Margarita's Soul Part 13

News of will forwarded in packet from office. More glad than can say, deserve it all. Cold wave here and shall take noon express Thursday. Sail Sat.u.r.day.

R. B.

CHAPTER XIV

THE ISLAND COTTAGE

I have hitherto said nothing about the Bank, for the best of reasons--I hate it. I hated it, I think, from the day when a letter from one of my father's friends introduced me to it, until the day when the letter from the legal firm of which Roger's uncle had been the brilliant head released me from it. I do not think, however, that many people knew this. I did my work as well as I could, accepted my periodical advances in salary with a becoming grat.i.tude, saved a little each year, and quieted my eruptions of furious disgust with the recollection of my mother's unhindered disposal of her little legacy since the day I left the university.

If anyone had told me that on a day in early autumn I should suddenly come into a thousand pounds a year and freedom, I should have caught my breath at the very idea, and here was the thing, a fact accomplished, and here was I, not only quite self-contained, but sober beyond my wont, and ready to take the Bank and all its stodgy horror upon my shoulders, if with it I might have had one thing--one woman!

The world was before me, where to choose, all the far corners and reaches for which I had inherited the hunger with the blood that ran in my veins--and if I might only have been the first to find one lonely, insignificant point on the Atlantic coast, my heart would have journeyed there, content, and ceased (or so I thought) its wanderings.

Truly our joys are tempered for us, and no shorn lamb was ever more carefully protected from the winds of heaven than we from too much joy. It is an actual fact that I regarded my resignation from the drudgery of twelve years, the disposal of my rooms and furniture, the heartening preliminaries with the lawyers, and my booking at the steamship company's offices, with less interest than the successful transportation of Margarita's wedding gift.

It was with a real thrill of pleasure that I drew out my small savings--a little over a thousand pounds--and with the breathless a.s.sistance of Sue Paynter and a famous actress of her acquaintance selected the most perfect single pearl to be purchased for that money.

One of the heads of the great firm whose name has been long a.s.sociated with American wealth and luxury himself lent a discerning hand to the selection, and for the first time I tasted the sn.o.bbish joy of sitting at ease in a dainty private room while respectful officials brought the splendours of the Orient to my lordly knees, and lesser buyers hung unattended over the common counters. Except in the purchase of my first gift for my mother--a tiny diamond sword-hilt, in memory of my father--I have never experienced so much pleasure.

It hung, a great blob of veined, milky whiteness, from a strong but tiny golden chain--a gift for a Rajah, not a bank-official! I had never expended so much, or half so much, upon a single purchase, and the pale, native thrift of Old and New England together glowed and thrilled scarlet in me, and the lucent, moonlike sphere flushed into a ruby before my dazzled eyes: I knew then how an eager chief will toss away a province for an emerald--if he may lay the jewel upon the neck of all the world for him!

I had the clasp engraved with her name--itself a pearl--and slipped the delicate case in my pocket. The great comedienne, whom I have always thought the sweetest of women--but one--talked a moment aside at the smiling request of the master jeweller and then whispered laughingly to Sue with the most artfully artless glance at me. Sue, who was a little drawn and white from her enemy neuralgia, murmured to me in French that I had the honour to render desolate Miss L----n R----l, the reigning stage beauty, who was greatly desirous of precisely that pearl and whose too vacillating admirer would doubtless enjoy his bad little quarter hour _a cause de moi_. I do not deny that this put a point to my satisfaction. I was, in fact, idiotically gratified--G.o.d and man that is born of woman alone know why.

I hurried to the dingy station as a boy hurries to the train that will take him home to the holidays, and the tedious hours were miraculously light, the face of the telegraph operator like the face of my best friend, the rough, damp pa.s.sage in the blue boat a pleasant incident.

Caliban had a friendly, stupid grin for me and rowed his best; the very oars knew how I wanted to get to her!

They stood with a lantern on the landing-steps, in the rough, picturesque clothes I had first seen them in, and we hurried through a thickening drizzle to the warm, light cottage, ridiculously hand-in-hand, the lantern bobbing between us.

Roger had revived his old school accomplishments and had ready a panful of delicious little sausages in a bath of tomatoes and onions and Worcestershire that sent me back to Vevay in the fraction of a second, and we dipped fragments of the crusty French loaf I had brought in the sauce, in the old Vevay fashion, and drank to their voyage in the last Burgundy from the little wine bin. If anything were needed to place Margarita's father in our estimations, that Burgundy would have done it! After the sweet course of jellied pancakes that Roger had taught Caliban, we fell upon the cigars I had brought, and when Margarita, an apt pupil, had sugared my demi-ta.s.se to my liking, I reached into my pocket and drew out the Russia leather case. My fingers trembled like a boy's as I took out the pearl and clasped it around her beautiful neck, above the soft black handkerchief.

"If this is not your first wedding present, Mrs. Bradley, I shall be furiously angry," I said with mock severity, to keep down the lump in my throat, for I was absurdly excited.

"Jerry, you extravagant old donkey, what do you mean by this?" Roger cried huskily, "I never heard of such a thing!" While Margarita, for the first time in our acquaintance a daughter of Eve, ran up to her mirror. She would have been as pleased, I think, with a necklace of iridescent seash.e.l.ls--wherein she differed widely from Miss L----n R----l, as Roger and I agreed.

We talked, of course, of Uncle Winthrop and the old days, of his loving interest in me, the slender little chap with the dead soldier-father, who had taken long walks up and down narrow old Winter Street with him, and mailed his letters, and fenced with his sword, and listened by the hour to his tales of rainy bivouac and last redoubt, of precious drops of brandy to a dying comrade and brave loans of army blankets in the cold dawn. We wondered at the extraordinary chance which had kept the old portfolio, with its worn leather edges that I remembered so well, hidden during the two years that had elapsed since his death, and what secretive instinct had led him to put his last will and testament there. We marvelled at the sagacity which had led him to drop hints as to the existence of such a doc.u.ment so effectively that the family had felt themselves bound to hold the property intact for three years, to give every possible chance of finding it, and had spent many useless dollars in the search for the old servants who were believed (and rightly, as the event proved) to have witnessed it. Our friendship had been more than ordinary in its strength and real sympathy; one of those attractions that laugh at disparity of years and absence of any tie of kinship, and, indeed, up to his death I had been far closer to him than Roger ever was. Dear old Uncle Win! He knew what he would do for me and what it would mean to me, well enough: as a young fellow, he had been tied to _his_ Bank!

I spoke tentatively of Sue Paynter, and Roger flushed and struck the table in his disgusted excitement.

"Good heavens, Jerry--I never once thought----"

Poor Sue! There was nothing more to say.

"The first thing I want you to do for me, Jerry," said Roger, "is to go through the cottage thoroughly and see if you discover any trace of who lived here. I've done it, of course, but I'd like to have some one else do it, too. Go all by yourself, and I won't give you any hint of my idea, and then we'll compare notes."

Nothing, just then, could have interested me more, and I started systematically for the cellar steps, lantern in hand.

The first thing that struck me was the trim neatness of this part of the house, too often--and especially in country districts--neglected.

The steps were firm and clean and nearly dustless, the cement floor dry and apparently freshly swept, the walls and ceiling well whitened with lime. Bins of vegetables, a barrel of summer apples, a cask of vinegar on two trestles with a pail thriftily set for the drippings, a wire cupboard with plates of food set there for the cellar coolness, and in one corner a little dairy compartment, built over a spring covered by a wooden trap-door, completed the furnishings of the floor.

For the rest, the place was a fairly well-stocked tool-house; a scythe and a grindstone, snow-shovel and ladders were arranged compactly; a watering-pot and rake stood fresh from use by the door.

A low cow-stall came next and beyond this a fowl roost, both these last noticeably clean and sweet, and this in a day when the microbe and the germ were not such prominent factors in our civilisation as they are at present.

I retraced my steps and went through the living-room to the room beyond it, over the shed and dairy. It was a fair-sized study, unmistakably a man's. The end wall held the fireplace, with a large map of the world hung over it. The ocean side of the cottage was windowless and lined with well-used books on pine shelves. These overflowed on the wall which held the entrance door, and where they stopped a sort of trophy of arms was arranged on the wall. An army revolver, a great Western six-shooter, a fine little hunting-piece, a grim Ghoorka knife and an a.s.segai, which I recognised from similar treasures on the barrack wall of an English friend of mine--an infantry major--one or two bayonets, a curious j.a.panese sword and a curved dagger whose workmanship was quite unknown to me, completed this decoration, which was the only one on the walls. In the centre of the floor stood a large table-desk of well-polished cherry with a heavy gla.s.s ink-well, pin-tray, letter-rack, etc., and a fair, clean square of blotting-paper. But none of the customary litter of such a desk was upon it; all was swept and garnished, orderly and bare. The drawers were empty, the ink-well pure, the very pens new. There was not the faintest hint of what work had gone on at that desk.

I crossed the room and took down a book here and there at random from the shelves. From one or two, evidently old ones, the fly leaves had been neatly cut out; others had no mark of any kind. It came over me with a staggering certainty that here was no careless, makeshift impulse; a methodical, definite annihilation had been intended and accomplished. An extraordinary man had arranged this. What was the secret he had concealed so perfectly, and what had been his motive?

What his necessity? Three or four comfortable chairs and a light wicker table completed the furniture of the room, which held--for me--the strange fascination of the living-room, that deep, impersonal sense of culture, that rigorous suppression of whim and irrelevant detail. The man (not so long dead, probably) who stood behind that room had stamped it indelibly, inevitably with the very character he had tried to eliminate from it. One wanted to have known him: one felt instinctively what a firm grip, what a level eye he had.

The books were almost as little tell-tale as the rest. A fine set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica; histories of all sorts, but only the best in every case; a little standard poetry; the great English novelists--d.i.c.kens much worn, Meredith's early works, the unquenchable Charles Reade, who has nursed so many fretful convalescents back to the harness; two or three fine editions of Shakespeare, one, a half-dozen small green volumes, worn loose from their bindings; Darwin, Huxley, and a dozen blazers of that wonderful trail, much underlined and cross-indexed, and a really remarkable collection of the great scientific travellers and explorers, that occupied much s.p.a.ce; and a fair collection of French fiction and archaeological research and German scientific and historical work completed my first rough impression of this library. I have gone over it very carefully since, and amused myself with noting its omissions--quite as significant in such cases as the actual contents.

No cla.s.sics but the usual school and college text-books; no recent fiction; almost no American literature except the most reliable of the historians; none of the essayists or belle-lettrists, except Carlyle, Macaulay, and such like heavy artillery; nothing whatever of a religious nature but a small, worn Bible thick with dust, on the top shelf among the school-books. And there was not in the whole library one page or line or word to indicate that its owner was conversant with or interested in Italian or Italy.

O builder of that sand-hued cottage, owner of that manly room of books, how many hours have I devoted to patient study of you! How many nights have I hunted you down, searched you out, compelled you to reveal yourself to me--and how strangely have I succeeded! It has been a labour of love, and I have sometimes felt I know your mind almost as my own.

In the outside further corner of the room a narrow, steep flight of steps led to the second story and lent a queer little foreign air to the whole. Ascending, I found myself in a small room with one door--its only entrance--and one window. For a moment I had a curious sense of the English barracks and seemed to be in the major's sleeping-room again. A low cot-bed with a narrow rug beside, a pine washing-stand and a chest of drawers, a straight chair and small bed-table with a reflecting candle and match box upon it, and a flat tin bath furnished this room, which was, like all the others, speckless. A small shaving-mirror was attached at convenient height near the window; razor and strop hung beside it. All this I took in at a glance, without turning, but when I did turn and confronted the entrance wall, I caught my breath. For there on the s.p.a.ce directly opposite the bed hung what, for a moment, I took to be a portrait of Margarita.

I moved closer and saw that it was a wonderfully perfect etching of a head by Henner--a first impression, beyond a doubt. It was a girl's head, half life size, almost in profile, white against the dark rain of her hair, which covered her shoulders and bust and blackened all the rest of the picture. The haunting melancholy, the youth, the purity of that face have become so a.s.sociated with Margarita and her home and that part of my life that I can never separate them, though it has been more than once pointed out to me, and fairly, I dare say, that the picture does not resemble her so much as I think, that her type of beauty is larger, less conventional, infinitely richer, and that, aside from the really unusually suggestive accident of her likeness, it is only a general effect.

Well, well, it may be. But I dare to believe that I understand, perhaps better than anybody, why it hung facing that bare cot-bed, and what it meant to the man who slept so many years of his life there, dreaming of the woman for whose sake he hung it. He knew what it recalled to him even as I know what it means to me, and to both of us it was more than any portrait. For we are fearfully and wonderfully made so that no reality shall ever content us, and those sudden sunsets and bars of music and the meaning glance of pictured eyes are to teach us this....

The picture (etched by Waltner) was framed in a broad band of dull gold, and under it, on a very slender, delicately carved teak-wood stand whose inlaid top just held it, was a silver bowl full of orange and yellow and flaming nasturtiums. They were quite fresh and must have been put there that morning, for the dew was still on the pale leaves.

It was inexpressibly touching, this altar-like, vivid touch in the austere room, and I stood, drowned in a wave of pity and pa.s.sionate regret--for what I could not quite tell--before it, overwhelmed by the close, compelling pressure of these mysterious dead loves: all over now and gone? Ah, who knows? Who can know? Not Darwin nor Huxley, be sure!

I went down the stairs, crossed the study and living-room, and after a comprehensive glance over the little kitchen ell with its simple _batterie de cuisine_ went up the main staircase, and entered the room over the study. Here again was a surprise, for this room was completely furnished in delicate, light bird's-eye maple, fit for a marquise, all dainty lemon-tinted curves. The exquisite bed was framed for a canopy, but lacked it; the coral satin recesses of the dressing-table had faded almost colourless; the chintz of the slender chairs had lost its pattern. An oval cheval gla.s.s reflected the floor on whose long unpolished surface sprawled two magnificent white bear skins. But with these furnishings the elegance ended, for nowhere in the cottage were to be found such curious, mocking contrasts. The walls, which should have displayed wanton Watteau cherubs, were bare, clean grey; instead of a satin coverlet a patchwork quilt covered the fluted bed; no scented gla.s.s and ivory and silver-stoppered armoury of beauty crowded the dressing-table, only a plain brush and comb such as one might see in some servant's quarters; the beautiful grained wardrobe's doors, carelessly ajar, spilled no foam and froth of lace and ribbon and silk stocking: only a beggarly handful of clean, well-worn print gowns hung from the shining pegs. A battered tin bath and water-can stood beneath the window, and on a graceful cushioned _prie-dieu_ instead of a missal lay--of all things--a mouse trap.

I have never in my life stood in a room so contradictory, so utterly unrelated to its supposed intention. Occupied it certainly was: towels and soap and sponge, and nightgown neatly folded on the patchwork quilt, showed that. But of all teasing suggestion of femininity, all the whimsical, rosy privacy of a girl's bedchamber, all the dainty nonsense and pretty purity, half artless, half artful, with which romance has invested this retreat and poetry and song have serenaded it, Margarita's apartment was entirely void. Even its spotlessness was not remarkable in a house so noticeable everywhere for this quality, and as for personality, a nun's cell has more. I think that its utter scentlessness added to the peculiar impression; there was not a suggestion of this feminine allurement; not even the homely lavender or the reminiscent dried roses hinted at the most matter-of-fact housewife's concession to her s.e.x.

And yet it had its own charm, this strange room, a peculiar French quality, provided, perhaps, by the mingling of yellow furniture and soft grey wall s.p.a.ces; and a quaint atmosphere of something once alive and breathing and daintily fleshly, cooled and faded and chastened by inexorable time....

I slept that night in the room with the etching (the silver bowl was filled with marigolds) and all night I heard the roar of the surf and the hiss of the breaking waves through my busy dreams.

I woke into a clear storm-swept morning, just after the dawn, very suddenly, and with no apparent reason for the waking. That is to say, I thought I woke, but knew instantly that it must be a very pleasant and odd species of dream, for there in the quiet light, at the foot of my bed--quite on it, in fact--sat Margarita. She smiled placidly, cla.s.sic in her long white nightgown, and I smiled placidly back as one does in dreams, and prayed not to wake.

"You speak when you sleep do you not, Jerry?" she said calmly, "because you called my name, but your eyes were closed."

Then a cold sweat broke out on my forehead and I clenched my hands under the blankets, for I knew I was awake.

"Margarita!" I gasped, "what is it? Why are you here?"

"Because I wanted to talk to you, Jerry," she answered pleasantly.

"Roger is asleep. Do you like this little room? It is my father's."

Her hair hung in two braids; one rosy bare foot showed under her nightgown, as she sat, her hands clasped about her knees, like a boy.

The upper b.u.t.ton of the gown was loose and I saw my milky, gleaming pearl around her neck; it was no whiter than her even teeth.

"Get down," I said sternly, "get off the bed immediately and go back to your room. You ought not to have come here!"

"But I do not want to get down, Jerry--the floor is cold. Roger is asleep and he cannot talk to me. It is like being alone, when anyone is asleep. Do you not want to talk to me, Jerry?"