An Ambitious Woman: A Novel

"Say! 'T ain't right t' shake me like this. I ain't goin' t' stand it, either. Come, change your mind. Treat me square. Will ye?"

Claire, driven to bay, did what her sex is sometimes held by a few renowned cynics as having a special talent for doing; she employed stratagem.

Her voice shook as she said: "Very well. What is it you wish me to do?"

She could feel the tense grasp upon her arm relax a little. This was just the kind of result she had aimed for.

"I want ye t' stay this side the river a spell yet, an' we'll eat somepn somewhere. Hey?"

The fingers about her arm had acquired a fondling laxity that half sickened her. But she waited a little. They were a good ten yards from the boat. It was possible that both their figures were too shadowed for the men at the chains to see them. Perhaps, on the other hand, these wardens did not care to shout a final notice that the boat was now unmoored.

Claire still chose to temporize. Her heart beat so that it seemed about to burst through her side; but she nevertheless kept her brain clear enough to maintain a subtlety of intent in strange contrast to her deep fear.

She had determined to get free if she could, and find refuge among the passengers on the boat. Here, in the lonely dusk of the dock, she was at a sad disadvantage; but once within the lighted cabin of the boat, she could find the same silent protection of mere surrounding that the car had afforded. She had a latent resolve, also, of future appeal to some of those whom she knew had preceded her, though this formed no real part of her present quick-formed scheme.

"Suppose that I do go with you," she said. "At what time would I be able to get home?"

Slocumb's grasp materially loosened. "Why, any time at all!" he exclaimed. "The boats run till 'bout two o'clock or so, an'" —

His sentence was cut short in its valuable explanation by a sudden disengaging spring on the part of Claire. She ran with her best speed toward the boat. She now perceived that it was just leaving the pier. By the time that she had gained almost the extreme edge of the latter, a voice from the receding boat itself cried out to her, "Don't jump!"

She saw, then, that a long, curved crevice was widening in a very rapid way at a slight space beyond the spot where she had abruptly halted. A few more seconds would make the leap a mere madness; now it needed nerve, agility, and was indeed a venture. But Slocumb stood behind her. The risk was worth the prize. Claire waited perhaps ten seconds; the crevice had grown a fissure; she saw the murky water give a dull flash or two, far below it. Then she jumped.

The space had not been more than three feet. She cleared it well. But what she had cleared sent a sharp terror through her the instant after both feet had touched the firm bourne of the deck. For a little while she stood quite still, shivering, with her back to the dock thus boldly quitted. Her mind was wholly in a whirl. She did not hear the half-growled words of one of the men who had lately unloosed the boat, chiding her upon her folly, in gruff contempt of syntax.

But very soon this access of intense alarm lessened. She partly ceased to fix her thought upon what she had done, recalling instead, why she had done it. She turned, giving two flurried looks to right and left, doubtless from a sense that the abhorred one might have breasted the same peril as herself – in his case far lighter, of course.

Her gaze swept the opposite pier. It gleamed drowsy and obscure, with the effect of some grave marine monster just risen from the muddy tides below it. Strangely, also, the lights at either side gave it the semblance of two malign blazing eyes. And in the glimmer thus made Claire saw Slocumb.

He had not taken the leap. At first amazement had wrought in him its brief yet telling effect. Then he had dashed to the end of the pier, momentarily furious at thus being balked. But in a second his fury had cooled. And something had cooled it, very new to him, though very forcible. This was pity. He might easily have cleared the interspace. But he forbore to do so. He thrust both hands into his pockets, and with lowered head moved away. In an instant more it was too late for him to have changed his novel resolve, even had he so wished.

By the time that Claire's look lighted upon the pier he was nowhere visible. He had disappeared from her sight forever, as also from her life. He had been a dread though brief experience – a glimpse given her into the melancholy darkness of human wrong. The shadows had seemed to take him back among themselves, where he rightly belonged. Perhaps the episode of his insolence wrought some sort of effect upon her future acts; it is certain that she never quite forgot the miserable dismay he had roused; and when the struggle for worldly success afterward spurred her with so keen a goad, some vague remembrance of to-night may have quickened her aspiring impulses and made what we call the socially best gain fresh worth in her eyes by contrast with such foul deeps as lie below it.

Once confident that Slocumb had not followed her, she managed, with unsteady pace, to reach the outer rail of the deck and lean against it while the boat traversed the river. She was trembling a good deal, and felt an extreme weakness as well. But a glow of triumph upbore her. She had escaped at last!

The ugly boat, as it sped along, seemed a sentient accomplice of her final good fortune. She had a fancy that its thick wooden rail dumbly throbbed beneath her grasp. Her posture was a half-cowering one; the spell of her poignant fears had not yet passed. Her head leaned itself peeringly from stooped shoulders in such a way that its slim neck took the sort of curve we see in a frightened deer's.

A somewhat late moon had recently risen, whose advent had altered the whole face of the heavens, flooding it with a spectral, yellowish light. But borne rapidly across the moon's blurred disk, on some high, fleet rush of air, scudded volumes of rolling and mutable vapor. They constantly soared above the great dusky city, at first in dense black masses, then thinning and lengthening as they came midway between zenith and horizon. While Claire watched these strange and volatile clouds, so incessant in their motion and so swift in their continual upward stream, they took, for her confused fancy, the semblance of pursuant phantom shapes. They formed themselves into visages and bodies; they stretched forth uncouth yet life-like arms; they clenched hands of misty gloom, and shook them far above her, with ghostly, imminent defiance. Her former transit across the river had been fraught with sweet, poetic mystery; her present voyage was one touched with a kind of allegoric terror.

But the boat soon found its second wharfage. Claire sped out through the two cabins in time to join the crowd of disembarking passengers. Once more back in Greenpoint, she hurried along certain familiar streets until she arrived at her own dwelling. It was now a little after ten o'clock. She had an instinct that it was about this time. Above the high piazza, both parlor-windows were dark, but below it the windows of the basement portion were brightly lit. She passed into the scant space of garden and sought the lower door; she pulled the bell, set in the woodwork at her right, and waited.

No answer came, and she rang again. One of the side-lights gave her a good view into the hall beyond. She presently saw her mother appear. Mrs. Twining opened the door. It was not till she and her daughter stood face to face that the latter made a certain sharp, abrupt discovery.

"Mother!" she said, "you're pale – you look very strange. Is it because I staid away so long?"

"No," replied Mrs. Twining.

Claire grasped her mother's arm with both hands. "Then what is it?" she questioned. "You don't mean that – that Father's sick? Do you?"

Mrs. Twining was white as death, and had dark rings round her fine black eyes. She laughed with great bitterness as she closed the door.

"Oh, no," she said. "Your father ain't sick, Claire."

These few words teemed, somehow, with a frightful irony. Claire knew her mother's moods so well that she now staggered backward a little as the two faced each other in this narrow hallway.

"Mother," she said, with a gasp, "what do you mean? Has anything happened to Father?"

"Yes," said Mrs. Twining with a cruelty that Claire never forgot and never forgave. "Your father's dead. He died at nine o'clock. The doctor's here now. He says it's heart-disease. You're a nice gadabout, to be off for hours, nobody knows where, and come home to find" …

Mrs. Twining ended her sentence at just this point, for Claire had dropped in a swoon before the next word could be spoken, upon the oil-cloth of the little hall which her own hands had so often swept.

VII

That night was one of anguish and horror. As soon as enough strength had come to her with the return of consciousness, Claire insisted upon being taken to where her father lay. Not a tear left her eyes as she knelt beside his body. She was very white, and seemed perfectly calm. She kissed the dead man, now and then, on forehead and cheek. Once she rose, went to the window, and set both arms lengthwise upon its sash, propping her chin against her clasped hands. In this attitude she stared forth at the heaven, still full of moony light and still alive with its black pageantry of hurrying clouds. But their motion was more quick, now; the wind had grown stronger and colder; all touch of mildness was rapidly vanishing from the atmosphere. Claire felt the panes shake, and heard them rattle, as she leaned thus. There seemed an awful sympathy between this wild phase of nature and her own tumultuous, distraught sensations.

Grief and alarm clashed within her soul. She could not simply and passionately regret her father's loss, for the thought of her own friendless and penurious state would thrust itself into her consciousness. Her feelings of pure bereavement, of standing face to face with a vast and stern solitude, of having had something torn from her heart by the roots, were terrible enough. But none the less, on this account, could she fail to think with inward thrills of fright on the subject of her merely material future. In an hour or two something solidly defensive had been shattered and swept away. Her father's protection had kept aloof, so to speak, the huge, merciless forces of society. Now these forces were rushing upon her like yonder stream of antic-shaped clouds.

"What is to become of me?" she murmured aloud, not knowing that she spoke at all. "Who will help me? Where shall I turn? I am so alone – so fearfully alone!"

Mrs. Twining had come into the room, as it chanced, a moment before the utterance of Claire's first words. It was now a little before midnight; she had entered this chamber of death twice before, and had looked at her daughter's kneeling figure, there beside the corpse, but had retired again in silence. Now she spoke, as Claire finished speaking. The girl turned instantly as she began.

"Yes," she said, in her most hard and curt way. "I s'pose you are alone, now he's gone! You ain't got any mother, of course not! She's a cipher; she always was. You're going to quit her, I dare say; you're going to leave her in the lurch. P'raps you'll find some of those you was with to-night that'll see you don't come to grief. Well, 't ain't for me to complain at this late day. I've had chance enough to take your measure, Miss, long ago!"

There was a look of dreary fatigue on Claire's white face as she slowly answered: "Mother, I will not leave you. I don't wish to leave you."

"Oh, you don't, eh? Then why did you say you was alone?"

"Did I say it?" returned Claire. She put one hand to her forehead. "I – I must have spoken aloud without knowing it." … Immediately afterward she crossed the room, going very close to her mother's side, and looking with eager meaning into the cold, austere, aquiline face.

"Don't be unkind to-night," she went on. "Remember this dreadful thing that has happened. It – it ought to – to soften you, Mother. It has nearly crazed me. I cannot reason; I can scarcely think. I – I can only suffer!"

Mrs. Twining curled her mouth in bitter dissent. "Oh, you didn't know the poor man was sick when you ran off and staid for hours. No, indeed! If you had, you wouldn't 'a' worried him as you did when he come home to tea and found you gone. He fell like a log, just as he got up from the table. But he hadn't eaten hardly a thing, and I guess you know why he didn't."

Claire uttered a quick, flurried cry. She grasped her mother's arm. "You – you don't mean," she exclaimed, in a piteously fierce way, "that I killed Father – or – or hastened his death by – by not being home? Oh, say, Mother, that you don't mean this! It would drive me mad if I believed so! Please say it isn't true!"

Claire's aspect breathed such desperation that it wrought havoc even with so stolid a perversity as that of the harsh, unpropitiable being whom she confronted.

"Well, no, I don't say that," murmured Mrs. Twining, with sullen alteration of mien and tone. "But I do say, Claire, that you was off somewhere, and he was fretted and pestered because you was, and" …

Here the peculiar nature of this most tormenting woman suddenly revealed a change. Her grim mouth twitched; her nostrils produced a kind of catarrhal sniff; her cold black eyes winked, as if tears were lurking to assail them. The next words that she spoke were in a high, querulous key.

"Oh! so you're the only one that's fit to mourn for that poor dead one, hey? I, his lawful wedded wife, and your own mother, ain't got any right to grieve! Oh, very well! I'm nobody at all, here. I'd better get away. You're chief mourner. There's nobody but you. I s'pose you'll pay all the expenses of the funeral, since you're so dreadful stuck-up about it!"

Claire shook her head, in a pathetic, conciliating way. She lifted one finger, at the same time. Her face was still white, and her dark-blue eyes were burning feverishly.

"No, no, Mother!" she said. "This is all wrong. You mustn't speak like that, here. If you didn't love him, I did. There's a little money yet. It's yours, but you'll give it; you've told me of it; it will be enough to bury Father decently. I promise you that if you do give it I will try very hard to get some work that will support us both."

Mrs. Twining put a hand on either hip. She stared at Claire for a moment. Then she answered her.

"No," she said. "I won't give a cent of it. It's only about a hundred dollars. He ain't led me such a nice life that I should be so awful grateful to him now he's gone. There's ways of burying that don't cost money. Yes, there's ways… Let 'em come and take him. I ain't going to beggar myself because he wants a rosewood coffin, and" —

"Mother!" cried Claire, pointing toward the dead, "he is here!"

"Oh, well!" said Mrs. Twining. She spoke the two brief words in a sort of abrupt whimper, taking a step or two toward the calm sheeted form of her dead husband. "S'pose he is here. I can't use that money, and I won't!"

Claire felt the hideous taste of those words. They who have thus far read this chronicle must have read it ill if they are not sure that no love for a mother so ceaselessly froward and hostile could now survive in her daughter's heart. But though she knew her mother capable of dread acts if occasion favored, Claire was thunderstruck by this last announcement.

It appeared to her monstrous and barbarous, as it indeed was. She clenched both hands, for an instant, and her eyes flashed.

"Say what you mean!" she retorted, not raising her voice, because of that piteous reverence which the still, prone shape inspired. "Can you mean that you will let charity bury our dead for us? Can you mean that?"

Mrs. Twining gave a quick, grim nod. "Yes, I do mean it," she returned. "And if you wasn't a fool you'd see why."

Claire folded her arms. Her next words came with grave, measured composure from white, set lips. "I may be a fool," she said, "but thank God I haven't your kind of wisdom! Keep your money, Mother. Do as you threaten. But when Potter's Field takes poor Father's body, that will be the end of everything between you and me. Remember that I said this. I will never speak to you, never notice you again, if you do so shameful a thing. If you spend that money as duty and as decency should both prompt, I will work for you, slave for you, cling to you always. But if not, we are no longer mother and daughter. You see, I don't speak with heat or with haste. I am perfectly calm. Now choose which course you will take. But never say that I did not fully warn you, when it will be too late for retraction!"

There was a splendidly quiet impressiveness in this speech of Claire's. She went and knelt once more beside her father's body after she had finished it. She had resolved upon no further entreaty or argument. The very atrocity of her mother's proposed design seemed to place continued discussion of it beyond the pale of all womanly dignity.

Mrs. Twining was too coarse a soul to see the matter as Claire saw it. She preferred to take the chances that her daughter would relent when the ignoble interment was over.

To-morrow came, and she gave no sign of altering her purpose. Claire scarcely addressed a word to her during this day. A few of the Greenpoint folk called at the house. Among these was Josie Morley, distressed at the tidings of death, and prepared to utter voluble regrets for having lost Claire in the crowd during the previous night.

But Claire would see no one. She remained with her father's body in the little room upstairs, locking its door when she thought there was any chance of a visitor being brought thither.

Now and then she wondered, with a dumb misery, whether her mother had made any attempt to bring about the loathed burial. She herself had a few dollars in her possession. This sum she meant to use in seeking employment after the earth had closed over her father's corpse. Once or twice a passionate impulse had seized her to go and seek help from those under whom her father had lately served in his drudging clerkship. But she repressed this feeling – or rather shame at the thought of possible refusal, mixed with a natural proud reluctance to own the sad need in which she stood, repressed it for her.

The next day she learned the full, torturing truth. Mrs. Twining had carried out her threat. Two shabby men came with a pine box. They placed the corpse herein. Claire had already paid it all the final reverential rites which her sex and her grief would allow. It was dressed in the same rusty outward garments which it had worn when death came. The men held a little discussion below stairs with Mrs. Twining. They afterward departed and remained away two good hours. When they returned they brought a dark wagon with an arched top. In the interval Claire still watched. She was quite silent. Perhaps if she had deigned now to plead with her mother, the latter, already a little frightened at the girl's stony, unvaried calmness, might have relented and agreed to more seemly obsequies. But except one glance of immeasurable reproach, during a brief visit which Mrs. Twining paid to the chamber, Claire gave no further sign of revolt.

When the men returned, she chanced to be looking from the window. She saw the wagon. She shuddered, and went back to her father. No one saw her bid him the last farewells. She showed no trace of tears when the men presently reëntered the room, but her dark-blue eyes shone from her hueless face with a dry, glassy glitter. Her mother now appeared. She looked at Claire in a covert, uneasy way, though there was much dogged obstinacy about the lines of her mouth. A moment later she spoke to the men. It seemed to Claire like the refinement of hypocrisy that she should set her voice in a mournful key.

"I s'pose you want to get it through right away," she said.

"Yes, ma'am," replied one of the men. "Those is always the orders."

Claire went to the window again. It was a raw, misty, drizzling day. She stared out into the dreary street. She did not want to see that pitiful box closed and sealed. She presently heard a grating sound which told her just what the men were doing.

And then she heard another sound that was quite as harsh. It was her mother's voice, lowered, and with a sort of whine in it.

"It's true enough that the dead ought to be buried properly, Claire, but that ain't any reason why the living shouldn't live – the best way they can. You take it hard now, but after a while you'll see you ain't got any real right to blame me. You'll see" —

"Don't touch me, please," interrupted Claire. Her mother had laid a hand on her arm, and she had receded instantly. Then she said, while steadying her voice, though not caring whether the men heard or no: "Did you intend going to – to the grave with him?"

Mrs. Twining gave a great elegiac sigh. "Oh, no, I couldn't stand it. I should break right down long before I got there."

"Very well," said Claire, "I am going."

One of the men looked up at her. He had a small, round face, an odd blond tuft of beard, and a pair of mild blue eyes. He held his screw-driver thrust into a screw while he spoke. His voice was very respectful. He had noticed Claire's look and mien before; he had a wife and children at home. Scarcely ever, in his experience, had he known a burial of this sort to take place from a dwelling as apparently thrifty as the present one.

"Excuse me, Miss," the man said, "but you couldn't ride in the wagon. There's just room for him and me." He indicated his companion by a little motion of the head. "And there's three other bodies. We're takin' 'em to the almshouse."

"Where is the almshouse?" asked Claire. She could not help giving her mother one shocked sidelong glance while this question left her lips.

"It's over in Flatbush," the man said.

Claire went close up to his side. If he had not seen the white distress in her face before, he must plainly have seen it now. "I know where that is," she said. "I could go there. The cars would take me." She put her hand on the rough wood of the box. The touch was so light that it resembled a caress. "Would they let me go to – to the almshouse and wait … near him … till he is buried?"

Mrs. Twining at once began to weep. Or rather, she spoke in a wailing tone that indicated tears, even if no tears really either gathered or fell.

"Claire, you mustn't think of going! No, you mustn't! Things are bad enough, as it is. Now, promise me that you won't take any such notion! Do promise!"

Claire paid no heed to this outburst. She was looking with eager fixity at the man. She had already roused his sympathy; she felt certain of it; his big, mild eye seemed to tell her so. "They won't all be buried till about two o'clock," he said. "There'll be five or six bodies to-day, I guess. If you start from here in about an hour, Miss, you can get to the buryin'-ground by just the right time. I'll see to it you do." The speaker here turned and winked one mild eye at his companion. The latter was staring rather lifelessly at Claire. He had a long, pale, tired-looking face.

"All right," he muttered, apathetically, as if he had not at all comprehended, but was willing to take matters on trust.

"I'll see to it that he ain't got in till you come," pursued Claire's new friend. "The Potter's Field ain't far from the County Buildings, as they call 'em. I s'pose you know how to get to Flatbush?" He scratched his sandy shock of hair for an instant, and told her just what cars to take.

Claire put faith in him. Something made her do so. When the pine box had been carried down stairs, placed inside the dark wagon, and driven away, she went to her own room and made a small, neat brown-paper parcel. Her clothes were few enough, and she left all of these except what seemed to her of vital necessity. "I don't want to look like a tramp," she told herself, with a darksome pleasantry. "I shall not, either. I shall only be a poor, shabby girl with a bundle."

When she emerged from her room her mother met her in the hall. Claire wore her bonnet. Mrs. Twining gave a frightened whimper as she saw this and the parcel.

"Oh, Claire," she said, "you ain't really going to the – the grave?"

"Yes, I am," she said. Her tones were so frigid and so melancholy that they caused a palpable start in her who heard them.

"Oh, Claire," moaned her mother, "if you go, I can't! I can't see him buried that way! Of course you can, if you want!"

"I do want," said Claire.

"But you'll come back! you'll come home again!"

As she was passing her mother, there in the hall, Claire turned and faced her. "I shall never come home again," she said, scarcely raising her voice above a whisper. "You remember what I told you."

Mrs. Twining was no longer merely frightened; she was terrified. "Claire!" she burst forth, "I ain't done right, perhaps. But don't be headstrong – now, don't! if you'd spoke to me yesterday – if you'd even spoke to me this morning, I might, … well, I might, after all, have given the money. But it's too late now, and" …

"Yes, it is too late now," Claire interrupted, and somehow with the effect of a shaft, shot noiselessly, and tellingly aimed.

After that she hurried straight down stairs, passed along the lower hall, and made rapid exit from the house.

A number of heads had been thrust from neighboring windows while the body was being borne away. Claire, who endured what was thus far the supreme humiliation of her life, wondered whether any one was watching now, but she kept her eyes drooped toward the pavement as she moved along, and never once looked to left or right. She despised these possible watchers, and yet she remembered what her dead had been – how kindly, how pure, how noble; and it was to her sense an infamy that his ignominious burial should be made a theme of vulgar gossip.

"He is to be put in Potter's Field," she told her own aching, bursting heart, while she still hurried along. "Yes, he! And he was so good, so fine, so much a gentleman! He is to be put in Potter's Field!.. But I will see the last sod placed over him… That man will keep his word… I shall stand by poor Father, his only mourner. He will be glad if he knows. What a slight thing it is to do for him, after all the love he gave me! But it is all I can do. All, and yet so little!"

A dreary ride in the cars at last brought her to Flatbush. After alighting she had quite a long walk through the gray, foggy atmosphere of a region which the sweetest mood of spring or summer finds no spell to beautify. It was now as hideous and lonesome as that hateful tract just beyond Greenpoint. The immense gloomy structures of the almshouses loomed beside the path she took. The conductor on the car had told her just how to reach the pauper graveyard. It lay at some distance from the grim buildings that she was obliged to pass, and within whose walls were prisoned the sin, the sickness and the madness of a great city.

Nothing could be more common, more neglectful, more wretchedly melancholy, than the place she at length gained. It was scarcely an acre in extent; it did not contain a single tree or shrub; it was enclosed by a fence of coarse, careless boarding. Its graves were so thick that you could scarcely pass between them. In each grave had been laid four bodies, and excepting a pathetic half-dozen or so of simple wooden crosses, there were no signs to tell who slept here, except rough, low stakes, each bearing four numbers. Never was the oblivion of death more sternly typified; never was its dark mockery more dolefully accentuated!

A little group of men stood near an open grave as Claire reached the gate. She saw them, and recognized one of them, who advanced toward her. She felt herself grow slightly faint as she perceived a box placed just at the rim of the earthy cavity.

"Was I in time?" she asked of the man, as they walked together inside the enclosure.

"Yes," he said, with a very kind voice. "You was just in time, Miss. All the others is turned in except him. I saved him on purpose."