Mavis of Green Hill Part 25

My thoughts blurred into a half-dream. I was on a ship. Somewhere Mercedes Howell was standing. I heard her calling from far off, "Billy, Billy!"

I awoke suddenly. Silas had gone and my husband was standing near me,

"You called me, Mavis," he was saying.

I looked at him, at the great, strange room, confused and half asleep.

"I was dreaming," I said, and then, "a nightmare."

"Oh, I see!" he laughed a little. "You look like a child," he said slowly, "with the firelight on your yellow hair and that flush in your cheeks."

I rose, tumbling Wiggles unceremoniously to the floor.

"Good-night," I said.

"Good-night," he answered, his hands deep in his pockets, and then, as I turned, "Sleep well, my little Make-Believe-Wife!"

CHAPTER X

I had been asleep for several hours, I fancy, that first night in Cuba, when I awoke to see the moonlight, like a living presence in my room. Across the floor it lay in long, level bars of light. Not the iron barriers at my window could keep it out. Silver it was, and never still, but quivering as if a heart shook it. The scent of flowers came to me, and far off in what was probably the native quarter, I heard a throbbing instrument touched very softly, and the sound of singing. It was all so strange, I could scarcely believe myself awake. And presently, in nightgown and bare feet, I went across the cool tiles to the windows and looked out.

The earth was silver under my eyes and the tall palms delicately feathered with light. The singing died away to half a sob. The smell of growing things was heavy and sweet on the air. It was all sheer beauty.

A little song began to weave itself in my brain. I had made songs before: almost too shy to set down on paper they were. But here, in Cuba, where everything seemed softness and release, I wondered if perhaps I could not sing with a stronger voice, and shape my songs with pen and ink. What was it Richard Warren had said about poets? And then, suddenly I knew that it was the thought of him which had taken me out of sleep and sent me trembling to the window, with my breast bare to the wonderful night. I knew that, once and for all, all beauty must be inextricably woven with the thought of him who had signed himself my "lover."

It was then that I became aware that something was hurting me cruelly--something cold and hard and forbidding. I crept back to bed with the marks of the bars across my breast.

In the morning I woke to find Peter sitting crosslegged on my bed saying solemnly,

"They're blue! They're grey! No, they're open and they're brown!"

Wide awake now, I caught him to me, cuddled him close and then asked wildly,

"Oh-h, Peter!--what's that?"

Not far from my window a raucous voice was saying, "Bring me my coffee! Coffee! Norah! Hurry up!"

"Perhaps it's Uncle Bill!" said Peter, open-mouthed.

"Of course it isn't, Peter," I said quite crossly, and climbed out of bed.

From my window, in the full, dazzling sunlight, I could see where the kitchen made an L, and the screened kitchen porch from which that terrifying voice emanated.

"Hurry!" it was saying. "Gol dern! Coffee! Coffee!"

"Why, Peter," I cried, "it's a macaw! A beauty! I've never seen one before--only pictures! Hurry and get dressed and let's go out and say good-morning to him!"

Sarah, apparently at home, and certainly composed, but rather too communicative as to the habits of "heathen," appeared, to help me dress and to hustle Peter into his own room. But before I was ready, a knock came at the door, and on its heels, Norah, bearing fragrant coffee and hot, brown rolls.

"Good morning, and it's never _up_ ye are!" she said in astonishment, setting the tray down on a little table which she spread with a white cloth.

"Doesn't one get up in Cuba?" I asked, laughing, as, in a negligee, I sat down to my breakfast.

"Not yet," she answered, "it's coffee ye have in bed, and then at eleven-thirty a real, big breakfast-lunch. Tea's at four, and dinner's at eight--unless ye'd rather it was different, ma'am," she added hastily.

"Not at all," I a.s.sured her, "I think it's a delightful arrangement.

When in Cuba...." I began gaily.

"Smoke Cubebs!" finished another voice, and my husband's dark head appeared in the open doorway. "Good morning, Mavis. How did you sleep?"

"Beautifully," I told him, just a little bit embarra.s.sed as his tall, bathrobed figure wandered unconcernedly in.

"Another cup," he said to Norah, with a side-glance at me and a careless, "with your permission."

I nodded--I couldn't very well do anything else, with Sarah there, and Norah beaming, and Peter dashing in to shriek loudly for milk.

In the general tumult, the macaw had started again,

"Norah!" it squawked. "Coffee! Coffee!"

"For heaven's sake," I said, "what sophisticated sort of a bird is that?"

"That's Arthur," said Norah proudly, and disappeared. Later, I left Bill and Peter exchanging pleasantries over the breakfast table and went to the kitchen porch to watch Arthur being fed bread, lavishly sopped in coffee, from a spoon. He was an utterly gorgeous bird, yellow and blue, and "a great talker," as Norah informed me. Me, however, he regarded for some time with a gla.s.sy eye, and merely reiterated his desire for strong drink.

Returning, I found my room empty and closing the door, proceeded, with mixed emotions, to dress.

Last night ... the moonlight and the surge of regret and longing which had threatened to drown me, seemed very far away. And it was mentally on tip-toe that I joined a white flannelled Bill for my first stroll about my temporary domain.

We were alone, Peter having long since appropriated the services of Silas and gone forth with him to view the country.

The sun was very hot, and I tilted my parasol low over my face.

Through avenues of palms we walked to the big, red-roofed garage, and on to the little orange grove behind the out-buildings. Beyond, the cane fields stretched, green and tall and waving. Figures, stunted, wiry, moved in the fields ... far off I saw a patient donkey stand, his back loaded with long lengths of cane tips. It was all hot and still, clear-cut and unreal to look at.

Silas, Peter and one of the natives came toward us, Peter rapt at the tremendous flow of Cuban-Spanish which surged above his small blonde head. They stopped to speak to us, Bill growing suddenly foreign and gesticulating as he answered the bent brown man's greetings.

"That's Juan," he told me, as we moved off. "Great old character. He has a daughter whom he adores, a girl who must be sixteen now, I should judge. He used to beat her unmercifully...."

"Horrible creature!" I said, with a shudder, my mind flashing back to that beautiful, sinister fortress rising, towered, from the sea, a symbol and a reminder....

Bill pushed his panama back from his broad forehead and whistled.

"I don't know," he said thoughtfully.... "After all, he beat her to keep her good."

A peac.o.c.k, tail unfurled, minced colorfully toward us, down the white pathway.