Chapter VII A Short Repentance
“Indeed, indeed, Repentance oft before
I swore—but was I sober when I swore?
And then and then came Spring and rose-in-hand
My thread-bare Penitence apieces tore.”
—The Rubaiyat.
Nine years had passed since the events related in the last chapter. Lynn Thayer had developed from a girl of nineteen into a woman of twenty-eight. She had lived quietly in Montreal, never relinquishing her position in the school, though, as the years went by, her aunt had more than once begged her to remain at home and lead the life of an ordinary young woman of her class.
As has before been said, Lynn occupied a rather exceptional position in Montreal. The average girl who teaches in the public schools makes up her mind, sooner or later, to be a teacher, only. Her position is not considered in the light of a disgrace, but, on the other hand, she occupies a slightly lower grade than does the girl who remains at home. The latter, provided she has the social connections and the time, may go into any society she pleases. She may be unable to return any hospitality except in a very simple fashion, but she may still figure as a “society girl” and receive and accept invitations in the most exclusive houses.
Probably no other girl but Lynn, however, was ever successful in combining the duties of a public school teacher and of a society girl. Both her father and mother had been so well-to-do, so well-known in Montreal; both had had so many rich friends, so many influential connections, that their daughter was of necessity a figure of interest. Then, too, she was connected with the nobility; and, what was more important, her aunts on both sides of the family, who lived in Montreal, received and returned visits from the most exclusive Butchers, Bakers and Candlestick-Makers, and were generally accepted as “fixtures” in society. Therefore Lynn had invitations of all kinds, not only from people of gentle breeding, aristocratic birth and good character, but also from that far more important section of “society” who lived in big houses and got their clothes from Paquin. She never “came out,” much to her aunt’s grief; but she “went out,” which was more to the point and which many girls who “come out” never succeed in doing. She was so popular, so generally liked, that her obstinate determination to spend her days in teaching was both admired and extolled.
Meanwhile, what of her brother?
On Mrs. Allardi’s death Lynn had secured from his father, who appeared supremely indifferent to the child and to his fate, a promise that she was to have full control of him, on condition of paying for his board and education. Lynn, after considerable thought, made arrangements for him at a good but unfashionable school in the country, as far as possible removed from his father. She was struck by the attitude of father and son to one another. Allardi seemed to regard his small son as an amusing kind of dog, to be patted on the head if he were in a good humour, kicked out of the way if he were not; he was proud of him, in a way, devoted to him; yet, apparently, never thought anything of his present wants or of his future needs. He was quite capable of leaving the child alone for days while he sought distraction elsewhere, and of loading him with bonbons and caresses on his return.
He felt that if this queer, silent step-daughter of his chose to supplement a small allowance which Mr. Thayer had promised to make the boy, he would be very foolish to stand in the way. He could make any promise she chose to exact and break it with alacrity as soon as the keeping of it became inconvenient. Therefore the readiness with which he promised to see practically nothing of the boy in the future sprang really from a defective sense of the value of a promise, rather than from the total heartlessness with which Lynn credited him. He was really fond of Lionel—in his way; and fully intended to see all that he wished of him, whenever necessary.
So the child went to school and Lynn returned to Montreal and worked steadily for the extra sums which were needed for Lionel’s maintenance. The next few years were comparatively restful and pleasant ones. The reports which she received of Lionel were not good, yet he seemed to be progressing fairly well, and Lynn, remembering her mother’s dying words, tried not to expect too much in the beginning. When Lionel was fourteen, however, he ran away and joined his father in New York.
Lynn did not even know his whereabouts and had no way of discovering them. The boy did not assuage her anxiety by writing, feeling that his hiding-place might be ascertained if he gave any clue to it and that he would then be compelled to return. However, Allardi wrote to Lynn after a time, telling her that the boy was with him and asking that she would not withdraw her help as Lionel already needed much that he could not give him.
Lynn exhausted entreaties, reproofs, and even threats. Allardi was the boy’s natural guardian in the eyes of the law; his will was absolute and he refused to send the boy from him unless well paid for so doing. This was out of the question. Lynn had already earned the reputation of a miser for the scantiness and plainness of the wardrobe which Mrs. Thayer felt herself constantly obliged to supplement. Naturally Mrs. Thayer could not see why a girl with fifty dollars a month to spend on herself alone—as she supposed—should lack for anything in reason.
Here the inconvenience and absurdity of the oath which Mrs. Allardi had made Lynn swear began to show itself most unpleasantly. The truth was so simple, the secrecy made the whole matter so difficult. Lynn had dreaded inquiries anent the boy when she first returned after her mother’s death, but none had been forthcoming. Mr. Thayer had expected that Lynn would ask him to have an eye to the boy and see that the small allowance he had promised to make him was fairly spent; when nothing was said on the matter he assumed that Lynn disliked the child as she did the father and preferred never to think or speak of them, now that the one link between them and her was broken. Mr. Thayer was glad to forget the existence of his sister-in-law’s other child. He had never even seen the father or the son; he had been intensely indignant at the second marriage contracted while Clara was visiting friends in the States; and, subsequent events having justified his indignation, he had sedulously avoided meeting any of the people concerned. His offer to adopt Lynn had been made by letter; he had sent money for the journey when that offer was accepted, and settled the amount agreed upon his sister-in-law; and had then endeavoured to drive the whole affair from his mind. However, upon Lynn’s return from New York, he did make some gruff inquiries as to the child’s whereabouts; and, on her replying that the boy was at a cheap but highly respectable boarding-school in the country, he had, with a feeling of relief, dismissed the whole matter from his mind, thinking that “that Italian blackguard” had some sense of decency after all.
There seemed little that Lynn could do, now that Lionel had taken matters into his own hands and openly declared his intention of remaining with his father. Of course the rational thing was to break her promise and take her relatives into her confidence. Only the most scrupulous moralist could hold her bound by an oath which her mother, could she have looked into the future, would have surely wished her to break. Ah, if only logic ruled life, how simple life would be. Unfortunately it does not.
Lynn had inherited from both father and mother an overstrained sense of honour and, though she had done her best to refrain from making the unfair and ridiculous promise, the possibility of breaking it when made never occurred to her.
The Roman Catholic system of confession has its advantages after all. Had Lynn gone to any confessional and asked for permission to break her oath, and absolution for the sin of so doing, what sensible man, priest or layman, would have refused to sanction such a procedure? Lynn, under the circumstances, had no confidant, no adviser, no one to show her the needlessness of her various sacrifices.
Besides, it is to be feared that Lynn’s sense of honour was so deeply ingrained that it could not, under any conditions, have yielded to the dictates of common sense. She would probably have done, in any circumstances, just what she proceeded to do; kept the foolish oath in its entirety, continued to help the ungrateful boy, in spite of the fact that he, in defiance of her expressed wishes, continued to live in New York with his father, and generally have conducted herself as over-fond and irrational women do, under such circumstances.
When Lionel was sixteen, however, his father died of consumption in a tragic and horrible manner; and Lionel, temporarily sobered by the occurrence, suddenly “turned over a new leaf,” as he expressed it, and wrote Lynn to that effect, declaring his intention of taking up literary work and “making his name in it.” Although his manner of supporting himself did not seem very practicable to his sister, she hailed with joy this indication that her work and care had at last borne fruit.
And, for a short time, Lionel was a source of unmitigated joy and pride to her. There are but a few poets in the world and he was one of them. His work earned him instant recognition among a certain set and, although his earnings were paltry, he, at all events, did earn something and bade fair to earn more. All literary workers know how frequently a certain amount of fame may be gained with very small pecuniary success to back it.
Then Lionel decided to live in Montreal. He was ill; New York did not agree with him; he wanted new experiences and realized that Lynn could give him one thing that he had never known—the society of rich and fashionable people; and, more important than all, he knew well that he could wheedle every penny of her earnings from her, provided he lived in the same town. The boy was a degenerate, totally without gentle feeling of any kind, his only approach to it being a sort of sympathetic and artistic understanding of other people’s emotions. His sister was, to him, merely a cow to be milked dry. He was, to his sister, a demi-god to be sacrificed to; she laid before him in the dust the burnt ashes of her heart and life—and received the fitting and inevitable reward of such folly.
By reason of the oath sworn by Lynn and also because Lionel had won fame under the name of Leo Ricossia, this was the name by which he chose to be known in Montreal. As Leo Ricossia he was received with open arms. He had secured letters of introduction to certain influential Montrealers and soon contrived to be formally presented to his sister at the home of one of these. His literary fame had preceded him, and this, in conjunction with his extraordinary beauty, his extreme youth, and the fact that he, already, lay under sentence of death made him, for the time being, “the rage.” No social gathering was complete without him; all the debutantes cut out his poems, pasted them in albums, and entreated his signature on the opening page; all the older women of fashion petted, indulged and ran after him.
It is extraordinary how rapidly and completely a certain person may become “the rage” and still more extraordinary how rapidly and completely this person may sink out of sight and be practically forgotten in the space of a few months. For about a year Ricossia’s popularity was at fever height; then—murmurs of disapprobation, shruggings of shoulders, a few hints here, a few direct words of condemnation there—and, by the end of another year, Society knew Ricossia no more. He had overstepped the limit of indulgence; much is excused to a young and handsome man with charming manners and lung disease; but not everything. In Ricossia’s case, unfortunately, there was everything to excuse and people finally and positively refused to excuse it. Ricossia, who had tired very quickly of comparative respectability, hastened the climax with a certain gay recklessness, and abandoned himself with entire satisfaction to all that he had vowed to relinquish when he came to Montreal. Taking up his abode in the disreputable old studio building before-mentioned, he proceeded to follow very literally the words of the Episcopal prayer-book, doing everything that he ought not to do, leaving undone all that he ought to do.
Now, it will be supposed, Lynn’s patience failed, utterly. Now, at last she abandoned the wretched boy who was bound to her only by blood and who had voluntarily relinquished every claim on her regard? Ah, no. Again let us repeat, if only logic ruled life, how simple life would be. As logic does not rule life, Lynn continued to support her half-brother, denying herself everything that she could go without, refusing all invitations that entailed expensive clothes, immolating herself on the altar of self-sacrifice with most-admired indiscretion. Nor was this all. As it was clearly impossible that the disgraced and ostracized Ricossia should visit her in the respectable home of her irreproachable relatives; as it was equally impossible that she should go by daylight to the somewhat disreputable quarter of the town where he lived; as everything within her denied the possibility of leaving him to die in poverty, illness and loneliness; for all these reasons and for fifty others equally excellent, Lynn hit on the brilliant plan of visiting him by stealth, Nicodemus-fashion, of going ostensibly to dine with some friend or friends, and of leaving early and driving to the Chatham in order to see for herself whether the worthless life was still extant and whether the cold heart craved anything that she could give it. A fool? Oh yes, a very great and undoubted fool.
Unfortunately the vast mass of humanity is composed of fools, and the people apparently free from any trace of such folly are not just the people whom we most admire and love. Casabianca, standing flame-encircled on the sinking ship; Joan of Arc leading a handful of peasants against the flower of the English army; Charlotte Corday giving her life on the guillotine for the pleasure of making a martyr of an inhuman hound; all these and all the other divine fools of history make a curious appeal to humanity. Why? That is difficult to answer. Perhaps because, deep in our hearts, we know ourselves to be fools and are not, in moments of depression, quite convinced that we are even divine fools.
Be that as it may, Lynn Thayer qualified herself, as will be admitted, for a high place in the picture gallery of fools; risking her reputation, beggaring her life, breaking her heart, all for the sake of a boy who had done nothing from childhood but grieve, torment and disappoint her. Ah, but he had done a little more than this. He had filled her life with his image; he had afforded her an object on which to squander the treasures of her mind and heart. And what more does the average fool want, whether she be an historical, or, as in this case, an ultra-modern fool?
Ricossia had hit on a way by which Lynn was enabled to supplement her teacher’s salary and provide for him more comfortably. Struck by the humour and style of a little sketch which she had written for his amusement, he made a few alterations in it and sent it to an editor with whom he was personally acquainted, under his own name. It was accepted and paid for; and, from that time on, Ricossia was known for his pungent and witty society skits. Lynn was only too grateful for the addition to her much-strained purse and delighted that her brother was pleased to approve of her work. Had it not been for this new method of earning, she would have found it increasingly difficult to account for the way in which her money went, bringing her no apparent return.
In her spare moments, therefore, she wrote, busily, and, moreover, assumed the duty of amanuensis to her brother, who seemed more and more indifferent, as his health declined and his energy waned, as to the disposal of his brain-wares. Provided he could carouse all night and sleep all day he seemed content; only varying this routine by complaints if Lynn either came at inopportune times or failed to come when she might have been of use.
He absolutely refused all medical aid and scoffed at the idea of going to a sanitarium. He knew that he must die and he wanted to die, happy. And, if Lynn had but known it, this, under the circumstances, was about the greatest kindness he could have done society in general and his sister in particular.