University of Virginia Library

1. CHAPTER I.
ACROSS THE GULF.

THE rainiest nights, like the rainiest lives,
are by no means the saddest.

This occurred to Miss Kelso one January
night, not many winters ago. Though, to be
exact, it was rather the weather than the simile
which occurred to her. The weather may happen
to anybody, and so serves a purpose like
photography and weddings. Reflections upon
life you run your chance of at twenty-three.

If, in addition to the circumstance of being
twenty-three, you are the daughter of a gentleman
manufacturer, and a resident of Boston,
it would hardly appear that you require the
ceremony of an introduction. A pansy-bed in
the sun would be a difficult subject of classification.
Undoubtedly, pages might with ease

be occupied in treating of Miss Kelso's genealogy.
Her descent from the Pilgrims could be
indisputably proved. It would be possible to
ascertain whether or not she cried at her mother's
funeral. Thrilling details of her life in the
nursery are upon record. Her first composition
is still legible. Indeed, three chapters, at the
least, might be so profitably employed in conveying
to the intelligence of the most far-sighted
reader the remotest intimation of Miss Kelso's
existence, that one feels compelled into an apology
to high art for presenting her in three lines
and a northeaster.

Perhaps it should be added that this young
lady was engaged to be married to her father's
junior partner, and that she was sitting in her
father's library, with her hands folded, at the
time when the weather occurred to her; sitting,
as she had been sitting all the opaque, gray
afternoon, in a crimson chair by a crimson fire,
a creamy profile and a creamy hand lifted and
cut between the two foci of color. The profile
had a level, generous chin. The hand had —
rings.

There are people who never do anything that

is not worth watching; they cannot eat an apple
or button a shoe in an unnoticeable, unsuggestive
manner. If they undertake to be awkward, they
do it so symbolically that you feel in debt to
them for it. Miss Kelso may have been one
of these indexical persons; at any rate, there
was something in her simple act of sitting before
a fire, in her manner of shielding her eyes
from the warmth to which her figure was languidly
abandoned, which to a posture-fancier
would have been very expressive.

She had noticed in an idle way, swathed to
the brain in her folds of heat and color, that the
chromatic run of drops upon a window, duly
deadened by drawn damask, and adapted nicely
to certain conditions of a cannel blaze, had a
pleasant sound. Accurately, she had not found
herself to be the possessor of another thought
since dinner; she had dined at three.

It had been a long storm, but Miss Kelso had
found no occasion to dampen the sole of her
delicate sandals in the little puddles that dotted
the freestone steps and drained pavement. It
had been a cold storm, but the library held, as
a library should, the tints and scents of June.

It had been a dismal storm; but what of that?
Miss Kelso was young, well, in love, and — Miss
Kelso. Given the problem, Be miserable, she
would have folded her hands there by her fire,
like a puzzled snow-flake in a gorgeous poppy,
and sighed, “But I do not understand!”

To be sure, her father was out of town, and she
had mislaid the score of La Grande Duchesse, —
undesirable circumstances, both, but not without
their compensations. For the placid pleasantness
of five o'clock paternal society, she had the rich,
irregular delights of solitude in a handsome house,
— a dream, a doubt, a daring fancy that human
society would snap, an odd hope pellmell upon
the heels of an extraordinary fear, snatches of
things, the mental chaos of a liberated prisoner.
Isolation in elegance is not apt to be productive
of thought, however, as I intimated.

Opposed to the loss of La Duchesse would be
the pleasure of making Maverick look for it.
Miss Kelso took a keen, appreciative enjoyment
in having a lazy lover; he gave her something
to do; he was an occupation in himself. She
had indeed a weakness for an occupation; suffered
passions of superfluous life; at the Cape

she rebelled because Providence had not created
her a bluefisher; in Paris she would make
muslin flowers, and learn the métier to-morrow.

This was piquant in her; her plighted husband
found himself entertained by it always;
he folded her two hands like sheets of rice-paper
over his own, with an easy smile.

The weather occurred to the young lady
about six o'clock in the form of a query: Was
it worth while to go out to-night? She cultivated
an objection to Don Giovanni in the rain,
— and it always rained on Giovanni; Maverick
could talk Brignoli to Mrs. Silver, and hold a
fan for Fly, as well without her; she happened
to find herself more interested in an arm-chair
than in anything else in the world, and slippers
were the solution of the problem of life. Was
it worth while?

This was one of those vital questions which
require immediate motives for a settlement, and
of immediate motives Miss Kelso possessed very
few. Indeed, it was as yet unanswered in her
own mind, when the silver handle of her carriage-door
had shut with a little shine like a smile

upon her, and Fly's voice, like boiling candy,
bubbled at her from the front seat.

Maverick had called; there had been a whiff
of pleasant wet air in her face; and, after all, life
and patent springs are much alike in doors or out.

Miss Kelso sank languidly back into the perfumed
cushions; the close doors and windows
shut in their thick sweetness; the broken lights
of the street dropped in, and Maverick sat beside
her.

“You have had your carriage re-scented,
Perley, I 'm sure,” said Fly, who was just
enough at home with Perley to say it.

“From Harris's, — yes.”

“Santalina, unless I am quite mistaken?”

This, softly, from Mrs. Silver; Mrs. Silver
was apt to speak very softly.

“I was tired to death of heliotrope,” said
Perley, with a weary motion of her well-shaped
head; “it clings so. There was some trouble,
I believe, to take it out; new stuffing and
covering. But I think it pays.”

“Indeed, yes, richly.”

“It always pays to take trouble for sachet, I
think,” said Fly, sententiously.

“Perley never makes a mistake in a perfume,”
— that came, of course, from Maverick.

“Perley never did make a mistake in a perfume,”
observed Mrs. Silver, in the mild motherly
manner which she had acquired from frequently
matronizing Perley. “Never from the
day Burt made the blunder of tuberoses for
her poor mother. The child flung them out
of the casket herself. She was six years old
the day before. It was a gratification to me
when Burt went out of fashion.”

Perley, it may be presumed, feeling always
some awkwardness at the mention of a dead
parent for whom propriety required her to
mourn, and in connection with whose faint memory
she could not, do the best she might, acquire
an unhappiness, made no reply, and sachet and
Mrs. Silver dropped into silence together. Fly
broke it, in her ready way: “So kind in you
to send for us, Perley!”

“It was quite proper,” said Perley.

She did not think of anything else to say,
and fell, as her santalina and her chaperone
had fallen, a little noticeably out of the conversation.

Fly and Maverick Hayle did the talking. Mrs.
Silver dropped in now and then properly.

Perley listened lazily to the three voices; one
sometimes hears very noticeable voices from very
unnoticeable people; these were distinct of note
as a triplet; idle, soft, and sweet — sweetly, softly
idle. She played accompaniments with them to
her amused fancy.

The triplet rounded into a chord presently, and
made her a little sleepy. Sensitive only to an
occasional flat or sharp of Brignoli or Kellogg,
she fell with half-closed eyes into the luxury of
her own thoughts.

What were they? What does any young lady
think about on her way to the opera? One
would like to know. A young lady, for instance,
who is used to her gloves, and indifferent to her
stone cameos; who has the score by heart, and
is tired of the prima donna; who has had a
season ticket every winter since she can remember,
and will have one every winter till
she dies?

The ride to the theatre was not a short one,
and slow that night on account of the storm,
which was thickening a little, half snow.

Perley, through the white curtains of her falling
eyelids, looked out at it; she was fond of
watching the streets when no one was watching
her, especially on stormy nights, for no reason
in particular that she knew of, except that
she felt so dry and comfortable. So clean too!
There were a great many muddy people out that
night; the sleet did not wash them as fast as the
mud spattered them; and the wind at the corners
sprang on them sharply. From her carriage
window she could look on and see it lying in
wait for them, and see it crouch and bound and
set teeth on them. She really followed with
some interest, having nothing better to do, the
manful struggles of a girl in a plaid dress, who
battled with the gusts about a carriage-length
ahead of her, for perhaps half a dozen blocks.
This girl struck out with her hands as a boxer
would; sometimes she pommelled with her elbows
and knees like a desperate prize-fighter;
she was rather small, but she kept her balance;
when her straw hat blew off, she chased headlong
after it, and Perley languidly smiled. She
was apt to be amused by the world outside of
her carriage. It conceived such original ways

of holding its hands, and wearing its hats, and
carrying its bundles. It had such a taste in
colors, such disregard of clean linen, and was
always in such a hurry. This last especially
interested her; Miss Kelso had never been in
a hurry in her life.

“There!” said Fly.

“Where?” said Perley, starting.

“I 've broken my fan; made a perfect wreck
of it! What shall I do? No, thank you.
Mr. Hayle, I am in blue to-night. You know
you could n't fail to get me a green one if you
tried. You must bring me out — but it 's too
wet to bring fans out. Mother, we must go in
ourselves.”

So it came about that in the land of fans, or in
the region roundabout, Maverick and the Silvers
disappeared in the flash of a fancy-store, and
Perley, in the carriage, was left alone.

“Dear me!” said Mrs. Silver, placidly, as the
umbrella extinguished her, “we are making our
friends a great deal of trouble, Fly, for a little
thing.”

Now Perley did not find it a trouble. She
was rather glad to be alone for a few minutes.

In fact, she took it very kindly in Fly to break
that fan, and, as she afterwards thought, with
reason.

The carriage door was left open, by her orders.
She found something pleasant in the wet wildness
of the storm; it came near enough almost to
dampen her cheek as she leaned forward towards
it; and the street came into the frame that was
left, in a sharp picture.

The sidewalk was very wet; in spots the
struggling snow drifted grayish white, and went
out into black mud under a sudden foot; the
eaves and awnings dripped steadily, and there
was a little puddle on the carriage step; the
colored lights of a druggist's window shimmered
and broke against the pavement and the carriage
and the sleet, leaving upon the fancy the surprise
of a rainbow in a snow-storm; people's
faces dipped through it curiously; here, a fellow
with a waxed mustache struck into murderous
red, and dripped so horridly that a policeman,
in the confusion of the storm, eyed him for half a
block; there, a hale old man fell suddenly into
the last stages of jaundice; beyond, a girl straggling
jealously behind a couple of very wet, but

very happy lovers, turned deadly green; a little
this way, another stepped into a bar of lily
white, and stood and shone in it for an instant,
“without spot or stain, or any such thing,” but
stepped out of it, quite out, shaking herself a
little as she went, as if the lighted touch had
scorched her.

Still another girl (Miss Kelso expressed to
herself some languid wonder that the night
should find so many young girls out, and alone,
and noted how little difference the weather appeared
to make with that class of people) — the
girl in plaid, whom the storm had buffeted
back for the last few moments — came up with
the carriage, and stopped, full against the druggist's
window, for breath. She looked taller,
standing in the light, than she had done when
boxing the wind at the corners, but still a little
undersized; she had no gloves, and her straw hat
hung around her neck by the strings; she must
have been very cold, for her lips were blue, but
she did not shiver.

Who has not noticed that fantastic fate of
galleries, which will hang a saint and a Magdalene,
a Lazarus and Dives, face to face? And

who has not felt, with those transfixed glances,
doomed by sunlight, starlight, moonlight, twilight,
in crowds and in hush, from year unto
year, to struggle towards each other, — vain builders
of a vain bridge across the fixed gulf of an
irreparable lot, — a weariness of sympathy, which
wellnight extinguished the artistic fineness of the
chance? Something of this feeling would have
struck a keen observer of Miss Kelso and the
little girl in plaid.

Their eyes had met, when the girl lifted her
arms to tie on her hat. Against the burning
globes of the druggist's window, which quivered
and swam through the sheen of the fall of sleet,
and just where the perfect prism broke about
her, she made a miserably meagre figure. Miss
Kelso, from the soft dry gloom of her carriage
door, leaned out resplendent.

The girl's lips moved angrily, and she said
something in a sharp voice which the wind must
have carried the other way, for the druggist
heard it, and sent a clerk out to order her off.
Miss Kelso, obeying one of her whimsical impulses,
— who had a better right, indeed, to be
whimsical? — beckoned to the girl, who, after

swearing a little at the druggist's clerk, strode
up rather roughly to the carriage.

“What do you want of me? and what were
you staring at? Did n't you ever see anybody
lose his hat in a sleet-storm before?”

“I beg your pardon,” said Miss Kelso; “I did
not mean to be rude.”

She spoke on the instinct of a lady. She was
nothing of a philanthropist, not much of a Christian.
Let us be honest, even if inbred sin
and courtesy, not justification by faith, and conscience,
induced this rather remarkable reply. I
call it remarkable, from the standpoint of girls in
plaid. That particular girl, without doubt, found
it so. She raised her eyes quickly and keenly to
the young lady's face.

“I think I must have been sorry for you,”
observed Miss Kelso; “that was why I looked at
you. You seemed cold and wet.”

“You 're not cold and wet, at any rate.”

This was raggedly said, and bitter. It made
Miss Kelso feel singularly uncomfortable; as if
she were to blame for not being cold and wet.
She felt a curious impulse towards self-defence,
and curiously enough she followed it by saying,
“I cannot help that!”

“No,” said the girl, after a moment's thought.
“N-no; but I hate to be pitied by carriage-folks.
I won't be pitied by carriage-folks!”

“Sit down on the steps,” said Miss Kelso, “and
let me look at you. I do not often see people
just like you. What is your name?”

“What 's yours?”

“I am called Miss Kelso.”

“And I am called Sip Garth.”

That ragged bitterness was in the girl's voice
again, much refined, but distinct. Miss Kelso, to
whom it seemed quite natural that the small
minority of the world should feel at liberty to
use, at first sight, the Christian name of the large
remainder, took little or no notice of it.

But what could bring her out in such a
storm, asked Miss Kelso of Sip Garth.

“The Blue Plum brings out better than me.
Who cares for a little sleet? See how wet I
am! I don't care.” She wrung out her thin
and dripping shawl, as she spoke, between her
bare, wet hands.

“The Blue Plum?” Miss Kelso hesitated,
taking the thing daintily upon her lips. What
did she, or should she, know of the Blue Plum?

“But the theatre is no place for you, my poor
girl.” She felt sure of as much as that. She
had dimly understood as much from her father
and the newspapers. No theatre patronized by
the lower classes could be a place for a poor
girl.

“It 's no place for you,” she said again. “You
had so much better go home.”

Sip Garth laughed. She swung herself upon
the highest step of Miss Kelso's carriage, and
laughed almost in Miss Kelso's fine, shocked
face.

“How do you know whether I had so much
better go home? Wait till you've been working
on your feet all day, and wait till you live where
I live, before you know whether I had so much
better go home! Besides” — she broke off with
a quick change of tone and countenance — “I
don't go for the Plum. The Plum does n't make
much odds to me. I go to see how much better
I could do it.”

“Could you?”

“Could n't I!”

“I don't quite understand.”

“I don't suppose you do. Give me the music,

give me the lights, and the people, and the
poetry, and I'd do it. I 'd make 'em laugh,
would n't I? I 'd make 'em cry, you may make
up your mind on that. That 's what I go to the
Plum for. I do it over. That 's what you think
of in the mills, don't you see? That 's so much
better than going home, — to do it over.”

“You seem,” said Miss Kelso, with some perplexed
weariness in her expression, — perhaps
she had carried her whim quite far enough, —
“you seem to be a very singular girl.”

Evidently Miss Kelso's coachman, whose hat-brim
appeared and peered uneasily over the box
at disgusted intervals, thought so too. Evidently
the passers, such of them as had preserved their
eyesight from the ravages of the sleet, thought
so too. Evidently it was quite time for the girl
in plaid to go.

“I wonder what you seem like,” said Sip
Garth, thoughtfully. She leaned, as she spoke,
into the sweet dimness of the carriage, and
gravely studied the sweet dimness of the young
lady's face. Having done this, she nodded to
herself once or twice with a shrewd smile, but
said nothing. Her wet shawl now almost brushed

Miss Kelso's dress; the girl was not filthy, but
the cleanliest poverty in a Boston tenement-house
fails to acquire the perfumes of Arabia,
and Perley sickened and shrank. Yet it struck
her as odd, for the moment, if you will believe it,
that she should have santalina in her carriage
cushions; not as ill-judged, not as undesirable,
not as in any way the concern of girls from tenement-houses,
not at all as something which she
would not do again to-morrow, but only as odd.

She had thought no more than this, when the
disgusted coachman, with an air of infinite personal
relief, officially announced Mr. Hayle, and
Fly came laughing sweetly back. It was quite
time for Sip to go.

In the confusion she dripped away among the
water-spouts like one of them, before Miss Kelso
could speak to her again.

The street came into the frame that was left in
a sharp picture. The sidewalk was once more
very wet; in spots the struggling snow drifted,
grayish white, and went out into black mud
under sudden feet; the eaves and awnings
dripped steadily, and there was a little puddle
on the carriage steps.

Miss Kelso had a young, fresh imagination,
a little highly colored, perhaps, by opera music,
and it made these things a vivid background
for the girl in plaid, into which and out of which
she stepped with a fanciful significance.

With the exception of her servants, her seamstresses,
and the very little members of a very little
Sabbath-school class, which demanded of her
very little thought and excited in her very little
interest, Miss Kelso had never in her life before
— I think I speak without exaggeration — had
never in her life before exchanged a dozen words
with an example of what Maverick Hayle was
pleased to term the , thereby evincing
at once his keen apcpreciation of the finer distinctions
both of life and letters, as well as the
fact, that, though a successful manufacturer, he
had received a collegiate education and had not
yet forgotten it. And, indeed, as he was accustomed
to observe, “Nothing gives a man such a
prestige in society.”

The girl in plaid then, to repeat, was a novelty
to Perley Kelso. She fell back into her cushions
again to think about her.

“Poor Perley! I hope she found herself amused

while we were gone,” sympathized Fly, fluttering
in with her new fan. Perley thanked her, and
had found herself amused, much amused.

Yet, in truth, she had found herself saddened,
singularly saddened. She could scarcely have
understood why. Nothing more definite than an
uncomfortable consciousness that all the world
had not an abundance of sachet and an appreciation
of Brignoli struck her distinctly. But how
it rained on that girl looking in at her from the
carriage steps! It must rain on many girls
while she sat in her sweet, warm, sheltered darkness.
It must be a disagreeable thing, this being
out in the rain. She did not fancy the thud of
drops on her carriage-roof as much as usual; the
wind waiting at corners to crouch and spring
on people ceased to amuse her; it looked cruel
and cold. She shivered and looked so chilly
that Maverick folded her ermines like a wonderful
warm snow-cloud tenderly about her, and
drowned the storm from her hearing with his
tender, lazy voice.

In the decorous rustle of the crowd winding
down through the corridors, like a glittering
snake, after Giovanni that night, Fly started

with a little faint scream, and touched Perley
on the arm.

“My dear Perley! — Mr. Hayle, there is a girl
annoying Perley.”

At Perley's elbow, trying quietly but persistently
to attract her attention, Perley was startled
and not well pleased to see the girl in plaid. In
the heat and light and scent and soft babble of
the place, she cut a jagged outline. The crowd
broke in beautiful billows about her and away
from her. It seemed not unlike a radiant sea
out of which she had risen, black and warning as
a hidden reef. She might have been thought to be
not so much a foreign horror as a sunken danger
in the shining place. She seemed, indeed, rather
to have bounded native from its glitter, than to
have forced herself upon it. Her eyes were very
large and bright, and she drew Perley's beautiful,
disturbed face down to her own with one bare
hand.

“Look here, young lady, I want to speak to
you. I want to know why you tell me the Plum
is no place for me? What kind of a place is
this for you? — now say, what kind of a place?
You don't know; but I do. I followed you here

to see. I tell you it 's the plating over that 's
the difference; the plating over. At the Plum
we say what we mean; and we mean bad enough,
very like. We 're rough, and we 're out with it.
Up at this place they 're in with it. They plate
over. The music plates over. The people plate
over. It 's different from us, and it ain't different
from us. Don't you see? No, you don't. I do.
But you 'd ought to, — you 'd ought to. You 're
old enough and wise enough. I don't mean to
be saucy; but I put it to you honest, if I have
n't seen and heard that in this grand place to-night
— all plated over — that 's no more fit for a
lady like you seem to be to sit and see and hear,
than it 's fit for me and the like of me to sit and
see and hear the Plum. I put it to you honest,
and that 's all, and I 'm sorry to plague you with
all your fine friends about, for I liked the looks
of you right well when I sat on your carriage
steps. But it ain't often you 'll have the chance
to hear truer words from a rough girl like me;
and it ain't likely you hear no more words true
nor false from me; so good by, young lady. I
put it to you honest!”

“Hush!” said Miss Kelso, somewhat pale, as

Maverick stepped up to drive the girl away.
“Let her alone. It 's only a girl I — amused
myself with when you went with Fly for the fan.
Let her be. It was only a whim of mine, and, as
it has proved, a foolish one. I am not used to
such people. She was coarse and hurt me. But
let her go.”

“I should advise you to choose your amusements
more wisely another time,” said Maverick
Hayle, looking angrily after Sip, who was edging
her way, with a sharp motion, through the radiant
sea. She disappeared from view on the
stairway suddenly, and the waves of scent and
light and heat and babble met and closed over
her as merrily as waves are wont to meet and
close over sunken reefs.

The ripple of Miss Kelso's disturbed thoughts
closed over her no less thoroughly, after the
momentary annoyance was past. She had done
a foolish thing, and been severely punished for
it. That was all. As Maverick said, the lower
classes could not bear any unusual attention from
their betters, without injury. Maverick in his
business connection had occasion to know. He
must be right.

Maverick in his business connection had occasion
to know another thing that night. Maverick
in his business connection was met by a telegram,
on returning with Miss Kelso to her
father's house. The senior partner held the
despatch in his hand. He was sitting in Miss
Kelso's parlor. His face was grave and disturbed.

“Losses, perhaps,” thought Perley, and left
father and son alone. They did not seem inclined
to remain alone, however. She had not
yet taken off her wraps in the hall, when she
heard Maverick say in an agitated voice, “I
can't! I cannot do it!” and Mr. Hayle the
senior came out. The despatch was still in
his hand.

“My dear Miss Perley,” he said, with some
hesitation.

“Yes, sir?” said Perley, unfastening her
corded fur.

“Your father —”

“Wait a minute!” said Perley, speaking fast.
She unfastened the fur, and folded the cape up
into a white heap with much pains and precision.

She was struck with a childish dread of hearing

a horrible thing. She felt singularly confused.
Snatches of Giovanni danced through
her brain. She thought that she saw the girl
in plaid sitting on her front stairs, with a worldful
of rain upon her head. Her own thought
came curiously back to her, in words: “How
disagreeable it must be to sit out in the rain!”
Her youth and happiness shrank with a sudden
faint sickness at being disturbed. It was with as
much fright as grief that she took the paper from
her father's old friend and read: —

“Crushed at six o'clock this afternoon, in the
freight depot at Five Falls. Instant death.”