Having done what was to be done, he went about his own affairs. Nobody gushed over him, and he escaped that perilous popularity which is as a millstone around a man's neck. Nevertheless the Butterfly Man had stumbled upon the something divine in his fellows, and they entertained for him a feeling that wasn't any more tangible, say, than pure air, and no more emotional than pure water, but was just about as vital and life-giving.
I was enchanted to have a whole county endorse my private judgment. I rose so in my own estimation that I fancy I was a bit condescending to St. Stanislaus! I was vain of the Butterfly Man's standing—folks couldn't like him too much, to please me. And I was greatly interested in the many invitations that poured in upon him, invitations that ranged all the way from a birthday party at Michael Karski's to a state dinner at the Eustis's.
From Michael's he came home gaily, a most outrageous posy pinned upon him by way of honor, and whistling a Slavic love song so dismal that one inferred love must be something like toothache for painfulness. He had had such a bully time, he told me. Big Jan had been there with his wife, an old friend of Michael's Katya. Although pale, and still somewhat shaky as to legs, Jan had willingly enough shaken hands with his conqueror.
It seemed quite right and natural that he and Jan should presently enter into a sort of Dual Alliance. Meester Fleent was to be Arbitrator Extraordinary. When he stipulated that thereafter Big Jan was only to tackle a man his own size, everybody cheered madly, and Mrs. Jan herself beamed red-eyed approval. She said her prayers to the man who had trounced Jan into righteousness.
But from the Eustis dinner, to which he went with my mother, he came home somber and heavy-hearted. Laurence was conspicuously absent; it is true he was away, defending his first big case in another part of the State. But Mr. George Inglesby was just as conspicuously present, apparently on the best of all possible terms with himself, the world in general, and Mrs. James Eustis in particular. His presence in that house, in the face of persistent rumors, made at least two guests uneasy. Mrs. Eustis showed him a most flattering attention. She was deeply impressed by him. He had just aided her pet mission in China—what he had given the heathen would have buttered my children's bread for many a day. Also, he was all but lyrical in his voicing of the shibboleth that Woman's Sphere is the Home, wherein she should be adored, enshrined, and protected. Woman and the Home! All the innate chivalry of Southern manhood—
I don't know that Louisa's Ma was ever enshrined or protected by the chivalry of any kind of manhood, no, nor any of the mill women. Their kind don't know the word. But Mrs. Eustis was, and she agreed with Mr. Inglesby's noble sentiments.
"Parson, you should have heard him!" raved the Butterfly Man. "There's a sort of man down here that's got chivalry like another sort's got hookworm, and he makes the man that hasn't got either want to set up an image to the great god Dam!
"You'd think being chivalrous would be enough for him, wouldn't you?" continued the Butterfly Man, bitterly. "Nix! What's he been working the heavy charity lay for, except that it's his turn to be a misunderstood Christian? Doesn't charity cover a multitude of skins, though? And doesn't it beat a jimmy when it comes to breaking into society!"
Mary Virginia, he added in an altered voice, had been exquisite in a frock all silver lace and shimmery stuffs like moonbeams, and with a rope of pearls about her throat, and in her black hair. Appleboro folks do not affect orchids, but Mary Virginia wore a huge cluster of those exotics. She had been very gracious to the Butterfly Man and Madame. But only for a brief bright minute had she been the Mary Virginia they knew. All the rest of the evening she seemed to grow statelier, colder, more dazzlingly and imperially regal. And her eyes were like frozen sapphires under her level brows, and her mouth was the red splendid bow of Pride.
Watching her, my mother was pained and puzzled; as for the Butterfly Man, his heart went below zero. Those who loved Mary Virginia had cause for painful reflections.
Blinded by her beauty, were we judging her by the light of affection, instead of the colder light of reason? We couldn't approve of her behavior to Laurence, nor was it easy to refrain from disapproval of what appeared to be a tacit endurance of Inglesby's attention. She couldn't plead ignorance of what was open enough to be town talk—the man's shameless passion for herself, a passion he seemed to take delight in flaunting. And she made no effort to explain; she seemed deliberately to exclude her old friends from the confidence once so freely given. She hadn't visited the Parish House since she had broken her engagement.
And all the while the spring that hadn't time for the little concerns of mortals went secretly about her immortal business of rejuvenation. The blue that had been so timid and so tentative overspread the sky; more robins came, and after them bluebirds and redbirds and Peterbirds, and the impudent screaming robber jay that is so beautiful and so bold, and flute-voiced vireos, and nuthatches, and the darling busybody wren fussing about her house-building in the corners of our piazzas. The first red flowers of the Japanese quince opened flame-like on the bare brown bushes. When the bridal-wreath by the gate saw that, she set industriously to work upon her own wedding-gown. The yellow jessamine was full of waxy gold buds; and long since those bold frontiersmen of the year, the Judas-trees, had flaunted it in bravest scarlet, and the slim-legged scouts of the pines showed shoulder-straps and cockades of new gay green above gallant brown leggings.
One brand new morning the Butterfly Man called me aside and placed in my hands a letter. The American Society of Natural History invited Mr. John Flint, already a member of the Entomological Society of France, a Fellow of the Entomological Society of London, and a member of the greatest of Dutch and German Associations, to speak before it and its guests, at a most notable meeting to be held in the Society's splendid Museum in New York City. Not to mention two mere ex-Presidents, some of the greatest scientific names of the Americas were included in that list. And it was before such as these that my Butterfly Man was to speak. Behold me rocking on my toes!
The first effect of this invitation was to please me immensely, I being a puffed-up old man and carnal-minded at times; nor do I seem to improve with age. The plaudits of the world, for anybody I admire and love, ring most sweetly in my foolish ears. Now the honors he had gotten from abroad were fine and good in their way, but this meant that the value of his work was recognized and his position established in his own country, in his own time. It meant a widening of his horizon, association with clever men and women, ennobling friendships to broaden his life. A just measure of appreciation from the worthwhile sweetens toil and encourages genius. And yet—our eyes met, and mine had to ask an old question.
"Would you better accept it?" I wondered.
"I can't afford not to," said he resolutely. "The time's come for me to get out in the open, and I might just as well face the music, and Do it Now. Risks? I hardly think so. I never hunted in couples, remember—I always went by my lonesome and got away with it. Besides, who's remembering Slippy? Nobody. He's drowned and dead and done with. But, however, and nevertheless, and because, I shall go."
Again we looked at each other; and his look was untroubled.
"The pipe-dreams I've had about slipping back into little old New York! But if anybody had told me I'd go back like I'm going, with the sort of folks waiting for me that will be waiting now, I'd have passed it up. Well, you never can tell, can you? And in a way it's funny—now isn't it?"
"No, you never can tell," said I, soberly. "But I do not think it at all funny. Quite the contrary." Suppose, oh, suppose, that after all these years, when a well-earned success was in his grasp, it should happen—I turned pale. He read my fear in my face and his smile might have been borrowed from my mother's mouth.
"Don't you get cold feet, parson," he counseled kindly. "Be a sport! Besides, it's all in the Game, you know."
"Is it?"
"Sure!"
"And worth while, John?"
He laughed. "Believe me! It's the worthwhilest thing under the sun to sit in the Game, with a sport's interest in the hands dealt out, taking yours as it comes to you, bluffing all you can when you've got to, playing your cards for all they're worth when it's your turn. No reneging. No squealing when you lose. No boasting how you did it when you win. There's nothing in the whole universe so intensely and immensely worth while as being you and alive, with yourself the whole kitty and the sky your limit! It's one great old Game, and I'm for thanking the Big Dealer that I'da whack at playing it." And his eyes snapped and his lean brown face flushed.
"And you are really willing to—to stake yourself now, my son?"
"Lord, parson, you ought to know! And you a dead ringer for the real thing in a classy sport yourself!"
"My dear son—!"
My dear son waved his fine hand, and chuckled in his red beard.
"Would you back down if this was your call? Why, you're the sort that would tackle the biggest noise in the ring, even if you knew you'd be dragged out on your pantry in the first half of the first round, if you thought you'd got holy orders to do it! If you saw me getting jellyfish of the spine now, you'd curl up and die—wouldn't you, honest Injun?" His eyes crinkled and he grinned so infectiously that my fears subsided. I had an almost superstitious certainty that nothing really evil could happen to a man who could grin like that. Fate and fortune are perfectly powerless before the human being who can meet them with the sword of a smile.
"Well," I admitted cautiously, "jellyfish of the spine must be an unlovely ailment; not that I ever heard of it before."
"You're willing for me to go, then?"
"You'd go anyhow, would you not?"
"Forget it!" said he roughly. "If you think I'd do anything I knew would cause you uneasiness, you've got another thing coming to you."
"Oh, go, for heaven's sake!" said I, sharply.
"All right. I'll go for heaven's sake," he agreed cheerfully. "And now it's formally decided I'm to go, and talk, the question arises—what they really want me to talk about? I don't know how to deal in glittering generalities. A chap on the trail of truth has got to let generalities go by the board. The minute he tackles the living Little People he chucks theories and bucks conditions.
"Suppose I tell the truth as I see it: that most so-called authorities are like cats chasing their tails—because they accept theories that have never been really proven, run after them, and so never get anywhere? And that facts dug up in the open under the sunlight don't always fit in with notions hatched out in libraries under the electric light?
"Suppose I say that after they've run everything down to that plasma they're so fond of beginning and ending with, there is still something behind it all their theories can't explain away? Protoplasm doesn't explain Life any more than the battery explains electricity. Instinct? Evolution? The survival of the fittest? Well, nothing is tagged for fair, and I'm more than willing to be shown. For the more I find out from the living things themselves,—you can't get truth from death, you've got to get it from life—the more self-evident it seems to me that to exist at all insects must have arrived on the scene complete, handfinished, with the union label of the Great Workshop on them by way of a trade-mark."
"As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, one God, world without end, Amen!" said I, smiling. I have never thought it necessary to explain or excuse the Creator. God is; things are.
But he shook his head, wrinkling his forehead painfully. "I wish I knew," said he, wistfully. "You're satisfied to believe, but I have got to know. Oh, great Power behind Things, I want to know! I want to know!"
Ah, but I also do most passionately wish to know! If, however, the Insect has taught me anything in my lifelong study of it, it is to recognize the Unknowable, to know there is that which I cannot hope to know. But if under the law of its world, so different from ours and yet so alike because so inevitable, the Insect must move in a fixed circle within which it is safe, a circle whose very limitation preserves it from error and thus from destruction, may not a like fixed circle beyond which we may not penetrate preserve us, too? Are these mountain peaks of the Unknowable, the Impassable, which encompass the skyline of our humanity, these heights so mysterious and so unscalable, not rather bulwarks between man's pride and the abyss?
Something of this I said to the Butterfly Man, and he nodded, but did not answer. He fell into a brown study; then plunged from the room without further look or word and made for his own desk. I was not afraid of what the Butterfly Man, fresh from little Appleboro's woods and fields, would have to say to the scholars and scientists gathered to hear him!
Apparently he was not either, for after he had gotten a few notes together he wisely turned the whole affair over to that mysterious Self that does our work and solves our problems for us. On the surface he busied himself with a paper setting forth the many reasons why the County of Appleboro should appropriate adequate funds for a common dipping vat, and hurried this to Dabney, who was holding open a space in the Clarion for it. Then there were new breeding cages to be made, for the supply of eggs and cocoons on hand would require additional quarters, once they began to emerge.
By the Saturday he had finished all this; and as I had that afternoon free we spent some beautiful hours with the microscope and slide mounts. I completed, too, the long delayed drawings of some diurnal wasp-moths and their larvæ. We worked until my mother interrupted us with a summons to an early dinner, for Saturday evening belongs to the confessional and I was shortly due at the church.
I left Flint with Madame and Miss Sally Ruth, who had run over after the neighborly Appleboro wont with a plate of fresh sponge-cake and a bowl of fragrant custard. Miss Sally Ruth is nothing if not generous, but there are times when one could wish upon her the affliction of dumbness. As I slipped into my cassock in the study, I could hear her uplifted voice, a voice so insistent and so penetrating that it can pierce closed doors and come through a ceiling:
"I declare to goodness, I don't know what to believe any more! She's got money enough in her own right, hasn't she? For heaven's sake, then, why should she marry for more money? But you never really know people, do you? Why, folks say—"
I hurried out of the house and ran the short distance to the church. I wished I hadn't heard; I wished Miss Sally Ruth, good as she is, would sometimes hold her tongue. She will set folks by the ears in heaven some of these days if she doesn't mend her ways before she gets there.
It must have been all of ten o'clock when I got back to the Parish House. Madame had retired; John Flint's rooms were dark. The night itself was dark, though in between the clouds that a brisk wind pulleyhauled about the skies, one saw many stars.
Too tired to sleep, I sat beside my window and breathed the repose that lay like a benediction upon the little city. I found myself praying; for Mary Virginia, whom I loved and over whom I was sorely troubled; for Laurence, even now walking such a road as I also once had to travel with feet as young but no more steadfast; and then with a thankfulness too deep for words, I thought a prayer for the Butterfly Man. So thinking and so praying, with a glow in my heart because of him, I closed my window, and crept into bed and into sleep.
I awoke with a start. Somebody was in the room. There was an urgent voice whispering my name, an urgent hand upon me. A pocket light flashed, and in its pale circle appeared the face of John Flint.
"Get up!" said he in an intense whisper. "And come. Come!"
"Why, what in the name of heaven—"
"Don't make a row!" he snarled, and brought his face close. "Here—let me help you. Heaven, man, how slow you are!" With furious haste he forced my clothes upon me and even as I mechanically struggled to adjust them he was hustling me toward the door, through the dark hall, and down the stairs.
"Easy there—careful of that step!" he breathed in my ear, guiding me.
"But what is the matter?" I whispered back impatiently. I do not relish mystery and I detest being led willynilly.
"In my rooms," said he briefly, and hustled me across the garden on the double run, I with my teeth chattering, for I had been dragged out of my sleep, and the night air was cold.
He fairly lifted me up his porch-steps, unlocked his door, and pushed me inside. With the drawn shades and the flickering firelight, the room was peaceful and pleasant enough. Then Kerry caught my astonished gaze, for the dog stood statue-like beside the Morris chair, and when I saw what Kerry guarded I crossed myself. Sunk into the chair, the Butterfly Man's old gray overcoat partly around her, was Mary Virginia.
At my involuntary exclamation she raised her head and regarded me. A great sigh welled from her bosom and I could see her eyes dilate and her lips quiver.
"Padre, Padre!" Down went her head, and she began to cry childishly, with sobs.
I watched her helplessly, too bewildered to speak. But the other man's face was the face of one crucified. I saw his eyes, and something I had been all too blind to rushed upon me overwhelmingly. This, then, was what had driven him forth for a time, this was what had left its indelible imprint upon him! He had hung upon his cross and I had not known. Oh, Butterfly Man, I had not known!
"She'll be able to talk to you in a few minutes now, parson." He was so perfectly unconscious of himself that he had no idea he had just made mute confession. He added, doubtfully: "She said she had to come to you, about something—I don't know what. It's up to you to find out—she's got to talk to you, parson."
"But—I wanted to talk to you, Padre. That's why I—ran away from home in the middle of the night." She sat suddenly erect. "I just couldn't stand things, any more—by myself—"
Gone was the fine lady, the great beauty, the proud jilt who had broken Laurence's heart and maddened and enslaved Inglesby. Here was only a piteous child with eyes heavy from weeping, with a pale and sad face and drooping childish lips. And yet she was so dear and so lovely, for all her reddened eyelids and her reddened little nose, that one could have wept with her. The Butterfly Man, with an intake of breath, stood up.
"I shall leave you with the Padre now," he said evenly, "to tell him what you wanted to tell him. Father, understand: there's something rotten wrong, as I've been telling you all along. Now she's got to tell you what it is and all about it. Everything. Whether she likes to or not, and no matter what it is, she's got to tell you. You understand that, Mary Virginia?"
She fixed him with a glance that had in it something hostile and oblique. Even with those dearest of women whom I adore, there are moments when I have the impression that they have, so to speak, their ears laid back flat, and I experience what I may justly term cat-fear. I felt it then.
"Oh, don't have too much consideration for my feelings, Mr. Flint!" said she, with that oblique and baffling glance, and the smile Old Fitz once likened to the Curve in the Cat's Tail. "Indeed, why should you go? Why don't you stay and find out why I wanted to run to the Padre—to beg him to find some way to help me, since I can't fall like a plum into Mr. Inglesby's hand when Mr. Hunter shakes the Eustis family tree!"
His breath came whistlingly between his teeth.
"Parson! You hear?" he slapped his leg with his open palm. "Oh, I knew it, I knew it!" And he turned upon her a kindling glance:
"I knew all along it was never in you to be anything but true!" said the Butterfly Man.
It is impossible for me to put down in her own words what Mary Virginia told the Butterfly Man and me. Also, I have had to fill in gaps here and there, supplying what was lacking, from my intimate knowledge of the actors and from such chance words and hints and bits of detail as came to me afterward. But what I have added has been necessary, in order to do greater justice to everybody concerned.
If it be true that the boy is father to the man, it is even more tritely true that the girl is mother to the woman, there being here less chance for change. So it was with Mary Virginia. That gracious little girlhood of hers, lived among the birds and bees and blossoms of an old Carolina garden, had sent her into the Church School with a settled and definite idealism as part of her nature. Her creed was simple enough: The world she knew was the best of all possible worlds, its men good, its women better; and to be happy and loved one had only to be good and loving.
The school did not disabuse her of this pleasing optimism. It was a very expensive school and could afford to have optimisms of its own. For one thing, it had no pupils poor enough to apply the acid test.
When Mary Virginia was seventeen, Mrs. Eustis perceived with dismay that her child who had promised beauty was instead become angular, awkward, and self-conscious; and promptly packed the unworldly one off to spend a saving summer with a strenuously fashionable cousin, a widow, of whom she herself was very fond. She liked the idea of placing the gauche girl under so vigorous and seasoned a wing as Estelle Baker's. As for Mrs. Baker herself, that gay and good-humored lady laughed at the leggy and serious youngster and promptly took her education in hand along lines not laid down in Church Schools.
Mrs. Baker was delighted with her own position—the reasonably young, handsome, and wealthy widow of a man she had been satisfied to marry and later to bury. She had an unimpaired digestion and no illusions, a kind heart, and the power of laughter. Naturally, she found life interesting. A club-woman, an ultra-modernist, vitally alive, she was fully abreast of her day. Her small library skimmed the cream of the insurgents and revolutionaries of genius; and here the shy and reticent schoolgirl with the mark of the churchly checkrein fresh upon her, was free to browse, for her cousin had no slightest notion of playing censor. Mrs. Baker thought that the sooner one was allowed to slough off the gaucheries of the Young Person, the better. She did not gauge the real and tumultuous depths of feeling concealed under the young girl's simplicity.
The revolutionaries and the insurgent and free poets didn't trouble Mary Virginia very much. Although she sensed that something was wrong with somebody somewhere—hence these lyrical lamentations—she could not, to save her, tell what all the pother was about, for as yet she saw the world couleur de rose. Some one or two of the French and Germans pleased her; she fell into long reveries over the Gael, who has the sound of the sea in his voice and whose eyes are full of a haunting light, as of sunsets upon graves. But it was the Russians who electrified and dazzled her. When she glimpsed with her eyes of a young girl those strange souls simple as children's and yet mosaiced with unimaginable and barbarous splendors, she stood blinking and half blinded, awed, fascinated, and avid to know more of that sky-scaling passion with which they burned.
And in that crucial moment she chanced upon the "Diary of Marie Bashkirtseff," so frank and so astounding that it took her breath away and swept her off her feet. She was stirred into a vague and trembling expectancy; she had the sense of waiting for something to happen. Life instantly became more colorful and more wonderful than she had dreamed could be possible, and she wished passionately to experience all these emotions, so powerful and so poignant. The Russian's morbid and disease-bright genius acted upon her as with the force and intensity of a new and potent toxin. She could not lay the book aside, but carried it up to her room to be pored and pondered over. She failed to understand that, untried as she was, it was impossible for her to understand it. Had the book come later, it had been harmless enough; but it came at a most critical moment of that seething period when youth turns inward to question the universe, and demands that the answer shall be personal to itself. The first long ground-swell of awakening emotion swept over her, sitting in the pleasant chintz-hung room, with the Russian woman's wild and tameless heart beating through the book open upon her knees. And these waves of emotion that at recurrent intervals surge over the soul, come from the shores of a farther country than any earthly seas have touched, and recede to depths so profound that only the eyes of God may follow their ebb and flow.
Mrs. Baker, however, saw nothing about which to give herself any concern. If she perceived the girl intense and preoccupied, she smiled indulgently—at Mary Virginia's age one is apt to be like that, and one recovers from that phase as one gets over mumps and measles. Mrs. Baker did think it advisable, though, to subtly detach the girl from books for awhile. She amused herself by allowing her wide-eyed glimpses of the larger life of grown-ups, by way of arousing and initiation. Thus it happened that one afternoon at the country-club, where Mary Virginia, at the green-fruit stage, found herself playing gooseberry instead of golf, Mrs. Baker sauntered up with a tall and very blonde man.
"Here," said she gaily, indicating with a wave of her hand her sulky-eyed young cousin, "is a marvel and a wonder—a girl who accepts on faith everything and everybody! My dear Howard, in all probability she will presently even believe in you!" With that she left them, whisked off by a waiting golfer.
The man and the girl appraised each other. The man saw young bread-and-butter with the raw sugar of beauty sprinkled upon it promisingly. What the girl saw was not so much a faultlessly groomed and handsome man as the most beautiful person in the world. And suddenly she was aware that that for which she had been waiting had come. Something divine and wonderful was happening, and there was fire before her eyes and the noise of unloosed winds and great waters in her ears, and her knees trembled and her heart fluttered. A vivid red flamed into her pale cheeks, a soft and trembling light suffused her blue eyes. That happens when the sweet and virginal freshness of youth is brought face to face with the bright shadow of love.
He drew her out of her shyness and made her laugh, and after awhile, when there was dancing, he danced with her. He did not behave to her as other men of Estelle's acquaintance had more than once behaved—as though they bestowed the lordly honor of their society upon her out of the sheer goodness of their hearts and their desire to please Mrs. Baker. Mary Virginia was uncompromising and stiff-necked enough then, and she bored most of her cousin's friends unconsciously. Now this man, as much their superior as the sun is to farthing dips, was exerting himself to please her. That was the one thing Mary Virginia needed to arouse her.
Mrs. Baker admired Mr. Hunter for a grace of manner almost Latin in its charm. If at times he puzzled her, he at least never bored her or anybody else, and for this she praised him in the gates. Her respect for him deepened when she perceived that he never allowed himself to be absorbed or monopolized.
The pleasant widow did not take him too seriously. She only asked that he amuse and interest her. He did both, to a superlative degree. That is why and how he saw so much of the school-girl cousin whose naïvete made him smile, it was so absurdly sincere.
Mrs. Baker was glad enough to have Howard take her charge off her hands occasionally. She thought contact with this fine pagan an excellent thing for the girl who took herself so seriously. She was really fond of Mary Virginia, but she must have found her hand-grenade directness a bit disconcerting at times. She wanted the child's visit to be pleasant, and she considered it very amiable of Howard to help her make it so. She had no faintest notion of danger—to her Mary Virginia was nothing but a child, a little girl one indulged with pickles and pound-cake and the bliss of staying up later than the usual bedtime. As for Hunter, his was the French attitude toward the Young Person; she had heard him say he preferred his flowers in full bloom and his fruit ripe—one then knows what one is getting; one isn't deceived by canker in the closed bud and worm in the green fruit. No, Howard wasn't the sort that hankered for verjuice.
None the less, although Mrs. Baker didn't know it, Mary Virginia was engaged to the godlike Howard when she returned to school. It was to be a state secret until after she was graduated, and in the meantime he was to "make himself worthier of her love." She hadn't any notion he could be improved upon, but it pleased her to hear him say that. Humility in the superman is the ultimate proof of perfection.
The maid who attended her room at school arranged for the receipt of his letters and mailed Mary Virginia's. The maid was sentimental, and delighted to play a part smacking of those dime novels she spoiled her brains with.
The little schoolgirl who was in love with love, and secretly betrothed to a man who had stepped alive out of old knightly romance, walked in the Land of April Rainbows and felt the whole joyous universe suffused with a delicious and quivering glow of light and sound and scent. Surcharged with an emotion that she was irresistibly urged to express, and unable to do so by word of mouth, she was driven to the necessity of putting it down on paper for him. And she put it down in the burning words, the fiery phrases, of those anarchists of art who had intoxicated and obsessed her.
Just a little later,—even a year later—and Mary Virginia could never have written those letters. But now, very ignorant, very innocent, very impassioned, she accomplished a miracle. She was like one speaking an unknown tongue, perfectly sure that the spirit moved her, but quite unable to comprehend what it was that it moved her to say.
When Mrs. Baker insisted that her young cousin should come back to her for the Christmas holidays, the girl was more than eager to go. Seeing him again only deepened her infatuation.
That holiday visit was an unusually gay one, for Mrs. Baker was really fond of Mary Virginia—the young girl's tenderness and simplicity touched the woman of the world. She gave a farewell dance the night before Mary Virginia was to return to school. It was an informal affair, with enough college boys and girls to lend it a junior air, but there was a goodly sprinkling of grown-ups to deepen it, for the hostess said frankly that she simply couldn't stand the Very Young except in broken doses and in bright spots.
Hunter, of course, was to be one of the grownups. He had sent Mary Virginia the flowers she was to wear. And she had a new dancing frock, quite the loveliest and fluffiest and laciest she had ever worn.
He was somewhat late. And so engrossed with him were all her thoughts, so eager was she to see him, that she was a disappointing companion for anybody else. She couldn't talk to anybody else. She flitted in and out of laughing groups like a blue-and-silver butterfly, and finally managed to slip away to the stair nook behind what Mrs. Baker liked to call the conservatory. This was merely a portion of the big back hall glassed in and hung with a yellow silk curtain; it had a tiny round crystal fountain in the center and one or two carved seats, but one wouldn't think so small a space could hold so much bloom and fragrance. From the nook where Mary Virginia sat, one could hear every word spoken in the flower-room, though the hearer remained hidden by the paneled stairway.
Hands in her lacy lap, eyes abstracted, she fell into the dreams that youth dreams; in which a girl—one's self, say,—walks hand in hand through an enchanted world with a being very, very little lower than the angels and twice as dear. They are such innocent dreams, such impossible dreams, so untouched of all reality; but I wonder, oh I wonder, if life can ever give us anything to repay their loss!
Somebody spoke in the conservatory and she looked up, startled. Through a parting in the silk curtain she glimpsed the woman and recognized one of Estelle's friends, handsome and fashionable, but a woman she had never liked.
"You provoke me. You try my patience too much!" she was saying, in a tone of suppressed anger. "People are beginning to say that you have a serious affair with that sugar-candy chit. I want to know if that is true?"
The man laughed, a lazy, pleasant, disarming laugh. She knew that laugh among a million, and her heart began to beat, but not with doubt or distrust. She wondered how she had missed him, and if he had been looking for her; she thought of the exquisite secret that bound them together, and wondered how he was going to protect it without evasions or untruthfulness. And she thought the woman abominable.
"You're so suspicious, Evie!" he said smilingly. "Why bother about what can give you no real concern? Why discuss it here, at all? It's not the thing, really."
The woman stamped her foot. She had an able-bodied temper.
"I will know, and I will know now. I have to know," said she, and her voice shook. Mary Virginia would have coughed then, would have made her presence known had she been able; but something held her silent. "Remember, you're not dealing with a love-sick school-girl now, Howard: you are dealing with me. Have you made that little fool think you're in love with her?"
"Why, and what then?" he asked coolly. "I like the child. Of course she is without form and void as yet, but there's quite a lot to that girl."
"Oh, yes! Quite a lot!" said she, with sarcasm. "That's what made me take notice. James Eustis's girl—and barrels of money. She'll be a catch. You are clever, Howard! But what of me?"
Mary Virginia's heart fluttered. Indeed, what of this other woman?
"Oh, well, there's nothing definite yet, Evie," said he soothingly. A hint of impatience was betrayed in his voice. Plainly, it irked him to be held up and questioned point-blank, at such a time and place. Just as plainly, he wished to conciliate his jealous questioner. "My dear girl, it would be all of two or three years before the affair could be considered. Let well enough alone, Evie. Let's talk about something else."
"No. We will talk about this. You are offering me a two or three years' reprieve, are you not? Well, and then?"
"Well, and then suppose I do marry the little thing,—if she hasn't changed her little mind?" said he, exasperated into punishing her. "It wouldn't be a bad thing for me, remember, and she's temptingly easy to deal with—that girl has more faith than the twelve apostles. Heavens, Evie, don't look like that! My dearest girl, you don't have to worry, anyhow. If your—er—impediment hasn't stood in my way, why should mine in yours?"
He spoke with a half-impatient, half-playful reproach. The woman uttered a little cry. To soothe and silence her, he kissed her. It was very risky, of course, but then the whole situation was risky, and he took his chance like the bold player he was. The girl crouching behind the paneled wall clenched her hands in her lap, felt her heart and brain on fire, and wondered why the sky did not fall upon the world and blot it out.
When those two had left the conservatory and she could command her trembling limbs and whip her senses back into some semblance of order, she went upstairs and got his letters. When she came downstairs again he was standing in the hall, and he came forward eager, smiling, tender, as if his heart welcomed her; as perhaps it did, men having catholic hearts. She put her hand on his arm and whispered: "Come into the conservatory."
The hall was quite empty. From drawing-room and library and dining-room came the laughter and chatter of many people. Then the music struck up a gay and popular air. The lilt and swing of it made her giddy. But the little flower-room was cool and sweet, and she drew a breath of relief.
Hunter bent his fair head, but she pushed him away with her hands against his chest. A horror of his beauty, his deliberate fascination, the falseness of him, came over her. For the first time she had been brought face to face with sin and falsehood, and hers was the unpardoning white condemnation of an angel to whom sin is unknown and falsehood impossible. That such knowledge should have come through him of all men made the thing more unbearable. Surprised and irritated by the pale tragedy of her aspect, Hunter stared, waiting for her to speak.
"I was on the stairs. I heard you—and that woman," said she with the directness that was sometimes so appalling. "And I know." Her face turned burning red before it paled again. She was ashamed for him with the noble shame of the pure in heart.
His face, too, went red and white with rage and astonishment. It was a damnable trap for a man to be caught in, and he was furious with the two women who had pushed him into it—he could have beaten them both with rods. Innocent as this girl was, he could not hope to deceive her as to the real truth. She had heard too much. But he thought he could manage her; women were as wax in Hunter's hands. To begin with, they wanted to believe him.
"I hate to have to say it—but the lady is jealous," he said frankly enough, with a disarming smile; and shrugged his shoulders, quite as if that simple statement explained and excused everything.
"Oh, she need not be afraid—of me!" said the girl, with white-hot scorn. "I'd rather die by inches of leprosy than belong to you now. You are clever, though. And I was easy to deal with, wasn't I? And I cared so much! I dare say it was really your hair and beard, but I honestly thought you a sort of Archangel! Well, you're not. You're not anything I thought you—not good nor kind nor honorable nor truthful—not anything but just a rather paltry sort of liar. You're not even loyal to her. I think I could respect you more if you were. But I am James Eustis's girl—and that's my salvation, Mr. Hunter. Please take your letters. You will send me back mine to-morrow."
He stroked his short gold beard. The color had come back into his face and a new light flashed into his cold blue eyes. He laughed. "Why, you game little angel!" he said delightedly. "Gad, I never thought you had it in you—never. I begin to adore you, Mary Virginia, upon my soul I do! Now listen to reason, my too-good child, and don't be so puritanical. You've got to take folks as they are and not as you'd like them to be, you know. Men are not angels, no, nor women, either. You must learn to be charitable—a virtue very good people seldom practice and never properly appreciate." And he added, leaning lower: "Mary Virginia! Give me another chance ... you won't be sorry, Ladybird."
But she stood unmoved, stonily silent, holding out the letters. And when he still ignored this silent insistence, she thrust them into his hands and left him.
Mary Virginia was to go back to school the next night. All day she waited for her letters. Instead came a note and a huge bunch of violets. The note said he couldn't allow those precious letters which meant so much to him to pass even into her hands who had written them. When he could summon up the courage, he would presently destroy them himself. And she had treated him with great harshness, and wouldn't she be a good little girl and let him see her, if only for a few minutes, before she went away?
Mary Virginia tore up the note and returned the violets by way of answer.
When she returned to school, the superioress regretted that she had been allowed to visit Mrs. Baker again, because too much gaiety wasn't good for her, and she was falling off in her studies. The other girls said she had lost all her looks, for in truth she was wan and peaked and hollow-eyed. Seventeen suffers frightfully, when it suffers at all. Eighteen enjoys its blighted affection, revels in its broken heart, would like to crochet a black edging on its immortal soul, and wouldn't exchange its secret sorrow for a public joy. Nineteen is convalescent—pride would come to its rescue even if life itself did not beguile it into being happy.
Mary Virginia got back her color and her appetite and forgot to remember that her heart was incurably broken and that she could never love again. She liked to think her painful experience had made her very wise. Then she went abroad, and her cure was complete. The result of it all was that poise and pride which had so greatly delighted the autocratic old kinswoman whose fiat had set the last seal of social success upon her.
When one of life's little jokes flung Hunter into Appleboro and she had to observe him with impartial and less ingenuous eyes, she forgave the simple schoolgirl's natural mistake. He had not changed, and she perceived his effect upon others older and wiser than herself. And her pride chose neither to slight nor to ignore him now, but rather to meet him casually, with indifference, as a stranger in whom she was not at all interested.
Mr. Inglesby she did not take seriously. She did not dream that a possible menace to herself lay in this stout man whom she considered fatuous and absurd, when she thought of him at all. That her mother should be completely taken in by his specious charity and his plausible presentment of himself, did not surprise her. She was inclined to smile scornfully and so dismiss him.
She underestimated Inglesby.
The very fact that there was such an obstacle in the way as a young fellow with whom she fancied herself in love only deepened Inglesby's passion for Mary Virginia. She was in her proper person all that he coveted and groveled to. To possess her in addition to his own wealth—what more could a man ask? Let Eustis become senator, governor, president, anything he chose. But let Inglesby have Mary Virginia by way of fair exchange.
Mr. Inglesby was well aware that Miss Eustis would not for one moment consider him—unless she had to. He proposed to so arrange affairs that she had to. Naturally, he looked to his private secretary to help him bring about this desirable end. And at this opportune moment fate played into his hands in a manner that left Mr. Hunter's assent a matter of course.
Mr. Hunter had very expensive tastes which his salary was not always sufficient to cover. Wherefore, like many another, he speculated. When he was lucky, it was easy money; but it was never enough. Of late he had not been fortunate, and he found himself confronted by the high cost of living as he chose to live. This annoyed him. So when there came his way what appeared to be an absolute certainty of not only recouping all his losses but of making some real money as well, Hunter plunged, with every dollar he could manage to get hold of. But Wall Street is a lane that has many crooked and devious turnings, and Mr. Hunter's investments took a very wrong turn. And this time it was not only all his own money that had been lost. The bottom might have dropped out of things then, except for Inglesby.
When Hunter had to tell him the truth the financier listened with an unmoved face. Then he swung around in his chair, lifted an eyebrow, grunted, and remarked briefly: "Very unsafe thing to do, Hunter. Very." And shoved his personal check across the desk. Nobody knew anything about it, except the head bookkeeper of the bank.
Inglesby had no illusions, however. He understood that to have in his power an immensely clever man who knew as much about his private affairs as Hunter did, was good business, to say the least. He simply invested in Mr. Hunter's brains and personality for his own immediate ends, and he expected his brilliant and expensive secretary to prove the worth of the investment.
Inglesby had not risen to his present heights by beating about the bush in his dealings with others. He had seized Success by the windpipe and throttled it into obedience, and he ruthlessly bent everything and everybody to his own purposes. The task he set before Hunter now was to steer the Inglesby ship through a perilous passage into the matrimonial harbor he had in mind. Let Hunter do that—no matter how—and the pilot's future was assured. Inglesby would be no niggardly rewarder. But let the venture come to shipwreck and Hunter must go down with it. Hunter was not left in any doubt upon that score.
Brought face to face with the situation as it affected his fortune and misfortune, Hunter must have had a very bad half an hour. I am sure he had not dreamed of such a contretemps, and he must have been startled and amazed by the cold calculation and the raw fury of passion he had to deal with. I do not think he relished his task. His was the sort of conscience that would dislike such a course, not because it was dishonorable or immoral in itself, but because its details offended his fastidiousness. I think he would have extricated himself honorably if he could. It just happened that he couldn't.
Give a sufficient shock to a man's pocket-nerve and you electrify his brain-cells, which automatically receive orders to work overtime. Hunter's brain worked then because it had to, self-preservation being the first law of nature. And this service for Inglesby not only spelt safety; it meant the golden key to the heights, the power to gratify those fine tastes which only a rich and able man can afford. Inglesby had promised that, and he had just had a fair example of what Inglesby's support meant.
One must try to consider the case from Mr. Hunter's point of view. To refuse Inglesby meant disaster. And who was Laurence, who was Mary Virginia, that he should quixotically wreck his prospects for them? Why should he lose Inglesby's goodwill or gain Inglesby's enmity for them or anybody else? Forced to choose, Hunter made the only choice possible to him.
Voe victis!