“Dearest Mother”:—Oh, there was so much, so very much, it was quite hopeless to write! There was the fairy in the glass. That must be told first. There was not the slightest doubt in Kate’s mind that the two were exactly the same, the fairy in the woods that day and the reflection of Elsie in the mirror at Madame Pearl’s. But what its explanation could be was unthinkable. At the time the little Kate had seen the fairy in the woods, Elsie was only a little girl of her own age. How, then, had Kate seen her as she would look eight years later in a mirror in a Boston shop? It was such an unanswerable question that Kate’s mind turned away from it. Still, not for one minute did she doubt that the two visions had been exactly the same. What would Katherine make of it?
“Hello. Good morning.” Jack Denton, in white flannels, tall and athletic, was standing the other side of the hedge, swinging his tennis racket and smiling a friendly, frank smile. “Excuse me, but you’re Miss Kate Marshall, aren’t you? My sister and I are coming to the party in your honour to-night. I’m Jack Denton, and Rose will be out in a minute. If you’ll play a set with us I’ll call up another fellow and make doubles.”
Kate jumped up, delighted. She went to the wall. “Good morning,” she said. “I was just beginning a letter. But I’d love to play—that is, for a little while, till Aunt Katherine needs me. But why don’t we just shout for Elsie? She likes tennis, I know, and Aunt Katherine says she plays wonderfully.”
But Jack’s expression had changed queerly. He grew slightly red and avoided looking directly at Kate. “No need to get any one yet,” he objected. “Heaven knows when Rose will be out. She’s awfully pokey—slow. Let us begin just by ourselves till she does appear, anyway. Can you jump? Here’s a hand.”
But Kate shook her head. “No, thanks. I don’t think I’ll play, after all. I may be called any minute to help Aunt Katherine, and besides—besides, it’s very warm, isn’t it?”
Kate was looking at the pad in her hand, about to turn away.
But Jack kept her a minute. “Oh, I say! You aren’t offended, are you? I wouldn’t do that for anything.”
“No, of course not.” But Kate’s negation was made only out of a spirit of reserve and also embarrassment. “No.”
“But you are, and I don’t wonder. Of course you’d be on your cousin’s side. And listen. We are, too. Rose and I and all of us are, always have been. We never could see any sense in all the hubbub. It’s just been Grandmother and Grandmother’s friends. We all thought Elsie was great stuff when she visited Miss Frazier before—— And we’re coming to the party to-night, you bet. Only—at this minute Grandmother is sitting right up there in a window where she can see the court, and it might change her, decide her for some reason not to go to-night. She feels that her going formally and giving in, as it were, publicly, is the thing that’s going to turn the trick. It’s her show, sort of. If we did it first, now, she might be just as bad as ever again, begin all over again. Do you see?”
“No, I don’t see,” Kate said in all truth. Jack’s explanations shed no light whatsoever. His face had grown steadily redder as he realized that he had simply made a mess of it. “I don’t see.”
But even as she stood looking at Jack Denton she was smiling at herself mentally, to hear how her voice had taken on the very timbre of Elsie’s when she was being her most unpleasantly polite. What a copy cat she was. Still, there was a certain satisfaction in finding herself so successful in a self-made rôle. “All you say is just Greek to me. And I ought to be writing my letter. Good morning.”
She turned deliberately and sauntered back to her place in the shade of the orchard. But Jack did not leave the wall. He stayed there watching her, a frown gathering on his brow. When she was seated, with her back against an apple tree trunk and her pad ready on her knee, he called again.
“Oh, I say,” he called. “I thought you knew everything about it all, of course. If you don’t, it’s a shame. I just can’t be apologetic enough.”
But Kate did not turn to him. “Go away, go away, go away,” she said, mentally. “I don’t want to hear any more. It’s not for you to unravel the mystery. I don’t want to know from a stranger. I feel very indignant. Very, very indignant, and I hardly know why.”
Kate’s silence meant as much to Jack Denton as the thoughts he could not hear. He turned away and strolled toward the house, swinging his racket and looking at the ground dejectedly. Kate was sorry she had been so deliberately rude, but she simply could not call him back. She was too really indignant, and at the same time unable to analyze her indignation. She returned to her letter.
But she found it very difficult to write. There was just too much ever to begin to put on paper, in spite of this being only her third day here! What she must do was simply tell the facts and let the rest go. The colour of the facts, all that lay underneath and over them, must wait. The letter that finally developed was a thin affair, perfunctory and empty of interest. Kate had never in her life felt so far from her mother.
The girls and Miss Frazier selected and cut flowers in the garden. They took them in loosely on their arms and tossed them down on a damp sheet spread on the floor just inside the drawing-room doors. Then came the deciding on receptacles and the placing of them. It was all very interesting, and exciting, too, for as the rooms grew in adornment Kate felt the party itself drawing nearer and nearer. Miss Frazier seemed very gay as they worked. She laughed and said whimsical things in a whimsical manner. And her every touch was deft, and the result artistic.
That morning Kate learned more about colour values and proportion than she had ever learned in all her years of school. She had not dreamed that so much mind could be used on such an apparently simple occupation as placing a few nasturtiums in a vase!
What a good time they were having! Kate moved about the big drawing-room and hall with almost dancing steps, she was so happy doing her aunt’s intelligent bidding and seeing loveliness form before her eyes and under her hand. And Elsie was laughing quite spontaneously at Aunt Katherine’s humour and taking as much delight as Kate in the growing beauty of the arrangements.
“Someone to speak to you on the telephone, Miss Frazier.” Isadora had come out from the telephone booth under the hall stairs.
“Who is it, please? Always get the name, Isadora.”
“Yes, ma’am. I always do when I can. But this gentleman won’t give his name. Says it’s not necessary. He wants to speak to you on important business, he says.”
“Won’t give his name! Nonsense! Tell him, then——” But suddenly in the middle of this command Aunt Katherine’s expression changed. “Oh, well, I think I know now who it must be. That’s all right, Isadora.”
Aunt Katherine dropped the yellow roses she was sorting—their wet stems and leaves instantly spreading white spots on to the polished surface of the little table. With a quick step she hurried toward the telephone booth. Kate snatched up the roses and remedied the harm they had done as well as she could with her pocket handkerchief. Then she and Elsie simply stood idly about waiting for the doors of the telephone booth to open and their Chieftain to reappear. For having seen Aunt Katherine work with the flowers they knew themselves incompetent to go ahead alone.
As Kate leaned against the banister, and Elsie smoothed her hair before a little gilt mirror on the wall near the door and secured the shell pins holding it, the front-door bell suddenly rang and Isadora came into the hall to answer it. A postman in livery standing there thrust a pad at her mumbling, “Sign here.”
Elsie dropped a shell pin on to the floor and rushed to Isadora. “It’s a special delivery,” she cried. “For me?”
Yes, it was for Elsie. She almost snatched it out of the postman’s hands and scrawled her signature on the pad that Isadora surrendered.
“All right,” she said, pushing the pad at the postman and the next instant shutting the door directly in his face. Had she shoved him out? Kate was not at all sure she hadn’t.
Then Elsie ran through the hall with the letter hugged up under her chin and up the stairs past Kate. “Tell Aunt Katherine I’ll be right back,” she called as she went. But she stopped on the first landing to lean over the banister and whisper down, “Don’t say anything about my having had a special delivery, will you, Kate?”
“Of course not, if you don’t want me to. It’s none of my business, is it?”
Kate was dressed and ready for the party half an hour before dinner that night. She stood surveying herself in the long door mirror. Anticipation had brought unusual colour that glowed even through the tan on her cheeks, and the corners of her lips were sharply uptilted.
“The cap is certainly a wonder worker,” she reflected. “It is magic; it makes me pretty. That’s even better than having a cap to make you invisible, much better!” And when she smiled at this idea the girl in the glass smiled, too, and was fascinatingly pretty. “Oh, if Mother could only see me! She’d hardly believe. If the picture telephone were perfected and Aunt had one I’d spend my last cent to call Mother up.”
All this was not so conceited as it sounds; for Kate knew perfectly well that ordinarily she could lay no claim to prettiness, that the charm of the person clothed in crocus-yellow satin in the mirror before her was due to Madame Pearl’s artistic genius and the pert, star-pointed silver cap. And when the idea came to her to go down to the kitchen and display herself to Julia in this enchantment it was wholly for Julia’s pleasure she intended it; she would be taking herself down in the same impersonal way she would take a doll down to turn it round. For finery of this sort and the kind of glamour that beautiful clothes give, she did not for a minute associate with herself, her very self. Ever since Julia had appeared to her on the stairs, asked eager questions about her mother and bestowed the gingerbread man on Kate, she had wanted to see her again. It seemed so queer and unnatural to be eating the delicious meals she cooked and ignoring her presence in the house. Wasn’t she a friend of her mother’s? But until this minute Kate had been too shy or too strange in the ways of her aunt’s big smoothly running establishment to seek Julia out in the dim, distant servants’ apartments. Now, however, in her magic cap, looking and feeling like a young princess, and also disguised in a way, she had no hesitation about it. She felt sure that Julia would be interested and pleased, and that Katherine, if she were in Kate’s place, would do that very thing. But on second thought she decided to wait until just after dinner, for this hour would surely be about the busiest one in a cook’s day.
She crossed the room and sat down at her dressing table again, pulling out a drawer. She would reread a letter from Sam, a scrawl that had come in the afternoon’s mail when she was too much occupied to give it her full attention. She had merely glanced it down hastily and put it away in this drawer on top of the key to the orchard house. She read it now, bending her head and not bothering to pick it up.
“Don’t let her befool you, Kitty. Take our word, she’s just a silly snob. You’re worth millions of her any minute. What a figure she’d cut in that meadow—you know, with the King of the Fairies! She just wouldn’t be anything, would she? Teach her a lesson. We’d like to, Lee and I.” There was more of the same sort; but she did not pick it up to turn the page. There was an uneasy stirring in her heart. It hadn’t been very decent of her, writing like that about Elsie. She could not remember now just how she had done it, or why. She knew that both Sam and Lee must have struggled together over the composition of this letter in reply. They had evidently thought it a very important letter indeed, and spent their best efforts on it. She appreciated that, and she appreciated their hot partisanship, too. What she didn’t appreciate at this minute was her own motives in having so called out their sympathy. And she had better tear it up. It certainly wasn’t a letter meant for other eyes to see. With a strange little ache in her soul somewhere, probably in her conscience, she picked up the sheet. Then her heart stood still, and the fingers crumpling the paper turned cold. She went queerly sick. The key that should have lain there under the letter was gone. It was nowhere in the drawer. And whoever had taken the key could scarcely have failed to read the words staring there so blackly up at you, all in Sam’s print-like script!
Moreover—she saw it now—the thief had gone through the whole dressing table before hitting upon this particular drawer. Everything was a little out of place. The thief was Elsie, of course. No one else wanted the key. Well, serve her right, then, to have read about herself!
Kate tore the letter into shreds and dropped it back into the drawer. Then she strode through the bathroom, and stood in Elsie’s open door. Elsie was already decked in her fairy green frock, her curls tied loosely at her neck in a way that Madame Pearl had begged her to wear them. But quite regardless of her finery she was curled up in the window seat, her sandaled feet tucked under her, looking dreamily out toward the orchard house. She was lost in her thoughts for she did not hear or feel Kate when she came striding across the room to stand over her. Even in the temper she was in, Kate could not help thinking, “How unconcerned she is about that beautiful frock! It’s as though she was born in it. How delicate, how fairy she looks!”
Elsie started out of her reverie at Kate’s voice.
“Give me my key,” she was saying huskily, her hand held out.
Elsie, in spite of the suddenness of the attack, did not stir except to turn her head.
“What key?”
“You know very well what key. You stole it.”
Red scorched Elsie’s cheeks at the word “stole.” Kate rejoiced at that. She would make it scorch even redder. “You are no better than a thief, to hunt through my things, to read my letters. To steal, to steal, to steal!”
Even as Kate stormed she knew, deep where knowing still had a foothold below the surface of her anger, that her greatest fury was at herself—fury that there had been such a letter for Elsie to read at all, that she had ever written the Hart boys as she had written them. But in spite of that knowing she seemed to have no control over the superficial Kate, the raging, furious Kate.
“You thief! You’re no better than a thief! Give me back my key.”
But Elsie’s response to this attack surprised Kate into a little calmness. She stood up, clenching her hands, and facing her accuser.
“Well, if I am a thief I am proud of it, proud, proud. So there! If you think I’m ashamed of it you’re wrong! Call me thief all you like. I like to be called thief. I like it. I am one. I’ve got your old key. I’ll give it to you to-night when we come up to bed, not before. I meant to all along. Then the orchard house will be yours, all yours. Go live in it! I won’t care. There’s the gong.”
But in spite of Kate’s growth in calmness her determination remained. “Aunt Katherine gave the key to me,” she said. “It belongs to me. Give it back this instant.”
“If I won’t, what will you do?”
Kate considered. “If you won’t, I’ll go right out there after dinner and climb in at a window and explore the whole house. I’ll discover your blessed secret whatever it is and not even wait till morning. That’s what I’ll do.”
Elsie stood looking at her. But something changed in her eyes. For a flash, or was it only Kate’s wild imagining, a comrade looked out through those clouded windows, making them in that instant clear as day, and then vanished. Now Kate knew what would have been the expression on the face of the fairy in the wood that June day, eight years ago, if she had not flashed back into the sunlight too quickly for her to catch it. It would have been this sky-clear look of the golden comrade.
“Why don’t you say you’ll tell Aunt Katherine?”
Kate looked at Elsie, amazed. Such an idea had never entered her head. Her face said so. Again the comrade flashed. But it vanished quicker than before, and this time definitely. “Well, you told your wonderful friends, ‘The boys,’ on me. You do tell, you see.”
Kate had no answer to that.
Elsie whirled about and went to her bed. From under her pillow she took the key, and returning, handed it to Kate, coolly. “Here it is,” she said, “and this is the last time I shall ever ask a favour of you, Kate Marshall. Please don’t use it to-night.”
Kate accepted the key. “All right,” she promised. “I won’t use it to-night. There won’t be time, anyway, with the party and everything.” She was not speaking to the Elsie who had asked the favour, however, but to the vanishing comrade, invisible now, whom she had seen clear enough in that one flash. Was that comrade within hearing, she wondered.
“Thanks,” Elsie said, as though she meant it, and in a relieved tone. Then she straightened. “But just the same, Kate Marshall, I shall never, never, never, never forgive you for calling me a thief, not so long as I live, I sha’n’t.”
“You said you were proud of it,” Kate rather cruelly retorted.
Elsie suddenly threw her arm across her eyes. To Kate’s dismay she was sobbing.
“Don’t cry, don’t cry,” she begged. “The gong rang minutes ago. Quick, wash your eyes. For Aunt Katherine’s sake! She’s been so good to us. Let’s go on pretending everything’s all right.”
Masterfully, but very wretched in her heart because of this bitter weeping of which she was the cause, Kate hurried Elsie into the bathroom, ran some cold water into the bowl, and put a wash cloth into her hands. “Quick, wash your eyes. For Aunt Katherine’s sake!” Kate commanded again, and Elsie obeyed.
Then Kate took her hand and hurried with her out through the twisted passageways to the main front hall and down the stairs. Dinner had been announced some time ago, and Aunt Katherine was waiting, standing and impatient, in the drawing-room. But when she saw them hurrying and hand-in-hand she smiled. When you have dressed for your first real party in your first real party frock you may be expected to be a little late!
“How lovely you are, Aunt Katherine.” Elsie gave her tribute spontaneously in as cool a way as though the scene upstairs had never taken place; and Kate echoed “Lovely, Aunt Katherine.”
Miss Frazier was touched. “Thank you, my dears,” she said. “And I can return the compliment. In fact, Madame Pearl has outdone herself!”
Miss Frazier deserved their tribute. She was both handsome and distinguished looking, with her graying hair done high and topped with a jewelled comb that sent out shivers of light whenever she moved, gowned in softest lilac-coloured silk draped with black lace, and wearing a long black lace scarf in a most regal manner. The lilac, the green, and the crocus-yellow figures that passed into the dining-room arm-in-arm caused the waitress Effie the most wide-eyed admiration.
“And they were as friendly, just as friendly as could be,” she told the kitchen when she removed the service plates. “You’d think Miss Frazier was their mother, she’s that affectionate. Why, it’s like a regular family to-night!”
Julia, handing out hot dishes, beamed. “Perhaps everything’s coming right, after all,” she said. “Katherine’s child will shed sunshine all about just as Katherine did.”
Bertha, sitting at a distant table playing cards with Timothy and the gardener, sniffed at that. “Miss Elsie is as capable of shedding sunshine as anybody,” she said, defensively. “She’s just made of it herself. I’m always telling you.”
“Yes, you’re always telling. But we’re never seeing,” Julia retorted. “Touched with melancholy, she seems to me, but as nice as you please. Only not cheerful to have about. It’s probably her poor mother’s awful death. Her heart’s broke.”
Bertha shook her head. “I don’t think her heart’s broken. She’s as gay as anything alone with me sometimes! And she’s the most generous child living.”
“She does funny things, though,” Timothy offered his bit. “Carrying groceries up to her room, buying eggs and bread and stuff and paying for ’em herself. Holt told me.”
Bertha looked at him, unbelieving. “Groceries in her room? No such thing. Who takes care of her room, do you think? I never saw such a thing in it. What do you mean?”
Then Timothy related how for a week past Elsie had bought foodstuffs every time she went to the village, and refused to give them to him to carry around to the kitchen afterward. Julia had assured him they were never ordered by her; so of course Miss Elsie took them to her room. Where else could she keep them?
Bertha would have nothing to do with that idea. Indeed, it was impossible there could be any such food supply as Timothy described in Elsie’s room, for Bertha knew every inch of that dainty apartment, and kept it in order. Still, she had respect for Timothy, and could not doubt his word when he insisted that Elsie actually had bought bread and eggs, lettuce, oil, and nuts and brought them home with her in the car. “What she does with ’em’s none of our business, that I can see,” she volunteered. “Feeds the birds in the gardens and orchard perhaps. She’s that unselfish! She’s probably even kinder to the birds than to human beings.”
But every one laughed at this explanation. You don’t feed birds eggs and oil and nuts! No, there was some mystery about it. Julia had felt mystery in the air for a week past, and not just because of Elsie’s queer purchases and the puzzle of what became of them, either. Mystery was simply “in the air.” Julia “felt” it.
Timothy nodded his head knowingly. Timothy was Irish and very romantic. “What can you expect?” he asked. “In a house with two young things like that! Why, they’ve just come out of the Fairyland of their childhood, they’re standing now on the edges of life. What can you expect but mystery? They’re all mystery.”
“I don’t mean that kind of mystery, Timothy,” Julia protested. “I mean regular down-and-out mystery. I feel it in my bones. You wait and see if I’m not right.”
Effie had returned from the dining-room again. “Miss Frazier’s telling them about Rome now,” she said. “She says she’ll take them both there together sometime, if Miss Kate’s mother’ll let her go. She said ‘Katherine’ just as easy as though it didn’t hurt a bit and as though it might be any name. Perhaps she wouldn’t mind our speaking it now. Things are changing.”
It was true. Things were changing with Miss Frazier. She sat at the head of her table to-night a light-hearted, spirited person. And she was more than that. She was intensely interesting. She said she meant soon to begin to travel, really to travel and see the world. Arabia attracted her, and all Asia. A book by a man named Ferdinand Ossendowski had lately stimulated her roving instincts and enthralled her imagination. Why should she not explore a totally different civilization from the one she had been born into! She recounted some of Ossendowski’s exploits, adventures, and escapes, and his stories of the “King of the World.” As she talked a panorama entirely new to her listeners unrolled before their minds’ visions. What a place this world was, what a place to be alive in, and what a time to be alive! How the importance of personal affairs evaporated in the face of such contemplation! The girls were as stirred as Miss Frazier herself apparently had been stirred; they were lifted out of themselves. They felt that the world was a challenge, that life was a challenge—a glorious one. For the time the party, drawing so near now, sank into insignificance.
But Miss Frazier, looking at their eager faces, suddenly remembered. She said, “Katherine wouldn’t let me take you to such out-of-the-way places yet, Kate, and of course I wouldn’t want to. But when we go to Rome——” Then she had talked about Rome and places nearer home. But in speaking of them she touched them with a new light and interest. Kate’s dream, as most girls’ dreams, had often been of some day going “abroad.” Such an adventure in contemplation had always seemed the very height of happiness to her. But now, Miss Frazier’s conversation lent travel new glamour, for Miss Frazier was steeped in history, the history of nations and religions and art, and her idea of travel was not simply of adventure into lands, but into realms of imagination, and into the past.
“Would you girls like to travel with me for a summer—perhaps next summer?” she asked.
Kate’s joy at such a prospect was too great to allow of words. She simply glowed at Aunt Katherine. But Elsie suddenly turned away her head. Somehow then, in that instant, the spell was broken. The dinner table with the diners floated back to Miss Frazier’s house in Oakdale, Massachusetts, and there they sat, consuming “cottage pudding” with lemon sauce, dressed and ready for a party.
After dinner Miss Frazier settled down, expecting to finish “The King of the Fairies” before the guests began to arrive, leaving the girls to amuse themselves in their own way. Elsie wandered out on to the star-lighted terrace, looking exactly like a dreamy fairy. Kate went with her, not speaking, and soon leaving her, to find her way around to the kitchen door.
The servants in their own attractive dining-room were just beginning dinner. Kate had forgotten how many of them there would be, and was almost overcome with embarrassment, when they all leapt to their feet and the maids walked around her in a circle, exclaiming admiringly. “I just wanted to show Julia the new frock Aunt Katherine gave me,” Kate was explaining a little breathlessly. “I never seem to see you, Julia,” she added, catching her eye at last in the group, “and I never really thanked you for the gingerbread man and your kind inquiries about Mother.”
“To think,” exclaimed Julia, “of my giving you a gingerbread man! Where were my wits? Why, you’re a young lady. But your mother liked gingerbread even after she was a young lady.”
“You’ll have a fine time at your party in that gown,” Isadora affirmed. “You couldn’t help it. There’ll be nothing half so beautiful.”
Meanwhile Bertha beamed. In a way she felt responsible for this young vision of splendour. Hadn’t she helped choose the dress, and hadn’t she finally put Kate into it! She was certainly involved in the display.
Then Julia said, feelingly, “We’re all grateful to you, Miss Kate, for bringing a party to this house again, for getting things natural. Miss Frazier’s acting like herself now, and it’s on account of you.”
“Why, I haven’t done anything,” Kate denied.
But she liked their praise and their warmth, and she felt now entirely in the mood for the party to begin.
Soon after eight Miss Frazier stood regally in the wide hall between her two nieces, receiving and introducing the first arrivals. They came fluttering in at the big wide-open door—girls in shimmering, fluffy party frocks of rainbow colours; boys, mostly in white flannels and dark coats, but a few in tuxedos; and a thin scattering of two older generations, these latter gray-haired grandmothers and younger matrons—some of the mothers looking scarcely older than their own children, in the modern manner. All was murmuring, laughter. Then the orchestra placed back in the blue breakfast-room began tuning their instruments. Jack Denton claimed Kate for the first dance. He danced perfectly, much better than Kate, in fact, who had had little experience; and all the time he kept up a stream of interesting nonsense. Kate laughed at him and swung along more and more in harmony with the music. How gay, how merry it all was! Elsie floated past, her green chiffon draperies like airy wings.
“Isn’t she lovely!” Kate exclaimed in admiration that must find voice. “Do you know I think she is the very prettiest——” She was going to say, “the very prettiest girl I have ever seen,” but Jack interrupted, his brown eyes smiling down at her: “No, I wouldn’t say she’s the prettiest——”
No one in all her life had ever even insinuated that Kate was pretty before, and the comparison that Jack indicated now was beyond contemplating. It was the magic silver cap, of course. Suppose it should blow off as they danced! How surprised Jack Denton would be!
As the evening went on Kate entertained more and more the conceit that she was masquerading in prettiness. There was no blinking the fact that she was tremendously popular. And it obviously was not just the easy popularity of the girl for whom the party is given. Not a bit of it. It was spontaneous, joyous. Perhaps she realized the reality of this popularity all the more because she had never experienced it before. At the two or three high-school dances in Middletown which her mother had allowed her to attend, while not being exactly a wallflower, she had not particularly shone. There had been many minutes of suspense when she forced a semblance of a smile to her lips and intense interest to her eyes while she watched the more popular girls swinging by with their partners, while all her mind was taken up with praying that Jim Walker or Cecil Quinn would look in from the hall and notice there was a girl there not dancing. It is true that Jim or Cecil or some other usually did notice sometime before the dance was half over and come to her rescue, for Kate was a good sort and everybody liked her. At those dances Kate never counted on the Hart boys for attention, although they were her escorts to and from; for to them Kate was no better than a sister. They would have been glad to see her popular, and taken natural pride to themselves in it. But it never entered their heads to be gallant themselves. No, the high-school dances had left Kate secure in the conviction that she would never be a success socially and in the philosophical determination not to care.
But to-night all that was changed. Even Elsie, perfectly beautiful as she was, was not having the same success. She danced constantly, of course, but often with a boy whom Kate had had to refuse.
In an intermission a dowager-like old lady beckoned to Kate from a chair near an open door leading out on to the terrace. Kate left Jack Denton who at the minute was fanning her with a magazine which he had picked up from a table for the purpose, and went to the dowager.
“Bring a chair,” the bejewelled one commanded, “and talk to an old woman for a minute.”
And when Kate had drawn up a stool that stood near and sat down close to her she said, “You are every bit as pretty as your mother was, Katherine Marshall. Every bit!”
Kate shook her head, laughing. “It’s just a disguise,” she affirmed, mysteriously.
“A disguise? What do you mean, you funny child?”
“This cap I am wearing is a magic cap,” Kate informed her, touching its star points ever so lightly with her finger tips. “But shh! don’t let them hear. I will confess to you, though, that it makes me much, much better looking than I really am, and more popular.”
The evening had rather gone to Kate’s head. But the dowager person liked it. She liked it very much. She tapped Kate’s shoulder with her jewelled lorgnette. “Well, then, shall I say,” she continued quite in Kate’s fantastic mood, “you have your mother’s prettiness to begin with, and on top of that the magic cap has added a good bit more. But even better than prettiness you have her spirit. She was always the belle of every party. And often I’ve sat right here in this very chair and watched her gliding past with the young men. Dancers did glide then, not hop and walk. In spite of her preoccupation she always gave me a smile as she drifted. And I was old and ugly even then.”
“Old and ugly! Are you wearing a magic something yourself to-night, then? Perhaps it’s your pearls that make you seem stately and lovely!”
There was blarney in this, for while the dowager was stately enough she certainly was not lovely in any usual sense of the word.
But Kate was scarcely responsible. She hardly knew what she was saying; she was simply effervescing with high spirits and a heady self-satisfaction.
The dowager laughed mellowly. She was not often mellow, and certainly she had not been mellow before this evening. She had sat perfectly still in her chair, her hands folded, with the expression of a judge in court. Now, however, she was a judge no longer. She had slipped into the spirit of the party, swept in on Kate’s fantasy. Miss Frazier watching, but not appearing to watch, from a distant divan where she conversed with two or three mothers, saw the mellowing even at that distance and was well pleased. “Congratulations, Kate,” she said, mentally. “Congratulations, and thank you.”
Meanwhile the dowager was murmuring in Kate’s ear: “You are a dear! It’s for your mother’s and your grandfather’s sake I came to-night and persuaded my daughter to let the young people come. And now I am glad I did.”
Kate looked up at her. “Why for their sake? Why not come, anyway?” But as she spoke automatically, Kate felt her lips stiffening over the words. Indignation was suddenly welling up as it had in the garden with Jack Denton that morning. Glamour fled away, and Kate was straightening like a warrior.
But the dowager hardly heard her question, and certainly did not notice the straightening process. She went on, “I always said no good would come of it. There’s something in good blood that tells—and in bad blood, too. Not that we knew the blood was bad—although in time it showed it was surely enough—just that we didn’t know anything about it! How Miss Frazier dared, a person of her race and blood——”
But Kate interrupted with a strained laugh. “Blood!” she wanted to exclaim. “You make me creep. Are you Lady Macbeth’s grandmother?” But she uttered no sound except the laugh. This was fortunate for Kate, and remarkable restraint. She sat with lips stiffened, watching the glamour gliding away out of her heart, out of the party.
The dowager had paused a minute at Kate’s laugh, waiting for her to speak. But now she continued, “Terrible risk. Everyone warned her. But she would listen to nobody, not even to me. Now she’s trying to unmake her bed. It’s to be hoped she sees the folly of expecting anything good to be made out of bad blood. Environment! Pshaw! Futile!”
Kate shivered. She looked around for a way of escape from this murmuring, croaking person whom but a minute ago she had dubbed stately and lovely. If she should start now and dance off on the music that was beginning again might she outdance the spectre? Might she overtake the glamour? There was Elsie, standing alone for the minute in the open doorway a few steps away. Kate knew now why she had outdistanced Elsie in popularity to-night; she knew it as she watched her, hardly aware of thinking about it at all. Elsie was too fine, too entirely lovely in the real meaning of the word to appeal to any but those sensitive to loveliness in its purest essence. She did not belong to the party at all. She belonged to the starlight beyond the lamplight, to the dim orchard—to the orchard house!
“Whom will you dance this with?” the dowager was inquiring in Kate’s ear.
“The first person that gets here,” Kate replied, quickly. But the dowager did not take offence. Several were in the race, but a tall, lanky youth won, a humorous creature with a happy-go-lucky bearing. When Kate rose to dance off with him, the dowager took her hand. She smiled up at her in the most friendly manner. “You must come to call on me soon,” she said. “Or I will call for you and take you for a drive and then home for tea. That will be better, I think. How is that?”
“Thank you.” Kate managed to smile, but it was a smile her mother would never have recognized.
“I’ll say,” her partner informed her the minute they were out of hearing, “you’ve made a hit. Do you know who she is? Jack Denton’s grandmother, Mrs. Van Vorst-Smith. The social autocrat of Oakdale. Everything will come your way now.”
But Kate did not respond to this gay assurance. “What’s the matter?” her partner asked, surprised. Responsiveness had been Kate’s greatest charm all the evening, if she had only known it, not the cap.
“Nothing. Only I’m chilly.”
The boy whistled. “No wonder, having sat next to that old iceberg so long. Though ’twas probably the air from the door, too. It’s lots cooler and a storm is coming up, I think. I’d have rescued you sooner if I’d had the nerve. She looked almost outlandishly amiable, though. What was her line?”
Kate shivered, a pretend shiver this time, getting her gaiety back. “Blood! Just blood, if you will believe me. Is she an ogress as well as a social autocrat? She discussed blood in several of its phases. Bad blood, good blood, and talking blood. Like the singing bone, I suppose.”
The boy laughed heartily. “She didn’t waste any time in mounting her hobby, I’ll say. But she can’t worry you. Your blood’s all right. That’s the word’s been going ’round ever since the invitations were out. ‘Fraziers, one of the best families in Massachusetts.’ She was probably congratulating you and expecting a return of the compliment.”
Kate laughed. But in spite of her new gaiety, the corners of her mouth had quite lost their winged tilt.
After a few more dances, supper was announced. Kate had promised Jack Denton early in the evening that she would take supper with him. She saw him now looking about for her. In an instant their eyes would meet and he would hurry across to her where she stood for the minute alone. But she suddenly realized that she was tired. She ached with too much dancing. She would never have acknowledged this to herself, of course, unless something had gone wrong with the evening. Hardly knowing why, she stepped out of the door near which she was for the instant standing, backward. That step precipitated her into a different world entirely. The stars had disappeared behind dark, windy rain clouds. The air was fresh, and you heard a wind and felt its edges. Kate took a deep breath. She would stay here in the blowy dark just for a little. It wouldn’t hurt Jack to search a minute longer.
She moved, still backward, farther away from the lighted doorway. She brushed against a garden chair and sat down. She leaned her head against its high back. An impulse came to take off the magic silver cap and be herself. Whimsically she lifted it from her head and placed it on her knee.
“Now you’re just Kate Marshall,” she spoke to herself, but aloud. “Just ordinary, plain-as-day Kate Marshall. Dowagers can’t spoil anything for you. They wouldn’t pay enough attention to you now to bother about spoiling. All the magic that’s really your own, all that isn’t false magic, she can’t touch. Nothing she could say could touch it.”
Kate sighed, having finished her little heartfelt speech to herself. She felt relieved and freshened. She had certainly cast off the dowager’s spell.
“That’s right. All the magic that’s your own, nobody, even a Mrs. Van Vorst-Smith, can touch. It’s safer than the stars from troubling!”
That was a low voice speaking directly behind her. No, it was not simply her own thoughts, although those words might very well have been in her mind that minute, for some of them were right out of “The King of the Fairies.” But it had been a voice, a man’s voice.
Slowly she turned her head. Directly behind her chair a man was standing. She could not see his features at all, because the night was so black, but she thought that he was hatless, and she knew he was in dark clothes. The wind, not merely its edges, had come to earth now. Was it flapping the borders of a long dark cape enveloping the vague figure?
The vague figure bent down to her. Yes, it was a dark cape, blowing away from his shoulders on the wind. It seemed as though the being himself leaned down out of the wind. “Give this to Elsie, please,” he said, in quite a matter-of-fact tone now. Then the wind took him. At least Kate could not see him any more. He had stepped back among the tall lilac bushes that bordered the terrace at that spot.
When he was gone it was just exactly as though he had never been, except for the folded paper that Kate found clutched in her hand. That folded paper, however, definitely fixed him as a reality. But who could it have been? Mr. O’Brien, the detective, crossed Kate’s mind, or one of his assistants, that young man of the polka-dotted tie. But instantly she laughed, though silently, at such a notion. They, neither of them, she felt sure, would by any chance have quoted from “The King of the Fairies” while doing business. “It’s safer than the stars from troubling.” Had the King of the Fairies himself passed her there on the wind? No, hardly. He wouldn’t be leaving a note for Elsie.
Anyway, whoever it might be, he had spoken in a voice whose bidding she was ready to follow. She rose and took the few steps between the chair and the drawing-room door. But she stepped over the sill without hurry, with a meditative air. The man, standing a little way in among the tall lilac bushes, said to himself; “She’s the right stuff. Not startled or upset. Good for Kate Marshall!”
Jack Denton pounced upon her almost at once. “Where have you been?” he cried. “The salad I fought for and won for you has just been commandeered by my grandmother. Now will you agree to stay put while I dash into the fray in the dining-room again?”
“Yes, after a minute. First I must find Elsie. I have to see her very specially.”
“Elsie? Haven’t laid eyes on her for some time. Give me your message and I’ll go hunt.”
“No, but do look around for her. I will, too, and that will save time.”