Randolph thought over Cope’s statement of his plans, and his slight touch of pique did not pass away. Toward the end of the evening, he spoke of the wreck and the rescue, after all.
“Well,” he said, “you are not so completely committed as I feared.”
“Committed?”
“By your new household arrangements.”
“Well, I shall have back my chum.”
Randolph put forward the alternative.
“I was afraid, for a moment, that you might be taking a wife.”
“A wife?”
“Yes. Such a rescue often leads straight to matrimony—in the storybooks, anyhow.”
Cope laughed, but with a slight disrelish. “We’re in actual life still, I’m glad to think. What I said on one stretch of the shore goes on the other,” he declared. “I don’t feel any more inclination to wedded life than ever, nor any likelihood”—here he spoke with effort, as if conscious of a possible danger on some remote horizon—“of entering it.”
“It would have been sudden, wouldn’t it?” commented Randolph, with a short laugh. “Well,” he went on, “one who inclines to hospitality must work with the material at his disposal. I shall be glad, on some occasion or other,” he proceeded, with a slight trace of formality creeping into his tone, “to entertain your friend.”
“I shall be more than glad,” replied Cope, “to have you meet.”
XVIII
Cope at the Call of Duty
Cope took his own time in calling upon the Ashburn Avenue circle; but he finally made, in person, the inquiries for which those made by telephone were an inadequate substitute. Yet he waited so long that, only a few hours before the time he had set, he received a sweet but somewhat urgent little note from Amy Leffingwell suggesting his early appearance. He felt obliged to employ the first moments of his call in explaining that he had been upon the point of coming, anyway, and that he had set aside the present hour two or three days before for this particular purpose: an explanation, he acknowledged inwardly, which held no great advantage for him.
“Why am I spinning such stuff?” he asked himself impatiently.
Amy’s note of course minimized her aid to him and magnified his aid to her. All this was in accord with established form, but it was in still stronger accord with her determination to idealize his share in the incident. His arm had grasped hers firmly—and she felt it yet. But when she went on to say—not for the first time, nor for the second—how kind and sympathetic he had been in supporting her chin against those slapping waves when the shore had seemed so far away, he wondered whether he had really done so. For a moment or two, possibly; but surely not as part of a conscious, reasoned scheme to save.
“She was doing all right enough,” he muttered in frowning protest.
Neither did he welcome Mrs. Phillips’ tendency to make him a hero. She was as willing as the girl herself to believe that he had kept Amy’s chin above water—not for a moment merely, but through most of the transit to shore. He sat there uneasily, pressing his thumbs between his palms and his closed fingers and drawing up his feet crampingly within their shoes; yet it somewhat eased his tension to find that Medora Phillips was disposed to put Amy into a subordinate place: Amy had been but a means to an end—her prime merit consisted in having given him a chance to function. Any other girl would have done as well. A slight relief, but a welcome.
Another mitigation: the house, the room, was full of people. The other young women of the household were present; even the young businessman who had understood the stove and the pump had looked in: no chance for an intense, segregated appreciation. There had been another weekend at the dunes, when this youth had nimbly ranged the forest and the beach to find wood for the great open fireplace; and he had come, now, at the end of the season, to make due acknowledgments for privileges enjoyed. He, for his part, was willing enough to regard Amy as a heroine; but he considered her as a heroine linked with the wrong man and operative in the wrong place. He cared nothing in the world for Cope, and disparaged him as before—when he did not ignore him altogether. If Amy had but been rescued by him, George F. Pearson, instead of by this Bertram Cope, and if she had been snatched from a disorderly set of breakers at the foot of those disheveled sandhills instead of from the prim, prosy, domestic edge of Churchton—well, wouldn’t the affair have been better set and better carried off? In such case it might have been picturesque and heroic, instead of slightly silly.
Yes, the room was full. Even Joseph Foster had contrived to get himself brought down by Peter: further practice for the day when he should make a still more ambitious flight and dine at Randolph’s new table. He sat in a dark corner of the room and tried to get, as best he might, the essential hang of the situation: the soft, insidious insistence of Amy; the momentum and bravado of his sister-in-law; the veiled disparagement of Cope in which George F. Pearson, seated on a sofa between Carolyn and Hortense, indulged for their benefit, or for his own relief; above all, he listened for tones and undertones from Cope himself. He had never seen Cope before (if indeed it could be said that he really saw him
