Jewel Weed Part 24

Madeline had always been characterized by those who knew her as lovely and placid. And why not? What else should life draw out of a girl of normal nature, surrounded by protecting love, given the good things of life as by right, s.h.i.+elded from the knowledge of evil, never facing a problem more exciting than those of Euclid. But now something began to stir in the unknown depths of her nature. For the first time in her life she had had a blow. There rose before her a vision of endless maidenhood. She saw herself as she had seen other women--uninteresting women, she had thought them. Now they seemed to her like tragedies--women whose lives did not count, either to themselves or to the world, middle-aged, somber, unrelated. To be childless, to eat and dress and wear the semblance of womanhood, even to play a little part in society, and yet to be but half a woman! To be no link in the generations! This was unendurable. The first demand of every soul is for life, and yet life is life only when it is part of the future. To live oneself one must live in others. All the mother hidden in the depths of her rose and cried out against any destiny that shut her out from the great stream of humanity.

"I shall be a side-eddy in the current. I shall grow stagnant and slimy and lead nowhere. And the rus.h.i.+ng waters will go leaping and laughing past."

She got up and moved restlessly up and down the room. She looked again out of the window at the sober end of the winter day. In the tree branches that clattered outside, her eyes fell on an empty nest.

"And am I to be such a thing?" she said. "Surely all the world must bow down in pity for the solitary woman." Some half-forgotten lines came back to her:

"Mine ear is full of the rocking of cradles.

For a single cradle, saith Nature, I would give every one of my graves."

By her little practice piano her eyes fell on the pages of Schubert's unfinished symphony.

"Unfinished!" she said. "And yet even there is the phrase that comes and comes again, sweeter and more full of meaning in every renewed variety.

So I must have love to play through my life, or else it will be nothing but a medley. It must be my music's theme; even if the symphony is unfinished. Are there women who can do without it, who can take a life alone and make it sweet and satisfying? Not I, oh G.o.d, not I! I'm no exceptional creature. I'm just a plain woman. And if life doesn't give me wifehood and motherhood, it gives me nothing. I wonder if all women feel this way. This pretty little Lena,--is she bursting with primal need of giving and taking? At any rate she has put something in d.i.c.k's face that was never there before--that I'd give my soul to see in a man's face when he looks at me."

Hitherto the world had ambled along in an amiable way; and now it suddenly turned and delivered a blow in the face. Every one is destined to receive such blows, some get little else. But the test comes in the way they are received. You may use belladonna as a poison, or you may use it to help the blind to see. So when pain comes, you may take it to your bosom and suckle it till it becomes a fine healthy child, too heavy for you to carry; or cast out the changeling and leave it on the doorstep to die. It matters little how much anguish skulks about the outside of life, so long as it finds no lodgment in the sacred shrines of the heart. Madeline met her first grief and fought it off; and, even while she thought it had given her a mortal wound, came the revelation of the powerlessness of the poor thing. She put her arms down on the window-sill to cry deliberately, but something dried her tears.

"I couldn't put that look in d.i.c.k's face, but could he put it in mine?

Was this taking of things for granted the best love of which I am capable? I've found out to-day that there are all kinds of things in me that I have never dreamed of before, and pa.s.sion is one of them, and rebellion. Great heavens! I might have married him and been serene and never found things out."

She seemed to be looking at a new Madeline; and while she stared, startled, this self grew greater and stronger.

"This is not the end of life; it is the beginning," she whispered. "I've been looking down the wrong road. d.i.c.k has no such power over me as to consign me to misery everlasting. I am mistress of my own fate. I have not handed it over to him. Happiness is not a thing to get. It is a state of mind to live in. It is my own affair, not that of others." She rested her chin in her hands and fell into a girl's day-dream, in which the nightmare was forgotten.

Twilight fell at last, and faint sounds came up to her to remind her that down stairs there were well-beloved people who did not know and should never know of her little vigil. Her father must be coming home.

It was time for her to put on her armor and go down. Armor is one of the necessities of life. If we can't wear it in steel plates on the outside, we must mask the face with impenetrability and the manner with pretense.

Never let the heart be vulnerable. Yet, try as we may, something of our weakness is laid bare. Hereafter Miss Elton might be serene, but would never again be placid.

But now she was quite herself.

Down stairs her father read the paper and her mother sat near the big table, hem-st.i.tching. For them everything was settled, and settled satisfactorily. They knew whom they were going to marry, and whether love was to be a success, and where they were going to live, and what they were going to do. Henceforth, for them the game meant only pleasantly plodding onward along paths already marked out. Just a wholesome common marriage, planted with the seed of love and watered with small self-sacrifices. How could they possibly remember the restlessness of youth, to whom all these things are hidden in the mists of the future, and who is longing for everything and sure of nothing?

Madeline sat down at the piano and her hands fell inevitably into phrasing the "unfinished symphony." She became aware that her mother laid down the st.i.tching and Mr. Elton's evening paper ceased to crackle.

As she stopped her father stood behind her. He bent and kissed the little parting in her hair.

"Your music grows sweeter and richer day by day, little girl," he said.

"I suppose as more comes into your life you have more to give. I'm glad that you give it out to us old folks at home."

Madeline wheeled about and sprang to her feet.

"Ah," she exclaimed, "if you have finished with your stupid old paper, I'll give you a real piece of news. It's a 'scoop' too, for no reporter has got hold of it yet. d.i.c.k Percival is engaged to little Miss Quincy."

Both father and mother stared at her in silence. She stood a little behind the chandelier, where the light shone full on her face, and in neither mouth nor eyes could they see the trace of shadow. On the contrary, there was a radiant loveliness about her that astonished those that loved her best.

Then Mr. Norris was announced.

Now when Miss Elton had her first peep into her soul, and so stirred up the possibilities in her nature, she also awoke to new insight into what was going on behind other people's eyes. The day when she could look a young man squarely in the face and say to him whatever she thought had pa.s.sed. The period of unconscious girlhood, much prolonged in her case, came to an end. Since, in this world, shadow goes with suns.h.i.+ne, so demons tag after angels; and with the dawn of her sweeter womanhood, Madeline developed a new spirit of contrariety and coquetry that astonished no one so much as herself.

When Mr. Norris came in, his apologetic glance told her at once that she had hardly spoken to him since she had turned up her straight little high-bred nose and informed him and d.i.c.k that she despised their underhand ways; told her, also, what had not dawned on her before, that here was an abject creature, and that it was the province of womanhood to batter and buffet him who is down, perhaps in secret fear of that day when outraged manhood will rise and claim a tyranny of its own.

So she put out her hand with that stiffness that holds at arm's length and said:

"Oh, how dy' do, Mr. Norris," just as though they had never sailed together in dual solitude, and she allowed her lip to curl in evidence of her disapproval of the much warmer greeting of her elders.

She sat down and eyed and tapped a small bronze slipper, while she ignored the reproachful glances of her mother at her rank desertion of conversational duties. Her father hardly noticed it. He himself so liked young men that he frequently forgot that his daughter and not himself might be the object of their quest. So he plunged cheerfully into an animated discussion of the new tide in civic politics, while Norris dully and conscientiously tried to bear up his end.

Ellery's eyes, however, as well as the thoughts behind those superficial thoughts that guided his words, were absorbed in the other side of the room, where Miss Elton canva.s.sed with her mother the merits of various embroidery silks. She was lovelier than ever. He had thought her perfect before, but to-night she had added a sheen to perfection and made herself entrancing, both reposeful and vivid. He wondered if she had heard of d.i.c.k's engagement and if her color covered a pale heart.

Suddenly she flung up her head impatiently, and came behind her father's chair to clap a small hand over his mouth in the middle of a sentence of which Norris had entirely lost track.

"Father, father," she cried, "do you think Mr. Norris wants to come here and maunder over stupid politics all the evening, after he has been writing stupid editorials about them all day? They _are_ stupid--I've read some of them." She smiled at the young man. "Wouldn't you both infinitely rather hear me sing?"

Mr. Elton kissed the offending hand before he put it gently down.

"I know I should."

Norris sprang up.

"May I turn your music?" he asked eagerly, but she shook her head as she moved away.

"There isn't going to be any music to turn."

She began to sing the same little Roumanian song that he remembered on their last evening in the Lenox house, and his spirits, lifted for a moment by her smile, went down again.

"Into the mist I gazed and fear came on me, Then said the mist, 'I weep for the lost sun.'"

She sang pa.s.sionately and he could have cried aloud. It was true then that she was grieving for d.i.c.k.

"The music is uncanny, isn't it?" she said, as she ended and found him near her. "How does it make you feel?"

"If I should find an image for my feelings just at present, you would scorn me for my base material thoughts."

"Find it," she commanded.

"I think I feel like a mince-pie--a maddening jumble of things delicious and indigestible."

She laughed and grew friendly. This, he thought, is, after all, her permanent mood; but before he could take advantage of it another caller, Mr. Early, appeared; and again she basely deserted Norris to the mercies of her father and mother, and devoted herself to the evident beatification of the apostle of the new in art.

CHAPTER XIV

THE RETURN OF RAM JUNA

One gloomy evening in January Mr. Early sat alone. He had so many tentacles spread out through the world of men and women that solitude was unusual to him. Indeed it had often occurred to him, as an example of the fallacy of ancient sayings, that there was nothing in that old epigram about the loneliness of the great. The higher he had risen in the scale of greatness the more insistently and persistently had the world invaded his life, until even his appreciation of solitude had atrophied.