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Life and Gabriella by Ellen Glasgow

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LIFE AND
GABRIELLA

THE STORY OF A WOMAN'S COURAGE

BY
ELLEN GLASGOW



FRONTISPIECE
BY
C. ALLAN GILBERT

GARDEN CITY NEW YORK

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
1916




CONTENTS


BOOK FIRST--THE AGE OF FAITH

CHAPTER PAGE
I. Presents a Shameless Heroine 3
II. Poor Jane 30
III. A Start in Life 61
IV. Mirage 90
V. The New World 122
VI. The Old Serpent 148
VII. Motherhood 176

BOOK SECOND--THE AGE OF KNOWLEDGE

I. Disenchantment. 211
II. A Second Start in Life 241
III. Work 274
IV. The Dream and the Years 300
V. Success 331
VI. Discoveries 368
VII. Readjustments 406
VIII. The Test 444
IX. The Past 476
X. Dream and the Reality 501




BOOK FIRST

THE AGE OF FAITH




CHAPTER I

PRESENTS A SHAMELESS HEROINE


After a day of rain the sun came out suddenly at five o'clock and threw
a golden bar into the deep Victorian gloom of the front parlour. On the
window-sill, midway between the white curtains, a pot of blue hyacinths
stood in a cracked china plate, and as the sunlight shone into the room,
the scent of the blossoms floated to the corner where Gabriella was
patiently pulling basting threads out of the hem of a skirt. For a
minute her capable hands stopped at their work, and raising her smooth
dark head she looked compassionately at her sister Jane, who was
sitting, like a frozen image of martyrdom, in the middle of the long
horsehair sofa. Three times within the last twelve months Jane had fled
from her husband's roof to the protection of her widowed mother, a weak
person of excellent ancestry, who could hardly have protected a sparrow
had one taken refuge beneath her skirt. Twice before Mrs. Carr had wept
over her daughter's woes and returned her, a sullen saint, to the arms
of the discreetly repentant Charley; but to-day, while the four older
children were bribed to good behaviour with bread and damson preserves
in the pantry, and the baby was contentedly playing with his rubber ring
in his mother's arms, Gabriella had passionately declared that "Jane
must never, never go back!" Nothing so dreadful as this had ever
happened before, for the repentant Charley had been discovered making
love to his wife's dressmaker, a pretty French girl whom Jane had
engaged for her spring sewing because she had more "style" than had
fallen to the austerely virtuous lot of the Carr's regular seamstress,
Miss Folly Hatch. "I might have known she was too pretty to be good,"
moaned Jane, while Mrs. Carr, in her willow rocking-chair by the window,
wiped her reddened eyelids on the strip of cambric ruffling she was
hemming.

Unmoved among them the baby beat methodically on his mother's breast
with his rubber ring, as indifferent to her sobs as to the intermittent
tearful "coos" of his grandmother. He had a smooth bald head, fringed,
like the head of a very old man, with pale silken hair that was almost
white in the sunshine, and his eyes, as expressionless as marbles,
stared over the pot of hyacinths at a sparrow perched against the deep
blue sky on the red brick wall of the opposite house. From beneath his
starched little skirt his feet, in pink crocheted shoes, protruded with
a forlorn and helpless air as if they hardly belonged to him.

"Oh, my poor child, what are we going to do?" asked Mrs. Carr in a
resigned voice as she returned to her hemming.

"There's nothing to do, mother," answered Jane, without lifting her eyes
from the baby's head, without moving an inch out of the position she had
dropped into when she entered the room. Then, after a sobbing pause, she
defined in a classic formula her whole philosophy of life: "It wasn't my
fault," she said.

"But one can always do something if it's only to scream," rejoined
Gabriella with spirit.

"I wouldn't scream," replied Jane, while the pale cast of resolution
hardened her small flat features, "not--not if he killed me. My one
comfort," she added pathetically, "is that only you and mother know how
he treats me."

Her pretty vacant face with its faded bloom resembled a pastel portrait
in which the artist had forgotten to paint an expression. "Poor Jane
Gracey," as she was generally called, had wasted the last ten years in a
futile effort to hide the fact of an unfortunate marriage beneath an
excessively cheerful manner. She talked continually because talking
seemed to her the most successful way of "keeping up an appearance."
Though everybody who knew her knew also that Charley Gracey neglected
her shamefully, she spent twelve hours of the twenty-four pretending
that she was perfectly happy. At nineteen she had been a belle and
beauty of the willowy sort; but at thirty she had relapsed into one of
the women whom men admire in theory and despise in reality. She had
started with a natural tendency to clinging sweetness; as the years went
on the sweetness, instead of growing fainter, had become almost cloying,
while the clinging had hysterically tightened into a clutch. Charley
Gracey, who had married her under the mistaken impression that her type
was restful for a reforming rake, (not realizing that there is nothing
so mentally disturbing as a fool) had been changed by marriage from a
gay bird of the barnyard into a veritable hawk of the air. His behaviour
was the scandal of the town, yet the greater his sins, the intenser grew
Jane's sweetness, the more twining her hold. "Nobody will ever think of
blaming you, darling," said Mrs. Carr consolingly. "You have behaved
beautifully from the beginning. We all know what a perfect wife you have
been."

"I've tried to do my duty even if Charley failed in his," replied the
perfect wife, unfastening the hooks of her small heliotrope wrap trimmed
with tarnished silver passementerie. Above her short flaxen "bang" she
wore a crumpled purple hat ornamented with bunches of velvet pansies;
and though it was two years old, and out of fashion at a period when
fashions changed less rapidly, it lent an air of indecent festivity to
her tearful face. Her youth was already gone, for her beauty had been of
the fragile kind that breaks early, and her wan, aristocratic features
had settled into the downward droop which comes to the faces of people
who habitually "expect the worst."

"I know, Jane, I know," murmured Mrs. Carr, dropping her thimble as she
nervously tried to hasten her sewing. "But don't you think it would be a
comfort, dear, to have the advice of a man about Charley? Won't you let
me send Marthy for your Cousin Jimmy Wrenn?"

"Oh, mother, I couldn't. It would kill me to have everybody know I'm
unhappy!" wailed Jane, breaking down.

"But everybody knows anyway, Jane," said Gabriella, sticking the point
of her scissors into a strip of buckram, for she was stiffening the
bottom of the skirt after the fashion of the middle 'nineties.

"Of course I'm foolishly sensitive," returned Jane, while she lifted the
baby from her lap and placed him in a pile of cushions by the deep arm
of the sofa, where he sat imperturbably gazing at the blue sky and the
red wall from which the sparrow had flown. "You can never understand my
feelings because you are so different."

"Gabriella is not married," observed Mrs. Carr, with sentimental
finality. "But I'm sure, Jane--I'm just as sure as I can be of anything
that it wouldn't do a bit of harm to speak to Cousin Jimmy Wrenn. Men
know so much more than women about such matters."

In her effort to recover her thimble she dropped her spool of thread,
which rolled under the sofa on which Jane was sitting, and while she
waited for Gabriella to find it, she gazed pensively into the almost
deserted street where the slender shadows of poplar trees slanted over
the wet cobblestones. Though Mrs. Carr worked every instant of her time,
except the few hours when she lay in bed trying to sleep, and the few
minutes when she sat at the table trying to eat, nothing that she began
was ever finished until Gabriella took it out of her hands. She did her
best, for she was as conscientious in her way as poor Jane, yet through
some tragic perversity of fate her best seemed always to fall short of
the simplest requirements of life. Her face, like Jane's, was long and
thin, with a pathetic droop at the corners of the mouth, a small bony
nose, always slightly reddened at the tip, and faded blue eyes beneath
an even row of little flat round curls which looked as if they were
plastered on her forehead.

Thirty-three years before, in the romantic and fiery 'sixties, she had
married dashing young Gabriel Carr for no better reason apparently than
that she was falling vaguely in love with love; and the marriage, which
had been one of reckless passion on his side, had been for her scarcely
more than the dreamer's hesitating compromise with reality. Passion,
which she had been taught to regard as an unholy attribute implanted by
the Creator, with inscrutable wisdom, in the nature of man, and left out
of the nature of woman, had never troubled her gentle and affectionate
soul; and not until the sudden death of her husband did she begin even
remotely to fall in love with the man. But when he was once safely dead
she worshipped his memory with an ardour which would have seemed to her
indelicate had he been still alive. For sixteen years she had worn a
crape veil on her bonnet, and she still went occasionally, after the
morning service was over on Sunday, to place fresh flowers on his grave.
Now that his "earthly nature," against which she had struggled so
earnestly while he was living, was no longer in need of the pious
exorcisms with which she had treated its frequent manifestations, she
remembered only the dark beauty of his face, his robust and vigorous
youth, the tenderness and gallantry of his passion. For her daughters
she had drawn an imaginary portrait of him which combined the pagan
beauty of Antinous with the militant purity of Saint Paul; and this
romantic blending of the heathen and the Presbyterian virtues had passed
through her young imagination into the awakening soul of Gabriella.

By the town at large Mrs. Carr's sorrow was alluded to as "a beautiful
grief," yet so deeply rooted in her being was the instinct to twine,
that for the first few years of her bereavement she had simply sat in
her widow's weeds, with her rent paid by Cousin Jimmy Wrenn and her
market bills settled monthly by Uncle Beverly Blair, and waited
patiently for some man to come and support her.

When no man came, and Uncle Beverly died of a stroke of apoplexy with
his will unsigned, she had turned, with the wasted energy of the unfit
and the incompetent, to solve the inexplicable problem of indigent
ladyhood. And it was at this crucial instant that Becky Bollingbroke had
put her awful question: "Have you made up your mind, Fanny, what you are
going to do?" That was twelve years ago, but deep down in some secret
cave of Fanny's being the ghastly echo of the words still reverberated
through the emptiness and the silence.

"Don't you think, darling," she pleaded now, as she had pleaded to Becky
on that other dreadful occasion, "that we had better send immediately
for Cousin Jimmy Wrenn?"

"I--I can't think," gasped Jane, "but you may if you want to, mother."

"Send, Gabriella," said Mrs. Carr quickly, and she added tenderly, while
Gabriella dropped her work and ran to the outside kitchen for Marthy,
the coloured drudge, "you will feel so much better, Jane, after you have
had his advice."

Then at the sight of Jane's stricken face, which had turned blue as if
from a sudden chill, she hurriedly opened the drawer of her sewing
machine, and taking out a bottle of camphor she kept there, began
tremulously rubbing her daughter's forehead. As she did so, she
remembered, with the startling irrelevance of the intellectually
untrained, the way Jane had looked in her veil and orange blossoms on
the day of her wedding.

"I wonder what on earth we have done to deserve our troubles?" she found
herself thinking while she put the stopper back into the bottle and
returned to her sewing.

"Marthy has gone, mother," said Gabriella, with her cheerful air as she
came back into the room, "and I shut the children in the laundry with
Dolly who is doing the washing."

"I hope they won't make themselves sick with preserves," remarked Jane,
with the first dart of energy she had shown. "Perhaps I'd better go and
see. If Fanny eats too much we'll be up all night with her."

"I told Dolly not to let them stuff," answered Gabriella, as she sat
down by the window and threaded her needle. She was a tall, dark girl,
slender and straight as a young poplar, with a face that was frank and
pleasant rather than pretty, and sparkling brown eyes which turned
golden and grew bright as swords when she was angry. Seen by the strong
light of the window, her face showed sallow in tone, with a certain
nobility about the bony structure beneath the soft girlish flesh, and a
look of almost stern decision in the square chin and in the full rich
curve of the mouth. Her hair, which was too fine and soft to show its
thickness, drooped from its parting at the side in a dark wing over her
forehead, where it shadowed her arched black eyebrows and the clear
sweet gravity of her eyes. As she bent over her sewing the thin pure
lines of her body had a look of arrested energy, of relaxed but
exuberant vitality.

"You won't go to the dance to-night, will you, Gabriella?" inquired Mrs.
Carr nervously.

"No, I'm not going," answered the girl regretfully, for she loved
dancing, and her white organdie dress, trimmed with quillings of blue
ribbon, lay upstairs on the bed. "I'll never dance again if only Jane
won't go back to Charley. I'll work my fingers to the bone to help her
take care of the children."

"I'll never, never go back," chanted Jane with feverish passion.

"But I thought Arthur Peyton was coming for you," said Mrs. Carr. "He
will be so disappointed."

"Oh, he'll understand--he'll have to," replied Gabriella carelessly.

The sunshine faded slowly from the hyacinths on the window-sill, and
drawing her crocheted cape of purple wool closer about her, Mrs. Carr
moved a little nearer the fireplace. Outside the March wind was blowing
with a melancholy sound up the long straight street, and rocking the
glossy boughs of an old magnolia tree in the yard From the shining
leaves of the tree a few drops of water fell on the brick pavement,
where several joyous sparrows were drinking, and farther off, as bright
as silver in the clear wind, a solitary church spire rose above the
huddled roofs of the town. When the wind lulled, as it did now and then,
a warm breath seemed to stir in the sunshine, which grew suddenly
brighter, while a promise of spring floated like a faint provocative
scent on the air. And this scent, so vague, so roving, that it was like
the ghostly perfume of flowers, stole at last into the memory, and made
the old dream of youth and the young grow restless at the call of Life,
which sang to the music of flutes in the brain. But the wind, rising
afresh, drove the spirit of spring from the street, and swept the broken
leaves of the magnolia tree over the drenched grass to the green-painted
iron urns on either side of the steps.

The house, a small brick dwelling, set midway of an expressionless row
and wearing on its front a look of desiccated gentility, stood in one
of those forgotten streets where needy gentlewomen do "light
housekeeping" in an obscure hinterland of respectability. Hill Street,
which had once known fashion, and that only yesterday, as old ladies
count, had sunk at last into a humble state of decay. Here and there the
edges of porches had crumbled; grass was beginning to sprout by the
curbstone; and the once comfortable homes had opened their doors to
boarders or let their large, high-ceiled rooms to the impoverished
relicts of Confederate soldiers. Only a few blocks away the stream of
modern progress, sweeping along Broad Street, was rapidly changing the
old Southern city into one of those bustling centres of activity which
the press of the community agreed to describe as "a metropolis"; but
this river of industrialism was spanned by no social bridge connecting
Hill Street and its wistful relicts with the statelier dignities and the
more ephemeral gaieties of the opposite side. To be really "in society"
one must cross over, either for good and all, or in the dilapidated
"hack" which carried Gabriella to the parties of her schoolmates in West
Franklin Street.

For in the middle 'nineties, before social life in Richmond had become
both complicated and expensive, it was still possible for a girl in
Gabriella's position--provided, of course, she came of a "good
family"--to sew all day over the plain sewing of her relatives, and in
the evening to reign as the acknowledged belle of a ball. "Society," it
is true, did not reach any longer, except in the historic sense, to Hill
Street; but the inhabitants of Hill Street, if they were young and
energetic, not infrequently made triumphant excursions into "society."
Though Gabriella was poor and sewed for her living, she had been, from
the moment she left school, one of the most popular girls in town. To be
sure, she was neither so pretty as Florrie Spencer nor so clever as
Julia Caperton, but in the words of Julia's brother Algernon, she was
"the sort you could count on." Even in her childhood it had become the
habit of those about her to count on Gabriella. Without Gabriella, her
mother was fond of saying, it would have been impossible to keep a roof
over their heads.

Twelve years before, when they had moved into the house in Hill Street,
Mrs. Carr had accepted from Jimmy Wrenn the rent of the first floor and
the outside kitchen, which was connected with the back porch by a
winding brick walk, overgrown with wild violets, while the upper story
was let to two elderly spinsters, bearing the lordly, though fallen,
name of Peterborough. These spinsters, like Mrs. Carr, spent their lives
in a beautiful and futile pretence--the pretence of keeping up an
appearance. They also took in the plain sewing of their richer
relatives, who lived in Franklin Street, and sent them little trays of
sweet things as soon as the midday dinner was over on Sunday. Sometimes
they would drop in to see Mrs. Carr just before supper was ready, and
then they would pretend that they lived on tea and toast because they
were naturally "light eaters," and that they sewed all day, not for the
money, but because they liked to have "something to do with their hands"
They were tall thin women in organdie caps and black alpaca dresses made
with long basques which showed a greenish cast in the daylight. The
walls of their rooms were covered with family portraits of the colonial
period, and Mrs. Carr, who had parted with most of her treasures, often
wondered how they had preserved so many proofs of a distinguished
descent. Even her silver had gone--first the quaint old service with the
Bolton crest, which had belonged to her mother; then, one by one, the
forks and spoons; and, last of all, Gabriella's silver mug, which was
carried, wrapped in a shawl, to the shop of old Mr. Camberwell. She was
a woman who loved inanimate things with the passion which other women
give only to children, and a thousand delicate fibres of sentiment knit
her soul to the portraits on the wall, to the furniture with which she
lived, to the silver and glass that had once belonged to her mother.
When one after one these things went from her, she felt as if the very
roots of her being were torn up from the warm familiar earth in which
they had grown. "There's nothing left in the parlour that I shouldn't be
ashamed to have your grandmother look at," she had once confessed to her
daughters.

Seen by the light of history, this parlour, in which so much of
Gabriella's childhood was spent, was not without interest as an archaic
survival of the fundamental errors of the mid-Victorian mind. The walls
were covered with bottle-green paper on which endless processions of
dwarfed blue peacocks marched relentlessly toward an embossed
border--the result of an artistic frenzy of the early 'eighties. Neither
Mrs. Carr nor Jimmy Wrenn, who paid the rent, had chosen this paper, but
having been left on the dealer's hands, it had come under the eye of the
landlord, who, since he did not have to live with it had secured it at a
bargain. Too unused to remonstrance to make it effective, Mrs. Carr had
suffered the offending decoration in meekness, while Jimmy, having a
taste for embossment, honestly regarded the peacocks as "handsome."
From the centre of the ceiling a massive gilt chandelier, elaborately
festooned with damaged garlands, shed, when it was lighted, a dim and
troubled gloom down on the threadbare Axminster carpet. Above the white
marble mantelpiece, the old French mirror, one of the few good things
left over from a public sale of Mrs. Carr's possessions, reflected a
pair of bronze candelabra with crystal pendants, and a mahogany clock,
which had kept excellent time for half a century and then had stopped
suddenly one day while Marthy was cleaning. In the corner, between the
door and the window, there was a rosewood bookcase, with the bare
shelves hidden behind plaited magenta silk, and directly above it hung
an engraving of a group of amiable children feeding fish in a pond.
Across the room, over the walnut whatnot, a companion picture
represented the same group of children scattering crumbs before a polite
brood of chickens in a barnyard. Between the windows a third engraving
immortalized the "Burial of Latané" in the presence of several sad and
resigned ladies in crinolines, while the sofa on which Jane sat was
presided over by a Sully portrait of the beautiful Angelica Carr,
wearing a white scarf on her head and holding a single rose in her hand.
This portrait and a Saint Memin drawing of Mrs. Carr's grandfather, the
Reverend Bartholomew Berkeley as a young man in a high stock, were the
solitary existing relics of that consecrated past when Fanny Berkeley
was "not brought up to do anything."

To Mrs. Carr, whose mind was so constituted that any change in her
surroundings produced a sensation of shock, the room was hallowed by the
simple fact that she had lived in it for a number of years. That an
object or a custom had existed in the past appeared to her to be an
incontestible reason why it should continue to exist in the present. It
was distressing to her to be obliged to move a picture or to alter the
position of a piece of furniture, and she had worn one shape of bonnet
and one style of hairdressing, slightly modified to suit the changing
fashions, for almost twenty years. Her long pale face, her pensive blue
eyes, and her look of anxious sweetness, made a touching picture of
feminine incompetence; and yet it was from this pallid warmth, this
gentle inefficiency of soul, that the buoyant spirit of Gabriella had
sprung.

For Gabriella was the incarnation of energy. From the moment of her
birth when, in the words of her negro "mammy" she had looked "as peart
as life," she had begun her battle against the enveloping twin powers of
decay and inertia. To the intense secret mortification of her mother,
who had prayed for a second waxlike infant after the fashion of poor
Jane, she had been a notoriously ugly baby (almost as ugly as her Aunt
Becky Bollingbroke who had never married), and as she grew up, this
ugliness was barely redeemed by what Jane, in her vague way, described
as "the something else in her face." According to Cousin Jimmy, who
never recognized charm unless its manifestations were soft and purring,
this "something else" was merely "a sunny temper"; and one of the
constant afflictions of Gabriella's childhood was overhearing her mother
remark to visitors: "No, she isn't so pretty as poor Jane, but, as
Cousin Jimmy tells us, she is blessed with a sunny temper."

"Give me that ruffle, mother, and I'll whip the lace on while we're
waiting," she said now, laying aside the skirt of her Easter dress, and
stretching out her hand for the strip of cambric in her mother's lap.
But Mrs. Carr did not hear, for she was gazing, with the concentrated
stare of Jane's baby, at a beautiful old lady who was walking slowly
through the faint sunshine on the opposite pavement.

"I wonder where Mrs. Peyton can be coming from in her best dress?" she
remarked, forgetting Jane for an instant while her sense of tragedy
yielded to the keener impulse of curiosity.

"She never goes anywhere but to church or to the Old Ladies' home,"
replied Gabriella. "Arthur says she hasn't paid a call since her
husband's death."

"Well, I haven't made one, except of course to my relatives, for fifteen
years," rejoined Mrs. Carr a trifle tartly. Then her manner lost its
unusual asperity, and she added excitedly, "They're coming now, Jane.
There's Cousin Jimmy and he's bringing Cousin Pussy and Uncle
Meriweather!"

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