The Magpies Nest (31 page)

But Carter is not an uncommon name. By another diabolical turn of ill-luck someone else got the letter, made nothing of it, and it went into a waste-basket. Another letter she sent to his office. That was forwarded to Chicago, and wandered about disconsolately in the limbo devoted to such poor strays until it was frayed and dingy. It reached him just about a year later.

There were nights, in the weeks of searching, when Nick walked in hell. He used to remember, with such horrible clearness, just how much money Hope had had; those little pieces of silver.

Doggedly he went back to work; there was nothing else to do, and he needed the money, to look for her He used to look at the faces of women in the streets, in the subway, everywhere. He stared, and never smiled. It was her distinction, at least, that he never even thought he saw her. Chicago was given up. How could she have got away from New York? So Spring passed, and Summer.

Grace Sturtevant was haunted by the memory of that shy, desperate voice asking for him over the insensate telephone. She never dared to tell him. Sympathy for him became a veritable dagger in her breast; her own suffering, dulled now into the resignation of the intelligent, quickened understanding. It did not need his grave, unhappy eyes, his face thinned and hardened, to show her his heart. She knew just what emptiness was there.

He never told Grace much. No one can honestly tell his or her own love-story. Those glowing figures who carry the banner of love down the long corridors of time are not flesh and blood; they cannot die because they never lived; they are only symbols. Their story is every lover's story—but no one's. Love denied, love fulfilled, love betrayed; each of a dozen phases has its symbolic lovers to interpret it. They are like vessels fashioned of crystal by great artists to hold a mighty wine.

But we lesser creatures hold up our little earthen cups for the pouring, and are filled. If we treasure the cup afterwards, poor shard that it is, we also prefer to guard it from the smiles of the unbeliever! All love stories are sublimely silly; but love never is.

So Nick, for fear of being maudlin—he knew now, to his own confounding, that a man can weep if he must—and of putting into words the sheer want of Hope, said little. What did she look like, Grace asked; and he brought up a picture of her, sitting rather hunched up, in childish fashion, over her drawing-board, rubbing her cheek with a charcoaled finger —funny, and heart-rending. He said her hair was "light," in that large way of a man. He saw her again, brushing it, with a book propped on her knee, and her blue satin slipper dangling from the tip of an arched foot on a chair rung. He simply stopped. The more because it was not a lover's vision of her he had, something to be rhymed and sung and flaunted with the bravery of inexperience in the eye of an envious world. It was the husband's tender, more homely portrait, which he carries next his heart, and hides with a profoundly casual air. The lover may fancy his lady's perfections so obvious that none can miss them, short of imbecility; but every true husband knows that only himself can see his wife as she deserves to be seen.

Was it then still so keen? Grace sighed inwardly, half glad that she was yielding herself to apathy; she thought her soul too desolate to feel more than a dying pang, unrealising but that it might be but going fallow, for a richer fruitage another season. She gave up the attempt, and rang for tea. The butler brought it promptly, on a tray laden with old silver and egg-shell china; Grace, bending above it, her slim, gracious hands busy, her fine head delicately stooped as if with its weight of pride, her crown of pale gleaming hair, and the soft shifting flow of her olive satin gown, made a picture of sheltered refinement that took Nick's eye in a curiously impersonal way. Sheltered, that was it; safe, guarded, delicately clad. And how was Hope faring? He rose abruptly; it was more than he could bear. Oh, he would not wish Grace other than sheltered; he would wish all women safe now for the sake of one; but it was too sharp to look on and think of closely.

"No, thanks, I won't have any," he said. "May I go to the nursery? Am I rude? I beg your pardon. Grace... Hemlock, if you like," with a poor effort at a joke. "Couldn't I take a biscuit to Maddie?"

"Of course; you'll find her there. The three of you!" Grace smiled faintly, but did not offer to go with him. All that was over.

Madeline greeted him with a scream of joy, reproved instantly by her nurse as unladylike; clutched the biscuit with one fat hand, and offered an exchange with the other. While he was convalescing she had had him so much she tyrannised over him entirely now, and gave him the half of her kingdom. Never a new toy could be accepted entirely without his approval; he had to put her to bed when he happened in at the right time, sing to her, tell her stories, read her picture-books. It was a picture-book she was thrusting on him now.

"Wead me," she said, climbing on his knee and dropping the book in process.

He just caught her from diving after it head foremost, brougnt her back by the slack of her pink rompers, and established her with the book on her pudgy lap.

"Nice book?" she inquired anxiously.

"A bee-yu-tiful book," Nick told her. "Let's see what's inside it."

"Babies," said Madeline. "But—dey have no muvver!" She seemed equally distressed and astonished by this unnatural circumstance, and spread one dimpled hand down on the opened leaf to point out the sad fact, thereby making the view difficult. Nick lifted it, opened his mouth to read the first verse—it was a series of jingles with wreaths of plump, solemn, preposterous, lovable imps prancing about the stanzas— and said softly, "Lord Almighty!"

"Wead me," demanded Madeline peremptorily.

"What?" said Nick, rather as if he did not understand the familiar request. Then, to her vast indignation, he set her down abruptly and carried her book to the window. "Hope!" he said again, to himself.

There was her name down in the corner—on the title-page, too, above the publisher's imprint—incredibly plain, like something one has mislaid, and finds again in the simplest and most obvious place. And the very pictures. Those funny little cherub heads, that used to pop up out of her portfolio. She had names for a dozen of them. He never could tell them apart, unless by their attitudes, but she declared seriously that he must be very stupid; their dispositions were entirely different. She could tell their life histories—lived in the moon—to prove it.

Madeline was fairly storming at him now. He paid no heed at all, tore the fly-leaf out of the cherished book, and dashed out.

"What is the matter?" asked Mrs. Sturtevant, lifting her cheek from her palm as he re-entered the drawing-room. A wail followed him from the nursery.

"Nothing, nothing at all." He looked at her with a bright, unseeing eye. "Everything's all right, I think—I have to go—I'll tell you if it's true..."

He went out like a man drunk on new wine, and left her staring, while Maddie's shrieks of rage and distress echoed unheeded.

CHAPTER XXVIII

WITH so much crowding on her to be done at once, with success, as it were, sitting on the doorstep until the house should be dusted for it to enter befittingly, it was some time before Hope had time to cast her accounts with life, and ask herself how her balance stood, for good or evil. She had to go home first, and yet more immediately she had to see Evelyn Curtis. That had been the first and most necessary step, and was not neglected. Their reunion was almost incoherently rejoicing; no one could have been more generously enthusiastic than Evelyn. Hope offered her the rights of an agent, but Evelyn would hardly accept; she named a fee almost nominal.

Hope took her to dine with Conroy Edgerton the next night, to honour her new contract. She came to terms with the Bancrofts, tentatively, earlier in the day and in haste. Excellent terms for a beginner, too, and Mr. Bancroft suspected her naïve manner for a pose, but proceeded to farm out her work so they should not suffer. Everyone was pleased, except possibly Edgerton at having a gooseberry for dinner. But he enfolded Evelyn with a large geniality, ordered champagne generously and toasted the contract and the Paris hat Hope had bought to please him, and prolonged the dinner to a supper after a vaudeville theatre.

"I thought we should have a long talk," he said, a little regretfully, in an aside, as he helped Hope on with her cloak. "However, you'll probably hear all the news." Hope, adjusting the symbolic hat, missed his slightly guilty look. "You might write to me," he suggested. "You know I've got to go back to-night. If I come to New York again—I may soon—I'd like to see you."

"You can always find me through the Bancrofts," said Hope. "Certainly, write. You don't know how odd it has been to see you again. Do you remember the night we set the prairie on fire?"

He looked like a schoolboy "caught out," and she burst out laughing. That night they had never thought to sit down so impersonally to a reminiscent evening.

"Plenty of water under the bridge since then. Hope " he said, and, his strangely youthful, ruddy face taking a deeper tinge, added, "Do you think I look much older?"

"You?" She went on laughing. "You'll never grow up, Con. I'm an old woman alongside you." What tricks Time can play, that she could take such a tone to him! "What did you say about news?
Is
there anything new?"

"Oh, nothing much," said Edgerton, and sighed.

"Marriage and death and division" had indeed wrought with his life. It seemed rather pathetic to Hope; she had a fellow-feeling for him.

He put the girls in a cab, and they saw him standing on the curb as they rolled away, a fine, substantial figure of a man, a credit to his tailor, his cook and himself—but alone.

Hope indignantly recalled that sympathetic sigh she had devoted to the touching picture, weeks later.

But then she was half across the world again, and talking to Mary; for yet more water had flowed under the bridge. When the wheel of life did begin to spin for her, it went at breathless speed. The letter calling her home came in immediate answer to her first jubilant announcement of good fortune. Both her father and her mother wrote. They were growing old, they said. They needed to say no more. She set to work feverishly to do what must be done immediately, and transmuted her first check forthwith into a railway ticket.

But there would be many more checks. She was really "made"; the welcome accorded the little syndicated stories, which the Bancrofts found a market for immediately, was an absolute assurance of that. Those were Mary's stories, and Hope had to go and see Mary and learn what her share in them was to be; but after all it was the drawings that counted most. For the rest of her life Hope could "walk delicately"; she could have as much purple and fine linen as might be reasonably required by one of her stature; in short, she had her passage booked for the big liner whence Edgerton had once surveyed her cockle-shell making for the open sea. She was rather glad; the excitement of the struggle for daily bread had lost its first keen edge. It had come just at the right time; not too soon nor too late.

Mary she saw more or less by the way; the only break in her journey. Mary, rather more vivacious than of old, and delighted to the verge of extravagance at the sight of her returned prodigal, come on her without warning, just off the train.

"You—you little viper," she exclaimed, almost upsetting the tea-table in a rush to embrace her at sight of Hope's mischievous eyes peeping in at her. Mrs. Hamilton had hastily smothered an outcry of surprise at the door to permit of her carefully planned entry.

"Heavens, did you come on wings? You got my letter—not that you deserved it, leaving me in ignorance so long. Take off your hat." She proceeded to divest Hope of her outer garments by friendly violence.

"I got no letter," said Hope, submitting laughingly "I got nothing; I am going home."

"For the fatted calf—I know."

"Yes," Hope began, and stopped. That was too good a guess. "Why, how did you know?" she asked.

"Know what?"

"That I had 'arrived,' in a becomingly small way, of course. I haven't told you. I was always just a pane of glass to you; but this is too much. Tell me, or I'll have you burnt for a witch."

"And I'll have you stuffed for a Strasburg goose"' retorted Mary, wiping the tears of enjoyment from her eyes. "Con told me, of course; wrote me instantly."

"Ah, he did? What—what's the meaning of that? Does he write you everything instantly? Oh—oh— Mary, where did that come from? Was it for that you saved him from me?" On her third finger Mary wore an enormous emerald. Hope had never seen anything so wonderful; she gasped over it, and rolled her eyes to heaven. "Is it really, really true?" she demanded, when she could command words.

"Yes." Mary was her old, rather mocking, good-humoured, impenetrable self. "So now you see why my most unworldly and righteous uncle helped me!"

"And you called
me
a viper!" said Hope, adding that to the recollection of her misplaced pity for Edgerton's loneliness. "Mary, are you going to be happy?"

"Yes, and I shall make him happy, too," said Mary calmly.

She could; she could make any man happy, if she chose. There was that in her would hold a man, divert him endlessly, and leave him always a little puzzled and wholesomely fearful.

"It's time someone was good to him," said Mary again, her manner suddenly changing into a curious mixture of protective tenderness -and belligerence— the eternal woman. "He is rather a dear, you know, Hope. Well, I wrote you to come for the wedding. Will you? And..."

"I should say," said Hope, "that he's always been pretty good to himself! Well—and what?"

"And will you kindly stay away afterwards?" said Mary. "Or promise not to steal my husband, if I let you come?"

"Well, of all things... What do I want with your darned old husband? I've got one too many now. I meant to say—when I've been home for awhile, I'm going to see what I can do to dispose of that one. Perhaps you can advise me?"

"Didn't you know?" cried Mary, sitting upright with a pained and slightly apprehensive expression. "Is it possible you have never heard?"