Margharita was in the gardens. The blue electric rays shone through the
plumes of the palm and shivered in feathery images on the walk. In the
little foolish fish-pond some stalwart fish was apparently bullying the
others, for often there sounded a frantic splashing.
Her mother came to her rapidly. "Margharita! Mister Smith is here!
Come!"
"Oh, is he?" cried the girl. She followed her mother to the house. She
swept into the little parlor with a grand air, the egotism of a savage.
Smith had heard the whirl of her skirts in the hall, and his heart, as
usual, thumped hard enough to make him gasp. Every time he called, he
would sit waiting with the dull fear in his breast that her mother
would enter and indifferently announce that she had gone up to heaven
or off to New York, with one of his dream-rivals, and he would never
see her again in this wide world. And he would conjure up tricks to
then escape from the house without any one observing his face break up
into furrows. It was part of his love to believe in the absolute
treachery of his adored one. So whenever he heard the whirl of her
skirts in the hall he felt that he had again leased happiness from a
dark fate.
She was rosily beaming and all in white. "Why, Mister Smith," she
exclaimed, as if he was the last man in the world she expected to see.
"Good-evenin'," he said, shaking hands nervously. He was always awkward
and unlike himself, at the beginning of one of these calls. It took him
some time to get into form.
She posed her figure in operatic style on a chair before him, and
immediately galloped off a mile of questions, information of herself,
gossip and general outcries which left him no obligation, but to look
beamingly intelligent and from time to time say: "Yes?" His personal
joy, however, was to stare at her beauty.
When she stopped and wandered as if uncertain which way to talk, there
was a minute of silence, which each of them had been educated to feel
was very incorrect; very incorrect indeed. Polite people always babbled
at each other like two brooks.
He knew that the responsibility was upon him, and, although his mind
was mainly upon the form of the proposal of marriage which he intended
to make later, it was necessary that he should maintain his reputation
as a well-bred man by saying something at once. It flashed upon him to
ask: "Won't you please play?" But the time for the piano ruse was not
yet; it was too early. So he said the first thing that came into his
head: "Too bad about young Manolo Prat being killed over there in Cuba,
wasn't it?"
"Wasn't it a pity?" she answered.
"They say his mother is heart-broken," he continued. "They're afraid
she's goin' to die."
"And wasn't it queer that we didn't hear about it for almost two
months?"
"Well, it's no use tryin' to git quick news from there."
Presently they advanced to matters more personal, and she used upon him
a series of star-like glances which rumpled him at once to squalid
slavery. He gloated upon her, afraid, afraid, yet more avaricious than
a thousand misers. She fully comprehended; she laughed and taunted him
with her eyes. She impressed upon him that she was like a
will-o'-the-wisp, beautiful beyond compare but impossible, almost
impossible, at least very difficult; then again, suddenly,
impossible--impossible--impossible. He was glum; he would never dare
propose to this radiance; it was like asking to be pope.
A moment later, there chimed into the room something that he knew to be
a more tender note. The girl became dreamy as she looked at him; her
voice lowered to a delicious intimacy of tone. He leaned forward; he
was about to outpour his bully-ragged soul in fine words,
when--presto--she was the most casual person he had ever laid eyes
upon, and was asking him about the route of the proposed trolley line.
But nothing short of a fire could stop him now. He grabbed her hand.
"Margharita," he murmured gutturally, "I want you to marry me."
She glared at him in the most perfect lie of astonishment. "What do you
say?"
He arose, and she thereupon arose also and fled back a step. He could
only stammer out her name. And thus they stood, defying the principles
of the dramatic art.
"I love you," he said at last.
"How--how do I know you really--truly love me?" she said, raising her
eyes timorously to his face and this timorous glance, this one timorous
glance, made him the superior person in an instant. He went forward as
confident as a grenadier, and, taking both her hands, kissed her.
That night she took a stained photograph from her dressing-table and
holding it over the candle burned it to nothing, her red lips meanwhile
parted with the intentness of her occupation. On the back of the
photograph was written: "One lesson in English I will give you--this: I
love you."
For the word is clear only to the kind who on peak or plain, from dark
northern ice-fields to the hot wet jungles, through all wine and want,
through lies and unfamiliar truth, dark or light, are governed by the
unknown gods, and though each man knows the law, no man may give tongue
to it.