My South Sea Sweetheart | Page 8

not a very famous one, but still not unknown. He had as much of the poetic temperament as many whose names are greater, but he had, I imagine, more feeling than power of expression. Thereby hung the tragedy of his marriage. He had married a girl who believed in nothing that she didn't see, credited the existence of nothing that was not told to her in plainest of words. And father couldn't tell her the things that she ought to have known, without any necessity for telling. And somebody else, in time, proved apt at telling that which she never should have known....
My little mother "played the game." If she had not, I, her daughter, would scarcely tell this tale. She loved the man of the silver tongue (I have wondered, words or no words, if he could ever have had a voice as silver as my father's was). She even told him so. She told my father. She would have told all the world. Her love, she said, was her glory. ... I don't know what she thought it was to her husband. I suppose she did not think about that at all.
The man waited. Probably he thought not understanding my little mother, even as she had not understood my rather that he had only to wait.
I was born my father's own child. When I was three days old, she laid me in his arms, and asked him to take me away from the room she wanted a good long sleep. Even the nurse was to go away.
They all went. They stayed within hearing, but no one heard a sound.... An hour later, my mother's body was found floating at the foot of the cliffs. They called it childbirth mania. I do not know or perhaps, I think I do....
The man? He went to "the war." You will not want to know which war it was. He never came back.
After that, when the shadows had cleared away a little, my father being, as I have said, a poet dreamed a dream. It was the dream that everybody has, at some period of his or her life the dream of an island of one's own. I need not tell you about it; you have had it too. But you never hoped to realize it, and never tried. I don't think my father would have tried either being so much of a poet if he had not about this time met old Ivory. Mr. Ivory was a retired missionary, who had spent many years in the Pacific. Father, in his Sydney home the beautiful little nest he had built for the bird that only wanted to fly free talked with the strange old man, and found that he, too, had suffered. His marriage had been unhappy. His sons had been unhappy. His grandsons had been more or less unhappy. All were still living, save the grandson, who had died in a shipwreck with his wife, leaving one little baby boy, whom Ivory had adopted.
He told my father these things, and I infer that they found each other very congenial on the subject of unhappy marriages. I thought in my childish days, and I think still more now, that the Ivorys, on the whole, were a violent-willed, impetuous crowd who made too early and too hurried choices. Their very virtues, which were as fierce as everything else connected with them, probably contributed to this result. But Ivory did not think so. He thought the institution of marriage itself was to blame. He was not, and is not, alone in his error.
He told my father much about islands and island life; told him, incidentally, that islands were purchasable things, and that a man who wanted one, and could afford to pay for his fancy, might have one as readily as he might have a horse or a house. It turned out, when inquiry was made, that few were at that time in the market. Hiliwa Dara being some miles square, of good soil, well watered, and uninhabited, naturally was valued high by the government to which it belonged. My father could not raise capital enough to buy it, and to live there as well. And yet his very soul, by now, was set on owning it.
Here old Ivory came to the rescue. He had saved money himself, and he had a curious plan in which my father, and no one else, could help him. He proposed a partnership. Lorraine, my aunt, at that time a widowed bride (for her fiance had died in a railway accident on the morning of their marriage day) , came as companion to father and future instructress to me. And father, who had neglected my christening hitherto, much to the horror of old Ivory, when he found it