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

Grenville's voice was hard and strange.

"It was barely his right to know that we were coming. I could do no less, as you'll certainly agree."

His speeches were constrained, unnatural, as Elaine had instantly felt. Her own were scarcely less embarrassed—after all these months when their entire world had comprised themselves alone. It seemed a monstrous error that anything but free, unfettered companionship and candor should exist between them now.

"I know," she said. "Of course." She added, after a moment, "It seems so peculiar, that's all—to—resume as we were before."

He was looking at his fist, for no good reason in the world.

"It is what you have hoped for every day."

"To get away from the Dyaks—why, of course."

Another silence supervened. After three unsuccessful efforts at speech, Elaine at last found the voice and the courage for a question:

"Do you wish to be—best man?"

Grenville spread out his fingers, for further inspection.

"I probably shouldn't have suggested it otherwise."

She turned upon him impulsively. "Sidney, are you absolutely honest?"

"Oh, I wouldn't trouble old Diogenes to get out of his grave and look me up," he answered, in his customary spirit, "but I've got a faint idea what honor means."

How well she knew his various manners of evasion! Her heart was pounding furiously. She leaned with all her weight against the rail, as if for fear he must hear its clamorous confessions.

She had never been so excited in her life—or more courageous. Likewise she felt she possessed certain God-given rights that were poised at the brink of disaster. For a love like hers comes never lightly and is not to be lightly dismissed. Her utterance was difficult, but mastered.

"One night—in the smoke—on the island—when we might have died of thirst—and you came with water—— You remember what you said?"

"Concerning what?"

"Concerning—love."

He was gripping a stanchion fiercely; his fingers were white with the strain.

"Vaguely—— I think I was exhausted."

"Oh! you're not—you're not honest at all!" she suddenly exploded. "That day of the wreck—on the steamer—you know what you said to me then! And any man who has acted so nobly, so thoughtfully——"

He turned and gripped the small, soft hand by his coat-sleeve on the rail.

"Don't do it, little woman—don't do it!" he said, in a low voice, charged with passion. "You told me some stinging truths that day, and now—they're truer than ever!"

"I didn't!" she said, no longer master of her feelings. "I didn't tell the truth! I said I hated—said I loathed—— And you said I'd throw his ring in the sea—and you said you'd make me—like you—some—and you know that I couldn't help liking you now—when you've treated me so horribly all the time! And after everything we've done together——"

"Elaine!" he interrupted, hoarsely, "when did you throw away his ring?"

"After the tiger—the night I gave you the cap, and you acted so hatefully and mean! It bounced and went into the water."

He was white, and tremendously shaken, while gleams of incandescence burned deeply in his eyes. How he stayed the lawless impulse to take her to his arms he never knew. He dropped her hand and turned away, with a savage note of pain upon his lips.

"Good Heavens!" he said, "why don't you help me a little? I had no right then! I have no right now! ... I'm going to take you home to Fenton, if it's the very last act of my life!"

She, too, was white and trembling.

"I know what you mean—you never loved! You don't know the meaning of the word!"

"All right," he said. "We'll let it go at that."

"Oh, you're perfectly horrid!" she suddenly cried, the hot tears springing to her eyes. "I refuse to be taken back to Gerald! I refuse to have anything more to do with any selfish man in the world!"

She retreated a little towards the saloon, her two hands going swiftly to a gleaming band that all but spanned her waist.

"And there's your old girdle, with Gerald's ring, that you made me throw away!" she added, flinging the tiger's collar towards the sea.

It struck on a stanchion, bounded to the deck, and settled against a near-by chair. She waited a second, instantly ashamed, and longing to beg his forgiveness. But he leaned as before against the rail, his eyes still bent upon the water.

Weakly, with drooping spirits, Elaine retreated through an open door, still watching, in hopes he would turn and call her back. Then, stoutly suppressing her choking and pent emotions, she fled to the dismal comfort of her stateroom, and, falling face downward in her narrow berth, surrendered to the vast relief of sobbing.

That one more shock of surprise could overtake the returning castaways before the final landing could be accomplished would have seemed incredible to either Grenville or Elaine—and yet it came.

They had spent a number of wretched days—days far more miserable and hope-destroying than any their dire experience had brought into being, as the mere result of that final scene enacted in the moonlight by the rail.

The steamer had touched in the night at some unimportant, outlying port of call to which no one had paid the tribute of interest usual on the sea. A single male passenger had boarded.

The man was Gerald Fenton. The message dispatched from Colombo had fetched him, post haste, to this midway ground for the meeting. But the meeting occurred in a manner wholly unexpected.

Like the wholly considerate gentleman he was, Fenton had made all preparations for removing the startling elements from the fact of his presence on the boat. Like so many of life's little schemings, however, the plans went all "aglee."

Elaine not only did not linger in her stateroom in the morning late enough to receive his note from the stewardess, but, when she hastened up to the topmost deck for her early morning exercise before the more lazy should appear, she literally ran into Fenton's arms at the head of the narrow stairs.

Her surprise could hardly have been greater. She recoiled from the contact automatically, before she had time to see who it was with whom she had collided. Then a note of astonishment broke from her lips as she halted, leadenly.

"Why—Gerald!" she managed to stammer, without the slightest hint of gladness in her tone. "Here?"

"Well, little girl!" he answered, smilingly; and, coming to her in his quiet way, he took her hands to greet her with a kiss.

A note of uncertainty forced itself to audible expression as she slightly retreated from his proffered caress and received it on her cheek.

"Well! well!" Fenton continued, "you're certainly fit—and brown! You couldn't have had the note I sent to break the news. I tried to give you warning."

"No," she said, constrainedly, "I've had no word. How did you get here—come aboard? I don't see how—— It took me so by surprise."

"I'm sorry," he said, his smile losing something of its brightness. "I boarded at midnight, when the steamer touched at Fargo. When I got Sid's wholly incredible wire that you were both safe and well and coming home—— But how is the good old rascal?"

Elaine's constraint increased.

"Quite well, I believe—as far as I know."

"Isn't he with you, here on the boat, going home?"

"Oh, yes, he's on the steamer."

Fenton was groping, without a woman's intuitions, through the something he felt in the air.

"Don't you like him, Elaine?" he asked her, bluntly. "What's wrong?"

"Why—nothing's wrong," she answered, unconvincingly. "It's just the surprise of meeting you like this."

"I'm sorry," he said, as he had before, his eyes now entirely smileless. "I might have managed it better, I suppose—— Aren't you a little bit glad to see me?"

Elaine attempted a smile and a manner more cordial. "Of course—I'm delighted! But it takes me just a minute or so to realize it's really you."

"Never mind. Take your time," he told her, indulgently. "Perfect miracle, you know, that you and old Sid should have come through the wreck of the 'Inca'—the sole survivors of the accident—and lived out there—somewhere—on an island, I hear—and now be nearing home. I'm eager to hear the story."

"Yes," she agreed, "it doesn't seem real to me, now. It's more like a long, strange dream."

"I have only heard a little from the captain," he continued, forcing a conversation which he felt was wholly unspontaneous and hardly even congenial.

"Naturally, all his information——"

She saw his eyes quickly brighten as his gaze went past her to the stairs.

"Sid!" he cried, moving swiftly forward; and Grenville appeared on the deck.

His face was suddenly reddened, beneath the veneer of tan. But the boyish joy with which he rushed for Fenton was a heartening thing to see.

The two simply gripped, with might and main, and hammered each other with one free hand apiece, and laughed, and called one another astonishing names till it seemed they might explode.

"You savage! You tough old Redskin!" Fenton finally managed to articulate, distinctly. "If it isn't yourself as big as life! And I want you to know I haven't made your fortune—not exactly—yet—but it's certain at last. And how about your winning my little girl? Speak up, you caveman of the—— Oh, Elaine!"

But Elaine had fled the scene.

That moment began the tug at the ties of friendship and the test of the souls of the three. It was not a time of happiness that thereupon ensued. Elaine avoided both the men as far as possible. Grenville alone seemed natural, and yet even his smiles were tinged with the artificial.

He was glad to relate their varied adventures—the tale of the perils through which they had finally won. But how much of it all Gerald Fenton really heard no man could with certainty tell.

Fenton was neither a self-conceited person nor a blind man, groping through life. Through the stem of his finely colored calabash he puffed many a thought, along with his fragrant tobacco fume, and revolved it in his brain.

Between certain lines of Grenville's story he read deep happenings. That Sidney had saved and preserved Elaine, and battled for her comfort and her very life, against all but overwhelming odds, was a fact that required no rehearsal.

Mere propinquity, as Fenton knew, has always been the match-maker incomparable, throughout the habited world. Add to the quite exceptional propinquity of a tropic-island existence a splendid and unfaltering heroism in Grenville, together with a mastery of every situation, months of daily service and devotion, and the rare good looks that Sidney had certainly developed—and what wonder Elaine should be changed?

The change in her bearing had struck him at once at the moment of their meeting by the stairs. He had never got past that since. When at length his course was clearly defined and his resolution firmly fixed, it still required skillful maneuvering on Fenton's part to manage the one little climax on which he finally determined.

But night, with her shadows, her softening moods, and her veiling ways of comfort, was an ally worthy of his trust. When he finally engineered the unsuspicious Grenville to the upper deck, where Elaine had already been enticed, evasion of the issue was done.

"It's amazing," said Fenton, in a pleasant, easy manner, "how I am becoming the talker of the crowd, when both you fond adventurers should be spilling out lectures by the mile. However, such is life." He paused for a moment, but the others did not speak.

"The genuine wonder of it all," he presently continued, "is seeing you both come back thus, safe and sound. I underwent my bit of grief when the news of the monstrous disaster finally arrived, as, of course, did many another. I thought I had lost the dearest friend and the—well, the dearest two friends—the dearest two beings in the world to me, in one huge cataclysm."

He paused once more and relighted his pipe. The flame of his match threw a rosy glow on the two set faces on either side of his position, as well as on his own. No one looked at anyone else, and the two still failed to answer.

"Well—here you both are!" the smoker resumed,