A PUPPET IN TRAGEDY
When Mary’s year of foreign travel was over she found herself so
completely unprepared for the flatness of life at home, that she
shipped her uncle off for Boston, and decided to remain abroad another
year. She had made many delightful acquaintances during her travels,
and had found it easy to map out twelve more months of traveling,
visiting, “stopping over,” and “settling down.”
When she considered the loneliness and helplessness of her uncle’s
returning to an unkept house, she felt the sense of guilt that
accompanies an act of unaccustomed selfishness, but a poor relation
had been invoked from the shades of the “unexhausted West,” and
Cousin Rebecca had gladly consented to supply creature comforts to Mr.
Elton till Mary’s return. “I know I’m selfish,” Mary acquiesced to her
accusing conscience, “but I can’t go home and see Philip and Edith
yet” (they had been married a month after she left Boston),--“I’m too
battered and bruised. My scars must heal, and my wounds grow callous
before I can see their happiness. If I had died Uncle Charles would
have got on somehow, and this will only be a year of desertion, and
perhaps it will be the only vacation in my life.” So she quieted her
qualms, and persisted, as usual, in the line of conduct she had laid
out for herself.
The second year passed as delightfully as the first, and Mary finally
turned her back on the land that had fulfilled her desires and
satisfied her senses, with a devout feeling of thankfulness that Europe
still existed as a memory and a hope, even though it was rapidly
fading from her natural vision. On the steamer that was bearing her too
rapidly towards her undesired home, she found various acquaintances,
among others an old school friend, Helen White, who was returning from
a six weeks’ tour in France. She was familiar with Mary’s immediate
circle in Boston, and able to give her much news and gossip that had
failed to be recorded in letters from home. Naturally one of Mary’s
first inquiries was in regard to the Morleys. How are they getting on
together, and in society, and with the world? Mary had had frequent
letters from Edith, full of her own peculiar aroma, containing amusing
and shrewd observations on the people that formed the background to her
new life, speaking often of Philip and his interests with affectionate
understanding, but always ending with an appeal to “come home soon
to the person who needed her most.” At the mention of Edith Morley’s
name, Helen White’s rather inanimate face woke up. “She is a wonderful
success in Boston!” she exclaimed. “There is not a more popular woman
in society. Every one wants her all the time. She seems to be equally
sought after by the smart and the stupid sets, and by all the unlabeled
people in between. I declare Philip Morley is a lucky man!”
“I suppose he’s as much pleased with Edith as the rest of the world
is,” suggested Mary, as a “leader.”
“How could he be otherwise? She is always perfectly lovely with him,
and evidently doesn’t cross his wishes in the least particular. She
is a model wife, and I must say--nice as Philip is--I think she
deserves some one a little more--more--well, interesting and unusual
and stimulating.” Mary grunted: “H’m. Well, if Edith is satisfied, I
suppose _we_ must be. What effect has marriage had upon Philip?”
“Between ourselves, I don’t think he has developed and broadened as
much as you would expect,” said Miss White, with her confidential
manner. “He is a little disappointing. He never seems to arrive
anywhere, and at thirty-eight one expects a man to be something more
than promising.”
Mary’s heart gave a protesting throb that was a physical pain. She
had dreaded to hear exactly what her unsuspecting friend had told
her without knowing it,--that Philip had found Edith out, and that
his nature, in order to expand to its potential capacities, demanded
outside stimulus,--opposition even, and that it had met nothing but
enervating echo and reflection.
When Mary was alone her eyes filled with tears of self-reproach
and suffering. “It was all my fault,” she accused herself, in her
exaggerated consciousness of disaster. “I was fool enough to think that
the hardest thing to do must be the right thing. The punishment for
stupidity is harder to bear than the punishment for sin,--and it ought
to be. The wages of folly is remorse, and that’s a good deal worse than
death,” she added, with her usual impersonal relentlessness.
During the thoughtful hours of the next few monotonous days, while
Mary’s impatient eyes questioned the horizon line--that symbol of
symmetry--for something visible beyond, she tried to persuade herself
that she had been over-subtle in her interpretation of Helen White’s
indifference towards Philip, and enthusiasm for Edith. Certainly no
hint of an unhappy marriage had been put into the words, although it
had been taken out of them. But she must possess her soul in patience;
she should know enough soon.
She knew two days after her arrival, when she and her uncle went to
dine at the Morleys’. Edith was dazzlingly unchanged. Her embrace of
Mary was the spontaneous hug of a child, who abandons itself to the
present emotion. “You dear old thing!” she exclaimed. “You’ve got a
French dress and an English accent, but I know you’re the same old
sixpence underneath.”
“Yes, I’m the same old nickel,--put me into American money,
please,--for I never was a better Yankee than under this foreign
veneer. The accent and the dress both come off, you know,--I only wear
them on formal occasions. Hello, Philip!” she broke off suddenly, as
he ran downstairs with unwonted speed to greet her. “Well, here we are
again,” she rattled on. “Let’s be rude and all stare at each other,
and then be polite and say we all look younger and more beautiful
than we did two years ago.” Her unflinching gaze met Philip’s,--met
it, passed it by, and penetrated to his inner self that lay hidden
behind the lazily drooping eyes and the sensitive disillusioned mouth.
He looked older, and, if wisdom implies a shattering of youthful
ideals, wiser as well. His appearance was by no means unhappy, but his
contentment showed too much of resignation, and Mary would have been
more pleased to detect a gleam of divine discontent, kindling ambition
into action. The pleasant and affectionate smile with which he turned
toward his wife had in it the hint of almost pitying tenderness with
which a grown person regards a child.
“Well, Edith, what can we say about Mary that she won’t consider
fulsome flattery?” he asked. “You are much cleverer than I. Put my
feelings into words.”
The girl turned her face--not towards the object of this discussion,
but to her husband, as though to read his thoughts; then she slipped
her hand through Mary’s arm and said, “You look just the way the real
Mary Elton was always meant to look,--not sad but serious, not scoffing
at life, but amused by it. You look like an embodiment of strength
and sympathy, such as it rests weary eyes to look upon. And besides,
Europe--or something--has put a funny little look of sweetness into
your face that didn’t use to”--She was interrupted by Mary’s suddenly
winding her feather boa around her mouth. “Keep still!” she commanded,
with her old-time vigor. “I won’t be insulted. _Sweet_, indeed! Edith,
you look thoroughly sour and bitter. You are a peculiarly ugly and
disagreeable looking woman. Philip looks meek and henpecked, and as
for poor old Uncle Charles,”--pulling her beaming uncle under the
electric light,--“he has grown ten years younger since losing his
business manager, and being allowed to shift for himself. Come and
show me the house,” she went on, leading the way to the parlor with
Edith trotting at her heels like a happy dog. “I haven’t seen your
wedding presents yet. Oh, there’s the lamp I gave you, and a very
decent looking one it is, too. Lamps can be so perfectly terrible when
they really make an effort to be ornamental that I try to be guided by
their purely utilitarian functions in selecting them. Oh, and there’s
the portrait! How I have wanted to see it! I assure you its praises
have echoed through Europe?” She paused in front of a picture that
would have attracted the attention of any human creature, no matter
how ignorant, no matter how wise. It did not need the signature of the
greatest living portrait painter to proclaim it as one of the modern
masterpieces of the world.
It was Edith’s self--or selves, to be strictly accurate. She was
standing with suddenly arrested movement, as though she had started to
step out of the frame, a living woman, and then had quickly decided to
remain a painted mystery. Firelight played on the rainbow-tinted satins
which draped the exquisite figure, and a gleam from a hidden light
brightened the gold-streaked hair. The background was a softly blended
tapestry, and the general color scheme justified the name of “The Opal”
left on it from a recent exhibition. But the woman’s face! In that
lay the miracle of the painter’s genius, for never surely was such a
marvelous blending of qualities,--such a symphony of harmonies in which
discords had their place.
Mary sucked in her breath with the “Oh!” of complete satisfaction.
“He will be an old master a few hundred years hence,” she said,
“and Edith will be the Mona Lisa of future generations. You have
lived sufficiently,” she went on, addressing the portrait’s original,
half-banteringly; “you may as well go upstairs and die this minute.
Your destiny is completed. To have inspired such a work as that means
genius in the subject as well as in the painter.”
“It has been too funny to hear different people’s comments on it,”
Edith said. “When it was first exhibited I put on three veils so as
not to be recognized; and then I had the greatest fun listening to the
criticisms of friends and strangers. I heard one lady say, ‘_There_ is
a person capable of any crime!’ Another said, ‘She should have been
painted as a Madonna. I have never seen such goodness in any human
countenance.’ A man whom I did not know said, ‘There is the only face
I have ever seen which expresses Browning’s line, “There’s a woman
like a dew-drop, she’s so purer than the purest.”’ And a horrid man
whom I _do_ know, said,--excuse my repeating such a remark,--‘What an
extraordinary likeness of Mrs. Morley! She looks like a nun turned
demi-mondaine!’”
“What do you think of it, Philip,” asked Mary, while Mr. Elton was
dryly commenting, “I consider it the portrait of a most intelligent
woman.”
Philip looked from the portrait to Mary, with his quiet smile.
“When you ask me that, it is like asking what I think of Edith,” he
explained. “It has all her moods and all her phases. It shows what she
may be, no less than what she has been. It is endlessly suggestive and
fascinating.”
“I was almost afraid to be painted by such a mind-reader,” Edith
confessed, “but I needn’t have been alarmed. If one has no mind it
can’t be read; and it seems to me he has painted nothing. Every one
reads something different into it, but the variations are in them, not
in me. That is where the painter’s skill comes in. As I look at it
myself, it is a mirror’s likeness of a dead face; yet every one else
speaks of its marvelous vitality.”
“It is well named,” Mary said softly. “Such changing living beauty
belongs only to the opal.”
“And to Edith Morley,” put in Mr. Elton, with a courtly bow.
Dinner was announced, and Edith insisted that the survey of her
possessions must be postponed or the soup would grow cold. During the
first part of the meal Mary did most of the talking. “What is the use
of being a Ulysses,” she protested, “if one can’t recite one’s Odyssey
to bored Penelopes? I can see you all gaping internally, but you’ve
got to listen to me for a while, and then I’ll give you a chance.”
She regaled them with anecdotes of American human nature as revealed
on foreign soil, and seemed her old merry self; but while her tongue
wagged fast and gayly, her brain was working in opposition to her
words. “There’s an immense change in him below the surface,” she said
to herself, and the sense of it caused a sudden contraction of the brow
which her laughing listeners did not comprehend. “Now _you_ talk,” she
said abruptly. “What’s become of the Reverend Sylvester Rogers? How did
Milly Lambert’s marriage turn out? Where is Marion Meridith? And what
happened to Jack Hudson?”
“Let’s see,” pondered Edith. “Mr. Rogers had a call to Kansas
City--also incidentally to marry an heiress. Milly Lambert succeeded in
getting a divorce from her wretched husband, though she knew exactly
what he was when she married him; Marion Meridith is just the same nice
girl that she always was,--too good for any of the men who want to
marry her; and Jack Hudson,--well, they say he and his wife want to be
separated, but they can’t seem to convince the lawyers that there’s any
occasion for it.”
“What do you think of divorce?” questioned Mr. Elton of Edith. It
was the kind of direct inquiry she never liked, for no suggestion of
the questioner’s opinion was evident, and his face had about as much
expression as a brick house in a block. Edith glanced tentatively at
her husband and Mary, but they offered her no assistance, so she said
lightly, “What do I think of divorce? Why, I never think of it. I don’t
have to, you see.”
Mary brought her fist down on the table with one of her unregenerate
gestures. “It is one of the greatest crimes of the day,” she
exclaimed, “the attitude of Public Opinion on Divorce! I believe some
of the churches are trying to do what they can to frown upon it,
but till some fixed law is made which applies in every State in the
Union, people will get divorced almost as fast as they get married.
The trouble is, each couple fancies its own case unique, and women
particularly seem to be incapable of giving up their own selfish
happiness for the good of humanity or the community.”
“I don’t suppose you’d ever marry a divorced man, Mary,” Edith
suggested, and the others all laughed at her characteristically
feminine way of turning an abstract argument into a personal question.
“I don’t suppose I should,” Mary replied bluntly. “Nor do I suppose
I’d marry a man who was not divorced,--nor do I think I shall ever be
the cause of divorce in others. The opinion of an old maid like me is
utterly worthless, of course, and I suppose ‘sour grapes’ would be the
motive attributed to me by any one who knew my views. It is the pretty
and foolish young married women who ought to be converted. I’m ashamed
of Milly Lambert.”
The intolerant Mary was speaking, but Edith brought back the new
incarnation by introducing the subject of Sydney Eaton’s interest in
politics. This gave Mary the chance to find out whether Philip still
continued to identify himself with the Municipal Improvement Society
and the Civic Club, and the various other reforming bodies in which he
had formerly been an active member. Her evident interest in the subject
loosened Philip’s tongue, and he began to talk as well as to listen.
This was just what Mary had wanted,--to find out whether the new
Philip had what was best in the old, and skillfully she cast her line,
the hook hidden in good conversational bait.
Mr. Elton unconsciously assisted, by judicious flourishes of the
landing net, in the form of questions demanding answers, and
statements requiring contradiction. Mary’s smile was that of the
successful fisherman when Philip laid down his knife and fork and
began to talk. His subject interested him, and Mary’s questions and
arguments stimulated him. He threw back his head, and indifference and
acquiescence shook off him like drops of water. His eyes lighted with
the old fire of enthusiasm, and his voice vibrated with earnestness. A
flush of almost triumphant success was reflected in Mary’s face. Edith
may have lulled Philip’s spirit to sleep, but she had not killed it.
As for Edith herself, she regarded her husband’s transformation with
undisguised pleasure. “Now I see what you’ve been wanting these last
two years, Philip!” she exclaimed, smiling joyously from him to her
friend. “It’s just been Mary! It’s good to see you like your old self.
Perhaps if I could only learn to quarrel and argue with you it would
goad you into going into politics, as your friends want you to. What
you need is a little opposition.”
“He’ll get enough of that if he goes into politics with his present
ideas of reform,” Mr. Elton chuckled. But Philip did not seem to
heed the comments that were flying round his head. He looked at Mary
and talked on, his mind quickened by her interested questions, his
intelligence freed by finding its fellow. Edith leaned back in her
chair and gave the satisfied sigh of a surfeited child. There was not
the smallest tinge of jealousy or of envy in the delight she took in
the pleasure of Philip and Mary in being together again. Her nature
was light but not petty, and small thoughts were as alien to her as big
ones.
When dinner was over, Edith took possession of her friend and carried
her off to the other room, calling back, “Now please smoke very long
cigars, and pretend you have a great deal to say to each other. Mary
and I are going to have a heart to heart talk, and we don’t wish to be
disturbed by mere men.”
As Edith stood in the firelight, Mary felt the rush of irresistible
admiration that her presence always excited. In all the galleries of
Europe, Mary’s eyes had rested on no more beautiful picture than this
wonderful woman, dressed in soft shades of varying yellows that seemed
to match their golden gleams with her sunshiny hair. Her engagement
ring--Philip’s opal--flashed its sympathetic response to every hue of
her gown and every variation of light, while a necklace of the same
stones--his wedding gift--flashed fire, like a setting of colored
lights encircling her exquisite head.
“Now let’s talk, just the way we used to,” she said, settling herself
in a corner of the big sofa, “which means that I will lay bare a few
hearts and brains and things, and you will dissect them.”
“Well, produce your material,” Mary commanded; “the surgeon’s knife is
ready.”
“I’ve got a splendid name for you!” Edith broke in. “It just came to me
this minute. You’re the Critic on the Heart! You do so love to analyze
emotions and criticise impulses.”
Mary rewarded her friend’s bestowal of the title by flinging a sofa
cushion at her, which Edith instantly tucked away behind her shoulders,
saying, “My back thanks you,” and leaned forward, looking like a
lovely daffodil in a calyx of green pillows.
“_You_ have no heart for me to criticise,” Mary said rather scornfully,
“and my own is a fossil. I am not a geologist, so I don’t understand
it. Produce another.”
“Philip’s!” Edith replied so promptly that Mary started.
“Thanks. I’d rather not,” she said shortly. “I know nothing of it, and
a man’s wife would surely not wish to discuss him in any private or
personal way, even with his best friend--and hers.”
“Now, Mary, you know it’s perfectly ridiculous to talk that way to
me,” Edith expostulated. “My marriage is your doing. You can’t dismiss
it that way with a grandiloquent generality. You’ve got to take the
consequences of your own acts.”
“And what are the consequences?” Mary forced herself to ask in a light
tone which she felt would not fit the relentlessly frank attitude of
the young wife.
“Unhappiness on his side, indifference on mine,” was the laconic
answer, that drew from Mary a sharp cry of “_Don’t_, Edith! Don’t say
such a thing--in such a way. What are you made of!”
“Sugar and spice and all that’s nice,” the girl sang gayly. “You
always knew that was all I was made of, but you thought the power of
my husband’s love would convert sugar and spice into heart and soul.
I regret to say the strength of Philip’s love was not sufficient to
perform that miracle,” she added, with an unusual touch of bitterness.
But she instantly laughed it away. “I knew you’d see that Philip had
found me out,” she said. “But he’s wonderfully good to me, he never
shows that he is disappointed,--but--you know I _have_ intuition, Mary,
if I haven’t anything else,--and I knew that he had ceased loving me
before we had been married a year. Of course that means that I am
adrift again,” and she sighed resignedly.
Rage surged in Mary’s breast, rage against herself and Edith, and a
rush of suffocating pity for Philip. But her anger, as usual, had to
stand aside for admiration and amazement at Edith’s next words.
“It was so fine in Philip,” the girl said slowly, her rich voice
vibrating with feeling, “it was so much nobler of him to cease loving
me when he found I was--nothing. Most men would have kept on caring for
me. I was always good to him, always sympathetic and affectionate; I
did everything he wanted me to, and, as you see,” she added naïvely,
“I have not lost my looks nor grown stupid. How many men would feel a
lack in such a wife? I have been the envy of débutantes and matrons,
the admired and adored of men, yet Philip has proved his fineness by
ceasing to love me. His nature is high enough to demand its equal.”
“You are making him out as much of a prig as Tennyson’s King Arthur,”
Mary expostulated, but Edith’s childlike laugh interrupted her. “Oh,
no! Philip has far too much humor and sense to wave his hands over me,
saying, ‘Lo, I forgive thee, even as eternal God forgives.’ Under such
provocation I should feel tempted to elope with the nearest Launcelot.
No, the good part of Philip is that no one but you and I knows that he
is a bitterly disappointed man. _I_ know it because I myself am his
disappointment, and you know it because”--
“Oh, I _don’t_ know it!” Mary hastily interposed. “I’m sure he seems
quite happy. You have too much intuition. You exaggerate. You may not
be just what Philip thought you, but who is what any one thinks them?
Besides, if he craves something different, you are surely adaptable
enough to give what he wants.”
“No, Mary,” Edith said sadly, “I cannot give leadership, advice,
stimulus, incentive. I can give only responsive qualities, as you know.
And there is danger ahead, Mary, danger for me as well as for him.”
Restlessly she rose from her cushioned corner and walked up and down.
“Do you still care for me, Mary?” she demanded earnestly. “I mean
enough to make a fight for me? Can you exert a strong enough influence
to overthrow a determined will pulling against yours?”
Mary did not trust herself to meet the appealing and appalling
clearness of the eyes waiting to disarm her. She was disgusted with
the girl’s egotism, angry with the weakness that had disillusioned
Philip. She cared too much for the man to feel pity for the woman. “I
am afraid I am beginning to lose patience with a clear-sightedness as
unavailing as yours,” she said, rather coldly. “If you and Philip are
unhappy, I am more so, for I have an added sense of responsibility for
your disappointment. I confess I do not feel like entering a tug of
war for the prize of your soul. Where everything seems to the onlooker
to be peaceful and serene, such strenuousness strikes me as being
inappropriate.”
Edith drew back a little, as if her friend’s sarcasm had hit her
lightly in the face.
“I have been dreadfully selfish,” she acquiesced with Mary’s thought.
“I am going to try never to talk to you about myself again. I think you
will make it easy for me to keep that resolution.”
Instantly Mary’s impulsive heart smote her. “Edith, forgive me!” she
cried. “I spoke thoughtlessly.”
Edith was by her side at once, radiant and fascinating. “Forgive you?
My dear old Mary, that word must never pass between us. I’ll try to be
more what you would wish,--but I want to say one thing.” Her fingers
twined together nervously. “I think--if I had had--a child--everything
might have been different.”
“I have so hoped that you would,” Mary murmured, with the half-abashed
embarrassment shown by the unmarried when referring to the subject that
is outside of their personal experience or prospects.
“I feel that I shall never have children,” Edith said quietly, “and I
am sorry for Philip as well as myself. He must turn to his work and I
to”--
“Mr. Grant Lorimer,” said the maid’s voice at the door. Mary started
as if the little white-capped servant had fired a pistol at her. But
Edith was halfway across the room, shaking hands with Mary’s old enemy
and crying out, “You have spoiled everything, Grant! Miss Elton and I
were having the first talk we’ve had for two years, and I hadn’t got
round to telling her that you are in Boston again. See how surprised
she looks!”
Mary tried to assume a cordiality she did not feel. “How do you do, Mr.
Lorimer? Yes, I am surprised to find any one drifting back to Boston
who does not belong here.”
If there were a dash of venom in her words he did not swallow it. He
made a profound bow as he seated himself beside her. “I feel that I
do in a measure belong here,” he said quietly. “Mrs. Morley always
gives me a sense of being at home, and perhaps an old friend like
myself brings with him a little different feeling of old times than
comes with new acquaintances, no matter how congenial.” Their foils
crossed in their opening greetings, as never failed to happen when
these combatants met. Edith rushed in to separate them. “I’m going to
treat you like the old friend you are, Grant,” she struck in, “and send
you into the dining-room to have a cigar and some coffee with Philip
and Mr. Elton. Then Mary and I can finish our feminine confidences and
you will have all the charm of novelty when you return with the others
fifteen minutes later. I know Philip wants to talk to you about stocks,
and I hate the sound of the word. Run along like a good boy.” Her voice
had the affectionate cadence of a mother giving wheedling advice to
her child. Mary’s suspicious brain wondered what was Edith’s motive in
thus summarily dismissing her friend. Was it merely that the electric
sparks of discord were disagreeable to one who loved harmony? was it
because Edith wished to speak to him alone, and could do it better
when her husband was in the room to absorb Mary’s attention? or was it
because she did not wish Mary to find out from her Southern admirer
how constant had been their companionship of late? In another minute
Mary was blaming herself for attributing false motives, for as Grant
Lorimer left the room in obsequious obedience to his queen’s command
Edith threw her arms around Mary, exclaiming, “I couldn’t have any one
come between us this first night. I want to be with you alone. Talk
to me, dear. Tell me all about you, what you’ve thought and felt and
experienced these two years. I’m sick of myself. I want to get close,
close in touch with you to-night. You always help me so much;” and
Edith cuddled up to her austere and angular friend like a tired child.
Mary never forgave herself for her next words. She gave a little hard
laugh and said, “I’ll talk to you as much as you please about what I
have seen, heard, and done, but I have happily outgrown the days of
immodest exposure of heart and mind and spirit. If you are catering
to what you think I want to talk about, you are making a mistake. I
don’t wish to talk about either myself or yourself. Let’s compromise on
Italy.”
A queer, quiet smile crept into the corners of Edith’s lips, and she
gave a little shrug, her frivolous submission to Fate. “Kismet. So be
it,” she said lightly, drawing her hand out of Mary’s arm but still
smiling with perfect amiability. “Italy is the subject of all others to
be discussed by friends who have been separated two years. I hope you
enjoyed Giorgione’s ‘Concert’ as much as I did, and felt like slapping
the insipid faces of Carlo Dolce’s Madonnas!”
When the men came in a little later, the girls were discussing the
relative merits of Perugino and Lippo Lippi with the passionate
interest frequently reserved for post-prandial confidences concerning
the advantages of rival schools of underwear.
Mr. Elton and Grant Lorimer took instant possession of their hostess,
who was laughingly accused by Lorimer of “showing off” about Italian
art.
“What a wonderful memory Edith has!” Mary exclaimed to Philip, as
he drew a chair up to the corner of her sofa. “It doesn’t seem fair
for one person to have so much. All the fairies were present at her
christening.”
“Yes, she is wonderfully endowed,” Philip acquiesced. “A good memory
knows what to forget as well as what to remember,” he added, and
suddenly Mary’s mind flew back to their last interview alone together,
when she had poured out the story of her love for him. She flushed
scarlet at the thought, and an intolerable sense of embarrassment and
shame flooded her. They talked of impersonal things, and no outsider
would have been conscious of effort or strain; but while Mary was
talking she was telling herself that their intercourse could never be
natural or agreeable. Their past yawned between them,--a past too vital
to be bridged with the commonplace,--while they chatted of friends, and
things that had happened to people in whom they were both interested.
Mary found herself watching Philip’s face with all her old affection
and belief, but with an added ache of sorrow, not for herself but for
him. “If he had only been happy I could have borne my own unhappiness,”
she groaned inwardly, “but he is a disappointed man. He was once
something, he could have been anything, and now he will be nothing.”
Involuntarily she turned towards the cause of his failure. Edith, with
her customary skill, was mixing oil and water in the persons of her
two guests. Mary remarked on it to Philip, and then, adding abruptly,
“A little vinegar has a wonderfully ameliorating effect on two alien
liquids; I am going to supply it,” impulsively, almost to the point of
rudeness, she quitted her seat and joined the group at the other side
of the room. Edith instantly beckoned to Philip to come and sit by her
side.
“This is a great deal cosier,” she said comfortably. “There are too
few of us to divide into groups. Mary is a wise woman to encourage us
to hang together, isn’t she, Philip?” She smiled up at her husband’s
rather baffled face with her winning air of confidence, but his
answering smile touched his mouth alone, leaving his eyes unresponding.
Mary instantly began firing questions at Lorimer, which he, bewildered,
answered with the brevity of surprise.
“Are you to be long in Boston?”
“Why, really I don’t know. My plans are quite uncertain.”
“Have you been here much during the last two years?”
“No. At least only recently. My business demands occasional visits to
other cities.”
“Where did you spend last summer?”
“At Northeast Harbor.”
“Oh, how pleasant for you to be near the Morleys!”
“Yes, indeed, delightful.” And so it went.
Finally Mary rose to her feet, weighted down by a confused sense of
failure, misunderstanding, and disappointment. “Come, Uncle Charles,
you must take me home,” she said. “I’m not as young as you, and half
past ten is the middle of my night. I haven’t my land legs or my
land brain yet, and I feel a little watery at both extremities,” she
explained to Edith.
“You must look in to-morrow or the next day and see that all goes well
in my absence,” Philip said, as he unfolded Mary’s wrap. “I have to run
on to New York for a few days on business, and Edith will think it a
good exchange if you will take my place.”
“Oh, why don’t you take her with you!” Mary cried impulsively. He
turned towards his wife, saying, “Well, Edith, what do you say,--will
you come with me?”
“Why, of course, if you want me,” she replied instantly.
“We’ll talk about it in the morning,” he said. “Good-night, Mary. It is
like old times to have you back again. We’ve missed you tremendously.
Good-night, Mr. Elton. I congratulate you on your return to slavery.”
Grant Lorimer stood beside the handsome couple, bowing with scrupulous
politeness. He looked mysteriously dark and enigmatic in the half
light. Mary turned as she went down the steps, fascinated by the
picture that Edith made, as she stood between the two men, gleaming
like a tongue of flame in her shimmering yellows. Somehow at that
moment her radiant beauty stamped itself on Mary’s consciousness more
forcibly than ever before. “Good-night, Mary,” called Edith for the
last time. “Philip isn’t going to take me to New York. I know him!
Don’t desert me. Remember I shall be all alone. I shall depend on you.
Don’t forget me.” Her voice vibrated with a tone of earnestness out
of keeping with her words, but her pretty inconsequent little laugh
trilled out. Mary saw Philip still standing by the open door, as Grant
Lorimer turned towards Edith with one of his compelling glances and
followed her into the parlor. Then a sudden gust of wind slammed the
door, and the vision went out like the picture on a magic lantern
slide.
Mary spent the next few hours between the nightmares of waking and
sleeping. As usual, she alternately blamed and justified herself for
her repellent attitude towards Edith’s confidences and confessions. “If
I am a critic on the heart, there is no heart for which I feel greater
scorn than my own,” she told herself bitterly. “I don’t know that it’s
any better to have a bad heart than none at all. I am blaming Edith for
what she can’t help; she was made by her parents and I by myself.” She
tossed restlessly on her pillows, jerking impatiently at the blankets.
“It’s only the sight of Philip and the thought of him that make me so
unjustly angry with poor Edith. If she had married a man whom I could
regard simply as her husband, my sympathies would be hers along with
my affection and my grudging admiration; but she has taken the will
power out of Philip Morley,--she is making him into a mere drifting
will-less creature like herself, and I _can’t_ forgive her when I care
so much for him. Oh, how absurd,--how _wrong_ it is for me to love
him as I do!” Warm tears fell on her pillow, and she turned it over
angrily. She tried to look at facts without blinking, and she saw the
shadow of something unavoidable darkening the radiance of Edith. “It’s
that wretched cad of a Dr. Fell,” she told herself. “He has too much
influence over her. I must exert mine in opposition.” Then she drifted
into unrestful sleep, clenching her fist at the powers of darkness,
vowing that she should save Edith yet, and murmuring “I was ever a
fighter,” as her imaginings changed to dreams.
The next day Mary was busied with her unpacking till late afternoon,
when she took a breathing space and went to see Edith. The maid told
her she had gone out ten minutes before, and that Mr. Morley had gone
to New York that morning. Mary left a message of regret which she
genuinely felt, and then made a long détour to get home, that she might
fill her lungs with fresh air before again attacking the problem of
sorting and distributing her spoils of travel.
When she got back she was disappointed to hear that Edith had been to
see her, and had waited half an hour in vain for her return. “I wish I
had thought to leave word for her to come to dinner to-night. It must
be lonely for her with Philip away,” Mary reproved herself, and several
times in the course of the evening she exclaimed irrelevantly to her
uncle, “I wish Edith were here!” The next morning Mary made amends to
her own conscience by going early to the Morleys to try and persuade
Edith to come back with her to spend the day. The maid recognized the
visitor of the afternoon before and asked her to step in. “Mrs. Morley
left a letter for you,” she explained. “Mr. Morley sent for her to join
him in New York last night, and Mr. Lorimer saw her off on the midnight
train. He told me about it while she was packing up her things.”
Mary’s legs shook under her and she felt herself grow pale and cold.
What did it mean? Was Philip ill? Was Grant Lorimer?--Tremblingly she
opened the envelope. Between the closely written pages another note
fell out addressed simply “To Philip.” Mary’s mind stopped thinking,
her heart seemed to cease beating. Automatically she turned the
enclosed envelope face down on her knee, and said to the maid in a
voice which was not her own, “Very well. You needn’t wait. I will read
Mrs. Morley’s letter here.” It ran as follows:--
DEAR MARY,--I am writing this while Grant Lorimer is waiting for me
to go away with him. This is not a letter of justification but of
explanation. I _can’t help it_, Mary, believe me, _I can’t help_
what I am doing. It had to be. It isn’t that I love him. Don’t
think I am just vulgarly bad. It is simply that he loves me more
than Philip, more than you, I am afraid, and that he has strength
to make me do what he wants. Don’t fancy that I do not think of
Philip,--of the disgrace--the humiliation--the bitter grief and
shame I am bringing him. But I cannot act otherwise. Perhaps if you
came in at this moment and defied the man downstairs and carried me
off with you, the battle would be won, for you know your influence
over me is hardly less hypnotic than his. Don’t ever blame
yourself, dear old Mary, for not having understood a little better
what I was going through. It is part of the tragedy that you could
not believe in such--weakness--as mine. Help Philip to understand
that I have never been anything but a puppet,--an irresponsible toy
with tangled strings pulled by many hands. I must write a few words
to Philip, and you must try to make him understand that there are
some events in life that are _inevitable_. I am not carried away by
passion,--I am not unhappy with Philip. I shall not be happy with
the other man. I am simply doing what I must do. Believe that, if
you can, and be good to Philip always, Mary, for my sake,--it is my
last request. I know that you will love me in spite of all I have
done and been, just as I shall always love you because you are your
own fine free self. And sometime, perhaps, I shall come back, and
then I know you will take me in.
EDITH.
Mechanically Mary folded up the letter. Her strained eyes looked like
those of a person in a trance. There was no look of comprehension
in her face. She laid Philip’s note on the table, propping it up
frivolously against a little match safe in the form of a red imp. Then
she walked to the window and looked out at the passers-by. “How badly
that woman’s skirt hangs!” she inwardly commented with the only part
of her mind that was not dead. After a few moments she shivered and
glanced at Edith’s letter, which her frozen fingers grasped. “I must go
before the maid returns,” she muttered vaguely, feeling as if a body
she had murdered lay by her side and would be discovered. She turned
towards the door. “Philip must not be told like that!” she exclaimed
angrily as she caught sight of the letter she had arranged for him, and
she crumpled it into her pocket, with trembling hands. Edith’s portrait
smiled at her with bewitching candor. “There’s a woman like a dew-drop,
she’s so purer than the purest,” Mary murmured. Then a muffled cry of
acute comprehension broke from her tightened throat. “Edith, forgive
me!” she cried wildly. “Oh, my God, how shall I tell Philip!” She bent
her abashed head, that she might not meet the generous smile of her
sinning friend, and when she crept home, hugging her terrible secret to
her heart, she looked like a guilty soul fleeing from justice.