Part 3 (1/2)
Not more than half awake, Mary had forgotten the elaborate way in which she had tied up her face, and catching sight in the mirror of an awful spook gliding toward her, she stepped back, almost frozen with terror.
Never had she imagined such a hideous ghost, white as flour, with one round eye higher than the other, and a dreadful slit of a mouth, all askew.
She was too frightened to utter a sound, but the pitcher fell to the floor with a crash, and as the cold water splashed over her feet she bounded back into bed and pulled the cover over her head. Instantly, as her hand came in contact with the mask on her face, she realized that it was only her own reflection in the gla.s.s which had frightened her, but the shock was so great she could not stop trembling.
Wakened by the sound of the breaking pitcher and Mary's wild plunge back into bed, Joyce sat up in alarm, but in response to her whisper Mary explained in m.u.f.fled tones from under the bedclothes that she had simply gotten up for a drink of water and dropped the pitcher. All the rest of the night her sleep was fitful and uneasy, for toward morning her face began to burn as if it were on fire. She tore off the mask and used it to wipe away what remained of the ointment. Most of it had been absorbed, however, and the skin was broken out in little red blisters.
Maybe in her zeal she had used too much of the magical cosmetic, or maybe her face, already made tender by various applications, resented the vigorous rubbings she gave it. At any rate she had cause to be frightened when she saw herself in the mirror. As she lifted the pitcher from the wash-stand, she happened to glance at the proverb calendar hanging over the towel-rack, and saw the verse for the day. It was ”Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.”
The big red letters stood out accusingly.
”Oh dear,” she thought, as she plunged her burning face into the bowl of cold water, ”if I hadn't had so much miserable pride, I wouldn't have destroyed what little complexion I had left. Like as not the skin will all peel off now, and I'll look like a half-scaled fish for weeks.”
She was so irritable later, when Joyce exclaimed over her blotched and mottled appearance, that Mrs. Ware decided she must be coming down with some kind of rash. It was only to prevent her mother sending for a doctor, that Mary finally confessed with tears what she had done.
”Why didn't you ask somebody?” said Joyce trying not to let her voice betray the laughter which was choking her, for Mary showed a grief too deep to ridicule.
”I--I was ashamed to,” she confessed, ”and I wanted to surprise you all.
The advertis.e.m.e.nt said g-grow b-beautiful while you sleep, and now--oh, it's _spoiled_ me!” she wailed. ”And I can't go to the house-party--”
”Yes, you can, goosey,” said Joyce, consolingly. ”Mamma has Grandma Ware's old receipt for rose balm, that will soon heal those blisters.
You would have saved yourself a good deal of trouble and suffering if you had gone to her in the first place.”
”Well, don't I know that?” blazed Mary, angrily. Then hiding her face in her arms she began to sob. ”You don't know what it is to be uh-ugly like me! I heard mamma say that I was as brown as a squaw, and I couldn't bear to think of Lloyd and Betty and everybody at The Locusts seeing me that way. _That's_ why I did it!”
”You are not ugly, Mary Ware,” insisted Joyce, in a most reproving big-sisterly voice. ”Everybody can't be a raving, tearing beauty, and anybody with as bright and attractive a little face as yours ought to be satisfied to let well enough alone.”
”That's all right for _you_” replied Mary, bitterly. ”But you aren't fat, with a turned-up nose and just a little thin straight pigtail of hair. You're pretty, and an artist, and you're going to be somebody some day. But I'm just plain 'little Mary,' with no talents or _anything_!”
Choking with tears, she rushed out of the room, and took refuge in the swing down by the beehives. For once the ”School of the Bees” failed to whisper a comforting lesson. This was a trouble which she could not seal up in its cell, and for many days it poisoned all life's honey.
Presently she slipped back into the house for a pencil and box of paper, and sitting on the swing with her geography on her knees for a writing-table, she poured out her troubles in a letter to Jack. It was only a few hundred miles to the mines, and she could be sure of a sympathetic answer before the blisters were healed on her face, or the hurt had faded out of her sensitive little heart.
CHAPTER IV.
MARY'S ”PROMISED LAND”
It was a hot, tiresome journey back to Kentucky. Joyce, worn out with all the hurried preparations of packing her mother and Norman off to the mines, closing the Wigwam for the summer, and putting her own things in order for a long absence, was glad to lean back in her seat with closed eyes, and take no notice of her surroundings. But Mary travelled in the same energetic way in which she killed snakes. Nothing escaped her.
Every pa.s.senger in the car, every sight along the way was an object of interest. She sat up straight and eager, scarcely batting an eyelash, for fear of missing something.
To her great relief the peeling process had been a short one, and thanks to the rose balm, not a trace of a blister was left on her smooth skin to remind her of her foolish little attempt to beautify herself in secret. The first day she made no acquaintances, for she admired the reserved way in which her pretty nineteen-year-old sister travelled, and tried to imitate her, but after one day of elegant composure she longed for a chance to drop into easy sociability with some of her neighbors.
They no longer seemed like strangers after she had travelled in their company for twenty-four hours.
So she seized the first social opportunity which came to her next morning. A middle-aged woman, who was taking up all the available s.p.a.ce in the dressing-room, grudgingly moved over a few inches when Mary tried to squeeze in to wash her face. Any one but Mary would have regarded her as a most unpromising companion, when she answered her question with a grumbling ”Yes, been on two days, and got two more to go.” The tone was as ungracious as if she had said, ”Mind your own business.”
The train was pa.s.sing over a section of rough road just then, and they swayed against each other several times, with polite apologies on Mary's part. Then as the woman finished skewering her hair into a tight knot she relaxed into friendliness far enough to ask, ”Going far yourself?”
”Yes, indeed!” answered Mary, cheerfully, reaching for a towel. ”Going to the Promised Land.”
The car gave a sudden lurch, and the woman dropped her comb, as she was sent toppling against Mary so forcibly that she pinned her to the wall a moment.