II.

It was late the next morning when Martin thrust his cheerful little face in at the door of Stephen Glyn’s room at the hotel.

“Well, how are you to-day?” cried the newcomer. “Gee, that was a narrow squeak you had last night, and no mistake!”

Stephen woke with a start, and turned in a dim and growing amazement at the stiffness of his limbs, the painful heaviness of his breath. Slowly, as the little Yale man sat chattering by his bed, the troubled events of the night before came back to him--the foolhardy plunge from the breakwater, the interval of blank nothingness, the agonized struggle back into life, the hands working at his chest and his limbs; then the slow opening of his eyelids under the frightened face of young Martin, bending over him.

“Yes, I did make an ass of myself, and no mistake,” he mused, aloud, in a hoarse and broken voice.

“Nonsense!” cried Martin. “A cramp--why, that’s likely to come over anybody. No one could laugh at you for having a cramp; though Miss May----” he stopped short, with a half-embarrassed laugh.

“What about Miss May?” asked Stephen, trying to conceal the agitation he felt.

“Why, nothing. Only, I met her just now going out to sail with some of the fellows. They all stopped to ask how you were. She didn’t say a word--stood there looking queer, somehow. So I told them you were feeling better this morning with all the water pumped out of you; and she began to laugh; didn’t say a word, just stood and laughed, till, upon my word, I thought she was going to cry. She’s a funny one and no mistake--half fish, I call her.”

Glyn was silent. So this was the way that his narrow escape from drowning appeared to Elfrida--to her for whom he had risked not only his life, but his dignity as well.

“Can I do anything for you, old chap?” asked the other, with good-natured solicitude.

“Thanks, I think you have done quite enough for me already.”

“Pshaw!” cried Martin, rising in the alarm of approaching thanks. “It was nothing. And now I’ve got to be going downstairs. As for you, my boy, you’d better lie still to-day. You don’t want to get pneumonia out of this, do you?”

But in spite of timely warnings, in spite of aching limbs and a dizzy head, it was not very long after this that Stephen rose, dressed himself and went slowly downstairs. From the few people sitting about on the piazza waiting for lunch--ladies with toy poodles, old gentlemen with newspapers--Glyn received congratulations on his escape, and remarks of a more or less trying facetiousness. Of course Elfrida was not there; of course she had not yet returned from her sail. And even if she had, what difference should it make to him?

So he strolled down on the rocks toward the breakwater with a rather slow and uncertain step. His heart was sore within him. The future was dim; in the present, one fact only stood out with dreary distinctness--he had given the best love of his life where return was not only denied, but, from the nature of things, impossible. As well toss a rose in a monkey cage as bestow a living heart on a perverse and freakish child like Elfrida, who regarded the gift merely as the means of a moment’s amusement, to be picked to pieces and then tossed to the ground. After all, was she a woman, or, as Martin had said, a wild creature, half human and half fish, for the possession of whom it was useless to contend with her cold and tempestuous lover, the sea?

He caught himself almost shaking his fist in a helpless rage of jealousy at the little green waves that lapped at his feet. “Rubbish!” he said to himself, in scorn at the fanciful absurdity of his notion. But then, as the scene of last night came back to him, he shook his head in mournful bewilderment.

A light clatter of stones on the breakwater above his head roused him from his reverie. Looking up, he saw a white figure hurrying silently along. “Good-morning,” he called, with a wild hope that his thoughts had translated themselves into the wild, living embodiment. There was no answer. “Miss May, is that you?” he called again.

There was a moment’s pause, then Elfrida’s face, white and severe, appeared over the stone coping. “I didn’t intend that you should hear me pass,” she said, frowning. “It was these hateful old stones that gave me away.”

Glyn’s heart contracted. Was his presence so disagreeable to her, then, that she chid the very stones that betrayed her presence to him? Then concern for his own pain was lost in sudden concern for the unsteadiness of her position.

“Take care, please! Those stones are loose where you are standing, I can see from below here.”

She smiled willfully. “Thank you, Mr. Glyn, I am quite secure. You see, this breakwater is a friend of mine. It would never go back on _me_.”

In her words, as in her smile, Glyn found an echo of that laughter with which earlier in the day she had greeted Martin’s story of his narrow encounter with death. “Yes,” he replied, with a bitter sinking of the heart, “I did make rather an ass of myself last night, didn’t I?”

She laughed abruptly, but made no reply. Glyn stood looking up at her as she stood on the barrier of loose stones above his head--shading her eyes with the book that she held in her hand, looking out over the sea. A sense of his own helplessness rocked Glyn’s soul in a sudden rage. He wanted her, oh, he wanted her, as she stood there, cold and immovable, defended at every point by her own scornful ignorance of common human emotion, unassailed even by the twin lords of mankind, Love and Death, which had so newly brushed closely past her.

Suddenly she started and turned to meet his gaze with half-startled, inscrutable eyes. “The tide is on the turn,” she said, in a quick-breathed undertone--then the stone under her foot slipped and settled, she flung out her arms to steady herself, and barely recovered her balance as she swayed for an instant on the edge of the rough stone parapet. In wild anxiety Glyn sprang forward, heedless of her book, which fell fluttering past his head.

“Take care!” he cried. “Take care!”

She smiled down at him, her lips a little white, but otherwise perfectly composed. “It’s too bad,” she said. “From the first day I met you, I am always frightening you to death, Mr. Glyn.”

Was she thinking of his failure of the night before? Glyn’s heart quivered with mortification. “Yes,” he said; “it’s easy to frighten me, you see.”

She laughed again--a little, quick, troubled laugh. “But I didn’t come down here to see you, you know, Mr. Glyn,” she said. “I was going out on the end of the breakwater to read for a little while, till lunch time--I didn’t expect to see you, you know.”

Why need she disclaim so eagerly any wish to see him? thought Glyn to himself. Not much danger of his flattering himself to the contrary. So he bowed with as much composure as he could muster.

“Certainly,” he replied; “and I am very sorry to have intruded upon your solitude. But let me see, your book--it fell past me just now, I think.”

He turned to search among the bowlders which lay strewed about him. Suddenly Elfrida’s voice came to him, strained and high.

“Mr. Glyn,” she said, “please don’t take any trouble about my book.”

He paused, perplexed. “It’s no trouble, Miss May, I assure you. Look! I can see it there between the bowlders in the seaweed--a new book, isn’t it? Here, let me give it to you.”

He took a step toward it. “Mr. Glyn!” cried Elfrida. “You mustn’t--you mustn’t! I forbid you to touch my book!”

Glyn turned and gazed up at her. She was leaning down toward him from the rough masonry above, her hands stretched out, her face flushed to a bright crimson, her eyes sparkling, wide open, filled with anger and with something else besides--misgiving and something that was almost like fear.

“Mr. Glyn!” she repeated, violently. “Please go away now, please! And let me come down and pick up my book myself!”

Glyn looked up at her, at her face, wild, beautiful and threatening, bent down toward him. So her scorn for him was so deep, her detestation so entire, that he was not to be permitted to touch so much as the book that had fallen from her hand.

Now, at last, beyond a doubt, he had his answer. He stood silent for a moment, looking dumbly first at the half-soaked volume almost hidden among the seaweed, then at the head above him, so lovely and so carelessly terrible, bright and golden against the blue background of the sky.

“Miss May,” he said, “believe me, I had no intention of intruding on you. I beg your pardon, and--good-by, Elfie!”

* * * * *

Now, the solitary steamer that calls at Pemaquid makes her single trip in the morning; the overland route to the distant railway station is so hilly and rough as to be almost impossible to the few aged horses in the village; hence there are difficulties in the way of anybody who is resolved to take his departure from Pemaquid immediately after lunch. “It’s too bad,” drawled old Ben, in sympathetic reply to Stephen’s eager inquiries, “but, you see, down East here nobody ain’t ever in a hurry. We hev all the time they is. In the West, of course, I know it’s different. I suppose, naow, in N’ York you have a train every hour in the day, don’t you?”

Stephen stood helpless. To remain another day in Pemaquid, after what had happened, was to him an impossibility; and yet how to escape? His eye fell on a small fishing schooner at the end of the wharf, the only boat of seagoing size that the place boasted. Her sails were hoisted and two men were working at her anchor. A sudden idea came to Stephen. “Couldn’t I hire that boat,” he said, “to sail me over to Boothbay Harbor?”

Old Ben began to laugh. “Couldn’t you hire a whale?” he said. “That boat, she’s the _Twin Sisters_, and she belongs to my brother-in-law, Jabez Hooper, and he’s sot in his ways, like the old monument over there. This is the day he’s goin’ swordfishin’ in her; and now he’s p’inted her nose for ’Tit Menan, it would take more money than you could find in six pots o’ gold to git him to p’int her to the west’ard for you instead.”

Stephen grasped eagerly at the idea. A few more weeks away from his work--what did it matter now, after all, in the emptiness of the dog days? “Swordfishing? Just the thing! Do you think he’d take me with him?”

“_As_ a passenger?” asked the cautious Ben.

“A passenger? Certainly. I’ll pay him anything in reason.”

To this proposition the old longshoreman gave a grudging and indifferent assent; then gleefully pushed out in a dory to arrange terms with his relative and wrangle about the amount of commission which his own enterprise was to receive; while Stephen went back to the hotel to pack up a few necessaries for the trip and arrange with the landlady for the storage of his luggage till his return.

A hurried inquiry brought forth the information that Martin had gone out sailing, together with most of the others. “Miss May, she’s gone, too,” remarked the woman, with the faint and flickering ghost of a smile. “They’ll all be _real_ sorry to find you turn up missin’ when they come back, I’m sure of that.”

Glyn left a hastily scribbled note for Martin, and hurried down to the pier, with strength restored to his limbs and hope to his heart by this unlooked for and novel means of escape. On the deck of this rough fishing boat he might escape from the fancied chains which had weighed him down to the unmanly servitude here in Pemaquid. Here on the sea he might find “the world of men for a man”; the world of hand-to-hand struggle with forces unchanged since the earth was made; the wind, the water, the sharp necessities of the chase. Here, if anywhere, was the path of deliverance from the chimera of Unfulfilled Desire.