Stevenson came a few years later: all the quaint comforts and intimate beauties hidden away behind the boulders plainly caught his elfish, childlike fancy—it was he who made the little grotto beyond the asparagus bed, lined the pool in it with unusual shells and coloured pebbles, fitted odd bits of looking-glass here and there, and wrote a poem on a smooth stone at the door for little Mary, to whom he dedicated it.

"The purple pool of mussel shells, All full of salty ocean smells, The coral branches in the wall— And you the mermaid queen of all ..."

She used to recite it all very charmingly. Roger never wanted it printed in the Child's Garden of Verses, where it properly belongs—one of the best of them, in my opinion.

He and Margarita talked together by the hour and I have seen his dog-like brown eyes fixed on her an hour at a time. I asked him once if he intended to "put her in a story"—the quaint query of the layman, so strangely irritating to the book-man—and he shook his loose-locked head slowly.

"They say I can't do women, you know," he said, "and nobody would believe her if I put her in, she's too artistically effective."

And here am I doing it! Fools rush in ...

It may seem odd that Roger and I should not discuss the opera business, but we didn't. That it hurt him I knew, for I knew Roger. Anglo-Saxon to the backbone, the position which his wife as a successful operatic star must put him in could be nothing but highly distasteful to him. It is one thing to snatch your wife from the stage, as Margarita's noble grandfather had done, and enjoy her in your home; it is quite another to see her snatched from your home to that stage, after you have married her. But I have never known a juster man, and though he talked little of the "rights" of women, and then in a brief, blunt fashion that would have exasperated the fast-emerging sex most terribly, he nevertheless respected the rights of every human creature most scrupulously. Though he had the private appreciation of the unmistakable good points of the harem-seclusion shared by every healthy male, he would never have shut Margarita into a New York house or a honeymoon-island against her will, and I think he was too proud to reason with her on the only lines open to him. I think, too, that his quiet refusal to take any strong measures may have been based, partly, on the full appreciation of the risk he ran in marrying such a bundle of possibilities as Margarita. One of the greatest passions that ever (I firmly believe) mated two people had whirled him out of the conventional current of his life, and because it had, in its course, brought him into the rapids, he was enough of a man to set his teeth and take it quietly, knowing that when he left the calm, green-bordered stream for the adventure of flood tide, he did it with his eyes open—a grown man. Or so, at least, I take it that he reasoned: he acted as if he had.

Again, it would have been difficult for me to discuss the matter for another reason than Roger's perfectly characteristic reserve. Much as I regretted that this issue should have arisen in Roger's household, like Sue Paynter I had a secret sympathy with Margarita. Roger was never fond of the stage, and I was. He preferred chamber-music and symphony to opera, and was never deeply sensible to the solo voice, though a good critic of it. The glamour of the stage—that lime-light that has eternally dazzled the sons of Adam—had little effect upon him: he was the last man in the world to marry an actress. Now, I was not. Judie, the naughty creature, had once her charm for me. I have stood in a crowd to see the Jersey Lily, and the Queen of English comediennes could have had me for a turn of her thick lashes—before I knew Margarita. My paternal grandmother was part French, and I have always observed that a mixture of blood predisposes its inheritors to dramatic triumphs—or enjoyments, if no more.

So he dug at his canal and Margarita practised her Jewel Song (it was a shade high for her: she was not a pure soprano, but had one of those flexible mezzos that tempt their trainers to all sorts of tours-de-force) and Dolledge tended Mary and Miss Jencks developed Caliban.

The good woman was utterly unhappy without some subject on which to exercise her really remarkable powers of education. Mary's attendant resented bitterly any rival in her certainly well-filled sphere, and Margarita was far beyond her one-time mentor now, and regarded her with the affectionate tolerance of a princess for her old nurse. This was hard on the devoted Barbara, for she adored Margarita, and to find oneself gently sliding to the foot of the pedestal, when one has not so long ago been occupied in moulding the statue, cannot be very enlivening, though one be never so philosophical.

In truth I had at that time a strange sensation: I found that I had insensibly drifted into a state of mind in which we five, Roger, Miss Jencks, Dolledge, Caliban and I seemed to be at home, contented, occupied, attached by every interest domestic and romantic, to the spot that was dearest on earth to us, while Margarita, a brilliant bird of passage, but lingered with us for the moment, before she took up her journey through the world—for that she was destined for the world, who could doubt? We were, to use the homely old figure, like a circle of motherly hens, staring fatalistically, sadly or disgustedly, according to our several barnyard temperaments, at our daring, iridescent duckling as she breasted the (to her) familiar flood.

For it was familiar: there are people for whom—taken though they may have been from the most secluded corner of the earth, unprepared, undisciplined, unwarned, the great world, the glitter of its footlights, the shock of its tournaments, the cruelty of its victories, the coldness of its neglect, have absolutely no terrors. They face it superbly, as one should face a mob, and the great world, like any proper mob, licks their feet and fawns on them. Admiration is their due; devotion is no more than the sky above them or the earth under them; they keep the divine, expectant hauteur of childhood and rule us, like the children, through our pity and our wonder. And Margarita was one of these.



CHAPTER XXV

THE ISLAND TOMB

But to go back to Miss Jencks and Caliban. It was Harriet Buxton who had suggested that the boy was not so deaf as we had thought, only stupid, and that his dumbness might yield to the methods then being so successfully used with that afflicted child who has since triumphed so brilliantly over more than human obstacles. Although, as Harriet pointed out, I have always felt that too much credit was given in that case to the pupil and too little to the teacher. The distance between English words of one syllable and Greek tragedy is only a matter of time: the distance between blank chaos and those one-syllabled words might well have seemed eternal!

Not that Miss Jencks had quite such a task ahead of her. Caliban had been trained into habits of relentless cleanliness, and an almost mechanical regularity of routine work. It was his clumsy hands that had arranged the flaming nasturtiums in the silver bowl under the Henner etching, his rude pantomime that purchased the bi-weekly bone for the mysteriously named Rosy, his weather wisdom that was sought when it was a question of an extended sailing party. In fact, I am inclined to think, in view of his subsequent progress, that some of his ignorance was feigned, as is often the case in these instances of arrested mental development. However that may have been, on the occasion of this visit I found him marvellously improved, his hair cut, his nondescript garments evolved into a modest sort of livery, his vocabulary no longer a series of grunts, his very pantomime more elastic. Margarita never changed her old methods of communication with him, but the rest of us, at Miss Jencks's earnest entreaty, fatigued ourselves amiably in order to elicit the guttural "yes" and "no" and "do not know" she had so laboriously taught him.

Best of all, his disposition had altered to a very considerable extent, and this improvement on his old surliness was of the greatest assistance to us on the occasion I must now narrate.

It was I—strangely fated to discover so many of the links in this wonderfully twined chain of Margarita's life—who stumbled by the merest chance on the last one really needed to complete the story. Zealous for the perfection of our Island, I selected a deep gully, filled with heavy boughs and loose unsightly rocks, as the next point for improvement, and bespoke the services of Caliban for the purpose. Greatly to my surprise, for he was attached to me, and always showed pleasure at rowing me over for my visits, he refused point blank to help me and even tried, in a series of clumsy ruses, to start me at work elsewhere. Vexed, but quite unsuspicious, I set to work by myself at pulling off the upper boughs, trusting to shame him into helping me with the stones, which seemed to have been tossed there in a sort of midden. When he found that I was persistent in my plan, he sat down at the edge of the gully, buried his face in his clumsy hands and wept silently, shuddering at every bough I lifted. Greatly interested now, I called Roger, and we worked together, assisted by the good-natured Italian retained now as gardener and assistant boatman (his name was Rafaello, and he was a not-too-unhappy bachelor, for, as he said, a girl who would run off with a man's rival a week before the wedding would have made but a doubtful wife for the most patient of husbands!)

As we neared the bottom of the gully Caliban grew more and more excited: now he would peer in fearfully, now run off a few yards, but he could never get very far away, for great as was his terror and sorrow, curiosity was stronger and he must be near, it seemed, at all costs.



Suddenly, as the last rotting bough was lifted from one end of the gully, my eye was caught by a series of stones wonderfully matched in size, eight or ten of them arranged in a sort of rough cross, and when with a quick thrill of apprehension I pushed aside the withered pine tree that covered the rest of the stones, the foot of the cross elongated, and the symbol of Calvary was seen to extend over a slightly raised oblong mound of earth. There was no mistaking that shape nor those dimensions; whoever has heard the rattle of that last remorseless handful and struggled with that almost nauseating rebellion at the sight of the raw clods, so unsightly in the smooth, peaceful green, knows that mound for what it is, and we knew this. Silently we cleared away the rest, and then the grave I had discerned fell into its true and illuminating relation to two other and evidently older crosses—at the feet of both and at right angles to them. In her death as in her life that gaunt, austere Hester was faithful, and like the stone hound at the ancient knight's bier she guarded her master's last sleep.

We took off our caps reverently; we needed no monument, no epitaph to name for us those exiled, unblessed graves. Prynne had made the first cross, we knew, twenty-seven years ago; Hester had made the second a few days before Roger visited the island. And the third? Ah, faithful Caliban, what hours of terrible tuition made thy task clear to thee? I shudder at the picture of that indefatigable New England woman illustrating in terrible pantomime the duties that would devolve upon her loutish servant at her death. But the lesson had been learned, the third coffin taken from the boat-house, the body laid within it at the graveside, carried swiftly from the house wrapped in a sheet, the lid nailed down, the earth filled in.

Gaspingly he verified my quiet questions and surmises—I have enough New England blood to know what ghastly forethought we are capable of!—and slowly he calmed himself, seeing that we were neither frightened nor angry ...

One end of the island repeats on a tiny scale the formation of the original peninsula. Three quaint red cedars stand pointed and forever green, more like the cypresses of Italy than anything in America; around its rocky beach the waves beat incessantly, but its grass is fresh and green, for there is a little spring there. Under the cypresses lie three flat graves, two side by side, one across their feet, and over each lies a flat carved table of marble—rich carvings that once stretched under three heavy mullioned windows over the back doors of an old Italian palace. There are only initials on these tables, initials and the numerals of years, but they are not utterly unblest. Good Parson Elder read the most beautiful burial service in the world over them, broken by the tears of a trusty servant; the children and the children's children of the crumbling bodies under two of those tables stood over them hand in hand; and Nature, who bears no grudge nor ever excommunicates the fruitful, brings to the sunlight every year the yellow daffodils and white narcissus, the wild rose and beach bayberry, the marigold and asters that love has planted there.

It may be that further clues, more detailed accounts of that secret island life, were hidden in those coffins; we never tried if it was so. Unknown and lonely they lived, unknown and lonely they had wished to lie in death, and so we left them, safe even from ourselves, who loved them for the wonderful child they had given us. And I like to think that God is no less forgiving than the Nature through which he tries to lead us to him.



CHAPTER XXVI

A HANDFUL OF MEMORIES

They left in October that year; Margarita to get ready for her debut, Roger, quiet and inscrutable, to work, as he said, at his treatise on Napoleon. He had grown deeply interested in this and spent most of his leisure at it, and it had gone far beyond his first idea of an essay. I did not go with them, but took the occasion for a filial visit to my mother and a grudging journey to North Carolina, where I stared uncomprehendingly at the chaotic hospital, a litter of bricks and scantling, listened to tiresome and enthusiastic statistics from young Collier and Dr. McGee, distributed papers of sweets to a ward of convalescent and sticky infants, and refused to take a toilsome journey around the borders of my one-time coal-lands. They were no longer mine—why should I care to view them?

Just before I left for Paris, where Captain Upgrove was to join me, I remembered some drawings I had planned to make in order to get the dimensions of the rambling, old-fashioned garden behind the house where I intended to put a certain ancient shallow stone basin I had in mind, and then beg Roger to pipe the spring into it for a sort of fountain-pool. There was such a basin on an old, decaying estate some miles out of our old school-town: Roger and I knew it well, for we had often been invited there by a friend of my mother's to drink tea and eat rusk and fresh butter and confiture (of field strawberries—delicious!) and—of all things—broiled bacon, because Roger was devotedly fond of it and never got it at school. How many June half-holidays have we hung over that old carved basin, teasing the goldfish, stopping up the tiny fountain till it spouted all over us, sailing beetles across it on linden leaves, or lolling full-fed and lazy, smoking contraband cigarettes of caporal! I knew well how pleased he would be when he saw that battered dolphin that threw the water and the funny little stone frogs at each corner, and I had a shrewd idea that old Mrs. Y—— would not object to parting with it, moss and lichen and all, if one made it worth her while!

A cold, rainy week—the delayed equinox—caught and held me on the island, huddled over the fire, and it was then that I conceived the famous idea of the furnace. I had planned many a pleasant autumn there, for it was now the best of America to me, and if such weeks as this were possible (and probable) there would be little comfort for me away from the chimney corner—which has never been my favourite post, by the way. Caliban and Agnes, the cook, a kindly Normandy woman, did their best for me and for the ravenous gang of workmen that laboured (in the slight intervals between their meals!) at the monstrous, many-mouthed iron tube in the cellar; while I chafed and scolded at the delays, unwilling to leave the men, weary of my dear Island now its chief jewel was gone, irritated by the tramping feet and tuneless whistling where I had heard so much the patter of petite Marie's slippers and the rich melody of her mother's voice.

It was then that I fell upon Lockwood Prynne's library and learned more of his mind, I believe, than anyone else could ever know. I wish I had known the man himself. The little I have been able to find out about him in the South (the war practically wiped out the family) only confirmed my first idea of him. I actually succeeded in tracking an old album of daguerreotypes to a shiftless darkey cabin and identifying a picture of him as a boy from a half-blind negro mammy, with one of his father in full uniform and a singularly beautiful head that I am sure from the likeness of the brow and the set of the eyes must have been his mother, though here the old slave could not or would not help me. I rescued, too, for Margarita, a rich carved mahogany chair from a cow stall ("ole Marse Lockwood's pay chair") and a graceful, brass-handled serving-table, "what his grandpa done leave fo' li'l Marse Lockwood fer ter rec'leck' him by." I picked up a silver cup, at a roadside auction (and bid high for it against a Fifth Avenue dealer) engraved with his mother's coat-of-arms, and shamelessly inveigled Margarita into taking it, later, and giving me in return the silver bowl that stood for so long under the Henner etching. It stands there still, but not in the old place. Not Caliban, but Hodgson fills that bowl to-day and every day that I am in America with the most beautiful flowers Uncle Winthrop's money can buy; though Lockwood Prynne no longer lies in the army cot that faces it, one of his best friends does—a friend who loves him no less, that he never saw his face.

Well, we got that furnace in and fifty tons of coal, too, towed over in an old scow and binned down in the cellar, and when I saw the bills for this last, I received the impression (which I have never been able wholly to abandon) that I must have been underpaid for those coal-lands!

Many a time have we discussed it since, with a curious, frightened wonder: why should that furnace have seemed so all-important to me? At best we expected to spend but few days at the Island when it could have been necessary; Margarita had grown up among Atlantic winters and had more times than she could count broken the ice in her bedroom ewer; such a luxurious whim would never have occurred to Roger, who, like most men of his type, expected every one to be as hardy as himself—how many generations of his ancestors had stoically toasted their shins while their backs were freezing! It must be, as Margarita teasingly insists, that my pathetic care for my rheumatic old bones was at the bottom of it all, and that I was rapidly assimilating one of the cardinal doctrines of the swollen purse, that no sum could be ill spent when spent for my comfort.

Well, well, let it go at that—to use the bluff, pertinent phrase of the present day. Though Barbara Jencks would have died before she had let it go at anything like that, I assure you, and has spent many an eager moment of shy, persistent effort to make me comprehend the inscrutable and sleepless interest of Providence, an interest which had intended, from the time of the Exodus, if I seize her idea correctly, that a hot-air plant should complete the summer home of Roger Bradley—a man who had less interest in Providence than anyone I know! Poor Barbara! As I hung about the house that mellow autumn, I fell, more than once, into musing laughter, as here and there some piece of furniture, some picture or dish or oddment brought back to me her uncounted, endless assaults on Margarita's simple, healthy and (to the orthodox English woman) baseless scheme of existence. Not that it should have been dignified by so philosophical a term as "scheme": Margarita was given to the practice of life, not its theory. I never tired of watching the extraordinary effect of her downright mental processes upon the mass of perfunctory, inherited ideas whose edges, once sharp-milled and fresh from some startling Mint, we have dulled and misshapen with generations of unthinking, accustomed barter.

For instance, a treasure of a Spode fruit dish that I had picked up at a dewy Devonshire farm, all clotted cream and apple-cheeked children, caught my eye as it lay on the piano, and I found myself chuckling as I recalled the unfortunate eddy of doctrine into which the innocent bit of china had whirled us. Margarita had asked what the quaint Scriptural figures upon it illustrated, and Miss Jencks, every ready, had explained to her the parable of the labourers in the vineyard and the marvel of the late comer's good fortune.

"And that is a very beautiful thought, my dear," she concluded, "is it not?"

Margarita stared at her in frank surprise.

"Beautiful?" she echoed, "you call it beautiful that so many poor men should work hard so long, and then have to see the lazy ones who came in late be paid as much as they for one-tenth as much work? I do not know what you mean by beautiful; it was certainly very unfair."

"My dear, my dear!" poor Barbara fluttered, "it had the approval of our Lord, remember."

"He was probably not one of the ones who had worked all day, then," Margarita replied blandly.

"It was not an actual occurrence," said Miss Jencks, a little coldly, as Roger's irrepressible chuckle echoed from the porch outside, "it was merely a parable—a lesson."

"Oh!" (The exquisite, falling melody of that simple monosyllable expressed so perfectly, through such a trained larynx, all the sudden lack of interest!) "It never happened, then? So of course it does not matter. But why do you call it a lesson, Miss Jencks?"

"Because it teaches Christian charity," said Barbara firmly.

Margarita turned away and dismissed the subject.

"If I ever hired myself to anybody, I would rather he had been taught fairness than Christian charity," she observed, and left Miss Jencks clutching the fruit plate pathetically, her eyes fixed hopelessly on me. For it was always my delicate task to soothe the poor lady after these theological encounters: Roger's uncompromising treatment of the situation had a way of uncomfortably resembling his wife's!

"You know, dear Miss Jencks," I began, as seriously as I could, "she is not really cynical—she is no more irreverent than a child would be. Surely some of your pupils, sometimes ..."

"Never, Mr. Jerrolds, never!" the bulwark of the Governor-General's family protested tearfully, "never, I assure you!"

"Well, well," I said, "it's all the same—they might have. You see, she pays these things the great compliment of taking them seriously—and literally. And they wouldn't work, Miss Jencks, some of them, if one tried them, you know. Just consider the labour unions for one thing: suppose Roger were to pay off his workmen on that principle—they'd fling his money in his face."



"Then what would you say to the Prodigal Son?" she shot at me defiantly.

"I say that it's very beautiful and that I'm old enough to hope it may be true," I told her, "but for heaven's sake, Miss Jencks, don't try Mrs. Bradley with it—not just now, at any rate!"

Then there was her guitar, a small one, of lemon-coloured pear wood, curiously inlaid: Whistler got it for her in one of those old pawn shops near the London wharves, and we used to wonder what happy sailor, burnt and eager for the town, had brought it for what waiting girl all the long miles, and how it had crept at last, ashamed and stained, into that dingy three-balled tomb of so many hopes and keepsakes. He sketched her in charcoal, dressed (he would have it) in black, with a Spanish comb in her hair and the guitar on a broad ribbon of strange deep Chinese blue; behind her, on an aerially slender perch, stands a gaudy Mexican parrot. It does not look like her to us who know her well (though, curiously enough, all strangers consider it an extremely fine likeness) but as a tour de force it is remarkable, and amongst the plain, Saxon furnishings of the Island living-room it stands out with an extraordinary vividness—an unmistakable bit of Southern Europe, the perfectly conscious sophistication of old cities and sunny, secret streets, worn uneven and discoloured before Raleigh started across seas.

Roger never liked it, I believe, and I have always suspected the impish James of deliberately putting us face to face with Margarita's foreign strain and the tiny, deep gulf that cut her off, in some parts of her nature, so hopelessly from us. And he made us see it, too, that Puck of all painters, even as he had intended, and we were forced to thank him for it, for it was too beautiful to have gone undone, and he knew it. And Jimmie's dead, worse luck, and one of his most devoted collectors told me last week that he really thought the psychological moment for selling out had arrived, for he'd never go any higher! And we're all grass, that to-day is and to-morrow goes into the oven, and there's no doubt of it, my brothers.

But how she used to sing O sole mio, with that sweet, piercing Italian cry, a real cri du coeur (except for the trifling fact that there was no more heart in it, really, than there is in most Italian singing! I suppose that while the art of song remains among the children of men, that particular child who is able to throw his voice most easily into what Mme. M——i used to call "ze frront of ze face" and detach it from the throat, where the true feelings lie gripped, will continue to thrill the other children with his or her "heart in the voice!") And how she would drag the rhythm, deliciously, intentionally, and shade the downward notes, and hang a breath too long on the phrase-ends, as only Italians dare! And how the distilled essence of Italy dripped out of those luscious, tender, mocking folk-songs, till the vineyards steeped before us, and the white city-squares baked in the noon sun, and the ardent sailor sang to his brown girl over the quaint, bobbing, weighted nets!

The men who dug the ice-house and piled the coast wall and blasted out trenches for draining would stop and lean on their picks, when her resonant, golden humming, like a drowsy contralto bee, floated out from the verandah vines to them: I have seen their faces clear and their dull eyes focus suddenly on some distant, darling memory, while they dropped back for a precious minute into the past that you think is all bread and cheese and beer, because, forsooth, they never sat beside you in white gloves when Margarita sang!

Go to—there was Spring and a girl for every man of them, once, and both were the same as yours.

I had to go into her room at that time, to make sure that the floor should not be unduly marred and that, according to the best of my poor judgment (Roger should have planned it all, as a matter of fact) the registers might be inserted in the best places; and as I moved among the dainty luxuries that replaced the almost sordid bareness of that room when I had first seen it, I realised, with surprise but with clear certainty, that the change was only apparent, not deep or inherent. They were all there, to be sure, the pretty paraphernalia that modern woman (and ancient, too, for the matter of that!) has found necessary to preserve and augment her mystery and charm; ivory and silver and crystal and fluted frills and scented silk. Oh, yes, they were all there, but there was no atmosphere of Margarita amongst them all: she had escaped out of them and given them the slip as effectually as in the old, bare days of the brush and comb and the print gown on a peg in the unscented closet. She was simply not there, that was all, and the most infatuated lover in all the Decameron would have felt that here was not the place for self-indulgent raptures. Margarita used her sleeping-room as a snail uses his shell or a bird its nest: it was impersonal, deserted, out of commission, now—the room, merely, of a beautiful woman, who might have been any woman, with a woman's need of comfort, warmth, clear air, and cleanliness pushed to an arrogance of physical purity.

My mother's bedroom was her own as definitely as her blue-veined, pointed hands; Sue Paynter's, into which I went once to lift out her little son in one of his illnesses, was like no one's else in the world, individual, intense; even old Madam Bradley's, in its clear whites and polished dark wood, translated to my boyish, awed soul, a sense of her impenetrable character.

But not so Margarita's. It was furnished and decorated in grey-blue tints, because I had suggested this. It had odd touches of greyish rose, because Whistler had insisted on it. It was fitted with old mahogany, because Roger liked this and collected it here and there. But of all the personality that her father-lover had known how to build into his home of exile, there was absolutely none.

Was it because there were no work-baskets, spilling lace and bits of ribbon, no photographs, no keepsakes, hideous perhaps, but dear for what they represent, no worn girlhood's books, no shamefaced toys, lingering from the nursery, no litter of any other member of her family? Perhaps. Mme. Modjeska, then, and even now one of the greatest actresses on our stage, called it an unwomanly room, but I am not quite sure that this is precisely what she meant.

No, the most vivid impression the room could make upon me was one that brings a reminiscent chuckle even to-day. As my eye fell on the antique dressing-table, I seemed to see, suddenly and laughably, Margarita, sweeping down the stairs, enveloped in a billowy peignoir, her hair loose, her eyes flashing furiously, in her extended finger and thumb, held as one would hold a noxious adder, a thin navy-blue necktie.

"Is that yours?" she demanded tragically of her husband.

"Why, yes, I believe it is," said Roger, with the grave politeness that years of intimacy could never take from him.

"I found it on my dressing-table!" she thundered, and her voice echoed like an angry vault, "on—my—dressing-table!"

She dropped it like a toad at his feet, swept us all with the lightning of her eyes, coldly, distastefully, and swam up the stairs, an avenging goddess, deaf to Roger's matter-of-fact apology, blind to Miss Jencks's deprecating blushes. As for me, so under the spell of that voice have I always been, that I swear I thought her hardly used—the darling vixen!



PART EIGHT

IN WHICH THE RIVER RUSHES INTO PERILOUS RAPIDS

Come, my mother that carried me, Make me to-night an olden spell! Try if my witch wife loves the Sea, Or she'll choose the waves or she'll choose for me, Then hey, for heaven or ho, for hell!

Circle the Cross on the midnight sand, Heap the fire and mutter the charm, Call her out to ye, soul in hand, Blind and bare to the moon she'll stand, Then out to the sea or in to my arm!

Sir Hugh and the Mermaiden.



CHAPTER XXVII

WE BRING OUR PEARL TO MARKET

I did not hear Margarita sing in opera till the night of her debut in Faust. Roger, on the contrary, was allowed to attend the last rehearsals: Margarita honestly wished for his criticism, which she knew from the very fact of his utter aloofness from her professional interests would be perfectly unbiased and sincere. It was not without a secret thrill of pleasure through my disappointment that I acquiesced in her decree; I knew that she would be nervous with me, from my very sympathy with her.

I can see the Opera now—the lights, the jewels, the moustaches, the white shirt-bosoms, the lorgnettes, the fat women with programmes, the great, shrouding curtain.

Sue was there, pallid with excitement, and Tip Elder, who had come over for a much-needed holiday, and Walter Carter, who had been on an errand to Germany, and who had (of all unexpected people!) convinced Madam Bradley that her own hard pride should no longer be forced to regulate her children's enmities, and come to extend the olive-branch to Roger.

I was as nervous as could be and Roger, I think, was not quite so calm as he seemed and gnawed his lower lip steadily.

But Margarita, one would suppose, had not only no nerves but not even any self-consciousness. She told us afterward that before the curtain rose she was nearly paralysed with terror and was convinced that her voice had gone—it caught in her throat. She could not remember the words of the Jewel Song and her stomach grew icy cold—if Roger had been there, she said, she would have begged him to take her away and hide her on the Island! But he was not there. No one was there but Madame and her maid, and she could not run away alone.

When she sat spinning at her wheel behind the layers of gauze, and Faust saw her in his dream, her legs shook so that she could not work the treadle. But when she paced slowly onto the scene in her grey gown all worked with tiny, nearly invisible little butterflies—they had made her put aside the big ones—she was as calm and composed as the chorus around her and her voice was as beautiful as I have ever heard it.

"The child was born for the stage, there is no doubt!" Sue whispered to me excitedly, and I nodded hastily, not wishing to lose a note or a movement.

It was her best-known part and she was very lovely and magnetic in it, but I do not think it really suited her so well as the Wagner dramas would have, later. It is with Marguerite as a great English comedienne expressed it to me some years later, of Juliet: one must be forty to play it properly—and then one is too old to play it properly!

But what a gait she had! Her stride just fitted the stage, her carriage of neck and head was such as great artists have worked years to attain—and she was unconscious of it. Her eyes looked sky-blue under the blonde wig, and the blonde tints were lovely, if not so fascinatingly surprising as her own.

When she stopped, fixed her great eyes upon Faust reproachfully and sang, like a sweet, truthful child,

Non, monsieur, je ne suis belle! Ni belle, ni demoiselle....

a little sigh of pleasure ran through the audience: she won them then and there. It seemed incredible that she was acting—it seemed that she must be real and that the others were trying to surround her with the reality she expected, as best they could. She had the sweet purity of tone—the candour, if I may so call it, often associated with delicate, small voices and singers of cool, rather inexpressive temperaments. But Bruenhilde was the part for her, and Bruenhilde was not cool and anything but inexpressive.

The only Marguerite I have ever seen since that resembled hers was Mme Calve's, and the French artist seemed studied and conscious beside Margarita. You see, she was young, she was sincere and ingenuous, she was slender and beautiful—and she had a fresh and lovely voice, well trained, into the bargain. She would never have made a great coloratura soprano. Neither her voice nor her temperament inclined to this. She belonged, properly speaking, to the advance guard of the natural method, the school of intelligence and subtle dramatic skill. I cannot imagine Margarita a stout, tightly laced, high-heeled creature, advancing to the footlights, jewelled finger-tips on massive chest, emitting a series of staccato fireworks interspersed with trills and scales apropos of nothing in this world or the next.

Such performances constituted Roger's main objection to the opera, and though he was considered Philistine once, it is amusing to see how the tide of even popular opinion is setting his way, now.

So in the great final trio, Margarita did not show at her best, perhaps; the situation seemed strained, unreal, and the final shriek a little high for her. But oh, what a lovely creature she was, alone in her cell! What lines her supple figure gave the loose prison robe, what poignant, simple, cruelly deserted grief, poured from her big, girlish eyes! And I do not believe anyone will ever again make such exquisite pathos of the poor creature's crazed return to her first meeting with her lover. So clearly did she picture to herself this early scene that we all saw it too, and lived it over again with the poor child.

"Ni belle, ni demoiselle ..."



It was the whole of love betrayed, abandoned, yet loving and forgiving, that little phrase; and I staunchly insist that the good Papa Gounod deserves credit for it, sentimentalist though he be!

It was after the garden love-scene that she won her recalls, over and over again. Above the great sheaf of hot-house daisies I sent up to the footlights she bowed and bowed and bowed again and smiled, and the jewels flashed on her white shoulders and the yellow braids shook at her deep, triumphant breaths, as she beamed out over us all, the wonderful, all-embracing smile of the born artist, that cannot be taught. Part of that brilliant smile came straight into my misted eyes, back in the loge, and so extraordinary is the power of such a success, so completely does that row of footlights cut off the victor from us who applaud below, that I, even I, who had literally taught this girl some of the ordinary reserves of decent society, who had found her a savage (socially speaking) only two years ago, now bowed low to her, dazed, humble as the man beside me who never saw her before.

How they pounded and cried, those amusing, sophisticated, babyish Parisians!

"Brava, la petite!" I hear the old gentleman now that turned to me in amazement, chattering like a well-preserved, middle-aged monkey; "but it is that it is an American, they tell me? Ca y est, alors! It is extraordinary, then, impayable! Je n'en reviens pas!"

"And why, Monsieur?" I asked.

"For the reason, simply, that it is well known how they are cold, those women, cold as ice, every one. But this one—Monsieur, I have seen many Marguerites, I who speak to you, but never before has it arrived to me to envy that fat Faust!"

And I (to whom he spoke) believed him thoroughly, I assure you. Though I doubt if the portly tenor was much flattered, for he had accepted the role with the idea of carrying off the honours of the evening, and exhibited, in the event, not a little of that acrimony which is so curiously inseparable from any collection of the world's great song-birds. Ever since Music, heavenly maid, was young, she has been so notoriously at variance with her fellow-musicians as to force the uninitiated into all sorts of cynical conclusions! Such as the necessity for some kind of handicap for all these harmonies, some make-weight for these unnaturally perfect chords. And it is but due to the various artists to admit that they supply these counter-checks bravely.

Well I suppose they would be too happy if it were all as harmonious as it sounds, and we should all (the poor songless rest of us) kill ourselves for jealousy! And if the fat Faust had really been as supremely blissful as he should have been when Margarita, with that indescribably lovely bending twist of her elastic body, drooped out of her canvas, rose-wreathed cottage window and threw her white arms about his neck in the most touching and suggestive abandon I have ever seen on the operatic stage—why, we should have been regretfully obliged to tear him to pieces, Roger and I and Walter Carter (I am afraid) and the well-preserved Frenchman!

She was not so philosophical as Goethe nor so saccharine as Gounod, our Margarita, and I don't know that I am more sentimental than another; but when the poor child in all her love and ignorance and simple intoxication with that sweet and terrible brew that Dame Nature never ceases concocting in her secret still-rooms, handed her white self over so trustfully to the plump and eager tenore robusto, a sudden disgust and fury at the imperturbable unfairness of that same inscrutable Dame washed over me like a wave and I could have wept like the silly Frenchman.

Do not be too scornful of that sad and sordid little stage story, ye rising generation—it is not for nothing that the great stupid public of older days, ignorant alike of Teutonics and chromatics, but wise in pity and terror, as old Aristotle knew, took it to their commonplace hearts! Do not trouble yourselves to explain to me that Gretchen was but an episode in a great cosmic philosophy; I knew it once, when I was young like you. But I am nearly sixty now—worse luck!—and I see why the cosmic philosophy has been quietly buried and the episode remains immortal! And so will you some day.

It was a great success for Madame and she basked in it; she had even a compliment for Roger. In our gay little supper, afterward, we had all a kind word—an almost pathetically kind word—for Roger. Margarita herself had never been so attentive to him, so eager for his ungrudging praise, so openly affectionate with him. He was very kind, very gentle, but in a quiet way he discouraged her demonstrative sweetness and led her to talk of her professional future. In her eyes as she looked at him over her wine-glass I seemed to see something I had never seen before, a sort of frightened pity; not the terror of a child cut off by the crowd from its guardian, but rather the fear of one who sees a one-time comrade on the other side of a widening flood, and regrets and fears for him and pities his loss and loneliness, but is driven by Destiny and cannot cross over. I wondered if the others saw it too, but dared not discover.

It was not altogether a happy petit souper, you see; I often think of it when I assist at similar gatherings, and wonder to myself if in all the glory and under all the triumph there is not some dark spot unknown to us flattering guests, some tiny gulf that is growing relentlessly, though we throw in never so many flowers and jewels to fill it. The wheel turns ever, and no pleasure of ours but is built on the shifting sand of some one's pain, even as Alif told me.

We had the Valentin of the opera, a dapper little Frenchman, with us (I forget his name: he had been very kind to Margarita and stood between her and the senseless jealousy of the big, handsome tenor more than once) and I heard him as we left the table remark significantly to Mme. M——i, with a glance at Roger,

"Monsieur is not artiste, then?"

"Surely that sees itself?" returned the famous teacher with a shrug.

"Un mari complaisant, alors?" said the baritone lightly.

Madame had never liked Roger, and was, moreover, a somewhat prejudiced person, but even her feelings could not prevent the irrepressible chuckle that greeted this.

"Do not think it, my friend—jamais de la vie!" she answered quickly, with a frank grimace as she caught my eye and guessed that I had overheard.

No, one could not image Roger as the "husband of his wife." It simply couldn't be supposed.

I had very little to say to him that night, myself. I felt clumsy and tactless, somehow, and certain that what I might say would be too much or too little.

It was Tip whose cheery, "How wonderfully fine she was, Roger! How proud you must be of her!" saved the day and gave us a chance to shake hands and leave them in the flower-filled coupe.

Well, after that it was all the same thing. Exercise, practice, performance, success; then sleep, and exercise again, da capo.

She was a prima donna now, our little Margarita, a successful artist, a public character. "Margarita Josepha," Madame had christened her, for twenty years ago simple American surnames found no favour with the impressario, and "cette charmante Mme. Josepha," "artiste vraiment ravissante," etc., etc., the critics called her.

As Juliet she looked her loveliest, as Marguerite she acted her best, as Aida she sang most wonderfully. Indeed it was this last that captured London and gave rise to the much exaggerated affair of the Certain Royal Personage. She sang Aida twelve times in one season (going to London from Paris) and the boys whistled the airs through the streets and the bands played from it whenever she rode in the Park. I myself saw the diamond bracelet Miss Jencks returned to the Duke of S—— (we did not tell Roger, by mutual consent, till much later) and the Queen's pearl-set brooch when she sang at Windsor marked at least one satisfying unanimity among members of the royal family.

I took Mary, long afterward, to hear Mme. G——i in the part Margarita made famous in London, and when the tears rolled down the child's face as poor Aida (that barbaric romanesque) dies in melody, portly though starving, and unconvincingly pale, I wished she might have seen her mother. There was a death! Nothing in Aida's life could possibly have become her like Margarita's leaving of it, I am sure.

Roger ceased to go after the first performances, and indeed he was very busy, and crossed the ocean more than once in the American interests of his French and English clientele. But whoever stopped at home or went, whoever applauded or yawned, whoever approved of the present status of the Bradley family or disapproved, one gaunt figure never left Margarita's side from the moment she left her door till she returned to it (except for the inevitable separations of the actual stage-scene, and I think she regretted the necessity for these!) This figure was Barbara Jencks's, and hers were the cool, uncompromising eyes into which the enraptured devotee gazed when he followed his card into the drawing-room, hers the strong and knuckly hands that put his flowers into water and his more valuable expressions of regard back into their velvet cases, previous to re-addressing them. She drove with Margarita, when Sue Paynter did not, and would have ridden with her, I verily believe, had not Carter and I volunteered to supply that deficiency.

It was she who received that astonished and, I fear, disappointed kiss from the German officer at Brussels, when the students drew Margarita's carriage home from the opera house after her astonishing triumph in the last act of Siegfried. It was an absurd part for her—she had never done Elsa nor Elizabeth, and Mme. M——i was very angry with her. Herr M——l, the great director, spent the summer in Italy and Switzerland and was with our party nearly all of the time. Purely to please himself he taught Margarita the role of Bruenhilde in Siegfried and insisted on her singing it that winter in Brussels under him. It was wonderful, and showed me what her real forte was to be. She was Bruenhilde, she did not need to act it. How the Master himself would have revelled in her!

She was very teachable—one of the most certain indications of her great capacities. Her Marguerite was almost entirely her own, for she had not learned how to use dramatic instruction; her Aida was almost Madame's own, for she had learned, then, and besides, did not understand the character; her Bruenhilde was herself, trained and assisted into the best canons of interpretation by a loyal Wagnerian. It is a short part, of course, but it showed what she could have done with the rest of it. At thirty-five she could have done the whole Ring; at forty I believe no one could have equalled her.

Carter got himself snarled hopelessly into a tangle with the government officials in Berlin (he was no diplomat, though a good fellow, and wild about Margarita, so that poor little Alice had more than one bad quarter-hour, I'm afraid) and it took Roger a great deal of Bradley influence with the American consul and a lot of patient correspondence to unravel his unlucky brother-in-law. This gave Roger a good excuse for being in and near Germany; whether he would have stayed without it, I don't know.

The work on Napoleon was done: he had laboured over it in Rome during the summer, and Margarita had been very sweet, refusing more than one invitation (at Sue Paynter's earnest request) to stay with him. But it was only too evident that she did not wholly wish to stay and that such a situation could not last long. Herr M——l kept her interested, and Seidl, whom he sent for to hear her practising for Siegfried, was most enthusiastic about her and displayed his admiration a little too strongly for our peace of mind. His was a developing, forcing influence, and Margarita showed the effect of it wonderfully; he inspired her to her best efforts, and Mme. M——i was terribly jealous of him. Personally, I could not but feel that his undoubtedly great influence upon her mind and methods represented one of his many invaluable contributions to the musical history of America—but I speak as an observer, merely, of an American artist, not as a husband!

Roger and he had what must be confessed was a quarrel (though the newspaper accounts of a duel were, of course, absurd) over the advisability of her singing privately for a young German princeling whom Seidl was very anxious to honour—he was then introducing the Wagnerian dramas into America and had not been long director of the Metropolitan Opera House, New York. It all smoothed over and we agreed to forget it, all of us, but Seidl's pride was hurt and Roger had done what I had not seen him do for fifteen years—lost his temper badly. He was not pleasant in a temper, old Roger, like all men of strong, controlled natures, and Margarita learned a lesson that day that she never forgot, I suppose. I believe if on the strength of that impression he had carried her off bodily—flung her over his saddle-bow, as it were, and ceased to respect her rights for twenty-four hours, we should all have been spared much strain and suffering. But he regretted his violence and told her so, which was fatal, or so it seemed to me. There are occasions when not to take advantage of a woman is to be unfair to her, and Margarita was very much a woman.

Well, well, it's all over now, and we have no need to regret that we did not try a different way. It may be we should have had to pay a greater price—for nothing lacks its price-mark on life's counter, more's the pity, and if we are deceived by long credit-accounts, the more fools we!



CHAPTER XXVIII

ARABIAN NIGHTS IN ENGLAND

I had much to reconstruct that season in regard to Margarita. I had found her once before, in Paris, no longer a child, but a woman; I found her now no woman merely, but a woman of the world. It seems incredible, indeed, and I have puzzled over it many an hour when the demon of sciatica has clawed at my hip and Hodgson's faithful hands have dropped fatigued from his ministrations. How she did it, how an untrained, emotional little savage, with hands as quick to strike as the paws of a cub lioness, with tongue as unbridled as the tongue of a four-year-old, with no more religion than a Parisian boulevardier, with not one-tenth the instruction of a London board-school child—how such a creature became in two years an (apparently) finished product of civilisation, I am at a loss to comprehend. That she did it is certain. My own eyes have seen Boston Brahmins drinking her tea gratefully; my own ears have heard New York fashionables babbling in her drawing-room. As for London, she dominated one whole season, and not to be able to bow to her, when she rode on her grey gelding of a morning, was to argue oneself unbowed to! Paris can never forget her, for did she not invent an entirely new Marguerite? And the Republic of Art is not ungrateful. She would have been a social success in Honolulu or Lapland, the witch!

Whether her ancestor the prince or her ancestress the actress made her development possible, whether her Connecticut grandfather or her Virginia grandmother taught her, how much she owed her bandit father who defied the world and her mother, the nun, who won it—both for love—who shall say?

When I look back on those wonderful months I find that the fanciful sprite whose province it is to tint imperishably the choice pictures that shall brighten the last grey days, has selected for my gallery not those hours when the footlights stretched between us, though one would suppose them beyond all doubt the most brilliant, but quaint, unexpected bits, sudden, unrehearsed scenes that stand out like tiny, jewelled landscapes viewed through a reversed telescope, or white sudden statues at the end of a dark corridor.

There is that delicious afternoon when we went, she and I and Sue Paynter and an infatuated undergrad, to Oxford together, and ate strawberries and hot buttered tea-cake and extraordinary little buns choked with plums, and honey breathing of clover and English meadows, and drank countless cups of strong English tea with blobs of yellow, frothing cream atop. Heavens, how we ate, and how we talked, and how tolerantly the warm, grey walls, ivy-hung and statue-niched, smiled through the long, opal English sunset at our frivolous and ephemeral chatter! They have listened to so much, those walls, and we shall perish and wax old as a garment, and still the tea and strawberries shall brew and bloom along the emerald turf, and infatuated youths shall cross their slim, white-flannelled legs and hang upon the voice of their charmer. Not the pyramids themselves give me that sense of the continuity of the generations, the ebb and flow of youth and youth's hot loves and hot regrets and the inexorable twilight that makes placid middle age, as do those grey walls and blooming closes of what I sometimes think is the very heart's core of England. My mother's countrymen may fill London with their national caravanseries and castles with their nation's lovely (if somewhat nasal) daughters, but Oxford shall defy them forever.

The infatuated undergrad was the owner of a banjo, an instrument hitherto unknown to Margarita and in regard to which she was vastly curious, and at her request he and three of his mates blushingly sang for her some of the American negro melodies then so popular among them. She was delighted with them and soon began to hum and croon unconsciously, the velvet of her voice mingling most piquantly with their sweet throaty English singing. By little and little her tones swelled louder and more bell-like: theirs softened gradually, till the harmony, so simple, yet so inevitable, dwindled to the nearest echo and barely breathed the quaint, primitive words:

"Nellie was a lady— Last night she died ..."

Those deep tones of hers, stolen from envious contraltos, turned in our ears to a mourning purple; a sombre, tender gloom haunted us, and the sorrow of life, that alone binds us together who live, hung like a lifting cloud over all who came within the magic radius of her voice. The people gathered like bees to a honeycomb from all sides; black caps and pale clear draperies drifted into a wondering circle; the clink of cups, the murmur of gentle English voices died softly away and the silence that was always her royal right spread around her.

"Toll the bell for lovely Nell, My dark ... Virginia ... bride!"

Who they were, those listening hundreds, I could not say for my life. I suppose they must have been some garden party—I distinctly recall the gaiters of a bishop and the coloured linings of more than one doctor's hood among them. They are as sudden, as unexplained in my memory, as those crowds in dreams, so definite, so individualised, where haunting, special faces stand out and hands clasp and shoulders touch—and all fades away. Around the vivid emerald lawn they group themselves, and Margarita, a pearl in pearly trailing laces, sits on a stone bench, defaced and mossy, in the centre, at the back; the lads adore at her feet, the banjo drops tinkling handfuls of chords at intervals, the birds flutter through the ivy overhead, the watered turf smells strong and sweet in the fanlike rays of the slow sun; bright pencils of yellow light fall like stained glass among the immemorial ivy; the day goes, softly, pensively....

"Toll the bell for lovely Nell ..."

"Ah-h-h!" they sigh and melt, and I see nothing more. But the picture is safe.

Then there was the famous house-party down in Surrey, whither the elect of England, for some reason or other, seem to gravitate; whether because the long midsummer Surrey days appear to them the last stage on the way to a peaceful, well-ordered heaven, in case they expect to spend eternity there, or a temporary solace, in case they don't! Sue, to whom all musical Europe opened its doors on poor Frederick's account, had taken Margarita, to whom the said doors were gladly opening on her own, to one of the famous country houses of a county famous for such jewels, and when Roger and I turned up there, who should our host be but one of my old schoolmates at Vevay—younger son of a younger son, then, and unimportant to a degree, but advanced since by one of those series of family holocausts that so change English county history, to be the head of a great house and lord of more acres than seems quite discreet—until one is in a position to slap the lord on the shoulder!

To Sue and me the soft-shod luxury, the studious, ripe comfort of the great, hedged establishment, were frankly marvellous, accustomed as we were to the many grades and stages of domestic prosperity between this rose-lined ease and little-a-year; but Margarita, to whom the old red jersey of the Island was no more real than the barbaric trappings of Aida, who accepted shells from Caliban or diamonds from Mephistopheles with equal sang-froid, displayed an indifference to her surroundings as regal as it was sincere. Indeed, the two simplest people at that party (famous for years in country-house annals as the most brilliant gathering of well-mixed rank and talent that ever fought with that arch-enemy of the leisured classes, Ennui, and throttled him successfully for seventy-two hours) were the wife of an American attorney-at-law and the eldest son of England's greatest duke—the most eligible parti in the United Kingdom, a youth of head-splitting lineage and fabulous possessions.

They sat together on the floor of a chintz-hung breakfast room, spinning peg-tops all over the polished wax, for two rainy hours before dinner (which function was delayed half an hour to please them, to the awed wonder of the lesser guests and the apoplectic amusements of the young peer's father) and were the only occupants of the great house, except three collie pups who sat with them, to see nothing odd in the performance, though Saint-Saens was come over from Paris to accompany Margarita on the piano and the princess of a royal family was dressed in her palpitating best for the best reason in the world not unconnected with the son of an historic house!

Du Maurier drew a picture of it for Punch in his very best manner (it went the length and breadth of England) and then, at Roger's grave request, withdrew it from the all-but-printed page and gracefully presented him with it. It was wonderfully characteristic of both of them and prettily done on both sides, to my old-fashioned way of thinking.

Well, it was after that top-spinning that Margarita and the Fortunate Youth jumped up carelessly, kicked away the tops, and raced each other to the noble music room, a magnificent gallery, all oak and Romneys and Lelys, and there the Fortunate Youth sat down at the piano (Saint-Saens standing amused in the curve of it) and began to play the accompaniment of one of Tosti's great popular waltz-songs. It is no longer in favour, your waltz-song, though I have lived through a sufficient number of musical fashions to be reasonably certain of its return to power, some day, but then it was at its height, and subalterns hummed them to military bands, from Simla to Quebec, and soft eyes dropped under those subalterns' right shoulders and soft hearts melted as the chorus was repeated by request, and the dawn found them still dancing—bless the happy days!

Now Providence had seen fit (displaying thus an astonishing lack of socialistic wisdom and an altogether regrettable tendency to give to those to whom much had already been given) to bestow upon this Fortunate Youth enough musical ability to have made the fortune of a pair of Blind Toms, so that he could play any and all instruments, instinctively, apparently, and almost equally well. He played also by ear, with the greatest ease, the most complicated harmonies, and could accompany anybody's singing or playing of anything whatever—if he happened to be in the mood for it.

"It is a thousand pities that one could not have found him in the gutter, that boy," as M. Saint-Saens confided to me, "it would have been of service to him!"

Which remark, being overheard, scandalised many good British souls horribly and caused the youth to blush with perfectly ingenuous and modest pleasure.

He sat down at the great Steinway and ran his long white fingers loosely over the keys, and said to Margarita, while the butler gazed in agony at his mistress, and the other guests, all arrayed for one of the climaxes of one of England's most temperamental importations from the kitchens of France, stood divided between interest and foreboding,

"I say, Mrs. Bradley, can you sing 'Bid me Good-bye and Go'? I'm awfully fond of that."

"I can sing it if it is here," said Margarita placidly, "why not?"

"Oh, it's safe to be here," he answered easily, and sure enough, it was there, in a cabinet close by.

Well, it was banal enough, heaven knows—how else could it have been popular? Lincoln was not a musician, so far as I know, but he knew that one can't fool all the people all the time! And the good Tosti, however light he may ring nowadays, had one little bit of information not always at the disposal of modern song-writers—he understood how to write for the human voice. Which has always seemed to me a very valuable acquisition, if one happens to be in the song-writing trade.

So when Margarita, with a quick glance at the obvious little melody, put her hands behind her back like a school-girl—she was dressed in a tight, plain little jacket and skirt of English tweeds, with stiff white collar and cuffs and thick-soled boots, and what used to be called an "Alpine hat"—and began to sing, to a slow waltz rhythm, one might not have expected much: indeed, the youth hummed audaciously with her, at first, and the other men, not one of whom was within many degrees of nonentity, beat time carelessly.

"Is there a single joy or pain That I may never know?"

Stop a bit! What caught at your heart and worried you, Colonel, and stabbed a little under your D. S. O.? Were you quite fair to that lovely, high-spirited creature you married, all those years ago?

"Take back your love, it is in vain ..."

Ah, Lady Mary, you are a good twelve stone nowadays, but when that poor younger cousin gave you that look in the garden and the roses crawled over the old dial in the moonlight, you were slighter, and crueler!

"Bid me good-bye and go!"

It was a waltz, oh, yes, but it was a very Dance of Death to those of us who had any parting to look back to, that changed our life—and we could never go back again and make it better; never any more. That was what cut so, and Margarita, dark and slim like a plain brown nightingale, who leaves plumage to the raucous peacock because it matters so little what she, the real queen of us all, wears—Margarita spelled it out remorselessly, to the tune of a mess-room waltz, and told us that youth is only once and so sweet and for so little time! And the boy beside her smiled with pleasure and embroidered her rich, clear-cut phrasing and annotated it and threw jewels and flowers of unexpected chords through it and mocked the sad, charming fatalism of it as only spendthrift youth can.

"You do not love me, no! Bid me good-bye and go ..."

Cruel Margarita, how could you make the tears splash down the cheeks of the poor little princess, who knew what was expected of her and had no greater sin on her conscience than a tiny lock of her yellow hair always warm, now, in the breast of a ridiculous second cousin on a sheep-ranch in far Dakota, U. S. A.?

"Good-bye, good-bye, 'tis better so ..."

They stand so still in this picture, those big, non-committal British, each gnawing his lip a little under the drooping mustache; the women's shoulders are ivory against the panelled oak and bowls of Guelder roses in Chinese bowls; that beautiful line from the base of the throat to the top of the corsage which America has not to give her daughters, as yet, heaves and droops; the Romneys smile behind their wax candles in sconces. It is only a waltz of the street, but she has bewitched us with it, has our Margarita.

But strongest and clearest of all, keen in light and dense in shadow like a Rembrandt, I see that extraordinary night in Trafalgar Square, that night that surely lives unique in the memory of Nelson and the Lions, though most that shared it may be, and doubtless are—for they were not for various reasons long-lived classes of people—dead and dust by now. How and why we found ourselves at Trafalgar Square I could not tell, though I went to the stake for it this minute. But I think it must have been that Margarita wanted to walk through the streets, a form of exercise for which she took fitful fancies at odd times, and that I, as was mostly the case, went with her.

We were all alone, for Roger, who shared our walks usually, when he was not too busy, had just left for Berlin an hour earlier, on one of his patient unravellings of Carter's diplomatic tangles.

It had been a dull, damp day—the kind of day that tried Margarita terribly in England, for she was much under the influence of the weather, and le beau temps brought out her plumage like her Mexican parrot in Whistler's portrait. Looking back at it all, too, I seem to feel, though with no definite reason for it, that she was perturbed and excited about something known only to herself, for she was strangely irritable on our walk, contradicted me fiercely, inquired testily who Nelson might be, then chid me for a dry old schoolmaster, when I told her, and such like flighty vagaries, inseparable, I believed, from her sex in general and her temperament in particular. If I have never taken the trouble to defend myself from the accusation of thinking The Pearl perfect in her somewhat spoiled relations with her best friends at this period of her life, it is because I have always considered that such people as are too inelastic in their views of human nature to realise that Margarita merely exhibited les defauts de ses qualites (as who of us does not, at one time or another?) are unworthy even my argumentative powers, which are not great, as I perfectly understand.

So she unsheathed her sharp little female claws and patted me mercilessly with them, and contrived to make me seem to myself a tactless, blundering fool to her heart's content that night, striding easily beside me, meanwhile, like a boy, though she had refused to change her high-heeled bronze slippers for more sensible footgear and carried the unreasonably long train of her black lace dinner gown over her arm. Roger did not care for her in black, and she seldom wore it, but had ordered this a few days ago from the great Worth, who then ruled those fortunate ladies who could afford to number themselves among his subjects with a sway he has since, I am assured, been forced to divide among other monarchs—the only monarchs left now to a Republic that has never denied that one divine succession through all her revolutions. For that monarchy Paris never will sing ca ira; for that principle she knows no cynicism; that wonderful juggernaut, the Fashion, shall never rumble across channel, it seems!

I had derided myself for a sentimentalist and spinner of fine theories when I had thought I detected a little defiance in her first assumption of this midnight black robe, with its startling corals on her arm and neck, and the foreign-looking comb behind her high-dressed hair, the whole bringing out markedly that continental strain that amused Whistler (naughty Jimmie!) and displeased Roger. But when she appeared in it that night determined on a dinner where most of the guests were highly distasteful to Roger, who had congratulated himself on a quiet evening at home; when she had dragged him to it at the risk of losing his only train and teased him shamefully all through it by the most ridiculous flirtation with one of the worst roues of Europe (Margarita was so fundamentally honest and so thoroughly attached to her husband that such performances could only be doubly painful to him, since they were obviously intended maliciously) when she sent him off before the long dinner's close without any but the most casual adieux and without the remotest intention of accompanying him, I was uncomfortably forced to the conclusion that this long-trained, inky dress was a veritable devil's livery, that she had put it on deliberately and that there would be no stopping her till the mood was off.

And now I find myself about to write a most unjustifiable thing, in view of the possibility of these idle memories falling somehow, sometime, somewhere, into the hands of that ubiquitous Young Person to whom all print is free as air in these enlightened days. In America it has been the rule, to suppress such print as could not brave this freedom; in France, to suppress such Young Persons as could! There is something to be said for both methods, and each has, perhaps, its defects; the one producing more stimulating Young Persons, the other enjoying more virile prose.

Be that as it may, I am quite aware that my duty to the youth of Anglo Saxondom should lead me to state, sadly but firmly, that such conduct as Margarita displayed on the night in question could have had but one result—that of filling me, her friend and admirer, with a grieved displeasure and disgust; that her unwomanly carelessness as to the feelings of others and her wanton disregard of the wishes and comfort of those who should have been dearest to her lowered her in my estimation and greatly detracted from her charm in my eyes. But I am not writing particularly for the Young Person and candour compels me to state that she was quite as interesting to me as ever! I didn't think she had treated Roger very handsomely—true; but Roger had known that he was marrying a delicious vixen when he married Margarita, you see, and if I had begun to lecture her, there were too many others who would have been only too delighted to relieve her of my society. She abused her power sometimes, I admit it—but then, she had the power! And oh, the balm she kept for the wounds she gave!

As I have said, I have not the remotest idea of how or why we confronted Nelson and the Lions, I cannot by any effort of memory see us arriving or leaving; but I see myself pausing in my lecture on English history, as a lighted transparency, a straggling crowd and a band bear down upon us suddenly out of nowhere. It is a poor, vicious sort of crowd, the gutter-sweepings of London; pale, stunted lads, haggard, idle slatterns, a handful of women of the street, a trio of tawdry flower girls. Around the band, which turns out to be only a big drum and a clattering tambourine, a group of men and women in a vaguely familiar uniform, the women in ugly coal-scuttle bonnets.

"What is that, Jerry?" says Margarita.

"That is the Salvation Army—let's get along," I answer.

But she will not, for she is curious, and I resign myself to the inevitable and wait. Their crude appeals are symbols born of a deep knowledge of the human heart they fight to win—gleaming light and rhythmic drum: the first groping of savagery, the last pinnacle of the most highly organised religious spectacle the world has yet elaborated. They gather near the fountain, they group about their lighted banner, and a drawling cockney voice afflicts the air. I can see the circle now—they form in the classic amphitheatre that knows no century nor country; a humpback pushing a barrow of something before him stops near us; a woman, coughing frightfully, leans on it, muttering to herself, staring at Margarita's scarf-wrapped head.

The cockney's address begins, "O my brothers ..." but I do not attend: I want to get Margarita out of the growing crowd, listless, but lifted for a moment from their sordid treadmill of existence by the light and the muffled, rhythmic crush and the high-pitched sing-song. They must have followed for a long way, for they are churnings from the very dregs of London and alien to Trafalgar Square, and the officer on his beat looks at them suspiciously enough.

"Won't you give us a song, lieutenant?" says the speaker suddenly, "pipe h'up there, friends—many a sinner's saved his soul with a song—w'y not some o' you? Are you ready, lieutenant?"

I can see her so plainly, the pretty, worn little creature; pale as death and in no condition for street singing, evidently, but plucky and borne along by the very zeal of the Crusaders. The other woman, who cannot sing, shakes the tambourine, a great, burly fellow, some rescued navvy, thuds at the drum, and her sweet, thin little voice rises, shrill, but wonderfully appealing, through the night.

"I need Thee every hour, Most gracious Lord!"

It is not difficult now to see why the crowd followed; her voice is like a child's lost in the wood, but brave, and sure of ultimate protection; it has a curious effect of the country and the hedgerows. They listen eagerly, they like it.

"Come, Margarita, I think we ought to get away—the crowd is getting thicker. People are staring at us."

"No, no, Jerry, let me alone! Oh, see the poor woman, she is too ill to sing! She has lost her voice—do you know it?"

And so she has. With a clutch at her throat and a pathetic turn of her eyes to the speaker, the little lieutenant shakes her head at him and is dumb. He seats her deftly on a camp stool by the drummer, pats her shoulder, sends a friendly gutter-rat with the face of a sneak-thief for water, and turns to the crowd.

"Come now, friends, the lieutenant 'ere 'as lost 'er voice along o' you, an' tryin' to save yer! Can't you pipe up, some o' you? If some of you'd sing a bit with us, now, maybe we'd be able to take back one soul to Christ with us to-night. Can't one o' yer sing?"

"I will sing!" says some one near me—and it is Margarita!

I clutch her cape fiercely, but it slips off in my hand and she is at the drum, and the lane that opened for her closes for me, and I fight in vain to reach her—Oh, it must be a dream!

"I need Thee every hour...."

Ah-h-h! The crowd sighs with the old familiar joy, the magic of the golden voice slips like a veil over the cruel angles of their broken lives and mists and softens everything.

She has a slip of printed paper in her hand and reads seriously from it; some one holds the transparency near her shoulder for light—her white shoulders, bare in Trafalgar Square!



"I need Thee every hour, Most gracious Lord, No tender voice like thine Can peace afford...."

They are still as death, tranced in those liquid bell-tones. The great drum shivers, as it shivered, of old, a tom-tom, across the African desert; the old, primal thrill creeps through my blood—good heavens, is this fear? Is it superstition? Is it religion?

"I need Thee—oh, I need Thee!"

The woman sobs like a damned soul beside me; a man coughs huskily. Will no one stop her? They have wedged me so that I cannot breathe, I feel them gathering from the nearby streets. And there she stands, coral like blood on her bare neck, the scarf fallen from her black hair, the plea of all humanity pouring in a great anguished stream of melody out of her white throat.

"I need Thee oh, I need Thee, Ev'ry hour I need Thee!"

The tambourine shudders barbarically across the smooth flood of her voice: it is the tingling crash of the Greek Mysteries—and I had thought it vulgar!

I hear hansoms jingling up—what will Roger say? He would kill them all, if he could, I know, and yet no one there would hurt a hair of her head—and does she not belong to the public?

God knows the poor devils need something—is it that, then? Is it a real thing? Do people fight for it like that? For this imperious Voice is agonising for something and the drum is the beat of its heart.

"Gawd's frightful hard on women," the poor creature beside me moans, and lo, the little dumb lieutenant is by her side miraculously, and like a shifting kaleidoscope the crowd lets them through and she kneels, shaking, by the drum.

Their white faces heap in layers before me; drawn, wolfish, brutal in the flaring lights they peer and gasp and sob, like uncouth inhabitants of another world—wait a bit, Jerry, it is your world, just the same, and perhaps you are responsible for it? Ugh!

"I need Thee ..."

"Gad, it's little Josefa!"

The clear English voice cuts across the hush, and,

"What a lark!" answers a deeper bass.

He is a very important and highly conventional personage, nowadays, that slender pink dandy, with five grown daughters and a Constituency; but if by any odd chance he should read this, I will wager he forgets what he is actually looking at for a moment and sees against the black shadows and rising night fog of Trafalgar Square a beautiful, black-robed woman in red corals lifted to an empty barrow by two eager club-dandies and held there by a gigantic Guardsman—the best fencer in Europe, once!

Oh, Bertie, the Right Honourable now, the always honourable then, do you know that there were tears on your pink cheeks? And your noble friend, who broke up his establishment in St. John's Wood the next day and founded the Little Order of the Sons of St. Francis, does he know that the lightning stroke that blinded him like Saul of Tarsus and sent him reeling from Piccadilly to the slums, lighted for a moment, as it fell, the way of a dazed, rheumatic bachelor from America, who saw the terror in his eyes and the sweat on his forehead as he held his corner of the barrow and Margarita drove him to his God?

"Ev'ry hour I need Thee ..."

The fog rolls over us, the lights flare through a sea of mist; the Honourable Bertie produces a hansom, from his pocket apparently, and the wild, dark etching is wiped out like a child's picture on a slate.

Margarita falls asleep on my shoulder, I gain my usual philosophical control, gradually, and realise, now the echoes of that agonised pleading have ceased to disturb my soul, that the woman beside me is not even a Christian, technically speaking, and knew not, literally, what she did!

The magic of the Golden Voice—ah, what magic can cope with it? Of all the pictures hers has painted for me on those miraculous, grey-tissued walls where memory lives, this strange coarse-tinted sketch—a very Hogarth in its unsparing contrasts—stands out the clearest. At night, when I close my eyes and think "London," then does that poor sister of the streets moan to me that "Gawd's frightful hard on women," and fight her way to Margarita—who has been favoured beyond most women, and knows not God—at least, not that implacable deity of the London slum! Whenever I hear or read the phrase "Salvation Army" then do I see a young exquisite with a white camellia in his buttonhole, gazing like a hypnotised Indian Seer at a crude transparency blotted with unconvincing texts, then rushing off to found a celibate order—from Margarita, who was no more celibate that Ceres the bountiful!

Ah, well, the Way is a Mystery, as Alif said, and who am I that I should expect to solve it, when kings and philosophers have failed? At any rate, I have my pictures safe.



CHAPTER XXIX

FATE GRIPS HER LANDING NET

She sang her French roles in Germany and three times in Siegfried, and was getting ready for Paris again when a long letter from Alice Carter besought us all to come to Boston as quickly as might be. Old Madam Bradley had been stricken suddenly with paralysis. One side of her body was beyond movement, but the other was as yet unimpaired, and by a series of questions they had found out that she wanted to see Roger—and Roger's wife—before she died. Nor was this enough, for the proud, afflicted old creature, when their ingenuity had failed, traced left-handed upon a slate, with infinite effort, my initials: evidently she wanted to make her peace in this world before she left it.

Margarita demurred a little and I, for one, should be the last to blame her. Greater knowledge of the world and especially her acquaintance with Walter Carter, who did not hesitate to blame his mother-in-law, had taught her to appreciate Madam Bradley's neglect, and her feeling for death had none of the sacred respect custom breeds in us—at least outwardly. She had just begun to study Lohengrin and a charming week at a French chateau with Sue had given her a taste for the society she liked and ornamented so well. She suggested that Roger and I should go alone, leaving her with Sue, and we (Sue and I) trembled for the outcome, for she seemed rather determined, to us.

But we had not counted sufficiently on Roger's sense of what was right and just. What might be considered a slighting of his personal claims he could endure patiently; what was due to his family and position he could not ignore. Quietly he cancelled Margarita's early contracts, secured passage and dismissed the servants.

"Be ready to sail on Saturday, cherie," he said, "I want my mother to see you very much, and Mary, too."

"Very well," said Margarita, round-eyed and breathing fast, and Barbara Jencks clapped her hands noiselessly. She adored Roger, as did all his servants and dependents, for that matter.

We reached Boston with the first early snows, and though his mother's face was set and her hand steady as she laid it on his head, I think they understood each other and were grateful from their hearts for that hour of reconciliation. For Margarita the stately silver-haired figure with immovable features and fixed, withdrawn gaze held some unexpected and inexplicable charm. She kissed Madam Bradley willingly, set the little Mary on her lap and beguiled the child with every graceful wile to laugh and crow and exhibit her tiny vocabulary. She sang by the hour, so that the gloomy house—brightened now, for the baby's health—echoed with her lovely notes. Bradleys and Searses and Wolcotts flocked to meet her and spread her fame and charm abroad; and Roger forgot for a while the load he carried and seemed like himself again. Even Sarah capitulated, and that before very long, too. I saw her actually wiping away a tear as she watched Madam Bradley lift with great effort her cold white finger and trace the outline of her grandchild's face: the little Mary was the image of her father and a fine Bradley, with only her mother's quick motions and mobile smile to remind one of that side of her ancestry.

Of course Madam Bradley was not demonstrative, nor even cordial, from any ordinary point of view, but from hers, and in the light of our knowledge of her, there was a tremendous difference. Already she had given little Mary a beautiful diamond cross and the famous Bradley silver tea-service. Sarah had softened wonderfully, too, and seemed to feel that since her aunt did not die, it was incumbent upon her to pay her debt to heaven by burying the hatchet. I don't think I ever quite did Sarah justice, so far as her feeling for Madam Bradley went—she appeared to be deeply and genuinely attached to her and was sick with anxiety when the stroke took her. She shared perfectly the grandmother's feeling over the baby, and Margarita's good taste in presenting Roger with such a perfect Bradley was set down to her credit with vigorous justice. For she never forgave poor Alice for the brown little Carters. Alice's children resembled their father, and Sue's (almost grandchildren, in that house) were sickly and comparatively unattractive; but Margarita's daughter, perfect in health, beautiful as a baby angel, active, daring, and enchantingly affectionate, satisfied the old lady's pride completely and she sat for hours contentedly watching her sprawl on an Indian blanket on the floor.

Either the comfort of renewed relations with her children mended her health or the fatality of the shock was overestimated, for she did not die, not then nor for many years, but lived, happier, perhaps in her affliction than before it, for the bond between her and Roger and Mother Mary, strengthened when she was preparing for death, never loosened again, and more than once, a black-robed, white-coiffed figure has visited the home of her father's like a slim shadow, and carried with her one of the Church's greatest blessings, surely—the healing of old wounds and the restoring of human loves.



PART NINE

IN WHICH THE RIVER FINDS THE SEA

Like a white snake upon the sands She's writhing in the crispy foam, She holds her soul in her open hands, And now she staggers and now she stands, And now she runs to her husband's home!

O I have seen a wife at rest, That croons the babe upon her knee, She lies upon her goodman's breast As gentle as a bird at nest, The mermaid's saved her soul from Sea!

Sir Hugh and the Mermaiden.



CHAPTER XXX

A TERROR IN THE SNOW

Well, they stayed the month nearly out, and then Roger took a fancy to see the Island in winter, and I, hugging to my breast the consciousness of that furnace, was easily persuaded to go with them: it is January, February and March that punish me so fearfully in the North, and really only the last two of those. I had thought Margarita a little distraite and cold to us all, toward the last, and feared she was resenting her exile: she took a short trip to New York, accompanied, of course, by the faithful Jencks, and I had visions of American contracts, but Roger never mentioned the subject—didn't even ask her why she went, I believe, she hated to be questioned so.

We found everything in first-rate order (I had written ahead to light the furnace) and you should have seen Roger's face when he noticed the registers in the big room! Like a boy's when some good-natured trick has been played upon him. Suppose we had not had them nor the coal—it makes me cold now to think of it.

I find I can't write about it very fully, after all, and I must be forgiven if I cut it short. It's a little too near, yet, after all the years. I know I never want to see snow again—it is the most cruel blue-white in the world.

We stopped the night, of course, and in the morning Roger and Margarita went for a walk on the crust, for it had snowed all night and the evening before—the great, fat, grey clouds were full of it—and we thought we were in for another blizzard like last year's. It had "let up" for a little, as they say about there, but Roger was afraid to risk going away till it had definitely ended, so they went for their walk, and I chatted with Miss Jencks by the fire. They had been gone about an hour when we heard a great scratching and whining at the door (I thought for a moment it was Kitch) and Rosy bounded in, snapping his teeth and glaring fearfully. We both jumped up and he flew at me and caught my sleeve in his teeth—for a moment, I confess, I felt a little queer, for I had seen him throw Caliban and hold him—then, as I drew back, he uttered the most heartrending howl I have ever heard, and spun wildly around, and at that moment I felt suddenly that something was up and that I was wanted. Miss Jencks felt it at exactly that moment, too, and ran for my great-coat before I asked her.

She says that I said,

"Where are they, old fellow? Go seek!" but I don't remember it. I know that she said in a low voice,

"I shall be of no use—I can't run—but I will have everything ready," though she says I must have imagined it.

Rosy flew through the door and I after him—she had the sense to bring me my heavy arctic overshoes, or I should have slipped in a minute—and I ran for about fifty yards.

Then something stopped me. Where it came from, what did it, I don't know and can never know, but I swear I heard a low, distinct voice close to me (not a cry, mind you, but a quiet, hoarse voice) saying,

"Get a rope. Get a rope."

I checked like a scared horse and nearly fell.

"Get a rope," I heard again, "get a rope."

Then, cursing at myself for a crazy fool, I actually turned, with Rosy showing his teeth at me, and dashed back (all those precious yards!) and grabbed a pile of rope Caliban had brought out to bind some big logs for hauling and abandoned under the eaves when we arrived on the island. Rosy was far ahead now, but he had gone through the crust at intervals and I tracked him by that.



Suddenly the wind—it was blowing a steady gale behind me—shifted, and I heard a succession of terrible cries, great hoarse, high shrieks, like nothing human and yet unlike any animal. Wordless, throat-tearing screams they were, and I shouted back, against the head-on wind,

"Coming! Coming! Hold on! I'm coming!" till I coughed and strangled and had to stop.

How I ran! I never did it before and certainly never can again. Rosy's tracks curved and twisted, and I felt I was losing time, but dared not risk missing them, for I was coming nearer to that awful voice steadily, though it echoed so I should have been helpless without any other guide.

Well, I found them. Roger up to his shoulders in icy water, his head dropped back, white, on her arm, and she up to her waist on a slippery ledge under the highest point of the bank—the bank that I blasted out! She was caught, I could see, on a jagged point by her heavy, woollen skirt (it was made in London, bless it!) and must have wedged her foot, besides, in some way, for she had his whole weight; her lips were blue. She wore a blood-red cape, all merry and Christmas-like against the white ledges, and her hair streamed in the wind. Her head was thrown back like a hound's and those blood-curdling screams poured out of it; her eyes were shut. Now and then Rosy bayed beside her, scratching at the snow, and where the water was not frozen in the protected pools it swirled like a mill-race around the nasty, pointed rocks.