The Coming of the Tide

XX

“One of them,” observed Frances Wilmot to the sea, “is like a sudden squall when the water is all furious, and driven this way and that; the other — the other is like your deepest deep, where dim, rich things lie hidden at the heart of the tides. The squall blows over and the water forgets, but the tide must go endlessly on its appointed way.”

The sea answered with all its myriad beauty of motion and color and sound. Across the brown rocks, purple-tinted where they gleamed with wet, a great green wave rolled in with exquisite curving, and the girl watched vainly for the moment when the blue of the deep water melted into the green of the wave, and for that when all shifted into pale foam. Leaning back against the rock, her hands clasped behind her head, and the wind from the sea blowing back her hair and her fluttering sleeves, she spoke aloud, exultantly, forgetting her decision of yesterday.

“No one but me knows the treasure hidden at the heart of him, and it is mine, all mine.”

Delicate, clear morning rested over the sea, and the rising tide brought Frances Wilmot, to whom the everlasting rhythm had grown to mean always a feeling of gain or of loss, strong sense of incoming life. Pale and far, a fairy dream of blue, the water stretched, with myriad sparkles of light, light, light, breaking the surface a thousand ways, moving hither and yon, and gleaming as if invisible mermaids in countless numbers were waving torches of flame. The freshness of those moments when earth was young was on land and sea, in the early look of blue water and the hints of silver mist not yet cleared from the face of the deep; and its voice was as the first murmur out of primeval quiet. Far away, dim with distance, two fishing boats were daintily riding the waves. Watching them, the girl leaned forward, and her eyes were wet,

“Tell me if I love him,” she begged of her comrade sea.

The great waves answered her in deep murmur on the rocks, and in faintest ripples over pebble and sand.

“I did not want to,” she whispered, with the sob of the tide in her voice. “I was content, for I had you and all the other beauty, and mv old happiness, and my old pain. It was all good, and I saw my way.”

From the heart of the sea to the heart of the woman came a cry, deep calling unto deep.

“I am afraid,” she said, brokenly, and the ocean, with moving finger, wrote its infinite meanings on rock and sand.

Frances Wilmot rose and walked along the lonely shore, over pebbly beach and grass-grown headland, and golden butterflies followed as in pursuit. The touch of autumn was over all the land, and the gray cliffs jutting into the water were aster-covered and crowned with yellowing grass. At her feet the tangled blackberry vines were touched with red, and all the hinted purple and crimson and gold seemed to her full of the great encompassing rhythm of things. Wandering the way of the sea, she sang to herself, her song of the fullness of life flowing out in melody that only now and then found words. The lilt of her voice caught the sound of the breaking wave, and its low notes chimed with the withdrawing ripple. Little trills as of human laughter broke and splashed with the foaming spray as the singer went on, voice and feet and body keeping the rhythm of the ocean. Tiny sandpipers fluttered away from her in charmed fear, and above, sea gulls listened on outstretched wings. Suddenly, with full melody of sound, her voice echoed a great sense of joy that came to her, smiting like a pang, as soul and sense thrilled with unbearable keenness of sudden life.

“Ah, it hurts!” she said, hiding in her hands, even from the sea, her face which glowed with the flush of love and the fear of love.

She had strolled, with the song on her lips, far out on a rocky headland, when, looking up, she saw, not far away, Alice Bevanne leaning back against a wall of rock, her hands clasped loosely before her. Her clothing of brownish gray was so near in color to that of the rocks that the singer had come very close without observing her, and the song broke off abruptly as the Southern girl stood and watched. Something in the slender strength of the figure with the finely cut face made it seem akin to this delicate shore, where white beach and grassgrown cliff showed singular austerity in their beauty of outline and of coloring. Detached, apart, the girl wore an inscrutable expression, caught from the ancient rocks.

“ Why did n’t you tell me that you were here?” asked Frances Wilmot reproachfully. “You must have heard long ago the great noise I was making.”

Alice Bevanne looked up with her eyes alight as with sudden sunshine on deep sea.

“I was afraid that you would stop,” she said simply, “and you did, just before you got to the final note, the note that I wanted to hear.”

They talked for a time carelessly on the rocks, in the rich summer sunshine already touched with autumn’s gold, trying to weave veils of commonplace before the recesses of their hearts, which the accident of meeting had half revealed.

“It is almost time for me to go away,” said the Southern girl, pointing to clustered purple asters that grew over their heads and to the least golden-rod that grew in a cleft of the rocks at their feet by the sea.

“You will never go away,” said Alice Bevanne, with a little husky quiver in her voice. “That which you are and do can never go.”

“Is it very lonely here in the winter?” asked Frances.

The girl looked at her as if startled by the thought that any state save loneliness could be possible, and Frances Wilmot, alight with love and fire, with the great joy of the world kindled in pulse and in finger, gazed at her friend with a new sense of her imperishable strength. It seemed as if to her had been granted, in saving grace of sacrifice and of renunciation, a deeper hold on life in letting go than she herself had found in the fulfillment of the heart’s desire. Her voice quivered as she laid her hand on Alice Bevanne’s, and spoke softly: —

“The note that you were waiting for is too high for me; I think that no one but you could sing it.”

XXI

Abel Marvin had been right in his estimate of the probable action of Uncle Peter when entrusted with his own secret: for the first time in its whole existence it was unsafe. The old man confided it first to Frances Wilmot, with a genuine appeal for sympathy, which was swfift and real after a startled outbreak of surprise. It was not hard for the girl to divine the depth of his misery, for he looked suddenly old and wilted and gray. His gay pride in the achievements and the shortcomings of his ancestors broken, there was nothing left for his support. Above their china, above their silver, above their mahogany, he had plumed himself upon their sins; stuff of his heart and soul were all their deeds of good and of ill, and the corroding rust of contented repose in ancestral experiences had eaten out all possibilities of action on his own part. Now all was gone, and for the first time he was alone with his own life, and helpless.

Mrs. Warren was his next confidante; Miss Wilmot was at the house only now and then, and Uncle Peter wanted somebody who knew near him all the time. To the woman who had borne his whims and listened courteously for many years to his endless talking, the shock was great, and the sudden loneliness of the old man tugged at her heartstrings. He had been too long identified with her troubles — the cause of many of them — for her to give him up lightly, and tears shone on her lashes as he told his tale. He found the sympathy of these two women most sweet; after all, there were consoling elements in the situation, romance, and mystery, of which he was the hero. It was part of a strange tale which he could perhaps write out some day.

Toward Paul his action was different. He walked into the library one morning where his nephew was sitting, gnawing the end of a penholder, lost in happy dreams, and told him the whole story, not only of the revelation in regard to his birth, but also of his project for disputing the will. Sitting in John Warren’s great leather chair, he spoke with the simple dignity of real shame.

“I could n’t go on concealing what I had done, Paul,” he said. “Your father would have despised such action, for I never really believed that I was in the right. You, too, would despise it, and you must know.”

Paul, astounded, incredulous, and deeply touched, realized that never in his life had he respected the old man so much as he did in this confession, which showed the influence of the Warren habit of suffering remorse disproportionate to misdeed. Then a gleam of amusement shot across the moisture in his eyes as the new Uncle Peter disappeared and the old one came back, whispering, —

“ In a way I did not do it, Paul; I only saw it done, and could not stop it. It was as if I were but the instrument of some all-compelling force. Many would call it an offense; I call it a phenomenon, for you cannot get back of scientific law. It was not I who sinned, it was nature who sinned against me; the great ancestral host moved hand and brain.”

Here Uncle Peter’s voice broke as he suddenly realized that this great ancestral host was no longer his, and that he could not explain himself ever again in terms of great-great-grandfather Warren. To Paul’s kindly suggestion that one line of forbears would perhaps fit as well as another that explanation of one’s shortcomings, he responded only with gloomy silence; then, thrown upon himself by virtue of his late misdeed and his confes sion, he took a new stand of moral firmness.

“I shall go away, Paul, for I have no right here, especially in the light of what I have done.”

The young man reached across the table and shook Uncle Peter’s dejected hand.

“You will do nothing of the kind with my consent. A man belongs where he has lived his life, and my father would never forgive me if harm came to you.”

“But my—my plot,” whispered Uncle Peter.

“Nonsense!” said Paul. “It did not amount to anything, and I have always felt, as you have, that the distribution was wrong.”

“It was strange, wasn’t it?” said the old man appreciatively.

“It was! ” Paul assented heartily.

“Young Mr. Bevanne felt it, too,” confided Uncle Peter. “ His sympathy in all this trial has meant much to me. I wish you knew him better.”

Paul growled something under his breath.

“He is extremely sensitive to other people’s troubles, and I could hardly have come through this without his delicate understanding and his advice. Oh, he has done nothing reprehensible,” for his nephew’s eyes suddenly blazed. “ He merely thought that there was a wrong there to right, and has given what help he could.”

Paul’s mother, meeting him in the hall as he went from the interview with Uncle Peter, wondered at the anger in his face.

“He has told you!” she exclaimed, touching her son’s sleeve with gentle fingers. “Don’t be hard on him, Paul. Your father always made allowances for Peter, and he has not been deceiving us; he never knew.”

”I wonder what kind of a brute you think me, mother! ” said Paul, with a sudden smile. “Can’t you realize that there are certain things that a son of yours would never even feel tempted to do?”

As the days went on, Paul Warren treated the old man even more kindly than of old; the irony of the situation was punishment enough, he said to himself, and Nemesis had been almost too swift. To his own amusement a feeling of freedom and relief took possession of him, for the dark incubus of his boyhood’s days departed, and the host of phantom ancestors conjured up by Uncle Peter fled into gray distance as their leader, with all his theories, stood routed by one simple fact. It was strange, Paul mused, that that which had been so solemn a thing to his earlier years should go with such sense of rippling merriment, but the world seemed all echoing with laughter to Paul Warren in these days, for joy had descended upon him at last, blotting out past and future. To waken every morning to a sense of the incredible beauty of his lot; to fall asleep every night with the feeling that happiness too great to grasp was his, was an experience that lay outside all that he had previously known of life. As he walked up and down the great stairway, past the old clock that had ticked away his forefathers’ lives, and the great portraits that had been the terror of his childhood, he stopped sometimes to ask, “Is it I?” Moments came when the intolerable joy was keenest hurt, so finely was his spirit strung. His occasional realization that a woman had refused his proffered love could not break his mood; perhaps he dreamed that her spoken no was a waiting yes; perhaps was content with the feeling that, whether she was to be his or no, the joy of life was his with its thrill, its sting, its pain.

He found her one day in the garden, seated on a green bench near the spot where he had seen her first. Sunlight lay on her dark hair and her white gown, as she told a tale to the least Andrew Lane, who was sitting, open-mouthed, upon the grass near her, beside a gray kitten that lay asleep in the sun, its head upon its warm paws. She had played much with the child during the summer, and had taught him all her lore.

“I like stories,” said Andy, suggestively.

“What kind of stories?”

“Fairy stories are best, but I should like one I have never heard.”

“And what about?”

“I think,” said the little man, after reflection, “about my kitty.”

“Your kitty asleep or awake?” asked Frances Wilmot gravely.

A smile of deep interest rippled across the child’s face.

“He is asleep now; I think I should like it about my kitty asleep.”

The Southern girl leaned back, thinking, and then the story began.

“This is called ‘The Kitten’s Dream.’ ”

“Who wrote it?” demanded Andy.

“Nobody wrote it; I just felt it, and I am going to tell it to you. The kitten dreamed that he was running; did n’t you see his paws twitch just now?”

“No, but they do sometimes,” admitted the child. “I know he likes to run better than anything else.”

“The kitten dreamed that he gave a little leap one day and sprang into a world where everything danced and moved all the time, so that there was something to chase forever and ever, to the end of the dream, to the end of the world. There were little silvery mice that, ran and ran, with their long tails dangling behind them; and there were green grasshoppers that hopped and hopped; and beautiful toads of green and brown that jumped and jumped, always sideways. There were fluttering butterflies of many colors, that flew this way and that, on wings that were yellow or blue or green with wonderful markings, and he chased them all and never caught any, and he was glad.”

“My kitty catches grasshoppers sometimes,” ventured Andy.

“Doesn’t he look sorry?” demanded the story-teller.

“Maybe,” said the boy, thinking hard. “I never thought of that.”

“In this country of the kitten’s dream, when the apples fell from the trees they rolled and rolled and never stopped; there were green ones, and golden ones, and deep, deep red ones, and they flashed away through the grass. The only thing that troubled the kitten was that he could not chase them all at the same time.

“The only flowers that grew here were flowers that moved and nodded” —

“I’ve seen them!” interrupted the child, visibly excited; “daisies and buttercups and wild honeysuckle.”

The story-teller assented.

“There were others, too, for all flowers move and dance if you only watch. Here the little green leaves twinkled and moved all the time, for the swiftest breeze chased and chased everything there, flower and leaf, butterfly and grasshopper, to the end of the world where some buttercups nodded over the very edge; and in chasing the breeze the kitten chased everything at once. Most gladly of all the little wind ran after the tall grass that grew in the meadow, and made it move in great waves like the waves of the sea.”

“That’s where I’ve seen the daisies,” said Andy, nodding eagerly. “Tell me about some more things that went.”

“I must not forget the brooks: there were little brooks that leaped and hopped, all full of golden sparkles, and it was as much as ever the kitten could do to keep up with one. In the brooks were fish with beautiful scales of many colors, silver and rose and purple all shading into one another, and the kitten played tag with the fish.”

“But did n’t he get wet ? He just hates water.”

“The dream that the kitten had oftenest,” said Frances Wilmot gravely, “was that the water did not make him wet. He could get into it with all four paws and tail to follow the fish, but he never caught them, and he never caught the brook, for it ran away from him, and he never caught the lovely golden-brown lights and shadows in the bed of the stream where the pebbles were, for whenever he put his foot on them they were gone.”

“Was it always summer?” asked the boy. “ It is n’t here.”

“No, sometimes it was winter, and there were great white snowflakes falling here and there, to follow and to follow. On cold nights there were warm fires in the great fireplace, and beautiful flames curled and danced and fluttered, only they made him sad, for they were bad for kitten paws. He knew, for once he had chased a little flame and had caught it, poor kitten! He liked better the little golden sunbeams moving on old gray stone walls in summer, and he ran after these by the hour, with leaf shadows moving in them, but he never caught any.

“But these are only things on earth. Often he dreamed of following through the sky great birds with blue wings, and birds with green wings, and birds with long white tails that fluttered just ahead. There were little mists and clouds, too, floating, floating away, and he often dreamed of running — how he never knew — through the air, and chasing now a rosy cloud and now a white one with purple shadows, but if lie ever got his paw on one it parted and floated on in a hundred little shapes of cloud, rosecolored or white, leaving the kitten distracted way up in the blue sky.”

“Did n’t he ever catch anything at all?” asked a grieved voice.

Frances Wilmot bent and stroked the child’s tawny hair.

“The kitten was a very wise one, and he always dreamed of running and running after things, and never catching them.”

The kitten woke and stretched itself in the sun, then lazily rose and began to chase a bit of thistle-down that floated past on the warm air.

“See!” said Frances Wilmot, triumphantly.

Andy looked after the kitten with new interest, then followed it as fast as bare feet could go. It was then that Paul Warren came out from the cool shadow of the cedar trees and looked down at the face whose humorous sadness told how near to her deeper thought the whimsical tale had gone.

“What wicked philosophy are you teaching that child ?” he asked.

“It is truth,” she said gravely. “It is only the escape of beauty that is beautiful, the feeling it come and go.”

“And of love?”

“Perhaps it is the same with love,” she answered, whispering, with her eyes closed under the sun. “It is so great; it comes, wave after wave, like the sea, like a great sea that has no shore; perhaps it goes the same way; who can tell ?”

“Then you have felt it coming?” he asked in a voice that trembled.

“I think,” she answered. “ that I have felt the ripples about my feet.”

He bent and kissed her where the dark hair met the brow, and her eyes, as they slowly opened, saw a sudden dimness in his. She smiled wistfully up at him.

“Only, if we try to bid this moment stay, we may never again find one so exquisite; perhaps it would be better to let it go, and to be forever pursuing and free.”

He took her hands and held them fast within his own; then, as a full realization of his joy swept over him, he bowed his head upon them, crying out:—

“T am unworthy, unworthy, but I love you. You are not afraid to come?”

“Yes,” she made answer, “ I am afraid, but I will come.”

XXII

The beauty of autumn deepened over sea and land as the September days went swiftly by. Clearer, crisper blue lay on the water, while all things growing by field and shore, the bulrushes in the swamp land, the grass on the upland slopes, aster, golden-rod, and fern blended into one dim harmony. Thistle-down and milkweed bloom floated noiselessly past the girl who wandered by shore and by inland paths, feeling in all the throbbing, passing color the very pulse of nature’s life beating on her own.

Through these long days of dream, when nature dreamed with her, her eyes were dim with happiness, broken only by the fear that joy had woven about her too potent a spell, and that nothing could break it henceforward, not the call of human suffering nor the old quick sense of human need. Then the mood passed; her own heart and the wide horizon line bore witness to the larger life that was rippling within her own.

She was much alone in these days, except when Paul Warren or his mother was with her, for she shunned the Bevanne household, fearing to meet Alec Bevanne. The scene on the rocks at Tern Island was too vivid and too terrible for her to wish a repetition, and the young man’s face, wrought out of its old semblance by overmastering passion, haunted her dreams. The few occasions on which she had seen him since that day brought her no relief; to be sure, the flame had died out of his face, but the darkened eyes and sullen mouth filled her with remorse for the wrong she had unwittingly done him.

She grieved that she must meet Alice Bevanne less and less, and grieved the more because she saw the record of fresh trouble written in the girl’s eyes. Longing to question her, but not daring, she stood aloof, fancying at times that Alice was aware of her brother’s story; at these moments her friend’s expression became to her but the visible picture of the anxiety in her own mind. Again she realized that this could be to the New England girl but one strand in the dark web which fate had woven about her, and remorse changed back to pity.

They were walking side by side along the quiet shore one evening, for Alice had come in the old fashion to the Inn, and were watching the faint, last flush of day fade into twilight over dim water and dusky shore. The moon which had hung like a pale shield against the blue gleamed round and golden as they paced the sand, and in the broad pathway of light a spectral ship with all sails set moved down the water, as if going from one land of faery to another. Suddenly the mystical charm of the moment was broken, and Frances felt her friend’s hand quiver on her arm. Following the glance of her straining eyes she saw, ahead, on the rocks which lay bare in the moonlight, a swift shadow moving close, too close, to the water; a man’s white hat gleamed out by the edge of the cliff, then disappeared. Alice Bevanne broke from her side, ran, fleet of foot, to the rocks, and climbed hastily up, and the sound of voices came back to the Southern girl, who stood alone on the white sand, her heart throbbing with a nameless fear. Presently Alice came back, and was silent as before.

“What is it ?” demanded Frances Wilmot.

“Nothing,” answered the girl, hastily. “I was afraid for a minute, but it is all right.”

“I will not be put off in this way!”

“It is only Alec,” said the other reluctantly, averting her face. “He has not seemed like himself lately, — something has troubled him, — we are afraid of melancholia, and I am watching him a little.”

“What caused it?” asked Frances, a quiver in her voice.

“Nothing that could be helped,” answered Alice quietly; then she turned her face, and her friend was aware that she knew.

“Ah!” cried Frances piteously, “you have so much to vex you! Why should I be sent to make life harder in so many ways!”

“Hush!” said Alice, laying a finger on her friend’s lips. “You have done nothing, nothing, do you understand, that has been your fault. To me you have been sheer blessing.”

Later, from a clump of birches near the top of the cliff, Frances watched brother and sister going home together along the grass-grown road across the moorland; and standing alone, while the little leaves fluttering in the night-wind on forehead and cheek, and the soft chirp of crickets mingling with the murmur of water, brought her an almost unbearable sense of fullness of life, she marveled at the growth of a soul where all that makes existence sweet had been denied. Achievement was already written on this girl’s face, in delicate pencilings, and soft shadows at temple and eye. It was one that could never show faded beauty, immortal meanings being written there.

That night Alice Bevanne stood long by her open window, with the cool night air on her lifted face, looking out into the shadowed night. Of what she was thinking none could tell: not the crickets chirping outside, nor the golden moon across the water, nor the scraggly locust trees that had guarded and shadowed her life. Then, going over to her mirror to unfasten the old-fashioned gold pin at the throat of her white woolen gown, she suddenly bent and blew out the candles in the branching candelabra, as if her reflection had startled her with an expression of sharing her confidence, for Alice Bevanne was reticent even in the presence of her mirror, and faced her own image with an expression which said : “Hitherto shalt thou come and no farther.” Far, fair away, as she lay sleeping on her pillow that night, seemed the beating of the tide; far, far away the ebb and flow of human life, so poignantly her own without any share.

As September lingered by the shore, the air was full of the breathlessness of coming change; then, out of the silence across the sea, came the great autumn storm. It began with a day of darkened sky and of ominous stillness; the slow waves on the purple-tinged rocks seemed thrilling with some deep sense of stir at the depths of things. Frances Wilmot was vaguely troubled; listening on the rocks with strained ears, she murmured her song of the tide, and into it crept a soft moan, drawn from the inner heart of pain. This sea was strange to her who had known and loved it in so many phases, —its stillest, most silvery look, its endlessly paling and deepening blue, and its swift, brief summer storms. Could this be her ocean, at whose edge she had so often waited in the soft ripple of darkness and of water, or had helped pile driftwood high, to watch the leaping golden flame of fire by the white flame of the waves? Now, under the low, dull purple clouds, came a sullen, lashing wind, bringing gusts of blinding rain. All things far were blotted from sight; from the window could be seen only blackened sky and darkened sea, against which gleamed streaks of livid foam. The dismal booming of the waves on the rocks sounded through day and night, and a great wind rushed from the water, shaking the Inn to its foundations, crashing in the branches of trees, and carrying the moan of the sea to the very heart of the forest.

Three days and nights the fury of the gale lasted, and one by one the ladies of the Emerson Inn deserted the ranks, while the schoolmistress maid, with heart beating fast in expectation, disappeared, joining the ranks of those who seek glory beyond the far horizon. Mistress Somebody from Somewhere was the first of the guests to depart; the house was going to rock, she observed, like a vessel in a tornado, and she had had enough experience of that kind. It was when the storm was at its height that the Lady from Cincinnati went, resolute, disregarding driving wind and pelting rain. She was not afraid of crashing branches, nor did she think wind or rain would hurt the horses, and she had two lectures to make ready at once for a woman’s club. Waterproofclad, with a thick veil tied under her chin, she looked through the dripping windows to see that her trunks were well covered in the express wagon, then bent and kissed Frances Wilmot’s brow.

“We have all gained a great deal from one another this summer, have n’t we?" she said, holding the girl’s hand. Then she went out into the wet world, and disappeared behind the lashing branches of the pines on the bill, down the streaming road, and passed from sight —forever.

But the little Lady from Boston stayed on, glorying in the storm, as the rain ceased, and still the clouds hung low, and a great wind blew and blew.

Higher and higher rose the sea. Dark and incredibly great came the strong racers of ocean, their high crests breaking in green curves, the green foaming into white. To Frances Wilmot, in her wonder and awe, it seemed as if lines of mountain had suddenly broken into quick movement, and were coming on in an awful march of tenor and of beauty, of roar and thunder, of color and shadow and foam.

XXIII

It was Uncle Peter who carried to Alec Bevanne the news concerning the happiness that had come upon the Warren household, — a chastened, quiet Uncle Peter, whose manner had lost something of its airy assurance. He had come out in driving wind to-day, though ordinarily the savage aspects of nature appealed to him but slightly, to watch the great waves rolling in under a darkened sky. The storm which had vanished from the upper air seemed to have betaken itself to the very heart of the sea, and to be raging there, secret, unappeasable. The mountain waves of yesterday were gone, yet more awful was the mighty stirring of the depths.

On the spray-dashed rocks he found Alec Bevanne, standing idly with his hands in his pockets and his felt hat pulled low over his eyes, dejected as if partaking of the mood of moaning wind and sullen sea. He hardly glanced at Uncle Peter, but stood apart, and the look in his blue eyes was that of one so withdrawn in his inner trouble that the beating waves of human life could not break entrance there. It grieved Uncle Peter, who could not bear the sight of suffering, nor a cold look from one who had been his friend, and, drawing near, he held out his withered old hand in greeting. The other shook it mechanically, with a look that suggested blank unconsciousness that any one was there rather than active desire that he should go away. With a wish to comfort, and to cheer, Uncle Peter, mysteriously touching the lapel of the young man’s coat, said in a half whisper,

“You look as if a bit of good news would do you good. In confidence I can tell you that our charming Miss Wilmot has consented to become one of our — of the Warren family, — in fact, to become Paul’s wife.”

Genuine gladness sounded in Uncle Peter’s voice: romance in any form he loved, — it need not be his own. In this mood of exhilaration he entirely forgot the passion of his young neighbor for Miss Wilmot, forgot until he saw his face, and then was frightened by the pallor that crept over cheek and forehead, and by the tightening of the lips and the cords of the neck. It was too late to do anything to repair his mistake, and Uncle Peter wisely resolved to go. He did so, tripping hastily over wet rock and slippery stone, for he felt that he was old and no longer strong of arm, and he had seen the sudden clenching of Alec Bevanne’s fists, with full realization that he had before him a man beside himself with rage.

“There have been two cases of insanity in that family,” said Uncle Peter breathlessly to himself, as he gained a safe place of wet grass in the cove.

Alec Bevanne was left alone upon the rocks, and, restless as the restless sea, he strolled along the shore with movements which suggested that the wind had its way with him and bent him to its will. Beyond the Emerson Inn he suddenly found Frances Wilmot at the edge of the little cove where his father’s old dory was pulled high upon the sand. The girl was standing with wind-tossed hair driven back from her forehead, and her golf cape blown from her shoulders with a motion that resembled the flutter of wings. Joy of the passion of the sea was strong upon her, as was shown by the look of her face when the spray touched it, and by the eyes that watched the inky purple of the far water, the great green curling waves, and the gray gulls far and near. She stood, braced with tense muscles against the wind, unconscious of him, unconscious of everything save the stormy beauty and the thunder of ocean.

As he saw her, he stopped for a moment and stood rigid, with his hands clenched tightly at his sides. Then a quiver went through him, and he shook with something that was not the might of the wind; an evil look came to the bright blue eyes as he went to her down the shore path where fern and golden-rod lay beaten low by the past fury of the storm. When he spoke to her, it was with a voice that trembled through his effort to appear entirely self-controlled.

“Miss Wilmot,” he said eagerly, “I am going to ask a very great service of you.”

She turned to him, smiling through the spray.

“ Yes ? ”

The rush of the wind and the roar of the breakers almost drowned his voice, and he came close to her before he spoke again.

“ My sister Alice,” he said quickly, and as he spoke she no longer wondered at his uncontrollable agitation, “is out yonder on the point beyond Storm Cove. She went out early this afternoon, mistaking the tide; it must have surprised her there and cut her off from the mainland. There is but one way to save her, and there is no one else near. Will you help ? I think that the Rocket will weather the waves; I’m a fairly good sailor, you know, and there is no such sea on as there was yesterday.”

She marveled at the length and the carefulness of his explanation, and answered before his last word was said.

“Alice in danger? Of course I will come! Quick! Push out, the dory, and I will help!”

She looked at the raging water and the long, white streaks of foam, knowing no fear in the excitement of the moment and the sudden call of need. The man’s hands grasped the boat, and, with strength that was not all of muscle, dragged it to the water, then, when he had bade her leap in, pulled out into the waves with vehement will. Admiration for his courage and his skill stung her with sudden penitence as she realized that she had misjudged in the past the man whose love for his sister could nerve him to deeds so great.

“Couldn’t we go on in the dory?” she asked, as they drew near the Rocket, which was tugging at her buoy as she rode the waves, now on the crest, now plunging into the trough.

“No, no!” he shouted back. “There, I have her. Jump!”

Obedient to his bidding, yet now half afraid, she sprang into the boat and crawled to the helm; the man leaped after her, and, with a shout that had a ring of exultation in it, ran up the sail, tugging at the wet halyards with fingers that trembled in strong excitement, then slipped his mooring, and they were away.

“So much sail in this sea?” asked Frances Wilmot; courage like this man’s was a splendid thing, she said nervously to herself.

“ She ’ll carry it! ” he cried back. “ Fine, is n’t it ?”

The Rocket leaped and plunged and rose again, lay almost on her beam ends, and went out on the great rolling waves. The strain on the girl’s muscles as she clung to the tiller was almost unbearable, yet with it came the joy of struggle, and a feeling of triumph as one breaker after another, crashing against the bow, dashed the spray from stem to stern and went seething past. Across the wash of wave and of spray she saw with wonder the look of delight in her companion’s eyes, and the brilliant spots of red that stained the pallor of his cheeks. A dull feeling of alarm paralyzed her hands, and the boat swayed and tossed as a great wave struck her almost abeam. When, with straining timbers, the Rocket had righted herself, Frances was horrified to see that the man, with insane exultation, was making ready to run up the jib.

“I cannot hold her,” she called quickly. “You must take my place.”

He did her bidding, grasping tiller and sheet, and the girl, creeping cautiously toward the bow, faced the shore and saw that they were heading, in a course that led past the Inn and past the Warren place, toward a point that jutted into the water toward the south. Suddenly she cried aloud, —

“But, Mr. Bevanne — you are mistaken, we need not go! There is Alice running along the rocks.”

He looked at tier, and for the first time spoke calmly.

“I am not mistaken; I have lied.”

“Is n’t Alice in danger?”

“I judge not, from what I see.”

“Why have you done this thing?”

Her scorn stung him as wind and spray could not sting.

“Because it is the only thing left to do,”he said dully. " If we may not live together, we must die together; there is no other way. If we upset, and I pray we may, there will be an end of my misery; that is all.”

Even in her moment of supreme danger, when she saw the reckless motions of his hands, and knew that every inch of the mainsail was spread to the storm wind, pity touched the woman’s heart for this man who was as a bit of driftwood in the great tide of passion that carried him whither it would. She knew his purpose now; he had made all ready for the disaster which he knew might any minute come.

Meanwhile, Alice Bevanne was running over the winding shore path toward the Warren house, running as she had never run before, yet with speed that seemed to her but a snail’s pace. Wet grass caught at her damp skirts and stayed her steps; scrub-pine and juniper reached out detaining fingers to hold her back. Here was the high rock where Paul Warren and she had sat enthroned as king and queen when she was six years old, with Alec for retainer or for rival monarch, as the occasion demanded, in those sweet hours of stolen play of which nothing was ever said at home; and just beyond was the cove where, the haughty footsteps of the retreating queen having led her too near the edge, she had fallen into the water, Paul Warren plunging to the rescue. These and myriad other pictures came back to her as the swift feet sped over root and pebble, bringing to the swifter spirit only a nightmare consciousness of standing still.

Near the boathouse in the cove she found Paul Warren, who was examining wharf and shore in order to see what damage had been done by the great storm. He lifted his head and looked at her in amazement, wondering what alarm could so transform the quietest face he knew.

“Mr. Warren,” gasped the girl breathlessly, “something is wrong, — there is danger, — you must go out”—

Dumb with wonder he looked over the waste of water, following the direction in which her finger pointed.

“It is Alec, — he is not himself any longer, and he has taken Miss Wilmot out in the Rocket. I do not understand, but see!”

Out on the water, rocking, sinking, rising again, Paul Warren saw a white rag of sail, forlorn and far as a lost hope.

“In a sea like this!” he cried.

“Go quickly! I will come with you, for you know that I can row. The wind is beating them in toward shore, you see. Alec — Alec does not know what he is doing.”

At his side, inspiring, suggesting, calming, the girl worked as one to whom the magic vision has been granted of the one right thing to do. The oars were close at hand in the boathouse; as he pushed out the dory, the woman stepped into the water at his side.

“I dare not let you go!” he panted.

“I dare not stay,” she answered.

There was a quick breath on his hand; a head was laid upon it in the old affectionate way of Robin Hood’s earlier years. With a joyous bark the dog leaped into the waves after his master, and, as if the sense of coming danger, working along the delicate nerves of the beast, had at last brought him conviction of something supremely right to be done, he tried to follow, but was driven back by the might of the breakers. Wild with excitement, he ran along the shore, leaping and barking, as the dory fought its way toward the south, cutting across the path of the Rocket, until, plunging in again, he was carried out by a retreating wave, and swam out bravely over the stormy water.

Paul Warren did not see this, nor did he see, in the face of Alice Bevanne, her fierce joy at sharing the danger of the beings whom she loved. Even when she spoke, he hardly heard her, though he mechanically obeyed the voice full of the quiet courage and self-possession of the girl’s daily life; —

“Head up a little! You can save her; the Rocket hasn’t capsized.”

An awful energy of passion lent to the arms of the man a strength as the strength of ten, for, as they met and breasted the waves, rising, gliding over, sinking in the trough of the next, fury such as he had never known descended upon him. It was a moment when all the inheritances of his life met and clashed, and the fire smouldering for generations blazed up all the more fiercely for the protecting ashes that had covered it. To reach this coward and fling him into the sea, to rescue the woman he loved, ridding the earth of the presence of this vile creature before it could again be fit for the tread of her feet, this was the one swelling desire of his heart. He was not thinking, the tempest within him was too strong for that; but through his mind, borne as dead leaves are borne by a furious gale, were drifting old words, old memories, old pictured scenes. His father’s death had come back to him, and, like a cry in his ears, more vivid to sense than the scream of the gulls as they followed the trough of the waves hunting their prey, came the words which had bade him fight out the Bevanne brood. The elder Bevanne’s pitifully weak love-letter came to him as a call to action, for each phrase recalled some look upon the face of the son when his eyes had rested on Frances Wilmot; and Paul Warren cursed himself that he, who had known the strength of the man’s hopeless love, had not measured by it the extent of the woman’s danger. So old passions hunted like unleashed hounds within his soul, and the memory of love’s sweetness and its hope were driven out by elemental fury.

It was no easy task set that day for the strong arms of the man, as he battled with the irresistible might of the sea. Nearer and nearer came the black hull on the water, driven shoreward by the strong east wind, while the dipping white sail more than once seemed to disappear. A thing of nerve and muscle, with no sense save that of vision, Paul Warren strained toward that white rag whose rising and falling on the waves meant cruel Tantalus hope. Each time he lost it his heart dragged down as with the weight of chains, down to the depths of the sea, of whose glories this woman had told him with laughter. The memory of her words brought him only pictures of her pale face and tangled hair lying among those dim, rich things of shadowy green and gold.

Now they were near enough to discern clearly the figures in the boat, and, as the possibility of rescuing the woman he loved became more strong, the white anger within him burned higher in uncontrollable quiet. Ah, his father had been right, and he, in his ignorance, had not known. Between him and the tossing, careening Rocket he plainly saw his father’s face, and he heard him say, “Young rattlesnakes are as poisonous as old ones.” Surely the heel of man was meant to crush out venomous things.

Paul Warren’s motions were slower as the supreme moment drew near. Masterfully, with deep breaths, he took mighty strokes, and the dory crept closer and closer to the wild sailboat as she wallowed to leeward. The eyes of the madman at the helm were fortunately turned away, but Frances Wilmot, facing the greatness of death, yet full of the certainty that wind nor wave could wrest her from her place at the heart of life, looked and saw her lover coming to her over the waves. It was the face of one who felt himself able to wrestle with death itself, and pluck back the life he loved. The girl bent toward him, and her eyes were full of joy that omnipotent love should come to her thus on the tide of the sea.

Then the sea which had wrought her danger offered her a slender chance of safety, for, more through a fortunate accident of wind and wave than by the strength of Paul Warren’s arms, the dory touched for a brief moment the side of the Rocket.

“Spring!” cried Paul; and Frances, with a movement too quick for fear, did his bidding. The appealing touch of the girl’s wet hair as the wind blew it across his face tingled through him, and he found the angry ocean less hard to fight than was his desire to take her only for an instant in his arms. Then he saw that Alec Bevanne had turned and was facing him, the blue eyes all alight with anger. A madman’s frenzy came upon the man left alone in the Rocket; and, with the skilled swiftness of a cat, he leaped into the dory, almost capsizing it by his sudden weight. He laid his hand upon Frances Wilmot’s golf cape, and his headlong motion betrayed the insane hope of upsetting the boat, dragging her with him to the depths. To Paul Warren came a sudden access of fury that was all compact of strength; in an instant’s time he had lifted the slender form of the intruder in his arms, and had flung him into the sea. A horrified cry rose from the two women, and Alice Bevanne’s hold upon the oars loosened as she made a swift movement to follow to her brother’s rescue, or to claim his fate.

“Stop!” cried Paul Warren, taking the oars from her. “You cannot help him; there was nothing else to do.”

The girl sank upon the bottom of the boat, covering her face with her hands, and Frances, taking the vacant seat, rowed stroke for stroke with Paul, glad that there was no time to realize the full horror of the moment. Back to the cove, over the tossing water, up on the great waves, and down again into the depths, rowed Paul Warren, stern vengeance sitting on his forehead. With fierce passion of which he had never dreamed, he exulted that he had rid the earth of that creature, as he exulted that this woman of all the world was safe, almost safe. A few more strokes, and then —

A great wave dashed them upon the sand of the cove by the Warren house, and with hands that trembled he helped the two drenched figures to alight from the dory .

“Go to my mother,” he said hoarsely.

But they turned away, and he watched them as they went toward the Inn, trembling as he looked at Frances Wilmot’s dark head, then marveling at the light on Alice Bevanne’s face. It brought him a dim feeling that this girl’s heroic nature had more than expiated the sins of both father and brother, and with this, as he looked out over the waste of waters, came a realization of his own deed.

“I have killed that man,” he said simply, as if a mechanical statement of the fact should be offered to the encompassing universe.

He dragged the dory higher on the sand, the strain on his muscles relieving the tension of the mind.

“ It had to be done,” said Paul Warren sternly, throwing back his head and brushing the wet hair from his forehead; “the lives of two women were at stake.”

But something in his heart spoke silently on as he scanned shore and water to see if perchance some incoming wave might not save the drowning man. It was less the deed than the motive for the deed that was in question. Spent passion left his mind free for his old cruelly ironic sense of things. He, whose impossibly high ideals had kept him from sharing the simplest phases of human life, had exulted in flinging a man to his death. He turned and walked down the stormstrewn shore, watching for some sign that it was not too late to help, full of a sense of tumult, before his eyes a feeling as of darkness unlighted, and in his ears the scream of the sea gulls which seemed to mingle with the scream of evil things in his soul.

XXIV

“But where is Paul ?” asked Mrs. Warren anxiously of Uncle Peter, as the old man brought her her letters at breakfast.

“I don’t know,” said Uncle Peter. “ In bed, I presume.”

“No, he must have gone out very early, for I stopped at his room just now to speak to him. I did not see him last, night.”

“He must be in the city,” suggested Uncle Peter.

“But he never goes without telling me.”

“Where’s Robin Hood?” demanded Uncle Peter suddenly.

Together they waited, lingering long at the table in the hope that Paul might join them, but he did not come. Aunt Belinda appeared as often as possible from the kitchen, torn between a desire to comfort away the worried look from Mrs. Warren’s face, and a determination not to recognize its cause. Uncle Peter chattered amiably of everything he could think of, his nervous cheerfulness increasing the mother’s agitation at every word; and then searched house and garden and nearer shore with an incidental air, as if ordered by his doctor to take a zigzag constitutional in every direction. Alone, at the window or on the veranda, stood Mrs. Warren, looking out over the water which was clearing after the storm, and stretched, incredibly blue, dark, with white foam at its edge, to the clear horizon line where it lay in hard relief against the pale blue of the sky. It was a day of no gentleness of mood, but of pitiless beauty and of shrill, unheeding wind.

The Sea Gull was riding up and down unhurt upon the waves; the dory was pulled high and dry upon the sand. Of that wild journey out over the stormtossed sea of yesterday no traces remained, and neither Mrs. Warren nor Uncle Peter knew of it. Aunt Belinda, however, had watched from the kitchen window the launching of the dory and the strange return with the Southern girl who had not gone forth with the other two, and she kept her own counsel, with much inarticulate muttering to herself among her pots and pans, aware, with that fine animal sensitiveness of her race, of the unspoken trouble in the air. The three waited in vain for note or telegram which would explain for them Paul’s absence; but none came, and with every passing minute of the day the current of foreboding grew more strong. As the afternoon wore on, the color died out of the sea, the life died out of the air, and sky and water stretched away, a dull, gray, leaden waste.

Late in the day the third Andrew Lane, driver at the Emerson Inn, strolled down the road and paused at his grandfather’s house, where the old man sat smoking in a splint-bottomed chair tipped comfortably back.

“Folks all right?” asked young Andrew.

Old Andrew grunted assent, and silently held out his pipe to give the visitor a light. They had puffed on speechlessly for several minutes before young Andrew ventured a further remark.

I see young Warren up the shore this mornin’, and I thought he looked kind of queer.”

Old Andrew listened sharply, and the wreaths of smoke ceased coming from his mouth.

“Acted like he was half crazy,” ventured young Andrew, who was suffering more agitation than he was willing to express; “went searchin’ round behind the rocks and lookin’ over the edge as if he’d lost somethin’. ”

“Fishin’, likely,” said the grandfather, nor could the bearer of ill tidings get any further expression of opinion from the old man, who asked a single question in regard to his young master’s whereabouts and then lapsed into smoky silence. It was not until young Andrew had gone home that old Andrew picked up his battered straw hat, refilled his pipe, and ambled down to the Warren house, where he had a long conference with Aunt Belinda.

Another morning dawned on sea and shore with a pallor that was not light; Paul Warren had come home at midnight, wan, distraught, and speechless. At the first glimmer in the east he was up again and away on his search, returning later for a morsel of food, but going out again immediately without explaining his strange conduct. The next day, Mrs. Warren, unable to endure longer the look of silent misery on her son’s face, begged Alice Bevanne to tell Frances Wilmot of this mysterious trouble, and she performed her task as she did all others, unflinchingly. The Southern girl listened with a face grown pale as the morning; then the two gazed at each other in silence, eyes and hearts full of the memory of that terrible moment when the avenger had stood upright in the dory and the head of Alec Bevanne had sunk under the waves.

“Your brother?” asked Frances, with lips that feared the answer.

“He is much better,” said Alice, “only still very stiff and bruised; but of course I could not explain to Mrs. Warren, and Mr. Warren, who does not know that Alec came safely home, is not to be found. He must have been searching farther up the coast when Alec was brought to shore by the waves.”

Courage had come back to the heart of Frances.

“I will find him,” she said simply; “he is somewhere by the sea.”

She rose and passed from the Inn, down the slippery path, past the nodding grasses wet with mist, past tangled beds of wild rose bushes, where red haws showed, and here and there a delicate, belated rose. Alice Bevanne stood watching her as she went farther and farther away, her dark hair and white gown breaking the encompassing gray; then turned and went slowly home, alone.

It was a day of the passing of things, as of an Avalon to which life had not come, or to which memories of life past had floated in shapes of mist. Out of the gray the slight waves broke in lines of white; spectral pines stood on near height or far, as at the end of the world. Pale-green willow and tall poplar tree beckoned in the moving fog to the very heart of mystery, and white road and grassy path alike seemed to end in cloud on hill or in hollow. As the girl wandered close by the shore or on the country roads where Paul and she had walked together, eye and ear were strained, but she did not find him. Far or near the murmur of the ocean came to her, and the answering murmur of the wind in the pines with the immemorial music. Again and again the mist half lifted over a sea of pearly blue, then closed in again, floating, breaking, a soft, palpable grayness everywhere.

Once, as the mist parted, before her on the wet sand she saw stretched out the lifeless form of Robin Hood, one paw flung across his eyes as the careless tide had left him there; she bent and patted the brave dark head.

But she could not stay, and went on searching by rocky bluff and sheltered cove, the fog again inclosing her, swift as the falling of a veil. The old paths were gone; familiar landmarks of pine and of cedar were wiped away as by obliterating fingers; and she stopped with a sudden sense of hopeless weariness. Passion had died out of the sea, and there was nothing left but its gray moan.

Then the will of the woman rose above the will of sky and of sea: somewhere he was waiting for her; of that her assurance was perfect. Somewhere he was listening for her voice which he so loved; her voice should find him. Across the mist she sent it, the cry of the bird to its wounded mate. It broke into her song of the tide, and, as it quivered on the air, it seemed to glow with golden light and color, and to break into iridescent beauty against the gray. Passion and love and faith were set free in the wonderful notes, high and low; the dropping of human tears was there, ripples of human laughter, and the supreme joy that touches pain. Far off across the mist the man heard it, and knew this woman’s deep sense of the melody at the heart of things, beneath the discord and the strife and sin, and he waited, the notes falling on his ear as cool drops of rain might fall on parched lips dying of thirst. She found him at last, exhausted by his fruitless search, leaning against a sheer wall of rock with the white quiet of despair on his face. As she came toward him with outstretched hands, her song died on her lips, for he shrank away.

“Don’t touch me,” he said sternly.

She paid no heed, but, with her old smile, drew him to a seat on the rocks, and half fearfully touched the disordered hair on his forehead, then laid cool fingers on his eyelids, closing them over the tired eyes.

“Frances, I have sent a man to his death,” he said brokenly.

“Mr. Bevanne came safely home,” she whispered.

Something like a sob broke from him, and the pale lips quivered.

“I am unspeakably glad for Alice and for her mother, but it does not alter what I did, or tried to do.”

She broke into her song again, and the man at her side, with closed eyes, drank it thirstily in; then, watching the changing expression on his face, she seized her moment and said coaxingly, —

“Come home! What do you mean by frightening us all nearly to death ? I have been waiting and waiting for you.”

“I did not realize —anything,” he said hoarsely. “I was searching, at first, for Bevanne. Frances, it is all true, all the old fear that darkened my boyhood, of hands waiting in the dark, clutching you out of the past, making you do their will.”

“ It is not true,” said the woman bravely; and, drawing nearer, she kissed his eyes and his brow with indescribable tenderness.

“That passion like that could master one unaware!”

She broke the tragic measure of his voice with a little light, joyous laugh.

“All that you needed to make you perfect was a little primitive passion!”

He stretched out a warning hand to ward her off, and paused, gazing at her with steady eyes.

“I shall never claim you, beloved, for I am not fit. There is nothing in human life but failure and misery and despair. It is only a pitfall set for our feet.”

Her soft hand lay across his eyes as she whispered, —

“There is nothing anywhere but love!”

“Ah, but you were afraid before,” he said.

“That was long ago,” she whispered, “before I knew.”

“But you don’t understand,” said the man’s voice, breaking. “In that moment I did not know what I was doing, and I committed a crime. Think how awful the possibilities of things are! To all intents I killed that man, and, dear, it might be you.”

With a sudden fierce sense of pity and of possession she drew his head to her bosom.

“Then I should say, as Sir Gawaine said of Lancelot, ‘Of a more nobler man might I not be slain.”’

(The end.)