Chapter III
1
The weather was not upon her side, Marianne thought, when upon the night of the ball waited at the harbor, with Marguerite and her father and mother, for the picket boat that was to take them out to the Orion. For it was a night made for love.
. . . In such a night as this,
When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees
And they did make no noise . . . in such a night
Did young Lorenzo swear he loved her well.
The words slipped into her mind with a sense of doom. Yes, it was that sort of night. The kind of unearthly night that is made for the fairy-tale love that is not of the earth either, the seed of it carried upon that wind that blows where it listeth and you cannot tell whence it comes or whither it goes, or why it should scatter the seed in those two hearts and not in others, or why the flowering of the seed should be so perfect a thing that man and woman are ready to fling away all that they have to enjoy it for only a day and a night.
It was Midsummer, and it would scarcely be dark all night. When the stars came, they would not be hard and bright but soft and luminous like lilies growing in a field, and one would still be thinking how fair the west had been at the sun’s departing when the east would be flushed again at his uprising. The sky overhead was a deep cool blue, the sea below smooth like glass, the exquisite colors of it perpetually yet imperceptibly changing with the slow movement of unseen currents. Each fishing boat in the harbor had its reflection of red or blue or green laid upon the surface of the water as though a painter had been trying out colors upon his palette, and the old houses of St. Pierre, piled about the harbor, had taken to themselves something of the unearthliness of the hour, so that they had no sharp angles, no hard colors or jagged outlines, but only a fluid softness of color and shape that belonged more to dream than to reality. The warships beyond the harbor were showing their lights already, soft moons of brightness encircling their hulls, and festoons of little stars caught in the spiders’ webs of the rigging. Music came from the ships, as though the stars themselves were singing, and from a tavern beside the harbor came the sound of a man’s voice lamenting to the accompaniment of a thrummed guitar. There were other sounds too, the movement of oars in rowlocks, laughing voices echoing over the water, the crying of the gulls, and the faint slap of the sea against the harbor wall.
Marianne found that Marguerite was beside her, pulling at her cloak. “What’s the matter with you, Marianne? Look, here comes William!”
He had promised to fetch them himself if they would wait at the top of a certain flight of steps at the harbor, and now here he was, running up the steps from the picket boat, exhilarated and happy. Dr. Ozanne was much better, though not well enough to come to the ball, and William had cast all care aside and abandoned himself to enjoyment as only he could do.
“You ladies can’t walk down those steps, they’re covered with weed,” said William, and he picked up Sophie with supreme disregard of her weight and handed her down to a burly, impassive seaman who stood at the bottom to receive her. Then it was Marianne’s turn, and for a moment she remembered the day when he had lifted her out of the boat under the archway at Pipet Lane. Then he had been a child, and had staggered beneath her weight; now he was a man and lifted her little figure as though it were a featherweight. “Remember the Green Dolphin?” he whispered laughingly, as he handed her to the impassive seaman. “Always,” she answered.
He said nothing to Marguerite as he lifted her down, and when they looked at each other they did not even smile. They had not been smiling, Marianne remembered, when they stood in each other’s arms before the bower of La Môme. It seemed it was not altogether a laughing matter, this love. “Wilt thou be gone? It is not yet near dawn,” Juliet had cried in anguish. And Romeo’s answer had been, “Night’s candles are burnt out. . . .”
Then the boat pushed off, and Marianne’s queer retrospective mood vanished completely in the excitement of the moment. Several other girls whom they knew, with their Mammas and Papas, had also embarked in this same picket boat, and their billowing silks and laces filled it to overflowing. And every youthful female eye in the boat was fixed upon the tall figure of William at the tiller. And William’s eyes made answer, and his gay talk kept the boatload in a gale of mirth. He could flirt as buoyantly and easily as a cock robin, and so harmlessly that he could do it in front of Papas and Mammas with complete impunity. For it was not admiration that he wanted, or power over others, but just that everyone should be as happy as he was himself. He flirted, too, with a bland impartiality that was almost godlike. For he liked women as women, whether they were pretty or plain. If they were pretty he enjoyed their prettiness, and if they were plain he was sorry for them and flirted with them all the more that they should forget it.
But he never flirted with Marianne and Marguerite. Marianne seemed to him more like a man than a woman, and Marguerite was the other half of himself.
The music grew louder over the water, and the moons of light and the festoons of little stars that had seemed from the shore to be shining in another world were suddenly blazing all about them. And then the Orion was looming overhead, and an awed silence fell.
Yet looking up at the great ship, with her masts towering to the evening sky and her great hull pierced by the muzzles of the guns, Marianne did not feel quite the same thrill of delight that had been hers when she had looked up at the Green Dolphin. The same thrill never comes twice, she thought, and only once in one’s life can one board a great ship for the first time. And that first time there had been no undercurrent of anxiety to mar her joy, for the day had not come when she must put her certainty that William was her own to the touchstone of actual fact. It was not easy, this translation of personal conviction into fact. It required the co-operation of other people, and that was a thing that the strongest will in the world could not always command.
Yet once upon the ballroom floor of the quarter-deck, Marianne had a moment of experience that was new and strange, and greedily she gathered it to her. Never before had she danced to the fiddle music of bronzed seamen with the sea about her and the night sky overhead. The scene was bright and gay, but it seemed very tiny in the surrounding immensity of space, and brittle and dangerous, as though this handful of laughing men and women were clinging together on a star that was hurtling through space to destruction, or on a small desert island beleaguered by the darkness that was flowing in now from every side. This sensation of danger, born perhaps of her knowledge that her personal happiness hung in the balance tonight, or of the sight of the great guns masked with flowers, stayed with her through the whole evening and gave by contrast a clear-cut, sharp brilliance to the beauty of the scene.
Lanterns were swinging overhead, and as one danced one looked up between them and saw the stars, and starlight and lantern light mingled bathed the scene in a magic light that made pretty girls appear beautiful and handsome men as gods. All the men wore uniform, and the blue and gold of the Navy and the scarlet and gold of the Island Militia, with the gleam of medals and the clink of swords, were a challenge that the finery of the women was hard put to it to meet.
But fortunately the year eighteen forty was not a year of female dowdiness. Hair was smoothly parted to fall into bunches of curls over the ears. White shoulders gleamed above low-cut gowns with tight bodices and tiny waists, and full skirts swaying over stiffened ballooning petticoats. The older women wore colors, with heavy gold bracelets, lockets, and earrings, but the unmarried girls wore white, with wreaths of flowers in their hair and posies tucked into their waistbands and carried in their hands, and their dancing shoes were bound about their ankles with satin ribbon. Marguerite wore white with yellow rosebuds and stood out among the other girls only because of her height and beauty, but Marianne challenged as much attention as ever in a gown of cherry red. She did not wear rosebuds tonight but green gauze ribbon twisted in her dark hair and round her wa
ist, and at her breast was a bunch of exotic orchids. She wore, as she nearly always did, the bizarre green earrings that Sophie had hated with undying hatred ever since that day when Marianne had brought them back from a morning of adventure in which her mother had had no share. Somehow those earrings seemed a symbol to Sophie of something that she dreaded, the pull of the outer world that sooner or later takes all adventurous children away from their homes, and or something, too, in Marianne herself that she disliked, something scheming and bold that she described to herself as “not quite nice.”
Sophie was not happy tonight. Even though he had rallied, she was not happy about Edmond. And she was not happy about either of her daughters. Marianne was attracting a great deal of attention, as usual, but it was not the right sort of attention. And Marguerite, dancing with William, seemed not quite her usual self. She was not talking fifteen to the dozen as she usually did when she was enjoying herself, she was silent and a little withdrawn. She had been like that since yesterday, Sophie remembered, since they had been so anxious about Dr. Ozanne. She had noticed William’s reliance upon Marianne and had quietly effaced herself. “Don’t do it!” Sophie cried voicelessly to her younger child, and did not know why she said it. But in a minute she knew. The figure of the dance brought William and Marguerite together again and she lifted her face and smiled at him as a girl smiles at the only man in the world.
Sophie was dismayed. She had not known it was like that with Marguerite. Time had passed so quickly that she had scarcely realized that Marguerite and William were no longer a couple of children who were like brother and sister to each other, but full-grown man and woman free to love and marry. She turned her eyes away from the two of them; but wherever she looked, she saw again her daughter’s smile, and she was more and more dismayed. For self-effacement and patient waiting were not the virtues to win an Ozanne. Sophie knew they were not, for she had practiced them herself with Edmond, and she had lost him and condemned him to an unhappy marriage. The Ozanne men were too lazy, even in love, to get what they wanted without vigorous assistance. “Fight for him tonight, Marguerite!” whispered Sophie under her breath. “Fight hard!” But even as she whispered the words, she knew it was no good. Truth was of the essence of Marguerite, and not even to save her life would she be able to adopt wiles not in accordance with her nature.
Sophie watched anxiously. When the dance ended, Marianne’s partner, no less a person than Captain Hartley of the Orion himself, returned her elder daughter to her as in duty bound, handing her to her seat beside her mother with much ceremony, and standing beside the two ladies to chat of this and that with a cultured charm that drove them both to the verge of hysteria. For it was hard to keep up a show of flattered attention when their whole souls were riveted upon the erring William and Marguerite, who had not returned to Mamma but were standing by the bulwark on the opposite side of the quarter-deck looking out to sea. They stood in the shadow, their two tall forms very close together, the lantern light gleaming only fitfully upon their two bright heads, upon Marguerite’s white dress and William’s blue and gold. There was something utterly absorbed in their attitude, as though they were oblivious of the light and laughter and movement behind them, aware of nothing but each other and the sea. Even so had Edmond and Sophie once leaned upon the harbor wall. In her passionate sympathy for her daughter, Sophie could feel the pressure of William’s body against her own, and the trembling of her nerves made answer. She was her daughter at this moment. Her hands stole down beside her as though to feel for William’s, and her desperate happiness seemed wrapping itself about her body like a flame.
Then Captain Hartley turned to answer a banality of Octavius’ and Marianne turned to her mother. “Mamma!” she whispered fiercely. “Look at William and Marguerite! They are disgracing us before everyone worth while upon the Island.”
“I don’t think so, dear,” said Sophie peaceably. “I don’t think anyone has noticed them over there in the shadow.”
“You’re too lax, Mamma,” said Marianne, one foot beating a maddening little tattoo upon the deck. “You should send Papa to bring them back.”
“Well, that would be to draw attention to them, and no mistake!” said Sophie. “No, my dear, we’ll leave them alone. They only have another five days.”
Marianne looked sharply at Sophie. So Mamma had noticed this love that was between those two. Had other people noticed it? Had the whole Island noticed it? Was it, perhaps, a thing of stronger growth than she had realized? It took all the self-control that she possessed to wait quietly until Captain Hartley had turned back to her mother again before she rose and laid her hand on her father’s arm. “Papa, stroll round the deck with me. I like to be seen with you. You’re much the handsomest man on board.”
Octavius, though he agreed with her, was none the less flattered. “And you’re the smartest woman,” he whispered to her as they strolled away. “I don’t say I like the color of that gown, but it certainly takes the eye.”
Sophie watched them go, first with sorrow that Marguerite’s moment of bliss must be sacrificed upon the altar of her sister’s sense of propriety, and then, suddenly, with a sense of revulsion and horror. Was Marianne jealous of her sister? Was she deliberately trying to wreck her happiness? Oh, I must be mad, thought poor Sophie. It’s not possible that Marianne loves William too; she’s so much older than he is. It’s not possible. But she could not convince herself that it was not possible, for Marianne was a strange creature whose passionate fancy moved with an unpredictable waywardness. She and Octavius were moving now only very slowly, stopping as they went to talk to acquaintances, but Sophie could find little comfort in that, for their progress, though socially correct, was dexterous and inexorable, and they would get there in Marianne’s good time. “Oh, be quick!” cried poor Sophie in her heart to William and Marguerite. “Be quick! Be quick!”
But William and Marguerite quite naturally did not hear the cry of her heart, for their own were much occupied. They had no very clear idea what they were talking about as they stood in the shadows looking out over the darkening sea. Anyway it didn’t matter. What mattered was the slight trembling of Marguerite’s hand in William’s, the warmth of his reassuring clasp, the strange, luminous light that seemed shining from her face when she lifted it to answer him, the soul in the eyes that each recognized as though it were a tried friend known centuries ago. The soft lap of the quiet water against the ship’s hull far below them was a voice to which they had listened when the world was young, and they knew from ages past that harp-thrumming of the breeze in the rigging. Over their heads “the floor of heaven was thick inlaid with patines of bright gold,” as it had always been, and presently they would turn to each other, as they had always done, and find again that perfect comfort of each other’s arms. They would be one flesh, one mind, one soul then, a unity that nothing could divide.
“Grand night!” boomed Octavius’ jovial voice suddenly, and his hand fell on William’s shoulder. “Taking a look at the Islands, William? Well, you’ll be far enough away by this day fortnight.”
“Aren’t you cold, dearest?” whispered Marianne tenderly to her sister. “I’ve brought your scarf. They’re just tuning up for the next dance.”
“Thank you,” said Marguerite, as her tiny sister stood on tiptoe to put the scarf round her shoulders. Her voice was only a toneless whisper, flat with exhaustion. Was she in time, wondered Marianne in an agony? She looked from one to the other with her bright, birdlike glance, her lips held in that tense, controlled smile that would not let them droop. She had taken a chance when she moved so slowly round the deck, she had gambled with her happiness that she might keep up the appearances that a weaker woman would have thrown to the winds. Yet one quick glance told her that as usual courage had won. The bewilderment in William’s face and the despair in Marguerite’s told her that she was in time, and she hoped that for tonight at any rate the danger of a declaration was averted. The pe
rfect moment, once lost, is not easily found again.
Yet as the evening wore on, it was obvious to Marianne that William meant to look for it. He was gay as ever as he danced with her and with the other girls to whom he had engaged himself, but fits of abstraction would seize him and he would gaze over his partner’s head with the expression of a lost dog, searching for the tall, swaying figure of Marguerite.
Never had there been so gay a ball, never so lovely a night. To most of the dancers the hours sped by on wings, but to Marianne they were leaden-footed. She got so tired that at last, during a dance when for once she had no partner, she went away by herself, with her green cloak wrapped about her, and found a shadowed corner where she could sit and rest on a coil of rope in the comfortable dark, looking out over the taffrail toward St. Pierre, where in many of the homely little houses lamps still shone behind the drawn red curtains. She felt herself suspended now between two worlds, the magic world of the dancers and the world of the lighted town across the sea. Don’t I belong to either of them, she asked herself, neither to the fairyland where men and women love each other nor to that homely place where they put a light in the window at night and kindle a flame on the hearth? The one should lead to the other, she thought, as she sat there between them. From the fairyland of love there should be a door leading out into the homely place of the fire on the hearth. Yet even though she won William as her husband, the key to those two worlds would not be in her hand unless she could learn how to win his love.
Green Dolphin Street Page 19