Part 18

"You must be free. You must get a little taste of life. You've a right to it. You lived in a little stupid village all your years--and now you're in the city. Listen to it! It would be yours for the asking. And it gives riches and glory to the pretty girls it likes. But you must go to it as a girl, not as a poor, broken, ragged thing, lugging a sickly baby with no name. Get rid of the baby, my dear. It will die, anyway. It will starve and sicken. Put it out of its misery. That medicine on your wash-stand--an overdose of that and you can say it was a mistake. Who can prove it wasn't? Then you are free. You'll have hundreds of friends, and a career, and a motor of your own, and servants, and a beautiful home. Don't waste your youth, my dear. Invest your beauty where it will bring big proceeds.

"See those lights off there--the big lights with the name of that woman in electric letters? She came to town poorer than you and with a worse name. Now she is rich and famous. And the Countess of--What's-her-name? She was poor and bad, but she didn't let any old-fashioned ideas of remorse hold her back. Go on; get rid of the brat. Go on!"

Hilda clutched the baby closer and moved away to shield her from this grim counselor. When she turned again she was alone. The woman had gone, but the air trembled with her fierce wisdom. She was ruthless, but how wise!

The lights flaring up into the sky carried that other woman's name. Her picture was everywhere. She had been poor and wicked. Now she was a household word, respected because she was rich. She had succeeded.

There came a lilting of music on a breeze. They were dancing, somewhere. The tango "coaxed her feet." Her body swayed with it.

If she were there, men would quarrel over her, rush to claim her--as they had done even in the village before she threw herself away on the most worthless, shiftless of the lot, who got her into trouble and deserted her. It was not her business to starve for his baby.

The baby began to fret again, to squawk with vicious explosions of ugly rage; it puled and yowled. It was a nuisance. It caught a fistful of her hair and wrenched till the tears of pain rushed to her eyes. She unclasped the little talons, ran to the wash-stand, took up an ugly bottle and poured out enough to put an end to that nauseating wail.

She bent over to lift the baby to the glass. Its lips touched her bosom. Its crying turned to a little chortle like a brook's music. It pommeled her with hands like white roses. The moon rested on its little head and made its fuzz of hair a halo. She paused, adoring it sacredly like another Madonna.

A soft tap at the door. She put the fatal glass away and turned guiltily. A dark little woman was there, and a soft, motherly voice spoke. It must be Mrs. Braywood's. She could not have suspected, for her tone was all of affection.

"I heard your child laughing, my dear--and crying. I don't know which went to my heart deeper. I just had to come to see it. It is so marvelous to be a mother. I've been married for ten years, and my husband and I have prayed and waited. But God would not send us a baby. He saved that honor for you. And such an honor and glory and power! To be a mother! To be a rose-bush and have a white bud grow upon your stem, and bloom! Oh, you lucky child, to be selected for such a privilege! You must have suffered; you must be suffering now; but there's nothing worth while that doesn't cost pain.

"It occurred to me that--don't misunderstand me, my child, but--well, the landlady said you were poor; she was in doubt of the room rent; so I thought--perhaps you might not want the baby as much as I do.

"I hoped you might let me take him. I'd be such a good mother to him. I'd love him as if he were my own, and my husband would pay you well for him. We'd give him our own name, and people should never know that he--that you--that we weren't really his parents. Give him to me, won't you? Please! I beg you!"

Hilda whirled away from her pleading hands and clenched the baby so hard that it cried a little. The sound was like that first wail of his she had ever heard. Again it went into her heart like a little hand seizing and wringing it.

Mrs. Braywood--if it were Mrs. Braywood--was not angry at the rebuff, though she was plainly disheartened. She tried to be brave, and sighed.

"Oh, I don't wonder you turn away. I understand. I wouldn't give him up if I were in your place. The father must come soon. He won't stay away long. Just let him see the baby and hear its voice and know it is his baby, and he will stand by you.

"He will come to you. He will hear the voice wherever he is, and he will make you his wife. And the baby will make a man of him and give him ambition and inspiration. Babies always provide for themselves, they say. You will have trouble, and you will suffer from the gibes of self-righteous people, and you will be cruelly blamed; but there is only one way to expiate sin, my child, and that is to face its consequences and pay its penalties in full. The only way to atone for a wrong deed is to do the next right thing. Take good care of your precious treasure. Good-by. His father will come soon. He will come. Good-by. Oh, you enviable thing, you mother!"

And now she was gone. But she had left the baby's value enhanced, and the mother's, too.

She had offered a price for the baby, and glorified the mother. The lonely young country girl felt no longer utterly disgraced. She did not feel that the baby was a mark of Heaven's disfavor, but rather of its favor. She felt lonely no longer. The streets interested her no more. Let those idle revelers go their way; let them dance and laugh. They had no child of their own to adore and to enjoy.

If the baby's father came they would be married. If he delayed--well, she would stumble on alone. The baby was her cross. She must carry it up the hill.

Hilda felt entirely content, but very tired, full of hope that Webster Edie would come to her, but full of contentment, too. She talked to the baby, and he seemed to understand her now. She could not translate his language, but he translated hers.

She slipped out of her day clothes and into her nightgown--and so to bed. She fell asleep with her baby in her arms. Her head drooped back and her parted lips seemed to pant and glow. The moon reached her window and sent in a long shaft of light. It found a great tear on her cheek. It gleamed on her throat bent back; it gleamed on one bare shoulder where the gown was torn; it gleamed on her breast where the baby drowsily clung.

There was a benediction in the moonlight.

DAUGHTERS OF SHILOH

I

Mrs. Serina Pepperall had called her husband twice without success. It was at that hatefulest hour of the whole week when everybody that has to get up is getting up and realizing that it is Monday morning, and raining besides.

It is bad enough for it to be Monday, but for it to be raining is inexcusable.

Young Horace Pepperall used to say that that was the reason the world didn't improve much. People got good on Sunday, and then it had to go and be Monday. He had an idea that if Sunday could be followed by some other day, preferably Saturday, there would be more happiness and virtue in the world. Mrs. Pepperall used to say that her boy was quite a ph'losopher in his way. Mr. Pepperall said he was a hopeless loafer and spent more time deciding whether he'd ought to do this or that than it would have taken to do 'em both twice. Whereupon Mrs. Pepperall, whose maiden name was Boody--daughter of Mrs. Ex-County-Clerk Boody--would remind her husband that he was only a Pepperall, after all, while her son was at least half Boody. Whereupon her husband would remind her of certain things about the Boodys. And so it would go. But that was other mornings. This was this morning.

Among all the homes that the sun looked upon--or would have looked upon if it could have looked upon anything and if it hadn't been raining and the Pepperall roof had not been impervious to light, though not to moisture--among them all, surely the Pepperall reveille would have been the least attractive. Homer never got his picture of rosy-fingered Aurora smilingly leaping out of the couch of night from any such home as the Pepperalls' in Carthage.

Serina was as unlike Aurora as possible. Aurora is usually poised on tiptoe, with her well-manicured nails gracefully extended, and nothing much about her except a chariot and more or less chiffon, according to whether the picture is for families or bachelors.

Serina was entirely surrounded by flannelette, of simple and pitilessly chaste design--a hole at the top for her head to go through and a larger one at the other extreme for her feet to stick out at. But it was so long that you couldn't have seen her feet if you had been there. And Papa Pepperall, who was there, was no longer interested in those once exciting ankles. They had been more interesting when there had been less of them. But we'd better talk about the sleeves.

The sleeves were so long that they kept falling into the water where Serina was making a hasty toilet at the little marble-topped altar to cleanliness which the Pepperalls called the "worsh-stand"--that is, the "hand-wash-basin," as Mrs. Hippisley called it after she came back from her never-to-be-forgotten trip to England.

But then Serina's sleeves had always been falling into the suds, and ever since she could remember she had rolled them up again with that peculiar motion with which people roll up sleeves. This morning, having failed to elicit papa from the bed by persuasion, she made such a racket about her ablutions that he lifted his dreary lids at last. He realized that it was morning, Monday, and raining. It irritated him so that he glared at his faithful wife with no fervor for her unsullied and unwearied--if not altogether unwearisome--devotion. He watched her roll up those sleeves thrice more. Somehow he wanted to scream at the futility of it. But he checked the impulse partly, and it was with softness that he made a comment he had choked back for years. "Serina--" he began.

"Well," she returned, pausing with the soap clenched in one hand.

He spoke with the luxurious leisureliness and the pauses for commas of a nearly educated man lolling too long abed:

"Serina, it has just occurred to me that, since we have been married, you have expended, on rolling back those everlastingly relapsing sleeves of yours, enough energy to have rolled the Sphinx of Egypt up on top of the Pyramid of Cheops."

Serina was so surprised that she shot the slippery soap under the wash-stand. She went right after it. There may be nymphs who can stalk a cake of soap under a wash-stand with grace, but Serina was not one of them. Her indolent spouse made another cynical comment:

"Don't do that! You look like the Goddess of Liberty trying to peek into the Subway."

But she did not hear him. She was rummaging for the soap and for an answer to his first remark. At length she emerged with both. She stood up and panted.

"Well, I can't see as it would 'a' done me any good if I had have!"

"Had have what?" her husband yawned, having forgotten his original remark.

"Got the Sphinnix on top of the Cheops. And besides, I've been meaning to hem them up; but now that you've gone bankrupt again, and I have to do my own cooking and all--"

"But, my dear Serina, you've said the same thing ever since we were married. What frets me is to think of the terrible waste of labor with nothing to show for it."

She sniffed, and retorted with all the superiority of the unsuccessful wife of an unsuccessful husband:

"Well, I can't see as you're so smart. Ever since we been married you been goin' to that stationery-store of yours, and you never learned enough to keep from going bankrupt three times. And now they've shut the shop, and you've nothing better to do than lay in bed and make fun of me that have slaved for you and your children."

They were always his children when she talked of the trouble they were. Her all too familiar oration was interrupted by the eel-like leap of the soap. This time it described a graceful arc that landed it under the middle of the bed--a double bed at that.

Pepperall had the gallantry to pursue it. He went head first over the starboard quarter of the deck, leaving his feet aboard. Just as he tagged the soap with his fingers his feet came on over after him, and he found himself flat on his back, with his head under the bed and his feet under the bureau.

When the thunder of his downfall had subsided he heard Serina say, "Now that you're up you better stay up."

So he wriggled out from under and got himself aloft, rubbing his indignant back. If Serina was no Aurora rising from the sea, her husband was no Phoebus Apollo. His gown looked like hers, only younger. It had a frivolous little pocket, and the slit-skirt effect on both sides; and it was cut what is called "misses' length," disclosing two of the least attractive shins in Carthage.

He was aching all over and he was angry, and he snarled as he stood at the wash-stand:

"Have you finished with this water?"

"Yes," she said, muffledly, from the depths of a face-towel.

"Why don't you ever empty the bowl then?" he growled, and viciously tilted the contents into the--must I say the awful word?--the slop-jar--what other word is there?

The water splashed over and struck the bare feet of both icily. They yowled and danced like Piute Indians, and glared at each other as they danced. They glared in a nagged rage that would have turned into an ugly quarrel if a great sorrow had not suddenly overswept them. They saw themselves as they were and by a whim of memory they remembered what they had been. He laughed bitterly:

"It's the first time we've danced together in a long time, eh?"

Her lower lip began to quiver and swell quite independently and she sighed:

"Not much like the dances we used to dance. Oh dear!"

She dropped into a chair and stared, not at her husband, but at the bridegroom of long ago he had shriveled from. She remembered those honeymoon mornings when they had awakened like eager children and laughed and romped and been glad of the new day. The mornings had been precious then, for it was a tragedy to let him go to his shop, as it was a festival to watch from the porch in the evening till he came round the corner and waved to her.

She looked from him to herself, to what she could see of herself--it was not all, but more than enough. She saw her heavy red hands and the coarse gown over her awkward knees, and the dismal slovenliness of her attitude. She felt that he was remembering the slim, wild, sweet girl he had married. And she was ashamed before his eyes, because she had let the years prey upon her and had lazily permitted beauty to escape from her--from her body, her face, her motions, her thoughts.

She felt that for all her prating of duty she had committed a great wickedness lifelong. She wondered if this were not "the unpardonable sin," whose exact identity nobody had seemed to decide--to grow strangers with beauty and to forget grace.

II

Whatever her husband may have been thinking, he had the presence of mind to hide his eyes in the water he had poured from the pitcher. He scooped it up now in double handfuls. He made a great splutter and soused his face in the bowl, and scrubbed the back of his neck and behind his ears and his bald spot, and slapped his eminent collar-bones with his wet hand. And then he was bathed.

Serina pulled on her stockings, and hated them and the coarser feet they covered. She opened the wardrobe door as a screen, less from modesty for herself than from sudden disgust of her old corset and her all too sober lingerie. She resolved that she would hereafter deck herself with more of that coquetry which had abruptly returned to her mind as a wife's most solemn duty.

Then she remembered that they were poorer than they ever had been. Now they could not even run into debt again; for who would give them further credit, since their previous bills had been canceled by nothing more satisfactory than the grim "Received payment" of the bankruptcy court?

It was too late for her to reform. Her song was sung. And as for buying frills and fallals, there were two daughters to provide for and a son who was growing into the stratum of foppery. With a sigh of dismissal she flung on her old wrapper, whose comfortableness she suddenly despised, and made her escape, murmuring, "I'll call the childern."

She pounded on the boy's door, and Horace eventually answered with his regular program of uncouth noises, like some one protesting against being strangled to death. These were followed by moans of woe, and then by far-off-sounding promises of "Oh, aw ri', I'm git'nup."

Serina moved on to her youngest daughter's door. She had tapped but once when it was opened by "the best girl that ever lived," according to her father; and according to her mother, "a treasure; never gave me a bit of trouble--plain, of course, but so willing!"

Ollie was fully dressed and so was her room, except for the bed, the covers of which were thrown back like a wave breaking over the footboard. In fact, after Ollie had kissed her mother she informed her that the kitchen fire was made, the wash-boiler on, and the breakfast going.

"You are a treasure!" Serina sighed.

She passed on to the door of Prue. Prue was the second daughter. Rosie, the eldest, had married Tom Milford and moved away. She was having troubles of her own, and children with a regularity that led Serina to dislike Tom Milford more than ever.

Serina knocked several times at Prue's door without response. Then she went in as she always had to. Prue was still asleep, and her yesterday's clothes seemed to be asleep, too, in all sorts of attitudes and all sorts of places. The only regularity about the room was the fact that every single thing was out of place. The dressing-table held a little chaos, including one stocking. The other stocking was on the floor. One silken garter glowed in the southeast corner and one in the northwest. One shoe reclined in the southwest corner and the other gaped in the northeast. But they were pretty shoes.

Her frock was in a heap, but it suggested a heap of flowers. Hair-ribbons and ribboned things and a crumpled sash bedecked the carpet. But the prettiest thing of all was the head half fallen from the pillow and half smothered in the tangled skeins of hair. One arm was bent back over her brow to shut out the sunlight and the other arm dangled to the floor. There was something adorable about the round chin nestling in the soft throat. Her chin seemed to frown with a lovable sullenness. There was a mysterious grace in the very sprawl vaguely outlined by the long wrinkles and ridges of the blankets.

Serina shook her head over Prue in a loving despair. She was the bad boy of the family, impatient, exacting, hot-tempered, stormy, luxurious, yet never monotonous.

"You can always put your hand on Ollie," Serina would say; "but you never know where Prue is from one minute to the next."

Consequently Ollie was not interesting and Prue was.

They were all afraid of Prue and afraid for her. They all toadied to her and she kept them excited--alarmed, perhaps; angry, oh yes; but never bored.

And there were rewards in her service, too, for she could be as stormy with affection as with mutiny. Sometimes she would attack Serina with such gusts of gratitude or admiration that her mother would cry for help. She would squeeze her father's ribs till he gasped for breath. When she was pleased she would dance about the house like a whirling mænad with ululations of ecstasy. These crises were sharp, but they left a sweet taste in the memory.

So Prue had the best clothes and did the least work. Prue was sent off to boarding-school in Chicago, though she had never been able to keep up with her classes in Carthage; while Ollie--who took first prizes till even the goody-goody boys hated her--stayed at home. She had dreamed of being a teacher in the High, but she never mentioned it, and she studied bookkeeping and stenography in the business college so that she could help her father.

Prue had not been home long and had come home with bad grace. When her father had found it impossible to borrow more money even to pay his clerks, to say nothing of boarding-school bills, he had to write the truth to Prue. He told her to come again to Carthage.

She did not come back at once and she refused to explain why. As a matter of fact, she had desperately endeavored to find a permanent job in Chicago. It was easy for so attractive a girl to get jobs, but it was hard for so domineering a soul to keep one. She was regretfully bounced out of three department stores in six days for "sassing" the customers and the aisle-manager.

She even tried the theater. She was readily accepted by a stage-manager, but when he found that he could not teach her the usual figures or persuade her to keep in step or line with the rest he regretfully let her go.

It was the regularity of it that stumped Prue. She could dance like a ballerina by herself, but she could not count "one-two-three-four" twice in succession. The second time it was "o-o-one-t'threeee-f'r" and next it would be "onety-thry-fo-o-our."

Prue hung about Chicago, getting herself into scrapes by her charm and fighting her way out of them by her ferocious pride. Finally she went hungry and came home. When she learned the extent of her father's financial collapse she delivered tirades against the people of Carthage and she sang him up as a genius. And then she sought escape from the depression at home by seeking what gaiety Carthage afforded. She made no effort to master the typewriter and she declined to sell dry-goods.