It was one o’clock on that same night Virginia Herrick leaned with round
bare arms on the table, above which hung a little oblong, old-fashioned
mirror in a warped mahogany frame. The one candle on a little bracket at
her right hand, brought out the clear tones in her face and throat and
arms, and dived vividly into her masses of loosened hair; beyond her was
a background of vague shadows; she looked from the tarnished mirror like
a painting from its frame. Her eyes were sombre and heavy under their
dark lids. The light falling down upon her sent long delicate shadows
trembling upon her cheeks--shadows such as are made by the bending of
summer grasses across a woman’s white gown, and which in Virginia’s case
were cast by her thick, curled lashes.
She had taken off the waist of her homespun dress, and the folds of her
much-gathered chemise assumed a silvery tone in the concentrated light.
The contrast between the dead white of the stuff and the living white of
her neck and arms was as perfect as when Southern peach-trees, blossoming
before their time, are seen next day against vast fields of snow.
One of the Persian cats leaped with soft agility upon the table, and
passed purring between the girl and her fair image in the dingy glass;
she swept him from her way with one sure motion of her strong bare arm,
and returned to her intent scrutiny of her own face.
The time passed on. A rat began an intermittent nibbling in the old
wainscoting of the room; sharp, sudden noises were heard overhead; the
fire died out in tinkling silence; a heavy shroud of semi-transparent
tallow wrapped the one candle. Two o’clock had sounded through the
hollow depths of the old house some time ago. Suddenly she spoke.
“I wisht I knew ef I war pretty,” she said. Then, with passionate
reiterance, “I _wisht_ I knew ef I war pretty.”
The cat, hearing her voice, leaped again beside her, as if to answer;
again she swept him to the floor. The soft, cushioned thud of his feet
against the bare boards sounded quite distinctly upon the silence, so
alert to catch every noise. “Oh, I wisht--I _wisht_ I knew ef I war
pretty,” she said once more.
Poor little savage, you are pretty indeed--with a prettiness which
civilization would give many of its privileges to possess. So, I doubt
not, were fashioned the wood-nymphs of old, with strength and with health
and with grace beyond all power of reproduction--even so have they gazed
deep into their woodland lakes; and the lakes, did they not answer? Who
but Beauty was ever mother of such curves and tints?
This time she put another question. “I wisht I knew
ef--it--pleased--_him_.”
She had yielded up her secret to the old mirror, and to Hafiz--what
better confidants? The one had no tongue; the other a tongue used only
for lapping unlimited supplies of Alderney cream.
With a sudden movement she leaned forward and blew out the sputtering
candle. She did not wish even her own eyes in the mirror to pry upon her.
Three days later Roden and Usurper figured in a hurdle race of some note
in the neighborhood.
This Usurper was by King Tom, out of Uarda, and as rank a brute as ever
went headlong at his hurdle, often taking off nearly a length too soon.
Virginia, who had seen him day after day at his work, ventured timidly to
suggest to Roden that one of the lads should ride the horse. He laughed,
and told her he had thought her above that very ordinary failing of
women--nervousness. She said nothing more, turning short on her heel
with the customary dissenting movement of her fine shoulders.
These races were to be quite a swell affair, and there were a good many
carriages outside of the course. Miss Erroll and her mother, sunk deep in
an old-fashioned landau, talked to Roden as he leaned on the side of the
carriage, very brown and gallant in his racing-togs.
Virginia was seated on Pokeberry, not three yards off. She watched
curiously each movement of Miss Erroll, dwelling with strained, wondering
eyes upon her pretty wrinkled gloves; her close-fitting corsage of white
serge; her little dark-red velvet toque; her parasol, a vivid arrangement
of cream-color and red, which made a charming plaque-like background for
her fair face; she also noticed the posy of blue and white flowers which
was pinned on the left side against the white bodice of Miss Erroll.
Roden’s colors were blue and white. Virginia herself had a little knot of
white and blue hyacinths on her riding-habit; she jerked them out with
a savage movement, tossed them on the ground, and carefully guided the
hoofs of Pokeberry upon them.
All unconscious was she that in her eyes, blue now with anger, and her
cheeks so white with pain, she wore his colors whether she would or not.
There were two races before the one in which he rode. Then he went off
to be weighed, and Virginia dismounted from Pokeberry, and gave a little
nigger a cent or two to hold the mare.
She went and leaned against the railing, waiting for the start. All went
well enough until the finish. Roden came sweeping down the homestretch in
an easy canter, Usurper well in hand and going game as a pebble, and one
more hurdle to jump.
Virginia held her breath; she had a horrible certainty that Usurper
would refuse that last hurdle, or do something equally idiotic. Roden
sent him at it in fine form. There was a second of expectancy, a smart
crash, and then Usurper, scrambling heavily to his feet, tore off down
the course, leaving a mass of blue and white half under the débris of the
hurdle. The brute had not risen an inch, and had flung Roden headfirst
into the hurdle, himself turning a complete somersault.
On came the other horses, ten of them, in full gallop. Mary Erroll stood
on her feet, with a little broken cry. Some men, until now paralyzed
with astonishment and horror, started forward; but swifter than all,
unhesitating, strong of arm as of nerve, Herrick’s daughter, diving
beneath the rail, rushed out into the middle of the track, and seizing
the senseless man beneath his arms dragged him by main force out of the
way of the coming horses. The hoof of one of them, however, struck her on
her left shoulder, taking a good bit of flesh and cloth clean away as
though with a knife.
There was a good deal of blood about Roden’s head--some at first thought
that he was seriously injured. They carried him into a tent and sent for
a surgeon. In an hour he was all right, however, and wrote a few words
upon some little ivory tablets, sent him by Miss Erroll for that purpose,
to assure her of his entire recovery. Mary then sent to ask if Miss
Herrick would not be so very kind as to come and speak to her. The girl
came, sullenly enough, touching from time to time the bandages about her
left shoulder, as though restless under even so slight a restraint.
“I want to thank you so very, very much,” said Mary, in her sweetest
voice. She leaned far out of the landau and held out her hand to Virginia.
“What a’ _you_ thankin’ me fur?” demanded the girl, fiercely, stepping
backward from the extended hand. “_You_ ain’t got nothin’ to thank me
fur--have you?” she ended, with a sudden change from aggressiveness to
appeal infinitely pathetic.
A swift red had dyed Mary’s face at the first reception of her kindly
meant advances. It faded out now, leaving her very pale.
“Every one who is a friend of Mr. Roden ought to thank you, if they do
not,” she said, with great dignity. “I am sorry I spoke, since it has
been so disagreeable to you. Good-morning.”
Virginia was dismissed--she felt it. The knowledge went scorching through
her veins as kirsch through the veins of one not accustomed to its fire.
She hated the girl with a mad, barbaric impulse, which was as much beyond
her control as its tides are beyond the control of the ocean; she felt an
animosity to Miss Erroll’s very hat, to her pretty parasol with its bunch
of red velvet ribbons on the bamboo handle. She would have liked to seize
and tear them to pieces, as a humming-bird tears the flower which has
refused its honey. A red mist rose to her eyes. The Erroll carriage and
its occupants seemed to be melting away and away in a golden haze. She
stepped backward, keeping her eyes on it, as a fascinated bird looks ever
on the serpent that has charmed it.
“I hate her--I hate her--I hate her,” she said, back of her teeth, not
fiercely, as she had at first spoken, but with a dull assertiveness.
She refused several offers from kindly neighbors who would have driven
her home. She could ride quite well, she said, without using her left arm.
The evening was lowering and purple towards the north-east, full of
vague shadows and noises of homeward creatures. The west was aglare as
with floating golden ribbons from some mighty, unseen Maypole behind the
luridly dark mountains.
The slanting light touched the crests of the clods in a newly ploughed
field to her left with a vivid effect, remindful of the light-capped
wavelets on an evening bay. Farther on it was long, glistening stalks of
fodder which caught the level gleaming from the west, as might the rifles
of a regiment that has been ordered to fire lying down. The fresh green
hollows of the hills were full of a palpable golden ether, like cups of
emerald brimmed with the lucent amber drink of other days.
A leather-winged bat brushed against her cheek, flying heavily into some
broom-straw just beyond. She saw nothing, felt nothing, heard nothing
beyond the dark hours ahead of her, the heavy aching of her heart, and
its loud monotonous beating, to which she unconsciously set words as one
does to the iterant chatter of a clock.
“Yes, he loves her--yes, he loves her,” so it seemed to say, over and
over, again and again. Almost she could have torn it from her breast
and flung it from her, had not it been sacred to her for the love of
him with which it was filled. Think of it; try to imagine it. A woman
fully developed, heart and body full of the South from bright head to
nimble feet, as the South is full of beauty; free as the birds that
cleaved her native air with strong, untiring wings; unlearned in all
emotion whether of love or of hate; not weary in sense or perception;
untutored, unknowing, uncivilized--and loving for the first time in all
her one-and-twenty years of living!
There was no analysis here, no picking to pieces of little emotions,
no skewering of butterfly passions to sheets of paper from the book of
former knowledge. No comparison between then and now--between now and
what might possibly have been had the bits of glass in the kaleidoscope
of existence assumed a certain difference of juxtaposition. She loved
him. Why she loved him, how she loved him, she could no more have told
you than she could have told the names of the different elements which
composed the tears with which her hot eyes brimmed.
It was seven o’clock of that same evening. Roden, restless and feverish,
flung from side to side on an old leathern sofa in the library. There
were no candles, but a great fire of chestnut-wood sought and found all
such points as were capable of illumination in the sombre old room--the
brass claw feet of the tables and chairs, the great brass hinges of the
rosewood bookcase, the glass knobs on an old writing-desk in one corner,
Roden’s eyes and hair as he lay listlessly resigned for a moment or two
staring into the noisy labyrinths of the flames.
It was half an hour later. The leaping flames had settled as in
sleep upon a bed of red-gold coals; a little ever-ascending spiral
of gray-white smoke escaped from a cleft in the end of one of the
half-burned logs. The old chimney-place was like a vivid picture set in
the dark wall. Its yawning black throat, heavily clogged with soot, was
tinged faintly for some way up by the glow from the lurid mass on the
hearth. The great iron fire-dogs, at least four feet in height, were
connected from shaft to shaft by a chain in grotesque suggestion of the
Siamese twins. The much-burnt bricks had assumed opaline tones, in rosy
grays and greenish-yellows, beneath the intense heat and light. On the
hearth-rug the collie lay stretched, his ruffled legs every now and then
executing an unavailing canter, as in his dreams perchance he chased a
soaring buzzard.
They were all three asleep--the fire, the collie, Roden. A soft crooning
wind, conducive to slumber, sighed at the doors and windows, vibrating
every once in a while with sonorous minor cadences.
Suddenly the incessant monotone was snapped, as it were, to silence.
The door leading into the library had been opened; some one entered
cautiously, stood still; then the door was again closed noiselessly.
The person who had entered crept forward a pace or two. It was Virginia.
She had not yet taken off her riding-habit, and the bandages were yet
about her shoulder. Some dark stains here and there told where the blood
had soaked through. As she came forward, nearer to the rich lambency of
the fire, her white face borrowed some of its roseate flush, but the
lines of pain, mental and physical, were traced as with a fine chisel
about the sombre mouth and eyes. Stealing past the foot of the sofa on
which Roden lay, she stood a moment looking at him. Her crossed wrists
pressed each other hard against her bosom, her long fingers drawing the
stuff of her habit in wrinkles with the tenseness of their grasp upon
it. Her breast rose and fell, impatient, eager, behind the close prison
of her arms, as some woodland thing so held might seek to be free. All
at once she sank down to her knees upon the hearth-rug, lifting both
hands to her bent face, and rocking herself to and fro with wild, swaying
movements of her supple body. The collie raised his head with a drowsy
curiosity, and let it fall heavily again upon the floor. The varying
monody of the wind had begun again through the chinks in the closed door.
At last she lifted her head, letting her clasped hands fall loosely into
her lap. A sudden flame showed her with an added vividness the face of
Roden as he lay in tired unconsciousness upon the old lounge. She moved
nearer to him, still on her knees; then again lifting her hands to her
bosom, leaned forward and gazed upon him as though one should drink with
the eyes. Her great braids, ruffled and half unplaited, followed the
lithe curves of her back with glittering undulations, as of two mated
golden serpents. So passed some moments.
Presently, as though uneasy, even in the far-off Land of Nod, beneath
those moveless, hungry, beautiful eyes, the young man stirred, and
muttered something in his sleep. Swift and noiseless as a cat she leaped
backward into the folded shadows; but he did not wake. Once more she came
forward. With a stealthy movement she drew out a little pair of scissors
from the bosom of her dress; then bending over, lifted, with the touch of
a butterfly upon a flower, one of Roden’s much-tossed curls. There was
the sharp hiss of steel through hair, and the soft brown semicircle lay
in the girl’s palm. She lifted it to her lips with the gesture of one
who, half starved, suddenly finds bread within his grasp; then turning,
she stole out again, even as she had entered.