Savage Bride

Chapter Two

A fanlight overhead lighted up murkily at the continued thumping. There was a juggling with the bolt, and the door opened. A silver-haired man, with rimless glasses and pendulous red turkey-gobbler throat, stood looking at the two men.

“Land sakes, couldn’t you hold your horses?” he said querulously.

“Has there been a young couple here tonight?” the older of the two fired at him.

“There’ve been several. I’m a justice of the peace.” He smiled deprecatingly.

“Dark-haired girl, olive-skinned. And the man with her was fair-haired. Giving the names of Mitty Fredericks and Lawrence Jones?”

“Yep, they were,” the justice nodded. “Not more than three quarters of an hour ago. Fact, they were the last ones here tonight.”

“And you — you did it? It’s already over?”

“I married them, yes,” the justice told him succinctly. “That’s what I’m here for.”

The older one turned and gave his companion a look of utter calamity. “Too late,” he said dismally. “It’s already been done.”

The second one stirred his breath with an expressive, long-drawn whistle.

The justice looked troubled, plucked at his wattled throat. “Nothing wrong, is there? Are you two relatives?”

“In a way,” said the older man limply. “I’m professor Fredericks. She was my ward.”

The justice plucked some more. “Their license seemed to be in order,” he said defensively. “Took it out in Baltimore two or three days ago, waited the required length of time. I didn’t see any reason not to accommodate them.”

“Baltimore, did you say?” the younger of the two repeated sharply. He turned his eyes inscrutably toward Fredericks for a moment.

“That’s right. I can only go by what documents are shown to me. I ain’t no mind reader, you know, mister.” The justice seemed more and more unsure of himself in the face of their accusing silence. He had shifted his plucking now to the topmost button of his bathrobe. “She gave her age as eighteen,” he added in final, faltering vindication.

A hiccup of morbid derision sounded in Fredericks’ throat.

“Eighteen,” he repeated.

Cotter slapped their car to a collision-like stop. They flung out of it as though the jolt itself had hurled them forth, leaving the doors gaping open on both sides.

They ran into the pier building, through its walled-in forepart, and down toward the far end, where gaps showed at the side, as if a long row of sliding doors had been left open. Opposite these, close enough to touch, a hue of portholes studding weather-beaten iron hull plates was creeping unnoticeably along, like something on a moving belt. The ship was still so close alongside its berth it was hard to tell whether it was actually under way or not. The water strip between was still so narrow it was invisible from above.

The newly retracted gangplank was still partially in position, but now it led off into vacancy. Cotter had leaped up on it and covered half its distance before he was collared and hauled back by two or three of the pier crew. “Hey, there, mister,” one of them grinned, “what you trying to do, dunk yourself?”

“Quit it, you fool,” Fredericks advised him from below. “It’s no use any more.”

They finished rolling the mobile structure back out of the way. Cotter stepped down and rejoined Fredericks. “Look at it,” he fumed. “Still close enough to touch!”

“Two minutes sooner,” Fredericks agreed bitterly. “Maybe that last traffic light did it. Or maybe that wrong turn you started to make, on the way down.”

“There comes the name,” Cotter said. He started to spell it out in reverse as the letters cleared the pier hatch one by one. “A-I–L — Santa Emilia. Do you see them? Maybe they’re not on it after all.”

Fredericks grabbed him by the arm suddenly. “There they are! Look, up there, on the second deck. In a straight line over that rust streak on the hull.”

They were standing there in a long line of others lining the rail. The man was hatless, tow-haired, everyday-looking; they probably wouldn’t have recognized him on his own account. But the girl next to him, nestled within the protective curve of his arm, would have stood out even at a greater distance. Black-haired, dark-eyed, with high cheekbones; there was something oddly exotic about her. Byzantine or Polynesian.

“Here goes; this is our last chance,” Cotter said grimly. He cupped his hands like a funnel out before his mouth. The taut line of his throat quivered with the volume of voice he was forcing out. But not a sound could be heard, even by Fredericks, at his very elbow.

For at that instant, with perfect synchronization, an abysmal, long-drawn blast sounded from the ship’s siren, drowning out everything in a tornado of din.

The man and the girl were slowly borne past. They were both looking up, in the direction the blast was coming from. The girl stuck a fingertip into each ear and shuddered. The man laughed. Then the two of them turned inward toward the deck. An empty space was all that remained to show where they had been, and even that didn’t last long.

The ship continued to glide past with mocking, trance-like slowness.

Cotter lit a cigarette, “No Smoking” signs papering the pier shed notwithstanding, and blew a shaft of smoke dejectedly down his shirtfront. A peculiar sort of fatalism seemed to have taken possession of him. “We know,” he said sepulchrally. “But they don’t. He doesn’t. Even she doesn’t herself. Maybe knowledge is the only real danger in this case. Why don’t we let them alone, let them work it out for themselves?”

Fredericks turned on him fiercely. “Do you know what you’re saying? Marriage is a sacrament. Any man who takes a woman to be his wife! I don’t care who he is, is entitled to—”

“To what?” asked Cotter presently, with a flicker of mordant amusement. “Entitled to what?”

Fredericks didn’t answer that.

“Come on,” he said in an oddly quiet voice, turning away. “We’re going to send a wire to San Francisco, to be delivered to him when the ship docks there, after it’s run up from the Canal.”

“Why not at sea?” Cotter queried. “Why not a radiogram while they’re still at sea, right now?”

“Because while they’re still at sea, he can’t get away from her. Once they’ve docked at San Francisco, he can.”

“If,” said Cotter sardonically, “he wants to. He just now married her, remember? They go blind in the heart when they do that.”

“He’s got to be given the chance,” Fredericks fumed. “He’s got to be told. They’ve got to be separated.”

Cotter snapped his half-finished cigarette into the mucous eddy the ship had left in its wake, and watched it go around in insane circles.

“Whom God hath joined together,” he murmured half audibly, “let God have mercy on. They’re going to need it.”