The Chinaberry Tree

• • • • •

  After a while she started on a new issue. “Dr. Ismay has told me about you Stephen, how you used to be head of the National Médical Association. ”

  “Only of the Tri-State, my dear.”

  “Well anyway you were in the running for all sorts of honor. You mustn’t let pity,—chivalry, stand in the way of your career. Isn’t there something about Cæsar’s wife being above reproach?”

  “I’m not Cæsar, I don’t know. I don’t care. A man knows what he wants Laurentine, you can count on that. Particularly a man who’s been through what I have.”

  She murmured something about “bad blood.”

  “Don’t ever say a thing like that to me again,” he bade her sternly. “In the first place there’s nothing in it in your case. In the second you’ve too much sense to think that even if there is such a thing as bad or good blood, marriage would affect it. Irene—my wife—was the daughter of one of the most socially prominent families in Washington but her father and mother were self-indulgent in their ways. Irene had never seen self-control practiced. As she grew older she too indulged herself. Marriage didn’t change her.

  “Now about yourself and then Laurentine—for God’s sake let’s have done with this. I deliberately found out all I could about your mother and Colonel Halloway and from all I hear the two of them must have loved each other devotedly. You must remember the times in which he lived and the social slant. It probably never entered his head to buck the concentrated opinion of his entire group by offering marriage. But he did everything else—he let the world know that your mother was his woman. He provided for her and for you. And in any event Laurentine it was their affair. It’s over and done with. We’ve got nothing to do with it.”

  But in her heart she was not sure that it was over and done with. But of this she said nothing. “I’m not sure of myself yet Stephen,” she told him bravely. “I made one mistake once about marriage—that is in my mind I did,” she explained in answer to his startled look, “and you admit you actually made one. We’ve got to go into this thing very carefully I’m afraid. All my life I’ve wanted things to move in the ordinary normal way in which they seem to move for other people. But after all I was born out of the ordinary and I can’t expect things to go that way. If we marry and it’s a mistake I couldn’t survive it.”

  Morosely he told her he didn’t remember ever saying anything about marriage.

  She burst out laughing then and quite without calculation or coquetry flung her arms about his neck and kissed him.

  “You did that naturally enough,” he murmured, appeased.

  CHAPTER XX

  AFTER they had parted Laurentine kissed her mother good-night and ascended to her room not to go to bed but to thresh certain matters over in her mind. Had she but known it her hesitancy and sobriety with regard to Dr. Denleigh and his intentions were indicative of a decided growth and breadth of vision on her part. Two years ago, a year perhaps, she would have rushed forward to meet the fulfillment implied by his frank conversations, but to-day she found herself somewhat to her astonishment in an entirely different mood. Something had happened to her.

  She had loved, in spite of her brave words—she had loved Phil Hackett. She would have, once she had become his wife, gone to him in a frenzy of adoration and gratitude based on her appreciation of his willingness to take her—“bad blood,” disgraceful parentage and all—under his protection; to give her his name to take the place of her own borrowed one. Hackett himself would have been amazed at the depth of devotion which he would have awakened. In all probability he would never meet with its like again.

  Now she knew different values. Her talks with Mrs. Ismay, her arguments with Denleigh, or rather his responses had given her a different estimate of herself. She was young, she was strong, she was beautiful; she had been, in comparison with the relaxed standards of the day, almost ridiculously careful of her name and fame. In brief she was the epitome of all those virtues and restraints which colored men so arrogantly demand in the women they make their wives.

  Yet in spite of all this, her head told her stubbornly, at the first glimpse of the difficulties which association with her would bring, Hackett had thrown her over. Her heart grew sick and faint again at the memory of those other days—she never, never let herself in again for that sort of thing. She had seen now that there was something in life besides marriage. Mrs. Ismay, she recalled, clinging gratefully to that brave exemplar, had had disappointments,—oh many of them. And she had gone ahead with her work as a trained nurse, she had become head of a nursing establishment in Boston. It was while working there with no thought of marriage that she had met Dr. Ismay, had recognized him as he had her, as her mate and the two had consummated a union which neither had ever regretted.

  Laurentine pondered on these matters. She liked Denleigh, she respected him, she was able to understand and appreciate the standards, created by his sad experience, by which he measured her. But she had nothing but his word by which to gauge his sincerity. Wounded to the quick by Hackett to whom she knew she had made the strongest appeal which a woman can make to a man, she had gone with no volition of her own through sheer instinct to the other extreme.

  She wanted, she craved, love, companionship, protection. Her whole nature cried out for the complementing which a true marriage affords. That was it, a true marriage. But she was incapable now of entering into that relationship unless she was sure that the man who chose her, sought her with no thought of superiority, pity, or condescension in his heart.

  “No,” she told herself, sternly that night, sitting by the window, beholding, but not seeing the Chinaberry Tree, “I’m not happy now, but at least I have peace and self-respect. I wouldn’t be happy without them and I might forfeit both in grasping at marriage. Stephen seems wonderful, but how can I tell, how can I test him? And what right have I to test him. . . . Perhaps God will show me a way. . . . I’ll have to wait and see.” And sitting there by the window she prayed.

  In the morning she went resolutely about her household duties. Denleigh telephoned and asked permission to call that evening. Gravely and sweetly she told him to come, feeling her heart, her very being quicken in spite of herself. For all her brave resolutions she let herself dwell on the possibility of marriage with Stephen, let her imagination feast on its sweetness.

  Her mother called in to her as she left the telephone. “The fall’s really coming Laurentine. I slept cold last night. I wish you’d hunt out some blankets for me for to-night. They’re in your closet ain’t they? Or have Johnasteen do it.”

  “I’ll do it myself mother,” she replied dutifully. She made rather a point of not asking the sewing girls to help about the house. “I’ll do it right now before I sit down. They’re in Melissa’s closet though I think.”

  Melissa had gone to school. Laurentine pushed her door open half regretfully, she so seldom entered this room. “I must be kinder to her again,” she thought, thinking of the pleasant times they had spent here. When her cousin had first come the older girl had often visited her to try on a dress, brush her hair, to suggest some special adornment which was to have its telling effect on the particular swain who was arriving that evening. Quite without jealousy or rancor of any kind Laurentine had helped and advised Melissa, reliving, or rather living for the first time her own vanished first youth in the latter’s spontaneity and fresh enjoyment.

  Of late she had observed the girl’s wistfulness and shyness in her presence and her heart contracted a little at the thought that she who had herself suffered so much and so consciously, should deliberately and wantonly wound that fresh, trusting youth.

  “After all it’s not Melissa’s fault that Phil Hackett is a cad,” she thought generously. She was so happy this morning. The September sun poured in the window, touching the articles on Melissa’s quaint little dressing table. To look at that table always amused Laurentine. She herself could have been taken for a Parisian model, her elegance, her freshness, her discreet use
of discreet scents and powders. But Melissa was the frank coquette; Laurentine could not imagine how in her environment she became possessed of a knowledge of these first aids to beauty.

  Melissa had creams, cleansing ones, tissue-building ones—of all things with her gorgeous youth!—vanishing creams, bleaching creams, tints for darkening the eyelids, tiny brushes for eyelashes, tweezers to shape her eyebrows, pastes for finger-nails, powders in several tints. Laurentine pulled open a drawer to descry strange combs and curling irons. Melissa’s hair in its natural state was crinkly, even “nappy,” but no one would ever have suspected it. Smiling, her cousin closed the drawer. “She really is a nice kid,” she murmured.

  The blankets neatly folded reposed in the top of the closet. She would get down three, one for each of them, Melissa should have the pale green one even though that was her own special favorite, it would blend in better with the lavender and heliotrope trimmings, she thought, glancing with artistic satisfaction at the cluster of deeply purple asters in the vase on the girl’s little writing table.

  Something fell out of the blanket and clattered to the floor—a small book—it lay there open on its face. Laurentine picked it up, glanced indulgently at its purple and dull gold binding—evidently Melissa spent all her small stock of pin-money on this kind of thing. She turned it over, expecting to find she hardly knew what, a poem, some cherished directions for improving the complexion—and saw her own name—“poor Laurentine.”

  A quick wave of distaste and anger ran over her. Without grasping the significance of what she was doing she stood and read the diary as she had never read the most fascinating romance. Read all of Melissa’s silly out-pourings about her own unstained, unimpeachable integrity, read of her pity and yet, it seemed to Laurentine’s angry eyes, her barely concealed satisfaction at Aunt Sal’s and her daughter’s sorry plight, their ancient shame. . . .

  Laurentine threw the book from her as though it stung her. “The miserable—brat!” she told herself. “To think of Judy’s foisting her on us . . . with those ideas in her head. And dependent on mother for every crumb of bread, for every inch of shelter. I could hate her.” She stood stock still. “But you won’t, Laurentine, you mustn’t.” She picked up the book again, thrust it into a fold of the green blanket, replaced that and another in the closet, and arranged the third on her mother’s bed.

  With something of her old stoic resignation, she went down to her work. But the day so happily begun was spoiled for her. She could not bring herself to respond in any but the briefest manner to Melissa’s greeting when the young girl returned from school. It gave her a sense of cruel satisfaction to see the mobile, childish face cloud and quiver ever so slightly at her coldness. “Why should she care what sort of treatment she receives from ‘such a worm as I?’ ” she asked herself, quoting an old-fashioned hymn.

  But she was dissatisfied and disgusted with herself. In the evening, distraite and bewildering she amazed Denleigh with her moody restlessness. She was sparkling, capricious, remote, momentarily tender. But he didn’t mind. Manlike, he rejoiced in this earnest of new fields to conquer. “Honesty and loyalty are what I’m looking for, Laurentine. I know you have both of these qualities. I don’t believe I’d like it too well if you did turn out to be too sweetly reasonable.”

  CHAPTER XXI

  ASSHUR’S letters came regularly. Boyish, completely uninspired missives they were. Following almost a regular routine, they assured Melissa of his love for her, told of his advance in his studies, and ended with his constant, and, to the girl, wearying admonishments, “to be good, very, very good.”

  Melissa read them through, faithfully, and answered them with equal fidelity. She owed much to Asshur. Thanks to him and to Ben Davis and Herbert Tucker, but mostly to Asshur she had tasted the joys of unalloyed belledom for almost two years. That is belledom in the particular circles in which she moved. She had, she felt, known what it seemed to be a queen.

  In these days she was no longer a queen. But she felt no regret. She had never known a moré satisfying existence. Save for one blot—that of Laurentine’s sustained and increased chill of disapproval —she had never experienced such rapture in living.

  From being queen she had become a lady-in-waiting. But a lady-in-waiting in what surroundings! Kitty Brown had “taken her up,” had liked her sincerely and because the girls who had previously been her closest intimates lived, every one of them, in nearby but none the less distant townships, Melissa, by sheer force of propinquity became Kitty’s chum, her pal, her right-hand man, her sidekick. She had the good sense not to presume on this, she rarely went to Kitty’s uninvited, never spoke of their friendship to the Epps and Newton girls, with whom she had once been so familiar, and because in her heart she did not care who was the dominant spirit as long as that spirit provided her with plenty of good times, she made no attempt to cross her new friend even in her slightest wish.

  Kitty was selfish, Kitty was wilful, Kitty was vain. But she was warm-hearted, generous, lively and original. Her parents, once worried by the girl’s fretfulness at having to reside in a small town after the social possibilities of New York, and assured of Melissa’s essential respectability, welcomed their daughter’s new friend warmly and left the pair for the most part to their own devices.

  But it is doubtful if this alone would have sufficed to render Melissa so entrancingly happy. The real source of the genuine ecstasy which she fairly exhaled these days was of course Malory Forten. Melissa had admired Ben and Herbert and had deeply liked and even become attached to Asshur Lane. But with Malory she had fallen deeply, completely, overwhelmingly in love. It seemed to her that he was all that any girl could desire. That curious strain in her which so insisted on conventionality and mere gentility found a vast satisfaction in Malory’s slight, rather delicate figure, his low voice, his unobtrusive, perfect manners, his neat, inconspicuous clothes.

  Even at his age, twenty, his views were definitely fixed. He believed in the church, which, however, he would not attend in Red Brook because his sisters went there and he would not accompany them. He believed in family, in the Republican party, in moderate wealth, a small family, a rather definite place for women. He planned to be an engineer and follow just that profession.

  As purposeful as Asshur, he lacked completely his unconscious rival’s catholicity of standard. Life, according to young Lane, was a gift to be relished. You might start out with a particular end in view, but there was no reason why you should not enter and enjoy an occasional by-path. Asshur thought he would be a scientific farmer because he liked the soil; farming seemed to him an essential industry; kingdoms, governments, business corporations might come and go but the earth and its productivity would always remain. Transportation too, he used to tell Melissa, would always be important. He thought it quite conceivable that he might be an aviator. He liked the idea of a large family.

  “I should like,” he told her gravely, “to have about eight children. You could have the whole world right in your own house then.”

  Melissa, who thought of farms and aviation in terms of dirty overalls and thick shoes and who had the modern girl’s own clear ideas on birth control, used to shudder a little and change the subject. Still there was about him a breeziness, an effect of daring and more important still the promise of great loyalty, which appealed to her.

  Malory was not especially daring or breezy, but he was, she was sure, loyal. His chief appeal to her was his appreciation of her essential gayety and vitality. It was so easy for her to give and so important, apparently, for him to have. Gradually the two fell into the habit of spending all their spare time together whenever this was possible. It was here that Laurentine’s attitude thwarted and chafed. Melissa winced even now when she thought of that evening when she had been on the verge of asking to have Malory come to the house. She had always taken great care to do this sort of thing from the time of her first arrival, not so much out of respect for Aunt Sal as that it satisfied in herself that desire w
hich she had to appear the well-bred, carefully protected girl.

  Laurentine, after a brief period of relaxation, had become, it seemed to her, chillier than ever. Well, she couldn’t help that. And after all Laurentine never had expressed herself unpleasantly on the subject of company.

  • • • • •

  Melissa had come in from school, her mind made up. At dinner she began, ignoring the apprehension which Laurentine’s marked coolness awakened in her.

  “Aunt Sal, there’s a boy I see at school every day, he’s been very nice—sometimes he helps me with my Latin. He’d like to come to see me and I’d like him to; it’s lonely since Asshur’s been gone and the other boys. Can he come?”

  Her aunt looked up from her plate, vaguely astonished at the plaintiveness of her request.

  “Come, why of course he c’n, if he’s a nice boy. I miss Asshur myself. What did you say this new boy’s name was?”

  Before the girl could reply Laurentine intervened. “I don’t think that would be wise, mother. Melissa can do without so much company. I used to think Asshur was around here quite too much. This is Melissa’s last year in High School, it seems to me we should see that nothing interferes with her getting the most out of it. It’s all right for her to go to Kitty Brown’s occasionally and for Kitty to come here, but she needn’t have every Tom, Dick and Harry in the town traipsing after her. . . . Excuse me, please.”

  She rose hastily, really infinitely ashamed of her unkindness. But she was unable to banish the thought of the diary from her mind. Melissa and her pity for “poor Laurentine!” Well, she’d soon realize that “poor Laurentine” was some one to be reckoned with!

  Aunt Sal, in surprise, said: “What’s happened to you two girls, Melissa? I don’t remember your quarrelin’.”

  But Melissa, with the bright insouciance of youth, shook it off with a shrug of her slender shoulders. “I’m sure I don’t know, Aunt Sal. She’s had a mad on me for a long time. It’s all right, don’t you bother, you sweet old thing. I don’t care whether he comes or not. I just asked because he was always pestering.”