"I know he looks so, dear, but he isn"t."
"Well, here"s your mother. Leave it to her. She will agree with me."
"Why, what is it, Jinny?" asked Mrs. Pendleton, laying her bundle on the couch (for she had come prepared to spend the night), and regarding Oliver with the indulgent eyes of an older generation.
"Virginia says at the last minute that she won"t go with us," said Oliver, angry, yet caressing as he always was in his manner to his mother-in-law, to whom he was sincerely devoted. "She"s got into her head that there"s something wrong with Harry, but you can tell by looking at the child that he is perfectly well."
"But I was up with him last night, mother. His throat hurts him," broke in Virginia in a voice that was full of emotion.
"He certainly looks all right," remarked Mrs. Pendleton, "and I can take care of him if anything should be wrong." Then she added very gravely, "If you can"t go, of course Oliver must stay at home, too, Virginia."
"I can"t," said Oliver; "not just for a whim, anyway. It would break up the party. Besides, I didn"t get a holiday all summer, and I"ll blow up that confounded bank unless I take a change."
In the last quarter of an hour the trip had become of tremendous importance to him. From a trivial incident which he might have relinquished a week ago without regret, the excursion with Abby had attained suddenly the dignity and the power of an event in his life.
Opposition had magnified inclination into desire.
"I don"t think it will do for Oliver to go without you, Jinny," said Mrs. Pendleton, and the gravity of her face showed how carefully she was weighing her words.
"But I can"t go, mother. You don"t understand," replied Virginia, while her lips worked convulsively. No one could understand--not even her mother. Of the three of them, it is probable that she alone realized the complete significance of her decision.
"Well, it"s too late now, anyway," remarked Oliver shortly. "You wouldn"t have time to dress and catch the train even if you wanted to."
Taking up his bag, he kissed her carelessly, shook hands with Mrs.
Pendleton, and throwing a "Good-bye, General!" to Harry, went out of the door.
As he vanished, Virginia started up quickly, called "Oliver!" under her breath, and then sat down again, drawing her child closer in her arms.
Her face had grown grey and stricken like the face of an old woman.
Every atom of her quivered with the longing to run after him, to yield to his wish, to promise anything he asked of her. Yet she knew that if he came back, they would only pa.s.s again through the old wearing struggle of wills. She had chosen not as she desired to, but as she must, and already she was learning that life forces one in the end to abide by one"s choices.
"Oh, Virginia, I am afraid it was a mistake," said Mrs. Pendleton in an agonized tone. The horror of a scandal, which was stronger in the women of her generation than even the horror of illness, still darkened her mind.
A shiver pa.s.sed through Virginia and left her stiller and graver than before.
"No, it was not a mistake, mother," she answered quietly. "I did what I was obliged to do. Oliver could not understand."
As she uttered the words, she saw Oliver"s face turned to Abby with the gay and laughing expression she had seen on it when the two rode down Old Street together, and a wave of pa.s.sionate jealousy swept over her.
She had let him go alone; he was angry with her; and for three days he would be with Abby almost every minute. And suddenly, she heard spoken by a mocking voice at the back of her brain: "You look at least ten years older than Abby."
"It does seem as if he might have stayed at home," remarked Mrs.
Pendleton; "but he is so used to having his own way that it is harder for him to give it up than for the rest of us. Your father says you have spoiled him."
She had spoiled him--this she saw clearly now, she who had never seen anything clearly until it was too late for sentimentality to work its harm. From the day of her marriage she had spoiled him because spoiling him had been for her own happiness as well as for his. She had yielded to him since her chief desire had been simply to yield and to satisfy.
Her unselfishness had been merely selfishness cloaked in the familiar aspect of duty. Another vision of him, not as he looked when he was riding with Abby, but as he had appeared to her in the early days of their marriage, floated before her. He had been hers utterly then--hers with his generous impulses, his high ideals, his undisciplined emotions.
And what had she done with him? What were her good intentions--what was her love, even, worth--when her intentions and her love alike had been so lacking in wisdom? It was as if she condemned herself with a judgment which was not her own, as if her life-long habit of seeing only the present instant had suddenly deserted her.
"He has been so nervous and unlike himself ever since the failure of his play, mother," she said. "It"s hard to understand, but it meant more to him than a woman can realize."
"I suppose so," returned Mrs. Pendleton sympathetically. "Your father says that he spoke to him bitterly the other day about being a failure.
Of course, he isn"t one in the least, darling," she added rea.s.suringly.
"I sometimes think that Oliver"s ambition was the greatest thing in his life," said Virginia musingly. "It meant to him, I believe, a great deal of what the children mean to me. He felt that it was himself, and yet in a way closer than himself. Until that dreadful time in New York I never understood what his work may mean to a man."
"I wish you could have gone with him, Jinny."
"I couldn"t," replied Virginia, as she had replied so often before. "I know Harry doesn"t look sick," she went on with that soft obstinacy which never attacked and yet never yielded a point, "but something tells me that he isn"t well."
An hour later, when she put him to bed, he looked so gay and rosy that she almost allowed herself the weakness of a regret. Suppose nothing was wrong, after all? Suppose, as Oliver had said, she was merely "sensational"? While she undressed in the dark for fear of awaking Jenny, who was sleeping soundly in her crib on Virginia"s side of the bed, her mind went back over the two harrowing days through which she had just lived, and she asked herself, not if she had triumphed for good over Abby, but if she had really done what was right both for Oliver and the children. After all, the whole of life came back simply to doing the thing that was right. So unused was she to the kind of introspection which weighs emotions as if they were facts, that she thought slowly, from sheer lack of practice in the subtler processes of reasoning.
Worry, the plain, ordinary sort of worry with which she was unhappily familiar, had not prepared her for the piercing anguish which follows the probing of the open wounds in one"s soul. To lie sleepless over butchers" bills was different, somehow, from lying sleepless over the possible loss of Oliver"s love. It was different, and yet, just as she had asked herself over and over again on those other nights if she had done right to run up so large an account at Mr. Dewlap"s, so she questioned her conscience now in the hope of finding justification for Oliver. "Ought I to have gone on the hunt yesterday?" she asked kneeling, with sore and aching limbs, by the bedside. "Had I a right to risk my life when the children are so young that they need me every minute? It is true nothing happened. Providence watched over me; but, then, something might have happened, and I could have blamed only myself. I was jealous--for the first time in my life, I was jealous--and because I was jealous, I did wrong and neglected my duty. Yesterday I sacrificed the children to Oliver, and to-day I sacrificed Oliver to the children. I love Oliver as much, but I have made the children. They came only because I brought them into the world. I am responsible for them--I am responsible for them," she repeated pa.s.sionately; and a moment later, she prayed softly: "O Lord, help me to want to do what is right."
Through the night, tired and sore as she was, she hardly closed her eyes, and she was lying wide awake, with her hand on the railing of Jenny"s crib, and her gaze on the half-bared bough of the old mulberry tree in the street, when a cry, or less than a cry, a small, choking whimper, from the nursery, caused her to spring out of bed with a start and slip into her wrapper which lay across the edge of the quilt.
"I"m coming, darling," she called softly, and the answer came back in Harry"s voice: "Mamma, I"m afraid!"
Without waiting to put on her slippers, for one of them had slid under the bed, she ran across the carpet and through the doorway into the adjoining room.
"What is it, my lamb? Does anything hurt you?" she asked anxiously.
"I"m afraid, mamma."
"What are you afraid of? Mamma is here, precious."
His little hands were hot when she clasped them, and the pathetic wonder in his blue eyes made her heart stand still with a fear greater than Harry"s. Ever since the children had come she had lived in terror of a serious illness attacking them.
"Where does it hurt you, darling? Can"t you tell me?"
"It feels so funny when I swallow, mamma. It"s all full of flannel."
"Will you open your mouth wide, then, and let mamma mop your throat with turpentine?"
But Harry hated turpentine even more than he hated the sore throat, and he protested with tears while she found the bottle in the bathroom and swathed the end of the wire mop in cotton. When she brought it to his bedside, he fought so strenuously that she was obliged at last to give up. His fever had excited him, and he sobbed violently while she applied the bandages to his throat and chest.
"Is it any better, dear?" she asked desperately at the end of an hour in which he had lain, weeping and angry, in her arms.
"It feels funny. I don"t like it," he sobbed, pushing her from him.
"Then I"ll send for Doctor Fraser. He"ll make you well."
But he didn"t want Doctor Fraser, who gave the meanest medicines. He didn"t want anybody. He hated everybody. He hated Lucy. He hated Jenny.
When at last day came, and Marthy appeared to know what Virginia wanted for breakfast, he was still vowing pa.s.sionately that he hated them all.
"Marthy, run at once for Doctor Fraser. Harry is quite sick," said Virginia, pale to the lips.
"But I won"t see him, mamma, and I won"t take his medicines. They are the meanest medicines."
"Perhaps he won"t give you any, precious, and if he does, mamma will taste every single one for you."
Then Jenny began to beg to get up, and Lucy, who had been watching with dispa.s.sionate curiosity from the edge of her little bed, was sent to amuse her until Marthy"s return.
"Suppose I had gone!" thought Virginia, while an overwhelming thankfulness swept the anxiety out of her mind. Not until the servant reappeared, dragging the fat old doctor after her, did Virginia remember that she was still barefooted, and go into her bedroom to search for her slippers.