Chapter III: A Social Secretary

In nineteen observant years Agatha had noted a business man's invariable interest in the local telegraph service, and the tendency of lovers to be dissatisfied with the mail facilities of the neighborhood. The concern manifested by Burton Forbes on learning that the Rural Free Delivery called at Oak Knoll but once a day, classified him definitely, in Agatha's estimation.

"You can always send Howard to the village for the afternoon mail," she suggested, the new warmth in her voice an unconscious demonstration of the truth that all the world loves a lover.

"Thanks, that's fine!" The brightening of Forbes' face quite offset his immediate conscientious warning that she was not to spoil him just because she was sorry for him.

As the Rural Free Delivery brought nothing of consequence on the morning following Forbes' arrival, Howard was despatched to the village after the mid-day meal, leaving Forbes in Agatha's care. Agatha conducted her charge to a creaking rocking chair, in the shadiest angle of the porch, and shoved a foot-stool near. "Now I'll get my knitting," she said blithely, "and we'll talk."

Forbes seemed delighted. "It's too good to be true," he murmured. "I thought they were extinct, the old ladies who sat knitting. It's like stepping into the heart of an old-fashioned story."

Agatha smiled tolerantly. "It's clear you're just back from South America. Up here everybody's knitting, young and old."

"But not like you," he insisted. "I am sure you have an air about it that differentiates your knitting from all this kittenish frolicking with balls of yarn." He turned his wistful face toward her as if it helped to visualize the picture, and then added, "Just the hour for confidences, isn't it?"

Agatha smiled at the dun colored wool in her lap. "A warm day, a cool porch, an old lady knitting, and a young man in love. Of course it's ideal for confidences."

He did not seem in any hurry to take advantage of the opening he had asked for. "I'm afraid I'm going to impose on you," he said, after so long a pause that she wondered whether he were planning to deny her charge. "Howard is a bright kid, and I'm sure he'll prove a satisfactory secretary, but there are a few letters I'd hate to dictate to a boy." He laughed with rather an engaging air of shyness as he added, "I imagine it won't be particularly easy to dictate them even to you."

"Of course not," agreed Agatha, with ready sympathy. "Love-letters seem one's own business more than almost anything in the world." His artless confidences had brought a lovely color to her cheeks. Practical as Agatha believed herself, she was romance-hungry, and it did not matter in the least that in this particular love-affair she was cast for a minor rôle. "And I'll read you her letters, too," she offered joyously. "It will save Howard some trying experiences. Howard's just at the age when he's horribly embarrassed by anything in the shape of sentiment."

"Thank you. I'd any amount rather you read them," returned Forbes gratefully. "But they won't be sentimental letters, at all. Howard could read them without finding a word that would bring a blush to his maiden cheek."

"Oh!" observed Agatha blankly, and knitted to the end of her needle without speaking. Apparently the path that had seemed so plain led nowhere, after all.

Forbes, too, seemed in no haste to speak. "Of course," he explained at last, "I'm very hopeful. If I make a complete recovery as the doctors tell me I'm likely to do, there's no reason why things shouldn't be as they were before."

Agatha laid down her knitting and regarded him fixedly, an upright crease between her brows. The tranquillity of his unconscious face gave the impression that she must have misunderstood him. "How were they before?" she asked bluntly.

Apparently he did not question her right to a categorical answer. "We had planned to be married in January till this came up. But of course I couldn't hold a girl like Julia when there's a possibility of my having to grope my way through life."

"No, of course not," agreed Agatha, with misleading calm. "But if she were enough in love with you to plan to marry you in January, I should suppose something would hold her, something you had nothing to do with."

There was a moment of rather tense silence. Then Forbes laughed out boyishly:

"You dear old soul," he cried, "you don't know how mid-Victorian that sounds. When you were a girl, women took all that sentimental stuff seriously; about sacrificing themselves for love, I mean. But you don't understand the modern girl. She's beyond that."

"I don't pretend to understand your Julia," agreed Agatha, her eyes aflame, "I don't want to."

Forbes laughed again, this time with a reservation in his mirth. "Look here," he said, "you mustn't criticize Julia, for then I can't talk to you about her, and that would be a deuced bore. And she's a queen. A girl of that sort is bound to know her value. Julia was really fond of me, not desperately in love as I was--as I am--that wasn't to be expected, but really fond of me and inclined to exaggerate ridiculously my small achievements. But of course it's out of the question for her to marry me if the rest of my life is to be a game of Blind Man's Buff."

"Per--perhaps so," Agatha stammered. One of her ready rages was coming on. She felt it distinctly. One familiar symptom was that her blood seemed boiling in her veins, and her ears felt hot and swollen. She had seen them before when she was angry, flaming like two danger signals, and tempering the redness of her hair. Her shaking hands made knitting quite impossible. "Of course people can't marry if they haven't the money to marry on," she succeeded in saying finally, in an unsteady voice, "but there's nothing to keep them from loving each other till they die, and having that comfort, anyway."

She had succeeded in making him very uncomfortable. She would have known that by the way the rocking chair was creaking as he squirmed, even if his astonished face had not borne witness to the facts in the case.

"It--it is not a question of money," he explained stiffly. "I have plenty, and so has she. We're not extravagant in our tastes, either of us. The thing that's out of the question--" He seemed to find a little difficulty in making it clear, after all, and floundered at this point. "You can't think of it," he protested angrily, "tying a girl like Julia, a beautiful, queenly creature, to a man who has to be led around like a poodle dog. God! I couldn't be coward enough to accept such a sacrifice."

"Oh, I understand, now." Agatha's anger was past the inarticulate stage. She pulled a needle from her knitting, and brandished it dangerously as she talked. "You mean that you wouldn't _let_ her be engaged to you." The affected innocence of her voice was flatly contradicted by the bitterness of her eyes. "You just insisted that there shouldn't be anything more between you two till you were sure that your eyes were going to be all right again. Well, I tell you frankly that I think you've treated Julia brutally, and that she has a right to detest you."

Apparently Mr. Forbes was losing confidence in his ability to make the matter clear. He sighed patiently as he tried again.

"No, that isn't it. We were agreed perfectly on the subject. Love isn't quite so reckless a passion as it was when you were young, Miss Kent. Julia and I belong to a reasonable generation, tremendously matter-of-fact. She was really cut up over the whole affair, but she felt she owed it to herself to break the engagement since my future was so uncertain, and I felt I owed it to her to release her. So we were perfectly agreed, you see."

"Yes, I see." Agatha was glaring at him with the expression of a vixen. "Just as businesslike as if you had been planning to go into partnership to raise chickens, weren't you? And so that's what the modern girl is like. Dear me!"

The edge to her voice made her irritation sufficiently plain, and Forbes, with a gentle deference that touched her, changed the topic to one unlikely to combat her old-fashioned prejudices. They were discussing Thackeray and George Eliot when Howard returned. Swinging himself from his pony, the boy came clattering along the porch, and deposited a package of mail on his employer's knees.

"It's lucky I went over," Howard declared. "You've got a regular windfall, five or six letters beside the things with one-cent stamps."

In spite of Mr. Forbes' assumption of ultra-modern reasonableness, his countenance betrayed a boyish ardor that added to Agatha's resentment against the recreant Julia. She took possession of the letters, saying to her brother, "You'd better put the pony up, hadn't you, Howard? I'll attend to Mr. Forbes' mail."

Her boarder only waited for the beat of the pony's hoofs to tell that Howard was out of hearing, before he leaned toward her, his face pathetically eager. "Is there one from her?"

"What's the post-mark?"

"She's probably at the Briercliff Manor, this week. She writes a striking hand, not the old-time idea of feminine, but full of character and strength. You'll always recognize it after you've seen it once."

Unfortunately it appeared that Agatha's education in this important branch of knowledge was not to begin immediately. There was no letter from Julia. This fact established, the light went out of Forbes' face, and it remained blank during the reading of several communications of varying degrees of interest. For the first time he seemed an embodiment of all the pitiful helplessness of the blind.

"I suppose," he ventured hesitatingly, when she had finished, "that you're too busy to take a letter for me to-day. Got to go on with that knitting, haven't you?"

Agatha longed to say yes. In her present mood, to transcribe an impassioned letter to the object of Forbes' regard, seemed well-nigh intolerable. Inexorably she forced herself to reply that she was not in the least busy. "I'll get Howard out of the way by sending him to the garden," she added. "He'll be perfectly willing to change jobs with me."

Howard, who had the average boy's aversion to the use of a pen, bore out her statement and joyfully agreed to picking peas in place of acting as an amanuensis. He went his way, favoring her with an almost ribald wink, a natural reaction from the profound respect he was now required to show her. With an expression that would have befitted Queen Elizabeth, when signing the death-warrant of Lady Jane Grey, Agatha began her task.

Forbes' mood, though disappointed, was not reproachful. His pale face flushing slightly at the novel experience of giving voice to such tender sentiments in the presence of a third person, he dictated the letter with only those pauses necessary to enable Agatha to keep pace with him.

"My Dearest Girl.

"The afternoon mail has just been brought from the village, and I was disappointed at not receiving a letter from you. Disappointed I am, but not surprised, for I am sure that wherever you are, you will have little time to yourself unless you take it by main force, so to speak. That is the penalty I pay for being in love with one so charming.

"I wish you could look in on me here, at the home of my father's old friend, Miss Agatha Kent. Oak Knoll is a fine old place. The house is spacious, comfortable and homelike, the last characteristic doubtless due to the personality of the owner. As Miss Kent is good enough to write this for me, I must wait some other opportunity to tell you how delightful I find her. Her type is disappearing, unluckily, which makes me all the more ready to congratulate myself on this chance of renewing a friendship which might almost be regarded as an inheritance.

"The troublesome eyes pained me a little last night, but lying awake was not altogether fruitless, as in the stillness I could bring your dear face before me almost as vividly as if I saw it in the flesh. To-day I feel much better. I am convinced that this wonderful air is going to make me over, and then in a few weeks I shall again have a right to indulge myself in the dreaming of those dreams which need no Daniel to interpret them."

Forbes' deep voice came to a halt at this point. He turned his face toward Agatha, the involuntary movement showing that his blindness was not of long duration, and smiled with that winsome boyishness which made it impossible to believe him past thirty.

"I believe I'll take my pen in hand for the wind-up, if you please, Miss Kent. I think I can manage a line or two, without making it illegible."

She brought the sheet to him, put the pen in his hand, and indicated where he was to begin to write. And then suddenly as she watched him, the outline of his fine profile was blurred by angry tears. Something in his expression gave her an inkling of the tenderness compressed in those few straggling lines, and all for the girl who had "owed it to herself" to break her engagement because of his misfortune.

"She owes it to herself to break with him," reflected Agatha, "but she doesn't owe it to him to make it final, and give him a chance to get over it Oh, no! He can go on to the end of his life dreaming about her, and making love to her, and feeding her vanity by his devotion. And then he calls that deliberate heartlessness reasonable, and makes himself believe that she's the type of the modern girl. The cat!"

Agatha's righteous indignation was getting the best of her. She said the last two words aloud.

"Beg pardon!" Forbes turned, showing a puzzled face.

"The cat is rather near the chickens," Agatha explained. "If you'll excuse me, I'll run down and drive her away." She started at a pace which would have been reckless for rheumatic knees, recalled herself, and slowed down till beyond his hearing. Then she stood quite still and stamped her foot upon the gravel like a restive horse, till she felt better.

When she returned, flushed but calm, the letter was completed and folded. "Haven't any asbestos envelopes, have you?" questioned Forbes, trying to make a joke out of his bit of sentiment. "I've made it hot stuff, I assure you." And then he acknowledged that an ordinary envelope would probably retain his ardent effusion without bursting into flame, and Agatha wrote the name she already hated, eying each letter malevolently, as she set it down:

Miss Julia Studley Briercliff Manor Briercliff, New York

Howard took her aside that night to thank her for relieving him of an obnoxious task. "It's the only part of the work I mind, writing those darned letters. Does he make 'em long?"

"A great deal too long," said Agatha, "and I don't blame you for hating that job. It's rotten."