Circumstance, too, had fed the potency of this difference. Claire had
not been reared like her mother. When she was nine years old her parents
were living in a tiny brick house near the East River, among New York
suburbs. But Claire had been sent to a small school near by, kept by a
dim, worn lady, with an opulent past and a most precarious present. She
had studied for three years under this lady's capable care, and had lost
nothing by the opportunity. Her swift, apt mind had delighted her
instructress, whose name was Mrs. Carmichael. Claire was remarkably
receptive; she had acquired without seeming effort. Mrs. Carmichael was
one of the many ladies who attempt the education of youth without either
system or equipment for so serious a task. Her slight body, doubtless
attenuated by recurring memories of a cherished past, would sometimes
invisibly quake before Claire's precocious questionings. She knew all
that she knew superficially, and she soon became fearful lest Claire
should pierce, by a sort of adroit ignorance, her veneer of academic
sham. She had a narrow little peaked face, of a prevailing pink hue, as
though it were being always bathed in some kind of sunset light, like
the rosy afterglow of her own perished respectability. Her nervous,
alert head was set on a pair of sloping shoulders, and she wore its
sparse tresses shaped into roulades and bandeaus which had an amateurish
look, and seemed to imitate the deft handiwork of some long-departed
tirewoman. She carried her small frame with erect importance. She was
always referring to vanished friendships with this or that notability,
but time and place were so ignored in these volunteered reminiscences as
to make her allusions acquire a tender mythic grandeur. Claire had
watched well her teacher's real and native elegance, and she had set
this down as a solid fact. Perhaps the child had probed her many
harmless falsities with equal skill. As for Mrs. Carmichael, she would
sometimes pat her pupil on the cheek and praise her in no weak terms. "I
wish that I had only known you a long time ago, my little lady," she
would say, in her serene treble voice. "I would have brought you up as
my own dear child, for I never had a child of my own. I would have given
you a place in the world to be proud of, and have watched with interest
the growth of your fine mental abilities, surrounded by those poor lost
friends of mine who would have delighted in so clever a girl as you
are."
"When you speak of your friends as lost, Mrs. Carmichael," Claire had
once replied, "do you mean that they are all dead now?"
At this question the lady slowly shook her head, with just enough
emphasis not to imperil the modish architecture of her locks.
"Some of them are dead, my dear," she murmured, with the least droop of
each pink eyelid, "but the rest are much too grand for me at present.
They have quite forgotten me." Here Mrs. Carmichael gave a quick,
fluttered cough, and then put the tips of her close-pressed fingers to
the edges of her close-pressed lips.
Claire privately thought them very churlish friends to have forgotten
anybody so high-bred and winsome as Mrs. Carmichael. And she publicly
expressed this thought at supper the same evening, while she sat with
her parents in a small lower room opening directly off the kitchen. A
weary maid, whose face flamed from the meal she had just cooked, was
patiently serving it. Mrs. Twining, who had lent no light hand toward
the Monday's washing, was in the act of distributing a somewhat meagre
beefsteak, which fate and an incompetent range had conspired to cover on
both sides with a layer of thick, sooty black. Mr. Twining was waiting
to get a piece of the beefsteak; he did not yet know of its disastrous
condition, for a large set of pewter casters reared its uncouth pyramid
between himself and the maltreated viand; but although such calamities
of cookery were not rare to his board, he was putting confidence, as
usual, in the favors of fortune, and preparing himself blandly for a
fresh little stroke of chagrin.
Outside it was midwinter dusk, and a bleak wind was blowing from
the ice-choked river, pale and dull under the sharp stars.
One-Hundred-and-Twelfth Street was in those years a much wilder spot
than now; its buildings, like its flag-stones, were capricious
incidents; its boon of the elevated railroad was yet undreamed of by
capitalists; you rode to it in languid horse-cars from the remote
centres of commerce, upward past parapets of virgin rock where perched
the hut of the squatter, or wastes of houseless highway where even the
aspiring tavern had not dared to pioneer. Mr. Twining had just ridden
hither by this laggard means, and he was tired and hungry; he wanted his
supper, a little valued chat with his beloved Claire, and a caress or
two from the child as well. After these he wanted a few hours of rest
before to-morrow re-dawned, with its humdrum austerities. One other
thing he desired, and this was a blessing more often desired than
attained. He had the wish for a peaceful domestic interval, as regarded
his wife's deportment, between home-coming and departure.
But to-night it had been otherwise decreed. Mrs. Twining's faint spark
of innate warmth was never roused by the contact of suds. Monday was her
day of wrath; you might almost have fancied that she had used a bit of
her superfluous soap in vainly trying to rub the rust from her already
tarnished hopes.
The small room where the trio sat was void of any real cheer. A pygmy
stove, at one side of it, stood fuel-choked and nearly florid in hue.
From this a strong volume of heat engulfed Mrs. Twining in its
oppressive spell, but lost vigor before it reached her husband or
Claire, and left the corners of the apartment so frigid that a gaunt
sofa, off where the light of the big oil-lamp could only vaguely touch
it, took upon its slippery hair-cloth surface the easy semblance of ice.
Two windows, not fashioned to thwart the unwonted bitterness of the
weather, were draped with nothing more resistant than a pair of canvas
shades, gorgeously pictorial in the full light of day, when seen by the
passer who seldom passed. These shades were of similar designs; in
justice to Mrs. Twining it must be told that they had been rented with
the house. On each a plumed gentleman in a gondola held fond converse
with a disheveled lady in a balcony. The conception was no less
Venetian in meaning than vicious in execution; but to-night, for any
observant wayfarer, such presentments of sunny Italy, while viewed
between blotches of wan frost that crusted the intervening panes, must
have appeared doubly counterfeit. Still, the chief discomfort of the
chamber, just at present, was a layer of brooding cold that lay along
its floor, doggedly inexterminable, and the sole approach to regularity
of temperature that its four walls contained.
It had made Claire gather up her feet toward the top rung of her chair,
and shiver once or twice, but it had not chilled the pretty gayety of
her childish talk, all of which had thus far been addressed to her
father.
"And so you like Mrs. Carmichael, my dear?" Twining had said, in his
smooth, cheerful voice. "Well, I am glad of that."
"Oh yes, I like her," replied Claire, with a slight, wise nod of her
head, where the clear gold of youth had not yet given way to the
brown-gold of maidenhood. "But I think it strange that all her fine
friends have dropped off from her. That's what she told me to-day,
Father; truly, she did! Why don't they care for her any more? Is it
because she's poor and has to teach little dunces like me?"
Twining's feminine blue eyes scanned the rather dingy tablecloth for a
moment. "I am afraid it is," he said, in a low voice, pressing between
his fingers a bit of ill-baked bread that grew doughy at a touch.
Mrs. Twining ceased to carve the obdurate beefsteak, though still
retaining her hold on the horn-handled knife and fork. She lifted her
head so that it quite towered above the formidable group of casters, and
looked straight at her husband.
"Don't put false notions into the child, Francis," she said, each word
seeming to strike the next with a steely click. "You're always doing it.
_You_ know nothing of where that woman came from, or who she is."
Twining looked at his wife. His gaze was very mild. "I only know what
she has told me, Jane," he said.
Mrs. Twining laughed and resumed the carving. Her laugh never went with
a smile; it never had the least concern with mirth; it was nearly always
a presage of irony, as an east wind will blow news of storm.
"Oh, certainly; what she's told you! That's you, all over! Suppose she'd
told you she'd been Lady of the White House once. You wouldn't have
believed her, not you! Of course not!"
"What is a Lady of the White House?" asked Claire, appealing to her
father. She was perfectly accustomed to these satiric outbursts on her
mother's part; they belonged to the home-circle; she would have missed
them if they had ceased; it would have been like a removal of the
hair-cloth sofa, or an accident to one of the lovers on the
window-shades.
Twining disregarded this simple question, which was a rare act with him;
he usually heard and heeded whatever Claire had to say.
"Please don't speak hard things of Mrs. Carmichael," he answered his
wife. "She's really a person who has seen better days."
"Better days!" echoed Mrs. Twining. "Well, then, we ought to shake
hands. _I_ think she's just _the_ plainest humbug I ever saw, with her
continual brag about altered circumstances. But I'll take your word for
it, Francis. The next time I see her I'll tell her we're
fellow-unfortunates. We'll compare our 'better days' together, and
calc'late who's seen the most."
Twining gave a faint sigh, and looked down. Then he raised his eyes
again, and a new spark lit their mildness. Something to-night had made
him lack his old patient tolerance.
"I'm afraid Mrs. Carmichael would have much the longer list," he said.
"Oh, you think so!"
"I know so."
Mrs. Twining tossed her head. The gloss was still on her dark hair,
whose gray threads had yet to come, later, in the Greenpoint days. She
was still, as the phrase goes, a fine figure of a woman. Her black eyes
had not lost their fire, nor her form its imposing fullness. She raised
herself a little from her chair, as she now spoke, and in her voice
there was the harshness that well fitted her bristling, aggressive mien.
"Oh! you _know_ so, do you?" she said, in hostile undertone. Then her
next words were considerably louder. "But _I_ happen to know, Francis
Twining, _Es_quire, who and what _I_ was when you took me from a
comfortable home to land me up here at the end of the world, where I'm
lucky if I can get hold of yesterday's newspaper to-morrow, and cross
over to the cars without leaving a shoe behind me in the mud!"
The least flush had tinged Twining's pale cheeks. He had looked very
steadily at his wife all through this speech. And when he now spoke, his
voice made Claire start. It did not seem his.
"You were a poor girl in a third-rate boarding-house, when I married
you," he said. "And the boarding-house was kept by relatives who
disliked and wanted to be rid of you. I don't see how you have fallen
one degree lower since you became my wife. But if you think that you
have so fallen, I beg that you will not forever taunt me with idle
sneers, of which I am sick to the soul!"
Mrs. Twining rose from her chair. Her dress was of some dark-red stuff,
and as the stronger light struck its woof the wrath of her knit brows
seemed to gain a lurid augment. She had grown pale, and a little mole,
just an inch or so to the left of her assertive nose, had got a new
clearness from this cause. She did not speak, at first, to her husband.
She addressed the fatigued and heated maid, who waited to hand Twining
his share of the doleful beefsteak--in this case a true burnt-offering.
"You can go into the kitchen, Mary Ann," she said, with tones that had a
kind of rumble, like the beginning of a large thunder-peal, before its
threat has become fury. "See to the range, you know. Dump all the coal
out, and then sift it."
Mary Ann went uneasily toward the door. She understood that this order
thinly masked a bluff command for her absence. Mrs. Twining slowly
turned her head, and followed the poor factotum with her kindled black
eyes till she had quitted the room. Then she looked with stern
directness at her husband.
"I've stood a good deal from you," she said, pitching her voice in a
much shriller key, "but I ain't going to stand _this_, Francis Twining,
and it's time I told you so."
Twining rose. He did not look at all angry. There was a weary distress
on his face, mixed with an unhabitual firmness.
"What have you stood?" he asked.
"Being browbeat by you, sir, because I see fit to talk out my mind, and
ain't the weak-spirited goose you'd like to have me!" retorted Mrs.
Twining, all rage and outcry.
"I don't want a quarrel," said Twining, calm as marble. "God knows I
don't, Jane! But the time has come for me to speak plainly. I have never
browbeaten you. It has been quite the opposite. I have already borne too
much from you for the sake of peace. But no peace springs from that
course. So now I mean to try another. You and I must live apart, since
we can't agree." He turned to Claire, at this point, and reached out one
hand, resting it on the girl's head. "Let our child choose which of us
she will go with," he added.
Claire started up, sprang to her father's side, and nestled herself
against him, catching one of his hands in both her own and drawing his
arm about her neck. She was trembling with what seemed sudden fear as
she looked up into his face.
"Father," she cried, "I'll go with _you_! I couldn't live alone with
Mother. If _you_ go, take me with you! Promise--please promise! Mother
isn't good to me a bit. I couldn't live alone with her! She is cross
nearly all the time, when you're not here, and she struck me yesterday,
and she often does it, and I didn't ever tell you before, because I knew
it would trouble you so to know!"
These words were spoken in a high, pleading, plaintive voice. The
child's sad little secret had been wrung from her by sheer terror of
desertion. There was no accusative resentment in her tones; she might
have gone on for a long time hiding the truth; it had leapt to her lips
now only in the shape of an impetuous argument against the dreaded
chance of being left behind, should her father's menace of departure
become fact. Mrs. Twining moved from her own side of the table to where
her husband and daughter stood. She looked persistently at Claire,
during this action, and had soon drawn very close to her.
"You sly young vixen!" she exclaimed. Her cry had a husky note, and she
raised one hand. It was plain that she meant wicked work to Claire.
Twining pushed Claire behind him, quick as thought, and seized his
wife's hand while it fell. He had grown white to the lips. His clasp was
not weak about the wrist which he still retained. He did not appear at
all like a man in a passion, but rather like one filled with the resolve
which gets new sinew from excitement.
"You shall never strike that child again." Then he released his wife's
wrist, and half turned, putting his arms round Claire, while she again
nestled at his side. "I will do all I can for you," he went on, "but
neither she nor I shall live with you after to-morrow. It was bad enough
to have you make things hard for me, but you shan't spoil her with your
own coarseness." The next moment he turned to Claire, wrapped her still
more fervently in both arms, and kissed her twice or thrice on the
uplifted forehead.
Mrs. Twining stood quite still, for a short while. She was watching her
husband intently. Something new in him had revealed itself to her; it
blunted the edge of her anger; she was unprepared for it. Personal
defiance in Twining might merely have quickened her own long-petted
sense of grievance, which had grown morbidly dear, as we know. But a
fresh experience fronted her; she found herself repelled, so to speak,
by the revolt of an insulted fatherhood.
It was a very serious rebellion, and she felt its force. Past
concessions from her husband gave the measure of his present mutiny. He
had never been humble to her, but he had yielded, and she had grown more
used than she realized to his pliant complaisance. This abrupt change
shocked her with an actual fright. Her ready little body-guard of taunts
and innuendoes fled her usual summons. The despot stood deserted; not a
janizary was left. She saw, in quick, startled perspective, her own
future, uncompanioned by the man whose supporting nearness her bitter
gibes had so often slighted. But apart from merely selfish causes, a
thrill of human regard for her child and the father of her child lent
fresh accent to alarm. It was like the tremor wrought in a slack
harp-string, or one rusty with disuse, but it was still a definite
vibration.
She succumbed awkwardly, like most overthrown tyrants. Tears would have
looked incongruous had they left the chill black of her eyes, just as
there are climes of so fixed a rigor that thaws rank in them as
phenomena. But her brows met in a perplexed frown that had no trace of
ire, and she made a flurried upward gesture with both hands, receding
several steps. When she spoke, which she promptly did, her native idiom
forgot the slight garb of change that marriage and nicer association had
lent it, and stood forth, stripped by agitation, in graceless nudity.
"Mercy me, Francis!" she exclaimed, "you ain't talking as if you was a
sane man at all! You'll quit your lawful wife, sir, 'cause she's boxed
her own young one's ears? Why, that child can put on the airs of any
six, when she's a mind to. I ain't punished her half enough. Do set down
and eat your supper and stop bein' a fool!"
These chronicled words have the effect of rather bald commonplace it is
true; but to the man and the child who heard them an apprehensive
whimper, a timorous dilation of the eyeball and a flurried quiver about
the severe mouth were accompaniments that held piercing significance.
Such tokens from their domestic autocrat meant surrender, and surrender
was hard for both Twining and Claire to join with past impressions of
rule and sway, of command and observance, from the very source which now
gave forth their direct opposites.
Both father and daughter still remained silent. Claire's head was still
nestling against his breast; Twining's arms still clasped her slight
frame, as before. Neither spoke. But Mrs. Twining soon spoke again, and
she moved toward the door as she did so.
"Oh, you won't set down, eh?" she inquired; and there was now a sullen
fright both in her manner and tone. "Very well. P'raps you'll eat your
supper when I'm gone. I've always heard crazy people must be humored.
Besides 'tisn't safe, with so many knives and forks round."
After that she left the room, going up stairs into the little hall above
the basement, where she could have seen her breath freeze if economic
reasons had not kept the lank, pendant gas-burner still unlighted.
She had beaten a positive retreat. Her exit had been a distinct
concession. Twining turned his gaze toward the vacant threshold after
she had passed it, as if he could not just realize the unwonted humility
of her leave-taking.
"Claire," he said, again kissing the child, while she yet clung to him,
"you should have told me before that your mother struck you. You should
have told me the first time she did it." He embraced her still more
closely. Since she was a baby he had always treasured her, and now that
defeat and disappointment dealt him such persistent strokes, his love
grew deeper with each disastrous year. Claire's presence in his life had
gained a precious worth from trouble; it was the star that brightened
with sweeter force against a deepening gloom.
He leaned down and slowly passed his lips along her silky hair, just
where its folds flowed off from one pale temple. "Oh, my little girl,"
he said, in a voice whose volume and feeling had both plainly
strengthened, "I hope that happy days are in store for you! I shall do
my best, darling, but if I fail don't blame me. Don't blame me!"
He appeared no longer to be addressing Claire. He had lifted his head.
Both his arms engirt her as previously, but his eyes, looking straight
before him, were sombre with meditation.
Claire gazed up into his face. "Father," she cried, "I shall be happy if
I am always with you! Don't look like that. Please don't. What does it
mean? I have never seen you so sad before. It frightens me. Father, you
are so strange and different." He smiled down at the child as her high,
pained appeal ended; but the smile soon fled again; a gloomy agitation
replaced it. She felt his clasping arms tremble.
"You cannot always have me," he answered. "I love you very much, my
little one, but some day I must leave you; my time will have come, and
it may come while your life is yet in its first flower. Then I want you
to be wiser than I. Listen to what I say. I am in a dark humor now, but
it will soon pass, for I can't help being cheerful, as you know; there's
a good deal more sun than shadow in me. But just now I am all shadow. I
feel as if I should never be successful, Claire. That is a queer word to
your young ears. Do you recollect, when I took you for that one day to
the country, last summer, how we set out to climb the large hill, and
were sure, at starting, that we should reach its top? But half way up we
grew tired and hot; there was no breeze, and the way was rough; so we
sat down, didn't we, and rested, and then went home? You have not
forgotten? Well, success means to do what you set out for, darling. It
means to climb the hill--not to get tired and go home. That is what
everybody is trying to do. But only a few of us ever reach the top. And
to reach the top means to have many good things--to be like the grand
people who were once Mrs. Carmichael's friends. Do you understand,
Claire?"
"Yes," said the child. Her lips were parted. A gloom had clouded the
blue of her eyes; they seemed almost black, and two unwonted gleams
pierced them. She was alarmed yet fascinated by the real sorrow in her
father's look, and by his unfamiliar speech, with its fervent speed and
bitter ring.
"I shall never gain the top of the hill, Claire!" Twining went on.
"Something tells me so now--to-night. To-morrow I shall be changed. I
shall turn hopeful again. I shall go climbing along, and pick myself up
stoutly if I stumble. But remember what I tell you to-night. In my
heart, little girl, there is a great fear. I am afraid I must leave you,
when I do die, poor and helpless. We are always helpless when we are
poor. But you must not lose courage. There is one thing a girl can
always do if she has beauty and wit, and you will have both. She can
marry. In the years of life left to me, I shall strain hard to make you
a lady. I am a gentleman. My father, and his father, and his father,
too, were all gentlemen. It is in your blood to be a lady, and a lady
you shall be. But your mother"--Here he paused. Even his raw sense of
wrong, and the precipitate reasoning native to all passion, forbade his
completing the last sentence.
"I know what you mean, Father," said Claire, who had not lost the
significance of a word, and whose mind would have grasped subtler
discourse than the present. She spoke falteringly, and turned her eyes
toward the deserted table; and then, with her shaken, tragic little
voice, she lapsed into the prose of things, slipping over that edge
between the emotional and the ordinary whose unwilling junction makes
the clash that we like to call comedy.
"Father," she said, "please sit down and eat your supper. It's getting
cold. Please do!"
This is not at all an index of Claire's thoughts, for they were then in
a storm of dread and misgiving; but she shrank from the changed aspect
of one known and loved in moods widely different. She seized, as if by a
fond instinct, the most ready means of re-securing her father as she had
at first found him and had always afterward prized him.
But her attempt was vain. Twining's arms only tightened about her frail
form. Like all with whom outburst is rare, his perturbation worked
toward a climax; it would brook no repression. There are craters that
keep the peace for many decades, but in spite of that their stored lava
will not be cheated of the eruptive chance.
So it was with Twining. He trembled more than ever, and his cheeks were
now quite hueless. "I want you to do all that I shall leave undone,
Claire!" he exclaimed, with voluble swiftness. "I want you to conquer a
high place among men and women. Be cool and wary, my daughter. Don't
live to serve self only, but push your claims, enforce your rights,
refuse to be thrust back, never make false steps, put faith in the few
and doubt the many. Remember what I am saying. You will need to recall
it, for you must start (God help you, little one!) with all the world
against you! Yes, all the world against you" ...
A sudden gasp ended Twining's words. His embrace of Claire relaxed, and
he staggered toward the sofa, which was just behind him. As he sank upon
it, his eyes closed and his head fell sideways. One hand fluttered about
his throat, and he seemed in straits for breath. Claire was greatly
terrified. She thought that to be death which was merely a transient
pause of vitality. The rough gust will bow the frailer tree, and
Twining, weary in mind and body, had made too abrupt drafts upon a
temperament far from robust.
The child uttered a piercing cry. It summoned the proscribed Mary Ann
from exile in the neighboring kitchen; it was heard and heeded by Mrs.
Twining, aloof in some remoter chamber. Yet, before either had reached
the scene of Claire's disquietude, her father had already pressed the
warm hand which sought his cold one, and had looked at her with a gaze
that wore the glow of recognition.
"Claire," he soon said, brokenly, and with faint utterance, "I--I was
unwell for a moment--that is all. Here, little girl, kiss me, and then
give me a glass of water."
"Yes, Father," said Claire. Her response showed a joyous relief. She
knelt beside him, and put her lips to his. It was like the good-night
kiss she always gave him, except that she made it longer than of old.
And then she rose to get the glass of water, hearing footsteps approach.
As she poured the liquid, with unsteady fingers, a partial echo of her
father's impetuous enjoinder swept through her mind. "I shall never
forget this night," she told herself. Her silent prophecy proved true.
She never did forget.