Life and Gabriella Part 50

"You don't mean it! I never should have believed it! The idea of your being a dressmaker. That's why you look so smart, I suppose. You're the smartest thing I've seen anywhere, but you look older, Gabriella."

"Well, you don't." It was perfectly true. Except for the gaudy decorations and the tw.a.n.ging accents of the arrogant young women, Gabriella might have imagined herself in the last century atmosphere of Broad Street in the middle 'nineties.

"I must tell you about the things I use." Florrie was always generous.

"But, I declare if I'd known this place was yours, I'd have got my hats here ages ago. Of course I knew it was dreadfully swell, but I thought the prices were beyond anything."

"They are," responded Gabriella with business-like brevity, while she glanced about for the flitting Miss Murphy.

"Look here, Gabriella, I hope you don't bear me any malice," Florrie burst out solicitously, for her frankness, like her sensuality, was elemental in its audacity. "You oughtn't to if you know what I saved you from," she proceeded convincingly. "Anyway, we were chums long before either of us ever thought about a man, and I didn't really do you a bit of harm. It wasn't as if you cared about George, was it?"

"No, it wasn't as if I'd cared about him." Gabriella was answering the appeal as truthfully as if Florrie had been the most excellent of her s.e.x. "You didn't harm me in any way--not in any way," she repeated with firmness.

"That's just the way I told mother you'd look at it. I knew you were always so broad-minded even as a girl. Then there isn't any reason we shouldn't be friends just as we used to be."

Gabriella shook her head, polite but implacable in her refusal. "It isn't what you did to me, Florrie," she answered gently, "it's what you are that I can't forgive. I can imagine that a good woman might do almost anything--might even run off with another woman's husband, but you aren't good. You wouldn't be good if you'd spent your life in a convent."

A quick flush--the flush of temper--stained the pearly whiteness of Florrie's skin. "Oh, of course, if you don't want to," she retorted, a little shrilly, though she tried to subdue her rebellious voice to the pitch of Fifth Avenue. "I only thought that being a working woman, you wouldn't have so very many friends, and you might get lonely. I had seats at the opera every night last winter, and time and again I'd have been glad to have given them to you. Then, too, I might have been able to bring you some custom. I know any number of rich women who don't think anything of paying a thousand dollars for a dress--"

Her insolence was so evidently the result of anger that Gabriella, without interrupting the flow, waited courteously until she paused.

"No, you cannot do anything for me, Florrie." Though Gabriella's voice was crisp and firm, her face looked suddenly older, and little lines, stamped by weariness and regret, appeared at the corners of her still brilliant eyes. "I don't wish you any harm," she went on more softly.

"If you were in trouble I'd do what I could for you, but somehow I don't seem able to forgive you for being what you are. Would you like to look at anything else?" she inquired in her professional tone. "Miss Murphy is waiting to show you some hats."

Her cheeks were burning when she pa.s.sed out of the ivory and gold door, saluted deferentially by the attendant in livery. "The effrontery!" she thought, "the barefaced effrontery!" and then, as her eyes fell on Florrie's trim little electric coupe beside the curb, she exclaimed mentally, recalling George's animated perplexity about the pearl necklace, "I wonder how in the world she does it?"

The meeting with Florrie appeared to her, as she walked home that afternoon, to be the last touch needed to push her into a state of utter despondency. The oppressive languor of the day had exhausted her strength, and when she left Dinard's she felt too indifferent, too spiritless even for the drive in the Park. It was still light when she got out of the stage at Twenty-third Street, and while she strolled listlessly down the blocks on the West Side, she had again that curious sensation of smothering which had come to her after her talk with O'Hara.

At the corner of Sixth Avenue a young Italian, with the face of a poet, was roasting peanuts in a little kerosene stove beside a flickering torch which enkindled the romantic youth in his eyes. Farther away some ragged children were dancing to the music of a hand-organ, which ground out a melancholy waltz; and from a tiny flower stall behind the stand of a bootblack there drifted the intense sweetness of hyacinths. An old negro, carrying a basket of clothes, pa.s.sed her in the middle of the block, and she thought: "That might have been in Richmond--that and the hand-organ and the perfume of hyacinths." A vision of Hill Street floated before her--the long straight street, with the sudden drop of ragged hill at the end; the old houses, with crumbling porches and countless signs: "Boarders Wanted" in the windows between the patched curtains; the irregular rows of tulip poplar, elm, or sycamore trees throwing their crooked shadows over the cobblestones; the blades of gra.s.s sprouting along the edges of the brick pavement--the vision of Hill Street as she remembered it twenty years ago in her girlhood; and then the image of her mother's face gazing out beneath the creamy blossoms and the dark s.h.i.+ning leaves of the old magnolia tree.

"Everything must have changed, I'd hardly recognize it," she thought.

"n.o.body we know lives on that side now, mother says. Yes, it has been a long time." She sighed, and then a little laugh broke from her lips, as she remembered that Charley, who had recently been West on a business trip, had brought home the good news that Richmond was as progressive as Denver. "At least it seems so to Charley," Mrs. Carr had hastened to add, "but you know how proud Charley is of all our newness. He says there is not a street in the West that looks fresher or more beautiful than Monument Avenue, and I am sure that is a great comfort. Cousin Jimmy says it shows what the South can do when it tries."

"I'd like to go back," mused Gabriella, walking more and more slowly. "I haven't been home for eighteen years, and I am thirty-eight to-day."

With the fugitive sweetness of the hyacinths there rushed over her again the feeling that life was slipping, slipping, and that she was missing something infinitely precious, something infinitely desirable. It was the panic of fleeting youth, of youth unsatisfied, denied, and still insatiable.

As she entered the gate she saw that O'Hara's windows were dark, and while a sigh of relief escaped her, she felt a swift contraction of her throat as if she had become suddenly paralyzed and was unable to swallow. "I hope he has gone," she said to herself in a whisper. "If he has gone, everything will be so much easier." But even to herself she could not explain what it was that would be made easier. Her relief was so vague that when she endeavoured to put it into words it seemed to dissolve and evaporate.

Miss Polly was watering the flowers in the window box, and turning, with the green watering-pot in her hand, she stared at Gabriella in silence for a minute before she exclaimed anxiously: "Mercy on us, Gabriella, what on earth, is the matter?"

"Nothing. I've had a hard day, and I'm tired."

"Well, you lie right straight down as soon as you take off your hat. I declare you look ten years older than you did this morning."

"I have seen Florrie for a minute."

"I reckon that was enough to upset anybody. Did she say she was sorry?"

"Sorry! She looked as if she had never been sorry for anything in her life. She was handsomer than ever--don't you remember how much you always admired her figure?--and she didn't look a day over twenty-five.

I don't believe she has ever known what it is to feel a regret."

"Well, you just wait, honey," responded Miss Polly consolingly, "you just wait. She'll be punished yet as sure as you're born."

"Oh, I'm not waiting for that. I don't wish her to be punished. Why should I? She is what she is."

"Do you s'pose she knows about George?"

"I doubt it. She didn't speak of his death. She is quite capable of forgetting that she ever knew him, and if she does, think of him, it is probably as a man who betrayed her innocence. You may be sure she has twisted it all about until every shred of the blame rests on somebody else. Florrie isn't the only woman who is made like that, but I believe," she reasoned it out coolly, "that it is her way of keeping her youth."

Miss Polly had put down the watering-pot, and she came presently with a bottle of camphor to the sofa where Gabriella was lying. "Are you sure you wouldn't like me to rub your head?" she inquired. "Dinner will be ready in a minute, but I shouldn't change my dress if I were you."

Gabriella rose slowly to a sitting position, and then stood up while she pushed the camphor away. "I hate the smell of it," she answered; "it makes me think of one of Jane's attacks. And, besides, I don't need it.

There is nothing in the world the matter with me." A moment later, to Miss Polly's unspeakable amazement, she sank down again, flung her arms over the back of the sofa, and burst into tears.

"Well, I never!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Miss Polly, rooted to the spot. "Well, I never!" In the ten years she had lived with Gabriella she had never seen her cry--not even after George's flight--and she felt as if the solid ground on which she stood had crumbled without warning, and left her insecurely balanced in s.p.a.ce. "Something certainly must be wrong, for it ain't like you to give way. Are you real sure you ain't got a pain somewhere?"

Shaking her head, and swallowing her sobs with an effort, Gabriella rose to her feet. "I'm just tired out, that's all," she said, strangely humble and deprecating.

"You must have been working too hard. It ain't right." For a minute or two the little seamstress brooded anxiously; then guided by an infallible instinct, she added decisively: "It's been a long time since you've seen your ma, and she's gettin' right smart along. Why don't you run down home for a few days while the flowers are blooming?"

A change pa.s.sed over Gabriella's face, and drying her eyes, she looked down on Miss Polly with a lovely enigmatical smile.

"I wonder if I might?" she said doubtfully.

"There ain't any earthly reason why you shouldn't. To-morrow's Friday, and they can get along without you at Dinard's perfectly well till the first of the week."

"Oh, yes, they can get along. I was only wondering"--a faint breeze stole in through the window, wafting toward her the scent of wet flowers--"I was only wondering"--her eyes grew suddenly radiant, and lifting her arms, she made a gesture as of one escaping from bondage--"I was only wondering if I might go to-morrow," she said.

CHAPTER X

THE DREAM AND THE REALITY

At the upper station a little group stood awaiting her, and as the train pulled slowly to the platform, Gabriella distinguished her mother's pallid face framed in the hanging c.r.a.pe of her veil; Jane, thin, anxious, anaemic, with her look of pinched sweetness; Chancy, florid, portly, and virtuously middle-aged, and their eldest daughter Margaret, a blooming, beautiful girl. Alighting, Gabriella was embraced by Mrs.

Carr, who shed a few gentle tears on her shoulders.

"Gabriella, my child, I thought you would never come back to us," she lamented; "and now everything is so changed that you will hardly recognize it as home."

"Well, if she can find a change that isn't for the better, I hope she'll point it out and let me make a note of it," boasted Charley, with hilarity. "I tell you what, Gabriella, my dear, we're becoming a number one city. Everything's new. We haven't left so much as an old brick lying around if we could help it. If you were to go back there to Hill Street, you'd scarcely know it for the hospitals and schools we've got there, and as for this part of the town--well, I reckon the apartment houses will fairly take your breath away. Apartment houses! Well, that's what I call progress--apartment houses and skysc.r.a.pers, and we've got them, too, down on Main Street. I'll show them to you to-morrow. Yes, by George, we're progressing so fast you can hardly see how we grow.

Why, there wasn't a skysc.r.a.per or an apartment house in the city when you left here, and precious few hospitals. But now--well, I'll show you!

We're the hospital city of the South, and more than that, we're becoming a metropolis. Yes, that's the word--we're becoming a metropolis. If you don't believe me, just watch as we go up Franklin Street to Monument Avenue. I suppose you thought of us still as a poor folksy little Southern city, with a lot of ground going to waste in gardens and green stuff. Well, you just wait till you see Monument Avenue. It's the handsomest boulevard south of Was.h.i.+ngton. It's all new, every brick of it. There's not a house the whole way up that isn't as fresh as paint, and the avenue is just as straight as if you'd drawn it with a ruler--"

But the change in the city, Gabriella reflected while she embraced Jane, was as nothing compared to the incredible change in Charley himself.

Middle-age had pa.s.sed over him like some fattening and solidifying process. He was healthy, he was corpulent, he was prosperous, conventional, and commonplace. If Gabriella had been seeking, with Hogarthian humour, to portray the evils of torpid and self-satisfied respectability, she could scarcely have found a better picture of the condition than Charley presented. And the more Charley expanded, the more bloodless and wan Jane appeared at his side. Her small, flat face with its yellowish and unhealthy tinge, its light melancholy eyes, and its look of lifeless and inhuman sanctification, exhaled the dried fragrance of a pressed flower. So disheartening was her appearance to Gabriella that it was a relief to turn from her to the freshness of Margaret, handsome, athletic, with cheeks like roses and the natural grace of a young animal.

"Oh, Aunt Gabriella, I hadn't any idea you were like this!" cried the girl with nave enthusiasm.

"You thought of me as gray-haired and wearing a bonnet and mantle?"