She left her sentence unfinished, but in the break there was the first

note of bitterness that her mother had ever heard from her lips. Was it

possible, after all, that there was "more in it" than she had let appear

in her words? Was it possible that her passionate defence of Abby had

been but a beautiful pretence?

"I'll go straight down to the Treadwells' to ask Susan for her horse,"

she added cheerfully, "and you'll come over very early, won't you, to

stay with the children? Oliver always starts before daybreak."

"Yes, darling, I'll get up at dawn and come over--but, Jinny, promise me

to be careful."

"Oh, I'll be careful," responded Virginia lightly, as she went out on

the porch.

CHAPTER VII

THE WILL TO LIVE

"It's all horrid talk. There's not a word of truth in it," she thought,

true to the Pendleton point of view, as she turned into Old Street on

her way to the Treadwells'. Then the sound of horses' hoofs rang on the

cobblestones, and, looking past the corner, she saw Oliver and Abby

galloping under the wine-coloured leaves of the oak tree at the

crossing. His face was turned back, as if he were looking over his

shoulder at the red sunset, and he was laughing as she had not heard him

laugh since that dreadful morning in the bedroom of the New York hotel.

What a boy he was still! As she watched him, it seemed to her that she

was old enough to be his mother, and the soreness in her heart changed

into an exquisite impulse of tenderness. Then he looked from the sunset

to Abby, and at the glance of innocent pleasure that passed between them

a stab of jealousy entered her heart like a blade. Before it faded, they

had passed the corner, and were cantering wildly up Old Street in the

direction of Abby's home.

"It is my fault. I am too settled. I am letting my youth go," she said,

with a passionate determination to catch her girlhood and hold it fast

before it eluded her forever. "I am only twenty-eight and I dress like a

woman of forty." And it seemed to her that the one desirable thing in

life was this fleet-winged spirit of youth, which passed like a breath,

leaving existence robbed of all romance and beauty. An hour before she

had not cared, and she would not care now if only Oliver could grow

middle-aged and old at the moment when she did. Ah, there was the

tragedy! All life was for men, and only a few radiant years of it were

given to women. Men were never too old to love, to pursue and capture

whatever joy the fugitive instant might hold for them. But women, though

they were allowed only one experience out of the whole of life, were

asked to resign even that one at the very minute when they needed it

most. "I wonder what will become of me when the children grow big enough

to be away all the time as Oliver is," she thought wistfully. "I wish

one never grew too old to have babies."

The front door of the Treadwell house stood open, and in the hall Susan

was arranging golden-rod and life-ever-lasting in a blue china bowl.

"Of course, you may have Belle to-morrow," she said in answer to

Virginia's faltering request. "Even if I intended going, I'd be only too

glad to lend her to you--but I can't leave mother anyway. She always

gets restless if I stay out over an hour."

Mrs. Treadwell's illness had become one of those painful facts which

people accept as naturally as they accept the theological dogma of

damnation. It was terrible, when they thought of it, but they seldom

thought of it, thereby securing tranquillity of mind in the face of both

facts and dogmas. Even Virginia had ceased to make her first question

when she met Susan, "How is your mother?"

"But, Susan, you need the exercise. I thought that was why the doctor

made Uncle Cyrus get you a horse."

"It was, but I only go for an hour in the afternoon. I begrudge every

minute I spend away from mother. Oh, Jinny, she is so pathetic! It

almost breaks my heart to watch her."

"I know, dearest," said Virginia; but at the back of her brain she was

thinking, "They looked so happy together, yet he could never really

admire Abby. She isn't at all the kind of woman he likes."

So preoccupied was she by this problem of her own creation, that her

voice had a strangely far off sound, as though it came from a distance.

"I wish I could help you, dear Susan. If you ever want me, day or night,

you know you have only to send for me. I'd let nothing except desperate

illness stand in the way of my coming."

It was true, and because she knew that it was true, Susan stooped

suddenly and kissed her.

"You are looking tired, Jinny. What is the matter?"

"Nothing except that I'm a sight in this old waist. I made it over to

save buying one, but I wish now I hadn't. It makes me look so settled."

"You need some clothes, and you used to be so fond of them."

"That was before the children came. I've never cared much since. It's

just as if life were a completed circle, somehow. There's nothing more

to expect or to wait for--you'll understand what I mean some day,

Susan."

"I think I do now. But only women are like that? Men are different----"

It was the classic phrase again, but on Susan's lips it sounded with a

new significance.

"And some women are different, too," replied Virginia. "Now there's Abby

Goode--Susan, what do you honestly think of Abby?"

There was a wistful note in the question, and around her gentle blue

eyes appeared a group of little lines, brought out by the nervous

contraction of her forehead. Was it the wan, smoky light of the

dusk?--Susan wondered, or was Virginia really beginning to break so

soon?

"Why, I like Abby. I always did," she answered, trying to look as if she

did not understand what Virginia had meant. "She's a little bit what

John Henry calls 'loud,' but she has a good heart and would do anybody a

kindness."

She had evaded answering, just as Virginia had evaded asking, the

question which both knew had passed unuttered between them--was Abby to

be trusted to keep inviolate the ancient unwritten pledge of honourable

womanhood? Her character was being tested by the single decisive virtue

exacted of her sex.

"I am glad you feel that way," said Virginia in a relieved manner after

a minute, "because I should hate not to believe in Abby, and some people

don't understand her manner--mother among them."

"Oh, she's all right. I'm sure of it," answered Susan, with heartiness.

The wistful sound had passed out of Virginia's voice, while the little

lines faded as suddenly from the corners of her eyes. She looked better

already--only she really ought not to wear such dowdy clothes, even

though she was happily married, reflected Susan, as she watched her, a

few minutes later, pass over the mulberry leaves, which lay, thick and

still, on the sidewalk.

At the corner of Sycamore Street a shopkeeper was putting away his goods

for the night, and in the window Virginia saw a length of hyacinth-blue

silk, matching her eyes, which she had remotely coveted for weeks--never

expecting to possess it, yet never quite reconciling herself to the

thought that it might be worn by some other woman. That length of silk

had grown gradually to symbolize the last glimmer of girlish vanity

which motherhood had not extinguished in her heart; and while she looked

at it now, in her new recklessness of mood, a temptation, born of the

perversity which rules human fate, came to her to go in and buy it while

she was still desperate enough to act foolishly and not be afraid. For

the first time in her life that immemorial spirit of adventure which

lies buried under the dead leaves of civilization at the bottom of every

human heart--with whose re-arisen ghost men have moved mountains and

ploughed jungles and charted illimitable seas--this imperishable spirit

stirred restlessly in its grave and prompted her for once to be

uncalculating and to risk the future. In the flickering motive which

guided her as she entered the shop, one would hardly have recognized the

lusty impulse which had sent her ancestors on splendid rambles of

knight-errantry, yet its hidden source was the same. The simple purchase

of twelve yards of blue silk which she had wanted for weeks! To an

outsider it would have appeared a small matter, yet in the act there was

the intrepid struggle of a personal will to enforce its desire upon

destiny. She would win back the romance and the beauty of living at the

cost of prudence, at the cost of practical comforts, at the cost, if

need be, of those ideals of womanly duty to which the centuries had

trained her! For eight years she had hardly thought of herself, for

eight years she had worked and saved and planned and worried, for eight

years she had given her life utterly and entirely to Oliver and the

children--and the result was that he was happier with Abby--with Abby

whom he didn't even admire--than he was with the wife whom he both

respected and loved! The riddle not only puzzled, it enraged her. Though

she was too simple to seek a psychological answer, the very fact that it

existed became an immediate power in her life. She forgot the lateness

of the evening, she forgot the children who were anxiously watching for

her return. The forces of character, which she had always regarded as

divinely fixed and established, melted and became suddenly fluid. She

wasn't what she had been the minute before--she wasn't even, she began

dimly to realize, what she would probably be the minute afterwards. Yet

the impulse which governed her now was as despotic as if it had reigned

in undisputed authority since the day of her birth. She knew that it was

a rebel against the disciplined and moderate rule of her conscience, but

this knowledge, which would have horrified her had she been in a normal

mood, aroused in her now merely a breathless satisfaction at the

spectacle of her own audacity. The natural Virginia had triumphed for an

instant over the Virginia whom the ages had bred.

At home she found Oliver waiting for supper, and the three children in

tears for fear she should decide to stay out forever.

"Oh, mother, we thought you'd gone away never to come back," sobbed

Lucy, throwing herself into her arms, "and what would little Jenny have

done?"

"Where in the world have you been, Virginia?" asked Oliver, a trifle

impatiently, for he was not used to having her absent from the house at

meal hours. "I was afraid somebody had been taken ill at the rectory, so

I went around to inquire."

"No, nobody was ill," answered Virginia quietly. Though her resolution

made her tremble all over, it did not occur to her for an instant that

even now she might recede from it. As the rector had gone to the war, so

she was going now to battle with Abby. She was afraid, but that quality

which had made the Pendletons despise fear since the beginning of

Dinwiddie's history, which they had helped to make, enabled her to

control her quivering muscles and to laugh at the reproachful protests

with which the children surrounded her. Through her mind there shot the

thought: "I have a secret from Oliver," and she felt suddenly guilty

because for the first time since her marriage she was keeping something

back from him. Then, following this, there came the knowledge, piercing

her heart, that she must keep her secret because even if she told him,

he would not understand. With the casualness of a man's point of view

towards an emotion, he would judge its importance, she felt, chiefly by

the power it possessed of disturbing the course of his life.

Unobservant, and ever ready to twist and decorate facts as she was, it

had still been impossible for her to escape the truth that men are by

nature incapable of a woman's characteristic passion for nursing

sentiment. To struggle to keep a feeling alive for no better reason than

that it was a feeling, would appear as wastefully extravagant to Oliver

as to the unimaginative majority of his sex. Such pure, sublime,

uncalculating folly belonged to woman alone!

When, at last, supper was over and the children were safely in bed, she

came downstairs to Oliver, who was smoking a cigar over a newspaper, and

asked carelessly:

"At what time do you start in the morning?"

"I'd like to be up by five," he replied, without lowering his paper.

"We're to meet the hounds at Croswell's store at a quarter of six, so

I'll have to get off by five at the latest. I wanted my horse fresh for

to-morrow, that's why I only went a mile or two this afternoon," he

added.

"Susan's to lend me Belle. I'm going with you," she said, after a pause

in which he had begun to read his paper again. This habit of treating

her as if she were not present when he wanted to read or to work, was,

she remembered, one of the things she had insisted upon in the beginning

of her marriage.

"By Jove!" he exclaimed, and the paper dropped from his hands. "I'm

jolly glad, but what will you do about the children?"

"Mother is coming to look after them. I'll be back in time to hear

Harry's lessons, I suppose."

"Why, of course; but, look here, you'll be awfully sore. You haven't

ridden after the hounds since I knew you. You might even get a fall."

"I used to go, though, a great deal--and it won't hurt me to be stiff

for a few days. Besides, I want to take up hunting again."

Her motive was beyond him--perhaps because of her nearness, which

prevented his getting the proper perspective of vision. For all his

keenness of insight, he failed utterly to see into the mysterious mind

of his wife. He could not penetrate that subtle interplay of traditional

virtues and discover that she was in the clutch of one of the oldest and

most savage of the passions.

"Then you'd better go to bed early and get some sleep," he said. "I

suppose we'll have a cup of coffee before starting."

"I'll make it on the oil stove while I am dressing. Marthy won't be up

then."

"Well, I'll come upstairs in ten minutes," he replied, taking up his

paper again. "I only want to finish this article."

In the morning when she opened the old green shutters and looked out of

the window, the horses, having been saddled by candlelight, were

standing under the mulberry tree at the gate. Eight years ago, in her

girlhood, she would have awakened in a delicious excitement on the

morning of a fox-hunt, and have dressed as eagerly as if she were going

to a ball; but to-day, while she lit the oil-stove in the hall room and

put on the kettle of water, she was supported not by the hope of

pleasure, but by a dull, an almost indefinable sensation of dread. The

instinct of woman to adjust her personality to the changing ideals of

the man she loves--this instinct older than civilization, rooted in

tragedy, and existing by right of an unconquerable necessity--rose

superior at the moment to that more stable maternal passion with which

it has conflicted since the beginning of motherhood. While she put on

her riding-habit and tied up the plait of her hair, the one thought in

Virginia's mind was that she must be, at all costs, the kind of woman

that Oliver wanted.

A little later, when they set out under the mulberry trees, she glanced

at him wistfully, as though she wanted him to praise the way she looked

in the saddle. But his eyes were on the end of the street, where a

little company of riders awaited them, and before she could ask a

question, Abby's high voice was heard exclaiming pleasantly upon her

presence. Not a particularly imposing figure, because of her rather

short legs, when she was on the ground, it was impossible for Virginia

to deny that Abby was amazingly handsome on horseback. Plump, dark, with

a superb bosom, and a colour in her cheeks like autumnal berries, she

had never appeared to better advantage than she did, sitting on her

spirited bay mare under an arch of scarlet leaves which curved over her

head. Turning at their approach, she started at a brisk canter up the

road, and as Virginia followed her, the sound of the horn floated, now

loud, now faint, out of the pale mist that spun fanciful silken webs

over the trees and bushes.

"Remember to look out for the creeks. That's where the danger comes,"

said Oliver, riding close to her, and he added nervously, "Don't try to

keep up with Abby."

Ahead of them stretched a deserted Virginia road, with its look of

brooding loneliness, as if it had waited patiently through the centuries

for a civilization which had never come; and on the right of it, beyond

a waste of scarlet sumach and sassafras and a winding creek screened in

elder bushes, the dawn was breaking slowly under a single golden-edged

cloud. Somebody on Virginia's left--a large, raw-boned, passionate

huntsman, in an old plum-coloured overcoat with a velvet collar--was

complaining loudly that they had started too late and the fox would have

gone to his lair before they reached the main party. Except for an oath,

which he rapped out by way of an emphasis not intended for the ladies,

he might have been conducting a religious revival, so solemnly

energetic, so deeply moved, was his manner. The hunt, which observed

naturally the characteristics of a society that was ardently

individualistic even in its sports, was one of those informal,

"go-as-you-please" affairs in which the supreme joy of killing is not

hampered by tedious regulations or unnecessary restrictions. The chief

thing was to get a run--to start a rare red fox, if luck was good,

because he was supposed to run straight by nature and not to move in

circles after the inconsiderate manner of the commoner grey sort. But

Providence, being inattentive to the needs of hunters in the

neighbourhood of Dinwiddie, had decreed that the red fox should live

there mainly in the vivid annals of old sportsmen.

"A grey fox with red ears. The best run I ever had. Tried to get in the

crotch of a hickory tree at the end. Was so exhausted he couldn't stir a

foot when the hounds got him." While they waited at the crossroads

before a little country store, where the pack of hounds, lean, cringing,

habitually hungry creatures, started from beneath an old field pine on

the right, Virginia heard the broken phrases blown on the wind, which

carried the joyous notes of the horn over the meadows. The casual

cruelty of the words awoke no protest in her mind, because it was a

cruelty to which she was accustomed. If the sport had been unknown in

Dinwiddie, and she had read of it as the peculiar activity of the

inhabitants of the British Islands, she would probably have condemned it

as needlessly brutal and degrading. But with that universal faculty of

the human mind to adjust its morality to fit its inherited physical

habits, she regarded "the rights of the fox" to-day with something of

the humorous scorn of sentimental rubbish with which her gentler

grandmother had once regarded "the rights of the slave." For centuries

the hunt had been one of the cherished customs of Dinwiddians; and

though she could not bear to see a fly caught in a web, it would never

have occurred to her to question the humanity of any sport in which her

ancestors had delighted. In her girlhood the sound of the horn had

called to her blood with all the intoxicating associations it awoke in

the raw-boned, energetic rider in the plum-coloured coat--but to-day

both the horn and the familiar landscape around her had grown strange

and unhomelike. For the first time since her birth she and the country

were out of harmony.

In the midst of the hounds, in the centre of the old field on the right,

the huntsman, who was at the same time master and owner of the dogs,

brandished a long raw-hide whip, flexible from the handle, which was

pleasantly known in Dinwiddie as a "mule-skinner." His face, burned to

the colour of ripe wheat, wore a rapt and exalted look, as though the

chasing of a small animal to its death had called forth his latent

spiritual ardours. Beyond him, like a low, smouldering fire, ran the red

and gold of the abandoned field.

"Please be careful, Virginia," said Oliver again, as they left the road

and cantered in the direction of a clump of pine woods in a hollow

beyond a rotting "snake" fence.

But she had seen his eyes on Abby a minute before, and had heard his

laugh as he answered her. A wave of recklessness broke over her, and she

felt that she despised fear with all her Pendleton blood, which loved a

fight only less passionately than it loved a sermon. Whatever

happened--if she broke her neck--she resolved that she would keep up

with Abby! With the drumming of the blood in her ears, an almost savage

joy awoke in her. Deep down in her, so deep that it was buried beneath

the Virginia Pendleton whom she and her world knew, there stirred

faintly the seeds of that ancient lust of cruelty from which have sprung

the brutal pleasures of men. The part of her--that small secret

part--which was primitive answered to the impulse of jealousy as it did

to the rapturous baying of the hounds out of the red and gold distance.

A branch grazed her cheek; her hat went as she raced down the high banks

of a stream; the thicket of elder tore the ribbon from her head, and

loosened her dark flying hair from its braid. In that desolate country,

in the midst of the October meadows, with the cries of the hounds

rising, like the voice of mortal tragedy, out of the tinted mist on the

marshes, the drama of human passions--which is the only drama for the

world's stage--was played out to an ending: love, jealousy, envy,

desire, desperation, regret--

But when the hunt was over, and she rode home, with a bedraggled brush,

which had once been grey, tied to her bridle, all the gorgeous pageantry

of the autumnal landscape seemed suddenly asking her: "What is the use?"

Her mood had altered, and she felt that her victory was as worthless as

the mud-stained fox's brush that swung mockingly back and forth from her

bridle. The excitement of the chase had ebbed away, leaving only the

lifeless satisfaction of the reward. She had neglected her children, she

had risked her life--and all for the sake of wresting a bit of dead fur

out of Abby's grasp. A spirit which was not her spirit, which was so old

that she no longer recognized that it had any part in her, which was yet

so young that it burned in her heart with the unquenchable flame of

youth--this spirit, which was at the same time herself and not herself,

had driven her, as helpless as a fallen leaf, in a chase that she

despised, towards a triumph that was worthless.

"By Jove, you rode superbly, Virginia! I had no idea you could do it,"

said Oliver, as they trotted into Dinwiddie.

She smiled back at him, and her smile was tired, dust-stained,

enigmatical.

"No, you did not know that I could do it," she answered.

"You'll keep it up now, won't you?" he asked pleadingly.

For an instant, looking away from him over the radiant fields, she

pondered the question. The silence which had settled around her was

unbroken by the sound of the horses' hoofs, by the laughter of the

hunters, by the far-off soughing of the pine trees in the forest; and

into this silence, which seemed to cover an eternity, the two

Virginias--the Virginia who desired and the Virginia who had learned

from the ages to stifle her desire--wrestled for the first time

together.

"Virginia!" floated Abby's breezy tones from the street behind her, and

turning, she rode back to the Goodes' gate, where the others were

dismounting. "Virginia, aren't you going to Atlantic City with us

to-morrow?"

Again she hesitated. Almost unconsciously her gaze passed from Abby to

Oliver, and she saw his pride in her in the smile with which he watched

her.

"Yes, I'll go with you," she replied after a minute.

She had, for once in her life, done the thing she wanted to do simply

because she wanted to do it. She had won back what she was losing; she

had fought a fair fight and she had triumphed; yet as she rode down the

street to her gate, there was none of the exultation of victory, none of

the fugitive excitement of pleasure even in her heart. Like other

mortals in other triumphant instants, she was learning that the fruit of

desire may be sweet to the eyes and bitter on the lips. She had

sacrificed duty to pleasure, and suddenly she had discovered that to one

with her heritage of good and evil the two are inseparable.

CHAPTER VIII

THE PANG OF MOTHERHOOD

In the night Harry awoke crying. He had dreamed, he said between his

sobs, when Virginia, slipperless and in her nightdress, bent over him,

that his mother was going away from him forever.

"Only for two nights, darling. Here, lean close against mother. Don't

you know that she wouldn't stay away from her precious boy?"

"But two nights are so long. Aren't two nights almost forever?"

"Why, my lamb, it was just two nights ago that grandma came over and

told you the Bible story about Joseph and his brothers. That was only a

teeny-weeny time ago, wasn't it?"

"But you were here, then mamma. And this morning was almost forever. You

stayed out so long that Lucy said you weren't coming back any more."

"That was naughty of Lucy because she is old enough to know better. Why

do you choke that way? Does your throat hurt you?"

"It hurts because you are going away, mamma."

"But I'm going only to be with papa, precious. Don't you want poor papa

to have somebody with him?"

"He's so big he can go by himself. But suppose the black man should come

in the night while you are away, and I'd get scared and nobody would

hear me."

"Grandma would hear you, Harry, and there isn't any black man that comes

in the night. You must put that idea out of your head, dear. You're

getting too big a boy to be afraid of the dark."

"Four isn't big, is it?"

"You're nearer five than four now, honey. Let me button your nightgown,

and lie down and try to go to sleep while mamma sings to you. Does your

throat really hurt you?"

"It feels as if it had teensy-weensy marbles in it. They came there when

I woke up in the dark and thought that you were going away to-morrow."

"Well, if your throat hurts you, of course mamma won't leave you. Open

your mouth wide now so I can look at it."

She lighted a candle while Harry, kneeling in the middle of his little

bed, followed her with his blue eyes, which looked three times their

usual size because of his flushed cheeks and his mounting excitement.

His throat appeared slightly inflamed when she held the candle close to

it, and after tucking him beneath the bed-clothes, she poured a little

camphorated oil into a cup and heated it on the small alcohol lamp she

kept in the nursery.

"Mamma is going to put a nice bandage on your throat, and then she is

going to lie down beside you and sing you to sleep," she said

cheerfully, as she cut off a strip of flannel from an old petticoat and

prepared to saturate it with the heated oil.

"Will you stay here all night?"

"All night, precious, if you'll be good and go fast asleep while I am

singing."

Holding tightly to her nightdress, Harry cuddled down between the

pillows with a contented sigh. "Then I don't mind about the marbles in

my throat," he said.

"But mamma minds, and she wants to cure them before morning. Now lie

very still while she wraps this good flannel bandage over the sore

places."

"I'll lie very still if you'll hold me, mamma."

Blowing out the candle, she crept into the little bed beside him, and

lay singing softly until his hands released their desperate grasp of her

nightdress, and he slipped quietly off to sleep. Even then, remembering

her promise, she did not go back to her bedroom until daylight.

"I wonder what makes Harry so afraid of the dark?" she asked, when

Oliver awoke and turned questioningly towards her. "He worked himself

really sick last night just from pure nervousness. I had to put

camphorated oil on his throat and chest, and lie beside him until

morning. He is sleeping quietly now, but it simply frightens me to death

when one of them complains of sore throat."

"You've spoiled him, that's what's the matter," replied Oliver, yawning.

"As long as you humour him, he'll never outgrow these night terrors."

"But how can you tell whether the fright makes him sick or sickness

brings on the fright? His throat was really red, there's no doubt about

that, but I couldn't see last night that it was at all ulcerated."

"He gives you more trouble than both the other children put together."

"Well, he's a boy, and boys do give one more trouble. But, then, you

have less patience with him, Oliver."

"That's because he's a boy, and I like boys to show some pluck even when

they are babies. Lucy and Jenny never raise these midnight rows whenever

they awake in the dark."

"They are not nearly so sensitive. You don't understand Harry."

"Perhaps I don't, but I can see that you are ruining him."

"Oh, Oliver! How can you say such a cruel thing to me?"

"I didn't mean to be cruel, Jinny, and you know it, but all the same it

makes me positively sick to see you make a slave of yourself over the

children. Why, you look as if you hadn't slept for a week. You are

positively haggard."

"But I have to be up with Harry when he is ill. How in the world could I

help it?"

"You know he kicks up these rows almost every night, and you humour

every one of his whims as if it were the first one. Don't you ever get

tired?"

"Of course I do, but I can't let my child suffer even if it is only from

fear. You haven't any patience, Oliver. Don't you remember the time when

you used to be afraid of things?"

"I was never afraid of the dark in my life. No sensible child is, if he

is brought up properly."

"Do you mean I am not bringing up my children----" Her tears choked her

and she could not finish the sentence.

"I don't mean anything except that you are making an old woman of

yourself before your time. You've let yourself go until you look ten

years older than----"

He checked himself in time, but she understood without his words that he

had started to say, "ten years older than Abby." Yes, Abby did look

young--amazingly young--but, then, what else had she to think of?

She lay down, but she was trembling so violently that she sat up quickly

again in order to recover her self-possession more easily. It seemed to

her that the furious beating of her heart must make him understand how

he had wounded her. It was the first discussion approaching a quarrel

they had had since their marriage, for she, who was so pliable in all

other matters, had discovered that she could become as hard as iron

where the difference related to Harry.

"You are unjust, Oliver. I think you ought to see it," she said in a

voice which she kept by an effort from breaking.

"I'll never see it, Jinny," and some dogged impulse to hurt her more

made him add, "It's for Harry's sake as well as yours that I'm

speaking."

"For Harry's sake? Oh, you don't mean--you can't really mean that you

think I'm not doing the best for my child, Oliver?"

A year ago Oliver would have surrendered at once before the terror in

her eyes; but in those twelve long months of effort, of hope, of balked

ambition, of bitter questioning, and of tragic disillusionment, a new

quality had developed in his character, and the generous sympathy of

youth had hardened at thirty-four to the cautious cynicism of

middle-age. It is doubtful if even he himself realized how transient

such a state must be to a nature whose hidden springs were moved so

easily by the mere action of change--by the effect of any alteration in

the objects that surrounded him. Because the enthusiasm of youth was

exhausted at the minute, it seemed to him that he had lost it forever.

And to Virginia, who saw but one thing at a time and to whom that one

thing was always the present instant, it seemed that the firm ground

upon which she trod had crumbled beneath her.

"Well, if you want the truth," he said quietly (as if any mother ever

wanted the truth about such a matter), "I think you make a mistake to

spoil Harry as you do."

"But," she brought out the words with a pathetic quiver, "I treat him

just as I do the others, and you never say anything about my spoiling

them."

"Oh, the others are girls. Girls aren't so easily ruined somehow. They

don't get such hard knocks later on, so it makes less difference about

them."

As she sat there in bed, propped up on her elbow, which trembled

violently against the pillows, with her cambric nightdress, trimmed only

with a narrow band of crocheted lace, opened at her slender throat, and

her hair, which was getting thin at the temples, drawn unbecomingly back

from her forehead, she looked, indeed, as Oliver had thought, "at least

ten years older than Abby." Though she was not yet thirty, the delicate,

flower-like bloom of her beauty was already beginning to fade. The

spirit which had animated her yesterday appeared to have gone out of her

now. He thought how lovely she had been at twenty when he saw her for

the first time after his return to Dinwiddie; and a sudden anger seized

him because she was letting herself break, because she was so needlessly

sacrificing her youth and her beauty.

An hour later she got up and dressed herself, with the feeling that she

had not rested a minute during the night. Harry was listless and fretful

when he awoke, and while she put on his clothes, she debated with

herself whether or not she should summon old Doctor Fraser from around

the corner. When his lesson hour came, he climbed into her lap and went

to sleep with his hot little head on her shoulder, and though he seemed

better by evening, she was still so anxious about him that she forgot

that she had promised Abby to go with them to Atlantic City until Oliver

came in at dusk and reminded her.

"Aren't you going, Virginia?" he inquired, as he hunted in the closet

for his bag which she had not had time to pack.

"I can't, Oliver. Harry isn't well. He has been unlike himself all day,

and I am afraid to leave him."

"He looks all right," he remarked, bending over the child in Virginia's

lap. "Does anything hurt you, Harry?"

"He doesn't seem to know exactly what it is," answered Virginia, "but if

he isn't well by morning, I'll send for Doctor Fraser."

"He's got a good colour, and I believe he's as well as he ever was,"

replied Oliver, while a curious note of hostility sounded in his voice.

"There's nothing the matter with the boy," he added more positively

after a minute. "Aren't you coming, Virginia?"

She looked up at him from the big rocking-chair in which she sat with

Harry in her arms, and as she did so, both became conscious that the

issue had broadened from a question of her going to Atlantic City into a

direct conflict of wills. The only thing that could make her oppose him

had happened for the first time since her marriage. The feminine impulse

to yield was overmatched by the maternal impulse to protect. She would

have surrendered her soul to him for the asking; but she could not

surrender, even had she desired to do so, the mother love which had

passed into her from out the ages before she had been, and which would

pass through her into the ages to come after her.

"Of course, if the little chap were really suffering, I'd be as anxious

about staying as you are," said Oliver impatiently; "but there's nothing

the matter. You're all right, aren't you, Harry?"

"Yes, I'm all right," repeated Harry, yawning and snuggling closer to

Virginia, "but I'm sleepy."

"He isn't all right," insisted Virginia obstinately. "There's something

wrong with him. I don't know what it is, but he isn't in the least like

himself."

"It's just your imagination. You've got the children on the brain,

Virginia. Don't you remember the time you woke me in the night and sent

me after Doctor Fraser because Jenny had a bad attack of the hiccoughs?"

"I know," acknowledged Virginia humbly. She could be humble enough, but

what good did that do when she was, as he told himself irritably, "as

stubborn as a mule"? Her softness--she had seemed as soft as flowers

when he married her--had been her greatest charm for him after her

beauty; and now, at the end of eight years in which she had appeared as

delightfully invertebrate as he could have desired, she revealed to his

astonished eyes a backbone that was evidently made of iron. She was

immovable, he admitted, and because she was immovable he was conscious

of a sharp unreasonable impulse to reduce her to the pliant curves of

her girlhood. After eight years of an absolute supremacy, which had been

far from good for him, his will had been tripped up at last by so small

a thing as a mere whim of Virginia's.

"You told Abby you would go," he urged, exasperated rather than soothed

by her humility. "And it's too late now for her to ask any one else."

"I'm so sorry, dear, but I never once thought about it. I've been so

worried all day."

He looked at the child, lying flushed and drowsy in Virginia's arms, and

his face hardened until a latent brutality crept out around his

handsome, but loosely moulded, lips. The truth was that Harry had never

looked healthier than he did at that instant in the firelight, and the

whole affair appeared to Oliver only another instance of what he called

Virginia's "sensational motherhood."

"Can't you see for yourself that he's perfectly well?" he asked.

"I know he looks so, dear, but he isn't."

"Well, here's your mother. Leave it to her. She will agree with me."

"Why, what is it, Jinny?" asked Mrs. Pendleton, laying her bundle on the

couch (for she had come prepared to spend the night), and regarding

Oliver with the indulgent eyes of an older generation.

"Virginia says at the last minute that she won't go with us," said

Oliver, angry, yet caressing as he always was in his manner to his

mother-in-law, to whom he was sincerely devoted. "She's got into her

head that there's something wrong with Harry, but you can tell by

looking at the child that he is perfectly well."

"But I was up with him last night, mother. His throat hurts him," broke

in Virginia in a voice that was full of emotion.

"He certainly looks all right," remarked Mrs. Pendleton, "and I can take

care of him if anything should be wrong." Then she added very gravely,

"If you can't go, of course Oliver must stay at home, too, Virginia."

"I can't," said Oliver; "not just for a whim, anyway. It would break up

the party. Besides, I didn't get a holiday all summer, and I'll blow up

that confounded bank unless I take a change."

In the last quarter of an hour the trip had become of tremendous

importance to him. From a trivial incident which he might have

relinquished a week ago without regret, the excursion with Abby had

attained suddenly the dignity and the power of an event in his life.

Opposition had magnified inclination into desire.

"I don't think it will do for Oliver to go without you, Jinny," said

Mrs. Pendleton, and the gravity of her face showed how carefully she was

weighing her words.

"But I can't go, mother. You don't understand," replied Virginia, while

her lips worked convulsively. No one could understand--not even her

mother. Of the three of them, it is probable that she alone realized the

complete significance of her decision.

"Well, it's too late now, anyway," remarked Oliver shortly. "You

wouldn't have time to dress and catch the train even if you wanted to."

Taking up his bag, he kissed her carelessly, shook hands with Mrs.

Pendleton, and throwing a "Good-bye, General!" to Harry, went out of the

door.

As he vanished, Virginia started up quickly, called "Oliver!" under her

breath, and then sat down again, drawing her child closer in her arms.

Her face had grown grey and stricken like the face of an old woman.

Every atom of her quivered with the longing to run after him, to yield

to his wish, to promise anything he asked of her. Yet she knew that if

he came back, they would only pass again through the old wearing

struggle of wills. She had chosen not as she desired to, but as she

must, and already she was learning that life forces one in the end to

abide by one's choices.

"Oh, Virginia, I am afraid it was a mistake," said Mrs. Pendleton in an

agonized tone. The horror of a scandal, which was stronger in the women

of her generation than even the horror of illness, still darkened her

mind.

A shiver passed through Virginia and left her stiller and graver than

before.

"No, it was not a mistake, mother," she answered quietly. "I did what I

was obliged to do. Oliver could not understand."

As she uttered the words, she saw Oliver's face turned to Abby with the

gay and laughing expression she had seen on it when the two rode down

Old Street together, and a wave of passionate jealousy swept over her.

She had let him go alone; he was angry with her; and for three days he

would be with Abby almost every minute. And suddenly, she heard spoken

by a mocking voice at the back of her brain: "You look at least ten

years older than Abby."

"It does seem as if he might have stayed at home," remarked Mrs.

Pendleton; "but he is so used to having his own way that it is harder

for him to give it up than for the rest of us. Your father says you have

spoiled him."

She had spoiled him--this she saw clearly now, she who had never seen

anything clearly until it was too late for sentimentality to work its

harm. From the day of her marriage she had spoiled him because spoiling

him had been for her own happiness as well as for his. She had yielded

to him since her chief desire had been simply to yield and to satisfy.

Her unselfishness had been merely selfishness cloaked in the familiar

aspect of duty. Another vision of him, not as he looked when he was

riding with Abby, but as he had appeared to her in the early days of

their marriage, floated before her. He had been hers utterly then--hers

with his generous impulses, his high ideals, his undisciplined emotions.

And what had she done with him? What were her good intentions--what was

her love, even, worth--when her intentions and her love alike had been

so lacking in wisdom? It was as if she condemned herself with a judgment

which was not her own, as if her life-long habit of seeing only the

present instant had suddenly deserted her.

"He has been so nervous and unlike himself ever since the failure of his

play, mother," she said. "It's hard to understand, but it meant more to

him than a woman can realize."

"I suppose so," returned Mrs. Pendleton sympathetically. "Your father

says that he spoke to him bitterly the other day about being a failure.

Of course, he isn't one in the least, darling," she added reassuringly.

"I sometimes think that Oliver's ambition was the greatest thing in his

life," said Virginia musingly. "It meant to him, I believe, a great deal

of what the children mean to me. He felt that it was himself, and yet in

a way closer than himself. Until that dreadful time in New York I never

understood what his work may mean to a man."

"I wish you could have gone with him, Jinny."

"I couldn't," replied Virginia, as she had replied so often before. "I

know Harry doesn't look sick," she went on with that soft obstinacy

which never attacked and yet never yielded a point, "but something tells

me that he isn't well."

An hour later, when she put him to bed, he looked so gay and rosy that

she almost allowed herself the weakness of a regret. Suppose nothing was

wrong, after all? Suppose, as Oliver had said, she was merely

"sensational"? While she undressed in the dark for fear of awaking

Jenny, who was sleeping soundly in her crib on Virginia's side of the

bed, her mind went back over the two harrowing days through which she

had just lived, and she asked herself, not if she had triumphed for good

over Abby, but if she had really done what was right both for Oliver and

the children. After all, the whole of life came back simply to doing the

thing that was right. So unused was she to the kind of introspection

which weighs emotions as if they were facts, that she thought slowly,

from sheer lack of practice in the subtler processes of reasoning.

Worry, the plain, ordinary sort of worry with which she was unhappily

familiar, had not prepared her for the piercing anguish which follows

the probing of the open wounds in one's soul. To lie sleepless over

butchers' bills was different, somehow, from lying sleepless over the

possible loss of Oliver's love. It was different, and yet, just as she

had asked herself over and over again on those other nights if she had

done right to run up so large an account at Mr. Dewlap's, so she

questioned her conscience now in the hope of finding justification for

Oliver. "Ought I to have gone on the hunt yesterday?" she asked

kneeling, with sore and aching limbs, by the bedside. "Had I a right to

risk my life when the children are so young that they need me every

minute? It is true nothing happened. Providence watched over me; but,

then, something might have happened, and I could have blamed only

myself. I was jealous--for the first time in my life, I was jealous--and

because I was jealous, I did wrong and neglected my duty. Yesterday I

sacrificed the children to Oliver, and to-day I sacrificed Oliver to the

children. I love Oliver as much, but I have made the children. They came

only because I brought them into the world. I am responsible for them--I

am responsible for them," she repeated passionately; and a moment later,

she prayed softly: "O Lord, help me to want to do what is right."

Through the night, tired and sore as she was, she hardly closed her

eyes, and she was lying wide awake, with her hand on the railing of

Jenny's crib, and her gaze on the half-bared bough of the old mulberry

tree in the street, when a cry, or less than a cry, a small, choking

whimper, from the nursery, caused her to spring out of bed with a start

and slip into her wrapper which lay across the edge of the quilt.

"I'm coming, darling," she called softly, and the answer came back in

Harry's voice: "Mamma, I'm afraid!"

Without waiting to put on her slippers, for one of them had slid under

the bed, she ran across the carpet and through the doorway into the

adjoining room.

"What is it, my lamb? Does anything hurt you?" she asked anxiously.

"I'm afraid, mamma."

"What are you afraid of? Mamma is here, precious."

His little hands were hot when she clasped them, and the pathetic wonder

in his blue eyes made her heart stand still with a fear greater than

Harry's. Ever since the children had come she had lived in terror of a

serious illness attacking them.

"Where does it hurt you, darling? Can't you tell me?"

"It feels so funny when I swallow, mamma. It's all full of flannel."

"Will you open your mouth wide, then, and let mamma mop your throat with

turpentine?"

But Harry hated turpentine even more than he hated the sore throat, and

he protested with tears while she found the bottle in the bathroom and

swathed the end of the wire mop in cotton. When she brought it to his

bedside, he fought so strenuously that she was obliged at last to give

up. His fever had excited him, and he sobbed violently while she

applied the bandages to his throat and chest.

"Is it any better, dear?" she asked desperately at the end of an hour in

which he had lain, weeping and angry, in her arms.

"It feels funny. I don't like it," he sobbed, pushing her from him.

"Then I'll send for Doctor Fraser. He'll make you well."

But he didn't want Doctor Fraser, who gave the meanest medicines. He

didn't want anybody. He hated everybody. He hated Lucy. He hated Jenny.

When at last day came, and Marthy appeared to know what Virginia wanted

for breakfast, he was still vowing passionately that he hated them all.

"Marthy, run at once for Doctor Fraser. Harry is quite sick," said

Virginia, pale to the lips.

"But I won't see him, mamma, and I won't take his medicines. They are

the meanest medicines."

"Perhaps he won't give you any, precious, and if he does, mamma will

taste every single one for you."

Then Jenny began to beg to get up, and Lucy, who had been watching with

dispassionate curiosity from the edge of her little bed, was sent to

amuse her until Marthy's return.

"Suppose I had gone!" thought Virginia, while an overwhelming

thankfulness swept the anxiety out of her mind. Not until the servant

reappeared, dragging the fat old doctor after her, did Virginia remember

that she was still barefooted, and go into her bedroom to search for her

slippers.

"You don't think he is seriously sick, do you, doctor? Is there any

need to be alarmed?" she asked, and her voice entreated him to allay her

anxiety.

The doctor, a benevolent soul in a body which had run to fat from lack

of exercise, was engaged in holding Harry's tongue down with a silver

spoon, while, in spite of the child's furious protests, he leisurely

examined his throat. When the operation was over, and Harry, crying,

choking, and kicking, rolled into Virginia's arms, she put the question

again, vaguely rebelling against the gravity in the kind old face which

was turned half away from her:

"There's nothing really the matter, is there, doctor?"

He turned to her, and laid a caressing, if heavy, hand on her shoulder,

which shook suddenly under the thin folds of her dressing-gown. After

forty years in which he had watched suffering and death, he preserved

still his native repugnance to contact with any side of life that did

not have a comfortable feeling to it.

"Oh, we'll get him all right soon, with some good nursing," he said

gently, "but I think we're going to have a bit of an illness on our

hands."

"But not serious, doctor? It isn't anything serious?"

She felt suddenly so weak that she could hardly stand, and instinctively

she reached out to grasp the large, protecting arm of the physician.

Even then his bland professional smile, which had in it something of the

serene detachment of the everlasting purpose of which it was a part, did

not fade, hardly changed even, on his features.

"Well, I think we'd better get the other children away. It might be

serious if they all had it on our hands."

"Had it? Had what? Oh, doctor--not--diphtheria?"

She brought out the word with a face of such unutterable horror that he

turned his eyes away, lest the memory of her look should interfere with

his treatment of the next case he visited. There was something infernal

in the sound of the thing which always knocked over the mothers of his

generation. He had never seen one of them who could hear it without

going to pieces on his hands; and for that reason he never mentioned the

disease by name unless they drove him to it. They feared it as they

might have feared the plague--and even more! If the medical profession

would begin calling it something else, he wondered if the unmitigated

terror of it wouldn't partially subside?

"Well, it looks like that now, Jinny," he said soothingly; "but we'll

come out all right, never fear. It isn't a bad case, you know, and the

chief thing is to get the other children out of danger."

At this she went over like a log on the bed, and it was only after he

had found the bottle of camphor on the mantelpiece and held it to her

nostrils, that she revived sufficiently to sit up again. But as soon as

her strength came back, her courage surprised and rejoiced him. After

that one sign of weakness, she became suddenly strong, and he knew by

the expression of her face, for he had had great experience with

mothers, that he could count on her not to break down again while he

needed her.

"I'd like to get a tent made of some sheets and keep a kettle boiling

under it," he said, for he was an old man and belonged to the dark ages

of medicine. "But first of all I'll get the children over to your

mother's. They'd better not come in here again. I'll ask the servant to

attend to them."

"You'll find her in the dining-room," replied Virginia, while she

straightened Harry's bed and made him more comfortable. The weakness had

passed, leaving a numbed and hardened feeling as though she had turned

to wood; and when, a little later, she looked out of the door to wave

good-bye to Lucy and Jenny, she was amazed to find that she felt almost

indifferent. Every emotion, even her capacity for physical sensation,

seemed to respond to the immediate need of her, to the exhaustless

demands on her bodily strength and her courage. As long as there was

anything to be done, she was sure now that she should be able to keep up

and not lose control of herself.

"May we come back soon, mamma?" asked Lucy, standing on tiptoe to wave

at her.

"Just as soon as Harry is well, darling. Ask grandpa to pray that he

will be well soon, won't you?"

"Jenny'll pay," lisped the baby, from Doctor Fraser's arms, where, with

her cap on one side and her little feet kicking delightedly, she was

beguiled by the promise of a birthday cake over at grandma's.

"I'll look in again in an hour or two," said the doctor in his jovial

tones as he swung down the stairs. Then Lucy pattered after him, and in

a few minutes the front door closed loudly behind them, and Virginia

went back to the nursery, where Harry was coughing the strangling cough

that tore at her heart.

By nightfall he had grown very ill, and when the next dawn came, it

found her, wan, haggard, and sleepless, fighting beside the old doctor

under the improvised tent of sheets which covered the little bed. The

thought of self went from her so utterly that she only remembered she

was alive when Marthy brought food and tried to force it between her

lips.

"But you must swallow it, ma'am. You need to keep up your strength."

"How do you think he looks, Marthy? Does he feel quite so hot to you? He

seems to breathe a little better, doesn't he?"

And during the long day, while the patch of sunlight grew larger, lay

for an hour like yellow silk on the windowsill, and then slowly dwindled

into the shadow, she sat, without moving, between the bed and the table

on which stood the bottles of medicine, a glass, and a pitcher of water.

When the child slept, overcome by the stupor of fever, she watched him,

with drawn breath, lest he should fade away from her if she were to

withdraw her passionate gaze for an instant. When he awoke and lay

moaning, while his little body shook with the long stifling gasps that

struggled between his lips, she held him tightly clasped in her arms,

with a woman's pathetic faith in the power of a physical pressure to

withstand the immaterial forces of death. A hundred times during the day

he aroused himself, stirred faintly in his feverish sleep, and called

her name in the voice of terror with which he used to summon her in the

night.

"It isn't the black man now, darling, is it? Remember there is no black

man, and mamma is close here beside you."

No, it wasn't the black man; he wasn't afraid of the darkness now, but

he would like to have his ship. When she brought it, he played for a

few minutes, and dozed off still grasping the toy in his hands. At

twelve the doctor came, and again at four, when the patch of sunlight,

by which she told the hours, had begun to grow fainter on the

windowsill.

"He is better, doctor, isn't he? Don't you notice that he struggles less

when he breathes?"

He looked at her with an expression of contemplative pity in his old

watery eyes, and she gave a little cry and stretched out her hands,

blindly groping.

"Doctor, I'll do anything--anything, if you'll only save him." An

impulse to reach beyond him to some impersonal, cosmic Power greater

than he was, made her add desperately: "I'll never ask for anything else

in my life. I'll give up everything, if you'll only promise me that you

will save him."

She stood up, drawing her thin figure, as tense as a cord, to its full

height, and beneath the flowered blue dressing-gown her shoulder blades

showed sharply under their fragile covering of flesh. Her hair, which

she had not undone since the first shock of Harry's illness, hung in

straight folds on either side of her pallid and haggard face. Even the

colour of her eyes seemed to have changed, for their flower-like blue

had faded to a dull grey.

"If we can pull through the night, Jinny," he said huskily, and added

almost sternly, "you must bear up, so much depends on you. Remember, it

is your first serious illness, but it may not be your last. You've got

to take the pang of motherhood along with the pleasure, my dear----"

The pang of motherhood! Long after he had left her, and she had heard

the street gate click behind him, she sat motionless, repeating the

words, by Harry's little bed. The pang of motherhood--this was what she

was suffering--the poignant suspense, the quivering waiting, the abject

terror of loss, the unutterable anguish of the nerves, as if one's heart

were being slowly torn out of one's body. She had had the joy, and now

she was enduring the inevitable pang which is bound up, like a hidden

pulse, in every mortal delight. Never pleasure without pain, never

growth without decay, never life without death. The Law ruled even in

love, and all the pitiful little sacrifices which one offered to

Omnipotence, which one offered blindly to the Power that might separate,

with a flaming sword, the cause from the effect, the substance from the

shadow--what of them? While Harry lay there, wrapped in that burning

stupor, she prayed, not as she had been taught to pray in her childhood,

not with the humble and resigned worship of civilization, but in the

wild and threatening lament of a savage who seeks to reach the ears of

an implacable deity. In the last twenty-four hours the Unknown Power she

entreated had changed, in her imagination, to an idol who responded only

to the shedding of blood.

"Only spare my child and I will give up everything else!" she cried from

the extremity of her anguish. The sharp edge of the bed hurt her bosom

and she pressed frantically against it. Had it been possible to lacerate

her body, to cut her flesh with knives, she might have found some

pitiable comfort in the mere physical pain. Beside the agony in her

mind, a pang of the flesh would have been almost a joy.

When at last she rose from her knees, Harry lay, breathing quietly,

with his eyes closed and the toy ship on the blanket beside him. His

childish features had shrunken in a day until they appeared only half

their natural size, and a faint bluish tinge had crept over his face,

wiping out all the sweet rosy colour. But he had swallowed a few

spoonfuls of his last cup of broth, and the painful choking sound had

ceased for a minute. The change, slight as it was, had followed so

closely upon her prayers, that, while it lasted, she passed through one

of those spiritual crises which alter the whole aspect of life. An

emotion, which was a curious mixture of superstitious terror and

religious faith, swept over her, reviving and invigorating her heart.

She had abased herself in the dust before God--she had offered all her

life to Him if He would spare her child--and had He not answered? Might

not Harry's illness, indeed, have been sent to punish her for her

neglect? A shudder of abhorrence passed through her as she remembered

the fox-hunt, and her passion of jealousy. The roll of blue silk, lying

upstairs in a closet in the third storey, appeared to her now not as a

temptation to vanity, but as a reminder of the mortal sin which had

almost cost her the life of her child. And suppose God had not stopped

her in time--suppose she had gone to Atlantic City as Oliver had begged

her to do?

In the room the light faded softly, melting first like frost from the

mirror in the corner beyond the Japanese screen, creeping slowly across

the marble surface of the washstand, lingering, in little ripples, on

the green sash of the windowsill. Out of doors it was still day, and

from where she sat by Harry's bed, she could see, under the raised tent,

every detail of the street standing out distinctly in the grey

twilight. Across the way the houses were beginning to show lights at the

windows, and the old lamplighter was balancing himself unsteadily on his

ladder at the corner. On the mulberry tree near the crossing the broad

bronze leaves swung back and forth in the wind, which sighed restlessly

around the house and drove the naked tendrils of a summer vine against

the green shutters at the window. The fire had gone down, and after she

had made it up very softly, she bent over Harry again, as if she feared

that he might have slipped out of her grasp while she had crossed the

room.

"If he only lives, I will let everything else go. I will think of

nothing except my children. It will make no difference to me if I do

look ten years older than Abby does. Nothing on earth will make any

difference to me, if only God will let him get well."

And with the vow, it seemed to her that she laid her youth down on the

altar of that unseen Power whose mercy she invoked. Let her prayer only

be heard and she would demand nothing more of life--she would spend all

her future years in the willing service of love. Was it possible that

she had imagined herself unhappy thirty-six hours ago--thirty-six hours

ago when her child was not threatened? As she looked back on her past

life, it seemed to her that every minute had been crowned with

happiness. Even the loss of her newborn baby appeared such a little

thing--such a little thing beside the loss of Harry, her only son. Mere

freedom from anxiety showed to her now as a condition of positive bliss.

Six o'clock struck, and Marthy knocked at the door with a cup of milk.

"Do you think he'll be able to swallow any of it?" she asked, and there

were tears in her eyes.

"He is better, Marthy, I am sure he is better. Has mother been here this

afternoon?"

"She stopped at the door, but she didn't like to come in on account of

the children. They are both well, she says, and send you their love. Do

you want any more water in the kettle, ma'am?"

The kettle, which was simmering away beside Harry's bed, under the tent

of sheets, was passed to Marthy through the crack in the door; and when

in a few minutes the girl returned with fresh water, Virginia whispered

to her that he had taken three spoonfuls of milk.

"And he let me mop his throat with turpentine," she said in quivering

tones. "I am sure--oh, I am sure he is better."

"I am praying every minute," replied Marthy, weeping; and it seemed

suddenly to Virginia that a wave of understanding passed between her and

the ignorant mulatto girl, whom she had always regarded as of different

clay from herself. With that miraculous power of grief to level all

things, she felt that the barriers of knowledge, of race, of all the

pitiful superiorities with which human beings have obscured and

decorated the underlying spirit of life, had melted back into the

nothingness from which they had emerged in the beginning. This feeling

of oneness, which would have surprised and startled her yesterday,

appeared so natural to her now, that, after the first instant of

recognition, she hardly thought of it again.

"Thank you, Marthy," she answered gently, and closing the door, went

back to her chair under the raised corner of the sheet. When the doctor

came at nine o'clock she was sitting there, in the same position, so

still and tense that she seemed hardly to be breathing, so ashen grey

that the sheet hanging above her head showed deadly white by contrast

with her face. In those three hours she knew that the clinging tendrils

of personal desire had relaxed their hold forever on life and youth.

"If he doesn't get worse, we'll pull through," said the doctor, turning

from his examination of Harry to lay his hand, which felt as heavy as

lead, on her shoulder. "We've an even chance--if his heart doesn't go

back on us." And he added, "Most mothers are good nurses, Jinny, but I

never saw a better one than you are--unless it was your own mother. You

get it from her, I reckon. I remember when you went through diphtheria

how she sent your father to stay with one of the neighbours, and shut

herself up with old Ailsey to nurse you. I don't believe she undressed

or closed her eyes for a week."

Her own mother! So she was not the only one who had suffered this

anguish--other women, many women, had been through it before she was

born. It was a part of that immemorial pang of motherhood of which the

old doctor had spoken. "But, was I ever in danger? Was I as ill as

Harry?" she asked.

"For twenty-four hours we thought you'd slip through our fingers every

minute. 'Twas only your mother's nursing that kept you alive--I've told

her that twenty times. She never spared herself an instant, and, it may

have been my imagination, but she never seemed to me to be the same

woman afterwards. Something had gone out of her."

Now she understood, now she knew, something had gone out of her, also,

and this something was youth. No woman who had fought with death for a

child could ever be the same afterwards--could ever value again the

small personal joys, when she carried the memory of supreme joy or

supreme anguish buried within her heart. She remembered that her mother

had never seemed young to her, not even in her earliest childhood; and

she understood now why this had been so, why the deeper experiences of

life rob the smaller ones of all vividness, of all poignancy. It had

been so easy for her mother to give up little things, to deny herself,

to do without, to make no further demands on life after the great

demands had been granted her. How often had she said unthinkingly in her

girlhood, "Mother, you never want anything for yourself." Ah, she knew

now what it meant, and with the knowledge a longing seized her to throw

herself into her mother's arms, to sob out her understanding and her

sympathy, to let her feel before it was too late that she comprehended

every step of the way, every throb of the agony!

"I'd spend the night with you, Jinny, if I didn't have to be with Milly

Carrington, who has two children down with it," said the doctor; "but if

there's any change, get Marthy to come for me. If not, I'll be sure to

look in again before daybreak."

When he had gone, she moved the night lamp to the corner of the

washstand, and after swallowing hastily a cup of coffee which Marthy had

brought to her before the doctor's visit, and which had grown quite

tepid and unpalatable, she resumed her patient watch under the raised

end of the sheet. The whole of life, the whole of the universe even, had

narrowed down for her into that faint circle of light which the lamp

drew around Harry's little bed. It was as if this narrow circle beat

with a separate pulse, divided from the rest of existence by its

intense, its throbbing vitality. Here was concentrated for her all that

the world had to offer of hope, fear, rapture, or anguish. The

littleness and the terrible significance of the individual destiny were

gathered into that faintly quivering centre of space--so small a part of

the universe, and yet containing the whole universe within itself!

Outside, in the street, she could see a half-bared bough of the mulberry

tree, arching against a square of window, from which the white curtains

were drawn back; and in order to quiet her broken and disjointed

thoughts, she began to count the leaves as they fell, one by one,

turning softly at the stem, and then floating out into the darkness

beyond. "One. Two. How long that leaf takes to loosen. He is better. The

doctor certainly thought that he was better. If he only gets well. O

God, let him get well, and I will serve you all my life!

Three--four--five--For twenty-four hours we thought you would slip

through our fingers. Somebody said that--somebody--it must have been the

doctor. And he was talking of me, not of Harry. That was twenty-six

years ago, and my mother was enduring then all this agony that I am

feeling to-night. Twenty-six years ago--perhaps at this very hour, she

sat beside me alone as I am sitting now by Harry. And before that other

women went through it. All the world over, wherever there are

mothers--north, south, east, west--from the first baby that was born on

the earth--they have every one suffered what I am suffering now--for it

is the pang of motherhood! To escape it one must escape birth and escape

the love that is greater than one's self." And she understood suddenly

that suffering and love are inseparable, that when one loves another

more than one's self, one has opened the gate by which anguish will

enter. She had forgotten to count the leaves, and when she remembered

and looked again, the last one had fallen. Against the parted white

curtains, the naked bough arched black and solitary. Even the small

silent birds that had swayed dejectedly to and fro on the branches all

day had flown off into the darkness. Presently, the light in the window

went out, and as the hours wore on, a fine drizzling rain began to fall,

as soft as tears, from the starless sky over the mulberry tree. A sense

of isolation greater than any she had ever known attacked her like a

physical chill, and rising, she went over to the fire and stirred the

pile of coal into a flame. She was alone in her despair, and she

realized, with a feeling of terror, that one is always alone when one

despairs, that there is a secret chamber in every soul where neither

love nor sympathy can follow one. If Oliver were here beside her--if he

were standing close to her in that throbbing circle around the bed--she

would still be separated from him by the immensity of that inner space

which is not measured by physical distances. "No, even if he were here,

he could not reach me," she said, and an instant later, with one of

those piercing illuminations which visit even perfectly normal women in

moments of great intensity, she thought quickly, "If every woman told

the truth to herself, would she say that there is something in her which

love has never reached?" Then, reproaching herself because she had left

the bed for a minute, she went back again and bent over the unconscious

child, her whole slender body curving itself passionately into an

embrace. His face was ashen white, except where the skin around his

mouth was discoloured with a faint bluish tinge. His flesh, even his

bones, appeared to have shrunk almost away in twenty-four hours. It was

impossible to imagine that he was the rosy, laughing boy, who had

crawled into her arms only two nights ago. The disease held him like

some unseen spiritual enemy, against which all physical weapons were as

useless as the little toys of a child. How could one fight that sinister

power which had removed him to an illimitable distance while he was

still in her arms? The troubled stupor, which had in it none of the

quiet and the restfulness of sleep, terrorized her as utterly as if it

had been the personal spirit of evil. The invisible forces of Life and

Death seemed battling in the quivering air within that small circle of

light.

While she bent over him, he stirred, raised himself, and then fell back

in a paroxysm of coughing. The violence of the spasm shook his fragile

little body as a rough wind shakes a flower on a stalk. Over his face

the bluish tinge spread like a shadow, and into his eyes there came the

expression of wondering terror which she had seen before only in the

eyes of young startled animals. For an instant it seemed almost as if

the devil of disease were wrestling inside of him, as if the small

vital force she called life would be beaten out in the struggle. Then

the agony passed; the strangling sound ceased, and he grew quiet, while

she wiped the poison from his mouth and nostrils, and made him swallow a

few drops of milk out of a teaspoon.

At the moment, while she fell on her knees by his bedside, it seemed to

her that she had reached that deep place beyond which there is nothing.

* * * * *

"You've pulled him through. We'll have him out of bed before many days

now," said the old doctor at daybreak, and he added cheerfully, "By the

way, your husband came in the front door with me. He wanted to rush up

here at once, but I'm keeping him away because he is obliged to go back

to the bank."

"Poor Oliver," said Virginia gently. "It is terrible on him. He must be

so anxious." But even while she uttered the words, she was conscious of

a curious sensation of unreality, as though she were speaking of a

person whom she had known in another life. It was three days since she

had seen Oliver, and in those three days she had lived and died many

times.

CHAPTER IX

THE PROBLEM OF THE SOUTH

"Father, I want to marry John Henry," said Susan, just as she had said

almost ten years ago, "Father, I want to go to college."

It was a March afternoon, ashen and windy, with flocks of small fleecy

clouds hurrying across a changeable blue sky, and the vague, roving

scents of early spring in the air. After his dinner, which he had taken

for more than fifty years precisely at two o'clock, Cyrus had sat down

for a peaceful pipe on the back porch before returning to the office.

Between the sunken bricks in the little walled-in yard, blades of vivid

green grass had shot up, seeking light out of darkness, and along the

grey wooden ledge of the area the dauntless sunflowers were unfolding

their small stunted leaves. On the railing of the porch a moth-eaten

cat--the only animal for whom Cyrus entertained the remotest

respect--was contentedly licking the shabby fur on her side.

"Father, I want to marry John Henry," repeated Susan, raising her voice

to a higher key and towering like a flesh and blood image of Victory

over the sagging cane chair in which he sat.

Taking his pipe from his mouth, he looked up at her; and so little had

he altered in ten years, that the thought flashed through her mind that

he had actually suffered no change of expression since the afternoon on

which she had asked him to send her to college. As a man he may not have

been impressive, but as a defeating force who could say that he had not

attained his fulfilment? It was as if the instinct of patriarchal

tyranny had entrenched itself in his person as in a last stronghold of

the disappearing order. When he died many things would pass away out of

Dinwiddie--not only the soul and body of Cyrus Treadwell, but the

vanishing myth of the "strong man," the rule of the individual despot,

the belief in the inalienable right of the father to demand blood

sacrifices. For in common with other men of his type, he stood equally

for industrial advancement and for domestic immobility. The body social

might move, but the units that formed the body social must remain

stationary.

"Well, I don't think I'd worry about marrying, if I were you," he

replied, not unkindly, for Susan inspired him with a respect against

which he had struggled in vain. "You are very comfortable now, ain't

you? And I'll see that you are well provided for after my death. John

Henry hasn't anything except his salary, I reckon."

Marriage as an economic necessity was perfectly comprehensible to him,

but it was difficult for him to conceive of anybody indulging in it

simply as a matter of sentiment. That April afternoon was so far away

now that it had ceased to exist even as an historical precedent.

"Yes, but I want to marry him, and I am going to," replied Susan

decisively.

"What arrangements would you make about your mother? It seems to me that

your mother needs your attention."

"Of course I couldn't leave mother. If you agree to it, John Henry is

willing to come here to live as long as I have to look after her. If

not, I shall take her away with me; I have spoken to her, and she is

perfectly willing to go."

The ten years which had left Cyrus at a standstill had developed his

daughter from a girl into a woman. She spoke with the manner of one who

realizes that she holds the situation in her hands, and he yielded to

this assumption of strength as he would have yielded ten years ago had

she been clever enough to use it against him. It was his own manner in a

more attractive guise, if he had only known it; and the Treadwell

determination to get the thing it wanted most was asserting itself in

Susan's desire to win John Henry quite as effectively as it had asserted

itself in Cyrus's passion to possess the Dinwiddie and Central Railroad.

Though the ends were different, the quality which moved father and

daughter towards these different ends was precisely the same. In Cyrus,

it was force degraded; in Susan, it was force refined; but the peculiar

attribute which distinguished and united them was the possession of the

power to command events.

"Take your mother away?" he repeated. "Why, where on earth would you

take her?"

"Then you'll have to agree to John Henry's coming here. It won't make

any difference to you, of course. You needn't see him except at the

table."

"But what would James say about it?" he returned, with the cowardice

natural to the habitual bully. The girl had character, certainly, and

though he disliked character in a woman, he was obliged to admit that

she had not failed to make an impression.

"James won't care, and besides," she added magnificently, "it is none of

his business."

"And it's none of mine, either, I reckon," said Cyrus, with a chuckle.

"Well, of course, it's more of mine," agreed Susan, and her delicious

laugh drowned his chuckle.

She had won her point, and strange to say, she had pleased him rather

than otherwise. He had suddenly a comfortable feeling in his digestive

organs as well as a sense of virtue in his soul. It was impossible not

to feel proud of her as she towered there above him with her superb

body, as fine and as supple as the body of a race horse, and her

splendid courage that made him wish while he looked at her that she,

instead of James, had been born a male. She was not pretty--she had

never been pretty--but he realized for the first time that there might

be something better even for a woman than beauty.

"Thank you, father," she said as she turned away, and he was glad again

to feel that she had conquered him. To be conquered by one's own blood

was different from being conquered by a business acquaintance.

"You mustn't disturb the household, you know," he said, but his voice

did not sound as dry as he had endeavoured to make it.

"I shan't disturb anybody," responded Susan, with the amiability of a

woman who, having gained her point, can afford to be pleasant. Then,

wheeling about suddenly on the threshold, she added, "By the way, I

forgot to tell you that Mandy was here three times this morning asking

to see you. She is in trouble about her son. He was arrested for

shooting a policeman over at Cross's Corner, you know, and the people

down there are so enraged, she's afraid of a lynching. You read about it

in the paper, didn't you?"

Yes, he had read about the shooting--Cross's Corner was only three miles

away--but, if he had ever known the name of Mandy's son, he had

forgotten it so completely that seeing it in print had suggested nothing

to his mind.

"Well, she doesn't expect me to interfere, does she?" he asked shortly.

"I believe she thought you might go over and do something--I don't know

what--help her engage a lawyer probably. She was very pitiable, but

after all, what can one do for a negro that shoots a policeman? There's

Miss Willy calling me!"

She ran indoors, and taking his pipe, which was still smoking, from his

mouth, Cyrus leaned back in his chair and stared intently at the small

fleecy clouds in the west. The cat, having cleaned herself to her

satisfaction, jumped down from the railing, and after rubbing against

his thin legs, leaped gently into his lap.

"Tut-tut!" he remarked grimly; but he did not attempt to dislodge the

animal, and it may be that some secret part of him was gratified by the

attention. He was still sitting there some minutes later, when he heard

the warning click of the back gate, and the figure of Mandy, appeared at

the corner of the kitchen wall. Rising from his chair, he shook the cat

from his knees, and descending the steps, met the woman in the centre of

the walk, where a few hardy dandelions were flattened like buttons

between the bricks.

"Howdy, Mandy. I'm sorry to hear that you're having trouble with that

boy of yours." He saw at once that she was racked by a powerful emotion,

and any emotion affected him unpleasantly as something extravagant and

indecent. Sweat had broken out in glistening clusters over her face and

neck, and her eyes, under the stray wisps of hair, had in them an

expression of dumb and uncomprehending submission.

"Ain't you gwineter git 'im away, Marster?" she began, and stronger even

than her terror was the awe of Cyrus which subdued her voice to a tone

of servile entreaty.

"Why did he shoot a policeman? He knew he'd hang for it," returned Cyrus

sharply, and he added, "Of course I can't get him away. He'll have to

take his deserts. Your race has got to learn that when you break the

law, you must pay for it."

At first he had made as if to push by her, but when she did not move, he

thought better of it and waited for her to speak. The sound of her heavy

breathing, like the breathing of some crouching beast, awoke in him a

curious repulsion. If only one could get rid of such creatures after

their first youth was over! If only every careless act could perish with

the impulse that led to it! If only the dried husks of pleasure did not

turn to weapons against one! These thoughts--or disjointed snatches of

thoughts like these--passed in a confused whirl through his brain as he

stood there. For an instant it was almost as if his accustomed lucidity

of purpose had deserted him; then the disturbance ceased, and with the

renewal of order in his mind, his life-long habit of prompt decision

returned to him.

"Your race has got to learn that when you break the law you must pay for

it," he repeated--for on that sound principle of justice he felt that he

must unalterably take his stand.

"He's all de boy I'se got, Marster," rejoined the negress, with an

indifference to the matter of justice which had led others of her colour

into those subterranean ways where abstract principles are not. "You

ain' done furgot 'im, Marster," she added piteously. "He 'uz born jes

two mont's atter Miss Lindy turnt me outer hyer--en he's jes ez w'ite ez

ef'n he b'longed ter w'ite folks."

But she had gone too far--she had outraged that curious Anglo-Saxon

instinct in Cyrus which permitted him to sin against his race's

integrity, yet forbade him to acknowledge, even to himself, that he bore

any part in the consequences of that sin. Illogical, he might have

admitted, but there are some truths so poisonous that no honest man

could breathe the same air with them.

Taking out his pocket-book, he slowly drew a fifty dollar bill from its

innermost recesses, and as slowly unfolded it. He always handled money

in that careful fashion--a habit which he had inherited from his father

and his grandfather before him, and of which he was entirely

unconscious. Filtering down through so many generations, the mannerism

had ceased at last to be merely a physical peculiarity, and had become

strangely spiritual in its suggestion. The craving for possession, the

singleness of desire, the tenacity of grasp, the dread of

relinquishment, the cold-blooded determination to keep intact the thing

which it had cost so much to acquire--all that was bound up in the

spirit of Cyrus Treadwell, and all that would pass at last with that

spirit from off the earth, was expressed in the gesture with which he

held out the bit of paper to the woman who had asked for his help. "Take

this--it is all I can do for you," he said, "and don't come whining

around me any more. Black or white, the man that commits a murder has

got to hang for it."

A sound broke from the negress that resembled a human cry of grief less

than it did the inarticulate moan of an animal in mortal pain. Then it

stopped suddenly, strangled by that dull weight of usage beneath which

the primal impulse in her was crushed back into silence. Instinctively,

as if in obedience to some reflex action, she reached out and took the

money from his hand, and still instinctively, with the dazed look of one

who performs in delirium the customary movements of every day, she fell

back, holding her apron deprecatingly aside while he brushed past her.

And in her eyes as she gazed after him there dawned the simple wonder of

the brute that asks of Life why it suffers.

Beyond the alley into which the gate opened, Cyrus caught sight of

Gabriel's erect figure hurrying down the side street in the direction of

the Old Ladies' Home, and calling out to him, he scrambled over the ash

heaps and tomato cans, and emerged, irritated but smiling, into the

sunlight.

"I'm on my way to the bank. We'll walk down together," he remarked

almost gently, for, though he disapproved of Gabriel's religious

opinions and distrusted his financial judgment, the war-like little

rector represented the single romance of his life.

"I had intended stopping at the Old Ladies' Home, but I'll go on with

you instead," responded Gabriel. "I've just had a message from one of

our old servants calling me down to Cross's Corner," he pursued, "so I'm

in a bit of a hurry. That's a bad thing, that murder down there

yesterday, and I'm afraid it will mean trouble for the negroes. Mr.

Blylie, who came to market this morning, told me a crowd had tried to

lynch the fellow last night."

"Well, they've got to hang when they commit hanging crimes," replied

Cyrus stubbornly. "There's no way out of that. It's just, ain't it?"

"Yes, I suppose so," admitted Gabriel, "though, for my part, I've a

feeling against capital punishment--except, of course, in cases of rape,

where, I confess, my blood turns against me."

"An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth--that's the law of God, ain't

it?"

"The old law, yes--but why not quote the law of Christ instead?"

"It wouldn't do--not with the negroes," returned Cyrus, who entertained

for the Founder of Christianity something of the sentimental respect

mingled with an innate distrust of His common-sense with which he

regarded His disciple.

"We can't condemn it until we've tried it," said Gabriel thoughtfully,

and he went on after a moment:

"The terrible thing for us about the negroes is that they are so grave

a responsibility--so grave a responsibility. Of course, we aren't to

blame--we didn't bring them here; and yet I sometimes feel as if we had

really done so."

This was a point of view which Cyrus had never considered, and he felt

an immediate suspicion of it. It looked, somehow, as if it were

insidiously leading the way to an appeal for money.

"It's the best thing that could have happened to them," he replied

shortly. "If they'd remained in Africa, they'd never have been civilized

or--or Christianized."

"Ah, that is just where the responsibility rests on us. We stand for

civilization to them; we stand even--or at least we used to stand--for

Christianity. They haven't learned yet to look above or beyond us, and

the example we set them is one that they are condemned, for sheer lack

of any finer vision, to follow. The majority of them are still hardly

more than uneducated children, and that very fact makes an appeal to

one's compassion which becomes at times almost unbearable."

But this was more than Cyrus could stand even from the rector, whose

conversation he usually tolerated because of the perverse, inexplicable

liking he felt for the man. The charm that Gabriel exercised over him

was almost feminine in its subtlety and in its utter defiance of any

rational sanction. It may have been that his nature, incapable though it

was of love, was not entirely devoid of the rarer capacity for

friendship--or it may have been that, with the inscrutable irony which

appears to control all human attractions, the caged brutality in his

heart was soothed by the unconscious flattery of the other's belief in

him. Now, however, he felt that Gabriel's highfaluting nonsense was

carrying him away. It was well enough to go on like that in the pulpit;

but on week days, when there was business to think of and every minute

might mean the loss of a dollar, there was no use dragging in either

religion or sentiment. Had he put his thoughts plainly, he would

probably have said: "That's not business, Gabriel. The trouble with

you--and with most of you old-fashioned Virginians--is that you don't

understand the first principles of business." These words, indeed, were

almost on his lips, when, catching the rector's innocent glance

wandering round to him, he contented himself with remarking satirically:

"Well, you were always up in the clouds. It doesn't hurt you, I reckon,

though I doubt if it does much toward keeping your pot boiling."

"I must turn off here," said Gabriel gently. "It's the shortest way to

Cross's Corner."

"Do you think any good will come of your going?"

"Probably not--but I couldn't refuse."

Much as he respected Cyrus, he was not sorry to part from him, for their

walk together had left him feeling suddenly old and incompetent to

battle with the problems of life. He knew that Cyrus, even though he

liked him, considered him a bit of a fool, and with a humility which was

unusual in him (for in his heart he was absolutely sure that his own

convictions were right and that Cyrus's were wrong) he began to ask

himself if, by any chance, the other's verdict could be secretly

justified. Was he in reality the failure that Cyrus believed him to be?

Or was it merely that he had drifted into that "depressing view" of

existence against which he so earnestly warned his parishioners? Perhaps

it wasn't Cyrus after all who had produced this effect. Perhaps the

touch of indigestion he had felt after dinner had not entirely

disappeared. Perhaps it meant that he was "getting on"--sixty-five his

last birthday. Perhaps--but already the March wind, fresh and

bud-scented, was blowing away his despondency. Already he was beginning

to feel again that fortifying conviction that whatever was unpleasant

could not possibly be natural.

Ahead of him the straight ashen road flushed to pale red where it

climbed a steep hillside, and when he gained the top, the country lay

before him in all the magic loveliness of early spring. Out of the rosy

earth innumerable points of tender green were visible in the sunlight

and invisible again beneath the faintly rippling shadows that filled the

hollows. From every bough, from every bush, from every creeper which

clung trembling to the rail fences, this wave of green, bursting through

the sombre covering of winter, quivered, as delicate as foam, in the

brilliant sunshine. On either side labourers were working, and where the

ploughs pierced the soil they left narrow channels of darkness.

In the soul of Gabriel, that essence of the spring, which is immortally

young and restless, awakened and gave him back his youth, as it gave the

new grass to the fields and the longing for joy to the hearts of the

ploughmen. He forgot that he was "getting on." He forgot the unnatural

depression which had made him imagine for a moment that the world was a

more difficult place than he had permitted himself to believe--so

difficult a place, indeed, that for some people there could be no

solution of its injustice, its brutality, its dissonance, its

inequalities. The rapture in the song of the bluebirds was sweeter than

the voice of Cyrus to which he had listened. And in a meadow on the

right, an old grey horse, scarred, dim-eyed, spavined, stood resting one

crooked leg, while he gazed wistfully over the topmost rail of the fence

into the vivid green of the distance--for into his aching old bones,

also, there had passed a little of that longing for joy which was born

of the miraculous softness and freshness of the spring. To him, as well

as to Gabriel and to the ploughmen and to the bluebirds flitting, like

bits of fallen sky, along the "snake fences," Nature, the great healer,

had brought her annual gift of the resurrection of hope.

"Cyrus means well," thought Gabriel, with a return of that natural

self-confidence without which no man can exist happily and make a

living. "He means well, but he takes a false view of life." And he added

after a minute: "It's odd how the commercial spirit seems to suck a man

dry when it once gets a hold on him."

He walked on rapidly, leaving the old horse and the ploughmen behind

him, and around his energetic little figure the grey dust, as fine as

powder, spun in swirls and eddies before the driving wind, which had

grown boisterous. As he moved there alone in the deserted road, with his

long black coat flapping against his legs, he appeared so insignificant

and so unheroic that an observer would hardly have suspected that the

greatest belief on the earth--the belief in Life--in its universality

in spite of its littleness, in its justification in spite of its

cruelties--that this belief shone through his shrunken little body as a

flame shines through a vase.

At the end of the next mile, midway between Dinwiddie and Cross's

Corner, stood the small log cabin of the former slave who had sent for

him, and as he approached the narrow path that led, between oyster

shells, from the main road to the single flat brown rock before the

doorstep, he noticed with pleasure how tranquil and happy the little

rustic home appeared under the windy brightness of the March sky.

"People may say what they please, but there never were happier or more

contented creatures than the darkeys," he thought. "I doubt if there's

another peasantry in the world that is half so well off or half so

picturesque."

A large yellow rooster, pecking crumbs from the threshold, began to

scold shrilly, and at the sound, the old servant, a decrepit negress in

a blue gingham dress, hobbled out into the path and stood peering at him

under her hollowed palm. Her forehead was ridged and furrowed beneath

her white turban, and her bleared old eyes looked up at him with a blind

and groping effort at recognition.

"I got your message, Aunt Mehitable. Don't you know me?"

"Is dat you, Marse Gabriel? I made sho' you wan' gwineter let nuttin'

stop you f'om comin'."

"Don't I always come when you send for me?"

"You sutney do, suh. Dat's de gospel trufe--you sutney do."

As he looked at her standing there in the strong sunlight, with her

palsied hand, which was gnarled and roughened until it resembled the

shell of a walnut, curving over her eyes, he felt that a quality at once

alien and enigmatical separated her not only from himself, but from

every other man or woman who was born white instead of black. He had

lived beside her all his life--and yet he could never understand her,

could never reach her, could never even discern the hidden stuff of

which she was made. He could make laws for her, but no child of a white

mother could tell whether those laws ever penetrated that surface

imitation of the superior race and reached the innate differences of

thought, feeling, and memory which constituted her being. Was it

development or mimicry that had brought her up out of savagery and

clothed her in her blue gingham dress and her white turban, as in the

outward covering of civilization?

Her look of crumbling age and the witch-like groping of her glance had

cast a momentary spell over him. When it was gone, he said cheerfully:

"You mustn't be having troubles at your time of life, Aunt Mehitable,"

and in his voice there was the subtle recognition of all that she had

meant to his family in the past, of all that his family had meant to

her. Her claim upon him was the more authentic because it existed only

in his imagination, and in hers. The tie that knit them together was

woven of impalpable strands, but it was unbreakable while he and his

generation were above the earth.

"Dar ain' no end er trouble, Marse Gabriel, ez long ez dar's yo' chillen

en de chillen er yo' chillen ter come atter you. De ole ain' so

techy--dey lets de hornet's nes' hang in peace whar de Lawd put

hit--but de young dey's diff'rent."

"I suppose the neighbourhood is stirred up about the murder. What in

God's name was that boy thinking of?"

The old blood crimes that never ceased where the white and the black

races came together! The old savage folly and the new freedom! The old

ignorance, the old lack of understanding, and the new restlessness, the

new enmity!

"He wan' thinkin' er nuttin', Marse Gabriel. We ole uns kin set down en

steddy, but de young dey up en does wid dere brains ez addled ez de

inside uv er bad aig. 'T wan' dat ar way in de old days w'en we all hed

de say so ez ter w'at wuz en w'at wan't de way ter behave."

Like an institution left from the ruins of the feudal system, which had

crumbled as all ancient and decrepit things must crumble when the wheels

of progress roll over them, she stood there wrapped in the beliefs and

customs of that other century to which she belonged. Her sentiments had

clustered about the past, as his had done, until the border-line between

the romance and the actuality had vanished. She could not help him

because she, also, possessed the retrospective, not the constructive,

vision. He was not conscious of these thoughts, and yet, although he was

unconscious of them, they coloured his reflections while he stood there

in the sunlight, which had begun to fall aslant the blasted pine by the

roadside. The wind had lowered until it came like the breath of spring,

bud-scented, caressing, provocative. Even Gabriel, whose optimism lay in

his blood and bone rather than in his intellect, yielded for a moment

to this call of the spring as one might yield to the delicious

melancholy of a vagrant mood. The long straight road, without bend or

fork, had warmed in the paling sunlight to the colour of old ivory; in a

neighbouring field a young maple tree rose in a flame of buds from the

ridged earth where the ploughing was over; and against the azure sky in

the south a flock of birds drifted up, like blown smoke, from the

marshes.

"Tell me your trouble, then," he said, dropping into the cane-seated

chair she had brought out of the cabin and placed between the flat stone

at the doorstep and the well-brink, on which the yellow rooster stood

spreading his wings. But Aunt Mehitable had returned to the cabin, and

when she reappeared she was holding out to him a cracked saucer on which

there was a piece of preserved watermelon rind and a pewter spoon.

"Dish yer is de ve'y same sort er preserves yo' mouf use'n ter water fur

w'en you wuz a chile," she remarked as she handed the sweet to him.

Whatever her anxiety or affliction could have been, the importance of

his visit had evidently banished it from her mind. She hovered over him

as his mother may have done when he was in his cradle, while the

cheerful self-effacement in which slavery had trained her lent a

pathetic charm to her manner.

"How peaceful it looks," he thought, sitting there, with the saucer in

his hand, and his eyes on the purple shadows that slanted over the

ploughed fields. "You have a good view of the low-grounds, Aunt

Mehitable," he said aloud, and added immediately, "What's that noise in

the road? Do you hear it?"

The old woman shook her head.

"I'se got sorter hard er heahin', Marse Gabriel, but dar's al'ays a

tur'able lot er fuss gwine on w'en de chillen begin ter come up f'om de

fields. 'T wuz becase uv oner dem ar boys dat I sont fur you," she

pursued. "He went plum outer his haid yestiddy en fout wid a w'ite man

down yonder at Cross's Co'nder, en dar's gwine ter be trouble about'n

hit des ez sho' ez you live."

Seated on the flat stone, with her hands hanging over her knees, and her

turbaned head swaying gently back and forth as she talked, she waited as

tranquilly as the rock waited for the inevitable processes of nature.

The patience in her look was the dumb patience of inanimate things; and

her half-bared feet, protruding from the broken soles of her shoes, were

encrusted with the earth of the fields until one could hardly

distinguish them from the ground on which they rested.

"It looks as if there was something like a fight down yonder by the

blasted pine," said the rector, rising from his chair. "I reckon I'd

better go and see what they're quarrelling about."

The negress rose also, and her dim eyes followed him while he went down

the little path between the borders of oyster shells. As he turned into

the open stretch of the road, he glanced back at her, and stopping for a

moment, waved his hand with a gesture that was careless and reassuring.

The fight, or whatever it was that made the noise, was still some

distance ahead in the shadow of the pine-tree, and as he walked towards

it he was thinking casually of other matters--of the wretched condition

of the road after the winter rains, of the need of greater thrift among

the farmers, both white and black, of the touch of indigestion which

still troubled him. There was nothing to warn him that he was

approaching the supreme event in his life, nothing to prepare him for a

change beside which all the changes of the past would appear as

unsubstantial as shadows. His soul might have been the soul in the

grass, so little did its coming or its going affect the forces around

him.

"If this shooting pain keeps up, I'll have to get a prescription from

Doctor Fraser," he thought, and the next minute he cried out suddenly:

"God help us!" and began to run down the road in the direction of the

blasted pine. There was hardly a breath between the instant when he had

thought of his indigestion and the instant when he had called out

sharply on the name of God, yet that flash of time had been long enough

to change the ordinary man into the hero. The spark of greatness in his

nature flamed up and irradiated all that had been merely dull and common

clay a moment before. As he ran on, with his coat tails flapping around

him, and his thin legs wobbling from the unaccustomed speed at which he

moved, he was so unimposing a figure that only the Deity who judges the

motives, not the actions, of men would have been impressed by the

spectacle. Even the three hearty brutes--and it took him but a glance to

see that two of them were drunk, and that the third, being a sober

rascal, was the more dangerous--hardly ceased their merry torment of the

young negro in their midst when he came up with them.

"I know that boy," he said. "He is the grandson of Aunt Mehitable. What

are you doing with him?"

A drunken laugh answered him, while the sober scoundrel--a lank, hairy

ne-er-do-well, with a tendency to epilepsy, whose name he remembered to

have heard--pushed him roughly to the roadside.

"You git out of this here mess, parson. We're goin' to teach this damn

nigger a lesson, and I reckon when he's learned it in hell, he won't

turn his grin on a white woman again in a jiffy."

"Fo' de Lawd, I didn't mean nuttin', Marster!" screamed the boy, livid

with terror. "I didn't know de lady was dar--fo' de Lawd Jesus, I

didn't! My foot jes slipped on de plank w'en I wuz crossin', en I

knocked up agin her."

"He jostled her," observed one of the drunken men judicially, "an' we'll

be roasted befo' we'll let a damn nigger jostle a white lady--even if

she ain't a lady--in these here parts."

In the rector's bone and fibre, drilled there by the ages that had

shaped his character before he began to be, there was all the white

man's horror of an insult to his womankind. But deeper even than this

lay his personal feeling of responsibility for any creature whose

fathers had belonged to him and had toiled in his service.

"I believe the boy is telling the truth," he said, and he added with one

of his characteristic bursts of impulsiveness, "but whether he is or

not, you are too drunk to judge."

There was going to be a battle, he saw, and in the swiftness with which

he discerned this, he made his eternal choice between the preacher and

the fighter. Stripping off his coat, he reached down for a stick from

the roadside; then spinning round on the three of them he struck out

with all his strength, while there floated before him the face of a man

he had killed in his first charge at Manassas. The old fury, the old

triumph, the old blood-stained splendour returned to him. He smelt the

smoke again, he heard the boom of the cannon, the long sobbing rattle of

musketry, and the thought stabbed through him, "God forgive me for

loving a fight!"

Then the fight stopped. There was a patter of feet in the dust as the

young negro fled like a hare up the road in the direction of Dinwiddie.

One of the men leaped the fence and disappeared into the tangled thicket

beyond; while the other two, sobered suddenly, began walking slowly over

the ploughed ground on the right. Ten minutes later Gabriel was lying

alone, with the blood oozing from his mouth, on the trodden weeds by the

roadside. The shadow of the pine had not moved since he watched it; on

the flat rock in front of the cabin the old negress stood, straining her

eyes in the faint sunshine; and up the long road the March wind still

blew, as soft, as provocative, as bud-scented.

BOOK THIRD

THE ADJUSTMENT

CHAPTER I

THE CHANGING ORDER

"So this is life," thought Virginia, while she folded her mourning veil,

and laid it away in the top drawer of her bureau. Like all who are

suddenly brought face to face with tragedy, she felt at the moment that

there was nothing else in existence. All the sweetness of the past had

vanished so utterly that she remembered it only as one remembers a dream

from which one has abruptly awakened. Nothing remained except this

horrible sense of the pitiful insufficiency of life, of the inexorable

finality of death. It was a week since the rector's death, and in that

week she had passed out of her girlhood forever. Of all the things that

she had lived through, this alone had had the power to crush the hope in

her and the odour of crape which floated through the crack of the drawer

sickened her with its reminder of that agonized sense of loss which had

settled over her at the funeral. She was only thirty--the best of her

life should still be in the future--yet as she looked back at her white

face in the mirror it seemed to her that she should never emerge from

the leaden hopelessness which had descended like a weight on her body.

Above the harsh black of her dress, which added ten years to her

appearance, she saw the darkened circles rimming her eyes, the faded

pallor of her skin, the lustreless wave of her hair, which had once had

a satiny sheen on its ripples.