Chapter 24

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_ CHAPTER XXIV

_In Which Roger Comes Once More to the Tower Rooms; and in Which a Duel is Fought in Modern Fashion._

It was Cousin Patty who had suggested sending for Roger. "He can look after me, Mary. If you won't let me go home, I don't want you to have the thought of me to burden you."

"You couldn't be a burden. And I don't know what Aunt Isabelle and I should have done without you."

She began to cry weakly, and Cousin Patty, comforting her, said in her heart, "There is no one but Roger who can say the right things to her."

As yet no one had said the right things. It seemed to Mary that she carried a wound too deep for healing. Gordon had softened the truth as much as possible, but he could not hide it from her. She knew that Barry, her boy Barry, had gone out of the world defeated.

It was Roger who helped her.

He came first upon her as she sat alone in the garden by the fountain. It was a sultry spring day, and heavy clouds hung low on the horizon. Thin and frail in her black frock, she rose to meet him, the ghost of the girl who had once bloomed like a flower in her scarlet wrap.

Roger took her hands in his.

"You poor little child," he said; "you poor little child."

She did not cry. She simply looked up at him, frozen-white. "Oh, it wasn't fair for him to go--that way. He tried so hard. He tried so hard."

"I know. And it was a great fight he put up, you must remember that."

"But to fail--at the last."

"You mustn't think of that. Somehow I can see Barry still fighting, and winning. One of a glorious company."

"A glorious company--Barry?"

"Yes. Why not? We are judged by the fight we make, not by our victory."

She drew a long breath. "Everybody else has been sorry. Nobody else could seem to understand."

"Perhaps I understand," he said, "because I know what it is to fight--and fail."

"But you are winning now." The color swept into her pale cheeks. "Cousin Patty told me."

"Yes. You showed me the way--I have tried to follow it."

"Oh, how ignorant I was," she cried, tempestuously, "when I talked to you of life. I thought I knew everything."

"You knew enough to help me. If I can help you a little now it will be only a fair exchange."

It helped her merely to have him there. "You spoke of Barry's still fighting and winning. Do you think that one goes on fighting?"

"Why not? It would seem only just that he should conquer. There are men who are not tempted, whose goodness is negative. Character is made by resistance against evil, not by lack of knowledge of it. And the judgments of men are not those which count in the final verdict."

He said more than this, breaking the bonds of her despair. Others had pitied Barry. Roger defended him. She began to think of her brother, not as her imagination had pictured him, flung into utter darkness, but with his head up--his beautiful fair head, a shining sword in his hand, fighting against the powers of evil--stumbling, falling, rising again.

He saw her relax as she listened, and his love for her taught him what to say.

And as he talked, her eyes noted the change in him.

This was not the Roger Poole of the Tower Rooms. This was a Roger Poole who had found himself. She could see it in his manner--she could hear it in his voice, it shone from his eyes. Here was a man who feared nothing, not even the whispers that had once had power to hurt.

The clouds were sweeping toward them, hiding the blue; the wind whirled the dead leaves from the paths, and stirred the budding branches of the hundred-leaved bush--touched with its first hint of tender green. The mist from the fountain was like a veil which hid the mocking face of the bronze boy.

But Mary and Roger had no eyes for these warnings; each was famished for the other, and this meeting gave to Mary, at least, a sense of renewed life.

She spoke of her future. "Constance and Gordon want me to come to them. But I hate to give up my work. I don't want to be discontented. Yet I dread the loneliness here. Did you ever think I should be such a coward?"

"You are not a coward--you are a woman--wanting the things that belong to you."

She sat very still. "I wonder--what are the things which belong to a woman?"

"Love--a home--happiness."

"And you think I want these things?"

"I know it."

"How do you know?"

"Because you have tried work--and it has failed. You have tried independence--and it has failed. You have tried freedom, and have found it bondage."

He was once more in the grip of the dream which he had dreamed as he had sat with Mary's letter in his hand on Cousin Patty's porch. If she would come to him there would be no more loneliness. His love should fill her life, and there would be, too, the love of his people. She should win hearts while he won souls. If only she would care enough to come.

It was the fear that she might not care which suddenly gripped him. Surely this was not the moment to press his demands upon her--when sorrow lay so heavily on her heart.

So blind, and cruel in his blindness, he held back the words which rose to his lips.

"Some day life will bring the things which belong to you," he said at last. "I pray God that it may bring them to you some day."

A line of Browning's came into her mind, and rang like a knell--"Some day, meaning no day."

She shivered and rose. "We must go in; there's rain in those clouds, and wind."

He rose also and stood looking down at her. Her eyes came up to his, her clear eyes, shadowed now by pain. What he might have said to her in another moment would have saved both of them much weariness and heartache. But he was not to say it, for the storm was upon them driving them before it, slamming doors, banging shutters in the big house as they came to it--a miniature cyclone, in its swift descent.

And as if he had ridden in on the wings of the storm came Porter Bigelow, his red mane blown like a flame back from his face, his long coat flapping.

He stopped short at the sight of Roger.

"Hello, Poole," he said; "when did you arrive?"

"This morning."

They shook hands, but there was no sign of a welcome in Porter's face.

"Pretty stiff storm," he remarked, as the three of them stood by the drawing-room window, looking out.

The rain came in shining sheets--the lightning blazed--the thunder boomed.

"It is the first thunder-storm of the season," Mary said. "It will wake up the world."

"In the South," Roger said, "the world is awake. You should see our gardens."

"I wish I could; Cousin Patty asked me to come."

"Will you?" eagerly.

"There's my work."

"Take a holiday, and let me show you the pines."

Porter broke in impatiently, almost insolently.

"Mary needs companionship, not pines. I think she should go to Constance. Leila and the General will go over as they planned in May, and the Jeliffes----"

"There's more than a month before May--which she could spend with us."

Porter stared. This was a new Roger, an insistent, demanding Roger. He spoke coldly. "Constance wants Mary at once. I don't think we should say anything to dissuade her. Aunt Isabelle and I can take her over."

And now Mary's head went up.

"I haven't decided, Porter." She was fighting for freedom.

"But Constance needs you, Mary--and you need her."

"Oh, no," Mary said, brokenly, "Constance doesn't need me. She has Gordon and the baby. Nobody needs me--now."

Roger saw the quick blood flame in Porter's face. He felt it flame in his own. And just for one fleeting moment, over the bowed head of the girl, the challenging eyes of the two men met.

Aunt Frances, who came over with Grace in the afternoon, went home in a high state of indignation.

"Why Patty Carew and Roger Poole should take possession of Mary in that fashion," she said to her daughter at dinner, "is beyond me. They don't belong there, and it would have been in better taste to leave at such a time."

"Mary begged Cousin Patty to stay," Grace said, "and as for Roger Poole, he has simply made Mary over. She has been like a stone image until to-day."

"I don't see any difference," Aunt Frances said. "What do you mean, Grace?"

"Oh, her eyes and the color in her cheeks, and the way she does her hair."

"The way she does her hair?" Aunt Frances laid down her fork and stared.

"Yes. Since the awful news came, Mary has seemed to lose interest in everything. She adored Barry, and she's never going to get over it--not entirely. I miss the old Mary." Grace stopped to steady her voice. "But when I went up with her to her room to talk to her while she dressed for dinner, she put up her hair in that pretty boyish way that she used to wear it, and it was all for Roger Poole."

"Why not for Porter?"

"Because she hasn't cared how she looked, and Porter has been there every day. He has been there too often."

"Do you think Roger will try to get her to marry him?"

"Who knows? He's dead in love with her. But he looks upon her as too rare for the life he leads. That's the trouble with men. They are afraid they can't make the right woman happy, so they ask the wrong one. Now if we women could do the proposing----"

"Grace!"

"Don't look at me in that shocked way, mother. I am just voicing what every woman knows--that the men who ask her aren't the ones she would have picked out if she had had the choice. And Mary will wait and weary, and Roger will worship and hang back, and in the meantime Porter will demand and demand and demand--and in the end he'll probably get what he wants."

Aunt Frances beamed. "I hope so."

"But Mary will be miserable."

"Then she'll be very silly."

Grace sighed. "No woman is silly who asks for the best. Mother, I'd love to marry a man with a mission--I'd like to go to the South Sea Islands and teach the natives, or to Darkest Africa--or to China, or India, anywhere away from a life in which there's nothing but bridge, and shopping, and deadly dullness."

She was in earnest now, and her mother saw it.

"I don't see how you can say such things," she quavered. "I don't see how you can talk of going to such impossible places--away from me."

Grace cut short the plaintive wail.

"Of course I have no idea of going," she said, "but such a life would furnish its own adventures; I wouldn't have to manufacture them."

It was with the wish to make life something more than it was that Grace asked Roger the next day, "Is there any work here in town like yours for the boy--you see Mary has told me about him."

He smiled. "Everywhere there are boys and girls, unawakened--if only people would look for them; and with your knowledge of languages you could do great things with the little foreigners--turn a bunch of them into good citizens, for example."

"How?"

"Reach them first through pictures and music--then through their patriotism. Don't let them learn politics and plunder on the streets; let them find their place in this land from you, and let them hear from you of the God of our fathers."

Grace felt his magnetism. "I wish you could go through the streets of New York saying such things."

He shook his head. "I shall not come to the city. My place is found, and I shall stay there; but I have faith to believe that there will yet be a Voice to speak, to which the world shall listen."

"Soon?"

"Everything points to an awakening. People are beginning to say, 'Tell us,' where a few years ago they said, 'There is nothing to tell.'"

"I see--it will be wonderful when it comes--I'm going to try to do my little bit, and be ready, and when Mary comes back, she shall help me."

His eyes went to where Mary sat between Porter and Aunt Frances.

"She may never come back."

"She must be made to come."

"Who could make her?"

"The man she loves."

She flashed a sparkling glance at him, and rose.

"Come, mother," she said, "it is time to go." Then, as she gave Roger her hand, she smiled. "Faint heart," she murmured, "don't you know that a man like you, if he tries, can conquer the--world?"

She left Roger with his pulses beating madly. What did she mean? Did she think that--Mary----? He went up to the Tower Rooms to dress for dinner, with his mind in a whirl. The windows were open and the warm air blew in. Looking out, he could see in the distance the shining river--like a silver ribbon, and the white shaft of the Monument, which seemed to touch the sky. But he saw more than that; he saw his future and Mary's; again he dreamed his dreams.

If he had hoped for a moment alone that night with the lady of his heart, he was doomed to disappointment, for Leila and her father came to dinner. Leila was very still and sweet in her widow's black, the General brooding over her. And again Roger had the sense that in this house of sorrow there was no place for love-making. For the joy that might be his--he must wait; even though he wearied in the waiting.

And it was while he waited that he lunched one day with Porter Bigelow. The invitation had surprised him, and he had felt vaguely troubled and oppressed by the thought that back of it might be some motive as yet unrevealed. But there had been nothing to do but accept, and at one o'clock he was at the University Club.

For a time they spoke of indifferent things, then Porter said, bluntly, "I am not going to beat about the bush, Poole. I've asked you here to talk about Mary Ballard."

"Yes?"

"You're in love with her?"

"Yes--but I question your right to play inquisitor."

"I haven't any right, except my interest in Mary. But I claim that my interest justifies the inquisition."

"Perhaps."

"You want to marry her?"

Roger shifted his position, and leaned forward, meeting Porter's stormy eyes squarely. "Again I question your right, Bigelow."

"It isn't a question of right now, Poole, and you know it. You're in love with her, I'm in love with her. We both want her. In days past men settled such things with swords or pistols. You and I are civilized and modern; but it's got to be settled just the same."

"Miss Ballard will have to settle it--not you or I."

"She can't settle it. Mary is a dreamer. You capture her with your imagination--with your talk of your work--and your people and the little gardens, and all that. And she sees it as you want her to see it, not as it really is. But I know the deadly dullness, the awfulness. Why, man, I spent a winter down there, at one of the resorts and now and then we rode through the country. It was a desert, I tell you, Poole, a desert; it is no place for a woman."

"You saw nothing but the charred pines and the sand. I could show you other things."

"What, for example?"

"I could show you an awakened people. I could show you a community throwing off the shackles of idleness and ignorance. I could show you men once tied to old traditions, meeting with eagerness the new ideals. There is nothing in the world more wonderful than such an awakening, Bigelow. But one must have the Vision to grasp it. And faith to believe it. It is the dreamers, thank God, who see beyond to-day into to-morrow. I haven't wealth or position to offer Mary, but I can offer her a world which needs her. And if I know her, as I think I do, she will care more for my world than for yours."

He did not raise his voice, but Porter felt the force of his restrained eloquence, as he knew Mary would feel it if it were applied to her.

And now he shot his poisoned dart.

"At first, perhaps. But when it came to building a home, there'd be always the stigma of your past, and she's a proud little thing, Poole."

Roger winced. "My past is buried. It is my future of which we must speak."

"You can't bury a past. You haven't even a pulpit to preach from."

Roger pushed back his chair. "I am tempted to wish," his voice was grim, "that we were not quite so civilized, not quite so modern. Pistols or swords would seem an easier way than this."

"I'm fighting for Mary. You've got to let go. None of her friends want it--Gordon would never consent."

It seemed to Roger that all the whispers which had assailed him in the days of long ago were rushing back upon him in a roaring wave of sound.

He rose, white and shaken. "Do you call it victory when one man stabs another through the heart? Well, if this is your victory, Bigelow--you are welcome to it." _

Read next: Chapter 25

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