The Raft
being played. A man's voice and a girl's, singing full-throatedly! They
faded voluptuously into silence.
“Because you are beautiful.” Her young heart beat flutteringly. Had
others thought it and been afraid to tell her? She leant back her head;
stars gazed down on her, approvingly and placid-eyed. All sounds and
sights were touched with poetry. The whole of life before her! Peter and
Harry waiting! So much of youth to spend; so many choices! Yet, only one
choice--Peter.
A voice hailed her. “Hulloa! Is that you, Kay?”
So soon! She sat up. San Terenzo with its golden eyes! On the crazy quay
she made out two blurs of white.
“Yes, Peter, it's Kay. Is Harry with you?”
Before the boat had stopped, as it nosed its way along the side, Harry
leapt in. “At last! It's you.”
His voice was strained and impetuous. For eight months he had waited; he
had been kept waiting an extra day--the longest of them all.
“Hush!” she whispered. “Peter---- I've told him nothing. You shouldn't
have come, Harry; you really shouldn't.”
She took a hand of each as they helped her to land. Walking back to the
villa, she gave them laughing glimpses of her adventure, “So it's
not such a bad day's work; he's going to make me live forever in a
portrait.”
Good-nights had been said. From her window Kay had seen the lights blown
out in other bedrooms. The fishing-village, fringing the shore, had been
in darkness for two hours. She leant out, gazing across the bay to where
the headland of Lerici curved in like a horn. Life--that was what she
thought about. It was in this very room that Shelley had wakened and
recognized the cowled figure of his soul, and had heard it question,
“Art thou satisfied?” It was the same question that she asked herself.
A knock upon the door! She started from the window and looked back. It
came again, so lightly that it seemed to say, “Only you and I are meant
to hear me.”
She threw a wrapper about her; her long bright hair fell shining across
her shoulders. It might be Peter. Again it came.
On the threshold Harry was standing.
“Let me speak to you.”
She hesitated.
“You gave me no chance to say anything. Am I to stay or--or to go
to-morrow?”
He ought to go. She knew that. And yet----.
“I can wait, Kay. Though you send me away, I shall wait forever for
you.”
She was sorry for him--and more than sorry. This pleading of the living
voice was different--so different from the pleading of letters. Dimly
she heard within herself the echo of his clamor stirring.
“Dear Harry, I want you to stay--but to stay just as you were always.”
He caught his breath. It was almost as though he laughed in the
darkness. “It was always as it is now. You didn't know; it began that
first day when I fought Peter, showing off like a boy. So if it's to be
as it was always-----.”
He looked so lonely standing there. He oughtn't to be sad with her--it
hurt; they'd always been glad together. She took his hands tremblingly,
“Stay and be--be the mouth-organ boy. We'll have such good times, Harry,
we three together. Don't be my--anything else. I'm too young for that,
and----
“And?”
“Peter hasn't learnt to do without me. Lorie was the same with you--you
understand. So Harry, promise me that you won't let Peter know--won't do
anything to make him know, or to make him unhappy.”
He put his arms about the narrow shoulders, stooping his head. “Trust
me.”
She leant her face aside sharply. “Not on my lips. They're for the man I
marry.”
“But one day I----.”
She freed herself from him gently. “Neither of us can tell.”
In the days that followed, when they walked and swam and sailed
together, Harry recognized what Kay had meant when she said that Peter
hadn't learnt to do without her. With the end of his hope of Cherry, all
his affections had flown homeward and had concentrated on the love of
his sister. It seemed as though he made an effort to find her sufficient
for his heart's cravings. To all other women his eyes were blind. The
thought that any other woman should come into his life seemed never to
occur to him.
Glory--she wrote to him, as Harry had written to Kay, with conscientious
regularity. But he read her letters aloud, obviously without editing;
they were serious letters like her eyes, searching and quiet, with a
hint of need behind them, and with bursts of fun when she told of the
struggles of her stepfather and Mr. Grace to run The Winged Thrust both
genially and for profit.
And the man who lived to-day as though it were a thousand years ago--a
week after Kay had first met him, they sailed across the gulf to
discover him. They found him in the castle painting.
“Ha! The little English girl!”
He threw down his brushes and came toward her with his arms extended. He
gathered her hands together into his own and bent over her intently with
his eyes of blue fire, “I thought I'd lost my earth-maiden.”
That was all. So long as Harry and Peter were present he was no more
than a shaggy artist, a little self-important, a little shy. When they
had walked off to explore the town it was different.
He picked her up as though she were a child, and sat her on the broken
wall, where the blue sea swept behind her shoulders and the white clouds
raced through her corn-colored hair. For a while he was utterly silent,
touching in sketches of her, testing various poses. The smell of wild
thyme mingled with that of flowers, fermenting in the sunshine. From far
below the wash of waves rose coolly.
Presently he spoke. “You stopped a long while away. Every day I've been
here watching for you. I don't often watch for anybody. If people don't
come----,” he snapped his fingers, “I begin again. I begin with someone
who won't keep me waiting.”
His egotism seemed not conceit, but justified consciousness of power.
Kay was beginning to explain; he cut in upon her. “It's all right. For
you I'd wait till--oh, till there wasn't any castle--till it was all
swept into the sea by rain. But only for you--for other people life's
too short.” He stopped sketching and looked up at her. “Little English
girl, life is very short. Phew!” He blew out his cheeks. “Like that, and
you are old. All the lovers are gone. No one cares whether you live or
die. With us men it's the same, only we--we search for the great secret.
You have it in your face. There's so much to do; it's not kind to keep
us waiting.”
“The great secret! What is it?”
He appeared to take no notice of her question. Picking up his pencil, he
went back to his sketching. Then, while he worked, glancing occasionally
to her face where the radiance of the sunshine fell against her profile,
“The great secret! It's hard to say. It's why we're here, and from where
we come, and where we go. It's the knowledge of life and the meaning
of death; it's everything that we call beauty. I see it in your face. I
paint it. How it came there, neither you nor I can say.”
Next day he set to work on canvas. The picture grew. It wasn't for
the picture that Kay went to him; it was for the things he said in the
loneliness, lifted high between the waste of tossing sea and restless
sky. He set her thinking; he made life more glad, more eager and,
because of its mystery, more poignant. The great secret! He didn't hope
to find it; but he told her of the men who had sought.
In telling her, he brought the soul into her eyes and set it down on
canvas. A young girl with blowy hair, perched among things ancient, her
white hands folded, patient for the future, with the pain of joy in her
wide child's eyes! That was what he painted.
And she--she was stirred by him. He gave her the freedom of his mind.
He treated her as a woman, teaching her knowledge and the sorrow of
knowledge--from all suspicion of which she had been guarded. She was as
much repelled as attracted by him; through him she learnt to love Harry.
She began to understand the suffering of love that is kept hungry. She
began to understand its urgency. At last she understood that such love
as Harry brought her must always stand first, sacrificing every other
affection. It was this that gave pain to her joy.
One day in early June, the man laid aside his brushes. “The last touch.
It's finished.”
He lifted her down very gently and watched her as she stood before it.
Clasping and unclasping her hands, she gazed at her own reflection with
an odd mixture of wonder and ecstacy. “But--but it's beautiful.”
He put his arm about her shoulder, speaking softly, “And so are you.”
“But not so beautiful.”
“More. I couldn't paint your voice.”
She stretched out her hands toward it. “Oh, I wish--I wish I could have
it.”
He tilted up her face. “Little English girl, it's yours. I did it for
you. You'll know now how you looked when your beauty dies.”
Tears came. It was like the world complaining against God's injustice.
“But I don't want it to die.”
He drew her head against him. “Kay--what an English name! Little Kay,
one thing will keep it alive.” She waited. “The great secret,” he
whispered; “it lies behind all life. For other people your beauty will
have vanished; a man who loves you will always see it.”
Before she was aware, he had touched her lips. If was as though he had
stained her purity.
On the sail back to San Terenzo, as the darkness drew about them, she
crept closer to Harry. He felt her hand groping for his own. “Kiddy,
you're burning--as hot as a coal. What is it? A touch of fever?”
She spoke chokingly. “Harry, my lips. They're yours.”
CHAPTER XLVI--THE ANGEL WHISTLES
It was the longest day in June. The room was stifling, filled with
greenish light which fell in stripes through the slats of the closed
shutters. On the tiled floor water had been sprinkled. Walls were
stripped bare. A sheet, dipped in disinfectants, was pinned across the
open door. On the other side sat the nun who had come to act as nurse.
She sympathized with the jealousy that kept them always at the bedside
and only intruded when she was sent for, or to give the medicines. This
desperate clinging of flesh to flesh while the soul was outgrowing
the body--how often she had watched it! She could not speak their
language--didn't understand anything but the quivering tenderness of
what was said. She was a little in awe of these two young Englishmen who
seemed so angry with God, and who sat day and night guarding the dying
girl lest, in an unheeded moment, God should snatch her from them.
Reckless of contagion, they bent above the pillow where the flushed face
tossed between the plaits of daffodil hair.
The fight was unequal; it couldn't last much longer. It had been going
on for a week. Had they known in time that it was typhoid----. By
the time they knew it was too late for her to be removed. The
fishing-village had none of the necessities of nursing; the doctor had
to come from Spezia.
Someone had to go for him at this moment; she had had a relapse. Harry
looked at Peter. “I'll go.” He spoke quietly, knowing that she might not
be there when he returned.
Peter touched Kay's hand, attempting the cheerfulness which they had
feigned from the first, hoping that it might deceive even Death.
“Kitten Kay.”
She opened her eyes. She had gone back years as her strength had failed.
She spoke as she looked, like a slight child-girl far distant from
womanhood.
“Belovedest?”
They had been crowding the gentleness of a full life into the words
exchanged in those few days.
He started to speak; choked and had to start afresh.
“Harry's off to Spezia to fetch the doctor--the man who's going to make
you well.”
“Well!”
It was uttered deliberately, with a wise disbelieving smile.
“Harry! Harry!”
Her face grew troubled as she tried to recollect a name that was
familiar.