before richard hand said good-bye to mary vanton that september he told her frankly of his love for her.
“i am not doing a dishonourable thing,” he insisted. “if i tell you this, now, it is my right to speak and your right to hear.”
[254]mary vanton sat looking directly at him, the brilliance gone from her blue eyes, the depths in them showing, the depths in her showing, too, in the way she listened, and the words she uttered. her wonderful hair, darkly red, lay framed against the white linen of a chair covering, a chair with a tall back that seemed to shield and protect her and bring out in relief the milky whiteness of her fine skin, unchanged by the sun and salt air, like a pure and unspotted marble.
“no,” she said, slowly, “it is not dishonourable. for it is not myself, mary vanton, that you love, but the girl mermaid. i am not she. i am much altered.”
“you are mermaid,” he said, simply, and in his voice there was reverence.
she shook her head at this and seemed to fall to pondering the questions his confession raised.
“your husband,” he went on, “has deliberately turned his back. it is necessary that you should have some material assistance. it will be necessary—from time to time. i don’t mean money, but i do mean counsel, advice, someone to talk things over with, help with the children, particularly with the boys. young john, for example. he’s fourteen and you are sending him away to school. you’re letting me take him and you don’t know what it means to me!” like most people, dick hand was not ashamed to show feeling, though he hesitated, embarrassed, before a revelation of the depth of it. and this went deep. he lifted his[255] head abruptly and his glance pierced the blue surface of the woman’s eyes and sank silently to unfathomable soundings.
in those strange regions they met. it was like the embodiment of a fancy as old as kingsley’s “water-babies.” but it was not a meeting of sprites, not a meeting in play. she was mermaid; he was merman. she was the incarnation of youth for him; he was the incarnation of dreams for her. each saw in the other something lost or denied.
“you are what i would most wish to be, were i not mary vanton,” she was saying, evenly, and he found it hard to believe that she was uttering the words, so magically did they echo his silent thought. “remember that i, too, was a girl. i also studied—chemistry. call it alchemy—wonderworking—the miracle of facts invested with the romance of their exploration and discovery. in my simplicity and eagerness i dreamed for myself a career.... you have had the career.... in your simplicity and hopefulness you dreamed for yourself the perpetuation of youth in an ideal love and the renewal of youth in your children.... that—has been mine. i have had the greater satisfaction. i have it now.
“but mine is the basic satisfaction. i have had, i still have, an ideal love. i have my children. the rest i can forego. the other dream i can have as a vicarious satisfaction in the splendid work you have[256] done and are doing. you, on the other hand, have not had the underlying satisfaction that has been mine.... these things cannot be undone. we have to deal with them as they are. we have to make the most of them, exploit them bravely, gallantly. it is the feat of living which, i suppose, everyone is called upon to perform.”
“you are right,” he said, affirmatively. “but you are also partly wrong. i was your lover and am now your friend; i love your children, and it is at least permitted me to love them as if they were my own.”
“they are that part of me which it is still permitted you to love,” she said, gravely. “and as a friend, as an old friend, as my one-time lover, as the realizer of that part of my dream which i in my own person never can realize—as such you are near and dear to me. between us there exists a strong tie. i do not think that anything will ever break it.”
“it is unbreakable and it exists. it can be no different, it need be no stronger,” he avowed.
a few moments later she heard him on the veranda, talking with her oldest boy.
“i’ll swim you a hundred yards in the bay and beat you,” he was saying to john in a youthfully challenging voice.
“you’re on,” replied the fourteen-year-old, concisely. “say, you can’t do it, though!”
they moved away and their voices dwindled. mary[257] vanton listened to the attenuating sound of their movements and chatter. a great thankfulness filled her heart, and when she rose from the chair where she had been sitting, motionless, tears were in her eyes.
