The Gay Cockade Part 4

Yet I knew he felt that he did not need my prayers. He had Nancy, more money than he could spend, and life was before him. What more, he would ask, could the G.o.ds give?

I issued final instructions to my maids about the dinner and put on my hat. It was a rather superlative hat and had come from Fifth Avenue. I spend the spring and fall in New York and buy my clothes at the smartest places. The ladies of Nantucket have never been provincial in their fas.h.i.+ons. Our ancestors shopped in the marts of the world. When our captains sailed the seas they brought home to their womenfolk the treasures of loom and needle from Barcelona and Bordeaux, from Bombay and Calcutta, London and Paris and Tokio.

And perhaps because of my content in my new hat, perhaps because of the pleasant young pair of lovers which I had left behind me in the old house, perhaps because of the shade and suns.h.i.+ne, and the gardens, perhaps because of the bells, the world seemed more than ever good to me as I went on my way.

My pew in the church is well toward the middle. My ancestors were modest, or perhaps they a.s.sumed that virtue. They would have neither the highest nor the lowest seat in the synagogue.

It happens, therefore, that strangers who come usually sit in front of me. I have a lively curiosity, and I like to look at them. In the winter there are no strangers, and my mind is, I fancy, at such times, more receptive to the sermon.

I was early and sat almost alone in the great golden room whose restraint in decoration suggests the primitive bareness of early days.

Gradually people began to come in, and my attention was caught by the somewhat unusual appearance of a man who walked up the aisle preceded by the usher.

He was rather stocky as to build, but with good, square military shoulders and small hips. He wore a blue reefer, white trousers, and carried a yachtsman's cap. His profile as he pa.s.sed into his pew showed him young, his skin slightly bronzed, his features good, if a trifle heavy.

Yet as he sat down and I studied his head, what seemed most significant about him was his hair. It was reddish-gold, thick, curled, and upstanding, like the hair on the head of a lovely child, or in the painting of a t.i.tian or a Tintoretto.

In a way he seemed out of place. Young men of his type so rarely came to church alone. Indeed, they rarely came to church at all. He seemed to belong to the out-of-doors--to wide s.p.a.ces. I was puzzled, too, by a faint sense of having seen him before.

It was in the middle of the sermon that it all connected up. Years ago a s.h.i.+p had sailed into the harbor, and I had been taken down to see it. I had been enchanted by the freshly painted figurehead--a strong young G.o.d of some old Norse tale, with red-gold hair and a bright blue tunic. And now in the harbor was _The Viking_, and here, in the shadow of a perfectly orthodox pulpit, sat that strong young G.o.d, more glorious even than my memory of his wooden prototype.

He seemed to be absolutely at home--sat and stood at the right places, sang the hymns in a delightful barytone which was not loud, but which sounded a clear note above the feebler efforts of the rest of us.

It has always been my custom to welcome the strangers within our gates, and I must confess to a preference for those who seem to promise something more than a perfunctory interchange.

So as my young viking came down the aisle, I held out my hand. "We are so glad to have you with us."

He stopped at once, gave me his hand, and bent on me his clear gaze.

"Thank you." And then, immediately: "You live here? In Nantucket?"

"Yes."

"All the year round?"

"Practically."

"That is very interesting." Again his clear gaze appraised me. "May I walk a little way with you? I have no friends here, and I want to ask a lot of questions about the island."

The thing which struck me most as we talked was his utter lack of self-consciousness. He gave himself to the subject in hand as if it were a vital matter, and as if he swept all else aside. It is a quality possessed by few New Englanders; it is, indeed, a quality possessed by few Americans. So when he offered to walk with me, it seemed perfectly natural that I should let him. Not one man in a thousand could have made such a proposition without an immediate erection on my part of the barriers of conventionality. To have erected any barrier in this instance would have been an insult, to my perception of the kind of man with whom I had to deal.

He was a gentleman, individual, and very much in earnest; and more than all, he was immensely attractive. There was charm in that clear blue gaze of innocence. Yet it was innocence plus knowledge, plus something which as yet I could not a.n.a.lyze.

He left me at my doorstep. I found that he had come to the island not to play around for the summer at the country clubs and on the bathing beach, but to live in the past--see it as it had once been--when its men went down to the sea in s.h.i.+ps. And because there was still so much that we had to say to each other, I asked him to have a cup of tea with me, "this afternoon at four."

He accepted at once, with his air of sweeping aside everything but the matter in hand. I entered the house with a sense upon me of high adventure. I could not know that I was playing fate, changing in that moment the course of Nancy's future.

Dinner was at one o'clock. It seems an impossible hour to people who always dine at night. But on the Sabbath we Nantucketers eat our princ.i.p.al meal when we come home from church.

Nancy and Anthony protested as usual. "Of course you can't expect us to dress."

Nancy sat down at the table with her hat on, and minus the velvet coat.

She was a bit disheveled and warm from her walk. She had brought in a great bunch of blue vetch and pale mustard, and we had put it in the center of the table in a bowl of gray pottery. My dining-room is in gray and white and old mahogany, and Nancy had had an eye to its coloring when she picked the flowers. They would not have fitted in with the decorative scheme of my library, which is keyed up, or down, to an antique vase of turquoise glaze, or to the drawing-room, which is in English Chippendale with mulberry brocade.

We had an excellent dinner, served by my little Portuguese maid. Nancy praised the lobster bisque and Anthony asked for a second helping of roast duck. They had their cigarettes with their coffee.

Long before we came to the coffee, however, Anthony had asked in his pleasant way of the morning service.

"Tell us about the sermon, Elizabeth."

"And the text," said Nancy.

I am apt to forget the text, and they knew it. It was always a sort of game between us at Sunday dinner, in which they tried to prove that my attention had strayed, and that I might much better have stayed at home, and thus have escaped the bondage of dogma and of dressing up.

I remembered the text, and then I told them about Olaf Th.o.r.esen.

Nancy lifted her eyebrows. "The pills man? Or was it--pork?"

"It was probably neither. Don't be a sn.o.b, Nancy."

She shrugged her shoulders. "It was you who said 'pork,' Elizabeth."

"He is coming to tea."

"To-day?"

"Yes."

"Sorry," said Nancy. "I'd like to see him, but I have promised to drive Bob Needham to 'Sconset for a swim."

Anthony had made the initial engagement--to play tennis with Mimi Sears, "Provided, of course, that you have no other plans for me," he had told Nancy, politely.

She had no plans, nor would she, under the circ.u.mstances, have urged them. That was their code--absolute freedom. "We'll be a lot happier if we don't tie each other up."

It was to me an amazing att.i.tude. In my young days lovers walked out on Sunday afternoons to the old cemetery, or on the moor, or along the beach, and came back at twilight together, and sat together after supper, holding hands.

I haven't the slightest doubt that Anthony held Nancy's hands, but there was nothing fixed about the occasions. They had done away with billing and cooing in the old sense, and what they had subst.i.tuted seemed to satisfy them.

Anthony left about three, and I went up to get into something thin and cool, and to rest a bit before receiving my guest. I heard Nancy at the telephone making final arrangements with the Drakes. After that I fell asleep, and knew nothing more until Anita came up to announce that Mr.

Th.o.r.esen was down-stairs.

Tea was served in the garden at the back of the house, where there were some deep wicker chairs, and roses in a riot of bloom.

"This is--enchanting--" said Olaf. He did not sit down at once. He stood looking about him, at the sun-dial, and the whale's jaw lying bleached on a granite pedestal, and at the fine old houses rising up around us.

"It is enchanting. Do you know, I have been thinking myself very fortunate since you spoke to me in church this morning."

After that it was all very easy. He asked and I answered. "You see," he explained, finally, "I am hungry for anything that tells me about the sea. Three generations back we were all sailors--my great-grandfather and his fathers before him in Norway--and far back of that--the vikings." He drew a long breath. "Then my grandfather came to America.

He settled in the West--in Dakota, and planted grain. He made money, but he was a thousand miles away from the sea. He starved for it, but he wanted money, and, as I have said, he made it. And my father made more money. Then I came. The money took me to school in the East--to college. My mother died and my father. And now the money is my own. I bought a yacht, and I have lived on the water. I can't get enough of it.

I think that I am making up for all that my father and my grandfather denied themselves."