Part 11 (1/2)
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 s.e.x 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 s.e.x whose chief concern has been the making of matches, she transfixed his imagination as skilfully as she might have impaled a b.u.t.terfly 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 pa.s.sion 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 s.e.x.
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.”