Virginia Part 32

"Will you stay here all night?"

"All night, precious, if you'll be good and go fast asleep while I am singing."

Holding tightly to her nightdress, Harry cuddled down between the pillows with a contented sigh. "Then I don't mind about the marbles in my throat," he said.

"But mamma minds, and she wants to cure them before morning. Now lie very still while she wraps this good flannel bandage over the sore places."

"I'll lie very still if you'll hold me, mamma."

Blowing out the candle, she crept into the little bed beside him, and lay singing softly until his hands released their desperate grasp of her nightdress, and he slipped quietly off to sleep. Even then, remembering her promise, she did not go back to her bedroom until daylight.

"I wonder what makes Harry so afraid of the dark?" she asked, when Oliver awoke and turned questioningly towards her. "He worked himself really sick last night just from pure nervousness. I had to put camphorated oil on his throat and chest, and lie beside him until morning. He is sleeping quietly now, but it simply frightens me to death when one of them complains of sore throat."

"You've spoiled him, that's what's the matter," replied Oliver, yawning.

"As long as you humour him, he'll never outgrow these night terrors."

"But how can you tell whether the fright makes him sick or sickness brings on the fright? His throat was really red, there's no doubt about that, but I couldn't see last night that it was at all ulcerated."

"He gives you more trouble than both the other children put together."

"Well, he's a boy, and boys do give one more trouble. But, then, you have less patience with him, Oliver."

"That's because he's a boy, and I like boys to show some pluck even when they are babies. Lucy and Jenny never raise these midnight rows whenever they awake in the dark."

"They are not nearly so sensitive. You don't understand Harry."

"Perhaps I don't, but I can see that you are ruining him."

"Oh, Oliver! How can you say such a cruel thing to me?"

"I didn't mean to be cruel, Jinny, and you know it, but all the same it makes me positively sick to see you make a slave of yourself over the children. Why, you look as if you hadn't slept for a week. You are positively haggard."

"But I have to be up with Harry when he is ill. How in the world could I help it?"

"You know he kicks up these rows almost every night, and you humour every one of his whims as if it were the first one. Don't you ever get tired?"

"Of course I do, but I can't let my child suffer even if it is only from fear. You haven't any patience, Oliver. Don't you remember the time when you used to be afraid of things?"

"I was never afraid of the dark in my life. No sensible child is, if he is brought up properly."

"Do you mean I am not bringing up my children----" Her tears choked her and she could not finish the sentence.

"I don't mean anything except that you are making an old woman of yourself before your time. You've let yourself go until you look ten years older than----"

He checked himself in time, but she understood without his words that he had started to say, "ten years older than Abby." Yes, Abby did look young--amazingly young--but, then, what else had she to think of?

She lay down, but she was trembling so violently that she sat up quickly again in order to recover her self-possession more easily. It seemed to her that the furious beating of her heart must make him understand how he had wounded her. It was the first discussion approaching a quarrel they had had since their marriage, for she, who was so pliable in all other matters, had discovered that she could become as hard as iron where the difference related to Harry.

"You are unjust, Oliver. I think you ought to see it," she said in a voice which she kept by an effort from breaking.

"I'll never see it, Jinny," and some dogged impulse to hurt her more made him add, "It's for Harry's sake as well as yours that I'm speaking."

"For Harry's sake? Oh, you don't mean--you can't really mean that you think I'm not doing the best for my child, Oliver?"

A year ago Oliver would have surrendered at once before the terror in her eyes; but in those twelve long months of effort, of hope, of balked ambition, of bitter questioning, and of tragic disillusionment, a new quality had developed in his character, and the generous sympathy of youth had hardened at thirty-four to the cautious cynicism of middle-age. It is doubtful if even he himself realized how transient such a state must be to a nature whose hidden springs were moved so easily by the mere action of change--by the effect of any alteration in the objects that surrounded him. Because the enthusiasm of youth was exhausted at the minute, it seemed to him that he had lost it forever.

And to Virginia, who saw but one thing at a time and to whom that one thing was always the present instant, it seemed that the firm ground upon which she trod had crumbled beneath her.

"Well, if you want the truth," he said quietly (as if any mother ever wanted the truth about such a matter), "I think you make a mistake to spoil Harry as you do."

"But," she brought out the words with a pathetic quiver, "I treat him just as I do the others, and you never say anything about my spoiling them."

"Oh, the others are girls. Girls aren't so easily ruined somehow. They don't get such hard knocks later on, so it makes less difference about them."

As she sat there in bed, propped up on her elbow, which trembled violently against the pillows, with her cambric nightdress, trimmed only with a narrow band of crocheted lace, opened at her slender throat, and her hair, which was getting thin at the temples, drawn unbecomingly back from her forehead, she looked, indeed, as Oliver had thought, "at least ten years older than Abby." Though she was not yet thirty, the delicate, flower-like bloom of her beauty was already beginning to fade. The spirit which had animated her yesterday appeared to have gone out of her now. He thought how lovely she had been at twenty when he saw her for the first time after his return to Dinwiddie; and a sudden anger seized him because she was letting herself break, because she was so needlessly sacrificing her youth and her beauty.

An hour later she got up and dressed herself, with the feeling that she had not rested a minute during the night. Harry was listless and fretful when he awoke, and while she put on his clothes, she debated with herself whether or not she should summon old Doctor Fraser from around the corner. When his lesson hour came, he climbed into her lap and went to sleep with his hot little head on her shoulder, and though he seemed better by evening, she was still so anxious about him that she forgot that she had promised Abby to go with them to Atlantic City until Oliver came in at dusk and reminded her.

"Aren't you going, Virginia?" he inquired, as he hunted in the closet for his bag which she had not had time to pack.

"I can't, Oliver. Harry isn't well. He has been unlike himself all day, and I am afraid to leave him."

"He looks all right," he remarked, bending over the child in Virginia's lap. "Does anything hurt you, Harry?"

"He doesn't seem to know exactly what it is," answered Virginia, "but if he isn't well by morning, I'll send for Doctor Fraser."

"He's got a good colour, and I believe he's as well as he ever was,"

replied Oliver, while a curious note of hostility sounded in his voice.

"There's nothing the matter with the boy," he added more positively after a minute. "Aren't you coming, Virginia?"

She looked up at him from the big rocking-chair in which she sat with Harry in her arms, and as she did so, both became conscious that the issue had broadened from a question of her going to Atlantic City into a direct conflict of wills. The only thing that could make her oppose him had happened for the first time since her marriage. The feminine impulse to yield was overmatched by the maternal impulse to protect. She would have surrendered her soul to him for the asking; but she could not surrender, even had she desired to do so, the mother love which had pa.s.sed into her from out the ages before she had been, and which would pa.s.s through her into the ages to come after her.

"Of course, if the little chap were really suffering, I'd be as anxious about staying as you are," said Oliver impatiently; "but there's nothing the matter. You're all right, aren't you, Harry?"

"Yes, I'm all right," repeated Harry, yawning and snuggling closer to Virginia, "but I'm sleepy."

"He isn't all right," insisted Virginia obstinately. "There's something wrong with him. I don't know what it is, but he isn't in the least like himself."

"It's just your imagination. You've got the children on the brain, Virginia. Don't you remember the time you woke me in the night and sent me after Doctor Fraser because Jenny had a bad attack of the hiccoughs?"

"I know," acknowledged Virginia humbly. She could be humble enough, but what good did that do when she was, as he told himself irritably, "as stubborn as a mule"? Her softness--she had seemed as soft as flowers when he married her--had been her greatest charm for him after her beauty; and now, at the end of eight years in which she had appeared as delightfully invertebrate as he could have desired, she revealed to his astonished eyes a backbone that was evidently made of iron. She was immovable, he admitted, and because she was immovable he was conscious of a sharp unreasonable impulse to reduce her to the pliant curves of her girlhood. After eight years of an absolute supremacy, which had been far from good for him, his will had been tripped up at last by so small a thing as a mere whim of Virginia's.

"You told Abby you would go," he urged, exasperated rather than soothed by her humility. "And it's too late now for her to ask any one else."

"I'm so sorry, dear, but I never once thought about it. I've been so worried all day."

He looked at the child, lying flushed and drowsy in Virginia's arms, and his face hardened until a latent brutality crept out around his handsome, but loosely moulded, lips. The truth was that Harry had never looked healthier than he did at that instant in the firelight, and the whole affair appeared to Oliver only another instance of what he called Virginia's "sensational motherhood."

"Can't you see for yourself that he's perfectly well?" he asked.