Outside, in the street, she could see a half-bared bough of the mulberry tree, arching against a square of window, from which the white curtains were drawn back; and in order to quiet her broken and disjointed thoughts, she began to count the leaves as they fell, one by one, turning softly at the stem, and then floating out into the darkness beyond. "One. Two. How long that leaf takes to loosen. He is better. The doctor certainly thought that he was better. If he only gets well. O God, let him get well, and I will serve you all my life! Three—four—five—For twenty-four hours we thought you would slip through our fingers. Somebody said that—somebody—it must have been the doctor. And he was talking of me, not of Harry. That was twenty-six years ago, and my mother was enduring then all this agony that I am feeling to-night. Twenty-six years ago—perhaps at this very hour, she sat beside me alone as I am sitting now by Harry. And before that other women went through it. All the world over, wherever there are mothers—north, south, east, west—from the first baby that was born on the earth—they have every one suffered what I am suffering now—for it is the pang of motherhood! To escape it one must escape birth and escape the love that is greater than one's self." And she understood suddenly that suffering and love are inseparable, that when one loves another more than one's self, one has opened the gate by which anguish will enter. She had forgotten to count the leaves, and when she remembered and looked again, the last one had fallen. Against the parted white curtains, the naked bough arched black and solitary. Even the small silent birds that had swayed dejectedly to and fro on the branches all day had flown off into the darkness. Presently, the light in the window went out, and as the hours wore on, a fine drizzling rain began to fall, as soft as tears, from the starless sky over the mulberry tree. A sense of isolation greater than any she had ever known attacked her like a physical chill, and rising, she went over to the fire and stirred the pile of coal into a flame. She was alone in her despair, and she realized, with a feeling of terror, that one is always alone when one despairs, that there is a secret chamber in every soul where neither love nor sympathy can follow one. If Oliver were here beside her—if he were standing close to her in that throbbing circle around the bed—she would still be separated from him by the immensity of that inner space which is not measured by physical distances. "No, even if he were here, he could not reach me," she said, and an instant later, with one of those piercing illuminations which visit even perfectly normal women in moments of great intensity, she thought quickly, "If every woman told the truth to herself, would she say that there is something in her which love has never reached?" Then, reproaching herself because she had left the bed for a minute, she went back again and bent over the unconscious child, her whole slender body curving itself passionately into an embrace. His face was ashen white, except where the skin around his mouth was discoloured with a faint bluish tinge. His flesh, even his bones, appeared to have shrunk almost away in twenty-four hours. It was impossible to imagine that he was the rosy, laughing boy, who had crawled into her arms only two nights ago. The disease held him like some unseen spiritual enemy, against which all physical weapons were as useless as the little toys of a child. How could one fight that sinister power which had removed him to an illimitable distance while he was still in her arms? The troubled stupor, which had in it none of the quiet and the restfulness of sleep, terrorized her as utterly as if it had been the personal spirit of evil. The invisible forces of Life and Death seemed battling in the quivering air within that small circle of light.
While she bent over him, he stirred, raised himself, and then fell back in a paroxysm of coughing. The violence of the spasm shook his fragile little body as a rough wind shakes a flower on a stalk. Over his face the bluish tinge spread like a shadow, and into his eyes there came the expression of wondering terror which she had seen before only in the eyes of young startled animals. For an instant it seemed almost as if the devil of disease were wrestling inside of him, as if the small vital force she called life would be beaten out in the struggle. Then the agony passed; the strangling sound ceased, and he grew quiet, while she wiped the poison from his mouth and nostrils, and made him swallow a few drops of milk out of a teaspoon.
At the moment, while she fell on her knees by his bedside, it seemed to her that she had reached that deep place beyond which there is nothing.
"You've pulled him through. We'll have him out of bed before many days now," said the old doctor at daybreak, and he added cheerfully, "By the way, your husband came in the front door with me. He wanted to rush up here at once, but I'm keeping him away because he is obliged to go back to the bank."
"Poor Oliver," said Virginia gently. "It is terrible on him. He must be so anxious." But even while she uttered the words, she was conscious of a curious sensation of unreality, as though she were speaking of a person whom she had known in another life. It was three days since she had seen Oliver, and in those three days she had lived and died many times.
"Father, I want to marry John Henry," said Susan, just as she had said almost ten years ago, "Father, I want to go to college."
It was a March afternoon, ashen and windy, with flocks of small fleecy clouds hurrying across a changeable blue sky, and the vague, roving scents of early spring in the air. After his dinner, which he had taken for more than fifty years precisely at two o'clock, Cyrus had sat down for a peaceful pipe on the back porch before returning to the office. Between the sunken bricks in the little walled-in yard, blades of vivid green grass had shot up, seeking light out of darkness, and along the grey wooden ledge of the area the dauntless sunflowers were unfolding their small stunted leaves. On the railing of the porch a moth-eaten cat—the only animal for whom Cyrus entertained the remotest respect—was contentedly licking the shabby fur on her side.
"Father, I want to marry John Henry," repeated Susan, raising her voice to a higher key and towering like a flesh and blood image of Victory over the sagging cane chair in which he sat.
Taking his pipe from his mouth, he looked up at her; and so little had he altered in ten years, that the thought flashed through her mind that he had actually suffered no change of expression since the afternoon on which she had asked him to send her to college. As a man he may not have been impressive, but as a defeating force who could say that he had not attained his fulfilment? It was as if the instinct of patriarchal tyranny had entrenched itself in his person as in a last stronghold of the disappearing order. When he died many things would pass away out of Dinwiddie—not only the soul and body of Cyrus Treadwell, but the vanishing myth of the "strong man," the rule of the individual despot, the belief in the inalienable right of the father to demand blood sacrifices. For in common with other men of his type, he stood equally for industrial advancement and for domestic immobility. The body social might move, but the units that formed the body social must remain stationary.
"Well, I don't think I'd worry about marrying, if I were you," he replied, not unkindly, for Susan inspired him with a respect against which he had struggled in vain. "You are very comfortable now, ain't you? And I'll see that you are well provided for after my death. John Henry hasn't anything except his salary, I reckon."
Marriage as an economic necessity was perfectly comprehensible to him, but it was difficult for him to conceive of anybody indulging in it simply as a matter of sentiment. That April afternoon was so far away now that it had ceased to exist even as an historical precedent.
"Yes, but I want to marry him, and I am going to," replied Susan decisively.
"What arrangements would you make about your mother? It seems to me that your mother needs your attention."
"Of course I couldn't leave mother. If you agree to it, John Henry is willing to come here to live as long as I have to look after her. If not, I shall take her away with me; I have spoken to her, and she is perfectly willing to go."
The ten years which had left Cyrus at a standstill had developed his daughter from a girl into a woman. She spoke with the manner of one who realizes that she holds the situation in her hands, and he yielded to this assumption of strength as he would have yielded ten years ago had she been clever enough to use it against him. It was his own manner in a more attractive guise, if he had only known it; and the Treadwell determination to get the thing it wanted most was asserting itself in Susan's desire to win John Henry quite as effectively as it had asserted itself in Cyrus's passion to possess the Dinwiddie and Central Railroad. Though the ends were different, the quality which moved father and daughter towards these different ends was precisely the same. In Cyrus, it was force degraded; in Susan, it was force refined; but the peculiar attribute which distinguished and united them was the possession of the power to command events.
"Take your mother away?" he repeated. "Why, where on earth would you take her?"
"Then you'll have to agree to John Henry's coming here. It won't make any difference to you, of course. You needn't see him except at the table."
"But what would James say about it?" he returned, with the cowardice natural to the habitual bully. The girl had character, certainly, and though he disliked character in a woman, he was obliged to admit that she had not failed to make an impression.
"James won't care, and besides," she added magnificently, "it is none of his business."
"And it's none of mine, either, I reckon," said Cyrus, with a chuckle.
"Well, of course, it's more of mine," agreed Susan, and her delicious laugh drowned his chuckle.
She had won her point, and strange to say, she had pleased him rather than otherwise. He had suddenly a comfortable feeling in his digestive organs as well as a sense of virtue in his soul. It was impossible not to feel proud of her as she towered there above him with her superb body, as fine and as supple as the body of a race horse, and her splendid courage that made him wish while he looked at her that she, instead of James, had been born a male. She was not pretty—she had never been pretty—but he realized for the first time that there might be something better even for a woman than beauty.
"Thank you, father," she said as she turned away, and he was glad again to feel that she had conquered him. To be conquered by one's own blood was different from being conquered by a business acquaintance.
"You mustn't disturb the household, you know," he said, but his voice did not sound as dry as he had endeavoured to make it.
"I shan't disturb anybody," responded Susan, with the amiability of a woman who, having gained her point, can afford to be pleasant. Then, wheeling about suddenly on the threshold, she added, "By the way, I forgot to tell you that Mandy was here three times this morning asking to see you. She is in trouble about her son. He was arrested for shooting a policeman over at Cross's Corner, you know, and the people down there are so enraged, she's afraid of a lynching. You read about it in the paper, didn't you?"
Yes, he had read about the shooting—Cross's Corner was only three miles away—but, if he had ever known the name of Mandy's son, he had forgotten it so completely that seeing it in print had suggested nothing to his mind.
"Well, she doesn't expect me to interfere, does she?" he asked shortly.
"I believe she thought you might go over and do something—I don't know what—help her engage a lawyer probably. She was very pitiable, but after all, what can one do for a negro that shoots a policeman? There's Miss Willy calling me!"
She ran indoors, and taking his pipe, which was still smoking, from his mouth, Cyrus leaned back in his chair and stared intently at the small fleecy clouds in the west. The cat, having cleaned herself to her satisfaction, jumped down from the railing, and after rubbing against his thin legs, leaped gently into his lap.
"Tut-tut!" he remarked grimly; but he did not attempt to dislodge the animal, and it may be that some secret part of him was gratified by the attention. He was still sitting there some minutes later, when he heard the warning click of the back gate, and the figure of Mandy, appeared at the corner of the kitchen wall. Rising from his chair, he shook the cat from his knees, and descending the steps, met the woman in the centre of the walk, where a few hardy dandelions were flattened like buttons between the bricks.
"Howdy, Mandy. I'm sorry to hear that you're having trouble with that boy of yours." He saw at once that she was racked by a powerful emotion, and any emotion affected him unpleasantly as something extravagant and indecent. Sweat had broken out in glistening clusters over her face and neck, and her eyes, under the stray wisps of hair, had in them an expression of dumb and uncomprehending submission.
"Ain't you gwineter git 'im away, Marster?" she began, and stronger even than her terror was the awe of Cyrus which subdued her voice to a tone of servile entreaty.
"Why did he shoot a policeman? He knew he'd hang for it," returned Cyrus sharply, and he added, "Of course I can't get him away. He'll have to take his deserts. Your race has got to learn that when you break the law, you must pay for it."
At first he had made as if to push by her, but when she did not move, he thought better of it and waited for her to speak. The sound of her heavy breathing, like the breathing of some crouching beast, awoke in him a curious repulsion. If only one could get rid of such creatures after their first youth was over! If only every careless act could perish with the impulse that led to it! If only the dried husks of pleasure did not turn to weapons against one! These thoughts—or disjointed snatches of thoughts like these—passed in a confused whirl through his brain as he stood there. For an instant it was almost as if his accustomed lucidity of purpose had deserted him; then the disturbance ceased, and with the renewal of order in his mind, his life-long habit of prompt decision returned to him.
"Your race has got to learn that when you break the law you must pay for it," he repeated—for on that sound principle of justice he felt that he must unalterably take his stand.
"He's all de boy I'se got, Marster," rejoined the negress, with an indifference to the matter of justice which had led others of her colour into those subterranean ways where abstract principles are not. "You ain' done furgot 'im, Marster," she added piteously. "He 'uz born jes two mont's atter Miss Lindy turnt me outer hyer—en he's jes ez w'ite ez ef'n he b'longed ter w'ite folks."
But she had gone too far—she had outraged that curious Anglo-Saxon instinct in Cyrus which permitted him to sin against his race's integrity, yet forbade him to acknowledge, even to himself, that he bore any part in the consequences of that sin. Illogical, he might have admitted, but there are some truths so poisonous that no honest man could breathe the same air with them.
Taking out his pocket-book, he slowly drew a fifty dollar bill from its innermost recesses, and as slowly unfolded it. He always handled money in that careful fashion—a habit which he had inherited from his father and his grandfather before him, and of which he was entirely unconscious. Filtering down through so many generations, the mannerism had ceased at last to be merely a physical peculiarity, and had become strangely spiritual in its suggestion. The craving for possession, the singleness of desire, the tenacity of grasp, the dread of relinquishment, the cold-blooded determination to keep intact the thing which it had cost so much to acquire—all that was bound up in the spirit of Cyrus Treadwell, and all that would pass at last with that spirit from off the earth, was expressed in the gesture with which he held out the bit of paper to the woman who had asked for his help. "Take this—it is all I can do for you," he said, "and don't come whining around me any more. Black or white, the man that commits a murder has got to hang for it."
A sound broke from the negress that resembled a human cry of grief less than it did the inarticulate moan of an animal in mortal pain. Then it stopped suddenly, strangled by that dull weight of usage beneath which the primal impulse in her was crushed back into silence. Instinctively, as if in obedience to some reflex action, she reached out and took the money from his hand, and still instinctively, with the dazed look of one who performs in delirium the customary movements of every day, she fell back, holding her apron deprecatingly aside while he brushed past her. And in her eyes as she gazed after him there dawned the simple wonder of the brute that asks of Life why it suffers.
Beyond the alley into which the gate opened, Cyrus caught sight of Gabriel's erect figure hurrying down the side street in the direction of the Old Ladies' Home, and calling out to him, he scrambled over the ash heaps and tomato cans, and emerged, irritated but smiling, into the sunlight.
"I'm on my way to the bank. We'll walk down together," he remarked almost gently, for, though he disapproved of Gabriel's religious opinions and distrusted his financial judgment, the war-like little rector represented the single romance of his life.
"I had intended stopping at the Old Ladies' Home, but I'll go on with you instead," responded Gabriel. "I've just had a message from one of our old servants calling me down to Cross's Corner," he pursued, "so I'm in a bit of a hurry. That's a bad thing, that murder down there yesterday, and I'm afraid it will mean trouble for the negroes. Mr. Blylie, who came to market this morning, told me a crowd had tried to lynch the fellow last night."
"Well, they've got to hang when they commit hanging crimes," replied Cyrus stubbornly. "There's no way out of that. It's just, ain't it?"
"Yes, I suppose so," admitted Gabriel, "though, for my part, I've a feeling against capital punishment—except, of course, in cases of rape, where, I confess, my blood turns against me."
"An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth—that's the law of God, ain't it?"
"The old law, yes—but why not quote the law of Christ instead?"
"It wouldn't do—not with the negroes," returned Cyrus, who entertained for the Founder of Christianity something of the sentimental respect mingled with an innate distrust of His common-sense with which he regarded His disciple.
"We can't condemn it until we've tried it," said Gabriel thoughtfully, and he went on after a moment:
"The terrible thing for us about the negroes is that they are so grave a responsibility—so grave a responsibility. Of course, we aren't to blame—we didn't bring them here; and yet I sometimes feel as if we had really done so."
This was a point of view which Cyrus had never considered, and he felt an immediate suspicion of it. It looked, somehow, as if it were insidiously leading the way to an appeal for money.
"It's the best thing that could have happened to them," he replied shortly. "If they'd remained in Africa, they'd never have been civilized or—or Christianized."
"Ah, that is just where the responsibility rests on us. We stand for civilization to them; we stand even—or at least we used to stand—for Christianity. They haven't learned yet to look above or beyond us, and the example we set them is one that they are condemned, for sheer lack of any finer vision, to follow. The majority of them are still hardly more than uneducated children, and that very fact makes an appeal to one's compassion which becomes at times almost unbearable."
But this was more than Cyrus could stand even from the rector, whose conversation he usually tolerated because of the perverse, inexplicable liking he felt for the man. The charm that Gabriel exercised over him was almost feminine in its subtlety and in its utter defiance of any rational sanction. It may have been that his nature, incapable though it was of love, was not entirely devoid of the rarer capacity for friendship—or it may have been that, with the inscrutable irony which appears to control all human attractions, the caged brutality in his heart was soothed by the unconscious flattery of the other's belief in him. Now, however, he felt that Gabriel's highfaluting nonsense was carrying him away. It was well enough to go on like that in the pulpit; but on week days, when there was business to think of and every minute might mean the loss of a dollar, there was no use dragging in either religion or sentiment. Had he put his thoughts plainly, he would probably have said: "That's not business, Gabriel. The trouble with you—and with most of you old-fashioned Virginians—is that you don't understand the first principles of business." These words, indeed, were almost on his lips, when, catching the rector's innocent glance wandering round to him, he contented himself with remarking satirically:
"Well, you were always up in the clouds. It doesn't hurt you, I reckon, though I doubt if it does much toward keeping your pot boiling."
"I must turn off here," said Gabriel gently. "It's the shortest way to Cross's Corner."
"Do you think any good will come of your going?"
"Probably not—but I couldn't refuse."
Much as he respected Cyrus, he was not sorry to part from him, for their walk together had left him feeling suddenly old and incompetent to battle with the problems of life. He knew that Cyrus, even though he liked him, considered him a bit of a fool, and with a humility which was unusual in him (for in his heart he was absolutely sure that his own convictions were right and that Cyrus's were wrong) he began to ask himself if, by any chance, the other's verdict could be secretly justified. Was he in reality the failure that Cyrus believed him to be? Or was it merely that he had drifted into that "depressing view" of existence against which he so earnestly warned his parishioners? Perhaps it wasn't Cyrus after all who had produced this effect. Perhaps the touch of indigestion he had felt after dinner had not entirely disappeared. Perhaps it meant that he was "getting on"—sixty-five his last birthday. Perhaps—but already the March wind, fresh and bud-scented, was blowing away his despondency. Already he was beginning to feel again that fortifying conviction that whatever was unpleasant could not possibly be natural.
Ahead of him the straight ashen road flushed to pale red where it climbed a steep hillside, and when he gained the top, the country lay before him in all the magic loveliness of early spring. Out of the rosy earth innumerable points of tender green were visible in the sunlight and invisible again beneath the faintly rippling shadows that filled the hollows. From every bough, from every bush, from every creeper which clung trembling to the rail fences, this wave of green, bursting through the sombre covering of winter, quivered, as delicate as foam, in the brilliant sunshine. On either side labourers were working, and where the ploughs pierced the soil they left narrow channels of darkness.
In the soul of Gabriel, that essence of the spring, which is immortally young and restless, awakened and gave him back his youth, as it gave the new grass to the fields and the longing for joy to the hearts of the ploughmen. He forgot that he was "getting on." He forgot the unnatural depression which had made him imagine for a moment that the world was a more difficult place than he had permitted himself to believe—so difficult a place, indeed, that for some people there could be no solution of its injustice, its brutality, its dissonance, its inequalities. The rapture in the song of the bluebirds was sweeter than the voice of Cyrus to which he had listened. And in a meadow on the right, an old grey horse, scarred, dim-eyed, spavined, stood resting one crooked leg, while he gazed wistfully over the topmost rail of the fence into the vivid green of the distance—for into his aching old bones, also, there had passed a little of that longing for joy which was born of the miraculous softness and freshness of the spring. To him, as well as to Gabriel and to the ploughmen and to the bluebirds flitting, like bits of fallen sky, along the "snake fences," Nature, the great healer, had brought her annual gift of the resurrection of hope.
"Cyrus means well," thought Gabriel, with a return of that natural self-confidence without which no man can exist happily and make a living. "He means well, but he takes a false view of life." And he added after a minute: "It's odd how the commercial spirit seems to suck a man dry when it once gets a hold on him."
He walked on rapidly, leaving the old horse and the ploughmen behind him, and around his energetic little figure the grey dust, as fine as powder, spun in swirls and eddies before the driving wind, which had grown boisterous. As he moved there alone in the deserted road, with his long black coat flapping against his legs, he appeared so insignificant and so unheroic that an observer would hardly have suspected that the greatest belief on the earth—the belief in Life—in its universality in spite of its littleness, in its justification in spite of its cruelties—that this belief shone through his shrunken little body as a flame shines through a vase.
At the end of the next mile, midway between Dinwiddie and Cross's Corner, stood the small log cabin of the former slave who had sent for him, and as he approached the narrow path that led, between oyster shells, from the main road to the single flat brown rock before the doorstep, he noticed with pleasure how tranquil and happy the little rustic home appeared under the windy brightness of the March sky.
"People may say what they please, but there never were happier or more contented creatures than the darkeys," he thought. "I doubt if there's another peasantry in the world that is half so well off or half so picturesque."
A large yellow rooster, pecking crumbs from the threshold, began to scold shrilly, and at the sound, the old servant, a decrepit negress in a blue gingham dress, hobbled out into the path and stood peering at him under her hollowed palm. Her forehead was ridged and furrowed beneath her white turban, and her bleared old eyes looked up at him with a blind and groping effort at recognition.
"I got your message, Aunt Mehitable. Don't you know me?"
"Is dat you, Marse Gabriel? I made sho' you wan' gwineter let nuttin' stop you f'om comin'."
"Don't I always come when you send for me?"
"You sutney do, suh. Dat's de gospel trufe—you sutney do."
As he looked at her standing there in the strong sunlight, with her palsied hand, which was gnarled and roughened until it resembled the shell of a walnut, curving over her eyes, he felt that a quality at once alien and enigmatical separated her not only from himself, but from every other man or woman who was born white instead of black. He had lived beside her all his life—and yet he could never understand her, could never reach her, could never even discern the hidden stuff of which she was made. He could make laws for her, but no child of a white mother could tell whether those laws ever penetrated that surface imitation of the superior race and reached the innate differences of thought, feeling, and memory which constituted her being. Was it development or mimicry that had brought her up out of savagery and clothed her in her blue gingham dress and her white turban, as in the outward covering of civilization?
Her look of crumbling age and the witch-like groping of her glance had cast a momentary spell over him. When it was gone, he said cheerfully:
"You mustn't be having troubles at your time of life, Aunt Mehitable," and in his voice there was the subtle recognition of all that she had meant to his family in the past, of all that his family had meant to her. Her claim upon him was the more authentic because it existed only in his imagination, and in hers. The tie that knit them together was woven of impalpable strands, but it was unbreakable while he and his generation were above the earth.
"Dar ain' no end er trouble, Marse Gabriel, ez long ez dar's yo' chillen en de chillen er yo' chillen ter come atter you. De ole ain' so techy—dey lets de hornet's nes' hang in peace whar de Lawd put hit—but de young dey's diff'rent."
"I suppose the neighbourhood is stirred up about the murder. What in God's name was that boy thinking of?"
The old blood crimes that never ceased where the white and the black races came together! The old savage folly and the new freedom! The old ignorance, the old lack of understanding, and the new restlessness, the new enmity!
"He wan' thinkin' er nuttin', Marse Gabriel. We ole uns kin set down en steddy, but de young dey up en does wid dere brains ez addled ez de inside uv er bad aig. 'T wan' dat ar way in de old days w'en we all hed de say so ez ter w'at wuz en w'at wan't de way ter behave."
Like an institution left from the ruins of the feudal system, which had crumbled as all ancient and decrepit things must crumble when the wheels of progress roll over them, she stood there wrapped in the beliefs and customs of that other century to which she belonged. Her sentiments had clustered about the past, as his had done, until the border-line between the romance and the actuality had vanished. She could not help him because she, also, possessed the retrospective, not the constructive, vision. He was not conscious of these thoughts, and yet, although he was unconscious of them, they coloured his reflections while he stood there in the sunlight, which had begun to fall aslant the blasted pine by the roadside. The wind had lowered until it came like the breath of spring, bud-scented, caressing, provocative. Even Gabriel, whose optimism lay in his blood and bone rather than in his intellect, yielded for a moment to this call of the spring as one might yield to the delicious melancholy of a vagrant mood. The long straight road, without bend or fork, had warmed in the paling sunlight to the colour of old ivory; in a neighbouring field a young maple tree rose in a flame of buds from the ridged earth where the ploughing was over; and against the azure sky in the south a flock of birds drifted up, like blown smoke, from the marshes.
"Tell me your trouble, then," he said, dropping into the cane-seated chair she had brought out of the cabin and placed between the flat stone at the doorstep and the well-brink, on which the yellow rooster stood spreading his wings. But Aunt Mehitable had returned to the cabin, and when she reappeared she was holding out to him a cracked saucer on which there was a piece of preserved watermelon rind and a pewter spoon.
"Dish yer is de ve'y same sort er preserves yo' mouf use'n ter water fur w'en you wuz a chile," she remarked as she handed the sweet to him. Whatever her anxiety or affliction could have been, the importance of his visit had evidently banished it from her mind. She hovered over him as his mother may have done when he was in his cradle, while the cheerful self-effacement in which slavery had trained her lent a pathetic charm to her manner.
"How peaceful it looks," he thought, sitting there, with the saucer in his hand, and his eyes on the purple shadows that slanted over the ploughed fields. "You have a good view of the low-grounds, Aunt Mehitable," he said aloud, and added immediately, "What's that noise in the road? Do you hear it?"
The old woman shook her head.
"I'se got sorter hard er heahin', Marse Gabriel, but dar's al'ays a tur'able lot er fuss gwine on w'en de chillen begin ter come up f'om de fields. 'T wuz becase uv oner dem ar boys dat I sont fur you," she pursued. "He went plum outer his haid yestiddy en fout wid a w'ite man down yonder at Cross's Co'nder, en dar's gwine ter be trouble about'n hit des ez sho' ez you live."
Seated on the flat stone, with her hands hanging over her knees, and her turbaned head swaying gently back and forth as she talked, she waited as tranquilly as the rock waited for the inevitable processes of nature. The patience in her look was the dumb patience of inanimate things; and her half-bared feet, protruding from the broken soles of her shoes, were encrusted with the earth of the fields until one could hardly distinguish them from the ground on which they rested.
"It looks as if there was something like a fight down yonder by the blasted pine," said the rector, rising from his chair. "I reckon I'd better go and see what they're quarrelling about."
The negress rose also, and her dim eyes followed him while he went down the little path between the borders of oyster shells. As he turned into the open stretch of the road, he glanced back at her, and stopping for a moment, waved his hand with a gesture that was careless and reassuring. The fight, or whatever it was that made the noise, was still some distance ahead in the shadow of the pine-tree, and as he walked towards it he was thinking casually of other matters—of the wretched condition of the road after the winter rains, of the need of greater thrift among the farmers, both white and black, of the touch of indigestion which still troubled him. There was nothing to warn him that he was approaching the supreme event in his life, nothing to prepare him for a change beside which all the changes of the past would appear as unsubstantial as shadows. His soul might have been the soul in the grass, so little did its coming or its going affect the forces around him.
"If this shooting pain keeps up, I'll have to get a prescription from Doctor Fraser," he thought, and the next minute he cried out suddenly: "God help us!" and began to run down the road in the direction of the blasted pine. There was hardly a breath between the instant when he had thought of his indigestion and the instant when he had called out sharply on the name of God, yet that flash of time had been long enough to change the ordinary man into the hero. The spark of greatness in his nature flamed up and irradiated all that had been merely dull and common clay a moment before. As he ran on, with his coat tails flapping around him, and his thin legs wobbling from the unaccustomed speed at which he moved, he was so unimposing a figure that only the Deity who judges the motives, not the actions, of men would have been impressed by the spectacle. Even the three hearty brutes—and it took him but a glance to see that two of them were drunk, and that the third, being a sober rascal, was the more dangerous—hardly ceased their merry torment of the young negro in their midst when he came up with them.
"I know that boy," he said. "He is the grandson of Aunt Mehitable. What are you doing with him?"
A drunken laugh answered him, while the sober scoundrel—a lank, hairy ne-er-do-well, with a tendency to epilepsy, whose name he remembered to have heard—pushed him roughly to the roadside.
"You git out of this here mess, parson. We're goin' to teach this damn nigger a lesson, and I reckon when he's learned it in hell, he won't turn his grin on a white woman again in a jiffy."
"Fo' de Lawd, I didn't mean nuttin', Marster!" screamed the boy, livid with terror. "I didn't know de lady was dar—fo' de Lawd Jesus, I didn't! My foot jes slipped on de plank w'en I wuz crossin', en I knocked up agin her."
"He jostled her," observed one of the drunken men judicially, "an' we'll be roasted befo' we'll let a damn nigger jostle a white lady—even if she ain't a lady—in these here parts."
In the rector's bone and fibre, drilled there by the ages that had shaped his character before he began to be, there was all the white man's horror of an insult to his womankind. But deeper even than this lay his personal feeling of responsibility for any creature whose fathers had belonged to him and had toiled in his service.
"I believe the boy is telling the truth," he said, and he added with one of his characteristic bursts of impulsiveness, "but whether he is or not, you are too drunk to judge."
There was going to be a battle, he saw, and in the swiftness with which he discerned this, he made his eternal choice between the preacher and the fighter. Stripping off his coat, he reached down for a stick from the roadside; then spinning round on the three of them he struck out with all his strength, while there floated before him the face of a man he had killed in his first charge at Manassas. The old fury, the old triumph, the old blood-stained splendour returned to him. He smelt the smoke again, he heard the boom of the cannon, the long sobbing rattle of musketry, and the thought stabbed through him, "God forgive me for loving a fight!"
Then the fight stopped. There was a patter of feet in the dust as the young negro fled like a hare up the road in the direction of Dinwiddie. One of the men leaped the fence and disappeared into the tangled thicket beyond; while the other two, sobered suddenly, began walking slowly over the ploughed ground on the right. Ten minutes later Gabriel was lying alone, with the blood oozing from his mouth, on the trodden weeds by the roadside. The shadow of the pine had not moved since he watched it; on the flat rock in front of the cabin the old negress stood, straining her eyes in the faint sunshine; and up the long road the March wind still blew, as soft, as provocative, as bud-scented.
"So this is life," thought Virginia, while she folded her mourning veil, and laid it away in the top drawer of her bureau. Like all who are suddenly brought face to face with tragedy, she felt at the moment that there was nothing else in existence. All the sweetness of the past had vanished so utterly that she remembered it only as one remembers a dream from which one has abruptly awakened. Nothing remained except this horrible sense of the pitiful insufficiency of life, of the inexorable finality of death. It was a week since the rector's death, and in that week she had passed out of her girlhood forever. Of all the things that she had lived through, this alone had had the power to crush the hope in her and the odour of crape which floated through the crack of the drawer sickened her with its reminder of that agonized sense of loss which had settled over her at the funeral. She was only thirty—the best of her life should still be in the future—yet as she looked back at her white face in the mirror it seemed to her that she should never emerge from the leaden hopelessness which had descended like a weight on her body. Above the harsh black of her dress, which added ten years to her appearance, she saw the darkened circles rimming her eyes, the faded pallor of her skin, the lustreless wave of her hair, which had once had a satiny sheen on its ripples.
"Grief makes a person look like this," she thought. "I shall never be a girl again—Oliver was right: I am the kind to break early." Then, because to think of herself in the midst of such sorrow seemed to her almost wicked, she turned away from the mirror, and laid her crape-trimmed hat on the shelf in the wardrobe. She was wearing a dress of black Henrietta cloth, which had been borrowed from one of her neighbours who had worn mourning, and the blouse and sleeves hung with an exaggerated fullness over her thin arms and bosom. All that had distinguished her beauty—the radiance, the colour the flower-like delicacy of bloom and sweetness—these were blotted out by her grief and by the voluminous mourning dress of the nineties. A week had changed her, as even Harry's illness had not changed her, from a girl into a woman; and horrible beyond belief, with the exception of her mother, it had changed nothing else in the universe! The tragedy that had ruined her life had left the rest of the world—even the little world of Dinwiddie—moving as serenely, as indifferently, on its way towards eternity. On the morning of the funeral she had heard the same market wagons rumble over the cobblestones, the same droning songs of the hucksters, the same casual procession of feet on the pavement. A passionate indignation had seized her because life could be so brutal to death, because the terror and the pity that flamed in her soul shed no burning light on the town where her father had worked and loved and fought and suffered and died. A little later the ceaseless tread of visitors to the rectory door had driven this thought from her mind, but through every minute, while he lay in the closed room downstairs, while she sat beside her mother in the slow crawling carriage that went to the old churchyard, while she stood with bowed head listening to the words of the service—through it all there had been the feeling that something must happen to alter a world in which such a thing had been possible, that life must stop, that the heavens must fall, that God must put forth His hand and work a miracle in order to show His compassion and His horror.
But nothing had changed. After the funeral her mother had come home with her, and the others, many with tear-stained faces, had drifted in separate ways back to eat their separate dinners. For a few hours Dinwiddie had been shaken out of its phlegmatic pursuit of happiness; for a few hours it had attained an emotional solidarity which swept it up from the innumerable bypaths of the personal to a height where the personal rises at last into the universal. Then the ebb had come; the sense of tragedy had lessened slowly with the prolongation of feeling; and the universal vision had dissolved and crystallized into the pitiless physical needs of the individual. After the funeral a wave almost of relief had swept over the town at the thought that the suspension and the strain were at an end. The business of keeping alive, and the moral compulsion of keeping abreast of one's neighbours, reasserted their supremacy even while the carriages, quickening their pace a trifle on the return drive, rolled out of the churchyard. Now at the end of a week only Virginia and her mother would take the time from living to sit down and remember.
In the adjoining room, which was the nursery, Mrs. Pendleton was sitting beside the window, with her Bible open on her knees, and her head bent a little in the direction of Miss Priscilla, who was mending a black dress by the table.
"It is so sweet of you, dear Miss Priscilla," she murmured in her vague and gentle voice as Virginia entered. So old, so pallid, so fragile she looked, that she might have been mistaken by a stranger for a woman of eighty, yet the impossibility of breaking the habit of a lifetime kept the lines of her face still fixed in an expression of anxious cheerfulness. For more than forty years she had not thought of herself, and now that the opportunity had come for her to do so, she found that she had almost forgotten the way that one went about it. Even grief could not make her selfish any more than it could make her untidy. Her manner, like her dress, was so little a matter of impulse, and so largely a matter of discipline and of conscience, that it expressed her broken heart hardly more than did the widow's cap on her head or the mourning brooch that fastened the crape folds of her collar.
"Do you want anything, mother darling? What can I do for you?" asked Virginia, stooping to kiss her.
"Nothing, dear. I was just telling Miss Priscilla that I had had a visit from Mr. Treadwell, and that"—her voice quivered a little—"he showed more feeling than I should have believed possible. He even wanted to make me an allowance."
Miss Priscilla drew out her large linen handkerchief, which was like a man's, and loudly blew her nose. "I always said there was more in Cyrus than people thought," she observed. "Here, I've shortened this dress, Jinny, until it's just about your mother's length."
She tried to speak carelessly, for though she did not concur in the popular belief that to ignore sorrow is to assuage it, her social instinct, which was as strongly developed as Mrs. Pendleton's, encouraged her to throw a pleasant veil over affliction.
"You're looking pale for want of air, Jinny," she added, after a minute in which she had thought, "The child has broken so in the last few days that she looks years older than Oliver."
"I'm trying to make her go driving," said Mrs. Pendleton, leaning forward over the open page of her Bible.
"But I can't go, mother; I haven't the heart for it," replied Virginia, choking down a sob.
"I don't like to see you looking so badly, dear. You must keep up your strength for the children's sake, you know."
"Yes, I know," answered Virginia, but her voice had a weary sound.
A little later, when Miss Priscilla had gone, and Oliver came in to urge her to go with him, she shook her head again, still palely resolute, still softly obstinate.
"But, Jinny, it isn't right for you to let your health go," he urged. "You haven't had a breath of air for days and you're getting sallow."
His own colour was as fine as ever; he grew handsomer, if a trifle stouter, as he grew older; and at thirty-five there was all the vigour and the charm of twenty in his face and manner. In one way only he had altered, and of this alteration, he, as well as Virginia, was beginning faintly to be aware. Comfort was almost imperceptibly taking the place of conviction, and the passionate altruism of youth would yield before many years to the prudential philosophy of middle-age. Life had defeated him. His best had been thrown back at him, and his nature, embittered by failure, was adjusting itself gradually to a different and a lower standard of values. Though he could not be successful, it was still possible, even within the narrow limits of his income and his opportunities, to be comfortable. And, like other men who have lived day by day with heroically unselfish women, he had fallen at last into the habit of thinking that his being comfortable was, after all, a question of supreme importance to the universe. Deeply as he had felt the rector's death, he, in common with the rest of Dinwiddie, was conscious of breathing more easily after the funeral was over. To his impressionable nature, alternations of mood were almost an essential of being, and there was something intolerable to him in any slowly harrowing grief. To watch Virginia nursing every memory of her father because she shrank from the subtle disloyalty of forgetfulness, aroused in him a curious mingling of sympathy and resentment.
"I wish you'd go, even if you don't feel like it—just to please me, Virginia," he urged, and after a short struggle she yielded to his altered tone, and got down her hat from the shelf of the wardrobe.
A little later, as the dog-cart rolled out of Dinwiddie into the country road, she looked through her black grenadine veil on a world which appeared to have lost its brightness. The road was the one along which she had ridden on the morning of the fox-hunt; ahead of them lay the same fields, sown now with the tender green of the spring; the same creeks ran there, screened by the same thickets of elder; the same pines wafted their tang on the March wind that blew, singing, out of the forest. It was all just as it had been on that morning—and yet what a difference!
"Put up your veil, Virginia—it's enough to smother you."
But she only shook her head, shrinking farther down into the shapeless borrowed dress as though she felt that it protected her. Following the habit of people whose choice has been instinctive rather than deliberate, a choice of the blood, not of the brain, they had long ago exhausted the fund of conversation with which they had started. There was nothing to talk about—since Virginia had never learned to talk of herself, and Oliver had grown reticent recently about the subjects that interested him. When the daily anecdotes of the children had been aired between them with an effort at breeziness, nothing remained except the endless discussion of Harry's education. Even this had worn threadbare of late, and with the best intentions in the world, Virginia had failed to supply anything else of sufficient importance to take its place. An inherited habit, the same habit which had made it possible for Mrs. Pendleton to efface her broken heart, prompted her to avoid any allusion to her grief in which she sat shrouded as in her mourning veil.
"The spring is so early this year," she remarked once, with her gaze on the rosy billows of an orchard. "The peach trees have almost finished blooming."
Then, as he made no answer except to flick at John Henry's bay mare with his whip, she asked daringly, "Are you writing again, Oliver?"
A frown darkened his forehead, and she saw the muscles about his mouth twitch as though he were irritated. For all his failure and his bitterness, he did not look a day older, she thought, than when she had first seen him driving down High Street in that unforgettable May. He was still as ardent, still as capable of inspiring first love in the imagination of a girl. The light and the perfume of that enchanted spring seemed suddenly to envelop her, and moved by a yearning to recapture them for an instant, she drew closer to him, and slipped her hand through his arm.
"Oh, I'm trying my luck with some trash. Nothing but trash has any chance of going in this damned business."
"You mean it's different from your others? It's less serious?"
"Less serious? Well, I should say so. It's the sort of ice-cream soda-water the public wants. But if I can get it put on, it ought to run, and a play that runs is obliged to make money. I doubt if there's anything much better than money, when it comes to that."
"You used to say it didn't matter."
"Did I? Well, I was a fool and I've learned better. These last few years have taught me that nothing else on earth matters much."
This was so different from what that other Oliver—the Oliver of her first love—might have said, that involuntarily her clasp on his arm tightened. The change in him, so gradual at first that her mind, unused to subtleties, had hardly grasped it, was beginning to frighten her.
"You have such burdens, dear," she said, and he noticed that her voice had acquired the toneless sweetness of her mother's. "I've tried to be as saving as I could, but the children have been sick so much that it seems sometimes as if we should never get out of debt. I am trying now to pay off the bills I was obliged to make while Harry was ill in October. If I could only get perfectly strong, we might let Marthy go, now that Jenny is getting so big."
"You work hard enough as it is, Virginia. You've been awfully good about it," he answered, but his manner was almost casual, for he had grown to take for granted her unselfishness with something of the unconcern with which he took for granted the comfortable feeling of the spring weather. In the early days of their marriage, when her fresh beauty had been a power to rule him, she had taught him to assume his right to her self-immolation on the altar of his comfort; and with the taste of bitterness which sometimes follows the sweets of memory, she recalled that their first quarrel had arisen because she had insisted on getting out of bed to make the fires in the morning. Then, partly because the recollection appeared to reproach him, and partly because, not possessing the critical faculty, she had never learned to acknowledge the existence of a flaw in a person she loved, she edged closer to him, and replied cheerfully:
"I don't mind the work a bit, if only the children will keep well so we shan't have to spend any more money. I shan't need any black clothes," she added, with a trembling lip. "Mrs. Carrington has given me this dress, as she has gone out of mourning, and I've got a piece of blue silk put away that I am going to have dyed."
He glanced at the shapeless dress, not indignantly as he would once have done, but with a tinge of quiet amusement.
"It makes you look every day of forty."
"I know it isn't becoming, but at least it will save having to buy one."
In spite of the fact that her small economies had made it possible for them to live wholesomely, and with at least an appearance of decency, on his meagre salary, they had always aroused in him a sense of bitter exasperation. He respected her, of course, for her saving, yet in his heart he knew that she would probably have charmed him more had she been a spendthrift—since the little virtues are sometimes more deadly to the passion of love than are the large vices. While he nodded, without disputing the sound common sense in her words, she thought a little wistfully how nice it would be to have pretty things if only one could afford them. Someday, when the children's schooling was over and Oliver had got a larger salary, she would begin to buy clothes that were becoming rather than durable. But that was in the future, and, meanwhile, how much better it was to grudge every penny she spent on herself as long as there were unpaid bills at the doctor's and the grocer's. All of which was, of course, perfectly reasonable, and like other women who have had a narrow experience of life, she cherished the delusion that a man's love, as well as his philosophy, is necessarily rooted in reason.
When they turned homeward, the bay mare, pricked by desire for her stable, began to travel more rapidly, and the fall of her hoofs, accompanied by the light roll of the wheels, broke the silence which had almost imperceptibly settled upon them. Not until the cart drew up at the gate did Virginia realize that they had hardly spoken a dozen words on the drive back.
"I feel better already, Oliver," she said, gratefully, as he helped her to alight. Then hastening ahead of him, she ran up the walk and into the hall, where her mother, looking wan and unnatural in her widow's cap, greeted her with the question:
"Did you have a pleasant drive, dear?"
For six months Mrs. Pendleton hid her broken heart under a smile and went softly about the small daily duties of the household, facing death, as she had faced life, with a sublime unselfishness and the manner of a lady. Her hopes, her joys, her fears even, lay in the past; there was nothing for her to look forward to, nothing for her to dread in the future. Life had given her all that it had to offer of bliss or sorrow, and for the rest of her few years she would be like one who, having finished her work before the end of the day, sits waiting patiently for the words of release to be spoken. As the months went on, she moved like a gentle shadow about her daughter's little home. So wasted and pallid was her body that at times Virginia feared to touch her lest she should melt like a phantom out of her arms. Yet to the last she never faltered, never cried out for mercy, never sought to hasten by a breath that end which was to her as the longing of her eyes, as the brightness of the sunlight, as the sweetness of the springtime. Once, looking up from Lucy's lesson which she was hearing, she said a little wistfully, "I don't think, Jinny, it will be long now," and then checking herself reproachfully, she added, "But God knows best. I can trust Him."
It was the only time that she had ever spoken of the thought which was in her mind day and night, for when she could no longer welcome her destiny, she had accepted it. Her faith, like her opinions, was child-like and uncritical—the artless product of a simple and incurious age. The strength in her had gone not into the building of knowledge, but into the making of character, and she had judged all thought as innocently as she had judged all literature, by its contribution to the external sweetness of living. A child of ten might have demolished her theories, and yet because of them, or in spite of them, she had translated into action the end of all reasoning, the profoundest meaning in all philosophy. But she was born to decorate instead of to reason. Though her mind had never winnowed illusions from realities, her hands had patiently woven both illusions and realities into the embroidered fabric of Life.
For six months she went about the house and helped Virginia with the sewing, which had become burdensome since the children, and especially Harry, were big enough to wear daily holes in their stockings. Then, when the half year was over, she took to her bed one evening after she had carefully undressed, folded her clothes out of sight, and read a chapter in her Bible. In the morning she did not get up, and at the end of a fortnight, in which she apologized for making extra work whenever food was brought to her, she clasped her hands on her thin breast, smiled once into Virginia's face, and died so quietly that there was hardly a perceptible change in her breathing. She had gone through life without giving trouble, and she gave none at the end. As she lay there in her little bed in Virginia's spare room, to which she had moved after Gabriel's death in order that the rectory might be got ready for the new rector, she appeared so shadowy and unearthly that it was impossible to believe that she had ever been a part of the restless strivings and the sombre violences of life. On the candle-stand by her bed lay her spectacles, with steel rims because she had never felt that she could afford gold ones; and a single October rose, from which a golden petal had dropped, stood in a vase beside the Bible. On the foot of the bed hung her grey flannelette wrapper, with a patch in one sleeve over which Harry had spilled a bottle of shoe polish, while through the half-shuttered window the autumn sunshine fell in long yellow bars over the hemp rugs on the floor. And she was dead! Her mother was dead—no matter how much she needed her, she would never come back. Out of the vacancy around her, some words of her own, spoken in her girlhood, returned to her. "There is only one thing I couldn't bear, and that is losing my mother." Only one thing! And now that one thing had happened, and she was not only bearing it, she was looking ahead to a future in which that one thing would be always beside her, always in her memory. Whatever the years brought to her, they could never bring her mother again—they could never bring her a love like her mother's.
Out of that same vacancy, which seemed to swallow and to hold everything, which seemed to exist both within and outside of herself, a multitude of forgotten images and impressions flashed into being. She saw the nursery fireside in the rectory, and her mother, with hair that still shone like satin, rocking back and forth in the black wicker chair with the sagging bottom. She saw her kneeling on the old frayed red and blue drugget, her skirt pinned up at the back of her waist, while she bathed her daughter's scratched and aching feet in the oblong tin foot-tub. She saw her, as beautiful as an angel, in church on Sunday mornings, her worshipful eyes lifted to the pulpit, an edge of tinted light falling on the open prayer-book in her hand. She saw her, thin and stooping, a shadow of all that she had once been—waiting—waiting——She had always been there. It was impossible to realize that a time could ever come when she would not be there—and now she was gone!
And behind all the images, all the impressions, the stubborn thought persisted that this was life—that one could never escape it—that whatever happened, one must come back to it at the last. "I have my children still left—but for my children I could not live!" she thought, dropping on her knees by the bedside, and hiding her face in the grey wrapper.
After this it seemed to her that she ceased to live except in the lives of her children, and her days passed so evenly, so monotonously, that she only noticed their flight when one of the old people in Dinwiddie remarked to her with a certain surprise: "You've almost a grown daughter now, Jinny," or "Harry will soon be getting as big as his father. Have you decided where you will send him to college?" She was not unhappy—had she ever stopped to ask herself the question, she would probably have answered, "If only mother and father were living, I should be perfectly satisfied"; yet in spite of her assurances, there existed deep down in her—so deep that her consciousness had never fully grasped the fact of its presence—a dumb feeling that something was missing out of life, that the actuality was a little less bright, a little less perfect than it had appeared through the rosy glamour of her virgin dreams. Was this "something missing" merely one of the necessary conditions of mortal existence? Or was there somewhere on the earth that stainless happiness which she had once believed her marriage would bring to her? "I should be perfectly satisfied if only——" she would sometimes say in the night, and then check herself before she had ended the sentence. The lack, real as it was, was still too formless to lend itself to the precision of words; it belonged less to circumstances than to the essential structure of life. And yet, as she put it to herself in her rare moments of depression, she had so much to be thankful for! The children grew stronger as they grew older—since Harry's attack of diphtheria, indeed, there had been no serious illness in the family, and as she approached middle-age, her terror of illness increased rather than diminished. The children made up for much—they ought to have made up for everything—and yet did they? There was no visible fault that she could attribute to them. With her temperamental inability to see flaws, she was accustomed to think of them as perfect children, as children whom she would not change, had she the power, by so much as a hair or an outline. They grew up, straight, fine, and fearless, full of the new spirit, eager to test life, to examine facts, possessed by that awakening feeling for truth which had always frightened her a little in Susan. Vaguely, without defining the sensation, she felt that they were growing beyond her, that she could no longer keep up with them, that, every year, they were leaving her a little farther behind them. They were fond of her, but she understood from something Jenny said one day, that they had ceased to be proud of her. It was while they were looking over an old photograph album of Susan's that, coming to a picture of Virginia, taken the week before her wedding, Jenny cried out: "Why, there's mother!" and slipped it out of the page.
"I never saw that before," Lucy said, leaning over with a laugh. "You were so young when you married, mother, and you wore such tight sleeves, and a bustle!"
"Would you ever have believed she was as pretty as that?" asked Jenny, with the unconscious brutality of childhood.
"If you are ever as beautiful as your mother was, you may thank your stars," said Susan dryly, and by the expression in her face Virginia knew that she was thinking, "If that was my child, I'd slap her!"
Harry, who had been stuffing fruitcake on the sofa—sweets were his weakness—rose suddenly and came over to the group.
"If you are ever as beautiful as she is now, you may thank your stars, Miss Yellow Frisk!" he remarked crushingly.
It was a little thing—so little that it seemed ridiculous to think of it as among the momentous happenings in a life—but with that extraordinary proneness of the little to usurp the significant places of memory, it had become at last one of the important milestones in her experience. At the end, when she forgot everything else, she would not forget Harry's foolish words, nor the look in his indignant boyish face when he uttered them. Until then she had not admitted to herself that there was a difference in her feeling for her children, but with the touch of his sympathetic, not over clean, hand on her shoulder, she knew that she should never again think of the three of them as if they were one in her interest and her love. The girls were good children, dear children—she would have let herself be cut in pieces for either of them had it been necessary—but between Harry and herself there was a different bond, a closer and a deeper dependency, which strengthened almost insensibly as he grew older. Her daughters she loved, but her son, as is the inexplicable way of women, she adored blindly and without wisdom. If it had been possible to ruin him, she would have done so, but, unlike many other sons, he seemed, by virtue of that invincible strength with which he had been born, to be proof against both spoiling and flattery. He was a nice boy even to strangers, even to Susan, with her serene judgment of persons, he appeared a thoroughly nice boy! He was not only a tall, lean, habitually towselled-headed youngster, with a handsome sunburned face and a pair of charming, slightly quizzical blue eyes, but he was, as his teachers and his school reports bore witness, possessed of an intellectual brilliancy which made study as easy, and quite as interesting to him, as play. Unlike his father, he had entered life endowed with a cheerful outlook upon the world and with that temperament of success which usually, but by no means inevitably, accompanies it. Whatever happened, he would make the best of it, he would "get on," and it was impossible to imagine him in any hole so deep that he could not, sooner or later, find the way out of it. The Pendleton and the Treadwell spirits had contributed their best to him. If he derived from Cyrus, or from some obscure strain in Cyrus's ancestry, a wholesome regard for material success, a robust determination to achieve results combined with that hard, clear vision of affairs which makes such achievement easy, he had inherited from Gabriel his genial temper, his charm of manner, and his faith in life, which, though it failed to move mountains, had sweetened and enriched the mere act of living. Though he was less demonstrative than Lucy, who had outgrown the plainness and the reticence of her childhood and was developing into a coquettish, shallow-minded girl, with what Miss Priscilla called "a glib tongue," Virginia learned gradually, in the secret way mothers learn things, that his love for her was, after his ambition, the strongest force in his character. Between him and his father there had existed ever since his babyhood a curious, silent, yet ineradicable hostility. Whether the fault was Oliver's or Harry's, whether the father resented the energy and the initiative of his son, or the son resented the indifference and the self-absorption of his father, Virginia had never discovered. For years she fought against admitting the discord between them. Then, at last, on the occasion of a quarrel, when it was no longer possible to dissemble, she followed Oliver into his study, which had once been the "back parlour," and pleaded with him to show a little patience, a little sympathy with his son. "He's a boy any father would be proud of——" she finished, almost in tears.
"I know he is," he answered irritably, "but the truth is he rubs me the wrong way. I suppose the trouble is that you have spoiled him."
"But he isn't spoiled. Everybody says——"
"Oh, everybody!" he murmured disdainfully, with a shrug of his fine shoulders.
He looked back at her with the sombre fire of anger still in his eyes, and she saw, without trying to see, without even knowing that she did see, all the changes that years had wrought in his appearance. Physically, he was a finer animal than he had been when she married him, for time, which had sapped her youth and faded her too delicate bloom, had but added a deeper colour to the warm brown of his skin, a steadier glow to his eyes, a more silvery gloss to his hair. At forty, he was a handsomer man than he had been at twenty-five, yet, in spite of this, some virtue had gone out of him—here, too, as in life, "something was missing." The generous impulses, the high heart for adventure, the enthusiasm of youth, and youth's white rage for perfection—where were these? It was as if a rough hand had passed over him, coarsening here, blotting out there, accentuating elsewhere. The slow, insidious devil of compromise had done its work. Once he had made one of the small band of fighters who fight not for advantage, but for the truth; now he stood in that middle place with the safe majority who are "neither for God nor for His enemies." Life had done this to him—life and Virginia. It was not only that he had "grown soft," as he would have expressed it, nor was it even wholly that he had grown selfish, for the canker which ate at the roots of his personality had affected not his character merely, but the very force of his will. Though the imperative he obeyed had always been not "I must," but "I want," his natural loftiness of purpose might have saved him from the results of his weakness had he not lost gradually the capacity for successful resistance with which he had started. If only in the beginning she had upheld not his inclinations, but his convictions; if only she had sought not to soothe his weakness, but to stimulate his strength; if only she had seen for once the thing as it was, not as it ought to have been——
He was buried in his work now, and there were months during this year when she appeared hardly to see him, so engrossed, so self-absorbed had he become. Sometimes she would remember, stifling the pang it caused, the nights when he had written his first plays in Matoaca City, and that he had made her sit beside him with her sewing because he could not think if she were out of the room. Now, he could write only when he was alone; he hated an interruption so much that she often let the fire go out rather than open his closed door to see if it was burning. If she went in to speak to him, he laid his pen down and did not take it up again while she was there. Yet this change had come so stealthily that it had hardly affected her happiness. She had grown accustomed to the difference before she had realized it sufficiently to suffer. Sometimes she would say to herself a little wonderingly, "Oliver used to be so romantic;" for with the majority of women whose marriages have surrendered to an invasion of the commonplace, she accepted the comfortable theory that the alteration was due less to circumstances than to the natural drying of the springs of sentiment in her husband's character. Occasionally, she would remember with a smile her three days' jealousy of Abby; but the brevity and the folly of this had established her the more securely in her impregnable position of unquestioning belief in him. She had started life believing, as the women of her race had believed for ages before her, that love was a divine gift which came but once in a lifetime, and which, coming once, remained forever indestructible. People, of course, grew more practical and less intense as they left youth farther behind them; and though this misty principle would have dissolved at once had she applied it to herself (for she became more sentimental as she approached middle-age), behind any suspicious haziness of generalization there remained always the sacred formula, "Men are different." Once, when a sharp outbreak of the primal force had precipitated a scandal in the home of one of her neighbours, she had remarked to Susan that she was "devoutly thankful that Oliver did not have that side to his nature."
"It must be a disagreeable side to live with," Susan, happily married to John Henry, and blissfully expectant of motherhood, had replied, "but as far as I know, Oliver never had a light fancy for a woman in his life—not even before he was married. I used to tell him that it was because he expected too much. Physical beauty by itself never seemed to attract him—it was the angel in you that he first fell in love with."
A glow of pleasure flushed Virginia's sharpened features, mounting to the thin little curls on her forehead. These little curls, to which she sentimentally clung in spite of the changes in the fashions, were a cause of ceaseless worry to Lucy, who had developed into a "stylish" girl, and would have died sooner than she would have rejected the universal pompadour of the period. It was the single vanity that Virginia had ever permitted herself, this adhering at middle-age to the quaint and rather coquettish hairdressing of her girlhood: and Fate had punished her by threading the little curls with grey, while Susan's stiff roll (she had adopted the newer mode) remained bravely flaxen. But Susan was one of those women who, lacking a fine fair skin and defying tradition, are physically at their best between forty and fifty.
"Oliver used to be so romantic," said Virginia, as she had said so often to herself, while the glow paled slowly from her cheeks, leaving them the colour of faded rose-leaves.
"Not so romantic as you were, Jinny."
"Oh, I am still," she laughed softly. "Lucy says I take more interest in her lovers now than she does," and she added after a minute, "Girls are so different to-day from what they used to be—they are so much less sentimental."
"But I thought Lucy was. She has enough flirtations for her age, hasn't she?"
"She has enough attention, of course—for the funny part is that, though she's only sixteen and not nearly so pretty as Jenny, the men are all crazy, as Miss Willy says, about her. But, somehow, it's different. Lucy enjoys it, but it isn't her life. As for Jenny, she's still too young to have taken shape, I suppose, but she has only one idea in her head and that is going to college. She never gives a boy a thought."