"I promised nothing. I never make promises."
"Your acceptance of my condition is a promise."
"Acceptance of your condition!" He choked and spluttered over it.
"And it's a mighty small condition considering all I'm going to do for
you with cheerfulness, amiability, a pleasant smile----"
"Hold your tongue and speak when you are spoken to!" he growled,
apparently furious, but secretly exulting at the child's refreshing
fearlessness with him.
It had been an instinct of self-preservation that had led Margaret to
demonstrate to her uncle, in that very first hour with him, that the
line would have to be drawn somewhere in his browbeating. And the word
"wench" had served her purpose. Thereafter, in the eight years that
she lived with him, docile and patient as she always was, he never
forgot, and she never had to remind him, that there was a limit past
which he could not safely venture in the indulgence of his tendency to
tyrannize.
But her life was hard; most girls would have found its monotony and
self-sacrifice unbearable; its gloomy environment in the great empty
barn of a house too depressing; its close confinement within the narrow
limits of the unkept grounds, overgrown with weeds and bushes, and dark
with big trees and a high hedge of hemlocks, as bad as any jail. There
were sometimes weeks at a stretch during which she saw no human being
save her uncle and the old negro couple who had lived on the place for
a quarter of a century; for though Harriet and her husband lived in
Charleston, her uncle would spare her so seldom to visit them, and was
so exacting as to her speedy return to him that she soon fell into the
way of confining her intercourse with her sister almost entirely to a
weekly exchange of letters.
In spite, however, of her isolation Margaret felt that there were
compensations in her lot. She had resources within herself in her love
of books, and she found in her uncle's rich intellectual equipment, of
which he freely gave her the benefit in their daily association, a
stimulus, a variety, and even an excitement that meant much more to her
than the usual girl's diversions of frocks, parties, and beaus would
have meant. It is true she often longed for a congenial companion of
her own age, she hungered for affection, she suffered keenly in her
occasional feverish paroxysms of restlessness, and there were times
when the surging fountains of her youth threatened to break down the
barriers that imprisoned a nature that was both large and impassioned.
"She's temperamental enough!" was her uncle's early conclusion as, from
day to day, the girl's mind and heart were unfolded to his keen
observation.
Her rare periods of passionate discontent, however, though leaving her
spent and listless for a time after they had passed over her, did not
embitter her. There was a fund of native sweetness in Margaret's soul
that even her life with cynical old Osmond Berkeley could not blight.
That philosopher marvelled often at his inability to spoil her,
remarkably open as he found her young mind to the ideas and theories
which he delighted in impressing upon her. It was indeed amazing how
readily she would select from the intellectual feast daily spread
before her what was wholesome and pure and reject what was morbid.
"That's right," he would approve when she would frankly refuse to
accept a dogma laid down to her. "Better think for yourself, even
though you think wrongly, than do as the other females of the species
do--believe whatever they are told to believe--or, worse, what it suits
their personal interests to believe. Be everlastingly thankful to me
that I encourage you to think for yourself, to face the _facts_ of
life. George Meredith writes, 'The education of girls is to make them
think that facts are their enemies.' _You_ shall not escape some
knowledge of facts if I can help it!"
"It's awfully nice of you to care so much about my mind, Uncle Osmond,"
she gratefully responded. "To really care for _any_thing about me. I
do love to be mothered and coddled and made much of!"
"Huh! 'Mothered and coddled and made much of!' You're at the wrong
shop! And don't let me hear you misuse that word 'nice.'"
"I insist upon being pleased at your caring at least about my mind!
I'd be grateful even to a dog that was good to me."
"I'm not a dog, and I'm never so 'good' to any one that you could
notice it particularly."
"Don't try to make yourself out worse than you are; you're bad enough,
honey, in all conscience!"
"Hold your impudence and bring me Volume Third of Kant's 'Critique.'"
"Oh, dear!" Margaret sighed as she obeyed, "is it going to be _that_
awful dope to-day? I hoped up to the last you'd choose an exciting
novel. Do you know I don't think it's womanly to understand Kant's
'Critique.'"
"I've no desire to be womanly. Do as I tell you."
In addition to finding his niece capable and patient as a nurse and
housekeeper, Margaret interested him more than any individual he had
known in many years. He secretly blessed the hour when she had come
into his sombre life to enliven and, yes, enrich it. Not for worlds,
however, would he have let _her_ know what she was to him.
There were rare moments when he was actually moved to an expression of
gratitude and tenderness for his long-suffering victim; but Margaret's
touchingly eager response to such overtures (heart-hungry as she was in
her loneliness) while gratifying him, had always the effect of making
him promptly withdraw into his hard shell again and to counteract, by
his most trying exactions, his momentary softness; so that in time she
learned to dread any least sign of amiability.
She did not know the full extent of her uncle's selfishness in his
treatment of her: how ruthlessly he schemed to avert the danger which
he thought often threatened him of losing her to some one of the
half-dozen middle-aged or elderly gentlemen of learning who had the
habit of visiting him in his retirement and who, to the last man of
them, whether married or single, adored his niece. It seemed that no
man could lay eyes on her without promptly loving her (what men called
love). Even his physician, happily married and the father of four
lusty boys, was, Berkeley could see, quite mad about her, though
Margaret never discovered it; she only thought him extremely agreeable
and kind and liked him accordingly. Indeed the only fun she ever got
out of this train of admirers was an occasional hour of liberty while
they were closeted with her uncle; for he took care, as soon as he
realized how alluring she was to most men, to have her out of the way
when his acquaintances dropped in, a deprivation to his own comfort for
which the visitor paid in an extra dose of pessimism and irony.
"When that child falls in love," Berkeley once told himself, "as of
course so temperamental a girl is bound to do sooner or later, it will
go hard with her. Let her wait, however, until I'm gone. Time enough
for her then. I need her. Couldn't endure life without her now that
I'm used to her!"
So he not only gave her no opportunity to meet marriageable men, he
tried to unsex her, to engraft upon her mind his own cynicism as to the
thing named love, his conviction of its gross selfishness, his scorn of
sentimentality and of "the hypocrisy that would idealize an ephemeral
emotion grounded in base, egoistic appetite."
"All 'love,' all attraction of whatever nature, is grounded in sex," he
would affirm. "The universe is upheld and constantly recreated by the
ceaseless action of so-called love. A purely natural, physical
phenomenon, therefore. There is not in life such a thing as a
disinterested love."
"A mother's love?" Margaret once suggested in reply to this avowal.
"Entirely selfish. She loves her child as part of herself; all her
pride and ambition for it are because it is _hers_."
"Well, if you call a mother's love selfish, there's no use saying
anything more."
"And not to mince matters," he reaffirmed, "I want you to know for your
own protection that a man's love for a woman is that of a beast of prey
for its victim!"
"But I'm so safe here, I don't need such protection; I never see a man.
No one but learned scholars ever come here."
"'Learned scholars' are not men, then, in your category?"
"Not the interesting wild kind that you warn me against."
"The man, woman, or 'learned scholar,' who has not a devil as well as
an angel in his soul, a beast as well as a god, is too limited a
creature to see life whole and big and round."
"Am _I_, then," she inquired with interest, "a devil and a beast as
well as an angel and a goddess, do you think?"
"Mostly devil, you! I couldn't stand the angel-goddess combination.
Even you, my girl, are wholly selfish; you would not stay with me for
one day if it were not that I give you a home. Come, now," he invited,
and evidently expected a protest against this assertion.
"Why, of course I shouldn't. _Why_ would I?"
He looked rather blank at this, though privately he never failed to
find her honesty refreshing.
"I never understood," she added, "that it was a question of affection
between you and me, did you, my dear?"
"'Affection!'" he sneered bitterly. "Affection for ourselves!"
"Of course. You wouldn't give me a bright and happy home like this if
you did not need me to wait on you thirty-six hours out of the
twenty-four with a cheerful, Cheshire-cat smile, and all for my food,
bed, and two new frocks and hats a year."
"Have you no appreciation, girl, of the liberal education it is for you
to be with me, to be permitted to read to me, to have such a library as
mine at your command?"
"Yes, indeed, Uncle Osmond."
"Well, then?"
"But I don't stay here for the pleasure of your amiable society, dear,"
she assured him, patting his hand. "You're far too much like your old
Scotch Thomas Carlyle that you admire so much. My goodness, what a
life Jane must have led with that old curmudgeon!"
"Hold your impudent tongue!"
"Yes, dear."
"Don't speak to me again to-day!"
"Thanks; I'm so glad you don't also require me to be brilliantly
conversational. I'd really have to charge extra for that, Uncle
Osmond."
"Get me my eggnog!"
In spite of all Osmond Berkeley's precautions, however, Margaret did,
of course, go through the intense and fiery ordeal of "falling in
love"; for when a maiden's budding soul begins to unfold to the beauty
of life, to throb and thrill before the wonder and mystery of the
universe, no walled imprisonment can check the course of nature--she is
bound to suffer the bitter-sweet experience of becoming enamoured of
something, it doesn't much matter what; a cigar-shop Indian will
suffice if nothing more lively comes her way. For circumstances are,
after all, nothing but "machinery, just meant to give thy life its
bent." Berkeley, priding himself on his knowledge of sex-psychology,
knowing that girls isolated in boarding-schools fall in love with their
woman teachers, and in colleges with each other, nevertheless persuaded
himself that he could, in this instance, defeat nature; that Margaret
was being safeguarded too absolutely to admit of her finding any outlet
whatever for the pent-up emotional current of her womanhood.
But there came to Berkeley Hill one day a stranger, an earnest young
minister of Charleston, who, having read a magazine article of Osmond
Berkeley's in which "the hysterical, unwholesome excitement of
evangelistic revivals" was demonstrated to be purely physiological,
wished to remonstrate with its author and point out to him that he was
grievously mistaken.
One keenly appraising, glance at the embarrassed, awkward young man as
he was shown into the library where Berkeley sat in his armchair before
the fire, with Margaret at his side reading to him from a just
published work by Josiah Royce, made her uncle decide that it would be
superfluous to send her from the room--"on account of a creature like
this, with no manners, no brains, and an Adam's apple!"
But it was the young man's deadly earnestness in the discussion between
these two unequal protagonists that impressed itself upon Margaret's
hungry imagination; his courage in coming with what he conceived to be
his burning message of truth to such a formidable "enemy to truth" as
the famous scholar, Dr. Osmond Berkeley. Evidently, the young man's
conscience, in spite of his painful shyness, had lashed him to this
visit, more dreadful than a den of lions. There were still, even in
these days, it seemed, martyrs for religion.
Now, while Margaret of course recognized the intellectual feebleness of
the young minister's side of the question which was under fire,
nevertheless, before his visit was concluded, his brow wore for her a
halo; his thin little voice was rich music to her quivering nerves; his
unsophisticated manner the outward sign of a beautiful simplicity; his
Adam's apple a peculiar distinction.
Berkeley, as soon as he found his visitor a bore, made short work of
him and got rid of him without ceremony. In Margaret's eyes the young
man stood up to his rebuffs like a hero and a martyr.
Her uncle did not notice, upon her return to the library after seeing
the young man into the hall, how bright were her eyes, how flushed her
cheeks, how sensitive the curve of her lips.
"Ha, ha!" he laughed sardonically, "wouldn't you rather go to hell than
have to hear him preach?"
"You laugh like a villain in a melodrama!" retorted Margaret.
"I haven't laughed for twenty years except at damned fools. When did
you ever see a melodrama?"
"Aunt Virginia took Harriet and me to see _The Two Orphans_ once."
"Damned presumption of the fellow to come here and take up my time! He
isn't even a gentleman."
"I thought you prided yourself on not being a snob, Uncle Osmond."
"Don't be stupid. Breeding is _breeding_."
"Well, what is good breeding if it isn't being courteous in your own
house? You may call that young man common, but I doubt whether he
bullies women!"
"You're cross!" he snapped at her. "Look pleasant!" he commanded,
bringing his hand down heavily on the arm of his chair.
"I won't!" And for the first and only time in all the eight years of
her life with him, Margaret turned upon him with a stamp of her foot.
He stared at her incredulously.
"You call _that_ good breeding, do you, stamping your foot at your
benefactor?"
"'Benefactor?'" Margaret flew across the room and violently turned the
pages of the dictionary on a stand in the corner. "'Benefactor,'" she
read, '"a doer of kindly deeds; a friendly helper.' You see, I'm
_your_ benefactor, according to the Standard."
"You're begging the question: is it well-bred for a young lady to stamp
her foot?"
"I'm ashamed that I did it, Uncle Osmond, and I beg your pardon."
"Your tone is not contrite!" he objected. But an unwonted flash in her
eyes made him see that this was one of the places where he would have
to "draw the line."
"You are tired," he said abruptly. "No wonder, after listening to the
braying of that evangelical ass for nearly an hour! Put on your wraps
and take a run about the grounds."
As with a look of relief Margaret turned to leave the room, he added in
a tone that was almost gentle, "Put on your heavy coat, child, the air
is very raw."
"Thank you, Uncle Osmond."
"And come back looking cheerful."
"I shall have to turn Christian Scientist if I'm to be cheerful under
_all_ circumstances--and you say you hate Christian Scientists because
they are _always so damned pleasant_."
"You can't turn Christian Scientist and live in the same house with
_me_!"
"But, Uncle Osmond, dear, I'm beginning to see that a Christian
Scientist is the only thing that _could_ live in the same house with
you!"
With that she left him, to a half-hour of anxious consideration of her
final thrust; for the one dread that hung over his life was the
possibility of Margaret's deserting him.
V
Margaret's suddenly conceived passion for the young minister went
through all the usual phases. It was not, of course, the individual
himself, but her impossible inhuman ideal of him, of which she was
enamoured, the man himself was as unknown to her as though she had
never seen him; his image merely served as a dummy to be clothed with
her rich imaginings. The thought of him dwelt with her every moment of
the day, making her absent-minded and listless, or feverishly
talkative. She made excuses to go frequently to town, to a dentist, to
a doctor, to see Harriet, just for a chance to drive past the
minister's parsonage, for even if she did not catch a glimpse of him,
it was manna to her soul to look upon the place of his abode. She
would have delighted to have lain her cheek upon the doorsill his foot
had pressed. The actual sight, once or twice, of his ungainly figure
on the street, set her heart to thumping so that she could not breathe.
Her discovery, through a paragraph in the religious news of a daily
paper, that he was married, did not affect her, for she was not
conscious of any desire to marry him; she only wanted to see him, to
hear him, to feel herself alive in all her being, in his presence.
Even the sermon she managed to hear him preach one Sunday morning, when
a visit from one of the scholarly gentlemen whom her uncle considered
dangerous, gave her a free half day, even her recognition, through that
sermon, of the man's mental barrenness, did not quench her passion.
What did finally kill it, after three months of mingled misery and
ecstasy, was an occasion as trivial as that which had given birth to
it. One day, in front of a grocery shop, where some provisions were
being piled into her phaeton, and where, to her quivering delight, the
Object of her adoration just chanced at that moment to come to make
some purchases, she heard him say to a negro employee of the grocer,
"Yes, sir, two pecks of potatoes and a head of cabbage; no, sir, no
strawberries."
To say "sir" to a negro! The scales fell from Margaret's eyes. Her
heart settled down comfortably in her bosom. Her nerves became quiet.
The young minister stood before her as he was. His Adam's apple was no
longer a peculiar distinction, but an Adam's apple. For this was South
Carolina.
Thereafter, her uncle found her a much more comfortable companion. But
keenly observant though he was, he had never suspected for a moment,
during those three months of Margaret's obsession, that she was
actually experiencing the thing he was so persistently trying to avert;
for it would not have been conceivable to him that any woman, least of
all his niece, Margaret Berkeley, could fall in love with "a milksop"
like "Rev. Hoops," as the poor man's printed visiting card proclaimed
him.
Never in all the rest of her life could Margaret laugh at that youthful
ordeal. That she could have been so insanely deluded was a mystery to
wonder over, to speculate about; but the passion itself, the depth, the
height, the glory of it, its revelation of human nature's capacity for
ecstasy--all this was a reality that would always be sacred to her.
At the same time, her discovery that an emotional experience so intense
and vital, so fundamental, could grow out of an absolute illusion and
be so ephemeral, made her almost as cynical about love as was her uncle
himself; so that always after that the seed of skepticism, which he so
earnestly endeavoured to plant in her mind, fell on prepared soil.
Had Margaret adopted indiscriminately her uncle's philosophical,
ethical, social, political, or even literary ideas, it would certainly
have unfitted her for living in a society so complacent, optimistic,
and conventional as that of most American communities. As it was, the
opinions she did come to hold, from her intercourse with this fearless,
if pessimistic, thinker, and from her wide and varied reading with him,
and also the ideals of life she formed in the solitude which gave her
so much time for thought, were unusual enough to make her unique among
women. One aspect of this difference from her kind was that she was
entirely free from the false sentimentality of the average young woman,
and this in spite of the fact that she was fervently imaginative and,
in a high degree, sensitive to the beauty and poetry of life. Another
and more radical point of difference was that she had what so very few
women do have--spiritual and intellectual fearlessness. And both of
these mental attitudes she owed not only to her own natural largeness
of heart and mind, but to the strong bias given her by her uncle toward
absolute honesty.
While, by reason of her more than ordinary mentality, as well as
because of a very adaptable disposition, Margaret bore her life of
self-sacrifice and isolation with less unhappiness than most girls
could have done, there was one phase of it which was vastly harder upon
her. Her nature being unusually strong in its affections, it took hard
schooling indeed before she could endure with stoicism the loveless
life she led. It was upon her relation with her elder sister Harriet,
the only human being who really belonged to her, that she tried to feed
her starved heart, cherishing almost with passion this one living bond;
idealizing her sister and her sister's love for her, looking with an
intensity of longing to the time when she would be free to be with
Harriet, to lavish upon her all her unspent love, to live in the
happiness of Harriet's love for her.
Harriet's lukewarmness, not manifest under her easy, good-natured
bearing, was destined one day to come as a great shock to Margaret.
It was one night about five months before her uncle's sudden death that
he talked with her of his will. They were together in the library,
waiting for Henry, the negro manservant, to finish his night's chores
about the place before coming to help the master of the house to bed.
"I trust, Margaret," Berkeley, with characteristic abruptness, broke a
silence that had fallen between them, "that you are not counting on
flourishing as an heiress when I have passed out?"
"I must admit," said Margaret apologetically, "that I never thought of
that, stupid as it may seem to you, Uncle Osmond. Now that you mention
it, it _would_ be pleasant."
"'Pleasant?' To have me die and leave you rich?"
"I mean only the heiress part would be pleasant--and having English
dukes marrying me, you know, and all that."
"How many English dukes, pray? I fancy they are a high-priced
commodity, and my fortune isn't colossal."
"I shouldn't want a really colossal fortune."
"Modest of you. But," he added, "if I did mean to do you the injury of
leaving you all I have, it would be more than enough to spoil what is
quite too rare and precious for spoiling"--he paused, his keen eyes
piercing her as he deliberately added--"a very perfect woman."
"Meaning _me_?" Margaret asked with wide-eyed astonishment.
"So I don't intend to leave you a dollar."
"Suit yourself, honey."
"You are like all the Berkeleys, entirely lacking in money sense. Now
the lack of money sense is refreshing and charming, but disastrous. I
shall not leave my money to you for four reasons." He counted them off
on his long, emaciated fingers. "First, because you wouldn't be
sufficiently interested in the damned money to take care of it;
secondly, you'd give it away to your sister, or to her husband, or to
your own husband, or to any one that knew how to work you; thirdly,
riches are death to contentment and to usefulness and the creator of
parasitism; fourthly, I wish you to be married for your good, sweet
self, my dear child, and not for my money."
"But if I'm penniless, _I_ may have to marry for money. From what you
tell me of love, money is the only thing left to marry for. And if it
has to be a marriage for money, I prefer to be the one who has the
money, if you please, Uncle Osmond."
"Well, you won't get mine. I tell you you are worth too much to be
turned into one of these parasitical women who are the blot on our
modern civilization. In no other age of the world has there been such
a race of feminine parasites as at the present. Let me tell you
something, Margaret: there is just one source of pure and unadulterated
happiness in life, and that I bequeath to you in withholding from you
my fortune. Congenial work, my girl, is the only sure and permanent
joy. Love? Madness and anguish. Family affection? Endless anxiety,
heartache, care. You are talented, child; discover what sort of work
you love best to do, fit yourself to do it preëminently well, and
you'll be happy and contented."
"But my gracious! Uncle Osmond, what chance have I to fit myself for
an occupation, out here at Berkeley Hill, taking care of you? These
years of my youth in which I might be preparing for a career I'm
devoting to you, my dear. So I really think it would only be poetic
justice for you to leave me your money, don't you?"
Her uncle, looking as though her words had startled and surprised him,
did not answer her at once. Considering her earnestly as she sat
before him, the firelight shining upon her dark hair and clear olive
skin, the peculiar expression of his gaze puzzled Margaret.
"That," he said slowly, "is an aspect of your case I had not
considered."
"Of course you had not; it wouldn't be at all like you to have
considered it, my dear."
"Well," he snapped, "my will is made. I'm leaving all I have, except
this place, for the founding of a college which shall be after _my_
idea of a college. Berkeley Hill, however, must, of course, remain in
the family."
"Don't, for pity's sake, burden the family (that's Harriet and me) with
Berkeley Hill, Uncle Osmond, if you don't give us the wherewithal to
keep it up and pay the taxes on it!" protested Margaret.
Again her uncle gazed at her with an enigmatical stare. "Huh!" he
muttered, "you've got some money sense after all. More than any
Berkeley _I_ ever met."
"I know this much about money," she said sententiously: "that while
poverty can certainly rob us of all that is worth while in life, wealth
can't buy the two essentials to happiness--love and good health."
"Since when have you taken to making epigrams?"
"Why, that is an epigram, isn't it! Good enough for a copybook."
"I tell you, girl, if I leave you rich, I rob you of the necessity to
work, and that is robbing you of life's only worth. The most pitiable
wretches on the face of the earth are idle rich women."
"If it's all the same to you, Uncle Osmond, I'd rather take my chances
for happiness _with_ riches than without them."
"I am to understand, then, that you actually have the boldness to tell
me to my face that you expect me to leave to you all I die possessed
of?"
"Yes, please."
"It's wonderfully like your damned complacency! Well, as I've told
you, I've already made my will."
"Here's Henry to take you upstairs. But you can make it over, or add a
codicil. Which shall I bring you to-night, an eggnog or beer?"
"I'm sick of all your slops. Let me alone."
"Yes, dear. Good-night," she answered with the perfunctory, artificial
pleasantness which she always employed, as per contract, in responding
to his surliness; and the absurdity, as well as the audacity, of that
bought-and-paid-for cheerfulness of tone, never failed to entertain the
old misanthrope.
Five months later the will which Osmond Berkeley's lawyer read to the
"mourners" gave Berkeley Hill to Margaret and her sister, Mrs. Walter
Eastman, while all the rest of the considerable estate was left to a
board of five trustees to be used for the founding of a college in
which there should be absolute freedom of thought in every department,
such a college as did not then exist on the face of the earth.
Harriet's husband, being a lawyer, offered at once to secure for
Margaret, through process of law, a reasonable compensation for her
eight years of service. But Margaret objected.
"You see Uncle Osmond didn't wish me to have any of his money, Walter."
"Don't be sentimental about it, Margaret. Your uncle had a lot of
sentiment, didn't he, about your sacrificing your life for him?"
"He had his reasons for not giving me his money. He sincerely thought
it would be better for me not to have it. He really did have some
heart for me, Walter. I'm not sentimental, but I couldn't touch a
dollar he didn't wish me to have."
"Then you certainly are sentimental," Walter insisted.
Almost immediately after the funeral Harriet and her family moved out
from Charleston to live at Berkeley Hill with Margaret, retaining the
two old negroes who for so many years had done all the work that was
done on the estate.
"We couldn't rent the place without spending thousands in repairing it,
so we'll have to live on it ourselves."
The sentiment that Margaret and Harriet cherished for this old
homestead which had for so long been occupied by some branch of the
family was so strong as to preclude any idea of selling the place.
It was Margaret's wish, at this time, to go away from Berkeley Hill and
earn her own living, as much for the adventure of it as because she
thought she ought not to be a burden to Walter. But the Southerner's
principle that a woman may with decency work for her living only when
bereft of all near male kin to earn it for her led Walter to protest
earnestly against her leaving their joint home.
Harriet, too, was at first opposed to it.
"You could be such a help and comfort to me, Margaret, dear, if you'd
stay. Henry and Chloe are too old and have too much work to do on this
huge place to help me with the children; and out here I can't do as I
did in Charleston--get in some one to stay with the babies whenever I
want to go anywhere. So you see how tied down I'd be. But with you
here, I should always feel so comfortable about the children whenever I
had to be away from them."
"But for what it would cost Walter to support me, Harriet, dear, you
could keep a nurse for the children."
"And spend half my time at the Employment Agency. A servant would
leave as soon as she discovered how lonesome it is out here, a half
mile from the trolley line. It's well Henry and Chloe are too attached
to the place to leave it."
"So the advantage of having me rather than a child's nurse is that I'd
be a fixture?" Margaret asked, hiding with a smile her inclination to
weep at this only reason Harriet had to urge for her remaining with her.
"Of course you'll be a fixture," Harriet answered affectionately.
"Walter and I are only too glad to give you a home."
So, for nearly a year after her uncle's death, Margaret continued to
live at Berkeley Hill.
Harriet always referred to their home as "My house," "My place," and
never dreamed of consulting her younger sister as to any changes she
saw fit to make in the rooms or about the grounds.
It was during these first weeks of Margaret's life with Harriet that
she suffered the keen grief of finding her own warm affection for her
sister thrown back upon itself in Harriet's want of enthusiasm over
their being together; her always cool response to Margaret's almost
passionate devotion; her abstinence from any least approach to sisterly
intimacy and confidence. It was not that Harriet disliked Margaret or
meant to be cold to her. It was only that she was constitutionally
selfish and indifferent.
So, in the course of time, Margaret came to lavish all the thwarted
tenderness of her heart upon her sister's three very engaging children.
But before that first year of her new life had passed over her head she
came to feel certain conditions of it to be so unbearable that, in
spite of Walter's protests (only Walter's this time), she made a
determined effort to get some self-supporting employment. And it was
then that she became aware of a certain fact of modern life of which
her isolation had left her in ignorance: she discovered that in these
days of highly specialized work there was no employment of any sort to
be obtained by the untrained. School teachers, librarians, newspaper
women, even shopgirls, seamstresses, cooks, and housemaids must have
their special equipment. And Margaret had no money with which to
procure this equipment. There is, perhaps, no more tragic figure in
our strenuous modern life than the penniless woman of gentle breeding,
unqualified for self-support.
The worst phase of Margaret's predicament was that it had become
absolutely impossible for her to continue to live longer under the same
roof with Walter and Harriet. The simple truth was, Harriet was
jealous of Walter's quite brotherly affection for her--for so Margaret
interpreted his kindly attitude toward her. Having no least
realization of her own unusual maidenly charm, the fact that her
brother-in-law was actually fighting a _grande passion_ for her would
have seemed to her grotesque, incredible; for Walter, being a Southern
gentleman, controlled his feelings sufficiently to treat her always
with scrupulous consideration and courtesy. Therefore, she considered
Harriet's jealousy wholly unreasonable. Why, her sister seemed
actually afraid to trust the two of them alone in the house together!
(Margaret did not dream that Walter was afraid to trust himself alone
in the house with her.) And if by chance Harriet ever found them in a
tête-à-tête, she would not speak to Margaret for days, and as Walter,
too, was made to take his punishment, Margaret was sure he must wish
her away. Of course, since she had become a cause for discord and
unhappiness between Harriet and Walter, she must go. A way must be
found for her to live away from Berkeley Hill.
It was this condition of things which she faced the night she lay on
the couch in her sister's room keeping guard over her sleeping children
while Harriet and Walter were seeing Nazimova in "Hedda Gabler."