(She would have been quite willing to make the journey with him, if she might have flown straightway back to the arms of her artist lover!)
"You see--it"s different--I can"t--" Milly could not bring herself to deal the blow. It seemed too absurd to state baldly that in twelve days a man had come into her life, whom she had never set eyes on thirteen days before, but who nevertheless had made it impossible for her to do what before that time she had looked forward to with serene content.
Such things happened in books, but were ridiculous to say!
"You care for some one else?"
Milly nodded, and her eyes dropped tears fast. It all seemed very sad, almost tragic. She was sorry for herself as well as for him....
If he felt it inexplicable that he had not been allowed to suspect this deep attachment before, he was too much of a man to mention it. He took his blow and did not argue about it.
"I"m so sorry!" Milly cried.
"It had to be," he said, hastily putting out a hand to her. "I shall love you always, Milly!" (It was the thing they said in books, but in this case it sounded forlornly true.) "I"m glad I"ve had the chance to love you," and he was gone.
Milly dropped tears all the way upstairs to her room, where she shut herself in and locked herself against family intrusion. In spite of her tears she was glad for what she had done. A woman"s heart seemed to her ample justification for inconsistencies, even if it jammed other hearts on the way to its goal. It was fate, that was all,--fate that Jack Bragdon should have walked into her life just twelve days before it would have been too late. Fate is a wondrously consoling word, especially in the concerns of the heart. It absolves from personal responsibility.
So Milly went to sleep, with tears still on her eyelashes, but a smile on her lips, and dreamed of her own happy fate. At last "the real, right thing" was hers!
X
MILLY MARRIES
She awoke with a sensation of bliss--a never ending happiness to be hers. Yet there were some disagreeable episodes before this bliss could be perfected. For one thing Horatio took the announcement of the new engagement very hard,--unexpectedly so. Grandma Ridge received it in stony silence with a sarcastic curve to her wrinkled lips, as if to say,--"Hope you know your mind this time!" But Horatio spluttered:--
"What? You don"t mean that la-di-da newspaper pup who parts his hair in the middle?"
(To part one"s hair in the middle instead of upon the slope of the head was Horatio"s aversion--it indicated to him a lack of serious, masculine purpose in a young man.)
"I thought you would do better than that, Milly.... What"s he making with his newspaper pictures?"
"I don"t know," Milly replied loftily.
She might guess that it was in the neighborhood of thirty dollars a week, sometimes increased by a few dollars through a magazine cover or commercial poster. But in her present exalted mood it was completely indifferent to Milly whether her lover was earning twenty dollars or two thousand a week. They would live somehow--of course: all young lovers did.... And was he not a genius? Milly had every confidence.
"You might just as well have married Ted Donovan," Horatio groaned.
(Donovan was the young man at Hoppers" whom Milly had disdained early in her West Side career.) "I saw him on the street the other day, and he"s doing finely--got a rise last January."
"He"s not fashionable enough for Milly," Grandma commented.
"I must say you treated that Mr. Duncan pretty badly," Horatio continued with unusual severity.
"I should say so!" Grandma interposed.
Milly might think so too, but she was serenely indifferent to all the defeated prospects, the bleeding hearts over which she must pa.s.s to the fulfilment of her being. It was useless to explain to her father and her grandmother the imperious call of "the real, right thing," and how immeasurably Jack differed from Ted Donovan, Clarence Albert, or even Edgar Duncan, and how indifferent to a true woman must be all the pain in the world, once she had found her Ideal.
Horatio and his mother might feel the waste of all their efforts in behalf of Milly,--the costly removal from the West Side home, the disastrous venture in the tea and coffee business, and all the rest,--to result in _this_, her engagement to a "mere newspaper feller who parts his hair in the middle." It was another example of the mournful experience of age,--the pouring forth of heart"s blood in useless sacrifice to Youth. But Milly saw that her artist lover,--and the flame in her heart, the song in her ears,--could not have been without all the devious turnings of her small career. Each step had been needed to bring her at last into Jack"s arms, and therefore the toil of the road was nothing--in her eyes. That was the way Milly looked at it.
Could one blame her, remembering her sentimental education, the sentimental ideals that for centuries upon centuries men have imposed upon the more imitative s.e.x? She could not see the simple selfishness of her life,--not then, perhaps later when she too became a mother.
The catastrophe of her first engagement had cut Milly off from her more fashionable friends and the world outside, and this second emotional crisis cut her off from the sympathy of her family. After that first wail Horatio was glumly silent, as if his cup of sorrow was now filled, and Grandma Ridge went her way in stern oblivion of Milly. The girl was so happy--and so much away from home--that she hardly felt the cold domestic atmosphere.
A few short weeks afterwards, however, Mrs. Ridge announced to her that a tenant having been found for the house they should move the first of the month.
"Where are you going?" Milly asked, a trifle bewildered.
"Your father and I are going to board on the West Side," her grandmother replied shortly, implying that Milly could do as she pleased, now that she was her own mistress.
"Why over there?"
"Your father has secured a place in his old business."
From the few further details offered by her grandmother Milly inferred that it was a very humble place indeed, and that only dire necessity had forced Horatio to accept it,--to sit at the gate in the great establishment where once he had held some authority.
"Poor papa!" Milly sighed.
"It"s rather late for you to be sorry, now," the old lady retorted pitilessly. She was of the puritan temper that loves to scatter irrefutable moral logic.
It was not until long afterward that Milly learned all the part the indomitable old lady had played in this crisis of her son"s affairs. She had not only gone to see Mr. Baxter, one of the Hopper partners who attended the Second Presbyterian Church, and begged him to give her son employment once more, but she had humbled herself to appeal personally to their enemy Henry Snowden and entreat him, for old friendship"s sake, to be magnanimous to a broken man. In these painful interviews she had not spared Milly. She had succeeded.
Sometime during the last hurried weeks of their occupancy of the Acacia Street house, Milly managed to have her lover come to Sunday supper and make formal announcement of their intentions to the old people. For long years afterwards she would remember the final scene of her emotional career in the little front room when her father had to shake hands with the young artist on the exact spot where Clarence"s glittering diamond had lain disdained, where the faithful ranchman had received his blow, standing, full in the face.
Little Horatio looked gray and old; his lips trembled and his hand shook as he greeted Bragdon.
"Well, sir, so you and Milly have made up your minds to get married?"
"Yes, sir."
"Hope you"ll make each other happy."
"We shall!" both chorused.
"And I hope you"ll be able to support her."
"We"ll live on nothing," Milly bubbled gayly.
"First time then I"ve known you to," Horatio retorted sourly.
It was the only bitter thing the little man ever said to his daughter, and it was the bitterness of disappointed hopes for her that forced the words from him then. Perhaps, too, Horatio had permitted himself to dream of Hesperidian apples of gold in eternal sunshine on the slopes of the Ventura hills and a peaceful old age far from the roaring, dirty city where he had failed. But when he spoke he was not thinking of himself, only of the dangers for his one loved child.
The meeting was hardly a cheerful one. Milly, in the exuberance of her new joy, could see no reason why everybody should not be as happy and hopeful as she was. But the older people, although they were scrupulously polite to the young artist, let their aloofness be felt in a chilly manner. This was Milly"s affair, they implied: she was running her life to suit herself, as American children were wont to do, without advice from her elders. The young man was obviously ill at ease.