Angela's Business Part 48

Mary Wing was crying. That painful hard tension had snapped; the indomitable slim figure drooped beaten, for once. She, also, made little sound in her peculiar difficulty. But her body shook with a stormy racking. And it hurt her, he was sure; hurt her physically, as if she couldn't find tears without breaking something inside....

Strange it seemed that once, in this very room, and only the other day really, he had wanted to see Mary cry. He had thought of it then as a desirable sort of symbol, hadn't he?--something of that sort. What did her tears have to tell him now? Then he had conceived himself as watching her emotion, moved doubtless, but yet with a secretly gratified masculinity. Now every heave of those slender shoulders was like a clutch upon his heart.

And still there was something in Charles that was not distress at all.

He was aware of another and quite different inner sense--peace, the end of struggle, fulfillment--he could not say what it was. It was strange.

He was not unhappy....

There came, after a time, signs that his friend was overcoming that hard revolt of feelings too much put upon. Even in the beginning she had never seemed to abandon herself, quite. At length, somewhat unexpectedly, she moved, turned from her seat under his eye, and, rising, went away to the office's one window. There she stood, her back toward him. And presently she began to clear her throat, with nervous quick coughings.

Through this, Charles had not spoken, or thought of doing so. To pat Mary's shoulder, this time, had not entered his head. His instinct seemed to feel the ba.n.a.lity of any intrusion upon her freedom: she should weep or not weep, just as seemed best to her. Now, as his grave eyes followed her, it occurred to him that his presence here had been, and was, a considerable intrusion. And about the time he had reached this conclusion, Mary spoke, naturally enough, except that a sharp catch of breath broke her sentence in the middle.

"I'm giving you ... a pleasant visit to-day."

The young man stirred on his perch. He answered, oddly, with a sort of growl:--

"That's right! I'm a fair-weather friend. Keep things pleasant for _me_ all the time--or good-bye."

His heroine was sniffing repeatedly, in the humanest way. She kept clearing her throat. Her movements made it clear that she was searching busily for her handkerchief. However, there lay her handkerchief on the table, under his eye. And if she, perhaps, hardly wished to turn and come for it just now, no more did he see his way clear to going and taking it to her.

"No--but what's the sense of it? I'm--doing just what I told Angela not to do. Feeling sorry for myself, that's all."

"Well, I don't feel sorry for you. Don't worry about that."

Charles came down the ladder, and stood a moment kicking at the "New Schools" strewn about the floor.

"Look here, suppose I save time by arranging about this box now? You want it to go to your house, I suppose?"

"No--I'm going to send it to the grammar-school."

"Oh--all right. I'll attend to it," he said, briefly. "I'll tell the porter to keep it to-night, and get a wagon to-morrow."

On which, without more ado, he stepped from the a.s.sistant princ.i.p.al's office, and shut the door behind him.

Charles's conference with the negro porter in the corridor below lasted a minute, perhaps. His diplomatic retirement lasted ten minutes, at least. His surplus time the young man spent in staring out of a tall window into a white-paved courtyard. But that it was a white-paved courtyard, or that it was a courtyard, he never knew. The instant he found that he was staring at it, he jumped a little, and went upstairs....

If he had meant this interval as a punctuation and the turning of a page, Mary, it seemed, had so accepted it. Reopening Mr. Geddie's door, Charles saw that his absence had been employed for a general setting to rights. The table had been moved back against the wall; the books and globe restored to it, the chair Mary had occupied returned to its place, the window opened to blow out the dust. Mary herself stood in the middle of the room, coated, b.u.t.toning her gloves. Without looking at her exactly, he was aware that the white veil which had been caught up around her hat was now let down.

Bygones were bygones, clearly: the least said, the soonest mended.

Charles remarked, exactly as if house-cleaning were the sole interest he knew of here: "Well, you've made a good job of it."

And Mary replied, with equal naturalness: "I did what I could. John will have to attend to these things on the floor."

"Yes--I told him to see to that at once."

"He ought to give the closet a good cleaning, too. I'd better tell him--this is just the time."

"I told him to be sure to scrub the closet. It'll be all right."

Looking up, she said: "You seem to have thought of everything."

"Let me get my hat," said Charles.

But Mary, standing in his way, was regarding him with a sudden directness he had no wish to reciprocate. And she answered his remark about the hat with a little exclamation.

"What's the matter with your eye?"

"My eye?" said the young man, and involuntarily put his hand there.

Recollecting, he finished: "Nothing--nothing at all."

The school-teacher came a step nearer, but he went round her as he spoke, and continued his way.

"But there's a good deal the matter with it!" she exclaimed, concerned.

"It's swollen--it looks discolored, too.--How did you hurt yourself?"

"Oh, that? Oh!" said Charles, carefully fitting on his hat, and then removing it again. "I remember now--it's nothing. Got a tumble this afternoon, that's all. Stupid thing."

"You must let me get some hot water down the hall. I'm afraid it's--"

But he indicated, quite brusquely, that his eye was all right, just the way he liked it, that having water put on it was, in particular, the last thing he would ever dream of.

She said behind him, slowly, after a pause: "If you won't, you won't, of course.... But it's so exactly like you--"

"Ready?" said Charles.

But when he turned he found that Mary had turned, too, after him--stood facing him anew. And this time the confrontation was too near, too immediate, to be further avoided.

He now discovered that the thin veil had not withdrawn his friend very far. Looking at her for the first time since her cataclysm, he saw that her delicate face wore that look described as "rain-washed," which commonly means peace, but peace at a price. The redness of her eyelids was quite perceptible. What struck the young man particularly, however, was the look of the blue eyes themselves. More or less irrelevant eyes he had always thought them, for all the heavy arched brows which so emphasized their faculty for steady, sometimes disconcerting, interrogation. That characteristic grave intentness was in Mary's gaze now: but it was not this that gave her look its power to hold Charles Garrott in his tracks.

The peculiar commotion within him gave forth in a short laugh, testy and embarra.s.sed: "Honestly, if you say the word 'eye' to me again--"

"I wasn't going to speak of your eye," said Mary Wing, with quite remarkable meekness.... "I was thinking of that remark you made--about being a fair-weather friend."

And then she went on hurriedly, with a rare, impulsiveness: "I've just been thinking--I don't suppose since the world began there was ever such another rainy-day friend as you. It's got so now that I never get into trouble without thinking right away--as I was thinking this afternoon when I left the Flowers'--that you'll be right there to help me with it.

Yes, I was. And it's so--perfect. Nothing to spoil it ever--not one thing for you to gain--all just your rather extravagant idea of what being a friend means. You don't know--how much it means...."

The strange speech--strange blossom of her disruptive emotion--ended a little short; but that it ended was the princ.i.p.al thing. Doubtless there had been a time when words such as these from Mary Wing, this fine frank expression of abiding friends.h.i.+p, would have been sweet and acceptable to Charles Garrott, crowning him with a full reward. But it seemed that that time must have pa.s.sed, somewhat abruptly....

The two moderns stood, gazing full at each other. And now, in the same moment, a little color tinged the girl's cheek, beneath her veil, and the young man turned rather pale.

"Miss Mary, you must be dreaming," said Charles, gently. "I've never done anything for you in my life. We both know that. Let's go."

Mary, her eyes falling, had resumed the b.u.t.toning of her gloves. She moved toward the door. The descent of the High School stairs was made in comparative silence. The chief item of importance developed was that Mary intended to go home by street-car; she was tired, she mentioned. It seemed that Charles, on the contrary, had no intention of foregoing his afternoon const.i.tutional. He said that he would see Miss Mary to her car, however; and he did.

So the old friends parted casually on a street corner, as they had done a hundred times before.

But in the Studio, there could be no such reserve, no such slurring of the characteristic services of men. Here combat must have its fair due, in the moral order of a too sedentary world. Judge Blenso, in brief, from whom no secrets were hid, had the full facts relative to the altered eye within ten minutes of Charles's homecoming, an hour later; and the Judge's cold manner, already somewhat softened by the heartening acceptance of Entry 3, straightway dissolved in exultation and proud joy. The reconciliation between uncle and nephew was instantaneous and immutable, and there followed, by consequence, the most broken, the most conversational, evening in the history of the Studio.

Charles was very glad to be reconciled with his relative. He was very glad to feel that his secretary no longer viewed him with bald disgust.