Book: The Story Of Julia Page

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"And, of course, people would say that I haven't paid the full penalty,
being a girl instead of a boy! Look at poor Tess, and Trilby, and Hetty
in 'Adam Bede!' I never let any one know it; even your aunt never would
have overlooked _that_, whatever she might say now. No; even Jim protected
me--and yet," Julia put her head back, shut her eyes, "and yet I've paid
a thousand times!" said she.

There was a long silence, and then Richard said:

"I've thought sometimes this might be it, Ju. Being alone so much, and
reading and thinking--I've worked it out in my own mind. Aunt Sanna saw
Jim in Berlin two years ago, you know, and gave him a horrible raking
over the coals, and just from what she quoted, it seemed as if there was
some secret about it, and that it lay with you. Then, of course," Richie
eased his lame leg by stretching it at full length before him, sinking
down in his chair, finger tips meeting, "of course I knew Jim," he
resumed. "Jim's pride is his weak point. He's like a boy in that: he
wants everything or nothing. He's like all my mother's children," said
Richie, comfortably analytical, "undisciplined. Chill penury never
repressed our noble rages; we never knew the sweet uses of adversity. I
did, of course, but here I am, a childless getting on in years, not apt
to leave a deep impression on the coming generation. It's a funny world,
Julie! It's a strange sort of civilization to pose under the name of
Christ. Christ had no double standard of morals; Christ forgave. Law is
all very well, society has its uses, I have no doubt, but there are
higher standards than either!" "Well, that has come to me forcibly
during the past few years," Julia said thoughtfully. "I wasn't a praying
small girl; how could I be? But after I went to The Alexander, being
physically clean and respectable made me long to be clean all over, I
suppose, and I began to go to church, and after a while I went to
confession, Rich, and I felt made over, as if all the stain of it had
slipped away! And then Jim came, and I told him all about it--"

"Before you were married?"

"Oh, Richie, of course!"

"Well, then, what--if he knew--"

"Oh, Richie, that's the terrible part. For I thought it was all dead and
gone, and it _was_ all dead and gone as far as I was concerned! But we
couldn't forget it--it suddenly seemed a live issue all over again; it
just rose and stood between us, and I felt so helpless, and poor Jim, I
think he was helpless, too!"

Richard made no comment, and there was a silence.

"You know Jim wasn't a--wasn't exactly a saint, Ju," Richard said
awkwardly after a while.

"I know," she answered with a quick nod.

"I believe he was an exceptionally decent fellow, as fellows go,"
pursued Richie. "But, of course, it is the accepted thing. On Jim's
first vacation, after he entered college, he told me he didn't care much
for that sort of thing--we had a long talk about it. But a year or two
later there was a young woman--he used to call her 'the little girl'--I
don't know exactly--Anyway, Dad went East, there was some sort of a
fuss, and I know Jim treated her awfully well--there never was any
question of that--she never felt anything but gratitude to him, whatever
grievances she had about any one else--"

His voice dropped.

"But it's not the same thing," Julia said with a sigh.

"No, I suppose not," Richard agreed.

"Life has been too violent and too swift with me," Julia resumed, after
a while. "If I had the past fifteen years to live over again, I would
live them very differently. I made an idol of Jim; he could do no wrong.
He wanted more bracing treatment than that; he should have been boldly
faced down. If I had been wiser, I would have treated all my marriage
differently. If I had been very wise, I should not have married at all,
should have kept my own secret. Perhaps, marrying, I should not have
told him the truth; I don't know. Anyway, I have mixed things up
hopelessly, given other people and myself an enormous amount of pain,
and wrecked my life and Jim's. And now, when I am thirty, I feel as if I
could begin to see light, begin to live--as if now, when nothing on
earth seems really important, I knew how to meet life!"

"Well, that's been my attitude for some years," Richie said, shifting
his lame leg again. "Of course I started in handicapped, which is a
great advantage--"

"Advantage? Oh, Richie!" Julia protested.

"Yes, it is, from one point of view," he insisted whimsically. "'Who
loses his life,' you know. Most boys and girls start off into life like
kites in a high wind without tails. There's a glorious dipping and
plunging and sailing for a little while, and then down they come in a
tangle of string and paper and broken wood. I had a tail to start with,
some humiliating deficiency to keep me balanced. No football and tennis
for me, no flirting and dancing and private theatricals. When Bab and
Ned were in one whirl of good times, I was working out chess problems to
make myself forget my hip, and reading Carlyle and Thoreau and Emerson.
Nobody is born content, Ju, and nobody has it thrust upon him; just a
few achieve it. I worked over the secret of happiness as if it was the
multiplication table. Happiness is the best thing in the world. It's
only a habit, and I've got it."

"_Is_ happiness the best thing in the world, Rich?" Julia asked wistfully.

"I think it is; real happiness, which doesn't necessarily mean a box at
the Metropolitan and a touring car," Richie said, smiling. "It seems to
me, to have a little house up here on the mountain, and to have people
here like me, and let me take care of them--"

"For nothing?" interposed Julia.

"Don't you believe it! I didn't write a cheque last month! Anyway, it
suits me. I have books, and letters, and a fire, and now and then a
friend or two--and now and then Julia and Anna to amuse me!"

"I'm happy, too," Julia said thoughtfully. "I realized it some time
ago--oh, a year ago! I feel just as you might feel, Rich, if you had
left some critical operation unfinished, or done in a wrong way, and
then gone back to do it over. I feel as if, in going back to first
principles, and doing what I could for my own people, I had 'trued' a
part of my life, if you can understand that! I had gone climbing and
blundering on, and reached a point where I couldn't help myself, but
they were just where they started, and I _could_ help them!"

"It was probably the best thing you could have done for yourself, at the
same time," Richard interpolated, with a swift glance.

"Oh, absolutely!" Julia laughed a little sadly. "I was like an animal
that goes out and eats a weed: I had a wild instinct that if I rushed
into my grandmother's house, and bullied everybody there, and simply
shrieked and stamped on the dirt and laziness and complaining, on the
whole wretched system that I grew up under, in short, that it would be a
heavenly relief! My dear Richie," and Julia laughed again, and more
naturally, "I wonder they didn't tar and feather me, and throw me out of
the house! I scoured and burned and scolded and bossed them all like a
madwoman. I told them that we had enough money to keep the house
decently, and always had had, but, my dear! I never dreamed the whole
crowd would fall in line so soon!"

"But, my Lord, Julie, what else could they do? You were paying all the
expenses, I suppose?"

"No, indeed I wasn't! Chester has a pretty fair salary now, and my
aunt's boys are awfully good about helping out. And then Muriel has a
position, and Evelyn is in a fair way to be a rich woman. Besides, the
mere question of where money is coming from never worried my people!
They managed as well with almost nothing at all, as with a really
adequate amount--which is to say that they don't know in the least what
the word manage means! Jim left me an immense sum, Rich, but I've never
touched anything but the interest. When we shingled or carpeted or
gardened out there, we paid for it by degrees, and it cost, I must
admit, only about one third of what it would have been on the other side
of town. I look back now at those first months, more than four years
ago," went on Julia, smiling as she leaned forward in her low chair, her
hands locked about her knees, her thoughtful eyes on the flickering
logs, "and I wonder we didn't all rise up in the night and kill each
other. I was like a person with a death wound, struggling madly through
the little time left me, absolutely indifferent to what any one thought.
I simply wanted to die fighting, to register one furious protest against
all the things I'd hated, and suffered, too! I remember reporters
coming, at first, wild with curiosity to know what took Doctor
Studdiford abroad, and why Mrs. Studdiford was living in a labourer's
house in the Mission. What impression they got I haven't the faintest
idea. Once or twice women called, just curious of course, Mrs. Hunter
and Miss Saunders--but that soon stopped. I was better hidden on
Shotwell Street than I would have been in the heart of India! Miss
Saunders came in, and met Mama and Grandma; we were having the kitchen
calcimined, the place was pretty well upset, I remember. Dear me, how
little what they thought or did or said seemed to count, when my whole
life was one blazing, agonizing cry for Jim!"

"That got better?" Richard asked huskily, after a pause.

"Rich, I think the past two, well, three years, have been the happiest
in my life," Julia said soberly. "My feet have been on solid ground. I
not only seem to understand my life better as it is, but all the past
seems clearer, too. I thought Jim was like myself, Richie, but he
wasn't; his whole viewpoint was different; perhaps that's why we loved
each other so!"

"And suppose he comes back?" Richard asked.

Julia frowned thoughtfully.

"Oh, Richie, how do I know! It's all so mixed up. Everybody, even Aunt
Sanna, thinks that he will! Everybody thinks I am a patient,
much-enduring wife, waiting for the end of an inexplicable situation.
Aunt Sanna thinks it's temporary aberration. Your father thinks there's
another woman in it. Your mother confided to Aunt Sanna that it is her
opinion that Bab refused Jim, and Jim married from pique."

"That sounds like Mother!" Richie said with a dry laugh.

"Doesn't it?" Julia smiled. "But the truth is," she added, "Jim has no
preconcerted plan. He's made a very close man friend or two in Germany,
belongs to a doctors' club. I know him so well! He lets the days, and
the weeks, and the years go by, forgetting me and everything that
concerns me as much as he can, and getting into a slow, dull rage
whenever he remembers that fate hit him, of all men in the world, such a
blow!"

"And the baby?" said Richie. "Don't you suppose she counts? Oh, Lord, to
have a kid of one's own," he added slowly, with the half-smiling sigh
Julia knew so well.

"I imagine she would count if he had seen her lately," Julia suggested.
"But she was such a tiny scrap! And Jim, as men go, isn't a lover of
children."

"You wouldn't divorce him, Julie?" Richard asked, after a silence.

"Oh, never!" she answered quickly. "No, I won't do that." She smiled.
"Yet, Rich," she added presently, "it's a strange thing to me that
really my one dread is that he will come back. I _think_ he means nothing
to me, yet, if I saw him--I don't know! Sometimes I worry for fear that
he might want Anna, and of course I wouldn't give her up if it meant a
dozen divorces."

Richard sat staring into the fire for a few moments; then he roused
himself to ask smilingly:

"How'd we get started on this little heart to heart, anyway?"

"Well, I don't know," Julia said, smiling, too. "I couldn't talk of it
for a long while. I can't now, to any one but you. But it all means less
to me than it did. Jim never could hurt me now as he did then." She
straightened up in her chair. "It's been a wonderful talk!" she said,
with shining eyes. "And you're a friend in a million, Richie, dear! And
now," very practically, "where are you going to sleep, my dear? Aunt
Sanna has your room."

"This couch out here is made up!" Richard said, with a backward jerk of
his head toward the room behind him.

"Ah, then you're all right!" Julia rose, and stopped behind his chair
for a moment, to lay a light kiss on his hair. "Good-night, Little
Brother!" she said affectionately.

Instantly one of the bony hands shot out, and Julia felt her wrist
caught as in a vise. Richard swiftly twisted about and got on his own
feet, and for a minute their eyes glittered not many inches apart. Julia
tried to laugh, but she was breathing fast.

"_Richard_!" she said in a sharp whisper. "What is it?"

"Julia!" he choked, breathing hard.

For a long moment they remained motionless, staring at each other. Then
Richard's grip on her wrists relaxed, and he sank into his deep chair,
dropped his elbows on his knees, and put his hands over his face. Julia
stood watching him for a second.

"Good-night, Richie!" she said then, almost inaudibly.

"Good-night!" he whispered through his shut fingers. Julia slipped
softly away, closing the door of her bedroom noiselessly behind her.

Anna was asleep in the upper bed, lying flat on her back, with her
lovely hair falling loosely about her flushed little face. The little
cabin bedroom was as sweet as the surrounding woodland, wide-open
windows admitted the fragrant coolness of the spring night. There was no
moon, but the sky that arched high above the little valley was thickly
spattered with stars. Richie's cat, a shadow among paler shadows, leaped
swiftly over the new grass. Julia got the milky odour of buttercups, the
breath of the little Persian lilac that flanked one end of the porch.

Her heart was beating thickly and excitedly, she did not want to think
why. Through her brain swept a confusion of thoughts, thoughts
disconnected and chaotic. She tried to remember just what words on her
part--on Richard's--had led to that strange mad moment of revelation,
but the memory of the moment itself overleaped all those preceding it.
Julia knelt, her elbows on the window sill, and felt merely that she
never wanted to move again. She wanted just to kneel here, hugging to
her heart the thrilling emotion of the moment, realizing afresh that
life was not dead in her; youth and love were not dead in her; she could
still tremble and laugh and cry in the exquisite joy of being beloved.

And it was Richie, so weak in body, so powerful in spirit; so humble in
little things, so bold and sure in the things that are great; not rich
in money, but rich in wisdom and goodness; Richie, who knew all her
pitiful history now, and had long suspected it, who loved her! Julia
knew even now that it was an ill-fated love; she knew that deep under
this first strangely thrilling current of pride and joy ran the cold
waters of renunciation. But cool reason had little to do with this mood;
she was as mad as any girl whose senses are suddenly, blindly, set free
by a lover's first kiss.

After a while she began mechanically to undress, brushed her hair, moved
about softly in the uncertain candlelight. And as she did so she became
more and more unable to resist the temptation to say "Good-night" to
Richie again. Neither brain nor heart was deeply involved in this
desire, but some influence, stronger than either, urged her irresistibly
toward its fulfilment.

She would not do it, of course! Not that there was harm in it; what
possible harm could there be in her putting her head into the
sitting-room and simply saying "Good-night?" Still, she would not do it.

A glance at herself in the dimly lighted mirror set her pulses to
leaping again. Surely candlelight had never fallen on a more exquisite
face, framed in so shining and soft an aureole of bright hair. The long
loose braid fell over her shoulder, a fine ruffle of thin linen lay at
the round firm base of her throat. She was still young--still
beautiful--

Anna stirred, sighed in her sleep. And instantly Julia had extinguished
the candle, and was bending tenderly over the child.

"It's only Mother, Sweet! Are you warm enough, dear? You _feel_
beautifully warm! Let Mother turn you over--so!"

"Is it morning, Mother?" murmured Anna.

"No, my heart! Mother's just going to bed." And ten minutes later Julia
was asleep, her face as serene as the child's own.

The morning brought her only a shamed memory of the night before and its
moods, and as Richie was quite his natural self, Julia determined to
dismiss the matter as a passing moment of misinterpreted sentiment on
both their parts. To-day was a Sunday, so perfect that they had
breakfast on the porch, and in the afternoon took a long climb on the
mountainside, across patches of blossoming manzanita, and through
meadows sweet with the liquid note of rising larks. They came back in
the twilight: Anna limp and drowsy on Richard's shoulders, Miss Toland
admitting to fatigue, but all three ready to agree with Julia's estimate
that it had been a wonderful Sunday.

But night brought to two of them that new and strange self-consciousness
that each had been secretly dreading all day. Julia fought it as she
might have fought the oncoming of a physical ill, yet inexorably it
arrived. Supper was an ordeal, she found speech difficult, she could
hardly raise her eyes.

"Julie, you're as rosy as a little gipsy," said Miss Toland approvingly.
"Doesn't colour become her, Rich?"

"She looks fine," Richard muttered, almost inarticulately. Julia looked
up only long enough to give Miss Toland a pained and fluttering smile.
She was glad of an excuse to disappear with Anna, when the little girl's
bedtime arrived, and lingered so long in the bedroom that Miss Toland
came and rapped on the door.

"Julia! What _are_ you doing?" called the older woman impatiently. Julia
came to the door.

"Why, I'm so tired, Aunt Sanna," she began smilingly.

"Tired, nonsense!" Miss Toland said roundly. "Come sit on the porch with
Richie and me. It's like summer out of doors, and there'll be a moon!"

So Julia went to take her place on the porch steps, with a great curved
branch of the white rose arching over her head, and the fragrant stretch
of the grassy hilltop sloping away, at her feet, to the valley far
below. Miss Toland dozed, and the younger people talked a little, and
were silent for long spaces between the little casual sentences that
to-night seemed so full of meaning.

The next day Julia went home, to Miss Toland's disgust and to little
Anna's sorrow. Richie drove Julia and the little girl to the train;
there was no explanation needed between them; at parting they looked
straight into each other's eyes.

"Ask us to come again some day," Julia said. "Not too soon, but as soon
as you can. And don't let us ever feel that we've done anything that
will hurt or distress you, Richie."

"You and Anna are both angels," Richard answered. "Only tell me that you
forgive me, Julie; that things after this will be just as they were
before?"

Julia smiled, and bit a thoughtful under lip.

"This is March," she said. "We'll come and see you, let me see--in July,
and everything shall be just as it was before! Perhaps I am really
getting old," she said to herself, half laughing and half sad, when she
was in her own kitchen an hour or two later. "But, while home is not
exciting, somehow I'd rather be here than philandering on the mountain
in the moonlight with Richie!"

"What you smiling about, Julie?" her mother asked, from the peaceful
east side of the kitchen where her chair frequently stood while Julia
and Mrs. Torney were busy in that cheerful apartment.

"Just thinking it was nice to be home again, Mama!"

"I don't hold much with visiting, myself," said Mrs. Torney, who was
becoming something of a philosopher as she went into old age. "But you
can't get that through a young one's skull!" she added, trimming the
dangling pastry from a pie with masterly strokes of her knife. "Either
you have such a good time that your own home is spoiled for you, for
dear knows how long, or else you set around wondering why on earth you
ever come. And then you've got to have the folks back to visit you, and
wear yourself all out talking like all possessed while you cook for 'em
and make their beds. I don't never feel clean when I've washed my face
away from home anyway, and I like my own bed under me. You couldn't get
me to visit anywheres now, if it was the Queen of Spain ast me!"

Julia laughed out merrily, and agreed with her aunt, glad to have left
the episode with Richie behind her. But it haunted her for many days,
nevertheless, rising like a disturbing mist between her and her calm
self-confidence, and shaking her contented conviction that the
renunciations necessary to her peace of mind had all been made. She
found fresh reason to gird herself in circumspection and silence, and
brooded, a little in discouragement, upon the incessantly recurring
problems of her life.

She went to visit the cabin on Tamalpais earlier even than she had
promised, however, for in June Barbara came home for a visit, bringing
two splendid little boys, with whom Anna fell instantly in love, and a
tiny baby in the care of a nurse. Julia spent a good deal of her time in
Sausalito during the visit, and more than once she and Barbara took the
four children to Mill Valley, and spent a few days with Richie, quite as
happy as the boys and Anna were in the free country life.

Five years of marriage had somewhat changed Barbara; she was thinner,
and freckled rather than rosy, and she wore her thick dark hair in a
fashion Julia did not very much admire. Also she seemed to care less for
dress than she once had done, even though what she wore was always the
handsomest of its kind. But she was an eagerly admiring and most devoted
wife, calmly assuming that the bronzed and silent "Francis" could do no
wrong, and Julia thought she had never seen a more charming and
conscientious mother. Barbara, whose husband's uncle was a lord, who had
been presented at the English court, and whose mail was peppered with
coats-of-arms, nursed her infant proudly and publicly, and was heard to
mention to old friends--not always women either--social events that had
occurred "just before Geordie came" or "when I was expecting Arthur."
Her rather thin face would brighten to its old beauty when Geordie and
Arthur, stamping in, bare kneed and glowing, recounted to her the joys
of Sausalito, and in evening dress she was quite magnificent, and
somehow seemed more at ease than American women ever do. Her efficiency
left even the capable Julia gasping and outdistanced. Barbara was equal
to every claim husband, children, family, and friends could make. She
came down to an eight o'clock breakfast, a chattering little son on each
side of her, announcing briskly that the tiny Malcolm had already had
his bath. She started the little people on the day's orderly round of
work and play while opening letters and chatting with her father; earned
the housemaid's eternal affection by personally dusting the big
drawing-room and replacing the flowers; answered the telephone in her
pleasantly modulated voice; faced her husband during his ten o'clock
breakfast, and discussed the foreign news with him in a manner Julia
thought extraordinarily clever; and at eleven came with the baby into
her mother's sunny morning-room for a little feminine gossip over
Malcolm's second breakfast. Barbara never left a note unanswered, no old
friend was neglected; tea hour always found the shady side porch full of
callers, children strayed from the candy on the centre table to the
cakes near the teapot, the doctor's collie lay panting in the doorway.
Barbara's rich soft laugh, the new tones that her voice had gained in
the past years, somehow dominated everything. Julia felt a vague new
restlessness and discontent assail her at this contact with Barbara's
full and happy life. Perhaps Barbara suspected it, for her generous
inclusion of Julia, when plans of any sort were afoot, knew no limit.
She won Anna's little heart with a thousand affectionate advances; loved
to have the glowing beauty of the little girl as a foil for her own
dark-haired boys.

"You're so busy--and necessary--and unself-conscious, Barbara," Julia
said, "you make other women seem such fools!"

It was a heavenly July afternoon, and the two were following Richie and
the children down one of the mountain roads above Mill Valley. Barbara,
who had acquired an Englishwoman's love of nursery picnics, had lured
her husband to join them to-day, and Julia had been pleasantly surprised
to see how fatherly the Captain was with his small boys, how willing to
go for water and tie dragging little shoe laces. But presently the
soldier grew restless, stared about him for a few moments, and finally
decided to leave the ladies and children to Richie's escort, and walk to
the summit of the mountain and back, as a means of working off some
excess of energy and gaining an appetite for dinner. He apparently did
not hear Barbara's warning not to be late, and her entreaty to be
careful, merely giving her a stolid glance in answer to these eager
suggestions, and remarking to the boys, who begged to accompany him a
little way: "Naow, naow, I tell you you carn't, so don't make little
arsses of yourselves blabbering abaout it!"

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