Virginia Part 31

"Susan's to lend me Belle. I'm going with you," she said, after a pause in which he had begun to read his paper again. This habit of treating her as if she were not present when he wanted to read or to work, was, she remembered, one of the things she had insisted upon in the beginning of her marriage.

"By Jove!" he exclaimed, and the paper dropped from his hands. "I'm jolly glad, but what will you do about the children?"

"Mother is coming to look after them. I'll be back in time to hear Harry's lessons, I suppose."

"Why, of course; but, look here, you'll be awfully sore. You haven't ridden after the hounds since I knew you. You might even get a fall."

"I used to go, though, a great deal--and it won't hurt me to be stiff for a few days. Besides, I want to take up hunting again."

Her motive was beyond him--perhaps because of her nearness, which prevented his getting the proper perspective of vision. For all his keenness of insight, he failed utterly to see into the mysterious mind of his wife. He could not penetrate that subtle interplay of traditional virtues and discover that she was in the clutch of one of the oldest and most savage of the pa.s.sions.

"Then you'd better go to bed early and get some sleep," he said. "I suppose we'll have a cup of coffee before starting."

"I'll make it on the oil stove while I am dressing. Marthy won't be up then."

"Well, I'll come upstairs in ten minutes," he replied, taking up his paper again. "I only want to finish this article."

In the morning when she opened the old green shutters and looked out of the window, the horses, having been saddled by candlelight, were standing under the mulberry tree at the gate. Eight years ago, in her girlhood, she would have awakened in a delicious excitement on the morning of a fox-hunt, and have dressed as eagerly as if she were going to a ball; but to-day, while she lit the oil-stove in the hall room and put on the kettle of water, she was supported not by the hope of pleasure, but by a dull, an almost indefinable sensation of dread. The instinct of woman to adjust her personality to the changing ideals of the man she loves--this instinct older than civilization, rooted in tragedy, and existing by right of an unconquerable necessity--rose superior at the moment to that more stable maternal pa.s.sion with which it has conflicted since the beginning of motherhood. While she put on her riding-habit and tied up the plait of her hair, the one thought in Virginia's mind was that she must be, at all costs, the kind of woman that Oliver wanted.

A little later, when they set out under the mulberry trees, she glanced at him wistfully, as though she wanted him to praise the way she looked in the saddle. But his eyes were on the end of the street, where a little company of riders awaited them, and before she could ask a question, Abby's high voice was heard exclaiming pleasantly upon her presence. Not a particularly imposing figure, because of her rather short legs, when she was on the ground, it was impossible for Virginia to deny that Abby was amazingly handsome on horseback. Plump, dark, with a superb bosom, and a colour in her cheeks like autumnal berries, she had never appeared to better advantage than she did, sitting on her spirited bay mare under an arch of scarlet leaves which curved over her head. Turning at their approach, she started at a brisk canter up the road, and as Virginia followed her, the sound of the horn floated, now loud, now faint, out of the pale mist that spun fanciful silken webs over the trees and bushes.

"Remember to look out for the creeks. That's where the danger comes,"

said Oliver, riding close to her, and he added nervously, "Don't try to keep up with Abby."

Ahead of them stretched a deserted Virginia road, with its look of brooding loneliness, as if it had waited patiently through the centuries for a civilization which had never come; and on the right of it, beyond a waste of scarlet sumach and sa.s.safras and a winding creek screened in elder bushes, the dawn was breaking slowly under a single golden-edged cloud. Somebody on Virginia's left--a large, raw-boned, pa.s.sionate huntsman, in an old plum-coloured overcoat with a velvet collar--was complaining loudly that they had started too late and the fox would have gone to his lair before they reached the main party. Except for an oath, which he rapped out by way of an emphasis not intended for the ladies, he might have been conducting a religious revival, so solemnly energetic, so deeply moved, was his manner. The hunt, which observed naturally the characteristics of a society that was ardently individualistic even in its sports, was one of those informal, "go-as-you-please" affairs in which the supreme joy of killing is not hampered by tedious regulations or unnecessary restrictions. The chief thing was to get a run--to start a rare red fox, if luck was good, because he was supposed to run straight by nature and not to move in circles after the inconsiderate manner of the commoner grey sort. But Providence, being inattentive to the needs of hunters in the neighbourhood of Dinwiddie, had decreed that the red fox should live there mainly in the vivid annals of old sportsmen.

"A grey fox with red ears. The best run I ever had. Tried to get in the crotch of a hickory tree at the end. Was so exhausted he couldn't stir a foot when the hounds got him." While they waited at the crossroads before a little country store, where the pack of hounds, lean, cringing, habitually hungry creatures, started from beneath an old field pine on the right, Virginia heard the broken phrases blown on the wind, which carried the joyous notes of the horn over the meadows. The casual cruelty of the words awoke no protest in her mind, because it was a cruelty to which she was accustomed. If the sport had been unknown in Dinwiddie, and she had read of it as the peculiar activity of the inhabitants of the British Islands, she would probably have condemned it as needlessly brutal and degrading. But with that universal faculty of the human mind to adjust its morality to fit its inherited physical habits, she regarded "the rights of the fox" to-day with something of the humorous scorn of sentimental rubbish with which her gentler grandmother had once regarded "the rights of the slave." For centuries the hunt had been one of the cherished customs of Dinwiddians; and though she could not bear to see a fly caught in a web, it would never have occurred to her to question the humanity of any sport in which her ancestors had delighted. In her girlhood the sound of the horn had called to her blood with all the intoxicating a.s.sociations it awoke in the raw-boned, energetic rider in the plum-coloured coat--but to-day both the horn and the familiar landscape around her had grown strange and unhomelike. For the first time since her birth she and the country were out of harmony.

In the midst of the hounds, in the centre of the old field on the right, the huntsman, who was at the same time master and owner of the dogs, brandished a long raw-hide whip, flexible from the handle, which was pleasantly known in Dinwiddie as a "mule-skinner." His face, burned to the colour of ripe wheat, wore a rapt and exalted look, as though the chasing of a small animal to its death had called forth his latent spiritual ardours. Beyond him, like a low, smouldering fire, ran the red and gold of the abandoned field.

"Please be careful, Virginia," said Oliver again, as they left the road and cantered in the direction of a clump of pine woods in a hollow beyond a rotting "snake" fence.

But she had seen his eyes on Abby a minute before, and had heard his laugh as he answered her. A wave of recklessness broke over her, and she felt that she despised fear with all her Pendleton blood, which loved a fight only less pa.s.sionately than it loved a sermon. Whatever happened--if she broke her neck--she resolved that she would keep up with Abby! With the drumming of the blood in her ears, an almost savage joy awoke in her. Deep down in her, so deep that it was buried beneath the Virginia Pendleton whom she and her world knew, there stirred faintly the seeds of that ancient l.u.s.t of cruelty from which have sprung the brutal pleasures of men. The part of her--that small secret part--which was primitive answered to the impulse of jealousy as it did to the rapturous baying of the hounds out of the red and gold distance.

A branch grazed her cheek; her hat went as she raced down the high banks of a stream; the thicket of elder tore the ribbon from her head, and loosened her dark flying hair from its braid. In that desolate country, in the midst of the October meadows, with the cries of the hounds rising, like the voice of mortal tragedy, out of the tinted mist on the marshes, the drama of human pa.s.sions--which is the only drama for the world's stage--was played out to an ending: love, jealousy, envy, desire, desperation, regret--

But when the hunt was over, and she rode home, with a bedraggled brush, which had once been grey, tied to her bridle, all the gorgeous pageantry of the autumnal landscape seemed suddenly asking her: "What is the use?"

Her mood had altered, and she felt that her victory was as worthless as the mud-stained fox's brush that swung mockingly back and forth from her bridle. The excitement of the chase had ebbed away, leaving only the lifeless satisfaction of the reward. She had neglected her children, she had risked her life--and all for the sake of wresting a bit of dead fur out of Abby's grasp. A spirit which was not her spirit, which was so old that she no longer recognized that it had any part in her, which was yet so young that it burned in her heart with the unquenchable flame of youth--this spirit, which was at the same time herself and not herself, had driven her, as helpless as a fallen leaf, in a chase that she despised, towards a triumph that was worthless.

"By Jove, you rode superbly, Virginia! I had no idea you could do it,"

said Oliver, as they trotted into Dinwiddie.

She smiled back at him, and her smile was tired, dust-stained, enigmatical.

"No, you did not know that I could do it," she answered.

"You'll keep it up now, won't you?" he asked pleadingly.

For an instant, looking away from him over the radiant fields, she pondered the question. The silence which had settled around her was unbroken by the sound of the horses' hoofs, by the laughter of the hunters, by the far-off soughing of the pine trees in the forest; and into this silence, which seemed to cover an eternity, the two Virginias--the Virginia who desired and the Virginia who had learned from the ages to stifle her desire--wrestled for the first time together.

"Virginia!" floated Abby's breezy tones from the street behind her, and turning, she rode back to the Goodes' gate, where the others were dismounting. "Virginia, aren't you going to Atlantic City with us to-morrow?"

Again she hesitated. Almost unconsciously her gaze pa.s.sed from Abby to Oliver, and she saw his pride in her in the smile with which he watched her.

"Yes, I'll go with you," she replied after a minute.

She had, for once in her life, done the thing she wanted to do simply because she wanted to do it. She had won back what she was losing; she had fought a fair fight and she had triumphed; yet as she rode down the street to her gate, there was none of the exultation of victory, none of the fugitive excitement of pleasure even in her heart. Like other mortals in other triumphant instants, she was learning that the fruit of desire may be sweet to the eyes and bitter on the lips. She had sacrificed duty to pleasure, and suddenly she had discovered that to one with her heritage of good and evil the two are inseparable.

CHAPTER VIII

THE PANG OF MOTHERHOOD

In the night Harry awoke crying. He had dreamed, he said between his sobs, when Virginia, slipperless and in her nightdress, bent over him, that his mother was going away from him forever.

"Only for two nights, darling. Here, lean close against mother. Don't you know that she wouldn't stay away from her precious boy?"

"But two nights are so long. Aren't two nights almost forever?"

"Why, my lamb, it was just two nights ago that grandma came over and told you the Bible story about Joseph and his brothers. That was only a teeny-weeny time ago, wasn't it?"

"But you were here, then mamma. And this morning was almost forever. You stayed out so long that Lucy said you weren't coming back any more."

"That was naughty of Lucy because she is old enough to know better. Why do you choke that way? Does your throat hurt you?"

"It hurts because you are going away, mamma."

"But I'm going only to be with papa, precious. Don't you want poor papa to have somebody with him?"

"He's so big he can go by himself. But suppose the black man should come in the night while you are away, and I'd get scared and n.o.body would hear me."

"Grandma would hear you, Harry, and there isn't any black man that comes in the night. You must put that idea out of your head, dear. You're getting too big a boy to be afraid of the dark."

"Four isn't big, is it?"

"You're nearer five than four now, honey. Let me b.u.t.ton your nightgown, and lie down and try to go to sleep while mamma sings to you. Does your throat really hurt you?"

"It feels as if it had teensy-weensy marbles in it. They came there when I woke up in the dark and thought that you were going away to-morrow."

"Well, if your throat hurts you, of course mamma won't leave you. Open your mouth wide now so I can look at it."

She lighted a candle while Harry, kneeling in the middle of his little bed, followed her with his blue eyes, which looked three times their usual size because of his flushed cheeks and his mounting excitement.

His throat appeared slightly inflamed when she held the candle close to it, and after tucking him beneath the bed-clothes, she poured a little camphorated oil into a cup and heated it on the small alcohol lamp she kept in the nursery.

"Mamma is going to put a nice bandage on your throat, and then she is going to lie down beside you and sing you to sleep," she said cheerfully, as she cut off a strip of flannel from an old petticoat and prepared to saturate it with the heated oil.