How we worked at that canal! Caliban and two swarthy Italians and Roger and I—for I marked out the course of it in an artfully natural curve and put in the stakes. There were eighty-odd feet across the part of the peninsula we selected, and it bade fair to wear us all out and last forever, till I seized the occasion of a business trip that took Roger away for four days and hired a great gang of labourers who finished it all up, so that he walked into his island home across a foot-bridge, to his great and boyish delight. What a big boy he was, after all! Not that I did not share his pleasure in the Island: it gave me a delicious feeling of security and distance from the rest of the world. With the help of the gang I had been able to widen our channel considerably and it took a very respectable bridge indeed to span the gap. We had made plans for a regular drawbridge, but later we abandoned them, and chopped even the old one down. The water has washed and washed and worn away since, on the island side, and now one must be bent upon a swim indeed who cares to venture among the jagged ledges and mill-races that my blasting made.
We piped our spring too—a beauty—up through the dairy cellar to the kitchen, and Caliban was saved many a weary trip. Some years afterward I took my chance during another absence of the lord of the Island, and a hurried and astonished set of plumbers installed a luxurious bathroom in either ell of the cottage—a surprise for his birthday. Profiting by a winter in Bermuda, I copied their roof reservoirs, allowing one to each ell, sanded without, whitewashed within, an architectural measure which made the skyline even more rocky and wild, in appearance, from the water. Before we left, that autumn, we planted fifty evergreens, pines, hemlocks and spruces, in a broad belt just opposite the Island, masking it completely from the shore, and hardly a year passed after that without thickening and lengthening that concealing wall. Oh, we guarded our jewel, I can tell you!
It was that summer, I think, that Whistler came to us and drew that series of sepia sketches that frames the big fireplace. They are on the plaster itself—a sort of exquisite fresco—and Venice sails, Holland wind-mills and London docks cluster round the faded bricks with an indescribably fascinating effect. At my urgent request I was allowed to protect them with thin tiles of glass riveted through the corners into the plaster: how the collectors' mouths water at the sight of them!
Stevenson came a few years later: all the quaint comforts and intimate beauties hidden away behind the boulders plainly caught his elfish, childlike fancy—it was he who made the little grotto beyond the asparagus bed, lined the pool in it with unusual shells and coloured pebbles, fitted odd bits of looking-glass here and there, and wrote a poem on a smooth stone at the door for little Mary, to whom he dedicated it.
"The purple pool of mussel shells,
All full of salty ocean smells,
The coral branches in the wall—
And you the mermaid queen of all ..."
She used to recite it all very charmingly. Roger never wanted it printed in the Child's Garden of Verses, where it properly belongs—one of the best of them, in my opinion.
He and Margarita talked together by the hour and I have seen his dog-like brown eyes fixed on her an hour at a time. I asked him once if he intended to "put her in a story"—the quaint query of the layman, so strangely irritating to the book-man—and he shook his loose-locked head slowly.
"They say I can't do women, you know," he said, "and nobody would believe her if I put her in, she's too artistically effective."
And here am I doing it! Fools rush in ...
It may seem odd that Roger and I should not discuss the opera business, but we didn't. That it hurt him I knew, for I knew Roger. Anglo-Saxon to the backbone, the position which his wife as a successful operatic star must put him in could be nothing but highly distasteful to him. It is one thing to snatch your wife from the stage, as Margarita's noble grandfather had done, and enjoy her in your home; it is quite another to see her snatched from your home to that stage, after you have married her. But I have never known a juster man, and though he talked little of the "rights" of women, and then in a brief, blunt fashion that would have exasperated the fast-emerging sex most terribly, he nevertheless respected the rights of every human creature most scrupulously. Though he had the private appreciation of the unmistakable good points of the harem-seclusion shared by every healthy male, he would never have shut Margarita into a New York house or a honeymoon-island against her will, and I think he was too proud to reason with her on the only lines open to him. I think, too, that his quiet refusal to take any strong measures may have been based, partly, on the full appreciation of the risk he ran in marrying such a bundle of possibilities as Margarita. One of the greatest passions that ever (I firmly believe) mated two people had whirled him out of the conventional current of his life, and because it had, in its course, brought him into the rapids, he was enough of a man to set his teeth and take it quietly, knowing that when he left the calm, green-bordered stream for the adventure of flood tide, he did it with his eyes open—a grown man. Or so, at least, I take it that he reasoned: he acted as if he had.