In Which Roger Writes a Letter; and in Which a Rose Blooms Upon the Pages of a Book.
In the Tower Rooms, Midnight——
It is best to write it. What I might have said to you in the garden would have been halting at best. How could I speak it all with your clear eyes upon me—all the sordid history of those years which are best buried, but whose ghosts to-night have risen again?
If in these months—this year that I have lived in these rooms, I have seemed to hide that which you will now know, it was not because I wanted to set myself before you as something more than I am. Not that I wished to deceive. It was simply that the thought of the old life brought a surging sense of helplessness, of hopelessness, of rebellion against fate, Having put it behind me, I have not wished to talk about it—to think about it—to have it, in all its tarnished tragedy, held up before your earnest, shining eyes.
For you have never known such things as I have to tell you, Mary Ballard. There has been sorrow in your life, and, I have seen of late, suffering for those you love. But, as yet, you have not doffed an ideal. You have not bowed that brave young head of yours. You have never yet turned your back upon the things which might have been.
As I have turned mine. I wish sometimes that you might have known me before the happening of these things which I am to tell you. But I wish more than all, that I might have known you. Until I came here, I did not dream that there was such a woman in the world as you. I had thought of women first, as a chivalrous boy thinks, later, as a disillusioned man. But of a woman like a young and ardent soldier, on fire to fight the winning battles of the world—of such a woman I had never dreamed.
But this year has taught me. I have seen you pushing away from you the things which would have charmed most women I have seen you pushing away wealth, and love for the mere sake of loving. I have seen you willing to work that you might hold undimmed the ideal which you had set for your womanhood. Loving and love-worthy, you have not been willing to receive unless you could give, give from the fulness of that generous nature of yours. And out of that generosity, you have given me your friendship.
And now; as I write the things which your clear eyes are to read, I am wondering whether that friendship will be withdrawn. Will you when you have heard of my losing battle, find anything in me that is worthy—will there be anything saved out of the wreck of your thought of me?
Well, here it is, and you shall judge:
I will skip the first years, except to say that my father was one of the New York Pooles who moved South after the Civil War. My mother was from Richmond. We were prosperous folk, with an unassailable social position. My mother, gracious and charming, is little more than a memory; she died when I was a child. My father married again, and died when I was in college. There were three children by this second marriage, and when the estate was settled, only a modest sum fell to my share.
I had been a lonely little boy—at college I was a dreamy, idealistic chap, with the saving grace of a love of athletics. Your brother-in-law will tell you something of my successes on our school team. That was my life—the day in the open, the nights among my books.
As time went on, I took prizes in oratory—there was a certain commencement, when the school went wild about me, and I was carried on the shoulders of my comrades.
There seemed open to me the Church and the law. Had I lived in a different environment, there would have been also the stage. But I saw only two outlets for my talents, the Church, toward which my tastes inclined, and the law, which had been my father's profession.
At last I chose the Church. I liked the thought of my scholarly future—of the power which my voice might have to sway audiences and to move them.
I am putting it all down, all of my boyish optimism, conceit—whatever you may choose to call it.
Yet I am convinced of this, and my success of a few years proved it, that had nothing interfered with my future, I should have made an impression on ever-widening circles.
But something came to interfere.
In my last years at the Seminary, I boarded at a house where I met daily the daughter of the landlady. She was a little thing, with yellow hair and a childish manner. As I look back, I can't say that I was ever greatly attracted to her. But she was a part of my life for so long that gradually there grew up between us a sort of good fellowship. Not friendship in the sense that I have understood it with you; there was about it nothing of spiritual or of mental congeniality. But I played the big brother. I took her to little dances; and to other college affairs. I gave both to herself and to her widowed mother such little pleasures as it is possible for a man to give to two rather lonely women. There were other students in the house, and I was not conscious that I was doing anything more than the rest of them.
Then there came a day when the yellow-haired child—-shall I call her Kathy?—wanted to go to a pageant in a neighboring town. It was to last two days, and there was to be a night parade, and floats and a carnival. Many of the students were going, and it was planned that Kathy and I should take a morning train on the first day, so that we might miss nothing. Kathy's mother would come on an afternoon train, and they would spend the night at a certain quiet hotel, while I was to go with a lot of fellows to another.
Well, when that afternoon train arrived, the mother was not on it. Nor did she come. Without one thought of unconventionality, I procured a room for Kathy at the place where she and her mother would have stopped. Then I left her and went to the other hotel to join my classmates. But carnival-mad; they did not come in at all, and went back on an express which passed through the town in the early morning.
When Kathy and I reached home at noon, we found her mother white and hysterical. She would listen to no explanations. She told me that I should have brought Kathy back the night before—that she had missed her train and thus her appointment with us. And she told me that I was in honor bound to marry Kathy.
As I write it, it seems such melodrama. But it was very serious then. I have never dared analyze the mother's motives. But to my boyish eyes her anxiety for her daughter's reputation was sincere, and I accepted the responsibility she laid upon me.
Well, I married her. And she put her slender arms about my neck and cried and thanked me.
She was very sweet and she was my—wife—and when I was given a parish and had introduced her to my people, they loved her for the white gentleness which seemed purity, and for acquiescent amiability which seemed—goodness.
I have myself much to blame in this—that I did not love her. All these years I have known it. But that I was utterly unawakened I did not know. Only in the last few months have I learned it.
Perhaps she missed what I should have given her. God knows. And He only knows whether, if I had adored her, worshiped her, things would have been different.
I was very busy. She was not strong. She was left much to herself. The people did not expect any great efforts on her part—it was enough that she should look like a saint—that she should lend herself so perfectly to the ecclesiastical atmosphere.
And now comes the strange, the almost unbelievable part. One morning when we had been married two years, I left the house to go to the office of one of my most intimate friends in the parish—a doctor who lived near us, who was unmarried, and who had prescribed now and then for my wife. As I went out, Kathy asked me to return to him a magazine which she handed me. It was wrapped and tied with a string. I had to wait in the doctor's office, and I unwrapped the magazine and untied the string, and between the leaves I found a note to—my friend.
Why do people do things like that? She might have telephoned what she had to say; she might have written it, and have sent it through the mails. But she chose this way, and let me carry to another man the message of her love for him.
For that was what the note told. There was no doubt, and I walked out of the office and went home. In other times with other manners, I might have killed him. If I had loved her, I might; I cannot tell. But I went home.
She seemed glad that I knew. And she begged that I would divorce her and let her marry him.
Dear Clear Eyes, who read this, what do you think of me? Of this story?
And what did I think? I who had dreamed, and studied and preached, and had never—lived? I who had hated the sordid? I who had thought myself so high?
As I married her, so I gave her a divorce. And as I would not have her name and mine smirched, I separated myself from her, and she won her plea on the ground of desertion.
Do you know what that meant in my life? It meant that I must give up my church. It meant that I must be willing to bear the things which might be said of me. Even if the truth had been known, there would have been little difference, except in the sympathy which would have been vouchsafed me as the injured party. And I wanted no man's pity.
And so I went forth, deprived of the right to lift up my voice and preach—deprived of the right to speak to the thousands who had packed my church. And now—what meaning for me had the candles on the altar, what meaning the voices in the choir? I had sung too, in the light of the holy candles, but it was ordained that my voice must be forever still.
I fought my battle out one night in the darkness of my church. I prayed for light and I saw none. Oh, Clear Eyes, why is light given to a man whose way is hid? I went forth from that church convinced that it was all a sham. That the lights meant nothing; that the music meant less, and that what I had preached had been a poetic fallacy.
Some of the people of my church still believe in me. Others, if you should meet them, would say that she was a saint, and that I was the sinner. Well, if my sin was weakness, I confess it. I should, perhaps, never have married her; but having married her, could I have held her mine against her will?
She married him. And a year after, she died. She was a frail little thing, and I have nothing harsh to say of her. In a sense she was a victim, first of her mother's ambition, next of my lack of love, and last of all, of his pursuit.
Perhaps I should not have told you this. Except my Bishop, who asked for the truth, and to whom I gave it, and whose gentleness and kindness are never-to-be-forgotten things—except for him, you are the only one I have ever told; the only one I shall ever tell.
But I shall tell you this, and glory in the telling. That if I had a life to offer of honor and of achievement, I should offer it now to you. That if I had met you as a dreaming boy, I would have tried to match my dreams to yours.
You may say that with the death of my wife things have changed. That I might yet find a place to preach, to teach—to speak to audiences and to sway them.
But any reëntrance into the world means the bringing up of the old story—the question—the whispered comment. I do not think that I am a coward. For the sake of a cause, I could face death with courage. But I cannot face questioning eyes and whispering lips.
So I am dedicated for all my future to mediocrity. And what has mediocrity to do with you, who have "never turned your back, but marched face forward"?
And so I am going away. Not so quickly that there will be comment. But quickly enough to relieve you of future embarrassment in my behalf.
I do not know that you will answer this. But I know that whatever your verdict, whether I am still to have the grace of your friendship or to lose it forever, I am glad to have lived this one year in the Tower Rooms. I am glad to have known the one woman who has given me back—my boyish dreams of all women.
And now a last line. If ever in all the years to come you should have need of me, I am at your service. I shall count nothing too hard that you may ask. I am whimsically aware that in the midst of all this darkness and tragedy my offer is that of the Mouse to the Lion. But there came a day when the Mouse paid its debt. Ask me to pay mine, and I will come—from the ends of the earth.
This was the letter which Mary found the next morning on her desk in the little office room into which Roger had been shown on the night of the wedding. She recognized his firm script and found herself trembling as she touched the square white envelope.
But she laid the letter aside until she had given Susan her orders, until she had given other orders over the telephone, until she had interviewed the furnace man and the butcher's boy, and had written and mailed certain checks.
Then she took the letter with her to her own room, locked the door and read it.
Constance, knocking a little later, was let in, and found her sister dressed and ready for the street.
"I've a dozen engagements," Mary said. She was drawing on her gloves and smiling. She was, perhaps, a little pale, but that the Mary of to-day was different from the Mary if yesterday was not visible from outward signs.
"I am going first to the dressmaker, to see about having that lovely frock you bought me fitted for Delilah's tea dance; then I'll meet you at Mrs. Carey's luncheon. And after that will be our drive with Porter, and the private view at the Corcoran, then two teas, and later the dinner at Mrs. Bigelow's. I'm afraid it will be pretty strenuous for you, Constance."
"I sha'n't try to take in the teas. I'll come home and lie down before I have to dress for dinner."
As she followed out her programme for the day, Mary was conscious that she was doing it well. She made conscientious plans with her dressmaker, she gave herself gayly to the light chatter of the luncheon; during the drive she matched Porter's exuberant mood with her own, she viewed the pictures and made intelligent comments.
After the view, Constance went home in Porter's car, and Mary was left at a house on Dupont Circle. Porter's eyes had begged that she would let him come with her, but she had refused to meet his eyes, and had sent him off.
As she passed through the glimmer of the golden rooms, she bowed and smiled to the people that she knew, she joked with Jerry Tuckerman, who insisted on looking after her and getting her an ice. And then, as soon as she decently could, she got away, and came out into the open air, drawing a long breath, as one who has been caged and who makes a break for freedom.
She did not go to the other tea. All day she had lived in a dream, doing that which was required of her and doing it well. But from now until the time that she must go home and dress for dinner, she would give herself up to thoughts of Roger Poole.
She turned down Connecticut Avenue, and walking lightly and quickly came at last to the old church, where all her life she had worshiped. At this hour there was no service, and she knelt for a moment, then sat back in her pew, glad of the sense of absolute immunity from interruption.
And as she sat there in the stillness, one sentence from his letter stood out.
"And now what meaning for me had the candles on the altar, what meaning the voices in the choir? I had sung, too, in the light of the candles, but it was ordained that my voice must be forever still."
This to Mary was the great tragedy—his loss of courage, his loss of faith—his acceptance of a passive future. Resolutely she had conquered all the shivering agony which had swept over her as she had read of that sordid marriage and its sequence. Resolutely she had risen above the faintness which threatened to submerge her as the whole of that unexpected history was presented to her; resolutely she had fought against a pity which threatened to overwhelm her.
Resolutely she had made herself face with clear eyes the conclusion; life had been too much for him and he had surrendered to fate.
To say that his letter in its personal relation to herself had not thrilled her would be to underestimate the warmth of her friendship for him; if there was more than friendship, she would not admit it. There had been a moment when, shaken and stirred by his throbbing words, she had laid down his letter and had asked herself, palpitating, "has love come to me—at last?" But she had not answered it. She knew that she would never answer it until Roger Poole found a meaning in life which was, as yet, hidden from him.
But how could she best help him to find that meaning? Dimly she felt that it was to be through her that he would find it. And he was going away. And before he went, she must light for him some little beacon of hope.
It was dark in the church now except for the candle on the altar.
She knelt once more and hid her face in her hands. She had the simple faith of a child, and as a child she had knelt in this same pew and had asked confidently for the things she desired, and she had believed that her prayers would be answered.
It was late when she left the church. And she was late in getting home. All the lower part of the house was lighted, but there was no light in the Tower Rooms. Roger, who dined down-town, would not come until they were on their way to Mrs. Bigelow's.
As she passed through the garden, she saw that on a bush near the fountain bloomed a late rose. She stooped and picked it, and flitting in the dusk down the path, she entered the door which led to the Tower stairway.
And when, an hour later, Roger Poole came into the quiet house, weary and worn from the strain of a day in which he had tried to read his letter with Mary's eyes, he found his room dark, except for the flicker of the fire.
Feeling his way through the dimness, he pulled at last the little chain of the electric lamp on his table. The light at once drew a circle of gold on the dark dull oak. And within that circle he saw the answer to his letter.
Wide open and illumined, lay John Ballard's old Bible. And across the pages, fresh and fragrant as the friendship which she had given him, was the late rose which Mary had picked in the garden.
In Which Mary and Roger Have Their Hour; and in Which a Tea-Drinking Ends in What Might Have Been a Tragedy.
To Mary, possessed and swayed by the letter which she had received from Roger, it seemed a strange thing that the rest of the world moved calmly and unconsciously forward.
The letter had come to her on Saturday. On Sunday morning everybody went to church. Everybody dined afterward, unfashionably, at two o'clock, and later everybody motored out to the Park.
That is, everybody but Mary!
She declined on the ground of other things to do.
"There'll be five of you anyhow with Aunt Frances and Grace," she said, "and I'll have tea for you when you come back."
So Constance and Gordon and Aunt Isabelle had gone off, and with Barry at Leila's, Mary was at last alone.
Alone in the house with Roger Poole!
Her little plans were all made, and she went to work at once to execute them.
It was a dull afternoon, and the old-fashioned drawing-room, with its dying fire, and pale carpet, its worn stuffed furniture and pallid mirrors looked dreary.
Mary had Susan Jenks replenish the fire. Then she drew up to it one of the deep stuffed chairs and a lighter one of mahogany, which matched the low tea-table which was at the left of the fireplace. She set a tapestry screen so that it cut off this corner from the rest of the room and from the door.
Gordon had brought, the night before, a great box of flowers, and there were valley lilies among them. Mary put the lilies on the table in a jar of gray-green pottery. Then she went up-stairs and changed the street costume which she had worn to church for her old green velvet gown. When she came down, the fire was snapping, and the fragrance of the lilies made sweet the screened space—Susan had placed on the little table a red lacquered tray, and an old silver kettle.
Susan had also delivered the note which Mary had given her to the Tower Rooms.
Until Roger came down Mary readjusted and rearranged everything. She felt like a little girl who plays at keeping house. Some new sense seemed waked within her, a sense which made her alive to the coziness and comfort and seclusion of this cut-off corner. She found herself trying to see it all through Roger Poole's eyes.
When he came at last around the corner of the screen, she smiled and gave him her hand.
"This is to be our hour together. I had to plan for it. Did you ever feel that the world was so full of people that there was no corner in which to be—alone?"
As he sat down in the big chair, and the light shone on his face, she saw how tired he looked, as if the days and the nights since she had seen him, had been days and nights of vigil.
She felt a surging sense of sympathy, which set her trembling as she had trembled when she had touched his letter as it had laid on her desk, but when she spoke her voice was steady.
"I am going to make you a cup of tea—then we can talk."
He watched her as she made it, her deft hands unadorned, except by the one quaint ring, the whiteness of her skin set on by her green gown, the whiteness of her soul symbolized by the lilies.
He leaned forward and spoke suddenly. "Mary Ballard," he said, "if I ever reach paradise, I shall pray that it may be like this, with the golden light and the fragrance, and you in the midst of it."
Earnestly over the lilies, she looked at him. "Then you believe in Paradise?"
"I should like to think that in some blessed future state I should come upon you in a garden of lilies."
"Perhaps you will." She was smiling, but her hand shook.
She felt shy, almost tongue-tied. She made him his tea, and gave him a cup; then she spoke of commonplaces, and the little kettle boiled and bubbled and sang as if there were no sorrow or sadness in the whole wide world.
She came at last timidly to the thing she had to say.
"I don't quite know how to begin about your letter. You see when I read it, it wasn't easy for me at first to think straight. I hadn't thought of you as having any such background to your life. Somehow the outlines I had filled in were—different. I am not quite sure what I had thought—only it had been nothing like—this."
"I know. You could not have been expected to imagine such a past."
"Oh, it is not your past which weighs so heavily—on my heart; it is your future."
Her eyes were full of tears. She had not meant to say it just that way. But it had come—her voice breaking on the last words.
He did not speak at once, and then he said: "I have no right to trouble you with my future."
"But I want to be troubled."
"I shall not let you. I shall not ask that of your friendship. Last night when I came back to my rooms I found a rose blooming upon the pages of a book. It seemed to tell me that I had not lost your friendship; and you have given me this hour. This is all I have a right to ask of your generosity."
She moved the jar of lilies aside, so that there might be nothing between them. "If I am your friend, I must help you," she said, "or what would my friendship be worth?"
"There is no help," he said, hurriedly, "not in the sense that I think you mean it. My past has made my future. I cannot throw myself into the fight again. I know that I have been called all sorts of a coward for not facing life. But I could face armies, if it were anything tangible. I could do battle with a sword or a gun or my fists, if there were a visible adversary. But whispers—you can't kill them; and at last they—kill you."
"I don't want you to fight," she said, and now behind the whiteness of her skin there was a radiance. "I don't want you to fight. I want you to deliver your message."
"What message?"
"The message that every man who stands in the pulpit must have for the world, else he has no right to stand there."
"You think then that I had no message?"
"I think," and now her hand went out to him across the table, as if she would soften the words, "I think that if you had felt yourself called to do that one thing, that nothing would have swayed you from it—there are people not in the churches, who never go to church, who want what you have to give—there are the highways and hedges. Oh, surely, not all of the people worth preaching to are the ones in the pews."
She flung the challenge at him directly.
And he flung it back to her, "If I had had such a woman as you in my life——"
"Oh, don't,don't." The radiance died. "What has any woman to do with it? It is you—yourself, who must stand the test."
After the ringing words there was dead silence. Roger sat leaning forward, his eyes not upon her, but upon the fire. In his white face there was no hint of weakness; there was, rather, pride, obstinacy, the ruggedness of inflexible purpose.
"I am afraid," he said at last, "that I have not stood the test."
Her clear eyes met his squarely. "Then meet it now."
For a moment he blazed. "I know now what you think of me, that I am a man who has shirked."
"You know I do not think that."
He surrendered. "I do know it. And I need your help."
Shaken by their emotion, they became conscious that this was indeed their hour. She told him all that she had dreamed he might do. Her color came and went as she drew the picture of his future. Some of the advice she gave was girlish, impracticable, but through it all ran the thread of her faith to him. She felt that she had the solution. That through service he was to find—God.
It was a wonderful hour for Roger Poole. An hour which was to shine like a star in his memory. Mary's mind had a largeness of vision, the ability to rise above the lesser things in order to reach the greater, which seemed super-feminine. It was not until afterward when he reviewed what they had said, that he was conscious that she had placed the emphasis on what he was to do. Not once had she spoken of what had been done—not once had she spoken of his wife.
"You mustn't bury yourself. You must find a way to reach first one group and then another. And after a time you'll begin to feel that you can face the world."
He winced. As she put it into words, he began to see himself as others must have seen him. And the review was not a pleasant one.
In a sense that hour with Mary Ballard in the screened space by the fire was the hour of Roger Poole's spiritual awakening. He realized for the first time that he had missed the meaning of the candles on the altar, the voices in the choir; he had missed the knowledge that one must spend and be spent in the service of humanity.
"I must think it over," he said. "You mustn't expect too much of me all at once."
"I shall expect—everything."
As she spoke and smiled, and it seemed to him that his old garment of fear slipped from him—as if he were clothed in the shining armor of her confidence in him.
They had little time to talk after that, for it was not long before they heard without the bray of a motor horn.
Roger rose at once.
"I must go before they come," he said.
But she laid her hand upon his arm. "No," she said, "you are not to go. You are never going to run away from the world again. Set aside the screen, please—and stay."
Porter, picked up on the way, came in with the others, to behold that glowing corner, and those two together.
With his red crest flaming, he advanced upon them.
"Somebody said 'tea.' May I have some, Mary?"
"When the kettle boils." She had risen, and was holding out her hand to him.
As the two men shook hands, Porter was conscious of some subtle change in Roger. What had come over the man—had he dared to make love to Mary?
And Mary? He looked at her.
She was serenely filling her tea ball. She had lighted the lamp beneath her kettle, and the blue flame seemed to cast her still further back among the shadows of her corner.
Grace Clendenning and Aunt Frances had come back with the rest for tea. Grace's head, with Porter's, gave the high lights of the scene. Barry had nicknamed them the "red-headed woodpeckers," and the name seemed justified.
While Porter devoted himself to Grace, however, he was acutely conscious of every movement of Mary's. Why had she given up her afternoon to Roger Poole? He had asked if he might come, and she had said, "after four," and now it was after four, and the hour which she would not give him had been granted to this lodger in the Tower Rooms.
It has been said before that Porter was not a snob, but to him Mary's attitude of friendliness toward this man, who was not one of them, was a matter of increasing irritation. What was there about this tall thin chap with the tired eyes to attract a woman? Porter was not conceited, but he knew that he possessed a certain value. Of what value in the eyes of the world was Roger Poole—a government clerk, without ambition, handsome in his dark way, but pale and surrounded by an air of gloom?
But to-night it was as if the gloom had lifted. To-night Roger shone as he had shone on the night of the Thanksgiving party—he seemed suddenly young and splendid—the peer of them all.
It came about naturally that, as they drank their tea, some one asked him to recite.
"Please "—it was Mary who begged.
Porter jealously intercepted the look which flashed between them, but could make nothing of it.
"The Whittington one is too long," Roger stated, "and I haven't Pittiwitz for inspiration—but here's another."
Leaning forward with his eyes on the fire, he gave it.
It was a man's poem. It was in the English of the hearty times of Ben Jonson and of Kit Marlowe—and every swinging line rang true.
"What will you say when the world is dying?What when the last wild midnight falls,Dark, too dark for the bat to be flyingRound the ruins of old St. Paul's?What will be last of the lights to perish?What but the little red ring we knew,Lighting the hands and the hearts that cherishA fire, a fire, and a friend or two!"CHORUS:"Up now, answer me, tell me true.What will be last of the stars to perish?--The fire that lighteth a friend or two."
As the last brave verse was ended, Gordon Richardson said, "By Jove, how it comes back to me—you used to recite Poe's 'Bells' at school."
Roger laughed. "Yes. I fancy I made them boom toward the end."
"You used to make me shiver and shake in my shoes."
Aunt Frances' voice broke in crisply, "What do you mean, Gordon; were you at school with Mr. Poole?"
"Yes. St. Martin's, Aunt Frances."
The name had a magic effect upon Mrs. Clendenning; the boys of St. Martin's were of the elect.
"Poole?" she said. "Are you one of the New York Pooles?"
Roger nodded. "Yes. With a Southern grafting—my mother was a Carew."
He was glad now to tell it. Let them follow what clues they would. He was ready for them. Henceforth nothing was to be hidden.
"I am going down next week," he continued, "to stay for a time with a cousin of my mother's—Miss Patty Carew. She lives still in the old manor house which was my grandfather's—she hadn't much but poverty and the old house for an inheritance, but it is still a charming place."
Aunt Frances was intent, however, on the New York branch of his family tree.
"Was your grandfather Angus Poole?"
"Yes."
Grace was wickedly conscious of her mother's state of mind. No one could afford to ignore any descendant of Angus Poole. To be sure, a second generation had squandered the fortune he had left, but his name was still one to conjure with.
"I never dreamed——" said Aunt Frances.
"Naturally," said Roger, and there was a twinkle in his eyes. "I am afraid I'm not a credit to my hard-headed financier of a grandfather."
It seemed to Mary that for the first time she was seeing him as he might have been before his trouble came upon him. And she was swept forward to the thought of what he might yet be. She grew warm and rosy in her delight that he should thus show himself to her people. She looked up to find Porter's accusing eyes fixed on her; and in the grip of a sudden shyness, she gave herself again to her tea-making.
"Surely some of you will have another cup?"
It developed that Aunt Frances would, and that the water was cold, and that the little lamp was empty of alcohol.
Mary filled it, and, her hand shaking from her inward excitement, let the alcohol overflow on the tray and on the kettle frame. She asked for a match and Gordon gave her one.
Then, nobody knew how it happened! The flames seemed to sweep up in a blue sheet toward the lace frills in the front of Mary's gown. It leaped toward her face. Constance screamed. Then Roger reached her, and she was in his arms, her face crushed against the thickness of his coat, his hands snatching at her frills.
It was over in a moment. The flames were out. Very gently, he loosed his arms. She lay against his shoulder white and still. Her face was untouched, but across her throat, which the low collar had left exposed, was a hot red mark. And a little lock of hair was singed at one side, her frills were in ruins.
He put her into a chair, and they gathered around her—a solicitous group. Porter knelt beside her. "Mary, Mary," he kept saying, and she smiled weakly, as his voice broke on "Contrary Mary."
Gordon had saved the table from destruction. But the flame had caught the lilies, crisping them, and leaving them black. Constance was shaken by the shock, and Aunt Frances kept asking wildly, "How did it happen?"
"I spilled the alcohol when I filled it," Mary said. "It was a silly thing to do—if I had had on one of my thinner gowns——" She shuddered and stopped.
"I shall send you an electric outfit to-morrow," Porter announced. "Don't fool with that thing again, Mary."
Roger stood behind her chair, with his arms folded on the top and said nothing. There was really nothing for him to say, but there were many things to think. He had saved that dear face from flame or flaw, the dear eyes had been hidden against his shoulder—his fingers smarted where he had clutched at her burning frills.
Porter Bigelow might take possession of her now, he might give her electric outfits, he might call her by her first name, but it had not been Porter who had saved her from the flames; it had not been Porter who had held her in his arms.
In Which the Whole World is at Sixes and Sevens, and in Which Life is Looked Upon as a Great Adventure.
It had been decided that, for a time at least, Gordon and Constance should stay with Mary. In the spring they would again go back to London. Grace Clendenning and Aunt Frances were already installed for the winter at their hotel.
The young couple would occupy the Sanctum and the adjoining room, and Mary was to take on an extra maid to help Susan Jenks.
In all her planning, Mary had a sense of the pervasiveness of Gordon Richardson. With masculine confidence in his ability, he took upon himself not only his wife's problems, but Mary's. Mary was forced to admit, even while she rebelled, that his judgments were usually wise. Yet, she asked herself, what right had an outsider to dictate in matters which pertained to herself and Barry? And what right had he to offer her board for Constance? Constance, who was her very own?
But when she had indignantly voiced her objection to Gordon, he had laughed. "You are like all women, Mary," he had said, "and of course I appreciate your point of view and your hospitality. But if you think that I am going to let my wife stay here and add to your troubles and expense without giving adequate compensation, you are vastly mistaken. If you won't let us pay, we won't stay, and that's all there is to it."
Here was masculine firmness against which Mary might rage impotently. After all, Constance was Gordon's wife, and he could carry her off.
"Of course," she said, yielding stiffly, "you must do as you think best."
"I shall," he said, easily, "and I will write you a check now, and you can have it to settle any immediate demands upon your exchequer. I shall be away a good deal, and I want Constance to be with you and Aunt Isabelle. It is a favor to me, Mary, to have her here. You mustn't add to my obligations by making me feel too heavily in your debt."
He smiled as he said it, and Gordon had a nice smile. And presently Mary found herself smiling back.
"Gordon," she said, in a half apology, "Porter calls me Contrary Mary. Maybe I am—but you see, Constance was my sister before she was your wife."
He leaned back in his chair and looked at her. "And you've had twenty years more of her than I—but please God, Mary, I am going to have twenty beautiful years ahead of me to share with her—I hope it may be three times twenty."
His voice shook, and in that moment Mary felt nearer to him than ever before.
"Oh, Gordon," she said, "I'm a horrid little thing. I've been jealous because you took Constance away from me. But now I'm glad you—took her, and I hope I'll live to dance at your—golden wedding." And then, most unexpectedly, she found herself sobbing, and Gordon was patting her on the back in a big-brotherly way, and saying that he didn't blame her a bit, and that if anybody wanted to take Constance away from him, they'd have to do it over his dead body.
Then he wrote the check, and Mary took it, and in the knowledge of his munificence, felt the relief from certain financial burdens.
Before he left her, Gordon, hesitating, referred gravely to another subject.
"And it will be better for you to have Constance here if Barry goes away."
"Barry?" breathlessly.
"Yes. Don't you think he ought to go, Mary?"
"No," she said, stubbornly; "where could he go?"
"Anywhere away from Leila. He mustn't marry that child. Not yet—not until he has proved himself a man."
The blow hit her heavily. Yet her sense of justice told her that he was right.
"I can't talk about it," she said, unsteadily; "Barry is all I have left."
He rose. "Poor little girl. We must see how we can work it out. But we've got to work it out. It mustn't drift."
Left alone, Mary sat down at her desk and faced the future. With Roger gone, and Barry going——
And the Tower Rooms empty!
She shivered. Before her stretched the darkness and storms of a long winter. Even Constance's coming would not make up for it. And yet a year ago Constance had seemed everything.
She crossed the hall to the dining-room and looked out of the window. The garden was dead. The fountain had ceased to play. But the little bronze boy still flung his gay defiance to wind and weather.
Pittiwitz, following her, murmured a mewing complaint. Mary picked her up; since Roger's going the gray cat had kept away from the emptiness of the upper rooms.
With the little purring creature hugged close, Mary reviewed her worries—the world was at sixes and sevens. Even Porter was proving difficult. Since the Sunday when Roger had saved her from the fire, Porter had adopted an air of possession. He claimed her at all times and seasons; she had a sense of being caught in a web woven of kindness and thoughtfulness and tender care, but none the less a web which held her fast and against her will.
Whimsically it came to her that the four men in her life were opposed in groups of two: Gordon and Porter stood arrayed on the side of logical preferences; Barry and Roger on the side of illogical sympathies.
Gordon had conveyed to her, in rather subtle fashion, his disapproval of Roger. It was only in an occasional phrase, such as "Poor Poole," or "if all of his story were known." But Mary had grasped that, from the standpoint of her brother-in-law, a man who had failed to fulfil the promise of his youth might be dismissed as a social derelict.
As for Barry—the situation with regard to him had become acute. His first disappearance after the coming of Constance had resulted in Gordon's assuming the responsibility of the search for him. He had found Barry in a little town on the upper Potomac, ostensibly on a fishing trip, and again there was a need for fighting dragons.
But Gordon did not fight with the same weapons as Roger Poole. His arguments had been shrewd, keen, but unsympathetic. And the result had been a strained relation between him and Barry. The boy had felt himself misunderstood. Gordon had sat in judgment. Constance had tearfully agreed with Gordon, and Mary, torn between her sense of Gordon's rightness, and her own championship of Barry, had been strung to the point of breaking.
She turned from the window, and went up-stairs slowly. In the Sanctum, Constance and Aunt Isabelle were sewing. At last Aunt Isabelle had come into her own. She spent her days in putting fine stitches into infinitesimal garments. There was about her constantly the perfume of the sachet powder with which she was scenting the fine lawn and lace which glorified certain baskets and bassinets. When she was not sewing she was knitting—little silken socks for a Cupid's foot, little warm caps, doll's size; puffy wool blankets on big wooden needles.
The Sanctum had taken on the aspect of a bower. Here Constance sat enthroned—and in her gentleness reminded Mary more and more of her mother. Here was always the sweetness of the flowers with which Gordon kept his wife supplied; here, too, was an atmosphere of serene waiting for a supreme event.
Mary, entering with Pittiwitz in her arms, tried to cast away her worries on the threshold. She must not be out of tune with this symphony. She smiled and sat down beside Constance. "Such lovely little things," she said; "what can I do?"
It seemed that there was a debate on, relative to the suitability of embroidery as against fine tucks.
Mary settled it. "Let me have it," she said; "I'll put in a few tucks and a little embroidery—I shall be glad to have my fingers busy."
"You're always so occupied with other things," Constance complained, gently. "I don't see half enough of you."
"You have Gordon," Mary remarked.
"You say that as if it really made a difference."
"It does," Mary murmured. Then, lest she trouble Constance's gentle soul, she added bravely, "But Gordon's a dear. And you're a lucky girl."
"I know I am." Constance was complacent. "And I knew you'd recognize it, when you'd seen more of Gordon."
Mary felt a rising sense of rebellion. She was not in a mood to hear a catalogue of Gordon's virtues. But she smiled, bravely. "I'll admit that he is perfect," she said; "we won't quarrel over it, Con, dear."
But to herself she was saying, "Oh, I should hate to marry a perfect man."
All the morning she sat there, her needle busy, and gradually she was soothed by the peace of the pleasant room. The world seemed brighter, her problems receded.
Just before luncheon was announced came Aunt Frances and Grace.
They brought gifts, wonderful little things, made by the nuns of France—sheer, exquisite, tied with pale ribbons.
"We are going from here to Leila's," Aunt Frances informed them; "we ordered some lovely trousseau clothes and they came with these."
Trousseau clothes? Leila's? Mary's needle pricked the air for a moment.
"They haven't set the day, you know, Aunt Frances; it will be a long engagement."
"I don't believe in long engagements," Aunt Frances' tone was final; "they are not wise. Barry ought to settle down."
Nobody answered. There was nothing to say, but Mary was oppressed by the grim humor of it all. Here was Aunt Frances bearing garments for the bride, while Gordon was planning to steal the bridegroom.
She stood up. "You better stay to lunch," she said; "it is Susan Jenks' hot roll day, and you know her rolls."
Aunt Frances peeled off her long gloves. "I hoped you'd ask us, we are so tired of hotel fare."
Grace laughed. "Mother is of old New York," she said, "and better for her are hot rolls and chops from her own kitchen range, than caviar and truffles from the hands of a hotel chef—in spite of all of our globe trotting, she hasn't caught the habit of meals with the mob."
Grace went down with Mary, and the two girls found Susan Jenks with the rolls all puffy and perfect in their pans.
"There's plenty of them," she said to Mary, "an' if the croquettes give out, you can fill up on rolls."
"Susan," Grace said, "when Mary gets married will you come and keep house for me?"
Susan smiled. "Miss Mary ain't goin' to git married."
"Why not?"
"She ain't that kind. She's the kind that looks at a man and studies about him, and then she waves him away and holds up her head, and says, 'I'm sorry, but you won't do.'"
The two girls laughed. "How did you get that idea of me, Susan?" Mary asked.
"By studyin' you," said Susan. "I ain't known you all your life for nothin'.
"Now Miss Constance," she went on, as she opened the oven and peeped in, "Miss Constance is just the other way. 'Most any nice man was bound to git her. An' it was lucky that Mr. Gordon was the first."
"And what about me?" was Grace's demand.
"Go 'way," said Susan, "you knows yo'se'f, Miss Grace. You bats your eyes at everybody, and gives your heart to nobody."
"And so Mary and I are to be old maids—oh, Susan."
"They don't call them old maids any more," Susan said, "and they ain't old maids, not in the way they once was. An old maid is a woman who ain't got any intrus' in life but the man she can't have, and you all is the kin' that ain't got no intrus' in the men that want you."
They left her, laughing, and when they reached the dining-room they sat down on the window-seat; where Mary had gazed out upon the dead garden and the bronze boy.
"And now," said Grace, "tell me about Roger Poole."
"There isn't much to tell. He's given up his position in the Treasury, and he's gone down to his cousin's home for a while. He's going to try to write for the magazines; he thinks that stories of that section will take."
"He's in love with you, Mary. But you're not in love with him—and you mustn't be."
"Of course not. I'm not going to marry, Grace."
Grace gave her a little squeeze. "You don't know what you are going to do, darling; no woman does. But I don't want you to fall in love with anybody yet. Flit through life with me for a time. I'll take you to Paris next summer, and show you my world."
"I couldn't, unless I could pay my own way."
"Oh, Mary, what makes you fight against anybody doing anything for you?"
"Porter says it is my contrariness—-but I just can't hold out my hands and let things drop into them."
"I know—and that's why you won't marry Porter Bigelow."
Mary flashed at her a surprised and grateful glance. "Grace," she said, solemnly, "you're the first person who has seemed to understand."
"And I understand," said Grace, "because to me life is a Great Adventure. Everything that happens is a hazard on the highway—as yet I haven't found a man who will travel the road with me; they all want to open a gate and shut me in and say, 'Stay here.'"
Mary's eyes were shining. "I feel that, too."
Grace kissed her. "You'd laugh, Mary, if I told the dream which is at the end of my journey."
"I sha'n't laugh—tell me."
There was a rich color in Grace's cheeks. In her modish frock of the black which she affected, and which was this morning of fine serge set on by a line of fur at hem and wrist, and topped by a little hat of black velvet which framed the vividness of her glorious hair, she looked the woman of the world, so that her words gained strength by force of contrast.
"Nobody would believe it," she prefaced, "but, Mary Ballard, some day when I'm tired of dancing through life, when I am weary of the adventures on the road, I'm going to build a home for little children, and spend my days with them."
So the two girls dreamed dreams and saw visions of the future. They sang and soared, they kissed and confided.
"Whatever comes, life shall never be commonplace," Mary declared, and as the bell rang and she went to the table, she felt that now nothing could daunt her—the hard things would be merely a part of a glorious pilgrimage.
Susan's hot rolls were pronounced perfect, and Susan, serenely conscious of it, banished the second maid to the kitchen and waited on the table herself.
Here were five women of one clan. She understood them all, she loved them all. She gave even to Aunt Frances her due. "They all holds their heads high," she had confided on one occasion to Roger Poole, "and Miss Frances holds hers so high that she almost bends back, but she knows how to treat the people who work for her, and she's always been mighty good to me."
Mary's mood of exaltation lasted long after her guests had departed. She found herself singing as she climbed the stairs that night to her room. And it was with this mood still upon her that she wrote to Roger Poole.
Her letter, penned on the full tide of her new emotion, was like wine to his thirsty soul. It began and ended formally, but every line throbbed with hope and courage, and responding to the note which she had struck, he wrote back to her.