A Rivermouth Romance | Page 9

bound to
drown itself annually, whether it wants to or not. It may be presumed,
then, that Rivermouth's proper quota of dead bodies was washed ashore
during the ensuing two months. There had been gales off the coast and
pleasure parties on the river, and between them they had managed to do
a ghastly business. But Mr. O'Rourke failed to appear among the
flotsam and jetsam which the receding tides left tangled in the piles of
the River-mouth wharves. This convinced Margaret that Larry had
proved a too tempting morsel to some buccaneering shark, or had fallen
a victim to one of those immense schools of fish which seem to have a
yearly appointment with the fishermen on this coast. From that day
Margaret never saw a cod or a mackerel brought into the house without
an involuntary shudder. She averted her head in making up the
fish-balls, as if she half dreaded to detect a faint aroma of whiskey
about them. And, indeed, why might not a man fall into the sea, be
eaten, say, by a halibut, and reappear on the scene of his earthly
triumphs and defeats in the noncommittal form of hashed fish?

"Imperial Cæsar, dead and turned to clay, Might stop a hole to keep the
wind away."
But, perhaps, as the conservative Horatio suggests, 't were to consider
too curiously to consider so.
Mr. Bilkins had come to adopt Margaret's explanation of O'Rourke's
disappearance. He was undoubtedly drowned; had most likely drowned
himself. The hat picked up on the wharf was strong circumstantial
evidence in that direction. But one feature of the case staggered Mr.
Bilkins. O'Rourke's violin had also disappeared. Now, it required no
great effort to imagine a man throwing himself overboard under the
influence of mania à potu; but it was difficult to conceive of a man
committing violinicide! If the fellow went to drown himself, why did
he take his fiddle with him? He might as well have taken an umbrella
or a German student-lamp. This question troubled Mr. Bilkins a good
deal first and last. But one thing was indisputable: the man was
gone--and had evidently gone by water.
It was now that Margaret invested her husband with charms of mind
and person not calculated to make him recognizable by any one who
had ever had the privilege of knowing him in the faulty flesh. She
eliminated all his bad qualities, and projected from her imagination a
Mr. O'Rourke as he ought to have been--a species of seraphic being
mixed up in some way with a violin; and to this ideal she erected a
costly headstone in the suburban cemetery. "It would be a proud day
for Larry," observed Margaret contemplatively, "if he could rest his oi
on the illegant monumint I 've put up to him." If Mr. O'Rourke could
have read the inscription on it, he would never have suspected his own
complicity in the matter.
But there the marble stood, sacred to his memory; and soon the snow
came down from the gray sky and covered it, and the invisible snow of
weeks and months drifted down on Margaret's heart, and filled up its
fissures, and smoothed off the sharp angles of its grief; and there was
peace upon it.
Not but she sorrowed for Larry at times. Yet life had a relish to it again;

she was free, though she did not look at it in that light; she was happier
in a quiet fashion than she had ever been, though she would not have
acknowledged it to herself. She wondered that she had the heart to
laugh when the ice-man made love to her. Perhaps she was conscious
of something comically incongruous in the warmth of a gentleman who
spent all winter in cutting ice, and all summer in dealing it out to his
customers. She had not the same excuse for laughing at the baker; yet
she laughed still more merrily at him when he pressed her hand over
the steaming loaf of brown-bread, delivered every Saturday morning at
the scullery door. Both these gentlemen had known Margaret many
years, yet neither of them had valued her very highly until another man
came along and married her. A widow, it would appear, is esteemed in
some sort as a warranted article, being stamped with the maker's name.
There was even a third lover in prospect; for according to the gossip of
the town, Mr. Donnehugh was frequently to be seen of a Sunday
afternoon standing in the cemetery and regarding Mr. O'Rourke's
headstone with unrestrained satisfaction.
A year had passed away, and certain bits of color blossoming among
Margaret's weeds indicated that the winter of her mourning was oyer.
The ice-man and the baker were hating each other cordially, and Mrs.
Bilkins was daily expecting