I
Madelaine Theddon was seventeen that autumn. She was one of those rare girls who seem to slip subtly into maturity while contemporaries of equal age are giggling over pimply-faced lovers, locking themselves away in bedrooms to indite silly billet-doux, sighing over novels or clandestinely “putting up their hair.”
On an afternoon in mid-September she had climbed Mt. Tom with a party of schoolmates older than herself in nothing but years. They had accidentally (?) encountered college boys from Amherst. They lunched, flirted, drank and danced in the great, airy Summit House.
Madelaine was an accomplished dancer because of her litheness and exquisite grace of carriage. Yet to-day she had not cared for dancing. “Old Mother Hubbard” the boys often nicknamed her,—and left her alone. It was increasingly difficult for Madelaine to endure the crudities and vaporings of slangy, big-footed adolescence. They had left her much alone to-day.
She stole down the deck-like Summit House verandas, one by one, down the weather-mellowed and unpainted steps, and wandered off to the lower point of ledge at the south of that summit plateau. The Connecticut valley was far-flung at her feet, already hazy with dew-fog and twinkling with the first lamps of evening.
Hushed, peaceful, lofty, that place was,—serene, like the hour. The western afterglow was dying into lead. The sky—always finer and vaster from a mountain height—seemed a mammoth arch of sapphire porcelain where a low-hung evening star in the clear southwest shared ephemeral honors with a chaste new moon.
Madelaine stood for a time with her figure in silhouette against the south, far out on the point of rock, raised in spirit above the world. The night wind, warm and river-moistened, blew up from vistaed lowlands, rippled her accordion skirt and raised pretty havoc with her hair. Her hands were thrust in the pockets of her sweater-coat, a sinuous protection of old-rose silk. She drank deeply of the night wind. She was thankful for the solitude.
The world was very beautiful in these first clear hours of early evening. She sank down after a time on the rock, gathering skirts about fragile ankles. She rested an elbow on a knee, a cheek in a shapely hand. And fancy wandered.
Faint, disturbing yearnings had throbbed in the girl’s body of late—her hunger for an Unknown Something was gradually changing—assuming a different aspect. There were times when she wanted to love—overwhelmingly—every one and everything in the world. Then she hated the world for its crudities and shrank from the monstrosities which shocked her on every hand.
Why did people remark—and keep on remarking—that she was “different”? Wherein was she different?
In so far as her school life developed, she played tennis, gave chafing-dish parties, went canoeing and handled the canoe herself, was officer and active worker in most of the school societies. She was versatile without being prodigal. Yet through all her activities ran that same thread of dark-eyed observation,—poise, self-conservation without repression, the intuitive ability to be ever the spectator while also the participant.
The other girls frankly “did not know what to make of her.” Yet when they were in difficulty or desired help on matters they were restrained from carrying to their elders, they sought out Madelaine Theddon as straight as a homing bee.
Up and down the slope at her left, the mountain cable-cars kept steep and endless shuttling. At her feet the serried lights of Holyoke Highlands brightened. Far to the south the concentration of radiance she knew to be Springfield glowed clearer on the horizon. Yet none of these, nor the stars, nor the fresh new moon, held the attraction of those dots of brave, optimistic twinkle where isolated homes were scattered upon the face of a night-shrouded valley floor. Was that it—the thing that troubled her—the lights of other people’s homes?
She did not wonder that heaven was peaceful, that God could be calm and omnipotent, high above the world. The spot and the panorama was an allegory. Yes, the earth was beautiful—very beautiful. She had always known it so. She knew it now a hundredfold. The pain came from wondering about her part in it, and of it, even as in her school life she remained the spectator though virilely the participant.
Waltz music from the Summit House drifted down to her. The world was hers, all its lights and laughter, all its fine rare things, all its rewards and fairies. No, the world was nothing of the sort! She was a mendicant, a Nobody. Always a Nobody. How could she ever forget that? So her moods played upon her. This at seventeen.
For Madelaine Theddon at seventeen, on a mountain height in the starlight, was as surely the Madelaine Theddon whom One Man found gloriously, as the sand-crusted diamond in the Kaffir’s girdle is the same burst of iridescent whiteness on Milady’s finger at Delmonico’s.
Madelaine, on the rock, wondered about the future, what she should do in the world, what niche she should fill. At times she felt a wild, instinctive impulse to attempt great tasks,—build, win, create, worship vast gods. Then her own weakness, namelessness, impotency, would overwhelm her. She must be attached to something substantial to do great work. Some one must have emphatic need of her. In these last moods she felt that building, winning, creating, worshiping vast gods, was all hollow nonsense,—tinsel and mummery. She only wanted to complement. But what she wanted to complement she could not decide, even if she could reach that far in her self-analysis. She was flowering indeed, but she was still seventeen.
The evening deepened. The afterglow—even the leaden afterglow—died on the hills. The stars and moon rode close. Lethe-like, exotic scents wandered through the upper air, no longer earthbound, soaring onward and upward to sweeten the reaches of infinity.
She was not in love, not at seventeen, despite encroaching maturity. Boys she knew, even the best of them, were calloused, independent, painfully sophisticated young hoydens whose principal invocation to the opposite sex was “Say!” And yet that restive, insatiable hunger to complement—the finest, grandest heritage of true womanhood—was gnawing. Gnawing pitifully.
Yet if she were not in love, love was in her,—blind, wingless, already beginning to look up through the latticed windows of cloistered maidenhood, observe the stars, long for freedom without knowing exactly what she would do with freedom if it were suddenly accorded her. Dreams came to her in detached hours, vague, breeze-wafted, miracle-laden. But when she tried to lay hold upon those dreams, make them over into conformity with reality, the world veered askew. She seemed to abrase her delicate soul in the enforced juxtaposition.