The winter began with a heavy snow-storm and ended in a long April rain, and in all those swiftly moving months I had seen Sally barely a dozen times. Not only my pride, but Miss Mitty's rigid commands had kept me from her house, and the girl had promised that for the first six months she would not meet me except by chance.
"In the spring—oh, in the spring," she wrote, "I shall be free. My promise was given and I could not recall it, but I believe now that it was pride, not love, that made them exact it. Do you know, I sometimes think that they do not love me at all. They have both told me that they would rather see me dead than married, as they call it, beneath me. Beneath me, indeed! Ah, dearest, dearest, how can one lower one's self to a giant? When I think of all that you are, of all that you have made yourself, I feel so humble and proud. The truth is, Ben, I'm not suffering half so much from love as I am from indignation. If it keeps up, some day I'll burst out like Aunt Matoaca, for I've got it in me. And she of all people! Why, she goes about in her meek, sanctified manner distributing pamphlets on the emancipation of woman, and yet she actually told me the other day that, of course, she would prefer to have only 'ladies' permitted to vote. 'In that case, however,' she added, 'I should desire to restrict the franchise to gentlemen, also.' Did you ever in your whole life hear of anything so absurd, and she really meant it. She's a martyr, and filled with a holy zeal to get burned or racked. But it's awful, every bit of it. Oh, lift me up, Ben! Lift me up!" And in a postscript, "What does the General say to you? Aunt Mitty has told the General."
The General had said nothing to me, but when I drove him up from his office the next day, he invited me to dine with him, and talked incessantly through the three simple courses about the prospects of the National Oil Company.
"So you're sweeping the whole South?" he said.
"Yes, Sam has made a big thing of it. We've knocked out everybody else in the oil business in this part of the world."
"Mark my word, then, you've been cutting into the interest of the oil trust, and it will come along presently and try to knock you out. When it does, Ben, make it pay, make it pay."
"Oh, I'll make it pay," I answered. "The consolidated interests may sweep out the independent companies, but they can't overturn the Great South Midland and Atlantic Railroad."
"It's the road, of course, that has made such a success possible."
"Yes, it's the road—everything is the road, General."
"And to think that when I got control of it, it was bankrupt."
Rising from the table he took my arm, and limped painfully into his study, where he lit a cigar and sank back in his easy chair.
"Look here, Ben," he began suddenly, with a change of tone, "what's this trouble brewing between you and Miss Mitty Bland?"
"There's no trouble, sir, except that her niece has promised to marry me."
"Promised to marry you, eh? Sally Mickleborough? Are you sure it's Sally Mickleborough?"
"I'm hardly likely to be mistaken, General, about the identity of my future wife."
"No, I suppose you ain't," he admitted, "but, good Lord, Ben, how did you make her do it?"
"I didn't make her. She was good enough to do it of her own accord."
"So she did it of her own accord? Well, confound you, boy, how did it ever occur to you to ask her?"
"That's what I can't answer, General, I don't believe it ever occurred to me any more than it occurred to me to fall in love with her."
"You've fallen in love with Sally Mickleborough, Miss Matoaca's niece. She refused George, you know?"
I replied that I didn't know it, but I never supposed that she would engage herself to two men at the same time.
"And she's seriously engaged to you?" he demanded, still unconvinced. "Are you precious sure she isn't flirting? Girls will flirt, and I don't reckon you've had much experience of 'em. Why, even Miss Mitty was known to flirt in a prim, stiff-necked fashion in her time, and as for Sarah Bland, they say she promised to marry a whole regiment before the battle of Seven Pines. A little warning beforehand ain't going to do any harm, Ben."
"I'm much obliged to you, General, but I don't think in this case it's needed. Sally is staunch and true."
"Sally? Do you call her 'Sally'? It used to be the custom to address the lady you were engaged to as 'Miss Sally' up to the day of the marriage."
I laughed and shook my head. "Oh, we move fast!"
"Yes, I'm an old man," he admitted sadly, "and I was brought up in a different civilisation. It's funny, my boy, how many customs were swept away with the institution of slavery."
"There'd have been little room for me in those days."
"Oh, you'd have got into some places quick enough, but you'd never have crossed the Blands' threshold when they lived down on James River. There isn't much of that nonsense left now, but Miss Mitty has got it and Theophilus has got it; and, when all's said, they, might have something considerably worse. Why, look at Miss Matoaca. When I first saw her you'd never have imagined there was an idea inside her head."
"I can understand that she must have been very pretty."
"Pretty? She was as beautiful as an angel. And to think of her distributing those damned woman's rights pamphlets! She left one on my desk," he added, sticking out his lower lip like a crying child, and wiping his bloodshot eyes on the hem of his silk handkerchief. "I tell you if she'd had a husband this would never have happened."
"We can't tell—it might have been worse, if she believes it."
"Believes what, sir?" gasped the great man, enraged. "Believes that outlandish Yankee twaddle about a woman wanting any rights except the right to a husband! Do you think she'd be running round loose in this crackbrained way if she had a home she could stay in and a husband she could slave over? I tell you there's not a woman alive that ain't happier with a bad husband than with none at all."
"That's a comfortable view, at any rate."
"View? It's not a view, it's a fact—and what business has a lady got with a view anyway? If Miss Matoaca hadn't got hold of those heathenish views, she'd be a happy wife and mother this very minute."
"Does it follow, General, that she would have been a happy one?" I asked a little unfairly.
"Of course it follows. Isn't every wife and mother happy? What more does she want unless she's a Yankee Abolitionist?"
"Who's a Yankee?" enquired young George, in his amiable voice from the hall. "I'm surprised to hear you calling names when the war is over, sir."
"I wasn't calling names, George. I was just saying that Miss Matoaca Bland was a Yankee. Did you ever hear of a Virginia lady who wasn't content to be what the Lord and the men intended her?"
"No, sir, I never did—but it seems to me that Miss Matoaca has managed to secure a greater share of your attention than the more amenable Virginia ladies."
"Well, isn't it a sad enough sight to see any lady going cracked?" retorted the General, hotly; "do you know, George, that Sally Mickleborough—he says he's sure it's Sally Mickleborough—has promised to marry Ben Starr?"
"Oh, it's Sally all right," responded George, "she has just told me."
He came over and held out his hand, smiling pleasantly, though there was a hurt look in his eyes.
"I congratulate you, Ben," he observed in his easy, good-natured way, "the best man comes in ahead."
His face wore the frown, not from temper, but from pain, that I had seen on it at the club when his favourite hunter had dropped dead, and he had tried to appear indifferent. He was a superb horseman, a typical man about town, a bit of a sport, also, as Dr. Theophilus said. I knew he loved Sally, just as I had known he loved his hunter, by a sympathetic reading of his character rather than by any expression of regret on his long, highly coloured, slightly wooden countenance, with its set mouth over which drooped a mustache so carefully trimmed that it looked almost as if it were glued on his upper lip.
"By the way, uncle, have you heard the last news?" he asked, "Barclay is buying all the A. P. & C. Stock he can lay hands on. It's selling at—"
"Hello! What's that? Barclay, did you say? I knew it was coming, and that he'd spring it. Here, Hatty, give me my cape, I'm going back to the office!"
"George, George, the doctor told you not to excite yourself," remonstrated Miss Hatty, appearing in the doorway with a glass of medicine in her hand.
"Excite myself? Pish! Tush!" retorted the General, "I ain't a bit more excited than you are yourself. Do you think if I hadn't had a cool head they'd have made me president of the South Midland? But I tell you Barclay's trying to get control of the A. P. & C., and I'll be blamed if he shall! Do you want him to snatch a railroad out of my very mouth, madam?"
By this time he had got into his cape and slouch hat, turning at the last moment to swallow Miss Hatty's dose of medicine with a wry mouth. Then with one arm in George's and one in mine, he descended the steps and limped as far as the car line on Main Street.
On that same afternoon I walked out to meet Sally on her ride in one of the country roads to what was called "the Pump House," and when she had dismounted, we strolled together along the little path under the scarlet buds of young maples. At the end of the path there was a rude bench placed beside the stream, which broke from the dam above with a sound that was like laughing water. The grass was powdered with small spring flowers, and overhead a sycamore drooped its silvery branches to the sparkling waves. Spring was in the air, in the scarlet buds of maples, in the song of birds, in the warm wind that played on Sally's flushed cheek and lifted a loosened curl on her forehead. And spring was in my heart, too, as I sat there beside her, on the old bench, with her hand in mine.
"You will marry me in November, Sally?"
"On the nineteenth of November, as I promised. Aunt Mitty and Aunt Matoaca have forbidden me to mention your name to them, so I shall walk with you to church some morning—to old Saint John's, I think, Ben."
"Then may God punish me if I ever fail you," I answered.
Her look softened. "You will never fail me."
"You will trust me now and in all the future?"
"Now and in all the future."
As we strolled back a little later to her horse that was tethered to a maple on the roadside, I told her of the success of the National Oil Company and of the possibility that I might some day be a rich man.
"As things go in the South, sweetheart, I'm a rich man now for my years."
"I am glad for your sake, Ben, but I have never expected to have wealth, you know."
"All the same I want you to have it, I want to give it to you."
"Then I'll begin to love it for your sake—if it means that to you?"
"It means nothing else. But what do you think it will mean to your aunts next November?"
She shook her head, while I untethered Dolly, the sorrel mare.
"They haven't a particle of worldliness, either of them, and I don't believe it will make any great difference if we have millions. Of course if you were, for instance, the president of the South Midland they would not have refused to receive you, but they would have objected quite as strongly to your marrying into the family. What you are yourself might concern them if they were inviting you to dinner, but when it is a question of connecting yourself with their blood, it is what your father was that affects them. I really believe," she finished half angrily, half humorously, "that Aunt Mitty—not Aunt Matoaca—would honestly rather I'd marry a well-born drunkard or libertine than you, whom she calls 'quite an extraordinary-looking young man.'"
"Then if they can neither be cajoled nor bought, I see no hope for them," I replied, laughing, as she sprang from my hand into her saddle.
The red flame of the maple was in her face as she looked back at me. "Everything will come right, Ben, if we only love enough," she said.
When I walked down to the office now, I began to be pointed out as "the General's wonderful boy." Invitations to start companies, or to directorships of innumerable boards, were showered upon me, and adventurous promoters of vain schemes sought desperately to shelter themselves behind my growing credit. Then, in the following October, the consolidated oil interests bought out my business at my own price, and I awoke one glorious morning to the knowledge that my fortune was made.
"If you're going to swell, Ben, now's the time," said the General, "and out you go."
But my training had been in a hard school, and by the end of the month he had ceased to enquire in the mornings "if my hat still fitted my head."
"You'll have your ups and downs, Ben, like the rest of us," he said, "but the main thing is, let your fortunes see-saw as they may, always keep your eyes on a level. By the way, I saw Sally Mickleborough last night, and when I asked her why she fell in love with you, she replied it was because she saw you pushing a wheel up a hill. Now there's a woman with a reason—you'd better look sharp, or she'll begin talking politics presently like her Aunt Matoaca. What do you think I found on my desk this morning? A pamphlet, addressed in her handwriting, about the presidential election." Then his tone softened. "So Sally's going to marry you in spite of her aunts? Well, she's a good girl, a brave girl, and I'm proud of her."
When I went home to supper, I was to have a different opinion from Dr. Theophilus.
"I saw Sally Mickleborough to-day, Ben, when I called on Miss Matoaca,—[that poor lady gets flightier every day, she left a pamphlet here this morning about the presidential election]—and the girl told me in the few minutes I saw her in the hall, that she meant to marry you next month."
"She will do me that great honour, doctor."
"Well, I regret it, Ben; I can't conceal from you that I regret it. You're a good boy, and I'm proud of you, but I don't like to see young folks putting themselves in opposition to the judgment of their elders. I'm an orthodox believer in the claims of blood, you know."
"And is there nothing to be said for the claims of love?"
"The claims of moonshine, Ben," observed Mrs. Clay in her sharp voice, looking up from a pair of yarn socks she was knitting for the doctor; "you know I'm fond of you, but when you begin to talk of the claims of love driving a girl to break with her family, I feel like boxing your ears."
"You see, Tina is a cynic," remarked Dr. Theophilus, smiling, "and I don't doubt that she has her excellent reasons, as usual; most cynics have. A woman, however, has got to believe in love to the point of lunacy or become a scoffer. What I contend, now, is that love isn't moonshine, but that however solid a thing it may be, it isn't, after all, as solid as one's duty to one's family."
"Of course I can't argue with you, doctor. I know little of the unit you call 'the family'; but I should think the first duty of the family would be to consider the happiness of the individual."
"And do you think, Ben, that you are the only person who is considering Sally's happiness?"
"I know that I am considering it; for the rest I can't speak."
"I firmly believe," broke in Mrs. Clay, "that Sally's behaviour has helped to drive Matoaca Bland clean out of her wits. She's actually sent me one of her leaflets,—what do you think of that, Theophilus?—to me, the most refined and retiring woman on earth."
"What I'd say, Tina, is that you aren't half as refined and retiring as Miss Matoaca," chuckled the doctor.
"That is merely the way she dresses," rejoined Mrs. Clay stiffly; "it is her poke bonnet and black silk mantle that deceives you. As for me, I can call no woman truly refined who does not naturally avoid the society of men."
"Well, Tina, I had a notion that all of you were pretty fond of it, when it comes to that."
"Not of the society of men, Theophilus, but of the select attentions of gentlemen."
"I'm not taking up for Miss Matoaca," pursued the good man; "I can't conscientiously do that, and I'm more concerned at this minute about the marriage of Ben and Sally. You may smile at me as superstitious, if you please, but I never yet saw a marriage turn out happily that was made in defiance of family feeling."
As I could make no reply to this, except to put forward a second time what Mrs. Clay had tartly called "the claims of moonshine," I bade the doctor goodnight, and going upstairs to my room, sat down beside the small square window, which gave on the garden, with its miniature box borders and its single clipped yew-tree, over which a young moon was rising. "A mixture of a fighter and a dreamer," the old man had once called me, and it seemed to me now that something apart from the mere business of living and the alert man of affairs, brooded in me over the young moon and the yew-tree.
A letter from Sally had reached me a few hours before, and taking it from my pocket, I turned to the lamp and read it for the sixth time with a throbbing heart.
"You ask me if I am happy, dearest," she wrote, "and I answer that I am happy, with a still, deep happiness, over which a hundred troubles and cares ripple like shadows on a lake. But oh! poor Aunt Mitty, with her silent hurt pride in her face, and poor Aunt Matoaca, with the strained, unnatural brightness in her eyes, and her cheeks so like rose leaves that have crumpled. Oh, Ben, I believe Aunt Matoaca is living over again her own romance, and it breaks my heart. Last night I went into her room, and found her with her old yellowed wedding veil and orange blossoms laid out on the bed. She tried to pretend that she was straightening her cedar chests, but she looked so little and pitiable—if you could only have seen her! I wonder what she would be now if the General had been a man like you? How grateful I am, how profoundly thankful with my whole heart that I am marrying a man that I can trust!"
"That I can trust!" Her words rang in my ears, and I heard them again, clear and strong, the next morning, when I met Miss Matoaca as I was on my way to my office. She was coming slowly up Franklin Street, her arms filled with packages, and when she recognised me, with a shy, startled movement to turn aside, a number of leaflets fluttered from her grasp to the pavement between us. When I stooped and gathered them up, her face, under the old-fashioned poke bonnet, was brought close to my eyes, and I saw that she looked wan and pinched, and that her bright brown eyes were shining as if from fever.
"Mr. Starr," she said, straightening her thin little figure as I handed her the leaflets, "I've wanted for some time to speak a word to you on the subject of my niece—Miss Mickleborough."
"Yes, Miss Matoaca."
"My sister Mitty thought it better that I should refrain from doing so, and upon such matters she has excellent judgment. It is my habit, indeed, to yield to her opinion in everything except a question of conscience."
"Yes?" for again she had paused. "It is very kind of you," I added.
"I do not mean it for kindness, Mr. Starr. My niece is very dear to me; and since poor Sarah's unfortunate experience, we have felt more—strongly, if possible, about unequal marriages. I know that you are a most remarkable young man, but I do not feel that you are in any way suited to make the happiness of our niece—Miss Mickleborough—"
"I am sorry, Miss Matoaca, but Miss Mickleborough thinks differently."
"Young people are rarely the best judges in such matters, Mr. Starr."
"But do you think their elders can judge for them?"
"If they have had experience—yes."
"Ah, Miss Matoaca, does our own experience ever teach us to understand the experience of others?"
"The Blands have never needed to be taught," she returned with pride, "that the claims of the family are not to be sacrificed to—to a sentiment. Except in the case of poor Sarah there has never been a mésalliance in our history. We have always put one thing above the consideration of our blood, and that is—a principle. If it were a question of conscience, however painful it might be to me, I should uphold my niece in her opposition to my sister Mitty. I myself have opposed her for a matter of principle."
"I am aware of it, Miss Matoaca."
Her withered cheeks were tinged with a delicate rose, and I could almost see the working of her long, narrow mind behind her long, narrow face.
"I should like to leave a few of these leaflets with you, Mr. Starr," she said.
A minute afterwards, when she had moved on with her meek, slow walk, I was left standing on the pavement with her suffrage pamphlets fluttering in my hand. Stuffing them hurriedly into my pocket, I went on to the office, utterly oblivious of the existence of any principle on earth except the one underlying the immediate expansion of the Great South Midland and Atlantic Railroad.
A fortnight later I heard that Miss Matoaca had begun writing letters to the "Richmond Herald"; and I remembered, with an easy masculine complacency, the pamphlets I had thrown into the waste basket beside the General's desk. The presidential election, with its usual upheaval of the business world, had arrived; and that timid little Miss Matoaca should have intruded herself into the affairs of the nation did not occur to me as possible, until the General informed me, while we watched a Democratic procession one afternoon, that Miss Mitty had come to him the day before in tears over the impropriety of her sister's conduct.
"She begged me to remonstrate with Miss Matoaca," he pursued, "and by George, I promised her that I would. There's one thing, Ben, I've never been able to stand, and that's the sight of a woman in tears. Of course when you've made 'em cry yourself, it is different; but to have a lady coming to you weeping over somebody else—and a lady like Miss Mitty—well, I honestly believe if she'd requested me to give her my skin, I'd have tried to get out of it just to oblige her."
"Did you go to Miss Matoaca?" I asked, for the picture of the General lecturing his old love on the subject of the proprieties had caught my attention even in the midst of a large Democratic procession that was marching along the street. While he rambled on in his breaking voice, which had begun to grow weak and old, I gazed over his head at the political banners with their familiar, jesting inscriptions.
"I declare, Ben, I'd rather have swallowed a dose of medicine," he went on; "you see I used to know Miss Matoaca very well forty years ago—I reckon you've heard of it. We were engaged to be married, and it was broken off because of some woman's rights nonsense she'd got in her head."
"Well, it's hard to imagine your interview of yesterday."
"There wasn't any interview. I went to her and put it as mildly as I could. 'Miss Matoaca,' I said, 'I'm sorry to hear you've gone cracked.'"
"And how did she take it?"
"'Do you mean my heart or my head, General?' she asked—she had always plenty of spirit, had Matoaca, for all her soft looks. 'It's your head,' I answered. 'Lord knows I'm not casting any reflections on the rest of you.' 'Then it has fared better than my heart, General,' she replied, 'for that was broken.' She looked kind of wild, Ben, as she said it. I don't know what she was talking about, I declare on my honour I don't!"
A cheer went up from the procession, and an expression of eager curiosity came into his face.
"Can you read that inscription, Ben? My eyes ain't so good as they used to be."
"It's some campaign joke. So your lecture wasn't quite a success?"
"It would have been if she'd listened to reason."
"But she did not, I presume?"
"She never listened to it in her life. If she had, she wouldn't be a poor miserable old maid at this moment. What's that coming they're making such a noise about? My God, Ben, if it ain't Matoaca herself!"
It was Matoaca, and the breathless horror in the General's voice passed into my own mind as I looked. There she was, in her poke bonnet and her black silk mantle, walking primly at the straggling end of the procession, among a crowd of hooting small boys and gaping negroes. Her eyes, very wide and bright, like the eyes of one who is mentally deranged, were fixed straight ahead, over the lines of men marching in front of her, on the blue sky above the church steeples. Under her poke bonnet I saw her meekly parted hair and her faded cheeks, flushed now with a hectic colour. In one neatly gloved hand her silk skirt was held primly; in the other she carried a little white silk flag, on which the staring gold letters were lost in the rippling folds. With her eyes on the sky and her feet in the dust, she marched, a prim, ladylike figure, an inspired spinster, oblivious alike of the hooting small boys and the half-compassionate, half-scoffing gazers upon the pavement.
"She's crazy, Ben," said the General, and his voice broke with a sob.
For a minute, as dazed as he, I stared blankly at the little figure with the white flag. Then bewilderment gave place before the call to action, and it seemed to me that I saw Sally there in Miss Matoaca, as I had seen her in the rising moon over the clipped yew, and in the whirlpool of the stock market. Leaving my place at the General's side, I descended the steps at a bound, and made my way through the jostling, noisy crowd to the little lady in its midst.
"Miss Matoaca!" I said.
For the first time her eyes left the sky, and as she looked down, the consciousness of her situation entered into her strained bright eyes. Her composure was lost in a birdlike, palpitating movement of terror.
"I—I am going as far as the Square, Mr. Starr," she replied, as if she were repeating by rote a phrase in a strange tongue.
At my approach the ridicule, somewhat subdued by the sense of her helplessness, broke suddenly loose. Bending over I offered her my arm, my head still uncovered. As the hand holding the white flag drooped from exhaustion, I took it, with the banner, into my own.
"Then I'll go with you, Miss Matoaca," I responded.
We started on, took a few measured paces in the line of march, and then her strength failing her, she sank back, with a pathetic moan of weariness, into my arms. Lifting her like a child I carried her out of the street and up the steps into the General's office. Turning at a touch as I entered the room, I saw that Sally was at my side.
"I've sent for Dr. Theophilus," she said. "There, put her on the lounge."
Kneeling on the floor she began bathing Miss Matoaca's forehead with water which somebody had brought. The General, his eyes very red and bloodshot and his lower lip fallen into a senile droop, was trying vainly to fan her with his pocket-handkerchief.
"We have always feared this would happen," said Sally, very quiet and pale.
"She was talking to me yesterday about her heart," returned the General, "and I didn't know what she meant."
He bent over, fanning her more violently with his silk handkerchief, and on the lounge beneath, Miss Matoaca lay, very prim and maidenly, with her skirt folded modestly about her ankles.
Dr. Theophilus, coming in with the messenger, bent over her for a long minute.
"I always thought her sense of honour would kill her," he said at last as he looked up.
A week after Miss Matoaca's funeral, Sally met me in one of the secluded streets by the Capitol Square, and we walked slowly up and down for an hour in the November sunshine. In her black clothes she appeared to have bloomed into a brighter beauty, a richer colour.
"Why can't I believe, Sally, that you will really marry me a week from to-day?"
"A week from to-day. Just you and I in old Saint John's."
"And Miss Mitty, will she not come with you?"
"She refuses to let me speak your name to her. It would be hard to leave her, Ben, if—if she hadn't been so bitter and stern to me for the last year. I live in the same house with her and see nothing of her."
"I thought Miss Matoaca's death might have softened her."
"Nothing will soften her. Aunt Matoaca's death has hurt her terribly, I know, but—and this is a dreadful thing to say—I believe it has hurt her pride more than her heart. If the poor dear had died quietly in her bed, with her prayer-book on the counterpane, Aunt Mitty would have grieved for her in an entirely different way. She lives in a kind of stained-glass seclusion, and anything outside of that seems to her vulgar—even emotion."
"How I must have startled her."
"You startled her so that she has never had courage to face the effect. Think what it must mean to a person who has lived sixty-five years in an atmosphere of stained glass to be dragged outside and made to look at the great common sun—"
A squirrel, running out from between the iron railing surrounding the square, crossed the pavement and then sat erect in front of us, his bushy tail waving like a brush over his ears. While she was bending over to speak to it, the Bland surrey turned the corner at a rapid pace, and I saw the figure of Miss Mitty, swathed heavily in black, sitting very stiff and upright behind old Shadrach. As she caught sight of us, she leaned slightly forward, and in obedience to her order, the carriage stopped the next instant beside the pavement.
"Sally!" she called, and there was no hint in her manner that she was aware of my presence.
"Yes, Aunt Mitty." The girl had straightened herself, and stood calmly and without embarrassment at my side.
"I should like you to come with me to Hollywood."
"Yes, Aunt Mitty."
Pausing for an instant, she gave me her hand. "Until Wednesday, Ben," she said in a low, clear voice, and then entering the surrey, she took her place under the fur robe and was driven away.
The week dragged by like a century, and on Wednesday morning, when I got up and opened my shutters, I found that our wedding-day had begun in a slow autumnal rain. A thick tent of clouds stretched overhead, and the miniature box in the garden looked like flutings of crape on the pebbled walk, which had been washed clean and glistening during the night. The clipped yew stood dark and sombre as a solitary mourner among the blossomless rose-bushes.
At breakfast Mrs. Clay poured my coffee with a rigid hand and an averted face, and Dr. Theophilus appeared to find difficulty in keeping up his cheerful morning comments.
"I'll miss you, Ben, my boy," he remarked, as he rose from the table; "it's a sad day for me when I lose you."
"I hate to lose you, doctor, but I shan't, after all, be far off. I've bought a house, as you know, beyond the Park in Franklin Street."
"The one Jack Montgomery used to live in before he lost his money—yes, it is a fine place. Well, you have my best wishes, Ben, whatever comes; you may be sure of that. I hope you and Sally will have every happiness."
He shook my hand in his hearty grasp before going into his little office, and the next minute I went out into the rain, and walked down for a few words with the General, before I met Sally under the big sycamore at the side gate. I had waited for her but a little while when she came out under an umbrella held by Aunt Euphronasia, who was to accompany us on our journey South in the General's private car. As she entered the carriage, I saw that she wore a white dress under her long black cloak.
"Mammy wouldn't let me be married in black," she said; "she says it means death or a bad husband."
"Dar ain' gwine be a bad husband fur dish yer chile," grumbled the old woman, who was evidently full of gloomy forebodings, "caze she ain' built wid de kinder spine, suh, dat bends easy."
"There'll be nobody at church?" asked Sally.
"Only the General, and I suppose the sexton."
"I am glad." She leaned forward, we clasped hands, and I saw that the eyes she lifted to mine were starry and expectant, as they had been that day, so many years ago, when she stood between the gate and the bed of geraniums in the General's yard.
The carriage rolled softly over the soaking streets, and above the sound of the wheels I heard the patter of the rain on the dead leaves in the gutters. I can see still a wet sparrow or two that fluttered down from the bared branches, and the negro maid sweeping the water from the steps in front of the doctor's house. There was no wind, and the rain fell in straight elongated drops like a shower of silvery pine-needles. The mixture of a fighter and a dreamer! On my wedding-day, as I sat beside the woman I loved, approaching the fulfilment of my desire, I was conscious of a curious gravity, of almost a feeling of sadness. The stillness without, intensified by the slow, soft fall of the rain on the dead leaves, seemed not detached, but at one with the inner stillness which possessed alike my heart and my brain. I, the man of action, the embodiment of worldly success, was awed by the very intensity of my love, which added a throb of apprehension to the supreme moment of its fulfilment.
The carriage crawled up the long hill, and stopped before the steps leading to the churchyard of Saint John's. Like a sombre omen up went the umbrella in the hands of Aunt Euphronasia; and as I led Sally across the pavement to the General, who stood waiting under the dripping maples and sycamores, I saw that she was very pale, and that her lips trembled when she smiled back at me. With her arm in the General's, she passed before me up the walk to the church door, while Aunt Euphronasia and I followed under the same umbrella a short way behind.
At the door the minister met us with outstretched hands, for he had known us from childhood; and when Aunt Euphronasia had removed the bride's moist cloak, Sally joined me before the altar, in the square of faint light that fell from the windows. The interior of the church was very dim, so dim that her white dress and the minister's gown seemed the only patches of high light in the obscurity. Through the window I could see the wet silvery boughs of a sycamore, and, I remember still, as if it had been illuminated upon my brain, a single bronzed leaf that writhed and twisted at the end of a slender branch. Never in my life had my mind been so awake to trivial impressions, so acutely aware of the external world, so perfectly unable to realise the profound significance of the words I uttered. The sound of the soft rain on the graves outside was in my ears, and instead of my marriage, I found myself thinking of the day I had seen Sally dancing toward me in her red shoes, over the coloured leaves. In those few minutes, which changed the course of our two lives, it was as if I myself—the man that men knew—had been present only in a dream.
When it was over, the General kissed Sally, and wiped his eyes on his silk handkerchief.
"You're a brave girl, my dear, and I'm proud of you," he said; "you've got your mother's heart and your father's fighting blood, and that's a good blending."
"I wish the sun had shone on you," observed the old minister, while I helped her into her cloak; "but we Christians can't afford to waste regret on heathen superstitions. I married your mother," he added, as if there were possible comfort in a proof of the futility of omens, "on a cloudless morning in June."
Sally shivered, and glanced across the churchyard, where the water dripped from the bared trees on the graves that were covered thickly with sodden leaves.
"The sun may welcome us home," she replied, with an effort to be cheerful; "we shall be back again in a fortnight."
"And you go South?" asked the minister nervously, like a man who tries to make conversation because his professional duty requires it of him. Then the umbrella went up again, and after a good-by to the General, we started together down the walk, with Aunt Euphronasia following close as a shadow.
"The rain does not sadden you, sweetheart?"
"It saddens me, but that does not mean that I am not happy."
"And you would do it over again?"
"I would do it over until—until the last hour of my life."
"Oh, Sally, Sally, if I were only sure that I was worthy."
A light broke in her face, and as she looked up at me, I bent over and kissed her under the leafless trees.
It was a bright December evening when we returned to Richmond, and drove through the frosty air to our new home. The house was large and modern, with a hideous brown stone front, and at the top of the brown stone steps several girl friends of Sally's were waiting to receive us. Beyond them, in the brilliantly lighted hall, I saw masses of palms and roses under the oak staircase.
"Oh, you bad Sally, not even to ask us to your wedding. And you know how we adore one!" cried a handsome, dark girl in a riding habit, named Bonny Page. "How do you do, Mr. Starr? We're to call you 'Ben' now because you've married our cousin."
I made some brief response, and while I spoke, I felt again the old sense of embarrassment, of strangeness in my surroundings, that always came upon me in a gathering of women—especially of girls. With Sally I never forgot that I was a strong man,—with Bonny Page I remembered only that I was a plain one. As she stood there, with her arm about Sally, and her black eyes dancing with fun, she looked the incarnate spirit of mischief,—and beside the spirit of mischief I felt decidedly heavy. She was a tall, splendid girl, with a beautiful figure,—the belle of Richmond and the best horsewoman of the state. I had seen her take a jump that had brought my heart to my throat, and come down on the other side with a laugh. A little dazzling, a little cold, fine, quick, generous to her friends, and merciless to her lovers, I had wondered often what subtle sympathy had knit Sally and herself so closely together.
"You'd always promised that I should be your bridesmaid," she remarked reproachfully; "she's hurt us dreadfully, hasn't she, Bessy? And it's very forgiving of us to warm her house and have her dinner ready for her."
Bessy, the little heroine of the azalea wreath and my first party, murmured shyly that she hoped the furniture was placed right and that the dinner would be good.
"Oh, you darlings, it's too sweet of you!" said Sally, entering the drawing-room, amid palms and roses, with an arm about the neck of each. "You know, don't you," she went on, "that poor Aunt Mitty's not coming kept me from having even you? How is she, Bonny? O Bonny, she won't speak to me."
Immediately she was clasped in Bonny's arms, where she shed a few tears on Bonny's handsome shoulder.
"She'll grow used to it," said little Bessy; "but, Sally, how did you have the courage?"
"Ask Bonny how she had the courage to take that five-foot jump."
"I took it with my teeth set and my eyes shut," said Bonny.
"Well, that's how I took Ben, with my teeth set and my eyes shut tight."
"And I came down with a laugh," added Bonny.
"So did I—I came down with a laugh. Oh, you dears, how lovely the house looks! Here are all the bridal roses that I missed and you've remembered."
"There're blue roses in your room," said Bonny; "I mean on the chintz and on the paper."
"How can I help being happy, when I have blue roses, Bonny? Aren't blue roses an emblem of the impossible achieved?"
Bonny's dancing black eyes were on me, and I read in them plainly the thought, "Yes, I'm going to be nice to you because Sally has married you, and Sally's my cousin—even if I can't understand how she came to do it."
No, she couldn't understand, and she never would, this I read also. The man that she saw and the man that Sally knew were two different persons, drawing life from two different sources of sympathy. To her I was still, and would always be, the "magnificent animal,"—a creature of good muscle and sinew, with an honest eye, doubtless, and clean hands, but lacking in the finer qualities of person and manner that must appeal to her taste. Where Sally beheld power, and admired, Bonny Page saw only roughness, and wondered.
Presently, they led her away, and I heard their merry voices floating down from the bedrooms above. The pink light of the candles on the dinner table in the room beyond, the vague, sweet scent of the roses, and the warmth of the wood fire burning on the andirons, seemed to grow faint and distant, for I was very tired with the fatigue of a man whose muscles are cramped from want of exercise. I felt all at once that I had stepped from the open world into a place that was too small for me. I was a rich man at last, I was the husband, too, of the princess of the enchanted garden, and yet in the midst of the perfume and the soft lights and the laughter floating down from above, I saw myself, by some freak of memory, as I had crouched homeless in the straw under a deserted stall in the Old Market. Would the thought of the boy I had been haunt forever the man I had become? Did my past add a keener happiness to my present, or hang always like a threatening shadow above it? There was a part in my life which these girls could not understand, which even Sally, whom I loved, could never share with me. How could they or she comprehend hunger, who had never gone without for a moment? Or sympathise with the lust of battle when they had never encountered an obstacle? Already I heard the call of the streets, and my blood responded to it in the midst of the scented atmosphere. These things were for Sally, but for me was the joy of the struggle, the passion to achieve that I might return, with my spoils and pile them higher and higher before her feet. The grasping was what I loved, not the possession; the instant of triumph, not the fruits of the conquest. Love throbbed in my heart, but my mind, as if freeing itself from a restraint, followed the Great South Midland and Atlantic, covering that night under the stars nearly twenty thousand miles of road. The elemental man in me chafed under the social curb, and I longed at that instant to bear the woman I had won out into the rough joys of the world. My muscles would soon grow flabby in this scented warmth. The fighter would war with the dreamer, and I would regret the short, fierce battle with my competitors in the business of life.
A slight sound made me turn, and I saw Bonny Page standing alone in the doorway, and looking straight at me with her dancing eyes.
"I don't know you yet, Ben," she said in the direct, gallant manner of a perfect horsewoman, "but I'm going to like you."
"Please try," I answered, "and I'll do my best not to make it hard."
"I don't think it will be hard, but even if it were, I'd do it for Sally's sake. Sally is my darling."
"And mine. So we're alike in one thing at least."
"I'm perfectly furious with Aunt Mitty. I mean to tell her so the next time I've taken a high jump."
"Poor Miss Mitty. How can she help herself? She was born that way."
"Well, it was a very bad way to be born—to want to break Sally's heart. Do you know, I think it was delightful—the way you did it. If I'm ever married, I want to run away, too,—only I'll run away on horseback, because that will be far more exciting."
She ran on merrily, partly I knew to take my measure while she watched me, partly to ease the embarrassment which her exquisite social instinct had at once discerned. She was charming, friendly, almost affectionate, yet I was conscious all the time that, in spite of herself, she was a little critical, a trifle aloof. Her perfect grooming, the very fineness of her self-possession, her high-bred gallantry of manner, and even the shining gloss on her black, beribboned hair, and her high boots, produced in me a sense of remoteness, which I found it impossible altogether to overcome.
In a little while there was a flutter on the staircase, and the other girls trooped down, with Sally in their midst. She had changed her travelling dress for a gown of white, cut low at the neck, and about her throat she wore a necklace of pearls I had given her at her wedding. There was a bright flush in her face, and she looked to me as she had done that day, in her red shoes, in Saint John's churchyard.
When I came downstairs from my dressing-room, I found that the girls had gone, and she was standing by the dinner table, with her face bent down over the vase of pink roses in the centre.
"So we are in our own home, darling, at last," I said, and a few minutes later, as I looked across the pink candle shades and the roses, and saw her sitting opposite to me, I told myself that at last both the fighter in me and the dreamer had found the fulfilment of their desire.
After dinner, when I had had my smoke in the library, we caught hands and wandered like two children over the new house—into the pink and white guest room, and then into Sally's bedroom, where the blue roses sprawled over the chintz-covered furniture and the silk curtains. A glass door gave on a tiny balcony, and throwing a shawl about her head and her bare shoulders, she went with me out into the frosty December night, where a cold bright moon was riding high above the church steeples. With my arm about her, and her head on my breast, we stood in silence gazing over the city, while the sense of her nearness, of her throbbing spirit and body, filled my heart with an exquisite peace.
"You and I are the world, Ben."
"You are my world, anyway."
"It is such a happy world to-night. There is nothing but love in it—no pain, no sorrow, no disappointment. Why doesn't everybody love, I wonder?"
"Everybody hasn't you."
"I'm so sorry for poor Aunt Mitty,—she never loved,—and for poor Aunt Matoaca, because she didn't love my lover. Oh, you are so strong, Ben; that, I think, is why I first loved you! I see you always in the background of my thoughts pushing that wheel up the hill."
"That won you. And to think if I'd known you were there, Sally, I couldn't have done it."
"That, too, is why I love you, so there's another reason! It isn't only your strength, Ben, it is, I believe, still more your self-forgetfulness. Then you forgot yourself because you thought of the poor horse; and again, do you remember the day of Aunt Matoaca's death, when you gave her your arm and took her little flag in your hand? You would have marched all the way to the Capitol just like that, and I don't believe you would ever have known that it looked ridiculous or that people were laughing at you."
"To tell the truth, Sally, I should never have cared."
She clung closer, her perfumed hair on my breast.
"And yet they wondered why I loved you," she murmured; "they wondered why!"
"Can you guess why I loved you?" I asked. "Was it for your red shoes? Or for that tiny scar like a dimple I've always adored?"
"I never told you what made that," she said, after a moment. "I was a very little baby when my father got angry with mamma one day—he had been drinking—and he upset the cradle in which I was asleep."
She lifted her face, and I kissed the scar under the white shawl.
The next day when I came home to luncheon, she told me that she had been to her old home to see Miss Mitty.
"I couldn't stand the thought of her loneliness, so I went into the drawing-room at the hour I knew she would be tending her sweet alyssum and Dicky, the canary. She was there, looking very thin and old, and, Ben, she treated me like a stranger. She wouldn't kiss me, and she didn't ask me a single question—only spoke of the weather and her flower boxes, as if I had called for the first time."
"I know, I know," I said, taking her into my arms.
"And everybody else is so kind. People have been sending me flowers all day. Did you ever see such a profusion? They are all calling, too,—the Fitzhughs, the Harrisons, the Tuckers, the Mayos, Jennie Randolph came, and old Mrs. Tucker, who never goes anywhere since her daughter died, and Charlotte Peyton, and all the Corbins in a bunch." Then her tone changed. "Ben," she said, "I want to see that little sister of yours. Will you take me there this afternoon?"
Something in her request, or in the way she uttered it, touched me to the heart.
"I'd like you to see Jessy—she's pretty enough to look at—but I didn't mean you to marry my family, you know."
"I know you didn't, dear, but I've married everything of yours all the same. If you can spare a few minutes after luncheon, we'll drive down and speak to her."
I could spare the few minutes, and when the carriage was ready, she came down in her hat and furs, and we went at a merry pace down Franklin Street to the boarding-house in which Jessy was living. As we drove up to the pavement, the door of the house opened and my little sister came out, dressed for walking and looking unusually pretty.
"Why, Ben, she's a beauty!" said Sally, in a whisper, as the girl approached us. To me Jessy's face had always appeared too cold and vacant for beauty, in spite of her perfect features and the brilliant fairness of her complexion. Even now I missed the glow of feeling or of animation in her glance, as she crossed the pavement with her slow, precise walk, and put her hand into Sally's.
"How do you do? It is very kind of you to come," she said in a measured, correct voice.
"Of course I came, Jessy. I am your new sister, and you must come and stay with me when I am out of mourning."
"Thank you," responded Jessy gravely, "I should like to."
The cold had touched her cheek until it looked like tinted marble, and under her big black hat her blond hair rolled in natural waves from her forehead.
"Are you happy here, Jessy?" I asked.
"They are very kind to me. There's an old gentleman boarding here now from the West. He is going to give us a theatre party to-night. They say he has millions." For the first time the glow of enthusiasm shone in her limpid blue eyes.
"A good use to make of his millions," I laughed. "Do you hear often from President, Jessy?"
The glow faded from her eyes and they grew cold again. "He writes such bad letters," she answered, "I can hardly read them."
"Never forget," I answered sternly, "that he denied himself an education in order that you might become what you are."
While I spoke the door of the house opened again, and the old gentleman she had alluded to came gingerly down the steps. He had a small, wizened face, and he wore a fur-lined overcoat, in which it was evident that he still suffered from the cold.
"This is my brother and my sister, Mr. Cottrel," said Jessy, as he came slowly toward us.
He bowed with a pompous manner, and stood twirling the chain of his eye-glasses. "Yes, yes, I have heard of your brother. His name is well known already," he answered. "I congratulate, sir," he added, "not the 'man who got rich quickly,' as I've heard you called, but the fortunate brother of a beautiful sister."
"What a perfectly horrid old man," remarked Sally, some minutes later, as we drove back again. "I think, Ben, we'll have to take the little sister. She's a beauty."
"If she wasn't so everlastingly cold and quiet."
"It suits her style—that little precise way she has. There's a look about her like one of Perugino's saints."
Then the carriage stopped at the office, and I returned, with a high heart, to the game.
During the first year of my marriage I was already spoken of as the most successful speculator in the state. The whirlpool of finance had won me from the road, and I had sacrificed the single allegiance to the bolder moves of the game. Yet if I could be bold, I was cautious, too,—and that peculiar quality which the General called "financial genius," and the world named "the luck of the speculator," had enabled me to act always between the two dangerous extremes of timidity and rashness. "To get up when others sat down, and to sit down when others got up," I told the General one day, had been the rule by which I had played.
"They were talking of you at the club last night, Ben," he said. "You were the only one of us who had sense enough to load up with A. P. & C. stock when it was selling at 80, and now it's jumped up to 150. Jim Randolph was fool enough to remark that you'd had the easiest success of any man he knew."
"Easy? Does he think so?"
"So you call that easy, gentlemen?' I responded. 'Well, I tell you that boy has sweated for it since he was seven years old. It's the only way, too, I'm sure of it. If you want to succeed, you've got to begin by sweating.'"
"Thank you, General, but I suppose most things look easy until you've tried them."
"It doesn't look easy to me, Ben, when I've seen you at it all day and half the night since you were a boy. What I said to those fellows at the club is the Gospel truth—there's but one way to get anything in this world, and that is by sweating for it."
We were in his study, to which he was confined by an attack of the gout, and at such times he loved to ramble on in his aging, reminiscent habit.
"You know, General," I said, "that they want me to accept the presidency of the Union Bank in Jennings' place. I've been one of the directors, you see, for the last three or four years."
"You'd be the youngest bank president in the country. It's a good thing, and you'd control enough money to keep you awake at night. But remember, Ben, as my dear old coloured mammy used to say to me, 'to hatch first ain't always to crow last.'"
"Do you call it hatching or crowing to become president of the Union Bank?"
"That depends. If you're shrewd and safe, as I think you are, it may turn out to be both. It would be a good plan, though, to say to yourself every time you come up Franklin Street, 'I've toted potatoes up this hill, and not my own potatoes either.' It's good for you, sir, to remember it, damned good."
"I'm not likely to forget it—they were heavy."
"It was the best thing that ever happened to you—it was the making of you. There's nothing I know so good for a man as to be able to remember that he toted somebody else's potatoes. Now, look at that George of mine. He never toted a potato in his life—not even his own. If he had, he might have been a bank president to-day instead of the pleasant, well-dressed club-man he is, with a mustache like wax-work. I've an idea, Ben, but don't let it get any farther, that he never got over not having Sally, and that took the spirit out of him. She's well, ain't she?"
"Yes, she's very well and more beautiful than ever."
"Hasn't developed any principles yet, eh? I always thought they were in her."
"None that interfere with my comfort at any rate."
"Keep an eye on her and keep her occupied all the time. That's the way to deal with a woman who has ideas—don't leave her a blessed minute to sit down and hatch 'em out. Pet her, dress her, amuse her, and whenever she begins to talk about a principle, step out and buy her a present to take her mind off it. Anything no bigger than a thimble will turn a woman's mind in the right direction if you spring it on her like a surprise. Ah, that's the way her Aunt Matoaca ought to have been treated. Poor Miss Matoaca, she went wrong for the want of a little simple management like that. You never saw Miss Matoaca Bland when she was a girl, Ben?"
"I have heard she was beautiful."
"Beautiful ain't the word, sir! I tell you the first time I ever saw her she came to church in a white poke bonnet lined with cherry-coloured silk, and her cheeks exactly a match to her bonnet lining." He got out his big silk handkerchief, and blew his nose loudly, after which he wiped his eyes, and sat staring moodily at his foot bandaged out of all proportion to its natural size.
"Who'd have thought to look at her then," he pursued, "that she'd go cracked over this Yankee abolition idea before she died."
"Why, I thought they owned slaves up to the end, General."
"Slaves? What have slaves got to do with it? Ain't the abolitionists and the woman suffragists and the rest of those damned fire-eating Yankees all the same? What they want to do is to overturn the Constitution, and it makes no difference to 'em whether they overturn it under one name or the other. I tell you, Ben, as sure's my name's George Bolingbroke, Matoaca Bland couldn't have told me to the day of her death whether she was an abolitionist or a woman's suffragist. When a woman goes cracked like that, all she wants is to be a fire-eater, and I doubt if she ever knows what she is eating it about. Women ain't like men, my boy, there isn't an ounce of moderation to the whole sex, sir. Why, look at the way they're always getting their hearts broken or their heads cracked. They can't feel an emotion or think an idea that something inside of 'em doesn't begin to split. Now, did you ever hear of a man getting his heart broken or his brain cracked?"
The canker was still there, doing its bitter work. For forty years Miss Matoaca had had her revenge, and even in the grave her ghost would not lie quiet and let him rest. In his watery little eyes and his protruding, childish lip, I read the story of fruitless excesses and of vain retaliations.
When I reached home, I found Sally in her upstairs sitting-room with Jessy, who was trying on an elaborate ball gown of white lace. Since the two years of mourning were over, the little sister had come to stay with us, and Sally was filled with generous plans for the girl's pleasure. Jessy, herself, received it all with her reserved, indifferent manner, turning her beautiful profile upon us with an expression of saintly serenity. It amused me sometimes to wonder what was behind the brilliant red and white of her complexion—what thoughts? what desires? what impulses? She went so placidly on her way, gaining what she wanted, executing what she planned, accepting what was offered to her, that there were moments when I felt tempted to arouse her by a burst of anger—to discover if a single natural instinct survived the shining polish of her exterior. Sally had worked a miracle in her manner, her speech, her dress; and yet in all that time I had never seen the ripple of an impulse cross the exquisite vacancy of her face. Did she feel? Did she think? Did she care? I demanded. Once or twice I had spoken of President, trying to excite a look of gratitude, if not of affection; but even then no change had come in the mirror-like surface of her blue eyes. President, I was aware, had sacrificed himself to her while I was still a child, had slaved and toiled and denied himself that he might make her a lady. Yet when I asked her if she ever wrote to him, she smiled quietly and shook her head.
"Why don't you write to him, Jessy? He was always fond of you."
"He writes such dreadful letters—just like a working-man's—that I hate to get them," she answered, turning to catch the effect of her train in the long mirror.
"He is a working-man, Jessy, and so am I."
She accepted the statement without demur, as she accepted everything—neither denying nor disputing, but apparently indifferent to its truth or falseness. My eyes met Sally's in the glass, and they held me in a long, compassionate gaze.
"All men are working-men, Jessy, if they are worth anything," she said, "and any work is good work if it is well done."
"He is a miner," responded Jessy.
"If he is, it is because he prefers to do the work he knows to being idle," I answered sharply. "What you must remember is that when he had little, and I had nothing, he gave you freely all that he had."
She did not answer, and for a moment I thought I had convinced her.
"Will you write to President to-night?" I asked.
"But we are having a dinner party. How can I?"
"To-morrow, then?"
"I am going to the theatre with Mrs. Blansford. Mr. Cottrel has taken a box for her. He is one of the richest men in the West, isn't he?"
"There are a great many rich men in the West. How can it concern you?"
"Oh, it's beautiful to be rich," she returned, in the most enthusiastic phrase I had ever heard her utter; and gathering her white lace train over her arm she went into her bedroom to remove the dress.
"What is she made of, Sally?" I asked, in sheer desperation; "flesh and blood, do you think?"
"I don't know, Ben, not your flesh and blood, certainly."
"But for President—why wasn't my father hanged before he gave him such a name!—she would have remained ignorant and common with all her beauty. He almost starved himself in order to send her to a good school and give her pretty clothes."
"I know, I know, it seems terribly ungrateful—but perhaps she's excited over her first dinner."
That evening we were to give our first formal dinner, and when I came downstairs a little before eight o'clock, I found the rooms a bower of azaleas, over which the pink-shaded lamps shed a light that touched Jessy's lace gown with pale rose.
"It's like fairyland, isn't it?" she said, "and the table is so beautiful. Come and see the table."
She led me into the dining-room and we stood gazing down on the decorations, while we waited for Sally.
"Who is coming, Jessy?"
"Twelve in all. General Bolingbroke and Mr. Bolingbroke, Mrs. Fitzhugh, Governor Blenner, Miss Page," she went on reading the cards, "Mr. Mason, Miss Watson, Colonel Henry, Mrs. Preston, Mrs. Tyler—"
"That will do. I'll know them when I see them. Do you like it, Jessy?"
"Yes, I like it. Isn't my dress lovely?"
"Very, but don't get spoiled. You see Sally has had this all her life, and she isn't spoiled."
"I don't believe she could be," she responded, for her admiration for Sally was the most human thing I had ever discovered about her, "and she's so beautiful—more beautiful, I think, than Bonny Page, though of course nobody would agree with me."
"Well, she's perfect, and she always was and always will be," I returned.
"You're a great man, aren't you?" she asked suddenly, turning away from the table.
"Why, no. What in the world put that into your head?"
"Well, the General told Mr. Cottrel you were a genius, and Mr. Cottrel said you were the first genius he had ever heard of who measured six feet two in his stockings."
"Of course I'm not a genius. They were joking."
"You're rich anyway, and that's just as good."
I was about to make some sharp rejoinder, irritated by her insistence on the distinction of wealth, when the sound of Sally's step fell on my ears, and a moment later she came down the brilliantly lighted staircase, her long black lace train rippling behind her. As she moved among the lamps and azaleas, I thought I had never seen her more radiant—not even on the night of her first party when she wore the white rose in her wreath of plaits. Her hair was arranged to-night in the same simple fashion, her mouth was as vivid, her grey eyes held the same mingling of light with darkness. But there was a deeper serenity in her face, brought there by the untroubled happiness of her marriage, and her figure had grown fuller and nobler, as if it had moulded itself to the larger and finer purposes of life.
"The house is charming, Jessy is lovely, and you, Ben, are magnificent," she said, her eyebrows arching merrily as she slipped her hand in my arm. "And it's a good dinner, too," she went on; "the terrapin is perfect. I sent into the country for the game, and the man from Washington came down with the decorations and the ices. Best of all, I made the salad myself, so be sure to eat it. We'll begin to be gay now, shan't we? Are you sure we have money enough for a ball?"
"We've money enough for anything that you want, Sally."
"Then I'll spend it—but oh! Ben, promise me you won't mention stocks to-night until the women have left the table."
"I'll promise you, and keep it, too. I don't believe I ever introduced a subject in my life to any woman but you."
"I'm glad, at least, there's one subject you didn't introduce to any other."
Then the door-bell rang, and we hurried into the drawing-room in time to receive Governor Blenner and the General, who arrived together.
"I almost got a fall on your pavement, Ben," said the General, "it's beginning to sleet. You'd better have some sawdust down."
It took me a few minutes to order the sawdust, and when I returned, the other guests were already in the room, and Sally was waiting to go in to dinner on the arm of Governor Blenner, a slim, nervous-looking man, with a long iron-grey mustache. I took in Mrs. Tyler, a handsome widow, with a young face and snow-white hair, and we were no sooner seated than she began to tell me a story she had heard about me that morning.
"Carry James told me she gave her little boy a penny and asked him what he meant to do with it. 'Ath Mithter Starr to thurn it into, a quarther,' he replied."
"Oh, he thinks that easy now, but he'll find out differently some day," I returned.
She nodded brightly, with the interested, animated manner of a woman who realises that the burden of conversation lies, not on the man's shoulders, but on hers. While she ate her soup I knew that her alert mind was working over the subject which she intended to introduce with the next course. From the other end of the table Sally's eyes were raised to mine over the basket of roses and lilies. Jessy was listening to George Bolingbroke, who was telling a story about the races, while his eyes rested on Sally, with a dumb, pained look that made me suddenly feel very sorry for him. I knew that he still loved her, but until I saw that look in his eyes I had never understood what the loss of her must have meant in his life. Suppose I had lost her, and he had won, and I had sat and stared at her across her own dinner table with my secret written in my eyes for her husband to read. A fierce sense of possession swept over me, and I felt angered because his longing gaze was on her flushed cheeks and bare shoulders.
"No, no wine. I've drunk my last glass of wine unless I may hope for it in heaven," I heard the General say; "a little Scotch whiskey now and then will see me safely to my grave."
"From champagne to Scotch whiskey was a flat fall, General," observed Mrs. Tyler, my sprightly neighbour.
"It's not so flat as the fall to Lithia water, though," retorted the General.
I was about to join vacantly in the laugh, when a sound in the doorway caused me to lift my eyes from my plate, and the next instant I sat paralysed by the figure that towered there over the palms and azaleas.
"Why, Benjy boy!" cried a voice, in a tone of joyous surprise, and while every head turned instantly in the direction of the words, the candles and the roses swam in a blur of colour before my eyes. Standing on the threshold, between two flowering azaleas, with a palm branch waving above his head, was President, my brother, who was a miner. Twenty years ago I had last seen him, and though he was rougher and older and greyer now, he had the same honest blue eyes and the same kind, sheepish face. The clothes he wore were evidently those in which he dressed himself for church on Sunday, and they made him ten times more awkward, ten times more ill at ease, than he would have looked in his suit of jeans.