Part Three. In Which The Stream Joins With Others And Plunges Down A Cliff - Chapter 9. Margarita Meets The Enemy And He Is Hers

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_ PART THREE. IN WHICH THE STREAM JOINS WITH OTHERS AND PLUNGES DOWN A CLIFF
CHAPTER IX. MARGARITA MEETS THE ENEMY AND HE IS HERS

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.

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 attitude 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 sex, 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 god-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.

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 sex.

"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 passed 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, muffled 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 assured 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 circumstances."

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. _

Read next: Part Three. In Which The Stream Joins With Others And Plunges Down A Cliff: Chapter 10. Fate Spreads An Island Feast

Read previous: Part Two. In Which The Spring Flows In A Little Stream: Chapter 8. The Mists Of Eden

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