The moment when Sheila had that terrifying inward vision of her own inconsistencies marked the beginning of her self-consciousness. For a while this was acute and painful. She was always afraid of finding herself, quite unintentionally, involved in a labyrinth of untruth, and her conscience, which passionately rejected any dishonesty that it perceived, was continually occupied in analyzing her emotions and impulses, her most guileless thoughts and her simplest actions.
"I am naturally a liar," she told herself solemnly. "I must watch myself all the time—because I am naturally a liar!"
But she said nothing of her self-revelation and ensuing struggles to Mrs. Caldwell. It was a thing to be overcome in shame and silence, and alone, this innate wickedness of hers.
Her shame was indeed so genuine that she met Ted, for the first time after he had shown her failing to her, with deep reluctance. He must have been thinking of her awful tendency ever since they had parted—as she had been. And he could not possibly respect her! But to her amazement, he greeted her with his usual manner of untroubled good fellowship. Clearly, she had not sunk in his estimation. She was astounded, and shocked at him as well as at herself, until it occurred to her that he might have forgotten the matter altogether. This was incredible, but more honorably incredible than that he should remember and not care. And if it were the case, she must not take advantage of his forgetfulness; she must not unfairly keep his esteem.
"Ted," she said, with an effort worthy of a more saintly confessor, "Ted, I reckon I ought to remind you about the way I acted with Lisbeth."
"What about it? Did your grandmother scold you much?"
"Why, no. Don't you understand what I mean?" It was too painful to put her sin into words.
"Has Lisbeth been after you again?" But the question was obviously not one of sympathy, for Ted's voice was sharp now. At the mention of Lisbeth he had recalled his grievance.
"No," repeated Sheila. "I meant I ought to remind you about—me."
And as Ted stared at her with no gleam of comprehension in his eyes, she was forced to become explicit: "I mean—the way I let Lisbeth believe what wasn't so."
Ted looked at her speculatively for a moment, wondering if he had better rebuke her again for her folly, so that she should not commit it a second time. She would be capable of doing the whole thing over, under the impression that she was benefiting Lisbeth. She was so queer!
"You were very silly," he said finally.
"I was wicked!" she exclaimed in a fervor of repentance.
Ted continued to regard her with that speculative gaze. "Well, youarea queer one!" he ejaculated slowly.
Sheila flushed. She had abased herself in penitence, and he only thought her queer. Healwaysthought her queer! She turned on him with a flare of temper that burned up her humility so far as he was concerned:
"Howdareyou call me queer? Howdareyou call me silly? I hate you, Theodore Kent! I never want to see you again as long as I live! You're—you're an abomination in the eyes of the Lord!"
And with this scriptural anathema, plagiarized from the Presbyterian minister's latest sermon, she flung away from him in a fit of wrath that did much to restore her normal self-respect.
However, though she felt no further uneasiness in the presence of Ted—whom she forgave the next day with the readiness that is the virtue of a quick temper—she continued her vigil over herself until time softened her impression of her iniquity. And even then, when her self-criticism had relaxed, her consciousness of her individual temperament remained. She had discovered herself, and this self, like her shadow which she had discovered with wild excitement in her babyhood, would be her life companion. After she ceased to fear it, as a possible moral monster, she began to take a profound interest in it and its behavior.
"What will you be doing next?" she would inquire of it quaintly, "whatwillyou be doing next, Other-Sheila?"
She did in fact credit this newly realized self of hers with a very distinct and separate personality. All her caprices, her unexpected and unexplainable impulses, her mystic imaginings, she laid at its door, and in her fantastic name for it—"Other-Sheila"—she probably found the true name for something that the psychologists define far more clumsily.
But stung into sensitiveness by Ted's taunt about her queerness, she kept her discovery of Other-Sheila to herself. Not even to Mrs. Caldwell, who was a friend as well as a grandmother; not even to Peter, who was all the while feeding her eager young mind with food both wholesome and stimulating, and becoming, in his task, a comrade who rivalled Ted in her affections, did she confide the existence of this other self. With self-consciousness came the instinct of reserve—not a lack of frankness, but a kind of modesty of the soul.
She had passed her fifteenth birthday before Other-Sheila roused her to unrest. Until that time, the shadowy self dwelling deep within her, and every now and then flashing forth elusively just long enough to manifest its reality, had been a secret and delightful companion, one with whom she held animated conversations when alone, and from whose acquiescence to all her wishes and opinions she extracted considerable comfort.
"Other-Sheila," she would say to herself, "is the only person who always agrees with me." And then she would add, with a glint of whimsical humor in her gray eyes, "I reckon that's what an Other-Sheila isfor!"
But after a while Other-Sheila became less acquiescent and more assertive. And for the first time in her life, Sheila felt within her the troubling spirit of discontent. She wanted something, wanted it desperately as the very young always do, but she did not know what that something was. It was a tantalizing experience, and she saw no end to it.
"If I could only find outwhatI want, I might get it," she mused. And then, "Don't you know what it is, Other-Sheila?" But Other-Sheila was provokingly unresponsive, though it was probably her desire that fretted the objective Sheila's mind.
Mrs. Caldwell saw the unrest in the young girl's face and recognized it for what it was—the unrest of growth. It was a look of unborn things stirring beneath the surface, stirring and quivering as flowers must stir and tremble beneath the ground before they break their way through to the sun. But though she watched eagerly from day to day, ready to do her part when the hour for it should come, Mrs. Caldwell was too wise a gardener to hasten bloom.
"Peter," said she one day, when he had paused in an indolent stroll to chat with her over her garden hedge, "Peter, it's a terrible thing to be young!"
"Is it?" he laughed. "Why?"
"So many things have to happen to you!" And out of the security of her placid years Mrs. Caldwell spoke with an earnest pity.
Peter laughed again. "Well, I'm young—at least, I suppose I would be so considered. Andnothingever happens to me!"
Mrs. Caldwell surveyed him with mischievous eyes. "No, Peter," she contradicted, "you're not young—yet. You're not even alive yet. You're too lazy to really live! But you'll have to come to it some day. We all have to be born finally."
He chuckled at her comprehension of him. Then a disturbed look fluttered across his face: "Do you actually mean that there's no escape?"
"None! It's better to yield gracefully—and have it over. And if you don't hurry a bit, Sheila will be through her growing pains while yours are still before you!"
"Little Sheila? The master's star pupil?"
"Yes," she insisted, "little Sheila. You'll be taking her to parties in a long frock before you know it. She graduates from the Seminary next year."
But Peter was nearer to meeting Sheila in a long frock than either he or Mrs. Caldwell dreamed. For at that moment Sheila was planning to wear one before she was a week older.
She and Charlotte Davis were in the latter's dainty room, and spread on the bed before them was Charlotte's new party frock. Charlotte's father was the wealthiest man in Shadyville, and both she and her frock did his wealth justice. She was now at home, for the Easter vacation, from a fashionable boarding-school in Baltimore, the Shadyville Seminary not satisfying Mr. Davis's requirements for his youngest and favorite daughter. Her absence from the little town during the greater part of the past two years had enabled her to erase its traces. She had become a typical city-bred girl and she appeared pert, smartly dressed and, for her sixteen years, amazingly mature. She had always been prettier than Sheila, though no one had ever realized it and probably no one ever would. For her prettiness was so informed with sharp intelligence that her face had a challenging and almost aggressive quality. Boys had never admired her, and men were not likely to do so either, so lacking was she in the softer and more appealing charms of her sex. Even at sixteen her bright blue eyes were a trifle hard, not because of what they had seen—for she was, in experience, still the nice little ingénue—but of what they had seenthrough. The veil of credulity never dimmed her clear, bold glance. But for Sheila she was always gentle, so strong in this shrewd, fastidious young creature was her one deep and uncritical affection.
As the two girls examined the frock on the bed—a rose chiffon over silk that fairly shrieked of expense—Sheila sighed. "Will you wear it Friday night?" she inquired wistfully.
For on Friday night Charlotte was to give a party—a real evening party to which the debutantes and even the older set were coming, as well as the school-girls and boys. It would be Sheila's first grown-up party—and she had only a white muslin and a blue sash to make herself fine with. Thus Mrs. Caldwell had dressed for parties until her marriage, and it had never occurred to her to provide any other costume for Sheila, who was not yet quite sixteen. Besides, in Mrs. Caldwell's opinion—and even in the exquisite Peter's—there was no sweeter sight than a young girl in white muslin and blue ribbons. But to Sheila, in comparison with Charlotte's splendor, the white muslin seemed unspeakably dowdy. And so, when she asked Charlotte about her toilette for the great occasion, it was with a heart of unfestive heaviness.
"Of course I'll wear this. That's what I got it for. Oh, Sheila, aren't the little sleeves cunning? Just half way to the elbow—it's lucky my arms aren't thin!"
But Sheila only sighed again in response to Charlotte's enthusiasm, and now Charlotte heard the sigh and glanced at her with sudden attentiveness. "What will you wear?" she demanded.
"I'll have to wear my white muslin. I haven't anything else."
"Oh, Sheila, that's too bad!"
"I wouldn't mind soverymuch except for—" And Sheila's eyes, wandering sadly toward Charlotte's chiffon, finished the sentence.
But Charlotte's dismay had already vanished. "You won't have to wear your white muslin either," she announced in her positive, capable way. "You can wear one of my frocks, Sheila. You must! Why"—this in a burst of generosity—"why, you can wear this one!"
"Oh, no, I couldn't do that. Not your new frock, Charlotte! But you're a dear to offer it!" And Sheila gave her friend a grateful hug, though Charlotte never encouraged caresses.
"Well, then, perhaps not this one," agreed Charlotte, to whom, used though she was to her pretty clothes, it would have been something of a hardship to surrender the first wearing of them to anyone else, "perhaps not this one—rose is more my color than yours. But another—a blue silk mull that will be lovely with your blue-gray eyes and black hair. I've worn it only two or three times, and never in Shadyville."
"No, I couldn't," said Sheila again. "Grandmother wouldn't let me. I'm sure she wouldn't."
"I don't see why."
"She wouldn't," persisted Sheila regretfully.
"Now look here, Sheila. She wouldn'tknow. You're going to spend the night with me and dress after you get here. Andshe'snot coming to the party."
It was the same form of temptation which Ted had offered Sheila in the woods three years before, but now it was tenfold stronger. Then a mere good time was at stake; now the gratification of her young vanity, of her first girlish desire to make herself charming, was to be gained. And as she had hesitated that day in the woods, for the sake of the fun, she hesitated now for the sake of this new, clamoring instinct.
"I'd have to tell her," she temporized.
"Then tell her," assented Charlotte impatiently, "but don't tell her until afterwards."
It was Sheila's own method of that earlier time—a middle path between conscience and desire, and lightly skirting both.
"I might do that," she remarked thoughtfully. "If I told her—even afterwards—it wouldn't be quite so wicked. And Iwantto wear the frock dreadfully!"
"Just tell her as if it's nothing at all," advised Charlotte cleverly, "as if we never even thought of it until after you got here that evening. Then she won't mind it a bit. You'll see she won't!"
"Yes, she will. She won't like my wearing your clothes. She won't think it'snice. And when I tell, I'll tell the whole thing—the way it really happened. But"—and Sheila's full-lipped, generous mouth straightened into a thin line of resolution—"I'm going to do it anyway, Charlotte!"
Three days intervened before the party, and they were not happy days for Sheila. Her sense of guilt depressed every moment of the time, especially when she was in Mrs. Caldwell's trusting presence. For Sheila was not equipped by nature to sin comfortably.
But when the eventful night arrived, and she beheld herself at last in Charlotte's blue silk mull, with its short sleeves and little round neck frothy with lace, and its soft skirt falling to her very feet, she forgot every scruple that had been sacrificed to that enchanting end.
Charlotte, gay as a bright-hued bird with her blue eyes and yellow hair and rose-colored gown, and her mother and young Mrs. Bailey, her married sister, all stood around Sheila in an admiring circle, every now and then breaking out anew into delighted exclamations over their transformed Cinderella.
"Isn't she too sweet?"
"And look at her eyes—as blue as Charlotte's, aren't they?"
"And what a young lady she seems! Isn't that long skirt becoming to her?" cried Charlotte.
Charlotte had worn her party frocks long for the last year, and she approved emphatically of the dignity thus attained for a few hours. It gave her a delicious foretaste of the real young ladyhood to come, when she meant to be very dignified and very brilliant indeed.
But to all their pleased outcry, Sheila said nothing at all. She merely stood, radiant and silent, before them until they had to leave her for a last survey of the rooms downstairs, the flowers and the supper. Then, sure that she was quite alone, Cinderella stole to the mirror.
For a long time she gazed at the girl in the glass; a straight, slim girl in a delicate little gown that somehow brought out fully, for the first time, the charming delicacy of her face—not the delicacy of small features, of frail health, nor of a timid temper, but of an exceeding and subtle fineness, partly of the flesh, partly of the spirit, like the fineness of rare and gossamer fabrics. Sheila, of course, did not perceive this, which was always to be her one real claim to beauty, but she saw the frock itself, and white young shoulders rising from it, and above it a pair of shining eyes. And suddenly an ache came sharply into her throat and the shining eyes filled with tears.
"Oh," she whispered, leaning to the figure in the mirror, "Oh,thisis what I wanted!I wanted to be beautiful!"
The evening was half over when Sheila, still up-borne on the tide of her feminine exultation, glanced across the room to find that Peter stood there quietly regarding her. Straightway she forsook the youth who was administering awkward flattery to her new-born vanity, and hastened to the side of her old friend.
"Oh, Peter, don't I look nice?" she demanded eagerly.
But Peter ignored the frank appeal for a compliment. "I think you'd better call me Mr. Burnett," said he. And his tone was so serious that she failed to catch the banter of his eyes.
"Why, I've always called you Peter, just like grandmother does—always!"
"Yes," admitted Peter, "and it's been very jolly and friendly. But, Sheila, I must havesomethingto remind me that you're still a little girl and my pupil. There's nothing in your appearance to suggest it, but perhaps—if you will address me with a great deal of respect——"
At that, Sheila laughed and patted her frock: "Oh, I understand you now! Do I really seem so grown-up?"
"So grown-up that I can't understand how Mrs. Caldwell came to let you do it."
"Oh, Peter!Oh, Peter!"
"Why, what's the matter?" he asked, surprised at the poignant exclamation. But she turned abruptly away from him, and presently he saw her blue gown flutter through a distant doorway.
"Now I wonder," he pondered, "what in the world I've done. Offended her by appearing to criticize Mrs. Caldwell, I suppose."
But Peter had done a much graver thing than that. Unconsciously, he had summoned Sheila's conscience to its deserted duty; and already, like any well-intentioned conscience that has taken a vacation, it was making up for lost time.
With that comment of Peter's—"I can't understand how Mrs. Caldwell came to let you do it"—Sheila's little house of pleasure suddenly tumbled to the ground. She had not meant to be sorry about the deception of the frock untilafterthe party, and until her encounter with Peter she had been successful enough in holding penitence at bay. That vision of herself in the mirror, seeming to answer some longing of her very soul, had indeed kept her forgetful of everything but a sense of fulfillment and triumph. But now, reminded of her grandmother, she began to be sorry at once—impatiently, violently sorry.
"I must go home," she murmured to herself distressfully, as she slipped unobserved through the crowded rooms. "I must go home. I can't wait until morning! I must tell grandmothernow!"
And so it happened that Mrs. Caldwell, looking out from her sitting-room window into the early spring night, saw a slim figure speed up her garden path as if urged by some importunate need; and the next moment Sheila was kneeling before her, with her face hidden upon her shoulder.
"Why, Sheila!—dear child!"
"Oh, grandmother, will you forgive me?"
"What should I forgive you? I'm sure you've done nothing wrong this time!" And Mrs. Caldwell, who was accustomed to the rigors of Sheila's conscience, smiled above the face on her breast with tender amusement.
But Sheila sprang to her feet and stepped back a pace or two. "Don't yousee?" she cried tragically.
And then Mrs. Caldwell discovered the transformation of her Cinderella. No demure little maiden this, in the white muslin and blue ribbons of an ingenuous spirit, but a fashionably clad "young lady," who appeared to have grown suddenly tall and rather stately with the clothing of her slim body in the long, soft gown.
"Sheila!" exclaimed Mrs. Caldwell involuntarily. And then, with her hands outstretched to the impressive young culprit, "Tell me all about it, dear."
And sitting on the floor at her grandmother's feet, regardless of Charlotte's crushed flounces, Sheila poured out her impetuous confession, from the first moment of temptation and yielding to the final one of Peter's awakening words.
"And when he spoke of you, grandmother, I just couldn'tbearit! I wondered how I could have been happy at all—I wondered how I could have forgotten you for a minute! I hated the frock! I hated the party! And I hated myself most of all! I had to come home and ask you to forgive me right away!"
And down went her head into Mrs. Caldwell's lap. "Do you—-think—you can forgive me?" came the muffled plea.
For answer Mrs. Caldwell bent and kissed the prostrate head, and it burrowed more comfortably against her knee. But Mrs. Caldwell did not speak. She was waiting for something, and when Sheila continued to burrow, in the contented silence of a penitence achieved, she inquired quietly: "Well, dear?"
Sheila lifted her head at that, and looked straight into the wise, sweet eyes above her: "I wanted something! I wanted something dreadfully! And I didn't know what it was. And then, when I saw myself in Charlotte's frock—and so changed—I thought I'd found what I wanted. I thought—I thought I'd wanted to be beautiful!"
"Yes," said Mrs. Caldwell gently, "I used to think that, too."
"Oh, grandmother, did you? Then you understand how I felt! But—but, you see, it didn't last. I wanted to be goodmore. That's what made me come home. Grandmother, do you supposethat'swhat I've wanted all the time, without knowing it—to be good?"
At the question, Mrs. Caldwell, wise gardener that she was, realized that one of the flowers which she had divined, stirring in the depths of Sheila's being, was pushing its way upward to the light, and that the moment had come for her to help it. She slipped her arms around the girl kneeling before her, as if seeking in love's touch inspiration for love's words.
"I think you will always want to be good," she said, "and I think you will always want to be beautiful. Women do, Sheila dear—even the women who are least beautiful and least—good. It's part of being a woman—just like loving things that are little and helpless.
"But, Sheila, being beautiful isn't enough! Even being good isn't enough, though of course it ought to be. It's essential, but it isn't enough. Every woman must have something else besides to make her happy—something that is hers,her own! She must have that to be beautifulfor, and to be good for—she must have that to live for!
"And that is what you want, dear—the thing that is your own. You have been born for that—you cannot be complete or content without it."
Mrs. Caldwell's voice rose, grave and rich with the harmonies of life, through the peaceful room, and Sheila quivered responsively in the circle of her arms. To the young girl, womanhood, that only yesterday had been so far away, now seemed to be drawing thrillingly near with all its attendant mysteries. And in her next question she took a step to meet it:
"Grandmother, what is it?—the thing that will be mine?"
"Dear, how can I tell? It isn't the same for us all. For one woman it is love; for another it is work; for some it is, blessedly, both work and love. For me—now—it isyou! How can I tell what it will be for my little girl?"
"I want it!" whispered Sheila. "I want it!"
"You must wait for it, dear. You must wait for it to come to you. You can't hurry life."
"But can't I doanything?"
"You can be good, and you can be beautiful, so that you'll be ready for it when it comes. But"—and now Mrs. Caldwell smiled, and with her smile the stress of the moment passed—"but not in Charlotte's frock! It wouldn't be fair to make yourself beautiful with borrowed plumage, would it, little bird of paradise? You'd only get a borrowed happiness out of that—one that you hadn't a right to, and couldn't keep."
Sheila rose from her knees, smiling, too. "I'll go right upstairs and take it off," she declared. "I want to play fair from the start—I onlywantwhat's really mine!"
And so, coming back, under Mrs. Caldwell's tactful guidance, from the deep waters to the pleasant, shallow wavelets that lap the shores of commonplace life, she began to busy herself with the small duties of the night, closing the windows and putting out the lamps. Then, with bed-time candles after the fashion of Mrs. Caldwell's own girlhood, the two started up the stairs, Sheila leading and lighting the way—as youth always will, despite the riper wisdom of age. Once she smiled over her shoulder; and before they had gained the top of the flight, she paused and reached back her hand to help her grandmother up the last few steps. There was something gracious and strong in the gesture—something that had not been in the nature of the Sheila who had bent her head to Mrs. Caldwell's knee an hour before. It was as if the womanhood of which Mrs. Caldwell had spoken had already awakened in her and with it, not only the longing for something of her own, but that kindred tenderness for things little and helpless—or helpless and old.
"Take my hand," she said sweetly, and there was in her voice the lovely gentleness that young mothers use toward their children.
The next day, when Charlotte came to inquire why her guest had flown, without warning and apparently without cause, she found a Sheila who, though garbed once more in her own short frock, seemed in some mysterious way more grown-up than she had in the trailing splendor of the night before.
"What's happened to you?" demanded Charlotte shrewdly, when the two girls were shut into the privacy of Sheila's little white bedroom, a room that resembled the despised white muslin and blue sash which had been discarded for Charlotte's furbelows. "I knowsomething'shappened to you. You're—different. Did somebody make love to you?"
"Goodness, no!" denied Sheila in a horrified tone, and the alarmed young blood rose in a slow, rich tide over her neck and face and temples.
"Oh, you needn't be so shocked. Somebody will some day!" And Charlotte laughed lightly out of her own precocious experience.
Of the two girls, Sheila was the one to be loved, but Charlotte was the one to be made love to—if the love-making were only the pastime of the hour. Charlotte was clever and daring and cold, and could take care of herself. She knew, even at sixteen, all the rules of the game: when to advance, when to retreat, and, most important of all, when to laugh. But Sheila would never be able to laugh at love or love's counterpart.
"Somebodywillmake love to you some day!" repeated Charlotte teasingly.
"Well, nobody has yet!" Sheila assured her crossly. "And what's more, I hope nobody will!Thatisn't what I want!"
"What do you want?" asked Charlotte curiously, detecting the underlying earnestness of the words. But she received no response, and so, bent upon an interesting topic, she harked back to Sheila's flight from the party: "If nobody made love to you, why did you run away? Did your conscience hurt you, Sheila?"
"Yes," admitted Sheila, "that was what made me come home. But I stayed home because of something else."
"What?"
Sheila groped for the language of Mrs. Caldwell's lesson: "Because I—I didn't want to be pretty in somebody else's clothes. I was happy for a little while, but it didn't last. You see, I'd borrowed that—the happiness—along with the frock. And of course I couldn't keep it. I just want what belongs to me after this, Charlotte. It isn't fair to take anything else—and it isn't any use either."
Charlotte stared at her with puzzled eyes. "Youarequeer," she remarked reflectively. "Youarequeer, Sheila. Theodore Kent always said so, and he was right. I wonder what he'll think of you when he gets back from college."
But Sheila, who had blushed painfully at the suggestion of a lover who did not exist, heard Ted's name without a flush or a tremor; and in despair of any conversation about dress or beaux, the guest presently took her departure.
A few days later Charlotte went back to her city school for further "finishing," though she had already been sharpened and polished to a bewildering edge and brilliancy. And left to herself, Sheila resumed her unsophisticated, girlish life.
"We aren't going to have any young ladies at our house after all, Peter," Mrs. Caldwell announced triumphantly over her teacup one afternoon.
And Peter, lounging on the leafy veranda and appreciatively sipping Mrs. Caldwell's fragrant amber brew, lifted a languidly interested face: "How are you going to stop time for Sheila? Of course you've done it for yourself, but not even you, fairy godmother, can do that for other people."
"I don't intend to try. I don't want to try. Because—when my little girl goes—it's time that will bring me some one better."
"The young lady, dear Mrs. Caldwell. The young lady—inevitably."
"No, Peter—the woman!" And Mrs. Caldwell's voice rang with pride and confidence. "There's the making of one in Sheila, Peter—of a real woman!"
"What's become of the poet you used to see in her?" he inquired.
"Oh, you've shut that safely into a cage of books. I'm not afraid of it any more."
"It can still sing behind the bars, you know," he warned her.
"No," she said, growing serious again, "it wouldn't—in Sheila's case. At least it wouldn't unless it got into just the right cage, hung in the sunshine and the south wind. That's what I'm afraid of, Peter—that Sheila herself will be snared into the wrong cage!"
But even while Mrs. Caldwell spoke, Sheila was standing at the open door of the right cage, gazing in with illumined eyes.
The spring was at its height, as warm and ripely blooming as early summer, and Sheila had slipped away to her favorite haunt of the back garden. She had taken a book with her, one of Peter's recommendation, and as she lay on the soft, fresh grass, she idly turned the pages, not from any desire to read, but for the pleasure of touching the leaves and knowing that, if she liked, she had only to look within for words that would create a fairyland as easily as the fingers of the spring had done.
But presently, sated with mere earth-sweetness, she lifted herself on her elbow and opened the book widely where her hand had finally rested. It was the choice of chance, that page; but, as happens every now and then, chance and the Shaping Power were at that moment one. For shining on the white leaf, as if written in silver, were the lines that have stirred every potential poet to rapture and self-knowledge:
—magic casements opening on the foamOf perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
Sheila read them with no fore-warning of their moving music. They flashed, winged, into her tranquil world—and shook it to its foundations. For the first time the full sense of beauty rushed upon her, and she caught her breath with the keen, aching ecstasy of it:
—magic casements opening on the foamOf perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
She read the lines again, and now aloud, softly, with a beauty-broken breath. She had wanted something, and all the while this—this—had been waiting for her. Compared to the joy of it, what was the joy of looking into a mirror and finding oneself fair? What was any other beauty beside this beauty of words, of subtle harmony and exquisite imagery?
And then there came to her the thought that some one—some one just human like herself—yes, human and young—had written these lines, had drawn them from the treasure house of himself.
"Oh," she whispered, "how happy he must have been! How happy! To have written this! If I had done it——"
She paused and sat up straight and still, the book falling unheeded from her hand. Slowly her eyes widened, filled first with light and then with tears.
"If I had written this! If I could writeanything!"
And suddenly, for that moment and for life, she knew!
"Thatis what I want—towrite!—tomakesomething beautiful!"
And then her guardian angel should have pushed her into the cage and fastened its door. For the sun was shining and the south wind was blowing—and it was the right cage!
One September afternoon, Peter lingered in his class-room after his duties were done and his pupils had departed. He usually lost no time in shaking the dust of academic toil from his feet—and from his mind—but to-day an unwonted longing for some steadying purpose, someraison d'être, made him remain to dally with the tools of his occupation, perhaps in a wistful hope that he might discover a hitherto unsuspected charm in the teaching of rhetoric to reluctant young girls.
"If they only cared," he thought, "if they only cared a little for the English language, it wouldn't be such a deadly grind to teach I them. Butthey'llnever 'contend for the shade of a world.' It's just a dull necessity to them—this business of learning how to use their mother tongue—except, of course, to Sheila. And next year she won't be here to help me endure it. Oh, how I wish I could get away—to something better, something bigger!"
But with the wish, there came to him also the certainty of its futility. He wouldn't get away; the next year, and the year following, and the year after that would find him still at his uninspiring post in the Shadyville Seminary, teaching bored pupils the properties of speech, and inwardly cursing himself for doing it.
For Peter knew that he would always be the victim of his own laziness; that every impulse toward a broader life and its achievements would be checked and overcome by what he termed his "vast inertia." In spite of his mental capacity, his social gifts, his assets of birth and excellent appearance, he would go through all his years without attaining either honors or profits—merely because, in his unconquerable languor, he would not exert himself to the extent of reaching out his hand for them.
He taught in the seminary because he must; because, otherwise, his bread would go unbuttered, or rather, there would be no bread to butter. For he was the last of a family whose fortune had been their "blood" and their brains, and not their material possessions. Nothing had been left to him but the prestige of his birth and his inherited intellect, and the connections which they opened to him. And these connections were rosebuds for him to wear in his buttonhole rather than beefsteak to swell his waistcoat. They entitled him to lead a cotillion, but not to direct a bank.
His natural parts, as he fully realized, would at any time have secured a career to him, if he had had the industry to use them assiduously. A little enterprise, a little initiative would long since have despatched him to the opportunities and successes of a city. But, always defeated by the "inertia" which he regarded as a fatal malady of his temperament—and also, perhaps, by a native distaste for the vulgar scramble and unsavory methods of the modern business world—his fine intelligence wasted itself in small tasks and his ambitions dissolved like dream-stuff in the somnolent atmosphere of Shadyville.
The only success available to him under such conditions was an advantageous marriage. This he could more than once have accomplished, for it cost him no effort to practice the abilities of the lover, and he had, indeed, a reputation for gallantry that invested him with a dangerous glamour as a suitor. But here he was thwarted each time by a quality that dominated him as ruthlessly to his undoing as did his laziness—and this quality was fastidiousness. For him only the exquisite was good enough. He wanted a woman with a face like an angel or a flower, and a soul to match it. And this the eligible girl had never had. So, although he had several times reached the verge of a leap into matrimonial prosperity, he had always drawn back before the crucial moment. A laugh—just a note too broad and loud—had once restrained him from the easy capture of half a million. He could not live with a woman who laughed like that, he told himself!
And on the other hand, though marriage appealed to him, he could not accept the exquisite in poverty. A few years before, he had spent a summer in courting a girl whose profile had enchanted him. In imagination he saw it always against a background of dull gold—the pure, slender throat; the sweet, round chin; the delicate, proud lip and nostril; the dreaming eye. But in fact, there was no background of gold, dull or otherwise; and when Peter reflected on the size of his salary and the shifts to which poverty must needs resort—the shabby clothes, the domestic sordidness, the devastating finger-marks of weariness and anxiety upon even the fairest face—his courage failed him, and he surrendered the profile to one who could give her a Kentucky stock farm, a town house in New York and a box at the opera there.
After that episode, he resigned his hope of romance. Fate was perverse and offered him impossible combinations, and he had not the energy to seek and seize for himself. So love, like the other big prizes of life, eluded him, and at thirty-three he was a confirmed bachelor as well as a professional idler. He still pursued the graceful, aimless flirtations that are the small change of intercourse at dances and dinners—just as he still read Theocritus—but neither his heart nor his mind engaged in any more serious endeavor.
And yet, every now and then, he felt a faint desire for something more, for something that should not be a pastime, nor a mere bread-and-butter chore—something that would demand and exhaust the best of him and give him in return the pride of work worth the doing and doing well.
This afternoon the desire was more than usually persistent, and it had held him at his desk long after school hours were over, fingering his pen and ink bottle, glancing through the weekly essays which had that day been handed in for criticism, and turning the leaves of a history of English literature with which he had vainly striven to awake enthusiasm in the minds of his class.
The school-room was a pleasant place, as school-rooms go. There were potted plants on the window sills and a few good engravings on the walls, and the afternoon sunshine was streaming gaily in. But to Peter the room was the disillusioning scene of unwilling labors—both on the part of his pupils and himself—and its chalky atmosphere was heavy and depressing.
"What's the use of pretending thatthisis a 'life-work'—a 'noble profession'?" he muttered, after his casual examination of a particularly discouraging essay. "They don'twantto learn. They only want to get through and away. After Sheila graduates, I'll he without a single responsive pupil. For I won't get another like her—not in years, and probably never. Why don't I chuck it all? Whydon'tI go away? There's nothing tostayfor! But my confounded antipathy to a tussle in the hurly-burly of my fellow-men——"
At that moment a tap sounded upon the door panel.
"Come in," called Peter carelessly, supposing that a pupil had returned for some forgotten possession. And he did not even look around until an amused voice inquired: "So absorbed, Professor Peter?" Then he turned to see Mrs. Caldwell, an old-fashioned picture in silvery gray, smiling at him from the doorway.
"I've come for a serious talk," said she, when he had seated her beside the sunniest window and established himself close by.
"Well," he answered ruefully, "you've come to the right place and the right person. I was just considering—in these scholarly surroundings—how I am wasting my life!"
"Really?" And she beamed on him hopefully. "Because that's the beginning of better things. Youcouldamount to so much, Peter!"
But he shook his head: "Not here. And I'm too lazy to leave Shadyville."
"Why not here? I don't want you to leave Shadyville. I can't do without you! But I want you to do something splendid here. Peter, why don't you write a book?"
He laughed: "Dear Mrs. Caldwell, to write a book requires more than the determination or the wish to write one."
"Genius?"
"Not necessarily. But at least a special kind of ability. The divine fire has never burned on my hearth—not even a tiny spark of it!"
"Then you think it's rather a great thing to be able to write?"
"I do indeed!" And the reverence of the book-lover thrilled through his tone.
"I'm glad you feel that way about writers, Peter," she remarked archly, "because—we have one up at our house." And she extended a note-book to him, a thin, paper-backed book such as his class used for compositions.
"You mean—Sheila?" For he had expected this.
"Yes. It's happened!—as I told you it would." And her voice was very grave now.
He opened the book—and discovered that Sheila's efforts were poems. "I'll read them to-night," he said cautiously.
But Mrs. Caldwell would not let him escape so easily: "No, Peter, please. If you have the time, read them now. There are only a few, and I can't go home without a message from you about them. Sheila's waiting up there—and she's simply tense!"
"Then she knows you've brought them to me?"
"Of course. Do you think I'd have done it without her permission? Peter, don't neglect your manners with your grandchildren."
"I deserve the rebuke, Mrs. Caldwell. But if Sheila wants me to see her poems, why hasn't she brought them to me herself?"
"Too shy! Peter, poets areverysensitive. It's an awful thing to have one in your family!"
"Oh, you won't find it so bad."
"Yes, I shall. I always told you it would happen. And I always told you, too, that I couldn't cope with such a—calamity."
"Well, there's still hope that this may be a case of 'sweet sixteen' instead of genius. I'll take a peep and give you a verdict."
"She's apoet," insisted Mrs. Caldwell, obstinately convinced of the worst. And she fixed her eyes on Peter's face, as he read, with an eagerness that, save for her lamentations, might have seemed anxiety to have her opinion confirmed.
Presently Peter chuckled.
"What are you laughing at, Peter?"
"Have you read the 'Ode to the Evening Star'?"
"Yes, I've read them all."
"Well, then——"
"Well, then—what?"
"You know why I'm laughing."
"You think it'sfunny?" And there was an unmistakable note of indignation in the question.
"Of course I think it's funny! Don't you?"
There was no reply, and Peter looked up from the note-book. "Don'tyou think it's funny?" he repeated. And then he stared at her. Her cheeks were pink with excitement, her eyes were glittering with angry tears. "Why, I thought—" he began.
But she interrupted him: "I certainly don't think it's funny. I think it's alovelypoem! I think they'realllovely poems! I expected you to appreciate them, but as you don't—" And she put out a peremptory hand for the book. But as Peter continued to stare at her, she perceived his amusement, and her resentment gave way to mirth.
"Oh, Peter, do forgive me for being cross to you, but you see——"
"I see that you're proud of these poems!" he exclaimed, his own eyes twinkling merrily.
"Yes," she admitted, "I am proud of them. I really do think they're the loveliest poems ever written!" And she met his laughing gaze quite shamelessly.
"And you're glad—yes,glad—that she's turned out a poet!" he accused.
"Yes," confessed Mrs. Caldwell again, "I'm glad!" And she leaned earnestly toward him: "Oh, Peter, isn't she wonderful?"
But Peter regarded her severely. "Ah, the deceit of woman! And I believed you when you claimed to be distressed! I sympathized with you!"
But Mrs. Caldwell was not to be abashed: "I've been a shocking hypocrite, haven't I? But you're so clever, Peter, that I expected you to see through me."
"I trusted you!" he mourned.
"Oh, Peter! Peter! That's the way a man always seeks to excuse his stupidity when a woman gets the best of him! But you can trust my sincerity now. And you can sympathize with me if Sheila'snota poet. You seem to doubt her being one!"
"She isn't a poet—yet. She may become one. I can't tell about that. What I am sure of is that she has a remarkable mind—as I told you long ago. She has things to express, and evidently the time has come when she wants to express them. That's the hopeful point."
"Then she is promising—for all your laughter?"
"Indeed she is! These poems are funny—but every now and then there's a flash of light through them. Mrs. Caldwell, I believe in thelight. I don't know what Sheila will do with it, but it's there—and it's wonderful!"
The tears were in Mrs. Caldwell's eyes again, not the bright tears of anger, but the soft mist that rises from a heart profoundly moved. As Peter spoke, the drops overflowed and rolled slowly down her cheeks, but she was unconscious of them. "You don't know what this means to me!" she said.
"I didn't know you would feel like this about it. You deceived me so thoroughly! But now I wonder why I didn't realize, in spite of all your protestations, that you'd care just this deeply. I should have understood what things of the mind are to you—you were my grandfather's friend!"
"Yes, I was your grandfather's friend. And he was a marvellous man, Peter. It's the proudest thing I can say of myself—that I was his friend." Then, quickly, as if she had closed a treasure box, she turned from the subject of her old friendship—which Peter knew might have been more—to that of Sheila.
"What shall I do with my poet, Peter? I'm as much afraid of her as I said I should be—and as unfit to help her."
"Let me help her! Will you let me train her?"
"Oh, my dear, I hoped you'd ask to do it!"
"Then it's a bargain—not only for the present, but for the future—after she graduates—as long as she needs me?"
Mrs. Caldwell flashed a keen glance at him: "As long as you will, Peter! I'll trust her to you gratefully."
But if there was any deeper significance in her words than her acceptance of the present compact, Peter failed to catch it. As he stood in the seminary doorway a few moments later, watching Mrs. Caldwell's retreating figure up the shady street, there came to him, however, a sense of having something to work for at last.
"What was it Mrs. Caldwell once said?" he murmured to himself. "That she wasn't wise enough to 'trim the wick of a star'? Yes, that was it. Well," he added whimsically, "I don't suppose I'm fit for the job either, but I'm going to undertake it. It'll be worth while staying here—it'll be worth while living—if I can trim the wick of a star and help it to shine!"