It was a long time before she brought me any news, and then it was interspersed with characteristic scoldings.
“Why didn’t I come before? Glory be to goodness, this day and this night, child. How can I be everywhere at once? People running in for hot drinks, and half-drowned creatures sopping the kitchen with sea water; it’s half dead I am! The captain of the ship? Well, Murphy says he’s alive, but he guesses he’s hurt internal, and the doctor’s been and taken him over to that little house across the field, where he can be more quiet and have a room to himself. You drink this hot tea, Miss Kate, and get into your bed, if you don’t want to be sick after this night’s work.”
She set down the tea and walked off, disapprobation expressed in every line of her retreating figure. When she reached the stairs I heard her mutter:
“Young ladies running out with the men in the middle of the night. ’Tain’t my idea of manners, and I guess it won’t be Mrs. Russell’s either, when I tell her what Miss Kate’s been up to.”
If I had been a boy I should have said something forcible to Bridget.
* * * * *
A severe cold kept me in my room for two days, and made me humble enough to swallow Bridget’s nostrums as well as her reproaches, for the dread that she might send for my mother and put an end to future free action on my part held me enslaved.
The gale blew itself out, and nature remembered that the month was May. May at Southstrand meant buttercups as large as daisies, and, in the woods, clustering masses of pink azaleas. The beach grass on the dunes waved silver in the south wind, the fields and meadows intensified their spring freshness by a cunning shading of velvet greens, and the blue of the sky melted into the sea.
During the hours of my imprisonment I had thought but one thought, seen but one vision—the face of my sailor captain as he lay on the beach, and I asked myself how I dared to thus idealize a stranger. Not for a second did I doubt his place in life. Class prejudice was mine to an overmastering extent, but I told myself that such beauty of body could only be the home of what I was pleased to call the soul of a gentleman. For narrowness of vision commend me to that which has only seen life through plate-glass windows and lace curtains. Thanks to a new influence, mine broadened and matured with the ripening summer.
The morning of the third day I ventured out, and naturally directed my steps to the life-saving station to ask news of the yacht’s crew. Herrick was just outside with his bicycle, prepared to skim off to the village to spend his leisure hours with his family, but he courteously waited to greet me and answer my questions.