Virginia Part 11

Miss Priscilla, whose native serenity drew strength from another's loss of temper, beamed into his flushed face as if she enjoyed the spectacle of his heightened colour.

"You oughtn't to talk like that, Oliver," she said. "How on earth are you going to fall in love and marry, if you haven't any money to keep a wife? What you need is a good girl to look after you. I never married, myself, but I am sometimes tempted to believe that even an unhappy marriage is better than none at all. At least it gives you something to think about."

"I have enough to think about already. I have my work."

"But work isn't a wife."

"I know it isn't, but I happen to like it better."

Her matchmaking instinct had received a check, but the placid determination which was the basis of her character was merely reinforced thereby to further efforts. It was for his good to marry (had not her mother and her grandmother instilled into her the doctrine that an early marriage was the single masculine safeguard, since, once married, a man's morality became not his own business, but his wife's), and marry him she was resolved to do, either with his cheerful co-operation, or, if necessary, without it. He had certainly looked at Virginia as if he admired her, and surely a girl like that--lovely, loving, unselfish to a fault, and trained from her infancy to excel in all the feminine virtues--surely, this perfect flower of s.e.x specialization could have been designed by Providence only for the delight and the sanctification of man.

"Then, if that is the way your mind is made up I hope you will be careful not to trifle with the feelings of a girl like Jinny Pendleton,"

she retorted severely.

By a single stroke of genius, inspired by the diplomacy inherent in a s.e.x whose chief concern has been the making of matches, she transfixed his imagination as skilfully as she might have impaled a b.u.t.terfly on a bodkin. While he stared at her she could almost see the iridescent wings of his fancy whirling madly around the idea by which she had arrested their flight. Trifle with Virginia! Trifle with that radiant vision of girlhood! All the chivalry of youth revolted from the suggestion, and he thought again of the wistful adoration in the eyes of a Perugino virgin.

Was it possible that she could ever look at him with that angelic expression of weakness and surrender? The fire of first love, which had smouldered under the weight of his reason, burst suddenly into flame.

His thoughts, which had been as clear as a geometrical figure, became suddenly blurred by the mystery upon which pa.s.sion lives. He was seized by a consuming wonder about Virginia, and this wonder was heightened when he remembered the appealing sweetness in her face as she smiled up at him. Did she already love him? Had he conquered by a look the exquisite modesty of her soul? With this thought the memory of her virginal shyness stung his senses as if it were the challenge of s.e.x.

Chivalry, love, vanity, curiosity--all these circled helplessly around the invisible axis of Miss Priscilla's idea.

"What do you mean? Surely you don't suppose--she hasn't said anything----"

"You don't imagine that Jinny is the kind of girl who would say anything, do you?" inquired Miss Priscilla.

"But there must be some reason why you should have----"

"If there is, my dear boy, I'm not going to tell it," she answered with a calmness which he felt, in his excited state, to be positively infernal. "All I meant was to warn you not to trifle with any girl as innocent of life as Jinny Pendleton is. I don't want her to get her heart broken before she has the chance to make some man happy."

"Do you honestly mean to imply that I could break her heart if I tried to?"

"I don't mean to imply anything. I am only telling you that she is just the kind of girl a man would want to marry. She is her mother all over again, and I don't believe Lucy has ever thought of herself a minute since she married."

"She looks like an angel," he said, "but----"

"And she isn't a bit the kind of girl that Susan is, though they are so devoted. Now, I can understand a man not wanting to marry Susan, because she is so full of ideas, and has a mind of her own about things. But Jinny is different."

Then, seeing that she had "unsettled" his mind sufficiently for her purpose, she rose and looked around the room with the inordinate curiosity about details which kept her still young in spite of her sixty years.

"You don't mean to tell me you brought all those books with you, Oliver?" she asked. "Why on earth don't you get rid of some of them?"

"I can't spare any of them. I never know which one I may want next."

"What are those you're putting on the mantelpiece? Isn't Darwin the name of the man who said we were all descended from monkeys?"

As he made no answer to this except to press her hand and thank her for coming, she left the mantelpiece and wandered to the window, where her gaze rested, with a look of maternal satisfaction, on the roofs of Dinwiddie.

"It's a jolly view of the town, isn't it?" he said. "There's nothing like looking down from a hilltop to give one a sense of superiority."

"You can see straight into Mrs. Goode's backyard," she replied, "and I never knew before that she left her clothes hanging on the line on Sunday. That comes, I suppose, from not looking after her servants and gadding about on all sorts of charities. She told me the other day that she belonged to every charitable organization in Dinwiddie."

"Is she Abby's mother?"

"Yes, but you'd never imagine they were any relation. Abby gave me more trouble than any girl I ever taught. She never would learn the multiplication table, and I don't believe to this day she knows it.

There isn't any harm in her except that she is a scatter-brain, and will make eyes or burst. I sometimes think it isn't her fault--that she was just born man-crazy."

"She's awfully good fun," he laughed.

"Are you going to her garden party on Wednesday?"

"I accepted before I quarrelled with Uncle Cyrus, but I'll have to get out of it now."

"Oh, I wouldn't. All the pretty girls in town will be there."

"Are there any plain ones? And what becomes of them?"

"The Lord only knows! Old Judge Ba.s.sett used to say that there wouldn't be any preserves and pickles in the world if all women were born good-looking. I declare I never realized how small the tower of Saint James' Church is!"

For a moment he hesitated, and when he spoke his voice had taken a deeper tone. "Will Virginia Pendleton be at the party?" he asked.

"She wouldn't miss it for anything in the world. Miss w.i.l.l.y Whitlow was sewing there yesterday on a white organdie dress for her to wear. Have you ever seen Jinny in white organdie? I always tell Lucy the child looks sweet enough to eat when she puts it on."

He laughed again, but not as he had laughed at her description of Abby.

"Ask her please to put blue bows on her flounces and a red rose in her hair," he said.

"Then you are going?"

"Not if I can possibly keep away. Oh, Cousin Priscilla, why didn't I inherit my soul from your side of the family."

"Well, for my part I don't believe in all this talk about inheritance.

n.o.body ever heard of inheriting anything but money when I was a girl.

You've got the kind of soul the good Lord wanted to put into you and that's all there is about it."

When he returned from a.s.sisting her in her panting and difficult descent of the stairs, he sat down again before the unfinished act of his play, but his eyes wandered from the ma.n.u.script to the town, which lay as bright and still in the sunlight as if it were imprisoned in crystal.

The wonder aroused in his mind by Miss Priscilla's allusion to Virginia persisted as a disturbing element in the background of his thoughts.

What had she meant? Was it possible that there was truth in the wildest imaginings of his vanity? Virginia's face, framed in her wreath of hair, floated beneath the tower of Saint James' Church at which he was gazing, and the radiant goodness in her look mounted like a draught of strong wine to his brain. Pa.s.sion, which he had discounted in his plans for the future, appeared suddenly to shake the very foundations of his life.

Never before had the spirit and the flesh united in the appeal of a woman to his imagination. Never before had the divine virgin of his dreams a.s.sumed the living red and white of young girlhood. He thought how soft her hair must be to the touch, and how warm her mouth would glow from his kisses. With a kind of wonder he realized that this was first love--that it was first love he had felt when he met her eyes under the dappled sunlight in High Street. The memory of her beauty was like a net which enmeshed his thoughts when he tried to escape it. Look where he would he saw always a cloud of dark hair and two deep blue eyes that shone as softly as wild hyacinths after a shower. Think as he would he met always the haunting doubt--"What did she mean? Can it be true that she already loves me?" So small an incident as Miss Priscilla's Sunday call had not only upset his work for the morning, but had changed in an instant the even course of his future. He decided suddenly that he must see Virginia again--that he would go to Abby Goode's party, and though the party was only three days off, it seemed to him that the waiting would be almost unbearable. Only after he had once seen her would it be possible, he felt, to stop thinking of her and to return comfortably to his work.

CHAPTER VIII

WHITE MAGIC

In the centre of her bedroom, with her back turned to that bookcase which was filled with sugared false-hoods about life, Virginia was standing very straight while Miss w.i.l.l.y Whitlow knelt at her feet and sewed pale blue bows on her overskirt of white organdie. Occasionally, the door opened softly, and the rector or one of the servants looked in to see "Jinny" or "Miss Jinny dressed for the party," and when such interruptions occurred, Mrs. Pendleton, who sat on an ottoman at the dressmaker's right hand and held a spool of thread and a pair of scissors in her lap, would say sternly, "Don't move, Jinny, stand straight or Miss w.i.l.l.y won't get the bows right." At these warning words, Virginia's thin shoulders would spring back and the filmy ruffles stir gently over her girlish breast.

Through the open window, beyond the drooping boughs of the paulownia trees, a few wistful stars shone softly through the web of purple twilight. The night smelt of a thousand flowers--all the mingled sweetness of old gardens floated in on the warm wind and caressed the faded figure of Miss w.i.l.l.y as lovingly as it did the young and radiant vision of Virginia. Once or twice the kneeling seamstress had glanced up at the girl and thought: "I wonder how it feels to be as lovely as that?" Then she sighed as one who had missed her heritage, for she had been always plain, and went on patiently sewing the bows on Virginia's overskirt. "You can't have everything in this world, and I ought to be thankful that I've kept out of the poorhouse," she added a minute later when a little stab of envy went through her at hearing the girl laugh from sheer happiness.