Virginia

"I remember. Their flowers cover everything when they fall, but I always loved them."

"Well, one does get attached to things. I hope you have had a pleasant summer in spite of the heat. It must have been a delight to have your daughter at home again. What a splendid worker she is. If we had her in Dinwiddie for good it wouldn"t be long before the old town would awaken.

Why, I"d been trying to get those girls" clubs started for a year, and she took the job out of my hands and managed it in two weeks."

"The dear child is very clever. Is your wife still in the mountains?"

"She"s coming back next week. We didn"t feel that it was safe to bring the baby home until that long spell of heat had broken." Then, as she turned towards the step, he added hastily, "Won"t you let me walk home with you?"

But this, she felt, was more than she could bear, and making the excuse of an errand on the next block, she parted from him at the gate, and hurried like a shadow back along High Street.

Until October there was no word from Oliver, and then at last there came a letter, which she threw, half read, into the fire. The impulsive act, so unlike the normal Virginia, soothed her for an instant, and she said over and over to herself, while she moved hurriedly about the room, as though she were seeking an escape from the moment before her, "I"m glad I didn"t finish it. I"m glad I let it burn." Though she did not realize it, this pa.s.sionate refusal to look at or to touch the thing that she hated was the last stand of the Pendleton idealism against the triumph of the actuality. It is possible that until that moment she had felt far down in her soul that by declining to acknowledge in words the fact of Oliver"s desertion, by hiding it from the children, by ignoring the processes which would lead to his freedom, she had, in some obscure way, deprived that fact of all power over her life. But now while his letter, blaming himself and yet pleading with her for his liberty, lay there, crumbling slowly to ashes, under her eyes, her whole life, with its pathos, its subterfuge, its losing battle against the ruling spirit of change, seemed crumbling there also, like those ashes, or like that vanished past to which she belonged. "I"m glad I let it burn," she repeated bitterly, and yet she knew that the words had never really burned, that the flame which was consuming them would never die until she lay in her coffin. Stopping in front of the fire, she stood looking down on the last shred of the letter, as though it were in reality the ruins of her life which she was watching. A dull wonder stirred in her mind amid her suffering--a vague questioning as to why this thing, of all things, should have happened? "If I could only know why it was--if I could only understand, it might be easier," she thought. "But I tried so hard to do what was right, and, whatever the fault was, at least I never failed in love. I never failed in love," she repeated. Her gaze, leaving the fire, rested for an instant on a little alabaster ash-tray which stood on the end of the table, and a spasm crossed her face, which had remained unmoved while she was reading his letter. Every object in the room seemed suddenly alive with memories. That was his place on the rug; the deep chintz-covered chair by the hearth was the one in which he used to sit, watching the fire at night, before going to bed; the clock on the mantel was the one he had selected; the rug, which was threadbare in places, he had helped her to choose; the pile of English reviews on the table he had subscribed to; the little gla.s.s water bottle on the candle-stand by the bed, she had bought years ago because he liked to drink in the night. There was nothing in which he did not have a part.

Every trivial incident of her life was bound up with the thought of him.

She could no more escape the torment of these a.s.sociations than she could escape the fact of herself. For so long she had been one with him in her thoughts that their relationship had pa.s.sed, for her, into that profound union of habit which is the strongest union of all. Even the years in which he had grown gradually away from her had appeared to her to leave untouched the deeper sanct.i.ties of their marriage.

A knock came at the door, and the cook, with a list of groceries in her hand, entered to inquire if her mistress were going to market. With the beginning of the autumn Virginia had tried to take an interest in her housekeeping again, and the daily trip to the market had relieved, in a measure, the terrible vacancy of her mornings. Now it seemed to her that the remorseless exactions of the material details of living offered the only escape from the tortures of memory. "Yes, I"ll go," she said, reaching out her hand for the list, and her heart cried, "I cannot live if I stay in this room any longer. I cannot live if I look at these things." As she turned away to put on her hat, she was seized by a superst.i.tious feeling that she might escape her suffering by fleeing from these inanimate reminders of her marriage. It was as though the chair and the rug and the clock had become possessed with some demoniacal spirit. "If I can only get out of doors I shall feel better,"

she insisted; and when she had hurriedly pinned on her hat and tied her tulle ruff at her throat, she caught up her gloves and ran quickly down the stairs and out into the street. But as soon as she had reached the sidewalk, the agony, which she had thought she was leaving behind her in the closed room upstairs, rushed over her in a wave of realization, and turning again, she started back into the yard, and stopped, with a sensation of panic, beside the bed of crimson dahlias at the foot of the steps. Then, while she hesitated, uncertain whether to return to her bedroom or to force herself to go on to the market, those hated familiar objects flashed in a blaze of light through her mind, and, opening the gate, she pa.s.sed out on the sidewalk, and started at a rapid step down the deserted pavement of Sycamore Street. "At least n.o.body will speak to me," she thought; but while the words were still on her lips, she saw a door in the block open wide, and one of her neighbours come out on his way to his business. Turning hastily, she fled into a cross street, and then gathering courage, went on, trembling in every limb, towards the old market, which she used because her mother and her grandmother had used it before her.

The fish-carts were still there just as they had been when she was a girl, but the army of black-robed housekeepers had changed or melted away. Here, also, the physical details of life had survived the beings for whose use or comfort they had come into existence. The meat and the vegetable stalls were standing in orderly rows about the octagonal building; wilted cabbage leaves littered the dusty floor; flies swarmed around the bleeding forms hanging from hooks in the sunshine; even Mr.

Dewlap, hale and red-cheeked, offered her white pullets out of the wooden coop at his feet. So little had the physical scene changed since the morning, more than twenty-five years ago, of her meeting with Oliver, that while she paused there beside Mr. Dewlap"s stall, one of the older generation might have mistaken her for her mother.

"My dear Virginia," said a voice at her back, and, turning, she found Mrs. Peachey, a trifle rheumatic, but still plump and pretty. "I"m so glad you come to the old market, my child. I suppose you cling to it because of your mother, and then things are really so much dearer uptown, don"t you think so?"

"Yes, I dare say they are, but I"ve got into the habit of coming here."

"One does get into habits. Now I"ve bought chickens from Mr. Dewlap for forty years. I remember your mother and I used to say that there were no chickens to compare with his white pullets."

"I remember. Mother was a wonderful housekeeper."

"And you are too, my dear. Everybody says that you have the best table in Dinwiddie!" Her small rosy face, framed in the shirred brim of her black silk bonnet, was wrinkled with age, but even her wrinkles were cheerful ones, and detracted nothing from the charming archness of her expression. Unconquerable still, she went her sprightly way, on rheumatic limbs, towards the grave.

"Have you seen dear Miss Priscilla?" asked Virginia, striving to turn the conversation away from herself, and shivering with terror lest the other should ask after Oliver, whom she had always adored.

"I stopped to inquire about her on my way down. She had had a bad night, the maid said, and Doctor Fraser is afraid that the cold she got when she went driving the other day has settled upon her lungs."

"Oh, I am so sorry!" exclaimed Virginia, but she was conscious of an immeasurable relief because Miss Priscilla"s illness was absorbing Mrs.

Peachey"s thoughts.

"Well, I must be going on," said the little lady, and though she flinched with pain when she moved, the habitual cheerfulness of her face did not alter. "Come to see me as often as you can, Jinny. I can"t get about much now, and it is such a pleasure for me to have somebody to chat with. People don"t visit now," she added regretfully, "as much as they used to."

"So many things have changed," said Virginia, and her eyes, as she gazed up at the blue sky over the market, had a yearning look in them. So many things had changed--ah, there was the pang!

On her way home, overcome by the fear that Miss Priscilla might die thinking herself neglected, Virginia stopped at the Academy, and was shown into the chamber behind the parlour, which had once been a cla.s.sroom. In the middle of her big tester bed, the teacher was lying, propped among pillows, with her cameo brooch fastening the collar of her nightgown and a purple wool shawl, which Virginia had knit for her, thrown over her shoulders.

"Dear Miss Priscilla, I"ve thought of you so often. Are you better to-day?"

"A little, Jinny, but don"t worry about me. I"ll be out of bed in a day or two." Though she was well over eighty-five, she still thought of herself as a middle-aged woman, and her constant plans for the future amazed Virginia, whose hold upon life was so much slighter, so much less tenacious. "Have you been to market, dear? I miss so being able to sit by the window and watch people go by. Then I always knew when you and Susan were on your way to Mr. Dewlap."

"Yes, I"ve begun to go again. It fills in the day."

"I never approved of your letting your servants market for you, Jinny.

It would have shocked your mother dreadfully."

"I know," said Virginia, and her voice, in spite of her effort to speak cheerfully, had a weary sound, which made her add with sudden energy, "I"ve brought you a partridge. Mr. Dewlap had such nice ones. You must try to eat it for supper."

"How like you that was, Jinny. You are your mother all over again. I declare I am reminded of her more and more every time that I see you."

Tears sprang to Virginia"s eyes, while her thin blue-veined hands gently caressed Miss Priscilla"s swollen and knotted fingers.

"You couldn"t tell me anything that would please me more," she answered.

"I used to think that Lucy would take after her, but she grew up differently."

"Yes, neither of the girls is like her. They are dear, good children, but they are very modern."

"Have you heard from them recently?"

"A few days ago, and they are both as well as can be."

"And what about Harry? I"ve always believed that Harry was your favourite, Jinny."

For an instant Virginia hesitated, with her eyes on the pot of red geraniums blooming between the white muslin curtains at the window. In his little cage in the sunlight, Miss Priscilla"s canary, the last of many generations of d.i.c.kys, burst suddenly into song.

"I believe that Harry loves me more than anybody else in the world does," she answered at last. "He"d come to me to-morrow if he thought I needed him."

Lying there in her great white bed, with her enormous body, which she could no longer turn, rising in a mountain of flesh under the linen sheet, the old teacher closed her eyes lest Virginia should see her soul yearning over her as it had yearned over Lucy Pendleton after the rector"s death. She thought of the girl, with the flower-like eyes and the braided wreath of hair, flitting in white organdie and blue ribbons, under the dappled sunlight in High Street, and she said to herself, as she had said twenty-five years ago, "If there was ever a girl who looked as if she were cut out for happiness, it was Jinny Pendleton."

"They say that Abby Goode is going to be married at last," remarked Virginia abruptly, for she knew that such bits of gossip supplied the only pleasant excitement in Miss Priscilla"s life.

"Well, it"s time. She waited long enough," returned the teacher, and she added, "I always knew that she was crazy about Oliver by the way she flung herself at his head." She had never liked Abby, and her prejudices, which had survived the shocks of life, were not weakened by the approaching presence of Death. It was characteristic of her that she should pa.s.s into eternity with both her love and her scorn undiminished.

"She was a little boisterous as a girl, but I never believed any harm of her," answered Virginia mildly; and then as Miss Priscilla"s lunch was brought in on a tray, she kissed her tenderly, with a curious feeling that it was for the last time, and went out of the door and down the gravelled walk into High Street. An exhaustion greater than any she had ever known oppressed her as she dragged her body, which felt dead, through the glorious October weather. Once, when she pa.s.sed Saint James"

Church, she thought wearily, "How sorry mother would be if she knew,"

while an intolerable pain, which seemed her mother"s pain as well as her own, pierced her heart. Then, as she hurried on, with that nervous haste which she could no longer control, the terrible haunted blocks appeared to throng with the faded ghosts of her youth. A grey-haired woman leaning out of the upper window of an old house nodded to her with a smile, and she found herself thinking, "I rolled hoops with her once in the street, and now she is watching her grandchild go out in its carriage." At any other moment she would have bent, enraptured, over the perambulator, which was being wheeled, by a nurse and a maid, down the front steps into the street; but to-day the sight of the soft baby features, lovingly surrounded by lace and blue ribbons, was like the turn of a knife in her wound. "And yet mother always said that she was never so happy as she was with my children," she reflected, while her personal suffering was eased for a minute by the knowledge of what her return to Dinwiddie had meant to her mother. "If she had died while I lived away, I could never have got over it--I could never have forgiven myself," she added, and there was an exquisite relief in turning even for an instant away from the thought of herself.

When she reached home luncheon was awaiting her; but after sitting down at the table and unfolding her napkin, a sudden nausea seized her, and she felt that it was impossible to sit there facing the mahogany sideboard, with its gleaming rows of silver, and watch the precise, slow-footed movements of the maid, who served her as she might have served a wooden image. "I took such trouble to train her, and now it makes me sick to look at her," she thought, as she pushed back her chair and fled hastily from the room into Oliver"s study across the hall. Here her work-bag lay on the table, and taking it up, she sat down before the fire, and spread out the centrepiece, which she was embroidering, in an intricate and elaborate design, for Lucy"s Christmas. It was almost a year now since she had started it, and into the luxuriant sprays and garlands there had pa.s.sed something of the restless love and yearning which had overflowed from her heart. Usually she was able to work on it in spite of her suffering, for she was one of those whose hands could accomplish mechanically tasks from which her soul had revolted; but to-day even her obedient fingers faltered and refused to keep at their labour. Her eyes, leaving the needle she held, wandered beyond the window to the branches of the young maple tree, which rose, like a pointed flame, toward the cloudless blue of the sky.

In the evening, when Susan came in, with a newspaper in her hand, and a pa.s.sionate sympathy in her face, Virginia was still sitting there, gazing at the dim outline of the tree and the strip of sky which had faded from azure to grey.

"Oh, Jinny, my darling, you never told me!"

Taking up the piece of embroidery from her lap, Virginia met her friend"s tearful caress with a frigid and distant manner. "There was nothing to tell. What do you mean?" she asked.

"Is--is it true that Oliver has left you? That--that----" Susan"s voice broke, strangled by emotion, but Virginia, without looking up from the rose on which she was working in the firelight, answered quietly:

"Yes, it is true. He wants to be free."

"But you will not do it, darling? The law is on your side."

With her eyes on the needle which she held carefully poised for the next st.i.tch, Virginia hesitated while the muscles of her face quivered for an instant and then grew rigid again.