"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 Miss Buxton, 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 haemorrhage! If they were Zulus," she added, flashing, "some one might do something for them."



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 anaesthetic—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 sense of 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."



PART SIX

IN WHICH YOU ARE SHOWN THE RIVER'S VERY SOURCES, FAR UNDERGROUND

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.



CHAPTER XX

A GARDEN GLIMPSE OF EDEN

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 of pergola, 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 the Miel du Chamounix and 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 (that pattern 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 and then 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!



CHAPTER XXI

HESTER PRYNNE'S SECRET

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 secret hiding-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 name Lockwood 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. The other 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 the plantation, 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 be served 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, naive repetitions, its tender terror, its brave, affectionate persistence, left little, even in their 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 so comme il faut should 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 Josephine."

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 love he 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.



CHAPTER XXII

FATE LAUGHS AND BAITS HER HOOK

I find to my surprise that these rambling chapters, intended, in the first place, as a sort of study of Margarita's development under the shock of applied civilisation, have grown rather into a chronicle of family history, a detail of tiny intimate events and memories that must surely disappoint Dr. M——l, at whose urgent instance they were undertaken. Margarita was, indeed, at that time, a fit subject for the thoughtful scientist, and hardly one of her conversations with her friends but would serve as a text for some learned psychological dissertation. But it would have been hard, even for a stony savant, to dissect that adorable personality! The points that I had intended to discuss are lost, I find, in her smile; the interest of her relations with the world, as it burst upon her in all its complications and problems, a grown woman, but ignorant as a savage and innocent as a child, is as nothing beside the interest of her relations with us who formed for so long her little special world. However, I cannot offer my scientist nor his distinguished colleague, Professor J——s, a mere tangle of personal reminiscences, so I must try to recall, as accurately as may be, the circumstances of Margarita's introduction to orthodox Christianity. At Miss Jencks's earnest petition Roger, who had grown really attached—as had we all—to the good creature, had finally yielded and allowed her to impart the outline of the New Testament story to her charge. I found her later, a moist handkerchief crumpled in her hand and a tiny worn leather volume on her lap.

"It didn't do, then?" I inquired sympathetically, for her plain, competent face was more disturbed by grief than I had ever seen it.

"Mr. Jerrolds," she demanded seriously, "do you think she has a soul? Of course that is wrong," she added hastily, "and I should not say such a thing, but do you know she treats it just like any other story? It means nothing to her. She has no respect for the most sacred things, Mr. Jerrolds!"

"But how could she have, dear Miss Jencks?" I urged gently. "They are not sacred to her, you must remember. She is what you would call a heathen, you know."

Miss Jencks folded her handkerchief thoughtfully.

"Yes, I know," she began, "but think, Mr. Jerrolds, think how gladly, how gratefully the heathen receive the Gospel! I shall never forget how the missionary described it that dined with the Governor-General once. It was in Lent, I remember, and the poor man regretted that it should be, he had eaten fish so steadily in the Islands! It was only necessary for him to tell the simple Gospel story, and it won them directly."

I bowed silently—it was at once the least and the most that I could do.

"And more than that, Mr. Jerrolds," the good woman continued, unburdening herself, clearly, of the results of many days of thought, "look at those wonderful conversions in the slums! Look what this Salvation Army is doing! The Governor-General used to say they were vulgar and that it was all claptrap, but that never seemed to me quite fair. We must have left something undone, we and the Dissenters, Mr. Jerrolds, if this General B——h can reach people we have lost. Isn't that so?"

To this I agreed heartily, and after a moment she went on.

"Why, the roughest, vilest men weep like children when they understand Our Lord's sacrifice, Mr. Jerrolds, and what it did for them, and surely if they, thieves and drunkards and—and worse, can be so touched, Mrs. Bradley...."

"Perhaps," I suggested as gently as I could, "it is just because Mrs. Bradley is neither a thief nor a drunkard nor worse, dear Miss Jencks, that she does not feel the necessity for weeping. The emotionalism of the convert is a curious thing, and the sense of sin together with vague memories of that Story, connected with childhood and childhood's innocence, may produce a state of mind responsible for a great deal that we could hardly expect from Mrs. Bradley."

"But we are all sinners, Mr. Jerrolds!" Again I bowed.

"Surely you believe this, Mr. Jerrolds?"

"I should not care for the task of convincing Mrs. Bradley of it," I replied dexterously.

"That was the trouble," she admitted mournfully. "I told her about Adam and Eve, but she said that whatever they had done was no affair of hers, and it could not be wrong to eat apples, anyway, she told me, they were so good for the voice."

I choked a little here.

"She is very literal," I said hastily, "and the apple has symbolised discord in more than one mythology."

"I showed her that beautiful picture of the Crucifixion," Miss Jencks added in a low, troubled voice, "and do you know, Mr. Jerrolds, she refused to look at it or hear about it as soon as she understood! She said it was an ugly story and the picture made her hands cold. She said it could do no good to kill anyone because she had done wrong. 'Religion is too bloody, Miss Jencks,' she said. 'I do not think I like it. If I were you I should try to forget it.' Isn't it terrible, Mr. Jerrolds?"

Poor Barbara Jencks! You were an Englishwoman and it was twenty years ago!

"Leave thou thy sister when she prays," says the poet, and with all due respect for his presumable nobility of intention, it is certainly the easiest course to pursue! I left Miss Jencks.

She followed me a little later, however, and told me that she was not entirely without hopes, for Margarita had been greatly taken with the Revelation of St. John the Divine, and had committed to memory whole chapters of it, with incredible rapidity, saying that it would make beautiful music. That very evening she sang it to us, or rather, chanted it, striking chords of inexpressible dignity and beauty on the piano—the pure Gregorian—by way of accompaniment. It was impossible that she could have heard such chords, for she had never attended a church service in her life and such intervals formed no part of her vocal instruction.

Afterward, I read Ecclesiastes to her, and she did the same thing with it, saying that it was the most beautiful thing she had ever heard—she did not care for Shakespeare, by the way, then or later. Tip Elder came to us for a week at that time, and the tears stood in the honest fellow's eyes as Margarita, her head thrown back, her own eyes fixed and sombre, her rich, heart-shaking voice vibrating like a tolling bell, sent out to us in her lovely, clear-cut enunciation the preacher's warning.

Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, while the evil days come not....

Oh, the poetry of it, the ageless beauty!

Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken....

Her voice was grave, like a boy's, and yet how rich with subtle promises! It was mellow, like a woman's, but not mellow from bruising—the only way, Mme. M——i told me once. Those poor women!

Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.

I can see her now ... there are those, I know, who have guessed my poor secret, and who wonder that I do not "console myself," in the silly phrase of the day. How could I? The twitter of the Hawaiian girls is like that of the beach-birds in my ears, after that golden-ivory voice!

It was in October, I think, that she began to grow restless. Roger was full of plans for the coming winter, and had even gone so far as to all but complete the formalities of renting a house in New York, when she startled us all by inquiring of me when I intended to start for Italy.

"For I am coming with you," she concluded placidly.

"I'm afraid not, cherie," said Roger, "I must get to work, you know. You can take lessons in New York, all you want."

"But I do not care to go to New York," she returned quietly. "I like Paris better. I need not nurse the baby, now, and I can sing a great deal. Jerry can take me."

"Mr. Bradley means he must be in New York to continue his professional career, dear Mrs. Bradley," Miss Jencks interposed, "and you must go with him, of course."

"Why?" asked Margarita.

"Because a wife's place is by her husband," said Miss Jencks, after a pause which neither Roger nor I volunteered to fill.

"But why?" Margarita inquired again. "I cannot do Roger's pro—professional career!"

"No, my dear, but you can help him greatly in it," Miss Jencks instructed placidly (she was invaluable, was Barbara, when it was a matter of proper platitude, which flowed from her lips with the ease of water from a tap—and she believed it, too!) "a man needs a woman in his home. Her influence—"

"Yes, I know, you have told me that before. But you could stay with Roger, Miss Jencks, and be that influence," said Margarita sweetly, "and I could go with Jerry." Was she impish, or only ingenuous, I wonder? One could never tell.

"How about the baby?" Roger demanded cheerfully.

"I am not going to nurse it any more," said the mother of little Mary quietly. "Madame said I had better stop it now—it will be better for my voice. So it will not need me. Dolledge knows all about taking care of it."

"But, my dear, are you sure it will be good for Mary not to nurse her? She is not six months old, you know," Miss Jencks suggested mildly.

Margarita leaned her round chin into the cup of her hands and gazed thoughtfully at her mentor.

"Then why do you not nurse her, dear Miss Jencks?" she asked.

At this Roger and I left the room hastily. I am unable to state what the late directress of the Governor-General's family said or did!

It was the next day, I remember, that I was called to New York on business connected with my mother's small affairs, and while there I was greatly surprised and not a little amused to receive a telegram from Roger asking me to engage passage for himself, Margarita, Miss Jencks, Dolledge and the baby, on my own boat, if possible, if not, to change my sailing to fit theirs. It is only fair to say that Sears, Bradley and Sears had recently become involved in a complicated lawsuit of international interests and importance, and Roger took some pains to inform me of the very handsome retaining-fee which his knowledge of the workings of English law combined with his proficiency in French quite justified him in accepting in consideration of his giving the greater part of his time to this case—a case almost certain to drag through the winter and require his presence in London and his constant correspondence with Paris.

I received this information as gravely as he offered it, but, to use his own phrase, I reserved my decision as to whether the lack of that same international case would have kept the Bradley menage in New York.

* * * * *

I stayed in Paris long enough to see Margarita and wee Mary, with their respective guardians, installed comfortably and charmingly in the Rue Marboeuf, bade Roger god-speed across the Channel (I could tell from the set of his shoulders how he would plunge into the work there and how well-earned would be his flying trips Parisward!) and then struck south into Italy, bent on a private errand of my own.

This was nothing less than the tracing, if possible, of Margarita's Italian ancestry, a mission, needless to say, laid upon me by no one, as she knew nothing of this and Roger, apparently, cared less. My reasons for undertaking this search, which I well knew might prove endless and was almost sure to be long, were a little obscure, even to myself, but I now believe them to have sprung principally from my smouldering rage against Sarah Bradley and her ugly insinuations—a subject I have not dwelt upon in this narrative. But I have thought much of it, and I believe now that my vow was registered from the hour of the finding of the dispatch box which solved one-half of the problem.

Sue Paynter was of great assistance to me here, and by judicious questionings of Mother Bradley at the Convent and artless suggestions and allusions when with the other good nuns, to whom she was honestly attached and whom she often visited, she actually procured for me a few vague clues, breathless rumours of those tragedies that rear, now and then, their jagged, warning heads above the smooth pools of cloister life. News travels fast and far among those quiet retreats; some system of mysterious telegraphy links Rome and Quebec and New York, and it was not without the name of a tiny town or two tucked away in my mind and at least three noble families jotted down on the inside cover of my bank-book that I started on my wild-goose chase.

They were, however, quite useless. Two of the noble families had held no greater sinner than a postulant whose ardour had cooled during her novitiate, and the third had paid for what was at best (or worst) a slight indiscretion with a broken spirit and rapidly failing health. It required no great exercise of detective powers to beg the genial little doctor of each tiny neighbourhood for Italian lessons and I learned more than his language from each. They were veritable hoards of gossip and information of all sorts, and my ever ready and unsuspected note-book held more than verb-contractions and strange vagaries of local idiom.

It was from none of these, however, that I got my first clue, but from the boatman who took me out at sunset for the idle, lovely hour that I love best in Italy and which her name always brings before me. Rafaello was a big, burned creature, beautiful as Antinoeus and as simple and faithful as a dog. He took a huge delight in teaching me all the quaint terms of his fisher dialect, and many a deep argument have we held, I gazing into the burning sulphur of the clouds, he with mobile features flashing and classic brown fingers never still, while he expounded to me his strange, half pagan, half Christian fatalism. He was of the South, "well toward the Boot Heel, signore," but Love, the master mariner, had driven him out of his course and brought him within fifty miles of Rome to court a fickle beauty of the hills, whose brother had come down for the wood-cutting and was friendly to his suit.

"These marsh people are a poor sort," said Rafaello contemptuously. "Not that I would take a wife from them, God forbid! Here they have great tracts, with buffalo and wild pig—yes, I have seen them myself, rooting through the wild oak—but have they the brains to invite the foreign signori to hunt there and earn fortunes by it? No. Have they even strength to cut their own timber? Again, no. They lie and shiver with malaria. Not that they are not a little better now," he admitted, shifting the sail so that we looked toward the headlands of Sardinia, a cloud of lateens drifting like gnats between, "now they are ploughing on the plains, the boats are out, the bullocks are busy, and the wind is putting a little strength into the poor creatures. I swear the best man among them is an old woman I took across in my felucca to pleasure my girl's brother—she tended him once when he chopped through his foot near her hut just on the edge of the hills. Seventy years, or nearly, and tough and wiry yet, and can help neatly with a boat. And money laid by, too, but is she idle? Never. She spins her hemp and weaves osiers into baskets and changes them for goats' hams. That with polenta keeps her all winter—and well, too. She is very close. The money, no one knows where it came from."



Thus Rafaello babbled on, steering cleverly and suddenly into one of the vast, unhealthy lagoons that shelter so many of the winged winter visitors of Italy—visitors unrecorded in the hotels, unnoted by the guides, but of greater interest than many tourists.

I, listening idly to him, caught my breath at the flight of flaming, rosy flamingoes that lighted inland, just beyond us, miracles of flower-like beauty.

"From Egypt, excellenz': They are not due till November, but the winter will be cold and they started early. In March they will start back. Why? How should I know? Who sends the wild duck, for that matter? I have seen a half-mile of them at one flight bound for this place. It may be the good God warns them and they go."

"It may be, Rafaello."

"But then, excellenz', does he send the brown water-hens, too, and if so, why not tell them of the young nobleman whom I brought here to shoot only last week? Is it likely God did not know I would bring him? Of course not."

"Perhaps they know, but must go, nevertheless," I ventured, and we were silent and thoughtful. Did they? Did they fly, helpless, to their death, bound by some fatal certainty? Was Alif right, and is it written for us all?

"That young Roman was very generous," Rafaello resumed after a while. "A few more like him, and she will think twice before she refuses again. How I bear it, I can't tell. Pettish she is, certainly, but oh, signore, lovely, lovely, like un angiolin'! It was from a nobleman—a foreigner, anyway, I suppose it is all one—that old 'Cina got her money, Lippo thinks. He hunted, too, Lippo says, and 'Cina's brother waited on him—he came from these parts. He took her brother north with him afterward, and well he did, too, for not many good Catholics would help him in what he did, and that brother was wicked enough, I suppose. She has little enough religion herself, the old woman—they say her money is for making peace with the church. For when it comes to the last rattle in the throat, excellenz', the boldest is glad of a little help," said Rafaello knowingly.

Night was on us now, and I, well knowing that the air was poisonous for me, could not bring myself to order the boat home. There, while Perseus burned above us and off toward Rome Orion hung steady as a lamp in a shrine, I lost myself in strange, deep thinking, and the marshes were the desert for me and Alif and Rafaello were the same, and I—who was I? What was I?

"The signore sleeps?" the man inquired timidly. "I think it is not good to sleep here. Shall we go back?"

"I'm not sleeping, Rafaello, but I suppose we'd better turn. I heard all you said. And what had this wicked foreigner done?"

"He stole a nun out of a holy convent, excellenz'," said Rafaello in a low voice.

I felt my heart jump.

"Near here?" I asked, as carelessly as I could.

"Oh, no, far away—I do not know. Nobody knows. It was only 'Cina and his sister came from here. Mother of God, does the signore think any woman born hereabouts would have blood enough for that? Look you, signore, she climbed down a tree and went with him in the night! A professed nun! Oh, no doubt she is burning now, that one! For no woman need take the veil, that is plain, but once taken, one is as good as married to God himself, and then to take a man after! Oh, no. She is certainly burning," concluded Rafaello with simple conviction.

"But I thought you said she was alive and made baskets," I said, persistently stupid.

"No, no, the signore misunderstands. That is 'Cina, who went with her when they sailed away, being sent for by her brother. The wicked one died, of course, and 'Cina came back with all the money. She nearly died, herself, on the great ship. She ate nothing—not a bite nor a scrap—for four days, she was so sick."

"He was an Englishman, I suppose?"

"No. From the signore's country. Not, of course, that they are all like that," Rafaello added politely, "but the truth must be told, he was."

Now it was that my studies in Italian temperament came to my assistance quite as strongly as my knowledge of the rough fisher patois. The Italian must not be questioned nor know that anything of interest or importance hangs on his answer. Even as the Oriental he must be handled guilefully, and it was with a guileful yawn that I dismissed the subject.

"It takes an Italian to believe that wild story, Rafaello," I said. "I'm afraid your old 'Cina was teasing Lippo. It all sounds fishy to me. Are we nearly in? I feel cold."

"Indeed no, signore, it is the truth. (We shall be in in eight minutes by the signore's watch.) 'Cina will never again speak to an Englishman or—or one from the signore's country. It is a vow. She would die first. Lippo got a chance for her to stand at her spinning for a crazy Englishman to paint in a picture—good money for it, too!—and she spat in his face. Perhaps the signore will believe that?"

Again I yawned.

"Those stories mean nothing," I said, quivering with impatience. "They are but as old legends without names—and dates and places. Old women like 'Cina never can give those names and dates and places. They do not know if it was ten or twenty or fifty years ago, nor if the man were Austrian or English, or the woman Italian or French or Spanish. Pin them down, and they begin to make excuses. But I don't know why we discuss it—it is not very interesting, even if it is true. Nevertheless, and because you seem offended, Rafaello, and I merely want to show you that I am right, I will cheerfully give a good English sovereign to you or Lippo or the old woman herself, if she can so much as tell you the name of this famous nun and the name of her seducer. You will find she cannot, and then, since I am willing to wager something, you must take me for a fishing-trip free a whole day, in the felucca. Is it a bargain?"

His teeth gleamed as he swore it was a bargain and I watched him bustle off from the quay with an excitement I had not felt since my recovery. What would he discover—for that he would discover something I did not doubt. What was Margarita's mother? Some fisher girl, whose father had won an English lady's-maid with his flashing smile? Some little shopkeeper's daughter? Child, perhaps, of some sprig of nobility, caught by a pair of cool, grey English eyes? I did not know, but I felt certain that the old 'Cina did.

I cannot linger too long over this part of my story, drawn out already far beyond my idle scheme, and enough is said when I tell you that the name brought me by the childishly triumphant Rafaello opened my eyes and pursed my lips into an amazed whistle.

Our little Margarita! Here was something to startle even steady old Roger. Only a few names in Italy are worthy to stand beside the splendid if impoverished House forced by pride to place its unwedded (because undowered) daughter in the convent that needs no dot. Obscure in financial realms alone, it required little search to put my finger on the epitaph of that brother of the cruel letter (a Cardinal before his death), on the father's pictured cruel face—he scorned to eat with the mushroom Romanoffs!—on the carved door-posts where Emperors had entered in the great Italian days, even on the gorgeous sculptured mantel-piece sold by Margarita's grandfather, an impetuous younger brother at the time of his mad marriage with an English beauty, whirled from the stage, whose brightest ornament contemporary record believed she was destined to become, had he not literally carried her, panting, from the scene of her first triumph.



Some idea of the relentless iron hands that tamed that brilliant, baffled creature—and hers was the only strain in Margarita that genius need be called on to vindicate!—I won from the old caretaker, a family retainer, who showed me, on a proper day, over the gloomy, faded glories of the musty palace. She was always heretic at heart, the old gossip mumbled, with furtive glances from my gold piece to the pictured lords above her, as if afraid they would revenge themselves for this tittle-tattle, heretic and light. A servant or a duke, a flower-seller or His Eminence, all was one to her crazy English notions. And the truth—how the mad creature told it! Blurted it out to everyone, so that they had to keep her shut up, finally. And would have her dogs about her—eating like Christians! And no money, when all was said. Her children? Four sons, all dead now, and their souls with Christ—one, of the Sacred College. Never a generation without the red hat, thank God. No daughters. Not so much as one? Why should there be? Some were spared daughters, when there was no money, and a blessing, too.

What figure had been cut from that group of four youths, cut so that a small hand that grasped a cup-and-ball showed plainly against one brother's sleeve? She did not know—how should she? Perhaps a cousin. It was painted by a famous Englishman and kept because it might bring money some day. Then why cut it? How should she know? There were no daughters and the hour was up. Would the signore follow her?

And Sarah was alarmed for the Bradley blood! Sarah feared for the pollution of that sacred fluid derived from English yeomen (at best), filtered through the middle-class expatriates of a nation itself hopelessly middle class beside the pure strain of a race of kings that was old and majestically forgotten ere Romulus was dreamed of! Back, back through those mysterious Etruscans, back to the very gods themselves, an absolutely unbroken line, stretched the forefathers of Margarita. Long before Bethlehem meant more than any other obscure village, long before its Mystic Babe began there his Stations of the Cross and brought to an end at Calvary the sacrifice that sent his agents overseas to civilise the savage Britons and make those middle-class yeomen possible, Margarita's ancestors had forgotten more gods than these agents displaced and had long ceased their own bloody and nameless sacrifices to an elder Jupiter than ever Paul knew. Etruscan galleys swarmed the sea, Etruscan bronze and gold were weaving into lovely lines, Etruscan bowls were lifted to luxurious and lovely lips at sumptuous feasts, in a gorgeous ritual, before the natives of a certain foggy island had advanced to blue-woad decoration! Her people's tombs lie calm and contemptuous under the loose, friable soil of that tragic land that has suffered Roman, Persian and Goth alike (wilt thou ever rise up again, O Mater Dolorosa? Is the circle nearly complete? Would that I might see thee in the rising!) they lie, too, under the angular and reclining forms of many a British spinster tourist, panoplied in Baedeker and stout-soled boots, large of tooth and long of limb, eating her sandwiches over the cool and placid vaults where the stone seats and biers, the black and red pottery, the inimitable golden jewelry, the casques and shields of gold, the ivory and enamel, the amber and the amulets, lie waiting the inevitable Teutonic antiquary. The very ashes of the great Lucomo prince and chieftain lying below this worthy if somewhat unseductive female would fade in horror away into the air, if one of his gods, Vertumnus, perhaps, or one of the blessed Dioscuri, should offer him such a companion or hint to him that the creature was of the same species as the round-breasted lovelinesses that sport upon the frescoes of his tomb, among the lotus flowers.

Poor Sarah—I can forgive her when I consider the pathos of her.



PART SEVEN

IN WHICH THE RIVER LEAPS A SUDDEN CLIFF AND BECOMES A CATARACT

Ay cross your brow and cross your breast For never again ye'll smile, Sir Hugh! Ye flouted them that loved ye best, Now ye must drink as ye did brew.

Syne she was warm against your side, And now she's singing the rising moon, She'll float in on the floating tide, And ye'll hold her soon and ye'll lose her soon!

Sir Hugh and the Mermaiden.



CHAPTER XXIII

FATE SPREADS HER NET

[FROM SUE PAYNTER]

PARIS, March 4th, 188—

JERRY DEAR:

Frederick died here a week ago. His heart, you know, was never very good, and the strain of his last concerts was too much for him. They were very successful, and just before I came over, the poor fellow had sent me—in one of his periodical fits of reform, Dieu merci!—some beautiful jewels, chains, aigrettes and a gorgeous diamond collar, begging me to sell them, but on no account to wear them, as if I would! I sold them pretty well—it's all for the babies, you know. Poor Frederick—I'm not sure his reforms were not the hardest to bear!

He has been for so long so less than nothing to me that the sense of freedom is startling. I'm glad I came as soon as I heard he was sinking—it was not so very sudden. I was with him to the last, and the strangest people came to see him—it was tragically funny. He seemed just like a poor, disreputable brother to me, and nothing mattered, really, except to get him what little comfort one could.

I brought the children over, and I think we shall stay here indefinitely. I have a nice little appartement not too far from the Bradleys, though, of course, I couldn't afford to live there! and such a dear, sensible bonne (a tout faire, of course) who gets the children into the park every day for me when I'm busy. For I am very seriously busy, and how, do you think? I wrote a long, gossippy letter to Alice Carter who loves chiffons, poor soul, though Madam Bradley doesn't give her many, telling her what was being worn and where, and how, and gave her a little account of a fashionable fete that a friend of mine had described to me, and the dear creature actually took the trouble of copying it, omitting personalities, of course, and showing it to a friend of Walter's, an amazing young man who is starting some woman's magazine with a phenomenal circulation, already. He offered her a really good price for it and said if I would do the same kind of letter every month, he would pay one hundred dollars for each one—five hundred francs! Of course I accepted, and now I spend two days a week in the shops, getting ideas and making sketches. You see I am a business woman, really, Jerry. I have always believed that plenty of women would do better at their husband's business, and let them hire housekeepers or attend to the house themselves! Look at the French women!

It seems so good to be here—it always agreed with me, la belle France, and the children seem well, too—for them. Little Susy really has some colour. They are especially fond of the Parc Monceau, and this charming out-of-door life that is so easy here will do wonders for them, I'm sure. That east wind of Boston—ugh, how I loathe it!

I feel so busy and so self-respecting—independence agrees with me. You see, with my few hundreds from father, and these letters, and the little income Roger got for me, with the principal put away for the children, I shall do very well indeed and owe "nothing to nobody." And when Susy gets old enough, I'm going to have her taught something—trade or profession, n'importe!—that will make her as independent as I am to-day. I think it is criminal not to. Then she needn't marry unless she wants to.

I wonder if you realise how many women marry to get away from home? Few men do, I imagine. It's not particularly flattering to you, messieurs, but it's the truth. I had four sisters, and I know!

You have heard, I suppose, that Margarita is actually in training for the opera? It was very exciting—Mme. M——i is really at the bottom of it, I think, though everybody agrees with her to this extent: the child really has extraordinary talent, and with her face and figure will be sure of success, one would think. Of course her voice is not phenomenal—I doubt if it is big enough for the New York opera house. How Frederick used to rail at that building! They wanted him to play there once, you know, at some big benefit. He always said no respectable human voice could be judged there—it seems the acoustics is wrong. But it is an exceptionally fine voice, nevertheless, and so pure and unspoiled. She had nothing to unlearn, literally, and her acting, Madame says, is superb. She can memorise anything, and in such a short time!

But for a Bradley! Madame is furious that she is married. There are plenty to have babies and live in America, she says, without her little Marguerite! M. le mari does not appreciate what a jewel he wishes to shut up, she says—but I am not so sure of that! Whether he is really going to let her or is only humouring her, I don't know. It is rather an embarrassing situation, au fond, because you know what she is—calm, lovely, enchanting—what you will, but absolutely immovable! Reasoning has no effect upon her, and then, to tell the truth, she has reasons of her own. Her desire for this is very strong, and her affection for Roger is not strong enough, apparently, to make her sacrifice herself. Do you think she has any soul, really? I mean, what we understand by that—something that takes more than two years of ordinary life to grow. Passionate, yes. Intelligent, yes. But a real soul? Je m' en doute.

"Of course I love Roger, Sue," she said to me, "but why should I not do what I want to just because I love him? I can love him and sing, too."

Then Miss Jencks advances to the fray, with pleasant platitudes about giving up what we like for those we love.

"But Roger loves me, too," says la Margarita—"why does he not give up what he likes because he loves me?"

Tableau! Que faire alors?

It is really rather complicated, I think, Jerry, though you will probably not agree with me, when I explain what I mean. I have done a great deal of thinking in the years since my marriage—I have been forced to. Things which would never have occurred to me, never come into my horizon if, for instance, I had married Roger; things which would never, I can see, be likely to come into the horizon of the happily (and prosperously) married, have come to me and I have been obliged, in my poor way, to philosophise over them.

Have you ever read Ibsen's play, the "Doll's House"? I don't think it has been acted in America, and probably won't be, unless, perhaps, in Boston. But get it and read it. It is to show that a woman is a personality, aside from her family relations, and must live her life, finally, herself. At least, so I understand it. It is to be acted in London soon, and I am going to try to see it—the theatre seems to mean so much more, this side the water! One really takes it seriously, somehow, along with the other arts. But then, there is no duty on art here!

Will you tell me, Jerry, why, if Margarita really is an artist and has a great gift, she should not use it? It may not be what would best please her husband (and you know, Jerry, I would cut off my hand for Roger! But I must say what I think) but if she sees a career open to her of fame, money and satisfaction, why should the fact of her marriage prevent it? As far as fame goes, she could be better known than Roger; as far as money goes, she could almost certainly earn more than he can; as far as what Nora, in the play I spoke of, calls "her duties towards herself," she could surely develop more fully. That is, if it is necessary for a woman to develop herself fully in any but the physical sense—and isn't it?

It is all very perplexing and I do so wish it had happened to any one but Roger! He is much hurt, I know, though he conceals it well, of course, in his quiet, steadfast sort of way. What a man he is! He would never be willing, I am sure, to go back to his profession in New York and leave Margarita alone in Europe, exposed to all the temptations and scandal and dangers that seem almost inevitable in the life she is preparing for. They might as well be completely and legally separated, in that case. He has money enough without practising law, of course, but he would never be idle—he loves his work—and as for hanging about as her business manager—I wish you could have seen his face when Madame suggested it! I explained to her it was not precisely the sort of thing his family were accustomed to do. She can't understand it, of course—she has the French idea of a lawyer. When I told her that Mr. Bradley was really vrai proprietaire and well-to-do aside from his practice, she had more respect for him.

"Then he will not need to occupy himself," she said triumphantly, "and all the better. Let him rent an estate and live en gentilhomme!"

She has promised to go back to America for the summer for two months—she can learn her roles there, she says, and Roger wants to go. Eh bien! We shall have to wait.

The child is beautiful—so strong and well, and so ridiculously the image of Roger. She is trying to stand now—think of it! My poor little rats were two years old before they could.

A vous toujours,

SUE.

[FROM MY ATTORNEYS]

SEARS, BRADLEY AND SEARS,

Attorneys and Counsellors-at-Law.

Cable Address, Valleshta.

2— COURT STREET, BOSTON, MASS.

March 10th, 188—

WINFRED JERROLDS, Esq.,

Cf., Coutts Bros.,

Cairo, Egypt.

DEAR SIR:

Pursuant to our letters to you of six weeks ago, we had our Mr. James go to the North Carolina plantation to investigate and report on the property. He was almost at once approached with offers to buy the property on terms which surprised him. He communicated with us and we took the responsibility of sending one of our best mining experts to look over the ground. We found that Pittsburg men had been making heavy purchases of land a few miles west across the range and had also been buying tracts adjacent to your lands both north and south; they had also had a party of engineers all over your lands under the guise of a fishing party.

The expert, Mr. Minton, reported that he found heavy outcroppings of coal on both sides of the valley, of excellent steaming quality. The veins apparently extend through your lands into the higher lands north and south of yours. West of you but a few miles these Pittsburg people have acquired large bodies of iron ore. But the most important fact of all is that the valley is the most practical route for a railroad across the range west of you, from the coast to the iron lands already mentioned, for many miles in either direction.

We have been negotiating for three weeks with these Pittsburg people and they have finally made us an offer which we enclose. Briefly, it amounts to $300,000 in five per cent. mortgage bonds, $250,000 in stock (this of problematic value) and a royalty of ten cents per ton on all coal mined on your lands, with an agreement to mine at least 50,000 tons annually until your coal measures are practically exhausted.

In view of your unwillingness to come here and yourself engineer a rival development company, not to speak of the difficulty of enlisting adequate capital in the face of the purchases already made by our Pittsburg friends, we think you cannot do better than accept this offer. Whether we can get as good an one later is doubtful. We have promised an answer by cable from you within three days of your receipt of this letter.

Congratulating you on these most fortunate discoveries, we remain,

Yours very respectfully,

SEARS, BRADLEY AND SEARS.

[FROM TIP ELDER]

UNIVERSITY CLUB, NEW YORK,

March 20th, 188—

DEAR JERRY:

I needn't say how hearty my congratulations are on your good luck, need I? What a hit that was! And what a fine use you are making of it, too! Of course I'll help all I can. I must hurry to catch this mail-boat, so I will just cut short and merely say that Latham and Waite, of Union Square, seem to have put in the best bid for the work and I have told them to send you the detailed budget and contracts as soon as they can get them ready. They have connections with a big brick-yard in Tennessee and say that they can put you up a very good little hospital, three wards, operating-room, six private rooms, diet kitchen, dispensary, nurses' dormitory and suite for superintendent, including one elevator, for close under $65,000, on very good terms of payment. This will include all fittings (hardware, etc.) and two fine, large piazzas, with arrangements for sun parlour, if desired. Also four bathrooms. Miss Buxton has selected the site, as I suppose she has written you, and Miss Bradley has secured another deaconess-nurse for the permanent staff. Young Collier has done marvellously well down there, and the generous endowment you offer will take care of two more boys, Miss Buxton says. Dr. McGee says that Collier has a real gift for surgery—I think I have got a scholarship for him at Johns Hopkins, next year.

What a fine little woman that nurse is! She can't speak of you without her eyes filling with tears. I teased her a little by saying that if she had not begged you for the use of that deserted farm-house on your land for a convalescent home, you would never have learned about the coal and probably sold the land for a song, so the credit was really hers—you ought to have seen the sparks in her eyes!

"You have really made him a rich man," I told her.

"I wish I could," she said very soberly, "but it's not money Mr. Jerrolds needs."

What do you suppose she meant? Anyhow, you've got it, old fellow, whether you need it or not, haven't you?

The hundred you sent me (you knew I didn't need any "fee") has gone into fitting up my club gymnasium. It went a good way, too. I miss Mrs. Paynter's suggestions—she is a good business-woman. What a release, that blackguard's death! Strong words for a minister, perhaps you think, but I tell you, my blood boils when I think what she endured. I gave up my grandfather's hell, long ago, but some men make you long to believe in purgatory!

I heard in a round-about way from Roger's brother-in-law Carter (Yale '8—, isn't he?) that Mrs. Bradley was going on the stage. I was afraid of it last summer.

Miss Bradley is a good woman, but not much like Roger, is she? Queer, how people get into the same family.

Hoping the rheumatism is all right now, and that you'll make use of me, in any way you can, I am

Yours faithfully,

TYLER FESSENDEN ELDER.

[FROM ROGER'S SISTER]

NEWTON, MASS.,

April 2nd, 188—

DEAR JERRY:

I can't resist, in spite of your warning, letting you know how deeply we appreciate your generous offer for the children. You know, of course, that we never felt the slightest claim. It would not have been so much, anyway, if it had been divided, and father always felt that people had a right to leave their money as they chose, if they had any rights in it at all, he said. I believe he thought it ought to go to the State, or something. He and Mr. C—l S—z used to talk about it evenings, I remember.

But to provide so generously for them in your will—it was truly kind and Walter feels it very much. I hope it will be long before they get it, Jerry. Of course Roger will have a son some day and then you will be giving it to Roger Bradley, as you say, and it won't have been out of the family really—you were just like one of us for so many years. And dearer to Uncle Win than any of us, I am sure.

With deepest gratitude again from Walter and myself, and hopes that you are quite well now,

Yours always,

ALICE BRADLEY CARTER.



CHAPTER XXIV

OUR SECOND SUMMER IN EDEN

That winter had been my introduction to Egypt. I have never since let more than three winters, at most, go by without revisiting the strange, haunted place; next to Nippon the fairy country it is dearest to me of all the warm corners of the earth—and I have dragged my twinging, tortured muscles to them all. Only last winter—for many months have passed since I copied those last letters into my manuscript, and I paid dear for a last attempt at a February in New York—I strolled through Cairo streets, drew gratefully into my nostrils the extraordinary mixture of odours that differentiates Cairo from every place in the world (how the great cities are stamped indelibly each with her own nameless atmosphere, by the way! And yet not quite nameless, for London's is based on street mud and flower-trays, Rome is garlic and incense, Paris is watered asphalt, New York is untended horses and tobacco-smoke, and Tokyo is rice straw) and as I strolled, a strange thing happened to me.

I was passing by a street-seller of scarabs, a treacherous-looking wretch, whose rolling eyes glanced covetously at the scarab—better than any of his—that I wore at my scarf-knot, and pressed against him to avoid a great black with a tray of brass bowls and platters on his head. Just ahead of me a lemonade-merchant uttered his wailing, minor cry, and as the crowd jostled in the narrow, dirty lane, my eye was caught by a coffee-coloured woman, a big Juno, with flashing teeth and a neck like a bronze tower. Across her shoulders sat a naked baby who held his balance by his two chubby hands buried in her thick black hair, one leg dropping over each splendid breast. She caught my eye, and laughed outright as the child kicked out with one fat foot and struck the brasses on the tray so that it tipped and swayed dangerously.

I stood there, lost in a maze of Cairo streets, and the babel of the shrieking, blue-clad donkey-boys was the scream of gulls to my ears and the sun on the swaying brass platters was the reflection of a polished sun-dial. The turquoises on the scarab-seller's tray were turquoises about Margarita's waist, the lemonade was borne by Caliban, and the child that rode astride those strong shoulders had hair like corn-silk burned in the sun and eyes as blue as any turquoise! For so had she held her baby, walking with that free, noble stride, and so she had laughed and met my eyes, and so the child had clutched her hair, in the summer just passed.

So vivid was the impression that I stood, as I say, in a maze, and the scarab-seller and he of the brass tray cursed me heartily as they struggled for balance in the pushing, screaming, reeking crowd. How meaningless that phrase, "real life!" Years and years of actual happenings in my life have been less real than those seconds in the Cairo streets, when down the alley-ways of sound and sight, across the intricate network of that spongy, grey tissue in my skull, this tiny, deathless, unimportant memory led my soul away from the present and left me, an unconscious, stupid, mechanical toy, to block the Cairo traffic, while I—the real I—lived far away. Truly the poets and the children are our only realists, and Time and Space have fooled the rest of us unmercifully.

I find that trivial recollections of this sort interest me far more in the recording than my sensations as a wealthy man. These last were, indeed, strikingly few. Beyond the pleasure of buying old Jeanne a Cashmere shawl, the hidden ambition of her life, and giving orders for Harriet's hospital (for I seemed to have brought the natives of North Carolina down on my shoulders, somehow—and that without the faintest interest in them!) my amazing good fortune made less impression upon me, as a matter of fact, than Uncle Winthrop's first legacy. What was there for me to do with it? Roger refused to touch a penny; my mother, beyond a little increase in her charity fund and a pony phaeton, was merely bewildered when asked to make any suggestions, and would have handed purses to every tramp in New England if she had been given the means; my father's people were well-to-do, and the conferring of benefactions has always been difficult for me, anyway. The only way for me would be to drop gold-pieces on needy thresholds by night and run away—a startling occupation for a rheumatic bachelor, surely! I do not know how to receive thanks—they embarrass me frightfully. To stand smugly with a philanthropic smile while the widow and the orphan weep around my knees, is something I should be forever unable to achieve. Harriet's hospital was not a charity—it was something to keep the ridiculous creature busy—her yacht, her picture gallery, her stud-farm, if you will.

As for me, I had none of these tastes. I bought the one or two pictures I had always wanted, that were within my means (most of them weren't within anybody's!) I put a piano in my new rooms, laid in a little wine for my appreciative friends, bespoke the unshared services of Hodgson, who was unfortunately necessary to me now that every sudden damp day crippled my right shoulder (he came to me wearing one of my old suits, by the way) and put a new steam-launch into Roger's concealed boat-house. I presented Margarita with another and a larger gift of pearls, it is true, but without one-tenth of the choking excitement with which I had clasped that first single one upon her neck.

The lady herself, however, balanced this equation; she was greatly delighted, and if she had not, perhaps, perfectly appreciated the first offering, more than atoned by her rapturous recognition of the second.

"And how they must have cost!" she cried. "Jerry, you are too generous—but I do love them!"

To think of Margarita's estimating the value of a gift!

We had famous talks that August, while Roger sweated at his new task—making an island for us, no less!—and petite Marie gathered shells and buried them in tiny, wave-washed graves.

She took to reading that summer, and I read Pendennis and David Copperfield aloud and she embroidered great grey butterflies all over her grey gown for Faust, and the big brindled hound slept at our feet near the beehives.

"Which do you like best?" I asked her curiously.

"Oh, the one about Mr. Pendennis is the prettiest," she answered promptly, "I should have liked the man that made that book the best. But Mr. Dickens knows about more things. He makes more different kinds of people."

"Thackeray has been called cynical," I suggested.

"What is that, Jerry?"

I explained, and she shook her head.

"O no, that is not cynical. That is the way things are, Jerry. Only everybody does not say so."

"Do you think," I asked, "that people really talk the way Mr. Micawber talks? I never heard anybody. And certainly nobody ever talked like his wife."

"No," she said thoughtfully, "I never did, either. But there must be a good many people like them, Jerry, I am sure. And if they knew as many long words as Mr. Dickens, that is the way they would talk, I think."

I have never heard a better criticism of the literary giant of the nineteenth century.

She never made the slightest secret of her affection for me nor of our thorough comprehension of each other and our similarity of tastes. Quiet always, or almost always, with Roger, with me she chattered like a bird, and I could give her opinion on many matters of which he knew nothing.

"Jerry and I like Botticelli and caviar sandwiches and street songs and Egypt, and Roger does not," she told Clarence King once—I can hear him roar now.

"I can talk better to you than to Roger," she confided to me one day on the rocks; "if it were the custom to have two husbands, Jerry, I should like you for the other—but it is not," she added mournfully.

I agreed to this with regret and she went on thoughtfully.

"You see, Roger would not like it, even if it was the custom, so I could not, anyway."

"That is very amiable of you," I said.

"It is strange how I always think of what he would like," she added, with perfect sincerity, I am sure. "One day when he would not let me have any more bread—it was so bad for my voice, you know—I got very angry and spoke crossly to him, but still he would not, and I told him that since he did not want me to sing he had better let me spoil my voice, if I wanted to—and you would think he would, would you not, Jerry?"

"No," I answered soberly, "no, Margarita, I wouldn't. He knew you really wanted your voice more than the bread, so he gave you what you wanted."

"Yes. But that day I was so angry, I planned how much more free I should be if he were to die—was it not terrible, Jerry?—and then I got so interested I could not stop, and I made a dying sickness for him like my father's, and Miss Buxton came, and then I got a black frock like Hester when my father died, and then we—you and I—made a grave for him with my father's grave on the little point, and then (this was all in my mind, you see, Jerry) I was so sad I cried and cried—as I do in Marguerite, all over my cheeks, and then, what do you think?"

"Heavens, child, what can I think? I don't know," I said unsteadily, revolving God knows what of possibilities in my presumptuous and selfish heart.

"Why," she said simply, "I felt so badly that I went to Roger (in my mind) to tell him about it and show him the beautiful grave we had made and my black frock (I had a little pointed bonnet with white under the front, like the widows in Paris) and suddenly I remembered that I could not show him—he would be dead! You see that would have been very bad, for I had been planning all the time that he would be there to—to—well, that he would be there! You see what I mean, don't you, Jerry? Roger has to be there."

"Yes, I see," I said, very low, filled with sickening shame, "he has to be there, my dear."

"And so I stopped all that dying sickness directly," she continued comfortably, "because it was too silly, if I could not tell him about it afterwards, you see.

"And yet he was very cross to me about the bread," she burst out childishly. "Why do I think he has to be there, Jerry? He cannot talk to me nearly so nicely as you can—he does not understand. Why must he be there?"

I choked and laughed at once.

"Because you love him, you silly Margarita!" I declared.

"That must be it," she agreed, with a serious, long look at me out of those deep-sea coloured eyes.

Ah, me!

How we worked at that canal! Caliban and two swarthy Italians and Roger and I—for I marked out the course of it in an artfully natural curve and put in the stakes. There were eighty-odd feet across the part of the peninsula we selected, and it bade fair to wear us all out and last forever, till I seized the occasion of a business trip that took Roger away for four days and hired a great gang of labourers who finished it all up, so that he walked into his island home across a foot-bridge, to his great and boyish delight. What a big boy he was, after all! Not that I did not share his pleasure in the Island: it gave me a delicious feeling of security and distance from the rest of the world. With the help of the gang I had been able to widen our channel considerably and it took a very respectable bridge indeed to span the gap. We had made plans for a regular drawbridge, but later we abandoned them, and chopped even the old one down. The water has washed and washed and worn away since, on the island side, and now one must be bent upon a swim indeed who cares to venture among the jagged ledges and mill-races that my blasting made.

We piped our spring too—a beauty—up through the dairy cellar to the kitchen, and Caliban was saved many a weary trip. Some years afterward I took my chance during another absence of the lord of the Island, and a hurried and astonished set of plumbers installed a luxurious bathroom in either ell of the cottage—a surprise for his birthday. Profiting by a winter in Bermuda, I copied their roof reservoirs, allowing one to each ell, sanded without, whitewashed within, an architectural measure which made the skyline even more rocky and wild, in appearance, from the water. Before we left, that autumn, we planted fifty evergreens, pines, hemlocks and spruces, in a broad belt just opposite the Island, masking it completely from the shore, and hardly a year passed after that without thickening and lengthening that concealing wall. Oh, we guarded our jewel, I can tell you!

It was that summer, I think, that Whistler came to us and drew that series of sepia sketches that frames the big fireplace. They are on the plaster itself—a sort of exquisite fresco—and Venice sails, Holland wind-mills and London docks cluster round the faded bricks with an indescribably fascinating effect. At my urgent request I was allowed to protect them with thin tiles of glass riveted through the corners into the plaster: how the collectors' mouths water at the sight of them!