A Young Man in a Hurry, and Other Short Stories

“Then come to breakfast, heart of my heart! – the moments are flying very swiftly, and there is only this day left – until to-morrow. Listen! I hear the steward moving like a gray rat in the pantry. Can we endure a steward in Eden?”

“Only during breakfast,” she said, laughing. “I smell the wheaten flapjacks, and, oh, I am famished!”

There have been other breakfasts – Barmecide breakfasts compared with their first crust broken in love.

But they ate – oh, indeed, they ate everything before them, from flapjacks to the piles of little, crisp trout. And they might have called for more, but there came, on tiptoe, the steward, bowing, presenting a telegram on a tray of silver; and Crawford’s heart stopped, and he stared at the bit of paper as though it concealed a coiled snake.

She, too, suddenly apprehensive, sat rigid, the smile dying out in her eyes; and when he finally took the envelope and tore it open, she shivered.

“Crawford, Sagamore Club:

“Ophir has consolidated with Steel Plank. You take charge of London office. Make arrangements to catch steamer leaving a week from to-morrow. Garcide and I will be at Sagamore to-night.

    James J. Crawford.”

He sat staring at the telegram; she, vaguely apprehensive for the safety of this new happiness of hers, clasped her hands tightly in her lap and waited.

“Any answer, sir?” asked the steward.

Crawford took the offered telegram blank and mechanically wrote:

“Instructions received. Will expect you and Garcide to-night.

    James Crawford.”

She sat, twisting her fingers on her knees, watching him in growing apprehension. The steward took the telegram.

Crawford looked at her with a ghastly smile.

They rose together, instinctively, and walked to the porch.

“Oh yes,” he said, under his breath, “such happiness was too perfect. Magic is magic – it never lasts.”

“What is it?” she asked, faintly.

He picked up his cap, which was lying on a chair.

“Let’s get away, somewhere,” he said. “Do you mind coming with me – alone?”

“No,” she said.

There was a canoe on the river-bank below the lawn. He took a paddle and setting-pole from the veranda wall, and they went down to the river, side by side.

Heedless of the protests of the scandalized belted kingfishers, they embarked on Sagamore Water.

The paddle flashed in the sunlight; the quick river caught the blade, the spray floated shoreward.

V

Late in the afternoon the canoe, heavily festooned with dripping water-lilies, moved like a shadow over the shining sands. The tall hemlocks walled the river with palisades unbroken; the calm water stretched away into the forest’s sombre depths, barred here and there by dusty sunbeams.

Over them, in the highest depths of the unclouded blue, towered an eagle, suspended from mid-zenith. Under them the shadow of their craft swept the yellow gravel.

Knee to knee, vis-à-vis, wrapped to their souls in the enchantment of each other, sat the entranced voyagers. Their rods lay idle beside them; life was serious just then for people who stood on the threshold of separation.

“I simply shall depart this life if you go to-morrow,” she said, looking at him.

The unfeigned misery in his face made her smile adorably, but she would not permit him to touch her.

“See to what you have brought me!” she said. “I’m utterly unable to live without you. And now what are you going to do with me?”

Her eyes were very tender. He caught her hand and kissed it, and laid it against his face.

“There is a way,” he said.

“A way?”

“Shall I lead? Would you follow?”

“What do you mean?” she asked, amused.

“There is a way,” he repeated. “That thread of a brook leads to it.”

He pointed off to the westward, where through the forest a stream, scarcely wider than the canoe, flowed deep and silent between its mounds of moss.

He picked up the paddle and touched the blade to the water; the canoe swung westward.

“Where are you taking me?” she asked.

But the canoe was already in the narrow stream, and he was laughing recklessly, setting-pole poised to swing round the short turns.

“If we turned back now,” she said, “it would be sunset before we reached the club.”

“What do we care?” he laughed. “Look!”

Without warning, a yellow glory broke through the trees, and the canoe shot out into a vast, flat country, drenched with the rays of the sinking sun.

Blue woods belted the distance; all in front of them was deep, moist meadow-land, carpeted with thickets of wild iris, through which the stream wound in pools of gold.

The beauty of it held her speechless; the spell was upon him, too, and he sat motionless, the water dripping from his steel-tipped setting-pole in drops of fire.

There was a figure moving in the distant meadow; the sun glimmered on something that might have been a long reed quivering.

“An old friend fishing yonder,” he said, quietly; “I knew he would be there.” He touched her and pointed to the distant figure. “That is the parson of Foxville,” he said. “We will need him before we go to London.”

She looked across the purple fields of iris. Suddenly his meaning flashed out like a sunbeam.

“Do – do you wish – that —now?” she faltered.