The Trumpeter Swan Part 48

The 'Sconset 'bus was waiting and they took it. Until two years ago no automobiles had been allowed on the island, but there had been the triumph of utility over the picturesque and quaint, and now one motored across the moor on smooth asphalt, in one-half the time that the trip had been made in the old days.

The Admiral did not like it. He admitted that it was quicker. "But we used to see the pheasants fly up from the bushes, and the ducks from the pools, and now they are gone before we can get our eyes on them."

Becky was not in a captious mood. The moor was before her, rising and falling in low unwooded hills, amber with dwarf goldenrod, red with the turning huckleberry, purple with drying gra.s.ses; green with a thousand lovely growing things still unpainted by the brush of autumn. The color was almost unbelievably gorgeous. Even the pools by the roadside were almost unbelievably blue, as if the water had been dyed with indigo, and above all was that incredible blue sky----!

Then out of the distance clear cut like cardboard the houses lifted themselves above the horizon, with the sea a wall to the right, and to the left, across the moor, the Sankaty lighthouse, white and red with the sun's rays striking across it.

They entered the village between rows of pleasant informal residences, many of them closed until another season; they pa.s.sed the tennis courts, and came to the post-office, with its flag flying. The 'bus stopped, and they found Tristram waiting for them.

"Tristram" is an old name in Nantucket. There was a Tristram among the nine men who had purchased the Island from Thomas Mayhew in 1659 for "30 pounds current pay and two beaver hats." The present Tristram wore the name appropriately. Fair-haired and tall, not young but towards the middle-years, strong with the strength of one who lives out-of-doors in all weathers, browned with the wind and sun, blue-eyed, he called no man master, and was the owner of his own small acres.

Like the Admiral, he gave himself up for two months of the year to the summer people. If his a.s.sociation with them was a business rather than a social affair, it was, none the less, interesting. The occupation of Nantucket by "off-islanders" was a matter of infinite speculation and amus.e.m.e.nt. Into the serenity of his life came restless men and women who golfed and swam and rode and danced, who chafed when it rained, and complained of the fog, who seemed endlessly trying to get something out of life and who were endlessly bored, who wondered how Tristram could stand the solitudes and who pitied him.

Tristram knew that he did not need their pity. He had a thousand things that they did not have. He was never bored, and he was too busy to manufacture amus.e.m.e.nts. There were always things happening on the island--each day brought something different.

To-day, it was the winter gulls. "They are coming down--lots of them from the north," he told the Admiral as they drove through the quaint settlement with its gray little houses, "the big ones----"

There was also the _gerardia_, pale pink and shading into mauve. He had brought a great bunch to "The Whistling Sally," and had put it in a bowl of gray pottery.

When Becky saw the flowers, she knew whom to thank. "Oh, Tristram,"

she said, "you found them on the moor."

Tristram, standing in the little front room of the Admiral's cottage, seemed to tower to the ceiling. "The Whistling Sally" from the outside had the look of a doll's house, too small for human habitation. Within it was unexpectedly commodious. It had the s.h.i.+pshape air of belonging to a seafaring man. The rooms were all on one floor. There was the big front room, which served as a sitting-room and dining-room. It had a table built out from the wall with high-backed benches on each side of it, and a rack for gla.s.ses overhead. There was a window above the table which looked out towards the sea. The walls were painted blue, and there was an old brick fireplace. A model of a vessel from which the figure-head in the front yard had been taken was over the mantel, flanked by an old print or two of Nantucket in the past. There were Windsor chairs and a winged chair; some pot-bellied silver twinkled in a corner cupboard.

The windows throughout were low and square and small-paned and white-curtained. The day was cool, and there was a fire on the hearth.

The blaze and the pink flowers, and the white curtains gave to the little room an effect of brightness, although outside the early twilight was closing in.

Jane came in with her white ap.r.o.n and added another high light. She kissed Becky. "Did your grandfather tell you that Mr. Cope is coming over to have chowder?" she asked.

It would be impossible to describe Jane's way of saying "chowder." It had no "r," and she clipped it off at the end. But it is the only way in the world, and the people who so p.r.o.nounce it are usually the only people in the world who can make it.

"Who is Mr. Cope?" Becky asked.

Mr. Cope, it seemed, had a cottage across the road from the Admiral's.

He leased it, and it was his first season at 'Sconset. His sister had been with him only a week ago. She had gone "offsh.o.r.e," but she was coming back.

"Is he young?" Becky asked.

"Well, he isn't old," said Jane, "and he's an artist."

Becky was not in the least interested in Mr. Cope, go she talked to Tristram until he had to go back to his farm and the cows that waited to be milked. Then Becky went into her room, and took off her hat and coat and ran a comb through the bronze waves of her hair. She did not change the straight serge frock in which she had travelled. She went back into the front room and found that Mr. Cope had come.

He was not old. That was at once apparent. And he was not young. He did not look in the least like an artist. He seemed, rather, like a prosperous business man. He wore a Norfolk suit, and his reddish hair was brushed straight back from his forehead. He had rather humorous gray eyes, and Becky thought there was a look of delicacy about his white skin. Later he spoke of having come for his health, and she learned that he had a weak heart.

He had a pleasant laughing voice. He belonged to Boston, but had lived abroad for years.

"With nothing to show for it," he told her with a shrug, "but one portrait. I painted my sister, and she kept that. But before we left Paris we burned the rest----"

"Oh, how dreadful," Becky cried.

"No, it wasn't dreadful. They were not worth keeping. You see, I played a lot and made sketches and things, and then there was the war--and I wasn't very well."

He had had two years of aviation, and after that a desk in the War Department.

"And now I am painting again."

"Gardens?" Becky asked, "or the sea?"

"Neither. I am trying to paint the moor. I'll show you in the morning."

The Admiral was in the kitchen, superintending the chowder. Jane knew how to make it, and he knew that she knew. But he always went into the kitchen at the psychological moment, tied on an ap.r.o.n, and put in the pilot crackers. Then he brought the chowder in, in a big porcelain tureen which was shaped like a goose. Becky loved him in his white ap.r.o.n, with his round red face, and the porcelain goose held high.

"If you could paint him like that," she suggested to Archibald Cope.

"Do you think he would let me?" eagerly.

After supper the two men smoked by the fire, and Becky sat between them and watched the blaze. She heard very little of the conversation. Her mind was in Albemarle. How far away it seemed! Just three nights ago she had danced at the Merriweathers' ball, and George had held her hand as she leaned over the balcony.

"If you can bring yourself back for a moment, Becky, to present company," her grandfather was saying, "you can tell Mr. Cope whether you will walk with us to-morrow to Tom Never's."

"I'd love it."

"Really?" Cope asked. "You are sure you won't be too tired?"

"Not in this air. I feel as if I could walk forever."

"How about a bit of a walk to-night--up to the bluff? Is it too late, Admiral?"

"Not for you two. I'll finish my pipe, and read my papers."

The young people followed the line of the bluff until they came to an open s.p.a.ce which looked towards the east. To the left of them was the ridge with a young moon hanging low above it, and straight ahead, brighter than the moon, whitening the heavens, stretching out and out until it reached the sailors in their s.h.i.+ps, was the Sankaty light.

"I always come out to look at it before I go to bed," said Cope; "it is such a _living_ thing, isn't it?"

The wind was rising and they could hear the sound of the sea. Becky caught her breath. "On dark nights I like to think how it must look to the s.h.i.+ps beyond the shoals----"

"The sea is cruel," said Cope; "that's why I don't paint it."

"Oh, it isn't always cruel."

"When isn't it? Last year, with the submarines, it was--a monster. I saw a picture once in a gallery, 'The Eternal Siren,' just the sea.

And a woman asked, 'Where's the Siren?'"

Becky laughed. "If you had sailor blood in you, you wouldn't feel that way. Ask Grandfather."

"The Admiral is prejudiced. He loves--the siren----"

"He would tell you that the sea isn't a siren. It's a bold, bl.u.s.tering la.s.s like the Whistling Sally out there in the front yard. Man has tamed her even if he hasn't quite mastered her."