Flood Tide Part 2

"She's most twenty. You said so yourself just now."

"Pooh! Twenty! What's twenty?" Zenas Henry cried derisively. "Why, I'm three times that already an' more too, an' I ain't old. So are you, Tiny. Twenty? Nonsense!"

"But Delight is twenty, Zenas Henry," persisted Celestina.

"What of it?"

"Well, you mustn't forget it, that's all," continued the woman softly.

"Many a girl her age is married an'----"

"Married!" burst out the man with indignation. "What under heaven are you talkin' about, Celestina? Delight marry? Not she! She's too young. Besides, she's well enough content with Abbie an' the three captains an' me. Marry? Delight marry! Ridiculous!"

"But you don't mean to say you expect a creature as pretty as she is not to marry," said Celestina aghast.

"Oh, why, yes," ruminated Zenas Henry. "Of course she's goin' to get married sometime by an' by--mebbe in ten years or so. But not now."

"Ten years or so! My goodness! Why, she'll be thirty or thirty-five, an' an old maid by that time."

"No, she won't. I was forty-five before I married, an' it didn't do me no hurt or spoil my chances."

"You might have been livin' with Abbie all them years, though."

"I know it."

He paused thoughtfully.

"Yes," he reflected aloud, "I've often thought what a pity it was Abbie an' I didn't have our first youth together. It took me half a lifetime to find out how much I needed her."

"You wouldn't want Delight should do that," ventured Celestina.

"Delight? We ain't discussin' Delight," retorted Zenas Henry, promptly on the defensive. "Delight's another matter altogether. She's nothin'

but a baby. There's no talk of her marryin' for a long spell yet."

Peevishly he kicked the turf with the toe of his boot.

Although he said no more, it was quite evident that he was much irritated.

"Well," he presently observed in a calmer tone, "I reckon I'll go round an' waylay Willie."

Celestina, leaning against the door frame, watched the gaunt, loose-jointed figure stride out into the suns.h.i.+ne and disappear behind the corner of the house.

What a day it was! From beneath the lattice that arched the entrance to the cottage and supported a rambler rose bursting into bloom she could see the bay, blue as a sapphire and scintillating with ripples of gold. A weather-stained scow was making its way out of the channel, and above it circled a screaming cloud of tern that had been routed from their nesting place on the margin of white sand that bordered the path to the open sea. Mingling with their cries and the rhythmic pulsing of the surf, the clear voices of the men aboard the tug reached her ear. It was flood tide, and the water that surged over the bar stained its reach of pearl to jade green and feathered its edges with snowy foam.

It was no weather to be cooped up indoors doing housework.

Idly Celestina loitered, drinking in the beauty of the scene. The languor of summer breathed in the gentle, pine-scented air and rose from the warm earth of the garden. Voluptuously she stretched her arms and yawned; then straightening to her customary erectness she went into the house, being probably the only woman in Wilton who that morning had abandoned her domestic duties long enough to take into her soul the benediction of the world about her.

It was such detours from the path of duty that had helped to win for Celestina her pseudonym of "easy goin'." Perhaps this very vagrant quality in her nature was what had aided her in so thoroughly sympathizing with Willie in his sporadic outbursts of industry. For Willie was not a methodical worker any more than was Celestina. There were intervals, it is true, when he toiled steadily, feverishly, all day long and far into the night, forgetting either to eat or sleep; then would follow days together when he simply pottered about, or did even worse and remained idle in the sunny shelter of the grape arbor.

Here on a rude bench constructed from a discarded four-poster he would often sit for hours, smoking his corncob pipe and softly humming to himself; but when genius went awry and his courage was at a low ebb, strings, wires, and pulleys having failed to work, he would neither smoke nor sing, but with eyes on the distance would sit immovable as if carved from stone.

To-day, however, was not one of his "settin' days." He had been up since dawn, had eaten no breakfast, and had even been too deeply preoccupied to fill and light the blackened pipe that dangled limply from his lips. Yet despite all his coaxings and cajolings, the iron pump opposite the shed door still refused to do anything but emit from its throat a few dry, profitless gurgles that seemed forced upward from the very caverns of the earth. Both Willie and Jan Eldredge looked tired and disheartened, and when Zenas Henry approached stood at bay, surrounded by a litter of wrenches, hammers, and scattered fragments of metal.

"What's the matter with your pump?" called Zenas Henry as he strolled toward them.

Willie turned on the intruder, a smile half humorous, half contemptuous, flitting across his face.

"If I could answer that question, Zenas Henry, I wouldn't be standin'

here gapin' at the darn thing," was his laconic response. "It's just took a spell, that's all there is to it. It was right enough last night."

"There's no accountin' fur machinery," Zenas Henry remarked.

The observation struck a note of pessimism that rasped Willie's patience.

"There's got to be some accountin' fur this claptraption," retorted he, a suggestion of crispness in his tone. "I shan't stir foot from this spot 'til I find out what's set it to actin' up this way."

Zenas Henry laughed at the declaration of war echoing in the words.

"I've given up flyin' all to flinders over everything that gets out of gear," he drawled. "If I was to be goin' up higher'n a kite every time, fur instance, that the seaweed ketches round the propeller of my motor-boat, I'd be in mid-air most of the time."

Willie raised his head with the alertness of a hunter on the scent.

"Seaweed?" he repeated vaguely.

Zenas Henry nodded.

"Ain't there no scheme fur doin' away with a nuisance like that?"

"I ain't discovered any," came dryly from Zenas Henry. "We've all had a whack at the thing--Captain Jonas, Captain Phineas, Captain Benjamin, an' me--an' we're back where we were at the beginnin'. Nothin' we've tried has worked."

"U--m!" ruminated Willie, stroking his chin.

"I've about come to the conclusion we ain't much good as mechanics, anyhow," went on Zenas Henry with a short laugh. "In fact, Abbie's of the mind that we get things out of order faster'n we put 'em in."

Janoah Eldridge rubbed his grimy hands and chuckled, but Willie deigned no reply.

"This propeller now," he presently began as if there had been no digression from the topic, "I s'pose the kelp gets tangled around the blades."

"That's it," a.s.sented Zenas Henry.

"An' that holds up your engine."

"Uh-huh," Zenas Henry agreed with the same bored inflection.

"An' that leaves you rockin' like a baby in a cradle 'til you can get the wheel free."

"Uh-huh."

There was a moment of silence.