Whirligigs | Page 7

by the Pajaro to be distributed at casual stopping-places. Thus do the beneficent voyagers scatter news and enter- tainment among the prisoners of sea and mountains. Tio Pancho, the hotel proprietor, set his great silver- rimmed aiteojos upon his nose and divided the papers into a number of smaller rolls. A barefooted muchacho dashed in, desiring the post of messenger.
"Bien venido," said Tio Pancho. "This to Se?ora Conant; that to el Doctor S-S-Schlegel -- Dios! what a name to say! - that to Se?or Davis -- one for Don Alberto. These two for the Casa de Huespedes, Numero 6, en la calle de las Buenas Gracias. And say to them all, muchacho, that the Pajaro sails for Panama at three this afternoon. If any have letters to send by the post, let them come quickly, that they may first pass through the correo."
Mrs. Conant received her roll of newspapers at four o'clock. The boy was late in delivering them, because he had been deflected from his duty by an iguana that crossed his path and to which he immediately gave chase. But it made no hardship, for she had no letters to send.
She was idling in a hammock in the patio of the house that she occupied, half awake, half happily dreaming of the paradise that she and Merriam had created out of the wrecks of their pasts. She was content now for the horizon of that shimmering sea to be the horizon of her life. They had shut out the world and closed the door.
Merriam was coming to her house at seven, after his dinner at the hotel. She would put on a white dress and an apricot-coloured lace mantilla, and they would walk an hour under the cocoanut palms by the lagoon. She smiled contentedly, and chose a paper at random from the roll the boy had brought.
At first the words of a certain headline of a Sunday newspaper meant nothing to her; they conveyed only a visualized sense of familiarity. The largest type ran thus: "Lloyd B. Conant secures divorce." And then the subheadings: "Well-known Saint Louis paint manufac- turer wins suit, pleading one year's absence of wife." "Her mysterious disappearance recalled." "Nothing has been heard of her since."
Twisting herself quickly out of the hammock, Mrs. Conant's eye soon traversed the half-column of the "Recall." It ended thus: "It will be remembered that Mrs. Conant disappeared one evening in March of last year. It was freely rumoured that her marriage with Lloyd B. Conant resulted in much unhappiness. Stories were not wanting to the effect that his cruelty toward his wife had more than once taken the form of physical abuse. After her departure a full bottle of tincture of aconite, a deadly poison, was found in a small medicine cabinet in her bedroom. This might have been an indication that she meditated suicide. It is supposed abandoned such an intention if she possessed it, and left her home instead."
Mrs. Conant slowly dropped the paper, and sat on a chair, clasping her hands tightly.
"Let me think -- O God! -- let me think," she whis- pered. "I took the bottle with me . . . I threw it out of the window of the train . . . I -- . . . there was another bottle in the cabinet . . . there were two, side by side -- the aconite -- and the valerian that I took when I could not sleep . . . If they found the aconite bottle full, why -- but, he is alive, of course -- I gave him only a harmless dose of valerian . . . I am not a murderess in fact . . . Ralph, I -- 0 God, don't let this be a dream!"
She went into the part of the house that she rented from the old Peruvian man and his wife, shut the door, and walked up and down her room swiftly and feverishly for half an hour. Merriam's photograph stood in a frame on a table. She picked it up, looked at it with a smile of exquisite tenderness, and -- dropped four tears on it. And Merriam only twenty rods away! Then she stood still for ten minutes, looking into space. She looked into space through a slowly opening door. On her side of the door was the building material for a castle of Romance -- love, an Arcady of waving palms, a lullaby of waves on the shore of a haven of rest, respite, peace, a lotus land of dreamy ease and security -- a life of poetry and heart's ease and refuge. Romanticist, will you tell me what Mrs. Conant saw on the other side of the door? You cannot? -- that is, you will not? Very well; then listen.