"Nat and I are engaged," she said in a low voice without answering his question. "Just since last night."

There was nothing more to be said. The ba.n.a.l wishes for happiness would not rise to his lips. He looked at her intently for a moment, saw her eyes again drop, and walked away. He was suddenly tired and wanted to go home and rest. The reaction of his nervous and physical strain had set in.

The hundred yards to his own gateway was a triumphal procession, but he scarcely realized it. Somehow he answered the acclamations that were heaped upon him. He smiled, but he did not know how.

At the gate some one was waiting for him. At first he thought it was his mother, but he suddenly saw that it was Elsa Mallaby. He told himself that she must have come down to the village to watch the fire, and wondered why she was in that particular place.

"Code," she cried, her face flushed with glad pride, "you were splendid! That was the bravest thing I ever heard of in my life. I knew you would do it!"

He smiled mechanically, thanked her, and pa.s.sed on while she gazed after him, hurt and struck silent by the cold misery in his face.

"I wonder," she said to herself slowly, "whether something besides what I told him has happened to him to-night?"

CHAPTER IV

REFUGEES

It was almost one o'clock in the morning when Code went into the parlor of his mother's cottage and sank down upon the ancient plush sofa. His eyes ached, and the back of his head and neck, where the fire had singed him, were throbbing painfully.

There was apparently no one at home.

Even little Josie, the orphan that helped his mother, seemed to have been drawn out into the road by the excitement of the night, and the house, except for a single lamp burning on the table, was in darkness.

He thought of going up-stairs to bed, but remembered that his mother was not in, and decided he would rest a little while and then go out and find her. Suddenly it seemed very luxurious and grateful to be able to stretch at full length after so much labor, and within a few minutes this sense of luxury had become a pleasant oblivion.

Voices and a bright light woke him up. Dazed and alarmed, he struggled to a sitting posture, but a gently firm hand pushed him down again and he heard his mother's voice.

"Lay down again, Code," she said. "You must be pretty well beat out with all you've done to-night. We've just got some friends for the night. Poor boy, let me see your burns!"

Schofield, who had guided schooners for years through the gales and shoals of the Bay of Fundy without a qualm, became red and ashamed at his mother's babying. Rubbing his sleepy eyes, he sat up again determinedly and made an effort to greet the company who, he knew, had come into the room with his mother.

Across the room, near the old melodeon, sat Nellie Tanner, holding little Bige and smiling wanly at him. The other two children leaned against her, asleep on either side.

"Don't get up, Code," she said. "You've earned your rest more than any man in Freekirk Head to-night. I'm afraid, though, we're going to make more trouble for you. Ma Schofield wouldn't let me go anywhere else but here till the _Rosan_ gets back from St. John's.

"Oh, I hate to think of their coming! They'll sail around Flag Point and look for the kiddies waving in front of the house. And they won't even see any house; but, thanks to you, Code, they'll see the kiddies."

He knew by the tense, strained tone of her voice that she was very near the breaking-point, and his whole being yearned to comfort her and try to make her happy.

Cursing himself for a lazy dolt, he sprang up and walked over toward her.

"Now, you just let me handle this, Nellie," he said, "and we'll soon have Tommie and Mary and Bige all curled up on that sofa like three kittens."

With a sigh of ineffable relief she resigned the dead weight in her weary arms to him, and he, stepping softly, and holding him gently as a woman, soon had the boy more comfortable than he had been for hours.

Mary and Tommie followed, and then Nellie, free of her responsibility at last, bent forward, put her elbows on her knees, and wept.

Code, racked and embarra.s.sed, looked around for his mother, but that mainstay was nowhere in sight. He thought of whistling, so as to appear unconscious of her tears, but concluded that would be merely rude. To take up a paper or book and read it in the face of a woman's weeping appeared hideous, although for the first time in many months, he felt irresistibly drawn to the ancient and dusty volumes in the gla.s.s-doored bookcase.

He compromised by turning his back on the affecting sight, thrusting his hands in his pockets, and studying the remarkably straight line formed by the abrupt junction of the wall and the ceiling.

"Do you mind if I cry, C--Code?" sobbed the girl, apparently realizing their position for the first time.

"No! Go right ahead!" he cried as heartily as though some one had asked for a match. He was intensely happy that the matter was settled between them. Now the harder she cried the more he liked it, for they understood one another. So she cried and he walked softly about, his hands in his pockets and his lips puckered for the whistle that he did not dare permit himself.

Ma Schofield interrupted this near-domestic scene by her arrival, carrying a tray, on which were several gla.s.ses covered with a film of frost and out of which appeared little green forests. Code ceased to think about whistling.

"Oh, Ma Schofield, what have you done?" cried Nellie, her tears for the moment forgetting to flow as her widening eyes took in the delights of the frosted gla.s.ses and piles of cake behind them.

"Done?" queried ma. "I haven't done anything but what my conscience tells me ought to be done. If yours cal'lates to disturb you some you can go right on up to your room, lamb, for you must be dead with lugging them children around."

Nellie's tears disappeared not to return. She shook her head.

"No, ma," she said; "my conscience is just like them children--sleeping so hard it would take Gabriel's trumpet to wake 'em up. It's more tired than I am."

"All right," said ma, with finality; "we will now proceed to refresh ourselves."

It was two o'clock before they separated for the remainder of the night.

Code's room, with its big mahogany double bed, was given over to Nellie and the children while he gladly resigned himself to the humpy plush sofa.

By this time they had received news from half a dozen neighbors that Bill Boughton's general store had been only half destroyed and that the contents had all been saved. The wharfs and fish-houses were at last burning and property on the leeward side of the flames was declared to be safe.

A general exodus began along the King's Road.

Men who had galloped up from Great Harbor, with an ax in one hand and a bucket in the other, mounted their horses and rode away. Others from Hayward's Cove and Castalia, who had driven in buggies and buckboards, collected their families and departed. The King's Road was the scene of a long procession, as though the people of Freekirk Head were evacuating the town.

A detachment of men under Squire Hardy's orders remained about the danger zone ready to check any further advance of the flames or to rouse the town to further resistance should this become necessary. But for the most part the people of the village returned to their homes.

Wide-awake and nervous, Schofield lay open-eyed upon the couch while unbidden thoughts raced through his brain.

The very fact of his sleeping on the plush couch was enough to bring to his mind the memory of one whom he had irretrievably lost on this memorable night. Was she not at this moment under his own roof, miserable and nearly dest.i.tute? He knew that, as long as he might live, his humble room up-stairs would never be the same again.

It had been made a place sweet and full of wonder by the very fact that she was in it. Never again, he knew, could he enter it without its being faintly fragrant of her who, all his life, he had considered the divinest created thing on earth. By her presence she had sanctified it and made of it a shrine for his meditative and wakeful hours.

Ever since they had gone to school together, hand in hand, the names of Nellie Tanner and Code Schofield had been linked in the mouths of Grande Mignon busybodies. Living all their lives two doors away, they had grown up in that careless intimacy of constant a.s.sociation that is unconscious of its own power until such intimacy is removed.

To-night the shock had come.

It was not that Code had taken for granted that Nellie would marry him. Never in his life had he told her that he loved her. It is not the habit of men who rove the seas to keep those they love constantly supplied with literature or confectionery, or to waste too many words in the language of devotion.

He admitted frankly to himself that he had always hoped to marry her when he had acquired the quarter interest in Bill Boughton's fishstand that had been promised him, but he had not told her so, nor did he know that she would accept him. The idea had been one to be thought of only at times of quietness and confidence in his future such as come to every man.

But he had not reckoned on Nat Burns. He had not realized quite to what an extent Burns had made progress. He recalled, now that it was brought forcibly home to him, that Nat had been constantly at the Tanners' for the last four or five months. But Code had thought nothing of this, for Nat had paid similar court at times to others of the girls of Freekirk Head. He was, in fact, considered the village beau.

And Nellie herself had told him nothing. There had been a modest shyness about her in their relations that had kept him at an exasperating and piquant distance.