Mavis of Green Hill Part 23

"Could you manage Bill?" he asked. "I have unpleasant a.s.sociations with my full name: it always reminds me of the woodshed, and my father's strong right hand."

Absurdly enough, I heard my own voice saying solemnly:

"Father called me William, Mother called me Will, Sister called me Willie, but the fellers called me Bill."

I stopped suddenly, wondering if I were going quite mad. But there was rea.s.suring laughter in the eyes bent upon me.

"Exactly," he said, gravely.

I attempted to laugh. It was a very poor effort, and ended in tears.

Dr. Denton sat down on the bed and took me into his arms, pressing my head against his shoulder. I didn't care. I cried there very comfortably, for a long time.

"It's all right," I heard his voice saying, coming, so it seemed, from a great distance. "It's all right. You'll feel lots better for it, Mavis."

After a while, I dried my eyes and lay back against the pillows again.

The intolerable burden about my heart had eased a little, in some miraculous manner.

"And now," announced my husband, "Mrs. Cardigan is going to bring you some supper. After that, she will make you comfortable for the night, and you are to drink what I send you. Uncle John sends his love and the demand that you pour his coffee for him in the morning, or, if you do not feel strong enough, you are to stay in bed, he says, and he will come up and pour yours! And I shall be next door to you, if you want anything in the night. But I am sure that you are going to sleep soundly."

He rose and looked down on me once more.

"Good night," he said. "Sleep well."

"Good night," I answered, "Dr.--B-B-Bill!"

His eyes twinkled, just for a moment.

"Good night," he responded, "Miss--M-M-Mavis!"

He opened the door for Mrs. Cardigan and her tray, stood aside, waved to me once, and was gone. All the way down the hall I heard him singing: "You are old, Father William" in a pleasant, gay baritone.

Suddenly I realized I was hungry.

I awoke the following morning feeling almost happy. There was a wonderful sense of adventure in looking out of my windows over the grey city streets, in hearing the hurrying footsteps go past me. So many people! So many sorrows and joys pa.s.sing beneath my window, so many eager feet going out to meet the day! I felt very small, almost insignificant, very unimportant.

"It's like an angel you're looking today, Mrs. Denton!" said Mrs.

Cardigan amiably, as she brought me my breakfast, with Uncle John following hard on her heels.

"And it's blushing she is!" added the honest creature in amazement.

Uncle John laid his hand on the shoulder of the old woman who had been nurse and housekeeper and almost-mother to him for thirty years.

"Run off with you, Mary," he said, laughing. "Mrs. Denton isn't used to blarney!"

"And her with the fine young husband!" said Mrs. Cardigan in obvious astonishment as she backed to the door.

Uncle John looked at me with laughing eyes: but I could not meet his glance.

The rest of the day is more or less of a blur to me now. Sarah came, with Peter and Wiggles. It was a matter for debate, which of the two last mentioned was the more excited. But it is certain that Peter talked more. His ideas of Cuba were wonderful and strange, and it was only by dint of dire threats of being left on the dock that we finally persuaded him to go to bed.

The following morning, February tenth, with the thermometer flirting with zero, we sailed for Cuba.

Sarah and I had connecting cabins: and I bribed a blonde, friendly steward to let me conceal Wiggles behind locked doors and thus keep him with us. On the other side of me, Dr. Denton was housed with Peter. All the cabins were full of flowers and fruit and books, and I am sure that, although I may have concealed it better, I was quite as excited as Peter and the pup.

It was, they tell me, a rough pa.s.sage. Somehow, I didn't seem to mind.

To lie in a deck-chair, m.u.f.fled to the eyes, and to watch the ocean seemed all that I wanted in life. I never tired of it. Grey and green and blue, as the fog or the sun caught it, there was never anything as wonderful as my first sight of the sea. I was even glad of the storms that delayed us longer than usual. For, even beyond Cape Hatteras, we had wind, and snow and cold. And then came a day when, little by little, people began to crawl greenly up from their cabins, shed their sweaters, and take an interest in life. Sarah among them. Poor dear, she had succ.u.mbed almost before we left the dock! Every dip of the boat, every rising and falling swell was met by her with the gloomy announcement that she wanted to die. Once, when I peered in at her, I found my husband sitting by her berth and answering quite gravely, her innumerable questions as to how they conducted burials at sea. Were they conducted "with decent Christian rites?" she was demanding weakly.

As I walked the deck with him, braced against the salt wind, my hair flying under my fur cap,

"You shouldn't tease Sarah!" I said indignantly.

"Shouldn't I?" he asked, forcibly restraining Peter from going over the rail--shouting, "I see a mermaid, Aunt Mavis!" "Perhaps not. But to the good sailor, seasickness is always a matter, inexplicable and humorous."

"By the way, I'm glad," he continued, "that you've stood the trip so well. It would be a pity," said he pensively, "to have injected into the romance of a honeymoon the very mundane element of mal-de-mer...."

I turned on my heel to leave him, but reckoned without the tremendous wave which swung lazily up to the boat, smote it, held it suspended a breathless moment, and then let it down again with unparalleled suddenness. My husband's arm intervened between me and the rail, checking my mad career in mid-air.

"Steady on," he said. "We've not reached tropical waters yet."

There was nothing to do but take his proffered arm and walk on, in haughty silence.

We sat at the Captain's table, and for the greater part of the trip we and the Captain sat there alone. No, not quite alone, for at the Captain's right sat the prettiest girl I have ever seen. We met her the first day out, and it was not long before she had attached herself to our party. Peter, always susceptible to beauty, caused me not a few pangs of jealousy before the trip was over. And Miss Mercedes Howell, for such was her mismated name, seemed to find much in common with my husband. She had thought at first, she confided to me navely, that the Doctor and I must be brother and sister despite the pa.s.senger list, and at all events, we must have been married a long, long time--was it not so, dear Mrs. Denton?

On my stately a.s.surance that I had been married less than a week, her enormous black eyes flew open to their widest. I changed the subject.

Miss Howell, so her vivacious chatter informed us, was returning to Havana after a period of college. I gathered that by the edict of the faculty she had gone through Va.s.sar in two years instead of the prescribed four.

"Oh, but it was dull," she told us at the table, with melting, melancholy eyes. "No young men! Nothing! Just stupid books and rules--rules--rules!! It was like prison! Imagine!"

And she looked brightly about the board for sympathy. If I had a momentary sense of sympathy, it was for the faculty, but evidently my husband and the Captain felt otherwise.

Mercedes, as she insisted I should call her, extending the courtesy to the entire family, and, as a matter of course, addressing me as Mavis and the remainder of the party as Peter and Bill, was the daughter of a wealthy American, settled in Cuba with a Spanish wife. She was twenty, and on returning to Cuba, was to make her debut. I was tremendously interested by her vivid account of Cuban Society, and went to bed each night with my head a whirl of horse races, and parties and country clubs and motor trips.

Her chaperone being confined to her cabin, Mercedes found that, after I had retired it was quite providential that she should keep "Billy"

pleasantly occupied on deck until such time as she should elect to go to bed. I must say that my husband advanced no serious objections. And when we parted on the docks at Havana, Mercedes escaped from her wan and weary attendant long enough to a.s.sure us all of her undying affection and to impart to us the pleasing information that Guayabal, whither we were bound, was quite near Havana, and that we could expect to see her often. I am afraid I was not very cordial. She was rather a dear, and superlatively, almost superfluously, pretty, but she made my head ache, and beside her youth and effervescence I felt curiously old.

Entering the harbor was something I shall never forget. The blue water and the sun on the white and mauve and pink houses, and the shining fortress of Morro castle rising up from the bay. Bill told me something of its history, as we leaned over the rail and watched the approach. And a sense of horror took hold of me, in the warmth and sunlight, as I thought of the torture chamber and the silenced screams of the prisoners....

And that is why, I suppose, my first impression of Cuba was one of beauty and cruelty, warmth and color and the dark, swift treachery of by-gone ages.

The landing, the inspection, the docks, pa.s.sed in a blur. Sarah, pale and miserable, sat on a trunk with Peter and watched her alien surroundings with unfriendly eyes. But it was not long before we were hustled away and into a long, luxurious open car, driven by a lean, hawk-eyed person who greeted us in an unmistakable Yankee tw.a.n.g, bless him, and seemed unfeignedly glad to see us.

"This is Silas, Mavis," my husband informed me, "chauffeur extraordinary, Jack-of-all-trades, and overseer-in-particular to my friend, Harry Reynolds. And this, Silas," he said, quite impressively, "is Mrs. Denton!"

I shook hands and presented Sarah, who brightened visibly at the home-touch, and after we were settled, with Peter and Wiggles and innumerable bags stowed in the front seat with Silas, I drew a deep breath and watched Havana slide by, gay with color, its narrow streets crowded, under a heavenly blue sky.

We ran along the low sea-wall, and pa.s.sing parks and wonderful stone edifices which seemed too fairy-like to be called houses, we were soon leaving the outskirts far behind us. Before us stretched a long, wide, white road, thick with fine, sharp dust.