Drowned Gold/Chapter 2
CHAPTER II
IT was at the very memorable reception given to a king and queen in the Princess Pier Concert Hall where I first met the third pawn of Fate. For a whole week we had been lying there, with gala decorations, in Torbay. There had been a display of illuminated ships, in which, I am proud to think, our own had not been outdone. From fighting-top to water-line we had pricked her out with toy lights, at the expense of much effort and of more work than comes when coaling. We had been overrun with visitors. We had been on constant parade. But never a day passed when I had not made occasion to see Miss Marty Sterritt!
The reception was much like all such. The guests had been allowed to inspect royalty at close range; there had been the customary national anthems, the disappearance of royalty, the lowering of the plush and gilt line that hedged them off from the others, and a fine band had reappeared in undress uniform. I had vainly tried to get a few words with Marty Sterritt, but had been discomfited by the fact that she seemed too popular to be left alone, and that there were many who craved introductions and the privilege of a number on her card. And in particular I noticed a German naval lieutenant, a junior, as could be told by his uniform. He was talking to her when I succeeded in giving her my salutations, and she was still laughing at something he had said. He bowed to me from the hips forward, as I came upon them, and she extended her white and capable hand.
"You must meet Count Waldo von Vennemann," she said, and introduced us. Even as I shook hands with him I remembered having heard his name frequently, not only from her own lips, but in connection with certain humorous escapades of dare-devilry, and that his rank alone had saved him from his Imperial Master's wrath. I admit, here and now, after all that has since happened, that I liked him. There was something magnetic in his frank smile, his hearty laugh, his clear eyes; yes, in his very youthfulness and virility. He spoke English without the slightest trace of an accent, and I learned, later, that his knowledge of America was astonishing.
"The count and I are old friends," Miss Sterritt said, and smiled as at some quaint recollection.
"Yes," he said, with his flashing smile. "Once when I bolted from home in quest of adventure, I worked for just five days for Mr. Henry Sterritt. Then he fired me!"
They laughed together, and she completed the story by adding, "Mr. Vennemann pretended to be a diver. He—a diver! And the worst of it was, after father discharged him, we couldn't get rid of him, because on the very night following his dismissal he called at our house, in dress-clothes, if you please, and offered father a cigar from a gold case, and asked how the salvaging business was proceeding since it had lost his valuable services!"
"But I got the best of it," the count parried. "I did get to watch the raising of the Scudder of Boston."
"By paying father passage and 'prog' money."
"But I got to see it, just the same, and twice they let me go down in a diver's suit—"
"When father wasn't there!"
"Of course! But I did, just the same."
He laughed heartily now, and I began to surmise that his reputation for strange pranks was not unearned. I actually began to respect him for his persistence; but I was not unaware of it when he calmly refused to be shaken off as Marty Sterritt took my arm and suggested that we get away from the somewhat over-warn: ballroom, and stroll out into the Pier Gardens for which Torquay is famed; for he walked with us, immaculate, distinguished, graceful, and conversational. I envied him his ability to entertain, as I have always envied those who can talk freely and fluently on any topic, for we who are called quiet men are not always unsociable by instinct: merely tongue-bound unfortunates, who spend much time in thinking what we might possibly say to prove that we are neither churls nor misanthropes.
I met the count aboard his own ship, where he made himself most agreeable, and, in turn, when he visited our cruiser, tried to return his hospitality; but I could not but feel a vague annoyance when, each time I visited the Sterritts, I found him there. And I admit this the more readily with the confession that never had I met one who absorbed so much of my thought as Marty Sterritt. The day when we received sailing orders was a sad one for me, who would have liked to loiter on the waters of Torbay, so conveniently within reach of Torquay and all it held, indefinitely. We slipped away after making our good-byes, and, as the cruiser felt the first big swell off Berry Head, capped with its ruined fort and modern light, I could see through my glasses two figures walking along the front by Princess Gardens, and knew them to be Marty Sterritt and Count Waldo von Vennemann. I sighed tempestuously, knowing that he had been left in a clear field to win her favor.
There was a strained diplomatic situation between our country and Turkey, and thither we went to lie idly through the fall months, wearying of Pera and Constantinople. Suddenly we returned westward, and awaited orders in Naples. And it was my turn for the clear field; for scarcely had we dropped anchor before an invitation came to visit the Sterritts, now domiciled in a hotel on the famous sea-front drive, and I lost no time. Captain Sterritt, despite all that climate and medical advice could do for him, was steadily failing. I was shocked by the change in his appearance. Moreover, there had come a great alteration in Marty, who seemed depressed, subdued, and fearful. I learned to know the longing to shield, and comfort, there in those days; for I gravely feared that the valiant old man was making his last fight, doggedly and grimly, but traveling steadily to defeat. Nature, against whom he had battled all his life, was preparing the stroke of grace.
Time and again words struggled within me to tell his daughter that if the spark of his life expired, I wished her to look to me as her rock of refuge. Time and again I stammered on the brink of telling all that was in my heart for her, and ever my tongue failed, curbed not only by my habitual reticence, but also by a new and overpowering shyness. And even then, while filled with pity for her, came a cablegram from my mother. My father was dead. Drowned in the sea that had been his throughout so much of his life! The little yawl that had been his delight had been his undoing, for it had failed to weather a storm. And there was something menacing in the appeal my mother sent, urging me to come home immediately, if leave could be secured, as my father's "business affairs demanded attention."
Through the infinite courtesy of that great admiral who has since gone to his rest, there was but small delay in securing leave, and in just fifteen days from the receipt of the cablegram, I entered the home of which I knew so little, where my mother waited my coming. It was a very sad reunion, because it was as if she had lost all moorings of life now that my father, who had been to her shield, shelter, and tower of strength, was gone. He had left a will, but it had not been read, being held for my return. The lawyer, who brought it to the house on the evening I telephoned him, was a very elderly man, such as my father would naturally have selected, and insisted on reading it aloud. It was a very useless and trying ceremony. It left everything he had in the world to me, his only son, "Trusting in my son's honor, which is without smirch or stain, to provide for his mother and be to her all that I have tried to be, and to give to her all the love that I have given both him and her throughout all my life since I have known her, and she gave him to me."
There was a letter with the will that was directed to me. I did not read it then, but sat with her throughout the evening, both silent, and staring into the flames that leaped up the big open fireplace that had been my father's great joy. Here he, too, had sat in the years of his restless retirement, undemonstrative save that, I know, he always sat with his arm around her, even as I did on that bleak December night. I did not read the letter immediately when, after bidding her good-night, I retired to my room, but stood looking about me with a strange sensation of suddenly realizing all the love that silent man of the sea had bestowed upon me in his own way. This home had been his one great extravagance. He had fought for the woman who had been his beacon, his ideal. And, with hard common sense and harsh self-appraisement, he had gone to a distinguished architect, told him how much he had to spend on that home, given him a certified check for fifty thousand dollars and told him to plan and build. There had been but one proviso in his retainer and instructions (for of this I learned from the lips of the architect himself, years later), that one room should be fitted to suit a sailor; that it should overlook the sea, and be within sound of the perpetual waves; that it should be a room to which a wearied mariner, come to rest, might enter as a haven, and with downcast eyes, as if ashamed of sentiment, he had concluded: "For that room, sir, shall belong, always, to my son, and, if God is so kind, to his sons when all of us are gone."
I switched off the lights and for a long time stood by the window, looking from the grateful warmth of modern heat out over the tops of the pine trees and the lawn, all snow-clad and white, toward the sea that now glittered under the cold winter moon. Thus, I doubted not, had my father stood, sometimes, thinking of the happiness he had planned for me when I, too, retired. And somehow, that night, I felt his presence in the room, and turned with a great yearning to speak to him. Ah, if it had been possible, on that night I should have been eloquent with all the unbounded memories of his wordless kindness, forgetting that it had ever been his way to hold me aloof.
Here, too, there was an ample grate and a glowing fire, rendering the elaborate heating system but a superfluity. I drew the shades and the hangings, and, by firelight alone, read his letter:
- To my boy, Tom (if ever this is read by you, which it may not be, inasmuch as the sea, or the intervention of God, may prohibit): You may have thought that, due to a very grievous failing of mine, I have never given you a father's affection, a father's caress, or a father's companionship. All of which I regret, for since that day when I first saw you, a tiny babe aboard the first ship I ever owned, the old Esperanza, you have been—always giving place to the great light of my life, your mother—the one being for whom I fought and strove. My limitations will have been defined, and all that I have done, and all in which I have failed, will have been totaled if this ever reaches your eyes. Suffice it that there have been but two beings in this world for whom I have done the best I could—my very utmost—your mother and you. I put you into the United States Navy because I am, first of all, an American, and believe that, next to the fealty due God Himself, there comes none other equal to that which a man owes his country. Also, I wished you to be a gentleman of the Navy, for no blackguard can therein survive. This letter will never be given you if you fail. It will not be put into your hands if I survive the woman who has been to me, regardless of all others, the greatest woman that God ever gave to man, your mother. It will not be read by you unless the will I have made has been read. One is a legal document; but this letter will be a codicil from the very heart of one who, though dumb in speech, and incapable in lavishment of outward caress, has loved you as no other man ever will. It is my last and sole request, and is based upon the following urgent reason: Your mother will need companionship from you, and you must give it!
- I therefore ask, that, if you are not indispensable to the service of your country, you shall resign and place yourself at her disposal, to comfort her last years, as I have tried to do.
- You will not, perhaps, be a rich man, as I had hoped, because times have changed, and steam has superseded us of the old school who trusted to fair winds, free sails, and a clean reputation for our profit. You have my consent to go into steam; but I wish you would, for the sake of one who loves you, your father, cling to the old name; for it has been dear to me because you were born aboard the Esperanza. You have been a good, obedient, and worthy son, of whom I am very proud. Reports for which I arranged have proven it; for there has never been a week when you were away from me that I did not have such report. May God bless you and prosper you, and make of you a strong staff to comfort your mother, for whom I shall wait with such patience as may be given in the Great and Last Port.
It was very dim in the room when I finished reading. The flames of the fire scintillated into innumerable broken flashes, through my tears, and I was glad that I was alone where none might observe my lack of repression. For an hour I sat bidding an unfaltering good-bye to the service that I had loved, and all the dreams that had arisen from it; but my hand did not falter when, after turning on the lights, I wrote my resignation from the United States Navy. The least I could give to that strange, silent, unemotional man, whose pride had held him aloof, but whose love had followed me from the hour of my birth, was obedience to his last request.