The air above the shelving stretches of sand-beach shimmered and
dilated with the heat of the August afternoon, as Margaret walked just
beyond the yeasty edge of the receding waves. There was little wind
stirring, and the cool damp was pleasant under her feet. She had left
the hotel behind, and the straggling line of bobbing, dark-blue specks,
which indicated the habitual bathers, was small in the distance.
A blue-and-silver bound book was in her hand, and her gray tweed skirt
and soft jacket, with a bunch of drooping crimson roses at the waist,
made a grateful spot upon the white glare. Summer sun and sea-wind had
given a clear olive to her face and a scarlet radiance to her full
lips, softly curved. Her hair, in waving masses of flush-brown, flowed
out from beneath her straw hat, tempting a breeze.
To her left were tumbled monotonous, low dunes, and beyond them the
torn clayey bank, gashed by storms; to her right, only barren stretch
of sea and sweep of sky.
At a bight of the shore, under the long, curved hole of a pine, leaning
to its fall from the high bank through which half its naked roots
struck sprangling, ran a zigzag footpath to a little grove, where
hemlock and stunted oak grew thickly. Up she climbed, poising lightly,
and drawing herself to the last step by grasping a sprawling creeper.
The green coolness refreshed her, and there was more movement in the
higher air.
She followed the twists of the path among the low bushes clustering in
front of a sparse clearing. Facing her, in the edge of the shade, where
the light fell in mottled shadows upon a soft, springy floor of dead
pine needles, with its wide arms laced in the rasping boughs of the
scrub-oaks around it, stood an unwieldy wooden cross, hewed roughly,
its base socketed in stone and its horizontal bar held in place by a
rust-red bolt. A cracked and crazy bench, also hewn, was set beneath,
and just above this was nailed a heavy board in which was deeply cut
this half-effaced inscription:
Here Lies
The Body of an Unknown Woman
Drowned
In the Wreck of the Schooner Bartlett,
May 9, 1871.
and below it, in larger characters, now almost obliterated by
gray-and-yellow stains:
Ora Pro Anima Sua.
This was Margaret’s favorite spot. She preferred its melancholy
solitude to the vivacious companionship of the cottage piazza, and
its quiet tones to the bizarre hues of the beach pavilion. It lay
removed from the usual paths, reached only by a wide detour, across
bush-tangled wastes or the long, uncomfortable walk up-shore on the
hot, yielding sand. Now she sank upon the seat with a deep sigh of
pleasure, letting her book fall open in her lap. Her eyes roved far
off across the gray-green heave where a buccaneering fish-hawk slanted
craftily.
A deeper light was in them as they fell upon the open printed leaf:
“For Love is fine and tense as silver wire,
Fierce as white lightning, glorious as drums
And beautiful as snow-mountains. Swift she is
As leaping flame and calm as winter stars.”
Its chaste beauty had long ago stamped the passage upon her memory;
to-day the lines hymned themselves to a subtle, splendid music.
Tossing the volume suddenly to one side, her hands loosed her belt.
She held the limp band movelessly a moment, and then bent her face
eagerly over it. Under her fingers the filigree of the clasp slid back,
disclosing a portrait. It was that of a man, young, resolute-faced,
with brown, wavy hair parted in the middle, and candid forehead. It was
rugged and masterful, but with a sweetness of lips and a tender, gray
softness of proud eyes that bespoke him not more a doer than a dreamer.
As she looked, her lips parted and a faint color crept up her neck,
showing brightly against the auburn hollows of her hair. She fondled
and petted the ivory with her hands, and then raised it to her lips,
kissing it, murmuring to it, and folding it over and over in the warm
moistness of her breath.
Holding it against her face, she walked up and down the open space
with quick, pushing steps, her free hand stripping the leaves from the
sweeping bush fronds, her hat fallen back, swaying from the knotted
streamers caught under the slipping coil between her shoulders.
Stopping at length in front of the bench, she hung the belt upon a
corner of the carven board, its violet weave tinging the weathered
grain and the painted circlet glowing like a jewelled period for the
massive lettering.
With one knee on the warped seat, she read again the fading sentences.
“An unknown woman.” Gone down into the cold green depths! Perhaps
with a dear, glowing secret in her heart, a one name bubbling from
her lips, a new quivering something in her soul, which the waters
could not still! That body buffeted and tossed by rearing breakers,
to lie nameless in a neglected grave; that soul, its earthly longing
forgotten, to go forever unregretful of what it had cried for with all
the might of its human passion!
Ah! but _did it_? If death touched her own soul to-day! “For love is
strong as death. * * * Many waters cannot quench love, neither can
the floods drown it!” In imagination she felt the numbing clasp of
the dragging under-deeps; she saw her soul wandering, wraith-like,
through shadowless, silent spaces and across infinite distances. Would
it bear with it a placid joy? Would it know no quicker heart-beat,
no tears that reddened the eyelid, no tender thrill in all its lucent
veins? Would nothing, nothing of that strange, sweet wildness that ran
imprisoned in all her blood cling to it still?
The thought bit her. She reached up and snatched down the belt,
pressing the clasp tightly with her cheek in the curve of her shoulder,
repeating dumbly to herself the pious “Ora pro anima sua” that stood
before her eyes.
* * * * *
A far crackling struck across her mood, and hastily drawing the belt
about her waist, she leaned sideways from the upright beam, raising her
hand quickly, as if to put back the lawless meshes of her hair. She
heard the sound of a confident step, crunching on the marly sand, and
the swish of bent-back bushes. It was coming in a direct line toward
her. There was a dry clatter of falling fence-rails, as though the
intruder, disdaining obstacles, preferred to walk through them.
She caught a glimpse of a familiar, bright-colored scarf between the
glimmering, leafy tangles, and then the thrust of a quick spring, and
an instant later the figure that had vaulted the heavy fence came
dropping, feet foremost, through the snapping screen of brambles, and
walked straight toward the spot where she had risen to her feet with a
little glad cry.