Virginia

"I shall never go again," she thought, as she slipped from her saddle at the gate, and, catching up her long riding-skirt, ran up the short walk to the steps. "I must be getting old. Something has gone out of me."

And there was no regret in her heart for this something which had fled out of her life, for the flashing desires and the old breathless pleasures of youth which she had lost. For a month this passive joy lasted – the joy of one whose days are full and whose every activity is in useful service. Then there came an October afternoon which she never forgot because it burned across her life like a prairie fire and left a scarred track of memory behind it. It had been a windless day, filled with glittering blue lights that darted like birds down the long ash-coloured roads, and spun with a golden web of air which made the fields and trees appear as thin and as unsubstantial as dreams. The children were with Marthy in the park, and Virginia, attired in the old waist with the new sleeves, was leaning on the front gate watching the slow fall of the leaves from the gnarled mulberry tree at the corner, when Mrs. Pendleton appeared on the opposite side of the street and crossed the cobblestones of the road with her black alpaca skirt trailing behind her.

"I wonder why in the world mother doesn't hold up her skirt?" thought Virginia, swinging back the little wooden gate while she waited. "Mother, you are letting your train get all covered with dust!" she called, as soon as Mrs. Pendleton came near enough to catch her half-whispered warning.

Reaching down indifferently, the older woman caught up a handful of her skirt and left the rest to follow ignominiously in the dust. From the carelessness of the gesture, Virginia saw at once that her mother's mind was occupied by one of those rare states of excitement or of distress when even the preservation of her clothes had sunk to a matter of secondary importance. When the small economies were banished from Mrs. Pendleton's consciousness, matters had assumed indeed a serious aspect.

"Why, mother, what on earth has happened?" asked Virginia, hurrying toward her.

"Let me come in and speak to you, Jinny. I mean inside the house. One can never be sure that some of the neighbours aren't listening," she said in a whisper.

Hurrying past her daughter, she went into the hall, and, then turning, faced her with her hand on the door-knob. In the dim light of the hall her face showed white and drawn, like the face of a person who has been suddenly stricken with illness. "Jinny, I've just had a visit from Mrs. Carrington – you know what a gossip she is – but I think I ought to tell you that she says people are talking about Oliver's riding so much with Abby."

A pain as sharp as if the teeth of a beast had fastened in her heart, pierced Virginia while she stood there, barring the door with her hands. Her peace, which had seemed indestructible a moment ago, was shattered by a sensation of violent anger – not against Abby, not against Oliver, not even against the gossiping old women of Dinwiddie – but against her own blindness, her own inconceivable folly! At the moment the civilization of centuries was stripped from her, and she was as simple and as primitive as a female of the jungle. On the surface she was still calm, but to her own soul she felt that she presented the appalling spectacle of a normal woman turned fury. It was one of those instants that are so unexpected, so entirely unnatural and out of harmony with the rest of life, that they obliterate the boundaries of character which separate the life of the individual from the ancient root of the race. Not Virginia, but the primeval woman in her blood, shrieked out in protest as she saw her hold on her mate threatened. The destruction of the universe, as long as it left her house standing in its bit of ground, would have overwhelmed her less utterly.

"But what on earth can they say, mother? It was all my fault. I made him go. He never lifted his finger for Abby."

"I know, darling, I know. Of course, Oliver is not to blame, but people will talk, and I think Abby ought to have known better."

For an instant only Virginia hesitated. Then something stronger than the primitive female in her blood – the spirit of a lady – spoke through her lips.

"I don't believe Abby was to blame, either," she said.

"But women ought to know better, Jinny, and Abby is nearly thirty."

"She always wanted me to go, mother. I don't believe she thought for a minute that she was doing anything wrong. Abby is a little coarse, but she's perfectly good. Nobody will make me think otherwise."

"Well, it can't go on, dear. You must stop Oliver's riding with her. And Mrs. Carrington says she hears that he is going to Atlantic City with them in General Goode's private car on Thursday."

"Abby asked me, too, but of course I couldn't leave the children."

"Of course not. Oliver must give it up, too. Oh, Jinny, a scandal, even where one is innocent, is so terrible. A woman – a true woman – would endure death rather than be talked about. I remember your cousin Jane Pendleton made an unhappy marriage, and her husband used to get drunk and beat her and even carry on dreadfully with the coloured servants – but she said that was better than the disgrace of a separation."

"But all that has nothing to do with me, mother. Oliver is an angel, and this is every bit my fault, not Abby's." The violence in her soul had passed, and she felt suddenly calm.

"Of course, darling, of course. Now that you see what it has led to, you can stop it immediately."

They were so alike as they stood there facing each other, mother and daughter, that they might have represented different periods of the same life – youth and age meeting together. Both were perfect products of that social order whose crowning grace and glory they were. Both were creatures trained to feel rather than think, whose very goodness was the result not of reason, but of emotion. And, above all, both were gentlewomen to the innermost cores of their natures. Passion could not banish for long that exquisite forbearance which generations had developed from a necessity into an art.

"I can't stop his going with her, because that would make people think I believed the things they say – but I can go, too, mother, and I will. I'll borrow Susan's horse and go fox-hunting with them to-morrow."

Once again, as on the afternoon when she had heard of Oliver's illness in New York, Mrs. Pendleton realized that her daughter's strength was more than a match for hers when the question related to Oliver.

"But the children, dear – and then, oh, Jinny, you might get hurt."

To her surprise Jinny laughed.

"I shan't get hurt, mother – and if I did – "

She left her sentence unfinished, but in the break there was the first note of bitterness that her mother had ever heard from her lips. Was it possible, after all, that there was "more in it" than she had let appear in her words? Was it possible that her passionate defence of Abby had been but a beautiful pretence?

"I'll go straight down to the Treadwells' to ask Susan for her horse," she added cheerfully, "and you'll come over very early, won't you, to stay with the children? Oliver always starts before daybreak."

"Yes, darling, I'll get up at dawn and come over – but, Jinny, promise me to be careful."

"Oh, I'll be careful," responded Virginia lightly, as she went out on the porch.

CHAPTER VII

THE WILL TO LIVE

"It's all horrid talk. There's not a word of truth in it," she thought, true to the Pendleton point of view, as she turned into Old Street on her way to the Treadwells'. Then the sound of horses' hoofs rang on the cobblestones, and, looking past the corner, she saw Oliver and Abby galloping under the wine-coloured leaves of the oak tree at the crossing. His face was turned back, as if he were looking over his shoulder at the red sunset, and he was laughing as she had not heard him laugh since that dreadful morning in the bedroom of the New York hotel. What a boy he was still! As she watched him, it seemed to her that she was old enough to be his mother, and the soreness in her heart changed into an exquisite impulse of tenderness. Then he looked from the sunset to Abby, and at the glance of innocent pleasure that passed between them a stab of jealousy entered her heart like a blade. Before it faded, they had passed the corner, and were cantering wildly up Old Street in the direction of Abby's home.

"It is my fault. I am too settled. I am letting my youth go," she said, with a passionate determination to catch her girlhood and hold it fast before it eluded her forever. "I am only twenty-eight and I dress like a woman of forty." And it seemed to her that the one desirable thing in life was this fleet-winged spirit of youth, which passed like a breath, leaving existence robbed of all romance and beauty. An hour before she had not cared, and she would not care now if only Oliver could grow middle-aged and old at the moment when she did. Ah, there was the tragedy! All life was for men, and only a few radiant years of it were given to women. Men were never too old to love, to pursue and capture whatever joy the fugitive instant might hold for them. But women, though they were allowed only one experience out of the whole of life, were asked to resign even that one at the very minute when they needed it most. "I wonder what will become of me when the children grow big enough to be away all the time as Oliver is," she thought wistfully. "I wish one never grew too old to have babies."

The front door of the Treadwell house stood open, and in the hall Susan was arranging golden-rod and life-ever-lasting in a blue china bowl.

"Of course, you may have Belle to-morrow," she said in answer to Virginia's faltering request. "Even if I intended going, I'd be only too glad to lend her to you – but I can't leave mother anyway. She always gets restless if I stay out over an hour."

Mrs. Treadwell's illness had become one of those painful facts which people accept as naturally as they accept the theological dogma of damnation. It was terrible, when they thought of it, but they seldom thought of it, thereby securing tranquillity of mind in the face of both facts and dogmas. Even Virginia had ceased to make her first question when she met Susan, "How is your mother?"

"But, Susan, you need the exercise. I thought that was why the doctor made Uncle Cyrus get you a horse."

"It was, but I only go for an hour in the afternoon. I begrudge every minute I spend away from mother. Oh, Jinny, she is so pathetic! It almost breaks my heart to watch her."

"I know, dearest," said Virginia; but at the back of her brain she was thinking, "They looked so happy together, yet he could never really admire Abby. She isn't at all the kind of woman he likes."

So preoccupied was she by this problem of her own creation, that her voice had a strangely far off sound, as though it came from a distance. "I wish I could help you, dear Susan. If you ever want me, day or night, you know you have only to send for me. I'd let nothing except desperate illness stand in the way of my coming."

It was true, and because she knew that it was true, Susan stooped suddenly and kissed her.

"You are looking tired, Jinny. What is the matter?"

"Nothing except that I'm a sight in this old waist. I made it over to save buying one, but I wish now I hadn't. It makes me look so settled."

"You need some clothes, and you used to be so fond of them."

"That was before the children came. I've never cared much since. It's just as if life were a completed circle, somehow. There's nothing more to expect or to wait for – you'll understand what I mean some day, Susan."

"I think I do now. But only women are like that? Men are different – "

It was the classic phrase again, but on Susan's lips it sounded with a new significance.

"And some women are different, too," replied Virginia. "Now there's Abby Goode – Susan, what do you honestly think of Abby?"

There was a wistful note in the question, and around her gentle blue eyes appeared a group of little lines, brought out by the nervous contraction of her forehead. Was it the wan, smoky light of the dusk? – Susan wondered, or was Virginia really beginning to break so soon?

"Why, I like Abby. I always did," she answered, trying to look as if she did not understand what Virginia had meant. "She's a little bit what John Henry calls 'loud,' but she has a good heart and would do anybody a kindness."

She had evaded answering, just as Virginia had evaded asking, the question which both knew had passed unuttered between them – was Abby to be trusted to keep inviolate the ancient unwritten pledge of honourable womanhood? Her character was being tested by the single decisive virtue exacted of her sex.

"I am glad you feel that way," said Virginia in a relieved manner after a minute, "because I should hate not to believe in Abby, and some people don't understand her manner – mother among them."

"Oh, she's all right. I'm sure of it," answered Susan, with heartiness.

The wistful sound had passed out of Virginia's voice, while the little lines faded as suddenly from the corners of her eyes. She looked better already – only she really ought not to wear such dowdy clothes, even though she was happily married, reflected Susan, as she watched her, a few minutes later, pass over the mulberry leaves, which lay, thick and still, on the sidewalk.

At the corner of Sycamore Street a shopkeeper was putting away his goods for the night, and in the window Virginia saw a length of hyacinth-blue silk, matching her eyes, which she had remotely coveted for weeks – never expecting to possess it, yet never quite reconciling herself to the thought that it might be worn by some other woman. That length of silk had grown gradually to symbolize the last glimmer of girlish vanity which motherhood had not extinguished in her heart; and while she looked at it now, in her new recklessness of mood, a temptation, born of the perversity which rules human fate, came to her to go in and buy it while she was still desperate enough to act foolishly and not be afraid. For the first time in her life that immemorial spirit of adventure which lies buried under the dead leaves of civilization at the bottom of every human heart – with whose re-arisen ghost men have moved mountains and ploughed jungles and charted illimitable seas – this imperishable spirit stirred restlessly in its grave and prompted her for once to be uncalculating and to risk the future. In the flickering motive which guided her as she entered the shop, one would hardly have recognized the lusty impulse which had sent her ancestors on splendid rambles of knight-errantry, yet its hidden source was the same. The simple purchase of twelve yards of blue silk which she had wanted for weeks! To an outsider it would have appeared a small matter, yet in the act there was the intrepid struggle of a personal will to enforce its desire upon destiny. She would win back the romance and the beauty of living at the cost of prudence, at the cost of practical comforts, at the cost, if need be, of those ideals of womanly duty to which the centuries had trained her! For eight years she had hardly thought of herself, for eight years she had worked and saved and planned and worried, for eight years she had given her life utterly and entirely to Oliver and the children – and the result was that he was happier with Abby – with Abby whom he didn't even admire – than he was with the wife whom he both respected and loved! The riddle not only puzzled, it enraged her. Though she was too simple to seek a psychological answer, the very fact that it existed became an immediate power in her life. She forgot the lateness of the evening, she forgot the children who were anxiously watching for her return. The forces of character, which she had always regarded as divinely fixed and established, melted and became suddenly fluid. She wasn't what she had been the minute before – she wasn't even, she began dimly to realize, what she would probably be the minute afterwards. Yet the impulse which governed her now was as despotic as if it had reigned in undisputed authority since the day of her birth. She knew that it was a rebel against the disciplined and moderate rule of her conscience, but this knowledge, which would have horrified her had she been in a normal mood, aroused in her now merely a breathless satisfaction at the spectacle of her own audacity. The natural Virginia had triumphed for an instant over the Virginia whom the ages had bred.

At home she found Oliver waiting for supper, and the three children in tears for fear she should decide to stay out forever.

"Oh, mother, we thought you'd gone away never to come back," sobbed Lucy, throwing herself into her arms, "and what would little Jenny have done?"

"Where in the world have you been, Virginia?" asked Oliver, a trifle impatiently, for he was not used to having her absent from the house at meal hours. "I was afraid somebody had been taken ill at the rectory, so I went around to inquire."

"No, nobody was ill," answered Virginia quietly. Though her resolution made her tremble all over, it did not occur to her for an instant that even now she might recede from it. As the rector had gone to the war, so she was going now to battle with Abby. She was afraid, but that quality which had made the Pendletons despise fear since the beginning of Dinwiddie's history, which they had helped to make, enabled her to control her quivering muscles and to laugh at the reproachful protests with which the children surrounded her. Through her mind there shot the thought: "I have a secret from Oliver," and she felt suddenly guilty because for the first time since her marriage she was keeping something back from him. Then, following this, there came the knowledge, piercing her heart, that she must keep her secret because even if she told him, he would not understand. With the casualness of a man's point of view towards an emotion, he would judge its importance, she felt, chiefly by the power it possessed of disturbing the course of his life. Unobservant, and ever ready to twist and decorate facts as she was, it had still been impossible for her to escape the truth that men are by nature incapable of a woman's characteristic passion for nursing sentiment. To struggle to keep a feeling alive for no better reason than that it was a feeling, would appear as wastefully extravagant to Oliver as to the unimaginative majority of his sex. Such pure, sublime, uncalculating folly belonged to woman alone!

When, at last, supper was over and the children were safely in bed, she came downstairs to Oliver, who was smoking a cigar over a newspaper, and asked carelessly:

"At what time do you start in the morning?"

"I'd like to be up by five," he replied, without lowering his paper. "We're to meet the hounds at Croswell's store at a quarter of six, so I'll have to get off by five at the latest. I wanted my horse fresh for to-morrow, that's why I only went a mile or two this afternoon," he added.

"Susan's to lend me Belle. I'm going with you," she said, after a pause in which he had begun to read his paper again. This habit of treating her as if she were not present when he wanted to read or to work, was, she remembered, one of the things she had insisted upon in the beginning of her marriage.

"By Jove!" he exclaimed, and the paper dropped from his hands. "I'm jolly glad, but what will you do about the children?"

"Mother is coming to look after them. I'll be back in time to hear Harry's lessons, I suppose."

"Why, of course; but, look here, you'll be awfully sore. You haven't ridden after the hounds since I knew you. You might even get a fall."

"I used to go, though, a great deal – and it won't hurt me to be stiff for a few days. Besides, I want to take up hunting again."

Her motive was beyond him – perhaps because of her nearness, which prevented his getting the proper perspective of vision. For all his keenness of insight, he failed utterly to see into the mysterious mind of his wife. He could not penetrate that subtle interplay of traditional virtues and discover that she was in the clutch of one of the oldest and most savage of the passions.

"Then you'd better go to bed early and get some sleep," he said. "I suppose we'll have a cup of coffee before starting."

"I'll make it on the oil stove while I am dressing. Marthy won't be up then."

"Well, I'll come upstairs in ten minutes," he replied, taking up his paper again. "I only want to finish this article."

In the morning when she opened the old green shutters and looked out of the window, the horses, having been saddled by candlelight, were standing under the mulberry tree at the gate. Eight years ago, in her girlhood, she would have awakened in a delicious excitement on the morning of a fox-hunt, and have dressed as eagerly as if she were going to a ball; but to-day, while she lit the oil-stove in the hall room and put on the kettle of water, she was supported not by the hope of pleasure, but by a dull, an almost indefinable sensation of dread. The instinct of woman to adjust her personality to the changing ideals of the man she loves – this instinct older than civilization, rooted in tragedy, and existing by right of an unconquerable necessity – rose superior at the moment to that more stable maternal passion with which it has conflicted since the beginning of motherhood. While she put on her riding-habit and tied up the plait of her hair, the one thought in Virginia's mind was that she must be, at all costs, the kind of woman that Oliver wanted.

A little later, when they set out under the mulberry trees, she glanced at him wistfully, as though she wanted him to praise the way she looked in the saddle. But his eyes were on the end of the street, where a little company of riders awaited them, and before she could ask a question, Abby's high voice was heard exclaiming pleasantly upon her presence. Not a particularly imposing figure, because of her rather short legs, when she was on the ground, it was impossible for Virginia to deny that Abby was amazingly handsome on horseback. Plump, dark, with a superb bosom, and a colour in her cheeks like autumnal berries, she had never appeared to better advantage than she did, sitting on her spirited bay mare under an arch of scarlet leaves which curved over her head. Turning at their approach, she started at a brisk canter up the road, and as Virginia followed her, the sound of the horn floated, now loud, now faint, out of the pale mist that spun fanciful silken webs over the trees and bushes.

"Remember to look out for the creeks. That's where the danger comes," said Oliver, riding close to her, and he added nervously, "Don't try to keep up with Abby."

Ahead of them stretched a deserted Virginia road, with its look of brooding loneliness, as if it had waited patiently through the centuries for a civilization which had never come; and on the right of it, beyond a waste of scarlet sumach and sassafras and a winding creek screened in elder bushes, the dawn was breaking slowly under a single golden-edged cloud. Somebody on Virginia's left – a large, raw-boned, passionate huntsman, in an old plum-coloured overcoat with a velvet collar – was complaining loudly that they had started too late and the fox would have gone to his lair before they reached the main party. Except for an oath, which he rapped out by way of an emphasis not intended for the ladies, he might have been conducting a religious revival, so solemnly energetic, so deeply moved, was his manner. The hunt, which observed naturally the characteristics of a society that was ardently individualistic even in its sports, was one of those informal, "go-as-you-please" affairs in which the supreme joy of killing is not hampered by tedious regulations or unnecessary restrictions. The chief thing was to get a run – to start a rare red fox, if luck was good, because he was supposed to run straight by nature and not to move in circles after the inconsiderate manner of the commoner grey sort. But Providence, being inattentive to the needs of hunters in the neighbourhood of Dinwiddie, had decreed that the red fox should live there mainly in the vivid annals of old sportsmen.

"A grey fox with red ears. The best run I ever had. Tried to get in the crotch of a hickory tree at the end. Was so exhausted he couldn't stir a foot when the hounds got him." While they waited at the crossroads before a little country store, where the pack of hounds, lean, cringing, habitually hungry creatures, started from beneath an old field pine on the right, Virginia heard the broken phrases blown on the wind, which carried the joyous notes of the horn over the meadows. The casual cruelty of the words awoke no protest in her mind, because it was a cruelty to which she was accustomed. If the sport had been unknown in Dinwiddie, and she had read of it as the peculiar activity of the inhabitants of the British Islands, she would probably have condemned it as needlessly brutal and degrading. But with that universal faculty of the human mind to adjust its morality to fit its inherited physical habits, she regarded "the rights of the fox" to-day with something of the humorous scorn of sentimental rubbish with which her gentler grandmother had once regarded "the rights of the slave." For centuries the hunt had been one of the cherished customs of Dinwiddians; and though she could not bear to see a fly caught in a web, it would never have occurred to her to question the humanity of any sport in which her ancestors had delighted. In her girlhood the sound of the horn had called to her blood with all the intoxicating associations it awoke in the raw-boned, energetic rider in the plum-coloured coat – but to-day both the horn and the familiar landscape around her had grown strange and unhomelike. For the first time since her birth she and the country were out of harmony.