Sitting Turk fashion on the sand near me was a beautiful young woman with great deep set grey eyes and two braids of long dark hair, one falling over either shoulder. Her skin was dark, nearly olive, and her mouth was of that deep, dark red that has always seemed to me so much more alluring than all the coral lips of poetry and convention. She was oddly attired in a short, faded blue serge skirt and a dull red jacket of the sort called at that sartorial epoch a "jersey." Tied around the neck of this was a black silk handkerchief. Black stockings, generously displayed, and worn white tennis shoes completed her costume--a trying one, certainly, and, one would have supposed, sufficiently prejudicial in my eyes, who have always had a confessed preference for the charm of well-selected clothes, and a certain critical judgment in that direction, I am told.
But Margarita would have moulded a suit of chain-armour, I believe, to her personality. It was quite obvious that she wore no corset, for the tight jersey clung to her round, firm bust and long, supple waist like a glove. Her shoulders were, perhaps, a little shade squared, which only added to the boyishness of the enchanting pose of her head, and the loose handkerchief gave the last touch to the daintily hardy fisher girl she seemed to have chosen for her masquerade. For there was nothing of the peasant about her; race showed in every feature, and the dim, toned colours of her faded clothes appeared the last touch of realistic art.
"You must wake, now," she said gravely, "and tell me if you are Jerry--are you?"
"Yes," I said, "I am. And you are----?"
"I am Margarita," she said. "Did you bring some one who knows how to marry people? Roger said you would."
"I brought him--he"s out there," I answered, pointing to the ocean generally.
She followed my arm with interest in her eyes. "Oh! Is that where he will do it?" she asked. "Roger did not tell me that. Is he swimming?"
"I think not," I answered seriously, "I think he is in a boat."
"I am glad of that," she remarked, "because I cannot swim, myself. And I must be with Roger, you know, when we are being married."
"It is usual," I admitted. I was really only half aware of the extraordinary character of our conversation. Every one became primitive in talking with Margarita and fell, more or less, into her style of discourse.
"Have you been married?" she asked placidly, her grave, lovely eyes full on mine. She sat quite motionless, her hands loose in her lap, neither twiddling them aimlessly nor pretending to employ them in the hundred nervous ways common to her s.e.x.
"No."
"Neither have I. Neither has Roger. But many people have. It cannot be hard."
"Oh, no! I believe it is the simplest thing in the world," I said, eyeing her narrowly. Was she teasing me? I wondered.
"So Roger says," she agreed with obvious relief. "It is only talking.
I cannot see why Roger could not learn to do it himself. Can you not do it, either?"
I shook my head. I was trying to believe that she was not quite sane, but it was impossible. Her mind, I could have sworn, was as vigorous as my own, though there was a difference, evidently. The precise, beautiful articulation of her English gave me a new direction. She must be a foreigner--Italian, for choice, in spite of her English eyes.
"Marrying people is a business like any other, Miss--I did not hear your last name?" I ventured.
"I have none," she said. "I mean," correcting herself, "Roger says that I must have one, of course, but I do not happen to have heard it," she added calmly.
"Ah, well," I said coldly, "it is a mere detail."
I was seriously vexed with Roger. This young woman pa.s.sed belief. I decided that she was an actress of the first water and resented being imposed upon.
"It is the same with my age--how old I am," she continued. "Roger thinks I am twenty years of age. Do you? He is going to ask you."
"Really, I can"t say," I returned shortly, "I am a poor judge of women"s ages--or characters," I added pointedly.
She did not blush nor move. Only her eyes widened slightly and darkened.
"Roger will ask you," she repeated and I felt, unreasonably, as it seemed to me then, that my tone had hurt her, as one"s tone, utterly incomprehensible as the words it utters may be, will hurt a child.
She sat in silence for a moment, and I, curiously eager for her next remark and conscious suddenly of that strange, m.u.f.fled excitement that had oppressed me a few hours before, watched her closely, gathering handfuls of sand and spilling them over my knee.
"Did you ever go to Broadway?" she began again.
"I have, yes."
"I did, too," she a.s.sured me eagerly. "I think it is beautiful. I should like to live there, should not you? Perhaps," hopefully, "you do live there?"
"No," I said, still on my guard and uncomfortable, "I don"t. Are you planning to live there after you are married?" She shook her head regretfully.
"I am afraid not," she said, and her voice dropped a full third and coloured with a most absurd and exquisite sombre quality, as Duse"s used to in _La Dame aux Camellias_. "Roger would not want to. He will not want me to walk there very much, either. And that is very strange, because there is where I first saw him. But there are places I shall like quite as well, he says, and he will take me there. Will you come, too?"
"I am afraid," I replied drily, "that I might be a little _de trop_, perhaps. Roger might not care for my society under those circ.u.mstances."
Again she answered my tone rather than my words.
"Roger loves you," she said simply.
"He used to," I returned--inexcusably. Oh, yes! utterly inexcusably.
Again her eyes widened and grew dark, and this time the corners of her mouth curved down pitifully, and I felt a strange heaviness at my heart.
"You do not love me, do you, Jerry?" she said, and now her voice dropped a good fifth and thrilled like the plucked string of a violoncello, and my nerves vibrated to it and tingled in my wrists.
"Roger said you would, and I thought you would--and you do not," she said sadly.
I clenched a handful of the moist sand and leaned toward her, my heart pounding furiously.
"Are you sorry?" I muttered unsteadily, fixing my eyes on hers.
She met them fully. Like great grey pools they were, her eyes, honest as mountain springs, clear as rain. They caught me and held me and drenched me in their innocent, warm sweetness; there was not one thought in her head, not one corner in her heart that I was not free to know. Those eyes had never held a secret since they opened into a world that had never, to her knowledge, deceived her. They swam in light, and oh, the depths on depths of love that one could sound there! My last hateful anchor broke clean off and my heart slipped from the stupid rocks of suspicion and self-protection and jealousy, and floated away on the bosom of that sweet, disturbing flood. I forgot Roger, I forgot what had been myself; in that instant, in the utter surrender of her innocent eyes, she became for me all at once the vision I had seen in the mist again, the thing we mean when we say woman--but now she was one single special woman, the vision and the flesh-and-blood reality together.
"Are you sorry?" I said again, and my voice was not my own.
She smiled at me till I caught my breath. "Not now, Jerry," she said softly, "because you do love me, now."
The sand fell, a tightly moulded shape, out of my hand, and I wrenched my eyes away from her. They smarted and stung, but the pain relieved me and cleared my brain, and I knew suddenly what I have known ever since and shall know till I die. There on the beach, before I had so much as touched her hand, I had fallen senselessly and hopelessly and everlastingly in love with Margarita.
CHAPTER X
FATE SPREADS AN ISLAND FEAST
I don"t know how long we sat silent on the beach. Such silence was never embarra.s.sing to her, because it seemed perfectly normal and usual, and I was too busy with my thoughts to feel any sense of restraint. And yet they were hardly thoughts: my head whirled in a confusion of regret and desire, and one moment my blood ran warm with the joy of my discovery, and the next a horrid chill crept over me as I saw my empty years--for if she might not fill them, no one else should. At last I drew a long breath.
"Are you hungry?" Margarita asked pleasantly. "When I am hungry I do that very often. If you will come now, we will have our breakfast."
She sprang to her feet with the lithe ease of a boy and held out her hand to me. I took it and we walked thus across the beach to the cottage, and during that walk, with her firm, warm hand fast in mine and her clean, elastic step beside me, I swore to myself that neither she nor Roger should ever regret what she had done to me, nor know it, if I could keep the knowledge from them. The last part of this vow was impossible of fulfillment, finally, but the first, thank G.o.d! has never been broken, or even for a moment strained, and I like to hope that this may count a little to my credit, in the ultimate auditing, for she was terribly alluring, this Margarita, and I am no more a stock or a stone than other men, I fancy.