The Burning Bridge by Philip Verrill Mighels (the best novels to read TXT) 📕

"But I may—confound your egotistic nerve, and your insistence! And I warn you, Fen, I mean every word, in case——"

"I understand—I understand you fully, without repetition," Fenton once more interrupted. "For Heaven's sake, give me your hand, old man, and cease firing."

"You meant it, then—no strings on the proposition?"

"Not a string—absolutely not a string."

A strange new thrill of pleasure crept into Grenville's being, warming his thin, anæmic pulses suddenly, as he met Fenton's gaze and once more permitted his thoughts to dwell on all the proposal embraced. Since Fenton refused to be worried concerning himself and the girl who supplied the motive for the trip, then why should he consider it further? Elaine was, in fact, swiftly fading from his reflections.

All his nature yearned towards the tropic seas. All his overwrought frame and substance ached for the long, lazy days of indolence, rest, and recuperation that alone could restore him to himself. He had always longed for precisely this excursion to the far-off edge of the sphere. His faculties leaped to the new-made possibility of a contact with the ancient world, heretofore so wholly inaccessible.

Already new color had come to his face and a new blaze of fire to his eyes. Privations and toil, those two unsparing allies that had made such inroads on his health and strength, seemed fading harmlessly away. The prospect was far too alluring to be resisted. There was no good reason in the world for refusing this favor to a friend.

The brightness of face that had ever made him so lovable, came unbidden, there in the glow.

"I suppose I'll have to go," he presently admitted, "if it's only to win your girl."

"Shake," said Fenton; and they shook.

The sea is an ancient worker of miracles in amazing transformation, but rarely does it bring about a more complete or startling metamorphosis than that which was wrought upon Grenville—trusted messenger for a friend.

Long before the shores of Cathay loomed welcomely upon his vision he had lost all sense of weariness or depression, and likewise all that worn and gaunt appearance of a large, thin frame inhabited by a dogged but thoroughly exhausted spirit.

He was once more his strong, bold, interested self, merry of speech, bright-eyed, untamed in his buoyant nature, lovable, thoughtful of those about him, impetuous, and never to be repressed. He had flirted uninterruptedly with all the old women and the children on the outward voyage, and was now as cheerfully repeating this gay performance on the steamship "Inca," homeward bound, on which he was certainly the favorite of the crew and his fellow-passengers.

The fortnight passed with Elaine upon the sea had been wholly uneventful, save for the vast commotion astir in Grenville's being. The worst that could happen, he told himself, had happened. His daily deportment towards his charge had baffled, piqued, and amused that young lady alternately, and convinced her that here was a brand-new specimen of the genus man with which she had never had a genuine experience.

She found him boyish, unexpected, apparently indifferent, and even unaware, at times, of her existence on the vessel, then fairly effervescent with deviltry that left her all but gasping. He was not to be classified, fixed, or calculated, save in certain traits of fearlessness, generosity, and kindness to those most needful of a helping smile, a merry word, or a spell of relief from daily cares.

He commanded a certain admiration from the puzzled girl, but as yet her actual feelings towards him were quite unanalyzed. She was constantly finding herself astonished at the scope and variety of his information; she was glad to listen when he talked; she was frequently touched to the very heart by his tender care of one or two frail little beings on the ship to whom much of his time was devoted.

There they were, with the situation between them apparently commonplace to dullness—till this one particular day.

It was not a common day on the ocean. Despite the fact he was neither mariner nor meteorologist, Grenville felt some vast disturbance impending in all the lifeless air, regardless of the fact the barometer was steady and the calm, rainless spell had been exceptionally prolonged. It was not precisely a premonition that addressed itself to his senses; it was something he could not explain.

A wave of heat passed swiftly through his body, leaving a strange excitement in its train, as he paused for a second to wonder if the "symptoms" he sensed were concerned not at all with sea or weather, but wholly with Elaine.

He admitted the love—the wild, free, passionate love that had swept him away, past all safe anchorage, with her entry into his existence. He had made no effort to conceal it from himself, to deny its overwhelming force. He had cursed Gerald Fenton most heartily and consistently for casting him into this maelstrom of conflicting emotions, and daily and nightly he had waged mighty war with that fortunately absent individual, who had calmly accepted his challenge.

The trouble had come unbidden. Elaine was so wholly different from the girl represented by Fenton's photograph! The picture had seemed so lifeless—and she was so gloriously alive! That one fact alone seemed sufficient excuse to Grenville for all that had happened to him since. He had not been fully informed, he argued, respecting her wondrous charms.

The two weeks mentioned, with Elaine at his side, had certainly accomplished the world-old complication once more, despite all his hard and honest struggling. When the fight had ceased he did not even know. What Elaine's private attitude was towards himself he had taken no time to inquire. That part mattered less than nothing at all—at least as concerned the present. He had warned old Fenton what to expect, but now—by the gods—how deeply he was mired in the quandary!

He was certainly mighty hard hit, he confessed, but meantime was equally positive that the singular something he plainly felt, invading the air and telling its message to some faint, imperfect sense of his being, had nothing whatsoever to do with this business of passionate emotions. Yet not a sign of uneasiness on the part of officers and crew could his keenest wit discover, in any quarter of the iron craft plowing steadily on across the sea.

He had climbed to the topmost deck of the ship, where he and a carpenter, who was hewing out a boat thwart with a gleaming adze, were temporarily alone. It was not Grenville's manner of wooing to hover beside Elaine throughout the day or evening. He had done no wooing, as a matter of fact, beyond assuming a somewhat bold but unoffending guardianship, which she might have found refreshing had it not so frequently taken her breath with its very matter-of-factness.

At the present moment, as Grenville was well aware, she was somewhere down on the shaded portion of the promenade, where the erstwhile stir of tropic air had ebbed to utter sluggishness and finally expired. One of the purser's young assistants, dressed in wrinkled white duck, was dumbly adoring at her side.

Impatiently banishing Fenton from his thoughts, Grenville gazed idly at the sultry sky, and as idly at the carpenter, wielding the polished adze. When a deckhand presently called this workman away, Grenville took up the implement left behind, felt he would like to swing it just once at the root of the complication now arisen between himself and his distant friend—on whose money he was voyaging—and whose sweetheart his nature demanded for a mate—and, replacing the tool on the weathered planks, he thrust both hands in his pockets and paced to and fro, beside a pair of inverted lifeboats and a raft, that occupied most of the deck.

He finally flung himself down on a hatch, in the shade of a white-painted funnel, and plunged his warring faculties into concentrated study of a problem in mechanics involved in a new invention. On the back of a letter, drawn from an inside pocket, he drew black hieroglyphics, that to him were wheels and levers that relieved his state of mind.

Absorption claimed him for its own. The swift, weird changes of the sky and atmosphere escaped his engrossed attention. He was not even aware of her presence till Elaine had been standing for fully five minutes, a few feet only from his side.

When he looked up at last and beheld once more that singular glow and beauty in the depths of her luminous eyes, and felt the subtle flattery involved in the fact she had come to the place to find him, seek him out, a flood of tidal passion surged to his outermost veins.

It was just the one straw too much, this unforeseen encounter, with the smile upon her lips. His sturdy resolutions all went down in utter confusion before the wild gladness of his heart. Yet he made no outward sign for Elaine to read.

Calmly, to all appearances, he placed the letter in his pocket.

"I hope," said Elaine, "I haven't disrupted anything important."

He arose and gazed at her oddly.

"You have, Elaine," he answered, in a voice he strove hard to control. "You've not only disrupted everything heretofore moving along its accustomed path of order, law, and calm, but you've also upset all sorts of established institutions and raised some merry Hades."

A spirit of the lively old Nick was infusing with his youthful blood as he stood there gazing upon her. Elaine, however, either failed to detect its presence, or she failed to understand.

"I?" she said, "Mr. Grenville. I'm sorry. What have I done?"

He could not have done the conventional thing, the deliberate, calm, or expected thing, to save his immortal soul. His nature was far too honest, too unabashed. He came a step nearer—and then she knew, but she could not have moved at the moment had death been the oncoming penalty for remaining where she stood. She had never been so startled in her life.

They two were absolutely alone and unobserved. Of this the impulsive Grenville was aware—and the knowledge had fired a certain madness in his being he was powerless to quell.

"Elaine," he said, as he suddenly caught her unresisting hands, "you've put old Fenton entirely out of the game. You're going to marry me."

She was dimly conscious of pain in her hands, where he crushed them in his ardor. But her shocked surprise was uppermost, as she faced him with blazing eyes.

"Mr. Grenville!" she said. "Mr. Grenville—you—— To say—to speak——"

"Elaine," he interrupted gayly, bright devils dancing in his boyish eyes, "it simply couldn't be helped. We were intended to meet—and were cut out for one another. So the hour must come when you'll pitch old Gerald's ring in the sea by order of the very Fates themselves!"

She snatched away her hands in indignation.

"For shame!" she cried in rising anger, her whole womanly being aflame with resistance to all his growing madness. "You haven't the slightest right in the world——"

"Right?" he repeated. "Right? I love you, Elaine! I love you! Haven't I said——"

"Oh, the treachery—the treachery to Gerald!" she cut in, with swiftly increasing emotion. "To say such things when your honor——"

"Wait!" he interrupted, eagerly. "I told him what he might expect from any such arrangement. I warned him precisely what might happen. He understood—accepted my conditions—made it a challenge—declared if I tried I couldn't win! And now——"

"You can't—you can't!—you can't!" she cried at him, angrily. "To think that Gerald—to think you'd dare——"

He suddenly caught her in his arms and crushed her against his breast. He kissed her on the mouth, despite her struggles.

"Elaine," he said, "you are mine—all mine—my sweetheart—my comrade—my mate!"

She finally planted her fists against his throat and thrust him from her in fury.

"You brute!" she answered, sobbing in her anger. "I hate you—I loathe you—despise you utterly! I wish I might never see your face again!"

"I'll make you love me, Elaine," he answered, white at last with intensity and deep-going passion. "I'll make you love me, as I love you—as madly—as wholly—as wondrously—before