Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

“ It was still very bright, very hot; but already, as though for sheer weight and wiltedness, the huge sun lolled in its orbit, and like a turbulent bed smoothed out at last for the night the green mangrove-pillow and white sand-sheet of the fast-receding shore gleamed soft and cool at last above the taut blue blanket of the Gulf.
Perched high in the bow of the launch Daphne sat staring back at her traveling companions—the puny Outlaw, the gigantic Lost Man, her own most distinguished-looking father, and the mysterious lady. ”

“ White as a ghost suddenly she lifted to her father's eyes the filmy hem of her gown where in two faint crimson splashes across one corner a man had stenciled the bow of his lips with his own life-blood.
"The deuce!" cried her father, and jumping into his wrapper rang precipitously for the porter.
"The young man who was—who was sick last night the one that had the hemorrhage—what about him?" he demanded of the first white- coated Darky who came running.
"Is—is he dead?" whispered Daphne.
"The young man what had the hemorrhage," confided the Darky, "he done gone leap from the train." ”

“ IT was dark when they sighted the yellow lantern light on Martha's Island. Darkness drops down so suddenly in the far south! It's rather spooky! Rather a nice spooky, though, if you happen to be a reasonably innocent Northerner looking for thrills. It's only poor souls like Lost Man and the Outlaw, and perhaps even Martha herself, to whom Darkness symbolizes a stab in the back, a shot from ambush, or God knows what!
To Daphne, this night, the darkness was all a-tingle with magic and pain. High overhead in ineffable crispness the blue-black dome of the sky seemed fairly crackling with stars. ”

“ Oh, upon my soul," he sweated, "I can't think what comes higher than billions!
"A 'billion' is plenty high enough," said Jaffrey Bretton. "But such being the case—why did you do it?"
"Why did I do it?" mumbled the stranger.
"Why? Why——" Once again the rakish, confused young face lifted, but this time at least a single illuminating conviction transfigured its confusion. "Why—because she was so pretty!"
With a cigarette at his lips, a match poised halfway in mid-air, Jaffrey Bretton's heels clicked together. Sharp as the crackle of a trainer's whip his smile snapped into the situation. ”

“ Peering down a moment later through the bright tickly blur of her hair her father noticed suddenly that her lips were moving.
"Oh, you're not praying, are you?" he squirmed. "Oh, I do hope you're not one of those people who makes his spiritual toilet in public! Dear me! Dear me! To brush your soul night and morning is no more, of course, than any neat person would do. But in public——"
"I wasn't praying," said Daphne. "I was making a little poem."
"You seem to be rather prone to make little poems," murmured her father.
"Would you like to hear this one?" offered Daphne. ”

“ It was at least very becoming to the lady to be startled, though all around the edges of the frank confession her lips showed still their stark, atavic pallor, and the clever gray eyes that searched the two blue-jersied figures before her were rather extravagantly dilated.
"Is—is this Martha's Island?" she questioned just a little bit abruptly.
"It is not!" said Jaffrey Bretton with some coldness. "Martha is a crazy lady. Do we look to you like crazy ladies?"
"Oh, no—of course not," flushed the intruder. "Only—only it is so awfully hard sometimes to place people without their clothes." ”

“ Before the sudden rush of color to her face her father gave a little startled gasp.
"Hanged if you're not pretty!" he said. "Shockingly pretty!" With an almost amused interest his eyes swept down across the exquisite little face and figure all muffled up to the tips of its ears in the great blue puffy-quilt against the snow-white pillows. "Truly when I came in here just now," he laughed, "I thought a magazine-cover had come to life on my bed!" With the laughter still on his lips all the mischief went suddenly out of his eyes. ”

“ Yet within an hour when they met again it was Daphne's face that was fairly blazing with excitement and her father's that was stricken with brooding.
Maybe too much "looking back" even from the last car of a train 65 isn't specially good for any man. Certainly just sitting up till nine o'clock never made any man look so tired.
Joggling back to his warm, plushy Pullman car from the cindery murk and chill of the observation platform it was then that Jaffrey Bretton sensed through the tail of his eye, as it were, the kaleidoscopic blur of a scuffle in the smoking-room. ”

“ With a curiously old gesture of finality she turned aside.
"So in this fashion ends passion," she murmured.
"What do you know about passion?" quizzed her father.
"It rhymes with 'fashion,'" said Daphne.
For an instant only from blue eyes to black eyes and black eyes to blue again the baffling, sphynxlike mystery of youth defied the baffling, sphynxlike mystery of experience. Then quite 93 abruptly her father reached out and cupped the little white quivering chin in the hollow of his hand.
"What did you think your lover would do, Daphne?" he smiled. "Tear down the college chapel? ”

“ That's why I didn't quite understand your father at first—I suppose," she acknowledged. "Our lives were so far apart."
"Do you think you understand me?" whispered Daphne.
"Oh, I understand you perfectly," smiled the Intruding Lady.
"Then what are you going to teach me?" quivered Daphne. "There are so many things I want to know! Who Lost Man was! Why people like the Outlaw are! Did—did Sheridan Kaire—break his word on purpose to free me?" ”

“ Somberly for a moment each man concerned himself with the lighting of a fresh cigarette.
Then Bretton jerked back his chair.
"Just what was your plan, Kaire?" he asked.
"I had planned," said Kaire, without an instant's hesitation, "to take Daphne to the first port we could make and marry her any old way she wanted to be married."
"Why?" asked Bretton.
"Why?" snarled Kaire. "Why? Well, what an extraordinary question! Why does any man marry any woman?" ”

“ With an oath Kaire sprang to his feet.
"I'm not the only man in the world who's been wild!" he cried. "And you know it—if anybody does!"
"You're the only man I think of at the moment," said Bretton, "who isn't pretty sorry about it when it comes to offering his stale hand to the first real woman of his life."
"Is—that—so?" sneered Kaire.
"It's—so," said Bretton very quietly. With a single glance at 207 Daphne he turned to Kaire again, struck another match, lit another cigarette. "Love isn't an overcoat, you know, Kaire," he said. "It's underclothes! The White Linen of Life! ”

“ So, mistaking austerity for purity, and severity for integrity, I married a woman to whom the slightest caress was a liberty, and marriage itself a sacrilege. In being sorry for myself I have not altogether, I trust, failed to be sorry for her. We are made as we are made. But it is only natural I suppose—that I should like my daughter to be a Good Lover. I believe in Good Lovers. But no one can make a good lover who is mated to a poor one!"
"I'll risk the kind of Lover I am!" cried Kaire. ”

“ If there's one thing I think refined it's swell traveling bags! But, oh, isn't it awful the way rich people cut up? Wouldn't you think her folks would stop her? Wouldn't you?"
From under the sheltering, shadowy brim of her hat Daphne shot an agonized glance at her father's half-averted face. But to her infinite astonishment her father's deep-set eyes were utterly serene, and even his shrewd mouth was relaxed at the moment into the faint ghost of a perfectly amiable smile. ”

“ It was the big, blue, bewildered child's eyes that proved the truth of the red lips answer.
"Why—why once," stammered Daphne perplexedly. "Why once on a boat—when I was a little girl—and—and lost my doll overboard— an—an old lady jumped up and kissed me. Oughtn't she to have?" 80 Heavy with bewilderment only the blue eyes lifted to the stranger's face, winced darkly away again behind their shadowy lashes, and opened wide once more to her father's strangely inscrutable smile.
"Yes—but man-kisses?" probed her father quite mercilessly. "You—you are engaged to be married?" ”

“ And always, without the slightest question or demur, Lost Man comes and cooks for me. Yet never once, I think, has he shown a flicker of recognition beyond staring up bewilderedly through every first brew of camp coffee to inquire, 'Say, boss,— have—I—ever—cooked for you before?'"
"Oh, but Old-Dad!" cried Daphne. "Don't you think we ought to try and take him home?"
"Home to what?" frowned her father. With a sudden glance of a lover his eyes reswept the turquoise-colored tide. "Wouldn't any man," he questioned, "rather die on the Spanish Main—than live in an asylum? ”

“ With unwavering nonchalance he swung around suddenly to the nearest news stand and began then and there to pile Daphne's blue broadcloth arms with every funny paper in sight.
From lips quivering so that they could barely function their speech Daphne protested the action. "Why—why, Old-Dad," she pleaded. "Do you think for one single moment that I shall ever smile again? Or—or ever—even want to smile again?" In a fresh shiver of tears and shame the hot tears started to her eyes. "Why I'm nothing but—but just an outlaw!" ”

“ There ain't no call to hurt nothing, I say."
"Nice one to talk, you are!" snarled Lost Man. "You—you man- killer, you!"
Quicker than a flash the Outlaw raised his gun again.
"I ain't no man-killer," he droned. "I ain't never in my life killed no man. What I killed was two men—both coming at me double. There ain't no man living, I tells you, more peaceful than me. . . . But when I'm moonshining"—in an instant the flaccid lips had tightened into a single merciless line—"but when I'm moonshining I don't stand no monkeyshining!"
"Oh, cut it out!" said Jaffrey Bretton. "Here come the ladies!" ”

“ Clacketty-clack-clack-clack of wheels and brakes, rhythm and rumble, rapture of speed, stark-eyed sleeplessness, a Railroad Night! Murky blackness spangled with hamlet lights! Interminable miles of wraith-like fog! A night-heron winging his homeward way suddenly across a bizarre sky striped like a Japanese fan! The faint, sweet, unbelievable scent of orange blossoms! And then the Florida Dawn!
It was the dawn that crept so inquisitively to the hem of Daphne's gown. ”

“ You chaps, Burnarde, whose hearts grow in the shape of Books—you chaps who mix the best ink-knowledge of the world with your own good blood—you love very purely, very ideally. No man could fail to trust you. But, Youth, Burnarde, brooks no rivals, either of work or play. And in the decision between two women—which more men have to make than any woman, thank God, ever guesses—you have chosen, I think—very wisely!"
Crackling with starch Miss Merriwayne swung sharply around. ”

“ It isn't exactly fair, you know! It isn't——" Flashing his lantern aloft he stood for a single instant with his slender, fastidiously flanneled figure silhouetted incongruously against the wild, primitive background of cactus and wreckage. Then in a faint paroxysm of coughing, light and figure faded out.
"Oh, I forgot," cried Daphne. "Why, of course we mustn't run!" All the excitement in her turned suddenly to tears. "After all," she confided impetuously, "running away on an island isn't so awfully satisfying! ”

“ TAKEN all in all, mileage undoubtedly is just about the paltriest form of separation that can occur between two people. If only Fate would break its impish habit of always and forever introducing such perfectly unexpected things into mileage! Even Fate though at just this time hadn't quite made up its mind perhaps just what it intended to do with little Daphne Bretton!
Given good food, a brave heart, and any reasonable amount of diversion, most young people outgrow their sins and even their mistakes almost as soon as they outgrow their clothes. ”

“ Then through hands and lips infinitely more discreet than Dighton's, but eyes not nearly so blank, the sparkling, spirited, utterly disheveled, utterly unexplainable little figure followed the master of the house-boat to the luxuriant, softly lighted cabin, where gathered round an almost priceless mahogany table two frowning, serious-minded women, and three frowning serious-minded men sat pouring over a great flare of blue prints.
"Nothing," affirmed President Merriwayne's clear, incisive voice at the moment, "nothing—I believe, so affects the human mind as a noble appearance." ”

“ With a shrug of his shoulders, Jaffrey Bretton gestured back to the camp fire at the edge of the cactus thicket where, crouched before the fragrant coffee pot in a scarecrow suit of gay- colored ginghams, a weirdly majestic looking old man with long scraggly hair and sharply aquiline features added the one tragic note to the scene.
"Lost Man has—'forgotten everything,'" he confided, a bit dryly.
"Forgotten everything?" repeated Daphne.
"Everything except how to make coffee," said her father, "or fry a bit of fish now and then! Forgotten who he is, I mean! Forgotten who he was! ”

“ Green there was too, of course—the vivid, clattering green of majestic cocoanut palms, the virescent flare of beech-grass, the crisp fan of scrub palmetto, and always the great, glossy mangrove trees rearing like giant laurel bushes in the dark, dustless splendor. But green in the Gulf, somehow, always seems like man's idea, or woman's—a sheer after-thought, as it were, of shade or trimmings. All the blue gulf wants is glare—and the eternal chance to grind pale rain bow-tinted shells into white sand! ”

“ Precipitately and without the slightest warning he plunged down into a chair and began to whimper maudlinly while with one uncertain finger tip he traced and retraced the twitching, zig- zagged scar. "It—it isn't nice, is it?" he babbled idiotically. "And I was such a pretty boy? . . . Ladies shouldn't ask such questions," he babbled. "Not just as you're going to kiss 'em. It—it makes dead faces floating between! It—isn't nice! Oh, Daphne darling—darling——"
But with a little scream of release Daphne's hand was already on the door knob. ”