Life and Gabriella Part 26

Her gaze dropped, but not until she had seen his look change and the slightly cynical smile--the smile of one who has examined everything and believes in nothing--fade from his lips. She had touched some chord deep down within him of which he had long ago forgotten even the existence--some echoed harmony of what had been perhaps the living faith of his youth.

"You're a gallant soul," he said briefly, and she wondered what it was that he knew, what it was that he was keeping back.

At the corner where they parted, he stood for a few moments, holding her hand in his big, soft grasp while he looked down on her. The suspicion and the cynicism had gone from his face, and she understood all at once why people still trusted him, still liked him, notwithstanding his reputation, notwithstanding even his repulsiveness. He was all that--he was immoral, he was repulsive--but he was something else also--he was human.

When she entered the house her first feeling was that the old atmosphere had returned, the old suspense, the old waiting, the old horror of impending calamity. A nervous dread made her hesitate to mount the steps, to go to her room, to inquire in a natural voice for the children. It was imaginary, of course, she a.s.sured herself, but it was very vivid as long as it lasted. Then she noticed that the usual order of the hall was disturbed, and when she rang, Burrows came, with a hurried, apologetic manner, after keeping her waiting. Mrs. Fowler's fur scarf hung on the ma.s.sive oak post of the staircase; the cards in the little tray on the hail table were scattered about; and the petals of a yellow chrysanthemum were strewn over the carpet.

Burrows, instead of explaining the confusion, appeared embarra.s.sed when she questioned him, and spurred by a sharp foreboding, she ran up the stairs to her mother-in-law's sitting-room. At her entrance a trembling voice wailed in a tone of remonstrance:

"Oh, Gabriella, have you been out?"

"Yes, I've been out. Mamma, what is the matter?"

"I looked for you everywhere. Archibald has been here, but he has just gone out again. I have never seen him so deeply moved--so--so indignant--" Mrs. Fowler broke off, bit her lip nervously, and paused while she tried to swallow her sobs. Her hat lay on a chair at her side, and in her hands she held a pair of half-soiled white gloves, which she smoothed out on her knee, as if she were hardly aware of what she was doing. In her blue eyes, so like George's, there was an agonizing terror and suspense. Her usually florid face was pale to the lips; and this pallor appeared to accentuate the dark, faintly lined shadows beneath her eyes and the grayness of her rigidly waved hair.

"Courage!" said Gabriella in a whisper to herself, and aloud she asked gently: "Dear mamma, what is it? Don't be afraid. I can bear it."

"Archibald has ordered George out of the house. He--George, I mean--had given him his promise not to see Florrie again, and it seems that he--he broke it. There has been a dreadful scene. I never imagined that Archibald could be so angry. He was terrible--and he is ill anyway and in great trouble about his financial affairs. I have been worried to death about him for weeks. He says things are going so badly downtown that he can't stave off the crash any longer, and now--this--this--" She broke down utterly, burying her convulsed face in her hands, which even in the instant of horror and tragedy, Gabriella noticed, had been manicured since the morning. "George has gone--we think he has gone off with Florrie," she cried, "and he--he will never come back as long as Archibald lives."

She was not thinking of Gabriella. True to the deepest instincts of her nature, she thought first of her son, then of her husband. It was not that she did not care for her daughter-in-law, did not sympathize; but the fact remained that Gabriella was only George's wife to her, while George was flesh of her flesh, bone of her bone, soul of her soul.

Though her choice was not deliberate, though it was unconscious and instinctive--nevertheless, she had chosen. At the crucial moment instinct had risen superior to reason, and she had chosen, not with her judgment, but with every quivering nerve and fibre of her being.

Gabriella was right, but George was her son; and had it been possible to secure George's happiness by sacrificing the right to the wrong, she would have made that sacrifice without hesitation, without scruple, and without regret.

"There's his father now," she whispered, lifting her disfigured face.

"Oh, Gabriella, I believe it will kill me!"

While Gabriella stood there waiting for George's father to enter, and listening to his slow, deliberate tread on the stairs, the heavy, laborious tread of a man who is uncertain of his strength, she remembered vividly, as if she were living it over again, the night she had waited by her fire to tell George that his first child was to be born. Many thoughts pa.s.sed through her mind, and at last these thoughts resolved themselves into a mult.i.tude of crowding images--all distinct and vivid images of George's face. She saw his face as she had first seen and loved it, with its rich colouring, its blue-gray eyes, like wells of romance she had once thought, its look of poetry and emotion which had covered so much that was merely commonplace and gross. She saw him as he had looked at their marriage, as he had looked, bending over her after her first child was born, and then she saw him as he had parted from her that morning--flushed, sneering, a little coa.r.s.ened, but still boyish, still charming. Well, it was all over now. It had been over so long that she had even ceased to regret it--for she was not by nature one of the women who could wear mourning for a lifetime.

The door opened: Archibald Fowler came in very slowly; and the first sight of his face brought home to her with a shock the discovery that he was the one of them who had suffered most. He looked an old man; his gentle scholar's face had taken an ashen hue; and his eyes were the eyes of one who has only partially recovered from the blow that has prostrated him.

"My dear child," he said; "my dear daughter," and laid his hand on her shoulder.

She clung to him, feeling a pa.s.sionate pity, not for herself, but for him. "You have too much to bear," she murmured caressingly. "You mustn't take it like this. You must try to get over it. For all our sakes you must try to get over it." The irony of it all--that she should be consoling her husband's father for her husband's desertion of her--did not appear to her until long afterwards. At the time she thought only that she--that somebody--must make the tragedy easier for him to bear.

"Come and sit down, Archibald," said Mrs. Fowler pleadingly. "Let me give you a gla.s.s of sherry and a biscuit; you are too tired to talk."

There was the old devotion in her manner, but there was also a new deference. For the first time in thirty years of marriage he had shown his strength to her, not his gentleness; for the first time he had opposed his will to hers in the cause of justice, and he had conquered her. In spite of her anguish, something of the romantic expectancy of her first love had returned to her heart and it showed in her softened voice, in her timid caresses, in her wistful eyes, which held a pathetic and startled brightness. He had triumphed in honour; and if her defeat had not involved George, she could almost have gloried in the completeness of her surrender.

He sat down with the air of a man who is not entirely awake to his surroundings; and his wife, after ordering the sherry, hovered over him with the touching solicitude of one who is living for the moment in the shadow of memory. While he sipped the wine, he waited until Burrows'

footsteps had pa.s.sed down the staircase, and then said with his usual quietness:

"There is something else, Evelyn, that I kept back. I couldn't tell you while you were so worried about George, but there is something else--"

She caught the words from him eagerly, with a gesture almost of relief.

"You mean it has come at last. I suspected it, and, oh, Archibald, I don't care--I don't care!"

"There were several failures to-day in Wall Street, and--" He broke off as if he were too tired to go on, and added slowly after a moment: "I am too old to begin again. I'd like to go back home--to go back to the South for my old age. Yes, I'm old."

But his wife was on her knees beside him, with her arms about his neck and her face hidden on his breast. "I don't care, I never cared," she said in a voice that was almost exultant. "We can be happy on so little--happier than we've ever been in our lives--just you and I to grow old together. We can go home to Virginia--to some small place and be happy. Happiness costs so little."

Slipping away, Gabriella went into the hail, and pa.s.sing her room, noiselessly pushed open the door of the nursery, where the children were sleeping. A night lamp was burning in one corner under a dark shade, and the nurse's knitting, a pile of white yarn, was lying on the table in the circle of green light, which was as soft as the glimmer of a glow-worm in a thicket. In their two little beds, separated by a strip of white rug, the children were sleeping quietly, with a wonderful freshness, like the dew of innocence, on their faces. Frances lay on her back, very straight and prim even in sleep, with the sheet folded neatly under her dimpled chin, her hands clasped on her breast, and her golden curls spread in perfect order over the lace-trimmed pillow. Her miniature features, framed in the dim gold of her hair, had the trite prettiness of an angel on a Christmas card; and beside her ethereal loveliness there was something gnome-like in the dark st.u.r.diness of Archibald, who slept on his side, with his fists pressed tightly under the pillow, and the frown produced by near-sightedness still wrinkling his forehead. Though he was not beautiful, he showed already the promise of character in his face, and his personality, which was remarkably developed for a child of his age, possessed a singular charm. He was the kind of child people describe as "unlike other children." His temperament was made up of surprises, and this quality of unexpectedness inspired in his mother a devotion that was almost tragic in its intensity. Never had she loved the normal Frances Evelyn as she loved Archibald.

As she looked down on them, sleeping so peacefully in the green light, a wave of sadness swept over her, and she thought of them suddenly as fatherless, impoverished, and unprotected, dependent on her untried labour for their lives and their happiness. Then, before the anxiety could take possession of her mind, she put it from her, and whispered, "Courage!" as she turned away and went out of the room.

CHAPTER III

WORK

They had planned the future so carefully that there was a pitiless irony in the next turn of the screw--for when they tried to awaken Archibald Fowler in the morning, he did not stir, and they realized presently, with the rebellious shock such tragedies always bring, that he had died in the night--that all that he had stood for, the more than thirty years of work and struggle, had collapsed in an hour. When the first grief, the first excitement, was over, and life began to flow quietly again in its familiar currents, it was discovered that the crash of his fortune had occurred on the day of his son's flight and disgrace, and that the two shocks, coming together, had killed him. While they sat in the darkened house, surrounded by the funereal smell of c.r.a.pe, the practical details of living seemed to matter so little that they scarcely gave them a thought. Not until weeks afterwards, when Patty and Billy had sailed for France, and Mrs. Fowler, shrouded in widow's weeds, had gone South to her old home, did Gabriella find strength to tear aside the veil of mourning and confront the sordid actuality. Then she found that the crash had buried everything under the ruins of Archibald Fowler's prosperity--that nothing remained except a bare pittance which would insure his widow only a scant living on the impoverished family acres.

For the rest there was nothing, and she herself was as poor as she had been in Hill Street before her marriage.

Walking back from the station after bidding her mother-in-law a tearful and tender good-bye, she tried despairingly to gather her scattered thoughts and summon all her failing resources; but in front of her plans there floated always the pathetic brightness of Mrs. Fowler's eyes gazing up at her from the heavy shadow of the c.r.a.pe veil she had lifted.

So that was the end--a little love, a little hope, a little happiness, and then separation and death. Effort appeared not only futile, but fantastic, and yet effort, she knew, must be made if she were to ward off dest.i.tution. She must recover her cheerfulness, she must be strong, she must be confident. Alone, penniless, with two children to support, she could not afford to waste her time and her energy in useless regret.

Whatever it cost her, she must keep alive her fighting courage and her belief in life. She had youth, health, strength, intelligence, resourcefulness on her side; and she told herself again that there were thousands of women living and fighting around her who were far worse off than she. "What others have done, I can do also, and do better," she murmured aloud as she walked rapidly back to Dinard's.

In the long front room the crowded mid-winter sale was in progress, and the six arrogant young women, goaded into a fleeting semblance of activity, were displaying dilapidated "left over" millinery to a throng of unfashionable casual customers. Madame, herself, scorned these casual customers, but her scorn was as water unto wine compared with the burning disdain of the six arrogant young women. They sauntered to and fro with their satin trains trailing elegantly over the carpet, with their fashionable curves accentuated as much as it was possible for pride to accentuate them, with their condescending heads turning haughtily above the high points of their collars. As Gabriella entered she saw the tallest and the most scornful of them, whose name was Murphy, insolently posing in the green velvet toque before a jaded hunter of reduced millinery, who shook her plain, sensible head at the hat as if she wished it to understand that she heartily disapproved of it.

Madame was not visible, but Gabriella found her a little later in the workroom, where she was volubly elucidating obscure points in business morality to the forewoman. Of all the women employed in the house, this particular forewoman was the only one who appeared to Gabriella to be without pretence or affectation. She was an honest, blunt, capable creature, with a face and figure which permanently debarred her from the showrooms, and a painstaking method of work. There was no haughtiness, no condescension, about her. She had the manner of one who, being without fortuitous aids to happiness, is willing to give good measure of ability and industry in return for the bare necessaries of existence.

"She is the only genuine thing in the whole establishment," thought Gabriella while she watched her.

If Miss Smith, the forewoman, had been in ignorance of the failure and death of Archibald Fowler, she would probably have read the announcement in Madame's face as she watched her welcome the wife of his son. There was nothing offensive, nothing unkind, nothing curt; but, in some subtle way, the difference was emphasized between the eccentric daughter-in-law of a millionaire and an inexperienced young woman who must work for her living. For the welcome revealed at once to the observant eyes of Miss Smith the significant detail that Madame's role had changed from the benefited to the benefactor. And, as if this were not enough for one morning's developments, it revealed also that Gabriella's fict.i.tious value as a saleswoman was beginning to decline; for Madame was disposed to scorn the sort of sensational advertis.e.m.e.nt which the newspapers had devoted of late to the unfortunate Fowlers. At one moment there had been grave doubt in Madame's mind as to whether or not she should employ young Mrs. Fowler in her respectable house; then, after a brief hesitation, she had shrewdly decided that ideas were worth something even when lacking the support of social position and financial security.

There were undoubtedly possibilities in Gabriella; and disgrace, Madame concluded cheerfully, could not take away either one's natural talent or one's aristocratic appearance. That the girl had distinction, even rare distinction, Madame admitted while she nodded approvingly at the severe black cloth gown with its collar and cuffs of fine white c.r.a.pe. The simple arrangement of her hair, which would have ruined many a pretty face, suited the ivory pallor of Gabriella's features. Mourning was becoming to her, Madame decided, and though she was not beautiful, she was unusually charming.

"She has few good points except her figure, and yet the whole is decidedly picturesque," thought Madame as impersonally as if she were criticising a fashion plate. "Very young men would hardly care for her--for very young men demand fine complexions and straight noses--but with older men who like an air, who admire grace, she would be taking, and women, yes, women would undoubtedly find her imposing. But she is not the sort to have followers," she concluded complacently.

"Shall I go to the workroom?" asked Gabriella in a businesslike voice when she had taken off her hat, "or do you wish me at the sale?"

Her soul shrank from the showrooms, but she had determined courageously that she would not allow her soul to interfere with her material purpose, and her purpose was to learn all that she could and to make herself indispensable to Madame. Only by acquiring a thorough knowledge of the business and making herself indispensable could she hope to succeed. And success was not merely desirable to her; it was vital. It meant the difference between food and hunger for her children.

"Miss Smith will find something for you to do this morning," replied Madame, politely, but without enthusiasm. "If there is a rush later on in the millinery, I will send for you to help out."

In the old days, when Dinard's was a small and exclusive house in one of the blocks just off Fifth Avenue, Madame would have scorned to combine the making of gowns and hats in a single establishment; but as she advanced in years and in worldly experience, she discovered that millinery drew the unwary pa.s.ser-by even more successfully than dressmaking did. Then, too, hats were easy to handle; they sold for at least four or five times as much as they actually cost; and so, gradually, while she was still unaware of the disintegrating processes within, Madame's principles had crumbled before the temptation of increasing profits. A lapse of virtue, perhaps, but Madame, who had been born an O'Grady, was not the first to discover that one's virtuous principles are apt to modify with one's years. The time was when she had despised false hair, having a natural wealth of her own, and now, with a few thin gray strands hidden under her golden wig, she had become morally reconciled to necessity. "It is a hard world, and one lives as one must," was her favourite maxim.

On the whole, however, having a philosophic bent of mind, she endeavoured to preserve, with rosy cheeks and golden hair, several other cheerful fictions of her youth. The chief of these, the artless delusion that, in spite of her obesity, her wig and her rouge, she still had power to charm the masculine eye, offered to her lively nature a more effective support than any virtuous principle could have supplied. A perennial, if ridiculous, coquetry sweetened her days and added sprightliness to the gay decline of her life. Being frankly material, she had confined her energies to the two unending pursuits of men and money, and having captured four husbands and acquired a comfortable bank account, she might have been content, had she been as discreet as she was provident, to rest on her substantial achievements. But the trouble with both men and money, when considered solely as rewards to enterprise, is that the quest of them is inexhaustible. One's income, however large, may reasonably become larger, and there is no limit to the number of husbands a prudent and fortunate woman may collect. And so age, which is, after all, a state of mind, not a term of years, was rendered harmless to Madame by her simple plan of refusing to acknowledge that it existed. This came of keeping one's head, she sometimes thought, though she never put her thought into words--this and all things else, including financial security and the perpetual pursuit of the elusive and lawless male. For at sixty-two she still felt young and she believed herself to be fascinating.

But Gabriella, patiently st.i.tching bias velvet bands on the brim of a straw hat for the early spring trade, felt that she was sustained neither by the pleasures of vanity nor by the sounder consolations of virtue. Her philosophy was quite as simple, if not so material, as Madame's. Human nature was divided between the victors and the victims, and the chief thing was not to let oneself become a victim. Her theory, like those of greater philosophers, was rooted not in reason, but in character, and she believed in life with all the sanguine richness of her blood. Of course it was a struggle, but she was one of those vital women who enjoy a struggle--who choose any aspect of life in preference to the condition of vegetative serenity. Unhappiness, which is so largely a point of view, an att.i.tude of mind, had pa.s.sed over her at a time when many women would have been consecrated to inconsolable misery.

She was penniless, she was unloved, she was deserted by her husband, she had lost, in a few weeks, her friends, her home, and her family, and she faced the future alone, except for her dependent and helpless children--yet in spite of these things, though she was thoughtful, worried, and often anxious, she realized that deep down in her the essential core of her being was not unhappy. When she had tried and failed, and lost her health and her children--if such sorrows ever came to her, then there would be time enough for unhappiness. Now, she was only twenty-seven; the rich, wonderful world surrounded her; and this world, even if she put love out of her life, was br.i.m.m.i.n.g over with beauty. It was good to be alive; it was good to watch the crowd in the street, to see the sunlight on the pavement, to taste the air, to feel the murmurous currents of the city flow around her as she walked home in the twilight. It was good to earn her bread and to go back in the evening to the joyful shouts of two well and happy children. She saw it all as an adventure--the whole of life--and the imperative necessity was to keep to the last the ardent heart of the true adventurer. While she st.i.tched with flying fingers, there pa.s.sed before her the pale sad line of the victims--of those who had resigned themselves to unhappiness. She saw her mother, anxious, pensive, ineffectual, with her widow's veil, her drooping eyelids, and her look of mournful acquiescence, as of one who had grown old expecting the worst of life; she saw poor Jane, tragic, martyred, with the feeble virtue and the cloying sweetness of all the poor Janes of this world; and she saw Uncle Meriweather wearing his expression of worried and resentful helplessness, as if he had been swept onward against his will by forces which he did not understand. All these people were victims, and from these people she had sprung. Their blood was her blood; their traditions were her traditions; their religion was her religion; even their memories were her memories. But something else, which was not theirs, was in her nature, and this something else had been born in the instant when she revolted against them. Perhaps the fighting spirit of her father--of that father who had gone out like a flame in his youth had battled on her side when she had turned against the inertia and decay which had walled in her girlhood.

In the afternoon Madame summoned her into the showrooms, and she a.s.sisted the exhausted young women at the sale of slightly damaged French hats to the unfashionable purchasers who preferred to pay reasonable prices. While she served them, which she did with a cheerfulness, an interest, and an amiability that distinguished her from the other saleswomen, she wondered how they could have so little common sense as to allow themselves to be deluded by the French labels on the soiled linings? She could have made a better hat in two hours than any one of those she sold at the reduced price of ten dollars; yet even the dingiest of them at last found a purchaser, and she saw the green velvet toque, which had been rejected by the sensible middle-aged woman in the morning, finally pa.s.s into the possession of a hard-featured spinster.

What amazed her, for she had a natural talent for dress, was the infallible instinct which guided the vast majority of these customers to the selection of the inappropriate. A few of them had taste, or had learned from experience what they could not wear; but by far the larger number displayed an ignorance of the most elementary principles of dress which shocked and astonished Gabriella. The obese and middle-aged winged straight as a bird toward the coquettish in millinery; the lean and haggard intuitively yearned for the picturesque; the harsh and simple aspired to the severely smart. Yet beneath the vain misdirection of impulses there was some obscure principle of attraction which ruled the absurdity of the decisions. Each woman, Gabriella discovered after an attentive hour at the sale, was dressing not her actual substance, but some pa.s.sionately cherished ideal of herself which she had stored in a remote and inaccessible chamber of her brain.

In all of the tedious selections Gabriella a.s.sisted with the pleasant voice, the ready sympathy, and the quick understanding which had made her so popular when she had worked for the old shop in Broad Street. The truth was that human nature interested her even in its errors, and her pleasant manners were simply the outward manifestation of an unaffected benevolence.