CHAPTER III.
IN BEAUTY'S QUEST
"Fortune has at last--fortune has at last-- Fortune has at last changed in our _fa_-vor!"
A hundred times, in the weeks that followed, Mary turned the old Vicar'ssaying into sort of a chant, and triumphantly intoned it as she wentabout the house, making preparations for her journey. Most of the timeshe was not aware that her lips were repeating what her heart wasconstantly singing, and one day, to her dire mortification, she chantedthe entire strain in one of the largest dry-goods stores in Phoenix,before she realized what she was doing.
She had gone with Joyce to select some dress material for herself. Ithad been so long since Mary had had any clothes except garments madeover and handed down, that the wealth of choice offered her was almostoverpowering. To be sure it was a bargain counter they were hangingover, but the remnants of lawn and organdy and gingham were soentrancingly new in design and dainty in coloring, that without athought to appearances she caught up the armful of pretty things whichJoyce had decided they could afford. Clasping them ecstatically in animpulsive hug, she sang at the top of her voice, just as she would havedone had she been out alone on the desert: "Fortune has at last changedin our _fa_-vor!"
When Joyce's horrified exclamation and the clerk's amused smile recalledher to her surroundings, she could have gone under the counter withembarrassment. Although she flushed hotly for several days whenever shethought of the way everybody in the store turned to stare at her, shestill hummed the same words whenever a sense of her great good fortuneoverwhelmed her. Such times came frequently, especially whenever a newgarment was completed and she could try it on with much preening andmany satisfied turns before the mirror.
It was on one of these occasions, when she was proudly revolving in thedaintiest of them all, a pale blue mull which she declared was the colorof a wild morning-glory, that a remark of her mother's, in the nextroom, filled her with dismay. It had not been intended for her ears,but it floated in distinctly, above the whirr of the sewing-machine.
"Joyce, I am sorry we made up that blue for Mary. She's so tanned andsunburned that it seems to bring out all the red tints in her skin, andmakes her look like a little squaw. I never realized how this climatehas injured her complexion until I saw her in that shade of blue, andremembered how becoming it used to be. She was like an apple-blossom,all white and pink, when we came out here."
Mary had been so busy looking at her new clothes that she had paidlittle attention to the face above them, reflected in the mirror. It hadtanned so gradually that she had become accustomed to having thatsunbrowned little visage always smile back at her. Besides, every oneshe met was tanned by the wind and weather, some of them spotted withbig dark freckles. Joyce wasn't. Joyce had always been careful aboutwearing a sunbonnet or a wide brimmed hat when she went out in the sun.Mary remembered now, with many compunctions, how often she had beenwarned to do the same. She wished with all her ardent little soul thatshe had not been so careless, and presently, after a serious,half-tearful study of herself in the glass, she went away to find aremedy.
In the back of the cook-book, she remembered, there was a receipt forcold cream, and in a magazine Mrs. Lee had loaned them was a wholecolumn devoted to face bleaches and complexion restorers. Having readeach formula, she decided to try them all in turn, if the first did notprove effective.
Buttermilk and lemon juice were to be had for the taking and could beapplied at night after Joyce had gone to sleep. Half-ashamed of thisdesire to make herself beautiful, Mary shrank from confiding hertroubles to any one. But several nights' use of all the home remediesshe could get, failed to produce the desired results. When she anxiouslyexamined herself in the glass, the unflattering mirror plainly showedher a little face, not one whit fairer for all its treatment.
The house-party was drawing near too rapidly to waste time on things ofsuch slow action, and at last, in desperation, she took down thesavings-bank in which, after long hoarding, she had managed to savenearly two dollars. By dint of a button-hook and a hat-pin and an hour'spatient poking, she succeeded in extracting five dimes. These shewrapped in tissue paper, and folded in a letter. In a Phoenixnewspaper she had seen an advertisement of a magical cosmetic, to befound on sale at one of the local drug-stores, and this was an orderfor a box.
She was accustomed to running out to watch for the postman. Often in hereagerness to get the mail she had met him half a mile down the road. Soshe had ample opportunity to send her order and receive a reply withoutthe knowledge of any of the family.
It was a delicious-smelling ointment. The directions on the wrapper saidthat on retiring, it was to be applied to the face like a thick paste,and a linen mask worn to prevent its rubbing off.
Now that the boys were away, Mary shared the circular tent with Joyce.The figures "mystical and awful" which she and Holland had put on itswalls with green paint the day they moved to the Wigwam, had fadedsomewhat in the fierce sun of tropical summers, but they still grinnedhideously from all sides. Outlandish as they were, however, no face onall the encircling canvas was as grotesque as the one which emerged fromunder the bed late in the afternoon, the day the box of cosmetic wasreceived.
Mary had crept under the bed in order to escape Norman's prying eyes incase he should glance into the tent in search of her. There, stretchedout on the floor with a pair of scissors and a piece of one of her oldlinen aprons, she had fashioned herself a mask, in accordance with thedirections on the box. The holes cut for the eyes and nose were a trifleirregular, one eye being nearly half an inch higher than the other, andthe mouth was decidedly askew. But tapes sewed on at the four cornersmade it ready for instant use, and when she had put it on and crawledout from under the bed, she regarded herself in the glass with greatsatisfaction.
"I hope Joyce won't wake up in the night and see me," she thought."She'd be scared stiff. This is a lot of trouble and expense, but I justcan't go to the house-party looking like a fright. I'd do lots more thanthis to keep the Princess from being ashamed of me."
Then she put it away and went out to the hammock, under theumbrella-tree, and while she sat swinging back and forth for a longhappy hour, she pictured to herself the delights of the cominghouse-party. The Princess would be changed, she knew. Her lastphotograph showed that. One is almost grown up at seventeen, and she hadbeen only fourteen, Mary's age, when she made that never to be forgottenvisit to the Wigwam. And she would see Betty and Betty's godmother andPapa Jack and the old Colonel and Mom Beck. The very names, as sherepeated them in a whisper, sounded interesting to her. And the twolittle knights of Kentucky, and Miss Allison and the Waltons--they wereall mythical people in one sense, like Alice in Wonderland and Bo-peep,yet in another they were as real as Holland or Hazel Lee, for they werehousehold names, and she had heard so much about them that she felt asort of kinship with each one.
With the mask and the box tucked away in readiness under her pillow, itwas an easy matter after Joyce had gone to sleep for Mary to liftherself to a sitting posture, inch by inch. Cautiously as a cat sheraised herself, then sat there in the darkness scooping out the smoothointment with thumb and finger, and spreading it thickly over herinquisitive little nose and plump round cheeks. All up under her hairand down over her chin she rubbed it with energy and thoroughness. Thentying on the mask, she eased herself down on her elbow, little bylittle, and snuggled into her pillow with a sigh of relief.
It was a long time before she fell asleep. The odor of the ointment wassickeningly sweet, and the mask gave her a hot smothery feeling. Whenshe finally dozed off it was to fall into a succession of uneasy dreams.She thought that the cat was sitting on her face; that an old ogre hadher head tied up in a bag and was carrying it home to change into anapple dumpling, then that she was a fly and had fallen into a bottle ofmucilage. From the last dream she roused with a start, hot anduncomfortable, but hardly wide awake enough to know what was the matter.
The salty dried beef they had had for supper made her intensel
y thirsty,and remembering the pitcher of fresh water which Joyce always broughtinto the tent every night, she slipped out of bed and stumbled acrossthe floor toward the table. The moon was several nights past the fullnow, so that at this late hour the walls of the tent glimmered white inits light, and where the flap was turned back at the end, it shone in,in a broad white path.
Not more than half awake, Mary had forgotten the elaborate way in whichshe had tied up her face, and catching sight in the mirror of an awfulspook gliding toward her, she stepped back, almost frozen with terror.Never had she imagined such a hideous ghost, white as flour, with oneround eye higher than the other, and a dreadful slit of a mouth, allaskew.
She was too frightened to utter a sound, but the pitcher fell to thefloor with a crash, and as the cold water splashed over her feet shebounded back into bed and pulled the cover over her head. Instantly, asher hand came in contact with the mask on her face, she realized that itwas only her own reflection in the glass which had frightened her, butthe shock was so great she could not stop trembling.
Wakened by the sound of the breaking pitcher and Mary's wild plunge backinto bed, Joyce sat up in alarm, but in response to her whisper Maryexplained in muffled tones from under the bedclothes that she had simplygotten up for a drink of water and dropped the pitcher. All the rest ofthe night her sleep was fitful and uneasy, for toward morning her facebegan to burn as if it were on fire. She tore off the mask and used itto wipe away what remained of the ointment. Most of it had beenabsorbed, however, and the skin was broken out in little red blisters.
Maybe in her zeal she had used too much of the magical cosmetic, ormaybe her face, already made tender by various applications, resentedthe vigorous rubbings she gave it. At any rate she had cause to befrightened when she saw herself in the mirror. As she lifted the pitcherfrom the wash-stand, she happened to glance at the proverb calendarhanging 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 ofcold water, "if I hadn't had so much miserable pride, I wouldn't havedestroyed what little complexion I had left. Like as not the skin willall 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 andmottled appearance, that Mrs. Ware decided she must be coming down withsome kind of rash. It was only to prevent her mother sending for adoctor, that Mary finally confessed with tears what she had done.
"Why didn't you ask somebody?" said Joyce trying not to let her voicebetray the laughter which was choking her, for Mary showed a grief toodeep to ridicule.
"I--I was ashamed to," she confessed, "and I wanted to surprise you all.The advertisement 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 GrandmaWare's old receipt for rose balm, that will soon heal those blisters.You would have saved yourself a good deal of trouble and suffering ifyou had gone to her in the first place."
"Well, don't I know that?" blazed Mary, angrily. Then hiding her face inher arms she began to sob. "You don't know what it is to be uh-ugly likeme! I heard mamma say that I was as brown as a squaw, and I couldn'tbear to think of Lloyd and Betty and everybody at The Locusts seeing methat way. _That's_ why I did it!"
"You are not ugly, Mary Ware," insisted Joyce, in a most reprovingbig-sisterly voice. "Everybody can't be a raving, tearing beauty, andanybody with as bright and attractive a little face as yours ought to besatisfied to let well enough alone."
"That's all right for _you_" replied Mary, bitterly. "But you aren'tfat, with a turned-up nose and just a little thin straight pigtail ofhair. You're pretty, and an artist, and you're going to be somebody someday. 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 theswing down by the beehives. For once the "School of the Bees" failed towhisper a comforting lesson. This was a trouble which she could not sealup 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 awriting-table, she poured out her troubles in a letter to Jack. It wasonly a few hundred miles to the mines, and she could be sure of asympathetic answer before the blisters were healed on her face, or thehurt had faded out of her sensitive little heart.