Part 44 (1/2)
”You never can tell. I thought she'd be back again before two months were up.”
”I know. We all prophesied dreadful things--even Susan.”
”That reminds me--I came down on the train with John Henry, and he said that Uncle Cyrus was breaking rapidly.”
”He has never been the same since his wife's death,” replied Virginia, who was a victim of this sentimental fallacy. ”It's strange--isn't it?--because we used to think they got on so badly.”
”I wonder if it is really that? Well, is there any other news? Has anything else happened?”
With his back to the fire, he stood looking down on her with kindly, questioning eyes. He had done his best; from the moment when he had entered the room and met the touching brightness in her face, he had struggled to be as natural, to be as affectionate even, as she desired.
At the moment, so softened, so self-reproachful was his mood, he would willingly have cut off his arm for her could the sacrifice in any manner have secured her happiness. But there were times when it seemed easier to give his life for her than to live it with her; when to shed his blood would have cost less than to make conversation. He yearned over Virginia, but he could not talk to her. Some impregnable barrier of personality separated them as if it were a wall. Already they belonged to different generations; they spoke in the language of different periods. At forty-seven, that second youth, the Indian summer of the emotions, which lingers like autumnal suns.h.i.+ne in the lives of most men and of a few women, was again enkindling his heart. And with this return of youth, he felt the awakening of infinite possibilities of feeling, of the ancient ineradicable belief that happiness lies in possession. Love, which had used up her spirit and body in its service, had left him untouched by its exactions. While she, having fulfilled her nature, was content to live anew not in herself, but in her children, the force of personal desire was sweeping over him again, with all the flame and splendour of adolescence. The ”something missing” waited there, just a little beyond, as he had seen it waiting in that enchanted May when he fell in love with Virginia. And between him and his vision of happiness there interposed merely his undisciplined conscience, his variable, though honest, desire to do the thing that was right. Duty, which had controlled Virginia's every step, was as remote and aloof from his life as was the creed of his fathers. Like his age, he was adrift among disestablished beliefs, among floating wrecks of what had once been rules of conduct by which men had lived. And the widening responsibilities, the deepening consciousness of a force for good greater than creed or rules, all the awakening moral strength which would lend balance and power to his age, these things had been weakened in his character by the indomitable egoism which had ordered his life.
There was nothing for him to fall back upon, nothing that he could place above the restless surge of his will.
Sitting there in the firelight, with her loving eyes following his movements, she told him, bit by bit, all the latest gossip of Dinwiddie.
Susan's eldest girl had developed a beautiful voice and was beginning to take lessons; poor Miss Priscilla had had a bad fall in Old Street while she was on the way to market, and at first they feared she had broken her hip, but it turned out that she was only dreadfully bruised; Major Peachey had died very suddenly and she had felt obliged to go to his funeral; Abby Goode had been home on a visit and everybody said she didn't look a day over twenty-five, though she was every bit of forty-four. Then, taking a little pile of samples from her work basket which stood on the table, she showed him a piece of black brocaded satin. ”Miss w.i.l.l.y is making me a dress out of this to wear in New York with you. I don't suppose you noticed whether or not they were wearing brocade.”
No, he hadn't noticed, but the sample was very pretty, he thought. ”Why don't you buy a dress there, Virginia? It would save you so much trouble.”
”Poor little Miss w.i.l.l.y has set her heart on making it, Oliver. And, besides, I shan't have time if we go only the day before.”
A flush had come to her face; at the corners of her mouth a tender little smile rippled; and her look of faded sweetness gave place for an instant to the warmth and the animation of girlhood. But the excitement of girlhood could not restore to her the freshness of youth. Her pleasure was the pleasure of middle-age; the wistful expectancy in her face was the expectancy of one whose interests are centred on little things. That inviolable quality of self-sacrifice, the quality which knit her soul to the enduring soul of her race, had enabled her to find happiness in the simple act of renouncement. The quiet years had kept undiminished the inordinate capacity for enjoyment, the exaggerated appreciation of trivial favours, which had filled Mrs. Pendleton's life with a flutter of thankfulness; and while Virginia smoothed the piece of black brocade on her knee, she might have been the re-arisen pensive spirit of her mother. Of the two, perhaps because she had ceased to wish for anything for herself, she was happier than Oliver.
All through dinner, while her soft anxious eyes dwelt on him over the bowl of pink roses in the centre of the table, he tried hard to throw himself into her narrow life, to talk only of things in which he felt that she was interested. Slight as the effort was, he could see her grat.i.tude in her face, could hear it in the gentle silvery sound of her voice. When he praised the dinner, she blushed like a girl; when he made her describe the dress which Miss w.i.l.l.y was making, she grew as excited as if she had been speaking of the sacred white satin she had worn as a bride. So little was needed to make her happy--that was the pathos! She was satisfied with the crumbs of life, and yet they were denied her.
Though she had been alone ever since Lucy's wedding, she accepted his belated visit as thankfully as if it were a gratuitous gift. ”It is so good of you to come down, dear, when you are needed every minute in New York,” she murmured, with a caressing touch on his arm, and, looking at her, he was reminded of Mrs. Pendleton's tremulous pleasure in the sweets that came to her on little trays from her neighbours. Once she had said eagerly, ”It will be so nice to see Miss Oldcastle, Oliver,”
and he had answered in a constrained tone which he tried to make light and casual, ”I am not sure that the part is going to suit her.”
Then he had changed the subject abruptly by rising from the table and asking her to let him see her latest letter from Harry.
The next morning he went out after breakfast to consult Cyrus about some investments, while Virginia laid out the lengths of brocade on the bed in the spare room, and sat down to wait for the arrival of the dressmaker. Outside, the trees were still white from the storm, and the wind, blowing through them, made a dry crackling sound as if it were rattling thorns in a forest. Though it was intensely cold, the suns.h.i.+ne fell in golden bars over the pavement and filled the town with a dazzling brilliancy through which the little seamstress was seen presently making her way. Alert, bird-like, consumed with her insatiable interest in other people, she entered, after she had removed her bonnet and wraps, and began to spread out her patterns. It was twenty-odd years since she had made the white satin dress in which Virginia was married, yet she looked hardly a day older than she had done when she knelt at the girl's feet and envied her happiness while she pinned up the s.h.i.+ning train. Failing love, she had filled her life with an inextinguishable curiosity; and this pa.s.sion, being independent of the desires of others, was proof alike against disillusionment and the destructive processes of time.
”So Mr. Treadwell has come home,” she remarked, with a tentative flourish of the scissors. ”I declare he gets handsomer every day that he lives. It suits him somehow to fill out, or it may be that I'm partial to fat like my poor mother before me.”
”He does look well, but I'd hardly call him fat, would you?”
”Well, he's stouter than he used to be, anyway. Did he say when he was going to take you back with him?”
”Next Wednesday. We'll have to hurry to get this dress ready in time.”
”I'll start right in at it. Have you made up your mind whether you'll have it princess or a separate waist and skirt?”
”I'm a little too thin for a princess gown, don't you think? Hadn't I better have it made like that black poplin which everybody thought looked so well on me?”
”But it ain't half so stylish as the princess. You just let me put a few cambric ruffles inside the bust and you'll stand out a plenty. I was reading in a fas.h.i.+on sheet only yesterday that they are trying to look as flat as they can manage in Paris.”
”Well, I'll try it,” murmured Virginia uncertainly, for her standards of dress were so vague that she was thankful to be able to rely on Miss w.i.l.l.y's self-const.i.tuted authority.
”You just leave it to me,” was the dressmaker's reply, while she thrust the point of the scissors into the gleaming brocade on the bed.