THE ISLAND COTTAGE
I have hitherto said nothing about the Bank, for the best of
reasons--I hate it. I hated it, I think, from the day when a letter
from one of my father's friends introduced me to it, until the day
when the letter from the legal firm of which Roger's uncle had been
the brilliant head released me from it. I do not think, however, that
many people knew this. I did my work as well as I could, accepted my
periodical advances in salary with a becoming gratitude, saved a
little each year, and quieted my eruptions of furious disgust with the
recollection of my mother's unhindered disposal of her little legacy
since the day I left the university.
If anyone had told me that on a day in early autumn I should suddenly
come into a thousand pounds a year and freedom, I should have caught
my breath at the very idea, and here was the thing, a fact
accomplished, and here was I, not only quite self-contained, but sober
beyond my wont, and ready to take the Bank and all its stodgy horror
upon my shoulders, if with it I might have had one thing--one woman!
The world was before me, where to choose, all the far corners and
reaches for which I had inherited the hunger with the blood that ran
in my veins--and if I might only have been the first to find one
lonely, insignificant point on the Atlantic coast, my heart would have
journeyed there, content, and ceased (or so I thought) its wanderings.
Truly our joys are tempered for us, and no shorn lamb was ever more
carefully protected from the winds of heaven than we from too much
joy. It is an actual fact that I regarded my resignation from the
drudgery of twelve years, the disposal of my rooms and furniture, the
heartening preliminaries with the lawyers, and my booking at the
steamship company's offices, with less interest than the successful
transportation of Margarita's wedding gift.
It was with a real thrill of pleasure that I drew out my small
savings--a little over a thousand pounds--and with the breathless
assistance of Sue Paynter and a famous actress of her acquaintance
selected the most perfect single pearl to be purchased for that money.
One of the heads of the great firm whose name has been long associated
with American wealth and luxury himself lent a discerning hand to the
selection, and for the first time I tasted the snobbish joy of sitting
at ease in a dainty private room while respectful officials brought
the splendours of the Orient to my lordly knees, and lesser buyers
hung unattended over the common counters. Except in the purchase of my
first gift for my mother--a tiny diamond sword-hilt, in memory of my
father--I have never experienced so much pleasure.
It hung, a great blob of veined, milky whiteness, from a strong but
tiny golden chain--a gift for a Rajah, not a bank-official! I had
never expended so much, or half so much, upon a single purchase, and
the pale, native thrift of Old and New England together glowed and
thrilled scarlet in me, and the lucent, moonlike sphere flushed into a
ruby before my dazzled eyes: I knew then how an eager chief will toss
away a province for an emerald--if he may lay the jewel upon the neck
of all the world for him!
I had the clasp engraved with her name--itself a pearl--and slipped
the delicate case in my pocket. The great comedienne, whom I have
always thought the sweetest of women--but one--talked a moment aside
at the smiling request of the master jeweller and then whispered
laughingly to Sue with the most artfully artless glance at me. Sue,
who was a little drawn and white from her enemy neuralgia, murmured to
me in French that I had the honour to render desolate Miss L----n
R----l, the reigning stage beauty, who was greatly desirous of
precisely that pearl and whose too vacillating admirer would doubtless
enjoy his bad little quarter hour _a cause de moi_. I do not deny that
this put a point to my satisfaction. I was, in fact, idiotically
gratified--God and man that is born of woman alone know why.
I hurried to the dingy station as a boy hurries to the train that will
take him home to the holidays, and the tedious hours were miraculously
light, the face of the telegraph operator like the face of my best
friend, the rough, damp passage in the blue boat a pleasant incident.
Caliban had a friendly, stupid grin for me and rowed his best; the
very oars knew how I wanted to get to her!
They stood with a lantern on the landing-steps, in the rough,
picturesque clothes I had first seen them in, and we hurried through a
thickening drizzle to the warm, light cottage, ridiculously
hand-in-hand, the lantern bobbing between us.
Roger had revived his old school accomplishments and had ready a
panful of delicious little sausages in a bath of tomatoes and onions
and Worcestershire that sent me back to Vevay in the fraction of a
second, and we dipped fragments of the crusty French loaf I had
brought in the sauce, in the old Vevay fashion, and drank to their
voyage in the last Burgundy from the little wine bin. If anything were
needed to place Margarita's father in our estimations, that Burgundy
would have done it! After the sweet course of jellied pancakes that
Roger had taught Caliban, we fell upon the cigars I had brought, and
when Margarita, an apt pupil, had sugared my demi-tasse to my liking,
I reached into my pocket and drew out the Russia leather case. My
fingers trembled like a boy's as I took out the pearl and clasped it
around her beautiful neck, above the soft black handkerchief.
"If this is not your first wedding present, Mrs. Bradley, I shall be
furiously angry," I said with mock severity, to keep down the lump in
my throat, for I was absurdly excited.
"Jerry, you extravagant old donkey, what do you mean by this?" Roger
cried huskily, "I never heard of such a thing!" While Margarita, for
the first time in our acquaintance a daughter of Eve, ran up to her
mirror. She would have been as pleased, I think, with a necklace of
iridescent seashells--wherein she differed widely from Miss L----n
R----l, as Roger and I agreed.
We talked, of course, of Uncle Winthrop and the old days, of his
loving interest in me, the slender little chap with the dead
soldier-father, who had taken long walks up and down narrow old Winter
Street with him, and mailed his letters, and fenced with his sword,
and listened by the hour to his tales of rainy bivouac and last
redoubt, of precious drops of brandy to a dying comrade and brave
loans of army blankets in the cold dawn. We wondered at the
extraordinary chance which had kept the old portfolio, with its worn
leather edges that I remembered so well, hidden during the two years
that had elapsed since his death, and what secretive instinct had led
him to put his last will and testament there. We marvelled at the
sagacity which had led him to drop hints as to the existence of such a
document so effectively that the family had felt themselves bound to
hold the property intact for three years, to give every possible
chance of finding it, and had spent many useless dollars in the search
for the old servants who were believed (and rightly, as the event
proved) to have witnessed it. Our friendship had been more than
ordinary in its strength and real sympathy; one of those attractions
that laugh at disparity of years and absence of any tie of kinship,
and, indeed, up to his death I had been far closer to him than Roger
ever was. Dear old Uncle Win! He knew what he would do for me and what
it would mean to me, well enough: as a young fellow, he had been tied
to _his_ Bank!
I spoke tentatively of Sue Paynter, and Roger flushed and struck the
table in his disgusted excitement.
"Good heavens, Jerry--I never once thought----"
Poor Sue! There was nothing more to say.
"The first thing I want you to do for me, Jerry," said Roger, "is to
go through the cottage thoroughly and see if you discover any trace of
who lived here. I've done it, of course, but I'd like to have some one
else do it, too. Go all by yourself, and I won't give you any hint of
my idea, and then we'll compare notes."
Nothing, just then, could have interested me more, and I started
systematically for the cellar steps, lantern in hand.
The first thing that struck me was the trim neatness of this part of
the house, too often--and especially in country districts--neglected.
The steps were firm and clean and nearly dustless, the cement floor
dry and apparently freshly swept, the walls and ceiling well whitened
with lime. Bins of vegetables, a barrel of summer apples, a cask of
vinegar on two trestles with a pail thriftily set for the drippings, a
wire cupboard with plates of food set there for the cellar coolness,
and in one corner a little dairy compartment, built over a spring
covered by a wooden trap-door, completed the furnishings of the floor.
For the rest, the place was a fairly well-stocked tool-house; a scythe
and a grindstone, snow-shovel and ladders were arranged compactly; a
watering-pot and rake stood fresh from use by the door.
A low cow-stall came next and beyond this a fowl roost, both these
last noticeably clean and sweet, and this in a day when the microbe
and the germ were not such prominent factors in our civilisation as
they are at present.
I retraced my steps and went through the living-room to the room
beyond it, over the shed and dairy. It was a fair-sized study,
unmistakably a man's. The end wall held the fireplace, with a large
map of the world hung over it. The ocean side of the cottage was
windowless and lined with well-used books on pine shelves. These
overflowed on the wall which held the entrance door, and where they
stopped a sort of trophy of arms was arranged on the wall. An army
revolver, a great Western six-shooter, a fine little hunting-piece, a
grim Ghoorka knife and an assegai, which I recognised from similar
treasures on the barrack wall of an English friend of mine--an
infantry major--one or two bayonets, a curious Japanese sword and a
curved dagger whose workmanship was quite unknown to me, completed
this decoration, which was the only one on the walls. In the centre of
the floor stood a large table-desk of well-polished cherry with a
heavy glass ink-well, pin-tray, letter-rack, etc., and a fair, clean
square of blotting-paper. But none of the customary litter of such a
desk was upon it; all was swept and garnished, orderly and bare. The
drawers were empty, the ink-well pure, the very pens new. There was
not the faintest hint of what work had gone on at that desk.
I crossed the room and took down a book here and there at random from
the shelves. From one or two, evidently old ones, the fly leaves had
been neatly cut out; others had no mark of any kind. It came over me
with a staggering certainty that here was no careless, makeshift
impulse; a methodical, definite annihilation had been intended and
accomplished. An extraordinary man had arranged this. What was the
secret he had concealed so perfectly, and what had been his motive?
What his necessity? Three or four comfortable chairs and a light
wicker table completed the furniture of the room, which held--for
me--the strange fascination of the living-room, that deep, impersonal
sense of culture, that rigorous suppression of whim and irrelevant
detail. The man (not so long dead, probably) who stood behind that
room had stamped it indelibly, inevitably with the very character he
had tried to eliminate from it. One wanted to have known him: one felt
instinctively what a firm grip, what a level eye he had.
The books were almost as little tell-tale as the rest. A fine set of
the Encyclopaedia Britannica; histories of all sorts, but only the best
in every case; a little standard poetry; the great English
novelists--Dickens much worn, Meredith's early works, the
unquenchable Charles Reade, who has nursed so many fretful
convalescents back to the harness; two or three fine editions of
Shakespeare, one, a half-dozen small green volumes, worn loose from
their bindings; Darwin, Huxley, and a dozen blazers of that wonderful
trail, much underlined and cross-indexed, and a really remarkable
collection of the great scientific travellers and explorers, that
occupied much space; and a fair collection of French fiction and
archaeological research and German scientific and historical work
completed my first rough impression of this library. I have gone over
it very carefully since, and amused myself with noting its
omissions--quite as significant in such cases as the actual contents.
No classics but the usual school and college text-books; no recent
fiction; almost no American literature except the most reliable of the
historians; none of the essayists or belle-lettrists, except Carlyle,
Macaulay, and such like heavy artillery; nothing whatever of a
religious nature but a small, worn Bible thick with dust, on the top
shelf among the school-books. And there was not in the whole library
one page or line or word to indicate that its owner was conversant
with or interested in Italian or Italy.
O builder of that sand-hued cottage, owner of that manly room of
books, how many hours have I devoted to patient study of you! How many
nights have I hunted you down, searched you out, compelled you to
reveal yourself to me--and how strangely have I succeeded! It has been
a labour of love, and I have sometimes felt I know your mind almost as
my own.
In the outside further corner of the room a narrow, steep flight of
steps led to the second story and lent a queer little foreign air to
the whole. Ascending, I found myself in a small room with one
door--its only entrance--and one window. For a moment I had a curious
sense of the English barracks and seemed to be in the major's
sleeping-room again. A low cot-bed with a narrow rug beside, a pine
washing-stand and a chest of drawers, a straight chair and small
bed-table with a reflecting candle and match box upon it, and a flat
tin bath furnished this room, which was, like all the others,
speckless. A small shaving-mirror was attached at convenient height
near the window; razor and strop hung beside it. All this I took in at
a glance, without turning, but when I did turn and confronted the
entrance wall, I caught my breath. For there on the space directly
opposite the bed hung what, for a moment, I took to be a portrait of
Margarita.
I moved closer and saw that it was a wonderfully perfect etching of a
head by Henner--a first impression, beyond a doubt. It was a girl's
head, half life size, almost in profile, white against the dark rain
of her hair, which covered her shoulders and bust and blackened all
the rest of the picture. The haunting melancholy, the youth, the
purity of that face have become so associated with Margarita and her
home and that part of my life that I can never separate them, though
it has been more than once pointed out to me, and fairly, I dare say,
that the picture does not resemble her so much as I think, that her
type of beauty is larger, less conventional, infinitely richer, and
that, aside from the really unusually suggestive accident of her
likeness, it is only a general effect.
Well, well, it may be. But I dare to believe that I understand,
perhaps better than anybody, why it hung facing that bare cot-bed, and
what it meant to the man who slept so many years of his life there,
dreaming of the woman for whose sake he hung it. He knew what it
recalled to him even as I know what it means to me, and to both of us
it was more than any portrait. For we are fearfully and wonderfully
made so that no reality shall ever content us, and those sudden
sunsets and bars of music and the meaning glance of pictured eyes are
to teach us this....
The picture (etched by Waltner) was framed in a broad band of dull
gold, and under it, on a very slender, delicately carved teak-wood
stand whose inlaid top just held it, was a silver bowl full of orange
and yellow and flaming nasturtiums. They were quite fresh and must
have been put there that morning, for the dew was still on the pale
leaves.
It was inexpressibly touching, this altar-like, vivid touch in the
austere room, and I stood, drowned in a wave of pity and passionate
regret--for what I could not quite tell--before it, overwhelmed by the
close, compelling pressure of these mysterious dead loves: all over
now and gone? Ah, who knows? Who can know? Not Darwin nor Huxley, be
sure!
I went down the stairs, crossed the study and living-room, and after a
comprehensive glance over the little kitchen ell with its simple
_batterie de cuisine_ went up the main staircase, and entered the room
over the study. Here again was a surprise, for this room was
completely furnished in delicate, light bird's-eye maple, fit for a
marquise, all dainty lemon-tinted curves. The exquisite bed was framed
for a canopy, but lacked it; the coral satin recesses of the
dressing-table had faded almost colourless; the chintz of the slender
chairs had lost its pattern. An oval cheval glass reflected the floor
on whose long unpolished surface sprawled two magnificent white bear
skins. But with these furnishings the elegance ended, for nowhere in
the cottage were to be found such curious, mocking contrasts. The
walls, which should have displayed wanton Watteau cherubs, were bare,
clean grey; instead of a satin coverlet a patchwork quilt covered the
fluted bed; no scented glass and ivory and silver-stoppered armoury of
beauty crowded the dressing-table, only a plain brush and comb such as
one might see in some servant's quarters; the beautiful grained
wardrobe's doors, carelessly ajar, spilled no foam and froth of lace
and ribbon and silk stocking: only a beggarly handful of clean,
well-worn print gowns hung from the shining pegs. A battered tin bath
and water-can stood beneath the window, and on a graceful cushioned
_prie-dieu_ instead of a missal lay--of all things--a mouse trap.
I have never in my life stood in a room so contradictory, so utterly
unrelated to its supposed intention. Occupied it certainly was: towels
and soap and sponge, and nightgown neatly folded on the patchwork
quilt, showed that. But of all teasing suggestion of femininity, all
the whimsical, rosy privacy of a girl's bedchamber, all the dainty
nonsense and pretty purity, half artless, half artful, with which
romance has invested this retreat and poetry and song have serenaded
it, Margarita's apartment was entirely void. Even its spotlessness was
not remarkable in a house so noticeable everywhere for this quality,
and as for personality, a nun's cell has more. I think that its utter
scentlessness added to the peculiar impression; there was not a
suggestion of this feminine allurement; not even the homely lavender
or the reminiscent dried roses hinted at the most matter-of-fact
housewife's concession to her sex.
And yet it had its own charm, this strange room, a peculiar French
quality, provided, perhaps, by the mingling of yellow furniture and
soft grey wall spaces; and a quaint atmosphere of something once alive
and breathing and daintily fleshly, cooled and faded and chastened by
inexorable time....
I slept that night in the room with the etching (the silver bowl was
filled with marigolds) and all night I heard the roar of the surf and
the hiss of the breaking waves through my busy dreams.
I woke into a clear storm-swept morning, just after the dawn, very
suddenly, and with no apparent reason for the waking. That is to say,
I thought I woke, but knew instantly that it must be a very pleasant
and odd species of dream, for there in the quiet light, at the foot of
my bed--quite on it, in fact--sat Margarita. She smiled placidly,
classic in her long white nightgown, and I smiled placidly back as one
does in dreams, and prayed not to wake.
"You speak when you sleep do you not, Jerry?" she said calmly,
"because you called my name, but your eyes were closed."
Then a cold sweat broke out on my forehead and I clenched my hands
under the blankets, for I knew I was awake.
"Margarita!" I gasped, "what is it? Why are you here?"
"Because I wanted to talk to you, Jerry," she answered pleasantly.
"Roger is asleep. Do you like this little room? It is my father's."
Her hair hung in two braids; one rosy bare foot showed under her
nightgown, as she sat, her hands clasped about her knees, like a boy.
The upper button of the gown was loose and I saw my milky, gleaming
pearl around her neck; it was no whiter than her even teeth.
"Get down," I said sternly, "get off the bed immediately and go back
to your room. You ought not to have come here!"
"But I do not want to get down, Jerry--the floor is cold. Roger is
asleep and he cannot talk to me. It is like being alone, when anyone
is asleep. Do you not want to talk to me, Jerry?"
"Yes, I want to talk to you, well enough," I answered in a sort of
stupor, "but--but you must go. Please go, Margarita!"
In her abominable perspicacity she answered what I meant, not what I
said.
"No," said she, shaking her head adorably, "I shall not go. Why do you
pull the blanket up to your chin so? Are you cold, too?"
My head was whirling and my breath came uneven through my lips, but I
fixed my eyes on the wall over her head, and this time there was, for
the best of reasons, no ambiguity in my voice.
"I beg and implore you, Margarita, to get down at once," I said, as
steadily as I could. "It is not at all proper for you to be here, and
I do not wish it. If you want to talk to me, I will dress immediately
and go out for a walk with you, but not unless you go instantly. Do
you understand me?"
She sighed plaintively and unclasped her hands from her knees.
"Yes, I understand you, Jerry," she said, dropping her voice that
haunting third, "but I would rather----"
"Are you going?" I cried.
"Y-yes, I am going," she murmured, and with what I knew were backward
imploring glances and argumentative pouts she slipped down,
hesitatingly, hopefully, as a child retreats, and pattered across to
the door.
When I lowered my eyes the room was empty--but where she had sat the
blanket was yet warm!