The Daughters of Danaus Part 5

"Well, Algitha," said her father, wondering at her silence, "how are the roses getting on? And I hope you have not forgotten the sweet-brier that you promised to grow for me."

"Oh, no, father, the sweet-brier has been ordered," returned Algitha, without her usual brightness of manner.

"Have you a headache?" enquired Mrs. Fullerton. "I hope you have not all been sitting up talking in Hadria's room, as you are too fond of doing.

You have the whole day in which to express your ideas, and I think you might let the remainder wait over till morning."

"We _were_ rather late last night," Algitha confessed.

"Pressure of ideas overpowering," added Fred.

"When _I_ was young, ideas would never have been tolerated in young people for a moment," said Mrs. Fullerton, "it would have been considered a mark of ill-breeding. You may think yourselves lucky to be born at this end of the century, instead of the other."

"Indeed we do!" exclaimed Ernest. "It's getting jolly interesting!"

"In some respects, no doubt we have advanced," observed his mother, "but I confess I don't understand all your modern notions. Everybody seems to be getting discontented. The poor want to be rich, and the rich want to be millionaires; men want to do their master's work, and women want to do men's; everything is topsy-turvy!"

"The question is: What const.i.tutes being right side up?" said Ernest.

"One can't exactly say what is topsy-turvy till one knows _that_."

"When I was young we thought we _did_ know," said Mrs. Fullerton, "but no doubt we are old-fashioned."

When luncheon was over, Mr. Fullerton went to the garden with his family, according to a time-honoured custom. His love of flowers sometimes made Hadria wonder whether her father also had been born with certain instincts, which the accidents of life had stifled or failed to develop. Terrible was the tyranny of circ.u.mstance! What had Emerson been dreaming of?

Mr. Fullerton, with a rose-bud in his b.u.t.ton-hole, went off with the boys for a farming walk. Mrs. Fullerton returned to the house, and the sisters were left pacing together in the sheltered old garden, between two rows of gorgeous autumn flowers.

Hadria felt sick with dread of the coming interview.

Algitha was buoyed up, for the moment, by a strong conviction that she was in the right.

"It can't be fair even for parents to order one's whole life according to their pleasure," she said. "Other girls submit, I know----"

"And so the world is full of abortive, ambiguous beings, fit for nothing. The average woman always seem to me to be _m.u.f.fled_----or morbid."

"That's what _I_ should become if I pottered about here much longer,"

said Algitha--"morbid; and if there is one thing on the face of the earth that I loathe, it is morbidness."

Both sisters were instinctively trying to b.u.t.tress up Algitha's courage, by strengthening her position with additional arguments.

"Is it fair," Hadria asked, "to summon children into the world, and then run up bills against them for future payment? Why should one not see the bearings of the matter?"

"In theory one can see them clearly enough; but it is poor comfort when it comes to practice."

"Oh, seeing the bearings of things is _always_ poor comfort!" exclaimed the younger sister, with sudden vehemence. "Upon my word, I think it is better, after all, to absorb indiscriminately whatever idiotcy may happen to be around one, and go with the crowd."

"Nonsense!" cried Algitha, who had no sympathy with these pa.s.sionate discouragements that alternated, in Hadria, with equally pa.s.sionate exaltations.

"When you have gone, I will ask Mrs. Gordon to teach me the spirit of acquiescence, and one of those distracting games--besique or halma, or some of the other infernal pastimes that heaven decrees for recalcitrant spirits in need of crushing discipline."

"I think I see you!" Algitha exclaimed with a dispirited laugh.

"It will be a trial," Hadria admitted; "but it is said that suffering strengthens the character. You may look forward before long, to claiming as sister a creature of iron purpose."

"I wonder, I wonder," cried Algitha, bending her fine head; "we owe everything to her."

"I know we do. It's of no use disguising the unpleasant side of the matter. A mother disappointed in her children must be a desperately unhappy woman. She has nothing left; for has she not resigned everything for them? But is sacrifice for ever to follow on sacrifice? Is life to go rolling after life, like the cheeses that the idiot in the fable sent running downhill, the one to fetch the other back?"

"Yes, for ever," said Algitha, "until a few dare to break through the tradition, and then everyone will wonder at its folly. If only I could talk the matter over, in a friendly spirit, with mother, but she won't let me. Ah! if it were not that one is born with feelings and energies and ambitions of one's own, parents might treat one as a showman treats his marionettes, and we should all be charmed to lie p.r.o.ne on our backs, or to dance as may be convenient to our creators. But, as it is, the life of a marionette--however affectionate the wire-pullers--does become monotonous after a time."

"As to that," said the younger sister, with a little raising of the brows, as if half shrinking from what she meant to say, "I think most parents regard their children with such favourable eyes, not so much because they are _they_ as because they are _theirs_."

The sisters paced the length of the garden without speaking. Then Hadria came to a standstill at the sun-dial, at the crossing of the paths, and began absently to trace the figures of the hours, with the stalk of a rose.

"After all," she said, "parents are presumably not actuated by humanitarian motives in bringing one into this wild world. They don't even profess to have felt an unselfish desire to see one enjoying oneself at their expense (though, as a matter of fact, what enjoyment one has generally _is_ at their expense). People are always enthusiastically congratulated on the arrival of a new child, though it be the fourteenth, and the income two hundred a year! This seems to point to a p.r.o.nounced taste for new children, regardless of the consequences!"

"Oh, of course," said Algitha, "it's one of the canons! Women, above all, are expected to jubilate at all costs. And I think most of them do, more or less sincerely."

"Very well then," cried Hadria, "it is universally admitted that children are summoned into the world to gratify parental instincts. Yet the parents throw all the onus of existence, after all, upon the children, and make _them_ pay for it, and apologise for it, and justify it by a thousand sacrifices and an ever-flowing grat.i.tude."

"I am quite ready to give grat.i.tude and sacrifice too," said Algitha, "but I don't feel that I ought to sacrifice _everything_ to an idea that seems to me wrong. Surely a human being has a right to his own life.

If he has not that, what, in heaven's name, _has_ he?"

"Anything but that!" cried Hadria.

While the momentous interview was going on, Hadria walked restlessly up and down the garden, feverishly waiting. The borders were brilliant with vast sunflowers, white lilies, and blazing "red-hot pokers" tangled together in splendid profusion, a very type of richness and glory of life. Such was the sort of existence that Hadria claimed from Fate. Her eyes turned to the bare, forlorn hills that even the August sunshine could not conjure into sumptuousness, and there she saw the threatened reality.

When at last Algitha's fine figure appeared at the further end of the path, Hadria hastened forward and took her sister's arm.

"It was worse than I had feared," Algitha said, with a quiver in her voice. "I _know_ I am right, and yet it seems almost more than I am equal for. When I told mother, she turned deadly white, and I thought, for a moment, that she was going to faint. Let's sit down on this seat."

"Oh, it was horrible, Hadria! Mother must have been cherishing hopes about us, in a way that I don't think she quite knew herself. After that first moment of wretchedness, she flew into a pa.s.sion of rage--that dreadful, tearing anger that people only feel when something of themselves is being wrenched away from them. She said that her children were all bad and unnatural; that she had spent her whole life in their interests; that if it had not been for her, we should all of us have grown up without education or accomplishments, or looks, or anything else; that she watched over us incessantly when we were little children, denying herself, spending her youth in devotion to us, when she might have gone into the world, and had some brightness and pleasure. If we imagined that she had never felt the dulness of her life, and never longed to go about and see people and things, we were much mistaken. But she had renounced everything she cared for, from her girlhood--she was scarcely older than I when her sacrifices began--and now her children gave no consideration to her; they were ready to scatter themselves. .h.i.ther and thither without a thought of her, or her wishes. They even talked scoffingly of the kind of life that she had led for _them_--for _them_, she repeated bitterly."

Hadria's face had clouded.

"Truly parents must have a bad time of it!" she exclaimed, "but does it really console them that their children should have a bad time of it too?"

Algitha was trembling and very pale.

"Mother says I shall ruin my life by this fad. What real good am I going to do? She says it is absurd the way we talk of things we know nothing about."

"But she won't let us know about things; one must talk about _some_thing!" cried Hadria with a dispirited laugh.

"She says she has experience of life, and we are ignorant of it. I reminded her that our ignorance was not exactly our fault."

"Ah! precisely. Parents throw their children's ignorance in their teeth, having taken precious good care to prevent their knowing anything. I can't understand parents; they must have been young themselves once. Yet they seem to have forgotten all about it. They keep us hoodwinked and infantile, and then launch us headlong into life, with all its problems to meet, and all momentous decisions made for us, past hope of undoing." Hadria rose restlessly in her excitement. "Surely no creature was ever dealt with so insanely as the well-brought-up girl! Surely no well-wisher so sincere as the average parent ever ill-treated his charge so preposterously."

Again there was a long silence, filled with painful thought. "One begins to understand a little, why women do things that one despises, and why the proudest of them so often submit to absolute indignity. You remember when Mrs. Arbuthnot and----"