Chapter 12

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_ CHAPTER XII

_In Which Mary and Roger Have Their Hour; and in Which a Tea-Drinking Ends in What Might Have Been a Tragedy._

To Mary, possessed and swayed by the letter which she had received from Roger, it seemed a strange thing that the rest of the world moved calmly and unconsciously forward.

The letter had come to her on Saturday. On Sunday morning everybody went to church. Everybody dined afterward, unfashionably, at two o'clock, and later everybody motored out to the Park.

That is, everybody but Mary!

She declined on the ground of other things to do.

"There'll be five of you anyhow with Aunt Frances and Grace," she said, "and I'll have tea for you when you come back."

So Constance and Gordon and Aunt Isabelle had gone off, and with Barry at Leila's, Mary was at last alone.

Alone in the house with Roger Poole!

Her little plans were all made, and she went to work at once to execute them.

It was a dull afternoon, and the old-fashioned drawing-room, with its dying fire, and pale carpet, its worn stuffed furniture and pallid mirrors looked dreary.

Mary had Susan Jenks replenish the fire. Then she drew up to it one of the deep stuffed chairs and a lighter one of mahogany, which matched the low tea-table which was at the left of the fireplace. She set a tapestry screen so that it cut off this corner from the rest of the room and from the door.

Gordon had brought, the night before, a great box of flowers, and there were valley lilies among them. Mary put the lilies on the table in a jar of gray-green pottery. Then she went up-stairs and changed the street costume which she had worn to church for her old green velvet gown. When she came down, the fire was snapping, and the fragrance of the lilies made sweet the screened space--Susan had placed on the little table a red lacquered tray, and an old silver kettle.

Susan had also delivered the note which Mary had given her to the Tower Rooms.

Until Roger came down Mary readjusted and rearranged everything. She felt like a little girl who plays at keeping house. Some new sense seemed waked within her, a sense which made her alive to the coziness and comfort and seclusion of this cut-off corner. She found herself trying to see it all through Roger Poole's eyes.

When he came at last around the corner of the screen, she smiled and gave him her hand.

"This is to be our hour together. I had to plan for it. Did you ever feel that the world was so full of people that there was no corner in which to be--alone?"

As he sat down in the big chair, and the light shone on his face, she saw how tired he looked, as if the days and the nights since she had seen him, had been days and nights of vigil.

She felt a surging sense of sympathy, which set her trembling as she had trembled when she had touched his letter as it had laid on her desk, but when she spoke her voice was steady.

"I am going to make you a cup of tea--then we can talk."

He watched her as she made it, her deft hands unadorned, except by the one quaint ring, the whiteness of her skin set on by her green gown, the whiteness of her soul symbolized by the lilies.

He leaned forward and spoke suddenly. "Mary Ballard," he said, "if I ever reach paradise, I shall pray that it may be like this, with the golden light and the fragrance, and you in the midst of it."

Earnestly over the lilies, she looked at him. "Then you believe in Paradise?"

"I should like to think that in some blessed future state I should come upon you in a garden of lilies."

"Perhaps you will." She was smiling, but her hand shook.

She felt shy, almost tongue-tied. She made him his tea, and gave him a cup; then she spoke of commonplaces, and the little kettle boiled and bubbled and sang as if there were no sorrow or sadness in the whole wide world.

She came at last timidly to the thing she had to say.

"I don't quite know how to begin about your letter. You see when I read it, it wasn't easy for me at first to think straight. I hadn't thought of you as having any such background to your life. Somehow the outlines I had filled in were--different. I am not quite sure what I had thought--only it had been nothing like--this."

"I know. You could not have been expected to imagine such a past."

"Oh, it is not your past which weighs so heavily--on my heart; it is your future."

Her eyes were full of tears. She had not meant to say it just that way. But it had come--her voice breaking on the last words.

He did not speak at once, and then he said: "I have no right to trouble you with my future."

"But I want to be troubled."

"I shall not let you. I shall not ask that of your friendship. Last night when I came back to my rooms I found a rose blooming upon the pages of a book. It seemed to tell me that I had not lost your friendship; and you have given me this hour. This is all I have a right to ask of your generosity."

She moved the jar of lilies aside, so that there might be nothing between them. "If I am your friend, I must help you," she said, "or what would my friendship be worth?"

"There is no help," he said, hurriedly, "not in the sense that I think you mean it. My past has made my future. I cannot throw myself into the fight again. I know that I have been called all sorts of a coward for not facing life. But I could face armies, if it were anything tangible. I could do battle with a sword or a gun or my fists, if there were a visible adversary. But whispers--you can't kill them; and at last they--kill you."

"I don't want you to fight," she said, and now behind the whiteness of her skin there was a radiance. "I don't want you to fight. I want you to deliver your message."

"What message?"

"The message that every man who stands in the pulpit must have for the world, else he has no right to stand there."

"You think then that I had no message?"

"I think," and now her hand went out to him across the table, as if she would soften the words, "I think that if you had felt yourself called to do that one thing, that nothing would have swayed you from it--there are people not in the churches, who never go to church, who want what you have to give--there are the highways and hedges. Oh, surely, not all of the people worth preaching to are the ones in the pews."

She flung the challenge at him directly.

And he flung it back to her, "If I had had such a woman as you in my life----"

"Oh, don't, _don't_." The radiance died. "What has any woman to do with it? It is you--yourself, who must stand the test."

After the ringing words there was dead silence. Roger sat leaning forward, his eyes not upon her, but upon the fire. In his white face there was no hint of weakness; there was, rather, pride, obstinacy, the ruggedness of inflexible purpose.

"I am afraid," he said at last, "that I have not stood the test."

Her clear eyes met his squarely. "Then meet it now."

For a moment he blazed. "I know now what you think of me, that I am a man who has shirked."

"You know I do not think that."

He surrendered. "I do know it. And I need your help."

Shaken by their emotion, they became conscious that this was indeed their hour. She told him all that she had dreamed he might do. Her color came and went as she drew the picture of his future. Some of the advice she gave was girlish, impracticable, but through it all ran the thread of her faith to him. She felt that she had the solution. That through service he was to find--God.

It was a wonderful hour for Roger Poole. An hour which was to shine like a star in his memory. Mary's mind had a largeness of vision, the ability to rise above the lesser things in order to reach the greater, which seemed super-feminine. It was not until afterward when he reviewed what they had said, that he was conscious that she had placed the emphasis on what he was to do. Not once had she spoken of what had been done--not once had she spoken of his wife.

"You mustn't bury yourself. You must find a way to reach first one group and then another. And after a time you'll begin to feel that you can face the world."

He winced. As she put it into words, he began to see himself as others must have seen him. And the review was not a pleasant one.

In a sense that hour with Mary Ballard in the screened space by the fire was the hour of Roger Poole's spiritual awakening. He realized for the first time that he had missed the meaning of the candles on the altar, the voices in the choir; he had missed the knowledge that one must spend and be spent in the service of humanity.

"I must think it over," he said. "You mustn't expect too much of me all at once."

"I shall expect--everything."

As she spoke and smiled, and it seemed to him that his old garment of fear slipped from him--as if he were clothed in the shining armor of her confidence in him.

They had little time to talk after that, for it was not long before they heard without the bray of a motor horn.

Roger rose at once.

"I must go before they come," he said.

But she laid her hand upon his arm. "No," she said, "you are not to go. You are never going to run away from the world again. Set aside the screen, please--and stay."

Porter, picked up on the way, came in with the others, to behold that glowing corner, and those two together.

With his red crest flaming, he advanced upon them.

"Somebody said 'tea.' May I have some, Mary?"

"When the kettle boils." She had risen, and was holding out her hand to him.

As the two men shook hands, Porter was conscious of some subtle change in Roger. What had come over the man--had he dared to make love to Mary?

And Mary? He looked at her.

She was serenely filling her tea ball. She had lighted the lamp beneath her kettle, and the blue flame seemed to cast her still further back among the shadows of her corner.

Grace Clendenning and Aunt Frances had come back with the rest for tea. Grace's head, with Porter's, gave the high lights of the scene. Barry had nicknamed them the "red-headed woodpeckers," and the name seemed justified.

While Porter devoted himself to Grace, however, he was acutely conscious of every movement of Mary's. Why had she given up her afternoon to Roger Poole? He had asked if he might come, and she had said, "after four," and now it was after four, and the hour which she would not give him had been granted to this lodger in the Tower Rooms.

It has been said before that Porter was not a snob, but to him Mary's attitude of friendliness toward this man, who was not one of them, was a matter of increasing irritation. What was there about this tall thin chap with the tired eyes to attract a woman? Porter was not conceited, but he knew that he possessed a certain value. Of what value in the eyes of the world was Roger Poole--a government clerk, without ambition, handsome in his dark way, but pale and surrounded by an air of gloom?

But to-night it was as if the gloom had lifted. To-night Roger shone as he had shone on the night of the Thanksgiving party--he seemed suddenly young and splendid--the peer of them all.

It came about naturally that, as they drank their tea, some one asked him to recite.

"Please "--it was Mary who begged.

Porter jealously intercepted the look which flashed between them, but could make nothing of it.

"The Whittington one is too long," Roger stated, "and I haven't Pittiwitz for inspiration--but here's another."

Leaning forward with his eyes on the fire, he gave it.

It was a man's poem. It was in the English of the hearty times of Ben Jonson and of Kit Marlowe--and every swinging line rang true.

"What will you say when the world is dying?
What when the last wild midnight falls,
Dark, too dark for the bat to be flying
Round the ruins of old St. Paul's?
What will be last of the lights to perish?
What but the little red ring we knew,
Lighting the hands and the hearts that cherish
A fire, a fire, and a friend or two!"

CHORUS:
"Up now, answer me, tell me true.
What will be last of the stars to perish?
--The fire that lighteth a friend or two."

As the last brave verse was ended, Gordon Richardson said, "By Jove, how it comes back to me--you used to recite Poe's 'Bells' at school."

Roger laughed. "Yes. I fancy I made them boom toward the end."

"You used to make me shiver and shake in my shoes."

Aunt Frances' voice broke in crisply, "What do you mean, Gordon; were you at school with Mr. Poole?"

"Yes. St. Martin's, Aunt Frances."

The name had a magic effect upon Mrs. Clendenning; the boys of St. Martin's were of the elect.

"Poole?" she said. "Are you one of the New York Pooles?"

Roger nodded. "Yes. With a Southern grafting--my mother was a Carew."

He was glad now to tell it. Let them follow what clues they would. He was ready for them. Henceforth nothing was to be hidden.

"I am going down next week," he continued, "to stay for a time with a cousin of my mother's--Miss Patty Carew. She lives still in the old manor house which was my grandfather's--she hadn't much but poverty and the old house for an inheritance, but it is still a charming place."

Aunt Frances was intent, however, on the New York branch of his family tree.

"Was your grandfather Angus Poole?"

"Yes."

Grace was wickedly conscious of her mother's state of mind. No one could afford to ignore any descendant of Angus Poole. To be sure, a second generation had squandered the fortune he had left, but his name was still one to conjure with.

"I never dreamed----" said Aunt Frances.

"Naturally," said Roger, and there was a twinkle in his eyes. "I am afraid I'm not a credit to my hard-headed financier of a grandfather."

It seemed to Mary that for the first time she was seeing him as he might have been before his trouble came upon him. And she was swept forward to the thought of what he might yet be. She grew warm and rosy in her delight that he should thus show himself to her people. She looked up to find Porter's accusing eyes fixed on her; and in the grip of a sudden shyness, she gave herself again to her tea-making.

"Surely some of you will have another cup?"

It developed that Aunt Frances would, and that the water was cold, and that the little lamp was empty of alcohol.

Mary filled it, and, her hand shaking from her inward excitement, let the alcohol overflow on the tray and on the kettle frame. She asked for a match and Gordon gave her one.

Then, nobody knew how it happened! The flames seemed to sweep up in a blue sheet toward the lace frills in the front of Mary's gown. It leaped toward her face. Constance screamed. Then Roger reached her, and she was in his arms, her face crushed against the thickness of his coat, his hands snatching at her frills.

It was over in a moment. The flames were out. Very gently, he loosed his arms. She lay against his shoulder white and still. Her face was untouched, but across her throat, which the low collar had left exposed, was a hot red mark. And a little lock of hair was singed at one side, her frills were in ruins.

He put her into a chair, and they gathered around her--a solicitous group. Porter knelt beside her. "Mary, Mary," he kept saying, and she smiled weakly, as his voice broke on "Contrary Mary."

Gordon had saved the table from destruction. But the flame had caught the lilies, crisping them, and leaving them black. Constance was shaken by the shock, and Aunt Frances kept asking wildly, "How did it happen?"

"I spilled the alcohol when I filled it," Mary said. "It was a silly thing to do--if I had had on one of my thinner gowns----" She shuddered and stopped.

"I shall send you an electric outfit to-morrow," Porter announced. "Don't fool with that thing again, Mary."

Roger stood behind her chair, with his arms folded on the top and said nothing. There was really nothing for him to say, but there were many things to think. He had saved that dear face from flame or flaw, the dear eyes had been hidden against his shoulder--his fingers smarted where he had clutched at her burning frills.

Porter Bigelow might take possession of her now, he might give her electric outfits, he might call her by her first name, but it had not been Porter who had saved her from the flames; it had not been Porter who had held her in his arms. _

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