AN AWAKENING
A little scrawl of a note, delivered just after breakfast at Mr. Elton's
door, brought Madeline to visit Mrs. Percival, who, like her mother,
seemed to be in continual need of her.
She found that lady lying in her favorite chair in the library--the
chair that had been her refuge in the days of her early widowhood, that
had comfortably housed her when books carried her away from her own
world of sorrows and problems into the world of illusions, the chair in
which she had dreamed of the great things that were to come into a
younger life, not her own, and yet deeply her own,--her son's.
Now she lay back in it with clasped hands, thinner than usual and with
eyes sadder. Madeline came in like a young Hebe, glowing with health and
vigor, and infinitely tender toward fragility.
"You are ill, dear mother Percival," cried the girl, dropping to her
knees and slipping an arm behind her friend's back in an unconscious
attitude of protection.
Mrs. Percival's fingers followed the soft curve that the girl's hair
made around her forehead.
"No, dear," she said slowly, "but I had something to tell you. I wanted
to speak to you myself, before any one else had the chance."
"Please tell me quickly."
"So many of my dearest hopes have come to nothing!" Mrs. Percival went
on, with a little bitterness that Madeline thought unlike her. "Each
blow, as it falls, seems the hardest to bear. I've tried to accept
whatever happens, graciously. It isn't always easy, Madeline, dear."
"Yes?" said Madeline.
"Dick--"
"Is anything the matter with Dick?" Madeline rose with a little cry.
"Dick does not think so," his mother answered. "My child, you have seen
something of this little Miss Quincy?"
Madeline's eyes dropped for the tenth of a second and a heaviness took
possession of her body; then she lifted her head bravely.
"Yes," she answered, "I know Miss Quincy--quite the most beautiful girl
I have ever seen."
"Very beautiful," echoed Mrs. Percival. "So I too thought, the only time
I ever saw her. Well, Madeline, what I have to tell you is that Dick is
to marry her."
The girl saw that the older woman's hands were trembling, and she laid
her own warm young palms over the cold old ones.
"I hope Dick will be very happy," she said softly. "I--I'm not a bit
surprised. We ought to have seen that it was coming. And Dick loves
her!"
And she laid her cheek against Mrs. Percival's, but the other pushed her
away and stared into the eyes so near her own.
"And you can take it so quietly?" she asked. "Forgive me, dear, if for
once I break down the barriers of reserve. I love you so much, let me be
frank. Surely you know what I hoped, what I thought."
"You thought Dick and I loved each other," Madeline said bravely.
"I hoped so. Heaven knows I hoped so."
"We are too good friends for that, dear Mrs. Percival. One needs a
little something unexplored and unexpected in a lover; don't you think
so? Dick and I knew each other in kilts and pig-tails."
"Well, it seems I am as much of an old fool as Dick is a young one,"
Mrs. Percival said bitterly. "I'm good for nothing but to lie here and
comfort myself with dreams."
"You're an old dear, and Dick is a young one," Madeline tried to laugh.
"And Miss Quincy is exquisite--charming."
"An old fool," repeated Mrs. Percival. "Now listen, sweetheart! If Dick
marries this girl, I have no intention of forgetting that he is my son,
and that she is his wife. I shall do all I can to help her to be worthy
of him; but before that happens, I am going to have the satisfaction of
speaking to just one person in the world--you--exactly what I think
about it. From what Mrs. Lenox told me, after her visit in the country,
and from what I saw myself, I think she is a vulgar little image
overlaid with tinsel."
"Oh, don't!" Madeline cried. "You and I do not really know her, but we
can trust Dick. He's too fine himself to be attracted by anything but
fineness. She must have character to have made the fight she has with
fate."
"Attracted by character! Pins and figs! My son is just like all the
others, I am finding. He's attracted by pink flesh. And as for heart
and soul--all the women that Dick has known well have been women of
refinement. He takes their purity and nobility for granted, as a part of
womanhood. He thinks he's marrying you and me. His reason has nothing to
do with it."
For the moment Madeline had no answer, and Mrs. Percival went on:
"It's foolish to care what people say about your tragedies. Oh, you
needn't shake your head. This is a tragedy, Madeline. And I do care
about the world. I hate to think of the whispering and gossiping because
my son--my son--has fallen a victim to a cheap adventuress."
"Nonsense," Madeline broke out. "Miss Quincy isn't an outcast, just
because she has had the world's cold shoulder. And people aren't so
silly as to let such external things prejudice them."
"Don't mistake me, dearie. I'm not taking exception to the girl because
she works. We're all--those of us that are good for much--the mothers
and wives and daughters of men who work, and we share in their labor. I
could admire and love a real worker, but this butterfly creature affects
me like a parasite--a woman who wants to get and not to give. It's just
because I feel that she isn't a real worker that I am afraid of her."
"And that, even if it is true, may be only the result of sordid
surroundings." Madeline's heart misgave her, for she had learned to
respect Mrs. Percival's judgments. "She'll blossom out and add
womanliness to beauty in such an atmosphere as you and Dick will give
her."
"Spontaneous generation will not do everything. You must have the germ
of a heart before you can develop the whole thing. Do you think you can
really change a girl who has lived for twenty years in the wrong
attitude?"
"You are judging cruelly," Madeline cried. "Of course every one has the
germs of good."
"And did it ever occur to you that the kind of love that Dick will give
his wife may be too good--so far above a coarse-grained woman that it
will not touch her comprehension? A lower grade of man might bring her
out better."
"It's impossible to think of so exquisite a creature being
coarse-grained," Madeline exclaimed. "I, for one, am going to believe in
her, and in a year, with you and Dick and mother and Mrs. Lenox and
myself all backing her, you'll be proud of her loveliness and tact. I
shall be only Cinderella's ugly sister. But you must not ever quite
forget me, Mrs. Percival." And Madeline laughed most cheerfully.
Mrs. Percival smiled in return. "Well, I have had my explosion. It's
extraordinary what a relief it is, once in a while. I'm not often so
guilty, am I, Madeline? After all, I've told you my fears rather than my
convictions. The situation does not seem so bad, now that I have said
even more than I think. Hereafter I shall find it easy to hold my
tongue."
"And you will try to like her?" Madeline asked anxiously.
"Of course, my dear. I shall try harder than any one else. I am going in
state to pay her a motherly call this very afternoon, feeling all the
time like a plated volcano." Mrs. Percival leaned back with a small
_moue_, then sat up again. "There's my boy's latch-key in the
lock now," she said.
Dick halted at the door when he saw the two and knew that they must have
been talking of him. He had something of an air of defiance thickly
overlaid with innocence; but Madeline went to meet him with hands
outstretched.
"Dick," she exclaimed, "I congratulate you with all my heart. She's the
prettiest creature in the world."
Dick, manlike, regarded this as the highest possible tribute to his
beloved and glowed in return. His defiance dropped like a shell and he
shook Madeline's hands with enthusiasm.
"You're a trump," he said. "I shall not forget how good you have been to
her; and I hope you two will always be friends."
"I should think so! I should like to see your trying to prevent us,
Dick," said Madeline saucily. "And your mother is going to love her,
too, when--"
"When we are married," Dick answered with silly masculine
self-consciousness.
"And that is to be soon!"
"As soon as I can manage it. I can't bear to have Lena living as she
does now; and there's no reason why we shouldn't cut it short."
"No reason at all. I don't wonder you feel so. Good-by, both of you."
Dick saw her to the door and Madeline walked out with her usual
deliberate serenity.
She found her way home with bottled-up emotions, as a hurt child holds
in the cry until he gets to the spot where mother's breast waits for the
inarticulate sobs. Everything she had done and said seemed to have been
the act of some far-away self, that had hardly any connection with the
real Madeline. The earth danced around her and she was incapable of real
thought. And yet the well-trained, automatic body that was her outer
shell conducted itself with reason. It even stopped in the living-room
to kiss her mother; it apparently skimmed a new copy of _Life_; it
convoyed her slowly up stairs to her own room, where it shut and locked
her door. But here her real self resumed control, as she threw herself
into an easy chair by the window and stared out at the desolation of
December where dead leaves went whirling in elfin eddying clouds.
For a few moments she let the solar system rock and reel around her, and
watched everything she had thought stable go up in smoke. Then upon the
world, swirling and pounding meaninglessly, there came an intense quiet.
She knew that the outer world was as serene as ever; but a great
throbbing pain within showed her that it was only her own little atom of
self that was revolutionized. Nature was not upset. There was still
order for her to hold fast to. For the first time she began to analyze
herself and her emotions.
She could not say that she had planned her future, but it had seemed so
natural and inevitable that she had accepted it without planning, almost
without thought. Dick and she had belonged to each other ever since they
could remember. At ten they had been outspoken lovers, and ever since
there had been that intimate comradeship that seemed to her to imply the
unspoken relation, behind, above, below. All this she had taken for
granted, like mother-love and her own dawning womanhood. And now Dick,
the chief corner-stone of her edifice, was torn away, and the whole airy
structure toppled and dissolved.
"I've been assuming all this," she said to herself, "and marriage isn't
a thing to take for granted. Shouldn't I have resented it if Dick had
appropriated me as though I belonged to him and had lost my freedom of
choice? I've been unfair to him. And now--if I should never marry--there
are surely plenty of good things left in the world. But are there?"
Madeline had always been characterized by those who knew her as lovely
and placid. And why not? What else should life draw out of a girl of
normal nature, surrounded by protecting love, given the good things of
life as by right, shielded from the knowledge of evil, never facing a
problem more exciting than those of Euclid. But now something began to
stir in the unknown depths of her nature. For the first time in her life
she had had a blow. There rose before her a vision of endless
maidenhood. She saw herself as she had seen other women--uninteresting
women, she had thought them. Now they seemed to her like
tragedies--women whose lives did not count, either to themselves or to
the world, middle-aged, somber, unrelated. To be childless, to eat and
dress and wear the semblance of womanhood, even to play a little part in
society, and yet to be but half a woman! To be no link in the
generations! This was unendurable. The first demand of every soul is for
life, and yet life is life only when it is part of the future. To live
oneself one must live in others. All the mother hidden in the depths of
her rose and cried out against any destiny that shut her out from the
great stream of humanity.
"I shall be a side-eddy in the current. I shall grow stagnant and slimy
and lead nowhere. And the rushing waters will go leaping and laughing
past."
She got up and moved restlessly up and down the room. She looked again
out of the window at the sober end of the winter day. In the tree
branches that clattered outside, her eyes fell on an empty nest.
"And am I to be such a thing?" she said. "Surely all the world must bow
down in pity for the solitary woman." Some half-forgotten lines came
back to her:
"Mine ear is full of the rocking of cradles.
For a single cradle, saith Nature, I would give every one of my graves."
By her little practice piano her eyes fell on the pages of Schubert's
unfinished symphony.
"Unfinished!" she said. "And yet even there is the phrase that comes and
comes again, sweeter and more full of meaning in every renewed variety.
So I must have love to play through my life, or else it will be nothing
but a medley. It must be my music's theme; even if the symphony is
unfinished. Are there women who can do without it, who can take a life
alone and make it sweet and satisfying? Not I, oh God, not I! I'm no
exceptional creature. I'm just a plain woman. And if life doesn't give
me wifehood and motherhood, it gives me nothing. I wonder if all women
feel this way. This pretty little Lena,--is she bursting with primal
need of giving and taking? At any rate she has put something in Dick's
face that was never there before--that I'd give my soul to see in a
man's face when he looks at me."
Hitherto the world had ambled along in an amiable way; and now it
suddenly turned and delivered a blow in the face. Every one is destined
to receive such blows, some get little else. But the test comes in the
way they are received. You may use belladonna as a poison, or you may
use it to help the blind to see. So when pain comes, you may take it to
your bosom and suckle it till it becomes a fine healthy child, too heavy
for you to carry; or cast out the changeling and leave it on the
doorstep to die. It matters little how much anguish skulks about the
outside of life, so long as it finds no lodgment in the sacred shrines
of the heart. Madeline met her first grief and fought it off; and, even
while she thought it had given her a mortal wound, came the revelation
of the powerlessness of the poor thing. She put her arms down on the
window-sill to cry deliberately, but something dried her tears.
"I couldn't put that look in Dick's face, but could he put it in mine?
Was this taking of things for granted the best love of which I am
capable? I've found out to-day that there are all kinds of things in me
that I have never dreamed of before, and passion is one of them, and
rebellion. Great heavens! I might have married him and been serene and
never found things out."
She seemed to be looking at a new Madeline; and while she stared,
startled, this self grew greater and stronger.
"This is not the end of life; it is the beginning," she whispered. "I've
been looking down the wrong road. Dick has no such power over me as to
consign me to misery everlasting. I am mistress of my own fate. I have
not handed it over to him. Happiness is not a thing to get. It is a
state of mind to live in. It is my own affair, not that of others." She
rested her chin in her hands and fell into a girl's day-dream, in which
the nightmare was forgotten.
Twilight fell at last, and faint sounds came up to her to remind her
that down stairs there were well-beloved people who did not know and
should never know of her little vigil. Her father must be coming home.
It was time for her to put on her armor and go down. Armor is one of the
necessities of life. If we can't wear it in steel plates on the outside,
we must mask the face with impenetrability and the manner with pretense.
Never let the heart be vulnerable. Yet, try as we may, something of our
weakness is laid bare. Hereafter Miss Elton might be serene, but would
never again be placid.
But now she was quite herself.
Down stairs her father read the paper and her mother sat near the big
table, hem-stitching. For them everything was settled, and settled
satisfactorily. They knew whom they were going to marry, and whether
love was to be a success, and where they were going to live, and what
they were going to do. Henceforth, for them the game meant only
pleasantly plodding onward along paths already marked out. Just a
wholesome common marriage, planted with the seed of love and watered
with small self-sacrifices. How could they possibly remember the
restlessness of youth, to whom all these things are hidden in the mists
of the future, and who is longing for everything and sure of nothing?
Madeline sat down at the piano and her hands fell inevitably into
phrasing the "unfinished symphony." She became aware that her mother
laid down the stitching and Mr. Elton's evening paper ceased to crackle.
As she stopped her father stood behind her. He bent and kissed the
little parting in her hair.
"Your music grows sweeter and richer day by day, little girl," he said.
"I suppose as more comes into your life you have more to give. I'm glad
that you give it out to us old folks at home."
Madeline wheeled about and sprang to her feet.
"Ah," she exclaimed, "if you have finished with your stupid old paper,
I'll give you a real piece of news. It's a 'scoop' too, for no reporter
has got hold of it yet. Dick Percival is engaged to little Miss Quincy."
Both father and mother stared at her in silence. She stood a little
behind the chandelier, where the light shone full on her face, and in
neither mouth nor eyes could they see the trace of shadow. On the
contrary, there was a radiant loveliness about her that astonished those
that loved her best.
Then Mr. Norris was announced.
Now when Miss Elton had her first peep into her soul, and so stirred up
the possibilities in her nature, she also awoke to new insight into what
was going on behind other people's eyes. The day when she could look a
young man squarely in the face and say to him whatever she thought had
passed. The period of unconscious girlhood, much prolonged in her case,
came to an end. Since, in this world, shadow goes with sunshine, so
demons tag after angels; and with the dawn of her sweeter womanhood,
Madeline developed a new spirit of contrariety and coquetry that
astonished no one so much as herself.
When Mr. Norris came in, his apologetic glance told her at once that she
had hardly spoken to him since she had turned up her straight little
high-bred nose and informed him and Dick that she despised their
underhand ways; told her, also, what had not dawned on her before, that
here was an abject creature, and that it was the province of womanhood
to batter and buffet him who is down, perhaps in secret fear of that day
when outraged manhood will rise and claim a tyranny of its own.
So she put out her hand with that stiffness that holds at arm's length
and said:
"Oh, how dy' do, Mr. Norris," just as though they had never sailed
together in dual solitude, and she allowed her lip to curl in evidence
of her disapproval of the much warmer greeting of her elders.
She sat down and eyed and tapped a small bronze slipper, while she
ignored the reproachful glances of her mother at her rank desertion of
conversational duties. Her father hardly noticed it. He himself so liked
young men that he frequently forgot that his daughter and not himself
might be the object of their quest. So he plunged cheerfully into an
animated discussion of the new tide in civic politics, while Norris
dully and conscientiously tried to bear up his end.
Ellery's eyes, however, as well as the thoughts behind those superficial
thoughts that guided his words, were absorbed in the other side of the
room, where Miss Elton canvassed with her mother the merits of various
embroidery silks. She was lovelier than ever. He had thought her perfect
before, but to-night she had added a sheen to perfection and made herself
entrancing, both reposeful and vivid. He wondered if she had heard of
Dick's engagement and if her color covered a pale heart.
Suddenly she flung up her head impatiently, and came behind her father's
chair to clap a small hand over his mouth in the middle of a sentence of
which Norris had entirely lost track.
"Father, father," she cried, "do you think Mr. Norris wants to come here
and maunder over stupid politics all the evening, after he has been
writing stupid editorials about them all day? They _are_ stupid--I've
read some of them." She smiled at the young man. "Wouldn't you both
infinitely rather hear me sing?"
Mr. Elton kissed the offending hand before he put it gently down.
"I know I should."
Norris sprang up.
"May I turn your music?" he asked eagerly, but she shook her head as she
moved away.
"There isn't going to be any music to turn."
She began to sing the same little Roumanian song that he remembered on
their last evening in the Lenox house, and his spirits, lifted for a
moment by her smile, went down again.
"Into the mist I gazed and fear came on me,
Then said the mist, 'I weep for the lost sun.'"
She sang passionately and he could have cried aloud. It was true then
that she was grieving for Dick.
"The music is uncanny, isn't it?" she said, as she ended and found him
near her. "How does it make you feel?"
"If I should find an image for my feelings just at present, you would
scorn me for my base material thoughts."
"Find it," she commanded.
"I think I feel like a mince-pie--a maddening jumble of things delicious
and indigestible."
She laughed and grew friendly. This, he thought, is, after all, her
permanent mood; but before he could take advantage of it another caller,
Mr. Early, appeared; and again she basely deserted Norris to the mercies
of her father and mother, and devoted herself to the evident
beatification of the apostle of the new in art.