The Gorgeous Isle Part 9

"I am not sacrificing myself. Do you fancy I am so great a fool as that? No--no--that is not the reason I shall marry him!"

"He certainly is a great poet and has improved vastly in appearance.

I never should have believed it to be possible." The inevitable was working in Miss Ogilvy. "But Mrs. Nunn? All her friends? There will be dreadful scenes. Oh Anne, dear, they will rush you off. They will never permit it."

"My aunt controls nothing but my property, and not the interest of that. If she refuses her consent I shall simply walk up to Fig Tree Church and marry Mr. Warner."

Miss Ogilvy recovered herself completely. "You will do nothing of the sort," she cried, warm with friendship and the prospect of figuring in the most sensational episode Nevis had known this many a year. "Come to me. Be my guest until the banns have been properly published, and marry from Ogilvy Grange. Everything must be _de rigueur_, or I should never forgive myself. And it would give me the greatest happiness, dear Anne. Mama and papa do everything I wish, and papa is one of Mr.

Warner's father's oldest friends. Mrs. Nunn will not consent. So promise that you will come to me."

"I am very grateful. I had not thought much about Aunt Emily's opposition, but no doubt she will turn me out of Bath House. You may see me at the Grange to-night."

"Send one of the grooms with a note as soon as you have had the inevitable scene. I only hope the result will be that I send the coach for you to-day. I do hope you'll be happy. Why shouldn't you? Byam Warner would not be the first man to settle down in matrimony. But can you stand living your life on Nevis."

"I should have wished to live here had I never met Byam Warner."

"Oh--well--you are not to be pitied. I shall paint you while you are at the Grange, all in white--only in a smarter gown--in this setting, and with those blue b.u.t.terflies circling about your head. You cannot imagine what a picture you made. What a pity I frightened them away.

Now, mind you write me at once."

She kissed her radiant friend with a sigh, doubting that even conquest of Lord Hunsdon would make herself look like a G.o.ddess, and rode on.

Anne went her way, even more slowly than before. She was in no haste to face Mrs. Nunn, and she would re-live the morning hours before other mere mortals scattered those precious images in her mind. Warner had taken her up to his hut concealed in a hollow of the mountain and surrounded on all sides by the jungle, then, while she sat on the one chair the establishment boasted, he had cooked their breakfast, a palatable mess of rice and plantains, and the best of coffee. They had consumed it with great merriment under a banana tree, then washed the dishes in a brook. Afterward he had shaken down several young cocoanuts and they had pledged themselves in the green wine. Then they had returned to the shade and talked--what had they not talked about?

Anne opened the sealed book of the past five years of which he had been the hero. He read it with amazement and delight, but contrite that he had received no message from that turbulent young brain by the North Sea. But he atoned by confessing that he had recognised her as his own the moment he laid eyes on her, that she was all and more than he had once modelled in the mists of his brain. He demanded every detail of that long union, so imaginative and so real, and told Anne that never before had a poet had the fortune to meet a woman who was a locked fountain of poetry, yet who revealed the sparkling flood by a method of her own with which no words could compete.

"And will you write my poems?" Anne had asked eagerly. But he had drawn down a broad leaf between his face and hers. "I told you that I was a poet no longer--merely a lover. To know absolute happiness in two forms in this world you must take them in turn. I shall write no more."

"Were you perfectly happy when you wrote?" asked Anne, a little jealously.

"Perfectly."

"I can almost understand it."

"I can no more express it than I have ever been able to tell in verse the half of what I blindly conceived."

"I should think that might have clouded your happiness."

"Yes--when a poem was revolving and seething in my distracted head.

Never tempt me to write, for while the thing is gestating I am a brute, moody, irritable, unhappy. The whole poem seems to work itself out remorselessly before I can put pen to paper, and at the same time is enveloped in a mist. I catch glimpses like will-o'-the-wisps in a fog bank, sudden visions of perfect form that seem to turn to grinning masks. It is maddening! But when the great moment arrives and I am at my desk I am the happiest man on earth."

By tacit consent the subject of the stimulants under which he had always written was ignored, as well as the terrible chapter of his life which it was her blessed fortune to close. They had discussed the future, talked of practical things. He had told her that his house could be put in order while they travelled among the islands, and that he made quite enough to support her properly if they lived on Nevis.

She had three hundred a year and would have more did she consent to let the manor for a longer term, and he had a.s.sured her that hers was a fortune on Nevis outside of Bath House. They finally decided to marry at once that he might show her the other islands before the hurricane season began.

In spite of loitering Anne arrived at the hotel quite two hours before luncheon, and after divesting herself of a frock that would send Mrs.

Nunn into hysterics if her news did not, she went to her aunt's room.

Mrs. Nunn, fresh from her sulphur bath, was reclining on a sofa in her large cool room, where the jalousies were half closed, and dawdling over _G.o.dey's Lady's Book_, a fashion magazine printed in the United States, which found great favour in her eyes.

"My dear Anne," she said languidly, "I suppose you breakfasted with Miss Ogilvy. La! La! You are more burnt than ever. Your face is quite red. And I would have you well bleached before the London season. Pray sit down. It affects my nerves to see you wander about like that."

Anne took a chair facing her aunt. "I did not breakfast with Miss Ogilvy. I have been talking to Mr. Warner all the morning."

"Heavens! what a waste of time, when you might have been talking to Hunsdon in the morning-room. It was quite empty. Maria has Mr. Warner in charge. I hope you have not been walking about with him. You know I told you----"

"No one saw us. We talked up in one of the jungles."

"One of the jungles!" Mrs. Nunn sat up. "I never heard anything sound so horrid. Do you tell me that you have the habit of sitting in jungles--dear me--with young gentlemen! I forbid you to go out again unattended."

"This was the first time."

"It a.s.suredly will be the last."

"I think not. Mr. Warner has a hut in the jungle and I am going to marry him."

"What--you----" And then as she met Anne's eyes she gave a piercing scream, and her maid rushed in. "The sal volatile!" she gasped. "The salts."

She fell back limp, and Anne, who was unaccustomed to the easy fainting of fine ladies, was terrified and administered the restoratives. But Mrs. Nunn may have been less time reviving than Anne fancied, for when she finally opened her eyes they were very hard and her features singularly composed.

"You may go, Claire," she said to the maid. "Return in an hour and pack my boxes. We leave by the packet to-morrow. Now," she added, turning to Anne, "I am prepared to talk to you. Only kindly remember, if you have anything further of a startling nature to communicate, that I am accustomed to less direct and brutal methods."

"I am sorry," said Anne humbly. Mrs. Nunn waved apology aside.

"Of course you know that I shall never give my consent. Are you determined to marry without it?"

"Yes."

[Ill.u.s.tration: "'I never wish to see you again'"]

"Your father all over. It was his expression of inhuman obstinacy in your eyes that gave me even more of a shock than your words. Many a time I endeavoured to gain his consent to your visiting London where you would have seen the world and been sensibly married by this time. Never under my earlier tutelage would you have made a fool of yourself. And you have used Hunsdon abominably ill."

"I have given him no encouragement whatever----"

"Do not argue. My nerves will not stand it. Now this much I have the right to demand: You are of age, I cannot prevent your marrying this outcast, but you owe it to me as well as to yourself to return to London, be presented to Her Majesty, and do a London season----"

"I never expect to leave the West Indies again, unless to be sure, Mr.

Warner should feel obliged to go to London himself. If you sail to-morrow I shall go to Medora Ogilvy----"

"You have planned it all out!" shrieked Mrs. Nunn. Anne hastily poured out another dose of sal volatile.

"I met Medora on my way home. She fancied how you would take it and offered me shelter."

"I am gratified that my sense of propriety is so well known. You can go to her. I proclaim to the world that I wash my hands of the disgraceful affair by leaving to-morrow. Great G.o.d! What a victory for Maria Hunsdon. I believe she plotted it all along."

Then she plunged into worldly argument, abuse of Warner, awful pictures of the future. Finally Anne rose.

"I don't wish to do your nerves a real injury, so I shall leave you until you are calmer," she said.

"I never wish to see you again."