I started at him. Who in the devil was he? Instinctively I began an apology.
"I--I didn"t recall at the moment----"
"Between you and me," he cut me short, "I"m just as well pleased that you didn"t, Jerrolds! The sooner we get through with all this white choker and black coat business, the sooner we"ll amount to something, in my way of thinking. Well, seriously--will I do? Do you know anybody better? Because I"ll go, if you don"t."
I grasped his offered hand.
"Heaven bless you," I thought, "whoever you are!" and, "All right," I said shortly, "it"s very kind of you. We"ll have to hurry, I"m afraid."
We had just time to jump for the last platform. I remember apostrophising the Gladstone rather strongly as I fell on its metal clasp, and glancing apologetically at my companion, but he was tactfully deaf, and we found a seat together, by good luck, and settled down for our hot and tiresome night.
I couldn"t very well ask his name by that time, it would have been too absurd. I trusted to Roger to get me out of that difficulty, for he knew Roger, evidently, and me too, though not very well, I judged. He certainly wasn"t in my college cla.s.s, for it would have come up, I was sure, in our talk. Not that we talked much. It was a stuffy, disagreeable ride, and I was alternately vexed with Roger and worried about him. In a hopelessly foolish manner I connected the razors and the parson, too closely for any reasonable inference in regard to the latter. I knew the connection was ridiculous but it was persistent, and as I had lost all hope of placing the man sitting beside me, my mind was altogether in a horrid muddle. Once he asked me abruptly if Roger were an Episcopalian.
"No," I answered, "he--his people are Unitarians."
"I"m a Congregationalist, as you know, of course," he went on, "but if it makes no more difference to Roger than it will to me, there"ll be no trouble."
"Anyone would suppose he was going to christen Roger," I thought disgustedly and returned to my troublesome thoughts, replying absently that it would be all right, of course.
We changed cars at S---- and got into a queer little local train filled with young village roughs, whose noisy horseplay annoyed me exceedingly. My mysterious parson, however, was deeply interested in them and related incident after incident in proof of what could be accomplished with this offensive part of the rural population by social organisation under competent direction. He even got out an old letter and proved to me on the back of it, with a stub of a pencil, what a pitiful outlay in money was sufficient to start a practical boys" club, including the rent of a second-hand piano, to be purchased ultimately on the instalment plan. In the midst of this lecture (it was no less) I fell asleep, uncomfortably and rudely, and it was he who shook me awake at last and carried the bag out of the close car.
CHAPTER VIII
THE MISTS OF EDEN
The station lights flared pale in the coming dawn. Behind the barred window of the ticket-office, which contained, as its bright lamp showed, a tumbled cot bed and a dilapidated arm-chair, a tousled young man sat playing Patience in his nightshirt on the telegraph table. We battered on his window, and to our amazement he nodded casually and entirely without surprise at us, reached into a corner of his littered room, grasped a pair of oars, and, pushing up the window, poked them out at us between the bars.
"Mr. Jerrolds, I guess," he remarked. "Mr. Bradley"s left the boat for you at the foot of the dock, little ways across the track there. It"s kind of a blue boat. You just sight the two reefs and the bell buoy and when you"re just opposite of the buoy, turn about and make for the sh.o.r.e. There"s a white pole where you land."
"Have you been sitting up--" I began, but he cut me short impatiently.
"No, I have insomnia--it"s something dreadful the way I have it," he explained. "I"m always sitting up."
I accepted the oars mechanically.
"And where is Mr. Bradley stopping?" I asked.
"Why, over to Miss Prynne"s. He met the afternoon train yest"day and the deaf an" dumb feller rowed over to-day, and when you didn"t turn up he left the oars. I tell you, he knows more"n you might think, to look at him."
"Was--is Mr. Bradley well?" I asked.
"He looked to be well enough yest"day," said the insomniac indifferently, "big feller, ain"t he?"
I shouldered the oars, and followed by my sensible parson with the bag, made for the untidy wharf through the silent village. The blue boat was not hard to discover in the pale, ghostly light; the bay was hardly rippled; it was to be another hot, sticky day. My companion begged the privilege of the oars.
"My old game, you know," he added apologetically, and swept us out on the black, mysterious water with beautiful, clean strokes. He had soon marked down the buoy and was regretting that it would be only a matter of twenty minutes before we must land.
"Do you know," he added with a boyish sort of smile, "all this is a real adventure to me, Jerrolds, and I can"t help enjoying it. It can"t be serious, you see--Roger"s well. Perhaps"--and he shot a curious glance at me--"perhaps he"s going to be married!"
I laughed a little stiffly. It was difficult to explain to this sensible parson that Bradleys did not marry in this fashion; it wasn"t quite complimentary to him. Moreover I didn"t know whether he would be sensible enough to understand what two or three of Roger"s friends knew very well--that he was unlikely to marry so long as Sue Paynter remained above ground. It had been simple enough, that affair: Sue and Roger had been engaged ten years before the time of which I am writing, they were within a few months of the wedding, and Frederick Paynter, her cousin, had come back from Germany, playing Chopin like a demi-G.o.d, and had whirled her off her feet in a fortnight. She broke off the engagement in a rather cruel way, it seemed to me--by telephone--and Roger hung up the receiver (I myself heard him answer slowly, "Very well, dear. I see. Good-bye.") and went to Algiers with me. When we came back they were married and he was having a great success, playing before Royalty and all that sort of thing.
I think it took Sue about a month to find out what any of her men friends could have told her in six seconds, and after that she kept him in Europe as much as she could. She kept up pretty well for three or four years, but at last she came back with her two delicate babies and satisfied everybody"s sense of propriety by nursing Frederick while he stayed in America and dining out with him twice a season before he returned to Europe. It was all very regrettable and Sarah would discuss it in her tactful way from time to time till, if I had been Roger, I should have choked her. Sue would not listen to a separation, even, and insisted that Frederick sent her plenty of money, which Roger invested for her, and old Madam Bradley had her often with them in Boston. Roger never discussed it; he didn"t need to. But I never knew him to be out of Boston or New York if the Paynters were there together, and I remarked that he invariably left word where he could be reached, day or night, when Frederick was playing a series of concerts.
All this ran through my mind as we cut through the water and the sky grew paler by degrees and the stars faded out. We were opposite the buoy now, dark amongst the dark waves, and we turned at right angles and made for the sh.o.r.e. The tide was high and we glided over the inner reef easily. Soon we could see the eaves of the cottage dimly, a c.o.c.k crowed sleepily, the white pole pointed out some rough steps cut in the rocks ahead.
That sudden sense of excitement grew in me again, a nervous longing to get hold of Roger, to get away from my oarsman, for I was worried out of all reason. He, to my satisfaction, at this moment proposed a separation.
"I haven"t had half enough of this," he said suddenly, "why don"t you land, Jerrolds, if you feel you ought to--though I don"t see how we can descend on Miss Prynne or anybody else at this unearthly hour--and I"ll pull about for a while? I don"t doubt you"d rather see Roger alone, anyhow, at first. When you want me, just give me a hail--I won"t be far. And tell him to have plenty of breakfast, will you?"
I agreed warmly to this and clambered up the slippery steps, still possessed by the same m.u.f.fled excitement. The beach was hard as a floor under me and I almost ran along it toward the sanded cottage.
The merest glance at it showed that no one watched there; the windows were dark. I skirted the rocky wall that protected its back and sides; no one was stirring in stable or outhouse. On the sh.o.r.e side a straggling gra.s.s stretch ran down to a sheltered, inland bay; a fair sized vegetable garden, glistening with dew, and a few fruit trees gave a domestic air to the place, utterly unguessed from the forbidding sea front. I wandered toward this little bay and sat in a delightful natural chair of rock to wait for the sunrise.
I must have lost myself for a few minutes, for when I opened my eyes everything before them was changed, as completely as the scene shifters change a stage picture. The little bay was crowded with rolling seas of white, thick mist, like an Alpine lake. Billow on billow it rolled in, faintly luminous here and there, breaking as smoke breaks, on the beach. As I stared, lost in the beauty of it, two great gold arrows from the sun behind me cut into the thickest of it and tore it like a curtain, and in the rent appeared two human figures, walking as it might be on clouds to earth. More than mortal tall they loomed in the mist, and no marbles I have ever seen--not even that Wonder of Melos--is so immortally lovely as they were. The woman wore a veil of crimson vine-leaves that wound about her hips and dropped on one side nearly to her knee, around the man"s neck a great lock of her long hair lay loose and on his head a rough wreath of the red leaves shone in the arrow of sunlight. Beside them a monstrous hound appeared suddenly: a trailing vine dripped like blood from his great jowl.
I could not have told what she looked like to save my life: she was what the world means when it says woman--beautiful, certainly, but no one person. One arm was on his shoulder, the other hand lay on the animal"s head; the mist covered their feet and they appeared as aerial, as unreal as figures in some a.s.sumption. But they were not through with earth, not they: they were humanity triumphant--the very crown and flower of creation. They came up from the sea with the grave, contented smile of the old G.o.ds on their faces. Nature, working patiently at her Saurians, had had this in her mind from the beginning, and I believed in that moment that G.o.d had indeed allowed her to perfect her last work in His image! For perhaps three heart-beats I saw them there, framed in the luminous mist, and then it rolled over them, swiftly, silently, and wiped them out, and I stumbled from the rock-seat and ran back across the beach, a great lump stiffening my throat and a hard, frightened jealousy nearly stifling me, to my shame and surprise.
For I had known Roger twenty-five years and yet I had never had the least idea of the man!
PART THREE
IN WHICH THE STREAM JOINS WITH OTHERS AND PLUNGES DOWN A CLIFF
He"s left his flocks, his fields, his kine, He"s left his folk and friends and all, He"s off to watch the cold sea shine, To brew for aye the salt sea brine, The mermaid hath Sir Hugh in thrall.
_Sir Hugh and the Mermaiden._
CHAPTER IX
MARGARITA MEETS THE ENEMY AND HE IS HERS
I flung myself down on the beach behind a big rock, so that I was completely cut off from the cottage, and stared at the sun rising, though it might as well have been the moon for all my appreciation of it. So this was it! No wonder he wanted a parson--it was high time, I thought virtuously. It cut me that he had never hinted this to me; that we, who had had no secrets from each other for so many years (as I thought) had really been divided by this, for what I inferred had been a long time. And yet a moment"s consideration brought home to me the almost certainty that it couldn"t have been so very long, after all. There had been, especially in the last year, weeks and even months when Roger and I had not been separated for eight hours at a stretch. He chose to work hard in the typical American fashion; I was obliged to. And I knew his att.i.tude toward the sort of _liaison_ we both despised. He had laboured enough and disgustedly enough at dragging a weak-kneed cousin of his (the black sheep that few large families dispense with) out of a connection of that kind. And anyhow, I knew that people who wore when they were together the look I had seen on those two visions of the mist could never be contented apart!
Well, well, it was a bad quarter of an hour for me, and I had to get over it as best I could, alone. Women are usually credited with a practical monopoly of jealousy of their own s.e.x, but wrongly, I am sure. We learn earlier to conceal it and, better still, realise the necessity for keeping quiet about it and getting over it. The clock continues to strike, and one"s friends continue to marry, and one continues to present silver mugs to one"s G.o.d-children--_voila tout!_
I suppose the worry and strain of it all, the hot, stuffy, sleepless night and the sudden shock at the last had tired me, for as I lay on the beach, sheltered by the rock, with just enough of the warm sun at my back for comfort, I went off into a doze and lost myself completely. I may have slept two hours, and woke with that perfectly definite sensation of some one"s being by and staring at me that disturbs one"s deepest dreams.