“She’s honest, it seems.”
“Yes, poor creature.”
“Mary,” asked Keturah Hand as she leaned forward while her niece adjusted the pillows behind her in the big Pullman chair, “when that man refused the jewels you told him that you would offer another ransom for Guy Vanton. What had you in mind?”
The younger woman was behind her aunt. Mrs. Hand twisted about suddenly to see her face. It was flushed, but Mermaid’s deep and brilliant eyes met her aunt’s unflinchingly.
“I would have married Guy,” she said, her voice vibrating slightly. “His father—that is, that man—talked about saving him. I would have matched my salvation of him against his—father’s. I would have fought for him against all the past evil that was dragging him down. Now his father is dead. He can—possibly—pull himself out alone, unaided. If not, I am ‘standing by.’ Oh, yes—I love him,” she finished, answering the interrogation that leaped from Keturah Hand’s eyes.
In the sunshine of California, in the cheerfulness of life in San Francisco, Keturah grew steadily better. Dick Hand executed a variety of projects, and only Mermaid remained unstirred and uninfluenced by her surroundings, by the change of air and scene. It is perhaps wrong to speak of her as “unstirred.” Shewas stirred and very deeply, but by no trifle of environment or of company. Down in her the great tides were swinging, moving resistlessly and in vast volume, imperceptible in their drift and direction on the surface. As was inevitable, Dick Hand again asked her to marry him and this time she gave him a final refusal. She did not put him off. She knew it would be useless. The current had set and was sweeping on through her. She could chart it, and she knew it would not shift. Something tremendous, something massive in her life would be required to deflect it.
“Why,” she asked herself, “should I pretend to myself any longer? I love Guy Vanton. I think I have always loved him. He is in peril and he needs my help. When he was caught in the surf did I wait to see if he could save himself? Not one instant! Why do I wait now? Why do I risk losing him, by letting him drown, forever? It isn’t right.”
She did up her hair in great coils, like thick cables of ship’s rope, and it seemed to her that each separate strand, so slender, so easily snapped, redoubled in its tensile power as it was gathered with the hundreds of others.
“Life,” she thought to herself, “is like that. We are tied to the past by a thousand filaments, every one of them slight, fragile, easily snapped, quickly broken. But they are all twisted together. They are like this coil of hair. They are like a thousand threads spuntogether, not to be snapped, not to be broken. A thousand things join Guy to the past. Some of the threads join the two of us.”
A fresh thought struck her.
“He can never escape wholly from his past. And I am almost the only thing or person in it that is pleasant or even halfway wholesome for him to remember.”
She recalled what she had told him, that he must no longer be passive but must act. Did not this counsel apply to herself? She knew she wanted him. She knew he wanted her. But however great his want of her he could not and would not call upon her to make what might be the sacrifice of a life—her life—to save his own. How could he, a man nearing middle age, really nameless, a child of disgrace and the son and heir of evil, lonely, sensitive, not unliked, but virtually friendless—how could he ask her to become his wife? He could ask of her nothing that she did not freely and of her own impulse offer and give him—friendship, sympathy, help, advice. The last item had an ironical ring in Mermaid’s consciousness. Advice to the drowning!
If he had the strength to save himself he had that strength, and that was all there was to it. For what was she waiting? To see him exercise it? But she loved him. It was not proof of his strength she required. What he had, what he lacked, was nothing—simply nothing. If he hadn’t it, she had strengthenough for two. Suppose she failed? Suppose she knew she would fail? The old image persisted before her. If he were drowning and she knew that her effort to save him would not succeed, would she abandon him, just stand there watching, or await what would happen with averted eyes? Of course not. You had to make the effort no matter if it was absolutely foredoomed to failure. And this effort which confronted her was not necessarily foredoomed at all; at least, so far as she or any one else could see. They might shake their heads but they could not tell.
In her way, the best way she could manage, she put this to her aunt, who listened almost silently until the end and then said, suddenly and abruptly: “Of course, Mary, if you love him—why, that settles everything.”
Mermaid felt bound to insist on the logic leading to this conclusion.
“Nonsense!” exclaimed Mrs. Hand, irritably. “You can’t reason about such a thing. When two persons love each other it settles everything—and unsettles everything, too,” she added. “There’s only one thing to do, and there’s only one person to do it.”
“There’s really no reason why a woman shouldn’t propose to a man,” continued Keturah. “I’m no great respecter of conventions. You may remember the time when I used to wear a man’s old coat. Conventions were made for the man and not man for theconventions, except political conventions.” She was resorting, as was not unusual with her, to flippancy to cover emotion. “I don’t know but that I may be said to have proposed to your Uncle Hosea, when I got money that was rightfully his from his brother and put it in his hands, indirectly, as a lover sends a box of flowers to his sweetheart. Only I couldn’t have the florist, Lawyer Brown, put my card in the box,” she noted. “However, it wasn’t necessary; it seldom is. You always know who sent the flowers.
“I believe, though I don’t know, that Keturah Hawkins proposed to John Hawkins,” she went on. “John was a speechless sort of man all his life. I’m sure he never brought himself to utter any such words as: ‘Will you marry me?’ They would have choked him. I suspect that at the proper time Keturah began calmly to talk about plans for the house I live in, progressing by easy stages to such matters as the date of the wedding and the clothes he would need, down to his underwear, winter weight.
“They say the way to resume is to resume, but often the way to begin is to resume, too. Each night that John called, Keturah resumed the subject she had not discussed the night before; and so they were married and lived happily ever after.”
Mermaid, reduced to laughter by this narration, said: “Well, to resume what we were not talking about just now, I shall go East day after to-morrow if youare willing. I will bring Guy out here and then I can see you home. You ought not to travel alone.”
“Don’t think you are going away and leave me in this place 3,000 miles from Blue Port, missy!” exclaimed her aunt. “I won’t stay here. Besides, Dick Hand is cross as a catamount since you told him for the last time that——”
Mrs. Hand broke off the sentence as she might have bitten off a thread of unnecessary length. She looked at her niece and sighed.
“You are a fine woman, my dear,” she said. “Come here and kiss me. You don’t have to put your mind on it. Just a dutiful kiss will do.”
Mermaid kissed her with undutiful violence.
They met, the two, on the beach, on a long sweep of the ocean shore where snipe were running at the edge of the lacy waves but where there was no other human being within sight or sound of them. They had met, you may say, before—at the Lone Cove Coast Guard Station, for instance, where Mermaid had kissed her father and shaken hands with everybody, including the one or two surviving honorary uncles of her childhood. They had sat them down at the long table over which Cap’n Smiley still presided, encouraging the art of conversation as one of those social amenities that marked the civilized man. They had eaten heartilyof simple and appetizing fare, had joked, laughed, told stories. Mermaid had been delighted at the physical transformation in Guy. He was broader shouldered, or certainly seemed so, and was obviously heavier, “filled out,” as her father put it. The colour in his cheeks was a thing to wonder at; so was the calm of his eyes. They were still those wild-animal eyes, but the look in them was that of a creature at peace with the world and, for the rest, unafraid. He was, except for the fact of a somewhat wider education, one of them.
But that had not been a meeting. This was their meeting, here on the smooth and endless stretch of hard-packed sand at the ocean’s edge.
They stood side by side, not looking at each other but at the ocean, at the curling, magnificent breakers which the southeast wind was driving in. The sun shone, the air was magic. Bird cries reached them, a tiny treble to the bass of the water’s roar.
“Out of the ocean you came,” he said. “Will you slip away and return into it again some day, I wonder? Mermaid! The name is poetry and the story is romance. When you go back, you must look for me. I shall be a wreathed Triton, blowing upon a conch shell. I shall be among those who pull the sea god’s chariot while you will be among those who swim in his escort. And we shall be much together. Always.”
“You have done it!” she said, exultingly. “Youhave become a man, and yet you have not lost the child and the poet in you. You are really the Guy Vanton I first knew, only grown, matured, with the world before you.”
“I have it all yet to conquer,” he told her, half laughing.
“Your greatest conquest has been made.”
He reached for her hand, pressed it, and held it.
“Guy,” she said, suddenly, “will you marry me?”
She felt his hand tremble. The tremendous tide within her swept on, and in her ears there was a noise like singing. She felt his arm about her, and it was needed. She made out his voice, saying: “Mermaid, will you have me? Will you—have—me? Oh, if you will!”
It was a cry of entreaty, a prayer, a thanksgiving.
She suddenly slipped down onto the sand and quite ridiculously collapsed in a heap. And he was on the sand beside her, folding her to him, murmuring little words that were inaudible and precious. She felt his hair against her cheek and for an instant their strange eyes confronted each other. In his were brown and golden lights; hers were less brilliantly blue, as if the surface reflection were gone, and looking into them it would be possible, almost for the first time, to guess at the depths concealed by their mirror-like quality.
They sat there for a long time while the sun declined slowly through the heavens, a futile effort of the wheelinguniverse to measure by cycles and hours a moment of eternity.
The death of “Mrs. Vanton”—no one ever was heartless enough to call her anything else—left entirely to Guy the moderate fortune which had been Captain Vanton’s. And now he had a use for it.
Mermaid and her husband travelled about, crossing the Atlantic and visiting Paris, where Guy showed his wife some scenes of his boyhood. They rambled through little towns. And in these the streets seemed always to be crowded with youngsters at play.
Mermaid had hold of Guy’s arm. He felt her red-gold hair brush his cheek.
“Children!” he said, and fell silent. “We, too, were children once. I think we will always remain children, you and I. The spirit does not die, but the body must be renewed. It is ours to renew it.”
They walked on together, and everywhere the children looked up from the excitement and laughter of their games to glance at them interestedly or disinterestedly, curiously or with indifference, and here and there they caught a smile, fleeting and momentary, fashioned expressly for them, inviting them to share the instant’s joy. As they walked they drew closer together. They were no longer blissfully happy, moving in a thoughtless perfection of shared and reciprocated love. They wereintelligently happy, perceptively, hopefully happy. To the delight of the moment and of each other was added the delight of anticipation. They walked on and looked down the long vista of the future.
Their love had now a meaning and a purpose for both of them that transcended the dear comradeship and pleasure of the present. It was still love, but it was not the same love; it had in it a sense of obligation, an instinct of fidelity, a passion of service, an element of devotion. In a little village church they knelt together, reverently, before the altar, and the same prayer was in both their hearts.