Part 25

She said, with a curious stilted politeness: "It was very good of you to come. But really you must not wait for me, please. I have a good deal more to do--a great deal more--and it is work of a sort that I have to do alone."

"Miss Mary," said Charles, "your mother told me, at my request, what has happened this afternoon."

Mary flinched, just perceptibly. But her voice, when she spoke, seemed harder than before.

"Well, it's the fact. That's all there is to say. There isn't anything more to discuss."

"I don't mean to discuss it, of course. There was just one thing I thought of--a--sort of suggestion."

Finding himself neither questioned nor forbidden, he continued: "Do you think it would be such a bad way out of the--the difficulty, if Donald were just to go on here for a while?"

Still Mary waited, hardly encouraging him, examining a "New School," silently laying it down in the packing-case at her feet.

"I know you feel," said Charles, inspecting the top of her hat, "that settling down to this consulting work, in a city that offers so many distractions all the time, won't be a good thing for Donald--from any point of view. Staying here won't take the place of the chance with Gebhardt he's throwing away, of course--that's pretty serious. Still, there ought to be plenty of good work for him to do here--isn't there?--for a few months, a year or two, if necessary. That would give him--and you--a little time to adjust things to--the new conditions. And then from the point of view of the Flowers, too,--of Mrs. Flower, in fact,--it occurred to me it mightn't be a bad sort of working compromise.... What do you think?"

"I think it is very sensible," she replied, with the same labored courtesy. "It is what I suggested, too."

"Oh," said Charles, and paused. "But Donald didn't want to give up Blake & Steinert, I suppose?"

"I haven't suggested it to Donald."

That brought a considerable silence.

"It's--settled, then?"

"It was settled last week."

A curious let-down feeling took possession of the young man. He pressed his hand to his forehead; and then for the first time was aware that his head ached furiously. In the same moment, his eye was unpleasantly caught by his burst-out gloves. Having stared at his hands for a second, he silently stripped off the gloves, balled them, and pitched the ball into a waste-basket near by.

"I'll just have a look into this closet for myself," said he, turning away. "I don't believe Geddie--"

"No!--please don't!--don't trouble! I really don't need any help, thank you. I don't ..."

Her wish to be alone was all but woundingly plain to him. And still it seemed to Charles physically impossible to turn now and walk out of the door. So, not looking at her, he answered in a peculiarly mild manner that, of course, this wasn't help at all, only a little indulgence of himself, which she really mustn't refuse him. And while he yet spoke, allowing no opportunity for such refusal, he hung his hat on Mr. Geddie's hook, and all the forepart of him disappeared upward into the closet.

After an interval rather longer than necessary, he re-emerged to view, a few periodicals in one hand, a faded bundle of typewritten papers in the other.

"Geddie's made a clean sweep. There's hardly another armful."

His manner was almost as cheery as Geddie's own. His "note" was to go ahead as if nothing had happened.

"Put them here?" asked Charles.

Mary Wing's arms quivered a little on the table.

"Put them _anywhere_! It doesn't make the _least_ difference!"

So Charles laid his burden down on the table, and quietly went up the ladder again. Here, for a space, he pretended to be impossibly busy over nearly empty shelves.

And then, out of the silence behind him, he heard his friend's voice, painfully stiff, somewhat strained.

"You see--you oughtn't to have come to see me to-day. I--I'm not fit for society. I tried to warn you. I haven't had time--to get philosophical yet."

The helper spoke into the dusty closet: "Well, you don't need to get philosophical with me. I'm pretty mad myself--as far as that goes."

"I wasn't prepared for it--at all.... And then I've been beating my head against it--like a fool--all afternoon."

Well he knew Mary's horror of weakness, her warranted confidence in her own self-control. Well he understood her regret for that uniquely sharp speech of hers. Was it this, a novel impulse to justify herself in his eyes, that seemed to force her on, beyond his expectation and against her own will?

"But don't suppose I went there expecting to have my own way about everything--manage them around like children. I didn't. I went respectfully. I went to beg. But it was no use."

Silence: and then the hard voice went on rapidly:--

"She and Donald had talked it all over, and decided that it would be best for his career to go to New York. She and Donald ... I _did_ think that, as I was planning Donald's work when she was still in short dresses, my opinion might have some weight with her. And I thought, just as you did, that something might be saved if they stayed here for the present--kept the house and all the rest of it. And then, of course, I lost my temper--that makes twice.... I reminded her how she had told me once that nothing could induce _her_ to leave her mother, as a widow.... What was the use? Of course she only cried, and said it was hopeless to try to explain to me--how differently a woman felt about all these things when she was going to be married. I believe she said I was incapable of understanding the new emotions that came with a great love."

That, indeed, seemed a romantic description of the mild, chance product of the Fordette. However, the replete young authority only said:--

"Then I suppose it's great love that taught her engineering so quickly--and all Donald's little peculiarities?"

Mary Wing made no answer. Her capable small hands took up the literature lately provided by Charles. And when she spoke, it was as if his unaccustomed acrimony had met and destroyed her own.

"Oh, it's natural that we should see everything differently. She is really a sweet-natured girl. I'm sorry already for what I said to her.... And her not wanting to stay here--you mustn't think that's just a selfish whim--just wanting to live in New York. Of course, what she wants is to have Donald to herself--to have their young married life to themselves. And my going there to give advice to-day--naturally that made her more certain than ever that she could never have that here--with me just around the corner. She let me understand that, finally. She intimated that Donald had said as much--he was tired of being managed.... Oh, it's perfectly natural, perfectly right. To-morrow, I'll accept it easily enough.... As I say--I haven't had much time."

He was more touched by that speech than everything that had gone before, yet more resolved, too, not to say, "I'm sorry."

"As a matter of fact," he asked straightforwardly, "what _was_ decided--as to Mrs. Flower?"

"It's not decided yet, at all. However, I have a plan--another suggestion--which it seems to me might meet some of the difficulties."

"Aren't there friends or relatives here that she might stay with for a time?"

"That's it. I think I can persuade her to live with us--till we have a chance to see how all this--"

"With _you_?"

"It's just a hope, as I say. I didn't think of it till just now. Mother is very fond of her. And Wallie can't give up college, of course. That would be--quite the worst thing."

The school-teacher spoke with characteristic matter-of-factness. If she was adding final touches to the portraits of two women, she did it, certainly, with supreme unconsciousness. In the brief stillness of the office, she efficiently neared the end of her task. The top of her table was almost bare, the litter on the floor was deep. And now she spoke again, dryly and quite conclusively.

"At any rate, nothing fatal has happened. Nobody knows that better than I do--really. No doubt it's personal vanity with me, as much as anything. And now--"

"Do you know," Charles Garrott spoke up suddenly, as if he did not hear her at all--"I think you're the best I ever knew? The best--the _best_--absolutely the most of a person--"

She, the strong, seemed to start and shrink; she broke in sharply, with instant signs of a shaken poise: "No--_please_! You don't understand me at all. I do--not need sympathy! It's just what I've been trying to say--"

"Well, you aren't getting it from me, no fear. Sympathy! If ever there was honest looking up, if ever--"

"No!--don't! I didn't tell you about it for that!--only to explain why I seemed so ... It was due you. As I say, nobody understands better than I how unreasonable it is--to be so disturbed. And if you hadn't come here to-day--"

"Won't you give me credit for some understanding? If you were ten times as disturbed, I'd think it the reasonablest--"

"Yes--for a woman. Well, I'm not that kind of woman," said Mary Wing, with curious agitation, as if she could stand any sort of talk better than this. "Please don't say any more. I don't tell my troubles to be comforted--patted on the head. I'm not feminine, I hope, after all these knocks. You make me--"

"Thank God, _no_!" said the young man on the ladder, considerably moved.

And then that connection which he must have been groping toward for a month flashed startlingly upon him, and he, the authority, blurted out like a boy:--

"No--_you're womanly_!"

He saw his old friend's face quiver a little as the strange word struck her: oddly, it seemed to silence her. But it was not possible that she could be one half so struck with that word as he, Charles Garrott, was. _Mary Wing was a Womanly Woman_.... And now she could no more have stopped his speech than she could have stopped a river when the one gate in the dam, long locked, has suddenly burst open.

"That's it. Of course.... Funny, I was just thinking over all that as I walked around here--how different those things are. No, not different--they don't belong in the same story at all. What's character got to do with--feathers in the springtime?... Born stupid," said Charles, in a low, stirred voice--"that seems to explain me. I'd better have been one-eyed--beat me over the head with it, and still I can't see.... Won't see. That's it!--it's worse. I'm just an old-line male--that's what. Just the sort who've taught women not to bother to try to be womanly when being feminine comes so much cheaper. Why, look at me, criticizing you in my thoughts, not liking it because you were--independent. What was that but just pique--don't you know?--just common ordinary male jealousy--because a woman didn't need my shoulder to lean on. Manly protector ... seventeenth-century stuff. Well, you've punished me, don't you worry.... Just standing where you always stood, just being your Self. Acting straight from your own law all the time, doing the best sort of things, one after the other--the biggest, the--the _tenderest_--"

"Don't," said the grammar-school teacher again, but in the littlest voice he had ever heard from her lips.

Rapt as he was, that voice penetrated him. More, it alarmed him: and with reason, too. Staring down with a new fixedness, touched with a faint, purely masculine horror, Charles beheld the strangest sight seen by him in many a day. Mary Wing, the unconquerable, had suddenly put her face into her hands.

He had really only been finishing that other talk of theirs, with a certain sense of right; but of course this wasn't the time for that. He had been indulging his analytic propensity, his fatal tendency to comment, at her expense. Hadn't he understood that she feared nothing so much as his sympathies?...

His friend, in her arresting attitude, sat as rigid as a carven woman. The stillness in the little office was profound. Then a voice strained out, very thin, but still not defeated:--

"Don't be alarmed. I'm ... not going to cry."

And that seemed to settle it. It was as if, in that silent struggle waged all the way from the Flowers' to now, the speaking of the word itself was the fatal admission. The school-teacher had no sooner pronounced it than her arms spread suddenly out on the table before her, and her head came down upon them.

Charles Garrott, on his ladder, was heard to take one breath, sharply. After that, no sound came from him. Quite motionless he sat, in the chance position in which the sudden disaster had overtaken him: long arms dangling from his knees, large feet hooked under a ladder-rung, some distance down. He hardly winked an eye.

Mary Wing was crying. That painful hard tension had snapped; the indomitable slim figure drooped beaten, for once. She, also, made little sound in her peculiar difficulty. But her body shook with a stormy racking. And it hurt her, he was sure; hurt her physically, as if she couldn't find tears without breaking something inside....

Strange it seemed that once, in this very room, and only the other day really, he had wanted to see Mary cry. He had thought of it then as a desirable sort of symbol, hadn't he?--something of that sort. What did her tears have to tell him now? Then he had conceived himself as watching her emotion, moved doubtless, but yet with a secretly gratified masculinity. Now every heave of those slender shoulders was like a clutch upon his heart.

And still there was something in Charles that was not distress at all. He was aware of another and quite different inner sense--peace, the end of struggle, fulfillment--he could not say what it was. It was strange. He was not unhappy....

There came, after a time, signs that his friend was overcoming that hard revolt of feelings too much put upon. Even in the beginning she had never seemed to abandon herself, quite. At length, somewhat unexpectedly, she moved, turned from her seat under his eye, and, rising, went away to the office's one window. There she stood, her back toward him. And presently she began to clear her throat, with nervous quick coughings.

Through this, Charles had not spoken, or thought of doing so. To pat Mary's shoulder, this time, had not entered his head. His instinct seemed to feel the banality of any intrusion upon her freedom: she should weep or not weep, just as seemed best to her. Now, as his grave eyes followed her, it occurred to him that his presence here had been, and was, a considerable intrusion. And about the time he had reached this conclusion, Mary spoke, naturally enough, except that a sharp catch of breath broke her sentence in the middle.

"I'm giving you ... a pleasant visit to-day."

The young man stirred on his perch. He answered, oddly, with a sort of growl:--

"That's right! I'm a fair-weather friend. Keep things pleasant for _me_ all the time--or good-bye."

His heroine was sniffing repeatedly, in the humanest way. She kept clearing her throat. Her movements made it clear that she was searching busily for her handkerchief. However, there lay her handkerchief on the table, under his eye. And if she, perhaps, hardly wished to turn and come for it just now, no more did he see his way clear to going and taking it to her.

"No--but what's the sense of it? I'm--doing just what I told Angela not to do. Feeling sorry for myself, that's all."

"Well, I don't feel sorry for you. Don't worry about that."

Charles came down the ladder, and stood a moment kicking at the "New Schools" strewn about the floor.

"Look here, suppose I save time by arranging about this box now? You want it to go to your house, I suppose?"

"No--I'm going to send it to the grammar-school."

"Oh--all right. I'll attend to it," he said, briefly. "I'll tell the porter to keep it to-night, and get a wagon to-morrow."

On which, without more ado, he stepped from the assistant principal's office, and shut the door behind him.

Charles's conference with the negro porter in the corridor below lasted a minute, perhaps. His diplomatic retirement lasted ten minutes, at least. His surplus time the young man spent in staring out of a tall window into a white-paved courtyard. But that it was a white-paved courtyard, or that it was a courtyard, he never knew. The instant he found that he was staring at it, he jumped a little, and went upstairs....

If he had meant this interval as a punctuation and the turning of a page, Mary, it seemed, had so accepted it. Reopening Mr. Geddie's door, Charles saw that his absence had been employed for a general setting to rights. The table had been moved back against the wall; the books and globe restored to it, the chair Mary had occupied returned to its place, the window opened to blow out the dust. Mary herself stood in the middle of the room, coated, buttoning her gloves. Without looking at her exactly, he was aware that the white veil which had been caught up around her hat was now let down.

Bygones were bygones, clearly: the least said, the soonest mended. Charles remarked, exactly as if house-cleaning were the sole interest he knew of here: "Well, you've made a good job of it."

And Mary replied, with equal naturalness: "I did what I could. John will have to attend to these things on the floor."

"Yes--I told him to see to that at once."

"He ought to give the closet a good cleaning, too. I'd better tell him--this is just the time."

"I told him to be sure to scrub the closet. It'll be all right."

Looking up, she said: "You seem to have thought of everything."

"Let me get my hat," said Charles.

But Mary, standing in his way, was regarding him with a sudden directness he had no wish to reciprocate. And she answered his remark about the hat with a little exclamation.

"What's the matter with your eye?"

"My eye?" said the young man, and involuntarily put his hand there. Recollecting, he finished: "Nothing--nothing at all."

The school-teacher came a step nearer, but he went round her as he spoke, and continued his way.

"But there's a good deal the matter with it!" she exclaimed, concerned. "It's swollen--it looks discolored, too.--How did you hurt yourself?"

"Oh, that? Oh!" said Charles, carefully fitting on his hat, and then removing it again. "I remember now--it's nothing. Got a tumble this afternoon, that's all. Stupid thing."

"You must let me get some hot water down the hall. I'm afraid it's--"

But he indicated, quite brusquely, that his eye was all right, just the way he liked it, that having water put on it was, in particular, the last thing he would ever dream of.

She said behind him, slowly, after a pause: "If you won't, you won't, of course.... But it's so exactly like you--"

"Ready?" said Charles.

But when he turned he found that Mary had turned, too, after him--stood facing him anew. And this time the confrontation was too near, too immediate, to be further avoided.

He now discovered that the thin veil had not withdrawn his friend very far. Looking at her for the first time since her cataclysm, he saw that her delicate face wore that look described as "rain-washed," which commonly means peace, but peace at a price. The redness of her eyelids was quite perceptible. What struck the young man particularly, however, was the look of the blue eyes themselves. More or less irrelevant eyes he had always thought them, for all the heavy arched brows which so emphasized their faculty for steady, sometimes disconcerting, interrogation. That characteristic grave intentness was in Mary's gaze now: but it was not this that gave her look its power to hold Charles Garrott in his tracks.

The peculiar commotion within him gave forth in a short laugh, testy and embarrassed: "Honestly, if you say the word 'eye' to me again--"

"I wasn't going to speak of your eye," said Mary Wing, with quite remarkable meekness.... "I was thinking of that remark you made--about being a fair-weather friend."

And then she went on hurriedly, with a rare, impulsiveness: "I've just been thinking--I don't suppose since the world began there was ever such another rainy-day friend as you. It's got so now that I never get into trouble without thinking right away--as I was thinking this afternoon when I left the Flowers'--that you'll be right there to help me with it. Yes, I was. And it's so--perfect. Nothing to spoil it ever--not one thing for you to gain--all just your rather extravagant idea of what being a friend means. You don't know--how much it means...."

The strange speech--strange blossom of her disruptive emotion--ended a little short; but that it ended was the principal thing. Doubtless there had been a time when words such as these from Mary Wing, this fine frank expression of abiding friendship, would have been sweet and acceptable to Charles Garrott, crowning him with a full reward. But it seemed that that time must have passed, somewhat abruptly....

The two moderns stood, gazing full at each other. And now, in the same moment, a little color tinged the girl's cheek, beneath her veil, and the young man turned rather pale.

"Miss Mary, you must be dreaming," said Charles, gently. "I've never done anything for you in my life. We both know that. Let's go."

Mary, her eyes falling, had resumed the buttoning of her gloves. She moved toward the door. The descent of the High School stairs was made in comparative silence. The chief item of importance developed was that Mary intended to go home by street-car; she was tired, she mentioned. It seemed that Charles, on the contrary, had no intention of foregoing his afternoon constitutional. He said that he would see Miss Mary to her car, however; and he did.

So the old friends parted casually on a street corner, as they had done a hundred times before.

But in the Studio, there could be no such reserve, no such slurring of the characteristic services of men. Here combat must have its fair due, in the moral order of a too sedentary world. Judge Blenso, in brief, from whom no secrets were hid, had the full facts relative to the altered eye within ten minutes of Charles's homecoming, an hour later; and the Judge's cold manner, already somewhat softened by the heartening acceptance of Entry 3, straightway dissolved in exultation and proud joy. The reconciliation between uncle and nephew was instantaneous and immutable, and there followed, by consequence, the most broken, the most conversational, evening in the history of the Studio.

Charles was very glad to be reconciled with his relative. He was very glad to feel that his secretary no longer viewed him with bald disgust. Nevertheless, there were times, necessarily, when a writer wished that he had no relative and secretary at all; and this, in a word, was one of them. Charles did not wish, to-night, to go over and over one set of primitive facts indefinitely; he did not wish to listen to sporting anecdote and reminiscence, hour after hour; in chief, he did not wish to go to bed at half-past ten o'clock. However, he did each and all of these things, perforce.

"Always retire early after a fight!--that was my father's rule, long as he lived!" cried Uncle George, his black eyes dangerously bright.... "No--let's see. _Before_ a fight--that was father's way! Well, good gad!--too late for that now! You come along to bed, my dear fellow!..."