Mary shook her head, really shaking it at herself. "Go away, Steve."
"I shall, after a little. But I had to come now. Her aunt said she saw you and made quite a time of it. I"m sorry."
"I"m not. We are good friends, in a sense; far better than we have ever been before. We found we were in accord--after all."
He looked at her in the same helpless fashion Luke had adopted.
"She will divorce you and marry someone else and continue to be a Gorgeous Girl," Mary finished, quietly. "No terrible fate will overtake her, nothing occur to rouse or develop her abilities. She will remain young and apparently childish until she suddenly reaches the stately dowager age overnight. Gorgeous Girls are like gypsies--they should either be very young and lissom or old, crinkled, and vested with powers of fortune-telling--the middle stage is impossible. I realized this morning that I"ve been fooling myself, all the heart in me trying to be 100 per cent efficient, when I really want to be a Gorgeous Girl--fluffy, helpless--a blooming little idiot. And I"m glad you have come so I can tell you."
"You don"t mean that," he corrected.
"Being incurably honest I am bound to tell tales on myself. Yes, I do mean it. I"d probably be rushing round for freckle lotion and patent nose pins, to give me a Greek-boy effect. I"d take to swathing myself in chiffons and have my hair a different tint each season. I think every business woman would do the same, too--if she had the chance. We have to fool ourselves to keep on going down the broad highway; or else we would be sanitarium devotees, neurasthenic muddles. So we strike our brave pose and call ourselves superwomen, advanced feminists, and all the rest of the feeble rubbish until the right man comes along. Sometimes he never comes--so we keep right ahead, growing dry as dust at heart and even fooling ourselves. I did. But it took your wife to show me my smug conceit, my fancy that I was a bulwark of commerce, so proper, so perfect! She showed me that I was just plain woman making the best of having been born into the twentieth century!
There is a Gorgeous Girl in all of us, Steve. So I can"t advise or comfort or do any of the things I used to--a bag of tricks we women in business have adopted to make the heart loneliness the less. Go away and make good! That is just what she told you--isn"t it? You will never believe in any of us again. And I don"t know that you should, after all. For cave men need Gorgeous Girls."
Steve was laughing down at her. "True--but they need the right Gorgeous Girl. I"m glad you have finally told the truth; I always suspected it. You have over-emphasized it somewhat--and the woman I married was unfairly over-emphasized as well. But in the main, what you have said is the truth. I a.s.sure you I am twice as glad to have an incentive instead of a lady directress. And I want you to be helpless--if you can; and fluffy--if you will! Don"t you see that you are the right Gorgeous Girl--and she was the wrong one--and I"m the culprit? Why, Mary, the worst thing you could do would be to descend upon me in curl papers under a pink net cap. Even that prospect does not frighten me!"
"Are you going away?" she asked, shyly.
"Not far--nothing spectacular or romantic. I"m done with that.
Beatrice goes West, I believe. She is quite happy. She is going to New York first to get her divorce wardrobe. It is her father I pity--he has to face another son-in-law," Steve laughed. "I am merely going to work for an old and reliable firm--use my nest egg for a house. A brown-shingled house, I think, with plain yard and a few ambitious shrubs blooming along the walks. I don"t know what they will be; I leave that to you!"
Luke wondered why he was not called upon for action, but he wondered still more as Mary came presently to ask that he tell Steve good-night. Her gray eyes were like captured sunrise.
"Luke, dear," she said in as feminine a manner as Beatrice might have done, "don"t worry about me any more. I"m a queer old sister--but it"s all coming out all right," kissing him before Steve, to his utter confusion.
CHAPTER XXIV
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 ma.s.sage. 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 g.a.y.l.o.r.d, 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 pa.s.sing 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 hemst.i.tched 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."