BY WILLIAM ALLEN DROMGOOLE.

Some barks there are that drift dreamily down stream, ever near to the shore where the waters are shallow. Some catch the current and go bounding on with sweep and swirl until the river, placid at last, slips into the tideless Everlasting. Some, alas! commanded by iron-hearted Fate, are headed up stream to fight—who dares call it Folly’s battle?—against the current which yields only to the invincible will and the tireless arm. They lie who swear that life turns on mere accident. There are no accidents in fate. The end is but a gathering of the means; the means but byways to the end; and at the last fate is master still, and we its victims are, as was she, my Claudia.

I am an old woman, childless and loveless; I know what it is to stand alone with life’s hollow corpses,—corpses of youth, and love, and hope. Perhaps this is why my heart turned to her in her sweet youth and guileless innocence. I used to fancy, when I saw her, a child under the old-fashioned locust’s shade that fell about her father’s modest place, that she was unlike other children. She had a thoughtful face—not beautiful, but soulful. I thank God now that the child was spared that curse. Fate set snares enough without that deadliest one of beauty. Yet she had soul; her eyes betrayed its strength and mirrored its deep passion,—that mightiest, holiest passion which men call genius. Her genius merely budded; fate set its heel against the plant and crushed it.

I knew her from her birth; knew her strong-hearted mother, and her gentle father, who slipped the noose of life when Claudia was a tiny thing, too young to more than lisp his name. Yet, with his last breath he blessed her, and blessed the man into whose arms he placed her, and left her to his care.

“You have said you owe me something,” said the dying man; “if so, pay it to my child, my girl-babe, in fatherly advice and guidance.”That man had been a felon and would have met a felon’s doom but for the friend whose child had been confided to his guidance. He had saved him by silence and by loans which had beggared him in lending. He was a strong man, and left his daughter something of his strength for heritage, and that was all. But from her mother, her great-souled mother, the child received enough of courage, and of hope, and faith, and energy, to make her life a sure thing at all events.

I lost her ’twixt the years of girl and womanhood, for both of us were poor, and I took such scanty living here and there as offered. But one day she found me out, and begged me to go with her to her old home under the locust trees. All were dead but her; she was alone; needed me for protection, and I, she argued, needed part of the old roof, too large for one small head.

“There’s a mortgage on it, dear,” she told me, “but I am young and strong, and have some education and some little energy; and,—” she laughed, “the note is held by that old boy-friend of my father who promised to look out for me, you know. So I have no fears of being turned out homeless, Gertie.”

So I went, and tried to be to her a friend. Instead, I was her lover—her worshipper. Her soul, as it opened to me day after day, expanding under the visÉ of poverty, took on such strength, such grandeur, that I almost stood in awe of her. She was so young, too, yet strong—strong as God, I used to think—and full of hope, and courage, and ambition. Ambition! that isn’t a word often applied to women; yet I say Claudia was ambitious. I upbraided her one day for this. She winced, and came and knelt down at my feet, her face upon her hands, her arms upon my knees, her sweet soul seeking mine through her eyes.

“Gertie,” said she, “I wonder why God made me a woman and fixed no place for me in all the many niches of creation. There is no room for such women as I am; women with bodies moulded for womanhood, and souls measured for man’s burdens.”

The words had a solemn sound—a solemn meaning likewise. I had no answer for such awesome words, and so the child talked on.

“I had a mother once,” she said, “who loved me, and who unfitted me—God rest her sainted memory—for my battle with adversity. Nay, dear, don’t look so shocked. I say that she unfitted me by instilling into my heart her own great grandeur, and her own grand courage. There is no room for such, I tell you. As a frail female weakling the slums would have cradled me; as a wife the world would have respected me; as a toiler for honest bread there is no place for me. My mother was to me a creature next to God, and I have sometimes dared to put her first when I have felt most deeply all her nobleness. My father died, then came our struggle, hers and mine. I was her idol, she my God. We clung as only child and parent can. I could have made good money in the shops or factories. The neighbors said so, and advised that I be ‘put to work.’

“‘What need had paupers of such training as she was giving me? Poverty was no disgrace, so it be honest poverty.’

“Aye, that’s it. How long will poverty be honest in children’s untrained keeping? My mother understood, and knew my needs, as well.

“‘The child is what the mother makes it,’ was her creed. And so she set her teeth against the factory and its damning influence, and she bade me look higher, teaching by her own life that hunger of body is better than a starved soul.

“Ambition was the food she gave my young life; that she declared the one rope thrown by God’s hand to the rescue of poor women. At last my soul took fire with hers; my heart awoke.

“My struggles for opportunities tortured her. She sold her thimble once,—a pretty golden one, my father’s gift—that I might have a book I needed. She did our household drudgery that the servant’s wage might go for my tuition in a thorough school. Oh, how we labored, she and I together, cheating night of many hours o’er books and study that were to repay us at the last with decent independence.

“The school days ended, the neighbors urged again the shops. But ‘no’ again. She had not spent her strength to fit me for the yard-stick and the shop-girl’s meagre living. She read the riddle of my being as only mothers can; saw the stamp upon my soul and fondly called it genius. Pinned her faith upon that slumbering curse, or blessing, as we choose each to interpret it.

“I had a little school some sixty miles from home. She had agreed that I might teach; that was in the course in which she wished my life to go. The schoolhouse was a cabin in the wood, through which flowed a river. We cannot tell the route by which we run to fame, and mine lay through this cabin in the woods. I scribbled bits of rhyme and broken verse, constantly; and found it fame enough if in the hurried jingle my mother detected ‘improvement,’ ‘promise.’

“But one day when the river burst its banks, the cabin, deluged, lay under water for ten days, and I became a temporary prisoner in my miserable boarding-house, I wrote a story, a simple, earnest little story. It sold, and more, it won a prize. Two hundred and fifty dollars,—it would take ten months of the little school to make so much. When it came—Gertie, I cannot tell you how I felt!—I thought that somehow in the darkness I had reached my hands out and found them clasped in God’s; held tight and fast, and strong and safe. I kneeled down in that cabin schoolroom, with the awe-struck children gathered round me, and choked with sobs and happy tears, thanked God who sent the blessed treasure.

“I had but one thought—Mother. I sent the children home—my work with them was done. Now I could go to her, and with a sprig of laurel to lay upon my brow, could silence stinging tongues while I worked quietly on at home. Home! never would I leave its blessed roof again. Oh, how my longing heart hurried my laggard feet. I did not write; no pen should cheat my tongue of the blessed story. I wished to feel her arms, see her smile, catch her heart-beat while I told her. God! I whispered His name softly in gratitude and love. I planned my surprise well, but I was doomed to disappointment. It was midnight when I reached the town; the streets were silent and no one spoke to me. ‘Some one must have told her,’ I said, as the hack in which I rode drew up before the door, and I saw the house was lighted; every window was wide open; and her room, where I, a child, had learned my woman’s lesson, was filled with people. Solemn, sitting folk; it was not a jubilee at all. ‘She is sick,’ I gasped, as my trembling fingers sought the gate latch. No, I saw her bed, the bed where I had nestled in her arms for eighteen years. It was white and stiff in its familiar drapings. I tore the gate ajar and bounded up the steps. My youngest sister met me in the doorway, weeping. I brushed her aside and passed in among the friendly neighbors who had hurried out on my arrival. I felt, but scarcely saw them as I said: ‘I want my mother.’ Then some one burst in tears and pointed to the open parlor door. Merciless heaven! resting upon two chairs stood a long, brown box; a coffin. I gave one shriek, so wild, so full of agony that not one who heard it stayed to offer the hollow mockery of comfort. ‘Merciful God! not my mother?’

“But it was. I never saw her face again. I would not look on it in death; that face which had been my life. But I love to think I have her presence with me here, together with her teaching, in my bosom. And with her help, for the dear dead always help us, I am working out my destiny after the pattern she set me. It is a hard task; grows harder every day; but I am young yet, and strong.”

Poor child. She did not know the dangers of the road she travelled; she only knew its hardships. Day after day she toiled, hopeful even in failure. The bloom left her cheek; but faith still fired her eye. One day she put away her manuscript, and left the house. The next day she returned. She had been to ask for her old place in the cabin schoolhouse. Too late; the place was filled. She sought one of her mother’s friends and asked for work, copying. She returned with white face and set lip, and a look of horror in her eyes. I understood. God help the poor, the respectable poor, those starvelings who cannot rise to independence and cannot sink to vileness. And oh, I prayed, God pity her,—my Claudia.

I watched her struggles with my own power palsied by that same old curse, poverty. She did her best; her struggles were torture to me even when she smiled and met them with sweet faith in her own strength and God’s goodness. She never once murmured, although I knew that many a night she had gone hungry to her desk, and rose from it, hungry still, at dawn.

And oh, when hope began to die, I saw it all; saw it in the weary eyes; heard it in the step that lagging past my door, climbed to its task, its hopeless task, again. I saw it in the cheek where hunger,—the hunger of the common herd—had set its fangs upon the delicate bloom. To ask for bread meant to receive a stone, a stone like unto the stones cast at her, that one in old Jerusalem. Perhaps she hungered too; who dares judge, since Christ himself refused to condemn.

She tried at shops at last, but no man wanted modest Quaker maids to measure off their goods. The shop-girl’s smile was part and parcel of the bargain, and if the smile beguiled a serpent in man’s clothing, why the girl must look to that.

One night I sought her room, her tidy little nest—my poor solitary birdling—and found her at her work, her old task of writing. She had gone back to it. There were rings about the eyes where tears were forbidden visitors. I took the poor head in my arms.

“Don’t, Claudia,” I cried. “The youth is all gone from your face.” “That’s right,” she said. “It left my heart long ago, and face and heart should have a common correspondence.”

And then she laughed, as if to cheat my old ears with the sound of merriment.

“I needed stamps,” she said. “The question rested, stamps vs. supper. Like a true artist I made my choice for art. But see here. That manuscript when it is finished, means no more hunger. Something tells me it will succeed, and save me. So I have called it Refuge, and on it I have staked my last hope.”

She playfully tapped the tidy page, and laughed again. But her words had a solemn earnestness about them to which her pale pinched face lent something still of awe.

Day after day I watched her, as day after day the battle became too much for her. Too much? I spoke too quickly when I said so. She was a mystery to me. I felt but could not understand her life, and its grand, heart-breaking changes. She had planned for something which she could not reach. The doors to it were closed. Her starving woman’s soul called for food; the husks were offered in its stead; the bestial, grovelling, brutish swine’s husks. She refused them. Her soul would make no compromise with swine. She was so strong, and had been so full of hope I could not understand her. You who have studied the tricks of the human heart, you who have held your own while faith died in your bosom, or you who have felt it stabbed and crushed refuse to die, perhaps you can understand that strange and fitful strength that came and went; that outburst of hope, that silence of despair which made, in turn, my dear one’s torture.

One night I found her sitting in the moonlight with her face dropped forward on the windowsill. So pure, so white, so frail of body, and so strong of soul, she might have been some marble priestess waiting there for God’s breath to move in passion through the pulseless stone.

“Claudia, dear, are you asleep?” I whispered.

“No, I was thinking if the moon would ever shine upon the night when I shall feel no more the pangs of hunger.”

I took her in my arms and wept, although her eyes were strangely tearless. She put out her hand and stroked away my tears.

“Don’t, dear,” she begged. “It is all right. It is only that there is no place for me. The niche I wish to fill has never been chiseled in the wall of this world’s matters. It is God’s mistake if one is made, and God must look to it. I tell you, Gertie,” and she rose up grandly in her pride and in her wrath, “there are but two niches made for woman in this world. There’s but one choice, wife or harlot. The poor, who refuse still to be vile, must step aside, since honest poverty by man’s decree is but a myth. There’s no room in this world for such.”

She was growing bitter, bitter, driving on, I thought, to that fatal rock from which the wrecks of lost women cry back to rail at God who would not save them from destruction, although they prayed aloud and shrieked their agony up heavenward, straight to His ears. I think sometimes I should not like to sit in God’s stead when such women come to face His judgment. Women who called, and called, and never had an answer, and so went down, still calling.

It was thus she called.

One day I came upon her where she had thrown herself upon a little garden stool to rest. A book lay on her knee, her eyes upon the page; and as I listened, for she read aloud, slowly, as when one reads to his own heart, I caught the meaning of the poet’s words as they had found interpretation by her:—

She was silent a moment, then repeated the first line of the stanza again, even more softly than before,

Then, tossing the book aside, she burst out wildly, all the pent-up patience, all the insulted and outraged womanhood within her, breaking bonds at last. She lifted up her hand as if calling down from God a curse, or offering at His register an oath. It might have been an oath, indeed; who knows? Thinking of her since I think it was an oath, made, in that moment of her frenzy, betwixt her soul and God, and registered with Him.

“Gertie,” she said, “to-day a man offered me money. Offered me all I asked, offered to make me his mistress. Do you hear? Do you? or has your soul gone deaf as mine has? His mistress! I meet it everywhere. Yet why? Because I am respectably poor. To-morrow the roof tumbles about my ears. The mortgage closes. You and I alike are homeless. I went to him, my father’s friend, to whom, in dying, he entrusted me for guidance. I begged of him that guidance, or, at the least, a little longer time upon the mortgage. He laughed. ‘Don’t worry,’ said he, ‘and don’t soil your pretty hands with ink stains any further. Leave that for the printer, or the devil. You and I will make an easier trade.’ Ease! ease! I tell you ’tis these flowery beds of ease on which poor suffocated women wake in hell. ‘Soil’ my soul and leave that for the ‘devil,’ too, his trade meant. He put it in plain words, that gray-haired guardian of a dead friend’s honor. Ease! I did not ask for ease, but work. I am strong, and young, and willing; but my ‘sand-house’ trembles with the lashing of the tide on its foundation. O my God! what fools we women be to kick against the pricks of fate.”

I repeated the words when she had left me there with the echo of her bitter rebellious words still ringing in my ears. I felt no anger and no fear for her, only sorrow, sorrow. My poor, proud darling. Her father’s house had sheltered many; his hand had been open and his bounty free. And yet not one reached out a hand to her. She might have begged, or held a hireling’s place. She was ‘not too good for it,’ the old friends said (so few are friends to poverty), but yet none found such a place for her.

Through my tears I saw her go down the garden walk, stopping to pluck a handful of the large Jack roses growing near the gate and tuck them in her belt, so that the dullish red blooms lay upon her heart, like blots of blood against her soft white dress. I shuddered, and drew my hand across my eyes. Blood! those old blood-roses rise before me now, in dreams at night. I heard the latch lift and click again into its place, and when I looked the child was gone.

She stayed a long while. Over all the garden and across the open windows, the moon was shining when I heard her step upon the doorway. It had a weary sound. Those feet which had begun so bravely were tired out already. Still had I no fear for her. She might have stayed until the gray dawn cleft the black of night and not one doubt of her could sting my faith. She climbed the stairs wearily, as if old age had of a sudden caught and cramped the young life in her feet; and listening thus I swore a mighty oath against the thing called Fate.

She so young, so strong, so willing, so full of aspiration, so loyal to faith and honor, with every door barred against her. O my God! was there none, not one human heart open to her cry? Was there but one resource—one opening for her pure soul and her proud heart—the harlot’s door? O my God! my God! women are driven to it every day, every day. Is it, indeed, the only door that opens to their knock? And would she, too, seek it at last, when faith should be quite dead? No, never! not while my palsied fingers could find strength to draw a knife across her throat.

I arose, and went to find her in her room. The door stood slightly open, and I entered, softly. Why so softly, I never could have told; only it seemed the proper thing to do. She had thrown herself across the bed, near by the open window. The moonlight flooded the room, showing me the strong, pale face lying against the pillow. Her white dress fell about her like a silverish shroud; and on the table near the window where she had sat to finish her task lay a manuscript. The moonlight fell upon the title page with mocking splendor. I stooped and read:

Dear heart! dear, sad soul! She had sought her refuge and indeed found strength. Strength! I brand him liar who calls it other.

One hand lay on the coverlid beside her, and one upon her breast half hidden by the dark blood-roses covering her heart. And that heart when I placed my hand over it—was still.

Broken! who dares say suicide? I say it was the grandest blow that weakness struck for virtue,—her life, offered in the name of outraged womanhood. The choice lay open. Shame or suicide! and like the real woman that she was, she made her choice for virtue. Conquered by fate, overcome by adversity, those who should have been helpers turned tempters. Who dares meet God in his soul and say she did not choose the better part?

I whispered it above her grave and left her there, under the stars and broken lily buds.

But when the grand Jack roses bloom, I always think of her, and thinking, I ponder again the same old riddle, Fate, whose edict swears, “No room for honest poverty; no niche for such as she.” And thinking thus I wonder,—where shall the blame rest? Whose shall the crime be?