An Ambitious Woman: A Novel

Mrs. Arcularius decided, however, to receive Claire as one of her pupils. There had been a falling-off, of late, in their list. A good many sweet girl-graduates had gone off at her last commencement day. Besides, it was absurd to suppose that any flock could be kept from an incidental black sheep or so. More than this, there was a fascinating intelligence about Claire's face, with its two dark-blue stars of eyes, and a musical sorcery in the child's timid tones when she spoke, that no diablerie of millinery could dispel.

It soon proved that Claire's fellow-scholars were far from sharing this latter opinion. She was received among them with haughty coolness, varied by incidental giggles. She suffered three days of silent torture, and at their end told her father, in a passion of tears, that he must take her away from Mrs. Arcularius's school. The girls there all despised her and laughed at her; hardly one of them had yet even spoken to her; they seemed to think her beneath them; it was horrible; she could not stand it; it was just as if she had some disease and they were all afraid of catching it from her.

"There is one girl," sobbed Claire, with her arms round her father's neck and her head on his dear, kindly breast, "that I know I shall slap or throw something at if I stay. She has red hair and very white skin, with little freckles all over it, and she is quite fat. She wears a different dress every day, and it's always something handsome but queer to look at… I heard her tell another girl that all her clothes came from Paris. She brings two bananas for lunch, and long cakes spread over with chocolate, that spirt out something soft and yellow, like custard, when she bites into them, and soil her fingers… Well, Father, that girl sits near me, and she is always making fun of me behind my back, and whispering things about me to the others that make them burst out laughing and watch me from the corners of their eyes… Of course this is only at recess, but at all times, Father, I can feel how they are thinking that I have no right, no business among them… And perhaps I haven't. Oh, Father, I want to be a lady as much as you want me to be one, but … isn't there some other way of learning how? If you'll only take me from that dreadful place, I'll … I'll go anywhere else you please!"

Indignant, yet pierced with sympathy for his darling, Twining promised her that she should go back no more to Mrs. Arcularius's.

Claire kissed him, and then put her wet cheek against his. But an instant later she lifted her head. She had thought of her mother, who was paying one of their fellow-boarders a visit that evening, and at this very moment was stating to her hostess, with a sort of saturnine braggadocio, that Claire's new school "ought to be a regular first-class one, and no mistake, for it was going to cost a regular first-class kind of a price."

"But Mother?" said Claire, in anxious query, "what will she say, Father?"

"Never mind what your mother will say, my dear," answered Twining, in his gentle undertone. And Claire remembered a certain night in One-Hundred-and-Twelfth Street, – a night which she had never really forgotten, as we know, and whose incident was fated sharply to revisit her through many an eventful year yet unlived.

But Claire's tears were scarcely dried before she regretted the promise won from her father, and asked him to revoke it. Her young face looked pale and resolute as she did so. Her brief burst of weakness had passed. The ambition to seize and hold any near means of advancement was already no weak impulse in her youthful being. As it afterward struck the great key-note of her life, and became the source of every discord or harmony which that life was to contain, so now its force had begun to stir secret centres and to prelude the steady influence which must soon impel and sway her.

"Let me try a little while longer, Father," she said, standing near him and holding his hand. Her head was slightly thrown backward; her mouth was grave and firm. She was so slender and fragile that this solemn mood might have made one think, as he regarded her, of a lily that had found some art to cast aside its droop, while all its lightsome traits of stem or petal still remained.

"Yes, I mean it, Father," she continued, with a very deep seriousness. "I have begun to climb the hill, and I shan't get tired so soon and sit down to rest. You told me I must not, and I won't. I do not want to sit down at all until I shall reach the top… But you can help me, if you will; you can make it easier for me." She pressed his hand. "Will you make it easier, Father?" she said.

"Yes!" he answered. He spoke the word without knowing what she meant. He could have spoken no other at this moment, with her eyes fixed on him like that, and her clinging hand tense about his own. He loved her so well that he would have faced any peril to save her from any harm. She was his cheer, his pride, his hope, his happiness. He thought her the most beautiful little girl in all the world. He had forgotten to tell himself that her mother made her look a guy in seeking to make her more pretty. To him she was always his innocent, blameless idol – his Claire, whom he had named after his own dead mother, known only in the idealizing years of early childhood. He never looked into her face without feeling his heart beat a trifle quicker. He had been in love with her from the time when he first held her, a new-born baby, and he was in love with her still. It was a love which had the best glow and thrill of those dramatic passions that make our tales, our tragedies, and our epics, only that by absence of the one fevered sentiment knit and kinned with these, it so gained in purity and unselfishness as to strip from all hint of over-praise the holier epithet of divine.

Naturally enough came Twining's afterthought.

"What is it that I can do for you, Claire?" he asked. "How can I make it easier?"

"In this way, Father. Listen. I want to dress differently at school. I want to wear another frock – I know which one – I am afraid you wouldn't recollect which it is if I told you. But it is not the pink merino which I have on now. Pink merino is not nice. And my new hat with the white roses is not nice, either. I didn't think of this till I noticed how the other girls dressed at Mrs. Arcularius's. Then I remembered that mine was something very like the style in which Mrs. Halloran used to dress her little girl, Bridget, every Sunday. You do recollect Mrs. Halloran, don't you Father? Her husband used to work on one of the Harlem boats, and they lived down near the river in that small red house, and there was a bee-hive in the garden, and a horrid bull-dog that used to jump out of his kennel if he heard the least noise, and bark so, and try to break his chain. But little Bridget used to have pink kid shoes, though, to match her dress, and very proud they made her. And her hair was curled in that stiff way, just as Mother curls mine. Now, Father, I want you to let me brush all the curl out of my hair except what it has of its own free choice, and to let me just tie it in a bunch behind with a dark ribbon, and to let me wear my brown bonnet, which is rather shabby, perhaps, though I don't mind that. And if Mother cares to buy me anything new, I want you to go with us – say some Saturday evening when the stores keep open – and to let me use my own taste in choosing quiet and pretty things. But that will be afterward. I'd like you to think, just now, only about to-morrow, you know. I'd like" – But there Twining stopped her with a kiss. He was smiling, but his eyes were moist.

"You shan't dress like little Bridget Halloran any longer, Claire, darling," he said. "I'll see to it as soon as your mother returns."

He kept his word. When Mrs. Twining reappeared he sent Claire out of the room. She knew a storm was coming; she was glad to be away while it broke and raged. She went as far away as possible, into her own bedroom, two chambers off, closing the intermediate doors. Once, while waiting here, she heard the smothered sound of a high, wrathful voice. It was her mother's, no doubt. But she knew that however hot the conflict, her father had made up his mind to be victor.

And he was. The next day Claire went to Mrs. Arcularius's without her white roses or her pink merino.

"You look for all the world like a charity-child," her mother said to her, in gruff leave-taking. "Still, I don't s'pose it matters any. You might as well practice for a short spell beforehand."

Claire's altered raiment produced an immense sensation among her classmates. Even several of the teachers showed signs of surprise. The new plainness of her attire brought out her unquestioned beauty, as gaudier and ill-blended vestments had before marred and obscured it. The back-drawn effect of her chestnut tresses, which were still streaked here and there with sunny threads, could not be doubted as charming even by the most prejudiced caviler. Her brow and temples were shown in their full purity of moulding, and the eyes beneath them gained poetic tenderness from this lovely exposure. She was not yet a girl clothed at all after the dainty manner of the girls about her, but she was at least no longer spoiled and hampered by unbecoming and vulgar garments. Everybody felt this promptly, and Claire herself soon recognized, by an intuition which always stood vassal to her singularly quick perceptions, that everybody had felt it.

This was to be a memorable day with her. It may seem trivial to employ so august a term when dealing with one yet on the threshold of our truly vital episodes, but, after all, there is a reality about the chagrins and victories of childhood which is none the less potent while both exist because both must shortly drop into shadow before harsher pangs and warmer transports. Claire had resolved to be a kind of miniature heroine if occasion should ask her to play that part; and she had a conviction, based on very fair grounds of reasoning, that some such demand might be made of her before the school-exercises for that day should reach their end.

Nor was she wrong. The recitations began, and were continued under various teachers until the twelve o'clock recess. Claire had suffered hitherto from the embarrassments of her surroundings, as regarded any frank assertion of what she knew and just how she knew it. But to-day she had conquered embarrassment; she was on her mettle, as the phrase goes; it was the main aim of her meditated plan to let herself be browbeaten in no particular, and the excitement born of this resolve had put her best faculties into nimble readiness.

Her understanding was of the quality beloved by instructors; it had a prehensile trait; it seized things and clung to them. The alarm of Mrs. Carmichael lest her pupil should unmask her elegant deficiencies had been no unfounded one. This lady's tuition of Claire had been but a series of suggestions, each of which the girl had rapidly tracked to its lair of remoter truth. Mrs. Carmichael had pointed her the path – quite often, it must be owned, with a somewhat faltering finger – and she had glided whither it led at a pace no less swift than secure. This was especially true of the French language, for which her aptitude was phenomenal, and which, under new conditions of instruction, she soon almost mastered. As a matter of mere fact, she had been placed, at present, among her inferiors in knowledge. She was much more advanced than the class of superb young misses who had wounded her with their callow disdain. And to-day she made this tellingly evident. Her answers came placid, self-assured, unhesitating. She sat, all through the morning, with hands folded together in her lap, and with looks that paid no seeming heed to any of her associates. Some of them were extremely stupid. They gave stammering responses, or rattled off the wrong thing with fatal glibness, or preserved that stolid silence which is the most naked candor of ignorance. The freckled girl, who ate bananas, cut an especially dull figure. Through some novel freak of parental indulgence she had been permitted to wear, this morning, a ring of clustered sapphires and diamonds, very beautiful and precious; and this she turned and re-turned, while puckering her forehead, whenever a question was put to her, as though the fair bauble might prove talismanic and show her some royal road out of learning's tangled mazes. No one appeared to think her replies particularly blundering or fatuous. Her ring, and her last new Parisian gown, and the luxurious prospect of her approaching lunch, seemed to invest even her weak wit with prestige. Claire felt it to be somehow in the air that this maiden's mental poverty should receive nothing except respectful sympathy from her fellows. Fortune does not shower every known gift on one favorite; that seemed to be tacitly understood. When she floundered in a French verb, or came to dire grief in compound fractions, the imbecility provoked no laughter; it bore a sort of gilded pardonableness, like the peccadillo of a princess.

When recess came, Claire had distinguished herself. Everybody was convinced that her powers of mind were much above the common. Two of the teachers, both ladies of gentle bearing and kindly disposition, came to her side, and cheered her with a few words of complimentary encouragement. The grand Mrs. Arcularius did not come; she was elsewhere, in her elegant little reception-room; she had not yet heard of her new pupil's handsome exploits. But if she had already heard of them she would have paid Claire no congratulations. Good scholarship, she would have argued, with splendid egotism, was in this case a form of gratitude to which she was of course amply entitled, since she had allowed Twining the honor of seeing her autograph on his daughter's future receipted bills.

During the first portion of the recess hour Claire ate her modest lunch, choking it down with strong reluctance. But one teacher now remained in the large class-room, and she was closely occupied in the examination of some written exercises. The girls were gathered here and there, among the files of desks, in whispering groups. They were all discussing Claire; she herself knew it; an instinct told her so. She was very much excited, but outwardly quite calm. The girls no longer stared at her; not a single giggle now broke the air; they had been impressed, startled, and perhaps a little awed as well; their pariah had turned out a sort of notability; she had clad herself in a sudden armor of cool defiance against impudence. They might have regarded her lately-revealed endowments as a queerness collateral with the eccentric quality of her clothing. But the pink robe, the brittle-looking curls, the beflowered hat, had vanished and left them no chance for such associative ridicule. There had been a transformation, abrupt and baffling. Claire was not going to be their butt; of this there was no doubt; she must either be accepted as an equal, or avoided as an inferior; she could no longer hold the position of a target for their covert raillery.

The freckled girl, of the sumptuous mid-day meal, however, preserved opposite opinions. Her name was Ada Gerrard, and her family was one of great wealth and distinction. Her elder sister, a mindless blonde with creamy skin and exuberant figure, had made a notable English marriage, having wedded no less a potentate than the young Marquis of Monogram, heir of a renowned ducal house. Miss Ada was a leader in her way, and she felt keenly disappointed by the unforeseen turn of affairs. She had anticipated prodigious fun out of the new scholar. She was by nature cruel and arrogant, and she was now affected as some feline creature that has been cheated of the prey it has meant to maul and maim.

Her reddish-hazel eyes, that showed so little white as to look like two large beads of clouded amber, and were fringed with scant lashes of lighter red, kept up a persistent scrutiny of Claire. She was sitting not far away from the latter, who caught, now and then, a waft of the delicate violet perfume which exhaled from her fine foreign apparel. She was occupied with her epicurean repast, whose dainties she devoured with a solemn gluttony; but this did not prevent her from keeping up a little fusillade of whispers to a friend on whom she had bestowed one or two bites of luscious cake as a mark of peculiar clemency.

The converse was at first low-toned. Claire had finished her brief refreshment. She had opened a book, and maintained at least the semblance of being engaged in its contents. Suddenly she heard Ada Gerrard speak these words, in a voice lifted above her former key, though doubtless meant solely for her companion's ears:

"I don't care how much she knows. She's a common little thing, and I wouldn't notice her if she got on her knees and begged me to."

Claire waited a few seconds, with head lowered above her book. She trembled while she so waited. The tremor was half from anger, half from intimidation. She felt, in every fibre of her being, the coarseness of this speech, but through her sensitive soul had shot a pang of false shame, dealt by the piercing sense of contrast between her own humble state and the probable grandeur and comfort of life which had fed Ada Gerrard's present superciliousness. But anger conquered. She ceased to tremble, and closed her book. Then she rose, quietly, and faced her classmate. It may have been that the generations of gentlewomen from which, on her father's side, she had sprung, helped to nerve and steady her now; since the primal source of all aristocracy is a cogent self-assertion, and those races alone gain heights overbrowing their kind whose first founders have had the will and vigor to push forward resisted claims.

Everybody saw her rise. It flashed through the little throng, in an instant, that something had spurred her into a course of retaliation. At least fifteen pairs of eager eyes were leveled upon her pale face. But she regarded Ada Gerrard only; and when she spoke, with enough clearness to be heard in all parts of the room, her first words were addressed strictly to that special offender.

"You say that you will not notice me," Claire began, "and yet you say it so loudly that I can hear you, and thus you very plainly contradict yourself; or, in other words, you try to attract my attention by speaking a falsehood."

Here she paused. A dead silence ensued. Many bewildered looks were exchanged. The presiding teacher stopped her task, and sat with a gaze of puzzled alarm fixed upon this resolute young combatant. Ada Gerrard flushed crimson, and ceased to discuss her savory confections.

Claire's voice quivered as she now proceeded, but she quickly controlled this perturbed sign: "I do not think there is much chance of my begging you on my knees to notice me," she said. "But I might be tempted to take such a way of begging that you would try and help me to forget, as long as I remain here, how I have had the ill-luck of being thrown near anyone so unkind, so impudent, and so vulgar as yourself."

Ada Gerrard sprang to her feet as the last calm word sounded from Claire's lips. She had clenched both of her plump hands, and there was a wrathful scowl on her face. Several titters were heard from her companions; they seemed to sting her; it was impossible for her to fail in perceiving that she had met an adversary of twice her own prowess. She knew to which side the sympathy had veered; all her imposing superiority in the way of dress, of diet, of home-splendor, of titled kindred, were momentarily as nothing beside Claire's placid antagonism. She was only an ugly girl in an ugly rage, who had behaved insolently and been rebuked with justice; while Claire, pale, unflinching, wholly in the right and wholly aware of it, her drawbacks of uncouth costume no longer present, her beauty a fact beyond dispute, her intelligence a recent discovery and a sharp surprise, stood clad with the dignity of easy and complete conquest.

Ada Gerrard suddenly burst into tears. They were very irate tears; there was not the least tincture of remorse or shame in them. She flung herself back into her chair, and covered her face for several minutes while she wept.

Claire watched her, tranquilly, for a little while. Then she sat down again and reopened her book. An intense silence reigned, broken by the sobs of Ada Gerrard. Claire leaned her head on her hand, feigning abrupt absorption in the page that she regarded, and feigning it very well. But her mind was in a secret whirl, now. She was mutely, but impetuously asking herself: "Will they think I was right? Will they take my part? Will they treat me any more kindly, or just as before?"

These silent, pathetic queries were fated to receive a speedy answer. Before the school hours of that same day had ended, the ostracism which had so wrung poor Claire's spirit was in a measure ended likewise. Less than a week had elapsed before she was on friendly terms with a number of her classmates. A little adverse clique soon shaped itself against her. Ada Gerrard, fiercely unforgiving, headed this hostile faction; its remaining members were a few stanch personal adherents who had never been able to resist the dazzling fascination of Miss Gerrard's toilets and lunches. But this opposing element was not actively inimical. Claire's party had the strength of multitude and the courage of its opinions. Still, its members were by no means ardent devotees; they sometimes hurt her with the sly stab of patronage, and they often gave her furtively to understand that her claims upon their favor were of a sort which they practically recognized without theoretically approving.

It would be hard to define just how they conveyed this impression. And yet Claire frequently felt its weight, like that of some vague tyranny which offers no tangible excuse for revolt. She could neither realize nor estimate the force with which she had been thrown into contact. Her years were yet too few, her experience was yet too limited; nor was the force manifest in active strength at Mrs. Arcularius's school, a narrow enough theatre for its exercise, and one where its full-grown momentum must of necessity dwindle into something like mere juvenile parody. Claire was yet to learn with how much rank haste its evil growth had sprung up in the big metropolis outside, thwarting and clogging any pure development of what has been called the republican idea, and making us sometimes bitterly wonder if the great dead philosophers were not tricked, after all, by wills-o'-the-wisp no less lovely than elusive.

But there were a few girls who met Claire on a perfectly equal footing, and left from their intercourse, at all times, the least frosty sparkle of condescension. Some of these may or may not consciously have undertaken their rôles. But with one, past doubt, and for excellent reasons, the kindly impulse was in every way spontaneous. The name of this pupil was Sophia Bergemann. She professed a deep fondness for Claire, and it was evidently sincere. She belonged among Mrs. Arcularius's tolerated plutocrats. Her father was a German brewer who had made a very large fortune out of lager-beer, and who dwelt in Hoboken, where he had built an immense house on spacious grounds. It was said that the lawns were adorned with statues in bronze and marble, and that the main drawing-room of the mansion was frescoed with a design representing Germany offering a tankard of foaming beer to Columbia, in colossal sociability. But the latter statement may have been only the caustic invention of Sophia's foes. She was stoutly disapproved by the conservative element, and this fact had helped to make her so warm a supporter of Claire. Being at daggers drawn with Ada Gerrard, she naturally hailed Claire's public rebuke with rapture, and immediately became her stanch ally.

"I was afraid you'd stay meek and mild right straight along, just as you began," she afterward confessed. "Somehow you looked as if you hadn't got any spunk. And I do like spunk. I believe in it." This article of faith Sophia had several times frankly verified. She had once pulled the ear of her fellow-pupil, and again narrowly escaped expulsion by slapping another's face. She had a buxom figure, a broad-blown countenance, nearly as round as a moon at the full, solid cheeks of constant vivid coloring, and hair so yellow that its keen tint blent with her brilliant complexion in producing the effect of an expensive wax doll enlarged and animated. She was drearily stupid at all her lessons, rivaling Ada Gerrard as the regnant ignoramus of the academy. Her gestures were painfully awkward; her walk was a cumbrous prance; she seemed incapable of seating herself without an elastic bounce. She grew very fond of Claire, as weeks went on, and gave her repeated invitations to pass a portion of the summer holidays at the grand Hoboken abode.