University of Virginia Library

10. CHAPTER X

“Where does the wind come from?” Theresa asked.
“It makes no flurry, yet its force keeps the water flat.”

“When it blows from the north at this time of year,”
said Jason, “it blows strong; but we shall have no flaws
with it.”

Philippa looked up at him reassured.

“You are scared, Philippa,” he said.

“Let me sit on the other side,” she begged; “there is
very little boat between me and the water here.”

“Stay where you are. I shall cross the bay presently;
with the wind behind us, the boat will right.”

“This is fine,” Parke remarked; “we glide over
glass.”

“Splendid,” replied Mr. Ritchings. “Your father is
an excellent boatman, isn't he?”

“His attitude betokens security, at least.”

He was half lying, half sitting; his right hand was on
the tiller, his left under his head, his legs were crossed in
the air, and his face was half hid by an old felt hat,
which was very much crushed.

“Isn't he an original?” Theresa said, in a low voice,
to Mr. Ritchings.

“Hush,” he whispered, with a laugh, “they are a
tribe of originals; don't you find them so?”

“All but Philippa,” she answered mischievously, looking
into his face. He turned very red, and asked Parke
where they were going.

“Pitt's Island,” suggested Philippa.

“That's a good place,” said Jason, pushing up his hat.

“What is on the island?” Theresa asked.

“Huckleberries and wood-ticks, at present,” Jason replied.

“We shall have to wade ashore,” Philippa cried.

“Philippa is so sensible,” Theresa exclaimed. “For
my part, I want to wade.”

Jason put up the helm for Pitt's Island. It would
take half an hour to round Hawk's Point, behind which
the island lay, and a few minutes more to reach shoal
water, he said, reclining at the tiller again.

Parke and Theresa crept forward, and sat down on
the other side of the sail; his boot-soles against the ballast
stones, and the edge of her skirts, were all that could
be seen of them at the other end of the boat. The sun
shone in their happy, handsome faces, and the breeze
blew: sufficient was the day for their pleasure thereof.

“We shall return with red noses,” he said.

She dabbled her hands in the water, and filliped some
in his face.

“If you do that again, while I am so helplessly lying
at your feet, supporting the weight of a cloak for your
sake, I'll—throw it off.”

She looked at him lazily, and said, “What changeable
eyes you have!”

He raised himself on his elbow, and brought his face
close to hers.

“How handsome you are, Theresa!”

“So are you.”

A pause, during which both looked into the deep,
green sea.

His hand fell softly upon hers; their fingers locked,
and palm was pressed to palm.

The voices of the syrens rose from the depths of the
sea, and a wild, sweet, delicious melody floated round
the pair.

“We hear nothing at the other end,” she said, at last,
releasing her hand.

“Do you wish to hear?” he asked, dropping back in
the folds of the cloak.

“I am not anxious about it. Mr. Ritchings is happy,
I suppose?”

“Why Mr. Ritchings?”

“With Philippa, you know.”

“Nonsense,” he exclaimed with energy: “he is nothing
to her.”

“I dare say; but he is smitten to the core with her.”

“He!”

“Now you are going to hate him. How selfish you
are! I wish Philippa would flirt, and worry you to
death.”

“Can't you teach her the art?”

“Do I possess it?”

He whistled “Lively Polly,” and then closed his eyes
as if he was sleeping.

Mr. Ritchings engaged Philippa in conversation, and
Jason was left to his thoughts, and steering.

“I have seen very little of you of late, Miss Philippa.”

“We have missed you from our house; that is the
reason, is it not?”

“You have been so much occupied!”

“A little more than usual.”

“But you are always a good deal occupied since your
cousin came home. Do you read together?”

“Oh no.”

“Is he not fond of reading?”

“Novels.”

“You do not like novels?”

“No; nor fairy stories, nor poetry.”

“Not a literal novel, like `Jane Eyre?'”

“Literal! Charlotte Bronte cheated her readers in a
new way. She threw a glamour over the burnt porridge
even, at the Lowood school, and the seed-cake which
Jane shared with Helen Burns. Did red and white furniture
ever look anywhere else as it did at `Thornfield?'
Haven't we all red and white articles which have never
stirred us beyond the commonplace?”

“The glamour of genius.”

“Genius describes ordinary life for us, and then we
suffer in reality the discrepancy of its words.”

“But life must be illustrated.”

“It cannot be; the text ruins the attempt.”

“Does not passion illustrate it?”

“I do not know.”

“Somebody says: `Nothing is so practical as the
ideal, which is ever at hand to uphold and better the
real,' and I believe it.”

“Shoal water,” cried Parke from the bow.

“We are among the rocks, Jason,” said Philippa,
bending over the side.

“We are on the ledge,” he answered. “I am going
to put you ashore from it. You can step from rock to
rock along the point; Miss Bond shall wade ashore, if
she prefers to.”

“`Oh pilot, 'tis a fearful thing' to have to scramble up
that bank in front of us,” Parke remarked.

“There's a path somewhere,” said Jason.

“I see a little flag-staff on the summit!” Theresa exclaimed.

sang Parke, assisting Theresa out of the boat.

Jason tied the sails and threw the anchor into the
sand, while the rest climbed the bank, and disappeared
in a thicket which bordered it. Theresa pulled the wild
shining smilax, and wreathed it round Parke's hat and
her own. They crossed a ravine filled with half-sunken
rocks and dense bushes, and came on the face of a hill,
their destination, whose top was covered with magnificent
pines. Philippa discovered that the provision-basket
had been forgotten, and slipped into the ravine to
meet Jason and remind him of it. He had not seen it,
and both of them went back to the boat.

“You pushed through the swamp, did you?” he said.
“I know a better course.”

She followed him into a dark, slippery path, black
with vegetable mould, and choked with rocks which
were beautifully stained with red-eyed moss, green velvet
moss, and a ruffled, fringed, scaly fungus-growth of
wonderful microscopic plants, which she carefully avoided,
with the idea that they must be poisonous.

“Don't you call this a handsome carpet?” he asked.

He was answered with a scream; looking round and
taking the direction of her eyes, he saw a lazy snake
coiled upon a rock she was about to step on; he seized

and flung it far into the bushes. Rubbing his hands with
grape-leaves, he said: “You are afraid of every thing.”

“Yes, I am,” she answered meekly. “How could
you take it up?”

“Because it frightened you, and the sooner out of the
way the better. I do not believe you can climb this
hill.”

“Oh yes.”

He caught her up, and with a few strides was at its
top, where he deposited her beside Theresa, and told her
the frightful adventure with a snake.

“Are you not well, Philippa?” asked Parke.

“Certainly.”

“Are you in good spirits?”

“Yes, as I always am.”

“I am awfully hungry.”

She started up to unpack the basket, and Parke threw
himself beside Theresa, who declared she was in raptures
with life. The dazzling, tremulous blue sea was round
her; over her stirred the green, scented, feathery sea of
the pines.

“`Ringed with the azure world,'” said she, “we sit
upon this smooth, elastic, red mat, commonly called pine
needles.”

“And `like a thunderbolt we'll fall'—on the repast
which awaits us in the shadow of yon towering tree.
Come, sylvan goddess, the minister has spread the cloth,
and put a stone on each corner of it to keep it from fluttering.”

“Roast chicken, Miss Bond, buttered bread, tart,
cake—which, or all?” asked Mr. Ritchings.

“All.”

“We have no plates, but napkins.”

“I eat with my fingers,” said Theresa.

Jason asked to be excused from coming to the table,
on account of the lowness of the seats and his inability to
dispose of his legs. Parke suggested the fork of a tree,
near by, not more than fifty feet from the ground.

“There is no plum-cake here, Mr. Ritchings,” said
Philippa, with a smile that warmed his spirits.

“I am out of office to-day.”

“Oh, how happy I am,” sighed Theresa, with her
mouth full of chicken.

“I am too,” said Parke, taking a bit of tart.

“Are the others as happy, think?” she asked.

“If they are as hungry.”

“Animal!”

Philippa came towards them with a glass of coffee, and
Mr. Ritchings followed with a paper of sugar and a
bottle of cream.

“There is one spoon only.”

“How delightful!”

`There,” said Parke, flinging a cone at Philippa, “the
inhabited world may dine now.”

A merry chat followed. Jason offered cigars; Philippa,
a little tired, reclined against a tree, and contemplated
the white clouds which floated in the aerial deep, and
curled their edges in relief against the pines. Theresa
subsided into silence.

Suddenly Jason unlocked his tongue. “There is something
in this scene, Mr. Ritchings, beyond ethics; it confounds
and annihilates them.”

A shade of annoyance passed over Parke's serene face.
He moved his cigar to the other side of his mouth. Mr.

Ritchings looked on the ground and picked up a twig,
but Theresa's subtle instinct understood Jason's meaning.

“You are right,” she said.

“A man does not value the Creator so much here; he
thinks of the created. Here falls the crown of humanity
upon his head in its circle of beauty, suffering, and uncertainty.
The speechless air, the deaf earth, the blindness
of substance—what do they but render us back
vagueness for vagueness? Why was Christ tempted
on a mount? Not because he could see therefrom the
kingdoms of the earth. I read these lines in one of your
books, Parke:

I think Christ was tempted with the loss of faith in
his heroic mission.”

“The old gent is breaking out with a vengeance,” murmured
Parke, in Theresa's ear.

“You must read the Gospel with a good deal of imagination,”
cried Mr. Ritchings. “In what do you believe?”

“In what I feel.”

He lighted a fresh cigar. His mood changed. He
made quaint remarks that forced even Philippa to laugh,
and Theresa thought him a genius. Six o'clock came,
and it was time to go. Sweeping the napkins into the
basket, he strode out of sight down the hill. Philippa
and Mr. Ritchings picked up the shawls and followed.
Parke moved in a roundabout way from tree to tree, for
Theresa was not inclined to leave.

“The picnic opened a mine in my governor,” he said.

“I have been struck with him from the first. He is
a genius.”

“A what, Miss Bond?”

“And geniuses never have children like themselves.”

“He must be one, then.”

“Why do you call me Miss Bond?”

“I call him a prime old fellow, any way, and you—
Theresa.”

“Shall I ever again have so beautiful an hour as this,
Parke? Let us never go into the world of human
beings!”

She clasped the trunk of a pine, and signed to him
to go on.

“I'll stay here forever, if you say so.”

“You would not.”

He was busy breaking off scales of bark, but he raised
his eyes. There was a tide of beautiful, dangerous darkness
in them.

“They will be waiting for us,” she added, drawing towards
him.

“Let them wait,” he said, with his lips on hers.

“Kiss me, Theresa—again.”

The voyage home was a silent one. It was past eight
when they reached the house, and when they sat down,
by blazing lamps, to supper, they felt dazed—like those
who come from a distant, different land, into a forgotten
home.