The Little Lady of the Big House / Маленькая хозяйка большого дома. Книга для чтения на английском языке

Graham looked quickly at her, and although she had asked the question of her husband, her head turned to the turn of his head, so that he found her eyes meeting his straightly and squarely in interrogation. Graham held her gaze with equal straightness as he answered: “She was a kanaka.”

“A queen, if you please,” Dick took up. “A queen out of the ancient chief stock. She was Queen of Huahoa.”

“Was it the chief stock that enabled her to out-endure the native men?” Paula asked. “Or did you help her?”

“I rather think we helped each other toward the end,” Graham replied. “We were both out of our heads for short spells and long spells. Sometimes it was one, sometimes the other, that was all in. We made the land[237] at sunset – that is, a wall of iron coast, with the surf bursting sky-high. She took hold of me and clawed me in the water to get some sense in me. You see, I wanted to go in, which would have meant finish.

“She got me to understand that she knew where she was; that the current set westerly along shore and in two hours would drift us abreast of a spot where we could land. I swear I either slept or was unconscious most of those two hours; and I swear she was in one state or the other when I chanced to come to and noted the absence of the roar of the surf. Then it was my turn to claw and maul her back to consciousness[238]. It was three hours more before we made the sand. We slept where we crawled out of the water. Next morning’s sun burnt us awake, and we crept into the shade of some wild bananas, found fresh water, and went to sleep again. Next I awoke it was night. I took another drink, and slept through till morning. She was still asleep when the bunch of kanakas, hunting wild goats from the next valley, found us.”

“I’ll wager, for a man who drowned a whole kanaka crew, it was you who did the helping,” Dick commented.

“She must have been forever grateful,” Paula challenged, her eyes directly on Graham’s. “Don’t tell me she wasn’t young, wasn’t beautiful, wasn’t a golden brown young goddess.”

“Her mother was the Queen of Huahoa,” Graham answered. “Her father was a Greek scholar and an English gentleman. They were dead at the time of the swim, and Nomare was queen herself. She was young. She was beautiful as any woman anywhere in the world may be beautiful. Thanks to her father’s skin, she was not golden brown. She was tawny golden. But you’ve heard the story undoubtedly —”

He broke off with a look of question to Dick, who shook his head.

Calls and cries and splashings of water from beyond a screen of trees warned them that they were near the tank.

“You’ll have to tell me the rest of the story some time,” Paula said.

“Dick knows it. I can’t see why he hasn’t told you.”

She shrugged her shoulders.

“Perhaps because he’s never had the time or the provocation.”

“God wot, it’s had wide circulation[239],” Graham laughed. “For know that I was once morganatic – or whatever you call it – king of the cannibal isles, or of a paradise of a Polynesian isle at any rate. – ‘By a purple wave on an opal beach in the hush of the Mahim woods,’” he hummed carelessly, in conclusion, and swung off from his horse.

“‘The white moth to the closing vine, the bee to the opening clover,’” she hummed another line of the song, while The Fop nearly got his teeth into her leg and she straightened him out with the spur, and waited for Dick to help her off and tie him.

“Cigars! – I’m in on that! – you can’t catch her!” Bert Wainwright called from the top of the high dive forty feet above. “Wait a minute! I’m coming!”

And come he did, in a swan dive that was almost professional and that brought hand-clapping approval from the girls.

“A sweet dive, balanced beautifully,” Graham told him as he emerged from the tank.

Bert tried to appear unconscious of the praise, failed, and, to pass it off, plunged into the wager.

“I don’t know what kind of a swimmer you are, Graham,” he said, “but I just want in[240] with Dick on the cigars.”

“Me, too; me, too!” chorused Ernestine, and Lute, and Rita.

“Boxes of candy, gloves, or any truck you care to risk,” Ernestine added.

“But I don’t know Mrs. Forrest’s records, either,” Graham protested, after having taken on the bets. “However, if in five minutes —”

“Ten minutes,” Paula said, “and to start from opposite ends of the tank. Is that fair? Any touch is a catch.[241]” Graham looked his hostess over with secret approval. She was clad, not in the single white silk slip she evidently wore only for girl parties, but in a coquettish imitation of the prevailing fashion mode, a suit of changeable light blue and green silk – almost the color of the pool; the skirt slightly above the knees whose roundedness he recognized; with long stockings to match, and tiny bathing shoes bound on with crossed ribbons. On her head was a jaunty swimming cap no jauntier than herself when she urged the ten minutes in place of five.