CHAPTER III
LEE had no friends of her own age. The large private school she attended was not patronised by the aristocracy of the city, and Mrs. Tarleton had so thoroughly imbued her daughter with a sense of the vast superiority of the gentle-born Southerner over the mere American, that Lee found in the youthful patrons of the Chambers Institute little likeness to her ideals. The children of her mother’s old friends were educated at home or at small and very expensive schools, preparatory to a grand finish in New York and Europe. Lee had continued to meet several of these fortunate youngsters during the first two of the five years which had followed her father’s death, but as she outgrew her fine clothes, and was put into ginghams for the summers and stout plaids for the winters, she was obliged to drop out of fashionable society. Occasionally she saw her former playmates sitting in their parents’ carriages before some shop in Kearney Street. They always nodded gaily to her with the loyalty of their caste; the magic halo of position survives poverty, scandal and exile.
“When you are grown I shall put my pride in my pocket, and ask Mrs. Montgomery to bring you out, and Jack Belmont to give you a party dress,” said Mrs. Tarleton one day. “I think you will be pretty,for your features are exactly like your father’s, and you have so much expression when you are right happy, poor child! You must remember never to frown, nor wrinkle up your forehead, nor eat hot cakes, nor too much candy, and always wear your camphor bag so you won’t catch anything; anddostand up straight, and youmustwear a veil when these horrid trade winds blow. Beauty is the whole battle of life for a woman, honey, and if you only do grow up pretty and are properlylancée, you will be sure to marry well. That is all I am trying to live for.”
Lee donned the veil to please her mother, although she loved to feel the wind in her hair. But she was willing to be beautiful, as beauty meant servants and the reverse of boarding-house diet. She hoped to find a husband as handsome and devoted as her father, and was quite positive that the kidney flourished within the charmed circle of society. But she sometimes regarded her sallow little visage with deep distrust. Her black hair hung in lank strands; no amount of coaxing would make it curl, and her eyes, she decided, were altogether too light a blue for beauty; her mother had saved Tarleton’s small library of standard novels from the wreck, and Lee had dipped into them on rainy days; the heroine’s eyes when not black “were a dark rich blue.” Her eyes looked the lighter for the short thick lashes surrounding them, and the heavy brows above. She was also very thin, and stooped slightly; but the maternal eye was hopeful. Mrs. Tarleton’s delicate beauty had vanished with her happiness, but while her husband lived she had preserved and made the most of it with manylittle arts. These she expounded at great length to her daughter, who privately thought beauty a great bore, unless ready-made and warranted to wear, and frequently permitted her mind to wander.
“At least remember this,” exclaimed Mrs. Tarleton impatiently one day at the end of a homily, to which Lee had given scant heed, being absorbed in the adventurous throng below, “if you are beautiful you rule men; if you are plain, men rule you. If you are beautiful your husband is your slave, if you are plain you are his upper servant. All the brains the blue-stockings will ever pile up will not be worth one complexion. (I do hope you are not going to be a blue, honey.) Why are American women the most successful in the world? Because they know how to be beautiful. I have seen many beautiful American women who had no beauty at all. What they want they will have, and the will to be beautiful is like yeast to dough. If women are flap-jacks it is their own fault. Only cultivate a complexion, and learn how to dress and walk as if you were used to the homage of princes, and the world will call you beautiful. Above all, get a complexion.”
“I will! I will!” responded Lee fervently. She pinned her veil all round her hat, squared her shoulders like a young grenadier, and went forth for air.
Although debarred from the society of her equals, she had friends of another sort. It was her private ambition at this period to keep a little shop, one half of which should be gay and fragrant with candies, the other sober and imposing with books. This ambition she wisely secluded from her aristocratic parent, butshe gratified it vicariously. Some distance up Market Street she had discovered a book shop, scarcely wider than its door and about eight feet deep. Its presiding deity was a blonde young man, out-at-elbows, consumptive and vague. Lee never knew his name; she always alluded to him as “Soft-head.” He never asked hers; but he welcomed her with a slight access of expression, and made a place for her on the counter. There she sat and swung her legs for hours together, confiding her ambitions and plans, and recapitulating her lessons for the intellectual benefit of her host. In return he told her the histories of the queer people who patronised him, and permitted her to “tend shop.” He thought her a prodigy, and made her little presents of paper and coloured pencils. Not to be under obligations, she crocheted him a huge woollen scarf, which he assured her greatly improved his health.
She also had a warm friend in a girl who presided over a candy store, but her bosom friend and confidante was a pale weary-looking young woman who suddenly appeared in a secondhand book shop in lowly Fourth Street, on the wrong side of Market. Lee was examining the dirty and disease-haunted volumes on the stand in front of the shop one day, when she glanced through the window and met the eager eyes and smile of a stranger. She entered the shop at once, and, planting her elbows on the counter, told the newcomer hospitably that she was delighted to welcome her to that part of the city, and would call every afternoon if she would be permitted to tend shop occasionally. If the stranger was amused she did not betray herself;she accepted the overture with every appearance of gratitude, and begged Lee to regard the premises as her own. For six months the friendship flourished. The young woman, whose name was Stainers, helped Lee with her sums, and had a keenly sympathetic ear for the troubles of little girls. Of herself she never spoke. Then she gave up her own battle, and was carried to the county hospital to die. Lee visited her twice, and one afternoon her mother told her that the notice of Miss Stainers’ death had been in the newspaper that morning.
Lee wept long and heavily for the gentle friend who had carried her secrets into a pauper’s grave.
“You are so young, and you have had so much trouble,” said Mrs. Tarleton with a sigh, that night. “But perhaps it will give you more character than I ever had. And nothing can break your spirits. They are your grandmother’s all over; you even gesticulate like her sometimes and then you look just like a little creole. She was a wonderful woman, honey, and had forty-nine offers of marriage.”
“I hope men are nicer than boys,” remarked Lee, not unwilling to be diverted. “The boys in this house are horrid. Bertie Reynolds pulls my hair every time I pass him, and calls me ‘Squaw;’ and Tom Wilson throws bread balls at me at the table and calls me ‘Broken-down-aristocracy.’ I’m surethey’llnever kiss a girl’s slipper.”
“A few years from now some girl will be leading them round by the nose. You never can tell how a boy will turn out; it all depends upon whether girlstake an interest in him or not. These are probably scrubs.”
“There’s a new one and he’s rather shy. They say he’s English. He and his father came last night. The boy’s name is Cecil; I heard his father speak to him at the table to-night. The father has a funny name; I can’t remember it. Mrs. Hayne says he is verydistingué, and she’s sure he’s a lord in disguise, but I think he’s very thin and ugly. He has the deepest lines on each side of his mouth, and a big thin nose, and a droop at the corner of his eyes. He’s the stuck-uppest looking thing I ever saw. The boy is about twelve, I reckon, and looks as if he wasn’t afraid of anything but girls. He has the curliest hair and the loveliest complexion, and his eyes laugh. They’re hazel, and his hair is brown. He looks much nicer than any boy I ever saw.”
“He is the son of a gentleman—and English gentlemen are the only ones that can compare with Southerners, honey. If you make friends with him you may bring him up here.”
“Goodness gracious!” exclaimed Lee. Her mother had encouraged her to ignore boys, and disliked visitors of any kind.
“I feel sure he is going to be your next friend, and you are so lonely, honey, now that poor Miss Stainers is gone. So ask him up if you like. It makes me very sad to think that you have no playmates.”
Lee climbed up on her mother’s lap. Once in a great while she laid aside the dignity of her superior position in the family, and demanded a petting.Mrs. Tarleton held her close and shut her eyes, and strove to imagine that the child in her arms was five years younger, and that both were listening for a step which so often smote her memory with agonising distinctness.