Children of the Whirlwind | Page 4

composite of
contradictions--a puzzle to the wisest of us: the lily lifting its graceful
purity aloft may have its roots in a dunghill. Samson's dead lion
putrefying by a roadside is ever and again being found to be a
storehouse of wild honey. We are too accustomed to the ordinary and
the obvious to consider that beauty or worth may, after bitter travail,
grow out of that which is ugly and unpromising.
Thus no one who looked on Maggie Carlisle and Larry Brainard at their
beginnings, had even a guess what manner of persons were to develop
from them or what their stories were to be.
The houses on the bit of street were all three-storied and all of a
uniform, dingy, scaling redness. The house of the Duchess, on the left
side as you came down the street toward the little Square which
squatted beside the East River, differed from the others only in that
three balls of tarnished gilt swung before it and unredeemed pledges

emanated a weakly lure from behind its dirt-streaked windows, and also
in that the personality of the Duchess gave the house something of a
character of its own.
The street did business with her when pressed for funds, but it knew
little definite about the Duchess except that she was shriveled and bent
and almost wordless and was seemingly without emotions. But of
course there were rumors. She was so old, and had been so long in the
drab little street, that she was as much a legend as a real person. No one
knew exactly how she had come by the name of "Duchess." There were
misty, unsupported stories that long, long ago she had been a shapely
and royal figure in colored fleshings, and that her title had been given
her in those her ruling days. Also there was a vague story that she had
come by the name through an old liking for the romances of that writer
who put forth her, or his, or their, prolific extravagances under the
exalted pseudonym of "The Duchess." Also there was a rumor that the
title came from a former alleged habit of the Duchess of carrying
beneath her shapeless dress a hoard of jewels worthy to be a duchy's
heirlooms. But all these were just stories--no more. Down in this
quarter of New York nicknames come easily, and once applied they
adhere to the end.
Some believed that she was now the mere ashes of a woman, in whom
lived only the last flickering spark. And some believed that beneath that
drab and spent appearance there smouldered a great fire, which might
blaze forth upon some occasion. But no one knew. As she was now, so
she had always been even in the memory of people considered old in
the neighborhood.
Beside the fact that she ran a pawnshop, which was reputed to be also a
fence, there were only two or three other facts that were known to her
neighbors. One was that in the far past there had been a daughter, and
that while still a very young girl this daughter had disappeared. It was
rumored that the Duchess had placed the daughter in a convent and that
later tire girl had married; but the daughter had never appeared again in
the quarter. Another fact was that there was a grandson, a handsome
young devil, who had come down occasionally to visit his grandmother,

until he began his involuntary sojourn at Sing Sing. Another fact--this
one the best known of all--was that two or three years before an
impudent, willful young girl named Maggie Carlisle had come to live
with her.
It was rather a meager history. People wondered and talked of mystery.
But perhaps the only mystery arose from the fact that the Duchess was
the kind of woman who never volunteered information about her affairs,
and the kind even the boldly curious hesitate to question...
And down here it was, in this unlovely street, in the Duchess's unlovely
house, that the drama of Maggie Carlisle and Larry Brainard began its
unpromising and stormy career: for, though they had thought of it little,
their forebears had been sowers of the wind, they themselves had sown
some of that careless seed and were to sow yet more--and there was to
be the reaping of that seed's wild crop.
CHAPTER II
When Maggie entered the studio on the Duchess's third floor, the big,
red-haired, unkempt painter roared his rebukes at her. She stiffened,
and in the resentment of her proud youth did not even offer an
explanation. Nodding to her father and Barney Palmer, she silently
crossed to the window and stood sullenly gazing over the single
mongrel tree before the house and down the narrow street and across
the little Square, at