Ramshackle House. Footner Hulbert
Counsell asked her directly: “Do you know New York?”
“I went to school there.” She named a famous finishing school.
Counsell could not but look his surprise.
“I had a legacy,” said Pen demurely. Her father frowned.
“Then you know people in New York?” Counsell said eagerly.
She shook her head. “I have not kept up with the girls.”
“She deliberately dropped them!” her father put in with an aggrieved air. “It is the infernal Broome pride. She was most popular in school.”
Pen laughed lightly. “Northerners are different,” she said. “They don’t make a merit of their departed glories.”
It was her way of letting Counsell know, without being disloyal to her father, that she did not share in her elder’s delusions. The young man looked at her in a new way. It was the first inkling of her real nature that she had given him. Pen felt his look through and through her.
Pendleton took advantage of the pause to secure the floor again, and held it for some time. But he had to eat too, and as soon as he stopped talking to chew, Counsell turned to Pen.
“Isn’t it rather lonely here?”
“Mercy, no!” laughed Pen. “Far too much to do!”
“I suppose there are lots of agreeable people in the neighborhood?”
“Up the county, oh yes,” said Pen.
“And you have all sorts of jolly parties?”
“They do,” said Pen briefly.
“Not you?”
Pen explained. “The road from here up the Neck that connects us with the world has become impassable for motors, even if we had one. Even a buggy can scarcely get through now. By road it’s twelve miles to the nearest white man’s house. Excepting the squatters. Our only way of communication is by motor-boat with the Island. Our friends do not live on the Island. And we’ve no way of getting up the county.”
“Have you no white neighbors at all?” he asked aghast.
“Old Mr. Weems Locket who keeps the lighthouse.”
“No white woman near?”
Pen shrugged. “No special hardship in that. I like men just as well as women.”
“Nobody but the light-keeper?”
“Oh yes, in bad weather the bug-eyes and the pungy-boats lie under our bank and the skippers come ashore to call on father and use the telephone.”
“In winter it must be hard.”
“Oh things are never really as bad as they seem to one who doesn’t know them.”
Just the same his sympathetic voice drew something out of her. For the first time she gave him her eyes freely. Wonderful dark, glowing eyes that won something of him that he never got back again. Her laughing, somber glance said as plainly as if the words had been spoken: “The winter here is Hell!” His eyes laughed back in hers, surrendering, and for an instant they were one.
This brief interchange was terribly sweet to Pen; so sweet that it scared her. For some time afterwards she was quite stiff with him, and his eyes reproached her.
When they left the table and went out on the porch Counsell made a deliberate move to separate her from her prosy father. With all his politeness the young man had a resolute air.
“I think this is simply the finest site for a house that I have ever seen,” he said to Pen. “Let’s walk out and look over the edge of the bank.”
Pen’s heart leaped—then sank again, remembering the morning’s work still undone, and the afternoon’s work all to do. Pendleton looked injured, but as no one paid the slightest attention to him he made believe to recollect something important that he had to do, and went into the house. Pen pleaded with her sterner self: “Just for a few minutes!” Meanwhile she was being firmly urged towards the boxes. Before she was aware of having given in, she found herself well on the way.
They strolled across the neglected lawn, matted with horse-mint, too spicy a vegetable to the taste of the stock that wandered over the place. The drive once paved with shell, made a wide circular sweep in front of the house, but the shell had disappeared under the horse-mint too. Part of the old bed enclosed within the drive Pen had dug up and put in a few dahlias. These she had essayed to protect from the horses and cows and sheep by a miscellaneous barricade of boxes and boards. She blushed for it now. She couldn’t explain to him that she had an instinct for flowers that had to find some outlet.
The earthen bank was sixty feet high. In the days of the place’s glory an ingenious gardener had planted honeysuckle at the base to keep it from washing and now the tangled vines swept all the way up to their feet in a bottle green wave flecked with the foam of its pale blossoms. The scent of it was dangerously enervating to youth.
“The whole world down here is full of honeysuckle,” murmured Don. “In the evening you can smell it far out in the Bay.”
An ineffably lovely panorama was spread before them, which the light haze customary to that soft land, endowed with a curiously moving quality. For awhile in silence their eyes ranged back and forth from Absolom’s Island on the one side out over the intenser blue of the Bay. At their feet rode a battered old schooner with a deckload of cord wood. Down at the left the octagonal lighthouse on its spindly legs was just within range of their vision.
“My camp is down there,” said Don. “On the other side of the old wharf. The curve in the beach hides it.”
They sat down with their feet hanging over the edge. Pen’s conscience was protesting more faintly now. She had recovered from her surprise attack and had her forces pretty well in hand. She found she was all right if she avoided looking at him. There was something leaping out of his eyes that simply confounded her. They talked about anything and nothing. He wanted to make her talk, whereas she desired to hear him. So they fenced. The little undertones of bitterness, of self-mockery, in Pen’s laughter struck powerfully on the man’s imagination. It appeared that this girl most decidedly had a flavor of her own.
He was reluctant to talk about himself and Pen could not ask questions. Consequently her hungry ears were obliged to pounce on the implications of his talk for information. He was of the great world it appeared. He knew everybody. He was not a mere philistine. He knew books, pictures, music; all that Pen thirsted for; and the people who made such things were among his friends. “Though I’m only a common stockbroker,” he put in with a laugh. This pleased Pen. She thought: “I wouldn’t want an artist for a lover”—and blushed for the thought. He was exactly what she wished him to be. It seemed to her magical that such a one should have been brought into her life if only for an hour or two. Only for an hour or two! She kept telling herself that firmly. “He’ll be gone to-morrow and I wishing he had never come!” That was the explanation of the bitterness.
She did ask him one question. “How on earth did you come to stray down here?”
He said: “I read somewhere, years ago, what a lovely and little known country there was on the western shore of Chesapeake Bay… I keep a canoe and a little tent handy in a club-house in New York. Whenever the world is too much with me I just paddle off for a few days.”
Pen’s few minutes lengthened out into an hour and she had simply not the strength to send him away. In the end her father was seen approaching, his discolored straw hat placed just so, a jute bag over his arm.
“I’m going over to the Island to get the mail,” he said to Counsell in an offhand tone. “Like to come along? It’s considered very picturesque.”
Counsell looked at Pen in indecision. He most assuredly did not want to go, but perhaps the best way to make headway with the girl was to be agreeable to the old man. You couldn’t always tell.
“Won’t