Virginia Part 23

"G.o.d bless Harry," was the imperturbable rejoinder to this pleading.

"Don't you want your poor mother to have some supper, Harry?" inquired Susan severely.

"Harry wants supper," answered the innocent.

"I suppose I'll have to let him go," said Virginia, distractedly, "but Oliver will be horrified. He says I don't reason with them enough.

Harry," she concluded sternly, "don't you understand that it is naughty of you to behave this way and keep mamma away from poor little Jenny?"

"Bad Jenny," said Harry.

"If you don't say your prayers this minute, you shan't have any preserves on your bread to-morrow."

"Bad preserves," retorted Harry.

"Well, if he won't, I don't see how I can make him," said Virginia.

"Come, then, get into bed, Harry, and go to sleep. You have been a bad boy and hurt poor mamma's feelings so that she is going to cry. She won't be able to eat her supper for thinking of the way you have disobeyed her."

Jumping into bed with a bound, Harry dug his head into the pillows, gurgled, and then sat up very straight.

"G.o.d bless dear papa, G.o.d bless dear mamma, G.o.d bless dear grandmamma, G.o.d bless dear grandpapa, G.o.d bless dear Lucy, G.o.d bless dear Jenny, G.o.d bless our dear friends everywhere," he repeated in a resounding voice.

"Oh, you precious lamb!" exclaimed Virginia. "He couldn't bear to hurt poor mamma, could he?" and she kissed him ecstatically before hastening to the slumbering Jenny in the adjoining room.

"I like the little scamp," said Susan, when she reported the scene to John Henry on the way home, "but he manages his mother perfectly.

Already his sense of humour is better developed than hers."

"I can't get over seeing Virginia with children," observed John Henry, as if the fact of Virginia's motherhood had just become evident to him.

"It suits her, though. She looked happier than I ever saw her--and so, for that matter, did Aunt Lucy."

"It made me wonder how Mrs. Pendleton had lived away from them for seven years. Why, you can't imagine what she is--she doesn't seem to have any life at all until you see her with Virginia's children."

"It's a wonderful thing," said John Henry slowly, "and it taught me a lot just to look at them. I don't know why, but it seemed to make me understand how much I care about you, Susan."

"Hadn't you suspected it before?" asked Susan as calmly as he had spoken. Emotionalism, she knew, she would never find in John Henry's wooing, and, though she could not have explained the reason of it to herself, she liked the brusque directness of his courts.h.i.+p. It was part of that large sincerity of nature which had first attracted her to him.

"Of course, in a way I knew I cared more for you than for anybody else--but I didn't realize that you were more to me than Virginia had ever been. I had got so in the habit of thinking I was in love with her that it came almost as a surprise to me to find that it was over."

"I knew it long ago," said Susan.

"Why didn't you make me see it?"

"Oh, I waited for you to find it out yourself. I was sure that you would some day."

"Do you think you could ever care for me, Susan?"

A smile quivered on Susan's lips as she looked up at him, but with the reticence which had always characterized her, she answered simply:

"I think I could, John Henry."

His hand reached down and closed over hers, and in the long look which they exchanged under the flickering street lamp, she felt suddenly that perfect security which is usually the growth of happy years. Whatever the future brought to them, she knew that she could trust John Henry's love for her.

"And we've lost seven years, dearest," he said, with a catch in his voice. "We've lost seven years just because I happened to be born a fool."

"But we've got fifty ahead of us," she replied with a joyous laugh.

As she spoke, her heart cried out, "Fifty years of the thing I want!"

and she looked up into the kind, serious face of John Henry as if it were the face of incarnate happiness. A tremendous belief in life surged from her brain through her body, which felt incredibly warm and young. She thought exultantly of herself as of one who did not accept destiny, but commanded it.

They walked the rest of the way in silence, but he held her hand pressed closely against his heart, and once or twice he turned in the deserted street and looked into her eyes as if he found there all the words that he needed.

"We won't waste any more time, will we, Susan?" he asked when they reached the house. "Let's be married in December."

"If mother is better by then. She hasn't been well, and I am anxious about her."

"We'll go to housekeeping at once. I'll begin looking about to-morrow.

G.o.d bless you, darling, for what you are giving me."

She caressed his hand gently with her fingers, and he was about to speak again, when the door behind them opened and the head of Cyrus appeared like that of a desolate bird of prey.

"Is that you, Susan?" he inquired. "Where have you been all this time?

Your mother was taken ill more than an hour ago, and the doctor says that she has been paralyzed."

Breaking away from John Henry, Susan ran up the steps and past her father into the hall, where Miss w.i.l.l.y stood weeping.

"I was all by myself with her. There wasn't another living soul in the house," sobbed the little dressmaker. "She fell over just like that, with her face all twisted, while I was talking to her."

"Oh, poor mother, poor mother!" cried the girl as she ran upstairs. "Is she in her room, and who is with her?"

"The doctor has been there for over an hour, and he says that she'll never be able to move again. Oh, Susan, how will she stand it?"

But Susan had already outstripped her, and was entering the sick-room, where Mrs. Treadwell lay unconscious, with her distorted face turned toward the door, as though she were watching expectantly for some one who would never come. As the girl fell on her knees beside the couch, her happiness seemed to dissolve like mist before the grim facts of mortal anguish and death. It was not until dawn, when the night's watch was over and she stood alone beside her window, that she said to herself with all the courage she could summon:

"And it's over for me, too. Everything is over for me, too. Oh, poor, poor mother!"

Love, which had seemed to her last night the supreme spirit in the universe, had surrendered its authority to the diviner image of Duty.

CHAPTER IV

HER CHILDREN

"Poor Aunt Belinda was paralyzed last night, Oliver," said Virginia the next morning at breakfast. "Miss w.i.l.l.y Whitlow just brought me a message from Susan. She spent the night there and was on her way this morning to ask mother to go."

Oliver had come downstairs in one of his absent-minded moods, but by the time Virginia had repeated her news he was able to take it in, and to show a proper solicitude for his aunt.