Mavis of Green Hill Part 42

Ah! if the Morro ghosts could walk again, What whispered horror could those bruised throats tell, Wrung by the cruel, long hands of Ancient Spain!

I gave the verses to Wright, after luncheon,--all of them. He could do with them as he liked, I said. Revise, correct, re-group. I was tired of singing songs, but I did not tell him that. In my heart I thought I would be glad to have my verses, bound and shut in a little book. They would remind me of Cuba, and of other things, when I was too old, too armoured by time, to feel the hurt of remembering. I would keep my Diary, too, against that distant day. Time, I had read, heals all. It was pleasant to think that sometime the ache in my breast would be stilled. But I thought perhaps I would miss it, it would grow to be part of me after a while--

Mercedes, looking in on me from the flowers screening the verandah where I sat, asked coaxingly,

"Coming walking with us, Mavis!"

"Us?" I inquired.

"Wright, and Billy, and me."

I shook my hand.

"I think not," I answered. "I have some letters to write."

"Billy said you wouldn't come," said she, pouting.

"Did he?"

For a moment I was inclined to reconsider, but the delight of proving my husband wrong would not have atoned for an hour of his society. And well I knew that Wright and Mercedes would, eventually, wander off or get surprisingly lost, or accomplish one of the fifty odd things which they managed so ingenuously, and which would rid them of even the most friendly chaperonage.

Mercedes waited.

"Bill is right," I said, "as always. I think I'll not go, Mercedes, if you and Wright don't mind."

"Not at all," she said generously, "only," and here her voice grew wistful, "only the time is getting so short, Mavis. In two days I'll be going to Havana for the Mendez dance--and to stay. And then, before we know it, you will be going home again."

"But you're following shortly," I reminded her.

"With my family!" she added.

"Won't your Mother consider lending you to me for a while this summer?"

I asked. "I shall be--" and almost I had said "so very lonely" before I thought. I stopped.

"Shall be what?" asked Mercedes, coming up the steps and dropping to my feet, on a crimson cushion.

"So very glad to see you," I answered, and truly.

"I wonder," said Mercedes.

"That's not very nice of you," I accused her.

"I didn't mean--what you said," she hastened to explain. "I only meant--I wonder if Wright would wait over and go up with us? It is so dull," she went on, "just travelling with the family, and Father likes him so much. What do you think, Mavis?"

Mavis thought that without Wright's pleasant, obtuse presence, that homeward voyage would be a nightmare. But she did not say so.

"I'm sure he'd love to," I answered, smiling into the pretty, eager face, "especially if you ask him--very nicely."

Mercedes laid her flushed cheek for a minute against my knees. Through the thin fabric of my gown I could feel the warmth of it.

"You like Wright, don't you?" she asked, a little anxiously. "And he's Billy's best friend--?"

I put my hand on her smooth, heavy hair. A scent, as of youth and flowers and sunshine came to me from the polished coils of it. Wright was a very fortunate young person.

"I'm very fond of him, Silly," said I, "and Bill adores him. There, is that recommendation enough?"

She jumped up, in a whirl of skirts, and kissed me impetuously: held me a moment in the clasp of her strong, young arms, and then, her high heels clicking on the tiles, ran into the house.

"More than enough," she called over her shoulder.

But when, charmingly hatted, dragging the point of a b.u.t.terfly sunshade after her, she went down the path between Bill and Wright, there was no sign of her recent agitation on that smooth, creamy cheek.

Left alone, I sighed a little, and looked ahead. They had fallen in love so wholeheartedly, so gaily, those two. I pictured them, if all went well, going through life like the Princess and Prince in the fairy-tale, living "happily forever after." She could love, I knew, that feather-brained, big-hearted little friend of mine. She was young, too, younger than her years, an astonishing thing in Southern women. She would be easily a.s.similated, would adapt herself gracefully. And it was patent that she thought Wright head and shoulders above the average cut of men. She had told me so, without knowing it, over and over again. And Wright, diffident, sensitive Wright, under his absurdities and his worldly airs? He would cherish her, I knew, and be good to her all his life: invest her with a never-failing glamour, make her his model and his sovereign lady: write madrigals about her: worship at her tiny feet. It was a very pretty little Romance....

They would never have pain in their love, I thought: never know undreamed of depths of agony and self-knowledge: never know secret shrines despoiled, the altars overthrown, desecrated....

I heard Peter's voice in the living room, and Sarah's asking where I was. I called to them and went in.

It was strange, I thought, as I discussed with Sarah the preliminaries of packing, how much I seemed to know about Love. I, who had never known, nor felt any save my Father's and that of my few, placid friends ... and perhaps that Love that is all dream-stuff. And in my heart was a voice which questioned and which I dared not answer. "How do you _know_?" it said to me. "_How do you know?_"

I closed my ears to it and drew Peter into my lap.

"Will you be glad to go home?" I asked him.

"Well," said Peter, considering, "there's--Silas."

"So there is," I a.s.sented.

"Couldn't he come with us?" asked Peter, coaxingly. "He could sleep in my room--"

I looked at Sarah, for appreciation of this. Lean, long Silas lodging in Peter's small nest. And I looked twice. Sarah, her head bent over an armful of my gowns, was--_blushing_! I couldn't believe my eyes. I might have fancied the Rock of Gibraltar moved to such soft symptoms of complexion, before Sarah.

"Why, Sarah!" I said, in amazement.

The difficult red crept up to her honest eyes. She raised them and met mine, and what I saw there was very beautiful.

I put Peter off my lap.

"Run out and play for a while, dear," I said, "before tea."

And then,

"Sarah?"

"He's a good man, Miss Mavis," she answered, clutching the gowns to her, ruinously--my careful Sarah! "And we're neither of us so young, nor so flighty that we wouldn't know our own minds. Mr. Reynolds has written him that he has a buyer for the place, and we thought that when things was settled down here, Silas could come up North to Green Hill--and--"

"But, Sarah," I cried out, in childish dismay, "I can't lose you--I can't--"

She put the gowns on a nearby chair and touched my hair with her faithful old hand.