“Not at all!” he protested almost peevishly. “Please not to suggest by pitying her that I have not represented there a fine, big, strong thing, built to stand up under anything! I could slay, with pleasure, at any time”–he diverged, carried away by a long-standing disgust,–“the pestiferous asses who call my things morbid. I am too careful to keep true to what I see. The difference between them–I mean the critics who call me morbid–and myself, is in the degree of sight.”
“Don’t get excited, Geraldino!” she checked fumings which she did not entirely understand. “What I meant was that looking at her has made me think of all the things that have gone wrong with me in my whole life. Don’t you call that a tribute? You couldn’t have painted this picture if you hadn’t suspected those things, and, honest, I don’t see how you could suspect them. Ever since I came over here I’ve been so jolly. Seems to me I’ve been nothing but jolly. I’ve been having such a good time! How you could see under it, I don’t know. 234As a matter of fact, I’ve always been jolly between-times. Give me half a chance, let me get out of the frying-pan, I’d be ready in a minute to go on a picnic. But I’ve not been spared my troubles, Geraldino; you were right there.”
At this reference to many sorrows, he found a thing to do more expressive than words. Sitting near each other as they were, he could reach her without rising; he bent forward and touched his lips commiseratingly to her hand.
He might have known that it would bring her story, but he had not schemed for this, and, unwilling, yet eager, to hear, was a prey to compunctions on more than one ground when, after a little gulp and sniff, she burst forth:
“I’ve seen perfectly dreadful times, Geraldino. Some of them were the sort of thing you can get over, but some of them–upon my word, I wonder at myself how I’ve got over them as I have. The queer thing is–I haven’t, in a way. It will come over me sometimes, in the queerest places, at the oddest moments, that I am still that woman to whom such awful things happened, that I, playing my silly monkey-shines, am that heart-broken woman.”
“I know,” murmured Gerald, and took her plump hands steadyingly between his hard, thin ones.
“I’ve never had any sense,” she let herself go. “Anybody can see that; and when I was younger I had even less, naturally, than I have now. Always, always, I wanted so to be happy! I wanted to have a good time. I was born wanting to have a good time. And everything was against it. But I managed somehow. One way or another, I got to the circus ’most every time. My mother used to wonder what my finish would be, and try to lick the Old Boy out of me. But it couldn’t be done. I’m just like my father, my dear old pa, who was a sinner. He let ma 235have her way in everything, as he thought it right to do. Not, I guess, because he always liked her way, but because after my sister, who was a beautiful child, died in such a terrible way that I can’t even bear to mention it,–she caught fire,”–Aurora hurriedly interjected, “ma came so near going out of her senses that pa humored her in everything. He thought the world of her; so did we all, but it couldn’t be called a happy home. There were three boys, besides me,–I was the last,–and we were all such everlastingly lively young ones, and ma was so strict! Pa was away most of the time getting a living. My pa, you know, was a pilot. It wasn’t a fat living for so many of us, but that wouldn’t have mattered long as we had enough to eat. But ma, poor soul, because of that twist her mind had taken through sorrow, was always seeing something wrong in everything we did; she never could be quiet or contented. The boys didn’t get so much of it: they were off out of doors and later at their trades; but me, I was kept in to help with the housework, and kept in for company, and kept in for no other reason, I guess, than because my wicked heart longed so to go out and play with the girls and boys. I dare say it was good for me. Ma meant all right, that I know, but ma was all along a sick woman. We realized later that though she was round and about, busy every minute, she was sick for years with the trouble that finally took her away. I don’t want you to think I didn’t have a real good mother, for I did–a first-rate mother who did her honest best to make a good woman of me.”
“I know, I know.” By a reminding pressure of her hands he begged she would trust him not to misunderstand.
236“But my pa–you should have known my pa!” Aurora’s face brightened immensely, and Gerald suspected that it was like him she looked when she screwed her lips to one side in a manner humorously suggesting a pipe at the corner of her mouth, and said in a voice not her own, “Golly, Nell, can’t you whistle for a snifter?” He could almost see a sailor’s chin-whiskers.
“He took me with him once in a while. Golly, those were good times, if you please! Free as air, all the peanuts I could eat, out in the boat with my pa, and catch fish, and catch a steamer if we could. We had an 8 big as a house on our sail. He was as good a seaman, my pa was, as any in East Boston, but he wasn’t a hustler. But there, if he’d been a hustler, he wouldn’t have been my pa. Wouldn’t for a house with a brownstone front have had my pa any different from what he was. Grandma was just the same sort, God bless her! easy-going, jolly, come a day, go a day, do as she please and let you do as you please. I used to have such lovely times at her house, summers, down on the Cape, before my sister died!