MIDNIGHT
The heat was oppressive. Miss Gibbie turned off all lights save the one
on the candle-stand by the high mahogany bed, with its valance of white
pique, drew the large wing chair close to the open window and sat
down in it. Over her gown she had put on a mandarin coat bought
somewhere in China, and on her feet were the slippers embroidered for
her by a Japanese girl she had sent to a hospital in Nagasaki.
The moon, coming out of its hiding place, for a moment poised clear and
cool in a trough of gray banked by curling clouds of black, sent a
thread of pale light upon the golden dragons on the coat, flashed on the
slippers, and was lost in the darkness under which it darted. Miss
Gibbie, watching, nodded toward it, and tapped the stool on which her
feet rested with the tip of her toes.
"The moon is like one's self," she said. "Go where you will you can't
get rid of it. Spooky thing, a moon. One big eye. Don't like it!"
She lay back in her chair and rested her hands on its arms. From the
garden below the night wind brought soft fragrance of lilacs and
crepe-myrtle, of bleeding-heart and wall-flower, of cow-slips and
candy-tuft, and as they blew in and out, like the touch of unseen
hands, they stirred old memories--made that which was dead, alive
again.
"You're a fool, Gibbie Gault--a fool! You are too old to care as you
care; too old to take up what you've turned your back on all these
years. You are too old--too old!"
Suddenly she sat up. "Too old, am I? I'll see about that! The tail end
of anything isn't its valuable part, and of a life it's usually useless,
but it is all I have left, and I'll be jammed if I don't do something
with it. And were I a man I wouldn't say I'll be jammed. Men have so
many advantages over women!"
Again she leaned back in her chair and tapped its arms with her long,
slender fingers. "I wonder how long I have to live. One--five--ten
years? What puppets we humans are--what puppets! Born without
permission, dying when it is neither pleasant nor convenient, we are
made to march or crawl through life on the edge of a precipice from
which at any moment we may be knocked over. And we're told we should
believe the experience is a privilege!" Both hands were lifted. "A
privilege! Mary thinks it is, thinks parts of it very pleasant, but Mary
never was a field in which she didn't find a four-leaf clover, and I
never saw one in which I did. 'Look for it,' she tells me." She shook
her head. "It isn't that. The pitiful part of life is when one cares so
little for what life gives!"
The tips of her fingers were brought together, then opened and shut
mechanically. "And once I cared so much! Who doesn't care when they
are young and wonderful things are ahead? Who doesn't care? And
now to be caring again after the long, long, useless years! To be
caring again!"
She closed her eyes and smiled a queer, twisted little smile. "It's got
me!" she said. "Old or not, it's got me! and it's a poor life that it
doesn't get! But who would have thought at your age, Gibbie Gault, you
would let another life do with yours what it will? And that's what you
are doing; you are letting Mary Cary do with you what she will! Well,
suppose I am?" The keen gray eyes opened with a snap, and without
warning stinging tears sprang in them. "Suppose I am? I've been a
selfish old fool and shut out the only thing worth the having in life,
and do you think now it's given me I am going to turn my back on it?
In all this big world sheis the only person who really loves me--the
only one I really love. And do you think?"--she nodded fiercely as if
to some one before her, then crumpled in a sudden heap in her chair.
"Oh, God, don't let her go out of my life! I'm an old woman and she's
all I've got! All I've got!"
For some moments she lay still, then reached out for her handkerchief.
"What a variety of fools one female can be! Sit up and behave yourself,
Gibbie Gault! You came near making a bargain with the Lord then, and
if there's one thing more than another that must be hard for Him to have
patience with it's a person who tries to make a deal with Him. 'Prosper
me and I'll pray you' is the prayer of many. 'Keep evil from me; hold
death back; take care of me, and I'll build a new church, send out a
missionary, give my tenth and over! Don't hurt me, and I'll be good!'
Who doesn't pray like that some time or other in life? Well, you came
near doing it yourself. Propitiation is an instinct, and money is all
some have to offer as a bribe. To love mercy, to deal justly, and to
walk humbly with one's Maker are terms too hard for most of us. Much
easier to dope one's conscience with money. It's the only thing I've
got, money is, and there have been times when I'd have given its every
dollar for the thing it couldn't get. I came near mentioning it just
now!"
She wiped her eyes resentingly, rubbed her cheeks none too gently, then
opened her handkerchief and smoothed it into damp folds.
"Tears! Who would believe Gibbie Gault had a tear duct!" She shook
her head. "Gibbie Gault has everything every other woman has, and if
she chooses to hide a hungry heart under a sharp tongue whose business
is it? People may talk about her as much as they please, but they
sha'n't feel sorry for her!" She threw her handkerchief on the table.
"What idiots we are to go masquerading through life! All playing a
part--all! Pretending not to care when we do care. Pretending we do
when we don't. What a shabby little sham most of this thing called life
is! What a shabby little sham!"
She changed her position, recrossed her feet and folded her arms. "If
Mary were here she would say I needed a pill. Perhaps I need two, but
not the pink ones already prepared. Everybody has a pill that's hard to
swallow. /My/ pill might go down easily with some, and over
theirs I might not blink, but--Well, a pill is a pill; facts are facts,
and old age is old age. The thing is to face what is, shake your fist at
it if necessary, but never meet it, if disagreeable, half-way. I never
meet anything half-way. But it's a cruel trick time plays on us, this
making of body and brain a withered, wrinkled thing, whimpering for
warmth and food and sleep, and babbling of the past. It's a cruel
trick!"
Out on the still air the clock in St. John's church steeple struck
twelve strokes with clear deliberation. From the hall below they were
repeated, and from the mantel behind her the hour chimed softly. She
closed her eyes. "Twelve o'clock! Time for ladies of my age to be in
bed. Not going to bed! And my age hasn't yet reached the
babbling-of-the-past stage. It will never reach that, Gibbie. Never!"
Was it a hundred or a thousand years ago that she used to sit on this
same stool at her father's knees and recite Latin verbs to him, and as
reward have him read her tales of breathless adventure and impossible
happenings, all the more delicious because forbidden by her prosaic
mother? She was seven when her mother died, but she barely
remembered her, and had she lived they would hardly have been great
friends. Her mother's pride was in pickles and preserves and brandy
peaches; in parties where the table groaned, the servants also, and in
the looking well after the ways of her household. But of a child's heart
and imagination she knew little. She was a true woman, but a housekeeper
had taken her place, and neither her father nor herself had been
seriously affected by her death.
And what splendid comrades she and her father were after her mother
left them! He would let no one teach her but himself, and how he loved
to show her off to his friends, putting her on top of the dining-room
table and making her recite in Latin bits from an ode of Horace, in
French a fable of La Fontaine's, in English a sonnet of Shelley or
extracts from Shakespeare's plays, and then letting her dance the
heel-and-toe shuffle taught her secretly by the darkies on the place.
What a selfish little pig she had been allowed to be! How selfish both
of them had been! Their books a passion, travel their delight, most
people but persons who bored or bothered, they had lived largely apart,
come and gone as they chose, cared little for what others said or
thought; and yet when the war came they were back, passionate defenders
of their cause, and in their hearts hot hate for those who sought to
crush it.
And then it was pride measured its lance with love, and won. The
awakening of her womanhood and the mockery of life had come
together, hand in hand, and henceforth she was another creature.
In her chair Miss Gibbie shivered. It was not the sudden gust of wind
that caused the sudden chill, but the scent of the micrafella roses just
under the window which the wind had brought; and her arms,
interlocked, were pressed closer to her breast. "Gibbie Gault, what a
fool you are!" she said, under her breath. "But how much bigger a fool
you were nearly fifty years ago!"
Seventeen. Young, vivid, brilliant, beautiful. Yes, beautiful! Nothing
is so beautiful as youth, and she had much more than youth. The gods had
been good to her up to then, and then they taunted her, made spring in
her heart love for one only--love that must be crushed and killed, for
the man who alone could inspire it wore the hated blue, was there to
fight against her people, and never must she marry him, she told
herself. On a visit North she had met him, and it was a whim of fate
that he should be captain of one of the companies taking possession of
Yorkburg, with headquarters in the Roy house, next to her own. A whim of
fate! Friend and foe they met daily, and battle was never waged more
hotly than was theirs. On his part, determination that never yields. On
hers, pride that never surrenders. And then one day there was a change
of orders. His regiment was sent away and to battle. Lest the horror,
the terror of it all undo her, she had bid him go, refused to promise in
the years to come she would ever be his wife, and the look on his fine,
brave face had followed her through life.
A month later he was brought back and by her order to her house.
Fatally wounded, in delirium her name was ever on his lips, but in
his eyes blankness. And on her knees by his bed she had twisted in an
agony of prayer that for one moment, but one moment, light might come
into them that she might pray for pardon ere he died. But no light
came and he died, not knowing that for her love, too, was dead.
Again Miss Gibbie stirred, for again she seemed to see herself. This
time she was by an open grave. White, rigid, erect, she watched with
tearless eyes the lowering, not of a mere body in the ground, but the
burying of all youth has the right to ask of life. Out of the future
were gone for her the dreams of girlhood and a woman's hopes. The
bareness and emptiness of coming years froze the blood in her heart,
and when she turned away she lifted her head and bid life do its worst.
Nothing could matter now.
Darker than the days of battle were the days of peace, and she made
her father close the house and go away. For years they wandered where
they would, but always were back for the month of June; and no one
remembered that the twenty-first was the date of Colleen McMasters's
death, or know that on that day his grave was visited, and there alone
a woman yielded to the memories that ever filled her heart.
When her father died life in Yorkburg was impossible. With a tilt of
her chin at its dulness, a wave of her hand at its narrowness, and
eyes closed to its happy content, she had gone back to London and
reopened the house which had become known for her sharp wit, her
freedom of speech, and her disregard of persons who had for
commendation but inherited position; and there for years had what
she called headquarters, but never thought of or spoke of as home.
She pulled her chair closer to the window and, with elbows on its sill
and chin on her crossed hands, looked out into the soft silence of the
night.
"What a time for seeing clearly, seeing things just as they are, this
midnight is, Gibbie Gault! In the darkness wasted time stares you in the
face and facts refuse to turn their backs. And you thought once the
waste was all the other way--thought you were wise to stand off and
watch the little comedies and tragedies, the pitiful strivings for place
and power, the sordid struggles for bread and meat, the stupid ones for
cap and bells! The motives and masques, the small deceptions and the
large hypocrisies of life interested you immensely, didn't they? Take
the truth out and face it. You tell other people the truth--tell it to
yourself. A selfish old pig, that's what you were, and thinking yourself
clever all the while. Clever! And why? Because all your life you have
been a student of history, of human happenings, and of man's behavior to
his fellow-man, and particularly to woman, you thought you knew life,
didn't you? You didn't! Because you were an evolutionist and recognized
Nature's disregard of human values, the impartial manifestations of her
laws, and the reckoning which their violation demands, you thought
science must satisfy. Science doesn't satisfy. With ignorance and
superstition, with life's cruelties and injustice, with human
helplessness, you could quarrel well, but beyond the sending out of
checks to serve as a soothing-syrup to your encumbrance of a conscience
what did you ever do to give a lift to anything? Nothing! And the pity
is there are many like you!
"'Cui-bono-itis.' That's what you had, Gibbie Gault--'cui-bono-itis.'
Bad thing! Almost as hard on the people about you as the 'ego-itis' of
to-day. Pity people can't die of their own diseases instead of killing
other people with them. Great pity!"
The moon was gone. Only in faint lines of light was the blackness of the
sky broken, and as she looked out over the trees in the garden below,
and down the street, asleep and still, the scene changed, and no longer
was she in Yorkburg, but in the little village of Chenonceaux, at the
Inn of Le Bon Laboureur. Her friend, Miss Rawley, of Edinborough, was
with her. They were taking their coffee outdoors at a table placed where
they could best get the breeze and see the roses climbing over the
lattice-work of the little hotel, with its pots of red geraniums in the
windows. And in the door the young proprietor was smiling happily, for
down the long, straight, tree-lined road an automobile which had just
left the chateau was coming, and he had visions of what it would mean.
"I didn't." She nodded her head. "It's a way life has, this bringing of
somebody across our path, this taking of somebody out of it, as
incidentally as if we were flies. Well, that's what I used to think most
of us were. Flies! Those who weren't flies were spiders. Some buzzed,
some bit, and all in a net--all! And to think of the way I was taken by
the shoulders and turned around! Made to see all I'd been doing was
squinting at life with my nose turned up. Just that! Because I had seen
the just man perish in his righteousness, and the wicked prosper in his
wickedness, I thought, with my ancient friend, that time and chance
happeneth to all, and people and pigs had much in common. What an old
fool you were, Gibbie Gault! Take your pill! You saw life as you wanted
to see it, and, giving nothing to it, got nothing out of it. Right!
"Queer what a kiss can do--just one!" She drew in her breath and felt
it all again. The automobile had stopped. A party of Americans had
gotten out and, slowly drinking her coffee, she watched them. A man and
his wife, two children, a nurse, and a young girl, twenty, perhaps.
Something about her, something of glow and vividness and warmth, held
her, and a faint memory was stirred. A clear, fresh voice called to the
chauffeur as she sprang out of the car and came close to the table near
which she was sitting, and then she heard her name spoken in joyous
surprise.
"It's Miss Gibbie Gault! Oh, Aunt Katherine, it is Miss Gibbie Gault!"
Without warning, two strong young arms were thrown around her neck
and on her lips a hearty kiss was pressed. "Oh, Miss Gibbie, I'm so
glad to see you! /I'm so glad!/ I'm Mary Cary who used to live in
Yorkburg. You don't mind my kissing you, do you? I couldn't help it,
I really couldn't! It's /so/ good to see some one from Yorkburg!"
And she was hugged again, hugged hard.
"Nearly three years ago!" Her lips quivered. "And a different world
you've been living in since. Somebody was really glad to see you. It
makes a great difference in life when some one is glad to see you!"
Was it fate, chance, circumstance that had brought the girl to her?
She did not know. Once she would have said. Maybe God needed them
together, was Mary's view, and she never commented on Mary's views.
In that at least she had learned to hold her tongue. But it did not
matter. They were here in Yorkburg, lives closely interknit, and here,
in the home in which she had been born, she was to live henceforth. And
if but close to her she could keep the girl who had warmed her heart
and opened her eyes she would ask nothing more of life.
For two years and more they had been together. Instantly she had
wanted her, and, never hesitating in efforts to get what she wanted,
a month after the meeting at the little Inn of Le Bon Laboureur she
invited her to be her guest in a trip around the world. The invitation
was blunt. She had long wanted to take this trip, had long been looking
for the proper companion. She had a dog, but he wasn't allowed to come
to the table. Would she go? Her uncle and aunt would not let her miss
the chance. They made her go. Doctor Alden and his wife were sensible
people.
And then the night in Cairo when Mary came in her room, sat on the
stool at her feet, and, crossing her arms on her lap, looked up in her
face and said they must go home. The holiday had been long and happy,
but more of it would be loss of time. And home was Yorkburg. A visit to
Michigan first, long talks with her uncle and aunt, and then whatever
she was to do in life was to be done in Yorkburg. There was a little
money, something her uncle had invested for her when she first went to
live with him, until she decided on some sort of work. She would teach,
perhaps, and she would rather it would be in the little town in which
she had found a home when homeless and without a friend. She was not
willing to live with anybody or anywhere without work. She was anxious
to be about it. When could they start?
"And of course I started. Started just when she said. Did just what
she wanted and some things she didn't. Trotted on back to the old
pasture-land where old sheep should graze, and here I am to stay until
the call comes. Whoever thought you'd come back to Yorkburg, Gibbie
Gault! Back to shabby, sleepy, satisfied old Yorkburg! Well, you're
here! Mary Cary made you come. She loves it, always wanting to do
something for it; helping every broken-down old thing in it; laughing
at its funny ways, and keeping straight along in hers. And for what?
To-morrow everybody will be talking about the meeting to-night. About
other things she's doing. Small thanks she'll get, and if you tell her
so she'll say if you do things for thanks you don't deserve them. Bless
my soul, if it isn't raining!"
A sudden downpour of rain startled her, and she sat upright; then, at
a noise behind, turned and saw Mary Cary coming in the door.
"Oh, Miss Gibbie, I could spank you! I really could! You aren't even
five years old at times. It has turned almost cold, and raining hard,
and here you are sitting by an open window!" She felt the gown of the
older woman anxiously. "I believe it's damp. If you don't get in bed
I'm going to--"
"Do what?" Miss Gibbie got out of her chair, threw off the mandarin
coat with its golden dragons, and kicked her slippers toward the door.
"What are you going to do?"
"Put you in it. Get in and let me cover you up! Are you sure you aren't
cold? Sure?"
"Sure." Miss Gibbie mimicked the anxious tones of the girl now bending
over and tucking the covering round her warm and tight. "What did you
come in here for, anyhow? Go to bed!"
"I knew you'd left the window open, and it has turned so cool. I was
afraid there was too much air." She stooped over and kissed her.
"Good-night! Don't get up to breakfast. I'll see you during the day."
With a swift movement she turned off the light on the candle-stand and
was gone, and under the covering Miss Gibbie hid her face in the pillow.
"Dear God," she said. "Dear God, she's all I've got. I'm an old woman,
and she's all I've got!"