FOR HOURS AND HOURS I WALKED, MUTTERING AND CURSINGFOR HOURS AND HOURS I WALKED, MUTTERING AND CURSING
My face must have excused my brusque departure, my utter inability to eat or drink another mouthful. I muttered something about a rough voyage and my land-legs (I, who never knew the meaning ofmal-de-mer!) and I know my forehead must have been drawn, for Miss Jencks pressedsal volatileupon me solicitously. Roger, manlike, let me get off immediately and alone, as I begged, and once at the bottom of the interminable stairs, I flung myself into a wanderingfiacre, and drove through the merry, lighted Paris boulevards, a helpless prey to passions black and bitter—to a wicked, seething jealousy such as I had never dreamed possible to a decent man.
Thatwas the deep throat, the large and lovely arm!Thatwas the dreamy, full-fed calm, the woman ruminant! God! how the thought tortured and tore at me! I, who had thought myself cured and a philosopher—a kindly philosopher! My first fit of love for her had carried its exaltation with it, but in this grinding, physical rage there was only shame and madness.
I caught, somehow, a train for Calais, I stumbled onto a boat there in a driving rain, and walked the deck in it all night. I travelled blindly to Oxford and tramped through soggy, steaming lanes, through sheets of drizzle, through icy runnels and marshy grass. For hours and hours I walked, muttering and cursing, my teeth chattering in my head, my brain on fire, my feet slushing in my soaking boots. I did not know clearly where I was, I did not know why I was walking nor where, but walk I must, like the convicts on the treadmill. Something laughed horribly in the air just behind me and said like a parrot, over and over again:
"We expect the child in June! We expect the child in June! We expect the child—"
I hit out with my blackthorn stick. "Damn you and your child!" I cried wildly, and fell face forward in a marshy puddle.
Long periods of time passed; days perhaps, perhaps years. Some one, I know, turned with difficulty on his side, so that the puddle did not choke his mouth and nostrils. Some one, by and by, felt something warm and wet and rough against his icy cheek and was grateful for the feeling. Some one was reading to me from a book which described the sensations of a man lifted up and carried in a broken balloon that could only ride a foot from the ground, bumping and jarring horribly, and I was that man, in some strange way, and at the same time I was the illustrations that accompanied the tale. I read the story myself finally, aloud and very shrilly, as that unfortunate man bumped along. After days of this cold journey, the man fell out of the balloon into a warm lake and was delighted with the change, for his very soul was chilled—until he realised, at first dimly, that the water was growing hotter every minute and that the intention was to torture him to death! I was that man, moreover, and I kicked and screamed wildly, though every motion in the boiling water was agony. Just at the point when my breath was failing and my heart slowed, they turned off the water in the lake from a tap, and as it slowly receded, I was safe again, and knew I could fall asleep.
Long I slept, and dreamed inexpressibly, and then I would feel the insidious lapping of the warm lake, rejoice a moment in the comforting heat, then realise with horror that the temperature was rising slowly but surely, and the inferno would begin all over again. Every joint and muscle was red-hot, each burning breath cut me like a knife.
I could not count how many times this happened, but I prayed loudly for the man to die (he had been confirmed, so he had a legal right to pray) and after a long time I began to have hopes that he would, for he discovered a way of drawing his face down under the boiling water and ceasing to breathe. Whenever he did this, a cold, smarting rain drove through the water on his face and forced him to breathe, but he managed to sink deeper and deeper, till at last he felt the throb of the great world on its axle going round, and saw the stars below him, and knew he was nearly free.
"More oxygen!" said a tiny, dry voice far off in infinite space, "more oxygen!"
I grew light and rose to the surface; the stars went out.
"More oxygen!" said the voice again, louder now and close to me. I fought to sink back again but it was useless; I burst up to the surface and breathed the sweet, icy air against my will.
"Now the mustard again, over the heart," said the voice, "and try the brandy."
Something ran like fire through my veins, I opened my eyes, stared into a black, bearded face and said distinctly:
"You nearly lost that man. He heard the thing going round."
Then I fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.
I was very weak and tired when I woke, but quite composed. That feeling of gentleness and conscious pathos that floods the weak and empty and lately racked body was mine, and I looked pensively at the white, blue-veined hand that lay so lax on the counterpane. What a siege it had been for the poor devil that owned that hand! For I realised that I had been very, very ill indeed.
As I studied the hand it was lifted gently from the counterpane by another and clasped lightly but firmly at the wrist. The arm above this hand was clad in striped blue and white gingham; a full white apron fell just at the limit of my sidewisevision. I was far too weak to raise my eyes, but it occurred to me that this must be my landlady, for I recognised the footboard of my bed. And yet it was not at all like my room. The arm-chair was gone, the books were gone, the student lamp was gone, although it was my sitting-room. Then why was the bed there? I frowned impatiently and then the white apron lowered itself, a white collar appeared, and above it a face which was perfectly familiar to me, though I could not attach any name to it.
"What can I do for you, Mr. Jerrolds? a drink, perhaps?" said a clear, competent voice, and I knew at once who she was—the Professor's sister's trained nurse. For one dreadful moment I feared Iwasthe Professor's sister—it seemed to me it must be so, that there was no other course open to me, for that was the person Miss Buxton nursed! Then, as she repeated my name quietly, it was as if a veil had been drawn, and I understood everything. My bed had been moved into the study; her bed was in my room. Doubtless the Professor had sent for her.
I felt thirsty, and hungry, too, a fact known to her, apparently, for in a moment she brought me a bowl of delicious broth, which she fed me very neatly by the spoonful. It made another man of me, that broth, and I watched her record it on a formidable chart, devoted to my important affairs, with great interest.
"Have I been ill long?" I asked, and my voice sounded hollow and rather high to my critical sense.
"Two weeks, Mr. Jerrolds," she said promptly, "quite long enough, wasn't it? It has been most interesting: a very pretty case, indeed."
"What was it?"
"Inflammatory rheumatism," she said, with a gratifying absence of doubt or delay (such a relief to a sick person!) "and a great deal of fever, very high. You ran a remarkable temperature, Mr. Jerrolds."
I received this information with the peculiar complacenceof the invalid. It seemed to me to denote marked ability and powers beyond the common, that fever!
"How did I get here?"
She sat in a low chair by the bed and regarded me pleasantly out of the kind, wise, brown eyes.
"I will tell you all about it," she said, "because I am sure you will be easier, but after I am through I want you to try to compose yourself and go off to sleep, because this will be enough talking for now, and I want you to be fresh for the doctor. Do you understand?"
I dropped my eyelids in token of agreement and she went on.
"You remember that you complained of feeling unwell in Paris at Mr. Bradley's house. You probably had quite a temperature then, though you might not have known it. You came directly back to Oxford, but for forty-eight hours no one knew where you were, for the people here supposed you there. Finally, when Mr. Bradley telegraphed, they grew anxious here, and while they were wondering what to do, your dog ran in, acting so strangely that they suspected something and followed him. He led them directly to you and they found you unconscious in a marshy old lane about six miles out from the town. They brought you here in a horse blanket, the Professor sent for me, and we have been taking care of you ever since. Mr. Bradley has been here twice, but you were too ill to see anybody; he saw that everything possible was being done. I shall write him directly that you are on the uphill road now, and that care and patience are all you need.
"Now, take this medicine, Mr. Jerrolds, and repay me for this long story by going directly to sleep."
I took it, lay for a moment in a dreamy wonder, and drifted off. As she had said, the uphill journey had begun.
That afternoon I saw the doctor, a grizzled, kindly man, and it was he who told me what I had already somehow divined—that I owed my life to Harriet Buxton.
"I never saw such nursing," he said frankly; "the woman has a real genius. It was nip and tuck with you, Mr. Jerrolds, and she simply set her teeth andwouldn'tgive up! One can't wonder the American nurses get such prices—they're worth it. Now it's hold hard and cultivate your patience, and get back that two or three stone we lost during the siege, and then good-bye to me!"
But oh, how long it was! Day after day, and night after night, and day after day again I counted the pieces of furniture in the bare, dull room and read faces into the hideous wall-paper and stared into the empty window. The little night-light punctuated the dark; the feeble sunlight struggled through the rain. The few kindly friends who called upon me I could not see; their sympathetic commonplaces were unendurable to my weakened nerves. Had it not been for the return, now and then, of the pains I had suffered in my delirium, mercifully less and less violent, which made the periods of their absence hours of comparative pleasure, I think I should have grown into a hopeless nervous invalid from sheer ennui. I had never been ill that I remember since the days of my childish maladies, and I fretted as only such an one can and must fret under the irksome novelty of pain, weakness and irritation.
How Harriet Buxton bore with my whims and fads and downright rudeness, I cannot tell. When in a fit of contrition I asked her this, she smiled and said that men were generally irritable.
"But I should go mad if I were obliged to humour the caprices of such a bear as I!"
"But you are not a nurse!" she answered quietly.
After ten days of steady convalescence, when I was propped up a little upon my pillows and could feed myself very handily from an ever-increasingly variedmenu, I asked suddenly if she had heard from Roger lately.
"Yes," she said promptly, "only yesterday. I was waiting till you asked. Before I give you the letter I must tellyou that they are no longer in Paris: they have gone back to America."
"America?" I echoed vaguely, with a half-shocked consciousness that I did not care very much one way or the other where they were.
"Yes, Mr. Bradley came in the day before they sailed, but you were far too ill to see him. At the same time I saw no reason why you should not pull through, and told him so. Mrs. Bradley suddenly expressed a wish to go to her old home, and though for some reasons they did not like to let her begin a sea voyage, for other reasons they wanted to gratify her. She grew quite determined and they decided to allow it. You know she expects her baby in June."
"Yes I know," I said quietly. I remembered the man who had tramped the wet lanes, but to-day he seemed to me a wicked fool, justly punished for his folly. For I knew, though no one had told me, that I should never be the same after this sickness. The very fibres of my soul had been twisted and burned in that white-hot furnace of my delirium, and though Nature might forgive me, she could never forget. Every winter she would take her toll, every damp season she would audit my account, after every exposure or fatigue she would lightly tap some shrinking nerve and whisper "Remember!" A passion whose strength I had never suspected had brought me to this bed, and in this bed that same passion had struggled and shrivelled and died. It was with no mock philosophy that I thought of Margarita. No, the fool knew his folly now. But it was a folly of which I had no need, I verily believe, to feel ashamed. It was not that I was the sort of monk we are told the Devil would be, when he was sick, although my physical weakness may have lain—God knows!—at the root of it, once. No, I had changed. Those who have gone through some such change (and I wonder, sometimes, how many of the passive, unremarkable people I pass on the street, in the fields, in hotels, have gone through such) know how well I knew the truth of this matterand how little likely I was to deceive myself. I loved her, yes, and shall love her while consciousness remains with me, but it would never again be bitter in my mouth and black in my heart.
"Let me see the letter, please, Miss Buxton," I asked, and she brought it, cutting it for me with her neat accuracy of motion and conservation of energy. I spread the single sheet open and began, but I never read more than one line of that letter.
For it began,
Dear old Jerry:Ever since Kitchener found you, I have changed—
Dear old Jerry:
Ever since Kitchener found you, I have changed—
"Kitch! Kitch!" I cried, overcome with shame and penitence. "Oh, Miss Buxton, do you—does anybody—"
"He is just outside," she said, "I will have him sent up at once. I thought you would want him soon, Mr. Jerrolds. And don't worry—he has never been neglected."
I clutched the sheet in my impatience. Very soon there was a scurrying through the hall, a little gasping snuffle, a small, sharp bark. Then he was on the bed before I saw his good brindled head, almost, and in my arms. I pressed my face against his dear, quivering coat, I surrendered my cheek to his warm, rough tongue, I translated each happy convulsive wriggle.
"Dear old Kitch—good fellow!" I muttered, none too steadily, for I was not strong yet, and he seemed suddenly the only friend on whom I could unreservedly count. Roger had wished to stay with me, I knew, but of course he must go with his wife, and I am glad that I never grudged his absence a moment. For this cause shall a man leave his life-long friend and cleave only to her, and there is no other way. But nothing, nothing could separate Kitch and me!
Miss Buxton left us alone together and we discussed the situation gravely and thoroughly and assured each other that it was only a matter of patience, now, and then, away together!
My spirits rose from the day he came in, and in another week I had advanced to a deep cushioned chair in the window for an hour a day. But it was not a very interesting window, commanding as it did my neighbour's eight-foot garden wall crowned with inhospitable broken glass, and though I appreciate the marvel of the spring as much, I suppose, as most of us, I could never occupy myself very long with natural beauties exclusively, and the trees and the grass could not satisfy my craving for human interest. Now that I was ready for them, all my friends were off for their Easter holiday, and I would not keep the Professor from his spring gardening, though he offered manfully. I have never cared for games, with the single exception of his beloved chess, and my eyes soon tired of reading.
And so at last, in default of something more to my mind, I turned to my nurse and determined to make that silent woman talk. At first it was difficult, for I tried to discover her feelings, her attitude, her history. As to the first two of these I met only failure and the last was pathetically simple. An orphan she was, a bread-winner, an observer. I say it was pathetic, but not thatshewas. Things are changing rapidly with women, I can see that plainly, but twenty years ago a man still felt, ridiculously perhaps, that a kindly, competent woman, however successful in her chosen profession, must needs be, in the very nature of the case, even more kindly and more competent with a child on her lap and an arm about her waist. If in the new doctrine of the Brotherhood of Man it is admitted that we owe each our debt to humanity and posterity, I, for one, have never been able to understand why women should not pay that debt in the coinage most obviously provided them for the purpose. The Brotherhood of Man is a great idea, but surely without the Motherhood of Woman it would grow a little shadowy and impractical. (I speak as a fool!)
And so, I repeat, there was something a little pathetic to me in Harriet Buxton's life, though nothing in the least patheticin her personality or her actions. Do not turn on me too fiercely, dear ladies, and demand of me with your well-known remorseless logic, what would have become of me if Harriet Buxton had not been beside me in my delirium, with nothing but a clinical thermometer on her knee, and a white apron around her waist. Do not, I beg you, for I shall shock all your strict habits of mind by taking refuge in blind, illogical instinct and reiterating my firm conviction that though I perish, truth is so, and that Nature had a better use for Harriet's lap and waist. She had! (as you used to say in the old emotional era) she had!!She had!!!
Well, in despair of eliciting anything romantic from her, I languidly inquired as to her travels. They were not extensive: this was her first "trip abroad." It had been rather a failure, in a way, for although she had been engaged with the understanding that her passage was to be paid both ways, her patient on recovery had decided to spend the summer abroad, and had made it very evident that she did not consider herself any longer responsible for her nurse under these circumstances!
"You should have taken legal advice," I expostulated, "the woman was dishonest. It was shocking, Miss Buxton—surely you could have done something?"
"Perhaps," she admitted, "but I had no friends here and it was hard enough to get my salary, anyway. I could have gone with Mrs. Bradley if I had been free. As it was, I sent them another American nurse I knew of in London, who was glad to go back."
"Why didn't you send her to me and go yourself?" I questioned curiously, "if you want to go so much?"
She looked at me in sincere surprise.
"Why, I had already accepted your case, Mr. Jerrolds," she said.
Alas, Harriet! Why, why were you not teaching your simple code of honour to some sturdy, kilted Harry?
There seemed to be nothing more to be got from MissBuxton, and we began to discuss the best winter climate for me, for I understood perfectly that for more years than the doctor cared to impress upon me just now I must avoid damp and chill. We discussed Nassau, Bermuda, Florida, and I mentioned North Carolina. Then Harriet Buxton opened her lips and spoke, and in a few amazed moments it became clear to me that I was in the presence of a fanatic.
For she had been in North Carolina, and this State that for me had spelled only a remarkably curative air and a deplorably illiterate population represented the hope of this woman's life, the ambition of her days and nights, the Macedonia that cried continually in her ears, "Come over and help us!"
For a year she had lived there in the western mountains, giving her duty's worth of hours to a wealthy patient, bargaining for so much free time to devote to that strange, pathetic race of pure-blooded mountaineers, tall, serious, shy Anglo-Saxons, our veritable elder brothers, ignorant appallingly, superstitious incredibly, grateful and generous to a degree. As she talked, rapidly now, with flushing cheeks and kindling eyes, she brought vividly before me these pale and patient people, welcoming her with eager hands, hanging on her wonderful skill, listening like chidden children to her horrified insistence upon long-forgotten decencies and sanitary measures never guessed. As my questions grew her confidence grew with them, and at last she went quickly to her room to return with a thick, black book, which she thrust into my hands.
"It's my diary," she explained. "If you are really interested you may read it. Oh Mr. Jerrolds, to think of the money that goes to Africa and India and slums full of Syrians and Russian Jews, when these Americans—our real kin, you know!—are putting an axe under the bed, with the blade up, to check a hæmorrhage! If they were Zulus," she added, flashing, "some one might do something for them."
HER WEEKLY CHECK, PLUS A DRAFT FOR A HUNDRED POUNDSHER WEEKLY CHECK, PLUS A DRAFT FOR A HUNDRED POUNDS
I could not keep myself from staring at her: with that flush, those kindling brown eyes and that heaving bosom, my nurse was near to being a handsome woman! And all because the natives of North Carolina had no adequate hospital service. Can you imagine anything more extraordinary? I opened the book curiously; not, of course, that I cared tuppence for the natives, but that I had actually begun to feel interested in Harriet Buxton.
I should never have thought of it again, probably, but for Harriet herself, for now that the magic string had been touched, her heart overflowed to its echoes, and my waking hours were filled with anecdotes touching, brutal or humourous, of her years of joy and labour. Her cottage rent had cost her forty dollars, her clothes nothing, her food had come largely from the grateful people. Over and over again she returned to her ridiculously pitiful calculations. She could live for one hundred dollars a year. She could have the use of a deserted schoolhouse, free. Two hundred dollars would fit up a tiny hospital and lending-closet, with linen, rubber articles, simple sick-room conveniences. If she had five hundred, she would start on that and trust to getting help to go on with. She could stay there a year, then nurse for a year, and go back with the money she had saved.
And so on, and so on, and so on! The floods of North Carolina needs that swept over my helpless head would have drowned a stronger brain than mine. In vain I tried to dam this tide of confidences and hopes and ha'penny economies: it was useless. After a week, during which actual photographs, hideous blue prints, the first advance guard of that flood of amateur photography destined to wash over the world, were brought out for my edification, I rebelled and declared myself cured.
"And to get rid of you," I added crossly, "I am going to give you this," and I handed her her weekly cheque, plus a draft for a hundred pounds. "Take it, and get off to those benighted natives, for heaven's sake!"
She stared at it, at me, at it again, then choked and fled to her room. I felt like a fool.
Later, when I saw what it really meant to the absurd creature, I surreptitiously copied bits of the sordid little diary, and sent them to Roger with a slight account of her, and suggested that he mention this matter to Sarah (who had recently washed her hands of the American negro on the occasion of his having bitterly disappointed her hopes in a brutal race riot) and give that philanthropist's energies a new direction.
I saw Harriet off to her boat, tried in vain to get a half hour of rational conversation on topics unrelated to the western mountains of North Carolina, agreed hastily to all directions as to my health, held Kitch up to be kissed, and went back to my sunny garden-corner, for it was full May now, and my strength was growing with the flowers.
I thought that chapter ended, and was startled and not a little shaken by the thick letter that found me planning my lonely summer early in June. It was from Harriet, a curious, incoherent screed; tiresomely detailed as to her plans, painfully brief as to important issues. She had found a letter from Mr. Bradley awaiting her arrival, she had followed his suggestions and interested Miss Sarah Bradley, his cousin, in her schemes, with the result that the Episcopal organisation had sent a deaconess for a year to work under Harriet's direction and a contribution toward fitting out the little hospital. She had gone to see Roger and thank him personally and found him on an island, with Mrs. Bradley in sudden and acute need of both nurse and physician, the former with a broken leg, the latter gone to New York for the day, as his prospective patient was supposed to be in no immediate need of him. She had hastily set the nurse's leg, telegraphed for the doctor, then devoted herself to Mrs. Bradley, who, though beautifully strong and well, developed sudden complications and gave her quite a little trouble. Things were rather doubtful and hard for five or six hours,but fortunately the doctor had left full supplies for the occasion and the other nurse was able to give the anæsthetic—she was dragged on a sofa by a deaf and dumb man, who ran five miles to the village just before. It ended triumphantly at dawn and Mrs. Bradley had a lovely little girl—the image of her father. Both were doing well.
Mr. Bradley had overestimated her services, and as she could not dream of accepting the fee he offered her, he had insisted upon paying a salary for three years to a young physician (selected by the doctor, who arrived at noon) who was to give his entire time and strength to the mountain hospital and superintend the affair, now grown into a real institution, since Mr. Elder had volunteered to supply a young fellow from his club, anxious to act as orderly and assistant for the sake of the training, and Mrs. Paynter, a friend of Mr. Bradley's, had managed to get a full dispensary supply at cost prices from connections of hers in the wholesale drug line.
"And it all comes from you, Mr. Jerrolds," the letter ended, "all owing to your wonderful, your noble interest, in this work! You told Mr. Bradley, and though he is not justified in thinking I saved her life, it is perfectly true that those cases give us a great deal of trouble sometimes, and I was very fortunate in having had a great deal of maternity work in the mountains, when I had to act all alone and do rather daring things. But I got the practice there, and so if I did save your friend's life (or the baby's, which is nearer the truth, I confess to you, Mr. Jerrolds!) you have amply rewarded the cause that gave me the training to do what I did!
"Your grateful
"Harriet Buxton."
I sat under the glass-topped wall, the letter between my knees, staring at the brick walk bordered with green turf. How strange it was, how incredibly strange! A curious senseof watchful, relentless destiny grew in me. Truly it slumbered not nor slept! I, who had cursed that child unborn, had reached over seas and helped it into the world! I, who had been jealous of my friend, had sent him a friend indeed! I, who had grudged Margarita husband and child (for in my black, cruel fever I did this) had given her back to both!
I pondered these things long (as if the thread in the tapestry should marvel at its devious windings) and then summoned my landlady.
"Mrs. Drabbit," said I, "I am thinking of going to America."
And is it I that must sit and spin?And is it I that my hair must bind?I hear but the great seas rolling in,I see but the great gulls sail the wind.Who sang the grey monk out o' the cell?Who but my mother that rode the sea!She stole a son o' the church to hell,And out of hell shall the church steal me?Sir Hugh and the Mermaiden.
And is it I that must sit and spin?And is it I that my hair must bind?I hear but the great seas rolling in,I see but the great gulls sail the wind.Who sang the grey monk out o' the cell?Who but my mother that rode the sea!She stole a son o' the church to hell,And out of hell shall the church steal me?
And is it I that must sit and spin?And is it I that my hair must bind?I hear but the great seas rolling in,I see but the great gulls sail the wind.
Who sang the grey monk out o' the cell?Who but my mother that rode the sea!She stole a son o' the church to hell,And out of hell shall the church steal me?
Sir Hugh and the Mermaiden.
It was mid-August, however, before I reached that part of America that was destined to mean so much to me. A visit to Mrs. Upgrove, my mother's old friend, extended itself beyond my plans, largely because of the pleasant acquaintance I formed there with her son, then Captain, now Major Upgrove, one of the most charming men I have ever encountered. Next to Roger he has become my best friend, incidentally disproving a theory of mine that warm friendships between men are not likely to be formed after thirty. Even as I write this chapter I am looking forward to his visit, and the slim Hawaiian girls are looking forward, too, I promise you, with wonderful, special garlands, and smiles that many a handsome young sailor may jingle his pockets in vain to win!
What is it, that strange, lasting charm that wins every woman-thing of every age and colour? His mother told me that he had it in the cradle, that the nurses were jealous over him and the sweet-shop women put his pennies back into his pockets! Yes, Lona, and yes, Maiti, the silver-haired Major is coming surely, and you shall surely dance! Never mind the wreaths for me, dear hypocrites—they were never woven for bald heads!
It was warm, almost as warm as this languid, creamy beach, the day I clambered, none too agile, over the thwarts of Caliban's boat and made my way up the sandy path to the cottage.
"I'm afraid the fever took it out of you, Jerry," Roger said,looking hard at me, and I nodded briefly and he gripped my hands a little harder.
"I'm glad you're here," he said.
Through the dear old room we stepped and out the further door, and here a surprise met me. The straggling grass stretch was now a rolling, green-hedged lawn, quartered by homelike brick paths. Two long ells had been added to the house, running at right angles straight out from it at either end, making a charming court of the door yard and doubling the size of the building; the fruit trees had been pruned and tended; an old grape arbour raised and trained into a quaint sort ofpergola, a strange sight, then, in America; a beautiful old sun-dial drowsed in a tangle of nasturtiums. A delicate, dreamy humming led my eyes to a group of beehives (always dear to me because of theMiel du Chamounixand our happy, sweet-toothed boyhood!) and near a border of poppies, marigold and hardy mignonette a great hound lay, vigilant beside a large, shallow basket, shaded by a gnarled wistaria clump. The basket was filled with something white, and as we stood in the door, a woman dressed in trailing white, with knots of rich blue here and there, came through a green gate in the side hedge and moved with a rich, swooping step toward the basket. Behind her through the open gate I saw a further lawn white with drying linen, and a quick, pleasant glimpse of a brown, broad woman in an old-world cap, paring fruit under an apple tree, a yellow cat basking at her feet.
The white-clad figure leaned over the basket, her deep-brimmed garden hat completely shading her face, lifted from it a struggling, tiny doll-creature, with a reddish-gold aureole above its rosy face, dandled it a moment in her arms, then sank like a settling gull into the hollow of a low seat-shaped boulder near the wistaria, fumbled a moment at the bosom of her lacy gown, and while I held my breath, before I could turn my eyes, gave it her breast. It pressed its wandering, blind hands into that miraculous, ivory globe (thatpattern of the living world) and through the dense, warm stillness of that garden spot, where the bees' hum was the very music of silence, there sounded, so gradually that I could not tell when the first notes stirred the soundlessness, a curious cooing and gurgling, a sort of fluty chuckle, a rippling, greedy symphony. It was not one voice, for below the cheeping treble of the suckling mite ran a lowing undertone, a murmurous, organ-like music, a sort of maternal fugue, that imitated and dictated at once that formless, elemental melody. Even as we stood riveted to the threshold, the sounds echoed in the air above us, seemed to descend mystically from the very heavens themselves, and as my heart swelled in me, a flock of pigeons swept down from some barnyard eyrie and dropped musically, in a cloud of grey and amethyst, beneath the pear tree. They crooned together there, the woman, the child and the birds, and truly it was not altogether human, that harmony, but like the notes of the pure and healthy animals (or the angels, may be?) that guard this living world from the fate of the frozen and exhausted moon.
"I—I can't get used to it," said Roger abruptly, "it—it seems too much, somehow," and we turned back into the room.
"It's not a bit too much for you, Roger!" I answered heartily (thank God, how heartily!) and we drew deep breaths and welcomed Miss Jencks, in irreproachable white duck—I had almost written white ducks—and talked about my momentous health.
Miss Jencks had abandoned her seaman's comforters for a cooler form of handiwork, suspiciously tiny in shape, but she pursued it relentlessly while we discussed the changes in the cottage; the gardens, the corn and asparagus planned for another season; the ducks quartered near the fresh-water brook; the tiny dairy built for her over the spring; the brick-wall for Roger's pet wall fruit; the piano dragged by oxen from the village; the sail-boat, manned now andthen by our enthusiastic telegrapher: the wondrous size and health of the tiny Mary.
She was called, as one who knew Roger might have expected, for his mother, after the old tradition, too, that gave every eldest daughter of the Bradleys that lovely name. No bitter obstinacy, no unyielding pride of Madam Bradley's could alter in his calm mind the course of his duty, and I never heard a harsh word from him concerning the matter. Margarita cared absolutely nothing about it and never, he told me, expressed the faintest curiosity as to his family or their relations with her.
Soon she was with us, dear and beautiful, with only a tiny lavender shadow under those cloudy eyes—misty just now and a little empty, with that placid emptiness of the nursing mother—to mark the change that my not-to-be-deceived scrutiny soon discovered. We left the sleepy Mary slowly patrolling the brick walks in a pompous perambulator propelled by a motherly English nurse under Miss Jencks's watchful eye, and strolled, in our customary hand-in-hand, to the boat-house, a low, artfully concealed structure, all but hidden under a jagged cliff, and faced wherever necessary with rough cobbled sea-stones sunk in wet cement and hardened there. The right wing of the cottage stood out unavoidably at one point against the skyline, and Roger, who had developed a surprising gift of architecture and a sort of rough landscape gardening, was planning an extension of the artificial sea-wall to cover this.
He worked at this himself, drenched with sweat, tugging at the stones, while Caliban and a mason from the village set them and threw sand over the wet plaster (the method which we decided must have been adopted by the builder of the cottage), and I, too weak yet to help in this giant's play, criticised the effect from a rowboat outside the lagoon, telegraphing messages by means of a handkerchief code. Often Margarita would come with me, embroidering placidly in the bow of the boat, under her wide hat. She detested sewing,and refused utterly to learn any form of it, to Miss Jencks's sorrow, but had invented a charming fashion of embroidery for herself and worked fitfully at tiny white butterflies in the corner of my cambric handkerchiefs—the one and only form this art of hers ever took. It became a sort of emblem and insignia of her, and Whistler, who began coming to them, I think, the year after that, or the next, made much of this fanciful bond between them. It was she who worked the black butterfly upon the lapel of his evening coat which created such a sensation in Paris one season.
Once while shooting in the Rockies with Upgrove, six or eight years ago, I pulled out an old buckskin tobacco pouch, turned it hopefully inside out in the search for a stray thimbleful, and discovered in a corner of the lining a faded yellow silk butterfly, all unknown to me till then! She must have worked it surreptitiously, like a mischievous, affectionate child; and as I held it in my hands, and stared at the graceful absurd thing, the lonely camp faded before me; the sizzling bacon, the rough shelter, the whistling guide, slipped back into some inconsequential past, and I lay again on the sun-warmed rocks, watching a yellow-headed toddler prying damp pebbles from the beach, to pile them later in her tolerant lap. Oh, Margarita! Oh, the happy days!
I remember so well the morning of the great discovery. It was one of those damp, rainy, grey days when happy people can afford to realise contentment indoors, and we were a very comfortable group indeed: Margarita sorting music, Roger drawing plans for a new chimney, Miss Jencks shaking a coral rattle for the delectation of the tiny Mary, who lay in her shallow basket under the lee of the great spinning-wheel, and I hugging the fire and watching them. I considered Roger's reforms in the matter of chimneys too thorough-going for the slender frame of the house and told him so.
"You'll batter the thing to pieces," I said, "see here!" and lifting my stick, which I had been poking at the baby after the irrelevant fashion of old bachelor friends, I hit out aimlessly at the side of the fireplace and struck one of the bricks a smart blow on one end. It turned slightly and slipped out of its place, and as I shouted triumphantly and pulled it away, I displaced its neighbour, too, and poked scornfully at a third. This, however, was firm as a rock, as well as all the others near it, and with a little excited suspicion of something to come I put my hand into the small, square chamber and grasped a dusty, oblong box, of tin, from the feel of it.
"Roger!" I gasped, "look here!"
"Well, well," he answered vaguely, "don't pull the place down on us, Jerry, that's all!"
"But Mr. Jerrolds appears to have discovered a secrethiding-place," Miss Jencks explained succinctly, and then they both stared at me while I drew out from a good arm's reach a tin dispatch box, thick with dust, a foot long and half as wide. I wiped the dust from its surface, and on the cover we read (for Roger and Miss Jencks were at my elbow now, I assure you!) written neatly with some sharp instrument on the black japanned surface, the nameLockwood Lee Prynne. With shaking fingers I lifted the lid, which opened readily, then recollecting myself, passed the box to Roger. He glanced curiously at Margarita, but she was absorbed in her music and as lost to us as a contented child. He held the box on his knees, pushed back the lid completely and lifted the top paper of all from the pile. It was badly burned at the edges, as were the packets of letters, the columns clipped from yellowed newspapers, the legal-looking paper with its faded seal and the rough drawings on stained water-colour paper that lay beneath it. It required no highly developed imagination to infer that the contents of the box had been laid on the fire, to be snatched away later.
Miss Jencks and I were frankly on tiptoe with excitement, but old Roger's hand was steady as a rock as he unfolded the stiff yellow parchment and spread before us the marriage certificate of Lockwood Lee Prynne and Maria Teresa—alas, the shape of a fatally hot coal had burned through the rest of the name! We skipped eagerly to the next place of handwriting, the officiating clergyman and the parish—for the form was English—but disappointment waited for us there, too, for the same coal had gone through two thicknesses of the folded paper, and only the date, Jan. 26, 186-, broke the expanse of print. The initials of one witness "H.L." and the Christian name "Bertha," of another, had escaped the coal on the third fold, and that was all.
Roger drew a long breath.
"So it's Prynne, after all," he said quietly, and unfolded the next paper.
This was a few lines of writing in a careful, not-too-well-formed hand, on a leaf torn from an old account-book, to judge from the rulings.
"Sept. 24, 186-. The child was born at four this morning," it said abruptly. "It may not live and she can't possibly. The Italian woman baptised it out of a silver bowl. It is a dreadful thing, for now if it does live it will be Romish, I suppose, but he said to let her have her way, so it had to be. He is nearly crazy. He will kill himself, I think. He knows she must die. It is named after her mother and an outlandish lot of other names for different people. As soon as she is dead the Italian woman is going back to Italy. I shall never leave him."
The leaf was folded here and several lines badly burned. At the bottom of the leaf I could just make out one more line.
"I cannot be sorry she is dying if I burn in hell for it. Hester Prynne."
Roger and I stared at each other, the same thought in our minds. I had imagined many things about the mysterious Hester, but never that she bore that name, as a matter of simple fact. The connection with Caliban had been too much for my overtrained imagination, and heaven knows what baseless theories I had woven around what was at best (or worst) a mere coincidence. For me the scarlet letter had flamed upon what I now know to have been a blameless breast, and in my excited fancy a stormy nature had suffered picturesque remorse where, as a matter of fact, only a deep and patient devotion had endured its unrecorded martyrdom of love unguessed and unreturned. So much for Literature!
Next came two folded half-columns from a newspaper, one containing only that dreadful list of the dead that our mothers read, white-cheeked and dry-eyed, in the war time. Opposite the names of Col. J. Breckenridge Lee and Lieut. J. Breckenridge Lee, Jr., were hasty, blotted crosses. Theother half-column, cut from another and better printed sheet, recorded with a terrible, terse clearness the shocking deaths of the aged Col. J.B. Lee and his son Lieut. J.B. Lee, Jr., of the Confederate Army, at the hand of his son-in-law, Capt. Lockwood Prynne, who was defending an encampment of the Northern forces from a skirmishing party led by the rebel officers. Captain Prynne recognised what he had done as the young lieutenant caught his father in his arms and turned to stagger back, and rushing forward had endeavoured to drag them to safety, receiving a shot himself that shattered his arm, wounding him severely. His recovery was doubtful.
Under our sympathetic eyes the old tragedy lived again, the crisp, cruel lines seemed printed in blood. It needed only the letter that lay beneath to make everything clear.
"Dear Bob," the letter began in the unmistakable neat hand we had read on the top of the box, "I cannot leave you without this word. I cannot explain—my brain is on fire, I think—but try to judge with lenience. Blood-poisoning set in, and my father died in hospital last week. On his dying bed I swore to him that I would never raise my hand against his country. I can't repeat all he said, but he's right, Bob, the South is wrong! Secession is wrong. I brought the body home, but mother could not come to the funeral. She is not at all violent, but she will never be the same again—she didn't know me, Bob. I can't describe how pitiful she is. Uncle James was her twin brother, you know, and they were everything to each other. When we heard of Fort Sumter she was nearly wild, and I promised her with my hand on her Bible never to fight the South. I meant it then—my friends, my home and you all. But I would have got her to release me if I could. But she couldn't release me now, and I would die before I broke that promise, the way she is now. I can't stay here. I couldn't look anybody in the face. I wish I could be shot. I may be, yet. I am going to Italy to see about those silk-worms for theplantation, that father was interested in. The war can't last much longer and it will be something to do. Mother is well looked after and I can't stay in this country—it's not decent. Can you write to me, Bob? I don't ask much—just write a line. What could I do? Write, for God's sake.
"Lockwood Lee Prynne."
Below this signature, in a different hand, was scrawled:
"I return this letter. I have nothing to say.
"R. S. L."
Alas, alas, the pity of it! The grey moss and the blue forget-me-nots grow together now over many a nameless grave, and Northern youth and Southern maid pull daisy petals beside the sunken cannon ball; but the ancient scar ploughed deep, and old records like this have heat enough in them yet to sear the nerves of us who trembled, maybe, in the womb, when those black lists of the wounded trembled in our mother's hands.
What a hideous thing it is! Can any bugle's screaming cover those anguished cries, or any scarlet stripes soak up the spreading blood? Bullets are merciful, my brothers, beside the cruel holes they pierce in hearts they never touched.
Roger laid the papers and letter reverently to one side, and I, who had been reading over his shoulder, brushed impatiently at my eyes. (I was not entirely a well man yet, remember!) Below the newspaper lay a signed deed, formally conveying a parcel of twenty acres of land, carefully measured and described, to Lockwood Lee Prynne, his heirs and assigns, and all the rest of the legal jargon. This was hardly burned at all.
Of the two slim packets of letters one was badly charred: parts of it fell away in Roger's hands, as he carefully opened it. I cannot transcribe them literally, or even to any great length, for they are too sad, and no good end would beserved by commemorating to what extent that fierce furnace of the Civil War burned away the natural ties of kindred and neighbour and home. Enough that the few remaining members spared out of what must have been a small family cut Margarita's father definitely off from them, in terms no man could have tried with any self-respect to modify. His father, a Northerner, who had identified himself since his Southern marriage with his wife's interests and kinsfolk, had lost touch with his own people, and a few death notices, slipped in among the letters, seemed to point to an almost complete loneliness, which Roger afterward verified. The other packet held two letters only, one in Italian (which language I learned, after a fashion, in order to read it) the other in French. The Italian letter was not only scorched badly, but so blistered—one did not need to ask how—that parts were quite illegible. The writer, a man, evidently, a young man, probably, conveyed in satire so keen, a contempt so bitter, a hatred so remorseless, that it was difficult to believe it a letter from a brother to his sister. Beneath the polished, scornful sentences—vitriol to a tender young heart—surged a tempest of primitive rage that thrust one back into the Renaissance, with its daggers and its smiles. "Let me tell you, then, once and for all," ran one sentence, breaking out fiercely, "that there is but one country on earth which can shelter you and that villain—his own! There I scorn to put my foot or allow the foot of any member of your family, but let him or his victim leave it—and so long as I live my vengeance shall search you out and wipe out this insult to my house, my country and my church!" The opening page was missing and the last one was badly burned, so we had absolutely no clue as to the family name.
Roger and I puzzled out enough of it to gather vaguely what the situation must have been, and when we read the second letter it was all clear. This second letter was burned and blistered, too, but its simple, naïve repetitions, its tender terror, its brave, affectionate persistence, left little, even intheir fragmentary condition, for us to guess. I will give only a page here and there.
"I have tried for four months not to write, but what you told me last has proved too strong for me and I must.... Oh, my dear one, my more than sister in this world, how could you have been permitted this deadly sin? It may be I shall be damned for even this one letter—my only one, for you must not write again. Sister Lisabetta suspects me already, and asked me last week why I should talk with the baker's daughter so secretly? So if she brings another letter I shall tell her to destroy it. Write to me no more."
Ah, now we knew! Strange indeed was the blood that ran in Margarita's blue-veined wrist! No light and fleeting passion had brought her into this world.
"....When I remember that it was I who brought you the first letter, I weep for hours. God forgive me, and Our Lady, but I thought it was only some idle nonsense of Sister Dolores—she was always so light, Dolores! They have sent her back to Spain—I know you loved her best! Sister Lisabetta found a bit of your gown caught on the cypress tree. How dared you risk your life so? I swore I knew nothing, nor did I, about what she asked me. The Archbishop came...."
I think I see the little figure slipping from bough to bough under the stars, the odour of all the vineyards is in my nostrils, the splashing of the Convent fountain sounds in my ears!
"....I could not sleep at night after that wicked letter of how you love him—how dare you, a vowed nun, write such sinful words? It must be, as they say, wrong to pray for you! Do not try to excuse yourself because your brother devoted you against your will—you were happy till he climbed the tree and saw you! Only Satan can make it so that one wicked look between the eyes should make a man and woman mad for—I will not remember that sinful letter, I will not! Maria, thou art lost!"
And so, even as she and Roger looked and could not look away and never after lost each other's eyes, even so, her mother looked at her lover and looking, lost (or so she thought) her soul! The wheel turns ever, as Alif taught me.
"....What good can such a marriage do? No Catholic could marry you, I am sure. It is no marriage. Your brother wrote you the truth. I do not wonder that you will never read or speak an Italian word again—you have disgraced Italy. But as he says, you are no true Italian—your English mother and her Protestant blood has made this horrible thing possible. Her death was a judgment on you."
Oh, these cruel, gentle women! And on these breasts we long to lay our heads!
"....I do not wonder that all his countrymen are against him, and that he must live alone all his days. Even in that wild land blasphemy has its deserts, then. But I cannot help being glad for you that his kinswoman will be your servant, for you are ill fitted to grow maize with the painted savages,ma plus douce! But how strange that even a distant relative of one socomme il fautshould be of a sort to do this!
"Alas, I talk as if I were again of the world! If Raoul had not died, I should have been...."
Here the letter was blotted beyond recognition for a whole, closely written page. It must have been tender here, and one sees the poor Maria fairly kissing it to pieces. I was grateful to the writer.
"....That you should be a mother! And soon! I cannot comprehend it. My head swims. Reverend Mother dreamed of you so, suckling it, with a halo around your head, and she awoke in terror and told Sister Lisabetta, who let it out. The devil put it into her dream, to tempt her, Sister Lisabetta says, for she was always too fond of you. She fasted three days and one heard her groaning in the night—she was as white as paper. Oh, Maria, to feel it at one's breast, tugging there!I think I am going mad. Never write again, for I shall never read it, nor know if it is born."
Truly God permits strange things. And yet celibacy is as old as civilisation, and the Will to Live has denied itself since first It was conscious. It cannot be pished and pshawed away, by you or me or another.
"...I will get this to the baker's daughter, and then when I am sure it is gone, I will confess it all, and whatever penance Reverend Mother puts upon me, I shall be only glad. It may be I shall be cut off from Our Blessed Lord longer than I can bear, and then I shall die, but I think I shall be forgiven finally, for something tells me so, and until I gave you the letter, that day near the fountain, I cannot think of any very great sin, can you, Maria? We were always good, we three. But now I am alone, for they will never let Dolores back. She grew so thin—my heart ached for her.
"Adieu, adieu—I have tried to hate you, as I ought, but your grey eyes look and look at me in the night, and I feel you tapping my fingers as you used to do—oh, if they will let me I will pray for you every day till I die, and Our Lady will remember that you were always good until he looked at you!
"For the last time—
"Your Joséphine."
Under this letter was hidden a crude little sketch of the cloister-end of some building on a sheet of drawing-paper, and near it, just outside a high wall, a fair outline of a thick cypress. There was nothing else in the box.
Nor did we ever learn another word or syllable of the life of those two in their lonely cottage. Whether Prynne built it himself or hired labourers for the work we never tried to discover. That he buried himself there with the passion of his lonely life, that these flaming lovers, cast off by God and the world, thought both well lost for what they found in each other, who can doubt? The love she inspired in him I can understand, for I have known her daughter; the lovehe woke in her, she being what she was, I do not dare to guess. What must that woman's soul have been? What storm of love must have swept her from her cloister-harbour—and on to what rocks, over what eternal depths! Deal gently with her, Church of her betrayal! Forgive her sins, I beg you, for she loved much.