The clock struck. Sophie closed her book and the two girls shot up upon their backboards as though released by a spring.
“Please, Mamma, may we go out?” cried Marguerite eagerly.
Sophie hesitated. It was Saturday, when she gave them more freedom than upon other days; the rain that had kept them in that morning and made them troublesome in consequence had ceased, and fresh air would do them good before bed. Yet for some reason or other she felt loath to let them go out into the autumn gale, used though they were to tempestuous weather. She went to the schoolroom window and looked out at a world rocked and tossed by the unseen power of the wind.
“Must you go out?” she asked.
“Please, please, darling Mamma!” cried Marguerite in her warm, eager voice.
“I think it would be advisable, Mamma,” said Marianne. “We need the exercise.”
She spoke primly in her quiet, hard little voice, her clear brain leading her to make unerring attack upon the maternal sense of duty rather than the maternal affections.
“Not beyond the garden, then,” said Sophie, temporizing. For what harm could come to them in the garden? Sheltered by its high walls, they would not even feel that fierce, exciting wind. “And put on your cloaks and bonnets, for it may turn chilly at the turn of the tide.”
“Yes, Mamma. Come along, Marguerite.” And the pitpat of Marianne’s small, determined feet and of Marguerite’s eager ones died away down the passage to the room that had once been the night nursery and was now their bedroom.
Sophie stayed at the window, looking down at the tossing world below her. Their house, a very old one that Octavius had bought at his marriage from an old sea captain, was in Le Paradis, the most aristocratic street on the Island, built high up in the rock citadel of St. Pierre, the Island’s only town, with the streets of the vulgar far down below it, as was only proper. All the élite lived in Le Paradis, and so of course it was the natural habitat of the Le Patourels. And it was a nice place to live. The houses faced each other across the narrow cobbled street, steep and twisting like a gully in the rock because St. Pierre was built upon the sheer, precipitous face of the granite cliff and partook of the nature of the rock to which it held. But their propinquity did not detract from the dignity and beauty of the tall old houses. Their granite walls, built to stand as enduringly against the gales as the cliff itself, had been covered with pink stucco a century ago, and with the passing of the years the pink had weathered to every conceivable lovely shade of saffron, orange, yellow, and old gold. Flights of shallow steps, scrubbed to a spotless white, flanked by fluted columns and beautiful iron railings and lantern holders, led up to handsome front doors with brass knockers beneath elegant fanlights; the windows were shuttered in the French style, and the old tiled roofs had weathered to colors that equaled the stuccoed fronts in beauty. In front of the area railings, flanking the white steps and the fluted columns, grew the hydrangeas that were the glory of the Island, pink, and blue, grown to amazing luxuriance in the sheltered, sunny warmth of the lovely street; and seen through opening front doors on summer days, through a vista of shining oak-paneled passage leading to garden doors set wide to the scent and color, were the old deep gardens with their velvety lawns, their roses and jessamines and great magnolia trees, their myrtle and veronica bushes and lavender hedges, and tangled vines upon the sheltering granite walls.
In the sunny, sheltered street, or in the high-walled gardens, or downstairs in the snug paneled parlors, one could forget that one lived on a seagirt island, for the roaring of the wind on stormy days was heard only as a distant rumor, but in the upstairs rooms that looked toward the harbor and the sea it was another matter, and it was at the window of such a room that Sophie was standing.
Below the sheltered garden, where the wax of the magnolia blossoms was still untarnished and the chrysanthemums and dahlias were like flames against the vivid green of the lawns, the narrow streets and the tumbled roofs of St. Pierre fell steeply to the sea. From the aloof height of Le Paradis, St. Pierre looked not quite real, crushed to nothingness by the immensity of sea and sky around it. The narrow, twisting cobbled lanes, the steep flights of steps, the old granite houses with their gables and protruding upper stories, the bow-windowed shops and the inns with their swinging signs, the tall church tower, the long sea wall guarded by the breakwaters and the grey mass of the fort, the masts of ships sheltering within the harbor, were dwarfed to the semblance of a dream town whose fragility caught at the heart. One feared for it in the violence of the forces that assailed it. Torn fragments of smoke whirled above it as though panic-stricken, the branches of trees that rose higher than the sheltering garden walls tossed as though in anguish, white waves dashed themselves against the breakwaters and showers of spray reached for the little town with clutching fingers; and round about, as far as the eye could see, white horses rode ceaselessly in over the grey labor and surge of the sea, and low grey clouds, mounting unendingly from below the horizon of the world, streamed overhead like the grey phantoms of terrible things that were yet to come upon the earth. . . . This was no world in which to let loose little children.
Sophie pulled herself up sharply. She was being ridiculously fanciful. The terror of natural forces was an illusory terror, for the spirit of man was always greater than they. For centuries the onslaught of the sea had not loosened the grip upon the rock of the small grey town that man had built; it had done nothing to it except immeasurably to increase its beauty by the buffetings. No shapes of doom, no torture, no fear, had chased man away yet from the tiny whirling star to which his spirit clung as tenaciously as did St. Pierre to the rock. Why? Why? Why? thought Sophie suddenly. Why this obstinate refusal to be exterminated? Why such cheerful willingness to feed the flame of life with individual agony? One didn’t know. One couldn’t know. Only God knew, who had breathed human life into the void, and wondering whatever could have possessed Him to do such a thing only gave Sophie a headache. She didn’t hold with metaphysical speculation, and always deliberately turned her thoughts when overtaken by it. Better not look at the winds and weather. Better look at the hackney coach toiling up the narrow street below her garden wall. Who was in it? That was the kind of curiosity that was really enjoyable, for one had some hope of satisfying it. So immersed in the coach was she that she paid no attention to the words that had slipped into her soul from somewhere or other and were tolling there like a deep-toned bell. “Be ye perfect . . . Be ye perfect . . . Be ye perfect.”
Who was in that coach? Someone who had arrived on the packet, no doubt. She too, though of course she hadn’t let Marianne know it, had wondered who was on board the packet today. It sailed from England only twice a week, and these two voyages, and the weekly voyage of a French packet from St. Malo, were the only contacts the Island had with the great world, so naturally it was a matter of burning interest, when the anchor rattled down and the sails were furled, to see what came up out of the hold and who walked across the gangplank. There were no telegrams then. Knowledge of wars and revolutions, of royal weddings, of Stephenson’s newly invented steam engine, of discoveries in far countries, news of the loves and deaths of friends and of new fashions in gowns and bonnets and cloaks, all came up out of the hold of the packet as out of Pandora’s box of dreams. And the storm-buffeted figures who crossed the gangplank were even more exciting. If they were old friends there would be the joy of reunion after long absence and danger, and if they were strangers then they might change the current of one’s life forever.
Who was in that hackney coach?
It stopped before the old empty house in Green Dolphin Street, just below the Le Patourels’ garden wall. Why, of course! It would be Dr. Ozanne. Edmond Ozanne come home again after twenty-five years of exile. He had left the Island as a young man to study medicine in London, had married and settled there. Rumor had it that his wife had been exceedingly well born and genteel, but possessed of delicate health and an extreme sens
ibility that had caused her in the first place to cling to his medical knowledge and dole upon his good looks, but in the second place to be disillusioned by the efficacy of that knowledge when applied to her own symptoms, and to be much tried by his rough and ready manners. The latter she must have attributed to his upbringing on a remote and savage island, for she had steadfastly refused to visit the place responsible for them, or to permit him to visit it without her. They had not been very happy, it seemed, and had had only one child, born late in their married life. Now the poor lady was dead, and he had come back to the Island again with his child to set up his plate in Green Dolphin Street. This information Sophie had gathered with difficulty, but perseverance, because when she had been eighteen and Edmond twenty, they had sometimes walked up and down the sea wall together, her hand in his, and looked out over the sea and talked of the great things he would do when he sailed away to England, and of how when he was a rich man he would come back to the Island and marry her. But he hadn’t come back, and after some years of spinsterhood, because none of the aspirants for her hand seemed quite right somehow, she had married Octavius, and after a short period of misery had not regretted it. No one had known about those strolls on the sea wall because the two families, Edmond’s and hers, had not been socially known to each other. Edmond’s parents had been respectable people, of an old Island family, but they had been In Trade; the Wine Trade, which of course holds a certain cachet, but still Trade. The Ozannes and her own people, the du Putrons, had bowed to each other in the street, but no more. Well, it would be possible to know Edmond socially now, since he had become a doctor. Doctors ranked with solicitors and clergymen as People Whom One Knew. Their profession put the hall mark of a gentleman upon them, and one closed an eye to what their parents had been. One must close this eye at some period in man’s social ascent, of course, otherwise, with the birth rate of the lower orders tending to be higher than that of the upper classes, gentlemen would die out. . . . But she must be very careful, before committing herself in any way, to find out what sort of man Edmond had turned into, and what his child was like, for she had her daughters to consider, and the child was a boy.
A cloaked figure stepped out of the hackney coach, clutching a large brass cage with a green parrot in it, but his hat was pulled so far down over his face that though she leaned swiftly forward, breathing childishly upon the windowpane in her eagerness, it was impossible to see what he looked like, now. He was followed by a small boy, who gave a hop, skip and a jump as he left the coach, and carried a carpetbag. They went into the house, the coachman staggering after with their luggage, and the door banged behind them in a sudden gust of wind that rattled the schoolroom windows and roared furiously in the chimney. Sophie was suddenly scared again, and ashamed of the way she had breathed upon the windowpane. She rubbed the mist off with her handkerchief and wished she had not said the girls might go out into the garden.
But here they were beside her in their cloaks and bonnets, bright-eyed with expectation. “Good-by, Mamma!” they cried. “Good-by!” And they had whirled off down the stairs before she could stop them.
2
There is something very thrilling about standing in a place of shelter while a gale roars by over your head. One tastes the excitement of violence without the fear. Standing beside the herbaceous border under the west wall the air was as still as on a summer’s day. Not a petal moved, not a grass blade was stirred, while all about them the October flowers had a brilliance that summer had scarcely known. The massed Michaelmas daisies and goldenrod, the dahlias and chrysanthemums, purple and scarlet and gold, seemed to burn with deeper and deeper passion as one looked at them, and the lawn after the morning’s rain wore a green so vivid that one caught one’s breath. A bonfire of dead leaves was burning in the corner of the garden, and the acrid smell of its blue smoke, mingled with the smell of wet chrysanthemums and the west wind from the sea, was the authentic bittersweet smell of the turning of the year. There was something triumphant about the blaze of color, something of fortitude in the determined quiet under the garden wall, that mocked at dissolution The gale might roar as it chose, but while that west wall of solid granite stood its ground the end was not yet for the garden. Life was not so easily extinguished, and spring trod upon winter’s heels. It flaunted its colors in the face of death, and it laughed under its breath.
And Marguerite laughed too, extracting every drop of color and scent and joy from the scene about her. Her face was rosy with pleasure in the depths of her brown beaver bonnet with its lining of quilted pink silk, and her brown caped cloak with its rosettes of rose-colored ribbon could not hide the quivering excitement of her body. Her fair curls were already tossed and untidy, and the bow of pink ribbon under her chin had come undone. She waved the folds of her cloak up and down like wings and swung, laughing, from her toes to her heels, back and forth, back and forth, like an intoxicated little bird rocking uproariously on a swaying branch. She did not want to go to any other place, or do anything except what she was doing, or be any other person. She was utterly contented in the place and the hour and the mere fact of her own existence. She lived. That was enough.
Marianne did not jig about like her little sister. She stood without movement on the garden path, waiting. She was dressed like Marguerite in a caped cloak with a beaver bonnet, only the rosettes on her cloak were brown, not pink, and the quilted lining of her bonnet was maroon like her dress. Sophie could not dress her in youthful colors, for they made her look more sallow than ever. Her bonnet strings were precisely tied, and her hands quite still under her cloak. She was always very tidy, which her mother thought odd in so passionate a creature, while Marguerite always had ribbons streaming and curls tossed in joyous disarray; but her tidiness was part of her intensity, part of the knitting together of body and mind and soul upon the one purpose.
Which at the moment was to get out of the garden into the exciting, tempestuous world beyond the west wall. She waited until her mother, watching them from the parlor window, had turned away to write at her escritoire, and then she withdrew her right hand from her cloak and in it was the key of the door behind the magnolia bush, that led through the west wall to Green Dolphin Street, which she had taken from its hook in the hall as they came out.
“But Mamma said to stay in the garden,” said Marguerite, wide-eyed, for her essential honesty was already a little prone to misgivings about the artifices to which Marianne was always prepared to stoop to get her way.
Marianne made no answer but dived behind the magnolia bush and unlocked the door. Marguerite followed her, silent at first, then with a gleeful chuckle at the adventurousness of the proceeding. For though she was a good child, she was not abnormally good. No one ever felt any anxiety about her dying young, in spite of the angelic loveliness of her dimpled face.
The door nearly knocked them over as it swung back with the whole force of the wind behind it, and for a moment the storm, rushing through, invaded the serenity of the garden. The branches of the magnolia tree thrashed wildly, the great waxen blossoms buffeting their faces. The wind rushed up under their skirts, whipped their pantaloons about their ankles, and swirled among their petticoats. It ripped Marguerite’s bonnet off her golden curls and blew Marianne’s cloak right up over her head. Laughing, they clutched each other to keep steady. Marianne, as the folds of her cloak fell down again over the two of them, found herself with her lips pressed against Marguerite’s smooth, cool cheek, Marguerite’s laughter gurgling in her ear, her soft breath on her neck, the warm little body in her arms. She smelled delicious. Her clothes were scented with lavender, her skin with violet soap, and from her curls came the faint, fresh scent that breathes from the hair of healthy children like perfume from a flower. Impulsively Marianne held her little sister pressed tightly against her thin chest and kissed her passionately, and as she did so there came to her another of her “moments,” one of those flashes of heightened awareness, of vivid experience, that wer
e the only sort of happiness she ever knew, moments that she awaited with such longing and, when they came, clutched with a greedy strength, warding off the sympathy or curiosity of others lest they smirch what was for her alone, what could only be savored alone, only one day yield its secret to her if her soul was by itself. Her senses, full of passionate delight in the perfection of the human body she held in her arms, reached out through and beyond it and laid hold of the scent of the wet chrysanthemums, the flaming colors of the garden and the thrilling overtones of the storm, with an ecstasy that as far transcended Marguerite’s steady love of life as a flash of lightning transcends the unwavering little candle burning merrily inside a lantern. But she could not hold her moment. For all her strength, it had gone before she could know what it was for. It slipped from her just as a gush of wind seized the door and swung it shut upon the garden of their childhood. They leaped for safety down the flight of steps that led to Green Dolphin Street and fell in a tumbled heap of frills and flounces at the bottom of it, Marguerite submerged in laughter and Marianne in bitter weeping.