It was a very serious rebellion, and she felt its force. Past concessions from her husband gave the measure of his present mutiny. He had never been humble to her, but he had yielded, and she had grown more used than she realized to his pliant complaisance. This abrupt change shocked her with an actual fright. Her ready little body-guard of taunts and innuendoes fled her usual summons. The despot stood deserted; not a janizary was left. She saw, in quick, startled perspective, her own future, uncompanioned by the man whose supporting nearness her bitter gibes had so often slighted. But apart from merely selfish causes, a thrill of human regard for her child and the father of her child lent fresh accent to alarm. It was like the tremor wrought in a slack harp-string, or one rusty with disuse, but it was still a definite vibration.
She succumbed awkwardly, like most overthrown tyrants. Tears would have looked incongruous had they left the chill black of her eyes, just as there are climes of so fixed a rigor that thaws rank in them as phenomena. But her brows met in a perplexed frown that had no trace of ire, and she made a flurried upward gesture with both hands, receding several steps. When she spoke, which she promptly did, her native idiom forgot the slight garb of change that marriage and nicer association had lent it, and stood forth, stripped by agitation, in graceless nudity.
"Mercy me, Francis!" she exclaimed, "you ain't talking as if you was a sane man at all! You'll quit your lawful wife, sir, 'cause she's boxed her own young one's ears? Why, that child can put on the airs of any six, when she's a mind to. I ain't punished her half enough. Do set down and eat your supper and stop bein' a fool!"
These chronicled words have the effect of rather bald commonplace it is true; but to the man and the child who heard them an apprehensive whimper, a timorous dilation of the eyeball and a flurried quiver about the severe mouth were accompaniments that held piercing significance. Such tokens from their domestic autocrat meant surrender, and surrender was hard for both Twining and Claire to join with past impressions of rule and sway, of command and observance, from the very source which now gave forth their direct opposites.
Both father and daughter still remained silent. Claire's head was still nestling against his breast; Twining's arms still clasped her slight frame, as before. Neither spoke. But Mrs. Twining soon spoke again, and she moved toward the door as she did so.
"Oh, you won't set down, eh?" she inquired; and there was now a sullen fright both in her manner and tone. "Very well. P'raps you'll eat your supper when I'm gone. I've always heard crazy people must be humored. Besides 'tisn't safe, with so many knives and forks round."
After that she left the room, going up stairs into the little hall above the basement, where she could have seen her breath freeze if economic reasons had not kept the lank, pendant gas-burner still unlighted.
She had beaten a positive retreat. Her exit had been a distinct concession. Twining turned his gaze toward the vacant threshold after she had passed it, as if he could not just realize the unwonted humility of her leave-taking.
"Claire," he said, again kissing the child, while she yet clung to him, "you should have told me before that your mother struck you. You should have told me the first time she did it." He embraced her still more closely. Since she was a baby he had always treasured her, and now that defeat and disappointment dealt him such persistent strokes, his love grew deeper with each disastrous year. Claire's presence in his life had gained a precious worth from trouble; it was the star that brightened with sweeter force against a deepening gloom.
He leaned down and slowly passed his lips along her silky hair, just where its folds flowed off from one pale temple. "Oh, my little girl," he said, in a voice whose volume and feeling had both plainly strengthened, "I hope that happy days are in store for you! I shall do my best, darling, but if I fail don't blame me. Don't blame me!"
He appeared no longer to be addressing Claire. He had lifted his head. Both his arms engirt her as previously, but his eyes, looking straight before him, were sombre with meditation.
Claire gazed up into his face. "Father," she cried, "I shall be happy if I am always with you! Don't look like that. Please don't. What does it mean? I have never seen you so sad before. It frightens me. Father, you are so strange and different." He smiled down at the child as her high, pained appeal ended; but the smile soon fled again; a gloomy agitation replaced it. She felt his clasping arms tremble.
"You cannot always have me," he answered. "I love you very much, my little one, but some day I must leave you; my time will have come, and it may come while your life is yet in its first flower. Then I want you to be wiser than I. Listen to what I say. I am in a dark humor now, but it will soon pass, for I can't help being cheerful, as you know; there's a good deal more sun than shadow in me. But just now I am all shadow. I feel as if I should never be successful, Claire. That is a queer word to your young ears. Do you recollect, when I took you for that one day to the country, last summer, how we set out to climb the large hill, and were sure, at starting, that we should reach its top? But half way up we grew tired and hot; there was no breeze, and the way was rough; so we sat down, didn't we, and rested, and then went home? You have not forgotten? Well, success means to do what you set out for, darling. It means to climb the hill – not to get tired and go home. That is what everybody is trying to do. But only a few of us ever reach the top. And to reach the top means to have many good things – to be like the grand people who were once Mrs. Carmichael's friends. Do you understand, Claire?"
"Yes," said the child. Her lips were parted. A gloom had clouded the blue of her eyes; they seemed almost black, and two unwonted gleams pierced them. She was alarmed yet fascinated by the real sorrow in her father's look, and by his unfamiliar speech, with its fervent speed and bitter ring.
"I shall never gain the top of the hill, Claire!" Twining went on. "Something tells me so now – to-night. To-morrow I shall be changed. I shall turn hopeful again. I shall go climbing along, and pick myself up stoutly if I stumble. But remember what I tell you to-night. In my heart, little girl, there is a great fear. I am afraid I must leave you, when I do die, poor and helpless. We are always helpless when we are poor. But you must not lose courage. There is one thing a girl can always do if she has beauty and wit, and you will have both. She can marry. In the years of life left to me, I shall strain hard to make you a lady. I am a gentleman. My father, and his father, and his father, too, were all gentlemen. It is in your blood to be a lady, and a lady you shall be. But your mother" – Here he paused. Even his raw sense of wrong, and the precipitate reasoning native to all passion, forbade his completing the last sentence.
"I know what you mean, Father," said Claire, who had not lost the significance of a word, and whose mind would have grasped subtler discourse than the present. She spoke falteringly, and turned her eyes toward the deserted table; and then, with her shaken, tragic little voice, she lapsed into the prose of things, slipping over that edge between the emotional and the ordinary whose unwilling junction makes the clash that we like to call comedy.
"Father," she said, "please sit down and eat your supper. It's getting cold. Please do!"
This is not at all an index of Claire's thoughts, for they were then in a storm of dread and misgiving; but she shrank from the changed aspect of one known and loved in moods widely different. She seized, as if by a fond instinct, the most ready means of re-securing her father as she had at first found him and had always afterward prized him.
But her attempt was vain. Twining's arms only tightened about her frail form. Like all with whom outburst is rare, his perturbation worked toward a climax; it would brook no repression. There are craters that keep the peace for many decades, but in spite of that their stored lava will not be cheated of the eruptive chance.
So it was with Twining. He trembled more than ever, and his cheeks were now quite hueless. "I want you to do all that I shall leave undone, Claire!" he exclaimed, with voluble swiftness. "I want you to conquer a high place among men and women. Be cool and wary, my daughter. Don't live to serve self only, but push your claims, enforce your rights, refuse to be thrust back, never make false steps, put faith in the few and doubt the many. Remember what I am saying. You will need to recall it, for you must start (God help you, little one!) with all the world against you! Yes, all the world against you" …
A sudden gasp ended Twining's words. His embrace of Claire relaxed, and he staggered toward the sofa, which was just behind him. As he sank upon it, his eyes closed and his head fell sideways. One hand fluttered about his throat, and he seemed in straits for breath. Claire was greatly terrified. She thought that to be death which was merely a transient pause of vitality. The rough gust will bow the frailer tree, and Twining, weary in mind and body, had made too abrupt drafts upon a temperament far from robust.
The child uttered a piercing cry. It summoned the proscribed Mary Ann from exile in the neighboring kitchen; it was heard and heeded by Mrs. Twining, aloof in some remoter chamber. Yet, before either had reached the scene of Claire's disquietude, her father had already pressed the warm hand which sought his cold one, and had looked at her with a gaze that wore the glow of recognition.
"Claire," he soon said, brokenly, and with faint utterance, "I – I was unwell for a moment – that is all. Here, little girl, kiss me, and then give me a glass of water."
"Yes, Father," said Claire. Her response showed a joyous relief. She knelt beside him, and put her lips to his. It was like the good-night kiss she always gave him, except that she made it longer than of old. And then she rose to get the glass of water, hearing footsteps approach.
As she poured the liquid, with unsteady fingers, a partial echo of her father's impetuous enjoinder swept through her mind. "I shall never forget this night," she told herself. Her silent prophecy proved true. She never did forget.
III
Twining's menace was not carried out. There was no actual reconciliation between husband and wife, and yet matters slowly rearranged themselves. The domestic machinery, being again set moving, went at first in a lame, spasmodic way, as though jarred and strained through all its wheel-work. But by degrees the old order of things returned. And yet a marked change, in one respect at least, was always afterward evident. Mrs. Twining had received a clear admonition, and she was discreet enough permanently to regard it. She still dealt in her former slurs and innuendoes; the leopard could not change its spots; no such radical reformation was naturally to be expected. But Twining had put forth his protest; he had shown very plainly that his endurance had its limits, and through all the years that followed, his wife never lost sight of this vivid little fact. She had been seriously frightened, and the fright left its vibration of warning as long as she and her husband dwelt under the same roof. Her sting had by no means been extracted, but its point was blunter and its poison less irritant. She never again struck Claire. She was sometimes very imperious to her daughter, and very acrimonious as well. But in her conduct there was now a sombre acknowledgment of curtailed authority, – an under-current of concession, occasionally rather faint, it is true, yet always operative.
During the next year the family deserted One-Hundred-and-Twelfth Street for a new place of abode. Twining received a few extra hundreds as earnest of shadowy thousands promised him by a glib-tongued rogue who was to appall the medical world with a wondrous compound that must soon rob half the diseases known to pathology of their last terrors. The elixir was to be "placed handsomely on the market," and toward this elegant enterprise poor Twining gave serious aid. For the lump of savings that went from him, however, he was paid only a tithe of his rash investment. One day he learned that the humane chemist had fled from the scene of his proposed benignities, and a little later came the drear discovery that his miraculous potion was merely an unskillful blending of two or three common specifics with as many popular nervines.
Meanwhile the halcyon promise of bettered fortunes had induced Twining to secure easier quarters. For several months he set his household gods within apartments on the second floor of a shapely brownstone residence in a central side-street. This was really a decisive move toward greater social importance. The very tone of his upholstery bespoke a distinct rise in life. There was not a hair-cloth sofa in his pretty suite of chambers. The furniture was tufted and modish; one or two glowing grates replaced the dark awkwardness of stoves; draughts were an abolished evil; to sup on burnt beefsteak had grown a shunned memory, since the family now dined at six o'clock each evening in a lower room, where they had a small table all to themselves, and ate a repast served in courses with a distinct air of fashion, if not always cooked after the loftier methods. Here they met other groups at other small tables, and bowed to them with the bland nod of co-sharers in worldly comfort. It was all a most noteworthy change for the Twinings, and its effect upon Mrs. Twining was no less obvious than acute. She seemed to clutch the new favors of fate with a mingled greed and distrust. She was like one who crushes thirstily between his lips a luscious fruit, won by theft, and thought to be watched with the intent of quick seizure.
She had already quite lost faith in anything like the permanence of her husband's good fortune. "I'd better make hay while the sun shines," she would exclaim, with a burst of laughter that had, as usual, no touch of mirth in it. "Lord knows when it'll end. I'm sure I hope never. Don't think I'm croaking. Gracious me, no! But even the Five Points won't seem so bad, after this. They say every dog has his day, don't they, Francis? So, all right; if mine's a short day, I'll be up and doing while it lasts."
She was undoubtedly up and doing. She carried her large frame with a more assertive majesty; she aired one or two fresh gowns with a loud ostentation; she had a little quarrel with a fellow-lodger of her own sex about the prevailing fashion in bonnets, and said so many personal things during the contest that her adversary, who was a person with nerves, retired in tearful disarray. On more than one Sunday morning she induced her husband to walk with her along Fifth Avenue and "see the churches come out." At such times she would lean upon his arm, grandly indifferent to the fact that her stature overtopped his own, and stare with her severe black eyes at all the passing phases of costume. It is probable that the pair made a very grotesque picture on these occasions, since all that implied refinement in the man's face and demeanor must have acquired a fatal stamp of insignificance beside the woman's pretension of carriage and raw spruceness of apparel. But Mrs. Twining was making her hay, as she has told us, while the sun shone, and it is hardly strange that she should not be critical as to the exact quality of her crop. A good deal of rough experience in the woes of dearth and drouth had, naturally, not made her a fastidious harvester.
Claire, meanwhile, had begun to feel as if she dwelt on quite a new sort of planet. Her environment had lost every trace of its former dullness. Its neutral shades had freshened into brilliant and exciting tints. Little Mrs. Carmichael, with her hoard of memories stowed away like old brocades in a scented chest, had herself faded off into a memory as dim as these. Claire had of late become one of the pupils in a large, well-reputed school, where she met girls of all ages and characters, but seemingly of only a single social rank. The academy was superintended by a magnificent lady in chronic black corded-silk, whose rich rustle was heard for a half minute before she entered each of her various class-rooms and held bits of whispered converse with the instructresses under her serene sway. Her name was Mrs. Arcularius, and its fine rhythmical polysyllable seemed to symbolize the dignity of its owner's slow walk, the majesty of her arched nose and gold eye-glasses, and the white breadth of her forehead, from which the gray tresses were rolled backward in high solidness, with quite a regal effect of hair-dressing. This lady was the direct contra-type of Mrs. Carmichael. It was widely recorded of her that she had once been a gentlewoman of independent wealth, had chanced upon adverse times, and had for this reason become the proprietress of a school. But she had made her grand friends pay the penalty of her misfortunes; she had acquired the skill of using them as an advertisement of her venture at self-support. She had not gone up to One-Hundred-and-Twelfth Street and mourned their loss; she had stayed in Twenty-Third Street, and suffered their children, little and big, to come unto her. She had at first graciously allowed herself to be pitied for her reverses, but she had always possessed the art of handing back their patronage to those who proffered it, in the wholly altered form of a gracious condescension from herself. This is a very clever thing to do; it is a thing which they alone know how to do who know how to fall from high places with a self-saving rebound; and Mrs. Arcularius, who was a decidedly ignorant woman, was also a marvelously clever one. She knew rather less, in a strictly educational sense, than poor, unsuccessful Mrs. Carmichael. She had been a friend of Mrs. Carmichael's in the latter's gladsome days, but she was now not even aware that her old associate was teaching school anywhere. Everybody was aware, on the other hand, that Mrs. Arcularius was teaching school, and just where she was teaching it. Poverty had crushed one; it had stimulated the other. Mrs. Arcularius was now exceedingly particular as regarded her visiting-book. She was a conspicuous figure at the most select receptions. Whether the fact that she presided over a fashionable school had made her lose caste or no, she chose secretly to believe that it had, and for this reason let her voluminous black silk robes rustle only in the most irreproachable assemblages.
She greatly desired that her pupils should all bear the sacred sign of aristocratic parentage. She did not object to the offspring of struggling plutocrats; for she was wise in her generation, and had seen more than one costly-laden camel squeeze itself through a needle's eye straight into the kingdom of the blessed. But she had strong objections to having her school lose tone. Above all things, this was her dread and abhorrence.
And therefore she had been covertly distressed by the application of Twining for his daughter's admission. She had "placed" him before he had spoken three words to her. She always "placed" with equal speed everybody whom she met for the first time. He was a decayed foreigner, and she abominated decayed foreigners. He was a person who wanted to make his common little daughter profit by the prestige of her establishment, and she had a like distaste for all persons of this class. She looked at Claire's attire, and inwardly shivered. The girl had on a frock cut and trimmed in a way that struck her observer as positively satanic. The lovely natural wave of her hair had been tortured by her mother into long ringlets, made sleek and firm under the stiffening spell of sugar-and-water, and pendant about her shoulders with a graceless vertical primness. But the head and front of the poor child's offending was, in the sight of her new critic, a hat which Mrs. Twining esteemed a triumph of taste, which she had bought as a great bargain the day before, and which was half-smothered, from crown to brim, in small white roses, each bearing a little movable glass bead that was meant to imitate a dew-drop.
Mrs. Arcularius decided, however, to receive Claire as one of her pupils. There had been a falling-off, of late, in their list. A good many sweet girl-graduates had gone off at her last commencement day. Besides, it was absurd to suppose that any flock could be kept from an incidental black sheep or so. More than this, there was a fascinating intelligence about Claire's face, with its two dark-blue stars of eyes, and a musical sorcery in the child's timid tones when she spoke, that no diablerie of millinery could dispel.
It soon proved that Claire's fellow-scholars were far from sharing this latter opinion. She was received among them with haughty coolness, varied by incidental giggles. She suffered three days of silent torture, and at their end told her father, in a passion of tears, that he must take her away from Mrs. Arcularius's school. The girls there all despised her and laughed at her; hardly one of them had yet even spoken to her; they seemed to think her beneath them; it was horrible; she could not stand it; it was just as if she had some disease and they were all afraid of catching it from her.
"There is one girl," sobbed Claire, with her arms round her father's neck and her head on his dear, kindly breast, "that I know I shall slap or throw something at if I stay. She has red hair and very white skin, with little freckles all over it, and she is quite fat. She wears a different dress every day, and it's always something handsome but queer to look at… I heard her tell another girl that all her clothes came from Paris. She brings two bananas for lunch, and long cakes spread over with chocolate, that spirt out something soft and yellow, like custard, when she bites into them, and soil her fingers… Well, Father, that girl sits near me, and she is always making fun of me behind my back, and whispering things about me to the others that make them burst out laughing and watch me from the corners of their eyes… Of course this is only at recess, but at all times, Father, I can feel how they are thinking that I have no right, no business among them… And perhaps I haven't. Oh, Father, I want to be a lady as much as you want me to be one, but … isn't there some other way of learning how? If you'll only take me from that dreadful place, I'll … I'll go anywhere else you please!"
Indignant, yet pierced with sympathy for his darling, Twining promised her that she should go back no more to Mrs. Arcularius's.
Claire kissed him, and then put her wet cheek against his. But an instant later she lifted her head. She had thought of her mother, who was paying one of their fellow-boarders a visit that evening, and at this very moment was stating to her hostess, with a sort of saturnine braggadocio, that Claire's new school "ought to be a regular first-class one, and no mistake, for it was going to cost a regular first-class kind of a price."
"But Mother?" said Claire, in anxious query, "what will she say, Father?"
"Never mind what your mother will say, my dear," answered Twining, in his gentle undertone. And Claire remembered a certain night in One-Hundred-and-Twelfth Street, – a night which she had never really forgotten, as we know, and whose incident was fated sharply to revisit her through many an eventful year yet unlived.
But Claire's tears were scarcely dried before she regretted the promise won from her father, and asked him to revoke it. Her young face looked pale and resolute as she did so. Her brief burst of weakness had passed. The ambition to seize and hold any near means of advancement was already no weak impulse in her youthful being. As it afterward struck the great key-note of her life, and became the source of every discord or harmony which that life was to contain, so now its force had begun to stir secret centres and to prelude the steady influence which must soon impel and sway her.
"Let me try a little while longer, Father," she said, standing near him and holding his hand. Her head was slightly thrown backward; her mouth was grave and firm. She was so slender and fragile that this solemn mood might have made one think, as he regarded her, of a lily that had found some art to cast aside its droop, while all its lightsome traits of stem or petal still remained.
"Yes, I mean it, Father," she continued, with a very deep seriousness. "I have begun to climb the hill, and I shan't get tired so soon and sit down to rest. You told me I must not, and I won't. I do not want to sit down at all until I shall reach the top… But you can help me, if you will; you can make it easier for me." She pressed his hand. "Will you make it easier, Father?" she said.
"Yes!" he answered. He spoke the word without knowing what she meant. He could have spoken no other at this moment, with her eyes fixed on him like that, and her clinging hand tense about his own. He loved her so well that he would have faced any peril to save her from any harm. She was his cheer, his pride, his hope, his happiness. He thought her the most beautiful little girl in all the world. He had forgotten to tell himself that her mother made her look a guy in seeking to make her more pretty. To him she was always his innocent, blameless idol – his Claire, whom he had named after his own dead mother, known only in the idealizing years of early childhood. He never looked into her face without feeling his heart beat a trifle quicker. He had been in love with her from the time when he first held her, a new-born baby, and he was in love with her still. It was a love which had the best glow and thrill of those dramatic passions that make our tales, our tragedies, and our epics, only that by absence of the one fevered sentiment knit and kinned with these, it so gained in purity and unselfishness as to strip from all hint of over-praise the holier epithet of divine.
Naturally enough came Twining's afterthought.
"What is it that I can do for you, Claire?" he asked. "How can I make it easier?"
"In this way, Father. Listen. I want to dress differently at school. I want to wear another frock – I know which one – I am afraid you wouldn't recollect which it is if I told you. But it is not the pink merino which I have on now. Pink merino is not nice. And my new hat with the white roses is not nice, either. I didn't think of this till I noticed how the other girls dressed at Mrs. Arcularius's. Then I remembered that mine was something very like the style in which Mrs. Halloran used to dress her little girl, Bridget, every Sunday. You do recollect Mrs. Halloran, don't you Father? Her husband used to work on one of the Harlem boats, and they lived down near the river in that small red house, and there was a bee-hive in the garden, and a horrid bull-dog that used to jump out of his kennel if he heard the least noise, and bark so, and try to break his chain. But little Bridget used to have pink kid shoes, though, to match her dress, and very proud they made her. And her hair was curled in that stiff way, just as Mother curls mine. Now, Father, I want you to let me brush all the curl out of my hair except what it has of its own free choice, and to let me just tie it in a bunch behind with a dark ribbon, and to let me wear my brown bonnet, which is rather shabby, perhaps, though I don't mind that. And if Mother cares to buy me anything new, I want you to go with us – say some Saturday evening when the stores keep open – and to let me use my own taste in choosing quiet and pretty things. But that will be afterward. I'd like you to think, just now, only about to-morrow, you know. I'd like" – But there Twining stopped her with a kiss. He was smiling, but his eyes were moist.
"You shan't dress like little Bridget Halloran any longer, Claire, darling," he said. "I'll see to it as soon as your mother returns."
He kept his word. When Mrs. Twining reappeared he sent Claire out of the room. She knew a storm was coming; she was glad to be away while it broke and raged. She went as far away as possible, into her own bedroom, two chambers off, closing the intermediate doors. Once, while waiting here, she heard the smothered sound of a high, wrathful voice. It was her mother's, no doubt. But she knew that however hot the conflict, her father had made up his mind to be victor.
And he was. The next day Claire went to Mrs. Arcularius's without her white roses or her pink merino.
"You look for all the world like a charity-child," her mother said to her, in gruff leave-taking. "Still, I don't s'pose it matters any. You might as well practice for a short spell beforehand."
Claire's altered raiment produced an immense sensation among her classmates. Even several of the teachers showed signs of surprise. The new plainness of her attire brought out her unquestioned beauty, as gaudier and ill-blended vestments had before marred and obscured it. The back-drawn effect of her chestnut tresses, which were still streaked here and there with sunny threads, could not be doubted as charming even by the most prejudiced caviler. Her brow and temples were shown in their full purity of moulding, and the eyes beneath them gained poetic tenderness from this lovely exposure. She was not yet a girl clothed at all after the dainty manner of the girls about her, but she was at least no longer spoiled and hampered by unbecoming and vulgar garments. Everybody felt this promptly, and Claire herself soon recognized, by an intuition which always stood vassal to her singularly quick perceptions, that everybody had felt it.
This was to be a memorable day with her. It may seem trivial to employ so august a term when dealing with one yet on the threshold of our truly vital episodes, but, after all, there is a reality about the chagrins and victories of childhood which is none the less potent while both exist because both must shortly drop into shadow before harsher pangs and warmer transports. Claire had resolved to be a kind of miniature heroine if occasion should ask her to play that part; and she had a conviction, based on very fair grounds of reasoning, that some such demand might be made of her before the school-exercises for that day should reach their end.