"We've taken a mermaid aboard, sir," said the sailing-master. "Nothing else, they say, sings after that fashion, and the men are on the lookout for foul weather."
"Never mind what the men say," said Reyburn, "while your barometer says nothing."
When Mr. Reyburn went on deck at sunrise he found Helen standing there with Lilian—with Lilian, who, after her day's illness, looked strangely wan and worn, looked like the feeble shadow of the other with her rich carnations, her glowing eyes, her picturesque outlines. Reyburn went aft and took Lilian's hand. "You have been so ill!" he said; and then he looked up and saw again this splendid creature, loosely clad in white, her black hair, unbraided and unbound, flowing in wave and ripple far down her back, her sleeve falling from the uplifted arm and perfect hand, that held a fan of the rose-colored spoonbill's feathers above her head, so beautiful and brilliant that she seemed only a projection of that beautiful and brilliant hour, with all its radiant dyes, before the sun was up; and he forgot that Lilian had been ill, forgot for a moment that Lilian existed. "I will find out what she is made of," thought Reyburn. "Are you made of clay?" he said boldly.
"He shall find that there is fire in my clay," said Helen to herself as she appeared not to heed his look or his words.
And there it began. And swift and sudden it went on to the end. She had come on board the yacht that first night to startle it with her beauty and her voice; last night, silent and stately, she had slipped through the evening like a dream; now she stood before him a dazzling creature of the morning: yesterday she was Penseroso; to-day she was Allegro; what would she be to-morrow? How sparkling, as one day followed another, her gayety was! and yet with no shallow sparkle: there was always the shadow of still depths just beyond—seasons of silence, moments of half sadness, times when he had to wonder whither her thoughts had led her. She sang a little song of the muleteers on the mountains, that he admired; then she must teach it to him, she said; they sang the song together, their voices lingering on the same note, rising in the same breath, falling in the same cadence. He had a sonorous tenor of his own: more than once she caught herself pausing in her part to hear it. How soft, and yet how strong, was the language of the song! he said; he must learn Spanish, she replied; and they hung together over the same book, and he repeated the phrase that fell from her lips—an apt pupil, it may be, for more than once the phrase, as he uttered it, deepened the color on her cheek. More than once she was conscious of gazing at him to find the charm that Lilian had found; more than once he caught her glance and held it there suspended; more than once you might have thought, by the quick, impatient manner in which she tore her eyes away, that she had found the charm herself. Perhaps he made some ostentation of his attraction before the others; perhaps the simulation of warmth was close enough to melt a colder heart than hers; perhaps it was not wholly simulation. It may be that her hand lay in his a moment longer than need was, her glance fell before his a moment sooner: it may be that as she fled all her manner beckoned him to follow. She was confiding to him her thoughts, her aspirations, her emotions, as if she wished that he, and he alone, should know them: he was listening as though there were no other knowledge in the world. If presently he thought of her as a creature of romance, if presently she felt the need of that keen interest, what wonder? They were playing with fire, and those that play with fire must needs be burned. And meantime, whether he looked at her languid in the burning noon, gay with the reviving freshness of the dusk, leaning over the bulwarks in the night and gazing up into the great spaces of the stars, he was always fascinated to look again. There was the profile exquisite as sculpture, there was the color as velvet soft as rose-petals, there was the droop of the long silken lashes half belying with its melancholy the rapture of the smile. Whether she spoke or whether she sang, her voice was music's self, and he was longing for the next tone; and presently—presently Lilian had faded like a phantom before this aurora who was fresh and rosy and dewy, with song and color and light—a sad pale phantom wan in a mist of tears.
And as for Lilian in this approaching trouble—in this trouble that was already here—was it to her mother that she turned as the good lady dozed and knitted there? Ah no, but to John himself; and perhaps John comprehended it, and, if he loved her all the more tenderly, suffered the more sharply. Possibly, as she saw Reyburn follow Helen as an entranced man follows a vision, as she saw Helen lead, Lilian knew that she deserved her punishment—knew that she had had her warning. Possibly she realized that the passion which had usurped the place of the love of years with her was but a selfish idealism—possibly saw at last, and with an agony, of what thin stuff the hero of her dream was made—possibly knew that it must be, and knew that it was best; but none the less she must have felt for a little while that there was no place left for her in the world, and she seemed to fade nearer and nearer the verge of it. Her old languor overcame her, her old pallor returned, her eyes were dull with their silent weeping: not yet twenty, she looked twice her years. Reyburn himself saw the change in her with trouble. "The voyage is doing you no good," he said.
"It is killing me!" she cried.
But he did not perceive the meaning of her unguarded cry: he did not know how it was with her, for he had not yet dreamed how it was with himself. But he was soon to discover.
Three weeks they had been wafted about from key to key, from bay to bay; they landed and explored the quaint old towns; they made trips into the tropical forests; great boatloads of juicy mangoes and guavas and bananas came off to them; they scattered coins on the clear bottom for the brown babies tumbling about the shores to dive after. Now at noon they lay anchored in still lagoons under the shadow of an overhanging orange-grove; now at night they were flying across the broad seas. But Lilian felt she could endure no more of it: her life was exhausted; she longed for the yacht's head to be turned northward, that she might die in peace on shore. John also was impatient to be gone. If he could have Lilian once more at home, he thought, he would marry her in spite of her protest, and take her where forgetfulness must needs soothe her, and strange faces make her cling to him in the old way. The way in which she clung to him now was too bitter to be borne. Her mother also began to think of home, and Mr. Sterling had wearied long ago; and at length, further pretences failing, they had been freshly provisioned and had started on their homeward way.
Reyburn had, indeed, been loath to make any change in their luxurious summering, but he was one of those who slide along with the days.