CHAPTER IXBENDING THE TWIG
The girl Madelaine had been within three weeks of her eleventh birthday when Mrs. Theddon adopted her from the Corpus-Christi Orphanage.
If the child were precocious in a queer, matronly way, her clouded parentage and life at the Home were mainly responsible. She was intensely feminine and affectionate, fiercely maternal, all of which at first made for a certain distress when thrust out into the coëducational environment of the Springfield public schools with children of equal age.
Like some unmarried women, Mrs. Theddon was full of theories as to how a child should be reared. Yet the woman was neither bigoted nor maudlin. She had brains and common sense. If she held theories on child culture and child psychology, it was because she had evolved them from a shrewdness of observation when in contact with the offspring of affluent parents with whom she associated. There was no “private school nonsense” for her child therefore, until Madelaine was old enough to know the meaning and worth of exclusiveness. Beside, for a few years, Gracia Theddon wanted the little girl about her home and private tutors could never supply that academic atmosphere and classcamaraderiewhich should be made chief among the heritages of adolescence.
So Madelaine went to the Forest Park school, and while the locality and its offspring were above normal, she stood out in her classes like an orchid in a thistle bed. She did careful, neat, thorough work and made friends. But she had no giggly age. No boys wrote asinine notes to her or tried to flirt with her. She shrank from participation in adolescent pranks.
At home she quickly absorbed the atmosphere of the Theddon household. She became an avid reader of everything in the big Theddon library. For hours at a time she lay stretched face downward along the window seat in the southeast corner of that splendid room, absorbed in the classics. And three years passed like white magic.
During her term in the ninth grade Madelaine grew perceptibly. It was an awkward time but never wholly distressing. At fifteen she was almost as tall as her foster-mother. Then she began to grow willowy, lithe and graceful.
She had few companions even then, and did not seem to cultivate them.
“Honestly, I wish the child would laugh once in a while,” Mrs. Theddon told a friend, calling one afternoon. “But somehow it doesn’t occur to her to laugh. She acts as if the world were too big, wonderful and mystic to contain such a thing as humor.”
“Then you’re satisfied with her?” the caller suggested.
“Satisfied? My dear woman, there are times when I’m afraid I’ll be unable to satisfy her! That sounds strange, doesn’t it? But the girl’s faith in every one and everything is so absolute and her ideals so quaint that I almost fear to have her grow further. I try to tell her, to pave the way for disillusion, but I don’t seem to get results. She looks at me so hurt and incredulous that I feel as though I were defiling Eden.”
This incredulity of Madelaine’s worried her mother far more than the latter cared to admit. Likewise the girl’s instinctive estheticism and reserve. One summer evening, as they strolled the length of Sumner Avenue, Mrs. Theddon expounded her philosophy of life for the first time aggressively, to her daughter.
“Madelaine, dear,” she declared, “I want you to think of this world and look upon life as a long, long, series of interesting and constructive experiences. All of them may not be pleasant. But always they must be constructive. Whether you make them interesting depends entirely upon yourself, your capacity for participation in them.”
“Participation!” repeated the girl. “What do you mean by participation?”
“I mean plunging in and enjoying them for all they’re worth, taking part in everything—your own accorded part—tothe utmost, regardless of how small that part may be. Don’t shrink from anything. Never be that most distressing and unfinished product—a “wallflower” or spectator. Plunge in—taste, feel, enjoy, laugh and love. Be in the center of things, never on the edge. Of course, I don’t meant perverted things, activities or pursuits that offend decency or violate self-respect. And there is never excuse for stirring a sewer, in order to prove it’s foul.”
“I understand, mother dear.”
“What I want to impress upon you, and the greatest heritage a parent can pass on to any child, is this: It’syourworld, yours to enjoy, yours to live in, play in, work in, get the most from. Every healthy activity exists to be experienced and not to be watched while others experience. Every social accomplishment, every art, every science, every hobby, has come about and is enjoyed because normal, healthy people in the past have found pleasure, enjoyment and improvement in them. If they have done so—you may likewise. Life has been given to you to get your portion. But Life can’t seize you by the shoulders and drag you in. You must go in for yourself. The deepest wrong I can conceive a grown person doing to a younger is implanting within his or her subconscious mind that horrible ‘You mustn’t!’ It’s the blackest handicap a child can acquire. My creed is ‘Do!’ Never doubt yourself. Never believe you’re any different from any girl or woman who has ever lived on earth. Because you’re not. Yet you’re not commonplace, either! The greatest self-crime is self-depreciation. Remember that all people believe in you unless you doubt yourself. They take you not at somebody else’s appraisal but solely at the estimate you place upon yourself. Timid people are only those with half-developed souls. I don’t mean by not being timid that you should be noisy or obstreperous. A child’s home influences should curb or counteract hoydenism. But hold up your head, be positive, never fear to look at life courageously, to see it clearly and see it whole. The world is yours, my dear, and all the men and women in it—for your enjoyment and boon companions.”
“You make me afraid when you talk to me like that—and yet you make me glad!” the girl responded wonderingly.
“I’ve learned it by bitter experience, dear—my philosophy.I’ve told you something of my story: how I started life a poor girl in a village up in Vermont. My father and mother were never able to see beyond the village sky line. Life and the outside world terrified them. Forever they were telling me ‘You can’t!’ Doubting themselves, of course they doubted their daughter. From ‘You can’t!’ it was a step to ‘You mustn’t!’ I loved a man at eighteen as dearly as I ever loved anybody. He was a smart young man, with many excellent qualities. In those days he was considered so smart I doubted that I could be his wife. It sounds strange. But I did. I thought he needed a cleverer woman than myself to be that wife successfully. I told him so. It broke his heart. Then my father and mother died suddenly—within a year of each other. I had to make my way alone; earn my living. I went to Boston. Always I found myself a wallflower, a spectator, while others played and enjoyed. I wanted to play and enjoy also. But I’d been taught to believe that ‘nice girls’ didn’t do anything but sit and fold their hands. Then, praise God, a man came and took me up into an exceeding high mountain.”
“Captain Theddon?”
“No. Not Captain Theddon! He was a man from Virginia. He loved me dearly. For a year I was almost too happy to move. It seemed the world about me was made of frail glass—pink glass. If I moved it would crash. This man took me in hand, I say. In a year he undid most of my vicious training. He opened a new heaven and a new earth by getting me to accept exactly what I told you a moment ago—to be a participant in everything instead of a spectator. He taught me the simple truth that shyness is only the fear of ridicule—but that people who ridicule are either deficient themselves or coarsely conceited. Therefore they are not deserving of attention at all. And under his tutelage, for two short years I was deliriously happy!”
“Why didn’t you marry him, mother dear?”
“He had to go to California—because of tuberculosis. He died out there.”
The girl was shocked. Then she observed softly:
“I should have thought it would have broken you too, mother dear.”
“It would have broken me, Madelaine, if Hugh hadn’ttaught me, along with the rest, to consider every experience that came to me as sent for some grand and constructive purpose. I think he knew he was going to die before he left me. Just a few moments before he boarded his train he said, ‘The greatest experience of your life, dear girl, lies just ahead. If you fail to apply it constructively, you’re not worthy of it at all.’ Poor me! I thought he meant our marriage if he recovered. He meant his own death—my loss of him. It came to me—his last message—after he was only a memory. It was hard to see anything constructive in that horrible disappointment. But I did. I plunged into life, making it give me something to outweigh my grief. I don’t mean I became frivolous—I simply refused to be morbid—for Hugh’s sake at first—then for the sake of Life itself. I saw that my loss had been sent to deepen my life, to make me sensitive to others who had suffered. I found out how richly one may live, whether it be in sunshine or in mist. And that philosophy now I want to pass along to you. To live, dear girl, just to live—for its own sweet sake—is a blessed, blessed privilege. But alas, so few know how to live. They go on the ‘I mustn’t’ policy, never stopping to reason out why. They merelyexist—even in the simplest of life’s rôles. And I don’t want you to merely exist, Madelaine. I want you to get from beautiful Life every last fleck of sunshine and shadow. There’s no sorrow that can come to you, dear, that you can’t make beautiful. There’s no joy or happiness that you can’t make injurious and vicious. Never mind what your rôle in life is to be, dear, whether you become a great artist or the unsung wife of an unsung man, whatever your hands find to do, don’t only ‘do it with all your might’ but find some way to make it interesting. A sod hut on a prairie can be made as interesting as a gallery of Italian art—if you only look at it in the right light, making the utmost of yourself and materials. But to do that, you must be a part of those materials yourself—always a participant, sure of yourself, positive, constructive, analytical, intense, living each day to every one of the eighty-six thousand, four hundred seconds it contains.”
Gracia Theddon not only preached this sort of thing; she lived it—every one of the day’s eighty-six thousand, four hundred seconds—herself. Her home, her social life, herdress, her face,—she had paid a price for everything that she was and owned. And having paid the price, she saw that she had her “Value Received.”
During these years, Madelaine had met very few of Gracia Theddon’s relatives. But the July after her graduation from grammar school, young Gordon Ruggles, son of Captain Theddon’s sister, alighted from the Albany train, gave a red-cap a half-dollar to carry his portmanteau two hundred feet, had a taxi convey him where a street car would have served at one-twentieth the expense and entered his aunt’s home without ringing the bell.
Young Ruggles was past sixteen, hard as nails, tough as a young owl and twice as wise, could lick his weight in wounded wildcats and circle the globe alone. One front tooth grew over another on his upper jaw, and he had a vicious right eye. When he wanted a thing, he went and took it. If his father didn’t care to pay the bill, the bill simply went unpaid. Most spoiled rich boys are weaklings and cowards. Gordon loved a fight as a girl loves silk.
Through the Theddon household he went therefore, opening doors and slamming them, throwing his cap on a table so carelessly it toppled and smashed a fancy vase, mounting the stairs with a curse and banging into his aunt’s room like a motion-picture villain looking for the escaped heroine.
On the north side of his aunt’s chamber he beheld the door into the maid’s room,—at least it had been the maid’s room when last he had visited the house. Gordon crossed over, yanked open the door, thrust in his head and shoulders and cried hoarsely:
“Suffering Arabella!”
Facing him was a girl at her toilet—twelve, fourteen, sixteen years—how old was she? Like a startled fawn, rigid with alarm, she backed against the foot of her bed and stopped the young Goth with her eyes.
Frock and pumps had yet to be negotiated. The former she caught up now and crumpled against her alabaster throat. So held, it only reached her knees. Her perfectlegs were classic in silken hosiery, so slender it appeared a mystery how those ankles supported the weight.
It was her head and her face, however, that had halted the intruder so abruptly. Her dark hair fluffed back from her forehead in a wavy pompadour. It was gathered with a small jeweled barrette at the back and long curls fell over an undraped shoulder, only accentuating the perfection of flesh. Her eyes blazed with the indignity of this intrusion. Her nostrils quivered.
“Gawd, what a filly!” was all the young worldly wiseman could articulate.
“Who are you? And how dare you come in here now?”
“And who are you?” returned Gordon.
“I’m Madelaine Theddon—Mrs. Theddon’s daughter!”
The lid of the boy’s bad eye flopped twice.
“You’re who?” he cried, amazed.
“I’m Mrs. Theddon’s daughter, I told you——”
“Tell that to the Marines! Aunt Gracia hasn’t got a daughter. Unless——” Being naturally low-minded, the alternative occurred to him promptly.
“But I am, I tell you! She adopted me—four years ago. And please go out till I’m dressed.”
Gordon laughed coarsely and licked his lips.
“Adopted you, did she? That’s a good one. She never told us about it.”
“That’s her business, isn’t it? I don’t know as there was any reason why she was required to do so, whoever you are. But if you possess any traits of a gentleman you’ll leave my room until I’m dressed.”
“Oh, don’t be catty. I’m her nephew, Gord, and you aren’t the first dame I’ve ever seen half-dressed.”
“I might gather as much from your conduct!”
“Been knocking me, has she? Well, just for that, I’ll get out when I please.”
“I shall call the servants!”
“Go ahead; I can lick any darned fathead Aunt Gracia’s got around here. But I hope you have better luck than I did. I hunted all over the place.”
The girl was close to tears. She looked around desperately. Then with a flash of white she was gone—into the bathroom. The intervening door was fastened swiftly.
“A peach!” whistled the boy. He moved back into thelarger chamber. “Now I wonder where did Gracia pick her up? She’s a pippin! A dream! A cuckoo! A lulu—Whew!”
Gracia Theddon came into the room,—trailed in, a long string of jade beads clicking against her knees. She stopped.
“Where did you come from?” she blazed.
“Johnsville! They kicked me out!”
“You mean you’ve been expelled?”
“Call it that if you want.”
“What for?”
“Oh, a bunch of us took Dutch leave one night and the girl that was with us squealed. They said I was responsible.”
“Which you probably were!”
“Well, what of it? They kicked me out, anyhow. I might as well be blamed as not.”
“But why have you come here?”
“Haven’t got any other place to go, have I?—with the mater and governor across.”
“Meaning you’ve spent all your money?”
“I guess so.”
“Take your feet off that polished chair! What do you think I’m going to do about it?”
“Make me financial once more——or lemme stay here till the governor gets back. I’d just as soon stay,” he grinned with a glance at Madelaine’s door.
“Oh, you had? Well, I’d as soon you had not!”
“Yeah—on account of what you got in the bathroom, what?”
“You unspeakable young vulgarian! How do you know——”
“Oh, I busted in there, looking for your maid. But you don’t need to be sore! She’s all right, leave it to me! Great taste you got, Aunt Grace. I couldn’t ‘a’ picked a prettier one myself!”
If Gracia Theddon had been less a lady she would have flown into a rage. Instead she returned calmly:
“Young man, your insinuations are an insult. Andwhether Madelaine happens to be here or not, I don’t want you around my house.”
“All right, give me some kale and I’ll blow.”
“I’ll give you nothing.”
“But look it, Aunt Gracia, I’ve got to have a place to sleep and eat, haven’t I? And the governor’ll be sore if he comes back and knows I asked you for dough and you gave me the icy stare.”
Biting her lip, the woman trailed across the room and stood by the window, looking out. After all, the boy’s father would reimburse her and it was better than having him remain under the same roof with Madelaine.
“How much do you want?” she demanded.
“Oh, a thousand will do! Till I need more.” And the youngster laughed.
“A thousand dollars! Are you crazy?”
“No, but if I set the figure lower you’d fork it across. And I’d rather stick around.”
Gracia sat down at her desk, wrote a check and ripped it from the check book.
“Now get out!” she ordered.
The boy’s bad eyelid flopped again.
“Until it’s gone, Aunt Grace,” he chaffed. “Happy days!”
“If I had my way, young man, you’d land in reform school. Get out!”
Gracia Theddon whirled, however, at sound of a voice from the door.
“You’re not sending him away on my account, are you, mother dear? I’m sure he didn’t mean anything. He couldn’t find you and was looking for the maid. And besides, I should have locked my door.”
“You should have done nothing of the sort,” Mrs. Theddon replied angrily. “He had no right to enter a girl’s room——”
“Introduce us, Aunt Grace. I thought I’d met the family.”
Gracia Theddon waged a quick battle with her temper.
She introduced the two,—stiffly.
“I’m sorry I was rude,” the boy said awkwardly a moment later. “But, you see, everybody goes on the idea that I’m a roughneck and a low-brow and I—I—well, I’ve got to live up to my reputation.” He shot a challenge at his aunt.
“I won’t think you a roughneck or low-brow—whatever those things mean,” Madelaine returned. “And I’m sure we can be friends. You’re not sending him away, mother dear, before I’ve even a chance to get acquainted with the only cousin I have?”
“He’s not your cousin——” Gracia began angrily. She meant to infer that Gordon and Madelaine had nothing in common in the matter of breeding or character. If she had not paused, she could have covered the break and it might not have been noticed. But she did pause and the Fairy Foundling flamed scarlet. For it taunted her with the old, old ache that after all she was a nobody, living on the Theddon generosity—a child from an orphanage—or one who had been bought like a pretty slave for a thousand dollars to ameliorate an affluent woman’s loneliness.
“Then we’ll try to play the game that we are cousins,” Madelaine contended. “I’m sure you’ve been mistaken about Gordon. It isn’t fair to believe people are some things until there’s nothing left for them to do but become those things—is it?”
Gordon and his aunt both sensed the defense in the girl’s argument. Gordon thought he had won in spite of his aunt, already. The girl’s fine grain was lost on him entirely. But not on the woman. She felt that the Fairy Foundling would champion and mother the most foul-souled criminal that ever drew breath. It was her heritage and her danger.
“Gordon,” the woman propounded in an iron voice, “my daughter is of different caliber than the girls you’ve been meeting, whether you’ve been in military school or not. So you keep in mind that you’re a young gentleman or—or—God help you!”
The boy pulled a daffodil from a near-by bowl and tore it to pieces angrily.
“I guess I know class when I see it,” he grumbled.
This was so raw and rude that even Madelaine paled. But she recovered herself and laughed.
“You know what I said about some of the children when they first came to the Home, mother dear? Well—let’s all try—to get—better acquainted.”
IV
At five o’clock the following afternoon, while Madelaine was dressing for dinner, Gracia entered her room and passed through to her daughter’s. She dismissed the maid and closed the door.
“I’ve just had an answer to my cable,” she announced. “Amos and Margaret are not coming back until spring. Amos is asking as a special favor that I keep Gordon here and look after him until he gets back and can deal with him.”
“But what of that, mother? I’m sure——”
“I’m sure that young barbarian will succeed in ingratiating himself into your sympathies, Madelaine. Make you believe he’s not the thing he emphatically is. I can’t very well deny Margaret’s boy the shelter of my home. But I can and shall deny him propinquity with my daughter. Madelaine, please take it kindly and believe it hurts me far more than it does yourself. But I’m going to send you away—to school.”
It was the girl’s turn to struggle with self for a moment. Then in even voice she replied quietly:
“Of course, I’ll do whatever pleases you, mother dear. For after all, you know, I’m indebted to you more than I can ever repay.”
Mrs. Theddon uttered a little cry.
“No, no! Madelaine! Don’t take it that way! You’re not a helpless mercenary—you weren’t bought——”
She stopped. The misery on the girl’s face was unmistakable.
“Wasn’t I, mother dear? I thought I was—for a thousand dollars——”
“Madelaine! How did you know? Who told you——?”
“I happened to be hiding, unintentionally, in Miss Howland’s office that day. I heard everything. And there’s not been one day since, when I’ve heard you tear a check from your check book, but what I’ve remembered why and how I’m—here! Why did you do it? Oh, mother dear? Why did you?”
“My God!” cried the woman. “Madelaine, I never dreamed you knew! Or if you did, I thought you too little for it to make any difference. Sometimes I’ve wondered ifyou’re not really a woman even older and wiser than myself—merely using a young girl’s body.”
“Why did you, mother dear? You really didn’t have to do it!”
“And has that been bothering you, dear?”
“Ever since the day I came!”
The woman’s face and posture remained wooden for a moment. Then she relaxed.
“You poor dear, parentless lamb! Don’t you know—don’t you understand—can’t you see why? I did it because of my love!”
“Your love!”
“Exactly. Maybe I’ve been trained and molded these last few years, Madelaine, to think of value as money. I can’t help that. A thousand people would have termed my payment to the Howland woman absurd and ridiculous. Of course it was. And yet I had a purpose in it. Dear heart—I wanted to feel you had cost me something. Something I had paid for so I had the right to bona fide ownership!”
The girl’s calm eyes searched the woman’s face. They read the truth.
“Cost you something?” she exclaimed.
“I couldn’t go through the pain of giving you birth, dear girl. Yet I felt myself cheapening you and cheapening myself to get you for nothing. I wanted to pay—pay something ridiculous—and I did!” The woman’s voice cracked. “It wasn’t the Howland person getting money to which she had no right—it was my parting with it that counted! Can’t you understand?”
“You might have given it to the Orphanage, instead of Miss Howland who really didn’t——”
“Child, child! You’ll never know how much I have given to the Orphanage since you arrived to make my life worth while!”
“Mother,” said the girl after a time, “tell me why you really want me to go away? Why is it you don’t want me around where Gordon is? What’s the matter with him?”
“I said he was a ‘rotter.’ That’s enough!”
“But what do you mean by a ‘rotter’? What especially could he do by just remaining here?”
Gracia Theddon bit her lip.
“Don’t you know how a bad boy could compromise a girl or woman if he took it into his head to do it?”
“Compromise her? Just what do you mean?”
Mrs. Theddon stood looking out of the window for a time.
“Sit down, Madge,” she directed, after decision showed grimly on her strong face. “I’m going to tell you a lot of things I wish that my mother had told me, even when I was as young as yourself.”
The room grew dark as they sat there. The girl had drawn a chair to the window and as the mother finished, she remained for a long time with her elbows on the sill, her hands cupped about her face, staring down at the river and the serried lights across the South End Bridge.
“I’m glad you’ve told me,” she said at last. “I’ve always wanted to know but never dared ask.”
Gracia Theddon arose and snapped on the lights.
A week later Gordon Ruggles accosted his aunt in the garden.
“Look here, Aunt Gracie, what have you done with our little Bird of Paradise?” he demanded angrily.
“Bird of Paradise! Madelaine left here night before last for boarding-school. But what school it is, or where it is, you’ll never learn—if I can help it!”
“Hid her away from me, eh?”
“Speaking bluntly, precisely that! For a time at least.”
“All right, Aunt Gracia! If you want to make it personal, I accept the challenge. We’ll see who gets Madelaine in the end—you or I. Only be a good sport if you lose, Aunt Grace. Be a good sport if you lose!”
He vaulted the hedge and was gone.