The Nest Builder Part 2

The girl listened in silence till the Scotchman had finished speaking, and replied briefly and quietly, inclining her head. The Scot, jotting something in a pocket notebook, left her with an air of elation, and she turned again to the children. One, a toddler, was picking at her skirt. She bent toward him a smile which gave Stefan almost a stab of satisfaction, it was so gravely sweet, so fitted to her person. She stooped lower to speak to the baby, and the artist saw the free, rhythmic motion which meant developed, and untrammeled muscles.

Presently the children, wriggling with joy, squatted in a circle, and the girl sank to the deck in their midst with one quick and easy movement, curling her feet under her. There proceeded an absurd game, involving a slipper and much squealing, whose intricacies she directed with unruffled ease.

Suddenly the wind puffed the hat of one of the small boys from his head, carrying it high above their reach. In an instant the girl was up, springing to her feet unaided by hand or knee. Reaching out, she caught the hat as it descended slantingly over the bulwarks, and was down again before the child's clutching hands had left his head.

A mother, none other than the prominently busted lady of Stefan's table, blew forward with admiring cries of grat.i.tude. Other matrons, vocative, surrounded the circle, momentarily cutting off his view. He changed his position to the bulwarks beside the group. There, a yard or two from the gleaming head, he perched on the rail, feet laced into its supports, and continued his concentrated observation.

"See yon chap," remarked the Scot from the smoking-room door to which his talent-seeking round of the deck had again brought him. "He's fair staring the eyes oot o'his head!"

"Exceedingly annoying to the young lady, I should imagine," returned his table neighbor, the prim minister, who had joined the group.

"Hoots, she willna' mind the likes of him," scoffed the other, with his booming laugh.

And indeed she did not. Oblivious equally of Byrd and of her more distant watchers, the English girl pa.s.sed from "Hunt the Slipper" to "A Cold and Frosty Morning," and from that to story-telling, as absorbed as her small companions, or as her watcher-in-chief.

Gradually the sun broke out, the water danced, huddled shapes began to rise in their chairs, disclosing unexpected spots of color--a bright tie or a patterned blouse--animation increased on all sides, and the ring about the storyteller became three deep.

After a time a couple of perky young stewards appeared with huge iron trays, containing thick white cups half full of chicken broth, and piles of biscuits. Upon this, the pouter-pigeon lady bore off her small son to be fed, other mothers did the same, and the remaining children, at the lure of food, sidled off of their own accord, or sped wildly, whooping out promises to return. For the moment, the story-teller was alone.

Stefan, seeing the Scot bearing down upon her with two cups of broth in his hand and purpose in his eye, wakened to the danger just in time.

Throwing his cigarette overboard, he sprang lightly between her and the approaching menace.

"Won't you be perfectly kind, and come for a walk?" he asked, stooping to where she sat. The girl looked up into a pair of green-gold eyes set in a brown, eager face. The face was lighted with a smile of dazzling friendliness, and surmounted by an uncovered head of thick, brown-black hair. Slowly her own eyes showed an answering smile.

"Thank you, I should love to," she said, and rising, swung off beside him, just in time--as Stefan maneuvered it--to avoid seeing the Scot and his carefully balanced offering. Discomfited, that individual consoled himself with both cups of broth, and bided his time.

"My name is Stefan Byrd. I am a painter, going to America to sell some pictures. I'm twenty-six. What is your name?" said Stefan, who never wasted time in preliminaries and abhorred small talk--turning his brilliant happy smile upon her.

"To answer by the book," she replied, smiling too, "my name is Mary Elliston. I'm twenty-five. I do odd jobs, and am going to America to try to find one to live on."

"What fun!" cried Stefan, with a faunlike skip of pleasure, as they turned onto the emptier windward deck. "Then we're both seeking our fortunes."

"Living, rather than fortune, in my case, I'm afraid."

"Well, of course you don't need a fortune, you carry so much gold with you," and he glanced at her s.h.i.+ning hair.

"Not negotiable, unluckily," she replied, taking his compliment as he had paid it, without a trace of self-consciousness.

"Like the sunlight," he answered. "In fact,"--confidentially--"I'm afraid you're a thief; you've imprisoned a piece of the sun, which should belong to us all. However, I'm not going to complain to the authorities, I like the result too much. You don't mind my saying that, do you?" he continued, sure that she did not. "You see, I'm a painter.

Color means everything to me--that and form."

"One never minds hearing nice things, I think," she replied, with a frank smile. They were swinging up and down the windward deck, and as he talked he was acutely aware of her free movements beside him, and of the blow of her skirts to leeward. Her hair, too closely pinned to fly loose, yet seemed to spring from her forehead with the urge of pinioned wings. Life radiated from her, he thought, with a steady, upward flame--not fitfully, as with most people.

"And one doesn't mind questions, does one--from real people?" he continued. "I'm going to ask you lots more, and you may ask me as many as you like. I never talk to people unless they are worth talking to, and then I talk hard. Will you begin, or shall I? I have at least two hundred things to ask."

"It is my turn, though, I think." She accepted him on his own ground, with an open and natural friendliness.

"I have only one at the moment, which is, 'Why haven't we talked before?'" and she glanced with a quiet humorousness at the few unpromising samples of the second cabin who obstructed the windward deck.

"Oh, good for you!" he applauded, "aren't they loathly!"

"Oh, no, all right, only not stimulating--"

"And we are," he finished for her, "so that, obviously, your question has only one answer. We haven't talked before because I haven't seen you before, and I haven't seen you because I have been growling in my cabin--voila tout!"

"Oh, never growl--it's such a waste of time," she answered. "You'll see, the second cabin isn't bad."

"It certainly isn't, _now_," rejoiced Stefan. "My turn for a question.

Have you relatives, or are you, like myself, alone in the world?"

"Quite alone," said Mary, "except for a married sister, who hardly counts, as she's years older than I, and fearfully preoccupied with husband, houses, and things." She paused, then added, "She hasn't any babies, or I might have stayed to look after them, but she has lots of money and 'position to keep up,' and so forth."

"I see her," said Stefan. "Obviously, she takes after the _other_ parent. You are alone then. Next question--"

"Oh, isn't it my turn again?" Mary interposed, smilingly.

"It is, but I ask you to waive it. You see, questions about _me_ are so comparatively trivial. What sort of work do you do?"

"Well, I write a little," she replied, "and I've been a governess and a companion. But I'm really a victim of the English method of educating girls. That's my chief profession--being a monument to its inefficiency," and she laughed, low and bell-like.

"Tell me about that--I've never lived in England," he questioned, with eager interest. ("And oh, Pan and Apollo, her voice!" he thought.)

"Well," she continued, "they bring us up so nicely that we can't do anything--except _be_ nice. I was brought up in a cathedral town, right in the Close, and my dear old Dad, who was a doctor, attended the Bishop, the Dean, and all the Chapter. Mother would not let us go to boarding-school, for fear of 'influences'--so we had governesses at home, who taught us nothing we didn't choose to learn. My sister Isobel married 'well,' as they say, while I was still in the schoolroom. Her husband belongs to the county--"

"What's that?" interrupted Stefan.

"Don't you know what the county is? How delightful! The 'county' is the county families--landed gentry--very ancient and swagger and all that--much more so than the t.i.tled people often. It was very great promotion for the daughter of one of the town to marry into the county--or would have been except that Mother was county also." She spoke with mock solemnity.

"How delightfully picturesque and medieval!" exclaimed Stefan. "The Guelphs and Ghibellines, eh?"

"Yes," Mary replied, "only there is no feud, and it doesn't seem so romantic when you're in it. The man my sister married I thought was frightfully boring except for his family place, and being in the army, which is rather decent. He talks," she smiled, "like a phonograph with only one set of records."

"Wondrous Being--Winged G.o.ddess--" chanted Stefan, stopping before her and apostrophizing the sky or the boat-deck--"a G.o.ddess with a sense of humor!" And he positively glowed upon her.

"About the first point I know nothing," she laughed, walking on again beside him, "but for the second," and her face became a little grave, "you have to have some humor if you are a girl in Lindum, or you go under."

"Tell me, tell me all about it," he urged. "I've never met an English girl before, _nor_ a G.o.ddess, and I'm so interested!"

They rested for a time against the bulwarks. The wind was dropping, and the spume seethed against the black side of the s.h.i.+p without force from the waves to throw it up to them in spray. They looked down into deep blue and green water gla.s.sing a sky warm now, and friendly, in which high white c.u.muli sailed slowly, like full-rigged s.h.i.+ps all but becalmed.

"It is a very commonplace story with us," Mary began. "Mother died a little time after Isobel married, and Dad kept my governess on. I begged to go to Girton, or any other college he liked, but he wouldn't hear of it. Said he wanted a womanly daughter." She smiled rather ruefully. "Dad was doing well with his practice, for a small-town doctor, and had a good deal saved, and a little of mother's money. He wanted to have more, so he put it all into rubber. You've heard about rubber, haven't you?"

she asked, turning to Stefan.

"Not a thing," he smiled.

"Well, every one in England was putting money into rubber last year, and lots of people did well, but lots--didn't. Poor old Dad didn't--he lost everything. It wouldn't have really mattered--he had his profession--but the shock killed him, I think; that and being lonely without Mother."

She paused a moment, looking into the water. "Anyhow, he died, and there was nothing for me to do except to begin earning my living without any of the necessary equipment."

"What about the brother-in-law?" asked Stefan.