The Ordeal of Elizabeth Part 3

"Don't look so unhappy, auntie," she said, quickly. "It's not your fault--no, nor mine either; and, I suppose, it's not the fault of the Neighborhood. People can't help being narrow and conservative; they were born so. But then, Aunt Cornelia, when--when I don't have so many friends, you can't expect me to draw the line so awfully closely."

Something like a sob crept into the girl's voice, but she went on with hardly a pause: "You mustn't think that I would want to know--any one.

This man isn't like the rest of Amanda's friends. Only wait till you hear him sing--you would lose your heart, I'm sure, on the spot. And now, confess, auntie, you would like me to have my picture painted.

The girls at school used to say that I would make a glorious picture.

Do _you_ think I would make a pretty picture, auntie?" She went over to Miss Cornelia and put her arms around her, looking up into her face with laughing, brilliant eyes, from which all bitterness had disappeared.

"My darling." Miss Cornelia, bewildered by the quick change of mood, could not find words. She thought that Elizabeth would make the prettiest picture in the world; but to have told her so would have been to run counter to all her ideas of propriety. So she finally said, with due regard for accepted formulas: "You shouldn't think so much about looks, Elizabeth. If you are good, that's the main thing."

"Of course, it's the main thing," Elizabeth a.s.sented, "but I'm afraid if it came to a choice, I'd rather be pretty, auntie, and so would most people." She ended with a light little laugh, and Miss Cornelia, in spite of her principles, attempted no rebuke.

The look of gaiety soon faded from Elizabeth's face. With a quick, impatient little sigh, she walked over to the window, and looked out into the night. It was still and sultry; heavy storm clouds were gathering and obscured the sky. The old elm trees, growing close about the house, cast sombre shadows; they seemed to keep out what little air there was. Elizabeth, as she leaned her hot cheek against the cool gla.s.s of the window-pane, felt again a sense of stifling, of being in a cage. It was useless to beat her wings; life was outside, but she could not reach it. "Oh, I would give anything in the world," she thought "just to breathe, to be free, to know what life is."

Suddenly she turned around with a start. There was a voice in the hall; some one spoke her name. A moment later a young man was advancing towards her across the dimly-lighted room. Mechanically she went to meet him. She did not think of her aunts, she did not think of anything but his presence.

"Have I--come too soon?" Paul Halleck asked, as he took her hand.

_Chapter VI_

Elizabeth drove again, a few weeks later, through shady, fragrant lanes, on her way to Ba.s.sett Mills. It was early in the morning, but the sun was already hot. The wild-roses along the road-side had mostly departed, the gra.s.s in the fields had a parched look. It was a long time since any rain had fallen, and the roads were thick with dust.

All the freshness of the early summer had faded. But for these signs of premature blight and the scorching effect of the sun, Elizabeth seemed to have no eyes.

She drove along in a happy dream. There was a brilliant color in her cheeks, a radiant light in her eyes. She bloomed like a rose that has unfolded every petal to the summer suns.h.i.+ne. The fields through which she pa.s.sed were not the familiar pasture-lands and "places" that skirted the road to Ba.s.sett Mills; they were the flowery meadows of poetic Arcadia, on the road that led to Paradise.

It was something of a bore, under the circ.u.mstances, that she must first of all go to Ba.s.sett Mills, but Miss Joanna had intrusted her with numerous commissions, that she could not very well refuse to discharge. That was the reason why she had started so early. There was a brook in a meadow near by; a brook shaded by weeping willow trees, under which nowadays a young artist sat sketching for many hours at a time. Elizabeth's drives, or walks had for the last few weeks led no further. But to-day she had decided to go first to Ba.s.sett Mills, and be back in time for the usual engagement, of which her aunts knew nothing.

The affair was not really so clandestine. There was no reason why she should have kept it secret beyond a vague embarra.s.sment, an unwillingness to speak about the one subject that occupied her thoughts. Miss Cornelia and Miss Joanna had, after the one protest, yielded to the inevitable; they had not even discouraged young Halleck's visits to their niece. They had gone so far as to admit, when he had come to tea at the Homestead, and sung and played for them afterwards for hours, that he was an extremely talented young man. It had been a most successful evening, Miss Joanna had not even gone to sleep. And yet, with it all, in both sisters there was some innate distrust, some lingering prejudice perhaps, that prevented them from succ.u.mbing entirely to the charm of his handsome face and beautiful voice. They were civil to him--painfully civil; but they did not welcome him as they would have welcomed young Frank Courtenay, who used to stare at Elizabeth in church every Sunday, but had never apparently mustered up courage to come and see her. He was much under the influence of his mother, who considered Elizabeth's hair "conspicuous" and had remarked that it was bad taste for a young girl to be _too_ well dressed--a fault that could not in justice be alleged against her own daughters.

Elizabeth, too, might have welcomed the visits of young Courtenay.

There had been times when she had doubted, sadly, if she were really so pretty as the girls at school had seemed to think. But these times were past, and she had not a thought to spare for Frank Courtenay's heavy, commonplace good looks. Paul Halleck had a.s.sured her many times that she was beautiful, and had sketched her in every variety of pose, in that impressionistic style which Elizabeth had secretly thought rather ugly, before she learned to regard it as the last word in Art.

Elizabeth had learned many other things in the last few weeks. Halleck undertook her education in all artistic and literary matters, showing her how little she had hitherto known of this or that great light. He quoted Swinburne and Rossetti; he read her extracts from Maeterlinck and Ibsen; he opened for her the treasures of that school which Nordau calls degenerate. He had all the intellectual and artistic jargon of the day at his tongue's end. She sat at his feet and devoutly learned it all.

She knew his history, now. It was very romantic, and it lost nothing in the telling. He had a keen eye for artistic effect, and spared not one sordid detail of his early surroundings which served to throw into more brilliant relief his subsequent career. He told how the possession of a lovely childish soprano had raised him literally from the gutter, and procured him a position as boy soloist in a Chicago church, and how, later on, a patron was found, who sent him abroad to study. He had wandered from one European centre to another; learned to play in Dresden and to paint in Paris, and developed a fine barytone voice, of which great things were prophesied. In fact, he was a universal genius, and could do anything, except apparently earn a living, which indeed has been always hard for genius. And so at last he drifted back to Chicago, where he sang for a while in the same church where he had begun his career; but finally left for some reason or another, and tried his fortune in New York. He was debating now whether to go abroad again to study in earnest for the stage, and meanwhile he was on a walking tour, sketching about the country. He had come to Ba.s.sett Mills for the sake of old a.s.sociations, and had stayed--well, he left it to Elizabeth to imagine _why_ he stayed.

All this was very interesting and romantic; far more so, Elizabeth thought, than any ordinary affair could have been, with some commonplace youth of the neighborhood. She had only one regret; she could not help wis.h.i.+ng in her heart that Paul's early surroundings had been, if not more exalted, less familiar. She would have preferred him to have no a.s.sociations with, no friends at, Ba.s.sett Mills. The place seemed to her, as she drove through it that morning, so hopelessly common, so unusually prosaic. The ugly, sordid houses, the people with their faces of dull stolidity, jarred upon the ecstatic tone of her mood. She could not imagine that genius could be born in such surroundings.

The discordant note was still more striking when, having discharged the greater part of her commissions, she entered the dry-goods shop, and found Aunt Rebecca in her most trying humor.

"So that's you, Elizabeth," she said, looking her niece severely up and down, while her thin lips moved at the corners. "It seems to me you're very much dressed up, driving round these dusty roads. The way you wear white is a caution! But I suppose for a millionaire like you it don't matter about the was.h.i.+ng."

Elizabeth bit her lip. "I'm not a millionaire, you know Aunt Rebecca,"

she said, "but I like to wear white, and it's as cheap as anything in the end. Is Amanda in?" she added quickly, anxious to stave off further criticism. "I'll go back and see her if she is."

"She's in the parlor," said Amanda's mother, shortly. "She's got a headache. I guess she don't feel like seeing company," she added hastily, but the words came too late. Elizabeth had already left the shop, and was crossing the narrow, dark little hall that led to the parlor. Her heart beat rapidly as she did so. She felt an odd, utterly irrational desire to feast her eyes on the spot where she had first experienced such new and delightful sensations.

There was no music in the room now, no air of festivity. The atmosphere was close and musty, the sun poured in at the window beside which Amanda sat sewing. She bent closely over her work, her skin was more pasty than ever and her eyes were red and swollen. Elizabeth remembered her aunt's words about the headache; otherwise she might have thought that her cousin had been crying. She went over and kissed her with a friendliness born of her own superabundant joy. The lips she touched were dry and hot. Amanda did not respond to the caress.

She stared stupidly at Elizabeth, as if half dazed by her sudden entrance.

"How are you, Amanda?" Elizabeth said. "I'm sorry you have a headache.

Perhaps it's the heat. It's a terribly hot day, and the roads are so dusty. Aunt Rebecca implied that my dress showed that very plainly. It was clean this morning--does it really look so badly?" She walked over to the mirror and inspected herself critically, setting her hat straight and adjusting the white ribbon about her throat. It was a long narrow gla.s.s, framed in black walnut, and there was a shelf underneath it, which supported a large sea-sh.e.l.l. The whole thing reminded her of a similar arrangement at her dressmaker's in town, and seemed in some way the crowning feature of the prosaic, painfully respectable character of the room. She hated to look at herself there--the gla.s.s brought out all one's defects. But to-day, in spite of the trying glare of the suns.h.i.+ne, her own image flashed back at her, so brilliantly fresh, in her white dimity gown, so redolent of health and beauty, that she could not help smiling back at it, as at some delightful apparition. Ah, yes, it was good to be young and pretty, and to have a lover waiting for one near by. Her eyes brightened unconsciously, and she gave a little caressing touch to the s.h.i.+ning ma.s.ses of wavy hair which stood out, like red molten gold, against the broad brim of her shady white hat.

The other girl sat and watched her.

"You like to look at yourself, don't you?" The words rang out harshly, suddenly. Elizabeth started and turned around. It seemed to her for a moment as if some third person had spoken--some one with a strange, mocking voice that she had never heard before. But there was no one else in the room.

"Yes, you like to look at yourself." Amanda went on after a pause, more quietly, "you think yourself a beauty, and a good many people, perhaps, might agree with you. _He_ tells you so, I suppose. I daresay he tells you your hair's picturesque--he used to tell me that about mine. He was going to paint my picture, but it went out of his head when he saw you. Most things did, I guess. He--he hasn't been here since." The girl's voice broke in a quick, convulsive sob, and she stopped for a moment, but went on almost immediately: "If you hadn't come in that day, it would have been all right. We were keeping company; every one in The Mills knew we were. All the girls were jealous of me--as if he'd have looked at them! Some of them work in the factory, there's many of them don't even have a piano and sit in their kitchens. I know what's genteel, even if I can't talk all that rubbish about music and Wagner that you learned at school. And what good will all that do you when you're married? What do you know about mending and sewing and cooking? What sort of a wife would you make him? You'd ruin him in a month with your fine clothes. But men are such fools!" She gave a short mirthless laugh, her eyes glittered strangely. Elizabeth stared at her paralyzed, glued to the spot in helpless fascination. She had never heard Amanda talk so much before.

Her words came quickly, fiercely, one upon another, like some overwhelming torrent that had been suddenly let loose.

"Why should you have so much more than me? Why should you have fine clothes, and a carriage, and go to school in New York, and have the swells in the neighborhood call on you? Was your mother any better than mine, or a hundredth part as good? She wasn't even respectable; no decent people at The Mills would speak to her before your father married her--I know that for a fact. And then to give yourself airs!"

Amanda stopped short, panting, exhausted by her own vehemence.

Elizabeth still stood before her powerless. When Amanda spoke of her mother the color rushed into her white face, and she made an effort to speak; but the words seemed to die away on her lips. Amanda, after a moment's pause, went on.

"It isn't that I care so much about that; you might have had everything else, if you hadn't taken--him. Why did you come in that day looking like a dressed-up doll? You hadn't been here for weeks, and I was glad. I didn't want him to know you--I wasn't afraid of the other girls. But you who've got so much--couldn't you have had the decency to leave him alone? Couldn't you see that he was mine?"

"Amanda," Elizabeth gasped out. "I--I didn't know. I--I never thought"--Her brain reeled, she stammered painfully, trying in vain for words to vindicate herself from this shameful charge. Amanda brushed her aside contemptuously.

"You didn't think?--no, you never do, of anything but yourself, your pretty face and pretty clothes! You're selfish and spoiled--every one knows it; you've had every wish granted till you want everything, and you won't be satisfied with less. But what's the good of saying all this to you?" she broke off suddenly, with a sharp change of tone. "I must be crazy; I've felt so, I'm sure, these last weeks. It won't make any difference--nothing I say can bring him back. And yet he'd have married me--if you hadn't come." She went to Elizabeth and gripped her by the wrist. "He kissed me once," she said. "Has he kissed you yet?"

"No," said Elizabeth, mechanically, "no." She shrank away a little and set her teeth. Amanda's grasp was painful, but she would not have cried out for worlds.

"Well, when he does," Amanda said, "remember this--he kissed me first.

You can't take that away from me--I have the first claim." She let go of Elizabeth's hands and fell back a step. There were two deep red marks from her grasp. "Now go," she said, "go to him. I knew you were going to him--I saw you thinking of it, and it made me hate you. Go to him and tell him that I hope his love for you will last as long as it did for me." She laughed again harshly and then suddenly burst into violent weeping. "Oh, it's ignominious," she said, "it's contemptible.

No one can despise me more than I do myself. I haven't any pride. I hate him--I hate him; yet I'd take him back now, if he'd come to me."

She sank down on the sofa and hid her face in the red plush cus.h.i.+ons, while her whole frame shook with convulsive sobs.

Elizabeth stood still in the middle of the floor. Mechanically she glanced at her reflection in the mirror; white, distraught, with startled eyes--a ghastly parody of the brilliant vision which had smiled back at her only a few minutes before. The hot sunlight, flooding the commonplace little room, seemed to bring out, with glaring vividness, all the tragic, sordid elements of the scene. A quarrel between two women about a lover! Could anything be more hopelessly vulgar and grotesque?

It was the sting of this thought that finally roused Elizabeth to speech. She raised her head with sudden haughtiness, and her words came clearly and fluently. "I don't know what you mean, Amanda," she said "by this scene. If there is any one whom you--you think I have taken from you, you can have him back to-morrow so far as I am concerned. I don't want any other woman's lover. It--it would be base.

Whatever else you think me, I'm not--that. If it is Paul Halleck whom you mean, you can marry him, if you wish, to-morrow. At least you may be sure of one thing, that I never will." Her low, vehement voice died away, and she waited for an answer; but none came. Amanda only sobbed on hysterically, her face buried in the sofa-cus.h.i.+ons.

Elizabeth stood looking at her for a moment, with a feeling in which pity, anger and repulsion were strangely mingled; then she hastily left the room by the door that led directly to the street. She had presence of mind enough to avoid the shop and her aunt's unfriendly eyes. She reached the carriage, and--un-heard-of thing--touched the white pony with the whip.

_Chapter VII_

They had left the last house behind; they were out in the open country. Elizabeth dropped the reins and let her tears flow unchecked--hot, blinding tears, the bitterest she had ever shed. At each familiar tree and landmark she sobbed with redoubled violence.

Only an hour before she had driven along this same road in the ecstatic glow of her first romance. Now all the bloom had been rubbed from that romance, all the glory faded from the hero of her dreams; she herself was a woman who had been insulted, humiliated, dragged in the dust.

By degrees a few coherent phrases detached themselves from the confused ma.s.s of painful recollections, and stung more sharply than the rest. "My mother better than yours--she wasn't even respectable; no decent people would speak to her" ... Oh, it was too bad--too bad; she had not thought it was so bad as that. Amanda must have exaggerated--she would ask her aunts; but no, no she would never speak of that interview to a soul. It was humiliating enough as it was....

"He kissed me once. Has he kissed you yet?" No, thank Heaven! that indignity had been spared her. They had hovered as yet on the borderland of love; she had put off the inevitable declaration with instinctive coquetry, a vague unwillingness to be won too easily. She was glad now--glad and thankful; he did not know that she cared,--he should never know. She had no love for the man who had kissed Amanda.... "Selfish and spoiled--thinking only of herself?" Yes, she might be all that; but at least she would not take another woman's lover. The words "it would be base," rang in her ears. Had she spoken them, or Amanda? At all events, they were true. It would be base to marry Halleck now. In fact, she did not wish to marry him. It was he who had involved her in this horrible, sordid misery. Her aunts were right; there must be distinctions of cla.s.ses. Had her father remembered this, people would not have it in their power to insult his daughter now.

Through all her complex feelings ran a sharp sense of anger against Amanda, mingled strangely with an involuntary pity, almost with an understanding of her point of view. It was not based on justice, but on fellow feeling. Amanda had resented her superiority; she, Elizabeth, knew what that was. She had felt the same herself, when smarting impotently under the patronizing friendliness of the other girls in the Neighborhood, and then had turned, with unconscious sn.o.bbery, to play the same part towards Amanda. The incongruous, grotesque humor of the situation struck her suddenly, and she laughed out loud in bitter irony. She had envied the other girls of the Neighborhood, Amanda had envied her, the girls at Ba.s.sett Mills had envied Amanda. Strange net-work of cla.s.ses in a democratic country, of distinctions the more galling for their intangibility. Of one thing Elizabeth was convinced, that she could never herself "put on airs" as Amanda had said, again; there was not a girl in the whole countryside, blessed with a good mother, who could not look down on her, if she pleased.