Butterfly

CHAPTER I-1

CHAPTER IThe dark November afternoon shut down upon the trampled and packed snow of the streets at about four o’clock; lights began to show pinkish and yellowish in the windows of village shops, and such motor-cars as were moving upon the ice and slush that surrounded the car-tracks in great pools and wallows showed wavering and moving lights in the twilight, as well. At the curbs, on both sides, mud-spattered cars were standing at irregular angles; there was a gush of light from the side door of the grocery, a covered truck was backed against the sidewalk, and young men in heavy sweaters, with red, chapped big hands, were hustling clean pine boxes and cardboard cartons to and fro.

In the shabby private office of John Spaulding, president of the Spaulding Brothers Packing Company of Mount Holly, Hilary Collier, his secretary, was standing idly at the window, her eyes absently fixed upon the familiar bustle of a late winter afternoon in the street, her thoughts, as usual, many miles away. She had spent most of her twenty-three years in the little town; she liked it, but she never seemed to herself to belong here. Beyond Burlington, beyond Camden, lay the great world, and Hilary knew that her destiny, as her mother’s before her, lay somewhere out there in the unknown.

Meanwhile, she was content. The years had been very kind to her since that other November day when, in her sixteenth year, newly fatherless, frightened and doubtful, she had come to old John Spaulding with a half-trembling and half-dignified plea for work—any kind of work. She had had only a few thousands in the world; and there was Dora! Dora was only eleven years old; Dora must be educated for the great destiny ahead of her.

John Spaulding had not realized then exactly what a treasure stood before him in this eager, untrained girl. But he had known at once that he could use Miss Collier somewhere and somehow; she was not the usual type of work-seeking woman in any way.

So Hilary, shaking and anxious to please, came into the packing rooms as checker, made friends, was promoted, acted in this capacity and that cheerfully, always successful and always climbing, until finally she found herself here, in this shabby, stove-heated office that was yet the holy of holies, the vice-president’s own sanctum; found herself his friend, his wife’s friend, popular among all her fellow employees, and—miracle of miracles!—able to take care of herself and Dora with none of those racking periods of misgiving and strain that she had feared would mark the opening years of her business career.

It did not seem to her the achievement that it might have seemed to many a girl of her age, because so much greater achievement lay still ahead. This was but the first step; the hardest, perhaps, in the sense of being the dullest and slowest, but by no means the bravest or most daring. The next step, sketched to her seven years ago, in her father’s fading and difficult voice as he lay dying, was by far more important.

“When Dora is eighteen or twenty. . . ,” Bronson Collier had whispered, “you must get away then, Hilary. She’ll have had all her groundwork by that time . . . she’ll have her wings . . . take her where they can teach her to fly!”

The echo of the passionate, anxious words had been Hilary’s creed for all these seven years. Dora must have her groundwork; she must grow into girlhood, strong and well, she must write a gentlewoman’s pretty letter, she must read French and German, know something of history and art. And of music she must know much, work not only with her mother’s violin, but with the piano, with counterpoint and orchestration, with every history of music that Hilary’s loyal eagerness could find for her in the old catalogues and lists of the world. For to Dora had descended the genius that had made her beautiful French mother known, at twenty, as one of the violinistes of her day. “Sabine Charpentier” was only a memory, vague and sweet, to her little daughter Dora, but Hilary remembered their mother well, and she felt herself the torch-bearer between the gifted mother and the gifted child.

How their father, a dreamy, impractical, despondent putterer in the world of music, had ever won Sabine from the brilliant opening of her career, was always a mystery to Hilary. Bronson Collier was a Bostonian, stranded in Munich, when they met. He had been discontentedly and desultorily connected with various orchestras there as pianist; he was the possessor of considerable musical knowledge, and some technical skill, but warmth and magnetism were lacking in his work as in his nature.

Why the gentle, enthusiastic, lovely Sabine loved him perhaps she herself never could say. For his sake she abandoned her art, there was a quiet wedding, there were some years of unsuccessful work abroad, and then they returned to America, where they tried to teach, Bronson darkly gloomy with his piano pupils, his girlish wife distressed and uncertain in her dealing with the few who came to her for work with the violin. In Philadelphia they starved: they moved a few miles away, to Mount Holly.

Meanwhile children came; first the sturdy and spirited Hilary, who seemed to both mother and father a miracle of beauty and charm; and then, four years later, a son. The boy was always delicate, needing care, and causing them an infinite anxiety even in the midst of troubled and uncertain financial prospects. These two were born in France; Dora came when Hilary was five and Bronson two years old; came to dreary little cramped rooms in Philadelphia, where the family struggle for existence was complicated by the bitter winter weather and by her brother’s rapidly failing health.

There was an epidemic of baby sicknesses that year; presently the Colliers left the cruel big city and the little grave of their only son behind them, and took the dancing Hilary and the staring baby into the friendlier atmosphere of the little New Jersey village. But some of the bitter cold of that terrible winter had crept into the mother’s heart, never to melt or thaw again.

The woman who had been Sabine Charpentier ten years ago lay quietly on a couch in the dim little parlour of the Mount Holly house; sometimes her white hands reached for the beloved, slim dark body of the Amati, but for the most part she made no effort, merely watching the other lives about her with dim and smiling eyes. Bronson put on his old greenish coat and went off to his pupils, old Mrs. Poett clattered pans in the kitchen, the baby wakened, whimpered, crowed, and fell asleep again, and Hilary, the one glowing, hopeful thing in her mother’s life, came and went with the joyous racket of healthy childhood.

Hilary brought her mother April violets and the year’s first plume of delicate lilac bloom. Hilary practised dutifully at the old square piano; her clever little fingers rippled through Schubert’s dances and Chopin’s études; when she was ten years old she composed for her mother a little étude of her own. Sabine’s white face was wet with tears as she embraced the little musician passionately; Bronson wasted a few of his precious dollars in having the music published.

And then, slow of growth, but bursting upon them with all the sudden glory of a miracle, came the wonderful thing that was to influence all of Hilary’s life and send her mother, and, when his turn came, her father, contentedly enough into the life beyond. This was Dora.

Dora had always been a beautiful child, obedient, winning, full of enchanting animation and vivacity, and she had shown an odd interest in music even in her baby days. Her mother had said of the baby, at eleven months, that she would finish any theme from the “Ring” if someone began it for her. Dora lisped in musical terms, and to Sabine’s hummed nursery airs Dora supplied a wavering alto at two years. She called the notes of the piano various colours; long before most children know colours at all, Dora was calling C blue, and G orange; she never confused them. She played little duets with Hilary when she was not quite four, and one day Bronson, giving a lesson, discovered to his amazement that the baby could name every note in the scale with her eyes shut. Sabine listened to her youngest-born tenderly, almost reverently, when Dora, in imperfect baby chatter, explained that some of the notes were like velvet, and some like satin, and that the deep bass notes were like the heavy black fur on Father’s old coat collar.

Long before this the child had picked up her mother’s violin, struggling patiently and intelligently toward harmony with the awkward big bow and the difficult strings. At four she stood graceful and erect before the little audience of three, her mane of fair straight hair falling upon her slender shoulders, her brown eyes serious, her lips twitching as do the lips of the great violinists when the beloved instrument is held close between cheek and shoulder. The baby fingers moved quickly and nervously, with that spider-like strength and precision that never come to many a patient worker, but that had been born in the little hand of Dora Collier.

Sabine was dying then, and knew it; but from that hour she was resigned to die. The genius that had been hers lived again in this child that was dearer than her own life; it remained now but to cherish and feed the sacred flame.

She consigned her child to Bronson, and for the remaining years of his life, only seven years, after all, he was passionately loyal to her trust. He watched and guarded and guided the child’s developing gift, and Hilary watched and guarded them both. The very definiteness and energy of her father’s absorption in Dora brought him a sort of prosperity at the end; everyone knew of the little Collier girl and her extraordinary promise, and there was a general tendency to forgive her father his oddities and appreciate his musical thoroughness and fervour at last. Pupils came to the little brick house, if only to have the youthful prodigy, with her mane of hair and her famous violin, introduced when the lesson was done; Bronson actually gave a recital or two of his pupils, with Dora for his star. And nothing, on these occasions, could have been more affecting, if there had been eyes to see it, which there were not, than the older daughter and sister, with her tremulous excitement and admiration for her gifted family.

Dora was eleven years old when Bronson suddenly died. He died with Hilary, who was sixteen, kneeling beside him and promising, with a stern gravity infinitely more moving than tears would have been, that she would take care of Dora. Dora was to be educated, to be trained, to be taken abroad to the best of teachers.

“There’s Kronski,” he said, suddenly, on the very last night of his life. “Konrad Kronski . . . he’s only a boy, but they say he’s the coming violinist. Your mother knew his mother, they lived in the same family, she was with her when he was born. Take Dora to him, ask his advice. He’ll teach her, or he’ll tell you . . . you’ll find letters his mother wrote us, when we first were married, in one of the chests. But she must be great, Hilary, she must be what we never were . . . you can make her great!”

No misgiving as to the possible fairness of this demand, made of a mere girl, ever troubled Bronson. Hilary’s was one of those vital and vivid natures that never dreamed of self-pity. There were in her such a wellspring of energy and self-reliance, such a keen delight in mere living, that she might almost have been said to welcome any loss and any misfortune that gave her a chance to prove her own splendid powers.

She did grieve for her father, heartily and with many a burst of refreshing tears. But she was too busy to grieve long, too deeply absorbed in the fascinating business of managing her own affairs. She had her memories, the household of books and music that her marvellous father and mother had left behind them, and Dora. The eyes of the entire village, sympathetic, admiring, curious, were upon the two little sisters. Hilary felt that she had no choice, she must rise to the demand of life.