“I am not at all elegant,” replied Anne, smiling; “as my aunt will tell you. I had to make myself some short skirts, and I get up at unearthly hours to have my tramp and return in time to dress for breakfast. But I have never met you.”
“I have passed you several times, but of course you did not notice me. I have a hut up in one of the jungles and I am always prowling about at that hour in the morning.” He hesitated, drew in his breath audibly, and as he looked down again, the colour rose under his pallid loose skin. “I came here to-day to meet you,” he added.
For a moment Anne felt that she was going to faint. Good God! Had this dreary outcast found his way to her castles in Spain? Could he know? She was unable to articulate, and he went on.
“You must pardon me if that was too bold a thing to say—you are the last person to whom I would give offence! But you have seemed to me the very spirit of the fresh robust North. I have fancied I could see the salt wind blowing about you. All the English creoles of this island are like porcelain. The fine ladies that come to Bath House take too much care of their complexions, doubtless of their pretty feet—they all want to be beauties rather than women. That is the reason you seem something of a goddess by contrast, and vastly refreshing to a West Indian.”
Anne drew a long breath as he blundered through his explanation. She was relieved, but at the same time femininely conscious of disappointment. Nor was there sentiment in his low monotonous voice. He paid but the homage of weary man to vital youth.
“I am unfashionably healthy,” she said, hoping that her eyes danced with laughter at the idea of being likened to a goddess. She continued with great vivacity, “How relieved I am that you have never noticed the hang of my morning skirts. Ah, that is because you are a poet. But I wish I could give you one-tenth of the pleasure, by my suggestion of the North, that I derive from your wonderful tropics. Don’t fancy that I get up at five merely for the pleasure of exercise. My chief object is to enjoy your island for a bit while all the rest of the world is asleep. These last sixteen days have been the happiest of my life.” She brought out the last words somewhat defiantly, but she met his gaze, still smiling.
“I am not surprised to learn that you are a poet. What else could be expected—once I learned to pay compliments gracefully, but if I have forgotten the art, I have not lost my power to admire and appreciate beauty in any form. It has given me the greatest pleasure I have known for years to watch you, and I thank you for coming to Nevis.”
Anne by this time was accustomed to the high-flown compliments of polite society, but she could not doubt the sincerity of this man, who had no place in a world where idle flattery was the small coin of talk. She blushed slightly and changed the subject, and as he talked, less and less haltingly, of the traditions of Nevis, she watched his eyes, fascinated. They were not the eyes of mere youth, any more than of a man who had seen far too much of life. Neither, upon closer inspection, were they the eyes of a saint or a martyr, although she could better understand Hunsdon’s estimate by picturing him born three centuries earlier. But they were the eyes of the undying idealist, of the inner vision, of a mental and spiritual life apart from the frailties of the body. They seemed to look at her, intent as was his gaze, as from a vast distance, from heights which neither she nor all that respectable world that despised his poor shell could ever attain. With it all there was no hint of superciliousness: the eyes were too sad, too terribly wise in their own way for that; and his whole manner went far beyond modesty; it had all the pitiable self-consciousness of one that has fallen from the higher social plane. No common man, no matter what his fame and offences, could lose his self-respect as this poor gentleman had done. Anne, filled with a pity she had never known was in her, exerted herself to divert his mind from the gulf which had so long separated him from his class. She talked as she fancied other women must have talked to him when he visited London in the first flush of his youth and fame. She even began with “The Blue Sepulchre,” which now no longer ranked with the best of his work, so far had he progressed beyond the unlicensed imagination of youth. She told him that she looked down from her balcony every morning expecting to see the domes and towers of ancient cities rise from the sea. And, alas! in the enthusiasm of her cause, before she could call a halt, she had told him all that his poetry had meant to her in her lonely life by the North Sea; in a few moments he was aware that she possessed every volume he had written, knew every line by heart; and although she caught herself up in time jealously to conceal the more portentous meanings it had held for her, he heard enough to make his eyes kindle at this delicious echo of his youth, coming from an innocent lovely creature who had evidently heard little of his evil life.
“I knew that you came from the sea!” he exclaimed. “And the purple rolling moors! How well I remember them, and longed to write of them. But only these latitudes drive my pen. Indeed, I once tried to write about the heather—the purple twilight—no figment of the poetical fancy, that. The atmosphere at that hour literally is purple.”
“When it is purple! But you should see the moors in all their moods as I have done. I rarely missed a day in winter, no matter how wild—I have tramped half a day many a time. And I can assure you that the sea itself cannot look more wild, more terrifying—with the wrack driving overhead, and the rain falling in torrents, and the wind whistling and roaring, and rushing past you as if called by the sea to some frightful tryst, some horrible orgy of the elements, and striving to tear you up and carry you with it. Still—still—perhaps it is as beautiful—then—in its way, as in its season of colour and peace.”