Her eyes—beautiful as the eyes of all happy women are beautiful—dwelt on him kindly while he struggled to explain his mission. All the dread of the unusual, all the inherited belief in the sanctity of fixed opinions, all the passionate distrust of ideas that have not stood the test of centuries—these things which make for the safety and the permanence of the racial life, were in the look of motherly indulgence with which she regarded him. She had just risen from a rocking-chair on the long porch, where honest Tom sat relating ponderous war anecdotes to an attentive group of boarders; and beyond her in the dimly lighted hall he could see the wide old staircase climbing leisurely into the mysterious silence of the upper storeys.

"I have a small room at the back that I might rent to you," she said hesitatingly after a pause. "I am afraid you will find it warm in summer, as it is just under the roof and has a western exposure, but I hardly think I could do better for you at the price you are able to pay. I understood that you intended to live with your uncle," she added in a burst of enthusiasm. "My husband has always been one of his greatest admirers."

The mention of Cyrus was like a spur to Oliver's ambition, and he realized with gratitude that it was merely his sensibility, not his resolution, which had been shaken.

"I'll take the room," he returned, ignoring what she had said as well as what she had implied about Cyrus. Then as she tripped ahead of him, he entered the dismantled hall, filled with broken pieces of fine old furniture, and ascended the stairs as far as the third storey. When she turned a loosened door-knob and passed before him into the little room at the back, he saw first of all the narrow window, with its torn green shade, beyond which clustered a blur of silvery foliage in the midst of red roofs and huddled chimneys. From this hilltop, he could look down unseen on that bit of the universal life which was Dinwiddie. He could watch the town at work and at play; he could see those twenty-one thousand souls either moved as a unit by the secret forces which ignore individuality, or separated and enclosed by that impenetrable wall of personality which surrounded each atom among them. He could follow the divisions of class and the still deeper divisions of race as they were symbolized in the old brick walls, overgrown with young grasses, which girdled the ancient gardens in High Street. From the dazzling glimpses of white muslin under honeysuckle arbours, to the dusky forms that swarmed like spawn in the alleys, the life of Dinwiddie loved, hated, enjoyed, and suffered beneath him. And over this love and this hatred, this enjoyment and this suffering, there presided—an outward and visible sign of the triumph of industrialism—the imposing brick walls of the new Treadwell tobacco factory.

A soft voice spoke in his ear, and turning, he looked into the face of Mrs. Peachey, whom he had almost forgotten.

"You will find the sun warm in the afternoon, I am afraid," she murmured, still with her manner of pleasantly humouring him which he found later to be an unconscious expression of her half maternal, wholly feminine attitude toward his sex.

"Oh, I daresay it will be all right," he responded. "I shall work so hard that I shan't have time to bother about the weather."

Leaving the window, he gazed around the little room with an impulse of curiosity. Who had lived here before him? A clerk? A travelling salesman? Perhaps one of the numerous indigent gentlewomen that formed so large and so important a part of the population of Dinwiddie? The walls were smeared with a sickly blue wash, and in several places there were the marks left from the pictures of the preceding lodger. An old mahogany bureau, black with age and ill usage, stood crosswise in the corner behind the door, and reflected in the dim mirror he saw his own face looking back at him. A film of dust lay over everything in the room, over the muddy blue of the walls, over the strip of discoloured matting on the floor, over the few fine old pieces of furniture, fallen now into abject degradation. The handsome French bed, placed conveniently between door and window, stood naked to the eyes, with its cheap husk mattress rolled half back, and its bare slats, of which the two middle ones were tied together with rope, revealing conspicuously its descent from elegance into squalor. As he saw it, the room was the epitome of tragedy, yet in the centre of it, on one of the battered and broken-legged Heppelwhite chairs, sat Mrs. Peachey, rosy, plump, and pretty, regarding him with her slightly quizzical smile. "Yes, life, of course, is sad if you stop to think about it," her smile seemed to assure him; "but the main thing, after all, is to be happy in spite of it."

"Do you wish to stay here to-night?" she asked, seeing that he had put down his bag.

"If you will let me. But I am afraid it will be inconvenient."

She shook her head. "Not if you don't mind the dust. The room has been shut up for weeks, and the dust is so dreadful in the spring. The servants have gone out," she added, "but I'll bring you some sheets for your bed, and you can fill your pitcher from the spout at the end of the hall. Only be careful not to stumble over the step there. It is hard to see when the gas is not lit."

"You won't object to my putting shelves around the walls?" he asked, while she pushed the mattress into place with the light and condescending touch of one who preserves the aristocratic manner not only in tragedy, but even in toil. It was, indeed, her peculiar distinction, he came to know afterward, that she worked as gracefully as other women played.

"Couldn't you find room enough without them?" she inquired while her gaze left the mattress and travelled dubiously to the mantelpiece. "It seems a pity for you to go to any expense about shelves, doesn't it?"

"Oh, they won't cost much. I'll do the work myself, and I'll do it in the mornings when it won't disturb anybody. I daresay I'll have to push that bed around a bit in order to make space."

Something in his vibrant voice—so full of the richness and the buoyant energy of youth—made her look at him as she might have looked at one of her children, or at that overgrown child whom she had married. And just as she had managed Tom all his life by pretending to let him have his way, so she proceeded now by instinct to manage Oliver. "You dear boy! Of course you may turn things upside down if you want to. Only wait a few days until you are settled and have seen how you like it."

Then she tripped out with her springy step, which had kept its elasticity through war and famine, while Oliver, gazing after her, wondered whether it was philosophy or merely a love of pleasure that sustained her? Was it thought or the absence of thought that produced her wonderful courage?

He heard her tread on the stairs; then the sound passed to the front hall; and a minute later there floated up the laughter with which the assembled boarders received her. Closing the door, which she had left open, he turned back to the window and stared from his hilltop down on the red roofs of Dinwiddie. White as milk, the moonlight lay on the brick wall at the foot of the garden, and down the gradual hill rows of chimneys were outlined against the faintly dappled sky in the west. In the next yard a hollow tree looked as if it were cut out of silver, and beneath its boughs, which drooped into the alley, he could see the huddled figure of an aged negress who had fallen asleep on a flagstone. So still was the night that the very smoke appeared to hang suspended above the tops of the chimneys, as though it were too heavy to rise and yet too light to float downward toward the motionless trees. Under the pale beams the town lost its look of solidity and grew spectral. Nothing seemed to hold it to the earth except the stillness which held the fallen flowers of the syringa there also. Even the church towers showed like spires of thistledown, and the winding streets, which ran beside clear walls and dark shining gardens, trailed off from the ground into the silvery air. Only the black bulk of the Treadwell factory beside the river defied the magic of the moon's rays and remained a solid reminder of the brevity of all enchantment.

Gradually, while Oliver waited for Mrs. Peachey's return, he ceased to think of the furniture in his room; he ceased to think even of the way in which he should manage to do his work, and allowed his mind to dwell, almost with a feeling of ecstasy, on the memory of Virginia. He saw the mist of little curls on her temples, her blue eyes, with their good and gentle expression, and the look of radiant happiness which played like light over her features. The beauty of the night acted as a spur to his senses. He wanted companionship. He wanted the smile and the touch of a woman. He wanted to fall in love with a girl who had blue eyes and a mouth like a flower!

"It wouldn't take me ten minutes to become a fool about her," he thought. "Confound this moonlight, anyhow. It's making an idiot of me."

Like many persons of artistic sensibility, he had at times the feeling that his imagination controlled his conduct, and under the sharp pressure of it now, he began to picture what the end would be if he were to fling himself headlong in the direction where his desires were leading him. If he could only let himself go! If he could only defy the future! If he could only forget in a single crisis that he was a Treadwell!

"If I were the right sort, I suppose I'd rush in and make her fall in love with me, and then marry her and let her starve," he thought. "But somehow I can't. I'm either not enough of a genius or not enough of a Treadwell. When it comes to starving a woman in cold blood, my conscience begins to balk. There's only one thing it would balk at more violently, and that is starving my work. That's what Uncle Cyrus would like—nothing better. By Jove! the way he looked when he had the nerve to make that proposition! And I honestly believe he thought I was going to agree to it. I honestly believe he was surprised when I stood out against him. He's a downright idiot, that's what is the matter with him. Why, it would be a crime, nothing less than a crime, for me to give up and go hunting after freight orders. Any ninny can do that. James can do that—but he couldn't see, he positively couldn't see that I'd be wasted at it."

The vision of Cyrus had banished the vision of Virginia, and leaving the window, Oliver began walking rapidly back and forth between the washstand and the bare bedstead. The fire of his ambition, which opposition had fanned into a blaze, had never burned more brightly in his heart than it did at that instant. He felt capable not only of renouncing Virginia, but of reforming the world. While he walked there, he dedicated himself to art as exclusively as Cyrus had ever dedicated himself to money—since Nature, who had made the individual, had been powerless to eradicate this basic quality of the type. A Treadwell had always stood for success, and success meant merely seeing but one thing at a time and seeing that thing at every instant. It meant to Cyrus and to James the thought of money as absolutely as it meant to Oliver the thought of art. The way to it was the same, only the ideas that pointed the way were different. To Cyrus and to James, indeed, as to all Treadwells everywhere, the idea was hardly an idea at all, since it had been crystallized by long usage into a fact. The word "success" (and what was success except another name for the universal Treadwell spirit?) invariably assumed the image of the dollar in the mind of Cyrus, while to Oliver, since his thinking was less carefully cooerdinated, it was without shape or symbol. Pacing the dusty floor, with the pale moonlight brooding like a flock of white birds over the garden, the young man would have defined the word as embracing all the lofty aspirations in the human soul. It was the hour when youth scaled the heights and wrested the divine fire from the heavens. At the moment he was less an individual than the embodied age of two-and-twenty. He was intellect in adolescence—intellect finding its strength—intellect in revolt against the tyranny of industrialism.

The staircase creaked softly, and following a knock at the door, Mrs. Peachey entered with her arms full of bed-clothes.

"I am so sorry I kept you waiting, Mr. Treadwell, but I was obliged to stop to speak to a caller. Oh, thank you. Do you really know how to make up a bed? How very clever of you! I'm sure Mr. Peachey couldn't do such a thing if his life depended upon it. Men are so helpless that it surprises me—it really does—when they know how to do anything. Oh, of course, you have lived about the world so much that you have had to learn how to manage. And you've been abroad? How very interesting! Some day when I have the time you must tell me about it. Not that I should ever care to go myself, but I love to hear other people talk about their travels. Professor Trimble—he lived over there a great many years—gave a talk before the Ladies' Aid Society of our church, and everybody said it was quite as instructive as going one's self. And then, too, one escaped all the misery of seasickness."

All the time she was busily spreading his bed, while he assisted her with what she described to her husband afterward as "the most charming manner, just as if he enjoyed it." This charming manner, which was the outward expression of an inborn kindliness, won her entirely to his side before the bed-making was over. That any one so frank and pleasant, with such nice boyish eyes, and so rich a colour, should prove untrustworthy, was unbelievable to that part of her which ruled her judgment. And since this ruling part was not reason, but instinct, she possessed, perhaps, as infallible a guide to opinions as ever falls to the lot of erring humanity. "I know he's all right. Don't ask me how I know it, Mr. Peachey," she observed while she brushed her hair for the night; "I don't know how I know it, but I do know it."

Oliver, meanwhile, had thrown off his coat, and settled down to work under the flickering gas, at the end of the mantelpiece. Inspiration had seized him while he helped Mrs. Peachey make his bed, and his "charming manner," which had at first been natural enough, had become at last something of an effort. He was writing the second act of a play in which he meant to supplant the pretty shams of the stage by the aspect of sober reality. The play dealt with woman—with the new woman who has grown so old in the last twenty years—with the woman whose past is a cross upon which she crucifies both herself and the public. Like most men of twenty-two, he was convinced that he understood all about women, and like most men of any age, he was under the impression that women acted, thought, and felt, not as individuals, but as a sex. The classic phrases, "women are like that," and "women think so queerly about things," were on his lips as constantly as if he were an average male and not an earnest-minded student of human nature. But while the average male applies general principles loosely and almost unconsciously, with Oliver the habit was the result of a distinctly formulated philosophy. He had, as he would probably have put it, a feeling for reality, and the stage appeared to him, on the whole, to be the most effective vehicle for revealing the universe to itself. If he was not a genius, he possessed the unconquerable individualism of genius; and he possessed, also, a cleverness which could assume the manner of genius without apparent effort. His ability, which no one but Cyrus had ever questioned, may not have been of the highest order, but at least it was better stuff than had ever gone into the making of American plays. In the early eighties profound darkness still hung over the stage, for the intellect of a democracy, which first seeks an outlet in statesmanship, secondly in commerce, and lastly in art and literature, had hardly begun to express itself, with the immaturity of youth, in several of these latter fields. It was Oliver's distinction as well as his misfortune that he lived before his country was ready for him. Coming a quarter of a century later, he might have made a part of a national emancipation of intellect. Coming when he did, he stood merely for one of the spasmodic reactions against the dominant spirit. Unwritten history is full of such reactions, since it is by the accumulated energy of their revolts that the world moves on its way.

But at the age of twenty-two, though he was assured that he understood both woman and the universe in which she belonged, he was pathetically ignorant of his own place in the extravagance of Nature. With the rest of us, he would have been astounded at the suggestion that he might have been born to be wasted. Other things were wasted, he knew, since those who called Nature an economist had grossly flattered her. Types and races and revolutions were squandered with royal prodigality—but that he himself should be so was clearly unthinkable. Deep down in him there was the obstinate belief that his existence was a vital matter to the awful Power that ruled the universe; and while he worked that May evening at the second act of his great play, with the sweat raining from his brow in the sweltering heat, it was as impossible for him to conceive of ultimate failure as it was for him to realize that he should ever cease to exist. The air was stagnant, the light was bad, his stomach was empty, and he was tormented by the stinging of the gnats that circled around the flame—but he was gloriously happy with the happiness of a man who has given himself to an idea.



CHAPTER VII

THE ARTIST IN PHILISTIA

At dawn, after a sleepless night, Oliver dressed himself and made a cup of coffee on the spirit lamp he carried in his bag. While he drank, a sense of power passed over him like warmth. He was cheered, he was even exhilarated. A single cup of this miraculous fluid, and his depression was vanquished as no argument could have vanquished it. Without sermonizing, without logic even, the demon of pessimism, which has its home in an empty stomach, was expelled into spiritual darkness. He remembered that he had eaten nothing for almost twenty-four hours (having missed yesterday's dinner), and this thought carried him downstairs, where he begged a roll from a yawning negro cook in the kitchen. Coming up to his room again, he poured out a second cup of coffee, added a dash of cream, which he had brought with him in a handleless pitcher, and leaning comfortably back in the worn horsehair covered chair by the window, relapsed into a positive orgy of enjoyment. His whole attitude toward the universe had been altered by a bubbling potful of brown liquid, and the tremendous result—so grotesquely out of proportion to its cause—appeared to him at the minute entirely right and proper. Everything was entirely right and proper, and he felt able to approve with a clear conscience the Divine arrangement of existence.

Outside, the sunrise, which he could not see, was flooding the roofs of Dinwiddie with a dull golden light. The heat had given way before the soft wind which smelt of flowers, and scattered tiny shreds of mist, like white rose-leaves, over the moist gardens. The look of unreality, which had been a fiction of the moonlight, faded gradually as the day broke, and left the harsh outlines and the blackened chimneys of the town unsoftened by any shadow of illusion. Presently, as the sunlight fell aslant the winding streets, there was a faint stir in the house; but since the day was Sunday, and Dinwiddie observed the Sabbath by sleeping late, this stir was slow and drowsy, like the movement of people but half awake. First, a dilapidated milk wagon rumbled through the alleys to the back gates, where dishevelled negro maids ran out with earthenware pitchers, which went back foaming around the brims. Then the doors of the houses opened slowly; the green outside shutters were flung wide; and an army of coloured servants bearing brooms, appeared on the porches, and made expressive gestures to one another over the railings. Occasionally, when one lifted a doormat in order to beat the dust out of it, she would forget to put it down again while she stared after the milk cart. Nobody—not even the servants—seemed to regard the wasted hours as of any importance. It struck Oliver that the only use Dinwiddie made of time was to kill it.

He fell to work with enthusiasm, and he was still working when the reverberations of the breakfast bell thundered in his ears. Going downstairs to the dining-room, he found several thin and pinched looking young women, with their hats on and Sunday-school lessons beside their plates. Mrs. Peachey, still smiling her quizzical smile, sat at the head of the table, pouring coffee out of an old silver coffee-pot, which was battered in on one side as if it had seen active service in the war. When, after a few hurried mouthfuls, he asked permission to return to his work, she received his excuses with the same cheerful acquiescence with which she accepted the decrees of Providence. It is doubtful, indeed, if her serenity, which was rooted in an heroic hopelessness, could have been shaken either by the apologies of a boarder or by the appearance of an earthquake. Her happiness was of that invulnerable sort which builds its nest not in the luxuriant gardens of the emotions, but in the bare, rock-bound places of the spirit. Courage, humour, an adherence to conviction which is wedded to an utter inability to respect any opinion except one's own; loyalty which had sprung from a principle into a passion; a fortifying trust, less in the Power that rules the universe than in the peculiar virtues of the Episcopal prayer-book when bound in black; a capacity for self-sacrifice which had made the South a nation of political martyrs; complacency, exaltation, narrowness of vision, and uncompromising devotion to an ideal—these were the qualities which had passed from the race into the individual and through the individual again back into the very blood and the fibre of the race.

"Do you work on Sunday?" she inquired sweetly, yet with the faintest tinge of disapproval in her tone.

He nodded. "Once in a while."

"Saint James' Church is only a few minutes' walk from here; but I suppose you are a Presbyterian, like your uncle?"

His respectability he saw hung in the balance—for to have avowed himself a freethinker would have dyed him socially only one shade less black than to have declared himself a Republican—so, escaping without a further confession of faith, he ascended to his room and applied himself anew to the regeneration of the American drama. The dull gold light, which slept on the brick walls, began presently to slant in long beams over the roofs, which mounted like steps up the hillside, while as the morning advanced, the mellow sound of chimes floated out on the stillness, calling Dinwiddians to worship, as it had called their fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers before them. The Sabbath calm, so heavy that an axe could hardly have dispelled it, filled the curving streets and the square gardens like an invisible fog—a fog that dulled the brain and weighed down the eyelids and made the grim walls of the Treadwell tobacco factory look as if they were rising out of a dream. Into this dream, under the thick boughs of mulberry trees, there passed presently a thin file of people, walking alone or in pairs. The men were mostly old; but the women were of every age, and all except the very young were clad in mourning and wore hanging veils on their bonnets. Though Oliver did not know it, he was, in reality, watching a procession of those who, having once embraced a cause and lost it, were content to go on quietly in a hush of memory for the rest of life. Passion had once inflamed them, but they moved now in the inviolable peace which comes only to those who have nothing left that they may lose. At the end of the line, in the middle of the earthen roadbed walked an old horse, with an earnest face and a dump cart hitched to him, and in the cart were the boxes of books which Susan had helped Oliver to pack the evening before. "Who'd have thought she'd get them here so soon?" he said to himself. "By George, she is a wonder! And Sunday too!"

The old horse, having reached the hilltop, disappeared behind the next house, and ten minutes later Mrs. Peachey escorted the smallest of his boxes into his bedroom.

"Your cousin is downstairs, but I didn't know whether you wanted me to bring her up here or not?" she said.

"Of course you do, don't you, Oliver?" asked Susan's voice, and entering the room, she coolly presented her cheek to him. This coolness, which impressed him almost as much as her extraordinary capability, made him feel sometimes as if she had built a stone wall between them. Years afterwards he asked himself if this was why his admiration for her had never warmed into love?

"Well, you're a good one!" he exclaimed, as she drew back from the casual embrace.

"I knew you were here," she answered, "because John Henry Pendleton" (was it his imagination or did the faintest blush tinge her face?) "saw Major Peachey last night and told me on his way home."

"You can't help me straighten up, I suppose? The room looks a sight."

"Not now—I'm on my way to church, and I'll be late if I don't hurry." She wore a grey cashmere dress, made with a draped polonaise which accentuated her rather full hips, and a hat with a steeple crown that did not suit the Treadwell arch of her nose. He thought she looked plain, but he did not realize that in another dress and hat she might have been almost beautiful—that she was, indeed, one of those large-minded, passionately honest women who, in their scorn of pretence or affectation, rarely condescend to make the best of their appearances. To have consciously selected a becoming hat would have seemed to her a species of coquetry, and coquetry, even the most innocent, she held in abhorrence. Her sincerity was not only intellectual; it was of that rarer sort which has its root in a physical instinct.

After she had gone, he worked steadily for a couple of hours, and then opened one of the boxes Susan had brought and arranged a few of his books in a row on the mantelpiece. It was while he stood still undecided whether to place "The Origin of Species" or "The Critique of Pure Reason" on the end nearest his bed, that a knock came at his door, and the figure of Miss Priscilla Batte, attired in a black silk dolman with bugle trimmings, stood revealed on the threshold.

"Sally Peachey just told me that you were here," she said, enfolding him in the embrace which seemed common to Dinwiddie, "so I thought I would speak to you on my way back from church. I don't suppose you've ever heard of me, but I am your cousin Priscilla Batte."

Though he was entirely unaware of it, the moment was a momentous one in his experience. The visit of Miss Priscilla may have appeared an insignificant matter to those who have not learned that the insignificant is merely the significant seen from another angle—but the truth was that it marked a decisive milestone in his emotional history. Even Mrs. Peachey, who had walked back from church with her, and who harboured the common delusion that Life selects only slim bodies for its secret agents, did not dream as she watched that enormous figure toil up the staircase that she was gazing upon the movement of destiny. Had Oliver been questioned as to the dominant influence in shaping his career, he would probably have answered blindly, but sincerely, "The Critique of Pure Reason"—so far was he from suspecting that his philosophy had less control over his future than had the accident that his mother was the third cousin of Priscilla Batte.

He pushed a chair into the widest space he could find, and she seated herself as modestly as if she were not the vehicle of the invisible Powers. The stiff grosgrain strings of her bonnet stood out like small wings under her double chin, and on her massive bosom he saw the cameo brooch bearing the war-like profile of Athene. As she sat there, beaming complacently upon him, with her prayer-book and hymnal held at a decent angle in front of her, she seemed to Oliver to dominate the situation simply by the solid weight of her physical presence. In her single person she managed to produce the effect of a majority. As a mere mass of humanity she carried conviction.

"I was sorry not to see you at church," she said, "but I suppose you went with Cyrus." As he shook his head silently, she added hastily, "I hope there's nothing wrong between you and him."

"Nothing except that I have decided not to go into the tobacco business."

"But what in the world are you going to do? How are you going to live if he doesn't provide for you?"

"Oh, I'll manage somehow. You needn't worry, Cousin Priscilla." He smiled at her across the unfinished page of his play, and this smile won her as it had won Mrs. Peachey. Like most spinsters she had remained a creature of sentiment, and the appeal of the young and masculine she found difficult to resist. After all he was a charming boy, her heart told her. What he needed was merely some good girl to take care of him and convert him to the Episcopal Church. And immediately, as is the way with women, she became as anxious to sacrifice Virginia to this possible redemption of the male as she had been alarmed by the suspicion that such a desire existed in Susan. Though it would have shocked her to hear that she held any opinion in common with Mohammed (who appeared in the universal history she taught only in a brief list of "false prophets"), there existed deep down in her the feeling that a man's soul was of greater consequence than a woman's in the eyes of God.

"I hope you haven't been foolish, Oliver," she said in a tone which conveyed an emotional sympathy as well as a moral protest.

"That depends upon what you mean by foolishness," he returned, still smiling.

"Well, I don't think you ought to quarrel with Cyrus. He may not be perfect. I am not saying that he mightn't have been a better husband, for instance—though I always hold the woman to blame when a marriage turns out a failure—but when all's said and done, he is a great man, Oliver."

He shook his head impatiently. "I've heard that until I'm sick of it—forgive me, Cousin Priscilla."

"Everybody admires him—that is, everybody except Belinda."

"I should say she'd had excellent opportunities for forming an opinion. What's he ever done, anyhow, that's great," he asked almost angrily, "except accumulate money? It seems to me that you've gone mad over money in Dinwiddie. I suppose it's the reaction from having to do without it so long."

Miss Priscilla, whose native serenity drew strength from another's loss of temper, beamed into his flushed face as if she enjoyed the spectacle of his heightened colour.

"You oughtn't to talk like that, Oliver," she said. "How on earth are you going to fall in love and marry, if you haven't any money to keep a wife? What you need is a good girl to look after you. I never married, myself, but I am sometimes tempted to believe that even an unhappy marriage is better than none at all. At least it gives you something to think about."

"I have enough to think about already. I have my work."

"But work isn't a wife."

"I know it isn't, but I happen to like it better."

Her matchmaking instinct had received a check, but the placid determination which was the basis of her character was merely reinforced thereby to further efforts. It was for his good to marry (had not her mother and her grandmother instilled into her the doctrine that an early marriage was the single masculine safeguard, since, once married, a man's morality became not his own business, but his wife's), and marry him she was resolved to do, either with his cheerful co-operation, or, if necessary, without it. He had certainly looked at Virginia as if he admired her, and surely a girl like that—lovely, loving, unselfish to a fault, and trained from her infancy to excel in all the feminine virtues—surely, this perfect flower of sex specialization could have been designed by Providence only for the delight and the sanctification of man.

"Then, if that is the way your mind is made up I hope you will be careful not to trifle with the feelings of a girl like Jinny Pendleton," she retorted severely.

By a single stroke of genius, inspired by the diplomacy inherent in a sex whose chief concern has been the making of matches, she transfixed his imagination as skilfully as she might have impaled a butterfly on a bodkin. While he stared at her she could almost see the iridescent wings of his fancy whirling madly around the idea by which she had arrested their flight. Trifle with Virginia! Trifle with that radiant vision of girlhood! All the chivalry of youth revolted from the suggestion, and he thought again of the wistful adoration in the eyes of a Perugino virgin. Was it possible that she could ever look at him with that angelic expression of weakness and surrender? The fire of first love, which had smouldered under the weight of his reason, burst suddenly into flame. His thoughts, which had been as clear as a geometrical figure, became suddenly blurred by the mystery upon which passion lives. He was seized by a consuming wonder about Virginia, and this wonder was heightened when he remembered the appealing sweetness in her face as she smiled up at him. Did she already love him? Had he conquered by a look the exquisite modesty of her soul? With this thought the memory of her virginal shyness stung his senses as if it were the challenge of sex. Chivalry, love, vanity, curiosity—all these circled helplessly around the invisible axis of Miss Priscilla's idea.

"What do you mean? Surely you don't suppose—she hasn't said anything——"

"You don't imagine that Jinny is the kind of girl who would say anything, do you?" inquired Miss Priscilla.

"But there must be some reason why you should have——"

"If there is, my dear boy, I'm not going to tell it," she answered with a calmness which he felt, in his excited state, to be positively infernal. "All I meant was to warn you not to trifle with any girl as innocent of life as Jinny Pendleton is. I don't want her to get her heart broken before she has the chance to make some man happy."

"Do you honestly mean to imply that I could break her heart if I tried to?"

"I don't mean to imply anything. I am only telling you that she is just the kind of girl a man would want to marry. She is her mother all over again, and I don't believe Lucy has ever thought of herself a minute since she married."

"She looks like an angel," he said, "but——"

"And she isn't a bit the kind of girl that Susan is, though they are so devoted. Now, I can understand a man not wanting to marry Susan, because she is so full of ideas, and has a mind of her own about things. But Jinny is different."

Then, seeing that she had "unsettled" his mind sufficiently for her purpose, she rose and looked around the room with the inordinate curiosity about details which kept her still young in spite of her sixty years.

"You don't mean to tell me you brought all those books with you, Oliver?" she asked. "Why on earth don't you get rid of some of them?"

"I can't spare any of them. I never know which one I may want next."

"What are those you're putting on the mantelpiece? Isn't Darwin the name of the man who said we were all descended from monkeys?"

As he made no answer to this except to press her hand and thank her for coming, she left the mantelpiece and wandered to the window, where her gaze rested, with a look of maternal satisfaction, on the roofs of Dinwiddie.

"It's a jolly view of the town, isn't it?" he said. "There's nothing like looking down from a hilltop to give one a sense of superiority."

"You can see straight into Mrs. Goode's backyard," she replied, "and I never knew before that she left her clothes hanging on the line on Sunday. That comes, I suppose, from not looking after her servants and gadding about on all sorts of charities. She told me the other day that she belonged to every charitable organization in Dinwiddie."

"Is she Abby's mother?"

"Yes, but you'd never imagine they were any relation. Abby gave me more trouble than any girl I ever taught. She never would learn the multiplication table, and I don't believe to this day she knows it. There isn't any harm in her except that she is a scatter-brain, and will make eyes or burst. I sometimes think it isn't her fault—that she was just born man-crazy."

"She's awfully good fun," he laughed.

"Are you going to her garden party on Wednesday?"

"I accepted before I quarrelled with Uncle Cyrus, but I'll have to get out of it now."

"Oh, I wouldn't. All the pretty girls in town will be there."

"Are there any plain ones? And what becomes of them?"

"The Lord only knows! Old Judge Bassett used to say that there wouldn't be any preserves and pickles in the world if all women were born good-looking. I declare I never realized how small the tower of Saint James' Church is!"

For a moment he hesitated, and when he spoke his voice had taken a deeper tone. "Will Virginia Pendleton be at the party?" he asked.

"She wouldn't miss it for anything in the world. Miss Willy Whitlow was sewing there yesterday on a white organdie dress for her to wear. Have you ever seen Jinny in white organdie? I always tell Lucy the child looks sweet enough to eat when she puts it on."

He laughed again, but not as he had laughed at her description of Abby. "Ask her please to put blue bows on her flounces and a red rose in her hair," he said.

"Then you are going?"

"Not if I can possibly keep away. Oh, Cousin Priscilla, why didn't I inherit my soul from your side of the family."

"Well, for my part I don't believe in all this talk about inheritance. Nobody ever heard of inheriting anything but money when I was a girl. You've got the kind of soul the good Lord wanted to put into you and that's all there is about it."

When he returned from assisting her in her panting and difficult descent of the stairs, he sat down again before the unfinished act of his play, but his eyes wandered from the manuscript to the town, which lay as bright and still in the sunlight as if it were imprisoned in crystal. The wonder aroused in his mind by Miss Priscilla's allusion to Virginia persisted as a disturbing element in the background of his thoughts. What had she meant? Was it possible that there was truth in the wildest imaginings of his vanity? Virginia's face, framed in her wreath of hair, floated beneath the tower of Saint James' Church at which he was gazing, and the radiant goodness in her look mounted like a draught of strong wine to his brain. Passion, which he had discounted in his plans for the future, appeared suddenly to shake the very foundations of his life. Never before had the spirit and the flesh united in the appeal of a woman to his imagination. Never before had the divine virgin of his dreams assumed the living red and white of young girlhood. He thought how soft her hair must be to the touch, and how warm her mouth would glow from his kisses. With a kind of wonder he realized that this was first love—that it was first love he had felt when he met her eyes under the dappled sunlight in High Street. The memory of her beauty was like a net which enmeshed his thoughts when he tried to escape it. Look where he would he saw always a cloud of dark hair and two deep blue eyes that shone as softly as wild hyacinths after a shower. Think as he would he met always the haunting doubt—"What did she mean? Can it be true that she already loves me?" So small an incident as Miss Priscilla's Sunday call had not only upset his work for the morning, but had changed in an instant the even course of his future. He decided suddenly that he must see Virginia again—that he would go to Abby Goode's party, and though the party was only three days off, it seemed to him that the waiting would be almost unbearable. Only after he had once seen her would it be possible, he felt, to stop thinking of her and to return comfortably to his work.



CHAPTER VIII

WHITE MAGIC

In the centre of her bedroom, with her back turned to that bookcase which was filled with sugared false-hoods about life, Virginia was standing very straight while Miss Willy Whitlow knelt at her feet and sewed pale blue bows on her overskirt of white organdie. Occasionally, the door opened softly, and the rector or one of the servants looked in to see "Jinny" or "Miss Jinny dressed for the party," and when such interruptions occurred, Mrs. Pendleton, who sat on an ottoman at the dressmaker's right hand and held a spool of thread and a pair of scissors in her lap, would say sternly, "Don't move, Jinny, stand straight or Miss Willy won't get the bows right." At these warning words, Virginia's thin shoulders would spring back and the filmy ruffles stir gently over her girlish breast.

Through the open window, beyond the drooping boughs of the paulownia trees, a few wistful stars shone softly through the web of purple twilight. The night smelt of a thousand flowers—all the mingled sweetness of old gardens floated in on the warm wind and caressed the faded figure of Miss Willy as lovingly as it did the young and radiant vision of Virginia. Once or twice the kneeling seamstress had glanced up at the girl and thought: "I wonder how it feels to be as lovely as that?" Then she sighed as one who had missed her heritage, for she had been always plain, and went on patiently sewing the bows on Virginia's overskirt. "You can't have everything in this world, and I ought to be thankful that I've kept out of the poorhouse," she added a minute later when a little stab of envy went through her at hearing the girl laugh from sheer happiness.

"Am I all right, mother? Tell me how I look."

"Lovely, darling. There won't be any one there sweeter than you are."

The maternal passion lit Mrs. Pendleton's eyes with splendour, and her worn face was illuminated as if a lamp had been held suddenly close to it. All day, in spite of a neuralgic pain in her temples, she had worked hard hemming the flounces for Virginia's dress, and into every stitch had gone something of the divine ecstasy of martyrdom. Her life centred so entirely in her affections that apart from love she could be hardly said to exist at all. In spite of her trials she was probably the happiest woman in Dinwiddie, for she had found her happiness in the only way it is ever won—by turning her back on it. Never once had she thought of it as an end to be pursued, never even as a flower to be plucked from the wayside. It is doubtful if she had ever stopped once in the thirty years of her marriage to ask herself the questions: "Is this what I want to do?" or "Does this make me happy?" Love meant to her not grasping, but giving, and in serving others she had served herself unawares. Even her besetting sin of "false pride" she indulged not on her own account, but because she, who could be humble enough for herself, could not bear to associate the virtue of humility with either her husband or her daughter.

The last blue bow was attached to the left side of the overskirt, and while Miss Willy rose from her knees, Virginia crossed to the window and gazed up at the pale stars over the tops of the paulownias. A joy so vibrant that it was like living music swelled in her breast. She was young! She was beautiful! She was to be loved! This preternatural certainty of happiness was so complete that the chilling disappointments of the last few days had melted before it like frost in the sunlight. It was founded upon an instinct so much deeper, so much more primitive than reason, that it resisted the logic of facts with something of the exalted obstinacy with which faith has resisted the arguments of philosophy. Like all young and inexperienced creatures, she was possessed by the feeling that there exists a magnetic current of attraction between desire and the object which it desires. "Something told" her that she was meant for happiness, and the voice of this "something" was more convincing than the chaotic march of phenomena. Sorrow, decay, death—these appeared to her as things which must happen inevitably to other people, but from which she should be forever shielded by some beneficent Providence. She thought of them as vaguely as she did of the remote tragedies of history. They bore no closer relation to her own life than did the French Revolution or the beheading of Charles the First. It was natural, if sad, that Miss Willy Whitlow should fade and suffer. The world, she knew, was full of old people, of weary people, of blighted people; but she cherished passionately the belief that these people were all miserable because, somehow, they had not chosen to be happy. There appeared something positively reprehensible in a person who could go sighing upon so kind and beautiful a planet. All things, even joy, seemed to her a mere matter of willing. It was impossible that any hostile powers should withstand the radiant energy of her desire.

Leaning there from the window, with her face lifted to the stars, and her mother's worshipping gaze on her back, she thought of the "happiness" which would be hers in the future: and this "happiness" meant to her only the solitary experience of love. Like all the women of her race, she had played gallantly and staked her world upon a single chance. Whereas a man might have missed love and still have retained life, with a woman love and life were interchangeable terms. That one emotion represented not only her sole opportunity of joy, it constituted as well her single field of activity. The chasm between marriage and spinsterhood was as wide as the one between children and pickles. Yet so secret was this intense absorption in the thought of romance, that Mrs. Pendleton, forgetting her own girlhood, would have been startled had she penetrated that lovely head and discovered the ecstatic dreams that flocked through her daughter's brain. Though love was the one window through which a woman might look on a larger world, she was fatuously supposed neither to think of it nor to desire it until it had offered itself unsolicited. Every girl born into the world was destined for a heritage of love or of barrenness—yet she was forbidden to exert herself either to invite the one or to avoid the other. For, in spite of the fiery splendour of Southern womanhood during the war years, to be feminine, in the eyes of the period, was to be morally passive.

"Your father has come to see your dress, dear," said her mother in the voice of a woman from whom sentiment overflowed in every tone, in every look, in every gesture.

Turning quickly, Virginia met the smiling eyes of the rector—those young and visionary eyes, which Nature, with a wistful irony, had placed beneath beetling brows in the creased and wrinkled face of an old man. The eyes were those of a prophet—of one who had lived his life in the light of a transcendent inspiration rather than by the prosaic rule of practical reason; but the face belonged to a man who had aged before his time under the accumulated stress of physical burdens.

"How do I look, father? Am I pretty?" asked Virginia, stretching her thin young arms out on either side of her, and waiting with parted lips to drink in his praise.

"Almost as beautiful as your mother, and she grows lovelier every day that she lives, doesn't she?"

His adoring gaze, which held the spirit of beauty as a crystal holds the spirit of light, passed from the glowing features of Virginia to the lined and pallid face of his wife. In that gaze there had been no shadow of alteration for thirty years. It is doubtful even if he had seen any change in her since he had first looked upon her face, and thought it almost unearthly in its angelic fairness. From the physical union they had entered into that deeper union of souls in which the body dissolves as the shadow dissolves into the substance, and he saw her always as she had appeared to him on that first morning, as if the pool of sunlight in which she had stood had never darkened around her. Yet to Virginia his words brought a startled realization that her mother—her own mother, with her faded face and her soft, anxious eyes—had once been as young and radiant as she. The love of her parents for each other had always seemed to her as natural and as far removed from the cloudless zone of romance as her own love for them—for, like most young creatures, she regarded love as belonging, with bright eyes and rosy cheeks, to the blissful period of youth.

"I hear John Henry's ring, darling. Are you ready?" asked Mrs. Pendleton.

"In a minute. Is the rose right in my hair?" replied Virginia, turning her profile towards her mother, while she flung a misty white scarf over her shoulders.

"Quite right, dear. I hope you will have a lovely time. I shall sit up for you, so you needn't bother to take a key."

"But you'll be so tired. Can't you make her go to bed, father?"

"I couldn't close my eyes till I knew you were safely home, and heard how you'd enjoyed yourself," answered Mrs. Pendleton, as they slowly descended the staircase, Virginia leading the way, and the rest following in a procession behind her. Turning at the gate, with her arm in John Henry's, the girl saw them standing in the lighted doorway, with their tender gaze following her, and the faces of the little seamstress and the two coloured servants staring over their shoulders. Trivial as the incident was, it was one of the moments which stood out afterwards in Virginia's memory as though a white light had fallen across it. Of such simple and expressive things life is woven, though the years had not taught her this on that May evening.

On the Goodes' lawn lanterns bloomed, like yellow flowers among the branches of poplar trees, and beneath them Mrs. Goode and Abby—a loud, handsome girl, with a coarsened complexion and a "sporting" manner—received their guests and waved them on to a dancing platform which had been raised between a rose-crowned summer-house and the old brick wall at the foot of the garden. Ropes were stretched over the platform, from the roof of the summer-house to a cherry tree at the end of the walk, and on these more lanterns of red, blue, and yellow paper were hanging. The air was scented with honeysuckle, and from an obscure corner behind a trellis the sound of a waltz floated. As music it was not of a classic order, but this did not matter since nobody was aware of it; and Dinwiddie, which developed quite a taste for Wagner at the beginning of the next century, could listen in the eighties with what was perhaps a sincerer pleasure, to stringed instruments, a little rough, but played with fervour by mulatto musicians. As Virginia drifted off in John Henry's arms for the first dance, which she had promised him, she thought: "I wonder if he will not come after all?" and a pang shot through her heart where the daring joy had been only a moment before. Then the music grew suddenly heavy while she felt her feet drag in the waltz. The smell of honeysuckle made her sad as if it brought back to her senses an unhappy association which she could not remember, and it seemed to her that her soul and body trembled, like a bent flame, into an attitude of expectancy.

"Let me stop a minute. I want to watch the others," she said, drawing back into the scented dusk under a rose arbour.

"But don't you want to fill your card? If the men once catch sight of you, you won't have a dance left."

"No—no, I want to watch a while," she said, with so strange an accent of irritation that he stared at her in surprise. The suspense in her heart hurt her like a drawn cord in throbbing flesh, and she felt angry with John Henry because he was so dull that he could not see how she suffered. In the distance, under the waving gilded leaves of the poplars, she saw Abby laughing up into a man's face, and she thought: "Can he possibly be in love with Abby? Some men are mad about her, but I know he isn't. He could never like a loud woman, and, besides, he couldn't have looked at me that way if he hadn't cared." Then it seemed to her that something of the aching suspense in her own heart stole into Abby's laughing face while she watched it, and from Abby it passed onward into the faces of all the girls who were dancing on the raised platform. Suspense! Was that a woman's life, after all? Never to be able to go out and fight for what one wanted! Always to sit at home and wait, without moving a foot or lifting a hand toward happiness! Never to dare gallantly! Never even to suffer openly! Always to will in secret, always to hope in secret, always to triumph or to fail in secret. Never to be one's self—never to let one's soul or body relax from the attitude of expectancy into the attitude of achievement. For the first time, born of the mutinous longing in her heart, there came to her the tragic vision of life. The faces of the girls, whirling in white muslin to the music of the waltz, became merged into one, and this was the face of all womanhood. Love, sorrow, hope, regret, wonder, all the sharp longing and the slow waiting of the centuries—above all the slow waiting—these things were in her brief vision of that single face that looked back at her out of the whirling dance. Then the music stopped, the one face dissolved into many faces, and from among them Susan passed under the swinging lanterns and came towards her.

"Oh, Jinny, where have you been hiding? I promised Oliver I would find you for him. He says he came only to look at you."

The music began joyously again; the young leaves, gilded by the yellow lantern-light, danced in the warm wind as if they were seized by the spirit of melody; and from the dusk of the trellis the ravished sweetness of honeysuckle flooded the garden with fragrance. With the vanished sadness in her heart there fled the sadness in the waltz and in the faces of the girls who danced to the music. Waiting no longer seemed pain to her, for it was enriched now by the burning sweetness of fulfilment.

Suddenly, for she had not seen him approach, she was conscious that he was at her side, looking down at her beneath a lantern which was beginning to flicker. A sense of deep peace—of perfect contentment with the world as God planned it—took possession of her. Even the minutes of suspense seemed good because they had brought at last this swift rush of happiness. Every line of his face—of that face which had captured her imagination as though it had been the face of her dreams—was illumined by the quivering light that gilded the poplars. His eyes were so close to hers that she saw little flecks of gold on the brown, and she grew dizzy while she looked into them, as if she stood on a height and feared to turn lest she should lose her balance and fall. A delicious stillness, which began in her brain and passed to her throbbing pulses, enveloped her like a perfume. While she stood there she was incapable of thought—except the one joyous thought that this was the moment for which she had waited since the hour of her birth. Never could she be the same afterwards! Never could she be unhappy again in the future! For, like other mortals in other ecstatic instants, she surrendered herself to the intoxicating illusion of their immortality.

After that silence, so charged with emotion for them both, it seemed that when he spoke it must be to utter words that would enkindle the world to beauty; but he said merely: "Is this dance free? I came only to speak to you."

His look added, "I came because my longing had grown unbearable"; and though she replied only to his words, it was his look that made the honeysuckle-trellis, the yellow lanterns, and the sky, with its few soft stars, go round like coloured balls before her eyes. The world melted away from her, and the distance between her and the whirling figures in white muslin seemed greater than the distance between star and star. She had the sense of spiritual remoteness, of shining isolation, which ecstasy brings to the heart of youth, as though she had escaped from the control of ordinary phenomena and stood in a blissful pause beyond time and space. It was the supreme moment of love; and to her, whose soul acknowledged no other supremacy than that of love, it was, also, the supreme moment of life.

His face, as he gazed down at her under the swinging leaves, seemed to her as different from all other faces as the exquisite violence in her soul was different from all other emotions she had ever known. She knew nothing more of him than that she could not be happy away from him. She needed no more infallible proof of his perfection than the look in his eyes when he smiled at her. So convincing was the argument of his smile that it was not only impregnable against any assault of facts, but rendered futile even the underlying principle of reason. Had Aristotle himself risen from his grave to prove to her that blind craving when multiplied by blind possession does not equal happiness, his logic would have been powerless before that unconquerable instinct which denied its truth. And around them little white moths, fragile as rose-leaves, circled deliriously in the lantern-light, for they, also, obeyed an unconquerable instinct which told them that happiness dwelt in the flame above which they were whirling.

"I am glad you wore blue ribbons" he said suddenly.

Her lashes trembled and fell, but they could not hide the glow that shone in her eyes and in the faint smile which trembled, like an edge of light, on her lips.

"Will you come into the summer-house and sit out this dance?" he asked when she did not speak, and she followed him under the hanging clusters of early roses to a bench in the dusk beside a little rustic table. Here, after a moment's silence, he spoke again recklessly, yet with a certain constraint of manner.

"I suppose I oughtn't to have come here to-night."

"Why not?" Their glances, bright as swords, crossed suddenly, and it seemed to her that the music grew louder. Had it been of any use, she would have prayed Life to dole the minutes out, one by one, like a miser. And all the time she was thinking: "This is the moment I've waited for ever since I was born. It has come. I am in the midst of it. How can I keep it forever?"

"Well, I haven't any business thinking about anything but my work," he answered. "I've broken with my uncle, you know. I'm as poor as a church mouse and I'll never be better off until I get a play on the stage. For the next few years I've got to cut out everything but hard work."

"Yes." Her tongue was paralyzed; she couldn't say what she felt, and everything else seemed to her horribly purposeless and ineffectual. She wondered passionately if he thought her a fool, for she could not look into his mind and discover how adorable he found her monosyllabic responses. The richness of her beauty combined with the poverty of her speech made an irresistible appeal to the strongest part of him, which was not his heart, but his imagination. He wondered what she would say if she were really to let herself go, and this wonder began gradually to enslave him.

"That's the reason I hadn't any business coming here," he added, "but the truth is I've wanted to see you again ever since that first afternoon. I got to wondering whether," he laughed in an embarrassed way, and added with an attempt at levity, "whether you would wear a red rose in your hair."

At his change of tone, she reached up suddenly, plucked the rose from her hair and flung it out on the grass. Her action, which belied her girlish beauty so strangely that only her mother would have recognized it as characteristic of the hidden force of the woman, held him for an instant speechless under her laughing eyes. Then turning away, he picked up the rose and put it into his pocket.

"I suppose you will never tell me why you did that?" he asked.

She shook her head. "I can't tell. I don't know. Something took me."

"Did you think I came just for the rose?"

"I didn't think."

"If I came for the rose, I ought to go. I wish I could. Do you suppose I'll be able to work again now that I've seen you? I've told myself for three days that if I could only see you again I'd be able to stop thinking about you."

She was not looking at him, but in every line of her figure, in every quiver of her lashes, in every breath that she drew, he read the effect of his words. It was as if her whole palpitating loveliness had become the vehicle of an exquisite entreaty. Her soul seemed to him to possess the purity, not of snow, but of flame, and this flame, in whose light nothing evil could live, curved towards him as if blown by a wind. He felt suddenly that he was swept onward by some outside power which was stronger than his will. An enchantment had fallen over him, and at one and the same instant he longed to break the power of the spell and knew that life would cease to be worth living if he were ever to do so. He saw her eyes, like blue flowers in the soft dusk, and the mist of curls on her temples stirred gently in the scented breeze that blew over the garden. All the sweetness of the world was gathered into the little space that she filled. Every impulse of joy he had ever felt—memories of autumn roads, of starlit mountains, of summer fields where bees drifted in golden clouds—all these were packed like honey into that single minute of love. And with the awakening of passion, there came the exaltation, the consciousness of illimitable possibilities which passion brings to the young. Never before had he realized the power that was in him! Never until this instant had he seen his own soul in the making! All the unquenchable faith of youth burned at white heat in the flame which his desire had kindled. He felt himself divided between an invincible brutality and an invincible tenderness. He would have fought with beasts for the sake of the gentle and passive creature beside him, yet he would have died rather than sully the look of angelic goodness with which she regarded him. To have her always gentle, always passive, never reaching out her hand, never descending to his level, but sitting forever aloof and colourless, waiting eternally, patient, beautiful and unwearied, to crown the victory—this was what the conquering male in him demanded.

"I ought to go," he said, so ineffectual was speech to convey the tumult within his brain. "I am keeping you from the others."

She had shrunk back into the dimness beyond the circle of lanterns, and he saw her face like a pale moon under the clustering rose-leaves. Her very breath seemed suspended, and there was a velvet softness in her look and in the gesture of timid protest with which she responded to his halting words. She was putting forth all her woman's power as innocently as the honeysuckle puts forth its fragrance. The white moths whirling in their brief passion over the lantern-flame were not more helpless before the movement of those inscrutable forces which we call Life. A strange stillness surrounded her—as though she were separated by a circle of silence from the dancers beyond the rose-crowned walls of the summer-house—and into this stillness there passed, like an invisible current, the very essence of womanhood. The longing of all the dead women of her race flowed through her into the softness of the spring evening. Things were there which she could know only through her blood—all the mute patience, all the joy that is half fear, all the age-long dissatisfaction with the merely physical end of love—these were in that voiceless entreaty for happiness; and mingled with them, there were the inherited ideals of self-surrender, of service, pity, loyalty, and sacrifice.

"I wish I could help you," she said, and her voice thrilled with the craving to squander herself magnificently in his service.

"You are an angel, and I'm a selfish beast to bring you my troubles."

"I don't think you are selfish—of course you have to think of your work—a man's work means so much to him."

"It's wonderful of you to feel that," he replied; and, indeed, at the instant while he searched her eyes in the dusk, the words seemed to him to embody all the sympathetic understanding with which his imagination endowed her. How perfectly her face expressed the goodness and gentleness of her soul! What a companion she would make to a man! What a lover! What a wife! Always soft, exquisite, tender, womanly to the innermost fibre of her being, and perfect in unselfishness as all womanly women are. How easy it would be to work if she were somewhere within call, ready to fly to him at a word! How glorious to go out into the world if he knew that she sat at home waiting—always waiting, with those eyes like wells of happiness, until he should return to her! A new meaning had entered swiftly into life. A feeling that was like a religious conversion had changed not only his spiritual vision, but the material aspect of nature. Whatever happened, he felt that he could never be the same man again.

"I shall see you soon?" he said, and the words fell like snow on the inner flame of his senses.

"Oh, soon!" she answered, bending a little towards him while a sudden glory illumined her features. Her voice, which was vibrant as a harp, had captured the wistful magic of the spring—the softness of the winds, the sweetness of flowers, the mellow murmuring of the poplars.

She rose from the bench, moving softly as if she were under an enchantment which she feared to break by a gesture. An ecstasy as inarticulate as grief kept him silent, and it was into this silence that the voice of Abby floated, high, shrill, and dominant.

"Oh, Virginia, I've looked everywhere for you," she cried. "Mr. Carrington is simply dying to dance with you!"

She bounced, as only the solid actuality can bounce, into the dream, precipitating the unwelcome presence of Mr. Carrington—a young man with a golden beard and the manner of a commercial minor prophet—there also. A few minutes later, as Virginia drifted away in his arms to the music of the waltz, she saw, over the heads of the dancers, Oliver and Abby walking slowly in the direction of the gate. A feeling of unreality seized her, as though she were looking through an azure veil at the world. The dancers among whom she whirled, the anxious mothers sitting uneasily on chairs under the poplars, the flowering shrubs, the rose-crowned summer-house, the yellow lanterns with the clouds of white moths circling around them—all these things had turned suddenly to shadows; and through a phantom garden, the one living figure moved beside an empty shape, which was Abby. Her feet had wings. She flew rather than danced in the arms of a shadow through this blue veil which enveloped her. Life burned within her like a flame in a porcelain vase, and this inner fire separated her, as genius separates its possessor, from the ordinary mortals among whom she moved.

Walking home with John Henry after the party was over, it seemed to her that she was lifted up and cradled in all the wonderful freshness of the spring. The sweet moist air fanned her face; the morning stars shone softly on her through the pearly mist; and the pale fingers of dawn were spread like a beneficent hand, above the eastern horizon. "To-morrow!" cried her heart, overflowing with joy; and something of this joy passed into the saddest hour of day and brightened it to radiance.

At the gate she parted from John Henry, and running eagerly along the path, opened the front door, which was unlocked, and burst into the dining-room, where her mother, wearied of her long watch, had fallen asleep beside the lamp, which was beginning to flicker.

"To-morrow!" still sang her heart, and the wild, sweet music of it filled the world. "To-morrow!"



CHAPTER IX

THE GREAT MAN MOVES

Several weeks later, at the close of a June afternoon, Cyrus Treadwell sat alone on the back porch of his house in Bolingbroke Street. He was smoking, and, between the measured whiffs of his pipe, he leaned over the railing and spat into a bed of miniature sunflowers which grew along the stone ledge of the area. For thirty years these flowers had sprung up valiantly every spring in that bleak strip of earth, and for thirty years Cyrus had spat among them while he smoked alone on the back porch on June afternoons.

While he sat there a great peace enfolded and possessed him. The street beyond the sagging wooden gate was still; the house behind him was still; the kitchen, in which showed the ebony silhouette of a massive cook kneading dough, was still with the uncompromising stillness of the Sabbath. In the midst of this stillness, his thoughts, which were usually as angular as lean birds on a bough, lost their sharpness of outline and melted into a vague and feathery mass. At the moment it was impossible to know of what he was thinking, but he was happy with the happiness which visits men of small parts and of sterile imagination. By virtue of these limitations and this sterility he had risen out of obscurity—for the spiritual law which decrees that to gain the world one must give up one's soul, was exemplified in him as in all his class. Success, the shibboleth of his kind, had controlled his thoughts and even his impulses so completely for years that he had come at last to resemble an animal less than he resembled a machine; and Nature (who has a certain large and careless manner of dispensing justice) had punished him in the end by depriving him of the ordinary animal capacity for pleasure. The present state of vacuous contentment was, perhaps, as near the condition of enjoyment as he would ever approach.

Half an hour before he had had an encounter with Susan on the subject of her going to college, but even his victory, which had been sharp and swift, was robbed of all poignant satisfaction by his native inability to imagine what his refusal must have meant to her. The girl had stood straight and tall, with her commanding air, midway between the railing and the weather-stained door of the house.

"Father, I want to go to college," she had said quite simply, for she was one who used words very much as Cyrus used money, with a temperamental avoidance of all extravagance.

Her demand was a direct challenge to the male in Cyrus, and, though this creature could not be said to be either primitive or predatory, he was still active enough to defend himself from the unprovoked assault of an offspring.

"Tut-tut," he responded. "If you want something to occupy you, you'd better start about helping your mother with her preserving."

"I put up seventy-five jars of strawberries."

"Well, the blackberries are coming along. I was always partial to blackberries."

He sat there, bald, shrunken, yellow, as soulless as a steam engine, and yet to Susan he represented a pitiless manifestation of destiny—of those deaf, implacable forces by which the lives of men and women are wrecked. He had the power to ruin her life, and yet he would never see it because he had been born blind. That in his very blindness had lain his strength, was a fact which, naturally enough, escaped her for the moment. The one thought of which she was conscious was a fierce resentment against life because such men possessed such power over others.

"If you will lend me the money, I will pay it back to you as soon as I can take a position," she said, almost passionately.

Something that was like the ghost of a twinkle appeared in his eyes, and he let fall presently one of his rare pieces of humour.

"If you'd like a chance to repay me for your education," he said, "there's your schooling at Miss Priscilla's still owing, and I'll take it out in help about the housekeeping."

Then Susan went, because going in silence was the only way that she could save the shreds of dignity which remained to her, and bending forward, with a contented chuckle, Cyrus spat benevolently down upon the miniature sunflowers.

In the half hour that followed he did not think of his daughter. From long discipline his mind had fallen out of the habit of thinking of people except in their relation to the single vital interest of his life, and this interest was not fatherhood. Susan was an incident—a less annoying incident, it is true, than Belinda—but still an incident. An inherent contempt for women, due partly to qualities of temperament and partly to the accident of a disillusioning marriage, made him address them always as if he were speaking from a platform. And, as is often the case with men of cold-blooded sensuality, women, from Belinda downward, had taken their revenge upon him.

The front door-bell jangled suddenly, and a little later he heard a springy step passing along the hall. Then the green lattice door of the porch opened, and the face of Mrs. Peachey, wearing the look of unnatural pleasantness which becomes fixed on the features of persons who spend their lives making the best of things, appeared in the spot where Susan had been half an hour before. She had trained her lips to smile so persistently and so unreasonably, that when, as now, she would have preferred to present a serious countenance to an observer, she found it impossible to relax the muscles of her mouth from their expression of perpetual cheerfulness. Cyrus, who had once remarked of her that he didn't believe she could keep a straight face at her own funeral, wondered, while he rose and offered her a chair, whether the periodical sprees of honest Tom were the cause or the result of the look of set felicity she wore. For an instant he was tempted to show his annoyance at the intrusion. Then, because she was a pretty woman and did not belong to him, he grew almost playful, with the playfulness of an uncertain tempered ram that is offered salt.

"It is not often that I am honoured by a visit from you," he said.

"The honour is mine. Mr. Treadwell," she replied, and she really felt it. "I was on my way upstairs to see Belinda, and it just crossed my mind as I saw you sitting out here, that I'd better stop and speak to you about your nephew. I wonder Belinda doesn't plant a few rose-bushes along that back wall," she added.

"I'd pay you fifty dollars, ma'am, if you'd get Belinda to plant anything"—which was not delicately put, perhaps, but was, after all, spoken in the only language that Cyrus knew.

"I thought she was so fond of flowers. She used to be as a girl."

"Humph!" was Cyrus's rejoinder, and then: "Well, what about my nephew, madam?" Clasping his bony hands over his knee, he leaned forward and waited, not without curiosity, for her answer. He did not admire Oliver—he even despised him—but when all was said, the boy had succeeded in riveting his attention. However poorly he might think of him, the fact remained that think of him he did. The young man was in the air as inescapably as if he were the measles.

"I'm worrying about him, Mr. Treadwell; I can't help myself. You know he boards with me."

"Yes'm, I know," replied Cyrus—for he had heard the fact from Miss Priscilla on his way home from church one Sunday.

"And he's not well. There's something the matter with him. He's so nervous and irritable that he's almost crazy. He doesn't eat a morsel, and I can hear him pacing up and down his room until daybreak. Once I got up and went upstairs to ask him if he was sick, but he said that he was perfectly well and was walking about for exercise. I am sure I don't know what it can be, but if it keeps up, he'll land in an asylum before the summer is over."

The look of satisfaction which her first words had brought to Cyrus's face deepened gradually as her story unfolded. "He's wanting money, I reckon," he commented, his imagination seizing upon the only medium in which it could work. As a philosopher may discern in all life different manifestations of the Deity, so he saw in all affliction only the wanting of money under varied aspects. Sorrows in which the lack of money did not bear a part always seemed to him to be unnecessary and generally self-inflicted by the sufferers. Of such people he would say impatiently that they took a morbid view of their troubles and were "nursing grief."

"I don't think it's that," said Mrs. Peachey. "He always pays his bills promptly on the first day of the month, and I know that he gets checks from New York for the writing he does. I'm sometimes tempted to believe that he has fallen in love."

"Love? Pshaw!" said Cyrus, and dismissed the passion.

"But it goes hard with some people, and he's one of that kind," rejoined the little lady, with spirit, for in spite of her wholesome awe of Cyrus, she could not bear to hear the sentiment derided. "We aren't all as sensible as you are, Mr. Treadwell."

"Well, if he is in love, as you say, whom is he in love with?" demanded Cyrus.

"It's all guesswork," answered Mrs. Peachey. "He isn't paying attention to any girl that I know of—but, I suppose, if it's anybody, it must be Virginia Pendleton. All the young men are crazy about her."

She had been prepared for opposition—she had been prepared, being a lady, for anything, as she told Tom afterwards, short of an oath—but to her amazement the unexpected, which so rarely happened in the case of Cyrus, happened at that minute. Human nature, which she had treated almost as a science, proved suddenly that it was not even an art. One of those glaring inconsistencies which confute every theory and overturn all psychology was manifested before her.

"That's the daughter of old Gabriel, aint it?" asked Cyrus, and unconsciously to himself, his voice softened.

"Yes, she's Gabriel's daughter, and one of the sweetest girls that ever lived."

"Gabriel's a good man," said Cyrus. "I always liked Gabriel. We fought through the war together."

"A better man never lived, nor a better woman than Lucy. If she's got a fault on earth, it's that she's too unselfish."

"Well, if this girl takes after them, the young fool has shown more sense than I gave him credit for."

"I don't think he's a fool," returned Mrs. Peachey, reflecting how wonderfully she had "managed" the great man, "but, of course, he's queer—all writers are queer, aren't they?"

"He's kept it up longer than I thought, but I reckon he's about ready to give in," pursued Cyrus, ignoring her question as he did all excursions into the region of abstract wonder. "If he'll start in to earn his living now, I'll let him have a job on the railroad out in Matoaca City. I meant to teach him a lesson, but I shouldn't like Henry's son to starve. I've nothing against Henry except that he was too soft. He was a good brother as brothers go, and I haven't forgotten it."

"Perhaps, if you'd talk to Oliver," suggested Mrs. Peachey. "I'm afraid I couldn't induce him to come to you, but——"

"Oh, I ain't proud—I don't need to be," interrupted Cyrus with a chuckle. "Only fools and the poor have any use for pride. I'll look in upon him sometime along after supper, and see if he's come to his wits since I last talked to him."

"Then, I'm glad I came to you. Tom would be horrified almost to death if he knew of it—but I've always said that when an idea crosses my mind just like that," she snapped her thumb and forefinger, "there's something in it."

As she rose from her seat, she looked up at him with the coquetry which was so inalienable an attribute of her soul that, had the Deity assumed masculine shape before her, she would instinctively have used this weapon to soften the severity of His judgment. "It was so kind of you not to send me away, Mr. Treadwell," she said in honeyed accents.

"It is a pleasure to meet such a sensible woman," replied Cyrus, with awkward gallantry. Her flattery had warmed him pleasantly, and in the midst of the dried husks of his nature, he was conscious suddenly that a single blade of living green still survived. He had ceased to feel old—he felt almost young again—and this rejuvenation had set in merely because a middle-aged woman, whom he had known since childhood, had shown an innocent pleasure in his society. Mrs. Peachey's traditional belief in the power of sex had proved its own justification.

When she had left him, Cyrus sat down again, and took up his pipe from the railing where he had placed it. "I'll go round and have some words with the young scamp," he thought. "There's no use waiting until after supper. I'll go round now while it is light."

Then, as if the softening impulse were a part of the Sabbath stillness, he leaned over the bed of sunflowers, and fixed his eyes on the pinkish tower of Saint James' Church, which he could see palely enkindled against the afterglow. A single white cloud floated like a dove in the west, and beneath it a rain of light fell on the shadowy roofs of the town. The air was so languorous that it was as if the day were being slowly smothered in honeysuckle, the heavy scent of which drifted to him from the next garden. A vast melancholy—so vast that it seemed less the effect of a Southern summer than of a universal force residing in nature—was liberated, with the first cooling breath of the evening, from man and beast, from tree and shrub, from stock and stone. The very bricks, sun-baked and scarred, spoke of the weariness of heat, of the parching thirst of the interminable summers.

But to Cyrus the languor and the intense sweetness of the air suggested only that the end of a hot day had come. "It's likely to be a drought," he was thinking while his upward gaze rested on the illuminated tower of the church. "A drought will go hard with the tobacco."

Having emptied his pipe, he was about to take down his straw hat from a nail on the wall, when the sound of the opening gate arrested him, and he waited with his eyes fixed on the winding brick walk, where the negro washerwoman appeared presently with a basket of clean clothes on her head. Beneath her burden he saw that there were some primitive attempts at Sunday adornment. She wore a green muslin dress, a little discoloured by perspiration, but with many compensating flounces; a bit of yellow ribbon floated from her throat, and in her hand she carried the festive hat which would decorate her head after the removal of the basket. Her figure, which had once been graceful, had grown heavy; and her face, of a light gingerbread colour, with broad, not unpleasant features, wore a humble, inquiring look—the look of some trustful wild animal that man has tamed and only partly domesticated. Approaching the steps, she brought down the basket from her head, and came on, holding it with a deprecating swinging movement in front of her.

"Howdy, Marster," she said, as if uncertain whether to stop or to pass on into the doorway.

"Howdy, Mandy," responded Cyrus. "There's a hot spell coming, I reckon."

Lowering the basket to the floor of the porch, the woman drew a red bandanna handkerchief from her bosom and began slowly to wipe the drops of sweat from her face and neck. The acrid odour of her flesh reached Cyrus, but he made no movement to draw away from her.

"I'se been laid up wid er stitch in my side, Marster, so I'se jes got dese yer close done dis mawnin'. Dar wan' noner de chillen at home ter tote um down yer, so I low I 'uz gwine ter drap by wid um on my way ter church."

As he did not reply, she hesitated an instant and over her features, which looked as if they had been flattened by a blow, there came an expression which was half scornful, half inviting, yet so little personal that it might have been worn by one of her treetop ancestors while he looked down from his sheltering boughs on a superior species of the jungle. The chance effect of light and shadow on a grey rock was hardly less human or more primitive.

"I'se gittin' moughty well along, Marster," she said; "I reckon I'se gittin' on toward a hunnard."

"Nonsense, Mandy, you ain't a day over thirty-five. There's a plenty of life left in you yet."

"Go way f'om yer, Marster; you knows I'se a heap older 'n dat. How long ago was hit I done fust come yer ter you all?"

He thought a moment. A question of calculation always interested him, and he prided himself on his fine memory for dates.

"You came the year our son Henry died, didn't you? That was in '66—eighteen years ago. Why, you couldn't have been over fifteen that summer."

For the first time a look of cunning—of the pathetic cunning of a child pitted against a man—awoke in her face.

"En Miss Lindy sent me off befo' de year was up, Marster. My boy Jubal was born de mont' atter she done tu'n me out." She hesitated a minute, and then added, with a kind of savage coquetry, "I 'uz a moughty likely gal, Marster. You ain't done furgit dat, is you?"

Her words touched Cyrus like the flick of a whip on a sore, and he drew back quickly while his thin lips grew tight.

"You'd better take that basket into the house," he said sharply.

In the negress's face an expression of surprise wavered for a second and then disappeared. Her features resumed their usual passive and humble look—a look which said, if Cyrus could have read human nature as easily as he read finance, "I don't understand, but I submit without understanding. Am I not what you have made me? Have I not been what you wanted? And yet you despise me for being the thing you made."

"I didn't mean nuttin', Marster. I didn't mean nuttin'," she protested aloud.

"Then get into the house," retorted Cyrus harshly, "and don't stand gaping there. Any more of your insolence and I'll never let you set foot in this yard again."

"'Fo' de Lawd, I didn't mean nuttin'! Gawd a' moughty, I didn't mean nuttin'! I jes lowed as you mought be willin' ter gun me fo' dollars a mont' fur de washin'. My boy Jubal——"

"I'll not give you a red cent more. If you don't want it, you can leave it. Get out of here!"

All the primitive antagonism of race—that instinct older than civilization—was in the voice with which he ordered her out of his sight. "It was downright blackmail. The fool was trying to blackmail me," he thought. "If I'd yielded an inch I'd have been at her mercy. It's a pretty pass things have come to when men have to protect themselves from negro women." The more he reflected on her impudence, the stronger grew his conviction that he had acted remarkably well. "Nipped it in the root. If I hadn't——" he thought.

And behind him in the doorway the washerwoman continued to regard him, over the lowered clothes basket, with her humble and deprecating look, which said, like the look of a beaten animal: "I don't understand, but I submit without understanding because you are stronger than I."

Taking down his hat, Cyrus turned away from her, and descended the steps. "I'll look up Henry's son before supper," he was thinking. "Even if the boy's a fool, I'm not one to let those of my own blood come to want."



CHAPTER X

OLIVER SURRENDERS

When Cyrus's knock came at his door, Oliver crossed the room to let in his visitor, and then fell back, startled, at the sight of his uncle. "I wonder what has brought him here?" he thought inhospitably. But even if he had put the question, it is doubtful if Cyrus could have enlightened him—for the great man was so seldom visited by an impulse that when, as now, one actually took possession of him, he obeyed the pressure almost unconsciously. Like most men who pride themselves upon acting solely from reason, he was the abject slave of the few instincts which had managed to take root and thrive in the stony ground of his nature. The feeling for family, which was so closely entwined with his supreme feeling for property that the two had become inseparable, moved him to-day as it had done on the historic occasion when he had redeemed the mortgaged roof over the heads of his spinster relations. Perhaps, too, some of the vague softness of June had risen in him and made him gentler in his judgments of youth.

"I didn't expect you or I'd have straightened up a bit," said Oliver, not overgraciously, while he hastily pushed his supper of bread and tea to one end of the table. He resented what he called in his mind "the intrusion," and he had no particular objection to his uncle's observing his resentment. His temper, never of the most perfect equilibrium, had been entirely upset by the effects of a June Sunday in Dinwiddie, and the affront of Cyrus's visit had become an indignity because of his unfortunate selection of the supper hour. Some hidden obliquity in the Treadwell soul, which kept it always at cross-purposes with life, prevented any lessening of the deep antagonism between the old and the young of the race. And so incurable was this obliquity in the soul of Cyrus, that it forced him now to take a tone which he had resolutely set his mind against from the moment of Mrs. Peachey's visit. He wanted to be pleasant, but something deep down within him—some inherited tendency to bully—was stronger than his will.

"I looked in to see if you hadn't about come to your senses," he began.

"If you mean come to your way of looking at things—then I haven't," replied Oliver, and added in a more courteous tone, "Won't you sit down?"

"No, sir, I can stand long enough to say what I came to say," retorted the other, and it seemed to him that the pleasanter he tried to make his voice, the harsher grew the sound of it in his ears. What was it about the rascal that rubbed him the wrong way only to look at him?

"As you please," replied Oliver quietly. "What in thunder has he got to say to me?" he thought. "And why can't he say it and have it over?" While Cyrus merely despised him, he detested Cyrus with all the fiery intolerance of his age. "Standing there like an old turkey gobbler, ugh!" he said contemptuously to himself.

"So you ain't hungry yet?" asked the old man, and felt that the words were forced out of him by that obstinate cross-grain in his nature over which he had no control.

"I've just had tea."

"You haven't changed your mind since you last spoke to me, eh?"

"No, I haven't changed my mind. Why should I?"

"Getting along pretty well, then?"

"As well as I expected to."

"That's good," said Cyrus mildly. "That's good. I just dropped in to make sure that you were getting along, that's all."