Chapter XIII: Congratulations Are in Order

Murray Prendergast had proposed. The summer sport had become dead earnest. Julia wrote Forbes the full details, explaining that the young man was awaiting her answer, and that she had asked two weeks in which to come to a decision. Apparently Julia, like Miss Finch, felt that to refuse Prendergast would be flying in the face of Providence, even though accepting him seemed a harsh necessity.

"'It's not what you and I dreamed of in the dear old days,'" wrote Julia. "'Oh, Burton, how far away those happy times seem when we sat hand in hand and planned our future. How merciless life is, Burton! Is there some dark fate in whose hands we are only puppets?'"

Agatha broke off in her reading to lift a scarlet face. "Must I go on with this?"

"Do you mean that you're tired?" Forbes' voice was self-controlled but in his pale cheeks a pulse beat like a trip hammer. Even his tears would not have hurt her like that palpitating spot over which his will was powerless.

"Yes, I _am_ tired. I'm terribly tired of the people who talk about fate when it's all their own cowardice, and pity themselves for losing what they deliberately threw away."

"It's a matter of view-point," said Forbes tonelessly. "If that's all, I'm afraid I must ask you to go on. I--I could hardly have Howard read it." All at once his white cheek showed a stain of red, as if the mere thought that any eyes but his own should see that letter was humiliating beyond endurance.

Julia's letter was as long as usual and decidedly more sentimental. She surrendered herself with abandon to the luxury of heart-break. She recalled a number of tender episodes, and wondered pathetically why fate could not have spared lovers so fond. To Agatha, Julia's melancholy was a theatrical make-believe on the face of it, as much a pose as her pretense of affection. Agatha did her best to spoil the effect of the letter by reading rapidly, and in a monotonous sing-song, but she could not keep her eyes from the face of the man before her, and she saw that every tender memory the missive evoked found response in his tortured heart.

She wound up breathless and hot and trembling uncontrollably. Forbes thanked her with a formal courtesy that added to her pain, for it seemed to set her at a distance. She wanted to put her arms about him, and cry over him, and tell him that the hurt would not last. Then she remembered with bitterness that she was a withered old woman in whose heart the fires of love had burned to ashes, long, long before, if indeed they had ever been kindled.

"I'd like a sheet of paper, please," Forbes said with the same laborious politeness. "I'll scrawl a line myself."

"What are you going to tell her?"

His air of surprise at the question indicated that there was but one answer. "What is there to say, except to wish her all happiness?"

"You're not going to blame her, then?"

"God forbid." He took the sheet she gave him, wrote upon it rapidly and folding it across, handed it back to her. "I'll have to ask you to direct the envelope for me," he said, still heart-breakingly patient. "I can write well enough for Julia's eyes, but not for Uncle Sam's."

Agatha did not reply. The breeze, always fresh upon the porch, had parted the folded sheet, and her reluctant gaze caught the signature, "Always yours, B.F." She turned away her eyes and caught her breath. "Always yours." That was the cruelty of it. Julia would marry Murray Prendergast and yet keep her hold on the heart of the man she had abandoned in his need. Her selfishness could not alter his loyalty. If the letter just read did not reveal her to him in her incomparable egotism, nothing ever would.

Agatha's heart bled for him in his white resignation. If he had done anything but sit there like a man under sentence of death, she would have felt equal to the occasion. But this white suffering terrified her. She dared not trust herself to look at him, for her eyes ran over at the sight of his drawn face. She stared out over the serene landscape as she said unsteadily, "Did you ask her to wait?"

"Wait? Why wait?"

"For you to get well, of course. If she's so fond of you, she ought to be able to wait a year or two until you've recovered your sight."

He shrugged his shoulders without replying, but the gesture revealed more than hopelessness, something alarmingly akin to indifference. And though Agatha knew that in the nature of the case, this mood could not last, it added fuel to her hatred of the shallow, selfish woman who was responsible. In her serener moments Agatha comforted herself by the reflection that however unhappy Forbes might be without Julia, he was bound to be more unhappy with her. But in the present crisis that consolation failed her. She was swayed by the desire to give him, at all costs, the thing he wanted.

Her plan was formed in an instant. Agatha was aware that with many women as with all men, undisputed possession tends to indifference. Forbes' one chance with Julia, she implicitly believed, was to awaken in the mind of that complacent young woman a doubt as to whether her unfortunate lover was in reality hers always, as he declared himself. Forbes, who scorned to ask even for a few months' delay, could not be expected to lend himself to the scheme unfolding in Agatha's fancy. Some friend must do for him what he would not stoop to do for himself.

As Agatha walked to the writing-desk, holding the folded sheet pinched shut with thumb and finger, for fear of again reading the assurance of Forbes' unalterable devotion, there was something oddly gallant in her bearing. Her keen common sense was temporarily quiescent. Her heart had things all its own way. Since the prospect of losing Julia irrevocably had graven that terrible look upon Forbes' face, she must find some way of making Julia hesitate to engage herself to Prendergast There was but one chance, as far as Agatha could see. She resolved to take it.

No one could consider it singular, Agatha decided, as she seated herself, if an amiable old lady should send a note of congratulation to the girl to whom she had penned so many communications. Agatha almost snatched the stationery from the drawer. She had a most unnatural fear of losing her courage by delay. At the moment she lacked neither courage nor inspiration.

"My Dear Miss Studley:

"I'm sure you will pardon a line from a woman old enough to be your grandmother."

Agatha paused, bit her pen and frowned. "I am, of course," she told herself, with that odd impression of dual identity, which at times made it difficult for her to remember whether she was nineteen or sixty-seven. "But it isn't worth while to make her feel so youthful." She reached for a fresh sheet of paper and made a new start.

"My Dear Miss Studley:

"I am sure you will pardon a line from a woman old enough to be your mother, who has come to feel right well acquainted with you through Mr. Forbes, and through reading your letters aloud to him. I want to be one of the first to congratulate you, and to wish you all the happiness you deserve."

Her pen poised in air, Agatha combated the temptation to underline the last two words. "It's exactly what I _do_ wish her," she mused. "All the happiness she deserves, not a bit more nor a bit less. Poor wretch, it's an inhuman sort of wish but I can't help it, and I'm afraid she won't realize that I'm consigning her to Purgatory."

The pen resumed its hurried scratching. It was not necessary for Agatha to wait for inspiration. Words came in a flood.

"Some people might blame you for your engagement, so soon after breaking with Mr. Forbes, but I assure you I do not feel that way. I am unmarried myself, and I know that when a woman loses one chance, she may never get another. Mr. Forbes might die or change his mind. I think you are very sensible to make sure of Mr. Prendergast while he is in the mood. Whatever ill-natured people may say about you, I for one will always take this view."

Agatha drew a long breath of pure satisfaction. She had undertaken the letter with the sole thought of rushing to Forbes' assistance in his extremity. But virtue was proving its own reward. She was enjoying herself immensely. Her sense of satisfaction made her reckless. When again the pen began moving down the sheet, it wrote more than Agatha had originally intended.

"I suppose you sometimes feel a little anxious about Mr. Forbes and his future. It is hard for us women to get rid of a feeling of responsibility for the men who love us. And I am glad I can set your natural misgivings at rest. It would not be a great surprise to me if you should hear of another engagement in the near future. Yet Mr. Forbes is a very honorable gentleman, I need not assure you, and as long as you were unmarried, or at least not engaged, he would not have permitted himself to become entangled with any other woman. But this summer he has spent a great deal of time with a girl who lives in the neighborhood. She is considered extremely pretty and though that does not mean anything to him at present, it is evident that he finds her company most enjoyable. Indeed I believe he is more interested in her than he himself realizes, while the fact that she has devoted practically her entire summer to him, seems to indicate that it would not be difficult to bring her to think of him as something more than a friend. And I've noticed that she seems quite responsive when he pats her hand or holds it, as he has a way of doing. I suppose he feels that an invalid has a right to some little privileges. On one occasion he did so far forget himself as to take her in his arms, but the circumstances were quite unusual, and I saw to it that the indiscretion was never repeated. I always manage to be around when the young people are together, for, as our beloved Longfellow expresses it, 'Man is fire and woman is tow.'

"I'm afraid I am a poor one to talk about discretion when I am writing you all this. I'm sure if Mr. Forbes knew he would be very much put out with me, and so I am going to ask you not to speak of this if you should happen to write again. Very likely Mr. Prendergast will not approve of your corresponding with an old flame, and who can blame him, for as Will Carlton says so ably, 'She that is false to one can be the same with two,' or words to that effect. I'm afraid my memory is not what it once was.

"Excuse this garrulous letter. How I have run on about Mr. Forbes instead of merely carrying out my first intention, and wishing you the future you so richly deserve.

"Very truly yours,

"Agatha Kent."

Agatha re-read the closely written sheets with growing delectation. In every respect they measured up to her anticipations. She had expressed her sentiments toward Julia with a plainness she would hardly have believed possible in a letter superficially observing the amenities of civilized life. She had planted some barbed suggestions where she flattered herself they would render the reader most uncomfortable. But that was not all. It is a thoroughly human weakness to wish to eat one's cake and have it too, and Agatha suspected Julia of having more than her share of this familiar characteristic. Julia, so Agatha argued, saw herself the irreproachable wife of a wealthy man, enjoying all the dignities incident to the Prendergast social sphere, and at the same time the object of another man's hopeless adoration. The doubt Agatha's letter suggested, that she could continue without a rival to rule in Forbes' affections, was, in Agatha's opinion, Forbes' one chance to keep her from the decisive step.

Agatha enclosed Forbes' brief communication with her own lengthy one and despatched it by Howard before qualms could assail her as to the advisability of dropping this particular bomb into the enemy's camp. She knew vaguely that a host of suggestions stood marshaled at the back of her brain, ready to demonstrate conclusively her lack of wisdom. If Julia did not choose to consider the letter confidential, trouble would ensue. The fact that Agatha saw all Forbes' letters, and that he knew only what she chose to tell him, gave her but slight advantage, since she confessed to scruples in the matter of other people's letters. And if it had the result she believed possible, and Julia refused to engage herself to Prendergast till Forbes' recovery was certain or proved impossible, Agatha could not congratulate herself on having assured her friend's happiness.

"I'm afraid I'm a good deal like a mother who gives the baby the scissors to play with because he cries for them. Only with a baby you can distract its attention, and make it think that something else is just as good, and with Burton Forbes that wouldn't work."

And then having satisfied herself by peering through the window that Forbes' face still wore the dazed look of a creature incomprehensibly wounded, Agatha threw herself upon the couch and sought the relief of tears. She wept as she did everything else. Hot tears rained down upon the pillow. Sobs shook her. Every now and then mirth got the upper hand and she laughed hysterically, interrupting, though briefly, the Niobe-like activities.

The storm was over as suddenly as it had begun. Agatha rose and regarded her swollen features in the mirror with much disfavor.

"I suppose it's no use to put powder on my nose. It would only look like a strawberry sprinkled with sugar. And anyway, Mr. Forbes can't see what a fright I am."

As if that thought had a miraculously sustaining power, Agatha drew a long breath and passed into the kitchen to help Phemie with the dinner.