I had telephoned Sally not to wait, and when I reached home I found that she had dismissed the servants and was preparing a little supper for me herself. While she served me, I sat perfectly silent, too exhausted to talk or to think, trying in vain to remember the more important events of the day. Only once did Sally speak, and that was to beg me to eat the slice of cold turkey she had laid on my plate.
"I'm not hungry, I got something with Judge Kenton down town," I returned as I pushed back my chair and rose from the table; "what I need is sleep, sleep, sleep. If I don't get to bed, I'll drop to sleep on the hearth-rug."
"Then go, dear," she answered, and not until I reached the landing above did I realise that through it all she had not put a single question to me. With the realisation I knew that I ought to have told her what in her heart she must have felt it to be her right to know; but a nervous shrinking, which seemed to be a result of my complete physical exhaustion, held me back when I started to retrace my steps.
She might cry, and the sight of tears would unman me. There's time enough, I thought. Why not to-morrow instead? Yet in my heart I knew it would be no easier to do it to-morrow than it was to-day. By some strange freak of the imagination those unshed tears of hers seemed already dropping upon my nerves. "There's time enough, she'll be obliged to hear it in the end," something within me repeated with a kind of dulness. And with the words, while my head touched the pillow, I started suddenly wide awake as though from the flash of a lantern that was turned inward. Trivial impressions of the afternoon stood out as if illuminated against the outer darkness, and there hovered before me the face of the old woman, in the plaid shawl, with her twisted mouth, and the foot of her grey yarn stocking held out in her palsied hand. "I reckon I'd feel easier if I had it back," said a voice somewhere in my brain.
The panic which had begun with the depositors of small accounts, spread next day to the holders of larger ones, and even while I stood at my window and watched the cash brought in in bags through the cheering crowd on the sidewalk, I knew that the quarter of a million dollars would go down with the rest. My financial insight had misled me, and the bank funds, which I had believed so carefully guarded, had suffered the same fate as my private fortune. There were more serious questions behind the immediate need of currency, and these questions drummed in my mind now, dull and regular as the beat of a hammer.
For three days we paid off our accounts, and at the end of that time, when I left the building, after the run had stopped, it seemed to me that the city had a deserted and trampled look, as if some enormous picnic had been held in the streets. A few loose shreds of paper, a banana peel here and there, the ends of numerous cigars, and the white patch torn from a woman's petticoat littered the pavement. Over all there was a thick coating of dust, and the wind, blowing straight from the east, whipped swirls of it into our faces, as the General and I drove slowly up-town in his buggy.
"You look down in the mouth, Ben," he remarked, as I took the reins.
"I've got an infernal toothache, General; it kept me awake all night."
"Well, bless my soul, you ought to be thankful if it takes your mind off the country. I haven't seen such a state of affairs since the days of reconstruction. I tell you, my boy, the only thing on earth to do is to take a julep. Lithia water is well enough in times of prosperity, but you can't support a panic on it. I've gone back to my julep, and if I die of it, I'll die with a little spirit in me."
"There're worse things than death ahead of me, General, there's ruin."
"It's the toothache, Ben. Don't let it take all the spirit out of you."
"No, it's more than the toothache, confound it!—it never leaves off. The truth is, I'm in the tightest place of my life, and to keep what I own would cost me more than I've got. I haven't the money to pay up—and if I can't buy outright, you see that I must let go."
"I've done what I could for you, Ben, and if there is more I can do, heaven knows I'll be thankful enough."
"You've already done too much, General, but I've made sure that you shan't suffer by it. I've simply gone down, that's all, and I've got to stay there till I can get on my feet. The bank will close temporarily, I suppose, but when it starts again, it will have to start with another man. I shall look out for a smaller job."
"If you come back to the road, I'll find a place for you—but it won't be like being a bank president, you know."
"Well, when the time comes, I'll let you know," I added, when the buggy stopped before my door, and I handed him the reins.
"Listen to me, my boy," he called back, as he drove off and I went up the brown stone steps, "and take a julep."
But the support I needed was not that of whiskey, and though I swallowed a dozen juleps, the thought of Sally's face when I broke the news would suffer no blessed obscurity.
"Shall I tell her now, or after dinner?" I asked, while I drew out my latch-key; and then when she met me at the head of the staircase, with her shining eyes, I grew cowardly again, and said, "Not now—not now. To-night I will tell her."
At night, when we sat opposite to each other, with a silver bowl of jonquils between us, she began talking idly about the marriage of Bonny Page, inspired, I felt, by a valiant determination to save the situation in the eyes of the servants at least. The small yellow candle shades, made to resemble flowers, shone like suns in a mist before my eyes; and all the time that my thoughts worked over the approaching hour, I heard, like a muffled undertone, the soft, regular footfalls of old Esdras, the butler, on the velvet carpet.
"I'll tell her after the servants have gone, and the house is quiet—when she has taken off her dinner gown—when she may turn on her pillow and cry it out. I'll say simply, 'Sally, I am ruined. I haven't a penny left of my own. Even the horses and the carriages and the furniture are not mine!' No, that is a brutal way. It will be better to put it like this"—"What did you say, dear?" I asked, speaking aloud.
"Only that Bonny Page is to have six bridesmaids, but the wedding will be quiet, because they have lost money."
"They've lost money?"
"Everybody has lost money—everybody, the General says. Ben, do you know," she added, "I've never cared truly about money in my heart."
In some vague woman's way she meant it, I suppose, yet as I looked at her, where she sat beyond the bowl of jonquils, in one of her old Paris gowns, which she had told me she was wearing out, I broke into a short, mirthless laugh. She held her head high, with its wreath of plaits that made a charming frame for her arched black eyebrows and her full red mouth. On her bare throat, round and white as a marble column, there was an old-fashioned necklace of wrought gold, which had belonged to some ancestress, who was doubtless the belle and beauty of her generation. Was it possible to picture her in a common gown, with her sleeves rolled up and the perplexed and anxious look that poverty brings in her eyes? For the first time in my life I was afraid to face the moment before me.
The roast was removed, the dessert served, and played with in silence. The footfalls of old Esdras, the butler, sounded softer on the carpet, as he carried away the untasted pudding and brought coffee and an apricot brandy, which he placed before me with a persuasive air. I lit a cigar at the flame of the little silver lamp he offered me, drank my coffee hurriedly, and rose from the table.
"Are you going to work, Ben?" asked Sally, following me to the door of the library.
"Yes, I am going to work."
Without a word she raised her lips to mine, and when I had kissed her, she turned slowly away, and went up the staircase, with the branching lights in the hall shining upon her head.
I closed the door, lowered the wick of the oil lamp on my desk, and began walking up and down the length of the room, between the black oak bookcases filled with rows of calf-bound volumes. I tried to think, but between my thoughts and myself there obtruded always, like some small, malignant devil, the face of the old woman on the pavement before the bank, with her distorted and twisted mouth. "This will have to go—everything will have to go—when I've sold every last stick I have in the world, I shall still owe a debt of some cool hundreds of thousands. I'll pay that, too, some day. Of course, of course, but when? Meanwhile, we've got to live somewhere, somehow. There's the child, too—and there's Sally. I always said I'd only money to give her, and now I haven't that. We'll have to go into some cheap place, and I'll begin over again, with the disadvantages of a failure behind me, and a burden of debt on my shoulders. She's got to know—I've got to tell her. Confound that old woman! Why can't I keep her out of my thoughts?"
The hours went by, and still I walked up and down between the black oak bookcases, driven by some demon of torture to follow the same line in the Turkish rug, to turn always at the same point, to measure always the same number of steps.
"Well, she got her money—they all got their money," I said at last. "I am the only one who is ruined—no, not the only one—there is Sally and there is the child. I'd feel easier," I added, echoing the words of the old woman aloud, "I'd feel easier if I were the only one."
A clock somewhere in the city struck the hour of midnight, and while the sound was still in the air, the door opened softly and Sally came into the room. She had slipped on a wrapper over her nightdress, and her hair, flattened and warmed by the pillow, hung in a single braid over her bosom. There were deep circles under her eyes, which shone the more brilliantly because of the heavy shadows.
"What is the matter, Ben? Why don't you come upstairs?"
"I couldn't sleep—I am thinking," I answered, almost roughly, oppressed by my weight of misery.
"Would you rather be alone? Shall I go away again?"
"Yes, I'd rather be alone."
She went silently to the door, stood there a minute, and then ran back with her arms outstretched.
"Oh, Ben, Ben, why are you so hard? Why are you so cruel?"
"Cruel? Hard? To you, Sally?"
"You treat me as if—as if I'd married you for your money and you've made me hate and despise it. I wish—I almost wish we hadn't a penny."
I laughed the bitter, mirthless laugh that had broken from me at dinner.
"As a matter of fact we haven't—not a single penny that we can honestly call our own."
She drew back instantly, her head held high under the branching electric jet in the ceiling.
"Well, I'm glad of it," she responded defiantly.
"You don't in the least understand what it means, Sally. It isn't merely giving up a few luxuries, it is actually going without the necessities. It is practically beginning again."
"I am glad of it," she repeated, and there was no regret in her voice.
"Oh, can't you understand?"
"Tell me and I will try."
"I've lost everything. I'm ruined."
"There is nothing left?"
"There is honour," I said bitterly, "a couple of hundred thousand dollars of debt, and a little West Virginia railroad too poor to go bankrupt."
"Then we must start from the very bottom?"
"From the very bottom. Nothing that you are likely to imagine can be worse than the facts—and I've brought you to it."
Something that was like a sob burst from me, and turning away, I flung myself into the chair on the hearth-rug.
"Can't you think of anything that would be worse?" she asked quietly.
I shook my head, "The worst thing about it is that I've brought you to it."
"Wouldn't it be worse," she went on in the same level voice, "if you had lost me?"
"Lost you!" I cried, and my arms were open at the thought.
"I'm glad, I'm glad." With the words she was on her knees at my side, and her mouth touched my cheek. "I knew it wasn't the worst, Ben,—I knew you'd rather give up the money than give up me. Ah, can't you see—can't you see, that the worst can't come to us while we are still together?"
Leaning over her, I gathered her to me with a hunger for comfort, kissing her eyes, her mouth, her throat, and the loosened braid on her bosom.
"Oh, you witch, you've almost made me happy!" I said.
"I am happy, Ben."
"Happy? The horses must go, and the carriage and the furniture even. We'll have to move into some cheap place. I'll get a position of some kind with the railroad, and then we'll have to scrimp and save for an eternity, until we pay off this damned burden of debt."
She laughed softly, her mouth at my ear. "I'm happy, Ben."
"We shan't be able to keep servants. You'll have to wear old clothes, and I'll go so shabby that you'll be ashamed of me. We'll forget what a bottle of wine looks like, and if we were ever to see a decent dinner, we shouldn't recognise it."
Again she laughed, "I'm still happy, Ben."
"We'll live in some God-forsaken, out-of-the-way little hole, and never even dare ask a person in to a meal for fear there wouldn't be enough potatoes to go around. It will be a daily uphill grind until I've managed to pay off honestly every cent I owe."
Her arms tightened about my neck, "Oh, Ben, I'm so happy."
"Then you are a perfectly abandoned creature," I returned, lifting her from the rug until she nestled against my heart. "I've given up trying to make you as miserable as a self-respecting female ought to be. If you won't be proper and wretched, I can't help it, for I've done my best. And the most ridiculous part of it is, darling, that I actually believe I'm happy, too!"
She laughed like a child between her kisses. "Then, you see, it isn't really the thing, but the way you take it that matters."
"I'm not sure about the logic of that—but I'm inclined to think just now that the only thing I've ever taken is you."
"If you'll try to remember that, you'll be always happy."
"But I must remember also that I've brought you to poverty—I, who had only money to give you."
"Do you dare to tell me to my face that I married you for money?"
"You couldn't very well have married me without it."
"I don't know about the 'very well,' but I know that I'd have done it."
"Do you think that, Sally?"
Turning in my arms, she lifted her head, and looked steadily into my face.
"Have I ever lied to you since we were married, Ben?"
"No, darling."
"Have I ever deceived you?"
"Never, I am sure," I responded with a desperate levity, "except for my good."
"Have I ever deceived you," she demanded sternly, "even for your good?"
"To tell the truth, I don't believe you ever have."
The warm pressure of her body was withdrawn, and rising to her feet, she stood before me under the blazing light.
"Then I'm not lying to you when I say that I'd have married you if you hadn't possessed a penny to your name—I'd have married you if—if I'd had to take in washing."
"Sally!" I cried, and made a movement to recapture her; but pushing me back, she stood straight and tall, with the fingers of her outstretched hand touching my breast.
"No, listen to me, listen to me," she said gravely. "As long as I have you and you love me, Ben, nothing can break my spirit, because the thing that makes life of value to me will still be mine. If you ever ceased to love me, I might get desperate, and do something wild and foolish—even run off with another man, I believe—I don't know, but I am my father's daughter, as well as my mother's. Until that time comes, I can bear anything, and bear it with courage—with gaiety even. I can imagine myself without everything else, but not without you. I love my child—you know I love my child—but even my child isn't you. If I had to choose to-night between my baby and you, I'd give him up,—and cling the closer to you. You are myself, and if I had to choose between everything else I've ever known in my life and you, I'd let everything else go and follow you anywhere—anywhere. There is nothing that you can endure that I cannot share with you. I can bear poverty, I could even have borne shame. If we had to go to some strange country far away from all I have ever known, I could go and go cheerfully. I can work beside you, I can work for you—oh, my dear, my dearest, I am your wife, do you still doubt me?"
I had fallen on my knees before her, with her open palms pressed to my forehead, in which my very brain seemed throbbing. As I looked up at her, she stooped and gathered me to her bosom.
"Do you know me now?" she asked in a whisper.
Then her voice broke, and the next instant she would have sunk down beside me, if I had not sprung to my feet and lifted her in my arms. While I held her thus, pressed close against me, something of her radiant strength entered into me, and I was aware of a power in myself that was neither hers nor mine, but the welding of the finer qualities in both our natures.
Sally was not beside me when I awoke in the morning, nor was she sipping her coffee by the window, as I had sometimes found her doing when I slept late. Going downstairs an hour afterwards, I discovered her, for the first time since our marriage, awaiting me in the dining-room. In her dainty breakfast jacket of blue silk, with a bit of lace and ribbon framing her wreath of plaits, she appeared to my tired eyes as the embodied freshness and buoyancy of the morning. Would her sparkling gaiety endure, I wondered, through the monotonous days ahead, when poverty became, not a child's play, not a game tricked out by the imagination, but the sordid actuality of hard work and hourly self-denial?
"I am practising early rising, Ben," she said, "and it's astonishing what an appetite it gives one. I've made the coffee myself, and Aunt Mehitable has just taught me how to make yeast. One can never tell what may come useful, you know, and if we go to live somewhere in a jungle, which I'm quite prepared to do, you'd be glad to know that I could make yeast, wouldn't you?"
"I suppose so, sweetheart, and as a matter of fact," I added presently, "this is the best cup of coffee I've had for many a month."
Laughing merrily, she perched herself on the arm of my chair, and sipped out of the cup I held toward her. "Of course it is. So you've gained that much by losing everything. It's very strange, Ben, and you may consider it presumptuous, but I've a profound conviction somewhere in the bottom of my heart that I can do everything better than anybody else, if I once turn my hand to it. At this minute I haven't a doubt that my yeast is better than Aunt Mehitable's. I'm going to cook dinner, too, and she'll be positively jealous of my performance. How do we know whether or not we'll meet any cooks in the jungle? And if we do, they'll probably be tigers—"
"Oh, Sally, Sally! You think it play now, but what will you feel when you know it's earnest?"
"Of course it's earnest. Do you imagine I'd get out of my bed at seven o'clock and cut up a slimy potato if it wasn't earnest? That may be your idea of play, but it's not mine."
"And you expect to flutter about a stove in a pale blue breakfast jacket and a lace cap?"
"Just as long as they last. When they go, I suppose I'll have to take to calico, but it will be pretty calico, and pink. Pink calico don't cost a penny more than drab—and there's one thing I positively decline to do, even in a jungle, and that is look ugly."
"You couldn't if you tried, my beauty."
"Oh, yes, I could—I could look hideous—any woman could if she tried. But as long as it doesn't cost any more, you've no objection to my cooking in pink instead of drab, I suppose?"
"I've an objection to your cooking in anything. Another cup of coffee, please."
"Ben."
"Yes, dear."
"You never drank but one of Aunt Mehitable's."
"I'm aware of it, and I'm aware of something else. It's worth being poor, Sally, to be poor with you."
"Then give me another taste of your coffee. But you don't call this being poor, do you, you silly boy?—with all this beautiful mahogany that I can use for a mirror? This isn't any fun in the world. Just wait until I spread the cloth over a pine table. Then we'll have something to laugh at sure enough, Ben."
"And I thought you'd cry!"
"You thought a great many very foolish things, my dear. You even thought I'd married you because I wanted to be rich, and it seemed an easy way."
"Only it turned out to be an easier way of getting poor."
"Well, rich or poor, what I married you for, after all, was the essential thing."
"And you've got it, sweetheart?"
"Of course I've got it. If I didn't have it, do you think I'd be able to laugh at a pine table?"
"If I were only sure you realised it!"
"You'll be sure enough when we are in the midst of it, and we'll be in the midst of it, I don't doubt, in a little while. I've been thinking pretty hard since last night, and this is what I worked out while I was making yeast."
"Let's have it, then."
"Now, the first thing we've got to do is to get out of debt, isn't it?"
"The very first thing, if it can be managed."
"We'll manage it this way. The furniture and the silver and my jewels must all be sold, of course; that's easy. But even after we've done that, there'll still be a great big burden to carry, I suppose?"
"Pretty big, I'm afraid, for your shoulders."
"Oh, we'll pay it every bit in the end. We won't go bankrupt. You'll go back to the railroad on a salary, and we'll begin to pinch on the spot."
"Yes, but times are hard and salaries are low."
"Anyway they're salaries, there's that much to be said for them. And while we're pinching as hard as we can pinch, we'll move over to Church Hill and rent two or three rooms in the old house with the enchanted garden. All the servants will have to go except Aunt Euphronasia, who couldn't go very far, poor thing, because she's rheumatic and can't stand on her feet. She can sit still very well, however, and rock the baby, and I'll look after the rooms and get the meals—I'm glad they'll be simple ones—and we'll put by every penny that we can save."
"The mere interest on the debt will take almost as much as we can save. There'll be some arrangement made, of course, and the payments will be easy, but there's one thing I'm determined on, and that is that I'll pay it, every cent, if I live. Then, too, there's chance, you know. Something may turn up—something almost always turns up to a man like myself."
"Well, if it turns up, we'll welcome it with open arms. But in the meantime we'll see if we can't scrape along without it. I'm going over this morning to look for rooms. How soon, Ben, do you suppose they will evict us?"
"Does there exist a woman," I demanded sternly, "who can be humorous over her own eviction?"
"It's better to be humorous over one's own than over one's neighbour's, isn't it? And besides, a laugh may help things, but tears never do. I was born laughing, mamma always said."
"Then laugh on, sweetheart."
I had risen from the table, and was moving toward the door, when she caught my arm.
"There's only one thing I'll never, never consent to," she said, "you remember Dolly?"
"Your old mare?"
"I've pensioned her, you know, and I'll pay that pension as long as she lives if we both have to starve."
"You shall do it if we're hanged and drawn for it—and now, Sally, I must be off to my troubles!"
"Then, good-by and be brave. Oh, Ben, my dearest, what is the matter?"
"It's my head. I've been worrying too much, and it's gone back on me like that twice in the last few days."
I went out hurriedly, convinced that even failure wasn't quite so bad as it had appeared from a distance; and Sally, following me to the door, stood smiling after me as I went down the block toward the car line. Looking back at the corner, I saw that she was still standing on the threshold, with the sun in her eyes and her head held high under the ruffle of lace and ribbon that framed her hair.
The street was filled with people that morning, and at the end of the first block Bonny Page nodded to me jauntily, as she passed on her early ride with Ned Marshall. Turning, almost unconsciously, my eyes followed her graceful, very erect figure, in its close black habit, swaying so perfectly with the motion of her chestnut mare. An immeasurable, wind-blown space seemed to stretch between us, and the very sound of the horse's hoofs on the cobblestones in the street came to me, faint and thin, as if it had floated back from some remote past which I but dimly remembered. I had never felt, even when standing at Bonny's side, that I was within speaking distance of her, and to-day, while I looked after the vanishing horses, I knew that odd, baffling sensation of struggling to break through an inflexible, yet invisible barrier. Why was it that I who had won Sally should still remain so hopelessly divided from all that to which Sally by right and by nature belonged?
Farther down the two great sycamores, still gaunt and bare as skeletons, stood out against a sky of intense blueness; and on the crooked pavement beneath, the shadows, fine and delicate as lace-work, rippled gently in the wind that blew straight in from the river. Looking up from under the silvery boughs, I saw the wire cage of the canary between the parted curtains, and beyond it the pale oval face of Miss Mitty, with its grave, set smile, so like the smile of the painted Blands and Fairfaxes that hung, in massive frames, on the drawing-room walls. In the midst of my own ruin an impulse of compassion entered my heart. The vacancy of the old grey house was like the vacancy of a tomb in which the ashes have scattered, and the one living spirit seemed that of the canary singing joyously in his wire cage. Something in the song brought Sally to my mind as she had appeared that morning at breakfast, and I felt again the soft, comforting touch of the hand she had laid on my face. Then I turned my eyes to the street, and saw George Bolingbroke coming slowly toward me, beyond the last great sycamore, which grew midway of the bricks. At the sight of him all that had comforted or supported me crumbled and fell. In its place came that sharp physical soreness—like the soreness from violent action—that the shock of my failure had brought. I, who had meant so passionately to win in the race, was suddenly crippled. Money, I had said, was all that I had to give, and yet I was beggared now even of that. Shorn of my power, what remained to me that would make me his match?
He came up, taking his cigar from his mouth as he stopped, and flicking the ashes away, while he stood looking at me with an expression of sympathy which he struggled in vain, I saw, to dissemble. On his finely coloured, though rather impassive features, there was the same darkening of a carefully suppressed emotion—the same lines of anger drawn, not by temper, but by suffering—that I had seen first at the club when his favourite hunter had died, and next on the day when the General had spoken to him, in my presence, of my engagement to Sally. Under his short dark mustache, his thin, nervous lips were set closely together.
"I'm awfully cut up, Ben," he said, "I declare I don't know when I was ever so cut up about anything before."
"I'm cut up too, George, like the deuce, but it doesn't appear to help matters, somehow."
"That's the worst thing about being a man of affairs like you—or like Uncle George," he observed, making an amiable effort to assure me that even in the hour of adversity, I still held my coveted place in the General's class; "when the crash comes, you big ones have to pay the piper, while the rest of us small fry manage to go scot-free."
It was put laboriously, but beneath the words I felt the force of that painful sympathy, too strong for concealment, and yet not strong enough to break through the inherited habit of self-command. The General had broken through, I acknowledged, but then was not the very greatness of the great man the expression of an erratic departure from traditions rather than of the perfect adherence to the racial type?
"And the louder the music the bigger the cost of the piper," I observed, with a laugh.
"Oh, you'll come out all right," he rejoined cheerfully, "things are never so bad as they might be."
"Well, I don't know that there's much comfort in reflecting that a thunder-storm might have been accompanied by an earthquake."
For a moment he stood in silence watching the end of his cigar, which went out in his hand. Then without meeting my eyes he asked in a voice that had a curiously muffled sound:—
"It's rough on Sally, isn't it? How does she stand it?"
"As she stands everything—like an angel out of heaven."
"Yes, you're right—she is an angel," he returned, still without looking into my face. An instant later, as if in response to an impulse which for once rose superior to the dead weight of custom, he blurted out with a kind of suffering violence, "I say, Ben, you know it's really awful. I'm so cut up about it I don't know what to do. I wish you'd let me help you out of this hole till you're on your feet. I've got nobody on me, you see, and I can't spend half of my income."
For the first time in our long acquaintance the tables were turned; it was George who was awkward now, and I who was perfectly at my ease.
"I can't do that, George," I said quietly, "but I'm grateful to you all the same. You're a first-rate chap."
We shook hands with a grip, and while he still lingered to strike a match and light the fresh cigar he had taken from his case, the little yellow flame followed, like an illuminated pointer, the expression of suffering violence which showed so strangely upon his face. Then, tossing the match into the gutter, he went on his way, while I passed the great scarred body of the sycamore and hurried down the long hill, which I never descended without recalling, as the General had said, that I had once "toted potatoes for John Chitling."
At the beginning of the next block, I saw the miniature box hedge and the clipped yew in the little garden of Dr. Theophilus, and as I turned down the side street, the face of the old man looked at me from the midst of some leafless red currant bushes that grew in clumps at the end of the walk.
"Come in, Ben, come in a minute," he called, beaming at me over his lowered spectacles, "there's a thing or two I should like to say."
As I entered the garden and walked along the tiny path, bordered by oyster shells, to the red currant bushes beyond, he laid his pruning-knife on the ground, and sat down on an old bench beside a little green table, on which a sparrow was hopping about. On his seventy-fifth birthday he had resigned his profession to take to gardening, and I had heard from no less an authority than the General that "that old fool Theophilus was spending more money in roses than Mrs. Clay was making out of pickles."
"What is it, doctor?" I asked, for, oppressed by my own burdens, I waited a little impatiently to hear "the thing or two" he wanted to say.
"You see I've given up people, Ben, and taken to roses," he began, while I stood grinding my heel into the gravelled walk; "and it's a good change, too, when you come to my years, there's no doubt of that. If you weed and water them and plant an occasional onion about their roots you can make roses what you want—but you can't people—no, not even when you've helped to bring them into the world. No matter how straight they come at birth, they're all just as liable as not to take an inward crank and go crooked before the end." He looked thoughtfully at the sparrow hopping about on the green table, and his face, beautiful with the wisdom of more than seventy years, was illumined by a smile which seemed in some way a part of the April sunshine flooding the clumps of red currant bushes and the miniature box. "George—I mean old George—was telling me about you, Ben," he went on after a minute, "and as soon as I heard of your troubles, I said to Tina—'We've got a roof and we've got a bite, so they'll come to us.' What with Tina's pickling and preserving we manage to keep a home, my boy, and you're more than welcome to share it with us—you and Sally and your little Benjamin—"
"Doctor—doctor—" was all I could say, for words failed me, and I, also, stood looking thoughtfully at the sparrow hopping about on the green table, with eyes that saw two small brown feathered bodies in the place where, a minute before, there had been but one.
"Come when you're ready, come when you're ready," he repeated, "and we'll make you welcome, Tina and I."
I grasped his hand without speaking, and as I wrung it in my own, I felt that it was long and fine and nervous,—the hand, not of a worker, but of a dreamer. Then tearing my gaze from the sparrow, I went back through the clump of red currant bushes, and between the shining rows of oyster shells, to the busy street which led to a busy world and my office door.
A fortnight later the house was sold over our heads, and when I came up in the afternoon, I found a red flag flying at the gate, and the dusty buggies of a few real estate men tied to the young maples on the sidewalk. Upstairs Sally was sitting on a couch, in the midst of the scattered furniture, while George Bolingbroke stood looking ruefully at a pile of silver and bric-a-brac that filled the centre of the floor.
"Are you laughing now, Sally?" I asked desperately, as I entered.
"Not just this minute, dear, because that awful man and a crowd of people have been going over the house, and Aunt Euphronasia and I locked ourselves in the nursery. I'll begin again, however, as soon as they've gone. All these things belong to George. It was silly of him to buy them, but he says he had no idea of allowing them to go to strangers."
"Well, George as well as anybody, I suppose," I responded, moodily.
Beside the window Aunt Euphronasia was rocking slowly back and forth, with little Benjamin fast asleep on her knees, and her great rolling eyes, rimmed with white, passed from me to George and from George to me with a defiant and angry look.
"I ain' seen nuttin' like dese yer doin's sence war time," she grumbled; "en hit's wuss den war time, caze war time hit's fur all, en dish yer hit ain't fur nobody cep'n us."
Throwing herself back on the pillow, Sally lay for a minute with her hand over her eyes.
"I can laugh now," she said at last, raising her head, and she, also, as she sat there, pale and weary but bravely smiling, glanced from me to George with a perplexed, inscrutable look. A minute later, when George made some pleasant, comforting remark and went down to join the crowd gathered before the door, her gaze still followed him, a little pensively, as he left the room. The bruise throbbed again; and walking to the window, I stood looking through the partly closed blinds to the street below, where I could see the dusty buggies, the switching tails of the horses, bothered by flies, and the group of real estate men, lounging, while they spat tobacco juice, by the red flag at the gate. In the warm air, which was heavy with the scent of a purple catalpa tree on the corner, the drawling voice of the auctioneer could be heard like the loud droning of innumerable bees. A carriage passed down the street in a cloud of dust, and the very dust, as it drifted toward us, was drenched with the heady perfume of the catalpa.
"That tree makes me dizzy," I said; "it's odd I never minded it before."
"You aren't well—that's the trouble—but even if you were, the voice of that man down there is enough to drive any sane person crazy. He sounds exactly as if he were intoning a church service over our misfortunes. That is certainly adding horror to humiliation," she finished with merriment.
"At any rate he doesn't humiliate you?"
"Of course he doesn't. Imagine one of the Blands and the Fairfaxes being humiliated by an auctioneer! He amuses me, even though it is our woes he is singing about. If I were Aunt Mitty, I'd probably be seated on the front porch with my embroidery at this minute, bowing calmly to the passers-by, as if it were the most matter-of-fact occurrence in the world to have an auctioneer selling one's house over one's head."
"Dear old enemy, I wonder what she thinks of this?"
"She hasn't heard it, probably. A newspaper never enters her doors, and do you believe she has a relative who would be reckless enough to break it to her?"
"I hope she hasn't, anyhow."
"They haven't had time to go to her. They have all been here. People have been coming all day with offers of help—even Jessy's Mr. Cottrel—and oh, Ben, she told me she meant to marry him! Bonny Page," a little sob broke from her, "Bonny Page wanted to give up her trip to Europe and have me take the money. Then everybody's been sending me luncheons and jellies and things just exactly as if I were an invalid."
"Hit's de way dey does in war time, honey," remarked Aunt Euphronasia, shaking little Benjamin with the slow, cradling movement of the arms known only to the negroes.
Downstairs the auction was over, the drawling monologue was succeeded by a babel of voices, and glancing through the blinds, I saw the real estate men untying their horses from the young maples. A swirl of dust laden with the scent of the catalpa blew up from the street.
"But we can't take help, Sally," I said, almost fiercely.
"No, we can't take help, I told them so—I told them that we didn't need it. In a few years we'd be back where we were, I said, and I believed it."
"Do you believe it after listening to that confounded fog-horn on the porch?"
"Well, it's a trial to faith, as Aunt Mitty would say, but, oh, Ben, I reallydobelieve it still."
It was a warm spring afternoon when we closed the door behind us for the last time, and took the car for Church Hill, where we had rented several rooms on the first floor of the house with the enchanted garden. As the car descended into the neighbourhood of the Old Market, with its tightly packed barrooms, its squalid junk shops, its strings of old clothes waving before darkened, ill-smelling doorways, I seemed to have stepped suddenly backward into a place that was divided between the dream and the actuality. I remembered my awakening on the pile of straw, with the face of John Chitling beaming down on me over the wheelbarrow of vegetables; and the incidents of that morning—the long line of stalls giving out brilliant flashes from turnips and onions, the sharp, fishy odour from the strings of mackerel and perch, the very bloodstains on the apron and rolled-up sleeves of the butcher—all these things were more vivid to my consciousness than were the faces of Sally and of Aunt Euphronasia, or the fretful cries of little Benjamin, swathed in a blue veil, in the old negress's lap. I had meant to make good that morning, when I had knelt there sorting the yellow apples. I had made good for a time, and yet to-day I was back in the place from which I had started. Well, not in the same place, perhaps, but my foot had slipped on the ladder, and I must begin again, if not from the very bottom, at least from the middle rung. The market wagons, covered with canvas, were still standing with empty shafts in the littered street, as if they had waited there, a shelter for prowling dogs, until my return. Mrs. Chitling's slovenly doorstep I could not see, but as we ascended the long hill on the other side, I recognised the musty "old clothes" shop, in which I had stumbled on "Sir Charles Grandison" and Johnson's Dictionary. That minute, I understood now, had been in reality the turning-point in my career. In that close-smelling room I had come to the cross-roads of success or failure, and swerving aside from the dull level of ignorance, I had rushed, almost by accident, into the better way. The very odour of the place was still in my nostrils—a mixture of old clothes, of stale cheese, of overripe melons. A sudden dizziness seized me, and a wave of physical nausea passed over me, as if the intense heat of that past summer afternoon had gone to my head.
The car stopped at the corner of old Saint John's; we got out, assisting Aunt Euphronasia, and then turned down a side street in the direction of our new home. As we mounted the curving steps, Sally passed a little ahead of me, and looked back with her hand on the door.
"I am happy, Ben," she said with a smile; and with the words on her lips, she crossed the threshold and entered the wide hall, where the moth-eaten stags' heads, worn bare of fur, still hung on the faded plaster.
My first impression upon entering the room was that the strange surroundings struck with a homelike and familiar aspect upon my consciousness. Then, as bewilderment gave place before a closer scrutiny, I saw that this aspect was due to the presence of the objects by which I had been so long accustomed to see Sally surrounded. Her amber satin curtains hung at the windows; the deep couch, with the amber lining, upon which she rested before dressing for dinner, stood near the hearth; and even the two crystal vases, which I had always seen holding fresh flowers upon her small, inlaid writing desk, were filled now with branching clusters of American Beauty roses. Beyond them, and beyond the amber satin curtains at the long window, I saw the elm boughs arching against a pale gold sunset into which a single swallow was flying. And I remember that swallow as I remember the look, swift, expectant, as if it, also, were flying, that trembled, for an instant, on Sally's face.
"It is George," she said, turning to me with radiant eyes; "George has done this. These are the things he bought, and I wondered so what he would do with them." Then before something in my face, the radiance died out of her eyes. "Would you rather he didn't do it? Would you rather I shouldn't keep them?" she asked.
A struggle began within me. Through the window I could see still the pale gold sunset beyond the elms, but the swallow was gone, and gone, also, from Sally's face was the look as of one flying.
"Would you rather that I shouldn't keep them?" she asked again, and her voice was very gentle.
At that gentleness the struggle ceased as sharply as it had begun.
"Do as you choose, darling, you know far better than I," I replied; and bending over her, I raised her chin that was lowered, and kissed her lips.
A light, a bloom, something that was fragrant and soft as the colour and scent of the American Beauty roses, broke over her as she looked up at me with her mouth still opening under my kiss.
"Then I'll keep them," she answered, "because it would hurt him so, Ben, if I sent them back."
The colour and bloom were still there, but in my heart a chill had entered to drive out the warmth. My ruin, my failure, the poverty to which I had brought Sally and the child through my inordinate ambition, and the weight of the two hundred thousand dollars of debt on my shoulders—all these things returned to my memory, with an additional heaviness, like a burden that has been lifted only to drop back more crushingly. And as always in my thoughts now, this sense of my failure came to me in the image of George Bolingbroke, with his air of generous self-sufficiency, as if he needed nothing because he had been born to the possession of all necessary things.
Sally drew the long pins from her hat, laid them, with the floating white veil and her coat, on a chair in one corner, and began to move softly about in her restful, capable way. Her very presence, I had once said of her, would make a home, and I remembered this a little later as I watched the shadow of her head flit across the faded walls above the fine old wainscoting, from which the white paint was peeling in places. Her touch, swift and unfaltering, released some spirit of beauty and cheerfulness which must have lain imprisoned for a generation in the superb old rooms. On the floor with us there were no other tenants, but when I heard an occasional sound in the room above, I remembered that the agent had told me of an aristocratic, though poverty-stricken, maiden lady, who was starving up there in the midst of some rare pieces of old Chippendale furniture, and with the portrait of an English ancestress by Gainsborough hanging above her fireless hearth.
"The baby is asleep, so Aunt Euphronasia and I are cooking supper," said Sally, when she had spread the cloth over the little table, and laid covers for two on either side of the shaded lamp; "at least she's cooking and I'm serving. Come into the garden, Ben, before it's ready, and run with me down the terrace."
"The garden is ruined. I saw it when I came over with the agent."
"Ruined? And with such lilacs! They are a little late because of the cold spring, but a perfect bower."
She caught my hand as she spoke, and we passed together through the long window leading from our bedroom to the porch, where a few startled swallows flew out, crying harshly, from among the white columns. Many of the elms had died; the magnolias and laburnums, with the exception of a few stately trees, had decayed on the terrace, and the thick maze of box was now thin and rapidly dwindling away from the gravelled paths. On the ground, under the young green of dandelion and wild violets, the rotting leaves of last year were still lying; and as we descended the steps, and followed the littered walks down the hill-side, broken pieces of pottery crumbled beneath our feet.
Clasping hands like two children, we stood for a minute in silence, with our eyes on the ruin before us, and the memory of the enchanted garden and our first love in our thoughts. Then, "Oh, Ben, the lilacs!" said Sally, softly.
They were there on all sides, floating like purple and white clouds in the wind, and shedding their delicious perfume over the scattered rose arbours and the dwindling box. Light, delicate, and brave, they had withstood frost and decay, while the latticed summer houses had fallen under the weight of the microphylla roses that grew over them. The wind now was laden with their sweetness, and the golden light seemed aware of their colour as it entered the garden softly through the screen of boughs.
"Do you remember the first day, Ben?"
"The first day? That was when President lifted me on the wall—and even the wall has gone."
"Did you dream then that you'd ever stand here with me like this?"
"I dreamed nothing else. I've never dreamed anything else."
"Then you aren't so very unhappy as long as we are together?"
"Not so unhappy as I might be, but, remember, I'm a man, Sally, and I have failed."
"Yes, you're a man, and you couldn't be happy even with me—without something else."
"The something else is a part of you. It belongs to you, and that's mostly why I want to make good. These debts are like a dead weight—like the Old Man of the Sea—on my shoulders. Until I'm able to shake them off, I shall not stand up straight."
"I'm glad you've gone back to the railroad."
"There are a lot of men in the railroad, and very few places. The General found me this job at six thousand a year, which is precious little for a man of my earning capacity. They'll probably want to send me down South to build up the traffic on the Tennessee and Carolina,—I don't know. It will take me a month anyway to wind up my affairs and start back with the road. Oh, it's going to be a long, hard pull when it once begins."
Pressing her cheek to my arm, she rubbed it softly up and down with a gentle caress. "Well, we'll pull it, never fear," she responded.
At our feet the twilight rose slowly from the sunken terrace, and the perfume of the lilacs seemed to grow stronger as the light faded. For a moment we stood drawn close together; then turning, with my arm still about her, we went back over the broken pieces of pottery, and ascending the steps, left the pearly afterglow and the fragrant stillness behind us.
Half an hour later, when we were in the midst of our supper, which she had served with gaiety and I had eaten with sadness, a hesitating knock came at the door leading into the dim hall, and opening it with surprise, I was confronted by a small, barefooted urchin, who stood, like the resurrected image of my own childhood, holding a covered dish at arm's length before him.
"If you please, ma'am," he said, under my shoulder, to Sally, who was standing behind me, "ma's jest heard you'd moved over here, an' she's sent you some waffles for supper."
"And what may ma's name be?" enquired Sally politely, as she removed the red and white napkin which covered the gift.
"Ma's Mrs. Titterbury, an' she lives jest over yonder. She says she's been a-lookin' out for you an' she hopes you've come to stay."
"That's very kind of her, and I'm much obliged. Tell her to come to see me."
"She's a-comin', ma'am," he responded cheerfully, and as he withdrew, his place was immediately filled by a little girl in a crimson calico, with two very tight and very slender braids hanging down to her waist in the back.
"Ma's been makin' jelly an' syllabub, an' she thought you might like a taste," she said, offering a glass dish. "Her name is Mrs. Barley, an' she lives around the corner."
"These are evidently our poorer neighbours," observed Sally, as the door closed after the crimson calico and the slender braids; "where are the well-to-do ones that live in all the big houses around us?"
"It probably never occurred to them that we might want a supper. It's the poor who have imagination. By Jove! there's another!"
This time it was a stout, elderly female in rusty black, with a very red face, whom, after some frantic groping of memory, I recognised as Mrs. Cudlip, unaltered apparently by her thirty years of widowhood.
"I jest heard you'd moved back over here, Benjy," she remarked, and at the words and the voice, I seemed to shrink again into the small, half-scared figure clad in a pair of shapeless breeches which were made out of an old dolman my mother had once worn to funerals, "an' I thought as you might like a taste of muffins made arter the old receipt of yo' po' ma's—the very same kind of muffins she sent me by you on the mornin' arter I buried my man."
Placing the dish upon the table, she seated herself, in response to an invitation from Sally, and spread her rusty black skirt, with a leisurely movement, over her comfortable lap. As I looked at her, I forgot that I stood six feet two inches in my stockings; I forgot that I had married a descendant of the Blands and the Fairfaxes; and I remembered as plainly as if it were yesterday, the morning of the funeral, when, with my mother's grey blanket shawl pinned on my shoulders, I had sat on the step outside and waited for the service to end, while I made scornful faces at the merry driver of the hearse.
"It's been going on thirty years sence yo' ma died, ain't it, Benjy?" she enquired, while I struggled vainly to recover a proper consciousness of my size and my importance.
"I was a little chap at the time, Mrs. Cudlip," I returned.
"An' it's been twenty, I reckon," she pursued reminiscently, "sence yo' pa was took. Wall, wall, time does fly when you come to think of deaths, now, doesn't it? I al'ays said thar wa'nt nothin' so calculated to put cheer an' spirit into you as jest to remember the people who've dropped off an' died while you've been spared. You didn't see much of yo' pa durin' his last days, did you?"
"Never after I ran away, and that was the night he brought his second wife home."
"He had a hard time toward the end, but I reckon she had a harder. It wa'nt that he was a bad man at bottom, but he was soft-natured an' easy, an' what he needed was to be helt an' to be helt steady. Some men air like that—they can't stand alone a minute without beginnin' to wobble. Now as long as yo' ma lived, she kept a tight hand on yo' pa, an' he stayed straight; but jest as soon as he was left alone, he began to wobble, an' from wobblin' he took to the bottle, and from the bottle he took to that brass-headed huzzy he married. She was the death of him, Benjy; I ought to know, for I lived next do' to 'em to the day of his burial. As to that, anyway, ma'am," she added to Sally, "my humble opinion is that women have killed mo' men anyway than they've ever brought into the world. It's a po' thought, I've al'ays said, in which you can't find some comfort."
"You were very kind to him, I have heard," I observed, as she paused for breath and turned toward me.
"It wa'nt mo'n my duty if I was, Benjy, for yo' ma was a real good neighbour to me, an' many's the plate of buttered muffins you've brought to my do' when you wa'nt any higher than that."
It was true, I admitted the fact as gracefully as I could.
"My mother thought a great deal of you," I remarked.
"You don't see many of her like now," she returned with a sigh, "the mo's the pity. 'Thar ain't room for two in marriage,' she used to say, 'one of 'em has got to git an' I'd rather 'twould be the other!' 'Twa'nt that way with the palaverin' yaller-headed piece that yo' pa married arterwards. She'd a sharp enough tongue, but a tongue don't do you much good with a man unless he knows you've got the backbone behind to drive it. It ain't the tongue, but the backbone that counts in marriage. At first he was mighty soft, but befo' two weeks was up he'd begun to beat her, an' I ain't got a particle of respect for a woman that's once been beaten. Men air born mean, I know, it's thar natur, an' the good Lord intended it; but, all the same, it's my belief that mighty few women come in for a downright beatin' unless they've bent thar backs to welcome it. It takes two to make a beatin' the same as a courtin', an' whar the back ain't ready, the blows air slow to fall."
"I never saw her but once, and then I ran away," I remarked to fill in her pause.
"Wall, you didn't miss much, or you either, ma'am," she rejoined politely; "she was the kind that makes an honest woman ashamed to belong to a sex that's got to thrive through foolishness, an' to git to a place by sidlin' backwards. That wa'nt yo' ma's way, Benjy, an' I've often said that I don't believe she ever hung back in her life an' waited for a man to hand her what she could walk right up an' take holt of without his help. 'The woman that waits on a man has got a long wait ahead of her,' was what she used to say."
Rising to her feet, she stood with the empty plate in her hand, and her back ceremoniously bent in a parting bow.
"Is that yo' youngest? Now, ain't he a fine baby!" she burst out, as little Benjamin appeared, crowing, in the arms of Aunt Euphronasia, "an he's got all the soft, pleasant look of yo' po' pa a'ready."
I opened the door, and with a last effusive good-by, she passed out in her stiff, rustling black, which looked as if she had gone into perpetual mourning.
"Will you have some syllabub, Ben?" enquired Sally primly, as the door closed.
"Sally, how will you stand it?"
"She wants to be kind—she really wants to be."
Crossing moodily to the table, I pushed aside the waffles, the muffins, and the syllabub, with an angry gesture.
"It is what I came from, after all. It is my class."
"Your class?" she repeated, laughing and sobbing together with her arms on my shoulders. "There's nobody else in the whole world in your class, Ben."
A week or two later the General stopped me as I was leaving his office.
"I don't like the look of you, Ben. What's the matter?"
"My head has been troubling me, General. It's been splitting for a week, and I can't see straight."
"You've thought too much, that's the mischief. Why not cut the whole thing and go West with me to-morrow in my car? I'll be gone for a month."
"It's out of the question. A man who is over head and ears in debt oughtn't to be spinning about the country in a private car."
"I don't see the logic of that as long as it's somebody else's car."
"You'd see it if you had two hundred thousand dollars of debt."
"Well, I've been worse off. I've had two hundred thousand devils of gout. Here, come along with me. Bring Sally, bring the youngster. I'll take the whole bunch of 'em."
When I declined, he still urged me, showing his annoyance plainly, as a man does in whom opposition even in trifles arouses a resentful, almost a violent, spirit of conquest. So, I knew, he had pursued every aim, great or small, of his life, with the look in his face of an intelligent bulldog, and the conviction somewhere in his brain that the only method of overcoming an obstacle was to hang on, if necessary, until the obstacle grew too weak to put forth further resistance. Once, and once only, to my knowledge, had this power to hang on, this bulldog grip, availed him but little, and that was when his violence had encountered a gentleness as soft as velvet, yet as inflexible as steel. In his whole life only poor little Miss Matoaca had withstood him; and as I met the angry, indomitable spirit in his eyes, there rose before me the figure of his old love, with her look of meek, unconquerable obstinacy and with the faint fragrance and colour about her that was like the fragrance and colour of faded rose-leaves.
"There's no use, General. I can't do it," I said at last; and parting from him at the corner, I signalled the car for Church Hill, while he drove slowly up-town in his buggy.
It was a breathless June afternoon. A spell of intense early heat had swept over the country, and the summer flowers were unfolding as if forced open in the air of a hothouse. At the door Sally met me with a telegram from Jessy announcing her marriage to Mr. Cottrel in New York; but the words and the fact seemed to me to have no nearer relation to my life than if they had described the romantic adventures of a girl, in a crimson blouse, who was passing along the pavement.
"Well, she's got what she wanted." I remarked indifferently, "so she's to be congratulated, I suppose. My head is throbbing as if it would break open. I'll go in and lie down in the dusk, before supper."
"Do the flowers bother you? Shall I take them away?" she asked, following me into the bedroom, and closing the shutters.
"I don't notice them. This confounded headache is the only thing I can think of. It hasn't let up a single minute."
Bending over me, she laid her cheek to mine, and stroked the hair back from my forehead with her small, cool hand, which reminded me of the touch of roses. Then going softly out, she closed the door after her, while I turned on my side, and lay, half asleep, half awake, in the deepening twilight.
From the garden, through the open blinds of the green shutters, floated the strong, sweet scent of the jessamine blooming on the columns of the piazza; and I heard, now and then, as if from a great distance, the harsh, frightened cry of a swallow as it flew out from its nest under the roof. A sudden, sharp realisation of imperative duties left undone awoke in my mind; and I felt impelled, as if by some outward pressure, to rise and go back again down the long, hot hill into the city. "There's something important I meant to do, and did not," I thought; "as soon as this pain stops, I suppose I shall remember it, and why it is so urgent. If I can only sleep for a few minutes, my brain will clear, and then I can think it out, and everything that is so confused now will be easy." In some way, I knew that this neglected duty concerned Sally and the child. I had been selfish with Sally in my misery. When I awoke with a clear head, I would go to her and say I was sorry.
The scent of the jessamine became suddenly so intense that I drew the coverlet over my face in the effort to shut it out. Then turning my eyes to the wall, I lay without thinking or feeling, while my consciousness slowly drifted outside the closed room and the penetrating fragrance of the garden beyond. Once it seemed to me that somebody came in a dream and bent over me, stroking my forehead. At first I thought it was Sally, until the roughness of the hand startled me, and opening my eyes, I saw that it was my mother, in her faded grey calico, with the perplexed and anxious look in her eyes, as if she, too, were trying to remember some duty which was very important, and which she had half forgotten. "Why, I thought you were dead!" I exclaimed aloud, and the sound of my own voice waked me.
It was broad daylight now; the shutters were open, and the breeze, blowing through the long window, brought the scent of jessamine distilled in the sunshine beyond. It seemed to me that I had slept through an eternity, and with my first waking thought, there revived the same pressure of responsibility, the same sense of duties, unfulfilled and imperative, with which I had turned to the wall and drawn the coverlet over my face. "I must get up," I said aloud; and then, as I lifted my hand, I saw that it was wasted and shrunken, and that the blue veins showed through the flesh as through delicate porcelain. Then, "I've been ill," I thought, and "Sally? Sally?" The effort of memory was too great for me, and without moving my body, I lay looking toward the long window, where Aunt Euphronasia sat, in the square of sunshine, crooning to little Benjamin, while she rocked slowly back and forth, beating time with her foot to the music.