passer-by that looked up and glimpsed the form of that beautiful young
woman in her glass world might have imagined. Mostly they were directed
to her new evening gown, a polonaise snatched it might almost be said
prematurely by Lady Flower from the most fashionable of Parisian
costumiers. Mary dreamed of its _passementerie_ of beads and ruching of
Honiton lace, and then with heightened color of the amount of bare arm
it must reveal. She supposed that her grandmother was right and that
she should display as much of the upper part of her arm without risk of
censorious comment, but....
Mary wished that Daisy Harland had come up from the country yesterday
instead of waiting until to-night to wish her best friend many happy
returns of the day. Daisy's opinion would have been so valuable. Daisy
was so advanced, so unconventional, and yet always so right. But then
Grandmamma, too, was always right, and Grandmamma had deliberately
chosen the dress. Mary gave up bothering about the problem, which was
no problem at all really, because she must obviously take Grandmamma's
advice as long as Grandmamma was alive to give it. And if Grandmamma
should die? Why, then, in this great house she, Mary Flower, should
be all alone! No wonder Grandmamma was anxious for her to be safely
married. Marriage? That was indeed something to talk about with her
friend. If only the frost would hold so that Daisy might be resigned
to stay in London for a while and spend hours in discussing marriage.
Not of course as the topic had been discussed at school, where nobody
knew anything for certain and the horridest girls vied with one
another in dreadful propoundings. No, not like that, but seriously,
almost religiously--if one could compare two things so far asunder as
religion and marriage.
Mary contemplated the prospect of marriage with several of the men who
visited the house in King's Gate. None of them considered thus made her
feel at all anxious to be married; rather did each one present himself
to her fancy like an unknown bottle of medicine, the efficacy of which
was guaranteed but of the niceness or nastiness of which there was
nothing to be learned from its external appearance. It was not that
Mary had never imagined herself in love. Like most schoolgirls she
had cherished impossible loyalties and sentimental passions; but the
figures upon which these had been bestowed were like the figures in a
picture book or the remote incarnations that are begotten by music.
Love was an aspiration to a life beyond the present, a kind of yearning
upon immortality; it was never a practical guide to the humdrum, the
yet so intricate humdrum, of existence; it had nothing at all to do
with marriage.
Lady Flower was responsible for this attitude of her granddaughter. By
living so much in Paris, by allowing the French half of her character
to recover from years of discouragement by her husband, and by brooding
over her son's _mésalliance_--it was typical of the sentimental English
that they should have to borrow the right word from France--the old
lady felt herself more and more definitely inclined to the _mariage de
convenance_. She never let pass an opportunity to impress upon Mary
its superiority.
"Love, my dear child," she would tell her, "is an invention of the
poets to excuse their own weaknesses."
This afternoon, as Mary stared out across the wintry park, love did
seem a long way off from King's Gate, and marriage, for all it was such
a mystery, did seem comparatively near.
"Though suppose nobody ever does propose to me?" Mary thought. She
turned round for reassurance from the large gilded mirror over the
mantelpiece, and wished that she had never seen herself in a glass
before, so that she could arrive at a decision about her beauty. Was
she beautiful? If with six other girls she stood before a mirror for
the first time, so that she did not know which was herself, should she
think herself beautiful? But she should know which was herself, because
she should recognize the other girls, and the stranger in the middle
would be herself.
"Oh, am I or am I not beautiful?" she asked aloud of her reflection,
standing motionless in that frozen, reflected room where nothing was
alive except the swift pendulum of the ormulu clock on the wall behind
her. "Am I or am I not beautiful?" she repeated with a sigh, as she
took her place once more by the window and gazed out at the black and
white trees in the Park, beneath whose filigree of boughs people were
wandering in couples upon the powdered grass, walking so slowly that
they must be happy, Mary thought. She was filled with envy of those
shadows beyond the railings, who could upon this cold January afternoon
pace up and down with such unhurried steps. They surely must be lovers,
who could find delight in this chill and somber air, who could stroll
arm in arm about this landscape that was sinking beneath the weight of
a leaden sky. There opposite, two shadows were actually sitting upon a
bench, sitting as close as birds sit upon a perch at dusk. They must
love each other very deeply and very dearly, to endure the cold, very
deeply and very dearly to stay there away from the firelight. Beautiful
firelight, Mary thought; and she watched for a while its diminished
reflection lambent within the milky windowpanes.
"_Miladi_ is awake, Mademoiselle," said Adèle, coming into the room.
The canaries that lived in the domed conservatory at the back of the
drawing-room began to sing. The depression of the long silence was
broken.
Mary ran up the cheerful gas-lit stairs to her grandmother.
Lady Flower had tried to neutralize the fretwork of age by excess of
lace. She was still ivory; but the ivory was scratched, here and there
even badly cracked. The texture of lace seemed more likely than any
other to distract the attention of the observer, to confuse him by its
infinite reticulation and thus provide an illusive calendry for that
wrinkled countenance of hers.
"Well, dear," she began at once, sitting up among the pillows when Mary
came into the room. "I slept much better than I expected after those
grated chestnuts we had for your birthday lunch. I have an impression
of dreaming a good deal, but I've forgotten what about. So much the
better, for there is nobody so irritating as a _raconteur des rêves_."
Mary had been half inclined to tell Lady Flower about her own dreams
by the window; but she was deterred by this remark, and perhaps in any
case she would have been too much afraid of the old lady's cynical
toleration to expose those fleeting and intangible shades of romantic
love to her sparrowy eyes and pecks.
"I'm glad you feel rested," she said.
"Thank you, my dear."
They were always very courteous to each other, these two, or rather
Lady Flower was always very courteous to her granddaughter. Mary was
dutiful; and Lady Flower accepted any hint of affection, any display
of sympathy or consideration, as the fruit of a good upbringing. She
had no qualms about the younger generation. In the estimation of Lady
Flower young people existed to show respect and do their duty toward
their elders. Youth and labor at this period were still in bondage.
"I have invited more people than I intended for this evening," Lady
Flower went on. "I was anxious to give you an opportunity of seeing
various aspects of contemporary life."
"How kind of you, Grandmamma."
"Nothing to thank me for; I am doing no more than my duty."
Lady Flower made this admission a trifle unwillingly; but she thought
it right to let Mary understand that, as she grew older, she, too,
would find duty dogging her like a shadow. She must not be allowed to
suppose that marriage meant freedom.
"Yes," she continued complacently, "I have invited several artistic
people. They seem to be getting themselves a good deal talked about
nowadays, and I felt you ought to meet some of them. By the way, Mr.
Alison is coming."
"I'm glad," said Mary. "He's very nice."
"Very nice, indeed," her grandmother agreed emphatically. "And very
much _beau garçon_. About thirty-five," she went on, meditating aloud.
"About thirty-five, and extremely well off. He wrote to me that he was
returning from the Continent on purpose to be present at your birthday
party. I must say I find that highly significant."
"Significant of what?"
"My dear, innocence is a charming and attractive quality; but do not
be too _ingénue_. No, not too _ingénue_. At any rate with me. You must
surely have noticed how _empressé_ he has always been with you? He
admires you, and though of course I do not wish to influence you unduly
or to persuade you into a hasty marriage, at the same time ... however,
there are others every bit as suitable as Mr. Alison. I just happen
to have noticed that he is rather obviously ... however, please, my
dear child, pay no attention to what I was saying, because I should
be unwilling, oh, yes, most unwilling, to precipitate a marriage with
anybody, even a young man so perfectly eligible as Mr. Alison. At the
same time, you are twenty, are you not? And I am seventy. You will of
course inherit a comfortable sum when I die, but that makes it all the
more imperative to choose for your husband a man who has money."
Mary did not quite see the logic of this; but she had long ago been
successfully cured of asking why; and, since the prospect of marrying
Mr. Alison was at least as pleasant as the prospect of marrying anybody
else, she was not sufficiently interested to pursue the topic.
But Mr. Alison took Mary into dinner; Lady Flower felt that he deserved
some reward for hurrying back from Nice.
James Alison, known generally as Jemmie Alison, was a stockbroker who
had succeeded at the age of twenty-seven to a lucrative business. As
a boy, when he had fair, curly hair, he had been definitely handsome.
He was now a florid man with a heavy fair mustache, who was still
good-looking, although his hair was beginning to require some arranging
before it would cover the top of his head, and his features showed
signs of coarsening. From his schooldays at Eton, indeed from the day
he was born, he had never been compelled to deny himself anything,
and like many men who have inherited a fortune early in life he looked
older than he was and felt older than he looked. After dinner he was
separated from Mary for some time; but at last he managed to find a
seat beside her in the conservatory while a famous tenor was singing:
_I had a message to send her,
To her, whom my soul loved best;
But I had my task to finish,
And she has gone home to rest._
"Beautiful song," said Mr. Alison.
"Exquisite!" Mary sighed.
_I had a message to send her,
So tender, and true, and sweet,
I longed for an Angel to bear it,
And lay it down at her feet._
"Things can be said in songs that can't be said any other way," Mr.
Alison murmured with a sigh.
Mary appeared wrapt in the melody.
_I cried, in my passionate longing;--
"Has the earth no Angel-friend
Who will carry my love the message
That my heart desires to send?"_
Mr. Alison looked appealingly at Mary; but she was still wrapt in the
melody.
_Then I heard a strain of music,
So mighty, so pure, so clear,
That my very sorrow was silent,
And my heart stood still to hear._
"One of the loveliest songs I ever heard," Mr. Alison declared. "And he
sings it divinely."
_And I tenderly laid my message
On the music's outspread wings._
_I heard it float farther and farther,
In sound more perfect than speech;
Farther than sight can follow,
Farther than soul can reach._
Mary with a tear in each eye was staring up at the dome of the
conservatory. Mr. Alison, although he could not muster a tear even
in one eye, looked in the same direction and derived a great deal of
satisfaction from the thought that he and this beautiful girl by his
side were both staring at the same pane of glass. The singer achieved a
triumphant C.
_And I know that at last my message
Has passed through the golden gate;
So my heart is no longer restless,
And I am content to wait._
"'Content to wait,'" Mr. Alison echoed meaningly, when the applause had
died down. "'Content to wait,'" he repeated. "So long as I know that
somebody has received my message."
Mary was nearly sure that this was a declaration; but she was not
absolutely sure, and she wished that Daisy Harland had not at the last
moment telegraphed to say that she could not be with her beloved Mary
on her twentieth birthday.
"Ah, Miss Flower," Mr. Alison continued, shaking his head. "It would
be hard for you to understand the thoughts of a man like myself when
he hears a song like that. At the same time, the moral of it surely is
that, however far away we may seem from heaven, we are not so far away
in reality. We can hope. We can hope, Miss Flower. I wonder if I might
venture to say Mary?"
"Oh, certainly, please call me Mary," she begged him nervously.
"Thank you, Mary."
Mr. Alison wished that he could quote a line of poetry about some
romantic Mary; but he could only think of _Mary had a little lamb_. And
he felt that to sigh this forth with as much passionate emphasis as he
could achieve would sound rather silly.
"I suppose," he ventured, "you couldn't bring yourself to call me
Jemmie? All my chums call me Jemmie. Jemmie Alison. Nobody ever calls
me James. Nobody ever did call me James except my grandmother on my
father's side. Funny old woman. She simply would not call me Jemmie.
She always said the name reminded her of a fright she had in childhood
when some burglars broke into her father's house, who of course would
have been my great-grandfather. Now that's going back some way. My
father died in '72. He was sixty-three then. So he was born in 1809,
when my grandmother was twenty-one. That makes her born in 1788. So I
suppose this burglary must have happened about 1798. That's a long time
ago, isn't it?"
"A very long time ago," Mary agreed. She was so much muddled by Mr.
Alison's statistics that if he had told her the burglary took place
shortly after the Battle of Hastings she would have accepted it as a
fact.
"I wish the old lady could have lived to meet you, Mary," he went on.
"You are just the kind of girl she would have liked me to marry."
Luckily for Mary, who did not know what comment she ought to make on
this last piece of information, by this time the tenor was off again:
_Do you grieve no costly offering
To the lady you can make?
One there is, and gifts less worthy
Queens have stooped to take._
_Take a Heart of virgin silver,
Fashion it with heavy blows,
Cast it into Love's hot furnace
When it fiercest glows._
"Is that your heart or mine?" Mr. Alison asked in a puzzled voice. "I
don't quite get that. I mean, is that his heart or hers?"
Mary motioned him not to talk, because people were beginning to turn
round and peer at the palms among which they were sitting, curious to
know what discordant mutter was profaning the music.
_With pain's sharpest point transfix it,
And then carve in letters fair,
Tender dreams and quaint devices,
Fancies sweet and rare._
_Set within it Hope's blue sapphire,
Many-changing, opal fears,
Blood-red ruby-stones of daring,
Mixed with pearly tears._
"Hope's red ruby!" exclaimed Mr. Alison. "That's really uncommonly
fine, I think."
_And when you have wrought and labored
Till the gift is all complete,
You may humbly lay your offering
At the Lady's feet._
_Should her mood perchance be gracious--
With disdainful smiling pride,
She will place it with the trinkets
Glittering at her side._
"I got muddled in that song," Mr. Alison confessed. "I don't think it's
as good as the first one. Mary, before another song begins, may I tell
you that I love you? May I ask you to be my wife? I know that you do
not love me yet. But you might learn to love me. Mightn't you, Mary?
You're very young. I can wait, now that I have delivered my message at
the golden gate. Now I shall always reverence that song, Mary. To my
dying day. It seems to me sitting here beside you at this moment more
like a sacred song than just ordinary poetry. I wonder who wrote it?"
"I wonder," echoed Mary, glad to find the conversation turning away
from personalities to literature.
"I suppose it wasn't Shakespeare?" Mr. Alison hazarded.
"No, I don't _think_ it was Shakespeare."
"He wrote such a lot of well-known stuff," said Mr. Alison. "One's
pretty safe five times out of ten to guess Shakespeare. But, Mary, you
have not replied to my question. May I hope? May I set in my heart
Hope's red ruby?"
"It was Hope's blue sapphire," she corrected.
"Well, whatever jewel it was, may I hope?"
"I hadn't expected anything like this," said Mary, wondering whether it
would create general consternation if she were to jump up from her seat
and rush out of the conservatory.
"I know it seems sudden; but it's not really so sudden. All the time
I've been in the south of France I've been thinking about you. I tried
to drown my despair by playing roulette. In fact, I won quite a lot of
money, because I played so recklessly."
Mary turned pale. Could her existence really affect a man of the world
like Mr. Alison up to the point of reckless gambling?
"I felt in my inmost being that you could not love me. You're as much
above me as a--as a--as an angel!" He tried not to look proud of the
simile. "I know I am not worthy of you, Mary. I know that. But I have
said enough. You look agitated. Please do not let my impetuosity
distress you. Hark! Somebody else is going to sing."
The deep notes of a voluptuous contralto broke into the murmur of small
talk like a dinner-gong.
"Don't forget, Mary," said Mr. Alison, when the sonorous abracadabra of
an Italian song had died away in loud applause. "I have delivered my
message, and I am content to wait. Shall I take you downstairs and get
you an ice?"
"Oh, thank you, Mr. Alison."
"Mary, please!" he moaned reproachfully. "Jemmie. I thought you'd
promised me that much."
It was lucky the ices were downstairs; for his tone would have melted
the lot had they been in the conservatory.
"Jemmie," she whispered, feeling exactly as if she had swallowed a pill
without water.
"You have made me radiantly happy," he affirmed. "By Jove, I feel as
if I never knew my name _was_ Jemmie until this moment."
As for Mary, she felt nothing except a vague hope that she had not
committed herself too deeply by granting Mr. Alison's desire to be
called Jemmie. Her grandmother might choose to consider that by doing
so she had accepted him. She prayed that Daisy Harland would soon reach
London. Otherwise, at this rate, she would find herself married before
she knew it.
For the rest of the evening she managed to avoid her suitor, though it
was at the cost of having to endure the dissertative bibble-babble upon
Japanese interiors of a young man with long hair and a double chin, one
of those artistic people whom the hostess had invited to her reception
in order to support a daring social experiment that was having a vogue.
"Did Mr. Alison give you an amusing account of his tour in France?"
Lady Flower inquired after the sound of the last carriage had died away
on the frosty air.
"He talked about France. He wasn't very amusing," said Mary.
"You seemed to be getting on very well together, nevertheless,"
observed her grandmother. "In fact, when What's-his-name, the tenor,
was singing it was really quite noticeable that you were too much
occupied with each other to pay any attention to the music."
"We were discussing the music," Mary said, wishing that her
grandmother would go to bed, and not ask any more questions.
"I suppose that if he does seriously intend to ask for your hand he
will speak to me first. He's not so young as to be able to neglect
that courtesy. He's not one of the young communards of to-day who
consider they have equal rights with parents and guardians. He'll
be ready to admit that we elders have some authority left. Only
fancy, my dear, Lady Pringle tells me that her daughters demand, yes,
positively demand, to play in a lawn-tennis competition next summer.
A public affair, as far as I can make out. She made me shudder with
her description of it. Young women of breeding and education are to
expose themselves in front of anybody who likes to pay the necessary
charge for admission. Dear me, I remember that your poor grandfather
used sometimes to be shocked by what he considered my ultra-modern and
extravagantly continental ideas. What would he have said, had he been
alive to-day? I do hope your friend, Daisy Harland, won't persuade
_you_ into wanting to appear as a female acrobat. She has always
struck me as the kind of young woman who would do anything. She was a
dreadfully noisy girl, I remember."
Mary allowed Daisy's character to be sacrificed in order to divert her
grandmother from the discussion of Mr. Alison. Soon she was able to
propose bed and was glad when at last she found herself alone in the
dark with her secret.
Her first proposal....
Only that afternoon she had been wondering if any one would propose to
her, and already on her twentieth birthday she had received one.
Jemmie....
But she did not think of him as Jemmie. Were she to become his wife
to-morrow, she should for a long time think of him as Mr. Alison.
Mary Alison....
That was rather attractive.
Mrs. Alison....
It was in his favor that he had neither father nor mother alive. If
she did make up her mind to marry him, she should not want another
grandmamma in her mother-in-law.
Mary Alison ... yours most truly, Mary Alison....
But marriage meant more than that. Rather horrid intimacies ...
children....
"Do I want children?" Mary asked herself. "I don't believe I do at all."
Pain! And of course, unless she had been utterly misinformed, it must
hurt horribly.
"I should never have the courage," she told herself. "Never," she
decided, and turning over she was soon fast asleep.
A week later, Daisy Harland did come to London, and to her in that top
room of the Harlands' house in South Kensington, in that room papered
with hunting scenes, which was bound up more closely with her girlhood
than any room in the world, Mary confided the tale of her first
proposal.
"He's not so bad," Daisy commented. "He's clean to look at. Pretty well
off too, I should say. But why be in a hurry?"
"Oh, I'm not in any hurry. It's my grandmother who is so anxious to see
me safely married."
"I wonder why. I suppose she can't bear the idea of not arranging the
whole matter to please herself."
Mary gazed down at the garden of the Square, in which little girls well
wrapped up in white furs were running about after large particolored
balls of india rubber, while their nurses gossiped gravely with one
another, moving with slow and stately tread behind their perambulators.
What fun she and Daisy had always had in the Square when she used to
stay with her friend for the holidays! Perhaps it was the bareness
of winter that made it seem so small nowadays; or perhaps everything
shrank as one grew older.
"Don't you think that a girl ought to love the man she is going to
marry?" Mary pressed.
"But what is love? Personally I've never been in love."
"Daisy! You were tremendously in love with Gerald Ashworth. Don't you
remember when you bought that lilac notepaper with two hearts stamped
in the top corner?"
Her friend laughed.
"You don't think seriously that the kind of silliness in which one
indulges at fifteen is to be considered an experience?"
"Yes, I do," Mary insisted. "If I hadn't been in love when I was small,
I shouldn't be bothering now about being in love with Jemmie Alison. I
shouldn't expect anything. As it is, I feel somehow that I want more
than he can give me."
"If you'd come back with me to Berkshire and hunt, you'd soon forget
all your troubles."
"Should I? I wonder. Not by hunting, Daisy. You would not enjoy hunting
so much, if you weren't so proud of yourself for learning to ride so
late in life."
"I wish we'd had our place in Berkshire when I was little," said Daisy
regretfully. "I _should_ have been a horsewoman then. The pater might
just as well have launched out a bit earlier. We didn't really save
anything by living in London."
"But it was fun when we used to play up here," said Mary. "Do you
remember when we made those paper boxes and filled them with ink and
dropped them on the pavement? Oh, and don't you remember when Eustace
Arnesby came to tea, and he dropped one on an old gentleman's hat?"
"Eustace is at Sandhurst now," said Daisy. "Talking of young love, I
did have rather a pash for him."
"Daisy!"
"What's the matter?"
"You do say such terrible things."