"How do you do, my little girl?"
"I am very well, thank you, Mademoiselle."
"Did you have a comfortable journey?"
"Yes, thank you, Mademoiselle. My grandmamma and I passed a very pleasant day in thetrain. What a long way off you live! About a thrillion miles, I suppose."
Mary decided that this sounded a little too far when it was put into speech. Perhaps on consideration she had better be content with impressing Grandmamma.
"Supposing she never wakes up!" Mary thought in alarm. "Supposing she's gone to sleep like the Sleeping Beauty for thrillions of years? Only she's not a Beauty," Mary added to herself in hopeful parenthesis. However, soon after this Grandmamma did wake up, by which time Mary herself had fallen asleep, and did not wake until the train reached Lyon, where they got out and drove in the dusk along the banks first of one river and then of another equally large until they reached their hotel. Mary was sent with the chambermaid to have a bath before she went to bed, and she had to walk along half a dozen dark, crooked passages before she reached the bathroom, which was full of steam; the bath itself was covered with a large sheet which floated about in the water and kept bellying out on either side of Mary as she splashed about. Her bath seemed to have caused much excitement in the hotel, for all the time people kept coming to the door and shouting outside to the chambermaid, who kept shouting back as excitedly while the pipes on the wall groaned and bubbled and clashed until Mary was glad when her bath was finished and the chambermaid, after wrapping her in several towels,picked her up in her arms and carried her back through the corridors, running fast and shouting to everybody she met to get out of the way. That night Mary slept in an enormous four-poster with heavy red curtains, and in the morning she went for a drive with her grandmother first along the banks of the sluggish, dark green Saône and then beside the sparkling azure Rhône. But what Mary liked best in Lyon was the Cathedral on the top of a steep hill, which looked like an elephant upside down with gilded legs and a golden trunk. Afterdéjeunerthey got into a most extraordinary train with carriages as tall as houses where passengers sat on top without any roof over them, in which they were puffed along until they reached their destination.
Châteaublanc was a small red-roofed town built upon the southern slopes of a range of low hills that rose not much higher than the rolling countryside of woodland, pasture, and vineyard, at the foot of which a small tributary of the Saône ran its shallow course over a bed of limestone. The ruins of the castle that gave its name to Châteaublanc still stood like an acropolis above the town, the sight of which compensated Mary for much, since this must really once upon a time have been an enchanted castle without any need to pretend that it was one. In fact, from the moment she alighted at the station Mary liked Châteaublanc. She liked the wide main street, where the houses dreamed in the sunlight behind green shutters and Gloire de Dijon roses, and wherein the middle of the front parterres beautiful purple and silver globes shimmered with the movement of the small world therein reflected.
"Oh, Grandmamma, how beautiful they are!" she cried, clapping her hands.
"Yes, you're in roseland here," said Lady Flower.
"No. Not the roses. They're beautiful too. But those purple balls!"
"My dear child, you don't mean to say you think those monstrous tinsel spheres beautiful! Why, they're perfectly hideous!"
Mary regarded her grandmother in amazement. She must be mad. She must be upset by the journey. She must be joking.
"Oh, and look! That garden's got five!" she shrieked, nearly falling out of thefiacrein her delight. "One purple. One silver. One blue. One gold. And one red. I hope in heaven there are thrillions and thrillions of them."
"God forbid!" exclaimed Lady Flower, sniffing her vinaigrette in dismay at the picture. "And I suppose you mean trillions."
Mary was silent after this until thefiacretook them beyond the main street into an avenue of clipped acacias and limes, from which they turned aside through wide paths into a curved drive where hydrangeas bloomed in the beds on either side.
"What funny flowers!" Mary exclaimed. "They're like the little woman in a house Uncle... Fawcus ... Mr. Fawcus gave me. When it was going to be wet, her bonnet and dress was pink and when it was going to be fine they were blue. Only really she wasn't ever pink or blue, but like those flowers, and then she was always wrong."
Thefiacrepulled up before a house with a white portico and French windows opening to the wide verandah that ran round it.
"Is this really going to be my school?" Mary asked incredulously. "Why, I thought it was going to be quite an ugly place. Oh, Grandmamma," she cried, "how kind of you to give me such a nice school!"
Lady Flower had been influenced by a number of considerations in her choice of a school for Mary, but what undoubtedly had least influence was her granddaughter's point of view in the matter. Nevertheless, as grown-up people use, she accepted the child's gratitude with complacency.
It certainly was a good school. Mademoiselle Lucinge was a woman of taste and breeding, who when little more than a girl had gone as governess to the house of an English nobleman, where she had remained ten years. Having inherited from a distant relative a house and a small property, she had felt justified in carrying out a project upon which she had for a long time set her heart. During her stay in England she had had an opportunity of coming into contact with a number of distinguished people, and from the moment she had opened herpensionshe had been successful. The greater number of herpupils were English, but many other nationalities were represented; and Lady Flower, who was prejudiced in favor of a cosmopolitan education, thought that in Mademoiselle Lucinge she had found the ideal person to correct in her granddaughter the effects of a deplorable upbringing, for which, strange to say, she did not in the least blame herself.
When Mary went to Châteaublanc, she found herself the youngest of thirty-five girls, and it had been agreed between Lady Flower and Mademoiselle that for the first two years she was to spend all her time there. So, when her grandmother bade good-by on the day after her arrival it was to be a long good-by, although it was understood that she might expect a visit whenever Lady Flower should be on her way to Aix.
Mary was too much delighted with thepensionto feel any sorrow at the prospect of so long a parting. Nor indeed was it to be expected that in barely three months her grandmother would have become indispensable to her happiness. Her new surroundings had already begun even to dim the basement of Paternoster Row. Uncle William and Aunt Lucy were now far away indeed. It would not be long before Mary would begin to remember her past life in a few bright patches like the bright patches of a faded carpet.
A month after Mary had arrived at thepensionwar was declared between France and Prussia. The pupils went home for their summer holidays, andMary was left with two girls from South America, both considerably older than herself. During this time Mademoiselle Lucinge took a great deal of trouble with Mary's education and was really more like a private governess in the care she lavished than the proprietress and headmistress of a fashionable school. The war was going so badly for France that it seemed more prudent to close the school that autumn. The two South American girls were sent off to Bordeaux that they might sail thence for home and relieve the minds of their parents who had sent a packet of anxious and excited letters. Mademoiselle Lucinge wrote to her grandmother to ask what she would like Mary to do. Lady Flower wrote back to say that she was convinced that the French defeats were of no importance and that very shortly the Prussians would be driven back over the Rhine. In any case, Paris was no place for her granddaughter, and in Paris she herself must stay to do her work with the Red Cross. Would Mademoiselle keep Mary at Châteaublanc?
Nothing could have fallen out better for Mary. She had now the entire attention of Mademoiselle; she had a beautiful house and beautiful gardens to herself; she had as many books to read as she wanted.
Mademoiselle Lucinge was a devout Catholic, and so were most of her pupils. As regards Mary's religious teaching, Lady Flower let Mademoiselle understand that she had no objection to as much religion being instilled into her granddaughter as was consonant with her social obligations in days to come; but she particularly requested that no attempt should be made to lure her into Catholicism. The Papacy was very unpopular in England at this period, and Lady Flower would have regarded it as a serious reflection upon her duty as guardian if she had allowed her granddaughter to enter society under such a handicap. She herself privately believed in nothing that was not material, even obvious, but inasmuch as positive scepticism would be considered as unbecoming as Popish extravagance she conformed to the religious mode of the time and expected her granddaughter to do the same.
Mademoiselle had not been a governess in England for ten years without learning how little the English mind being considered eccentric abroad, how much they hate to be thought eccentric at home. At the same time, Mary was the youngest pupil in her school, and she regarded her own duties of guardianship more gravely than Lady Flower regarded hers. Whatever might be Mary's life in days to come, Mademoiselle was determined that she should not be denied in childhood an opportunity to prepare the soul for those deep consolations of religious belief that might one day come to her aid in a time of stress. And Mary loved the quiet hours with Mademoiselle, when in her gray boudoir she spoke to her about God.
One mellow Sunday evening in mid-September,when the news from the seat of war was as bad as it could be and when Mademoiselle's austere and gracious countenance was lined with care and grief for her country, Mary had been learning the fifth commandment in the catechism of the Church of England:
Honor thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long in the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.
Honor thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long in the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.
A robin redbreast was singing in the magnolia on the lawn beneath the turret window of Mademoiselle's gray room, and Mary's thoughts on seeing the bird went back to the attic in Paternoster Row, where she had first read of the death of poor Cock Robin. When Mademoiselle's exposition of filial piety was concluded, Mary asked her if she ought to honor her grandmother as much as she would have honored her father and mother were they alive.
"Quite as much, my child," said Mademoiselle.
Mary thought for a moment or two.
"But oughtn't I to honor Mr. and Mrs. Fawcus, who Grandmamma says I mustn't call Uncle William and Aunt Lucy any more?"
It was Mademoiselle's turn to think for a moment.
"You ought to honor their memory," she said at last.
"But why mayn't I write to them and tell themwhere I am? And tell about you, Mademoiselle, and what I'm doing and about the garden and the lizards and the white cows who pull the carts and about treading on the grapes and beating the corn with those funny sticks and about my sabots and the melon I have for breakfast? They would like to hear."
Mademoiselle could not bear that the gratitude and affection of a little child should be thus discouraged, although Lady Flower's last words had been to forbid any communication between Mary and her former guardians. In the end she compromised by letting Mary write a letter and writing herself by the same post to Mr. Fawcus, begging him not to reply and explaining the circumstances in which she had allowed Mary to write. It was unlike Mademoiselle to compromise; but she was tormented by the woes of France that autumn and not so much mistress as usual of her judgment or emotions. Her kindly intention did much harm, for when Mary received no answer to her letter she was embittered by the thought that her beloved friends had already forgotten her, and this was the first disillusion of her life.
During this time Mary, with the facility of childhood, learned to speak French, so that before the leaves fell from the trees that year she was as fluent as if she had been living in Châteaublanc from infancy. One day in October—it was soon after the news had arrived of Gambetta's escape from Parisin a balloon—Mary, wandering in a remote corner of the grounds, discovered a stripling of about sixteen who was digging holes for young trees to be planted in them when the autumn rains should have soaked down into the soil. He was a slim, handsome boy with fine features and dark, silky hair; but it was not his good looks that interested Mary so much as the fact that he seemed to be working in a frenzy of despair.
"Qu'est-ce que tu as?" she demanded.
"J'ai mal au cœur," he replied sullenly, wiping a tear from his eye and bending low over his spade.
"But why are you crying?" she persisted. She spoke in French, of course.
"My tears belong to me," he said. "At least the Prussians have left us our tears."
"Are you the son of our gardener?" she asked.
To this ollendorfian query he nodded.
"Of Monsieur Menard?"
He nodded again.
"Alors, tu es Pierre?"
"Oui, je suis Pierre."
Mary produced an apple from the pocket of the hideous crimson pelisse she was wearing, and while she slowly munched it she regarded the boy with solemn curiosity. She had heard of young Pierre Menard who had run away from home to join the troops that were everywhere being recruited in the provinces to drive the Prussians out of France, and of how his father had found him in the market-placeof Villefranche and brought him back, because he was too young to be a soldier.
"I'm sorry you could not go to be a soldier, Pierre," she said at last. "Would you like the other half of my apple?"
The boy accepted the proffered fruit with a surly grace, and presently he was confiding in Mary the tale of his wrecked ambition.
"If I'm strong enough to plant trees, I'm strong enough to carry achassepot," he declared. "If I can dig holes for trees, I can dig graves for Prussians."
Mary condoled with him, listened to his tales of the Emperor, not the degenerate captive of the enemy, but the great Napoleon, and lamented with him the glory of which he was being foiled by his father's cruelty.
"We must fight on for years, Gambetta says, and, who knows? I may rise to be a marshal of France before the war comes to an end."
"You might be Emperor," Mary agreed with enthusiasm.
Pierre tried to look modest and disclaim so exalted an ambition as that; but there was in the manner of his disclaimer a suggestion that he did not think such an altitude impossible.
Mary saw a good deal of Pierre, because Mademoiselle who was sorry for the boy raised no objection to her frequenting his company. For a longtime Mary had been anxious to visit the ruined castle on the hill above the town, and on All Saints' Day she begged and obtained permission to be escorted there by Pierre. There was not much left of the old castle beyond crumbling ivy-colored walls and nettle-grown courts, although there was one round tower, which was still almost intact. Below the foundations of this tower was a largeoubliettebristling with the very spikes which had impaled unhappy prisoners precipitated upon them years ago. Mary and Pierre gazed down with awe through the open trap and imagined that they could still see bones and bloodstains upon the floor thirty feet below. Immediately beside the trap was a small embrasure in the thick walls of the tower lighted by a lancet window through which could be seen a vast expanse of country, meadows and woods and vineyards and that great serpent the Saône. Hither it was that the prisoner condemned to die was led up blinking from the dungeons below to take his last look at France; here he was allowed to spend a few wistful moments; hence he stepped upon the trap to vanish forever from the eyes of men.
There was room for both Mary and Pierre to stand close together in the embrasure and on this holy morn to gaze out at the russet landscape breathless beneath the milky blue of the November sky.
"My little one," said Pierre, "I would rather throw myself down into thatoubliettethan stay hereany longer while France bleeds to death. Hark! Do you hear the sound of drums?"
"Yes, very far away. Trump—trump—trump—trump!" she whispered in awe of the menacing beat.
"Alors, je file!" he cried. "You can find your way home alone?"
"But suppose there are cows on the road?"
"My little one, it is impossible to permit cows to stand in the way ofla patrie et la gloire. I will conduct you outside the Castle gates and you must find your way home. As for me, this time I will go to the war.Vive la France!"
Mary stood in the ruined gateway, waving her hand to Pierre who went running and skipping along the white road after those faint-heard, those elusive drum-taps that might have been anywhere and seemed to be everywhere.
"We shall meet again after the war," he had called back to her.
Mademoiselle sent for Monsieur Menard and begged him not to interfere again with his son's desire to serve France, and she was so eloquent that Monsieur Menard gave way. But when peace was signed, Pierre did not come back to Châteaublanc, because his father vowed that there would be no doing anything with him nowadays. So through the interest of one of Mademoiselle's patrons he was found a clerkship in the English branch of abig French commercial house, and Mary did not see him again in Châteaublanc.
But he was her first romance, and the memory of Pierre did not fade quickly, even when Mademoiselle's house was full of girls again and Mary's real school life began.
Chapter Three
THE MAIDEN
Chapter Three: The Maiden
On a January afternoon, the afternoon of her twentieth birthday, Mary Flower stood by the drawing-room windows of a house in King's Gate, staring out across the Knightsbridge road to where in soot and snow the trees of Hyde Park were etched upon a gray expanse of sky. The house was very still, for it was the time when old Lady Flower took her daily nap, to the routine of which she attributed the vitality that enabled her at seventy to sustain the exertion of arranging an advantageous marriage for her granddaughter. To-day lunch had been protracted to celebrate with various dishes Mary's birthday, and to-night a dinner-party was to be followed by a musical reception. The house, seeming to conspire with her ladyship's snores, achieved a stillness that was even more perceptible than usual.
Mary's meditations were neither so profound nor so romantic as any passer-by that looked up and glimpsed the form of that beautiful young woman in her glass world might have imagined. Mostly they were directed to her new evening gown, a polonaise snatched it might almost be said prematurely by Lady Flower from the most fashionable ofParisian costumiers. Mary dreamed of itspassementerieof beads and ruching of Honiton lace, and then with heightened color of the amount of bare arm it must reveal. She supposed that her grandmother was right and that she should display as much of the upper part of her arm without risk of censorious comment, but....
Mary wished that Daisy Harland had come up from the country yesterday instead of waiting until to-night to wish her best friend many happy returns of the day. Daisy's opinion would have been so valuable. Daisy was so advanced, so unconventional, and yet always so right. But then Grandmamma, too, was always right, and Grandmamma had deliberately chosen the dress. Mary gave up bothering about the problem, which was no problem at all really, because she must obviously take Grandmamma's advice as long as Grandmamma was alive to give it. And if Grandmamma should die? Why, then, in this great house she, Mary Flower, should be all alone! No wonder Grandmamma was anxious for her to be safely married. Marriage? That was indeed something to talk about with her friend. If only the frost would hold so that Daisy might be resigned to stay in London for a while and spend hours in discussing marriage. Not of course as the topic had been discussed at school, where nobody knew anything for certain and the horridest girls vied with one another in dreadful propoundings. No, not like that, but seriously, almost religiously—if one could compare two things so far asunder as religion and marriage.
Mary contemplated the prospect of marriage with several of the men who visited the house in King's Gate. None of them considered thus made her feel at all anxious to be married; rather did each one present himself to her fancy like an unknown bottle of medicine, the efficacy of which was guaranteed but of the niceness or nastiness of which there was nothing to be learned from its external appearance. It was not that Mary had never imagined herself in love. Like most schoolgirls she had cherished impossible loyalties and sentimental passions; but the figures upon which these had been bestowed were like the figures in a picture book or the remote incarnations that are begotten by music. Love was an aspiration to a life beyond the present, a kind of yearning upon immortality; it was never a practical guide to the humdrum, the yet so intricate humdrum, of existence; it had nothing at all to do with marriage.
Lady Flower was responsible for this attitude of her granddaughter. By living so much in Paris, by allowing the French half of her character to recover from years of discouragement by her husband, and by brooding over her son'smésalliance—it was typical of the sentimental English that they should have to borrow the right word from France—the old lady felt herself more and more definitely inclined to themariage de convenance. She never let pass anopportunity to impress upon Mary its superiority.
"Love, my dear child," she would tell her, "is an invention of the poets to excuse their own weaknesses."
This afternoon, as Mary stared out across the wintry park, love did seem a long way off from King's Gate, and marriage, for all it was such a mystery, did seem comparatively near.
"Though suppose nobody ever does propose to me?" Mary thought. She turned round for reassurance from the large gilded mirror over the mantelpiece, and wished that she had never seen herself in a glass before, so that she could arrive at a decision about her beauty. Was she beautiful? If with six other girls she stood before a mirror for the first time, so that she did not know which was herself, should she think herself beautiful? But she should know which was herself, because she should recognize the other girls, and the stranger in the middle would be herself.
"Oh, am I or am I not beautiful?" she asked aloud of her reflection, standing motionless in that frozen, reflected room where nothing was alive except the swift pendulum of the ormulu clock on the wall behind her. "Am I or am I not beautiful?" she repeated with a sigh, as she took her place once more by the window and gazed out at the black and white trees in the Park, beneath whose filigree of boughs people were wandering in couples upon the powdered grass, walking so slowly that they mustbe happy, Mary thought. She was filled with envy of those shadows beyond the railings, who could upon this cold January afternoon pace up and down with such unhurried steps. They surely must be lovers, who could find delight in this chill and somber air, who could stroll arm in arm about this landscape that was sinking beneath the weight of a leaden sky. There opposite, two shadows were actually sitting upon a bench, sitting as close as birds sit upon a perch at dusk. They must love each other very deeply and very dearly, to endure the cold, very deeply and very dearly to stay there away from the firelight. Beautiful firelight, Mary thought; and she watched for a while its diminished reflection lambent within the milky windowpanes.
"Miladiis awake, Mademoiselle," said Adèle, coming into the room.
The canaries that lived in the domed conservatory at the back of the drawing-room began to sing. The depression of the long silence was broken.
Mary ran up the cheerful gas-lit stairs to her grandmother.
Lady Flower had tried to neutralize the fretwork of age by excess of lace. She was still ivory; but the ivory was scratched, here and there even badly cracked. The texture of lace seemed more likely than any other to distract the attention of the observer, to confuse him by its infinite reticulation and thus provide an illusive calendry for that wrinkled countenance of hers.
"Well, dear," she began at once, sitting up among the pillows when Mary came into the room. "I slept much better than I expected after those grated chestnuts we had for your birthday lunch. I have an impression of dreaming a good deal, but I've forgotten what about. So much the better, for there is nobody so irritating as araconteur des rêves."
Mary had been half inclined to tell Lady Flower about her own dreams by the window; but she was deterred by this remark, and perhaps in any case she would have been too much afraid of the old lady's cynical toleration to expose those fleeting and intangible shades of romantic love to her sparrowy eyes and pecks.
"I'm glad you feel rested," she said.
"Thank you, my dear."
They were always very courteous to each other, these two, or rather Lady Flower was always very courteous to her granddaughter. Mary was dutiful; and Lady Flower accepted any hint of affection, any display of sympathy or consideration, as the fruit of a good upbringing. She had no qualms about the younger generation. In the estimation of Lady Flower young people existed to show respect and do their duty toward their elders. Youth and labor at this period were still in bondage.
"I have invited more people than I intended for this evening," Lady Flower went on. "I was anxious to give you an opportunity of seeing various aspects of contemporary life."
"How kind of you, Grandmamma."
"Nothing to thank me for; I am doing no more than my duty."
Lady Flower made this admission a trifle unwillingly; but she thought it right to let Mary understand that, as she grew older, she, too, would find duty dogging her like a shadow. She must not be allowed to suppose that marriage meant freedom.
"Yes," she continued complacently, "I have invited several artistic people. They seem to be getting themselves a good deal talked about nowadays, and I felt you ought to meet some of them. By the way, Mr. Alison is coming."
"I'm glad," said Mary. "He's very nice."
"Very nice, indeed," her grandmother agreed emphatically. "And very muchbeau garçon. About thirty-five," she went on, meditating aloud. "About thirty-five, and extremely well off. He wrote to me that he was returning from the Continent on purpose to be present at your birthday party. I must say I find that highly significant."
"Significant of what?"
"My dear, innocence is a charming and attractive quality; but do not be tooingénue. No, not tooingénue. At any rate with me. You must surely have noticed howempresséhe has always been with you? He admires you, and though of course I do not wish to influence you unduly or to persuade you into a hasty marriage, at the same time ... however, there are others every bit as suitable as Mr.Alison. I just happen to have noticed that he is rather obviously ... however, please, my dear child, pay no attention to what I was saying, because I should be unwilling, oh, yes, most unwilling, to precipitate a marriage with anybody, even a young man so perfectly eligible as Mr. Alison. At the same time, you are twenty, are you not? And I am seventy. You will of course inherit a comfortable sum when I die, but that makes it all the more imperative to choose for your husband a man who has money."
Mary did not quite see the logic of this; but she had long ago been successfully cured of asking why; and, since the prospect of marrying Mr. Alison was at least as pleasant as the prospect of marrying anybody else, she was not sufficiently interested to pursue the topic.
But Mr. Alison took Mary into dinner; Lady Flower felt that he deserved some reward for hurrying back from Nice.
James Alison, known generally as Jemmie Alison, was a stockbroker who had succeeded at the age of twenty-seven to a lucrative business. As a boy, when he had fair, curly hair, he had been definitely handsome. He was now a florid man with a heavy fair mustache, who was still good-looking, although his hair was beginning to require some arranging before it would cover the top of his head, and his features showed signs of coarsening. From his schooldays at Eton, indeed from the day he wasborn, he had never been compelled to deny himself anything, and like many men who have inherited a fortune early in life he looked older than he was and felt older than he looked. After dinner he was separated from Mary for some time; but at last he managed to find a seat beside her in the conservatory while a famous tenor was singing:
I had a message to send her,To her, whom my soul loved best;But I had my task to finish,And she has gone home to rest.
"Beautiful song," said Mr. Alison.
"Exquisite!" Mary sighed.
I had a message to send her,So tender, and true, and sweet,I longed for an Angel to bear it,And lay it down at her feet.
"Things can be said in songs that can't be said any other way," Mr. Alison murmured with a sigh.
Mary appeared wrapt in the melody.
I cried, in my passionate longing;—"Has the earth no Angel-friendWho will carry my love the messageThat my heart desires to send?"
Mr. Alison looked appealingly at Mary; but she was still wrapt in the melody.
Then I heard a strain of music,So mighty, so pure, so clear,That my very sorrow was silent,And my heart stood still to hear.
"One of the loveliest songs I ever heard," Mr. Alison declared. "And he sings it divinely."
And I tenderly laid my messageOn the music's outspread wings.I heard it float farther and farther,In sound more perfect than speech;Farther than sight can follow,Farther than soul can reach.
Mary with a tear in each eye was staring up at the dome of the conservatory. Mr. Alison, although he could not muster a tear even in one eye, looked in the same direction and derived a great deal of satisfaction from the thought that he and this beautiful girl by his side were both staring at the same pane of glass. The singer achieved a triumphant C.
And I know that at last my messageHas passed through the golden gate;So my heart is no longer restless,And I am content to wait.
"'Content to wait,'" Mr. Alison echoed meaningly, when the applause had died down. "'Contentto wait,'" he repeated. "So long as I know that somebody has received my message."
Mary was nearly sure that this was a declaration; but she was not absolutely sure, and she wished that Daisy Harland had not at the last moment telegraphed to say that she could not be with her beloved Mary on her twentieth birthday.
"Ah, Miss Flower," Mr. Alison continued, shaking his head. "It would be hard for you to understand the thoughts of a man like myself when he hears a song like that. At the same time, the moral of it surely is that, however far away we may seem from heaven, we are not so far away in reality. We can hope. We can hope, Miss Flower. I wonder if I might venture to say Mary?"
"Oh, certainly, please call me Mary," she begged him nervously.
"Thank you, Mary."
Mr. Alison wished that he could quote a line of poetry about some romantic Mary; but he could only think ofMary had a little lamb. And he felt that to sigh this forth with as much passionate emphasis as he could achieve would sound rather silly.
"I suppose," he ventured, "you couldn't bring yourself to call me Jemmie? All my chums call me Jemmie. Jemmie Alison. Nobody ever calls me James. Nobody ever did call me James except my grandmother on my father's side. Funny old woman. She simply would not call me Jemmie. She always said the name reminded her of a fright shehad in childhood when some burglars broke into her father's house, who of course would have been my great-grandfather. Now that's going back some way. My father died in '72. He was sixty-three then. So he was born in 1809, when my grandmother was twenty-one. That makes her born in 1788. So I suppose this burglary must have happened about 1798. That's a long time ago, isn't it?"
"A very long time ago," Mary agreed. She was so much muddled by Mr. Alison's statistics that if he had told her the burglary took place shortly after the Battle of Hastings she would have accepted it as a fact.
"I wish the old lady could have lived to meet you, Mary," he went on. "You are just the kind of girl she would have liked me to marry."
Luckily for Mary, who did not know what comment she ought to make on this last piece of information, by this time the tenor was off again:
Do you grieve no costly offeringTo the lady you can make?One there is, and gifts less worthyQueens have stooped to take.Take a Heart of virgin silver,Fashion it with heavy blows,Cast it into Love's hot furnaceWhen it fiercest glows.
"Is that your heart or mine?" Mr. Alison asked in a puzzled voice. "I don't quite get that. I mean, is that his heart or hers?"
Mary motioned him not to talk, because people were beginning to turn round and peer at the palms among which they were sitting, curious to know what discordant mutter was profaning the music.
With pain's sharpest point transfix it,And then carve in letters fair,Tender dreams and quaint devices,Fancies sweet and rare.Set within it Hope's blue sapphire,Many-changing, opal fears,Blood-red ruby-stones of daring,Mixed with pearly tears.
"Hope's red ruby!" exclaimed Mr. Alison. "That's really uncommonly fine, I think."
And when you have wrought and laboredTill the gift is all complete,You may humbly lay your offeringAt the Lady's feet.Should her mood perchance be gracious—With disdainful smiling pride,She will place it with the trinketsGlittering at her side.
"I got muddled in that song," Mr. Alison confessed. "I don't think it's as good as the first one.Mary, before another song begins, may I tell you that I love you? May I ask you to be my wife? I know that you do not love me yet. But you might learn to love me. Mightn't you, Mary? You're very young. I can wait, now that I have delivered my message at the golden gate. Now I shall always reverence that song, Mary. To my dying day. It seems to me sitting here beside you at this moment more like a sacred song than just ordinary poetry. I wonder who wrote it?"
"I wonder," echoed Mary, glad to find the conversation turning away from personalities to literature.
"I suppose it wasn't Shakespeare?" Mr. Alison hazarded.
"No, I don'tthinkit was Shakespeare."
"He wrote such a lot of well-known stuff," said Mr. Alison. "One's pretty safe five times out of ten to guess Shakespeare. But, Mary, you have not replied to my question. May I hope? May I set in my heart Hope's red ruby?"
"It was Hope's blue sapphire," she corrected.
"Well, whatever jewel it was, may I hope?"
"I hadn't expected anything like this," said Mary, wondering whether it would create general consternation if she were to jump up from her seat and rush out of the conservatory.
"I know it seems sudden; but it's not really so sudden. All the time I've been in the south of France I've been thinking about you. I tried todrown my despair by playing roulette. In fact, I won quite a lot of money, because I played so recklessly."
Mary turned pale. Could her existence really affect a man of the world like Mr. Alison up to the point of reckless gambling?
"I felt in my inmost being that you could not love me. You're as much above me as a—as a—as an angel!" He tried not to look proud of the simile. "I know I am not worthy of you, Mary. I know that. But I have said enough. You look agitated. Please do not let my impetuosity distress you. Hark! Somebody else is going to sing."
The deep notes of a voluptuous contralto broke into the murmur of small talk like a dinner-gong.
"Don't forget, Mary," said Mr. Alison, when the sonorous abracadabra of an Italian song had died away in loud applause. "I have delivered my message, and I am content to wait. Shall I take you downstairs and get you an ice?"
"Oh, thank you, Mr. Alison."
"Mary, please!" he moaned reproachfully. "Jemmie. I thought you'd promised me that much."
It was lucky the ices were downstairs; for his tone would have melted the lot had they been in the conservatory.
"Jemmie," she whispered, feeling exactly as if she had swallowed a pill without water.
"You have made me radiantly happy," he affirmed. "By Jove, I feel as if I never knew my namewasJemmie until this moment."
As for Mary, she felt nothing except a vague hope that she had not committed herself too deeply by granting Mr. Alison's desire to be called Jemmie. Her grandmother might choose to consider that by doing so she had accepted him. She prayed that Daisy Harland would soon reach London. Otherwise, at this rate, she would find herself married before she knew it.
For the rest of the evening she managed to avoid her suitor, though it was at the cost of having to endure the dissertative bibble-babble upon Japanese interiors of a young man with long hair and a double chin, one of those artistic people whom the hostess had invited to her reception in order to support a daring social experiment that was having a vogue.
"Did Mr. Alison give you an amusing account of his tour in France?" Lady Flower inquired after the sound of the last carriage had died away on the frosty air.
"He talked about France. He wasn't very amusing," said Mary.
"You seemed to be getting on very well together, nevertheless," observed her grandmother. "In fact, when What's-his-name, the tenor, was singing it was really quite noticeable that you were too much occupied with each other to pay any attention to the music."
"We were discussing the music," Mary said, wishing that her grandmother would go to bed, and not ask any more questions.
"I suppose that if he does seriously intend to ask for your hand he will speak to me first. He's not so young as to be able to neglect that courtesy. He's not one of the young communards of to-day who consider they have equal rights with parents and guardians. He'll be ready to admit that we elders have some authority left. Only fancy, my dear, Lady Pringle tells me that her daughters demand, yes, positively demand, to play in a lawn-tennis competition next summer. A public affair, as far as I can make out. She made me shudder with her description of it. Young women of breeding and education are to expose themselves in front of anybody who likes to pay the necessary charge for admission. Dear me, I remember that your poor grandfather used sometimes to be shocked by what he considered my ultra-modern and extravagantly continental ideas. What would he have said, had he been alive to-day? I do hope your friend, Daisy Harland, won't persuadeyouinto wanting to appear as a female acrobat. She has always struck me as the kind of young woman who would do anything. She was a dreadfully noisy girl, I remember."
Mary allowed Daisy's character to be sacrificed in order to divert her grandmother from the discussion of Mr. Alison. Soon she was able to propose bed and was glad when at last she found herself alone in the dark with her secret.
Her first proposal....
Only that afternoon she had been wondering if any one would propose to her, and already on her twentieth birthday she had received one.
Jemmie....
But she did not think of him as Jemmie. Were she to become his wife to-morrow, she should for a long time think of him as Mr. Alison.
Mary Alison....
That was rather attractive.
Mrs. Alison....
It was in his favor that he had neither father nor mother alive. If she did make up her mind to marry him, she should not want another grandmamma in her mother-in-law.
Mary Alison ... yours most truly, Mary Alison....
But marriage meant more than that. Rather horrid intimacies ... children....
"Do I want children?" Mary asked herself. "I don't believe I do at all."
Pain! And of course, unless she had been utterly misinformed, it must hurt horribly.
"I should never have the courage," she told herself. "Never," she decided, and turning over she was soon fast asleep.
A week later, Daisy Harland did come to London, and to her in that top room of the Harlands' house in South Kensington, in that room papered with hunting scenes, which was bound up moreclosely with her girlhood than any room in the world, Mary confided the tale of her first proposal.
"He's not so bad," Daisy commented. "He's clean to look at. Pretty well off too, I should say. But why be in a hurry?"
"Oh, I'm not in any hurry. It's my grandmother who is so anxious to see me safely married."
"I wonder why. I suppose she can't bear the idea of not arranging the whole matter to please herself."
Mary gazed down at the garden of the Square, in which little girls well wrapped up in white furs were running about after large particolored balls of india rubber, while their nurses gossiped gravely with one another, moving with slow and stately tread behind their perambulators. What fun she and Daisy had always had in the Square when she used to stay with her friend for the holidays! Perhaps it was the bareness of winter that made it seem so small nowadays; or perhaps everything shrank as one grew older.
"Don't you think that a girl ought to love the man she is going to marry?" Mary pressed.
"But what is love? Personally I've never been in love."
"Daisy! You were tremendously in love with Gerald Ashworth. Don't you remember when you bought that lilac notepaper with two hearts stamped in the top corner?"
Her friend laughed.
"You don't think seriously that the kind of silliness in which one indulges at fifteen is to be considered an experience?"
"Yes, I do," Mary insisted. "If I hadn't been in love when I was small, I shouldn't be bothering now about being in love with Jemmie Alison. I shouldn't expect anything. As it is, I feel somehow that I want more than he can give me."
"If you'd come back with me to Berkshire and hunt, you'd soon forget all your troubles."
"Should I? I wonder. Not by hunting, Daisy. You would not enjoy hunting so much, if you weren't so proud of yourself for learning to ride so late in life."
"I wish we'd had our place in Berkshire when I was little," said Daisy regretfully. "Ishouldhave been a horsewoman then. The pater might just as well have launched out a bit earlier. We didn't really save anything by living in London."
"But it was fun when we used to play up here," said Mary. "Do you remember when we made those paper boxes and filled them with ink and dropped them on the pavement? Oh, and don't you remember when Eustace Arnesby came to tea, and he dropped one on an old gentleman's hat?"
"Eustace is at Sandhurst now," said Daisy. "Talking of young love, I did have rather a pash for him."
"Daisy!"
"What's the matter?"
"You do say such terrible things."
"In fact," Daisy continued, "when I look back at my innocent girlhood, I seem to have spent my time falling in and falling out of love with lanky boys. And you, my darling Mary, are trying to make out that that kind of thing is serious. Well, if it was, my young life has been lived, for at present I couldn't fall in love with anybody."
"I believe I could," said Mary meditatively. "But not with Jemmie Alison. If you really think about it, marriage is terrible."
"Why?"
Here was Mary's opportunity to ask Daisy a few direct questions; but, when it came to the point, she could not bring herself to do so. She could not imagine that she would ever feel more intimate with any other girl than she felt with Daisy, and if she could not ask Daisy she could not ask anybody.
"Why?" her friend repeated.
"Oh, always being with the same person," said Mary, with this explanation allowing the opportunity to pass.
Daisy went back to her hunting; Mary remained in London.
"We might go to Ventnor in March," said Lady Flower. "I don't feel inclined to travel far. I really believe that I'm beginning to feel old. I wish I could see you safely married. You strike me as being somewhat listless in your manner. That would vanish if you were married."
Jemmie Alison ventured to think that Mary was not looking quite herself. He would have been glad to suggest the same remedy as Lady Flower; but he lacked the courage and compromised.
"What you want is a dog," he decided. "A nice little dog. Give you an excuse for taking a walk every morning in the Park. I should like to think of you with your little dog under the trees when I'm working in my office."
Jemmie Alison proved that he had faith in his prescription by taking a great deal of trouble to procure for Mary the very dog for the purpose—a wise Dandie Dinmont not so young as to require the elements of training, yet not so old as to be fretting for a former mistress or master.
"He is called Mac. You don't dislike that name?" the donor asked.
Mary said that she thought it was a most suitable name.
"There's so much in a name," he continued meaningly.
"Yes, and it's so unlucky, I always think, to change a name," Mary added.
"Oh, you think it's unlucky?" Jemmie Alison asked in a gloomy tone.
Mac was a success from the moment of his arrival, and Mary was really grateful to her friend—friendship was the relation established between her and Jemmie Alison after several discussions—for the kind thought that made the dog hers. Shewas glad when the need of exercising Mac took her out into Hyde Park where by now, crocuses, a myriad steady flames, defied the wind and lighted the dim green of the London grass. There were also white and purple crocuses that gave Mary a keener pleasure than the yellow ones, for they seemed to be not so much the first flowers of Spring as the last flowers of Winter, and to express with their cold hues and tranquillity of form the sharpness of life that was there all the time. They reminded her somehow of those lovers who wandered about in the iron chill of that January afternoon, those regardful lovers whose happy indifference to time or weather she had so greatly envied.
One morning the sun was so warm that, tired with throwing sticks for Mac, Mary sat down on a chair in the Broad Walk, watching the children bowling their hoops or running about with pink and blue balloons, while with one splay paw upon his mistress's instep Mac sat watching the other dogs. Mary from paying attention to the children and nurses fell to wondering about the fragments of shell that were mixed with the fresh gravel of the path. From what far-off beach had they come, or were they fossil shells from the bed of a long-receded ocean? Whencesoever it came, each fragment had once been part of a living animal. A living animal. Not a hundred years hence, she, or all that part of her beheld now by the passers-by, would seem not more important than one of these shells.Was there not indeed something more permanent than this bodily husk? Grandmamma did not think so. Mary was sure of her unbelief, even if every Sunday morning Grandmamma in sealskin and dove-gray silk did make use of the pew she rented for herself and Mary in St. Peter's, Knightsbridge.
"You are seen in church," she told her granddaughter. "One is anxious for you to be seen."
With the help of her vinaigrette Lady Flower kept awake during the sermon and congratulated herself upon the charming appearance of Mary, when Mary rose to take her share of singing unto the Lord at Morning Prayer.
The notion that her granddaughter was contemplating the serious aspect and expression of religious fervor would have shocked the old lady; the knowledge that she was sitting in Kensington Gardens asking herself what she really was would have made Lady Flower think more earnestly than ever that it was high time her granddaughter was married.
"It must be for something," Mary told herself, crushing a tiny scalloped fragment with her toe. "Life must be meant for something."
Any attempt to solve the riddle of the universe had to be postponed on account of Mac's suddenly being involved in a desperate fight, for while his mistress had been lost in meditation he had been exposed to the insults of an aggressive fox terrier.
"Bandy-legged Sawney!" the terrier had murmured when he trotted fussily past with erect tail.Mac's ears had twitched under this reflection upon his nationality; but he had restrained himself. Presently the terrier had come trotting back, this time on three legs as if to insinuate that he was a better dog on three legs than a Dandie Dinmont on four.
"Donkey's ears!" he had snarled.
Even this Mac had endured in patience, for his splay paw was still reposing on his mistress' instep and he was proud of the pose, too proud to abandon it for a fox-terrier. But, when his mistress had of her own accord released him by withdrawing her toe from his protection, Mac had been able to stand no more.
"Let him come back and say another word," he had growled to himself, turning round and round and scratching up the gravel in his irritation. The fox-terrier had trotted back more aggressive than ever and to emphasize his contempt of the Dandie Dinmont's short legs he had swaggered up and down in front of Mac on the tips of his paws, boastfully snarling.
Mac rushed in, and the fight began.
The nearest children climbed hastily over the railings to the safety of the grass: nurses screamed to their charges: a park-keeper looked out of the window of his little green room and made ready to effect an impressive arrival upon the scene when the fight was over.
"Your dog began it," a weather-beaten womansaid angrily to Mary. "I call all and sundry to witness that it was your dog who deliberately made an attack upon mine. Trusty! Trusty! Oh, my poor Trusty, he'll be killed. That other brute's got him down. He's being bitten to pieces, my poor old Trusty!"
Mary was hitting both dogs with her whip-lead; but although she felt that she was using most unfeminine force, such force that the ribbons of her bonnet came untied and at any moment she expected to find her hair loose upon her shoulders, her blows had not the slightest effect upon the dogs. The owner of the fox-terrier was exciting herself more every moment, and Mary was afraid that presently she should find herself being rolled over and over among those fragments of shells, her preoccupation with which had been the cause of Mac's outburst. However, the Dandie Dinmont was certainly winning; and if the weather-beaten lady did attack her, perhaps he would have disposed of the fox-terrier in time to rescue his mistress. At that moment a slim young man rushed into the middle of the fray and, seizing both dogs by their tails, he held them apart until he had returned them growling to the arms of their owners.
"You can think yourself lucky that I don't take out a summons against you," said the owner of the fox-terrier, hurrying off, without a word of thanks to the young man, to bathe Trusty's wounds at the nearest fountain.
He was a dark young man with fine features and deep brown eyes, who spoke English with a French accent.
"Pardon, Mademoiselle, we have not met before, have we?" he asked, looking hard at Mary.
She thought that he was trying to improve the occasion and was on the point of replying with a cold negative, when she began to wonder where and how she had met this stranger before. In his frankly puzzled stare there was not a hint of presumption, and, though to enter into conversation with a young man who had rendered her a service in a public park was contrary to the whole spirit of her bringing up, Mary could not resist her curiosity.
"Have we met before?" she asked. "I've a feeling that we have somewhere. You are French, are you not?"
"From the Lyonnais," he replied.
"But that's where I was at school."
"I lived in Châteaublanc," he continued. In a flash she remembered who he was.
"Pierre Menard!" she cried.
"And you are the little English girl with—pardon, Mademoiselle—with red hair."
When two old friends meet after a long lapse of time, the years between are either swept away altogether or their capacity for separation is doubled. In this case they were obliterated. Here on this fine morning in early March Pierre stood before Mary as many times he had stood in the fair landscapes of memory. She heard again the diminishing sound of the drum that played him on to glory down that winding road ten years ago; she stood again beside him in that embrasure, gazing at a world washed with the gold of that breathless and mellow autumn day; she saw him again in heroic guise and found in his handling of the dog-fight such an inspired chivalry as she had found in his setting forth to fight for France.
"And how well you speak English, Monsieur."
"I have lived in London for eight years. I'm working with Marechal et Cie, the big silk merchants. I had some business to transact in Kensington and took the opportunity of walking through the Gardens this beautiful day."
"Then I must not detain you," she murmured.
With a gesture he disposed of any urgency in his business.
"You were in a greater hurry last time we were together," Mary reminded him.
She blushed at the adverb she had used, for it seemed to sweep them toward an intimacy that she felt was imprudent.
"I was not old enough last time, Mademoiselle, to appreciate my good fortune. And you were, if I may say so, a very little girl in those days, Mademoiselle."
While they were talking, they had moved away from the populous Broad Walk and were wandering now through a grove of elms. Mary lookinground realized that they were as much alone together as if they were in the country. Yet not for anything would she have been anywhere else, not for anything would she have missed this new music in the twittering of the sparrows overhead, this fresh glow in the grass, this sudden accord of herself with the Spring.
"I ought really to be going home," she murmured. "I only came out to give my little dog a run."
"See how much he is enjoying himself on the grass. I could never have the heart to deprive him of a moment's pleasure, Mademoiselle. I should indeed beingrat."
They were wandering deeper into the green heart of the Gardens. Mary, looking over her shoulder, saw the houses of Kensington lose themselves in a mist of bare boughs, heard the traffic sound more faintly, ceased to feel the slightest desire to solve the riddle of the universe, and threw all the responsibility of her behavior upon Fate.
"I've felt for a long time that something was about to happen," she told herself deliberately without being the least aware of inconsistency, who only half an hour ago was feeling drearily that nothing was going to happen. What nice hands Pierre had ... she pulled herself up for a moment, but a moment later asked herself indignantly by what other name she should think of him. He had always been Pierre. Why did he keep staring sideways ather without speaking? She must be careful to appear utterly unconscious of his glances.
"I'm trying to tell myself that you are grown up," Pierre said.
It was so easy to think of him as Pierre. Monsieur Menard would sound so affected, and Mr. Menard would sound ridiculous.
"I am grown up. I'm twenty."
What would Grandmamma say if she could hear her? Yet after all he must know within a year or two how old she was, so why pretend?
"I am twenty-seven."
"I think you look older than that," Mary said judicially. "I should have guessed you were thirty, if I had not known that you were scarcely seventeen when you went off to the war."
Mary felt that it was important to impress on Pierre how much she was aware of that boy and girl friendship. It would never do for him to think that she would have allowed herself to walk with him under these trees because he was what he was now. No sooner had she decided this than she felt a sharp desire to glance sideways at him, to see more exactly what he was indeed now. She tried hard to resist the impulse, but the longer she resisted the more urgent it became, and thus their eyes met.
She blushed in confusion, but an instant afterward turned pale with emotion.
"Mademoiselle, you are ill," he cried. "Sit hereawhile. The sun is shining. You will not catch cold."
Why did he call her Mademoiselle? Why did he not say "Mary"? Oh, she must not think such thoughts. Probably he did not know her name, or if he ever knew it he must have forgotten it long ago. He was behaving so well, and she was behaving so badly.
"I don't know what you must think of me," she murmured.
"Mademoiselle, I should not dare to say so soon what I thought."
"Is your opinion of me as bad as all that?" She was behaving like a coquette. What was happening to her? Mac's fight must have upset her more than she thought.
"You are unkind to me," said Pierre with a shrug.
"Unkind?" she echoed.
"You taunt me with my position...." He broke off and began to play with the dog.
Already a quarrel. How exciting life became when one could quarrel!
"You misunderstand me, Monsieur," Mary said with a dignity that she hoped was a match for his. "I had not the least intention of taunting you. Perhaps you are trying to persuade yourself into thinking that, because you are afraid that you may have led me to suppose that you were more interested in thinking about me than you really were."
"I am too much interested in you," Pierre retorted. "And you with the cruelty of your sex have perceived that too quickly. But you are right to make it clear to me that you have only condescended to give me your company.... Ah, Mademoiselle, do you think I have forgotten that when you first met me I was the gardener's son?"
So he was! But he was French. And France was now a republic where all were equal.
"I remember perfectly what you were," said Mary. "But I don't remember that it made any difference to me when I was ten, and I don't see why it should make any difference when I'm twenty."
"Mademoiselle," cried Pierre, starting to his feet, "I entreat you not to mock me. I have no right to say what I feel for you. But at least I may beg you to spare my feelings."
"You really do speak English quite perfectly," Mary exclaimed in obvious, open-eyed admiration of his fluency.
"Mademoiselle, if I should wish to change my employer, I would beg you to give me a written testimonial."
"Ah, now it's you who are sneering at me," said Mary, turning upon Pierre reproachful eyes.
He made a gesture that was intended to convey how little it mattered to her what he did or what he said or what he thought. Who was he in her world?
Mary felt that it would give quite a wrong impression of herself if she did not succeed in convincing him that she despised those artificial barriers of rank and station to which he evidently supposed she attached so much importance.
"I assure you that I never was and never could be conscious of any difference between us like that," she affirmed. "I look upon you as an old friend whom Fate—Fate," she repeated emphatically, for she felt that it was imperative to make it clear from the start that Fate was going to be accounted culpable for anything that might happen, "whom Fate has brought once more into my life. I should never have allowed myself to take this walk with you alone, if I didn't consider you an old friend. And now I'm sure you ought to be keeping your appointment. It would never do for you to neglect your business on my account."
"But shall we ever meet again?" he asked.
"Fate will decide that," answered Mary demurely. "I dare say, if your business brings you this way sometimes, we shall meet."
And of course they did meet, not once but many times that Spring.
"It was really a happy thought of Mr. Alison's to give you that odd-looking dog," Lady Flower observed. "Your color is much better since you've made a habit of exercising that dog in the Park. I really don't think you'll want to leave town until the season is over. And I shall not be sorry for an excuse to stay where I am. I find these short excursions into the country rather a bore nowadays."
"I'm perfectly well in London," Mary assured her grandmother. "I think it would be a great mistake to go away."
Mary did not meet Pierre in the Park every day, but she did meet him very often; and, although at the back of her mind she had a suspicion that he must be neglecting his business to be able to meet her as often as he did, she allowed herself to suppose that it was Fate. And if ever before her mirror she was tempted by honesty to ask herself what was going to be the end of it, she always hurried down to dinner and left Fate to argue it out upstairs. Her friend Daisy had been back in town a long time before Mary gave the least hint of an interest in life. In fact, if she had not met Pierre unexpectedly one morning when she was out walking with Daisy, she would probably never have said anything about her romance.