As It Was in the Beginning Part 50

Elaine not only did not linger in her stateroom in the morning late enough to receive his note from the stewardess, but, when she hastened up to the topmost deck for her early morning exercise before the more lazy should appear, she literally ran into Fenton's arms at the head of the narrow stairs.

Her surprise could hardly have been greater. She recoiled from the contact automatically, before she had time to see who it was with whom she had collided. Then a note of astonishment broke from her lips as she halted, leadenly.

"Why--Gerald!" she managed to stammer, without the slightest hint of gladness in her tone. "Here?"

"Well, little girl!" he answered, smilingly; and, coming to her in his quiet way, he took her hands to greet her with a kiss.

A note of uncertainty forced itself to audible expression as she slightly retreated from his proffered caress and received it on her cheek.

"Well! well!" Fenton continued, "you're certainly fit--and brown! You couldn't have had the note I sent to break the news. I tried to give you warning."

"No," she said, constrainedly, "I've had no word. How did you get here--come aboard? I don't see how---- It took me so by surprise."

"I'm sorry," he said, his smile losing something of its brightness. "I boarded at midnight, when the steamer touched at Fargo. When I got Sid's wholly incredible wire that you were both safe and well and coming home---- But how is the good old rascal?"

Elaine's constraint increased.

"Quite well, I believe--as far as I know."

"Isn't he with you, here on the boat, going home?"

"Oh, yes, he's on the steamer."

Fenton was groping, without a woman's intuitions, through the something he felt in the air.

"Don't you like him, Elaine?" he asked her, bluntly. "What's wrong?"

"Why--nothing's wrong," she answered, unconvincingly. "It's just the surprise of meeting you like this."

"I'm sorry," he said, as he had before, his eyes now entirely smileless. "I might have managed it better, I suppose---- Aren't you a little bit glad to see me?"

Elaine attempted a smile and a manner more cordial. "Of course--I'm delighted! But it takes me just a minute or so to realize it's really you."

"Never mind. Take your time," he told her, indulgently. "Perfect miracle, you know, that you and old Sid should have come through the wreck of the 'Inca'--the sole survivors of the accident--and lived out there--somewhere--on an island, I hear--and now be nearing home. I'm eager to hear the story."

"Yes," she agreed, "it doesn't seem real to me, now. It's more like a long, strange dream."

"I have only heard a little from the captain," he continued, forcing a conversation which he felt was wholly unspontaneous and hardly even congenial.

"Naturally, all his information----"

She saw his eyes quickly brighten as his gaze went past her to the stairs.

"Sid!" he cried, moving swiftly forward; and Grenville appeared on the deck.

His face was suddenly reddened, beneath the veneer of tan. But the boyish joy with which he rushed for Fenton was a heartening thing to see.

The two simply gripped, with might and main, and hammered each other with one free hand apiece, and laughed, and called one another astonis.h.i.+ng names till it seemed they might explode.

"You savage! You tough old Redskin!" Fenton finally managed to articulate, distinctly. "If it isn't yourself as big as life! And I want you to know I haven't made your fortune--not exactly--yet--but it's certain at last. And how about your winning my little girl?

Speak up, you caveman of the---- Oh, Elaine!"

But Elaine had fled the scene.

That moment began the tug at the ties of friends.h.i.+p and the test of the souls of the three. It was not a time of happiness that thereupon ensued. Elaine avoided both the men as far as possible. Grenville alone seemed natural, and yet even his smiles were tinged with the artificial.

He was glad to relate their varied adventures--the tale of the perils through which they had finally won. But how much of it all Gerald Fenton really heard no man could with certainty tell.

Fenton was neither a self-conceited person nor a blind man, groping through life. Through the stem of his finely colored calabash he puffed many a thought, along with his fragrant tobacco fume, and revolved it in his brain.

Between certain lines of Grenville's story he read deep happenings.

That Sidney had saved and preserved Elaine, and battled for her comfort and her very life, against all but overwhelming odds, was a fact that required no rehearsal.

Mere propinquity, as Fenton knew, has always been the match-maker incomparable, throughout the habited world. Add to the quite exceptional propinquity of a tropic-island existence a splendid and unfaltering heroism in Grenville, together with a mastery of every situation, months of daily service and devotion, and the rare good looks that Sidney had certainly developed--and what wonder Elaine should be changed?

The change in her bearing had struck him at once at the moment of their meeting by the stairs. He had never got past that since. When at length his course was clearly defined and his resolution firmly fixed, it still required skillful maneuvering on Fenton's part to manage the one little climax on which he finally determined.

But night, with her shadows, her softening moods, and her veiling ways of comfort, was an ally worthy of his trust. When he finally engineered the unsuspicious Grenville to the upper deck, where Elaine had already been enticed, evasion of the issue was done.

"It's amazing," said Fenton, in a pleasant, easy manner, "how I am becoming the talker of the crowd, when both you fond adventurers should be spilling out lectures by the mile. However, such is life." He paused for a moment, but the others did not speak.

"The genuine wonder of it all," he presently continued, "is seeing you both come back thus, safe and sound. I underwent my bit of grief when the news of the monstrous disaster finally arrived, as, of course, did many another. I thought I had lost the dearest friend and the--well, the dearest two friends--the dearest two beings in the world to me, in one huge cataclysm."

He paused once more and relighted his pipe. The flame of his match threw a rosy glow on the two set faces on either side of his position, as well as on his own. No one looked at anyone else, and the two still failed to answer.

"Well--here you both are!" the smoker resumed, crus.h.i.+ng the match and throwing it away. "If I were to lose your love and friends.h.i.+p now---- But never mind that--I sha'n't! You were dead to me, both of you, all those months, and mourned rather poignantly. That's the point I want you both to understand--that I had accepted the fact of losing you both, forever."

Grenville slightly stirred, but did not speak. Elaine was clasping her hands in her lap and locking her fingers till they ached.

"Naturally," Fenton told them, quietly, "I conformed my thoughts to your demise, at last, as we all must do in actual cases. I adjusted my heart-strings, when I could, anew. n.o.body else came into my life, to occupy your places, for n.o.body could. Yet I did adjust things as I've said. Well--now that brings us up to the point."

Grenville sank back against his seat, but restlessly leaned forward as before. Elaine alone remained absolutely motionless, rigid with attention, if not also with suppressed excitement at something she felt impending. Fenton thumbed at the glowing tobacco in his pipe.

"It appears to me," he continued, "all the circ.u.mstances I have mentioned being taken into consideration, that you two friends that I love so well have so many times saved one another's lives that no one living has the slightest right to think or to act as might have been the case if you had not pa.s.sed so entirely from his ken, and his plans, and daily existence. His claims to your resurrected selves are--different, let us say, or secondary."

The silence that fell for a moment became acutely painful.

"That's all I'm really driving at, after all my long and labored preamble," Fenton concluded, deliberately rising and facing about to confront the pair on the bench. "I recognize certain inevitable things--and I know they're right--and the way the Almighty intended....

Don't let me lose my friends again.... Let's all be sensible.... I don't ask or expect to be loved the way you love one another--but I'd like to be old Gerald to you both."

He turned and went slowly down the narrow stairs, and his pipe trailed a spark behind him.

After a time, when Grenville moved over and placed his arm about Elaine, she struggled for a moment, feebly.

"I don't--I don't love you in the least!" she protested. "I hate you--as I always have--and the way I always shall!"