Resolutely she swung her green mantle round her shoulders, picked up her green umbrella, jewel case, and reticule and went on deck to join William.
Hand in hand, with Old Nick beside them, they stood by the rail. It was late afternoon, and the slight heat mist that had veiled the world when they left Weymouth had drawn away, and sea and sky held an intensity of deep, tranquil color that probed not only height and depth but hearts too. The wind was cool and fresh, and the sun so gentle that its light was a benediction and its warmth a feather-soft caress. Small rocky islands, the fringe of what Marianne had long ago so proudly called the archipelago, that were as the first sight of home to returning Islanders, were slipping swiftly by, each with its garland of white foam worn with the old proud air.
“Will she be at the harbor to meet us?” asked William hoarsely.
“Who? Marguerite? No, of course not,” said Marianne a little tartly. “Nuns are not allowed to go gadding about the place meeting people off boats. There’ll be no one at the harbor, William, but dear Charlotte will be at Le Paradis. It was good of Marguerite to arrange for us to have Charlotte.”
They were silent again, blessing Marguerite in their hearts. For she had done great things for them. She had found another house for the orphanage in double-quick time and had had Le Paradis repainted and had put in it the furniture and china that Marianne had long ago told her to put into store. And best of all, she had installed Charlotte Marquand as housekeeper, with one of her daughters to help her, because Charlotte, too, was getting old. Their home was ready for them. They had only to open the door and walk in.
The Island came into view, just the same, not changed at all, with the stretches of wind-swept sand and golden common misted with the lilac of sea holly and sea lavender just as they used to be, and the whitewashed cottages peeping from behind the shelter of grey-green hillocks just as they used to do. And then the long sea wall and the first sight of St. Pierre with its grey granite houses piling up and up upon the rock. And now the steamer was slackening speed as the harbor held out its arms to gather them in, the pier upon one side, the fort upon the other. They could see the flights of stone steps leading down to the water from the harbor wall, and the masts of the fishing boats, and the tower of the town Church. The noise of the engines died away as they glided in, and they could hear the familiar harbor sounds that are the same all the world over; the small ripples slapping against the hulls of quiet ships, the ringing of a church bell on land, the crying of the gulls whose silver wings were wheeling overhead. They were alongside now, the ship’s bell clanged and the gangplank was rattling out, and all was bustle and confusion, for as usual half the Island had come down to the pier to meet the steamer. Bronzed, blue-jerseyed sailormen, the sons and grandsons of the men they had known in their youth, were surging all about them, and the familiar Island patois was ringing in their ears. The old smells assailed them, the scent of the squelching green seaweed that carpeted the harbor steps, the smell of fish, of tar, of wet wood, of the old-fashioned carriages with their patient horses drawn up in a row along the pier, the smell of flowers and the salt smell of the sea. . . . They were home.
They found themselves in a carriage, rattling along over the cobbles, their heavy boxes on the roof and Old Nick and their hand luggage piled up around them. They had no very clear idea as to how they had got there, but they seemed to remember that an immense welcome had enfolded them as soon as they had crossed the gangplank. Word had passed from the ship to the pier, perhaps, that they were returned Islanders, for not only the sailors who had handled their luggage, and the driver who every now and then bent down from his box to nod to them through the little window of the carriage, had given them a great welcome, but the very gulls had cried aloud in delight, and everyone had seemed to smile at them. That knowledge that comes only once or twice in a lifetime, that conviction of having done the right thing, the thing that was planned, that was meant from the beginning, came to them in full flood. . . . They had done right to come home.
As the coach climbed slowly up the steep old twisting streets, the air seemed all gold. They could not see very well, because their eyes were misted, but they knew when they had come to the street of Le Paradis because they could smell the hydrangeas and the jessamine. And then the carriage stopped with a jolt, and there was the familiar flight of shallow steps, scrubbed to a snowy whiteness, flanked by the fluted columns and the lantern holders. The front door was flung open and there stood Charlotte, not changed very much in spite of her white hair. Her face was shining with welcome as she came down the steps to greet them, but so serene that it might have been only yesterday that she had seen them last.
2
Changed, bathed, rested, they sat together in the parlor after dinner, with Old Nick in his cage in the window near them. William had a book in his hands and his eyeglasses on his nose, but was still too stupefied by emotion to take in a single word of what he was reading. Marianne, however, had entirely recovered from it and was busy, as she knitted, with plans for the embellishment of No. 3 Le Paradis. She was one of those competent women who do not have to watch their stitches as they knit, and as her needles flew, her eyes, bright with their scheming, roamed round the room.
Marguerite had evidently been busy with it, for there were many little touches that only she could have given. The beautiful sampler that Marianne herself had worked in her childhood had been framed and hung upon the wall, and the petit-point chair seat, representing a ship in full sail, that she had worked long ago, and that Sophie had used in an unworthy chair, had been transferred to the beautiful Chippendale one that she was sitting upon at this moment. All over the house she had been aware of Marguerite’s touches, and the whole of it had been made completely habitable, with not a single thing in it that was not beautiful. But the weeding out of the least valuable furniture for the sale that had been held after Octavius’ death had left it looking singularly austere. And somehow, Marianne felt, you could tell that a religious order had had the running of this house for many years. There was a feeling as though the fires that had been lit here had been sufficient for health but not for luxury, and one got the impression that rather too much sunlight and fresh air had been allowed to stream through inadequately curtained windows over uncarpeted floors that could not fade into well-scrubbed corners where nothing was ever hidden. In short, there was over the whole place an atmosphere of doing-without and nonconcealment that was entirely uncongenial to Marianne’s temperament; as uncongenial as the gentle flavor of feminine resignation that seemed to hang about her mother’s fragile escritoire, over there in the corner, and the elegant and valuable but rather wish-washy china ornaments on the mantelpiece that had been Sophie’s choice. Sophie’s wifely subservience to Octavius had always annoyed Marianne, and it annoyed her now, as did this newer nunnery flavor. Well, she’d soon get rid of them both. In a month’s time the atmosphere of this house would be that neither of self-immolation nor self-denial but self-fulfillment; it would be her own atmosphere. As regarded the re-creation of No. 3 Le Paradis, she was going to succeed in getting what she wanted as she had never succeeded yet. Her needles clicked and flashed triumphantly as her eyes came back from their journeying and fixed themselves upon her work for that one knitting event for which their regard was necessary—the turning of the heel.
So much noise were her triumphant needles making, so absorbed was she in the turning of the heel, that she failed to hear the door open and was unaware that anyone had come in until William, his eyeglasses falling from his nose and his book crashing to the floor, lumbered to his feet with a queer, strangled cry; a very odd cry indeed, such as Marianne never remembered to have heard before from his lips, heartbroken, incredulous, joyful—
She was on her feet in an instant, rigid with the pain that cry had caused her, looking with a direct and yet panic-stricken gaze straight into the eyes of her sister Marguerite. . . . And Marguerite was beautiful in age, beautiful as she
had never been even in the heyday of youth. . . . Marianne had time for just that one thought, and for the astonished dismay it caused her, before her sister’s arms were about her and she was being pressed to Marguerite’s bosom and kissed upon both cheeks with a passionate warmth of affection that would surely have been more becoming in a little child than in a staid and elderly nun. Staid? But she wasn’t staid at all. She was kissing William now, also upon both cheeks, and laughing and crying and talking all at the same time in that abandoned Gallic fashion that had become distasteful to Marianne during her long sojourn among the undemonstrative Scotch folk of Dunedin. Obviously Marguerite’s years in France had done her no good. And she was making a complete fool of William. The tears were running down his rugged old cheeks, and he too was laughing and talking both together in a way that a man of his age should have been ashamed of. Marianne’s legs gave way beneath her and she sat down rather suddenly, though with no fraction of a loss of dignity, upon the chair that was mercifully just behind her. Upright and impassive, regal in her evening finery of satin and old lace, she waited until the other two should come to their senses.
Marguerite recovered first, sat down beside Marianne and laid her hand upon her sister’s. She was speaking quite calmly and collectively now, though Marianne had no idea what she was saying; she was aware only of the beauty of the low-pitched voice and of the slender white hand that lay upon her own. It was a bad shock to find Marguerite still so lovely when she had hopefully pictured her aged and ugly. These nuns, of course, did no work at all. They led disgracefully lazy lives—just praying. Marguerite had not been worn with toil and hardship like her poor sister. Marianne’s rigid back became straighter than ever with resentment as she looked up steadily into Marguerite’s face, courageously intent upon knowing the worst.
And from the point of view of a jealous wife the worst was very bad indeed, for Marguerite, like many women who lose their beauty when their first youth is past, had regained it again in age and at sixty-three was strikingly lovely. If her face was worn, the faint hollowing of cheeks and temples was not unbecoming, for she had made such friends with time the sculptor that he had touched her face only with loving fingers. The fine bone-structure of her face was more noticeable now than it had been in her girlhood, and the delicacy of line and plane, the clear pallor, were that of a perfectly cut cameo. The good health that was still hers showed itself in the fine texture of her skin and the easy, strong carriage of head and shoulders. Her eyes, if they were a little sunken, had lost none of their lovely color; they were the deep blue of gentians beneath the perfectly arched eyebrows. Her mouth was merry and tender as ever, and Marianne noticed with a pang of envy that if she had lost any teeth, the loss was not noticeable. And if all this were not enough, thought poor Marianne, her face bore the indefinable stamp of spiritual power. She was young as only the reborn are young, wearing the serenity of her spiritual acceptance like a light about her. With an aching sense of exile Marianne realized that she and her sister lived upon different sides of a closed door. Marguerite turned to say something to William, and Marianne, too, turned to look at her husband, whose round red face was beaming like the rising sun in a most ridiculous way, his hazel eyes brimming with light like a boy’s. She saw the comradeship of their easy-meeting glances and knew with a flash of insight that William, too, was on the other side of the door.
Marianne did not know quite how she got through the rest of the visit, though she heard her voice making precise and appropriate answers in the right places. Mercifully Marguerite did not stay long, and Marianne gathered, to her intense relief, that this visit of welcome was a special dispensation and that hereafter they would see her only when they visited her at stated intervals at the convent. “Yet I shall feel you so near,” said Marguerite. “The three of us here together on the Island—it’s as though we were children again.”
“Even upon the other side of the world you always felt near,” said William suddenly.
“Of course,” asserted Marguerite matter-of-factly, and turned to bid Marianne good-by. “Nothing could separate us three,” she said with her cheek against her sister’s.
Marianne, aware of the closed door, found that her lips were so stiff that she could scarcely return Marguerite’s kiss. William, she noticed, when his turn came, seemed to experience no difficulty, and it seemed to her that it took him a full half hour to conduct Marguerite out to her waiting carriage. . . . Though the French clock on the mantelpiece said two minutes.
“Holy Moses!” he exclaimed, returning quite unconsciously to the favorite ejaculation of his boyhood as he came back to her again, rubbing his hands with delight. “Whoever would have expected to find her so little changed?”
“Her appearance was a great shock to me,” said Marianne with truth.
Chapter III
1
In the weeks that followed William continued to find everything unchanged, while Marianne continued to suffer from shock. William found himself happy when he had expected to be unhappy, and Marianne was unhappy when she had expected to be happy. They were alike only in their mutual realization that whatever one expects to feel in this life, one will probably feel the opposite.
Certainly, meditated William, he had never expected that in old age a man could re-enter the fairyland of his boyhood and experience its delights all over again. Holy Moses, but he’d not known the thing was possible. He honestly believed that he was happier now than he’d ever been in all his life before. Damned if he wasn’t.
These pleasing reflections occurred to William upon the cliff top above La Baie des Saints, where he sat upon a seat basking in the September sunlight, his hat on the back of his head and his hands folded upon the gold knob of the handsome new walking stick Marianne had given him to assist his peregrinations about the unchanged Island.
Holy Moses, but how he enjoyed these walks! The perfect summer weather, the rest, the leisure, the freedom from business worries, had made a new man of him. Vigor he had thought lost forever had come back with astonishing speed, and sixty-five years old though he was, he had never felt so fit. It was positively good to be alive these days. Of course, one couldn’t expect things to go on forever in this blissful fashion. Life being life, there were bound to be a few ups and downs sooner or later, but meanwhile it was worth while to have lived if only for the enjoyment of this Indian summer.
La Baie des Saints was not changed at all. The grey granite cliffs fell away beneath him just as they had always done, clothed now with the purple of the heather, and down below was the little bay with its crescent of golden sand now veiled and now revealed by the outgoing tide. The village of Notre Dame was just the same. It seemed that the same smoke curled up from its chimneys and the same fishing nets were spread to dry over the low stone walls that enclosed the small, sweet gardens full of tamarisk and fuchsia. And upon the other side of the bay the convent towered up upon the clifftop. He could see the tower of the Church, where by night the light still burned to guide mariners home, and he remembered that just below the window where it shone, the Madonna stood in her niche looking out to sea. He had walked all the way out from St. Pierre, strolling along the unchanged sandy lanes sniffing the scent of the bracken and the escallonia flowers, pausing to get his breath on the hilltop where Octavius had halted the chariot so many years ago, and looking at the islands flung like a handful of flowers upon the radiant sea. . . . There was dear Marie-Tape-Tout and Le Petit Aiguillon, he had said to himself, identifying them, and there was the island shaped like a floating fairy castle, and the green one with a grey bowed head, like an old man in an emerald cloak praising God, and the exquisite amethyst-colored one shaped like a bird just poised for flight. . . . Those last three islands had reminded him suddenly of Marianne and Marguerite and himself, though he could not imagine why. Yes, it was all the same. He could find no change except this arrival upon the clifftop of the comfortable seat he was sitting on. There were quite a number
of these convenient seats scattered about the cliffs nowadays. Most thoughtful of the Islanders to have provided them just in time for his homecoming in old age.
He took out his huge turnip of a gold watch, poised his eyeglasses on his nose, and consulted it. He was on his way to visit the Mother Superior of Notre Dame du Castel, and he must be neither too early nor too late, for it seemed that the laws of the Medes and Persians were as nothing for strictness in comparison with those governing the visiting hours at convents. He had seen Marguerite only once since the visit of welcome she had paid them at Le Paradis, and upon that occasion Marianne had been with him. They had driven out together in one of the little Island carriages that were used when there was no luggage, odd, attractive horse-drawn conveyances like a bath chair for two, for they could not afford a carriage of their own, and had sat upon the hardest chairs in the world and conversed with Marguerite in the convent visitors’ room for the allotted forty minutes, timed by the clock on the mantelpiece. Marianne had been oppressed by the timing of the visit, by the gloom of the visitors’ room, which smelled of mice and faced landward into a shrubbery of ancient, moldering laurel bushes, and boasted no decoration whatsoever except a particularly alarming picture of the Last Judgment suspended upon a wall covered with the most hideous wallpaper ever seen, most distressingly stained with damp. So oppressed had she been that this morning, just as all their plans had been made to drive out together again, she had said she wasn’t going. She had the kind of headache that would not be improved by sitting on a hard kitchen chair in an aroma of mice, getting rheumatics from the damp and meditating upon her latter end, she had said. If that was William’s idea of the best way to spend a summer afternoon, he could go alone.
So he had countermanded the little carriage and had come, alone; and now as he waited for the appointed hour, his heart was carrying on inside him like a singing bird on a spring morning. For on that previous visit he had not been oppressed by the gloom and damp of the visitors’ room. He hadn’t even noticed them. He had seen nothing but the face of the woman he loved, felt nothing but the utter happiness of being with her. He chuckled as he remembered how he had dreaded seeing Marguerite again. Changed? He had not realized to what extent bodies can be molded by the soul’s impact upon them, so that the recognition of comradely spirits by each other becomes easier with age.