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Updated: June 5, 2025
"Have your own way; I'll marry you if you want me to!" She made him pay for this. "You see," she said to my aunt, "I told you I was going to marry him." "Well, then come out motoring tonight when you've got your dishes done," called old Conboy. "I'm going to the breakwater with Johnny Deutra tonight," said Deolda, in that awful truthful way of hers.
I had an uncomfortable sense of knowing that I ought to leave Deolda and Johnny and that Johnny was waiting for me to go to talk. And yet I was fascinated, as little girls are; and just as I was about to leave the room I ran into old Conboy hurrying in, his reddish hair standing on end. "Well, Deolda," said he, "Captain Hammar's gone down the Cape all of a sudden.
"But how ?" I started, and stopped, for Deolda had dropped beside the chest and pressed her face in the shawl, and I remembered that her mother was dead only a few days ago, and I couldn't ask her how the great dancer came to be in Dennisport in the cabin under the dunes. I tiptoed out, my heart thrilled with romance for the gypsy dancer's daughter.
I knew that she had sent her Johnny out informed with her own terrible courage. A weaker woman could have kept him back. A weaker woman would have had remorse. But Deolda had the courage to hold what she had taken, and maybe this courage of hers is the very heart of romance.
"You see what you get," said my aunt, "if you marry that girl." "I'll get worse not marrying her," said Conboy. "I may die any minute; I've a high blood pressure, and maybe a stroke will carry me off any day. But I've never wanted anything in many years as I want to hold Deolda in my arms." "Shame on you!" cried my aunt. "An old man like you!" So things went on. Johnny kept right on coming.
There never was so long an evening. The squall blew over and a heavy blow set in. I could hear the pounding of the waves on the outside shore. Deolda sat outside the circle of the lamp in a horrible tense quiet. My aunt tried to make talk, and made a failure of it.
"She ought to marry Johnny and make a man of him," I persisted, for it seemed ridiculous to me to call Johnny Deutra a boy when he was twenty and handsome as a picture in a book. My prim words touched some sore place in Deolda. She gave a brief gesture with her hands and pushed the idea from her. "I can't," she said, "I can't do it over again. Oh, I can't I can't.
After that Deolda went off in Conboy's motor as soon as her dishes were done and after supper there would be handsome Johnny Deutra. We were profoundly shocked. You may be sure village tongues were already busy after a few days of these goings on. "Deolda," my aunt said, sternly, "what are you going out with that old Conboy for?" "I'm going to marry him," Deolda answered. "You're what?"
"I'm saying to Deolda here," said Captain Hammar, coming up to my aunt, "that I'll make a better runnin' mate than Conboy." He drew her up to him. There was something alike about them; the same devil flamed out of the eyes of both of them. Their glances met like forked lightning. "I've got a lot more money than him, too," said Hammar, jerking his thumb toward Conboy. He roused the devil in Deolda.
There is a law of averages, a law of compensation, you know. The balance wheel turns; the tides change; the sands of occasion shift. Fate gave this man one overwhelmingly glorious chance to say something. He was mute. The second time she sealed his lips forever. By MARY HEATON VORSE After twenty years I saw Deolda Costa again, Deolda who, when I was a girl, had meant to me beauty and romance.
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