Virginia

Having drunk his coffee, Oliver pa.s.sed his cup to her, and laid down his paper.

"You look tired, Virginia. I hope it hasn"t been too much for you?"

"Oh, no. Have you quite got over your headache?"

"Pretty much, but those lights last night were rather trying. Don"t put any cream in this time. I want the stimulant."

"Perhaps it has got cold. Shall I ring for fresh?"

"It doesn"t matter. This will do quite as well. Have you any shopping that you would like to do this morning?"

Shopping! When her whole world had crumbled around her! For an instant the lump in her throat made speech impossible; then summoning that mild yet indestructible spirit, which was as the spirit of all those generations of women who lived in her blood, she answered gently:

"Yes, I had intended to buy some presents for the girls."

"Then you"d better take a taxicab for the morning. I suppose you know the names of the shops you want to go to?"

"Oh, yes. I know the names. Are you going to the theatre?"

"I"ve got to change a few lines in the play, and the sooner I go about it the better."

"Then don"t bother about me, dear. I"ll just put on my long coat over this dress and go out right after breakfast."

"But you haven"t eaten anything," he remarked, glancing at her plate.

"I wasn"t hungry. The fresh air will do me good. It has turned so much warmer, and the snow is all melting."

As she spoke, she rose from the table and began to prepare herself for the street, putting on the black hat with the ostrich tip and the bunch of violets on one side, which didn"t seem just right since she had come to New York, and carefully wrapping the ends of her fur neck-piece around her throat. It was already ten o"clock, for Oliver had slept late, and she must be hurrying if she hoped to get through her shopping before luncheon. While she dressed, a wan spirit of humour entered into her, and she saw how absurd it was that she should rush about from shop to shop, buying things that did not matter in order to fill a life that mattered as little as they did. To her, whose mental outlook had had in it so little humour, it seemed suddenly that the whole of life was ridiculous. Why should she have sat there, pouring Oliver"s coffee and talking to him about insignificant things, when her heart was bursting with this sense of something gone out of existence, with this torturing realization of the irretrievable failure of love?

Taking up her m.u.f.f and her little black bag from the bureau, she looked back at him with a smile as she turned towards the door.

"Good-bye. Will you be here for luncheon?"

"I"m afraid I can"t. I"ve an appointment down-town, but I"ll come back as early as I can."

Then she went out and along the hall to the elevator, in which there was a little girl, who reminded her of Jenny, in charge of a governness in spectacles. She smiled at her almost unconsciously, so spontaneous, so interwoven with her every mood was her love for children; but the little girl, being very proper for her years, did not smile back, and a stab of pain went through Virginia"s heart.

"Even children have ceased to care for me," she thought.

At the door, where she waited a few minutes for her taxicab, a young bride, with her eyes shining with joy, stood watching her husband while he talked with an acquaintance, and it seemed to Virginia that it was a vision of her own youth which had risen to torment her. "That was the way I looked at Oliver twenty-five years ago," she said to herself; "twenty-five years ago, when I was young and he loved me." Then, even while the intolerable pain was still in her heart, she felt that something of the buoyant hopefulness of that other bride entered into her and restored her courage. A resolution, so new that it was born of the joyous glance of a stranger, and yet so old that it seemed a part of that lost spirit of youth which had once carried her in a wild race over the Virginian meadows, a resolution which belonged at the same time to this other woman and to herself, awoke in her and mingled like a draught of wine with her blood. "I will not give up," she thought. "I will go to her. Perhaps she does not know--perhaps she does not understand. I will go to her, and everything may be different." Then her taxicab was called, and stepping into it, she gave the name not of a shop, but of the apartment house in which Margaret Oldcastle lived.

It was one of those February days when, because of the promise of spring in the air, men begin suddenly to think of April. The sky was of an intense blue, with little clouds, as soft as feathers, above the western horizon. On the pavement the last patches of snow were rapidly melting, and the gentle breeze which blew in at the open window of the cab, was like a caressing breath on Virginia"s cheek. "It must be that she does not understand," she repeated, and this thought gave her confidence and filled her with that unconquerable hope of the future without which she felt that living would be impossible. Even the faces in the street cheered her, for it seemed to her that if life were really what she had believed it to be last night, these men and women could not walk so buoyantly, could not smile so gaily, could not spend so much thought and time on the way they looked and the things they wore. "No, it must have been a mistake, a ghastly mistake," she insisted almost pa.s.sionately.

"Some day we shall laugh over it together as we laughed over my jealousy of Abby. He never loved Abby, not for a minute, and yet I imagined that he did and suffered agony because of it." And her taxicab went on merrily between the cheerful crowds on the pavements, gliding among gorgeous motor cars and carriages drawn by high-stepping horses and pedlers" carts drawn by horses that stepped high no longer, among rich people and poor people, among surfeited people and hungry people, among gay people and sad people, among contented people and rebellious people--among all these, who hid their happiness or their sorrow under the mask of their features, her cab spun onward bearing her lightly on the most reckless act of her life.

At the door of the apartment house she was told that Miss Oldcastle could not be seen, but, after sending up her card and waiting a few moments in the hall before a desk which reminded her of a gilded squirrel-cage, she was escorted to the elevator and borne upward to the ninth landing. Here, in response to the tinkle of a little bell outside of a door, she was ushered into a reception room which was so bare alike of unnecessary furniture and of the Victorian tradition to which she was accustomed, that for an instant she stood confused by the very strangeness of her surroundings. Then a charming voice, with what sounded to her ears as an affected precision of speech, said: "Mrs.

Treadwell, this is so good of you!" and, turning, she found herself face to face with the other woman in Oliver"s life.

"I saw you at the play last night," the voice went on, "and I hoped to get a chance to speak to you, but the reporters simply invaded my dressing-room. Won"t you sit here in the sunshine? Shall I close the window, or, like myself, are you a worshipper of the sun?"

"Oh, no, leave it open. I like it." At any other moment she would have been afraid of an open window in February; but it seemed to her now that if she could not feel the air in her face she should faint. With the first sight of Margaret Oldcastle, as she looked into that smiling face, in which the inextinguishable youth was less a period of life than an attribute of spirit, she realized that she was fighting not a woman, but the very structure of life. The glamour of the footlights had contributed nothing to the flame-like personality of the actress. In her simple frock of brown woollen, with a wide collar of white lawn turned back from her splendid throat, she embodied not so much the fugitive charm of youth, as that burning vitality over which age has no power.

The intellect in her spoke through her n.o.ble rather than beautiful features, through her ardent eyes, through her resolute mouth, through every perfect gesture with which she accompanied her words. She stood not only for the elemental forces, but for the free woman; and her freedom, like that of man, had been built upon the strewn bodies of the weaker. The law of sacrifice, which is the basic law of life, ruled here as it ruled in mother-love and in the industrial warfare of men. Her triumph was less the triumph of the individual than of the type. The justice not of society, but of nature, was on her side, for she was one with evolution and with the resistless principle of change. Vaguely, without knowing that she realized these things, Virginia felt that the struggle was useless; and with the sense of failure there awoke in her that instinct of good breeding, that inherited obligation to keep the surface of life sweet, which was so much older and so much stronger than the revolt in her soul.

"You were wonderful last night. I wanted to tell you how wonderful I thought you," she said gently. "You made the play a success--all the papers say so this morning."

"Well, it was an easy play to make successful," replied the other, while a fleeting curiosity, as though she were trying to explain something which she did not quite understand, appeared in her face and made it, with its redundant vitality, almost coa.r.s.e for an instant. "It"s the kind the public wants, you couldn"t help making it go."

The almost imperceptible conflict which had flashed in their eyes when they met, had died suddenly down, and the dignity which had been on the side of the other woman appeared to have pa.s.sed from her to Virginia.

This dignity, which was not that of triumph, but of a defeat which surrenders everything except the inviolable sanct.i.ties of the spirit, shielded her like an impenetrable armour against both resentment and pity. She stood there wrapped in a gentleness more una.s.sailable than any pa.s.sion.

"You did a great deal for it and a great deal for my husband," she said, while her voice lingered unconsciously over the word. "He has told me often that without your acting he could never have reached the position he holds."

Then, because it was impossible to say the things she had come to say, because even in the supreme crises of life she could not lay down the manner of a lady, she smiled the grave smile with which her mother had walked through a ruined country, and taking up her m.u.f.f, which she had laid on the table, pa.s.sed out into the hall. She had let the chance go by, she had failed in her errand, yet she knew that, even though it cost her her life, even though it cost her a thing far dearer than life--her happiness--she could not have done otherwise. In the crucial moment it was principle and not pa.s.sion which she obeyed; but this principle, filtering down through generations, had become so inseparable from the sources of character, that it had pa.s.sed at last through the intellect into the blood. She could no more have bared her soul to that other woman than she could have stripped her body naked in the market-place.

At the door her cab was still waiting, and she gave the driver the name of the toy shop at which she intended to buy presents for Lucy"s stepchildren. Though her heart was breaking within her, there was no impatience in her manner when she was obliged to wait some time before she could find the particular sort of doll for which Lucy had written; and she smiled at the apologetic shopgirl with the forbearing consideration for others which grief could not destroy. She put her own anguish aside as utterly in the selection of the doll as she would have done had it been the peace of nations and not a child"s pleasure that depended upon her effacement of self. Then, when the purchase was made, she took out her shopping list from her bag and pa.s.sed as conscientiously to the choice of Jenny"s clothes. Not until the morning had gone, and she rolled again up Fifth Avenue towards the hotel, did she permit her thoughts to return to the stifled agony within her heart.

To her surprise Oliver was awaiting her in their sitting-room, and with her first look into his face, she understood that he had reached in her absence a decision against which he had struggled for days. For an instant her strength seemed fainting as before an impossible effort.

Then the shame in his eyes awoke in her the longing to protect him, to spare him, to make even this terrible moment easier for him than he could make it alone. With the feeling, a crowd of memories thronged through her mind, as though called there by that impulse to shield which was so deeply interwoven with the primal pa.s.sion of motherhood. She saw Oliver"s face as it had looked on that spring afternoon when she had first seen him; she saw it as he put the ring on her hand at the altar; she saw it bending over her after the birth of her first child; and then suddenly his face changed to the face of Harry, and she saw again the little bed under the hanging sheet and herself sitting there in the faintly quivering circle of light. She watched again the slow fall of the leaves, one by one, as they turned at the stem and drifted against the white curtains of the window across the street.

"Oliver," she said gently, so gently that she might have been speaking to her sick child, "would you rather that I should go back to Dinwiddie to-night?"

He did not answer, but, turning away from her, laid his head down on his arm, which he had outstretched on the table, and she saw a shiver of pain pa.s.s through his body as if it had been struck a physical blow. And just as she had put herself aside when she bought the doll, so now she forgot her own suffering in the longing to respond to his need.

"I can take the night train--now that I have seen the play there is no reason why I should stay. I have got through my shopping."

Raising his head, he looked up into her face. "Whatever happens, Virginia, will you believe that I never wanted to hurt you?" he asked.

For a moment she felt that the strain was intolerable, and a fear entered her mind lest she should faint or weep and so make things harder than they should be able to bear.

"You mean that something must happen--that there will be a break between us?" she said.

Leaving the table, he walked to the window and back before he answered her.

"I can"t go on this way. I"m not that sort. A generation ago, I suppose, we should have done it--but we"ve lost grip, we"ve lost endurance." Then he cried out suddenly, as if he were justifying himself: "It is h.e.l.l.

I"ve been in h.e.l.l for a year--don"t you see it?"

After his violence, her voice sounded almost lifeless, so quiet, so utterly free from pa.s.sion, was its quality.

"As long as that--for a year?" she asked.

"Oh, longer, but it has got worse. It has got unendurable. I"ve fought--G.o.d knows I"ve fought--but I can"t stand it. I"ve got to do something. I"ve got to find a way. You must have seen it coming, Virginia. You must have seen that this thing is stronger than I am."

"Do--do you want her so much?" and she, who had learned from life not to want, looked at him with the pity which he might have seen in her eyes had he stabbed her.

"So much that I"m going mad. There"s no other end to it. It"s been coming on for two years--all the time I"ve been away from Dinwiddie I"ve been fighting it."

She did not answer, and when, after the silence had grown oppressive, he turned back from the window through which he had been gazing, he could not be sure that she had heard him. So still she seemed that she was like a woman of marble.

"You"re too good for me, that"s the trouble. You"ve been too good for me from the beginning," he said.