Part 12 (1/2)
”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 pa.s.sion 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 st.i.tch 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 a.s.sociate 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 w.i.l.l.y 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 s.h.i.+elded 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 w.i.l.l.y Whitlow should fade and suffer. The world, she knew, was full of old people, of weary people, of blighted people; but she cherished pa.s.sionately 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 wors.h.i.+pping 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 const.i.tuted 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 pa.s.sive.
”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 acc.u.mulated 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, pa.s.sed 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 coa.r.s.ened 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 cla.s.sic order, but this did not matter since n.o.body 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 a.s.sociation which she could not remember, and it seemed to her that her soul and body trembled, like a bent flame, into an att.i.tude 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 pa.s.sed 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 att.i.tude of expectancy into the att.i.tude 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 pa.s.sed 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 G.o.d 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 pa.s.sed 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.