"I know exactly how you feel, dear. I never spent a night outside my home after my first child came until you grew up. I don't see how any true woman could bear to do it, unless, of course, she was called away because of a serious illness."
"If Oliver were ill, or you, or father, I'd go in a minute unless one of the children was really sick—but just to see a play is different, and I'd feel as if I were neglecting my duty. The funny part is that Oliver is so wrapped up in this play that he doesn't seem to be able to get his mind off it, poor darling. Father was never that way about his sermons, was he?"
"Your father never thought of himself or of his own interests enough, Jinny. If he ever had a fault, it was that. But I suppose he approaches perfection as nearly as a man ever did."
Slipping the darning gourd into the toe of one of Lucy's little white stockings, Virginia gazed attentively at a small round hole while she held her needle arrested slightly above it. So exquisitely Madonna-like was the poise of her head and the dreaming, prophetic mystery in her face, that Mrs. Pendleton waited almost breathlessly for her words.
"There's not a single thing that I would change in Oliver, if I could," she said at last.
"It is so beautiful that you feel that way, darling. I suppose all happily married women do."
A week later, across Harry's birthday cake, which stood surrounded by four candles in the centre of the rectory table, Virginia offered her cheerful explanation of Oliver's absence, in reply to a mild inquiry from the rector. "He was obliged to go to New York yesterday about the rehearsal of 'The Beaten Road,' father. We were both so sorry he couldn't be here to-day, but it was impossible for him to wait over."
"It's a pity," said the rector gently. "Harry will never be just four years old again, will you, little man?" Even the substantial fact that Oliver's play would, it was hoped, provide a financial support for his children, did not suffice to lift it from the region of the unimportant in the mind of his father-in-law.
"But he'll have plenty of other birthdays when papa will be here," remarked Virginia brightly. Though she had been a little hurt to find that Oliver had arranged to leave home the night before, and that he had appeared perfectly blind to the importance of his presence at Harry's celebration, her native good sense had not permitted her to make a grievance out of the matter. On her wedding day she had resolved that she would not be exacting of Oliver's time or attention, and the sweetness of her disposition had smoothed away any difficulties which had intervened between her and her ideal of wifehood. From the first, love had meant to her the opportunity of giving rather than the privilege of receiving, and her failure to regard herself as of supreme consequence in any situation had protected her from the minor troubles and disillusionments of marriage.
"It is too bad to think that dear Oliver will have to be away for two whole weeks," said Mrs. Pendleton.
"Is he obliged to stay that long?" asked the rector, sympathetically. Never having missed an anniversary since the war, he could look upon Oliver's absence as a fit subject for condolence.
"He can't possibly come home until the play is produced, and that won't be for two weeks yet," replied Virginia.
"But I thought it rested with the actors now. Couldn't they go on just as well without him?"
"He thinks not, and, of course, it is such a great play that he doesn't want to take any risks with it."
"Of course he doesn't," assented Mrs. Pendleton, who had believed that the stage was immoral until Virginia's husband began to write for it.
"I know he'll come back the very first minute that he can get away," said Virginia with conviction, before she stooped to comfort Harry, who was depressed by the discovery that he was not expected to eat his entire cake, but instantly hopeful when he was promised a slice of sister Lucy's in the summer.
Late in the afternoon, when the children, warmly wrapped in extra shawls by Mrs. Pendleton, were led back through the cold to the house in Prince Street, one and all of the party agreed that it was the nicest birthday that had ever been. "I like grandma's cake better than our cake," announced Harry above his white muffler. "Why can't we have cake like that, mamma?"
He was trotting sturdily, with his hand in Virginia's, behind the perambulator, which contained a much muffled Jenny, and at his words Mrs. Pendleton, who walked a little ahead, turned suddenly and hugged him tight for an instant.
"Just listen to the darling boy!" she exclaimed, in a choking voice.
"Because nobody else can make such good cake as grandma's," answered Virginia, quite as pleased as her mother. "And she's going to give you one every birthday as long as you live."
"Can't I have another birthday soon, mamma?"
"Not till after sister Lucy's. You want sister Lucy to have one, don't you? and dear little Jenny?"
"But why can't I have a cake without a birthday, mamma?"
"You may, precious, and grandma will make you one," said Mrs. Pendleton, as she helped Marthy wheel the perambulator over the slippery crossing and into the front gate.
On the hall table there was a telegram from Oliver, and Virginia tore it open while her mother and Marthy unfastened the children's wraps.
"He's at the Hotel Bertram," she said joyously, "and he says the rehearsals are going splendidly."
"Did he mention Harry's birthday?" asked Mrs. Pendleton, trying to hide the instinctive dread which the sight of a telegram aroused in her.
"He must have forgotten it. Can't you come upstairs to the nursery with us, mother?"
"No, your father is all alone. I must be getting back," replied Mrs. Pendleton gently.
An hour or two later, when Virginia sat in her rocking-chair before the nursery fire, with Harry, worn out with his play and forgetful of the dignity of his four years, asleep in her lap, she opened the telegram again and reread it hungrily while the light of love shone in her face. She knew intuitively that Oliver had sent the telegram because he had not written—and would not write, probably, until he had finished with the hardest work of his play. It was an easy thing to do—it took considerably less of his time than a letter would have done; but she had inherited from her mother the sentimental vision of life which unconsciously magnifies the meaning of trivial attentions. She looked through her emotions as through a prism on the simple fact of his telegraphing, and it became immediately transfigured. How dear it was of him to realize that she would be anxious until she heard from him! How lonely he must be all by himself in that great city! How much he must have wanted to be with Harry on his birthday! Sitting there in the fire-lit nursery, her heart sent out waves of love and sympathy to him across the distance and the twilight. On the rug at her feet Lucy rocked in her little chair, crooning to her doll with the beginnings of the mother instinct already softening her voice, and in the adjoining room Jenny lay asleep in her crib while the faithful Marthy watched by her side. Beyond the window a fine icy rain had begun to fall, and down the long street she could see the lamps flickering in revolving circles of frost. In the midst of the frozen streets, that little centre of red firelight separated her as completely from the other twenty-one thousand human beings among whom she lived as did the glow of personal joy that suffused her thoughts. From the dusk below she heard the tapping of a blind beggar's stick on the pavement, and the sound made, while it lasted, a plaintive accompaniment to the lullaby she was singing. "Two whole weeks," she thought, while her longing reached out to that unknown room in which she pictured Oliver sitting alone. "Two whole weeks. How hard it will be for him." In her guarded ignorance of the world she could not imagine that Oliver was suffering less from this enforced absence from all he loved than she herself would have suffered had she been in his place. Of course, men were different from women—that ancient dogma was embodied in the leading clause of her creed of life; but she had always understood that this difference vanished in some miraculous way after marriage. She knew that Oliver had to work, of course—how otherwise could he support his family?—but the idea that his work might ever usurp the place in his heart that belonged to her and the children would have been utterly incomprehensible to her had she ever thought of it. Jealousy was an alien weed, which could not take root in the benign soil of her nature.
For a week there was no letter from Oliver, and at the end of that time a few lines scrawled on a sheet of hotel paper explained that he spent every minute of his time at the theatre.
"Poor fellow, it's dreadfully hard on him, isn't it?" Virginia said to her mother, when she showed her the imposing picture of the hotel at the head of his letter.
There was no hint of compassion for herself in her voice. Her pity was entirely for Oliver, constrained to be away for two whole weeks from his children, who grew more interesting and delightful every day that they lived. "Harry has gone into the first reader," she added, turning from the storeroom shelves on which she was laying strips of white oilcloth. "He will be able to read his lesson to Oliver when he comes home."
"I have always understood that your father could read his Bible at the age of four," remarked Mrs. Pendleton, who passionately treasured this solitary proof of the rector's brilliancy.
"I am afraid Harry is backward. He hates his letters—especially the letter A—so much that it takes me an hour sometimes to get him to say it after me. My only comfort is that Oliver says he couldn't read a line until he was over seven years old. Would you scallop this oilcloth, mother, or leave it plain?"
"I always scallop mine. Mrs. Treadwell must be better, Jinny; Susan sent me a dessert yesterday."
"Yes, but she will never be able to move herself. Do you think that poor Susan will marry John Henry now?"
"I wonder?" replied Mrs. Pendleton vaguely. Then the sound of Harry's laughter floated in suddenly from the backyard, and her eyes, following Virginia's, turned automatically to the pantry window.
"They've come home for a snack, I suppose?" she said. "Shall I fix some bread and preserves for them?"
"Oh, I'll do it," responded Virginia, while she reached for the crock of blackberry jam on the shelf at her side.
Another week passed and there was no word from Oliver, until Mrs. Pendleton came in at dusk one evening, with an anxious look on her face and a folded newspaper held tightly in her hand.
"Have you seen any of the accounts of Oliver's play, Jinny?" she asked.
"No, I haven't had time to look at the papers to-day—Harry has hurt his foot."
She spoke placidly, looking up from the nursery floor, where she knelt beside a basin of warm water at Harry's feet. "Poor little fellow, he fell on a pile of bricks," she added, "but he's such a hero he never even whimpered, did he, darling?"
"But it hurt bad," said Harry eagerly.
"Of course, it hurt dreadfully, and if he hadn't been a man he would have cried."
"Sister would have cried," exulted the hero.
"Indeed, sister would have cried. Sister is a girl," responded Virginia, smothering him with kisses over the basin of water.
But Mrs. Pendleton refused to be diverted from her purpose even by the heroism of her grandson.
"John Henry found this in a New York paper and brought it to me. He thought you ought to see it, though, of course, it may not be so serious as it sounds."
"Serious?" repeated Virginia, letting the soapy washrag fall back into the basin while she stretched out her moist and reddened hand for the paper.
"It says that the play didn't go very well," pursued her mother guardedly. "They expect to take it off at once, and—and Oliver is not well—he is ill in the hotel——"
"Ill?" cried Virginia, and as she rose to her feet the basin upset and deluged Harry's shoes and the rug on which she had been kneeling. Her mind, unable to grasp the significance of a theatrical failure, had seized upon the one salient fact which concerned her. Plays might succeed or fail, and it made little difference, but illness was another matter—illness was something definite and material. Illness could neither be talked away by religion nor denied by philosophy. It had its place in her mind not with the shadow, but with the substance of things. It was the one sinister force which had always dominated her, even when it was absent, by the sheer terror it aroused in her thoughts.
"Let me see," she said chokingly. "No, I can't read it—tell me."
"It only says that the play was a failure—nobody understood it, and a great many people said it was—oh, Virginia—immoral!—There's something about its being foreign and an attack on American ideals—and then they add that the author refused to be interviewed and they understood that he was ill in his room at the Bertram."
The charge of immorality, which would have crushed Virginia at another time, and which, even in the intense excitement of the moment, had been an added stab to Mrs. Pendleton, was brushed aside as if it were the pestiferous attack of an insect.
"I am going to him now—at once—when does the train leave, mother?"
"But, Jinny, how can you? You have never been to New York. You wouldn't know where to go."
"But he is ill. Nothing on earth is going to keep me away from him. Will you please wipe Harry's feet while I try to get on my clothes?"
"But, Jinny, the children?"
"You and Marthy must look after the children. Of course I can't take them with me. Oh, Harry, won't you please hush and let poor mamma dress? She is almost distracted."
Something—a secret force of character which even her mother had not suspected that she possessed—had arisen in an instant and dominated the situation. She was no longer the gentle and doting mother of a minute ago, but a creature of a fixed purpose and an iron resolution. Even her face appeared to lose its soft contour and hardened until Mrs. Pendleton grew almost frightened. Never had she imagined that Virginia could look like this.
"I am sure there is some mistake about it. Don't take it so terribly to heart, Jinny," she pleaded, while she knelt down, cowed and obedient, to wipe Harry's feet.
Virginia, who had already torn off her house dress, and was hurriedly buttoning the navy blue waist in which she had travelled, looked at her calmly without pausing for an instant in her task.
"Will you bind up his foot with some arnica?" she asked. "There's an old handkerchief in my work basket. I want you and father to come here and stay until I get back. It will be less trouble than moving all their things over to the rectory."
"Very well, darling," replied Mrs. Pendleton meekly. "We'll do everything that we can, of course," and she added timidly, "Have you money enough?"
"I have thirty dollars. I just got it out of the bank to-day to pay Marthy and my housekeeping bills. Do you think that will be as much as I'll need?"
"I should think so, dear. Of course, if you find you want more, you can telegraph your father."
"The train doesn't leave for two hours, so I'll have plenty of time to get ready. It's just half-past six now, and Oliver didn't leave the house till eight o'clock."
"Won't you take a little something to eat before you go?"
"I couldn't swallow a morsel, but I'll sit with you and the children as soon as I've put the things in my satchel. I couldn't possibly need but this one dress, could I? If Oliver isn't really ill, I hope we can start home to-morrow. That will be two nights that I'll spend away. Oh, mother, ask father to pray that he won't be ill."
Her voice broke, but she fiercely bit back the sob before it escaped her lips.
"I will, dear, I promise you. We will both think of you and pray for you every minute. Jinny, are you sure it's wise? Couldn't we send some one—John Henry would go, I know—in your place?"
A spasm of irritation contracted Virginia's features. "Please don't, mother," she begged, "it just worries me. Whatever happens, I am going." Then she sobbed outright. "He wanted me to go with him at first, and I wouldn't because I thought it was my duty to stay at home with the children. If anything should happen to him, I'd never forgive myself."
She was slipping her black cloth skirt over her head as she spoke, and her terror-stricken face disappeared under the pleats before Mrs. Pendleton could turn to look at her. When her head emerged again above the belt of her skirt, the expression of her features had grown more natural.
"You'll go down in a carriage, won't you?" inquired her mother, whose mind achieved that perfect mixture of the sentimental and the practical which is rarely found in any except Southern women.
"I suppose I'll have to. Then I can take my satchel with me, and that will save trouble. You won't forget, mother, that I give Lucy a teaspoonful of cod-liver oil after each meal, will you? She has had that hacking cough for three weeks, and I want to break it up."
"I'll remember, Jinny, but I'm so miserable about your going alone."
Turning to the closet, Virginia unearthed an old black satchel from beneath a pile of toys, and began dusting it inside with a towel. Then she took out some underclothes from a bureau drawer and a few toilet articles, which she wrapped in pieces of tissue paper. Her movements were so methodical that the nervousness in Mrs. Pendleton's mind slowly gave way to astonishment. For the first time in her life, perhaps, the mother realized that her daughter was no longer a child, but a woman, and a woman whose character was as strong and as determined as her own. Vaguely she understood, without analyzing the motives that moved Virginia, that this strength and this determination which so impressed her had arisen from those deep places in her daughter's soul where emotion and not thought had its source. Love was guiding her now as surely as it had guided her when she had refused to go with Oliver to New York, or when, but a few minutes ago, she had knelt down to wash and bandage Harry's little earth-stained feet. It was the only power to which she would ever surrender. No other principle would ever direct or control her.
Marthy, who appeared with Jenny's supper, was sent out to order the carriage and to bear a message to the rector, and Virginia took the little girl in her lap and began to crumble the bread into the bowl of milk.
"Wouldn't you like me to do that, dear?" asked Mrs. Pendleton, with a submission in her tone which she had never used before except to the rector. "Don't you want to fix your hair over?"
"Oh, no, I'll keep on my hat till I go to bed, so it doesn't matter. I'd rather you'd finish my packing if you don't mind. There's nothing more to go in except some collars and my bedroom slippers and that red wrapper hanging behind the door in the closet."
"Are you going to take any medicine?"
"Only that bottle of camphor and some mustard plasters. Yes, you'd better put in the brandy flask and the aromatic ammonia. You can never tell when you will need them. Now, my darlings, mother is going away and you must keep well and be as good as gold until she comes back."
To the amazement of Mrs. Pendleton (who reflected that you really never knew what to expect of children), this appeal produced an immediate and extraordinary result. Lucy, who had been fidgeting about and trying to help with the packing, became suddenly solemn and dignified, while an ennobling excitement mounted to Harry's face. Never particularly obedient before, they became, as soon as the words were uttered, as amenable as angels. Even Jenny stopped feeding long enough to raise herself and pat her mother's cheek with ten caressing, milky fingers.
"Mother's going away," said Lucy in a solemn voice, and a hush fell on the three of them.
"And grandma's coming here to live," added Harry after the silence had grown so depressing that Virginia had started to cry.
"Not to live, precious," corrected Mrs. Pendleton quickly. "Just to spend two days with you. Mother will be home in two days."
"Mother will be home in two days," repeated Lucy. "May I stay away from school while you're away, mamma?"
"And may I stop learning my letters?" asked Harry.
"No, darlings, you must do just as if I were here. Grandma will take care of you. Now promise me that you will be good."
They promised obediently, awed to submission by the stupendous importance of the change. It is probable that they would have observed with less surprise any miraculous upheaval in the orderly phenomena of nature.
"I don't see how I can possibly leave them—they are so good, and they behave exactly as if they realized how anxious I am," wept Virginia, breaking down when Marthy came to announce that the rector had come and the carriage was at the door.
"Suppose you give it up, Jinny. I—I'll send your father," pleaded Mrs. Pendleton, in desperation as she watched the tragedy of the parting.
But that strange force which the situation had developed in Virginia yielded neither to her mother's prayers nor to the last despairing wails of the children, who realized, at the sight of the black bag in Marthy's hands, that their providence was actually deserting them. The deepest of her instincts—the instinct that was at the root of all her mother love—was threatened, and she rose to battle. The thing she loved best, she had learned, was neither husband nor child, but the one that needed her.
She had lain down in her clothes, impelled by the feeling that if there were to be a wreck she should prefer to appear completely dressed; so when the chill dawn came at last and the train pulled into Jersey City, she had nothing to do except to adjust her veil and wait patiently until the porter came for her bag. His colour, which was black, inspired her with confidence, and she followed him trustfully to the platform, where he delivered her to another smiling member of his race. The cold was so penetrating that her teeth began to chatter as she turned to obey the orders of the dusky official who had assumed command of her. Never had she felt anything so bleak as the atmosphere of the station. Never in her life had she been so lonely as she was while she hurried down the long dim platform in the direction of a gate which looked as if it led into a prison. She was chilled through; her skin felt as if it had turned to india rubber; there was a sickening terror in her soul; and she longed above all things to sit down on one of the inhospitable tracks and burst into tears; but something stronger than impulse urged her shivering body onward and controlled the twitching muscles about her mouth. "In a few minutes I shall see Oliver. Oliver is ill and I am going to him," she repeated over and over to herself as if she were reciting a prayer.
Inside the station she declined the offer of breakfast, and was conducted to the ferry, where she was obliged to run in order to catch the boat that was just leaving. Seated on one of the long benches in the saloon, with her bag at her feet and her umbrella grasped tightly in her hand, she gazed helplessly at the other passengers and wondered if any one of them would tell her what to do when she reached the opposite side. The women, she thought, looked hard and harassed, and the men she could not see because of the rows of newspapers behind which they were hidden. Once her wandering gaze caught the eyes of a middle-aged woman in rusty black, who smiled at her above the head of a sleeping child.
"That's a pretty woman," said a man carelessly, as he put down his paper, and she realized that he was talking about her to his companion. Then, as the terrible outlines of the city grew more distinct on the horizon, he got up and strolled as carelessly past her to the deck. He had spoken of her as indifferently as he might have spoken of the weather.
As the tremendous battlements (which were not tremendous to any of the other passengers) emerged slowly from the mist and cleft the sombre low-hanging clouds, from which a few flakes of snow fell, her terror vanished suddenly before the excitement which ran through her body. She forgot her hunger, her loneliness, her shivering flesh, her benumbed and aching feet. A sensation not unlike the one with which the rector had marched into his first battle, fortified and exhilarated her. The fighting blood of of her ancestors grew warm in her veins. New York developed suddenly from a mere spot on a map into a romance made into brick; and when a ray of sunlight pierced the heavy fog, and lay like a white wing aslant the few falling snowflakes, it seemed to her that the shadowy buildings lost their sinister aspect and softened into a haunting and mysterious beauty. Somewhere in that place of mystery and adventure Oliver was waiting for her! He was a part of that vast movement of life into which she was going. Then, youth, from which hope is never long absent, flamed up in her, and she was glad that she was still beautiful enough to cause strangers to turn and look at her.
But this mood, also, passed quickly, and a little later, while she rolled through the grey streets, into which the slant sunbeams could bring no colour, she surrendered again to that terror of the unknown which had seized her when she stood in the station. The beauty had departed from the buildings; the pavements were dirty; the little discoloured piles of snow made the crossings slippery and dangerous; and she held her breath as they passed through the crowded streets on the west side, overcome by the fear of "catching" some malign malady from the smells and the filth. The negro quarters in Dinwiddie were dirty enough, but not, she thought with a kind of triumph, quite so dirty as New York. When the cab turned into Fifth Avenue, she took her handkerchief from her nostrils; but this imposing street, which had not yet emerged from its evil dream of Victorian brownstone, impressed her chiefly as a place of a thousand prisons. It was impossible to believe that those frowning walls, undecorated by a creeper or the shadow of a tree, could really be homes where people lived and children were born.
At first she had gazed with a childish interest and curiosity on the houses she was passing; then the sense of strangeness gave place presently to the exigent necessity of reaching Oliver as soon as possible. But the driver appeared indifferent to her timid taps on the glass at his back, while the horse progressed with the feeble activity of one who had spent a quarter of a century ineffectually making an effort. Her impatience, which she had at first kept under control, began to run in quivers of nervousness through her limbs. The very richness of her personal life, which had condensed all experience into a single emotional centre, and restricted her vision of the universe to that solitary window of the soul through which she looked, prevented her now from seeing in the city anything except the dreary background of Oliver's illness and failure. The naïve wonder with which she had watched the gigantic outlines shape themselves out of the white fog, had faded utterly from her mind. She ached with longing to reach Oliver and to find him well enough to take the first train back to Dinwiddie.
At the hotel her bag and umbrella were wrested from her by an imperious uniformed attendant, and in what seemed to her an incredibly short space of time, she was following him along a velvet lined corridor on the tenth floor. The swift ascent in the elevator had made her dizzy, and the physical sensation reminded her that she was weak for food. Then the attendant rapped imperatively at a door just beyond a shining staircase, and she forgot herself as completely as it had been her habit to do since her marriage.
"Come in!" responded a muffled voice on the inside, and as the door swung open, she saw Oliver, in his dressing-gown, and with an unshaved face, reading a newspaper beside a table on which stood an untasted cup of coffee.
"I didn't ring," he began impatiently, and then starting to his feet, he uttered her name in a voice which held her standing as if she were suddenly paralyzed on the threshold. "Virginia!"
A sob rose in her throat, and her faltering gaze passed from him to the hotel attendant, who responded to her unspoken appeal as readily as if it were a part of his regular business. Pushing her gently inside, he placed her bag and umbrella on an empty chair, took up the breakfast tray from the table, and inquired, with a kindness which strangely humbled her, if she wished to give an order. When she had helplessly shaken her head, he bowed and went out, closing the door softly upon their meeting.
"What in thunder, Virginia?" began Oliver, and she realized that he was angry.
"I heard you were sick—that the play had failed. I was so sorry I hadn't come with you—" she explained; and then, understanding for the first time the utter foolishness of what she had done, she put her hands up to her face and burst into tears.
He had risen from his chair, but he made no movement to come nearer to her, and when she took down her hands in order to wipe her eyes, she saw an expression in his face which frightened her by its strangeness. She had caught him when that guard which every human being—even a husband—wears, had fallen away, though in her ignorance it seemed to her that he had become suddenly another person. That she had entered into one of those awful hours of self-realization, when the soul must face its limitations alone and make its readjustments in silence, did not occur to her, because she, who had lived every minute of her life under the eyes of her parents or her children, could have no comprehension of the hunger for solitude which was devouring Oliver's heart. She saw merely that he did not want her—that she had not only startled, but angered him by coming; and the bitterness of that instant seemed to her more than she was able to bear. Something had changed him; he was older, he was harder, he was embittered.
"I—I am so sorry," she stammered; and because even in the agony of this moment she could not think long of herself, she added almost humbly, "Would you rather that I should go back again?" Then, by the haggard look of his face as he turned away from her towards the window, she saw that he, also, was suffering, and her soul yearned over him as it had yearned over Harry when he had had the toothache. "Oh, Oliver!" she cried, and again, "Oh, Oliver, won't you let me help you?"
But he was in the mood of despairing humiliation when one may support abuse better than pity. His failure, he knew, had been undeserved, and he was still smarting from the injustice of it as from the blows of a whip. For twenty-four hours his nerves had been on the rack, and his one desire had been to hide himself in the spiritual nakedness to which he was stripped. Had he been obliged to choose a witness to his suffering, it is probable that he would have selected a stranger from the street rather than his wife. The one thing that could have helped him, an intelligent justification of his work, she was powerless to give. In his need she had nothing except love to offer; and love, she felt instinctively, was not the balm for his wound.
Afraid and yet passionately longing to meet his eyes, she let her gaze fall away from him and wander timidly, as if uncertain where to rest, about the disordered room, with its dull red walls, its cheap Nottingham lace curtains tied back with cords, its elaborately carved walnut furniture, and its litter of days old newspapers upon the bed. She saw his neckties hanging in an uneven row over the oblong mirror, and she controlled a nervous impulse to straighten them out and put them away.
"Why didn't you telegraph me?" he asked, after a pause in which she had struggled vainly to look as if it were the most natural thing in the world that he should receive her in this way. "If I had known you were coming, I should have met you."
"Father wanted to, but I wouldn't let him," she answered. "I—I thought you were sick."
In spite of his despair, it is probable that at the moment she was suffering more than he was—since a wound to love strikes deeper, after all, than a wound to ambition. Where she had expected to find her husband, she felt vaguely that she had encountered a stranger, and she was overwhelmed by that sense of irremediable loss which follows the discovery of terrible and unfamiliar qualities in those whom we have known and loved intimately for years. The fact that he was plainly struggling to disguise his annoyance, that he was trying as hard as she to assume a manner he did not feel, only added a sardonic humour to poignant tragedy.
"Have you had anything to eat?" he asked abruptly, and remembering that he had not kissed her when she entered, he put his arm about her and brushed her cheek with his lips.
"No, I waited to breakfast with you. I was in such a hurry to get here."
"By Jove!" he exclaimed, and going over to the bell, he touched it with the manner of a man who is delighted that anything so perfectly practical as food exists in the world.
While he was speaking to the waiter, she took off her hat, and washed the stains of smoke and tears from her face. Her hair was a sight, she thought, but while she gazed back at her stricken eyes in the little mirror over the washstand, she recalled with a throb of gratitude that the stranger on the boat had said she was pretty. She felt so humble that she clung almost with desperation to the thought that Oliver always liked to have people admire her.
When she turned from the washstand, he was reading the newspaper again, and he put it aside with a forced cheerfulness to arrange the table for breakfast.
"Aren't you going to have something too?" she asked, looking disconsolately at the tray, for all her hunger had departed. If he would only be natural she felt that she could bear anything! If he would only stop trying to pretend that he was not miserable and that nothing had happened! After all, it couldn't be so very bad, could it? It wasn't in the least as if one of the children were ill.
She poured out a cup of coffee for him before drinking her own, and putting it down on the table at his side, waited patiently until he should look up again from his paper. A lump as hard as lead had risen in her throat and was choking her.
"Are the children well?" he asked presently, and she answered with an affected brightness more harrowing than tears, "Yes, mother is taking care of them. Lucy still has the little cough, but I'm giving her cod-liver oil. And, what do you think? I have a surprise for you. Harry can read the first lesson in his reader."
He smiled kindly back at her, but from the vacancy in his face, she realized that he had not taken in a word that she had said. His trouble, whatever it was, could absorb him so utterly that he had ceased even to be interested in his children. He, who had borne so calmly the loss of that day-old baby for whom she had grieved herself to a shadow, was plunged into this condition of abject hopelessness merely because his play was a failure! It was not only impossible for her to share his suffering; she realized, while she watched him, that she could not so much as comprehend it. Her limitations, of which she had never been acutely conscious until to-day, appeared suddenly insurmountable. Love, which had seemed to her to solve all problems and to smooth all difficulties, was helpless to enlighten her. It was not love—it was something else that she needed now, and of this something else she knew not even so much as the name.
She drank her coffee quickly, fearing that if she did not take food she should lose control of herself and anger him by a display of hysterics.
"I don't wonder you couldn't drink your coffee," she said with a quivering little laugh. "It must have been made yesterday." Then, unable to bear the strain any longer, she cried out sharply: "Oh, Oliver, won't you tell me what is the matter?"
His look grew hard, while a spasm of irritation contracted his mouth.
"There's nothing you need worry about—except that I've borrowed money, and I'm afraid we'll have to cut down things a bit until I manage to pay it back."
"Why, of course we'll cut down things," she almost laughed in her relief. "We can live on a great deal less, and I'll market so carefully that you will hardly know the difference. I'll put Marthy in the kitchen and take care of the children myself. It won't be the least bit of trouble."
She knew by his face that he was grateful to her, though he said merely: "I'm a little knocked up, I suppose, so you mustn't mind. I've got a beast of a headache. Martin is going to take 'The Beaten Road' off at the end of the week, you know, and he doesn't think now that he will produce the other. There wasn't a good word for me from the critics, and yet, damn them, I know that the play is the best one that's ever come out of America. But it's real—that's why they fell foul of it—it isn't stuffed with sugar plums."
"Why, what in the world possessed them?" she returned indignantly. "It is a beautiful play."
She saw him flinch at the word, and the sombre irritation which his outburst had relieved for a minute, settled again on his features. Her praise, she understood, only exasperated him, though she did not realize that it was the lack of discrimination in it which aroused his irritation. At the moment, intelligent appreciation of his work would have been bread and meat to him, but her pitiful attempts at flattery were like bungling touches on raw flesh. Had he written the veriest rags of sentimental rubbish, he knew she would as passionately have defended their "beauty."
"I'll get dressed quickly and look after some business," he said, "and we'll go home to-night."
Her eyes shone, and she began to eat her eggs with a resolution born of the consoling memory of Dinwiddie. If only they could be at home again with the children, she felt that all this trouble and misunderstanding would vanish. With a strange confusion of ideas, it seemed to her that Oliver's suffering had been in some mysterious way produced by New York, and that it existed merely within the circumscribed limits of this dreadful city.
"Oh, Oliver, that will be lovely!" she exclaimed, and tried to subdue the note of joy in her voice.
"I shan't be able to get back to lunch, I'm afraid. What will you do about it?"
"Don't bother about me, dearest. I'll dress and take a little walk just to see what Fifth Avenue is like. I can't get lost if I go perfectly straight up the street, can I?"
"Fifth Avenue is only a block away. You can't miss it. Now I'll hurry and be off."
She knew that he was anxious to be alone, and so firmly was she convinced that this mood of detachment would leave him as soon as he was in the midst of his family again, that she was able to smile tolerantly when he kissed her hastily, and seizing his hat, rushed from the room. For a time after he had gone she amused herself putting his things in order and packing the little tin trunk he had brought with him; but the red walls and the steam heat in the room sickened her at last, and when she had bathed and dressed and there seemed nothing left for her to do except get out her work-bag and begin darning his socks, she decided that she would put on her hat and go out for a walk. It did not occur to her to feel hurt by the casual manner in which Oliver had shifted the responsibility of her presence—partly owing to a personal inability to take a selfish point of view about anything, and partly because of that racial habit of making allowances for the male in which she had been sedulously trained from her infancy.
At the door the porter directed her to Fifth Avenue, and she ventured cautiously as far as the flowing rivulet at the corner, where she would probably have stood until Oliver's return, if a friendly policeman had not observed her stranded helplessness and assisted her over. "How on earth am I to get back again?" she thought, smiling up at him; and this anxiety engrossed her so completely that for a minute she forgot to look at the amazing buildings and the curious crowds that hurried frantically in their shadows. Then a pale finger of sunlight pointed suddenly across the high roofs in front of her, and awed, in spite of her preoccupation, by the strangeness of the scene, she stopped and watched the moving carriages in the middle of the street and the never ending stream of people that passed on the wet pavements. Occasionally, while she stood there, some of the passers-by would turn and look at her with friendly admiring eyes, as though they found something pleasant in her lovely wistful face and her old-fashioned clothes; and this pleased her so much that she lost her feeling of loneliness. It was a kindly crowd, and because she was young and pretty and worth looking at, a part of the exhilaration of this unknown life passed into her, and she felt for a little while as though she belonged to it. The youth in her responded to the passing call of the streets, to this call which fluted like the sound of pipes in her blood, and lifted her for a moment out of the narrow track of individual experience. It was charming to feel that all these strangers looked kindly upon her, and she tried to show that she returned their interest by letting a little cordial light shine in her eyes. For the first time in her life the personal boundaries of sympathy fell away from her, and she realized, in a fleeting sensation, something of the vast underlying solidarity of human existence. A humble baby in a go-cart waited at one of the crossings for the traffic to pass, and bending over, she hugged him ecstatically, not because he reminded her of Harry, but simply because he was a baby.
"He is so sweet I just had to squeeze him," she said to his mother, a working woman in a black shawl, who stood behind him.
Then the two women smiled at each other in that freemasonry of motherhood of which no man is aware, and Virginia wondered why people had ever foolishly written of the "indifference of a crowd." The chill which had lain over her heart since her meeting with Oliver melted utterly in the glow with which she had embraced the baby at the crossing. With the feeling of his warm little body in her arms, everything had become suddenly right again. New York was no longer a dreadful city, and Oliver's failure appeared as brief as the passing pang of a toothache. Her natural optimism had returned like a rosy mist to embellish and obscure the prosaic details of the situation. Like the cheerful winter sunshine, which transfigured the harsh outlines of the houses, her vision adorned the reality in the mere act of beholding it.
Midway of the next block there was a jeweller's window full of gems set in intricate patterns, and stopping before it, she studied the trinkets carefully in the hope of being able to describe them to Lucy. Then a man selling little automatic pigs at the corner attracted her attention, and she bought two for Harry and Jenny, and carried them triumphantly away in boxes under her arm. She knew that she looked countrified and old-fashioned, and that nobody she met was wearing either a hat or a dress which in the least resembled the style of hers; but the knowledge of this did not trouble her, because in her heart she preferred the kind of clothes which were worn in Dinwiddie. The women in New York seemed to her artificial and affected in appearance, and they walked, she thought, as if they were trying to make people look at them. The bold way they laced in their figures she regarded as almost indecent, and she noticed that they looked straight into the eyes of men instead of lowering their lashes when they passed them. Her provincialism, like everything else which belonged to her and had become endeared by habit and association, seemed to her so truly beautiful and desirable that she would not have parted with it for worlds.
Turning presently, she walked down Fifth Avenue as far as Twenty-third Street, and then, confused by the crossing, she passed into Broadway, without knowing that it was Broadway, until she was enlightened by a stranger to whom she appealed. When she began to retrace her steps, she discovered that she was hungry, and she longed to go into one of the places where she saw people eating at little tables; but her terror of what she had heard of the high prices of food in New York restaurants restrained her. General Goode still told of paying six dollars and a half for a dinner he had ordered in a hotel in Fifth Avenue, and her temperamental frugality, reinforced by anxiety as to Oliver's debts, preferred to take no unnecessary risks with the small amount in her pocket book. Oliver, of course, would have laughed at her petty economies, and have ordered recklessly whatever attracted his appetite; but, as she gently reminded herself again, men were different. On the whole, this lordly prodigality pleased her rather than otherwise. She felt that it was in keeping with the bigness and the virility of the masculine ideal; and if there were pinching and scraping to be done, she immeasurably preferred that it should fall to her lot to do it and not to Oliver's.
At the hotel she found that Oliver had not come in, and after a belated luncheon of tea and toast in the dining-room, she went upstairs and sat down to watch for his return between the Nottingham lace curtains at the window. From the terrific height, on which she felt like a sparrow, she could see a row of miniature puppets passing back and forth at the corner of Fifth Avenue. For hours she tried in vain to distinguish the figure of Oliver in the swiftly moving throng, and in spite of herself she could not repress a feeling of pleasant excitement. She knew that Oliver would think that she ought to be depressed by his failure, yet she could not prevent the return of a child-like confidence in the profound goodness of life. Everything would be right, everything was eternally bound to be right from the beginning. That inherited casuistry of temperament, which had confused the pleasant with the true for generations, had become in her less a moral conviction than a fixed quality of soul. To dwell even for a minute on "the dark side of things" awoke in her the same instinct of mortal sin that she had felt at the discovery that Oliver was accustomed to "break" the Sabbath by reading profane literature.
When, at last, as the dusk fell in the room, she heard his hasty step in the corridor, a wave of joyful expectancy rose in her heart and trembled for utterance on her lips. Then the door opened; he came from the gloom into the pale gleam of light that shone in from the window, and with her first look into his face her rising joy ebbed quickly away. A new element, something for which neither her training nor her experience had prepared her, entered at that instant into her life. Not the external world, but the sacred inner circle in which they had loved and known each other was suddenly clouded. Everything outside of this was the same, but the fact confronted her there as grimly as a physical sore. The evil struck at the very heart of her love, since it was not life, but Oliver that had changed.
Oliver had changed; for months this thought had lain like a stone on her heart. She went about her life just as usual, yet never for an instant during that long winter and spring did she lose consciousness of its dreadful presence. It was the first thing to face her in the morning, the last thing from which she turned when, worn out with perplexity, she fell asleep at night. During the day the children took her thoughts away from it for hours, but never once, not even while she heard Harry's lessons or tied the pink or the blue bows in Lucy's and Jenny's curls, did she ever really forget it. Since the failure of Oliver's play, which had seemed to her such a little thing in itself, something had gone out of their marriage, and this something was the perfect understanding which had existed between them. There were times when her sympathy appeared to her almost to infuriate him. Even her efforts towards economy—for since their return from New York she had put Marthy into the kitchen and had taken entire charge of the children—irritated rather than pleased him. And the more she irritated him, the more she sought zealously, by innumerable small attentions, to please and to pacify him. Instead of leaving him in the solitude which he sought, and which might have restored him to his normal balance of mind, she became possessed, whenever he shut himself in his study or went alone for a walk, with a frenzied dread lest he should permit himself to "brood" over the financial difficulties in which the wreck of his ambition had placed them. She, who feared loneliness as if it were the smallpox, devised a thousand innocent deceptions by which she might break in upon him when he sat in his study and discover whether he was actually reading the papers or merely pretending to do so. In her natural simplicity, it never occurred to her to penetrate beneath the surface disturbances of his mood. These engrossed her so completely that the cause of them was almost forgotten. Dimly she realized that this strange, almost physical soreness, which made him shrink from her presence as a man with weak eyes shrinks from the light, was the outward sign of a secret violence in his soul, yet she ministered helplessly to each passing explosion of temper as if it were the cause instead of the result of his suffering. Introspection, which had lain under a moral ban in a society that assumed the existence of an unholy alliance between the secret and the evil, could not help her because she had never indulged in it. Partly because of the ingenuous candour of the Pendleton nature, and partly owing to the mildness of a climate which made it more comfortable for Dinwiddians to live for six months of the year on their front porches and with their windows open, she shared the ingrained Southern distrust of any state of mind which could not cheerfully support the observation of the neighbours. She knew that he had turned from his work with disgust, and if he wasn't working and wasn't reading, what on earth could he be doing alone unless he had, as she imagined in desperation, begun wilfully to "nurse his despondency?" Even the rector couldn't help her here—for his knowledge of character was strictly limited to the types of the soldier and the churchman, and his son-in-law did not belong, he admitted, in either of these familiar classifications. At the bottom of his soul the good man had always entertained for Oliver something of the kindly contempt with which his generation regarded a healthy male, who, it suspected, would decline either to preach a sermon or to kill a man in the cause of morality. But on one line of treatment father and daughter were passionately agreed—whatever happened, it was not good that Oliver should be left by himself for a minute. When he was in the bank, of course, where Cyrus had found him a place as a clerk on an insignificant salary, it might be safely assumed that he was cheered by the unfailing company of his fellow-workers; but when he came home, the responsibility of his distraction and his cure rested upon Virginia and the children. And since her opinion of her own power to entertain was modest, she fell back with a sublime confidence on the unrivalled brilliancy and the infinite variety of the children's prattle. During the spring, as he grew more and more indifferent and depressed, she arranged that the children should be with him every instant while he was in the house. She brought Jenny's high chair to the table in order that the adorable infant might breakfast with her father; she kept Harry up an hour later at night so that he might add the gaiety of his innocent mirth to their otherwise long and silent evenings. Though she would have given anything to drop into bed as soon as the babies were undressed, she forced herself to sit up without yawning until Oliver turned out the lights, bolted the door, and remarked irritably that she ought to have been asleep hours ago.
"You aren't used to sitting up so late, Virginia; it makes you dark under the eyes," he said one June night as he came in from the porch where he had been to look up at the stars.
"But I can't go to bed until you do, darling. I get so worried about you," she answered.
"Why in heaven's name, should you worry about me? I am all right," he responded crossly.
She saw her mistake, and with her unvarying sweetness, set out to rectify it.
"Of course, I know you are—but we have so little time together that I don't want to miss the evenings."
"So little!" he echoed, not unkindly, but in simple astonishment.
"I mean the children sit up late now, and of course we can't talk while they are playing in the room."
"Don't you think you might get them to bed earlier? They are becoming rather a nuisance, aren't they?"
He said it kindly enough, yet tears rushed to her eyes as she looked at him. It was impossible for her to conceive of any mood in which the children would become "rather a nuisance" to her, and the words hurt her more than he was ever to know. It seemed the last straw that she could not bear, said her heart as she turned away from him. She had borne the extra work without a complaint; she had pinched and scraped, if not happily, at least with a smile; she had sat up while her limbs ached with fatigue and the longing to be in bed—and all these things were as nothing to the tragic confession that the children had become "rather a nuisance." Of the many trials she had had to endure, this, she told herself, was the bitterest.
Though her feet burned and her muscles throbbed with fatigue, she lay awake for hours, with her eyes wide open in the moonlight. All the small harassing duties of the morrow, which usually swarmed like startled bees through her brain at night, were scattered now by this vague terror which assumed no definite shape. The delicacy of Lucy's chest, Harry's stubborn refusal to learn to spell, and even the harrowing certainty that the children's appetites were fast outstripping the frugal fare she provided—these stinging worries had flown before a new anxiety which was the more poignant, she felt, because she could not give it a name. The Pendleton idealism was powerless to dispel this malign shadow which corresponded so closely to that substance of evil whose very existence the Pendleton idealism eternally denied. To battle with a delusion was virtually to admit one's belief in its actuality, and this, she reflected passionately, lying awake there in the darkness, was the last thing she was prepared at the moment to do. Oliver was changed, and yet her duty was plainly to fortify herself with the consoling assurance that, whatever happened, Oliver could never really change. Deep down in her that essential fibre of her being which was her soul—which drew its vitality from the racial structure of which it was a part, and yet which distinguished and separated her from every other person and object in the universe—this essential fibre was compacted of innumerable Pendleton refusals to face the reality. Even with Lucy's chest and Harry's lessons and the cost of food, she had always felt a soothing conviction that by thinking hard enough about them she could make them every one come out right in the morning. As a normal human being in a world which was not planned on altruistic principles, it was out of the question that she should entirely escape an occasional hour of despondency; but with the narrow outlook of women who lead intense personal lives, it would have been impossible for her to see anything really wrong in the universe while Oliver and all the children were well. God was in His heaven as long as the affairs of her household worked together for good. "It can't be that he is different—I must have imagined it," she thought now, breathing softly lest she should disturb the sleeping Oliver. "It is natural that he should be worried about his debts, and the failure of the play went very hard with him, of course—but if he appears at times to have grown bitter, it must be only that I have come to exact too much of him. I oughtn't to expect him to take the same interest in the children that I do——"
Then, rising softly on her elbow, she smoothed the sheet over Jenny's dimpled little body, and bent her ear downward to make sure that the child was breathing naturally in her sleep. In spite of her depression that rosy face framed in hair like spun yellow silk, aroused in her a feeling of ecstasy. Whenever she looked at one of her children—at her youngest child especially—her maternal passion seemed to turn to flame in her blood. Even first love had not been so exquisitely satisfying, so interwoven of all imaginable secret meanings of bliss. Jenny's thumb was in her mouth, and removing it gently, Virginia bent lower and laid her hot cheek on the soft shining curls. Some vital power, an emanation from that single principle of Love which ruled her life, passed from the breath of the sleeping child into her body. Peace descended upon her, swift and merciful like sleep, and turning on her side, she lay with her hand on Jenny's crib, as though in clinging to her child she clung to all that was most worth while in the universe.
The next night Oliver telephoned from the Treadwells' that he would not be home to supper, and when he came in at eleven o'clock, he appeared annoyed to find her sitting up for him.
"You ought to have gone to bed, Virginia. You look positively haggard," he said.
"I wasn't sleepy. Mother came in for a few minutes, and we put the children to bed. Jenny wanted to say good-night to you, and she cried when I told her you had gone out. I believe she loves you better than she does anybody in the world, Oliver."
He smiled with something of the casual brilliancy which had first captivated her imagination. In spite of the melancholy which had clouded his charm of late, he had lost neither his glow of physical well-being nor the look of abounding intellectual energy which distinguished him from all other men whom she knew. It was this intellectual energy, she sometimes thought, which purified his character of that vein of earthiness which she had looked upon as the natural, and therefore the pardonable, attribute of masculine human nature.
"If she keeps her looks, she'll leave her mother behind some day," he answered. "You need a new dress, Jinny. I hate that old waist and skirt. Why don't you wear the swishy blue silk I always liked on you?"
"I made it over for Lucy, dear. She had to have a dress to wear to Lily Carrington's birthday party, and I didn't want to buy one. It looks ever so nice on her."
"Doubtless, but I like it better on you."
"It doesn't matter what I wear, but Lucy is so fond of pretty things, and children dress more now than they used to do. What did Susan have to say?"
He had turned to bolt the front door, and while his back was towards her, she raised her hand to smother a yawn. All day she had been on her feet, except for the two hours when she had worked at her sewing-machine, while Harry and Jenny were taking their morning nap. She had not had time to change her dress until after supper, and she had felt so tired then that it had not seemed worth while to do so. There was, in fact, nothing to change to, since she had made over the blue silk, except an old black organdie, cut square in the neck, which she had worn in the months before Jenny's birth. As a girl she had loved pretty clothes; but there were so many other things to think about now, and from the day that her first child had come to her it had seemed to matter less and less what she wore or how she appeared. Nothing had really counted in life except the supreme privilege of giving herself, body and soul, in the service of love. All that she was—all that she had—belonged to Oliver and to his children, so what difference could it make to them, since she gave herself so completely, whether she wore new clothes or old?
When he turned to her, she had smothered the yawn, and was smiling. "Is Aunt Belinda just the same?" she asked, for he had not answered her question about Susan.
"To tell the truth, I forgot to ask," he replied, with a laugh. "Susan seemed very cheerful, and John Henry was there, of course. It wouldn't surprise me to hear any day that they are to be married. By the way, Virginia, why did you never tell me what a good rider you are? Abby Goode says you would have been a better horsewoman than she is if you hadn't given up riding."
"Why, I haven't been in the saddle for years. I stopped when we had to sell my horse Bess, and that was before you came back to Dinwiddie. How did Abby happen to be there?"
"She stopped to see Susan about something, and then we got to talking—the bunch of us. John Henry asked me to exercise his horse for him when he doesn't go. I rather hope I'll get a chance to go fox-hunting in the autumn. Abby was talking about it."
"Has she changed much? I haven't seen her for years. She is hardly ever in Dinwiddie."
"Well, she's fatter, but it's becoming to her. It makes her look softer. She's a bit coarse, but she tells a capital story. I always liked Abby."
"Yes, I always liked Abby, too," answered Virginia, and it was on the tip of her tongue to add that Abby had always liked Oliver. "If he hadn't seen me, perhaps he might have married her," she thought, and the remote possibility of such bliss for poor defrauded Abby filled her with an incredible tenderness. She would never have believed that bouncing, boisterous Abby Goode could have aroused in her so poignant a sympathy.
He appeared so much more cheerful than she had seen him since his disastrous trip to New York, that, moved by an unselfish impulse of gratitude towards the cause of it, she put out her hand to him, while he raised his arm to extinguish the light.
"I am so glad about the horse, dear," she said. "It will be nice for you to go sometimes with Abby."
"Why couldn't you come too, Jinny?"
"Oh, I shouldn't have time—and, besides, I gave it up long ago. I don't think a mother has any business on horseback."
"All the same I wish you wouldn't let yourself go to pieces. What have you done to your hands? They used to be so pretty."
She drew them hastily away, while the tears rose in a mist to her eyes. It was like a man—it was especially like Oliver—to imagine that she could clean up half a house and take charge of three children, yet keep her hands as white and soft as they had been when she was a girl and did nothing except wait for a lover. In a flash of memory, she saw the reddened and knotted hands of her mother, and then a procession of hands belonging to all the mothers of her race that had gone before her. Were her own but a single pair in that chain of pathetic hands that had worked in the exacting service of Love?
"It is so hard to keep them nice," she said; but her heart cried, "What do my hands matter when it is for your sake that I have spoiled them?" With her natural tendency to undervalue the physical pleasures of life, she had looked upon her beauty as a passing bloom which would attract her lover to the veiled wonders of her spirit. Fleshly beauty as an end in itself would have appeared to her as immoral a cult as the wilful pursuit of a wandering desire in the male.
"I never noticed until to-night what pretty hands Abby has," he said, innocently enough, as he turned off the gas.
A strange sensation—something which was so different from anything she had ever felt before that she could not give it a name—pierced her heart like an arrow. Then it fled as suddenly as it had come, and left her at ease with the thought: "Abby has had nothing to hurt her hands. Why shouldn't they be pretty?" But not for Abby's hands would she have given up a single hour when she had washed Jenny's little flannels or dug enchanted garden beds with Harry's miniature trowel.
"She used to have a beautiful figure," she said with perfect sincerity.
"Well, she's got it still, though she's a trifle too large for my taste. You can't help liking her—she's such jolly good company, but, somehow, she doesn't seem womanly. She's too fond of sport and all that sort of thing."
His ideal woman still corresponded to the type which he had chosen for his mate; for true womanliness was inseparably associated in his mind with those qualities which had awakened for generations the impulse of sexual selection in the men of his race. Though he enjoyed Abby, he refused stubbornly to admire her, since evolution, which moves rapidly in the development of the social activities, had left his imagination still sacredly cherishing the convention of the jungle in the matter of sex. He saw woman as dependent upon man for the very integrity of her being, and beyond the divine fact of this dependency, he did not see her at all. But there was nothing sardonic in his point of view, which had become considerably strengthened by his marriage to Virginia, who shared it. It was one of those mental attitudes, indeed, which, in the days of loose thinking and of hazy generalizations, might have proved its divine descent by its universality. Oliver, his Uncle Cyrus, the rector, and honest John Henry, however they may have differed in their views of the universe or of each other, were one at least in accepting the historical dogma of the supplementary being of woman.
And yet, so strange is life, so inexplicable are its contradictions, there were times when Oliver's ideal appeared almost to betray him, and the intellectual limitations of Virginia bored rather than delighted him. Habit, which is a sedative to a phlegmatic nature, acts not infrequently as a positive irritant upon the temperament of the artist; and since he had turned from his work in a passion of disgust at the dramatic obtuseness of his generation, he had felt more than ever the need of some intellectual outlet for the torrent of his imagination. As a wife, Virginia was perfect; as a mental companion, she barely existed at all. She was, he had come to recognize, profoundly indifferent to the actual world. Her universe was a fiction except the part of it that concerned him or the children. He had never forgotten that he had read his play to her one night shortly after Jenny's birth, and she had leaned forward with her chin on her palm and a look in her face as if she were listening for a cry which never came from the nursery. Her praise had had the sound of being recited by rote, and had aroused in him a sense of exasperation which returned even now whenever she mentioned his work. In the days of his courtship the memory of her simplicities clung like an exquisite bouquet to the intoxicating image of her; but in eight years of daily intimacy the flavour and the perfume of mere innocence had evaporated. The quality which had first charmed him was, perhaps, the first of which he had grown weary. He still loved Virginia, but he had ceased to talk to her. "If you go into the refrigerator, Oliver, don't upset Jenny's bottle of milk," she said, looking after him as he turned towards the dining-room.
Her foot was already on the bottom step of the staircase, for she had heard, or imagined that she had heard, a sound from the nursery, and she was impatient to see if one of the children had awakened and got out of bed. All the evening, while she had changed the skin-tight sleeves of the eighties to the balloon ones of the nineties in an old waist which she had had before her marriage and had never worn because it was unbecoming, her thoughts had been of Harry, whom she had punished for some act of flagrant rebellion during the afternoon. Now she was eager to comfort him if he was awake and unhappy, or merely to cuddle and kiss him if he was fast asleep in his bed.
At the top of the staircase she saw the lowered lamp in the nursery, and beside it stood Harry in his little nightgown, with a toy ship in his arms.
"Mamma, I'm tired of bed and I want to play."
"S—sush, darling, you will wake Jenny. It isn't day yet. You must go back to bed."
"But I'm tired of bed."
"You won't be after I tuck you in."
"Will you sit by me and tell me a story?"
"Yes, darling, I'll tell you a story if you'll promise not to talk."
Her eyes were heavy with sleep, and her limbs trembled from the exhaustion of the long June day; but she remembered the punishment of the afternoon, and as she looked at him her heart seemed melting with tenderness.
"And you'll promise not to go away until I'm fast asleep?—you'll promise, mamma?"
"I'll promise, precious. No, you mustn't take your ship to bed with you. That's a darling."
Then, as Oliver was heard coming softly up the stairs for fear of arousing the children, she caught Harry's moist hand in hers and stole with him into the nursery.
To Virginia in the long torrid days of that summer there seemed time for neither anxiety nor disappointment. Every minute of her eighteen waking hours was spent in keeping the children washed, dressed, and good-humoured. She thought of herself so little that it never occurred to her to reflect whether she was happy or unhappy—hardly, even, whether she was awake or asleep. Twice a week John Henry's horse carried Oliver for a ride with Abby and Susan, and on these evenings he stayed so late that Virginia ceased presently even to make a pretence of waiting supper. Several times, on September afternoons, when the country burned with an illusive radiance as if it were seen through a mirage, she put on her old riding-habit, which she had hunted up in the attic at the rectory, and mounting one of Abby's horses, started to accompany them; but her conscience reproached her so bitterly at the thought that she was seeking pleasure away from the children, that she hurried homeward across the fields before the others were ready to turn. As with most women who are born for motherhood, that supreme fact had not only absorbed the emotional energy of her girlhood, but had consumed in its ecstatic flame even her ordinary capacities for enjoyment. While fatherhood left Oliver still a prey to dreams and disappointments, the more exclusive maternal passion rendered Virginia profoundly indifferent to every aspect of life except the intimate personal aspect of her marriage. She couldn't be happy—she couldn't even be at ease—while she remembered that the children were left to the honest, yet hardly tender, mercies of Marthy.
"I shall never go again," she thought, as she slipped from her saddle at the gate, and, catching up her long riding-skirt, ran up the short walk to the steps. "I must be getting old. Something has gone out of me."
And there was no regret in her heart for thissomethingwhich had fled out of her life, for the flashing desires and the old breathless pleasures of youth which she had lost. For a month this passive joy lasted—the joy of one whose days are full and whose every activity is in useful service. Then there came an October afternoon which she never forgot because it burned across her life like a prairie fire and left a scarred track of memory behind it. It had been a windless day, filled with glittering blue lights that darted like birds down the long ash-coloured roads, and spun with a golden web of air which made the fields and trees appear as thin and as unsubstantial as dreams. The children were with Marthy in the park, and Virginia, attired in the old waist with the new sleeves, was leaning on the front gate watching the slow fall of the leaves from the gnarled mulberry tree at the corner, when Mrs. Pendleton appeared on the opposite side of the street and crossed the cobblestones of the road with her black alpaca skirt trailing behind her.
"I wonder why in the world mother doesn't hold up her skirt?" thought Virginia, swinging back the little wooden gate while she waited. "Mother, you are letting your train get all covered with dust!" she called, as soon as Mrs. Pendleton came near enough to catch her half-whispered warning.
Reaching down indifferently, the older woman caught up a handful of her skirt and left the rest to follow ignominiously in the dust. From the carelessness of the gesture, Virginia saw at once that her mother's mind was occupied by one of those rare states of excitement or of distress when even the preservation of her clothes had sunk to a matter of secondary importance. When the small economies were banished from Mrs. Pendleton's consciousness, matters had assumed indeed a serious aspect.