Book 2 - Chapter 3

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_ BOOK II CHAPTER III

The beautiful Mrs. Gregory made her first appearance in society, after the birth of her second son, on the occasion of Miss Leila Buckney's marriage to Mr. Parker Hoyt. The continual postponement of this event had been a standing joke among their friends for two or three years; it took place in early December, at the most fashionable of all the churches, with a reception and supper to follow at the most fashionable of all the hotels. Leila naturally looked tired and excited; she had made a gallant fight for her lover, for long years, and she had won, but as yet the returning tide of comfort and satisfaction had not begun in her life. Parker had been a trying fiance; he was a cool-blooded, fishlike little man; there had been other complications: her father's heavy financial losses, her mother's discontent in the lingering engagement, her sister's persisting state of unmarriedness.

However, the old aunt was at last dead. Parker had dutifully gone to her side toward the end, and had returned again, duly, bringing the casket, and escorting Miss Clay. And now Mamma was dressed, and Edith was in a hideously unbecoming green and silver gown, and the five bridesmaids were duly hatted and frocked in green and silver, and she was dressed, too, realizing that her new corsets were a trifle small, and her lace veil too heavy.

And the disgusting caterer had come to some last-moment agreement with Papa whereby they were to have the supper without protest, and the florist's insolent man had consented to send the bouquets at last. The fifteen hundred dreadful envelopes were all addressed, the back-breaking trying-on of gowns was over, the three hundred and seventy-one gifts were arranged in two big rooms at the hotel, duly ticketed, and the three hundred and seventy-one dreadful personal notes of thanks had been somehow scribbled off and dispatched. Leila was absolutely exhausted, and felt as pale and pasty as she looked. People were all so stupid and tiresome and inconsiderate, she said wearily to herself, and the awful breakfast would be so long and dull, with everybody saying the same thing to her, and Parker trying to be funny and simply making himself ridiculous! The barbarity of the modern wedding impressed itself vaguely upon the bride as she laughed and talked in a strained and mechanical manner, and whatever they said to her and to her parents, the guests were afterward unanimous in deciding that poor Leila had been an absolute fright.

But Mrs. Gregory, in her dark blue suit and her new sables, won everybody's eyes as she came down the church aisle with her husband beside her. Her son was not quite a month old, and if she had not recovered her usual wholesome bloom, there was a refined, almost a spiritual, element in her beauty now that more than made up for the loss. She wore a fragrant great bunch of violets at her breast, and under the sweeping brim of her hat her beautiful eyes were as deeply blue as the flowers. She seemed full of a new wifely and matronly charm to-day, and it was quite in key with the pose that old Mrs. Gregory and young Charles should be constantly in her neighborhood. Her relatives with her, her babies safe at home, young Mrs. Gregory was the personification of domestic dignity and decorum.

At the hotel, after the wedding, she was the centre of an admiring group, and conscious of her husband's approving eyes, full of her old brilliant charm. All the old friends rallied about her--they had not seen much of her since her marriage--and found her more magnetic than ever. The circumstances of her marriage were blotted out by more recent events now: there was the Chase divorce to discuss; the Villalonga motor-car accident; Elinor Vanderwall had astonished everybody a few weeks before by her sudden marriage to millions in the person of old Peter Pomeroy; now people were beginning to say that Jeanette Vanderwall might soon be expected to follow suit with Peter's nephew George. The big, beautifully decorated reception-room hummed with gay gossip, with the tinkling laughter of women and the deeper tones of men.

Caterers' men began to work their way through the crush, bearing indiscriminately trays of bouillon, sandwiches, salads, and ices. The bride, with her surrounding bridesmaids, was still standing at the far end of the room mechanically shaking hands, and smilingly saying something dazed and inappropriate to her friends as they filed by; but now various groups, scattered about the room, began to interest themselves in the food. Elderly persons, after looking vaguely about for seats, disposed of their coffee and salad while standing, and soon there was a general breaking-up; the Buckney- Hoyt wedding was almost a thing of the past.

Rachael, thinking of the impending dinner-hour of little Gerald Fairfax Gregory, began to watch the swirling groups for Warren. They could slip away now, surely; several persons had already gone. Her heart was in her nursery, where Jim was toddling back and forth tirelessly in the firelight, and where, between the white bars of the new crib, was the tiny roll of snowy blankets that enclosed the new baby.

"That's a pretty girl," she found herself saying involuntarily as her absent eyes were suddenly arrested by the face and figure of one of the guests. "I wonder who that is?"

The brown eyes she was watching met hers at the same second, and smiling a little question, their owner came toward her.

"Hello, Rachael," the girl said. "How are you after all these years?"

"Magsie Clay!" Rachael exclaimed, the look of uncertainty on her face changing to one of pleasure and welcome. "Well, you dear child, you! How are you? I knew you were here, and yet I couldn't place you. You've changed--you're thinner."

"Oh, much thinner, but then I was an absolute butterball!" Miss Clay said. "Tell me about yourself. I hear that you're having a baby every ten minutes!"

"Not quite!" Rachael said, laughing, but a little discomposed by the girl's coolness. "But I have two mighty nice boys, as I'll prove to you if you'll come see me!"

"Don't expect me to rave over babies, because I don't know anything about them," said Magsie Clay, with a slow, drawling manner that was, Rachael decided, effective. "Do they like toys?"

"Jimmy does, the baby is rather young for tastes of any description," Rachael answered with an odd, new sense of being somehow sedate and old-fashioned beside this composed young woman. Miss Clay was not listening. Her brown eyes were moving idly over the room, and now she suddenly bowed and smiled.

"There's Greg!" she said. "What a comfort it is to see a man dress as that man dresses!"

"I've been looking for you," Warren Gregory said, coming up to his wife, and, noticing the other woman, he added enthusiastically: "Well, Margaret! I didn't know you! Bless my life and heart, how you children grow up!"

"Children! I'm twenty-two!" Miss Clay said, pouting, with her round brown eyes fixed in childish reproach upon his face. They had been great friends when Warren was with his mother in Paris, nearly four years ago, and now they fell into an animated recollection of some of their experiences there with the two old ladies. While they talked Rachael watched Magsie Clay with admiration and surprise.

She knew all the girl's history, as indeed everybody m the room knew it, but to-day it was a little hard to identify the poised and beautiful young woman who was looking so demurely up from under her dark lashes at Warren with the "little Clay girl" of a few years ago.

Parker Hoyt's aunt, the magnificent old Lady Frothingham, had been just enough of an invalid for the twenty years preceding her death to need a nurse or a companion, or a social secretary, or someone who was a little of all three. The great problem was to find the right person, and for a period that actually extended itself over years the right person was not to be found, and the old lady was consequently miserable and unmanageable.

Then came the advent of Mrs. Clay, a dark, silent, dignified widow, who more than met all requirements, and who became a companion figure to the little, fussing, over-dressed old lady. From the day she first arrived at the Frothingham mansion Mrs. Clay never failed her old employer for so much as a single hour. For fifteen years she managed the house, the maids, and, if the truth were known, the old lady herself, with a quiet, irresistible efficiency. But it was early remarked that she did not manage her small daughter with her usual success. Magsie was a fascinating baby, and a beautiful child, quicker of speech than thought, with a lovely little heart-shaped face framed in flying locks of tawny hair. But she was unmanageable and strong-willed, and possessed of a winning and insolent charm hard to refuse.

Her mother in her silent, repressed way realized that Magsie was not having the proper upbringing, but her own youth had been hard and dark, and it was perhaps the closest approach to joy that she ever knew when Magsie glowing under her wide summer hats, or radiant in new furs, rushed up to demand something preposterous and extravagant of her mother, and was not denied.

She was a stout, conceited sixteen-year-old when her mother died, so spoiled and so self-centred that old Lady Frothingham had been heard more than once to mutter that the young lady could get down from her high horse and make herself useful, or she could march. But that was six years ago. And now--this! Magsie had evidently decided to make herself useful, but she had managed to make herself beautiful and fascinating as well. She was in mourning now for the good-hearted old benefactress who had left her a nest-egg of some fifteen thousand dollars, and Rachael noticed with approval that it was correct mourning: simple, severe, Parisian. Nothing could have been more becoming to the exquisite bloom of the young face than the soft, clear folds of filmy veiling; under the small, close-set hat there showed a ripple of rich golden hair. The watching woman thought that she had never seen such self-possession; at twenty-two it was almost uncanny. The modulated, bored young voice, the lazily lifted, indifferent young eyes, the general air of requesting an appreciative world to be amusing and interesting, or to expect nothing of Miss Magsie Clay, these things caused Rachael a deep, hidden chuckle of amusement. Little Magsie had turned out to be something of a personality! Why, she was even employing a distinct and youthfully insolent air of keeping Warren by her side merely on sufferance--Warren, the cleverest and finest man in the room, who was more than twice her age!

"To think that she is younger than Charlotte!" Rachael ejaculated to herself, catching a glimpse of Charlotte, towed by her mother, uncomfortable, ignored, blinking through her glasses. And when she and Warren were in the car homeward bound, she spoke admiringly of Magsie. "Did you ever see any one so improved, Warren? Really, she's quite extraordinary!"

Warren smiled absently.

"She's a terribly spoiled little thing," he remarked. "She's out for a rich man, and she'll get him!"

"I suppose so," Rachael agreed, casting about among the men she knew for an appropriate partner for Miss Clay.

"Suppose so!" he echoed in good-humored scorn. "Don't you fool yourself, she'll get what she's after! There isn't a man alive that wouldn't fall for that particular type!"

"Warren, do you suppose so?" his wife asked in surprise.

"Well, watch and see!"

"Perhaps--" Rachael's interest wandered. "What time have you?" she asked.

He glanced at his watch. "Six-ten."

"Six-TEN! Oh, my poor abused baby--and I should have been here at quarter before six!" She was all mother as she ran upstairs. Had he been crying? Oh, he had been crying! Poor little old duck of a hungry boy, did he have a bad, wicked mother that never remembered him! He was in her arms in an instant, and the laughing maid carried away her hat and wrap without disturbing his meal. Rachael leaned back in the big chair, panting comfortably, as much relieved over his relief as he was. The wedding was forgotten. She was at home again; she could presently put this baby down and have a little interval of hugging and 'tories with Jimmy.

"You'll get your lovely dress all mussed," said old Mary in high approval.

"Never mind, Mary!" her mistress said in luxurious ease before the fire, "there are plenty of dresses!"

A week later Warren came in, in the late afternoon, to say that he had met Miss Clay downtown, and they had had tea together. She suggested tea, and he couldn't well get out of it. He would have telephoned Rachael had he fancied she would care to come. She had been out? That was what he thought. But how about a little dinner for Magsie? Did she think it would be awfully stupid?

"No, she's not stupid," Rachael said cordially. "Let's do it!"

"Oh, I don't mean stupid for us," Warren hastened to explain. "I mean stupid for her!"

"Why should it be stupid for her?" Rachael looked at him in surprise.

"Well, she's awfully young, and she's getting a lot of attention, and perhaps she'd think it a bore!"

"I don't imagine Magsie Clay would find a dinner here in her honor a bore," Rachael said in delicate scorn. "Why, think who she is, Warren--a nurse's daughter! Her father was--I don't know what--an enlisted man, who rose to be a sergeant!"

"I don't believe it!" he said flatly.

"It's true, Warren. I've known that for years--everybody knows it!"

"Well," Warren Gregory said stubbornly, "she's making a great hit just the same. She's going up to the Royces' next week for the Bowditch theatricals, and she's asked to the Pinckard dinner dance. She may not go on account of her mourning."

"Her mourning is rather absurd under the circumstances," Rachael said vaguely, antagonized against anyone he chose to defend. "And if people choose to treat her as if she were Mrs. Frothingham's daughter instead of what she really is, it's nice for Magsie! But I don't see why we should."

"We might because she is such a nice, simple girl," Warren suggested, "and because we like her! I'm not trying to keep in the current; I've no social axe to grind; I merely suggested it, and if you don't want to--"

"Oh, of course, if you put it that way!" Rachael said with a faint shrug.. "I'll get hold of some eligibles--we'll have Charlie, and have rather a youthful dinner!"

Warren, who was shaving, was silent for a few minutes, then he said thoughtfully:

"I don't imagine that Charlie is the sort of person who will interest her. She may be only twenty-two, but she is older than most girls in things like that. She's had more offers now than you could shake a stick at--"

"She told you about them?"

"Well, in a general way, yes--that is, she doesn't want to marry, and she hates the usual attitude, that a lot of college kids have to be trotted out for her benefit!"

This having been her own exact attitude a few seconds before, Rachael flushed a little resentfully.

"What DOES she want to do?"

Warren shaved on for a moment in silence, then with a rather important air he said impulsively:

"Well, I'll tell you, although she told me in confidence, and of course nothing may come of it. You won't say anything about it, of course? She wants to go on the stage."

"Really!" said Rachael, who, for some reason she could not at this moment define, was finding the conversation extraordinarily distasteful.

"Yes, she's had it in mind for years," Warren pursued with simplicity. "And she's had some good offers, too. You can see that she's the kind of girl that would make an immediate hit, that would get across the footlights, as it were. Of course, it all depends upon how hard she's willing to work, but I believe she's got a big future before her!"

There was a short silence while he finished the operation of shaving, and Rachael, who was busy with the defective clasp of a string of pearls, bent absorbedly over the microscopic ring and swivel.

"Let's think about the dinner," she said presently. She found that he had already planned almost all the details.

When it took place, about ten days later, she resolutely steeled herself for an experience that promised to hold no special enjoyment for her. Her love for her husband made her find in his enthusiasm for Magsie something a little pitiful and absurd. Magsie was only a girl, a rather shallow and stupid girl at that, yet Warren was as excited over the arrangements for the dinner as if she had been the most important of personages. If it had been some other dinner--the affair for the English ambassador, or the great London novelist, or the fascinating Frenchman who had painted Jimmy--she told herself, it would have been comprehensible! But Warren, like all great men, had his simple, almost childish, phases, and this was one of them!

She watched her guest of honor, when the evening came, with a puzzled intensity. Magsie was in her glory, sparkling, chattering, almost noisy. Her exquisite little white silk gown was so low in the waist, and so short in the skirt, that it was almost no gown at all, yet it was amazingly smart. She had touched her lips with red, and her eyelids were cunningly given just a hint of elongation with a black pencil. Her bright hair was pushed severely from her face, and so trimly massed and netted as not to show its beautiful quantity, and yet, somehow, one knew the quantity was there in all its gold glory.

Rachael, magnificent in black-and-white, was ashamed of herself for the instinctive antagonism that she began to feel toward this young creature. It was not the fact of Magsie's undeniable youth and beauty that she resented, but it was her affectations, her full, pouting lips, her dimples, her reproachful upward glances. Even these, perhaps, in themselves, she did not resent, she mused; it was their instant effect upon Warren and, to a greater or lesser degree, upon all the other men present, that filled her with a sort of patient scorn. Rachael wondered what Warren's feeling would have been had his wife suddenly picked out some callow youth still in college for her admiring laughter and earnest consideration.

It was sacrilege to think it. It was always absurd, an older man's kindly interest in, and affection for, a pretty young girl, but what harm? He thought her beautiful, and charming, and talented- well, she was those things. It was January now, in March they were going to California, then would come dear Home Dunes, and before the summer was over Magsie would be safely launched, or married, and the whole thing but an episode! Warren was her husband and the father of her two splendid boys; there was tremendous reassurance in the thought.

But that evening, and throughout the weeks that followed, Rachael mused somewhat sadly upon the extraordinary susceptibility of the human male. Magsie's methods were those of a high-school belle. She pouted, she dimpled, she dispensed babyish slaps, she lapsed into rather poorly imitated baby talk. She was sometimes mysterious and tragic, according to her own lights, her voice deep, her eyes sombre; at other times she was all girl, wild for dancing and gossip and matinees. She would widen her eyes demurely at some older woman, plaintively demanding a chaperon, all these bad men were worrying her to death; she had nicknames for all the men, and liked to ask their wives if there was any harm in that? Like Billy, and like Charlotte, she never spoke of anyone but herself, but Billy was a mere beginner beside Magsie, and poor Charlotte like a denizen of another world.

Magsie always scored. There was an air of refinement and propriety about the little gypsy that saved her most daring venture, and in a society bored to death with its own sameness she became an instant favorite. Everyone said that "there was no harm in Magsie," she was the eagerly heralded and loudly welcomed cap-and- bells wherever she went.

Early in March there was an entertainment given in one of the big hotels for some charity, and Miss Clay, who appeared in a dainty little French comedy, the last number on the program, captured all the honors. Her companion player, Dr. Warren Gregory, who in the play had taken the part of her guardian, and, with his temples touched with gray, his peruke, and his satin coat and breeches, had been a handsome foil for her beauty, was declared excellent, but the captivating, piquant, enchanting Magsie was the favorite of the hour. Before the hot, exciting, memorable evening was over the rumor flew about that she had signed a contract to appear with Bowman, the great manager, in the fall.

The whole experience was difficult for Rachael, but no one suspected it, and she would have given her life cheerfully to keep her world from suspecting. Long before the rehearsals for the little play were over she knew the name of that new passion that was tearing and gnawing at her heart. No use to tell herself that if Magsie WAS deeply admired by Warren, if Magsie WAS beautiful, if Magsie WAS constantly in his thoughts, way, she, Rachael, was still his wife; his home, his sons, his name were hers! She was jealous--jealous--jealous of Magsie Clay.

She could not bear even the smothering thought of a divided kingdom. Professionally, socially, the world might claim him; but no one but herself should ever claim even one one-hundredth of that innermost heart of his that had been all her own! The thought pierced her vitally, and she felt in sick discouragement that she could not fight, she could not meet his cruelty with new cruelty. Her very beauty grew dimmed, and the old flashing wit and radiant self-confidence were clouded for a time. When she was alone with her husband she felt constrained and serious, her heart a smouldering furnace of resentment and pain.

"What do you think of this, dearie?" he asked eagerly one afternoon. "We got talking about California at the Princes' last night, and it seems that Peter and Elinor plan to go; only not before the first week in April. Now, that would suit me as well as next week, if it wouldn't put you out. Could you manage it? The Pomeroys take their car, and an awfully nice crowd; just you and I--if we'll go--Peter and Elinor, and perhaps the Oliphants, and a beau for Magsie!"

Rachael had been waiting for Magsie's name. But there seemed to be nothing to say. She rose to the situation gallantly. She put the boys in the care of their grandmother and the faithful Mary, with Doctor Valentine's telephone number pasted prominently on the nursery wall. She bought herself charming gowns and hats, she made herself the most delightful travelling companion that ever seven hot and spoiled men and women were fortunate enough to find. When everyone, even Magsie, was bored and cross, upset by close air, by late hours, by unlimited candy and cocktails, Mrs. Gregory would appear from her stateroom, dainty, interested, ready for bridge or gossip, full of enthusiasm for the scenery and for the company in which she found herself. When she and Warren were alone she often tried to fancy herself merely an acquaintance again, with an acquaintance's anxiety to meet his mood and interest him. She made no claims, she resented nothing, and she schooled herself to praise Magsie, to quote her, and to discuss her.

The result was all that she could have hoped. After the five weeks' trip Warren was heard to make the astonishing comment that Magsie was a shallow little thing, and Rachael, hungrily kissing her boys' sweet, bewildered faces, and laughing and crying together as Mary gave her an account of every hour of her absence, felt more than rewarded for the somewhat sordid scheme and the humiliating effort. Little Gerald was in short clothes now, a rose of a baby, and Jimmy at the irresistible age when every stammered word and every changing expression had new charm. _

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