Chapter 21

"It is so kind of you," she repeated. "And it will be so interesting to see how you do it. And, oh, I am forgetting the thing I came for--how stupid, how wrong of me. It's a message from Jack. He wants to know if you will drive with him."

"And what are all the plans for to-day?" Mrs. Upton asked irrelevantly, unpinning the clustered knobs at the back of Mary's head and softly shaking out the stringently twisted locks as she uncoiled them.

"It is _so_ kind of you;--but oughtn't I to take Jack his answer first?"

"The answer will wait. He has his letters to see to now. What are they all doing?"

"Well, let me see; Rose is in the hammock and Eddy is talking to her. Imogen is going to take Miss Bocock to see her club."

"Oh, it is Imogen's club day, is it? She asked Miss Bocock?"

"Miss Bocock asked her, or, rather, Jack told her that he had been telling Miss Bocock about it; it was Jack who asked. He knew, of course, that she would be interested in it;--a big, fine person like Miss Bocock would be bound to be."

"Um," Valerie seemed vaguely to consider as she passed the comb down the long tresses. "I don't think that I can let Imogen carry off Miss Bocock;--Miss Bocock can go to the club another day; I want to do some gardening with her this morning; she's a very clever gardener, did you know?--So I shall be selfish. Imogen can take Sir Basil; he likes walks."

Mrs. Upton was now brushing, and very dexterously; but Mary, glancing at her with a little anxiety for the avowed selfishness, fancied that she was not thinking much about the hair. Mary could not quite interpret the change she felt in the lovely face. Something hard, something controlled was there.

"But Jack?"--she questioned.

"Well, Jack can take you on the drive. You and he have seen very little of each other since you've come; such old friends as you are, too."

"Yes, we are," said Mary, gazing abstractedly at her own face, now, in the mirror, and forgetting both her own transformation and the face that bent above her. A familiar cloud of pain gathered within her and, suddenly, she found herself bursting out with:--"Oh, Mrs. Upton--I am so unhappy about Jack!"

Valerie, in the mirror, gave her a keen, quick glance. "I am, too, Mary," she said.

Mary, at this, turned in her chair to look up at her:--"You see, you feel it, too!"

"That _he_ is unhappy? Yes, I see and feel it."

"And you care;--I am sure that you care."

"I care very much. I love Jack very much."

Mary seized her hand and tears filled her eyes. "Oh, you _are_ a dear!--One must love him when one really knows him, mustn't one?--Mrs. Upton, I've known Jack all my life and he is simply one of the noblest, deepest, realest people in the whole world."

"I am sure of that."

"Well, then, can't you help him?" Mary cried.

"How can I help him?--In what way?" Valerie asked, her grave smile fading.

"With Imogen. It's that, you see, their alienation, that's breaking his heart.

"Of course you've seen it all more clearly than I have," Mary went on, her hair about her face, her hand clasping Valerie's;--"Of course you understand it, and everything that has happened to them. I love Imogen, too--please don't doubt that;--but, but, I can't but feel that it's _her_ mistake, _her_ blindness that has been the cause. She couldn't accept it, you see, that he should--stand for a new thing, and be loyal to the old thing at the same time."

Valerie, now, had sunken into a chair near Mary's, and one hand was still in Mary's hand, and in the other she still held a tress of Mary's hair. She looked down at this tress while she said:--"But Imogen was right, quite right. He couldn't stand for the new thing and be loyal to the old."

Mary's eyes widened: "You mean,--Mrs. Upton?--"

"Just what you do. That _I_ am the cause."

She raised her eyes to Mary's and the girl became scarlet.

"Oh,--you do see it all," she breathed.

"All, all, Mary. To Imogen I stand, I must stand, for the wrong; to Jack--though he can't think of me very well as 'standing' for anything, I'm not altogether in that category. So that his championship of me judges him in Imogen's eyes. Imogen has had a great deal to bear. Have you heard of the last thing? She has not told you? I have refused my consent to her having a biography of her father written. She had set her heart on it."

"Oh, I hadn't heard anything. You wouldn't consent? Oh, poor Imogen!"

"It is, poor Imogen. In this, too, she has found no sympathy in Jack. All his sympathy is with me. It has been the end, for both of them. And it is inevitable, Mary."

"Oh, Mrs. Upton, what can I say--what can I think?--I don't seem to be able to see who is right and who is wrong!" Mary covered the confusion of her thoughts by burying her face in her hands.

"No; one can't see. That's what one finds out."

"Of course, I have always thought Mr. Upton a very wonderful person," Mary murmured from behind her hands, her Puritan instinct warning her that now, when it gave her such pain, was the time above all others for a "testifying," a "bearing witness."--"But I know that Jack never felt about that as I did. Of course I, too, think that the biography ought to be written."

Valerie was silent, and her silence, Mary felt, was definitive.

She wouldn't explain herself; she wouldn't seek self-exculpation; and while, with all her humility, Mary felt that as a little stinging, she felt it, also, as something of a relief. Mrs. Upton, no doubt, was indifferent as to her opinion of her rightness and her wrongness, and Mrs. Upton--there was the comfort of it,--was a person whom one must put on one side when it came to judgments. She didn't seem to belong to any of the usual categories. One didn't want to judge her. One was thankful for the haze she made about herself and her motives. That Jack understood her was, Mary felt sure, the result of some peculiar perspicacity of Jack's, for she didn't believe that Mrs. Upton had ever explained or exculpated herself to Jack, either. It even dawned on her that his perspicacity perhaps consisted mainly in the sense of trust that she herself was experiencing. She trusted Mrs. Upton, were she right, or were she wrong, and there was an end of it. With that final realization she uncovered her eyes and met her hostess's eyes again, eyes so soft, so clear, but with, in them, a look of suffering. Childlike, her hair folding behind her cheek and neck, she was faded, touched with age; Mary had never seen it so clearly. Somehow it made her even sorrier than the suffering she recognized.

"Oh, but it's been hard for you, too," she exclaimed, shyly but irrepressibly, "everything, all of it. Just let me say that."

Valerie had blushed her infrequent, vivid blush. She rose and came behind Mary's chair again, gathering up the abandoned tresses. But before she began to comb and coil she said, "Thanks," leaning forward and, very lightly, kissing the girl's forehead.

After that there was silence between them while the work of hair-dressing went on. Valerie did not speak again until, softly forming the contour of the transfigured head, she said, looking at Mary's reflection with an air of quiet triumph;--"Now, is not that charming?"

"Charming; perfectly charming," Mary replied, vaguely; the tears were near her eyes.

"You must come again, to-morrow, and do it under my supervision. It only needs this, now." She thrust two heavy tortoise-shell pins into the coils on either side of Mary's head.

"Those beautiful pins! I am afraid I shall lose them!"

"But they are yours,--mementoes of the new era in hair-dressing. I have several of them. There, you are quite as I would have you,--as far as your head goes."

"Not as far as the rest of me goes, I'm afraid," said Mary, laughing in spite of herself, and lured from sadness.

"I wish you'd let me make the rest of you to match," said Valerie. "I've always loved dressing people up. I loved dressing my dolls when I was a child. That stiff shirt doesn't go with your head."

"No, it doesn't. I really don't see," said Mary tentatively, "why one shouldn't regard dressing as a form of art; I mean, of course, as long as one keeps it in its proper place, as it were."

"To get it in its proper place is to dress well, don't you think. I found such a pretty lawn dress of mine in a trunkful of things put away here; it's a little too juvenile for me, now, and, besides, I'm in mourning. May I put you into it?"

"But I should feel so odd, so frivolous. I'm such a staid, solemn person."

"But the dress is staid, too,--a dear little austerity of a dress;--it's just as much you as that way of doing your hair is. Don't imagine that I would commit such a solecism as to dress you frivolously. Look; will you put this on at once,--to please me?"

She had drawn the delicate thing, all falls and plaitings of palest blue, from a closet, and, shaking it out, looked up with quite serious eyes of supplication. It was impossible not to yield. Laughing, frightened, charmed, Mary allowed Mrs. Upton to dress her, and then surveyed herself in the long mirror with astonishment. She couldn't but own that it was herself, though such a transfigured self. She didn't feel out of place, though she felt new and strange.

"Now, Mary, go down to them and see to it that they all do as I say," Valerie insisted. "Imogen is to take Sir Basil to the club;--Miss Bocock is to garden with me--tell her particularly that I count upon her. Jack is to take you for a drive. And, Mary," she put her hand for a moment on the girl's shoulder, grave for all her recovered lightness;--"you are not to talk of sad things to Jack. You must help me about Jack. You must cheer him;--make him forget. You must talk of all the things you used to talk of before--before either I or Imogen came."

They were all on the veranda when Mary went down; all, that is, but Rose and Eddy. Sir Basil and Miss Bocock were deep in letters. Imogen, seated on a step, the sunlight playing over her fluttering black, endured--it was evident that enjoyment made no part of her feeling--a vivid and emphatic account from Jack of some recent political occurrence. He was even reading, here and there, bits from the newspaper he held, and Mary fancied that there was an unnatural excitement in his voice, an unusual eagerness in his eye, with neither of which had he in the least infected Imogen.

On seeing Mary appear he dropped the newspaper and joined her in the hall, drawing her from there into the little library. "Well?--Well?--" he questioned keenly.

He had no eyes for her transformation, Mary noted that, although Imogen, in the instant of her appearance, had fixed grave and astonished eyes upon her. She repeated her message.

"Well, do you know," said Jack, "we can't obey her. I'm so sorry;--I should have liked the drive with you, Mary, of all things; but it turns out that I can't take anybody this morning, I've some letters, just come, that must be answered by return. But, Mary, see here," his voice dropped and his keenness became more acute;--"help me about it. See that she goes. She needs it."

"Needs it?"

"Don't you see that she's worn out?"

"Jack, only this morning, I've begun to suspect it;--what is the matter?"

"Everything. Everything is the matter. So, she mustn't be allowed to take all the drudgery on her hands. Miss Bocock may go to the club with Imogen; she's just ready to go, she wants to go;--and Mrs. Upton must have the drive with Sir Basil. He'd far rather drive with her than walk with Imogen," said Jack brazenly.

"I suppose so, they are such great friends;--only;--drudgery?--She likes Miss Bocock. She likes gardening,"--Mary's breath was almost taken away by his tense decisiveness.

"She likes Sir Basil better"; Jack said it in the freest manner, a manner that left untouched any deeper knowledge that they might both be in possession of. "Imogen likes him better, too. It's for that, so that Imogen may have the best of it, that she's taking Miss Bocock off Imogen's hands;--you see, I see that you do. So, you just stay here and keep still about your counter-demands, while I manage it."

"But Jack,--you bewilder me!--I ought to give my message. I hate managing."

"I'll see that your message is given."

"But how can you?--Jack--what _are_ you planning?"

He was going and, with almost an impatience of her Puritan scruples, he paused at the door to reply:--"Don't bother. I'm all right. I won't manage it. I'll simply _have_ it so."

Half an hour later Valerie came down-stairs wearing her white hat with its black ribbons and drawing on her gardening gloves. And in the large, cool hall, holding his serviceable letters, Jack awaited her.

"I hope you won't mind," he announced, but in the easiest tones; "we can't obey you this morning. Miss Bocock's gone off to the club with Imogen, and Sir Basil is going to take you for a drive."

Valerie, standing on the last step of the stair, a little above him, paused in the act of adjusting her glove, to stare at him. Easy as his tone was he couldn't hide from her that he wore a mask.

"Was Mary too late to give my message?"

"Yes;--that is, no, not exactly; but the club had been arranged and Miss Bocock was eager about it and knew you wouldn't mind, especially as Sir Basil set his heart on the drive with you, when he heard that I couldn't go."

"That you couldn't go?--but you sent Mary to ask me."

"I had to waive my claim,--I've just had these letters"; he held them up. "Very important; they must be answered at once; it will take all my morning, and, of course, when Sir Basil heard that, he jumped at his chance."

Valerie was still on the step above him, fully illuminated, and, as, with that careful ease, he urged Sir Basil's eagerness upon her, he saw--with what a throb of the heart, for her, for himself--that her deep flush rose.

Oh, she loved him. She couldn't conceal it, not from the eyes that watched her now. And was she glad of an unasked-for help, or did her pride suspect help and resent it? Above all did she know how in need of help she was?

He hadn't been able to prevent his eyes from turning from the blush; they avowed, he feared, the consciousness that he would hide; but, after a little moment, in the same voice of determined, though cautious penetration, Valerie questioned: "Is Imogen just gone?"

"She has been gone these fifteen minutes," said Jack, striving to conceal triumph.

"And Mary?"

"Mary?"

"Yes; where is Mary? Is she left out of all your combinations?"

She did probe, then, though her voice was so mild, the voice, only, of the slightly severe, slightly displeased hostess who finds her looms entangled.

"Mary always has a lot to do."

"Sir Basil shall take Mary," said Valerie cheerfully, as though she picked up the thread and found a way out of the silly chaos of his making.

And at this crisis, this check from the goddess who wouldn't be served, Jack's new skill rose to an almost sinister height. Without a flaw in their apparent candor, his eyes met hers while he said:--"Please don't upset my little personal combination. It's very selfish of me, I know;--but I wanted to keep Mary for myself this morning. I've seen so little of her of late; and I need her to talk over my letters with; they're about things we are both interested in."

Valerie looked fixedly at him while he made this statement, and he couldn't tell what her look meant. But, evidently, she yielded to his counter-stratagem, feeling it, no doubt, unavoidable, for the buggy just then drew up before the door, and the figure of Sir Basil appeared above.

"I _am_ in luck!" said Sir Basil. Excitement as well as eagerness was visible in him. Valerie did not look up at him, though she smiled vaguely, coming down from her step and selecting a parasol on her way to the door. Jack was beside her, and he saw that the flush still stayed. He seemed to see, too, that she was excited and eager, but, more than all, that she was frightened. Yet she kept, for him, her quiet voice.

Before Sir Basil joined them she had time to say:--"You are rather mysterious, Jack. If you have deep-laid plans, I would rather you paid me the compliment of showing me the deepest one at once. I am not being nasty to you," she smiled faintly. "Find Mary at once, you must have wasted a lot of time already in getting to those letters."

Jack stood in the doorway while they drove off. Valerie, though now very pale, in the shadow of her hat, showed all her gay tranquillity, and she was very lovely. Sir Basil must see that. He must see that, and all the other things, that, perhaps, he had forgotten for a foolish moment.

Jack felt himself, this morning, in a category where he had never thought it possible that he should find himself. It was difficult to avoid the conviction that he had, simply, lied two or three times in order to send Mrs. Upton and Sir Basil off together in their long, swaying, sunny solitude. Jack had never imagined it possible that he should lie. But, observing, as he was forced to, the blot on his neat, clean conscience, he found himself considering it without a qualm. His only qualm was for its success. The drive would justify him. He almost swore it to himself, as Valerie's parasol disappeared among the trees. The drive would justify him, and reinstate Sir Basil. Unless Sir Basil were a fool, what he had done was well done.

Yet, when they had disappeared, it was with the saddest drop to anxious, to gnawing uncertainty, that Jack turned back into the house. An echo of the fear that he had felt in Valerie seemed to float back to him. It was as if, in some strange way, he had handed her over to pain rather than to joy, to sacrifice rather than to attainment.

XXVII

Jack's morning was not a happy one. It was bad enough to have told so many fibs, or, at all events, to have invented so many opportune truths, and it was worse to have to go on inventing more of them to Mary, now that his dexterities had linked him to her.

Mary looked, as was only too natural, much surprised, when he told her that his letters required her help. She looked still more so when she found how inadequate were their contents to account for such a claim.

Indeed there was, apparently, but one letter upon which her advice could be of the least significance, and after she had given him all the information she had to give in regard to the charity for which it appealed, there was really nothing more for them to do.

"But--the letters that required the immediate answers?" she asked.

Jack's excited, plausible manner had dropped from him. Mary felt it difficult to be severe when his look of dejection was piercing her heart; still, she felt that she owed it to him as well as to herself, she must see a little more clearly into how he had "had things so."

He replied, his eye neither braving nor evading hers, that he had already answered them; and Mary, after a little pause, in which she studied her friend's face, said:--"I don't understand you this morning, Jack."

"I'm afraid you'll understand me less when I make you a confession. I didn't give your message this morning, Mary."

"Didn't give Mrs. Upton's message, to Miss Bocock, to Sir Basil?"

"No," said Jack, but with more mildness and sadness than compunction;--"I want to be straight with you, at all events. So I'd rather tell you. All I did was to say to Sir Basil that I found I couldn't take Mrs. Upton for the drive I'd promised, so that if he wanted to take my place, he was welcome to the buggy. He wanted to, of course. That went without saying."

"Why, Jack Pennington!"

"Miss Bocock, luckily, was on the other side of the veranda, so that I had only to go round to her afterward and tell her that Mrs. Upton had suggested their gardening, but that since she was going to drive with Sir Basil she could go off to the club, at once, too, with Imogen."

"But, Jack!--what did you mean by it?"--Mary, quite aghast, stared at her Machiavellian friend.

"Why, that Sir Basil should take her. That's all I meant from the beginning, when I proposed going myself. Do forgive me, you dear old brick. You see, I'm so awfully set on her not being done out of things."

"Done out of things?"

"Oh, little things, if you like, young things. She's young, and she ought to have them. Say you forgive me."

"Of course, Jack dear, I forgive you, though I don't understand you. But that's not the point. Everything seems so queer, so twisted; every one seems different. And to find _you_ not straight is worst of all."

"I promise you, it's my last sin," said Jack.

Mary, though shaking her bewildered head, had to smile a little, and, the smile encouraging him to lightness, he remarked on her changed aspect.

"So do forgive and forget. I had to confess, when I'd not been true to you. Really, my nature isn't warped. What an extremely becoming dress that is Mary;--and what have you done to your hair?"

"It's _she_," said Mary, flushing with pleasure.

"Mrs. Upton?"

"Yes, she did my hair and gave me the dress. She was so sweet and dear."

Jack lightly touched a plaited ruffle of the wide sleeve, and Mary felt that he had never less thought of her than when he so touched her dress. She put aside the deep little pang that gave her to say: "It's true, Jack, she ought to have young things, just because they are going from her; one feels that: She oughtn't to be standing back, and giving up things, yet. I see a little what you mean. _Isn't_ it pretty?" Still, with an absent hand, he lightly touched, here and there, a ruffle of her sleeve. "But it's like her. I hardly feel myself in it."

"You've never so looked yourself," said Jack. "That's what she does, brings out people's real selves."

Mrs. Upton and Sir Basil did not come back to lunch, and Imogen's face was somber indeed as she faced her guests at the table. Jack, vigilant and pitiless, guessed at the turmoil of her soul.

She asked him, with an icy sweetness, how his letters had prospered. "Did you get them all off?"

Jack said that he had, and Mary, casting a wavering glance at him, saw that if he intended to sin no more, he showed, at all events, a sinful guilelessness of demeanor. She herself began to blush so helplessly and so furiously that Imogen's attention was drawn to her. Imogen, also, was vigilant.

"And what have you been doing, Mary dear?" she asked.

"I--oh"--poor Mary looked the sinful one;--"I--helped Jack a little."

"Helped Jack?--Oh, yes, he had heaps of letters, hadn't he? What were they all about, Mary?"

"Oh, charities."

"Charities?--What charities? How many charities?--I'm interested in that, you know--I'm rather hurt that you didn't ask my advice, too," and Imogen smiled her ominous smile. "What were the charities?"

Mary, crimson to the brow, her eyes on her plate, now did her duty.

"There was only one."

"One--and that of such consequence that Jack had to give up his drive because of it?--what an interesting letter."

"There were other letters, of course," Jack, in aid of his innocent accomplice, struck in. "None that would have particularly interested you, Imogen. I only needed advice about the one, a local Boston affair."

"There were others, Mary," said Imogen, laughing a little, "You needn't look so guilty on Jack's account." Mary gave her a wide, startled stare.

"You see, Mary," said Rose, after lunch in the drawing-room, "saints can sting."

"What was the matter!" Mary murmured, her head still seemed to buzz, as though from a violent box on the ear. "I never heard Imogen speak like that. To _hurt_ one!"

"I fancy she'd been getting thwarted in some way," said Rose comfortably; "saints do sting, then, sometimes, the first thing that happens to be at hand. How Jack and she hate each other!"

Mary went away to her room and cried.

Meanwhile Jack wandered about in the woods until, quite late in the afternoon, he saw from the rustic bench, where, finally, he had cast himself, the returning buggy climbing up through the lower woodlands.