Gradually the shy heart opened to us and we spoke together of the simple mysteries of earth. For example Little Invalid knew nothing of the tides and the moon’s influence, and no triumph of modern science could more have amazed her. Then from the terrifying parlour of the hotel we brought to her pieces of coral and seaweed, and these she had never seen and she touched them with reverent fingers. In the parlour too was an hourglass filled with shining sand—it was like finding jewels in the coal bin to extract things of such significance from that temple of plush and paper flowers. She held the coral and the seaweed and the hourglass while we went back to the little book or sat watching the waves, gray-green, like the leaves of my moth geranium.
In this manner two hours had passed without our suspecting when, flushed and breathless, Bessie and Henny reappeared. They were very distressed and frightened over having stayed so long away, but no degree of embarrassment could disguise their happy possession of those two hours on the white beach.
Pelleas beamed on them both.
“Ah, well, now,” he said, “we couldn’t think of going away down there before luncheon. Run along back, but mind that you are here by one o’clock. You are to lunch with us.”
At that my heart bounded, though I knew very well that Pelleas had intended certain five dollars in his portemonnaie for far other and sterner purposes. Yet it is a great truth that the other and sterner purposes are always adjusted in the end and the commonwealth goes safely on no matter how often you divert solitary bills to radiant uses with which they have no right to be concerned. Being I dare say a very spendthrift old woman I cannot argue matters of finance, but this one principle I have often noted; and I venture to believe that the people who omit the radiant uses are not after all the best citizens. I write this in defence of Pelleas, whose financial conscience troubled him for many a day on account of that luncheon.
So back those old-young married people went to the beach, trying hard, as I could see, not to appear too delighted lest Little Invalid feel herself a burden to us all. And when they returned at one o’clock with bright eyes and cheeks already beginning to tan, Pelleas marshaled us all to a table by a window toward the sea, and a porter drew Little Invalid’s chair beside us.
What a luncheon was that. Time was—when Pelleas was still able to model and I to write so as to deceive a few—that we have sat at beautiful dinner tables with those whose jests we knew that we should read later, if we outlived them, set in the bezel of a chapter of their biographies—and such a dinner is likely to give one a delicious historic feeling while one is yet pleasantly the contemporary of the entrée. Time has been too when a few of us have sat about a simple board thankful for the miracle of that companionship. But save the dinners which Pelleas and I have celebrated alone I think that there never was another such dinner in our history. When his first embarrassment was gone we found that Henny had a quiet drollery which delighted us and caused his wife’s eyes to light adoringly. They said little about themselves; indeed, save for the confidences of Little Invalid, we knew when we parted nothing whatever about them, and yet we were the warmest friends. However, it was enough to have been let into that honeymoon secret.
And what a morning had those two had. I cannot begin to recount what experiences had been theirs with great waves that had overtaken them, with dogs that had gone in after shingles, and with smooth stones and “angel-wing” shells and hot peanuts of which they had brought a share to Little Invalid. I cannot recall what strange people they had met and remembered. Above all I cannot tell you how they had listened to that solemn beat and roar, and would try to make us know its message—of course they did not know that this was what they tried to tell us, but Pelleas and I understood well enough.
After luncheon when Little Invalid was back on the veranda, her cheeks flushed with the unwonted excitement—it was her first dinner in a real hotel, she told me—Pelleas leaned against a pillar with an exaggerated air which I could not fathom, until:—
“Really,” he said, “I’m so very sleepy that I’m going to settle myself in this big chair for a doze. Don’t you want to rest for a little, Etarre? Suppose that we three all have a long quiet nap and you two young people get back to the beach for a while so as not to bother us.”