It was to me an amazing attitude. In my young days lovers walked out on Sunday afternoons to the old cemetery, or on the moor, or along the beach, and came back at twilight together, and sat together after supper, holding hands.
I haven't the slightest doubt that Anthony held Nancy's hands, but there was nothing fixed about the occasions. They had done away with billing and cooing in the old sense, and what they had substituted seemed to satisfy them.
Anthony left about three, and I went up to get into something thin and cool, and to rest a bit before receiving my guest. I heard Nancy at the telephone making final arrangements with the Drakes. After that I fell asleep, and knew nothing more until Anita came up to announce that Mr. Thoresen was down-stairs.
Tea was served in the garden at the back of the house, where there were some deep wicker chairs, and roses in a riot of bloom.
"This is--enchanting--" said Olaf. He did not sit down at once. He stood looking about him, at the sun-dial, and the whale's jaw lying bleached on a granite pedestal, and at the fine old houses rising up around us. "It is enchanting. Do you know, I have been thinking myself very fortunate since you spoke to me in church this morning."
After that it was all very easy. He asked and I answered. "You see," he explained, finally, "I am hungry for anything that tells me about the sea. Three generations back we were all sailors--my great-grandfather and his fathers before him in Norway--and far back of that--the vikings." He drew a long breath. "Then my grandfather came to America. He settled in the West--in Dakota, and planted grain. He made money, but he was a thousand miles away from the sea. He starved for it, but he wanted money, and, as I have said, he made it. And my father made more money. Then I came. The money took me to school in the East--to college. My mother died and my father. And now the money is my own. I bought a yacht, and I have lived on the water. I can't get enough of it. I think that I am making up for all that my father and my grandfather denied themselves."
I can't in the least describe to you how he said it. There was a tenseness, almost a fierceness, in his brilliant blue eyes. Yet he finished up with a little laugh. "You see," he said, "I am a sort of Flying Dutchman--sailing the seas eternally, driven not by any sinister force but by my own delight in it."
"Do you go alone?"
"Oh, I have guests--at times. But I am often my own--good company--"
He stopped and rose. Nancy had appeared in the doorway. She crossed the porch and came down toward us. She was in her bathing suit and cap, gray again, with a line of green on the edges, and flung over her shoulders was a gray cloak. She was on her way to the stables--it was before the day of motor-cars on the island, those halcyon, heavenly days. The door was open and her horse harnessed and waiting for her. She could not, of course, pass us without speaking, and so I presented Olaf.
Anita had brought the tea, and Nancy stayed to eat a slice of thin bread and butter. "In this air one is always hungry," she said to Olaf, and smiled at him.
He did not smile back. He was surveying her with a sort of frowning intensity. She spoke of it afterward, "Does he always stare like that?" But I think that, in a way, she was pleased.
She drove her own horse, wrapped in her cloak and with an utter disregard to the informality of her attire. She would, I knew, gather up the Drakes and Bob Needham, likewise attired in bathing costumes, and they would all have tea on the other side of the island, naiad-like and utterly unconcerned. I did not approve of it, but Nancy did not cut her life to fit my pattern.
When she had gone, Olaf said to me, abruptly, "Why does she wear gray?"
"Oh, she has worked out a theory that repression in color is an evidence of advanced civilization. The Japanese, for example--"
"Why should civilization advance? It has gone far enough--too far--And she should wear a blue cloak--sea-blue--the color of her eyes--"
"And of yours." I smiled at him.
"Yes. Are they like hers?"
They were almost uncannily alike. I had noticed it when I saw them together. But there the resemblance stopped.
"She belongs to the island?"
"She lives in New York. But every drop of blood in her is seafaring blood."
"Good!" He sat for a moment in silence, then spoke of something else. But when he was ready to go, he included Nancy in an invitation. "If you and Miss Greer could lunch with me to-morrow on my yacht--"
I was not sure about Nancy's engagements, but I thought we might. "You can call us up in the morning."
Nancy brought the Drakes and Bob Needham back with her for supper, and Mimi Sears was with Anthony. Supper on Sunday is an informal meal--everything on the table and the servants out.
Nancy, clothed in something white and exquisite, served the salad. "So your young viking didn't stay, Elizabeth?"
"I didn't ask him."
It was then that she spoke of his frowning gaze. "Does he always stare like that?"
Anthony, breaking in, demanded, "Did he stare at Nancy?"
I nodded. "It was her eyes."
They all looked at me. "Her eyes?"
"Yes. He said that her cloak should have matched them."
Anthony flushed. He has a rather captious code for outsiders. Evidently Olaf had transgressed it.
"Is the man a dressmaker?"
"Of course not, Anthony."
"Then why should he talk of Nancy's clothes?"
"Well," Nancy remarked, "perhaps the less said about my clothes the better. I was in my bathing suit."
Anthony was irritable. "Well, why not? You had a right to wear what you pleased, but he did not have a right to make remarks about it."
I came to Olaf's defense. "You would understand better if you could see him. He is rather different, Anthony."
"I don't like different people," and in that sentence was a summary of Anthony's prejudices. He and Nancy mingled with their own kind. Anthony's friends were the men who had gone to the right schools, who lived in the right streets, belonged to the right clubs, and knew the right people. Within those limits, humanity might do as it pleased; without them, it was negligible, and not to be considered.
After supper the five of them were to go for a sail. There was a moon, and all the wonder of it.
Anthony was not keen about the plan. "Oh, look here, Nancy," he complained, "we have done enough for one day--"
"I haven't."
Of course that settled it. Anthony shrugged his shoulders and submitted. He did not share Nancy's almost idolatrous worship of the sea. It was the one fundamental thing about her. She bathed in it, swam in it, sailed on it, and she was never quite happy away from it.
I heard Anthony later in the hall, protesting. I had gone to the library for a book, and their voices reached me.
"I thought you and I might have one evening without the others."
"Oh, don't be silly, Anthony."
I think my heart lost a beat. Here was a lover asking his mistress for a moment--and she laughed at him. It did not fit in with my ideas of young romance.
Yet late that night I heard the murmur of their voices and looked out into the white night. They stood together by the sun-dial, and his arm was about her, her head on his shoulder. And it was not the first time that a pair of lovers had stood by that dial under the moon.
I went back to bed, but I could not sleep. I lighted my bedside lamp, and read _Vanity Fair_. I find Thackeray an excellent corrective when I am emotionally keyed up.
Nancy, too, was awake; I could see her light shining across the hall. She came in, finally, and sat on the foot of my bed.
"Your viking was singing as we passed his boat--"
"Singing?"
"Yes, hymns, Elizabeth. The others laughed, Anthony and Mimi, but I didn't laugh. His voice is--wonderful--"
She had on a white-crêpe _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 shine 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--pushing?"
"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."