THE PAST
It was the morning of Gabriella's thirty-eighth birthday, and she was
standing, with her hat on, before the window of her sitting-room, gazing
with dreaming eyes at the young leaves on the elm tree. The day's work
was ahead of her, but for a little while, standing there by the open
window, she gave herself, with a sense of pleasure, of abandonment, to
the rare luxury of regret. Out of her whole year it was the one day
when, for a few hours, she permitted herself to think sadly of the past
and the future, when she cherished in her heart something of the gentle
melancholy of her mother's retrospective philosophy.
In the street, beyond the narrow yard, where the grass lay like a veil,
there was a curious deadening of sounds, as if the traffic had become
suddenly muffled in the languorous softness of spring. Out of this
imaginary stillness floated the sharp twittering of sparrows and the
bright laugh of a child at play in one of the neighbouring yards. Above
the grim outlines of the city the sky shone divinely clear and blue,
flecked by a single cloud, soft as an eagle's feather, which drifted in
a mist of light above the horizon. The city, beneath that azure sky,
borrowed the transparent brightness of an object that is imprisoned in
crystal. White magic had transformed it for an hour, and the street,
the houses, the shining elm tree, and the distant frowning brows of the
skyscrapers, all seemed as unreal as the vivid yet impalpable images in
a dream. And into this world of crystal there drifted, like the essence
of spring, the dreamy fragrance from the window box filled with white
hyacinths.
While she stood there Gabriella thought pensively of many things. She
thought of the day's work before her, of the gown she was designing for
Mrs. Pletheridge, of Fanny's latest lover, the brother of a schoolmate,
of the clothes she should send the child to the White Sulphur Springs,
of her mother, and of Jane's eldest daughter, Margaret; and then very
slowly, with the scent of the hyacinths drowning all merely prosaic
memories, she began to think hopelessly and tenderly of Arthur Peyton.
She thought of him as he had looked on the day when she had told him of
her engagement of the sympathetic expression in his eyes, and of his
beautiful manner, which she had felt at the time she could never forget.
Well, after eighteen years she had not forgotten it. Compared with
Arthur, all other men seemed to her as unreal as shadows. "How could
Miss Polly imagine that I'd think of Ben O'Hara after a love like that?"
she reflected indignantly.
And then, perhaps because for a shadow he was so solidly substantial,
she became aware that O'Hara's image was trespassing upon the hallowed
soil of her reverie. To be sure, she had seen a great deal of him since
George's death, when he had been so wonderfully considerate and helpful.
Scarcely a day had passed since then that he had not brightened by some
reminder of his friendship. They had spent long evenings together; and
occasionally, accompanied by the delighted Miss Polly, they had gone to
dinner at a restaurant and later to a concert or a play. That he had
been almost too kind it was impossible for her to deny; but she had
tried her best to repay him--she had, when one came to the point, done
as much as she could to remedy the defects of his education. At first
she had given zest, sympathy, eagerness, to her self-appointed task of
making him over; then, as the months went by, a sense of doubt, of
discouragement, of approaching failure, had tempered her enthusiasm, and
at last she had realized that her work, except in the merest details,
had been ineffectual and futile. The differences, which she had regarded
as superficial, were, in reality, fundamental. It was impossible to make
him over because he was so completely himself. He stood quite definitely
for certain tendencies in democracy, and by no ingenious manipulation
could she twist him about until he presented the sham appearance of
moving in the opposite direction. For the logic of her failure was
perfectly simple--he couldn't see, however hard he tried, the things she
wanted him to look at. The difficulty was far deeper than a mere matter
of finish, or even of education--for it was, after all, not one of
manner, but of material. Day by day she had realized more clearly that
the problem confronting them was one which involved their different
standards of living and their individual philosophies. The things which
she regarded as essential were to him only the accidental variations of
life. He had lived so long in touch with the basic realities--with vast
spaces and the stark aspect of desert horizons, with droughts, and
winds, and the unquenchable pangs of thirst and hunger, with the vital
issues of birth and death in their most primitive forms--he had lived so
long in touch with the simplest and most elemental forces of Nature,
that his spirit, as well as his vision, had adjusted itself to a
trackless and limitless field of view. No, what he was now he must
remain, since to change him, except in trivial details, was out of her
power.
And of course he had his virtues--she would have been the last to deny
him his virtues. Whenever she applied the touchstone of character, she
realized how little alloy there was in the pure gold of his nature. He
was truthful, he was generous, he was brave, kind, and tolerant; but his
virtues, like his personality, were large, flamboyant, and without
gradations of colour. Custom had not pruned their natural luxuriance,
nor had tradition toned down the violence of their contrasts. They were
experimental, not established virtues, as obviously the expression of
the man himself as was his uncultivated preference for red geraniums.
For he possessed, she admitted, a sincerity such as she had not believed
compatible with human designs--certainly not with human achievement.
According to the code of the sheltered half of her sex--according to the
inflexible code of her mother and Jane--he was not a gentleman. He
lacked breeding, he lacked taste, he lacked the necessary education of
schools; but in other ways, in ways peculiarly his own, she was
beginning dimly to realize that he possessed qualities immeasurably
larger than any superficial lack in his nature. In balance, moderation,
restraint--in all the gracious attributes with which Arthur was endowed
in her memory, in all the attributes she had particularly esteemed in
the past--she understood that O'Hara would undoubtedly fall below her
inherited standards. But, failing in these things, he had been able to
command her respect by the sheer force of his character. Though he had,
as he had confessed to her, gone down into hell, she could not talk to
him for an hour without recognizing that he had never lost a natural
chivalry of mind beside which the cultivated chivalry of manner appeared
as exotic as an orchid in a hothouse. Even Arthur, she was aware, would
have lied to her for her own good; but she would have trusted O'Hara to
speak the truth to her at any cost. In this, as well as in his practical
efficiency, and his crude yet vital optimism, he embodied, she felt, the
triumphs and the failures of American democracy--this democracy of ugly
fact and of fine ideals, of crooked deeds and of straight feeling, of
little codes and of large adventures, of puny lives and of heroic
deaths--this democracy of the smoky present and the clear future. "If
this is our raw material to-day," she thought hopefully, "what will the
finished and signed product of to-morrow be?"
"Gabriella, ain't these lovely?"
Whirling out of the sunshine, she saw Miss Polly holding a rustic basket
of primroses and cowslips. "Mr. O'Hara wants to know if he may speak to
you for a minute before you go out?"
"Oh, yes, I'm not in a hurry this morning." Then Miss Polly disappeared
and an instant later the vacant space in the doorway was filled
exuberantly by O'Hara.
"I wanted to be the first to wish you a happy birthday," he began, a
little shyly, a little awkwardly, though his face was flushing with
pleasure.
"The flowers are wonderful!" For a minute, while she answered him, he
seemed to be a part of the unreal intense brightness of the world
outside--of that magic world where the elm tree and the grass and the
sunny street were all imprisoned in crystal. He diffused a glowing
consciousness of success, a sanguine faith in the inherent goodness of
experience. For, as she had discovered long ago, O'Hara was one of those
who stood not for the elimination of struggle, but for the complete
acceptance of life. He had sprung out of ugliness, he had lived
intimately with evil; and yet more than any one she had ever known, he
seemed to her to radiate the simple, uncalculating joy of living. He was
the strongest person she knew, as well as the happiest. He had never
evaded facts, never feared a risk, never shirked an issue, never lacked
the hardy, adventurous courage of battle. In his own words, life had
never "found him a quitter."
He stood in front of her now, fresh, smiling, robust, with his look of
suddenly arrested energy, and the dark red of his hair, which was still
moist from his bath, striking a vivid note against the cool grays and
blues of the background. The sunshine, falling through the open window,
warmed the ruddy tan of his face, and made his eyes like pools of clear
light in which the jubilant spirit of the spring was reflected. "After
all, it isn't what one does, it is what one is, that matters," she
thought while she looked at him. "At the end, as Miss Polly said, it is
character, not circumstances, that counts."
"I've been all over New York this morning looking for that basket," he
said. Though he had been so eager to make light of his services to her
in her trouble, she was amused from time to time by a childlike vanity
which prompted him to impress her with the value of small attentions;
and this she was swift to recognize as the opposite of Arthur's
delicacy. It was the only littleness she had observed in O'Hara so
far--this reluctance to hide his smaller lights under a bushel--and in
its place, it was amusing. Here was an obvious instance where nature
unassisted by training appeared to fall short.
"They couldn't be lovelier if you'd gone all over the world," she
responded sincerely.
Before answering her he hesitated a moment, and she watched pityingly
the struggle he was making toward an impossible self-expression. The
thing he wanted to say, the thing struggling so pathetically in the
inarticulateness of his feeling, would not, she knew, be uttered in
words.
"You are the first woman I ever wanted to send flowers to," he said
presently; and added with abject infelicity: "It's strange, isn't it?"
"Yes, it's strange," she assented pleasantly. Though his words were
ineffectual, she was aware suddenly of a force before which she felt a
vague impulse of flight. Now, if ever, she understood that she must keep
their relations as superficial as she had always meant them to be--that
she must cling with all her strength to the comfortable surface of
appearances. "But you haven't had many women friends, have you?"
"I've wanted to give other things," he went on hurriedly; "but not
flowers. I never thought of flowers until I met you."
"That's nice for me." She was growing nervous, and in her nervousness
she precipitated the explosion by venturing rashly: "But there's Alice,
too, isn't there, to like them?" Her voice was firm and friendly. Once
for all she intended him to understand how aloof she stood from any
sentimental advances.
"Alice?" For an instant his response hung fire, enveloped in a fog of
perplexity. Then, with an air of dispelling the cloud, he made a
vigorous gesture of denial, and moved nearer to her with the swiftness
and directness of a natural force. "Why, Alice was you! You were Alice
all the time!" he exclaimed energetically.
"You mean--" She checked herself in alarm, paralyzed the next instant by
the tremendous, unexpected blow of her discovery.
"So you thought there was somebody else!" The delight in his face kept
her silent, amazed, incapable of explanation. His arm was still
outstretched, as if he were brushing aside the last flimsy barrier
between them, and his voice, with its unrestrained and radiant joy,
stirred some faintly quivering echoes in the secret depths of her being.
It was as if the jubilant spirit of spring had flowered suddenly in his
look.
"There wasn't anybody else." He came still nearer, and she stood there,
startled, incredulous, powerless either to retreat or to prevent the
inevitable instant that was approaching. "At least, there wasn't anybody
I ever knew named Alice except a school teacher when I was a kid. She
was good and she was pretty like you, and I used to dream about her
after school, and every evening at dusk I would go out of my way to
speak to her in Sixth Avenue. Once she told me that she'd wait for me to
grow up and get rich so I could marry her, and after I went out to
Arizona I used to think about her a lot. When I came on you suddenly,
standing there in the dusk with your hands full of lilacs, it all came
back to me because you, looked like her, with your dark hair and your
tall slenderness. Then before I knew what I was, doing I called you by
her name. I oughtn't to have done it," he finished ecstatically, "but
I'm jolly glad now that I did."
So he also, the man of action and of enterprise, he, the worker and the
adventurer, so he also cultivated his garden of dreams!
"I didn't know--I didn't know--" she found herself murmuring faintly in
protest.
"But you know now!" His voice rang out exultantly, and, though she felt
that the thing she feared and dreaded was coming upon her, she still
stood there without moving a step, without lifting a hand, mesmerized,
enchanted, by the force of the man. "You know now," he repeated. "You
know now, Gabriella, and you knew all along."
It was true. In spite of her surprise, in spite of her shrinking, in
spite of her evasion, she confessed it in her heart. She had known all
the time. Something deep down in her, something secret and profound and
clairvoyant, had discerned the truth from the beginning.
"No! no!" she cried out sharply, for, mistaking her silence, he had
stooped to her with the directness which impelled all his movements,
which so easily brushed aside and discarded intervening encumbrances,
and had kissed her on the lips.
For an instant, in the merciless tenderness of his arms, her resistance
melted from her. Beneath the crash of the storm she did not think, she
did not struggle, she did not murmur. Her consciousness seemed
suspended, and with her consciousness, her memory, her judgment, even
her passionate unshaken loyalty to the love of her youth. Then, after
the moment of weakness, of passive submission, it was as if her soul and
body caught fire at a flash, and a quiver of anger ran through her,
enkindling her glance and nerving her spirit.
"But I do not love you! I never meant that I loved you!" she cried.
At her words his arms dropped to his sides, and he stood as if turned to
stone, with only his questioning eyes and the vivid red of his hair
seeming alive. There was no need now for her to struggle. At her first
movement to escape he had released her and drawn to a distance.
"You don't love me?" he stammered. "Why, I saw it. I've seen it for
weeks. I see it now in your face."
"You see nothing--nothing." She denied it bitterly. "I liked you as a
friend. I did not think of this. I never suspected it. I don't love you.
I don't love you in the least."
He was very still. The jubilant spirit of the spring had ebbed away from
his look, and even in the height of her anger she was struck by the
change in his face.
"I don't believe you," he said gravely after a minute. "I don't believe
you."
"You must believe me. I don't love you. I have never thought of you
except as a friend. I have loved another man all my life."
Her voice rose accusingly, triumphantly, and so fervent was her look
that she might have been repeating a creed. It was as if she hoped by
convincing him to persuade her own rebellious heart of the truth she
proclaimed.
Now at last he understood. She had been lucid enough even for the
crystalline lucidity of his thought.
"I am sorry. I made a mistake," he said quietly, and after the exultant
note of a few moments ago there was a dull level of flatness in his
voice. "I am sorry. There don't seem to be anything else that I can say
or do, but--but it wouldn't have happened if I had understood--" He
paused, looked at her closely for a minute, and then added stubbornly,
with an echo of the old confidence in his tone: "I still don't believe
it."
"It is true, nevertheless." She was trembling with indignation, and this
indignation, in spite of her natural fairness, was not directed against
herself, against her own blindness and folly. Though she knew that she
was to blame, she was furious, not with herself, but with O'Hara. He had
insulted her, and she resolved bitterly that she would never forgive
him. Even now, whenever she was silent, she could still feel his kiss on
her mouth, and the vividness of the sensation stung her into passionate
anger. She was no longer the reasonable and competent Gabriella, who had
so successfully "managed her life"; she was primitive woman in the grip
of primitive anger; and balance, moderation, restraint, had flown from
her soul. The very mystery of her feeling, its complexity, its
suddenness, its remorselessness--these emotions worked together to
deepen the sense of insult, of injury, with which she burned.
"It is true, and you have no right to doubt it. You have no right." She
caught her breath sharply, and then went on with inexcusable harshness:
"Even if there hadn't been any one else, I should never--I could never
in the world--"
Her loss of self-control gave him an advantage, which he was either too
generous or too stupid to perceive. "Well, forget all about it. I am
going now," he answered quietly.
While she watched him moving away from her, she was conscious of an
inexplicable longing to stab him again more deeply before she lost him
forever. It was intolerable to her that he should leave her while she
was still indignant, that he should evade her just resentment by the
natural cowardice of flight.
"I can't forget it," she said; "how can you expect me to?"
For an instant he seemed on the point of smiling. Then, turning, at the
door, he walked back to where she was standing, and said gravely: "When
I came in here it was to ask you to marry me, and, if it's the last word
I ever speak, I thought you understood--that you knew how I felt. I was
even fool enough to think you would be willing to marry me. That's all I
can say. I haven't any other excuses."
For the second time he went to the door, opened it, and then turning
quickly, came back again. "I am not the sort to change, and I shan't
change about this. You are a free woman, and if you ever feel that you
made a mistake, if you ever want me or need me, you can just come to me.
I shan't stop caring for you, and if you choose to come, I'll be
waiting. I believed you were meant for me when I first saw you--and I
believe it now. In spite of all you say, I am going to keep on believing
it--"
He went out, closing the door softly, and five minutes later, feeling
extraordinarily young, she watched him pass through the gate, and walk
as buoyantly as ever in the direction of Broadway. While she looked
after him she wondered suddenly why novelists always dropped their
heroines as soon as they passed twenty-seven? "If I'd been in a play,
they'd have put me in the background, dressed in lavender, and made me
look on and do fancywork," she thought humorously, "but this is real
life, and I've just had a real love scene on my thirty-eighth birthday.
He couldn't have been more romantic if I'd been Fanny," she mused with
an agreeable complacency. "It's only in books and plays that people stop
falling in love when they pass the twenties. I don't believe they ever
stop in real life. I believe it goes on forever." And glancing at the
glass, she added truthfully: "I want love more to-day than I wanted it
when I was twenty--and so does Ben O'Hara."
A sensation of stifling, as if her throat were closing together,
oppressed her suddenly, and picking up her hand-bag, she ran downstairs
and out of the house.
By the time she reached Broadway her anger had ebbed, but the
oppression, the feeling that she was being slowly smothered, was still
in her throat and bosom. After all, seen in the sober light of reason,
why had she been so indignant? There had been a misapprehension; he had
thought that she was in love with him, and thinking so, he had kissed
her. That was the case plainly stated; and what was there in this to
send a burning, rush of anger to her heart? What was there in this that
had made her turn and insult him? For the first time in her life she had
lost her temper without cause, and had raged, she told herself sternly,
like a fury. And beneath her rage she had been conscious always of some
vague, incomprehensible disloyalty to Arthur--of a feeling of,
humiliation, of self-reproach, which appeared ridiculous when she
remembered that she had been kissed against her will and without
warning. But, in spite of this, she knew intuitively, with a knowledge
deeper than reason, that the glory of her Dream had paled in the moment
when she lay in O'Hara's arms.
A subtle change had come over the spirit of spring since she had left
the elm tree and the emerald veil of the grass. It was no longer
jubilant, but languorous, wistful, haunting, as if it eternally pursued,
through the fugitive seasons, an immortal and ineffable beauty. The
enchanted crystal had been shattered in an instant, and she saw life
now, not imprisoned in magical sunshine, but gray, sordid, monotonous,
as utterly hopeless as the faces thronging in Broadway. Yet not many
months ago she had seen in these, same faces the inward hope, the joy in
sadness, the gaiety in disappointment, which had brightened the world
for her. Then she had been aware of an invisible current flowing from
the crowd to herself; but to-day this shining current was broken or
turned aside, and she felt detached, adrift, and distrustful of the
future. That mental correspondence with the mood of the crowd, with the
life of the city, which had come to her first on the brilliant morning
in September, and then again when she walked home with O'Hara in the
winter's dusk--which had released a new faculty in her soul, and had
given her a fresh perception of human responsibilities--this had
deserted her so utterly that she could barely remember its miraculous
visitation. Then her personal life had seemed to become a part of the
life of the street, of the sky, of the mysterious city outlined against
the gray background of dusk. To-day she walked alone and without
sympathy through the crowd. Her feet dragged, and she felt dully that
she had lost her share in both the street and the sky. The very faces of
the men and women around her--those lethargic foreign faces which
crowded out the finer American type--awoke in her the sensation of
hopeless revolt which one feels before the impending destruction of
higher forms by masses of inert and conscienceless matter. She thought
gloomily: "I have lost the vision--there is no hope either for me or for
America except in the clear vision of the future." And while she spoke
there passed over her the vague feeling of loss, of something missing,
as if a precious possession had slipped from her grasp.
Her morning's work was unusually trying, and at one o'clock, when she
put on her hat before going out to lunch, she asked herself dejectedly:
"What can be the matter with me? Before I go home I'll take a taxicab
and drive up Riverside for an hour. If only the children were here, I
should not feel so depressed." She remembered regretfully that Archibald
and Fanny would be away all summer; and then from thinking of her
children, she passed by almost insensible degrees of despondency to
meditating pensively about Arthur Peyton. What a wreck, what an
inconceivably stupid wreck she had made of her happiness!
As she entered the outer showroom on her way to the street, she heard
the voice of Miss Murphy attuned to a cooing pitch, and glancing around
a little, painted cabinet, filled with useless ornaments, which stood in
the centre of the floor, she beheld a dazzling head of reddish gold
before one of the elaborately decorated French mirrors. While she
advanced the red-gold waves, worn with extreme flatness over a forehead
of pearly whiteness, were submerged for a minute in the smallest and
roundest hat in the shop, and from a fashionable figure, reminding her
vaguely of an ambulatory dressmaker's model, there issued a high,
fluting note of delighted ejaculation.
"This is just exactly what I've been looking all over New York for! Now,
isn't it too funny for anything that I should have found it right here
the very minute I came in?" As Gabriella's face flashed back from the
mirror the fashionable figure sprang suddenly to life, and the voice,
still fluting delightedly, exclaimed:
"Why, Gabriella! Where on earth did you come from?"
For a minute sheer amazement kept Gabriella clinging helplessly to the
ridiculous cabinet, from the top of which an artificial rose-bush seemed
to shower artificial pink petals down on her head. Then, recovering
herself, with a sharp effort of will, she went forward a few steps
beyond the shelter of the cabinet, and said composedly:
"How do you do, Florrie? I did not recognize you at first."
For it was Florrie herself, Florrie in the flesh, Florrie, glowing,
sparkling, prosperous, victorious. Her figure, conforming to the latest
mode, had lost its pinched protuberances, and was long, slender, sinuous
in its perfection of line. Beneath the small round hat, her hair, glossy
with brilliantine, was like melted gold in the large loose waves which
revealed the rosy tips of her ears. She was thirty-nine, and she looked
scarcely a day over twenty-five. The peach-blossom texture of her skin
was as unlined by care or pain as if she had spent the last ten years
immured in a convent; for in this case, at least, Gabriella realized
while she looked at her, the retribution which awaits upon sinners had
been tardy in its fulfilment.
As she moved toward her, without noticing the friendly hand that Florrie
held out, Gabriella was conscious of an ironical inclination to laugh.
Though she felt no bitter personal resentment against Florrie--for,
after all, Florrie had not been able to hurt her--there struggled in her
bosom an indignation more profound, more moving, than any merely
personal emotion could be. Her resentment was directed not against
Florrie, but against some abstract destiny which had permitted Florrie
to have her way without paying the price. For on the pinnacle of a
destructive career, unsinged by the conflagration she had so carelessly
started, Florrie was poised securely, crowned, triumphant, rejoicing. On
her dazzling height, successful and happy, she was as far removed as one
could imaginably be from the repentant Magdalen of tradition. The memory
of George's face as it looked in death, floated before the austere
mental vision of Gabriella, and she reflected grimly that tradition was
not always the mirror of life. For in this one case at least, the man,
not the woman, had been the victim of natural law, and Florrie, fool
though she was, had shown herself at the hour of requital to be stronger
than fate. By that instinctive wisdom, which is so much older, so much
truer than civilization, she had triumphed over the ordination of life.
In refusing to suffer she had blunted every weapon with which Nature
might have punished her in the end. Not by virtue, since she had none,
but by pure insensibility, she had escaped the wages of sin. She was a
sensualist whose sensuality, hard, metallic, glittering, encased her
like armour.
At Gabriella's approach Miss Murphy fluttered off cooingly in the
direction of a fresh customer, and only the festively garlanded French
mirror witnessed the meeting of the two who had been schoolgirls
together. Swift as an arrow there shot through Gabriella's mind, "I
wonder what Ben O'Hara would think of her?" Then she checked the
dangerous flight of her fancy, for she remembered that O'Hara's thoughts
about anything no longer concerned her.
"Are you buying a hat?" inquired Florrie curiously.
"No, I belong here. I am Madame Dinard."
"You don't mean it! I never should have believed it! The idea of your
being a dressmaker. That's why you look so smart, I suppose. You're the
smartest thing I've seen anywhere, but you look older, Gabriella."
"Well, you don't." It was perfectly true. Except for the gaudy
decorations and the twanging accents of the arrogant young women,
Gabriella might have imagined herself in the last century atmosphere of
Broad Street in the middle 'nineties.
"I must tell you about the things I use." Florrie was always generous.
"But, I declare if I'd known this place was yours, I'd have got my hats
here ages ago. Of course I knew it was dreadfully swell, but I thought
the prices were beyond anything."
"They are," responded Gabriella with business-like brevity, while she
glanced about for the flitting Miss Murphy.
"Look here, Gabriella, I hope you don't bear me any malice," Florrie
burst out solicitously, for her frankness, like her sensuality, was
elemental in its audacity. "You oughtn't to if you know what I saved you
from," she proceeded convincingly. "Anyway, we were chums long before
either of us ever thought about a man, and I didn't really do you a bit
of harm. It wasn't as if you cared about George, was it?"
"No, it wasn't as if I'd cared about him." Gabriella was answering the
appeal as truthfully as if Florrie had been the most excellent of her
sex. "You didn't harm me in any way--not in any way," she repeated with
firmness.
"That's just the way I told mother you'd look at it. I knew you were
always so broad-minded even as a girl. Then there isn't any reason we
shouldn't be friends just as we used to be."
Gabriella shook her head, polite but implacable in her refusal. "It
isn't what you did to me, Florrie," she answered gently, "it's what you
are that I can't forgive. I can imagine that a good woman might do
almost anything--might even run off with another woman's husband, but
you aren't good. You wouldn't be good if you'd spent your life in a
convent."
A quick flush--the flush of temper--stained the pearly whiteness of
Florrie's skin. "Oh, of course, if you don't want to," she retorted, a
little shrilly, though she tried to subdue her rebellious voice to the
pitch of Fifth Avenue. "I only thought that being a working woman, you
wouldn't have so very many friends, and you might get lonely. I had
seats at the opera every night last winter, and time and again I'd have
been glad to have given them to you. Then, too, I might have been able
to bring you some custom. I know any number of rich women who don't
think anything of paying a thousand dollars for a dress--"
Her insolence was so evidently the result of anger that Gabriella,
without interrupting the flow, waited courteously until she paused.
"No, you cannot do anything for me, Florrie." Though Gabriella's voice
was crisp and firm, her face looked suddenly older, and little lines,
stamped by weariness and regret, appeared at the corners of her still
brilliant eyes. "I don't wish you any harm," she went on more softly.
"If you were in trouble I'd do what I could for you, but somehow I don't
seem able to forgive you for being what you are. Would you like to look
at anything else?" she inquired in her professional tone. "Miss Murphy
is waiting to show you some hats."
Her cheeks were burning when she passed out of the ivory and gold door,
saluted deferentially by the attendant in livery. "The effrontery!" she
thought, "the barefaced effrontery!" and then, as her eyes fell on
Florrie's trim little electric coupé beside the curb, she exclaimed
mentally, recalling George's animated perplexity about the pearl
necklace, "I wonder how in the world she does it?"
The meeting with Florrie appeared to her, as she walked home that
afternoon, to be the last touch needed to push her into a state of utter
despondency. The oppressive languor of the day had exhausted her
strength, and when she left Dinard's she felt too indifferent, too
spiritless even for the drive in the Park. It was still light when she
got out of the stage at Twenty-third Street, and while she strolled
listlessly down the blocks on the West Side, she had again that curious
sensation of smothering which had come to her after her talk with
O'Hara.
At the corner of Sixth Avenue a young Italian, with the face of a poet,
was roasting peanuts in a little kerosene stove beside a flickering
torch which enkindled the romantic youth in his eyes. Farther away some
ragged children were dancing to the music of a hand-organ, which ground
out a melancholy waltz; and from a tiny flower stall behind the stand of
a bootblack there drifted the intense sweetness of hyacinths. An old
negro, carrying a basket of clothes, passed her in the middle of the
block, and she thought: "That might have been in Richmond--that and the
hand-organ and the perfume of hyacinths." A vision of Hill Street
floated before her--the long straight street, with the sudden drop of
ragged hill at the end; the old houses, with crumbling porches and
countless signs: "Boarders Wanted" in the windows between the patched
curtains; the irregular rows of tulip poplar, elm, or sycamore trees
throwing their crooked shadows over the cobblestones; the blades of
grass sprouting along the edges of the brick pavement--the vision of
Hill Street as she remembered it twenty years ago in her girlhood; and
then the image of her mother's face gazing out beneath the creamy
blossoms and the dark shining leaves of the old magnolia tree.
"Everything must have changed, I'd hardly recognize it," she thought.
"Nobody we know lives on that side now, mother says. Yes, it has been a
long time." She sighed, and then a little laugh broke from her lips, as
she remembered that Charley, who had recently been West on a business
trip, had brought home the good news that Richmond was as progressive as
Denver. "At least it seems so to Charley," Mrs. Carr had hastened to
add, "but you know how proud Charley is of all our newness. He says
there is not a street in the West that looks fresher or more beautiful
than Monument Avenue, and I am sure that is a great comfort. Cousin
Jimmy says it shows what the South can do when it tries."
"I'd like to go back," mused Gabriella, walking more and more slowly. "I
haven't been home for eighteen years, and I am thirty-eight to-day."
With the fugitive sweetness of the hyacinths there rushed over her again
the feeling that life was slipping, slipping, and that she was missing
something infinitely precious, something infinitely desirable. It was
the panic of fleeting youth, of youth unsatisfied, denied, and still
insatiable.
As she entered the gate she saw that O'Hara's windows were dark, and
while a sigh of relief escaped her, she felt a swift contraction of her
throat as if she had become suddenly paralyzed and was unable to
swallow. "I hope he has gone," she said to herself in a whisper. "If he
has gone, everything will be so much easier." But even to herself she
could not explain what it was that would be made easier. Her relief was
so vague that when she endeavoured to put it into words it seemed to
dissolve and evaporate.
Miss Polly was watering the flowers in the window box, and turning, with
the green watering-pot in her hand, she stared at Gabriella in silence
for a minute before she exclaimed anxiously: "Mercy on us, Gabriella,
what on earth, is the matter?"
"Nothing. I've had a hard day, and I'm tired."
"Well, you lie right straight down as soon as you take off your hat. I
declare you look ten years older than you did this morning."
"I have seen Florrie for a minute."
"I reckon that was enough to upset anybody. Did she say she was sorry?"
"Sorry! She looked as if she had never been sorry for anything in her
life. She was handsomer than ever--don't you remember how much you
always admired her figure?--and she didn't look a day over twenty-five.
I don't believe she has ever known what it is to feel a regret."
"Well, you just wait, honey," responded Miss Polly consolingly, "you
just wait. She'll be punished yet as sure as you're born."
"Oh, I'm not waiting for that. I don't wish her to be punished. Why
should I? She is what she is."
"Do you s'pose she knows about George?"
"I doubt it. She didn't speak of his death. She is quite capable of
forgetting that she ever knew him, and if she does, think of him, it is
probably as a man who betrayed her innocence. You may be sure she has
twisted it all about until every shred of the blame rests on somebody
else. Florrie isn't the only woman who is made like that, but I
believe," she reasoned it out coolly, "that it is her way of keeping her
youth."
Miss Polly had put down the watering-pot, and she came presently with a
bottle of camphor to the sofa where Gabriella was lying. "Are you sure
you wouldn't like me to rub your head?" she inquired. "Dinner will be
ready in a minute, but I shouldn't change my dress if I were you."
Gabriella rose slowly to a sitting position, and then stood up while she
pushed the camphor away. "I hate the smell of it," she answered; "it
makes me think of one of Jane's attacks. And, besides, I don't need it.
There is nothing in the world the matter with me." A moment later, to
Miss Polly's unspeakable amazement, she sank down again, flung her arms
over the back of the sofa, and burst into tears.
"Well, I never!" ejaculated Miss Polly, rooted to the spot. "Well, I
never!" In the ten years she had lived with Gabriella she had never seen
her cry--not even after George's flight--and she felt as if the solid
ground on which she stood had crumbled without warning, and left her
insecurely balanced in space. "Something certainly must be wrong, for it
ain't like you to give way. Are you real sure you ain't got a pain
somewhere?"
Shaking her head, and swallowing her sobs with an effort, Gabriella rose
to her feet. "I'm just tired out, that's all," she said, strangely
humble and deprecating.
"You must have been working too hard. It ain't right." For a minute or
two the little seamstress brooded anxiously; then guided by an
infallible instinct, she added decisively: "It's been a long time since
you've seen your ma, and she's gettin' right smart along. Why don't you
run down home for a few days while the flowers are blooming?"
A change passed over Gabriella's face, and drying her eyes, she looked
down on Miss Polly with a lovely enigmatical smile.
"I wonder if I might?" she said doubtfully.
"There ain't any earthly reason why you shouldn't. To-morrow's Friday,
and they can get along without you at Dinard's perfectly well till the
first of the week."
"Oh, yes, they can get along. I was only wondering"--a faint breeze
stole in through the window, wafting toward her the scent of wet
flowers--"I was only wondering"--her eyes grew suddenly radiant, and
lifting her arms, she made a gesture as of one escaping from bondage--"I
was only wondering if I might go to-morrow," she said.