PAGE 4
The Man On The Beach
by
“Your skirt is ruined, your hair is coming down, your hat is half off your head, and your shoes–in Heaven’s name, Maria! what HAVE you done with your shoes?”
Maria had exhibited a slim stockinged foot from under her skirt. It was scarcely three fingers broad, with an arch as patrician as her nose. “Somewhere between here and the carriage,” she answered; “Dick can run back and find it, while he is looking for your brooch, mamma. Dick’s so obliging.”
The robust voice of Dick thundered, but the wasted figure of Dick feebly ploughed its way back, and returned with the missing buskin.
“I may as well carry them in my hand like the market girls at Saumur, for we have got to wade soon,” said Miss Maria, sinking her own terrors in the delightful contemplation of the horror in her parent’s face, as she pointed to a shining film of water slowly deepening in a narrow swale in the sands between them and the cabin.
“It’s the tide,” said the elder gentleman. “If we intend to go on we must hasten; permit me, my dear madam,” and before she could reply he had lifted the astounded matron in his arms, and made gallantly for the ford. The gentle Maria cast an ominous eye on her brother, who, with manifest reluctance, performed for her the same office. But that acute young lady kept her eyes upon the preceding figure of the elder gentleman, and seeing him suddenly and mysteriously disappear to his armpits, unhesitatingly threw herself from her brother’s protecting arms,–an action which instantly precipitated him into the water,–and paddled hastily to the opposite bank, where she eventually assisted in pulling the elderly gentleman out of the hollow into which he had fallen, and in rescuing her mother, who floated helplessly on the surface, upheld by her skirts, like a gigantic and variegated water-lily. Dick followed with a single gaiter. In another minute they were safe on the opposite bank.
The elder lady gave way to tears; Maria laughed hysterically; Dick mingled a bass oath with the now audible surf; the elder gentleman, whose florid face the salt water had bleached, and whose dignity seemed to have been washed away, accounted for both by saying he thought it was a quicksand.
“It might have been,” said a quiet voice behind them; “you should have followed the sand dunes half a mile further to the estuary.”
They turned instantly at the voice. It was that of the Man on the Beach. They all rose to their feet and uttered together, save one, the single exclamation, “James!” The elder gentleman said “Mr. North,” and, with a slight resumption of his former dignity, buttoned his coat over his damp shirt front.
There was a silence, in which the Man on the Beach looked gravely down upon them. If they had intended to impress him by any suggestion of a gay, brilliant, and sensuous world beyond in their own persons, they had failed, and they knew it. Keenly alive as they had always been to external prepossession, they felt that they looked forlorn and ludicrous, and that the situation lay in his hands. The elderly lady again burst into tears of genuine distress, Maria colored over her cheek-bones, and Dick stared at the ground in sullen disquiet.
“You had better get up,” said the Man on the Beach, after a moment’s thought, “and come up to the cabin. I cannot offer you a change of garments, but you can dry them by the fire.”
They all rose together, and again said in chorus, “James!” but this time with an evident effort to recall some speech or action previously resolved upon and committed to memory. The elder lady got so far as to clasp her hands and add, “You have not forgotten us–James, oh, James!”; the younger gentleman to attempt a brusque “Why, Jim, old boy,” that ended in querulous incoherence; the young lady to cast a half-searching, half-coquettish look at him; and the old gentleman to begin, “Our desire, Mr. North”–but the effort was futile. Mr. James North, standing before them with folded arms, looked from the one to the other.