Twining's menace was not carried out. There was no actual reconciliation
between husband and wife, and yet matters slowly rearranged themselves.
The domestic machinery, being again set moving, went at first in a lame,
spasmodic way, as though jarred and strained through all its wheel-work.
But by degrees the old order of things returned. And yet a marked
change, in one respect at least, was always afterward evident. Mrs.
Twining had received a clear admonition, and she was discreet enough
permanently to regard it. She still dealt in her former slurs and
innuendoes; the leopard could not change its spots; no such radical
reformation was naturally to be expected. But Twining had put forth his
protest; he had shown very plainly that his endurance had its limits,
and through all the years that followed, his wife never lost sight of
this vivid little fact. She had been seriously frightened, and the
fright left its vibration of warning as long as she and her husband
dwelt under the same roof. Her sting had by no means been extracted, but
its point was blunter and its poison less irritant. She never again
struck Claire. She was sometimes very imperious to her daughter, and
very acrimonious as well. But in her conduct there was now a sombre
acknowledgment of curtailed authority,--an under-current of concession,
occasionally rather faint, it is true, yet always operative.
During the next year the family deserted One-Hundred-and-Twelfth Street
for a new place of abode. Twining received a few extra hundreds as
earnest of shadowy thousands promised him by a glib-tongued rogue who
was to appall the medical world with a wondrous compound that must soon
rob half the diseases known to pathology of their last terrors. The
elixir was to be "placed handsomely on the market," and toward this
elegant enterprise poor Twining gave serious aid. For the lump of
savings that went from him, however, he was paid only a tithe of his
rash investment. One day he learned that the humane chemist had fled
from the scene of his proposed benignities, and a little later came the
drear discovery that his miraculous potion was merely an unskillful
blending of two or three common specifics with as many popular nervines.
Meanwhile the halcyon promise of bettered fortunes had induced Twining
to secure easier quarters. For several months he set his household gods
within apartments on the second floor of a shapely brownstone residence
in a central side-street. This was really a decisive move toward greater
social importance. The very tone of his upholstery bespoke a distinct
rise in life. There was not a hair-cloth sofa in his pretty suite of
chambers. The furniture was tufted and modish; one or two glowing grates
replaced the dark awkwardness of stoves; draughts were an abolished
evil; to sup on burnt beefsteak had grown a shunned memory, since the
family now dined at six o'clock each evening in a lower room, where
they had a small table all to themselves, and ate a repast served in
courses with a distinct air of fashion, if not always cooked after the
loftier methods. Here they met other groups at other small tables, and
bowed to them with the bland nod of co-sharers in worldly comfort. It
was all a most noteworthy change for the Twinings, and its effect upon
Mrs. Twining was no less obvious than acute. She seemed to clutch the
new favors of fate with a mingled greed and distrust. She was like one
who crushes thirstily between his lips a luscious fruit, won by theft,
and thought to be watched with the intent of quick seizure.
She had already quite lost faith in anything like the permanence of her
husband's good fortune. "I'd better make hay while the sun shines," she
would exclaim, with a burst of laughter that had, as usual, no touch of
mirth in it. "Lord knows when it'll end. I'm sure I hope never. Don't
think I'm croaking. Gracious me, no! But even the Five Points won't seem
so bad, after this. They say every dog has his day, don't they, Francis?
So, all right; if mine's a short day, I'll be up and doing while it
lasts."
She was undoubtedly up and doing. She carried her large frame with a
more assertive majesty; she aired one or two fresh gowns with a loud
ostentation; she had a little quarrel with a fellow-lodger of her own
sex about the prevailing fashion in bonnets, and said so many personal
things during the contest that her adversary, who was a person with
nerves, retired in tearful disarray. On more than one Sunday morning she
induced her husband to walk with her along Fifth Avenue and "see the
churches come out." At such times she would lean upon his arm, grandly
indifferent to the fact that her stature overtopped his own, and stare
with her severe black eyes at all the passing phases of costume. It is
probable that the pair made a very grotesque picture on these occasions,
since all that implied refinement in the man's face and demeanor must
have acquired a fatal stamp of insignificance beside the woman's
pretension of carriage and raw spruceness of apparel. But Mrs. Twining
was making her hay, as she has told us, while the sun shone, and it is
hardly strange that she should not be critical as to the exact quality
of her crop. A good deal of rough experience in the woes of dearth and
drouth had, naturally, not made her a fastidious harvester.
Claire, meanwhile, had begun to feel as if she dwelt on quite a new sort
of planet. Her environment had lost every trace of its former dullness.
Its neutral shades had freshened into brilliant and exciting tints.
Little Mrs. Carmichael, with her hoard of memories stowed away like old
brocades in a scented chest, had herself faded off into a memory as dim
as these. Claire had of late become one of the pupils in a large,
well-reputed school, where she met girls of all ages and characters, but
seemingly of only a single social rank. The academy was superintended by
a magnificent lady in chronic black corded-silk, whose rich rustle was
heard for a half minute before she entered each of her various
class-rooms and held bits of whispered converse with the instructresses
under her serene sway. Her name was Mrs. Arcularius, and its fine
rhythmical polysyllable seemed to symbolize the dignity of its owner's
slow walk, the majesty of her arched nose and gold eye-glasses, and the
white breadth of her forehead, from which the gray tresses were rolled
backward in high solidness, with quite a regal effect of hair-dressing.
This lady was the direct contra-type of Mrs. Carmichael. It was widely
recorded of her that she had once been a gentlewoman of independent
wealth, had chanced upon adverse times, and had for this reason become
the proprietress of a school. But she had made her grand friends pay the
penalty of her misfortunes; she had acquired the skill of using them as
an advertisement of her venture at self-support. She had not gone up to
One-Hundred-and-Twelfth Street and mourned their loss; she had stayed in
Twenty-Third Street, and suffered their children, little and big, to
come unto her. She had at first graciously allowed herself to be pitied
for her reverses, but she had always possessed the art of handing back
their patronage to those who proffered it, in the wholly altered form of
a gracious condescension from herself. This is a very clever thing to
do; it is a thing which they alone know how to do who know how to fall
from high places with a self-saving rebound; and Mrs. Arcularius, who
was a decidedly ignorant woman, was also a marvelously clever one. She
knew rather less, in a strictly educational sense, than poor,
unsuccessful Mrs. Carmichael. She had been a friend of Mrs. Carmichael's
in the latter's gladsome days, but she was now not even aware that her
old associate was teaching school anywhere. Everybody was aware, on the
other hand, that Mrs. Arcularius was teaching school, and just where she
was teaching it. Poverty had crushed one; it had stimulated the other.
Mrs. Arcularius was now exceedingly particular as regarded her
visiting-book. She was a conspicuous figure at the most select
receptions. Whether the fact that she presided over a fashionable school
had made her lose caste or no, she chose secretly to believe that it
had, and for this reason let her voluminous black silk robes rustle only
in the most irreproachable assemblages.
She greatly desired that her pupils should all bear the sacred sign of
aristocratic parentage. She did not object to the offspring of
struggling plutocrats; for she was wise in her generation, and had seen
more than one costly-laden camel squeeze itself through a needle's eye
straight into the kingdom of the blessed. But she had strong objections
to having her school lose tone. Above all things, this was her dread and
abhorrence.
And therefore she had been covertly distressed by the application of
Twining for his daughter's admission. She had "placed" him before he had
spoken three words to her. She always "placed" with equal speed
everybody whom she met for the first time. He was a decayed foreigner,
and she abominated decayed foreigners. He was a person who wanted to
make his common little daughter profit by the prestige of her
establishment, and she had a like distaste for all persons of this
class. She looked at Claire's attire, and inwardly shivered. The girl
had on a frock cut and trimmed in a way that struck her observer as
positively satanic. The lovely natural wave of her hair had been
tortured by her mother into long ringlets, made sleek and firm under the
stiffening spell of sugar-and-water, and pendant about her shoulders
with a graceless vertical primness. But the head and front of the poor
child's offending was, in the sight of her new critic, a hat which Mrs.
Twining esteemed a triumph of taste, which she had bought as a great
bargain the day before, and which was half-smothered, from crown to
brim, in small white roses, each bearing a little movable glass bead
that was meant to imitate a dew-drop.
Mrs. Arcularius decided, however, to receive Claire as one of her
pupils. There had been a falling-off, of late, in their list. A good
many sweet girl-graduates had gone off at her last commencement day.
Besides, it was absurd to suppose that any flock could be kept from an
incidental black sheep or so. More than this, there was a fascinating
intelligence about Claire's face, with its two dark-blue stars of eyes,
and a musical sorcery in the child's timid tones when she spoke, that no
_diablerie_ of millinery could dispel.
It soon proved that Claire's fellow-scholars were far from sharing this
latter opinion. She was received among them with haughty coolness,
varied by incidental giggles. She suffered three days of silent torture,
and at their end told her father, in a passion of tears, that he must
take her away from Mrs. Arcularius's school. The girls there all
despised her and laughed at her; hardly one of them had yet even spoken
to her; they seemed to think her beneath them; it was horrible; she
could not stand it; it was just as if she had some disease and they were
all afraid of catching it from her.
"There is one girl," sobbed Claire, with her arms round her father's
neck and her head on his dear, kindly breast, "that I know I shall slap
or throw something at if I stay. She has red hair and very white skin,
with little freckles all over it, and she is quite fat. She wears a
different dress every day, and it's always something handsome but queer
to look at.... I heard her tell another girl that all her clothes came
from Paris. She brings two bananas for lunch, and long cakes spread over
with chocolate, that spirt out something soft and yellow, like custard,
when she bites into them, and soil her fingers.... Well, Father, that
girl sits near me, and she is always making fun of me behind my back,
and whispering things about me to the others that make them burst out
laughing and watch me from the corners of their eyes.... Of course this
is only at recess, but at all times, Father, I can feel how they are
thinking that I have no right, no business among them.... And perhaps I
haven't. Oh, Father, I want to be a lady as much as you want me to be
one, but ... isn't there some other way of learning how? If you'll only
take me from that dreadful place, I'll ... I'll go anywhere else you
please!"
Indignant, yet pierced with sympathy for his darling, Twining promised
her that she should go back no more to Mrs. Arcularius's.
Claire kissed him, and then put her wet cheek against his. But an
instant later she lifted her head. She had thought of her mother, who
was paying one of their fellow-boarders a visit that evening, and at
this very moment was stating to her hostess, with a sort of saturnine
braggadocio, that Claire's new school "ought to be a regular first-class
one, and no mistake, for it was going to cost a regular first-class kind
of a price."
"But Mother?" said Claire, in anxious query, "what will _she_ say,
Father?"
"Never mind what your mother will say, my dear," answered Twining, in
his gentle undertone. And Claire remembered a certain night in
One-Hundred-and-Twelfth Street,--a night which she had never really
forgotten, as we know, and whose incident was fated sharply to revisit
her through many an eventful year yet unlived.
But Claire's tears were scarcely dried before she regretted the promise
won from her father, and asked him to revoke it. Her young face looked
pale and resolute as she did so. Her brief burst of weakness had passed.
The ambition to seize and hold any near means of advancement was already
no weak impulse in her youthful being. As it afterward struck the great
key-note of her life, and became the source of every discord or harmony
which that life was to contain, so now its force had begun to stir
secret centres and to prelude the steady influence which must soon impel
and sway her.
"Let me try a little while longer, Father," she said, standing near him
and holding his hand. Her head was slightly thrown backward; her mouth
was grave and firm. She was so slender and fragile that this solemn mood
might have made one think, as he regarded her, of a lily that had found
some art to cast aside its droop, while all its lightsome traits of stem
or petal still remained.
"Yes, I mean it, Father," she continued, with a very deep seriousness.
"I have begun to climb the hill, and I shan't get tired so soon and sit
down to rest. You told me I must not, and I won't. I do not want to sit
down at all until I shall reach the top.... But you can help me, if you
will; you can make it easier for me." She pressed his hand. "_Will_ you
make it easier, Father?" she said.
"Yes!" he answered. He spoke the word without knowing what she meant. He
could have spoken no other at this moment, with her eyes fixed on him
like that, and her clinging hand tense about his own. He loved her so
well that he would have faced any peril to save her from any harm. She
was his cheer, his pride, his hope, his happiness. He thought her the
most beautiful little girl in all the world. He had forgotten to tell
himself that her mother made her look a guy in seeking to make her more
pretty. To him she was always his innocent, blameless idol--his Claire,
whom he had named after his own dead mother, known only in the
idealizing years of early childhood. He never looked into her face
without feeling his heart beat a trifle quicker. He had been in love
with her from the time when he first held her, a new-born baby, and he
was in love with her still. It was a love which had the best glow and
thrill of those dramatic passions that make our tales, our tragedies,
and our epics, only that by absence of the one fevered sentiment knit
and kinned with these, it so gained in purity and unselfishness as to
strip from all hint of over-praise the holier epithet of divine.
Naturally enough came Twining's afterthought.
"What is it that I can do for you, Claire?" he asked. "How _can_ I make
it easier?"
"In this way, Father. Listen. I want to dress differently at school. I
want to wear another frock--I know which one--I am afraid you wouldn't
recollect which it is if I told you. But it is not the pink merino which
I have on now. Pink merino is not nice. And my new hat with the white
roses is not nice, either. I didn't think of this till I noticed how the
other girls dressed at Mrs. Arcularius's. Then I remembered that mine
was something very like the style in which Mrs. Halloran used to dress
her little girl, Bridget, every Sunday. You do recollect Mrs. Halloran,
don't you Father? Her husband used to work on one of the Harlem boats,
and they lived down near the river in that small red house, and there
was a bee-hive in the garden, and a horrid bull-dog that used to jump
out of his kennel if he heard the least noise, and bark so, and try to
break his chain. But little Bridget used to have pink kid shoes, though,
to match her dress, and very proud they made her. And her hair was
curled in that stiff way, just as Mother curls mine. Now, Father, I want
you to let me brush all the curl out of my hair except what it has of
its own free choice, and to let me just tie it in a bunch behind with a
dark ribbon, and to let me wear my brown bonnet, which is rather shabby,
perhaps, though I don't mind that. And if Mother cares to buy me
anything new, I want you to go with us--say some Saturday evening when
the stores keep open--and to let me use my own taste in choosing quiet
and pretty things. But that will be afterward. I'd like you to think,
just now, only about to-morrow, you know. I'd like"--But there Twining
stopped her with a kiss. He was smiling, but his eyes were moist.
"You shan't dress like little Bridget Halloran any longer, Claire,
darling," he said. "I'll see to it as soon as your mother returns."
He kept his word. When Mrs. Twining reappeared he sent Claire out of the
room. She knew a storm was coming; she was glad to be away while it
broke and raged. She went as far away as possible, into her own bedroom,
two chambers off, closing the intermediate doors. Once, while waiting
here, she heard the smothered sound of a high, wrathful voice. It was
her mother's, no doubt. But she knew that however hot the conflict, her
father had made up his mind to be victor.
And he was. The next day Claire went to Mrs. Arcularius's without her
white roses or her pink merino.
"You look for all the world like a charity-child," her mother said to
her, in gruff leave-taking. "Still, I don't s'pose it matters any. You
might as well practice for a short spell beforehand."
Claire's altered raiment produced an immense sensation among her
classmates. Even several of the teachers showed signs of surprise. The
new plainness of her attire brought out her unquestioned beauty, as
gaudier and ill-blended vestments had before marred and obscured it. The
back-drawn effect of her chestnut tresses, which were still streaked
here and there with sunny threads, could not be doubted as charming even
by the most prejudiced caviler. Her brow and temples were shown in their
full purity of moulding, and the eyes beneath them gained poetic
tenderness from this lovely exposure. She was not yet a girl clothed at
all after the dainty manner of the girls about her, but she was at least
no longer spoiled and hampered by unbecoming and vulgar garments.
Everybody felt this promptly, and Claire herself soon recognized, by an
intuition which always stood vassal to her singularly quick perceptions,
that everybody had felt it.
This was to be a memorable day with her. It may seem trivial to employ
so august a term when dealing with one yet on the threshold of our truly
vital episodes, but, after all, there is a reality about the chagrins
and victories of childhood which is none the less potent while both
exist because both must shortly drop into shadow before harsher pangs
and warmer transports. Claire had resolved to be a kind of miniature
heroine if occasion should ask her to play that part; and she had a
conviction, based on very fair grounds of reasoning, that some such
demand might be made of her before the school-exercises for that day
should reach their end.
Nor was she wrong. The recitations began, and were continued under
various teachers until the twelve o'clock recess. Claire had suffered
hitherto from the embarrassments of her surroundings, as regarded any
frank assertion of what she knew and just how she knew it. But to-day
she had conquered embarrassment; she was on her mettle, as the phrase
goes; it was the main aim of her meditated plan to let herself be
browbeaten in no particular, and the excitement born of this resolve had
put her best faculties into nimble readiness.
Her understanding was of the quality beloved by instructors; it had a
prehensile trait; it seized things and clung to them. The alarm of Mrs.
Carmichael lest her pupil should unmask her elegant deficiencies had
been no unfounded one. This lady's tuition of Claire had been but a
series of suggestions, each of which the girl had rapidly tracked to its
lair of remoter truth. Mrs. Carmichael had pointed her the path--quite
often, it must be owned, with a somewhat faltering finger--and she had
glided whither it led at a pace no less swift than secure. This was
especially true of the French language, for which her aptitude was
phenomenal, and which, under new conditions of instruction, she soon
almost mastered. As a matter of mere fact, she had been placed, at
present, among her inferiors in knowledge. She was much more advanced
than the class of superb young misses who had wounded her with their
callow disdain. And to-day she made this tellingly evident. Her answers
came placid, self-assured, unhesitating. She sat, all through the
morning, with hands folded together in her lap, and with looks that paid
no seeming heed to any of her associates. Some of them were extremely
stupid. They gave stammering responses, or rattled off the wrong thing
with fatal glibness, or preserved that stolid silence which is the most
naked candor of ignorance. The freckled girl, who ate bananas, cut an
especially dull figure. Through some novel freak of parental indulgence
she had been permitted to wear, this morning, a ring of clustered
sapphires and diamonds, very beautiful and precious; and this she turned
and re-turned, while puckering her forehead, whenever a question was put
to her, as though the fair bauble might prove talismanic and show her
some royal road out of learning's tangled mazes. No one appeared to
think her replies particularly blundering or fatuous. Her ring, and her
last new Parisian gown, and the luxurious prospect of her approaching
lunch, seemed to invest even her weak wit with prestige. Claire felt it
to be somehow in the air that this maiden's mental poverty should
receive nothing except respectful sympathy from her fellows. Fortune
does not shower every known gift on one favorite; that seemed to be
tacitly understood. When she floundered in a French verb, or came to
dire grief in compound fractions, the imbecility provoked no laughter;
it bore a sort of gilded pardonableness, like the peccadillo of a
princess.
When recess came, Claire had distinguished herself. Everybody was
convinced that her powers of mind were much above the common. Two of the
teachers, both ladies of gentle bearing and kindly disposition, came to
her side, and cheered her with a few words of complimentary
encouragement. The grand Mrs. Arcularius did not come; she was
elsewhere, in her elegant little reception-room; she had not yet heard
of her new pupil's handsome exploits. But if she had already heard of
them she would have paid Claire no congratulations. Good scholarship,
she would have argued, with splendid egotism, was in this case a form of
gratitude to which she was of course amply entitled, since she had
allowed Twining the honor of seeing her autograph on his daughter's
future receipted bills.
During the first portion of the recess hour Claire ate her modest lunch,
choking it down with strong reluctance. But one teacher now remained in
the large class-room, and she was closely occupied in the examination of
some written exercises. The girls were gathered here and there, among
the files of desks, in whispering groups. They were all discussing
Claire; she herself knew it; an instinct told her so. She was very much
excited, but outwardly quite calm. The girls no longer stared at her;
not a single giggle now broke the air; they had been impressed,
startled, and perhaps a little awed as well; their pariah had turned out
a sort of notability; she had clad herself in a sudden armor of cool
defiance against impudence. They might have regarded her lately-revealed
endowments as a queerness collateral with the eccentric quality of her
clothing. But the pink robe, the brittle-looking curls, the beflowered
hat, had vanished and left them no chance for such associative
ridicule. There had been a transformation, abrupt and baffling. Claire
was not going to be their butt; of this there was no doubt; she must
either be accepted as an equal, or avoided as an inferior; she could no
longer hold the position of a target for their covert raillery.
The freckled girl, of the sumptuous mid-day meal, however, preserved
opposite opinions. Her name was Ada Gerrard, and her family was one of
great wealth and distinction. Her elder sister, a mindless blonde with
creamy skin and exuberant figure, had made a notable English marriage,
having wedded no less a potentate than the young Marquis of Monogram,
heir of a renowned ducal house. Miss Ada was a leader in her way, and
she felt keenly disappointed by the unforeseen turn of affairs. She had
anticipated prodigious fun out of the new scholar. She was by nature
cruel and arrogant, and she was now affected as some feline creature
that has been cheated of the prey it has meant to maul and maim.
Her reddish-hazel eyes, that showed so little white as to look like two
large beads of clouded amber, and were fringed with scant lashes of
lighter red, kept up a persistent scrutiny of Claire. She was sitting
not far away from the latter, who caught, now and then, a waft of the
delicate violet perfume which exhaled from her fine foreign apparel. She
was occupied with her epicurean repast, whose dainties she devoured with
a solemn gluttony; but this did not prevent her from keeping up a little
fusillade of whispers to a friend on whom she had bestowed one or two
bites of luscious cake as a mark of peculiar clemency.
The converse was at first low-toned. Claire had finished her brief
refreshment. She had opened a book, and maintained at least the
semblance of being engaged in its contents. Suddenly she heard Ada
Gerrard speak these words, in a voice lifted above her former key,
though doubtless meant solely for her companion's ears:
"I don't care _how_ much she knows. She's a common little thing, and _I_
wouldn't notice her if she got on her knees and begged me to."
Claire waited a few seconds, with head lowered above her book. She
trembled while she so waited. The tremor was half from anger, half from
intimidation. She felt, in every fibre of her being, the coarseness of
this speech, but through her sensitive soul had shot a pang of false
shame, dealt by the piercing sense of contrast between her own humble
state and the probable grandeur and comfort of life which had fed Ada
Gerrard's present superciliousness. But anger conquered. She ceased to
tremble, and closed her book. Then she rose, quietly, and faced her
classmate. It may have been that the generations of gentlewomen from
which, on her father's side, she had sprung, helped to nerve and steady
her now; since the primal source of all aristocracy is a cogent
self-assertion, and those races alone gain heights overbrowing their
kind whose first founders have had the will and vigor to push forward
resisted claims.
Everybody saw her rise. It flashed through the little throng, in an
instant, that something had spurred her into a course of retaliation. At
least fifteen pairs of eager eyes were leveled upon her pale face. But
she regarded Ada Gerrard only; and when she spoke, with enough clearness
to be heard in all parts of the room, her first words were addressed
strictly to that special offender.
"You say that you will not notice me," Claire began, "and yet you say it
so loudly that I can hear you, and thus you very plainly contradict
yourself; or, in other words, you try to attract my attention by
speaking a falsehood."
Here she paused. A dead silence ensued. Many bewildered looks were
exchanged. The presiding teacher stopped her task, and sat with a gaze
of puzzled alarm fixed upon this resolute young combatant. Ada Gerrard
flushed crimson, and ceased to discuss her savory confections.
Claire's voice quivered as she now proceeded, but she quickly controlled
this perturbed sign: "I do not think there is much chance of my begging
you on my knees to notice me," she said. "But I might be tempted to take
such a way of begging that you would try and help me to forget, as long
as I remain here, how I have had the ill-luck of being thrown near
anyone so unkind, so impudent, and so vulgar as yourself."
Ada Gerrard sprang to her feet as the last calm word sounded from
Claire's lips. She had clenched both of her plump hands, and there was a
wrathful scowl on her face. Several titters were heard from her
companions; they seemed to sting her; it was impossible for her to fail
in perceiving that she had met an adversary of twice her own prowess.
She knew to which side the sympathy had veered; all her imposing
superiority in the way of dress, of diet, of home-splendor, of titled
kindred, were momentarily as nothing beside Claire's placid antagonism.
She was only an ugly girl in an ugly rage, who had behaved insolently
and been rebuked with justice; while Claire, pale, unflinching, wholly
in the right and wholly aware of it, her drawbacks of uncouth costume
no longer present, her beauty a fact beyond dispute, her intelligence a
recent discovery and a sharp surprise, stood clad with the dignity of
easy and complete conquest.
Ada Gerrard suddenly burst into tears. They were very irate tears; there
was not the least tincture of remorse or shame in them. She flung
herself back into her chair, and covered her face for several minutes
while she wept.
Claire watched her, tranquilly, for a little while. Then she sat down
again and reopened her book. An intense silence reigned, broken by the
sobs of Ada Gerrard. Claire leaned her head on her hand, feigning abrupt
absorption in the page that she regarded, and feigning it very well. But
her mind was in a secret whirl, now. She was mutely, but impetuously
asking herself: "Will they think I was right? Will they take my part?
Will they treat me any more kindly, or just as before?"
These silent, pathetic queries were fated to receive a speedy answer.
Before the school hours of that same day had ended, the ostracism which
had so wrung poor Claire's spirit was in a measure ended likewise. Less
than a week had elapsed before she was on friendly terms with a number
of her classmates. A little adverse clique soon shaped itself against
her. Ada Gerrard, fiercely unforgiving, headed this hostile faction; its
remaining members were a few stanch personal adherents who had never
been able to resist the dazzling fascination of Miss Gerrard's toilets
and lunches. But this opposing element was not actively inimical.
Claire's party had the strength of multitude and the courage of its
opinions. Still, its members were by no means ardent devotees; they
sometimes hurt her with the sly stab of patronage, and they often gave
her furtively to understand that her claims upon their favor were of a
sort which they practically recognized without theoretically approving.
It would be hard to define just how they conveyed this impression. And
yet Claire frequently felt its weight, like that of some vague tyranny
which offers no tangible excuse for revolt. She could neither realize
nor estimate the force with which she had been thrown into contact. Her
years were yet too few, her experience was yet too limited; nor was the
force manifest in active strength at Mrs. Arcularius's school, a narrow
enough theatre for its exercise, and one where its full-grown momentum
must of necessity dwindle into something like mere juvenile parody.
Claire was yet to learn with how much rank haste its evil growth had
sprung up in the big metropolis outside, thwarting and clogging any pure
development of what has been called the republican idea, and making us
sometimes bitterly wonder if the great dead philosophers were not
tricked, after all, by wills-o'-the-wisp no less lovely than elusive.
But there were a few girls who met Claire on a perfectly equal footing,
and left from their intercourse, at all times, the least frosty sparkle
of condescension. Some of these may or may not consciously have
undertaken their roles. But with one, past doubt, and for excellent
reasons, the kindly impulse was in every way spontaneous. The name of
this pupil was Sophia Bergemann. She professed a deep fondness for
Claire, and it was evidently sincere. She belonged among Mrs.
Arcularius's tolerated plutocrats. Her father was a German brewer who
had made a very large fortune out of lager-beer, and who dwelt in
Hoboken, where he had built an immense house on spacious grounds. It was
said that the lawns were adorned with statues in bronze and marble, and
that the main drawing-room of the mansion was frescoed with a design
representing Germany offering a tankard of foaming beer to Columbia, in
colossal sociability. But the latter statement may have been only the
caustic invention of Sophia's foes. She was stoutly disapproved by the
conservative element, and this fact had helped to make her so warm a
supporter of Claire. Being at daggers drawn with Ada Gerrard, she
naturally hailed Claire's public rebuke with rapture, and immediately
became her stanch ally.
"I was afraid you'd stay meek and mild right straight along, just as you
began," she afterward confessed. "Somehow you looked as if you hadn't
got any spunk. And I do like spunk. I believe in it." This article of
faith Sophia had several times frankly verified. She had once pulled the
ear of her fellow-pupil, and again narrowly escaped expulsion by
slapping another's face. She had a buxom figure, a broad-blown
countenance, nearly as round as a moon at the full, solid cheeks of
constant vivid coloring, and hair so yellow that its keen tint blent
with her brilliant complexion in producing the effect of an expensive
wax doll enlarged and animated. She was drearily stupid at all her
lessons, rivaling Ada Gerrard as the regnant ignoramus of the academy.
Her gestures were painfully awkward; her walk was a cumbrous prance; she
seemed incapable of seating herself without an elastic bounce. She grew
very fond of Claire, as weeks went on, and gave her repeated
invitations to pass a portion of the summer holidays at the grand
Hoboken abode.
But before the summer holidays arrived, Claire had left Mrs.
Arcularius's school for good. Twining had awakened to one more dismayed
perception of having been grossly duped; the reed on which he had leaned
had snapped beneath him; prompt retrenchments became inevitable; his
poor ventured thousands were dissolved, as a last ironical sort of
ingredient, in the worthless elixir.
For a long time his affairs stood miserably involved. His innocent share
in a matter of imposture and chicanery was misconstrued and sharply
censured by his employers. He was discharged from his clerkship, and put
face to face with the worst threats of need. Mrs. Twining, forced to
resign her briefly-worn robes of ease for the old garb of drudgery,
spared no zeal in proving herself not to have been a false prophetess of
disaster.
"I ain't a bit surprised," she would declare, with one of her thin, acid
laughs. "Mercy, no! Don't mind me. I was prepared for it, Francis. So
here we are over in Jersey City, and a pretty shabby part of it, too!
Oh, well, it's better'n keeping a peanut-stand, anyhow. You'll bring me
there, some day; you're bound to. I ain't eaten a peanut in ever so
long. I'm saving my taste for 'em."
Twining secretly writhed under these thrusts. His meagre stock of money
was slipping from him daily. But he was still cheerful. The tough
texture of his optimism still refused to be rent. A few more years, and
its severance must come, warp and woof, but as yet the sturdy fibres
held good against every strain.
He secured another position at last. The salary, smaller than before,
was at least regular. But the quarters in Jersey City, though humble and
restricted, made too strong an annual drain upon his impoverished purse.
After two years of pitiful struggle, the family removed to Greenpoint.
Claire was then sixteen. But before this new change occurred, Twining's
evil genius had again tempted him, and with the usual malign result. He
trusted a fellow-man once more, and once more he was confounded. This
time it was of necessity a much smaller hazard. Only three hundred
dollars went, though millions were of course to be ultimately realized.
One day a sallow, elderly man, with eyes bleared from dissipation and
clothes that hung glazed round a bony figure, fell in with poor Twining,
and talked to him glibly about a miraculous patent. It concerned the
giving of signals on railroads by an electrical process. It was to
effect a sublime security against all future accidents of travel by
land. A few primary steps were to be taken before this marvel should
obtain the indorsements of eager capitalists. The sallow little man, in
three interviews, during which he cleverly contrived not to smell too
strongly of liquor, convinced Twining that he was a neglected genius.
The money was given him, and a receipt for it was signed with a hand
whose insecurity passed for grateful emotion. But this origin might have
been ascribed with more truth to the rheumy moisture that filled the
recipient's eyes when he placed a plump roll of bills within his
threadbare waistcoat-pocket. Twining never saw him after that eventful
conference. He died about three weeks later of delirium tremens in a
city hospital. It was his seventh attack.
This fresh blow leveled Twining. Neither his wife nor his child ever
knew of it. But it struck into him a sort of terror at himself from
which he never recovered. He had trusted humanity for the last time. He
still remained amiable, genial, gentle. But despair had turned his heart
to lead. Both Claire and Mrs. Twining saw the change, though ignorant of
its cause. The Greenpoint epoch had now begun.
In Jersey City Claire had been sent to a public school. Here she had met
genuine daughters of the people. Some of them were almost in rags;
others represented thrifty home-surroundings; all were very different
from the sleek children of wealth and caste whom she had known at Mrs.
Arcularius's. At first she suffered torments of disgust. But by degrees
the slow, continual pressure of habit wore away the edge of her
distaste, as a constant sea-wash will blunt the rim of a shell. She
absorbed herself in study, made rapid progress, and learned much that a
fashionable school would have left untaught.
Her fastidiousness in a measure vanished. A good deal of the old
acquired nicety stayed, but her age was impressionable, and ceaseless
contact with rough manners and crude opinions wrought its certain
effect. She was now rubbing against taffetas, and before it had been
against silk. She was hearing the boorish laugh and the slovenly idiom
to-day, when yesterday she had heard the mirth of culture and the phrase
of decorum. Her young life had thus far been a strange discord of
opposing influences. She felt this in periods of half-bewildered
retrospect, and sometimes with moods of passionate melancholy as well.
The intense contrast of the changes through which she had passed,
disheartened while it stimulated her. She meant to try her best; she
wanted with all her energy to gain secure and permanent elevation; she
had no intent of sitting down and resting before she reached the top of
the hill, for her father's heated words of admonition and entreaty yet
swept their insistent echo through her spirit.
But the hill seemed a sheer steep, defiant of any foothold. If she was
eager to ascend, loath to rest, full of splendid activity, what mattered
these favoring conditions when circumstances turned them to mockery?
They were at Greenpoint, now. They had been there three years. Claire
was nineteen. Her school days had ended. They could no longer afford to
keep a servant; she had to help her mother in all menial domestic
offices. She had to bake, to sweep, to wash, to sew. She hated the
place; she hated the life. But she saw her father's hidden despair, and
so hid her own. More than this, she trembled at certain signs that his
health was failing. He would have seizures of sudden weakness at morning
or night; she feared to ask him whether they also occurred when he was
absent at his business, lest he might suspect the acute nature of her
anxiety, and so acquire new cause for worriment.
She loved him more than ever. The dread of his loss would steal with
ghastly intrusion along her dreams at night. She thought of her grim,
acrimonious mother, and said to herself: 'If he should die! It would be
terrible! I should be worse than alone!' Every kiss that she gave him
took a more clinging fondness.
He never spoke of his future. He never spoke of hers. She understood
why. Each always met the other with a smile. There was something
beautiful in their reciprocal deceit. They heard the dead leaves crackle
under their footsteps, but they strove to talk as if the boughs were in
bud.
And so the weeks went on. The bitterness of their second winter in
Greenpoint had now yielded to the mildness of a second spring. But the
vernal change brought no cheer to Claire. In the little yellowish-drab
wooden house where they dwelt, with lumber-yards and sloop-wharves
blocking all view of the river, with stupid, haggling neighbors on
either side of them, with ugliness and stagnation and poverty at
arm's-reach, was a girl so weighed upon and crushed by the stern
arbitraments of want, that she often felt herself as much a captive as
if she could not have moved a limb without hearing the clank of a
chain.