Green Dolphin Street

  “Time to go home,” he said abruptly.

  John elected to come too. “Just as far as the bridge,” he said, and it was he who helped Véronique onto her pony, lifting her with a swift, easy swing, scrupulously not letting his hands linger on her body or his eyes meet hers, and he who walked beside her, laughing and talking with her, holding her bridle when the path was rough and stony.

  William fell behind, of deliberate intent, so that John might have a free field. John, usually so taciturn, always had a good deal to say to Véronique; William could hear the murmur of his gentle, low-pitched Scotch voice and Véronique’s answering happy laughter. Only when she was with John was there quite that bell-like note in her laughter.

  He forbore to hurry them, even though time was going on and to be late back might lead to difficulties with Marianne. Watching them, he acknowledged to himself that it was not only, though chiefly, for Véronique’s sake that he so deeply desired this marriage. It was for his own sake too. If Véronique were to marry a valley man, he and she would never be far apart. When he said to himself that there was no price he would not pay for her happiness, it was always with a half-unconscious reservation—that he himself should never lose her.

  Chapter II

  1

  Marianne had restricted the acreage of looking glass in her daughter’s room lest vanity be encouraged, but in her own she saw her reflection at every turn. Besides the looking glass on her dressing table, and the hand mirror that she kept on the table beside the bed, there were two long pier glasses let into the panels of the wardrobe in which it was possible to see the whole of one’s person from top to toe. It was very necessary that one should, at her age, she considered. When a woman is fifty-six years old and for twenty-four years has endured the rigors of pioneering in a new country, she is no longer in any danger of vanity when she looks in the glass, but she needs to see herself from every angle if her façade of dignity is to be equally impressive to the beholder whether he beholds from north, south, east, or west.

  For that was what she aimed at now, dignity. As a girl, since she could not be beautiful, she had decided to be chic, and had been it, but she had most surprisingly put on weight just lately, and you cannot be chic and stout. But you can be dignified and stout—look at Queen Victoria—and Marianne, though she did not yet equal Her Majesty in the matter of embonpoint, outdid even her great exemplar in the matter of dignity. The dignity of Marianne Ozanne at this date was really quite astonishing.

  The clothes of the period helped. As she stood before the two long pier glasses on this fairest of fair spring mornings, adjusting the dark green folds of her morning gown, she decided that there is nothing like a bustle for dignity. On girls like Véronique she disliked it, for it tended to detract from their natural grace, but for women who were no longer slim it was just the thing. That sixteen-inch projection at the back was in itself a suggestion that extenuation of outline is desirable, and the elegant drapings of the voluminous gown that incorporated it into its being were a further declaration that quantity as well as quality is required for supreme excellence.

  Encouraged by this thought, rustling with importance, Marianne moved back to her dressing table to put on her heavy gold locket, her gold watch and chain, and the greenstone earrings that she still wore sometimes in memory of Captain O’Hara. She always put the final touches to her toilette at her dressing table, for the draped looking glass with its back to the light gave a more flattering reflection of her face than did the pier glass. There is less to be done about an aging face than an aging figure; more’s the pity, thought Marianne. Beneath the demurely parted grey hair her face was sallower than ever, and very lined. But there was still something to be said for it, she thought. She had not, like Queen Victoria, been beaten by her mouth, for she could still smilingly frustrate its tendency to droop at the corners, and the glance of her dark eyes was still bright and birdlike. Tai Haruru, were they to meet again, would recognize her.

  But she knew they would never meet again, and it was odd, and a little exasperating, that at every dawning she should think of him, and at the first glimmer of starshine, and during those rare, brief moments of her busy day when some shape or sound of beauty made her pause for a moment and look or listen. And peculiar that she, who had never been a dreamer, should dream now so constantly that she was running home to him through a dark wood, and odder still that in these dreams she should always be a little girl.

  For it was William whom she believed to be the one man in her life, whose soul by day she was still seeking up and down the hills and valleys of that arid, adventurous country where her spirit lived, that country where the beautiful city on the horizon always turned out to be a desert mirage when one got to it. This turning of the city into a mirage, this pursuit of William’s spirit by her spirit, were twin facts that she scarcely acknowledged to herself, but so wearied was the woman by the perpetual escape of the quarry, the perpetual withdrawal of the city, that of late years, though hardly aware of it, she had turned with relief to the peculiar dreams that turned her into a little girl again running home to Tai Haruru. In her dream she never reached the home with the lighted windows that was built in the wood, yet the sense of fear and frustration that tormented her in the daytime pursuit of William was not present in this dream. For the little girl in the dream knew that fairy tales always have the right ending, and knew that this was a fairy tale because she had been inside one before and knew the feel of it. . . . Marianne Ozanne had stood in Tai Haruru’s arms under the stars at Wellington.

  But the aging woman of fifty-six who was adjusting earrings and watch and chain and locket before her glass had almost forgotten the sensations of that brief experience; had indeed not tried to remember them, because a full understanding of herself was not a thing that she had ever wanted. . . . Those rare moments of humility when some measure of it had come to her had always proved most disintegrating and uncomfortable. . . . It was only the little girl of the dream who was wise enough to know that there are more sorts of love than one, only the little girl who knew that Marianne Ozanne the woman had mistaken the nature of the city she wanted and had been throughout her life pursuing the wrong man. Had she paid any attention to the life of her spirit, the persistent intrusion of Tai Haruru into it might have told Marianne that the right man does not have to be pursued. There had been neither pursuit nor withdrawal upon the deck of the Orion, nor in the garden of the Parsonage at Wellington, only a tacit acknowledgment of oneness.

  What was he doing now? wondered Marianne, taking a handkerchief from her drawer. Ringing the bell for Mass in that ridiculous church at the world’s end that he had described in that one long letter he had written to her and William about a year after he had left them? Setting out for a day’s work in the forest among his precious kauri trees? Sitting on the seashore in the sun smoking his long curved pipe and waiting for that crazy priest he lived with to come back from a night’s fishing? His letter, carried through the wilderness by a Maori to the nearest coast settlement where trading ships put in, had been months in transit, but its many pages had been penned with such vigor and freshness that they had brought his life as vividly before her as though for a while she had lived it with him and were recapturing it in memory. . . . Even now, when she paused in her work, there came sometimes the odd feeling that she not only had lived it with him, but was living it. . . . But this was a sensation that she quickly thrust aside, for she disliked odd feelings and had no wish to become as crazy as he was himself . . . he and Samuel.

  That couple of lunatics! Angrily she banged the drawer of her dressing table shut and flung open the windows to the sweet morning air. Mad as hatters, both of them. And Samuel had been worse than mad, he had been a monster of selfishness into the bargain. Tai Haruru had at least been without ties, but Samuel had been a married man and had had no right whatever to break the heart of her poor Susanna in the way he had. She had no patience with him, and in the st
ory of his death was unable to find anything at all except the pigheadedness and self-will of a man who has never been properly broken in by his wife. . . . William would never have gone adventuring off by himself like that. He’d have known better than even to suggest such a thing.

  Luckily Susanna, judging by her letters, saw it all differently. Tai Haruru, when he visited her in Wellington, had doubtless managed to present the whole crazy business in a favorable light, and once the violence of her first grief had passed, she had been able to regard herself with inordinate pride as the wife of a martyr. Well, let her, poor soul, if that comforted her, Marianne had thought, and in the letters that she had written back in answer to Susanna’s outpourings she had encouraged the idea, while insisting vehemently that Susanna should leave New Zealand, that she had always disliked, and return to England where the tranquilizing effect of a settled government and the Gulf Stream encouraged a mode of behavior in men and weather less calculated to undermine a woman’s peace.

  But Susanna, most surprisingly, had refused to do any such thing. With an obstinacy surprising in one so gentle, she had elected to remain in Wellington and teach in the school there, in the hope of one day becoming a missionary herself. And when the second Maori war had at last dragged to its conclusion, she had had her wish. Two years ago, in 1872, when the last vestiges of rebellion had died away, when there were no more massacres and the white folk could once again draw easy breath, she had been one of a small company of white men and women who established a mission station at the very village in the forest where Samuel had died. They had found his grave with the cross still intact, so terrified had been the Maoris of the curses of Tai Haruru the Sounding Sea. They had built a stout wooden church upon the side of the burned-out little hut that had been his church, and a dispensary where had been his dispensary; and Marianne would be interested to hear, wrote Susanna in glowing pride, that they had made a few converts already. Marianne was not particularly interested. If she was interested in any mission, it was a Roman Catholic one at the world’s end, about which she had been told only once, and was not likely to be told again.

  No, she would not hear from Tai Haruru again. She knew that quite certainly. Her only contact with him now was this strange holding of him in her thoughts and dreams by day and night, that she accomplished without any volition of her own.

  She consulted the large, important-looking gold watch that was tucked into her waistband, that William had given her when the tide of their fortunes had first turned in this place and he had had a little money to spare for luxuries. She smiled tenderly as she consulted it. It had not been anything for himself that he had bought, nor even for Véronique, but a watch and chain for his wife. It was ridiculous of her to feel sometimes that he was not yet entirely hers. She had made him and saved him, and he worshipped her.

  It was a pity that there was no one to see her sail down the stairs and into the kitchen. Her exits and entrances had always been memorable, but now, with her added weight, they had become positively majestic. She herself, this morning, expecting to find William, Véronique, and Nat all in the kitchen to greet her, felt her superb entry fall flat. Majesty is scarcely majesty without subservient servitors, and Old Nick’s raucous, “Oh, my, dearie!” was more mocking than subservient. She eyed him coldly. She loved him no better as the years went on, and found his obstinate longevity as irksome as it was astounding. She looked about her. Where in the world were they all? The kettle was singing on the hob and the table was laid, but Véronique should have been frying the bacon and eggs and cutting the bread, William should have been bringing in water from the well, and Nat mixing up the food for the chickens. Her mouth set a little grimly as she tied on an apron and prepared to do Véronique’s work for her.

  But she had done no more than stretch out her hand for the frying pan when that hand was arrested in mid-air. The frying pan hung always on a hook by the grandfather clock, with Véronique’s crop on a hook just below it, and the crop was not there. It needed only that tiny fact, combined with William’s sheepishness early this morning, to tell her what had happened. Once again, like a couple of naughty children playing truant from their schoolmarm, they had run off to enjoy themselves without her knowledge. Several times before, she had caught them doing this, and had said nothing, and they had not known that she had known. But this morning William had actually lied to her. That was too much. White-faced, she held on to the kitchen table fighting an onslaught of the old anger that she had never expected to feel again. She was in truth very tired. Her years of struggle had taxed even her vitality, and she had been short of sleep last night, so long had she and William argued about the relative values of steam and gold and sheep. She was incredibly tired, and her fatigue opened the way to her anger. Why must they deceive her in this way? Had she ever begrudged them their pleasures? No, never, and she worked her fingers to the bone for them. She was an old woman, worn out before her time, and all because she had toiled night and day for years and years for a couple of ingrates who had not even sufficient affection for her to admit her to their confidence. She had given her whole life to William, only to have him desert her now for the child she had given him; and that same child preferred the father who had suffered for her not so much as an ache in his little finger to the mother who had borne her in so much pain. Here she was, alone in this beautiful home that she had made for them, expected to fry the bacon and eggs and bring the water from the well without assistance, while they went gallivanting off up the mountains without a single thought for anyone or anything except their own selfish pleasure. Leaving her alone here. Alone. Even Nat, who ought to have been here mixing up the chickens’ food, was out in the stable fussing over those wretched animals whom he cared for far more than he cared for Marianne Ozanne, who had opened her home to him when Captain O’Hara died, who had given him such astonishing love and devotion, recking nothing at all of the burden that his increasing years and frailty laid upon her already overburdened strength. Yes, she was near the breaking point now. She had toiled and toiled for years and years, only to be left quite alone at the end of it all without a word of thanks from a single soul for whom she had labored. It had always been like this. Not a word of thanks had she ever had for all the work she had done for the poor on the Island. And no one really loved her. They might say they did, but they didn’t. Tai Haruru had said he loved her, but he had ridden off to the world’s end and left her to tackle the new life in South Island quite alone. Her husband and child might say they loved her, but they rode off up the mountains to enjoy themselves without her. Nat might indicate affection by those queer noises he made, but he was not here with her now in this misery. She sank down onto the chair behind her, covered her face with her hands and wept.

  “Oh, my!” squawked Old Nick. The spectacle of her rare tears always filled him with unholy glee. He rocked himself from side to side on his perch, screeching detestably, and his mockery was so cruel and hateful that she picked up the tea cosy and flung it at him, then dropped her dignified head right down on her arms on the table and sobbed again.

  A hand was laid on her shoulder with a reassuring pressure, and a series of loving and distressful noises went off like fireworks in her right ear. She looked up to find Nat beside her, his one eye anxiously searching her face, his ancient monkey countenance puckered into a mask of distress that would have been comical but for the anguish of it, the anguish of love that asks nothing better than to take upon itself all the pain of the beloved but is denied that supreme joy by the insulating nature of pain, that once let loose makes of its victim a lost island in the flood. Your country can be my country, Nat cried out voicelessly to Marianne, and your God mine, where you live I can live and there can I be buried, but your pain cannot be my pain, and because it cannot, I too am in pain, and so we look at each other across the double flood of it and know the ultimate sorrow of mortality.

  Marianne was all at once most deeply touched and most profoundly irritat
ed. To realize for the first time the greatness of Nat’s love for her, that was balm, but the knowledge that this terrific scene of emotion had been called forth by such a trivial incident, that she was in fact making an enormous fuss about nothing, was galling to her pride and rubbed her up the wrong way so completely that she flashed out at poor Nat in a perfect fury of self-justification.

  “No, I’m not ill,” she stormed in answer to his anxious noises of inquiry. “Not ill, only bitterly hurt. Why do they go off like this without telling me?”

  “To spare ye, ma’am,” said Nat.

  “To spare me?” demanded Marianne.

  “Ye see, ma’am,” said Nat gently, and speaking the exact truth, as was his habit, “if Mr. Ozanne and Miss Véronique tell ye they are seekin’ a bit of pleasure without ye, it bein’, maybe, somethin’ they can’t invite ye to partake in, such as ridin’, ye, ma’am, never havin’ learnt to ride, why then, ma’am, ye’re that hurt an’ jealous that it grieves ’em. An’ so, ma’am, ye see, they keep silent.”