CHAPTER VIII

It is sad to chronicle the fact that, on the way back to the _Shark_, Captain Bell's language was not such as a maiden's ears should hear. But it is doubtful if Cécile's ears did hear it, such paternal explosions being somewhat too common of occurrence to command attention. On the other hand, the treatment which she had just received at the hands of the poet was an entirely new experience, and, in consideration of what Wood had told her, one that puzzled her mightily. There was naturally no way of poor Cécile's knowing that the poet took her for her sister Hermione, and was working off a little artistic pique, due to the return of verses, which had cost him gallons of tea and many pounds of macaroons.

Bell was going off at intervals, like an automatic fog-horn.

"The ---- fool!" he stormed, to the expressionless delight of his crew, which pulled away with stony faces. "Is he a wild ass of the desert, or does he think I am, or both? What in thunder did he mean by all that rot about Hermione shooting the keeper and he standin' by to bury him in the sand? Was the fool tryin' to josh me, I'd like to know? And all that slush about percussion somethin' and poetic interpretation by an æolian harp crackin' on ... Did you ever see such a cub-faced, swab-headed guillemot? Soul-talk! I want a drink..."

These and other winged words were lost upon Cécile. She was trying to hit on some solution of Applebo's treatment of herself. Certainly there had been some hidden meaning in the looks which he had turned upon her; something which suggested a motive for his peculiar behaviour. Cécile, who found it quite impossible to construe any situation as unflattering to herself, decided that the behaviour of the poet was nothing less than sheer "bluff." Either he was trying to disguise some deep, inner emotion, or else he had wished to mislead Captain Bell as to the true reason for his constant attendance. Cécile did not for an instant take seriously Applebo's sentimental effusions about the effect upon his poetry produced by the propinquity of the _Shark_. She was quite convinced that there was a very deep and subtle method underlying his apparently foolish pose. Heretofore she had been divided as to whether he must be considered as a really smitten lover or merely as a sort of half-witted loon, which, like all of its species, was quite at home on the wave. She had even thought it possible that he might be a fool of whimsical ideas who had actually attached himself to the _Shark_ from sheer lacking objective. This theory had been overturned by Wood's revelations, and she had accompanied her father to call on Applebo with the secret determination of discovering what was really underneath his eccentric behaviour.

The sleepy quick-wittedness; the supine manner of attempting to disguise a fierce forcefulness beneath; the deep, resonant voice, silky and warm; the inscrutable, leonine face with its mane of tawny hair; the _tout ensemble_, had deeply impressed Cécile, though she was not yet conscious of how deeply. But she knew that Applebo was very far from being the pilot-fish which he claimed to be. A chunk of pork on a hook, perhaps, but a pilot-fish ... no! Cécile had a vague instinct that she was shortly to be more fully informed in the matter.

Notwithstanding which, she arrived at the schooner in a state of extreme irritation, while her father had subsided into a sub-acute exasperation expressed by grunts and growls. A certain curiosity had backed up the real motive for the call aboard the _Daffodil_, and this curiosity had been politely but effectually flouted, and both father and daughter much resented it. Especially the daughter, as much trifling with the affections of many young men is a poor way for a girl to get in training to have a young man treat her with _lèse majesté_.

On coming alongside of the schooner they found a boat from the _Arcturus_, and Cécile's temper was not improved at hearing the gay laughter from the deck, where Hermione, Paula, Huntington Wood, and Mr. Poole were having a very good time. Cécile was one of those girls who grow restive at the sight of attractive men in the possession of other girls, so she proceeded at once to break up the _partie carrée_, taking Wood away from Paula as one might deprive a child of some object with which it was too young to play.

All were curious to hear about the call upon Mr. Applebo, however, especially as the red and belligerent expression of Captain Bell's face showed that it had not been in all ways agreeable.

"Your friend Applebo," said Cécile to Wood, "is, without exception, the rudest man I ever met."

Hermione raised her eyebrows. Wood, always loyal to the absent, protested.

"Oh, no!" said he, "odd and eccentric and all of that, but not really rude...."

"Call it what you like," said Cécile. "We had to board his nasty little boat practically by force, after which he did nothing but sit there and make sneering remarks."

"That was the only way he managed to keep awake," growled Bell, who was pacing up and down his quarter-deck with short, impatient steps.

"Apparently," said Cécile, "he was trying to be witty at our expense. You should have heard what papa said about him coming back...."

"We did ... from the time you left the yawl," said Hermione.

Cécile gave a mirthless little laugh. "Fancy your being so silly as to say that he was in love with me!"

"Huntington never said that," observed Hermione. "He merely said that Applebo was in love with somebody aboard the _Shark_."

There was a laugh, which was quickly checked, for Cécile's face became suddenly crimson. She bit her lip, and her grey eyes actually filled with tears of sheer mortification. Wood went quickly to her rescue.

"Up to this time," said he, "Harold has probably fancied himself in love with an Ideal. Now that he has seen the Real, we may look for rapid developments."

"Huh..." grunted Captain Bell, whose promenade had brought him within earshot, "he's a balm, that's what's the matter with him. Said it wasn't Hermione he rescued, but the gamekeeper. Said Hermione was about to assassinate him, and that if she had he would have dug a hole in the sand and shoved him in ... huh ... h'm ... balmy as a spring dream...."

"He's quite capable of it," said Wood, and glanced at Hermione. There was a vivid red splash in either of the girl's cheeks, and her eyes were like sapphires.

"By Jove..." Wood laughed. "Look at Hermione! I believe she would have helped him! What a pair of savages!"

Bell stopped in his beat and threw one arm around Paula. He made no secret of the fact that she was his favourite daughter; a preference which aroused no jealousy in the hearts of the other girls, as both appreciated fully Paula's sweetness of disposition and invariable unselfishness. She was, in a way, the mean between the extremes of Cécile's calculating and Hermione's impetuous nature; also she acted as a sort of fender between her sisters and their father. On the whole, the family was an affectionate one, but high spirits and diverse dispositions made the offices of a peace advocate indispensable.

"D'ye know what I think?" snapped Bell. "I think that the scoundrel is secretly in love with Paula, and he ain't man enough to step up and say so!"

"What makes you think that?" Wood asked.

"Logical exclusion. Here he has performed a service for Hermione, and lets it drop there, and Cécile goes aboard his boat and he sits there and jollies her. What was it he said ... that about the idle amusement he furnished bein' a fair exchange for the use of our minds ... eh ... what was it, Cécile...?"

"Some rubbish ... I don't know..." Cécile turned away, angrily.

"Besides," continued Bell, "Paula is the only one he has ever sighted close aboard. All right, old man" ... he glanced toward the _Daffodil_ ... "we'll see how much of a test you can stand. Wait 'til I romp you up and down the coast from St. John's, Newfoundland, to Hatteras a few times!" He glanced at Wood. "Come with us, Huntington. You'll see some sport. The beggar means to follow, if he can."

Wood hesitated. Cécile was looking at him, ready to give a little sign of affirmation, but to her extreme surprise, Wood glanced, not at her, but at Paula. Cécile's eyes followed his. Paula was looking at Wood, and as he hesitated, her face grew suddenly pale.

"Do you all want me?" asked Wood, smiling.

"Of course we do," answered Hermione. "Do come."

Paula echoed the invitation, a little faintly, and Cécile, in a cool, indifferent way. She was wondering at the peculiar expression she had caught in Paula's eyes as they met those of Wood.

"Then I'll go with great delight," said Wood. "But I don't think that the chase will last very long, when it comes to offshore work. You can hardly expect a little yawl like that to keep up with a schooner of this size."

"I'll back him," said Hermione. "The _Shark_ is about as speedy as an oyster-float."

"Just the same," snapped Bell, "I'll make you a bet, young lady, that we will have lost our pilot-fish at the end of ten days."

"For what...?" asked Hermione.

"For a month's allowance. Double or none. Come now, do you take me?"

"Done with you!" said Hermione, promptly.

Huntington Wood was giving a dinner party ashore that night, and Cécile, according to her custom when dining out, spent the late hours of the afternoon in repose. Her room aboard the _Shark_ was as big and luxuriously furnished as though it had belonged to a modern country-house, and she slept in a brass bed securely bolted to the deck. Adjoining was a boudoir and bath.

In a flowered kimono, her bright hair unconfined, Cécile was taking her beauty-rest and turning in her mind the events of the day. Piqued as she had been at Applebo's behaviour, she was by this time angry ... and a little startled to find how insistently his personality occupied her thoughts. She would have resented this more had it not been that this retrospect was by no means disagreeable.

The startling feature of this obsession was the vividness with which she could recall every detail. Cécile had only to close her eyes to see again the big-framed, loosely-held figure, the sleepy, leonine face with its mane of wavy hair, sun-bleached on top of the head to the colour of old oakum, but holding rich, coppery tints in its depths. Facial features were shockingly vivid; the high, wide cheekbones, the cheeks themselves cut out to a degree which gave the mouth an appearance of being slightly pushed out, the upper lip slightly raised in the middle. Most distinct was the set of the eyes; the leonine "bumps" with the bushy eyebrows, the eyes themselves of a clear, deep amber and fringed about with lashes that looked black, but were not.

She thought, with a gust of irritation, of the poet's blinking, indifferent expression and of the sudden gracious change in the cat-like face when he smiled. The smile humanised him, it was so kind. And it reassured one, in revealing teeth that were straight and white and even, and not feline. The recollection to most stir Cécile's pulse was that of the deep, resonant purring voice, which seemed to have left its echoes in her ears, as the voice of the sea leaves its murmur in a conch-shell.

"If it weren't for that catty, mocking pose," thought Cécile, "how attractive he would be!" She pictured him as open and frank and sincere ... looking into her eyes with no veil across his own ... Cécile's heart beat furiously. She wondered if she were going to make a fool of herself and fall in love with the only man who had ever treated her with disrespect.

Perhaps the factor which made Applebo's memory so intrusive was his enigmatical position. From thinking of him Cécile would ponder, until her head ached, upon what could be his real motive. She was now convinced that his attendance was not aimless. She was also sure that if it were due to a sentimental emotion toward herself she would very soon know of it, now that they had met. There had certainly been some deep meaning, some understanding in those, regards which he had given her.

Thinking of these things she fell into a doze, only to be pursued by vague images of her waking thoughts. Then, just before fully awakening, she saw, as in a camera-obscura, the face of Applebo regarding her with a lazy, ironical smile. This was not fancy, but an actual vision, which faded slowly as she awoke.

"Bother the man!" cried Cécile, fiercely to herself. "One would think that I were an ingenue of eighteen, haunted by visions of my first beau!"

Many men had called Cécile cold, unfeeling, heartless ... all of which terms were, from the man's point of view, quite correct. From Cécile's, they were wrong. As she saw it, love was a game in which one must realise, just as in football, the possibility of getting hurt. A coward or cry-baby had no right to play it. If any man could hurt her, as she was said to have hurt others, he was quite at liberty to go ahead and do it. It was, perhaps, in the hunt for the person who could do this that she had ruthlessly vivisected so many hearts. Cécile felt instinctively that she possessed no lack of deep feeling, if the right man were to claim it.

But Cécile knew quite well that she was not "in love at first sight." She was momentarily fascinated, perhaps, but mingled with her sentiment there was not the least trace of sympathetic or tender interest. On the contrary, the thought of Applebo exasperated her. She felt that she would like to wake him out of his lethargy with a hat-pin or the butt-end of an oar. Something in his sleek, smooth complacency aroused the desire to do him a damage.

Tired at length of the changeless object of her fancy, she tried to put it from her mind, but in vain. Then, finding herself unable to stem the tide of her imaginings, she tried drifting with them, to arrive ultimately at the startling knowledge that she was quite wild to see the poet again. She was also forced to admit, for however much she might deceive others Cécile was always candid with herself, that, were he to exert his magnetic potentialities toward that end, it was very possible that she might wind up by falling very desperately in love with Mr. Harold Applebo.

Hardly had she arrived at this rather humiliating conclusion when the maid entered, handed her a note, and went out again. The post-mark was a local one, and the handwriting of the copy-plate regularity which one associates with bills. Nevertheless, Cécile's heart beat with a sudden increased force as she tore open the letter. Inside was a single sheet of corn-coloured note-paper covered by a fine regular calligraphy, which Cécile recognised at a glance as being identical with that in which some of Hermione's letters had been addressed. She held it to the waning light from her port-hole, and read as follows:--

TO CÉCILE

_Lips oft sing loudest when the heart is numb; 'Tis when Love enters there, though all unseen, These scarlet courtiers, bowing to their Queen, Knowing their hollowness, are stricken dumb._

_Thus, ere Love reached me with his tiny dart, Clamoured I vainly. Many a lover's moan And sigh proclaimed a love I ne'er had known, Vaunted a passion alien to my heart._

_My soul has met with thine. Though I did wrong, These lips are stilled. No slightest sigh is heard, And all my poesy is prisoned in a word:-- "I love thee, Sweet." Herein lies all my song. The Pilot-fish._

Cécile read the verses twice through, then flung herself back amongst the pillows with a burning face.

The solution was not long in coming. Apparently, the poet had previously sent verses, from time to time, to Hermione. Cécile had seen the envelopes. It was very wrong of Hermione to have received them and said nothing to her about it. Cécile would reprove her for that later on ... not just at present.

It was probable, she thought, that Applebo had seen Hermione at some time, found her attractive, and being himself of a sentimental and poetic nature, had fancied himself in love with her. Then, in their meeting of that morning he had, no doubt, been disillusioned, found Hermione a mere child and a bit of a hoyden. Later on, seeing herself, Cécile, he had been completely vanquished.

Certain parts of the verses appeared to bear this out. The theme of the poem, as a whole, was that formerly, when he really had felt nothing, he had been doing a lot of singing. Hence the verses which Hermione had from time to time received. But now that he had really fallen in love, he found himself deprived of expression.

Cécile put away the verses, rang for her maid, and proceeded to dress. At the dinner that night everybody who knew her agreed that she had never been so radiantly lovely.

"Lucky dog!" said Poole to Huntington Wood. "You'll win her before this wild-goose chase is over!"

Wood smiled, and his eyes followed Paula as she crossed the room to speak to an acquaintance.