"She'll be able to talk to you in a few minutes now, parson." He was so perfectly unconscious of himself that he had no idea he had just made mute confession. He added, doubtfully: "She said she had to come to you, about something--I don't know what. It's up to you to find out--she's got to talk to you, parson."

"But--I wanted to talk to you, Padre. That's why I--ran away from home in the middle of the night." She sat suddenly erect. "I just couldn't stand things, any more--by myself--"

Gone was the fine lady, the great beauty, the proud jilt who had broken Laurence's heart and maddened and enslaved Inglesby. Here was only a piteous child with eyes heavy from weeping, with a pale and sad face and drooping childish lips. And yet she was so dear and so lovely, for all her reddened eyelids and her reddened little nose, that one could have wept with her. The b.u.t.terfly Man, with an intake of breath, stood up.

"I shall leave you with the Padre now," he said evenly, "to tell him what you wanted to tell him. Father, understand: there's something rotten wrong, as I've been telling you all along. Now she's got to tell you what it is and all about it. Everything. Whether she likes to or not, and no matter what it is, she's got to tell you. You understand that, Mary Virginia?"

She fixed him with a glance that had in it something hostile and oblique. Even with those dearest of women whom I adore, there are moments when I have the impression that they have, so to speak, their ears laid back flat, and I experience what I may justly term cat-fear.

I felt it then.

"Oh, don't have too much consideration for my feelings, Mr. Flint!"

said she, with that oblique and baffling glance, and the smile Old Fitz once likened to the Curve in the Cat's Tail. "Indeed, why should you go? Why don't you stay and find out _why_ I wanted to run to the Padre--to beg him to find some way to help me, since I can't fall like a plum into Mr. Inglesby's hand when Mr. Hunter shakes the Eustis family tree!"

His breath came whistlingly between his teeth.

"Parson! You hear?" he slapped his leg with his open palm. "Oh, I knew it, I knew it!" And he turned upon her a kindling glance:

"I knew all along it was never in you to be anything but true!" said the b.u.t.terfly Man.

CHAPTER XVI

"WILL YOU WALK INTO MY PARLOR"

It is impossible for me to put down in her own words what Mary Virginia told the b.u.t.terfly Man and me. Also, I have had to fill in gaps here and there, supplying what was lacking, from my intimate knowledge of the actors and from such chance words and hints and bits of detail as came to me afterward. But what I have added has been necessary, in order to do greater justice to everybody concerned.

If it be true that the boy is father to the man, it is even more tritely true that the girl is mother to the woman, there being here less chance for change. So it was with Mary Virginia. That gracious little girlhood of hers, lived among the birds and bees and blossoms of an old Carolina garden, had sent her into the Church School with a settled and definite idealism as part of her nature. Her creed was simple enough: The world she knew was the best of all possible worlds, its men good, its women better; and to be happy and loved one had only to be good and loving.

The school did not disabuse her of this pleasing optimism. It was a very expensive school and could afford to have optimisms of its own.

For one thing, it had no pupils poor enough to apply the acid test.

When Mary Virginia was seventeen, Mrs. Eustis perceived with dismay that her child who had promised beauty was instead become angular, awkward, and self-conscious; and promptly packed the unworldly one off to spend a saving summer with a strenuously fashionable cousin, a widow, of whom she herself was very fond. She liked the idea of placing the gauche girl under so vigorous and seasoned a wing as Estelle Baker's. As for Mrs. Baker herself, that gay and good-humored lady laughed at the leggy and serious youngster and promptly took her education in hand along lines not laid down in Church Schools.

Mrs. Baker was delighted with her own position--the reasonably young, handsome, and wealthy widow of a man she had been satisfied to marry and later to bury. She had an unimpaired digestion and no illusions, a kind heart, and the power of laughter. Naturally, she found life interesting. A club-woman, an ultra-modernist, vitally alive, she was fully abreast of her day. Her small library skimmed the cream of the insurgents and revolutionaries of genius; and here the shy and reticent schoolgirl with the mark of the churchly checkrein fresh upon her, was free to browse, for her cousin had no slightest notion of playing censor. Mrs. Baker thought that the sooner one was allowed to slough off the gaucheries of the Young Person, the better. She did not gauge the real and tumultuous depths of feeling concealed under the young girl's simplicity.

The revolutionaries and the insurgent and free poets didn't trouble Mary Virginia very much. Although she sensed that something was wrong with somebody somewhere--hence these lyrical lamentations--she could not, to save her, tell what all the pother was about, for as yet she saw the world _couleur de rose_. Some one or two of the French and Germans pleased her; she fell into long reveries over the Gael, who has the sound of the sea in his voice and whose eyes are full of a haunting light, as of sunsets upon graves. But it was the Russians who electrified and dazzled her. When she glimpsed with her eyes of a young girl those strange souls simple as children's and yet mosaiced with unimaginable and barbarous splendors, she stood blinking and half blinded, awed, fascinated, and avid to know more of that sky-scaling pa.s.sion with which they burned.

And in that crucial moment she chanced upon the "Diary of Marie Bashkirtseff," so frank and so astounding that it took her breath away and swept her off her feet. She was stirred into a vague and trembling expectancy; she had the sense of waiting for something to happen. Life instantly became more colorful and more wonderful than she had dreamed could be possible, and she wished pa.s.sionately to experience all these emotions, so powerful and so poignant. The Russian's morbid and disease-bright genius acted upon her as with the force and intensity of a new and potent toxin. She could not lay the book aside, but carried it up to her room to be pored and pondered over. She failed to understand that, untried as she was, it was impossible for her to understand it. Had the book come later, it had been harmless enough; but it came at a most critical moment of that seething period when youth turns inward to question the universe, and demands that the answer shall be personal to itself. The first long ground-swell of awakening emotion swept over her, sitting in the pleasant chintz-hung room, with the Russian woman's wild and tameless heart beating through the book open upon her knees. And these waves of emotion that at recurrent intervals surge over the soul, come from the sh.o.r.es of a farther country than any earthly seas have touched, and recede to depths so profound that only the eyes of G.o.d may follow their ebb and flow.

Mrs. Baker, however, saw nothing about which to give herself any concern. If she perceived the girl intense and preoccupied, she smiled indulgently--at Mary Virginia's age one is apt to be like that, and one recovers from that phase as one gets over mumps and measles. Mrs.

Baker did think it advisable, though, to subtly detach the girl from books for awhile. She amused herself by allowing her wide-eyed glimpses of the larger life of grown-ups, by way of arousing and initiation. Thus it happened that one afternoon at the country-club, where Mary Virginia, at the green-fruit stage, found herself playing gooseberry instead of golf, Mrs. Baker sauntered up with a tall and very blonde man.

"Here," said she gaily, indicating with a wave of her hand her sulky-eyed young cousin, "is a marvel and a wonder--a girl who accepts on faith everything and everybody! My dear Howard, in all probability she will presently even believe in _you_!" With that she left them, whisked off by a waiting golfer.

The man and the girl appraised each other. The man saw young bread-and-b.u.t.ter with the raw sugar of beauty sprinkled upon it promisingly. What the girl saw was not so much a faultlessly groomed and handsome man as the most beautiful person in the world. And suddenly she was aware that that for which she had been waiting had come. Something divine and wonderful was happening, and there was fire before her eyes and the noise of unloosed winds and great waters in her ears, and her knees trembled and her heart fluttered. A vivid red flamed into her pale cheeks, a soft and trembling light suffused her blue eyes. That happens when the sweet and virginal freshness of youth is brought face to face with the bright shadow of love.

He drew her out of her shyness and made her laugh, and after awhile, when there was dancing, he danced with her. He did not behave to her as other men of Estelle's acquaintance had more than once behaved--as though they bestowed the lordly honor of their society upon her out of the sheer goodness of their hearts and their desire to please Mrs.

Baker. Mary Virginia was uncompromising and stiff-necked enough then, and she bored most of her cousin's friends unconsciously. Now this man, as much their superior as the sun is to farthing dips, was exerting himself to please her. That was the one thing Mary Virginia needed to arouse her.

Mrs. Baker admired Mr. Hunter for a grace of manner almost Latin in its charm. If at times he puzzled her, he at least never bored her or anybody else, and for this she praised him in the gates. Her respect for him deepened when she perceived that he never allowed himself to be absorbed or monopolized.

The pleasant widow did not take him too seriously. She only asked that he amuse and interest her. He did both, to a superlative degree. That is why and how he saw so much of the school-girl cousin whose navete made him smile, it was so absurdly sincere.

Mrs. Baker was glad enough to have Howard take her charge off her hands occasionally. She thought contact with this fine pagan an excellent thing for the girl who took herself so seriously. She was really fond of Mary Virginia, but she must have found her hand-grenade directness a bit disconcerting at times. She wanted the child's visit to be pleasant, and she considered it very amiable of Howard to help her make it so. She had no faintest notion of danger--to her Mary Virginia was nothing but a child, a little girl one indulged with pickles and pound-cake and the bliss of staying up later than the usual bedtime. As for Hunter, his was the French att.i.tude toward the Young Person; she had heard him say he preferred his flowers in full bloom and his fruit ripe--one then knows what one is getting; one isn't deceived by canker in the closed bud and worm in the green fruit. No, Howard wasn't the sort that hankered for verjuice.

None the less, although Mrs. Baker didn't know it, Mary Virginia was engaged to the G.o.dlike Howard when she returned to school. It was to be a state secret until after she was graduated, and in the meantime he was to "make himself worthier of her love." She hadn't any notion he could be improved upon, but it pleased her to hear him say that.

Humility in the superman is the ultimate proof of perfection.

The maid who attended her room at school arranged for the receipt of his letters and mailed Mary Virginia's. The maid was sentimental, and delighted to play a part smacking of those dime novels she spoiled her brains with.

The little schoolgirl who was in love with love, and secretly betrothed to a man who had stepped alive out of old knightly romance, walked in the Land of April Rainbows and felt the whole joyous universe suffused with a delicious and quivering glow of light and sound and scent. Surcharged with an emotion that she was irresistibly urged to express, and unable to do so by word of mouth, she was driven to the necessity of putting it down on paper for him. And she put it down in the burning words, the fiery phrases, of those anarchists of art who had intoxicated and obsessed her.

Just a little later,--even a year later--and Mary Virginia could never have written those letters. But now, very ignorant, very innocent, very impa.s.sioned, she accomplished a miracle. She was like one speaking an unknown tongue, perfectly sure that the spirit moved her, but quite unable to comprehend what it was that it moved her to say.

When Mrs. Baker insisted that her young cousin should come back to her for the Christmas holidays, the girl was more than eager to go. Seeing him again only deepened her infatuation.

That holiday visit was an unusually gay one, for Mrs. Baker was really fond of Mary Virginia--the young girl's tenderness and simplicity touched the woman of the world. She gave a farewell dance the night before Mary Virginia was to return to school. It was an informal affair, with enough college boys and girls to lend it a junior air, but there was a goodly sprinkling of grown-ups to deepen it, for the hostess said frankly that she simply couldn't stand the Very Young except in broken doses and in bright spots.

Hunter, of course, was to be one of the grownups. He had sent Mary Virginia the flowers she was to wear. And she had a new dancing frock, quite the loveliest and fluffiest and laciest she had ever worn.

He was somewhat late. And so engrossed with him were all her thoughts, so eager was she to see him, that she was a disappointing companion for anybody else. She couldn't talk to anybody else. She flitted in and out of laughing groups like a blue-and-silver b.u.t.terfly, and finally managed to slip away to the stair nook behind what Mrs. Baker liked to call the conservatory. This was merely a portion of the big back hall gla.s.sed in and hung with a yellow silk curtain; it had a tiny round crystal fountain in the center and one or two carved seats, but one wouldn't think so small a s.p.a.ce could hold so much bloom and fragrance. From the nook where Mary Virginia sat, one could hear every word spoken in the flower-room, though the hearer remained hidden by the paneled stairway.

Hands in her lacy lap, eyes abstracted, she fell into the dreams that youth dreams; in which a girl--one's self, say,--walks hand in hand through an enchanted world with a being very, very little lower than the angels and twice as dear. They are such innocent dreams, such impossible dreams, so untouched of all reality; but I wonder, oh I wonder, if life can ever give us anything to repay their loss!

Somebody spoke in the conservatory and she looked up, startled.

Through a parting in the silk curtain she glimpsed the woman and recognized one of Estelle's friends, handsome and fashionable, but a woman she had never liked.

"You provoke me. You try my patience too much!" she was saying, in a tone of suppressed anger. "People are beginning to say that you have a serious affair with that sugar-candy chit. I want to know if that is true?"

The man laughed, a lazy, pleasant, disarming laugh. She knew that laugh among a million, and her heart began to beat, but not with doubt or distrust. She wondered how she had missed him, and if he had been looking for her; she thought of the exquisite secret that bound them together, and wondered how he was going to protect it without evasions or untruthfulness. And she thought the woman abominable.

"You're so suspicious, Evie!" he said smilingly. "Why bother about what can give you no real concern? Why discuss it here, at all? It's not the thing, really."

The woman stamped her foot. She had an able-bodied temper.

"I will know, and I will know now. I have to know," said she, and her voice shook. Mary Virginia would have coughed then, would have made her presence known had she been able; but something held her silent.

"Remember, you're not dealing with a love-sick school-girl now, Howard: you are dealing with _me_. Have you made that little fool think you're in love with her?"

"Why, and what then?" he asked coolly. "I like the child. Of course she is without form and void as yet, but there's quite a lot to that girl."

"Oh, yes! Quite a lot!" said she, with sarcasm. "That's what made me take notice. James Eustis's girl--and barrels of money. She'll be a catch. You are clever, Howard! But what of _me_?"

Mary Virginia's heart fluttered. Indeed, what of this other woman?

"Oh, well, there's nothing definite yet, Evie," said he soothingly. A hint of impatience was betrayed in his voice. Plainly, it irked him to be held up and questioned point-blank, at such a time and place. Just as plainly, he wished to conciliate his jealous questioner. "My dear girl, it would be all of two or three years before the affair could be considered. Let well enough alone, Evie. Let's talk about something else."