Their spirits rose as they ate. It was festive and joyous, even this dirty country station. The September sun was shining brightly through the window, and a faint breeze came straying in, smelling of the salt water. She had given no thought to what they would do, to where they would go. She did not ask. It was good to trust all to him, just to step forth from the old maze into this dreamed existence, which somehow had been made true, where there was no need to take thought. She pushed away her ice untouched and began slowly to draw on her gloves.
"All the way here from Bedmouth I had a queer feeling that I was making a journey that I had made before, though I was never here in my life. And now it seems as if we had sat by this window some other day,--it is all so expected!" she mused. And she thought how that morning when she got up, she had gone to her little girl, the baby Lilla, and kissed her. With her arms about the child she had felt again that her act was right and that some day when the little one was a woman she would know and understand.
Her lips trembled, and then a slow smile suffused her face, bringing color, and leaning forward she murmured:--
"I am so happy!" Their eyes met, and for the moment they were lost in wonder, unconscious of the noisy room....
With a familiarity of old knowledge, Falkner descended the winding streets to the water front. In this lower part of the town the dingy old houses had an air of ancient grandeur, and tall elms drooped dust-laden branches over the street.
"Dear old place!" he exclaimed, memories reviving of his boyhood cruises.
"It was in ninety-one when I was here last. I never expected to put in here again."
The streets were empty, a noon stillness brooding in them. Margaret slipped her hand into his, the joy, the freedom, the sense of the open road sweeping over her afresh. The world was already fading behind them.... They came out upon the wharves, and threaded their way among the sagging gray buildings that smelt of salt fish, until the harbor water lapped at the piles beneath their feet.
"There"s the _Swallow_!" Falkner cried, pointing into the stream.
They were soon aboard, and Margaret curled herself in the c.o.c.kpit on a rug, while Falkner ran up the sails. Little waves were dancing across the harbor. Taking the tiller, he crouched beside her and whispered:--
"Now we are off--to the islands of the blest!"
It was all so in her dream, even to the white sail slowly filling before the breeze. They glided past hulking schooners lying idle with grimy sails all set, and from their decks above black-faced men looked down curiously at the white figure in the c.o.c.kpit of the little sloop. Behind the schooners the wharves and the red brick warehouses, the elms and the white houses on the hill, the tall spires--all drew backwards into the westering sun. A low gray lighthouse came into sight; the _Swallow_ dipped and rose; and the breeze freshened as they entered the lower bay. A great ship was slowly rounding the point, bound outward, too, laboring into the deep--for what? For some noisy port beneath the horizon. But for her the port of starlight and a man"s arm,--the world was wonderful, this day! Falkner raised his hand and pointed far away to the eastward where a shadow lay like a finger on the sea,
"Our harbor is over there!"
Away to the east, to the broad open ocean, it was fitting they should speed,--they who had shaken themselves loose from the land....
She held the tiller when he rummaged below for a chart, and while she was there alone, a pot-bellied pleasure steamer, swarming with people, rolled past, shaking the _Swallow_ with its wake. The people on the decks spied the sail-boat, raised gla.s.ses, looked down, and had their say. "A bit of the chattering world that is left," thought Margaret, "like all the rest."
And something joyful within cried: "Not to-day! To-day I defy you. To-day I have escaped--I am a rebel. You can do nothing with me. Oh, to-day I am happy, happy, happy,--can you say that?" Falkner came up from the cabin with his chart, and shading his eyes, swept the sea for the landmarks of their course. And the _Swallow_ sped on out of the noisy to-day through a path of gold and blue to the radiant to-morrow.
"See!" Falkner pointed back to the old seaport grown dim in the distance behind them. The sun was falling behind the steeples, and only the black smoke from engine and chimney marked the edge of the sh.o.r.e. Far away to the north opened a long reach of blue water and at the head of the bay green fields descending gently to the sea. The _Swallow_ was a lonely dot in the open waters, dipping, rising, the sun on its white sail,--fleeing always.
Falkner sat beside her, circling her shoulders with his arm, talking of the sea and the boat as if they had sailed for many days like this together and were familiar with all. His arm as it touched her said, "I love you!" And his eyes resting on her face said, "But we are happy, together, you and I,--so strangely happy!"
What was left there behind--the city and the vessels, the land itself--was all the mirage of life, had never been lived by them. And this--the swaying, sweeping boat, a dot upon the ocean and they together, heart by heart, going outward to the sea and night--was all that was real. Could it be possible that they two would ever land again on that far sh.o.r.e of circ.u.mstance, hemmed in by petty and sorrowful thoughts?
Yet across the dream came the thought of the Little Man, waiting behind there, and the woman knew that on the morrow after the morrow she should wake. For life is stronger than a single soul! ...
To the west and north there were islands, long stretches of sea opening between their green sh.o.r.es, far up into the coast land. The wind freshened and died, until at last in the twilight with scarcely a ripple the _Swallow_ floated into a sheltered cove on the outermost of all the islands. A forest of stiff little spruces covered the sea point, and behind this was a smooth green field, and above on the crest of the island a small white farm-house.
"A man named Viney used to live there," Falkner said, breaking a long silence. "Either he or some one else will take us in." Margaret helped him anchor, furl the sails, and then they went ash.o.r.e, pulling the tender far up on the shingle beech beside the lobster-pots. They crossed the field--it was nearly dark and the _Swallow_ was a speck on the dark water beneath--and knocked at the white farm-house.
"It is like what you knew must be so when you were a child," whispered Margaret.
"But suppose they turn us away?"
"Why, we"ll go back to the _Swallow_ or sleep under the firs! But they won"t. There is a charm in all our doings this day, dearest."
The Vineys welcomed them, and gave them supper. Then Mr. Viney, divining that with these two wanderers a love matter was concerned, remarked suggestively:--
"Maybe you"d like to go over to my son"s place to sleep. My son"s folks built a camp over there on the Pint. It"s a sightly spot, and they"ve gone back to the city. Here, Joe, you show "em the path!"
So in the starlight they threaded the spruce forest down by the sea, and found the "camp," a wooden box, with a broad veranda hanging over the eastern cliff.
"Yes!" exclaimed Margaret, taking now her woman"s place of command; "this is the very spot. We"ll sleep here on the veranda. You can bring out the bedding. If we had ordered it all, we could not have discovered the perfect thing, like this!"
The gray pathway of the ocean lay at their feet, and from the headlands up and down the coast, from distant islands, the lights began to call and answer each other. A cloud of smoke far eastward hung over a seagoing steamer. And throughout the little island, over the floor of the ocean, in the wood about them, there was perfect stillness, a cessation of all movement.
"Peace! Such large and splendid peace!" Margaret murmured, as they stood gazing at the beauty of the coming night. Peace without and answering peace within. Surely they had come to the heart of solitude, removed from the tumultuous earth.
"Come!" he whispered at her ear, and she slowly turned her face to him.
"Now, I know!" she said triumphantly. "This has been sent to answer me,--all the glory and the wonder and the peace of life, my dearest! I know it all. We have lived all our years with this vision in our hearts, and it has been given to us to have it at last."
And as they lay down beside each other she murmured:--
"Peace that is above joy,--see the stars!"
And there beneath the tranquil stars in the calm night came the ecstasy of union, transcending Fate and Sorrow....
Thus at the extreme verge of human experience these two realized that inner state of harmony, that equilibrium of spirit, towards which conscious beings strive blindly, and which sanctioning what man forbids gives reason to life. The spirit within them declared that it was best so to gain the heights, whether in the final sum of life it should lie as Sin or Glory, For this night, for these immediate hours, as man and woman they would rise to wider kingdoms of themselves than ever otherwise might be reached.
Thus far to them had come revelation.
In the morning Margaret would play housewife. Sending Falkner to the Vineys" for the things needed, she cooked the meal while he swam out to the _Swallow_ and made ready for the day"s sail. Whimsically she insisted on doing all without his help, and when he was ready, she served him before she would eat herself,--"Just as Mrs. Viney would her man."
Did she wish to show him that she was equal to the common surface of living,--a comrade to do her part? Or, rather, was the act symbolical,--woman serving joyfully where she yields real mastery? The woman, so often capricious and disdainful, was submissive, as if she would say: "This man is my mate. I am forever his. It is my best joy to be through him myself."
And after the meal she insisted on completing the task by washing the dishes, putting all to rights in the camp; then mended a rent in his coat which he had got from a stumble in the dark the night before. He laughed, but her eyes shone.
"Let me _do_ as long as I can! ... There--wouldn"t you and I shed things!
That"s the way to live,--to shed things." As they pa.s.sed the Vineys" house on their way to the boat, Margaret observed:--
"That would do very well for us, don"t you think? You could go lobstering, and I would have a garden. Can you milk a cow?" She was picturing the mould for their lives.
And all that day as they sailed among the islands, up thoroughfares, across the reaches of the sea, they played a little game of selecting the right cottage from the little white farm-houses dotted along the sh.o.r.es, and said, "We"d take this or that, and we"d do thus and so with it--and live this way!" Then they would laugh, and grow pensive, as if the land with its smoke wreaths had suddenly drifted past their eyes, reminding them of the future. "You are bound with invisible cords," a voice said. "You have escaped in fancy, but to-morrow you will find the world wagging its old way." But the woman knew that no matter what came, the morrow and all the morrows could never be again as her days once had been. For the subtle virtue of a great fulfilment is its power to alter the inner aspect of all things thereafter. Nothing could ever be the same to either of them. The stuff of their inner lives had been changed....
They sailed the day long in the full sun, which beat down with a memory of summer that already had departed. At noon they landed on a rocky islet, a mere clump of firs water bound, and after eating their luncheon they lay under the fragrant trees and talked long hours.
"If this hadn"t been," Falkner said with deep grat.i.tude, "we should not have known each other."
She smiled back triumphantly. That was the truth she had divined the night he was to have left her.
"No," she a.s.sented, "we should have been almost strangers and been dissatisfied always."
"And now nothing can come between us, not time nor circ.u.mstance, nor pain.
Nothing! It is sealed for all time--our union."
"Our life together, which has been and will be forever."