The Mermaid of Druid Lake and Other Stories Part 14

"What! desert my kingdom in such a economic crisis! Not this King. No, siree. Victor I. stays right here as long as there's a Tortilla to king it over. There's no kin in Squan to lament the loss of Peleg Timrod, and I've had a bully time here. Plenty of bananas, pineapples and cocoanuts to live on, no work to do, and a couple of queens to boot."

"Queens?" cried Captain Cromwell.

"Golly!" exclaimed his crew.

"Yes; two as fine-looking girls as you'd want to see. I'm powerful sorry they ain't here now to give you a royal welcome. They're gone with the rest of the island and the rest of the subjects. I miss 'em."

Victor I. sighed. Then he resumed after a pause:

"Women certainly are the curiousest things. They're the same everywhere.

Life's no good without 'em, and they plague you to death while you're trying to live with 'em. Now, there's those two queens. I loved both, and yet I had such trouble with 'em last week I made 'em go home to their father's hut. Ain't I sorry they wasn't at the palace when the sou'easter came!

"How did I get 'em? Oh, they were given to me when I first came to Tortilla. You see, when I got throwed up here there was a family of natives, eight in all--the old man, the old woman, three daughters, the husband of one of them and two young boys. The two girls who didn't have no husbands took a s.h.i.+ne to me as soon as I came and dad just pa.s.sed me along to both. That was before I declaimed myself King. I was brought up in Sunday-school all right and I knowed well only Turks and Mormons had two wives at a time. But, under the circ.u.mstances, I couldn't offend anybody, so I just took both. Eugenie--that's the name I give her--she could cook and keep house out of sight. The little one--Marie Antoinette--was the cutest and soon had the biggest corner of my heart.

That's what got me into trouble. You see, new clothes was scarce on Tortilla, and when I gave a bit of my old sail to Marie Antoinette for a Sunday-go-to-meetin' dress and didn't give none to Eugenie their oldest sister put the devil into Eugenie's head. She"----

The further recital of the tale of a pair of queens was cut short by a terrible roaring. A piece of the island behind the wharf broke loose and sank into the bay with a suddenness that put the Tuckahoe in dire peril.

The wave that followed the engulfing of an acre of land lifted the little bugeye and nearly capsized it, at the same time ripping the wharf to pieces and snapping the moorings. Captain Cromwell and his negro sprang to the tiller and succeeded in steadying her. When they had time to look about them they saw the red-headed King in the water a hundred feet away, swimming for what was left of his kingdom.

"Come nearer; I'll throw you a line," shouted Captain Cromwell.

"No; I'll stick to my kingdom," answered Victor I., alias Peleg Timrod.

"You'd better sheer off; you'll hit a coral reef or get drawn under."

The Tuckahoe's master saw that it was good advice, and he ordered John Was.h.i.+ngton to hoist sail. By the time this was done they were a quarter of a mile out in the bay, and Victor I., wet and dripping, was again on his terra firma.

"Goodbye," yelled the bay captain.

"Bye-bye," returned the King, nonchalantly.

And soon he was but a speck on the strand of the floating island, which was making good progress southward.

For half an hour Tortilla Key was visible in the bay. Captain Cromwell and John watched it unceasingly, the latter growing more and more relieved as the bugeye scudded nearer home and farther from the moving marvel. Strange to relate, over the bay, usually dotted with small or large vessels, there was no steamer or sailing craft to be seen up to the time that the bunch of tall palms became a speck off Annapolis and was finally lost in the south horizon. This evidently suggested a line of action to the master of the Tuckahoe.

"John Was.h.i.+ngton," he said, as he mustered his crew aft and addressed it sternly, "don't you ever breathe a word about that floatin' island to a living soul, or I'll skin you alive."

"Golly, Cap. Jim, you knows I ain't."

"Well, you'd better not, because folks is liable to think we made a round of Pratt-street saloons afore we boarded the Tuckahoe."

"Dey sutt'nly 'll think we's liars, Cap. Jim."

"They certainly will, John."

For a week Captain Cromwell scanned the daily papers anxiously for news of the progress of the queer derelict. And each day, with equal curiosity, John Was.h.i.+ngton visited him to learn what he could.

"Thought as how it mout a b.u.mped up down Norfolk way," said the crew.

"No, it hasn't," replied the Captain. "I guess it must be chasing up and down the ocean now."

"Golly, Cap. Jim, but dat dere was powerful queer."

"Are you sure, John, you've never told any one--not even Liza?"

"Go 'way, Cap'n, wha' for you s'pose I'se gwine tell de old woman?"

But he had. And her narrative, as circulated in Eastern-Sh.o.r.e cabins, was a vastly more moving tale than the simple unvarnished truth as you and I know it.

_Alexander the Great_

Alexander loved everything about Antoinette except her too p.r.o.nounced fondness for the romantic. That perturbed him greatly. n.o.body liked to be sentimental with a pretty girl more than did Alexander. If he could squeeze Antoinette's hand slyly at Ford's or the Academy when a "dark scene" was on, and get a sweet answering pressure; if he engineered his arm about her undisturbed when he took her driving on Druid Hill's unlighted roads of a summer night; if he hazarded an occasional kiss on her warm, cherry-red lips as they lingered in the parting on the front steps of her Harlem-avenue home--he was as pleased as any admiring lover could well be. And the next day in that dull, prosaic German-street office, pictures of Antoinette as she laughed, of Antoinette as she lowered her clear brown eyes after that kiss, would thrust themselves most impertinently into each page of the big ledger he had to post.

The trouble, however, with Antoinette from Alexander's viewpoint was that she was more romantic than that. It was all right for her to be a trusting little dear and allow him the occasional kiss or hug. But no adorer likes to be told that he doesn't come up to the lady's ideal, and that was what Antoinette had plainly given Alexander to understand in those moments when, spurred on by the kiss or the hug, he had sought to make her more truly his only and own. "The man I marry," vowed the darling Antoinette, "must be a hero. You're just an ordinary fellow.

You're better than the rest I know, and I like you awfully much. But Alexander, dear," and she gave a little twist to the top b.u.t.ton of his coat, "I don't love you, because you have never shown yourself capable of bold deeds or brave actions. I am woman enough to wors.h.i.+p a man who can do things of that kind. The age of chivalry is not dead. There are heroes in this world, and though I'm awfully fond of you, Alexander, I'm going to wait until I meet my ideal." Then Alexander would hie himself to his Gilmor-street home and curse his luck. What could a plain, una.s.suming, workaday clerk do in the way of being a hero? Where did he have opportunities of meeting situations of peril in which he could prove his valor?

One of those evenings when Antoinette waxed confidential and revealed her true thoughts--evenings rare, because, as a rule, she was fencing coquettishy with tongue and eyes--she acknowledged that the nearest approach to her ideal that she had ever seen was a handsome, lithe young Atlantic City life guard. She put such a valuation upon the courage of this sun-bronzed, red-s.h.i.+rted Adonis that Alexander's jealousy rose to the fuming point. There pressed upon him the notion of going to the City-by-the-Sea, either to challenge this approximate ideal to mortal combat or of emulating his choice of occupation and working a lifeboat and a rescue-line himself. Then he reflected that, after all, he would rather be a live clerk in Baltimore than a dead hero in the restless ocean surf.

"It's all the fault of those blamed novels," muttered Alexander, in his wrath. "She has filled up her head with that silly trash until she has spoiled the finest girl on earth." He never met her on Lexington street that she was not on her way to or from the Enoch Pratt Library, or was carrying home the latest bit of fiction from the bookstores. The old and the new alike fed her imagination--Scott, the elder Dumas, the King Arthur romances, Stanley Weyman, Anthony Hope, Hallie Erminie Rives, Laura Jean Libbey, Bertha M. Clay, Mrs. Alexander--all were fish for her net, tabloids for her mental digestion. "If she had her way, she would make me a Rob Roy, a Romeo, a Prisoner of Zenda, a Sir Gal--or whatever the d.i.c.kens that old fellow's name was," vowed Alexander, who, it must be confessed, was not strong on literature.

For three hours and more he lay awake on his bed that night. He knew the length of time, because the wind was from the east and brought the sound of the City Hall's strike to him. How to gain Antoinette in marriage, how to meet her fancy of what a man ought to be, how to be a hero without an untimely fate in the flower of his youth--was ever lover more perplexed, more worried!

The next morning brought his deliverance. It came to him as he held himself in place on two inches of the footboard of a crowded open car.

A queer spot for salvation to be handed to a despairing lover! Yet salvation is accustomed to odd performances. In this instance it popped into Alexander's mind so unexpectedly that he chuckled and made a seated individual think Alexander was reading the jokes of his penny paper over his shoulder. As a matter of fact, Alexander was soaring into a new and unexplored world. A great white light was leading him far from the madding crowd.

For three days chuckling alternated with heavy thinking. His mind was so engrossed with the probability of his deliverance from the trials and anxieties of trying vainly to please Antoinette that when he went, by appointment, to take her to Electric Park to see the vaudeville show he came perilously near telling her all about it. And that to the swain who hopes to capture a hesitating maiden would, as every masculine knows, have been fatal. As it was, Alexander's countenance was so benign and cheerful that the little lady noticed it.

"You've got a surprise for me, I know," she declared as she eyed him, pouting most charmingly.

She had hit so near the truth that Alexander, helpless masculine, floundered. "N--n--no. I--I--I haven't," he vowed.

"Yes, you have, Alexander Brotherton," she replied, spiritedly; and at midnight as they were crossing Harlem square, homeward bound, she snuggled up to him confidingly and intimated that it was about time to tell her.

Alexander weakened. When a fellow is 24 and a girl is 22 and unusually pretty and winsome, his heart must be adamant to withstand that little trick of snuggling up. Alexander gasped, but with the gasp gained sense enough to see he couldn't tell her about the "great white light."

Antoinette, girl like, was miffed. It was the first time in her experience with Alexander, and in fact with several other adorers, that she had not been able to operate that little device successfully. As a result, she was rather cool when they parted.

The next evening Alexander went around to make it up. He had to "crawl,"

of course. They all do. The girls make them do it. And when he had apologized earnestly for the eleventh time and vowed with a double criss-cross that there really wasn't any secret, Antoinette was partially mollified and allowed Alexander to stay until past 11 o'clock without a recurrence of pouting on her part.

The next night she was in a lovely humor when Alexander came around. It was close and hot, and, after buying sondaes at the drug store on the corner below, Alexander suggested riding out and strolling along some of the paths of Druid Hill Park. He put it humbly, but he was most blithe and joyous when she consented.

They were walking up the Mall on their way to the boat lake half an hour later. It was dark just there, and, as no one seemed to be near, Alexander let his hand steal around Antoinette's little waist.

"You shouldn't do that," said Antoinette slipping away from him, but not angrily. "We're not engaged, you know."