Margarita's Soul Part 30

[Ill.u.s.tration: THEY ARE STILL AS DEATH, TRANCED IN THOSE LIQUID BELL-TONES]

"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 superst.i.tion? _Is it religion?_

"I _need_ Thee--oh, I _need_ Thee!"

The woman sobs like a d.a.m.ned 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?

G.o.d 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 ba.s.s.

He is a very important and highly conventional personage, nowadays, that slender pink dandy, with five grown daughters and a Const.i.tuency; 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 n.o.ble 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 G.o.d?

"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 coa.r.s.e-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 G.o.d--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 b.u.t.tonhole, 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 pa.s.sage and dismissed the servants.

"Be ready to sail on Sat.u.r.day, _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 Sea.r.s.es 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 inc.u.mbent 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 x.x.x

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.