Virginia Part 38

"It makes you look every day of forty."

"I know it isn't becoming, but at least it will save having to buy one."

In spite of the fact that her small economies had made it possible for them to live wholesomely, and with at least an appearance of decency, on his meagre salary, they had always aroused in him a sense of bitter exasperation. He respected her, of course, for her saving, yet in his heart he knew that she would probably have charmed him more had she been a spendthrift--since the little virtues are sometimes more deadly to the pa.s.sion of love than are the large vices. While he nodded, without disputing the sound common sense in her words, she thought a little wistfully how nice it would be to have pretty things if only one could afford them. Someday, when the children's schooling was over and Oliver had got a larger salary, she would begin to buy clothes that were becoming rather than durable. But that was in the future, and, meanwhile, how much better it was to grudge every penny she spent on herself as long as there were unpaid bills at the doctor's and the grocer's. All of which was, of course, perfectly reasonable, and like other women who have had a narrow experience of life, she cherished the delusion that a man's love, as well as his philosophy, is necessarily rooted in reason.

When they turned homeward, the bay mare, p.r.i.c.ked by desire for her stable, began to travel more rapidly, and the fall of her hoofs, accompanied by the light roll of the wheels, broke the silence which had almost imperceptibly settled upon them. Not until the cart drew up at the gate did Virginia realize that they had hardly spoken a dozen words on the drive back.

"I feel better already, Oliver," she said, gratefully, as he helped her to alight. Then hastening ahead of him, she ran up the walk and into the hall, where her mother, looking wan and unnatural in her widow's cap, greeted her with the question:

"Did you have a pleasant drive, dear?"

For six months Mrs. Pendleton hid her broken heart under a smile and went softly about the small daily duties of the household, facing death, as she had faced life, with a sublime unselfishness and the manner of a lady. Her hopes, her joys, her fears even, lay in the past; there was nothing for her to look forward to, nothing for her to dread in the future. Life had given her all that it had to offer of bliss or sorrow, and for the rest of her few years she would be like one who, having finished her work before the end of the day, sits waiting patiently for the words of release to be spoken. As the months went on, she moved like a gentle shadow about her daughter's little home. So wasted and pallid was her body that at times Virginia feared to touch her lest she should melt like a phantom out of her arms. Yet to the last she never faltered, never cried out for mercy, never sought to hasten by a breath that end which was to her as the longing of her eyes, as the brightness of the sunlight, as the sweetness of the springtime. Once, looking up from Lucy's lesson which she was hearing, she said a little wistfully, "I don't think, Jinny, it will be long now," and then checking herself reproachfully, she added, "But G.o.d knows best. I can trust Him."

It was the only time that she had ever spoken of the thought which was in her mind day and night, for when she could no longer welcome her destiny, she had accepted it. Her faith, like her opinions, was child-like and uncritical--the artless product of a simple and incurious age. The strength in her had gone not into the building of knowledge, but into the making of character, and she had judged all thought as innocently as she had judged all literature, by its contribution to the external sweetness of living. A child of ten might have demolished her theories, and yet because of them, or in spite of them, she had translated into action the end of all reasoning, the profoundest meaning in all philosophy. But she was born to decorate instead of to reason.

Though her mind had never winnowed illusions from realities, her hands had patiently woven both illusions and realities into the embroidered fabric of Life.

For six months she went about the house and helped Virginia with the sewing, which had become burdensome since the children, and especially Harry, were big enough to wear daily holes in their stockings. Then, when the half year was over, she took to her bed one evening after she had carefully undressed, folded her clothes out of sight, and read a chapter in her Bible. In the morning she did not get up, and at the end of a fortnight, in which she apologized for making extra work whenever food was brought to her, she clasped her hands on her thin breast, smiled once into Virginia's face, and died so quietly that there was hardly a perceptible change in her breathing. She had gone through life without giving trouble, and she gave none at the end. As she lay there in her little bed in Virginia's spare room, to which she had moved after Gabriel's death in order that the rectory might be got ready for the new rector, she appeared so shadowy and unearthly that it was impossible to believe that she had ever been a part of the restless strivings and the sombre violences of life. On the candle-stand by her bed lay her spectacles, with steel rims because she had never felt that she could afford gold ones; and a single October rose, from which a golden petal had dropped, stood in a vase beside the Bible. On the foot of the bed hung her grey flannelette wrapper, with a patch in one sleeve over which Harry had spilled a bottle of shoe polish, while through the half-shuttered window the autumn suns.h.i.+ne fell in long yellow bars over the hemp rugs on the floor. And she was dead! Her mother was dead--no matter how much she needed her, she would never come back. Out of the vacancy around her, some words of her own, spoken in her girlhood, returned to her. "There is only one thing I couldn't bear, and that is losing my mother." Only one thing! And now that one thing had happened, and she was not only bearing it, she was looking ahead to a future in which that one thing would be always beside her, always in her memory.

Whatever the years brought to her, they could never bring her mother again--they could never bring her a love like her mother's.

Out of that same vacancy, which seemed to swallow and to hold everything, which seemed to exist both within and outside of herself, a mult.i.tude of forgotten images and impressions flashed into being. She saw the nursery fireside in the rectory, and her mother, with hair that still shone like satin, rocking back and forth in the black wicker chair with the sagging bottom. She saw her kneeling on the old frayed red and blue drugget, her skirt pinned up at the back of her waist, while she bathed her daughter's scratched and aching feet in the oblong tin foot-tub. She saw her, as beautiful as an angel, in church on Sunday mornings, her wors.h.i.+pful eyes lifted to the pulpit, an edge of tinted light falling on the open prayer-book in her hand. She saw her, thin and stooping, a shadow of all that she had once been--waiting--waiting----She had always been there. It was impossible to realize that a time could ever come when she would not be there--and now she was gone!

And behind all the images, all the impressions, the stubborn thought persisted that this was life--that one could never escape it--that whatever happened, one must come back to it at the last. "I have my children still left--but for my children I could not live!" she thought, dropping on her knees by the bedside, and hiding her face in the grey wrapper.

After this it seemed to her that she ceased to live except in the lives of her children, and her days pa.s.sed so evenly, so monotonously, that she only noticed their flight when one of the old people in Dinwiddie remarked to her with a certain surprise: "You've almost a grown daughter now, Jinny," or "Harry will soon be getting as big as his father. Have you decided where you will send him to college?" She was not unhappy--had she ever stopped to ask herself the question, she would probably have answered, "If only mother and father were living, I should be perfectly satisfied"; yet in spite of her a.s.surances, there existed deep down in her--so deep that her consciousness had never fully grasped the fact of its presence--a dumb feeling that something was missing out of life, that the actuality was a little less bright, a little less perfect than it had appeared through the rosy glamour of her virgin dreams. Was this "something missing" merely one of the necessary conditions of mortal existence? Or was there somewhere on the earth that stainless happiness which she had once believed her marriage would bring to her? "I should be perfectly satisfied if only----" she would sometimes say in the night, and then check herself before she had ended the sentence. The lack, real as it was, was still too formless to lend itself to the precision of words; it belonged less to circ.u.mstances than to the essential structure of life. And yet, as she put it to herself in her rare moments of depression, she had so much to be thankful for! The children grew stronger as they grew older--since Harry's attack of diphtheria, indeed, there had been no serious illness in the family, and as she approached middle-age, her terror of illness increased rather than diminished. The children made up for much--they ought to have made up for everything--and yet did they? There was no visible fault that she could attribute to them. With her temperamental inability to see flaws, she was accustomed to think of them as perfect children, as children whom she would not change, had she the power, by so much as a hair or an outline. They grew up, straight, fine, and fearless, full of the new spirit, eager to test life, to examine facts, possessed by that awakening feeling for truth which had always frightened her a little in Susan. Vaguely, without defining the sensation, she felt that they were growing beyond her, that she could no longer keep up with them, that, every year, they were leaving her a little farther behind them. They were fond of her, but she understood from something Jenny said one day, that they had ceased to be proud of her. It was while they were looking over an old photograph alb.u.m of Susan's that, coming to a picture of Virginia, taken the week before her wedding, Jenny cried out: "Why, there's mother!" and slipped it out of the page.

"I never saw that before," Lucy said, leaning over with a laugh. "You were so young when you married, mother, and you wore such tight sleeves, and a bustle!"

"Would you ever have believed she was as pretty as that?" asked Jenny, with the unconscious brutality of childhood.

"If you are ever as beautiful as your mother was, you may thank your stars," said Susan dryly, and by the expression in her face Virginia knew that she was thinking, "If that was my child, I'd slap her!"

Harry, who had been stuffing fruitcake on the sofa--sweets were his weakness--rose suddenly and came over to the group.

"If you are ever as beautiful as she is now, you may thank your stars, Miss Yellow Frisk!" he remarked crus.h.i.+ngly.

It was a little thing--so little that it seemed ridiculous to think of it as among the momentous happenings in a life--but with that extraordinary p.r.o.neness of the little to usurp the significant places of memory, it had become at last one of the important milestones in her experience. At the end, when she forgot everything else, she would not forget Harry's foolish words, nor the look in his indignant boyish face when he uttered them. Until then she had not admitted to herself that there was a difference in her feeling for her children, but with the touch of his sympathetic, not over clean, hand on her shoulder, she knew that she should never again think of the three of them as if they were one in her interest and her love. The girls were good children, dear children--she would have let herself be cut in pieces for either of them had it been necessary--but between Harry and herself there was a different bond, a closer and a deeper dependency, which strengthened almost insensibly as he grew older. Her daughters she loved, but her son, as is the inexplicable way of women, she adored blindly and without wisdom. If it had been possible to ruin him, she would have done so, but, unlike many other sons, he seemed, by virtue of that invincible strength with which he had been born, to be proof against both spoiling and flattery. He was a nice boy even to strangers, even to Susan, with her serene judgment of persons, he appeared a thoroughly nice boy! He was not only a tall, lean, habitually towselled-headed youngster, with a handsome sunburned face and a pair of charming, slightly quizzical blue eyes, but he was, as his teachers and his school reports bore witness, possessed of an intellectual brilliancy which made study as easy, and quite as interesting to him, as play. Unlike his father, he had entered life endowed with a cheerful outlook upon the world and with that temperament of success which usually, but by no means inevitably, accompanies it. Whatever happened, he would make the best of it, he would "get on," and it was impossible to imagine him in any hole so deep that he could not, sooner or later, find the way out of it. The Pendleton and the Treadwell spirits had contributed their best to him.

If he derived from Cyrus, or from some obscure strain in Cyrus's ancestry, a wholesome regard for material success, a robust determination to achieve results combined with that hard, clear vision of affairs which makes such achievement easy, he had inherited from Gabriel his genial temper, his charm of manner, and his faith in life, which, though it failed to move mountains, had sweetened and enriched the mere act of living. Though he was less demonstrative than Lucy, who had outgrown the plainness and the reticence of her childhood and was developing into a coquettish, shallow-minded girl, with what Miss Priscilla called "a glib tongue," Virginia learned gradually, in the secret way mothers learn things, that his love for her was, after his ambition, the strongest force in his character. Between him and his father there had existed ever since his babyhood a curious, silent, yet ineradicable hostility. Whether the fault was Oliver's or Harry's, whether the father resented the energy and the initiative of his son, or the son resented the indifference and the self-absorption of his father, Virginia had never discovered. For years she fought against admitting the discord between them. Then, at last, on the occasion of a quarrel, when it was no longer possible to dissemble, she followed Oliver into his study, which had once been the "back parlour," and pleaded with him to show a little patience, a little sympathy with his son. "He's a boy any father would be proud of----" she finished, almost in tears.

"I know he is," he answered irritably, "but the truth is he rubs me the wrong way. I suppose the trouble is that you have spoiled him."

"But he isn't spoiled. Everybody says----"

"Oh, everybody!" he murmured disdainfully, with a shrug of his fine shoulders.

He looked back at her with the sombre fire of anger still in his eyes, and she saw, without trying to see, without even knowing that she did see, all the changes that years had wrought in his appearance.

Physically, he was a finer animal than he had been when she married him, for time, which had sapped her youth and faded her too delicate bloom, had but added a deeper colour to the warm brown of his skin, a steadier glow to his eyes, a more silvery gloss to his hair. At forty, he was a handsomer man than he had been at twenty-five, yet, in spite of this, some virtue had gone out of him--here, too, as in life, "something was missing." The generous impulses, the high heart for adventure, the enthusiasm of youth, and youth's white rage for perfection--where were these? It was as if a rough hand had pa.s.sed over him, coa.r.s.ening here, blotting out there, accentuating elsewhere. The slow, insidious devil of compromise had done its work. Once he had made one of the small band of fighters who fight not for advantage, but for the truth; now he stood in that middle place with the safe majority who are "neither for G.o.d nor for His enemies." Life had done this to him--life and Virginia. It was not only that he had "grown soft," as he would have expressed it, nor was it even wholly that he had grown selfish, for the canker which ate at the roots of his personality had affected not his character merely, but the very force of his will. Though the imperative he obeyed had always been not "I must," but "I want," his natural loftiness of purpose might have saved him from the results of his weakness had he not lost gradually the capacity for successful resistance with which he had started. If only in the beginning she had upheld not his inclinations, but his convictions; if only she had sought not to soothe his weakness, but to stimulate his strength; if only she had seen for once the thing as it was, not as it ought to have been----

He was buried in his work now, and there were months during this year when she appeared hardly to see him, so engrossed, so self-absorbed had he become. Sometimes she would remember, stifling the pang it caused, the nights when he had written his first plays in Matoaca City, and that he had made her sit beside him with her sewing because he could not think if she were out of the room. Now, he could write only when he was alone; he hated an interruption so much that she often let the fire go out rather than open his closed door to see if it was burning. If she went in to speak to him, he laid his pen down and did not take it up again while she was there. Yet this change had come so stealthily that it had hardly affected her happiness. She had grown accustomed to the difference before she had realized it sufficiently to suffer. Sometimes she would say to herself a little wonderingly, "Oliver used to be so romantic;" for with the majority of women whose marriages have surrendered to an invasion of the commonplace, she accepted the comfortable theory that the alteration was due less to circ.u.mstances than to the natural drying of the springs of sentiment in her husband's character. Occasionally, she would remember with a smile her three days'

jealousy of Abby; but the brevity and the folly of this had established her the more securely in her impregnable position of unquestioning belief in him. She had started life believing, as the women of her race had believed for ages before her, that love was a divine gift which came but once in a lifetime, and which, coming once, remained forever indestructible. People, of course, grew more practical and less intense as they left youth farther behind them; and though this misty principle would have dissolved at once had she applied it to herself (for she became more sentimental as she approached middle-age), behind any suspicious haziness of generalization there remained always the sacred formula, "Men are different." Once, when a sharp outbreak of the primal force had precipitated a scandal in the home of one of her neighbours, she had remarked to Susan that she was "devoutly thankful that Oliver did not have that side to his nature."

"It must be a disagreeable side to live with," Susan, happily married to John Henry, and blissfully expectant of motherhood, had replied, "but as far as I know, Oliver never had a light fancy for a woman in his life--not even before he was married. I used to tell him that it was because he expected too much. Physical beauty by itself never seemed to attract him--it was the angel in you that he first fell in love with."

A glow of pleasure flushed Virginia's sharpened features, mounting to the thin little curls on her forehead. These little curls, to which she sentimentally clung in spite of the changes in the fas.h.i.+ons, were a cause of ceaseless worry to Lucy, who had developed into a "stylish"

girl, and would have died sooner than she would have rejected the universal pompadour of the period. It was the single vanity that Virginia had ever permitted herself, this adhering at middle-age to the quaint and rather coquettish hairdressing of her girlhood: and Fate had punished her by threading the little curls with grey, while Susan's stiff roll (she had adopted the newer mode) remained bravely flaxen. But Susan was one of those women who, lacking a fine fair skin and defying tradition, are physically at their best between forty and fifty.

"Oliver used to be so romantic," said Virginia, as she had said so often to herself, while the glow paled slowly from her cheeks, leaving them the colour of faded rose-leaves.

"Not so romantic as you were, Jinny."

"Oh, I am still," she laughed softly. "Lucy says I take more interest in her lovers now than she does," and she added after a minute, "Girls are so different to-day from what they used to be--they are so much less sentimental."

"But I thought Lucy was. She has enough flirtations for her age, hasn't she?"

"She has enough attention, of course--for the funny part is that, though she's only sixteen and not nearly so pretty as Jenny, the men are all crazy, as Miss w.i.l.l.y says, about her. But, somehow, it's different. Lucy enjoys it, but it isn't her life. As for Jenny, she's still too young to have taken shape, I suppose, but she has only one idea in her head and that is going to college. She never gives a boy a thought."

"That's queer, because she promises already to be the most beautiful girl in Dinwiddie."

"She is beautiful. I am quite sure that it isn't because she is my daughter that I think so. But, all the same, I'm afraid she'll never be as popular as Lucy is. She is so distant and overbearing to men that they are shy of her."

"And you'll let her go to college?"

"If we can afford it--and now that Oliver hopes to get one of his plays put on, we may have a little more money. But it seems such a waste to me. I never saw that it could possibly do a woman any good to go to college--though of course I always sympathized with your disappointment, dear Susan. Jenny is bent on it now, but I feel so strongly that it would be better for her to come out in Dinwiddie and go to parties and have attention."

"And does Oliver feel that, too?"

"Oh, he doesn't care. Jenny is his favourite, and he will let her do anything he thinks she has set her heart on. But he has never put his whole life into the children's as I have done."

"But if she goes, will you be able to send Harry?"

"Of course, Harry's education must come before everything else--even Oliver realizes that. Do you know, I've hardly bought a match for ten years that I haven't stopped to ask myself if it would take anything from Harry's education. That's why I've gone as shabby as this almost ever since he was born--that and my longing to give the girls a few pretty things."

"You haven't bought a dress for yourself since I can remember. I should think you would wear your clothes out making them over."

The look in Virginia's face showed that the recollection Susan had invoked was not entirely a pleasant one.

"I've done with as little as I could," she answered. "Only once was I really extravagant, and that was when I bought a light blue silk which I didn't have made up until years afterwards when it was dyed black. Dyed things never hold their own," she concluded pensively.

"You are too unselfish--that is your only fault," said Susan impulsively. "I hope they appreciate all you have been to them."

"Oh, they appreciate me," returned Virginia with a laugh. "Harry does, anyhow."

"I believe Harry is your darling, Jinny."

"I try not to make any difference in my feeling--they are all the best children that ever lived--but--Susan, I wouldn't breathe this to anybody on earth but you--I can't help thinking that Harry loves me more than the others do. He--he has so much more patience with me. The girls sometimes laugh at me because I am old-fas.h.i.+oned and behind the times, and I can see that it annoys them because I am ignorant of things which they seem to have been born knowing."