Beatrice sent for Gay before she decided to run down to New York to
gather up some good-looking things to wear while West. More and more
the novelty of the situation was appealing to her. She would ship her
car out and take with her a maid, the Pom, and her aunt, besides three
trunks of clothes. She also had learned of hot springs that were
extremely reducing; and of a wonderful lawyer whom several of her
friends recommended. It had grown very distressing to have a cave man
prowl about the villa, the eternal disapproval of whatsoever she did,
then her father's presence got on her nerves. Considering everything
she was glad to escape, and she welcomed the sympathy and peculiar
publicity that would be hers. The role of an injured woman is almost
as attractive as that of a romantic parasite. All in all, she was just
bound to have a good time.
To be sure she thought of Steve working for someone else, making
one twentieth of his former income, marrying Mary and starting
housekeeping in eight rooms and a pocket handkerchief of a lawn--and
she envied them. This was only natural; it would be fun to be in
Mary's place for a fortnight or so, so she could tell about it
afterward. And she thought of Mary and of all she had admitted in
the tenseness of their conversation.
When she returned from New York Gay met her at the train. He carried
a single long-stemmed white rose, which, he lisped, stood for
friendship. And Beatrice--three pounds heavier if the truth were
told--quite languid and easily pleased, looked affectionately upon
Gay, who was trying to smile his sweetest.
"Of course this is very hard"--feeling it the thing to say--"but
inevitable."
"I always knew it," he supplemented, feeling that the gates of
paradise were slowly opening for him. Within a year or so he would not
even have the pretense at a business. "I understand only too well. May
I say to my old friend, one whose opinions have swayed me far more
than she has imagined, that I, too, have experienced a similar
disillusionment which terminated more tragically?"
"Really?" Beatrice roused from her cushions. "Tell me, Gay, just when
did you begin to regret having married Trudy?"
The barriers down, Gay began a rapid fire of incidents concerning
Trudy's gross nature and lack of comprehension, and the patience it
had required to bear with her. He twirled her diamond ring on his
finger. Beatrice spied it.
"Why, that setting is just a little different from any I have," she
said, almost crossly. "I never saw it before."
She held out her hand, and the minor question of a dead wife and a
discarded husband was put aside until further ennui should overtake
them.
Aunt Belle opposed the divorce trip more vigorously than any one else
concerned. It seemed to her naught but a wild panorama of rattlesnakes
and Indians, with no opportunity for her daily massage. Besides, she
knew Beatrice's moods, and as time went on, between Constantine's
ridicule and his daughter's tempers, Aunt Belle was forced to work
hard to maintain a look of joyous contentment.
But there was nothing else for her to do unless she wished to be taken
to an old ladies' home. Her brother had said he would be delighted to
have her away, her pretenses and simpering nothings drove him to
distraction; and he had at last secured a man attendant who knew how
to dodge small articles skilfully for the compensation of a hundred
dollars a month and all he could pilfer. Like Beatrice, Aunt Belle
regretted that the actual divorce must lack a gorgeous setting; it was
quite commonplace. But one cannot have everything, and Beatrice had as
much as hinted that for her second wedding she would use the sunken
gardens at the Villa Rosa and wear a cloth-of-gold gown without a veil
but a smart aigrette of gilded feathers.
Beatrice shrank from saying good-bye to her father. It was more than
her usual dislike of entering the sick room. She had come to realize
that though her father caused her to be the sort of person she was, he
himself had remained both real and simple, succeeding by force of this
fact, and her contact with both Steve and Mary convinced her that she
did not wish to know real, everyday persons--they had nothing in
common with her and caused her to be restless and distressed. Gay was
as wild a mental tonic as she desired.
However, she bent solicitously over him and murmured the usual things:
"Take best care of yourself--miss you worlds--do be careful--will
write every day."
Constantine looked up at her, tears in the harsh eyes, which had lost
their black sparkle. "I'm sorry," he said, in childish fashion, as she
waited for an equally conventional reply. "Your mother would have
liked Steve."
"Papa!"--shocked at his lack of fairness--"how horrid!"
"Maybe I was wrong--maybe if your mother had lived it would have been
different. She would have liked Steve."
Beatrice played her final weapon against Steve's reputation in her
father's eyes.
"He is going to marry Miss Faithful. He has loved her for a long time.
Now you see what I have endured."
"Are you sure?"
"Oh, quite. He admitted it. So did she." Beatrice knew that Mary's
declaration against ever marrying Steve would have as much effect as
to attempt to keep the sun from shining if it so inclined. "I've no
doubt they will be the model couple of a model village, for if ever
there was a reformer it is Steve. He never should have been a rich
man."
"Not at thirty," his father-in-law championed. "So--it's the woman who
worked for him that won.... I guess it's the way of things, Bea."
"You uphold him?" Her temper was rising.
Constantine shook his head, closing the dull eyes. "I'm out of it
all," he excused himself. "There's a check for you on the table."
Either pretended or real, he seemed to go to sleep without delay.
* * * * *
Some months later Gaylord, very suave in white flannels, came in to
tell Constantino that he was to meet Beatrice in Chicago, en route
from the West, and that they were planning to announce their
engagement shortly after their arrival in Hanover. At which
Constantine managed to curse Gay in as horrid fashion as he knew how.
But Gay was quite too happy and secure to mind the reception. Besides,
there was nothing Constantine could do about it. It was a rather neat
form of revenge since his daughter would bring into his family the son
of one of the men he had ruthlessly ruined in his own ascent of the
ladder.
Gay had done nothing but write letters to Beatrice, in which he copied
all the smart sayings and quips of everyone else, purporting them as
original, impoverishing himself for florists' orders and gifts, and
even taking a desperate run out to see Beatrice ensconced in state in
a Western town with her tortured aunt and lady's maid and a stout
squaw to do the housekeeping. Gay knew that all this work would not
count in vain. So when he proposed to Beatrice, having taken three
days in which to write the love missive, he knew that he would be
accepted, and therefore counted Constantine's wrath as a passing
annoyance.
Everything considered, Beatrice could do no better. She had inclined
toward a minister as a second husband, she one time said, but her
chances there were small since she was not a bona-fide widow. Gay
would endure anything at her hands; he knew no pride, he had no
purpose in existing save to have a good time, neither did he possess
annoying theories about life. He was an adept at flattery, and he
understood Beatrice's sensitiveness about being called stout. With a
suitor at hand well trained for the part, why waste time looking
further, she argued.
So the wedding in the sunken gardens with the cloth-of-gold-garbed
bride was planned for the next season's calendar and there would be
all the pleasure of talking it over, the entertainments, the new
clothes, and so on. His father-in-law was paralyzed and his
aunt-in-law was senile. Gay was bound to be master of all he surveyed
before long.
Perhaps during the breaking up of his establishment he might be
unpleasantly reminded of a red-haired girl who had died unmourned and
whose very ring Beatrice now wore--in exchange for one of hers which
Gay wore. But he could take an extra cordial if that was the case and
soon forget. After all, Trudy, like Steve, had been impossible; and
Gay felt positive that impossible people would not count at judgment
day.
Likewise Beatrice, who regarded the whole thing as a lark, thought
sometimes of Steve, who, she understood, was superintendent of a large
plant some two hundred miles removed from Hanover, and of the time
when the slightest flicker of her eyes made him glad for all the day,
or the suggestion of a pout brought him to the level of despair.
Perhaps she thought, too, of the very few moments as his wife during
which she had wished things might have been as he wanted. No, not
really wished--but wondered how it would have been. And of Mary she
thought a great deal--that was to be expected. No one wrote her about
Mary, no one seemed to think it would be interesting. The dozen dear
friends who deluged her with weekly items of local scandal never once
told her of her wife-in-law, as Gay dubbed her. Therefore she thought
of her more than she did of any one else--even Gay.
She wondered if Mary was making simple hemstitched things for her
trousseau; if she would shamelessly marry this divorced man,
superintendent of a cement works; if she would go live in a
brown-shingled house and belong to the town social centre and all the
rest of the woman's-column, bargain-day, sewing-society things. And
Beatrice knew that Mary would. Moreover, that she would make a
complete success of so doing. Whereas even now Beatrice merely
regarded Gay as essential to complete her defeat.
When she reached home, in company with Gay, her aunt, the maid, and an
armful of flowers, the attendant told them her father was dead. He had
had a bad turn in the early morning--no pain--just drifted off. Well,
the only intelligible things he had said were--should he repeat them
now? Well, the two words he had said over and over again were
"Steve--Hannah--Hannah--Steve."
So the cloth-of-gold wedding with the sunken-garden setting was
changed for a wedding at twilight in the conservatory, Beatrice
dressed in shimmery mauve out of memory to dear papa!
* * * * *
"You have renounced your economic independence and you are now
approaching the legal-vassal stage," Steve warned Mary as they viewed
the rooms of the new brown house. "Do you know what it all means?"
"No; probably that is why we women do so," she retorted. "Luke says
you are bully and everything is fino--and I set quite a store by
Luke's opinions."
"You'll have green-plush and golden-oak people call on you, I'm
afraid, and a few who run to Sheraton and crystal goblets. There will
be funny entertainments and dinner parties where the hostess fries the
steak and then removes her apron to display her best silk gown."
"I am prepared. And the maid will leave us before the month is over
and I shall be her understudy. Well, I can. That is something."
"I'm not going to ask permission to smoke--I'm going to sprawl in all
the chairs and puff away at my leisure."
"Do. I'll try to remember it is good for moths."
"Mary, are you satisfied?" he asked, wistfully.
"Of course. It never does to have it all perfect--to the last detail
of the wallpaper designs. That never lasts."
She went to lay her head on his shoulder for a brief second, almost
boyishly darting away and running upstairs to see to some detail in
which Steve was not concerned.
He went to the side doorway of the house to look out at the other
houses and yards--pleasant, livable dwellings without romantic
construction or extravagant details--the homes of the people who keep
the world moving and mostly turning to the right.
He felt he had earned this brown house--and the woman who was upstairs
examining the linen-closet capacity. He had neither stolen nor
bargained for either. It was true there was a tinge of regret, like a
calm stretch of road without the suggestion of a stirring breeze. One
cannot chain youth, romance, and Irish-Basque ancestry together and
let them go breakneck speed without glorious and eternal memories of
the feat.
Mary realized this--even though she might pretend ignorance of the
fact. She had reckoned with it before she gave Steve her word. Perhaps
it, too, had been a factor in stripping off the mask of commercial nun
and showing him the Gorgeous-Girl propensities. Nothing would content
him so much as to think of someone dependent upon him, make him
shoulder responsibility, surround him in a halo of hero worship. Even
if they both knew this to be a lovely rosy joke--aide-de-camp of
romance, which even the most practical American woman will not
forgo--Mary had been wise in telling him the truth. The only time
women do at all well in fibbing is to each other. Besides, there is a
vast difference between fibs and rosy jokes!
Steve had earned this, therefore it would be his for all time. And
though he felt youth had gone from him--the optimistic swashbuckling
youth which conquered all in his pathway--approaching middle age was
good to have, and he rejoiced that this mad noonday was over. As he
looked out at the simple grounds and thought of how sensible Mary was,
and how sensible was the colour of their modest car, and a hundred
similar facts--there crossed his mind a vision of the Gorgeous Girl
like a frail, exotic jungle flower, clad in copper-coloured tulle with
tiny rusty satin slippers and surrounded by a bodyguard of the
season's best dancers.
"Why, Stevuns," he almost fancied her light, gay voice saying, "aren't
you funny!" Then the tiny rusty satin slippers tripped away to the
latest of waltz tunes.
Well, that was at an end. Perhaps even to Mary, who had come
downstairs, delighted at finding extra shelf room, Steve would never
confide these fleeting visions that would cross his mind from time to
time; also his banished boy heart. Mary would grow a trifle matronly
of figure, become addicted to severe striped silks, perhaps insist on
meatless days--and smokeless rooms, for all she said not just now. She
would dominate a trifle and be on committees, raise a great hue and
cry as to the right schools for the children. But she would always be
his Mary Faithful, gray-eyed and incurably honest and loving him
without pause and without thought of her own splendid self. Truly he
was a fortunate man, for though there is an abundance of Gorgeous
Girls these days there are seldom enough Mary Faithfuls to go round.
But he would never tell even his nearest and dearest of the visions.
This would be Steve's one secret.
And as Steve thought sometimes of the Gorgeous Girl in copper-coloured
tulle and with a dancing bodyguard, or in white fur coats being
halfway carried into her motor car, so would the Gorgeous Girl
sometimes find Gay and his simpering servility quite beside her own
thoughts. Once more she would see Steve, young and flushed with a
lover's dream!
The same germ of greatness in these Gorgeous Girls as in their fathers
frequently causes them to produce good results in the lives of those
they apparently harm. As in Steve's case--he found his ultimate
salvation not so much by Mary Faithful's love and service as by
realizing the Gorgeous Girl's shallow tragedy. With iron wills
concealed behind childish faces and misdirected energy searching for
novelty, so the Gorgeous Girls stand to-day a deluxe monument to the
failure of their adoring, check-bestowing, shortsighted parents. They
are neither salamanders nor vampires. Steve had not spoken truly. They
are more chaste and generous of heart than the former, more aloof from
sordid things than the latter. Wonderful, curious little creatures
with frail, tempting physiques and virile endurance, playing whatever
game is handy without remorse and without vicious intent just as long
as it interests them--in the same careless fashion their fathers
stoked an engine or became a baker's assistant as long as it proved
advantageous.
Moreover, they are so apart from the workaday world that it is
impossible to refrain from thinking of them in unwise fashion--even
after life has fallen into pleasant channels and the dearly beloved of
all the world is by one's side. So strong yet so weak, so tantalizing
yet generous, they have the power to haunt at strange intervals and in
strange fashion. So it was with Steve. He could not experience a storm
of definite reproach at the thought of Beatrice--nor bitter hatred.
Only a vague, lonesome urge, which soon dulled beside the sharp
commands of common sense.
It was only Mary who was done with visions and could give herself
unreservedly to the making of her home, the rearing of her family. But
Mary had realized her vision--not relinquished it.
THE END
THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS
GARDEN CITY, N. Y.