It was a name, of course; but the name of what? It repeated and repeated itself to him, after he got back into bed, until its very iteration made him drowsy.

Outside the gale whistled and shrieked. The wind, pa.s.sing its last resistance after its sweep across the prairies before it leaped upon the lake, battered and clamored in its a.s.sault about the house. But as Alan became sleepier, he heard it no longer as it rattled the windows and howled under the eaves and over the roof, but as out on the lake, above the roaring and ice-crunching waves, it whipped and circled with its chill the ice-shrouded sides of struggling ships. So, with the roar of surf and gale in his ears, he went to sleep with the sole conscious connection in his mind between himself and these people, among whom Benjamin Corvet's summons had brought him, the one name "_Miwaka_."

CHAPTER VI

CONSTANCE SHERRILL

In the morning a great change had come over the lake. The wind still blew freshly, but no longer fiercely, from the west; and now, from before the beach beyond the drive, and from the piers and breakwaters at the harbor mouth, and from all the western sh.o.r.e, the ice had departed. Far out, a nearly indiscernible white line marked the ice-floe where it was traveling eastward before the wind; nearer, and with only a gleaming crystal fringe of frozen snow clinging to the sh.o.r.e edge, the water sparkled, blue and dimpling, under the morning sun; mult.i.tudes of gulls, hungry after the storm, called to one another and circled over the breakwaters, the piers, and out over the water as far as the eye could see; and a half mile off sh.o.r.e, a little work boat--a shallop twenty feet long--was put-put-ing on some errand along a path where twelve hours before no horsepower creatable by man could have driven the hugest steamer.

Constance Sherrill, awakened by the sunlight reflected from the water upon her ceiling, found nothing odd or startling in this change; it roused her but did not surprise her. Except for the short periods of her visits away from Chicago, she had lived all her life on the sh.o.r.e of the lake: the water--wonderful, ever altering--was the first sight each morning. As it made wilder and more grim the desolation of a stormy day, so it made brighter and more smiling the splendor of the sunshine and, by that much more, influenced one's feelings.

Constance held by preference to the seagoing traditions of her family.

Since she was a child, the lake and the life of the ships had delighted and fascinated her; very early she had discovered that, upon the lake, she was permitted privileges sternly denied upon land--an arbitrary distinction which led her to designate water, when she was a little girl, as her family's "respectable element." For while her father's investments were, in part, on the water, her mother's property all was on the land. Her mother, who was a Seaton, owned property somewhere in the city, in common with Constance's uncles; this property consisted, as Constance succeeded in ascertaining about the time she was nine, of large, wholesale grocery buildings. They and the "brand" had been in the possession of the Seaton family for many years; both Constance's uncles worked in the big buildings where the canning was done; and, when Constance was taken to visit them, she found the place most interesting--the berries and fruit coming up in great steaming cauldrons; the machines pushing the cans under the enormous faucets where the preserves ran out and then sealing the cans and pasting the bright Seaton "brand" about them. The people there were interesting--the girls with flying fingers sorting fruit, and the men pounding the big boxes together; and the great s.h.a.ggy-hoofed horses which pulled the huge, groaning wagons were most fascinating. She wanted to ride on one of the wagons; but her request was promptly and completely squashed.

It was not "done"; nor was anything about the groceries and the canning to be mentioned before visitors; Constance brought up the subject once and found out. It was different about her father's ships. She could talk about them when she wanted to; and her father often spoke of them; and any one who came to the house could speak about them. Ships, apparently, were respectable.

When she went down to the docks with her father, she could climb all over them, if she was only careful of her clothes; she could spend a day watching one of her father's boats discharging grain or another unloading ore; and, when she was twelve, for a great treat, her father took her on one of the freighters to Duluth; and for one delightful, wonderful week she chummed with the captain and mates and wheelmen and learned all the pilot signals and the way the different lighthouses winked.

Mr. Spearman, who recently had become a partner of her father's, was also on the boat upon that trip. He had no particular duty; he was just "an owner" like her father; but Constance observed that, while the captain and the mates and the engineers were always polite and respectful to her father, they asked Mr. Spearman's opinion about things in a very different way and paid real attention--not merely polite attention--when he talked. He was a most desirable sort of acquisition; for he was a friend who could come to the house at any time, and yet he, himself, had done all sorts of exciting things. He had not just gone to Harvard and then become an owner, as Constance's father had; at fifteen, he had run away from his father's farm back from the east sh.o.r.e of little Traverse Bay near the northern end of Lake Michigan. At eighteen, after all sorts of adventures, he had become mate of a lumber schooner; he had "taken to steam" shortly after that and had been an officer upon many kinds of ships. Then Uncle Benny had taken him into partnership. Constance had a most exciting example of what he could do when the ship ran into a big storm on Lake Superior.

Coming into Whitefish Bay, a barge had blundered against the vessel; a seam started, and water came in so fast that it gained on the pumps.

Instantly, Mr. Spearman, not the captain, was in command and, from the way he steered the ship to protect the seam and from the scheme he devised to stay the inrush of water, the pumps began to gain at once, and the ship went into Duluth safe and dry. Constance liked that in a man of the sort whom people knew. For, as the most active partner--though not the chief stockholder--of Corvet, Sherrill and Spearman, almost every one in the city knew him. He had his bachelor "rooms" in one of the newest and most fashionable of the apartment buildings facing the lake just north of the downtown city; he had become a member of the best city and country clubs; and he was welcomed quickly along the Drive, where the Sherrills' mansion was coming to be considered a characteristic "old" Chicago home.

But little over forty, and appearing even younger, Spearman was distinctly of the new generation; and Constance Sherrill was only one of many of the younger girls who found in Henry Spearman refreshing relief from the youths who were the sons of men but who could never become men themselves. They were nice, earnest boys with all sorts of serious Marxian ideas of establishing social justice in the plants which their fathers had built; and carrying the highest motives into the city or national politics. But the industrial reformers, Constance was quite certain, never could have built up the industries with which they now, so superiorly, were finding fault; the political purifiers either failed of election or, if elected, seemed to leave politics pretty much as they had been before. The picture of Spearman, instantly appealed to and instantly in charge in the emergency, remained and became more vivid within Constance, because she never saw him except when he dominated.

And a decade most amazingly had bridged the abyss which had separated twelve years and thirty-two. At twenty-two, Constance Sherrill was finding Henry Spearman--age forty-two--the most vitalizing and interesting of the men who moved, socially, about the restricted ellipse which curved down the lake sh.o.r.e south of the park and up Astor Street. He had, very early, recognized that he possessed the vigor and courage to carry him far, and he had disciplined himself until the coa.r.s.eness and roughness, which had sometimes offended the little girl of ten years before, had almost vanished. What crudities still came out, romantically reminded of his hard, early life on the lakes. Had there been anything in that life of his of which he had not told her--something worse than merely rough and rugged, which could strike at her? Uncle Benny's last, dramatic appeal to her had suggested that; but even at the moment when he was talking to her, fright for Uncle Benny--not dread that there had been anything wrong in Henry's life--had most moved her. Uncle Benny very evidently was not himself.

As long as Constance could remember, he had quarreled violently with Henry; his antagonism to Henry had become almost an obsession; and Constance had her father's word for it that, a greater part of the time, Uncle Benny had no just ground for his quarrel with Henry. A most violent quarrel had occurred upon that last day, and undoubtedly its fury had carried Uncle Benny to the length of going to Constance as he did.

Constance had come to this conclusion during the last gloomy and stormy days; this morning, gazing out upon the shining lake, clear blue under the wintry sun, she was more satisfied than before. Summoning her maid, she inquired first whether anything had been heard since last night of Mr. Corvet. She was quite sure, if her father had had word, he would have awakened her; and there was no news. But Uncle Benny's son, she remembered, was coming to breakfast.

Uncle Benny's son! That suggested to Constance's mother only something unpleasant, something to be avoided and considered as little as possible. But Alan--Uncle Benny's son--was not unpleasant at all; he was, in fact, quite the reverse. Constance had liked him from the moment that, confused a little by Benjamin Corvet's absence and Simons's manner in greeting him, he had turned to her for explanation; she had liked the way he had openly studied her and approved her, as she was approving him; she had liked the way he had told her of himself, and the fact that he knew nothing of the man who proved to be his father; she had liked very much the complete absence of impulse to force or to pretend feeling when she had brought him the picture of his father--when he, amazed at himself for not feeling, had looked at her; and she had liked most of all his refusal, for himself and for his father, to accept positive stigma until it should be proved.

She had not designated any hour for breakfast, and she supposed that, coming from the country, he would believe breakfast to be early. But when she got downstairs, though it was nearly nine o'clock, he had not come; she went to the front window to watch for him, and after a few minutes she saw him approaching, looking often to the lake as though amazed by the change in it.

She went to the door and herself let him in.

"Father has gone down-town," she told him, as he took off his things.

"Mr. Spearman returns from Duluth this morning, and father wished to tell him about you as soon as possible. I told father you had come to see him last night; and he said to bring you down to the office."

"I overslept, I'm afraid," Alan said.

"You slept well, then?"

"Very well--after a while."

"I'll take you down-town myself after breakfast."

She said no more but led him into the breakfast room. It was a delightful, cozy little room, Dutch furnished, with a single wide window to the east, an enormous hooded fireplace taking up half the north wall, and blue Delft tiles set above it and paneled in the walls all about the room. There were the quaint blue windmills, the fishing boats, the baggy-breeked, wooden-shod folk, the ca.n.a.ls and barges, the dikes and their guardians, and the fishing ship on the Zuyder Zee.

Alan gazed about at these with quick, appreciative interest. His quality of instantly noticing and appreciating anything unusual was, Constance thought, one of his pleasantest and best characteristics.

"I like those too; I selected them myself in Holland," she observed.

She took her place beside the coffee pot, and when he remained standing--"Mother always has her breakfast in bed; that's your place,"

she said.

He took the chair opposite her. There was fruit upon the table; Constance took an orange and pa.s.sed the little silver basket across.

"This is such a little table; we never use it if there's more than two or three of us; and we like to help ourselves here."

"I like it very much," Alan said.

"Coffee right away or later?"

"Whenever you do. You see," he explained, smiling in a way that pleased her, "I haven't the slightest idea what else is coming or whether anything more at all is coming." A servant entered, bringing cereal and cream; he removed the fruit plates, put the cereal dish and two bowls before Constance, and went out. "And if any one in Blue Rapids," Alan went on, "had a man waiting in the dining-room and at least one other in the kitchen, they would not speak of our activities here as 'helping ourselves.' I'm not sure just how they would speak of them; we--the people I was with in Kansas--had a maidservant at one time when we were on the farm, and when we engaged her, she asked, 'Do you do your own stretching?' That meant serving from the stove to the table, usually."

He was silent for a few moments; when he looked at her across the table again, he seemed about to speak seriously. His gaze left her face and then came back.

"Miss Sherrill," he said gravely, "what is, or was, the _Miwaka_? A ship?"

He made no attempt to put the question casually; rather, he had made it more evident that it was of concern to him by the change in his manner.

"The _Miwaka_?" Constance said.

"Do you know what it was?"

"Yes; I know; and it was a ship."

"You mean it doesn't exist any more?"

"No; it was lost a long time ago."

"On the lakes here?"

"On Lake Michigan."

"You mean by lost that it was sunk?"

"It was sunk, of course; but no one knows what happened to it--whether it was wrecked or burned or merely foundered."

The thought of the unknown fate of the ship and crew--of the ship which had sailed and never reached port and of which nothing ever had been heard but the beating of the Indian drum--set her blood tingling as it had done before, when she had been told about the ship, or when she had told others about it and the superst.i.tion connected with it. It was plain Alan Conrad had not asked about it idly; something about the _Miwaka_ had come to him recently and had excited his intense concern.

"Whose ship was it?" he asked. "My father's?"

"No; it belonged to Stafford and Ramsdell. They were two of the big men of their time in the carrying trade on the lakes, but their line has been out of business for years; both Mr. Stafford and Mr. Ramsdell were lost with the _Miwaka_."