Part 52

"Have I drawn you?" he inquired.

"Quite immaterial to the question, which is: A lemon or not a lemon?"

"If you could but see yourself at this moment, you would not ask," he said, looking at her with amused scrutiny.

The lovely face, the blue black hair, the fine figure in the simple pink organdie, the slender ankles, the well-shod feet--a lemon!

"But as I can't see myself, and have no mirror handy, your testimony is desired," she insisted. "A lemon or not a lemon?"

"A lemon!" he answered.

"Then you can't have any objection----"

"If you bring Miss Erskine in?" he interrupted. "Nay! Nay! Nay! NAY!"

"----if I take you there for a game of Bridge--shall we go this very evening?"

"If you wish," he answered.

She laughed. "I don't wish--and we are growing very silly. Come, tell about your Annapolis trip. You stayed a great while."

"Something more than three weeks!"

"It's a queer old town, Annapolis--they call it the 'Finished City!' It's got plenty of landmarks, and relics, but nothing more. If it were not for the State Capitol and Naval Academy, it would be only a lot of ruins, lost in the sand. In midsummer, it's absolutely dead. No one on the streets, no one in the shops, no one any place.--Deserted--until there's a fire. Then you should see them come out!"

"That is sufficiently expressed!" laughed Croyden. "But, with the autumn and the Academy in session, the town seemed very much alive. We sampled 'Cheney's Best,' Wegard's Cakes, and saw the Custard-and-Cream Chapel."

"You've been to Annapolis, sure!" she replied. "There's only one thing more--did you see Paul Jones?"

He shook his head. "We missed him."

"Which isn't surprising. You can't find him without the aid of a detective or a guide."

"Then, who ever finds him?"

"No one!--and there is the shame. We accepted the vast labors and the money of our Ambassador to France in locating the remains of America's first Naval Hero; we sent an Embassy and a warship to bring them back; we received them with honor, orated over them, fired guns over them. And then, when the spectators had departed--assuming they were to be deposited in the crypt of the Chapel--we calmly chucked them away on a couple of trestles, under a stairway in Bancroft Hall, as we would an old broom or a tin can. That's our way of honoring the only Naval Commander we had in the Revolution. It would have been better, much better, had we left him to rest in the quiet seclusion of his grave in France--lost, save in memory, with the halo of the past and privacy of death around him."

"And why didn't we finish the work?" said Croyden. "Why bring him here, with the attendant expense, and then stop, just short of completion? Why didn't we inter him in the Chapel (though, God save me from burial there), or any place, rather than on trestles under a stairway in a midshipmen's dormitory?"

"Because the appropriation was exhausted, or because the Act wasn't worded to include burial, or because the Superintendent didn't want the bother, or because it was a nuisance to have the remains around--or some other absurd reason. At all events, he is there in the cellar, and he is likely to stay there, till Bancroft Hall is swallowed up by the Bay. The junket to France, the parade, the speeches, the spectacular part are over, so, who cares for the entombment, and the respect due the distinguished dead?"

"I don't mean to be disrespectful," he observed, "but it's hard luck to have one's bones disturbed, after more than a hundred years of tranquillity, to be conveyed clear across the Atlantic, to be orated over, and sermonized over, and, then, to be flung aside like old junk and forgot. However, we have troubles of our own--I know I have--more real than Paul Jones! He may be glad he's dead, so he won't have any to worry over. In fact, it's a good thing to be dead--one is saved from a heap of worry."

She looked at him, without replying.

"What's the use?" he said. "A daily struggle to procure fuel sufficient to keep up the fire."

"What's the use of anything! Why not make an end of life, at once?" she asked.

"Sometimes, I'm tempted," he admitted. "It's the leap in the dark, and no returning, that restrains, I reckon--and the fact that we must face it alone. Otherwise----"

She laughed softly. "Otherwise death would have no terrors! You have begged the question, or what amounts to it. But, to return to Annapolis; what else did you see?"

"You have been there?"