A Woman Ventures: A Novel — David Graham Phillips

EMILY.

A WOMAN
VENTURES

A NOVEL

BY
DAVID GRAHAM PHILLIPS

AUTHOR OF
THE FASHIONABLE ADVENTURES OF
JOSHUA CRAIG, THE HUSBAND’S STORY, ETC.

WITH FRONTISPIECE BY
WILLIAM JAMES HURLBUT

GROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS : : NEW YORK

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER PAGE

I. THE SHIPWRECK 1

II. THE DESERT ISLAND 8

III. SAIL--HO! 16

IV. A BLACK FLAG 23

V. THE PENITENT PIRATE 31

VI. A CHANGED CRUSOE 39

VII. BACK TO THE MAINLAND 45

VIII. AMONG A STRANGE PEOPLE 57

IX. AN ORCHID HUNTER 67

X. FURTHER EXPLORATION 79

XI. SEEN FROM A BARRICADED WINDOW 93

XII. A RISE AND A FALL 101

XIII. A COMPROMISE WITH CONVENTIONALITY 112

XIV. “EVERYTHING AWAITS MADAME” 120

XV. A FLICKERING FIRE 126

XVI. EMBERS 138

XVII. ASHES 152

XVIII. “THE REAL TRAGEDY OF LIFE” 167

XIX. EMILY REFUSES CONSOLATION 176

XX. BACHELOR GIRLS 185

XXI. A “MARRIED MAN” 199

XXII. A PRECIPICE 213

XXIII. A “BETTER SELF” 225

XXIV. TO THE TEST 238

XXV. MR. GAMMELL PRESUMES 248

XXVI. THE TRUTH ABOUT A ROMANCE 257

XXVII. “IN MANY MOODS” 269

XXVIII. A FORCED ADVANCE 278

XXIX. A MAN AND A “PAST” 288

XXX. TWO AND A TRIUMPH 299

XXXI. WHERE PAIN IS PLEASURE 308

XXXII. THE HIGHWAY OF HAPPINESS 313

XXXIII. LIGHT 324

A Woman Ventures.

CHAPTER I.

THE SHIPWRECK.

WENTWORTH Bromfield was mourned by his widow and daughter with a depth that would have amazed him.

For twenty-one years he had been an assistant secretary in the Department of State at Washington--a rather conspicuous position, with a salary of four thousand a year. Influential relatives representing Massachusetts in the House or in the Senate, and often in both, had enabled him to persist through changes of administration and of party control, and to prevail against the “pull” of many an unplaced patriot. Perhaps he might have been a person of consequence had he exercised his talents in some less insidiously lazy occupation. He had begun well at the law; but in return for valuable local services to the party, he got the offer of this political office, and, in what he came to regard as a fatal moment, he accepted it. His wife--he had just married--said that he was “going in for a diplomatic career.” He faintly hoped so himself, but the warnings of his common sense were soon verified. “Diplomatic career” proved to be a sonorous name for a decent burial of energy and prospects.

He had drawn his salary year after year. He had gone languidly through his brief daily routine at the Department. He had been mildly fluttered at each Presidential election, and again after each inauguration. He had indulged in futile impulses to self-resurrection, in severe attacks of despondency. Then, at thirty-seven, he had grasped the truth--that he would remain an assistant secretary to the end of his days. Thenceforth aspirations and depressions had ceased, and his life had set to a cynical sourness. He read, he sneered, he ate, and slept.

The Bromfields had a small additional income--Mrs. Bromfield’s twelve hundred a year from her father’s estate. This was most important, as it represented a margin above comfort and necessity, a margin for luxury and for temptation to extravagance. Mr. Bromfield was fond of good dinners and good wines, and he could not enjoy them at the expense of his friends without an occasional return. Mrs. Bromfield had been an invalid after the birth of Emily, long enough to form the habit of invalidism. After Emily passed the period when dress is not a serious item, they went ever more deeply into debt.

While Mrs. Bromfield’s craze for doctors and drugs was in one view as much an extravagance as Mr. Bromfield’s club, in another view it was a valuable economy. It made entertaining impossible; it enabled Emily to go everywhere without the necessity for return hospitalities, and to “keep up appearances” generally. Many of their friends gave Mrs. Bromfield undeserved credit for shrewdness and calculation in her hypochondria.

Emily had admirers, and, in her first season, one fairly good chance to marry. The matchmakers who were interested in her--“for her mother’s sake,” they said, but in fact from the matchmaking mania,--were exasperated by her refusal. They remonstrated with her mother in vain.

“I know, I know,” sighed Mrs. Bromfield. “But what can I do? Emily is so headstrong and I am in such feeble health. I am forbidden the agitation of a discussion. I’ve told Emily that a girl without money, and with nothing but family, must be careful. But she won’t listen to me.”

Mrs. Ainslie, the most genuinely friendly of all the women who insured their own welcome by chaperoning a clever, pretty, popular girl, pressed the matter upon Emily with what seemed to her an impertinence to be resented.

“Don’t be offended, child,” said Mrs. Ainslie, replying to Emily’s haughty coldness. “You ought to thank me. I only hope you will never regret it. A girl without a dot can’t afford to trifle. A second season is dangerous, especially here in Washington, where they bring the babies out of the nursery to marry them off.”

“Why, you yourself used to call Bob Fulton one of nature’s poor jokes,” Emily retorted. “You overlooked these wonderful good qualities in him until he began to annoy me.”

“Sarcasm does not change the facts.” Mrs. Ainslie was irritated in her even-tempered, indifferent fashion. “You think you’ll wait and look about you. But let me tell you, my dear, precious few girls, even the most eligible of them, have more than one really good chance to marry. Oh, I know what they say. But they exaggerate flirtations into proposals. This business--yes, business--of marrying isn’t so serious a matter with the men as it is with us. And we can’t hunt; we must sit and wait. In this day the stupidest men are crafty enough to see through the subtlest kind of stalking.”

Emily had no reply. She could think of no arguments except those of the heart. And she felt that it would be ridiculous to bring them into the battering and bruising of this discussion.

It was in May that she refused her “good chance.” In June her father fell sick. In mid-July they buried him and drove back from the cemetery to face ruin.

Ruin, in domestic finance, has meanings that range from the borderland of comedy to the blackness beyond tragedy.

The tenement family, thrust into the street and stripped of their goods for non-payment of rent, find in ruin an old acquaintance. They take a certain pleasure in the noise and confusion which their uproarious bewailing and beratings create throughout the neighbourhood. They enjoy the passers-by pausing to pity them, a ragged and squalid group, homeless on the curb. They have been ruined many times, will be ruined many times. They are sustained by the knowledge that there are other tenements, other “easy-payment” merchants. A few hours, a day or two at most, and they are completely reëstablished and are busy making new friends among their new neighbours, exchanging reminiscences of misfortune and rumours of ideal “steady jobs.”

The rich family suddenly ruined has greater shock and sorrow. But usually there are breaks in the fall. A son or a daughter has married well; the head of the family gets business opportunities through rich friends; there is wreckage enough to build up a certain comfort, to make the descent into poverty gradual, almost gentle.

But to such people as the Bromfields the word ruin meant--ruin. They had not had enough to lose to make their catastrophe seem important to others; indeed, the fact that a little was saved made their friends feel like congratulating them. But the ruin was none the less thorough. They were shorn of all their best belongings--all the luxury that was through habit necessity. They must give up the comfortable house in Connecticut Avenue, where they had lived for twenty years. They must leave their associations, their friends. They must go to a New England factory village. And there they would have a tiny income, to be increased only by the exertions of two women, one a helpless hypochondriac, both ignorant of anything for which any one would give pay. And this cataclysm was wrought within a week.

“Fate will surely strike the finishing blow,” thought Emily, as she wandered drearily through the dismantling house. “We shall certainly lose the little we have left.” And this spectre haunted her wakeful nights for weeks.

Mr. Bromfield was not a “family man.” He had left his wife and home first to the neglect of servants, and afterward to the care of his daughter. As Emily grew older and able to judge his life-failure, his vanity, his selfishness--the weaknesses of which he was keenly conscious, he saw or fancied he saw in her clear eyes a look that irritated him against himself, against her, and against his home. He was there so rarely that the women never took him into account. Yet instead of bearing his death with that resigned fortitude which usually characterises the practical, self-absorbed human race in its dealings with the inevitable, they mourned him day and night.

After one of his visits of business and consolation, General Ainslie returned home with tears in his eyes.

“It is wonderful, wonderful!” he said in his “sentimental” voice--a tone which his wife understood and prepared to combat. She liked his sentimental side, but she had only too good reason to deplore its influence upon his judgment.

“What now?” she inquired.

“I’ve been to see Wentworth’s widow and daughter. It was most touching, Abigail. He always neglected them, yet they mourn him in a way that a better man might envy.”

“Mourn him? Why, he was never at home. They hardly knew him.”

“Yet I have never seen such grief.”

“Grief? Of course. But not for him. They don’t miss him; they miss his salary--his four thousand a year. And that’s the kind of grief you can’t soothe. The real house of mourning is the house that’s lost its breadwinner.”

General Ainslie looked uncomfortable.

“Do you remember that Chinese funeral we saw at Pekin, George?” his wife continued. “Do you remember the widows in covered cages dragging along behind the corpse--and the big fellow with the prod walking behind each cage? And whenever the widows stopped howling, don’t you remember how those prods were worked until the response from inside was satisfactory?”

“Yes, but--really, I must say, Abbie----”

“Well, George--poverty is the prod. No wonder they mourn Wentworth.”

General Ainslie looked foolish. “I guess I won’t confess,” he said to himself, “that it was this afternoon I told the Bromfields they had only five hundred a year and the house in Stoughton. It would encourage her in her cynicism.”

CHAPTER II.

THE DESERT ISLAND.

THREE months later--August, September, and October, the months of Stoughton’s glory--gave Emily Bromfield a minute acquaintance with all that lay within her new horizon. She was as familiar with Stoughton as Crusoe with his island--and was in a Crusoe-like state of depression. She thought she had found the lowest despond of which human nature is capable on the day she saw the top of the Washington monument disappear, saw the last of the city of her enjoyments and her hopes. But now she dropped to a still lower depth--that depth in which the heart becomes a source of physical discomfort, the appetite fails, the brain sinks into a stupor and the health begins to decline.

“Don’t be so blue, Emmy,” Mrs. Ainslie had said at the station as they were leaving Washington. “Nothing is as bad as it seems in advance. Even Stoughton will have its consolations--though I must confess I can’t think what they could be at this distance.”

But the proverb was wrong and Stoughton as a reality was worse than Stoughton as a foreboding.

At first Emily was occupied in arranging their new home--creeper-clad, broad of veranda and viewing a long sloping lawn where the sun and the moon traced the shadows of century-old trees. She began to think that Stoughton was not so bad after all. The “best people” had called and had made a good impression. Her mother had for the moment lifted herself out of peevish and tearful grief, and had ceased giving double weight to her daughter’s oppressive thoughts by speaking them. But illusion and delusion departed with the departing sense of novelty.

Nowhere does nature do a kindlier summer work than in Stoughton. In winter the trees and gardens and lawns, worse than naked with their rustling or crumbling reminders of past glory, expose the prim rows of prim houses and the stiff and dull life that dozes behind their walls. In winter no one could be deceived as to what living in Stoughton meant--living in it in the sense of being forced there from a city, forced to remain permanently.

But in summer, nature charitably lends Stoughton a corner of the gorgeous garment with which she adorns its country. The sun dries the muddy streets and walks, and the town slumbers in comfort under huge trees, whose leaves quiver with what seems to be the gentle joy of a quiet life. The boughs and the creepers conspire to transform hideous little houses into crystallised songs of comfort and content. The lawns lie soft and green and restful. The gardens dance in the homely beauty of lilac and hollyhock and wild rose. Those who then come from the city to Stoughton sigh at the contrast of this poetry with the harsh prose of city life. They wonder at the sombre faces of the old inhabitants, at the dumb and stolid expression of youth, at the fierce discontent which smoulders in the eyes of a few.

But if they stay they do not wonder long. For the town in the bare winter is the real town the year round. The town of summer, tricked out in nature’s borrowed finery, is no more changed than was the jackdaw by his stolen peacock plumes. The smile, the gaiety, is on the surface. The prim, solemn old heart of Stoughton is as unmoved as when the frost is biting it.

In the first days of November Emily Bromfield, walking through the wretched streets under bare black boughs and a gray sky, had the full bitterness of her castaway life forced upon her. She felt as if she were suffocating.

She had been used to the gayest and freest society in America. Here, to talk as she had been used to talking and to hearing others talk, would have produced scandal or stupefaction. To act as she and her friends acted in Washington, would have set the preachers to preaching against her. There was no one with whom she could get into touch. She had instantly seen that the young men were not worth her while. The young women, she felt, would meet her advances only in the hope of getting the materials for envious gossip about her.

“It will be years,” she said to herself, “before I shall be able to narrow and slacken myself to fit this place. And why should I? Of what use would life be?”

She soon felt how deeply Stoughton disapproved of her, chiefly, as she thought, because she did not conceal her resentment against its prying and peeping inquiry and its narrow judgments. She was convinced that but for her bicycle and her books she would go mad. Her ever-present idea, conscious or sub-conscious, was, “How get away from Stoughton?” A hundred times a day she repeated to herself, or aloud in the loneliness of her room, “How? how? how?” sometimes in a frenzy; again, stupidly, as if “how” were a word of a complex and difficult meaning which she could not grasp.

But there was never any answer.

She had formerly wished at times that she were a man. Now, she wished it hourly. That seemed the only solution of the problem of her life--that, or marriage. And she felt she might as hopefully wish the one as the other.

Year by year, with a patience as slow and persevering as that of a colony of coral insects, Stoughton developed a small number of youth of both sexes. Year by year the railroads robbed her of her best young men, leaving behind only such as were stupid or sluggard. Year by year the young women found themselves a twelvemonth nearer the fate of the leaves which the frost fails to cut off and disintegrate. For a few there was the alternative of marrying the blighted young men--a desperate adventure in the exchange of single for double or multiple burdens.

Some of the young women rushed about New England, visiting its towns, and finding each town a reproduction of Stoughton. Some went to the cities a visiting, and returned home dazed and baffled. A few bettered themselves in their quest; but more only increased their discontent, or, marrying, regretted the ills they had fled. Those who married away from home about balanced those who were deprived of opportunities to marry, by the girl visitors from other towns, who caught with their new faces and new man-catching tricks the Stoughton eligible-ineligibles.

At twenty a Stoughton girl began to be anxious. At twenty-five, the sickening doubt shot its anguish into her soul. At thirty came despair; and rarely, indeed, did despair leave. It was fluttered sometimes, or pretended to be; but, after a few feeble flappings, it roosted again. In Stoughton “society” the old maids outnumbered the married women.

Clearly, there was no chance to marry. Emily might have overcome the timidity of such young men as there were, and might have married almost any one of them. But her end would have been more remote than ever. It was not marriage in itself that she sought, but release from Stoughton. And none of these young men was able to make a living away from Stoughton, even should she marry him and succeed in getting him away.

She revolved the idea of visiting her friends in Washington. But there poverty barred the way. She had never had so very many clothes. Now, she could afford only the simplest and cheapest. She looked over what she had brought with her from Washington. Each bit of finery reminded her of pleasures, keen when she enjoyed them, cruelly keen in memory. The gowns were of a kind that would have made Stoughton open its sleepy eyes, but they would not do for Washington again.

The people she knew there were self-absorbed, inclined to snobbishness, to patronising contemptuously those of their own set who were overtaken by misfortunes and could not keep the pace. They tolerated these reminders of the less luxurious and less fortunate phases of life, but--well, toleration was not a virtue which Emily Bromfield cared to have exercised toward herself. She could hear Mrs. Ainslie or Mrs. Chesterton or Mrs. Connors-Smith whispering: “Yes--the poor dear--it’s so sad. I really had to take pity on her. No--not a penny--I even had to send her the railway fares. But I felt it was a duty people in our position owe.”

And so her prison had no door.

Emily kept her thoughts to herself. Her mother was almost as content as she had been in Washington. Did she not still have her diseases? Were there not doctors and drug-shops? Was there not a circulating library, mostly light literature of her favourite innocuous kind? And did not the old women who called listen far more patiently than her Washington friends to tedious recitals of symptoms and of the plots and scenes of novels?

Emily could keep to her room or ride about the country on her bicycle. She at least had the freedom of her prison, and was not disturbed in her companionship with solitude. With the bad weather, she hid in her room more and more. She would sit there hours on hours in the same position, staring out of the window, thinking the same thoughts over and over again, and finding fresh springs of unhappiness in them each time.

Occasionally she gave way to storms of grief.

The day she looked over her dresses under the stimulus of the idea of visiting Washington was one of her worst days. As she stood with her finery about her and a half-hope in her heart, she recalled her Washington life--her school days, her first season, her flirtations, the confident, arrogant way in which she had looked forward on life. Then came the thought that all was over, that she could not go to Washington, that she must stay in Stoughton--on and on and on----

She grew hot and cold by turns, sank to the floor, buried her face in the heap of cloth and lace and silk. If the good people of Stoughton had peeped at her they would have thought her possessed of an evil spirit. She gnashed her teeth and tore at the garments, her slight frame shaking with sobs of impotent rage and despair.

When she came to herself and went downstairs, pale and calm and cold, her mother was talking with a woman who had come in to gossip. She took up a book and was gone.

“Your daughter is not looking well,” said Mrs. Alcott, sourly resentful of Emily’s courteous frigidity.

“Poor child!” said Mrs. Bromfield, “she takes her father’s death so to heart.”

CHAPTER III.

SAIL--HO!

WINTER’S swoop upon Stoughton that year was early and savage. In her desperate loneliness and boredom Emily began occasionally to indulge in the main distraction of Stoughton--church. On a Sunday late in March she went for the first time since Christmas. Her mother had succumbed to the drugs and had been really ill, so ill that Emily did not dare let herself admit the dread of desolation which menaced. But, the crisis past, Mrs. Bromfield had rapidly returned to her normal state. The peril of death cowed or dignified her into silence. When she again took up her complainings, her daughter was reassured.

As she walked the half mile to the little church, Emily was in better spirits than at any time since she had come to Stoughton. The reaction from her fears had given her natural spirits of youth their first chance to assert themselves. She found herself hopeful for no reason, cheerful not because of benefits received or expected, but because of calamities averted. “I might be so much worse off,” she was thinking. “There is mother, and there is the income. I feel almost rich--and a little ungrateful. I’m in quite a church-going mood.”

The walk through the cold air did her good, and as she went up the aisle her usually pale face was delicately flushed and she was carrying her slender but very womanly figure with that erectness and elasticity which made its charm in the days when people were in the habit of discussing her prospects as based upon her title to beauty. Her black dress and small black hat brought out the finest effects of her red-brown hair and violet eyes and rosy white skin. She was, above all, most distinguished looking--in strong contrast to the stupid faces and ill-carried forms in “Sunday best.”

Her coming caused a stir--that rustling and creaking of garments feminine and starched, which in the small town church always arouses the dozers for something uncommon. She faintly smiled a greeting to Mrs. Cockburn as she entered the pew where that old lady was sitting. She had just raised her head from the appearance of prayer, when Mrs. Cockburn whispered:

“Have you seen young Mr. Wayland?”

Emily could not remember that she had heard of him. But Mrs. Cockburn’s agitation demanded a show of interest, so she whispered:

“No--where is he?”

She would have said, “Who is he?” but that would have called for a long explanation. And, as Mrs. Cockburn had a wide space between her upper front teeth, every time she whispered the letter =s= the congregation rustled and the minister was disconcerted.

“There,” whispered Mrs. Cockburn. “Straight across--don’t look now, for he’s looking at us--straight across to the other side two pews forward.”

When they rose for the hymn, Emily glanced and straightway saw the cause of Mrs. Cockburn’s excitement. He was a commonplace-looking young man with a heavy moustache. His hair was parted in the middle and brushed back carefully and smoothly. He was dressed like a city man, as distinguished from the Stoughton man who, little as he owed to nature, owed even less to art as exploited by the Stoughton tailors.

Young Mr. Wayland would not have attracted Emily’s attention in a city because he was in no way remarkable. But in Stoughton he seemed to her somewhat as an angel might seem to a Peri wandering in outer darkness. When she discovered him looking at her a few moments later, and looking with polite but interested directness, she felt herself colouring. She also felt pleased--and hopeful in that fantastic way in which the desperate dream of desperate chances.

After the service she stood talking to Mrs. Cockburn, affecting an unprecedented interest in a woman whom she liked as little--if as much--as any in Stoughton. Her back was toward the aisle but she felt her “sail-ho,” coming.

“He’s on his way to us,” said Mrs. Cockburn hoarsely--she had been paying no attention to what Emily had been saying to her, or to her own answers. She now pushed eagerly past Emily to greet the young man at the door of the pew.

“Why, I’m so glad to see you again, Mr. Wayland,” she said with a cordiality that verged on hysteria. “It has been a long time. I’m afraid you’ve forgotten an old woman like me.”

“No, indeed, Mrs. Cockburn,” replied Wayland, who had just provided himself with her name. “It’s been only four years, and you’ve not changed.”

Mrs. Cockburn saw his eyes turn toward Emily and introduced him. Emily was not blushing now, or apparently interested. She seemed to be simply waiting for her path to be cleared.

“I felt certain it was you,” began young Wayland, a little embarrassed. He made a gesture as if to unbutton his long coat and take something from his inside pocket, then seemed to change his mind. “I’ve a note of introduction to you, that is to your mother--Mrs. Ainslie, you know. But I heard that your mother was ill. And I hesitated about coming.”

“Mother is much better.” Emily was friendly, but not effusive. “I am sure she--both of us--will be glad to see a friend of Mrs. Ainslie.”

She smiled, shook hands with him, gave him a fascinating little nod, submitted to a kiss on the cheek from Mrs. Cockburn and went swiftly and gracefully down the aisle. Wayland looked after her with admiration. He had been in Stoughton three weeks and was profoundly bored.

Mrs. Cockburn was also looking after her, but disapprovingly. “A nice young woman in some ways,” she said. “But she carries her head too high for the plain people here.”

“She’s had a good deal of trouble, I’ve heard,” Wayland answered, not committing himself.

The next morning Mrs. Bromfield got a letter from Mrs. Ainslie. It was of unusual length for Mrs. Ainslie, who was a bird-of-passage that rarely paused long enough for extended communication.

“I never could get used to that big, angular handwriting,” said Mrs. Bromfield to her daughter. “Won’t you read it to me, please?”

Emily began at “My Dear Frances” and read steadily through, finding in the postscript four sentences which should have begun the letter of so worldly-wise a woman: “Don’t on any account let Emily see this. You know how she acted about Bob Fulton. She ought to have learned better by this time, but I don’t trust her. Be careful what you say to her.”

Mrs. Ainslie was urging the opportunity offered by the sojourn of young Wayland in Stoughton. “Emily will have a clear field,” she wrote. “He’s got money in his own right--millions when his father dies--and he’s a good deal of a fool--dissipated, I hear, but in a prudent, business-like way. It’s Emily’s chance for a resurrection.”

Mrs. Bromfield was made speechless by the postscript. Emily sat silent, looking at the letter on the table before her.

“Don’t be prejudiced against him, dear,” pleaded her mother.

“I imagine it doesn’t matter in the least what I think of him,” Emily replied. She rose and left the room, sending back from the doorway a short, queer laugh that made her mother feel how shut out she was from what was going on in her daughter’s mind.

If she could have seen into that small, ethereal-looking head she would have been astounded at the thoughts boiling there. Emily had been bred in an atmosphere of mercenary or, rather, “practical” ideas. But she was also a woman of sound and independent mind, in the habit of thinking for herself, and with strong mental and physical self-respect. She would have hesitated to marry unwisely for love. But she had been far from that state of self-degradation in which a young woman deliberately and consciously closes her heart, locks the door and flings the key away. Now however, the deepest instinct of the human animal--the instinct of self-preservation--was aroused in her. It seemed to her that an imperative command had issued from that instinct--a command at any cost to flee the living death of Stoughton.

* * * * *

That same afternoon Mrs. Bromfield learned--without having to ask a question--all that Stoughton knew about the Waylands: They were the pride of the town and also its chief irritation. It gloried in them because it believed that the report of their millions was as clamourous throughout the nation as in its own ears. It was exasperated against them, because it believed that they ought to live in Stoughton and be content with a life which it thought, or thought it thought, desirable above life in any other place whatsoever.

So as long as Mrs. Wayland lived, the family had spent at least half of each year there; and Stoughton, satisfied on that point, disliked them for other reasons, first of all for being richer than any one else. When Mrs. Wayland died, leaving an almost grown daughter and a son just going into trousers, General Wayland had put the girl in school at Dobbs Ferry-on-the-Hudson, the boy in Groton, had closed the house and made New York his residence. The girl died two years after the death of her mother. The boy went from Groton to Harvard, from Harvard to his father’s business--the Cotton Cloth Trust. The Wayland homestead, the most considerable in Stoughton with its two wings built to the original square house, with its conservatories and its stables, was opened for but a few weeks each winter. And then it was opened only in part--to receive the General on his annual business visit to the factories of the Stoughton Cotton Mills Company, the largest group in the “combine.” Sometimes he brought Edgar. But Edgar gave the young women of Stoughton no opportunities to ensnare him. He kept to his work and departed at the earliest possible moment. This year he had come alone, as his father had now put him in charge of their Stoughton interests.

CHAPTER IV.

A BLACK FLAG.

UNTIL Wayland saw Emily at church he had no intention to seize the opportunity which Mrs. Ainslie’s disinterested kindliness had made for him. Ever since he left the restraint of the “prep.” school for Harvard, with a liberal allowance and absolute freedom, women had been an important factor in his life; and they were still second only to money-making. But not such women as Emily Bromfield.

In theory he had the severest ideas of woman. Practically, his conception of woman’s sphere was not companionship or love or the family, not either mental or sentimental, but frankly physical. And something in that element in Emily’s personality--perhaps the warmth of her beauty of form in contrast to the coldness of her beauty of face--made it impossible for this indulgent and self-indulgent young man to refrain from seeking her out. He was close with his money in every way except where his personal comfort or amusement was concerned. There he was generous to prodigality. And when he learned how poor the Bromfields were and how fiercely discontented Emily was in her Stoughton prison-cell, he decided that the only factor in the calculation was whether or not on better acquaintance his first up-flaring would persist.

In one respect Washington society is unequalled. Nowhere else is a girl able so quickly and at so early an age to get so complete an equipment of worldly knowledge. Emily’s three years under the tutelage of cynical Mrs. Ainslie had made her nearly as capable to see through men as are acute married women. Following the Washington custom of her day, she had gone about with men almost as freely as do the girls of a Western town. And the men whom she had thus intimately known were not innocent, idealising, deferential Western youths, but men of broad and unscrupulous worldliness. Many of them were young diplomats, far from home, without any sense of responsibility in respect of the women of the country in which they were sojourners of a day. They played the game of “man and woman” adroitly and boldly.

Emily understood Wayland only so far as the clean can from theoretical experience understand the unclean. Thus far she quickly penetrated into his intentions toward her and his ideas of her. He was the reverse of complex. He had not found it necessary to employ in these affairs the craft he was beginning to display in business, to the delight of his father. His crude and candid method of conquest had been successful hitherto. Failure in this instance seemed unlikely. And there were no male relatives who might bring him to an uncomfortable accounting.

Two weeks after he met Emily--weeks in which he had seen her several times--he went to her house for dinner. She had been advancing gradually, in strict accordance with her plan of campaign. Wayland had unwittingly disarmed himself and doubly armed her by giving undue weight to her appearance of extreme youth and golden inexperience, and by overestimating his own and his money’s fascinations. He had not a suspicion that there was design or even elaborate preparation in the vision which embarrassed and fired him as he entered the Bromfields’ parlour. She was in a simple black dinner gown, which displayed her arms and her rosy white shoulders. And she had a small head and a way of doing her hair that brought out the charm of every curve of her delicate face. Instead of looking cold this evening, she put into her look and smile a seeming of--well, more than mere liking, he thought.

It happened to be one of Mrs. Bromfield’s good days, so she rambled on, covering Wayland’s silence. Occasionally--not too often--Emily lifted her glance from her plate and gave the young man the full benefit of her deep, dark, violet eyes. When Mrs. Bromfield spoke apologisingly of the absence of wine, he was surprised to note that he had not missed it.

But after dinner, when he was alone in the sitting-room with Emily, he regretted that he had had nothing to drink. He could explain his timidity, his inability to get near the subject uppermost in his mind only on the ground that he had had no stimulus to his courage and his tongue. All that day he had been planning what he would say; yet as he went home in his automobile, upon careful review of all that had been said and done, he found that he had made no progress. The conversation had been general and not for an instant personal to her. The only personalities had been his own rather full account of himself, past, present and future--a rambling recital, the joint result of his nervousness and her encouragement.

“At least she understands that I don’t intend to marry,” he thought, remembering one part of the conversation.

“There’s nothing in marriage for me,” he had said, after a clumsy paving of the way.

“Of course not,” she had assented. “I never could understand how a young man, situated as you are, could be foolish enough to chain himself.”

And then, as he remembered with some satisfaction, she added the only remark she had made which threw any light upon her own feelings and ideas: “It would be as foolish for you to marry, as it would be for me to refuse a chance to get out of this dreadful place.”

As he reflected on this he had no suspicion of subtlety. It did not occur to him that she hardly deserved credit for frankly confessing what could not be successfully denied or concealed, or that she might have confessed in order to put him off his guard, to make him think her guilelessly straightforward.

A second and a third call, a drive and several long walks; still he had done nothing to further his scheme. He put off his return to New York, seeing her every day, each time in a fresh aspect of beauty, in a new mood of fascination. One night, a month after he met her at church, he found her alone on the wide piazza. She was in an evening dress, white, clinging close to her, following her every movement. He soon reached his limit of endurance.

“You are maddening,” he said abruptly, stretching out his arms to seize her. He thrust her wraps violently away from her throat and one shoulder. He was crushing her against his chest, was kissing her savagely.

She wrenched herself away from him, panting with anger, with repulsion. But he thought it was a return of his ardour, and she did not undeceive him. “You mustn’t!” she said. “You know that it is impossible. You must go. Good-night!”

She left him and he, after waiting uncertainly a few moments, went slowly down the drive, in a rage, but a rage in which anger and longing were curiously mingled. When he called the next day, she was “not at home.” When he called again she could not come down, she must stay beside her mother, who had had another attack, so the servant explained in a stammering, unconvincing manner. He wrote that he wished to see her to say good-bye as he was leaving the next day. Then he called and she came into the parlour--“just for an instant.” She was wearing a loose gown, open at the throat, with sleeves falling away from her arms. Her small feet were thrust into a pair of high-heeled red slippers and her stockings had openwork over the ankles. She seemed so worried about her mother that it was impossible for him to re-open the one subject and resume progress, as he had hoped to do. But it was not impossible for him to think. And Emily, anxiously watching him from behind her secure entrenchments, noted that he was thinking as she wished and hoped. His looks, his voice encouraged her to play her game, her only possible game, courageously to the last card.

“If he doesn’t come back,” she thought, “at least I’ve done my best. And I think he will come.”

She sent him away regretfully, but immediately, standing two steps up the stairway in a final effective pose. He set his teeth together and took the train for New York. There he outdid all his previous impulses of extravagant generosity with himself, but he could not drive her from his mind. Those who formerly amused him, now seemed vulgar, silly, and stale. They made her live the more vividly in his imagination. Business gave him no relief. At his office his mind wandered to her, and the memory of that stolen kiss made his nerves quiver and hot flushes course over and through him. At the end of three weeks, he returned to Stoughton. “I’ve let myself go crazy,” he thought, “I’ll see her again and convince myself that I’m a fool.”

As he neared her house, his mind became more at ease. When he rang the bell he was laughing at himself for having got into such a frenzy over “nothing but a woman like the rest of ’em.” But as soon as he saw her, he was drunk again.

“I love you,” he stammered. “I can’t do without you. Will you--will you marry me, Emily?”

There was no triumph either in her face or in her mind. She was hearing the hammer smash in the thick walls of her prison, but she shrank from the sound. As she looked at his commonplace, heavy-featured face; as she listened to his monotonous voice, with its hint of tyranny and temper; as she felt his greedy eyes and hot, trembling fingers;--a revulsion swept over her and left her sick with disgust--disgust for her despicable self, loathing for him and for his feeling for her--his “love.”

“How can I?” she thought, turning away to hide her expression from him. “How can I? And yet, how can I refuse?”

“I must have until--until this evening,” she said in a low voice and with an effort. “I--I thought you had gone--for good and all--and I tried to put you out of my thoughts.”

She was standing near him and he crushed her in his arms. “You must, you must,” he exclaimed. “I must have you.”

She let him kiss her once, then pushed him away, hiding her face in no mere pretence of modesty and maidenly repulsion. “This evening,” she said, almost flying from him.

She paused at the door of her mother’s sitting-room. From it came the odor of drugs, and in it were all the evidences of the tedious companionship of her poverty-stricken prison life--the invalid chair with its upholstery tattering; the worn carpet; the wall paper stained, and in one corner giving way because of a leak which they had no money to repair; the table with its litter of bottles, of drug-boxes, of patent-medicine advertisements and trashy novels; in the bed the hypochondriac herself, old, yellow, fat in an unhealthy way, with her empty, childish, peevish face.

Emily did not enter, but went on to her own room--bare, cheerless, proofs of poverty and impending rags and patches threatening to obtrude. She looked out through the trees at the glimpses of the town--every beat of the pulse of her youth was a sullen and hateful protest against it. Beyond were the tall chimneys of the mills, with the black clouds from them smutching the sky--there lived the work-people, the boredom of the town driving them to brutal dissipation.

“I must! I must!” she said, between her set teeth, then sank down in the window seat and buried her face in her arms.

That evening she accepted him, and the next morning her mother announced the engagement to the first caller.

CHAPTER V.

THE PENITENT PIRATE.

WAYLAND had the commercial instinct too strongly developed not to fear that he was paying an exorbitant price for a fancy which would probably be as passing as it was powerful. Whenever Emily was not before his eyes he was pushing the bill angrily aside. But in the stubbornness of self-indulgence he refused to permit himself to see that he was making a fool of himself. If she had not gauged him accurately, or, rather, if she had not mentally and visibly shrunk even from the contact with him necessary to shaking hands, he might quickly have come to his cool-blooded senses. But their engagement made no change in their relations. Her mother’s illness helped her to avoid seeing him for more than a few minutes at a time. Her affectation of an extreme of prudery--with inclination and policy reinforcing each the other--made her continue to keep herself as elusive, as tantalising to him as she had been at that dinner when he “fell head over heels in love--” so he described it to her. And he thoroughly approved of her primness. For, to him there were only two classes of women--good women, those who knew nothing; bad women, those who knew and, knowing, must of necessity feel and act as coarsely as himself. The most of the time which he believed she was devoting to her mother, she was passing in her room in arguing the two questions: “How can I give him up? How can I marry him?”

Her acute intelligence did not permit her to deceive herself. She knew with just what kind of man she was dealing, knew she would continue to loathe him after she had married him, knew her reason for marrying him was as base, if not baser, than his reason for marrying her. “He is at least a purchaser,” she said to herself contemptuously, “while I am merely the thing purchased.” And her conduct was condemned by her whole nature except the one potent instinct of feminine laziness. “If only I had been taught to work,” she thought “or taught not to look down upon work! Yet how could it be so low as this?”

She felt that she might not thus degrade herself if she had some one to consult, some one to encourage her to recover and retain her self-respect. But who was there? She laughed at the idea of consulting her mother--that never strong mind, now enfeebled to imbecility by drugs and novels. And even if she had had a capable mother, what would have been her advice? Would it not have been to be “sensible” and “practical” and not fling away a brilliant “chance”--wealth and distinction for herself, proper surroundings and education for the children that were sure to come? And would not that advice be sound?

Only arguments of “sentimentality,” of super-sensitiveness, appeared in opposition to the urgings of conventional everyday practice. And was not Stoughton worse than Wayland? Could it possibly be more provocative of all that was base in her to live with Stoughton than to live with Wayland? Wayland would be one of a great many elements in her environment after the few first weeks of marriage. If she accepted the alternative, it would be her whole environment, in all probability for the rest of her life.

A month after the announcement of the engagement, her mother sank into a stupor and, toward the end of the fifth day, died. Just as her father had been missed and mourned more than many a father who deserved and received love, so now her mother, never deserving nor trying to deserve love, was missed and mourned as are few mothers who have sacrificed everything to their children. This fretful, self-absorbed invalid was all that Emily had in the world.

Wayland was startled when Emily threw herself into his arms and clinging close to him sobbed and wept on his shoulder. Sorrow often quickens into sympathy the meanest natures. The bereaved are amazed to find the world so strangely gentle for the time. And Wayland for the moment was lifted above himself. There were tenderness, affection in his voice and in the clasp of his arms about her.

“I have no one, no one,” she moaned. “Oh, my good mother, my dear little mother! Ah, God, what shall I do?”

“We will bear it together, dear,” he whispered. “My dear, my beautiful girl.” And for the first time he genuinely respected a woman, felt the promptings of the honest instincts of manliness.

His change had a profound effect upon the young girl in her mood of loneliness and dependence. She reproached herself for having thought so ill of him, for having underrated his character. With quick generosity she was at the opposite extreme; she treated him with a friendliness which enabled him to see her as she really was--in all respects except the one where desperation was driving her to action abhorrent to her normal self.

As her sweetness and high-minded intelligence unfolded before his surprised eyes, he began to think of her as a human being instead of thinking only of the effect of her beauty upon his senses. He grew to like her, to regard her as an ideal woman for a wife. But--he did not want a wife. And as the new feeling developed, the old feeling died away.

Emily had gained a friend. But she had lost a lover.

Two weeks after her mother’s funeral, Wayland kissed her good-night as calmly as if he had been her brother. At the gate he paused and looked back at the house, already dark except in one second-story room, where Emily’s aunt was waiting up for her. “I am not worthy of her,” he said to himself. “I am not fit to marry her. I should be miserable trying to live up to such a woman. I must get out of it.”

But how? He pretended to himself that he was hesitating because of his regard for her and her need for him. In fact his hesitation arose from doubt about the way to escape from this most uncongenial atmosphere without betraying to her what a dishonourable creature he was. And the more he studied the difficulty, the more formidable it seemed. This however only increased his eagerness to escape, his alarm at the prospect of being tied for life to moral and mental superiority.

He hoped she would give him an excuse. But as she now liked him, she was the better able to conceal the fact that she did not love him; and had he been far less unskilled in reading feminine character, he would still have been deceived. Emily was deceiving herself--almost.

As soon as he felt that he could leave with decency, he told her he must go to New York. She had been noting that he no longer spoke of their marriage, no longer urged that it be hastened. But it occurred to her that he might be restrained by the fear of distressing her when her mother had been dead so short a time; and this seemed a satisfactory explanation. Three days after he reached New York he sent this letter--the result of an effort that half-filled the scrap-basket in a quiet corner of the writing-room of his club:

I have been thinking over our engagement and I am convinced that when you know my mind, you will wish it to come to an end. I am not worthy of you. You are mistaken in me. I could not make you happy. You are too far above me in every way. It would be spoiling your whole life to marry you under such false pretences. Looking back over our acquaintance, I am ashamed of the motives which led me to make this engagement. Forgive me for being so abrupt, but I think the truth is best.

“Pretty raw,” he thought, as he read it over. “But it’s the truth and the truth is best in this case. I can’t afford to trifle. And--what can she do?”

When Emily finished reading the letter, she was crushed. Her pride, her vanity, her future--all stabbed in the vitals. Just when she thought herself most secure, she was overthrown and trampled. She could see Stoughton gloating over her--who would have thought that Stoughton could ever reach and touch her? She could see herself pinioned there, or in some similar Castle Despair, for life.

To be outwitted by such a man--and how? She could not explain it. Her experience of ways masculine had not been intimate enough to give her a clue to the subtle cause of Wayland’s changed attitude. She paced her room in fury, denouncing him as a cur, a traitor, a despicable creature, too vile and low for adequate portrayal in any known medium of expression. She went over scheme after scheme for holding him to his promise, for bringing him back--some of them schemes which made her blush when she recalled them in after years. She wrote a score of letters--long, short; bitter, pleading; some appealing to his honour, some filled with hypocritical expressions of love and veiling a vague threat which she hoped might terrify him, though she knew it was meaningless. But she tore them up. And after tossing much and sleeping a little she sent this answer:

DEAR EDGAR:

Certainly, if you feel that way. But you mustn’t let any nervousness about the past interfere with our friendship. That has become very dear to me. The only ill luck I wish you is that you’ll have to come to Stoughton soon. I won’t ask you to write to me, because I know you’re not fond of writing letters--and nothing happens here that any one would care to hear about. My aunt is staying with me for a few months at least. Until I see you,

EMILY.

“It’s of no use to make a row,” she thought. “If anything can bring him back, certainly it is not tears or reproaches or threats. And how appeal to the honour of a man who has no honour?”

Her mind was clear enough, but her feelings were in a ferment. She knew that it was in some way her fault that she had lost him. “And I deserved to lose him,” she admitted. “But that doesn’t excuse him or help me.”

He answered promptly:

MY DEAR FRIEND:

How like you your letter was. If I did not know so well how unworthy of you I am, how I would plead for the honour of having such a woman as my wife. I wish I could look forward to seeing you soon--but I’m going abroad on Saturday and I shan’t return for some time. As soon as I do, I’ll let you know. It is good of you to offer me your friendship. I am proud to accept it. If you ever need a friend, you will find him in

Yours faithfully,

EDGAR WAYLAND.

The expression of Emily’s face was anything but good, it was the reverse of “lady-like,” as she read this death-warrant of her last hope. “The coward!” she exclaimed, and, as her eyes fell on the satirical formality, “Yours faithfully,” she uttered an ugly laugh which would have given a severe shock to Wayland’s new ideas of her.

“Fooled--jilted--left for dead,” she thought, despair closing in, thick and black. And she crawled into bed, to lie sleepless and tearless, her eyes burning.

CHAPTER VI.

A CHANGED CRUSOE.

IN the third night Emily had ten hours of the sleep of exhausted youth. She awoke in the mood of the brilliant July morning which was sending sunshine and song and the odour of honeysuckles through the rifts in the lattices of her shutters. She was restored to her normal self. She was able to examine her affairs calmly in the light of her keen and courageous mind.

Ever since she had been old enough to be of active use, she had had the training of responsibility--responsibility not only for herself, but also for her mother and the household. She had had the duties of both woman and man forced upon her and so had developed capacity and self-reliance. She had read and experienced and thought perhaps beyond the average for girls of her age and breeding. Undoubtedly she had read and thought more than most girls who are, or fancy they are, physically attractive. Her father’s caustic contempt for shallow culture, for ignorance thinly disguised by good manners, had been his one strong influence on her.

“All my own fault,” she was saying to herself now, as she lay propped on her elbow among her pillows. “It was a base plan, unworthy of me. I ought to be glad that the punishment was not worse. The only creditable thing about it is that I played the game so badly that I lost.” And then she smiled, wondering how much of her new virtue was real and how much was mere making the best of a disastrous defeat.

Why had she lost? What was the false move? She could not answer, but she felt that it was through ignorance of some trick which a worse woman would have known.

“Never again, never again,” she thought, “will I take that road. What I get I must get by direct means. Either I’m not crafty enough or not mean enough to win in the other way.”

She was singing as she went downstairs to join her aunt. The old woman, her father’s sister who had never married, was knitting in the shady corner of the front porch, screened from the sun by a great overhanging tree, and from the drive and the road beyond, by the curtain of honeysuckles and climbing roses. As Emily came into view, she dropped the knitting and looked at her with disapproval upon her thin old face.

“But why, auntie?” said the girl, answering the look. “I feel like singing. I feel so young and well and--hopeful. You don’t wish me to play the hypocrite and look glum and sad? Besides, the battle must begin soon, and good spirits may be half of it.”

Her aunt sighed and looked at her with the unoffending pity of sympathy. “Perhaps you’re right, Emmy,” she said. “God knows, life is cruel enough without our fighting to prolong its miseries. And it does seem as if you’d had more than your share of them thus far.” She was admiring her beautiful niece and thinking how ill that fragile fineness seemed fitted for the struggle which there seemed no way of averting. “You’re almost twenty-one,” she said aloud. “You ought to have had a good husband and everything you wanted by this time.”

Emily winced at this unconscious stab into the unhealed wound. “Isn’t there anything in life for a woman on her own account?” she asked impatiently. “Is her only hope through some man? Isn’t it possible for her to make her own happiness, work out her own salvation? Must she wait until a man condescends to ask her to marry him?”

“I’d like to say no,” replied her aunt, “but I can’t. As the world is made now, a woman’s happiness comes through home and children. And that means a husband. Even if her idea of happiness were not home and children, still she’s got to have a husband.”

“But why? Why do you say ‘as the world is made now?’ Aren’t there thousands, tens of thousands of women who make their own lives, working in all sorts of ways--from teaching school to practising medicine or law or writing or acting?”

“Yes--but they’re still only women. They may lie about it. But with a few exceptions, abnormal women, who are hardly women at all, they’re simply filling a gap in their lives--perhaps trying to find husbands in unusual ways. Everybody must have an object, to be in the least happy. And children is the object the world has fixed for us women. Whether we’re conscious of it or not, we pursue it. And if we’re thwarted in it, we’re--well, we’re not happy.”

The old woman was staring out sadly into space. The cheerfulness had faded from the girl’s face. But presently she shook her head defiantly and broke the silence.

“I refuse to believe it,” she said with energy. “Oh, I don’t deny that I feel just as you describe. And why shouldn’t I? Why shouldn’t we all? Aren’t we brought up that way? Are we ever taught anything else? It’s the way women have been trained from the beginning. But--that doesn’t make it so.”

“No, it doesn’t,” replied her aunt. “And probably it isn’t so. But don’t make the mistake, child, of thinking that the world is run on a basis of what’s so. It isn’t. It’s run on a basis of think-so and believe-so and hope-so.”

Emily stood up beside her aunt and looked out absently through the leaves. “I don’t care what any one says or what every one says,” she said. “I don’t say that I don’t want love and home and all that. I do want it. But I think I want it as a man wants it. I want it as my very own, not as the property of some man which he graciously or grudgingly permits me to share. And I purpose to try to make my own life. If I marry, it will be as a man marries--when I’m pleased and not before. No, don’t look frightened, auntie. I’m not going to do anything shocking. I understand that the game must be played according to the rules, or one is likely to be excluded.”