"YOU'RE SURE, Frank, there's NO insurance?"
"Father always said that you disliked the idea," replied her son; "that
you thought insurance looked like your calculating on his death."
Under her husband's adroit prompting Mrs. Gower had discovered such a
view of insurance in her brain. She now recalled expressing it--and
regretted. But she was silenced. She tried to take her mind of the
subject of money. But, like Mildred, she could not. The thought of
imminent poverty was nagging at them like toothache. "There'll be
enough for a year or so?" she said, timidly interrogative.
"I hope so," said Frank.
Mildred was eying him fixedly again. Said she: "Have you found
anything at all?"
"He had about eight thousand dollars in bank," said Frank. "But most
of it will go for the pressing debts."
"But how did HE expect to live?" urged Mildred.
"Yes, there must have been SOMETHING," said her mother.
"Of course, there's his share of the unsettled and unfinished business
of the firm," admitted Frank.
"How much will that be?" persisted Mildred.
"I can't tell, offhand," said Frank, with virtuous reproach. "My
mind's been on--other things."
Henry Gower's widow was not without her share of instinctive
shrewdness. Neither had she, unobservant though she was, been within
sight of her son's character for twenty-eight years without having
unconfessed, unformed misgivings concerning it. "You mustn't bother
about these things now, Frank dear," said she. "I'll get my brother to
look into it."
"That won't be necessary," hastily said Frank. "I don't want any rival
lawyer peeping into our firm's affairs."
"My brother Wharton is the soul of honor," said Mrs. Gower, the elder,
with dignity. "You are too young to take all the responsibility of
settling the estate. Yes, I'll send for Wharton to-morrow."
"It'll look as though you didn't trust me," said Frank sourly.
"We mustn't do anything to start the gossips in this town," said his
wife, assisting.
"Then send for him yourself, Frank," said Mildred, "and give him charge
of the whole matter."
Frank eyed her furiously. "How ashamed father would be!" exclaimed he.
But this solemn invoking of the dead man's spirit was uneffectual. The
specter of poverty was too insistent, too terrible. Said the widow:
"I'm sure, in the circumstances, my dear dead husband would want me to
get help from someone older and more experienced."
And Frank, guilty of conscience and an expert in the ways of
conventional and highly moral rascality, ceased to resist. His wife,
scenting danger to their getting the share that "rightfully belongs to
the son, especially when he has been the brains of the firm for several
years," made angry and indiscreet battle for no outside interference.
The longer she talked the firmer the widow and the daughter became, not
only because she clarified suspicions that had been too hazy to take
form, but also because they disliked her intensely. The following day
Wharton Conover became unofficial administrator. He had no difficulty
in baffling Frank Gower's half-hearted and clumsy efforts to hide two
large fees due the dead man's estate. He discovered clear assets
amounting in all to sixty-three thousand dollars, most of it available
within a few months.
"As you have the good-will of the firm and as your mother and sister
have only what can be realized in cash," said he to Frank, "no doubt
you won't insist on your third."
"I've got to consider my wife," said Frank. "I can't do as I'd like."
"You are going to insist on your third?" said Conover, with an accent
that made Frank quiver.
"I can't do otherwise," said he in a dogged, shamed way.
"Um," said Conover. "Then, on behalf of my sister and her daughter
I'll have to insist on a more detailed accounting than you have been
willing to give--and on the production of that small book bound in red
leather which disappeared from my brother-in-law's desk the afternoon
of his death."
A wave of rage and fear surged up within Frank Gower and crashed
against the seat of his life. For days thereafter he was from time to
time seized with violent spasms of trembling; years afterward he was
attributing premature weaknesses of old age to the effects of that
moment of horror. His uncle's words came as a sudden, high shot climax
to weeks of exasperating peeping and prying and questioning, of sneer
and insinuation. Conover had been only moderately successful at the
law, had lost clients to Frank's father, had been beaten when they were
on opposite sides. He hated the father with the secret, hypocritical
hatred of the highly moral and religious man. He despised the son. It
is not often that a Christian gentleman has such an opportunity to
combine justice and revenge, to feed to bursting an ancient grudge, the
while conscious that he is but doing his duty.
Said Frank, when he was able to speak: "You have been listening to the
lies of some treacherous clerk here."
"Don't destroy that little book," proceeded Conover tranquilly. "We
can prove that you took it."
Young Gower rose. "I must decline to have anything further to say to
you, sir," said he. "You will leave this office, and you will not be
admitted here again unless you come with proper papers as
administrator."
Conover smiled with cold satisfaction and departed. There followed a
series of quarrels--between Frank and his sister, between Frank and his
mother, between Frank's wife and his mother, between Mildred and her
mother, between the mother and Conover. Mrs. Gower was suspicious of
her son; but she knew her brother for a pinchpenny, exacting the last
drop of what he regarded as his own. And she discovered that, if she
authorized him to act as administrator for her, he could--and beyond
question would--take a large share of the estate. The upshot was that
Frank paid over to his mother and sister forty-seven thousand dollars,
and his mother and her brother stopped speaking to each other.
"I see that you have turned over all your money to mother," said Frank
to Mildred a few days after the settlement.
"Of course," said Mildred. She was in a mood of high scorn for
sordidness--a mood induced by the spectacle of the shameful manners of
Conover, Frank, and his wife.
"Do you think that's wise?" suggested Frank.
"I think it's decent," said Mildred.
"Well, I hope you'll not live to regret it," said her brother.
Neither Mrs. Gower nor her daughter had ever had any experience in the
care of money. To both forty-seven thousand dollars seemed a
fortune--forty-seven thousand dollars in cash in the bank, ready to
issue forth and do their bidding at the mere writing of a few figures
and a signature on a piece of paper. In a sense they knew that for
many years the family's annual expenses had ranged between forty and
fifty thousand, but in the sense of actuality they knew nothing about
it--a state of affairs common enough in families where the man is in
absolute control and spends all he makes. Money always had been
forthcoming; therefore money always would be forthcoming.
The mourning and the loss of the person who had filled and employed
their lives caused the widow and the daughter to live very quietly
during the succeeding year. They spent only half of their capital. For
reasons of selfish and far-sighted prudence which need no detailing
Frank moved away to New York within six months of his father's death
and reduced communication between himself and wife and his mother and
sister to a frigid and rapidly congealing minimum. He calculated that
by the time their capital was consumed they would have left no feeling
of claim upon him or he feeling of duty toward them.
It was not until eighteen months after her father's death, when the
total capital was sunk to less than fifteen thousand dollars, that
Mildred awakened to the truth of their plight. A few months at most,
and they would have to give up that beautiful house which had been her
home all her life. She tried to grasp the meaning of the facts as her
intelligence presented them to her, but she could not. She had no
practical training whatever. She had been brought up as a rich man's
child, to be married to a rich man, and never to know anything of the
material details of life beyond what was necessary in managing servants
after the indifferent fashion of the usual American woman of the
comfortable classes. She had always had a maid; she could not even
dress herself properly without the maid's assistance. Life without a
maid was inconceivable; life without servants was impossible.
She wandered through the house, through the grounds. She said to
herself again and again: "We have got to give up all this, and be
miserably poor--with not a servant, with less than the tenement people
have." But the words conveyed no meaning to her. She said to herself
again and again: "I must rouse myself. I must do something. I
must--must--must!" But she did not rouse, because there was nothing to
rouse. So far as practical life was concerned she was as devoid of
ideas as a new-born baby.
There was but the one hope--marriage, a rich marriage. It is the habit
of men who can take care of themselves and of women who are securely
well taken care of to scorn the woman or the helpless-bred man who
marries for money or even entertains that idea. How little imagination
these scorners have! To marry for a mere living, hardly better than
one could make for oneself, assuredly does show a pitiful lack of
self-reliance, a melancholy lack of self-respect. But for men or women
all their lives used to luxury and with no ability whatever at earning
money--for such persons to marry money in order to save themselves from
the misery and shame that poverty means to them is the most natural,
the most human action conceivable. The man or the woman who says he or
she would not do it, either is a hypocrite or is talking without
thinking. You may in honesty criticize and condemn a social system that
suffers men and women to be so crudely and criminally miseducated by
being given luxury they did not earn. But to condemn the victims of
that system for acting as its logic compels is sheer folly or sheer
phariseeism.
Would Mildred Gower have married for money? As the weeks fled, as the
bank account dwindled, she would have grasped eagerly at any rich man
who might have offered himself--no matter how repellent he might have
been. She did not want a bare living; she did not want what passes
with the mass of middle-class people for comfort. She wanted what she
had--the beautiful and spacious house, the costly and fashionable
clothing, the servants, the carriages and motors, the thousand and one
comforts, luxuries, and vanities to which she had always been used. In
the brain of a young woman of poor or only comfortably off family the
thoughts that seethed in Mildred Gower's brain would have been so many
indications of depravity. In Mildred Gower's brain they were the
natural, the inevitable, thoughts. They indicated everything as to her
training, nothing as to her character. So, when she, thinking only of
a rich marriage with no matter whom, and contrasting herself with the
fine women portrayed in the novels and plays, condemned herself as
shameless and degraded, she did herself grave injustice.
But no rich man, whether attractive or repulsive, offered. Indeed, no
man of any kind offered. Instead, it was her mother who married.
A widower named James Presbury, elderly, with an income of five to six
thousand a year from inherited wealth, stumbled into Hanging Rock to
live, was impressed by the style the widow Gower maintained, believed
the rumor that her husband had left her better off than was generally
thought, proposed, and was accepted. And two years and a month after
Henry Gower's death his widow became Mrs. James Presbury--and ceased to
veil from her new husband the truth as to her affairs.
Mildred had thought that, than the family quarrels incident to settling
her father's estate, human nature could no lower descend. She was now
to be disillusioned. When a young man or a young woman blunders into a
poor marriage in trying to make a rich one, he or she is usually
withheld from immediate and frank expression by the timidity of youth.
Not so the elderly man or woman. As we grow older, no matter how
timidly conventional we are by nature, we become, through selfishness
or through indifference to the opinion of others or through impatience
of petty restraint, more and more outspoken. Old Presbury discovered
how he had tricked himself four days after the wedding. He and his
bride were at the Waldorf in New York, a-honeymooning.
The bride had never professed to be rich. She had simply continued in
her lifelong way, had simply acted rich. She well knew the gaudy
delusions her admirer was entertaining, and she saw to it that nothing
was said or done to disturb him. She inquired into his affairs, made
sure of the substantiality of the comparatively small income he
possessed, decided to accept him as her best available chance to escape
becoming a charge upon her anything but eager and generous relatives.
She awaited the explosion with serenity. She cared not a flip for
Presbury, who was a soft and silly old fool, full of antiquated
compliments and so drearily the inferior of Henry Gower, physically and
mentally, that even she could appreciate the difference, the descent.
She rather enjoyed the prospect of a combat with him, of the end of
dissimulating her contempt. She had thought out and had put in arsenal
ready for use a variety of sneers, jeers, and insults that suggested
themselves to her as she listened and simpered and responded while he
was courting.
Had the opportunity offered earlier than the fourth day she would have
seized it, but not until that fourth morning was she in just the right
mood. She had eaten too much dinner the night before, and had followed
it after two hours in a stuffy theater with an indigestible supper. He
liked the bedroom windows open at night; she liked them closed. After
she fell into a heavy sleep, he slipped out of bed and opened the
windows wide--to teach her by the night's happy experience that she was
entirely mistaken as to the harmfulness of fresh winter air. The
result was that she awakened with a frightful cold and a splitting
headache. And as the weather was about to change she had shooting
pains like toothache through her toes the instant she thrust them into
her shoes. The elderly groom, believing he had a rich bride, was all
solicitude and infuriating attention. She waited until he had wrought
her to the proper pitch of fury. Then she said--in reply to some
remark of his:
"Yes, I shall rely upon you entirely. I want you to take absolute
charge of my affairs."
The tears sprang to his eyes. His weak old mouth, rapidly falling to
pieces, twisted and twitched with emotion. "I'll try to deserve your
confidence, darling," said he. "I've had large business experience--in
the way of investing carefully, I mean. I don't think your affairs
will suffer in my hands."
"Oh, I'm sure they'll not trouble you," said she in a sweet, sure tone
as the pains shot through her feet and her head. "You'll hardly notice
my little mite in your property." She pretended to reflect. "Let me
see--there's seven thousand left, but of course half of that is
Millie's."
"It must be very well invested," said he. "Those seven thousand shares
must be of the very best."
"Shares?" said she, with a gentle little laugh. "I mean dollars."
Presbury was about to lift a cup of cafe au lait to his lips. Instead,
he turned it over into the platter of eggs and bacon.
"We--Mildred and I," pursued his bride, "were left with only forty-odd
thousand between us. Of course, we had to live. So, naturally,
there's very little left."
Presbury was shaking so violently that his head and arms waggled like a
jumping-jack's. He wrapped his elegant white fingers about the arms of
his chair to steady himself. In a suffocated voice he said: "Do you
mean to say that you have only seven thousand dollars in the world?"
"Only half that," corrected she. "Oh, dear, how my head aches! Less
than half that, for there are some debts."
She was impatient for the explosion; the agony of her feet and head
needed outlet and relief. But he disappointed her. That was one of
the situations in which one appeals in vain to the resources of
language. He shrank and sank back in his chair, his jaw dropped, and
he vented a strange, imbecile cackling laugh. It was not an expression
of philosophic mirth, of sense of the grotesqueness of an anti-climax.
It was not an expression of any emotion whatever. It was simply a
signal from a mind temporarily dethroned.
"What are you laughing at?" she said sharply.
His answer was a repetition of the idiotic sound.
"What's the matter with you?" demanded she. "Please close your mouth."
It was a timely piece of advice; for his upper and false teeth had
become partially dislodged and threatened to drop upon the shirt-bosom
gayly showing between the lapels of his dark-blue silk house-coat. He
slowly closed his mouth, moving his teeth back into place with his
tongue--a gesture that made her face twitch with rage and disgust.
"Seven thousand dollars," he mumbled dazedly.
"I said less than half that," retorted she sharply.
"And I--thought you were--rich."
A peculiar rolling of the eyes and twisting of the lips gave her the
idea that he was about to vent that repulsive sound again. "Don't you
laugh!" she cried. "I can't bear your laugh--even at its best."
Suddenly he galvanized into fury. "This is an outrage!" he cried,
waving his useless-looking white fists. "You have swindled me--SWINDLED
me!"
Her head stopped aching. The pains in her feet either ceased or she
forgot them. In a suspiciously calm voice she said: "What do you
mean?"
"I mean that you are a swindler!" he shouted, banging one fist on the
table and waving the other.
She acted as though his meaning were just dawning upon her. "Do you
mean," said she tranquilly, "that you married me for money?"
"I mean that I thought you a substantial woman, and that I find you are
an adventuress."
"Did you think," inquired she, "that any woman who had money would
marry YOU?" She laughed very quietly. "You ARE a fool!"
He sat back to look at her. This mode of combat in such circumstances
puzzled him.
"I knew that you were rich," she went on, "or you would not have dared
offer yourself to me. All my friends were amazed at my stooping to
accept you. Your father was an Irish Tammany contractor, wasn't he?--a
sort of criminal? But I simply had to marry. So I gave you my family
and position and name in exchange for your wealth--a good bargain for
you, but a poor one for me."
These references to HIS wealth were most disconcerting, especially as
they were accompanied by remarks about his origin, of which he was so
ashamed that he had changed the spelling of his name in the effort to
clear himself of it. However, some retort was imperative. He looked at
her and said:
"Swindler and adventuress!"
"Don't repeat that lie," said she. "You are the adventurer--despite
the fact that you are very rich."
"Don't say that again," cried he. "I never said or pretended I was
rich. I have about five thousand a year--and you'll not get a cent of
it, madam!"
She knew his income, but no one would have suspected it from her
expression of horror. "What!" she gasped. "You dared to marry ME when
you were a--beggar! Me--the widow of Henry Gower! You impudent old
wreck! Why, you haven't enough to pay my servants. What are we to
live on, pray?"
"I don't know what YOU'LL live on," replied he. "_I_ shall live as I
always have."
"A beggar!" she exclaimed. "I--married to a beggar." She burst into
tears. "How men take advantage of a woman alone! If my son had been
near me! But there's surely some law to protect me. Yes, I'm sure
there is. Oh, I'll punish you for having deceived me." Her eyes dried
as she looked at him. "How dare you sit there? How dare you face me,
you miserable fraud!"
Early in her acquaintance with him she had discovered that determining
factors in his character were sensitiveness about his origin and
sensitiveness about his social position. On this knowledge of his
weaknesses was securely based her confidence that she could act as she
pleased toward him. To ease her pains she proceeded to pour out her
private opinion of him--all the disagreeable things, all the insults
she had been storing up.
She watched him as only a woman can watch a man. She saw that his rage
was not dangerous, that she was forcing him into a position where fear
of her revenging herself by disgracing him would overcome anger at the
collapse of his fatuous dreams of wealth. She did not despise him the
more deeply for sitting there, for not flying from the room or trying
to kill her or somehow compelling her to check that flow of insult. She
already despised him utterly; also, she attached small importance to
self-respect, having no knowledge of what that quality really is.
When she grew tired, she became quiet. They sat there a long time in
silence. At last he ran up the white flag of abject surrender by
saying:
"What'll we live on--that's what I'd like to know?"
An eavesdropper upon the preceding violence of upward of an hour would
have assumed that at its end this pair must separate, never to see each
other again voluntarily. But that idea, even as a possibility, had not
entered the mind of either. They had lived a long time; they were
practical people. They knew from the outset that somehow they must
arrange to go on together. The alternative meant a mere pittance of
alimony for her; meant for him social ostracism and the small income
cut in half; meant for both scandal and confusion.
Said she fretfully: "Oh, I suppose we'll get along, somehow. I don't
know anything about those things. I've always been looked after--kept
from contact with the sordid side of life."
"That house you live in," he went on, "does it belong to you?"
She gave him a contemptuous glance. "Of course," said she. "What low
people you must have been used to!"
"I thought perhaps you had rented it for your bunco game," retorted he.
"The furniture, the horses, the motor--all those things--do they belong
to you?"
"I shall leave the room if you insult me," said she.
"Did you include them in the seven thousand dollars?"
"The money is in the bank. It has nothing to do with our house and our
property."
He reflected, presently said: "The horses and carriages must be sold
at once--and all those servants dismissed except perhaps two. We can
live in the house."
She grew purple with rage. "Sell MY carriages! Discharge MY servants!
I'd like to see you try!"
"Who's to pay for keeping up that establishment?" demanded he.
She was silent. She saw what he had in mind.
"If you want to keep that house and live comfortably," he went on,
"you've got to cut expenses to the bone. You see that, don't you?"
"I can't live any way but the way I've been used to all my life,"
wailed she.
He eyed her disgustedly. Was there anything equal to a woman for folly?
"We've got to make the most of what little we have," said he.
"I tell you I don't know anything about those things," repeated she.
"You'll have to look after them. Mildred and I aren't like the women
you've been used to. We are ladies."
Presbury's rage boiled over again at the mention of Mildred. "That
daughter of yours!" he cried. "What's to be done about her? I've got
no money to waste on her."
"You miserable Tammany THING!" exclaimed she. "Don't you dare SPEAK of
my daughter except in the most respectful way."
And once more she opened out upon him, wreaking upon him all her wrath
against fate, all the pent-up fury of two years--fury which had been
denied such fury's usual and natural expression in denunciations of the
dead bread-winner. The generous and ever-kind Henry Gower could not be
to blame for her wretched plight; and, of course, she herself could not
be to blame for it. So, until now there had been no scapegoat.
Presbury therefore received the whole burden. He, alarmed lest a
creature apparently so irrational, should in wild rage drive him away,
ruin him socially, perhaps induce a sympathetic court to award her a
large part of his income as alimony, said not a word in reply. He bade
his wrath wait. Later on, when the peril was over, when he had a firm
grip upon the situation--then he would take his revenge.
They gave up the expensive suite at the Waldorf that very day and
returned to Hanging Rock. They alternated between silence and the
coarsest, crudest quarrelings, for neither had the intelligence to
quarrel wittily or the refinement to quarrel artistically. As soon as
they arrived at the Gower house, Mildred was dragged into the wrangle.
"I married this terrible man for your sake," was the burden of her
mother's wail. "And he is a beggar--wants to sell off everything and
dismiss the servants."
"You are a pair of paupers," cried the old man. "You are shameless
tricksters. Be careful how you goad me!"
Mildred had anticipated an unhappy ending to her mother's marriage, but
she had not knowledge enough of life or of human nature to anticipate
any such horrors as now began. Every day, all day long the vulgar
fight raged. Her mother and her stepfather withdrew from each other's
presence only to think up fresh insults to fling at each other. As
soon as they were armed they hastened to give battle again. She
avoided Presbury. Her mother she could not avoid; and when her mother
was not in combat with him, she was weeping or wailing or railing to
Mildred.
It was at Mildred's urging that her mother acquiesced in Presbury's
plans for reducing expenses within income. At first the girl, even
more ignorant than her mother of practical affairs, did not appreciate
the wisdom, not to say the necessity, of what he wished to do, but soon
she saw that he was right, that the servants must go, that the horses
and carriages and the motors must be sold. When she was convinced and
had convinced her mother, she still did not realize what the thing
really meant. Not until she no longer had a maid did she comprehend.
To a woman who has never had a maid, or who has taken on a maid as a
luxury, it will seem an exaggeration to say that Mildred felt as
helpless as a baby lying alone in a crib before it has learned to
crawl. Yet that is rather an understatement of her plight. The maid
left in the afternoon. Mildred, not without inconveniences that had in
the novelty their amusing side, contrived to dress that evening for
dinner and to get to bed; but when she awakened in the morning and was
ready to dress, the loss of Therese became a tragedy. It took the girl
nearly four hours to get herself together presentably--and then, never
had she looked so unkempt. With her hair, thick and soft, she could do
nothing.
"What a wonderful person Therese was!" thought she. "And I always
regarded her as rather stupid." Her mother, who had not had a maid
until she was about thirty and had never become completely dependent,
fared somewhat better, though, hearing her moans, you would have
thought she was faring worse.
Mildred's unhappiness increased from day to day, as her wardrobe fell
into confusion and disrepair. She felt that she must rise to the
situation, must teach herself, must save herself from impending
dowdiness and slovenliness. But her brain seemed to be paralyzed. She
did not know how or where to begin to learn. She often in secret gave
way to the futility of tears.
There were now only a cook and one housemaid and a man of all work--all
three newcomers, for Presbury insisted--most wisely--that none of the
servants of the luxurious, wasteful days would be useful in the new
circumstances. He was one of those small, orderly men who have a
genius for just such situations as the one he now proceeded to grapple
with and solve. In his pleasure at managing everything about that
house, in distributing the work among the three servants, in marketing,
and, in inspecting purchases and nosing into the garbage-barrel, in
looking for dust on picture-frames and table-tops and for neglected
weeds in the garden walks--in this multitude of engrossing delights he
forgot his anger over the trick that had been played upon him. He
still fought with his wife and denounced her and met insult with
insult. But that, too, was one of his pleasures. Also, he felt that
on the whole he had done well in marrying. He had been lonely as a
bachelor, had had no one to talk with, or to quarrel with, nothing to
do. The marriage was not so expensive, as his wife had brought him a
house--and it such a one as he had always regarded as the apogee of
elegance. Living was not dear in Hanging Rock, if one understood
managing and gave time to it. And socially he was at last established.
Soon his wife was about as contented as she had ever been in her life.
She hated and despised her husband, but quarreling with him and railing
against him gave her occupation and aim--two valuable assets toward
happiness that she had theretofore lacked. Her living--shelter, food,
clothing enough--was now secure. But the most important factor of all
in her content was the one apparently too trivial to be worthy of
record. From girlhood she could not recall a single day in which she
had not suffered from her feet. And she had been ashamed to say
anything about it--had never let anyone, even her maid, see her feet,
which were about the only unsightly part of her. None had guessed the
cause of her chronic ill-temper until Presbury, that genius for the
little, said within a week of their marriage:
"You talk and act like a woman with chronic corns."
He did not dream of the effect this chance thrust had upon his wife.
For the first time he had really "landed." She concealed her fright
and her shame as best she could and went on quarreling more viciously
than ever. But he presently returned to the attack. Said he:
"Your feet hurt you. I'm sure they do. Now that I think of it, you
walk that way."
"I suppose I deserve my fate," said she. "When a woman marries beneath
her she must expect insult and low conversation."
"You must cure your feet," said he. "I'll not live in the house with a
person who is made fiendish by corns. I think it's only corns. I see
no signs of bunions."
"You brute!" cried his wife, rushing from the room.
But when they met again, he at once resumed the subject, telling her
just how she could cure herself--and he kept on telling her, she
apparently ignoring but secretly acting on his advice. He knew what he
was about, and her feet grew better, grew well--and she was happier
than she had been since girlhood when she began ruining her feet with
tight shoes.
Six months after the marriage, Presbury and his wife were getting on
about as comfortably as it is given to average humanity to get on in
this world of incessant struggle between uncomfortable man and his
uncomfortable environment. But Mildred had become more and more
unhappy. Her mother, sometimes angrily, again reproachfully--and that
was far harder to bear--blamed her for "my miserable marriage to this
low, quarrelsome brute." Presbury let no day pass without telling her
openly that she was a beggar living off him, that she would better
marry soon or he would take drastic steps to release himself of the
burden. When he attacked her before her mother, there was a violent
quarrel from which Mildred fled to hide in her room or in the remotest
part of the garden. When he hunted her out to insult her alone, she
sat or stood with eyes down and face ghastly pale, mute, quivering. She
did not interrupt, did not try to escape. She was like the chained and
spiritless dog that crouches and takes the shower of blows from its
cruel master.
Where could she go? Nowhere. What could she do? Nothing. In the
days of prosperity she had regarded herself as proud and high spirited.
She now wondered at herself! What had become of the pride? What of the
spirit? She avoided looking at her image in the glass--that thin,
pallid face, those circled eyes, the drawn, sick expression about the
mouth and nose. "I'm stunned," she said to herself. "I've been stunned
ever since father's death. I've never recovered--nor has mother." And
she gave way to tears--for her father, she fancied; in fact, from shame
at her weakness and helplessness. She thought--hoped--that she would
not be thus feeble and cowardly, if she were not living at home, in the
house she loved, the house where she had spent her whole life. And
such a house! Comfort and luxury and taste; every room, every corner
of the grounds, full of the tenderest and most beautiful associations.
Also, there was her position in Hanging Rock. Everywhere else she
would be a stranger and would have either no position at all or one
worse than that of the utter outsider. There, she was of the few
looked up to by the whole community. No one knew, or even suspected,
how she was degraded by her step-father. Before the world he was
courteous and considerate toward her as toward everybody. Indeed,
Presbury's natural instincts were gentle and kindly. His hatred of
Mildred and his passion for humiliating her were the result of his
conviction that he had been tricked into the marriage and his inability
to gratify his resentment upon his wife. He could not make the mother
suffer; but he could make the daughter suffer--and he did. Besides,
she was of no use to him and would presently be an expense.
"Your money will soon be gone," he said to her. "If you paid your just
share of the expenses it would be gone now. When it is gone, what will
you do?"
She was silent.
"Your mother has written to your brother about you."
Mildred lifted her head, a gleam of her former spirit in her eyes. Then
she remembered, and bent her gaze upon the ground.
"But he, like the cur that he is, answered through a secretary that he
wished to have nothing to do with either of you."
Mildred guessed that Frank had made the marriage an excuse.
"Surely some of your relatives will do something for you. I have my
hands full, supporting your mother. I don't propose to have two
strapping, worthless women hanging from my neck."
She bent her head lower, and remained silent.
"I warn you to bestir yourself," he went on. "I give you four months.
After the first of the year you can't stay here unless you pay your
share--your third."
No answer.
"You hear what I say, miss?" he demanded.
"Yes," replied she.
"If you had any sense you wouldn't wait until your last cent was gone.
You'd go to New York now and get something to do."
"What?" she asked--all she could trust herself to speak.
"How should _I_ know?" retorted he furiously. "You are a stranger to
me. You've been educated, I assume. Surely there's something you can
do. You've been out six years now, and have had no success, for you're
neither married nor engaged. You can't call it success to be flattered
and sought by people who wanted invitations to this house when it was a
social center."
He paused for response from her. None came.
"You admit you are a failure?" he said sharply.
"Yes," said she.
"You must have realized it several years ago," he went on. "Instead of
allowing your mother to keep on wasting money in entertaining lavishly
here to give you a chance to marry, you should have been preparing
yourself to earn a living." A pause. "Isn't that true, miss?"
He had a way of pronouncing the word "miss" that made it an epithet, a
sneer at her unmarried and unmarriageable state. She colored, paled,
murmured:
"Yes."
"Then, better late than never. You'll do well to follow my advice and
go to New York and look about you."
"I'll--I'll think of it," stammered she.
And she did think of it. But in all her life she had never considered
the idea of money-making. That was something for men, and for the
middle and lower classes--while Hanging Rock was regarded as most
noisomely middle class by fashionable people, it did not so regard
itself. Money-making was not for ladies. Like all her class, she was
a constant and a severe critic of the women of the lower orders who
worked for her as milliners, dressmakers, shop-attendants, cooks,
maids. But, as she now realized, it is one thing to pass upon the work
of others; it is another thing to do work oneself. She-- There was
literally nothing that she could do. Any occupation, even the most
menial, was either beyond her skill or beyond her strength, or beyond
both.
Suddenly she recalled that she could sing. Her prostrate spirit
suddenly leaped erect. Yes, she could sing! Her voice had been praised
by experts. Her singing had been in demand at charity entertainments
where amateurs had to compete with professionals. Then down she
dropped again. She sang well enough to know how badly she sang--the
long and toilsome and expensive training that lay between her and
operatic or concert or even music-hall stage. Her voice was fine at
times. Again--most of the time--it was unreliable. No, she could not
hope to get paying employment even as a church choir-singer. Miss
Dresser who sang in the choir of the Good Shepherd for ten dollars a
Sunday, had not nearly so good a voice as she, but it was reliable.
"There is nothing I can do--nothing!"
All at once, with no apparent bridge across the vast chasm, her heart
went out, not in pity but in human understanding and sisterly sympathy,
to the women of the pariah class at whom, during her stops in New York,
she had sometimes gazed in wonder and horror. "Why, we and they are
only a step apart," she said to herself in amazement. "We and they are
much nearer than my maid or the cook and they!"
And then her heart skipped a beat and her skin grew cold and a fog
swirled over her brain. If she should be cast out--if she could find
no work and no one to support her--would she-- "O my God!" she moaned.
"I must be crazy, to think such thoughts. I never could! I'd die
first--DIE!" But if anyone had pictured to her the kind of life she
was now leading--the humiliation and degradation she was meekly
enduring with no thought of flight, with an ever stronger desire to
stay on, regardless of pride and self-respect--if anyone had pictured
this to her as what she would endure, what would she have said? She
could see herself flashing scornful denial, saying that she would
rather kill herself. Yet she was living--and was not even
contemplating suicide as a way out!
A few days after Presbury gave her warning, her mother took advantage
of his absence for his religiously observed daily constitutional to say
to her:
"I hope you didn't think I was behind him in what he said to you about
going away?"
Mildred had not thought so, but in her mother's guilty tone and
guiltier eyes she now read that her mother wished her to go.
"It'd be awful for me to be left here alone with him," wailed her
mother insincerely. "Of course we've got no money, and beggars can't
be choosers. But it'd just about kill me to have you go."
Mildred could not speak.
"I don't know a thing about money," Mrs. Presbury went on. "Your
father always looked after everything." She had fallen into the way of
speaking of her first husband as part of some vague, remote past,
which, indeed, he had become for her. "This man"--meaning
Presbury--"has only about five thousand a year, as you know. I suppose
that's as small as he says it is. I remember our bills for one month
used to be as much or more than that." She waved her useless, pretty
hands helplessly. "I don't see HOW we are to get on, Mildred!"
Her mother wished her to go! Her mother had fallen under the influence
of Presbury--her mother, woman-like, or rather, ladylike, was of kin to
the helpless, flabby things that float in the sea and attach themselves
to whatever they happen to lodge against. Her mother wished her to go!
"At the same time," Mrs. Presbury went on, "I can't live without
somebody here to stand between me and him. I'd kill him or kill
myself."
Mildred muttered some excuse and fled from the room, to lock herself in.
But when she came forth again to descend to dinner, she had resolved
nothing, because there was nothing to resolve. When she was a child
she leaned from the nursery window one day and saw a stable-boy
drowning a rat that was in a big, oval, wire cage with a wooden bottom.
The boy pressed the cage slowly down in the vat of water. The rat, in
the very top of the cage, watched the floor sink, watched the water
rise. And as it watched it uttered a strange, shrill, feeble sound
which she could still remember distinctly and terribly. It seemed to
her now that if she were to utter any sound at all, it would be that
one.