Patience Sparhawk and Her Times. Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
Sparhawk was sitting on the porch reading a novel when Patience walked up to her, snatched the book from her hand, and flung it into a rose-tree. The woman was sober, and quailed as she met her daughter’s eyes. Patience had walked rapidly under a hot sun. Her face was scarlet, and she was trembling.
“I hate you!” she sobbed. “I hate you! It doesn’t do any good to tell you so, but it does me good to say it.”
The girl looked the incarnation of evil passions. She was elemental Hate, a young Cain.
“I wish you were dead,” she continued. “You’ve ruined every bit of my life.”
“Why—what—what—” mumbled the woman. But the colour was coming to her face, and her eyes were beginning to glitter unpleasantly.
“You know well enough what. You were in town drunk on Saturday night, and were in saloons with a farm hand. To make a brute of yourself was bad enough—but to go about with a common man! Are you going to marry him?”
Mrs. Sparhawk laughed. “Well, I guess not.”
Patience drew a quick breath of relief. “Well, that’s what they’re saying—that you’re going to marry him—a man that can’t read nor write. Now look here, I want one thing understood—unless you swear to me you’ll not set foot in that town again I’ll have you put in the Home of the Inebriates—There! I’ll not be disgraced again; I’ll do it.”
Mrs. Sparhawk sprang to her feet, her face blazing with rage. “You will, will you?” she cried. She caught the girl by the shoulders, and shaking her violently, boxed first one ear, then the other, with her strong rough hands. For an instant Patience was stunned, then the blood boiled back to her brain. She screamed harshly, and springing at her mother clutched her about the throat. The lust to kill possessed her. A red curtain blotted even the hated face from sight. Instinctively she tripped her mother and went down on top of her. The crash of the body brought two men to the rescue, and Patience was dragged off and flung aside.
“My land!” exclaimed one of the men, his face white with horror. “Was you going to kill your ma?”
“Yes, that she was,” spluttered Mrs. Sparhawk, sitting up and pulling vaguely at the loose flesh of her throat. “She’d have murdered me in another minute.”
Patience by this time was white and limp. She crawled upstairs to her room and locked the door. She sank on the floor and thought on herself with horror.
“I never knew,” she reiterated, “that I was so bad. Why, I’m fifteen, and I never wanted to kill even a bird before. I wouldn’t learn to shoot. I’d never drown a kitten. When the Chinaman stuck a red-hot poker through the bars of the trap and burnt ridges in the live rat I screamed and screamed. And now I’ve nearly killed my mother, and wanted to. Who, who would have thought it?”
When she was wearied with the futile effort to solve the new problem, she became suddenly conscious that she felt no repentance, no remorse. She was horrified at the sight of the black veins in her soul; but she felt a certain satisfaction at having unbottled the wrath that consumed her, at having given her mother the physical equivalent of her own mental agony. Over this last cognisance of her capacity for sin she sighed and shook her head.
“I may as well give myself up,” she thought with young philosophy. “I am what I am, and I suppose I’ll do what I’m going to do.”
She went downstairs and out of the house. She passed a group of men; they stared at her in horror. Then another little seed from the vast garden of human nature shot up to flower in Patience’s puzzled brain. She lifted her head with an odd feeling of elation: she was the sensation of the hour.
She went out on Point Lobos and listened to the hungry roar of the waves, watched the tossing spray. Nature took her to her heart as ever, and when the day was done she was normal once more. She returned to the house and helped to get supper, although she refused to speak to her equally sullen parent.
IX
It was several days before the story reached Monterey. When it did, the girls treated Patience to invective and contumely, but delivered their remarks at long range. The mother of Manuela said peremptorily that Patience Sparhawk should never darken the doors of the Peralta mansion again, and even Mrs. Thrailkill told the weeping Rosita that the intimacy must end.
Miss Galpin was horrified. When school was over she took Patience firmly by the hand and led her up the hill to her boarding-place, the widow Thrailkill’s ancestral home. The long low adobe house was traversed from end to end by a pillared corridor. It was whitewashed every year, and its red tiles were renewed at intervals, but otherwise the march of civilisation had passed it by. Mrs. Thrailkill, large and brown, with a wart between her kind black eyes, and a handsome beard, was rocking herself on the corridor. When she recognised the teacher’s companion she arose with great dignity and swung herself into the house.
Miss Galpin led Patience down the corridor to a room at the end, and motioned her to a chair. Several magazines lay on a table, and Patience reached her hand to them involuntarily; but Miss Galpin took the hand and drew the girl toward her. The young teacher’s brown eyes wore a very puzzled expression. Even her carefully regulated bang had been pushed upward with a sudden dash of the hand. She was only twenty-two, and her experience of human nature was limited. Her ideas of life were accumulated largely from the novels of Mr. Howells and Mr. James, whom she revered; and neither of these gentlemen photographed such characters as Patience. It had probably never occurred to them that Patiences existed. She experienced a sudden thrill of superiority, then craved pardon of her idols.
“Patience, dear,” she said gently, “is this terrible story true?”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Patience, standing passively at Miss Galpin’s knee.
“You actually tried to kill your mother?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Miss Galpin gasped. She waited a moment for a torrent of excuse and explanation; but Patience was mute.
“And you are not sorry?” she faltered.
“No, ma’am.”
“Oh, Patience!”
“I’m sorry you feel so badly, ma’am. Please don’t cry,” for the estimable young woman was in tears, and mentally reviling her preceptors.
“How can I help feeling terribly, Patience? You break my heart.”
“I’m sorry, dear Miss Galpin.”
“Patience, don’t you love God?”
“No, ma’am, not particularly. Leastways, I’ve never thought much about it.”
“You little heathen!”
“No, ma’am, I’m not. My father was very religious. But please don’t talk religion to me.”
“Patience, I don’t know what to make of you. I am in despair. You’re not a bad girl. You give me little trouble, and I’ve always said that you had finer impulses than any girl I’ve ever known, and the best brain. You ought to realise better than any girl of your age the difference between right and wrong. And yet you have done what not another girl in the school would do, inferior as they are—”
“How do you know, ma’am? I never thought I would. Neither did you think I would. You can’t tell what you’ll do till you do it.”
Miss Galpin was distracted. She resumed hurriedly:
“I want you to be a good woman, Patience—a good as well as a clever woman. And how can you be good if you don’t love God?”
“Are all people good the same way?”
“Well,