giggle. She jumped up from the ottoman, swooping her arms down to embrace
the mother, who still sat sewing. “All right momsey, I’m to go to the
dance; it’s all settled. Let me try Tweetums, Elinor!” she ran over to
the cage, brushing her sister to one side. Tina seemed to take the light
with her when she moved; it clung around her bright hair, and radiated
from her fair skin and her dear eyes, and even lurked, shimmering, in
the folds of her sky-blue gown. She stood with upraised head touching
the gilded wires of the cage, talking in tender, caressing sound to the
little feathered rebel, with a lure of sugar crumbs upon her red lips,
until he came to peck at them. What made the transition—what magic was
hers? There was a sudden splash, a shower of raindrops over her laughing,
triumphant face as she started back, before she ran from the room. Tina
had the winning way.
“I thought I heard Tina in here,” said a taller sister, entering by
another door. Annette was perhaps not so pretty as the other two, but
she had a large, blonde gentleness, very reposefully attractive. She
had been engaged for four years to a charming fellow, whose only lack
was that of money, consequent on a dependent mother and sisters. The
lovers had preserved the spirit of romance by varying the manifestations
of it—for the last twelvemonth spending their time with note-book and
pencil, raptly ciphering out the future possibilities of a livelihood
for two on the narrowest known limit. Although Annette and Joseph had
seen each other nearly every evening during this probation her soft eyes
suffused and her soft cheeks rosed as virginally on the thousandth time
he appeared as on the first.
She held up a garment now as she spoke. “I want to give this new waist to
Tina to mend. Just see where she’s torn it! I found it under her desk.”
“Now, Annette, if you’ve been putting her room to rights again——!” Elinor
held up her hands in despair.
“I couldn’t stand seeing it the way it was,” said Annette apologetically.
“Yes, of course, that’s the way you spoil her. I’m sure you and I were
brought up very differently. Here, give me a needle and thread, she’ll
never mend that waist. Mother, now you’ve let Tina think she’s going to
the dance, that settles it; you can’t go back on it now: but I think she
ought to understand that _this_ is absolutely the last time.”
“She seemed to take it so to heart,” said the mother weakly. She tried
to rally herself intelligently. “Of course I don’t mind her accepting
invitations occasionally; she’s nearly eighteen; but the girls who are
not out have more going on than the girls that are. And that young
Fanshawe—he seems a stupid sort of a boy, to me; but he does such
reckless things I do _not_ like to have Tina with him.”
“Oh, mother, he’s all right, really, he’s only young.” Annette’s tone
was gently protesting. “He’s so much richer than the others that he can
do more things—that’s all; she’ll soon get tired of him. All the boys in
that set are devoted to Tina. When a girl is as pretty as she is——” The
three looked at each other in the pause that followed, but each saw only
the image of the beloved youngest.
Tina, indeed, was in that stage of rebellion at life in which she could
see no meaning in any law of her elders; her young desire controverted
all their worldly experience. What was the use of saying she couldn’t
want to do things when she patently did? Refusal hardened her; reason
was only that which darkeneth understanding. She resented any appeal to
her affection, not because she had little, but because she had so much
that she fought being mastered by it, and thrown into those hated fits
of weeping and contrition. She stormily wanted what she wanted. Yet if
she were left untrammelled she showed unexpected glimpses of a heart
passionately loving and tender; an undercurrent as old as the world, as
deep as life, profoundly affecting. Tina was the only one of the family
who had “temperament,” a fact dimly perceived only in the desire to
shield the child from something unknown. At present there was the uneasy
feeling that this something might be a youthful attachment for Francis
Fanshawe.
To the critical eye, young Fanshawe, an orphan, was simply a stolid
and uninteresting young fellow of twenty-one, tall, heavily built, and
reddish in hair and complexion. Elinor characterized him as “thuddy,” a
word coined by the family to indicate the quality of weight. He had no
expression, and was tongue-tied in the presence of his elders, even the
sympathetic Annette failing to elicit response from him, though with
the youth of his own “set” Francis seemed to be voluble enough in the
loud exchange of catch phrases and slangy interjections which made their
happy intercourse, and he and Tina could talk by the hour together in a
murmuring undertone. He was rather dangerously well off in a community
where only the fathers had money, a fact in itself calculated to affect
his reputation. But his light-blue eyes could look squarely into yours,
and he had a good grip of the hand. He was undoubtedly a nice enough boy
if you liked that kind, though Elinor could only wonder that anybody
did. She herself only liked people who interested and stimulated.
With Elinor a lover was a creature to be analyzed mercilessly under the
suspicion that otherwise he might get some power over one by sheer force
of his affection; he was pictured in all sorts of impossible situations
to test his attraction, every barrier was erected that ingenuity could
devise. The way Elinor “treated” Robert was one of the stock subjects
of interest and reprehension in the family, though Robert, intelligent,
darkly good-looking and ineffective, was simply pleased if she was
pleasant, and patiently snubbed when she wasn’t. Annette and Joseph—that
patently good fellow who had had the courage of his convictions four
years ago—enjoyed their little confidences of amused laughter over the
situation. Still, precedent had made an engagement of marriage something
to be very thoughtfully entered into, or necessarily prolonged. When it
came to Tina——
Mrs. Malison wrote to her husband, as he did to her, every night during
his long absences from home. She reposed so thoroughly in theory on his
judgment that neither of them realized that in practice she decided
everything. Her resolution to restrict the girl’s gaieties was suddenly
hardened by the events of the dance, though it was twenty-four hours
before she got a chance to express it, Tina having slept until the late
afternoon in defiance of her pledge to study, and visitors taking up the
rest of the day. One visitor, indeed, was partly responsible for the
mother’s steadily increasing purpose; kind, elderly, little Miss Ward in
her neat black jacket, trimmed with a mysterious ginger-coloured fur,
being one of those amiable conversationalists who scatter the seeds of
discomfort wherever they tread. Mrs. Malison, although she knew from
aforetime what she had to expect, couldn’t help the usual thrill of
exasperation at the opening sentence:
“How fleshy you are growing! I said the other day as you were passing, ‘I
hardly knew Mrs. Malison, she’s getting so stout; it’s easy to see that
she doesn’t let things worry _her_!’ Your husband looked very badly, I
think, when he was here last. I want to apologize for not coming before
to congratulate Miss Elinor on her engagement to Mr. Harper.”
“My dear Miss Ward, you have been misinformed”—Mrs. Malison felt that she
was holding herself well in hand—“Elinor would be very much obliged to
you, I’m sure—but there is no engagement.”
“Well, now, isn’t that singular!” Miss Ward’s small features indicated a
deep and wondering interest. “I certainly understood from Mrs. Painter
that Ethel said it was announced; I know she mentioned that every one was
talking of it. I was there yesterday looking at the things Mrs. Painter
brought over from the other side—beautiful, aren’t they? She gave me
a lovely little framed photograph from some place in Italy—Sorrento,
I think; you can get them here for a quarter, but of course it’s the
_thought_ you value. She showed me the most exquisite laces—and hats——!
Six of them; perfect dreams. How pretty _your_ hat looks this year;
you’ve had such good wear out of it, too, haven’t you? I’m sure _I_
never mind if a thing isn’t in the newest style! Oh, by the way, my
sister was one of the chaperons with you last night at the young people’s
dance. She said Miss Tina evidently enjoyed herself if one could judge
by her actions—quite a case, isn’t she! And so noticeable-looking, too.
Of course, when she gets as old as your other daughters she’ll sober
down; I’m sure, as I told my sister, you never see them doing anything
conspicuous.”
Conspicuous! The word of all others calculated to bring the blood to a
mother’s cheek. Mrs. Malison trembled almost visibly with her effort
at self-control, as she switched the conversation further afield,
though she saw as plainly as on the night before the lighted ballroom
and the tall, lissome, white-clad figure of Tina, with gleaming golden
hair and scintillating eyes, “holding hands” with Francis Fanshawe in
ring-around-a-rosy fashion, now high above her head, now swinging low
down, as the two went flying across the floor, not once, but many times,
with an exaggerated, heel-and-toe, boy-and-girl sportiveness after every
one else was seated and the music had grown as freakishly mad as they.
Mrs. Malison had not realized at first that it was Tina. Then, after
that whispered rebuke they had disappeared until it was nearly time to
go home, emerging finally, on being sent for, from a palm-hidden corner
of the enclosed balcony, Tina with very flushed cheeks, hazy eyes and
a general air of having been Called Back, too plain to be mistaken—a
perfectly open, childlike defiance of inevitable comment that made one
moan in ludicrous dismay. There is nothing so patently open to criticism
as innocence. Even through the “thuddiness” of Francis there showed
the glitter of an eye which told of the spirit within. Mrs. Malison’s
annoyance had culminated when she spoke to Tina on the second morning.
She was fully nerved for struggle. This thing had to stop.
“Tina, I have been waiting for an opportunity to speak to you about
the ball. I was very much displeased with your behaviour; _very_ much
displeased! I felt obliged to write to your father about it. I cannot
allow you to go to another dance this winter.”
“All right; I don’t want to,” said Tina uninterestedly.
She had thrown herself down on the wicker lounge beside a black poodle
stretched out on the Roman-striped coverlet, and putting her arms around
the animal surveyed her mother from this position. Mrs. Malison’s eyes
feasted on the picture.
“Tina, you are entirely too young to do as you please. You know nothing
about the consequences. After this you are to attend to your studies. I
don’t wish you to be seen with Francis Fanshawe any more; and I don’t
wish you to invite him here.”
“He’s not coming,” said Tina briefly. “Momsey, I want a new grey suit! I
know I had this green one last month, but I hate it. All my friends are
getting grey suits now.”
“Tina, have you quarrelled with Francis?”
“No.”
Mrs. Malison looked uncomfortably puzzled.
“Then—— Has he done anything you don’t like, dear?”
“No.”
“There isn’t anything that you’re keeping from me?” In spite of denial,
Mrs. Malison felt the tenacity of some purpose that she could not fathom.
“No; oh, _no_!” Tina raised her voice at the sight of her two sisters in
the doorway. “You can come in; momsey’s finished scolding me. I want a
new grey suit—all my friends have grey suits!”
“Well, of all things!” Elinor’s tone was exasperated. “Another new
suit—when Annette and I have been wearing our old ones all winter! That’s
so like you, Tina, never considering where the money is to come from.”
“I don’t care where the money comes from! Annette, don’t you think I can
have it?”
“It seems a little foolish, dear—unless you could wear it later in the
season,” began Annette pacifically. “By the way, I heard you say that
Francis wasn’t coming here. I thought he was going to take you and Edith
to the school concert to-night.”
“No; Robert’s going to take us,” said Tina. She detached herself from her
sisters’ embrace and ran away, with the black poodle after her.
“Robert,” repeated Elinor meditatively; she sat down in the chair her
mother had just vacated and stared at Annette. “How very odd! Robert has
never taken Tina anywhere. She must have written to him. That child does
the most unexpected things! I was wondering last night if I would care
for Robert if he were quite different. Some men have such a brutal streak
in them. On the other hand, you like a man to know his own mind and keep
to it.”
“Yes, indeed,” assented Annette absently. She dropped down on the lounge.
“Joseph and I were figuring last night that if we had two dollars more
a month we might really get married. That would include the twenty-five
cents a week for doctor’s bills—I suppose we ought to allow that.” She
stopped a moment to switch onto another track. “It seemed to me there was
something odd in Tina’s manner this morning, Elinor; I think she has some
plan about Francis!”
As that week went on, and the next and the next, it became apparent
to all that there was a change in the dear little youngest. She threw
herself into her studies with exemplary conscientiousness, she performed
her small, appointed tasks with the modicum of fractiousness. She went
out nowhere. She was as lively and capricious as she had always been,
and although she celebrated her eighteenth birthday, seemed younger
than ever; but through it all there was an odd change—an absence of
earnestness when she was earnest, an absence of mirth when she was
mirthful. In some unexplained way Tina wasn’t with them; something
ineffably bright and soul-inspiring had dropped out of the household. The
loss of it made a growing little undercurrent of uneasiness, of anxiety.
Through all the daily living there is in every home a fateful knowledge
of the unexpressed.
It is impossible to hide one’s secrets. The whole family felt sure that
Tina was thinking of Francis Fanshawe, though she never even looked
out of the window when he spun past it, as sometimes happened, in his
big, white motor car, filled with a gay crowd of bugle-blowing boys.
Elinor, with the tacit consent of her elders, actually wrote a note
inviting him to the house. He came, indeed, but Tina refused to see
him, playing checkers up-stairs in the library with Robert, who had a
meditative, humorous way of beating her, while Elinor, perforce, did the
entertaining. The big youth was not unpleasing, as she owned afterwards,
though he said next to nothing, but his blue eyes looked unusually
appreciative and he gripped her hand so hard when he left that her
fingers were nearly welded into each other.
It was at the end of the month that Tina came into her mother’s room one
morning with an unexpected rush, her golden head thrown back, the black
poodle barking delightedly at her heels. There was a note in her voice
which had not been there in these four weeks past, as she said:
“Momsey, I’ve something to say to you.”
“Well, come over here, dear. I want to hook you up; your dress is all
open in the back. I wish you would be more careful. Isn’t it time for you
to go to your lessons?”
“I’m not going to study any more, mother.”
“My dear child, what do you mean?”
“I’ve decided that I want to get married,” said Tina—“to Francis.” A wave
of colour rose suddenly over her lovely face, and she made an annoyed
motion as if to brush it away. “Annette knows I want to marry him. I
wanted her to tell you, but she said you wouldn’t like it unless I told
you myself. So now I’m telling you. And I hope you won’t mind very much,
for Francis and I will never care for any one else.”
“Oh, my dear child!” said Mrs. Malison. Mother and daughter looked at
each other with the same expression of dominant will. “This is, of
course, nonsense, Tina.” She braced herself as one does against a coming
blow so appalling that one cannot stop to fear the weight of it; all
one’s energies must be used to fend it off.
“It distresses me to hear you talk like this; you don’t mean it—you don’t
know _what_ it means; but it distresses me, Tina!”
“There, I knew you’d say that!” cried Tina in poignant remonstrance. She
dropped into her favourite attitude of hunched up shoulders, her lips set
in scornful bitterness. “Every one lectures me and scolds me—nobody wants
me to do anything I like except Francis. Even Robert lectures me, though
he’s such a muff with Elinor! I know none of you like Francis. I know you
all despise him, but he’s a thousand times nicer to me than any one else
is. He likes me to have everything I want.”
“Oh, Tina!” said poor Mrs. Malison, her heart pierced with twenty
daggers. “Of course, I’m not saying—— If you still care for him in a
couple of years, then, perhaps, your father and I may consider it. But
you can’t know your own mind now, my darling. You have seen nothing of
life; marriage is a very serious thing.”
“Then I don’t want to wait until I know about life, if it’s as horrid as
you say it is!” said Tina, hotly. “I don’t want to wait until I change
my mind. I’ll never change it. I made Francis stay away on purpose all
last month to see what it would be like—and I _hated_ it—and so did he.”
Tina’s voice had the ring of a passionate conviction, her blue eyes had a
sombre depth of melancholy in them. “Why do we have to wait for years and
years like Annette and Joseph when it isn’t necessary? Mother, why can’t
Francis and I be married? My grandmother was married at sixteen.”
“And would you leave your father and me, Tina, when we’ve taken care
of you, and loved you, so much?” Mrs. Malison’s voice shook, she
fastened her eyes on her daughter with anguish. Tina’s mouth took on the
obstinate curve which the too obvious appeal to her affections always
brought there. She didn’t even take the trouble to answer as she tapped
irritatingly on the floor with her small foot. The silence conveyed even
more forcibly than words that it was a recognized fact that people left
their parents when they married without discredit attaching to them—it
was part of the plan. Even through her wretchedness Mrs. Malison drearily
acquiesced in the received view of the matter! but for Tina—her baby——
Ah, that was a different thing.
For Tina’s own good this time she must not have her way.
The mother went around all day with a stone on her heart, that made her
face white and drawn and breathing difficult, while Annette and Elinor
talked excitedly and incessantly with household avocations half done,
and sought the dear little wayward sister separately afterwards, Annette
with mute caresses, and larges pieces of bread and jam to supplement the
lack of a breakfast, and Elinor with intelligent reasoning as she put the
child’s collar straight and fastened her belt. Tina had never dressed
herself alone in her life. “I thought I cared for Tommy Burns, Tina, when
I was seventeen, and as for even looking at him now——! When it comes down
to it, dear, what men have you ever seen?”
“I’ve seen—Robert,” said Tina dangerously, under her breath.
Elinor’s arms fell away from her office of tiring woman; she stood
staring.
“Robert——?”
Tina’s eyes gleamed with a daring, revealing, lightning flash: “Well,
if you’re never nice to a person yourself, Elinor——” She escaped to the
doorway for a parting shot.
“Yes, _Robert_!” she called back elfishly, and fled, passing her mother
with no recognition, and actually going out in young Fanshawe’s car with
him for all the afternoon, only coming back in time for dinner, which was
a state function, with guests, and going to bed immediately afterwards.
It is strange how one untoward event disrupts all the working order of
the mind; that which has given joy loses its flavour, that which has been
counted on as sure becomes fluctuant. Everything has to arrange itself
anew. If Elinor wrote a note to a Robert who had neglected to appear, it
was not from the dictates of reason, but from a novel and jealous desire
for his presence. If Annette and Joseph sat up unusually late after the
guests had departed it was, perhaps, because figuring over a housekeeping
text-book wasn’t as satisfying as sometimes, and they had to keep at it
a little longer to capture the pleasure of that future living together.
Even to the most unselfish, the most vernally patient of lovers waiting
may show a grim face, all “bare of bliss” at times, especially when
confronted with a boy of twenty-one who has money and to spare for that
leap over the matrimonial barriers. It was only after thoroughly studying
a mysterious way of Approaching a Butcher, by which, although special
cuts and roasts were so much a pound, you got a whole diagrammic ox for a
dollar, that that prophetic feeling of happiness mingled once more with
the lovers’ goodnight kiss. Heaven only knows what delicate sentiment was
embedded in those visionary steaks and chops!
Long after Joseph had gone Mrs. Malison and Annette talked in the
mother’s room, with low, painfully murmuring voices, taking counsel
together into the small hours. It was three of the clock when the
hurrying of soft footsteps and a touch at the chamber door startled them,
and then a piteous voice:
“Momsey; oh, momsey!”
The mother was up on the instant, opening the door; by the light in the
hall, Tina’s eyes, ice-blue, stared at her over the lace frills of her
night-dress. “I came to tell you—if you feel like that—the way you looked
to-day—I’ll tell Francis I won’t marry him; it will _kill_ me; but if you
are happy it doesn’t make any difference. I can’t _stand_ seeing you look
like that! It will kill me, but you’ll be happier, any way.”
“Oh, dear me!” said Mrs. Malison in despair—anxiety lent roughness to her
voice. “This is nonsense, Tina. Come up-stairs this minute. The idea!
with nothing on your feet—you’ll get your death of cold.” She led the
girl to her own bed, tucking the soft form with resolute fingers, and
lying down herself afterwards under the coverlet with her cheek against
Tina’s chill flesh.
“Oh, Tina, as if mother could ever be glad if you were unhappy! It’s just
because I fear that if you have what you want that it will only be for
your unhappiness that I look as I do. If your father were only at home!”
Tina gave a movement of impatience, though she lay close cuddled in her
mother’s arms. “I think it would have been a great deal better if we had
eloped—Francis and I,” she murmured.
“Tina!” The mother gave a horrified gasp.
“Well, I do think so—it would have saved everything, all the feeling so
badly, and the talk, and everything. Francis and I wanted to go off in
the automobile this afternoon and get married then, and settle it all at
once. People never seem to mind a bit after it’s all over—the Boggses
made such a fuss about Lucy’s marrying that widower and now nobody says a
word about it. She comes to Sunday-night’s tea with _his_ children.”
“But you didn’t elope, my darling,” said Mrs. Malison, searching for the
one crumb of comfort.
“Francis thought you might mind.”
“That was _very_ right of Francis.”
“And he was afraid the car would break down; he had to take it to the
garage for repairs.”
“Oh, dear!” sighed the poor mother once more.
It was only after Tina seemed to be asleep that she stole down-stairs
again to drop into an uneasy slumber herself.
This battle was going to be a long and weary fray.
They were all down unusually early to breakfast but Tina.
“Don’t waken Miss Tina,” Mrs. Malison warned the maid.
“Sure she’s not in the house, ma’am.” Emma’s tone was glibly important.
“Bridget said as how Miss Tina slipped out at six o’clock this morning;
she came down the stairs a tiptoe in her new grey shuit. ’Twas towards
the trolley car she wint.”
It had happened then already—the blow had fallen! The headstrong child
had gone. Mrs. Malison whispered the words with lips that could hardly
frame the words. Other people’s daughters had deceived them and done this
thing—she had felt shamed for them—but hers! The room went around with
her, some one was bringing her water. She saw the scared faces of Annette
and Elinor bending over her—the moments seemed like dreary years as they
passed.