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The Precipice: A Novel, a novel by Elia W. Peattie |
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Chapter 11 |
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_ CHAPTER XI They had met like flame and wind. It was irrational and wonderful and conclusive. But after all, it might not have come to quite so swift a climax if Marna, following Kate's advice, had not confided the whole thing to Mrs. Barsaloux. Now, Mrs. Barsaloux was a kind woman, and one with plenty of sentiment in her composition. But she believed that there were times when Love should not be given the lead. Naturally, it seemed to her that this was one of them. She had spent much money upon the education of this girl whom she had "assumed," as Marna sometimes playfully put it. Nothing but her large, active, and perhaps interfering benevolence and Mama's winning and inexplicable charm held the two together, and the very slightness of their relationship placed them under peculiar obligations to each other. "It's ungrateful of you," Mrs. Barsaloux explained, "manifestly ungrateful! It's your role to love nothing but your career." She was not stern, merely argumentative. "But didn't you expect me ever to love any one?" queried Marna. Mrs. Barsaloux contemplated a face and figure made for love from the beginning, and delicately ripened for it, like a peach in the sun. "But you could have waited, my dear girl. There's time for both the love and the career." Marna shook her head slowly. "George says there isn't," she answered with an irritating sweetness. "He says I'm not to go on the stage at all. He says--" "Don't 'he says' me like that, Marna," cried her friend. "It sounds too unutterably silly. Here you are with a beautiful talent--every one agrees about that--and a chance to develop it. I've made many sacrifices to give you that chance. Very well; you've had your trial before the public. You've made good. You could repay yourself and me for all that has been involved in your development, and you meet a man and come smiling to me and say that we're to throw the whole thing over because 'he says' to." Marna made no answer at all, but Mrs. Barsaloux saw her settle down in the deep chair in which she was sitting as if to huddle away from the storm about to break over her. "She isn't going to offer any resistance," thought the distressed patron with dismay. "Her mind is completely made up and she's just crouching down to wait till I'm through with my private little hurricane." So, indeed, it proved. Mrs. Barsaloux felt she had the right to say much, and she said it. Marna may or may not have listened. She sat shivering and smiling in her chair, and when it was fit for her to excuse herself, she did, and walked out bravely; but Mrs. Barsaloux noticed that she tottered a little as she reached the door. She did not go to her aid, however. "It's an infatuation," she concluded. "I must treat her as if she had a violent disease and take care of her. When people are delirious they must be protected against themselves. It's a delirium with her, and the best thing I can do is to run off to New York with her. She can make her next appearance when the opera company gets there. I'll arrange it this afternoon." She refrained from telling Marna of her plans, but she went straight to the city and talked over the situation with her friend the impresario. He seemed anything but depressed. On the contrary, he was excited--even exalted. "Spirit her away, madam," he advised. "Of course she will miss her lover horribly, and that will be the best thing that can happen to her. Why did not the public rise to her the other night? Not because she could not sing: far from it. If a nightingale sings, then Miss Cartan does. But she left her audience a little cold. Let us face the facts. You saw it. We all saw it. And why? Because she was too happy, madam; too complaisant; too uninstructed in the emotions. Now it will be different. We will take her away; we will be patient with her while she suffers; afterward she will bless us, for she will have discovered the secret of the artist, and then when she opens her little silver throat we shall have SONG." Mrs. Barsaloux, with many compunctions, and with some pangs of pure motherly sympathy, nevertheless agreed. "If only he had been a man above the average," she said, as she tearfully parted from the great man, "perhaps it would not have mattered so much." The impresario lifted his eyebrows and his mustaches at the same time and assumed the aspect of a benevolent Mephistopheles. "The variety of man, madam," he said sententiously, "makes no manner of difference. It is the tumult in Miss Marna's soul which I hope we shall be able to utilize"--he interrupted himself with a smile and a bow as he opened the door for his departing friend--"for the purposes of art." Mrs. Barsaloux sat in the middle of her taxi seat all the way home, and saw neither street, edifice, nor human being. She was looking back into her own busy, confused, and frustrated life, and was remembering certain things which she had believed were buried deep. Her heart misgave her horribly. Yet to hand over this bright singing bird, so exquisite, so rare, so fitted for purposes of exposition, to the keeping of a mere male being of unfortunate contiguity, to permit him to carry her into the seclusion of an ordinary home to wait on him and regulate her life according to his whim, was really too fantastic for consideration. So she put her memories and her tendernesses out of sight and walked up the stairs with purpose in her tread. * * * * * She meant to "have it out" with the girl, who was, she believed, reasonable enough after all. "She's been without her mother for so long," she mused, "that it's no wonder she's lacking in self-control. I must have the firmness that a mother would have toward her. It would be the height of cruelty to let her have her own way in this." If the two could have met at that moment, it would have changed the course of both their lives. But a trifle had intervened. Marna Cartan had gone walking; and she never came back. Only, the next day, radiantly beautiful, with fresh flowers in her hands, Marna Fitzgerald came running in begging to be forgiven. She tried to carry the situation with her impetuosity. She was laughing, crying, pleading. She got close to her old friend as if she would enwrap her in her influence. She had the veritable aspect of the bride. Whatever others might think regarding her lost career, it was evident that she believed the great hour had just struck for her. Her husband was with her. "Haven't you any apology to make, sir?" poor Mrs. Barsaloux cried to him. He looked matter-of-fact, she thought, and as if he ought to be able to take a reasonable view of things. But she had misjudged. Perhaps it was his plain, everyday, commercial garments which deceived her and made her think him open to week-day arguments; for at that moment he was really a knight of romance, and at Mrs. Barsaloux's question his eyes gleamed with unsuspected fires. "Who could be so foolish as to apologize for happiness like ours?" he demanded. "Aren't you going to forgive us, dear?" pleaded Marna. But Mrs. Barsaloux couldn't quite stand that. "You sound like an old English comedy, Marna," she said impatiently. "You're of age; I'm no relation to you; you've a perfect right to be married. Better take advantage of being here to pack your things. You'll need them." "You mean that I'm not expected to come here again, _tante_?" "I shall sail for France in a week," said Mrs. Barsaloux wearily. "For France, _tante_? When did you decide?" "This minute," said the lady, and gave the married lovers to understand that the interview was at an end. Marna went weeping down the street, holding on to her George's arm. "If she'd been Irish, she'd have cursed me," she sobbed, "and then I'd have had something to go on, so to speak. Perhaps I could have got her to take it off me in time. But what are you going to do with a snubbing like that?" "Oh, leave it for the Arctic explorers to explain. They're used to being in below-zero temperature," George said with a troubled laugh. "I'm sure I can't waste any time thinking about a woman who could stand out against you, Marna, the way you are this day, and the way you're looking." "But, George, she thinks I'm a monster." "Then there's something wrong with her zoology. You're an--" "Don't call me an angel, dear, whatever you do! There are some things I hate to be called--they're so insipid. If any one called me an angel I'd know he didn't appreciate me. Come, let's go to Kate's. She's my court of last appeal. If Kate can't forgive me, I'll know I've done wrong." * * * * * Kate was never to forget that night. She had come in from a day of difficult and sordid work. For once, the purpose back of all her toil among the people there in the great mill town was lost sight of in the sheer repulsiveness of the tasks she had had to perform. The pathos of their temptations, the terrific disadvantages under which they labored, their gray tragedies, had some way lost their import. She was merely a dreadfully fagged woman, disgusted with evil, with dirt and poverty. She was at outs with her world and impatient with the suffering involved in the mere living of life. Moreover, when she had come into the house, she had found it dark as usual. The furnace was down, and her own room was cold. But she had set her teeth together, determined not to give way to depression, and had made her rather severe toilet for dinner when word was brought to her by the children's nurse that Dr. and Mrs. Fitzgerald desired to see her. For a moment she could not comprehend what that might mean; then the truth assailed her, took her by the hand, and ran her down the stairs into Mama's arms. "But it's outrageous," she cried, hugging Marna to her. "How could you be so willful?" "It's glorious," retorted Marna. "And if I ever was going to be willful, now's the time." "Right you are," broke in George. "What does Stevenson say about that? 'Youth is the time to be up and doing.' You're not going to be severe with us, Miss Barrington? We've been counting on you." "Have you?" inquired Kate, putting Marna aside and taking her husband by the hand. "Well, you are your own justification, you two. But haven't you been ungrateful?" Marna startled her by a bit of Dionysian philosophy. "Is it ungrateful to be happy?" she demanded. "Would anybody have been in the right who asked us to be unhappy? Why don't you call us brave? Do you imagine it isn't difficult to have people we love disapproving of us? But you know yourself, Kate, if we'd waited forty-eight hours, I'd have been dragged off to live with my career." She laughed brightly, sinking back in her chair and throwing wide her coat. Kate looked at her appraisingly, and warmed in the doing of it. "You don't look as if you were devoted to a career, she admitted. "Oh," sighed Fitzgerald, "I only just barely got her in time!" "And now what do you propose doing?" "Why, to-morrow we shall look for a place to live--for a home." "Do you mean a flat?" asked Kate with a flick of satire. "A flat, or anything. It doesn't matter much what." "Or where?" "It will be on the West Side," said the matter-of-fact Fitzgerald. "And who'll keep house for you? Must you find servants?" "Why, Kate, we're dreadfully poor," cried Marna excitedly, as if poverty were a mere adventure. "Didn't you know that? I shall do my own work." "Oh, we've both got to work," added Fitzgerald. He didn't say he was sorry Marna had to slave with her little white hands, or that he realized that he was doing a bold--perhaps an impious--thing in snatching a woman from her service to art to go into service for him. Evidently he didn't think that way. Neither minded any sacrifice apparently. The whole of it was, they were together. Suddenly, they seemed to forget Kate. They stood gazing at each other as if their sense of possession overwhelmed them. Kate felt something like angry resentment stir in her. How dared they, when she was so alone, so weary, so homeless? "Will you stay to dinner with me?" she asked with something like asperity. "To dinner?" they murmured in vague chorus. "No, thanks." "But where do you intend to have dinner?" "We--we haven't thought," confessed Marna. "Oh, anywhere," declared Fitzgerald. Marna rose and her husband buttoned her coat about her. They smiled at Kate seraphically, and she saw that they wanted to be alone, and that it made little difference to them whether they were sitting in a warm room or walking the windy streets. She kissed them both, with tears, and said:-- "God bless you." That seemed to be what they wanted. They longed to be blessed. "That's what Aunt Dennison said," smiled Fitzgerald. Then Kate realized that now the exotic Marna would be calling the completely domesticated Mrs. Dennison "aunt." But Marna looked as if she liked that, too. It was their hour for liking everything. As Kate opened the outer door for them, the blast struck through her, but the lovers, laughing, ran down the stairs together. They were, in their way, outcasts; they were poor; the future might hold bitter disillusion. But now, borne by the sharp wind, their laughter drifted back like a song. Kate wrapped her old coat about her and made her solitary way to Mrs. Dennison's depressed Caravansary. _ |
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