The Price She Paid Part 3

And once more she opened out upon him, wreaking upon him all her wrath against fate, all the pent-up fury of two years--fury which had been denied such fury's usual and natural expression in denunciations of the dead bread-winner. The generous and ever-kind Henry Gower could not be to blame for her wretched plight; and, of course, she herself could not be to blame for it. So, until now there had been no scapegoat.

Presbury therefore received the whole burden. He, alarmed lest a creature apparently so irrational, should in wild rage drive him away, ruin him socially, perhaps induce a sympathetic court to award her a large part of his income as alimony, said not a word in reply. He bade his wrath wait. Later on, when the peril was over, when he had a firm grip upon the situation--then he would take his revenge.

They gave up the expensive suite at the Waldorf that very day and returned to Hanging Rock. They alternated between silence and the coa.r.s.est, crudest quarrelings, for neither had the intelligence to quarrel wittily or the refinement to quarrel artistically. As soon as they arrived at the Gower house, Mildred was dragged into the wrangle.

"I married this terrible man for your sake," was the burden of her mother's wail. "And he is a beggar--wants to sell off everything and dismiss the servants."

"You are a pair of paupers," cried the old man. "You are shameless tricksters. Be careful how you goad me!"

Mildred had antic.i.p.ated an unhappy ending to her mother's marriage, but she had not knowledge enough of life or of human nature to antic.i.p.ate any such horrors as now began. Every day, all day long the vulgar fight raged. Her mother and her stepfather withdrew from each other's presence only to think up fresh insults to fling at each other. As soon as they were armed they hastened to give battle again. She avoided Presbury. Her mother she could not avoid; and when her mother was not in combat with him, she was weeping or wailing or railing to Mildred.

It was at Mildred's urging that her mother acquiesced in Presbury's plans for reducing expenses within income. At first the girl, even more ignorant than her mother of practical affairs, did not appreciate the wisdom, not to say the necessity, of what he wished to do, but soon she saw that he was right, that the servants must go, that the horses and carriages and the motors must be sold. When she was convinced and had convinced her mother, she still did not realize what the thing really meant. Not until she no longer had a maid did she comprehend.

To a woman who has never had a maid, or who has taken on a maid as a luxury, it will seem an exaggeration to say that Mildred felt as helpless as a baby lying alone in a crib before it has learned to crawl. Yet that is rather an understatement of her plight. The maid left in the afternoon. Mildred, not without inconveniences that had in the novelty their amusing side, contrived to dress that evening for dinner and to get to bed; but when she awakened in the morning and was ready to dress, the loss of Therese became a tragedy. It took the girl nearly four hours to get herself together presentably--and then, never had she looked so unkempt. With her hair, thick and soft, she could do nothing.

"What a wonderful person Therese was!" thought she. "And I always regarded her as rather stupid." Her mother, who had not had a maid until she was about thirty and had never become completely dependent, fared somewhat better, though, hearing her moans, you would have thought she was faring worse.

Mildred's unhappiness increased from day to day, as her wardrobe fell into confusion and disrepair. She felt that she must rise to the situation, must teach herself, must save herself from impending dowdiness and slovenliness. But her brain seemed to be paralyzed. She did not know how or where to begin to learn. She often in secret gave way to the futility of tears.

There were now only a cook and one housemaid and a man of all work--all three newcomers, for Presbury insisted--most wisely--that none of the servants of the luxurious, wasteful days would be useful in the new circ.u.mstances. He was one of those small, orderly men who have a genius for just such situations as the one he now proceeded to grapple with and solve. In his pleasure at managing everything about that house, in distributing the work among the three servants, in marketing, and, in inspecting purchases and nosing into the garbage-barrel, in looking for dust on picture-frames and table-tops and for neglected weeds in the garden walks--in this mult.i.tude of engrossing delights he forgot his anger over the trick that had been played upon him. He still fought with his wife and denounced her and met insult with insult. But that, too, was one of his pleasures. Also, he felt that on the whole he had done well in marrying. He had been lonely as a bachelor, had had no one to talk with, or to quarrel with, nothing to do. The marriage was not so expensive, as his wife had brought him a house--and it such a one as he had always regarded as the apogee of elegance. Living was not dear in Hanging Rock, if one understood managing and gave time to it. And socially he was at last established.

Soon his wife was about as contented as she had ever been in her life.

She hated and despised her husband, but quarreling with him and railing against him gave her occupation and aim--two valuable a.s.sets toward happiness that she had theretofore lacked. Her living--shelter, food, clothing enough--was now secure. But the most important factor of all in her content was the one apparently too trivial to be worthy of record. From girlhood she could not recall a single day in which she had not suffered from her feet. And she had been ashamed to say anything about it--had never let anyone, even her maid, see her feet, which were about the only unsightly part of her. None had guessed the cause of her chronic ill-temper until Presbury, that genius for the little, said within a week of their marriage:

"You talk and act like a woman with chronic corns."

He did not dream of the effect this chance thrust had upon his wife.

For the first time he had really "landed." She concealed her fright and her shame as best she could and went on quarreling more viciously than ever. But he presently returned to the attack. Said he:

"Your feet hurt you. I'm sure they do. Now that I think of it, you walk that way."

"I suppose I deserve my fate," said she. "When a woman marries beneath her she must expect insult and low conversation."

"You must cure your feet," said he. "I'll not live in the house with a person who is made fiendish by corns. I think it's only corns. I see no signs of bunions."

"You brute!" cried his wife, rus.h.i.+ng from the room.

But when they met again, he at once resumed the subject, telling her just how she could cure herself--and he kept on telling her, she apparently ignoring but secretly acting on his advice. He knew what he was about, and her feet grew better, grew well--and she was happier than she had been since girlhood when she began ruining her feet with tight shoes.

Six months after the marriage, Presbury and his wife were getting on about as comfortably as it is given to average humanity to get on in this world of incessant struggle between uncomfortable man and his uncomfortable environment. But Mildred had become more and more unhappy. Her mother, sometimes angrily, again reproachfully--and that was far harder to bear--blamed her for "my miserable marriage to this low, quarrelsome brute." Presbury let no day pa.s.s without telling her openly that she was a beggar living off him, that she would better marry soon or he would take drastic steps to release himself of the burden. When he attacked her before her mother, there was a violent quarrel from which Mildred fled to hide in her room or in the remotest part of the garden. When he hunted her out to insult her alone, she sat or stood with eyes down and face ghastly pale, mute, quivering. She did not interrupt, did not try to escape. She was like the chained and spiritless dog that crouches and takes the shower of blows from its cruel master.

Where could she go? Nowhere. What could she do? Nothing. In the days of prosperity she had regarded herself as proud and high spirited.

She now wondered at herself! What had become of the pride? What of the spirit? She avoided looking at her image in the gla.s.s--that thin, pallid face, those circled eyes, the drawn, sick expression about the mouth and nose. "I'm stunned," she said to herself. "I've been stunned ever since father's death. I've never recovered--nor has mother." And she gave way to tears--for her father, she fancied; in fact, from shame at her weakness and helplessness. She thought--hoped--that she would not be thus feeble and cowardly, if she were not living at home, in the house she loved, the house where she had spent her whole life. And such a house! Comfort and luxury and taste; every room, every corner of the grounds, full of the tenderest and most beautiful a.s.sociations.

Also, there was her position in Hanging Rock. Everywhere else she would be a stranger and would have either no position at all or one worse than that of the utter outsider. There, she was of the few looked up to by the whole community. No one knew, or even suspected, how she was degraded by her step-father. Before the world he was courteous and considerate toward her as toward everybody. Indeed, Presbury's natural instincts were gentle and kindly. His hatred of Mildred and his pa.s.sion for humiliating her were the result of his conviction that he had been tricked into the marriage and his inability to gratify his resentment upon his wife. He could not make the mother suffer; but he could make the daughter suffer--and he did. Besides, she was of no use to him and would presently be an expense.

"Your money will soon be gone," he said to her. "If you paid your just share of the expenses it would be gone now. When it is gone, what will you do?"

She was silent.

"Your mother has written to your brother about you."

Mildred lifted her head, a gleam of her former spirit in her eyes. Then she remembered, and bent her gaze upon the ground.

"But he, like the cur that he is, answered through a secretary that he wished to have nothing to do with either of you."

Mildred guessed that Frank had made the marriage an excuse.

"Surely some of your relatives will do something for you. I have my hands full, supporting your mother. I don't propose to have two strapping, worthless women hanging from my neck."

She bent her head lower, and remained silent.

"I warn you to bestir yourself," he went on. "I give you four months.

After the first of the year you can't stay here unless you pay your share--your third."

No answer.

"You hear what I say, miss?" he demanded.

"Yes," replied she.

"If you had any sense you wouldn't wait until your last cent was gone.

You'd go to New York now and get something to do."

"What?" she asked--all she could trust herself to speak.

"How should _I_ know?" retorted he furiously. "You are a stranger to me. You've been educated, I a.s.sume. Surely there's something you can do. You've been out six years now, and have had no success, for you're neither married nor engaged. You can't call it success to be flattered and sought by people who wanted invitations to this house when it was a social center."

He paused for response from her. None came.

"You admit you are a failure?" he said sharply.

"Yes," said she.

"You must have realized it several years ago," he went on. "Instead of allowing your mother to keep on wasting money in entertaining lavishly here to give you a chance to marry, you should have been preparing yourself to earn a living." A pause. "Isn't that true, miss?"

He had a way of p.r.o.nouncing the word "miss" that made it an epithet, a sneer at her unmarried and unmarriageable state. She colored, paled, murmured:

"Yes."

"Then, better late than never. You'll do well to follow my advice and go to New York and look about you."

"I'll--I'll think of it," stammered she.

And she did think of it. But in all her life she had never considered the idea of money-making. That was something for men, and for the middle and lower cla.s.ses--while Hanging Rock was regarded as most noisomely middle cla.s.s by fas.h.i.+onable people, it did not so regard itself. Money-making was not for ladies. Like all her cla.s.s, she was a constant and a severe critic of the women of the lower orders who worked for her as milliners, dressmakers, shop-attendants, cooks, maids. But, as she now realized, it is one thing to pa.s.s upon the work of others; it is another thing to do work oneself. She-- There was literally nothing that she could do. Any occupation, even the most menial, was either beyond her skill or beyond her strength, or beyond both.

Suddenly she recalled that she could sing. Her prostrate spirit suddenly leaped erect. Yes, she could sing! Her voice had been praised by experts. Her singing had been in demand at charity entertainments where amateurs had to compete with professionals. Then down she dropped again. She sang well enough to know how badly she sang--the long and toilsome and expensive training that lay between her and operatic or concert or even music-hall stage. Her voice was fine at times. Again--most of the time--it was unreliable. No, she could not hope to get paying employment even as a church choir-singer. Miss Dresser who sang in the choir of the Good Shepherd for ten dollars a Sunday, had not nearly so good a voice as she, but it was reliable.

"There is nothing I can do--nothing!"

All at once, with no apparent bridge across the vast chasm, her heart went out, not in pity but in human understanding and sisterly sympathy, to the women of the pariah cla.s.s at whom, during her stops in New York, she had sometimes gazed in wonder and horror. "Why, we and they are only a step apart," she said to herself in amazement. "We and they are much nearer than my maid or the cook and they!"