High Tide at Noon (18 page)

Suddenly she remembered Nils again. Poor Nils, she thought dutifully, trying to conjure up a picture of him with his dark sea-blue eyes and his grim mouth, trying to remember his fingers on her shoulders and his voice asking her to marry him. She remembered the shock of it, and the sense of loss and grief afterwards. She knew she would remember it again, with more poignance; but now, at the moment when she stood alone in the dim kitchen, something else came between her and the picture of Nils.

She shook herself impatiently and walked into the other room with her easy, arrogant Bennett carriage, chin a little higher than usual. Her father and mother were deep in a discussion. Joanna sat down on the couch and listened to them with some enjoyment. They sounded so normal, she thought.

“I know there's a perfectly good stove in Nate's bam,” said Donna firmly. “Mary mentioned it only a few weeks ago.”

“If it's the one I think it is, the boy couldn't boil water on it.”

“Stephen, don't be so—so—”

“So what?” said Stephen with a dark twinkle.

“So much like your father. Do
you
know of a stove?”

“It's coming warm weather. We might let him take the one from the shop.”

Donna's lips tightened. “And have you catch your death of cold working out there some wretched day.”

Stephen sighed and knocked out his pipe. “Well then, all I can say is feed him up here till he gets a stove of his own.”

“I'd just as lief,” said Donna calmly. “I wouldn't worry then about the kind of meals he was getting. He wants feeding up, that boy. His sister couldn't have been much of a cook.”

“You can see what you've brought home, Joanna,” murmured Stephen. “Your mother is smitten.”

“It must be that Bonnie Prince Charlie influence.” Joanna grinned at Stephen, grateful for the softening that had come to his face this evening. Donna looked better too. Joanna turned over on her stomach and began to read.

When the boys came in, Owen brought Alec's fiddle from the kitchen, took it out of the case, and tucked it under his chin with a dashing air.

“What'll it be, folks?” he asked blandly, posing against the mantel.

“You're bound to make a noise with that one way or another, aren't you?” Philip said. “If you don't mind, I'd like to hear sort of a pretty noise. So hand it over to Alec.”

Alec looked questioningly at Donna and Stephen. “Do you mind if I play?”

“I'd like to hear you, Alec,” said Donna.

“Go ahead,” murmured Stephen from behind his paper. Alec took his fiddle affectionately into his hands, put it under his chin, and tuned it. His eyes twinkled around at them all; he looked pleased because they wanted him to play. At Joanna, his glance halted.

“What'll I play?”

“Anything at all,” she said. “Please.” For an instant their eyes held; then he laid his cheek against the smooth, warm-toned wood and poised the bow. There was a sudden sharp pause in the room; without any other gesture than the placing of the violin, the lifting of the bow, he had become the center. All others watched him. Joanna felt a queer, breathless detachment, as if she were watching from very far away. Lamplight caught in his hair, turning the light brown to ruddy gold, but his face was thrown into shadow; his hair and the instrument were the same color.

“My father taught me this,” he said suddenly, and began to play. A little tune crept wailing through the room, a lost and plaintive little tune with a refrain of falling tears; again and again that refrain came back, throbbing through the hushed room and talking to the wind that mounted around the house.

And he had brought Charles back to them. There was not one of them who didn't hear the wind outside, and the thunder of the sea, and remember that tonight they weren't all gathered here safe and warm under one roof. One had gone out from this house; and he would never come back as the boy they had known.

Who was this stranger suddenly among them? When Joanna thought she could bear it no longer, the tune ended on a sobbing minor note. Alec Douglass lifted his head and said, “I don't know why I chose that one to start with.”

Donna said very quietly, “What was the name of it?”

“ ‘The Flowers of the Forest.' It's a lament.”

“Let's have some reels,” said Owen, leaning forward impatiently. “Something fast.”

“How's this, my boy?”

This
was a gallant marching tune, with a lilt and a swing and an excitement that made it hard for you to sit still, to keep from tapping your foot. It was a valiant, swaggering song. Joanna loved it at once. She was sorry when it finished.

“What was that?” she demanded eagerly, her long eyes brilliant.

“ ‘The Road to the Isles,' ” he told her. “And you should hear it on the pipes! My father wanted to buy me bagpipes, but my mother wouldn't let him. She said it was bad enough to listen to the fiddle, and us kids being Border raiders, without having pipes to drive her mad. Dad was born a couple hundred years too late. He wasn't meant to be a fisherman. He was born for kilts and a Lost Cause.”

“He sounds nice,” said Joanna. Stephen put down his paper.

“Now Jo, I don't know how I'd look in kilts, but I've got plenty of Lost Causes. The Island's full of 'em.”

Joanna winked at him and he winked back, and retired behind his paper. Alec began to play again and the whimsies of his bow threw a different spell around them—a spell woven, to Joanna's enchanted fancy, of heather and coldly bubbling Highland streams, of wooded glens and stags at eve and Walter Scott's stories, and the old, old ballads in a ragged book she'd found once in the attic. The music lilted in the room, the fingers flew with magic certainty across the strings, the bow danced, and Alec Douglass laughed as he played; his laughter reflected in the quiet shine of Donna's eyes, in Owen's vivid face, in Philip's tilted head, and Stephen's absently tapping foot.

And Joanna, sitting on the couch, felt a sudden wild, exultant happiness sweep through her body until she wanted to jump up or dance or shout.

When, abruptly, he had finished, and taken the fiddle from under his chin, there was a breathless stillness in the room. Joanna felt stranded; left high and dry on a rock until the tide of her fierce excitement should ebb away. It was Owen who let out a long reverent whistle.

“My God, if you ever played like that at a dance, you'd have 'em going right through the roof! Cripes, and I thought Maurice could play!”

Alec's smile was pleased and diffident. “I'm glad you like it. But—” He shrugged, and laid the violin in the case. “Fiddling isn't much. I'd rather be a good lobsterman.” Without the music he was only a tall, too-thin young man again, sandy-haired, gaunt, cleanly shabby. A little shy.

Joanna, holding a book in her lap, stared absently at the print and wondered what had come over her to make her feel so queer when he was playing. I'm tired and nervous, she thought. That's all it is. Nerves . . .

Donna closed her workbasket and stood up. “I think it's time we thought about bed. Alec, you're staying here tonight.”

“But that's too much, ma'am!” He got up quickly, color rising in his lean cheeks. “I can sleep aboard the boat.”

“Philip will show you your room,” Donna said definitely, and Joanna knew her mother couldn't bear to look at Charles' bed. But no one would have guessed what lay behind that tranquil smile. “Joanna you get the boys a mug-up. I'll go along to bed.”

I
N
M
AY THE
I
SLAND
became whole-hearted about spring, and burst into blossom. Bunchberry and cranberry blooms, star-flowers—the Island was afoam with them. A wild pear tree leaned over the ancient, red-rusted Whitcomb gate like a slender young girl in white. Joanna, coming along the lane with the harbor silken and blue behind her, and the robins and song sparrows singing their valiant young hearts out from Gunnar's alder swamp, stopped to look at the little tree with tender and dreaming eyes.

She picked a pale delicate spray and walked on toward the house; there was a path through the tangled field now. Joanna stopped and looked up, to watch Alec and Owen against the sky. They were reshingling the roof, and the sound of hammers was sharp in the windless, sunny afternoon.

Owen saw her and whistled, and Alec waved a shingle. “Hello, down there!” he hailed her. “Come on up and set a while!”

“You're too high-minded for me!” she called back, and sat down in the warm dry grass. Peace flowed through her and she wished this hour might never end, this hour made up of the luminous blue of sea and sky, the soft May wind, the white blossoms like a fragrant snow in the hollows and on the grassy slopes wandering down to the water.

She lay back and watched the tall feathery grasses swaying against the sky; far overhead a gull passed in effortless white-winged flight. The sun was very warm on her face and drowsy lids, already it had laid a faint glow of pink across her cheekbones and the bridge of her nose—where the freckles used to be.

This is heaven, she thought drowsily, and was sublimely unaware of Alec Douglass till his shadow fell coolly on her face. She opened her eyes.

“I thought you two were on the roof.”

“We came down,” Owen explained.

“So I see. Well, I came up to inspect the job, but I'll take a report on it. I'm not in a ridgepole-walking mood today.”

“Come on and inspect the house, then.” Alec looked down at her, smiling, and put out his hand. “You haven't been in it since the stove came.”

Joanna took the offered hand, a long, lean, strong hand, and came lightly to her feet “What a mane,” said Owen, tugging ungently at the thick black hair. “Another month, and you'll pass for a Shetland pony.”

“I like long black hair.” Alec took the spray of wild pear from her hand and tucked it behind her ear. He stepped back and looked at the effect with narrowed bright eyes. Joanna tilted her head.

“How do I look?” she asked, and under his suddenly intent gaze she felt her cheeks grow warm.

“You look—good,” he said softly.

“Cripes, no cigarettes,” Owen muttered. Alec offered him a package but he refused it. “I don't like those things, they're stronger'n white lightning. Well, if you fellas are going to stand there and look at each other, I'm going down to the store.”

He left them, whistling, his hands in his pockets, his stride long and arrogant and free. Joanna and Alec watched him go through the gate.

“He's a good kid,” Alec said. “Maybe some time I'll have a chance to help him out the way he's been helping me.”

“Owen's all right,” said Joanna somberly. Since Charles' marriage, she had frequent qualms about the other boys; she had thought Charles was invulnerable, but he wasn't, and now there were moments of wondering what would happen to Owen, who was ten times more reckless than Charles, and a hundred times more impatient and hungry for life.

But the moments were brief. She smiled quickly at Alec and said, “Can I see the house?”

They went across the wide porch and into the house, whose doors and windows were flung open to the warm air of May. The big bare rooms were full of sunshine, the floors had been swept, the windows washed.

“It smells clean,” she said approvingly.

“It looks pretty good since I got rid of the squatters.” Alec propped himself against a door frame. “One hornet's nest, a hundred and three spiders, and a family of moths living in an old blanket. Intelligent, too, those moths. They understood the situation after I explained it to them.”

“Didn't they mind being put out?”

“Not at all. I told them they might move down to Mr. Sorensen's attic. That was after Mr. Sorensen came up to see me,” he added politely, “to tell me there wasn't room for loafers on the Island.”

Joanna chuckled. Alec said, “Laugh like that again. I like it. Did I tell you I found a race of primitive men down cellar? They didn't have eyes or chins, and they were white like mushrooms. When the sun shone on 'em, they melted.”

“Like snow?” she asked solemnly.

“No. Like candle grease. They left spots.”

They walked into the big front room, empty except for a cot, and Joanna felt a faint coldness across her pleasant mood. Once before she had stood in this room, perhaps in this exact spot, and had known what pure terror meant. Now it seemed unreal, like something she'd read or dreamed a long time ago, except for the old cot. Now it was made up with Alec's bedding.

“What are you thinking?” he asked curiously, watching her.

She said hastily, “Do you ever get homesick?”

“Not on your life! This is pretty near heaven, after what I left.”

She wanted to ask him why he left home, wondering if Philip had been right about a girl, but there was a tiny, rushing scamper overhead. Alec looked resigned.

“The mice moved in right after I did.”

“You can get a cat from my uncle,” Joanna said. Through the front windows she could see Gunnar and young flaxen-haired David furrowing the ground for their garden, and wondered idly if they'd seen Owen going toward the harbor, and herself entering the house with Alec. If Gunnar saw me, he'll talk, she thought impatiently. He'll know how long I stayed and all about it.

Her first impulse was to stay, and let Gunnar wonder, but the sight of him had made its little warning signal in her brain. She didn't want trouble, she didn't want the faintest whisper of it. It would spoil everything, she thought suddenly and inexplicably.

“Let's go out,” she said casually. “It's too nice to stay in. You've done a good job of housecleaning.”

“Thanks, Jo.” He was pleased. “But don't go home yet. Let's go rowing.”

“I'd love to,” Joanna said honestly, and they went out together into the glowing day.