Going upstairs, Virginia took off her hat and coat, and, without changing her dress, came down again with a piece of fancy-work in her hands. Placing herself under the lamp in Oliver's study, she took a few careful stitches in the centrepiece she was embroidering for Lucy, and then letting her needle fall, sat gazing into the wood-fire which crackled softly on the brass andirons. From the lamp on the desk an amber glow fell on the dull red of the leather-covered furniture, on the pale brown of the walls, on the rich blending of oriental colours in the rug at her feet. It was the most comfortable room in the house, and for that reason she had fallen into the habit of using it when Oliver was away. Then, too, his personality had impressed itself so ineffaceably upon the surroundings which he had chosen and amid which he had worked, that she felt nearer to him while she sat in his favourite chair, breathing the scent of the wood-fire he loved.
She thought of the "dear children," of how pleased she was that they were all well and happy, of how "sweet" Harry and Jenny were about writing to her; and so unaccustomed was she to thinking in the first person, that not until she took up her embroidery again and applied her needle to the centre of a flower, did she find herself saying aloud: "I must send for Miss Willy to-morrow and engage her for next week. That will be something to do."
And looking ahead she saw days of endless stitching and basting, of endless gossip accompanied by the cheerful whirring of the little dressmaker's machine. "I used to pity Miss Willy because she was obliged to work," she thought with surprise, "but now I almost envy her. I wonder if it is work that keeps her so young and brisk? She's never had anything in her life, and yet she is so much happier than some people who have had everything."
The maid came to announce supper, and, gathering up her fancy-work, Virginia laid it beside the lamp on the end of Oliver's writing table. As she did so, she saw that her photograph, taken the year of her marriage, which he usually carried on his journeys, had been laid aside and overlooked when he was packing his papers. It was the first time he had forgotten it, and a little chill struck her heart as she put it back in its place beside the bronze letter rack. Then the chill sharpened suddenly until it became an icy blade in her breast, for she saw that the picture of Margaret Oldcastle was gone from its frame.
There was a hard snowstorm on the day Oliver returned to Dinwiddie, and Virginia, who had watched from the window all the afternoon, saw him crossing the street through a whirl of feathery flakes. The wind drove violently against him, but he appeared almost unconscious of it, so buoyant, so full of physical energy was his walk. Never had he looked more desirable to her, never more lovable, than he did at that instant. Something, either a trick of imagination or an illusion produced by the flying whiteness of the storm, gave him back for a moment the glowing eyes and the eager lips of his youth. Then, as she turned towards the door, awaiting his step on the stairs, the mirror over the mantel showed her her own face, with its fallen lines, its soft pallor, its look of fading sweetness. She had laid her youth down on the altar of her love, while he had used love, as he had used life, merely to feed the flame of the unconquerable egoism which burned like genius within him.
He came in, brushing a few flakes of snow from his sleeve, and it seemed to her that the casual kindness of his kiss fell like ice on her cheek as he greeted her. It was almost three months since he had seen her, for he had been unable to come home for Christmas, but from his manner he might have parted from her only yesterday. He was kind—he had never been kinder—but she would have preferred that he should strike her.
"Are you all right?" he asked gently, turning to warm his hands at the fire. "Beastly cold, isn't it?"
"Oh, yes, I am all right, dear. The play is a great success, isn't it?"
His face clouded. "As such things go. It's awful rot, but it's made a hit—there's no doubt of that."
"And the other one, 'The Home'—when is the first night of that?"
"Next week. On Thursday. I must get back for it."
"And I am to go with you, am I not? I have looked forward to it all winter."
At the sound of her anxious question, a contraction of pain, the look of one who has been touched on the raw, crossed his face. Though she was not penetrating enough to discern it, there were times when his pity for her amounted almost to a passion, and at such moments he was conscious of a blind anger against Life, as against some implacable personal force, because it had robbed him of the hard and narrow morality on which his ancestors leaned. The scourge of a creed which had kept even Cyrus walking humbly in the straight and flinty road of Calvinism, appeared to him in such rare instants as one of the spiritual luxuries which a rationalistic age had destroyed; for it is not granted to man to look into the heart of another, and so he was ignorant alike of the sanctities and the passions of Cyrus's soul. What he felt was merely that the breaking of the iron bonds of the old faith had weakened his powers of resistance as inevitably as it had liberated his thought. The sound of his own rebellion was in his ears, and filled with the noise of it, he had not stopped to reflect that the rebellion of his ancestors had seemed less loud only because it was inarticulate. Was it really that his generation had lost the capacity for endurance, the spiritual grace of self-denial, or was it simply that it had lost its reticence and its secrecy with the passing of its inflexible dogmas?
"Why, certainly you must go if you would care to," he answered.
"Perhaps Jenny will come over from Bryn Mawr to join us. The dear child was so disappointed that she couldn't come home for Christmas."
"If I'd known in time that she wasn't coming, I'd have found a way of getting down just for dinner with you. I hope you weren't alone, Virginia."
"Oh, no, Miss Priscilla came to spend the day with me. You know she used to take dinner with us every Christmas at the rectory."
A troubled look clouded his face. "Jenny ought to have been here," he said, and asked suddenly, as if it were a relief to him to change the subject: "Have you had news of Harry?"
The light which the name of Harry always brought to her eyes shone there now, enriching their faded beauty. "He writes to me every week. You know he hasn't missed a single Sunday letter since he first went off to school. He is wild about Oxford, but I think he gets a little homesick sometimes, though of course he'd never say so."
"He'll do well, that boy. The stuff is in him."
"I'm sure he's a genius if there ever was one, Oliver. Only yesterday Professor Trimble was telling me that Harry was far and away the most brilliant pupil he had ever had."
"Well, he's something to be proud of. And now what about Lucy? Is she still satisfied with Craven?"
"She never writes about anything else except about her house. Her marriage seems to have turned out beautifully. You remember I wrote you that she was perfectly delighted with her stepchildren, and she really appears to be as happy as the day is long."
"You never can tell. I thought she'd be back again before two months were up."
"I know. We all prophesied dreadful things—even Susan."
"That reminds me—I came down on the train with John Henry, and he said that Uncle Cyrus was breaking rapidly."
"He has never been the same since his wife's death," replied Virginia, who was a victim of this sentimental fallacy. "It's strange—isn't it?—because we used to think they got on so badly."
"I wonder if it is really that? Well, is there any other news? Has anything else happened?"
With his back to the fire, he stood looking down on her with kindly, questioning eyes. He had done his best; from the moment when he had entered the room and met the touching brightness in her face, he had struggled to be as natural, to be as affectionate even, as she desired. At the moment, so softened, so self-reproachful was his mood, he would willingly have cut off his arm for her could the sacrifice in any manner have secured her happiness. But there were times when it seemed easier to give his life for her than to live it with her; when to shed his blood would have cost less than to make conversation. He yearned over Virginia, but he could not talk to her. Some impregnable barrier of personality separated them as if it were a wall. Already they belonged to different generations; they spoke in the language of different periods. At forty-seven, that second youth, the Indian summer of the emotions, which lingers like autumnal sunshine in the lives of most men and of a few women, was again enkindling his heart. And with this return of youth, he felt the awakening of infinite possibilities of feeling, of the ancient ineradicable belief that happiness lies in possession. Love, which had used up her spirit and body in its service, had left him untouched by its exactions. While she, having fulfilled her nature, was content to live anew not in herself, but in her children, the force of personal desire was sweeping over him again, with all the flame and splendour of adolescence. The "something missing" waited there, just a little beyond, as he had seen it waiting in that enchanted May when he fell in love with Virginia. And between him and his vision of happiness there interposed merely his undisciplined conscience, his variable, though honest, desire to do the thing that was right. Duty, which had controlled Virginia's every step, was as remote and aloof from his life as was the creed of his fathers. Like his age, he was adrift among disestablished beliefs, among floating wrecks of what had once been rules of conduct by which men had lived. And the widening responsibilities, the deepening consciousness of a force for good greater than creed or rules, all the awakening moral strength which would lend balance and power to his age, these things had been weakened in his character by the indomitable egoism which had ordered his life. There was nothing for him to fall back upon, nothing that he could place above the restless surge of his will.
Sitting there in the firelight, with her loving eyes following his movements, she told him, bit by bit, all the latest gossip of Dinwiddie. Susan's eldest girl had developed a beautiful voice and was beginning to take lessons; poor Miss Priscilla had had a bad fall in Old Street while she was on the way to market, and at first they feared she had broken her hip, but it turned out that she was only dreadfully bruised; Major Peachey had died very suddenly and she had felt obliged to go to his funeral; Abby Goode had been home on a visit and everybody said she didn't look a day over twenty-five, though she was every bit of forty-four. Then, taking a little pile of samples from her work basket which stood on the table, she showed him a piece of black brocaded satin. "Miss Willy is making me a dress out of this to wear in New York with you. I don't suppose you noticed whether or not they were wearing brocade."
No, he hadn't noticed, but the sample was very pretty, he thought. "Why don't you buy a dress there, Virginia? It would save you so much trouble."
"Poor little Miss Willy has set her heart on making it, Oliver. And, besides, I shan't have time if we go only the day before."
A flush had come to her face; at the corners of her mouth a tender little smile rippled; and her look of faded sweetness gave place for an instant to the warmth and the animation of girlhood. But the excitement of girlhood could not restore to her the freshness of youth. Her pleasure was the pleasure of middle-age; the wistful expectancy in her face was the expectancy of one whose interests are centred on little things. That inviolable quality of self-sacrifice, the quality which knit her soul to the enduring soul of her race, had enabled her to find happiness in the simple act of renouncement. The quiet years had kept undiminished the inordinate capacity for enjoyment, the exaggerated appreciation of trivial favours, which had filled Mrs. Pendleton's life with a flutter of thankfulness; and while Virginia smoothed the piece of black brocade on her knee, she might have been the re-arisen pensive spirit of her mother. Of the two, perhaps because she had ceased to wish for anything for herself, she was happier than Oliver.
All through dinner, while her soft anxious eyes dwelt on him over the bowl of pink roses in the centre of the table, he tried hard to throw himself into her narrow life, to talk only of things in which he felt that she was interested. Slight as the effort was, he could see her gratitude in her face, could hear it in the gentle silvery sound of her voice. When he praised the dinner, she blushed like a girl; when he made her describe the dress which Miss Willy was making, she grew as excited as if she had been speaking of the sacred white satin she had worn as a bride. So little was needed to make her happy—that was the pathos! She was satisfied with the crumbs of life, and yet they were denied her. Though she had been alone ever since Lucy's wedding, she accepted his belated visit as thankfully as if it were a gratuitous gift. "It is so good of you to come down, dear, when you are needed every minute in New York," she murmured, with a caressing touch on his arm, and, looking at her, he was reminded of Mrs. Pendleton's tremulous pleasure in the sweets that came to her on little trays from her neighbours. Once she had said eagerly, "It will be so nice to see Miss Oldcastle, Oliver," and he had answered in a constrained tone which he tried to make light and casual, "I am not sure that the part is going to suit her."
Then he had changed the subject abruptly by rising from the table and asking her to let him see her latest letter from Harry.
The next morning he went out after breakfast to consult Cyrus about some investments, while Virginia laid out the lengths of brocade on the bed in the spare room, and sat down to wait for the arrival of the dressmaker. Outside, the trees were still white from the storm, and the wind, blowing through them, made a dry crackling sound as if it were rattling thorns in a forest. Though it was intensely cold, the sunshine fell in golden bars over the pavement and filled the town with a dazzling brilliancy through which the little seamstress was seen presently making her way. Alert, bird-like, consumed with her insatiable interest in other people, she entered, after she had removed her bonnet and wraps, and began to spread out her patterns. It was twenty-odd years since she had made the white satin dress in which Virginia was married, yet she looked hardly a day older than she had done when she knelt at the girl's feet and envied her happiness while she pinned up the shining train. Failing love, she had filled her life with an inextinguishable curiosity; and this passion, being independent of the desires of others, was proof alike against disillusionment and the destructive processes of time.
"So Mr. Treadwell has come home," she remarked, with a tentative flourish of the scissors. "I declare he gets handsomer every day that he lives. It suits him somehow to fill out, or it may be that I'm partial to fat like my poor mother before me."
"He does look well, but I'd hardly call him fat, would you?"
"Well, he's stouter than he used to be, anyway. Did he say when he was going to take you back with him?"
"Next Wednesday. We'll have to hurry to get this dress ready in time."
"I'll start right in at it. Have you made up your mind whether you'll have it princess or a separate waist and skirt?"
"I'm a little too thin for a princess gown, don't you think? Hadn't I better have it made like that black poplin which everybody thought looked so well on me?"
"But it ain't half so stylish as the princess. You just let me put a few cambric ruffles inside the bust and you'll stand out a plenty. I was reading in a fashion sheet only yesterday that they are trying to look as flat as they can manage in Paris."
"Well, I'll try it," murmured Virginia uncertainly, for her standards of dress were so vague that she was thankful to be able to rely on Miss Willy's self-constituted authority.
"You just leave it to me," was the dressmaker's reply, while she thrust the point of the scissors into the gleaming brocade on the bed.
The morning passed so quickly amid cutting, basting, and gossip, that it came as a surprise to Virginia when she heard the front door open and shut and Oliver's rapid step mounting the stairs. Meeting him in the hall, she led the way into her bedroom, and asked with the caressing, slightly conciliatory manner which expressed so perfectly her attitude toward life:
"Did you see Uncle Cyrus?"
"Yes, and he was nicer than I have ever known him to be. By the way, Virginia, I've transferred enough property to you to bring you in a separate income. This was really what I went down about."
"But what is the matter, dear? Don't you feel well? Have you had any worries that you haven't told me?"
"Oh, I'm all right, but it's better so in case something should happen."
"But what could possibly happen? I never saw you look better. Miss Willy was just saying so."
He turned away, not impatiently, but as one who is seeking to hide an emotion which has become too strong. Then without replying to her question, he muttered something about "a number of letters to write before dinner," and hurried out of the room and downstairs to his study.
"I wonder if he has lost money," she thought, vaguely troubled, as she instinctively straightened the brushes he had disarranged on the bureau. "Poor Oliver! He seems to think about nothing but money now, and he used to be so romantic."
He used to be so romantic! She repeated this to Susan that evening when, after Miss Willy's departure for the night, she took her friend into the spare room to show her the first shapings of the princess gown.
"Do you remember that we used to call him an incurable Don Quixote?" she asked. "And now he has become so different that at times it makes me smile to think of him as he was when I first knew him. I suppose it's better so, it's more normal. He used to be what Uncle Cyrus called 'flighty,' bent on reforming the world and on improving people, you know, and now he doesn't seem to care whether outside things are good or bad, just as long as his plays go well and he can give us all the money we want."
"It's natural, isn't it?" asked Susan. "One can't stay young forever, you see."
"And yet in some ways he doesn't appear to be a bit older. I like his hair being grey, don't you? It makes his colour look even richer than before."
"Yes," said Susan, "I like his hair and I like him. Only I wish he didn't have to leave you by yourself so much of the time."
"He is going to take me back with him on Wednesday. Miss Willy is making this dress for me to wear. I want to look nice because, of course, everybody will be noticing Oliver."
"It's lovely, and I'm sure you'll look as sweet as the angel that you are, Jinny," answered Susan, stooping to kiss her.
By Tuesday night the dress was finished, and Virginia was stuffing the sleeves with tissue paper before packing it into her trunk, when Oliver came into the room and stood watching her in silence.
"I do hope it won't get crumpled," she said anxiously as she spread a towel over the tray. "Miss Willy is so proud of it, and I don't believe I could have got anything prettier in New York."
"Virginia," he said suddenly, "you've set your heart on going to-morrow, haven't you?"
Turning from the trunk, she looked up at him with a tender, inquiring smile. Above her head the electric light, with which Oliver and the girls had insisted on replacing the gas-jets that she preferred, cast a hard glitter over the hollowed lines of her face and over the thinning curls which she had striven to brush back from her temples. Her figure, unassisted as yet by Miss Willy's ruffles, looked so fragile in the pitiless glare that his heart melted in one of those waves of sentimentality which, because they were impotent to affect his conduct, cost him so little. As she stood there, he realized more acutely than he had ever done before how utterly stationary she had remained since he married her. With her sweetness, her humility, her old-fashioned courtesy and consideration for others, she belonged still in the honey-scented twilight of the eighties. While he had moved with the world, she, who was confirmed in the traditions of another age, had never altered in spirit since that ecstatic moment when he had first loved her. The charm, the grace, the virtues, even the look of gentle goodness which had won his heart, were all there just as they had been when she was twenty. Except for the fading flesh, the woman had not changed; only the needs and the desires of the man were different. Only the resurgent youth in him was again demanding youth for its mate.
"Why, my trunk is all packed," she replied. "Has anything happened?"
"Oh, no, I was only wondering how you would manage to amuse yourself. You know I shall be at the theatre most of the time."
"But you mustn't have me on your mind a minute, Oliver. I won't go a step unless you promise me not to worry about me a bit. It's all so new to me that I shall enjoy just sitting in the hotel and watching the people."
"Then we'd better go to the Waldorf. That might interest you more."
His eagerness to provide entertainment for her touched her as deeply as if it had been a proof of his love instead of his anxiety, and she determined in her heart that if she were lonesome a minute he must never suspect it. Ennui, having its roots in an egoism she did not possess, was unknown to her.
"That will be lovely, dear. Lucy wrote me when she was there on her wedding trip that she used to sit for hours in the corridor looking at the people that went by, and that it was as good as a play."
"That settles it. I'll telegraph for rooms," he said cheerfully, relieved to find that she fell in so readily with his suggestion.
She was giving a last caressing pat to the tray before closing the trunk, and the look of her thin hands, with their slightly swollen knuckles, caused him to lean forward suddenly and wrest the keys away from her.
"Let me do that. I hate to see you stooping," he said.
The telegram was sent, and late the next evening, as they rolled through the brilliant streets towards the hotel, Virginia's interest was as effervescent as if she were indeed the girl that she almost felt herself to have become. The sound of the streets excited her like martial music, and little gasps of surprise and pleasure broke from her lips as the taxicab turned into Broadway. It was all so different from her other visit when she had come alone to find Oliver, sick with failure, in the dismal bedroom of that hotel. Now it seemed to her that the city had grown younger, that it was more awake, that it was brighter, gayer, and that she herself had a part in its brightness and its gaiety. The crowds on Broadway seemed keeping step to some happy tune, and she felt that her heart was dancing with them, so elated, so girlishly irresponsible was her mood.
"Why, Oliver, there is a sign of your play with a picture of Miss Oldcastle on it!" she exclaimed delightedly, pointing to an advertisement before a theatre they were passing. Then, suddenly, it appeared to her that the whole city was waving this advertisement. Wherever she turned "The Home" stared back at her, an orgy of red and blue surrounding the smiling effigy of the actress. And this proof of Oliver's fame thrilled her as she had not been thrilled since the telegram had come announcing that Harry had won the scholarship which would take him to Oxford. The woman's power of sinking her ambition and even her identity into the activities of the man was deeply interwoven with all that was essential and permanent in her soul. Her keenest joys, as well as her sharpest sorrows, had never belonged to herself, but to others. It was doubtful, indeed, if, since the day of her marriage, she had been profoundly moved by any feeling which was centred merely in a personal desire. She had wanted things for Oliver and for the children, but for herself there had been no separate existence apart from them.
"Oliver, I never dreamed that it would be like this. The play will be a great success—even a greater one than the last, won't it, dear?" Her face, with its exquisite look of exaltation, of self-forgetfulness, was turned eagerly towards the crowd of feverish pleasure-seekers that passed on, pursuing its little joys, under the garish signs of the street.
"Well, it ought to be," he returned; "it's bad enough anyway."
His eyes, like hers, were fixed on the thronging streets, but, unlike hers, they reflected the restless animation, the pathetic hunger, which made each of those passing faces appear to be the plastic medium of an insatiable craving for life. Handsome, well-preserved, a little over-coloured, a little square of figure, with his look of worldly importance, of assured material success, he stood to-day, as Cyrus had stood a quarter of a century ago, as an imposing example of that Treadwell spirit from which his youth had revolted.
That night, when they had finished dinner, and Oliver, in response to a telephone message, had hurried down to the theatre, Virginia went upstairs to her room, and, after putting on the lavender silk dressing-gown which Miss Willy had made for the occasion, sat down to write her weekly letter to Harry.
My Darling Boy.I know you will be surprised to see from this letter that I am really in New York at last—and at the Waldorf! It seems almost like a dream to me, and whenever I shut my eyes, I find myself forgetting that I am not in Dinwiddie—but, you remember, your father had always promised me that I should come for the first night of his new play, which will be acted to-morrow. You simply can't imagine till you get here how famous he is and how interested people are in everything about him, even the smallest trifles. Wherever you look you see advertisements of his plays (he has three running now) and coming up Broadway for only a block or two last night, I am sure that I saw Miss Oldcastle's picture a dozen times. I should think she would hate dreadfully to have to make herself so conspicuous—for she has a nice, refined face—but Oliver says all actresses have to do it if they want to get on. He takes all the fuss they make over him just as if he despised it, though I am sure that in his heart he can't help being pleased. While we were having dinner, everybody in the dining-room was turning to look at him, and if I hadn't known, of course, that not a soul was thinking of me, I should have felt badly because I hadn't time to change my dress after I got here. All the other women were beautifully dressed (I never dreamed that there were so many diamonds in the world. Miss Willy would simply go crazy over them), but I didn't mind a bit, and if anybody thought of me at all, of course, they knew that I had just stepped off the train. After dinner your father went to the theatre, and I sat downstairs alone in the corridor for a while and watched the people coming and going. It was perfectly fascinating at first. I never saw so many beautiful women, and their hair was arranged in such a lovely way, all just alike, that it must have taken hours to do each head. The fashions that are worn here are not in the least like those of Dinwiddie, though Miss Willy made my black brocade exactly like one in a fashion plate that came directly from Paris, but I know that you aren't as much interested in this as Lucy and Jenny would be. The dear girls are both well, and Lucy is carried away with her stepchildren. She says she doesn't see why every woman doesn't marry a widower. Isn't that exactly like Lucy? She is always so funny. If only one of you were here with me, I should enjoy every minute, but after I'd sat there for a while in the midst of all those strangers, I began to feel a little lonely, so I came upstairs to write you this letter. New York is a fascinating place to visit, but I am glad I live in Dinwiddie where everybody knows me.And now, my dearest boy, I must tell you how perfectly overjoyed I was to get your last letter, and to know that you are so delighted with Oxford. I think of you every minute, and I pray for you the last thing at night before I get into bed. Try to keep well and strong, and if you get a cold, be sure not to let it run on till it turns to a hacking cough. Remember that Doctor Fraser always used to say that every cough, no matter how slight, is dangerous. I hope you aren't studying too hard or overdoing athletics. It is so easy to tax one's strength too much when one gets excited. I am sure I don't know what to think of the English students being "standoffish" with Americans. It seems very foolish of them not to be nice and friendly, especially to Virginians, who were really English in the beginning. But I am glad that you don't mind, and that you would rather be a countryman of George Washington than a countryman of George the Third. Of course England is the greatest country in the world—you remember your grandfather always said that—and we owe it everything that we have, but I think it very silly of English people to be stiff and ill-mannered.I hope you still read your Bible, darling, and that you find time to go to church once every Sunday. Even if it seems a waste of time to you, it would have pleased your grandfather, and for his sake I hope you will go whenever you can possibly do so. It was so sweet of you to write in Addison's Walk because you did not want to miss my Sunday letter and yet the day was too beautiful not to be out of doors. God only knows, my boy, what a comfort you are to me. There was never a better son nor one who was loved more devotedly.Your Mother.
My Darling Boy.
I know you will be surprised to see from this letter that I am really in New York at last—and at the Waldorf! It seems almost like a dream to me, and whenever I shut my eyes, I find myself forgetting that I am not in Dinwiddie—but, you remember, your father had always promised me that I should come for the first night of his new play, which will be acted to-morrow. You simply can't imagine till you get here how famous he is and how interested people are in everything about him, even the smallest trifles. Wherever you look you see advertisements of his plays (he has three running now) and coming up Broadway for only a block or two last night, I am sure that I saw Miss Oldcastle's picture a dozen times. I should think she would hate dreadfully to have to make herself so conspicuous—for she has a nice, refined face—but Oliver says all actresses have to do it if they want to get on. He takes all the fuss they make over him just as if he despised it, though I am sure that in his heart he can't help being pleased. While we were having dinner, everybody in the dining-room was turning to look at him, and if I hadn't known, of course, that not a soul was thinking of me, I should have felt badly because I hadn't time to change my dress after I got here. All the other women were beautifully dressed (I never dreamed that there were so many diamonds in the world. Miss Willy would simply go crazy over them), but I didn't mind a bit, and if anybody thought of me at all, of course, they knew that I had just stepped off the train. After dinner your father went to the theatre, and I sat downstairs alone in the corridor for a while and watched the people coming and going. It was perfectly fascinating at first. I never saw so many beautiful women, and their hair was arranged in such a lovely way, all just alike, that it must have taken hours to do each head. The fashions that are worn here are not in the least like those of Dinwiddie, though Miss Willy made my black brocade exactly like one in a fashion plate that came directly from Paris, but I know that you aren't as much interested in this as Lucy and Jenny would be. The dear girls are both well, and Lucy is carried away with her stepchildren. She says she doesn't see why every woman doesn't marry a widower. Isn't that exactly like Lucy? She is always so funny. If only one of you were here with me, I should enjoy every minute, but after I'd sat there for a while in the midst of all those strangers, I began to feel a little lonely, so I came upstairs to write you this letter. New York is a fascinating place to visit, but I am glad I live in Dinwiddie where everybody knows me.
And now, my dearest boy, I must tell you how perfectly overjoyed I was to get your last letter, and to know that you are so delighted with Oxford. I think of you every minute, and I pray for you the last thing at night before I get into bed. Try to keep well and strong, and if you get a cold, be sure not to let it run on till it turns to a hacking cough. Remember that Doctor Fraser always used to say that every cough, no matter how slight, is dangerous. I hope you aren't studying too hard or overdoing athletics. It is so easy to tax one's strength too much when one gets excited. I am sure I don't know what to think of the English students being "standoffish" with Americans. It seems very foolish of them not to be nice and friendly, especially to Virginians, who were really English in the beginning. But I am glad that you don't mind, and that you would rather be a countryman of George Washington than a countryman of George the Third. Of course England is the greatest country in the world—you remember your grandfather always said that—and we owe it everything that we have, but I think it very silly of English people to be stiff and ill-mannered.
I hope you still read your Bible, darling, and that you find time to go to church once every Sunday. Even if it seems a waste of time to you, it would have pleased your grandfather, and for his sake I hope you will go whenever you can possibly do so. It was so sweet of you to write in Addison's Walk because you did not want to miss my Sunday letter and yet the day was too beautiful not to be out of doors. God only knows, my boy, what a comfort you are to me. There was never a better son nor one who was loved more devotedly.
Your Mother.
In the morning, with the breakfast tray, there arrived a bunch of orchids from one of Oliver's theatrical friends, who had heard that his wife was in town; and while Virginia laid the box carefully in the bathtub, her eyes shone with the grateful light which came into them whenever some one did her a small kindness or courtesy.
"They will be lovely for me to wear to-night, Oliver. It was so nice of him to send them, wasn't it?"
"Yes, it was rather nice," Oliver replied, looking up from his paper at the pleased sound of her voice. Ever since his return at a late hour last night, she had noticed the nervousness in his manner and had sympathetically attributed it to his anxiety about the fate of his play. It was so like Oliver to be silent and self-absorbed when he was anxious.
Through the day he was absent, and when he returned, in the evening, to dress for the theatre, she was standing before the mirror fastening the bunch of orchids on the front of her gown. As he entered, she turned toward him with a look of eager interest, of pleasant yet anxious excitement. She had never in her life, except on the morning of her wedding day, taken so long to dress; but it seemed to her important that as Oliver's wife she should look as nice as she could.
"Am I all right?" she asked timidly, while she cast a doubtful glance in the mirror at the skirt of the black brocade.
"Yes, you're all right," he responded, without looking at her, and the suppressed pain in his voice caused her to move suddenly toward him with the question, "Aren't you well, Oliver?"
"Oh, I'm well, but I'm tired. I had a headache on the way up and I haven't been able to shake it off."
"Shall I get you something for it?"
"No, it will pass. I'd like a nap, but I suppose it's time for me to dress."
"Yes, it's half-past six, and we've ordered dinner for seven."
He went into the dressing-room, and turning again to the mirror, she changed the position of the bunch of orchids, and gave a little dissatisfied pat to the hair on her forehead. If only she could bring back some of the bloom and the freshness of youth! The glow had gone out of her eyes; the winged happiness, which had given her face the look as of one flying towards life, had passed, leaving her features a little wan and drawn, and fading her delicate skin to the colour of withered flowers. Yet the little smile, which lingered like autumn sunshine around her lips, was full of that sweetness which time could not destroy, because it belonged not to her flesh, but to an unalterable quality of her soul; and this sweetness, which she exhaled like a fragrance, would cause perhaps one of a hundred strangers to glance after her with the thought, "How lovely that woman must once have been!"
"Are you ready?" asked Oliver, coming out of his dressing-room, and again she started and turned quickly towards him, because it seemed to her that she was hearing his voice for the first time. So nervous, so irritable, so quivering with suppressed feeling, was the sound of it, that she hesitated between the longing to offer sympathy and the fear that her words might only add to his suffering.
"Yes, I am quite ready," she answered, without adding that she had been ready for more than an hour; and picking up her wrap from the bed, she passed ahead of him through the door which he had opened. As he stopped to draw the key from the lock, her eyes rested with pride on the gloss of his hair, which had gone grey in the last year, and on his figure, with its square shoulders and its look of obvious distinction, as of a man who had achieved results so emphatically that it was impossible either to overlook or to belittle them. How splendid he looked! And what a pity that, after all his triumphs, he should still be so nervous on the first night of a play!
In the elevator there was a woman in an ermine wrap, with Titian hair under a jewelled net; and Virginia's eyes were suffused with pleasure as she gazed at her. "I never saw any one so beautiful!" she exclaimed to Oliver, as they stepped out into the hall; but he merely replied indifferently: "Was she? I didn't notice." Then his tone lost its deadness. "If you'll wait here a minute, I'd like to speak to Cranston about something," he said, almost eagerly. "I shan't keep you a second."
"Don't worry about me," she answered cheerfully, pleased at the sudden change in his manner. "Stay as long as you like. I never get tired watching the people."
He hurried off, while, dazzled by the lights, she drew back behind a sheltering palm, and stood a little screened from the brilliant crowd in which she took such innocent pleasure. "How I wish Miss Willy could be here," she thought, for it was impossible for her to feel perfect enjoyment while there existed the knowledge that another person would have found even greater delight in the scene than she was finding herself. "How gay they all look—and there are not any old people. Everybody, even the white-haired women, dress as if they were girls. I wonder what it is that gives them all this gloss as if they had been polished, the same gloss that has come on Oliver since he has been so successful? What a short time he stayed. He is coming back already, and every single person is turning to look at him."
Then a voice beyond the palm spoke as distinctly as if the words were uttered into her ear. "That's Treadwell over there—a good-looking man, isn't he?—but have you seen the dowdy, middle-aged woman he is married to? It's a pity that all great men marry young—and now they say, you know, that he is madly in love with Margaret Oldcastle——"
In the night, after a restless sleep, she awoke in terror. A hundred incidents, a hundred phrases, looks, gestures, which she had thought meaningless until last evening, flashed out of the darkness and hung there, blazing, against the background of the night. Yesterday these things had appeared purposeless; and now it seemed to her that only her incredible blindness, only her childish inability to face any painful fact until it struck her between the eyes, had kept her from discovering the truth before it was thrust on her by the idle chatter of strangers. A curious rigidity, as if she had been suddenly paralyzed, passed from her heart, which seemed to have ceased beating, and crept through her limbs to her motionless hands and feet. Though she longed to call out and awaken Oliver, who, complaining of insomnia, spent the night in the adjoining room, this immobility, which was like the graven immobility of death, held her imprisoned there as speechless and still as if she lay in her coffin. Only her brain seemed on fire, so pitilessly, so horribly alive had it become.
From the street beyond the dim square of the window, across which the curtains were drawn, she could hear the ceaseless passing of carriages and motor cars; but her thoughts had grown so confused that for a long while, as she lay there, chill and rigid under the bed-clothes, she could not separate the outside sounds from the tumult within her brain. "Now that I know the truth I must decide what is best to do," she thought quite calmly. "As soon as this noise stops I must think it all over and decide what is best to do." But around this one lucid idea the discordant roar of the streets seemed to gather force until it raged with the violence of a storm. It was impossible to think clearly until this noise, which, in some strange way, was both in the street outside and within the secret chambers of her soul, had subsided and given place to the quiet of night again. Then gradually the tempest of sound died away, and in the midst of the stillness which followed it she lived over every hour, every minute, of that last evening when it had seemed to her that she was crucified by Oliver's triumph. She saw him as he came towards her down the shining corridor, easy, brilliant, impressive, a little bored by his celebrity, yet with the look of vital well-being, of second youth, which separated and distinguished him from the curious gazers among whom he moved. She saw him opposite to her during the long dinner, which she could not eat; she saw him beside her in the car which carried them to the theatre; and clearer than ever, as if a burning iron had seared the memory into her brain, she saw him lean on the railing of the box, with his eyes on the stage where Margaret Oldcastle, against the lowered curtain, smiled her charming smile at the house. It had been a wonderful night, and through it all she had felt the iron nails of her crucifixion driven into her soul.
Breaking away from that chill of terror with which she had awakened, she left the bed and went over to the window, where she drew the heavy curtains aside. In Fifth Avenue the electric lights sparkled like frost on the pavement, while beyond the roofs of the houses the first melancholy glow of a winter's sunrise was suffusing the sky with red. While she watched it, a wave of unutterable loneliness swept over her—of that profound spiritual loneliness which comes to one at dawn in a great city, when knowledge of the sleeping millions within reach seems only to intensify the fact of individual littleness and isolation. She felt that she stood alone, not merely in the world, but in the universe; and the thought that Oliver slept there in the next room made more poignant this feeling, as though she were solitary and detached in the midst of limitless space. Even if she called him and he came to her, she could not reach him. Even if he stood at her side, the immeasurable distance between them would not lessen.
When the morning came, she dressed herself in her prettiest gown, a violet cloth, with ruffles of old lace at the throat and wrists; but this dress, of which she had been so proud in Dinwiddie that she had saved it for months in order to have it fresh for New York, appeared somehow to have lost its charm and distinction, and she knew that last evening had not only destroyed her happiness, but had robbed her of her confidence in the taste and the workmanship of Miss Willy. Knowledge, she saw now, had shattered the little beliefs of life as well as the large ones.
Oliver liked to breakfast in his dressing-gown, fresh from his bath and eager for the papers, so when he came hurriedly into the sitting-room, the shining tray was already awaiting him, and she sat pouring his coffee in a band of sunlight beside the table. This sunlight, so merciful to the violet gown, shone pitilessly on the darkened hollows which the night had left under her eyes, and on the little lines which had gathered around her bravely smiling mouth.
"It was a wonderful success, all the papers say so, Oliver," she said, when he had seated himself at the other end of the table and taken the coffee from her hand, which shook in spite of her effort.
"Yes, it went off well, there's no doubt of it," he answered cheerfully, so cheerfully that for a minute a blind hope shot trembling through her mind. Could it all have been a dream? Was there some dreadful mistake? Would she presently discover that she had imagined that night of useless agony through which she had passed?
"The audience was so sympathetic. I saw a number of women crying in the last act when the heroine comes back to her old home."
"It caught them. I thought it would. It's the kind of thing they like."
He opened a paper as he spoke, and seeing that he wanted to read the criticisms, she broke his eggs for him, and then turning to her own breakfast tried in vain to swallow the piece of toast which she had buttered. But it was useless. She could not eat; she could not even drink her coffee, which had stood so long that it had grown tepid. A feeling of spiritual nausea, beside which all physical sensations were as trivial and meaningless as the stinging of wasps, pervaded her soul and body, and choked her, like unshed tears, whenever she tried to force a bit of food between her trembling lips. All the casual interests with which she filled her days, those seemingly small, yet actually tremendous interests without which daily life becomes almost unlivable, flagged suddenly and died while she sat there. Nothing mattered any longer, neither the universe nor that little circle of it which she inhabited, neither life nor death, neither Oliver's success nor the food which she was trying to eat. This strange sickness which had fallen upon her affected not only her soul and body, but everything that surrounded her, every person or object at which she looked, every stranger in the street below, every roof which she could see sharply outlined against the glittering blue of the sky. Something had passed out of them all, some essential quality which united them to reality, some inner secret of being without which the animate and the inanimate alike became no better than phantoms. The spirit which made life vital had gone out of the world. And she felt that this would always be so, that the next minute and the next year and all the years that came afterwards would bring to her merely the effort of living—since Life, having used her for its dominant purpose, had no further need of her. Once only the thought occurred to her that there were women who might keep their own even now by fighting against the loss of it, by passionately refusing to surrender what they could no longer hold as a gift. But with the idea there came also that self-knowledge which told her that she was not one of these. The strength in her was the strength of passiveness; she could endure, but she could not battle. Long ago, as long ago as the night on which she had watched in the shadow of death beside Harry's bed, she had lost that energy of soul which had once flamed up in her with her three days' jealousy of Abby. It was her youth and beauty then which had inspirited her, and she was wise enough to know that the passions which become youth appear ridiculous in middle-age.
Having drunk his coffee, Oliver passed his cup to her, and laid down his paper.
"You look tired, Virginia. I hope it hasn't been too much for you?"
"Oh, no. Have you quite got over your headache?"
"Pretty much, but those lights last night were rather trying. Don't put any cream in this time. I want the stimulant."
"Perhaps it has got cold. Shall I ring for fresh?"
"It doesn't matter. This will do quite as well. Have you any shopping that you would like to do this morning?"
Shopping! When her whole world had crumbled around her! For an instant the lump in her throat made speech impossible; then summoning that mild yet indestructible spirit, which was as the spirit of all those generations of women who lived in her blood, she answered gently:
"Yes, I had intended to buy some presents for the girls."
"Then you'd better take a taxicab for the morning. I suppose you know the names of the shops you want to go to?"
"Oh, yes. I know the names. Are you going to the theatre?"
"I've got to change a few lines in the play, and the sooner I go about it the better."
"Then don't bother about me, dear. I'll just put on my long coat over this dress and go out right after breakfast."
"But you haven't eaten anything," he remarked, glancing at her plate.
"I wasn't hungry. The fresh air will do me good. It has turned so much warmer, and the snow is all melting."
As she spoke, she rose from the table and began to prepare herself for the street, putting on the black hat with the ostrich tip and the bunch of violets on one side, which didn't seem just right since she had come to New York, and carefully wrapping the ends of her fur neck-piece around her throat. It was already ten o'clock, for Oliver had slept late, and she must be hurrying if she hoped to get through her shopping before luncheon. While she dressed, a wan spirit of humour entered into her, and she saw how absurd it was that she should rush about from shop to shop, buying things that did not matter in order to fill a life that mattered as little as they did. To her, whose mental outlook had had in it so little humour, it seemed suddenly that the whole of life was ridiculous. Why should she have sat there, pouring Oliver's coffee and talking to him about insignificant things, when her heart was bursting with this sense of something gone out of existence, with this torturing realization of the irretrievable failure of love?
Taking up her muff and her little black bag from the bureau, she looked back at him with a smile as she turned towards the door.
"Good-bye. Will you be here for luncheon?"
"I'm afraid I can't. I've an appointment down-town, but I'll come back as early as I can."
Then she went out and along the hall to the elevator, in which there was a little girl, who reminded her of Jenny, in charge of a governness in spectacles. She smiled at her almost unconsciously, so spontaneous, so interwoven with her every mood was her love for children; but the little girl, being very proper for her years, did not smile back, and a stab of pain went through Virginia's heart.
"Even children have ceased to care for me," she thought.
At the door, where she waited a few minutes for her taxicab, a young bride, with her eyes shining with joy, stood watching her husband while he talked with an acquaintance, and it seemed to Virginia that it was a vision of her own youth which had risen to torment her. "That was the way I looked at Oliver twenty-five years ago," she said to herself; "twenty-five years ago, when I was young and he loved me." Then, even while the intolerable pain was still in her heart, she felt that something of the buoyant hopefulness of that other bride entered into her and restored her courage. A resolution, so new that it was born of the joyous glance of a stranger, and yet so old that it seemed a part of that lost spirit of youth which had once carried her in a wild race over the Virginian meadows, a resolution which belonged at the same time to this other woman and to herself, awoke in her and mingled like a draught of wine with her blood. "I will not give up," she thought. "I will go to her. Perhaps she does not know—perhaps she does not understand. I will go to her, and everything may be different." Then her taxicab was called, and stepping into it, she gave the name not of a shop, but of the apartment house in which Margaret Oldcastle lived.
It was one of those February days when, because of the promise of spring in the air, men begin suddenly to think of April. The sky was of an intense blue, with little clouds, as soft as feathers, above the western horizon. On the pavement the last patches of snow were rapidly melting, and the gentle breeze which blew in at the open window of the cab, was like a caressing breath on Virginia's cheek. "It must be that she does not understand," she repeated, and this thought gave her confidence and filled her with that unconquerable hope of the future without which she felt that living would be impossible. Even the faces in the street cheered her, for it seemed to her that if life were really what she had believed it to be last night, these men and women could not walk so buoyantly, could not smile so gaily, could not spend so much thought and time on the way they looked and the things they wore. "No, it must have been a mistake, a ghastly mistake," she insisted almost passionately. "Some day we shall laugh over it together as we laughed over my jealousy of Abby. He never loved Abby, not for a minute, and yet I imagined that he did and suffered agony because of it." And her taxicab went on merrily between the cheerful crowds on the pavements, gliding among gorgeous motor cars and carriages drawn by high-stepping horses and pedlers' carts drawn by horses that stepped high no longer, among rich people and poor people, among surfeited people and hungry people, among gay people and sad people, among contented people and rebellious people—among all these, who hid their happiness or their sorrow under the mask of their features, her cab spun onward bearing her lightly on the most reckless act of her life.
At the door of the apartment house she was told that Miss Oldcastle could not be seen, but, after sending up her card and waiting a few moments in the hall before a desk which reminded her of a gilded squirrel-cage, she was escorted to the elevator and borne upward to the ninth landing. Here, in response to the tinkle of a little bell outside of a door, she was ushered into a reception room which was so bare alike of unnecessary furniture and of the Victorian tradition to which she was accustomed, that for an instant she stood confused by the very strangeness of her surroundings. Then a charming voice, with what sounded to her ears as an affected precision of speech, said: "Mrs. Treadwell, this is so good of you!" and, turning, she found herself face to face with the other woman in Oliver's life.
"I saw you at the play last night," the voice went on, "and I hoped to get a chance to speak to you, but the reporters simply invaded my dressing-room. Won't you sit here in the sunshine? Shall I close the window, or, like myself, are you a worshipper of the sun?"
"Oh, no, leave it open. I like it." At any other moment she would have been afraid of an open window in February; but it seemed to her now that if she could not feel the air in her face she should faint. With the first sight of Margaret Oldcastle, as she looked into that smiling face, in which the inextinguishable youth was less a period of life than an attribute of spirit, she realized that she was fighting not a woman, but the very structure of life. The glamour of the footlights had contributed nothing to the flame-like personality of the actress. In her simple frock of brown woollen, with a wide collar of white lawn turned back from her splendid throat, she embodied not so much the fugitive charm of youth, as that burning vitality over which age has no power. The intellect in her spoke through her noble rather than beautiful features, through her ardent eyes, through her resolute mouth, through every perfect gesture with which she accompanied her words. She stood not only for the elemental forces, but for the free woman; and her freedom, like that of man, had been built upon the strewn bodies of the weaker. The law of sacrifice, which is the basic law of life, ruled here as it ruled in mother-love and in the industrial warfare of men. Her triumph was less the triumph of the individual than of the type. The justice not of society, but of nature, was on her side, for she was one with evolution and with the resistless principle of change. Vaguely, without knowing that she realized these things, Virginia felt that the struggle was useless; and with the sense of failure there awoke in her that instinct of good breeding, that inherited obligation to keep the surface of life sweet, which was so much older and so much stronger than the revolt in her soul.
"You were wonderful last night. I wanted to tell you how wonderful I thought you," she said gently. "You made the play a success—all the papers say so this morning."
"Well, it was an easy play to make successful," replied the other, while a fleeting curiosity, as though she were trying to explain something which she did not quite understand, appeared in her face and made it, with its redundant vitality, almost coarse for an instant. "It's the kind the public wants, you couldn't help making it go."
The almost imperceptible conflict which had flashed in their eyes when they met, had died suddenly down, and the dignity which had been on the side of the other woman appeared to have passed from her to Virginia. This dignity, which was not that of triumph, but of a defeat which surrenders everything except the inviolable sanctities of the spirit, shielded her like an impenetrable armour against both resentment and pity. She stood there wrapped in a gentleness more unassailable than any passion.
"You did a great deal for it and a great deal for my husband," she said, while her voice lingered unconsciously over the word. "He has told me often that without your acting he could never have reached the position he holds."
Then, because it was impossible to say the things she had come to say, because even in the supreme crises of life she could not lay down the manner of a lady, she smiled the grave smile with which her mother had walked through a ruined country, and taking up her muff, which she had laid on the table, passed out into the hall. She had let the chance go by, she had failed in her errand, yet she knew that, even though it cost her her life, even though it cost her a thing far dearer than life—her happiness—she could not have done otherwise. In the crucial moment it was principle and not passion which she obeyed; but this principle, filtering down through generations, had become so inseparable from the sources of character, that it had passed at last through the intellect into the blood. She could no more have bared her soul to that other woman than she could have stripped her body naked in the market-place.
At the door her cab was still waiting, and she gave the driver the name of the toy shop at which she intended to buy presents for Lucy's stepchildren. Though her heart was breaking within her, there was no impatience in her manner when she was obliged to wait some time before she could find the particular sort of doll for which Lucy had written; and she smiled at the apologetic shopgirl with the forbearing consideration for others which grief could not destroy. She put her own anguish aside as utterly in the selection of the doll as she would have done had it been the peace of nations and not a child's pleasure that depended upon her effacement of self. Then, when the purchase was made, she took out her shopping list from her bag and passed as conscientiously to the choice of Jenny's clothes. Not until the morning had gone, and she rolled again up Fifth Avenue towards the hotel, did she permit her thoughts to return to the stifled agony within her heart.
To her surprise Oliver was awaiting her in their sitting-room, and with her first look into his face, she understood that he had reached in her absence a decision against which he had struggled for days. For an instant her strength seemed fainting as before an impossible effort. Then the shame in his eyes awoke in her the longing to protect him, to spare him, to make even this terrible moment easier for him than he could make it alone. With the feeling, a crowd of memories thronged through her mind, as though called there by that impulse to shield which was so deeply interwoven with the primal passion of motherhood. She saw Oliver's face as it had looked on that spring afternoon when she had first seen him; she saw it as he put the ring on her hand at the altar; she saw it bending over her after the birth of her first child; and then suddenly his face changed to the face of Harry, and she saw again the little bed under the hanging sheet and herself sitting there in the faintly quivering circle of light. She watched again the slow fall of the leaves, one by one, as they turned at the stem and drifted against the white curtains of the window across the street.
"Oliver," she said gently, so gently that she might have been speaking to her sick child, "would you rather that I should go back to Dinwiddie to-night?"
He did not answer, but, turning away from her, laid his head down on his arm, which he had outstretched on the table, and she saw a shiver of pain pass through his body as if it had been struck a physical blow. And just as she had put herself aside when she bought the doll, so now she forgot her own suffering in the longing to respond to his need.
"I can take the night train—now that I have seen the play there is no reason why I should stay. I have got through my shopping."
Raising his head, he looked up into her face. "Whatever happens, Virginia, will you believe that I never wanted to hurt you?" he asked.
For a moment she felt that the strain was intolerable, and a fear entered her mind lest she should faint or weep and so make things harder than they should be able to bear.
"You mean that something must happen—that there will be a break between us?" she said.
Leaving the table, he walked to the window and back before he answered her.
"I can't go on this way. I'm not that sort. A generation ago, I suppose, we should have done it—but we've lost grip, we've lost endurance." Then he cried out suddenly, as if he were justifying himself: "It is hell. I've been in hell for a year—don't you see it?"
After his violence, her voice sounded almost lifeless, so quiet, so utterly free from passion, was its quality.
"As long as that—for a year?" she asked.
"Oh, longer, but it has got worse. It has got unendurable. I've fought—God knows I've fought—but I can't stand it. I've got to do something. I've got to find a way. You must have seen it coming, Virginia. You must have seen that this thing is stronger than I am."
"Do—do you want her so much?" and she, who had learned from life not to want, looked at him with the pity which he might have seen in her eyes had he stabbed her.
"So much that I'm going mad. There's no other end to it. It's been coming on for two years—all the time I've been away from Dinwiddie I've been fighting it."
She did not answer, and when, after the silence had grown oppressive, he turned back from the window through which he had been gazing, he could not be sure that she had heard him. So still she seemed that she was like a woman of marble.
"You're too good for me, that's the trouble. You've been too good for me from the beginning," he said.
Unfastening her coat, which she had kept on, she laid it on the sofa at her back, and then put up her hands to take out her hatpins.
"I must pack my things," she said suddenly. "Will you engage my berth back to Dinwiddie for to-night?"
He nodded without speaking, and she added hastily, "I shan't go down again before starting. But there is no need that you should go to the train with me."
At this he turned back from the door where he had waited with his hand on the knob. "Won't you let me do even that?" he asked, and his voice sounded so like Harry's that a sob broke from her lips. The point was so small a one—all points seemed to her so small—that her will died down and she yielded without protest. What did it matter—what did anything matter to her now?
"I'll send up your luncheon," he added almost gratefully. "You will be ill if you don't eat something."
"No, please don't. I am not hungry," she answered, and then he went out softly, as though he were leaving a sick-room, and left her alone with her anguish—and her packing.
Without turning in her chair, without taking off her hat, from which she had drawn the pins, she sat there like a woman in whom the spirit has been suddenly stricken. Beyond the window the perfect day, with its haunting reminder of the spring, was lengthening slowly into afternoon, and through the slant sunbeams the same gay crowd passed in streams on the pavements. On the roof of one of the opposite houses a flag was flying, and it seemed to her that the sight of that flag waving under the blue sky was bound up forever with the intolerable pain in her heart. And with that strange passivity of the nerves which nature mercifully sends to those who have learned submission to suffering, to those whose strength is the strength, not of resistance, but of endurance, she felt that as long as she sat there, relaxed and motionless, she had in a way withdrawn herself from the struggle to live. If she might only stay like this forever, without moving, without thinking, without feeling, while she died slowly, inch by inch, spirit and body.
A knock came at the door, and as she moved to answer it, she felt that life returned in a slow throbbing agony, as if her blood were forced back again into veins from which it had ebbed. When the tray was placed on the table beside her, she looked up with a mild, impersonal curiosity at the waiter, as the dead might look back from their freedom and detachment on the unreal figures of the living. "I wonder what he thinks about it all?" she thought vaguely, as she searched in her bag for his tip. "I wonder if he sees how absurd and unnecessary all the things are that he does day after day, year after year, like the rest of us? I wonder if he ever revolts with this unspeakable weariness from waiting on other people and watching them eat?" But the waiter, with his long sallow face, his inscrutable eyes, and his general air of having petrified under the surface, was as enigmatical as life.
After he had gone out, she rose from her untasted luncheon, and going into her bedroom, took the black brocaded gown off the hanger and stuffed the sleeves with tissue paper as carefully as if the world had not crumbled around her. Then she packed away her wrapper and her bedroom slippers and shook out and folded the dresses she had not worn. For a time she worked on mechanically, hardly conscious of what she was doing, hardly conscious even that she was alive. Then slowly, softly, like a gentle rain, her tears fell into the trunk, on each separate garment as she smoothed it and laid it away.
At half-past eight o'clock she was waiting with her hat and coat on when Oliver came in, followed by the porter who was to take down her bags. She knew that he had brought the man in order to avoid all possibility of an emotional scene; and she could have smiled, had her spirit been less wan and stricken, at this sign of a moral cowardice which was so characteristic. It was his way, she understood now, though she did not put the thought into words, to take what he wanted, escaping at the same time the price which nature exacts of those who have not learned to relinquish. Out of the strange colourless stillness which surrounded her, some old words of Susan's floated back to her as if they were spoken aloud: "A Treadwell will always get the thing he wants most in the end." But while he stabbed her, he would look away in order that he might be spared the memory of her face.
Without a word, she followed her bags from the room without a word she entered the elevator, which was waiting, and without a word she took her place in the taxicab standing beside the curbstone. There was no rebellion in her thoughts, merely a dulled consciousness of pain, like the consciousness of one who is partially under an anæsthetic. The fighting courage, the violence of revolt, had no part in her soul, which had been taught to suffer and to renounce with dignity, not with heroics. Her submission was the submission of a flower that bends to a storm.
As she sat there in silence, with her eyes on the brilliant street, where the signs of his play stared back at her under the flaring lights, she began to think with automatic precision, as though her brain were moved by some mechanical power over which she had no control. Little things crowded into her mind—the face of the doll she had bought for Lucy's stepchild that morning, the words on one of the electric signs on the top of a building they were passing, the leopard skin coat worn by a woman on the pavement. And these little things seemed to her at the moment to be more real, more vital, than her broken heart and the knowledge that she was parting from Oliver. The agony of the night and the morning appeared to have passed away like a physical pang, leaving only this deadness of sensation and the strange, almost unearthly clearness of external objects. "It is not new. It has been coming on for years," she thought. "He said that, and it is true. It is so old that it has been here forever, and I seem to have been suffering it all my life—since the day I was born, and before the day I was born. It seems older than I am. Oliver is going from me. He has always been going from me—always since the beginning," she repeated slowly, as if she were trying to learn a lesson by heart. But so remote and shadowy did the words appear, that she found herself thinking the next instant, "I must have forgotten my smelling-salts. The bottle was lying on the bureau, and I can't remember putting it into my bag." The image of this little glass bottle, with the gold top, which she had left behind was distinct in her memory; but when she tried to think of the parting from Oliver and of all that she was suffering, everything became shadowy and unreal again.
At the station she stood beside the porter while he paid the driver, and then entering the doorway, they walked hurriedly, so hurriedly that she felt as if she were losing her breath, in the direction of the gate and the waiting train. And with each step, as they passed down the long platform, which seemed to stretch into eternity, she was thinking: "In a minute it will be over. If I don't say something now, it will be too late. If I don't stop him now, it will be over forever—everything will be over forever."
Beside the night coach, in the presence of the conductor and the porter, who stood blandly waiting to help her into the train, she stopped suddenly, as though she could not go any farther, as though the strength which had supported her until now had given way and she were going to fall. Through her mind there flashed the thought that even now she might hold him if she were to make a scene, that if she were to go into hysterics he would not leave her, that if she were to throw away her pride and her self-respect and her dignity, she might recover by violence the outer shell at least of her happiness. How could he break away from her if she were only to weep and to cling to him? Then, while the idea was still in her mind, she knew that to a nature such as hers violence was impossible. It took passion to war with passion, and in this she was lacking. Though she were wounded to the death, she could not revolt, could not shriek out in her agony, could not break through that gentle yet invincible reticence which she had won from the past.
Down the long platform a child came running with cries of pleasure, followed by a man with a red beard, who carried a suitcase. As they approached the train, Virginia entered the coach, and walked rapidly down the aisle to where the porter was waiting beside her seat.
For the first time since they had reached the station Oliver spoke. "I am sorry I couldn't get the drawing-room for you," he said. "I am afraid you will be crowded"; and this anxiety about her comfort, when he was ruining her life, did not strike either of them, at the moment, as ridiculous.
"It does not matter," she answered; and he put out his hand.
"Good-bye, Virginia," he said, with a catch in his voice.
"Good-bye," she responded quietly, and would have given her soul for the power to shriek aloud, to overcome this indomitable instinct which was stronger than her personal self.
Turning away, he passed between the seats to the door of the coach, and a minute later she saw his figure hurrying back along the platform down which they had come together a few minutes ago.