The house was half closed when I reached it, though the open shutters to the upper windows led me to believe that some of the rooms, at least, were tenanted. When I entered the gate and passed the stuccoed wing to the rear piazza, I saw that the terraces were blotted and ruined as if an invading army had tramped over them. The magnolias and laburnums, with the exception of a few lonely trees, had already fallen; the latticed arbours were slowly rotting away; and several hardy rose-bushes, blooming bravely in the overgrown squares, were the only survivals of the summer splendour that I remembered. Turning out of the path, I plucked one of these gallant roses, and found it pale and sickly, with a November blight at the heart. Only the great elms still arched their bared branches unchanged against a red sunset; and now as then the small yellow leaves fluttered slowly down, like wounded butterflies, to the narrow walks.

I had left the upper terrace and had descended the sunken green steps, when the dry rustle of leaves in the path fell on my ears, and turning a fallen summer house, I saw Sally approaching me through the broken maze of the box. A colour flamed in her face, and pausing in the leaf-strewn path, she looked up at me with shining and happy eyes.

"It has been so long since I saw you," she said, with her hand outstretched.

I took her hand, and turning we moved down the walk while I still held it in mine. Out of the blur of her figure, which swam in a mist, I saw only her shining and happy eyes.

"It has been a thousand years," I answered, "but I knew that they would pass."

"That they would pass?" she repeated.

"That they must pass. I have worked for that end every minute since I saw you. I have loved you, as you surely know," I blurted out, "every instant of my life, but I knew that I could offer you nothing until I could offer you something worthy of your acceptance."

Reaching out her hand, which she had withdrawn from mine, she caught several drifting elm leaves in her open palm.

"And what," she asked slowly, "do you consider to be worthy of my acceptance?"

"A name," I answered, "that you would be proud to bear. Not only the love of a man's soul and body, but the soul and body themselves after they have been tried and tested. Wealth, I know, would not count with you, and I believe, birth would not, even though you are a Bland—but I must have wealth, I must have honour, so that at least you will not appear to stoop. I must give you all that it lies in my power to achieve, or I must give you nothing."

"Wealth! honour!" she said, with a little laugh, "O Ben Starr! Ben Starr!"

"So that, at least, you will not appear to stoop," I repeated.

"I stoop to you?" she responded, and again she laughed.

"You know that I love you?" I asked.

"Yes," she replied, and lifted her eyes to mine, "I know that you love me."

"Beyond love I have nothing at the moment."

A light wind swept the leaves from her hand, and blew the ends of her white veil against my breast.

"And suppose," she demanded in a clear voice, "that love was all that I wanted?"

Her lashes did not tremble; but in her eyes, in her parted red lips, and in her whole swift and expectant figure, there was something noble and free, as if she were swept forward by the radiant purpose which shone in her look.

"Not my love—not yet—my darling," I said.

At the word her blush came.

"You say you have only yourself to give," she went on with an effort. "Is it possible that in the future—in any future—you could have more than yourself?"

"Not more love, Sally, not more love."

"Then more of what?"

"Of things that other men and women count worth the having!"

The sparkle returned to her eyes, and I watched the old childish archness play in her face.

"Do I understand that you are proposing to other men and women or to me, sir?" she enquired, above her muff, in the prim tone of Miss Mitty.

"To neither the one nor the other," I answered stubbornly, though I longed to kiss the mockery away from her curving lips. "When the time comes I shall return to you."

"And you are doing this for the sake of other people, not for me," she said. "I suppose, indeed, that it's Aunt Mitty and Aunt Matoaca you are putting before me. They would be flattered, I am sure, if they could only know of it—but they can't. As a matter of fact, they also put something before me, so I don't appear to come first with anybody. Aunt Mitty prefers her pride and Aunt Matoaca prefers her principles, and you prefer both—"

"I am only twenty-six," I returned. "In five years—in ten at most—I shall be far in the race—"

"And quite out of breath with the running," she observed, "by the time you turn and come back for me."

"I don't dare ask you to wait for me."

"As a matter of fact," she responded serenely, "I don't think I shall. I could never endure waiting."

Her calmness was like a dash of cold water into my face.

"Don't laugh at me whatever you do," I implored.

"I'm not laughing—it's far too serious," she retorted. "That scheme of yours," she flashed out suddenly, "is worthy of the great brain of the General."

"Now I'll stand anything but that!" I replied, and turned squarely on her; "Sally, do you love me?"

"Love a man who puts both his pride and his principles before me?"

"If you don't love me—and, of course you can't—why do you torment me?"

"It isn't torment, it's education. When next you start to propose to the lady of your choice, don't begin by telling her you are lovesick for the good opinion of her maiden aunts."

"Sally, Sally!" I cried joyfully. My hand went out to hers, and then as she turned away—my arm was about her, and the little fur hat with the bunch of violets was on my breast.

"O, Ben Starr, were you born blind?" she said with a sob.

"Sally, am I mad or do you love me?" I asked, and the next instant, bending over as she looked up, I kissed her parted lips.

For a minute she was silent, as if my kiss had drawn her strength through her tremulous red mouth. Her body quivered and seemed to melt in my arms—and then with a happy laugh, she yielded herself to my embrace.

"A little of both, Ben," she answered, "you are mad, I suppose, and so am I—and I love you."

"But how could you? When did you begin?"

"I could because I would, and there was no beginning. I was born that way."

"You meant you have cared for me, as I have for you—always?"

"Not always, perhaps—but—well, it started in the churchyard, I think, when I gave you Samuel. Then when I met you again it might have been just the way you look—for oh, Ben, did you ever discover that you are splendid to look at?"

"A magnificent animal," I retorted.

She blushed, recognising the phrase. "To tell the truth, though, it wasn't the way you look," she went on impulsively, "it was, I think,—I am quite sure,—the time you pushed that wheel up the hill. I adored you, Ben, at that moment. If you'd asked me to marry you on the spot I'd have responded, 'Yes, thank you, sir,' as one of my great-grandmothers did at the altar."

"And to think I didn't even know you were there. I'd forgotten it, but I remember now the General told me I made a spectacle of myself."

"Well, I always liked a spectacle, it's in my blood. I like a man, too, who does things as if he didn't care whether anybody was looking at him or not—and that's you, Ben."

"It's not my business to shatter your ideals," I answered, and the next minute, "O Sally, how is it to end?"

"That depends, doesn't it," she asked, "whether you want to marry me or my maiden aunts?"

"Do you mean that you will marry me?"

"I mean, Ben, that if you aren't so obliging as to marry me, I'll pine away and die a lovelorn death."

"Be serious, Sally."

"Could anything on earth be more serious than a lovelorn death?"

I would have caught her back to my breast, but eluding my arms, she stood poised like the fleeting-spirit of gaiety in the little path.

"Will you promise to marry me, Ben Starr?" she asked.

"I'll promise anything on earth," I answered.

"Not to talk any more about my stooping to a giant?"

"I won't talk about it, darling, I'll let you do it."

"And if you're poor you'll let me be poor too? And if you're rich you'll give me a share of the money?"

"Both—all."

"And you'll make a sacrifice for me—as the General said George wouldn't—whenever I happen particularly to want one?"

"A million of them—anything, everything."

She came a step nearer, and raised her smiling lips to mine.

"Anything—everything, Ben, together," she said.

Presently we walked back slowly, hand in hand, through the maze of box.

"Will you tell your aunts, or shall I, Sally?" I asked.

"We'll go to them together."

"Now, at this instant?"

"Now—at this instant," she agreed, "but I thought you were so patient?"

"Patient? I'm as patient as an engine on the Great South Midland."

"A minute ago you were prepared to wait ten years."

"Oh, ten years!" I echoed, as I followed her out of the enchanted garden.

At the corner the surrey was standing, and the face of old Shadrach, the negro driver, stared back at me, transfixed with amazement.

"Whar you gwine now, Miss Sally?" he demanded defiantly of his young mistress, as I took my place under the fur rug beside her.

"Home, Uncle Shadrach," she replied.

"Ain't I gwine drap de gent'man some whar on de way up?"

"No, Uncle Shadrach, home,"—and for home we started merrily with a flick of the whip over the backs of the greys.

Sitting beside her for the first time in my life, I was conscious, as we drove through the familiar streets, only of an acute physical delight in her presence. As she turned toward me, her breath fanned my cheek, the touch of her arm on mine was a rapture, and when the edge of her white veil was blown into my face, I felt my blood rush to meet it. Never before had I been so confident, so strong, so assured of the future. Not the future alone, but the whole universe seemed to lie in the closed palm of my hand. I knew that I was plain, that I was rough beside the velvet softness of the woman who had promised to share my life; but this plainness, this roughness, no longer troubled me since she had found in it something of the power that had drawn her to me. My awkwardness had dropped from me in the revelation of my strength which she had brought. The odour of burning leaves floated up from the street, and I saw again her red shoes dancing over the sunken graves in the churchyard. Oh, those red shoes had danced into my life and would stay there forever!



CHAPTER XVI

IN WHICH SALLY SPEAKS HER MIND

We crossed the threshold, which I had thought never to pass again, and entered the drawing-room, where a cedar log burned on the andirons. At either end of the low brass fender, Miss Mitty and Miss Matoaca sat very erect, like two delicate silhouettes, the red light of the flames shining through their fine, almost transparent profiles. Beyond them, over the rosewood spinet, I saw their portrait, painted in fancy dress, with clasped hands under a garland of roses.

As we entered the room, they rose slightly from their chairs, and turned toward us with an expression of mild surprise on their faces. It was impossible, I knew, for their delicately moulded features to express any impulse more strongly.

"Dear aunties," began Sally, in a voice that was a caress, "I've brought Ben back with me because I met him in the garden on Church Hill—and—and—and he told me that he loved me."

"He told you that he loved you?" repeated Miss Mitty in a high voice, while Miss Matoaca sat speechless, with her unnaturally bright eyes on her niece's face.

Kneeling on the rug at their feet, Sally looked from one to the other with an appealing and tender glance.

"You brought him back because he told you that he loved you?" said Miss Mitty again, as if her closed mind had refused to admit the words she had uttered.

"Well, only partly because of that, Aunt Mitty," replied Sally bravely, "the rest was because—because I told him that I loved him."

For a moment there was a tense and unnatural silence in the midst of which I heard the sharp crackling of the fire and smelt the faint sweet smell of the burning cedar. The two aunts looked at each other over the kneeling girl, and it seemed to me that the long, narrow faces had grown suddenly pinched and old.

"I—I don't think we understood quite what you said, Sally dear," said Miss Matoaca, in a hesitating voice; and I felt sorry for her as she spoke—sorry for them both because the edifice of their beliefs and traditions, reared so patiently through the centuries by dead Fairfaxes and Blands, had crumbled about their ears.

"What she means, Miss Matoaca," I said gently, coming forward into the firelight, "is that I have asked her to marry me."

"To marry you—you—Ben Starr?" exclaimed Miss Mitty abruptly, rising from her chair, and then falling nervelessly back. "There is some mistake—not that I doubt," she added courteously, the generations of breeding overcoming her raw impulse of horror, "not that I doubt for a minute that you are an estimable and deserving character—General Bolingbroke tells me so and I trust his word. But Sally marry you! Why, your father—I beg your pardon for reminding you of it—your father was not even an educated man."

"No," I replied, "my father was not an educated man, but I am."

"That speaks very well for you, sir, I am sure—but how—how could my niece marry a man who—I apologise again for alluding to your origin—whose father was a stone-cutter—I have heard?"

"Yes, he was a stone-cutter, and I am sorry to say wasn't even a good one."

"I don't know that good or bad makes a difference, except, of course, as it affected his earning a livelihood. But the fact remains that he was a common workman and that no member of our family on either side has ever been even remotely connected with trade. Surely, you yourself, Mr. Starr, must be aware that my niece and you are not in the same walk of life. Do you not realise the impossibility of—of the connection you speak of?"

"I realised it so much," I answered, "that until I met her this afternoon I had determined to wait five—perhaps ten years before asking her to become my wife."

"Ten years? But what can ten years have to do with it? Families are not made in ten years, Mr. Starr, and how could that length of time alter the fact that your father was a person of no education and that you yourself are a self-made man?"

"I am not ashamed to offer her the man after he is made," I replied. "What I did not think worthy of her was the man in the making."

"But it is the man in the making that I want," said Sally, rising to her feet, and taking my hand in hers. "O Aunt Matoaca, I love him!"

The little lady to whom she appealed bent slowly forward in the firelight, her face, which had grown old and wan, looking up at us, as we stood there, hand in hand, on the rug.

"I am distressed for you, Sally," she said, "but when it becomes a question of honour, love must be sacrificed."

"Honour!" cried Sally, and there was a passionate anger in her voice, "but I do honour him." My hand was in hers, and she stooped and kissed it before turning to Miss Matoaca, who had drawn herself up, thin and straight as a blade, in her chair.

"You are right," I said, "to tell me that I am unworthy of your niece—for I am. I am plain and rough beside her, but, at least, I am honest. What I offer her is a man's heart, and a man's hand that has dealt cleanly and fairly with both men and women."

Until the words were uttered my pride had blinded me to my cruelty. Then I saw two bright red spots appear in Miss Matoaca's thin cheeks, and I asked myself in anger if the General or George Bolingbroke would have been guilty of so deep a thrust? Did she dream that I knew her story? And were those pathetic red spots the outward sign of a stab in her gentle bosom?

"There are many different kinds of merit, Mr. Starr," she returned, with a wistful dignity. "I do not undervalue that of character, but I do not think that even a good character can atone for the absence of family inheritance—of the qualities which come from refined birth and breeding. We have had the misfortune in our family of one experience of an ill-assorted and tragic marriage," she added.

"We must never forget poor Sarah's misery and ours, Sister Matoaca," remarked Miss Mitty, from the opposite side of the hearth; "and yet Harry Mickleborough's father was a most respectable man, and the teacher of Greek in a college."

All the pity went out of me, and I felt only a blind sense of irritation at the artificial values, the feminine lack of grasp, the ignorance of the true proportions of life. I grew suddenly hard, and something of this hardness passed into my voice when I spoke.

"I stand or fall by own worth and by that alone," I returned, "and your niece, if she marries me, will stand or fall as I do. I ask no favours, no allowances, even from her."

Withdrawing her hand from mine, Sally took a single step forward, and stood with her eyes on the faces that showed so starved and wan in the firelight.

"Don't you see—oh, can't you see," she asked, "that it is because of these very things that I love him? How can I separate his past from what he is to-day? How can I say that I would have this or that different—his birth, his childhood, his struggle—when all these have helped to make him the man I love? Who else have I ever known that could compare with him for a minute? You wanted me to marry George Bolingbroke, but what has he ever done to prove what he was worth?"

"Sally, Sally," said Miss Mitty, sternly, "he had no need to prove it. It was proved centuries before his birth. The Bolingbrokes proved themselves to their king before this was a country—"

"Well, I'm not his king," rejoined Sally, scornfully, "so it wasn't proved to me. I ask something more."

"More, Sally?"

"Yes, more, Aunt Mitty, a thousand times and ten thousand times. What do I care for a dead arm that fought for a dead king? Both are dust to-day, and I am alive. No, no, give me, not honour and loyalty that have been dead five hundred years, but truth and courage that I can turn to to-day,—not chivalric phrases that are mere empty sound, but honesty and a strong arm that I can lean on."

Miss Matoaca's head had dropped as if from weariness over her thin breast, which palpitated under the piece of old lace, like the breast of a wounded bird. Then, as the girl stopped and caught her breath sharply from sheer stress of feeling, the little lady looked up again and straightened herself with a gesture of pride.

"Do not make the mistake, Sally," she said, "of thinking that a humble birth means necessarily greater honesty than a high one. Generations of refinement are the best material for character-building, and you might as easily find the qualities you esteem in a gentleman of your own social position."

"I might, Aunt Matoaca; but, as a matter of fact, have I? Until you have seen a man fight can you know him? Is family tradition, after all, as good a school as the hard world? A life like Ben's does not always make a man good, I know, but it has made him so. If this were not true—if any one could prove to me that he had been false or cruel to any living creature—man, woman, or animal—I'd give him up to-day and not break my heart—"

It was true, I knew it as she spoke, and I could have knelt to her.

"You are blind, Sally, blind and rash as your mother before you," returned Miss Mitty.

"No, Aunt Mitty, it is you who are blind—who see by the old values that the world has long since outgrown—who think you can assign a place to a man and say to him, 'You belong there and cannot come out of it.' But, oh, Aunt Matoaca, surely you, who have sacrificed so much for what you believe to be right,—who have placed principle before any claims of blood, surely you will uphold me—"

"My child, my child," replied the poor lady, with a sob, "I placed principle first, but never emotion—never emotion."

"Poor Sarah was the only one of us who gave up everything for the sake of an emotion," added Miss Mitty, "and what did it bring her except misery?"

Our cause was lost—we saw it at the same instant—and again Sally gave me her hand and stood side by side with me in the firelight.

"I am sorry, dear aunts," she said gently, and turning to me, she added slowly and clearly, "I will marry you a year from to-day, if you will wait, Ben."

"I will wait for you, whether you marry me or not, forever," I answered; and bowing silently, I turned and left the room, while Sally went down again on her knees.

Once outside, I drew a long breath of air, sharp with the scent of the sycamore, and stood gazing up at the clear sunset beyond the silvery boughs. It was good to be out of those mouldering traditions, that atmosphere of an all-enveloping past; good, too, to be out of the tapestried room, away from the grave, fixed smiles of the dead Blands and Fairfaxes and the close, sweet smell of the burning cedar. There I dared not step with my full weight, lest I should ruthlessly tread on a sentiment, or bring down a moth-eaten tradition upon my head. I was for the hard, bright world, and the future; there in that cedar-scented room, sat the two ladies, forever guarding the faded furniture and the crumbling past. The pathetic contradiction of Miss Matoaca returned to me, and I laughed aloud. Miss Matoaca, who worked for the emancipation of women, while she herself was the slave of an ancestry of men who oppressed women, and women who loved oppression! Miss Matoaca, whose mind, long and narrow like her face, could grasp but a single idea and reject the sequence to which it inevitably led! I wondered if she meant to emancipate "ladies" merely, or if her principles could possibly overleap her birthright of caste? Was she a gallant martyr to the inequalities of sex, who still clung, trembling, to the inequalities of society? She would go to the stake, I felt sure, for the cause of womanhood, but she would go supported by the serene conviction that she was "a lady." The pathos of it, and the mockery, checked the laugh in my throat. To how many of us, after all, was it given to discern, not only immediate effects, but universal relations as well? To the General? To myself? What did we see except the possible opportunity, the room for the ego, the adjustment to selfish ends? Yet our school was the world. Should we, then, expect that little lady, with her bright eyes and her withered roseleaf cheeks, to look farther than the scented firelight in which she sat? I felt a tenderness for her, as I felt a tenderness for all among whom Sally moved. The house in which she lived, the threshold she had crossed, the servants who surrounded her, were all bathed for me in the rosy light of her lamps. Common day did not shine there. I was but twenty-seven, and my eyes could still find romance in the rustle of her skirt and in the curl of her eyelash.

In the little office, where the curtains were drawn and the green-shaded lamp already lit, I found Dr. Theophilus sitting over his evening mint julep, the solitary dissipation in which I had ever seen him indulge. His strong, ruddy face, with its hooked nose and illuminating smile, was still the face of a middle-aged man, though he had passed, a year ago, his seventieth birthday. At his feet, Waif, a stray dog, rescued in memory of Robin, the pointer, was curled up on a rug.

"Well, my boy," he said cheerily, "you've had a good day, I hope?"

"A good day, doctor, I've been in heaven," I answered.

His smile shone out, clear and bright, as it did at a patient's bedside. "I've been there, too, Ben," he responded, "forty years ago."

"Then why didn't you stay, sir?"

"Because it isn't given to any man to stay longer than a few minutes. Ah, my boy, you are the mixture of a fighter and a dreamer."

"But suppose," I blushed, for I was a reserved man, though few people were reserved with Dr. Theophilus, "suppose that your heaven is a woman?"

"Has it ever been anything else to a man since Adam?" he asked. "Every man's heaven, and most men's hell, is a woman, my boy. Why, look at old George Bolingbroke now! He's no longer young, and he's certainly no longer handsome, yet I've seen him, in his day, stand up straight and tall in church at Miss Matoaca Bland's side, and look perfectly happy because he could sing from the same hymn-book. Then a week later, when she'd thrown him over, I saw him jump up at a supper, and drink champagne out of the slipper of some variety actress."

"Yet she was right, I suppose, to throw him over?"

"Oh, she was right, I'm not questioning that she was right," he responded hastily; "but it isn't always the woman who is right, Ben," he added, "that makes a man's heaven."

"The poor little lady had no slipperful of champagne to fall back on," I suggested.

"It's a pity she hadn't—for it's as true as the Gospel, that George Bolingbroke drove her into all this nonsense about the equality of sexes. Equality, indeed! A man doesn't want to make love to an equal, but to an angel! Bless my soul, I don't know to save my life, what to think of Miss Matoaca, except that she's crazy. That's the kindest thing I can say for her. She's gone now and got into correspondence with some bloodthirsty, fire-eating woman's rights advocates up North, and she's actually taken to distributing their indecent pamphlets. She had the face to leave one on my desk this morning. I'd just taken it in the tongs before you came in and put it into the fire. There are the ashes of it," he added sardonically, waving his silver goblet in the direction of some grey shreds of paper in the fireplace.

"All the same, doctor, she may be crazy, but I respect her."

"Respect her? Respect Miss Matoaca Bland? Of course you respect her, sir. Even George Bolingbroke, bitter as he is, respects her from his boots up. She's the embodiment of honour, and if there's a man alive who doesn't respect the embodiment of honour, be it male or female, he ought—he ought to be taken out and horsewhipped, sir! Her own sister, poor Miss Mitty, has the greatest veneration for her, though she can't help lying awake at night and wondering where those crazy principles will lead her next. If they lead her to a quagmire, she'll lift her skirts and step in, Ben, there's no doubt of that—and what Miss Mitty fears now is that, since she's got hold of these abolition sheets, they'll lead her to the public platform—"

"You mean she'd get up and speak in public? She couldn't to save her head."

"You'd better not conclude that Miss Matoaca can't do anything until you've seen her try it," replied the doctor indignantly. "I suppose you'd think she couldn't bombard a political meeting, with not a woman to help her. Yet last winter she went down to the Legislature, in her black silk dress and poke bonnet, and tried to get her obnoxious measures brought before a committee."

"Was she laughed at?" I demanded angrily.

"Good Lord, no. They are gentlemen, even if they are politicians, and they know a lady even if she's cracked."

"And is she entirely alone? Has she no supporter?"

"As far as I know, my boy, Matoaca Bland is the only blessed thing in the state that cares a continental whether women are emancipated or not."

He lifted the silver goblet to his lips, and drank long and deeply, while the rustle of Mrs. Clay's skirts was heard at his office door. After a sharp rap, she entered in her bustling way, and presented me with a second julep, deliciously frosted and fragrant. She was a small, very alert old lady, wearing a bottle-green alpaca, made so slender in the waist that it caused her to resemble one of her own famous pickled cucumbers.

"Theophilus," she began in a crisp, high voice, "I hope you have sent in those bills, as you promised me?"

"Good Lord, Tina," responded the doctor, with a burst of irritation, "isn't it bad enough to be sick without being made to pay for it?"

"You promised me, Theophilus."

"I promised you I'd send bills to the folks I'd cured, but, when I came to think of it, how was I to know, Tina, that I'd cured any?"

"At least you dosed them?"

"Yes, I dosed them," he admitted; "but taking medicine isn't a pleasure that I'd like to pay for."

Turning away, she rustled indignantly through the door, and Dr. Theophilus, as he returned to the rim of his silver goblet, gave me a sly wink over his sprigs of mint.

"Yes, Ben, it isn't always the woman who is right that makes a man's heaven," he said.



CHAPTER XVII

IN WHICH MY FORTUNES RISE

The winter began with a heavy snow-storm and ended in a long April rain, and in all those swiftly moving months I had seen Sally barely a dozen times. Not only my pride, but Miss Mitty's rigid commands had kept me from her house, and the girl had promised that for the first six months she would not meet me except by chance.

"In the spring—oh, in the spring," she wrote, "I shall be free. My promise was given and I could not recall it, but I believe now that it was pride, not love, that made them exact it. Do you know, I sometimes think that they do not love me at all. They have both told me that they would rather see me dead than married, as they call it, beneath me. Beneath me, indeed! Ah, dearest, dearest, how can one lower one's self to a giant? When I think of all that you are, of all that you have made yourself, I feel so humble and proud. The truth is, Ben, I'm not suffering half so much from love as I am from indignation. If it keeps up, some day I'll burst out like Aunt Matoaca, for I've got it in me. And she of all people! Why, she goes about in her meek, sanctified manner distributing pamphlets on the emancipation of woman, and yet she actually told me the other day that, of course, she would prefer to have only 'ladies' permitted to vote. 'In that case, however,' she added, 'I should desire to restrict the franchise to gentlemen, also.' Did you ever in your whole life hear of anything so absurd, and she really meant it. She's a martyr, and filled with a holy zeal to get burned or racked. But it's awful, every bit of it. Oh, lift me up, Ben! Lift me up!" And in a postscript, "What does the General say to you? Aunt Mitty has told the General."

The General had said nothing to me, but when I drove him up from his office the next day, he invited me to dine with him, and talked incessantly through the three simple courses about the prospects of the National Oil Company.

"So you're sweeping the whole South?" he said.

"Yes, Sam has made a big thing of it. We've knocked out everybody else in the oil business in this part of the world."

"Mark my word, then, you've been cutting into the interest of the oil trust, and it will come along presently and try to knock you out. When it does, Ben, make it pay, make it pay."

"Oh, I'll make it pay," I answered. "The consolidated interests may sweep out the independent companies, but they can't overturn the Great South Midland and Atlantic Railroad."

"It's the road, of course, that has made such a success possible."

"Yes, it's the road—everything is the road, General."

"And to think that when I got control of it, it was bankrupt."

Rising from the table he took my arm, and limped painfully into his study, where he lit a cigar and sank back in his easy chair.

"Look here, Ben," he began suddenly, with a change of tone, "what's this trouble brewing between you and Miss Mitty Bland?"

"There's no trouble, sir, except that her niece has promised to marry me."

"Promised to marry you, eh? Sally Mickleborough? Are you sure it's Sally Mickleborough?"

"I'm hardly likely to be mistaken, General, about the identity of my future wife."

"No, I suppose you ain't," he admitted, "but, good Lord, Ben, how did you make her do it?"

"I didn't make her. She was good enough to do it of her own accord."

"So she did it of her own accord? Well, confound you, boy, how did it ever occur to you to ask her?"

"That's what I can't answer, General, I don't believe it ever occurred to me any more than it occurred to me to fall in love with her."

"You've fallen in love with Sally Mickleborough, Miss Matoaca's niece. She refused George, you know?"

I replied that I didn't know it, but I never supposed that she would engage herself to two men at the same time.

"And she's seriously engaged to you?" he demanded, still unconvinced. "Are you precious sure she isn't flirting? Girls will flirt, and I don't reckon you've had much experience of 'em. Why, even Miss Mitty was known to flirt in a prim, stiff-necked fashion in her time, and as for Sarah Bland, they say she promised to marry a whole regiment before the battle of Seven Pines. A little warning beforehand ain't going to do any harm, Ben."

"I'm much obliged to you, General, but I don't think in this case it's needed. Sally is staunch and true."

"Sally? Do you call her 'Sally'? It used to be the custom to address the lady you were engaged to as 'Miss Sally' up to the day of the marriage."

I laughed and shook my head. "Oh, we move fast!"

"Yes, I'm an old man," he admitted sadly, "and I was brought up in a different civilisation. It's funny, my boy, how many customs were swept away with the institution of slavery."

"There'd have been little room for me in those days."

"Oh, you'd have got into some places quick enough, but you'd never have crossed the Blands' threshold when they lived down on James River. There isn't much of that nonsense left now, but Miss Mitty has got it and Theophilus has got it; and, when all's said, they, might have something considerably worse. Why, look at Miss Matoaca. When I first saw her you'd never have imagined there was an idea inside her head."

"I can understand that she must have been very pretty."

"Pretty? She was as beautiful as an angel. And to think of her distributing those damned woman's rights pamphlets! She left one on my desk," he added, sticking out his lower lip like a crying child, and wiping his bloodshot eyes on the hem of his silk handkerchief. "I tell you if she'd had a husband this would never have happened."

"We can't tell—it might have been worse, if she believes it."

"Believes what, sir?" gasped the great man, enraged. "Believes that outlandish Yankee twaddle about a woman wanting any rights except the right to a husband! Do you think she'd be running round loose in this crackbrained way if she had a home she could stay in and a husband she could slave over? I tell you there's not a woman alive that ain't happier with a bad husband than with none at all."

"That's a comfortable view, at any rate."

"View? It's not a view, it's a fact—and what business has a lady got with a view anyway? If Miss Matoaca hadn't got hold of those heathenish views, she'd be a happy wife and mother this very minute."

"Does it follow, General, that she would have been a happy one?" I asked a little unfairly.

"Of course it follows. Isn't every wife and mother happy? What more does she want unless she's a Yankee Abolitionist?"

"Who's a Yankee?" enquired young George, in his amiable voice from the hall. "I'm surprised to hear you calling names when the war is over, sir."

"I wasn't calling names, George. I was just saying that Miss Matoaca Bland was a Yankee. Did you ever hear of a Virginia lady who wasn't content to be what the Lord and the men intended her?"

"No, sir, I never did—but it seems to me that Miss Matoaca has managed to secure a greater share of your attention than the more amenable Virginia ladies."

"Well, isn't it a sad enough sight to see any lady going cracked?" retorted the General, hotly; "do you know, George, that Sally Mickleborough—he says he's sure it's Sally Mickleborough—has promised to marry Ben Starr?"

"Oh, it's Sally all right," responded George, "she has just told me."

He came over and held out his hand, smiling pleasantly, though there was a hurt look in his eyes.

"I congratulate you, Ben," he observed in his easy, good-natured way, "the best man comes in ahead."

His face wore the frown, not from temper, but from pain, that I had seen on it at the club when his favourite hunter had dropped dead, and he had tried to appear indifferent. He was a superb horseman, a typical man about town, a bit of a sport, also, as Dr. Theophilus said. I knew he loved Sally, just as I had known he loved his hunter, by a sympathetic reading of his character rather than by any expression of regret on his long, highly coloured, slightly wooden countenance, with its set mouth over which drooped a mustache so carefully trimmed that it looked almost as if it were glued on his upper lip.

"By the way, uncle, have you heard the last news?" he asked, "Barclay is buying all the A. P. & C. Stock he can lay hands on. It's selling at—"

"Hello! What's that? Barclay, did you say? I knew it was coming, and that he'd spring it. Here, Hatty, give me my cape, I'm going back to the office!"

"George, George, the doctor told you not to excite yourself," remonstrated Miss Hatty, appearing in the doorway with a glass of medicine in her hand.

"Excite myself? Pish! Tush!" retorted the General, "I ain't a bit more excited than you are yourself. Do you think if I hadn't had a cool head they'd have made me president of the South Midland? But I tell you Barclay's trying to get control of the A. P. & C., and I'll be blamed if he shall! Do you want him to snatch a railroad out of my very mouth, madam?"

By this time he had got into his cape and slouch hat, turning at the last moment to swallow Miss Hatty's dose of medicine with a wry mouth. Then with one arm in George's and one in mine, he descended the steps and limped as far as the car line on Main Street.

On that same afternoon I walked out to meet Sally on her ride in one of the country roads to what was called "the Pump House," and when she had dismounted, we strolled together along the little path under the scarlet buds of young maples. At the end of the path there was a rude bench placed beside the stream, which broke from the dam above with a sound that was like laughing water. The grass was powdered with small spring flowers, and overhead a sycamore drooped its silvery branches to the sparkling waves. Spring was in the air, in the scarlet buds of maples, in the song of birds, in the warm wind that played on Sally's flushed cheek and lifted a loosened curl on her forehead. And spring was in my heart, too, as I sat there beside her, on the old bench, with her hand in mine.

"You will marry me in November, Sally?"

"On the nineteenth of November, as I promised. Aunt Mitty and Aunt Matoaca have forbidden me to mention your name to them, so I shall walk with you to church some morning—to old Saint John's, I think, Ben."

"Then may God punish me if I ever fail you," I answered.

Her look softened. "You will never fail me."

"You will trust me now and in all the future?"

"Now and in all the future."

As we strolled back a little later to her horse that was tethered to a maple on the roadside, I told her of the success of the National Oil Company and of the possibility that I might some day be a rich man.

"As things go in the South, sweetheart, I'm a rich man now for my years."

"I am glad for your sake, Ben, but I have never expected to have wealth, you know."

"All the same I want you to have it, I want to give it to you."

"Then I'll begin to love it for your sake—if it means that to you?"

"It means nothing else. But what do you think it will mean to your aunts next November?"

She shook her head, while I untethered Dolly, the sorrel mare.

"They haven't a particle of worldliness, either of them, and I don't believe it will make any great difference if we have millions. Of course if you were, for instance, the president of the South Midland they would not have refused to receive you, but they would have objected quite as strongly to your marrying into the family. What you are yourself might concern them if they were inviting you to dinner, but when it is a question of connecting yourself with their blood, it is what your father was that affects them. I really believe," she finished half angrily, half humorously, "that Aunt Mitty—not Aunt Matoaca—would honestly rather I'd marry a well-born drunkard or libertine than you, whom she calls 'quite an extraordinary-looking young man.'"

"Then if they can neither be cajoled nor bought, I see no hope for them," I replied, laughing, as she sprang from my hand into her saddle.

The red flame of the maple was in her face as she looked back at me. "Everything will come right, Ben, if we only love enough," she said.



CHAPTER XVIII

THE PRINCIPLES OF MISS MATOACA

When I walked down to the office now, I began to be pointed out as "the General's wonderful boy." Invitations to start companies, or to directorships of innumerable boards, were showered upon me, and adventurous promoters of vain schemes sought desperately to shelter themselves behind my growing credit. Then, in the following October, the consolidated oil interests bought out my business at my own price, and I awoke one glorious morning to the knowledge that my fortune was made.

"If you're going to swell, Ben, now's the time," said the General, "and out you go."

But my training had been in a hard school, and by the end of the month he had ceased to enquire in the mornings "if my hat still fitted my head."

"You'll have your ups and downs, Ben, like the rest of us," he said, "but the main thing is, let your fortunes see-saw as they may, always keep your eyes on a level. By the way, I saw Sally Mickleborough last night, and when I asked her why she fell in love with you, she replied it was because she saw you pushing a wheel up a hill. Now there's a woman with a reason—you'd better look sharp, or she'll begin talking politics presently like her Aunt Matoaca. What do you think I found on my desk this morning? A pamphlet, addressed in her handwriting, about the presidential election." Then his tone softened. "So Sally's going to marry you in spite of her aunts? Well, she's a good girl, a brave girl, and I'm proud of her."

When I went home to supper, I was to have a different opinion from Dr. Theophilus.

"I saw Sally Mickleborough to-day, Ben, when I called on Miss Matoaca,—[that poor lady gets flightier every day, she left a pamphlet here this morning about the presidential election]—and the girl told me in the few minutes I saw her in the hall, that she meant to marry you next month."

"She will do me that great honour, doctor."

"Well, I regret it, Ben; I can't conceal from you that I regret it. You're a good boy, and I'm proud of you, but I don't like to see young folks putting themselves in opposition to the judgment of their elders. I'm an orthodox believer in the claims of blood, you know."

"And is there nothing to be said for the claims of love?"

"The claims of moonshine, Ben," observed Mrs. Clay in her sharp voice, looking up from a pair of yarn socks she was knitting for the doctor; "you know I'm fond of you, but when you begin to talk of the claims of love driving a girl to break with her family, I feel like boxing your ears."

"You see, Tina is a cynic," remarked Dr. Theophilus, smiling, "and I don't doubt that she has her excellent reasons, as usual; most cynics have. A woman, however, has got to believe in love to the point of lunacy or become a scoffer. What I contend, now, is that love isn't moonshine, but that however solid a thing it may be, it isn't, after all, as solid as one's duty to one's family."

"Of course I can't argue with you, doctor. I know little of the unit you call 'the family'; but I should think the first duty of the family would be to consider the happiness of the individual."

"And do you think, Ben, that you are the only person who is considering Sally's happiness?"

"I know that I am considering it; for the rest I can't speak."

"I firmly believe," broke in Mrs. Clay, "that Sally's behaviour has helped to drive Matoaca Bland clean out of her wits. She's actually sent me one of her leaflets,—what do you think of that, Theophilus?—to me, the most refined and retiring woman on earth."

"What I'd say, Tina, is that you aren't half as refined and retiring as Miss Matoaca," chuckled the doctor.

"That is merely the way she dresses," rejoined Mrs. Clay stiffly; "it is her poke bonnet and black silk mantle that deceives you. As for me, I can call no woman truly refined who does not naturally avoid the society of men."

"Well, Tina, I had a notion that all of you were pretty fond of it, when it comes to that."

"Not of the society of men, Theophilus, but of the select attentions of gentlemen."

"I'm not taking up for Miss Matoaca," pursued the good man; "I can't conscientiously do that, and I'm more concerned at this minute about the marriage of Ben and Sally. You may smile at me as superstitious, if you please, but I never yet saw a marriage turn out happily that was made in defiance of family feeling."

As I could make no reply to this, except to put forward a second time what Mrs. Clay had tartly called "the claims of moonshine," I bade the doctor goodnight, and going upstairs to my room, sat down beside the small square window, which gave on the garden, with its miniature box borders and its single clipped yew-tree, over which a young moon was rising. "A mixture of a fighter and a dreamer," the old man had once called me, and it seemed to me now that something apart from the mere business of living and the alert man of affairs, brooded in me over the young moon and the yew-tree.

A letter from Sally had reached me a few hours before, and taking it from my pocket, I turned to the lamp and read it for the sixth time with a throbbing heart.

"You ask me if I am happy, dearest," she wrote, "and I answer that I am happy, with a still, deep happiness, over which a hundred troubles and cares ripple like shadows on a lake. But oh! poor Aunt Mitty, with her silent hurt pride in her face, and poor Aunt Matoaca, with the strained, unnatural brightness in her eyes, and her cheeks so like rose leaves that have crumpled. Oh, Ben, I believe Aunt Matoaca is living over again her own romance, and it breaks my heart. Last night I went into her room, and found her with her old yellowed wedding veil and orange blossoms laid out on the bed. She tried to pretend that she was straightening her cedar chests, but she looked so little and pitiable—if you could only have seen her! I wonder what she would be now if the General had been a man like you? How grateful I am, how profoundly thankful with my whole heart that I am marrying a man that I can trust!"

"That I can trust!" Her words rang in my ears, and I heard them again, clear and strong, the next morning, when I met Miss Matoaca as I was on my way to my office. She was coming slowly up Franklin Street, her arms filled with packages, and when she recognised me, with a shy, startled movement to turn aside, a number of leaflets fluttered from her grasp to the pavement between us. When I stooped and gathered them up, her face, under the old-fashioned poke bonnet, was brought close to my eyes, and I saw that she looked wan and pinched, and that her bright brown eyes were shining as if from fever.

"Mr. Starr," she said, straightening her thin little figure as I handed her the leaflets, "I've wanted for some time to speak a word to you on the subject of my niece—Miss Mickleborough."

"Yes, Miss Matoaca."

"My sister Mitty thought it better that I should refrain from doing so, and upon such matters she has excellent judgment. It is my habit, indeed, to yield to her opinion in everything except a question of conscience."

"Yes?" for again she had paused. "It is very kind of you," I added.

"I do not mean it for kindness, Mr. Starr. My niece is very dear to me; and since poor Sarah's unfortunate experience, we have felt more—strongly, if possible, about unequal marriages. I know that you are a most remarkable young man, but I do not feel that you are in any way suited to make the happiness of our niece—Miss Mickleborough—"

"I am sorry, Miss Matoaca, but Miss Mickleborough thinks differently."

"Young people are rarely the best judges in such matters, Mr. Starr."

"But do you think their elders can judge for them?"

"If they have had experience—yes."

"Ah, Miss Matoaca, does our own experience ever teach us to understand the experience of others?"

"The Blands have never needed to be taught," she returned with pride, "that the claims of the family are not to be sacrificed to—to a sentiment. Except in the case of poor Sarah there has never been a mesalliance in our history. We have always put one thing above the consideration of our blood, and that is—a principle. If it were a question of conscience, however painful it might be to me, I should uphold my niece in her opposition to my sister Mitty. I myself have opposed her for a matter of principle."

"I am aware of it, Miss Matoaca."

Her withered cheeks were tinged with a delicate rose, and I could almost see the working of her long, narrow mind behind her long, narrow face.

"I should like to leave a few of these leaflets with you, Mr. Starr," she said.

A minute afterwards, when she had moved on with her meek, slow walk, I was left standing on the pavement with her suffrage pamphlets fluttering in my hand. Stuffing them hurriedly into my pocket, I went on to the office, utterly oblivious of the existence of any principle on earth except the one underlying the immediate expansion of the Great South Midland and Atlantic Railroad.

A fortnight later I heard that Miss Matoaca had begun writing letters to the "Richmond Herald"; and I remembered, with an easy masculine complacency, the pamphlets I had thrown into the waste basket beside the General's desk. The presidential election, with its usual upheaval of the business world, had arrived; and that timid little Miss Matoaca should have intruded herself into the affairs of the nation did not occur to me as possible, until the General informed me, while we watched a Democratic procession one afternoon, that Miss Mitty had come to him the day before in tears over the impropriety of her sister's conduct.

"She begged me to remonstrate with Miss Matoaca," he pursued, "and by George, I promised her that I would. There's one thing, Ben, I've never been able to stand, and that's the sight of a woman in tears. Of course when you've made 'em cry yourself, it is different; but to have a lady coming to you weeping over somebody else—and a lady like Miss Mitty—well, I honestly believe if she'd requested me to give her my skin, I'd have tried to get out of it just to oblige her."

"Did you go to Miss Matoaca?" I asked, for the picture of the General lecturing his old love on the subject of the proprieties had caught my attention even in the midst of a large Democratic procession that was marching along the street. While he rambled on in his breaking voice, which had begun to grow weak and old, I gazed over his head at the political banners with their familiar, jesting inscriptions.

"I declare, Ben, I'd rather have swallowed a dose of medicine," he went on; "you see I used to know Miss Matoaca very well forty years ago—I reckon you've heard of it. We were engaged to be married, and it was broken off because of some woman's rights nonsense she'd got in her head."

"Well, it's hard to imagine your interview of yesterday."

"There wasn't any interview. I went to her and put it as mildly as I could. 'Miss Matoaca,' I said, 'I'm sorry to hear you've gone cracked.'"

"And how did she take it?"

"'Do you mean my heart or my head, General?' she asked—she had always plenty of spirit, had Matoaca, for all her soft looks. 'It's your head,' I answered. 'Lord knows I'm not casting any reflections on the rest of you.' 'Then it has fared better than my heart, General,' she replied, 'for that was broken.' She looked kind of wild, Ben, as she said it. I don't know what she was talking about, I declare on my honour I don't!"

A cheer went up from the procession, and an expression of eager curiosity came into his face.

"Can you read that inscription, Ben? My eyes ain't so good as they used to be."

"It's some campaign joke. So your lecture wasn't quite a success?"

"It would have been if she'd listened to reason."

"But she did not, I presume?"

"She never listened to it in her life. If she had, she wouldn't be a poor miserable old maid at this moment. What's that coming they're making such a noise about? My God, Ben, if it ain't Matoaca herself!"

It was Matoaca, and the breathless horror in the General's voice passed into my own mind as I looked. There she was, in her poke bonnet and her black silk mantle, walking primly at the straggling end of the procession, among a crowd of hooting small boys and gaping negroes. Her eyes, very wide and bright, like the eyes of one who is mentally deranged, were fixed straight ahead, over the lines of men marching in front of her, on the blue sky above the church steeples. Under her poke bonnet I saw her meekly parted hair and her faded cheeks, flushed now with a hectic colour. In one neatly gloved hand her silk skirt was held primly; in the other she carried a little white silk flag, on which the staring gold letters were lost in the rippling folds. With her eyes on the sky and her feet in the dust, she marched, a prim, ladylike figure, an inspired spinster, oblivious alike of the hooting small boys and the half-compassionate, half-scoffing gazers upon the pavement.

"She's crazy, Ben," said the General, and his voice broke with a sob.

For a minute, as dazed as he, I stared blankly at the little figure with the white flag. Then bewilderment gave place before the call to action, and it seemed to me that I saw Sally there in Miss Matoaca, as I had seen her in the rising moon over the clipped yew, and in the whirlpool of the stock market. Leaving my place at the General's side, I descended the steps at a bound, and made my way through the jostling, noisy crowd to the little lady in its midst.

"Miss Matoaca!" I said.

For the first time her eyes left the sky, and as she looked down, the consciousness of her situation entered into her strained bright eyes. Her composure was lost in a birdlike, palpitating movement of terror.

"I—I am going as far as the Square, Mr. Starr," she replied, as if she were repeating by rote a phrase in a strange tongue.

At my approach the ridicule, somewhat subdued by the sense of her helplessness, broke suddenly loose. Bending over I offered her my arm, my head still uncovered. As the hand holding the white flag drooped from exhaustion, I took it, with the banner, into my own.

"Then I'll go with you, Miss Matoaca," I responded.

We started on, took a few measured paces in the line of march, and then her strength failing her, she sank back, with a pathetic moan of weariness, into my arms. Lifting her like a child I carried her out of the street and up the steps into the General's office. Turning at a touch as I entered the room, I saw that Sally was at my side.

"I've sent for Dr. Theophilus," she said. "There, put her on the lounge."

Kneeling on the floor she began bathing Miss Matoaca's forehead with water which somebody had brought. The General, his eyes very red and bloodshot and his lower lip fallen into a senile droop, was trying vainly to fan her with his pocket-handkerchief.

"We have always feared this would happen," said Sally, very quiet and pale.

"She was talking to me yesterday about her heart," returned the General, "and I didn't know what she meant."

He bent over, fanning her more violently with his silk handkerchief, and on the lounge beneath, Miss Matoaca lay, very prim and maidenly, with her skirt folded modestly about her ankles.

Dr. Theophilus, coming in with the messenger, bent over her for a long minute.

"I always thought her sense of honour would kill her," he said at last as he looked up.



CHAPTER XIX

SHOWS THE TRIUMPH OF LOVE

A week after Miss Matoaca's funeral, Sally met me in one of the secluded streets by the Capitol Square, and we walked slowly up and down for an hour in the November sunshine. In her black clothes she appeared to have bloomed into a brighter beauty, a richer colour.

"Why can't I believe, Sally, that you will really marry me a week from to-day?"

"A week from to-day. Just you and I in old Saint John's."

"And Miss Mitty, will she not come with you?"

"She refuses to let me speak your name to her. It would be hard to leave her, Ben, if—if she hadn't been so bitter and stern to me for the last year. I live in the same house with her and see nothing of her."

"I thought Miss Matoaca's death might have softened her."

"Nothing will soften her. Aunt Matoaca's death has hurt her terribly, I know, but—and this is a dreadful thing to say—I believe it has hurt her pride more than her heart. If the poor dear had died quietly in her bed, with her prayer-book on the counterpane, Aunt Mitty would have grieved for her in an entirely different way. She lives in a kind of stained-glass seclusion, and anything outside of that seems to her vulgar—even emotion."

"How I must have startled her."

"You startled her so that she has never had courage to face the effect. Think what it must mean to a person who has lived sixty-five years in an atmosphere of stained glass to be dragged outside and made to look at the great common sun—"

A squirrel, running out from between the iron railing surrounding the square, crossed the pavement and then sat erect in front of us, his bushy tail waving like a brush over his ears. While she was bending over to speak to it, the Bland surrey turned the corner at a rapid pace, and I saw the figure of Miss Mitty, swathed heavily in black, sitting very stiff and upright behind old Shadrach. As she caught sight of us, she leaned slightly forward, and in obedience to her order, the carriage stopped the next instant beside the pavement.

"Sally!" she called, and there was no hint in her manner that she was aware of my presence.

"Yes, Aunt Mitty." The girl had straightened herself, and stood calmly and without embarrassment at my side.

"I should like you to come with me to Hollywood."

"Yes, Aunt Mitty."

Pausing for an instant, she gave me her hand. "Until Wednesday, Ben," she said in a low, clear voice, and then entering the surrey, she took her place under the fur robe and was driven away.

The week dragged by like a century, and on Wednesday morning, when I got up and opened my shutters, I found that our wedding-day had begun in a slow autumnal rain. A thick tent of clouds stretched overhead, and the miniature box in the garden looked like flutings of crape on the pebbled walk, which had been washed clean and glistening during the night. The clipped yew stood dark and sombre as a solitary mourner among the blossomless rose-bushes.

At breakfast Mrs. Clay poured my coffee with a rigid hand and an averted face, and Dr. Theophilus appeared to find difficulty in keeping up his cheerful morning comments.

"I'll miss you, Ben, my boy," he remarked, as he rose from the table; "it's a sad day for me when I lose you."

"I hate to lose you, doctor, but I shan't, after all, be far off. I've bought a house, as you know, beyond the Park in Franklin Street."

"The one Jack Montgomery used to live in before he lost his money—yes, it is a fine place. Well, you have my best wishes, Ben, whatever comes; you may be sure of that. I hope you and Sally will have every happiness."

He shook my hand in his hearty grasp before going into his little office, and the next minute I went out into the rain, and walked down for a few words with the General, before I met Sally under the big sycamore at the side gate. I had waited for her but a little while when she came out under an umbrella held by Aunt Euphronasia, who was to accompany us on our journey South in the General's private car. As she entered the carriage, I saw that she wore a white dress under her long black cloak.

"Mammy wouldn't let me be married in black," she said; "she says it means death or a bad husband."

"Dar ain' gwine be a bad husband fur dish yer chile," grumbled the old woman, who was evidently full of gloomy forebodings, "caze she ain' built wid de kinder spine, suh, dat bends easy."

"There'll be nobody at church?" asked Sally.

"Only the General, and I suppose the sexton."

"I am glad." She leaned forward, we clasped hands, and I saw that the eyes she lifted to mine were starry and expectant, as they had been that day, so many years ago, when she stood between the gate and the bed of geraniums in the General's yard.

The carriage rolled softly over the soaking streets, and above the sound of the wheels I heard the patter of the rain on the dead leaves in the gutters. I can see still a wet sparrow or two that fluttered down from the bared branches, and the negro maid sweeping the water from the steps in front of the doctor's house. There was no wind, and the rain fell in straight elongated drops like a shower of silvery pine-needles. The mixture of a fighter and a dreamer! On my wedding-day, as I sat beside the woman I loved, approaching the fulfilment of my desire, I was conscious of a curious gravity, of almost a feeling of sadness. The stillness without, intensified by the slow, soft fall of the rain on the dead leaves, seemed not detached, but at one with the inner stillness which possessed alike my heart and my brain. I, the man of action, the embodiment of worldly success, was awed by the very intensity of my love, which added a throb of apprehension to the supreme moment of its fulfilment.

The carriage crawled up the long hill, and stopped before the steps leading to the churchyard of Saint John's. Like a sombre omen up went the umbrella in the hands of Aunt Euphronasia; and as I led Sally across the pavement to the General, who stood waiting under the dripping maples and sycamores, I saw that she was very pale, and that her lips trembled when she smiled back at me. With her arm in the General's, she passed before me up the walk to the church door, while Aunt Euphronasia and I followed under the same umbrella a short way behind.

At the door the minister met us with outstretched hands, for he had known us from childhood; and when Aunt Euphronasia had removed the bride's moist cloak, Sally joined me before the altar, in the square of faint light that fell from the windows. The interior of the church was very dim, so dim that her white dress and the minister's gown seemed the only patches of high light in the obscurity. Through the window I could see the wet silvery boughs of a sycamore, and, I remember still, as if it had been illuminated upon my brain, a single bronzed leaf that writhed and twisted at the end of a slender branch. Never in my life had my mind been so awake to trivial impressions, so acutely aware of the external world, so perfectly unable to realise the profound significance of the words I uttered. The sound of the soft rain on the graves outside was in my ears, and instead of my marriage, I found myself thinking of the day I had seen Sally dancing toward me in her red shoes, over the coloured leaves. In those few minutes, which changed the course of our two lives, it was as if I myself—the man that men knew—had been present only in a dream.

When it was over, the General kissed Sally, and wiped his eyes on his silk handkerchief.

"You're a brave girl, my dear, and I'm proud of you," he said; "you've got your mother's heart and your father's fighting blood, and that's a good blending."

"I wish the sun had shone on you," observed the old minister, while I helped her into her cloak; "but we Christians can't afford to waste regret on heathen superstitions. I married your mother," he added, as if there were possible comfort in a proof of the futility of omens, "on a cloudless morning in June."

Sally shivered, and glanced across the churchyard, where the water dripped from the bared trees on the graves that were covered thickly with sodden leaves.

"The sun may welcome us home," she replied, with an effort to be cheerful; "we shall be back again in a fortnight."

"And you go South?" asked the minister nervously, like a man who tries to make conversation because his professional duty requires it of him. Then the umbrella went up again, and after a good-by to the General, we started together down the walk, with Aunt Euphronasia following close as a shadow.

"The rain does not sadden you, sweetheart?"

"It saddens me, but that does not mean that I am not happy."

"And you would do it over again?"

"I would do it over until—until the last hour of my life."

"Oh, Sally, Sally, if I were only sure that I was worthy."

A light broke in her face, and as she looked up at me, I bent over and kissed her under the leafless trees.



CHAPTER XX

IN WHICH SOCIETY RECEIVES US

It was a bright December evening when we returned to Richmond, and drove through the frosty air to our new home. The house was large and modern, with a hideous brown stone front, and at the top of the brown stone steps several girl friends of Sally's were waiting to receive us. Beyond them, in the brilliantly lighted hall, I saw masses of palms and roses under the oak staircase.

"Oh, you bad Sally, not even to ask us to your wedding. And you know how we adore one!" cried a handsome, dark girl in a riding habit, named Bonny Page. "How do you do, Mr. Starr? We're to call you 'Ben' now because you've married our cousin."

I made some brief response, and while I spoke, I felt again the old sense of embarrassment, of strangeness in my surroundings, that always came upon me in a gathering of women—especially of girls. With Sally I never forgot that I was a strong man,—with Bonny Page I remembered only that I was a plain one. As she stood there, with her arm about Sally, and her black eyes dancing with fun, she looked the incarnate spirit of mischief,—and beside the spirit of mischief I felt decidedly heavy. She was a tall, splendid girl, with a beautiful figure,—the belle of Richmond and the best horsewoman of the state. I had seen her take a jump that had brought my heart to my throat, and come down on the other side with a laugh. A little dazzling, a little cold, fine, quick, generous to her friends, and merciless to her lovers, I had wondered often what subtle sympathy had knit Sally and herself so closely together.

"You'd always promised that I should be your bridesmaid," she remarked reproachfully; "she's hurt us dreadfully, hasn't she, Bessy? And it's very forgiving of us to warm her house and have her dinner ready for her."

Bessy, the little heroine of the azalea wreath and my first party, murmured shyly that she hoped the furniture was placed right and that the dinner would be good.

"Oh, you darlings, it's too sweet of you!" said Sally, entering the drawing-room, amid palms and roses, with an arm about the neck of each. "You know, don't you," she went on, "that poor Aunt Mitty's not coming kept me from having even you? How is she, Bonny? O Bonny, she won't speak to me."

Immediately she was clasped in Bonny's arms, where she shed a few tears on Bonny's handsome shoulder.

"She'll grow used to it," said little Bessy; "but, Sally, how did you have the courage?"

"Ask Bonny how she had the courage to take that five-foot jump."

"I took it with my teeth set and my eyes shut," said Bonny.

"Well, that's how I took Ben, with my teeth set and my eyes shut tight."

"And I came down with a laugh," added Bonny.

"So did I—I came down with a laugh. Oh, you dears, how lovely the house looks! Here are all the bridal roses that I missed and you've remembered."

"There're blue roses in your room," said Bonny; "I mean on the chintz and on the paper."

"How can I help being happy, when I have blue roses, Bonny? Aren't blue roses an emblem of the impossible achieved?"

Bonny's dancing black eyes were on me, and I read in them plainly the thought, "Yes, I'm going to be nice to you because Sally has married you, and Sally's my cousin—even if I can't understand how she came to do it."

No, she couldn't understand, and she never would, this I read also. The man that she saw and the man that Sally knew were two different persons, drawing life from two different sources of sympathy. To her I was still, and would always be, the "magnificent animal,"—a creature of good muscle and sinew, with an honest eye, doubtless, and clean hands, but lacking in the finer qualities of person and manner that must appeal to her taste. Where Sally beheld power, and admired, Bonny Page saw only roughness, and wondered.

Presently, they led her away, and I heard their merry voices floating down from the bedrooms above. The pink light of the candles on the dinner table in the room beyond, the vague, sweet scent of the roses, and the warmth of the wood fire burning on the andirons, seemed to grow faint and distant, for I was very tired with the fatigue of a man whose muscles are cramped from want of exercise. I felt all at once that I had stepped from the open world into a place that was too small for me. I was a rich man at last, I was the husband, too, of the princess of the enchanted garden, and yet in the midst of the perfume and the soft lights and the laughter floating down from above, I saw myself, by some freak of memory, as I had crouched homeless in the straw under a deserted stall in the Old Market. Would the thought of the boy I had been haunt forever the man I had become? Did my past add a keener happiness to my present, or hang always like a threatening shadow above it? There was a part in my life which these girls could not understand, which even Sally, whom I loved, could never share with me. How could they or she comprehend hunger, who had never gone without for a moment? Or sympathise with the lust of battle when they had never encountered an obstacle? Already I heard the call of the streets, and my blood responded to it in the midst of the scented atmosphere. These things were for Sally, but for me was the joy of the struggle, the passion to achieve that I might return, with my spoils and pile them higher and higher before her feet. The grasping was what I loved, not the possession; the instant of triumph, not the fruits of the conquest. Love throbbed in my heart, but my mind, as if freeing itself from a restraint, followed the Great South Midland and Atlantic, covering that night under the stars nearly twenty thousand miles of road. The elemental man in me chafed under the social curb, and I longed at that instant to bear the woman I had won out into the rough joys of the world. My muscles would soon grow flabby in this scented warmth. The fighter would war with the dreamer, and I would regret the short, fierce battle with my competitors in the business of life.

A slight sound made me turn, and I saw Bonny Page standing alone in the doorway, and looking straight at me with her dancing eyes.

"I don't know you yet, Ben," she said in the direct, gallant manner of a perfect horsewoman, "but I'm going to like you."

"Please try," I answered, "and I'll do my best not to make it hard."

"I don't think it will be hard, but even if it were, I'd do it for Sally's sake. Sally is my darling."

"And mine. So we're alike in one thing at least."

"I'm perfectly furious with Aunt Mitty. I mean to tell her so the next time I've taken a high jump."

"Poor Miss Mitty. How can she help herself? She was born that way."

"Well, it was a very bad way to be born—to want to break Sally's heart. Do you know, I think it was delightful—the way you did it. If I'm ever married, I want to run away, too,—only I'll run away on horseback, because that will be far more exciting."

She ran on merrily, partly I knew to take my measure while she watched me, partly to ease the embarrassment which her exquisite social instinct had at once discerned. She was charming, friendly, almost affectionate, yet I was conscious all the time that, in spite of herself, she was a little critical, a trifle aloof. Her perfect grooming, the very fineness of her self-possession, her high-bred gallantry of manner, and even the shining gloss on her black, beribboned hair, and her high boots, produced in me a sense of remoteness, which I found it impossible altogether to overcome.

In a little while there was a flutter on the staircase, and the other girls trooped down, with Sally in their midst. She had changed her travelling dress for a gown of white, cut low at the neck, and about her throat she wore a necklace of pearls I had given her at her wedding. There was a bright flush in her face, and she looked to me as she had done that day, in her red shoes, in Saint John's churchyard.

When I came downstairs from my dressing-room, I found that the girls had gone, and she was standing by the dinner table, with her face bent down over the vase of pink roses in the centre.

"So we are in our own home, darling, at last," I said, and a few minutes later, as I looked across the pink candle shades and the roses, and saw her sitting opposite to me, I told myself that at last both the fighter in me and the dreamer had found the fulfilment of their desire.

After dinner, when I had had my smoke in the library, we caught hands and wandered like two children over the new house—into the pink and white guest room, and then into Sally's bedroom, where the blue roses sprawled over the chintz-covered furniture and the silk curtains. A glass door gave on a tiny balcony, and throwing a shawl about her head and her bare shoulders, she went with me out into the frosty December night, where a cold bright moon was riding high above the church steeples. With my arm about her, and her head on my breast, we stood in silence gazing over the city, while the sense of her nearness, of her throbbing spirit and body, filled my heart with an exquisite peace.

"You and I are the world, Ben."

"You are my world, anyway."

"It is such a happy world to-night. There is nothing but love in it—no pain, no sorrow, no disappointment. Why doesn't everybody love, I wonder?"

"Everybody hasn't you."

"I'm so sorry for poor Aunt Mitty,—she never loved,—and for poor Aunt Matoaca, because she didn't love my lover. Oh, you are so strong, Ben; that, I think, is why I first loved you! I see you always in the background of my thoughts pushing that wheel up the hill."

"That won you. And to think if I'd known you were there, Sally, I couldn't have done it."

"That, too, is why I love you, so there's another reason! It isn't only your strength, Ben, it is, I believe, still more your self-forgetfulness. Then you forgot yourself because you thought of the poor horse; and again, do you remember the day of Aunt Matoaca's death, when you gave her your arm and took her little flag in your hand? You would have marched all the way to the Capitol just like that, and I don't believe you would ever have known that it looked ridiculous or that people were laughing at you."

"To tell the truth, Sally, I should never have cared."

She clung closer, her perfumed hair on my breast.

"And yet they wondered why I loved you," she murmured; "they wondered why!"

"Can you guess why I loved you?" I asked. "Was it for your red shoes? Or for that tiny scar like a dimple I've always adored?"

"I never told you what made that," she said, after a moment. "I was a very little baby when my father got angry with mamma one day—he had been drinking—and he upset the cradle in which I was asleep."

She lifted her face, and I kissed the scar under the white shawl.

The next day when I came home to luncheon, she told me that she had been to her old home to see Miss Mitty.

"I couldn't stand the thought of her loneliness, so I went into the drawing-room at the hour I knew she would be tending her sweet alyssum and Dicky, the canary. She was there, looking very thin and old, and, Ben, she treated me like a stranger. She wouldn't kiss me, and she didn't ask me a single question—only spoke of the weather and her flower boxes, as if I had called for the first time."

"I know, I know," I said, taking her into my arms.

"And everybody else is so kind. People have been sending me flowers all day. Did you ever see such a profusion? They are all calling, too,—the Fitzhughs, the Harrisons, the Tuckers, the Mayos, Jennie Randolph came, and old Mrs. Tucker, who never goes anywhere since her daughter died, and Charlotte Peyton, and all the Corbins in a bunch." Then her tone changed. "Ben," she said, "I want to see that little sister of yours. Will you take me there this afternoon?"

Something in her request, or in the way she uttered it, touched me to the heart.

"I'd like you to see Jessy—she's pretty enough to look at—but I didn't mean you to marry my family, you know."

"I know you didn't, dear, but I've married everything of yours all the same. If you can spare a few minutes after luncheon, we'll drive down and speak to her."

I could spare the few minutes, and when the carriage was ready, she came down in her hat and furs, and we went at a merry pace down Franklin Street to the boarding-house in which Jessy was living. As we drove up to the pavement, the door of the house opened and my little sister came out, dressed for walking and looking unusually pretty.

"Why, Ben, she's a beauty!" said Sally, in a whisper, as the girl approached us. To me Jessy's face had always appeared too cold and vacant for beauty, in spite of her perfect features and the brilliant fairness of her complexion. Even now I missed the glow of feeling or of animation in her glance, as she crossed the pavement with her slow, precise walk, and put her hand into Sally's.

"How do you do? It is very kind of you to come," she said in a measured, correct voice.

"Of course I came, Jessy. I am your new sister, and you must come and stay with me when I am out of mourning."

"Thank you," responded Jessy gravely, "I should like to."

The cold had touched her cheek until it looked like tinted marble, and under her big black hat her blond hair rolled in natural waves from her forehead.

"Are you happy here, Jessy?" I asked.

"They are very kind to me. There's an old gentleman boarding here now from the West. He is going to give us a theatre party to-night. They say he has millions." For the first time the glow of enthusiasm shone in her limpid blue eyes.

"A good use to make of his millions," I laughed. "Do you hear often from President, Jessy?"

The glow faded from her eyes and they grew cold again. "He writes such bad letters," she answered, "I can hardly read them."

"Never forget," I answered sternly, "that he denied himself an education in order that you might become what you are."

While I spoke the door of the house opened again, and the old gentleman she had alluded to came gingerly down the steps. He had a small, wizened face, and he wore a fur-lined overcoat, in which it was evident that he still suffered from the cold.

"This is my brother and my sister, Mr. Cottrel," said Jessy, as he came slowly toward us.

He bowed with a pompous manner, and stood twirling the chain of his eye-glasses. "Yes, yes, I have heard of your brother. His name is well known already," he answered. "I congratulate, sir," he added, "not the 'man who got rich quickly,' as I've heard you called, but the fortunate brother of a beautiful sister."

"What a perfectly horrid old man," remarked Sally, some minutes later, as we drove back again. "I think, Ben, we'll have to take the little sister. She's a beauty."

"If she wasn't so everlastingly cold and quiet."

"It suits her style—that little precise way she has. There's a look about her like one of Perugino's saints."

Then the carriage stopped at the office, and I returned, with a high heart, to the game.



CHAPTER XXI

I AM THE WONDER OF THE HOUR

During the first year of my marriage I was already spoken of as the most successful speculator in the state. The whirlpool of finance had won me from the road, and I had sacrificed the single allegiance to the bolder moves of the game. Yet if I could be bold, I was cautious, too,—and that peculiar quality which the General called "financial genius," and the world named "the luck of the speculator," had enabled me to act always between the two dangerous extremes of timidity and rashness. "To get up when others sat down, and to sit down when others got up," I told the General one day, had been the rule by which I had played.

"They were talking of you at the club last night, Ben," he said. "You were the only one of us who had sense enough to load up with A. P. & C. stock when it was selling at 80, and now it's jumped up to 150. Jim Randolph was fool enough to remark that you'd had the easiest success of any man he knew."

"Easy? Does he think so?"

"So you call that easy, gentlemen?' I responded. 'Well, I tell you that boy has sweated for it since he was seven years old. It's the only way, too, I'm sure of it. If you want to succeed, you've got to begin by sweating.'"

"Thank you, General, but I suppose most things look easy until you've tried them."

"It doesn't look easy to me, Ben, when I've seen you at it all day and half the night since you were a boy. What I said to those fellows at the club is the Gospel truth—there's but one way to get anything in this world, and that is by sweating for it."

We were in his study, to which he was confined by an attack of the gout, and at such times he loved to ramble on in his aging, reminiscent habit.

"You know, General," I said, "that they want me to accept the presidency of the Union Bank in Jennings' place. I've been one of the directors, you see, for the last three or four years."

"You'd be the youngest bank president in the country. It's a good thing, and you'd control enough money to keep you awake at night. But remember, Ben, as my dear old coloured mammy used to say to me, 'to hatch first ain't always to crow last.'"

"Do you call it hatching or crowing to become president of the Union Bank?"

"That depends. If you're shrewd and safe, as I think you are, it may turn out to be both. It would be a good plan, though, to say to yourself every time you come up Franklin Street, 'I've toted potatoes up this hill, and not my own potatoes either.' It's good for you, sir, to remember it, damned good."

"I'm not likely to forget it—they were heavy."

"It was the best thing that ever happened to you—it was the making of you. There's nothing I know so good for a man as to be able to remember that he toted somebody else's potatoes. Now, look at that George of mine. He never toted a potato in his life—not even his own. If he had, he might have been a bank president to-day instead of the pleasant, well-dressed club-man he is, with a mustache like wax-work. I've an idea, Ben, but don't let it get any farther, that he never got over not having Sally, and that took the spirit out of him. She's well, ain't she?"

"Yes, she's very well and more beautiful than ever."

"Hasn't developed any principles yet, eh? I always thought they were in her."

"None that interfere with my comfort at any rate."

"Keep an eye on her and keep her occupied all the time. That's the way to deal with a woman who has ideas—don't leave her a blessed minute to sit down and hatch 'em out. Pet her, dress her, amuse her, and whenever she begins to talk about a principle, step out and buy her a present to take her mind off it. Anything no bigger than a thimble will turn a woman's mind in the right direction if you spring it on her like a surprise. Ah, that's the way her Aunt Matoaca ought to have been treated. Poor Miss Matoaca, she went wrong for the want of a little simple management like that. You never saw Miss Matoaca Bland when she was a girl, Ben?"

"I have heard she was beautiful."

"Beautiful ain't the word, sir! I tell you the first time I ever saw her she came to church in a white poke bonnet lined with cherry-coloured silk, and her cheeks exactly a match to her bonnet lining." He got out his big silk handkerchief, and blew his nose loudly, after which he wiped his eyes, and sat staring moodily at his foot bandaged out of all proportion to its natural size.

"Who'd have thought to look at her then," he pursued, "that she'd go cracked over this Yankee abolition idea before she died."

"Why, I thought they owned slaves up to the end, General."

"Slaves? What have slaves got to do with it? Ain't the abolitionists and the woman suffragists and the rest of those damned fire-eating Yankees all the same? What they want to do is to overturn the Constitution, and it makes no difference to 'em whether they overturn it under one name or the other. I tell you, Ben, as sure's my name's George Bolingbroke, Matoaca Bland couldn't have told me to the day of her death whether she was an abolitionist or a woman's suffragist. When a woman goes cracked like that, all she wants is to be a fire-eater, and I doubt if she ever knows what she is eating it about. Women ain't like men, my boy, there isn't an ounce of moderation to the whole sex, sir. Why, look at the way they're always getting their hearts broken or their heads cracked. They can't feel an emotion or think an idea that something inside of 'em doesn't begin to split. Now, did you ever hear of a man getting his heart broken or his brain cracked?"

The canker was still there, doing its bitter work. For forty years Miss Matoaca had had her revenge, and even in the grave her ghost would not lie quiet and let him rest. In his watery little eyes and his protruding, childish lip, I read the story of fruitless excesses and of vain retaliations.

When I reached home, I found Sally in her upstairs sitting-room with Jessy, who was trying on an elaborate ball gown of white lace. Since the two years of mourning were over, the little sister had come to stay with us, and Sally was filled with generous plans for the girl's pleasure. Jessy, herself, received it all with her reserved, indifferent manner, turning her beautiful profile upon us with an expression of saintly serenity. It amused me sometimes to wonder what was behind the brilliant red and white of her complexion—what thoughts? what desires? what impulses? She went so placidly on her way, gaining what she wanted, executing what she planned, accepting what was offered to her, that there were moments when I felt tempted to arouse her by a burst of anger—to discover if a single natural instinct survived the shining polish of her exterior. Sally had worked a miracle in her manner, her speech, her dress; and yet in all that time I had never seen the ripple of an impulse cross the exquisite vacancy of her face. Did she feel? Did she think? Did she care? I demanded. Once or twice I had spoken of President, trying to excite a look of gratitude, if not of affection; but even then no change had come in the mirror-like surface of her blue eyes. President, I was aware, had sacrificed himself to her while I was still a child, had slaved and toiled and denied himself that he might make her a lady. Yet when I asked her if she ever wrote to him, she smiled quietly and shook her head.