Virginia Part 40

"She's a charmer on the stage. I heard father tell her that she made the play, and I'm not sure that he wasn't right."

"But you saw her off the stage, didn't you?"

"Oh, yes, she asked me to dinner. She didn't look nearly so young, then, and she's not exactly pretty; but, somehow, it didn't seem to matter.

She's got genius--you couldn't be with her ten minutes without finding out that. I never saw any one in my life so much alive. When she's in a room, even if she doesn't speak, you can't keep your eyes off her. She's like a bright flame that you can't stop looking at--not even if there are a lot of prettier women there, too."

"Is she dark or fair?"

He stopped to think for a moment.

"To save my life I can't remember--but I think she's dark--at least, her eyes are, though her hair may be light. But you never think of her appearance when she's talking. I believe she's the best talker I ever heard--better even than father."

His enthusiasm had got the better of him, and it was evident that Oliver's success had banished for a time at least the secret hostility which had existed between father and son. That pa.s.sion for material results, which could not be separated from the Treadwell spirit without robbing that spirit of its vitality, had gradually altered the family att.i.tude toward Oliver's profession. Art, like business, must justify itself by its results, and to a commercial age there could be no justifiable results that could not bear translation into figures.

Success was the chief end of man, and success could be measured only in terms of money.

"There's your father's step," said Virginia, whose face looked drawn and pallid in the dusk. "Let me light the lamp, darling. He hates to read his paper by anything but lamplight."

But he had jumped up before she had finished and was hunting for matches in the old place under the clock on the mantelpiece. She was such a little, thin, frail creature that he laughed as she tried to help him.

"So Lucy is going to marry that old rotter, is she?" he asked pleasantly as his father entered. "Well, father! I was just asking mother why she let Lucy marry that old rotter?"

"But the dear child has set her heart on him, and he is really very nice to us," replied Virginia hurriedly. Though she was disappointed in Lucy's choice, it seemed dreadful to her to speak of a man who was about to enter the family as a "rotter."

"You stop it, Harry, if you have the authority. I haven't," answered Oliver carelessly. "Is your neuralgia better, Virginia?"

"It's quite gone, dear. Doctor Powell gave me some aspirin and it cured it." She smiled gratefully at him, with a touching pleasure in the fact that he had remembered to ask. As she glanced quickly from father to son, eager to see them reconciled, utterly forgetful of herself, something of the anxious cheerfulness of Mrs. Pendleton's spirit appeared to live again in her look. Though her freshness had withered, she was still what is called "a sweet looking woman," and her expression of simple goodness lent an appealing charm to her features.

"Are you going back to New York soon, father?" asked Harry, turning politely in Oliver's direction. From his manner, which had lost its boyishness, Virginia knew that he was trying with all his energy to be agreeable, yet that he could not overcome the old feeling of constraint and lack of sympathy.

"Next week. 'The Home' is to be put on in February, and I'm obliged to be there for the rehearsals."

"Does Miss Oldcastle take the leading part?"

"Yes."

Crossing the room, Oliver held out his hands to the fire, and then turning, stretched his arms, with a stifled yawn, above his head. The only fault that could be urged against his appearance was that his figure was becoming a trifle square, that he was beginning to look a little too well-fed, a little too comfortable. For the rest, his hair, which had gone quite grey, brought out the glow and richness of his colour and lent a striking emphasis to his dark, s.h.i.+ning eyes.

"Do you think that the new play is as good as 'Pretty f.a.n.n.y'?" asked Virginia.

"Well, they're both rot, you know," he answered, with a laugh.

"Oh, Oliver, how can you, when all the papers spoke so admiringly of it?"

"Why shouldn't they? It is perfectly innocuous. The kind of thing any father might take his daughter to see. We shan't dispute that, anyhow."

His flippancy not only hurt, it confused her. It was painful enough to have him speak so slightingly of his success, but worse than this was the feeling it aroused in her that he was defying authority. Even if her innate respect for the printed word had not made her accept as final the judgment of the newspapers, there was still the incontestable fact that so many people had paid to see "Pretty f.a.n.n.y" that both Oliver and Miss Oldcastle had reaped a small fortune. She glanced in a helpless way at Harry, and he said suddenly:

"Don't you think Jenny ought to come home to be with mother after Lucy marries? You are obliged to go to New York so often that she will get lonely."

"It's a good idea," agreed Oliver amiably, "but there's another case where you'll have to use greater authority than mine. When I stopped reforming people," he added gaily, "I began with my own family."

"The dear child would come in a minute if I suggested it," said Virginia, "but she enjoys her life at college so much that I wouldn't have her give it up for anything in the world. It would make me miserable to think that any of my children made a sacrifice for me."

"You needn't worry. We've trained them differently," said Oliver, and though his tone was slightly satirical, the satire was directed at himself, not at his wife.

"I am sure it is what I should never want," insisted Virginia, almost pa.s.sionately, while she rose in response to the announcement of supper, and met Lucy, in trailing pink chiffon, on the threshold.

"Are you sure your coat is warm enough, dear?" she asked. "Wouldn't you like to wear my furs? They are heavier than yours."

"Oh, I'd love to, if you wouldn't mind, mother."

Raising herself on tiptoe, Lucy kissed Harry, and then ran to the mirror, eager to see if the black fur looked well on her.

"They're just lovely on me, mother. I feel gorgeous!" she exclaimed triumphantly, and indeed her charming girlish face rose like a white flower out of the rich dark furs.

In Virginia's eyes, as she turned back in the doorway to watch her, there was a radiant self-forgetfulness which illumined her features. For a moment she lived so completely in her daughter's youth that her body seemed to take warmth and colour from the emotion which transfigured her.

"I am so glad, darling," she said. "It gives me more pleasure to see you in them than it does to wear them myself." And though she did not know it, she embodied her gentle philosophy of life in that single sentence.

CHAPTER III

MIDDLE-AGE

Jenny had promised to come home a week before Lucy's wedding, but at the last moment, while they waited supper for her, a telegram announced with serious brevity that she was "detained." Twenty-four hours later a second telegram informed them that she would not arrive until the evening before the marriage, and at six o'clock on that day, Virginia, who had been packing Lucy's trunks ever since breakfast, looked out of the window at the sound of the door-bell, and saw the cab which had contained her second daughter standing beside the curbstone.

"Mother, have you the change to pay the driver?" asked a vision of stern loveliness floating into the room. With the winter's glow in her cheeks and eyes and the bronze sheen on her splendid hair, which was brushed in rippling waves from her forehead and coiled in a severely simple knot on her neck, she might have been a wandering G.o.ddess, who had descended, with immortal calm, to direct the affairs of the household. Her white s.h.i.+rtwaist, with its starched severity, suited her austere beauty and her look of almost superhuman composure.

"Take off your hat, darling, and lie down on the couch while I finish Lucy's packing," said Virginia, when she had sent the servant downstairs to pay the cabman. Her soul was in her eyes while she watched Jenny remove her plain felt hat, with its bit of blue scarf around the crown--a piece of millinery which presented a deceptive appearance of inexpensiveness--and pa.s.s the comb through the s.h.i.+ning arch of her hair.

"I am so sorry, mother dear, I couldn't come before, but there were some important lectures I really couldn't afford to miss. I am specializing in biology, you know."

Her manner, calm, sweet, and gently condescending, was such as she might have used to a child whom she loved and with whom she possessed an infinite patience. One felt that while talking, she groped almost unconsciously for the simplest and shortest words in which her meaning might be conveyed. She did not lie down as Virginia had suggested, but straightening her short skirt, seated herself in an upright chair by the table and crossed her slender feet in their sensible, square-toed shoes.

While she gazed at her, Virginia remembered, with a smile, that Harry had once said his sister was as flawless as a geometrical figure, and he couldn't look at her without wanting to twist her nose out of shape. In spite of her beauty, she was not attractive to men, whom she awed and intimidated by a candid a.s.sumption of superiority. For Lucy's conscienceless treatment of the male she had unmitigated contempt. Her sister, indeed, had she not been her sister, would have appeared to her as an object for frank condemnation--"one of those women who waste themselves in foolish flirtations." As it was, loving Lucy, and being a loyal soul, with very scientific ideas of her own responsibility for her sister as well as for that abstract creature whom she cla.s.sified as "the working woman," she thought of Lucy tenderly as a "dear girl, but simple." Her mother, of course, was, also, "simple"; but, then, what could one expect of a woman whose only education had been at the Dinwiddie Academy for Young Ladies? To Jenny, education had usurped the place which the church had always occupied in the benighted mind of her mother. All the evils of our civilization--and these evils shared with the working woman the first right to her attention--she attributed to the fact that the former generations of women had had either no education at all, or worse even than that, had had the meretricious brand of education which was supplied by an army of Miss Priscillas. For Miss Priscilla herself, entirely apart from the Academy, which she described frankly, to Virginia's horror, as "a menace," she entertained a sincere devotion, and this ability to detach her judgments from her affections made her appear almost miraculously wise to her mother, who had been born a Pendleton.

"No, I'm not tired. Is there anything I can help you about, mother?" she asked, for she was a good child and very helpful--the only drawback to her a.s.sistance being that when she helped she invariably commanded.

"Oh, no, darling, I'll be through presently--just as soon as I get this trunk packed. Lucy's things are lovely. I wish you had come in time to see them. Miss w.i.l.l.y and I spent all yesterday running blue ribbons in her underclothes, and though we began before breakfast, we had to sit up until twelve o'clock so as to get through in time to begin on the trunks this morning."

Her eyes shone as she spoke, and she would have enjoyed describing all Lucy's clothes, for she loved pretty things, though she never bought them for herself, finding it impossible to break the habit of more than twenty years of economy; but Jenny, who was proud of her sincerity, looked so plainly bored that she checked her flowing descriptions.

"I hope you brought something beautiful to wear to-morrow, Jenny?" she ventured timidly, after a silence.

"Of course I had to get a new dress, as I'm to be maid of honour, but it seemed so extravagant, for I had two perfectly good white chiffons already."