21. Chapter XXI
Wednesday.
Well, Sally, mia, life looks a bit more rosy! I've separated Dolores from her cigarette, from her furry coat of powder, from her athletic perfume, from her circus clothes, and to-day, in spite of her incredible size (the inches and pounds she has acquired in six months!) the years have fallen from her. In a slim, brown tricotine with a wide, untrimmed hat of silky brown straw her loveliness has come back, and with it my enthusiasm.
She is docile in the main, when not too violently opposed, and I feed my fancy on the joy and pride I shall have in her, when she has finished school, in five years.
She starts on Monday, a splendid, firm, well-disciplined school where they have sensible rules about not letting the pupils come home for weekends. The head-mistress was charmed with Dolores and Dolores has "kissed up to God" her resolve to be good.
I'm honestly ashamed of my panic over first impressions. She's really an angel.
JANE.
Thursday.
She's really a demon.
J.
New York City,
June 29th.
DEAREST SALLY,
It's weeks since I've written you, but I'm a broken woman, old before my time. I may not look quite so forlorn as the geologist did, but I feel it.
Did I write something about the rosy but dim and distant date when Dolores would be "through school?" Well, it's come. She's through school. And school, I might mention in passing, is through with her,--five of them, from Miss Trenchard's Spartan smartness to the gentle Spanish convent. She's a demon-baby. She's a cross between Carmen and Mary Maclane.
Of course the wedding has had to be postponed. Michael Daragh is angelic about it, and he hasn't been able to help me with Dolores as much as he would like because he's been engulfed with a new settlement house, and his dope fiend has been wobbling again, but our calendar is finished and accepted now, and a really nice girl is being really nice to him--liking him, trusting him, and M.D. is at peace about him.
Dolores came definitely home from the convent to-day with a clever note from the Mother Superior ... they feel that the child needs more space ... freedom....
Good heavens, so do I!
Ay de mi, that I ever saw Mexico! And yet, the demon-baby loves me, and I love her, but I also love Michael Daragh and would like exceedingly to marry him. My house is ready, my clothes are finished, and so--nearly--am I.
But I cannot go off on a honeymoon unless I leave her in safety. Sarah, now that your mother is so improved, wouldn't you like to take a boarder? You could chain her to the baby-grand....
Distractedly,
THE VIRGIN MOTHER OF HER SOUL.
P.S. A friend, knowing of my plight, has just telephoned about a very fine New Thought school which will be glad to receive my ward. Well, they'll have some entirely new thoughts in that school which they've never had before!
J.
July Sixth.
SALLY DARLING,
I jibber with joy! The best and most beautiful of all my leading men was sent by a kind Providence to take tea with me to-day and talk over the new play idea, and while he was here Dolores Tristeza arrived in state and a taxi from the N.T. school, along with her trunk and her temper and her temperament and Santa Catalina and José-María. Utterly ignoring him, she launched upon a monologue of her fancied wrongs, dramatizing every incident, impersonating every one from the Principal to the taxi driver. I'd seen her through so many of these Mad Scenes that it left me quite cold, but not so my actor-man. When she had finished, spitting (dryly but venomously) upon all schools, and flung herself out of the room, he sprang to his feet.
"Good gad, Jane Vail,--don't you know what you've got here? A young Nazimova! An infant Kalich! Schools--nonsense! Teach her the A.B.C.'s--but don't touch that accent--and turn her loose on the stage!"
Sarah, he's right. It's the thing, the only thing, to do with her. I took her to see Nazimova to-night, and she sat star-eyed and hardly breathing. When we came home I told her my new ideal for her and she wept with joy. She swears by the green tail of Santa Catalina and kisses up to God that she will never be wicked again, and she believes it, and so do I, for I've touched her imagination at last. I've been trying to keep a Bird of Paradise in a chicken coop! I'll put her with the right people for training, and have her with me a great deal, and not try to muss up her poor little mind with mathematics.
She is lying sleepless and bright-eyed in her bed, and I must go in to her now, to soothe her off to the Poppy Fields with happy plans and prophesies.
When are you coming?
JANE.
July Eighth.
MY DEAR,
I float on a sea of rosy bliss. Randal's girl has almost promised to marry him, and he's a new man, and Dolores is a lamb, dreaming of the time she may begin her study for the stage, in the early fall.
We are to be married on the afternoon of the twenty-fourth, and take the night boat for Boston and thence to Maine, to Three Meadows. It was M.D. who sent me there by scolding me into realization of my grubbiness four years ago; I want to have my honeymoon there. The Deacon and "Angerleek" have a little house which they rent, and they are making it ready for us.
I'm afraid every one at home will think me quite mad to be married here instead of in my dear old house, but Sally, after all, my wedding belongs to this world, not to that. I shall be married here at Mrs. Hills' in her big old double parlors, the ugliness conquered with flowers, and I shall wear my traveling things--as the village paper would say--"the bride, attired in a modish going-away gown"--I know you'll wail for all the trimmings, Sally dear,--the veil and the train and all the rest, but that sort of thing belongs to eighteen, not twenty-eight. I'm beyond the age of opera bouffe weddings,--I don't vision myself coming down a white-ribboned aisle with wobbly knees, covered with orange blossoms and gooseflesh! But--oh, Sally, the truth is that I would be married in a mackintosh or a bathing suit, I'm so dizzily, dazedly happy!
Dolores Tristeza, good as an angel out of a frieze, agrees to stay docilely with Emma Ellis at Hope House while we are away. She calls her "
Ella de la barba" with reference to the small but determined little fringe on poor E.E.'s chin and I tremble--no, I don't! I'm not afraid of anything now. Everything is and will be perfect.
If only you can come, best of friends!
Happily,
JANE.
The Day!
MY DEAREST SALLY,
"I must be making haste,
I have no time to waste--
This is--this is my wedding morning!"
But my haste is done. I am radiantly ready now, and there are seven still and shining hours ahead.
My trunk is packed with jolly Island clothes; my bag stands ready to close; my sitting room is running over with gifts, little and large, proud and pitiful,--from Marty Wetherby's opulent clock and Rodney Harrison's gorgeous silver service to "Angerleek's" preserves and the hand-painted mustard pot from Ethel and Jerry and Billiken, and a virtuously ugly dusting cap from Mrs. Mussel. If only you were here, Sally dearest! But I know your mother needs you, and it must be a blessed thing to have a mother to need you!
Sally, I'm feeling very proud and very humble, very----
Later.
Just as I wrote that, Michael Daragh came, white, tight-lipped, more than ever like the Botticelli St. Michael; he was the "Captain-General of the Hosts of Heaven." All he needed was a sword.
"Woman, dear," he said, "I've the sad, terrible news will be breaking your heart."
"Have you decided not to marry me?" I asked, facetiously, but I didn't feel in the least humorous.
"'Tis my lad," he said, "Randal. She's thrown him over, that girl. Destroyed he is with grief and shame, bound again for the black pit."
I tried to comfort him. I said I was sure the boy was too firmly on his feet to slip now, but he knew better, or worse, and he said he dared not leave him for an hour, and then, Sarah, I began to see what it meant, and it turned me to iron and ice.
"You mean," I said, "you want to postpone our marriage?"
"Never that, Acushla, but--couldn't we be taking him with us? 'Tis the wild thing to be asking you, but after all, woman dear, we've the whole of our lives ahead, and for him it means all the world! Say we'll be taking him!"
Now, Sarah Farraday, I ask you, as a reasonable human being, what you think of that?
To take a dope fiend with us on our honeymoon!
I seemed to see the future in one blinding flash--always our own rights, our own happiness, relentlessly pushed aside. I'm glad I can't remember all I said, but I shall remember the look on his face as long as I live. But I was right--I was right. He belongs in a painted picture, St. Michael, not in a warm, vital, human world.
So, it isn't my wedding morning after all.
J.
Three P.M.
I'm putting a special delivery stamp on this, Sally dear, so you'll get it before the other one.
I relented in sackcloth and ashes and shame, of course, and telephoned to tell him so, but I couldn't get him because he was on his way here to tell me
he would yield, that he wouldn't ask me to take Randal with us. Then we had another moving scene, reversed this time, I pleading penitently to take him. M.D. said he had had a good talk with the poor lad, and he had sworn to brace up alone.
I shall always be glad I yielded, but I know now
just how Abraham felt when he found the ram caught in the bushes! And I'll always be glad that for once M.D. chose happiness for himself.
Very shakily, but gratefully,
JANE.
Midnight,
On the Boston Boat.
My dear, do you remember a silly song of our childhood with a refrain like this--
"I'm not blessed with surplus wealth,
Bump tiddy ump bump, bump tiddy ump bump,--
Off on a honeymoon all by myself, Bump tiddy ump bump bay!"
Well, my dear Sarah, that is exactly the sort of wedding journey which has fallen to me.
We were married. Yes, I'm very clear about that. Dolores, my dewy-eyed dove, stood with me, and Randal, ghastly and trembling, by Michael Daragh. The solemn old minister knotted us securely. Michael kissed me. (I'm very clear about that, too.)
Suddenly, like a cyclone, like a typhoon, Dolores Tristeza cast herself upon me. "Virgin mawther of my soul," she howled, "do not leave me! I keel myself!
Ella de la barba ees nawthing to me! Do not leave me to die with these so ugly strangers!
No tengo más amiga que tu!" (Thou art my only friend!)
She was working up into a frenzy which made all her earlier efforts sound like lullabies with the soft pedal on, and she was shaking herself into convulsions and crying real tears. "Behold," she sobbed, "
las lágrimas de la huérfanita;" (The tears of the little orphan!)
I counted ten. Then I turned to my new husband.
"Michael Daragh," I said, meekly, "will you take Randal with you and let me take Dolores with me?"
I wish you could have seen people's faces as we went off in a groaning taxi, ourselves, our luggage, Randal, white and protesting, Dolores, tearful but triumphant, José-María, snapping and snarling, Santa Catalina, strongly urging every one to shut his ugly mouth for the love of all the saints.
Sally, you've read a hundred stories, haven't you, which went like this--the ceremony, the good wishes, the rice, the old shoes, then--"he jerked down the curtain of the cab window,"--"Alone at last," he murmured, "my
wife;" "He folded her in his arms."
I think Michael Daragh's feeling was that we were not
entirely alone, and that it was a rather large order to fold in his arms a swearing parrot, a shivering, hairless dog, a robust Mexican orphan, a bride and a dope fiend, for he made not the first gesture of the above ritual.
It is after midnight. Dolores is asleep here in my stateroom, a smile of seraphic peace on her face, but in the room next door I hear the steady murmur of M.D.'s voice reading to poor Randal, who cannot sleep, who has tried to jump overboard. Michael dares not leave him for an instant, even to tell me good-night.
Sally, it
is really funny, but I have to keep assuring and reminding myself that it is.
JANE.
Morning,
At Three Meadows.
SALLY, MY DEAR,
Once again I crept up a river of mother-of-pearl in the gauzy dawn to this island sanctuary. The Deacon met us, amazed at our number, and led us to the silver gray house just beyond theirs on a little, lifting hill, where "Angerleek" will "do for us."
Morning brought counsel. While my husband (carelessly said--just like that!) while my husband looked after luggage I talked to Randal, sane again, haggard, abased. "My dear boy," I said, "
you aren't going to be in the way at all! You'll look after yourself and be company for Michael when he wants good man-talk. It's this demon-child. If--
do you suppose you could look after her for me!"
He wrung my hand. "Count on me! If there's anything I can do, to atone, to square myself--I'll be her nurse, her governess, her jailer!"
Then to a meek
huérfanita, feeding her menagerie, I made oration. "Daughter of my soul, thou knowest thy presence is a joy of purest ray serene, but this Randal creature, tagging ever at the heels of my spouse----"
"Star of my heart," she said, grinding her teeth, "he is a pig and the son of a pig! Have no fear,
Madrecita, I will herd him, like cattle, away from thy sight." She kissed up to God.
JANE.
The Silver Gray House,
On the Lifting Hill,
Three Meadows.
I have ceased to reckon time by calendars, Sally dearest, but I think we have been here, Michael Daragh and I, seven or ten days.
Oh, yes, the others are still here,--at least, they are on the island, but we never see them. They come and go like Brownies, like elves, like the "Little People" of Michael's land, bringing our meals and our mail, vanishing silently.... They stand between us and the village and the Deacon and the world. They are our shields and barriers; our sure defense; our shock absorbers. I shouldn't
think of ever going on a honeymoon without them. We have signed them up for all our anniversary excursions, and between whiles we'll loan them to friends for wedding trips and rent them to a select public,--there'll be miles of Waiting List as soon as they are known!
Make your reservations early!
Whole islands and oceans of love, old dear!
Devotedly,
JANE VAIL DARAGH.
(
Mrs. Michael Daragh!!!)
P.S. Sally, dearest, remember what I said, the night before I left Wetherby Ridge for the first time?--That I wasn't really "going away" from you all, but only "going on?" I lost my way for a while, Sally; I was content with just "getting on," but he found me and herded me sternly back to the highroad, and now, always and forevermore, no credit to the likes of me, but because I've espoused the Captain-General of the Hosts of Heaven, I'll be going on--and
on--with Michael Daragh. And, oh, my dear, but indeed--as he said of me long ago--I have been
anointed with the oil of joy above my fellows;
J. V. D.