The Return of the Prodigal Part 58

"What do you think? He has never forgiven her for going away, though it happened to be the very thing he wanted. How's that for inconsistency?"

"Has she seen the--the Colonel since?"

"She has. A strange, unaccountable longing to see the Colonel comes over her periodically, like a madness, and she rushes home from the ends of the earth. That's happened three times. It's the most erratic and incalculable thing about her. But going home doesn't answer."

"I should hardly have thought it would."

"Except that she's got the control of more money now. Tell you how it happened. The last time she went home she found the poor little Colonel making his little will. He asked her point-blank what she meant to do with the property when he was in his little grave. He must have had an inkling. And Frida, who is honesty itself, said she didn't know, but she rather thought she would sell it and make for the unexplored. Then he was frightened, and made her make a solemn vow never to do anything of the kind. Somehow the property seems to have recovered itself, with all she put into it; anyhow, after that, it managed to disgorge another thousand a year. So Frida's more independent than ever."

Durant made an impatient movement that nearly sent him overboard to the bottom of the sea, where, indeed, he wished that Frida Tancred's thousands were lying. Georgie noticed the movement, and blushed for the first time in their acquaintance.

"Just look at those children," said she, "they simply adore Frida.

It's odd, but she's got the most curious power of making people adore her. I don't know what she does to them, but waiters, policemen, porters, customhouse officers, they're all the same. The people in the hotels we stayed in adored her. So did the Arabs up the Nile and the Soudanese in the desert, so did the Kaffirs on the veldt and the coolies that carried her up the Himalayas--and she's no light weight, is Frida."

Georgie paused while her fancy followed Frida in delightful retrospect. Durant said nothing, he sat waiting for her to go on.

She went on.

"Women, too--I've seen them hanging about drafty corridors for hours on the off chance of seeing her. There was a dreadful girl we knew in Paris, who used to grovel on her doormat and weep because she said Frida wouldn't speak to her. Frida loathed her, but she was awfully nice to her till one day when she tripped over her on the mat. Then she wasn't nice to her at all; she hauled her up by the belt, and told her to get up and go away and never make such a fool of herself again."

Georgie cast at Durant a look that said, "That's how our Frida deals with obstructives!"

"And where was all this remarkable fascination five years ago?"

"It was there all right enough, lying dormant, you know. I felt it.

Mrs. Fazakerly felt it--that's why she married the Colonel. You felt it."

"I didn't."

"Excuse me, you did. That's why you stayed three weeks at Coton Manor when you needn't have stopped three days. As for Mr. Manby there, he simply wors.h.i.+ps the ground she treads on, as they say."

"The devil he does! What's he doing here?"

"As you see, he's painting pictures as hard as ever he can go. He paints them in order to live; but as he has to live in order to paint, Frida--well, between you and me, Frida keeps him and Eileen and Ermyntrude, the whole family, in short. But that's a detail. It isn't offered as any explanation of the charm. I don't believe that anybody ever realizes that Frida has money."

He could believe that. He had never realized it himself. Her enjoyment of life was so finished an art that it kept its machinery well out of sight.

"Frida," Georgie serenely continued, "has a weakness for landscape painters. The memory of her mother--no doubt."

"Don't they--don't they bore her?"

"No. It takes a great deal to bore Frida--naturally, after the Colonel. Besides, she doesn't give them the chance. n.o.body ever gets what you may call a hold on Frida. There's so much more of her than they can grasp. And there are, at least, three sides of her by which she's unapproachable. One of them's her liberty. If you or I or the little Manby man were to take liberties with her liberty Frida would----"

"What would Frida do?"

"She would drop us down, very gently, at the nearest port, and make for the Unexplored! And yet, I don't know. That's the lovely and fascinating thing about Frida--that you never _do_ know."

XVI

The fortnight's cruise was at an end, the _Torch_ had gone back to her owners, without Durant, who had contrived to stay on board the _Windward_ till the latest possible moment. The yacht was lying-to, outside the same white-walled harbor where she had first found Durant. She wheeled aimlessly about with slackened sails, swaying, balancing, hovering like a bird on the wing, impervious and restless, waiting for the return of the boat that was to take Durant on sh.o.r.e. It had only just put off with the first load of guests--the Manbys--under Georgie Chatterton's escort. As Durant watched it diminis.h.i.+ng and vanis.h.i.+ng, he thought of how Georgie had described their hostess's method of dealing with exacting friends.

She was dropping them, very gently, at the nearest port. Poor Manby!

And it would be his own turn next. And yet Georgie had said, "You never know." He must and would know; at any rate, he would take his chance. Meanwhile, he had a whole hour before him to find out in, for the crew had commissions in the town. That hour was Frida's and his own.

The two weeks had gone he knew not how; and yet he had taken count of the procession of the days. Days of clouds, when, under a drenching mist, the land was sodden into the likeness of the sea, the sea stilled into a leaden image of the land; days of rain, when the wet decks shone like amber, and the sea's face was smoothed out and pitted by the showers; days of sun, when they went with every sail spread, over a warm, quivering sea, whose ripples bore the s.h.i.+vered reflections of the sky in so many blue flames that leaped and danced with the _Windward_ in her course; days of wind, when the Channel was a race of tumultuous waves, green-hearted, silver-lipped, swelling and breaking and swelling, and flowering into foam, days when the yacht careened over with steep decks, laid between wind and water, flush with the foam, driven by the wind as by her soul; days when Durant and Frida, who delighted in rough weather, sat out together on deck alone. They knew every sound of that marvelous world, sounds of the calm, of water lapping against the yacht's side, the tender, half-audible caress of the sea; sounds of the coming gale, more seen than heard, more felt than seen, the deep, long-drawn shudder of the sea when the wind's path is as the rain's path; and that sound, the song of her soul, the keen, high, exultant song that the wind sings, playing on her shrouds as on a many-stringed instrument. The boat, in her unrest, rolling, tossing, wheeling and flying, was herself so alive, so one with the moving wind and water, and withal so slight a sh.e.l.l for the humanity within her, that she had brought them, the man and the woman, nearer and nearer to the heart of being; they touched through her the deep elemental forces of the world. The sea had joined what the land had kept asunder. At this last hour of Durant's last day they were drifting rather than sailing past a sunken sh.o.r.e, a fringe of gray slate, battered by the tide and broken into thin layers, with edges keen as knives; above it, low woods of dwarf oaks stretched northward, gray and phantasmal as the sh.o.r.e, stunted and tortured into writhing, unearthly shapes by the violence of storms. For here and now the sea had its way; it had taken on reality; and earth was the phantom, the vanis.h.i.+ng, the vague.

They had been pacing the deck together for some minutes, but at last they stood still, looking landward.

Durant sighed heavily and then he spoke.

"Frida, you know what I am going to say----"

They turned and faced each other. In the man's eyes there was a cloud, in the woman's a light, a light of wonder and of terror.

She smiled bravely through her fear. "Yes, I know what you are going to say. But I don't know----"

"What _don't_ you know?"

"I don't know what you mean."

"You don't know what I mean?"

"I know you are going to say you love me, and you had better not.

For I don't know what that means. The thing you call love was left out of my composition. Some women are born like that."

"I don't believe it. It's only your way of saying that you don't care for _me_."

"I like you. I always have liked you. I'll go farther--if I ever loved any man it would be you."

"The fact remains that it isn't?"

"It isn't, and it never will be. But you may be very certain that it will never be anyone else."

"Tell me one thing--was there ever a time when it might have been?"

"That isn't fair. I can't answer that question."

"You can. Think--was there ever a time, no matter how short, the fraction of a minute, when if I'd only had the sense, if I had only known----"

"Are you sure you didn't know? I was afraid you did."

"Then you really mean it--that if I'd only asked you then----"

"Thank Heaven, you did not!"

"Why are you thanking Heaven?"

"Because--because--I can't be sure, but I might--I might have taken you at your word."