THE GOOD-BYE GATE
Fortunately they were so late in getting to the station that there was
no time for a prolonged leave-taking. Phil hurried away to the
baggage-room to check their trunks. Henrietta made a move as if to
follow. Her overwrought sympathies kept her nervously opening and
shutting her hands, for she dreaded scenes, and would not have put
herself in the way of witnessing a painful parting, had she not thought
she owed it to Joyce to stand by her to the last.
Joyce noticed the movement, and divining the cause, said with a little
smile, as she laid a detaining hand on her arm, "Don't be scared, Henry.
We are not going to have any high jinks, are we, Mary. We made the old
Vicar's acquaintance too early in the game and have been practising his
motto too many years to go back on him now. We're going to keep
inflexible, no matter what happens. Aren't we, Mary?"
For several minutes Mary had been seeing things through a blur of tears,
which came at the thought of what a long parting this might be. There
was no telling when she would see Joyce again. It might be years. But
she answered a resolute yes, and Joyce went on.
"Why, we taught it even to Norman when he wasn't more than a baby.
'Swallow your sobs, and stiffen,' we'd say, and he'd gulp them down
every time, and brace up like a little soldier. Oh, if I'd just flop and
let myself go I could cry myself into a shoestring in five minutes. But
thanks to early discipline we're not going to do it. Are we, Mary?"
By this time Mary could only shake her head in reply, but she did it
resolutely, and the determination carried her safely through the parting
with Joyce. But Phil almost broke down the self-control she was
struggling to maintain, when he came back with the checks and hurried
aboard the train with her and Betty. Taking both her hands in his he
looked down with both voice and face so full of tender sympathy, that
her lips quivered and her eyes filled with tears.
"You brave little thing!" he exclaimed in a low tone. "If there is ever
anything that I can do to make it easier, let me know, and I'll come.
Promise me now. You'll let me know."
"I--I promise," she answered, faltering over the sob that rose in her
throat as she tried to speak, but smiling bravely up at him.
With one more hand-clasp that spoke sympathy and understanding even more
than his words had done, and somehow left her with a sense of being
comforted and protected, he went away. But half way down the aisle he
turned and dashed back, drawing a little package from his pocket as he
came.
"Something to read on the way," he explained. "Wait till you get to that
lonesome stretch of desert," Then with a smile that she carried in her
memory for years, he said once more, "Good-bye, little Vicar! Remember,
I'll come!"
He swung down the steps at the front end of the car just as the train
started, and through the open window she had one more glimpse of him, as
he stood there lifting his hat. Farther back, at the station gate Joyce
waited with her arm linked in Henrietta's, for the moment when Mary's
last glance should be turned to seek her. She met it with a blithe wave
of her handkerchief, and Mary waved vigorously in response. It was a
long time before she turned away from the window. When she did she had
nearly recovered her self-control, and grateful for Betty's considerate
silence, she busied herself with her suit-case a few minutes, fumbling
with the lock, and making a pretence of repacking, in order to find room
for the book that Phil had brought.
The night before, in the first numb apathy of the shock, it had seemed
to her that nothing mattered any more. Nothing could make the dreadful
state of affairs more bearable; but now she acknowledged to herself that
some things did help. How wonderfully comforting Phil's assurance of
sympathy had been; the silent assurance of that firm, tender hand-clasp.
It was easier to be brave since he had called her so and expected it of
her.
Betty, in a seat across the aisle, opened a magazine, but Mary could not
settle down to read. A nervous unrest kept her going over and over in
her mind, as she had done through the previous night, the scenes that
lay ahead of her. There was the packing, and she checked off on her
fingers the many details that she must be sure to remember. There were
those borrowed books she mustn't forget to return. Her scissors were in
Cornie's room. Miss Gilmer had her best basketry patterns. There were so
many things that finally she made a memorandum of them, dully wondering
as she did so how she could think of them at all. One would have
supposed that the awful disaster that was continually in her thoughts
would have blotted out these little commonplace trivial concerns. But
they didn't. She couldn't understand it.
Presently the sound of a low crooning in the seat behind her made her
glance over her shoulder. An old coloured mammy, in the whitest of
freshly starched aprons and turbans, was rocking a child to sleep in her
arms. He was a dear little fellow, pink and white as an apple-blossom,
with a Teddy bear hugged close in his arms. One furry paw rested on his
dimpled neck. The bit of Uncle Remus song the nurse was singing had a
soothing effect on him, but it fell dismally on Mary's ears:
"Oh, don't stay long! Oh, don't stay late!
My honey, my love.
Hit ain't so mighty fur ter de Good-bye Gate,
My honey, my love!"
"The Good-bye Gate!" she repeated to herself. That was what they had
come to now, she and Jack. Not a little wicket through which one might
push his way back some day, but a great barred thing that was clanging
behind them irrevocably, shutting them away for ever from the fair road
along which they had travelled so happily. Shutting out even the
slightest view of those far-off "Delectable Mountains," towards which
they had been journeying. In the face of Jack's misfortune and all that
he was giving up, her part of the sacrifice sank into comparative
insignificance. Her suffering for him was so great that it dulled the
sharpness of her own renunciations, and even dulled her disappointment
for Joyce. The year in Paris had meant as much to her as the course at
Warwick Hall had meant to Mary.
All through the trip she sat going round and round the same circle of
thoughts, ending always with the hopeless cry, "Oh, _why_ did it have to
be? It isn't right that _he_ should have to suffer so!" Once when the
train stopped for some time to take water and wait on a switch for the
passing of a fast express, she opened her suit-case and took out her
journal and fountain-pen. Going on with the record from the place where
she had dropped it the day before when Jack's letter interrupted it, she
chronicled the receipt of the check, the shopping expedition that
followed, and the gay outing afterward in the touring-car. Then down
below she wrote:
"But now I have come to the Good-bye Gate. Good-bye to all my good
times. So good-bye, even to you, little book, since you were to mark
only the hours that shine. Here at the bottom of the page I must write
the words, '_The End_.'"
When they reached Warwick Hall she was too tired to begin any
preparations that night for the longer journey, and still so dazed with
the thought of Jack's calamity to be keenly alive to the fact that this
was the last night she would ever spend in the beloved room. She was
thankful to have it to herself for these last few hours, and thankful
when Betty and Madam Chartley finally went out and left her alone. She
was worn out trying to keep up before people and to be brave as they
bade her. It was a relief to put out the light and, lying there alone in
the dark, cry and cry till at last she sobbed herself to sleep.
Not till the next morning did she begin to feel the wrench of leaving,
when the fresh fragrance of wet lilacs awakened her, blowing up from the
old garden where all the sweetness of early April was astir. Then she
remembered that she would be far, far away when the June roses bloomed
at Commencement, and that this was the last time she would ever be
wakened by the blossoms and bird-calls of the dear old garden.
She sat up and looked around the room from one familiar object to
another, oppressed and miserable at the thought that she would never see
them again. Then her glance rested on Lloyd's picture, and for once the
make-believe companionship of Lloyd's shadow-self brought a comfort as
deep as if her real self had spoken. She held out her arms to it,
whispering brokenly:
"Oh, _you_ understand how hard it is, don't you, dear? You're the only
one in the world who does, because you had to give up all this, too."
Gazing at the pictured face through her tears, she recalled how Lloyd
had met _her_ disappointment, trying to live each day so unselfishly
that she could go on, stringing the little pearls on her rosary.
"If you could do it, I can too," she said presently. "And the best of
having such a chum is I needn't leave you behind when I leave school.
You are one thing that I don't have to give up."
That picture was the last thing she put into her trunk. She left it
hanging on the wall while she did all the rest of her packing, that she
might glance at it now and then. It helped wonderfully to remember that
Lloyd had had the same experience. Madam Chartley came in while she was
in the midst of her preparations for leaving, glad to find her making
them with her usual energy and interest When in answer to her offers of
assistance Mary assured her there was nothing any one could do, she
said, "I'll not stay then, except to say one thing that I may not have
opportunity for later." She paused and laid her hands on Mary's
shoulders, looking down at her searchingly and kindly.
"I want you to know this--that I have never had a pupil whom I parted
from as reluctantly as I shall part from you. Your enthusiasm and love
of school have been a joy to your teachers and an inspiration to every
girl in Warwick Hall. If it were merely a matter of expense I would not
let you go, but under the circumstances I have no right to interfere.
You ought to go. And my dear little girl, remember this, whenever
regrets come up for the school days brought so suddenly to a close, that
school is only to prepare us to meet the tests of life, and already you
have met one of its greatest--'_To renounce when that shall be
necessary, and not be embittered_!' And you are doing that so bravely
that I want you to know how much I admire and love you for it."
To Madam's surprise the words of praise did not carry the comfort she
intended. Mary's arms were thrown around her neck and a tearful face
hidden on her shoulder, as leaning against her she sobbed, "Oh, Madam
Chartley! I wish you could feel that way about me, but honestly I
haven't stood the test. I can renounce for myself, and not feel bitter,
but I can't renounce for Jack! It makes me _wild_ whenever I think of
all he has to give up. It isn't right! How could God let such an awful
thing happen to him, when he has always lived such a beautiful unselfish
life?"
Drawing her to a seat beside the window, Madam sat with an arm around
her, until the sobs grew quiet, and then began to answer her
question--the same old cry that has gone up from stricken souls ever
since the world began. And Mary, listening, felt the comfort and the
uplift of a strong faith that had learned to go unfaltering through the
sorest trials, knowing that out of the worst of them some compensating
good should be wrested in the end. For months afterwards, whenever that
bitter cry rose to her lips again, she stilled it with the remembrance
of those words. Sometime, somehow, even this terrible calamity should be
made the stepping-stone to better things. How such a thing could come to
pass Mary could not understand, but Madam's faith that such would be so,
comforted her. It was as if one little glimmering star struggled out
through the blackness of the night, and in the light of that she plucked
up courage to push on hopefully through the dark.
That afternoon just as her trunk was being carried out, the 'bus drove
up, bringing back its first instalment of returning pupils. Cornie Dean
was among them, and Elise and A.O. Mary, looking out of the window,
heard the familiar voices, and feeling that their questions and sympathy
would be more than she could bear, caught up her hat and hand-baggage,
and ran over to Betty's room to wait there until time to go.
"No, I can't see any of them, _please_." she begged, when Betty came in
to say how distressed and shocked they all were to hear about Jack, and
to know that she was leaving school. They were all crying over it, and
wanted to see her, if only for a moment.
"No," persisted Mary. "It would just start me all off again to hear one
sympathetic word, and my eyes are like red flannel now. I've already
said good-bye to Madam, and I'm going to slip out without speaking to
another soul."
"You'll have to speak to Hawkins," said Betty. "For he is lying in wait
for you with such a box of lunch as never went out of this establishment
before. He asked Madam's permission to put it up for you himself. He
told her about your binding up his hands the day the chafing-dish turned
over and burned him so badly, and about the letter you wrote for one of
the maids that got her sister into a school for the blind, and several
other things, winding up with 'There's a young lady with a _'eart_ in
'er, Ma'am!'"
Betty mimicked his accent so well that Mary laughed for the first time
since her return. "Well, he's got a 'eart in _'im_!" she answered,
"though I never would have imagined it the day I made my entrance here.
He was like a grand, graven image. Oh, Betty, it _is_ nice to know that
people like you and are sorry that you are going. Even if it does make
you feel sort of weepy it takes a big part of the sting out of leaving."
Betty went with her in to Washington, and stayed with her until the
train left. Hawkins was the only one they encountered on their way out,
and Mary took the proffered lunch-box with a smile that was very close
to tears. Her voice faltered over her words of thanks, and when she had
been handed into the 'bus she dared not trust herself to look back at
the faithful old servitor in the doorway. Once, just as they swung
around the curve that hid the beautiful grounds from sight, she leaned
out for one more look, then hastily pulled down her veil.
At the station, as they sat waiting for her train, Betty said, "I'll
write every week and tell you all the news, but don't feel that you must
answer regularly. I know how your time will be occupied. But I should
like a postal now and then, telling me how Jack is. You know," she went
on, stooping to retie her shoe, "he and I have been corresponding for
some time, and I think of him as one of my oldest and best friends. I
shall always be anxious for news of him."
Betty could fairly feel the surprise in Mary's face, even though she was
stooping forward too far to see it, and she heard with inward amusement
her astonished exclamations. "Well, of all things! I didn't know you
were writing to each other! Jack never said a word about it, and yet he
sent you a message nearly every time he wrote to me!"
She was still puzzling about it when her train was called, and she had
to take leave of Betty. All too soon the last familiar face was out of
sight, and the long, lonely journey home was begun.
It was near the close of the third day's journey when she remembered
Phil's book and took it out of its wrappings. She was not in a reading
humour, but time hung heavy, and he had said to open it when she reached
the desert. Besides, she was a trifle curious to see what kind of a book
he had chosen for her. It was a very small one. She could soon skim
through it.
"_The Jester's Sword_" was the title. Not a very attractive subject for
any one in her mood, she thought. It would be a sorry smile at best that
the gayest of jesters could bring to her. She turned the leaves
listlessly, then sat up with an air of attention. There on the
title-page was a line from Stevenson, the very thing Madam Chartley had
said to her the day she left Warwick Hall. "_To renounce when that shall
be necessary, and not be embittered._"
Phil had chosen wisely after all if his little tale were to tell her how
to do it. Then a paragraph on the first page claimed her attention.
"_Because he was born in Mars' month, the bloodstone became his signet,
sure token that undaunted courage would be the jewel of his soul._"
Why, she and Jack were both born in Mars' month, and each had a
bloodstone, and each had to answer to an awful call for courage. It was
dear of Phil to choose such an appropriate story. Settling herself
comfortably back in the seat, she began to read, never dreaming what a
difference in all her after life the little tale was to make.