第34章

She seemed to have come up to this radiant and wise and marvellously talented womanhood of hers, to their minds, quite spontaneously.There had been a little Celia--a red-headed, sulky, mutinous slip of a girl, always at war with her step-mother, and affording no special comfort or hope to the rest of the family.Then there was a long gap, during which the father, four times a year, handed Michael a letter he had received from the superioress of a distant convent, referring with cold formality to the studies and discipline by which Miss Madden might profit more if she had been better brought up, and enclosing a large bill.Then all at once they beheld a big Celia, whom they spoke of as being home again, but who really seemed never to have been there before--a tall, handsome, confident young woman, swift of tongue and apprehension, appearing to know everything there was to be known by the most learned, able to paint pictures, carve wood, speak in divers languages, and make music for the gods, yet with it all a very proud lady, one might say a queen.

The miracle of such a Celia as this impressed itself even upon the step-mother.Mrs.Madden had looked forward with a certain grim tightening of her combative jaws to the home-coming of the "red-head." She felt herself much more the fine lady now than she had been when the girl went away.She had her carriage now, and the magnificent new house was nearly finished, and she had a greater number of ailments, and spent far more money on doctor's bills, than any other lady in the whole section.The flush of pride in her greatest achievement up to date--having the most celebrated of New York physicians brought up to Octavius by special train--still prickled in her blood.It was in all the papers, and the admiration of the flatterers and "soft-sawdherers"--wives of Irish merchants and smaller professional men who formed her social circle--was raising visions in her poor head of going next year with Theodore to Saratoga, and fastening the attention of the whole fashionable republic upon the variety and resources of her invalidism.

Mrs.Madden's fancy did not run to the length of seeing her step-daughter also at Saratoga; it pictured her still as the sullen and hated "red-head," moping defiantly in corners, or courting by her insolence the punishments which leaped against their leash in the step-mother's mind to get at her.

The real Celia, when she came, fairly took Mrs.Madden's breath away.The peevish little plans for annoyance and tyranny, the resolutions born of ignorant and jealous egotism, found themselves swept out of sight by the very first swirl of Celia's dress-train, when she came down from her room robed in peacock blue.The step-mother could only stare.

Now, after two years of it, Mrs.Madden still viewed her step-daughter with round-eyed uncertainty, not unmixed with wrathful fear.She still drove about behind two magnificent horses; the new house had become almost tiresome by familiarity; her pre-eminence in the interested minds of the Dearborn County Medical Society was as towering as ever, but somehow it was all different.

There was a note of unreality nowadays in Mrs.Donnelly's professions of wonder at her bearing up under her multiplied maladies; there was almost a leer of mockery in the sympathetic smirk with which the Misses Mangan listened to her symptoms.Even the doctors, though they kept their faces turned toward her, obviously did not pay much attention; the people in the street seemed no longer to look at her and her equipage at all.Worst of all, something of the meaning of this managed to penetrate her own mind.She caught now and again a dim glimpse of herself as others must have been seeing her for years--as a stupid, ugly, boastful, and bad-tempered old nuisance.

And it was always as if she saw this in a mirror held up by Celia.

Of open discord there had been next to none.Celia would not permit it, and showed this so clearly from the start that there was scarcely need for her saying it.

It seemed hardly necessary for her to put into words any of her desires, for that matter.All existing arrangements in the Madden household seemed to shrink automatically and make room for her, whichever way she walked.A whole quarter of the unfinished house set itself apart for her.

Partitions altered themselves; door-ways moved across to opposite sides; a recess opened itself, tall and deep, for it knew not what statue--simply because, it seemed, the Lady Celia willed it so.

When the family moved into this mansion, it was with a consciousness that the only one who really belonged there was Celia.She alone could behave like one perfectly at home.