Before Richard Hand said good-bye to Mary Vanton that September he told
her frankly of his love for her.
“I am not doing a dishonourable thing,” he insisted. “If I tell you
this, now, it is my right to speak and your right to hear.”
Mary Vanton sat looking directly at him, the brilliance gone from her
blue eyes, the depths in them showing, the depths in her showing, too,
in the way she listened, and the words she uttered. Her wonderful hair,
darkly red, lay framed against the white linen of a chair covering, a
chair with a tall back that seemed to shield and protect her and bring
out in relief the milky whiteness of her fine skin, unchanged by the
sun and salt air, like a pure and unspotted marble.
“No,” she said, slowly, “it is not dishonourable. For it is not myself,
Mary Vanton, that you love, but the girl Mermaid. I am not she. I am
much altered.”
“You are Mermaid,” he said, simply, and in his voice there was
reverence.
She shook her head at this and seemed to fall to pondering the
questions his confession raised.
“Your husband,” he went on, “has deliberately turned his back. It
is necessary that you should have some material assistance. It will
be necessary--from time to time. I don’t mean money, but I do mean
counsel, advice, someone to talk things over with, help with the
children, particularly with the boys. Young John, for example. He’s
fourteen and you are sending him away to school. You’re letting me take
him and you don’t know what it means to me!” Like most people, Dick
Hand was not ashamed to show feeling, though he hesitated, embarrassed,
before a revelation of the depth of it. And this went deep. He lifted
his head abruptly and his glance pierced the blue surface of the
woman’s eyes and sank silently to unfathomable soundings.
In those strange regions they met. It was like the embodiment of a
fancy as old as Kingsley’s “Water-Babies.” But it was not a meeting of
sprites, not a meeting in play. She was Mermaid; he was Merman. She was
the incarnation of youth for him; he was the incarnation of dreams for
her. Each saw in the other something lost or denied.
“You are what I would most wish to be, were I not Mary Vanton,” she
was saying, evenly, and he found it hard to believe that she was
uttering the words, so magically did they echo his silent thought.
“Remember that I, too, was a girl. I also studied--chemistry. Call it
alchemy--wonderworking--the miracle of facts invested with the romance
of their exploration and discovery. In my simplicity and eagerness I
dreamed for myself a career.... You have had the career.... In your
simplicity and hopefulness you dreamed for yourself the perpetuation of
youth in an ideal love and the renewal of youth in your children....
That--has been mine. I have had the greater satisfaction. I have it
now.
“But mine is the basic satisfaction. I have had, I still have, an ideal
love. I have my children. The rest I can forego. The other dream I can
have as a vicarious satisfaction in the splendid work you have done
and are doing. You, on the other hand, have not had the underlying
satisfaction that has been mine.... These things cannot be undone. We
have to deal with them as they are. We have to make the most of them,
exploit them bravely, gallantly. It is the feat of living which, I
suppose, everyone is called upon to perform.”
“You are right,” he said, affirmatively. “But you are also partly
wrong. I was your lover and am now your friend; I love your children,
and it is at least permitted me to love them as if they were my own.”
“They are that part of me which it is still permitted you to love,”
she said, gravely. “And as a friend, as an old friend, as my one-time
lover, as the realizer of that part of my dream which I in my own
person never can realize--as such you are near and dear to me. Between
us there exists a strong tie. I do not think that anything will ever
break it.”
“It is unbreakable and it exists. It can be no different, it need be no
stronger,” he avowed.
A few moments later she heard him on the veranda, talking with her
oldest boy.
“I’ll swim you a hundred yards in the bay and beat you,” he was saying
to John in a youthfully challenging voice.
“You’re on,” replied the fourteen-year-old, concisely. “Say, you can’t
do it, though!”
They moved away and their voices dwindled. Mary Vanton listened to the
attenuating sound of their movements and chatter. A great thankfulness
filled her heart, and when she rose from the chair where she had been
sitting, motionless, tears were in her eyes.