What is it, that strange, lasting charm that wins every woman-thing of every age and colour? His mother told me that he had it in the cradle, that the nurses were jealous over him and the sweet-shop women put his pennies back into his pockets! Yes, Lona, and yes, Maiti, the silver-haired Major is coming surely, and you shall surely dance!
Never mind the wreaths for me, dear hypocrites--they were never woven for bald heads!
It was warm, almost as warm as this languid, creamy beach, the day I clambered, none too agile, over the thwarts of Caliban"s boat and made my way up the sandy path to the cottage.
"I"m afraid the fever took it out of you, Jerry," Roger said, looking hard at me, and I nodded briefly and he gripped my hands a little harder.
"I"m glad you"re here," he said.
Through the dear old room we stepped and out the further door, and here a surprise met me. The straggling gra.s.s stretch was now a rolling, green-hedged lawn, quartered by homelike brick paths. Two long ells had been added to the house, running at right angles straight out from it at either end, making a charming court of the door yard and doubling the size of the building; the fruit trees had been pruned and tended; an old grape arbour raised and trained into a quaint sort of _pergola_, a strange sight, then, in America; a beautiful old sun-dial drowsed in a tangle of nasturtiums. A delicate, dreamy humming led my eyes to a group of beehives (always dear to me because of the _Miel du Chamounix_ and our happy, sweet-toothed boyhood!) and near a border of poppies, marigold and hardy mignonette a great hound lay, vigilant beside a large, shallow basket, shaded by a gnarled wistaria clump. The basket was filled with something white, and as we stood in the door, a woman dressed in trailing white, with knots of rich blue here and there, came through a green gate in the side hedge and moved with a rich, swooping step toward the basket.
Behind her through the open gate I saw a further lawn white with drying linen, and a quick, pleasant glimpse of a brown, broad woman in an old-world cap, paring fruit under an apple tree, a yellow cat basking at her feet.
The white-clad figure leaned over the basket, her deep-brimmed garden hat completely shading her face, lifted from it a struggling, tiny doll-creature, with a reddish-gold aureole above its rosy face, dandled it a moment in her arms, then sank like a settling gull into the hollow of a low seat-shaped boulder near the wistaria, fumbled a moment at the bosom of her lacy gown, and while I held my breath, before I could turn my eyes, gave it her breast. It pressed its wandering, blind hands into that miraculous, ivory globe (that pattern of the living world) and through the dense, warm stillness of that garden spot, where the bees" hum was the very music of silence, there sounded, so gradually that I could not tell when the first notes stirred the soundlessness, a curious cooing and gurgling, a sort of fluty chuckle, a rippling, greedy symphony. It was not one voice, for below the cheeping treble of the suckling mite ran a lowing undertone, a murmurous, organ-like music, a sort of maternal fugue, that imitated and dictated at once that formless, elemental melody. Even as we stood riveted to the threshold, the sounds echoed in the air above us, seemed to descend mystically from the very heavens themselves, and as my heart swelled in me, a flock of pigeons swept down from some barnyard eyrie and dropped musically, in a cloud of grey and amethyst, beneath the pear tree. They crooned together there, the woman, the child and the birds, and truly it was not altogether human, that harmony, but like the notes of the pure and healthy animals (or the angels, may be?) that guard this living world from the fate of the frozen and exhausted moon.
"I--I can"t get used to it," said Roger abruptly, "it--it seems too much, somehow," and we turned back into the room.
"It"s not a bit too much for you, Roger!" I answered heartily (thank G.o.d, how heartily!) and we drew deep breaths and welcomed Miss Jencks, in irreproachable white duck--I had almost written white ducks--and talked about my momentous health.
Miss Jencks had abandoned her seaman"s comforters for a cooler form of handiwork, suspiciously tiny in shape, but she pursued it relentlessly while we discussed the changes in the cottage; the gardens, the corn and asparagus planned for another season; the ducks quartered near the fresh-water brook; the tiny dairy built for her over the spring; the brick-wall for Roger"s pet wall fruit; the piano dragged by oxen from the village; the sail-boat, manned now and then by our enthusiastic telegrapher: the wondrous size and health of the tiny Mary.
She was called, as one who knew Roger might have expected, for his mother, after the old tradition, too, that gave every eldest daughter of the Bradleys that lovely name. No bitter obstinacy, no unyielding pride of Madam Bradley"s could alter in his calm mind the course of his duty, and I never heard a harsh word from him concerning the matter. Margarita cared absolutely nothing about it and never, he told me, expressed the faintest curiosity as to his family or their relations with her.
Soon she was with us, dear and beautiful, with only a tiny lavender shadow under those cloudy eyes--misty just now and a little empty, with that placid emptiness of the nursing mother--to mark the change that my not-to-be-deceived scrutiny soon discovered. We left the sleepy Mary slowly patrolling the brick walks in a pompous perambulator propelled by a motherly English nurse under Miss Jencks"s watchful eye, and strolled, in our customary hand-in-hand, to the boat-house, a low, artfully concealed structure, all but hidden under a jagged cliff, and faced wherever necessary with rough cobbled sea-stones sunk in wet cement and hardened there. The right wing of the cottage stood out unavoidably at one point against the skyline, and Roger, who had developed a surprising gift of architecture and a sort of rough landscape gardening, was planning an extension of the artificial sea-wall to cover this.
He worked at this himself, drenched with sweat, tugging at the stones, while Caliban and a mason from the village set them and threw sand over the wet plaster (the method which we decided must have been adopted by the builder of the cottage), and I, too weak yet to help in this giant"s play, criticised the effect from a rowboat outside the lagoon, telegraphing messages by means of a handkerchief code. Often Margarita would come with me, embroidering placidly in the bow of the boat, under her wide hat. She detested sewing, and refused utterly to learn any form of it, to Miss Jencks"s sorrow, but had invented a charming fashion of embroidery for herself and worked fitfully at tiny white b.u.t.terflies in the corner of my cambric handkerchiefs--the one and only form this art of hers ever took. It became a sort of emblem and insignia of her, and Whistler, who began coming to them, I think, the year after that, or the next, made much of this fanciful bond between them. It was she who worked the black b.u.t.terfly upon the lapel of his evening coat which created such a sensation in Paris one season.
Once while shooting in the Rockies with Upgrove, six or eight years ago, I pulled out an old buckskin tobacco pouch, turned it hopefully inside out in the search for a stray thimbleful, and discovered in a corner of the lining a faded yellow silk b.u.t.terfly, all unknown to me till then! She must have worked it surrept.i.tiously, like a mischievous, affectionate child; and as I held it in my hands, and stared at the graceful absurd thing, the lonely camp faded before me; the sizzling bacon, the rough shelter, the whistling guide, slipped back into some inconsequential past, and I lay again on the sun-warmed rocks, watching a yellow-headed toddler prying damp pebbles from the beach, to pile them later in her tolerant lap. Oh, Margarita! Oh, the happy days!
CHAPTER XXI
HESTER PRYNNE"S SECRET
I remember so well the morning of the great discovery. It was one of those damp, rainy, grey days when happy people can afford to realise contentment indoors, and we were a very comfortable group indeed: Margarita sorting music, Roger drawing plans for a new chimney, Miss Jencks shaking a coral rattle for the delectation of the tiny Mary, who lay in her shallow basket under the lee of the great spinning-wheel, and I hugging the fire and watching them. I considered Roger"s reforms in the matter of chimneys too thorough-going for the slender frame of the house and told him so.
"You"ll batter the thing to pieces," I said, "see here!" and lifting my stick, which I had been poking at the baby after the irrelevant fashion of old bachelor friends, I hit out aimlessly at the side of the fireplace and struck one of the bricks a smart blow on one end. It turned slightly and slipped out of its place, and as I shouted triumphantly and pulled it away, I displaced its neighbour, too, and poked scornfully at a third. This, however, was firm as a rock, as well as all the others near it, and with a little excited suspicion of something to come I put my hand into the small, square chamber and grasped a dusty, oblong box, of tin, from the feel of it.
"Roger!" I gasped, "look here!"
"Well, well," he answered vaguely, "don"t pull the place down on us, Jerry, that"s all!"
"But Mr. Jerrolds appears to have discovered a secret hiding-place,"
Miss Jencks explained succinctly, and then they both stared at me while I drew out from a good arm"s reach a tin dispatch box, thick with dust, a foot long and half as wide. I wiped the dust from its surface, and on the cover we read (for Roger and Miss Jencks were at my elbow now, I a.s.sure you!) written neatly with some sharp instrument on the black j.a.panned surface, the name _Lockwood Lee Prynne_. With shaking fingers I lifted the lid, which opened readily, then recollecting myself, pa.s.sed the box to Roger. He glanced curiously at Margarita, but she was absorbed in her music and as lost to us as a contented child. He held the box on his knees, pushed back the lid completely and lifted the top paper of all from the pile. It was badly burned at the edges, as were the packets of letters, the columns clipped from yellowed newspapers, the legal-looking paper with its faded seal and the rough drawings on stained water-colour paper that lay beneath it. It required no highly developed imagination to infer that the contents of the box had been laid on the fire, to be s.n.a.t.c.hed away later.
Miss Jencks and I were frankly on tiptoe with excitement, but old Roger"s hand was steady as a rock as he unfolded the stiff yellow parchment and spread before us the marriage certificate of Lockwood Lee Prynne and Maria Teresa--alas, the shape of a fatally hot coal had burned through the rest of the name! We skipped eagerly to the next place of handwriting, the officiating clergyman and the parish--for the form was English--but disappointment waited for us there, too, for the same coal had gone through two thicknesses of the folded paper, and only the date, Jan. 26, 186-, broke the expanse of print. The initials of one witness "H.L." and the Christian name "Bertha," of another, had escaped the coal on the third fold, and that was all.
Roger drew a long breath.
"So it"s Prynne, after all," he said quietly, and unfolded the next paper.
This was a few lines of writing in a careful, not-too-well-formed hand, on a leaf torn from an old account-book, to judge from the rulings.
"Sept. 24, 186-. The child was born at four this morning," it said abruptly. "It may not live and she can"t possibly. The Italian woman baptised it out of a silver bowl. It is a dreadful thing, for now if it does live it will be Romish, I suppose, but he said to let her have her way, so it had to be. He is nearly crazy. He will kill himself, I think. He knows she must die. It is named after her mother and an outlandish lot of other names for different people. As soon as she is dead the Italian woman is going back to Italy. I shall never leave him."
The leaf was folded here and several lines badly burned. At the bottom of the leaf I could just make out one more line.
"I cannot be sorry she is dying if I burn in h.e.l.l for it. Hester Prynne."
Roger and I stared at each other, the same thought in our minds. I had imagined many things about the mysterious Hester, but never that she bore that name, as a matter of simple fact. The connection with Caliban had been too much for my overtrained imagination, and heaven knows what baseless theories I had woven around what was at best (or worst) a mere coincidence. For me the scarlet letter had flamed upon what I now know to have been a blameless breast, and in my excited fancy a stormy nature had suffered picturesque remorse where, as a matter of fact, only a deep and patient devotion had endured its unrecorded martyrdom of love unguessed and unreturned. So much for Literature!
Next came two folded half-columns from a newspaper, one containing only that dreadful list of the dead that our mothers read, white-cheeked and dry-eyed, in the war time. Opposite the names of Col. J. Breckenridge Lee and Lieut. J. Breckenridge Lee, Jr., were hasty, blotted crosses. The other half-column, cut from another and better printed sheet, recorded with a terrible, terse clearness the shocking deaths of the aged Col. J.B. Lee and his son Lieut. J.B. Lee, Jr., of the Confederate Army, at the hand of his son-in-law, Capt.
Lockwood Prynne, who was defending an encampment of the Northern forces from a skirmishing party led by the rebel officers. Captain Prynne recognised what he had done as the young lieutenant caught his father in his arms and turned to stagger back, and rushing forward had endeavoured to drag them to safety, receiving a shot himself that shattered his arm, wounding him severely. His recovery was doubtful.
Under our sympathetic eyes the old tragedy lived again, the crisp, cruel lines seemed printed in blood. It needed only the letter that lay beneath to make everything clear.
"Dear Bob," the letter began in the unmistakable neat hand we had read on the top of the box, "I cannot leave you without this word. I cannot explain--my brain is on fire, I think--but try to judge with lenience.
Blood-poisoning set in, and my father died in hospital last week. On his dying bed I swore to him that I would never raise my hand against his country. I can"t repeat all he said, but he"s right, Bob, the South is wrong! Secession is wrong. I brought the body home, but mother could not come to the funeral. She is not at all violent, but she will never be the same again--she didn"t know me, Bob. I can"t describe how pitiful she is. Uncle James was her twin brother, you know, and they were everything to each other. When we heard of Fort Sumter she was nearly wild, and I promised her with my hand on her Bible never to fight the South. I meant it then--my friends, my home and you all. But I would have got her to release me if I could. But she couldn"t release me now, and I would die before I broke that promise, the way she is now. I can"t stay here. I couldn"t look anybody in the face. I wish I could be shot. I may be, yet. I am going to Italy to see about those silk-worms for the plantation, that father was interested in. The war can"t last much longer and it will be something to do. Mother is well looked after and I can"t stay in this country--it"s not decent. Can you write to me, Bob? I don"t ask much--just write a line. What could I do? Write, for G.o.d"s sake.
"LOCKWOOD LEE PRYNNE."
Below this signature, in a different hand, was scrawled:
"I return this letter. I have nothing to say.
"R. S. L."
Alas, alas, the pity of it! The grey moss and the blue forget-me-nots grow together now over many a nameless grave, and Northern youth and Southern maid pull daisy petals beside the sunken cannon ball; but the ancient scar ploughed deep, and old records like this have heat enough in them yet to sear the nerves of us who trembled, maybe, in the womb, when those black lists of the wounded trembled in our mother"s hands.
What a hideous thing it is! Can any bugle"s screaming cover those anguished cries, or any scarlet stripes soak up the spreading blood?
Bullets are merciful, my brothers, beside the cruel holes they pierce in hearts they never touched.
Roger laid the papers and letter reverently to one side, and I, who had been reading over his shoulder, brushed impatiently at my eyes. (I was not entirely a well man yet, remember!) Below the newspaper lay a signed deed, formally conveying a parcel of twenty acres of land, carefully measured and described, to Lockwood Lee Prynne, his heirs and a.s.signs, and all the rest of the legal jargon. This was hardly burned at all.
Of the two slim packets of letters one was badly charred: parts of it fell away in Roger"s hands, as he carefully opened it. I cannot transcribe them literally, or even to any great length, for they are too sad, and no good end would be served by commemorating to what extent that fierce furnace of the Civil War burned away the natural ties of kindred and neighbour and home. Enough that the few remaining members spared out of what must have been a small family cut Margarita"s father definitely off from them, in terms no man could have tried with any self-respect to modify. His father, a Northerner, who had identified himself since his Southern marriage with his wife"s interests and kinsfolk, had lost touch with his own people, and a few death notices, slipped in among the letters, seemed to point to an almost complete loneliness, which Roger afterward verified. The other packet held two letters only, one in Italian (which language I learned, after a fashion, in order to read it) the other in French.
The Italian letter was not only scorched badly, but so blistered--one did not need to ask how--that parts were quite illegible. The writer, a man, evidently, a young man, probably, conveyed in satire so keen, a contempt so bitter, a hatred so remorseless, that it was difficult to believe it a letter from a brother to his sister. Beneath the polished, scornful sentences--vitriol to a tender young heart--surged a tempest of primitive rage that thrust one back into the Renaissance, with its daggers and its smiles. "_Let me tell you, then, once and for all_," ran one sentence, breaking out fiercely, "_that there is but one country on earth which can shelter you and that villain--his own!
There I scorn to put my foot or allow the foot of any member of your family, but let him or his victim leave it--and so long as I live my vengeance shall search you out and wipe out this insult to my house, my country and my church!_" The opening page was missing and the last one was badly burned, so we had absolutely no clue as to the family name.
Roger and I puzzled out enough of it to gather vaguely what the situation must have been, and when we read the second letter it was all clear. This second letter was burned and blistered, too, but its simple, nave repet.i.tions, its tender terror, its brave, affectionate persistence, left little, even in their fragmentary condition, for us to guess. I will give only a page here and there.
"_I have tried for four months not to write, but what you told me last has proved too strong for me and I must.... Oh, my dear one, my more than sister in this world, how could you have been permitted this deadly sin? It may be I shall be d.a.m.ned for even this one letter--my only one, for you must not write again. Sister Lisabetta suspects me already, and asked me last week why I should talk with the baker"s daughter so secretly? So if she brings another letter I shall tell her to destroy it. Write to me no more._"
Ah, now we knew! Strange indeed was the blood that ran in Margarita"s blue-veined wrist! No light and fleeting pa.s.sion had brought her into this world.
".... _When I remember that it was I who brought you the first letter, I weep for hours. G.o.d forgive me, and Our Lady, but I thought it was only some idle nonsense of Sister Dolores--she was always so light, Dolores! They have sent her back to Spain--I know you loved her best!
Sister Lisabetta found a bit of your gown caught on the cypress tree.
How dared you risk your life so? I swore I knew nothing, nor did I, about what she asked me. The Archbishop came...._"