As I entered the house, the sound of Aunt Euphronasia's crooning fell on my ears, and going into the nursery, I found Sally sitting by the window, with the child on her knees, while the old negress waved a palm-leaf fan back and forth with a slow, rhythmic movement. A night-lamp burned, with lowered wick, on the bureau, and as Sally looked up at me, I saw that her face had grown wan and haggard since I had left her.
"The baby was taken very ill just after you went," she said; "we feared a convulsion, and I sent one of the neighbours' children for the doctor. It may be only the heat, he says, but he is coming again at midnight."
"I had hoped you would be able to get off in the morning."
"No, not now. The baby is too ill. In a few days, perhaps, if he is better."
Her voice broke, and kneeling beside her, I clasped them both in my arms, while the anguish in my heart rose suddenly like a wild beast to my throat.
"What can I do, Sally?" I asked passionately. "What can I do?"
"Nothing, dear, nothing. Only be quiet."
Only be quiet! Rising to my feet I walked softly to the end of the room, and then turning came back again to the spot where I had knelt. At the moment I longed to knock down something, to strangle something, to pull to earth and destroy as a beast destroys in a rage. Through the open window I could see a full moon shining over a magnolia, and the very softness and quiet of the moonlight appeared, in some strange way, to increase my suffering. A faint breeze, scented with jessamine, blew every now and then from the garden, rising, dying away, and rising again, until it waved the loosened tendrils of hair on Sally's neck. The odour, also, like the moonlight, mingled, while I stood there, and was made one with the anguish in my thoughts. Again I walked the length of the room, and again I turned and came back to the window beside which Sally sat. My foot as I moved stumbled upon something soft and round, and stooping to pick it up, I saw that it was a rubber doll, dropped by little Benjamin when he had grown too ill or too tired to play. I laid it in Sally's work-basket on the table, and then throwing off my coat, flung myself into a chair in one corner. A minute afterwards I rose, and walking gently through the long window, looked on the garden, which lay dim and fragrant under the moonlight. On the porch, twining in and out of the columns, the star jessamine, riotous with its second blooming, swayed back and forth like a curtain; and as I bent over, the small, white, deadly sweet blossoms caressed my face. A white moth whirred by me into the room, and when I entered again, I saw that it was flying swiftly in circles, above the flame of the night-lamp on the bureau. Sally was sitting just as I had left her, her arm under the child's head, her face bent forward as if listening to a distant, almost inaudible sound. She appeared so still, so patient, that I wondered in amazement if she had sat there for hours, unchanged, unheeding, unapproachable? There was in her attitude, in her pensive quiet, something so detached and tragic, that I felt suddenly that I had never really seen her until that minute; and instead of going to her as I had intended, I drew away, and stood on the threshold watching her almost as a stranger might have done. Once the child stirred and cried, lifting his little hands and letting them fall again with the same short cry of distress. The flesh of my heart seemed to tear suddenly asunder, and I sprang forward. Sally looked up at me, shook her head with a slow, quiet movement, and I stopped short as if rooted there by the single step I had taken. After ten years I remember every detail, every glimmer of light, every fitful rise and fall of the breeze, as if, not visual objects only, but scents, sounds, and movements, were photographed indelibly on my brain. I know that the white moth fluttered about my head, and that raising my hand, I caught it in my palm, which closed over it with violence. Then the cry from little Benjamin came again, and opening my palm, I watched the white moth fall dead, with crushed wings, to the floor. When I forget all else in my life, I shall still see Sally sitting motionless, like a painted figure, in the faint, reddish glow of the night-lamp, while above her, and above the little waxen face on her knee, the shadow, of the palm-leaf fan, waved by Aunt Euphronasia, flitted to and fro like the wing of a bat.
At midnight the doctor came, and when he left, I followed him to the front steps.
"I'll come again at dawn," he said, "and in the meantime look out for your wife. She's been strained to the point of breaking."
"You think, then, that the child is—is hopeless?"
"Not hopeless, but very serious. I'll be back in a few hours. If there's a change, send for me, and remember, as I said, look out for your wife."
I went indoors, found some port wine left in Miss Mitty's bottles, poured out a glass, and carried it to her.
"Drink this, darling," I said.
As I held it to her lips, she swallowed it obediently, and then, looking up, she thanked me with her unfailing smile.
"Oh, we'll drink outer de healin' fountain, by en bye, lil' chillun,"
"Oh, we'll drink outer de healin' fountain, by en bye, lil' chillun,"
crooned Aunt Euphronasia softly, and the tune has rung ever afterwards somewhere in my brain. To escape from it at the time, I went out upon the front steps, closed the door, and walked, restless as a caged tiger, up and down the deserted pavement. A homeless dog or two, panting from thirst, lay in the gutter; otherwise there was not a sound, not a living thing, from end to end of the long dusty street.
For two hours I walked up and down there, entering the house from time to time to see if Sally needed me, or if she had moved. Then, as the light broke feebly, the doctor came, and we went in together. Sally was still sitting there, as she had sat all night, rigid in the dim glow of the lamp, and over her Aunt Euphronasia still waved the palm-leaf fan with its black, flitting shadow. Then, as we crossed the threshold, there was a sudden sharp cry, and when I sprang forward and caught them both in my arms, I found that Sally had fainted and the child was dead on her knees.
We buried the child in the old Bland section at Hollywood, where a single twisted yew-tree grew between the graves, obliterated by ivy, of Edmond Bland and his wife, Caroline Matilda, born Fairfax. On the way home Sally sat rigid and tearless, with her hand in mine, and her eyes fixed on the drawn blinds of the carriage, as though she were staring intently through the closed window at something that fascinated and held her gaze in the dusty street.
"Does your head ache, darling?" I asked once, and she made a quick, half-impatient gesture of denial, with that strained, rapt look, as if she were seeing a vision, still in her face. Only when we reached home, and Aunt Euphronasia met her with outstretched arms on the threshold, did this agonised composure break down in passionate weeping on the old negress's shoulder.
The strength which had upheld her so long seemed suddenly to have departed, and all night she wept on my breast, while I fanned her in the hot air, which had grown humid and close. Not until the dawn had broken did my arm drop powerless with sleep, and the fan fell on the pillow. Then I slept for an hour, worn out with grief and exhaustion, and when presently I awoke with a start, I saw that she had left my side, and that her muslin dressing-gown was missing from the chintz-covered chair where it had lain. When I called her in alarm, she came through the doorway that led to the kitchen, freshly dressed, with a coffeepot in her hand.
"For God's sake, Sally," I implored, "don't make coffee for me!"
"I've made it, dear," she answered. "I couldn't let you go out without a mouthful to eat. You did not sleep a wink."
"And you?" I demanded.
"I didn't sleep either, but then I can rest all day." Her lip trembled and she pressed her teeth into it. "By the time you are dressed, Ben, breakfast will be ready."
Her eyes were red and swollen, her mouth pale and tremulous, all her radiant energy seemed beaten out of her; yet she spoke almost cheerfully, and there was none of the slovenliness of sorrow in her fresh and charming appearance. I dressed quickly, and going into the sitting-room, drank the coffee she had made because I knew it would please her. When it was time for me to start, she went with me to the door, and turning midway of the block, I saw her standing on the steps, smiling after me, with the sun in her eyes, like the ghost of herself as she had stood and smiled the morning after my failure. In the evening I found her paler, thinner, more than ever like the wan shadow of herself, yet meeting me with the same brave cheerfulness with which she had sent me forth. Could I ever repay her? I asked myself passionately, could I ever forget?
The dreary summer weeks dragged by like an eternity; the autumn came and passed, and at the first of the year I was sent down, with a salary of ten thousand dollars, to build up traffic on the Tennessee and Carolina Railroad, which the Great South Midland and Atlantic had absorbed. Sally went with me, but she was so languid and ill that the change, instead of invigorating her, appeared to exhaust her remaining vitality. She lived only when I was with her, and when I came in unexpectedly, as I did sometimes, I would find her lying so still and cold on the couch that I would gather her to me in a passion of fear lest she should elude the lighter grasp with which I had held her. Never, not even in her girlhood, had I loved her with the intensity, the violence, of those months when I hardly dared clasp her to me in my terror that she might dissolve and vanish from my embrace. Then, at last, when the spring came, and the woods were filled with flowering dogwood and red-bud, she seemed to revive a little, to bloom softly again, like a flower that opens the sweeter and fresher after the storm.
"Is it the mild air, or the spring flowers?" I asked one afternoon, as we drove through the Southern woods, along a narrow deserted road that smelt of the budding pines.
"Neither, Ben, it is you," she replied. "I have had you all these months. Without that I could not have lived."
"You have had me," I answered, "ever since the first minute I saw your face. You have had me always."
"Not always. During those years of your great success I thought I had lost you."
"How could you, Sally, when it was all for you, and you knew it?"
"It may have been for me in the beginning, but success, when it came, crowded me out. It left me no room. That's why I didn't really mind the failure, dear, and the poverty—that's why I don't now really mind this burden of debt. Success took you away from me, failure brings you the closer. And when you go from me, Ben, there's something in me, I don't know what—something, like Aunt Matoaca in my blood—that rises up and rebels. If things had gone on like that, if you hadn't come back, I should have grown hard and indifferent. I should have found some other interest."
"Some other interest?" I repeated, while my heart throbbed as if a spasm of memory contracted it.
"Oh, of course, I don't know now just what I mean—but when I look back, I realise that I couldn't have stood many years like that with nothing to fill them. I'd have done something desperate, if it was only going over gates after Bonny. There's one thing they taught me, though, Ben," she added, "and that is that poor Aunt Matoaca was right."
"Right in what, Sally?"
"Right in believing that women must have larger lives—that they mustn't be expected to feed always upon their hearts. You tell them to let love fill their lives, and then when the lives are swept bare and clean of everything else, in place of love you leave mere vacancy—just mere vacancy and nothing but that. How can they fill their lives with love when love isn't there—when it's off in the stock market or the railroad, or wherever its practical affairs may be?"
"But it comes back in the evening."
"Yes, it comes back in the evening and falls asleep over its cigar."
"Well, you've got me now," I responded cheerfully, "there's no doubt of that, you've got me now."
"That's why I'm getting well. How delicious the pines are! and look at the red-bud flowering there over the fence! It may be wicked of me, but, do you know—I've never been really able to regret that you lost your money."
"It is rather wicked, dear, to rejoice in my misery."
"I didn't say I 'rejoiced'—only that I couldn't regret. How can I regret it when the money came so between us?"
"But it didn't, Sally, if you could only understand! I loved you just as much all that time as I do now."
"But how was I to be sure, when you didn't want to be with me?"
"I did want to be with you—only there was always something else that had to be done."
"And the something else came always before me. But my life, you see, was swept bare and clean of everything except you."
"I had to work, Sally, I had to follow my ambition."
"You work now, but it is different. I don't mind this because it isn't working with madness. Just as you felt that you wanted your ambition, Ben, I felt that I wanted love. I was made so, I can't help it. Like Aunt Matoaca, my life has been swept and garnished for that one guest, and if it were ever to fail me, I'd—I'd go wild like Aunt Matoaca, I suppose."
A red bird flew out of the pines across the road, and lifting her eyes, she followed its flight with a look in which there was a curious blending of sadness with passion. The truth of her words came home to me, with a quiver of apprehension, while I looked at her face, and by some curious freak of memory there flashed before me the image of George Bolingbroke as he had bent over to lay the blossom of sweet alyssum beside her plate. In all those months George, not I, had been there, I remembered, and some fierce resentment, which was half jealousy, half remorse, made me answer her almost with violence as my arm went about her.
"But you had the big things always, and it is the big things that count in the end."
"Yes, the big things count in the end. I used to tell myself that when you forgot all the anniversaries. You remember them now."
"I have time to think now, then I hadn't." As I uttered the words I was conscious of a sudden depression, of a poignant realisation of what this "time to think" signified in my life. The smart of my failure was still there, and I had known hours of late when my balked ambition was like a wild thing crying for freedom within me. The old lust of power, the passion for supremacy, still haunted my dreams, or came back to me at moments like this, when I drove with Sally through the restless pines, and smelt those vague, sweet scents of the spring, which stirred something primitive and male in my heart. The fighter and the dreamer, having fought out their racial battle to a finish, were now merged into one.
We drove home slowly, the lights of the little Southern village shining brightly through a cloudless atmosphere ahead—and the lights, like the spring scents and the restless soughing of the pines, deepened the sense of failure, of incompleteness, from which I suffered. My career showed to me as suddenly cut off and broken, like a road the making of which has stopped short halfway up a hill. Did she discern this restlessness in me, I wondered, this ceaseless ache which resembled the ache of muscles that have been long unused?
After this the months slipped quietly by, one placid week succeeding another in a serene and cloudless monotony. Sally had few friends, there were no women of her own social position in the place; yet she was never lonely, never bored, never in search of distraction.
"I love it here, Ben," she said once, "it is so peaceful, just you and I."
"You'd tire of it before long, and you'll be glad enough to go back to Richmond when next spring comes."
At the time she did not protest, but when the following spring began to unfold, and we prepared to return to Virginia in May, there was something pensive and wistful in her parting from the little village and from the people who had been kind to her in the year she had spent there. We had taken several rooms in the house of Dr. Theophilus, who was supported in his prodigality in roses only by the strenuous pickling and preserving of Mrs. Clay; and as we drove, on a warm May afternoon, up the familiar street from the station, I tried in vain to arouse in her some of the interest, the animation, that she had lost.
"You'll be glad to see the doctor and Bonny and George," I said.
"Yes, I'll be glad to see the doctor and Bonny and George. There is the house now, and look, the doctor is in his garden."
He had seen us before she spoke, for glancing up meditatively from working a bed of bleeding hearts near the gate, his dim old eyes, over their lowered spectacles, had been attracted to the approaching carriage. Rising to his feet, he came rapidly to the pavement, his trowel still in hand, his outstretched arms trembling with pleasure.
"Well, well, so here you are. It's good to see you. Tina, they have come sooner than we expected them. Moses" (to a little negro, who appeared from behind the currant bushes, where he had been digging), "take the bags upstairs to the front rooms and tell your Miss Tina that they have come sooner than we expected them."
As Moses darted off on his errand, in which he was assisted by the negro coachman, Dr. Theophilus led us back into the garden, and placed Sally in a low canvas chair, which he had brought from the porch to a shady spot between a gorgeous giant of battle rose-bush and a bed of bleeding hearts in full bloom.
"Come and sit down, my dear, come and sit down," he repeated, fussing about her. "Tina will give you a cup of tea out here before you go to your rooms, and Ben and I will take our juleps before supper. I've been working in my garden, you see; there's nothing so satisfying in old age as a taste for flowers. It's more absorbing than chess, as I tell George—old George, I mean—and it's more soothing than children. Were you far enough South, my dear, to see the yellow jessamine grow wild? They tell me, too, that the Marshal Niel rose runs there up to the roofs of the houses. With us it is a very delicate rose. I have never been able to do anything with it,—but I have had a great success this year with my bleeding hearts, you will notice. Ah, there's Tina! So you see, Tina, here they are. They came sooner than we expected."
From the low white porch, under a bower of honeysuckle, Mrs. Clay appeared, with a cup of tea and a silver basket of sponge snowballs which she placed before Sally on a small green table; and immediately a troop of slate-coloured pigeons fluttered from the mimosa tree and the clipped yew at the end of the garden, and began pecking greedily in the gravelled walk.
"I'm glad you've come, my dears," remarked the old lady in her brusque, honest manner, "and I hope to heaven that you will be able to take Theophilus's mind off his flowers. I declare he has grown so besotted about them that I believe he'd sell the very clothes off his back to buy a new variety of rose or lily. Only a week ago he took back a dozen socks I had given him because he said he'd rather have the money to spend in a strange kind of iris he'd just heard of."
"A most remarkable plant," observed the doctor, with enthusiasm, "the peculiarity of which is that it is smaller and less attractive to the vulgar eye than the common iris, of which I have a great number growing at the end of the garden. Don't listen to Tina, my children, she's a cynic, and no cynic can understand the philosophy of gardening. It was one of the wisest of men, though a trifle unorthodox, I admit, who advised us to cultivate our garden. A pessimist he may have been before he took up the trowel, but a cynic—never."
"I am not complaining of the trowel, Theophilus," observed Mrs. Clay, "though when it comes to that I don't see why a trowel and a bed of roses is any more philosophic than a ladle and a kettle of pickles."
"Perhaps not, Tina, perhaps not," chuckled the doctor, "but yours is a practical mind, and there's nothing, I've always said, like a practical mind for seeing things crooked. It suits a crooked world, I suppose, and that's why it usually manages to get on so well in it."
"And I'd like to know how you see things, Theophilus," sniffed Mrs. Clay, whose temper was rising.
"I see them as they are, Tina, which isn't in the very least as they appear," rejoined the good man, unruffled.
He bent forward, made a lunge with his trowel at a solitary blade of grass growing in the bed of bleeding hearts, and after uprooting it, returned with a tranquil face to his garden chair.
But Mrs. Clay, having, as he had said, a practical mind, merely sniffed while she wiped off the small green table with a red-bordered napkin and scattered the crumbs of sponge-cake to the greedy slate-coloured pigeons.
"If I judged you by what you appear, Theophilus," she retorted, crushingly, "I should have judged you for a fool on the day you were born."
This sally, which was delivered with spirit, afforded the doctor an evident relish.
"If you knew your Juvenal, my dear," he responded, with perfect good humour, "you would remember:Fronti nulla fides."
Rising from his seat, he stooped fondly over the bed of bleeding hearts, and gathering a few blossoms, presented them to Sally, with a courtly bow.
"A favourite flower of mine. My poor mother was always very partial to it," he remarked.
It was a bright June day, I remember, when I came to the surface again, and saw clear sky for the first time for more than two years. I had entered the office a little late, and the General had greeted me with an outstretched hand in which I felt the grip of the bones through the flabby flesh.
"Look here, Ben, have you kept control of the West Virginia and Wyanoke?" he enquired, and I saw the pupils of his eyes contract to fine points of steel, as they did when he meant business.
"Nobody wanted it, General. I still own control—or rather I still practically own the road."
"Well, take my advice and don't sell to the first man that asks you, even if he comes from the South Midland. I've just heard that they've been tapping those undeveloped coal fields at Wyanoke, and I shouldn't be surprised if they turned out, after all, to be the richest in West Virginia."
It was then that I saw clear sky.
"I'll hold on, General, as long as you say," I replied. "Meanwhile, I'll run out there and have a look."
"Oh, have a look by all means. I say, Ben," he added after a minute, with a worried expression in his face, "have you heard about the trouble that old fool Theophilus has been getting into? Mark my words, before he dies, he'll land his sister in the poorhouse, as sure as I sit here. Garden needed moisture, he said, couldn't raise some of those scraggy, new-fangled things that nobody can pronounce the names of except himself, so he went to work and had pipes laid from one end to the other. When the bill came in there was no way to pay it except by mortgaging his house, so he's gone and mortgaged it. Mrs. Clay, poor lady, came to me on the point of tears—she'll be in the poorhouse yet, I was obliged to tell her so—and entreated me to make an effort to restrain Theophilus. 'I try to keep the catalogues from reaching him,' she said, 'but sometimes the postman slips in without my seeing him, and then he's sure to deliver one. Whenever Theophilus reads about any strange specimen, or any hybridising nonsense that nobody heard of when I was young, he seems to go completely out of his head, and the worst of 'em is,' she added," concluded the General, chuckling under his breath, "'there isn't a single pretty, sweet-smelling flower in the lot.'"
"I'm awfully sorry about the house, General. Isn't there some way of curbing him?"
"I never saw the bit yet that could curb an old fool," replied the great man, indignantly; "the next thing his roof will be sold over his head, and they'll go to the poorhouse, that's what I told Mrs. Clay. Poor lady, she was really in a terrible state of mind."
"Surely you won't let it come to that. Wait till these dreamed-of coal fields materialise and I'll take over that mortgage."
The General's lower lip shot out with a sulky and forbidding expression.
"The best thing that could happen to the old fool would be to have his house sold above him, and by Jove, if he doesn't cease his extravagance, I'll stand off and let them do it as sure as my name is George Bolingbroke. What Theophilus needs," he concluded angrily, "is discipline."
"It's too late to begin to discipline a man of over eighty."
"No, it ain't," retorted the General; "it's never too late. If it doesn't do him any good in this world, it will be sure to benefit him in the next. He's entirely too opinionated, that's the trouble with him. Do you remember the way he sat up over there on Church Hill, and tried to beat me down that Robert Carrington lived in Bushrod's house, and that he'd attended him there in his last illness? As if I didn't know Bushrod Carrington as well as my own brother. Got all his clothes in Paris. Can see him now as he used to come to church in one of his waistcoats of peaehblow brocade. Yet you heard Theophilus stick out against me. Wouldn't give in even when I offered to take him straight to Bushrod's grave in Saint John's Churchyard, where I had helped to lay him. That's at the back of the whole thing, I tell you. If Theophilus had had a little discipline, this would never have happened."
"All the same I hope you won't let it come to a sale," I responded, as a bunch of telegrams was brought to him, and we settled down to our morning's work.
In the afternoon when I went back to the doctor's, I found Sally in the low canvas chair between the giant-of-battle rose-bush and the bleeding hearts, with George Bolingbroke on the ground at her feet, reading to her, I noticed at a glance, out of a book of poems. George hated poetry—I had never forgotten his contemptuous boyish attitude toward Latin—and the sight of him stretched there, his handsome figure at full length, his impassive face flushed with a fine colour, produced in me a curious irritation, which sounded in my voice when I spoke.
"I thought you scorned literature, George. Are you acting the part of a gay deceiver?"
"Oh, it goes well on a day like this," he rejoined in his amiable drawling manner; "the doctor has been quoting his favourite verse of Horace to us. He has had trouble with his hybridising or something, so he tells us—what is it, doctor? I'm no good at Latin."
Dr. Theophilus, who was planting oysters at the roots of a calla lily, having discovered, as he repeatedly informed us, that such treatment increased the number and size of the blossoms, raised his fine old head, and stood up after wiping his trowel on the trimly mown grass in the border.
"Æquam memento rebus in arduis servare mentem," he replied, rolling the Latin words luxuriously on his tongue, as if he relished the flavour. "That verse of the poet has sustained me in many and varied afflictions. Not to know it is to dispense with an unfailing source of consolation in trouble. When using it at a patient's bedside, I have found that it invariably acted as a sedative to an excited mind. I sometimes think," he added gently, "that if Tina had not been ignorant of Latin, she would have had a—a less practical temper."
Picking up the trowel, which he had laid on the grass, he returned with a calm soul to his difficulties, while Sally, looking up at me with anxious eyes, said:—
"Something has happened, Ben. What is it?"
I broke into a laugh. "Only that that little dead-beat road in West Virginia may restore my fortune, after all," I replied.
The next day I went to Wyanoke and reorganised the affairs of the little road. Shortly afterwards orders for freight cars came in faster than we were able to supply them, and we called at once on the cars of the Great South Midland and Atlantic.
"If you weren't a friend, this would be a mighty good chance to squeeze you," remarked the General; "we could keep your cars back until we'd clean squelched your traffic, and then buy the little road up for a song. It's business, but it isn't fair, and I'll be blamed if I'm going to squelch a friend."
He did not squelch us, being as good as his word; the undeveloped coal fields developed amazingly and the result was that before the year was over, I had sold the little road at my own price to the big one. Then I stood up and drew breath, like a man released from the weight of irons.
"We can go into our own home," I said joyfully to Sally. "In a year or two, if all goes well, and I work hard, we'll be back again where we were."
"Where we were?" she repeated, and there was, I thought, a listless note in her voice.
"Doesn't it make you happy?" I asked.
"Oh, I'm glad, glad the debt is gone, and now you'll look young and splendid again, won't you?"
"I'll try hard if you want me to."
"I do want you to," she answered, looking up at me with a smile.
The window was open, and a flood of sunshine fell on her pale brown hair, as it rested against the high arm of a chintz-covered sofa. Her hand, small and childlike, though less round and soft than it had been two years ago, caressed my cheek when I bent over her. She was well again, she was blooming, but the bloom was paler and more delicate, and there was a fragility in her appearance which was a new and disturbing sign of diminished strength. Would she ever, even when cradled in luxuries, recover her buoyant health, her sparkling vitality, I wondered.
The old Bland house, with the two great sycamores growing beside it, was for sale; and thinking to please Sally, I bought it without her knowledge, filled, as it was, with the Bland and Fairfax furniture, which had surrounded Miss Mitty and Miss Matoaca. On the day some eight or nine months later that we moved into it the sycamores were budding, and there were faint spring scents in the air.
"This is where you belong. This is home to you," I said as we stood on the wide porch at the back, and looked down on the garden. "You will be happy here, dearest."
"Oh, yes, I'll be happy here."
"It won't be so hard for you when I'm obliged to leave you alone. I'm sorry I've had to be away so much of late. Have you been lonely?"
"I've taken up riding again. George has found me a new horse, a beauty. To-morrow I shall follow the hounds with Bonny."
"Oh, be careful, Sally, promise me that you will be careful."
She turned with a laugh that sounded a little reckless.
"There's no pleasure in being careful, and I'm seeking pleasure," she answered.
The next morning I went to New York for a couple of days, and when I returned late one afternoon, I found Sally, in her riding habit, pouring tea for Bonny Marshall and George Bolingbroke in the drawing-room.
I was very tired, my mind was engrossed in business, as it had been engrossed since the day of the sale of the West Virginia and Wyanoke Railroad, and I was about to pass upstairs to my dressing-room, when George, catching sight of me, called to me to come in and exert my powers of persuasion.
"I'm begging Sally to sell that horse, Beauchamp," he said. "She tried to make him take a fence this afternoon and he balked and threw her. At first we were frightened out of our wits, but she got up laughing and insisted upon mounting him again on the spot."
"Of course you didn't let her," I retorted, with anger.
"Let her? Great Scott! have you been married to a Bland for nearly eight years and are you still saying, 'let her'?"
"I mounted and rode on with the hunt," said Sally, looking at me with shining eyes in which there was a defiant and reckless expression. "He got quite away with me, but I held on and came in at the death, though without a hat. Now my arms are so sore I shall hardly be able to do my hair."
"Of course you're not to ride that horse again, Sally," I responded sternly, forgetting my dusty clothes, forgetting Bonny's dancing black eyes that never left my face while I stood there.
"Of course I am, Ben," rejoined Sally, laughing, while a high colour rose to her forehead. "Of course I'm going to ride him to-morrow afternoon when I go out with Bonny."
"Ah, don't, please," entreated Bonny, in evident distress; "he's really an ugly brute, you know, dear, if he is so beautiful."
"I feel awfully mean about it, Ben," said George, "because, you see, I got him for her."
"And you got him," I retorted, indignantly, "without knowing evidently a thing about him."
"One can never know anything about a brute like that. He went like a lamb as long as I was on him, but the trouble is that Sally has too light a hand."
"He'd be all right with me," remarked Bonny, stretching out her arm, in which the muscle was hard as steel. "See what a grip I have."
"I'll never give up, I'll never give up," said Sally, and though she uttered the words with gaiety, the expression of defiance, of recklessness, was still in her eyes.
When George and Bonny had gone, I tried in vain to shake this resolve, which had in it something of the gentle, yet unconquerable, obstinacy of Miss Matoaca.
"Promise me, Sally, that you will not attempt to ride that horse again," I entreated.
Turning from me, she walked slowly to the end of the room and bent over the box of sweet alyssum, which still blossomed under a canary cage on the window-sill. A cedar log was burning on the andirons, and the red light of the flames fell on the tapestried furniture, on the quaint inlaid spinet in one corner, and on the portrait above it of Miss Mitty and Miss Matoaca clasping hands under a garland of roses.
"Will you promise me, dearest?" I asked again, for she did not answer.
Lifting her head from the flowers, she stood with her hand on one of the delicate curtains, and her figure, in its straight black habit, drawn very erect.
"I'll ride him," she responded quietly, "if—if he kills me."
"But why—why—what on earth is the use of taking so great a risk?" I demanded.
A humorous expression shot into her face, and I saw her full, red lips grow tremulous with laughter.
"That," she answered, after a moment, "is my ambition. All of us have an ambition, you know, women as well as men."
"An ambition?" I repeated, and looked in mystification at the portrait above the spinet.
"It sounds strange to you," she went on, "but why shouldn't I have one? I was a very promising horsewoman before my marriage, and my ambition now is to—to go after Bonny. Only Bonny says I can't," she added regretfully, "because of my hands."
"They are too small?"
"Too small and too light. They can't hold things."
"Well, they've managed to hold one at any rate," I responded gaily, though I added seriously the minute afterward, "If you'll let me sell that horse, darling, I'll give you anything on God's earth that you want."
"But suppose I don't want anything on God's earth except that horse?"
"There's no sense in that," I blurted out, in bewilderment. "What in thunder is there about the brute that has so taken your fancy?"
Her hand fell from the curtain, and plucking a single blossom of sweet alyssum, she came back to the hearth holding it to her lips.
"He has taken my fancy," she replied, "because he is exciting—and I am craving excitement."
"But you never used to want excitement."
"People change, all the poets and philosophers tell us. I've wanted it very badly indeed for the last six or eight months."
"Just since we've recovered our money?"
"Well, one can't have excitement without money, can one? It costs a good deal. Beauchamp sold for sixteen hundred dollars."
"He'd sell for sixteen to-morrow if I had my way."
"But you haven't. He's the only excitement I have and I mean to keep him. I shall go out again with the hounds on Saturday."
"If you do, you'll make me miserable, Sally. I shan't be able to do a stroke of work."
"Then you'll be very foolish, Ben," she responded, and when I would have still pressed the point, she ran out of the room with the remark that she must have a hot bath before dinner. "If I don't I'll be too stiff to mount," she called back defiantly as she went up the staircase.
All night I worried over the supremacy of Beauchamp, but on the morrow she was kept in bed by the results of her fall, and before she was up again, George had spirited the horse off somewhere to a farm in the country.
"I'd have turned horse thief before I'd have let her get on him again," he said. "I bought the brute, so I had the best right to dispose of him as I wanted to."
"Well, I hope you'll do better next time," I returned. "Sally has got some absurd idea in her head about rivalling Bonny Marshall, but she never will because she isn't built that way."
"No, she isn't built that way," he agreed, "and I'm glad of it. When I want a boy I'd rather have him in breeches than in skirts. Is she out of bed yet?"
"She was up this morning, and on the point of telephoning to the stables when I left the house."
He laughed softly. "Well, my word goes at the stables," he rejoined, "so you needn't worry. I'll not let any harm come to her."
The tone in which he spoke, pleasant as it was, wounded my pride of possession in some inexplicable manner. Sally was safe! It was all taken out of my hands, and the only thing that remained for me was to return with a tranquil mind to my affairs. In spite of myself this constant beneficent intervention of George in my life fretted my temper. If he would only fail sometimes! If he would only make a mistake! If he would only attend to his own difficulties, and leave mine to go wrong if they pleased!
This was on my way up-town in the afternoon, and when I reached home, I found Sally lying on a couch in her upstairs sitting-room, with an uncut novel in her hands.
"Ben, did you sell Beauchamp?" she asked, as I entered, and her tone was full of suppressed resentment, of indignant surprise.
"I'm sorry to say I didn't, dear," I responded cheerfully, "for I should certainly have done so if George hadn't been too quick for me."
"It was George, then," she said, and her voice lost its resentment.
"Yes, it was George—everything is George," I retorted, in an irascible tone.
Her eyebrows arched, not playfully as they were used to do, but in surprise or perplexity.
"He has been very good to me all my life," she answered quietly.
"I know, I know," I said, repenting at once of my temper, "and if you want another horse, Sally, you shall have it—George will find you a gentle one this time."
She shook her head, smiling a little.
"I don't want a gentle one. I wanted Beauchamp, and since he has gone I don't think I care to ride any more. Bonny is right, I suppose, I could never keep up with her."
"Just as you like, sweetheart, but for my part, I feel easier, somehow, when you don't go out with the hounds. I'd rather you wouldn't do such rough riding."
"That's because like most men you have an ideal of a 'faire ladye,'" she answered, mockingly. "I'm not sure, however, that the huntress hasn't the best of it. What an empty existence the 'faire ladye' must have led!"
At first I thought her determination was uttered in jest, and would not endure through the night; but as the weeks and the months went by and she still refused to consider the purchase of the various horses George put through their paces before her, I realised that she really meant, as she had said, to give up her brief dream of excelling Bonny. Then, for a few months in the spring and summer, she turned to gardening with passion, and aided by Dr. Theophilus and George, she planted a cart-load of bulbs in our square of ground at the back. When I came up late now, I would find the three of them poring over flower catalogues, with gathered brows and thoughtful, enquiring faces.
"There's nothing like a love of the trowel for making friends," remarked the old man, one May afternoon, when I found them resting from their labours while they drank tea on the porch; "it's a pity you haven't time to take it up, Ben. Now, young George there has developed a most extraordinary talent for gardening that he never knew he possessed until I cultivated it. I shouldn't wonder if it took the place of the horse with him in the end. What do you say, Sally?" he added, turning to where Sally and George were leaning together over the railing, with their eyes on a bed of Oriental poppies. "I was telling Ben that I shouldn't wonder if George's taste for flowers would not finally triumph over his fancy for the horse."
For a minute Sally did not look round, and when at last she turned, her face wore a defiant and reckless expression, as it had done that afternoon when Beauchamp had thrown her.
"I'm not sure, doctor," she answered; "after all flowers are tame sport, aren't they? And George is like me—what he wants is excitement."
"I'm sorry to hear that, my dear, a gentle and quiet pursuit is a source of happiness. You remember what Horace says—"
"Ah, I know, doctor, but did even Horace remember what he said while he was young?"
George was still gazing attentively down on the bed of Oriental poppies at the foot of the steps, and though he had taken no part in the conversation, something in his back, in the rigid look of his shoulders, as though his muscles were drawn and tense, made me say suddenly:
"If George has changed his hobby from horse-racing to flowers, I'll begin to expect the General to start collecting insects."
At this George wheeled squarely upon me, and in his dark, flushed face there was the set look of a man that has taken a high jump.
"It's a bad plan to pin all your pleasure on one thing, Ben," he said. "If you put all your eggs in one basket you're more than likely to stub your toe."
"Well, a good deal depends upon how wisely you may have chosen your pursuit," commented the doctor, pushing his spectacles away from his eyes to his hair, which was still thick and long; "I don't believe that a man can make a mistake in selecting either flowers or insects for his life's interest. The choice between the two is merely a question of temperament, I suppose, and though I myself confess to a leaning toward plants, I seriously considered once devoting my declining years to the study of the habits of beetles. Your suggestion as to George, however,—old George, I am alluding to,—is a capital one, and I shall call his attention to it the next time I see him. He couldn't do better, I am persuaded, than bend his remaining energies in the direction of insects."
He paused to drink his tea, nodding gently over the rim of his cup to Bonny Marshall and Bessy Dandridge, who came through one of the long windows out upon the porch.
"So you've really stopped for a minute," remarked Bonny merrily, swinging her floating silk train as if it were the skirt of a riding habit, "and even Ben has fallen out of the race long enough to get a glimpse of his wife. Have stocks tripped him up again, poor fellow? Do you know, Sally, it's perfectly scandalous the way you are never seen in public together. At the reception at the Governor's the other night, one of those strange men from New York asked me if George were your husband. Now, that's what I call positively improper—I really felt the atmosphere of the divorce court around me when he said it—and my grandmama assures me that if such a thing had happened toyourgrandmama, Caroline Matilda Fairfax, she would never have held up her head again. 'But neither morals nor manners are what they were when Caroline Matilda and I were young,' she added regretfully, 'and it is due, I suppose, to the war and to the intrusion into society of all these new people that no one ever heard of.' When I mentioned the guests at the two last receptions I'd been to, if you will believe me, she had never heard of a single name,—'all mushrooms,' she declared."
Her eyes, dancing roguishly, met mine over the tea-table, and a bright blush instantly overspread her face, as if a rose-coloured search-light had fallen on her.
The embarrassment which I always felt in her presence became suddenly as acute as physical soreness, and the blush in her face served only to illuminate her consciousness of my difference, of my roughness, of the fact that externally, at least, I had never managed to shake myself free from a resemblance to the market boy who had once brought his basket of potatoes to the door of this very house. The "magnificent animal," I knew, had never appealed to her except as it was represented in horse-flesh; and yet the "magnificent animal" was what in her eyes I must ever remain. I looked at George, leaning against a white column, and his appearance of perfect self-sufficiency, his air of needing nothing, changed my embarrassment into a smothered sensation of anger. And as in the old days of my first great success, this anger brought with it, through some curious association of impulses, a fierce, almost a frenzied, desire for achievement. Here, in the little world of tradition and sentiment, I might show still at a disadvantage, but outside, in the open, I could respond freely to the lust for power, to the passion for supremacy, which stirred my blood. Turning, with a muttered excuse about letters to read, I went into the house, and closed my study door behind me with a sense of returning to a friendly and familiar atmosphere.
Through the rest of the year Sally devoted herself with energy to the cultivation of flowers; but when the following spring opened, after a hard winter, she seemed to have grown listless and indifferent, and when I spoke of the garden, she merely shook her head and pointed to an unworked border at the foot of the grey-wall.
"I can't make anything grow, Ben. All those brown sticks down there are the only signs of the bulbs I set out last autumn with my own hands. Nothing comes up as it ought to."
"Perhaps you need pipes like the doctor," I suggested.
"Oh, no, that would uproot the old shrubs, and besides, I am tired of it, I think."
She was lying on the couch in her sitting-room, a pile of novels on a table beside her, and the delicacy in her appearance, the transparent fineness of her features, of her hands, awoke in me the feeling of anxiety I had felt so often during the year after little Benjamin's death.
"I'm sorry I can't get up to luncheon now, darling, but we are making a big railroad deal. What have you been doing all day long by yourself?"
She looked up at me, and I remembered the face of Miss Matoaca, as I had seen it against the red firelight on the afternoon when Sally and I had gone in to tell her of our engagement.
"I didn't go out," she answered. "It was raining so hard that I stayed by the fire."
"You've been lying here all day alone?"
"Bonny Page came in for a few minutes."
"Have you read?"
"No, I've been thinking."
"Thinking of what, sweetheart?"
"Oh, so many things. You've come up again, haven't you, Ben, splendidly! Luck is with you, the General says, and whatever you touch prospers."
"Yes, I've come up, but this is the crisis. If I slip now, if I make a false move, if I draw out, I'm as dead as a door-nail. But give me five or ten years of hard work and breathless thinking, and I'll be as big a man as the General."
"As the General?" she repeated gently, and played with the petals of an American Beauty rose on the table beside her.
"As soon as I'm secure, as soon as I can slacken work a bit, I'm going to cut all this and take you away. We'll have a second honeymoon when that time comes."
"In five or ten years?"
"Perhaps sooner. Meanwhile, isn't there something that I can do for you? Is there anything on God's earth that you want? Would you like a string of pearls?"
She shook her head with a laugh. "No, I don't want a string of pearls. Is it time now to dress for dinner?"
"Would you mind if I didn't change, dear? I'm so tired that I shall probably fall asleep over the dessert."
An evening or two later, when I came up after seven o'clock, I thought that she had been crying, and taking her in my arms, I passionately kissed the tear marks away.
"There's but one thing to do, Sally. You must go away. What do you say to Europe?"
"With you?"
"I wish to heaven it could be with me, but if I shirk this deal now, I'm done for, and if I stick it out, it may mean future millions. Why not ask Bessy Dandridge?"
"I don't think I want to go with Bessy Dandridge."
Her tone troubled me, it was so gentle, so reserved, and walking to the window, I stood gazing out upon the April rain that dripped softly through the budding sycamores. I felt that I ought to go, and yet I knew that unless I gave up my career, it was out of the question. The railroad deal was, as I had said, very important, and if I were to withdraw from it now, it would probably collapse and bring down on me the odium of my associates. After my desperate failure of less than five years ago, I was just recovering my ground, and the incidents of that disaster were still too recent to permit me to breathe freely. My name had suffered little because my personal tragedy had been regarded as a part of the general panic, and I had, in the words of George Bolingbroke, "gone to smashes with honour." Yet I was not secure now; I had not reached the top of the ladder, but was merely mounting. "It's for Sally's sake that I'm doing it," I said to myself, suddenly comforted by the reflection; "without Sally the whole thing might go to ruin and I wouldn't hold up my hand. But I must make her proud of me. I must justify her choice in the eyes of her friends." And the balm of this thought seemed to lighten my weight of trouble and to appease my conscience. "It isn't as if I were doing it for myself, or my own ambition. I am really doing it for her—everything is for her. If I can hold on now, in a few years I'll give her millions to spend." Then I remembered that the last time I had gone motoring with her it had appeared to do her good, and that she had remarked she preferred a car with a red lining.
"I tell you what, sweetheart," I said, going back to her, "as I can't take you away, I'll buy you a new motor car with a red lining and I'll take you out every blessed afternoon I can get off from the office. You'll like that, won't you?" I asked eagerly.
"Yes, I'll like that," she replied, with an effort at animation, while she bent her face over the rose in her hand.
A week later I bought the motor car, the handsomest I could find, with the softest red lining; and when May came, I went out with her whenever I could break away from my work. But the pressure was great, the General was failing and leaned on me, and I was over head and ears in a dozen outside schemes that needed only my amazing energy to push them to success. Never had my financial insight appeared so infallible, never had my "genius" for affairs shone so brilliantly. The years of poverty had increased, not dissipated, my influence, and I had come up all the stronger for the experience that had sent me down. The lesson that a weaker man might have succumbed beneath, I had absorbed into myself, and was now making use of as I had made use of every incident, bad or good, in my life. I passed on, I accumulated, but I did not squander. Little things, as well as great things, served me for material, and during those first years of my recovery, I became by far the most brilliant figure in my world of finance. "Pile all the bu'sted stocks in the market on his shoulders, and he'll still come out on top," chuckled the General. "The best thing that ever happened to you, Ben, barring the toting of potatoes, was the blow on the head that sent you under water. A little fellow would have drowned, but you knew how to float."
"I'd agree with you about its being the best thing, except—except for Sally."
"What's the matter with Sally? Is she going cracked? You know I always said she was the image of her aunt—Miss Matoaca Bland."
"She has never recovered. Her health seems to have given way."
"She needs coddling, that's the manner of women and babies. Do you coddle her? It's worth while, though some men don't know how to do it. Lord, Lord, I remember when my poor mother was on her death-bed and my father got on his knees and asked her if he'd been a good husband (she was his third wife and died of her tenth child), she looked at him with a kind of gentle resentment and replied: 'You were a saint, I suppose, Samuel, but I'd rather have had a sinner that would have coddled me.' She was the prim, flat-bosomed type, too, just like Miss Mitty Bland, and my father said afterwards, crying like a baby, that he had so much respect for her he would as soon have thought of trying to coddle a Lombardy poplar. Poplar or mimosa tree, I tell you, they are all made that way, every last one of them—and nothing on earth made poor Miss Matoaca a fire-eater and a disturber of the peace except that she didn't have a man to coddle her."
"I give Sally everything under heaven I can think of, but she doesn't appear to want it."
"Keep on giving, it's the only way. You'll see her begin to pick up presently before you know it. They ain't rational, my boy, that's the whole truth about 'em, they ain't rational. If Miss Matoaca had belonged to a rational sex, do you think she'd have killed herself trying to get on an equality with us? You can't make a pullet into a rooster by teaching it to crow, as my old mammy used to say." For a minute he was silent, and appeared to be meditating. "I tell you what I'll do, Ben," he said at last, with a flash of inspiration, "I'll go in with you and see if I can't cheer up Sally a bit."
When we reached my door, he let the reins fall over the back of his old horse, and getting out, hobbled, with my assistance, upstairs, and into Sally's sitting-room, where we found George Bolingbroke, looking depressed and sullen.
She was charmingly dressed, as usual, and as the General entered, she came forward to meet him with the gracious manner which some one had told me was a part, not of her Bland, but of her Fairfax inheritance. "That's a pretty tea-gown you've got on," observed the great man, in the playful tone in which he might have remarked to a baby that it was wearing a beautiful bib. "You haven't been paying much attention to fripperies of late, Ben tells me. Have you seen any hats? I don't know anything better for a woman's low spirits, my dear, than a trip to New York to buy a hat."
She laughed merrily, while her eyes met George Bolingbroke's over the General's head.
"I bought six hats last month," she replied.
"And you didn't feel any better?"
"Not permanently. Then Ben got me a diamond bracelet." She held out her arm, with the bracelet on her wrist, which looked thin and transparent.
The General bent his bald head over the trinket, which he examined as attentively as if it had been a report of the Great South Midland and Atlantic Railroad.
"Ben's got good taste," he observed; "that's a pretty bracelet."
"Yes, it's a pretty bracelet."
"But that didn't make you feel any brighter?"
"Oh, I'm well," she responded, laughing. "I've just been telling George I'm so well I'm going to a ball with him."
"To a ball," I said; "are you strong enough for that, Sally?"
"I'm quite strong, I'm well, I feel wildly gay."
"It's the best thing for her," remarked the General. "Don't stop her, Ben, let her go."
At dinner that night, in a gorgeous lace gown, with pearls on her throat and in her hair, she was cheerful, animated, almost, as she had said, wildly gay. When George came for her, I put her into the carriage.
"Are you all right?" I asked anxiously. "Are you sure you are strong enough, Sally?"
"Quite strong. What will you do, Ben?"
"I've got to work. There are some papers to draw up. Don't let her stay late, George."
"Oh, I'll take care of her," said George. "Good-night."
She leaned out, touching my hand. "You'll be in bed when I come back. Good-night."
The carriage rolled off, and entering the house I went into the library, where I worked until twelve o'clock. Then as Sally had not returned and I had a hard day ahead of me, I went upstairs to bed.
She did not wake me when she came in, and in the morning I found her sleeping quietly, with her cheek pillowed on her open palm, and a pensive smile on her lips. After breakfast, when I came up to speak to her before going out, she was sitting up in bed, in a jacket of blue satin and a lace cap, drinking her coffee.
"Did you have a good time?" I asked, kissing her. "Already you look better."
"I danced ever so many dances. Do you know, Ben, I believe it was diversion I needed. I've thought too much and I'm going to stop."
"That's right, dance on if it helps you."
"I can't get that year on Church Hill out of my mind."
"Forget it, sweetheart, it's over; forget it."
"Yes, it's over," she repeated, and then as she lay back, in her blue satin jacket, on the embroidered pillows and smiled up at me, I saw in her face a reflection of the faint wonder which was the inherited look of the Blands in regarding life.
The memory of this look was with me as I went, a little later, down the block to the car line, but meeting the General at the corner, all other matters were crowded out of my mind by the gravity of the news he leaned out of his buggy to impart.
"Well, it's come at last, Ben, just as I said it would," he remarked cheerfully; "Theophilus is to be sold out at four o'clock this afternoon."
"I'd forgotten all about it, General, but do you really mean you will let it come to a public auction?"
"It's the only way on God's earth to stop his extravagance. Of course I'm going to buy the house in at the end. I've given the agent orders. Theophilus ain't going to suffer, but he's got to have a lesson and I'm the only one who can teach it. A little judicious discipline right now will make him a better and a happier man for the remainder of his life. He's too opinionated, that's the trouble with him and always has been. He's got some absurd idea in his head now that I ought to quit the railroad and begin watching insects. Actually brought me a microscope and some ants in a little box that he had had sent all the way from California. Wanted me to build 'em a glass house in my garden, and spend my time looking at 'em. 'Look here, Theophilus,' I said, 'I haven't come to my dotage yet, and when I get there, I'm going to take up something a little bigger than an insect. From a railroad to an ant is too long a jump."
"But this auction, General, I'm very much worried about it. You know I'd always intended to take over that mortgage, but, to tell the truth, it escaped my memory."
"Oh, leave that to me, leave that to me," responded the great man serenely. "Theophilus ain't going to suffer, but a little discipline won't do him any harm."
His plan was well laid, I saw, but the best-laid plans, as the great man himself might have informed me, are not always those that are destined to reach maturity. When I had parted from him, I fell, almost unconsciously, to scheming on my own account, and the result was that before going into my office, I looked up the real estate agent who had charge of the auction, and took over the mortgage which too great an indulgence in roses had forced upon Dr. Theophilus. In my luncheon hour I rushed up to the house, where I found Mrs. Clay, with a big wooden ladle in her hand, wandering distractedly between the outside kitchen and the little garden, where the doctor was placidly spraying his roses with a solution of kerosene oil.
"I knew it would come," said the poor lady, in tears; "no amount of preserves and pickles could support the extravagance of Theophilus. More than two years ago George Bolingbroke warned me that I should end my days in the poorhouse, and it has come at last. As for Theophilus, even the thought of the poorhouse does not appear to disturb him. He does nothing but walk around and repeat some foolish Latin verse about Æquam—æquam—until I am sick of the very sound—"
When I explained to her that the auction would be postponed, at least for another century, she recovered her temper and her spirit, and observed emphatically that she hoped the lesson would do Theophilus good.
"May I go out to him now?"
"Oh, yes, you'll find him somewhere in the garden. He has just been in with a watering-pot to ask for kerosene oil."
In the centre of the gravelled walk, between the shining rows of oyster shells, the doctor stood energetically spraying his roses. At the sound of my step he looked round with a tranquil face, his long white hair blowing in the breeze above his spectacles, which he wore, as usual when he was not reading, pushed up on his forehead.
"Ah, Ben, you find us afflicted, but not despondent," he observed. "Now is the time, as I just remarked to Tina a minute ago, to prove the unfailing support of a knowledge of Latin and of the poet Horace.Æquam memento—"
"I'm afraid, doctor, I haven't time for Horace," I returned, ruthlessly cutting short his enjoyment, while the sonorous sentence still rolled in his mouth; "but I've attended to this affair of the mortgage, and you shan't be bothered again. Why on earth didn't you come to me sooner about it?"
Bending over, he plucked a rosebud with a canker at the heart, and stood meditatively surveying it. "An Anna von Diesbach," he observed, "and when perfect a most beautiful rose. The truth was, my boy, that I felt a delicacy about approaching my friends in the hour of my misfortunes. Old George I did go to in my extremity, but I fear, Ben,—I seriously fear that I have estranged old George by making him a present of a little box of ants. He imagines, I fancy, that I intended a reflection upon his intelligence. Because the ant is small, he concludes, unreasonably, that it is unworthy. On the contrary, as I endeavoured to convince him, it possesses a degree of sagacity and foresight the human being might well envy—"
"I can't stop now, doctor, I'm in too great a rush, but remember, if you ever have a few hundred dollars you'd like me to turn over for you, I'm at your service. At all events, preserve your calm soul and leave me to contend with your difficulties—"
"The word 'preserve,'" commented the doctor, "though used in a different and less practical sense, reminds me of Tina. She has sacrificed her peace of mind to preserves, as I told her this morning. Even I should find it impossible to maintain an equable character, if I lived in the atmosphere of a stove and devoted my energies to a kettle. One's occupation has, without doubt, a marked influence upon one's attitude towards the universe. This was in my thoughts entirely when I suggested to a man of old George's headstrong and undisciplined nature that he would do well to investigate the habits of a sober and industrious insect like the ant. He has led an improvident life, and I thought that as he neared his end, whatever would promote a philosophic cast of mind would inevitably benefit his declining years—"
"He doesn't like to be reminded that they are declining, doctor, that's the trouble," I returned, as I shook hands hurriedly, and went on down the gravelled walk between the oyster shells to the gate that opened, beyond the currant bushes, out into the street.
My readjustment of the doctor's affairs had occupied no small part of my working day, and it was even later than usual when I arrived at home, too tired to consider dressing for dinner. At the door old Esdras announced that Sally had already gone to dine with Bonny Marshall, and would go to the theatre afterwards.
"Was she alone, Esdras?"
"Naw, suh, Marse George he done come fur her en ca'ried her off."
"Well, I'll dine just as I am, and as soon as it's ready."
The house was empty and deserted without Sally, and the perfume of a mimosa tree, which floated in on the warm breeze as I entered the drawing-room, came to me like the sweet, vague scent of her hair and her gown. A dim light burned under a pink shade in one corner, and so quiet appeared the quaint old room, with its faded cashmere rugs and its tapestried furniture, that the eyes of the painted Blands and Fairfaxes seemed alive as they looked down on me from the high white walls. From his wire cage, shrouded in a silk cover, the new canary piped a single enquiring note as he heard my step.
I dined alone, waited on in a paternal, though condescending, manner by old Esdras, and when I had finished my coffee I sat for a few minutes with a cigar on the porch, where the branches of the mimosa tree in full bloom drooped over the white railing. While I sat there, I thought drowsily of many things—of the various financial schemes in which I was now involved; of the big railroad deal which I had refused to shirk and which meant possible millions; of the fact that the General was rapidly aging, and had already spoken of resigning the presidency of the Great South Midland and Atlantic. Then there flashed before me suddenly, in the midst of my business reflections, the look with which Sally had regarded me that morning while she lay, in her blue satin jacket, on the embroidered pillows.
"How alike all the Blands are," I thought sleepily, as I threw the end of my cigar out into the garden and rose to go upstairs to bed; "I never noticed until of late how much Sally is growing to resemble her Aunt Matoaca."
At midnight, after two hours' restless sleep, I awoke to find her standing before the bureau, in a gown of silver gauze, which gave her an illusive appearance of being clothed in moonlight. When I called her, and she turned and came toward me, I saw that there was a brilliant, unnatural look in her face, as though she had been dancing wildly or were in a fever. And this brilliancy seemed only to accentuate the sharpened lines of her features, with their suggestion of delicacy, of a too transparent fineness.
"You were asleep, Ben. I am sorry I waked you," she said.
"What is the matter, you are so flushed?" I asked.
"It was very warm in the theatre. I shan't go again until autumn."
"I don't believe you are well, dear. Isn't it time for you to get out of the city?"
Her arms were raised to unfasten the pearl necklace at her throat, and while I watched her face in the mirror, I saw that the flush suddenly left it and it grew deadly white.
"It's that queer pain in my back," she said, sinking into a chair, and hiding her eyes in her hands. "It comes on like this without warning. I've had it ever—ever since that year on Church Hill."
In an instant I was beside her, catching her in my arms as she swayed toward me.
"What can I do for you, dearest? Shall I get you a glass of wine?"
"No, it goes just as it comes," she answered, letting her hands fall from her face, and looking at me with a smile. "There, I'm better now, but I think you're right. I need to go out of the city. Even if I were to stay here," she added, "you would be almost always away."
"Go North with Bonny Marshall, as she suggested, and I'll join you for two weeks in August."
Shrinking gently out of my arms, she sat with the unfastened bodice of her gown slipping away from her shoulders, and her face bent over the pearl necklace which she was running back and forth through her fingers.
"Bonny and Ned and George all want me to go to Bar Harbor," she said, after a moment. Then she raised her eyes and looked at me with the expression of defiance, of recklessness, I had seen in them first on the afternoon when Beauchamp had thrown her. "If you want me to go, too, that will decide it."
"Of course I shall miss you,—I missed you this evening,—but I believe it's the thing for you."
"Then I'll go," she responded quietly, and turning away, as if the conversation were over, she went into her dressing-room to do her hair for the night.
Two weeks later she went, and during her absence the long hot summer dragged slowly by while I plunged deeper and deeper into the whirlpool of affairs. In August I made an effort to spend the promised two weeks with her, but on the third day of my visit, I was summoned home by a telegram; and once back in the city, the General's rapidly failing health kept me close as a prisoner at his side. When October came and I met her at the station, I noticed, with my first glance, that the look of excitement, of strained and unnatural brilliancy, had returned to her appearance. Some inward flame, burning steadily at a white heat, shone in her eyes and in her altered, transparent features.