"WILL YOU WALK INTO MY PARLOR"
It is impossible for me to put down in her own words what Mary
Virginia told the Butterfly Man and me. Also, I have had to fill in
gaps here and there, supplying what was lacking, from my intimate
knowledge of the actors and from such chance words and hints and bits
of detail as came to me afterward. But what I have added has been
necessary, in order to do greater justice to everybody concerned.
If it be true that the boy is father to the man, it is even more
tritely true that the girl is mother to the woman, there being here
less chance for change. So it was with Mary Virginia. That gracious
little girlhood of hers, lived among the birds and bees and blossoms
of an old Carolina garden, had sent her into the Church School with a
settled and definite idealism as part of her nature. Her creed was
simple enough: The world she knew was the best of all possible worlds,
its men good, its women better; and to be happy and loved one had only
to be good and loving.
The school did not disabuse her of this pleasing optimism. It was a
very expensive school and could afford to have optimisms of its own.
For one thing, it had no pupils poor enough to apply the acid test.
When Mary Virginia was seventeen, Mrs. Eustis perceived with dismay
that her child who had promised beauty was instead become angular,
awkward, and self-conscious; and promptly packed the unworldly one off
to spend a saving summer with a strenuously fashionable cousin, a
widow, of whom she herself was very fond. She liked the idea of
placing the gauche girl under so vigorous and seasoned a wing as
Estelle Baker's. As for Mrs. Baker herself, that gay and good-humored
lady laughed at the leggy and serious youngster and promptly took her
education in hand along lines not laid down in Church Schools.
Mrs. Baker was delighted with her own position--the reasonably young,
handsome, and wealthy widow of a man she had been satisfied to marry
and later to bury. She had an unimpaired digestion and no illusions, a
kind heart, and the power of laughter. Naturally, she found life
interesting. A club-woman, an ultra-modernist, vitally alive, she was
fully abreast of her day. Her small library skimmed the cream of the
insurgents and revolutionaries of genius; and here the shy and
reticent schoolgirl with the mark of the churchly checkrein fresh upon
her, was free to browse, for her cousin had no slightest notion of
playing censor. Mrs. Baker thought that the sooner one was allowed to
slough off the gaucheries of the Young Person, the better. She did not
gauge the real and tumultuous depths of feeling concealed under the
young girl's simplicity.
The revolutionaries and the insurgent and free poets didn't trouble
Mary Virginia very much. Although she sensed that something was wrong
with somebody somewhere--hence these lyrical lamentations--she could
not, to save her, tell what all the pother was about, for as yet she
saw the world _couleur de rose_. Some one or two of the French and
Germans pleased her; she fell into long reveries over the Gael, who
has the sound of the sea in his voice and whose eyes are full of a
haunting light, as of sunsets upon graves. But it was the Russians who
electrified and dazzled her. When she glimpsed with her eyes of a
young girl those strange souls simple as children's and yet mosaiced
with unimaginable and barbarous splendors, she stood blinking and half
blinded, awed, fascinated, and avid to know more of that sky-scaling
passion with which they burned.
And in that crucial moment she chanced upon the "Diary of Marie
Bashkirtseff," so frank and so astounding that it took her breath away
and swept her off her feet. She was stirred into a vague and trembling
expectancy; she had the sense of waiting for something to happen. Life
instantly became more colorful and more wonderful than she had dreamed
could be possible, and she wished passionately to experience all these
emotions, so powerful and so poignant. The Russian's morbid and
disease-bright genius acted upon her as with the force and intensity
of a new and potent toxin. She could not lay the book aside, but
carried it up to her room to be pored and pondered over. She failed to
understand that, untried as she was, it was impossible for her to
understand it. Had the book come later, it had been harmless enough;
but it came at a most critical moment of that seething period when
youth turns inward to question the universe, and demands that the
answer shall be personal to itself. The first long ground-swell of
awakening emotion swept over her, sitting in the pleasant chintz-hung
room, with the Russian woman's wild and tameless heart beating through
the book open upon her knees. And these waves of emotion that at
recurrent intervals surge over the soul, come from the shores of a
farther country than any earthly seas have touched, and recede to
depths so profound that only the eyes of God may follow their ebb and
flow.
Mrs. Baker, however, saw nothing about which to give herself any
concern. If she perceived the girl intense and preoccupied, she smiled
indulgently--at Mary Virginia's age one is apt to be like that, and
one recovers from that phase as one gets over mumps and measles. Mrs.
Baker did think it advisable, though, to subtly detach the girl from
books for awhile. She amused herself by allowing her wide-eyed
glimpses of the larger life of grown-ups, by way of arousing and
initiation. Thus it happened that one afternoon at the country-club,
where Mary Virginia, at the green-fruit stage, found herself playing
gooseberry instead of golf, Mrs. Baker sauntered up with a tall and
very blonde man.
"Here," said she gaily, indicating with a wave of her hand her
sulky-eyed young cousin, "is a marvel and a wonder--a girl who accepts
on faith everything and everybody! My dear Howard, in all probability
she will presently even believe in _you_!" With that she left them,
whisked off by a waiting golfer.
The man and the girl appraised each other. The man saw young
bread-and-butter with the raw sugar of beauty sprinkled upon it
promisingly. What the girl saw was not so much a faultlessly groomed
and handsome man as the most beautiful person in the world. And
suddenly she was aware that that for which she had been waiting had
come. Something divine and wonderful was happening, and there was fire
before her eyes and the noise of unloosed winds and great waters in
her ears, and her knees trembled and her heart fluttered. A vivid red
flamed into her pale cheeks, a soft and trembling light suffused her
blue eyes. That happens when the sweet and virginal freshness of youth
is brought face to face with the bright shadow of love.
He drew her out of her shyness and made her laugh, and after awhile,
when there was dancing, he danced with her. He did not behave to her
as other men of Estelle's acquaintance had more than once behaved--as
though they bestowed the lordly honor of their society upon her out of
the sheer goodness of their hearts and their desire to please Mrs.
Baker. Mary Virginia was uncompromising and stiff-necked enough then,
and she bored most of her cousin's friends unconsciously. Now this
man, as much their superior as the sun is to farthing dips, was
exerting himself to please her. That was the one thing Mary Virginia
needed to arouse her.
Mrs. Baker admired Mr. Hunter for a grace of manner almost Latin in
its charm. If at times he puzzled her, he at least never bored her or
anybody else, and for this she praised him in the gates. Her respect
for him deepened when she perceived that he never allowed himself to
be absorbed or monopolized.
The pleasant widow did not take him too seriously. She only asked that
he amuse and interest her. He did both, to a superlative degree. That
is why and how he saw so much of the school-girl cousin whose naïvete
made him smile, it was so absurdly sincere.
Mrs. Baker was glad enough to have Howard take her charge off her
hands occasionally. She thought contact with this fine pagan an
excellent thing for the girl who took herself so seriously. She was
really fond of Mary Virginia, but she must have found her hand-grenade
directness a bit disconcerting at times. She wanted the child's visit
to be pleasant, and she considered it very amiable of Howard to help
her make it so. She had no faintest notion of danger--to her Mary
Virginia was nothing but a child, a little girl one indulged with
pickles and pound-cake and the bliss of staying up later than the
usual bedtime. As for Hunter, his was the French attitude toward the
Young Person; she had heard him say he preferred his flowers in full
bloom and his fruit ripe--one then knows what one is getting; one
isn't deceived by canker in the closed bud and worm in the green
fruit. No, Howard wasn't the sort that hankered for verjuice.
None the less, although Mrs. Baker didn't know it, Mary Virginia was
engaged to the godlike Howard when she returned to school. It was to
be a state secret until after she was graduated, and in the meantime
he was to "make himself worthier of her love." She hadn't any notion
he could be improved upon, but it pleased her to hear him say that.
Humility in the superman is the ultimate proof of perfection.
The maid who attended her room at school arranged for the receipt of
his letters and mailed Mary Virginia's. The maid was sentimental, and
delighted to play a part smacking of those dime novels she spoiled her
brains with.
The little schoolgirl who was in love with love, and secretly
betrothed to a man who had stepped alive out of old knightly romance,
walked in the Land of April Rainbows and felt the whole joyous
universe suffused with a delicious and quivering glow of light and
sound and scent. Surcharged with an emotion that she was irresistibly
urged to express, and unable to do so by word of mouth, she was driven
to the necessity of putting it down on paper for him. And she put it
down in the burning words, the fiery phrases, of those anarchists of
art who had intoxicated and obsessed her.
Just a little later,--even a year later--and Mary Virginia could never
have written those letters. But now, very ignorant, very innocent,
very impassioned, she accomplished a miracle. She was like one
speaking an unknown tongue, perfectly sure that the spirit moved her,
but quite unable to comprehend what it was that it moved her to say.
When Mrs. Baker insisted that her young cousin should come back to her
for the Christmas holidays, the girl was more than eager to go. Seeing
him again only deepened her infatuation.
That holiday visit was an unusually gay one, for Mrs. Baker was really
fond of Mary Virginia--the young girl's tenderness and simplicity
touched the woman of the world. She gave a farewell dance the night
before Mary Virginia was to return to school. It was an informal
affair, with enough college boys and girls to lend it a junior air,
but there was a goodly sprinkling of grown-ups to deepen it, for the
hostess said frankly that she simply couldn't stand the Very Young
except in broken doses and in bright spots.
Hunter, of course, was to be one of the grownups. He had sent Mary
Virginia the flowers she was to wear. And she had a new dancing frock,
quite the loveliest and fluffiest and laciest she had ever worn.
He was somewhat late. And so engrossed with him were all her thoughts,
so eager was she to see him, that she was a disappointing companion
for anybody else. She couldn't talk to anybody else. She flitted in
and out of laughing groups like a blue-and-silver butterfly, and
finally managed to slip away to the stair nook behind what Mrs. Baker
liked to call the conservatory. This was merely a portion of the big
back hall glassed in and hung with a yellow silk curtain; it had a
tiny round crystal fountain in the center and one or two carved seats,
but one wouldn't think so small a space could hold so much bloom and
fragrance. From the nook where Mary Virginia sat, one could hear every
word spoken in the flower-room, though the hearer remained hidden by
the paneled stairway.
Hands in her lacy lap, eyes abstracted, she fell into the dreams that
youth dreams; in which a girl--one's self, say,--walks hand in hand
through an enchanted world with a being very, very little lower than
the angels and twice as dear. They are such innocent dreams, such
impossible dreams, so untouched of all reality; but I wonder, oh I
wonder, if life can ever give us anything to repay their loss!
Somebody spoke in the conservatory and she looked up, startled.
Through a parting in the silk curtain she glimpsed the woman and
recognized one of Estelle's friends, handsome and fashionable, but a
woman she had never liked.
"You provoke me. You try my patience too much!" she was saying, in a
tone of suppressed anger. "People are beginning to say that you have a
serious affair with that sugar-candy chit. I want to know if that is
true?"
The man laughed, a lazy, pleasant, disarming laugh. She knew that
laugh among a million, and her heart began to beat, but not with doubt
or distrust. She wondered how she had missed him, and if he had been
looking for her; she thought of the exquisite secret that bound them
together, and wondered how he was going to protect it without evasions
or untruthfulness. And she thought the woman abominable.
"You're so suspicious, Evie!" he said smilingly. "Why bother about
what can give you no real concern? Why discuss it here, at all? It's
not the thing, really."
The woman stamped her foot. She had an able-bodied temper.
"I will know, and I will know now. I have to know," said she, and her
voice shook. Mary Virginia would have coughed then, would have made
her presence known had she been able; but something held her silent.
"Remember, you're not dealing with a love-sick school-girl now,
Howard: you are dealing with _me_. Have you made that little fool
think you're in love with her?"
"Why, and what then?" he asked coolly. "I like the child. Of course
she is without form and void as yet, but there's quite a lot to that
girl."
"Oh, yes! Quite a lot!" said she, with sarcasm. "That's what made me
take notice. James Eustis's girl--and barrels of money. She'll be a
catch. You are clever, Howard! But what of _me_?"
Mary Virginia's heart fluttered. Indeed, what of this other woman?
"Oh, well, there's nothing definite yet, Evie," said he soothingly. A
hint of impatience was betrayed in his voice. Plainly, it irked him to
be held up and questioned point-blank, at such a time and place. Just
as plainly, he wished to conciliate his jealous questioner. "My dear
girl, it would be all of two or three years before the affair could be
considered. Let well enough alone, Evie. Let's talk about something
else."
"No. We will talk about this. You are offering me a two or three
years' reprieve, are you not? Well, and then?"
"Well, and then suppose I do marry the little thing,--if she hasn't
changed her little mind?" said he, exasperated into punishing her. "It
wouldn't be a bad thing for me, remember, and she's temptingly easy to
deal with--that girl has more faith than the twelve apostles. Heavens,
Evie, don't look like that! My dearest girl, _you_ don't have to
worry, anyhow. If your--er--impediment hasn't stood in my way, why
should mine in yours?"
He spoke with a half-impatient, half-playful reproach. The woman
uttered a little cry. To soothe and silence her, he kissed her. It was
very risky, of course, but then the whole situation was risky, and he
took his chance like the bold player he was. The girl crouching behind
the paneled wall clenched her hands in her lap, felt her heart and
brain on fire, and wondered why the sky did not fall upon the world
and blot it out.
When those two had left the conservatory and she could command her
trembling limbs and whip her senses back into some semblance of order,
she went upstairs and got his letters. When she came downstairs again
he was standing in the hall, and he came forward eager, smiling,
tender, as if his heart welcomed her; as perhaps it did, men having
catholic hearts. She put her hand on his arm and whispered: "Come
into the conservatory."
The hall was quite empty. From drawing-room and library and
dining-room came the laughter and chatter of many people. Then the
music struck up a gay and popular air. The lilt and swing of it made
her giddy. But the little flower-room was cool and sweet, and she drew
a breath of relief.
Hunter bent his fair head, but she pushed him away with her hands
against his chest. A horror of his beauty, his deliberate fascination,
the falseness of him, came over her. For the first time she had been
brought face to face with sin and falsehood, and hers was the
unpardoning white condemnation of an angel to whom sin is unknown and
falsehood impossible. That such knowledge should have come through him
of all men made the thing more unbearable. Surprised and irritated by
the pale tragedy of her aspect, Hunter stared, waiting for her to
speak.
"I was on the stairs. I heard you--and that woman," said she with the
directness that was sometimes so appalling. "And I _know_." Her face
turned burning red before it paled again. She was ashamed for him with
the noble shame of the pure in heart.
His face, too, went red and white with rage and astonishment. It was a
damnable trap for a man to be caught in, and he was furious with the
two women who had pushed him into it--he could have beaten them both
with rods. Innocent as this girl was, he could not hope to deceive her
as to the real truth. She had heard too much. But he thought he could
manage her; women were as wax in Hunter's hands. To begin with, they
_wanted_ to believe him.
"I hate to have to say it--but the lady is jealous," he said frankly
enough, with a disarming smile; and shrugged his shoulders, quite as
if that simple statement explained and excused everything.
"Oh, she need not be afraid--of me!" said the girl, with white-hot
scorn. "I'd rather die by inches of leprosy than belong to you now.
You are clever, though. And I _was_ easy to deal with, wasn't I? And I
cared so much! I dare say it was really your hair and beard, but I
honestly thought you a sort of Archangel! Well, you're not. You're not
anything I thought you--not good nor kind nor honorable nor
truthful--not anything but just a rather paltry sort of liar. You're
not even loyal to _her_. I think I could respect you more if you were.
But I _am_ James Eustis's girl--and that's my salvation, Mr. Hunter.
Please take your letters. You will send me back mine to-morrow."
He stroked his short gold beard. The color had come back into his face
and a new light flashed into his cold blue eyes. He laughed. "Why, you
game little angel!" he said delightedly. "Gad, I never thought you had
it in you--never. I begin to adore you, Mary Virginia, upon my soul I
do! Now listen to reason, my too-good child, and don't be so
puritanical. You've got to take folks as they are and not as you'd
like them to be, you know. Men are not angels, no, nor women, either.
You must learn to be charitable--a virtue very good people seldom
practice and never properly appreciate." And he added, leaning lower:
"Mary Virginia! Give me another chance ... you won't be sorry,
Ladybird."
But she stood unmoved, stonily silent, holding out the letters. And
when he still ignored this silent insistence, she thrust them into his
hands and left him.
Mary Virginia was to go back to school the next night. All day she
waited for her letters. Instead came a note and a huge bunch of
violets. The note said he couldn't allow those precious letters which
meant so much to him to pass even into her hands who had written them.
When he could summon up the courage, he would presently destroy them
himself. And she had treated him with great harshness, and wouldn't
she be a good little girl and let him see her, if only for a few
minutes, before she went away?
Mary Virginia tore up the note and returned the violets by way of
answer.
When she returned to school, the superioress regretted that she had
been allowed to visit Mrs. Baker again, because too much gaiety wasn't
good for her, and she was falling off in her studies. The other girls
said she had lost all her looks, for in truth she was wan and peaked
and hollow-eyed. Seventeen suffers frightfully, when it suffers at
all. Eighteen enjoys its blighted affection, revels in its broken
heart, would like to crochet a black edging on its immortal soul, and
wouldn't exchange its secret sorrow for a public joy. Nineteen is
convalescent--pride would come to its rescue even if life itself did
not beguile it into being happy.
Mary Virginia got back her color and her appetite and forgot to
remember that her heart was incurably broken and that she could never
love again. She liked to think her painful experience had made her
very wise. Then she went abroad, and her cure was complete. The result
of it all was that poise and pride which had so greatly delighted the
autocratic old kinswoman whose fiat had set the last seal of social
success upon her.
When one of life's little jokes flung Hunter into Appleboro and she
had to observe him with impartial and less ingenuous eyes, she forgave
the simple schoolgirl's natural mistake. He had not changed, and she
perceived his effect upon others older and wiser than herself. And her
pride chose neither to slight nor to ignore him now, but rather to
meet him casually, with indifference, as a stranger in whom she was
not at all interested.
Mr. Inglesby she did not take seriously. She did not dream that a
possible menace to herself lay in this stout man whom she considered
fatuous and absurd, when she thought of him at all. That her mother
should be completely taken in by his specious charity and his
plausible presentment of himself, did not surprise her. She was
inclined to smile scornfully and so dismiss him.
She underestimated Inglesby.
The very fact that there was such an obstacle in the way as a young
fellow with whom she fancied herself in love only deepened Inglesby's
passion for Mary Virginia. She was in her proper person all that he
coveted and groveled to. To possess her in addition to his own
wealth--what more could a man ask? Let Eustis become senator,
governor, president, anything he chose. But let Inglesby have Mary
Virginia by way of fair exchange.
Mr. Inglesby was well aware that Miss Eustis would not for one moment
consider him--unless she had to. He proposed to so arrange affairs
that she had to. Naturally, he looked to his private secretary to help
him bring about this desirable end. And at this opportune moment fate
played into his hands in a manner that left Mr. Hunter's assent a
matter of course.
Mr. Hunter had very expensive tastes which his salary was not always
sufficient to cover. Wherefore, like many another, he speculated. When
he was lucky, it was easy money; but it was never enough. Of late he
had not been fortunate, and he found himself confronted by the high
cost of living as he chose to live. This annoyed him. So when there
came his way what appeared to be an absolute certainty of not only
recouping all his losses but of making some real money as well, Hunter
plunged, with every dollar he could manage to get hold of. But Wall
Street is a lane that has many crooked and devious turnings, and Mr.
Hunter's investments took a very wrong turn. And this time it was not
only all his own money that had been lost. The bottom might have
dropped out of things then, except for Inglesby.
When Hunter had to tell him the truth the financier listened with an
unmoved face. Then he swung around in his chair, lifted an eyebrow,
grunted, and remarked briefly: "Very unsafe thing to do, Hunter.
Very." And shoved his personal check across the desk. Nobody knew
anything about it, except the head bookkeeper of the bank.
Inglesby had no illusions, however. He understood that to have in his
power an immensely clever man who knew as much about his private
affairs as Hunter did, was good business, to say the least. He simply
invested in Mr. Hunter's brains and personality for his own immediate
ends, and he expected his brilliant and expensive secretary to prove
the worth of the investment.
Inglesby had not risen to his present heights by beating about the
bush in his dealings with others. He had seized Success by the
windpipe and throttled it into obedience, and he ruthlessly bent
everything and everybody to his own purposes. The task he set before
Hunter now was to steer the Inglesby ship through a perilous passage
into the matrimonial harbor he had in mind. Let Hunter do that--no
matter how--and the pilot's future was assured. Inglesby would be no
niggardly rewarder. But let the venture come to shipwreck and Hunter
must go down with it. Hunter was not left in any doubt upon that
score.
Brought face to face with the situation as it affected his fortune and
misfortune, Hunter must have had a very bad half an hour. I am sure he
had not dreamed of such a contretemps, and he must have been startled
and amazed by the cold calculation and the raw fury of passion he had
to deal with. I do not think he relished his task. His was the sort of
conscience that would dislike such a course, not because it was
dishonorable or immoral in itself, but because its details offended
his fastidiousness. I think he would have extricated himself honorably
if he could. It just happened that he couldn't.
Give a sufficient shock to a man's pocket-nerve and you electrify his
brain-cells, which automatically receive orders to work overtime.
Hunter's brain worked then because it had to, self-preservation being
the first law of nature. And this service for Inglesby not only spelt
safety; it meant the golden key to the heights, the power to gratify
those fine tastes which only a rich and able man can afford. Inglesby
had promised that, and he had just had a fair example of what
Inglesby's support meant.
One must try to consider the case from Mr. Hunter's point of view. To
refuse Inglesby meant disaster. And who was Laurence, who was Mary
Virginia, that he should quixotically wreck his prospects for them?
Why should he lose Inglesby's goodwill or gain Inglesby's enmity for
them or anybody else? Forced to choose, Hunter made the only choice
possible to him.
_Voe victis!_