HER INHERITANCE
A block away, near the head of High Street, stood the old church of
Saint James, and at its back, separated by a white paling fence from the
squat pinkish tower and the solitary grave in the churchyard (which was
that of a Southern soldier who had fallen in the Battle of Dinwiddie),
was the oblong wooden rectory in which Gabriel Pendleton had lived since
he had exchanged his sword for a prayer-book and his worn Confederate
uniform for a surplice. The church, which was redeemed from
architectural damnation by its sacred cruciform and its low ivied
buttresses where innumerable sparrows nested, cast its shadow, on clear
days, over the beds of bleeding hearts and lilies-of-the-valley in the
neglected garden, to the quaint old house, with its spreading wings, its
outside chimneys, and its sloping shingled roof, from which five
dormer-windows stared in a row over the slender columns of the porch.
The garden had been planned in the days when it was easy to put a dozen
slaves to uprooting weeds or trimming flower beds, and had passed in
later years to the breathless ministrations of negro infants, whose
experience varied from the doubtful innocence of the crawling age to the
complete sophistication of six or seven years. Dandelion and wire-grass
rioted, in spite of their earnest efforts, over the crooked path from
the porch, and periwinkle, once an intruder from the churchyard, spread
now in rank disorder down the terraced hillside on the left, where a
steep flight of steps fell clear to the narrow cross street descending
gradually into the crowded quarters of the town. Directly in front of
the porch on either side of the path grew two giant paulownia trees,
royal at this season in a mantle of violet blossoms, and it was under
their arching boughs that the girls stopped when they had entered the
garden. Ever since Virginia could remember, she had heard threats of
cutting down the paulownias because of the litter the falling petals
made in the spring, and ever since she could lisp at all she had begged
her father to spare them for the sake of the enormous roots, into which
she had loved to cuddle and hide.
"If I were ever to go away, I believe they would cut down these trees,"
she said now a little wistfully, but she was not thinking of the
paulownias.
"Why should they when they give such splendid shade? And, besides, they
wouldn't do anything you didn't like for worlds."
"Oh, of course they wouldn't, but as soon as I was out of sight they
might persuade themselves that I liked it," answered Virginia, with a
tender laugh. Though she was not by nature discerning, there were
moments when she surprised Susan by her penetrating insight into the
character of her parents, and this insight, which was emotional rather
than intellectual, had enabled her to dominate them almost from infancy.
Silence fell between them, while they gazed through the veil of twilight
at the marble shaft above the grave of the Confederate soldier. Then
suddenly Susan spoke in a constrained voice, without turning her head.
"Jinny, Oliver isn't one bit of a hero--not the kind of hero we used to
talk about." It was with difficulty, urged by a vigorous and
uncompromising conscience, that she had uttered the words.
"And besides," retorted Virginia merrily, "he is in love with Abby
Goode."
"I don't believe that. They stayed in the same boarding-house once, and
you know how Abby is about men."
"Yes, I know, and it's just the way men are about Abby."
"Well, Oliver isn't, I'm sure. I don't believe he's ever given her more
than a thought, and he told me last night that he couldn't abide a
bouncing woman."
"Does Abby bounce?"
"You know she does--dreadfully. But it wasn't because of Abby that I
said what I did."
Something quivered softly between them, and a petal from the Jacqueminot
rose in Virginia's hair fluttered like a crimson moth out into the
twilight. "Was it because of him, then?" she asked in a whisper.
For a moment Susan did not answer. Her gaze was on the flight of steps,
and drawing Virginia with her, she began to walk slowly toward the
terraced side of the garden. An old lamplighter, carrying his ladder to
a lamp-post at the corner, smiled up at them with his sunken toothless
mouth as he went by.
"Partly, darling," said Susan. "He is so--I don't know how to make you
understand--so unsettled. No, that isn't exactly what I mean."
Her fine, serious face showed clear and pale in the twilight. From the
high forehead, under the girlish fringe of fair hair, to the thin, firm
lips, which were too straight and colourless for beauty, it was the
face of a woman who could feel strongly, but whose affections would
never blur the definite forms or outlines of life. She looked out upon
the world with level, dispassionate eyes in which there was none of
Virginia's uncritical, emotional softness. Temperamentally she was
uncompromisingly honest in her attitude toward the universe, which
appeared to her, not as it did to Virginia, in mere formless masses of
colour out of which people and objects emerged like figures painted on
air, but as distinct, impersonal, and final as a geometrical problem.
She was one of those women who are called "sensible" by their
acquaintances--meaning that they are born already disciplined and
confirmed in the quieter and more orderly processes of life. Her natural
intelligence having overcome the defects of her education, she thought
not vaguely, but with clearness and precision, and something of this
clearness and precision was revealed in her manner and in her
appearance, as if she had escaped at twenty years from the impulsive
judgments and the troublous solicitudes of youth. At forty, she would
probably begin to grow young again, and at fifty, it is not unlikely
that she would turn her back upon old age forever. Just now she was too
tremendously earnest about life, which she treated quite in the large
manner, to take a serious interest in living.
"Promise me, Jinny, that you'll never let anybody take my place," she
said, turning when they had reached the head of the steps.
"You silly Susan! Why, of course, they shan't," replied Virginia, and
they kissed ecstatically.
"Nobody will ever love you as I do."
"And I you, darling."
With arms interlaced they stood gazing down into the street, where the
shadow of the old lamplighter glided like a ghost under the row of pale
flickering lights. From a honeysuckle-trellis on the other side of the
porch, a penetrating sweetness came in breaths, now rising, now dying
away. In Virginia's heart, Love stirred suddenly, and blind, wingless,
imprisoned, struggled for freedom.
"It is late, I must be going," said Susan. "I wish we lived nearer each
other."
"Isn't it too dark for you to go alone? John Henry will stop on his way
from work, and he'll take you--if you really won't stay to supper."
"No, I don't mind in the least going by myself. It isn't night, anyway,
and people are sitting out on their porches."
A minute afterwards they parted, Susan going swiftly down High Street,
while Virginia went back along the path to the porch, and passing under
the paulownias, stopped beside the honeysuckle-trellis, which extended
to the ruined kitchen garden at the rear of the house. Once vegetables
were grown here, but except for a square bed of mint which spread
hardily beneath the back windows of the dining-room, the place was left
now a prey to such barbarian invaders as burdock and moth mullein. On
the brow of the hill, where the garden ended, there was a gnarled and
twisted ailanthus tree, and from its roots the ground fell sharply to a
distant view of rear enclosures and grim smoking factories. Some clothes
fluttered on a line that stretched from a bough of the tree, and turning
away as if they offended her, Virginia closed her eyes and breathed in
the sweetness of the honeysuckle, which mingled deliciously with the
strange new sense of approaching happiness in her heart. The awakening
of her imagination--an event more tumultuous in its effects than the
mere awakening of emotion--had changed not only her inner life, but the
ordinary details of the world in which she lived. Because a young man,
who differed in no appreciable manner from dozens of other young men,
had gazed into her eyes for an instant, the whole universe was altered.
What had been until to-day a vague, wind-driven longing for happiness,
the reaching out of the dream toward the reality, had assumed suddenly a
fixed and definite purpose. Her bright girlish visions had wrapped
themselves in a garment of flesh. A miracle more wonderful than any she
had read of had occurred in the streets of Dinwiddie--in the very spot
where she had walked, with blind eyes and deaf ears, every day since she
could remember. Her soul blossomed in the twilight, as a flower
blossoms, and shed its virginal sweetness. For the first time in her
twenty years she felt that an unexplored region of happiness surrounded
her. Life appeared so beautiful that she wanted to grasp and hold each
fugitive sensation before it escaped her. "This is different from
anything I've ever known. I never imagined it would be like this," she
thought, and the next minute: "I wonder why no one has ever told me that
it would happen? I wonder if it has ever really happened before, just
like this, since the world began? Of all the ways I've dreamed of his
coming, I never thought of this way--no, not for an instant. That I
should see him first in the street like any stranger--that he should be
Susan's cousin--that we should not have spoken a word before I knew it
was he!" Everything about him, his smile, his clothes, the way he held
his head and brushed his hair straight back from his forehead, his
manner of reclining with a slight slouch on the seat of the cart, the
picturesque blue dotted tie he wore, his hands, his way of bowing, the
red-brown of his face, and above all the eager, impetuous look in his
dark eyes--these things possessed a glowing quality of interest which
irradiated a delicious excitement over the bare round of living. It was
enough merely to be alive and conscious that some day--to-morrow, next
week, or the next hour, perhaps, she might meet again the look that had
caused this mixture of ecstasy and terror in her heart. The knowledge
that he was in the same town with her, watching the same lights,
thinking the same thoughts, breathing the same fragrance of
honeysuckle--this knowledge was a fact of such tremendous importance
that it dwarfed to insignificance all the proud historic past of
Dinwiddie. Her imagination, seizing upon this bit of actuality, spun
around it the iridescent gossamer web of her fancy. She felt that it was
sufficient happiness just to stand motionless for hours and let this
thought take possession of her. Nothing else mattered as long as this
one thing was blissfully true.
Lights came out softly like stars in the houses beyond the church-tower,
and in the parlour of the rectory a lamp flared up and then burned dimly
under a red shade. Looking through the low window, she could see the
prim set of mahogany and horsehair furniture, with its deep, heavily
carved sofa midway of the opposite wall and the twelve chairs which
custom demanded arranged stiffly at equal distances on the faded
Axminster carpet.
For a moment her gaze rested on the claw-footed mahogany table, bearing
a family Bible and a photograph album bound in morocco; on the engraving
of the "Burial of Latane" between the long windows at the back of the
room; on the cloudy, gilt-framed mirror above the mantel, with the two
standing candelabra reflected in its surface--and all these familiar
objects appeared to her as vividly as if she had not lived with them
from her infancy. A new light had fallen over them, and it seemed to her
that this light released an inner meaning, a hidden soul, even in the
claw-footed table and the threadbare Axminster carpet. Then the door
into the hall opened and her mother entered, wearing the patched black
silk dress which she had bought before the war and had turned and darned
ever since with untiring fingers. Shrinking back into the dusk, Virginia
watched the thin, slightly stooping figure as it stood arrested there in
the subdued glow of the lamplight. She saw the pale oval face, so
transparent that it was like the face of a ghost, the fine brown hair
parted smoothly under the small net cap, the soft faded eyes in their
hollowed and faintly bluish sockets, and the sweet, patient lips, with
their expression of anxious sympathy, as of one who had lived not in her
own joys and sorrows, but in those of others. Vaguely, the girl realized
that her mother had had what is called "a hard life," but this knowledge
brought no tremor of apprehension for herself, no shadow of disbelief in
her own unquestionable right to happiness. A glorious certainty
possessed her that her own life would be different from anything that
had ever been in the past.
The front door opened and shut; there was a step on the soft grass under
the honeysuckle-trellis, and her father came towards her, with his long
black coat flapping about him. He always wore clothes several sizes too
large for him under the impression that it was a point of economy and
that they would last longer if there was no "strain" put upon them. He
was a small, wiry man, with an amazing amount of strength for his build,
and a keen, humorous face, ornamented by a pointed chin beard which he
called his "goatee." His eyes were light grey with a twinkle which
rarely left them except at the altar, and the skin of his cheeks had
never lost the drawn and parchment-like look acquired during the last
years of the war. One of the many martial Christians of the Confederacy,
he had laid aside his surplice at the first call for troops to defend
the borders, and had resumed it immediately after the surrender at
Appomattox. It was still an open question in Dinwiddie whether Gabriel
Pendleton, who was admitted to have been born a saint, had achieved
greater distinction as a fighter or a clergyman; though he himself had
accepted the opposite vocations with equal humility. Only in the dead of
sweltering summer nights did he sometimes arouse his wife with a groan
and the halting words, "Lucy, I can't sleep for thinking of those men I
killed in the war." But with the earliest breeze of dawn, his remorse
usually left him, and he would rise and go about his parochial duties
with the serene and child-like trust in Providence that had once carried
him into battle. A militant idealism had ennobled his fighting as it now
exalted his preaching. He had never in his life seen things as they are
because he had seen them always by the white flame of a soul on fire
with righteousness. To reach his mind, impressions of persons or objects
had first to pass through a refining atmosphere in which all baser
substances were eliminated, and no fact had ever penetrated this medium
except in the flattering disguise of a sentiment. Having married at
twenty an idealist only less ignorant of the world than himself, he had,
inspired by her example, immediately directed his energies towards the
whitewashing of the actuality. Both cherished the naïve conviction that
to acknowledge an evil is in a manner to countenance its existence, and
both clung fervently to the belief that a pretty sham has a more
intimate relation to morality than has an ugly truth. Yet so unconscious
were they of weaving this elaborate tissue of illusion around the world
they inhabited that they called the mental process by which they
distorted the reality, "taking a true view of life." To "take a true
view" was to believe what was pleasant against what was painful in spite
of evidence: to grant honesty to all men (with the possible exception of
the Yankee army and a few local scalawags known as Readjusters); to deny
virtue to no woman, not even to the New England Abolitionist; to regard
the period before the war in Virginia as attained perfection, and the
present as falling short of that perfection only inasmuch as it had
occurred since the surrender. As life in a small place, among a simple
and guileless class of gentlefolk, all passionately cherishing the same
opinions, had never shaken these illusions, it was but natural that they
should have done their best to hand them down as sacred heirlooms to
their only child. Even Gabriel's four years of hard fighting and scant
rations were enkindled by so much of the disinterested idealism that
had sent his State into the Confederacy, that he had emerged from them
with an impoverished body, but an enriched spirit. Combined with his
inherent inability to face the facts of life, there was an almost
superhuman capacity for cheerful recovery from the shocks of adversity.
Since he had married by accident the one woman who was made for him, he
had managed to preserve untarnished his innocent assumption that
marriages were arranged in Heaven--for the domestic infelicities of many
of his parishioners were powerless to affect a belief that was founded
upon a solitary personal experience. Unhappy marriages, like all other
misfortunes of society, he was inclined to regard as entirely modern and
due mainly to the decay of antebellum institutions. "I don't remember
that I ever heard of a discontented servant or an unhappy marriage in my
boyhood," he would say when he was forced against his will to consider
either of these disturbing problems. Not progress, but a return to the
"ideals of our ancestors," was his sole hope for the future; and in
Virginia's childhood she had grown to regard this phrase as second in
reverence only to that other familiar invocation: "If it be the will of
God."
As he stood now in the square of lamplight that streamed from the
drawing-room window, she looked into his thin, humorous face, so
spiritualized by poverty and self-sacrifice that it had become merely
the veil for his soul, and the thought came to her that she had never
really seen him as he was until to-day.
"You're out late, daughter. Isn't it time for supper?" he asked, putting
his arm about her. Beneath the simple words she felt the profound
affection which he rarely expressed, but of which she was conscious
whenever he looked at her or spoke to her. Two days ago this affection,
of which she never thought because it belonged to her by right like the
air she breathed, had been sufficient to fill her life to overflowing;
and now, in less than a moment, the simplest accident had pushed it into
the background. In the place where it had been there was a restless
longing which seemed at one instant a part of the universal stirring of
the spring, and became the next an importunate desire for the coming of
the lover to whom she had been taught to look as to the fulfilment of
her womanhood. At times this lover appeared to have no connection with
Oliver Treadwell; then the memory of his eager and searching look would
flush the world with a magic enchantment. "He might pass here at any
minute," she thought, and immediately every simple detail of her life
was illuminated as if a quivering rosy light had fallen aslant it. His
drive down High Street in the afternoon had left a trail of glory over
the earthen roadbed.
"Yes, I was just going in," she replied to the rector's question, and
added: "How sweet the honeysuckle smells! I never knew it to be so
fragrant."
"The end of the trellis needs propping up. I noticed it this morning,"
he returned, keeping his arm around her as they passed over the short
grassy walk and up the steps to the porch. Then the door of the rectory
opened, and the silhouette of Mrs. Pendleton, in her threadbare black
silk dress with her cameo-like profile softened by the dark bands of her
hair, showed motionless against the lighted space of the hall.
"We're here, Lucy," said the rector, kissing her; and a minute later
they entered the dining-room, which was on the right of the staircase.
The old mahogany table, scarred by a century of service, was laid with
a simple supper of bread, tea, and sliced ham on a willow dish. At one
end there was a bowl of freshly gathered strawberries, with the dew
still on them, and Mrs. Pendleton hastened to explain that they were a
present from Tom Peachey, who had driven out into the country in order
to get them. "Well, I hope his wife has some, also," commented the
rector. "Tom's a good fellow, but he could never keep a closed fist,
there's no use denying it."
Mrs. Pendleton, who had never denied anything in her life, except the
biblical sanction for the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution,
shook her head gently and began to talk in the inattentive and anxious
manner she had acquired at scantily furnished tables. Ever since the
war, with the exception of the Reconstruction period, when she had lived
practically on charity, she had managed to exist with serenity, and
numerous negro dependents, on the rector's salary of a thousand dollars
a year. Simple and wholesome food she had supplied to her family and her
followers, and for their desserts, as she called the sweet things of
life, she had relied with touching confidence upon her neighbours. What
they would be for the day, she did not know, but since poverty, not
prosperity, breeds the generous heart, she was perfectly assured that
when Miss Priscilla was putting up raspberries, or Mrs. Goode was making
lemon pie, she should not be forgotten. During the terrible war years,
it had become the custom of Dinwiddie housekeepers to remember the wife
of the rector who had plucked off his surplice for the Confederacy, and
among the older generation the habit still persisted, like all other
links that bound them to a past which they cherished the more
passionately because it guarded a defeated cause. Like the soft
apologetic murmur of Mrs. Pendleton's voice, which was meant to distract
attention rather than to impart information, this impassioned memory of
the thing that was dead sweetened the less romantic fact of the things
that were living. The young were ignorant of it, but the old _knew_.
Mrs. Pendleton, who was born a great lady, remained one when the props
and the background of a great lady had crumbled around her; and though
the part she filled was a narrow part--a mere niche in the world's
history--she filled it superbly. From the dignity of possessions she had
passed to the finer dignity of a poverty that can do without. All the
intellect in her (for she was not clever) had been transmuted into
character by this fiery passage from romance into reality, and though
life had done its worst with her, some fine invincible blade in the
depths of her being she had never surrendered. She would have gone to
the stake for a principle as cheerfully as she had descended from her
aristocratic niche into unceasing poverty and self-denial, but she would
have gone wearing garlands on her head and with her faint, grave smile,
in which there was almost every quality except that of humour, touching
her lips. Her hands, which were once lovely, were now knotted and worn;
for she had toiled when it was necessary, though she had toiled always
with the manner of a lady. Even to-day it was a part of her triumph that
this dignity was so vital a factor in her life that there was none of
her husband's laughter at circumstances to lighten her burden. To her
the daily struggle of keeping an open house on starvation fare was not a
pathetic comedy, as with Gabriel, but a desperately smiling tragedy.
What to Gabriel had been merely the discomfort of being poor when
everybody you respected was poor with you, had been to his wife the slow
agony of crucifixion. It was she, not he, who had lain awake to wonder
where to-morrow's dinner could be got without begging; it was she, also,
who had feared to doze at dawn lest she should oversleep herself and not
be downstairs in time to scrub the floors and the furniture before the
neighbours were stirring. Uncle Isam, whose knees were crippled with
rheumatism, and Docia, who had a "stitch" in her side whenever she
stooped, were the only servants that remained with her, and the nursing
of these was usually added to the pitiless drudgery of her winter. But
the bitter edge to all her suffering was the feeling which her husband
spoke of in the pulpit as "false pride"--the feeling she prayed over
fervently yet without avail in church every Sunday--and this was the
ignoble terror of being seen on her knees in her old black calico dress
before she had gone upstairs again, washed her hands with cornmeal,
powdered her face with her pink flannel starchbag, and descended in her
breakfast gown of black cashmere or lawn, with a net scarf tied daintily
around her thin throat, and a pair of exquisitely darned lace ruffles
hiding her wrists.
As she sat now, smiling and calm, at the head of her table, there was no
hint in her face of the gnawing anxiety behind the delicate blue-veined
hollows in her forehead. "I thought John Henry would come to supper,"
she observed, while her hands worked lovingly among the old white and
gold teacups which had belonged to her mother, "so I gathered a few
flowers."
In the centre of the table there was a handful of garden flowers
arranged, with a generous disregard of colour, in a cut-glass bowl, as
though all blossoms were intended by their Creator to go peaceably
together. Only on formal occasions was such a decoration used on the
table of the rectory, since the happiest adornment for a meal was
supposed to be a bountiful supply of visible viands; but the hopelessly
mended mats had pierced Mrs. Pendleton's heart, and the cut-glass bowl,
like her endless prattle, was but a pitiful subterfuge.
"Oh, I like them!" Virginia had started to answer, when a hearty voice
called, "May I come in?" from the darkness, and a large, carelessly
dressed young man, with an amiable and rather heavy countenance, entered
the hall and passed on into the dining-room. In reply to Mrs.
Pendleton's offer of tea, he answered that he had stopped at the
Treadwells' on his way up from work. "I could hardly break away from
Oliver," he added, "but I remembered that I'd promised Aunt Lucy to take
her down to Tin Pot Alley after supper, so I made a bolt while he was
convincing me that it's better to be poor with an idea, as he calls it,
than rich without one." Then turning to Virginia, he asked suddenly:
"What's the matter, little cousin? Been about too much in the sun?"
"Oh, it's only the rose in my hair," responded Virginia, and she felt
that there was a fierce joy in blushing like this even while she told
herself that she would give everything she possessed if she could only
stop it.
"If you aren't well, you'd better not go with us, Jinny," said Mrs.
Pendleton. "It was so sweet of John Henry to remember that I'd promised
to take Aunt Ailsey some of the bitters we used to make before the war."
Everything was "so sweet" to her, the weather, her husband's sermons,
the little trays that came continually from her neighbours, and she
lived in a perpetual state of thankfulness for favours so insignificant
that a less impressionable soul would have accepted them as undeserving
of more than the barest acknowledgment.
"I am perfectly well," insisted Virginia, a little angry with John Henry
because he had been the first to notice her blushes.
Rising hurriedly from the table, she went to the door and stood looking
out into the spangled dusk under the paulownias, while her mother
wrapped the bottle in a piece of white tissue paper and remarked with an
animation which served to hide her fatigue from the unobservant eyes of
her husband, that a walk would do her good on such a "perfectly lovely
night."
Gabriel, who loved her as much as a man can love a wife who has
sacrificed herself to him wisely and unwisely for nearly thirty years,
had grown so used to seeing her suffer with a smile that he had drifted
at last into the belief that it was the only form of activity she really
enjoyed. From the day of his marriage he had never been able to deny her
anything she had set her heart upon--not even the privilege of working
herself to death for his sake when the opportunity offered.
"Well, well, if you feel like it, of course you must go, my dear," he
replied. "I'll step over and sit a minute with Miss Priscilla while you
are away. Never could bear the house without you, Lucy."
While this protest was still on his lips, he followed her from the
house, and turned with Virginia and John Henry in the direction of the
Young Ladies' Academy. From the darkness beyond the iron gate there came
the soothing flow of Miss Priscilla's voice entertaining an evening
caller, and when the rector left them, as if irresistibly drawn toward
the honeyed sound of gossip, Virginia walked on in silence between John
Henry and her mother. At each corner a flickering street lamp burned
with a thin yellow flame, and in the midst of the narrow orbit of its
light several shining moths circled swiftly like white moons revolving
about a sun. In the centre of the blocks, where the darkness was broken
only by small flower-like flakes of light that fell in clusters through
boughs of mulberry or linden trees, there was the sound of whispering
voices and of rustling palm-leaf fans on the crowded porches behind
screens of roses or honeysuckle. Mrs. Pendleton, whose instinct prompted
her to efface herself whenever she made a third at the meeting of maid
and man (even though the man was only her nephew John Henry), began to
talk at last after waiting modestly for her daughter to begin the
conversation. The story of Aunt Ailsey, of her great age, and her
dictatorial temper, which made living with other servants impossible to
her, started valiantly on its familiar road, and tripped but little when
the poor lady realized that neither John Henry nor Virginia was
listening. She was so used to talking for the sake of the sound she made
rather than the impression she produced that her silvery ripple had
become almost as lacking in self-consciousness as the song of a canary.
But Virginia, walking so quietly at her side, was inhabiting at the
moment a separate universe--a universe smelling of honeysuckle and
filled with starry pathways to happiness. In this universe Aunt Ailsey
and her peculiarities, her mother's innocent prattle, and the solid body
of John Henry touching her arm, were all as remote and trivial as the
night moths circling around the lamps. Looking at John Henry from under
her lowered lashes, she felt a sudden pity for him because he was so
far--so very far indeed from being the right man. She saw him too
clearly as he was--he stood before her in all the hard brightness of the
reality, and first love, like beauty, depends less upon the truth of an
outline than it does upon the softening quality of an atmosphere. There
was no mystery for her in the simple fact of his being. There was
nothing left to discover about his great stature, his excellent heart,
and his safe, slow mind that had been compelled to forego even the sort
of education she had derived from Miss Priscilla. She knew that he had
left school at the age of eight in order to become the support of a
widowed mother, and she was pitifully aware of the tireless efforts he
had made after reaching manhood to remedy his ignorance of the
elementary studies he had missed. Never had she heard a complaint from
him, never a regret for the sacrifice, never so much as an idle wonder
why it should have been necessary. If the texture of his soul was not
finely wrought, the proportions of it were heroic. In him the Pendleton
idealism had left the skies and been transmuted into the common
substance of clay. He was of a practical bent of mind and had developed
a talent for his branch of business, which, to the bitter humiliation of
his mother, was that of hardware, with a successful specialty in
bathtubs. Until to-day Virginia had always believed that John Henry
interested her, but now she wondered how she had ever spent so many
hours listening to his talk about business. And with the thought her
whole existence appeared to her as dull and commonplace as those hours.
A single instant of experience seemed longer to her than all the years
she had lived, and this instant had drained the colour and the sweetness
from the rest of life. The shape of her universe had trembled suddenly
and altered. Dimly she was beginning to realize that sensation, not
time, is the true measure of life. Nothing and everything had happened
to her since yesterday.
As they turned into Short Market Street, Mrs. Pendleton's voice trailed
off at last into silence, and she did not speak again while they passed
hurriedly between the crumbling houses and the dilapidated shops which
rose darkly on either side of the narrow cinder-strewn walks. The scent
of honeysuckle did not reach here, and when they stopped presently at
the beginning of Tin Pot Alley, there floated out to them the sharp
acrid odour of huddled negroes. In these squalid alleys, where the lamps
burned at longer distances, the more primitive forms of life appeared to
swarm like distorted images under the transparent civilization of the
town. The sound of banjo strumming came faintly from the dimness beyond,
while at their feet the Problem of the South sprawled innocently amid
tomato cans and rotting cabbage leaves.
"Wait here just a minute and I'll run up and speak to Aunt Ailsey,"
remarked Mrs. Pendleton with the dignity of a soul that is superior to
smells; and without noticing her daughter's reproachful nod of
acquiescence, she entered the alley and disappeared through the doorway
of the nearest hovel. A minute later her serene face looked down at them
over a patchwork quilt which hung airing at half length from the window
above. "But this is not life--it has nothing to do with life," thought
Virginia, while the Pendleton blood in her rose in a fierce rebellion
against all that was ugly and sordid in existence. Then her mother's
tread was heard descending the short flight of steps, and the sensation
vanished as quickly and as inexplicably as it had come.
"I tried not to keep you waiting, dear," said Mrs. Pendleton, hastening
toward them while she fanned herself rapidly with the small black fan
she carried. Her face looked tired and worn, and before moving on, she
paused a moment and held her hand to her thin fluttering breast, while
deep bluish circles appeared to start out under the expression of
pathetic cheerfulness in her eyes. This pathetic cheerfulness, so
characteristic of the women of her generation, was the first thing,
perhaps, that a stranger would have noticed about her face; yet it was a
trait which neither her husband nor her child had ever observed. There
was a fine moisture on her forehead, and this added so greatly to the
natural transparency of her features that, standing there in the wan
light, she might have been mistaken for the phantom of her daughter's
vivid flesh and blood beauty. "I wonder if you would mind going on to
Bolingbroke Street, so I may speak to Belinda Treadwell a minute?" she
asked, as soon as she had recovered her breath. "I want to find out if
she has engaged Miss Willy Whitlow for the whole week, or if there is
any use my sending a message to her over in Botetourt. If she doesn't
begin at once, Jinny, you won't have a dress to wear to Abby Goode's
party."
Virginia's heart gave a single bound of joy and lay quiet. Not for
worlds would she have asked to go to the Treadwells', yet ever since
they had started, she had longed unceasingly to have her mother suggest
it. The very stars, she felt, had worked together to bring about her
desire.
"But aren't you tired, mother? It really doesn't matter about my dress,"
she murmured, for it was not in vain that she had wrested a diploma for
deportment from Miss Priscilla.
"Why can't I take the message for you, Aunt Lucy? You look tired to
death," urged John Henry.
"Oh, I shan't mind the walk as soon as we get out into the breeze,"
replied Mrs. Pendleton. "It's a lovely night, only a little close in
this alley." And as she spoke she looked gently down on the Problem of
the South as the Southern woman had looked down on it for generations
and would continue to look down on it for generations still to
come--without seeing that it was a problem.
"Well, it's good to get a breath of air, anyway!" exclaimed John Henry
with fervour, when they had passed out of the alley into the lighted
street. Around them the town seemed to beat with a single heart, as if
it waited, like Virginia, in breathless suspense for some secret that
must come out of the darkness. Sometimes the sidewalks over which they
passed were of flag-stones, sometimes they were of gravel or of strewn
cinders. Now and then an old stone house, which had once sheltered
crinoline and lace ruffles, or had served as a trading station with the
Indians before Dinwiddie had become a city, would loom between two small
shops where the owners, coatless and covered with sweat, were selling
flat beer to jaded and miserable customers. Up Bolingbroke Street a
faint breeze blew, lifting the moist satin-like hair on Mrs. Pendleton's
forehead. Already its ancient dignity had deserted the quarter in which
the Treadwells lived, and it had begun to wear a forsaken and injured
look, as though it resented the degradation of commerce into which it
had descended.
"I can't understand why Cyrus Treadwell doesn't move over to Sycamore
Street," remarked John Henry after a moment of reflection in which he
had appeared to weigh this simple sentence with scrupulous exactness.
"He's rich enough, I suppose, to buy anything he wants."
"I've heard Susan say that it was her mother's old home and she didn't
care to leave it," said Mrs. Pendleton.
"I don't believe it's that a bit," broke in Virginia with characteristic
impulsiveness. "The only reason is that Mr. Treadwell is stingy. With
all his money, I know Mrs. Treadwell and Susan hardly ever have a dollar
they can spend on themselves."
Though she spoke with her accustomed energy, she was conscious all the
time that the words she uttered were not the ones in her thoughts. What
did Cyrus Treadwell's stinginess matter when his only relation to life
consisted in his being the uncle of Oliver? It was as if a single shape
moved alive through a universe peopled with shadows. Only a borrowed
radiance attached itself now to the persons and objects that had
illumined the world for her yesterday. Yet she approached the crisis of
her life so silently that those around her did not recognize it beneath
the cover of ordinary circumstances. Like most great moments it had come
unheralded; and though the rustling of its wings filled her soul,
neither her mother nor John Henry heard a stir in the quiet air that
surrounded them. Walking between the two who loved her, she felt that
she was separated from them both by an eternity of experience.
There were several blocks of Bolingbroke Street to walk before the
Treadwells' house was reached, and as they sauntered slowly past decayed
dwellings, Virginia's imagination ran joyously ahead of her to the
meeting. Would it happen this time as it had happened before when he
looked at her that something would pass between them which would make
her feel that she belonged to him? So little resistance did she offer to
the purpose of Life that she seemed to have existed from the beginning
merely as an exquisite medium for a single emotion. It was as if the
dreams of all the dead women of her race, who had lived only in loving,
were concentrated into a single shining centre of bliss--for the
accumulated vibrations of centuries were in her soul when she trembled
for the first time beneath the eyes of a lover. And yet all this
blissful violence was powerless to change the most insignificant
external fact in the universe. Though it was the greatest thing that
could ever happen to her, it was nothing to the other twenty-one
thousand human beings among whom she lived; it left no mark upon that
procession of unimportant details which they called life.
They were in sight of the small old-fashioned brick house of the
Treadwells, with its narrow windows set discreetly between outside
shutters, and she saw that the little marble porch was deserted except
for the two pink oleander trees, which stood in green tubs on either
side of the curved iron railings. A minute later John Henry's
imperative ring brought a young coloured maid to the door, and Virginia,
who had lingered on the pavement, heard almost immediately an effusive
duet from her mother and Mrs. Treadwell.
"Oh, do come in, Lucy, just for a minute!"
"I can't possibly, my dear; I only wanted to ask you if you have engaged
Miss Willy Whitlow for the entire week or if you could let me have her
for Friday and Saturday? Jinny hasn't a rag to wear to Abby Goode's lawn
party and I don't know anybody who does quite so well for her as poor
Miss Willy. Oh, that's so sweet of you! I can't thank you enough! And
you'll tell her without my sending all the way over to Botetourt!"
By this time Susan had joined Virginia on the sidewalk, and the liquid
honey of Mrs. Pendleton's voice dropped softly into indistinctness.
"Oh, Jinny, if I'd only known you were coming!" said Susan. "Oliver
wanted me to take him to see you, and when I couldn't, he went over to
call on Abby."
So this was the end of her walk winged with expectancy! A disappointment
as sharp as her joy had been pierced her through as she stood there
smiling into Susan's discomfited face. With the tragic power of youth to
create its own torment, she told herself that life could never be the
same after this first taste of its bitterness.