Used though she was to Nat’s mumbling remarks, Marianne in her anger missed most of this. But she caught the word “jealous” and it was like fuel thrown on the fire of her anger.
“Jealous?” she raged. “Jealous? I’m never jealous! And to spare me, you said? Is it to spare me that I am left to carry in the water alone? All my life long, Nat, I have been toiling for those I love without a word of thanks! Have you mixed the chicken food this morning, Nat? I don’t see it.”
Nat went quietly out of the kitchen, and that small portion of her mind that was not occupied with her own troubles noticed that his face looked suddenly grey. It was years since she had lost her temper like this, and it was the very first time that she had lost it with Nat himself. Then her sobs broke out afresh and she forgot all about him.
She took down the frying pan and began to fry the eggs and bacon. If they were cold by the time William and Véronique arrived, that would be their fault, for it was already long past breakfast time. As she turned the fizzling slices over and over she fought down her sobs, for she was not going to be caught crying by her erring husband and child. They should not know how deeply their callous behavior had hurt her. She had too much pride for that. Jealous! How dared Nat say such a thing? Yet he, at least, loved her still. Vaguely she was aware of him coming in and out, first with the chicken food ready mixed to be boiled over the fire later, and then with buckets of water that he had drawn up from the well, and her anger against her husband stirred afresh. For it was not fair that Nat should have to do William’s work for him. He was a very old man now, probably nearer ninety than eighty, and sometimes she thought that his heart was not strong. It was too bad of William.
A moment later the door opened to admit William, with Véronique just behind him, both of them smiling those broad, yet uneasy smiles with which the erring endeavor to deflect attention from their sins. They opened their mouths wide to utter bright, affectionate remarks, similarly intentioned, but Marianne cut them short.
“You’re very late,” she said coldly. “How untidy you look, Véronique. Nat is drawing the water for you, William.”
“The old scoundrel!” ejaculated William in consternation. “I’ve told him time and again never to do that. It’s too heavy a job. What induced him to do such a thing? I’d have been back in a moment. Where is he?”
“At the well, no doubt,” said Marianne.
William went out and Véronique came to Marianne. “Give me the frying pan, Mamma darling,” she said gaily. “That’s my job, you know.”
“I am aware of it,” said Marianne. “But I am quite accustomed to doing all the work. I have been doing it all my life. Hadn’t you better wash your extremely dirty hands?”
Véronique drew back, biting her lip to keep the tears from coming, and there was a cold, hateful silence in the kitchen, while she washed her hands at the sink and Marianne laid the bacon and eggs, perfectly cooked in spite of her emotion, on a pink china dish.
Then the door was kicked open from outside and the two women turned, startled, to see William standing on the threshold with Nat in his arms.
“Found him lying in a faint over the well parapet,” said William briefly. “Where’s the whiskey?”
2
Two days later Nat died in his sleep of heart failure and extreme old age, his death as easy and painless as a death well can be. He never fully recovered consciousness again, and throughout the last day of his life he was reliving the last hours of the Green Dolphin, standing beside Captain O’Hara on the poop as the great ship sped to her death. Marianne, performing every service for him herself, sitting beside him when there was nothing active that she could do and watching him in an agony of love, wished that he would say one word to her before he went away. But he spoke only to Captain O’Hara, and that in such confused and broken speech that she could seldom make out what he said, until the last sentence of all, which came out clear and strong, almost in the tones of Captain O’Hara’s own voice. “I’m followin’ close behind ye. I’ll be with ye in a moment.” After that he fell asleep and did not wake again.
William and Véronique grieved for Nat, and William reproached himself most humbly for that unpunctuality of his that had been the cause of the old fellow’s death, yet they both sorrowed without bitterness, for after all, dear old Nat had been incredibly old, and they were glad for him that his death had been so peaceful and so easy. Old Nick, too, though he drooped in his cage and molted quite a lot of tail feathers, seemed resigned. The sorrow of the three of them, though sincere, had a gentleness that befitted the circumstances, and against its background the violence of Marianne’s grief appeared almost ridiculous.
“After all, dearest, it isn’t as though you had anything to reproach yourself with,” argued William tenderly, leaning over the foot of the great fourposter and regarding his wife’s ravaged face upon the pillow with considerable perturbation. . . . The blow of Nat’s death, coming upon her when she was overwrought and overtired, had so completely exhausted her that he and Véronique had had to put her to bed, and the sight of Marianne in bed in the daytime, when she was not actually ill, was so astonishing that he felt as perturbed as though this were North Island and there’d been an earthquake. “Not a darned thing with which to reproach yourself,” he repeated energetically. “Astonishing, the way you always looked after the old fellow.”
“You see, he was—the poor,” said Marianne, brokenly. “I promised your father.”
William gaped at her in consternation. Was she lightheaded?
“I’ll not be so nice a woman now he’s gone, William,” she continued. “He called out all that is best in me. He was—the child. I see now why I’ve always loved the poor. They stood to me for the child.”
“What child?” asked the puzzled William.
“There is a child standing alongside us all whom we must love and emulate,” said Marianne. “Otherwise it’s all no good.”
“Upon my word, dearest, I don’t quite know what you’re talking about,” said William, and he came round the bed and laid his great hand on her forehead. “Must have a temperature,” he muttered anxiously.
“I doubt if I know what I’m talking about either,” said Marianne, “but I haven’t got a temperature.”
And then she began weakly to sob again.
“There! There!” said William. “There’s nothing to cry about. You’ve not got a single thing to reproach yourself with. Not a damn thing.”
This parrot cry of his was the least comforting thing he could have said to poor Marianne, for like a thorn stuck in her mind was the unacknowledged knowledge that she had. “It’s because you were late for breakfast that he drew the water from the well,” she sobbed reproachfully.
“Yes, yes, yes,” said William humbly. “All my fault, dearest. All my fault. I’m damn sorry.”
“Don’t swear, William,” sobbed Marianne.
Véronique’s head came round the door. “I’ve some tea here, Mamma. Could you fancy it?”
“Just a cup. My head’s too bad to eat,” lamented Marianne. “William, take your hand off my forehead, you’re driving me distracted.”
William tiptoed on squeaking boots from the room, thankfully leaving the floor to his daughter. Véronique’s pretty face was puckered with distress as she set the tray beside the bed and plumped up her mother’s pillows. Except for an occasional cold in the head, Mamma never ailed, and she was in a regular panic. It couldn’t be only the grief for Nat that was making her so bad. What if she was going into a decline? What if she had scarlet fever or diphtheria? What if she were going to die? Tears rose to Véronique’s eyes, and her heart seemed to be beating in her throat.
“Oh, Mamma, Mamma, I wish I knew what was the matter with you!” she wailed.
Marianne looked up into her daughter’s beautiful tear-filled eyes and saw there a love far greater than she had known Véronique felt for he
r. She had known the child loved her, of course, but she had not known she loved her as much as this. Triumph welled in her at the sight of her daughter’s distress; but after it came that cold calculation that had always enabled her to seize upon everything that came to hand, even the suffering or love of those she cared for, to bring her nearer to that new magical city that all her life long had been looming up so enticingly on her horizon.
“There’s nothing the matter with me, dear,” she said, “but I’m worn out with toiling away year after year in this wretched farm at the back of beyond. It’s rest and change I want, Véronique, and if I don’t get them, I don’t see how I can go on.”
“But of course you must have them, darling Mamma!”
“It would have been so heavenly to have gone and stayed at Dunedin for a bit,” said Marianne, “and smelled the sea again and had a little society. I was born by the sea, you know, and it’s the breath of life to me, and in my girlhood I always moved in the best society. I abandoned everything for your dear Papa, and I’ve never reproached him for the hardships of my life since my marriage, but there are times when one longs for a little ease, a little comfort—”
She wept again, and Véronique’s mind was too distracted by anxiety to note the comfort of her mother’s bedroom, or the pile of exquisite, down-filled pillows against which Marianne was taking her ease at this moment.
“But of course, Mamma,” she cried. “You must go away for a good long holiday. I’ll look after Papa and the house. You need not worry about anything. I’ll look after everything just as you would yourself.”
“I very much doubt if I am fit to go alone, darling,” lamented Marianne. “You’ve no idea how weak and ill I feel.”
“Then I’ll come with you,” said Véronique.
“But I’d be distracted with anxiety if poor Papa was left here all alone without either of us.”
“I know what we’ll do!” cried Véronique in triumph. “We’ll all go! John Ogilvie can look after everything for Papa. Dear old John is as reliable as an oak tree. Papa has said so over and over again.”
Marianne’s broken voice steadied and rose to tones of almost epic tragedy. “There’s nothing in the world,” she declared, “that would root your father up out of this hateful valley. If only you knew, Véronique, how I’ve argued and implored, and all to no purpose!”
“There’s nothing Papa wouldn’t do to get you well, Mamma,” said Véronique. “We love you so dearly, he and I. Leave it to me, Mamma. I’ll persuade him.”
Marianne looked at her daughter over the top of her lace-trimmed handkerchief, and the brightness of her birdlike glance was not due to fever.
“We’d have such fun, Véronique,” she cried. “You’d be able to go to balls and parties, and I could buy you some really smart gowns. You’re so pretty, dearest, and there’s no one here to see you except the silly sheep. You’re so patient about it, darling, but you never have any fun here. Even though it is rather too full of strait-laced Scotch people, there is plenty of society in Dunedin. Now I come to think of it, Mrs. Bennet lives there. She’s a sister of that friend of Aunt Susanna’s whom we stayed with years ago at Nelson, and I have her address. She’s wealthy and moves in the best society. She’d introduce you to the right people. . . . The Union Steamship Company was formed by Dunedin men,” she added, “and your father is so interested in steam. If only he—”
“Leave Papa to me,” interrupted Véronique, her eyes dancing, and flew out of the room. Marianne lay back on her pillows flushed with triumph. She had inserted the thin end of the wedge.
Then into her rosy triumph there intruded a cold little trickle of memory. She was back again in the Le Paradis garden, congratulating herself because Dr. Ozanne’s illness had enabled her to strengthen her hold on William. Why should she think of that just now, and why should the memory make her feel so uncomfortable? She thrust the questions away, poured herself out a second cup of tea, and found that she could eat something after all.
3
Véronique entered the kitchen like a whirlwind and precipitated herself into her father’s arms. “Papa! Papa! Please will you take Mamma and me for a holiday to Dunedin? Oh, Papa, please, please! Mamma will get quite well again if she has a rest and change, and I shall be able to go to balls, Papa, and have some new frocks.”
William looked down soberly at his daughter, and his face hardened and a slight bitterness dawned in his eyes. He had always wondered why Marianne had not tried to enlist her daughter as an ally in her fight to leave the Country of the Green Pastures. She had been waiting, no doubt, for the right moment.
“Of course you and Mamma shall go,” he said. “But you won’t need me. I must stay here.”
“But, Papa, Mamma won’t go unless you go too. She’s made up her mind about that, and you know what Mamma is once she makes up her mind. Oh, Papa, you must come too. You can trust John to look after everything here. You know you can. Oh, Papa, Papa, please, please! Mamma is grieving so dreadfully over Nat, and it will turn her thoughts. I’d like it, too, Papa. You know, Papa, I’ve never been to a proper ball.”
Her face was flushed and sparkling with eagerness, but in the wide blue eyes he saw a dawning of surprise and apprehension, and he knew it was because this was the first time in her life that she had seen him with a hard-set mouth and bitterness in his eyes. If he held out, she might find it difficult to forgive him. . . .
“Have it all your own way, darling,” he said, his cheek against hers. “I’ll do anything that you and Mamma want.”
Chapter III
1
Véronique sat in the window seat of their parlor looking out across the street to the houses opposite. They had taken extremely expensive rooms in one of the most prosperous quarters of Dunedin, and the houses that Véronique looked at were charming and dignified, with flights of steps leading up to front doors flanked by pillars. Trees lined the street, and the smart carriages that drove up and down all day long were checkered by the faintly stirring leaf shadows of high summer. Véronique had pushed the window wide open, so that she might feel the cool breeze upon her hot cheeks; it came from the sea, the cold Pacific that beat against the high cliffs of Dunedin, and the mountain-bred girl welcomed its coolness with delight. She found a town in summer rather stuffy, even Dunedin with its generally rigorous climate, and so did Old Nick, petulantly scratching himself and swearing under his breath in the cage beside her, but whereas Old Nick did not in the least mind expressing his feelings on the subject, Véronique refused to own them even to herself. Dunedin was perfect. Life was an ecstatic whirling dream of fun and laughter, and she had never been so deliriously happy in all her life before. Every evening she assured William of this fact, and every evening his gentle answering smile left her vaguely irritated. Why couldn’t he be more enthusiastic about this glorious holiday that they were having? Why couldn’t he enjoy himself more at the lovely parties they went to? It spoiled things for her to have him not so thrilled over everything as she and Marianne were. She couldn’t help being vexed with him because he was not so thrilled. And imperceptibly, during these last two months, she had drawn a little away from her father and nearer to her mother. . . . Marianne liked Frederick. . . . William had never said he didn’t like Frederick, and he was always exceedingly polite to him, but Véronique knew in her bones that her father was withholding from Frederick that entire devotion that was Frederick’s due.
And she considered it most ungrateful of him, because Frederick had done simply everything for them. They had been in quite humble lodgings at first, clean but not very luxurious. William had gone on to Dunedin ahead of his wife and daughter and found them himself, and had got everything ready to receive Marianne when she and Véronique arrived, even to flowers in bowls on the window sills and books from the circulating library upon the table. Véronique had liked these lodgings, and had enjoyed exploring Dunedin with him, and going shopping with
Marianne, and the novelty of everything had at first completely satisfied her. But Marianne had been discontented from the beginning. She had found the lodgings cramped and the cooking too plain, and she hadn’t got well as quickly as she should have done. William had thought the quiet of the lodgings he had found—they were in a cul-de-sac, and so one was spared the noise of passing carriages—would have been just the thing for her in her exhausted condition, but somehow they hadn’t seemed to be. Mrs. Bennet had been duly notified of their presence and had called, but had turned out to be a sad sufferer from asthma. She was unable to entertain other than very quietly, she had said with a sigh, she was unequal to the exertion. And when she had asked them to her house, there had been no one there under seventy, and it had, indeed, been very quiet. “But she would have put herself out a bit more,” Marianne had said irritably to William, “if we had been in more stylish lodgings.” And William had looked very discouraged, and Marianne had gone to bed early with a headache, though she had done nothing at all to bring it on, had scarcely, in fact, except for the dull party, stirred out of her armchair all day.
And then Frederick had come to the rescue, exactly like the prince in a fairy tale.
Véronique and Marianne had attended an afternoon concert dressed in the very smartest of their new gowns, Marianne in purple silk, be-ribboned and flounced, with a very smart little hat trimmed with violets, and Véronique in pale blue, the overskirt draped in U-shaped folds in front and hitched up at the back to show an underskirt composed of hundreds of cascading frills. Her little white hat had been tipped well forward over her nose so as to show the mass of pale gold ringlets at the back of her head, and had had a blue feather in it. When they had entered the vestibule, Frederick had just been entering too, and had stood politely aside, with a most graceful bow, to let them go in first. Marianne had swept past him with a regal inclination of the head, but Véronique had paused a moment intending to say thank you, because she thought it was so good of him to bow like that to strangers. . . . And then, as she had stood there rooted to the ground like the nymph Daphne, a strange glow had thrilled through her, so that even her fingertips tingled. . . . For this was the lover of her dreams.