CHAPTER XIII

The showers returned in the night. They kept Alice company during several sleepless hours. In the morning the sun was out. It was Sunday and when Annie brought her mistress her rolls and chocolate Alice asked the maid if she had been to church.

"Kate and I went to early church," said Annie.

"And what time is late church, Annie?"

"Ten thirty, Mrs. MacBirney."

"I am going myself this morning."

"And what will you wear?"

"Anything that is cool."

Alice was thinking less of what she should wear than of how she should tell her husband that she had resolved upon going to church. Painful experience had taught her what ridicule and resource of conjugal meanness to expect whenever she found courage to say she meant to go to church. Yet hope, consoling phantom, always suggested that her husband the next time might prove more amenable to reason.

When at last she managed casually to mention her momentous resolve, MacBirney showed that he had lost none of his alertness on the subject. He made use first of surprise to express his annoyance. "To church?" Then he gave vent to a contemptuous exclamation uttered with a semblance of good-natured indifference. "I thought you had got that notion pretty well out of your head, Alice."

"You have got it pretty well out for me, Walter. Sometimes it comes back. It came this morning--after a wakeful night. I haven't been for a long time."

"What church do you want to go to?"

His disingenuousness did not stir her. "To my own, of course. There is a little church in the village, you know."

"Oh, that frame affair, yes. Awfully cheap looking, isn't it? And it threatens rain again. Don't mind getting wet?"

"Oh, no, I'll take the victoria."

"You can't; Peters is going to drive me over to The Towers."

"Then give me one of the cars."

"I understand they are both out of order."

"Oh, Walter! Can't you have Peters drive you to The Towers after he takes me to Sunbury?"

"I have an engagement with Robert Kimberly at eleven o'clock."

"Could you change it a little, do you think, Walter?"

"An engagement with Robert Kimberly!"

"Or be just a little late for it?"

MacBirney used his opportunity to advantage. "Keep _him_ waiting! Alice, when you get an idea into your head about going to church you lose your common-sense."

She turned to the window to look at the sky. "I can't walk," she said hopelessly. Her husband made no comment. As her eyes turned toward the distant Towers she remembered that Robert Kimberly the evening before had asked--and so insistently that it had been one of the causes of her wakefulness--for permission to bring over in the morning some grapes from his hot-houses. He had wanted to come at eleven o'clock and she had assured him she should not be at home--this because, during some uneasy moments when they were close together in the car, she had resolved that the next morning she should seek if only for an hour an influence long neglected but quite removed from his. It was clear to her as she now stood at the window, that Kimberly had sought every chance to be at her personal service at eleven o'clock, even though her husband professed an engagement with him.

"Couldn't Peters," she asked, turning again to MacBirney, "drive me down half an hour earlier--before you go? I can wait at the church till he comes back after me?"

MacBirney was reading the stock-market reports in the morning paper. "All right," he said curtly.

She was contained this time. There had been occasions when scenes such as this had brought hot tears, but five years of steady battering had fairly subdued Alice.

At high mass, an hour later, villagers saw a fine lady--a Second Lake lady, they shrewdly fancied from the carriage that brought her--kneeling among them in a pew close to the altar, and quite oblivious of those about her, kneeling, too, at times when they stood or sat; kneeling often with her face--which they thought pretty--hidden in her hands as if it somehow had offended; kneeling from the credo until the stragglers in the vestibule and about the church door began to slip away from the last gospel. There was an unusual stir about the church because it was a confirmation Sunday and an archbishop, a white-haired man who had once been in charge of the little Sunbury parish himself, was present.

Alice followed the last of the congregation out of the door and into the village sunshine. She looked up and down the country road for her horses but none were in sight. Below the church where the farmers' rigs stood, a big motor-car watched by village boys was waiting. They knew that the car, with its black and olive trimmings, was from The Towers because they were familiar with the livery of the villa grooms.

Their curiosity was rewarded when they saw the fine lady come out of the church. The instant she appeared a great gentleman stepped from the black tonneau and, lifting his hat very high, hastened across the muddy road to greet her--certainly she made a picture as she stood on the church steps in her tan pongee gown with her brown hair curling under a rose-wreathed Leghorn hat.

Her heart gave a frightened jump when she saw who was coming. But when the gentleman spoke, his voice was so quiet that even those loitering near could not hear his words. There was some discussion between the two. His slight gestures as they talked, seemed to indicate something of explanation and something of defence. Then a suggestion of urgency appeared in his manner. The fine lady resisted.

From under her pongee parasol she looked longingly up the road and down for her horses, but for a while no horses came. At last a carriage looking like her own did come down the lake road and she hoped for a moment. Then as the carriage drove rapidly past her face fell.

The great gentleman indicated his annoyance at the insolent mud that spattered from the carriage wheel by a look, but he kept quite near to the fine lady and his eyes fell very kindly on her pink cheeks. Her carriage did not come even after they had gone to his car and seated themselves in the tonneau to await it. He was too clever to hurry her. He allowed her to wait until she saw her case was quite hopeless, then she told him he might drive her home.

"I came," he explained, answering an annoyed note in a second question that she asked, "because I understood you were going to church----"

"But I did not say I was."

"I must have dreamed it."

Brice, sitting at the wheel in front of them, smiled--but only within his heart--when this came to his ears; because it was Brice who had been asked during the morning where Mrs. MacBirney was and Brice who had reported. He was senior to Peters, senior to all the Second Lake coachmen and chauffeurs, and usually found out whatever he wanted to find out.

"At any rate," Kimberly laughed good-naturedly, "I have been waiting here half an hour for you."

Brice knew that this was true to the minute, for in that half-hour there had been many glances at two good watches and a hamper of hot-house grapes. Brice himself, since a certain missed train, involving language that lingered yet in his ears, carried a good watch.

But to-day not even amiable profanity, which Brice recalled as normal during extended waits, had accompanied the unusual detention. No messenger had been despatched to sound the young village priest with a view of expediting the mass and the fine lady had been in nowise interrupted during her lengthened devotions. Kimberly, in this instance, had truthfully been a model of patience.

"These are the grapes," Brice heard behind him, as he let the machine out a bit and fancied the top of the hamper being raised. "Aren't they exceptional? I found the vines in Algeria. There are lilies on this side."

An expression of involuntary admiration came from the tonneau. "Assumption lilies! For your sister?"

"No, for you. They are to celebrate the feast."

"The feast? Why, of course!" Then came a categorical question, animated but delivered with keenness: "How did you know that to-day is the feast of the Assumption?"

A bland evasion followed. "I supposed that every one knew the fifteenth of August is the feast of the Assumption. Taste this grape."

"I am very sure _you_ didn't know."

"But I _did_. Taste the grape."

"Who told you?"

"Whence have you the faculties of the Inquisition? Why do you rack me with questions?"

"I begin to suspect, Mr. Kimberly, that you belong on the rack."

"No doubt. At least I have spent most of my life there."

"Come, please! Who told you?"

"Francis, of course; now will you taste this grape?"