I had fallen on my knees before her, with her open palms pressed to my forehead, in which my very brain seemed throbbing. As I looked up at her, she stooped and gathered me to her bosom.

"Do you know me now?" she asked in a whisper.

Then her voice broke, and the next instant she would have sunk down beside me, if I had not sprung to my feet and lifted her in my arms. While I held her thus, pressed close against me, something of her radiant strength entered into me, and I was aware of a power in myself that was neither hers nor mine, but the welding of the finer qualities in both our natures.



CHAPTER XXVI

THE RED FLAG AT THE GATE

Sally was not beside me when I awoke in the morning, nor was she sipping her coffee by the window, as I had sometimes found her doing when I slept late. Going downstairs an hour afterwards, I discovered her, for the first time since our marriage, awaiting me in the dining-room. In her dainty breakfast jacket of blue silk, with a bit of lace and ribbon framing her wreath of plaits, she appeared to my tired eyes as the embodied freshness and buoyancy of the morning. Would her sparkling gaiety endure, I wondered, through the monotonous days ahead, when poverty became, not a child's play, not a game tricked out by the imagination, but the sordid actuality of hard work and hourly self-denial?

"I am practising early rising, Ben," she said, "and it's astonishing what an appetite it gives one. I've made the coffee myself, and Aunt Mehitable has just taught me how to make yeast. One can never tell what may come useful, you know, and if we go to live somewhere in a jungle, which I'm quite prepared to do, you'd be glad to know that I could make yeast, wouldn't you?"

"I suppose so, sweetheart, and as a matter of fact," I added presently, "this is the best cup of coffee I've had for many a month."

Laughing merrily, she perched herself on the arm of my chair, and sipped out of the cup I held toward her. "Of course it is. So you've gained that much by losing everything. It's very strange, Ben, and you may consider it presumptuous, but I've a profound conviction somewhere in the bottom of my heart that I can do everything better than anybody else, if I once turn my hand to it. At this minute I haven't a doubt that my yeast is better than Aunt Mehitable's. I'm going to cook dinner, too, and she'll be positively jealous of my performance. How do we know whether or not we'll meet any cooks in the jungle? And if we do, they'll probably be tigers—"

"Oh, Sally, Sally! You think it play now, but what will you feel when you know it's earnest?"

"Of course it's earnest. Do you imagine I'd get out of my bed at seven o'clock and cut up a slimy potato if it wasn't earnest? That may be your idea of play, but it's not mine."

"And you expect to flutter about a stove in a pale blue breakfast jacket and a lace cap?"

"Just as long as they last. When they go, I suppose I'll have to take to calico, but it will be pretty calico, and pink. Pink calico don't cost a penny more than drab—and there's one thing I positively decline to do, even in a jungle, and that is look ugly."

"You couldn't if you tried, my beauty."

"Oh, yes, I could—I could look hideous—any woman could if she tried. But as long as it doesn't cost any more, you've no objection to my cooking in pink instead of drab, I suppose?"

"I've an objection to your cooking in anything. Another cup of coffee, please."

"Ben."

"Yes, dear."

"You never drank but one of Aunt Mehitable's."

"I'm aware of it, and I'm aware of something else. It's worth being poor, Sally, to be poor with you."

"Then give me another taste of your coffee. But you don't call this being poor, do you, you silly boy?—with all this beautiful mahogany that I can use for a mirror? This isn't any fun in the world. Just wait until I spread the cloth over a pine table. Then we'll have something to laugh at sure enough, Ben."

"And I thought you'd cry!"

"You thought a great many very foolish things, my dear. You even thought I'd married you because I wanted to be rich, and it seemed an easy way."

"Only it turned out to be an easier way of getting poor."

"Well, rich or poor, what I married you for, after all, was the essential thing."

"And you've got it, sweetheart?"

"Of course I've got it. If I didn't have it, do you think I'd be able to laugh at a pine table?"

"If I were only sure you realised it!"

"You'll be sure enough when we are in the midst of it, and we'll be in the midst of it, I don't doubt, in a little while. I've been thinking pretty hard since last night, and this is what I worked out while I was making yeast."

"Let's have it, then."

"Now, the first thing we've got to do is to get out of debt, isn't it?"

"The very first thing, if it can be managed."

"We'll manage it this way. The furniture and the silver and my jewels must all be sold, of course; that's easy. But even after we've done that, there'll still be a great big burden to carry, I suppose?"

"Pretty big, I'm afraid, for your shoulders."

"Oh, we'll pay it every bit in the end. We won't go bankrupt. You'll go back to the railroad on a salary, and we'll begin to pinch on the spot."

"Yes, but times are hard and salaries are low."

"Anyway they're salaries, there's that much to be said for them. And while we're pinching as hard as we can pinch, we'll move over to Church Hill and rent two or three rooms in the old house with the enchanted garden. All the servants will have to go except Aunt Euphronasia, who couldn't go very far, poor thing, because she's rheumatic and can't stand on her feet. She can sit still very well, however, and rock the baby, and I'll look after the rooms and get the meals—I'm glad they'll be simple ones—and we'll put by every penny that we can save."

"The mere interest on the debt will take almost as much as we can save. There'll be some arrangement made, of course, and the payments will be easy, but there's one thing I'm determined on, and that is that I'll pay it, every cent, if I live. Then, too, there's chance, you know. Something may turn up—something almost always turns up to a man like myself."

"Well, if it turns up, we'll welcome it with open arms. But in the meantime we'll see if we can't scrape along without it. I'm going over this morning to look for rooms. How soon, Ben, do you suppose they will evict us?"

"Does there exist a woman," I demanded sternly, "who can be humorous over her own eviction?"

"It's better to be humorous over one's own than over one's neighbour's, isn't it? And besides, a laugh may help things, but tears never do. I was born laughing, mamma always said."

"Then laugh on, sweetheart."

I had risen from the table, and was moving toward the door, when she caught my arm.

"There's only one thing I'll never, never consent to," she said, "you remember Dolly?"

"Your old mare?"

"I've pensioned her, you know, and I'll pay that pension as long as she lives if we both have to starve."

"You shall do it if we're hanged and drawn for it—and now, Sally, I must be off to my troubles!"

"Then, good-by and be brave. Oh, Ben, my dearest, what is the matter?"

"It's my head. I've been worrying too much, and it's gone back on me like that twice in the last few days."

I went out hurriedly, convinced that even failure wasn't quite so bad as it had appeared from a distance; and Sally, following me to the door, stood smiling after me as I went down the block toward the car line. Looking back at the corner, I saw that she was still standing on the threshold, with the sun in her eyes and her head held high under the ruffle of lace and ribbon that framed her hair.

The street was filled with people that morning, and at the end of the first block Bonny Page nodded to me jauntily, as she passed on her early ride with Ned Marshall. Turning, almost unconsciously, my eyes followed her graceful, very erect figure, in its close black habit, swaying so perfectly with the motion of her chestnut mare. An immeasurable, wind-blown space seemed to stretch between us, and the very sound of the horse's hoofs on the cobblestones in the street came to me, faint and thin, as if it had floated back from some remote past which I but dimly remembered. I had never felt, even when standing at Bonny's side, that I was within speaking distance of her, and to-day, while I looked after the vanishing horses, I knew that odd, baffling sensation of struggling to break through an inflexible, yet invisible barrier. Why was it that I who had won Sally should still remain so hopelessly divided from all that to which Sally by right and by nature belonged?

Farther down the two great sycamores, still gaunt and bare as skeletons, stood out against a sky of intense blueness; and on the crooked pavement beneath, the shadows, fine and delicate as lace-work, rippled gently in the wind that blew straight in from the river. Looking up from under the silvery boughs, I saw the wire cage of the canary between the parted curtains, and beyond it the pale oval face of Miss Mitty, with its grave, set smile, so like the smile of the painted Blands and Fairfaxes that hung, in massive frames, on the drawing-room walls. In the midst of my own ruin an impulse of compassion entered my heart. The vacancy of the old grey house was like the vacancy of a tomb in which the ashes have scattered, and the one living spirit seemed that of the canary singing joyously in his wire cage. Something in the song brought Sally to my mind as she had appeared that morning at breakfast, and I felt again the soft, comforting touch of the hand she had laid on my face. Then I turned my eyes to the street, and saw George Bolingbroke coming slowly toward me, beyond the last great sycamore, which grew midway of the bricks. At the sight of him all that had comforted or supported me crumbled and fell. In its place came that sharp physical soreness—like the soreness from violent action—that the shock of my failure had brought. I, who had meant so passionately to win in the race, was suddenly crippled. Money, I had said, was all that I had to give, and yet I was beggared now even of that. Shorn of my power, what remained to me that would make me his match?

He came up, taking his cigar from his mouth as he stopped, and flicking the ashes away, while he stood looking at me with an expression of sympathy which he struggled in vain, I saw, to dissemble. On his finely coloured, though rather impassive features, there was the same darkening of a carefully suppressed emotion—the same lines of anger drawn, not by temper, but by suffering—that I had seen first at the club when his favourite hunter had died, and next on the day when the General had spoken to him, in my presence, of my engagement to Sally. Under his short dark mustache, his thin, nervous lips were set closely together.

"I'm awfully cut up, Ben," he said, "I declare I don't know when I was ever so cut up about anything before."

"I'm cut up too, George, like the deuce, but it doesn't appear to help matters, somehow."

"That's the worst thing about being a man of affairs like you—or like Uncle George," he observed, making an amiable effort to assure me that even in the hour of adversity, I still held my coveted place in the General's class; "when the crash comes, you big ones have to pay the piper, while the rest of us small fry manage to go scot-free."

It was put laboriously, but beneath the words I felt the force of that painful sympathy, too strong for concealment, and yet not strong enough to break through the inherited habit of self-command. The General had broken through, I acknowledged, but then was not the very greatness of the great man the expression of an erratic departure from traditions rather than of the perfect adherence to the racial type?

"And the louder the music the bigger the cost of the piper," I observed, with a laugh.

"Oh, you'll come out all right," he rejoined cheerfully, "things are never so bad as they might be."

"Well, I don't know that there's much comfort in reflecting that a thunder-storm might have been accompanied by an earthquake."

For a moment he stood in silence watching the end of his cigar, which went out in his hand. Then without meeting my eyes he asked in a voice that had a curiously muffled sound:—

"It's rough on Sally, isn't it? How does she stand it?"

"As she stands everything—like an angel out of heaven."

"Yes, you're right—she is an angel," he returned, still without looking into my face. An instant later, as if in response to an impulse which for once rose superior to the dead weight of custom, he blurted out with a kind of suffering violence, "I say, Ben, you know it's really awful. I'm so cut up about it I don't know what to do. I wish you'd let me help you out of this hole till you're on your feet. I've got nobody on me, you see, and I can't spend half of my income."

For the first time in our long acquaintance the tables were turned; it was George who was awkward now, and I who was perfectly at my ease.

"I can't do that, George," I said quietly, "but I'm grateful to you all the same. You're a first-rate chap."

We shook hands with a grip, and while he still lingered to strike a match and light the fresh cigar he had taken from his case, the little yellow flame followed, like an illuminated pointer, the expression of suffering violence which showed so strangely upon his face. Then, tossing the match into the gutter, he went on his way, while I passed the great scarred body of the sycamore and hurried down the long hill, which I never descended without recalling, as the General had said, that I had once "toted potatoes for John Chitling."

At the beginning of the next block, I saw the miniature box hedge and the clipped yew in the little garden of Dr. Theophilus, and as I turned down the side street, the face of the old man looked at me from the midst of some leafless red currant bushes that grew in clumps at the end of the walk.

"Come in, Ben, come in a minute," he called, beaming at me over his lowered spectacles, "there's a thing or two I should like to say."

As I entered the garden and walked along the tiny path, bordered by oyster shells, to the red currant bushes beyond, he laid his pruning-knife on the ground, and sat down on an old bench beside a little green table, on which a sparrow was hopping about. On his seventy-fifth birthday he had resigned his profession to take to gardening, and I had heard from no less an authority than the General that "that old fool Theophilus was spending more money in roses than Mrs. Clay was making out of pickles."

"What is it, doctor?" I asked, for, oppressed by my own burdens, I waited a little impatiently to hear "the thing or two" he wanted to say.

"You see I've given up people, Ben, and taken to roses," he began, while I stood grinding my heel into the gravelled walk; "and it's a good change, too, when you come to my years, there's no doubt of that. If you weed and water them and plant an occasional onion about their roots you can make roses what you want—but you can't people—no, not even when you've helped to bring them into the world. No matter how straight they come at birth, they're all just as liable as not to take an inward crank and go crooked before the end." He looked thoughtfully at the sparrow hopping about on the green table, and his face, beautiful with the wisdom of more than seventy years, was illumined by a smile which seemed in some way a part of the April sunshine flooding the clumps of red currant bushes and the miniature box. "George—I mean old George—was telling me about you, Ben," he went on after a minute, "and as soon as I heard of your troubles, I said to Tina—'We've got a roof and we've got a bite, so they'll come to us.' What with Tina's pickling and preserving we manage to keep a home, my boy, and you're more than welcome to share it with us—you and Sally and your little Benjamin—"

"Doctor—doctor—" was all I could say, for words failed me, and I, also, stood looking thoughtfully at the sparrow hopping about on the green table, with eyes that saw two small brown feathered bodies in the place where, a minute before, there had been but one.

"Come when you're ready, come when you're ready," he repeated, "and we'll make you welcome, Tina and I."

I grasped his hand without speaking, and as I wrung it in my own, I felt that it was long and fine and nervous,—the hand, not of a worker, but of a dreamer. Then tearing my gaze from the sparrow, I went back through the clump of red currant bushes, and between the shining rows of oyster shells, to the busy street which led to a busy world and my office door.

A fortnight later the house was sold over our heads, and when I came up in the afternoon, I found a red flag flying at the gate, and the dusty buggies of a few real estate men tied to the young maples on the sidewalk. Upstairs Sally was sitting on a couch, in the midst of the scattered furniture, while George Bolingbroke stood looking ruefully at a pile of silver and bric-a-brac that filled the centre of the floor.

"Are you laughing now, Sally?" I asked desperately, as I entered.

"Not just this minute, dear, because that awful man and a crowd of people have been going over the house, and Aunt Euphronasia and I locked ourselves in the nursery. I'll begin again, however, as soon as they've gone. All these things belong to George. It was silly of him to buy them, but he says he had no idea of allowing them to go to strangers."

"Well, George as well as anybody, I suppose," I responded, moodily.

Beside the window Aunt Euphronasia was rocking slowly back and forth, with little Benjamin fast asleep on her knees, and her great rolling eyes, rimmed with white, passed from me to George and from George to me with a defiant and angry look.

"I ain' seen nuttin' like dese yer doin's sence war time," she grumbled; "en hit's wuss den war time, caze war time hit's fur all, en dish yer hit ain't fur nobody cep'n us."

Throwing herself back on the pillow, Sally lay for a minute with her hand over her eyes.

"I can laugh now," she said at last, raising her head, and she, also, as she sat there, pale and weary but bravely smiling, glanced from me to George with a perplexed, inscrutable look. A minute later, when George made some pleasant, comforting remark and went down to join the crowd gathered before the door, her gaze still followed him, a little pensively, as he left the room. The bruise throbbed again; and walking to the window, I stood looking through the partly closed blinds to the street below, where I could see the dusty buggies, the switching tails of the horses, bothered by flies, and the group of real estate men, lounging, while they spat tobacco juice, by the red flag at the gate. In the warm air, which was heavy with the scent of a purple catalpa tree on the corner, the drawling voice of the auctioneer could be heard like the loud droning of innumerable bees. A carriage passed down the street in a cloud of dust, and the very dust, as it drifted toward us, was drenched with the heady perfume of the catalpa.

"That tree makes me dizzy," I said; "it's odd I never minded it before."

"You aren't well—that's the trouble—but even if you were, the voice of that man down there is enough to drive any sane person crazy. He sounds exactly as if he were intoning a church service over our misfortunes. That is certainly adding horror to humiliation," she finished with merriment.

"At any rate he doesn't humiliate you?"

"Of course he doesn't. Imagine one of the Blands and the Fairfaxes being humiliated by an auctioneer! He amuses me, even though it is our woes he is singing about. If I were Aunt Mitty, I'd probably be seated on the front porch with my embroidery at this minute, bowing calmly to the passers-by, as if it were the most matter-of-fact occurrence in the world to have an auctioneer selling one's house over one's head."

"Dear old enemy, I wonder what she thinks of this?"

"She hasn't heard it, probably. A newspaper never enters her doors, and do you believe she has a relative who would be reckless enough to break it to her?"

"I hope she hasn't, anyhow."

"They haven't had time to go to her. They have all been here. People have been coming all day with offers of help—even Jessy's Mr. Cottrel—and oh, Ben, she told me she meant to marry him! Bonny Page," a little sob broke from her, "Bonny Page wanted to give up her trip to Europe and have me take the money. Then everybody's been sending me luncheons and jellies and things just exactly as if I were an invalid."

"Hit's de way dey does in war time, honey," remarked Aunt Euphronasia, shaking little Benjamin with the slow, cradling movement of the arms known only to the negroes.

Downstairs the auction was over, the drawling monologue was succeeded by a babel of voices, and glancing through the blinds, I saw the real estate men untying their horses from the young maples. A swirl of dust laden with the scent of the catalpa blew up from the street.

"But we can't take help, Sally," I said, almost fiercely.

"No, we can't take help, I told them so—I told them that we didn't need it. In a few years we'd be back where we were, I said, and I believed it."

"Do you believe it after listening to that confounded fog-horn on the porch?"

"Well, it's a trial to faith, as Aunt Mitty would say, but, oh, Ben, I really do believe it still."



CHAPTER XXVII

WE CLOSE THE DOOR BEHIND US

It was a warm spring afternoon when we closed the door behind us for the last time, and took the car for Church Hill, where we had rented several rooms on the first floor of the house with the enchanted garden. As the car descended into the neighbourhood of the Old Market, with its tightly packed barrooms, its squalid junk shops, its strings of old clothes waving before darkened, ill-smelling doorways, I seemed to have stepped suddenly backward into a place that was divided between the dream and the actuality. I remembered my awakening on the pile of straw, with the face of John Chitling beaming down on me over the wheelbarrow of vegetables; and the incidents of that morning—the long line of stalls giving out brilliant flashes from turnips and onions, the sharp, fishy odour from the strings of mackerel and perch, the very bloodstains on the apron and rolled-up sleeves of the butcher—all these things were more vivid to my consciousness than were the faces of Sally and of Aunt Euphronasia, or the fretful cries of little Benjamin, swathed in a blue veil, in the old negress's lap. I had meant to make good that morning, when I had knelt there sorting the yellow apples. I had made good for a time, and yet to-day I was back in the place from which I had started. Well, not in the same place, perhaps, but my foot had slipped on the ladder, and I must begin again, if not from the very bottom, at least from the middle rung. The market wagons, covered with canvas, were still standing with empty shafts in the littered street, as if they had waited there, a shelter for prowling dogs, until my return. Mrs. Chitling's slovenly doorstep I could not see, but as we ascended the long hill on the other side, I recognised the musty "old clothes" shop, in which I had stumbled on "Sir Charles Grandison" and Johnson's Dictionary. That minute, I understood now, had been in reality the turning-point in my career. In that close-smelling room I had come to the cross-roads of success or failure, and swerving aside from the dull level of ignorance, I had rushed, almost by accident, into the better way. The very odour of the place was still in my nostrils—a mixture of old clothes, of stale cheese, of overripe melons. A sudden dizziness seized me, and a wave of physical nausea passed over me, as if the intense heat of that past summer afternoon had gone to my head.

The car stopped at the corner of old Saint John's; we got out, assisting Aunt Euphronasia, and then turned down a side street in the direction of our new home. As we mounted the curving steps, Sally passed a little ahead of me, and looked back with her hand on the door.

"I am happy, Ben," she said with a smile; and with the words on her lips, she crossed the threshold and entered the wide hall, where the moth-eaten stags' heads, worn bare of fur, still hung on the faded plaster.

My first impression upon entering the room was that the strange surroundings struck with a homelike and familiar aspect upon my consciousness. Then, as bewilderment gave place before a closer scrutiny, I saw that this aspect was due to the presence of the objects by which I had been so long accustomed to see Sally surrounded. Her amber satin curtains hung at the windows; the deep couch, with the amber lining, upon which she rested before dressing for dinner, stood near the hearth; and even the two crystal vases, which I had always seen holding fresh flowers upon her small, inlaid writing desk, were filled now with branching clusters of American Beauty roses. Beyond them, and beyond the amber satin curtains at the long window, I saw the elm boughs arching against a pale gold sunset into which a single swallow was flying. And I remember that swallow as I remember the look, swift, expectant, as if it, also, were flying, that trembled, for an instant, on Sally's face.

"It is George," she said, turning to me with radiant eyes; "George has done this. These are the things he bought, and I wondered so what he would do with them." Then before something in my face, the radiance died out of her eyes. "Would you rather he didn't do it? Would you rather I shouldn't keep them?" she asked.

A struggle began within me. Through the window I could see still the pale gold sunset beyond the elms, but the swallow was gone, and gone, also, from Sally's face was the look as of one flying.

"Would you rather that I shouldn't keep them?" she asked again, and her voice was very gentle.

At that gentleness the struggle ceased as sharply as it had begun.

"Do as you choose, darling, you know far better than I," I replied; and bending over her, I raised her chin that was lowered, and kissed her lips.

A light, a bloom, something that was fragrant and soft as the colour and scent of the American Beauty roses, broke over her as she looked up at me with her mouth still opening under my kiss.

"Then I'll keep them," she answered, "because it would hurt him so, Ben, if I sent them back."

The colour and bloom were still there, but in my heart a chill had entered to drive out the warmth. My ruin, my failure, the poverty to which I had brought Sally and the child through my inordinate ambition, and the weight of the two hundred thousand dollars of debt on my shoulders—all these things returned to my memory, with an additional heaviness, like a burden that has been lifted only to drop back more crushingly. And as always in my thoughts now, this sense of my failure came to me in the image of George Bolingbroke, with his air of generous self-sufficiency, as if he needed nothing because he had been born to the possession of all necessary things.

Sally drew the long pins from her hat, laid them, with the floating white veil and her coat, on a chair in one corner, and began to move softly about in her restful, capable way. Her very presence, I had once said of her, would make a home, and I remembered this a little later as I watched the shadow of her head flit across the faded walls above the fine old wainscoting, from which the white paint was peeling in places. Her touch, swift and unfaltering, released some spirit of beauty and cheerfulness which must have lain imprisoned for a generation in the superb old rooms. On the floor with us there were no other tenants, but when I heard an occasional sound in the room above, I remembered that the agent had told me of an aristocratic, though poverty-stricken, maiden lady, who was starving up there in the midst of some rare pieces of old Chippendale furniture, and with the portrait of an English ancestress by Gainsborough hanging above her fireless hearth.

"The baby is asleep, so Aunt Euphronasia and I are cooking supper," said Sally, when she had spread the cloth over the little table, and laid covers for two on either side of the shaded lamp; "at least she's cooking and I'm serving. Come into the garden, Ben, before it's ready, and run with me down the terrace."

"The garden is ruined. I saw it when I came over with the agent."

"Ruined? And with such lilacs! They are a little late because of the cold spring, but a perfect bower."

She caught my hand as she spoke, and we passed together through the long window leading from our bedroom to the porch, where a few startled swallows flew out, crying harshly, from among the white columns. Many of the elms had died; the magnolias and laburnums, with the exception of a few stately trees, had decayed on the terrace, and the thick maze of box was now thin and rapidly dwindling away from the gravelled paths. On the ground, under the young green of dandelion and wild violets, the rotting leaves of last year were still lying; and as we descended the steps, and followed the littered walks down the hill-side, broken pieces of pottery crumbled beneath our feet.

Clasping hands like two children, we stood for a minute in silence, with our eyes on the ruin before us, and the memory of the enchanted garden and our first love in our thoughts. Then, "Oh, Ben, the lilacs!" said Sally, softly.

They were there on all sides, floating like purple and white clouds in the wind, and shedding their delicious perfume over the scattered rose arbours and the dwindling box. Light, delicate, and brave, they had withstood frost and decay, while the latticed summer houses had fallen under the weight of the microphylla roses that grew over them. The wind now was laden with their sweetness, and the golden light seemed aware of their colour as it entered the garden softly through the screen of boughs.

"Do you remember the first day, Ben?"

"The first day? That was when President lifted me on the wall—and even the wall has gone."

"Did you dream then that you'd ever stand here with me like this?"

"I dreamed nothing else. I've never dreamed anything else."

"Then you aren't so very unhappy as long as we are together?"

"Not so unhappy as I might be, but, remember, I'm a man, Sally, and I have failed."

"Yes, you're a man, and you couldn't be happy even with me—without something else."

"The something else is a part of you. It belongs to you, and that's mostly why I want to make good. These debts are like a dead weight—like the Old Man of the Sea—on my shoulders. Until I'm able to shake them off, I shall not stand up straight."

"I'm glad you've gone back to the railroad."

"There are a lot of men in the railroad, and very few places. The General found me this job at six thousand a year, which is precious little for a man of my earning capacity. They'll probably want to send me down South to build up the traffic on the Tennessee and Carolina,—I don't know. It will take me a month anyway to wind up my affairs and start back with the road. Oh, it's going to be a long, hard pull when it once begins."

Pressing her cheek to my arm, she rubbed it softly up and down with a gentle caress. "Well, we'll pull it, never fear," she responded.

At our feet the twilight rose slowly from the sunken terrace, and the perfume of the lilacs seemed to grow stronger as the light faded. For a moment we stood drawn close together; then turning, with my arm still about her, we went back over the broken pieces of pottery, and ascending the steps, left the pearly afterglow and the fragrant stillness behind us.

Half an hour later, when we were in the midst of our supper, which she had served with gaiety and I had eaten with sadness, a hesitating knock came at the door leading into the dim hall, and opening it with surprise, I was confronted by a small, barefooted urchin, who stood, like the resurrected image of my own childhood, holding a covered dish at arm's length before him.

"If you please, ma'am," he said, under my shoulder, to Sally, who was standing behind me, "ma's jest heard you'd moved over here, an' she's sent you some waffles for supper."

"And what may ma's name be?" enquired Sally politely, as she removed the red and white napkin which covered the gift.

"Ma's Mrs. Titterbury, an' she lives jest over yonder. She says she's been a-lookin' out for you an' she hopes you've come to stay."

"That's very kind of her, and I'm much obliged. Tell her to come to see me."

"She's a-comin', ma'am," he responded cheerfully, and as he withdrew, his place was immediately filled by a little girl in a crimson calico, with two very tight and very slender braids hanging down to her waist in the back.

"Ma's been makin' jelly an' syllabub, an' she thought you might like a taste," she said, offering a glass dish. "Her name is Mrs. Barley, an' she lives around the corner."

"These are evidently our poorer neighbours," observed Sally, as the door closed after the crimson calico and the slender braids; "where are the well-to-do ones that live in all the big houses around us?"

"It probably never occurred to them that we might want a supper. It's the poor who have imagination. By Jove! there's another!"

This time it was a stout, elderly female in rusty black, with a very red face, whom, after some frantic groping of memory, I recognised as Mrs. Cudlip, unaltered apparently by her thirty years of widowhood.

"I jest heard you'd moved back over here, Benjy," she remarked, and at the words and the voice, I seemed to shrink again into the small, half-scared figure clad in a pair of shapeless breeches which were made out of an old dolman my mother had once worn to funerals, "an' I thought as you might like a taste of muffins made arter the old receipt of yo' po' ma's—the very same kind of muffins she sent me by you on the mornin' arter I buried my man."

Placing the dish upon the table, she seated herself, in response to an invitation from Sally, and spread her rusty black skirt, with a leisurely movement, over her comfortable lap. As I looked at her, I forgot that I stood six feet two inches in my stockings; I forgot that I had married a descendant of the Blands and the Fairfaxes; and I remembered as plainly as if it were yesterday, the morning of the funeral, when, with my mother's grey blanket shawl pinned on my shoulders, I had sat on the step outside and waited for the service to end, while I made scornful faces at the merry driver of the hearse.

"It's been going on thirty years sence yo' ma died, ain't it, Benjy?" she enquired, while I struggled vainly to recover a proper consciousness of my size and my importance.

"I was a little chap at the time, Mrs. Cudlip," I returned.

"An' it's been twenty, I reckon," she pursued reminiscently, "sence yo' pa was took. Wall, wall, time does fly when you come to think of deaths, now, doesn't it? I al'ays said thar wa'nt nothin' so calculated to put cheer an' spirit into you as jest to remember the people who've dropped off an' died while you've been spared. You didn't see much of yo' pa durin' his last days, did you?"

"Never after I ran away, and that was the night he brought his second wife home."

"He had a hard time toward the end, but I reckon she had a harder. It wa'nt that he was a bad man at bottom, but he was soft-natured an' easy, an' what he needed was to be helt an' to be helt steady. Some men air like that—they can't stand alone a minute without beginnin' to wobble. Now as long as yo' ma lived, she kept a tight hand on yo' pa, an' he stayed straight; but jest as soon as he was left alone, he began to wobble, an' from wobblin' he took to the bottle, and from the bottle he took to that brass-headed huzzy he married. She was the death of him, Benjy; I ought to know, for I lived next do' to 'em to the day of his burial. As to that, anyway, ma'am," she added to Sally, "my humble opinion is that women have killed mo' men anyway than they've ever brought into the world. It's a po' thought, I've al'ays said, in which you can't find some comfort."

"You were very kind to him, I have heard," I observed, as she paused for breath and turned toward me.

"It wa'nt mo'n my duty if I was, Benjy, for yo' ma was a real good neighbour to me, an' many's the plate of buttered muffins you've brought to my do' when you wa'nt any higher than that."

It was true, I admitted the fact as gracefully as I could.

"My mother thought a great deal of you," I remarked.

"You don't see many of her like now," she returned with a sigh, "the mo's the pity. 'Thar ain't room for two in marriage,' she used to say, 'one of 'em has got to git an' I'd rather 'twould be the other!' 'Twa'nt that way with the palaverin' yaller-headed piece that yo' pa married arterwards. She'd a sharp enough tongue, but a tongue don't do you much good with a man unless he knows you've got the backbone behind to drive it. It ain't the tongue, but the backbone that counts in marriage. At first he was mighty soft, but befo' two weeks was up he'd begun to beat her, an' I ain't got a particle of respect for a woman that's once been beaten. Men air born mean, I know, it's thar natur, an' the good Lord intended it; but, all the same, it's my belief that mighty few women come in for a downright beatin' unless they've bent thar backs to welcome it. It takes two to make a beatin' the same as a courtin', an' whar the back ain't ready, the blows air slow to fall."

"I never saw her but once, and then I ran away," I remarked to fill in her pause.

"Wall, you didn't miss much, or you either, ma'am," she rejoined politely; "she was the kind that makes an honest woman ashamed to belong to a sex that's got to thrive through foolishness, an' to git to a place by sidlin' backwards. That wa'nt yo' ma's way, Benjy, an' I've often said that I don't believe she ever hung back in her life an' waited for a man to hand her what she could walk right up an' take holt of without his help. 'The woman that waits on a man has got a long wait ahead of her,' was what she used to say."

Rising to her feet, she stood with the empty plate in her hand, and her back ceremoniously bent in a parting bow.

"Is that yo' youngest? Now, ain't he a fine baby!" she burst out, as little Benjamin appeared, crowing, in the arms of Aunt Euphronasia, "an he's got all the soft, pleasant look of yo' po' pa a'ready."

I opened the door, and with a last effusive good-by, she passed out in her stiff, rustling black, which looked as if she had gone into perpetual mourning.

"Will you have some syllabub, Ben?" enquired Sally primly, as the door closed.

"Sally, how will you stand it?"

"She wants to be kind—she really wants to be."

Crossing moodily to the table, I pushed aside the waffles, the muffins, and the syllabub, with an angry gesture.

"It is what I came from, after all. It is my class."

"Your class?" she repeated, laughing and sobbing together with her arms on my shoulders. "There's nobody else in the whole world in your class, Ben."



CHAPTER XXVIII

IN WHICH SALLY STOOPS

A week or two later the General stopped me as I was leaving his office.

"I don't like the look of you, Ben. What's the matter?"

"My head has been troubling me, General. It's been splitting for a week, and I can't see straight."

"You've thought too much, that's the mischief. Why not cut the whole thing and go West with me to-morrow in my car? I'll be gone for a month."

"It's out of the question. A man who is over head and ears in debt oughtn't to be spinning about the country in a private car."

"I don't see the logic of that as long as it's somebody else's car."

"You'd see it if you had two hundred thousand dollars of debt."

"Well, I've been worse off. I've had two hundred thousand devils of gout. Here, come along with me. Bring Sally, bring the youngster. I'll take the whole bunch of 'em."

When I declined, he still urged me, showing his annoyance plainly, as a man does in whom opposition even in trifles arouses a resentful, almost a violent, spirit of conquest. So, I knew, he had pursued every aim, great or small, of his life, with the look in his face of an intelligent bulldog, and the conviction somewhere in his brain that the only method of overcoming an obstacle was to hang on, if necessary, until the obstacle grew too weak to put forth further resistance. Once, and once only, to my knowledge, had this power to hang on, this bulldog grip, availed him but little, and that was when his violence had encountered a gentleness as soft as velvet, yet as inflexible as steel. In his whole life only poor little Miss Matoaca had withstood him; and as I met the angry, indomitable spirit in his eyes, there rose before me the figure of his old love, with her look of meek, unconquerable obstinacy and with the faint fragrance and colour about her that was like the fragrance and colour of faded rose-leaves.

"There's no use, General. I can't do it," I said at last; and parting from him at the corner, I signalled the car for Church Hill, while he drove slowly up-town in his buggy.

It was a breathless June afternoon. A spell of intense early heat had swept over the country, and the summer flowers were unfolding as if forced open in the air of a hothouse. At the door Sally met me with a telegram from Jessy announcing her marriage to Mr. Cottrel in New York; but the words and the fact seemed to me to have no nearer relation to my life than if they had described the romantic adventures of a girl, in a crimson blouse, who was passing along the pavement.

"Well, she's got what she wanted." I remarked indifferently, "so she's to be congratulated, I suppose. My head is throbbing as if it would break open. I'll go in and lie down in the dusk, before supper."

"Do the flowers bother you? Shall I take them away?" she asked, following me into the bedroom, and closing the shutters.

"I don't notice them. This confounded headache is the only thing I can think of. It hasn't let up a single minute."

Bending over me, she laid her cheek to mine, and stroked the hair back from my forehead with her small, cool hand, which reminded me of the touch of roses. Then going softly out, she closed the door after her, while I turned on my side, and lay, half asleep, half awake, in the deepening twilight.

From the garden, through the open blinds of the green shutters, floated the strong, sweet scent of the jessamine blooming on the columns of the piazza; and I heard, now and then, as if from a great distance, the harsh, frightened cry of a swallow as it flew out from its nest under the roof. A sudden, sharp realisation of imperative duties left undone awoke in my mind; and I felt impelled, as if by some outward pressure, to rise and go back again down the long, hot hill into the city. "There's something important I meant to do, and did not," I thought; "as soon as this pain stops, I suppose I shall remember it, and why it is so urgent. If I can only sleep for a few minutes, my brain will clear, and then I can think it out, and everything that is so confused now will be easy." In some way, I knew that this neglected duty concerned Sally and the child. I had been selfish with Sally in my misery. When I awoke with a clear head, I would go to her and say I was sorry.

The scent of the jessamine became suddenly so intense that I drew the coverlet over my face in the effort to shut it out. Then turning my eyes to the wall, I lay without thinking or feeling, while my consciousness slowly drifted outside the closed room and the penetrating fragrance of the garden beyond. Once it seemed to me that somebody came in a dream and bent over me, stroking my forehead. At first I thought it was Sally, until the roughness of the hand startled me, and opening my eyes, I saw that it was my mother, in her faded grey calico, with the perplexed and anxious look in her eyes, as if she, too, were trying to remember some duty which was very important, and which she had half forgotten. "Why, I thought you were dead!" I exclaimed aloud, and the sound of my own voice waked me.

It was broad daylight now; the shutters were open, and the breeze, blowing through the long window, brought the scent of jessamine distilled in the sunshine beyond. It seemed to me that I had slept through an eternity, and with my first waking thought, there revived the same pressure of responsibility, the same sense of duties, unfulfilled and imperative, with which I had turned to the wall and drawn the coverlet over my face. "I must get up," I said aloud; and then, as I lifted my hand, I saw that it was wasted and shrunken, and that the blue veins showed through the flesh as through delicate porcelain. Then, "I've been ill," I thought, and "Sally? Sally?" The effort of memory was too great for me, and without moving my body, I lay looking toward the long window, where Aunt Euphronasia sat, in the square of sunshine, crooning to little Benjamin, while she rocked slowly back and forth, beating time with her foot to the music.

"Oh, we'll ride in de golden cha'iot, by en bye, lil' chillun, We'll ride in de golden cha'iot, by en bye.

Oh, we'se all gwine home ter glory, by en bye, lil' chillun, We'se all gwine home ter glory by en bye.

Oh, we'll drink outer de healin' fountain, by en bye, lil' chillun, We'll drink outer de healin' fountain by en bye."

"Sally!" I called aloud, and my voice sounded thin and distant in my own ears.

There was the sound of quick steps, the door opened and shut, and Sally came in and leaned over me. She wore a blue gingham apron over her dress, her sleeves were rolled up, and her hand, when it touched my face, felt warm and soft as if it had been plunged into hot soapsuds. Then my eyes fell on a jagged burn on her wrist.

"What is that?" I asked, pointing to it. "You've hurt yourself."

"Oh, Ben, my dearest, are you really awake?"

"What is that, Sally? You have hurt yourself."

"I burned my hand on the stove—it is nothing. Dearest, are you better? Wait. Don't speak till you take your nourishment."

She went out, returning a moment later with a glass of milk and whiskey, which she held to my lips, sitting on the bedside, with her arm slipped under my pillow.

"How long have I been ill, Sally?"

"Several weeks. You became conscious and then had a relapse. Do you remember?"

"No, I remember nothing."

"Well, don't talk. Everything is all right—and I'm so happy to have you alive I could sing the Jubilee, as Aunt Euphronasia says."

"Several weeks and there was no money! Of course, you went to the General, Sally—but I forgot, the General is away. You went to somebody, though. Surely you got help?"

"Oh, I managed, Ben. There's nothing to worry about now that you are better. I feel that there'll never be anything to worry about again."

"But several weeks, Sally, and I lying like a log, and the General away! What did you do?"

"I nursed you for one thing, and gave you medicine and chicken broth and milk and whiskey. Now, I shan't talk any more until the doctor comes. Lie quiet and try to sleep."

But the jagged burn on her wrist still held my gaze, and catching her hand as she turned away, I pressed my lips to it with all my strength.

"Your hand feels so queer, Sally. It's as red as if it had been scalded."

"I've been cooking my dinner, and you see I eat a great deal. There, now, that's positively my last word."

Bending over, she kissed me hurriedly, a tear fell on my face, and then before I could catch the fluttering hem of her apron, she had broken from me, and gone out, closing the door after her. For a minute I lay perfectly motionless, too weak for thought. Then opening my eyes with an effort, I stared straight up at the white ceiling, against which a green June beetle was knocking with a persistent, buzzing sound that seemed an accompaniment to the crooning lullaby of Aunt Euphronasia.

"Oh, we'se all gwine home ter glory, by en bye, lil' chillun, We'se all gwine home ter glory, by en bye."

"Will he break his wings on the ceiling, or will he fly out of the window?" I thought drowsily, and it appeared to me suddenly that my personal troubles—my illness, my anxiety for Sally, and even the poverty that must have pressed upon her—had receded to an obscure and cloudy distance, in which they became less important in my mind than the problem of the green June beetle knocking against the ceiling. "Will he break his wings or will he fly out?" I asked, with a dull interest in the event, which engrossed my thoughts to the exclusion of all personal matters. "I ought to think of Sally and the child, but I can't. My head won't let me. It has gone wrong, and if I begin to think hard thoughts I'll go delirious again. There is jessamine blooming somewhere. Did she have a spray in her hair when she bent over me? Why did she wear a gingham apron at a ball instead of pink tarlatan? No, that was not the problem I had to solve. Will he break his wings or will he fly out?"

"Oh, we'll fit on de golden slippers, by en bye, lil' chillun,"

crooned Aunt Euphronasia, rocking little Benjamin in the square of sunlight.

The song soothed me and I slept for a minute. Then starting awake in the cold sweat of terror, I struggled wildly after the problem which still eluded me.

"Has he flown out?" I asked.

"Who, Marse Ben?" enquired the old negress, stopping her rocking and her lullaby at the same instant.

"The June beetle. I thought he'd break his wings on the ceiling."

"Go 'way f'om hyer, honey, he ain' gwine breck 'is wings. Dar's moughty little sense inside er dem, but dey ain' gwine do dat. Is yo' wits done come back?"

"Not quite. I feel crazy. Aunt Euphronasia!"

"W'at you atter, Marse Ben?"

"How did Sally manage?"

"Ef'n hit's de las' wud I speak, she's done managed jes exactly ez ef'n she wuz de Lawd A'moughty."

"And she didn't suffer?"

"Who? She? Dar ain' none un us suffer, honey, we'se all been livin' on de ve'y fat er de lan', we is. Dar's been roas' pig en shoat e'vy blessed day fur dinner."

She had talked me down, and I turned over again and lay in silence, until Sally came in with a dose of medicine and a cup of broth.

"Have I been very ill, Sally?"

"Very ill. It was the long mental strain, followed by the intense heat. At one time we feared that a blood vessel was broken. Now, put everything out of your mind, and get well."

She had taken off her gingham apron, and was wearing one of her last summer's dresses of flowered organdie. I remembered that I had always liked it because it had blue roses over it.

"How can I get well when I know that you have been starving?"

"But we haven't been. We've had everything on earth we wanted."

"Then thank God you got help. Whom did you go to?"

Putting the empty glass aside, she began feeding me spoonfuls of broth, with her arm under my pillow.

"If you will be bad and insist upon knowing—I didn't go to anybody. You said you couldn't bear being helped, you know."

"I said it—oh, darling—but I didn't think of this!"

"Well, I thought of it, anyway, and I wasn't going to do while you were ill and helpless what you didn't want me to do when you were well."

"You mean you told nobody all these weeks?"

"Well, I told one or two people, but I didn't accept charity from them. The General was away, you know, but some people from the office came over with offers of help—and I told them we needed nothing. Dr. Theophilus was too far away to treat you, but he has come almost every day with a pitcher of Mrs. Clay's chicken broth. Oh, we've prospered, Ben, there's no doubt of that, we've prospered!"

"How soon may I get up?"

"Not for three weeks, and it will be another three weeks even if you're good, before you can go back to the office."

A sob rose in my throat, but I bit it back fiercely before it passed my lips.

"Oh, Sally, my darling, why did you marry me?"

"You cruel boy," she returned cheerfully, as she smoothed my pillows, "when you know that if I hadn't married you there wouldn't be any little Benjamin in the world."

After this the slow days dragged away, while I consumed chicken broth and milk punches with a frantic desire to get back my strength. Only to be on my feet again, and able to lift the burden from Sally's shoulders! Only to drive that tired look from her eyes, and that patient, divine smile from her lips! I watched her with jealous longing while I lay there, helpless as a fallen tree, and I saw that she grew daily thinner, that the soft redness never left her small, childlike hands, that three fine, nervous wrinkles had appeared between her arched eyebrows. Something was killing her, while I, the man who had sworn before God to cherish her, was but an additional burden on her fragile shoulders. And yet how I loved her! Never had she seemed to me more lovely, more desirable, than she did as she moved about my bed in her gingham apron, with the anxious smile on her lips, and the delicate furrows deepening between her eyebrows.

"How soon? How soon, Sally?" I asked almost hourly, kissing the scar on her wrist when she bent over me.

"Be patient, dear."

"I am trying to be patient for your sake, but oh, it's devilish hard!"

"I know it is, Ben. Another week, and you will be up."

"Another week, and this killing you!"

"It isn't killing me. If it were killing me, do you think I could laugh? And you hear me laugh?"

"Yes, I hear you laugh, and it breaks my heart as I lie here. If I'm ever up, Sally, if I'm ever well, I'll make you go to bed and I will slave over you."

"There are many things I'd enjoy more, dear. Going to bed isn't my idea of happiness."

"Then you shall sit on a cushion and eat nothing but strawberries and cream."

"That sounds better. Well, there's something I've got to see about, so I'll leave you with Aunt Euphronasia to look after you. The doctor says you may have a cup of tea if you're good. We'll make a party together."

An hour or two later, when the afternoon sunshine was shut out by the green blinds, and the room was filled with a gentle droning sound from the humming-birds at the jessamine, she drew up the small wicker tea table to my bedside, and we made the party with merriment. Her eyes were tired, the three fine nervous wrinkles had deepened between her arched eyebrows, and the soft redness I had objected to, covered her hands; yet that spirit of gaiety, which had seemed to me to resemble the spirit of the bird singing in the old grey house, still showed in her voice and her smile. As she brewed the tea in the little brown tea-pot and poured it into the delicate cups, with the faded pattern of moss rosebuds around the brim, I wondered, half in a dream, from what inexhaustible source she drew this courage which faced life, not with endurance, but with blitheness. Were the ghosts of the dead Blands and Fairfaxes from whom she had sprung fighting over again their ancient battles in their descendant?

"This is a nice party, isn't it?" she asked, when she had brought the hot buttered toast from the kitchen and cut it into very small slices on my plate; "the tea smells deliciously. I paid a dollar and a quarter for a pound of it this morning."

"If I'm ever rich again you shall pay a million and a quarter, if you want to."

The charming archness awoke in her eyes, while she looked at me over the brim of the cup.

"Isn't this just as nice as being rich, Ben?" she asked; "I am really, you know, a far better cook than Aunt Mehitable."

"All the same I'd rather live on bread and water than have you do it," I answered.

She lifted her hand, pushing the heavy hair from her forehead, and my gaze fell on the jagged scar on her wrist. Then, as she caught my glance, her arm dropped suddenly under the table, and she pulled her loose muslin sleeve into place.

"Does the burn hurt you, Sally?"

"Not now—it is quite healed. At first it smarted a little."

"Darling, how did you do it?"

"I've forgotten. On the stove, I think."

I fell back on the pillow, too faint, in spite of the tea I had taken, to follow a thought in which there was so sharp and so incessant a pang. Before my eyes the little table, with its white cloth and its fragile china service, decorated with moss rosebuds, appeared to dissolve into some painful dream distance, in which the sound of the humming-birds at the jessamine grew gradually louder.

Six days longer I remained in bed, too weak to get into my clothes, or to stand on my feet, but at the end of that time I was permitted to struggle to the square of sunlight by the window, where I sat for an hour with the warm breeze from the garden blowing into my face. For the first day or two I was unable to rise from the deep chintz-covered chair, in which Aunt Euphronasia and Sally had placed me; but one afternoon, when the old negress had returned to the kitchen, and Sally had gone out on an errand, I disobeyed their orders and crawled out on the porch, where the scent of the jessamine seemed a part of the summer sunshine. The next day I ventured as far as the kitchen steps, and found Aunt Euphronasia plucking a chicken for my broth, with little Benjamin asleep in his carriage at her side.

"Aunt Euphronasia, do you know where Sally goes every afternoon?" I enquired.

"Hi! Marse Ben, ain't un 'oman erbleeged ter teck her time off de same ez a man?" she demanded indignantly. "She cyarn' be everlastin'ly a-settin' plum at yo' elbow."

"You know perfectly well I'm not such a brute as to be complaining, mammy."

"Mebbe you ain't, honey, but hit sounds dat ar way ter me."

"If I could only make sure she'd gone to walk, I'd be jolly glad."

"Ef'n you ax me," she retorted contemptuously, "she ain't de sort, suh, dat's gwineter traipse jes' fur de love er traipsing.'"

There was small comfort, I saw, to be had from her, so turning away, while she resumed her plucking, I crawled slowly back through the bedroom into the hall, and along the hall to the front door, which stood open. Here the dust of the street rose like steam to my nostrils, and the stone steps and the brick pavement were thickly coated. A watering-cart turned the corner, scattering a refreshing spray, and behind it came a troop of thirsty dogs, licking greedily at the water before it sank into the dust. The foliage of the trees was scorched to a livid shade, and the ends of the leaves curled upward as if a flame had blown by them. Down the street, as I stood there, came the old familiar cry from a covered wagon: "Water-million! Hyer's yo' watermillion fresh f'om de vine!"

Clinging to the iron railing, which burned my hand, I descended the steps with trembling limbs, and stood for a minute in the patch of shade at the bottom. A negro, seated on the curbing, was drinking the juice from a melon rind, and he looked up at me with rolling eyes, his gluttonous red lips moving in rapture.

"Dish yer's a moughty good melon, Marster," he said, and returned to his feast.

As I was about to place my foot on the bottom step and begin the difficult ascent, my eyes, raised to our sitting-room window, hung spellbound on a black and white sign fastened against the panes:

"Fine laundering. Old laces a specialty. Desserts made to order."

"Old laces a specialty," I repeated, as if struck by the phrase. Then, as my strength failed me, I sank on the stone step in the patch of shade, and buried my face in my hands.



CHAPTER XXIX

IN WHICH WE RECEIVE VISITORS

I was still sitting there, with my head propped in my hands, when my eyes, which had seen nothing before, saw Sally coming through the hot dust in the street, with George Bolingbroke, carrying a bundle under his arm, at her side. As she neared me a perplexed and anxious look—the look I had seen always on the face of my mother when the day's burden was heavy—succeeded the smiling brightness with which she had been speaking to George.

"Why, Ben!" she exclaimed, quickening her steps, "what are you doing out here in this terrible heat?"

"I got down and couldn't get back," I answered.

"Well, you ought to be ashamed of yourself. Here, George, give me the bundle and help him up."

"He deserves to be left here," remarked George, laughing good-humouredly as he grasped my arm, and half led, half dragged me up the steps and into the house. Then, when I was placed in the deep chintz-covered chair by the window, Sally came in with a milk punch, which she held to my lips while I drank.

"You're really very foolish, Ben."

"I know all, Sally," I replied, sitting up and pushing the glass and her hand away, "and I'm going to get up and go back to work to-morrow."

"Then drink this, please, so you will be able to go. I suppose you saw the sign," she pursued quietly, when I had swallowed the punch; "George saw it, too, and it put him into a rage."

"What has George got to do with it?" I demanded with a pang in my heart.

"He hasn't anything, of course, but it was kind of him all the same to want to lend me his money. You see, the way of it was that when you fell ill, and there wasn't a penny in the house, I remembered how bitterly you'd hated the idea of taking help."

I caught her hand to my lips. "I'd beg, borrow, or steal for you, darling."

"You'd neglected to tell me that, so I didn't know. What I did was to sit down and think hard for an hour, and at the end of that time, when you were well enough to be left, I got on the car and went over to see several women, who, I knew, were so rich that they had plenty of old lace and embroidery. I told them exactly how it was and, of course, they all wanted to give me money, and Jennie Randolph even sat down and cried when I wouldn't take it. Then they agreed to let me launder all their fine lace and embroidered blouses, and I've made desserts and cakes for some of them and—and—"

"Don't go on, Sally, I can't stand it. I'm a crackbrained fool and I'm going to cry."

"Of course, the worst part was having to leave you, but when George found out about it, he insisted upon fetching and carrying my bundles."

"George!" I exclaimed sharply, and a spasm of pain, like the entrance of poison into an unhealed wound, contracted my heart. "Was that confounded package under his arm," I questioned, almost angrily, "some of the stuff?"

"That was a blouse of Maggie Tyler's. He is going to take it back to her on Friday. There, now, stay quiet, while I run and speak to him. He is waiting for me in the kitchen."

She went out, as if it were the most natural thing in the world for her to take in washing and for George to deliver it, while, opening the long green shutters, I sat staring, beyond the humming-birds and the white columns, to the shimmering haze that hung over the old tea-roses and the dwindled box in the garden. Here the heat, though it was still visible to the eyes, was softened and made fragrant by the greenness of the trees and the grass and by the perfume of the jessamine and the old tea-roses, dropping their faintly coloured leaves in the sunshine. From time to time the sounds of the city, grown melancholy and discordant, like the sounds that one hears in fever, reached me across the shimmering vagueness of the garden.

And then as I sat there, with folded hands, there came to me, out of some place, so remote that it seemed a thousand miles away from the sunny stillness, and yet so near that I knew it existed only within my soul, a sense of failure, of helplessness, of humiliation. A hundred casual memories thronged through my mind, and all these memories, gathering significance from my imagination, plunged me deeper into the bitter despondency which had closed over my head. I saw the General, with his little, alert bloodshot eyes, like the eyes of an intelligent bulldog, with that look of stubbornness, of tenacity, persisting beneath the sly humour that gleamed in his face, as if he were thinking always somewhere far back in his brain, "I'll hang on to the death, I'll hang on to the death." His figure, which, because of that legendary glamour I had seen surrounding it in childhood, still personified shining success in my eyes, appeared to add a certain horror to this sense of helplessness, of failure, that dragged me under. Deep down within me, down below my love for Sally or for the child, something older than any emotion, older than any instinct except the instinct of battle, awakened and passed from passiveness into violence. "Let me but start again in the race," said this something, "let me but stand once more on my feet." The despondency, which had been at first formless and vague as mere darkness, leaped suddenly into a tangible shape, and I felt that the oppressive weight of the debt on my shoulders was the weight, not of thought, but of metal. Until that was lifted—until I had struggled free—I should be crippled, I told myself, not only in ambition, but in body.

From the detached kitchen, at the end of the short brick walk, overgrown with wild violets, that led to it, the sound of George's laugh fell on my ears. Rising to my feet with an effort, I stood, listening, without thought, to the sound, which seemed to grow vacant and sad as it floated to me in the warm air over the sunken bricks. Then passing through the long window, I descended the steps slowly, and stopped in the shadow of a pink crape myrtle that grew near the kitchen doorway. Again the merriment came to me, Sally's laughter mingling this time with George's.

"No, that will never do. This is the way," she said, in her sparkling voice, which reminded me always of running water.

"Sally!" I called, and moving nearer, I paused at the kitchen step, while she came quickly forward, with some white, filmy stuff she had just rinsed in the tub still in her hands.

"Why, here's Ben!" she exclaimed. "You bad boy, when I told you positively not to get up out of that chair!"

A gingham apron was pinned over her waist and bosom, her sleeves were rolled back, and I saw the redness from the hot soapsuds rising from her hands to her elbows.

"For God's sake, Sally, what are you doing?" I demanded, and reaching out, as I swayed slightly, I caught the lintel of the door for support.

"I'm washing and George is splitting kindling wood," she replied cheerfully, shaking out the white, filmy stuff with an upward movement of her bare arms; "the boy who splits the wood never came—I think he ate too many currants yesterday—and if George hadn't offered his services as man of all work, I dread to think what you and Aunt Euphronasia would have eaten for supper."

"It's first-rate work for the muscles, Ben," remarked George, flinging an armful of wood on the brick floor, and kneeling beside the stove to kindle a fire in the old ashes. "I haven't a doubt but it's better for the back and arms than horseback riding. All the same," he added, poking vigorously at the smouldering embers, "I'm going to wallop that boy as soon as I've got this fire started."

"You won't have time to do that until you've delivered the day's washing," rejoined Sally, with merriment.

"Yes, I shall. I'll stop on my way—that boy comes first," returned George with a grim, if humorous, determination.

This humour, this lightness, and above all this gallantry, which was so much a part of the older civilisation to which they belonged, wrought upon my disordered nerves with a feeling of anger. Here, at last, I had run against that "something else" of the Blands', apart from wealth, apart from position, apart even from blood, of which the General had spoken. Miss Mitty might go in rags and do her own cooking, he had said, but as long as she possessed this "something else," that supported her, she would preserve to the end, in defiance of circumstances, her terrible importance.

"You know I don't care a bit what I eat, Sally!" I blurted out, in a temper.

"Well, you may not, dear, but George and I do," she rejoined, pinning the white stuff on a clothes-line she had stretched between the door and the window, "we are both interested, you see, in getting you back to work. There's the door-bell, George. You may wash your hands at the sink and answer it. If it's the butter, bring it to me, and if it's a caller, let him wait, while I turn down my sleeves."

Rising from his knees, George washed his hands at the sink, and went out along the brick walk to the house, while I stood in the doorway, under the shadow of the pink crape myrtle, and made a vow in my heart.

"Sally," I said at last in the agony of desperation, "you ought to have married George."

With her arms still upraised to the clothes-line, she looked round at me over her shoulder.

"He is useful in an emergency," she admitted; "but, after all, the emergency isn't the man, you know."

I was about to press the point home to conscience, when George, returning along the walk, announced with the mock solemnity of a footman in livery, that the callers were Dr. Theophilus and the General, who awaited us in the sitting-room.

"There's no hurry, Sally," he added; "they started over to condole with you, I imagine, but they've both become so absorbed in discussing this neighbourhood as it was fifty years ago, that I honestly believe they've entirely forgotten that you live here."

"Well, we'll have to remind them," said Sally, with a laugh; and when she had rolled down her sleeves and tidied her hair before the cracked mirror on the wall, we went back to the house, where we found the two old men engaged in a violent controversy over the departed inhabitants of Church Hill.

"I tell you, Theophilus, it wasn't Robert Carrington, but his brother Bushrod that lived in that house!" exclaimed the General, as we entered; and he concluded—while he shook hands with us, in the tone of one who forever clinches an argument, "I can take you this minute straight over there to his grave in Saint John's Churchyard. How are you, Ben, glad to see you up," he observed in an absent-minded manner. "Have you got a palm-leaf fan around, Sally? I can't get through these sweltering afternoons without a fan. What do you think Theophilus is arguing about now? He is trying to prove to me that it was Robert Carrington, not Bushrod, who lived in that big house at the top of the hill. Why, I tell you I knew Bushrod Carrington as well as I did my own brother, sir."

He sat far back in his chair, pursing his full red lips angrily, like a whimpering child, and fanning himself with short, excited movements of the palm-leaf fan. His determined, mottled face was covered thickly with fine drops of perspiration.

"I knew Robert very intimately," remarked the doctor, in a peaceable voice. "He married Matty Price, and I was the best man at his wedding. They lived unhappily, I believe, but he told me on his death-bed—I attended him in his last illness—that he would do it over again if he had to re-live his life. 'I never had a dull minute after I married her, doctor,' he said, 'I lived with her for forty years and I never knew what was coming next till she died.'"

"Robert was a fool," commented the General, brusquely, "a long white-livered, studious fellow that dragged around at his wife's apron strings. Couldn't hold a candle to his brother Bushrod. When I was a boy, Bushrod Carrington—he was nearer my father's age than mine—was the greatest dandy and duellist in the state. Got all his clothes in Paris, and I can see him now, as plainly as if it were yesterday, when he used to come to church in a peachblow brocade waistcoat of a foreign fashion, and his hair shining with pomatum. Yes, he was a great duellist—that was the age of duels. Shot a man the first year he came back from France, didn't he?"

"A sad scamp, but a good husband," remarked the doctor, ignoring the incident of the duel. "I remember when his first child was born, he was on his knees praying the whole time, and then when it was over he went out and got as drunk as a lord. 'Where's Bushrod?' were the first words his wife spoke, and when some fool answered her, 'Bushrod's drunk, Bessy,' she replied, like an angel, 'Poor fellow, I know he needs it.' They were a most devoted couple, I always heard. Who was she, George? It's gone out of my mind. Was she Bessy Randolph?"

"No, Bessy Randolph was his first flame, and when she threw him over for Ned Peyton, he married Bessy Tucker. They used to say that when he couldn't get one Bessy, he took the other. Yes, he made a devoted husband, never a wild oat to sow after his marriage. I remember when I called on him once, when he was living in that big house there on top of the hill—"

"I think you're wrong about that, George. I am sure it was Robert who lived there. When I attended him in his last illness—"

"I reckon I know where Bushrod Carrington lived, Theophilus. I've been there often enough. The house you're talking about is over on the other side of the hill, and was built by Robert."

"Well, I'm perfectly positive, George, that when I attended Robert in his last illness—"

"His last illness be hanged! I tell you what, Theophilus, you're getting entirely too opinionated for a man of your years. If it grows on you, you'll be having an attack of apoplexy next. Have you got a glass of iced water you can give Theophilus, Sally?"

"I'll get it," said young George, as Sally rose, and when he had gone out in response to her nod, the General, cooling a little, glanced with a sly wink from Sally to me. "You put me in mind of Bushrod's first flame, Bessy Randolph, my dear," he observed; "she was a great belle and beauty and half the men in Virginia proposed to her, they used to say, before she married Ned Peyton. 'No, I can't accept you for a husband,' the minx would reply, 'but I think you will do very well indeed as a hanger-on.' It looks as if you'd got George for a hanger-on, eh?"

"At present she's got him in place of a boy-of-all-jobs," I observed rightly, though a fierce misery worked in my mind.

"Well, she can't do better," said the doctor, as they prepared to leave. "Let me hear how you are, Ben. Don't eat too much till you get back your strength, and be sure to take your egg-nog three times a day. Come along, George, and we'll look up Robert's and Bushrod's graves in the churchyard. You'd better bring the palm-leaf fan, you'll probably need it."

They descended the curving steps leisurely, the General clinging to the railing on one side, and supported by George on the other. Then, at last, after many protestations of sympathy, and not a few anecdotes forgotten until the instant of departure revived the memory, the old grey horse, deciding suddenly that it was time for oats and the cool stable, started of his own accord up the street toward the churchyard. As the buggy passed out of sight, with the palm-leaf fan waving frantically when it turned the corner, George came up the steps again, and going indoors, brought out the little bundle of lace that he was to deliver to its owner on his way home.

"Keep up your pluck, Ben," he said cheerfully; and turning away, he looked at Sally with a long, thoughtful gaze as he held out his hand.

"Now, I'm going to wallop that boy," he remarked, after a minute. "Is there anything else? I'll be over to-morrow as soon as I can get off from the office."

"Nothing else," she replied; then, as he was moving away, she leaned forward, with that bloom and softness in her look which always came to her in moments when she was deeply stirred. "George!" she called, in a low voice, "George!"

He stopped and came back, meeting her vivid face with eyes that grew suddenly dark and gentle.

"It's just to say that I don't know what in the world I should have done without you," she said.

Again he turned from her, and this time he went quickly, without looking back, along the dusty street in the direction of the car line beyond the corner.

"You've been up too long, Ben, and you're as white as a sheet," said Sally, putting her hand on my arm. "Come, now, and lie down again while Aunt Euphronasia is cooking supper. I must iron Maggie Tyler's blouse as soon as it is dry."

The mention of Maggie Tyler's blouse was all I needed to precipitate me into the abyss above which I had stood. Too miserable to offer useless comment upon so obvious a tragedy, I followed her in silence back to the bedroom, where she placed me on the bed and flung a soft, thin coverlet over my prostrate body. She was still standing beside me, when Aunt Euphronasia hobbled excitedly into the room, and looking across the threshold, I discerned a tall, slender figure, shrouded heavily in black, hovering in the dim hall beyond.

"Hi! hi! honey, hyer's Miss Mitty done come ter see you!" exclaimed Aunt Euphronasia, in a burst of ecstasy.

Sally turned with a cry, and the next instant she was clasped in Miss Mitty's arms, with her head hidden in the rustling crape on the old lady's shoulder.

"I've just heard that you were in trouble, and that your husband was ill," said Miss Mitty, when she had seated herself in the chair by the window; "I came over at once, though I hadn't left the house for a year except to go out to Hollywood."

"It was so good of you, Aunt Mitty, so good of you," replied Sally, caressing her hand.

"If I'd only known sooner, I should have come. You are looking very badly, my child."

"Ben will be well quickly now, and then I can rest."

At this she turned toward me, and enquired in a gentle, reserved way about my illness, the nature of the fever, and the pain from which I had suffered.

"I hope you had the proper food, Ben," she said, calling me for the first time by my name; "I am sorry that I could not supply you with my chicken jelly. Dr. Theophilus tells me he considers it superior to any he has ever tried.—even to Mrs. Clay's."

"Comfort Sally, Miss Mitty, and it will do me more good than chicken jelly."

For a minute she sat looking at me kindly in silence. Then, as little Benjamin was brought, she took him upon her lap, and remarked that he was a beautiful baby, and that she already discerned in him the look of her Uncle Theodoric Fairfax.

"I should like you to come to my house as soon as you are able to move," she said presently, as she rose to go, and paused for a minute to bend over and kiss little Benjamin. "You will be more comfortable there, though the air is, perhaps, fresher over here."

I thanked her with tears in my eyes, and a resolve in my mind that at least Sally and the baby should accept the offer.

"There is a basket of old port in the sitting-room; I thought it might help to strengthen you," were her last words as she passed out, with Sally clinging to her arm, and the crape veil she still wore for Miss Matoaca rustling as she moved.

"Po' Miss Mitty has done breck so I 'ouldn't hev knowed her f'om de daid," observed Aunt Euphronasia, when the front door had closed and the sound of rapidly rolling wheels had passed down the street.

All night Sally and I talked of her, she resisting and I entreating that she should go to her old home for the rest of the summer.

"How can I leave you, Ben? How can you possibly do without me?"

"Don't bother about me. I'll manage to scrape along, somehow. There are two things that are killing me, Sally—the fact of owing money that I can't pay, and the thought of your toiling like a slave over my comfort."

"I'll go, then, if you will come with me."

"You know I can't come with you. She only asked me, you must realise, out of pity."

"Well, I shan't go a step without you," she said decisively at last, "for I don't see how on earth you would live through the summer if I did."

"I don't see either," I admitted honestly, looking at her, as she stood in the frame of the long window, the ruffles of her muslin dressing-gown blowing gently in the breeze which had sprung up in the garden. Beyond her there was a pale dimness, and the fresh, moist smell of the dew on the grass.

What she had said was the truth. How could I have lived through the summer if she had left me? Since the night after my failure, when we had come, for the first time, face to face with each other, I had leaned on her with all the weight of my crippled strength; and this weight, instead of crushing her to the earth, appeared to add vigour and buoyancy to her slender figure. Long afterwards, when my knowledge of her had come at last, not through love, but through bitterness, I wondered why I had not understood on that night, while I lay there watching her pale outline framed by the window. Love, not meat and drink, was her nourishment, and without love, though I were to surround her with all the fruits of the earth, she would still be famished. That she was strong, I had already learned. What I was still to discover was that this strength lay less in character than in emotion. Her very endurance—her power of sustained sympathy, of sacrifice—had its birth in some strangely idealised quality of passion—as though even suffering or duty was enkindled by this warm, clear flame that burned always within her.

As the light broke, we were awakened, after a few hours' restless sleep, by a sharp ring at the bell; and when she had slipped into her wrapper and answered it, she came back very slowly, holding an open note in her hands.

"Oh, poor Aunt Mitty, poor Aunt Mitty. She died all alone in her house last night, and the servants found her this morning."

"Well, the last thing she did was a kindness," I said gently.

"I'm glad of that, glad she came to see me, but, Ben, I can't help believing that it killed her. She had Aunt Matoaca's heart trouble, and the strain was too much." Then, as I held out my arms, she clung to me, weeping. "Never leave me alone, Ben—whatever happens, never, never leave me alone!"

* * * * *

A few days later, when Miss Mitty's will was opened, it was found that she had left to Sally her little savings of the last few years, which amounted to ten thousand dollars. The house, with her income, passed from her to the hospital endowed by Edmond Bland in a fit of rage with his youngest daughter; and the old lady's canary and the cheque, which fluttered some weeks later from the lawyer's letter, were the only possessions of hers that reached her niece.

"She left the miniature of me painted when I was a child to George," said Sally, with the cheque in her hand; "George was very good to her at the end. Did you ever notice my miniature, framed in pearls, that she wore sometimes, in place of grandmama's, at her throat?"

I had not noticed it, and the fact that I had never seen it, and was perfectly unaware whether or not it resembled Sally, seemed in some curious way to increase, rather than to diminish, the jealous pain at my heart. Why should George have been given this trifle, which was associated with Sally, and which I had never seen?

She leaned forward and the cheque fluttered into my plate.

"Take the money, Ben, and do what you think best with it," she added.

"It belongs to you. Wouldn't you rather keep it in bank as a nest-egg?"

"No, take it. I had everything of yours as long as you had anything."

"Then it goes into bank for you all the same," I replied, as I slipped the paper into my pocket.

An hour later, as I passed in the car down the long hill, I told myself that I would place the money to Sally's account, in order that she might draw on it until I had made good the strain of my illness. My first intention had been to go into the bank on my way to the office; but glancing at my watch as I left the car, I found that it was already after nine o'clock, and so returning the cheque to my pocket, I crossed the street, where I found the devil of temptation awaiting me in the person of Sam Brackett.

"I say, Ben, if you had a little cash, here's an opportunity to make your fortune rise," he remarked; "I've just given George a tip and he's going in."

"You'd better keep out of it, Ben," said George, wheeling round suddenly after he had nodded and turned away. "It's copper, and you know if there's a thing on earth that can begin to monkey when you don't expect it to, it's the copper trade."

"Bonanza copper mining stock is selling at zero again," commented Sam imperturbably, "and if it doesn't go up like a shot, then I'm a deader."

Whether his future was to be that of a deader or not concerned me little; but while I stood there on the crowded pavement, with my eyes on the sky, I had a sudden sensation, as if the burden of debt—which was the burden, not of thought, but of metal—had been removed from my shoulders. My first fortune had been made in copper,—why not repeat it? That one minute's sense of release, of freedom, had gone like wine to my head. I saw stretching away from me the dull years I must spend in chains, but I saw, also, in the blessed vision which Sam Brackett had called up, the single means of escape.

"What does the General think of it, George?" I enquired.

"He's putting in money, I believe, moderately as usual," replied George, with a worried look on his face; "but I tell you frankly, Ben, whether it's a good thing or not, if that's Miss Mitty's legacy, you oughtn't to speculate with it. Sally might need it."

"Sally needs a thousand times more," I returned, not without irritation, "and I shall get it for her in the way I can." Then I held out my hand. "You're a first-rate chap, George," I added, "but just think what it would mean to Sally if I could get out of debt at a jump."

"I dare say," he responded, "but I'm not sure that putting your last ten thousand dollars in the Bonanza copper mining stock is a rational way of doing it."

"Such things aren't done in a rational way. The secret of successful speculating is to be willing to dare everything for something. Sam's got faith in the Bonanza, and he knows a hundred times as much about it as you or I."

"If it doesn't rise," said Sam emphatically, "then I'm a deader."

I still saw the dull years stretching ahead, and I still felt the tangible weight on my shoulders of the two hundred thousand dollars I owed. The old prostrate instinct of the speculator, which is but the gambler's instinct in better clothes, lifted its head within me.

"Well, it won't do any harm to go into Townley's and find out about it," I said, moving in the direction of the broker's office next door.



CHAPTER XXX

IN WHICH SALLY PLANS

My first sensation after putting Sally's ten thousand dollars into copper mining stock was one of immense relief, almost of exhilaration, as if I already heard in my fancy the clanking of the loosened chains as they dropped from me. I recalled, one by one, the incidents of my earliest "risky" and yet fortunate venture, when, following the General's advice, I had gone in boldly, and after a short period of breathless fluctuation, had "realised," as he had said, "a nice little fortune for a first hatching." And because this seemed to me the single means of recovery, because I had so often before in my life been guided by some infallible instinct to seize the last chance that in the outcome had proved to be the right way, I felt now that reliance upon fortune, that assurance of the thing hoped for, which was as much a portion of experience as it was a quality of temperament.

At home, when I reached there late in the afternoon, I found Sally just stepping out of the General's buggy, while the great man, sacrificing gallantry to the claims of gout, sat, under his old-fashioned linen dust robe, holding the slackened reins over the grey horse.

"We've got a beautiful plan, Ben, the General and I," remarked Sally, when he had driven away, and we were entering the house; "but it's a secret, and you're not to know of it until it is ready to be divulged."

"Is George aware of it?" I asked irrelevantly, moved by I know not what spirit of averseness.

"Yes, we've let George into it, but I'm not perfectly sure that he approves. The idea came to the General and to me almost at the same instant, and that is a very good thing to be said of any idea. It proves it to be an elastic one anyway."

She talked merrily through supper, breaking into smiles from time to time, caressing evidently this idea, which was so elastic, and which she declined provokingly to divulge. But I, also, had my secret, for my mind, responding to the springs of hope, toyed ceaselessly with the possibility of escape. For several weeks this dream of ultimate freedom possessed my thoughts, and then, at last, when the copper trade, instead of reviving, seemed paralysed for a season, I awakened with a shock, to the knowledge that I had lost Sally's little fortune as irretrievably as I appeared to have lost my larger one. Clearly my financial genius was asleep, or off assisting at a sacrifice; and it did little good, as I toiled home in the afternoon, to curse myself frantically for a perverse and a thankless brute. It was too late now; I had played the fool once too often and the money was gone. Was my brain weakened permanently by the fever, I wondered? Had the muscles of my will dwindled away and grown flabby, like the muscles of my body?

As I left the car, a group of school children ran along the pavement in front of me, and then scattering like pigeons, fluttered after a big, old-fashioned barouche that had turned the corner. When it came nearer, I saw that the barouche was the General's, a piece of family property which had descended to him from his father, and that the great man now sat on the deep, broadcloth-covered cushions, his legs very far apart, his hands clasped on his gold-headed walking-stick, and his square, mottled face staring straight ahead, with that look of tenacity, as if he were saying somewhere back in his brain, "I'll hang on to the death."

Before our door, where Sally was waiting in her hat and veil, the barouche drew up with a flourish; Balaam, the old negro coachman, settled himself for a doze on the box, and the pair of fat roans began switching their long tails in the faces of the swarming school children.