She was the first to waken in the morning, and stealing softly from him,
she left the embers of their fire among the rushes and went wandering
among the trees, so that when he rose he saw her figure, airy and white,
among their columns. She seemed the spirit of the trees to his doting
eye, as though ’twas there among them she had always dwelt; the wood was
furnished and completed by her presence.
“There is not in the world a sweeter place,” she cried, “and I have never
seen such berries! Look, I have brought you some, Sir Sluggard, that we
might taste them first together.” She put a spray of the berries between
her teeth and let him sweeten the fruit with a kiss as he took his share
from her lips with his own.
“The woman tempted me, and I did eat,” said Morar, laughing, and culled
the berries with his arms around her. They burst on his palate with a
savour sharp and heady. He was about to ask for more when he saw her
change. The smile had suddenly gone from her face at his words; for the
first time he saw that her eyes were capable of anger.
“Upon my word,” said she in an impatient voice, “I think it a poor
compliment to me after my trouble in getting the berries for you that you
should have such a thought in your head about me.”
“There you go,” he answered quickly, an unreasonable vexation sweeping
through him in a gust. “Did ever any one hear the like, that because I
am indifferent to your silly berries you should snarl like a cat?”
“A cat!” she cried, furious.
“Just a cat,” he repeated deliberately. “For God’s sake give me peace,
and get your hair up before the men come ashore for us. It is time we
were home; I am heart-sick of this sailing. And it ill becomes a woman
of your years to play-act the child and run barefoot about island sands.”
The berries she still held in her hand she crushed between her palms till
the juice of them stained her gown and ran like blood between her
fingers. The perfume rose to her nostrils and seemed to fill her head
with a pungent vapour.
“Well? Well?” he said with irritation at her staring. She covered her
eyes with her hands and burst into tears.
He only whistled. Someway she appeared a sloven in dress, awkward in
gesture, and a figure of insincerity. If he had not a sudden new
conviction that she was everything she should not be, there was the
accent of her voice, the evidence of his eyesight. For when, in wild
exasperation at his manner, she took her hands from her face, she showed
a visage stained and sour, tempestuous eyes, and lips grown thin and
pallid.
“I hate you! I hate you!” she cried, and stamped with her bare feet on
the sand. “I cannot for my life understand what I ever saw in you that I
should have married you. Any one with her senses might have hesitated to
tie herself for life to a man with so much evil in his countenance.”
“Yours would be none the worse for washing,” said Morar remorselessly,
with an eye on her berry-stained face.
“There’s a gentleman!” she cried. “Oh, my grief, that I should have
spoiled my life!”
“You knew what I was when you took me,” said Morar. “Lord knows, I made
no pretence at angelic virtues, and ’twas there, by my faith, I was
different from yourself!”
“And there’s the coward and liar too!” cried his wife. “You were far too
cunning to show me what you really were, and it must have been a woeful
ignorance of the world that made me take you on your own estimate.”
“Well, then, the mistake has been on both sides,” said Morar. “There’s
no one could be more astonished than myself that my real wife should be
so different from what till this hour I had imagined her. Madam, you
need not be so noisy; if you scream a little louder the crew will be let
into a pretty secret. It is like enough they know you already, for I
have been singularly blind.”
He put up what seemed to her for the first time an unlovely hand to
stifle a forced yawn: she saw an appalling cruelty in the mouth that had
so often kissed her and called her sweet names; his very attitude
expressed contempt for her.
“What have I done?” she asked, distracted.
“It is not what you have done,” he said with a coarse deliberation, “’tis
what you are and what you cannot help being. The repentance must lie
with me. I would give, gaily, ten years of my life to obliterate the
past six months.”
“Faith, ’tis a man of grace and character says so to his newly-married
wife.”
At these words Morar started slightly, and looked for a moment confused.
“Newly married!” he said; “Lord help us! so we are. Some way, I fancied
we had been married for years. Well, we have not taken long to discover
each other, and will have the more leisure to repent. I understand you,
madam, into the very core; there is not a vein of your body hides a
secret from me. I was mistaken; I thought your beauty something more
than a pink cheek; I thought you generous till I saw how generous you
could be at my expense, and how much the rent-roll of Morar weighed with
you in your decision to marry me. I thought you humble and unaffected,
and now I see you posing about this business of bare feet on the sand,
the morning breeze in your gown, breakfasts of berries and water.”
“Pray go on,” cried the lady. “Pray go on. Every word you say confirms
the character I now see in your face.”
“I thought you truthful, so you are—in the letter and the word; but the
flattery you have for those you would conciliate, the insincerity of your
laugh in the presence of those you would please, the unscrupulousness of
your excuses for the omission of duties unpleasant to you—what are these
but lies of the worst kind?”
“Oh heavens,” she cried, “I was not always so! If I am so now I must be
what you made me. I remember—” she drew her hand across her brow; “I
seem to remember some one else I thought was me, that loved you, and
could not be too good and pure for you even in her imagination. You
seemed a king to that poor foolish girl’s imagination; she loved you
so—she loved you so, she was so happy!”
“Just so!” said Morar. “You had, seemingly, well deceived yourself. And
now I can tell you that you may cry your eyes out, for I know what a
woman gets her tears so readily for. It is that when she is crying and
lamenting she may not betray her chagrin and ill-temper in her face.
Have done with it, and let us get out of this! I see the men put out the
boat; they will be with us in a moment; for Heaven’s sake let us have no
more theatricals. The fate of us both is sealed, and we must, I suppose,
live the rest of our lives together like the other married fools we
know—putting as fair a face as we can on a ghastly business.”
She was standing beside tall blades of shelister—the iris of the
isles—and when he spoke like this to her she suddenly plucked a handful
and began to tear them wantonly with her fingers.
“I assure you that you have seen the last of my tears,” said she. “I
would not cry out if you struck me! There is something almost as sweet
as love, and that is hate, and I seem to have come from a race that must
have either. I have a feeling in me that I could have loved eternally if
I had found the proper object, but now I know that I can always be sure
you will keep me hating, and I am not sorry. Yes, yes, you have said it,
Morar, a ghastly business; but I will not put any fair face on it to
deceive the world, I assure you! It could not be deceived: blind would
it be, indeed, if it could not see the sneer in your face, and hear the
coward in your voice.”
“Silence, you fool; the men are coming!” he said, clutching at her wrist
and twisting it cruelly.
She gave a little shriek of pain, and caught at her breast with the other
hand that held the broken blades of shelisters.
“Oh, you have struck me!” she cried. “That is the end of my shame, and I
shall make you suffer.”
He saw a poignard glint momentarily in the morning sun that was turning
Isle Faoineas’ sands to gold, and before he could prevent her she had
plunged the weapon in her bosom. She fell with a cry at his feet, her
hair in the ashes of the fire they had last night sat by. The blood came
bubbling to her mouth and welled out on her bosom where the poignard rose
and fell with her moaning.
For a moment, instead of pity and remorse, there was a feeling of
release. Behind him sounded the plash of oars; he turned hastily and saw
the men had left the sloop and were approaching land. “Oh _Dhia_!” he
said to himself, “here’s a bonny business to explain!” and then ’twas
very far from well with Morar, for he heard the woman moan her wish for
water, and he knew she shared the agony of that inward fire that scorched
his throat as if the berries he had swallowed had been beads of heated
metal. At his feet was the glass they had drunk from on the last night
of their happiness; he picked it up and ran to the well that tinkled on
the hillock, then hurried to her side and raised her up to let her drink.
The draught, it seemed, revived her; she shuddered and sighed, and turned
in his arms; then his own torment mastered him, and he drank too.
Through his whole flesh went a pleasant chill; a gladness danced in him,
and he saw a thing miraculous in his bride—the flush come back to her
cheek, and all her wild sweet beauty, and her smile, as she leaned
against his shoulder like one new waked from sleep, so that he looked
into her face and saw himself reflected in her eyes. The berry stains
were on her lips, the bosom of her gown was reddened with their juices,
and in between her breasts lay the blade of the shelister, sparkling with
dew, and glinting in the sunshine as it rose and fell in time with her
heart’s pulsations.
“Oh, love!” she said, and put her arms about his neck, “I dreamt—I dreamt
a dreadful dream!”
“And I, sweetheart,” said Morar, looking aghast at the berry stains, and
the mark of his fingers on her wrist, and on the iris blade that were
evidence it had been no dream. “I dreamt, too, love—my God! such
dreaming! I do not wonder now the world holds far aloof from this Island
of Illusion. God bless the well, the holy well; but the curse of curses
on the berries of Ealan Faoineas!”
Together, hand in hand, they fled to the shore and waded out on the sandy
shallow to meet the boat; the sloop shook out her sails like some proud
eager bird; from her deck, together waist-encircled, they saw the blue
tide rise on the yellow sands, the trees nod, the birds flit among the
thickets of the glen, and heard the tinkle of the well in Ealan Faoineas.