They came before long to the descent of which he had spoken; it was a miniature gorge, which led down to the beach in the scallop where Garda had begun her race. As soon as they reached the lower level, Garda went to Margaret and took her hands. "Do you really feel better!" she said.

"We'll stay here a while and rest."

Margaret refused, saying that the feeling of fatigue had pa.s.sed away.

"You _have_ got more color than usual," said Garda, scanning her face.

"A sure sign that I am perfectly well again," answered Margaret, smiling.

"A sure sign that you are very tired," said Evert Winthrop.

Margaret made no reply, she began to walk northward, with Garda, up the beach; Lucian Spenser kept his place on the other side of Garda; but Winthrop joined the Rev. Mr. Moore, who was alone.

Mr. Moore improved the occasion, he related the entire history of the Spenser, or rather the Byrd family, the family of Lucian's mother (connections of the celebrated Colonel Byrd). That is, their history in the past; as to the present and its representative, he seemed quite without information.

The present representative spent several days at the rectory; and probably imparted the information which was lacking. During his visit he formed one, as Garda had antic.i.p.ated, of the various little parties which Betty still continued to arrange and carry out for the entertainment of her dearest Katrina; then he took leave of the rector and his wife, and returned to the camp in the swamp.

Three days later he came back to remain some time; he took a room at the Seminole, saying that his hours were quite too uncertain for a well-regulated household like that of the Moores.

His hours proved to be uncertain indeed, save that a certain number of them were sure to be spent with Garda Thorne. A few also were spent in bringing Torres out of his seclusion. For Lucian took a fancy to the young Cuban; "I don't think you half appreciate him," he said, in his easy, unattached way--unattached to any local view. "He's a perfect mine of gold in the way of peculiarities and precious oddities; he repays you every time."

"I was not aware that oddities had so much value in the market,"

remarked Dr. Kirby, dryly.

"My dear sir, the greatest!" said Lucian, still in his detached tone.

The Doctor was not very fond of Lucian. The truth was, the Doctor did not like to be called "my dear sir;" the possessive p.r.o.noun and the adjective made a different thing of it from his own Johnsonian mode of address.

"_I_ appreciate Mr. Torres," Garda remarked, "I always have appreciated him. He's like a thunder-cloud on the edge of the sky; you feel that he could give out some tremendous flashes if he pleased; some day he will please."

"I'll tell him that," said Spenser, who, among his other accomplishments, had that of speaking Spanish.

Whether he told or not, the young Cuban at any rate appeared among them again. He was tired, possibly, of the consumption of his soul. But there was this advantage about Torres, that though he might consume his own, he had no desire to consume the soul (or body either) of any one else; whereas Manuel appeared to cherish this wish to an absolutely sanguinary degree. The dislike he had had for Evert Winthrop was nothing compared with the rage with which he now regarded Lucian Spenser. To tell the truth, Lucian trespa.s.sed upon his own ground: if Manuel was handsome, Lucian was handsomer still. "A finer-looking young man than Lucian Spenser," Mrs. Rutherford had more than once remarked, "is _very_ seldom seen." And Kate Rutherford was a judge.

Lucian having no horse, as Winthrop had, could not, as Garda expressed it, ride over the pine barrens in every direction and stop at East Angels; but he had a fisherman's black boat, with ragged sail, and though it was not an _Emperadora_, it could still float down the Espiritu with sufficient swiftness, giving its occupant an opportunity to stop at the same old Spanish residence, where there was a convenient water-landing as well as an entrance from the barrens. The occupant stopped so often, and his manner when he did stop was so different from that of their other visitors, that Mrs. Thorne felt at last that duty demanded that she should "make inquiries." This duty had never been esteemed one of the princ.i.p.al ones of life at Gracias-a-Dios; Mrs.

Thorne's determination, therefore, showed that her original New England maxims were alive somewhere down in her composition still (as Betty Carew had always declared that they were), in spite of the layer upon layer of Thorne and Duero traditions with which she had carefully overlaid them. She was aware that it was a great inconsistency on her part to revert, at this late day, to the methods of her youth. But what could she do? The Thornes and Dueros were dead, and had left no precedents for a case like this; and Lucian Spenser was alive (particularly so), and with Garda almost all the time.

"She asked me," said the Rev. Mr. Moore to his wife, "what I knew, that was 'definite,' about Lucian, which seemed to me, Penelope, a very singular question, Lucian being so near and dear a relative of ours. I did not, however, comment upon this; I simply gave her a full account of the Spenser family, or rather of the Byrds, his mother's side of the house, going back (in order to be explicit) through three generations.

Strange to say, this did not appear to satisfy her; I will not say that she interrupted me, for she did not; but she had nevertheless, in some ways, an appearance of--of being perhaps somewhat impatient."

"Oh, _I_ know!" said Mrs. Moore, nodding her head. "She coughed behind her hand; and she shook out her handkerchief, holding it by the exact middle between her forefinger and thumb; and she tapped on the floor with the point of her slipper; and she settled her cuffs; and then she coughed again."

"That is exactly what she did! You have a wonderful insight, Penelope,"

said her husband, admiringly.

"Give me a _woman_, and I'll unravel her for you in no time--in no time at all," answered Penelope. "But men are different--_so_ much deeper; you yourself are very deep, Middleton."

The clergyman stroked his chin meditatively; his eyes wandered, and after a while rested peacefully on the floor.

"There! I know just what you're thinking of now," resumed his wife from her sofa; "I can tell you every word!"

Her husband, who at that moment was thinking of nothing at all, unless it might be of a worn place which he had detected in the red and white matting at his feet, raised his eyes and looked at her with amiable expectancy. He had long ago learned to acquiesce in all the discoveries respecting himself made by his clever Penelope; he even believed in them after a vague fashion, and was much interested in hearing the latest.

But he was so unmitigatedly modest, he took such impersonal views of everything, including himself, that he could listen to her eulogistic divinations by the hour without the least real appropriation of them, as though they had been spoken of some one else. He thought them very wonderful, and he thought her almost a sibyl as she brought them forth; but no glow of self-appreciation followed, this frugal man was not easily made to glow. At present, when his wife had unrolled before him the interesting thoughts which she knew he was thinking (and the rector himself was always of the opinion that he must be thinking them somewhere, in some remote part of his mind which for the moment he had forgotten), she concluded, triumphantly, as follows: "I can always tell what you are thinking of from the expression of your face, Middleton; it's not in the _least_ necessary for you to speak." Which was on the whole, perhaps, fortunate for Middleton.

Mrs. Thorne, not having succeeded in obtaining "definite" information from the Rev. Mr. Moore, addressed herself, at length, to Evert Winthrop. Something that was almost a friendship had established itself between these two; Mrs. Thorne found Winthrop very "satisfying," she mentioned that she found him so; she mentioned it to Margaret Harold, with whom, also, she now had an acquaintance which was almost intimate, though in this case the intimacy had been formed and kept up princ.i.p.ally by herself. "Yes, extremely satisfying," she repeated; "on every subject of importance he has definite information, or a definite opinion, and these he gives you--when you ask for them--with the utmost clearness.

Touch him anywhere," continued the lady, tapping her delicately starched handkerchief (which she held up for the purpose) with her little knuckle, "anywhere, I say," she went on, still tapping, "and--he _resounds_."

"Dear me, mamma! is he hollow?" said Garda, while Margaret gave way to laughter. But Mrs. Thorne liked even Margaret's laughs; Margaret too she found "very satisfying," she said.

When she spoke to Winthrop about Lucian Spenser, however, she found him perhaps not so satisfying as usual.

"I know nothing whatever about Mr. Spenser," he answered.

"We are seeing a good deal of him at present," remarked the little mother, in a conversational tone, ignoring his reply. "It's rather better--don't you think so?--to know something--_definite_--of those one is seeing a good deal of?"

"That is the way to learn, isn't it--seeing a good deal of them?"

Winthrop answered.

Mrs. Thorne coughed in her most discreet manner, and looked about the room for a moment or two. Then, "Do _you_ like him, Mr. Winthrop?" she said, her eyes on the opposite wall.

"My dear lady, what has that got to do with it?"

"Much," responded Mrs. Thorne, modestly dropping her eyes to the carpet.

"A man's opinion of a man, you know, may be quite different from a woman's."

"There is his cousin, Mr. Moore."

"I have already asked Mr. Moore; he knows only Mr. Spenser's grandfathers," replied Mrs. Thorne, dismissing the clergyman, as informant, with a wave of her dry little hand.

"Dr. Kirby, then."

"Dr. _Kirby_" said the lady, with an especial emphasis on the name, as though there were a dozen other doctors in Gracias--"Dr. _Kirby_ speaks well of Mr. Spenser. But we should not count too much upon that, for Dr. _Kirby_ looks upon him, as I may say, medically."

"Good heavens! does he want to dissect him?" said Winthrop.

Mrs. Thorne gave her guarded little laugh. "No; but he says that he is such a perfect specimen, physically, of the Anglo-Saxon at his best. He may be; I am sure I am willing. But we are not all ethnologists, I suppose, and something more definite in the way of a background than ancient Saxony, or even Anglia, would be, I think, desirable, when, as I remarked before, one is seeing so much of a person."

There was a short silence, which Winthrop did not break. Then he rose, and took up his hat and whip; he had been paying one of his afternoon visits at the old house. "Don't be uneasy," he said, in the half-protecting tone which he often adopted now when speaking to the little mistress of East Angels; "if you are seeing much of this Mr.

Spenser, you and your daughter, you must remember that you are also seeing much of others as well; of Manuel Ruiz, of young Torres, even of myself; there's safety in numbers."

"Mr. Spenser is not in the least like any of you; that is my trouble,"

Mrs. Thorne declared, with emphasis. "I do not mean," she added, with her anxious particularity, "that _you_ are in the least like Manuel or Adolfo, Mr. Winthrop; of course not."

Winthrop did not reply to this beyond a smile. He took leave, and went towards the door.

Mrs. Thorne's gaze followed him; then with her quick step she crossed the room, and stopped him on the threshold. "Mr. Winthrop, do _you_ like to see my little girl showing such an interest in this Lucian Spenser?"

Her voice was almost a whisper, but her bright eyes met his bravely.

For a moment he returned her gaze. Then, "I like it immensely," he said, and went down the stairs.