FIRST LOVE
The next morning, so indestructible is the happiness of youth, she awoke
with her hope as fresh as if it had not been blighted the evening
before. As she lay in bed, with her loosened hair making a cloud over
the pillows, and her eyes shining like blue flowers in the band of
sunlight that fell through the dormer-window, she quivered to the early
sweetness of honeysuckle as though it were the charmed sweetness of love
of which she had dreamed in the night. She was only one of the many
millions of women who were awaking at the same hour to the same miracle
of Nature, yet she might have been the first woman seeking the first man
through the vastness and the mystery of an uninhabited earth. Impossible
to believe that an experience so wonderful was as common as the bursting
of the spring buds or the humming of the thirsty bees around the
honeysuckle arbour!
Slipping out of bed, she threw her dressing-gown over her shoulders, and
kneeling beside the window, drank in the flower-scented air of the May
morning. During the night, the paulownia trees had shed a rain of violet
blossoms over the wet grass, where little wings of sunshine, like golden
moths, hovered above them. Beyond the border of lilies-of-the-valley she
saw the squat pinkish tower of the church, and beneath it, in the
narrow churchyard, rose the gleaming shaft above the grave of the
Confederate soldier. On her right, in the centre of the crooked path,
three negro infants were prodding earnestly at roots of wire-grass and
dandelion; and brushing carelessly their huddled figures, her gaze
descended the twelve steps of the almost obliterated terrace, and
followed the steep street down which a mulatto vegetable vendor was
urging his slow-footed mule.
A wave of joy rose in her breast, and she felt that her heart melted in
gratitude for the divine beauty of life. The world showed to her as a
place filled with shining vistas of happiness, and at the end of each of
these vistas there awaited the unknown enchanting thing which she called
in her thoughts "the future." The fact that it was the same world in
which Miss Priscilla and her mother lived their narrow and prosaic lives
did not alter by a breath her unshakable conviction that she herself was
predestined for something more wonderful than they had ever dreamed of.
"He may come this evening!" she thought, and immediately the light of
magic suffused the room, the street outside, and every scarred roof in
Dinwiddie.
At the head of her bed, wedged in between the candle stand and the
window, there was a cheap little bookcase of walnut which contained the
only volumes she had ever been permitted to own--the poems of Mrs.
Hemans and of Adelaide Anne Procter, a carefully expurgated edition of
Shakespeare, with an inscription in the rector's handwriting on the
flyleaf; Miss Strickland's "Lives of the Queens of England"; and several
works of fiction belonging to the class which Mrs. Pendleton vaguely
characterized as "sweet stories." Among the more prominent of these
were "Thaddeus of Warsaw," a complete set of Miss Yonge's novels, with a
conspicuously tear-stained volume of "The Heir of Redclyffe," and a
romance or two by obscure but innocuous authors. That any book which
told, however mildly, the truth about life should have entered their
daughter's bedroom would have seemed little short of profanation to both
the rector and Mrs. Pendleton. The sacred shelves of that bookcase
(which had been ceremoniously presented to her on her fourteenth
birthday) had never suffered the contaminating presence of realism. The
solitary purpose of art was, in Mrs. Pendleton's eyes, to be "sweet,"
and she scrupulously judged all literature by its success or failure in
this particular quality. It seemed to her as wholesome to feed her
daughter's growing fancy on an imaginary line of pious heroes, as it
appeared to her moral to screen her from all suspicion of the existence
of immorality. She did not honestly believe that any living man
resembled the "Heir of Redclyffe," any more than she believed that the
path of self-sacrifice leads inevitably to happiness; but there was no
doubt in her mind that she advanced the cause of righteousness when she
taught these sanctified fallacies to Virginia.
As she rose from her knees, Virginia glanced at her white dress, which
was too crumpled for her to wear again before it was smoothed, and
thought regretfully of Aunt Docia's heart, which invariably gave warning
whenever there was extra work to be done. "I shall have to wear either
my blue lawn or my green organdie this evening," she thought. "I wish I
could have the sleeves changed. I wonder if mother could run a tuck in
them?"
It did not occur to her that she might smooth the dress herself, because
she knew that the iron would be wrested from her by her mother's hands,
which were so knotted and worn that tears came to Virginia's eyes when
she looked at them. She let her mother slave over her because she had
been born into a world where the slaving of mothers was a part of the
natural order, and she had not as yet become independent enough to
question the morality of the commonplace. At any minute she would gladly
have worked, too, but the phrase "spare Virginia" had been uttered so
often in her hearing that it had acquired at last almost a religious
significance. To have been forced to train her daughter in any
profitable occupation which might have lifted her out of the class of
unskilled labour in which indigent gentlewomen by right belonged, would
have been the final dregs of humiliation in Mrs. Pendleton's cup. On one
of Aunt Docia's bad days, when Jinny had begged to be allowed to do part
of the washing, she had met an almost passionate refusal from her
mother. "It will be time enough to spoil your hands after you are
married, darling!" And again, "Don't do that rough sewing, Jinny. Give
it to me." From the cradle she had borne her part in this racial custom
of the sacrifice of generation to generation--of the perpetual
immolation of age on the flowery altars of youth. Like most customs in
which we are nurtured, it had seemed natural and pleasant enough until
she had watched the hollows deepen in her mother's temples and the
tireless knotted hands stumble at their work. Then a pang had seized her
and she had pleaded earnestly to be permitted to help.
"If you only knew how unhappy it makes me to see you ruining your pretty
fingers, Jinny. My child, the one comfort I have is the thought that I
am sparing you."
Sparing her! Always that from the first! Even Gabriel chimed in when it
became a matter of Jinny. "Let me wash the dishes, Lucy," he would
implore. "What? Will you trust me with other people's souls, but not
with your china?"
"It's not a man's work, Mr. Pendleton. What would the neighbours think?"
"They would think, I hope, my dear, that I was doing my duty."
"But it would not be dignified for a clergyman. No, I cannot bear the
sight of you with a dishcloth."
In the end she invariably had her way with them, for she was the
strongest. Jinny must be spared, and Gabriel must do nothing
undignified. About herself it made no difference unless the neighbours
were looking; she had not thought of herself, except in the indomitable
failing of her "false pride," since her marriage, which had taken place
in her twentieth year. A clergyman's wife might do menial tasks in
secret, and nobody minded, but they were not for a clergyman.
For a minute, while she was dressing, Virginia thought of these
things--of how hard life had been to her mother, of how pretty she must
have been in her youth. What she did not think of was that her mother,
like herself, was but one of the endless procession of women who pass
perpetually from the sphere of pleasure into the sphere of service. It
was as impossible for her to picture her mother as a girl of twenty as
it was for her to imagine herself ever becoming a woman of fifty.
When she had finished dressing she closed the door softly after her as
if she were afraid of disturbing the silence, and ran downstairs to the
dining-room, where the rector and Mrs. Pendleton greeted her with
subdued murmurs of joy.
"I was afraid I'd miss you, daughter," from the rector, as he drew her
chair nearer.
"I was just going to carry up your tray, Jinny," from her mother. "I
kept a nice breast of chicken for you which one of the neighbours sent
me."
"I'd so much rather you'd eat it, mother," protested Jinny, on the point
of tears.
"But I couldn't, darling, I really couldn't manage it. A cup of coffee
and a bit of toast is all I can possibly stand in the morning. I was up
early, for Docia was threatened with one of her heart attacks, and it
always gives me a little headache to miss my morning nap."
"Then you can't go to market, Lucy; it is out of the question," insisted
the rector. "After thirty years you might as well make up your mind to
trust me, my dear."
"But the last time you went you gave away our shoulder of lamb to a
beggar," replied his wife, and she hastened to add tenderly, lest he
should accept the remark as a reproof, "it's sweet of you, dearest, but
a little walk will be good for my head if I am careful to keep on the
shady side of the street. I can easily find a boy to bring home the
things, and I am sure it won't hurt me a bit."
"Why can't I go, mother?" implored Virginia. "Susan always markets for
Mrs. Treadwell." And she felt that even the task of marketing was
irradiated by this inner glow which had changed the common aspect of
life.
"Oh, Jinny, you know how you hate to feel the chickens, and one can
never tell how plump they are by the feathers."
"Well, I'll feel them, mother, if you'll let me try."
"No, darling, but you may go with me and carry my sunshade. I'm so sorry
Docia can't smooth your dress. Was it much crumpled?"
"Oh, dreadfully! And I did so want to wear it this evening. Do you think
Aunt Docia could show me how to iron?"
Docia, who stood like an ebony image of Bellona behind her mistress's
chair, waving a variegated tissue paper fly screen over the coffee-urn,
was heard to think aloud that "dish yer stitch ain' helt up er blessed
minute sence befo' daylight." Not unnaturally, perhaps, since she was
the most prominent figure in her own vision of the universe, she had
come at last to regard her recurrent "stitch" as an event of greater
consequence than Virginia's appearance in immaculate white muslin. An
uncertain heart combined with a certain temper had elevated her from a
servile position to one of absolute autocracy in the household.
Everybody feared her, so nobody had ever dared ask her to leave. As she
had rebelled long ago against the badge of a cap and an apron, she
appeared in the dining-room clad in garments of various hues, and her
dress on this particular morning was a purple calico crowned
majestically by a pink cotton turban. There was a tradition still afloat
that Docia had been an excellent servant before the war; but this
amiable superstition had, perhaps, as much reason to support it as had
Gabriel's innocent conviction that there were no faithless husbands when
there were no divorces.
"I'm afraid Docia can't do it," sighed Mrs. Pendleton, for her ears had
caught the faint thunder of the war goddess behind her chair, and her
soul, which feared neither armies nor adversities, trembled before her
former slaves. "But it won't take me a minute if you'll have it ready
right after dinner."
"Oh, mother, of course I couldn't let you for anything. I only thought
Aunt Docia might be able to teach me how to iron."
At this, Docia muttered audibly that she "ain' got no time ter be
sho'in' nobody nuttin'."
"There, now, Docia, you mustn't lose your temper," observed Gabriel as
he rose from his chair. It was at such moments that the remembered joys
of slavery left a bitter after taste on his lips. Clearly it was
impossible to turn into the streets a servant who had once belonged to
you!
When they were in the hall together, Mrs. Pendleton whispered nervously
to her husband that it must be "poor Docia's heart that made her so
disagreeable and that she would feel better to-morrow."
"Wouldn't it be possible, my dear?" inquired the rector in his pulpit
manner, to which his wife's only answer was a startled "Sh-sh-ush."
An hour later the door of Gabriel's study opened softly, and Mrs.
Pendleton entered with the humble and apologetic manner in which she
always intruded upon her husband's pursuits. There was an accepted
theory in the family, shared even by Uncle Isam and Aunt Docia, that
whenever Gabriel was left alone for an instant, his thoughts naturally
deflected into spiritual paths. In the early days of his marriage he had
tried honestly to live up to this exalted idea of his character; then
finding the effort beyond him, and being a man with an innate
detestation of hypocrisy, he had earnestly endeavoured to disabuse his
wife's imagination of the mistaken belief in his divinity. But a notion
once firmly fixed in Mrs. Pendleton's mind might as well have been
embedded in rock. By virtue of that gentle obstinacy which enabled her
to believe in an illusion the more intensely because it had vanished,
she had triumphed not only over circumstances, but over truth itself. By
virtue of this quality, she had created the world in which she moved and
had wrought beauty out of chaos.
"Are you busy with your sermon, dear?" she asked, pausing in the
doorway, and gazing reverently at her husband over the small black silk
bag she carried. Like the other women of Dinwiddie who had lost
relatives by the war, she had never laid aside her mourning since the
surrender; and the frame of crape to her face gave her the pensive look
of one who has stepped out of the pageant of life into the sacred
shadows of memory.
"No, no, Lucy, I'm ready to start out with you," replied the rector
apologetically, putting a box of fishing tackle he had been sorting back
into the drawer of his desk. He was as fond as a child of a day's sport,
and never quite so happy as when he set out with his rod and an old
tomato can filled with worms, which he had dug out of the back garden,
in his hands; but owing to the many calls upon him and his wife's
conception of his clerical dignity, he was seldom able to gratify his
natural tastes.
"Oh, father, please hurry!" called Virginia from the porch, and rising
obediently, he followed Mrs. Pendleton through the hall and out into the
May sunshine, where the little negroes stopped an excited chase of a
black and orange butterfly to return doggedly to their weeding.
"Are you sure you wouldn't rather I'd go to market, Lucy?"
"Quite sure, dear," replied his wife, sniffing the scent of
lilies-of-the-valley with her delicate, slightly pinched nostrils. "I
thought you were going to see Mr. Treadwell about putting John Henry
into the bank," she added. "It is such a pity to keep the poor boy
selling bathtubs. His mother felt it so terribly."
"Ah, so I was--so I was," reflected Gabriel, who, though both of them
would have been indignant at the suggestion, was as putty in the hands
of his wife. "Well, I'll look into the bank on Cyrus after I've paid my
sick calls."
With that they parted, Gabriel going on to visit a bedridden widow in
the Old Ladies' Home, while Mrs. Pendleton and Virginia turned down a
cross street that led toward the market. At every corner, it seemed to
Virginia, middle-aged ladies, stout or thin, wearing crape veils and
holding small black silk bags in their hands, sprang out of the shadows
of mulberry trees, and barred their leisurely progress. And though
nothing had happened in Dinwiddie since the war, and Mrs. Pendleton had
seen many of these ladies the day before, she stopped for a sympathetic
chat with each one of them, while Virginia, standing a little apart,
patiently prodded the cinders of the walk with the end of her sunshade.
All her life the girl had been taught to regard time as the thing of
least importance in the universe; but occasionally, while she listened
in silence to the liquid murmur of her mother's voice, she wondered
vaguely how the day's work was ever finished in Dinwiddie. The story of
Docia's impertinence was told and retold a dozen times before they
reached the market. "And you really mean that you can't get rid of her?
Why, my dear Lucy, I wouldn't stand it a day! Now, there was my Mandy.
Such an excellent servant until she got her head turned----" This from
Mrs. Tom Peachey, an energetic little woman, with a rosy face and a
straight gray "bang" cut short over her eyebrows. "But, Lucy, my child,
are you doing right to submit to impertinence? In the old days, I
remember, before the war----" This from Mrs. William Goode, who had been
Sally Peterson, the beauty of Dinwiddie, and who was still superbly
handsome in a tragic fashion, with a haunted look in her eyes and masses
of snow-white hair under her mourning bonnet. Years ago Virginia had
imagined her as dwelling perpetually with the memory of her young
husband, who had fallen in his twenty-fifth year in the Battle of Cold
Harbor, but she knew now that the haunted eyes, like all things human,
were under the despotism of trifles. To the girl, who saw in this
universal acquiescence in littleness merely the pitiful surrender of
feeble souls, there was a passionate triumph in the thought that her own
dreams were larger than the actuality that surrounded her. Youth's scorn
of the narrow details of life left no room in her mind for an
understanding of the compromise which middle-age makes with necessity.
The pathos of resignation--of that inevitable submission to the petty
powers which the years bring--was lost upon the wistful ignorance of
inexperience. While she waited dutifully, with her absent gaze fixed on
the old mulberry trees, which whitened as the wind blew over them and
then slowly darkened again, she wondered if servants and gossip were the
only things that Oliver had heard of in his travels? Then she remembered
that even in Dinwiddie men were less interested in such matters than
they were in the industries of peanuts and tobacco. Was it only women,
after all, who were in subjection to particulars?
When they turned into Old Street, John Henry hailed them from the
doorway of a shop, where he stood flanked by a row of spotless bathtubs.
He wore a loose pongee coat, which sagged at the shoulders, his straight
flaxen hair had been freshly cut, and his crimson necktie had got a
stain on it at breakfast; but to Virginia's astonishment, he appeared
sublimely unconscious both of his bathtubs and his appearance. He was
doubtless under the delusion that a pongee coat, being worn for comfort,
was entirely successful when it achieved that end; and as for his
business, it was beyond his comprehension that a Pendleton could have
reason to blush for a bathtub or for any other object that afforded him
an honest livelihood.
He called to them at sight, and Mrs. Pendleton, following her instinct
of fitness, left the conversation to youth.
"John Henry, father is going to see Mr. Treadwell about the place in the
bank. Won't it be lovely if he gives it to you!"
"He won't," replied John Henry. "I'll bet you anything he's keeping it
for his nephew."
Virginia's blush came quickly, and turning her head away, she gazed
earnestly down the street to the octagonal market, which stood on the
spot where slaves were offered for sale when she was born.
"Mr. Treadwell is crossing the street now," she said after a minute. "I
wonder why he keeps his mouth shut so tight when he is alone?"
A covered cart, which had been passing slowly, moved up the hill, and
from beyond it there appeared the tall spare figure of a man with
iron-gray hair, curling a little on the temples, a sallow skin,
splotched with red over the nose, and narrow colourless lips that looked
as if they were cut out of steel. As he walked quickly up the street,
every person whom he passed turned to glance after him.
"I wonder if it is true that he hasn't made his money honestly?" asked
Virginia.
"Oh, I hope not!" exclaimed Mrs. Pendleton, who in her natural desire to
believe only good about people was occasionally led into believing the
truth.
"Well, I don't care," retorted Virginia, "he's mean. I know just by the
way his wife dresses."
"Oh, Jinny!" gasped Mrs. Pendleton, and glanced in embarrassment at her
nephew, whose face, to her surprise, was beaming with enjoyment. The
truth was that John Henry, who would have condemned so unreasonable an
accusation had it been uttered by a full-grown male, was enraptured by
the piquancy of hearing it on the lovely lips of his cousin. To demand
that a pretty woman should possess the mental responsibility of a human
being would have seemed an affront to his inherited ideas of gallantry.
His slow wit was enslaved by Jinny's audacity as completely as his kind
ox-like eyes were enthralled by the young red and white of her beauty.
"But he's a great man. You can't deny that," he said with the playful
manner in which he might have prodded a kitten in order to make it claw.
"A great man! Just because he has made money!"
"Well, he couldn't have got rich, you know, if he hadn't had the sense
to see how to do it," replied the young man with enthusiasm. Like most
Southerners who had been forced without preparation into the hard school
of industry, he had found that his standards followed inevitably the
changing measure of his circumstances. From his altered point of view,
the part of owing property appeared so easy, and the part of winning it
so difficult, that his respect for culture had yielded almost
unconsciously to his admiration for commerce. When the South came again
to the front, he felt instinctively that it would come, shorn of its
traditional plumage, a victor from the hard-fought industrial
battlefields of the century; and because Cyrus Treadwell led the way
toward this triumph, he was ready to follow him. Of the whole town, this
grim, half legendary figure (passionately revered and as passionately
hated) appeared to him to stand alone not for the decaying past, but for
the growing future. The stories of the too rapid development of the
Treadwell fortune he cast scornfully aside as the malicious slanders of
failure. What did all this tittle-tattle about a great man prove anyhow
except his greatness? Suppose he _had_ used his railroad to make a
fortune--well, but for him where would the Dinwiddie and Central be
to-day if not in the junk shop? Where would the lumber market be? the
cotton market? the tobacco market? For around Cyrus, standing alone and
solitary on his height, there had gathered the great illusion that
makes theft honest and falsehood truth--the illusion of Success; and
simple John Henry Pendleton, who, after nineteen years of poverty and
memory, was bereft alike of classical pedantry and of physical comforts,
had grown a little weary of the endless lip-worship of a single moment
in history. Granted even that it was the greatest moment the world had
seen, still why couldn't one be satisfied to have it take its place
beside the wars of the Spartans and of the ancient Britons? Perpetual
mourning was well enough for ladies in crape veils and heroic gentlemen
on crutches; but when your bread and meat depended not upon the graves
you had decorated, but upon the bathtubs you had sold, surely something
could be said for the Treadwell point of view.
As Virginia could find no answer to this remark, the three stood in
silence, gazing dreamily, with three pairs of Pendleton eyes, down
toward the site of the old slave market. Directly in their line of
vision, an over-laden mule with a sore shoulder was straining painfully
under the lash, but none of them saw it, because each of them was
morally incapable of looking an unpleasant fact in the face if there was
any honourable manner of avoiding it. What they beheld, indeed, was the
most interesting street in the world, filled with the most interesting
people, who drove happy animals that enjoyed their servitude and needed
the sound of the lash to add cheer and liveliness to their labours.
Never had the Pendleton idealism achieved a more absolute triumph over
the actuality.
"Well, we must go on," murmured Mrs. Pendleton, withdrawing her
visionary gaze from the hot street littered with fruit rinds and
blood-stained papers from a neighbouring butcher shop. "It was lovely
to have this glimpse of you, John Henry. What nice bathtubs you have!"
Smiling her still lovely smile into the young man's eyes, she proceeded
on her leisurely way, while Virginia raised the black silk sunshade over
her head. In front of them they could see long rows of fish-carts and
vegetable stalls around which hovered an army of eager housekeepers. The
social hours in Dinwiddie at that period were the early morning ones in
the old market, and Virginia knew that she should hear Docia's story
repeated again for the benefit of the curious or sympathetic listeners
that would soon gather about her mother. Mrs. Pendleton's marketing,
unlike the hurried and irresponsible sort of to-day, was an affair of
time and ceremony. Among the greetings and the condolences from other
marketers there would ensue lengthy conversations with the vendors of
poultry, of fish, or of vegetables. Every vegetable must be carefully
selected by her own hands and laid aside into her special basket, which
was in the anxious charge of a small coloured urchin. While she felt the
plump breasts of Mr. Dewlap's chickens, she would inquire with
flattering condescension after the members of Mr. Dewlap's family. Not
only did she remember each one of them by name, but she never forgot
either the dates of their birthdays or the number of turkeys Mrs. Dewlap
had raised in a season. If marketing is ever to be elevated from an
occupation to an art, it will be by a return to Mrs. Pendleton's method.
"Mother, please buy some strawberries," begged Virginia.
"Darling, you know we never buy fruit, or desserts. Somebody will
certainly send us something. I saw Mrs. Carrington whipping syllabub on
her back porch as we passed."
"But they're only five cents a basket."
"Well, put a basket with my marketing, Mr. Dewlap. Yes, I'll take that
white pullet if you're sure that she is plumper than the red one."
She moved on a step or two, while the white pullet was handed over by
its feet to the small coloured urchin and to destruction. If Mrs.
Pendleton had ever reflected on the tragic fate of pullets, she would
probably have concluded that it was "best" for them to be fried and
eaten, or Providence, whose merciful wisdom she never questioned, would
not have permitted it. So, in the old days, she had known where the
slave market stood, without realizing in the least that men and women
were sold there. "Poor things, it does seem dreadful, but I suppose it
is better for them to have a change sometimes," she would doubtless have
reasoned had the horror of the custom ever occurred to her--for her
heart was so sensitive to pain that she could exist at all only by
inventing a world of exquisite fiction around her.
"Aren't you nearly through, mother?" pleaded Virginia at last. "The sun
will be so hot going home that it will make your head worse."
Mrs. Pendleton, who was splitting a pea-shell with her thumb in order to
ascertain the size and quality of the peas, murmured soothingly, "Just a
minute, dear"; and the girl, finding it impossible to share her mother's
enthusiasm for slaughtered animals, fell back again into the narrow
shade of the stalls. She revolted with a feeling of outrage against the
side of life that confronted her--against the dirty floor, strewn with
withered vegetables above which flies swarmed incessantly, and against
the pathos of the small bleeding forms which seemed related neither to
the lamb in the fields nor to the Sunday roast on the table. That divine
gift of evasion, which enabled Mrs. Pendleton to see only the thing she
wanted to see in every occurrence, was but partially developed as yet in
Virginia; and while she stood there in the midst of her unromantic
surroundings, the girl shuddered lest Oliver Treadwell should know that
she had ever waited, hot, perspiring, with a draggled skirt, and a bag
of tomatoes grasped in her hands, while her mother wandered from stall
to stall in a tireless search for peas a few cents cheaper than those of
Mr. Dewlap. Youth, with its ingenuous belief that love dwells in
external circumstances, was protesting against the bland assumption of
age that love creates its own peculiar circumstances out of itself. It
was absurd, she knew, to imagine that her father's affection for her
mother would alter because she haggled over the price of peas; yet the
emotion with which she endowed Oliver Treadwell was so delicate and
elusive that she felt that the sight of a soiled skirt and a perspiring
face would blast it forever. It appeared imperative that he should see
her in white muslin, and she resolved that if it cost Docia her life she
would have the flounces of her dress smoothed before evening. She, who
was by nature almost morbidly sensitive to suffering, became, in the
hands of this new and implacable power, as ruthless as Fate.
"Now I'm ready, Jinny dear. Are you tired waiting?" asked Mrs.
Pendleton, coming toward her with the coloured urchin in her train.
"Why, there's Susan Treadwell. Have you spoken to her?"
The next instant, before the startled girl could turn, a voice cried out
triumphantly: "O Jinny!" and in front of her, looking over Susan's
shoulder, she saw the eager eyes and the thin, high-coloured face of
Oliver Treadwell. For a moment she told herself that he had read her
thoughts with his penetrating gaze, which seemed to pierce through her;
and she blushed pink while her eyes burned under her trembling lashes.
Then the paper bag, containing the tomatoes, burst in her hands, and its
contents rolled, one by one, over the littered floor to his feet. Both
stooped at once to recover it, and while their hands touched amid wilted
cabbage leaves, the girl felt that love had taken gilded wings and
departed forever!
"Put them in the basket, dear," Mrs. Pendleton could be heard saying
calmly in the midst of her daughter's agony--for, having lived through
the brief illumination of romance, she had come at last into that steady
glow which encompasses the commonplace.
"This is my cousin Oliver, Virginia," remarked Susan as casually as if
the meeting of the two had not been planned from all eternity by the
beneficent Powers.
"I'm afraid I've spoiled your nice red tomatoes," said a voice that
filled Virginia's whirling mind with a kind of ecstatic dizziness. As
the owner of the voice held out his hand, she saw that it was long and
thin like the rest of him, with blue veins crossing the back, and
slender, slightly crooked fingers that hurt hers with the strength of
their pressure. "To confess the truth," he added gaily after an instant,
"my breath was quite taken away because, somehow, this was the last
place on earth in which I expected to find you. It's a dreadful
spot--don't you think so? If we've got to be cannibals, why in Heaven's
name make a show and a parade of it?"
"What an extraordinary young man!" said Mrs. Pendleton's eyes; and
Virginia found herself blushing again because she felt that her mother
had not understood him. A delicious embarrassment--something different
and more vivid than any sensation she had ever known--held her
speechless while he looked at her. Had her life depended on it, she
could not have uttered a sentence--could hardly even have lifted her
lashes, which seemed suddenly to have become so heavy that she felt the
burden of them weighing over her eyes. All the picturesque phrases she
had planned to speak at their first meeting had taken wings with
perfidious romance, yet she would have given her dearest possession to
have been able to say something really clever. "He thinks me a
simpleton, of course," she thought--perfectly unconscious that Oliver
was not thinking of her wits at all, but of the wonderful rose-pink of
her flesh. At one and the same instant, she felt that this silence was
the most marvellous thing that had ever happened to her and longed to
break it with some speech so brilliant that he would never forget it.
Little thrills of joy, like tiny flames, ran over her, and the light in
her eyes shone on him through the quivering dusk of her lashes. Even
when she looked away from him, she could still see his expression of
tender gaiety, as though he were trying in vain to laugh himself free
from an impulse that was fast growing too strong for him. What she did
not know was that the spring was calling to him through her youth and
sex as it was calling through the scented winds and the young buds on
the trees. She was as ignorant that she offered herself to him through
her velvet softness, through the glow in her eyes, through her quivering
lips, as the flower is that it allures the bee by its perfume. So subtly
did Life use her for its end that the illusion of choice in first love
remained unimpaired. Though she was young desire incarnate, he saw in
her only the unique and solitary woman of his dreams.
"Do you come here every day?" he asked, and immediately the blue sky and
the octagonal market spun round at his voice.
As nothing but commonplace words would come to her, she was obliged at
last to utter them. "Oh, no, not every day."
"I've always had a tremendous sympathy for women because they have to
market and housekeep. I wonder if they won't revolt some time?"
This was so heretical a point of view that she tried earnestly to
comprehend it; but all the time her heart was busy telling her how
different he was from every other man--how much more interesting! how
immeasurably superior! Her attention, in spite of her efforts at serious
thought, would not wander from the charm of his voice, from the peculiar
whimsical trick of his smile, which lifted his mouth at one corner and
made odd little wrinkles come and go about his eyes. His manner was full
of sudden nervous gestures which surprised and enchanted her. All other
men were not merely as clay beside him--they were as straw! Seeing that
he was waiting for a response, she made a violent endeavour to think of
one, and uttered almost inaudibly: "But don't they like it?"
"Ah, that's just it," he answered as seriously as if she hadn't known
that her speech bordered on imbecility. "Do they really like it? or have
they been throwing dust in our eyes through the centuries?" And he gazed
at her as eagerly as if he were hanging upon her answer. Oh, if she
could only say something clever! If she could only say the sort of thing
that would shock Miss Priscilla! But nothing came of her wish, and she
was reduced at last to the pathetic rejoinder, "I don't know. I'm afraid
I've never thought about it."
For a moment he stared at her as though he were enraptured by her reply.
With such eyes and such hair, she might have been as simple as she
appeared and he would never have known it. "Of course you haven't, or
you wouldn't be you!" he responded; and by the time she came to her
senses, she was following her mother and the negro urchin out of the
market. Though she was in reality walking over cinders, she felt that
her feet were treading on golden air.