He came in sight of the brightly lit windows of his house, and his song died abruptly on his lips. The lights should have been so welcoming; but yet, somehow, they were not. That place of the fire on the hearth—home—it struck him suddenly that he and Marianne had never really had it. At the settlement there had been so much bitterness; and the Green Pastures, that he still loved better than any spot on earth, he saw now to have been always more Véronique’s home than his and Marianne’s. And this house, dedicated to dinner parties, had never seemed to him to belong to anyone except the servants.
Before he had time to insert his latchkey, the front door was flung open by the butler and his overcoat peeled off him before he had time to rescue the parcels in the pockets. The man removed them—the flaxen curls of a doll were showing through the paper of one of them, and some lollipops fell on the floor from another—with an impassive countenance that yet managed to combine obsequiousness with a veiled contempt in a way that fell little short of genius, and stood holding them, awaiting William’s instructions. Confound the fellow! William detested servants shooting up around him like mushrooms at every step he took. “Put ’em in the library,” he said irritably. “Mrs. Ozanne in?”
“Awaiting you in the parlor, Sir. Dinner has been put back.”
The tone of the man’s voice implied reproof, and William stumped upstairs to change, feeling like a chidden child. In the smaller house, thank God, they’d not be able to afford a butler.
Twenty minutes later, clad in his perfectly cut evening clothes, he faced Marianne across the glittering expanse of their dinner table, with its shining damask and silver and bowls of exquisitely arranged flowers. Marianne wore a gown of cherry-colored velvet tonight with a fichu of exquisite lace, and the diamonds in her ears sparkled when she moved her shapely head. Her detractors vowed that she dressed in a fashion most unsuitable for her years, disdaining the bonnets and somber colors affected by most old ladies. Yet her bizarre clothes always became her, and she was looking especially fine tonight. William opened his mouth to tell her so, but remembered the presence of the butler just in time.
“Storm before morning,” he said. “The wind was getting up as I came home.”
Marianne made a suitable reply, and they talked upon impersonal topics with great skill throughout the length of the elaborate meal. It had taken Marianne a long time to train William in the art of conversing before servants, but he could do it now to admiration. Her heart swelled with pride as she looked at him sitting there benign and immaculate at the head of the table. Who could believe that this handsome old gentleman was the same being as the rough lumberman who had come to meet her at Wellington? Her fight was won. She’d made a grand thing of William.
They were alone at last in their armchairs, one on each side of the parlor fire, Marianne with her knitting, William with a newspaper that he had no intention of reading. With a sigh of relief he slipped his heels out of his too-tight evening shoes, folded his hands across his waistcoat and prepared to doze. Old Nick was already asleep, in a very smart new cage, with a green satin cover on the top. A tendency to sleep more and to limit his vocabulary to the one ejaculation, “Oh, my!”—uttered with so many shades of meaning that the limitation was scarcely any restriction at all—were the only signs he gave of an age that by this time was surely colossal. His health was still excellent, and Marianne had long ago given up all hope of his demise. He would outlive her to a certainty.
“William!” she said, “don’t slouch like that. Sit up. I want to talk to you.”
William opened his eyes, sighed, and levered himself to an upright position. “Yes, dear?”
“What sort of meeting did you have this afternoon?”
“Deuced unpleasant,” said William. “Business is bad. The sooner we get out of this house, dear, the better.”
Marianne’s needles clicked on sharply, and she did not even raise her head as she said decidedly, “And the sooner we get out of this country, the better.”
“Eh?” ejaculated William.
“I said,” repeated Marianne, “the sooner we get out of this country, the better. If we stay on here, we shall only lose what little money we have left. You’ve not much head for business, you know, William, and if it hadn’t been for me we’d have been bankrupt long ago. I don’t blame you of course, dear, it’s the way you’re made, but I’m too tired now to continue playing the man’s part as well as the woman’s. I need rest in my old age, and rest is a thing that one cannot encompass in a new country. We’ll go back to Europe, back to the Island, William, and end our days at Le Paradis. No. 3 is a house eminently suitable for dignified retirement, and we’ve enough money, if you’re not too extravagant and leave the management of our affairs to me, to contrive quite nicely. That little trouble you got into in China is so long ago that no one will remember it now. And it will be an excellent thing for Véronique and her children to have us settled in Europe. As the children get older she will be able to bring them to visit us. That will broaden their minds, and hers, and give her a rest from John and that dreadful farm life to which you condemned her when you married her to him. But I am not only thinking of Véronique, William, I am thinking a little, too, of Marguerite. For a whole lifetime she has been separated from her nearest and dearest. It will be an unspeakable joy to her to see us once again.”
Marianne’s voice had flowed on quietly and her needles had not ceased to flash and click. And still she did not look up. So matter-of-fact was she that she might have been suggesting that they should have coffee for breakfast instead of tea.
“Eh?” whispered William hoarsely.
“It would be sweet to go home, William,” continued Marianne very softly. “That lovely little Island—no one knows what it cost me to leave it when I came out here to this raw, terrible country to marry you. Only your great need of me, William dear, could have induced me to leave it. I was born there, William. I should like to die there.”
And now, at last, she looked up and their eyes met. Her eyes were lovelier now in her old age than they had ever been, he thought. Though bright as ever, they were not so needle sharp.
“William?” she pleaded softly.
He gave her no answer. He heaved himself up out of his chair and blundered over to the library door like a blind man, knocking over two flower vases and a small table on his way. He went in, shut the door, and locked it. Marianne rang for the butler. “Mop up that water if you please,” she said, and continued calmly with her knitting. The thought that her servants were commenting upon the little incidents of her personal life never disturbed her as it did William. Feeling herself the inhabitant of a more exalted world than theirs, she was able to retain her sense of privacy within it. William felt his world and theirs to be the same.
But when the butler had gone, she dropped her knitting and clasped her hands tightly together on her lap. William had vouchsafed her no glimpse at all into his mind, and she was terribly anxious. The wind had risen now and was rattling the casement, just as it had rattled the old schoolroom window at home on the day when she and Marguerite had lain upon their backboards and their mother had read aloud to them from the Book of Ruth. “Ton peuple sera mon peuple.” Yes, but it was with insight that the young man Keats had written, “She stood in tears amid the alien corn.” Quite suddenly all her wily arguments for going home, real or unconsciously fabricated, fell away, leaving her with just the one sincere and aching longing—to be in that old schoolroom again and hear the wind rattling the window.
3
William blundered to the chair before his writing table and sat down. He was confronted by a neat row of presents—the doll, the bag of lollipops, a little workbox, a miniature tea set of painted wood, and a tiny dustpan and brush. Jane Anne was a very domesticated child, and nothing pleased her so much as to play at being a housewife like Mamma. He could see her in his mind’s eye now, as he had seen her when he was last at the farm,
sitting on a wooden stool before the kitchen fire beside Véronique, each of them bathing a baby, Véronique bathing Robin in his tin tub and Jane Anne bathing the smallest of her wooden dolls in the slop basin. It was stormy weather, and wind whirled round the house, but in the kitchen it was deliciously warm and cosy and they did not care. He could see the beloved room, still the heart of the house, the firelight shining on all the treasures, the copper pans, the purple tobacco jar, the box of shells from La Baie des Petits Fleurs that had once been Véronique’s favorite playthings and were now just as beloved by her children. Robin was shouting lustily in his bath, lovely little Lettice was threading a bead necklace, and William John of the five freckles, who did not take kindly to intellectual pursuits, was seated at the kitchen table with John, sighing deeply while the mysteries of multiplication and subtraction were explained to him by the most patient father in the world. And Véronique? Her face was so glowing with happiness as she lifted Robin from his tub to her lap that William was reminded of an old picture of the Nativity that he had seen once, where all the light in the stable shines out from the mother’s face.
And now it was demanded of him that he should tear himself out of that charmed circle and put half the world between himself and that glowing face. No! His hands, lying on the writing table before him, clenched themselves fiercely. There are demands that can be made of a man that are too great to be met, and this was one of them. No! For a long while he sat there, the whole of him taut with negation, defending the citadel of his being with all his strength against the besieging army of Marianne’s arguments.
For they were good arguments. He and she were old now to continue in business, struggling against a tide of adverse fortune; yet in a pioneer country, humming like a beehive with restless activity, it was not easy to stand aside in idleness. The tempo was too quick. Restless striving was in the blood. Europe was the place for rest, Europe where the slow swing of tradition and the mellowed serenity of ancient cities dreaming under a tranquil sun were of the very essence of peace. Yes, it would be good for Véronique’s children, when they were grown, to experience that peculiar serenity of old Europe, a different sort of peace from the fresh morning quiet of the Green Pastures; the peace of age. It would be good to give them the experience of that dignity. And Véronique herself? But would she ever come? John was not the sort of man who would want to leave his native country, and would she leave him alone? She might, but it was not very likely. Though she loved her father, he was not her world as she was his. John and her children were now her world. No; if they went, it was possible that he might never see Véronique again, and that he could not face. Nor, he realized abruptly, could he face that meeting with the Mother Superior of Notre Dame du Castel, that old woman who had once been the girl he had so deeply loved. His imagination conjured up a horrific picture of a wrinkled, sallow face framed in white linen, gnarled hands thrust into black sleeves, a hushed voice, a sedate and cloistered walk where once there had been color and laughter and the grace of morning, and his soul rose up in revolt. Just as he could not face the parting with Véronique, so he could not face the meeting with Marguerite. . . . The thing was impossible. . . . Marianne’s arguments were good, but the thing was impossible.
There was a soft knocking at his locked door, and a voice, a little girl’s voice, cried, “Let me in, William! Let me in!” He lifted his head, startled. It was years since he had heard that voice. Not, surely, since that evening at the settlement when he had found her weeping in her room and she had cried out to him like a changeling child, “If only you’ll love me, William. If only you’ll love me.” He got up quickly and unlocked the door, and there she was standing like a chidden child, her hands covering her face.
“Marianne!” he ejaculated. “Marianne!”
He pulled her in, locked the door again in case that damned butler should come along, and sat down in his writing chair once more, taking her on his knee. Absurd to see this modish old lady, in her jewels and cherry-red gown, sitting like a child on his knee.
“I want to go home. William,” she said weakly. “Oh, William, I do so badly want to go home!”
It was a cry of absolute sincerity. Beneath all her vanity, her pride, her spider-like spinning of intrigue, it seemed that there lived always this sincere little girl. And it was for the welfare of this immortal child that he was in this world responsible.
Home? They’d never really had one, he had been thinking this evening. Yet it was, perhaps, not yet too late. . . . And it came to him suddenly that when he had paid down for Véronique’s happiness the price of partial separation from her, perhaps he had not paid the whole price. This deeper separation would cancel the debt.
“Very well, Marianne,” he said. “We’ll go home.”
Chapter II
1
“We shall be in in an hour, Madam.”
Marianne opened her eyes and blinked at the stewardess, astonished to find that she had been asleep. Worn out by the long railway journey from Liverpool, where the steamship from New Zealand had docked, to Weymouth, where they had come aboard the steam packet for the Channel Islands, she and William had gone to the private cabin they had engaged for just forty winks. But they had been so tired that the little nap had become deep sleep. Glancing across the tiny cabin, Marianne could see that William had not yet awakened, and that Old Nick in his cage was still immobile.
“Already?” she ejaculated in astonishment.
“It’s such lovely weather, Madam,” said the stewardess. “It’s been a calm, quick voyage.” Then she smiled at the little old lady sitting up in her berth, bright-eyed and excited as a child of twelve. “Your first visit to the Islands, Madam?”
“Oh, no, no!” cried Marianne. “I was born there. My husband and I are going home after thirty-six years’ exile on the other side of the world.”
“Thirty-six years!” ejaculated the stewardess. “Why, Madam, it must have been sailing ships in those days!”
“It was,” said Marianne. “The journey out seemed to take a lifetime, and the journey home just five minutes. Unbelievable, the speed. Absolutely unbelievable! In an hour, did you say? Good gracious me! William! William!”
The handsome old gentleman lying flat on his back in the other berth, with his mouth open, snoring cheerfully, opened one eye. “Eh?” he enquired.
“William! We shall be in in an hour!”
“Forty minutes, now, Madam,” said the stewardess, and withdrew smiling, to spread the news that the lovable old couple in No. 1 cabin were returning home after thirty-six years.
Marianne, who seemed to be shedding years as fast as the speeding hour was shedding minutes, flew across the cabin like a ten-year-old and shook her husband vigorously awake. “William! William! In in forty minutes.” Then she turned from him to the bird cage on the floor and whisked away its green satin cover. “Wake up, you wicked old bird! In in forty minutes!”
Never in all her life had she spoken to Old Nick so companionably. Opening his eyes he blinked in astonishment. Then squawked. “Oh, my!” he ejaculated. “Back the mainyard, mates.”
“You silly old bird, there is no mainyard,” Marianne informed him. “This is a steamship. You’ve come speeding from the other side of the world, my dear, in a steamship.”
“And the most damned uncomfortable voyage too,” growled William, who was now on his feet, trying to button his waistcoat with fingers that trembled. “Hustle—that’s what it’s been—hustle, hustle the whole way over. And the smell of the engines enough to upset a man’s liver for life.”
They had been arguing about the relative merits of sail and steam ever since they had left New Zealand, and Marianne opened her mouth to make a sharp retort. Then she closed it again, realizing that William had taken refuge in the old controversy merely to cover up an almost unbearable emotion. . . . He had buttoned his waistcoat all crooked and was making a very poor job of finding the hat
that was staring him in the face as large as life. . . . With her efficiency not in the least impaired by her excitement she came to him, rebuttoned his waistcoat, handed him his hat and Old Nick in his cage, adjusted his plaid Inverness over his shoulders, and sent him out to see the steward about the luggage. Then, alone in the cabin, she smoothed the folds of her elegant green traveling dress and poised the smart but absurd green hat with a tall crown, that was the very latest fashion, upon her piled-up hair. Then she took the diamonds out of her ears, put them away in the green leather jewel case that was fastened to her wrist by a thin gold chain, and hung in their place the greenstone earrings which she had worn when she left the Island. Then she stood for a moment looking out of the porthole, and through a sudden mist of tears it seemed that she saw a white-winged sailing ship, a superb and graceful clipper, speeding over the smooth summer sea. “Captain O’Hara,” she said aloud. “Nat. I don’t forget you. Green Dolphin, lovely Green Dolphin, they may build smelly, noisy steamships ten times your size, but they’ll never build a ship like you. I hope I’ll not be alive, Green Dolphin, when the last clipper goes home from the sea.”
This was treason to the pulsing engines that had borne her so swiftly and luxuriously home, and in William’s hearing nothing would have induced her to utter it, but to the ghost of the Green Dolphin she could say what she liked, for to the dead our hearts are known.