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Life and Gabriella by Ellen Glasgow

E >> Ellen Glasgow >> Life and Gabriella




"Oh, mother, I can't possibly see them! I feel as if it would kill me!"
cried Jane in desperation.

"Give her the camphor, mother," said Gabriella with grim humour as she
went to open the door.

"Brace yourself, my darling. They are coming," pleaded Mrs. Carr, as she
slipped her arm under Jane's head. At the first hint of any excitement
she invariably lost her presence of mind and became distracted; and
Jane's hysterical outbursts never failed to convince her, though they
usually left the more skeptical Gabriella unmoved. "Don't you think you
would feel better if you lay back on the pillows?" she urged.

Then the bell rang, and before Jane could swallow her sobs, her sister
ushered in Jimmy and Pussy Wrenn, who were closely followed by the
ponderous figure of Uncle Meriweather, a gouty but benign old gentleman,
whose jet-black eyebrows and white imperial gave him a misleading
military air.

"Well, well, my dear, what's this I hear about Charley?" demanded Cousin
Jimmy, whose sprightly manner was never sprightlier than in the hour of
tragedy or the house of mourning. "What does he mean by letting you run
away from him?"

"I've done my duty by Charley. I've never, never failed in my duty!"
wept Jane, breaking down on Pussy's tender bosom, and waking the
sleeping baby.

"We know, darling, we know," said Pussy, patting Jane's shoulder, while
Jimmy drew a white silk handkerchief from his pocket, and hid his face
under the pretence of blowing his nose.

To see a woman cry never failed to wring a sympathetic tear from Jimmy.
Though he was a man of hard common sense, possessed of an inflexible
determination to make money, there was a soft spot inside of him which
was reached only by the distress of one of the opposite sex. The
suffering--particularly the financial suffering--of men left him
unmoved. He could foreclose a mortgage or press a debt (as long as the
debtor's wife or daughter did not appeal to him) as well as another; but
the instant a skirt fluttered on the horizon that soft something inside
of him appeared, as he expressed it, "to give way." Apart from their
afflictions, he had an eye, he used to boast, for but one woman in the
world, and she, thank God, was his wife. Handsome, portly, full-blooded,
and slightly overfed, he had let Pussy twine him about her little finger
ever since the afternoon when he had first seen her, small, trim, and
with "a way with her," at the age of six.

"Poor, poor child," said Pussy, cuddling Jane and the baby together
against her sympathetic bosom. "Something must be done, Cousin Fanny.
Something must be done, as Mr. Wrenn said on the way down, if it's only
for the satisfaction of letting Charley know what we think of him."

"We've got to put down our pride and take some step," declared Jimmy,
wondering vaguely how he could have forgotten the spirited utterance his
wife attributed to him. "I'm all for the authority of the husband, of
course, and the sanctity of the home, and everything according to the
Bible and all that--but, bless my soul, there's got to be a limit to
what a woman is expected to stand. There're some things, and I know
Uncle Meriweather will agree with me, that it isn't in human nature to
put up with."

"If I were forty years younger I'd call him out and give him a whipping
he wouldn't forget in a jiffy," blustered Uncle Meriweather, feebly
violent. "There's no way of defending a lady in these Godforsaken days.
Why, I remember when I was a boy, my poor father--God bless him!--you
recollect him, don't you Fanny?--never used a walking stick in his life
and could read print without glasses at ninety--"

"Making love to the dressmaker," pursued Jimmy, whose righteous anger
refused to be turned aside from its end.

"Don't you think, Cousin Fanny," whispered Pussy, "that Gabriella had
better leave the room?"

"Gabriella? Why, how on earth can we spare her?" Mrs. Carr whispered
back rather nervously. Then, beneath Pussy's compelling glance, she
added timidly: "Hadn't you better go, darling, and see what the children
are doing?"

"They are playing in the laundry," replied Gabriella reassuringly. "I
told Dolly not to let them go out of her sight."

"She knows so much already for her age," murmured Mrs. Carr
apologetically to Pussy.

"I don't know what Mr. Wrenn will think of your staying, dear," said
Pussy, smiling archly at the girl. "Mr. Wrenn, I was just saying that I
didn't know what you would think of Gabriella's staying in the room."

Jimmy's large handsome face, with its look of perpetual innocence--the
incorruptible innocence of a man who has never imagined anything--turned
helplessly in the direction of his wife. All things relating to
propriety came, he felt instinctively, within the natural sphere of
woman, and to be forced, on the spur of the moment, to decide a delicate
question of manners, awoke in him the dismay of one who sees his
accustomed prop of authority beginning to crumble. Surely Pussy knew
best about things like that! He would as soon have thought of
interfering with her housekeeping as of instructing her in the details
of ladylike conduct. And, indeed, he had not observed that Gabriella was
in the room until his wife, for her own purpose, had adroitly presented
the fact to his notice.

"Gabriella in the room?" he repeated in perplexity. "Why, you'd better
go, hadn't you, Gabriella? Oughtn't she to go, Pussy?"

"Just as you think best, dear, but it seems to me--"

"Certainly she ought to go," said Uncle Meriweather decisively. "The
less women and girls know about such matters, the better. I don't
understand, Fanny, how you could possibly have consented to Gabriella's
being present."

"I didn't consent, Uncle Meriweather," protested poor Mrs. Carr, who
could not bear the mildest rebuke without tears; "I only said to Pussy
that Gabriella knew a great deal more already than she ought to, and I'm
sure I'm not to blame for it. If I'd had my way she would have been just
as sheltered as other girls."

"Don't cry, mother, it isn't your fault," said Gabriella. "Uncle
Meriweather, if you make mother cry I'll never forgive you. How can she
help all these dreadful things going on?"

She was sensible, she was composed, she was perfectly sweet about it;
but, and this fact made Pussy gasp with dismay, she did not budge an
inch from her position. With her clear grave eyes, which lost their
sparkle when she grew serious, and her manner of eager sympathy, she
appeared, indeed, to be the only one in the room who was capable of
facing the situation with frankness. That she meant to face it to the
end, Pussy could not doubt while she looked at her.

"Oh, it doesn't matter about Gabriella. She knows everything," said
Jane, with the prickly sweetness of suffering virtue.

"But she's a young girl--young girls oughtn't to hear such things,"
argued Uncle Meriweather, feeling helplessly that something was wrong
with the universe, and that, since it was different from anything he had
ever known in the past, he was unable to cope with it. Into his eyes,
gentle and bloodshot above his fierce white moustache--the eyes of one
who has never suffered the painful process of thinking things out, but
has accepted his opinions as unquestioningly as he has accepted his
religion or the cut of his clothes--there came the troubled look of one
who is struggling against forces that he does not understand. For
Gabriella was serious. There was not the slightest hope in the disturbed
mind of Uncle Meriweather that she was anything but perfectly serious.
Caprice, being a womanly quality, was not without a certain charm for
him. He was quite used to it; he knew how to take it; he had been taught
to recognize it from his childhood up. It was pretty, it was playful;
and his mind, if so ponderous a vehicle could indulge in such activity,
was fond of play. But after the first perplexed minute or two he had
relinquished forever the hope that Gabriella was merely capricious.
Clearly the girl knew what she was talking about; and this knowledge, so
surprising in one of her age and sex, gave him a strange dreamy sense of
having just awakened from sleep.

"I must say I like girls to be girls, Fanny," he pursued testily; "I
reckon I'm only an old fogy, but I like girls to be girls. When a woman
loses her innocence, she loses her greatest charm in the eyes of a
man--of the right sort of a man. Pluck the peach with the bloom on it,
my poor father used to say. He didn't believe in all this new-fangled
nonsense about the higher education of women--none of his daughters
could do more I than read and write and spell after a fashion, and yet
look what wives and mothers they made! Pokey married three times, and
was the mother of fourteen children, nine of them sons. And are we any
better off now than then, I ask? Whoever heard of a woman running away
from her husband before the war, and now here is poor Jane--"

"But it isn't my fault, Uncle Meriweather!" cried Jane, in desperation
at his obtuseness. "I've tried to be the best wife I could--ask Charley
if I haven't. He neglected me long before I let any one know--even
mother. I forgave him again and again, and I'd go on forgiving him
forever if he would let me. I've told him over and over that I was going
to be a faithful wife to him if he killed me."

"Of course, my dear, I'm not meaning to reproach you," said Uncle
Meriweather, overcome by the effect of his words. "We all know that
you've stood as much as any woman could and keep her self-respect. It
isn't possible, I suppose, for you to go on living with Charley?"

"Oh, I couldn't bear a separation, not a legal one at any rate," groaned
Mrs. Carr. "Of course she must come away for a time, but nobody must
hear of it or it would kill me. They are one in the sight of God, and my
dear old father had such a horror of separations."

"Well, I'd kick him out--I'd kick him out so quickly he wouldn't know
it," declared Jimmy. "If a daughter of mine were married to that scamp,
she'd never lay eyes on him except over my dead body. I reckon God would
enjoy the sight of his getting his deserts."

Deep down in Cousin Jimmy, deeper than sentiment, deeper than tradition,
deeper even than the solid bedrock of common sense, there was the
romantic essence of his soul, which hated baseness with a fiery hatred.
His ruddy face, still boyish in spite of his fifty years, blanched
slowly, and there came into his soft dark eyes the look he had worn at
Malvern Hill under the fire of the enemy.

At the sight Gabriella thrilled as she did when drums were beating and
armies were marching. "Oh, Cousin Jimmy, don't let her go back!" she
cried.

"I can't go back to him now! I can never, never go back to him again!"
intoned Jane with passionate energy.

"No, God bless her, she shan't go back," declared Jimmy, as profoundly
stirred as Gabriella.

"But the children? What will become of the children?" demanded Mrs.
Carr, not of Jimmy, but of the universe. Her helpless gaze, roving
wildly from face to face, and resting nowhere, was like the gaze of a
small animal caught in a trap. "If Jane separates the children from
their father what will people think of her?" she asked, still vainly
addressing Heaven.

"As long as she is right it doesn't matter what people think," retorted
Gabriella; but her protest, unlike her mother's, was directed to the
visible rather than to the invisible powers. The thought of Jane's
children--of the innocent souls so unaware of the awful predicament in
which they were placed that their bodies could be devouring bread and
damson preserves in the laundry. The poignant thought of these children
moved her more deeply than she had ever been moved before in her twenty
years. A passion for self-sacrifice rushed through her with the piercing
sweetness of religious ecstasy. Nothing like this had ever happened to
her before--not when she was confirmed, not when she had stood at the
head of her class, not when she had engaged herself to Arthur Peyton two
years before. It was the pure flame of experience at its highest point
that burned in her.

"I will take care of the children," she said breathlessly. "I will give
up my whole life to them. I will get a place in a store and work my
fingers to the bone, if only Jane will never go back."

For a moment there was silence; but while Gabriella waited for somebody
to answer, she felt that it was a silence which had become vocal with
inexpressible things. The traditions of Uncle Meriweather, the
conventions of Mrs. Carr, the prejudices of Jimmy, and the weak impulses
of Jane, all these filled the dusk through which the blank faces of her
family stared back at her. Then, while she stood white and trembling
with her resolve--with the passionate desire to give herself, body and
soul, to Jane and to Jane's children--the voice of Experience spoke
pleasantly, but firmly, through Cousin Pussy's lips, and it dealt with
Gabriella's outburst as Experience usually deals with Youth.

"You are a dear child, Gabriella," it said; "but how in the world could
you help Jane by going into a store?"

In the midst of the emotional scene, Cousin Pussy alone remained sweetly
matter-of-fact. Though she was not without orderly sentiments, her
character had long ago been swept of heroics, and from her arched gray
hair, worn à la Pompadour, to her pretty foot in its small neat boot,
she was a practical soul who had as little use for religious ecstasy as
she had for downright infidelity. There seemed to her something
positively unnatural in Gabriella's manner--a hint of that "sudden
conversion" she associated with the lower classes or with the negroes.

"You are a dear child," she repeated, biting her fresh lips; "but how
will you help Jane by going into a store?"

"I can trim hats," returned Gabriella stubbornly. "Mr. Brandywine will
take me into his new millinery department, I know, for I said something
to him about it the other day."

"Oh, Gabriella, not in a store! It would kill mother!" cried Jane, with
the prophetic wail of Cassandra.

"Not in a store!" echoed Mrs. Carr; "you couldn't work in a store. If
you want to work," she concluded feebly, "why can't you work just as
well in your home?"

"But it isn't the same thing, mother," explained Gabriella, with angelic
patience. "Nobody will get me to make hats at home, and, besides, I've
got to learn how to do it. I've got to learn business methods."

"But not in a shop, my dear," protested Uncle Meriweather in the precise
English of his youth.

"Bless my heart!" chuckled Cousin Jimmy. "Business methods! You're as
good as a show, Gabriella, and, by George! you've plenty of pluck. I
like pluck in man or woman."

"I shouldn't encourage her if I were you, Mr. Wrenn," said Cousin Pussy,
almost forgetting to be indirect.

"Well, of course, I don't approve of that store business," replied
Jimmy, deprecatingly, "but I can't help liking pluck when I see it. Look
here, Gabriella, if you're bent on working, why don't you turn in and
teach?"

"Yes, let her teach by all means," agreed Uncle Meriweather, with
genuine enthusiasm for the idea. "I've always regarded teaching as an
occupation that ought to be restricted by law to needy ladies."

"But I can't teach, I don't know enough, and, besides, I'd hate it,"
protested Gabriella.

"I'm sure you might start a school for very little children," said Mrs.
Carr. "You don't have to know much, to teach them, and you write a very
good hand."

"What about plain sewing?" asked Pussy in her ready way. "Couldn't you
learn to make those new waists all the girls are wearing?"

"I haven't the patience to sew well. Look how hard mother works, making
buttonholes with stitches so fine you can hardly see them, and yet she
doesn't get enough to put bread into her mouth, and but for her
relatives she'd have been in the poorhouse long ago. I'm tired of being
on charity just because we are women. Now that Jane has come home for
good I am simply obliged to find something to do."

"I don't mind your wanting to work, dear, I think it's splendid of you,"
returned Pussy, "but I do feel that you ought to work in a ladylike
way--a way that wouldn't interfere with your social position and your
going to germans and having attention from young men and all that."

"Why don't you make lampshades, Gabriella?" demanded Jane in an emphatic
burst of inspiration. "Sophy Madison earns enough from lampshades to
send her sister and herself to the White Sulphur Springs every summer."

"Sophy makes all the lampshades that anybody wants, and, besides, she
gets orders from the North--she told me so yesterday."

"Gabriella crochets beautifully," remarked Mrs. Carr a little nervously
because of the failure of her first suggestion. "The last time I went to
see Miss Matoaca Chambers in the Old Ladies' Home, she told me she made
quite a nice little sum for her church by crocheting mats."

"And Gabriella can cook, too," rejoined Pussy, with exaggerated
sprightliness, for she felt that Mrs. Carr's solution of the problem had
not been entirely felicitous. "Why doesn't she try sending some of her
angel food to the Woman's Exchange?"

Jimmy, who had listened to this advice with the expression of tolerant
amusement he always wore when women began to talk about the more serious
affairs of life in his presence, made an honest, if vulgar, attempt to
lighten the solemnity of the situation with a joke.

"Gabriella isn't trying to earn church money. You're out gunning for a
living, aren't you, Ella?" he inquired.

"I'm sick of being dependent," repeated Gabriella, while her face grew
stern. "Do you think if Jane had had enough money to live on that she
would ever have stood Charley so long?"

"Oh, yes, I should, Gabriella. Marriage is sacred to me!" exclaimed
Jane, whose perfect wifeliness atoned, even in the opinion of Jimmy, for
any discrepancies in logic. "Nothing on earth could have induced me to
leave him until--until this happened."

The conviction that she had never at any moment since her marriage
"failed in her duty to Charley" lent a touching sanctity to her
expression, while the bitter lines around her mouth faded in the wan
glow that flooded her face. Whatever her affliction, however intense her
humiliation, Jane was supported always by the most comforting of
beliefs--the belief that she had been absolutely right and Charley
absolutely wrong through the ten disillusioning years of their married
life. Never for an instant--never even in a nightmare--had she been
visited by the disquieting suspicion that she was not entirely
blameless.

"Well, you've left him now anyway," said Gabriella, with the disarming
candour which delighted Jimmy and perplexed Uncle Meriweather, "so
somebody has got to help you take care of the children."

"She shall never come to want as long as Pussy and I have a cent left,"
declared Cousin Jimmy, and his voice expressed what Mrs. Carr described
afterward as "proper feeling."

"And we'd really rather that you'd earn less and keep in your own
station of life," said Pussy decisively.

"If you mean that you'd rather I'd work buttonholes or crochet mats than
go into a store and earn a salary, then I can't do it," answered
Gabriella, as resolute, though not so right-minded, as poor Jane. "I'd
rather die than be dependent all my life, and I'm going to earn my
living if I have to break rocks to do it."




CHAPTER II

POOR JANE


Supper was over, and Gabriella, still in the dress she had worn all day,
was picking up the children's clothes from the floor of her room.
According to Mrs. Carr's hereditary habit in sorrow or sickness, Jane
had been served in bed with tea and toast, while several small hard cots
had been brought down from the attic and arranged in the available space
in the two bedrooms. As Gabriella looked at the sleeping children, who
had kicked the covering away, and lay with round rosy limbs gleaming in
the lamplight, she remembered that Arthur Peyton was coming at nine
o'clock to take her to Florrie's party, and she told herself with grim
determination that she would never go to a party again. The Berkeley
conscience, that vein of iron which lay beneath the outward softness and
incompetence of her mother and sister, held her, in spite of her
tempting youth, to the resolution she had made. She had told Jimmy that
she meant to earn her living if she had to break rocks to do it, and
Gabriella, like Pussy, came of a race that "did not easily change its
mind."

Turning to the bureau, she smoothed out the children's hair ribbons and
pinned them, in two tight little blue and pink rolls, to the pincushion.
Then taking up a broken comb, she ran it through the soft lock of hair
that fell like a brown wing over her forehead. Her bright dark eyes,
fringed in short thick lashes and set wide apart under arched eyebrows,
gazed questioningly back at her from a row of german favours with which
she had decorated the glass; and it was as if the face of youth,
flickering with a flamelike glow and intensity, swam there for an
instant in the dim greenish pool of the mirror. Beneath the charm of the
face there was the character which one associates, not with youth, but
with age and experience. Beneath the fine, clear lines of her head and
limbs, the tall slenderness of her figure, the look of swiftness and of
energy, which was almost birdlike in its grace and poise, there was a
strength and vigour which suggested a gallant boy rather than the
slighter and softer frame of a girl.

While she stood there, Gabriella thought regretfully of all that it
would mean to give up her half-dependent and wholly ladylike existence
and go to work in a shop. Necessity not choice was driving her; and in
spirit she looked back almost wistfully to the securely circumscribed
lot of her grandmother. For there was little of the rebel in her
temperament; and had she been free to choose, she would have
instinctively selected, guided by generations of gregarious ancestors,
the festive girlhood which Cousin Pussy had so ardently described. She
wanted passionately all the things that other girls had, and her only
quarrel, indeed, with the sheltered life was that she couldn't afford
it. In the expressive phrase of Cousin Jimmy, the sheltered life "cost
money," and to cost money was to be beyond the eager grasp of Gabriella.

The door opened as if yielding under protest, and Marthy entered, still
hurriedly tying the strings of the clean apron she had slipped on over
her soiled one before answering the door-bell.

"Yo' beau done come, Miss Ella. Ain't you gwine?"

"No, I'm not going to the party, Marthy, but ask him to wait just a
minute."

"He's settin' over yonder in de parlour wid his overcoat on."

"Well, ask him to take it off; I'll be there in a moment." She spoke as
gravely as Marthy had done, yet in her face there was a light play of
humour.

Two years ago she would have thrilled with joy at the thought that
Arthur was waiting for her; but in those two years since her engagement
she had grown to look upon her first love as the gossamer, fairylike
romance of a child. For months she had known that the engagement must be
broken sooner or later; and she knew now, while she listened to Marthy's
shuffling feet hastening to deliver her message, that she must break it
to-night. In the dim pool of her mirror a face looked back at her that
was not the face of Arthur Peyton; she saw it take form there as one
sees a face grow gradually into life from the dimness of dreams. It was,
she told herself to-night, the very face of her dream that she saw.

"Well, I must get it over," she said with a sternness which gave her a
passing resemblance to the Saint Memin portrait of the Reverend
Bartholomew Berkeley; "I've got to get it over to-night, and whatever
happens I've got to be honest." Then, with a last glance at the sleeping
children, she lowered the gas, and went across the darkened hail, which
smelt of pickles and bacon because one end of it was used as a
storeroom.

The parlour had been swept since the family council had deliberated
there over Jane's destiny. The scraps of cambric had been gathered up
from the threadbare arabesques in the carpet; the chairs had been placed
at respectable distances apart; the gas-jets in the chandelier were
flaming extravagantly under the damaged garlands; and the sewing machine
had been wheeled into the obscurity of the hail, for it would have
humiliated Gabriella's mother to think that her daughter received young
men in a room which looked as if somebody had worked there.

When Gabriella entered, Arthur Peyton was standing in front of the
fireplace, gazing abstractedly at his reflection in the French mirror.
Though his chestnut hair was carefully brushed, he had instinctively
lifted his hand to smooth down an imaginary lock, and while he did this,
he frowned slightly as if at a recollection that had ruffled his temper.
His features were straight and very narrow, with the look of
sensitiveness one associates with the thoroughbred, and the delicate
texture of his skin emphasized this quality of high-breeding, which was
the only thing that one remembered about him. In his light-gray eyes
there was a sympathetic expression which invariably won the hearts of
old ladies, and these old ladies were certain to say of him afterward,
"such a gentleman, my dear--almost of the old school, you know, and we
haven't many of them left in this hurrying age."

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