Virginia Part 37

"Fo' de Lawd, I didn't mean nuttin', Marster!" screamed the boy, livid with terror. "I didn't know de lady was dar--fo' de Lawd Jesus, I didn't! My foot jes slipped on de plank w'en I wuz crossin', en I knocked up agin her."

"He jostled her," observed one of the drunken men judicially, "an' we'll be roasted befo' we'll let a d.a.m.n n.i.g.g.e.r jostle a white lady--even if she ain't a lady--in these here parts."

In the rector's bone and fibre, drilled there by the ages that had shaped his character before he began to be, there was all the white man's horror of an insult to his womankind. But deeper even than this lay his personal feeling of responsibility for any creature whose fathers had belonged to him and had toiled in his service.

"I believe the boy is telling the truth," he said, and he added with one of his characteristic bursts of impulsiveness, "but whether he is or not, you are too drunk to judge."

There was going to be a battle, he saw, and in the swiftness with which he discerned this, he made his eternal choice between the preacher and the fighter. Stripping off his coat, he reached down for a stick from the roadside; then spinning round on the three of them he struck out with all his strength, while there floated before him the face of a man he had killed in his first charge at Mana.s.sas. The old fury, the old triumph, the old blood-stained splendour returned to him. He smelt the smoke again, he heard the boom of the cannon, the long sobbing rattle of musketry, and the thought stabbed through him, "G.o.d forgive me for loving a fight!"

Then the fight stopped. There was a patter of feet in the dust as the young negro fled like a hare up the road in the direction of Dinwiddie.

One of the men leaped the fence and disappeared into the tangled thicket beyond; while the other two, sobered suddenly, began walking slowly over the ploughed ground on the right. Ten minutes later Gabriel was lying alone, with the blood oozing from his mouth, on the trodden weeds by the roadside. The shadow of the pine had not moved since he watched it; on the flat rock in front of the cabin the old negress stood, straining her eyes in the faint suns.h.i.+ne; and up the long road the March wind still blew, as soft, as provocative, as bud-scented.

BOOK THIRD

THE ADJUSTMENT

CHAPTER I

THE CHANGING ORDER

"So this is life," thought Virginia, while she folded her mourning veil, and laid it away in the top drawer of her bureau. Like all who are suddenly brought face to face with tragedy, she felt at the moment that there was nothing else in existence. All the sweetness of the past had vanished so utterly that she remembered it only as one remembers a dream from which one has abruptly awakened. Nothing remained except this horrible sense of the pitiful insufficiency of life, of the inexorable finality of death. It was a week since the rector's death, and in that week she had pa.s.sed out of her girlhood forever. Of all the things that she had lived through, this alone had had the power to crush the hope in her and the odour of c.r.a.pe which floated through the crack of the drawer sickened her with its reminder of that agonized sense of loss which had settled over her at the funeral. She was only thirty--the best of her life should still be in the future--yet as she looked back at her white face in the mirror it seemed to her that she should never emerge from the leaden hopelessness which had descended like a weight on her body.

Above the harsh black of her dress, which added ten years to her appearance, she saw the darkened circles r.i.m.m.i.n.g her eyes, the faded pallor of her skin, the l.u.s.treless wave of her hair, which had once had a satiny sheen on its ripples.

"Grief makes a person look like this," she thought. "I shall never be a girl again--Oliver was right: I am the kind to break early." Then, because to think of herself in the midst of such sorrow seemed to her almost wicked, she turned away from the mirror, and laid her c.r.a.pe-trimmed hat on the shelf in the wardrobe. She was wearing a dress of black Henrietta cloth, which had been borrowed from one of her neighbours who had worn mourning, and the blouse and sleeves hung with an exaggerated fullness over her thin arms and bosom. All that had distinguished her beauty--the radiance, the colour the flower-like delicacy of bloom and sweetness--these were blotted out by her grief and by the voluminous mourning dress of the nineties. A week had changed her, as even Harry's illness had not changed her, from a girl into a woman; and horrible beyond belief, with the exception of her mother, it had changed nothing else in the universe! The tragedy that had ruined her life had left the rest of the world--even the little world of Dinwiddie--moving as serenely, as indifferently, on its way towards eternity. On the morning of the funeral she had heard the same market wagons rumble over the cobblestones, the same droning songs of the hucksters, the same casual procession of feet on the pavement. A pa.s.sionate indignation had seized her because life could be so brutal to death, because the terror and the pity that flamed in her soul shed no burning light on the town where her father had worked and loved and fought and suffered and died. A little later the ceaseless tread of visitors to the rectory door had driven this thought from her mind, but through every minute, while he lay in the closed room downstairs, while she sat beside her mother in the slow crawling carriage that went to the old churchyard, while she stood with bowed head listening to the words of the service--through it all there had been the feeling that something must happen to alter a world in which such a thing had been possible, that life must stop, that the heavens must fall, that G.o.d must put forth His hand and work a miracle in order to show His compa.s.sion and His horror.

But nothing had changed. After the funeral her mother had come home with her, and the others, many with tear-stained faces, had drifted in separate ways back to eat their separate dinners. For a few hours Dinwiddie had been shaken out of its phlegmatic pursuit of happiness; for a few hours it had attained an emotional solidarity which swept it up from the innumerable bypaths of the personal to a height where the personal rises at last into the universal. Then the ebb had come; the sense of tragedy had lessened slowly with the prolongation of feeling; and the universal vision had dissolved and crystallized into the pitiless physical needs of the individual. After the funeral a wave almost of relief had swept over the town at the thought that the suspension and the strain were at an end. The business of keeping alive, and the moral compulsion of keeping abreast of one's neighbours, rea.s.serted their supremacy even while the carriages, quickening their pace a trifle on the return drive, rolled out of the churchyard. Now at the end of a week only Virginia and her mother would take the time from living to sit down and remember.

In the adjoining room, which was the nursery, Mrs. Pendleton was sitting beside the window, with her Bible open on her knees, and her head bent a little in the direction of Miss Priscilla, who was mending a black dress by the table.

"It is so sweet of you, dear Miss Priscilla," she murmured in her vague and gentle voice as Virginia entered. So old, so pallid, so fragile she looked, that she might have been mistaken by a stranger for a woman of eighty, yet the impossibility of breaking the habit of a lifetime kept the lines of her face still fixed in an expression of anxious cheerfulness. For more than forty years she had not thought of herself, and now that the opportunity had come for her to do so, she found that she had almost forgotten the way that one went about it. Even grief could not make her selfish any more than it could make her untidy. Her manner, like her dress, was so little a matter of impulse, and so largely a matter of discipline and of conscience, that it expressed her broken heart hardly more than did the widow's cap on her head or the mourning brooch that fastened the c.r.a.pe folds of her collar.

"Do you want anything, mother darling? What can I do for you?" asked Virginia, stooping to kiss her.

"Nothing, dear. I was just telling Miss Priscilla that I had had a visit from Mr. Treadwell, and that"--her voice quivered a little--"he showed more feeling than I should have believed possible. He even wanted to make me an allowance."

Miss Priscilla drew out her large linen handkerchief, which was like a man's, and loudly blew her nose. "I always said there was more in Cyrus than people thought," she observed. "Here, I've shortened this dress, Jinny, until it's just about your mother's length."

She tried to speak carelessly, for though she did not concur in the popular belief that to ignore sorrow is to a.s.suage it, her social instinct, which was as strongly developed as Mrs. Pendleton's, encouraged her to throw a pleasant veil over affliction.

"You're looking pale for want of air, Jinny," she added, after a minute in which she had thought, "The child has broken so in the last few days that she looks years older than Oliver."

"I'm trying to make her go driving," said Mrs. Pendleton, leaning forward over the open page of her Bible.

"But I can't go, mother; I haven't the heart for it," replied Virginia, choking down a sob.

"I don't like to see you looking so badly, dear. You must keep up your strength for the children's sake, you know."

"Yes, I know," answered Virginia, but her voice had a weary sound.

A little later, when Miss Priscilla had gone, and Oliver came in to urge her to go with him, she shook her head again, still palely resolute, still softly obstinate.

"But, Jinny, it isn't right for you to let your health go," he urged.

"You haven't had a breath of air for days and you're getting sallow."

His own colour was as fine as ever; he grew handsomer, if a trifle stouter, as he grew older; and at thirty-five there was all the vigour and the charm of twenty in his face and manner. In one way only he had altered, and of this alteration, he, as well as Virginia, was beginning faintly to be aware. Comfort was almost imperceptibly taking the place of conviction, and the pa.s.sionate altruism of youth would yield before many years to the prudential philosophy of middle-age. Life had defeated him. His best had been thrown back at him, and his nature, embittered by failure, was adjusting itself gradually to a different and a lower standard of values. Though he could not be successful, it was still possible, even within the narrow limits of his income and his opportunities, to be comfortable. And, like other men who have lived day by day with heroically unselfish women, he had fallen at last into the habit of thinking that his being comfortable was, after all, a question of supreme importance to the universe. Deeply as he had felt the rector's death, he, in common with the rest of Dinwiddie, was conscious of breathing more easily after the funeral was over. To his impressionable nature, alternations of mood were almost an essential of being, and there was something intolerable to him in any slowly harrowing grief. To watch Virginia nursing every memory of her father because she shrank from the subtle disloyalty of forgetfulness, aroused in him a curious mingling of sympathy and resentment.

"I wish you'd go, even if you don't feel like it--just to please me, Virginia," he urged, and after a short struggle she yielded to his altered tone, and got down her hat from the shelf of the wardrobe.

A little later, as the dog-cart rolled out of Dinwiddie into the country road, she looked through her black grenadine veil on a world which appeared to have lost its brightness. The road was the one along which she had ridden on the morning of the fox-hunt; ahead of them lay the same fields, sown now with the tender green of the spring; the same creeks ran there, screened by the same thickets of elder; the same pines wafted their tang on the March wind that blew, singing, out of the forest. It was all just as it had been on that morning--and yet what a difference!

"Put up your veil, Virginia--it's enough to smother you."

But she only shook her head, shrinking farther down into the shapeless borrowed dress as though she felt that it protected her. Following the habit of people whose choice has been instinctive rather than deliberate, a choice of the blood, not of the brain, they had long ago exhausted the fund of conversation with which they had started. There was nothing to talk about--since Virginia had never learned to talk of herself, and Oliver had grown reticent recently about the subjects that interested him. When the daily anecdotes of the children had been aired between them with an effort at breeziness, nothing remained except the endless discussion of Harry's education. Even this had worn threadbare of late, and with the best intentions in the world, Virginia had failed to supply anything else of sufficient importance to take its place. An inherited habit, the same habit which had made it possible for Mrs.

Pendleton to efface her broken heart, prompted her to avoid any allusion to her grief in which she sat shrouded as in her mourning veil.

"The spring is so early this year," she remarked once, with her gaze on the rosy billows of an orchard. "The peach trees have almost finished blooming."

Then, as he made no answer except to flick at John Henry's bay mare with his whip, she asked daringly, "Are you writing again, Oliver?"

A frown darkened his forehead, and she saw the muscles about his mouth twitch as though he were irritated. For all his failure and his bitterness, he did not look a day older, she thought, than when she had first seen him driving down High Street in that unforgettable May. He was still as ardent, still as capable of inspiring first love in the imagination of a girl. The light and the perfume of that enchanted spring seemed suddenly to envelop her, and moved by a yearning to recapture them for an instant, she drew closer to him, and slipped her hand through his arm.

"Oh, I'm trying my luck with some trash. Nothing but trash has any chance of going in this d.a.m.ned business."

"You mean it's different from your others? It's less serious?"

"Less serious? Well, I should say so. It's the sort of ice-cream soda-water the public wants. But if I can get it put on, it ought to run, and a play that runs is obliged to make money. I doubt if there's anything much better than money, when it comes to that."

"You used to say it didn't matter."

"Did I? Well, I was a fool and I've learned better. These last few years have taught me that nothing else on earth matters much."

This was so different from what that other Oliver--the Oliver of her first love--might have said, that involuntarily her clasp on his arm tightened. The change in him, so gradual at first that her mind, unused to subtleties, had hardly grasped it, was beginning to frighten her.

"You have such burdens, dear," she said, and he noticed that her voice had acquired the toneless sweetness of her mother's. "I've tried to be as saving as I could, but the children have been sick so much that it seems sometimes as if we should never get out of debt. I am trying now to pay off the bills I was obliged to make while Harry was ill in October. If I could only get perfectly strong, we might let Marthy go, now that Jenny is getting so big."

"You work hard enough as it is, Virginia. You've been awfully good about it," he answered, but his manner was almost casual, for he had grown to take for granted her unselfishness with something of the unconcern with which he took for granted the comfortable feeling of the spring weather.

In the early days of their marriage, when her fresh beauty had been a power to rule him, she had taught him to a.s.sume his right to her self-immolation on the altar of his comfort; and with the taste of bitterness which sometimes follows the sweets of memory, she recalled that their first quarrel had arisen because she had insisted on getting out of bed to make the fires in the morning. Then, partly because the recollection appeared to reproach him, and partly because, not possessing the critical faculty, she had never learned to acknowledge the existence of a flaw in a person she loved, she edged closer to him, and replied cheerfully:

"I don't mind the work a bit, if only the children will keep well so we shan't have to spend any more money. I shan't need any black clothes,"

she added, with a trembling lip. "Mrs. Carrington has given me this dress, as she has gone out of mourning, and I've got a piece of blue silk put away that I am going to have dyed."

He glanced at the shapeless dress, not indignantly as he would once have done, but with a tinge of quiet amus.e.m.e.nt.