WHAT HAPPENED THIRTY YEARS AGO
When Shirley came across the lawn at Rosewood, Major Montague Bristow
sat under the arbor talking to her mother.
The major was massive-framed, with a strong jaw and a rubicund
complexion--the sort that might be supposed to have attained the utmost
benefit to be conferred by a consistent indulgence in mint-juleps. His
blue eyes were piercing and arched with brows like sable rainbows, at
variance with his heavy iron-gray hair and imperial. His head was
leonine and he looked like a king who has humbled his enemy. It may be
added that his linen was fine and immaculate, his black string-tie
precisely tied and a pair of gold-rimmed eye-glasses swung by a flat
black cord against his white waistcoat. There was a touch of the
military in the squareness of shoulder and the lift of the rugged head,
no less than in the gallant little bow with which he rose to greet the
girl coming toward them.
"Shirley," said her mother, "the major's brutal, and he shan't have his
mint-julep."
"What has he been doing?" asked the other, her brows wrinkling in a
delightful way she had.
"He has reminded me that I'm growing old."
Shirley looked at the major skeptically, for his chivalry was undoubted.
During a long career in law and legislature it had been said of him that
he could neither speak on the tariff question nor defend a man for
murder, without first paying a tribute to "the women of the South, sah."
"Nothing of the sort," he rumbled.
Mrs. Dandridge's face softened to wistfulness. "Shirley, _am_ I?" she
asked, with a quizzical, almost a droll uneasiness. "Why, I've got every
emotion I've ever had. I read all the new French novels, and I'm even
thinking of going in for the militant suffragette movement."
The girl had tossed her hat and crop on the table and seated herself by
her mother's chair. Now reaching down, she drew one of the fragile
blue-veined hands up against her cheek, her bronze hair, its heavy coil
loosened, dropping over one shoulder like sunlit seaweed. "What was it
he said, dearest?"
"He thinks I ought to wear a worsted shawl and arctics." Her mother
thrust out one little thin-slippered foot, with its slender ankle
gleaming through its open-work stocking like mother-of-pearl. "Imagine!
In _May_. And he knows I'm vain of my feet! Major, if you had ever had a
wife, you would have learned wisdom. But you mean well, and I'll take
back what I said about the julep. You mix it, Shirley. Yours is even
better than Ranston's.
"She makes me one every day, Monty," she continued, as Shirley went into
the house. "And when she isn't looking, I pour it into the bush there.
See those huge, maudlin-looking roses? That's the shameless result. It's
a new species. I'm going to name it _Tipsium Giganticum_."
Major Bristow laughed as he bit the end off a cigar. "All the same," he
said in his big rumbling voice, "you need 'em, I reckon. You need more
than mint-juleps, too. You leave the whisky to me and the doctor, and
you take Shirley and pull out for Italy. Why not? A year there would do
you a heap of good."
She shook her head. "No, Monty. It isn't what you think. It's--here."
She lifted her hand and touched her heart. "It's been so for a long
time. But it may--it can't go on forever, you see. Nothing can."
The major had leaned forward in his chair. "Judith!" he said, and his
hand twitched, "it isn't true!" And then, "How do you know?"
She smiled at him. "You remember when that big surgeon from Vienna came
to see the doctor last year? Well, the doctor brought him to me. I'd
known it before in a way, but it had gone farther than I thought. No
one can tell just how long it may be. It may be years, of course, but
I'm not taking any sea trips, Monty."
He cleared his throat and his voice was husky when he spoke. "Shirley
doesn't know?"
"Certainly _not_. She mustn't." And then, in sudden sharpness: "You
shan't tell her, Monty. You wouldn't dare!"
"No, indeed," he assured her quickly. "Of course not."
"It's just among us three, Doctor Southall and you and me. We three have
had our secrets before, eh, Monty?"
"Yes, Judith, we have."
She bent toward him, her hands tightening on the cane. "After all, it's
true. To-day I _am_ getting old. I may look only fifty, but I feel sixty
and I'll admit to seventy-five. It's joy that keeps us young, and I
didn't get my fair share of that, Monty. For just one little week my
heart had it all--_all_--and then--well, then it was finished. It was
finished long before I married Tom Dandridge. It isn't that I'm
empty-headed. It's that I've been an empty-_hearted_ woman, Monty--as
empty and dusty and desolate as the old house over yonder on the ridge."
"I know, Judith, I know."
"You've been empty in a way, too," she said. "But it's been a different
way. You were never in love--really in love, I mean. Certainly not with
me, Monty, though you tried to make me think so once upon a time, before
Sassoon came along, and--Beauty Valiant."
The major blinked, suddenly startled. It was out, the one name neither
had spoken to the other for thirty years! He looked at her a little
guiltily; but her eyes had turned away. They were gazing between the
catalpas to where, far off on a gentle rise, the stained gable of a roof
thrust up dark and gaunt above its nest of foliage. "Everything changed
then," she continued dreamily, "everything."
The major's fingers strayed across his waistcoat, fumbling uncertainly
for his eye-glasses. For an instant he, too, was back in the long-ago
past, when he and Valiant had been comrades. What a long panorama
unfolded at the name; the times when they had been boys fly-fishing in
the Rapidan and fox-hunting about Pilot-Knob with the yelping
hounds--crisp winters of books and pipes together at the old university
at Charlottesville--later maturer years about Damory Court when the
trail of sex had deepened into man's passion and the devil's rivalry. It
had been a curious three-sided affair--he, and Valiant, and Sassoon.
Sassoon with his dissipated flair and ungovernable temper and strange
fits of recklessness; clean, high-idealed, straight-away Valiant; and
he--a Bristow, neither better nor worse than the rest of his name. He
remembered that mad strained season when he had grimly recognized his
own cause as hopeless, and with burning eyes had watched Sassoon and
Valiant racing abreast. He remembered that glittering prodigal dance
when he had come upon Valiant and Judith standing in the shrubbery, the
candle-light from some open door engoldening their faces: hers smiling,
a little flippant perhaps, and conscious of her spell; his grave and
earnest, yet wistful.
"You promise, John?"
"I give my sacred word. Whatever the provocation, I will not lift my
hand against him. Never, never!" Then the same voice, vibrant,
appealing. "Judith! It isn't because--because--you care for him?"
He had plunged away in the darkness before her answer came. What had it
mattered then to him what she had replied? And that very night had
befallen the fatal quarrel!
The major started. How that name had blown away the dust! "That's a long
time ago, Judith."
"Think of it! I wore my hair just as Shirley does now. It was the same
color, with the same fascinating little lights and whorls in it." She
turned toward him, but he sat rigidly upright, his gaze avoiding hers.
Her dreamy look was gone now, and her eyes were very bright.
"Thirty years ago to-morrow they fought," she said softly, "Valiant and
Sassoon. Every woman has her one anniversary, I suppose, and to-morrow's
mine. Do you know what I do, every fourteenth of May, Monty? I keep my
room and spend the day always the same way. There's a little book I
read. And there's an old haircloth trunk that I've had since I was a
girl. Down in the bottom of it are some--things, that I take out and set
round the room ... and there is a handful of old letters I go over from
first to last. They're almost worn out now, but I could repeat them all
with my eyes shut. Then, there's a tiny old straw basket with a yellow
wisp in it that once was a bunch of cape jessamines. I wore them to that
last ball--the night before it happened. The fourteenth of May used to
be sad, but now, do you know, I look forward to it! I always have a lot
of jessamines that particular day--I'll have Shirley get me some
to-morrow--and in the evening, when I go down-stairs, the house is full
of the scent of them. All summer long it's roses, but on the fourteenth
of May it has to be jessamines. Shirley must think me a whimsical old
woman, but I insist on being humored."
She was silent a moment, the point of her slender cane tracing circles
in the gravel. "It's a black date for you too, Monty. _I_ know. But men
and women are different. I wonder what takes the place to a man of a
woman's haircloth trunk?"
"I reckon it's a demijohn," he said mirthlessly.
A smile flashed over her face, like sunshine over a flower, and she
looked up at him slowly. "What bricks men are to each other! You and the
doctor were John Valiant's closest friends. What did you two care what
people said? Why, _women_ don't stick to each other like that! It isn't
in petticoats! It wouldn't do for women to take to dueling, Monty; when
the affair was over and done, the seconds would fall to with their
hatpins and jab each other's eyes out!"
He smiled, a little bleakly, and cleared his throat.
"Isn't it strange for me to be talking this way now!" she said
presently. "Another proof that I'm getting old. But the date brings it
very close; it seems, somehow, closer than ever this year.--Monty,
weren't you tremendously surprised when I married Tom Dandridge?"
"I certainly was."
"I'll tell you a secret. _I_ was, too. I suppose I did it because of a
sneaking feeling that some people were feeling sorry for me, which I
never could stand. Well, he was a man any one might honor. I've always
thought a woman ought to have two husbands: one to love and cherish, and
the other to honor and obey. I had the latter, at any rate."
"And you've lived, Judith," he said.
"Yes," she agreed, with a little sigh, "I've lived. I've had Shirley,
and she's twenty and adorable. Some of my emotions creak a bit in the
hinges, but I've enjoyed things. A woman is cat enough not to be wholly
miserable if she can sit in the sun and purr. And I've had people
enough, and books to read, and plenty of pretty things to look at, and
old lace to wear, and I've kept my figure and my vanity--I'm not too old
yet to thank the Lord for that! So don't talk to me about worsted shawls
and horrible arctics. For I won't wear 'em. Not if I know myself! Here
comes Shirley. She's made two juleps, and if you're a gentleman, you'll
distract her attention till I've got rid of mine in my usual way."
* * * * *
The major, at the foot of the cherry-bordered lane, looked back across
the box-hedge to where the two figures sat under the rose-arbor, the
mother's face turned lovingly down to Shirley's at her knee. He stood a
moment watching them from under his slouched hat-brim.
"You never looked at me that way, Judith, did you!" he sighed to
himself. "It's been a long time, too, since I began to want you
to--'most forty years. When it came to the show-down, I wasn't even as
fit as Tom Dandridge!"
He pulled his hat down farther over his big brow and sighed again as he
strode on. "You just couldn't make yourself care, could you! People
can't, maybe. And I reckon you were right about it. I wasn't fit."