At the close of the war the Ganos were ruined. The rambling, verandaed
house was sold for a song to the Gano-Lees, and the question was, where
could John with his delicate health, his interrupted and insufficient
schooling, make a livelihood? Where could Mrs. Gano live most
inexpensively, and with least annoyance to sensibilities so outraged by
the issue of the war? Certainly not in Virginia--not anywhere in the
despoiled, prostrate South. Certainly not in the hated North. But the
West--
Far off in the wilds of one of the Middle States, Mrs. Gano's father,
William Calvert, had once held property, and in her early youth she had
been taken from Baltimore in a stage-coach over the Alleghany Mountains
to visit him during one of his long absences from home on business in
connection with these Western lands. He had bought a queer, grim house
in a little town on a river among the Mioto Hills, and made himself
there a temporary home or headquarters for these yearly Western
pilgrimages. The State where he had his interests was the first one
carved out of the great Northwestern Territory, and though later on a
much farther West robbed this mid-America of its early century
associations of adventure and of danger, it was far remoter from the
Atlantic seaboard then than the Pacific is to-day.
The house that Mrs. Gano inherited from her father had been built in
times of Indian warfare for a fortress and ammunition centre. With the
retreat of the Indians to the Western Reservation, the settlement's need
of a fort was less than the need of a school. The solid and spacious
rectangular building of stone on the height above the river was turned
into an academy for boys. A rival school sapped its prosperity in time;
it declined into bankruptcy, and came upon the market. William Calvert
bought it, made it into a dwelling-house, ultimately adding a wooden L,
and establishing his partner's family there. This house in the small but
growing town of New Plymouth was all that was left to his eldest
daughter when his shrunken estate was divided at his death. Through
former acquaintances of William Calvert, the position of teller in the
principal bank of the town was obtained for John Gano; and hither at the
close of the war came Mrs. Gano with her son of twenty and her daughter,
Valeria, nineteen.
New Plymouth was not looked upon by its inhabitants as at all beyond the
pale of a most advanced civilization. Founded by stout New-Englanders,
it was one of the oldest settlements in this part of the world. It had
its churches, its court-house, its excellent academy for boys and its
unparalleled seminary for young ladies, when the present capital of the
State was a wild unpeopled plain, crossed by winding cow-paths.
Mrs. Gano soon discovered that her own view of her exile among a ruder
people, and to a narrower and more primitive life, was not likely to be
shared by her neighbors, proud of their New England origin, and secure
in their honest self-esteem. This difference of view was a matter quite
unimportant to the new-comer, except that it made it easier to carry out
her plan of refraining from any share in the active life of the bustling
little community.
"I am an invalid," she gave out; "I neither pay nor receive visits."
She did not even go often to church. The Rev. Mr. Collins was "a person
of no education," she decided, "and spoke with a vile Western accent."
But she rented a pew, and with rigid regularity sent the children to sit
in it. Her children! As she called them, so she treated them--John, six
feet two, doing a man's work in the world, with a man's spirit, and the
tall, grave Valeria.
The girl was an enigmatic creature, silent, self-absorbed, shrinking
from the give-and-take of social life. It was not the cross to her that
it was to her more genial brother that their mother's craving for
solitude, and not too Christian contempt for her well-meaning neighbors,
precluded asking people to the house. But the young man, after the young
man's fashion, escaped to some extent the tyranny of home conditions. He
had come forth from his juvenile predilection for pious observances. He
had developed a passion for natural science, and yet was content to work
hard all day in the bank, and to spend his free evenings in a rapidly
acquired circle of new friends. In summer there were moonlight drives
and walks; there was boating on the Mioto, and singing songs and
discreet love-making on the "stoops" of the houses of the prettiest
girls. In the mild weather, too, sometimes combining a picnic with the
pursuit of knowledge, he would make up a party to go to Black Hand or
Cedar Rock, where the hills were rich in fossils, and sometimes he would
go farther afield to find specimens in the coal seams of the region. In
winter there were church sociables, "taffy-pulls," sleigh-rides, and
skating-parties. He was, in short, living an active and healthy life
under conditions not intrinsically inspiring, perhaps, except to the
inner vision of ardent youth.
His mother offered no objection to his amusing himself in New Plymouth's
somewhat crude society, but took quick alarm at a piece of chance gossip
repeated by the privileged factotum, Aunt Jerusha.
"Massa John done got a reel truly-truly sweetheart _dis_ time. He'll be
marryin' her berry soon, by all 'counts."
It came out that the lady in question was Miss Hattie Fox. Who _was_
Miss Hattie Fox? Valeria had seen her at church. She was very pretty,
and her father was senior warden at St. Thomas's on Sundays, and
attorney-at-law at 114 Main Street on week-days. To Mrs. Gano's evident
annoyance, nothing obviously objectionable could be urged against the
girl. The next Sunday, Mrs. Gano went to church. Coming out, the
impulsive John went forward, and had a precious whispered word with the
lady in question. As the young people reached the bottom of the church
steps, his mother touched him on the shoulder.
"Introduce Miss Fox to me," she said.
John performed the ceremony with the air of one who lights a
powder-train, and against all canons of prudence stands waiting to see
the explosion. But, behold! his mother was most gracious.
"Your family have been very hospitable to my son," she said. "I am an
invalid, and do not entertain, but if you will come to supper some
evening, my daughter and I will be glad to see you. Could you come
to-night?"
"Oh yes; _do_ come," urged the smiling and unwary John.
She came. She was certainly a beautiful and amiable creature, but
nevertheless John found himself fighting valiantly against the sudden
temptation to judge her by a brand-new standard. His mother's soft
Southern voice made Hattie's Western burr sound curiously common, and
the manners he had thought delightfully vivacious seemed boisterous on a
sudden. As he listened through his mother's ears, it dawned upon him for
the first time that the girl laughed too loudly and too constantly. He
set his acute discomfort down to his humiliating lack of discernment in
the past, and too easy conquest by mere good looks. He did not realize
that Hattie's gaucheries were intensified by her nervous awe of Mrs.
Gano. She had never known any one in the least like her hostess, and so
far from failing in respect, she was so deeply impressed that in her
wonder and veneration she was driven to adopt the juvenile device for
the working off of oppressive emotion--pretending to be extravagantly at
her ease.
One or two things in that evening of disillusionment stood out with
painful distinctness in John Gano's memory for years. Naturally, Hattie
answered "Yes" and "No" to John's mother, not as Southern youths said to
their elders: "Yes, ma'am," and "No, ma'am," or "Sir." But she also sat
down to the piano without being invited, and sang a song which it was
plain Mrs. Gano thought unrefined. Even John realized now that it
wasn't quite the song he had imagined.
At supper, when Mrs. Gano's covert but unsparing inspection of the girl
announced to her children, plain as words, that their visitor was
overloaded with jewelry, John thought to mitigate the enormity of the
huge frying-pan locket Hattie wore on her innocent breast by observing:
"Haven't I heard your sister say you have a daguerrotype of your father
in the locket you're wearing?"
"Right you are!" she said. "I never go without it." Then to Mrs. Gano:
"_My!_ I'm awful fawnd of my paw. P'raps you'd like to see him."
Miss Fox obligingly unfastened the frying-pan, and shied it, quoit-like,
down the table to her hostess.
There was a pause, a hideous silence.
"Pass me the crackers, Venus," Mrs. Gano said, presently, to Aunt
Jerusha's daughter. As she took the plate she, without touching it,
indicated the big bold locket. "Take that to Miss Fox," she said.
And while the maid was conveying the visitor's property back to her in
the middle of a large tray, Mrs. Gano had turned to Valeria and was
speaking of the morning's sermon.
Poor Miss Hattie put the finishing touch to her visit by departing
without taking leave of her hostess.
"Won't you come to the parlor a moment and say good-bye to my mother?"
said John, when Valeria brought their guest down-stairs into the hall,
hatted and gloved, and ready to go home.
"Gracious Peter! say good-bye?" The guest drew back in genuine alarm.
"You may just bet I won't say 'beans' before her from now till Gabriel
blows his trumpet in the morning. Did you hear the last thing she said
to me? _My!_"
"No; I was playing 'Dixie Land.'"
"Yes; and all through it she kept looking at the clock, and when you got
to the loud part she leaned over and asked me whether I expected my
father or a servant to come for me? My _gracious_!"
"Oh, but I--I--" stammered John.
"You--_you_? Not a bit of it. She said Jerusha should see me to my door.
The old hag's out at the gate now waiting for me. Oh _my_!"
And Miss Fox fled the premises.
No word ever passed between mother and son about the young lady. It was
wholly unnecessary to discuss her. John had been made to see, in a
ruthless light, the unseemliness of asking this raw little Westerner to
be his mother's successor in the house of Gano, even in these degenerate
days.
John's disappointment had no tragic issue, yet, in spite of the
consolation of other friends, in spite of the joys of experimental
science in the freedom of the woodshed, he was grievously unhappy for a
time, especially on Saturday evenings, which he had been used to spend
at the Foxes'. Partly in order to have an excuse for breaking through
that custom, and partly for a belated doctrinal reason, he occupied his
Saturday evenings in taking Hebrew lessons from the Principal of the
Boys' Academy. Young Gano had the inquirer's temper, and if he had not
had his bread to win, he would probably have been a traveller along many
of the roads of learning.
And Valeria--she had not been as successful as her brother in shaking
off the paralyzing fears and lulling hopes of the old religious view.
But a new passion had found its way into her secluded life, altering,
shaping, imperiously governing it. It was no sudden love for the hero of
a girlish dream, no dedication of dawning woman-life to the worship of
some man, made saint or savior by imagination's magic, no fairy prince's
coming, no Romeo calling under her balcony in the night, that wakened
this grave-eyed dreamer of dreams to a thrilling sense of life and
service. It was that most blessed or accursed summons to rise and join
the ranks of those who follow Art. Here in the Western wilds, among
conditions grotesquely unpropitious, barren beyond the telling, sordid,
if you like, this keen young vision, searching the horizon of a pent-up
life, had seen the signal from afar, shining and beckoning her on.
Valeria at nineteen was lamely, impotently following that
Will-o'-the-wisp which, under fairest conditions, may "lead to bewilder
and dazzle to blind," and of which you shall say in vain, "He lights you
to the swamps of death." The happy followers know the swamps of death
are waiting all, but many there be who travel thither without the
kind-deceiving light.
Valeria, in common with some other members of her family, had written
little verses, chiefly religious; but that was nothing. It had been said
long ago in Maryland that the Ganos were born with a pen in their hands.
Like the others, she had given some of her time to music, when her
mother was out of ear-shot. She had a smattering of French, a modicum of
German, and a few lessons in painting. In the home in New Plymouth there
were specimens here and there about the house of work done before she
left Maryland: a Melanchthon with a coppery face and a glimpse of
hair-shirt, two copies of the portrait of Raphael done by himself, a
"Beatrice Cenci," and a "Holy Family." But from the days of inarticulate
childhood, with no more than a handful of her native soil and a
watering-pot, or a precious lump of putty from the plantation carpenter,
she had tasted the tyrannous joy of the creator, fashioning beasts and
men.
And now, grown up, exiled to the West, living in poverty, and isolated
from all art save that in books, she said to herself that she had been
sent into the world to model beautiful forms, and express her restless
spirit in enduring marble.
In vain she prayed to be allowed to go away and study--not to Paris, not
to Rome: only to New York. She had a small legacy left her by an aunt.
The interest was so little, why not spend the capital in studying
sculpture? Her mother, amazed at the proposal, left Valeria no moment in
doubt of her determination to crush it.
Valeria's Aunt Paget was with them on a visit when the matter was under
discussion. Mrs. Paget was seldom admitted to family counsels, and felt
herself something of a stranger in her sister's house. She was the
worldly, the frivolous member of her family, who "dressed in the mode"
and "cultivated society." She was surprised when on this occasion the
topic proved too much of the "burning" order to be smuggled out of
sight.
"Study sculpture! Such a thing is unheard of!" ejaculated Mrs. Paget,
making wide blue eyes at her elder sister and her niece.
"So I tell Valeria," said Mrs. Gano. "She couldn't go to New York alone,
she couldn't live there without a chaperon."
"And even if she could afford it, you need her here. You are always ill
nowadays."
"It isn't that," said Mrs. Gano. "I'm thinking of Valeria herself."
"Of course; so am I. She ought to marry."
"I shall never marry!"
Aunt Paget smiled.
"Well, at all events, it won't help you to be chiselling marble."
"Help me to what?"
"To a suitable marriage, of course."
Valeria's dark eyes flashed, but before she could speak her mother said:
"I am not one of those women who are anxious for their children to
marry. I shall be more than content if Valeria remains single."
"Well, Sarah, forgive me, but I think it's a mistake. I said so before
we left Maryland, when she refused young Middleton. Every one of us was
married before we were Valeria's age, and none of us ever _dreamed_ of
wanting to go away from our home and study sculpture, or do _anything_
in the least unladylike."
Valeria gathered up her sewing as if to leave the room.
"You must admit," Aunt Paget went on, "there's something unfeminine
about sculpture. I'm not sure it isn't even a little irreligious."
"You don't know anything about it, Maria. You never had the least taste
yourself for anything but dress and going out."
"Well, you see, that's what makes it so surprising," said the younger
sister, in an apologetic tone. "You have always thought me so frivolous,
and yet I wouldn't _think_--no, not in my wildest moments--of being a
sculptor."
As Valeria left the room, Mrs. Gano looked with pride after the tall,
willowy figure.
"You must remember," she said, speaking unusually gently, "the Ganos are
more artistic than we Calverts. Valeria has great talents."
But having talent altered little. Valeria beat her wings against the
walls of the old Indian fortress all in vain. But she studied books, she
got clay for modelling, and tools, and in secret wrought rude images
that mocked her dreams. By-and-by she flung the tools aside, and the
plastic clay that she had meant to fashion into forms of beauty hardened
uncouthly into an unmeaning mass. An interim of aimlessness and despair
of life was followed by a gradual healing of the spirit and restored
activity of mind, through nothing more nor less than the power of
poetry. Saturated with Keats and Shelley, she took up again her old
childish habit of verse-making, but very seriously now, thinking of
herself as a poet. Some hint of the way she passed her time, some
whisper, through servants or others, of the reams of paper she engrossed
with verse, got abroad in the town. She was asked to contribute to the
_Mioto Gazette_, and was stopped on her way from church, by people she
scarcely knew, to hear that her fellow-townsmen were full of curiosity
and pride at having a poet among them. She was embarrassed, but not
altogether displeased. Not so Mrs. Gano, whose favorite remark about the
good people of New Plymouth was that they didn't know a B from a bull's
foot. _Of course_ they were impressed that any one in this benighted
place should write verse!
"Just tell them the next time they bother you that the Ganos do it by
the yard."
It was very difficult to impress this mother of hers, who took so much
for granted.
"I think," said Valeria, with dignity, laying down a volume of _Aurora
Leigh_--"I think I shall seriously devote myself to literature."
"Ah! then in that case be careful you don't adopt New Plymouth
standards."
"I am not likely to."
"I don't know. Nothing is more difficult than to avoid measuring
yourself by the people you live among. John is an ignoramus compared to
his father, but he tells me he is considered _here_ a highly educated
person."
"I think, mother," the girl said, gravely, "that you'll protect me from
having too good an opinion of my work."
But the conversation had set her thoughts in a new groove. There was
truth in this. She must guard against an ignorant satisfaction in her
poems. She must have better standards of style; she must know what the
masters taught and practised. She must learn to be more critical than
even her critical mother. "The great teachers of the world shall be my
teachers," she said to herself, and there sprang up within her a new and
fiery curiosity about the classics.
She asked her mother to let the Roman Catholic priest teach her Latin,
and the request was granted with but slight demur, as an alternative to
the pursuit of art away from home. Quietly and doggedly Valeria went on
with her studies, teaching herself Greek, and lying long mornings on the
floor in the Blue Room, getting by heart the wit and wisdom of men to
whom the existence of a creature like Valeria Gano, in such a world as
America, would have been harder to grasp than she, unaided, had found
the niceties of the historical tense, or tolerance for her masters'
morals.
While the girl up-stairs was patiently learning letters of the pagans,
in the room below the mother conned Church History and Biblical
Criticism, searching the Creeds and her own unquiet heart for
justification and for peace. And all the while about these two absorbed,
self-centred women surged the turbulent life of the little town. Gossip
was busy with Mrs. Gano from the first, albeit her face was unknown to
most of her towns-people--to nearly all who had not seen her in her rare
pilgrimages to St. Thomas's. They speculated, too, about the young girl
who dressed so severely, and whom one couldn't fancy at a party or a
picnic--who, though an irreproachable Episcopalian, learned Latin of
Father O'Brien, wrote verses about heathen gods and goddesses, if report
spoke true, and yet sat in church on Sunday with the rapt look of a
medieval saint.
It was universally agreed by the neighbors that John Gano was the flower
of the flock. He, at least, was an addition to New Plymouth society,
being a very rising as well as agreeable person.
There was more than one sore young heart in the town when, in the
following year, John Gano came back from a visit to his childhood's home
in the South, engaged to marry his cousin Virginia Gano-Lee, just
sixteen at the time. His mother, who had never ceased to fear that,
despite her vigilance, he might be beguiled into marrying some one of
these "ill-mannered Western girls," hailed the idea of further alliance
with the Gano-Lees. However, much too big as her house was for her own
use, she did not welcome John's natural proposal to bring his wife there
to live.
"No; wait till you can make a home of your own," his mother had said.
So it behoved the young man to better his worldly position as speedily
as possible. An opening in a bank in New York, with a little larger
salary, and prospect of a partnership, took him away from New Plymouth
the following year, and left his mother and sister alone in the old
house.