"Anthony and I are going for a walk," she said. "I will bring you some flowers for your bowls, Elizabeth."
It was just then that the yacht steamed into the harbor--majestically, like a slow-moving swan. I picked out the name with my sea-glasses, _The Viking_.
I handed the glasses to Nancy. "Never heard of it," she said. "Did you?"
"No," I answered. Most of the craft which came in were familiar, and I welcomed them each year.
"Some new-rich person probably," Nancy decided. "Ducky, I have a feeling that the owner of _The Viking_ bought it from the proceeds of pills or headache powders."
"Or pork."
I am not sure that Nancy and I were justified in our disdain--whale-oil has perhaps no greater claim to social distinction than bacon and ham or--pills.
The church bells were ringing, and I had to go down. Nancy stayed on the roof.
"Send Anthony up if he's there," she said; "we will sit here aloft like two cherubs and look down on you, and you will wish that you were with us."
But I knew that I should not wish it; that I should be glad to walk along the shaded streets with my friends and neighbors, to pass the gardens that were yellow with sunlight, and gay with larkspur and foxglove and hollyhocks, and to sit in the pew which was mine by inheritance.
Anthony was down-stairs. He was a tall, perfectly turned out youth, and he greeted me in his perfect manner.
"Nancy is on the roof," I told him, "and she wants you to come up."
"So you are going to church? Pray for me, Elizabeth."
Yet I knew he felt that he did not need my prayers. He had Nancy, more money than he could spend, and life was before him. What more, he would ask, could the gods give?
I issued final instructions to my maids about the dinner and put on my hat. It was a rather superlative hat and had come from Fifth Avenue. I spend the spring and fall in New York and buy my clothes at the smartest places. The ladies of Nantucket have never been provincial in their fashions. Our ancestors shopped in the marts of the world. When our captains sailed the seas they brought home to their womenfolk the treasures of loom and needle from Barcelona and Bordeaux, from Bombay and Calcutta, London and Paris and Tokio.
And perhaps because of my content in my new hat, perhaps because of the pleasant young pair of lovers which I had left behind me in the old house, perhaps because of the shade and sunshine, and the gardens, perhaps because of the bells, the world seemed more than ever good to me as I went on my way.
My pew in the church is well toward the middle. My ancestors were modest, or perhaps they assumed that virtue. They would have neither the highest nor the lowest seat in the synagogue.
It happens, therefore, that strangers who come usually sit in front of me. I have a lively curiosity, and I like to look at them. In the winter there are no strangers, and my mind is, I fancy, at such times, more receptive to the sermon.
I was early and sat almost alone in the great golden room whose restraint in decoration suggests the primitive bareness of early days. Gradually people began to come in, and my attention was caught by the somewhat unusual appearance of a man who walked up the aisle preceded by the usher.
He was rather stocky as to build, but with good, square military shoulders and small hips. He wore a blue reefer, white trousers, and carried a yachtsman's cap. His profile as he passed into his pew showed him young, his skin slightly bronzed, his features good, if a trifle heavy.
Yet as he sat down and I studied his head, what seemed most significant about him was his hair. It was reddish-gold, thick, curled, and upstanding, like the hair on the head of a lovely child, or in the painting of a Titian or a Tintoretto.
In a way he seemed out of place. Young men of his type so rarely came to church alone. Indeed, they rarely came to church at all. He seemed to belong to the out-of-doors--to wide spaces. I was puzzled, too, by a faint sense of having seen him before.
It was in the middle of the sermon that it all connected up. Years ago a ship had sailed into the harbor, and I had been taken down to see it. I had been enchanted by the freshly painted figurehead--a strong young god of some old Norse tale, with red-gold hair and a bright blue tunic. And now in the harbor was _The Viking_, and here, in the shadow of a perfectly orthodox pulpit, sat that strong young god, more glorious even than my memory of his wooden prototype.
He seemed to be absolutely at home--sat and stood at the right places, sang the hymns in a delightful barytone which was not loud, but which sounded a clear note above the feebler efforts of the rest of us.
It has always been my custom to welcome the strangers within our gates, and I must confess to a preference for those who seem to promise something more than a perfunctory interchange.
So as my young viking came down the aisle, I held out my hand. "We are so glad to have you with us."
He stopped at once, gave me his hand, and bent on me his clear gaze. "Thank you." And then, immediately: "You live here? In Nantucket?"
"Yes."
"All the year round?"
"Practically."
"That is very interesting." Again his clear gaze appraised me. "May I walk a little way with you? I have no friends here, and I want to ask a lot of questions about the island."
The thing which struck me most as we talked was his utter lack of self-consciousness. He gave himself to the subject in hand as if it were a vital matter, and as if he swept all else aside. It is a quality possessed by few New Englanders; it is, indeed, a quality possessed by few Americans. So when he offered to walk with me, it seemed perfectly natural that I should let him. Not one man in a thousand could have made such a proposition without an immediate erection on my part of the barriers of conventionality. To have erected any barrier in this instance would have been an insult, to my perception of the kind of man with whom I had to deal.
He was a gentleman, individual, and very much in earnest; and more than all, he was immensely attractive. There was charm in that clear blue gaze of innocence. Yet it was innocence plus knowledge, plus something which as yet I could not analyze.
He left me at my doorstep. I found that he had come to the island not to play around for the summer at the country clubs and on the bathing beach, but to live in the past--see it as it had once been--when its men went down to the sea in ships. And because there was still so much that we had to say to each other, I asked him to have a cup of tea with me, "this afternoon at four."
He accepted at once, with his air of sweeping aside everything but the matter in hand. I entered the house with a sense upon me of high adventure. I could not know that I was playing fate, changing in that moment the course of Nancy's future.
* * * * *
Dinner was at one o'clock. It seems an impossible hour to people who always dine at night. But on the Sabbath we Nantucketers eat our principal meal when we come home from church.
Nancy and Anthony protested as usual. "Of course you can't expect us to dress."
Nancy sat down at the table with her hat on, and minus the velvet coat. She was a bit disheveled and warm from her walk. She had brought in a great bunch of blue vetch and pale mustard, and we had put it in the center of the table in a bowl of gray pottery. My dining-room is in gray and white and old mahogany, and Nancy had had an eye to its coloring when she picked the flowers. They would not have fitted in with the decorative scheme of my library, which is keyed up, or down, to an antique vase of turquoise glaze, or to the drawing-room, which is in English Chippendale with mulberry brocade.
We had an excellent dinner, served by my little Portuguese maid. Nancy praised the lobster bisque and Anthony asked for a second helping of roast duck. They had their cigarettes with their coffee.
Long before we came to the coffee, however, Anthony had asked in his pleasant way of the morning service.
"Tell us about the sermon, Elizabeth."
"And the text," said Nancy.
I am apt to forget the text, and they knew it. It was always a sort of game between us at Sunday dinner, in which they tried to prove that my attention had strayed, and that I might much better have stayed at home, and thus have escaped the bondage of dogma and of dressing up.
I remembered the text, and then I told them about Olaf Thoresen.
Nancy lifted her eyebrows. "The pills man? Or was it--pork?"
"It was probably neither. Don't be a snob, Nancy."
She shrugged her shoulders. "It was you who said 'pork,' Elizabeth."
"He is coming to tea."
"To-day?"
"Yes."
"Sorry," said Nancy. "I'd like to see him, but I have promised to drive Bob Needham to 'Sconset for a swim."
Anthony had made the initial engagement--to play tennis with Mimi Sears, "Provided, of course, that you have no other plans for me," he had told Nancy, politely.
She had no plans, nor would she, under the circumstances, have urged them. That was their code--absolute freedom. "We'll be a lot happier if we don't tie each other up."