CHAPTER XIII

Applebo looked at her and nodded.

"My _father!_" he said.

His hand was lying on the yawl's low rail. Hermione reached up and touched it with her own. It was a quick, impulsive little gesture, friendly and sympathetic.

"Would you like to have me tell him?" she asked. "Because if so, I will."

Applebo's strong hand turned, caught hers in his firm grip, and carried it to his lips.

"That would be the act of a real friend!" he cried. "Will you?"

"Of course I will. In fact, I think that Uncle Chris would rather learn it from me than from anybody in the world."

"I'm sure he would! Tell him then, Hermione."

"When?"

"Choose the time as seems best to you. I will go away as soon as the weather clears. Write me to the New York Yacht Club. And you are sure that it's not asking too much?"

"No. You see, it is for Uncle Chris as much as for you. More, perhaps, for he is getting on in years and must feel his lack of the ties of blood. Now I must go. Hear that patient bell! It reminds me of Uncle Chris ... steady and constant and so dependable!"

She glanced up at him with her vivid smile. Applebo's face was transfigured ... as Hermione thought, at the prospect of finding a father. It is more probable that his radiant expression was at finding something else. At any rate, all of the sleepy, baffling expression was absent; might never have been there. The amber eyes were wide and alert; clear, steady, looking into hers with a rich golden light in their depths which set Hermione's pulse a-tingle. In fact, Hermione was unconsciously aware of some peculiar rich, warm glow all about the poet, and, like a brilliant green moth, she found great difficulty in leaving it for the chill, surrounding gloom. But the patient bell was calling steadily, so she said, with regret:

"I should like to talk with you some more about all of this, but I don't want to worry ... your father." She smiled; then, a sudden idea striking her, she added:

"Why not get in my skiff and I will row past the schooner and sing out to say that I am all right, but not quite ready to go aboard. Then we can have a few minutes more ... to discuss the matter."

"Very well," said Applebo, and stepped down into the skiff, placing the dory-compass under the sternsheets.

"We don't need that," said he.

"How about finding the yawl again?"

"We can find her. That is one of my few natural gifts."

Hermione picked up her oars and began to pull in the direction of the bell. Applebo, lounging in the stern, watched her long, vigorous strokes. Her green tam was frosted with the mist; the thick black hair had also a silver rime, but cheeks and lips and sapphire eyes defied the sad grey of the humid world through which they drifted like alien spirits, seeking their own place.

Hermione, looking at Applebo as she pulled along, found him very pleasing to her eyes. He, too, wore the badge of the warm, comforting earth which claimed them both, however much they might adapt themselves to the sea. The colourless gloom, filtering out above all of the reds and yellows from the generous sun-rays, those in which the poet was so rich, glowed like autumn leaves of a November day. His hair shone like a marigold and his skin was of the luscious tint of a russet orange. Also, there was a radiance of expression which Hermione ascribed to filial devotion, long suppressed. No doubt some of it was.

The steady ringing of the _Shark's_ bell grew louder. Suddenly Applebo raised his hand. His trained eye had caught the straight, slim column of a mast rising into the thinner atmosphere aloft. Hermione caught the water with her oars and shoved vigorously astern. The way of the skiff fully checked, she rested on her oars.

"_Shark_ ahoy...!" she hailed.

"Hello!" came the voice of Heldstrom. "So dere you are!" There was a note of great relief in the heavy bass.

"I am not coming aboard just yet," called Hermione.

"Yes, you must!" called Heldstrom. "Your fadder has yoost sent vord ... 'Stop ringin' that bell!'"

"Stop it then," retorted Hermione. "I don't need it. The weather is clearing. I can see your spars."

"You can see nodding!" growled Heldstrom, "but I can see fere you go out no more ven der vedder iss t'ick! Next time you get no boat, yoong lady!"

"I will be back in a few minutes," said Hermione. "_Au revoir_..."

She dipped her oars and pulled off into the fog, leaving Heldstrom growling impotently on the schooner's deck.

"My parent," Applebo observed, "appears to be a bit of a despot."

"He is a dear," said Hermione.

"You will catch it when you go back."

"No. He will say nothing, but wait until next time. Before then I will have told him why I prolonged my leave. Now tell me just what you would like to have me say. Do you wish me to tell him all that you have told me?"

For it had occurred to Hermione's practical mind that Applebo was doing, from his standpoint, a very loyal thing in claiming as a parent a man who, no matter how fine his personal qualities, was after all merely the sailing-master of a schooner-yacht. Viewed from a purely worldly aspect, Applebo was the social superior of Christian Heldstrom. Applebo was a blood-relation to royalty, independently well off, well educated, and a person to whom any society would be glad to open its doors. His father, on the other hand, was an ex-enlisted man of the United States Navy, at present holding a position which, if not exactly menial, was not far from it. It were not as though Applebo were drawn to his father by a tie of affection or early obligation. Heldstrom had never laid eyes upon his son, nor did Applebo owe his father anything but the mere fact of his physical existence, which can scarcely be recognised as a debt of gratitude. On the other hand, so far as Applebo knew, his father was merely a poor sailorman, dependent on his meagre pay, already advanced in years, and a possible care and burden for years to come. Impressed as she was by the romantic aspects of the case, all of these things occurred, nevertheless, to Hermione's practical reason and served greatly to elevate her opinion of Harold Applebo.

To test him more thoroughly, she put forward, in a tentative way, a little of what was in her mind.

"You are quite sure that you want to establish this relationship?" she asked. "Of course, while Captain Heldstrom is a very splendid man, and all of that, you really owe him nothing. And, socially, there is some difference between you."

"Hermione!" Applebo's voice was actually pained.

"But what is the particular advantage of it to you?" persisted Hermione.

"Advantage! Don't you think it's an advantage to have a father? Especially, when he's as good a sort as you tell me that mine is? You surprise me, Hermione!"

"But you are a young man of fortune and education and high connections, while he..."

"Is my father," said Applebo, quietly.

The blood rushed to Hermione's face. Her blue eyes filled.

"Forgive me!" she cried. "I was just trying to ... to ... I wanted to see if you had any snobbery about you...."

"But, my dear girl, how can one be snobbish about one's own father? That would be so inconsistent!"

"Some people are," said Hermione.

"Then I am not that particular sort of fool ... which is lucky for me, since I am so many others! No. I want my father. You don't know what it means to me to find that there is somebody so close to me. Hermione, I have been the most solitary person you can imagine...."

In rapid, graphic words he told her of his lonely, friendless boyhood; the long vacations, when other boys went to their homes and he remained at the boarding-school; the envy with which he was wont to listen to the recital of holiday sprees by his schoolmates. Later, at college, his peculiar personality had marked him as one apart, and, sensitive as he was, this aloofness he had accepted as a quality of his destiny. Always of a romantic, imaginative, and sentimental nature, expansiveness where his emotions were touched had brought only ridicule, hence the gradual adoption of the mocking, inscrutable pose.

"There were so many times," he told her, "when I couldn't help expressing what I felt. People laughed at me. At first I fought; then I learned that it saved a lot of wear and tear to laugh back ... a little harder. So I took a pose that kept them guessing. People like to laugh at you, and they don't particularly object when you laugh at them, as long as they know what you are laughing at, and that you really are laughing. But when they are puzzled to tell whether you are really making fun of them, and if so at what, they get shy of you and leave you alone. So I was left alone. How much alone, nobody will ever know...."

The mist was in Hermione's eyes before he had finished. Applebo interrupted his own narrative to look up and say:

"Where are you going?"

Hermione came back to earth with a sudden shock.

"I'm sure I don't know," said she. "To tell the truth, I don't even know where we are. Do you?"

Applebo dropped his head and peered into the fog, and raised his hand. Hermione stopped pulling and rested on her oars. Applebo slightly turned his head to listen.

"I hear the swash of water ahead," he said. "That must be the far side of the inlet."

"But I have been pulling more toward the mainland!" cried Hermione.

"I think that you have swerved a bit. There is scarcely any air stirring, but what there is strikes me on the other cheek. Pull ahead a little."

Hermione did so. Presently the swash of water on the rocks grew plainly distinct, and, a few minutes later, a dark, irregular outline reared itself through the fog.

"Rocks," said Applebo. "We are on the east side of the inlet."

"But I am sure that we are on the other side," said Hermione. She raised her hand. "Listen...!"

From somewhere in the murk came the sound of eight bells.

"I must be getting back," said Hermione. "Which way?"

"Let me take the oars..."

Hermione nodded, and they shifted places. She was not tired, but she wanted to see the strong, lithe body in action. Applebo picked up the light oars and, without so much as a glance over his shoulder, pulled off apparently at random into the fog. As he rowed, he told her about his voyaging in pursuit of the _Shark_. Hermione was amazed to learn how arduous this had sometimes been. Secure and comfortable aboard the big, staunch _Shark_, it was not easy to realise the conditions to be sometimes confronted by a little boat like the _Daffodil_.

"You are like a gull..." she said. "Hello ... there's a boat ahead!"

"The yawl," said Applebo, indifferently.

Hermione opened her violet eyes very wide.

"I must have been pulling in a circle!" she exclaimed.

"You described quite an arc."

"But how did you know?"

"I felt it. Some of us have that instinct of the hound and the sea-turtle and the gull. It's not subject to analysis. At sea, I never take a sight ... but I use the lead a good deal." He laid the skiff alongside.

"Before I go," said Hermione, "I want to peep into the cabin. May I?"

"If you like. I'd be more hospitable, but something tells me that it is not convenable, and, since you are Hermione, you are still a mere child ... how old...?"

"Twenty."

"An infant in arms! However ... so long as they are the proper arms ... and I'm so much older that it doesn't matter. Come aboard."

He stepped out and extended one hand to Hermione, making fast the skiff with the other.

"How old are you?" asked Hermione.

"Getting senile. I have been out of college four years; that makes me twenty-five. At such an age there are no longer rules of propriety; one thinks only of the grave. How do you like my cabin?"

Hermione, with a delicious sense of wrongdoing, examined with rapture the cabin of the _Daffodil_. This inspection was brief to the point of being cursory, and, as she came up through the companionway, she heard the bell of the _Shark_ again tolling its insistent summons.

"And to think," she cried, "that you should have followed us all of those weary knots on this little thing! And just because you knew that your father was aboard!"

"Hermione, filial affection was _not_ the lure of the last two thousand miles."

"What was...?"

"Get in your skiff and I will tell you."

Hermione's heart stampeded furiously. It was frightened less at these discreet words than at a sudden flash in the clear eyes of her companion. Every sentient impulse warned her to get immediately into her skiff and row away, just as fast as she could. But other and stronger impulses made this craven course exceedingly difficult. She did not want to row off into the cold, grey mist and leave new problems to be solved by the lonely, romantic figure beside her. She felt that he needed her, and this need, to a person of Hermione's rich nature, was a far more impelling force than any need of her own.

She looked a little fearfully at Applebo. He was smiling at her with the air of one about to say a conventional farewell ... or about to try to do so. Hermione thought of his loneliness ... the Finn was still ashore ... and the tears rose to her eyes. She lingered, and from afar the _Shark's_ bell chided her.

"Good-bye..." said Hermione, tremulously, and held out her hand.

Applebo took it, raised it in his, and brushed it with his lips.

"Good-bye," he answered, almost brusquely.

Still Hermione did not go. Perhaps it may have occurred to her that inasmuch as she had been trying to go, without success, for the last half-hour, an additional half-minute would not particularly matter. This is feminine reasoning, and as sound as any such, and Hermione was exceedingly feminine. Perhaps, also, there flashed across her memory the recollection of another farewell, and of something which had happened, partly under water. At any rate, she lingered. This was very wrong of Hermione, and if she had had a mother, poor girl, instead of an elderly Norwegian sailorman impotently banging a bell, it never could have happened. But she lingered. Some instinct advised her that there was still something to be told; that she had not heard the entire tale, and that there would be a singular incompletion to the whole affair until she was told it. In which she was quite correct. Long-lost parents have an undoubted value, but it dwindles shockingly before that of new-found loves.

"Good-bye..." said Hermione, invitingly, and held out her hand.

Applebo had honestly meant to put her back in her boat and give her a shove in the direction of the patient bell. But there are limits to all human self-control, and Hermione at that moment stood outside them. There was a sad little droop to her shoulders, and to the corners of her pretty mouth, and the roses in her cheeks and violets in her eyes were blazing through the fog like flowers in a neglected garden. In that moment Hermione's sweetness was certainly not intended to expend itself on several cubic fathoms of fog, and, if Applebo permitted this, he would have been a fool and not worth the trouble of telling about. He had been thinking not of himself, but of Hermione, and, when he saw that Hermione was not quite content, he forgot that she was a very young girl, and he a wise and world-worn man of twenty-five, of whom the motto should have been--_memento mori_. Wherefore, he said:

"Hermione, I have told you the truth, and nothing but the truth, but not the whole truth. I followed the _Shark_ because I wanted a father. But, since we met on the beach at Shoal Harbour and swam off together to the schooner, this splendid filial devotion has been quite eclipsed by something else. I have been able to think of nothing but a girl in a green bathing suit, and, when your father gave me that 'dare' to follow him all up and down the coast, I took it up because I did not want to lose her out of my daily life. The verses that I have been sending from time to time during this chase have been the only really sincere ones I ever wrote...."

"Then the 'Hermione' ones that you sent to me were not sincere?"

"They are not insincere, but their sentiment was directed towards the Ideal. After I met you on the beach, they were offered to the Real."

"And went to Cécile..."

Applebo bent his bushy brows upon her in a way curiously suggestive of Heldstrom. Hermione wondered that she had never noticed the resemblance.

"Hermione," said he, "I have been a silly, careless fool and you do well to remind me of it. But do you remember having told me on the beach at Shoal Harbour that you had never seen any of my verses?"

The blood rushed into the girl's face and she dropped her eyes. Hermione had thought of that lie many times, but she was in the hope that Applebo had forgotten it.

"Since you didn't know me when you saw me," she answered, with a schoolgirl pout, "_I_ did not intend to put you right. What made you send the verses in the first place?"

"The idea appealed to my romantic nature. I had seen you on Fifth Avenue and admired your walk. I saw you many times, but never face to face. I like to write verses, and one writes better when one has a definite object. They were harmless things, and I knew that you would not take too seriously such an act of unasked devotion on the part of one whom you had never seen. Nor did you."

Hermione was silent for an instant. Then she said, almost shyly:

"And afterwards..."

Her violet eyes wandered fearsomely from side to side, aloft, into the fog, at her skiff, to rest finally on those of Applebo. The clear, amber ones, which seemed to have grown suddenly dark, were waiting for them. They telegraphed a message which so shook Hermione that she gave a little gasp and reached for the wire stay. The dense fog wrapped them about in its protecting folds.

"Hermione," said Applebo, in his deepest voice. "I think that you had better get into your skiff and go back to the _Shark_ and tell them to stop ringing that bell. The 'afterwards' will wait until another day."

"I want it now!" murmured Hermione, scarcely knowing what she said.

Her long lashes dropped on the rose-red cheeks. Her heart was fluttering wildly and she gripped the wet wire with all of her strength. She scarcely saw Applebo as he stepped quickly to her side and took her hand in his big one, crushing it even more tightly to the iron shroud. Then she looked up in frightened questioning, surprised to find him so close and marvelling at the breadth of the big chest. Her head came a little above its upper level, and Hermione was a big girl. Close as he stood to her, Hermione was obliged to give her face an upward tilt to look into his eyes, which she did, questioningly, yet with a swift, wild exultation.

One downward step and Hermione would be in her skiff, prepared for flight and the security of the chiding bell. But she could not take it. Her feet were glued to the deck; her body as though lashed to the wire stay. Applebo began to speak, and she scarcely knew what he said, even while she thrilled at the deep, organ-noted voice.

"Hermione ... Hermione ... you are still a little girl and perhaps I am doing wrong in telling you these things. I have loved you, sweetheart, from the moment I saw you that morning on the beach. I struggled against it, but it has been too strong. You are my Ideal quickened into life, and, though we scarcely know each other, all the nature that is in me cries out for you. When I say that I love you, I say it all. Now you must get into your skiff, dear, and go back. From this time on our attitude shall be the conventional one. I shall try to win you, but first there are other things to do. Go, Hermione."

Just as when he had kissed her in the water, Hermione felt all of her personal volition leave her. She could only cling to the stay and stare at him dumbly with vague, dark violet eyes. So she looked up into his face, her own colourless, except for a crimson splash in the centre of either cheek, and her coral lips trembling. Her black hair was veiled in the grey, clinging mist. She suffered from no lack of strength, but her mind and body were filled with the pleasant lethargy which might come of a rare old wine, and which would quickly pass. Hermione felt no hurry for it to pass.

So she clung to the stay and stared at the poet, and muffled in the fog came the notes of the bell, querulous and complaining, with a hint of impatience in its quickened beat. Applebo looked at her questioningly ... and Hermione's eyes shouted the exultant answer to this query. A golden flame leaped from the amber depths so close to her face, and, for some strange reason, Hermione felt the hot tears obscure her vision and the fog became a swirling chaos of grey. Her body swayed as she stood. She tried to say "Good-bye," but the quivering lips brought no sound.

And then she felt a strong, encircling arm about her, while her yielding body was drawn close and her pale, tear-stained, upturned face fell forward against the man's broad chest. Her hand loosed its hold on the stay, of which she no longer had any need, and with its mate stole up to rest on the strong shoulders. Hermione gave a little gasp; her arms went about his neck. There was a torrent of words in her ears, crashing like deep, glorious chords, and she heard her own voice saying: "Yes ... yes ... I love you, I love you...."

[Illustration: And then she felt a strong, encircling arm about her]

All was swift and wonderfully rapturous. Kisses smothered the words pouring from her lips, and these lips quickly found a far more potent manner of expression. Scarcely any time this lasted, if one is to figure time in moments such as these by stupid seconds, which might be each an eternity.

Hermione's scattered senses were rallied by the _chunk-a-chunk_ of oars close at hand. She felt Applebo turn to glance over his shoulder, and looked up to see him peering into the fog. Hermione drew herself away and stood for a moment, dazed and panting, for she had need of breath, poor girl.

"Here comes the Finn," said Applebo. "Now you must go, darling...."

Scarcely knowing how she got there, Hermione found herself back in the skiff staring blindly at the compass which Applebo placed on the thwart again. "Good-bye..." she murmured, and thrust at the yawl's side with her oar. She held up her hand, and Applebo leaned far down to kiss it. Hermione dipped her oars, and was wafted into the swimming mist.

Applebo stood looking after her, his face like ivory, but his eyes like yellow diamonds. The fog swam and eddied in a faint puff of air, striking down over the high bank on the shoreward side of the harbour.

The sound of Hermione's oars grew fainter and fainter, until his ear could no longer follow it. Then, as he listened, the _Shark's_ bell stopped ringing.