"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 fashion 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 attitude toward Nancy.
* * * * *
When I told Nancy that Anthony had been invited, she demanded, "How did Olaf Thoresen 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 furnishings. 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 ship 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 ship.
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 ship 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.
His quick glance swept Nancy--the ghostly Nancy in gray, with only the blue of her eyes, and that touch of artificial pink in her cheeks to redeem her from somberness. He shook his head with a gesture of impatience.
"I don't like it," he said, abruptly. "Why do you deaden your beauty with dull colors?"
Nancy's eyes challenged him. "If it is deadened, how do you know it is beauty?"
"May I show you?" Again there was that tense excitement which I had noticed in the garden.
"I don't know what you mean," yet in that moment the color ran up from her neck to her chin, the fixed pink spots were lost in a rush of lovely flaming blushes.
For with a sudden movement he had snatched off her cap, and had thrown the cloak around her. The transformation was complete. It was as if he had waved a wand. There she stood, the two long, thick braids, which she had worn pinned close under her cap, falling heavily like molten metal to her knees, the blue cloak covering her--heavenly in color, matching her eyes, matching the sea, matching the sky, matching the eyes of Olaf.
I think I must have uttered some sharp exclamation, for Olaf turned to me. "You see," he said, triumphantly, "I have known it all the time. I knew it the first time that I saw her in the garden."
Nancy had recovered herself. "But I can't stalk around the streets in a blue cloak with my hair down."
He laughed with her. "Oh, no, no. But the color is only a symbol. Modern life has robbed you of vivid things. Even your emotions. You are--afraid--" He caught himself up. "We can talk of that after our swim. I think we shall have a thousand things to talk about."
Nancy held out her hand for her cap, but he would not give it to her. "Why should you care if your hair gets wet? The wind and the sun will dry it--"
I was amazed when I saw that she was letting him have his way. Never for a moment had Anthony mastered her. For the first time in her life Nancy was dominated by a will that was stronger than her own.
I sat on deck and watched them as they swam like two young sea gods, Nancy's bronze hair bright under the sun. Olaf's red-gold crest....
The blue cloak lay across my knee. Nancy had cast it off as she had descended into the launch. I had examined it and had found it of soft, thick wool, with embroidery of a strange and primitive sort in faded colors. Yet the material of the cloak had not faded, or, if it had, there remained that clear azure, like the Virgin's cloak in old pictures.
I knew now why Olaf had wanted Nancy on board, why he had wanted to swim with her in the sea which was as blue as her eyes and his own. It was to reveal her to himself as the match of the women of the Sagas. I found this description later in one of the old books in the ship's library:
* * * * *
Then Hallgerd was sent for, and came with two women. She wore a blue woven mantle ... her hair reached down to her waist on both sides, and she tucked it under her belt.
And there was, too, this account of a housewife in her "kyrtil":
The dress-train was trailing, The skirt had a blue tint; Her brow was brighter, Her neck was whiter Than pure new fallen snow.
In other words, that one glance at Nancy in the garden, when he had risen at her entrance, had disclosed to Olaf the fundamental in her. He had known her as a sea-maiden. And she had not known it, nor I, nor Anthony.
* * * * *
Luncheon was served on deck. We were waited on by fair-haired, but very modern Norsemen. The crew on _The Viking_ were all Scandinavians. Most of them spoke English, and there seemed nothing uncommon about any of them. Yet, in the mood of the moment, I should have felt no surprise had they served us in the skins of wild animals, or had set sail like pirates with the two of us captive on board.
I will confess, also, to a feeling of exaltation which clouded my judgment. I knew that Olaf was falling in love with Nancy, and I half guessed that Nancy might be falling in love with Olaf, yet I sat there and let them do it. If Anthony should ever know! Yet how can he know? As I weigh it now, I am not sure that I have anything with which to reproach myself, for the end, at times, justifies the means, and the Jesuitical theory had its origin, perhaps, in the profound knowledge that Fate does not always use fair methods in gaining her ends.