Life and Gabriella
BOOK TWO
CHAPTER IX
THE PAST
It was the morning of Gabriella's thirty-eighth birthday, and she was
standing, with her hat on, before the window of her sitting-room, gazing with
dreaming eyes at the young leaves on the elm tree. The day's work was ahead of
her, but for a little while, standing there by the open window, she gave
herself, with a sense of pleasure, of abandonment, to the rare luxury of regret.
Out of her whole year it was the one day when, for a few hours, she permitted
herself to think sadly of the past and the future, when she cherished in her
heart something of the gentle melancholy of her mother's retrospective
philosophy.
In the street, beyond the narrow yard, where the grass lay like a veil, there
was a curious deadening of sounds, as if the traffic had become suddenly muffled
in the languorous softness of spring. Out of this imaginary stillness floated
the sharp twittering of sparrows and the bright laugh of a child at play in one
of the neighbouring yards. Above the grim outlines of the city the sky shone
divinely clear and blue, flecked by a single cloud, soft as an eagle's feather,
which drifted in a mist of light above the horizon. The city, beneath that azure
sky, borrowed the transparent brightness of an object that is imprisoned in
crystal. White magic had transformed it for an hour, and the street, the houses,
the shining elm tree, and the distant frowning brows of the skyscrapers, all
seemed as unreal as the vivid yet impalpable images in a dream. And into this
world of crystal there drifted, like the essence of spring, the dreamy fragrance
from the window box filled with white hyacinths.
While she stood there Gabriella thought pensively of many things. She thought
of the day's work before her, of the gown she was designing for Mrs.
Pletheridge, of Fanny's latest lover, the brother of a schoolmate, of the
clothes she should send the child to the White Sulphur Springs, of her mother,
and of Jane's eldest daughter, Margaret; and then very slowly, with the scent of
the hyacinths drowning all merely prosaic memories, she began to think
hopelessly and tenderly of Arthur Peyton. She thought of him as he had looked on
the day when she had told him of her engagement of the sympathetic expression in
his eyes, and of his beautiful manner, which she had felt at the time she could
never forget. Well, after eighteen years she had not forgotten it. Compared with
Arthur, all other men seemed to her as unreal as shadows. "How could Miss Polly
imagine that I'd think of Ben O'Hara after a love like that?" she reflected
indignantly.
And then, perhaps because for a shadow he was so solidly substantial, she
became aware that O'Hara's image was trespassing upon the hallowed soil of her
reverie. To be sure, she had seen a great deal of him since George's death, when
he had been so wonderfully considerate and helpful. Scarcely a day had passed
since then that he had not brightened by some reminder of his friendship. They
had spent long evenings together; and occasionally, accompanied by the delighted
Miss Polly, they had gone to dinner at a restaurant and later to a concert or a
play. That he had been almost too kind it was impossible for her to deny; but
she had tried her best to repay him—she had, when one came to the point, done as
much as she could to remedy the defects of his education. At first she had given
zest, sympathy, eagerness, to her self-appointed task of making him over; then,
as the months went by, a sense of doubt, of discouragement, of approaching
failure, had tempered her enthusiasm, and at last she had realized that her
work, except in the merest details, had been ineffectual and futile. The
differences, which she had regarded as superficial, were, in reality,
fundamental. It was impossible to make him over because he was so completely
himself. He stood quite definitely for certain tendencies in democracy, and by
no ingenious manipulation could she twist him about until he presented the sham
appearance of moving in the opposite direction. For the logic of her failure was
perfectly simple—he couldn't see, however hard he tried, the things she wanted
him to look at. The difficulty was far deeper than a mere matter of finish, or
even of education—for it was, after all, not one of manner, but of material. Day
by day she had realized more clearly that the problem confronting them was one
which involved their different standards of living and their individual
philosophies. The things which she regarded as essential were to him only the
accidental variations of life. He had lived so long in touch with the basic
realities—with vast spaces and the stark aspect of desert horizons, with
droughts, and winds, and the unquenchable pangs of thirst and hunger, with the
vital issues of birth and death in their most primitive forms—he had lived so
long in touch with the simplest and most elemental forces of Nature, that his
spirit, as well as his vision, had adjusted itself to a trackless and limitless
field of view. No, what he was now he must remain, since to change him, except
in trivial details, was out of her power.
And of course he had his virtues—she would have been the last to deny him his
virtues. Whenever she applied the touchstone of character, she realized how
little alloy there was in the pure gold of his nature. He was truthful, he was
generous, he was brave, kind, and tolerant; but his virtues, like his
personality, were large, flamboyant, and without gradations of colour. Custom
had not pruned their natural luxuriance, nor had tradition toned down the
violence of their contrasts. They were experimental, not established virtues, as
obviously the expression of the man himself as was his uncultivated preference
for red geraniums. For he possessed, she admitted, a sincerity such as she had
not believed compatible with human designs—certainly not with human achievement.
According to the code of the sheltered half of her sex—according to the
inflexible code of her mother and Jane—he was not a gentleman. He lacked
breeding, he lacked taste, he lacked the necessary education of schools; but in
other ways, in ways peculiarly his own, she was beginning dimly to realize that
he possessed qualities immeasurably larger than any superficial lack in his
nature. In balance, moderation, restraint—in all the gracious attributes with
which Arthur was endowed in her memory, in all the attributes she had
particularly esteemed in the past—she understood that O'Hara would undoubtedly
fall below her inherited standards. But, failing in these things, he had been
able to command her respect by the sheer force of his character. Though he had,
as he had confessed to her, gone down into hell, she could not talk to him for
an hour without recognizing that he had never lost a natural chivalry of mind
beside which the cultivated chivalry of manner appeared as exotic as an orchid
in a hothouse. Even Arthur, she was aware, would have lied to her for her own
good; but she would have trusted O'Hara to speak the truth to her at any cost.
In this, as well as in his practical efficiency, and his crude yet vital
optimism, he embodied, she felt, the triumphs and the failures of American
democracy—this democracy of ugly fact and of fine ideals, of crooked deeds and
of straight feeling, of little codes and of large adventures, of puny lives and
of heroic deaths—this democracy of the smoky present and the clear future. "If
this is our raw material to-day," she thought hopefully, "what will the finished
and signed product of to-morrow be?"
"Gabriella, ain't these lovely?"
Whirling out of the sunshine, she saw Miss Polly holding a rustic basket of
primroses and cowslips. "Mr. O'Hara wants to know if he may speak to you for a
minute before you go out?"
"Oh, yes, I'm not in a hurry this morning." Then Miss Polly disappeared and
an instant later the vacant space in the doorway was filled exuberantly by
O'Hara.
"I wanted to be the first to wish you a happy birthday," he began, a little
shyly, a little awkwardly, though his face was flushing with pleasure.
"The flowers are wonderful!" For a minute, while she answered him, he seemed
to be a part of the unreal intense brightness of the world outside—of that magic
world where the elm tree and the grass and the sunny street were all imprisoned
in crystal. He diffused a glowing consciousness of success, a sanguine faith in
the inherent goodness of experience. For, as she had discovered long ago, O'Hara
was one of those who stood not for the elimination of struggle, but for the
complete acceptance of life. He had sprung out of ugliness, he had lived
intimately with evil; and yet more than any one she had ever known, he seemed to
her to radiate the simple, uncalculating joy of living. He was the strongest
person she knew, as well as the happiest. He had never evaded facts, never
feared a risk, never shirked an issue, never lacked the hardy, adventurous
courage of battle. In his own words, life had never "found him a quitter."
He stood in front of her now, fresh, smiling, robust, with his look of
suddenly arrested energy, and the dark red of his hair, which was still moist
from his bath, striking a vivid note against the cool grays and blues of the
background. The sunshine, falling through the open window, warmed the ruddy tan
of his face, and made his eyes like pools of clear light in which the jubilant
spirit of the spring was reflected. "After all, it isn't what one does, it is
what one is, that matters," she thought while she looked at him. "At the end, as
Miss Polly said, it is character, not circumstances, that counts."
"I've been all over New York this morning looking for that basket," he said.
Though he had been so eager to make light of his services to her in her trouble,
she was amused from time to time by a childlike vanity which prompted him to
impress her with the value of small attentions; and this she was swift to
recognize as the opposite of Arthur's delicacy. It was the only littleness she
had observed in O'Hara so far—this reluctance to hide his smaller lights under a
bushel—and in its place, it was amusing. Here was an obvious instance where
nature unassisted by training appeared to fall short.
"They couldn't be lovelier if you'd gone all over the world," she responded
sincerely.
Before answering her he hesitated a moment, and she watched pityingly the
struggle he was making toward an impossible self-expression. The thing he wanted
to say, the thing struggling so pathetically in the inarticulateness of his
feeling, would not, she knew, be uttered in words.
"You are the first woman I ever wanted to send flowers to," he said
presently; and added with abject infelicity: "It's strange, isn't it?"
"Yes, it's strange," she assented pleasantly. Though his words were
ineffectual, she was aware suddenly of a force before which she felt a vague
impulse of flight. Now, if ever, she understood that she must keep their
relations as superficial as she had always meant them to be—that she must cling
with all her strength to the comfortable surface of appearances. "But you
haven't had many women friends, have you?"
"I've wanted to give other things," he went on hurriedly; "but not flowers. I
never thought of flowers until I met you."
"That's nice for me." She was growing nervous, and in her nervousness she
precipitated the explosion by venturing rashly: "But there's Alice, too, isn't
there, to like them?" Her voice was firm and friendly. Once for all she intended
him to understand how aloof she stood from any sentimental advances.
"Alice?" For an instant his response hung fire, enveloped in a fog of
perplexity. Then, with an air of dispelling the cloud, he made a vigorous
gesture of denial, and moved nearer to her with the swiftness and directness of
a natural force. "Why, Alice was you! You were Alice all the time!" he exclaimed
energetically.
"You mean—" She checked herself in alarm, paralyzed the next instant by the
tremendous, unexpected blow of her discovery.
"So you thought there was somebody else!" The delight in his face kept her
silent, amazed, incapable of explanation. His arm was still outstretched, as if
he were brushing aside the last flimsy barrier between them, and his voice, with
its unrestrained and radiant joy, stirred some faintly quivering echoes in the
secret depths of her being. It was as if the jubilant spirit of spring had
flowered suddenly in his look.
"There wasn't anybody else." He came still nearer, and she stood there,
startled, incredulous, powerless either to retreat or to prevent the inevitable
instant that was approaching. "At least, there wasn't anybody I ever knew named
Alice except a school teacher when I was a kid. She was good and she was pretty
like you, and I used to dream about her after school, and every evening at dusk
I would go out of my way to speak to her in Sixth Avenue. Once she told me that
she'd wait for me to grow up and get rich so I could marry her, and after I went
out to Arizona I used to think about her a lot. When I came on you suddenly,
standing there in the dusk with your hands full of lilacs, it all came back to
me because you, looked like her, with your dark hair and your tall slenderness.
Then before I knew what I was, doing I called you by her name. I oughtn't to
have done it," he finished ecstatically, "but I'm jolly glad now that I
did."
So he also, the man of action and of enterprise, he, the worker and the
adventurer, so he also cultivated his garden of dreams!
"I didn't know—I didn't know—" she found herself murmuring faintly in
protest.
"But you know now!" His voice rang out exultantly, and, though she felt that
the thing she feared and dreaded was coming upon her, she still stood there
without moving a step, without lifting a hand, mesmerized, enchanted, by the
force of the man. "You know now," he repeated. "You know now, Gabriella, and you
knew all along."
It was true. In spite of her surprise, in spite of her shrinking, in spite of
her evasion, she confessed it in her heart. She had known all the time.
Something deep down in her, something secret and profound and clairvoyant, had
discerned the truth from the beginning.
"No! no!" she cried out sharply, for, mistaking her silence, he had stooped
to her with the directness which impelled all his movements, which so easily
brushed aside and discarded intervening encumbrances, and had kissed her on the
lips.
For an instant, in the merciless tenderness of his arms, her resistance
melted from her. Beneath the crash of the storm she did not think, she did not
struggle, she did not murmur. Her consciousness seemed suspended, and with her
consciousness, her memory, her judgment, even her passionate unshaken loyalty to
the love of her youth. Then, after the moment of weakness, of passive
submission, it was as if her soul and body caught fire at a flash, and a quiver
of anger ran through her, enkindling her glance and nerving her spirit.
"But I do not love you! I never meant that I loved you!" she cried.
At her words his arms dropped to his sides, and he stood as if turned to
stone, with only his questioning eyes and the vivid red of his hair seeming
alive. There was no need now for her to struggle. At her first movement to
escape he had released her and drawn to a distance.
"You don't love me?" he stammered. "Why, I saw it. I've seen it for weeks. I
see it now in your face."
"You see nothing—nothing." She denied it bitterly. "I liked you as a friend.
I did not think of this. I never suspected it. I don't love you. I don't love
you in the least."
He was very still. The jubilant spirit of the spring had ebbed away from his
look, and even in the height of her anger she was struck by the change in his
face.
"I don't believe you," he said gravely after a minute. "I don't believe
you."
"You must believe me. I don't love you. I have never thought of you except as
a friend. I have loved another man all my life."
Her voice rose accusingly, triumphantly, and so fervent was her look that she
might have been repeating a creed. It was as if she hoped by convincing him to
persuade her own rebellious heart of the truth she proclaimed.
Now at last he understood. She had been lucid enough even for the crystalline
lucidity of his thought.
"I am sorry. I made a mistake," he said quietly, and after the exultant note
of a few moments ago there was a dull level of flatness in his voice. "I am
sorry. There don't seem to be anything else that I can say or do, but—but it
wouldn't have happened if I had understood—" He paused, looked at her closely
for a minute, and then added stubbornly, with an echo of the old confidence in
his tone: "I still don't believe it."
"It is true, nevertheless." She was trembling with indignation, and this
indignation, in spite of her natural fairness, was not directed against herself,
against her own blindness and folly. Though she knew that she was to blame, she
was furious, not with herself, but with O'Hara. He had insulted her, and she
resolved bitterly that she would never forgive him. Even now, whenever she was
silent, she could still feel his kiss on her mouth, and the vividness of the
sensation stung her into passionate anger. She was no longer the reasonable and
competent Gabriella, who had so successfully "managed her life"; she was
primitive woman in the grip of primitive anger; and balance, moderation,
restraint, had flown from her soul. The very mystery of her feeling, its
complexity, its suddenness, its remorselessness—these emotions worked together
to deepen the sense of insult, of injury, with which she burned.
"It is true, and you have no right to doubt it. You have no right." She
caught her breath sharply, and then went on with inexcusable harshness: "Even if
there hadn't been any one else, I should never—I could never in the world—"
Her loss of self-control gave him an advantage, which he was either too
generous or too stupid to perceive. "Well, forget all about it. I am going now,"
he answered quietly.
While she watched him moving away from her, she was conscious of an
inexplicable longing to stab him again more deeply before she lost him forever.
It was intolerable to her that he should leave her while she was still
indignant, that he should evade her just resentment by the natural cowardice of
flight.
"I can't forget it," she said; "how can you expect me to?"
For an instant he seemed on the point of smiling. Then, turning, at the door,
he walked back to where she was standing, and said gravely: "When I came in here
it was to ask you to marry me, and, if it's the last word I ever speak, I
thought you understood—that you knew how I felt. I was even fool enough to think
you would be willing to marry me. That's all I can say. I haven't any other
excuses."
For the second time he went to the door, opened it, and then turning quickly,
came back again. "I am not the sort to change, and I shan't change about this.
You are a free woman, and if you ever feel that you made a mistake, if you ever
want me or need me, you can just come to me. I shan't stop caring for you, and
if you choose to come, I'll be waiting. I believed you were meant for me when I
first saw you—and I believe it now. In spite of all you say, I am going to keep
on believing it—"
He went out, closing the door softly, and five minutes later, feeling
extraordinarily young, she watched him pass through the gate, and walk as
buoyantly as ever in the direction of Broadway. While she looked after him she
wondered suddenly why novelists always dropped their heroines as soon as they
passed twenty-seven? "If I'd been in a play, they'd have put me in the
background, dressed in lavender, and made me look on and do fancywork," she
thought humorously, "but this is real life, and I've just had a real love scene
on my thirty-eighth birthday. He couldn't have been more romantic if I'd been
Fanny," she mused with an agreeable complacency. "It's only in books and plays
that people stop falling in love when they pass the twenties. I don't believe
they ever stop in real life. I believe it goes on forever." And glancing at the
glass, she added truthfully: "I want love more to-day than I wanted it when I
was twenty—and so does Ben O'Hara."
A sensation of stifling, as if her throat were closing together, oppressed
her suddenly, and picking up her hand-bag, she ran downstairs and out of the
house.
By the time she reached Broadway her anger had ebbed, but the oppression, the
feeling that she was being slowly smothered, was still in her throat and bosom.
After all, seen in the sober light of reason, why had she been so indignant?
There had been a misapprehension; he had thought that she was in love with him,
and thinking so, he had kissed her. That was the case plainly stated; and what
was there in this to send a burning, rush of anger to her heart? What was there
in this that had made her turn and insult him? For the first time in her life
she had lost her temper without cause, and had raged, she told herself sternly,
like a fury. And beneath her rage she had been conscious always of some vague,
incomprehensible disloyalty to Arthur—of a feeling of, humiliation, of
self-reproach, which appeared ridiculous when she remembered that she had been
kissed against her will and without warning. But, in spite of this, she knew
intuitively, with a knowledge deeper than reason, that the glory of her Dream
had paled in the moment when she lay in O'Hara's arms.
A subtle change had come over the spirit of spring since she had left the elm
tree and the emerald veil of the grass. It was no longer jubilant, but
languorous, wistful, haunting, as if it eternally pursued, through the fugitive
seasons, an immortal and ineffable beauty. The enchanted crystal had been
shattered in an instant, and she saw life now, not imprisoned in magical
sunshine, but gray, sordid, monotonous, as utterly hopeless as the faces
thronging in Broadway. Yet not many months ago she had seen in these, same faces
the inward hope, the joy in sadness, the gaiety in disappointment, which had
brightened the world for her. Then she had been aware of an invisible current
flowing from the crowd to herself; but to-day this shining current was broken or
turned aside, and she felt detached, adrift, and distrustful of the future. That
mental correspondence with the mood of the crowd, with the life of the city,
which had come to her first on the brilliant morning in September, and then
again when she walked home with O'Hara in the winter's dusk—which had released a
new faculty in her soul, and had given her a fresh perception of human
responsibilities—this had deserted her so utterly that she could barely remember
its miraculous visitation. Then her personal life had seemed to become a part of
the life of the street, of the sky, of the mysterious city outlined against the
gray background of dusk. To-day she walked alone and without sympathy through
the crowd. Her feet dragged, and she felt dully that she had lost her share in
both the street and the sky. The very faces of the men and women around
her—those lethargic foreign faces which crowded out the finer American
type—awoke in her the sensation of hopeless revolt which one feels before the
impending destruction of higher forms by masses of inert and conscienceless
matter. She thought gloomily: "I have lost the vision—there is no hope either
for me or for America except in the clear vision of the future." And while she
spoke there passed over her the vague feeling of loss, of something missing, as
if a precious possession had slipped from her grasp.
Her morning's work was unusually trying, and at one o'clock, when she put on
her hat before going out to lunch, she asked herself dejectedly: "What can be
the matter with me? Before I go home I'll take a taxicab and drive up Riverside
for an hour. If only the children were here, I should not feel so depressed."
She remembered regretfully that Archibald and Fanny would be away all summer;
and then from thinking of her children, she passed by almost insensible degrees
of despondency to meditating pensively about Arthur Peyton. What a wreck, what
an inconceivably stupid wreck she had made of her happiness!
As she entered the outer showroom on her way to the street, she heard the
voice of Miss Murphy attuned to a cooing pitch, and glancing around a little,
painted cabinet, filled with useless ornaments, which stood in the centre of the
floor, she beheld a dazzling head of reddish gold before one of the elaborately
decorated French mirrors. While she advanced the red-gold waves, worn with
extreme flatness over a forehead of pearly whiteness, were submerged for a
minute in the smallest and roundest hat in the shop, and from a fashionable
figure, reminding her vaguely of an ambulatory dressmaker's model, there issued
a high, fluting note of delighted ejaculation.
"This is just exactly what I've been looking all over New York for! Now,
isn't it too funny for anything that I should have found it right here the very
minute I came in?" As Gabriella's face flashed back from the mirror the
fashionable figure sprang suddenly to life, and the voice, still fluting
delightedly, exclaimed:
"Why, Gabriella! Where on earth did you come from?"
For a minute sheer amazement kept Gabriella clinging helplessly to the
ridiculous cabinet, from the top of which an artificial rose-bush seemed to
shower artificial pink petals down on her head. Then, recovering herself, with a
sharp effort of will, she went forward a few steps beyond the shelter of the
cabinet, and said composedly:
"How do you do, Florrie? I did not recognize you at first."
For it was Florrie herself, Florrie in the flesh, Florrie, glowing,
sparkling, prosperous, victorious. Her figure, conforming to the latest mode,
had lost its pinched protuberances, and was long, slender, sinuous in its
perfection of line. Beneath the small round hat, her hair, glossy with
brilliantine, was like melted gold in the large loose waves which revealed the
rosy tips of her ears. She was thirty-nine, and she looked scarcely a day over
twenty-five. The peach-blossom texture of her skin was as unlined by care or
pain as if she had spent the last ten years immured in a convent; for in this
case, at least, Gabriella realized while she looked at her, the retribution
which awaits upon sinners had been tardy in its fulfilment.
As she moved toward her, without noticing the friendly hand that Florrie held
out, Gabriella was conscious of an ironical inclination to laugh. Though she
felt no bitter personal resentment against Florrie—for, after all, Florrie had
not been able to hurt her—there struggled in her bosom an indignation more
profound, more moving, than any merely personal emotion could be. Her resentment
was directed not against Florrie, but against some abstract destiny which had
permitted Florrie to have her way without paying the price. For on the pinnacle
of a destructive career, unsinged by the conflagration she had so carelessly
started, Florrie was poised securely, crowned, triumphant, rejoicing. On her
dazzling height, successful and happy, she was as far removed as one could
imaginably be from the repentant Magdalen of tradition. The memory of George's
face as it looked in death, floated before the austere mental vision of
Gabriella, and she reflected grimly that tradition was not always the mirror of
life. For in this one case at least, the man, not the woman, had been the victim
of natural law, and Florrie, fool though she was, had shown herself at the hour
of requital to be stronger than fate. By that instinctive wisdom, which is so
much older, so much truer than civilization, she had triumphed over the
ordination of life. In refusing to suffer she had blunted every weapon with
which Nature might have punished her in the end. Not by virtue, since she had
none, but by pure insensibility, she had escaped the wages of sin. She was a
sensualist whose sensuality, hard, metallic, glittering, encased her like
armour.
At Gabriella's approach Miss Murphy fluttered off cooingly in the direction
of a fresh customer, and only the festively garlanded French mirror witnessed
the meeting of the two who had been schoolgirls together. Swift as an arrow
there shot through Gabriella's mind, "I wonder what Ben O'Hara would think of
her?" Then she checked the dangerous flight of her fancy, for she remembered
that O'Hara's thoughts about anything no longer concerned her.
"Are you buying a hat?" inquired Florrie curiously.
"No, I belong here. I am Madame Dinard."
"You don't mean it! I never should have believed it! The idea of your being a
dressmaker. That's why you look so smart, I suppose. You're the smartest thing
I've seen anywhere, but you look older, Gabriella."
"Well, you don't." It was perfectly true. Except for the gaudy decorations
and the twanging accents of the arrogant young women, Gabriella might have
imagined herself in the last century atmosphere of Broad Street in the middle
'nineties.
"I must tell you about the things I use." Florrie was always generous. "But,
I declare if I'd known this place was yours, I'd have got my hats here ages ago.
Of course I knew it was dreadfully swell, but I thought the prices were beyond
anything."
"They are," responded Gabriella with business-like brevity, while she glanced
about for the flitting Miss Murphy.
"Look here, Gabriella, I hope you don't bear me any malice," Florrie burst
out solicitously, for her frankness, like her sensuality, was elemental in its
audacity. "You oughtn't to if you know what I saved you from," she proceeded
convincingly. "Anyway, we were chums long before either of us ever thought about
a man, and I didn't really do you a bit of harm. It wasn't as if you cared about
George, was it?"
"No, it wasn't as if I'd cared about him." Gabriella was answering the appeal
as truthfully as if Florrie had been the most excellent of her sex. "You didn't
harm me in any way—not in any way," she repeated with firmness.
"That's just the way I told mother you'd look at it. I knew you were always
so broad-minded even as a girl. Then there isn't any reason we shouldn't be
friends just as we used to be."
Gabriella shook her head, polite but implacable in her refusal. "It isn't
what you did to me, Florrie," she answered gently, "it's what you are that I
can't forgive. I can imagine that a good woman might do almost anything—might
even run off with another woman's husband, but you aren't good. You wouldn't be
good if you'd spent your life in a convent."
A quick flush—the flush of temper—stained the pearly whiteness of Florrie's
skin. "Oh, of course, if you don't want to," she retorted, a little shrilly,
though she tried to subdue her rebellious voice to the pitch of Fifth Avenue. "I
only thought that being a working woman, you wouldn't have so very many friends,
and you might get lonely. I had seats at the opera every night last winter, and
time and again I'd have been glad to have given them to you. Then, too, I might
have been able to bring you some custom. I know any number of rich women who
don't think anything of paying a thousand dollars for a dress—"
Her insolence was so evidently the result of anger that Gabriella, without
interrupting the flow, waited courteously until she paused.
"No, you cannot do anything for me, Florrie." Though Gabriella's voice was
crisp and firm, her face looked suddenly older, and little lines, stamped by
weariness and regret, appeared at the corners of her still brilliant eyes. "I
don't wish you any harm," she went on more softly. "If you were in trouble I'd
do what I could for you, but somehow I don't seem able to forgive you for being
what you are. Would you like to look at anything else?" she inquired in her
professional tone. "Miss Murphy is waiting to show you some hats."
Her cheeks were burning when she passed out of the ivory and gold door,
saluted deferentially by the attendant in livery. "The effrontery!" she thought,
"the barefaced effrontery!" and then, as her eyes fell on Florrie's trim little
electric coupé beside the curb, she exclaimed mentally, recalling George's
animated perplexity about the pearl necklace, "I wonder how in the world she
does it?"
The meeting with Florrie appeared to her, as she walked home that afternoon,
to be the last touch needed to push her into a state of utter despondency. The
oppressive languor of the day had exhausted her strength, and when she left
Dinard's she felt too indifferent, too spiritless even for the drive in the
Park. It was still light when she got out of the stage at Twenty-third Street,
and while she strolled listlessly down the blocks on the West Side, she had
again that curious sensation of smothering which had come to her after her talk
with O'Hara.
At the corner of Sixth Avenue a young Italian, with the face of a poet, was
roasting peanuts in a little kerosene stove beside a flickering torch which
enkindled the romantic youth in his eyes. Farther away some ragged children were
dancing to the music of a hand-organ, which ground out a melancholy waltz; and
from a tiny flower stall behind the stand of a bootblack there drifted the
intense sweetness of hyacinths. An old negro, carrying a basket of clothes,
passed her in the middle of the block, and she thought: "That might have been in
Richmond—that and the hand-organ and the perfume of hyacinths." A vision of Hill
Street floated before her—the long straight street, with the sudden drop of
ragged hill at the end; the old houses, with crumbling porches and countless
signs: "Boarders Wanted" in the windows between the patched curtains; the
irregular rows of tulip poplar, elm, or sycamore trees throwing their crooked
shadows over the cobblestones; the blades of grass sprouting along the edges of
the brick pavement—the vision of Hill Street as she remembered it twenty years
ago in her girlhood; and then the image of her mother's face gazing out beneath
the creamy blossoms and the dark shining leaves of the old magnolia tree.
"Everything must have changed, I'd hardly recognize it," she thought. "Nobody we
know lives on that side now, mother says. Yes, it has been a long time." She
sighed, and then a little laugh broke from her lips, as she remembered that
Charley, who had recently been West on a business trip, had brought home the
good news that Richmond was as progressive as Denver. "At least it seems so to
Charley," Mrs. Carr had hastened to add, "but you know how proud Charley is of
all our newness. He says there is not a street in the West that looks fresher or
more beautiful than Monument Avenue, and I am sure that is a great comfort.
Cousin Jimmy says it shows what the South can do when it tries."
"I'd like to go back," mused Gabriella, walking more and more slowly. "I
haven't been home for eighteen years, and I am thirty-eight to-day." With the
fugitive sweetness of the hyacinths there rushed over her again the feeling that
life was slipping, slipping, and that she was missing something infinitely
precious, something infinitely desirable. It was the panic of fleeting youth, of
youth unsatisfied, denied, and still insatiable.
As she entered the gate she saw that O'Hara's windows were dark, and while a
sigh of relief escaped her, she felt a swift contraction of her throat as if she
had become suddenly paralyzed and was unable to swallow. "I hope he has gone,"
she said to herself in a whisper. "If he has gone, everything will be so much
easier." But even to herself she could not explain what it was that would be
made easier. Her relief was so vague that when she endeavoured to put it into
words it seemed to dissolve and evaporate.
Miss Polly was watering the flowers in the window box, and turning, with the
green watering-pot in her hand, she stared at Gabriella in silence for a minute
before she exclaimed anxiously: "Mercy on us, Gabriella, what on earth, is the
matter?"
"Nothing. I've had a hard day, and I'm tired."
"Well, you lie right straight down as soon as you take off your hat. I
declare you look ten years older than you did this morning."
"I have seen Florrie for a minute."
"I reckon that was enough to upset anybody. Did she say she was sorry?"
"Sorry! She looked as if she had never been sorry for anything in her life.
She was handsomer than ever—don't you remember how much you always admired her
figure?—and she didn't look a day over twenty-five. I don't believe she has ever
known what it is to feel a regret."
"Well, you just wait, honey," responded Miss Polly consolingly, "you just
wait. She'll be punished yet as sure as you're born."
"Oh, I'm not waiting for that. I don't wish her to be punished. Why should I?
She is what she is."
"Do you s'pose she knows about George?"
"I doubt it. She didn't speak of his death. She is quite capable of
forgetting that she ever knew him, and if she does, think of him, it is probably
as a man who betrayed her innocence. You may be sure she has twisted it all
about until every shred of the blame rests on somebody else. Florrie isn't the
only woman who is made like that, but I believe," she reasoned it out coolly,
"that it is her way of keeping her youth."
Miss Polly had put down the watering-pot, and she came presently with a
bottle of camphor to the sofa where Gabriella was lying. "Are you sure you
wouldn't like me to rub your head?" she inquired. "Dinner will be ready in a
minute, but I shouldn't change my dress if I were you."
Gabriella rose slowly to a sitting position, and then stood up while she
pushed the camphor away. "I hate the smell of it," she answered; "it makes me
think of one of Jane's attacks. And, besides, I don't need it. There is nothing
in the world the matter with me." A moment later, to Miss Polly's unspeakable
amazement, she sank down again, flung her arms over the back of the sofa, and
burst into tears.
"Well, I never!" ejaculated Miss Polly, rooted to the spot. "Well, I never!"
In the ten years she had lived with Gabriella she had never seen her cry—not
even after George's flight—and she felt as if the solid ground on which she
stood had crumbled without warning, and left her insecurely balanced in space.
"Something certainly must be wrong, for it ain't like you to give way. Are you
real sure you ain't got a pain somewhere?"
Shaking her head, and swallowing her sobs with an effort, Gabriella rose to
her feet. "I'm just tired out, that's all," she said, strangely humble and
deprecating.
"You must have been working too hard. It ain't right." For a minute or two
the little seamstress brooded anxiously; then guided by an infallible instinct,
she added decisively: "It's been a long time since you've seen your ma, and
she's gettin' right smart along. Why don't you run down home for a few days
while the flowers are blooming?"
A change passed over Gabriella's face, and drying her eyes, she looked down
on Miss Polly with a lovely enigmatical smile.
"I wonder if I might?" she said doubtfully.
"There ain't any earthly reason why you shouldn't. To-morrow's Friday, and
they can get along without you at Dinard's perfectly well till the first of the
week."
"Oh, yes, they can get along. I was only wondering"—a faint breeze stole in
through the window, wafting toward her the scent of wet flowers—"I was only
wondering"—her eyes grew suddenly radiant, and lifting her arms, she made a
gesture as of one escaping from bondage—"I was only wondering if I might go
to-morrow," she said.