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Abel And His Great Adventure
by
“There is one–the other of the two I spoke of the day I told you about Alice. It’s harder for me to speak of this one.”
“Don’t speak of it if it hurts you,” I said.
“But I want to. It’s a whim of mine. Do you know why I told you of Alice and why I’m going to tell you of Mercedes? It’s because I want someone to remember them and think of them sometimes after I’m gone. I can’t bear that their names should be utterly forgotten by all living souls.
“My older brother, Alec, was a sailor, and on his last voyage to the West Indies he married and brought home a Spanish girl. My father and mother didn’t like the match. Mercedes was a foreigner and a Catholic, and differed from us in every way. But I never blamed Alec after I saw her. It wasn’t that she was so very pretty. She was slight and dark and ivory-coloured. But she was very graceful, and there was a charm about her, master–a mighty and potent charm. The women couldn’t understand it. They wondered at Alec’s infatuation for her. I never did. I–I loved her, too, master, before I had known her a day. Nobody ever knew it. Mercedes never dreamed of it. But it’s lasted me all my life. I never wanted to think of any other woman. She spoiled a man for any other kind of woman–that little pale, dark-eyed Spanish girl. To love her was like drinking some rare sparkling wine. You’d never again have any taste for a commoner draught.
“I think she was very happy the year she spent here. Our thrifty women-folk in Stillwater jeered at her because she wasn’t what they called capable. They said she couldn’t do anything. But she could do one thing well–she could love. She worshipped Alec. I used to hate him for it. Oh, my heart has been very full of black thoughts in its time, master. But neither Alec nor Mercedes ever knew. And I’m thankful now that they were so happy. Alec made this arbour for Mercedes–at least he made the trellis, and she planted the vines.
“She used to sit here most of the time in summer. I suppose that’s why I like to sit here. Her eyes would be dreamy and far-away until Alec would flash his welcome. How that used to torture me! But now I like to remember it. And her pretty soft foreign voice and little white hands. She died after she had lived here a year. They buried her and her baby in the graveyard of that little chapel over the harbour where the bell rings every evening. She used to like sitting here and listening to it. Alec lived a long while after, but he never married again. He’s gone now, and nobody remembers Mercedes but me.”
Abel lapsed into a reverie–a tryst with the past which I would not disturb. I thought he did not notice my departure, but as I opened the gate he stood up and waved his hand.
Three days later I went again to the old garden by the harbour shore. There was a red light on a distant sail. In the far west a sunset city was built around a great deep harbour of twilight. Palaces were there and bannered towers of crimson and gold. The air was full of music; there was one music of the wind and another of the waves, and still another of the distant bell from the chapel near which Mercedes slept. The garden was full of ripe odours and warm colours. The Lombardies around it were tall and sombre like the priestly forms of some mystic band. Abel was sitting in the hop-vine arbour; beside him Captain Kidd slept. I thought Abel was asleep, too; his head leaned against the trellis and his eyes were shut.
But when I reached the arbour I saw that he was not asleep. There was a strange, wise little smile on his lips as if he had attained to the ultimate wisdom and were laughing in no unkindly fashion at our old blind suppositions and perplexities.
Abel had gone on his Great Adventure.