Chapter IV: Complications

For a week Forbes' spirits were fitful. Morning after morning, the Rural Free Delivery brought a variety of offerings, and disappointment along with the rest. Each afternoon Howard rode to the village, and though he never returned empty-handed, he might as well have done so, since he failed to bring the right letter. Had it not been for Agatha, Forbes' depression might easily have become serious. She spent with him all the time she could spare, even shelling peas and whipping cream upon the porch within arm's length of his chair. Whatever opinion he expressed, she promptly disagreed. She railed at modern institutions. She professed unbounded contempt for the modern girl. She was as prickly as a chestnut burr, as puckery as an unripe persimmon, as ruffling as a January gale. But she gained her point. Forbes did not mope.

In that week of waiting, she wrote at his dictation three letters to Julia, all of them ardently tender, and quite uncomplaining. Though he confessed to disappointment over not hearing from her, he did not seem to question that it was her privilege to keep him waiting her pleasure. His humility aroused Agatha to a fury of protest. She dotted her "i's" as if she were stabbing the paper, and crossed her "t's" with a sweep, like the slash of a knife. Her valorous instinct to champion the cause of the under dog had never been so constantly in evidence.

The table at Oak Knoll was extremely good that week. In addition to distracting Forbes' thoughts by continually opposing him, Agatha concentrated her attention on making him eat. The fundamental common sense, underlying like granite her girlish caprices and audacity, assured her that an aching heart was in some mysterious fashion relieved by a full stomach. The price Forbes had insisted on paying for his board had seemed to her excessive, and now it justified her in trying her choicest recipes. And while Forbes' mood would have made it easy for him to be quite indifferent to what was set before him, thanks to these tactics he ate with a rather shamefaced relish, and assured Agatha that cooks of her sort had all been born before the Civil War.

At the end of a trying week, the looked-for letter arrived. Agatha herself took it from the mail box at the end of the long drive, and she eyed it as if it had been a new species of noxious insect. Though she had never seen Julia's chirography, she instantly recognized it, even without the aid of the post-mark. The letter was a long one, evidently, for it had called for double postage.

Agatha walked rapidly back to the house, congratulating herself that her duties would be less onerous, at least till the stimulating effect of this letter had worn away. She beckoned to Howard, who was escorting Forbes about the grounds on his morning constitutional, and despatched him on some unnecessary errand, while she took his place at Forbes' side. "It's come," she said briefly.

Though terse, the statement was quite intelligible. Forbes put out his hand eagerly, and she saw it was trembling. She gave him the letter, conscious of a pity that had a mixture of contempt. "Shall I read it to you?" she asked.

"Why, of course. What am I thinking of! Shall we go to the porch? It seems like a fat fellow, and I don't want to keep you standing."

Agatha put her hand through his arm and steered him in the direction of the house. She noticed the shadow on his face had lifted. A little color had come to his cheeks, and his sensitive mouth seemed on the point of smiling. She felt that she despised his weakness in letting himself be played upon by the caprices of a heartless girl, but at the same time, she wanted to cry. And Forbes, as if suspecting her mood, entertained her as they walked, by making fun of himself and of the rapture he could not hide.

"What do you think, Miss Kent? Will you be equal to reading this to me every day till the next one comes?"

"I suppose," said Agatha with resignation, "that I can stand it if you can."

"Oh, there won't be any difficulty as far as I'm concerned. In fact, if my eyes were normal, I should probably read it several times a day, whenever I had a minute to spare. But I haven't the nerve to impose on you to that extent."

"Heaven forbid!" cried Agatha devoutly, and he broke into hilarious laughter. Agatha reflected that if this was the result of falling in love, the longer that catastrophe was postponed, the better.

Forbes had been quite correct in saying that Julia's letter would not be sentimental. Howard could have read it without the slightest embarrassment. She apologized casually for not having written earlier, and by way of explanation gave a list of her engagements for the past two weeks, a device which lent her letter the effect of the society column in a Sunday newspaper, and accounted for the double postage. The names of several men appeared frequently in her record, and it was evident that Forbes was not the only one of his sex to recognize her charm. She even quoted one or two compliments she had received, as if certain of his sympathetic pleasure in her popularity, and his expression as he listened seemed to justify her confidence.

On the last page of the fifteen, Julia detached herself from this fascinating theme, and touched on his affairs. She was glad he was better and she was sure he must enjoy Oak Knoll. She thought those old colonial houses simply lovely and from his description, Miss Kent was a perfect dear. It was good of him to write so often for she was always glad to hear, and she was very cordially his friend, Julia.

Agatha laid down the letter, hardly able to keep back the scornful comment that rushed to her lips like a hemorrhage. She was rather in hopes Forbes would say it himself. The shallowness of the missive, its unabashed vanity, its colossal selfishness were so apparent to her intelligence that she half expected to have Forbes break the silence by congratulating himself on his escape from marrying Julia in January. With this thought in her mind, the fatuous complacency indicated by Forbes' tone came in the nature of a shock.

"She's a bit irregular as a correspondent, but when she does write, you see it's some letter."

Agatha digested this in silence.

"You can gather from this," continued the unconscious Mr. Forbes, "how popular she is. Wherever she goes, she's the center of attention."

Since it gave him pleasure to continue in this strain, and Agatha was not really hard-hearted, she composed herself to listen till Howard's return. But the sight of her brother's slender figure in the distance was peculiarly welcome. By dint of vehement gestures, she induced him to exchange his sauntering gait for a run, and so shortened her ordeal perceptibly.

Howard looked from the frowning girl to the smiling young man with perplexity. For several days Forbes' depression had weighed on the boy's spirits. And now Mr. Forbes was grinning like a chessy cat, and Aggie looked mad enough to bite a nail in two. Howard continued to stare till by a sweeping gesture Agatha indicated her wish to be left to herself. For some time Forbes had gone through the program of exercise his physician had outlined with a listlessness which proved his lack of interest. Now as Howard suggested continuing their interrupted walk, he clapped the boy on the shoulder, seized his arm and the two went off laughing. And Agatha, recalling his boast that he was a representative of a generation remarkable for its reasonableness, smiled sourly and significantly after his departing figure, and asked herself whether all men were fools, or only the nice ones.

In her valiant effort to sustain Forbes' spirits, Agatha had for some days neglected her household duties, and she profited by his temporary accession of cheerfulness to despatch a number of pressing duties, aided by Phemie Tidd, the daughter of a neighboring farmer. The most notable characteristic of Phemie was her stupidity, and though Agatha had sometimes found this trying, in the present emergency she derived satisfaction from the certainty that nature had rendered it impossible for Phemie to find out anything on her own initiative. Whether she was positively weak-minded or not was a question on which the community did not agree, but under careful supervision she accomplished rather more work than would have seemed possible, considering her mental equipment.

As there was no immediate prospect of another letter from Julia, Howard was excused from his afternoon trips to the village, and left to discharge his secretarial duties unassisted. For this reason Agatha was several hours late in learning an important bit of news. It was approaching noon on Friday when she came out upon the porch flushed and weary, after a strenuous morning, and dropped into a chair near that which Forbes was occupying. Though the young man was alone, his mood was evidently cheerful. As she approached him, his smile challenged her attention, and she pondered with frank amazement on the extraordinary effect of Julia's inane letter.

"It's Miss Kent, isn't it?" Forbes looked boyishly pleased over having guessed correctly. "I am beginning to enjoy some of the perquisites of blindness. I can recognize the footsteps of all of you. Do you know you walk with wonderful lightness for a woman of your age?"

Agatha immediately resolved to begin wearing a pair of Howard's slippers, which could be kept on only by dragging her feet.

"I've been wanting to see you all the morning," continued Forbes light-heartedly. "I've great news for you. We're going to have company."

"Company!" Had Forbes' sense of hearing reached the stage of acuteness he fondly imagined, he would have recognized instantly a note of wildness in Agatha's exclamation.

"Had a letter this morning from a pal of mine, fellow I knew in college. He's coming to-morrow to spend Sunday with me."

"To spend Sunday!" Even though Forbes was unable to perceive the frozen horror of Agatha's countenance, her appalled tone convinced him that something was wrong. His smile gave way to an expression of anxiety.

"It won't inconvenience you to put him up, will it, Miss Kent?"

Agatha found herself unable to reply. Her castle in the air was about to topple. A friend of Forbes was coming, and his would be as eyes to the blind. Through him Forbes would learn that the house was in need of painting and shingling and papering, that the furniture was in all stages of dilapidation, and that she herself was not an elderly lady with a motherly interest in youth, but a mere girl with a surprising facility in falsehood. And while these agonized forebodings flitted through her brain, Forbes was offering dismayed apologies.

"I beg your pardon a thousand times. I should have realized--Of course, this isn't a boarding-house, but the fact that you advertised for boarders, misled me, don't you see? If Warren's coming is going to put you out at all, I'll have Howard telegraph him at once."

Agatha came to herself. There was risk, of course, in granting permission for his friend's visit, yet anything was better, even discovery, than that she should appear inhospitable. Her cheeks grew hot as she recalled his generosity and saw him confused and apologetic over having asked a friend to solace his loneliness for a week-end.

"Indeed you shall do nothing of the kind," she said with authority. "You didn't understand me. I'm only sorry not to meet your friend. I expect to be away over Sunday."

"Oh, but that's bad. I particularly wanted Warren to see you. We might telegraph him to make it Sunday week."

Agatha vetoed the suggestion. It was better that Mr. Warren should come as he had planned. "And besides," she added with swift return of her normal audacity, "if he is here you won't miss me so much."

"I shall miss you under any and all circumstances, dear lady." Forbes' air of animation had returned, and it was so great a relief to see him smiling again, that she resolutely shut her eyes to the pitfalls ahead.

"I shall get a girl from the neighborhood to do the cooking," explained Agatha. "And Miss Finch will mother you all in my place."

"But not in your way." Forbes had a confused but unflattering impression of Miss Finch, due to the fact that she never dared trust herself to converse with him for more than a minute at a time, for fear of making some unfortunate revelation. "And I'm sorry," he ended regretfully, "that Warren's not to taste your cooking."

"Oh, Hephzibah is exactly as good. I trained her."

"Good Heavens! You don't mean there's a living woman with a name like that."

"Oh, do you think Hephzibah an odd name? It wasn't uncommon when I was a girl." Agatha felt that she had taken leave of reason as well as of principle. "Hephzibah Diggs," she repeated thoughtfully. "I suppose it would have rather a quaint sound to any one not used to it."

"It's a name for the vaudeville stage," said Mr. Forbes with conviction. He returned to the subject of Agatha's other substitute. "I suppose Warren will have a chance to get more of an impression of Miss Finch than I have succeeded in doing, for he'll have his eyes to help him out. All I have been able to discover is that she never finishes her sentences."

"She's shy with men, poor girl," said Agatha, and then as he looked puzzled, "Of course she seems quite elderly to you, but to me she's only a girl."

Forbes whistled softly, shaking his head. "A blind man would credit you with immortal youth, and convict her of never having been less than middle-aged. I begin to believe that eyesight is misleading."

Agatha broke away from him before her mood of reprehensible recklessness should have implicated her still further. Then in the seclusion of her own room, she wept. "It's bad enough to stretch the truth when I positively can't help it," she told herself, "but this morning I simply wallowed in falsehood. And now I must live up to Hephzibah Diggs. Why couldn't I have called her Mamie Thompson? It's all the fault of that atrocious Warren person, and I wish something would happen to him on the way down. I suppose it's too much to hope for a railway accident, with only one passenger killed, but that would serve him exactly right."

Agatha's courage did not revive until she undertook to prepare Miss Finch for the responsibilities which would devolve upon her in the absence of the mistress of the house. Her pale eyes became unnaturally prominent as Agatha explained.

"Agatha, I can't. I'd go through fire and water for you, but I can't have a lie on my conscience. At my age I've got to prepare for death, any day, and I can't be loading my soul down with mortal sin."

"Oh, Fritz, don't be so foolish. It's not necessary to lie." Agatha's conscience gave a twinge like an uneasy tooth, as she recalled her entirely gratuitous inventions of the morning. "All you have to do is to keep from telling the truth."

"You can do it all right, you're so quick-witted, but I have to have time."

Agatha had an inspiration. "If he says anything you don't know how to answer, pretend you're hard of hearing. And make him keep repeating it over till he gets tired, or you've thought of something to say."

Miss Finch showed no inclination to rejoice over this simple solution of her difficulty. Her thin nose reddened as abruptly as if it had been pinched, and her eyes filled.

"I know I'm going to make a mess of things. I've felt from the start that no good could come of cheating a blind man. And after you go to-morrow--"

"But I'm not really going, Fritz. Somebody must do the cooking. I shall be in the kitchen, and my name will be Hephzibah Diggs."

"Hephzibah Diggs!" Miss Finch repeated, appalled. "You're going to be somebody else?"

"Only till Mr. Warren gets out of the house."

"And you picked out that name yourself, just for the fun of it?"

Agatha reddened under her old friend's accusing gaze. "I had to have some name," she protested weakly.

"You didn't have to have that. It almost looks to me as if you were getting where you took pleasure in deception."

As this only echoed Agatha's self-accusation, she exclaimed, "The idea!" with an air of indignant protest.

"It keeps me awake nights," Miss Finch continued mournfully, "the way things are in this house. It seems as if there might be an explosion any minute. You're young and light-hearted, Agatha, and you can't understand my feelings."

"Can't I, though," mused Agatha, as her old friend tottered toward the house. "And what's more, I shouldn't wonder if the explosion came off in just about twenty-four hours."