Life and Gabriella Part 36

"You are not to see another play, except when I take you, for a whole year. Remember what I tell you, f.a.n.n.y!" replied Gabriella sternly. Not Mrs. Carr herself, not Cousin Becky Bollingbroke, of sanctified memory, could have regarded an actress's career with greater horror than did the advanced and independent Gabriella. Any career, indeed, appeared to her to be out of the question for f.a.n.n.y (a girl who couldn't even get on a street car without being spoken to), and of all careers the one the stage afforded was certainly the last she would have selected for her daughter.

"I'll remember," responded f.a.n.n.y coolly, and Gabriella knew in her heart that the girl would disobey her at the first opportunity. It was impossible to chaperon her every minute, and f.a.n.n.y, unchaperoned, was, in the realistic phrase of her brother, "looking for trouble."

"I'll send her to boarding-school next year," Gabriella determined; and she reflected gloomily that with f.a.n.n.y and, Archibald both away, she might as well be a bachelor woman.

"Well, children, you're both going away next winter," she said positively. "I can't look after you, f.a.n.n.y, and make your living at the same time, so I shall send you to boarding-school. What do you say to Miss Bradfordine's?"

"That's up on the Hudson, mother. I don't want to go out of New York."

f.a.n.n.y was genuinely alarmed at last.

"The farther away from New York the better, my daughter."

"What will you do here all alone with Miss Polly?

"Oh, we'll do very well," answered Gabriella with cheerful promptness; "you need not worry about me."

"If I'm good this summer, will you change your mind, mother?"

"Try being good, and see." Though Gabriella spoke sweetly, it was with the obstinate sweetness of Mrs. Carr. One thing she had resolved firmly in the last quarter of an hour: f.a.n.n.y should go away to boarding-school next September.

"Ain't you goin' to walk in the suffrage parade this year, f.a.n.n.y?"

inquired Miss Polly, who always thought it necessary to interrupt an argument between Gabriella and her daughter.

"I haven't anything to wear," replied f.a.n.n.y pettishly. Her brief interest in "votes for women" had evaporated with the entrance of the matinee idol into her life.

"There's a lovely white gown just in from Paris I'll get for you," said Gabriella pleasantly. She was tired, for she had had a trying day; but long ago, when her children were babies, she had determined that she would never permit herself to speak sharply to them. In f.a.n.n.y's most exasperating humours, Gabriella tried to remember her own youthful mistakes, tried to be lenient to George's faults which she recognized in the girl's character.

"As if anybody needed to be dressed up to march!" exclaimed Archibald scornfully, and he added: "She's always acting, isn't she, mother?"

"Hush, dear, you mustn't tease your sister," Gabriella admonished the boy, though her voice when she spoke to him was attuned to a deeper and softer note.

"If you make me go to boarding-school next year, I don't care whether you take the rooms in Twenty-third Street or not," said f.a.n.n.y sullenly, for, in spite of her fickle temperament, there was a remarkable tenacity in her thwarted inclinations.

"Very well. I'll look at the house and decide to-morrow." As the servant came in to lay the table, Gabriella dismissed the subject of f.a.n.n.y's school, and opened the book--it chanced to be a volume of Browning--which she was reading aloud to the children.

"I am really worried about f.a.n.n.y," she said to Miss Folly at midnight, while she lingered in the living-room before going to bed. "I honestly don't know what to make of her, and I feel, somehow, that she is one of my failures."

"Well, you can't expect everything to go the way you want it. Did you see the judge?"

"Yes, I saw him, but it was no use." Her visit to Judge Crowborough appeared to her perturbed mind as a piece of headstrong and extravagant folly, and she dismissed it from her thoughts as she had dismissed heavier burdens in the past. "Men simply won't treat Women in business as they treat men, and I don't see unless human nature changes, how it is to be helped. But what about the house in Twenty-third Street? Do you think I ought to look at it?"

"It was the most homelike place we saw, by a long way. There ain't many places in New York where you can have a flower-bed in the front yard."

"Do you think f.a.n.n.y will be happy there? A year before this stage mania seized her, you know, she was wild to move to Park Avenue."

"Well, you know I've got a suspicion," Miss Folly dropped her voice to a whisper. "Of course it ain't nothin' but a suspicion, for she never opens her mouth about it to me, but I've got a right smart suspicion that that young actor she is so crazy about lives somewhere down there in that neighbourhood, and she thinks she could watch him go by in the street. I don't believe, you know, that she's ever so much as spoken to him in her life."

"It's impossible!" exclaimed Gabriella, for this revelation of Miss Polly's discernment was astonishing to her; "but if that's the case,"

she added gravely, "I oughtn't to think of moving into the house."

"Oh, well, I don't know that he's anywhere very near, and f.a.n.n.y's goin'

to be at boarding-school for a year or two and away with Jane at the White Sulphur in the summers. She won't be there much anyhow, will she?"

"Not much, but how I shall miss her--and, of course, if I miss her, I'll miss Archibald even more, because he gives me no anxiety. It's odd," she finished abruptly, "but I've been depressed all day. I suppose my birthday has something to do with it."

"You ain't often like that, Gabriella. I never saw anybody keep in better spirits than you do."

"I'm happy, but the spring makes me restless. I feel as if I'd missed something I ought to have had."

"All of us feel that way at times, I reckon, but it don't last, and we settle down comfortably after a while to doin' without what we haven't got. And you've been mighty successful, honey. You've succeeded in everything you undertook except marriage."

"Yes, except my marriage."

"Well, I reckon things happen and you can't do 'em over again," observed the little seamstress, with the natural fatalism of the "poor white" of the South.

As she undressed and got into bed, Gabriella told herself cheerfully that there was, indeed, no need to worry over things that you couldn't change after they happened. From the open window a shaft of light fell on her mirror, and while she watched it, she tried to convince her rebellious imagination that she was perfectly satisfied, that life had given her all that she had ever desired. "I have more than most women anyhow," she insisted, weakening a little. "I've accomplished what I undertook, and by the time I'm fifty, if things go well, I may become a rich woman. I'll be able to give f.a.n.n.y everything that she wants, and if she hasn't married, we can go abroad every summer, and Archibald can join us in Switzerland or the Tyrol. About Archibald, at least, I can feel perfectly easy. He is the kind of boy to succeed. He is strong, he hasn't a weakness, and I am sure there isn't a brighter boy in the world." Around the shaft of light in the mirror a stream of sparks, like tiny comets, began to form and quiver back and forth as if they were flying. "It's a pity the judge can't help me, but it wouldn't do. I'd never forget what happened to-day, and you can never tell when trouble like that is coming. I'll either make Madame give me half the profits for managing the business or I'll go to Blakeley & Grymn at a salary of ten thousand a year. She won't let me go, of course, because she knows I'd take two thirds of her customers with the. Then I'll invest all I can save in the business until finally I am able to buy it entirely--"

An elevated train pa.s.sed the corner, and while the rumble died slowly in the distance, she found herself thinking of Arthur. "How different my life might have been if I had only stayed true to him. That's the happiest lot that could fall to a woman, to be loved by a man as faithful and tender as Arthur." For a few minutes she lay, without thought, watching the lights quiver and dance in the mirror, and listening to the faint rumble of the elevated train far up the street.

Then, just as she was falling asleep, a question flashed out of the flickering lights into her mind, and she started awake again. "I wonder who Alice is?" she said aloud to the night.

Several weeks, later, at the end of a busy day, Gabriella stood in front of the house in London Terrace, watching her furniture as it pa.s.sed across the pavement and up the flagged walk into the hail. The yard was neglected and overgrown with dandelions and wire-gra.s.s; but an old rose-bush by the steps was in full bloom, and already Miss Polly was surveying the tangled weeds with the eye of a destroyer.

"I declare I'm just hungerin' for flowers," she said wistfully, following the dining-room table as far as the foot of the steps where Gabriella stood. "The very first thing in the morning before I get breakfast, I'm goin' to sow some mignonette and nasturtium seeds in that border along the wall, and fix some window boxes with clove pinks and sweet alyssum in 'em like your ma used to have in summer. I reckon that's why I was so set on this place from the first. It looks more like Richmond in old times than it does like New York."

Beyond the gra.s.s and weeds, over which Gabriella was gazing, the street was so quiet for the moment that it might have been one of those forgotten squares in Richmond (she had never called them blocks) where needy gentlewomen still practised "light housekeeping" in the social twilight of the last century. Now and then a tired man or woman slouched by from work; once a newsboy stopped at the gate to shout the name of his paper in belligerent accents; and a few wagons or a clanging car pa.s.sed rapidly in the direction of Broadway. From the corner of Ninth Avenue the elevated road, which seemed to her at times the only permanent thing in her surroundings, still roared and rumbled its disturbing undercurrent in her life.

"I think we shall be quite comfortable here," she said, watching the last piece of furniture pa.s.s through the door. "Where are the children?"

The air had the rich softness of summer, and the roving fragrance from the old garden rose-bush by the steps awakened a strange homesickness in her heart--that mysterious homesickness which the spring gives us for places we have never seen.

"The children are upstairs fixing their rooms," replied Miss. Polly, stooping to pluck up a weed by the roots. "I reckon I'd better go and tell Minnie to begin gettin' dinner, hadn't I?"

"Yes, I'll come in presently. I hate to leave the air and the roses."

"I wish we had the whole house, Gabriella."

"It would be ever so much nicer, because I'm afraid the man on the first floor is dreadfully common. I don't like the look of that golden-oak hatrack in the hail."

"Well, men never did have much taste. Think of the things your Cousin Jimmy would admire if Miss p.u.s.s.y didn't tell him not to. Do you recollect that paper in your parlour at home? Now Mr. Jimmy thought that paper downright handsome. I've heard him say so."

"It was dreadful, but, do you know, I designed a gown last winter in peac.o.c.k blue like that paper, and it was a tremendous success. Poor mother, I wish she could have seen it--peac.o.c.k blue with an embossed border."

"You may laugh about it now, but I don't believe your mother minded it much. People in old times didn't let things get on their nerves the way they do to-day."

She went indoors to attend to the dinner table; and as Gabriella turned back to the steps, she heard the gate slam and a man's voice exclaim heartily: "I'll see you about it to-morrow." Then a figure came rapidly up the walk--a large, free figure, with a buoyant swing, which awoke a trivial and fleeting a.s.sociation in her memory. Without noticing her, the man stooped for an instant beside the rose-bush, plucked a bud, and held it to his nostrils as he turned to the steps. His voice, singing a s.n.a.t.c.h of ragtime which she recognized without recalling the name of it, rang out, gay and powerful, as he approached her.

"I've seen him somewhere. Who can he be?" she thought, and then swiftly, as in a blaze of light, she remembered the May afternoon in West Twenty-third Street, and "Alice," whom she had wondered about and forgotten. She had again a vivid impression of bigness, of freshness, and of gray eyes that, reminded her vaguely of the colour of a storm on the sea.

"Good evening!" he remarked with impersonal friendliness as he pa.s.sed her; and from the quality of his voice she inferred, as she had done on that May afternoon, that he was without culture, probably without education.

He went inside; the door of his front room opened and shut, and after a minute or two the s.n.a.t.c.h of ragtime floated merrily through his window.