Virginia

"Well, she"s fatter, but it"s becoming to her. It makes her look softer.

She"s a bit coa.r.s.e, 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 grat.i.tude 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 pa.s.sing 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 a.s.sociated in his mind with those qualities which had awakened for generations the impulse of s.e.xual 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 s.e.x. 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 att.i.tudes, 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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sion 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 this _something_ which 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 pa.s.sive 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 a.s.sumed indeed a serious aspect.

"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-k.n.o.b. 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 coa.r.s.e, but she"s perfectly good. n.o.body 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."