The Gay Cockade Part 6

She had on a white-crepe _peignoir_, and there was no color in her cheeks. Her skin had the soft whiteness of a rose petal. Her eyes were like stars. As I lay there and looked at her I wondered if it was Anthony's kisses or the memory of Olaf's singing which had made her eyes s.h.i.+ne like that.

I had heard him sing, and I said so, "in church."

Her arms clasped her knees. "Isn't it queer that he goes to church and sings hymns?"

"Why queer? I go to church."

"Yes. But you are different. You belong to another generation, Elizabeth, and he doesn't look it."

I knew what she meant. I had thought the same thing when I first saw him walking up the aisle. "He has asked us to lunch with him to-morrow on his boat."

It was the first time that I had mentioned it. Somehow I had not cared to speak of it before Anthony.

She showed her surprise. "So soon? Doesn't that sound a little--pus.h.i.+ng?"

"It sounds as if he goes after a thing when he wants it."

"Yes, it does. I believe I should like to accept. But I can't to-morrow.

There's a clambake, and I have promised the crowd."

"He will ask you again."

"Will he? You can say 'yes' for Wednesday then. And I'll keep it."

"I am not sure that we had better accept."

"Why not?"

"Well, there's Anthony."

She slid from the bed and stood looking down at me. "You think he wouldn't like it?"

"I am afraid he wouldn't. And, after all, you are engaged to him, Nancy."

"Of course I am, but he is not my jailer. He does as he pleases and I do as I please."

"In my day lovers pleased to do the same thing."

"Did they? I don't believe it. They just pretended, and there is no pretense between Anthony and me"--she stooped and kissed me--"they just pretended, Elizabeth, and the reason that I love Anthony is because we don't pretend."

After that I felt that I need fear nothing. Nancy and Anthony--freedom and self-confidence--why should I try to match their ideals with my own of yesterday? Yet, as I laid my book aside, I resolved that Olaf should know of Anthony.

I had my opportunity the next day. Olaf came over to sit in my garden and again we had tea. He was much pleased when he knew that Nancy and I would be his guests on Wednesday.

"Come early. Do you swim? We can run the launch to the beach--or, better still, dive in the deeper water near my boat."

"Nancy swims," I told him. "I don't. And I am not sure that we can come early. Nancy and Anthony usually play golf in the morning."

"Who is Anthony?"

"Anthony Peak. The man she is going to marry."

He hesitated a moment, then said, "Bring him, too." His direct gaze met mine, and his direct question followed. "Does she love him?"

"Of course."

"It is not always 'of course.'" He stopped and talked of other things, but in some subtle fas.h.i.+on I was aware that my news had been a shock to him, and that he was trying to adjust himself to it, and to the difference that it must make in his att.i.tude toward Nancy.

When I told Nancy that Anthony had been invited, she demanded, "How did Olaf Th.o.r.esen know about him?"

"I told him you were engaged."

"But why, Elizabeth? Why shout it from the housetops?"

"Well, I didn't want him to be hurt."

"You are taking a lot for granted."

I shrugged my shoulders. "We won't quarrel, and a party of four is much nicer than three."

As it turned put, however, Anthony could not go. He was called back to Boston on business. That was where Fate again stepped in. It was, I am sure, those three days of Anthony's absence which turned the scale of Nancy's destiny. If he had been with us that first morning on the boat Olaf would not have dared....

Nancy wore her white linen and her gray-velvet coat, and a hat with a gull's wing. She carried her bathing suit. "He intends, evidently, to entertain us in his own way."

Olaf's yacht was modern, but there was a hint of the barbaric in its furnis.h.i.+ngs. The cabin into which we were shown and in which Nancy was to change was in strangely carved wood, and there was a wolfskin on the floor in front of the low bed. The coverlet was of a fine-woven red-silk cloth, weighed down by a border of gold and silver threads. On the wall hung a square of tapestry which showed a strange old s.h.i.+p with sails of blue and red and green, and with golden dragon-heads at stem and stern.

Nancy, crossing the threshold, said to Olaf, who had opened the door for us, "It is like coming into another world; as if you had set the stage, run up the curtain, and the play had begun."

"You like it? It was a fancy of mine to copy a description I found in an old book. King Olaf, the Thick-set, furnished a room like this for his bride."

Olaf, the Thick-set! The phrase fitted perfectly this strong, stocky, blue-eyed man, who smiled radiantly upon us as he shut the door and left us alone.

Nancy stood in the middle of the room looking about her. "I like it,"

she said, with a queer shake in her voice. "Don't you, Elizabeth?"

I liked it so much that I felt it wise to hide my pleasure in a pretense of indifference. "Well, it is original to say the least."

But it was more than original, it was poetic. It was--Melisande in the wood--one of Sinding's haunting melodies, an old Saga caught and fixed in color and carving.

In this glowing room Nancy in her white and gray was a cold and incongruous figure, and when at last she donned her dull cap, and the dull cloak that she wore over her swimming costume, she seemed a ghostly shadow of the bright bride whom that other Olaf had brought--a thousand years before--to his strange old s.h.i.+p.

I realize that what comes hereafter in this record must seem to the unimaginative overdrawn. Even now, as I look back upon it, it has a dream quality, as if it might never have happened, or as if, as Nancy had said, it was part of a play, which would be over when the curtain was rung down and the actors had returned to the commonplace.

But the actors in this drama have never returned to the commonplace. Or have they? Shall I ever know? I hope I may never know, if Nancy and Olaf have lost the glamour of their dreams.

Well, we found Olaf on deck waiting for us. In a sea-blue tunic, with strong white arms, and the dazzling fairness of his strong neck, he was more than ever like the figurehead on the old s.h.i.+p that I had seen in my childhood. He carried over his arm a cloak of the same sea-blue. It was this cloak which afterward played an important part in the mystery of Nancy's disappearance.