Blow the Man Down, Holman Day [e ink epub reader TXT] 📗

was played all over New England. The folks whose money built the roads were squeezed out. Long before my mother died our money was gone, but my father and I did not allow her to know it. We mortgaged and gave her what she had always been used to. And when my father died there was nothing!"
Her eyes glistened. "That's chivalry," she cried. "That's the spirit of the knights of old when women were concerned. I adore you for what you did!"
"It was the way my father and I looked at it," he said, mildly. "My father was not a very practical man, but I always agreed with him. And I am happy now, earning my own living. Why should I think my grandfather ought to have worked all his life so that I would not need to work?"
"I suppose it's different with a big, strong man and a woman. She needs so much that a man must give her."
Captain Mayo became promptly silent, crestfallen, and embarrassed. He stared aft, he looked at the splendid yacht whose finances he managed and whose extravagance he knew. He saw the girl at his side, and blinked at the gems which flashed in the sunlight as her fingers tucked up the locks of hair where the breeze had wantoned.
"I think my father works because he loves it," she said. "I wish he would rest and enjoy other things more. If mother had lived to influence him perhaps he would see something else in life instead of merely piling up money. But he doesn't listen to me. He gives me money and tells me to go and play. I miss my mother, boy! I haven't anybody to talk with--who understands!"
There were tears in her eyes, and he was grateful for them. He felt that she had depths in her nature. But keen realization of his position, compared with hers, distressed him. She stood there, luxury incarnate, mistress of all that money could give her.
"Anybody can make money," she declared. "My father and those men are sitting there and building plans to bring them thousands and thousands of dollars. All they need to do is put their heads together and plan. Every now and then I hear a few words. They're going to own all the steamboats--or something of that kind. Anybody can make money, I say, but there are so few who know how to enjoy it."
"I have been doing a lot of thinking since last night--Alma." He hesitated when he came to her name, and then blurted it out.
"Do you think it is real lover-like to treat my name as if it were a hurdle that you must leap over?" she asked, with her aggravating little chuckle. "Oh, you have so much to learn!"
"I'm afraid so. I have a great many things ahead of me to learn and do. I have been thinking. I have been afraid of the men who sit and scheme and put all their minds on making money. They did bitter things to us, and we didn't understand until it was all over. But I must go among them and watch them and learn how to make money."
"Don't be like the others, now, and talk money--money," she said, pettishly. "Money and their love-affairs--that's the talk I have heard from men ever since I was allowed to come into the drawing-room out of the nursery!"
"But I must talk money a little, dear. I have my way to make in the world."
"Thrifty, practical, and Yankee!" she jested. "I suppose you can't help it!"
"It isn't for myself--it's for you!" he returned, wistfully, and with a voice and demeanor he offered himself as Love's sacrifice before her--the old story of utter devotion--the ancient sacrifice.
"I have all I want," she insisted.
"But _I_ must be able to give you what you want!"
"I warn you that I hate money-grubbers! They haven't a spark of romance in them. Boyd, you'd be like all the rest in a little while. You mustn't do it."
"But I must have position--means before I dare to go to your father--if I ever shall be able to go to him!"
"Go to him for what?"
"To ask him--to say--to--well, when we feel that I'm in a position where we can be married--"
"Of course we shall be married some day, boy, but all that will take care of itself when the time comes. But now you are-- How old are you, Boyd?"
"Twenty-six."
"And I am nineteen. And what has marriage to do with the love we are enjoying right now?"
"When folks are in love they want to get married."
"Granted! But when lovers are wise they will treat romance at first as the epicure treats his glass of good wine. They will pour it slowly and hold the glass up against the light and admire its color!" In her gay mood she pinched together thumb and forefinger and lifted an imaginary glass to the sun. "Then they will sniff the bouquet. Ah-h-h, how fragrant! And after a time they will take a little sip--just a weeny little sip and hold it on the tongue for ever so long. For, when it is swallowed, what good? Oh, boy, here are you--talking first of all about marriage! Talking of the good wine of life and love as if it were a fluid simply to satisfy thirst. We are going to love, first of all! Come, I will teach you."
He did not know what to say to her. There was a species of abandon in her gaiety. Her exotic language embarrassed one who had been used to mariners' laconic directness of speech. She looked at him, teasing him with her eyes. He was a bit relieved when the pale-faced secretary came dragging himself up the ladder and broke in on the tete-a-tete.
"Mr. Marston's orders are, Captain Mayo, that you turn here and go west. Do you know the usual course of the Bee line steamers?"
"Yes, sir."
"He requests you to turn in toward shore and follow that course."
"Very well, sir." Captain Mayo walked to the wheel. "Nor' nor'west, Billy, until I can give you the exact course."
"Nor' nor'west!" repeated the wheelsman, throwing her hard over, and the _Olenia_ came about with a rail-dipping swerve and retraced her way along her own wake of white suds.
Miss Marston preceded the captain down the ladder and went into the chart-room. "A kiss--quick!" she whispered.
He held her close to him for a long moment.
"You are a most obedient captain," she said.
When he released her and went at his task, she leaned upon his shoulder and watched him as he straddled his parallels across the chart.
"We'll run to Razee Reef," he told her, eager to make her a partner in all his little concerns. "The Bee boats fetch the whistler there so as to lay off their next leg. I didn't know that Mr. Marston was interested in the Bee line."
"I heard him talking about that line," she said, indifferently. "Sometimes I listen when I have nothing else to do. He used a naughty word about somebody connected with that company--and it's so seldom that he allows himself to swear I listened to see what it was all about. I don't know even now. I don't understand such things. But he said if he couldn't buy 'em he'd bu'st 'em. Those were his words. Not very elegant language. But it's all I remember."
Before he left the chart-room Mayo took a squint at the barometer. "I'm sorry he has ordered me in toward the coast," he said. "The glass is too far below thirty to suit me. I think it means fog."
"But it's so clear and beautiful," she protested.
"It's always especially beautiful at sea before something bad happens," he explained, smiling. "And there has been a big fog-bank off to s'uth'ard for two days. It's a good deal like life, dear. All lovely, and then the fog shuts in!"
"But I would be happy with you in the fog," she assured him.
He glowed at her words and answered with his eyes.
She would have followed him back upon the bridge, but the steward intercepted her. He had waited outside the chart-room.
"Mr. Marston's compliments, Miss Marston! He requests you to join him at cards."
She pouted as she gave back Mayo's look of annoyance, and then obeyed the mandate.
Mr. Marston was stroking his narrow strip of chin beard with thumb and forefinger when she arrived on the quarter-deck. The men of business were below, and he motioned to a hammock chair beside him.
"Alma, for the rest of this cruise I want you to stay back here with our guests where you belong," he commanded with the directness of attack employed by Julius Marston in his dealings with those of his menage.
"What do you mean, father?"
"That--exactly. I was explicit, was I not?"
"But you do not intimate that--that I have--"
"Well?" Mr. Marston believed in allowing others to expose their sentiments before he uncovered his own.
"You don't suggest that there is anything wrong in my being on the bridge where I enjoy myself so much. I am trying to learn something about navigation."
"I am paying that fellow up there to attend to all that."
"And it gets tiresome back here."
"You selected your own company for the cruise--and there is Mr. Beveridge ready to amuse you at any time."
"Mr. Beveridge amuses me--distinctly amuses me," she retorted. "But there is such a thing as becoming wearied even of such a joke as Mr. Beveridge."
"You will please employ a more respectful tone when you refer to that gentleman," said her father, with severity. But he promptly fell back into his usual mood when she came into his affairs. He was patronizingly tolerant. "Your friend, Miss Burgess, has been joking about your sudden devotion to navigation, Alma."
"Nan Burgess cannot keep her tongue still, even about herself."
"I know, but I do not intend to have you give occasion even for jokes. Of course, I understand. I know your whims. You are interested, personally, in that gold-braided chap about as much as you would be interested in that brass thing where the compass is--whatever they call it."
"But he's a gentleman!" she cried, her interest making her unwary. "His grandfather was--"
"Alma!" snapped Julius Marston. His eyes opened wide. He looked her up and down. "I have heard before that an ocean trip makes women silly, I am inclined to believe it. I don't care a curse who that fellow's grandfather was. _You_ are my daughter--and you keep off that bridge!"
The men of business were coming up the companion-way, and she rose and hurried to her stateroom.
"I don't dare to meet Nan Burgess just now," she told herself. "Friendships can be broken by saying certain things--and I feel perfectly capable of saying just those things to her at this moment."
In the late afternoon the _Olenia_, the shore-line looming to starboard, shaped her course to meet and pass a big steamer which came rolling down the sea with a banner of black smoke flaunting behind her.
The fog which Captain Mayo had predicted was coming. Wisps of it trailed over the waves--skirmishers sent ahead of the main body which marched in mass more slowly behind.
A whistling buoy, with its grim grunt, told all mariners to 'ware Razee Reef, which was lifting its jagged, black bulk against the sky-line. With that fog coming, Captain Mayo needed to take exact bearings from Razee, for he had decided to run for harbor that night. That coastline, to whose inside course Marston's orders had sent the yacht, was too dangerous to be negotiated in a night which was fog-wrapped. Therefore, the captain took the whistler nearly dead on, leaving to the larger steamer plenty