Virginia

Unfastening her coat, which she had kept on, she laid it on the sofa at her back, and then put up her hands to take out her hatpins.

"I must pack my things," she said suddenly. "Will you engage my berth back to Dinwiddie for to-night?"

He nodded without speaking, and she added hastily, "I shan"t go down again before starting. But there is no need that you should go to the train with me."

At this he turned back from the door where he had waited with his hand on the k.n.o.b. "Won"t you let me do even that?" he asked, and his voice sounded so like Harry"s that a sob broke from her lips. The point was so small a one--all points seemed to her so small--that her will died down and she yielded without protest. What did it matter--what did anything matter to her now?

"I"ll send up your luncheon," he added almost gratefully. "You will be ill if you don"t eat something."

"No, please don"t. I am not hungry," she answered, and then he went out softly, as though he were leaving a sick-room, and left her alone with her anguish--and her packing.

Without turning in her chair, without taking off her hat, from which she had drawn the pins, she sat there like a woman in whom the spirit has been suddenly stricken. Beyond the window the perfect day, with its haunting reminder of the spring, was lengthening slowly into afternoon, and through the slant sunbeams the same gay crowd pa.s.sed in streams on the pavements. On the roof of one of the opposite houses a flag was flying, and it seemed to her that the sight of that flag waving under the blue sky was bound up forever with the intolerable pain in her heart. And with that strange pa.s.sivity of the nerves which nature mercifully sends to those who have learned submission to suffering, to those whose strength is the strength, not of resistance, but of endurance, she felt that as long as she sat there, relaxed and motionless, she had in a way withdrawn herself from the struggle to live. If she might only stay like this forever, without moving, without thinking, without feeling, while she died slowly, inch by inch, spirit and body.

A knock came at the door, and as she moved to answer it, she felt that life returned in a slow throbbing agony, as if her blood were forced back again into veins from which it had ebbed. When the tray was placed on the table beside her, she looked up with a mild, impersonal curiosity at the waiter, as the dead might look back from their freedom and detachment on the unreal figures of the living. "I wonder what he thinks about it all?" she thought vaguely, as she searched in her bag for his tip. "I wonder if he sees how absurd and unnecessary all the things are that he does day after day, year after year, like the rest of us? I wonder if he ever revolts with this unspeakable weariness from waiting on other people and watching them eat?" But the waiter, with his long sallow face, his inscrutable eyes, and his general air of having petrified under the surface, was as enigmatical as life.

After he had gone out, she rose from her untasted luncheon, and going into her bedroom, took the black brocaded gown off the hanger and stuffed the sleeves with tissue paper as carefully as if the world had not crumbled around her. Then she packed away her wrapper and her bedroom slippers and shook out and folded the dresses she had not worn.

For a time she worked on mechanically, hardly conscious of what she was doing, hardly conscious even that she was alive. Then slowly, softly, like a gentle rain, her tears fell into the trunk, on each separate garment as she smoothed it and laid it away.

At half-past eight o"clock she was waiting with her hat and coat on when Oliver came in, followed by the porter who was to take down her bags.

She knew that he had brought the man in order to avoid all possibility of an emotional scene; and she could have smiled, had her spirit been less wan and stricken, at this sign of a moral cowardice which was so characteristic. It was his way, she understood now, though she did not put the thought into words, to take what he wanted, escaping at the same time the price which nature exacts of those who have not learned to relinquish. Out of the strange colourless stillness which surrounded her, some old words of Susan"s floated back to her as if they were spoken aloud: "A Treadwell will always get the thing he wants most in the end." But while he stabbed her, he would look away in order that he might be spared the memory of her face.

Without a word, she followed her bags from the room without a word she entered the elevator, which was waiting, and without a word she took her place in the taxicab standing beside the curbstone. There was no rebellion in her thoughts, merely a dulled consciousness of pain, like the consciousness of one who is partially under an anaesthetic. The fighting courage, the violence of revolt, had no part in her soul, which had been taught to suffer and to renounce with dignity, not with heroics. Her submission was the submission of a flower that bends to a storm.

As she sat there in silence, with her eyes on the brilliant street, where the signs of his play stared back at her under the flaring lights, she began to think with automatic precision, as though her brain were moved by some mechanical power over which she had no control. Little things crowded into her mind--the face of the doll she had bought for Lucy"s stepchild that morning, the words on one of the electric signs on the top of a building they were pa.s.sing, the leopard skin coat worn by a woman on the pavement. And these little things seemed to her at the moment to be more real, more vital, than her broken heart and the knowledge that she was parting from Oliver. The agony of the night and the morning appeared to have pa.s.sed away like a physical pang, leaving only this deadness of sensation and the strange, almost unearthly clearness of external objects. "It is not new. It has been coming on for years," she thought. "He said that, and it is true. It is so old that it has been here forever, and I seem to have been suffering it all my life--since the day I was born, and before the day I was born. It seems older than I am. Oliver is going from me. He has always been going from me--always since the beginning," she repeated slowly, as if she were trying to learn a lesson by heart. But so remote and shadowy did the words appear, that she found herself thinking the next instant, "I must have forgotten my smelling-salts. The bottle was lying on the bureau, and I can"t remember putting it into my bag." The image of this little gla.s.s bottle, with the gold top, which she had left behind was distinct in her memory; but when she tried to think of the parting from Oliver and of all that she was suffering, everything became shadowy and unreal again.

At the station she stood beside the porter while he paid the driver, and then entering the doorway, they walked hurriedly, so hurriedly that she felt as if she were losing her breath, in the direction of the gate and the waiting train. And with each step, as they pa.s.sed down the long platform, which seemed to stretch into eternity, she was thinking: "In a minute it will be over. If I don"t say something now, it will be too late. If I don"t stop him now, it will be over forever--everything will be over forever."

Beside the night coach, in the presence of the conductor and the porter, who stood blandly waiting to help her into the train, she stopped suddenly, as though she could not go any farther, as though the strength which had supported her until now had given way and she were going to fall. Through her mind there flashed the thought that even now she might hold him if she were to make a scene, that if she were to go into hysterics he would not leave her, that if she were to throw away her pride and her self-respect and her dignity, she might recover by violence the outer sh.e.l.l at least of her happiness. How could he break away from her if she were only to weep and to cling to him? Then, while the idea was still in her mind, she knew that to a nature such as hers violence was impossible. It took pa.s.sion to war with pa.s.sion, and in this she was lacking. Though she were wounded to the death, she could not revolt, could not shriek out in her agony, could not break through that gentle yet invincible reticence which she had won from the past.

Down the long platform a child came running with cries of pleasure, followed by a man with a red beard, who carried a suitcase. As they approached the train, Virginia entered the coach, and walked rapidly down the aisle to where the porter was waiting beside her seat.

For the first time since they had reached the station Oliver spoke. "I am sorry I couldn"t get the drawing-room for you," he said. "I am afraid you will be crowded"; and this anxiety about her comfort, when he was ruining her life, did not strike either of them, at the moment, as ridiculous.

"It does not matter," she answered; and he put out his hand.

"Good-bye, Virginia," he said, with a catch in his voice.

"Good-bye," she responded quietly, and would have given her soul for the power to shriek aloud, to overcome this indomitable instinct which was stronger than her personal self.

Turning away, he pa.s.sed between the seats to the door of the coach, and a minute later she saw his figure hurrying back along the platform down which they had come together a few minutes ago.

CHAPTER VI

THE FUTURE

A chill rain was falling when Virginia got out of the train the next morning, and the raw-boned nags. .h.i.tched to the ancient "hacks" in the street appeared even more dejected and forlorn than she had remembered them. Then one of the noisy negro drivers seized her bag, and a little later she was rolling up the long hill in the direction of her home.

Dinwiddie was the same; nothing had altered there since she had left it--and yet what a difference! The same shops were unclosing their shutters; the same crippled negro beggar was taking his place at the corner of the market; the same maids were sweeping the sidewalks with the same brooms; the same clerk bowed to her from the drug store where she bought her medicines; and yet something--the only thing which had ever interested her in these people and this place--had pa.s.sed out of them. Just as in New York yesterday, when she had watched the sunrise, so it seemed to her now that the spirit of reality had faded out of the world. What remained was merely a mirage in which phantoms in the guise of persons made a pretence of being alive.

The front door of her house stood open, and on the porch one of the coloured maids was beating the dust out of the straw mat. "As if dust makes any difference when one is dead," Virginia thought wearily; and an unutterable loathing pa.s.sed over her for all the little acts by which one rendered tribute to the tyranny of appearances. Then, as she entered the house, she felt that the sight of the familiar objects she had once loved oppressed her as though the spirit of melancholy resided in the pieces of furniture, not in her soul. This weariness, so much worse than positive pain, filled her with disgust for all the a.s.sociations and the sentiments she had known in the past. Not only the house and the furniture and the small details of housekeeping, but the street and the town and every friendly face of a neighbour, had become an intolerable reminder that she was still alive.

In her room, where a bright fire was burning, and letters from the girls lay on the table, she sat down in her wraps and gazed with unseeing eyes at the flames. "The children must not know. I must keep it from the children as long as possible," she thought dully, and it was so natural to her to plan sparing them, that for a minute the idea took her mind away from her own anguish. "If I could only die like this, then they need never know," she found herself reflecting coldly a little later, so coldly that she seemed to have no personal interest, no will to choose in the matter. "If I could only die like this, n.o.body need be hurt--except Harry," she added.

For the first time, with the thought of Harry, her restraint suddenly failed her. "Yes, it would hurt Harry. I must live because Harry would want me to," she said aloud; and as though her strength were reinforced by the words, she rose and prepared herself to go downstairs to breakfast--prepared herself, too, for the innumerable little agonies which would come with the day, for the sight of Susan, for the visits from the neighbours, for the eager questions about the fashions in New York which Miss w.i.l.l.y would ask. And all the time she was thinking clearly, "It can"t last forever. It must end some time. Who knows but it may stop the next minute, and one can stand a minute of anything."

The day pa.s.sed, the week, the month, and gradually the spring came and went, awakening life in the trees, in the gra.s.s, in the fields, but not in her heart. Even the dried sticks in the yard put out shoots of living green and presently bore blossoms, and in the borders by the front gate, the crocuses, which she had planted with her own hands a year ago, were ablaze with gold. All nature seemed joining in the resurrection of life, all nature, except herself, seemed to flower again to fulfilment. She alone was dead, and she alone among the dead must keep up this pretence of living which was so much harder than death.

Once every week she wrote to the children, restrained yet gently flowing letters in which there was no mention of Oliver. It had been so long, indeed, since either Harry or the girls had a.s.sociated their parents together, that the omission called forth no question, hardly, she gathered, any surprise. Their lives were so full, their interests were so varied, that, except at the regular intervals when they sat down to write to her, it is doubtful if they ever seriously wondered about her.

In July, Jenny came home for a month, and Lucy wrote regretfully that she was "so disappointed that she couldn"t join mother somewhere in the mountains"; but beyond this, the girls" lives hardly appeared to touch hers even on the surface. In the month that Jenny spent in Dinwiddie, she organized a number of societies and clubs for the improvement of conditions among working girls, and in spite of the intense heat (the hottest spell of the summer came while she was there), she barely allowed herself a minute for rest or for conversation with her mother.

"If you would only go to the mountains, mother," she remarked the evening before she left. "I am sure it isn"t good for you to stay in Dinwiddie during the summer."

"I am used to it," replied Virginia a little stubbornly, for it seemed to her at the moment that she would rather die than move.

"But you ought to think of your health. What does father say about it?"

A contraction of pain crossed Virginia"s face, but Jenny, whose vision was so wide that it had a way of overlooking things which were close at hand, did not observe it.

"He hasn"t said anything," she answered, with a strange stillness of voice.

"I thought he meant to take you to England, but I suppose his plays are keeping him in New York."

Rising from her chair at the table--they had just finished supper--Virginia reached for a saucer and filled it with ice cream from a bowl in front of her.

"I think I"ll send Miss Priscilla a little of this cream," she remarked.

"She is so fond of strawberry."

The next day Jenny went, and again the silence and the loneliness settled upon the house, to which Virginia clung with a morbid terror of change. Had her spirit been less broken, she might have made the effort of going North as Jenny had urged her to do, but when her life was over, one place seemed as desirable as another, and it was a matter of profound indifference to her whether it was heat or cold which afflicted her body. She was probably the only person in Dinwiddie who did not hang out of her window during the long nights in search of a pa.s.sing breeze.

But with that physical insensibility which accompanies prolonged torture of soul, she had ceased to feel the heat, had ceased even to feel the old neuralgic pain in her temples. There were times when it seemed to her that if a pin were stuck into her body she should not know it. The one thing she asked--and this Life granted her except during the four weeks of Jenny"s visit--was freedom from the need of exertion, freedom from the obligation to make decisions. Her housekeeping she left now to the servants, so she was spared the daily hara.s.sing choices of the market and the table. There remained nothing for her to do, nothing even for her to worry about, except her broken heart. Her friends she had avoided ever since her return from New York, partly from an unbearable shrinking from the questions which she knew they would ask whenever they met her, partly because her mind was so engrossed with the supreme fact that her universe lay in ruins, that she found it impossible to lend a casual interest to other matters. She, who had effaced herself for a lifetime, found suddenly that she could not see beyond the immediate presence of her own suffering.

Usually she stayed closely indoors through the summer days, but several times, at the hour of dusk, she went out alone and wandered for hours about the streets which were a.s.sociated with her girlhood. In High Street, at the corner where she had first seen Oliver, she stood one evening until Miss Priscilla, who had caught sight of her from the porch of the Academy (which, owing to the changing fashions in education and the infirmities of the teacher, was the Academy no longer), sent out her negro maid to beg her to come in and sit with her. "No, I"m only looking for something," Virginia had answered, while she hurried back past the church and down the slanting street to the twelve stone steps which led up the terraced hillside at the rectory. Here, in the purple summer twilight, spangled with fireflies, she felt for a minute that her youth was awaiting her; and opening the gate, she pa.s.sed as softly as a ghost along the crooked path to the two great paulownias, which were beginning to decay, and to the honeysuckle arbour, where the tendrils of the creeper brushed her hair like a caress. Under the light of a young moon, it seemed to her that nothing had changed since that spring evening when she had stood there and felt the wonder of first love awake in her heart. Nothing had changed except that love and herself. The paulownias still shed their mysterious shadows about her, the red and white roses still bloomed by the west wing of the house, the bed of mint still grew, rank and fragrant, beneath the dining-room window. When she put her hand on the bole of the tree beside which she stood, she could still feel the initials V. O. which Oliver had cut there in the days before their marriage. A light burned in the window of the room which had been the parlour in the days when she lived there, and as she gazed at it, she almost expected to see the face of her mother, with its look of pathetic cheerfulness, smiling at her through the small greenish panes. And then the past in which Oliver had no part, the past which belonged to her and to her parents, that hallowed, unforgettable past of her childhood, which seemed bathed in love as in a flood of light--this past enveloped her as the magic of the moonbeams enveloped the house in which she had lived. While she stood there, it was more living than the present, more real than the aching misery in her heart.

The door of the house opened and shut; she heard a step on the gravelled path; and bending forward out of the shadow, she waited breathlessly for the sound of her father"s voice. But it was a young rector, who had recently accepted the call to Saint James" Church, and his boyish face, rising out of the sacred past, awoke her with a shock from the dream into which she had fallen.

"Good-evening, Mrs. Treadwell. Were you coming to see me?" he asked eagerly, pleased, she could see, by the idea that she was seeking his services.

"No, I was pa.s.sing, and the garden reminded me so of my girlhood that I came in for a minute."

"It hasn"t changed much, I suppose?" His alert, business-like gaze swept the hillside.

"Hardly at all. One might imagine that those were the same roses I left here."

"An improvement or two wouldn"t hurt it," he remarked with animation.

"These old trees make such a litter in the spring that my wife is anxious to get them down. Women like tidiness, you know, and she says, while they are blooming, it is impossible to keep the yard clean."