CHAPTER XVI

I arrived in the kitchen the following morning, to discuss luncheon with Norah, and found the entire kitchen-force massed at the screened-door, watching Mercedes coquetting with Arthur. There was a temptation to draw an analogy between the brilliantly-plumaged, addle-pated bird and the decorative girl who stood at the cage-door, poking her white fingers perilously through the wiring and cooing to him in softest Spanish. It must be admitted, that weeks of painstaking effort on my part to win Arthur to a display of friendliness toward me, had resulted in nothing. But ten minutes with Mercedes had proved his undoing: the bird was positively maudlin. I came out to the cage, and at once the half-closed orbs of Arthur underwent an unflattering change. He opened them to their widest and bleakest and said, hoarsely sarcastic, "Pretty darling! Darling! Bow-wow-wow! Carramba!" at which Mercedes exclaimed delightedly,

"Oh, isn't he clever! Who taught him that?"

"The swearing, or the pet names?" I answered, stooping to say goodmorning to Wiggles, "I haven't the remotest idea."

"Billy?" suggested my guest, touching her perfectly dressed hair with highly manicured finger-tips.

"Possibly," I answered. "He invariably barks and then swears at me, before luncheon."

"Billy or Arthur?" inquired Mercedes with interest.

I laughed.

"Have you seen either of the men this morning?" I asked. "I heard them go out early."

"They went to Crowell's," she answered. "I saw them off. They will not be back before tea, Billy told me."

I tried to look as if I had heard these plans before, and merely forgotten them for a moment.

"How nice!" I said, insincerely, "We will have a nice, long day together--with no disturbing male element," I added maliciously.

"I will like that too," said Mercedes, with great unexpectedness. "You never let me talk to you alone, Mavis, and" she finished with a funny little undercurrent of wistfulness in her pretty voice, "I have no friends my own age--women friends, I mean."

I had grown to be a little annoyed at my guest, but somehow, her simple statement opened up a vista before me which I had not dreamed existed. The child seemed, after all, hungry for companionship. It was out of the question that she should find it with her own indolent mother, who treated her as if she were half plaything and half infant; or with her father, whose attitude toward her was a curious commingling of affectionate despotism and anxiety: and the basis on which she met all her many men-satellites was not one guaranteed to produce comradeship.

I put my arm through hers and took her into the kitchen with me. After my inconsiderable domestic task was completed, we went out on the verandah together, armed with sewing. Mercedes sewed beautifully, an art which her early convent education had taught her, and I took a real aesthetic pleasure in watching the smooth, dark head, bent over the fine linen in her lap.

"What are you making?" I asked her, idly.

She exhibited the very feminine garment: exquisitely embroidered and sewn with the most exact and even of tiny stitches.

"I wish I could sew like that," I said, enviously, "but I should think you would ruin your eyes."

She raised to mine the tremendous pools of liquid darkness in question.

"But no," she said. "All Spanish girls are clever with the needle. The Sisters taught me when I was very young."

I had been, with the Howells, to one of the convents near Havana, and I recalled now the sweet, patient faces of the nuns, and the marvelous work they showed us. Some of it lay in one of my trunks now, a present to Mrs. Goodrich from Bill and me. The thought of Mercedes behind the austere cloister walls was incongruous.

"Were you long with the nuns?" I asked her.

"Seven years," she answered, and then, amazingly, "I was very happy there--for a long time I wanted to take the veil, but Father was simply horrified at the idea."

I was somewhat horrified myself.

"I can't imagine it," I said flatly.

"Why?"

I didn't answer for a moment, and she went on,

"But I know why--you think me very light and frivolous, do you not, Mavis?"

"It would be difficult," I answered cautiously, "to imagine you as a nun!"

"They are good women," she said, and was silent.

Suddenly I realized that I knew very little more about this girl than I had known on the boat coming down to Havana, and yet, I had been with her almost constantly ever since.

"Didn't you care for college?" I inquired, rather diffidently.

Her great eyes lighted up.

"It was wonderful--in some ways--" she said slowly, "so many girls, of all classes, gathered together. At first I could not understand. At home, you know, one is very careful whom one knows. It is changing a little now. I remember I was scandalized, my first months at college, to find that the President of the Senior class was a waitress in one of the campus houses--actually waiting on the table! It was too incredible! I wrote home, and Mother begged Father to send for me at once. She was even more shocked than I! But Father laughed, she said, and told her it would do me good. He said it was high time that a little of my American blood came to the fore. Later I learned that this girl, the Senior President, had practically worked her way through the four years of college. She was the daughter of a very poor man--a peasant, we would call him. And yet there was hardly a girl in that great college who would not have given everything she had for the respect and admiration and love which that quiet, plain-featured girl had won and held from students and faculty alike."

"You too?" I asked.

"I, too," said Mercedes simply. She bent her head a little lower over the white fabric in her lap and went on, not quite clearly. "I was not very popular. Some liked me, yes. They even asked me to their homes for the shorter vacations. But they liked me because I was 'different': because it was 'smart' to say that they had a Spanish-American girl as a friend: or because I was pretty and bright and did not care much to study. But I made no real friendships."

I was, by now, very interested. Here was a cross-section of life that I had no knowledge of. A feeling of sympathy stirred in me: this gay, alien little creature, with the blood of two widely dissimilar nations warring in her, coming fresh from her convent to the democratic freedom of an American college. I said,

"Tell me a little about it all, Mercedes. I only know college-life second hand, for, as perhaps Bill has told you, I was a helpless invalid for eleven years. But I was fortunate in my friends, although I had few of my own age, and in a Father who was my greatest playfellow and my most understanding comrade."

The quick, facile tears rose to the big eyes. She pulled her chair a little closer and laid her warm, vibrant hand on mine.

"I didn't know," she said. "I'm so sorry. Billy told me that you had been ill--but I didn't dream.--You're wonderful, Mavis," she said, "delicate and lovely as an orchid. I always feel clumsy and too highly-colored beside you. And you have been so kind and sweet--"

I grew very remorseful: my feelings toward Mercedes Howells had been anything but "kind and sweet." They had been distinctly critical and almost unfriendly. For the first time, I did not resent her easy use of my husband's given name: for the first time I realized the old truth that to know people is to like them.

I gave the narrow, high-bred hand a little squeeze.

"Don't be silly, child," I said lightly. "And tell me more about your American impressions."

"You sound just like the reporter who came on the boat, my first trip North," said Mercedes, with a little giggle. "Such a nice young man! But the things he put in the paper about me! 'Beautiful Spanish-American heiress screams with delight at the first glimpse of her father's country.' I didn't really scream," she explained conscientiously, "but I talked more than I should have. Father wrote me quite an angry letter about it. He is very well known," she added, without pride, "and it annoyed him. He says no woman can hold her tongue, anyway! But how was I to know that the nice young man was a reporter?"

I had a vision of Mercedes, hands flying, eyes everywhere, babbling and bubbling for the _New York Press_. It was too amusing. No wonder Mr. Howells had been 'annoyed.'

"Go on," I said encouragingly.

"The girls I went home with," she said, after a while, "they lived in wonderful houses and had such beautiful clothes. But I didn't like them, somehow. You see, at home we are very strictly brought up. After a girl is out, she has some freedom, of course, and, after she marries, it is quite different--she can do as she likes. And until Father had insisted upon my being educated in the States, my Mother had had all the care of me. And I was brought up as the Spanish girls are, as my Mother was in her own Madrid. These American girls I visited thought of nothing but good times. They spoke no language but their own--"

"How many do you speak, Mercedes?" I interrupted, curiously.

"English, Spanish, French, of course," she answered, "and a little smattering of Italian and German. I had governesses until I was ten, and then I went to the convent. And much emphasis was laid on languages."

I suppressed a gasp, and she went on.

"It was from them--my college friends--that I learned that it is easy to deceive one's parents. And that it is quite right and proper to have as many cavaliers as one can. 'Scalp-hunting' they called it--"

I thought of Mercedes' not inadept efforts along the line of scalps, and thinking, asked,

"But haven't Spanish girls--and girls all over the world--very much the same ambitions along that line?"

Mercedes knitted her brows, and as she looked at me, I was startled, for, for the first time, I saw in her a very definite resemblance to her father. There was a strength of jaw there, to which the rounded, soft chin had blinded me: a certain Northern keenness in the Southern eyes.

"Why yes," she answered, "but it is--to marry that they--shall I say--hunt? But it was not that with my New York friends. They had no desire to marry: many of them told me that they would hate being tied down, that they disliked children. No, it was not to marry--but merely to play and to be amused--"

I laughed.

"It's the motive then," I said, "that makes the difference in your eyes?"

"Of course," she said frankly. "To marry, to have a family, to be mistress in one's own home, that is--"

"The legitimate ambition of every woman," I concluded for her.

"Si, Senora," she answered, laughing in spite of herself.

"But," I argued, "you must have met other American girls whose interest was not solely centered in the fine art of flirtation."

"I understood them--those you speak of, even less!" said Mercedes guilelessly. "My roommate was such a one. She wanted to be an engineer just fancy! And she was so pretty too!"

"An engineer!" I ejaculated, for even to my American mind this was an unusual ambition for my sex to harbor. "And she had no use for men, too?" I asked.

"That was just it," said Mercedes, in obvious wonderment. "She had any number of men friends: corresponded with them, saw them at dances: they even called upon her at college. But a flirt she was not. They were her friends, she said. And she was like another boy with them. I went to her home once, a little town in Massachusetts, and I could not understand her at all. She was like a sister to her mother, a son to her father, and a comrade to her dance-partners. It was too amazing!"

There was the whole thing in a nutshell, I thought. She could understand but not condone the promiscuous flirtations of her American sisters: but the girl who was comrade to a man, and friend, and who looked on him as such, and not as an extra "scalp" or a possible husband, was beyond her comprehension.

"But," I argued, "returning to the butterflies, surely, Mercedes, you have quite as much freedom now as any American girl. And, forgive me, my dear, but you employ it in much the same manner."

Her glance was mischievous and rather child-like.

"That has only been since my return home," she said. "Mother is not pleased, but Father says, 'let her go ahead.' And--as to what you say, I am trying very hard to be American now."

"Not the comrade sort, such as your mechanical roommate?" I suggested.

She regarded me in amazement.

"But most of the men I meet are Cubans," she stated. "Do you think _they_ would understand it--if I could be like that little Mary Adams?"

I considered, shook my head.

"Of course not," she said, answering her own question. "They would laugh and shrug--and be, perhaps, disagreeable. They can accept such a manner in an American girl. They do not like it, or comprehend it, but some of them have learned their lesson. And they must respect it. But--in a Spanish girl--it would be unthinkable. Besides," she added frankly, "I couldn't--"

She was right. Temperamentally unfit, emotionally too highly developed.

"And--as to the flirting," she said shyly, "I--I like to attract people. I like to make them laugh and say nice things. And perhaps my American friends have taught me something of their methods."

"And your motive--?" I asked.

She stretched her graceful arms wide. Her hair had a blue sheen in the shaded light of the verandah and her skin was magnolia-white.

"I haven't any!" said Mercedes frankly.

"Not even a small gold band in the perspective?" I said.

She looked down at her ringless hands: at the heap of fragrant linen lying in her lap.

"This is to be part of my trousseau," she answered, indirectly, "part of what you call a 'Hope Chest.' All girls of my class sew a great deal and lay it all away until they marry. And, after all, I am not like my New York cousins, for where they say 'perhaps--when I get tired of playing,' I say, 'someday, when I meet the right man.' And so, you see, I am not like my Mother's people either--not quite. For they say, 'someday when my parents are satisfied--and let us hope it will be soon!'"

I didn't wonder that Bill--that the men found her charming. The mixture of innocence and sophistication, the innate and the acquired worldliness was really delicious.

"Do you talk to many people like this?" I asked curiously.

"Of course not," she answered, wide-eyed. "I know of no one who would understand. There are times," she admitted, with a little sigh, "When I really do not understand myself."

At the luncheon table I found myself looking at Mercedes, half as if she were a stranger, half as if she were an old friend.

"I envy you and Bill, Mavis," she said, once, when Fong had left the room, "you have so much to make you happy. He's a very lucky man."

I smiled. It was not a subject on which I wished to be interrogated.

"And you," she went on, "are a lucky girl. He's awfully fine, that husband of yours."

She played for a moment with her tea-spoon, and looked at me, rather pathetically.

"I like the way American men are with their wives," she said, "I wish I could have met a Billy--"

I might have responded that, in a few months' time, my husband would be legally free to take an interest in such remarks, but I refrained.

"You must have met a number of men, in two years," I said.

"Not Billies," she answered firmly, "awfully young they were, and--" she paused.

Fong came in just then, and the conversation took a more discreet turn. After luncheon, siesta-ing in the two big swings down among the palms, I brought up the subject again.

"So, after all," I said, "the 'right man' must be an American, Mercedes?"

I had not calculated on the effect of my idle words. A vivid scarlet spread to the roots of the black hair.

"On the boat," she answered, "we talked, your Bill and I--and since then, also. And I have learned a little of the reverence for women that your fine men have: a little of the way they guard and protect them--not by bars and bolts and commands, but by love and chivalry and thoughtfulness. I have seen that too, in my Father, a little. But, after all, my Father married Mother, and so, it is different with him. And he has never talked to me as he would to the daughter, perhaps, of an American wife--"

I thought of my own Father and knew a swift pang of pity, for this rather rudderless little craft.

"It was through Billy that I got to know you," Mercedes went on--"he was always talking about you. And you--you always held me off--"

Something very warm and sweet crept into my heart, and I put my hand out, across the space between.

"I'm sorry," I said, "awfully sorry, Mercedes,--you see, perhaps I wasn't quite used to girls."

"You'll really be my friend now?" she asked, naïvely: and I was conscious that I spoke the whole truth as I answered,

"I am your friend, Mercedes,--never doubt it."

Our hands clasped on that, and within ten minutes, her quiet breathing told me that she slept. I lay awake a little longer, thinking very hard. So Bill had really seen the best of her after all. He had not told me, for I had never tried to know, even second hand. He would have let me go on believing the girl to be heartless and silly, and admiration-loving, nothing else. It was not fair! And then I stopped to realize that I had not _wanted_ to believe her anything else. Before I fell asleep, I had absolved Mercedes Howells from deliberately trying to flirt with my husband. She would have been my friend more than his, had I wished her to be. Failing that, she had turned to the person, who, oddly enough, had apparently comprehended her little complexities. I looked over at the serene face, the heavy, white lids, with their weight of dark lashes, folded over the big eyes. A little smile curved the lovely, full mouth, and she slept, as a child sleeps, one hand under her soft cheek.

It was very still. The palm leaves rustled faintly over my head, and the sunlight fell hot and golden through the trees. My eyes closed in spite of myself, and with a very tender impulse toward my new friend, I turned on my side and slept.