Cape of Storms: A Novel

by Percival Pollard

"Ah, so you don't want to go just yet?"

"Oh, I haven't half seen it all, you know! Still,—" she sighed gently and looked out beyond the real horizon, "it will be nice to be home again."

Wooton brought a couple of steamer chairs and placed them on the deck-space that was well in the shadow of the awning. The sun was beginning to grow almost unpleasantly strong. Presently, with a minute or so of wriggling away from the wharf, of backing and sidling, the little steamer got proper headway and proceeded slowly on its way up the river. The central portion of the town was soon passed; green garden-spaces, and houses shut in by cherry-trees, gave way to low-lying meadows and hills rising up in the distance. The perpetual "shug-shug-shug" of the engines, and the hushed whispering of the river as the steamer bows cut through the water were almost the only sounds that broke the quiet. There was not a cloud in the sky. Swallows darted arrow-like through the air.

Wooton had pushed his hat back from his forehead and sat with half-closed eyes. He was silent. Miss Ware, looking at him shyly, wondered what he was thinking about; told herself once more that he was the handsomest man she had ever seen, and then sent her clear gaze riverward again. What Wooton was thinking at that moment was that he would give many things if in his spirit there were still that simplicity that would ask of life no more feverish pleasures than those he was now enjoying—the pleasures of peace and quiet. To be able to sit thus, with half-closed eyes, as it were, and let the wind of the world always blow merely a gentle breath across one's face!—perhaps, after all, that was the road to happiness. On the other hand, the thousand and one experiences; missed, the opportunities wasted! Surely it was impossible to appreciate the sweets of good had one not first tasted of the fruit of knowledge of evil! But supposing one so got the taste of the bitter apple into one's mouth that thereafter all things tasted bitter and the good, especially, created only nausea? For that was his own state. Well, in that case—he smiled to himself in his silence—there was nothing to be done but enjoy, enjoy to think of the once easily reached contentment as of a dream that is dead, and to strive so ceaselessly to blow the embers of the fires of pleasure that they would at least keep smouldering until all the vessel was ashes. The pleasures of the moment—those were the things to seize! The moment was the thing to enjoy; the morrow might not come.

He turned to look at the girl beside him, who had by this time resigned herself with something of quiet amusement to his silence, and now sat, veilless, her lips slightly open to the breeze, her face unspeakably fair-seeming with its rosy flush and its look of eager, expectant enjoyment. He told himself that, as far as this moment at least went, it left little to be desired; to sit beside so sweety a girl as Dorothy Ware was surely pleasure enough. And then he thought somewhat grimly that he himself was, unfortunately, impregnable to the infection of such simple joys.

"A penny!" he spoke softly, as if not to wake her too brusquely from a rêverie.

"Oh," she cried, with a little start, and, turning toward him, "they are not worth so much, really! I was thinking of Mr. Lancaster. He used to be so terribly ambitious; you know. Didn't you say you knew of him, in town?"

Wooton realized that he must needs be diplomatic. He called it diplomacy; some persons might have rudely termed it mendacity. The two are commonly confounded.

"Yes," he replied, "some artists that I knew used to mention his name occasionally." He paused an instant or two and then continued, impassively, "I seem to remember hearing someone say that he was engaged to some very rich girl."

Dorothy Ware smiled sadly. "I supposed he would be," she said, simply. She felt angry at herself for not feeling the news more deeply; yet it hardly seemed to touch her at all; it was just as if she had heard that one of her girl friends had married. She recalled Dick's impassioned, if soberly worded, farewell; she remembered her own words; she wondered how it was possible that the passing months could have changed her so that now she seemed almost indifferent as to young Lancaster's fortunes or misfortunes.