It was during the second spring that Mrs. Fanshaw came. Because of the
little matron Jean had finally broken her resolve to write no letters
home, whereupon her mother accepted the change as a sign of repentance
which, after a seemly interval, she decided to encourage with her
presence. Jean was keenly expectant of the promised visit. With the
shifting of her whole point of view she now blamed herself for many of
the things, so petty taken one by one, so serious in gross, which had
made her home life what it was; and out of the reaction there welled
an unguessed tenderness for her mother, shy of written expression, but
eager to confess itself in deed.
The official who brought Jean to the waiting-room and remained near
during the interview need not have turned a tactful back upon their
meeting for Mrs. Fanshaw's sake. That lady was as composed as the
best usage of Shawnee Springs's truly genteel could dictate under
circumstances so untoward. Her features reflected the most decorous
blend of pious resignation and parental compassion when the slender
blue-and-white figure flung itself from the doorway into her arms, and
she permitted the penitent to remain upon the bosom of her best alpaca
for an appreciable space of time with full knowledge that a waterfall
of lace, divers silken bows, and a long gold chain were lamentably
crushed by the impact.
"Concentrate, child," she admonished firmly. "How often I've told you
to aim at self-control at all times!"
Jean clung to her in a passion of homesickness, hearing nothing.
"Mother! Mother!" she repeated.
Mrs. Fanshaw detached herself, repaired the ravages, and turned a
critical eye upon her daughter.
"What a fright they've made of you!" she sighed. "The color of that
dress is becoming enough, but the pattern! What _have_ you been doing
to your hair?"
"My hair?" Jean fingered her braid vaguely. "Oh! You mean at the front?
It must be plain, you know."
"And your hands! You never kept them like Amelia's, but now--why, they
might be a day-laborer's."
"They are," said Jean.
But Mrs. Fanshaw's interest had fluttered elsewhere.
"I can't be too thankful that I spared Amelia this ordeal," she went
on. "Amelia was anxious to come. She said she felt it was her duty, but
I refused. She is so sensitive she could not have borne it. To see her
own sister in such clothes and in such surroundings would have made an
indelible impression."
Jean now had herself only too well in hand.
"I dare say the refuge might tarnish Amelia's girlish bloom," she
retorted dryly. "I hope you'll feel no bad effects yourself, mother."
"I'm positive I shall," replied Mrs. Fanshaw, seriously. "My nerves
are in a state already. But let that pass. Whatever the cost, I should
have come long ago if your behavior had been always what it should.
I could not come while you hardened your heart against God's will.
Your stubbornness in the beginning--they wrote me fully, Jean; your
unwomanly attempt to run away; that shocking riot, all showed--"
"That's past, mother."
"Past, yes; but not forgotten. Shawnee Springs never forgets anything.
Your escape was in the papers. I wrote you all that."
"They never let me know. Not in the home papers, the county papers?"
"No." Mrs. Fanshaw drew herself up. "Consideration for me prevented
that outrage. The editors preserved the same delicate silence that they
kept when you were arrested. But you don't seem to remember that city
dailies are read in Shawnee Springs. One vile sheet even printed your
picture."
The girl's face crimsoned painfully.
"Oh!" she cried sharply. "How could they! Where could they get it?"
Her mother hesitated.
"Amelia was in a way responsible," she admitted. "She was naturally
anxious at your disappearance, and when a nice-mannered young man
called and said that if he had your description he could help in the
search, the dear girl received him with open arms. How could _she_ know
he was a reporter!"
"She gave that man my picture!"
"Like a trusting child. Amelia has felt all our trouble so keenly. For
weeks after you were sent away she could scarcely look one of her set
in the face. She said she felt like a refuge girl herself. I had to
appeal to our pastor to make her see that neither of us was to blame.
She shrank from the world even then, but the world came to her."
"Meaning Harry Fargo?" queried Jean, emerging suddenly from the gloom
induced by Amelia's imbecility.
"Harry was particularly sweet," admitted Mrs. Fanshaw, archly. "In
fact, he has become a son to me in everything but name. If Amelia would
only--but I mustn't gossip."
Jean smiled without mirth.
"I think she'll land him," she encouraged.
Her mother frowned.
"What a common expression!" she rebuked. "I thought at first I noticed
an improvement in your language. Your voice is certainly better--much
lower. It's the prison discipline, I presume. But speaking of Harry, I
really think we may regard it as, well, reasonably sure. I must say I'm
pleased. Harry is so eligible."
Jean silently reviewed young Mr. Fargo's points; athlete second
to none in the gymnasium of the local Y.M.C.A.; gifted with a
tenor voice particularly effective at church festivals in ballads of
tee-total sentiment; heir presumptive to a mineral spring, a retail
coal business, and a seat in the directorate of the First National
Bank; clearly destined, in fine, to bloom one of the solid men of his
community. Joined to these virtues, present and prospective, he seemed
sincerely, if not ardently, fond of Amelia, and Jean with her whole
heart wished her sister's long-drawn-out wooing godspeed.
Perhaps she couched this less happily than she might. At all events,
Mrs. Fanshaw took warm-offence at some allusion to the suitor's
leisured siege.
"Under the circumstances," she remarked severely, "it's a wonder his
attentions have continued at all. No eligible young man in Shawnee
Springs can be expected to want a sister-in-law whose name everybody
mentions in the same breath with Stella Wilkes's, and you know the
Fargo family is as proud as Lucifer. I don't see that they have any
call to set themselves up as they do--the Tuttles were landowners in
the county twenty years before a Fargo was heard of; but there is
certainly some excuse for their standing off about Amelia. You don't
seem to appreciate how painful her situation has been. People were
only just pitching on something else to talk about after you went,
when you stirred the scandal up again by running away. That nearly
spoiled everything. I had it on the best of authority--Mrs. Fargo's
dressmaker is mine now--that Harry and his father actually came to
words. Then, to cap the climax, we'd no sooner settled down in peace
than the vulgar riot happened. Nobody knew positively whether you
were implicated, but they naturally judged you were, and of course I
couldn't conscientiously deny it when they asked me point-blank. It has
been terrible--terrible."
Jean was swept away upon the flood of egotism. She forgot that she too
had a point of view. Their wrongs were the great wrongs.
"I'm sorry," she said humbly. "It's true I didn't realize. I don't want
to stand in Amelia's way. You won't have reason to complain again while
I am here."
"I don't expect I shall. I can't conceive of another thing you could
be up to, even if your disposition to consider _our_ feelings a little
should change. If they'll only marry before your term expires!"
Jean's lips tightened.
"There's almost a year and a half yet," she said grimly. "Surely that's
time enough."
"It would be for anybody but a Fargo," sighed her mother. "They're slow
at everything. We can only hope and wait. It's been very hard."
"I'll try not to make it more so afterward," Jean returned. "I suppose
I must go back to the Springs at first. When a girl goes out they take
her--home. But I'll not stay. I'll go away at once."
"Go away! There are none of the relatives you can visit. The Tuttles
all feel the disgrace as if it were their own. As for your father's
folks--"
"I don't mean to visit. I mean to work--to live."
Mrs. Fanshaw focussed her parochial mind upon this outlandish
suggestion, assuming, as was her habit with novel impressions, an air
of truculent disapproval.
"Perhaps you still think you can gallivant about the country like a
man?" she remarked.
"No. I've got over that. I shall find some woman's work."
"You mean you'll cook, scrub, do the servant's drudgery you've learned
here? That would be a nice tale to go the rounds of the Springs!"
"I would cook or scrub if I had to, but I've been taught other
things. One of the girls who's leaving this fall--her name is Amy
Jeffries--knew no more about earning a living than I when she came
here, but she has an eight-dollar-a-week place waiting for her in New
York. She's going with a ready-made cloak firm. It was Miss Archer who
got her the place, and she says when the time comes she can probably do
as well by me."
"New York!" Mrs. Fanshaw shied with rural timidity from the fascinating
name. "You in New York! I must get Amelia's opinion. What if it should
prove a way out!"
During the remainder of the call the talk strayed mainly in a maze of
Shawnee Springs gossip which Jean followed in a lethargy beneath which
throbbed an ache. She had grown to value her home, not for what it had
been, but for what it might be, and to realize that it was beyond doubt
the more a home without her, cut deep. Mrs. Fanshaw had amputated an
ideal.
It in no way eased the smart to feel that her mother intended no
downright brutality. Indeed, as Jean did her the justice to perceive,
she tried in her clumsy way to be kind. She reverted again to the
agreeable change in the girl's voice, approved her quieter manner,
and, looking closer, even discerned a neatness in general upon which
she bestowed measured praise. It was in the midst of these final
note-takings that she detected her daughter in a vain attempt to
conceal some object in the folds of a pocketless dress.
"What are you doing?" she demanded in abrupt suspicion. "What are you
hiding from me?"
The girl started.
"Nothing," she said evasively.
"Nothing! You were always truthful at least."
"I mean nothing important."
Mrs. Fanshaw laid a firm grasp upon the shrinking hand, and dragged its
secret to light.
"Embroidery!" she exclaimed.
Jean's cheeks were poppies.
"Yes," she faltered.
"Whose is it?"
"Mine."
The reluctant monosyllables whipped Mrs. Fanshaw's curiosity wide awake.
"No more nonsense," she charged. "Tell me at once who gave you this."
"Nobody," confessed Jean faintly. "I--I made it."
"You!" A pair of glasses, black-rimmed and formidable, bore instantly
upon the marvel and searched it stitch by stitch.
Jean waited breathless. Wrought with infinite labor not of the hands
alone, the little piece of needlework was absurdly freighted with
meaning. In the old days she had loathed such employment as ardently as
her sister loved it, but of late she had set herself doggedly to learn
the art, since it seemed to her that this more than anything else would
typify her new outlook, her return to sex. As such a symbol she had
brought her handiwork into the visitors' room. As such, before their
meeting, she had hoped her mother might interpret it. Even now, bereft
of illusions as she was, she still hoped something, she knew not what.
In fairness to Mrs. Fanshaw it should be recorded that she apparently
grasped some hint of this. Relatively speaking, her smile was
encouraging. Viewed from her own standpoint, she all but scaled the top
note of praise when, extending the embroidery at last, she said,--
"It is almost as good as Amelia's."
The new Jean was still no candidate for sainthood. White to the lips
with anger, she caught the emblem of her regeneration from Mrs.
Fanshaw's profaning hand and tore it to little strips.