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Page 60
Betty, in a seat across the aisle, opened a magazine, but Mary could not
settle down to read. A nervous unrest kept her going over and over in
her mind, as she had done through the previous night, the scenes that
lay ahead of her. There was the packing, and she checked off on her
fingers the many details that she must be sure to remember. There were
those borrowed books she mustn't forget to return. Her scissors were in
Cornie's room. Miss Gilmer had her best basketry patterns. There were so
many things that finally she made a memorandum of them, dully wondering
as she did so how she could think of them at all. One would have
supposed that the awful disaster that was continually in her thoughts
would have blotted out these little commonplace trivial concerns. But
they didn't. She couldn't understand it.
Presently the sound of a low crooning in the seat behind her made her
glance over her shoulder. An old coloured mammy, in the whitest of
freshly starched aprons and turbans, was rocking a child to sleep in her
arms. He was a dear little fellow, pink and white as an apple-blossom,
with a Teddy bear hugged close in his arms. One furry paw rested on his
dimpled neck. The bit of Uncle Remus song the nurse was singing had a
soothing effect on him, but it fell dismally on Mary's ears:
"Oh, don't stay long! Oh, don't stay late!
My honey, my love.
Hit ain't so mighty fur ter de Good-bye Gate,
My honey, my love!"
"The Good-bye Gate!" she repeated to herself. That was what they had
come to now, she and Jack. Not a little wicket through which one might
push his way back some day, but a great barred thing that was clanging
behind them irrevocably, shutting them away for ever from the fair road
along which they had travelled so happily. Shutting out even the
slightest view of those far-off "Delectable Mountains," towards which
they had been journeying. In the face of Jack's misfortune and all that
he was giving up, her part of the sacrifice sank into comparative
insignificance. Her suffering for him was so great that it dulled the
sharpness of her own renunciations, and even dulled her disappointment
for Joyce. The year in Paris had meant as much to her as the course at
Warwick Hall had meant to Mary.
All through the trip she sat going round and round the same circle of
thoughts, ending always with the hopeless cry, "Oh, _why_ did it have to
be? It isn't right that _he_ should have to suffer so!" Once when the
train stopped for some time to take water and wait on a switch for the
passing of a fast express, she opened her suit-case and took out her
journal and fountain-pen. Going on with the record from the place where
she had dropped it the day before when Jack's letter interrupted it, she
chronicled the receipt of the check, the shopping expedition that
followed, and the gay outing afterward in the touring-car. Then down
below she wrote:
"But now I have come to the Good-bye Gate. Good-bye to all my good
times. So good-bye, even to you, little book, since you were to mark
only the hours that shine. Here at the bottom of the page I must write
the words, '_The End_.'"
When they reached Warwick Hall she was too tired to begin any
preparations that night for the longer journey, and still so dazed with
the thought of Jack's calamity to be keenly alive to the fact that this
was the last night she would ever spend in the beloved room. She was
thankful to have it to herself for these last few hours, and thankful
when Betty and Madam Chartley finally went out and left her alone. She
was worn out trying to keep up before people and to be brave as they
bade her. It was a relief to put out the light and, lying there alone in
the dark, cry and cry till at last she sobbed herself to sleep.
Not till the next morning did she begin to feel the wrench of leaving,
when the fresh fragrance of wet lilacs awakened her, blowing up from the
old garden where all the sweetness of early April was astir. Then she
remembered that she would be far, far away when the June roses bloomed
at Commencement, and that this was the last time she would ever be
wakened by the blossoms and bird-calls of the dear old garden.
She sat up and looked around the room from one familiar object to
another, oppressed and miserable at the thought that she would never see
them again. Then her glance rested on Lloyd's picture, and for once the
make-believe companionship of Lloyd's shadow-self brought a comfort as
deep as if her real self had spoken. She held out her arms to it,
whispering brokenly:
"Oh, _you_ understand how hard it is, don't you, dear? You're the only
one in the world who does, because you had to give up all this, too."
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