Virginia Part 49

"What good would it do," she asked, "to hold him to me when he wishes to be free?" And then, with one of those flashes of insight which came to her in moments of great emotional stress, she added quietly, "It is not the law, it is life."

Putting her arms around her, Susan pressed her to her bosom as she might have pressed a suffering child whom she was powerless to help or even to make understand.

"Jinny, Jinny, let me love you," she begged.

"How did you know?" asked Virginia, as coldly as though she had not heard her. "Has it got into the papers?"

For an instant Susan's pity struggled against her loyalty. "General Goode told me that there had been a good deal about Oliver and--and Miss Oldcastle in the New York papers for several days," she answered, "and this morning a few lines were copied in the Dinwiddie _Bee_. Oliver is so famous it was impossible to keep things hushed up, I suppose. But you knew all this, Jinny darling."

"Oh, yes, I knew that," answered Virginia; then, rising suddenly from her chair, she said almost irritably: "Susan, I want to be alone. I can't think until I am alone." By her look Susan knew that until that minute some blind hope had kept alive in her, some childish pretence that it might all be a dream, some pa.s.sionate evasion of the ultimate outcome.

"But you'll let me come back? You'll let me spend the night with you, Jinny?"

"If you want to, you may come. But I don't need you. I don't need anybody. I don't need anybody," she repeated bitterly; and this bitterness appeared to change not only her expression, but her features and her carriage and that essential attribute of her being which had been the real Virginia.

Awed in spite of herself, Susan put on her hat again, and bent over to kiss her. "I'll be back before bed-time, Jinny. Don't shut me away, dear. Let me share your pain with you."

At this something that was like a smile trembled for an instant on Virginia's face.

"You are good, Susan," she responded, but there was no tenderness, no grat.i.tude even, in her voice. She had grown hard with the implacable hardness of grief.

When the door had closed behind her friend, she stood looking through the window until she saw her pa.s.s slowly, as though she were reluctant to go, down Sycamore Street in the direction of her home. "I am glad she has gone," she thought coldly. "Susan is good, but I am glad she has gone." Then, turning back to the fire, she took up the piece of embroidery and mechanically folded it before she laid it away. While her hands were still on the bag in which she kept it, a s.h.i.+ver went through her body, and a look of resolution pa.s.sed over her features, making them appear as if they were sculptured in marble.

"He will be sorry some day," she thought. "He will be sorry when it is too late, and if I were there now--if I were to see him, it might all be prevented. It might all be prevented and we might be happy again." In her distorted mind, which worked with the quickness and the intensity of delirium, this idea a.s.sumed presently the prominence and the force of an hallucination. So powerful did it become that it triumphed over all the qualities which had once const.i.tuted her character--over the patience, the sweetness, the unselfish goodness--as easily as it obscured the rashness and folly of the step which she planned. "If I could see him, it might all be prevented," she repeated obstinately, as though some one had opposed her; and, going upstairs to her bedroom, she packed her little handbag and put on the travelling dress which she had worn in New York. Then, very softly, as though she feared to be stopped by the servants, she went down the stairs and out of the front door; and, very softly, carrying her bag, she pa.s.sed into the street and walked hurriedly in the direction of the station. And all the way she was thinking, "If I can only see him again, this may not happen and everything may be as it was before when he still loved me." So just and rational did this idea appear to her, that she found herself wondering pa.s.sionately why she had not thought of it before. It was so easy a way out of her wretchedness that it seemed absurd of her to have overlooked it. And this discovery filled her with such tremulous excitement, that when she opened her purse to buy her ticket, her hands shook as if they were palsied, and the porter, who held her bag, was obliged to count out the money. The whole of life, which had looked so dark an hour ago, had become suddenly illuminated.

Once in the train, her nervousness left her, and when an acquaintance joined her after they had started, she was able to talk connectedly of trivial occurrences in Dinwiddie. He was a fat, apoplectic looking man, with a bald head which shone like satin, and a drooping moustache slightly discoloured by tobacco. His appearance, which she had never objected to before, seemed to her grotesque; but in spite of this, she could smile almost naturally at his jokes, which she thought inconceivably stupid.

"I suppose you heard about Cyrus Treadwell's accident," he said at last when she rose to go to her berth. "Got knocked down by an automobile as he was getting off a street car at the bank. It isn't serious, they say, but he was pretty well stunned for a while."

"No, I hadn't heard," she answered, and thought, "I wonder why Susan didn't tell me." Then she said good-night and disappeared behind the curtains of her berth, where she lay, without undressing, until morning.

"This is the way--there is no other way to stop it," she thought, and all night the rumble of the train and the flas.h.i.+ng of the lights in the darkness outside of her window kept up a running accompaniment to the words. "It is a sin--and there is no other way to stop it. He is committing a sin, and when I see him he will understand it, and it will be as it was before." This idea, which was as fixed as an obsession of delirium, seemed to occupy some central s.p.a.ce in her brain, leaving room for a crowd of lesser thoughts which came and went fantastically around it like the motley throng of a circus. She thought of Cyrus Treadwell's accident, of the stupid jokes the man from Dinwiddie had told her, of the noises of the train, which would not let one sleep, of the stations which blazed out, here and there, in the darkness. But in the midst of this confusion of images and impressions, a clear voice was repeating somewhere in her brain: "This is the way--there is no other way to stop it before it is too late."

In the morning, when she got out in New York, and gave the driver the name of the little hotel at which she had stopped on her first visit, this glowing certainty faded like the excitement of fever from her mind, and she relapsed into the stricken hopelessness of the last six months.

The bleakness of her spirits fell like a cloud on the brilliant October day, and the suns.h.i.+ne, which lay in golden pools on the pavements, appeared to increase the sense of universal melancholy which had followed so sharply on the brief exaltation of the night. "I must see him--it is the only way," her brain still repeated, but the ring of conviction was gone from the words. Her flight from Dinwiddie showed to her now in all the desperate folly with which it might have appeared to a stranger. The impulse which had brought her had ebbed away, and with the impulse had pa.s.sed also the confidence and the energy of her resolve.

At the hotel, where the red bedroom into which they ushered her appeared to have waited unaltered for the second tragedy of her life, she bathed and dressed herself, and after a cup of black coffee, taken because a sensation of dizziness had alarmed her lest she should faint in the street, she put on her hat again and went out into Fifth Avenue. She remembered the name of the hotel at the head of Oliver's letter, and she directed her steps towards it now with an automatic precision of which her mind seemed almost unconscious. All thought of asking for him had vanished, yet she was drawn to the place where he was by a force which was more irresistible than any choice of the will. An instinct stronger than reason was guiding her steps.

In Fifth Avenue the crowd was already beginning to stream by on the sidewalks, and as she mingled with it, she recalled that other morning when she had moved among these people and had felt that they looked at her kindly because she was beautiful and young. Now the kindness had given way to indifference in their eyes. They no longer looked at her; and when a shop window, which she was pa.s.sing, showed her a reflection of herself, she saw only a commonplace middle-aged figure, with a look of withered sweetness in the face, which had grown suddenly wan. And the sight of this figure fell like a weight on her heart, destroying the last vestige of courage.

Before the door of the hotel in which Oliver was staying, she stood so long, with her vacant gaze fixed on the green velvet carpet within the hall, that an attendant in livery came up at last and inquired if she wished to see any one. Arousing herself with a start, she shook her head hurriedly and turned back into the street, for when the crucial moment came her decision failed her. Just as she had been unable to make a scene on the night when they had parted, so now it was impossible for her to descend to the vulgarity of thrusting her presence into his life.

Unless the frenzy of delirium seized her again, she knew that she should never have the strength to put the desperation of thought into the desperation of action. What she longed for was not to fight, not to struggle, but to fall, like a wounded bird, to the earth, and be forgotten.

At the crossing, where there was a crush of motor cars and carriages, she stopped for a moment and thought how easy it would be to die in the crowded street before returning to Dinwiddie. "All I need do is to slip and fall there, and in a second it would be over." But so many cars went by that she knew she should never be able to do it, that much as she hated life, something bound her to it which she lacked the courage to break. There shot through her mind the memory of a soldier her father used to tell about, who was always first on the field of battle, but had never found the courage to charge. "He was like me--for I might stand here forever and yet not find the courage to die."

A beggar came up to her and she thought, "He is begging of me, and yet I am more miserable than he is." Then, while she searched in her bag for some change, it seemed to her that the faces gliding past her became suddenly distorted and twisted as though the souls of the women in the rapidly moving cars were crucified under their splendid furs. "That woman in the sable cloak is beautiful, and yet she, also, is in torture," she reflected with an impersonal coldness and detachment. "I was beautiful, too, but how did it help me?" And she saw herself as she had been in her girlhood with the glow of happiness, as of one flying, in her face, and her heart filled with the joyous expectancy of the miracle which must happen. "I am as old now as Miss w.i.l.l.y was then--and how I pitied her!" Tears rushed to her eyes, which had been so dry a minute before, while the memory of that lost gaiety of youth came over her in a wave that was like the sweetness of the honeysuckle blooming in the rectory garden.

A policeman, observing that she had waited there so long, held up the traffic until she had crossed the street, and after thanking him, she went on again towards the hotel in which she was staying. "He was kind about helping me over," she said to herself, with an impulse of grat.i.tude; and this casual kindness seemed to her the one spot of light in the blackness which surrounded her.

As she approached the hotel, her step flagged, and she felt suddenly that even that pa.s.sive courage which was hers--the courage of endurance--had deserted her. She saw the dreadful hours that must ensue before she went back to Dinwiddie, the dreadful days that would follow after she got there, the dreadful weeks that would run on into the dreadful years. Silent, grey, and endless, they stretched ahead of her, and through them all she saw herself, a little hopeless figure, moving towards that death which she had not had the courage to die. The thoughts of the familiar streets, of the familiar faces, of the house, of the furniture, of the leaf-strewn yard in which her bed of dahlias was blooming--all these aroused in her the sense of spiritual nausea which she had felt when she went back to them after her parting from Oliver. Nothing remained except the long empty years, for she had outlived her usefulness.

At the door of the hotel, the hall porter met her with a cheerful face, and she turned to him with the instinctive reliance on masculine protection which had driven her to the friendly shelter of the policeman at the crossing in Fifth Avenue. In reply to her helpless questions, he looked up the next train to Dinwiddie, which left within the hour, and after buying her ticket, a.s.sisted her smilingly into the taxicab. While she sat there, in the middle of the seat, with her little black bag rocking back and forth as the cab turned the corners, all capacity for feeling, all possibility of sensation even, seemed to have pa.s.sed out of her body. The impulse which was carrying her to Dinwiddie was the physical impulse which drives a wounded animal back to die in its shelter. Even the flaring advertis.e.m.e.nts of Oliver's play, which was still running in a Broadway theatre, aroused no pain, hardly any thought of him or of the past, in her mind. She had ceased to suffer, she had ceased even to think; and when, a little later, she followed the station porter down the long platform, she was able to brush aside the memory of her parting from Oliver as lightly as though it were the trivial sting of a wasp. When she remembered the agony of the last year, of yesterday, of the morning through which she had just lived, it appeared almost ridiculous. That death which she had lacked the courage to die seemed creeping over her soul before it reached the outer sh.e.l.l of her body.

In the train, she was attacked by a sensation of faintness, and remembering that she had eaten nothing all day, she went into the dining-car, and sat down at one of the little tables. When her luncheon was brought, she ate almost ravenously for a minute. Then her sudden hunger was followed by a disgust for the look of the dishes and the cinders on the table-cloth, and after paying her bill, for which she waited an intolerable time, she went back to her chair in the next coach, and watched, with unseeing eyes, the swiftly moving landscape, which rushed by in all the brilliant pageantry of October. Several seats ahead of her, two men were discussing politics, and one of them, who wore a clerical waistcoat, raised his voice suddenly so high that his words penetrated the wall of blankness which surrounded her thoughts, "I tell you it is the greatest menace to our civilization!" and then, as he controlled his excitement, his speech dropped quickly into indistinctness.

"How absurd of him to get so angry about it," thought Virginia with surprise, "as if a civilization could make any difference to anybody on earth." And she watched the clergyman for a minute, as if fascinated by the display of his earnestness. "What on earth can it matter to him?"

she wondered mildly, "and yet to look at him one would think that his heart was bound up in the question." But in a little while she turned away from him again, and lying back in her chair, stared across the smooth plains to the pale golden edge of the distant horizon. Through the long day she sat, without moving, without taking her eyes from the landscape, while the sunlight faded slowly away from the fields and the afterglow flushed and waned, and the stars shone out, one by one, through the silver web of the twilight. Once, when the porter had offered her a pillow, she had looked round to thank him; once when a child, toddling along the aisle, had fallen at her feet, she had bent over to lift it, but beyond this, she had stirred only to hand her ticket to the conductor when he aroused her by touching her arm. Where the sunset and the afterglow had been, she saw at last only the lights of the train reflected in the smeared gla.s.s of the window, but so unconscious was she of any change in that utter vacancy at which she looked, that she could not have told whether it was an hour or a day after leaving New York that she came back to Dinwiddie. Even then she would still have sat there, speechless, inert, unseeing, had not the porter taken her bag from the rack over her head and accompanied her from the glare of the train out into the dimness of the town, where the crumbling "hacks" hitched to the decrepit horses still waited. Here her bag was pa.s.sed over to a driver, whom she vaguely remembered, and a few minutes later she rolled, in one of the ancient vehicles, under the pale lights of the street which led to her home. In the drug store at the corner she saw Miss Priscilla's maid buying medicines, and she wondered indifferently if the teacher had grown suddenly worse. Then, as she pa.s.sed John Henry's house, she recognized his large shadow as it moved across the white shade at the window of the drawing-room. "Susan was coming to spend last night with me," she said aloud, and for the first and last time in her life, an ironic smile quivered upon her lips.

With a last jolt the carriage drew up at the sidewalk before her home; the driver dismounted, grinning, from his box; and in the lighted doorway, she saw the figure of her maid, in trim cap and ap.r.o.n, waiting to welcome her. Not a petal had fallen from the bed of crimson dahlias beside the steps; not a leaf had changed on the young maple tree, which rose in a spire of flame toward the stars. Inside, she knew, there would be the bright fire, the cheerful supper table, the soft bed turned down--and the future.

On the porch she stopped and looked back into the street as she might have looked back at the door of a prison. The negro driver, having placed her bag in the hall, stood waiting expectantly, with his hat in his hand, and his s.h.i.+ning black eyes on her face; and opening her purse, she paid him, before walking past the maid over the threshold. Ahead of her stretched the staircase which she would go up and down for the rest of her life. On the right, she could look into the open door of the dining-room, and opposite to it, she knew that the lamp was lit and the fire burning in Oliver's study. Then, while a wave of despair, like a mortal sickness, swept over her, her eyes fell on an envelope which lay on the little silver card-tray on the hall table, and as she tore it open, she saw that it contained but a single line:

"Dearest mother, I am coming home to you, "HARRY."

THE END

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

THE MILLER OF OLD CHURCH

THE ROMANCE OF A PLAIN MAN

THE ANCIENT LAW

THE WHEEL OF LIFE

THE DELIVERANCE

THE BATTLEGROUND

THE VOICE OF THE PEOPLE

PHASES OF AN INFERIOR PLANET

THE DESCENDANT

THE FREEMAN, AND OTHER POEMS

THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS GARDEN CITY, N. Y.