David Poindexter's Disappearance, and Other Tales Part 5

"Who?--what have you been saying, my dear?" inquired Aunt Corwin, rousing herself from the perusal of a letter. "Here's Sarah writes that Frank Redmond was to sail from Havre the 20th; so he won't be here for a week or ten days yet."

"Well, he might not have come at all," said the girl, coloring slightly. "I'm sure I didn't think he would, when he went away."

"You are both of you a year older and wiser," said the widow, meditatively; "and you have learned, I hope, not to irritate a man needlessly. I never irritated Corwin in all my life. They don't understand it."

"Here comes Mr. Haymaker," observed Miss Leithe. "I shall ask him."

"Don't ask him in," said Mrs. Corwin, retiring; "he chatters like an organ-grinder."

"Oh, good-morning, Miss Mary!" exclaimed Mr. Haymaker, as he mounted the steps of the veranda, with his hands extended and his customary effusion. "How charming you are looking after your bath and your walk and all! Did you ever see such a charming morning? I never was at a place I liked so much as Squittig Point; the new Newport, I call it--eh? the new Newport. So fas.h.i.+onable already, and only been going, as one might say, three or four years! Such charming people here! Oh, by-the-way, whom do you think I ran across just now? You wouldn't know him, though--been abroad since before you were born, I should think.

Most charming man I ever met, and awfully wealthy. Ran across him in Europe--Paris, I think it was--stop! or was it Vienna? Well, never mind. Drayton, that's his name; ever hear of him? Ambrose Drayton. Made a great fortune in the tea-trade; or was it in the mines? I've forgotten. Well, no matter. Great traveler, too--Africa and the Corea, and all that sort of thing; and fought under Garibaldi, they say; and he had the charge of some diplomatic affair at Pekin once. The quietest, most gentlemanly fellow you ever saw. Oh, you must meet him.

He's come back to stay, and will probably spend the summer here. I'll get him and introduce him. Oh, he'll be charmed--we all shall."

"What sort of a looking person is he?" Miss Leithe inquired.

"Oh, charming--just right! Trifle above medium height; rather lighter weight than I am, but graceful; grayish hair, heavy mustache, blue eyes; style of a retired English colonel, rather. You know what I mean--trifle reticent, but charming manners. Stop! there he goes now--see him? Just stopping to light a cigar--in a line with the light-house. Now he's thrown away the match, and walking on again.

That's Ambrose Drayton. Introduce him on the sands this afternoon. How is your good aunt to-day? So sorry not to have seen her! Well, I must be off; awfully busy to-day. Good-by, my dear Miss Mary; see you this afternoon. Good-by. Oh, make my compliments to your good aunt, won't you? Thanks. So charmed! _Au revoir_."

"Has that fool gone?" demanded a voice from within.

"Yes, Auntie," the young lady answered.

"Then come in to your dinner," the voice rejoined, accompanied by the sound of a chair being drawn up to a table and sat down upon. Mary Leithe, after casting a glance after the retreating figure of Mr.

Haymaker and another toward the light-house, pa.s.sed slowly through the wire-net doors and disappeared.

Mr. Drayton had perforce engaged his accommodations at the hotel, all the cottages being either private property or rented, and was likewise constrained, therefore, to eat his dinner in public. But Mr. Drayton was not a hater of his species, nor a fearer of it; and though he had not acquired precisely our American habits and customs, he was disposed to be as little strange to them as possible. Accordingly, when the gong sounded, he entered the large dining-room with great intrepidity. The arrangement of tables was not continuous, but many small tables, capable of accommodating from two to six, were dotted about everywhere.

Mr. Drayton established himself at the smallest of them, situated in a part of the room whence he had a view not only of the room itself, but of the blue sea and yellow rocks on the other side. This preliminary feat of generals.h.i.+p accomplished, he took a folded dollar bill from his pocket and silently held it up in the air, the result being the speedy capture of a waiter and the introduction of dinner.

But at this juncture Mr. Haymaker came pitching into the room, as his nature was, and pinned himself to a standstill, as it were, with his eyegla.s.s, in the central aisle of tables. Drayton at once gave himself up for lost, and therefore received Mr. Haymaker with kindness and serenity when, a minute or two later, he came plunging up, in his usual ecstasy of sputtering amiability, and seated himself in the chair at the other side of the table with an air as if everything were charming in the most charming of all possible worlds, and he himself the most charming person in it.

"My dear Drayton, though," exclaimed Mr. Haymaker, in the interval between the soup and the bluefish, "there is some one here you must know--most charming girl you ever knew in your life, and has set her heart on knowing you. We were talking about you this morning--Miss Mary Leithe. Lovely name, too; pity ever to change it--he! he! he! Why, you must have seen her about here; has an old aunt, widow of Jim Corwin, who's dead and gone these five years. You recognize her, of course?"

"Not as you describe her," said Mr. Drayton, helping his friend to fish.

"Oh, the handsomest girl about here; tallish, wavy brown hair, soft brown eyes, the loveliest-shaped eyes in the world, my dear fellow; complexion like a t.i.tian, figure slender yet, but promising. A way of giving you her hand that makes you wish she would take your heart,"

pursued Mr. Haymaker, impetuously filling his mouth with bluefish, during the disposal of which he lost the thread of his harangue.

Drayton, however, seemed disposed to recover it for him.

"Is this young lady from New England?" he inquired.

"New-Yorker by birth," responded the ever-vivacious Haymaker; "father a Southern man; mother a Bostonian. Father died eight or nine years after marriage; mother survived him six years; girl left in care of old Mrs.

Corwin--good old creature, but vague--very vague. Don't fancy the marriage was a very fortunate one; a little friction, more or less.

Leithe was rather a wild, unreliable sort of man; Mrs. Leithe a woman not easily influenced--immensely charming, though, and all that, but a trifle narrow and set. Well, you know, it was this way: Leithe was an immensely wealthy man when she married him; lost his money, struggled along, good deal of friction; Mrs. Leithe probably felt she had made a mistake, and that sort of thing. But Miss Mary here, very different style, looks like her mother, but softer; more in her, too. Very little money, poor girl, but charming. Oh! you must know her."

"What did you say her mother's maiden name was?"

"Maiden name? Let me see. Why--oh, no--oh, yes--Cleveland, Mary Cleveland."

"Mary Cleveland, of Boston; married Hamilton Leithe, about nineteen years ago. I used to know the lady. And this is her daughter! And Mary Cleveland is dead!--Help yourself, Haymaker. I never take more than one course at this hour of the day."

"But you must let me introduce you, you know," mumbled Haymaker, through his succotash.

"I hardly know," said Drayton, rubbing his mustache. "Pardon me if I leave you," he added, looking at his watch. "It is later than I thought."

Nothing more was seen of Drayton for the rest of that day. But the next morning, as Mary Leithe sat on the Bowlder Rock, with a book on her lap, and her eyes on the bathers, and her thoughts elsewhere, she heard a light, leisurely tread behind her, and a gentlemanly, effective figure made its appearance, carrying a malacca walking-stick, and a small telescope in a leather case slung over the shoulder.

"Good-morning, Miss Leithe," said this personage, in a quiet and pleasant voice. "I knew your mother before you were born, and I can not feel like a stranger toward her daughter. My name is Ambrose Drayton.

You look something like your mother, I think."

"I think I remember mamma's having spoken of you," said Mary Leithe, looking up a little shyly, but with a smile that was the most winning of her many winning manifestations. Her upper lip, short, but somewhat fuller than the lower one, was always alive with delicate movements; the corners of her mouth were blunt, the teeth small; and the smile was such as Psyche's might have been when Cupid waked her with a kiss.

"It was here I first met your mother," continued Drayton, taking his place beside her. "We often sat together on this very rock. I was a young fellow then, scarcely older than you, and very full of romance and enthusiasm. Your mother--". He paused a moment, looking at his companion with a grave smile in his eyes. "If I had been as dear to her as she was to me," he went on, "you would have been our daughter."

Mary looked out upon the bathers, and upon the azure bay, and into her own virgin heart. "Are you married, too?" she asked at length.

"I was cut out for an old bachelor, and I have been true to my destiny," was his reply. "Besides, I've lived abroad till a month or two ago, and good Americans don't marry foreign wives."

"I should like to go abroad," said Mary Leithe.

"It is the privilege of Americans," said Drayton. "Other people are born abroad, and never know the delight of real travel. But, after all, America is best. The life of the world culminates here. We are the prow of the vessel; there may be more comfort amids.h.i.+ps, but we are the first to touch the unknown seas. And the foremost men of all nations are foremost only in so far as they are at heart American; that is to say, America is, at present, even more an idea and a principle than it is a country. The nation has perhaps not yet risen to the height of its opportunities. So you have never crossed the Atlantic?"

"No; my father never wanted to go; and after he died, mamma could not."

"Well, our American Emerson says, you know, that, as the good of travel respects only the mind, we need not depend for it on railways and steamboats."

"It seems to me, if we never moved ourselves, our minds would never really move either."

"Where would you most care to go?"

"To Rome, and Jerusalem, and Egypt, and London."

"Why?"

"They seem like parts of my mind that I shall never know unless I visit them."

"Is there no part of the world that answers to your heart?"

"Oh, the beautiful parts everywhere, I suppose."

"I can well believe it," said Drayton, but with so much simplicity and straightforwardness that Mary Leithe's cheeks scarcely changed color.

"And there is beauty enough here," he added, after a pause.

"Yes; I have always liked this place," said she, "though the cottages seem a pity."

"You knew the old farm-house, then?"

"Oh, yes; I used to play in the farm-yard when I was a little girl.

After my father died, Mamma used to come here every year. And my aunt has a cottage here now. You haven't met my aunt, Mr. Drayton?"