Part 3

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 principal 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 Thoresen.

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

"It was probably neither. Don't be a snob, 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 circumstances, 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 attitude. 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 substituted 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. Thoresen 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."

I can't in the least describe to you how he said it. There was a tenseness, almost a fierceness, in his brilliant blue eyes. Yet he finished up with a little laugh. "You see," he said, "I am a sort of Flying Dutchman--sailing the seas eternally, driven not by any sinister force but by my own delight in it."

"Do you go alone?"

"Oh, I have guests--at times. But I am often my own--good company--"

He stopped and rose. Nancy had appeared in the doorway. She crossed the porch and came down toward us. She was in her bathing suit and cap, gray again, with a line of green on the edges, and flung over her shoulders was a gray cloak. She was on her way to the stables--it was before the day of motor-cars on the island, those halcyon, heavenly days. The door was open and her horse harnessed and waiting for her. She could not, of course, pass us without speaking, and so I presented Olaf.

Anita had brought the tea, and Nancy stayed to eat a slice of thin bread and butter. "In this air one is always hungry," she said to Olaf, and smiled at him.

He did not smile back. He was surveying her with a sort of frowning intensity. She spoke of it afterward, "Does he always stare like that?" But I think that, in a way, she was pleased.

She drove her own horse, wrapped in her cloak and with an utter disregard to the informality of her attire. She would, I knew, gather up the Drakes and Bob Needham, likewise attired in bathing costumes, and they would all have tea on the other side of the island, naiad-like and utterly unconcerned. I did not approve of it, but Nancy did not cut her life to fit my pattern.

When she had gone, Olaf said to me, abruptly, "Why does she wear gray?"

"Oh, she has worked out a theory that repression in color is an evidence of advanced civilization. The Japanese, for example--"

"Why should civilization advance? It has gone far enough--too far--And she should wear a blue cloak--sea-blue--the color of her eyes--"

"And of yours." I smiled at him.

"Yes. Are they like hers?"

They were almost uncannily alike. I had noticed it when I saw them together. But there the resemblance stopped.

"She belongs to the island?"

"She lives in New York. But every drop of blood in her is seafaring blood."

"Good!" He sat for a moment in silence, then spoke of something else. But when he was ready to go, he included Nancy in an invitation. "If you and Miss Greer could lunch with me to-morrow on my yacht--"

I was not sure about Nancy's engagements, but I thought we might. "You can call us up in the morning."

Nancy brought the Drakes and Bob Needham back with her for supper, and Mimi Sears was with Anthony. Supper on Sunday is an informal meal--everything on the table and the servants out.

Nancy, clothed in something white and exquisite, served the salad. "So your young viking didn't stay, Elizabeth?"

"I didn't ask him."

It was then that she spoke of his frowning gaze. "Does he always stare like that?"

Anthony, breaking in, demanded, "Did he stare at Nancy?"

I nodded. "It was her eyes."

They all looked at me. "Her eyes?"

"Yes. He said that her cloak should have matched them."

Anthony flushed. He has a rather captious code for outsiders. Evidently Olaf had transgressed it.

"Is the man a dressmaker?"

"Of course not, Anthony."

"Then why should he talk of Nancy's clothes?"

"Well," Nancy remarked, "perhaps the less said about my clothes the better. I was in my bathing suit."

Anthony was irritable. "Well, why not? You had a right to wear what you pleased, but he did not have a right to make remarks about it."

I came to Olaf's defense. "You would understand better if you could see him. He is rather different, Anthony."

"I don't like different people," and in that sentence was a summary of Anthony's prejudices. He and Nancy mingled with their own kind. Anthony's friends were the men who had gone to the right schools, who lived in the right streets, belonged to the right clubs, and knew the right people. Within those limits, humanity might do as it pleased; without them, it was negligible, and not to be considered.

After supper the five of them were to go for a sail. There was a moon, and all the wonder of it.

Anthony was not keen about the plan. "Oh, look here, Nancy," he complained, "we have done enough for one day--"

"I haven't."

Of course that settled it. Anthony shrugged his shoulders and submitted. He did not share Nancy's almost idolatrous worship of the sea. It was the one fundamental thing about her. She bathed in it, swam in it, sailed on it, and she was never quite happy away from it.

I heard Anthony later in the hall, protesting. I had gone to the library for a book, and their voices reached me.

"I thought you and I might have one evening without the others."

"Oh, don't be silly, Anthony."

I think my heart lost a beat. Here was a lover asking his mistress for a moment--and she laughed at him. It did not fit in with my ideas of young romance.

Yet late that night I heard the murmur of their voices and looked out into the white night. They stood together by the sun-dial, and his arm was about her, her head on his shoulder. And it was not the first time that a pair of lovers had stood by that dial under the moon.

I went back to bed, but I could not sleep. I lighted my bedside lamp, and read _Vanity Fair_. I find Thackeray an excellent corrective when I am emotionally keyed up.

Nancy, too, was awake; I could see her light shining across the hall. She came in, finally, and sat on the foot of my bed.

"Your viking was singing as we passed his boat--"

"Singing?"

"Yes, hymns, Elizabeth. The others laughed, Anthony and Mimi, but I didn't laugh. His voice is--wonderful--"

She had on a white-crêpe _peignoir_, and there was no color in her cheeks. Her skin had the soft whiteness of a rose petal. Her eyes were like stars. As I lay there and looked at her I wondered if it was Anthony's kisses or the memory of Olaf's singing which had made her eyes shine like that.

I had heard him sing, and I said so, "in church."

Her arms clasped her knees. "Isn't it queer that he goes to church and sings hymns?"

"Why queer? I go to church."

"Yes. But you are different. You belong to another generation, Elizabeth, and he doesn't look it."

I knew what she meant. I had thought the same thing when I first saw him walking up the aisle. "He has asked us to lunch with him to-morrow on his boat."

It was the first time that I had mentioned it. Somehow I had not cared to speak of it before Anthony.

She showed her surprise. "So soon? Doesn't that sound a little--pushing?"

"It sounds as if he goes after a thing when he wants it."

"Yes, it does. I believe I should like to accept. But I can't to-morrow. There's a clambake, and I have promised the crowd."

"He will ask you again."

"Will he? You can say 'yes' for Wednesday then. And I'll keep it."

"I am not sure that we had better accept."

"Why not?"

"Well, there's Anthony."

She slid from the bed and stood looking down at me. "You think he wouldn't like it?"

"I am afraid he wouldn't. And, after all, you are engaged to him, Nancy."

"Of course I am, but he is not my jailer. He does as he pleases and I do as I please."

"In my day lovers pleased to do the same thing."

"Did they? I don't believe it. They just pretended, and there is no pretense between Anthony and me"--she stooped and kissed me--"they just pretended, Elizabeth, and the reason that I love Anthony is because we don't pretend."

After that I felt that I need fear nothing. Nancy and Anthony--freedom and self-confidence--why should I try to match their ideals with my own of yesterday? Yet, as I laid my book aside, I resolved that Olaf should know of Anthony.

I had my opportunity the next day. Olaf came over to sit in my garden and again we had tea. He was much pleased when he knew that Nancy and I would be his guests on Wednesday.

"Come early. Do you swim? We can run the launch to the beach--or, better still, dive in the deeper water near my boat."

"Nancy swims," I told him. "I don't. And I am not sure that we can come early. Nancy and Anthony usually play golf in the morning."

"Who is Anthony?"

"Anthony Peak. The man she is going to marry."

He hesitated a moment, then said, "Bring him, too." His direct gaze met mine, and his direct question followed. "Does she love him?"

"Of course."

"It is not always 'of course.'" He stopped and talked of other things, but in some subtle fashion I was aware that my news had been a shock to him, and that he was trying to adjust himself to it, and to the difference that it must make in his attitude toward Nancy.

* * * * *

When I told Nancy that Anthony had been invited, she demanded, "How did Olaf Thoresen know about him?"

"I told him you were engaged."

"But why, Elizabeth? Why shout it from the housetops?"

"Well, I didn't want him to be hurt."

"You are taking a lot for granted."

I shrugged my shoulders. "We won't quarrel, and a party of four is much nicer than three."

As it turned put, however, Anthony could not go. He was called back to Boston on business. That was where Fate again stepped in. It was, I am sure, those three days of Anthony's absence which turned the scale of Nancy's destiny. If he had been with us that first morning on the boat Olaf would not have dared....

Nancy wore her white linen and her gray-velvet coat, and a hat with a gull's wing. She carried her bathing suit. "He intends, evidently, to entertain us in his own way."

Olaf's yacht was modern, but there was a hint of the barbaric in its furnishings. The cabin into which we were shown and in which Nancy was to change was in strangely carved wood, and there was a wolfskin on the floor in front of the low bed. The coverlet was of a fine-woven red-silk cloth, weighed down by a border of gold and silver threads. On the wall hung a square of tapestry which showed a strange old ship with sails of blue and red and green, and with golden dragon-heads at stem and stern.

Nancy, crossing the threshold, said to Olaf, who had opened the door for us, "It is like coming into another world; as if you had set the stage, run up the curtain, and the play had begun."

"You like it? It was a fancy of mine to copy a description I found in an old book. King Olaf, the Thick-set, furnished a room like this for his bride."

Olaf, the Thick-set! The phrase fitted perfectly this strong, stocky, blue-eyed man, who smiled radiantly upon us as he shut the door and left us alone.

Nancy stood in the middle of the room looking about her. "I like it," she said, with a queer shake in her voice. "Don't you, Elizabeth?"

I liked it so much that I felt it wise to hide my pleasure in a pretense of indifference. "Well, it is original to say the least."

But it was more than original, it was poetic. It was--Melisande in the wood--one of Sinding's haunting melodies, an old Saga caught and fixed in color and carving.

In this glowing room Nancy in her white and gray was a cold and incongruous figure, and when at last she donned her dull cap, and the dull cloak that she wore over her swimming costume, she seemed a ghostly shadow of the bright bride whom that other Olaf had brought--a thousand years before--to his strange old ship.

I realize that what comes hereafter in this record must seem to the unimaginative overdrawn. Even now, as I look back upon it, it has a dream quality, as if it might never have happened, or as if, as Nancy had said, it was part of a play, which would be over when the curtain was rung down and the actors had returned to the commonplace.

But the actors in this drama have never returned to the commonplace. Or have they? Shall I ever know? I hope I may never know, if Nancy and Olaf have lost the glamour of their dreams.

Well, we found Olaf on deck waiting for us. In a sea-blue tunic, with strong white arms, and the dazzling fairness of his strong neck, he was more than ever like the figurehead on the old ship that I had seen in my childhood. He carried over his arm a cloak of the same sea-blue. It was this cloak which afterward played an important part in the mystery of Nancy's disappearance.

His quick glance swept Nancy--the ghostly Nancy in gray, with only the blue of her eyes, and that touch of artificial pink in her cheeks to redeem her from somberness. He shook his head with a gesture of impatience.

"I don't like it," he said, abruptly. "Why do you deaden your beauty with dull colors?"

Nancy's eyes challenged him. "If it is deadened, how do you know it is beauty?"

"May I show you?" Again there was that tense excitement which I had noticed in the garden.

"I don't know what you mean," yet in that moment the color ran up from her neck to her chin, the fixed pink spots were lost in a rush of lovely flaming blushes.

For with a sudden movement he had snatched off her cap, and had thrown the cloak around her. The transformation was complete. It was as if he had waved a wand. There she stood, the two long, thick braids, which she had worn pinned close under her cap, falling heavily like molten metal to her knees, the blue cloak covering her--heavenly in color, matching her eyes, matching the sea, matching the sky, matching the eyes of Olaf.

I think I must have uttered some sharp exclamation, for Olaf turned to me. "You see," he said, triumphantly, "I have known it all the time. I knew it the first time that I saw her in the garden."

Nancy had recovered herself. "But I can't stalk around the streets in a blue cloak with my hair down."

He laughed with her. "Oh, no, no. But the color is only a symbol. Modern life has robbed you of vivid things. Even your emotions. You are--afraid--" He caught himself up. "We can talk of that after our swim. I think we shall have a thousand things to talk about."

Nancy held out her hand for her cap, but he would not give it to her. "Why should you care if your hair gets wet? The wind and the sun will dry it--"

I was amazed when I saw that she was letting him have his way. Never for a moment had Anthony mastered her. For the first time in her life Nancy was dominated by a will that was stronger than her own.

I sat on deck and watched them as they swam like two young sea gods, Nancy's bronze hair bright under the sun. Olaf's red-gold crest....

The blue cloak lay across my knee. Nancy had cast it off as she had descended into the launch. I had examined it and had found it of soft, thick wool, with embroidery of a strange and primitive sort in faded colors. Yet the material of the cloak had not faded, or, if it had, there remained that clear azure, like the Virgin's cloak in old pictures.

I knew now why Olaf had wanted Nancy on board, why he had wanted to swim with her in the sea which was as blue as her eyes and his own. It was to reveal her to himself as the match of the women of the Sagas. I found this description later in one of the old books in the ship's library:

* * * * *

Then Hallgerd was sent for, and came with two women. She wore a blue woven mantle ... her hair reached down to her waist on both sides, and she tucked it under her belt.

And there was, too, this account of a housewife in her "kyrtil":

The dress-train was trailing, The skirt had a blue tint; Her brow was brighter, Her neck was whiter Than pure new fallen snow.

In other words, that one glance at Nancy in the garden, when he had risen at her entrance, had disclosed to Olaf the fundamental in her. He had known her as a sea-maiden. And she had not known it, nor I, nor Anthony.

* * * * *

Luncheon was served on deck. We were waited on by fair-haired, but very modern Norsemen. The crew on _The Viking_ were all Scandinavians. Most of them spoke English, and there seemed nothing uncommon about any of them. Yet, in the mood of the moment, I should have felt no surprise had they served us in the skins of wild animals, or had set sail like pirates with the two of us captive on board.

I will confess, also, to a feeling of exaltation which clouded my judgment. I knew that Olaf was falling in love with Nancy, and I half guessed that Nancy might be falling in love with Olaf, yet I sat there and let them do it. If Anthony should ever know! Yet how can he know? As I weigh it now, I am not sure that I have anything with which to reproach myself, for the end, at times, justifies the means, and the Jesuitical theory had its origin, perhaps, in the profound knowledge that Fate does not always use fair methods in gaining her ends.