Try if my witch wife loves the Sea,
Or she'll choose the waves or she'll choose for me,
Then hey, for heaven or ho, for hell!

Circle the Cross on the midnight sand,
Heap the fire and mutter the charm,
Call her out to ye, soul in hand,
Blind and bare to the moon she'll stand,
Then out to the sea or in to my arm!

_Sir Hugh and the Mermaiden._

CHAPTER XXVII

WE BRING OUR PEARL TO MARKET

I did not hear Margarita sing in opera till the night of her _debut_
in _Faust_. Roger, on the contrary, was allowed to attend the last
rehearsals: Margarita honestly wished for his criticism, which she
knew from the very fact of his utter aloofness from her professional
interests would be perfectly unbiased and sincere. It was not without
a secret thrill of pleasure through my disappointment that I
acquiesced in her decree; I knew that she would be nervous with me,
from my very sympathy with her.

I can see the _Opera_ now--the lights, the jewels, the moustaches, the
white shirt-bosoms, the lorgnettes, the fat women with programmes, the
great, shrouding curtain.

Sue was there, pallid with excitement, and Tip Elder, who had come
over for a much-needed holiday, and Walter Carter, who had been on an
errand to Germany, and who had (of all unexpected people!) convinced
Madam Bradley that her own hard pride should no longer be forced to
regulate her children's enmities, and come to extend the olive-branch
to Roger.

I was as nervous as could be and Roger, I think, was not quite so calm
as he seemed and gnawed his lower lip steadily.

But Margarita, one would suppose, had not only no nerves but not even
any self-consciousness. She told us afterward that before the curtain
rose she was nearly paralysed with terror and was convinced that her
voice had gone--it caught in her throat. She could not remember the
words of the _Jewel Song_ and her stomach grew icy cold--if Roger had
been there, she said, she would have begged him to take her away and
hide her on the Island! But he was not there. No one was there but
Madame and her maid, and she could not run away alone.

When she sat spinning at her wheel behind the layers of gauze, and
_Faust_ saw her in his dream, her legs shook so that she could not
work the treadle. But when she paced slowly onto the scene in her grey
gown all worked with tiny, nearly invisible little butterflies--they
had made her put aside the big ones--she was as calm a