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Margarita's Soul: The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty, a novel by Josephine Daskam Bacon |
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Part Nine. In Which The River Finds The Sea - Chapter 32. The Sunset End |
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_ PART NINE. IN WHICH THE RIVER FINDS THE SEA CHAPTER XXXII. THE SUNSET END To-day I went to Mary's wedding, and it has made me very thoughtful. She was very lovely--a great, blooming blonde, the image of Roger. They were a fine pair, as he held her on his arm: he looking younger than his sixty years, she older than her twenty, for all the children are wonderfully mature and well-developed. She was nearly as tall as young Paynter, whose slenderness, however, is like steel. I well remember when Dr. McGee took him to North Carolina and made him over--a weak, irritable little precocity of twelve or so. He never ate or slept in a house for three years, and I think that the birds and trees of that period got into his opera and made it what it is, the musical event of a decade. He works best in Paris, and they will live there, after a honeymoon on the Island. I don't think Mary was ever the favourite child, though each of the six thinks it is, Margarita is so wonderful with them! She cannot hide from me, who watch every light in her eye, that young Roger, the second child and oldest boy, means a shade more to her than the others, just as Roger, when he sits alone with Sue, the second daughter, talks to her more confidentially than to any of the others, and watches her yellow head most steadily when they are all swimming, off the Island wharf. They are both fine, big girls, just as Roger and my namesake are fine, big, steady fellows and little Lockwood is a fine, big, handsome child. But my foolish old heart lost itself long ago to a pair of slate-blue eyes set in an olive face under dark, strong waves of hair, and when into that large, blonde brood there came a perfect baby Margarita, a slender, dark thing who flashed the summer twilight sky at one from under her long dark lashes, I claimed her for mine and mine she is--my Peggy. She is alone among the others, my precious black swan: her quaint, dreamy thoughts are not their practical, sunny clear-headedness, her self-peopled, solitary wanderings are not their merry comradeships, her lovely, statuesque movements are not their athletic tumbles. She stood to-day at her mother's knee in just the attitude S----n painted them for me, her eyes clouded with awe just as the bloom upon her mother's sweeping gown of velvet clouded its elusive blue, the soft plume upon her bride-maiden's hat leaned against the rich lace on her mother's breast. How beautiful they were! As I stared at them and their eyes lighted at the same moment with just the same dear smile, so that they were more than ever wonderfully alike, I heard a woman whisper behind me that the gentleman the beautiful Mrs. Bradley and her picturesque little daughter were smiling at was the child's godfather, an old friend--all his money left to her and his namesake, her brother. Before the whisper had ended Margarita the woman had turned her eyes toward her husband--they could not leave him long that day--but Margarita the child kept hers on me, and under them the years rolled back and I seemed to see a grave young girl sitting on the sand in a faded jersey, looking down into my heart and telling me that I loved her! How many times since have I not seen her on that beach, cradling her rosy babies in her strong, smooth arms, murmuring with her graceful daughters, judging mildly between some claim of her tall, eager sons! How many summer evenings have I sat with Peggy in my arms and watched her pace that silvering beach with her husband, hand in hand like young lovers! I think they forget utterly that Time slips by, he passes them so gently. It is a favourite claim of ours who are bidden to that home that it is an enchanted isle, and that he only brushes it with his wings, gliding over, and turns the scythe away and holds the hour-glass steady. Even the children feel it: it is a half-jesting, half-serious plaint with them that the goats, the donkeys, and the ponies to which they successively transfer their affections can never secure immortal youth by a yearly sojourn in that happy kingdom. I offered once to rebuild our old bridge--to make it a drawbridge, even, and thus keep our treasure safe, but after a long council it was rejected. "It wouldn't be a really island, then, you see, Jerry dear," said my Peggy (always deputed to bear an ultimatum to me) "and we like it better an island--don't you?" Of course it must be an island! It was marked out for an island when first the waters were gathered up and the dry land appeared. I think all the happy places are islands--I should like to make one of Italy. I am convinced that when the Garden of Eden is definitely settled (and Major Upgrove is trying to persuade me to come with him to find it--he has a theory) it will be found to be a secret isle in some great estuary or arm of that ageless Eastern river suspected by the major. Surely that mysterious Apple (of whose powers Margarita was once so sceptical) never grew on any vulgar, easily-to-be-come-at mainland! No, it lurks to-day in its own island Paradise, and the angel with the flaming sword cut the land apart from all common ground so that the furrows smoked beneath it as the floods raced in. If we find it--the major and I--shall we bring some apples back to Peggy? In truth, I am none too sure. Why my darling's sex has been so eager for that Apple is not yet entirely evident--though I am not too stupidly obstinate to admit that it may be evident, one day. But the fact remains that Eve certainly regretted it, and Adam, one would suppose, must have, for he has been settling dressmaker's accounts ever since! As to the position held by this father of mankind among the Bradley children, by the way, volumes might be written. To suppose that Barbara Jencks, their bond slave in all else, has remitted an atom of her zeal in bringing them into the state of religious conviction enjoyed by the Governour-General's family, would indicate the densest ignorance of her character. And success has not been entirely lacking, for my namesake delights in the battles of the Kings and Sue's sweet life is a very Sermon on the Mount. But Lockwood still sacrifices to Pan among the beehives and propitiates the Thunder God with favourite kittens, and Roger the Second long ago informed his would-be mentor, to her horror, that if a fellow tried to be like his father and told the truth and worked hard, he thought that fellow could take his chances with God! Dear, obstinate lad, with your cleft chin and your blue eyes, it is not your grandmother, who leaves her Emerson and her Psalms unread together, when she can fill her keen, proud eyes with you, that will deny your simple creed! But my little Peggy has outgrown Pan, and scorns to appease her baby brother's deities. "I asked Roger," she said to me one late afternoon, when we sat in her mother's rocky seat and watched the red sun sink, "why the sun was here--just so that we could see things? And he said yes. And the moon the same way, for night. But that little blind girl I see in the Park, in New York, she can't see things, Jerry dear. She never can. What is that for?" "I can't tell, sweetheart." "You don't know, Jerry dear?" "No, Peggy, I don't know." "But someone knows?" "That I can't tell, either." She turned her serious, deep eyes on me. "But, Jerry dear, nothing can be that someone--Someone--don't know, can it? That wouldn't be right. There must be Some one?" "I hope so, sweetheart." She stared quietly at the rosy ball that sank, below us and far away, at the rim of the sea--Margarita's sea. "I know there is, Jerry," she said simply. "Look at that, the way I do, and you'll know, too." And just then, I thought I did ... Sue was at the wedding, of course, grey, and a little worn, now, but dressed a merveille and delightful in her pride at her genius-boy. His sister, a wonderful, modern young woman, has learned her "trade," indeed, though one that her mother never dreamed of, and will decorate, furnish and supply with everything from ancestral portraits to patent mouse-traps any structure from a hotel to a steam-yacht that you may place in her capable, college-bred hands. A remarkable achievement is young Susan--the achievement of the fin de siecle generation. At the wedding-breakfast she described to me her last "job"; the putting in commission of a dilapidated fifteenth-century chateau for its new oil-king owner--he was born in a bog-cabin in Ireland and never tasted anything but potatoes and stir-about till he was fourteen. But Susan has raked Europe for a service fit for him to eat his cabbage from and Asia for rugs fit for his no longer bare feet, and has deposited his good American cheque in her bank. She is improving the occasion of her American visit by an extended hunt for old silver and brasses and china for a great country house on the Hudson--its many-millioned mistress will pay well for her "imported" treasures! Truly is Susan a lesson to us, and wide would be her great-grandmother's eyes could she see Susan disposing of her girlish samplers and draping her camel's-hair shawl behind a Hawthorne jar. And I am bound to admit that Susan is not marrying, though her mother was struggling with two delicate children at her age. No, Susan has no need to "marry to get away from home." As fast as this accomplished young woman establishes herself in a charming house, some envious person buys it of her, and she moves serenely to a new one, a contented, self-respecting Arab with a bank account. Ah, well, perhaps it will be, as her mother triumphantly declares, all the more honour to the man who gets her, after all! We oldsters must not be stubborn, nowadays. My mother, like old Mrs. Upgrove, is living still; well and happy, both of them, thank God, and as proud of their sons as if either had ever done anything to deserve it. Neither of them has much to say of Margarita, I have noticed, though both fondle her children, a little absently, perhaps, and feign to wonder what it is we see in Peggy that blinds us to the excellencies of the others--stouter children and more respectful, my dear! And Death, that spares them both, and old Madam Bradley, too (eighty-eight now and half paralysed for nearly twenty years!), what had we done that he should take away one whom we and the world--her world--could so ill spare? Does Someone, indeed, know why, my sweetheart Peggy? I try to think so, but it is hard to see. Nine years ago Harriet put Peggy into her mother's arms and praised the little thing and kissed them both, and then told Roger that she must leave them, for she felt ill and would not risk the responsibility of further nursing. She would send a good nurse straight from New York, she said, and Roger himself took her there, leaving the doctor with Margarita, as soon as he dared. He brought back the other nurse, wired me to look after Harriet, and left her comfortable in the little apartment of a good friend of hers, with a promise of a speedy return. He never saw her alive again. Dr. McGee, even then a famous physician and devotedly attached to her, worked day and night over her, but it was useless; the over-strained, busy heart had given way and she lived only three days, growing feebler with every hour. I was sitting beside her in the afternoon, trying to be cheerful, trying to cheer her with those futile subterfuges we are forced to, trying to get it all clear in my own troubled mind, when she smiled whimsically at me and begged me to spare myself such pain. "A nurse is the last person to need such talk, dear Mr. Jerrolds," she whispered to me, and as the good deaconess who had been her first helper in her chosen work burst into tears and stumbled from the room, she put out her hand and I took it silently. "What you have been--what you have been, Harriet!" I muttered unsteadily, and then her eyes met mine. "What have I been?" her lips barely formed the words, "do you know?" There in her soft brown eyes I saw at last--at once. God knows I never guessed before. They met mine so calmly, so honestly, so fearlessly--alas, they could be fearless now! "And I have been such a fool--such a brute!" "Hush! you never knew," she whispered, "you could not help it, my dear. It was so from the very first--when you saw my diary." "But I might--I might have----" Again she smiled whimsically. "O no," she said quietly, "there was no chance for me, of course. I never dreamed of it, my dear. But--but I wanted you to know it. There has never been anybody but you." I tried to speak, but could not, and again, but the words dried on my lips. Then I saw that she was sleeping--from exhaustion, probably, and sat by her in silence till the deaconess came back, red-eyed, and sent me away. I bent over her and kissed her cheek, before I left, and I am sure that her lips moved and that the hand I had held while she slept pressed mine faintly. But she did not open her eyes, and in the morning the message came that she had drifted easily away, in that same sleep before dawn. Gone--and I never knew, never faintly surmised, never considered! Gone--and there had never been anybody but me! Ah, Peggy, there had need be Someone that knows, to make good the pity of it, the cruelty of it, the senseless waste of it! But we three, whom she gave so generously to each other, whom, in turn, she tended back to life, into whose lives she has grown as a tree grows, can we call her love wasted? Nor is it among us alone that her memory flourishes. No woman in all those mountain parishes she loved so well faces her dark hour of travail without blessing her name and the name of her messengers, whom, in the endowment called in memorial of her, Margarita sends to them, to tend them and the children they bear, as Harriet helped her and hers. She lies among them, a stone's throw from the corner-stone she laid nearly twenty years ago, now, and many visitors have never seen the tablet that lies along her grave--so thick the flowers are always lying there. "Mother says you are not to look so sad, Jerry dear, because it isn't me that Freddy's marrying!" says Peggy softly, behind me, and I come back to the present, with a jerk. "Not Freddy, perhaps," I answer with pretended severity, "but some other young sprig no better than Freddy, and then poor old Jerry may go hang!" She slips her firm little hand--Margarita's hand--into mine shyly. "Now, Jerry, how silly you are!" she says, looking carefully to see if I am teasing her or by any chance in earnest. "How can I marry a young sprig, when I am going to marry you?" "Since when?" I inquire sardonically. "Why, Jerry!" Her big eyes open wide, she plants herself before me and stares accusingly. "You know very well--you can't have forgotten? You and I and little Jerry and Miss Jencks are going round the world when I am sixteen! To Japan, and see the wistaria and the cherry blossoms and the five hundred little stone Buddha-gods that get all wet with spray and the red bridge nobody may walk on!" "Anywhere else?" "Yes, to Vevay and see where Mr. Boffin used to live and old Joseph that told you when you were all grown big and went back, "C'est moi, Monsieur, qui suis Joseph: j' ai nettoye les premieres bottes de Monsieur!" How well I remember those first formidable boots, and my manly feelings when I clumped them down in the hall before my door for Joseph to clean! Jerry and Peggy and I are going over every foot of the old grounds--the school, where the little fellows still sport their comfortable, round capes; the way, well trodden still, I'll wager, to the old patisserie with its tempting windows of indigestible joys; the natatorium where we dived like frogs; the English church where we learned the Collects and eyed the young ladies' school gravely till it blushed individually and collectively; the famous field where I fought the grocer's boy who cried "a bas les Anglais!" three days running. (He beat me, incidentally.) I find that all the old memories come back very sweetly: I had a happy childhood, on the whole, one that never lacked love and sympathy. Believe me, ye parents, who think that these days will soon be forgotten, they make a difference, these idle memories, and life is inexpressibly richer if those early days are rich in pleasant little adventures and cheery little experiences, cheerily shared! I have more to remember than Roger, whose early boyhood was, though far wealthier than mine, strangely poorer from the lack of just this mellow glow over and through it. And Margarita's? We shall never know what filled those silent, childish hours of hers, alone with the dogs and the gulls. Her quaint lonely games, her towers of sand and shell, her musings by the tide, her dreams on the sun-warmed rocks--I fancy I see them all in watching Peggy. She cannot tell herself. "I began to live," she says, "when I met Roger." "You have lived a great deal, since, have you not, Margarita?" I say, a little wistfully, perhaps, she is so splendid and so complete, and one seems so broken and colourless and middle-aged beside her. "A great deal. Yes, I suppose so," she answers, and her eye rests quickly but surely on Roger, on each of the yellow heads, then on the dark one, and then, at last, on me. "You have given up a great deal for those handsome heads, Margarita," I go on, under the spur of some curious impulse, "did you never regret it? You had the world at your feet, Madame used to say, and you gave it up ..." She looks at me with the only eyes in the world that can make me forget Peggy's, and gives me both her hands (one with a flashing, cloudy star sapphire burning on it) in that free, lovely gesture so characteristic of her. "Don't, Jerry!" she says in her sweet, husky voice, and Roger hearing it, turns slightly from his guests and gives her a swift, strong look. The gay wedding crowd melts away, the clatter of the wine-glasses is the wash of pebbles on the beach, her hand in mine seems wet with flying spray, as she speaks in that rich, vibrating voice, for me alone: "I had the world at my feet--yes, Jerry dear, and I nearly lost it, did I not? I did not know, you see. And I have it now, Jerry, I have it now!" (O, Susan of the bank account, who need not marry to get away from home, will that look come to your eyes and glow there till your face is too bright for an elderly bachelor to bear? Indeed, I hope it may!) "There is only one world for a woman, Jerry," says Margarita softly, "and no one can be happy, like me, till she lives in it--the hearts that love her. His and theirs--and yours, dear Jerry, O always yours!" His and Theirs and Mine! Amen to that, my dear, and surely if there is Someone that knows, He knows that what you say is true! [THE END] _ |
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