In September she sent Honora a letter of congratulation.
"So it's twins! Girls! Were you transported or amused?
Patience and Patricia--very pretty. You'll stay at home with
the treasures, won't you? You see, there's something about
you I can't quite understand, if you'll forgive me for saying
it. You were an exuberant girl, but after marriage you grew
austere--put your lips together in a line that discouraged
kissing. So I'm not sure of you even now that the babies have
come. Some day you'll have to explain yourself to me.
"I'm one who needs explanations all along the road. Why? Why?
Why? That is what my soul keeps demanding. Why couldn't I go
back to Chicago with Ray McCrea? He was down here the other
day, but I wouldn't let him say the things he obviously had
come to say, and now he's on his way abroad and very likely
we shall not meet again. I feel so numb since mummy died that
I can't care about Ray. I keep crying 'Why?' about Death
among other things. And about that horrid gulf between father
and me. If we try to get across we only fall in. He has me
here ready to his need. He neither knows nor cares what my
thoughts are. So long as I answer the telephone faithfully,
sterilize the drinking-water, and see that he gets his
favorite dishes, he is content. I have no liberty to leave
the house and my restlessness is torture. The neighbors no
longer flutter in as they used when mummy was here. They
have given me over to my year of mourning--which
means vacuity.
"Partly for lack of something better to do I have cleaned the
old house from attic to cellar, and have been glad to creep
to bed lame and sore from work, because then I could sleep.
Father won't let me read at night--watches for signs of the
light under my door and calls out to me if it shows. It is
golden weather without, dear friend, and within is order and
system. But what good? I am stagnating, perishing. I can see
no release--cannot even imagine in what form I would like it
to come. In your great happiness remember my sorrow. And with
your wonderful sweetness forgive my bitter egotism. But
truly, Honora, I die daily."
The first letter Honora Fulham wrote after she was able to sit at her
desk was to Kate. No answer came. In November Mrs. Fulham telephoned to
Lena Vroom to ask if she had heard, but Lena had received no word.
"Go down to Silvertree, Lena, there's a dear," begged her old
schoolmate. But Lena was working for her doctor's degree and could not
spare the time. The holidays came on, and Mrs. Fulham tried to imagine
her friend as being at last broken to her galling harness. Surely there
must be compensations for any father and daughter who can dwell
together. Her own Christmas was a very happy one, and she was annoyed
with herself that her thoughts so continually turned to Kate. She had
an uneasy sense of apprehension in spite of all her verbal assurances to
Lena that Kate could master any situation.
* * * * *
What really happened in Silvertree that day changed, as it happened, the
course of Kate's life. Sorrow came to her afterward, disappointment,
struggle, but never so heavy and dragging a pain as she knew that
Christmas Day.
She had been trying in many unsuspected ways to relieve her father's
grim misery,--a misery of which his gaunt face told the tale,--and
although he had said that he wished for "no flubdub about Christmas,"
she really could not resist making some recognition of a day which found
all other homes happy. When the doctor came in for his midday meal, Kate
had a fire leaping in the old grate with the marble mantel and a turkey
smoking on a table which was set forth with her choicest china and
silver. She had even gone so far as to bring out a dish distinctly
reminiscent of her mother,--the delicious preserved peaches, which had
awaked unavailing envy in the breasts of good cooks in the village.
There was pudding, too, and brandy sauce, and holly for decorations. It
represented a very mild excursion into the land of festival, but it was
too much for Dr. Barrington.
He had come in cold, tired, hungry, and, no doubt, bitterly sorrowful at
the bottom of his perverse heart. He discerned Kate in white--it was
the first time she had laid off her mourning--and with a chain of her
mother's about her neck. Beyond, he saw the little Christmas feast and
the old silver vase on the table, red with berries.
"You didn't choose to obey my orders," he said coldly, turning his
unhappy blue eyes on her.
"Your orders?" she faltered.
"There was to be no fuss and feathers of any sort," he said. "Christmas
doesn't represent anything recognized in my philosophy, and you know it.
We've had enough of pretense in this house. I've been working to get
things on a sane basis and I believed you were sensible enough to help
me. But you're just like the rest of them--you're like all of your sex.
You've got to have your silly play-time. I may as well tell you now that
you don't give me any treat when you give me turkey, for I don't
like it."
"Oh, dad!" cried Kate; "you do! I've seen you eat it many times! Come,
really it's a fine dinner. I helped to get it. Let's have a good time
for once."
"I have plenty of good times, but I have them in my own way."
"They don't include me!" cried Kate, her lips quivering. "You're too
hard on me, dad,--much too hard. I can't stand it, really."
He sat down to the table and ran his finger over the edge of the
carving-knife.
"It wouldn't cut butter," he declared. "Martha, bring me the steel!"
"I sharpened it, sir," protested Martha.
"Sharpened it, did you? I never saw a woman yet who could sharpen a
knife."
He began flashing the bright steel, and the women, their day already in
ashes, watched him fascinatedly. He was waiting to pounce on them. They
knew that well enough. The spirit of perversity had him by the throat
and held him, writhing. He carved and served, and then turned again to
his daughter.
"So I'm too hard on you, am I?" he said, looking at her with a cold
glint in his eye. "I provide you with a first-class education, I house
you, clothe you, keep you in idleness, and I'm too hard on you. What do
you expect?"
"Why, I want you to like me," cried Kate, her face flushing. "I simply
want to be your daughter. I want you to take me out with you, to give me
things. I wanted you to give me a Christmas present. I want other
things, too,--things that are not favors."
She paused and he looked at her with a tightening of the lips.
"Go on," he said.
"I am not being kept in idleness, as I think you know very well. My time
and energies are given to helping you. I look after your office and your
house. My time is not my own. I devote it to you. I want some
recognition of my services--I want some money."
She leaned back in her chair, answering his exasperated frown with a
straight look, which was, though he did not see it, only a different
sort of anger from his own.
"Well, you won't get it," he said. "You won't get it. When you need
things you can tell me and I'll get them for you. But there's been
altogether too much money spent in this house in years gone by for
trumpery. You know that well enough. What's in that chest out there in
the hall? Trumpery! What's in those bureau drawers upstairs? Truck!
Hundreds of dollars, that might have been put out where it would be
earning something, gone into mere flubdub."
He paused to note the effect of his words and saw that he had scored.
Poor Mrs. Barrington, struggling vaguely and darkly in her own feminine
way for some form of self-expression, had spent her household allowance
many a time on futile odds and ends. She had haunted the bargain
counter, and had found herself unable to get over the idea that a thing
cheaply purchased was an economic triumph. So in drawers and chests and
boxes she had packed her pathetic loot--odds and ends of embroidery, of
dress goods, of passementerie, of chair coverings; dozens of spools of
thread and crochet cotton; odd dishes; jars of cold cream; flotsam and
jetsam of the shops, a mere wreckage of material. Kate remembered it
with vicarious shame and the blood that flowed to her face swept on into
her brain. She flamed with loyalty to that little dead, bewildered
woman, whose feet had walked so falteringly in her search for the roses
of life. And she said--
But what matter what she said?
Her father and herself were at the antipodes, and they were separated no
less by their similarities than by their differences. Their wistful and
inexpressive love for each other was as much of a blight upon them as
their inherent antagonism. The sun went down that bleak Christmas night
on a house divided openly against itself.
The next day Kate told her father he might look for some one else to run
his house for him. He said he had already done so. He made no inquiry
where she was going. He would not offer her money, though he secretly
wanted her to ask for it. But it was past that with her. The miserable,
bitter drama--the tawdry tragedy, whose most desperate accent was its
shameful approach to farce--wore itself to an end.
Kate took her mother's jewelry, which had been left to her, and sold it
at the local jeweler's. All Silvertree knew that Kate Barrington had
left her home in anger and that her father had shown her the back of
his hand.