CHAPTER X

MAGGIE TELLS WHAT BEFEL HER

I think I came to the rescue, but I was so flurried, so completely driven out of myself, that ordered recollection begins only in the middle of the blather which usually serves as conversational counters at such meetings. I made myself known to Mrs. Hutchinson, and she, worthy soul, much perplexed by certain mysterious incidents soon to be made clear (after a fashion), extricated us from a difficult situation by the true motherliness of her surprise and admiration at finding Karl grown to be a bigger man than his father.

She was a Scotswoman, and she delighted in proclaiming the fact. Thus, although a lady of good birth and refined manners, she did not disdain to use the homely phrases of “her ain people” when they expressed her thoughts better than the polished slang which passes current for English in society nowadays.

“Eh, but it’s a cure for sair e’en to see you, honey,” she cried, when she had assured herself that this six-footer was really the young Grier whom she had heard so much about of late. (This cryptic remark will explain itself presently.) “I was sure my letter to your mother would bring you quickly to us if you were not abroad. Did she telegraph to you? I suppose she could not have written in the time. And how kind it is of you to hurry up to London in time to receive us! Did you say you came from Oxford? Well, from what I have heard of young gentlemen at the ’Varsity, they seldom object to an urgent call that brings them to London.”

Now that sort of rattling talk is admirably calculated to dissipate metapsychic puzzles into thin air. I was exceedingly grateful to Mrs. Hutchinson. From that moment dated my lasting admiration for her dear, outspoken, open-hearted qualities. Excellent soul! She was trustworthy as oak, and quite as dense to anything beyond the circle of her comprehension.

The two young boobies gazing so pathetically at each other were enabled in the interim to recover their speech and their every-day faculties. Karl’s eyes kindled with a friendly interest which threatened developments, and Maggie gazed at him with a smiling, fawn-like wistfulness calculated to drive any heart-whole and well-regulated young man frantic in five minutes by the clock.

It was my first actual, if vicarious, acquaintance with that pleasant malady known as love at first sight, and, judging by the symptoms of this well-matched pair, the disease is one which, like measles in childhood, is calculated to do the cynic good.

I suppose it is my duty, right here, as Hooper would say, to describe Maggie Hutchinson. I would prefer to give a definition of the differential calculus--one can hunt up these things so readily in any work of reference--but to what encyclopedia can a man turn when he wishes to limn in mere words the elusive charms of a beautiful, well-educated girl, in whom a delightful femininity is blended with the rare artistic temperament--blended, too, with the deftness of a skilled gardener who grafts one lovely and sweet-scented plant on another? If the human soul were ever visible to our mortal senses it must most nearly attain tangible form in fragrant young womanhood. Every artist who seeks inspiration in nature, every poet who writes a stanza to Spring or the Dawn, knows that this is so. And that is why it is not good for mankind that woman should, by training or environment, weaken the God-given maternal instinct which is the golden halo of the Madonna.

Some such thought came to me when I first set eyes on Maggie Hutchinson. She realized an ideal and that is saying much. Not that she was so strikingly handsome that men must stare and women sniff merely because she passed, nor that her pose of head and general shapeliness would have enraptured a Greek sculptor. No, I am compelled to state that by the generality of critics Maggie would only be placed among the nondescript “good-looking” section of young ladies, and she might, or might not, be molded like the Capuan Venus for all that her orthodox “tailor-built” (that is the right description, I believe) traveling costume revealed.

But the peculiar circumstances under which I met her, and the rapt spirituality of that look which she flashed at Karl through the gathering tears, added a spice of romance to an otherwise colorless incident. The musician who extracts a thousand tumultuous words out of a single _lied ohne wörte_ can best understand the emotional flood of thought which conveys a whole volume of meaning. For an instant I experienced some glimmering perception of Karl’s sixth sense. I fancied I actually felt the physical and psychic influence of that “magnetic personality” which we all of us talk about but seldom endeavor to explain.

And then “Miss Hutchinson” told me that she was not tired, “not the least little bit”; that mother and she had “dined on the train”; that it was, indeed, most kind on my part to have secured a private sitting-room for the joint and several use of our party and our party’s friends. So you see, the first impression fled quickly enough, leaving behind it a glowing streak of recollection like unto the half-remembered track of a shooting star. But, thank Heaven, in Maggie’s case it was renewed and developed and perfected until, whether under the spell of her unwavering friendship or thrilled to ecstasy by the inarticulate rapture which, at times, she drew from the infinite storehouse of the violin, in order to please those near and dear to her, I can say candidly that she was the goddess of one small circle, its Athéne and Euterpe rolled into one. Nor was it long before my wife claimed her as her greatest friend. That last saving clause is necessary. This is not _my_ love story, but, as the astute reader must have perceived long since, Maggie’s and Karl’s. Yet I shall be exceedingly surprised--almost as greatly taken aback as I was by the discoveries of the next hour--if the said reader, though an expert dissector of love stories, from the long-drawn-out wooing of Rachel by Jacob, down to the _motif_ of the very latest _crime passionel_ in Paris, shall have guessed already the reason why Maggie wept when first she met Karl in the vestibule of the Pall Mall Hotel.

Apparently, we have all been standing there an unconscionably long time. Really, we have done nothing of the sort, for I am quite adept in bringing about the right combination of luggage porters, lift attendants, chambermaids and waiters, to secure the best and quickest results in making people at home in a modern big hotel.

“I am so glad to be off the steamer,” sighed Mrs. Hutchinson, gratefully, as she sank into a spacious chair in our sitting-room. “Walking along the corridor just now, I caught myself wondering why the other folk using it did not lean over at absurd angles. Even yet the carpet seems to heave gently each half-minute.”

That was just the sort of remark calculated to place us at our ease. We chatted freely while the ladies drank a little champagne and nibbled a biscuit; I sampled the hotel whisky, and smoked, together with Karl, at the earnest request of our fair companions.

Karl, by the way, did not know the taste of alcohol, or of any intoxicant. The wisdom of the gods kept him free from that obsession. Goodness only knows what would have happened if the man with a superhuman sense (which it was, according to our present lights) yielded to drink!

Hence, when Mrs. Hutchinson, beginning at the end of the story, told us that she wrote to Mrs. Grier from Queenstown, and a computation of hours revealed that the mystery of the telegram was no mystery at all, the way was paved by growing familiarity to permit the conversation to wander off into less well-defined paths. For the good lady made no secret of the _raison d’être_ of her letter.

“Maggie had a dream, or a vision--something akin to what my old Highland nurse used to call _taichitaraugh_, a Gaelic mouthful meaning ‘shadow-sight.’ It was so realistic that it nearly made her ill, and she startled me considerably, when she confided it to me, which was not until twenty-four hours later.”

Mrs. Hutchinson, of course, could not guess what a spark on tinder was one of those time-worn words in Karl’s ears. I glanced at him to see if the winged barb had struck home, but I was not long in discerning that Maggie’s presence occupied his ordinary senses quite sufficiently to keep his telegnomic sense dormant. It might, indeed, stimulate and intensify the others, but no man would use a telephone or an opera glass to hear or see his best girl when she was seated in the same room as himself, would he? Science can do a lot for us, but I will back Dame Nature’s idea of a magnet in the shape of a pretty woman against any wizard device of the latter-day alchemist.

Then the mother, at Maggie’s request, essayed to give us the history of an afternoon dream on board the good ship _Merlin_. The day was Sunday, and the weather had been bad. The ship was traversing that choppy belt of the Atlantic which makes the day of rest so particularly unrestful in the majority of vessels sailing from New York or Liverpool on a Wednesday. Indeed, the “White Star Sunday” is an ocean proverb.

“Neither of us felt equal to taking luncheon in the saloon,” said she, “so a deck-steward brought us some tempting dishes. The sea subsided rapidly under the change of wind, and we were comfortable enough after our meal. I fell into a slight doze. Maggie says she did not.”

“No, mother, I am sure I was awake, because I was running over in my mind Almaviva’s song, ‘Ecco ridente il cielo,’ with the guitar accompaniment for the violins,” interrupted Maggie.

Then why, my dear young lady, should your cheeks flutter _now_ between white and pink, like a Marie Vornhoot rose, beneath the most attractive and healthy brown with which sun and sea have decorated you? And why, with even greater emphasis, should you have been warbling to yourself _then_ the love-sick outpourings of the Seville gallant to his Rosina? I thought those old operas were, if not dead, for they are immortal, at least buried alive beneath a mound of Gaiety muslin and the striped cotton habiliments of many musical comedy coons.

“Girls get such whimsies in their heads that they often do not know what they are thinking about,” replied practical Mrs. Hutchinson. “Yet there can be no doubt, my dear, that something extraordinary did occur.”

“When I woke up,” she continued, addressing Karl and me, “I found Maggie crying softly to herself. Naturally I was alarmed, and when she did not answer I caught her arm. Then she appeared to recover her wits, but she frightened me even more thoroughly by murmuring something about the utter bliss--”

“Mother!” broke in the girl, evidently nerving herself for an ordeal, though her face was aflame, “let me describe what happened.”

“Well, well!” said Mrs. Hutchinson, “tell it your own way. I admit I never got the hang of it to rights.”

It was impossible to watch both Karl’s face and Maggie’s, so I devoted myself to an intent study of the subtle emotions which sent their undecipherable shadows across the girl’s eyes. But the woman does not breathe, or is not worthy of breath, who cannot be an actress when the great crises of existence throb across life’s stage. Indeed, she controlled her expression and chose her words so well that she soon led my rambling fancy back to the sufficiently bewildering climax of her own adventure.

“Mother has left out what you might call a predisposing influence,” she said, smiling, and she spoke to me, not to Karl. “Have you ever heard of the agonic line?”

“Has it anything to do with the ‘Personal’ column in the _Times_?” was my banal reply.

“No!” It was Karl who answered, and there was a timbre in his voice I had not heard before. It silenced Maggie for the moment. Perhaps it suggested a chord drawn with nerve-thrilling effect from her own beloved violin. Anyhow, he took up the parable.

“An agonic line is an irregular line, running generally north and south, which marks those parts of the earth’s surface where the magnetic needle points to the true north. There are three of them, and they are slowly changing their positions,” he said.

“Thank you! I could not have explained it so clearly,” smiled Maggie, though she persistently averted her eyes. “Well, during the morning, the Chief Officer had been telling me things about the deviation of the compass, the importance of the agonic lines, the magnetic vagaries of some parts of the globe, and the great value to sailors of a recent discovery that at a certain point in front of the foremast the compass ceases to be affected by the polarization which is set up in all iron ships.”

Ting! Some tiny nerve-bell jingled in my head. Polarization! Karl and I exchanged looks. We had rapidly made the same calculation. Allowing for difference of sun-time, Miss Margaret’s disturbing dream-vision, whatever it disclosed, must have been exactly contemporaneous with Karl’s poker-juggling in the Mitre Hotel.

“_Now_ what is it?” demanded Mrs. Hutchinson, whose shrewd Scottish eyes were quick to detect the secret telegraphy between the others, for Maggie flushed most charmingly again, and we three established a circuit of intelligence. “Why do you all gowp like that? You make my flesh creep. The next thing you will be telling me is that there are ghosts in the room!”