conversation with Marsden and the self-communion which was his least congenial occupation.
For an hour or so, he loitered in the little shop, listening idly to the yarns which Marsden rolled as sweet morsels under his tongue: of the whale which the fishermen had caught off the beach, a sea-monster of untold length, breadth, and thickness, which had been sold for a thousand dollars; of the marvellous experiences of his father, as captain of a trading-vessel in the ”East Injies;” and finally of the fire-s.h.i.+p which he himself had seen hanging between sea and sky, out yonder between the island and the mainland.
”You say you saw it yourself?” Flint asked, partly from listless curiosity, and partly with an eye to the society of psychical research.
”True as yo' 're a settin' thar. 'Twas one night nigh onto fifteen years ago,--good deal such a night as this heer. The old cow wuz sick that night, and as I wuz out to the barn, puttin' hot cloths on her till past midnight. Ez I wuz comin' into the house, I looked out, and there, jest where the mist was breakin' away, hung a s.h.i.+p, lookin'
like a light under a cloud.”
”Did you call any one?” queried Flint.
”Call any one? Lord! I was too scared to move hand or foot; I jest stood gapin' at her till she faded clean out o' sight.”
”Mirage, I suppose,” Flint murmured to himself, ”unless the old fellow is lying out and out, which is not likely.” Then, aloud, as he rose, stretching himself lazily, ”If you ever see the fire-s.h.i.+p again, while I am here, let me know. I have always wanted to see a wreck, and a phantom wreck is better than none.”
”Don't go to talkin' too much about it,” said Marsden, mysteriously.
”They say it brings bad luck.”
”Apparently it brings bad luck for anybody but you to do the talking.
Well, I think I will leave you before I am tempted to a loquaciousness which might bring down a curse on the house of Marsden.”
Smiling to himself over the old man's superst.i.tion, Flint climbed the stairs to his own room, as softly as possible, lest Brady's wrath at being waked descend upon him. Having closed his door cautiously, he sat down by the open window, enjoying the soothing dampness of the fog as it came rolling in laden with the pungent fragrance of the salt marshes.