Part 35 (1/2)

Outside, in the street, she could see a half-bared bough of the mulberry tree, arching against a square of window, from which the white curtains were drawn back; and in order to quiet her broken and disjointed thoughts, she began to count the leaves as they fell, one by one, turning softly at the stem, and then floating out into the darkness beyond. ”One. Two. How long that leaf takes to loosen. He is better. The doctor certainly thought that he was better. If he only gets well. O G.o.d, let him get well, and I will serve you all my life!

Three--four--five--For twenty-four hours we thought you would slip through our fingers. Somebody said that--somebody--it must have been the doctor. And he was talking of me, not of Harry. That was twenty-six years ago, and my mother was enduring then all this agony that I am feeling to-night. Twenty-six years ago--perhaps at this very hour, she sat beside me alone as I am sitting now by Harry. And before that other women went through it. All the world over, wherever there are mothers--north, south, east, west--from the first baby that was born on the earth--they have every one suffered what I am suffering now--for it is the pang of motherhood! To escape it one must escape birth and escape the love that is greater than one's self.” And she understood suddenly that suffering and love are inseparable, that when one loves another more than one's self, one has opened the gate by which anguish will enter. She had forgotten to count the leaves, and when she remembered and looked again, the last one had fallen. Against the parted white curtains, the naked bough arched black and solitary. Even the small silent birds that had swayed dejectedly to and fro on the branches all day had flown off into the darkness. Presently, the light in the window went out, and as the hours wore on, a fine drizzling rain began to fall, as soft as tears, from the starless sky over the mulberry tree. A sense of isolation greater than any she had ever known attacked her like a physical chill, and rising, she went over to the fire and stirred the pile of coal into a flame. She was alone in her despair, and she realized, with a feeling of terror, that one is always alone when one despairs, that there is a secret chamber in every soul where neither love nor sympathy can follow one. If Oliver were here beside her--if he were standing close to her in that throbbing circle around the bed--she would still be separated from him by the immensity of that inner s.p.a.ce which is not measured by physical distances. ”No, even if he were here, he could not reach me,” she said, and an instant later, with one of those piercing illuminations which visit even perfectly normal women in moments of great intensity, she thought quickly, ”If every woman told the truth to herself, would she say that there is something in her which love has never reached?” Then, reproaching herself because she had left the bed for a minute, she went back again and bent over the unconscious child, her whole slender body curving itself pa.s.sionately into an embrace. His face was ashen white, except where the skin around his mouth was discoloured with a faint bluish tinge. His flesh, even his bones, appeared to have shrunk almost away in twenty-four hours. It was impossible to imagine that he was the rosy, laughing boy, who had crawled into her arms only two nights ago. The disease held him like some unseen spiritual enemy, against which all physical weapons were as useless as the little toys of a child. How could one fight that sinister power which had removed him to an illimitable distance while he was still in her arms? The troubled stupor, which had in it none of the quiet and the restfulness of sleep, terrorized her as utterly as if it had been the personal spirit of evil. The invisible forces of Life and Death seemed battling in the quivering air within that small circle of light.

While she bent over him, he stirred, raised himself, and then fell back in a paroxysm of coughing. The violence of the spasm shook his fragile little body as a rough wind shakes a flower on a stalk. Over his face the bluish tinge spread like a shadow, and into his eyes there came the expression of wondering terror which she had seen before only in the eyes of young startled animals. For an instant it seemed almost as if the devil of disease were wrestling inside of him, as if the small vital force she called life would be beaten out in the struggle. Then the agony pa.s.sed; the strangling sound ceased, and he grew quiet, while she wiped the poison from his mouth and nostrils, and made him swallow a few drops of milk out of a teaspoon.

At the moment, while she fell on her knees by his bedside, it seemed to her that she had reached that deep place beyond which there is nothing.

”You've pulled him through. We'll have him out of bed before many days now,” said the old doctor at daybreak, and he added cheerfully, ”By the way, your husband came in the front door with me. He wanted to rush up here at once, but I'm keeping him away because he is obliged to go back to the bank.”

”Poor Oliver,” said Virginia gently. ”It is terrible on him. He must be so anxious.” But even while she uttered the words, she was conscious of a curious sensation of unreality, as though she were speaking of a person whom she had known in another life. It was three days since she had seen Oliver, and in those three days she had lived and died many times.

CHAPTER IX

THE PROBLEM OF THE SOUTH

”Father, I want to marry John Henry,” said Susan, just as she had said almost ten years ago, ”Father, I want to go to college.”

It was a March afternoon, ashen and windy, with flocks of small fleecy clouds hurrying across a changeable blue sky, and the vague, roving scents of early spring in the air. After his dinner, which he had taken for more than fifty years precisely at two o'clock, Cyrus had sat down for a peaceful pipe on the back porch before returning to the office.

Between the sunken bricks in the little walled-in yard, blades of vivid green gra.s.s had shot up, seeking light out of darkness, and along the grey wooden ledge of the area the dauntless sunflowers were unfolding their small stunted leaves. On the railing of the porch a moth-eaten cat--the only animal for whom Cyrus entertained the remotest respect--was contentedly licking the shabby fur on her side.

”Father, I want to marry John Henry,” repeated Susan, raising her voice to a higher key and towering like a flesh and blood image of Victory over the sagging cane chair in which he sat.

Taking his pipe from his mouth, he looked up at her; and so little had he altered in ten years, that the thought flashed through her mind that he had actually suffered no change of expression since the afternoon on which she had asked him to send her to college. As a man he may not have been impressive, but as a defeating force who could say that he had not attained his fulfilment? It was as if the instinct of patriarchal tyranny had entrenched itself in his person as in a last stronghold of the disappearing order. When he died many things would pa.s.s away out of Dinwiddie--not only the soul and body of Cyrus Treadwell, but the vanis.h.i.+ng myth of the ”strong man,” the rule of the individual despot, the belief in the inalienable right of the father to demand blood sacrifices. For in common with other men of his type, he stood equally for industrial advancement and for domestic immobility. The body social might move, but the units that formed the body social must remain stationary.

”Well, I don't think I'd worry about marrying, if I were you,” he replied, not unkindly, for Susan inspired him with a respect against which he had struggled in vain. ”You are very comfortable now, ain't you? And I'll see that you are well provided for after my death. John Henry hasn't anything except his salary, I reckon.”

Marriage as an economic necessity was perfectly comprehensible to him, but it was difficult for him to conceive of anybody indulging in it simply as a matter of sentiment. That April afternoon was so far away now that it had ceased to exist even as an historical precedent.

”Yes, but I want to marry him, and I am going to,” replied Susan decisively.

”What arrangements would you make about your mother? It seems to me that your mother needs your attention.”

”Of course I couldn't leave mother. If you agree to it, John Henry is willing to come here to live as long as I have to look after her. If not, I shall take her away with me; I have spoken to her, and she is perfectly willing to go.”

The ten years which had left Cyrus at a standstill had developed his daughter from a girl into a woman. She spoke with the manner of one who realizes that she holds the situation in her hands, and he yielded to this a.s.sumption of strength as he would have yielded ten years ago had she been clever enough to use it against him. It was his own manner in a more attractive guise, if he had only known it; and the Treadwell determination to get the thing it wanted most was a.s.serting itself in Susan's desire to win John Henry quite as effectively as it had a.s.serted itself in Cyrus's pa.s.sion to possess the Dinwiddie and Central Railroad.

Though the ends were different, the quality which moved father and daughter towards these different ends was precisely the same. In Cyrus, it was force degraded; in Susan, it was force refined; but the peculiar attribute which distinguished and united them was the possession of the power to command events.

”Take your mother away?” he repeated. ”Why, where on earth would you take her?”

”Then you'll have to agree to John Henry's coming here. It won't make any difference to you, of course. You needn't see him except at the table.”

”But what would James say about it?” he returned, with the cowardice natural to the habitual bully. The girl had character, certainly, and though he disliked character in a woman, he was obliged to admit that she had not failed to make an impression.

”James won't care, and besides,” she added magnificently, ”it is none of his business.”

”And it's none of mine, either, I reckon,” said Cyrus, with a chuckle.