Green Dolphin Street
Page 10
Her eyes did not waver as they rested on her father’s face, for she had heard it said. She’d just said it herself to Dr. Ozanne.
“And what do you mean by helping people?” asked Octavius. “Giving them the benefit of my advice?”
“Not only that, Papa,” said his daughter, smiling at him. “Generous people give more than advice; and I said as much to Dr. Ozanne.”
“What the devil have you said to Dr. Ozanne?” demanded her anxious parent.
“That I thought you would like to treat William like the son that dear Mamma has always longed for but has never had,” said Marianne sweetly, “and pay for him to go into the Navy. After all, he is the living image of the son Mamma would have liked to have had, isn’t he, Mamma?”
And Sophie, startled beyond measure, suddenly dropped her work on the floor and was a long time picking it up again. She was not only startled, she was touched to the quick that Marianne, who had always seemed so unsympathetic, should have divined this hidden longing.
“Darling Marianne!” she cried impulsively, and then her tear-filled eyes fixed themselves upon her husband’s face. “Do what she wants, Octavius,” they pleaded silently. “You can afford it. Don’t shake her faith in you. Don’t shame her before the Doctor.”
And because they had been married for so long, Octavius knew exactly what her eyes were saying.
“When you go and see the Doctor, Papa,” said Marianne, “you won’t tell him that we’ve talked like this, will you? I don’t want him to think that I’ve persuaded you to be so generous, when all the time it was your own idea.”
And by this time Octavius, a little muddled as well as mellowed by his port, was beginning to think that it was his own idea. The glow of his generosity as well as of his port, was warming him from top to toe and having a markedly good effect upon his digestion, never very strong during the after-dinner hour. But he was nevertheless a little startled by the suddenness of his own nobility, and Marianne talked a little longer to give him time to adjust himself.
“Dr. Ozanne is very proud,” she said. “You may have a little difficulty in making him see reason. But you’ve got such tact, Papa, you’ll do it. Mention Mamma and her affection for William.”
“I don’t need to be told how to carry out my own ideas, thank you, Marianne,” said her father, and there was just a hint of revolt in his tones, for his subconscious mind, not so fuddled by the fumes of his wine as his conscious one, was beginning to wonder whose was the initiative in this conversation. Marianne noticed the revolt and introduced a slightly dictatorial note into her next remark.
“Don’t go this evening, Papa,” she said. “Tomorrow will do, or any time. Don’t go tonight.”
Octavius arose instantly from his chair. “I shall certainly go tonight,” he said. “I shall go now. No time like the present.”
As he passed his wife’s chair, she put up her hand and touched his cheek. “You are good, Octavius,” she whispered. “I always knew you were good. . . . Take the Doctor a bottle of our French brandy, my love. I’m sure it will be welcome.”
“Certainly, dearest,” said Octavius, and inflated his chest and went out.
The two women looked at each other in silence for a moment or two, and with increased respect. On Sophie’s side the respect was a little startled, for it seemed to her that her daughter had grown from a child into an adroit and understanding woman all in the space of one half hour, and on Marianne’s side it was tinged with a new sympathy and understanding. . . . For when her mother had dropped her work on the floor, she had known that her guess had been correct: Sophie had once loved Dr. Ozanne as she herself loved William.
“It was clever of you to think of the brandy, Mamma,” said Marianne. “That will put them both in a good mood. It’s the very best brandy, isn’t it? The kind that we smuggle to England?”
For the second time the startled Sophie dropped her work on the floor. . . . She had had no idea that Marianne knew about the profitable smuggling trade in which so many respectable Islanders had a finger. . . . When she picked it up again, her lovely face had flushed a rosy pink.
“How did you know I longed for a son, Marianne?” she whispered.
“By the way you look at William,” said Marianne. “You’d like a son just like William. . . . And William is just like his father. . . . Did you love Dr. Ozanne very much, Mamma?”
Sophie gasped, and clutched her work just as it was about to slither off her silken lap for the third time.
“Don’t worry, Mamma,” said Marianne. “I won’t tell Papa.”
“Marianne,” said Sophie, “I think you’d better go to bed. You seem to have grown up into a woman all of a sudden—but still—I think you had better go to bed before you or I say something we may regret later.”
“Very well,” said Marianne, getting up. “Good night, Mamma,” and she kissed her mother on her beautiful, flushed cheek, whispering as she did so, “Mamma, how could you have married Papa?”
“Marianne! Marianne!” protested her mother. “Your father is very, very good.”
“He’s easily managed,” conceded Marianne, and she curtseyed and left the room.
She mounted the stairs with a jaunty step. It had probably been quite sensible of Mamma to marry Papa, she decided on second thought. If you can’t marry the man you love, then the next best thing is to marry one who is easily managed. . . . But the best thing of all, of course, is to marry a man beloved as well as manageable, as she herself intended to do.
She undressed quickly, put on her frilly white nightgown and her white nightcap, and slipped into the fourposter with the powder blue curtains that she shared with Marguerite. She needed no candle, for the window was wide and uncurtained and the summer twilight still filled the room. Her little sister was already asleep, her face pearly white and innocent in its aureole of golden curls. Marianne kissed her softly before she lay down. She looked such a child, and Marianne herself, now, was a woman.
She lay on her back, listening to the distant surge of the sea, and her womanhood seemed pulsing through her like the blood in her veins. She had learned so much about herself and what she wanted in the last two days. Maternity had been quickened in her, and love of the poor. And she knew that fighting can be fun up till the very end, and that she would never really be afraid, and that though a woman is hedged about with the restrictions of her sex, she can get what she wants if she has sufficient of the enchantress in her to spin a clever web.
“And I spun my web cleverly tonight,” thought Marianne. “I spun it very well. And I did not tell a single lie either. I did not say a word to Dr. Ozanne or Papa that was not the truth.”
She sighed with contentment as the night gathered about her, and then began once more to twist the little gold rings round and round in her ears.
Part 2 Marguerite
Call not thy wanderer home as yet
Though it be late.
Now is his first assailing of
The invisible gate.
Be still through that light knocking. The hour
Is thronged with fate.
To that first tapping at the invisible door
Fate answereth.
What shining image or voice, what sigh
Or honied breath,
Comes forth, shall be the master of life
Even to death.
GEORGE WILLIAM RUSSELL.
Chapter I
1
It was All Saints’ Day and Marguerite’s birthday, and the Le Patourels were enjoying an immense breakfast, a fine day, a whole holiday and the prospect of an outing. It was a family tradition that they should go for a picnic upon Marguerite’s birthday and today they were to drive in the chariot to the other side of the Island, to beautiful rocky La Baie des Saints, where the children would scramble about on the beach and their parents sit beneath Sophie’s par
asol and enjoy the view, while over them would brood the great convent of Notre Dame du Castel, built upon its rock above the thundering Atlantic waves.
It was the habit of the Island, once it had put the storms of the autumn equinox behind it, to produce a spell of beautiful weather almost as warm and sunny as June, and in the heart of this weather All Saints’ Day was caught up like perfume in a flower. Marianne and Marguerite could not remember a year when All Saints’ Day had not been fine and lovely; as a festival it ranked only second in their minds with Christmas and Easter.
Religion was an integral part of the children’s lives. All the Islanders were devout, and had been since those days when their Island had been called l’île sainte, l’île bienheureuse, those days far back in the mists of time when monks from the great Abbey of Mont-Saint-Michel in Normandy had rowed across the stormy sea in their little boats, landed at La Baie des Saints, and built themselves the monastery on the clifftop that had later become the Convent of Notre Dame du Castel. Many great saints at different times had visited the Island, not excluding St. Patrick himself, and there were several beautiful old churches built by those saints of old, and innumerable shrines and holy wells, all of them garlanded with legends that were as familiar to Marianne and Marguerite as Jack and the Beanstalk and the Sleeping Beauty to English children.
At the Reformation the Island had adopted the discipline of the reformed churches of Geneva and France, and the majority of the Islanders were not now Catholic, but the peasants remained always Catholic at heart, loving the old festivals and keeping the legends of the early saints fresh in their memories. Of the many religious communities that had once lived on the Island there remained now only two, the sisters of the convent school beside the Catholic Church of St. Raphael at St. Pierre and the nuns of Notre Dame du Castel.
The Le Patourels were not Catholics and had not been since the Reformation, but they were Islanders, and as they ate their breakfast on this festival morning their subconscious thoughts and memories, their deep and hidden instincts, were, unknown to themselves, distinctly unreformed.
Yet if their spirits moved through the shining paths of l’île sainte et l’île bienheureuse, their bodies this morning were looking distinctly of this world, well fed, well clothed, shining with prosperity. The four of them were a pleasing sight. Octavius, pausing in the mastication of a slice of well-cooked ham to survey the scene before him, decided not for the first time that the Strength of the Empire was founded upon the Home, especially his home, with its beauty, wealth, and culture, its lofty Christian sentiments and excellent cuisine. Octavius was a happy man. He was entirely contented with all that he possessed, including himself, and could see no room for improvement anywhere. He was not worried about the future happiness and the matrimonial chances of Marianne, as was Sophie, for he was one of those fortunate people who are invariably convinced that their affairs will turn out in accordance with their personal desires; and if by any chance things did not work out according to plan, his conviction that it was not his fault was so strong that his enjoyment of it quite outweighed any personal inconvenience that he might suffer from the denial of his wishes. But his wishes were not often denied him, for like all sensible men he had the sense to wish for things that were within the power of his ability to encompass.
And as his ability was considerable, he had encompassed a good deal, and raked it in with a skillful hand. His affluence, for instance. He had not been born wealthy; but the happy combination of an open, guileless countenance with an astute and guileful brain in business matters had had its inevitable result, of which the beautiful room, the loaded table, and the elegant females at whom he gazed with such benignity were the outward and visible sign.
The austere beauty of the outside of No. 3 Le Paradis was echoed within, where the simple furniture that had been good enough for Octavius’ parents was still good enough for him. Sheraton chairs stood about the mahogany table. There were a few family portraits hanging on the walls, but not enough to hide the beautiful paneling. The curtains were of pale gold brocade, the very color of the sunshine that lay in pools upon the polished floor.
But there was nothing austere about the food. The Le Patourels were drinking fragrant coffee frothing with rich cream out of cups of exquisite French china, scarlet and blue and gold. There was a huge home-cured ham, pâlette, upon the table, eggs, butter and preserves, dishes of fruit, crisp rolls, and a home-made bread-cake called galette, of a thick, spongy consistency that was most satisfactory filling. Sophie, who feared for the elegance of her figure, was toying with coffee and rolls in the French style, but Octavius and the girls were nourishing themselves with vigor and concentration.
Octavius, having demolished two boiled eggs and helped himself to a second plateful of pâlette, was about to admonish his wife to eat a little more when his eye fell upon her contours and he decided that her moderation was to be commended. He did not want her to lose her beauty. He was immensely proud of it. She looked particularly pleasing this morning in her gown of grey silk shot with fire color, with its sleeves slightly puffed at the shoulders, then fitting snugly over her shapely arms, its long shining folds that reached the ground and hid her feet, and its delicate ruchings at neck and wrist. She did not favor the new fashion of extravagantly small waists, ankle-length ballooning skirts, and sleeves extended on wires and stretched over bolsters on the shoulders, so that a woman looked less like a woman than an hourglass, and he was glad of it, for he was as conservatively minded as she was herself. He liked the graceful lines of her old-fashioned clothes, and the old-fashioned mobcap on her fair curls, as much as he liked the great gold locket enclosing a lock of his hair, and the huge brooch that held curls cut from the children’s heads, tied with blue ribbon, confined beneath glass and framed in pinchbeck, and the heavy swinging gold earrings that had been his wedding gift. These were her invariable ornaments and were the symbol of her devotion to the family circle. She was a good wife. His only regret was that the brooch held only two little baby curls and not ten. But the limitation of her childbearing was not his fault or hers, and before the inscrutable wisdom of Providence that had seen fit to deny him his quiverful he was content to bow his head; especially as a small family is less expensive to educate, and that now, by some process he had not been altogether able to follow, William Ozanne had become almost as a son to him.
And though small, his family gave satisfaction to his eye. He did not agree with Sophie that Marianne was plain. Octavius was a wishful thinker. It was not within the bounds of possibility that any daughter of his should be plain, therefore she was not plain. Her new tartan frock of russet brown and deep green and dark red, with a full skirt long enough to hide the pantaloons that had never been becoming to her, gave fullness to her thin figure, and its colors became her dark hair (still in curl so early in the morning) and her dark eyes that for some reason or other had had a new light in them just lately. She was looking almost happy, and she still had the color in her cheeks that had bloomed there last night when she had insisted that William should make one of the picnic party, and Octavius had demurred because, though he was about to pour out a mint of money upon him, he did not really want William perpetually underfoot, and Marianne had insisted and had got her way.
Marguerite, of course, always looked happy, but today being her birthday she was absolutely radiant with joy, her eyes as blue as her new blue dress with the gauze ribbons, and her plump legs in their clean white pantaloons (that still had to show several inches below the hem of her dress because she was still only little) swinging joyously backward and forward beneath the table with a soft swishing sound that it took Octavius a few moments of exploration to identify.
“Keep your legs still, Marguerite,” he commanded. And she kept them still. She never made noises just to annoy, as so many children do. When she discovered that what she considered was a pleasant sound was not thought so by others, she immediately desisted from making it.
The birthday picnic was always a luncheon picnic, as at this season of the year the middle of the day was the warmest and most suitable for outdoor recreation, and the period of waiting until it was time to start was always difficult for the girls. “Though it would be much worse if we had to wait till three o’clock,” said Marguerite to Marianne as they crossed the passage to the parlor. “If we had to wait till three o’clock I should burst. . . . There’ll be anglicé cake for lunch, and raspberry wine.”
“You are a greedy child,” reproved Marianne.
“I am not greedy,” said Marguerite, crossing the room with a hop, skip and a jump, “but I like raspberry wine.”
They sat upon straight-backed chairs in a patch of sunshine in the parlor window, their feet upon small wooden footstools, and stitched at their needlework. Marianne had started a new and beautiful petit point for a chair seat, representing a ship in full sail. She did needlework, as she did everything, with the maximum of competence and speed. Her fingers flew as she worked, and the room swayed and tumbled about her with the swaying of weeds beneath the water, the motion of the ship breasting the waves, the tumbling of the dolphins and the wheeling of the gulls. Her whole being was a loom where dim purples and pearly greys wove in and out of a stretched taut web of bright blue and gold; blue of the sea, gold of the sun, purple and grey of winds and waters, of veiled mornings, of evenings of silent rain and the dreams that come between sleeping and waking; with just here a flash of fire in the grey, seen and then not seen, a flash of exultation as though the key of a treasure house suddenly gleamed in one’s fingers, yet when one turned to find the door one’s hands were empty. . . .