Virginia Part 13

"It's wonderful of you to feel that," he replied; and, indeed, at the instant while he searched her eyes in the dusk, the words seemed to him to embody all the sympathetic understanding with which his imagination endowed her. How perfectly her face expressed the goodness and gentleness of her soul! What a companion she would make to a man! What a lover! What a wife! Always soft, exquisite, tender, womanly to the innermost fibre of her being, and perfect in unselfishness as all womanly women are. How easy it would be to work if she were somewhere within call, ready to fly to him at a word! How glorious to go out into the world if he knew that she sat at home waiting--always waiting, with those eyes like wells of happiness, until he should return to her! A new meaning had entered swiftly into life. A feeling that was like a religious conversion had changed not only his spiritual vision, but the material aspect of nature. Whatever happened, he felt that he could never be the same man again.

"I shall see you soon?" he said, and the words fell like snow on the inner flame of his senses.

"Oh, soon!" she answered, bending a little towards him while a sudden glory illumined her features. Her voice, which was vibrant as a harp, had captured the wistful magic of the spring--the softness of the winds, the sweetness of flowers, the mellow murmuring of the poplars.

She rose from the bench, moving softly as if she were under an enchantment which she feared to break by a gesture. An ecstasy as inarticulate as grief kept him silent, and it was into this silence that the voice of Abby floated, high, shrill, and dominant.

"Oh, Virginia, I've looked everywhere for you," she cried. "Mr.

Carrington is simply dying to dance with you!"

She bounced, as only the solid actuality can bounce, into the dream, precipitating the unwelcome presence of Mr. Carrington--a young man with a golden beard and the manner of a commercial minor prophet--there also.

A few minutes later, as Virginia drifted away in his arms to the music of the waltz, she saw, over the heads of the dancers, Oliver and Abby walking slowly in the direction of the gate. A feeling of unreality seized her, as though she were looking through an azure veil at the world. The dancers among whom she whirled, the anxious mothers sitting uneasily on chairs under the poplars, the flowering shrubs, the rose-crowned summer-house, the yellow lanterns with the clouds of white moths circling around them--all these things had turned suddenly to shadows; and through a phantom garden, the one living figure moved beside an empty shape, which was Abby. Her feet had wings. She flew rather than danced in the arms of a shadow through this blue veil which enveloped her. Life burned within her like a flame in a porcelain vase, and this inner fire separated her, as genius separates its possessor, from the ordinary mortals among whom she moved.

Walking home with John Henry after the party was over, it seemed to her that she was lifted up and cradled in all the wonderful freshness of the spring. The sweet moist air fanned her face; the morning stars shone softly on her through the pearly mist; and the pale fingers of dawn were spread like a beneficent hand, above the eastern horizon. "To-morrow!"

cried her heart, overflowing with joy; and something of this joy pa.s.sed into the saddest hour of day and brightened it to radiance.

At the gate she parted from John Henry, and running eagerly along the path, opened the front door, which was unlocked, and burst into the dining-room, where her mother, wearied of her long watch, had fallen asleep beside the lamp, which was beginning to flicker.

"To-morrow!" still sang her heart, and the wild, sweet music of it filled the world. "To-morrow!"

CHAPTER IX

THE GREAT MAN MOVES

Several weeks later, at the close of a June afternoon, Cyrus Treadwell sat alone on the back porch of his house in Bolingbroke Street. He was smoking, and, between the measured whiffs of his pipe, he leaned over the railing and spat into a bed of miniature sunflowers which grew along the stone ledge of the area. For thirty years these flowers had sprung up valiantly every spring in that bleak strip of earth, and for thirty years Cyrus had spat among them while he smoked alone on the back porch on June afternoons.

While he sat there a great peace enfolded and possessed him. The street beyond the sagging wooden gate was still; the house behind him was still; the kitchen, in which showed the ebony silhouette of a ma.s.sive cook kneading dough, was still with the uncompromising stillness of the Sabbath. In the midst of this stillness, his thoughts, which were usually as angular as lean birds on a bough, lost their sharpness of outline and melted into a vague and feathery ma.s.s. At the moment it was impossible to know of what he was thinking, but he was happy with the happiness which visits men of small parts and of sterile imagination. By virtue of these limitations and this sterility he had risen out of obscurity--for the spiritual law which decrees that to gain the world one must give up one's soul, was exemplified in him as in all his cla.s.s. Success, the s.h.i.+bboleth of his kind, had controlled his thoughts and even his impulses so completely for years that he had come at last to resemble an animal less than he resembled a machine; and Nature (who has a certain large and careless manner of dispensing justice) had punished him in the end by depriving him of the ordinary animal capacity for pleasure. The present state of vacuous contentment was, perhaps, as near the condition of enjoyment as he would ever approach.

Half an hour before he had had an encounter with Susan on the subject of her going to college, but even his victory, which had been sharp and swift, was robbed of all poignant satisfaction by his native inability to imagine what his refusal must have meant to her. The girl had stood straight and tall, with her commanding air, midway between the railing and the weather-stained door of the house.

"Father, I want to go to college," she had said quite simply, for she was one who used words very much as Cyrus used money, with a temperamental avoidance of all extravagance.

Her demand was a direct challenge to the male in Cyrus, and, though this creature could not be said to be either primitive or predatory, he was still active enough to defend himself from the unprovoked a.s.sault of an offspring.

"Tut-tut," he responded. "If you want something to occupy you, you'd better start about helping your mother with her preserving."

"I put up seventy-five jars of strawberries."

"Well, the blackberries are coming along. I was always partial to blackberries."

He sat there, bald, shrunken, yellow, as soulless as a steam engine, and yet to Susan he represented a pitiless manifestation of destiny--of those deaf, implacable forces by which the lives of men and women are wrecked. He had the power to ruin her life, and yet he would never see it because he had been born blind. That in his very blindness had lain his strength, was a fact which, naturally enough, escaped her for the moment. The one thought of which she was conscious was a fierce resentment against life because such men possessed such power over others.

"If you will lend me the money, I will pay it back to you as soon as I can take a position," she said, almost pa.s.sionately.

Something that was like the ghost of a twinkle appeared in his eyes, and he let fall presently one of his rare pieces of humour.

"If you'd like a chance to repay me for your education," he said, "there's your schooling at Miss Priscilla's still owing, and I'll take it out in help about the housekeeping."

Then Susan went, because going in silence was the only way that she could save the shreds of dignity which remained to her, and bending forward, with a contented chuckle, Cyrus spat benevolently down upon the miniature sunflowers.

In the half hour that followed he did not think of his daughter. From long discipline his mind had fallen out of the habit of thinking of people except in their relation to the single vital interest of his life, and this interest was not fatherhood. Susan was an incident--a less annoying incident, it is true, than Belinda--but still an incident.

An inherent contempt for women, due partly to qualities of temperament and partly to the accident of a disillusioning marriage, made him address them always as if he were speaking from a platform. And, as is often the case with men of cold-blooded sensuality, women, from Belinda downward, had taken their revenge upon him.

The front door-bell jangled suddenly, and a little later he heard a springy step pa.s.sing along the hall. Then the green lattice door of the porch opened, and the face of Mrs. Peachey, wearing the look of unnatural pleasantness which becomes fixed on the features of persons who spend their lives making the best of things, appeared in the spot where Susan had been half an hour before. She had trained her lips to smile so persistently and so unreasonably, that when, as now, she would have preferred to present a serious countenance to an observer, she found it impossible to relax the muscles of her mouth from their expression of perpetual cheerfulness. Cyrus, who had once remarked of her that he didn't believe she could keep a straight face at her own funeral, wondered, while he rose and offered her a chair, whether the periodical sprees of honest Tom were the cause or the result of the look of set felicity she wore. For an instant he was tempted to show his annoyance at the intrusion. Then, because she was a pretty woman and did not belong to him, he grew almost playful, with the playfulness of an uncertain tempered ram that is offered salt.

"It is not often that I am honoured by a visit from you," he said.

"The honour is mine. Mr. Treadwell," she replied, and she really felt it. "I was on my way upstairs to see Belinda, and it just crossed my mind as I saw you sitting out here, that I'd better stop and speak to you about your nephew. I wonder Belinda doesn't plant a few rose-bushes along that back wall," she added.

"I'd pay you fifty dollars, ma'am, if you'd get Belinda to plant anything"--which was not delicately put, perhaps, but was, after all, spoken in the only language that Cyrus knew.

"I thought she was so fond of flowers. She used to be as a girl."

"Humph!" was Cyrus's rejoinder, and then: "Well, what about my nephew, madam?" Clasping his bony hands over his knee, he leaned forward and waited, not without curiosity, for her answer. He did not admire Oliver--he even despised him--but when all was said, the boy had succeeded in riveting his attention. However poorly he might think of him, the fact remained that think of him he did. The young man was in the air as inescapably as if he were the measles.

"I'm worrying about him, Mr. Treadwell; I can't help myself. You know he boards with me."

"Yes'm, I know," replied Cyrus--for he had heard the fact from Miss Priscilla on his way home from church one Sunday.

"And he's not well. There's something the matter with him. He's so nervous and irritable that he's almost crazy. He doesn't eat a morsel, and I can hear him pacing up and down his room until daybreak. Once I got up and went upstairs to ask him if he was sick, but he said that he was perfectly well and was walking about for exercise. I am sure I don't know what it can be, but if it keeps up, he'll land in an asylum before the summer is over."

The look of satisfaction which her first words had brought to Cyrus's face deepened gradually as her story unfolded. "He's wanting money, I reckon," he commented, his imagination seizing upon the only medium in which it could work. As a philosopher may discern in all life different manifestations of the Deity, so he saw in all affliction only the wanting of money under varied aspects. Sorrows in which the lack of money did not bear a part always seemed to him to be unnecessary and generally self-inflicted by the sufferers. Of such people he would say impatiently that they took a morbid view of their troubles and were "nursing grief."

"I don't think it's that," said Mrs. Peachey. "He always pays his bills promptly on the first day of the month, and I know that he gets checks from New York for the writing he does. I'm sometimes tempted to believe that he has fallen in love."

"Love? Pshaw!" said Cyrus, and dismissed the pa.s.sion.

"But it goes hard with some people, and he's one of that kind," rejoined the little lady, with spirit, for in spite of her wholesome awe of Cyrus, she could not bear to hear the sentiment derided. "We aren't all as sensible as you are, Mr. Treadwell."

"Well, if he is in love, as you say, whom is he in love with?" demanded Cyrus.

"It's all guesswork," answered Mrs. Peachey. "He isn't paying attention to any girl that I know of--but, I suppose, if it's anybody, it must be Virginia Pendleton. All the young men are crazy about her."

She had been prepared for opposition--she had been prepared, being a lady, for anything, as she told Tom afterwards, short of an oath--but to her amazement the unexpected, which so rarely happened in the case of Cyrus, happened at that minute. Human nature, which she had treated almost as a science, proved suddenly that it was not even an art. One of those glaring inconsistencies which confute every theory and overturn all psychology was manifested before her.

"That's the daughter of old Gabriel, aint it?" asked Cyrus, and unconsciously to himself, his voice softened.

"Yes, she's Gabriel's daughter, and one of the sweetest girls that ever lived."

"Gabriel's a good man," said Cyrus. "I always liked Gabriel. We fought through the war together."

"A better man never lived, nor a better woman than Lucy. If she's got a fault on earth, it's that she's too unselfish."

"Well, if this girl takes after them, the young fool has shown more sense than I gave him credit for."