The Gay Cockade Part 3

"What things?"

The roar of the crowd came louder to their ears. "Harding, Harding!

Jimmie Harding!"

"Listen," he said, and the light in his eyes was not for her. "Listen, Ursula, they're calling me."

She stood alone after he had left her. I am sure that even then she did not quite believe it was the end. She did not know how, in all the years, his wife had molded him.

When he had satisfied the crowd, Jimmie fought his way to where Elise and Duncan and I stood together.

Elise was wrapped in a great cloak of silver brocade. There was a touch of silver, too, in her hair. But she had never seemed to me so small, so childish.

"Oh, Jimmie," she said, as he came up, "you've done it!"

"Yes"--he was flushed and laughing, his head held high--"you always said I could do it. And I shall do it again. Did you hear them shout, Elise?"

"Yes."

"Jove! I feel like the old woman in the nursery rhyme, 'Alack-a-daisy, do this be I?'" He was excited, eager, but it was not the old eagerness.

There was an avidity, a greediness.

She laid her hand on his arm. "You've earned a rest, dearest. Let's go up in the hills."

"In the hills? Oh, we're too old, Elise."

"We'll grow young."

"To-night I've given youth to the world. That's enough for me"--the light in his eyes was not for her--"that's enough for me. We'll hang around New York for a week or two, and then we'll go back to Albemarle.

I want to get to work on another play. It's a great game, Elise. It's a great game!"

She knew then what she had done. Here was a monster of her own making.

She had sacrificed her lover on the altar of success. Jimmie needed her no longer.

I would not have you think this an unhappy ending. Elise has all that she had asked, and Jimmie, with fame for a mistress, is no longer an unwilling captive in the old house. The prisoner loves his prison, welcomes his chains.

But Duncan and I talk at times of the young Jimmie who came years ago into our office. The Jimmie Harding who works down in Albemarle, and who struts a little in New York when he makes his speeches, is the ghost of the boy we knew. But he loves us still.

THE HIDDEN LAND

The mystery of Nancy Greer's disappearance has never been explained. The man she was to have married has married another woman. For a long time he mourned Nancy. He has always held the theory that she was drowned while bathing, and the rest of Nancy's world agrees with him. She had left the house one morning for her usual swim. The fog was coming in, and the last person to see her was a fisherman returning from his nets.

He had stopped and watched her flitting wraith-like through the mist. He reported later that Nancy wore a gray bathing suit and cap and carried a blue cloak.

"You are sure she carried a cloak?" was the question which was repeatedly asked. For no cloak had been found on the sands, and it was unlikely that she had worn it into the water. The disappearance of the blue cloak was the only point which seemed to contradict the theory of accidental drowning. There were those who held that the cloak might have been carried off by some acquisitive individual. But it was not likely; the islanders are, as a rule, honest, and it was too late in the season for "off-islanders."

I am the only one who knows the truth. And as the truth would have been harder for Anthony Peak to bear than what he believed had happened, I have always withheld it.

There was, too, the fear that if I told they might try to bring Nancy back. I think Anthony would have searched the world for her. Not, perhaps, because of any great and pa.s.sionate need of her, but because he would have thought her unhappy in what she had done, and would have sought to save her.

I am twenty years older than Nancy, her parents are dead, and it was at my house that she always stayed when she came to Nantucket. She has island blood in her veins, and so has Anthony Peak. Back of them were seafaring folk, although in the foreground was a generation or two of cosmopolitan residence. Nancy had been educated in France, and Anthony in England. The Peaks and the Greers owned respectively houses in Beacon Street and in Was.h.i.+ngton Square. They came every summer to the island, and it was thus that Anthony and Nancy grew up together, and at last became engaged.

As I have said, I am twenty years older than Nancy, and I am her cousin.

I live in the old Greer house on Orange Street, for it is mine by inheritance, and was to have gone to Nancy at my death. But it will not go to her now. Yet I sometimes wonder--will the s.h.i.+p which carried her away ever sail back into the harbor? Some day, when she is old, will she walk up the street and be sorry to find strangers in the house?

I remember distinctly the day when the yacht first anch.o.r.ed within the Point. It was a Sunday morning and Nancy and I had climbed to the top of the house to the Captain's Walk, the white-railed square on the roof which gave a view of the harbor and of the sea.

Nancy was twenty-five, slim and graceful. She wore that morning a short gray-velvet coat over white linen. Her thick brown hair was gathered into a low knot and her fine white skin had a touch of artificial color.

Her eyes were a clear blue. She was really very lovely, but I felt that the gray coat deadened her--that if she had not worn it she would not have needed that touch of color in her cheeks.

She lighted a cigarette and stood looking off, with her hand on the rail. "It is a heavenly morning, Ducky. And you are going to church?"

I smiled at her and said, "Yes."

Nancy did not go to church. She practiced an easy tolerance. Her people had been, originally, Quakers. In later years they had turned to Unitarianism. And now in this generation, Nancy, as well as Anthony Peak, had thrown off the shackles of religious observance.

"But it is worth having the churches just for the bells," Nancy conceded on Sunday mornings when their music rang out from belfry and tower.

It was worth having the churches for more than the bells. But it was useless to argue with Nancy. Her morals and Anthony's were irreproachable. That is, from the modern point of view. They played cards for small stakes, drank when they pleased, and, as I have indicated, Nancy smoked. She was, also, not unkissed when Anthony asked her to marry him. These were not the ideals of my girlhood, but Anthony and Nancy felt that such small vices as they cultivated saved them from the narrow-mindedness of their forebears.

"Anthony and I are going for a walk," she said. "I will bring you some flowers for your bowls, Elizabeth."

It was just then that the yacht steamed into the harbor--majestically, like a slow-moving swan. I picked out the name with my sea-gla.s.ses, _The Viking_.

I handed the gla.s.ses to Nancy. "Never heard of it," she said. "Did you?"

"No," I answered. Most of the craft which came in were familiar, and I welcomed them each year.

"Some new-rich person probably," Nancy decided. "Ducky, I have a feeling that the owner of _The Viking_ bought it from the proceeds of pills or headache powders."

"Or pork."

I am not sure that Nancy and I were justified in our disdain--whale-oil has perhaps no greater claim to social distinction than bacon and ham or--pills.

The church bells were ringing, and I had to go down. Nancy stayed on the roof.

"Send Anthony up if he's there," she said; "we will sit here aloft like two cherubs and look down on you, and you will wish that you were with us."

But I knew that I should not wish it; that I should be glad to walk along the shaded streets with my friends and neighbors, to pa.s.s the gardens that were yellow with sunlight, and gay with larkspur and foxglove and hollyhocks, and to sit in the pew which was mine by inheritance.

Anthony was down-stairs. He was a tall, perfectly turned out youth, and he greeted me in his perfect manner.

"Nancy is on the roof," I told him, "and she wants you to come up."

"So you are going to church? Pray for me, Elizabeth."