She ripped the coat of soiled linen with the scissors in her chatelaine. The old negro, coming in with chocolate, brought hot water for her. Together they dressed the wound with balsam and pitoma leaf, binding it with Indian cotton. The steward brought in fruit and bread. They ate and drank together, mechanically, not as though they wanted food.
“Olivia,” Margaret said, “you are in great sorrow. Some of it, Olivia, perhaps all of it, is due to me. I want you. I want you to feel that I feel for you. Feel deeply. Oh, my God. I’m sorry for you. You poor woman.”
“Charles,” she said, “you mustn’t think. You’ve no right. You mustn’t think that. That what has happened was due to you. Don’t, Charles. You won’t, I know. I see too clearly what happened. I see your mind, Charles, all along. I understand.” She knelt very swiftly and kissed his hand. “There,” she said, very white. “I understand.”
Margaret closed his eyes, then looked at a gleam of flame far distant, and at the blue band on the bows of Tucket’s sloop, plunging the sea into milk within hail of him.
“You were right, Olivia,” he said, in a shaking voice. “I shall never reap my plantations yonder.”
“No,” she answered. “Nor I.”
There was silence between them for a little while.
“Charles,” she added, “we both had Darien schemes.”
“Yes, Olivia.”
“They came to nothing. Because. There. We were too wild to see what, what we were building with.”