"Why, mother, what on earth has happened?" asked Virginia, hurrying toward her.
"Let me come in and speak to you, Jinny. I mean inside the house. One can never be sure that some of the neighbours aren't listening," she said in a whisper.
Hurrying past her daughter, she went into the hall, and, then turning, faced her with her hand on the door-knob. In the dim light of the hall her face showed white and drawn, like the face of a person who has been suddenly stricken with illness. "Jinny, I've just had a visit from Mrs. Carrington—you know what a gossip she is—but I think I ought to tell you that she says people are talking about Oliver's riding so much with Abby."
A pain as sharp as if the teeth of a beast had fastened in her heart, pierced Virginia while she stood there, barring the door with her hands. Her peace, which had seemed indestructible a moment ago, was shattered by a sensation of violent anger—not against Abby, not against Oliver, not even against the gossiping old women of Dinwiddie—but against her own blindness, her own inconceivable folly! At the moment the civilization of centuries was stripped from her, and she was as simple and as primitive as a female of the jungle. On the surface she was still calm, but to her own soul she felt that she presented the appalling spectacle of a normal woman turned fury. It was one of those instants that are so unexpected, so entirely unnatural and out of harmony with the rest of life, that they obliterate the boundaries of character which separate the life of the individual from the ancient root of the race. Not Virginia, but the primeval woman in her blood, shrieked out in protest as she saw her hold on her mate threatened. The destruction of the universe, as long as it left her house standing in its bit of ground, would have overwhelmed her less utterly.
"But what on earth can they say, mother? It was all my fault. I made him go. He never lifted his finger for Abby."
"I know, darling, I know. Of course, Oliver is not to blame, but people will talk, and I think Abby ought to have known better."
For an instant only Virginia hesitated. Then something stronger than the primitive female in her blood—the spirit of a lady—spoke through her lips.
"I don't believe Abby was to blame, either," she said.
"But women ought to know better, Jinny, and Abby is nearly thirty."
"She always wanted me to go, mother. I don't believe she thought for a minute that she was doing anything wrong. Abby is a little coarse, but she's perfectly good. Nobody will make me think otherwise."
"Well, it can't go on, dear. You must stop Oliver's riding with her. And Mrs. Carrington says she hears that he is going to Atlantic City with them in General Goode's private car on Thursday."
"Abby asked me, too, but of course I couldn't leave the children."
"Of course not. Oliver must give it up, too. Oh, Jinny, a scandal, even where one is innocent, is so terrible. A woman—a true woman—would endure death rather than be talked about. I remember your cousin Jane Pendleton made an unhappy marriage, and her husband used to get drunk and beat her and even carry on dreadfully with the coloured servants—but she said that was better than the disgrace of a separation."
"But all that has nothing to do with me, mother. Oliver is an angel, and this is every bit my fault, not Abby's." The violence in her soul had passed, and she felt suddenly calm.
"Of course, darling, of course. Now that you see what it has led to, you can stop it immediately."
They were so alike as they stood there facing each other, mother and daughter, that they might have represented different periods of the same life—youth and age meeting together. Both were perfect products of that social order whose crowning grace and glory they were. Both were creatures trained to feel rather than think, whose very goodness was the result not of reason, but of emotion. And, above all, both were gentlewomen to the innermost cores of their natures. Passion could not banish for long that exquisite forbearance which generations had developed from a necessity into an art.
"I can't stop his going with her, because that would make people think I believed the things they say—but I can go, too, mother, and I will. I'll borrow Susan's horse and go fox-hunting with them to-morrow."
Once again, as on the afternoon when she had heard of Oliver's illness in New York, Mrs. Pendleton realized that her daughter's strength was more than a match for hers when the question related to Oliver.
"But the children, dear—and then, oh, Jinny, you might get hurt."
To her surprise Jinny laughed.
"I shan't get hurt, mother—and if I did——"
She left her sentence unfinished, but in the break there was the first note of bitterness that her mother had ever heard from her lips. Was it possible, after all, that there was "more in it" than she had let appear in her words? Was it possible that her passionate defence of Abby had been but a beautiful pretence?
"I'll go straight down to the Treadwells' to ask Susan for her horse," she added cheerfully, "and you'll come over very early, won't you, to stay with the children? Oliver always starts before daybreak."
"Yes, darling, I'll get up at dawn and come over—but, Jinny, promise me to be careful."
"Oh, I'll be careful," responded Virginia lightly, as she went out on the porch.
"It's all horrid talk. There's not a word of truth in it," she thought, true to the Pendleton point of view, as she turned into Old Street on her way to the Treadwells'. Then the sound of horses' hoofs rang on the cobblestones, and, looking past the corner, she saw Oliver and Abby galloping under the wine-coloured leaves of the oak tree at the crossing. His face was turned back, as if he were looking over his shoulder at the red sunset, and he was laughing as she had not heard him laugh since that dreadful morning in the bedroom of the New York hotel. What a boy he was still! As she watched him, it seemed to her that she was old enough to be his mother, and the soreness in her heart changed into an exquisite impulse of tenderness. Then he looked from the sunset to Abby, and at the glance of innocent pleasure that passed between them a stab of jealousy entered her heart like a blade. Before it faded, they had passed the corner, and were cantering wildly up Old Street in the direction of Abby's home.
"It is my fault. I am too settled. I am letting my youth go," she said, with a passionate determination to catch her girlhood and hold it fast before it eluded her forever. "I am only twenty-eight and I dress like a woman of forty." And it seemed to her that the one desirable thing in life was this fleet-winged spirit of youth, which passed like a breath, leaving existence robbed of all romance and beauty. An hour before she had not cared, and she would not care now if only Oliver could grow middle-aged and old at the moment when she did. Ah, there was the tragedy! All life was for men, and only a few radiant years of it were given to women. Men were never too old to love, to pursue and capture whatever joy the fugitive instant might hold for them. But women, though they were allowed only one experience out of the whole of life, were asked to resign even that one at the very minute when they needed it most. "I wonder what will become of me when the children grow big enough to be away all the time as Oliver is," she thought wistfully. "I wish one never grew too old to have babies."
The front door of the Treadwell house stood open, and in the hall Susan was arranging golden-rod and life-ever-lasting in a blue china bowl.
"Of course, you may have Belle to-morrow," she said in answer to Virginia's faltering request. "Even if I intended going, I'd be only too glad to lend her to you—but I can't leave mother anyway. She always gets restless if I stay out over an hour."
Mrs. Treadwell's illness had become one of those painful facts which people accept as naturally as they accept the theological dogma of damnation. It was terrible, when they thought of it, but they seldom thought of it, thereby securing tranquillity of mind in the face of both facts and dogmas. Even Virginia had ceased to make her first question when she met Susan, "How is your mother?"
"But, Susan, you need the exercise. I thought that was why the doctor made Uncle Cyrus get you a horse."
"It was, but I only go for an hour in the afternoon. I begrudge every minute I spend away from mother. Oh, Jinny, she is so pathetic! It almost breaks my heart to watch her."
"I know, dearest," said Virginia; but at the back of her brain she was thinking, "They looked so happy together, yet he could never really admire Abby. She isn't at all the kind of woman he likes."
So preoccupied was she by this problem of her own creation, that her voice had a strangely far off sound, as though it came from a distance. "I wish I could help you, dear Susan. If you ever want me, day or night, you know you have only to send for me. I'd let nothing except desperate illness stand in the way of my coming."
It was true, and because she knew that it was true, Susan stooped suddenly and kissed her.
"You are looking tired, Jinny. What is the matter?"
"Nothing except that I'm a sight in this old waist. I made it over to save buying one, but I wish now I hadn't. It makes me look so settled."
"You need some clothes, and you used to be so fond of them."
"That was before the children came. I've never cared much since. It's just as if life were a completed circle, somehow. There's nothing more to expect or to wait for—you'll understand what I mean some day, Susan."
"I think I do now. But only women are like that? Men are different——"
It was the classic phrase again, but on Susan's lips it sounded with a new significance.
"And some women are different, too," replied Virginia. "Now there's Abby Goode—Susan, what do you honestly think of Abby?"
There was a wistful note in the question, and around her gentle blue eyes appeared a group of little lines, brought out by the nervous contraction of her forehead. Was it the wan, smoky light of the dusk?—Susan wondered, or was Virginia really beginning to break so soon?
"Why, I like Abby. I always did," she answered, trying to look as if she did not understand what Virginia had meant. "She's a little bit what John Henry calls 'loud,' but she has a good heart and would do anybody a kindness."
She had evaded answering, just as Virginia had evaded asking, the question which both knew had passed unuttered between them—was Abby to be trusted to keep inviolate the ancient unwritten pledge of honourable womanhood? Her character was being tested by the single decisive virtue exacted of her sex.
"I am glad you feel that way," said Virginia in a relieved manner after a minute, "because I should hate not to believe in Abby, and some people don't understand her manner—mother among them."
"Oh, she's all right. I'm sure of it," answered Susan, with heartiness.
The wistful sound had passed out of Virginia's voice, while the little lines faded as suddenly from the corners of her eyes. She looked better already—only she really ought not to wear such dowdy clothes, even though she was happily married, reflected Susan, as she watched her, a few minutes later, pass over the mulberry leaves, which lay, thick and still, on the sidewalk.
At the corner of Sycamore Street a shopkeeper was putting away his goods for the night, and in the window Virginia saw a length of hyacinth-blue silk, matching her eyes, which she had remotely coveted for weeks—never expecting to possess it, yet never quite reconciling herself to the thought that it might be worn by some other woman. That length of silk had grown gradually to symbolize the last glimmer of girlish vanity which motherhood had not extinguished in her heart; and while she looked at it now, in her new recklessness of mood, a temptation, born of the perversity which rules human fate, came to her to go in and buy it while she was still desperate enough to act foolishly and not be afraid. For the first time in her life that immemorial spirit of adventure which lies buried under the dead leaves of civilization at the bottom of every human heart—with whose re-arisen ghost men have moved mountains and ploughed jungles and charted illimitable seas—this imperishable spirit stirred restlessly in its grave and prompted her for once to be uncalculating and to risk the future. In the flickering motive which guided her as she entered the shop, one would hardly have recognized the lusty impulse which had sent her ancestors on splendid rambles of knight-errantry, yet its hidden source was the same. The simple purchase of twelve yards of blue silk which she had wanted for weeks! To an outsider it would have appeared a small matter, yet in the act there was the intrepid struggle of a personal will to enforce its desire upon destiny. She would win back the romance and the beauty of living at the cost of prudence, at the cost of practical comforts, at the cost, if need be, of those ideals of womanly duty to which the centuries had trained her! For eight years she had hardly thought of herself, for eight years she had worked and saved and planned and worried, for eight years she had given her life utterly and entirely to Oliver and the children—and the result was that he was happier with Abby—with Abby whom he didn't even admire—than he was with the wife whom he both respected and loved! The riddle not only puzzled, it enraged her. Though she was too simple to seek a psychological answer, the very fact that it existed became an immediate power in her life. She forgot the lateness of the evening, she forgot the children who were anxiously watching for her return. The forces of character, which she had always regarded as divinely fixed and established, melted and became suddenly fluid. She wasn't what she had been the minute before—she wasn't even, she began dimly to realize, what she would probably be the minute afterwards. Yet the impulse which governed her now was as despotic as if it had reigned in undisputed authority since the day of her birth. She knew that it was a rebel against the disciplined and moderate rule of her conscience, but this knowledge, which would have horrified her had she been in a normal mood, aroused in her now merely a breathless satisfaction at the spectacle of her own audacity. The natural Virginia had triumphed for an instant over the Virginia whom the ages had bred.
At home she found Oliver waiting for supper, and the three children in tears for fear she should decide to stay out forever.
"Oh, mother, we thought you'd gone away never to come back," sobbed Lucy, throwing herself into her arms, "and what would little Jenny have done?"
"Where in the world have you been, Virginia?" asked Oliver, a trifle impatiently, for he was not used to having her absent from the house at meal hours. "I was afraid somebody had been taken ill at the rectory, so I went around to inquire."
"No, nobody was ill," answered Virginia quietly. Though her resolution made her tremble all over, it did not occur to her for an instant that even now she might recede from it. As the rector had gone to the war, so she was going now to battle with Abby. She was afraid, but that quality which had made the Pendletons despise fear since the beginning of Dinwiddie's history, which they had helped to make, enabled her to control her quivering muscles and to laugh at the reproachful protests with which the children surrounded her. Through her mind there shot the thought: "I have a secret from Oliver," and she felt suddenly guilty because for the first time since her marriage she was keeping something back from him. Then, following this, there came the knowledge, piercing her heart, that she must keep her secret because even if she told him, he would not understand. With the casualness of a man's point of view towards an emotion, he would judge its importance, she felt, chiefly by the power it possessed of disturbing the course of his life. Unobservant, and ever ready to twist and decorate facts as she was, it had still been impossible for her to escape the truth that men are by nature incapable of a woman's characteristic passion for nursing sentiment. To struggle to keep a feeling alive for no better reason than that it was a feeling, would appear as wastefully extravagant to Oliver as to the unimaginative majority of his sex. Such pure, sublime, uncalculating folly belonged to woman alone!
When, at last, supper was over and the children were safely in bed, she came downstairs to Oliver, who was smoking a cigar over a newspaper, and asked carelessly:
"At what time do you start in the morning?"
"I'd like to be up by five," he replied, without lowering his paper. "We're to meet the hounds at Croswell's store at a quarter of six, so I'll have to get off by five at the latest. I wanted my horse fresh for to-morrow, that's why I only went a mile or two this afternoon," he added.
"Susan's to lend me Belle. I'm going with you," she said, after a pause in which he had begun to read his paper again. This habit of treating her as if she were not present when he wanted to read or to work, was, she remembered, one of the things she had insisted upon in the beginning of her marriage.
"By Jove!" he exclaimed, and the paper dropped from his hands. "I'm jolly glad, but what will you do about the children?"
"Mother is coming to look after them. I'll be back in time to hear Harry's lessons, I suppose."
"Why, of course; but, look here, you'll be awfully sore. You haven't ridden after the hounds since I knew you. You might even get a fall."
"I used to go, though, a great deal—and it won't hurt me to be stiff for a few days. Besides, I want to take up hunting again."
Her motive was beyond him—perhaps because of her nearness, which prevented his getting the proper perspective of vision. For all his keenness of insight, he failed utterly to see into the mysterious mind of his wife. He could not penetrate that subtle interplay of traditional virtues and discover that she was in the clutch of one of the oldest and most savage of the passions.
"Then you'd better go to bed early and get some sleep," he said. "I suppose we'll have a cup of coffee before starting."
"I'll make it on the oil stove while I am dressing. Marthy won't be up then."
"Well, I'll come upstairs in ten minutes," he replied, taking up his paper again. "I only want to finish this article."
In the morning when she opened the old green shutters and looked out of the window, the horses, having been saddled by candlelight, were standing under the mulberry tree at the gate. Eight years ago, in her girlhood, she would have awakened in a delicious excitement on the morning of a fox-hunt, and have dressed as eagerly as if she were going to a ball; but to-day, while she lit the oil-stove in the hall room and put on the kettle of water, she was supported not by the hope of pleasure, but by a dull, an almost indefinable sensation of dread. The instinct of woman to adjust her personality to the changing ideals of the man she loves—this instinct older than civilization, rooted in tragedy, and existing by right of an unconquerable necessity—rose superior at the moment to that more stable maternal passion with which it has conflicted since the beginning of motherhood. While she put on her riding-habit and tied up the plait of her hair, the one thought in Virginia's mind was that she must be, at all costs, the kind of woman that Oliver wanted.
A little later, when they set out under the mulberry trees, she glanced at him wistfully, as though she wanted him to praise the way she looked in the saddle. But his eyes were on the end of the street, where a little company of riders awaited them, and before she could ask a question, Abby's high voice was heard exclaiming pleasantly upon her presence. Not a particularly imposing figure, because of her rather short legs, when she was on the ground, it was impossible for Virginia to deny that Abby was amazingly handsome on horseback. Plump, dark, with a superb bosom, and a colour in her cheeks like autumnal berries, she had never appeared to better advantage than she did, sitting on her spirited bay mare under an arch of scarlet leaves which curved over her head. Turning at their approach, she started at a brisk canter up the road, and as Virginia followed her, the sound of the horn floated, now loud, now faint, out of the pale mist that spun fanciful silken webs over the trees and bushes.
"Remember to look out for the creeks. That's where the danger comes," said Oliver, riding close to her, and he added nervously, "Don't try to keep up with Abby."
Ahead of them stretched a deserted Virginia road, with its look of brooding loneliness, as if it had waited patiently through the centuries for a civilization which had never come; and on the right of it, beyond a waste of scarlet sumach and sassafras and a winding creek screened in elder bushes, the dawn was breaking slowly under a single golden-edged cloud. Somebody on Virginia's left—a large, raw-boned, passionate huntsman, in an old plum-coloured overcoat with a velvet collar—was complaining loudly that they had started too late and the fox would have gone to his lair before they reached the main party. Except for an oath, which he rapped out by way of an emphasis not intended for the ladies, he might have been conducting a religious revival, so solemnly energetic, so deeply moved, was his manner. The hunt, which observed naturally the characteristics of a society that was ardently individualistic even in its sports, was one of those informal, "go-as-you-please" affairs in which the supreme joy of killing is not hampered by tedious regulations or unnecessary restrictions. The chief thing was to get a run—to start a rare red fox, if luck was good, because he was supposed to run straight by nature and not to move in circles after the inconsiderate manner of the commoner grey sort. But Providence, being inattentive to the needs of hunters in the neighbourhood of Dinwiddie, had decreed that the red fox should live there mainly in the vivid annals of old sportsmen.
"A grey fox with red ears. The best run I ever had. Tried to get in the crotch of a hickory tree at the end. Was so exhausted he couldn't stir a foot when the hounds got him." While they waited at the crossroads before a little country store, where the pack of hounds, lean, cringing, habitually hungry creatures, started from beneath an old field pine on the right, Virginia heard the broken phrases blown on the wind, which carried the joyous notes of the horn over the meadows. The casual cruelty of the words awoke no protest in her mind, because it was a cruelty to which she was accustomed. If the sport had been unknown in Dinwiddie, and she had read of it as the peculiar activity of the inhabitants of the British Islands, she would probably have condemned it as needlessly brutal and degrading. But with that universal faculty of the human mind to adjust its morality to fit its inherited physical habits, she regarded "the rights of the fox" to-day with something of the humorous scorn of sentimental rubbish with which her gentler grandmother had once regarded "the rights of the slave." For centuries the hunt had been one of the cherished customs of Dinwiddians; and though she could not bear to see a fly caught in a web, it would never have occurred to her to question the humanity of any sport in which her ancestors had delighted. In her girlhood the sound of the horn had called to her blood with all the intoxicating associations it awoke in the raw-boned, energetic rider in the plum-coloured coat—but to-day both the horn and the familiar landscape around her had grown strange and unhomelike. For the first time since her birth she and the country were out of harmony.
In the midst of the hounds, in the centre of the old field on the right, the huntsman, who was at the same time master and owner of the dogs, brandished a long raw-hide whip, flexible from the handle, which was pleasantly known in Dinwiddie as a "mule-skinner." His face, burned to the colour of ripe wheat, wore a rapt and exalted look, as though the chasing of a small animal to its death had called forth his latent spiritual ardours. Beyond him, like a low, smouldering fire, ran the red and gold of the abandoned field.
"Please be careful, Virginia," said Oliver again, as they left the road and cantered in the direction of a clump of pine woods in a hollow beyond a rotting "snake" fence.
But she had seen his eyes on Abby a minute before, and had heard his laugh as he answered her. A wave of recklessness broke over her, and she felt that she despised fear with all her Pendleton blood, which loved a fight only less passionately than it loved a sermon. Whatever happened—if she broke her neck—she resolved that she would keep up with Abby! With the drumming of the blood in her ears, an almost savage joy awoke in her. Deep down in her, so deep that it was buried beneath the Virginia Pendleton whom she and her world knew, there stirred faintly the seeds of that ancient lust of cruelty from which have sprung the brutal pleasures of men. The part of her—that small secret part—which was primitive answered to the impulse of jealousy as it did to the rapturous baying of the hounds out of the red and gold distance. A branch grazed her cheek; her hat went as she raced down the high banks of a stream; the thicket of elder tore the ribbon from her head, and loosened her dark flying hair from its braid. In that desolate country, in the midst of the October meadows, with the cries of the hounds rising, like the voice of mortal tragedy, out of the tinted mist on the marshes, the drama of human passions—which is the only drama for the world's stage—was played out to an ending: love, jealousy, envy, desire, desperation, regret—
But when the hunt was over, and she rode home, with a bedraggled brush, which had once been grey, tied to her bridle, all the gorgeous pageantry of the autumnal landscape seemed suddenly asking her: "What is the use?" Her mood had altered, and she felt that her victory was as worthless as the mud-stained fox's brush that swung mockingly back and forth from her bridle. The excitement of the chase had ebbed away, leaving only the lifeless satisfaction of the reward. She had neglected her children, she had risked her life—and all for the sake of wresting a bit of dead fur out of Abby's grasp. A spirit which was not her spirit, which was so old that she no longer recognized that it had any part in her, which was yet so young that it burned in her heart with the unquenchable flame of youth—this spirit, which was at the same time herself and not herself, had driven her, as helpless as a fallen leaf, in a chase that she despised, towards a triumph that was worthless.
"By Jove, you rode superbly, Virginia! I had no idea you could do it," said Oliver, as they trotted into Dinwiddie.
She smiled back at him, and her smile was tired, dust-stained, enigmatical.
"No, you did not know that I could do it," she answered.
"You'll keep it up now, won't you?" he asked pleadingly.
For an instant, looking away from him over the radiant fields, she pondered the question. The silence which had settled around her was unbroken by the sound of the horses' hoofs, by the laughter of the hunters, by the far-off soughing of the pine trees in the forest; and into this silence, which seemed to cover an eternity, the two Virginias—the Virginia who desired and the Virginia who had learned from the ages to stifle her desire—wrestled for the first time together.
"Virginia!" floated Abby's breezy tones from the street behind her, and turning, she rode back to the Goodes' gate, where the others were dismounting. "Virginia, aren't you going to Atlantic City with us to-morrow?"
Again she hesitated. Almost unconsciously her gaze passed from Abby to Oliver, and she saw his pride in her in the smile with which he watched her.
"Yes, I'll go with you," she replied after a minute.
She had, for once in her life, done the thing she wanted to do simply because she wanted to do it. She had won back what she was losing; she had fought a fair fight and she had triumphed; yet as she rode down the street to her gate, there was none of the exultation of victory, none of the fugitive excitement of pleasure even in her heart. Like other mortals in other triumphant instants, she was learning that the fruit of desire may be sweet to the eyes and bitter on the lips. She had sacrificed duty to pleasure, and suddenly she had discovered that to one with her heritage of good and evil the two are inseparable.
In the night Harry awoke crying. He had dreamed, he said between his sobs, when Virginia, slipperless and in her nightdress, bent over him, that his mother was going away from him forever.
"Only for two nights, darling. Here, lean close against mother. Don't you know that she wouldn't stay away from her precious boy?"
"But two nights are so long. Aren't two nights almost forever?"
"Why, my lamb, it was just two nights ago that grandma came over and told you the Bible story about Joseph and his brothers. That was only a teeny-weeny time ago, wasn't it?"
"But you were here, then mamma. And this morning was almost forever. You stayed out so long that Lucy said you weren't coming back any more."
"That was naughty of Lucy because she is old enough to know better. Why do you choke that way? Does your throat hurt you?"
"It hurts because you are going away, mamma."
"But I'm going only to be with papa, precious. Don't you want poor papa to have somebody with him?"
"He's so big he can go by himself. But suppose the black man should come in the night while you are away, and I'd get scared and nobody would hear me."
"Grandma would hear you, Harry, and there isn't any black man that comes in the night. You must put that idea out of your head, dear. You're getting too big a boy to be afraid of the dark."
"Four isn't big, is it?"
"You're nearer five than four now, honey. Let me button your nightgown, and lie down and try to go to sleep while mamma sings to you. Does your throat really hurt you?"
"It feels as if it had teensy-weensy marbles in it. They came there when I woke up in the dark and thought that you were going away to-morrow."
"Well, if your throat hurts you, of course mamma won't leave you. Open your mouth wide now so I can look at it."
She lighted a candle while Harry, kneeling in the middle of his little bed, followed her with his blue eyes, which looked three times their usual size because of his flushed cheeks and his mounting excitement. His throat appeared slightly inflamed when she held the candle close to it, and after tucking him beneath the bed-clothes, she poured a little camphorated oil into a cup and heated it on the small alcohol lamp she kept in the nursery.
"Mamma is going to put a nice bandage on your throat, and then she is going to lie down beside you and sing you to sleep," she said cheerfully, as she cut off a strip of flannel from an old petticoat and prepared to saturate it with the heated oil.
"Will you stay here all night?"
"All night, precious, if you'll be good and go fast asleep while I am singing."
Holding tightly to her nightdress, Harry cuddled down between the pillows with a contented sigh. "Then I don't mind about the marbles in my throat," he said.
"But mamma minds, and she wants to cure them before morning. Now lie very still while she wraps this good flannel bandage over the sore places."
"I'll lie very still if you'll hold me, mamma."
Blowing out the candle, she crept into the little bed beside him, and lay singing softly until his hands released their desperate grasp of her nightdress, and he slipped quietly off to sleep. Even then, remembering her promise, she did not go back to her bedroom until daylight.
"I wonder what makes Harry so afraid of the dark?" she asked, when Oliver awoke and turned questioningly towards her. "He worked himself really sick last night just from pure nervousness. I had to put camphorated oil on his throat and chest, and lie beside him until morning. He is sleeping quietly now, but it simply frightens me to death when one of them complains of sore throat."
"You've spoiled him, that's what's the matter," replied Oliver, yawning. "As long as you humour him, he'll never outgrow these night terrors."
"But how can you tell whether the fright makes him sick or sickness brings on the fright? His throat was really red, there's no doubt about that, but I couldn't see last night that it was at all ulcerated."
"He gives you more trouble than both the other children put together."
"Well, he's a boy, and boys do give one more trouble. But, then, you have less patience with him, Oliver."
"That's because he's a boy, and I like boys to show some pluck even when they are babies. Lucy and Jenny never raise these midnight rows whenever they awake in the dark."
"They are not nearly so sensitive. You don't understand Harry."
"Perhaps I don't, but I can see that you are ruining him."
"Oh, Oliver! How can you say such a cruel thing to me?"
"I didn't mean to be cruel, Jinny, and you know it, but all the same it makes me positively sick to see you make a slave of yourself over the children. Why, you look as if you hadn't slept for a week. You are positively haggard."
"But I have to be up with Harry when he is ill. How in the world could I help it?"
"You know he kicks up these rows almost every night, and you humour every one of his whims as if it were the first one. Don't you ever get tired?"
"Of course I do, but I can't let my child suffer even if it is only from fear. You haven't any patience, Oliver. Don't you remember the time when you used to be afraid of things?"
"I was never afraid of the dark in my life. No sensible child is, if he is brought up properly."
"Do you mean I am not bringing up my children——" Her tears choked her and she could not finish the sentence.
"I don't mean anything except that you are making an old woman of yourself before your time. You've let yourself go until you look ten years older than——"
He checked himself in time, but she understood without his words that he had started to say, "ten years older than Abby." Yes, Abby did look young—amazingly young—but, then, what else had she to think of?
She lay down, but she was trembling so violently that she sat up quickly again in order to recover her self-possession more easily. It seemed to her that the furious beating of her heart must make him understand how he had wounded her. It was the first discussion approaching a quarrel they had had since their marriage, for she, who was so pliable in all other matters, had discovered that she could become as hard as iron where the difference related to Harry.
"You are unjust, Oliver. I think you ought to see it," she said in a voice which she kept by an effort from breaking.
"I'll never see it, Jinny," and some dogged impulse to hurt her more made him add, "It's for Harry's sake as well as yours that I'm speaking."
"For Harry's sake? Oh, you don't mean—you can't really mean that you think I'm not doing the best for my child, Oliver?"
A year ago Oliver would have surrendered at once before the terror in her eyes; but in those twelve long months of effort, of hope, of balked ambition, of bitter questioning, and of tragic disillusionment, a new quality had developed in his character, and the generous sympathy of youth had hardened at thirty-four to the cautious cynicism of middle-age. It is doubtful if even he himself realized how transient such a state must be to a nature whose hidden springs were moved so easily by the mere action of change—by the effect of any alteration in the objects that surrounded him. Because the enthusiasm of youth was exhausted at the minute, it seemed to him that he had lost it forever. And to Virginia, who saw but one thing at a time and to whom that one thing was always the present instant, it seemed that the firm ground upon which she trod had crumbled beneath her.
"Well, if you want the truth," he said quietly (as if any mother ever wanted the truth about such a matter), "I think you make a mistake to spoil Harry as you do."
"But," she brought out the words with a pathetic quiver, "I treat him just as I do the others, and you never say anything about my spoiling them."
"Oh, the others are girls. Girls aren't so easily ruined somehow. They don't get such hard knocks later on, so it makes less difference about them."
As she sat there in bed, propped up on her elbow, which trembled violently against the pillows, with her cambric nightdress, trimmed only with a narrow band of crocheted lace, opened at her slender throat, and her hair, which was getting thin at the temples, drawn unbecomingly back from her forehead, she looked, indeed, as Oliver had thought, "at least ten years older than Abby." Though she was not yet thirty, the delicate, flower-like bloom of her beauty was already beginning to fade. The spirit which had animated her yesterday appeared to have gone out of her now. He thought how lovely she had been at twenty when he saw her for the first time after his return to Dinwiddie; and a sudden anger seized him because she was letting herself break, because she was so needlessly sacrificing her youth and her beauty.
An hour later she got up and dressed herself, with the feeling that she had not rested a minute during the night. Harry was listless and fretful when he awoke, and while she put on his clothes, she debated with herself whether or not she should summon old Doctor Fraser from around the corner. When his lesson hour came, he climbed into her lap and went to sleep with his hot little head on her shoulder, and though he seemed better by evening, she was still so anxious about him that she forgot that she had promised Abby to go with them to Atlantic City until Oliver came in at dusk and reminded her.
"Aren't you going, Virginia?" he inquired, as he hunted in the closet for his bag which she had not had time to pack.
"I can't, Oliver. Harry isn't well. He has been unlike himself all day, and I am afraid to leave him."
"He looks all right," he remarked, bending over the child in Virginia's lap. "Does anything hurt you, Harry?"
"He doesn't seem to know exactly what it is," answered Virginia, "but if he isn't well by morning, I'll send for Doctor Fraser."
"He's got a good colour, and I believe he's as well as he ever was," replied Oliver, while a curious note of hostility sounded in his voice. "There's nothing the matter with the boy," he added more positively after a minute. "Aren't you coming, Virginia?"
She looked up at him from the big rocking-chair in which she sat with Harry in her arms, and as she did so, both became conscious that the issue had broadened from a question of her going to Atlantic City into a direct conflict of wills. The only thing that could make her oppose him had happened for the first time since her marriage. The feminine impulse to yield was overmatched by the maternal impulse to protect. She would have surrendered her soul to him for the asking; but she could not surrender, even had she desired to do so, the mother love which had passed into her from out the ages before she had been, and which would pass through her into the ages to come after her.
"Of course, if the little chap were really suffering, I'd be as anxious about staying as you are," said Oliver impatiently; "but there's nothing the matter. You're all right, aren't you, Harry?"
"Yes, I'm all right," repeated Harry, yawning and snuggling closer to Virginia, "but I'm sleepy."
"He isn't all right," insisted Virginia obstinately. "There's something wrong with him. I don't know what it is, but he isn't in the least like himself."
"It's just your imagination. You've got the children on the brain, Virginia. Don't you remember the time you woke me in the night and sent me after Doctor Fraser because Jenny had a bad attack of the hiccoughs?"
"I know," acknowledged Virginia humbly. She could be humble enough, but what good did that do when she was, as he told himself irritably, "as stubborn as a mule"? Her softness—she had seemed as soft as flowers when he married her—had been her greatest charm for him after her beauty; and now, at the end of eight years in which she had appeared as delightfully invertebrate as he could have desired, she revealed to his astonished eyes a backbone that was evidently made of iron. She was immovable, he admitted, and because she was immovable he was conscious of a sharp unreasonable impulse to reduce her to the pliant curves of her girlhood. After eight years of an absolute supremacy, which had been far from good for him, his will had been tripped up at last by so small a thing as a mere whim of Virginia's.
"You told Abby you would go," he urged, exasperated rather than soothed by her humility. "And it's too late now for her to ask any one else."
"I'm so sorry, dear, but I never once thought about it. I've been so worried all day."
He looked at the child, lying flushed and drowsy in Virginia's arms, and his face hardened until a latent brutality crept out around his handsome, but loosely moulded, lips. The truth was that Harry had never looked healthier than he did at that instant in the firelight, and the whole affair appeared to Oliver only another instance of what he called Virginia's "sensational motherhood."
"Can't you see for yourself that he's perfectly well?" he asked.
"I know he looks so, dear, but he isn't."
"Well, here's your mother. Leave it to her. She will agree with me."
"Why, what is it, Jinny?" asked Mrs. Pendleton, laying her bundle on the couch (for she had come prepared to spend the night), and regarding Oliver with the indulgent eyes of an older generation.
"Virginia says at the last minute that she won't go with us," said Oliver, angry, yet caressing as he always was in his manner to his mother-in-law, to whom he was sincerely devoted. "She's got into her head that there's something wrong with Harry, but you can tell by looking at the child that he is perfectly well."
"But I was up with him last night, mother. His throat hurts him," broke in Virginia in a voice that was full of emotion.
"He certainly looks all right," remarked Mrs. Pendleton, "and I can take care of him if anything should be wrong." Then she added very gravely, "If you can't go, of course Oliver must stay at home, too, Virginia."
"I can't," said Oliver; "not just for a whim, anyway. It would break up the party. Besides, I didn't get a holiday all summer, and I'll blow up that confounded bank unless I take a change."
In the last quarter of an hour the trip had become of tremendous importance to him. From a trivial incident which he might have relinquished a week ago without regret, the excursion with Abby had attained suddenly the dignity and the power of an event in his life. Opposition had magnified inclination into desire.
"I don't think it will do for Oliver to go without you, Jinny," said Mrs. Pendleton, and the gravity of her face showed how carefully she was weighing her words.
"But I can't go, mother. You don't understand," replied Virginia, while her lips worked convulsively. No one could understand—not even her mother. Of the three of them, it is probable that she alone realized the complete significance of her decision.
"Well, it's too late now, anyway," remarked Oliver shortly. "You wouldn't have time to dress and catch the train even if you wanted to."
Taking up his bag, he kissed her carelessly, shook hands with Mrs. Pendleton, and throwing a "Good-bye, General!" to Harry, went out of the door.
As he vanished, Virginia started up quickly, called "Oliver!" under her breath, and then sat down again, drawing her child closer in her arms. Her face had grown grey and stricken like the face of an old woman. Every atom of her quivered with the longing to run after him, to yield to his wish, to promise anything he asked of her. Yet she knew that if he came back, they would only pass again through the old wearing struggle of wills. She had chosen not as she desired to, but as she must, and already she was learning that life forces one in the end to abide by one's choices.
"Oh, Virginia, I am afraid it was a mistake," said Mrs. Pendleton in an agonized tone. The horror of a scandal, which was stronger in the women of her generation than even the horror of illness, still darkened her mind.
A shiver passed through Virginia and left her stiller and graver than before.
"No, it was not a mistake, mother," she answered quietly. "I did what I was obliged to do. Oliver could not understand."
As she uttered the words, she saw Oliver's face turned to Abby with the gay and laughing expression she had seen on it when the two rode down Old Street together, and a wave of passionate jealousy swept over her. She had let him go alone; he was angry with her; and for three days he would be with Abby almost every minute. And suddenly, she heard spoken by a mocking voice at the back of her brain: "You look at least ten years older than Abby."
"It does seem as if he might have stayed at home," remarked Mrs. Pendleton; "but he is so used to having his own way that it is harder for him to give it up than for the rest of us. Your father says you have spoiled him."
She had spoiled him—this she saw clearly now, she who had never seen anything clearly until it was too late for sentimentality to work its harm. From the day of her marriage she had spoiled him because spoiling him had been for her own happiness as well as for his. She had yielded to him since her chief desire had been simply to yield and to satisfy. Her unselfishness had been merely selfishness cloaked in the familiar aspect of duty. Another vision of him, not as he looked when he was riding with Abby, but as he had appeared to her in the early days of their marriage, floated before her. He had been hers utterly then—hers with his generous impulses, his high ideals, his undisciplined emotions. And what had she done with him? What were her good intentions—what was her love, even, worth—when her intentions and her love alike had been so lacking in wisdom? It was as if she condemned herself with a judgment which was not her own, as if her life-long habit of seeing only the present instant had suddenly deserted her.
"He has been so nervous and unlike himself ever since the failure of his play, mother," she said. "It's hard to understand, but it meant more to him than a woman can realize."
"I suppose so," returned Mrs. Pendleton sympathetically. "Your father says that he spoke to him bitterly the other day about being a failure. Of course, he isn't one in the least, darling," she added reassuringly.
"I sometimes think that Oliver's ambition was the greatest thing in his life," said Virginia musingly. "It meant to him, I believe, a great deal of what the children mean to me. He felt that it was himself, and yet in a way closer than himself. Until that dreadful time in New York I never understood what his work may mean to a man."
"I wish you could have gone with him, Jinny."
"I couldn't," replied Virginia, as she had replied so often before. "I know Harry doesn't look sick," she went on with that soft obstinacy which never attacked and yet never yielded a point, "but something tells me that he isn't well."
An hour later, when she put him to bed, he looked so gay and rosy that she almost allowed herself the weakness of a regret. Suppose nothing was wrong, after all? Suppose, as Oliver had said, she was merely "sensational"? While she undressed in the dark for fear of awaking Jenny, who was sleeping soundly in her crib on Virginia's side of the bed, her mind went back over the two harrowing days through which she had just lived, and she asked herself, not if she had triumphed for good over Abby, but if she had really done what was right both for Oliver and the children. After all, the whole of life came back simply to doing the thing that was right. So unused was she to the kind of introspection which weighs emotions as if they were facts, that she thought slowly, from sheer lack of practice in the subtler processes of reasoning. Worry, the plain, ordinary sort of worry with which she was unhappily familiar, had not prepared her for the piercing anguish which follows the probing of the open wounds in one's soul. To lie sleepless over butchers' bills was different, somehow, from lying sleepless over the possible loss of Oliver's love. It was different, and yet, just as she had asked herself over and over again on those other nights if she had done right to run up so large an account at Mr. Dewlap's, so she questioned her conscience now in the hope of finding justification for Oliver. "Ought I to have gone on the hunt yesterday?" she asked kneeling, with sore and aching limbs, by the bedside. "Had I a right to risk my life when the children are so young that they need me every minute? It is true nothing happened. Providence watched over me; but, then, something might have happened, and I could have blamed only myself. I was jealous—for the first time in my life, I was jealous—and because I was jealous, I did wrong and neglected my duty. Yesterday I sacrificed the children to Oliver, and to-day I sacrificed Oliver to the children. I love Oliver as much, but I have made the children. They came only because I brought them into the world. I am responsible for them—I am responsible for them," she repeated passionately; and a moment later, she prayed softly: "O Lord, help me to want to do what is right."
Through the night, tired and sore as she was, she hardly closed her eyes, and she was lying wide awake, with her hand on the railing of Jenny's crib, and her gaze on the half-bared bough of the old mulberry tree in the street, when a cry, or less than a cry, a small, choking whimper, from the nursery, caused her to spring out of bed with a start and slip into her wrapper which lay across the edge of the quilt.
"I'm coming, darling," she called softly, and the answer came back in Harry's voice: "Mamma, I'm afraid!"
Without waiting to put on her slippers, for one of them had slid under the bed, she ran across the carpet and through the doorway into the adjoining room.
"What is it, my lamb? Does anything hurt you?" she asked anxiously.
"I'm afraid, mamma."
"What are you afraid of? Mamma is here, precious."
His little hands were hot when she clasped them, and the pathetic wonder in his blue eyes made her heart stand still with a fear greater than Harry's. Ever since the children had come she had lived in terror of a serious illness attacking them.
"Where does it hurt you, darling? Can't you tell me?"
"It feels so funny when I swallow, mamma. It's all full of flannel."
"Will you open your mouth wide, then, and let mamma mop your throat with turpentine?"
But Harry hated turpentine even more than he hated the sore throat, and he protested with tears while she found the bottle in the bathroom and swathed the end of the wire mop in cotton. When she brought it to his bedside, he fought so strenuously that she was obliged at last to give up. His fever had excited him, and he sobbed violently while she applied the bandages to his throat and chest.
"Is it any better, dear?" she asked desperately at the end of an hour in which he had lain, weeping and angry, in her arms.
"It feels funny. I don't like it," he sobbed, pushing her from him.
"Then I'll send for Doctor Fraser. He'll make you well."
But he didn't want Doctor Fraser, who gave the meanest medicines. He didn't want anybody. He hated everybody. He hated Lucy. He hated Jenny. When at last day came, and Marthy appeared to know what Virginia wanted for breakfast, he was still vowing passionately that he hated them all.
"Marthy, run at once for Doctor Fraser. Harry is quite sick," said Virginia, pale to the lips.
"But I won't see him, mamma, and I won't take his medicines. They are the meanest medicines."
"Perhaps he won't give you any, precious, and if he does, mamma will taste every single one for you."
Then Jenny began to beg to get up, and Lucy, who had been watching with dispassionate curiosity from the edge of her little bed, was sent to amuse her until Marthy's return.
"Suppose I had gone!" thought Virginia, while an overwhelming thankfulness swept the anxiety out of her mind. Not until the servant reappeared, dragging the fat old doctor after her, did Virginia remember that she was still barefooted, and go into her bedroom to search for her slippers.
"You don't think he is seriously sick, do you, doctor? Is there any need to be alarmed?" she asked, and her voice entreated him to allay her anxiety.
The doctor, a benevolent soul in a body which had run to fat from lack of exercise, was engaged in holding Harry's tongue down with a silver spoon, while, in spite of the child's furious protests, he leisurely examined his throat. When the operation was over, and Harry, crying, choking, and kicking, rolled into Virginia's arms, she put the question again, vaguely rebelling against the gravity in the kind old face which was turned half away from her:
"There's nothing really the matter, is there, doctor?"
He turned to her, and laid a caressing, if heavy, hand on her shoulder, which shook suddenly under the thin folds of her dressing-gown. After forty years in which he had watched suffering and death, he preserved still his native repugnance to contact with any side of life that did not have a comfortable feeling to it.
"Oh, we'll get him all right soon, with some good nursing," he said gently, "but I think we're going to have a bit of an illness on our hands."
"But not serious, doctor? It isn't anything serious?"
She felt suddenly so weak that she could hardly stand, and instinctively she reached out to grasp the large, protecting arm of the physician. Even then his bland professional smile, which had in it something of the serene detachment of the everlasting purpose of which it was a part, did not fade, hardly changed even, on his features.
"Well, I think we'd better get the other children away. It might be serious if they all had it on our hands."
"Had it? Had what? Oh, doctor—not—diphtheria?"
She brought out the word with a face of such unutterable horror that he turned his eyes away, lest the memory of her look should interfere with his treatment of the next case he visited. There was something infernal in the sound of the thing which always knocked over the mothers of his generation. He had never seen one of them who could hear it without going to pieces on his hands; and for that reason he never mentioned the disease by name unless they drove him to it. They feared it as they might have feared the plague—and even more! If the medical profession would begin calling it something else, he wondered if the unmitigated terror of it wouldn't partially subside?
"Well, it looks like that now, Jinny," he said soothingly; "but we'll come out all right, never fear. It isn't a bad case, you know, and the chief thing is to get the other children out of danger."
At this she went over like a log on the bed, and it was only after he had found the bottle of camphor on the mantelpiece and held it to her nostrils, that she revived sufficiently to sit up again. But as soon as her strength came back, her courage surprised and rejoiced him. After that one sign of weakness, she became suddenly strong, and he knew by the expression of her face, for he had had great experience with mothers, that he could count on her not to break down again while he needed her.
"I'd like to get a tent made of some sheets and keep a kettle boiling under it," he said, for he was an old man and belonged to the dark ages of medicine. "But first of all I'll get the children over to your mother's. They'd better not come in here again. I'll ask the servant to attend to them."
"You'll find her in the dining-room," replied Virginia, while she straightened Harry's bed and made him more comfortable. The weakness had passed, leaving a numbed and hardened feeling as though she had turned to wood; and when, a little later, she looked out of the door to wave good-bye to Lucy and Jenny, she was amazed to find that she felt almost indifferent. Every emotion, even her capacity for physical sensation, seemed to respond to the immediate need of her, to the exhaustless demands on her bodily strength and her courage. As long as there was anything to be done, she was sure now that she should be able to keep up and not lose control of herself.
"May we come back soon, mamma?" asked Lucy, standing on tiptoe to wave at her.
"Just as soon as Harry is well, darling. Ask grandpa to pray that he will be well soon, won't you?"
"Jenny'll pay," lisped the baby, from Doctor Fraser's arms, where, with her cap on one side and her little feet kicking delightedly, she was beguiled by the promise of a birthday cake over at grandma's.
"I'll look in again in an hour or two," said the doctor in his jovial tones as he swung down the stairs. Then Lucy pattered after him, and in a few minutes the front door closed loudly behind them, and Virginia went back to the nursery, where Harry was coughing the strangling cough that tore at her heart.
By nightfall he had grown very ill, and when the next dawn came, it found her, wan, haggard, and sleepless, fighting beside the old doctor under the improvised tent of sheets which covered the little bed. The thought of self went from her so utterly that she only remembered she was alive when Marthy brought food and tried to force it between her lips.
"But you must swallow it, ma'am. You need to keep up your strength."
"How do you think he looks, Marthy? Does he feel quite so hot to you? He seems to breathe a little better, doesn't he?"
And during the long day, while the patch of sunlight grew larger, lay for an hour like yellow silk on the windowsill, and then slowly dwindled into the shadow, she sat, without moving, between the bed and the table on which stood the bottles of medicine, a glass, and a pitcher of water. When the child slept, overcome by the stupor of fever, she watched him, with drawn breath, lest he should fade away from her if she were to withdraw her passionate gaze for an instant. When he awoke and lay moaning, while his little body shook with the long stifling gasps that struggled between his lips, she held him tightly clasped in her arms, with a woman's pathetic faith in the power of a physical pressure to withstand the immaterial forces of death. A hundred times during the day he aroused himself, stirred faintly in his feverish sleep, and called her name in the voice of terror with which he used to summon her in the night.
"It isn't the black man now, darling, is it? Remember there is no black man, and mamma is close here beside you."
No, it wasn't the black man; he wasn't afraid of the darkness now, but he would like to have his ship. When she brought it, he played for a few minutes, and dozed off still grasping the toy in his hands. At twelve the doctor came, and again at four, when the patch of sunlight, by which she told the hours, had begun to grow fainter on the windowsill.
"He is better, doctor, isn't he? Don't you notice that he struggles less when he breathes?"
He looked at her with an expression of contemplative pity in his old watery eyes, and she gave a little cry and stretched out her hands, blindly groping.
"Doctor, I'll do anything—anything, if you'll only save him." An impulse to reach beyond him to some impersonal, cosmic Power greater than he was, made her add desperately: "I'll never ask for anything else in my life. I'll give up everything, if you'll only promise me that you will save him."
She stood up, drawing her thin figure, as tense as a cord, to its full height, and beneath the flowered blue dressing-gown her shoulder blades showed sharply under their fragile covering of flesh. Her hair, which she had not undone since the first shock of Harry's illness, hung in straight folds on either side of her pallid and haggard face. Even the colour of her eyes seemed to have changed, for their flower-like blue had faded to a dull grey.
"If we can pull through the night, Jinny," he said huskily, and added almost sternly, "you must bear up, so much depends on you. Remember, it is your first serious illness, but it may not be your last. You've got to take the pang of motherhood along with the pleasure, my dear——"
The pang of motherhood! Long after he had left her, and she had heard the street gate click behind him, she sat motionless, repeating the words, by Harry's little bed. The pang of motherhood—this was what she was suffering—the poignant suspense, the quivering waiting, the abject terror of loss, the unutterable anguish of the nerves, as if one's heart were being slowly torn out of one's body. She had had the joy, and now she was enduring the inevitable pang which is bound up, like a hidden pulse, in every mortal delight. Never pleasure without pain, never growth without decay, never life without death. The Law ruled even in love, and all the pitiful little sacrifices which one offered to Omnipotence, which one offered blindly to the Power that might separate, with a flaming sword, the cause from the effect, the substance from the shadow—what of them? While Harry lay there, wrapped in that burning stupor, she prayed, not as she had been taught to pray in her childhood, not with the humble and resigned worship of civilization, but in the wild and threatening lament of a savage who seeks to reach the ears of an implacable deity. In the last twenty-four hours the Unknown Power she entreated had changed, in her imagination, to an idol who responded only to the shedding of blood.
"Only spare my child and I will give up everything else!" she cried from the extremity of her anguish. The sharp edge of the bed hurt her bosom and she pressed frantically against it. Had it been possible to lacerate her body, to cut her flesh with knives, she might have found some pitiable comfort in the mere physical pain. Beside the agony in her mind, a pang of the flesh would have been almost a joy.
When at last she rose from her knees, Harry lay, breathing quietly, with his eyes closed and the toy ship on the blanket beside him. His childish features had shrunken in a day until they appeared only half their natural size, and a faint bluish tinge had crept over his face, wiping out all the sweet rosy colour. But he had swallowed a few spoonfuls of his last cup of broth, and the painful choking sound had ceased for a minute. The change, slight as it was, had followed so closely upon her prayers, that, while it lasted, she passed through one of those spiritual crises which alter the whole aspect of life. An emotion, which was a curious mixture of superstitious terror and religious faith, swept over her, reviving and invigorating her heart. She had abased herself in the dust before God—she had offered all her life to Him if He would spare her child—and had He not answered? Might not Harry's illness, indeed, have been sent to punish her for her neglect? A shudder of abhorrence passed through her as she remembered the fox-hunt, and her passion of jealousy. The roll of blue silk, lying upstairs in a closet in the third storey, appeared to her now not as a temptation to vanity, but as a reminder of the mortal sin which had almost cost her the life of her child. And suppose God had not stopped her in time—suppose she had gone to Atlantic City as Oliver had begged her to do?
In the room the light faded softly, melting first like frost from the mirror in the corner beyond the Japanese screen, creeping slowly across the marble surface of the washstand, lingering, in little ripples, on the green sash of the windowsill. Out of doors it was still day, and from where she sat by Harry's bed, she could see, under the raised tent, every detail of the street standing out distinctly in the grey twilight. Across the way the houses were beginning to show lights at the windows, and the old lamplighter was balancing himself unsteadily on his ladder at the corner. On the mulberry tree near the crossing the broad bronze leaves swung back and forth in the wind, which sighed restlessly around the house and drove the naked tendrils of a summer vine against the green shutters at the window. The fire had gone down, and after she had made it up very softly, she bent over Harry again, as if she feared that he might have slipped out of her grasp while she had crossed the room.
"If he only lives, I will let everything else go. I will think of nothing except my children. It will make no difference to me if I do look ten years older than Abby does. Nothing on earth will make any difference to me, if only God will let him get well."
And with the vow, it seemed to her that she laid her youth down on the altar of that unseen Power whose mercy she invoked. Let her prayer only be heard and she would demand nothing more of life—she would spend all her future years in the willing service of love. Was it possible that she had imagined herself unhappy thirty-six hours ago—thirty-six hours ago when her child was not threatened? As she looked back on her past life, it seemed to her that every minute had been crowned with happiness. Even the loss of her newborn baby appeared such a little thing—such a little thing beside the loss of Harry, her only son. Mere freedom from anxiety showed to her now as a condition of positive bliss.
Six o'clock struck, and Marthy knocked at the door with a cup of milk. "Do you think he'll be able to swallow any of it?" she asked, and there were tears in her eyes.
"He is better, Marthy, I am sure he is better. Has mother been here this afternoon?"
"She stopped at the door, but she didn't like to come in on account of the children. They are both well, she says, and send you their love. Do you want any more water in the kettle, ma'am?"
The kettle, which was simmering away beside Harry's bed, under the tent of sheets, was passed to Marthy through the crack in the door; and when in a few minutes the girl returned with fresh water, Virginia whispered to her that he had taken three spoonfuls of milk.
"And he let me mop his throat with turpentine," she said in quivering tones. "I am sure—oh, I am sure he is better."
"I am praying every minute," replied Marthy, weeping; and it seemed suddenly to Virginia that a wave of understanding passed between her and the ignorant mulatto girl, whom she had always regarded as of different clay from herself. With that miraculous power of grief to level all things, she felt that the barriers of knowledge, of race, of all the pitiful superiorities with which human beings have obscured and decorated the underlying spirit of life, had melted back into the nothingness from which they had emerged in the beginning. This feeling of oneness, which would have surprised and startled her yesterday, appeared so natural to her now, that, after the first instant of recognition, she hardly thought of it again.
"Thank you, Marthy," she answered gently, and closing the door, went back to her chair under the raised corner of the sheet. When the doctor came at nine o'clock she was sitting there, in the same position, so still and tense that she seemed hardly to be breathing, so ashen grey that the sheet hanging above her head showed deadly white by contrast with her face. In those three hours she knew that the clinging tendrils of personal desire had relaxed their hold forever on life and youth.
"If he doesn't get worse, we'll pull through," said the doctor, turning from his examination of Harry to lay his hand, which felt as heavy as lead, on her shoulder. "We've an even chance—if his heart doesn't go back on us." And he added, "Most mothers are good nurses, Jinny, but I never saw a better one than you are—unless it was your own mother. You get it from her, I reckon. I remember when you went through diphtheria how she sent your father to stay with one of the neighbours, and shut herself up with old Ailsey to nurse you. I don't believe she undressed or closed her eyes for a week."
Her own mother! So she was not the only one who had suffered this anguish—other women, many women, had been through it before she was born. It was a part of that immemorial pang of motherhood of which the old doctor had spoken. "But, was I ever in danger? Was I as ill as Harry?" she asked.
"For twenty-four hours we thought you'd slip through our fingers every minute. 'Twas only your mother's nursing that kept you alive—I've told her that twenty times. She never spared herself an instant, and, it may have been my imagination, but she never seemed to me to be the same woman afterwards. Something had gone out of her."
Now she understood, now she knew, something had gone out of her, also, and this something was youth. No woman who had fought with death for a child could ever be the same afterwards—could ever value again the small personal joys, when she carried the memory of supreme joy or supreme anguish buried within her heart. She remembered that her mother had never seemed young to her, not even in her earliest childhood; and she understood now why this had been so, why the deeper experiences of life rob the smaller ones of all vividness, of all poignancy. It had been so easy for her mother to give up little things, to deny herself, to do without, to make no further demands on life after the great demands had been granted her. How often had she said unthinkingly in her girlhood, "Mother, you never want anything for yourself." Ah, she knew now what it meant, and with the knowledge a longing seized her to throw herself into her mother's arms, to sob out her understanding and her sympathy, to let her feel before it was too late that she comprehended every step of the way, every throb of the agony!
"I'd spend the night with you, Jinny, if I didn't have to be with Milly Carrington, who has two children down with it," said the doctor; "but if there's any change, get Marthy to come for me. If not, I'll be sure to look in again before daybreak."
When he had gone, she moved the night lamp to the corner of the washstand, and after swallowing hastily a cup of coffee which Marthy had brought to her before the doctor's visit, and which had grown quite tepid and unpalatable, she resumed her patient watch under the raised end of the sheet. The whole of life, the whole of the universe even, had narrowed down for her into that faint circle of light which the lamp drew around Harry's little bed. It was as if this narrow circle beat with a separate pulse, divided from the rest of existence by its intense, its throbbing vitality. Here was concentrated for her all that the world had to offer of hope, fear, rapture, or anguish. The littleness and the terrible significance of the individual destiny were gathered into that faintly quivering centre of space—so small a part of the universe, and yet containing the whole universe within itself!