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SYLVIA SCARLETT
BOOKS BY COMPTON MACKENZIE
SYLVIA SCARLETT PLASHERS MEAD
HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK [ESTABLISHED 1817]
THE EARLY LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF
SYLVIA SCARLETT
By COMPTON MACKENZIE
Author of "PLASHERS MEAD" "SINISTER STREET" "CARNIVAL" ETC.
[Illustration: colophon]
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
SYLVIA SCARLETT
Copyright, 1918,
by Harper & Brothers
Printed in the United States of America
PRELUDE
=_Prelude_=
At six o'clock on the morning of Ash Wednesday in the year 1847, the
Honorable Charles Cunningham sat sipping his coffee in the restaurant of
the Vendanges de Bourgogne. He was somewhat fatigued by the exertions
that as "lion" of the moment he had felt bound to make, exertions that
had included a display of English eccentricity and had culminated in a
cotillion at a noble house in the Faubourg St.-Germain, the daughter of
which had been assigned to him by Parisian gossip as his future wife.
Marriage, however, did not present itself to his contemplation as an
urgent duty; and he sipped his coffee, reassured by the example of his
brother Saxby, who, with the responsibility of a family succession,
remained a bachelor. In any case, the notion of marrying a French girl
was preposterous; he was not to be flattered into an unsuitable alliance
by compliments upon his French. Certainly he spoke French uncommonly
well, devilishly well for an Englishman, he told himself; and he stroked
his whiskers in complacent meditation.
Charles Cunningham had arrived at the Vendanges de Bourgogne to watch
that rowdy climax of Carnival, the _descente de la Courtille_. And now
through the raw air they were coming down from Belleville, all sorts of
revelers in masks and motley and rags. The noise of tin trumpets and toy
drums, of catcalls and cocoricots, of laughter and cheers and whistling,
came nearer. Presently the road outside was thronged for the aristocrats
of the Faubourg St.-Germain to alight from their carriages and mix with
the mob. This was the traditional climax of Carnival for Parisian
society: every year they drove here on Ash Wednesday morning to get
themselves banged on the head by bladders, to be spurted with cheap
scent and pelted with sugar-plums, and to retaliate by flinging down
hot louis for the painful enrichment of the masses. The noise was for a
time deafening; but gradually the cold light of morning and the
melancholy Lenten bells cast a gloom upon the crowd, which passed on
toward the boulevards, diminishing in sound and size at every street
corner.
The tall, fair Englishman let himself be carried along by the exodus,
thinking idly what excitable folk foreigners were, but conscious,
nevertheless, of a warmth of intimacy that was not at all disagreeable,
the kind of intimacy that is bestowed on a man by taking a pack of
friendly dogs for a country walk. Suddenly he was aware of a small hand
upon his sleeve, a small hand that lay there like a white butterfly;
and, looking down, he saw a poke-bonnet garlanded with yellow rosebuds.
The poke-bonnet was all he could see, for the wearer kept her gaze
steadily on the road, while with little feet she mimicked his long
strides. The ineffable lightness of the arm laid on his own, the joyous
mockery of her footsteps, the sense of an exquisite smile beneath the
poke-bonnet, and the airy tremor of invitation that fluttered from the
golden shawl of Siamese crêpe about her shoulders tempted him to
withdraw from the crowd at the first opportunity. Soon they were in a
by-street, whence the clamor of Carnival slowly died away, leaving no
sound upon the morning air but their footfalls and the faint whisper of
her petticoats where she tripped along beside him.
Presently the poke-bonnet was raised; Charles Cunningham beheld his
companion's face, a perfect oval, set with eyes of deepest brown,
demurely passionate, eyes that in this empty street were all for him. He
had never considered himself a romantic young man; when this encounter
had faded to a mere flush upon the dreamy sky of the past, he was always
a little scornful of his first remark, and apt to wonder how the deuce
he ever came to make it.
"By Jove! _vous savez, vous êtes tout à fait comme un oiseau!_"
"_Eh, alors?_" she murmured, in a tone that was neither defiance nor
archness nor indifference nor invitation, but something that was
compounded of all four and expressed exactly herself. "_Eh, alors?_"
"_Votre nid est loin d'ici?"_ he asked.
Nor did he blush for the guise of his speech at the time: afterward it
struck him as most indecorously poetic.
"_Viens donc,"_ she whispered.
"_Comment appelez-vous?"_
"_Moi, je suis Adèle._"
"_Adèle quoi?_" he pressed.
"_Mais Adèle alors, tout simplement ça._"
"_C'est un peu--vous savez--un peu._" He made a sweep with his
unoccupied arm to indicate the vagueness of it all.
"I love you," she trilled; deep down in her ivory throat emotion caught
the trill and made of it a melody that set his heart beating.
"_Vraiment?_" he asked, very solemnly; then laying syllable upon
syllable in a kind of amazed deliberation, as a child builds a tower of
bricks, he began to talk to her in French.
"_Mais, comme tu parles bien,_" she told him.
"_Tu m'inspires,_" he murmured, hoarsely.
Afterward, when he looked back at the adventure, he awarded this remark
the prize for folly.
The adventure did not have a long life; a week later Charles Cunningham
was called back to England by the news of his brother's illness. Before
Lent was out he had become the Earl of Saxby, who really had to think
seriously of marriage and treat it with more respect than the Parisian
gossip over which Charles Cunningham had idly mused at six o'clock of
Ash Wednesday morning in the year 1847. As for Adèle, she met in May the
owner of a traveling-booth, a widower called Bassompierre with a small
son, who had enough of the gipsy to attract the irresponsible Adèle and
enough of the bourgeois to induce her to marry him for the sake of a
secure and solid future. She need not have troubled about her future,
the deep-voiced Adèle; for just when November darkens to December she
died in giving birth to Juliette. The gipsy in Albert Bassompierre
accepted as his own daughter Juliette; the bourgeois in him erected a
cross in the cemetery and put a wreath of immortelles in a glass case to
lie on Adèle's tomb. Then he locked away the few pieces of jewelry that
life had brought her, hung another daguerreotype beside the one of his
first wife, and wrapped Juliette in a golden shawl of Siamese crêpe.
Lightly the two daguerreotypes swung to and fro; and lightly rocked the
cradle where the baby Juliette lay sleeping, while the caravan jolted
southward along the straight French roads where the poplars seemed to be
commenting to one another in the wind.
For eighteen years the caravan jolted along these roads, until young
Edouard Bassompierre was old enough to play leading man throughout the
repertory and thereby most abruptly plunge his predecessor into old age.
At the same time Juliette was allowed to act the soubrettes; her father
was too much afraid of the leading lady to play any tricks of suddenly
imposed senility with her. It was, on the whole, a jolly life, this
vagrancy from fair to fair of all the towns of France. It was jolly,
when the performance was done, to gather in the tent behind the stage
and eat chipped potatoes and drink red wine with all the queer people
whose voices were hoarse with crying their wares all the day long.
Then came, one springtime, the fair at Compiègne. Business was splendid,
for the Emperor was there to hunt the wild boar in the forest. Never had
old Albert Bassompierre beaten his big drum so confidently at the
entrance of his booth; never had Edouard captured so many young women's
hearts; both of them were too much occupied with their own triumphs to
notice the young officer who came every night to the play. The Emperor
left Compiègne in April; when he departed, the young officer departed
also, accompanied by Juliette.
"_Ah, la vache,_" cried old Bassompierre; "it's perhaps as well her
mother didn't live, for she might have done the same."
"You should have let her play the lead," said Edouard.
"She can play lead in real life," replied old Bassompierre. "If she
can," he added, fiercely.
But when Juliette wrote to him from Paris and told him how happy she was
with her lover, the gipsy in Bassompierre drove out the bourgeois, and
he sent his daughter her mother's jewelry and the golden shawl; but he
kept the daguerreotype, for, after all, Juliette was not really his
daughter and Adèle had really been his wife.
Three years passed. Juliette lived in a little house at Belleville with
two baby girls called Elène and Henriette. When in after years she
looked back to this time it seemed to her smothered in roses, the roses
of an operatic scene. Everything, indeed, in retrospect was like
that--the arrival of her lover in his gay uniform, the embowered kisses,
the lights of Paris far below, the suppers on the veranda, the warm
Sunday mornings, the two babies asleep on the lawn and their father
watching them, herself before a glass and her lover's face seen over her
shoulder, the sudden sharp embrace; all were heavy with the intolerable
sense of a curtain that must fall. Then came the war; there was a
hurried move down to stuffy apartments in Paris; ready money hastily got
together by the young officer, who spoke confidently of the large sum it
was, since, after all, the war would be over in a month and the
Prussians have had their lesson; and at last a breathless kiss. The
crowds surged cheering through the streets, the two babies screamed
disapproval of their new surroundings, and
Juliette's lover was killed in the first battle; he had only time to
scribble a few trembling lines:
_Mon adorée, je t'ai flanqué un mauvais coup. Pardonnez-moi. Mes
dernières pensées sont pour toi. Adieu. Deux gros bécots aux bébés.
J'ai parlé pour toi à mon père. Cherche argent--je t'embrasse
follement follem---- _
Yet when she received this letter, some impulse kept her from going to
her lover's father. She could not bear the possibility of being made to
realize that those debonair years of love were regarded by him as an
intrigue to be solved by money. If André's mother had been alive, she
might have felt differently; now she would not trouble a stricken family
that might regard her tears as false; she would not even try to return
to her own father. No doubt he would welcome her; but pride, all the
strange and terrible pride that was henceforth to haunt Juliette's soul,
forbade her.
It was impossible, however, to remain in Paris; and without any reason
for her choice she took her babies to Lyon and settled down in rooms
overlooking the Rhône, to await the end of the war. When she had paid
the cost of the journey and bought herself the necessary mourning, she
found she had nearly eleven thousand francs left; with care this could
surely be made to last three years at least; in three years much might
happen. As a matter of fact, much happened almost at once; for the
beauty of Juliette, a lustrous and imperial beauty, caught the fancy of
Gustave Lataille, who was conductor of the orchestra at one of the
smaller theaters in Lyon. To snare his fancy might not have been enough;
but when with her dowry she captured also his imagination, he married
her. Juliette did not consider it wrong to marry this somber, withered,
and uncommunicative man of forty, for whom she had neither passion nor
affection. He struck her as essentially like most of the husbands she
had observed hitherto; and she esteemed herself lucky not to have met
such a one before she had been granted the boon of love. She must have
inherited from that unknown father her domestic qualities; she certainly
acquired none from Adèle. From him, too, may have come that pride which,
however it may have found its chief expression in ideals of bourgeois
respectability, was nevertheless a fine fiery virtue and supported her
spirit to the very last.
Juliette and Lataille lived together without anything to color a drab
existence. Notwithstanding his connection with the theater, Lataille had
no bohemian tastes; once when his wife suggested, after a visit from her
father, that there seemed no reason why she should not apply for an
engagement to act, he unhesitatingly refused his permission; when she
attempted to argue, he reminded her that he had given his name to Elène
and Henriette, and she was silent. Henceforth she devoted herself to
sewing, and brought into the world four girls in successive
years--Françoise, Marie, Marguerite, and Valentine. The last was born in
1875, soon after the Latailles had moved to Lille, where Gustave had
secured the post of conductor at the principal theater. Juliette
welcomed the change, for it gave her the small house of her own which
she had long wanted; moreover, nobody in Lille knew at first hand of the
circumstances in which Gustave had married her, so that Elène and
Henrietta could go to school without being teased about their mother's
early lapse from the standards of conduct which she fervently desired
they would adopt.
Unfortunately, the conductor had only enjoyed his advancement a year
when he was struck down by a paralytic stroke. With six small children
and a palsied husband upon her hands, Juliette had to find work. Partly
from compassion for her ill-fortune, but chiefly because by now she was
a most capable seamstress, the management of the theater engaged her as
wardrobe mistress; and for five years Juliette sustained her husband,
her children, and her house. They were years that would have rubbed the
bloom from most women; but Juliette's beauty seemed to grow rather than
diminish. Her personality became proverbial in the town of Lille, and
though as wardroom mistress she was denied the public triumph of the
footlights, she had nevertheless a fame of her own that was considered
unique in the history of her profession. Her pride flourished on the
deference that was shown her even by the management; between her beauty
and her sharp tongue she achieved an authority that reached its height
in the way she brought up her children. Their snowy pinafores, their
trim stockings, their manners, and their looks were the admiration of
the _quartier_; and when in the year 1881 Gustave Lataille died, the
neatness of their new black dresses surprised even the most confirmed
admirers of Madame Lataille's industry and taste. At no time could
Juliette have seemed so beautiful as when, after the funeral, she raised
her widow's veil and showed the attendant sympathizers a countenance
unmarked by one tear of respectable emotion. She was far too proud to
weep for a husband whom she had never loved and whose death was a
relief; when the neighbors expressed astonishment at the absence of any
outward sorrow, she flung out a challenge to fate:
"I have not reached the age of thirty-four, and brought up six children,
and never once been late with so much as a ribbon, to cry for any man
now. He'll be a wonderful man that will ever make me cry. Henriette,
don't tug at your garter."
And as she stood there, with great brown eyes burning beneath a weight
of lustrous black hair, she seemed of marble without and within.
Nevertheless, before six months had passed, Madame Lataille fell
impetuously in love with a young English clerk of twenty-one, called
Henry Snow; what is more, she married him. Nobody in Lille was able to
offer a credible explanation of her behavior. People were willing to
admit that his conduct was comprehensible, notwithstanding the fourteen
years of her seniority; and it says much for the way Juliette had
impressed her personality upon a dull provincial world that Henry Snow's
action should have been so immediately understood. Before the problem of
her conduct, however, the world remained in perplexity. Financial
considerations could not have supplied a motive; from all accounts the
Englishman was unlikely to help; indeed, gossip said that even in his
obscure position he had already had opportunities of showing that, such
as it was, the position was better than he deserved and unlikely to be
bettered in the future. Nor could his good looks have attracted her, for
he was insignificant; and since Englishmen in the experience of Lille
were, whatever their faults, never insignificant, the insignificance of
Henry Snow acquired an active quality which contradicted its
characterization and made him seem not merely unattractive, but
positively displeasing. Nor could she have required some one to help in
managing her six children; altogether the affair was a mystery, which
gathered volume when the world began to realize the depth of the feeling
that Henry Snow had roused in Juliette. All the world loves a lover, but
only when it is allowed to obtrude itself upon the love. Juliette,
absorbed by her emotion and the eternal jealousy of the woman who
marries a man much younger than herself, refused to admit any spectators
to marvel at the development of the mystery. She carried on her work as
usual; but instead of maintaining her position as a figure she became an
object of curiosity, and presently, because that curiosity was never
gratified, an object of suspicion. The lover-loving world began to shake
its head and calumny whispered everywhere its commentary; she could
never have been a _femme propre_; this marriage must have been forced
upon the young Englishman as the price of a five-year-old intrigue.
When some defender of Juliette pointed out that the clerk had only been
in Lille three years, that his name had never been connected with hers,
and that in any case he was only twenty-one now, calumny retorted with a
long line of Henry Snows; presently the story of Juliette's life with
André Duchesnil was dragged to light, and by an infinite multiplication
of whispers her career from earliest youth was established as
licentious, mercenary, and cruel.
For a while Juliette was so much wrapped up in her own joy that she did
not observe the steady withdrawal of popular esteem. Having made it
clear to everybody that she wished to be left alone with her husband,
she supposed she had been successful and congratulated herself
accordingly, until one day a persistent friend, proof against Juliette's
icy discouragement, drove into her that the _quartier_ was pitying Henry
Snow, that things were being said against her, and that the only way to
put a stop to unkind gossip was to move about among the neighbors in
more friendly fashion.
Gradually it dawned upon Juliette that her friend was the emissary of a
universally accepted calumny, the voice of the _quartier_, the first to
brave her, and only now rash enough to do so because she had public
opinion at her back. This did not prevent Juliette from showing her
counselor the door to the street, nor from slamming it so abruptly that
a meter of stuff was torn from her skirt; yet when she went back to her
room and picked up her needlework there came upon her with a shock the
realization of what effect all this might have on Henry. If the world
were pitying him now, it would presently be laughing; if he were laughed
at, he would grow to hate her. Hitherto she had been so happy in her
love that she had never stopped to consider anything or anybody. She
remembered now Henry's amazement when, in the first tumultuous wave of
passion dammed for so many years, she had refused to let herself be
swept away; she recalled his faint hesitation when first she spoke of
marriage and gave him to understand that without marriage she would not
be his. Even then he must have foreseen the possibility of ridicule, and
he had only married her because she had been able to seem so desirable.
And she was still desirable; he was still enthralled; he was still vain
of her love; yet how was the flattery of one woman to mitigate for a man
the contempt of the crowd? Mercifully, he was an Englishman in a French
town, therefore it would take longer for the popular feeling to touch
him; but soon or late it would strike home to his vanity. Something must
be devised to transfix him with the dignity of marriage. They must have
a child; no father could do anything but resent and despise laughter
that would be directed against his fatherhood. Juliette's wish was
granted very shortly afterward; and when she told her husband of their
expectation she held him close and looked deep into his eyes for the
triumph she sought. Perhaps the fire in her own was reflected in his,
for she released him from her embrace with a sigh of content.
Through the months of waiting Juliette longed for a boy. It seemed to
her somehow essential for the retention of Henry's love that she should
give him a boy; she could scarcely bear another girl, she who had
brought into the world six girls. Much of Juliette's pride during those
months was softened by her longing; she began once more to frequent the
company of her neighbors in her zest for the least scrap of information
that would help the fulfilment of it. There was no fantastic concoction
she would not drink, nor any omen she would not propitiate. Half the
saints in the calendar were introduced to her by ladies that knew them
and vouched for the interest they would take in her pregnancy. Juliette
never confided to anybody her reason for wanting a boy; and nobody
suspected it, since half a dozen girls were enough to explain any
woman's desire for a change. One adviser discovered in a tattered volume
of obstetrical theory that when the woman was older than the man the
odds were on a male child. Juliette's researches to gather confirmation
of this remark led her into discussions about unequal marriages; and as
the time of her confinement drew near she became gentler and almost
anxious to discuss her love for Henry Snow, so much gentler and less
reserved that those who had formerly whispered loudest and most falsely
to one another now whispered sympathetically to her.
On the day before Juliette's confinement her husband came in from work
very irritable.
"Here, when's this baby going to be born? I'm getting a bit annoyed. The
men at the office are betting on its being a boy. It makes me look a
fool, you know, that sort of thing."
She clutched his arm. "Which do you want, Henri? Tell me, _mon amour,
mon homme_."
"I don't care which it is, as long as you're quick about it and this
betting stops."
That night she was delivered of a girl, and because it was his she
choked down the wild disappointment and loved Sylvia the best of all her
seven girls.
SYLVIA SCARLETT
=Sylvia Scarlett=
CHAPTER I
The first complete memory of her father that Sylvia possessed was of
following her mother out into the street on a clear moonlight night
after rain and of seeing him seated in a puddle outside the house,
singing an unintelligible song which he conducted with his umbrella. She
remembered her mother's calling to him sharply, and how at last after
numerous shakings and many reproaches he had walked into the house on
all fours, carrying the umbrella in his mouth like a dog. She remembered
that the umbrella was somehow wrong at the end, different from any other
umbrella she had ever seen, so that when it was put into the hall-stand
it looked like a fat old market woman instead of the trim young lady it
should have resembled. She remembered how she had called her mother's
attention to the loss of its feet and how her mother, having apparently
realized for the first time her presence at the scene, had promptly
hustled her up-stairs to bed with so much roughness that she had cried.
When Sylvia was older and had become in a way her mother's confidante,
sitting opposite to her in the window to sew until it was no longer
possible to save oil for the lamp, she ventured to recall this scene.
Her mother had laughed at the remembrance of it and had begun to hum the
song her father had sung:
La donna è mobile
La da-di la-di-da.
"Shall I ever forget him?" Madame Snow had cried. "It was the day your
sister Elène was married, and he had been down to the railway-station
to see them off to Bruxelles."
Sylvia had asked what the words of the song meant, and had been told
that they meant women were always running around.
"Where?" she had pressed.
"Some of them after men and others running away from them," her mother
had replied.
"Shall I do that when I'm big?" Sylvia had continued. "Which shall I
do?"
But it had been time to fetch the lamp and the question had remained
unanswered.
Sylvia was five when her sister Elène was married; soon afterward
Henriette married, too. She remembered that very well, because Marie
went to join Françoise in the other bedroom, and with only Marguerite
and Valentine left, they no longer slept three in a bed. This
association had often been very uncomfortable because Marguerite would
eat biscuits, the crumbs of which used to scratch her legs; and worse
than the crumbs was the invariable quarrel between Marguerite and
Valentine that always ended in their pinching each other across Sylvia,
so that she often got pinched by mistake.
For several years Sylvia suffered from being the youngest of many
sisters, and her mother's favorite. When she went to school, she asked
other girls if it were not nicer to have brothers, but the stories she
heard about the behavior of boys made her glad there were only girls in
her house. She had practical experience of the ways of boys when at the
age of eight she first took part in the annual _féerie_ at the Lille
theater. On her first appearance she played a monster; though all the
masks were very ugly, she, being the smallest performer, always got the
ugliest, and with the progress of the season the one that was most
knocked about. In after years these performances seemed like a nightmare
of hot cardboard-scented breath, of being hustled down the stone stairs
from the dressing-room, of noisy rough boys shouting and scrambling for
the best masks, of her legs being pinched, while she was waiting in the
wings, by invisible boys, and once of somebody's twisting her mask
right round as they made the famous entrance of the monsters, so that,
being able to see nothing, she fell down and made all the audience
laugh. Such were boys!
In contrast with scenes of discomfort and misery like these were the
hours when she sat sewing with her mother in the quiet house. There
would be long silences only broken by the sound of her mother's hand
searching for new thread or needle in the work-basket, of clocks, of
kettle on the hob, or of distant street cries. Then her mother would
suddenly laugh to herself and begin a tale so interesting that Sylvia's
own needlework would lie idly on her knee, until she was reproved for
laziness, and silence again inclosed the room. Sometimes the sunset
would glow through the window-panes upon her mother's work, and Sylvia
would stare entranced at the great silken roses that slowly opened their
petals for those swift fingers. Sometimes it would be a piece of lace
that lay on her mother's lap, lace that in the falling dusk became light
and mysterious as a cloud. Yet even these tranquil hours had storms, as
on the occasion when her mother had been working all day at a lace cap
which had been promised without fail to somebody at the theater who
required it that night. At six o'clock she had risen with a sigh and
given the cap to Sylvia to hold while she put on her things to take it
down to the theater. Sylvia had stood by the fire, dreaming over the
beauty of the lace; and then without any warning the cap had fallen into
the fire and in a moment was ashes. Sylvia wished she could have
followed the cap when she saw her mother's face of despair on realizing
what had happened. It was then that for the first time she learned how
much depended upon her mother's work; for during all that week, whenever
she was sent out on an errand, she was told to buy only the half of
everything, half the usual butter, half the usual sugar, and what was
stranger still to go to shops outside the _quartier_ at which Madame
Snow never dealt. When she inquired the reason of this her mother asked
her if she wanted all the _quartier_ to know that they were poor and
could only afford to buy half the usual amount that week.
Sylvia, when the first shame of her carelessness had died away, rather
enjoyed these excursions to streets more remote, where amusing
adventures were always possible. One Saturday afternoon in April Sylvia
set out with a more than usually keen sense of the discoveries and
adventures that might befall her. The first discovery was a boy on a
step-ladder, polishing a shop window; and the second discovery was that
she could stand on the curbstone and never once fail to spit home upon
the newly polished glass. She did this about a dozen times, watching the
saliva dribble down the pane and speculating with herself which driblet
would make the longest journey. Regretfully she saw that the boy was
preparing to descend and admire his handiwork, because two driblets were
still progressing slowly downward, one of which had been her original
fancy for the prize of endurance. As she turned to flee, she saw on the
pavement at her feet a golden ten-franc piece; she picked it up and
grasping it tightly in her hot little hand ran off, not forgetting, even
in the excitement of her sudden wealth, to turn round at a safe distance
and put out her tongue at the boy to mark her contempt for him, for the
rest of his class, and for all their handiwork, especially that newly
polished window-pane. Then she examined the gold piece and marveled at
it, thinking how it obliterated the memory of that mother-o'-pearl
button which only the other day she had found on the dust-heap and lost
a few hours afterward.
It was a wonderful afternoon, an afternoon of unbridled acquisition,
which began with six very rich cakes and ended with a case of needles
for her mother that used up her last sou. Coming out of the needle-shop,
her arms full of packages, she met a regiment of soldiers marching and
singing. The soldiers expressed her triumphant mood, and Sylvia marched
with them, joining in their songs. She had a few cakes left and, being
grateful to the soldiers, she handed them round among them, which earned
her much applause from passers-by. When the regiment had arrived at the
barracks and her particular friends had all kissed her farewell and
there were no more bystanders to smile their approbation, Sylvia thought
it would be wise to do the shopping for her mother. She had marched
farther than she realized with the soldiers; it was nearly dusk when
she reached the grocer's where she was to buy the small quantity of
sugar that was all that could be afforded this week. She made her
purchase, and put her hand into the pocket of her pinafore for the
money: the pocket was empty. Everything in the grocer's shop seemed to
be tumbling about her in a great and universal catastrophe. She searched
feverishly again; there was a small hole; of course her mother had given
her a ten-franc piece, telling her to be very careful indeed of the
change, which was wanted badly for the rent. She could not explain to
the man what had happened and, leaving the packet on the counter, she
rushed from the shop into the cruel twilight, choked by tearless sobs
and tremors of apprehension. At first she thought of trying to find the
shops where she had made her own purchases that she might recover such
of the money as had not been eaten; but her nervous fears refused to let
her mind work properly, and everything that had happened on this
luckless afternoon seemed to have happened in a dream. It was already
dark; all she could do was to run home, clutching the miserable toys to
her heart and wondering if the needle-case could possibly allay a
little, a very little, of her mother's anger.
Madame Snow began as soon as Sylvia entered the house by demanding what
she had been doing to be so late in coming home. Sylvia stammered and
was silent; stammered again and let fall all her parcels; then she burst
into a flood of tears that voiced a despair more profound than she had
ever known. When her mother at last extracted from Sylvia what had
happened she, too, wept; and the pair of them sat filling the room with
their sobs, until Henry Snow appeared upon the scene and asked if they
had both gone mad.
His wife and daughter sobbed a violent negative. Henry stared at the
floor littered with Sylvia's numerous purchases, but found there no
answer to the riddle. He moved across to Juliette and shook her, urging
her not to become hysterical.
"The last bit of money I had and the rent due on Monday!" she wailed.
"Don't you worry about money," said Henry, importantly. "I've had a bit
of luck at cards," and he offered his wife a note. Moreover, when he
heard the reason for all this commotion of grief, he laughed, said it
might have happened to any one, congratulated Sylvia upon her choice of
goods, declared it was time she began to study English seriously and
vowed that he was the one to be her teacher, yes, by gad, he was, and
that to-morrow morning being Sunday they would make a start. Then he
began to fondle his wife, which embarrassed Sylvia, but nevertheless
because these caresses so plainly delighted her mother, they consoled
her for the disaster. So she withdrew to a darker corner of the room and
played with the doll she had bought, listening to the conversation
between her parents.
"Do you love me, Henri?"
"Of course I love you."
"You know that I would sacrifice the world for you? I've given you
everything. If you love me still, then you must love me for
myself--myself alone, _mon homme_."
"Of course I do."
"But I'm growing old," protested Juliette. "There are others younger
than I. _Ah, Henri, amour de ma vie_, I'm jealous even of the girls. I
want them all out of the house. I hate them now, except ours--ours, _ma
poupée_."
Sylvia regarding her own doll could not help feeling that this was a
most inappropriate name for her father; she wondered why her mother
called him that and decided finally that it must be because he was
shorter than she was. The evening begun so disastrously ended most
cheerfully; when Françoise and Marie arrived back at midnight, they
escaped even the mildest rebuke from their mother.
Sylvia's father kept his promise about teaching her English, and she was
granted the great pleasure of being admitted to his room every evening
when he returned from work. This room until now had always been a
Bluebeard's chamber, not merely for Sylvia, but for every one else in
the house. To be sure Sylvia had sometimes, when supper was growing
cold, peeped in to warn her father of fleeting time, but it had always
been impressed upon her that in no circumstances was she to enter the
room; though she had never seen in these quick glimpses anything more
exciting than her father sitting in his shirt-sleeves and reading in a
tumble-down arm-chair, there had always been the sense of a secret. Now
that she was made free of this apartment she perceived nothing behind
the door but a bookcase fairly full of books, nothing indeed anywhere
that seemed to merit concealment, unless it were some pictures of
undressed ladies looking at themselves in a glass. Once she had an
opportunity of opening one of the books and she was astonished, when her
father came in and caught her, that he said nothing, for she felt sure
that her mother would have been very angry if she had seen her reading
such a book. She had blushed when her father found her; when he had said
nothing and even laughed in a queer unpleasant sort of a way, she had
blushed still more deeply. Yet whenever she had a chance she read these
books afterward and henceforth regarded her father with an affectionate
contempt which was often expressed too frankly to please her mother, who
finally became so much irritated by it that she sent her away to
Bruxelles to stay with Elène, her eldest married sister. Sylvia did not
enjoy this visit very much, because her brother-in-law was always making
remarks about her personal appearance, comparing it most unfavorably
with his wife's. It seemed that Elène had recently won a prize for
beauty at the Exposition, and though Sylvia would have been suitably
proud of this family achievement in ordinary circumstances, this
continual harping upon it to her own disadvantage made her wish that
Elène had been ignobly defeated.
"Strange her face should be so round and yours such a perfect oval,"
Elène's husband would say. "And her lips are so thin and her eyes so
much lighter than yours. She's short, too, for her age. I don't think
she'll ever be as tall as you. But of course every one can't be
beautiful."
"Of course they can't," Sylvia snapped. "If they could, Elène might not
have won the prize so easily."
"She's not a great beauty, but she has a tongue. And she's smart," her
brother-in-law concluded.
Sylvia used to wonder why every one alluded to her tongue. Her mother
had told her just before she was sent to Bruxelles that the priest had
put too much salt on it when she was christened. She resolved to be
silent in future; but this resolve reacted upon her nerves to such an
extent that she wrote home to Lille and begged to be allowed to come
back. There had been diplomacy in the way she had written to her father
in English rather than to her mother in French. Such a step led her
mother to suppose that she repented of criticizing her father; it also
prevented her sister Elène from understanding the letter and perhaps
writing home to suggest keeping her in Bruxelles. Sylvia was overjoyed
at receiving an early reply from her mother bidding her come home, and
sending stamps for her to buy a picture post-card album, which would be
much cheaper in Belgium; she was enjoined to buy one picture post-card
and put it in the album, so that the customs officials should not charge
duty.
Sylvia had heard a great deal of smuggling and was thrilled by the
illegal transaction, which seemed to her the most exciting enterprise of
her life. She said good-by to Bruxelles without regret; clasping her
album close, she waited anxiously for the train to start, thinking to
herself that Elène only kept on putting her head into the carriage
window to make stupid remarks because the compartment was crowded and
she hoped some one would recognize her as the winner of the beauty
competition at the Bruxelles Exposition.
At last the train started, and Sylvia settled down to the prospect of
crossing the frontier with contraband. She looked at all the people in
the carriage, thinking to herself what dangers she would presently
encounter. It was almost impossible not to tell them, as they sat there
in the stuffy compartment scattering crumbs everywhere with their
lunches. Soon a pleasant woman in black engaged Sylvia in conversation
by offering her an orange from a string-bag. It was very difficult to
eat the orange and keep a tight hold of the album; in the end it fell on
the floor, whereupon a fat old gentleman sitting opposite stooped over
and picked it up for her. He had grunted so in making the effort that
Sylvia felt she must reward him with more than thanks; she decided to
divulge her secret and explain to him and the pleasant woman with the
string-bag the history of the album. Sylvia was glad when all her other
fellow-travelers paid attention to the tale, and she could point out
that an album like this cost two francs fifty centimes in Lille, whereas
in Bruxelles she had been able to buy it for two francs. Then, because
everybody smiled so encouragingly, she unwrapped the album and showed
the single picture post-card, discoursing upon the ruse. Everybody
congratulated her, and everybody told one another anecdotes about
smuggling, until finally a tired and anxious-looking woman informed the
company that she was at that very moment smuggling lace to the value of
more than two thousand francs. Everybody warned her to be very careful,
so strict were the customs officials; but the anxious-looking woman
explained that it was wrapped round her and that in any case she must
take the risk, so much depended upon her ability to sell this lace at a
handsome profit in France.
When the frontier was reached Sylvia alighted with the rest of the
travelers to pass through the customs, and with quickening heart she
presented herself at the barrier, her album clutched tightly to her
side. No, she had nothing to declare, and with a sigh of relief at
escape from danger she saw her little valise safely chalked. When she
passed through to take her seat in the train again, she saw a man whom
she recognized as a traveler from her own compartment that had told
several anecdotes about contraband. He was talking earnestly now to one
of the officials at the barrier and pointing out the anxious woman, who
was still waiting to pass through.
"I tell you she had two thousand francs' worth of lace wrapped round
her. She admitted it in the train."
Sylvia felt her legs give way beneath her when she heard this piece of
treachery. She longed to cry out to the woman with the lace that she had
been betrayed, but already she had turned deathly pale at the approach
of the officials. They were beckoning her to follow them to a kind of
cabin, and she was moving toward it hopelessly. It was dreadful to see a
poor woman so treated, and Sylvia looked round to find the man who had
been the cause of it, but he had vanished.
Half an hour afterward the woman of the lace wearily climbed into the
compartment and took her seat with the rest; her eyes were red and she
was still weeping bitterly. The others asked what had happened.
"They found it on me," she moaned. "And now what shall I do? It was all
we had in the world to pay the mortgage on our house. My poor husband is
ill, very ill, and it was the only way to save him. I should have sold
that lace for four thousand francs, and now they have confiscated it and
we shall be fined one thousand francs. We haven't any money. It was
everything--everything. We shall lose our house and our furniture, and
my husband will die. Oh, _mon Dieu! mon Dieu!_"
She rocked backward and forward in her grief; nothing that any one could
say comforted her. Sylvia told how she had been betrayed; everybody
execrated the spy and said how careful one should be to whom one spoke
when traveling; but that did not help the poor woman, who sobbed more
and more despairingly.
At last the train came to its first stop in France, and the man that had
denounced the poor woman suddenly jumped in, as they were starting
again, and took his old seat. The fat gentleman next to Sylvia swelled
with indignation; his veins stood out, and he shouted angrily at the man
what a rascal he was. Everybody in the carriage joined in abusing him;
and the poor woman herself wailed out her sad story and reproached him
for the ruin he had brought upon her. As for Sylvia, she could not
contain herself, but jumped up and with all her might kicked him on the
shins, an action which made the fat gentleman shout: "_Bravo! Vas-y!
Encore, la gosse! Bravo! Bis! Bis!"_
When the noise had subsided the man began to speak.
"I regret infinitely, madame, the inconvenience to which I was
unfortunately compelled to put you, but the fact is that I myself was
carrying diamonds upon me to the value of more than two hundred thousand
francs."
He suddenly took out a wallet from his pocket and emptied the stones
into his hand, where they lay sparkling in the dusty sunshine of the
compartment. Everybody was silent with surprise for a moment; when they
began to abuse him again, he trickled the diamonds back into the wallet
and begged for attention.
"How much have you lost, madame?" he inquired, very politely.
The woman of the lace poured forth her woes for the twentieth time.
"Permit me to offer you these notes to the value of six thousand
francs," he said. "I hope the extra thousand will recompense you for the
temporary inconvenience to which I was unfortunately compelled to put
you. Pray accept my deepest apologies, but at the same time let me
suggest greater discretion in future. Yet we are all human, are we not,
monsieur?" he added, turning to the fat gentleman next to Sylvia. "Will
you be very much surprised when I tell you that I have never traveled
from Amsterdam but I have found some indiscreet fellow-traveler that has
been of permanent service to me at temporary inconvenience to himself.
This time I thought I was going to be unlucky, for this was the last
compartment left; fortunately that young lady set a bad example."
He smiled at Sylvia.
This story, when she told it at home, seemed to make a great impression
upon her father, who maintained that the stranger was a fool ever to
return to the carriage.
"Some people seem to think money's made to throw into the gutter," he
grumbled.
Sylvia was sorry about his point of view, but when she argued with him
he told her to shut up; later on that same evening he had a dispute with
his wife about going out.
"I want to win it back," he protested. "I've had a run of bad luck
lately. I feel to-night it's going to change. Did I tell you I saw the
new moon over my right shoulder, as I came in?"
"So did I," said his wife. "But I don't rush off and gamble away other
people's money for the sake of the moon."
"You saw it, too, did you?" said Henry, eagerly. "Well, there you are!"
The funny thing was that Henry was right; he did have a run of good
luck, and the house became more cheerful again. Sylvia went on with her
English studies; but nowadays even during lessons her father never
stopped playing cards. She asked him once if he were telling his
fortune, and he replied that he was trying to make it. "See if you can
pick out the queen," he would say. And Sylvia never could, which made
her father chuckle to himself with pleasure. About this time, too, he
developed a habit of playing with a ten-centime piece. Whenever he or
any one else was talking, he used to fidget with this coin; in the
middle of something important or interesting it used to jingle down on
the floor, and everybody had to go on hands and knees to search for it.
This habit became so much the intrinsic Henry Snow that Sylvia could
never think of him without that ten-centime piece sliding over his long
mobile hands, in and out of his prehensile fingers: and though with the
progress of time he ceased to drop the coin very often, the restless
motion always irritated her. When Sylvia was eleven her uncle Edouard
came to Lille with his caravan and brought the news of the death of her
grandfather. She was not much impressed by this, but the caravan and the
booth delighted her; and when her uncle asked if he might not take her
away with him on a long tour through the south of France, she begged to
be allowed to go. Her mother had so often held her spellbound by tales
of her own wandering life that, when she seemed inclined to withhold her
permission, Sylvia blamed her as the real origin of this longing to
taste the joys of vagrancy, pleading so earnestly that at last her
mother gave way and let her go.
Uncle Edouard and Aunt Elise, who sat in the box outside the booth and
took the money, were both very kind to Sylvia, and since they had no
children of their own, she was much spoilt. Indeed, there was not a dull
moment throughout the tour; for even when she went to bed, which was
always delightfully late, bed was really a pleasure in a caravan.
In old Albert Bassompierre's days the players had confined themselves to
the legitimate drama; Edouard had found it more profitable to tour a
variety show interspersed with one-act farces and melodrama. Sylvia's
favorites in the company were Madame Perron, the wife of the _chanteur
grivois_, and Blanche, a tall, fair, noisy girl who called herself a
_diseuse_, but who usually sang indecent ballads in a powerful
contralto. Madame Perron was Sylvia's first attraction, because she had
a large collection of dolls with which she really enjoyed playing. She
was a _femme très-propre_, and never went farther with any of her
admirers in the audience than to exact from him the gift of a doll.
"_Voilà ses amours manqués_," her husband used to say with a laugh.
In the end Sylvia found her rather dull, and preferred to go tearing
about the country with Blanche, who, though she had been a scullery-maid
in a Boulogne hotel only a year ago, had managed during her short career
on the stage to collect more lovers than Madame Perron had collected
dolls. She had a passion for driving. Sylvia could always be sure that
on the morning after their opening performance in any town a wagonette
or dog-cart would be waiting to take them to some neighboring village,
where a jolly party would make a tremendous noise, scandalize the
inhabitants, and depart, leaving a legacy of unpopularity in the
district for whichever of Blanche's lovers had paid for the
entertainment with his purse and his reputation. Once they arrived at a
village where a charity bazaar was being held under the direction of the
_curé_. Blanche was presented to him as a distinguished actress from
Paris who was seeking peace and recreation in the depths of the country.
The _curé_ asked if it would be presuming too far on her good nature to
give them a taste of her art in the cause of holy charity, a speech
perhaps from Corneill or Racine. Blanche assented immediately and
recited a piece stuffed so full of spicy argot that the rustic gentility
understood very little of it, though enough to make them blush--all
except the priest, that is, who was very deaf and asked Blanche, when
she had finished, if it were not a speech from Phèdre she had declaimed,
thanking her very earnestly for the pleasure she had given his simple
parish folk, a pleasure, alas, which he regretted he had not been able
to enjoy as much as he should have enjoyed it before he became deaf.
On another occasion they drove to see the ruins of an ancient castle in
Brittany, and afterward went down into the village to drink wine in the
garden of the inn, where an English family was sitting at afternoon tea.
Sylvia stared curiously at the two little girls who obeyed their
governess so promptly and ate their cakes so mincingly. They were the
first English girls she had ever seen, and she would very much have
liked to tell them that her father was English, for they seemed to want
cheering up, so solemn were their light-blue eyes and so high their
boots. Sylvia whispered to Blanche that they were English, who replied
that so much was very obvious, and urged Sylvia to address them in their
native tongue; it would give them much pleasure, she thought. Sylvia,
however, was too shy, so Blanche in her loudest voice suddenly shouted:
"Oh yes! T'ank you! I love you! All right! You sleep with me?
Goddambleudi!"
The English family looked very much shocked, but the governess came to
their rescue by asking in a thin throaty voice for the "attition," and
presently they all walked out of the garden. Blanche judged the English
to be a dull race, and, mounting on a table, began a rowdy dance. It
happened that, just when the table cracked, the English governess came
back for an umbrella she had left behind, and that Blanche, leaping
wildly to save herself from falling, leaped on the governess and brought
her to the ground in a general ruin of chairs and tables. Blanche picked
up the victim and said that it was all very _rigolo_, which left miss as
wise as she was before, her French not extending beyond the tea-table
and the chaster portions of a bedroom. Blanche told Sylvia to explain to
miss that she had displayed nothing more in her fall than had given much
pleasure to all the world. Sylvia, who really felt the poor governess
required such practical consolation, translated accordingly, whereat
miss became very red and, snatching her umbrella, walked away muttering,
"Impertinent little gipsy." When Blanche was told the substance of her
last remark, she exclaimed, indignantly:
_"Elles sont des vrais types, vous savez, ces gonzesses. Mince, alors!
Pourquoi s'emballer comme ça? Elle portait un pantalon fermé! Quelle
race infecte, ces Anglais! Moi, je ne peux pas les suffrir."_
Sylvia, listening to Blanche's tirade, wondered if all the English were
like that. She thought of her father's books, and decided that life in
France must have changed him somehow. Then she called to mind with a
shiver the solemn light-blue eyes of the little girls. England must be a
cold sort of a place where nobody ever laughed; perhaps that was why
her father had come away. Sylvia decided to remain in France, always in
a caravan if possible, where no English miss could poke about with bony
fingers in one's bread and butter.
Sylvia acquired a good deal of worldly wisdom from being so continuously
in the society of Blanche, and for a child of eleven she was growing up
somewhat rapidly. Yet it would have been hard to say that the influence
of her noisy friend was hurtful, for it never roused in Sylvia a single
morbid thought. Life in those days presented itself to her mostly as an
amusing game, a game that sometimes caused tears, but tears that were
easily dried, because, after all, it was only a game. Such was the
situation created on one occasion by the unexpected arrival of Blanche's
_fiancé_ from his regiment, the 717th of the line.
The company was playing at St.-Nazaire at the time, and Louis Moreau
telegraphed from Nantes that he had been granted a _congé_ of
forty-eight hours.
"_Mince, alors!_" cried Blanche to Sylvia. "And, you know, I don't want
to give him up, because he has thirty thousand francs and he loves me _à
la folie_. We are only waiting till he has finished his military service
to get married. But I don't want him here. First of all, I have a very
_chic_ lover, who has a _poignon fou_ and doesn't care how much he
spends, and then the lover of my heart is here."
Sylvia protested that she had heard the last claim too often.
"No, but this is something much greater than a _béguin_. It is real
love. _Il est très trr-ès-beau garçon, tu sais._ And, _chose
très-drôle_, he also is doing his military service here. _Tout ça ne se
dessine pas du tout bien, tu sais, mais pas du tout, tu comprends! Moi,
je ne suis pas veineuse. Ah, non, alors, c'est le comble!_"
Blanche had been sufficiently agile to extract the usual wagonette and
pair of horses from the chic lover to whom she had introduced her real
lover, a tall cuirassier with fierce mustaches, as her brother; but the
imminent arrival of Louis was going to spoil all this, because Louis
knew well that she did not possess a relative in the world, in fact, as
Blanche emphasized, her solitary position had been one of her charms.
"You'll have to get rid of Monsieur Beaujour." This was the rich lover.
"And lose my horses? _Ah, non, alors!_"
"Well, then you'll have to tell Marcel he mustn't come near you until
Louis has gone."
"And see him go off with that Jeanne at the Clair de la Lune Concert!"
"Couldn't Louis pay for the horses?" suggested Sylvia.
"I'm not going to let him waste his money like that; besides, he'll only
be here two nights. _C'est assommant, tu sais_," Blanche sighed.
In the middle of the discussion Louis arrived, a very short little
_sous-officier_ with kind watery eyes and a mustache that could only be
seen properly out of doors. Louis had not had more than five minutes
with his _fiancée_ before M. Beaujour drove up with the wagonette and
pair. He was the son of a rich shipping agent in St.-Nazaire, with a
stiff manner that he mistook for evidence of aristocratic descent, and
bad teeth that prevented him from smiling more than he could help.
"I shall tell him you're my brother," said Blanche, quickly. Louis began
to protest.
"_Pas de boniment_," Blanche went on. "I must be pleasant to strangers
in front. Madame Bassompierre insists on that, and you know I've never
given you any cause to be really jealous."
M. Beaujour looked very much surprised when Blanche presented Louis to
him as her brother; Sylvia, remembering the tall cuirassier with the
fierce mustaches that had also been introduced as Blanche's brother,
appreciated his sensations. However, he accepted the relationship and
invited Louis to accompany them on the drive, putting him with Sylvia
and seating himself next Blanche on the box; Louis, who found Sylvia
sympathetic, talked all the time about the wonderful qualities of
Blanche, continually turning round to adore her shapely back.
M. Beaujour invited Louis to a supper he was giving that evening in
honor of Blanche, and supposed, perhaps a little maliciously, that
Monsieur would be glad to meet his brother again, who was also to be of
the party. Louis looked at Blanche in perplexity; she frowned at him and
said nothing.
That supper, to which M. and Mme. Perron with several other members of
the company were invited, was a very restless meal. First, Blanche would
go out with the host while Marcel and Louis glared alternately at each
other and the door; then she would withdraw with Louis, while M.
Beaujour and Marcel glared and fidgeted; finally she would disappear
with Marcel, once for such a long time that Sylvia grew nervous and went
outside to find her. Blanche was in tears; Marcel was stalking up and
down the passage, twisting his fierce mustaches and muttering his
annoyance. Sylvia was involved in a bitter discussion about the various
degrees of Blanche's love, and in the end Blanche cried that her whole
life had been shattered, and rushed back to the supper-room. Sylvia took
this opportunity of representing Blanche's point of view to Marcel, and
so successful was she with her tale of the emotional stress caused by
the conflict of love with prudence that finally Marcel burst into tears,
called down benedictions upon Sylvia's youthful head, and rejoined the
supper-party, where he drank a great quantity of red wine and squeezed
Blanche's hand under the table for the rest of the evening.
Sylvia, having been successful once, now invited Louis to accompany her
outside. To him she explained that Marcel loved Blanche madly, that she,
the owner, as Louis knew, of a melting heart, had been much upset by her
inability to return his love, and that Louis must not be jealous,
because Blanche loved only him. Louis's eyes became more watery than
ever, and he took his seat at table again, a happy man until he drank
too much wine and had to retire permanently from the feast. Finally
Sylvia tackled M. Beaujour, and, recognizing that he was probably tired
of lies, told him the truth of the situation, leaving it to him as an
_homme supérieur_ to realize that he could only be an episode in
Blanche's life and begging him not to force his position that night. M.
Beaujour could not help being flattered by this child's perception of
his superiority, and for the rest of the entertainment played the host
in a manner that was, as Madame Perron said, _très très-correcte_.
However, amusing evenings like this came to an end for Sylvia when once
more the caravan returned to Lille. Her uncle and aunt had so much
enjoyed her company that they proposed to Madame Snow to adopt Sylvia as
their own daughter. Sylvia, much as she loved her mother, would have
been very glad to leave the house at Lille, for it seemed, when she saw
it again, poverty-stricken and pinched. There was only Valentine now
left of her sisters, and her mother looked very care-worn. Her father,
however, declined most positively to listen to the Bassompierres'
proposal, and was indeed almost insulting about it. Madame Snow wearily
bade Sylvia say no more, and the caravan went on its way again. Sylvia
wondered whether life in Lille had always been as dull in reality as
this, or if it were dull merely in contrast with the gay life of
vagrancy. Everybody in Lille seemed to be quarreling. Her mother was
always reproaching Valentine for being late, and her father for losing
money, and herself for idleness in the house. She tried to make friends
with her sister, but Valentine was suspicious of her former intimacy
with their mother, and repelled her advances. The months dragged on,
months of eternal sewing, eternal saving, eternal nagging, eternal
sameness. Then one evening, when her mother was standing in the kitchen,
giving a last glance at everything before she went down to the theater,
she suddenly threw up her arms, cried in a choking voice, "Henri!" and
collapsed upon the floor. There was nobody in the house except Sylvia,
who, though she felt very much frightened, tried for a long time,
without success, to restore her mother to consciousness. At last her
father came in and bent over his wife.
"Good God, she's dead!" he exclaimed, and Sylvia broke into a sweat of
horror to think that she had been alone in the twilight with something
dead. Her father struggled to lift the body on the sofa, calling to
Sylvia to come and help him. She began to whimper, and he swore at her
for cowardice. A clock struck and Sylvia shrieked. Her father began to
drag the body toward the sofa; playing-cards fell from his sleeves on
the dead woman's face.
"Didn't she say anything before she died?" he asked. Sylvia shook her
head.
"She was only forty-six, you know," he said; in and out of his fingers,
round and round his hand, slipped the ten-centime piece.
For some time after his wife's death Henry Snow was inconsolable, and
his loudly expressed grief had the effect of making Sylvia seem hard,
for she grew impatient with him, especially when every week he used to
sell some cherished piece of furniture. She never attempted to explain
her sentiments when he accused her of caring more for furniture than for
her dead mother; she felt it would be useless to explain them to him,
and suffered in silence. What Sylvia found most inexplicable was the way
in which her father throve on sorrow and every day seemed to grow
younger. This fact struck her so sharply that one day she penetrated the
hostility that had been gathering daily between her and Valentine and
asked her sister if she had observed this queer change. Valentine got
very angry; demanded what Sylvia meant; flung out some cruel sneers; and
involved her in a scene with her father, who charged her with malice and
underhanded behavior. Sylvia was completely puzzled by the effect of her
harmless observation, and supposed that Valentine, who had always been
jealous of her, had seized the opportunity to make further mischief. She
could never understand why Valentine was jealous of her, because
Valentine was really beautiful, and very much like her mother, enviable
from any point of view, and even now obviously dearer to her stepfather
than his own daughter. She would have liked to know where the caravan
was now; she was sure that her father would no longer wish to forbid her
adoption by Uncle Edouard and Aunt Elise.
The house grew emptier and emptier of furniture; Sylvia found it so hard
to obtain any money from her father for current expenses that she was
often hungry. She did not like to write to any of her older sisters,
because she was afraid that Valentine would make it appear that she was
in the wrong and trying to stir up trouble. Summer passed into autumn,
and with the lengthening darkness the house became unbearably still;
neither her father nor her sister was ever at home; even the clocks had
now all disappeared. Sylvia could not bear to remain indoors; for in her
nervous, hungry state old childish terrors were revived, and the great
empty loft at the top of the house was once again inhabited by that
one-legged man with whose clutches her mother used to frighten her when
naughty long ago. There recurred, too, a story told by her mother on
just such a gusty evening as these, of how, when she first came to
Lille, she had found an armed burglar under her bed, and of how the man
had been caught and imprisoned. Even her mother, who was not a nervous
woman, had been frightened by his threats of revenge when he should be
free again, and once when she and her mother were sewing together close
to the dusky window her mother had fancied she had seen him pass the
house, a large pale man in a dark suit. Supposing he should come back
now for his revenge? And above all these other terrors was the dread of
her mother's ghost.
Sylvia took to going out alone every evening, whether it rained or blew,
to seek in the streets relief from the silence of the desolate house.
Loneliness came to seem to her the worst suffering imaginable, and the
fear of it which was bred during these months haunted her for years to
come.
In November, about half past eight of a windy night, Sylvia came back
from one of her solitary walks and found her father sitting with a
bottle of brandy in the kitchen. His face was haggard; his collar was
loose; from time to time he mopped his forehead with a big blue
handkerchief and stared at himself in a small cracked shaving-glass that
he must have brought down from his bedroom. She asked if he were ill,
and he told her not to worry him, but to go out and borrow a railway
time-table.
When Sylvia returned she heard Valentine's angry voice in the kitchen,
and waited in the passage to know the cause of the dispute.
"No, I won't come with you," Valentine was saying. "You must be mad! If
you're in danger of going to prison, so much the worse for you. I've got
plenty of people who'll look after me."
"But I'm your stepfather."
Valentine's laugh made Sylvia turn pale.
"Stepfather! Fine stepfather! Why, I hate you! Do you hear? I hate you!
My man is waiting for me now, and he'll laugh when he hears that a
convict wants his step-daughter to go away with him. My mother may have
loved you, but I'd like her to see you now. _L'amour de sa vie. Son
homme! Sa poupée, sa poupée! Ah, mais non alors! Sa poupée!"_
Sylvia could not bear any longer this mockery of her mother's love, and,
bursting into the kitchen, she began to abuse Valentine with all the
vulgar words she had learned from Blanche.
Valentine caught her sister by the shoulders and shook her violently:
_"Tu seras bien avec ton père, sale gosse!"_
Then she smacked her cheek several times and left the house.
Sylvia flung her arms round her father.
"Take me with you," she cried. "You hate her, don't you? Take me,
father."
Henry rose and, in rising, upset the bottle of brandy.
"Thank God," he said, fervently. "My own daughter still loves me."
Sylvia perceived nothing ludicrous in the tone of her father's speech,
and happy tears rose to her eyes.
"See! here is the time-table. Must we go to-night? Sha'n't we go
to-night?"
She helped her father to pack; at midnight they were in the train going
north.