Patience Sparhawk and Her Times: A Novel

by Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

But it was not long before Patience learned the bitter lesson that she was not as other girls, despite the fact that at that time she was well dressed and that she drifted naturally to the head of her classes. School girls are coarse and cruel. Children are the periodical relapse of civilisation into savagery. These girls of Monterey excluded Patience from their games and recess conversations, and intimated broadly that her mother was not respectable.

At first Patience gave them little heed. She loved study, and was of a wild happy nature beneath her prim exterior. Moreover, Rosita was her loyal friend; and one of the older girls, Manuela Peralta, who had a kind and independent heart, sheltered her as much as she could. But Patience was too bright and observing to remain long in ignorance of her hostile environment. When the awakening came her young soul was filled with rage and bitterness. The full meaning of their innuendoes she was too ignorant to understand, but that she was regarded as a pariah was sufficiently evident.

Little as she loved her mother, a natural impulse sent her to her only remaining parent with the story of her wrongs. Mrs. Sparhawk became violently indignant and shortly after very drunk. The subject was never mentioned between them again; nor did Patience speak of it with any one but Rosita, whom she regarded as a second, beloved, and somewhat inferior self. But her soul cried out for the strength that only a man’s strong soul can give to woman at any age; and the man that had prayed to live and defend her lay with the forgotten Californians on the hill.

Mr. Foord divined her trouble, and did what he could to make her life endurable, although her shy reserve forbade any intimacy beyond the old friendship. Miss Galpin, her teacher, made no secret of the fact that Patience was her favourite scholar, and encouraged her to study and read and forget.

Patience indulged in no further outbreak, even to herself. She cultivated a cold and impassive exterior, an air of rigid indifference, and studied until her small head ached. She was not old enough to analyse; it was instinct only that made her assume callousness; but in her young vague way she grappled with the social problem. She did not approve of Mrs. Sparhawk any more than others did; but Mrs. Sparhawk’s daughter behaved herself, and stood at the head of her classes, and had been assured again and again that she “looked like a little lady:” therefore she was at a loss to comprehend why Patience Sparhawk was not as good as other girls. There was Panchita McPherson, who lied profusely and whose mother sat in the sun all day and baked herself like an old crocodile, while her husband sat on the fence by the Post Office and smoked a pipe from the first of January until the thirty-first of December. Yet Panchita was of the haute noblesse, and treated Patience as she would a rag-picker. Francesca Montez never knew a lesson and was so vulgar that she brought the blush to Patience’s cheek; but she lived in an adobe mansion which once had been the scene of princely splendour, and gave two parties a year. The American girls had not even the prestige of the past; they could not reckon up a great-grandfather between them, much less peeling portraits of caballeros and trunks of splendid finery; but they were bright and aggressive, and made themselves a power in the school.

As Patience grew older she compelled the respect of her mates, and they ceased to annoy her. The consciousness of social supremacy never faded, not for an instant; but even tying a tin can to a dog’s tail becomes monotonous in time, and they had numberless little interests to absorb them. If Patience had been a rollicking emotional child she would doubtless have kissed herself into popularity and been treated to much good-natured patronage; but she scorned placation, and grew more reserved as the years went by. She accepted her fate, and discovered that there were times and hours when her mother, schoolmates, and social problems could be forgotten. Her spirits were naturally buoyant, and her mind grew philosophical; but as Mr. Foord once observed to Miss Galpin, “her start in life had been all wrong, and it would matter more with her than with some others.”

IV

After Patience had put the kitchen in order she went up to her room. She slept at one end of the house, her mother at the opposite. Several of the hired men occupied a dormitory between; the rest slept over the dairy.

She lit her candle and began to undress, then extinguished the flame suddenly and went down stairs and out of the house. She felt sullen and heavy and depressed, and knew the remedy.

The moon was at the full; the great ploughed fields were a sea of silver; the dark pines on the hills opened their aisles to cataracts of crystal, splashing through the green uplifted arms. Strange shadows moved amidst the showers of cold light, twisting rhythmically under the touch of the night wind.