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The Wheel of Life by Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow

E >> Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow >> The Wheel of Life




"I knew that you were there even before I looked out of the window," she
exclaimed to Gerty, in what Adams had once called her "Creole voice."
Then she paused, laughing happily, as she looked, with her animated
glance, from Gerty to Trent and from Trent to Adams. To the younger man,
full of his enthusiasm and his ignorance, the physical details of her
appearance seemed suddenly of no larger significance than the pale
bronze gown she wore or the old coffee-coloured lace knotted upon her
bosom in some personal caprice of dress. What she gave to him as she
stood there, looking from Adams to himself with her ardent friendly
glance, was an impression of radiant energy, of abundant life.

She turned back after the first greeting, leading the way into the
pleasant firelit room, where a white haired old gentleman with an
interesting blanched face rose to receive them.

"I have just proved to Mr. Wilberforce that I could 'feel' you coming,"
said Laura with a smile as she unfastened Gerty's furs.

"And I have argued that she could quite as well surmise it," returned
Mr. Wilberforce, as he fell back into his chair before the wood fire.

"Well, you may know in either way that my coming may be counted on,"
said Gerty, "for I have sacrificed for you the society of the most
interesting man I know."

"What! Is it possible that Perry has been forsaken?" enquired Adams in
his voice of quiet humor. In the midst of her flippant laughter, Gerty
turned on him the open cynicism of her smile.

"Now is it possible that Perry has that effect on you?" she asked with
curiosity. "For I find him decidedly depressing."

"Then if it isn't Perry I demand the name," persisted Adams gayly,
"though I'm perfectly ready to wager that it's Arnold Kemper."

"Kemper," repeated Laura curiously, as if the name arrested her almost
against her will. "Wasn't there a little novel once by an Arnold
Kemper--a slight but striking thing with very little grammar and a great
deal of audacity?"

"Oh, that was done in his early days," replied Adams, "as a kind of
outlet to the energy he now expends in racing motors. I asked Funsten,
who does our literary notices, if there was any chance for him again in
fiction, and he answered that the only favourable thing he could say of
him was to say nothing."

"But he's gone in for automobiles now," said Gerty, "they're so much
bigger, after all, he thinks, than books."

"I haven't seen him for fifteen years," remarked Adams, "but I recognise
his speech."

"One always recognises his speeches," admitted Gerty, "there's a stamp
on them, I suppose, for somehow he himself is great even if his career
isn't--and, after all," she concluded seriously, "it is--what shall I
call it--the personal quantity that he insists on."

"The personal quantity," repeated Laura laughing, and, as if the
description of Kemper had failed to interest her, she turned the
conversation upon the subject of Trent's play.




CHAPTER II

TREATS OF AN ECCENTRIC FAMILY


When the last caller had gone Laura slid back the folding doors which
opened into the library and spoke to a little old gentleman, with a very
bald head, who sat in a big armchair holding a flute in his wrinkled and
trembling hand. He had a simple, moonlike face, to which his baldness
lent a deceptive appearance of intellect, and his expression was of such
bland and smiling goodness that it was impossible to resent the tedious
garrulity of his conversation. In the midst of his shrivelled
countenance his eyes looked like little round blue buttons which had
been set there in order to keep his features from entirely slipping
away. He was the oldest member of the Wilde family, and he had lived in
the house in Gramercy Park since it was built by his father some sixty
years or more ago.

"Tired waiting, Uncle Percival?" asked Laura, raising her voice a little
that it might penetrate his deafened hearing.

As he turned upon her his smile of perfect patience the old gentleman
nodded his head quickly several times in succession. "I waited to play
until after the people went," he responded in a voice that sounded like
a cracked silver bell. "Your Aunt Angela has a headache, so she couldn't
stand the noise. I went out to get her some flowers and offered to sit
with her, but this is one of her bad days, poor girl." He fell silent
for a minute and then added, wistfully, "I'm wondering if you would like
to hear 'Ye Banks and Braes o' Bonnie Doon'? It used to be your mother's
favourite air."

Though he was an inoffensively amiable and eagerly obliging old man, by
some ironic contradiction of his intentions his life had become a series
of blunders through which he endeavoured to add his share to the general
happiness. His soul was overflowing with humanity, and he spent
sleepless nights evolving innocent pleasures for those about him, but
his excess of goodness invariably resulted in producing petty annoyances
if not serious inconveniences. So his virtues had come to be regarded
with timidity, and there was an ever present anxiety in the air as to
what Uncle Percival was "doing" in his mind. The fear of inopportune
benefits was in its way as oppressive as the dread of unmerited
misfortune.

Laura shook her head impatiently as she threw herself into a chair on
the other side of the tall bronze lamp upon the writing table. On the
stem of an eccentric family tree she was felt to be the perfect flower
of artistic impulses, and her enclosed life in the sombre old house had
not succeeded in cultivating in her the slightest resemblance to an
artificial variety. She was obviously, inevitably, impulsively the
original product, and Uncle Percival never realised this more hopelessly
than in that unresponsive headshake of dismissal. Laura could be kind,
he knew, but she was kind, as she was a poet, when the mood prompted.

"Presently--not now," she said, "I want to talk to you awhile. Do you
know, Aunt Rosa was here again to-day and she still tries to persuade us
to sell the house and move uptown. It is so far for her to come from
Seventieth Street, she says, but as for me I'd positively hate the
change and Aunt Angela can't even stand the mention of it." She leaned
forward and stroked his arm with one of her earnest gestures. "What
would you do uptown, dear Uncle Percival?" she inquired gently.

The old man laid the flute on his knees, where his shrunken little hands
still caressed it. "Do? why I'd die if you dragged me away from my
roots," he answered.

Laura smiled, still smoothing him down as if he were an amiable dog.
"Well, the Park is very pleasant, you know," she returned, "and it is
full of walks, too. You wouldn't lack space for exercise."

"The Park? Pooh!" piped Uncle Percival, raising his voice; "I wouldn't
give these streets for the whole of Central Park together. Why, I've
seen these pavements laid and relaid for seventy years and I remember
all the men who walked over them. Did I ever tell you of the time I
strolled through Irving Place with Thackeray? As for Central Park, it
hasn't an ounce--not an ounce of atmosphere."

"Oh, well, that settles it," laughed Laura. "We'll keep to our own
roots. We are all of one mind, you and Aunt Angela and I."

"I'm sure Angela would never hear of it," pursued Uncle Percival, "and
in her affliction how could one expect it?"

For a moment Laura looked at him in a compassionate pause before she
made her spring. "There's nothing in the world the matter with Aunt
Angela," she said; "she's perfectly well."

Blank wonder crept into the old gentleman's little blue eyes and he
shook his head several times in solemn if voiceless protest. Forty years
ago Angela Wilde, as a girl of twenty, had in the accustomed family
phrase "brought lasting disgrace upon them," and she had dwelt, as it
were, in the shadow of the pillory ever since. Unmarried she had yielded
herself to a lover, and afterward when the full scandal had burst upon
her head, though she had not then reached the fulfilment of a singularly
charming beauty, she had condemned herself to the life of a solitary
prisoner within four walls. She had never since the day of her awakening
mentioned the name of her faithless or unfortunate lover, but her silent
magnanimity had become the expression of a reproach too deep for words,
and her bitter scorn of men had so grown upon her in her cloistral
existence that there were hours together when she could not endure even
the inoffensive Percival. Cold, white, and spectral as one of the long
slim candles on an altar, still beautiful with an indignant and wounded
loveliness, she had become in the end at once the shame and the romance
of her family.

"There is no reason under the sun why Aunt Angela shouldn't come down to
dinner with us to-night," persisted Laura. "Don't you see that by
encouraging her as you did in her foolish attitude, you have given her
past power over her for life and death. It is wrong--it is ignoble to
bow down and worship anything--man, woman, child, or event, as she bows
down and worships her trouble."

The flute shook on Uncle Percival's knees. "Ah, Laura, would you have
her face the world again?" he asked.

"The world? Nonsense! The world doesn't know there's such a person in
it. She was forgotten forty years ago, only she has grown so selfish in
her grief that she can never believe it."

The old man sighed and shook his head. "The women of this generation
have had the dew brushed off them," he lamented, "but your mother
understood. She felt for Angela."

"And yet it was an old story when my mother came here."

"Some things never grow old, my dear, and shame is one of them."

Laura dismissed the assertion with a shrug of scornful protest, and
turned the conversation at once into another channel. "Am I anything
like my mother, Uncle Percival?" she asked abruptly.

For a moment the old man pondered the question in silence, his little
red hands fingering the mouth of his flute.

"You have the Creole hair and the Creole voice," he replied; "but for
the rest you are your father's child, every inch of you."

"My mother was beautiful, I suppose?"

"Your father thought so, but as for me she was too little and
passionate. I can see her now when she would fly into one of her spasms
because somebody had crossed her or been impolite without knowing it."

"They got on badly then--I mean afterward."

"What could you expect, my dear? It was just after the War, and, though
she loved your father, she never in her heart of hearts forgave him his
blue uniform. There was no reason in her--she was all one fluttering
impulse, and to live peaceably in this world one must have at least a
grain of leaven in the lump of one's emotion." He chuckled as he ended
and fixed his mild gaze upon the lamp. Being very old, he had come to
realise that of the two masks possible to the world's stage, the comic,
even if the less spectacular, is also the less commonplace.

"So she died of an overdose of medicine," said Laura; "I have never been
told and yet I have always known that she died by her own hand.
Something in my blood has taught me."

Uncle Percival shook his head. "No--no, she only made a change," he
corrected. "She was a little white moth who drifted to another
sphere--because she had wanted so much, my child, that this earth would
have been bankrupt had it attempted to satisfy her."

"She wanted what?" demanded Laura, her eyes glowing.

The old man turned upon her a glance in which she saw the wistful
curiosity which belongs to age. "At the moment you remind me of her," he
returned, "and yet you seem so strong where she was only weak."

"What did she want? What did she want?" persisted Laura.

"Well, first of all she wanted your father--every minute of him, every
thought, every heart-beat. He couldn't give it to her, my dear. No man
could. I tell you I have lived to a great age, and I have known great
people, and I have never seen the man yet who could give a woman all the
love she wanted. Women seem to be born with a kind of divination--a
second sight where love is concerned--they aren't content with the mere
husk, and yet that is all that the most of them ever get--"

"But my father?" protested Laura; "he broke his heart for her."

A smile at the fine ironic humour of existence crossed the old man's
sunken lips. "He gave to her dead what she had never had from him
living," he returned. "When she was gone everything--even the man's life
for which he had sacrificed her--turned worthless. He always had the
seeds of consumption, I suppose, and his gnawing remorse caused them to
develop."

A short silence followed his words, while Laura stared at him with eyes
which seemed to weigh gravely the meaning of his words. Then, rising
hurriedly, she made a gesture as if throwing the subject from her and
walked rapidly to the door.

"Aunt Rosa and Aunt Sophy are coming to dine," she said, "so I must
glance at the table. I can't remember now whether I ordered the oysters
or not."

The old man glanced after her with timid disappointment. "So you haven't
time to hear me play?" he asked wistfully.

"Not now--there's Aunt Angela's dinner to be seen to. If Mr. Bleeker
comes with Aunt Sophy you can play to him. He likes it."

"But he always goes to sleep, Laura. He doesn't listen--and besides he
snores so that I can't enjoy my own music."

"That's because he'd rather snore than do anything else. I wouldn't let
that worry me an instant. He goes to sleep at the opera."

She went out, and after giving a few careful instructions to a servant
in the dining-room, ascended the staircase to the large square room in
the left wing where Angela remained a wilful prisoner. As she opened the
door she entered into a mist of dim candle light, by which her aunt was
pacing restlessly up and down the length of the apartment.

To pass from the breathless energy of modern New York into this quiet
conventual atmosphere was like crossing by a single step the division
between two opposing civilisations. Even the gas light, which Angela
could not endure, was banished from her eyes, and she lived always in a
faint, softened twilight not unlike that of some meditative Old-World
cloisters. The small iron bed, the colourless religious prints, the pale
drab walls and the floor covered only by a chill white matting, all
emphasised the singular impression of an expiation that had become as
pitiless as an obsession of insanity. On a small table by a couch, which
was drawn up before a window overlooking the park, there was a row of
little devotional books, all bound neatly in black leather, but beyond
this the room was empty of any consolation for mind or body. Only the
woman herself, with her accusing face and her carelessly arranged
snow-white hair, held and quickened the imagination in spite of her
suggestion of bitter brooding and unbalanced reason. Her eyes looking
wildly out of her pallid face were still the beautiful, fawn-like eyes
of the girl of twenty, and one felt in watching her that the old tragic
shock had paralysed in them the terrible expression of that one moment
until they wore forever the indignant and wounded look with which she
had met the blow that destroyed her youth.

"Dear," said Laura, entering softly as she might have entered a death
chamber. "You will see Aunt Rosa and Aunt Sophy, will you not?"

Angela did not stop in her nervous walk, but when she reached the end of
the long room she made a quick, feverish gesture, raising her hands to
push back her beautiful loosened hair. "I will do anything you wish,
Laura, except see their husbands."

"I've ceased to urge that, Aunt Angela, but your own sisters--"

"Oh, I will see them," returned Angela, as if the words--as if any
speech, in fact--were wrung from the cold reserve which had frozen her
from head to foot.

Laura went up to her and, with the impassioned manner which she had
inherited from her Southern mother, enclosed her in a warm and earnest
embrace. "My dear, my dear," she said, "Uncle Percival tells me that
this is one of your bad days. He says, poor man, that he went out and
got you flowers."

Angela yielded slowly, still without melting from her icy remoteness.
"They were tuberoses," she responded, in a voice which was in itself
effectual comment.

"Tuberoses!" exclaimed Laura aghast, "when you can't even stand the
scent of lilies. No wonder, poor dear, that your head aches."

"Mary put them outside on the window sill," said Angela, in a kind of
resigned despair, "but their awful perfume seemed to penetrate the
glass, so she took them down into the coal cellar."

"And a very good place for them, too," was Laura's feeling rejoinder;
"but you mustn't blame him," she charitably concluded, "for he couldn't
have chosen any other flower if he had had the whole Garden of Eden to
select from. It isn't really his fault after all--it's a part of
fatality like his flute."

"He played for me until my head almost split," remarked Angela wearily,
"and then he apologised for stopping because his breath was short."

A startled tremor shook through her as a step was heard on the
staircase. "Who is it, Laura?"

Laura went quickly to the door and, after pausing a moment outside,
returned with a short, flushed, and richly gowned little woman who was
known to the world as Mrs. Robert Bleeker.

More than twenty years ago, as the youngest of the pretty Wilde sisters,
she had, in the romantic fervour of her youth and in spite of the
opposition of her parents, made a love match with a handsome,
impecunious young dabbler in "stocks." "Sophy is a creature of
sentiment," her friends had urged in extenuation of a marriage which was
not then considered in a brilliant light, but to the surprise of
everybody, after the single venture by which she had proved the mettle
of her dreams, she had sunk back into a prosperous and comfortable
mediocrity. She had made her flight--like the queen bee she had soared
once into the farthest, bluest reaches of her heaven, and henceforth she
was quite content to relapse into the utter commonplaces of the hive.
Her yellow hair grew sparse and flat and streaked with gray, her
pink-rose face became over plump and mottled across the nose, and her
mind turned soon as flat and unelastic as her body; but she was
perfectly satisfied with the portion she had had from life, for, having
weighed all things, she had come to regard the conventions as of most
enduring worth.

Now she rustled in with an emphatic announcement of stiff brocade, and
enveloped the spectral Angela in an embrace of comfortable arms and
bosom. Her unwieldy figure reminded Laura of a broad, low wall that has
been freshly papered in a large flowered pattern. On her hands and bosom
a number of fine emeralds flashed, for events had shown in the end that
the impecunious young lover was not fated to dabble in stocks in vain.

"Oh Angela, my poor dear, how are you?" she enquired.

Angela released herself with a shrinking gesture and, turning away, sat
down at the foot of the long couch. "I am the same--always the same,"
she answered in her cold, reserved voice.

"You took your fresh air to-day, I hope?"

"I went down in the yard as usual. Laura," she looked desperately
around, "is that Rosa who has just come in?" As she paused a knock came
at the door, and Laura opened it to admit Mrs. Payne--the eldest, the
richest and the most eccentric of the sisters.

From a long and varied association with men and manners Mrs. Payne had
gathered a certain halo of experience, as of one who had ripened from
mere acquaintance into a degree of positive intimacy with the world. She
had seen it up and down from all sides, had turned it critically about
for her half-humorous, half-sentimental inspection, and the frank
cynicism which now flavoured her candid criticism of life only added the
spice of personality to her original distinction of adventure. As the
wife of an Ambassador to France in the time of the gay Eugenie, and
again as one of the diplomatic circle in Cairo and in Constantinople,
she had stored her mind with precious anecdotes much as a squirrel
stores a hollow in his tree with nuts. Life had taught her that the one
infallible method for impressing your generation is to impress it by a
difference, and, beginning as a variation from type, she had ended by
commanding attention as a preserved specimen of an extinct species.
Long, wiry, animated, and habitually perturbed, she moved in a continual
flutter of speech--a creature to be reckoned with from the little, flat,
round curls upon her temples, which looked as if each separate hair was
held in place by a particular wire, to the sweep of her black velvet
train, which surged at an exaggerated length behind her feet. Her face
was like an old and tattered comic mask which, though it has been flung
aside as no longer provocative of pleasant mirth, still carries upon its
cheeks and eyebrows the smears of the rouge pot and the pencil.

"My dear Angela," she now asked in her excited tones, "have you really
been walking about again? I lay awake all night fearing that you had
over-taxed your strength yesterday. Mrs. Francis Barnes--you never knew
her of course, but she was a distant cousin of Horace's--died quite
suddenly, without an instant's warning, after having walked rapidly
twice up and down the room. Since then I have always looked upon
movement as a very dangerous thing."

"Well, I could hardly die suddenly under any circumstances," returned
Angela, indifferently. "You've been watching by my death-bed for forty
years."

"Oh, dear sister," pleaded Mrs. Bleeker, whose heart, was as soft as her
bosom.

"It does sound as if you thought we really wanted your things,"
commented Mrs. Payne, opening and shutting her painted fan. "Of
course--if you were to die we should be too heart-broken to care what
you left--but, since we are on the subject, I've always meant to ask you
to leave me the shawl of old rose-point which belonged to mother."

"Rosa, how can you?" remonstrated Mrs. Bleeker, "I am sure I hope Angela
will outlive me many years, but if she doesn't I want everything she has
to go to Laura."

"Well, I'm sure I don't see how Laura could very well wear a rose-point
shawl," persisted Mrs. Payne. "I wouldn't have started the subject for
anything on earth, Angela, but, since you've spoken of it, I only
mention what is in my mind. And now don't say a word, Sophy, for we'll
go back to other matters. In poor Angela's mental state any little
excitement may bring on a relapse."

"A relapse of what?" bluntly enquired honest Mrs. Bleeker.

Mrs. Payne turned upon her a glance of indignant calm.

"Why a relapse of--of her trouble," she responded. "You show a strange
lack of consideration for her condition, but for my part I am perfectly
assured that it needs only some violent shock, such as may result from
a severe fall or the unexpected sight of a man, to produce a serious
crisis."

Mrs. Bleeker shook her head with the stubborn common sense which was the
reactionary result of her romantic escapade.

"A fall might hurt anybody," she rejoined, "but I'm sure I don't see why
the mere sight of a man should. I've looked at one every day for thirty
years and fattened on it, too."

"That," replied Mrs. Payne, who still delighted to prick at the old
scandal with a delicate dissecting knife, "is because you have only
encountered the sex in domestic shackles. As for me, I haven't the least
doubt in the world that the sudden shock of beholding a man after forty
years would be her death blow."

"But she has seen Percival," insisted Mrs. Bleeker; and feeling that her
illustration did not wholly prove her point added, weakly, "at least he
wears breeches."

"I would not see him if I could help myself," broke in Angela, with
sudden energy. "I never--never--never wish to see a man again in this
world or the next."

Mrs. Payne glanced sternly at Mrs. Bleeker and followed it with an
emphatic head shake, which said as plainly as words, "So there's your
argument."

"All the same, I don't believe Robert would shock her," remarked Mrs.
Bleeker.

"Never--never--never," repeated Angela in a frozen agony, and, rising,
she walked restlessly up and down again until a servant appeared to
inform the visiting sisters that dinner and Miss Wilde awaited them
below.




CHAPTER III

APOLOGISES FOR AN OLD-FASHIONED ATMOSPHERE


As soon as dinner was over Uncle Percival retired with Mr. Bleeker into
the library, from which retreat there issued immediately the shrill
piping of the flute. Mr. Bleeker, with an untouched glass of sherry at
his elbow and an unlighted cigar in his hand, sank back into the placid
after-dinner reverie which is found in the rare cases when old age has
encountered a faultless digestion. The happiest part of his life was
spent in the pleasant state between waking and sleeping, while as yet
the flavour of his favourite dishes still lingered in his mouth--just as
the most blissful moments known to Uncle Percival were those in which he
piped his cherished airs upon his antiquated instrument. The eldest
member of the Wilde family was very old indeed--had in fact successfully
rounded some years ago the critical point of his eightieth birthday, and
there was the zest of a second childhood in the animation with which he
had revived the single accomplishment of his early youth. That youth was
now more vivid to his requickened memory than the present was to his
enfeebled faculties. The past had become a veritable obsession in his
mind, and when he fingered the old flute strength came back to his
half-palsied hands and breath returned to his shrunken little body. His
own music was the one sound he heard in all its distinctness, and he
hung upon it with an enjoyment which was almost doting in its childish
delight.

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