The Gay Cockade | Page 8

it would be," he said, "but we have other things to do, my
dear."
"What things?"
The roar of the crowd came louder to their ears. "Harding, Harding!
Jimmie Harding!"
"Listen," he said, and the light in his eyes was not for her. "Listen,
Ursula, they're calling me."
She stood alone after he had left her. I am sure that even then she did
not quite believe it was the end. She did not know how, in all the years,
his wife had molded him.

When he had satisfied the crowd, Jimmie fought his way to where Elise
and Duncan and I stood together.
Elise was wrapped in a great cloak of silver brocade. There was a touch
of silver, too, in her hair. But she had never seemed to me so small, so
childish.
"Oh, Jimmie," she said, as he came up, "you've done it!"
"Yes"--he was flushed and laughing, his head held high--"you always
said I could do it. And I shall do it again. Did you hear them shout,
Elise?"
"Yes."
"Jove! I feel like the old woman in the nursery rhyme, 'Alack-a-daisy,
do this be I?'" He was excited, eager, but it was not the old eagerness.
There was an avidity, a greediness.
She laid her hand on his arm. "You've earned a rest, dearest. Let's go up
in the hills."
"In the hills? Oh, we're too old, Elise."
"We'll grow young."
"To-night I've given youth to the world. That's enough for me"--the
light in his eyes was not for her--"that's enough for me. We'll hang
around New York for a week or two, and then we'll go back to
Albemarle. I want to get to work on another play. It's a great game,
Elise. It's a great game!"
She knew then what she had done. Here was a monster of her own
making. She had sacrificed her lover on the altar of success. Jimmie
needed her no longer.
I would not have you think this an unhappy ending. Elise has all that
she had asked, and Jimmie, with fame for a mistress, is no longer an
unwilling captive in the old house. The prisoner loves his prison,

welcomes his chains.
But Duncan and I talk at times of the young Jimmie who came years
ago into our office. The Jimmie Harding who works down in
Albemarle, and who struts a little in New York when he makes his
speeches, is the ghost of the boy we knew. But he loves us still.

THE HIDDEN LAND
The mystery of Nancy Greer's disappearance has never been explained.
The man she was to have married has married another woman. For a
long time he mourned Nancy. He has always held the theory that she
was drowned while bathing, and the rest of Nancy's world agrees with
him. She had left the house one morning for her usual swim. The fog
was coming in, and the last person to see her was a fisherman returning
from his nets. He had stopped and watched her flitting wraith-like
through the mist. He reported later that Nancy wore a gray bathing suit
and cap and carried a blue cloak.
"You are sure she carried a cloak?" was the question which was
repeatedly asked. For no cloak had been found on the sands, and it was
unlikely that she had worn it into the water. The disappearance of the
blue cloak was the only point which seemed to contradict the theory of
accidental drowning. There were those who held that the cloak might
have been carried off by some acquisitive individual. But it was not
likely; the islanders are, as a rule, honest, and it was too late in the
season for "off-islanders."
I am the only one who knows the truth. And as the truth would have
been harder for Anthony Peak to bear than what he believed had
happened, I have always withheld it.
There was, too, the fear that if I told they might try to bring Nancy back.
I think Anthony would have searched the world for her. Not, perhaps,
because of any great and passionate need of her, but because he would
have thought her unhappy in what she had done, and would have

sought to save her.
I am twenty years older than Nancy, her parents are dead, and it was at
my house that she always stayed when she came to Nantucket. She has
island blood in her veins, and so has Anthony Peak. Back of them were
seafaring folk, although in the foreground was a generation or two of
cosmopolitan residence. Nancy had been educated in France, and
Anthony in England. The Peaks and the Greers owned respectively
houses in Beacon Street and in Washington Square. They came every
summer to the island, and it was thus