one who has been touched on the raw, crossed his face. Though she was
not penetrating enough to discern it, there were times when his pity for
her amounted almost to a passion, and at such moments he was conscious
of a blind anger against Life, as against some implacable personal
force, because it had robbed him of the hard and narrow morality on
which his ancestors leaned. The scourge of a creed which had kept even
Cyrus walking humbly in the straight and flinty road of Calvinism,
appeared to him in such rare instants as one of the spiritual luxuries
which a rationalistic age had destroyed; for it is not granted to man to
look into the heart of another, and so he was ignorant alike of the
sanctities and the passions of Cyrus's soul. What he felt was merely
that the breaking of the iron bonds of the old faith had weakened his
powers of resistance as inevitably as it had liberated his thought. The
sound of his own rebellion was in his ears, and filled with the noise of
it, he had not stopped to reflect that the rebellion of his ancestors
had seemed less loud only because it was inarticulate. Was it really
that his generation had lost the capacity for endurance, the spiritual
grace of self-denial, or was it simply that it had lost its reticence
and its secrecy with the passing of its inflexible dogmas?
"Why, certainly you must go if you would care to," he answered.
"Perhaps Jenny will come over from Bryn Mawr to join us. The dear child
was so disappointed that she couldn't come home for Christmas."
"If I'd known in time that she wasn't coming, I'd have found a way of
getting down just for dinner with you. I hope you weren't alone,
Virginia."
"Oh, no, Miss Priscilla came to spend the day with me. You know she used
to take dinner with us every Christmas at the rectory."
A troubled look clouded his face. "Jenny ought to have been here," he
said, and asked suddenly, as if it were a relief to him to change the
subject: "Have you had news of Harry?"
The light which the name of Harry always brought to her eyes shone there
now, enriching their faded beauty. "He writes to me every week. You know
he hasn't missed a single Sunday letter since he first went off to
school. He is wild about Oxford, but I think he gets a little homesick
sometimes, though of course he'd never say so."
"He'll do well, that boy. The stuff is in him."
"I'm sure he's a genius if there ever was one, Oliver. Only yesterday
Professor Trimble was telling me that Harry was far and away the most
brilliant pupil he had ever had."
"Well, he's something to be proud of. And now what about Lucy? Is she
still satisfied with Craven?"
"She never writes about anything else except about her house. Her
marriage seems to have turned out beautifully. You remember I wrote you
that she was perfectly delighted with her stepchildren, and she really
appears to be as happy as the day is long."
"You never can tell. I thought she'd be back again before two months
were up."
"I know. We all prophesied dreadful things--even Susan."
"That reminds me--I came down on the train with John Henry, and he said
that Uncle Cyrus was breaking rapidly."
"He has never been the same since his wife's death," replied Virginia,
who was a victim of this sentimental fallacy. "It's strange--isn't
it?--because we used to think they got on so badly."
"I wonder if it is really that? Well, is there any other news? Has
anything else happened?"
With his back to the fire, he stood looking down on her with kindly,
questioning eyes. He had done his best; from the moment when he had
entered the room and met the touching brightness in her face, he had
struggled to be as natural, to be as affectionate even, as she desired.
At the moment, so softened, so self-reproachful was his mood, he would
willingly have cut off his arm for her could the sacrifice in any manner
have secured her happiness. But there were times when it seemed easier
to give his life for her than to live it with her; when to shed his
blood would have cost less than to make conversation. He yearned over
Virginia, but he could not talk to her. Some impregnable barrier of
personality separated them as if it were a wall. Already they belonged
to different generations; they spoke in the language of different
periods. At forty-seven, that second youth, the Indian summer of the
emotions, which lingers like autumnal sunshine in the lives of most men
and of a few women, was again enkindling his heart. And with this return
of youth, he felt the awakening of infinite possibilities of feeling, of
the ancient ineradicable belief that happiness lies in possession. Love,
which had used up her spirit and body in its service, had left him
untouched by its exactions. While she, having fulfilled her nature, was
content to live anew not in herself, but in her children, the force of
personal desire was sweeping over him again, with all the flame and
splendour of adolescence. The "something missing" waited there, just a
little beyond, as he had seen it waiting in that enchanted May when he
fell in love with Virginia. And between him and his vision of happiness
there interposed merely his undisciplined conscience, his variable,
though honest, desire to do the thing that was right. Duty, which had
controlled Virginia's every step, was as remote and aloof from his life
as was the creed of his fathers. Like his age, he was adrift among
disestablished beliefs, among floating wrecks of what had once been
rules of conduct by which men had lived. And the widening
responsibilities, the deepening consciousness of a force for good
greater than creed or rules, all the awakening moral strength which
would lend balance and power to his age, these things had been weakened
in his character by the indomitable egoism which had ordered his life.
There was nothing for him to fall back upon, nothing that he could
place above the restless surge of his will.
Sitting there in the firelight, with her loving eyes following his
movements, she told him, bit by bit, all the latest gossip of Dinwiddie.
Susan's eldest girl had developed a beautiful voice and was beginning to
take lessons; poor Miss Priscilla had had a bad fall in Old Street while
she was on the way to market, and at first they feared she had broken
her hip, but it turned out that she was only dreadfully bruised; Major
Peachey had died very suddenly and she had felt obliged to go to his
funeral; Abby Goode had been home on a visit and everybody said she
didn't look a day over twenty-five, though she was every bit of
forty-four. Then, taking a little pile of samples from her work basket
which stood on the table, she showed him a piece of black brocaded
satin. "Miss Willy is making me a dress out of this to wear in New York
with you. I don't suppose you noticed whether or not they were wearing
brocade."
No, he hadn't noticed, but the sample was very pretty, he thought. "Why
don't you buy a dress there, Virginia? It would save you so much
trouble."
"Poor little Miss Willy has set her heart on making it, Oliver. And,
besides, I shan't have time if we go only the day before."
A flush had come to her face; at the corners of her mouth a tender
little smile rippled; and her look of faded sweetness gave place for an
instant to the warmth and the animation of girlhood. But the excitement
of girlhood could not restore to her the freshness of youth. Her
pleasure was the pleasure of middle-age; the wistful expectancy in her
face was the expectancy of one whose interests are centred on little
things. That inviolable quality of self-sacrifice, the quality which
knit her soul to the enduring soul of her race, had enabled her to find
happiness in the simple act of renouncement. The quiet years had kept
undiminished the inordinate capacity for enjoyment, the exaggerated
appreciation of trivial favours, which had filled Mrs. Pendleton's life
with a flutter of thankfulness; and while Virginia smoothed the piece of
black brocade on her knee, she might have been the re-arisen pensive
spirit of her mother. Of the two, perhaps because she had ceased to wish
for anything for herself, she was happier than Oliver.
All through dinner, while her soft anxious eyes dwelt on him over the
bowl of pink roses in the centre of the table, he tried hard to throw
himself into her narrow life, to talk only of things in which he felt
that she was interested. Slight as the effort was, he could see her
gratitude in her face, could hear it in the gentle silvery sound of her
voice. When he praised the dinner, she blushed like a girl; when he made
her describe the dress which Miss Willy was making, she grew as excited
as if she had been speaking of the sacred white satin she had worn as a
bride. So little was needed to make her happy--that was the pathos! She
was satisfied with the crumbs of life, and yet they were denied her.
Though she had been alone ever since Lucy's wedding, she accepted his
belated visit as thankfully as if it were a gratuitous gift. "It is so
good of you to come down, dear, when you are needed every minute in New
York," she murmured, with a caressing touch on his arm, and, looking at
her, he was reminded of Mrs. Pendleton's tremulous pleasure in the
sweets that came to her on little trays from her neighbours. Once she
had said eagerly, "It will be so nice to see Miss Oldcastle, Oliver,"
and he had answered in a constrained tone which he tried to make light
and casual, "I am not sure that the part is going to suit her."
Then he had changed the subject abruptly by rising from the table and
asking her to let him see her latest letter from Harry.
The next morning he went out after breakfast to consult Cyrus about some
investments, while Virginia laid out the lengths of brocade on the bed
in the spare room, and sat down to wait for the arrival of the
dressmaker. Outside, the trees were still white from the storm, and the
wind, blowing through them, made a dry crackling sound as if it were
rattling thorns in a forest. Though it was intensely cold, the sunshine
fell in golden bars over the pavement and filled the town with a
dazzling brilliancy through which the little seamstress was seen
presently making her way. Alert, bird-like, consumed with her insatiable
interest in other people, she entered, after she had removed her bonnet
and wraps, and began to spread out her patterns. It was twenty-odd years
since she had made the white satin dress in which Virginia was married,
yet she looked hardly a day older than she had done when she knelt at
the girl's feet and envied her happiness while she pinned up the shining
train. Failing love, she had filled her life with an inextinguishable
curiosity; and this passion, being independent of the desires of others,
was proof alike against disillusionment and the destructive processes of
time.
"So Mr. Treadwell has come home," she remarked, with a tentative
flourish of the scissors. "I declare he gets handsomer every day that
he lives. It suits him somehow to fill out, or it may be that I'm
partial to fat like my poor mother before me."
"He does look well, but I'd hardly call him fat, would you?"
"Well, he's stouter than he used to be, anyway. Did he say when he was
going to take you back with him?"
"Next Wednesday. We'll have to hurry to get this dress ready in time."
"I'll start right in at it. Have you made up your mind whether you'll
have it princess or a separate waist and skirt?"
"I'm a little too thin for a princess gown, don't you think? Hadn't I
better have it made like that black poplin which everybody thought
looked so well on me?"
"But it ain't half so stylish as the princess. You just let me put a few
cambric ruffles inside the bust and you'll stand out a plenty. I was
reading in a fashion sheet only yesterday that they are trying to look
as flat as they can manage in Paris."
"Well, I'll try it," murmured Virginia uncertainly, for her standards of
dress were so vague that she was thankful to be able to rely on Miss
Willy's self-constituted authority.
"You just leave it to me," was the dressmaker's reply, while she thrust
the point of the scissors into the gleaming brocade on the bed.
The morning passed so quickly amid cutting, basting, and gossip, that it
came as a surprise to Virginia when she heard the front door open and
shut and Oliver's rapid step mounting the stairs. Meeting him in the
hall, she led the way into her bedroom, and asked with the caressing,
slightly conciliatory manner which expressed so perfectly her attitude
toward life:
"Did you see Uncle Cyrus?"
"Yes, and he was nicer than I have ever known him to be. By the way,
Virginia, I've transferred enough property to you to bring you in a
separate income. This was really what I went down about."
"But what is the matter, dear? Don't you feel well? Have you had any
worries that you haven't told me?"
"Oh, I'm all right, but it's better so in case something should happen."
"But what could possibly happen? I never saw you look better. Miss Willy
was just saying so."
He turned away, not impatiently, but as one who is seeking to hide an
emotion which has become too strong. Then without replying to her
question, he muttered something about "a number of letters to write
before dinner," and hurried out of the room and downstairs to his study.
"I wonder if he has lost money," she thought, vaguely troubled, as she
instinctively straightened the brushes he had disarranged on the bureau.
"Poor Oliver! He seems to think about nothing but money now, and he used
to be so romantic."
He used to be so romantic! She repeated this to Susan that evening when,
after Miss Willy's departure for the night, she took her friend into the
spare room to show her the first shapings of the princess gown.
"Do you remember that we used to call him an incurable Don Quixote?" she
asked. "And now he has become so different that at times it makes me
smile to think of him as he was when I first knew him. I suppose it's
better so, it's more normal. He used to be what Uncle Cyrus called
'flighty,' bent on reforming the world and on improving people, you
know, and now he doesn't seem to care whether outside things are good or
bad, just as long as his plays go well and he can give us all the money
we want."
"It's natural, isn't it?" asked Susan. "One can't stay young forever,
you see."
"And yet in some ways he doesn't appear to be a bit older. I like his
hair being grey, don't you? It makes his colour look even richer than
before."
"Yes," said Susan, "I like his hair and I like him. Only I wish he
didn't have to leave you by yourself so much of the time."
"He is going to take me back with him on Wednesday. Miss Willy is making
this dress for me to wear. I want to look nice because, of course,
everybody will be noticing Oliver."
"It's lovely, and I'm sure you'll look as sweet as the angel that you
are, Jinny," answered Susan, stooping to kiss her.
By Tuesday night the dress was finished, and Virginia was stuffing the
sleeves with tissue paper before packing it into her trunk, when Oliver
came into the room and stood watching her in silence.
"I do hope it won't get crumpled," she said anxiously as she spread a
towel over the tray. "Miss Willy is so proud of it, and I don't believe
I could have got anything prettier in New York."
"Virginia," he said suddenly, "you've set your heart on going to-morrow,
haven't you?"
Turning from the trunk, she looked up at him with a tender, inquiring
smile. Above her head the electric light, with which Oliver and the
girls had insisted on replacing the gas-jets that she preferred, cast a
hard glitter over the hollowed lines of her face and over the thinning
curls which she had striven to brush back from her temples. Her figure,
unassisted as yet by Miss Willy's ruffles, looked so fragile in the
pitiless glare that his heart melted in one of those waves of
sentimentality which, because they were impotent to affect his conduct,
cost him so little. As she stood there, he realized more acutely than he
had ever done before how utterly stationary she had remained since he
married her. With her sweetness, her humility, her old-fashioned
courtesy and consideration for others, she belonged still in the
honey-scented twilight of the eighties. While he had moved with the
world, she, who was confirmed in the traditions of another age, had
never altered in spirit since that ecstatic moment when he had first
loved her. The charm, the grace, the virtues, even the look of gentle
goodness which had won his heart, were all there just as they had been
when she was twenty. Except for the fading flesh, the woman had not
changed; only the needs and the desires of the man were different. Only
the resurgent youth in him was again demanding youth for its mate.
"Why, my trunk is all packed," she replied. "Has anything happened?"
"Oh, no, I was only wondering how you would manage to amuse yourself.
You know I shall be at the theatre most of the time."
"But you mustn't have me on your mind a minute, Oliver. I won't go a
step unless you promise me not to worry about me a bit. It's all so new
to me that I shall enjoy just sitting in the hotel and watching the
people."
"Then we'd better go to the Waldorf. That might interest you more."
His eagerness to provide entertainment for her touched her as deeply as
if it had been a proof of his love instead of his anxiety, and she
determined in her heart that if she were lonesome a minute he must never
suspect it. Ennui, having its roots in an egoism she did not possess,
was unknown to her.
"That will be lovely, dear. Lucy wrote me when she was there on her
wedding trip that she used to sit for hours in the corridor looking at
the people that went by, and that it was as good as a play."
"That settles it. I'll telegraph for rooms," he said cheerfully,
relieved to find that she fell in so readily with his suggestion.
She was giving a last caressing pat to the tray before closing the
trunk, and the look of her thin hands, with their slightly swollen
knuckles, caused him to lean forward suddenly and wrest the keys away
from her.
"Let me do that. I hate to see you stooping," he said.
The telegram was sent, and late the next evening, as they rolled through
the brilliant streets towards the hotel, Virginia's interest was as
effervescent as if she were indeed the girl that she almost felt herself
to have become. The sound of the streets excited her like martial music,
and little gasps of surprise and pleasure broke from her lips as the
taxicab turned into Broadway. It was all so different from her other
visit when she had come alone to find Oliver, sick with failure, in the
dismal bedroom of that hotel. Now it seemed to her that the city had
grown younger, that it was more awake, that it was brighter, gayer, and
that she herself had a part in its brightness and its gaiety. The crowds
on Broadway seemed keeping step to some happy tune, and she felt that
her heart was dancing with them, so elated, so girlishly irresponsible
was her mood.
"Why, Oliver, there is a sign of your play with a picture of Miss
Oldcastle on it!" she exclaimed delightedly, pointing to an
advertisement before a theatre they were passing. Then, suddenly, it
appeared to her that the whole city was waving this advertisement.
Wherever she turned "The Home" stared back at her, an orgy of red and
blue surrounding the smiling effigy of the actress. And this proof of
Oliver's fame thrilled her as she had not been thrilled since the
telegram had come announcing that Harry had won the scholarship which
would take him to Oxford. The woman's power of sinking her ambition and
even her identity into the activities of the man was deeply interwoven
with all that was essential and permanent in her soul. Her keenest joys,
as well as her sharpest sorrows, had never belonged to herself, but to
others. It was doubtful, indeed, if, since the day of her marriage, she
had been profoundly moved by any feeling which was centred merely in a
personal desire. She had wanted things for Oliver and for the children,
but for herself there had been no separate existence apart from them.
"Oliver, I never dreamed that it would be like this. The play will be a
great success--even a greater one than the last, won't it, dear?" Her
face, with its exquisite look of exaltation, of self-forgetfulness, was
turned eagerly towards the crowd of feverish pleasure-seekers that
passed on, pursuing its little joys, under the garish signs of the
street.
"Well, it ought to be," he returned; "it's bad enough anyway."
His eyes, like hers, were fixed on the thronging streets, but, unlike
hers, they reflected the restless animation, the pathetic hunger, which
made each of those passing faces appear to be the plastic medium of an
insatiable craving for life. Handsome, well-preserved, a little
over-coloured, a little square of figure, with his look of worldly
importance, of assured material success, he stood to-day, as Cyrus had
stood a quarter of a century ago, as an imposing example of that
Treadwell spirit from which his youth had revolted.
That night, when they had finished dinner, and Oliver, in response to a
telephone message, had hurried down to the theatre, Virginia went
upstairs to her room, and, after putting on the lavender silk
dressing-gown which Miss Willy had made for the occasion, sat down to
write her weekly letter to Harry.
MY DARLING BOY.
I know you will be surprised to see from this letter that I am
really in New York at last--and at the Waldorf! It seems almost
like a dream to me, and whenever I shut my eyes, I find myself
forgetting that I am not in Dinwiddie--but, you remember, your
father had always promised me that I should come for the first
night of his new play, which will be acted to-morrow. You simply
can't imagine till you get here how famous he is and how interested
people are in everything about him, even the smallest trifles.
Wherever you look you see advertisements of his plays (he has three
running now) and coming up Broadway for only a block or two last
night, I am sure that I saw Miss Oldcastle's picture a dozen times.
I should think she would hate dreadfully to have to make herself so
conspicuous--for she has a nice, refined face--but Oliver says all
actresses have to do it if they want to get on. He takes all the
fuss they make over him just as if he despised it, though I am sure
that in his heart he can't help being pleased. While we were having
dinner, everybody in the dining-room was turning to look at him,
and if I hadn't known, of course, that not a soul was thinking of
me, I should have felt badly because I hadn't time to change my
dress after I got here. All the other women were beautifully
dressed (I never dreamed that there were so many diamonds in the
world. Miss Willy would simply go crazy over them), but I didn't
mind a bit, and if anybody thought of me at all, of course, they
knew that I had just stepped off the train. After dinner your
father went to the theatre, and I sat downstairs alone in the
corridor for a while and watched the people coming and going. It
was perfectly fascinating at first. I never saw so many beautiful
women, and their hair was arranged in such a lovely way, all just
alike, that it must have taken hours to do each head. The fashions
that are worn here are not in the least like those of Dinwiddie,
though Miss Willy made my black brocade exactly like one in a
fashion plate that came directly from Paris, but I know that you
aren't as much interested in this as Lucy and Jenny would be. The
dear girls are both well, and Lucy is carried away with her
stepchildren. She says she doesn't see why every woman doesn't
marry a widower. Isn't that exactly like Lucy? She is always so
funny. If only one of you were here with me, I should enjoy every
minute, but after I'd sat there for a while in the midst of all
those strangers, I began to feel a little lonely, so I came
upstairs to write you this letter. New York is a fascinating place
to visit, but I am glad I live in Dinwiddie where everybody knows
me.
And now, my dearest boy, I must tell you how perfectly overjoyed I
was to get your last letter, and to know that you are so delighted
with Oxford. I think of you every minute, and I pray for you the
last thing at night before I get into bed. Try to keep well and
strong, and if you get a cold, be sure not to let it run on till it
turns to a hacking cough. Remember that Doctor Fraser always used
to say that every cough, no matter how slight, is dangerous. I hope
you aren't studying too hard or overdoing athletics. It is so easy
to tax one's strength too much when one gets excited. I am sure I
don't know what to think of the English students being
"standoffish" with Americans. It seems very foolish of them not to
be nice and friendly, especially to Virginians, who were really
English in the beginning. But I am glad that you don't mind, and
that you would rather be a countryman of George Washington than a
countryman of George the Third. Of course England is the greatest
country in the world--you remember your grandfather always said
that--and we owe it everything that we have, but I think it very
silly of English people to be stiff and ill-mannered.
I hope you still read your Bible, darling, and that you find time
to go to church once every Sunday. Even if it seems a waste of time
to you, it would have pleased your grandfather, and for his sake I
hope you will go whenever you can possibly do so. It was so sweet
of you to write in Addison's Walk because you did not want to miss
my Sunday letter and yet the day was too beautiful not to be out of
doors. God only knows, my boy, what a comfort you are to me. There
was never a better son nor one who was loved more devotedly.
YOUR MOTHER.
In the morning, with the breakfast tray, there arrived a bunch of
orchids from one of Oliver's theatrical friends, who had heard that his
wife was in town; and while Virginia laid the box carefully in the
bathtub, her eyes shone with the grateful light which came into them
whenever some one did her a small kindness or courtesy.
"They will be lovely for me to wear to-night, Oliver. It was so nice of
him to send them, wasn't it?"
"Yes, it was rather nice," Oliver replied, looking up from his paper at
the pleased sound of her voice. Ever since his return at a late hour
last night, she had noticed the nervousness in his manner and had
sympathetically attributed it to his anxiety about the fate of his play.
It was so like Oliver to be silent and self-absorbed when he was
anxious.
Through the day he was absent, and when he returned, in the evening, to
dress for the theatre, she was standing before the mirror fastening the
bunch of orchids on the front of her gown. As he entered, she turned
toward him with a look of eager interest, of pleasant yet anxious
excitement. She had never in her life, except on the morning of her
wedding day, taken so long to dress; but it seemed to her important that
as Oliver's wife she should look as nice as she could.
"Am I all right?" she asked timidly, while she cast a doubtful glance in
the mirror at the skirt of the black brocade.
"Yes, you're all right," he responded, without looking at her, and the
suppressed pain in his voice caused her to move suddenly toward him with
the question, "Aren't you well, Oliver?"
"Oh, I'm well, but I'm tired. I had a headache on the way up and I
haven't been able to shake it off."
"Shall I get you something for it?"
"No, it will pass. I'd like a nap, but I suppose it's time for me to
dress."
"Yes, it's half-past six, and we've ordered dinner for seven."
He went into the dressing-room, and turning again to the mirror, she
changed the position of the bunch of orchids, and gave a little
dissatisfied pat to the hair on her forehead. If only she could bring
back some of the bloom and the freshness of youth! The glow had gone out
of her eyes; the winged happiness, which had given her face the look as
of one flying towards life, had passed, leaving her features a little
wan and drawn, and fading her delicate skin to the colour of withered
flowers. Yet the little smile, which lingered like autumn sunshine
around her lips, was full of that sweetness which time could not
destroy, because it belonged not to her flesh, but to an unalterable
quality of her soul; and this sweetness, which she exhaled like a
fragrance, would cause perhaps one of a hundred strangers to glance
after her with the thought, "How lovely that woman must once have been!"
"Are you ready?" asked Oliver, coming out of his dressing-room, and
again she started and turned quickly towards him, because it seemed to
her that she was hearing his voice for the first time. So nervous, so
irritable, so quivering with suppressed feeling, was the sound of it,
that she hesitated between the longing to offer sympathy and the fear
that her words might only add to his suffering.
"Yes, I am quite ready," she answered, without adding that she had been
ready for more than an hour; and picking up her wrap from the bed, she
passed ahead of him through the door which he had opened. As he stopped
to draw the key from the lock, her eyes rested with pride on the gloss
of his hair, which had gone grey in the last year, and on his figure,
with its square shoulders and its look of obvious distinction, as of a
man who had achieved results so emphatically that it was impossible
either to overlook or to belittle them. How splendid he looked! And what
a pity that, after all his triumphs, he should still be so nervous on
the first night of a play!
In the elevator there was a woman in an ermine wrap, with Titian hair
under a jewelled net; and Virginia's eyes were suffused with pleasure as
she gazed at her. "I never saw any one so beautiful!" she exclaimed to
Oliver, as they stepped out into the hall; but he merely replied
indifferently: "Was she? I didn't notice." Then his tone lost its
deadness. "If you'll wait here a minute, I'd like to speak to Cranston
about something," he said, almost eagerly. "I shan't keep you a second."
"Don't worry about me," she answered cheerfully, pleased at the sudden
change in his manner. "Stay as long as you like. I never get tired
watching the people."
He hurried off, while, dazzled by the lights, she drew back behind a
sheltering palm, and stood a little screened from the brilliant crowd in
which she took such innocent pleasure. "How I wish Miss Willy could be
here," she thought, for it was impossible for her to feel perfect
enjoyment while there existed the knowledge that another person would
have found even greater delight in the scene than she was finding
herself. "How gay they all look--and there are not any old people.
Everybody, even the white-haired women, dress as if they were girls. I
wonder what it is that gives them all this gloss as if they had been
polished, the same gloss that has come on Oliver since he has been so
successful? What a short time he stayed. He is coming back already, and
every single person is turning to look at him."
Then a voice beyond the palm spoke as distinctly as if the words were
uttered into her ear. "That's Treadwell over there--a good-looking man,
isn't he?--but have you seen the dowdy, middle-aged woman he is married
to? It's a pity that all great men marry young--and now they say, you
know, that he is madly in love with Margaret Oldcastle----"
CHAPTER V
BITTERNESS
In the night, after a restless sleep, she awoke in terror. A hundred
incidents, a hundred phrases, looks, gestures, which she had thought
meaningless until last evening, flashed out of the darkness and hung
there, blazing, against the background of the night. Yesterday these
things had appeared purposeless; and now it seemed to her that only her
incredible blindness, only her childish inability to face any painful
fact until it struck her between the eyes, had kept her from discovering
the truth before it was thrust on her by the idle chatter of strangers.
A curious rigidity, as if she had been suddenly paralyzed, passed from
her heart, which seemed to have ceased beating, and crept through her
limbs to her motionless hands and feet. Though she longed to call out
and awaken Oliver, who, complaining of insomnia, spent the night in the
adjoining room, this immobility, which was like the graven immobility of
death, held her imprisoned there as speechless and still as if she lay
in her coffin. Only her brain seemed on fire, so pitilessly, so horribly
alive had it become.
From the street beyond the dim square of the window, across which the
curtains were drawn, she could hear the ceaseless passing of carriages
and motor cars; but her thoughts had grown so confused that for a long
while, as she lay there, chill and rigid under the bed-clothes, she
could not separate the outside sounds from the tumult within her brain.
"Now that I know the truth I must decide what is best to do," she
thought quite calmly. "As soon as this noise stops I must think it all
over and decide what is best to do." But around this one lucid idea the
discordant roar of the streets seemed to gather force until it raged
with the violence of a storm. It was impossible to think clearly until
this noise, which, in some strange way, was both in the street outside
and within the secret chambers of her soul, had subsided and given place
to the quiet of night again. Then gradually the tempest of sound died
away, and in the midst of the stillness which followed it she lived over
every hour, every minute, of that last evening when it had seemed to her
that she was crucified by Oliver's triumph. She saw him as he came
towards her down the shining corridor, easy, brilliant, impressive, a
little bored by his celebrity, yet with the look of vital well-being, of
second youth, which separated and distinguished him from the curious
gazers among whom he moved. She saw him opposite to her during the long
dinner, which she could not eat; she saw him beside her in the car which
carried them to the theatre; and clearer than ever, as if a burning iron
had seared the memory into her brain, she saw him lean on the railing of
the box, with his eyes on the stage where Margaret Oldcastle, against
the lowered curtain, smiled her charming smile at the house. It had been
a wonderful night, and through it all she had felt the iron nails of her
crucifixion driven into her soul.
Breaking away from that chill of terror with which she had awakened,
she left the bed and went over to the window, where she drew the heavy
curtains aside. In Fifth Avenue the electric lights sparkled like frost
on the pavement, while beyond the roofs of the houses the first
melancholy glow of a winter's sunrise was suffusing the sky with red.
While she watched it, a wave of unutterable loneliness swept over
her--of that profound spiritual loneliness which comes to one at dawn in
a great city, when knowledge of the sleeping millions within reach seems
only to intensify the fact of individual littleness and isolation. She
felt that she stood alone, not merely in the world, but in the universe;
and the thought that Oliver slept there in the next room made more
poignant this feeling, as though she were solitary and detached in the
midst of limitless space. Even if she called him and he came to her, she
could not reach him. Even if he stood at her side, the immeasurable
distance between them would not lessen.
When the morning came, she dressed herself in her prettiest gown, a
violet cloth, with ruffles of old lace at the throat and wrists; but
this dress, of which she had been so proud in Dinwiddie that she had
saved it for months in order to have it fresh for New York, appeared
somehow to have lost its charm and distinction, and she knew that last
evening had not only destroyed her happiness, but had robbed her of her
confidence in the taste and the workmanship of Miss Willy. Knowledge,
she saw now, had shattered the little beliefs of life as well as the
large ones.
Oliver liked to breakfast in his dressing-gown, fresh from his bath and
eager for the papers, so when he came hurriedly into the sitting-room,
the shining tray was already awaiting him, and she sat pouring his
coffee in a band of sunlight beside the table. This sunlight, so
merciful to the violet gown, shone pitilessly on the darkened hollows
which the night had left under her eyes, and on the little lines which
had gathered around her bravely smiling mouth.
"It was a wonderful success, all the papers say so, Oliver," she said,
when he had seated himself at the other end of the table and taken the
coffee from her hand, which shook in spite of her effort.
"Yes, it went off well, there's no doubt of it," he answered cheerfully,
so cheerfully that for a minute a blind hope shot trembling through her
mind. Could it all have been a dream? Was there some dreadful mistake?
Would she presently discover that she had imagined that night of useless
agony through which she had passed?
"The audience was so sympathetic. I saw a number of women crying in the
last act when the heroine comes back to her old home."
"It caught them. I thought it would. It's the kind of thing they like."
He opened a paper as he spoke, and seeing that he wanted to read the
criticisms, she broke his eggs for him, and then turning to her own
breakfast tried in vain to swallow the piece of toast which she had
buttered. But it was useless. She could not eat; she could not even
drink her coffee, which had stood so long that it had grown tepid. A
feeling of spiritual nausea, beside which all physical sensations were
as trivial and meaningless as the stinging of wasps, pervaded her soul
and body, and choked her, like unshed tears, whenever she tried to force
a bit of food between her trembling lips. All the casual interests with
which she filled her days, those seemingly small, yet actually
tremendous interests without which daily life becomes almost unlivable,
flagged suddenly and died while she sat there. Nothing mattered any
longer, neither the universe nor that little circle of it which she
inhabited, neither life nor death, neither Oliver's success nor the food
which she was trying to eat. This strange sickness which had fallen upon
her affected not only her soul and body, but everything that surrounded
her, every person or object at which she looked, every stranger in the
street below, every roof which she could see sharply outlined against
the glittering blue of the sky. Something had passed out of them all,
some essential quality which united them to reality, some inner secret
of being without which the animate and the inanimate alike became no
better than phantoms. The spirit which made life vital had gone out of
the world. And she felt that this would always be so, that the next
minute and the next year and all the years that came afterwards would
bring to her merely the effort of living--since Life, having used her
for its dominant purpose, had no further need of her. Once only the
thought occurred to her that there were women who might keep their own
even now by fighting against the loss of it, by passionately refusing to
surrender what they could no longer hold as a gift. But with the idea
there came also that self-knowledge which told her that she was not one
of these. The strength in her was the strength of passiveness; she could
endure, but she could not battle. Long ago, as long ago as the night on
which she had watched in the shadow of death beside Harry's bed, she
had lost that energy of soul which had once flamed up in her with her
three days' jealousy of Abby. It was her youth and beauty then which had
inspirited her, and she was wise enough to know that the passions which
become youth appear ridiculous in middle-age.
Having drunk his coffee, Oliver passed his cup to her, and laid down his
paper.
"You look tired, Virginia. I hope it hasn't been too much for you?"
"Oh, no. Have you quite got over your headache?"
"Pretty much, but those lights last night were rather trying. Don't put
any cream in this time. I want the stimulant."
"Perhaps it has got cold. Shall I ring for fresh?"
"It doesn't matter. This will do quite as well. Have you any shopping
that you would like to do this morning?"
Shopping! When her whole world had crumbled around her! For an instant
the lump in her throat made speech impossible; then summoning that mild
yet indestructible spirit, which was as the spirit of all those
generations of women who lived in her blood, she answered gently:
"Yes, I had intended to buy some presents for the girls."
"Then you'd better take a taxicab for the morning. I suppose you know
the names of the shops you want to go to?"
"Oh, yes. I know the names. Are you going to the theatre?"
"I've got to change a few lines in the play, and the sooner I go about
it the better."
"Then don't bother about me, dear. I'll just put on my long coat over
this dress and go out right after breakfast."
"But you haven't eaten anything," he remarked, glancing at her plate.
"I wasn't hungry. The fresh air will do me good. It has turned so much
warmer, and the snow is all melting."
As she spoke, she rose from the table and began to prepare herself for
the street, putting on the black hat with the ostrich tip and the bunch
of violets on one side, which didn't seem just right since she had come
to New York, and carefully wrapping the ends of her fur neck-piece
around her throat. It was already ten o'clock, for Oliver had slept
late, and she must be hurrying if she hoped to get through her shopping
before luncheon. While she dressed, a wan spirit of humour entered into
her, and she saw how absurd it was that she should rush about from shop
to shop, buying things that did not matter in order to fill a life that
mattered as little as they did. To her, whose mental outlook had had in
it so little humour, it seemed suddenly that the whole of life was
ridiculous. Why should she have sat there, pouring Oliver's coffee and
talking to him about insignificant things, when her heart was bursting
with this sense of something gone out of existence, with this torturing
realization of the irretrievable failure of love?
Taking up her muff and her little black bag from the bureau, she looked
back at him with a smile as she turned towards the door.
"Good-bye. Will you be here for luncheon?"
"I'm afraid I can't. I've an appointment down-town, but I'll come back
as early as I can."
Then she went out and along the hall to the elevator, in which there was
a little girl, who reminded her of Jenny, in charge of a governness in
spectacles. She smiled at her almost unconsciously, so spontaneous, so
interwoven with her every mood was her love for children; but the little
girl, being very proper for her years, did not smile back, and a stab of
pain went through Virginia's heart.
"Even children have ceased to care for me," she thought.
At the door, where she waited a few minutes for her taxicab, a young
bride, with her eyes shining with joy, stood watching her husband while
he talked with an acquaintance, and it seemed to Virginia that it was a
vision of her own youth which had risen to torment her. "That was the
way I looked at Oliver twenty-five years ago," she said to herself;
"twenty-five years ago, when I was young and he loved me." Then, even
while the intolerable pain was still in her heart, she felt that
something of the buoyant hopefulness of that other bride entered into
her and restored her courage. A resolution, so new that it was born of
the joyous glance of a stranger, and yet so old that it seemed a part of
that lost spirit of youth which had once carried her in a wild race over
the Virginian meadows, a resolution which belonged at the same time to
this other woman and to herself, awoke in her and mingled like a draught
of wine with her blood. "I will not give up," she thought. "I will go to
her. Perhaps she does not know--perhaps she does not understand. I will
go to her, and everything may be different." Then her taxicab was
called, and stepping into it, she gave the name not of a shop, but of
the apartment house in which Margaret Oldcastle lived.
It was one of those February days when, because of the promise of spring
in the air, men begin suddenly to think of April. The sky was of an
intense blue, with little clouds, as soft as feathers, above the western
horizon. On the pavement the last patches of snow were rapidly melting,
and the gentle breeze which blew in at the open window of the cab, was
like a caressing breath on Virginia's cheek. "It must be that she does
not understand," she repeated, and this thought gave her confidence and
filled her with that unconquerable hope of the future without which she
felt that living would be impossible. Even the faces in the street
cheered her, for it seemed to her that if life were really what she had
believed it to be last night, these men and women could not walk so
buoyantly, could not smile so gaily, could not spend so much thought and
time on the way they looked and the things they wore. "No, it must have
been a mistake, a ghastly mistake," she insisted almost passionately.
"Some day we shall laugh over it together as we laughed over my jealousy
of Abby. He never loved Abby, not for a minute, and yet I imagined that
he did and suffered agony because of it." And her taxicab went on
merrily between the cheerful crowds on the pavements, gliding among
gorgeous motor cars and carriages drawn by high-stepping horses and
pedlers' carts drawn by horses that stepped high no longer, among rich
people and poor people, among surfeited people and hungry people, among
gay people and sad people, among contented people and rebellious
people--among all these, who hid their happiness or their sorrow under
the mask of their features, her cab spun onward bearing her lightly on
the most reckless act of her life.
At the door of the apartment house she was told that Miss Oldcastle
could not be seen, but, after sending up her card and waiting a few
moments in the hall before a desk which reminded her of a gilded
squirrel-cage, she was escorted to the elevator and borne upward to the
ninth landing. Here, in response to the tinkle of a little bell outside
of a door, she was ushered into a reception room which was so bare alike
of unnecessary furniture and of the Victorian tradition to which she was
accustomed, that for an instant she stood confused by the very
strangeness of her surroundings. Then a charming voice, with what
sounded to her ears as an affected precision of speech, said: "Mrs.
Treadwell, this is so good of you!" and, turning, she found herself face
to face with the other woman in Oliver's life.
"I saw you at the play last night," the voice went on, "and I hoped to
get a chance to speak to you, but the reporters simply invaded my
dressing-room. Won't you sit here in the sunshine? Shall I close the
window, or, like myself, are you a worshipper of the sun?"
"Oh, no, leave it open. I like it." At any other moment she would have
been afraid of an open window in February; but it seemed to her now that
if she could not feel the air in her face she should faint. With the
first sight of Margaret Oldcastle, as she looked into that smiling
face, in which the inextinguishable youth was less a period of life than
an attribute of spirit, she realized that she was fighting not a woman,
but the very structure of life. The glamour of the footlights had
contributed nothing to the flame-like personality of the actress. In her
simple frock of brown woollen, with a wide collar of white lawn turned
back from her splendid throat, she embodied not so much the fugitive
charm of youth, as that burning vitality over which age has no power.
The intellect in her spoke through her noble rather than beautiful
features, through her ardent eyes, through her resolute mouth, through
every perfect gesture with which she accompanied her words. She stood
not only for the elemental forces, but for the free woman; and her
freedom, like that of man, had been built upon the strewn bodies of the
weaker. The law of sacrifice, which is the basic law of life, ruled here
as it ruled in mother-love and in the industrial warfare of men. Her
triumph was less the triumph of the individual than of the type. The
justice not of society, but of nature, was on her side, for she was one
with evolution and with the resistless principle of change. Vaguely,
without knowing that she realized these things, Virginia felt that the
struggle was useless; and with the sense of failure there awoke in her
that instinct of good breeding, that inherited obligation to keep the
surface of life sweet, which was so much older and so much stronger than
the revolt in her soul.
"You were wonderful last night. I wanted to tell you how wonderful I
thought you," she said gently. "You made the play a success--all the
papers say so this morning."
"Well, it was an easy play to make successful," replied the other, while
a fleeting curiosity, as though she were trying to explain something
which she did not quite understand, appeared in her face and made it,
with its redundant vitality, almost coarse for an instant. "It's the
kind the public wants, you couldn't help making it go."
The almost imperceptible conflict which had flashed in their eyes when
they met, had died suddenly down, and the dignity which had been on the
side of the other woman appeared to have passed from her to Virginia.
This dignity, which was not that of triumph, but of a defeat which
surrenders everything except the inviolable sanctities of the spirit,
shielded her like an impenetrable armour against both resentment and
pity. She stood there wrapped in a gentleness more unassailable than any
passion.
"You did a great deal for it and a great deal for my husband," she said,
while her voice lingered unconsciously over the word. "He has told me
often that without your acting he could never have reached the position
he holds."
Then, because it was impossible to say the things she had come to say,
because even in the supreme crises of life she could not lay down the
manner of a lady, she smiled the grave smile with which her mother had
walked through a ruined country, and taking up her muff, which she had
laid on the table, passed out into the hall. She had let the chance go
by, she had failed in her errand, yet she knew that, even though it cost
her her life, even though it cost her a thing far dearer than life--her
happiness--she could not have done otherwise. In the crucial moment it
was principle and not passion which she obeyed; but this principle,
filtering down through generations, had become so inseparable from the
sources of character, that it had passed at last through the intellect
into the blood. She could no more have bared her soul to that other
woman than she could have stripped her body naked in the market-place.
At the door her cab was still waiting, and she gave the driver the name
of the toy shop at which she intended to buy presents for Lucy's
stepchildren. Though her heart was breaking within her, there was no
impatience in her manner when she was obliged to wait some time before
she could find the particular sort of doll for which Lucy had written;
and she smiled at the apologetic shopgirl with the forbearing
consideration for others which grief could not destroy. She put her own
anguish aside as utterly in the selection of the doll as she would have
done had it been the peace of nations and not a child's pleasure that
depended upon her effacement of self. Then, when the purchase was made,
she took out her shopping list from her bag and passed as
conscientiously to the choice of Jenny's clothes. Not until the morning
had gone, and she rolled again up Fifth Avenue towards the hotel, did
she permit her thoughts to return to the stifled agony within her heart.
To her surprise Oliver was awaiting her in their sitting-room, and with
her first look into his face, she understood that he had reached in her
absence a decision against which he had struggled for days. For an
instant her strength seemed fainting as before an impossible effort.
Then the shame in his eyes awoke in her the longing to protect him, to
spare him, to make even this terrible moment easier for him than he
could make it alone. With the feeling, a crowd of memories thronged
through her mind, as though called there by that impulse to shield which
was so deeply interwoven with the primal passion of motherhood. She saw
Oliver's face as it had looked on that spring afternoon when she had
first seen him; she saw it as he put the ring on her hand at the altar;
she saw it bending over her after the birth of her first child; and then
suddenly his face changed to the face of Harry, and she saw again the
little bed under the hanging sheet and herself sitting there in the
faintly quivering circle of light. She watched again the slow fall of
the leaves, one by one, as they turned at the stem and drifted against
the white curtains of the window across the street.
"Oliver," she said gently, so gently that she might have been speaking
to her sick child, "would you rather that I should go back to Dinwiddie
to-night?"
He did not answer, but, turning away from her, laid his head down on his
arm, which he had outstretched on the table, and she saw a shiver of
pain pass through his body as if it had been struck a physical blow. And
just as she had put herself aside when she bought the doll, so now she
forgot her own suffering in the longing to respond to his need.
"I can take the night train--now that I have seen the play there is no
reason why I should stay. I have got through my shopping."
Raising his head, he looked up into her face. "Whatever happens,
Virginia, will you believe that I never wanted to hurt you?" he asked.
For a moment she felt that the strain was intolerable, and a fear
entered her mind lest she should faint or weep and so make things harder
than they should be able to bear.
"You mean that something must happen--that there will be a break between
us?" she said.
Leaving the table, he walked to the window and back before he answered
her.
"I can't go on this way. I'm not that sort. A generation ago, I suppose,
we should have done it--but we've lost grip, we've lost endurance." Then
he cried out suddenly, as if he were justifying himself: "It is hell.
I've been in hell for a year--don't you see it?"
After his violence, her voice sounded almost lifeless, so quiet, so
utterly free from passion, was its quality.
"As long as that--for a year?" she asked.
"Oh, longer, but it has got worse. It has got unendurable. I've
fought--God knows I've fought--but I can't stand it. I've got to do
something. I've got to find a way. You must have seen it coming,
Virginia. You must have seen that this thing is stronger than I am."
"Do--do you want her so much?" and she, who had learned from life not to
want, looked at him with the pity which he might have seen in her eyes
had he stabbed her.
"So much that I'm going mad. There's no other end to it. It's been
coming on for two years--all the time I've been away from Dinwiddie I've
been fighting it."
She did not answer, and when, after the silence had grown oppressive, he
turned back from the window through which he had been gazing, he could
not be sure that she had heard him. So still she seemed that she was
like a woman of marble.
"You're too good for me, that's the trouble. You've been too good for me
from the beginning," he said.
Unfastening her coat, which she had kept on, she laid it on the sofa at
her back, and then put up her hands to take out her hatpins.
"I must pack my things," she said suddenly. "Will you engage my berth
back to Dinwiddie for to-night?"
He nodded without speaking, and she added hastily, "I shan't go down
again before starting. But there is no need that you should go to the
train with me."
At this he turned back from the door where he had waited with his hand
on the knob. "Won't you let me do even that?" he asked, and his voice
sounded so like Harry's that a sob broke from her lips. The point was so
small a one--all points seemed to her so small--that her will died down
and she yielded without protest. What did it matter--what did anything
matter to her now?
"I'll send up your luncheon," he added almost gratefully. "You will be
ill if you don't eat something."
"No, please don't. I am not hungry," she answered, and then he went out
softly, as though he were leaving a sick-room, and left her alone with
her anguish--and her packing.
Without turning in her chair, without taking off her hat, from which she
had drawn the pins, she sat there like a woman in whom the spirit has
been suddenly stricken. Beyond the window the perfect day, with its
haunting reminder of the spring, was lengthening slowly into afternoon,
and through the slant sunbeams the same gay crowd passed in streams on
the pavements. On the roof of one of the opposite houses a flag was
flying, and it seemed to her that the sight of that flag waving under
the blue sky was bound up forever with the intolerable pain in her
heart. And with that strange passivity of the nerves which nature
mercifully sends to those who have learned submission to suffering, to
those whose strength is the strength, not of resistance, but of
endurance, she felt that as long as she sat there, relaxed and
motionless, she had in a way withdrawn herself from the struggle to
live. If she might only stay like this forever, without moving, without
thinking, without feeling, while she died slowly, inch by inch, spirit
and body.
A knock came at the door, and as she moved to answer it, she felt that
life returned in a slow throbbing agony, as if her blood were forced
back again into veins from which it had ebbed. When the tray was placed
on the table beside her, she looked up with a mild, impersonal curiosity
at the waiter, as the dead might look back from their freedom and
detachment on the unreal figures of the living. "I wonder what he thinks
about it all?" she thought vaguely, as she searched in her bag for his
tip. "I wonder if he sees how absurd and unnecessary all the things are
that he does day after day, year after year, like the rest of us? I
wonder if he ever revolts with this unspeakable weariness from waiting
on other people and watching them eat?" But the waiter, with his long
sallow face, his inscrutable eyes, and his general air of having
petrified under the surface, was as enigmatical as life.
After he had gone out, she rose from her untasted luncheon, and going
into her bedroom, took the black brocaded gown off the hanger and
stuffed the sleeves with tissue paper as carefully as if the world had
not crumbled around her. Then she packed away her wrapper and her
bedroom slippers and shook out and folded the dresses she had not worn.
For a time she worked on mechanically, hardly conscious of what she was
doing, hardly conscious even that she was alive. Then slowly, softly,
like a gentle rain, her tears fell into the trunk, on each separate
garment as she smoothed it and laid it away.
At half-past eight o'clock she was waiting with her hat and coat on when
Oliver came in, followed by the porter who was to take down her bags.
She knew that he had brought the man in order to avoid all possibility
of an emotional scene; and she could have smiled, had her spirit been
less wan and stricken, at this sign of a moral cowardice which was so
characteristic. It was his way, she understood now, though she did not
put the thought into words, to take what he wanted, escaping at the same
time the price which nature exacts of those who have not learned to
relinquish. Out of the strange colourless stillness which surrounded
her, some old words of Susan's floated back to her as if they were
spoken aloud: "A Treadwell will always get the thing he wants most in
the end." But while he stabbed her, he would look away in order that he
might be spared the memory of her face.
Without a word, she followed her bags from the room without a word she
entered the elevator, which was waiting, and without a word she took her
place in the taxicab standing beside the curbstone. There was no
rebellion in her thoughts, merely a dulled consciousness of pain, like
the consciousness of one who is partially under an anæsthetic. The
fighting courage, the violence of revolt, had no part in her soul, which
had been taught to suffer and to renounce with dignity, not with
heroics. Her submission was the submission of a flower that bends to a
storm.
As she sat there in silence, with her eyes on the brilliant street,
where the signs of his play stared back at her under the flaring lights,
she began to think with automatic precision, as though her brain were
moved by some mechanical power over which she had no control. Little
things crowded into her mind--the face of the doll she had bought for
Lucy's stepchild that morning, the words on one of the electric signs on
the top of a building they were passing, the leopard skin coat worn by a
woman on the pavement. And these little things seemed to her at the
moment to be more real, more vital, than her broken heart and the
knowledge that she was parting from Oliver. The agony of the night and
the morning appeared to have passed away like a physical pang, leaving
only this deadness of sensation and the strange, almost unearthly
clearness of external objects. "It is not new. It has been coming on for
years," she thought. "He said that, and it is true. It is so old that it
has been here forever, and I seem to have been suffering it all my
life--since the day I was born, and before the day I was born. It seems
older than I am. Oliver is going from me. He has always been going from
me--always since the beginning," she repeated slowly, as if she were
trying to learn a lesson by heart. But so remote and shadowy did the
words appear, that she found herself thinking the next instant, "I must
have forgotten my smelling-salts. The bottle was lying on the bureau,
and I can't remember putting it into my bag." The image of this little
glass bottle, with the gold top, which she had left behind was distinct
in her memory; but when she tried to think of the parting from Oliver
and of all that she was suffering, everything became shadowy and unreal
again.
At the station she stood beside the porter while he paid the driver, and
then entering the doorway, they walked hurriedly, so hurriedly that she
felt as if she were losing her breath, in the direction of the gate and
the waiting train. And with each step, as they passed down the long
platform, which seemed to stretch into eternity, she was thinking: "In a
minute it will be over. If I don't say something now, it will be too
late. If I don't stop him now, it will be over forever--everything will
be over forever."
Beside the night coach, in the presence of the conductor and the porter,
who stood blandly waiting to help her into the train, she stopped
suddenly, as though she could not go any farther, as though the strength
which had supported her until now had given way and she were going to
fall. Through her mind there flashed the thought that even now she might
hold him if she were to make a scene, that if she were to go into
hysterics he would not leave her, that if she were to throw away her
pride and her self-respect and her dignity, she might recover by
violence the outer shell at least of her happiness. How could he break
away from her if she were only to weep and to cling to him? Then, while
the idea was still in her mind, she knew that to a nature such as hers
violence was impossible. It took passion to war with passion, and in
this she was lacking. Though she were wounded to the death, she could
not revolt, could not shriek out in her agony, could not break through
that gentle yet invincible reticence which she had won from the past.
Down the long platform a child came running with cries of pleasure,
followed by a man with a red beard, who carried a suitcase. As they
approached the train, Virginia entered the coach, and walked rapidly
down the aisle to where the porter was waiting beside her seat.
For the first time since they had reached the station Oliver spoke. "I
am sorry I couldn't get the drawing-room for you," he said. "I am afraid
you will be crowded"; and this anxiety about her comfort, when he was
ruining her life, did not strike either of them, at the moment, as
ridiculous.
"It does not matter," she answered; and he put out his hand.
"Good-bye, Virginia," he said, with a catch in his voice.
"Good-bye," she responded quietly, and would have given her soul for the
power to shriek aloud, to overcome this indomitable instinct which was
stronger than her personal self.
Turning away, he passed between the seats to the door of the coach, and
a minute later she saw his figure hurrying back along the platform down
which they had come together a few minutes ago.
CHAPTER VI
THE FUTURE
A chill rain was falling when Virginia got out of the train the next
morning, and the raw-boned nags hitched to the ancient "hacks" in the
street appeared even more dejected and forlorn than she had remembered
them. Then one of the noisy negro drivers seized her bag, and a little
later she was rolling up the long hill in the direction of her home.
Dinwiddie was the same; nothing had altered there since she had left
it--and yet what a difference! The same shops were unclosing their
shutters; the same crippled negro beggar was taking his place at the
corner of the market; the same maids were sweeping the sidewalks with
the same brooms; the same clerk bowed to her from the drug store where
she bought her medicines; and yet something--the only thing which had
ever interested her in these people and this place--had passed out of
them. Just as in New York yesterday, when she had watched the sunrise,
so it seemed to her now that the spirit of reality had faded out of the
world. What remained was merely a mirage in which phantoms in the guise
of persons made a pretence of being alive.
The front door of her house stood open, and on the porch one of the
coloured maids was beating the dust out of the straw mat. "As if dust
makes any difference when one is dead," Virginia thought wearily; and
an unutterable loathing passed over her for all the little acts by which
one rendered tribute to the tyranny of appearances. Then, as she entered
the house, she felt that the sight of the familiar objects she had once
loved oppressed her as though the spirit of melancholy resided in the
pieces of furniture, not in her soul. This weariness, so much worse than
positive pain, filled her with disgust for all the associations and the
sentiments she had known in the past. Not only the house and the
furniture and the small details of housekeeping, but the street and the
town and every friendly face of a neighbour, had become an intolerable
reminder that she was still alive.
In her room, where a bright fire was burning, and letters from the girls
lay on the table, she sat down in her wraps and gazed with unseeing eyes
at the flames. "The children must not know. I must keep it from the
children as long as possible," she thought dully, and it was so natural
to her to plan sparing them, that for a minute the idea took her mind
away from her own anguish. "If I could only die like this, then they
need never know," she found herself reflecting coldly a little later, so
coldly that she seemed to have no personal interest, no will to choose
in the matter. "If I could only die like this, nobody need be
hurt--except Harry," she added.
For the first time, with the thought of Harry, her restraint suddenly
failed her. "Yes, it would hurt Harry. I must live because Harry would
want me to," she said aloud; and as though her strength were reinforced
by the words, she rose and prepared herself to go downstairs to
breakfast--prepared herself, too, for the innumerable little agonies
which would come with the day, for the sight of Susan, for the visits
from the neighbours, for the eager questions about the fashions in New
York which Miss Willy would ask. And all the time she was thinking
clearly, "It can't last forever. It must end some time. Who knows but it
may stop the next minute, and one can stand a minute of anything."
The day passed, the week, the month, and gradually the spring came and
went, awakening life in the trees, in the grass, in the fields, but not
in her heart. Even the dried sticks in the yard put out shoots of living
green and presently bore blossoms, and in the borders by the front gate,
the crocuses, which she had planted with her own hands a year ago, were
ablaze with gold. All nature seemed joining in the resurrection of life,
all nature, except herself, seemed to flower again to fulfilment. She
alone was dead, and she alone among the dead must keep up this pretence
of living which was so much harder than death.
Once every week she wrote to the children, restrained yet gently flowing
letters in which there was no mention of Oliver. It had been so long,
indeed, since either Harry or the girls had associated their parents
together, that the omission called forth no question, hardly, she
gathered, any surprise. Their lives were so full, their interests were
so varied, that, except at the regular intervals when they sat down to
write to her, it is doubtful if they ever seriously wondered about her.
In July, Jenny came home for a month, and Lucy wrote regretfully that
she was "so disappointed that she couldn't join mother somewhere in the
mountains"; but beyond this, the girls' lives hardly appeared to touch
hers even on the surface. In the month that Jenny spent in Dinwiddie,
she organized a number of societies and clubs for the improvement of
conditions among working girls, and in spite of the intense heat (the
hottest spell of the summer came while she was there), she barely
allowed herself a minute for rest or for conversation with her mother.
"If you would only go to the mountains, mother," she remarked the
evening before she left. "I am sure it isn't good for you to stay in
Dinwiddie during the summer."
"I am used to it," replied Virginia a little stubbornly, for it seemed
to her at the moment that she would rather die than move.
"But you ought to think of your health. What does father say about it?"
A contraction of pain crossed Virginia's face, but Jenny, whose vision
was so wide that it had a way of overlooking things which were close at
hand, did not observe it.
"He hasn't said anything," she answered, with a strange stillness of
voice.
"I thought he meant to take you to England, but I suppose his plays are
keeping him in New York."
Rising from her chair at the table--they had just finished
supper--Virginia reached for a saucer and filled it with ice cream from
a bowl in front of her.
"I think I'll send Miss Priscilla a little of this cream," she remarked.
"She is so fond of strawberry."
The next day Jenny went, and again the silence and the loneliness
settled upon the house, to which Virginia clung with a morbid terror of
change. Had her spirit been less broken, she might have made the effort
of going North as Jenny had urged her to do, but when her life was over,
one place seemed as desirable as another, and it was a matter of
profound indifference to her whether it was heat or cold which afflicted
her body. She was probably the only person in Dinwiddie who did not hang
out of her window during the long nights in search of a passing breeze.
But with that physical insensibility which accompanies prolonged torture
of soul, she had ceased to feel the heat, had ceased even to feel the
old neuralgic pain in her temples. There were times when it seemed to
her that if a pin were stuck into her body she should not know it. The
one thing she asked--and this Life granted her except during the four
weeks of Jenny's visit--was freedom from the need of exertion, freedom
from the obligation to make decisions. Her housekeeping she left now to
the servants, so she was spared the daily harassing choices of the
market and the table. There remained nothing for her to do, nothing even
for her to worry about, except her broken heart. Her friends she had
avoided ever since her return from New York, partly from an unbearable
shrinking from the questions which she knew they would ask whenever they
met her, partly because her mind was so engrossed with the supreme fact
that her universe lay in ruins, that she found it impossible to lend a
casual interest to other matters. She, who had effaced herself for a
lifetime, found suddenly that she could not see beyond the immediate
presence of her own suffering.
Usually she stayed closely indoors through the summer days, but several
times, at the hour of dusk, she went out alone and wandered for hours
about the streets which were associated with her girlhood. In High
Street, at the corner where she had first seen Oliver, she stood one
evening until Miss Priscilla, who had caught sight of her from the porch
of the Academy (which, owing to the changing fashions in education and
the infirmities of the teacher, was the Academy no longer), sent out her
negro maid to beg her to come in and sit with her. "No, I'm only looking
for something," Virginia had answered, while she hurried back past the
church and down the slanting street to the twelve stone steps which led
up the terraced hillside at the rectory. Here, in the purple summer
twilight, spangled with fireflies, she felt for a minute that her youth
was awaiting her; and opening the gate, she passed as softly as a ghost
along the crooked path to the two great paulownias, which were beginning
to decay, and to the honeysuckle arbour, where the tendrils of the
creeper brushed her hair like a caress. Under the light of a young moon,
it seemed to her that nothing had changed since that spring evening when
she had stood there and felt the wonder of first love awake in her
heart. Nothing had changed except that love and herself. The paulownias
still shed their mysterious shadows about her, the red and white roses
still bloomed by the west wing of the house, the bed of mint still grew,
rank and fragrant, beneath the dining-room window. When she put her hand
on the bole of the tree beside which she stood, she could still feel the
initials V. O. which Oliver had cut there in the days before their
marriage. A light burned in the window of the room which had been the
parlour in the days when she lived there, and as she gazed at it, she
almost expected to see the face of her mother, with its look of pathetic
cheerfulness, smiling at her through the small greenish panes. And then
the past in which Oliver had no part, the past which belonged to her and
to her parents, that hallowed, unforgettable past of her childhood,
which seemed bathed in love as in a flood of light--this past enveloped
her as the magic of the moonbeams enveloped the house in which she had
lived. While she stood there, it was more living than the present, more
real than the aching misery in her heart.
The door of the house opened and shut; she heard a step on the gravelled
path; and bending forward out of the shadow, she waited breathlessly for
the sound of her father's voice. But it was a young rector, who had
recently accepted the call to Saint James' Church, and his boyish face,
rising out of the sacred past, awoke her with a shock from the dream
into which she had fallen.
"Good-evening, Mrs. Treadwell. Were you coming to see me?" he asked
eagerly, pleased, she could see, by the idea that she was seeking his
services.
"No, I was passing, and the garden reminded me so of my girlhood that I
came in for a minute."
"It hasn't changed much, I suppose?" His alert, business-like gaze swept
the hillside.
"Hardly at all. One might imagine that those were the same roses I left
here."
"An improvement or two wouldn't hurt it," he remarked with animation.
"These old trees make such a litter in the spring that my wife is
anxious to get them down. Women like tidiness, you know, and she says,
while they are blooming, it is impossible to keep the yard clean."
"I remember. Their flowers cover everything when they fall, but I always
loved them."
"Well, one does get attached to things. I hope you have had a pleasant
summer in spite of the heat. It must have been a delight to have your
daughter at home again. What a splendid worker she is. If we had her in
Dinwiddie for good it wouldn't be long before the old town would awaken.
Why, I'd been trying to get those girls' clubs started for a year, and
she took the job out of my hands and managed it in two weeks."
"The dear child is very clever. Is your wife still in the mountains?"
"She's coming back next week. We didn't feel that it was safe to bring
the baby home until that long spell of heat had broken." Then, as she
turned towards the step, he added hastily, "Won't you let me walk home
with you?"
But this, she felt, was more than she could bear, and making the excuse
of an errand on the next block, she parted from him at the gate, and
hurried like a shadow back along High Street.
Until October there was no word from Oliver, and then at last there came
a letter, which she threw, half read, into the fire. The impulsive act,
so unlike the normal Virginia, soothed her for an instant, and she said
over and over to herself, while she moved hurriedly about the room, as
though she were seeking an escape from the moment before her, "I'm glad
I didn't finish it. I'm glad I let it burn." Though she did not realize
it, this passionate refusal to look at or to touch the thing that she
hated was the last stand of the Pendleton idealism against the triumph
of the actuality. It is possible that until that moment she had felt far
down in her soul that by declining to acknowledge in words the fact of
Oliver's desertion, by hiding it from the children, by ignoring the
processes which would lead to his freedom, she had, in some obscure way,
deprived that fact of all power over her life. But now while his letter,
blaming himself and yet pleading with her for his liberty, lay there,
crumbling slowly to ashes, under her eyes, her whole life, with its
pathos, its subterfuge, its losing battle against the ruling spirit of
change, seemed crumbling there also, like those ashes, or like that
vanished past to which she belonged. "I'm glad I let it burn," she
repeated bitterly, and yet she knew that the words had never really
burned, that the flame which was consuming them would never die until
she lay in her coffin. Stopping in front of the fire, she stood looking
down on the last shred of the letter, as though it were in reality the
ruins of her life which she was watching. A dull wonder stirred in her
mind amid her suffering--a vague questioning as to why this thing, of
all things, should have happened? "If I could only know why it was--if I
could only understand, it might be easier," she thought. "But I tried so
hard to do what was right, and, whatever the fault was, at least I never
failed in love. I never failed in love," she repeated. Her gaze, leaving
the fire, rested for an instant on a little alabaster ash-tray which
stood on the end of the table, and a spasm crossed her face, which had
remained unmoved while she was reading his letter. Every object in the
room seemed suddenly alive with memories. That was his place on the
rug; the deep chintz-covered chair by the hearth was the one in which he
used to sit, watching the fire at night, before going to bed; the clock
on the mantel was the one he had selected; the rug, which was threadbare
in places, he had helped her to choose; the pile of English reviews on
the table he had subscribed to; the little glass water bottle on the
candle-stand by the bed, she had bought years ago because he liked to
drink in the night. There was nothing in which he did not have a part.
Every trivial incident of her life was bound up with the thought of him.
She could no more escape the torment of these associations than she
could escape the fact of herself. For so long she had been one with him
in her thoughts that their relationship had passed, for her, into that
profound union of habit which is the strongest union of all. Even the
years in which he had grown gradually away from her had appeared to her
to leave untouched the deeper sanctities of their marriage.
A knock came at the door, and the cook, with a list of groceries in her
hand, entered to inquire if her mistress were going to market. With the
beginning of the autumn Virginia had tried to take an interest in her
housekeeping again, and the daily trip to the market had relieved, in a
measure, the terrible vacancy of her mornings. Now it seemed to her that
the remorseless exactions of the material details of living offered the
only escape from the tortures of memory. "Yes, I'll go," she said,
reaching out her hand for the list, and her heart cried, "I cannot live
if I stay in this room any longer. I cannot live if I look at these
things." As she turned away to put on her hat, she was seized by a
superstitious feeling that she might escape her suffering by fleeing
from these inanimate reminders of her marriage. It was as though the
chair and the rug and the clock had become possessed with some
demoniacal spirit. "If I can only get out of doors I shall feel better,"
she insisted; and when she had hurriedly pinned on her hat and tied her
tulle ruff at her throat, she caught up her gloves and ran quickly down
the stairs and out into the street. But as soon as she had reached the
sidewalk, the agony, which she had thought she was leaving behind her in
the closed room upstairs, rushed over her in a wave of realization, and
turning again, she started back into the yard, and stopped, with a
sensation of panic, beside the bed of crimson dahlias at the foot of the
steps. Then, while she hesitated, uncertain whether to return to her
bedroom or to force herself to go on to the market, those hated familiar
objects flashed in a blaze of light through her mind, and, opening the
gate, she passed out on the sidewalk, and started at a rapid step down
the deserted pavement of Sycamore Street. "At least nobody will speak to
me," she thought; but while the words were still on her lips, she saw a
door in the block open wide, and one of her neighbours come out on his
way to his business. Turning hastily, she fled into a cross street, and
then gathering courage, went on, trembling in every limb, towards the
old market, which she used because her mother and her grandmother had
used it before her.
The fish-carts were still there just as they had been when she was a
girl, but the army of black-robed housekeepers had changed or melted
away. Here, also, the physical details of life had survived the beings
for whose use or comfort they had come into existence. The meat and the
vegetable stalls were standing in orderly rows about the octagonal
building; wilted cabbage leaves littered the dusty floor; flies swarmed
around the bleeding forms hanging from hooks in the sunshine; even Mr.
Dewlap, hale and red-cheeked, offered her white pullets out of the
wooden coop at his feet. So little had the physical scene changed since
the morning, more than twenty-five years ago, of her meeting with
Oliver, that while she paused there beside Mr. Dewlap's stall, one of
the older generation might have mistaken her for her mother.
"My dear Virginia," said a voice at her back, and, turning, she found
Mrs. Peachey, a trifle rheumatic, but still plump and pretty. "I'm so
glad you come to the old market, my child. I suppose you cling to it
because of your mother, and then things are really so much dearer
uptown, don't you think so?"
"Yes, I dare say they are, but I've got into the habit of coming here."
"One does get into habits. Now I've bought chickens from Mr. Dewlap for
forty years. I remember your mother and I used to say that there were no
chickens to compare with his white pullets."
"I remember. Mother was a wonderful housekeeper."
"And you are too, my dear. Everybody says that you have the best table
in Dinwiddie!" Her small rosy face, framed in the shirred brim of her
black silk bonnet, was wrinkled with age, but even her wrinkles were
cheerful ones, and detracted nothing from the charming archness of her
expression. Unconquerable still, she went her sprightly way, on
rheumatic limbs, towards the grave.
"Have you seen dear Miss Priscilla?" asked Virginia, striving to turn
the conversation away from herself, and shivering with terror lest the
other should ask after Oliver, whom she had always adored.
"I stopped to inquire about her on my way down. She had had a bad night,
the maid said, and Doctor Fraser is afraid that the cold she got when
she went driving the other day has settled upon her lungs."
"Oh, I am so sorry!" exclaimed Virginia, but she was conscious of an
immeasurable relief because Miss Priscilla's illness was absorbing Mrs.
Peachey's thoughts.
"Well, I must be going on," said the little lady, and though she
flinched with pain when she moved, the habitual cheerfulness of her face
did not alter. "Come to see me as often as you can, Jinny. I can't get
about much now, and it is such a pleasure for me to have somebody to
chat with. People don't visit now," she added regretfully, "as much as
they used to."
"So many things have changed," said Virginia, and her eyes, as she gazed
up at the blue sky over the market, had a yearning look in them. So many
things had changed--ah, there was the pang!
On her way home, overcome by the fear that Miss Priscilla might die
thinking herself neglected, Virginia stopped at the Academy, and was
shown into the chamber behind the parlour, which had once been a
classroom. In the middle of her big tester bed, the teacher was lying,
propped among pillows, with her cameo brooch fastening the collar of her
nightgown and a purple wool shawl, which Virginia had knit for her,
thrown over her shoulders.
"Dear Miss Priscilla, I've thought of you so often. Are you better
to-day?"
"A little, Jinny, but don't worry about me. I'll be out of bed in a day
or two." Though she was well over eighty-five, she still thought of
herself as a middle-aged woman, and her constant plans for the future
amazed Virginia, whose hold upon life was so much slighter, so much less
tenacious. "Have you been to market, dear? I miss so being able to sit
by the window and watch people go by. Then I always knew when you and
Susan were on your way to Mr. Dewlap."
"Yes, I've begun to go again. It fills in the day."
"I never approved of your letting your servants market for you, Jinny.
It would have shocked your mother dreadfully."
"I know," said Virginia, and her voice, in spite of her effort to speak
cheerfully, had a weary sound, which made her add with sudden energy,
"I've brought you a partridge. Mr. Dewlap had such nice ones. You must
try to eat it for supper."
"How like you that was, Jinny. You are your mother all over again. I
declare I am reminded of her more and more every time that I see you."
Tears sprang to Virginia's eyes, while her thin blue-veined hands gently
caressed Miss Priscilla's swollen and knotted fingers.
"You couldn't tell me anything that would please me more," she answered.
"I used to think that Lucy would take after her, but she grew up
differently."
"Yes, neither of the girls is like her. They are dear, good children,
but they are very modern."
"Have you heard from them recently?"
"A few days ago, and they are both as well as can be."
"And what about Harry? I've always believed that Harry was your
favourite, Jinny."
For an instant Virginia hesitated, with her eyes on the pot of red
geraniums blooming between the white muslin curtains at the window. In
his little cage in the sunlight, Miss Priscilla's canary, the last of
many generations of Dickys, burst suddenly into song.
"I believe that Harry loves me more than anybody else in the world
does," she answered at last. "He'd come to me to-morrow if he thought I
needed him."
Lying there in her great white bed, with her enormous body, which she
could no longer turn, rising in a mountain of flesh under the linen
sheet, the old teacher closed her eyes lest Virginia should see her soul
yearning over her as it had yearned over Lucy Pendleton after the
rector's death. She thought of the girl, with the flower-like eyes and
the braided wreath of hair, flitting in white organdie and blue ribbons,
under the dappled sunlight in High Street, and she said to herself, as
she had said twenty-five years ago, "If there was ever a girl who looked
as if she were cut out for happiness, it was Jinny Pendleton."
"They say that Abby Goode is going to be married at last," remarked
Virginia abruptly, for she knew that such bits of gossip supplied the
only pleasant excitement in Miss Priscilla's life.
"Well, it's time. She waited long enough," returned the teacher, and she
added, "I always knew that she was crazy about Oliver by the way she
flung herself at his head." She had never liked Abby, and her
prejudices, which had survived the shocks of life, were not weakened by
the approaching presence of Death. It was characteristic of her that she
should pass into eternity with both her love and her scorn undiminished.
"She was a little boisterous as a girl, but I never believed any harm of
her," answered Virginia mildly; and then as Miss Priscilla's lunch was
brought in on a tray, she kissed her tenderly, with a curious feeling
that it was for the last time, and went out of the door and down the
gravelled walk into High Street. An exhaustion greater than any she had
ever known oppressed her as she dragged her body, which felt dead,
through the glorious October weather. Once, when she passed Saint James'
Church, she thought wearily, "How sorry mother would be if she knew,"
while an intolerable pain, which seemed her mother's pain as well as her
own, pierced her heart. Then, as she hurried on, with that nervous haste
which she could no longer control, the terrible haunted blocks appeared
to throng with the faded ghosts of her youth. A grey-haired woman
leaning out of the upper window of an old house nodded to her with a
smile, and she found herself thinking, "I rolled hoops with her once in
the street, and now she is watching her grandchild go out in its
carriage." At any other moment she would have bent, enraptured, over the
perambulator, which was being wheeled, by a nurse and a maid, down the
front steps into the street; but to-day the sight of the soft baby
features, lovingly surrounded by lace and blue ribbons, was like the
turn of a knife in her wound. "And yet mother always said that she was
never so happy as she was with my children," she reflected, while her
personal suffering was eased for a minute by the knowledge of what her
return to Dinwiddie had meant to her mother. "If she had died while I
lived away, I could never have got over it--I could never have forgiven
myself," she added, and there was an exquisite relief in turning even
for an instant away from the thought of herself.
When she reached home luncheon was awaiting her; but after sitting down
at the table and unfolding her napkin, a sudden nausea seized her, and
she felt that it was impossible to sit there facing the mahogany
sideboard, with its gleaming rows of silver, and watch the precise,
slow-footed movements of the maid, who served her as she might have
served a wooden image. "I took such trouble to train her, and now it
makes me sick to look at her," she thought, as she pushed back her chair
and fled hastily from the room into Oliver's study across the hall. Here
her work-bag lay on the table, and taking it up, she sat down before the
fire, and spread out the centrepiece, which she was embroidering, in an
intricate and elaborate design, for Lucy's Christmas. It was almost a
year now since she had started it, and into the luxuriant sprays and
garlands there had passed something of the restless love and yearning
which had overflowed from her heart. Usually she was able to work on it
in spite of her suffering, for she was one of those whose hands could
accomplish mechanically tasks from which her soul had revolted; but
to-day even her obedient fingers faltered and refused to keep at their
labour. Her eyes, leaving the needle she held, wandered beyond the
window to the branches of the young maple tree, which rose, like a
pointed flame, toward the cloudless blue of the sky.
In the evening, when Susan came in, with a newspaper in her hand, and a
passionate sympathy in her face, Virginia was still sitting there,
gazing at the dim outline of the tree and the strip of sky which had
faded from azure to grey.
"Oh, Jinny, my darling, you never told me!"
Taking up the piece of embroidery from her lap, Virginia met her
friend's tearful caress with a frigid and distant manner. "There was
nothing to tell. What do you mean?" she asked.
"Is--is it true that Oliver has left you? That--that----" Susan's voice
broke, strangled by emotion, but Virginia, without looking up from the
rose on which she was working in the firelight, answered quietly:
"Yes, it is true. He wants to be free."
"But you will not do it, darling? The law is on your side."
With her eyes on the needle which she held carefully poised for the next
stitch, Virginia hesitated while the muscles of her face quivered for an
instant and then grew rigid again.
"What good would it do," she asked, "to hold him to me when he wishes to
be free?" And then, with one of those flashes of insight which came to
her in moments of great emotional stress, she added quietly, "It is not
the law, it is life."
Putting her arms around her, Susan pressed her to her bosom as she might
have pressed a suffering child whom she was powerless to help or even to
make understand.
"Jinny, Jinny, let me love you," she begged.
"How did you know?" asked Virginia, as coldly as though she had not
heard her. "Has it got into the papers?"
For an instant Susan's pity struggled against her loyalty. "General
Goode told me that there had been a good deal about Oliver and--and Miss
Oldcastle in the New York papers for several days," she answered, "and
this morning a few lines were copied in the Dinwiddie _Bee_. Oliver is
so famous it was impossible to keep things hushed up, I suppose. But you
knew all this, Jinny darling."
"Oh, yes, I knew that," answered Virginia; then, rising suddenly from
her chair, she said almost irritably: "Susan, I want to be alone. I
can't think until I am alone." By her look Susan knew that until that
minute some blind hope had kept alive in her, some childish pretence
that it might all be a dream, some passionate evasion of the ultimate
outcome.
"But you'll let me come back? You'll let me spend the night with you,
Jinny?"
"If you want to, you may come. But I don't need you. I don't need
anybody. I don't need anybody," she repeated bitterly; and this
bitterness appeared to change not only her expression, but her features
and her carriage and that essential attribute of her being which had
been the real Virginia.
Awed in spite of herself, Susan put on her hat again, and bent over to
kiss her. "I'll be back before bed-time, Jinny. Don't shut me away,
dear. Let me share your pain with you."
At this something that was like a smile trembled for an instant on
Virginia's face.
"You are good, Susan," she responded, but there was no tenderness, no
gratitude even, in her voice. She had grown hard with the implacable
hardness of grief.
When the door had closed behind her friend, she stood looking through
the window until she saw her pass slowly, as though she were reluctant
to go, down Sycamore Street in the direction of her home. "I am glad she
has gone," she thought coldly. "Susan is good, but I am glad she has
gone." Then, turning back to the fire, she took up the piece of
embroidery and mechanically folded it before she laid it away. While her
hands were still on the bag in which she kept it, a shiver went through
her body, and a look of resolution passed over her features, making them
appear as if they were sculptured in marble.
"He will be sorry some day," she thought. "He will be sorry when it is
too late, and if I were there now--if I were to see him, it might all be
prevented. It might all be prevented and we might be happy again." In
her distorted mind, which worked with the quickness and the intensity of
delirium, this idea assumed presently the prominence and the force of an
hallucination. So powerful did it become that it triumphed over all the
qualities which had once constituted her character--over the patience,
the sweetness, the unselfish goodness--as easily as it obscured the
rashness and folly of the step which she planned. "If I could see him,
it might all be prevented," she repeated obstinately, as though some one
had opposed her; and, going upstairs to her bedroom, she packed her
little handbag and put on the travelling dress which she had worn in New
York. Then, very softly, as though she feared to be stopped by the
servants, she went down the stairs and out of the front door; and, very
softly, carrying her bag, she passed into the street and walked
hurriedly in the direction of the station. And all the way she was
thinking, "If I can only see him again, this may not happen and
everything may be as it was before when he still loved me." So just and
rational did this idea appear to her, that she found herself wondering
passionately why she had not thought of it before. It was so easy a way
out of her wretchedness that it seemed absurd of her to have overlooked
it. And this discovery filled her with such tremulous excitement, that
when she opened her purse to buy her ticket, her hands shook as if they
were palsied, and the porter, who held her bag, was obliged to count out
the money. The whole of life, which had looked so dark an hour ago, had
become suddenly illuminated.
Once in the train, her nervousness left her, and when an acquaintance
joined her after they had started, she was able to talk connectedly of
trivial occurrences in Dinwiddie. He was a fat, apoplectic looking man,
with a bald head which shone like satin, and a drooping moustache
slightly discoloured by tobacco. His appearance, which she had never
objected to before, seemed to her grotesque; but in spite of this, she
could smile almost naturally at his jokes, which she thought
inconceivably stupid.
"I suppose you heard about Cyrus Treadwell's accident," he said at last
when she rose to go to her berth. "Got knocked down by an automobile as
he was getting off a street car at the bank. It isn't serious, they say,
but he was pretty well stunned for a while."
"No, I hadn't heard," she answered, and thought, "I wonder why Susan
didn't tell me." Then she said good-night and disappeared behind the
curtains of her berth, where she lay, without undressing, until morning.
"This is the way--there is no other way to stop it," she thought, and
all night the rumble of the train and the flashing of the lights in the
darkness outside of her window kept up a running accompaniment to the
words. "It is a sin--and there is no other way to stop it. He is
committing a sin, and when I see him he will understand it, and it will
be as it was before." This idea, which was as fixed as an obsession of
delirium, seemed to occupy some central space in her brain, leaving room
for a crowd of lesser thoughts which came and went fantastically around
it like the motley throng of a circus. She thought of Cyrus Treadwell's
accident, of the stupid jokes the man from Dinwiddie had told her, of
the noises of the train, which would not let one sleep, of the stations
which blazed out, here and there, in the darkness. But in the midst of
this confusion of images and impressions, a clear voice was repeating
somewhere in her brain: "This is the way--there is no other way to stop
it before it is too late."
In the morning, when she got out in New York, and gave the driver the
name of the little hotel at which she had stopped on her first visit,
this glowing certainty faded like the excitement of fever from her mind,
and she relapsed into the stricken hopelessness of the last six months.
The bleakness of her spirits fell like a cloud on the brilliant October
day, and the sunshine, which lay in golden pools on the pavements,
appeared to increase the sense of universal melancholy which had
followed so sharply on the brief exaltation of the night. "I must see
him--it is the only way," her brain still repeated, but the ring of
conviction was gone from the words. Her flight from Dinwiddie showed to
her now in all the desperate folly with which it might have appeared to
a stranger. The impulse which had brought her had ebbed away, and with
the impulse had passed also the confidence and the energy of her
resolve.
At the hotel, where the red bedroom into which they ushered her appeared
to have waited unaltered for the second tragedy of her life, she bathed
and dressed herself, and after a cup of black coffee, taken because a
sensation of dizziness had alarmed her lest she should faint in the
street, she put on her hat again and went out into Fifth Avenue. She
remembered the name of the hotel at the head of Oliver's letter, and she
directed her steps towards it now with an automatic precision of which
her mind seemed almost unconscious. All thought of asking for him had
vanished, yet she was drawn to the place where he was by a force which
was more irresistible than any choice of the will. An instinct stronger
than reason was guiding her steps.
In Fifth Avenue the crowd was already beginning to stream by on the
sidewalks, and as she mingled with it, she recalled that other morning
when she had moved among these people and had felt that they looked at
her kindly because she was beautiful and young. Now the kindness had
given way to indifference in their eyes. They no longer looked at her;
and when a shop window, which she was passing, showed her a reflection
of herself, she saw only a commonplace middle-aged figure, with a look
of withered sweetness in the face, which had grown suddenly wan. And
the sight of this figure fell like a weight on her heart, destroying the
last vestige of courage.
Before the door of the hotel in which Oliver was staying, she stood so
long, with her vacant gaze fixed on the green velvet carpet within the
hall, that an attendant in livery came up at last and inquired if she
wished to see any one. Arousing herself with a start, she shook her head
hurriedly and turned back into the street, for when the crucial moment
came her decision failed her. Just as she had been unable to make a
scene on the night when they had parted, so now it was impossible for
her to descend to the vulgarity of thrusting her presence into his life.
Unless the frenzy of delirium seized her again, she knew that she should
never have the strength to put the desperation of thought into the
desperation of action. What she longed for was not to fight, not to
struggle, but to fall, like a wounded bird, to the earth, and be
forgotten.
At the crossing, where there was a crush of motor cars and carriages,
she stopped for a moment and thought how easy it would be to die in the
crowded street before returning to Dinwiddie. "All I need do is to slip
and fall there, and in a second it would be over." But so many cars went
by that she knew she should never be able to do it, that much as she
hated life, something bound her to it which she lacked the courage to
break. There shot through her mind the memory of a soldier her father
used to tell about, who was always first on the field of battle, but had
never found the courage to charge. "He was like me--for I might stand
here forever and yet not find the courage to die."
A beggar came up to her and she thought, "He is begging of me, and yet I
am more miserable than he is." Then, while she searched in her bag for
some change, it seemed to her that the faces gliding past her became
suddenly distorted and twisted as though the souls of the women in the
rapidly moving cars were crucified under their splendid furs. "That
woman in the sable cloak is beautiful, and yet she, also, is in
torture," she reflected with an impersonal coldness and detachment. "I
was beautiful, too, but how did it help me?" And she saw herself as she
had been in her girlhood with the glow of happiness, as of one flying,
in her face, and her heart filled with the joyous expectancy of the
miracle which must happen. "I am as old now as Miss Willy was then--and
how I pitied her!" Tears rushed to her eyes, which had been so dry a
minute before, while the memory of that lost gaiety of youth came over
her in a wave that was like the sweetness of the honeysuckle blooming in
the rectory garden.
A policeman, observing that she had waited there so long, held up the
traffic until she had crossed the street, and after thanking him, she
went on again towards the hotel in which she was staying. "He was kind
about helping me over," she said to herself, with an impulse of
gratitude; and this casual kindness seemed to her the one spot of light
in the blackness which surrounded her.
As she approached the hotel, her step flagged, and she felt suddenly
that even that passive courage which was hers--the courage of
endurance--had deserted her. She saw the dreadful hours that must ensue
before she went back to Dinwiddie, the dreadful days that would follow
after she got there, the dreadful weeks that would run on into the
dreadful years. Silent, grey, and endless, they stretched ahead of her,
and through them all she saw herself, a little hopeless figure, moving
towards that death which she had not had the courage to die. The
thoughts of the familiar streets, of the familiar faces, of the house,
of the furniture, of the leaf-strewn yard in which her bed of dahlias
was blooming--all these aroused in her the sense of spiritual nausea
which she had felt when she went back to them after her parting from
Oliver. Nothing remained except the long empty years, for she had
outlived her usefulness.
At the door of the hotel, the hall porter met her with a cheerful face,
and she turned to him with the instinctive reliance on masculine
protection which had driven her to the friendly shelter of the policeman
at the crossing in Fifth Avenue. In reply to her helpless questions, he
looked up the next train to Dinwiddie, which left within the hour, and
after buying her ticket, assisted her smilingly into the taxicab. While
she sat there, in the middle of the seat, with her little black bag
rocking back and forth as the cab turned the corners, all capacity for
feeling, all possibility of sensation even, seemed to have passed out of
her body. The impulse which was carrying her to Dinwiddie was the
physical impulse which drives a wounded animal back to die in its
shelter. Even the flaring advertisements of Oliver's play, which was
still running in a Broadway theatre, aroused no pain, hardly any thought
of him or of the past, in her mind. She had ceased to suffer, she had
ceased even to think; and when, a little later, she followed the station
porter down the long platform, she was able to brush aside the memory of
her parting from Oliver as lightly as though it were the trivial sting
of a wasp. When she remembered the agony of the last year, of yesterday,
of the morning through which she had just lived, it appeared almost
ridiculous. That death which she had lacked the courage to die seemed
creeping over her soul before it reached the outer shell of her body.
In the train, she was attacked by a sensation of faintness, and
remembering that she had eaten nothing all day, she went into the
dining-car, and sat down at one of the little tables. When her luncheon
was brought, she ate almost ravenously for a minute. Then her sudden
hunger was followed by a disgust for the look of the dishes and the
cinders on the table-cloth, and after paying her bill, for which she
waited an intolerable time, she went back to her chair in the next
coach, and watched, with unseeing eyes, the swiftly moving landscape,
which rushed by in all the brilliant pageantry of October. Several seats
ahead of her, two men were discussing politics, and one of them, who
wore a clerical waistcoat, raised his voice suddenly so high that his
words penetrated the wall of blankness which surrounded her thoughts, "I
tell you it is the greatest menace to our civilization!" and then, as he
controlled his excitement, his speech dropped quickly into
indistinctness.
"How absurd of him to get so angry about it," thought Virginia with
surprise, "as if a civilization could make any difference to anybody on
earth." And she watched the clergyman for a minute, as if fascinated by
the display of his earnestness. "What on earth can it matter to him?"
she wondered mildly, "and yet to look at him one would think that his
heart was bound up in the question." But in a little while she turned
away from him again, and lying back in her chair, stared across the
smooth plains to the pale golden edge of the distant horizon. Through
the long day she sat, without moving, without taking her eyes from the
landscape, while the sunlight faded slowly away from the fields and the
afterglow flushed and waned, and the stars shone out, one by one,
through the silver web of the twilight. Once, when the porter had
offered her a pillow, she had looked round to thank him; once when a
child, toddling along the aisle, had fallen at her feet, she had bent
over to lift it, but beyond this, she had stirred only to hand her
ticket to the conductor when he aroused her by touching her arm. Where
the sunset and the afterglow had been, she saw at last only the lights
of the train reflected in the smeared glass of the window, but so
unconscious was she of any change in that utter vacancy at which she
looked, that she could not have told whether it was an hour or a day
after leaving New York that she came back to Dinwiddie. Even then she
would still have sat there, speechless, inert, unseeing, had not the
porter taken her bag from the rack over her head and accompanied her
from the glare of the train out into the dimness of the town, where the
crumbling "hacks" hitched to the decrepit horses still waited. Here her
bag was passed over to a driver, whom she vaguely remembered, and a few
minutes later she rolled, in one of the ancient vehicles, under the
pale lights of the street which led to her home. In the drug store at
the corner she saw Miss Priscilla's maid buying medicines, and she
wondered indifferently if the teacher had grown suddenly worse. Then, as
she passed John Henry's house, she recognized his large shadow as it
moved across the white shade at the window of the drawing-room. "Susan
was coming to spend last night with me," she said aloud, and for the
first and last time in her life, an ironic smile quivered upon her lips.
With a last jolt the carriage drew up at the sidewalk before her home;
the driver dismounted, grinning, from his box; and in the lighted
doorway, she saw the figure of her maid, in trim cap and apron, waiting
to welcome her. Not a petal had fallen from the bed of crimson dahlias
beside the steps; not a leaf had changed on the young maple tree, which
rose in a spire of flame toward the stars. Inside, she knew, there would
be the bright fire, the cheerful supper table, the soft bed turned
down--and the future.
On the porch she stopped and looked back into the street as she might
have looked back at the door of a prison. The negro driver, having
placed her bag in the hall, stood waiting expectantly, with his hat in
his hand, and his shining black eyes on her face; and opening her purse,
she paid him, before walking past the maid over the threshold. Ahead of
her stretched the staircase which she would go up and down for the rest
of her life. On the right, she could look into the open door of the
dining-room, and opposite to it, she knew that the lamp was lit and the
fire burning in Oliver's study. Then, while a wave of despair, like a
mortal sickness, swept over her, her eyes fell on an envelope which lay
on the little silver card-tray on the hall table, and as she tore it
open, she saw that it contained but a single line:
"Dearest mother, I am coming home to you,
"HARRY."
THE END
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH
THE ROMANCE OF A PLAIN MAN
THE ANCIENT LAW
THE WHEEL OF LIFE
THE DELIVERANCE
THE BATTLEGROUND
THE VOICE OF THE PEOPLE
PHASES OF AN INFERIOR PLANET
THE DESCENDANT
THE FREEMAN, AND OTHER POEMS
THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS GARDEN CITY, N. Y.