Lifted Masks Part 2

She did not want him to drop the velvet gown and furthermore, she _would_ like a cup of tea. There came into her mind a fortifying thought about the relative deaths of sheep and lambs. If to be killed for the sheep were indeed no worse than being killed for the lamb, and if a cup of tea went with the sheep and nothing at all with the lamb--?

So she agreed. "There's a nice little tea-shop right round the corner. We girls often go there."

"Tea? Like tea? All right, then"--and he started manfully on.

But as she entered the tea-shop she was filled with keen sense of the desirableness of being slain for the lesser animal. For, cosily installed in their favourite corner, were "the girls."

Virginia had explained to these friends some three hours before that she could not go with them that afternoon as she must attend a musicale some friends of her mother's were giving. Being friends of her mother's, she expatiated, she would have to go.

Recollecting this, also for the first time remembering the musicale, she bowed with the _hauteur_ of self-consciousness.

Right there her friend contributed to the tragedy of a sheep's death by dropping the yellow opera cloak. While he was stooping to pick it up the violet velvet gown slid backward and Virginia had to steady it until he could regain position. The staring in the corner gave way to t.i.ttering--and no dying sheep had ever held its head more haughtily.

The death of this particular sheep proved long and painful. The legs of Virginia's friend and the legs of the tea-table did not seem well adapted to each other. He towered like a human mountain over the dainty thing, twisting now this way and now that. It seemed Providence--or at least so much of it as was represented by the management of that shop--had never meant fat people to drink tea.

The table was rendered further out of proportion by having a large box piled on either side of it.

Expansively, and not softly, he discoursed of these things. What did they think a fellow was to do with his _knees_? Didn't they sell tea enough to afford any decent chairs? Did all these women pretend to really _like_ tea?

Virginia's sense of humour rallied somewhat as she viewed him eating the sandwiches. Once she had called them doll-baby sandwiches; now that seemed literal: tea-cups, _pet.i.t gateau_, the whole service gave the fancy of his sitting down to a tea-party given by a little girl for her dollies.

But after a time he fell silent, looking around the room. And when he broke that pause his voice was different.

"These women here, all dressed so fine, nothing to do but sit around and eat this folderol, _they_ have it easy--don't they?"

The bitterness in it, and a faint note of wistfulness, puzzled her.

Certainly _he_ had money.

"And the husbands of these women," he went on; "lots of 'em, I suppose, didn't always have so much. Maybe some of these women helped out in the early days when things weren't so easy. Wonder if the men ever think how lucky they are to be able to get it back at 'em?"

She grew more bewildered. Wasn't he "getting it back?" The money he had been spending that day!

"Young Lady," he said abruptly, "you must think I'm a queer one."

She murmured feeble protest.

"Yes, you must. Must wonder what I want with all this stuff, don't you?"

"Why, it's for your wife, isn't it?" she asked, startled.

"Oh yes, but you must wonder. You're a shrewd one, Young Lady; judging the thing by me, you must wonder."

Virginia was glad she was not compelled to state her theory. Loud and common and impossible were terms which had presented themselves, terms which she had fought with kind and good-natured and generous.

Their purchases she had decided were to be used, not for a knock, but as a cras.h.i.+ng pound at the door of the society of his town. For her part, Virginia hoped the door would come down.

"And if you knew that probably this stuff would never be worn at all, that ten to one it would never do anything more than lie round on chairs--then you _would_ think I was queer, wouldn't you?"

She was forced to admit that that would seem rather strange.

"Young Lady, I believe I'll tell you about it. Never do talk about it to hardly anybody, but I feel as if you and I were pretty well acquainted--we've been through so much together."

She smiled at him warmly; there was something so real about him when he talked that way.

But his look then frightened her. It seemed for an instant as though he would brush the tiny table aside and seize some invisible thing by the throat. Then he said, cutting off each word short: "Young Lady, what do you think of this? I'm worth more 'an a million dollars--and my wife gets up at five o'clock every morning to do was.h.i.+ng and scrubbing."

"Oh, it's not that she _has_ to," he answered her look, "but she _thinks_ she has to. See? Once we were poor. For twenty years we were poor as dirt. Then she did have to do things like that. Then I struck it. Or rather, it struck me. Oil. Oil on a bit of land I had. I had just sense enough to make the most of it; one thing led to another--well, you're not interested in that end of it.

But the fact is that now we're rich. Now she could have all the things that these women have--Lord A'mighty she could lay abed every day till noon if she wanted to! But--you see?--it _got_ her--those hard, lonely, grinding years _took_ her. She's"--he shrunk from the terrible word and faltered out--"her mind's not--"

There was a sobbing little flutter in Virginia's throat. In a dim way she was glad to see that the girls were going. She _could_ not have them laughing at him--now.

"Well, you can about figure out how it makes me feel," he continued, and looking into his face now it was as though the spirit redeemed the flesh. "You're smart. You can see it without my callin' your attention to it. Last time I went to see her I had just made fifty thousand on a deal. And I found her down on her knees thinking she was scrubbing the floor!"

Unconsciously Virginia's hand went out, following the rush of sympathy and understanding. "But can't they--restrain her?" she murmured.

"Makes her worse. Says she's got it to do--frets her to think she's not getting it done."

"But isn't there some _way_?" she whispered. "Some way to make her _know_?"

He pointed to the large boxes. "That," he said simply, "is the meaning of those. It's been seven years--but I keep on trying."

She was silent, the tears too close for words. And she had thought it cheap ambition!--vulgar aspiration--silly show--vanity!

"Suppose you thought I was a queer one, talking about lively looking things. But you see now? Thought it might attract her attention, thought something real gorgeous like this might impress money on her. Though I don't know,"--he seemed to grow weary as he told it; "I got her a lot of diamonds, thinking they might interest her, and she thought she'd stolen 'em, and they had to take them away."

Still the girl did not speak. Her hand was shading her eyes.

"But there's nothing like trying. Nothing like keeping right on trying. And anyhow--a fellow likes to think he's taking his wife something from Paris."

They pa.s.sed before her in their heartbreaking folly, their tragic uselessness, their lovable absurdity and stinging irony--those things they had bought that afternoon: an _opera cloak_--a _velvet dress_--_those hats_--_red silk stockings_.

The mockery of them wrung her heart. Right there in the tea-shop Virginia was softly crying.

"Oh, now that's too bad," he expostulated clumsily. "Why, look here, Young Lady, I didn't mean you to take it so hard."

When she had recovered herself he told her much of the story. And the thing which revealed him--glorified him--was less the grief he gave to it than the way he saw it. "It's the cursed unfairness of it," he concluded. "When you consider it's all because she did those things--when you think of her bein' bound to 'em for life just because she was _too faithful doin' 'em_--when you think that now--when I could give her everything these women have got!--she's got to go right on worrying about baking the bread and was.h.i.+ng the dishes--did it for me when I was poor--and now with me rich she can't get _out_ of it--and I _can't reach_ her--oh, it's _rotten!_ I tell you it's _rotten!_ Sometimes I can just hear my money _laugh_ at me! Sometimes I get to going round and round in a circle about it till it seems I'm going crazy myself."

"I think you are a--a n.o.ble man," choked Virginia.

That disconcerted him. "Oh Lord--don't think that. No, Young Lady, don't try to make any plaster saint out of _me_. My life goes on. I've got to eat, drink and be merry. I'm built that way. But just the same my heart on the inside's pretty sore, Young Lady. I want to tell you that the whole inside of my heart is _sore as a boil_!"

They were returning for the hats. Suddenly Virginia stopped, and it was a soft-eyed and gentle Virginia who turned to him after the pause. "There are lovely things to be bought in Paris for women who aren't well. Such soft, lovely things to wear in your room. Not but what I think these other things are all right. As you say, they may--interest her. But they aren't things she can use just now, and wouldn't you like her to have some of those soft lovely things she could actually wear? They might help most of all. To wake in the morning and find herself in something so beautiful--"

"Where do you get 'em?" he demanded promptly.

And so they went to one of those shops which have, more than all the others, enshrined Paris in feminine hearts. And never was lingerie selected with more loving care than that which Virginia picked out that afternoon. A tear fell on one particularly lovely _robe de nuit_--so soothingly soft, so caressingly luxurious, it seemed that surely it might help bring release from the bondage of those crus.h.i.+ng years.

As they were leaving they were given two packages. "Just the kimona thing you liked," he said, "and a trinket or two. Now that we're such good friends, you won't feel like you did this morning."

"And if I don't want them myself, I might send them to my mother,"

Virginia replied, a quiver in her laugh at her own little joke.