I COME TO THE SURFACE
It was a bright June day, I remember, when I came to the surface again,
and saw clear sky for the first time for more than two years. I had
entered the office a little late, and the General had greeted me with an
outstretched hand in which I felt the grip of the bones through the
flabby flesh.
"Look here, Ben, have you kept control of the West Virginia and
Wyanoke?" he enquired, and I saw the pupils of his eyes contract to fine
points of steel, as they did when he meant business.
"Nobody wanted it, General. I still own control--or rather I still
practically own the road."
"Well, take my advice and don't sell to the first man that asks you,
even if he comes from the South Midland. I've just heard that they've
been tapping those undeveloped coal fields at Wyanoke, and I shouldn't
be surprised if they turned out, after all, to be the richest in West
Virginia."
It was then that I saw clear sky.
"I'll hold on, General, as long as you say," I replied. "Meanwhile, I'll
run out there and have a look."
"Oh, have a look by all means. I say, Ben," he added after a minute,
with a worried expression in his face, "have you heard about the trouble
that old fool Theophilus has been getting into? Mark my words, before he
dies, he'll land his sister in the poorhouse, as sure as I sit here.
Garden needed moisture, he said, couldn't raise some of those scraggy,
new-fangled things that nobody can pronounce the names of except
himself, so he went to work and had pipes laid from one end to the
other. When the bill came in there was no way to pay it except by
mortgaging his house, so he's gone and mortgaged it. Mrs. Clay, poor
lady, came to me on the point of tears--she'll be in the poorhouse yet,
I was obliged to tell her so--and entreated me to make an effort to
restrain Theophilus. 'I try to keep the catalogues from reaching him,'
she said, 'but sometimes the postman slips in without my seeing him, and
then he's sure to deliver one. Whenever Theophilus reads about any
strange specimen, or any hybridising nonsense that nobody heard of when
I was young, he seems to go completely out of his head, and the worst of
'em is,' she added," concluded the General, chuckling under his breath,
"'there isn't a single pretty, sweet-smelling flower in the lot.'"
"I'm awfully sorry about the house, General. Isn't there some way of
curbing him?"
"I never saw the bit yet that could curb an old fool," replied the great
man, indignantly; "the next thing his roof will be sold over his head,
and they'll go to the poorhouse, that's what I told Mrs. Clay. Poor
lady, she was really in a terrible state of mind."
"Surely you won't let it come to that. Wait till these dreamed-of coal
fields materialise and I'll take over that mortgage."
The General's lower lip shot out with a sulky and forbidding expression.
"The best thing that could happen to the old fool would be to have his
house sold above him, and by Jove, if he doesn't cease his extravagance,
I'll stand off and let them do it as sure as my name is George
Bolingbroke. What Theophilus needs," he concluded angrily, "is
discipline."
"It's too late to begin to discipline a man of over eighty."
"No, it ain't," retorted the General; "it's never too late. If it
doesn't do him any good in this world, it will be sure to benefit him in
the next. He's entirely too opinionated, that's the trouble with him. Do
you remember the way he sat up over there on Church Hill, and tried to
beat me down that Robert Carrington lived in Bushrod's house, and that
he'd attended him there in his last illness? As if I didn't know Bushrod
Carrington as well as my own brother. Got all his clothes in Paris. Can
see him now as he used to come to church in one of his waistcoats of
peaehblow brocade. Yet you heard Theophilus stick out against me.
Wouldn't give in even when I offered to take him straight to Bushrod's
grave in Saint John's Churchyard, where I had helped to lay him. That's
at the back of the whole thing, I tell you. If Theophilus had had a
little discipline, this would never have happened."
"All the same I hope you won't let it come to a sale," I responded, as a
bunch of telegrams was brought to him, and we settled down to our
morning's work.
In the afternoon when I went back to the doctor's, I found Sally in the
low canvas chair between the giant-of-battle rose-bush and the bleeding
hearts, with George Bolingbroke on the ground at her feet, reading to
her, I noticed at a glance, out of a book of poems. George hated
poetry--I had never forgotten his contemptuous boyish attitude toward
Latin--and the sight of him stretched there, his handsome figure at full
length, his impassive face flushed with a fine colour, produced in me a
curious irritation, which sounded in my voice when I spoke.
"I thought you scorned literature, George. Are you acting the part of a
gay deceiver?"
"Oh, it goes well on a day like this," he rejoined in his amiable
drawling manner; "the doctor has been quoting his favourite verse of
Horace to us. He has had trouble with his hybridising or something, so
he tells us--what is it, doctor? I'm no good at Latin."
Dr. Theophilus, who was planting oysters at the roots of a calla lily,
having discovered, as he repeatedly informed us, that such treatment
increased the number and size of the blossoms, raised his fine old head,
and stood up after wiping his trowel on the trimly mown grass in the
border.
"_Æquam memento rebus in arduis servare mentem_," he replied, rolling
the Latin words luxuriously on his tongue, as if he relished the
flavour. "That verse of the poet has sustained me in many and varied
afflictions. Not to know it is to dispense with an unfailing source of
consolation in trouble. When using it at a patient's bedside, I have
found that it invariably acted as a sedative to an excited mind. I
sometimes think," he added gently, "that if Tina had not been ignorant
of Latin, she would have had a--a less practical temper."
Picking up the trowel, which he had laid on the grass, he returned with
a calm soul to his difficulties, while Sally, looking up at me with
anxious eyes, said:--
"Something has happened, Ben. What is it?"
I broke into a laugh. "Only that that little dead-beat road in West
Virginia may restore my fortune, after all," I replied.
The next day I went to Wyanoke and reorganised the affairs of the little
road. Shortly afterwards orders for freight cars came in faster than we
were able to supply them, and we called at once on the cars of the Great
South Midland and Atlantic.
"If you weren't a friend, this would be a mighty good chance to squeeze
you," remarked the General; "we could keep your cars back until we'd
clean squelched your traffic, and then buy the little road up for a
song. It's business, but it isn't fair, and I'll be blamed if I'm going
to squelch a friend."
He did not squelch us, being as good as his word; the undeveloped coal
fields developed amazingly and the result was that before the year was
over, I had sold the little road at my own price to the big one. Then I
stood up and drew breath, like a man released from the weight of irons.
"We can go into our own home," I said joyfully to Sally. "In a year or
two, if all goes well, and I work hard, we'll be back again where we
were."
"Where we were?" she repeated, and there was, I thought, a listless note
in her voice.
"Doesn't it make you happy?" I asked.
"Oh, I'm glad, glad the debt is gone, and now you'll look young and
splendid again, won't you?"
"I'll try hard if you want me to."
"I do want you to," she answered, looking up at me with a smile.
The window was open, and a flood of sunshine fell on her pale brown
hair, as it rested against the high arm of a chintz-covered sofa. Her
hand, small and childlike, though less round and soft than it had been
two years ago, caressed my cheek when I bent over her. She was well
again, she was blooming, but the bloom was paler and more delicate, and
there was a fragility in her appearance which was a new and disturbing
sign of diminished strength. Would she ever, even when cradled in
luxuries, recover her buoyant health, her sparkling vitality, I
wondered.
The old Bland house, with the two great sycamores growing beside it, was
for sale; and thinking to please Sally, I bought it without her
knowledge, filled, as it was, with the Bland and Fairfax furniture,
which had surrounded Miss Mitty and Miss Matoaca. On the day some eight
or nine months later that we moved into it the sycamores were budding,
and there were faint spring scents in the air.
"This is where you belong. This is home to you," I said as we stood on
the wide porch at the back, and looked down on the garden. "You will be
happy here, dearest."
"Oh, yes, I'll be happy here."
"It won't be so hard for you when I'm obliged to leave you alone. I'm
sorry I've had to be away so much of late. Have you been lonely?"
"I've taken up riding again. George has found me a new horse, a beauty.
To-morrow I shall follow the hounds with Bonny."
"Oh, be careful, Sally, promise me that you will be careful."
She turned with a laugh that sounded a little reckless.
"There's no pleasure in being careful, and I'm seeking pleasure," she
answered.
The next morning I went to New York for a couple of days, and when I
returned late one afternoon, I found Sally, in her riding habit, pouring
tea for Bonny Marshall and George Bolingbroke in the drawing-room.
I was very tired, my mind was engrossed in business, as it had been
engrossed since the day of the sale of the West Virginia and Wyanoke
Railroad, and I was about to pass upstairs to my dressing-room, when
George, catching sight of me, called to me to come in and exert my
powers of persuasion.
"I'm begging Sally to sell that horse, Beauchamp," he said. "She tried
to make him take a fence this afternoon and he balked and threw her. At
first we were frightened out of our wits, but she got up laughing and
insisted upon mounting him again on the spot."
"Of course you didn't let her," I retorted, with anger.
"Let her? Great Scott! have you been married to a Bland for nearly eight
years and are you still saying, 'let her'?"
"I mounted and rode on with the hunt," said Sally, looking at me with
shining eyes in which there was a defiant and reckless expression. "He
got quite away with me, but I held on and came in at the death, though
without a hat. Now my arms are so sore I shall hardly be able to do my
hair."
"Of course you're not to ride that horse again, Sally," I responded
sternly, forgetting my dusty clothes, forgetting Bonny's dancing black
eyes that never left my face while I stood there.
"Of course I am, Ben," rejoined Sally, laughing, while a high colour
rose to her forehead. "Of course I'm going to ride him to-morrow
afternoon when I go out with Bonny."
"Ah, don't, please," entreated Bonny, in evident distress; "he's really
an ugly brute, you know, dear, if he is so beautiful."
"I feel awfully mean about it, Ben," said George, "because, you see, I
got him for her."
"And you got him," I retorted, indignantly, "without knowing evidently a
thing about him."
"One can never know anything about a brute like that. He went like a
lamb as long as I was on him, but the trouble is that Sally has too
light a hand."
"He'd be all right with me," remarked Bonny, stretching out her arm, in
which the muscle was hard as steel. "See what a grip I have."
"I'll never give up, I'll never give up," said Sally, and though she
uttered the words with gaiety, the expression of defiance, of
recklessness, was still in her eyes.
When George and Bonny had gone, I tried in vain to shake this resolve,
which had in it something of the gentle, yet unconquerable, obstinacy of
Miss Matoaca.
"Promise me, Sally, that you will not attempt to ride that horse again,"
I entreated.
Turning from me, she walked slowly to the end of the room and bent over
the box of sweet alyssum, which still blossomed under a canary cage on
the window-sill. A cedar log was burning on the andirons, and the red
light of the flames fell on the tapestried furniture, on the quaint
inlaid spinet in one corner, and on the portrait above it of Miss Mitty
and Miss Matoaca clasping hands under a garland of roses.
"Will you promise me, dearest?" I asked again, for she did not answer.
Lifting her head from the flowers, she stood with her hand on one of the
delicate curtains, and her figure, in its straight black habit, drawn
very erect.
"I'll ride him," she responded quietly, "if--if he kills me."
"But why--why--what on earth is the use of taking so great a risk?" I
demanded.
A humorous expression shot into her face, and I saw her full, red lips
grow tremulous with laughter.
"That," she answered, after a moment, "is my ambition. All of us have an
ambition, you know, women as well as men."
"An ambition?" I repeated, and looked in mystification at the portrait
above the spinet.
"It sounds strange to you," she went on, "but why shouldn't I have one?
I was a very promising horsewoman before my marriage, and my ambition
now is to--to go after Bonny. Only Bonny says I can't," she added
regretfully, "because of my hands."
"They are too small?"
"Too small and too light. They can't hold things."
"Well, they've managed to hold one at any rate," I responded gaily,
though I added seriously the minute afterward, "If you'll let me sell
that horse, darling, I'll give you anything on God's earth that you
want."
"But suppose I don't want anything on God's earth except that horse?"
"There's no sense in that," I blurted out, in bewilderment. "What in
thunder is there about the brute that has so taken your fancy?"
Her hand fell from the curtain, and plucking a single blossom of sweet
alyssum, she came back to the hearth holding it to her lips.
"He has taken my fancy," she replied, "because he is exciting--and I am
craving excitement."
"But you never used to want excitement."
"People change, all the poets and philosophers tell us. I've wanted it
very badly indeed for the last six or eight months."
"Just since we've recovered our money?"
"Well, one can't have excitement without money, can one? It costs a good
deal. Beauchamp sold for sixteen hundred dollars."
"He'd sell for sixteen to-morrow if I had my way."
"But you haven't. He's the only excitement I have and I mean to keep
him. I shall go out again with the hounds on Saturday."
"If you do, you'll make me miserable, Sally. I shan't be able to do a
stroke of work."
"Then you'll be very foolish, Ben," she responded, and when I would have
still pressed the point, she ran out of the room with the remark that
she must have a hot bath before dinner. "If I don't I'll be too stiff to
mount," she called back defiantly as she went up the staircase.
All night I worried over the supremacy of Beauchamp, but on the morrow
she was kept in bed by the results of her fall, and before she was up
again, George had spirited the horse off somewhere to a farm in the
country.
"I'd have turned horse thief before I'd have let her get on him again,"
he said. "I bought the brute, so I had the best right to dispose of him
as I wanted to."
"Well, I hope you'll do better next time," I returned. "Sally has got
some absurd idea in her head about rivalling Bonny Marshall, but she
never will because she isn't built that way."
"No, she isn't built that way," he agreed, "and I'm glad of it. When I
want a boy I'd rather have him in breeches than in skirts. Is she out of
bed yet?"
"She was up this morning, and on the point of telephoning to the stables
when I left the house."
He laughed softly. "Well, my word goes at the stables," he rejoined, "so
you needn't worry. I'll not let any harm come to her."
The tone in which he spoke, pleasant as it was, wounded my pride of
possession in some inexplicable manner. Sally was safe! It was all taken
out of my hands, and the only thing that remained for me was to return
with a tranquil mind to my affairs. In spite of myself this constant
beneficent intervention of George in my life fretted my temper. If he
would only fail sometimes! If he would only make a mistake! If he would
only attend to his own difficulties, and leave mine to go wrong if they
pleased!
This was on my way up-town in the afternoon, and when I reached home, I
found Sally lying on a couch in her upstairs sitting-room, with an uncut
novel in her hands.
"Ben, did you sell Beauchamp?" she asked, as I entered, and her tone was
full of suppressed resentment, of indignant surprise.
"I'm sorry to say I didn't, dear," I responded cheerfully, "for I should
certainly have done so if George hadn't been too quick for me."
"It was George, then," she said, and her voice lost its resentment.
"Yes, it was George--everything is George," I retorted, in an irascible
tone.
Her eyebrows arched, not playfully as they were used to do, but in
surprise or perplexity.
"He has been very good to me all my life," she answered quietly.
"I know, I know," I said, repenting at once of my temper, "and if you
want another horse, Sally, you shall have it--George will find you a
gentle one this time."
She shook her head, smiling a little.
"I don't want a gentle one. I wanted Beauchamp, and since he has gone I
don't think I care to ride any more. Bonny is right, I suppose, I could
never keep up with her."
"Just as you like, sweetheart, but for my part, I feel easier, somehow,
when you don't go out with the hounds. I'd rather you wouldn't do such
rough riding."
"That's because like most men you have an ideal of a 'faire ladye,'" she
answered, mockingly. "I'm not sure, however, that the huntress hasn't
the best of it. What an empty existence the 'faire ladye' must have
led!"
At first I thought her determination was uttered in jest, and would not
endure through the night; but as the weeks and the months went by and
she still refused to consider the purchase of the various horses George
put through their paces before her, I realised that she really meant, as
she had said, to give up her brief dream of excelling Bonny. Then, for a
few months in the spring and summer, she turned to gardening with
passion, and aided by Dr. Theophilus and George, she planted a cart-load
of bulbs in our square of ground at the back. When I came up late now, I
would find the three of them poring over flower catalogues, with
gathered brows and thoughtful, enquiring faces.
"There's nothing like a love of the trowel for making friends," remarked
the old man, one May afternoon, when I found them resting from their
labours while they drank tea on the porch; "it's a pity you haven't time
to take it up, Ben. Now, young George there has developed a most
extraordinary talent for gardening that he never knew he possessed until
I cultivated it. I shouldn't wonder if it took the place of the horse
with him in the end. What do you say, Sally?" he added, turning to where
Sally and George were leaning together over the railing, with their eyes
on a bed of Oriental poppies. "I was telling Ben that I shouldn't wonder
if George's taste for flowers would not finally triumph over his fancy
for the horse."
For a minute Sally did not look round, and when at last she turned, her
face wore a defiant and reckless expression, as it had done that
afternoon when Beauchamp had thrown her.
"I'm not sure, doctor," she answered; "after all flowers are tame sport,
aren't they? And George is like me--what he wants is excitement."
"I'm sorry to hear that, my dear, a gentle and quiet pursuit is a source
of happiness. You remember what Horace says--"
"Ah, I know, doctor, but did even Horace remember what he said while he
was young?"
George was still gazing attentively down on the bed of Oriental poppies
at the foot of the steps, and though he had taken no part in the
conversation, something in his back, in the rigid look of his shoulders,
as though his muscles were drawn and tense, made me say suddenly:
"If George has changed his hobby from horse-racing to flowers, I'll
begin to expect the General to start collecting insects."
At this George wheeled squarely upon me, and in his dark, flushed face
there was the set look of a man that has taken a high jump.
"It's a bad plan to pin all your pleasure on one thing, Ben," he said.
"If you put all your eggs in one basket you're more than likely to stub
your toe."
"Well, a good deal depends upon how wisely you may have chosen your
pursuit," commented the doctor, pushing his spectacles away from his
eyes to his hair, which was still thick and long; "I don't believe that
a man can make a mistake in selecting either flowers or insects for his
life's interest. The choice between the two is merely a question of
temperament, I suppose, and though I myself confess to a leaning toward
plants, I seriously considered once devoting my declining years to the
study of the habits of beetles. Your suggestion as to George,
however,--old George, I am alluding to,--is a capital one, and I shall
call his attention to it the next time I see him. He couldn't do better,
I am persuaded, than bend his remaining energies in the direction of
insects."
He paused to drink his tea, nodding gently over the rim of his cup to
Bonny Marshall and Bessy Dandridge, who came through one of the long
windows out upon the porch.
"So you've really stopped for a minute," remarked Bonny merrily,
swinging her floating silk train as if it were the skirt of a riding
habit, "and even Ben has fallen out of the race long enough to get a
glimpse of his wife. Have stocks tripped him up again, poor fellow? Do
you know, Sally, it's perfectly scandalous the way you are never seen in
public together. At the reception at the Governor's the other night, one
of those strange men from New York asked me if George were your husband.
Now, that's what I call positively improper--I really felt the
atmosphere of the divorce court around me when he said it--and my
grandmama assures me that if such a thing had happened to _your_
grandmama, Caroline Matilda Fairfax, she would never have held up her
head again. 'But neither morals nor manners are what they were when
Caroline Matilda and I were young,' she added regretfully, 'and it is
due, I suppose, to the war and to the intrusion into society of all
these new people that no one ever heard of.' When I mentioned the guests
at the two last receptions I'd been to, if you will believe me, she had
never heard of a single name,--'all mushrooms,' she declared."
Her eyes, dancing roguishly, met mine over the tea-table, and a bright
blush instantly overspread her face, as if a rose-coloured search-light
had fallen on her.
The embarrassment which I always felt in her presence became suddenly as
acute as physical soreness, and the blush in her face served only to
illuminate her consciousness of my difference, of my roughness, of the
fact that externally, at least, I had never managed to shake myself free
from a resemblance to the market boy who had once brought his basket of
potatoes to the door of this very house. The "magnificent animal," I
knew, had never appealed to her except as it was represented in
horse-flesh; and yet the "magnificent animal" was what in her eyes I
must ever remain. I looked at George, leaning against a white column,
and his appearance of perfect self-sufficiency, his air of needing
nothing, changed my embarrassment into a smothered sensation of anger.
And as in the old days of my first great success, this anger brought
with it, through some curious association of impulses, a fierce, almost
a frenzied, desire for achievement. Here, in the little world of
tradition and sentiment, I might show still at a disadvantage, but
outside, in the open, I could respond freely to the lust for power, to
the passion for supremacy, which stirred my blood. Turning, with a
muttered excuse about letters to read, I went into the house, and closed
my study door behind me with a sense of returning to a friendly and
familiar atmosphere.
Through the rest of the year Sally devoted herself with energy to the
cultivation of flowers; but when the following spring opened, after a
hard winter, she seemed to have grown listless and indifferent, and when
I spoke of the garden, she merely shook her head and pointed to an
unworked border at the foot of the grey-wall.
"I can't make anything grow, Ben. All those brown sticks down there are
the only signs of the bulbs I set out last autumn with my own hands.
Nothing comes up as it ought to."
"Perhaps you need pipes like the doctor," I suggested.
"Oh, no, that would uproot the old shrubs, and besides, I am tired of
it, I think."
She was lying on the couch in her sitting-room, a pile of novels on a
table beside her, and the delicacy in her appearance, the transparent
fineness of her features, of her hands, awoke in me the feeling of
anxiety I had felt so often during the year after little Benjamin's
death.
"I'm sorry I can't get up to luncheon now, darling, but we are making a
big railroad deal. What have you been doing all day long by yourself?"
She looked up at me, and I remembered the face of Miss Matoaca, as I had
seen it against the red firelight on the afternoon when Sally and I had
gone in to tell her of our engagement.
"I didn't go out," she answered. "It was raining so hard that I stayed
by the fire."
"You've been lying here all day alone?"
"Bonny Page came in for a few minutes."
"Have you read?"
"No, I've been thinking."
"Thinking of what, sweetheart?"
"Oh, so many things. You've come up again, haven't you, Ben, splendidly!
Luck is with you, the General says, and whatever you touch prospers."
"Yes, I've come up, but this is the crisis. If I slip now, if I make a
false move, if I draw out, I'm as dead as a door-nail. But give me five
or ten years of hard work and breathless thinking, and I'll be as big a
man as the General."
"As the General?" she repeated gently, and played with the petals of an
American Beauty rose on the table beside her.
"As soon as I'm secure, as soon as I can slacken work a bit, I'm going
to cut all this and take you away. We'll have a second honeymoon when
that time comes."
"In five or ten years?"
"Perhaps sooner. Meanwhile, isn't there something that I can do for you?
Is there anything on God's earth that you want? Would you like a string
of pearls?"
She shook her head with a laugh. "No, I don't want a string of pearls.
Is it time now to dress for dinner?"
"Would you mind if I didn't change, dear? I'm so tired that I shall
probably fall asleep over the dessert."
An evening or two later, when I came up after seven o'clock, I thought
that she had been crying, and taking her in my arms, I passionately
kissed the tear marks away.
"There's but one thing to do, Sally. You must go away. What do you say
to Europe?"
"With you?"
"I wish to heaven it could be with me, but if I shirk this deal now, I'm
done for, and if I stick it out, it may mean future millions. Why not
ask Bessy Dandridge?"
"I don't think I want to go with Bessy Dandridge."
Her tone troubled me, it was so gentle, so reserved, and walking to the
window, I stood gazing out upon the April rain that dripped softly
through the budding sycamores. I felt that I ought to go, and yet I knew
that unless I gave up my career, it was out of the question. The
railroad deal was, as I had said, very important, and if I were to
withdraw from it now, it would probably collapse and bring down on me
the odium of my associates. After my desperate failure of less than five
years ago, I was just recovering my ground, and the incidents of that
disaster were still too recent to permit me to breathe freely. My name
had suffered little because my personal tragedy had been regarded as a
part of the general panic, and I had, in the words of George
Bolingbroke, "gone to smashes with honour." Yet I was not secure now; I
had not reached the top of the ladder, but was merely mounting. "It's
for Sally's sake that I'm doing it," I said to myself, suddenly
comforted by the reflection; "without Sally the whole thing might go to
ruin and I wouldn't hold up my hand. But I must make her proud of me. I
must justify her choice in the eyes of her friends." And the balm of
this thought seemed to lighten my weight of trouble and to appease my
conscience. "It isn't as if I were doing it for myself, or my own
ambition. I am really doing it for her--everything is for her. If I can
hold on now, in a few years I'll give her millions to spend." Then I
remembered that the last time I had gone motoring with her it had
appeared to do her good, and that she had remarked she preferred a car
with a red lining.
"I tell you what, sweetheart," I said, going back to her, "as I can't
take you away, I'll buy you a new motor car with a red lining and I'll
take you out every blessed afternoon I can get off from the office.
You'll like that, won't you?" I asked eagerly.
"Yes, I'll like that," she replied, with an effort at animation, while
she bent her face over the rose in her hand.
A week later I bought the motor car, the handsomest I could find, with
the softest red lining; and when May came, I went out with her whenever
I could break away from my work. But the pressure was great, the General
was failing and leaned on me, and I was over head and ears in a dozen
outside schemes that needed only my amazing energy to push them to
success. Never had my financial insight appeared so infallible, never
had my "genius" for affairs shone so brilliantly. The years of poverty
had increased, not dissipated, my influence, and I had come up all the
stronger for the experience that had sent me down. The lesson that a
weaker man might have succumbed beneath, I had absorbed into myself, and
was now making use of as I had made use of every incident, bad or good,
in my life. I passed on, I accumulated, but I did not squander. Little
things, as well as great things, served me for material, and during
those first years of my recovery, I became by far the most brilliant
figure in my world of finance. "Pile all the bu'sted stocks in the
market on his shoulders, and he'll still come out on top," chuckled the
General. "The best thing that ever happened to you, Ben, barring the
toting of potatoes, was the blow on the head that sent you under water.
A little fellow would have drowned, but you knew how to float."
"I'd agree with you about its being the best thing, except--except for
Sally."
"What's the matter with Sally? Is she going cracked? You know I always
said she was the image of her aunt--Miss Matoaca Bland."
"She has never recovered. Her health seems to have given way."
"She needs coddling, that's the manner of women and babies. Do you
coddle her? It's worth while, though some men don't know how to do it.
Lord, Lord, I remember when my poor mother was on her death-bed and my
father got on his knees and asked her if he'd been a good husband (she
was his third wife and died of her tenth child), she looked at him with
a kind of gentle resentment and replied: 'You were a saint, I suppose,
Samuel, but I'd rather have had a sinner that would have coddled me.'
She was the prim, flat-bosomed type, too, just like Miss Mitty Bland,
and my father said afterwards, crying like a baby, that he had so much
respect for her he would as soon have thought of trying to coddle a
Lombardy poplar. Poplar or mimosa tree, I tell you, they are all made
that way, every last one of them--and nothing on earth made poor Miss
Matoaca a fire-eater and a disturber of the peace except that she didn't
have a man to coddle her."
"I give Sally everything under heaven I can think of, but she doesn't
appear to want it."
"Keep on giving, it's the only way. You'll see her begin to pick up
presently before you know it. They ain't rational, my boy, that's the
whole truth about 'em, they ain't rational. If Miss Matoaca had belonged
to a rational sex, do you think she'd have killed herself trying to get
on an equality with us? You can't make a pullet into a rooster by
teaching it to crow, as my old mammy used to say." For a minute he was
silent, and appeared to be meditating. "I tell you what I'll do, Ben,"
he said at last, with a flash of inspiration, "I'll go in with you and
see if I can't cheer up Sally a bit."
When we reached my door, he let the reins fall over the back of his old
horse, and getting out, hobbled, with my assistance, upstairs, and into
Sally's sitting-room, where we found George Bolingbroke, looking
depressed and sullen.
She was charmingly dressed, as usual, and as the General entered, she
came forward to meet him with the gracious manner which some one had
told me was a part, not of her Bland, but of her Fairfax inheritance.
"That's a pretty tea-gown you've got on," observed the great man, in the
playful tone in which he might have remarked to a baby that it was
wearing a beautiful bib. "You haven't been paying much attention to
fripperies of late, Ben tells me. Have you seen any hats? I don't know
anything better for a woman's low spirits, my dear, than a trip to New
York to buy a hat."
She laughed merrily, while her eyes met George Bolingbroke's over the
General's head.
"I bought six hats last month," she replied.
"And you didn't feel any better?"
"Not permanently. Then Ben got me a diamond bracelet." She held out her
arm, with the bracelet on her wrist, which looked thin and transparent.
The General bent his bald head over the trinket, which he examined as
attentively as if it had been a report of the Great South Midland and
Atlantic Railroad.
"Ben's got good taste," he observed; "that's a pretty bracelet."
"Yes, it's a pretty bracelet."
"But that didn't make you feel any brighter?"
"Oh, I'm well," she responded, laughing. "I've just been telling George
I'm so well I'm going to a ball with him."
"To a ball," I said; "are you strong enough for that, Sally?"
"I'm quite strong, I'm well, I feel wildly gay."
"It's the best thing for her," remarked the General. "Don't stop her,
Ben, let her go."
At dinner that night, in a gorgeous lace gown, with pearls on her throat
and in her hair, she was cheerful, animated, almost, as she had said,
wildly gay. When George came for her, I put her into the carriage.
"Are you all right?" I asked anxiously. "Are you sure you are strong
enough, Sally?"
"Quite strong. What will you do, Ben?"
"I've got to work. There are some papers to draw up. Don't let her stay
late, George."
"Oh, I'll take care of her," said George. "Good-night."
She leaned out, touching my hand. "You'll be in bed when I come back.
Good-night."
The carriage rolled off, and entering the house I went into the library,
where I worked until twelve o'clock. Then as Sally had not returned and
I had a hard day ahead of me, I went upstairs to bed.
She did not wake me when she came in, and in the morning I found her
sleeping quietly, with her cheek pillowed on her open palm, and a
pensive smile on her lips. After breakfast, when I came up to speak to
her before going out, she was sitting up in bed, in a jacket of blue
satin and a lace cap, drinking her coffee.
"Did you have a good time?" I asked, kissing her. "Already you look
better."
"I danced ever so many dances. Do you know, Ben, I believe it was
diversion I needed. I've thought too much and I'm going to stop."
"That's right, dance on if it helps you."
"I can't get that year on Church Hill out of my mind."
"Forget it, sweetheart, it's over; forget it."
"Yes, it's over," she repeated, and then as she lay back, in her blue
satin jacket, on the embroidered pillows and smiled up at me, I saw in
her face a reflection of the faint wonder which was the inherited look
of the Blands in regarding life.