"Girls must go into heroics over something, I suppose; but you must see
for yourself that all this would look pretty badly if it came out and
wasn't explained, and it would hardly be worth while to lose your
reputation and your home and your position too, for an oath to a dead
woman. Too bad you have to come here by night, but, of course, day-time
is impossible, for people would be sure to see you, whereas the chances
are ten to one against it in the dark and dressed as you are. That
absurd oath! What was it now? And she was going to come back and curse
you, too, if you broke it, wasn't she?" He laughed.
"Our mother, Liol!" said Lynn, in a choked voice.
"Yes, our mother. I've almost forgotten what she looked like even, but
I suppose you remember her better than I do, though I don't see why you
should, considering the length of time that you were away from her
and--see here, Lynn, you've been here an ungodly time; I don't want to
hurry you, but--oh, I say! Amherst is puzzling his brains out as to how
I can write such healthy, humourous prose. You would have shouted if you
had heard him, the other night."
"Perhaps. But I must go, directly."
Lynn shivered and drew her fur a little more closely about her throat.
"I must go now, Liol," she repeated in a low voice. "Good-bye. And
don't--but there! what's the use of talking? Do as you please, dear;
only try to love me a little if you can. You're all I've got."
"Mighty little at that, too! You have but little here below nor will
you have that little long--there, don't look like that, old girl! I'm
only joking, you know."
With this joke ringing in her ears Lynn left; passed down the rickety
stairs, through the dark doorway, out upon the noisy street. It was not
a savoury neighbourhood this, where her brother had elected to take up
his abode. In fact, it was not a place for a lady at any hour of the
day or night. In face of an overpowering compulsion, however, a woman
sometimes forgets that she is a lady, and this was what had happened in
Lynn's case. The love which, in the majority of instances, is divided
among parents, brothers, sisters, husband, children, had been
concentrated upon one object. A foolish vow exacted by a delirious and
dying woman had become the important thing in Lynn Thayer's life, the
keeping of it a sacred duty.
We are usually punished both for our follies and our virtues, and Lynn
was certainly severely punished for hers. Ricossia, as he was called, in
Montreal, kept her on a constant rack of uncertainty and suspense.
Daily, hourly, she expected to hear of his death and, sometimes, in
moments of more than usual bitterness and grief, she almost wished that
he were safe in the grave and incapable of doing himself or her more
harm. The unworthiness of the loved object, moreover, made life
proportionately bitter; the necessity for constant deceit and stealth
was a cruel necessity to one of her nature, and the witty tales which
helped to procure her brother the luxuries he craved were frequently
written in anguish of heart and despair of spirit. Poor Punchinello,
dancing gaily on the night his love died and his heart was broken, has
many a modern prototype.
Yet through all the disgust and grief which his nature and actions
caused her, her love never faltered. To her, the drinking, drug-crazed
youth in whose degenerate nature there was not a trace of anything high
or kind was the baby brother of early days; the baby brother whom she
had tended, adored, sacrificed and been sacrificed for during the most
impressionable years of her life. The tiny creature had crept into the
lonely heart of the child, satisfying every want, sweetening every
bitterness. There had been nothing else in Lynn's life that had held
comparison with this.
*CHAPTER IV*
*A BRILLIANT MATCH*
"Love is a pastime for one's youth; marriage, a provision for
one's old age."--_Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler_.
"For life is not the thing we thought and not the thing we plan,
And woman, in a bitter world, must do the best she can."
--_Robert Service_.
In order that the reader may more fully understand the foregoing
chapters and the predicament in which certain of the characters find
themselves, it is necessary to ask him to return with us to a period
some thirty years before, when a certain young lady, known as Clara
Brooks, had just made a most sensible match.
Now, as this was the first sensible thing that Miss Brooks had ever been
known to do, it naturally attracted some attention and created some
discussion. For she was one of those impossible beings who want to be
happy and who, instead of viewing happiness in the light of a series of
discreetly conducted flirtations, ending in marriage with the most
eligible of the flirtees, had persisted in prolonging these flirtations
to a really indiscreet period of time and had even carried her folly so
far as to refuse two or three really desirable offers. She had a vague
yet fairly positive idea that marriage, in order to be at all happy or
satisfactory, must be based on mutual love and esteem, and, because of
this antiquated and most unfortunate notion, she had remained unmarried
until the age of twenty-five.
This attitude of Clara's laid her open to much well-deserved censure.
There were two opinions about it; the first being that she had no common
sense, whatever; the second being that she was unfortunately romantic
and fanciful, yet somewhat to be commended in that her ideals were of a
slightly higher order than those of the average girl. There was not
much truth in either of these views. Clara Brooks, like most of the
rest of the world, was supremely selfish, though not unpleasantly so.
She loved love; she also loved money; she wanted to be happy, whatever
the price she paid for happiness; and she did not care to do anything
that she thought likely to militate against her happiness. That was
all.
It seemed very hard to Clara, who possessed beauty of quite an unusual
order, a wheedling tongue, and a pretty taste in dress, that she could
not marry both for love and money. She would have preferred to marry
for love, however, if she had been obliged to make a choice. This was
partly because she had never known poverty and could not compute its
discomforts with any degree of accuracy; but, also, because she was one
of those women who are capable of an overpowering infatuation and who
are, therefore, instinctively on the watch for a possible object which
may awaken it. The object had not appeared; Clara was twenty-five, and
twenty-five, at the period of which I write, was not the twenty-five of
to-day. Only people of unusual fascination and prettiness, such as Miss
Brooks, dared to be unmarried at twenty-five. Already her enemies were
beginning to brand her with the awful stigma of "old maid," already her
friends were beginning to murmur plaintively, "What can she be thinking
about?"
Clara's thoughts ended in a very usual fashion. As Prince Charming had
not arrived; as the time was fast approaching when she would be
relegated to the dreadful social lumber room where all such derelicts of
love were stowed by grieving relatives in the "good old days"; as
enemies were, as has before been said, beginning to murmur "old maid"
behind her back, and friends, "silly girl" to her face; for all these
reasons and for fifty others, Clara Brooks suddenly made up her mind to
accept a well-to-do and silent man, by name Lowden Thayer, who for some
time past had been obviously attracted by her undoubted charms. Now the
sky brightened for Clara. She, as a bride-to-be, received many handsome
wedding presents, a number of compliments on her most unexpected good
sense, and a vast amount of eminently imbecile advice from well-meaning
ignoramuses of both sexes.
The wedding was a fine one; all Clara's relatives were pleased to know
that she was settled and would be provided for until the day of her
death no matter how ugly or unpleasant or incapable she became with age;
and all Lowden Thayer's relatives were pleased to think that he had
married at all, though the majority of them felt that he had made a most
unsuitable choice. Wherein they were undoubtedly right.
After the honeymoon, the Thayers took up their abode in a handsome house
in a fashionable quarter of Montreal; the gentleman went to business
every day and the lady began to receive and return calls from the elite
of what is known as "society."
She had many calls of all kinds to return, for she had fulfilled the
whole duty of civilized woman; she had married, and married well.
Within a year she further absolved herself of blame by bringing into the
world a little, helpless infant, bald and thin and red-faced, who howled
most objectionably and seemed as indignant at having existence thus
forced upon it as though it knew what existence really was. Probably it
was no prophetic instinct but some more prosaic ailment that led Clara's
infant daughter to make night hideous with her cries. Be that as it
may, its mother conceived something that almost amounted to dislike for
the ugly little voyager upon the sea of life for whose existence she was
responsible. She loved men and boys; why then should she give birth to
a daughter? She loved beauty; why should her first-born be devoid even
of hair? Besides ... the baby resembled its father; the "good match"
which Fate had compelled her to make, much against her wishes; the
detested crumple in her bed of roses; the hated benefactor to whose
unwise fancy she was indebted for board and clothing, place in society
and honourable title of "married woman"; the loathed necessity which
spoilt everything--even her child--for her.
This much, however, must be said for Clara Thayer; though the child
meant less than nothing to her, she did not neglect it on that account.
She may have been an unnatural mother, but she was not a soulless brute,
and she therefore attended carefully to its wants and saw that it lacked
for nothing that she could give it. What she could not give it, it
necessarily went without; but she did her duty so far as she was able
and was unexpectedly and munificently rewarded. For when her little
girl was three years of age its father died, leaving her a wealthy and
beautiful widow.
Now when Fortune is too kind to us Fate sometimes plays a grim joke, in
order to level us with the vast mass of toiling, yearning, disappointed,
suffering fellow-humans. This is what Fate did with Clara Thayer.
She was young, rich, beautiful, able to marry whom she pleased and live
as she liked without let or hindrance. Fate had given her good coin
with which to purchase anything her vagrant fancy might light upon. She
might have chosen whom she would. Therefore she chose an extremely
good-looking scoundrel whose Irish mother and Italian father had
bequeathed to him, together with the light-hearted fascinations of their
kindred natures, the sum total of every vice of which both lands are
capable. The sweet kindness of heart and warm devotion to cause and
kindred which characterize the Italian and Irish races lay in the
softness of his dark eyes, the velvet smoothness of his voice, but were
quite absent from his nature. This Clara Thayer did not know; and, had
she known, it is more than probable that she would not have cared. For
the first time in her life she was in the grip of a perfectly irrational
fascination, an infatuation which drove her as a whirlwind might drive
wheat. The infatuation ended, moreover, only when her life did.
This was, perhaps, a natural ending to Clara Thayer's career. It was
natural, too, that people should refer to her as that poor girl who made
"such a sensible first match" and "such an idiotic second one." As a
matter of fact it would be difficult to determine which of Clara's two
marriages was the more idiotic. Her first was for money, her second,
for love. Her first supplied her with good food, pretty clothes and
unlimited boredom. Her second gave her sharp rapture and equally
poignant pain. Possibly, if she had remained unmarried she might have
encountered worse things than any of these. Of the three wishes which
the bad fairy, Life, gives the average woman it is difficult to say
which is the least fraught with unhappiness.
"Woman in a bitter world must do the best she can." Clara Brooks did
the best she could and bad was the best.
However she died at forty-five, and many women live to be old.
*CHAPTER V*
*"BLIND FOOLS OF FATE"*
"Blind fools of fate and slaves of circumstance,
Life is a fiddler and we all must dance."
--_Robert Service_.
When Clara Thayer gave birth to a daughter she was, as has been before
stated, disappointed. When that daughter developed the appearance and
characteristics of its father Clara began to dislike it. In vain she
reasoned with herself, in vain upbraided herself, secretly and severely,
in vain called herself "an unnatural mother." The sad fact remained
that she did not care for the child. It had no pretty ways, no graceful
tricks; its eyes were dull, its skin was pale, its hair ordinary. If it
had resembled her she would have loved it; if it had resembled her
mother, her father, anyone for whom she cared, she would have idolized
it. It resembled no one, however, but her husband, and, although when
Clara had married Lowden Thayer she had been supremely indifferent to
him, that indifference had, unfortunately, deepened into a positively
appalling dislike. Not dislike for his character which she respected;
not dislike for his attitude toward her which left nothing to be
desired; no, dislike for the man, himself, dislike for his personality,
his manners, his way of entering a room, his way of brushing his hair,
his way of walking, talking, breathing.
It is easy here for the reader to throw down this veracious account of a
real woman with the single comment that she was unreasonable and
ungrateful. It is true that she was unreasonable but not that she was
ungrateful. She knew all that she owed to her husband, she sometimes
hated herself for her lack of feeling, and she strove earnestly to hide
her dislike and to do her duty in a way befitting a wife and mother. It
was a bitter addition to what seemed to her an already difficult life
when the child, to whose advent she had looked with so much hope and
longing, turned out the counterpart of her husband. Instead of a
distraction it was a perpetual reminder of the galling chain; instead of
a delight it represented merely another disagreeable duty.
Clara was generally considered a model wife and mother; every domestic
obligation was scrupulously performed, every connubial and matronly
demand upon her time, health and patience, uncomplainingly complied
with. When Mr. Thayer died, however, four years after their marriage,
Clara felt only an unspeakable relief; and when, nine years later, Mr.
Thayer's brother offered to adopt Lynn, on condition that her mother
gave her up, entirely, Clara felt only that a burden had been lifted
from her shoulders.
She had one child by her second husband after she had been married to
him five years, and that child was a boy who combined his father's
picturesque, foreign beauty with his mother's refinement and grace. To
him, she was an adoring mother; he was second in her heart only to Guido
Allardi. Just as Lynn had been the image of the man whom Clara had
disliked, so Lionel was the image of the man whom she worshipped. There
was no wish or choice in the matter; she always felt sorry that she
could not care for Lynn, and she sometimes wished, in moments of
bitterness, that Lionel did not resemble his father so closely. It was
a rare retribution of Fate, this! the unloved child of the unloved
father who was all that a mother could wish and the idolized child of
the idolized father who inherited from him every trait that could break
a mother's heart. If Lowden Thayer could have looked into the future he
would have been amply revenged. It is improbable, however, that he
wanted revenge; he wanted his wife's love and, failing that, he wanted
rest. He never had the first but we may reasonably hope that he had the
latter.
"Love's eyes are very blind," but they are never so blind as not to
perceive dislike on the part of the loved object, however
conscientiously that dislike may be hidden. Lowden Thayer was a just
man; he saw that his wife did her best and he, on his part, did his
best, hid his sorrow manfully, and, when he died, willed Clara all his
property, unhampered by any galling restrictions.
The little daughter whom he left behind developed in a rather
interesting fashion.
The widely diverse natures of Lowden Thayer and his wife mingled oddly
in her. She had her father's face but her mother's pliant, graceful
figure and movements. She inherited from her father a useful brain,
capable of assimilating considerable knowledge and of reasoning
accurately and carefully; but she had her mother's brilliancy and lively
wit. She had her father's industry, business ability, and sense of
justice, and her mother's love of popularity and social gayety. From
both she inherited one thing in overwhelming measure; the capacity for
any amount of silent, tenacious affection which no ill-treatment could
shake, no disillusionment alter. Another thing, too, she had from both;
the ability to suffer in silence, keeping a cool and careless front to
the world and hiding a bleeding heart and a broken spirit behind a
smiling face and manner. Lynn was thus, in many ways, not so unlike her
mother as that mother supposed.
At the time when Lynn was adopted by her uncle Horace she was twelve
years of age. The next seven years were very busy ones. Child though
she was, she felt keenly the fact that her uncle had taken her into his
home in fulfilment of a sense of duty, rather than from motives of
affection. She determined that she would be indebted to him for nothing
more than was absolutely necessary. In pursuance of this idea she
begged to be allowed to train for a teacher and, on graduating, insisted
on taking a position which offered itself. Her uncle made little
objection; he cherished the common masculine delusion that women who
live at home have nothing to do with their time and he thought it rather
a good idea that some of this time should be occupied. The idea of his
niece being a public school teacher did not exactly appeal to his sense
of the fitness of things; but, after all, since the girl was bent on it,
"let her do as she likes" was his ultimatum. Therefore Lynn did as she
liked; and events which shortly afterwards transpired made her think
with horror of the fact that, had she followed her aunt's wishes, she
would have been without any money that she could call her own.
It was when she was nineteen that she received a letter in an unknown
handwriting. Its contents were brief and pregnant. Her mother was
dying; would Lynn visit her in New York before she died? as there was
much that she had to say. The letter ended with an injunction to hide
the matter from her uncle and aunt, who would never allow her to travel
alone, and would insist on accompanying her, which her mother did not
wish.
It would be difficult to describe the effect which this letter had upon
Lynn. She had always known that she held no place in her mother's
heart, and that knowledge was a settled grief, not an active sorrow.
The letter gave her a dull pain, almost like the pain which one would
experience, could the corpse of a dead friend whom one had mourned, then
almost though not quite forgotten, suddenly come to life and demand
recognition.
Lynn had held no communication with her mother since she had lived with
her uncle in Montreal. To her literal and very punctilious mind the
fact that this correspondence was debarred as a condition of adoption
rendered it out of the question. Besides, it must be remembered that
there had been no tender, anguished parting of mother and child; Clara
had, as always, behaved prettily and politely, had kissed the plain
little face, distorted with difficult feeling, and had inwardly
congratulated herself that this child of Lowden Thayer had inherited his
silent, unemotional nature. Otherwise she would have felt more
hesitation about sending her among strangers. As it was--the child was
a good child, who could be depended upon to give little or no trouble to
her guardians, and she had so little feeling that one place was likely
to be much like another place to her. True, Clara reflected with a
slight qualm, true, the child was devoted to her little brother; but
children soon forget. It would be a criminal sentimentality and one for
which the girl would have a right to reproach her in the future, did she
neglect this excellent chance of having her provided for. So she kissed
her once again, trying to smile at her with affection and kindness, told
her that she must not altogether forget her mother and her little
brother, though it was not likely that she would see them again for a
little while; and watched the train steaming out of the crowded station
with mingled feelings of pity, relief, self-congratulation, and some
faint stirring of sorrow that she could not feel more spontaneous
affection for her own child. Her own child!--that recalled Lionel to
her mind and her eyes brightened and gleamed. How beautiful he was! how
dear! how sweet that Fate should give her this one lovely thing to
offset her disappointment in the other direction! And how delightful
that the six hundred which Horace Thayer had allowed her for the future
should be tied up so tightly that only she could have access to it.
Little Lionel need not lack for everything while she had that to fall
back upon.
It may be asked if no thought of her dead husband, no perception of the
difference between him and Allardi ever caused her to draw painful
contrasts and inferences. Yes, these thoughts, these comparisons did
occur to her sorrowfully enough at times; she frequently bewailed the
ugly Fate which made the faithful dead abhorrent, the unprincipled and
worthless living dear to her. But facts are facts. The dead was
abhorrent, the living _was_ dear. So with her children. Despite the
fact that, although at the time of which we write, Lionel was a baby, he
already displayed traits which made her uneasy; despite the fact that
Lynn had been almost pathetically "good" from babyhood, humbly devoted
to her mother, utterly subservient to every whim of her baby brother;
despite these facts, Clara had for Lynn, at best, a sort of affectionate
tolerance, while for Lionel she had an overpowering love.
Do not, dear reader, wholly bury poor Clara under the weight of your
virtuous indignation. She had an unfortunate disposition, that was all.
The worthless attracted, the worthy annoyed her. She was no more to
blame than the child who seizes some pernicious sweetmeat and refuses
even to look at the nourishing and expensive meal which awaits his
pleasure.
This much, at least, it is desired that the reader keep clearly in mind
when judging Clara Allardi. Both in her "mariage de convenance" and in
her "love-match" she made the best of what she had; tried not to visit
upon Lowden Thayer the dislike which marriage with him had awakened;
endeavoured to bear patiently with Guido Allardi's vagaries and steadily
refused to leave him even when all her own money had been squandered and
when he was incapable of making enough to support her, comfortably.
This last, though, can scarcely be attributed to her for righteousness.
The real reason that she stayed with the Italian was because she could
not leave him; she was like a parasite, drawing her very breath through
him and unable to exist away from him.