Chapter 3

"And any answer she may care to make to me, if you'll address it to me there," handing back her book to her, "will always reach me, wherever I may be."

"It is a splendid game," he said when he was going, "and I'm glad you let me play. If more people played this game, I'd find the world a lot pleasanter place to live in."

"When you know the Secret you can show other people how to play," Mary Alice suggested.

"That's so," he said. "Well, I shan't let you forget you are to tell it to me."

VIII

LEARNING TO BE BRAVE AND SWEET

Godmother's charming drawing-room seemed intolerably empty when he had gone and they two stood by the fire and looked into it trying to see again the jungle scene he had pointed out to them in the bed of coals. But the jungle was gone; the vision had faded with the seer. And Godmother and Mary Alice began picking up the teacups and the toast plate, almost as if there had been a funeral.

Then Godmother laughed. "How solemn we are!" she said, pretending to think it all very funny.

But Mary Alice couldn't pretend. She set down his teacup which she had just lifted with gentle reverence off the mantel, where he left it, and went closer to Godmother. Her lips were trembling, but she did not have to speak.

"I know, Precious--I know," whispered Godmother. She sat down in a big chair close to the fire--the chair he had just left--and Mary Alice sat on the hearth-rug and nestled her head against Godmother's knees. Neither of them said anything for what seemed a long time. They just looked into the glowing bed of coals and saw--different things!

Then, "I think," Mary Alice began, in a voice that was full of tears, "I think I wish we hadn't played any game. I think I wish I hadn't seen him at all."

"Lovey _dear_!"

"Yes, I do!" wept Mary Alice, refusing to be comforted. "Everything was beautiful, before he came. And now he's gone, and I'm so--lonesome!"

Godmother was silent for a moment. "There's the Secret," she suggested, at last. "It was--it was when I felt just as you do now, that I began to learn the Secret."

Mary Alice made no reply; there seemed to be nothing that she could say But after they had sat silent for a long while, she got up and kissed her godmother with a new passion which had in it tenderness as well as adoration.

"I don't believe I can be brave and lovely about it, as you must have been to make people love you so. But I'm going to _try_," she said.

The success with which Mary Alice's trying met was really beautiful to see. At first, it was pretty hard for her to care much about the Secret, or about people. Every assemblage just seemed to her an empty crowd where he was not. But when she began to wonder to how many of those selfsame people the others seemed the same as to her, she was interested once more; the Secret began to work.

It worked so well, in fact, that Mary Alice came to be quite famous in a small way. People in Godmother's distinguished and delightful "set" talked enthusiastically of Mary Alice's quiet charm, and she was asked here and asked there, and had a quite wonderful time.

Her "poor" friend came in, whenever he could, for tea and toast; and sometimes he made what he called "a miserable return" for this hospitality, by asking Godmother and Mary Alice to dine with him at his palace on upper Fifth Avenue and afterwards to sit in his box at the opera. He was a widower, and his two sons were married and lived in palaces of their own. His only daughter was abroad finishing her education; and his great, lonely house was to serve a brief purpose for her when she "came out" and until she married. Then, he thought, he would either give it up or turn it over to her; certainly he would not keep it for himself.

At first, Mary Alice found it hard to remember the Secret "with so many footmen around." But by and by she got used to them and, other things being equal, could have nearly as good a time in a palace as in a flat. For this, she had a wonderful example in Godmother of whom some one had once said, admiringly, that she was "never mean to anybody just because he's rich." It was true. Godmother was just as "nice" to the rich as to the poor, to the "cowering celebrity" (as she was wont to say) as to the most important nobody. It was the Secret that helped her to do it. It was the Secret that helped Mary Alice.

And so the winter went flying by. Twice, letters came--from him; and Mary Alice answered them, giving the answers to Godmother to send. Once he wrote from London, and once from somewhere on the Bosphorus. They were lonesome letters, both; but he didn't ask for the Secret, though he mentioned it each time.

IX

TELLING THE SECRET TO MOTHER

In March, Godmother said: "I am going abroad for the summer, dear, and I've just had a conference with my man of affairs. He reports some unexpectedly good dividends from my small handful of stock in a company that is enjoying a boom, and so if we're careful--you and I--there will be enough so I can take you with me." Mary Alice was too surprised, too happy to speak. "Now, you'll want to go home, of course," Godmother went on, "and so we'll agree on a sailing date and then you may fly back to mother as soon as you wish, and stay till it's time to go abroad."

They decided to sail the first of May; so Mary Alice went home almost immediately, and on an evening late in March got off the train on to that familiar platform whence she had so fearfully set forth only four short months ago.

Father was at the station to meet her; and at home, by the soft-coal fire burning beneath the white marble mantel in the sitting-room, Mother was sewing and waiting for her.

Mary Alice was thinking, as she and Father neared the house, of that miserable evening in the fall when she had stolen past her mother and gone up to her room and wept passionately, in the dark, because life had no enchantment for her. There would be no stealing past dear Mother now! For the Secret was for Mother, too--yes, very much indeed for Mother, as Mary Alice and Godmother had agreed in their wonderful "tucking in" talk the night before Mary Alice came away. All the way home, on the train, she had hardly been able to wait till she got to Mother with this beautiful new thing in her heart.

Perhaps Mother had dreaded her girl's home-coming, in a way, almost as much as she yearned for it. But if she had, Mary Alice never knew it; and if she had, Mother herself soon forgot it. For in all the twenty years of Mary Alice's life, her mother had never, it seemed, had so much of her girl as in the month that followed her home-coming. Hour after hour they worked about the house or sat before that grate fire in the unchanged sitting-room, and talked and talked and talked. Mary Alice told every little detail of those four months until her mother lived them over with her and the light and life of them animated her as they had animated Mary Alice.

Little by little, in that month, Mary Alice came at least to the beginning of a wonderful new understanding: came to see how parents--and _god_parents!--cease to have any particular future of their own and live in the futures of the young things they love. Mary Alice's bleak years had been bitter for her mother, too; perhaps bitterer than for her. And her new enchantment with life was like new blood in her mother's veins.

Mother cried when Mary Alice told her the Secret. "Oh, it's true! it's true!" she said. "If only everybody could know it, what a different world this would be!"

And as for the--Other! When Mary Alice told her mother about him and what his coming into her life and his going out of it had meant, Mother just held her girl close and could not speak.

The precious month flew by on wings as of the wind. Mary Alice was "the town wonder," as her brother Johnny said, and she enjoyed that as only a girl who has been the town wall-flower can; but after all, everything was as nothing compared with Mother and the exultation that had so evidently come into her life because out of her love and pain and sacrifice a soul had come into the world to draw so richly from the treasures of other hearts and to give so richly back again. There is no triumph like it, as Mary Alice would perhaps know, some day. A mother's purest happiness is very like God's own.

But at last the sailing date was close at hand. Mary Alice's heart was heavy and glad together. "If I could only take you!" she whispered to her mother.

Mother shook her head. "I wouldn't go and leave your father and the children," she said. "You go and enjoy it all for me. I like it better that way."

And so, once more Mary Alice smiled through tear-filled eyes at the dear faces on the station platform, and was gone again into the big world beyond her home. But this time what a different girl it was who went!

X

THE OLD WORLD AND THE KING

They had an unusually delightful voyage. The weather was perfection and their fellow-voyagers included many persons interesting to talk with and many others interesting to observe and speculate about.

One particularly charming experience came to Mary Alice through the Captain's appreciation of her eagerness. Godmother had taught her to love the stars. As well as they could, in New York where, to most people, only scraps of sky are visible at a time, they had been wont to watch with keen interest for the nightly appearance of stars they could see from their windows or from the streets as they went to and fro. And when they got aboard ship and had the whole sky to look at, they revelled in their night hours on the deck, and in picking out the constellations and their "bright, particular stars." This led the Captain to tell Mary Alice something of the stars as the sailors' friends; and she had one of the most memorable evenings of her life when he explained to her something of the science of navigation and made her see how their great greyhound of the ocean, just like the first frail barks of the Tyrians, picked its way across trackless wastes of sea by the infallible guidance of "the friendly stars." All this particularly interested Mary Alice because of Some One who lived much in the open and spent many and many a night on the broad deserts, looking up at the stars.

They landed at Naples, and lingered a fortnight in that lovely vicinity; then, up to Rome, to Florence and Venice, to Milan and the Italian Lakes, through Switzerland into France, and so to Paris. Godmother had once spent a winter at Capri; she had spent several winters in Florence. She knew Venice well. She had hosts of dear, familiar things to show Mary Alice in each place.

At last they came to Paris. Godmother lamented that it was in July they came; but Mary Alice, who had no recollections of Paris in April and May, found nothing to lament. They stayed more than a month--and made a number of the enchanting little journeys which can be made out of Paris forever and ever without repeating, it seems.

Then, with a trunk in which were two "really, truly" Paris dresses--very, very modest ones, to be sure, but unmistakably touched with Parisian chic--and a mind in which were hundreds of wonderful Paris memories, Mary Alice crossed to England. They went at once to London where, it seemed to Mary Alice, she must stay forever, to be satisfied. Godmother had hosts of charming friends in London, even beyond what she had in Italy and France; but for the first fortnight she gave up her time entirely to Mary Alice's sightseeing. By and by her friends began to find out she was there and to clamour insistently for her. And as the exodus from town was as complete as it ever gets, most of the invitations were from the country. So that Mary Alice began to see something of that English country-house life she had read so much about, and to meet personages whose names filled her with awe--until she remembered the Secret. And thus she came to the Great Event of her life.

Godmother had what Mary Alice called "a duchess friend" of whom she was very, very fond. The Duchess was a woman about Godmother's age, and quite as lovely to look at as a duchess should be. She was mistress of many and vast estates, and wore--on occasions--a coronet of diamonds and strings of pearls "worth a king's ransom," just like a duchess in a story. But she seemed to Mary Alice to have hardly the mildest interest in the jewels she wore and the palaces she lived in; Mary Alice found it hard to bear in mind that to the Duchess these were just as matter-of-fact, as usual, as unvariable, as the home sitting-room and the "good" hat had once been to Mary Alice. And like Mary Alice, the Duchess found her happiness in reaching out for something new and different. The Duchess liked the world that Godmother lived in--the world of Godmother's lovely mind; and she loved Godmother's companionship.

That was how it came about that Mary Alice found herself very often in exalted society. The exalted personages did not notice her much; but every once in a while, by remembering the Secret, she got on happy terms with some of them.

And at last a very unusual thing happened. The King was coming to honour the Duke and Duchess with a visit; coming to see one of those ancient and glorious estates the like of which no king owns, and which are the pride of all the kingdom. Many sovereigns had stayed at this splendid old place on England's south coast--a place as famous for its beauty as for its six hundred years of history; so it was no unusual thing for it to house a king. The unusual part of it all was Mary Alice being there. By the King's permission a wonderful house party was asked to meet him. Godmother couldn't be asked; she had never been presented, and the King was unaware of her existence. The Duchess would not have dared to present Godmother's name on the list submitted to the King. Much less, therefore, would she have dared to present Mary Alice's. "But----!" said the Duchess, and went on to unfold a plan.

If Mary Alice would not mind staying on with the Duchess while Godmother paid another visit; and if she would not mind having a room somewhere in a remote wing; and would not mind not being asked to mingle with the party in any way, she might see something of such sights as perhaps she would never be able to see otherwise. Mary Alice was delighted partly because she wanted to see the sights and partly because the thought of going away from this wonderful place made her heart ache. So she was moved out of the fine guest suite she and Godmother had been lodged in, and over to a room in a far wing of the vast house. From this wing one could look down on to the terraces for which the love and genius of none other than quaint John Evelyn--greatest of England's Garden Philosophers--were responsible. To these terraces the guests would certainly come, and to the world-famous rose garden into which also Mary Alice could look from her window in the far wing. But even if she were to see no royalty, she was grateful for the privilege of staying on a few days longer in this Paradise by the sea. And not the least delight of her new quarters was that they were high enough up so that from them she could overlook the sheltering Ilex-trees which made these marvellous gardens possible so close to the shore, and see the Channel ships a-sailing--three-masted schooners laden with wood; fishing-smacks; London barges with their picturesque red sails bellying in the wind; and an occasional ocean liner trailing its black smoke across the horizon. What with the sea and the gardens and the rich history of the place, Mary Alice felt that she could never tire of it, even if she did not see the King. But it would be delightful to see him, too. Some day the history of this splendid old place would include this royal visit; and Mary Alice, who had read of other such occasions and wished she might have been a mouse in a corner to witness them--as, for instance, when Queen Elizabeth was here--now felt the thrill of having that wish come true, in a way; and so far from feeling "set aside" or slighted, liked her window in the wing and her participation in the party above any other she might have had.

Mary Alice dined, the first night of the house party, with the Duchess's older children, and then went back to her room to sit at the window and look down on the terraces where, after a while, some of the men guests came to smoke.

It was late, but the twilight still lingered. Mary Alice could not tell who many of the men were, but she could see the King and she watched him interestedly as he paced up and down. She had been told how no one must speak to a king until the king has first spoken to him; and she felt that at best it must be a dreary business--being a king.

Presently, though, in the thickening shadows she saw a form that made her heart stand still. _Could it be_? She was probably mistaken--madly mistaken--but something in the way a man down there carried himself made her think of Godmother's little drawing-room in far-off New York and a man who was "playing the game." But the King was talking to this man--talking most interestedly, it seemed. She _must_ be mistaken!

Nevertheless, when the men had all gone in, she put on a white shawl and slipped down on to the terrace. She felt as if she must know; and of course she couldn't ask, for she did not know his name.

The terraces were deserted, and she paced up and down undisturbed, trying to assure herself that Godmother would probably have known if he were in England--his last letter had been from the Far East--and especially if he were coming here. There were times, as she reminded herself, when she was continually seeing him; out of every crowd, suddenly his tall form would seem to emerge; in the loneliness of quiet places, as by miracle he would seem to be where a moment ago she knew there was no one. Then a sense of separation would intervene, and for days she would be given over to the belief that she was never to see him again. To-night was doubtless just one of the times when, for no reason that she could understand, he seemed physically near to her.

She was standing very still in the shadow of an ivy-grown pillar, looking up at the Pole star and wondering if he in his wanderings might not be looking at it too, when a man's voice close beside her made her jump. It was an unfamiliar voice. "Star-gazing?" it said, pleasantly. She turned, and recognized the King.

"Yes, Your Majesty," she answered. At first she thought she was going to be frightened. Then she remembered the Secret, and before she knew it she was deep in conversation with the King.

As she talked, a puzzled expression she could not see came into the King's face. He had a wonderful memory for names, a memory which seldom failed him; but he couldn't place this girl. And it was dark, too, so he couldn't see her. But he liked to hear her talk. She had that rare thing, in his experience, a fresh, sweet view-point. The bloom of enchantment was still on life for her, and as he drew her out, he found that she was refreshing him as nothing had done for a weary while.

Then, kingly obligation called him indoors to join the throng whose everlasting sameness palled on him almost unendurably. Something he said made Mary Alice feel this--made her see, as in a flash, a girl who had gone home, once, from a party and wept because life was so dull. She was sorry for the King!

"I seldom forget a name," he said, "but I--before we go in, won't you please remind me of yours?"

Mary Alice laughed. "Your Majesty has never heard my name," she said, "and I can't go in; I'm not of the party." And she explained.

"I see," he said. "I shall have to thank the Duchess. I have had a most refreshing quarter of an hour."

"I'm glad," said Mary Alice, simply. "I felt afraid, at first--as nearly everybody does, I suppose. And then I thought how dreadful that must be--to have every one afraid of you, when you're really a very nice, gentle person--I mean----! Well, I guess Your Majesty knows what I mean. And then I remembered my Secret----"

"Secret?"

And so, of course, she had to tell. It was rather a long story, hurry as she would, because the King interrupted with so many questions. But she wouldn't tell what the Secret was until "the very last thing."

"Um," said the King, when she had finally divulged it. That was all he said; but the way he said it made Mary Alice know that the Secret was right.

XI

A MEETING AND A PARTING

The next day was full of activities which kept the house guests far afield. But Mary Alice had an exciting day at home; for the King had spoken to the Duchess about her and asked to have her presented to him that evening.

The Duke and Duchess had spent a fortune on the entertainment of their King; had provided for his beguiling every costly diversion that could be thought of. But they had not been able to give him anything new, and they felt that he was enduring the visit amiably rather than actually enjoying it. It remained, apparently, for the Girl from Nowhere to give him real pleasure.

So the Duchess--secretly sympathetic--left orders with her French maid that Mary Alice was to be made ready to see the King.

Mary Alice chose the simplest thing that rigorous French maid would allow and kept as close as possible to her own individual and unpretending style. But even then, she was a pretty resplendent young person as she stole timidly down to find the Duchess and be presented to the King.

The guests were assembled in the great drawing-room, and Mary Alice was frightened almost to death when she saw the splendour of the scene and realized what part she had to play in it.

Then, in a daze, she was swept forward and presented, and found herself looking into eyes that smiled as with an old friendliness. So she smiled back again, and soon forgot the onlookers, answering His Majesty's kindly questions.

He turned from her, presently, to speak to some one else, and Mary Alice caught sight then of a face she knew. For an instant, she stood staring. For an instant, he stood staring back, as unbelieving as she.

Then, "You seem to be on friendly terms with His Majesty," he said. "Have you showed him how to play the game, too?"

"No," Mary Alice answered, "but I've told him the Secret."

As soon as they could, they escaped--those two--out on to the terrace where the stars were shining thickly overhead.

"On one of those--those times in New York when we talked together," he said, "you told me that when something very marvellous had happened to you and you couldn't believe you were awake, that it was really true, you asked your Godmother to pinch you. It--er, wouldn't be at all proper for me to ask you to please pinch me. But if you know any perfectly proper equivalent, I wish you'd do it."

"I've pinched myself," she returned, "and it seems I am awake. So I judge you must be, too."

"Then how, please----?"

And she told him.

"And you don't know yet who I am?"

"No."

So he told her. "I warned you it was nothing interesting," he said; "it is just my work that people are interested in. I don't belong in there," indicating the great house, "any more than you do. They like me for a novelty, because I've dared and suffered; and because, as things turned out, I was in a position to do what they are pleased to call a great service to the Empire. I wish I liked them better--they want to be very kind to me, and I was born of them, so they like me the better for that. But I've been in the wilderness too much--I can't get used to these strange folk at home."

"I used to think I couldn't get used to strange folk," Mary Alice murmured, "but I seem to have got on fairly well for a girl from Nowhere."

"Was it the Secret?"

She nodded.

"When may I know?"