CHAPTER XII.
CROSSES ON THE LINE.
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T happened that not long after Cyn sang at a concert given in one of the principal halls of the city. Of course, a party from the Hotel Norman attended. This party consisted not only of all the young people, but also included Mrs. Simonson.
Cyn made a great success, and was encored every time she sang. Never had Nattie so fully realized the beauty and brilliancy of her friend, as she did upon that evening. Nor could she fail to observe that Clem, too, was startled into a new admiration. Was it because of this that a seriousness, quite foreign to the gay scene, fell over Nattie's face?
As for Celeste, she was decidedly envious, and had there been no gentlemen in the party, would have turned exceedingly glum. As it was, she, with some difficulty, called up her usual smiles, and contented herself with whispering spitefully to Quimby,
"How can she appear before the public so? it seems so unwomanly!
"Charming, indeed!" replied Quimby, without the slightest idea of what she had said, as his attention was concentrated on Cyn, and his brain incapable of entertaining two ideas at once.
But while acknowledging her attractions, Quimby preserved his composure, arguing to himself in a common sense way,
"What is the use of a fellow falling in love with a girl that every other fellow is sure to fall in love with too, you know?"
Mrs. Simonson, good soul, quite swelled with pride in her lodger, and by her behavior created the impression in the minds of people sitting near, that she was the singer's mother.
And Jo—unsentimental Jo—was entirely carried away. With the music, of course, for music was art, and art, only in another branch, was his life and work; and was not Cyn a beautiful work of Nature, the mother of all art?
"He will be a very lucky man who shall call our Cyn his," whispered Clem to Jo, as she came out in answer to an encore.
"What!" ejaculated Jo, so savagely that every one turned to look at him, and Clem opened his eyes wide with surprise. "Bah! Nonsense!"
And some way or other, after this, the music sounded very dismal to Jo, and the close air of the room made his head ache; but he had been working very hard all day, and was tired, so this was quite natural.
Was Clem presuming on his good looks, and thinking of making Cyn his, he wondered? If he was, she certainly would not be fool enough to—Jo stopped here in his meditations, because he would like to have been a little surer that she would not. Very strongly he felt just then that "things of a doubtful nature were sometimes very uncertain!"
It was, of course, no sentiment on his part that caused these emotions. He did not wish Cyn to throw herself away in matrimony, that was all; and so strong were his feelings on this point that he could not banish the idea from his mind all the rest of the evening, and was noticeably thoughtful.
But he was very gay; even unusually, wildly gay on the way home, and kept Mrs. Simonson, whom he escorted, in such a state of laughter that she burst three buttons, and was all "wheezed up" when they reached the hotel.
"Why are you so thoughtful to-night?" Clem asked Nattie, as they walked down their street behind the rest, in the wake of Jo's gayety and Celeste's meaningless giggle. Celeste was clinging to the arm of the unwilling, but helpless Quimby, and chatting of the handsome tenor.
With a slight start, Nattie replied to Clem's question,
"I do not know. Am I?"
"Yes; you have hardly spoken a word all the way. Is anything the trouble?" asked Clem, and she, looking moodily on the ground, did not see the anxiety in his eyes as he spoke.
"Nothing!" she replied; then startled him by bursting out passionately,
"I am tired of living with no object; with nothing but a daily routine. Can it be there is no better place in the world for me? That my life must be always thus? I cannot be contented!"
Clem stopped short and stared at her agitated face.
"I never knew you were not happy, Nattie," he said, gently.
"Oh! I am not unhappy; I am only discontented," Nattie replied.
"You are. somewhat contradictory in your statements," said Clem, as they went on again, for she also had stopped. "Is it office troubles that annoy you? Poor little girl, it is a monotonous life!"
Nattie flushed at the tenderness in his voice.
"That is one thing," she replied, a little tremblingly, "but I want something to work for, as Cyn has. I am ambitious; my present position can never content me; I am haunted all the time by an uneasy consciousness that if I was smart I should be doing something to get ahead; and yet, I don't know what to do!"
"I remember you once said something about becoming a writer; why not try that?" suggested Clem.
They had reached their own landing at the hotel, and paused. The remainder of the party bad disappeared.
"It seems so hopeless," Nattie answered, dispiritedly; "there is no opening anywhere."
"But it will never do to wait for that, you know. If the world is a closed oyster, we must open it. Isn't that the way Cyn did?" said Clem, half surmising the realization of the difference between Cyn's brilliant success and her own plodding along that had caused her dejection; and as he spoke, he took her hand in his, but Nattie snatched it quickly away.
"Ah! Cyn!" she said in sudden and uncoatrollable jealousy, "of course you could never expect me to compare with her!"
Clem looked at her a moment, then some emotion flushed his face, and he would have spoken had not Miss Kling, disgusted with her inability to catch a word from inside, opened her door, saying sharply,
"Are you coming in, Miss Rogers?"
"Certainly," Nattie replied quickly, and already ashamed of her jealous outburst "Good night, Clem."
"But will you not come over and congratulate Cyn on her success?" he asked, detaining her. "I heard a carriage just stop, and think she is in it."
"Not to-night; to-morrow," said Nattie, hastily, and left him before he could again urge the request.
"Oh!" said Miss Kling, as Nattie closed the door behind her, "was that Mr. Stanwood who came home with you?"
"Yes;" Nattie answered, briefly.
"I should hardly have thought Miss Archer would have allowed it!" remarked Miss Kling, with a sneeze.
"I don't know why she should have forbidden it!" replied Nattie, coldly, yet looking somewhat startled. Poor Nattie's nerves were decidedly unstrung to-night.
"You do not mean to say that you are ignorant of what every one else knows?" queried Miss Kling, with a malicious sparkle in her eyes; "that they are just the same as engaged."
Nattie turned a very pale face towards her.
"I—I think you are mistaken," she faltered.
"Mistaken! no indeed!" said Miss Kling, positively; "I should think your own eyes might tell you that! Why, Mrs. Simonson says, Miss Archer has thought of nobody but him since he came into the house, and that anybody can tell he is in love with her, from his actions and the attentions he pays her, and Celeste told me the same thing, long ago. But I suppose Miss Archer is willing he should come home with you. She isn't, of course, jealous of you!"
There was a sneering emphasis in Miss Kling's last words, that made them anything but complimentary, as Nattie felt; but saying only, in a voice she vainly tried to steady,
"You may be right," she went into her own room, and locked the door behind her.
She knew now! knew what that first romantic acquaintance, that dejection at the companionship lost in the obnoxious red-head, that joy when "C" was restored to her in Clem, that unsatisfied desire to have him back on the wire, all to herself; that suppressed jealousy of Cyn, led to—and what it all meant; that she loved him! and he, did he, as they said, love Cyn? alas! who could help loving bright, beautiful Cyn? To attract him to herself was only the romance of their first acquaintance—and even this Cyn slightly shared; it was not Cyn's fault. Nattie could not be guilty of the petty meanness of disliking her friend because she possessed attractions superior to her own. But if he loved Cyn, then, indeed, had the curtain fallen on the sad ending of her romance; the lights were out, and all was darkness. If he loved Cyn? Nattie, with the first full knowledge of her own feelings, could hardly hope otherwise, remembering their intimacy, his marked attention to her, his praise of her, and her winning beauty and talents. Yes, it must be that he loved her! Oh, why must Cyn be given everything, and she—nothing? What kind of fate was it that marked out the broad, sunny road for one, and the somber, uneven pathway for another? Must her life be one of lonely discontent, a telegraph office at the beginning, and a telegraph office at the end? was this to be all?
"No!" thought Nattie, raising her head proudly, and looking at the red and swollen eyes that gazed at her from the opposite glass. "Life shall give me something of its best; if not of love, then of fame! and I will work and persevere until I gain it!"
Yet, for all of her resolution, Nattie sobbed herself to sleep. Not so easy is it to renounce love, and look forward to a life barren of its best and sweetest gift.
And after this there was a change in her observable even to the undiscerning Quimby. Shadows had fallen over her face, lurked in her gray eyes and around the corners of her mouth. The old restlessness had given place to a settled gloom. She was less often seen among the gay circle that gathered in Cyn's parlor, pleading every possible excuse for staying away, and when with them, to his surprise and delight, and to Celeste's dismay, she devoted herself to Quimby, to Jo—to any one rather than to Clem. For most of all had she changed to him. Afraid of betraying her secret, and unable to control the pain that overpowered her when in his presence, now she knew her own heart, she avoided him in every practicable way, and seldom, even over their wire, talked with him. She was always "tired," or "busy," when he called her now.
Clem, surprised and puzzled by this unaccountable change, at first endeavored to overcome her coolness, but ended by becoming cool in his turn, and talked and joked with Cyn more than ever. And if a touch of the shadows on Nattie's face sometimes crept over his own, she, in her self-engrossment, did not observe it.
If Quimby's hopes burned brighter at this state of affairs, and he was consequently happier, Jo, for some reason unexplained, was not. In fact, he was decidedly queer; now gay, now horribly cynical, not to say morose.
Truly, Cupid, viewed in the character of a telegraphist, was far from being a success; for he had switched everybody off on to the wrong wire!
Cyn, gay unconscious Cyn, no more dreamed of Clem being supposedly in love with her, than she did that Jo was so filled with thoughts of her, that, had he been a different kind of a man, one would have called him desperately in love. But Cyn, unconscious of all this, saw, and with sorrow, the ever-increasing coldness between Nattie and Clem. For she had quite set her heart on the romance that had commenced in dots and dashes culminating in orange blossoms—a Wired Love. But now, to her vexation, she saw her anticipations liable to be set at naught, and herself unable to obtain even a clew to the trouble. Like the "line man," who goes up and down to find why the wires will not work, she could not find the "break" anywhere, and decided that romances, whether "wired" or taken in the ordinary way, were certainly very unwieldy things to manage.
"It seems to me that you do not use that wire very often now," she said one evening to Clem and Nattie, the latter of whom she had forcibly dragged forth from the solitude of her room. "Were it not for me, it would rust. Why! I used to hear your clatter into the small hours, but now"
"Now we are more sensible," concluded Nattie, leaning over the piano to look at some music. "One gets tired of talking in dots and dashes after a time!"
Poor Nattie's trouble made her bitter sometimes.
"Yes, one wants a person they don't know to talk with, in order to make it interesting!" added Clem, not to be outdone.
"Good gracious!" thought Cyn, dismayed at the result of her probing. "This is really dreadful!" then she exclaimed impulsively,
"I hope you have not quarreled, you two!"
"Oh! dear no!" replied Nattie quickly, "what should we quarrel about?"
But Clem, after looking at her a moment, advanced and held out his hand, saying frankly,
"I believe we have been cross to each other of late, although how it happened I do not know! So let us make up and be good!"
Cyn looked up hopefully at this, but Nattie, who could hardly conceal her agitation, replied coldly,
"I do not see that anything has been the matter!" and placing a limp hand in his for an instant, turned away.
Clem bit his lip, then took out his watch, saying,
"I believe I have an engagement down town this evening. I shall have to leave you now, I fear, ladies."
Nattie celebrated his departure by bursting into tears that she vainly tried to hide, and was detected in this situation on the sofa by Cyn.
Cyn's arms were about her in a moment, and Cyn's voice said lovingly,
"What is it, dear? Tell, me what is the matter lately? Trust me with it. Is it about Clem?"
With a determination, very brave and unselfish, but unfortunately entirely uncalled for, not to mar Cyn's happy love by her sorrow, Nattie checked the tears, of which she was ashamed, and answered,
"No! I am very weak and foolish. The idea of my crying like a school-girl! I am only unhappy because—because—I am nobody!"
And this was all the information the sympathetic and perplexed Cyn could obtain.
Sitting that night on a low cricket before the fire with her dark hair unbound—and it was fortunate for Jo's peace of mind that he could not see her just then, becauses she was such an interesting "study!"—Cyn thought it all over, and could not, as she told herself, make out what it was all about.
"I thought everything was going on so smoothly," she mused, "and now here is what Clem himself would term a cross on the wire! and no one can find out where it is! Doesn't she love him, I wonder? I should, if I was she! Does he love her? if he does not, he is no kind of a hero! Ah! I know what would test the matter! a crisis! Now, for instance, if the house would only get on fire, and Nat burn up—that is, almost—and Clem save her just in time—that is the sort of thing that brings these heroes to terms in the dramas! but I suppose—everything is so different in real life—Clem would not wake up in time, and she would burn to a crisp—or some one else would save her first—Quimby, for instance, he is always doing something he ought not! no, I don't think it would do to risk it! nevertheless, I am convinced that a crisis is what is essential to complete the circuit, telegraphically speaking, or in other words, to bring down the curtain on every body, embracing everybody, with great eclat!"