Ainslee's Magazine/The Woman With a Past/The Ghost Makers
I.—THE GHOST MAKERS
All service ranks the same with God—
With God, whose puppets, best and worst,
Are we; there is no last, no first.—Pippa Passes.
PIPPA CARPENTER noticed the girl as soon as she went into the Turkish room. She was sitting close to the window overlooking the middle entrance to the hotel, and eagerly watching every one that came in. Mrs. Carpenter herself had merely entered the Room of Many Appointments to write a note. Instead of doing that, however, she dropped lazily into one of the seductive deep chairs and furtively watched the girl at the window.
Pippa Carpenter had two commodities which are delightful if you can make use of them, but weary burdens to those who cannot spend either: they were time and money. She had enough money and too much leisure, and, besides, a great emptiness of life. Life had been to her a lover and an enemy—it had kissed her and stabbed her, the one close upon the other. She bore the imprint of its kiss upon her sad and passionate mouth. Its dagger wound showed in the unquenchable pain of her eyes. She was a very pretty woman—French in type, pale-faced, dark-lashed, red-haired, violet-eyed—exquisitely soignée from head to foot, with languid, lovely hands as slim as a child's, and as caressingly savante as a courtesan's.
One of the thousand pieces which Out of the thousand pieces which had been made of her enthusiasms, she had kept an incurable interest in her fellow creatures. She could not ever remember that she was not, in a measure, her brother's and sister's keeper. Pippa was not a good woman, as the good people consider goodness, but she had in her the divine unrest which is sympathy, and which must trouble any but the most untender angels when they look from paradise into hell. Pippa, being—well. emphatically not in paradise herself, had an even livelier feeing for such as walk in darkness.
The girl she was looking at was attractive—fresh, but a little dimmed by some sort of storm and stress at present. Looking at her intently, Mrs. Carpenter saw that she was not quite so young as she had thought at first; or was it simply that she was tired? Or troubled? Or only married?
She had very dark, velvety eyes, the sort that goes as a rule with a soft, emotional nature, and rippling dark hair. Her mouth was a little blurred in outline. Life would harden it later, but for the moment the Cupid's bow of it was a thought too melting of line. For the rest, she was pathetically, yet riotously. unhappy. §he was, in fact, enjoying that luxury of distress which is so intoxicating to certain temperaments.
Mrs. Carpenter, versed in most branches of emotional knowledge, could see that the child—she was a child intrinsically, whether she was nineteen or twenty-seven, married or a school-teacher—had somehow worked herself, whether by progression or retrogression, one could not say at first sight, into a mood of heroics. For a space she was clearly the heroine of her own drama, a fatal rôle for any woman under fifty—or even sixty, in these well-preserved days. Mrs. Carpenter, Pippa of the big, empty heart, felt thrilled with pity for her. One's emotions in one's first dramas are so bitterly, terribly keen, the more so because one has written the parts oneself, and knows so tragically well how they must be played!
The dark-eyed young woman, after moving about restlessly and looking at a tiny wrist watch, went over to one of the small desks and began to write a note.
Mrs. Carpenter saw a tear splash down upon it, and felt a stab of—was it pity or envy? Oh, those anguished, irrational letters of youth, written with heart's blood and punctuated with tear blots! The letters that are sent off frantically, unread, full of heart-rending little errors and omissions! Mrs. Carpenter had long since lost the power to write those wonderful, silly letters.
With a quivering sigh, the dark-eyed one put her note in an envelope and addressed it. The next moment she looked up in time to see some one pass down Peacock Alley. Mrs. Carpenter could read in her frown, start, and hurried rush for the door, that she was not sure whether she recognized the person or not. She went out into the corridor to make sure, and Pippa went quietly over to the desk that she had just left. Some vague idea was in her mind to take up the letters so impetuously flung there and carry them after the girl, but, after all, she would doubtless come back for them immediately.
Then the second idea came to her.
Of course, even Mrs. Carpenter could never have done it if Providence hadn't so deliberately put the cards in her hand, and, as a matter of fact, she had not even the remotest idea of interfering in the dark-eyed girl's destiny until she saw that she was holding the cards aforesaid, and realized their possibilities. Then it all came to her with a sort of rush, and she made up her mind, the instant she thought of it, that she would do it.
You see, in matters of this sort, Pippa had the advantage or disadvantage of not caring a particle whether a thing was “being done,” as the English say, or whether it wasn't. She just went ahead and did what she chose. It did not any longer matter to her what people might say about her, nor did her own soul trouble her overmuch. She really did not think it worth bothering about.
The cards that fate had dealt her were a bundle of letters which the dark-eyed girl had left on the desk. Most of them were in opened envelopes, postmarked, and so on; one was freshly sealed and stamped, and had not yet been through the mails. The canceled envelopes were all addressed to “Mrs. Theodore Martin,” or “Mrs. T. E. Martin.” So she was married, after all! The other was directed, in the dashing, almost illegible hand which was fashionable for a few years in a certain débutante set, to “Miss Carol Wainright,” at a New York address.
Mrs. Carpenter stood very still, with the letters in her hand. She knew who Carol Wainwright was; she had known Carol Wainwright's mother. That was in the golden age, when she was a young society woman, and Mrs. Wainwright a somewhat older, very popular matron in an exclusive set. Later, Pippa had passed out of the orbit of such people as the Wainwrights. She was what is uncomfortably called déclassé. But she had never lost her curious sense of loyalty to her own caste, her desire to honor the women of it, to protect the young girls of it, and, if possible, to spare the boys of it. Seasoned men she counted all on much the same basis, whatever their class or birthright.
Her observation told her that the dark-eyed young “Mrs. T. E. Martin” was in desperate trouble, and something deeper than observation told her that she was also in danger. She thought she knew the type. Strange as it might appear, she had not been unlike that impulsive, emotional little creature herself at the Beginning of the World.
When Evelyn Martin came flying back into the Turkish room, with consternation in her dark eyes, she was met at the desk by a graceful and gracious woman, unmistakably well bred, but with a certain elusive and fantastic charm which Evelyn vaguely characterized as ”foreign.” The woman wore the most perfect clothes imaginable, and furs that might actually be real sable. There were purple tones in her hat, also in her hair and eyes.
“Mrs. Martin?” she said, smiling very slightly. “I don't believe you remember me, but I am a friend of Carol Wainwright's, or rather,” with a little moue, as if she wished to be quite truthful at the sacrifice of her vanity, “of her mother's! Of course, I'm nearer Hrs. Wainwright's generation, but I am devoted to Carol. Have you ever heard her speak of Philippa Carpenter?” After all, why shouldn't she use her own name, or, rather, the name which had become her own through years of adoption? The Wainwrights had never heard it, but that was all the better.
“Why—no,” said the dark-eyed girl, with a pretty hesitation. She had a charming, fresh voice, Pippa noticed, and a candid manner. “I don't really believe I ever have, but—I'm awfully glad to meet you.” She held out her hand frankly. “Or have we met before? I've a shocking memory, and I—I'm most awfully upset to-day.”
Her soft mouth quivered a little. She was not yet sufficiently woman of the world to be able to take refuge, with real comfort and security, in her social mask. Later it would be a friend and helper to her, but just now it would not stay in place.
“We have met before,” said Mrs. Carpenter, “but only at tea, and you were just a débutante then.” What, she wondered, had the girl's name been? “You are married since then, too!”
The cloud in the dark eyes told her that there was where the trouble lay. Mrs. Martin had gathered up her precious letters. It seemed to Mrs. Carpenter that one of them she caressed as she touched it, but it may have been imagination.
“Yes,” she said, in a less natural voice, “I am married.”
”Speaking of tea,” said Mrs. Carpenter, changing the subject immediately, “it is after five, isn't it? And I'm longing for my usual cup. Can't we go in here to the tea room together?”
The younger woman assented in the listless, polite way of one who does not honestly care one way or the other, and the two sought out a small table partly screened by palms. Mrs. Martin knew several people in the room, and bowed perfunctorily to them. Mrs. Carpenter, rather carefully if the girl had been astute enough to notice it, looked at nobody, but studied the tiny tea card, and her companion's face. The last vestige of hope seemed to have gone out of the young countenance. She sat quietly, trying to be attentive to the small talk which rippled soothingly from Philippa.
Wise and heart-weary Philippa! How well she knew the safeguard of commonplaces—the healing, blessed qualities of talk that means nothing!
After a while Evelyn Martin, who had been choking down the tea. and trying to crumble a muffin so that it would look as though she had been eating it, turned her pathetic eyes toward the older woman, and said with a little rush:
“Mrs. Carpenter—you're so—so awfully kind—and I feel as though you were so wonderfully sensible somehow—I—I've just got to talk to you. I'm almost—almost out of my mind!”
She nearly strangled with a sob, but because she was facing the crowded tea room, and its many lights and curious eyes, she forced the tears back with an effort that left her pale. “I'm almost—out of my mind!” she repeated.
Mrs. Carpenter took care not to look at her for a moment. With great deliberation, she poured out another cup of tea and waited. She knew the rest would come with no word from her. It was what she had been expecting, what she had been so grateful it had been reserved for her, and her only, to hear.
“I—I've not been awfully happy with Ted,” said Evelyn, in a low, shaky voice. “Probably you've heard?”
Mrs. Carpenter shook her head.
“Well—we haven't hit it off. We were tremendously in love at first. That was two years ago. Since then—well, we've gotten into different crowds. You know how those things happen. There's—there's another man.” She paused a moment to see if Mrs. Carpenter looked unwontedly surprised or shocked, but to her relief Mrs. Carpenter looked neither the one nor the other, and she went on with a little more courage.
“Of course—you understand—it's just been a—a flirtation till now. But he—he wants me to go away.”
“With him?” Pippa spoke for the first time.
“Yes, with him, so we can be together forever.”
“You and he—and the ghosts.”
Evelyn stared. She had not much imagination. “What ghosts?” she said.
“Never mind now. Go on. When are you going away?”
“It's this way,” said Evelyn, a trifle drearily. “I—I'm an awful little fool, you know, as weak as water. I don't think I want to be wicked. It seems horrid—and—and common, somehow.”
“It is,” said the woman. “Horrid and common.”
“But I seem to just—drift—I don't suppose a woman like you—self-possessed, and strong, and cool—and—and that, can understand. But—if it hadn't been for Carol, I—I'd have done something foolish long ago. Carol is strong and calm—like you. She made me promise that I would never go away with—him——without letting her know. She said she would stop me if she had to go to the ends of the earth to do it. She said she'd always look after me. She—she's wonderful, you see. Well, I told him—that I'd go away—to-night to his yacht. It's at anchor, and we'd start for Norway in the morning. I've always wanted to wander about the world, to be free, and have adventures. But I couldn't break my word to Carol, and I told her to meet me here to-day to say good-by. I—I couldn't go back to—the house—after I'd said I would go to the yacht.”
A slow, shamed color crept into her cheeks. What a baby she was, a baby toddling into a tornado!
“But Carol didn't come,” she said listlessly. “I waited, and she didn't come. So I've written her good~by, instead. And—and the reason why I've told you all this is because you know Carol, and I want you to tell her that—I—I tried, I truly did, only I wasn't strong enough. And she was out of town—and she didn't come” The tears were coming now, in spite of the lights and the people. “And,” finished Evelyn forlornly, “it is horrible of me to have told you—a stranger—all this—only it doesn't matter any longer now anyway, because I'm going away forever.”
“Why, no,you're not!” said Mrs. Carpenter, in a pleasant, confident tone. “You're not going to do anything of the sort.”
“You don't understand,” said Evelyn. “I've given my word to meet him at seven o'clock.”
“Well, break it,” said Mrs. Carpenter. “You surely don't mind breaking your word, do you? If you did, you wouldn't have thought of breaking your marriage vows, you know.”
Evelyn looked at her rather blankly. It seemed to be a new point of view to her.
“Besides,” proceeded Philippa, “there's another reason you won't go. It's your own weakness. You're too much of a coward to face the ghosts.”
“It's the second time you've spoken of the ghosts,” said Mrs. Martin, puzzled. “I wish you would tell me what you mean.”
Philippa leaned her slim arms on the table and gazed with a troubled earnestness at the pretty, weak face opposite her—the childish, drooping mouth, the wet eyes. Could this girl understand the message that she had to give, the message that life had been so painfully and lengthily fitting her to give?
Very quietly, and in the sort of voice that comes from too deep a spring within us to be heard often, Philippa talked of the ghosts that haunt humanity.
“Don't you know,” she said, looking deeply into the dark eyes, “that half our lives we are making ghosts? Ghosts that will walk and walk, till the very end?”
Evelyn stared at her as though hypnotized. They had both forgotten the faces and the lights. The tea grew cold between them.
“Some of them,” said Pippa Carpenter, “are quite little, the ghosts we make—goblin ghosts that one would never believe had the power to truly hurt us. We laugh at them at first, they seem so silly and so unimportant; sometimes we blush as we laugh, and tell ourselves that we were terribly foolish. but that that is all past now. But later, after we have begun to grow wise and have almost forgotten that we were ever foolish, we will be walking along quite safe and content in the sun, with flowers growing on each side of the path, and a clean air in our faces, and suddenly, around a bend, will come one or maybe two or three of the goblin ghosts that we made long ago. And they will stand still and look at us, and we will not laugh then, nor blush, for their little impish features will seem ugly and terrible to us, and we will be a bit afraid. And the ghosts that we have made will wait there for us, and when we pass, they will take hold of our skirts with their little skeleton fingers, and go with us down the pathway between the flowers. And sometimes they will go away again. but we can never be sure that they will not come back.”
“But I don't see”—Evelyn was a little pale now—“how do we make such horrors for ourselves, when—when we haven't meant to do any one any harm?”
“Every time,” said Pippa, “that you do a thing that you try to make sound decent by saying it is 'foolish' or 'indiscreet,' you are making a ghost.”
The other woman stared at her, not comprehending.
“When,” went on Pippa, “you let a man make love to you just a little—not too much—just enough to be exciting, with one eye on the door lest some one come in unexpectedly—you are making a ghost!”
“How can you!” cried the woman, looking away. Pippa knew that she had judged her fairly.
“When you go somewhere with a man, to dinner or supper—all right in itself, but something that you don't exactly want to tell your sister or your husband, or your best friend about, just the same—you are making a ghost.”
The woman was looking frightened. “How did you know?” she whispered, and bit her lips for having said it.
“Every single time,” the older woman went inexorably on, “that you let yourself go a little, even though you have no real intention of wrongdoing, you are making ghosts. And as surely as I sit here, ghost-ridden, in front of you this afternoon—they will come back to haunt you some day.”
Evelyn half rose from her chair. She was clearly frightened. “Oh,” she gasped, “you make me feel as though there were ghosts here now, as you speak!”
”There are,” said Pippa Carpenter. “There are the ghosts of all my mistakes, little and big—the foolish, small goblin ghosts that went with the foolish, small lies and the foolish, small indiscretions at the beginning, and other great ghosts that are monsters, and storm clouds, blotting out the sun.”
“You talk so strangely,” said Evelyn, staring at her. “I never heard a woman talk like you before. It is like poetry, yet I know it is real, you mean it—and it is terrible, somehow.” Suddenly her whole tense face seemed to melt and break, and she stretched out her hand to Mrs. Carpenter across the tea table. ”Oh, I won't go, I won't go!” she whispered, sobbing. “Oh, I'm so glad I met you. I'm so glad, I'm so glad!”
Looking up, Mrs. Carpenter, whose own clear gaze was a little blurred, saw a tall, fair girl, heavily swathed in a fur motor coat, looking into the tea room with an expression of desperate anxiety. With one of her intuitions telling her who it was, Philippa signaled to the waiter and paid the check, just as the tall girl caught sight of Mrs. Martin and hurried into the room, with a radiance on her fair face. With her eyes on the swiftly approaching figure, Mrs. Carpenter said gently: “Tell that lovely and wonderful Carol of yours that I—tried to take care of you in her place.”
The next moment the tall girl had paused by the tea table, and there was a little sobbing cry from Mrs. Martin:
”Oh, Carol! Carol!”
“I motored in from Rhinebeck the moment I got your message, but the car broke down. Evelyn, my poor, little, foolish Evelyn!”
In a moment Mrs. Martin turned to speak to the woman who had “taken care of her in Carol's place,” but she had gone.
”It was Mrs. Carpenter, Carol—you remember her?”
”Never heard of her in my life,” said Carol. ”Come, Evelyn, I'm going to take you home to Ted.”
It was two months later that Mr. and Mrs. Theodore Martin, newly reconciled, were dining at a New York restaurant, and that Mrs. Martin suddenly caught sight of a graceful, beautifully dressed woman, sitting alone at a table some distance off. The dark-eyed young wife gave a little cry of excited recognition.
“It is—it is actually she!” she exclaimed, springing up. “Oh, Teddy—it's a dear woman who—who helped me once when I needed it awfully!”
“Nonsense, Evelyn! You don't know her—you can't possibly!” Ted Martin's good-humored, rather unimaginative face was quite red with embarrassment.
“But I do! It must be she. I'll have to go over and speak to her.”
“But hang it, dear, she—I know who she is, and she—well, she's déclassée. You can't be seen speaking to a woman like that in a public place!”
But already Evelyn had flown over to the other table. a radiant, eager figure in her dainty gown, with a soft color in her cheeks. She put out her hand to the pretty, red-haired woman sitting alone at the little table, and started to speak. But the little shy smile died on her lips, for the woman, who had been looking past her at the table where Ted Martin was still sitting, raised a pair of blank purple-gray eyes to her.
”I'm afraid,” she said, in gentle, distant tones, “that you have made a mistake. I have never had the pleasure of meeting you before.”
Troubled and bewildered, Evelyn went back to her own table.
“Well,” said her husband, “you didn't know her, did you? I knew it was impossible.”
The other woman sat quietly at the little table drinking her coffee—alone. except for the ghosts that sat always with her at meal.