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-va.s.sal 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 ap.r.o.n 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 a.s.sistant 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