An Ambitious Woman: A Novel

I

If any spot on the globe can be found where even Spring has lost the sweet trick of making herself charming, a cynic in search of an opportunity for some such morose discovery might thank his baleful stars were chance to drift him upon Greenpoint. Whoever named the place in past days must have done so with a double satire; for Greenpoint is not a point, nor is it ever green. Years ago it began by being the sluggish suburb of a thriftier and smarter suburb, Brooklyn. By degrees the latter broadened into a huge city, and soon its neighbor village stretched out to it arms of straggling huts and swampy river-line, in doleful welcome. To-day the affiliation is complete. Man has said let it all be Brooklyn, and it is all Brooklyn. But the sovereign dreariness of Greenpoint, like an unpropitiated god, still remains. Its melancholy, its ugliness, its torpor, its neglect, all preserve an unimpaired novelty. It is very near New York, and yet in atmosphere, suggestion, vitality, it is leagues away. Our noble city, with its magnificent maritime approaches, its mast-thronged docks, its lordly encircling rivers, its majesty of traffic, its gallant avenues of edifices, its loud assertion of life, and its fine promise of riper culture, fades into a dim memory when you have touched, after only a brief voyage, upon this forlorn opposite shore.

No Charon rows you across, though your short trip has too often the most funereal associations. You take passage in a squat little steamboat at either of two eastern ferries, and are lucky if a hearse with its satellite coaches should fail to embark in your company; for, curiously, the one enlivening fact associable with Greenpoint is its close nearness to a famed Roman Catholic cemetery. It is doubtful if the unkempt child wading in the muddy gutter ever turns his frowzy head when these dismal retinues stream past him. They are always streaming past him; they are as much a part of this lazy environ as the big, ghostly geese that saunter across its ill-tended cobblestones, the dirty goats that nibble at the placards on its many dingy fences, or the dull-faced Germans that plod its semi-paven streets. Death, that is always so bitter a commonplace, has here become a glaring triteness. Watched, along the main thoroughfare, from porches of liquor-shops and windows of tenement-houses, death has perhaps gained a sombre popularity with not a few shabby gazers. It rides in state, at a dignified pace; it has followers, too, riding deferentially behind it. Sometimes it has martial music, and the pomp of military escort. Life seldom has any of this, in Greenpoint. It cannot ride, or rarely. It must walk, and strain to keep its strength even for that. One part of it drudges with the needle, fumes over the smoky stove, sighs at the unappeasable baby; another part takes by dawn the little dwarfish ferry-boat, and hies to the great metropolis across the river, returning jaded from labor by nightfall. No wonder, here, if death should seem to possess not merely a mournful importance but a gloomy advantage as well, or if for these toilful townsfolk philosophy had reversed itself, and instead of the paths of glory leading to the grave, it should look as if the grave were forever leading to some sort of peculiar and comfortable glory.

But Greenpoint, like a hardened conscience, still has her repentant surprises. She is not quite a thing of sloth and penury. True, the broad street that leads from steamboat to cemetery is lined with squalid homes, and the mourners who are so incessantly borne along to Calvary must see little else than beer-sellers standing slippered and coatless beside their doorways, or thin, pinched women haggling with the venders of sickly groceries. But elsewhere one may find by-streets lined with low wooden dwellings that hint of neatness and suggest a better grade of living. A yellowish drab prevails as the hue of these houses; they seem all to partake of one period, like certain homogeneous fossils. But they do not breathe of antiquity; they are fanciful with trellised piazzas and other modern embellishments of carpentry; sometimes they possess miniature Corinthian pillars, faded by the trickle of rain between their tawny flutings, as if stirred with the dumb desire to be white and classic. Scant gardens front them, edged with a few yards of ornamental fence. Their high basement windows stare at you from a foundation of brick. They are very prosaic, chiefly from their lame effort to be picturesque; and when you look down toward the river, expecting to feel refreshed by its gleam, you are disheartened at the way in which lumber-yards and sloop-wharves have quite shut any glimpse of it from your eyes.

In one of these two-storied wooden houses, not many years ago, dwelt a family of three people, – a Mr. Francis Twining, his wife, and their only child, a girl, named Claire. Mr. Twining was an Englishman by birth; many years had passed since he first landed on these shores. He had come here nearly penniless, but with proud hopes. He was then only three-and-twenty. He had sprung from a good country family, had been fitted at Eton for Oxford, and had seen one year at the famed University. Then sharp financial disaster had overtaken his father, whose death soon followed. Francis was a younger son, but even to the heir had fallen a shattered patrimony, and to himself merely a slender legacy. With this, confident and undaunted as though it were the purse of Fortunio, Francis had taken voyage for New York. At first he had shown a really splendid energy. Slim of figure, with a pale, womanish face lit by large, soft blue eyes, he gave slight physical sign of force or even will. But though possessed of both, he proved one of those ill-fated beings whom failure never tires of rebuffing. His mental ability was unquestioned; he shrank with sensitive disgust from all vice; he had plenty of ambition, and the instinct of solid industry. Yet, as years passed on, both secured him but meagre recompense for struggle. He had begun his career with a clerkship; now, at fifty-three, he was a clerk still. All his hope had fled; he had undergone bitter heart-burnings; he had striven to solve the problem of his own defeat. Meanwhile its explanation was not difficult. He had a boyish trust in his fellow-creatures that no amount of stern experience seemed to weaken. Chicanery had made him its sport. Five separate times he had been swindled mercilessly by men in whom he had reposed implicit faith. There had lain his rock of ruin: he was always reposing implicit faith in everybody. His life had been one long pathos of over-credulity. He could think, reason, reflect, analyze, but he was incapable of doubting. A fool could have deceived him, and naturally, on repeated occasions, knaves had not found it difficult. At fifty-three his last hard-earned savings had been wormed from him by the last plausible scamp. And now he had accepted himself as the favorite of misfortune; over the glow of his spirit disappointment had cast its dulling spell, like the deep film of ash that sheathes a spent ember. He had now one aim – to keep his wife and child from indigence while he lived, and one despair – that he could not keep them from indigence after he was dead. But his really lovely optimism still remained. He had been essentially amiable and complaisant in all intercourse with his kind, and this quality had not lost a ray of its fine former lustre. With ample excuse for the worst cynic feeling, he continued a gentle yet unconscious philanthropist. There was something piteously sweet in the obstinacy with which he still saw only the bright side of humanity. His delicate person had grown more slim; his rusty clothes hung about him with a mournful looseness; his oval face, worn by worriment, had taken keener lines; but his large blue eyes still kept their liquid sparkle, and kindled in prompt unison with his alert smile. The flaxen growth that had always fringed his lips and chin with cloudy lightness, had now become of a frosty gray. Seen passingly, no one would have called him, as the current phrase goes, a gentleman. His wearied mien forbade the suggestion of leisure, while his broadcloth spoke of long wear and speedy purchase. But a close gaze might have caught the unperished refinement that still clung to him with sad persistence, and was evident in such minor effects of personal detail as a glimpse of cleanly linen about throat and wrist, a cheap yet careful lustre of the often jaded boot, a culture and purity of the hand, or even a choice nicety of the finger-nail.

He had married after reaching these shores, and his marriage had proved another instance of misplaced confidence. His wife had been handsome when a young woman, and she had become Mrs. Twining at about the age of five-and-twenty. She was personally quite the opposite of her bridegroom; she was an inch taller than he, and had an aquiline face, splendid with a pair of very black eyes that she had rolled and flashed at the other sex since early girlhood. She had rolled and flashed them at her present husband, and so conquered him. She was a good inch taller than he, and lapse of time had not diminished the difference since their union. She had been extremely vulgar as Miss Jane Wray, when Twining had married her, and she was extremely vulgar still. She had first met him in a boarding-house in East Broadway, where Twining had secured a room on his arrival from England. At this period East Broadway wore only a waning grace of gentility; some few conservative nabobs still lingered there, obstinately defying plebeian inroads. Its roomy brick mansions, with their arched, antique doorways devoid of any vestibule; their prim-railed stoops that guessed not of ornate balusters; and their many-paned, thin-sashed windows where plate-glass had never glittered, were already invaded by inmates whose Teuton names and convex noses prophesied the social decline that must soon grasp this once select purlieu. Jane Wray was neither German nor Hebrew; she was American in the least pleasant sense of that word, both as regarded parentage and breeding. She was an orphan, and the recipient of surly charity from unprosperous relatives. She wanted very greatly to marry, and Twining had seemed to her a golden chance. There was much about her from which he shrank; but she contrived to rouse his pity, and then to lure from him a promise which he would have despised himself not to keep.

The succeeding years had brought bitter mutual disappointments. Mrs. Twining had believed firmly in her husband's powers to sound the horn of luck and slay the giant of adversity. But he had done neither, and it now looked as if his bones were one day to bleach along the roadway to success. She became an austere grumbler, forever pricking her sweet-tempered lord with a tireless little bodkin of reproach. Her vulgarities had sharpened; her wit, always cruel and acute, had tipped itself with a harsher venom and fledged itself with a swifter feather; her bright, coarse beauty had dimmed and soured; she was at present a gaunt, elderly female, with square shoulders and hard, dark eyes, who flung sarcasms broadcast with a baleful liberality, and seemed forever standing toward her own destiny in the attitude of a person who has some large unsettled claim against a nefarious government.

Claire Twining, the one child who had been born of this ill-assorted marriage, was now nineteen years old. She bore a striking likeness to her father; she possessed his blue eyes, a trifle darker in shade, his broad white forehead, his sloping delicacy of visage, and his erect though slender frame. From him, too, had come the sunny quality of her smile, the gold tints in her chestnut hair, the fine symmetry of hands and feet. Rather from association than heredity she had caught his kindly warmth of manner; but in Claire the cordial impulse was far less spontaneous; she had her black list of dislikes, and she took people on trust with wary prudence. Here spoke her mother's share in the girl's being, as it spoke also in a certain distinct chiseling of every feature, that suggested a softened memento of Miss Jane Wray's girlish countenance, though Claire's coloring no more resembled her mother's of past time than wild-rose is like peony, or pastel like chromo. But there was one more maternal imprint set deep within this girl's nature, not to be thinned or marred by any stress of events, and productive of a trait whose development for good or ill is the chief cause that her life has here been chronicled. The birthright was a perilous one; it was a heritage of discontent; its tendency was perpetual longings for better environment, for ampler share in the world's good gifts, for higher place in its esteem and stronger claim to its heed. But what in her mother had been ambition almost as crudely eager as a boorish elbow-thrust, was in Claire more decorous and interesting, like the push of a fragile yet determined hand through a sullen crowd. In both cases the dissatisfaction was something that is peculiar to the woman of our land and time – a desire not to try and adorn the sphere in which she is born, but to try and reach a new sphere held as more suited for her own adornment. Yet Claire's restless yearning lacked the homely grossness of her mother's; it reflected a finer flash; it was not all cut from one piece; it had its subtlety, its enthusiasm, even its justification. It was not a mere stubborn hunger for advancement; it was a wish to gain advancement by the passport of proper worthiness. She did not want the air to lift her away from hated surroundings, but she wanted wings that would turn the air her willing ally. It was what her father had made her that touched what her mother had made her with a truly poetic tenderness. By only a little prouder curve of the neck and a little happier fullness of the plume, we part the statuesque swan from considerably more commonplace kindred. Something like this delightful benison of difference had fallen upon Claire.

II

Circumstance, too, had fed the potency of this difference. Claire had not been reared like her mother. When she was nine years old her parents were living in a tiny brick house near the East River, among New York suburbs. But Claire had been sent to a small school near by, kept by a dim, worn lady, with an opulent past and a most precarious present. She had studied for three years under this lady's capable care, and had lost nothing by the opportunity. Her swift, apt mind had delighted her instructress, whose name was Mrs. Carmichael. Claire was remarkably receptive; she had acquired without seeming effort. Mrs. Carmichael was one of the many ladies who attempt the education of youth without either system or equipment for so serious a task. Her slight body, doubtless attenuated by recurring memories of a cherished past, would sometimes invisibly quake before Claire's precocious questionings. She knew all that she knew superficially, and she soon became fearful lest Claire should pierce, by a sort of adroit ignorance, her veneer of academic sham. She had a narrow little peaked face, of a prevailing pink hue, as though it were being always bathed in some kind of sunset light, like the rosy afterglow of her own perished respectability. Her nervous, alert head was set on a pair of sloping shoulders, and she wore its sparse tresses shaped into roulades and bandeaus which had an amateurish look, and seemed to imitate the deft handiwork of some long-departed tirewoman. She carried her small frame with erect importance. She was always referring to vanished friendships with this or that notability, but time and place were so ignored in these volunteered reminiscences as to make her allusions acquire a tender mythic grandeur. Claire had watched well her teacher's real and native elegance, and she had set this down as a solid fact. Perhaps the child had probed her many harmless falsities with equal skill. As for Mrs. Carmichael, she would sometimes pat her pupil on the cheek and praise her in no weak terms. "I wish that I had only known you a long time ago, my little lady," she would say, in her serene treble voice. "I would have brought you up as my own dear child, for I never had a child of my own. I would have given you a place in the world to be proud of, and have watched with interest the growth of your fine mental abilities, surrounded by those poor lost friends of mine who would have delighted in so clever a girl as you are."

"When you speak of your friends as lost, Mrs. Carmichael," Claire had once replied, "do you mean that they are all dead now?"

At this question the lady slowly shook her head, with just enough emphasis not to imperil the modish architecture of her locks.

"Some of them are dead, my dear," she murmured, with the least droop of each pink eyelid, "but the rest are much too grand for me at present. They have quite forgotten me." Here Mrs. Carmichael gave a quick, fluttered cough, and then put the tips of her close-pressed fingers to the edges of her close-pressed lips.

Claire privately thought them very churlish friends to have forgotten anybody so high-bred and winsome as Mrs. Carmichael. And she publicly expressed this thought at supper the same evening, while she sat with her parents in a small lower room opening directly off the kitchen. A weary maid, whose face flamed from the meal she had just cooked, was patiently serving it. Mrs. Twining, who had lent no light hand toward the Monday's washing, was in the act of distributing a somewhat meagre beefsteak, which fate and an incompetent range had conspired to cover on both sides with a layer of thick, sooty black. Mr. Twining was waiting to get a piece of the beefsteak; he did not yet know of its disastrous condition, for a large set of pewter casters reared its uncouth pyramid between himself and the maltreated viand; but although such calamities of cookery were not rare to his board, he was putting confidence, as usual, in the favors of fortune, and preparing himself blandly for a fresh little stroke of chagrin.

Outside it was midwinter dusk, and a bleak wind was blowing from the ice-choked river, pale and dull under the sharp stars. One-Hundred-and-Twelfth Street was in those years a much wilder spot than now; its buildings, like its flag-stones, were capricious incidents; its boon of the elevated railroad was yet undreamed of by capitalists; you rode to it in languid horse-cars from the remote centres of commerce, upward past parapets of virgin rock where perched the hut of the squatter, or wastes of houseless highway where even the aspiring tavern had not dared to pioneer. Mr. Twining had just ridden hither by this laggard means, and he was tired and hungry; he wanted his supper, a little valued chat with his beloved Claire, and a caress or two from the child as well. After these he wanted a few hours of rest before to-morrow re-dawned, with its humdrum austerities. One other thing he desired, and this was a blessing more often desired than attained. He had the wish for a peaceful domestic interval, as regarded his wife's deportment, between home-coming and departure.

But to-night it had been otherwise decreed. Mrs. Twining's faint spark of innate warmth was never roused by the contact of suds. Monday was her day of wrath; you might almost have fancied that she had used a bit of her superfluous soap in vainly trying to rub the rust from her already tarnished hopes.

The small room where the trio sat was void of any real cheer. A pygmy stove, at one side of it, stood fuel-choked and nearly florid in hue. From this a strong volume of heat engulfed Mrs. Twining in its oppressive spell, but lost vigor before it reached her husband or Claire, and left the corners of the apartment so frigid that a gaunt sofa, off where the light of the big oil-lamp could only vaguely touch it, took upon its slippery hair-cloth surface the easy semblance of ice. Two windows, not fashioned to thwart the unwonted bitterness of the weather, were draped with nothing more resistant than a pair of canvas shades, gorgeously pictorial in the full light of day, when seen by the passer who seldom passed. These shades were of similar designs; in justice to Mrs. Twining it must be told that they had been rented with the house. On each a plumed gentleman in a gondola held fond converse with a disheveled lady in a balcony. The conception was no less Venetian in meaning than vicious in execution; but to-night, for any observant wayfarer, such presentments of sunny Italy, while viewed between blotches of wan frost that crusted the intervening panes, must have appeared doubly counterfeit. Still, the chief discomfort of the chamber, just at present, was a layer of brooding cold that lay along its floor, doggedly inexterminable, and the sole approach to regularity of temperature that its four walls contained.

It had made Claire gather up her feet toward the top rung of her chair, and shiver once or twice, but it had not chilled the pretty gayety of her childish talk, all of which had thus far been addressed to her father.

"And so you like Mrs. Carmichael, my dear?" Twining had said, in his smooth, cheerful voice. "Well, I am glad of that."

"Oh yes, I like her," replied Claire, with a slight, wise nod of her head, where the clear gold of youth had not yet given way to the brown-gold of maidenhood. "But I think it strange that all her fine friends have dropped off from her. That's what she told me to-day, Father; truly, she did! Why don't they care for her any more? Is it because she's poor and has to teach little dunces like me?"

Twining's feminine blue eyes scanned the rather dingy tablecloth for a moment. "I am afraid it is," he said, in a low voice, pressing between his fingers a bit of ill-baked bread that grew doughy at a touch.

Mrs. Twining ceased to carve the obdurate beefsteak, though still retaining her hold on the horn-handled knife and fork. She lifted her head so that it quite towered above the formidable group of casters, and looked straight at her husband.

"Don't put false notions into the child, Francis," she said, each word seeming to strike the next with a steely click. "You're always doing it. You know nothing of where that woman came from, or who she is."

Twining looked at his wife. His gaze was very mild. "I only know what she has told me, Jane," he said.

Mrs. Twining laughed and resumed the carving. Her laugh never went with a smile; it never had the least concern with mirth; it was nearly always a presage of irony, as an east wind will blow news of storm.

"Oh, certainly; what she's told you! That's you, all over! Suppose she'd told you she'd been Lady of the White House once. You wouldn't have believed her, not you! Of course not!"

"What is a Lady of the White House?" asked Claire, appealing to her father. She was perfectly accustomed to these satiric outbursts on her mother's part; they belonged to the home-circle; she would have missed them if they had ceased; it would have been like a removal of the hair-cloth sofa, or an accident to one of the lovers on the window-shades.

Twining disregarded this simple question, which was a rare act with him; he usually heard and heeded whatever Claire had to say.

"Please don't speak hard things of Mrs. Carmichael," he answered his wife. "She's really a person who has seen better days."

"Better days!" echoed Mrs. Twining. "Well, then, we ought to shake hands. I think she's just the plainest humbug I ever saw, with her continual brag about altered circumstances. But I'll take your word for it, Francis. The next time I see her I'll tell her we're fellow-unfortunates. We'll compare our 'better days' together, and calc'late who's seen the most."

Twining gave a faint sigh, and looked down. Then he raised his eyes again, and a new spark lit their mildness. Something to-night had made him lack his old patient tolerance.

"I'm afraid Mrs. Carmichael would have much the longer list," he said.

"Oh, you think so!"

"I know so."

Mrs. Twining tossed her head. The gloss was still on her dark hair, whose gray threads had yet to come, later, in the Greenpoint days. She was still, as the phrase goes, a fine figure of a woman. Her black eyes had not lost their fire, nor her form its imposing fullness. She raised herself a little from her chair, as she now spoke, and in her voice there was the harshness that well fitted her bristling, aggressive mien.

"Oh! you know so, do you?" she said, in hostile undertone. Then her next words were considerably louder. "But I happen to know, Francis Twining, Esquire, who and what I was when you took me from a comfortable home to land me up here at the end of the world, where I'm lucky if I can get hold of yesterday's newspaper to-morrow, and cross over to the cars without leaving a shoe behind me in the mud!"