Part 39 (2/2)
Just then too down comes the maid sayin' there wa'n't anything to go back; so I starts to beat it.
I didn't get far, though, with a hundred and ninety pound young lady blockin' the doorway.
”Torchy, you must help us!” says Marjorie. ”There isn't anyone else we can ask. And you're always doing such clever things for Papa and Brother Bob!”
Say, it was a puffy lot of hot air she hands out; but I admit that after two or three more speeches like that, and with her promisin' to square anything Piddie might have to say about not comin' back, she had me goin'.
”Well, what's the proposition?” says I.
”Let's tell him all, so he will understand just what he's to do,”
suggests Marjorie.
And, say, you should have heard them two, with me pinned in between 'em on the couch, givin' me the tale in a sort of chorus, both talkin' to once and beginnin' at diff'rent ends.
”It's such a romance!” squeals Marjorie.
”You see, he's coming to-night,” says Mildred, ”and n.o.body knows.”
”Yes, I got that all down,” says I; ”but what's the first part? Who is he and where's he from?”
Well, it's some yarn, all right! Seems that Mildred was a boardin'
school chum of Marjorie's who'd come up from Atlanta to spend the summer with friends in Newport. As a wind-up to the season they'd taken her on a yachtin' trip up the coast. Such a poky old trip, too! n.o.body aboard but old married folks that played bridge all the time, and one bald headed bachelor who couldn't sit out in the moonlight with her unless he was wrapped up in a steamer rug.
So what was a girl with eyes like Mildred's to do, anyway? She was bein'
bored to death, when, as luck would have it, something went wrong with the propeller shaft. The yacht was 'way up off the coast of Maine at the time, and the nearest place where it was safe to anchor was in the lee of a barren, d.i.n.ky little island. And they stays there three whole days, while the crew tinkers things up below and the folks yawn their heads off.
All but Millie. She got so desp'rate she rowed ash.o.r.e all by herself.
Accordin' to her description, that must have been a perfectly punk little island. It was all rock, except in a few spots where there was some scrub bushes and mangy gra.s.s. Plunk in the middle was an old shack of a house surrounded by lobster pots and racks of codfish spread out to dry, and she says it was the smelliest scenery she'd ever got real close to.
But Mildred was sore on the yacht and all the stupid folks on it; so she wanders out to windward of the worst smells, plants herself on the flattest rock she can find, and prepares to read. That's her pose when she looks up and discovers this male party with the sun kissed locks and the dreamy eyes standin' there gazin' at her curious.
”It wasn't Adonis that I called him,” says Mildred. ”Who was that stunning old Greek that we had the bust of in the school library, Madge?”
”Hermes?” says Marjorie.
”That's it!” says Mildred. ”He was a perfect Hermes; only his curly hair was all sun bleached, and his face was tanned a lovely brown, and he had big, broad shoulders, and--and he was smoking a pipe.”
”And about his eyes!” prompts Marjorie.
”Oh, they were perfectly stunning,” says she, ”real sea blue.”
Well, anybody that ever read a midsummer fiction number could have supplied the next chapters. Here's the lovely city girl, the n.o.ble browed but unsuspectin' native, golden summer days, and no compet.i.tion.
Why, with a catchy t.i.tle and a few mushy pictures it would make a lovely contribution to one of the leadin' thirty-five-centers, just as it stood. And Mildred knew her cue, all right. She trains them front row eyes of hers on him, opens up with a few lines of lively chatter, and inside of half an hour she has him sittin' picturesque at her feet, callin' him Hermes of the Lobster Pots, and otherwise workin' the siren spell.
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