Green Dolphin Street

  William and Marianne had won the friendship of their neighbors less quickly than their little daughter. The homesteads were so far apart, the men and women who lived in them so desperately hard-worked, that they could not foregather very much. And William and Marianne were not Scotch, and so were regarded somewhat in the light of foreigners by that clannish race. And then the way in which they had taken possession of Alec Magee had seemed to their neighbors a little odd. Had he really wished to take them into partnership, or to make that will, leaving them everything he died possessed of; or had that sharp-tongued, shrewish little woman persuaded him into it? They were without proof that she had, and they were also without proof as to the means by which William Ozanne had so very soon become the wealthiest sheep farmer in the district. Sheep farming demanded large areas of land for its success, and Magee had owned very little. Land had to be purchased from the New Zealand Company, the price of it was high, and William had obviously had very little capital behind him at the start. Yet as the years went on, more and more of the mountain pastures seemed to be his. There were, of course, methods by which a man could become possessed of land without buying all of it outright. He could buy narrow strips of pasture which were so situated as to enclose a large area to which no one else had access and of which he therefore had undisputed use. Or there was “dummying”—shepherds bought land cheaply apparently for themselves, in reality for their masters. Well, they were none of them above reproach, and just as in the early days in North Island it had been a matter of delicacy not to inquire into a man’s personal history, so nowadays in South Island one did not ask how he had come by his land. . . . Only, none of them had come by their wealth quite as quickly as William. . . . But the men had to make friends with him in the end, he was such a good fellow, such good company, so hugely kind, and so obviously browbeaten by his forceful wife. The women could never really like Marianne; her clothes were too smart for a farmer’s wife, and she captivated the men with them at the rare local festivities with a thoroughness that was not seemly in a woman of her age; and the brilliance of her talk was a thing that they themselves could not aspire to; nor could they bake cakes like hers. . . . But she was the mother of Véronique, and that was a circumstance that covered a multitude of sins.

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  And, in her husband’s eyes, covered them all. For she was not only the mother of Véronique, it was her genius that had created for her child the perfect setting for her life. The original tumble-down wooden farmhouse had now been repaired and enlarged into a house out of a fairy tale. Year by year, as their prosperity increased, Marianne had been adding to its attractions, contented while there had been so much still left to do, discontented only now that her creation was finished down to the last shelf in the store cupboard and the last dimity frill in Véronique’s bedroom. It had been Véronique’s bedroom that she had made first, enduring heaven knew how many jolting wagon journeys to the nearest town to buy pretty furniture and flowered pink hangings, and a little round mirror that should be large enough to show Véronique if her hair was tidy but not large enough to reveal her beauty to her and encourage vanity. Then she had tackled the parlor, with its small upright piano for Véronique to play on, its blue brocade curtains, pretty china ornaments, and lovely, fragile pieces of furniture. It was not until Véronique’s bedroom and the parlor with her piano had been perfect down to the last detail that Marianne had turned her attention to the immense fourposter for herself and William, in place of the rough mattresses on the floor that they had had hitherto, a wardrobe like a mausoleum, and a washstand with a marble top. . . . The carting of these articles of furniture up the steep rocky road that led to the valley, and the inserting of them into the farmhouse, a matter of great difficulty requiring the removal of several windows, was now one of the valley sagas and would not cease to be recited while any lived who had beheld the miracle. . . . Then there had been Nat’s little room in the roof to be made comfortable and shipshape, and the pantry and still room and store cupboards and dairy to be made as up-to-date as possible, and then, but only then, had she turned her attention to the kitchen.

  To be met with a flat refusal, on the part of her husband and daughter, to have it touched. They were prepared to put up with the number and breakability of the parlor ornaments to please her, and William was resigned to the nightly incarceration of himself in the stuffy fourposter, and Véronique never said that the pink of her bedroom curtains was a color she disliked, but they would not have the kitchen touched. They loved it just as it was, with the great, wide fireplace where on winter evenings, with snow falling in the mountains, they sat before the blazing logs and told each other stories, the inglenook where motherless lambs were sometimes laid to keep warm and where Véronique petted them and fed them with warm milk from a baby’s bottle, the smoke-blackened beams where home-cured hams and bunches of herbs hung from the hooks, the rag rug made by Alec Magee’s mother upon the clean-scrubbed stone floor, the settle and the copper pans that had belonged to Alec, the old grandfather clock that had been his, and the purple tobacco jar. To Marianne, Alec Magee had been merely a means to an end, but William and Véronique had been fond of him; and they would not have his mother’s rag rugs banished to the attic, nor his tobacco jar placed anywhere except in the place of honor on the mantelpiece. Véronique, always so lovingly amenable to all her mother’s wishes, had been curiously obstinate about the kitchen. It was hers, she had cried out in a sudden fit of temper, on that day when Marianne had finished with the rest of the house and was turning her attention to the kitchen; it was hers and Papa’s, she had made it for herself and Papa, and Mamma was not to touch it. And Marianne, stabbed to silence by the bitter hurt of her daughter’s words, had looked about her and noted with astonishment that Véronique had made the kitchen. All her little treasures, that one would have expected her to keep in her bedroom, she kept here. The lacquer desk and the Chinese workbox, which Marguerite had sent to her niece as soon as she had returned to the Island, stood on a table beside the grandfather clock. The absurd little box of shells from La Baie des Petits Fleurs stood on the mantelpiece between the tobacco jar and a particularly blatant tea caddy ornamented with a portrait of Queen Victoria, a present from Nat that Véronique adored. The cross-stitch kettle holder had been made by Véronique, and the little sampler of a ship in full sail that hung over the mantelpiece. She kept bowls full of flowers in special places. On the wall beside the window where Old Nick hung in his cage, within reach of the deep window seat where she so often sat, her father had hung the bookshelf he had made for her. It held her few precious books, her Bible and Pilgrim’s Progress, Grimm’s fairy tales, Shakespeare and Milton, and a fat manuscript book in which she had written out the old tales her father had told her when she was small, the tales of Green Dolphin Country and the Island. She had no taste for scientific study, as her mother had had at her age, but she had Marianne’s clear mind, which, combined with her father’s imagination, had given her a taste for literature which had been encouraged by Mr. Ogilvie, her beloved Scotch schoolmaster. And she had her mother’s gift of concentration upon the matter in hand. She could sit curled up on the window seat reading for an hour at a time, completely oblivious of whatever might be going on in the kitchen around her. Yes, it was Véronique’s room. Though Marianne and her maids bustled about it all day long, though lambs bleated in the inglenook and shepherds came knocking at the door, though Nat came and went with pails of milk and baskets of vegetables and the cat and her kittens thought the place theirs, yet it remained Véronique’s room. After Marianne, always so tired these days, had gone early to bed, Véronique and her father sat together and watched the logs fall from rosy flame to feathery ash, and in the grey dawns it was more often than not they who kindled the fire on the hearth again. That was as it should be, William thought. This room where the fire on the hearth burned all the year round was the center of life for house and farm, and so it was natural that Véronique should guard the fire and that this sho
uld be her special room, for the whole of this place existed solely for Véronique.

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  “Quick now,” he said. “The kettle’s boiling. Make that cup of tea for Nat and come along, or we’ll be back late and upset your mother.” He was thankful that Véronique had ordained this visit to Nat and the cow, for it turned his lie to Marianne into a truth.

  Véronique was already dressed in her habit of warm blue cloth, and her curls were done up tidily on top of her head. She needed no hat in this free, wild country. She made Nat’s tea, very strong and sweet as he liked it, poured it into a can and put it into a basket with some little cakes, and took her crop from its corner by the grandfather clock. Then they lifted the latch of the door and stole outside.

  They pushed open a door and were at once enfolded in the warm, lantern-lit enchantment of the stable.

  “How are they, Nat?” asked William.

  “Doin’ fine,” said Nat, with pride, and William watched him with a smile as Véronique knelt down to caress Rhoda and the calf. Nat had been astonishingly happy these last ten years. Blessings on Marianne, thought William. It was he who had saved Nat’s life, but it was she who had made it worth living after it had been saved. It was he who had invented the Country of the Green Pastures as a fairy tale for Véronique’s entertainment, but she who had translated it into actual, satisfying fact. Quite suddenly, he realized what he owed to her. He was a blundering ass of a fellow, capable of good moments but of no sustained direction of purpose, but she had given the direction and guided their lives to this complete and perfect happiness; that might be theirs for years to come, if only she would now let them be.

  That “if only,” the knowledge that life, like a restless woman, lets nothing stay still as it is, was like a sudden cold draft blowing down the back of his neck. He turned abruptly away and went to the far end of the stable to saddle their horses; Véronique’s white pony and the stout chestnut cob who supported his master’s great weight with such exemplary fortitude and patience.

  But cantering through the green meadow beyond the farm with Véronique, he forgot that momentary dull in the delight of the moment. He himself was a clumsy rider who would have preferred his own feet to a horse’s back any day had not the great distances that he had to cover, if he was to keep his eye upon the whole of his domain, made a horse a necessity; but Véronique rode as though she had been born on horseback, and to be with her was to share her joy.

  They cantered over a stout wooden bridge that spanned one of those swift, clear streams that came down from the mountains to water their delectable valley, across another meadow, and then their sure-footed horses were climbing a steep path up the hillside. Though the sun had not yet lifted above the mountains, it was full daylight now, with the mist still opaque but thinning to an opalescent veil of light that would soon be the sun-shot blue of infinite space. The turf was a pure bright green, the bushes misted over with the delicate bright gauze of spiders’ webs. They rode in silence, attentive, as the valley music of bird song died away behind them, to the music of the high hills that almost imperceptibly stole in and took its place, that music of distant sheep bells blended with the murmur of falling streams that can stir some hearts more deeply than any other music in the world. It could so stir Véronique, for it was the music of her own country.

  Véronique spoke first. “Let’s go and look at our hoggets,” she said.

  They climbed a little further, dismounted, and, leading the horses reached the lip of one of those lovely green cups of shelter that were to be found hidden here and there within the folds of these hills. One did not know it was there until one had climbed to the summit of the long ridge of rock that protected it upon this eastern side and looked down upon the wide green lawn below, dotted with the beautiful yearling merinos. There were hundreds of them cropping the spring turf, and Véronique laughed for joy at the sight. They had only lately been moved up from the valley below, where they had wintered, and they were in ecstasy at their change of quarters. Their short tails quivered as they ate, and their bodies gleamed white in the early sunshine. Yet when they looked round at their owners they had the faces of wise old dowagers. And, in repose, the dignity. They knew their worth, perhaps. Some instinct had made them aware of the price of wool at this period.

  “There’s something wrong with grass that has not got sheep upon it,” said Véronique.

  William laughed. “There speaks the true shepherdess.”

  Véronique looked up at him, flushing with pleasure. “A shepherdess,” she said softly. “I like that.”

  And then her eyes went to the far end of the green lawn where there was a rough hut built of piled stones, and were shadowed with disappointment because there seemed no one there. . . . A shepherdess. Where was the shepherd? . . . Resolutely she turned back to William and plunged into animated talk upon the subject of the hoggets. She had always known a lot about the practical side of her father’s trade, and just lately, he had noticed, she had been at great pains to inform herself accurately as to statistics.

  “Is this fall in the price of wool serious, Papa?” she asked him wisely.

  “No, Véronique,” he replied, his eyes twinkling with amusement, for he had noticed that quite unconscious search of Amaryllis for Lycidas. “The boom years are over, but there will always be a demand for wool. I’m not making the money that I did, but then to my way of thinking I was making a bit too much a few years back. I’m one of those fellows who find a lot of money hanging round my neck burdensome. I want no more than what is sufficient to keep our home exactly as it is.”

  “Nor I, Papa,” she answered fervently. “But Mamma—”

  She checked herself, for there was a tacit understanding between these two that they should never criticize their wife and mother to each other. But for her that adored home down in the valley would never have existed at all.

  “Grand morning.”

  John Ogilvie had come up behind them and taken them by surprise. They swung round in greeting, and Véronique, with the sun in her eyes, put up her hand to shield them that she might see John the better. With absolute un-self-consciousness she looked up at his face, delighting in him with the frankness of a child, laughing a little because he was so good to see. Her father glanced at her intently. No, she did not know yet. Her delight in John was of the same quality as her delight in her home, in the beauty of the morning, in the hoggets. He was just a part of it all, he always had been, and she had not waked up yet to the fact that he was the most integral part.

  And the man? William’s glance went to John’s face, and then quickly away again, shamed. Not right to look at a man at quite such a naked moment. But curse the fellow! If Véronique had not had the sun in her eyes, surely she would have seen; and John had promised William that she should not see just yet. Four months ago, when John had first spoken to William of his love for Véronique, William had pleaded that she was a child still, and had asked John to wait. He had spoken so not out of selfishness, for his deep love for Véronique desired her eventual marriage with this man more than anything else on earth, but because he believed she was not quite ready yet, either mentally or physically. And John, with the insight of a love that was almost as great as William’s, had accepted the decision, and was waiting. He was six years older than Véronique, but that was no great age, and like all countrymen he was inured to patience.

  But it was damned hard on the poor fellow, William thought, and compassion compelled him to glance at him once more. John had got himself in hand again. That brief flare-up of passion that had set his tanned face burning, widened his eyes, and tightened his mouth as though with a sudden tremor of fiery pain had gone, leaving him becalmed in his usual quietude.

  Marianne considered John a lazy, stupid fellow. She was deceived by the slow deliberation of his movements and the fact that he did not speak unless he had something to say. She did not like him. She did not like the stead
y regard of his keen grey eyes that went on looking at the object or person before them until it seemed they knew all there was to know about it or her, when they would blink suddenly, just once, as though the mind behind the eyes had totted up a total and drawn a line. And the great kindness that was always in his eyes did not necessarily leave one with the feeling that his deductions had been other than entirely accurate; any more than the tenderness that was in his slow, wide smile could disguise the obstinacy of his mouth and the strength of his jaw. Vaguely Marianne felt this man to be a threat and a portent, a symbol of an unchangeable way of life that would clamp down upon her husband and child for good and all if she was not careful, and in consequence she couldn’t abide him. It was William’s most desperate and urgent hope, just at present, that the gradual drawing together of Véronique and John should escape her notice until their oneness was a thing that even she could not divide. She had noticed nothing yet, for John, instinctively aware of her dislike and uneasy with her, had up till now been as reticent as a clam in her presence. Moreover, she thought of him as a mere common shepherd, of the earth earthy, and her ambitions for her child had soared so high that they had quite lost sight of things down on the earth.

  John’s early brilliance had led his father to expect great things of him and to endure many deprivations to send his son to school at Dunedin. . . . He was not to be a mere country dominie, like his father, but to become headmaster of Dunedin College at the very least. . . . But John had disappointed his father. With a good education behind him, and a fine mind, he had chosen to come back to the valley where he had been born and devote his life to sheep, and among his elders only William had not expressed surprise. For William knew that there are some places, like some mothers, that have more power than others of binding their children to them. And there are some children, natives of certain lovely valleys, certain hill towns or hamlets by the sea, whose roots cannot be dragged out of their native soil without agony. These are those whose birthplace is the physical counterpart of their especial spiritual country. They are doubly at home, doubly blessed if they are left where they belong, doubly wretched if they are uprooted. John was one of these children, and Véronique was another. They were nymph and shepherd, Amaryllis and Lycidas; and looking from one to the other in the fresh mountain dawn, terror seized William. For the rude winds of the world may be powerless against the flowers of Paradise, but they can wither the flowers of Arcadia very easily, and it would be difficult, even for his great love, to keep them from blowing in.