Paula reached her destination early the next morning. She had not slept
during the night and as soon as the light began to dawn she raised the
blind at her window and lay in her berth looking out drearily at the
face of the country, growing constantly more familiar, but yet dimly
descried and colorless as a scene in sepia, with the lagging night still
clinging to the earth. Belts of white vapor lay in every depression; the
forests along the horizon made a dark circumference for the whole; the
stars were wan and sad of aspect and faded from the sky, one by one, as
the eye dwelt upon them. The characteristic features of the swamp region
had vanished. In many places the land was deeply gullied, showing as the
day waxed a richly tinted red clay that made the somber landscape glow.
Everywhere were the hedges of the evergreen Cherokee rose, defining the
borders of fields, often untrimmed and encroaching in a great green
billow on spaces unmeet for a mere boundary mark. The trees were huge;
gigantic oaks and the spreading black-gum; and she was ready, her hat
on, her wrap and furs adjusted, looking out eagerly at these dense bosky
growths when the red wintry sun began to cast long shafts of quiet dull
sheen adown their aisles, showing the white rime on the rough bark of
the boughs, or among the russet leaves, still persistently clinging.
More than once the conductor came in to consult her as to the precise
point of stoppage, and, when a long warning whistle set the echoes astir
in the quiet matutinal atmosphere and the train began to slow down, she
was alertly on her feet.
“You are sure of the place, ma’am?” said the conductor, helping her
descend the step; he was new to the road, and there seemed to him
nothing here but woods.
She reassured him as she lightly ran down the steep incline, and then
she stood for a moment, mechanically watching the train, epitome of the
world, sweeping away and leaving her here, the dense forest before her,
the smoke flaunting backward, the sun emblazoning its convolutions, the
wondering faces of the passengers at the windows.
She remembered the time when this wonder would have nettled her. She had
wanted a station platform built here, but her uncle had utilitarian
theories, and, somehow, “never got round to it,” as he was wont to
phrase it. So seldom, indeed, they boarded the train, so seldom it
brought a visitor, that it seemed to him the least and last needed
appurtenance of the plantation. She wondered if the stoppage had been
not noted at the house. The woods were silent, as with mystery, as she
took her way through “the grove.” The frost lay white on the grass, and
there was even a glint of ice in the water lurking in the ruts of a
wagon wheel in the road. She walked on these frozen edges after a
fashion learned long ago to keep her feet dainty when not so expensively
shod as now. Suddenly she heard the deep baying of a hound.
“Oh, old Hero!” she exclaimed pettishly. “He will tell them all I have
come!”
For she had wished to slip in unobserved. The humiliation of her return
in this wise seemed less when the kindly old roof should be above her
head. But the dog met her, fierce and furious, at the fence of the door
yard--how she had hated that fence; she had wanted the grove and yard
thrown together like some fine park. As the old retainer recognized her
the complication of his barks which he could not forego, in view of her
capacity as stranger, with his wheezes and whines of ecstasy, as
greeting to an old friend, while he leaped and gamboled about her,
brought her uncle and aunt, every chick and child, the servants from the
outhouses, and all the dogs on the place to make cheerful acclaim of
welcome.
So long had it been since she had heard this hearty, genuine note of
disinterested affection that it came like balm to her lacerated heart,
and suddenly there seemed no more need for pride, for dissimulation, for
self-restraint. She broke down and burst into a flood of tears, the
group lachrymose in sympathy and wiping their eyes.
She had planned throughout the night how best and when to tell her
story, but it was disclosed without preface or method, before she had
been in the house ten minutes, her aunt cautiously closing the door of
the sitting-room the instant Mr. Floyd-Rosney’s name was mentioned and
her uncle looking very grave.
“You were quite right in coming at once to us, my dear,” he said kindly.
“Be sure you shall not be shipped out of the country.”
He was a tall, heavy man, somewhat spare and angular, and his large
well-formed features expressed both shrewdness and kindness. He had
abundant grizzled hair and his keen gray eyes were deeply set under
thick dark eyebrows. He was a fair-minded man one could see at a glance,
a thoroughly reliable man in every relation of life, a gentleman of the
old school.
“Some arrangement will surely be made about the baby; I shall love to
see the little fellow again. Set your heart at rest. I will communicate
at once with Mr. Floyd-Rosney, as your nearest relative, standing in
_loco parentis_.”
“And give me some breakfast,” said Paula, lapsing into the old childish
whine of a spoiled household pet. “I have had nothing to eat since
yesterday at lunch.”
The husband and wife exchanged a glance over her head.
“And before I forget it----” she raised herself to an upright position
and took from her bag the twenty dollar bill. “Please write and return
this to old Colonel Kenwynton. I should be ashamed to sign my name to
such a letter. He _would_ lend it to me--though I didn’t need it after
he and Adrian Ducie--Randal Ducie’s brother--had lent me the money to
buy my ticket.”
Mrs. Majoribanks was a stern-faced woman with rigid ideas of the
acceptable in conduct. Her dark hair, definitely streaked with gray,
banded smoothly along her high forehead, her serious, compelling, gray
eyes, the extreme neatness and accuracy of adjustment of her dress, her
precise method of enunciation, intimated an uncompromising personality,
possessing high ideals religiously followed,--somewhat narrow of view,
perhaps, and severe of judgment, but unfalteringly, immovably upright.
“But, Paula, why didn’t you buy your own ticket with your own money? To
allow another to buy it was inappropriate.”
“I had no money,” Paula explained humbly. “Mr. Floyd-Rosney lets me buy
anything I want on account, but he never gives me any money to spend as
I like.” Once more the husband and wife looked significantly at each
other. All that they possessed was his, but the privileges of ownership
were exercised in common, the expenditures a matter of mutual confidence
and agreement, and it may be doubted if he ever took a step in business
affairs without consultation with her.
The spare, sober decorum of the aspect of the house appealed to Paula in
her present state of mind, her taste for magnificence glutted, and she
remembered, with a sort of wonder, her intolerance of the stiff old
furniture of the sitting-room covered with hair-cloth; the crimson
brocade, well frayed, of the parlor glimpsed through the open door, with
the old-fashioned lambrequins at the windows and carefully mended lace
curtains, and the family portraits in oil on the walls; the linoleum on
the floor of the hall that had been there seeming indestructible since
she could remember; the barometer hanging over the long sofa; the
grandfather’s clock in the corner, still allotting the hours, however
lives might wax or wane; the dining-room, with the burly sideboard and
the peacock fly-brush, and the white-jacketed waiter, and the brisk
little darkey that ran in and out with the relays of hot buttered
waffles. It all seemed so sane, so simple, so safe. Here and there,
conspicuously placed, were gifts which she and Mr. Floyd-Rosney had
made, ostentatiously handsome. She thought them curiously out of accord
with the tone of the place, and, oddly enough, she felt ashamed of them.
She asked herself how and why had such an obsession as had possessed her
ever come to her--the hankering for the empty life of show, and fashion,
and wealth. Had she not had every reasonable wish gratified, enjoyed
every advantage of a solid and careful education, had every social
opportunity in a circle, limited, certainly, but characterized by
refinement, and dignity, and seemliness, that was the gentility of long
traditions of gentlefolks--not pretty manners, picked up the day before
yesterday. She had come back to it now--her wings clipped, her feathers
drooping.
She could not enter into the old home life as of yore--it seemed
strangely alien, though so familiar. She would look vaguely at her young
cousins, each altered and much more mature in the five years that had
passed since she was an inmate of the household--well grown, handsome,
intelligent boys they were, instead of the romping children she had
left. They spent the mornings with a tutor who came from the neighboring
town to read with them, and the eldest was much given to argument with
his father, insisting vivaciously on his theories of government, of
religion, of politics, of the proper method of construing certain Latin
verses; the two younger were absorbed in their dogs, their rabbits,
their games--the multitudinous little interests of people of their age,
so momentous to them. Always their world was home--she wondered what
the real world would seem to them when they should emerge into it, what
the theories of government, the phrasing of Latin verses, the home
absorptions would prove as preparation for life as she knew it.
Certainly they did not formulate it. She said to herself that a more
secluded existence could hardly be matched outside a monastery. She did
not believe any of the three had ever seen a game of football or
baseball; the life of cities, of travel, of association with their
fellows was as a sealed book to them. In their minds Ingleside was a
realm; their father was their comrade; their mother was the court of
last resort.
But Paula’s absorbed thoughts refused all but the slightest speculation
upon the subject of their future and she could urge herself to only the
shadow of interest in her aunt’s pursuits and absorptions. Even the room
of her girlhood--she could not enter there, she could not sleep there,
for dreams--dreams--dreams! They might have there faculties of
visualization or unseen they could stab her unaware. Never again should
her spirit encounter these immaterial essences. She asked her aunt to
give her her grandmother’s room. It was small comfort in laying her head
on that pillow which had never known a selfish thought, an unsanctified
desire, to feel the difference, the distance. But here all good
influences abode, and she was consoled in a sort for the unappreciated
affliction of that saintly death, to whisper into the downy depth--“I
have come back--scourged--scourged!”
How she remembered that that good grandmother had so grievously
deprecated the course toward Randal Ducie; that she had declared the
greatest of all disasters is a marriage without love, and that a promise
is a promise; many times she shook her head, and shed some shy, shy
tears over Randal’s dismissal, though Paula wrote the letter in a frenzy
of careless energy, without erasing a word or troubling to take a copy.
She would note with a sort of apologetic affection the details of this
familiar room that she had early learned to stigmatize as old-fashioned,
and in her schoolgirl phrase “tacky”--the chintz curtains with their big
flowers; the hair-cloth covered rocking chairs; the four-poster mahogany
bedstead with its heavily corniced tester, the red cloth goffered to the
center to focus in a big gilt star; the mahogany bureau, so tall that
the mirror made good headway to the ceiling; the floriated Brussels
carpet so antique of pattern that she used to say she believed it was
manufactured before the flood and so staunch of web that it was destined
to last till doomsday; the little work-table, with its drawers still
filled with spools, and buttons, and reels of embroidery silk, and balls
of wool for knitting and crochet--doubtless some piece of her
grandmother’s beautiful handiwork still lay where her busy fingers had
placed it, with the needle yet in the stitch.
The rose curtained window gave on no smiling scene--it was one of the
few outlooks from the house that was not of bosky presentment. But the
grove had ceased ere these precincts were reached and the view was of a
dull bit of pasture and beyond a dreary stretch of cornfields, in which
the stalks still stood, stripped of the ears, pallid with frost and
writhen into fantastic postures by wind and weather. It was but a
dreary landscape, trembling under slanting lines of rain, and later of
sleet, for the halcyon weather had vanished at last, and winter had come
in earnest. A mist hung much of the time between the earth and a leaden
sky, and the woods that lay along the low horizon were barely glimpsed
as a dull, indistinct smudge.
Nothing, she said to herself, could ever rehabilitate the universe for
her. This crisis was so comprehensive, so significant. She clenched her
hands when she reviewed the past few years with a nervous fury so
intense that the nails marked the palms. Her memories and her
self-reproach seared her consciousness like hot iron. Whelmed in the
luxury of wealth, proud of her preëminence of station, sharing as far as
might be her husband’s domineering assumptions toward others, cravenly
submitting when his humor required her, too, to crook the knee, she had
subverted her every opinion, her inmost convictions, to theories of life
she would once have despised, to estimate as of paramount value the
things she had been taught to hold as dross. She had cast aside all her
standards of intrinsic worth. Sometimes she would spring from sleep and
walk the floor, the red glow of the embers on the wall, the shadows
glooming about her, the events of those tumultuous years, in the fierce
white light of actuality rather than the glimpses of memories, deploying
before her. Resist his influence----? She had flattered, she had
surrounded him with an atmosphere of adulation. She had loved so much
his possessions and her realized ambitions that she had imbibed the
theory that she had loved him. True, she had admired him--his impressive
presence, his domineering habit of mind, his expensive culture, his
discrimination in matters of art and music, the cringing attitude toward
him of his employees, his humble friends, and now and then a man on his
own plane, unable to sustain his individuality before that coercive
influence. Bring tribute--bring tribute! In every relation of life that
fiat went forth. And she had permitted herself to believe that her
craven acquiescence in this demand was--love! And, doubtless, the
tyrant, unabashed by the glaring improbability, had believed it too.
The phases of fashionable life are never so minimized as in the presence
of some great and grave actuality of human experience--she looked back
upon them now with a disgusted wonder and an averse contempt. The world
for which she had longed in her quiet rural home, which had opened its
doors so unexpectedly, so beatifically, to her trembling entrance,
seemed to her now full of dull and commonplace people, all eagerly
pursuing some sordid scheme of advancement, regardful of their fellows
only to envy values which they do not share, to cringe before
consequence and station which only belittle them, to pull down, if
occasion permit, those who are on the up-grade, to alternately court and
decry their superiors, and to revile and baffle the humble. And for a
share in this world, this outlook, this atmosphere, she had bartered her
happiness, had destroyed her identity, as nearly as she might, had
achieved the lot of a lifelong victim to intolerable tyranny.
In all her beclouded spiritual sky there had glowed the radiance of one
single star, one pure and genuine emotion, her maternal love, bought by
no price, asking naught, giving in an ecstasy of self-abnegation that
made sacrifice a luxury and suffering a joy.
And now this light of her life was obscured by dense clouds, and who
could say how and when it would emerge.
The change of place, the sense of escape acted in some sort as a
respite, but there was possible no surcease of anguished solicitude. Her
uncle began almost immediately the concoction of a letter to Mr.
Floyd-Rosney, which should be a triumph of epistolary art to accomplish
its ends. He desired to remonstrate against the enforced expatriation of
Mrs. Floyd-Rosney, to insist on the propriety of restoring her son to
her care, and to condemn the cruelty of the separation, all expressed in
such soft choice locutions as to give no offense to the gusty temper of
her husband and to make no reflections on the justice of his conduct. He
wished to take a tone of authority and seniority as being the nearest
and eldest relative of Mrs. Floyd-Rosney, and thus entitled to offer his
views and advice in her behalf, yet to avoid seeming intrusive and
guilty of interference between husband and wife.
As he wrote at his desk in the sitting-room, his intent grizzled head
bent over the repeated drafts of this effort, Paula, passing in the hall
without, catching a glimpse of his occupation, had space in her
multifarious anguish for a sense of deep humiliation that this should be
going forward in her interest. How she had flaunted the achievement of
her great marriage in this her simple home, in the teeth of their
misgivings, their covert reservations, their deprecation of her
treatment of Randal Ducie. She had piqued herself on the fact that not
many girls so placed, so far from the madding crowd, could have made
such a ten-strike in the matrimonial game. Her standards were not
theirs; her life was regulated on a plane which did not conform to their
ideals, but as time went on they had ventured to hope for the best, and
when Geoffrey Majoribanks had been asked occasionally if his niece had
not made a very rich marriage he would add “and a very happy one.” This
he had believed, although in view of Floyd-Rosney’s imperious
temperament and the process of his wife’s evident subjugation, it must
seem that the wish had constrained his credulity. Now the illusion was
dispelled, the bubble had burst, and it devolved upon him to patch up
from its immaterial constituent elements some semblance of conjugal
reconciliation and the possibility of a degree of happiness in the
future.
He was a ready scribe, as were most men of his day, and had a neat gift
of expression. But he called for help continually in this instance, now
from his wife, and throwing ceremony to the winds, in view of the
importance of the missive, once his hearty, resonant voice summoned the
party most in interest, Paula herself.
“Our object is to get the child restored to your care and to compass a
cessation of this insistence that you shall go abroad,--not to win in an
argument. Now do you think this phrasing could offend Mr. Floyd-Rosney,
or wound his feelings?”
Paula, standing tall, pale, listless, beside the desk, leaning on one
hand among the litter of discarded papers of the voluminous epistle,
looked down into his anxious, upturned face, beneath his tousled,
grizzled hair, pitying the limitations of his perceptions.
“Any phrasing will offend Mr. Floyd-Rosney if he wishes to be offended,”
she replied languidly, “and he has no feelings to wound.”
She went slowly out of the room, leaving him meditatively biting the
handle of his pen.
The letter bade fair to become a permanent occupation. He worked at it
late at night and all the forenoon of the next day, and when, at the two
o’clock dinner, his wife suggested that he should take Paula out for a
drive about the country,--she would be interested in seeing how little
it had changed since she was a resident here--he shook his head doggedly
over the big turkey that he was deftly carving.
“No,--no,” he said, “I must get back to that--that document. You and one
of the boys can take her to drive.”
The “document” was duly finished at last and duly mailed. Then
expectation held the household to fever heat. The return mail brought
nothing; the next post was not more significant; nor the next; nor the
next. A breathless suspense supervened.
One Monday morning Major Majoribanks came into the sitting-room with a
sheaf of newspapers in his trembling hand, a ghastly white face and eyes
of living fire. He could not speak; he could scarcely control his
muscles sufficiently to open a journal and point with a shaking finger
to a column with great headlines. He placed the newspaper in the hands
of his wife, who was alone in the room, then he went softly to the door,
closed it, and sank down in an armchair, gasping for breath. His wife,
too, turned pale as she read, but her hand was steady.
Mr. Edward Floyd-Rosney, the paper recited, to the great amazement of
the city, had brought suit against his wife for divorce. The allegations
of the bill set forth that she had fled from her home with Randal Ducie,
who was named as co-respondent, and the husband made oath that in
seeking to intercept and reclaim her, following her to the station as
soon as he discovered her absence, he had witnessed her departure in
company with Randal Ducie just as the train moved out of the shed.
Major Majoribanks presently hirpled, for he could scarcely walk, across
the room, and laid his finger on another column in a different portion
of the paper, and treating of milder sensations.
“I didn’t need this to prove that--that--a base lie----” his stiff lips
enunciated with difficulty.
This paragraph treated of the current cotton interests, giving extracts
from an address made by Randal Ducie in New Orleans at a banquet of an
association interested in levee protection, on the evening and also at
the hour when he was represented in Floyd-Rosney’s bill as fleeing with
his neighbor’s wife in a city five hundred miles distant. He had made
himself conspicuous as an advocate of certain methods of levee
protection, and his views were both ardently upheld and rancorously
contested even at the festive board. The occasion was thus less
harmonious than such meetings should be, and the local papers had much
“write-up” besides the menu and the toasts, in the views of various
planters and several engineer officers, guests of the occasion, lending
themselves to a spirited discussion of Randal Ducie’s recommendations.