Virginia

"Why, there's Susan!" exclaimed Oliver, coming toward her with an eager pleasure in his face which made it more boyish than ever. "Well, well, it's good to see you, Susan. Are you the same old dear I left behind me?"

"The same," said Susan laughing. "And so glad about your plays, Oliver, so perfectly delighted."

"By Jove, you're the first person to speak of them," he replied. "Nobody else seems to think a play is worth mentioning as long as a baby is in sight. That's a delusion of Virginia's, too. I wish you'd convince her, Susan, that a man is of some use except as a husband and a father."

"But they are such nice babies, Oliver."

"Oh, nice enough as babies go. The boy's a trump. He'd be a man already if his mother would let him. But babies ought to have their season like everything else under the sun. For God's sake, Susan, talk to me about something else!" he added in mock despair.

Virginia was already in the house, and when Oliver and Susan joined her, they found Mrs. Pendleton trying to persuade her to let Marthy carry the sleeping Jenny up to the nursery.

"Give me that child, Jinny," said Oliver, a trifle sharply. "You know the doctor told you not to carry her upstairs."

"But I'm sure it won't hurt me," she responded, with an angelic sweetness of voice. "It will wake her to be changed, and the poor little thing has had such a trying day."

"Well, you aren't going to carry her, if she wakes twenty times," retorted Oliver. "Here, Marthy, if she thinks I'd drop her, suppose you try it."

"Why, bless you, sir, I can take her so she won't know it," returned Marthy reassuringly, and coming forward, she proved her ability by sliding the unconscious child from Virginia's arms into her own.

"Where is Harry?" asked Mrs. Pendleton anxiously. "Nobody has seen Harry since we got here."

"I is, ma'am," replied the cheerful Marthy over her shoulder, as she toiled up the stairs, with Virginia and little Lucy noiselessly following. "I've undressed him and I was obliged to hide his clothes to keep him from putting 'em on again. He's near daft with excitement."

"Perhaps I'd better go up and help get them to bed," said Mrs. Pendleton, turning from the rector to Oliver. "I'm afraid Jinny will be too tired to enjoy her supper. Harry is in such a gale of spirits I can hear him talking."

"You might as well, my dear," rejoined the rector mildly, as he stooped over to replace one of the baby's bottles in the basket from which it had slipped. "Don't you think we might get some of these things out of the way?" he added. "If you take that alcohol stove, Oliver, I'll follow with these caps and shawls."

"Certainly, sir," rejoined Oliver readily. He always addressed the rector as "sir," partly because it seemed to him to be appropriate, partly because he knew that the older man expected him to do so. It was one of Oliver's most engaging characteristics that he usually adapted himself with perfect ease to whatever life or other people expected of him.

While they were carrying the baskets into the passage at the back of the dining-room, Mrs. Pendleton, whose nervous longing had got at last beyond her control, deserted Susan, with an apology, and flitted up the stairs.

"Come up and tell Jinny good-night before you go, dear," she added; "I'm afraid she will not get down again to see you."

"Oh, don't worry about me," replied Susan. "I want to say a few words to Oliver, and then I'm coming up to see Harry. Harry appears to me to be a man of personality."

"He's a darling child," replied Mrs. Pendleton, a little vaguely, "and Jinny says she never saw him so headstrong before. He is usually as good as gold."

"Well, well, it's a fine family," said the rector, beaming upon his son-in-law, when they returned from the passage. "I never saw three healthier children. It's a pity you lost the other one," he added in a graver tone, "but as he lived such a short time, Virginia couldn't take it so much to heart as if he had been older. She seems to have got over the disappointment."

"Yes, I think she's got over it," said Oliver.

"It will be good for her to be back in Dinwiddie. I never felt satisfied to think of her so far away."

"Yes, I'm glad we could come back," agreed Oliver pleasantly, though he appeared to Susan's quick eye to be making an effort.

"By the way, I haven't spoken of your literary work," remarked the rector, with the manner of a man who is saying something very agreeable. "I have never been to the theatre, but I understand that it is losing a great deal of its ill odour. I always remember when anything is said about the stage that, after all, Shakespeare was an actor. We may be old-fashioned in Dinwiddie," he pursued in the complacent tone in which the admission of this failing is invariably made, "but I don't think we can have any objection to sweet, clean plays, with an elevating moral tone to them. They are no worse, anyway, than novels."

Though Oliver kept his face under such admirable control, Susan, glancing at him quickly, saw a shade of expression, too fine for amusement, too cordial for resentment, pass over his features. His colour, which was always high, deepened, and raising his head, he brushed the smooth dark hair back from his forehead. Through some intuitive strain of sympathy, Susan understood, while she watched him, that his plays were as vital a matter in his life as the children were in Virginia's.

"I must run up and see Harry before he goes to sleep," she said, feeling instinctively that the conversation was becoming a strain.

At the allusion to his grandson, the rector's face lost immediately its expression of forced pleasantness and relapsed into its look of genial charm.

"You ought to be proud of that boy, Oliver," he observed, beaming. "There's the making of a fine man in him, but you mustn't let Jinny spoil him. It took all my strength and authority to keep Lucy from ruining Jinny, and I've always said that my brother-in-law Tom Bland would have been a first-rate fellow if it hadn't been for the way his mother raised him. God knows, I like a woman to be wrapped up heart and soul in her household – and I don't suppose anybody ever accused the true Southern lady of lacking in domesticity – but if they have a failing, which I refuse to admit, it is that they are almost too soft-hearted where their children – especially their sons – are concerned."

"I used to tell Virginia that she gave in to Harry too much when he was a baby," said Oliver, who was evidently not without convictions regarding the rearing of his offspring; "but she hasn't been nearly so bad about it since Jenny came. Jenny is the one I'm anxious about now. She is a headstrong little beggar and she has learned already how to get around her mother when she wants anything. It's been worse, too," he added, "since we lost the last poor little chap. Ever since then Virginia has been in mortal terror for fear something would happen to the others."

"It was hard on her," said the rector. "We men can't understand how women feel about a thing like that, though," he added gently. "I remember when we lost our babies – you know we had three before Virginia came, but none of them lived more than a few hours – that I thought Lucy would die of grief and disappointment. You see they have all the burden and the anxiety of it, and I sometimes think that a child begins to live for a woman a long time before a man ever thinks of it as a human being."

"I suppose you're right," returned Oliver in the softened tone which proved to Susan that he was emotionally stirred. "I tried to be as sympathetic with Virginia as I could, but – do you know? – I stopped to ask myself sometimes if I could really understand. It seemed to her so strange that I wasn't knocked all to pieces by the thing – that I could go on writing as if nothing had happened."

"I am not sure that it isn't beyond the imagination of a man to enter into a woman's most sacred feeling," remarked the rector, with a touch of the sentimentality in which he religiously shrouded the feminine sex. So ineradicable, indeed, was his belief in the inherent virtue of every woman, that he had several times fallen a helpless victim in the financial traps of conscienceless Delilahs. But since his innocence was as temperamental a quality as was Virginia's maternal passion, experience had taught him nothing, and the fact that he had been deceived in the past threw no shadow of safeguard around his steps in the present. This endearing trait, which made him so successful as a husband, was probably the cause of his unmitigated failure as a reformer. In looking at a woman, it was impossible for him to see anything except perfection.

When Susan reached the top of the staircase, Mrs. Pendleton called to her, through the half open door of the nursery, to come in and hear how beautifully Lucy was saying her prayers. Her voice was full of a suppressed excitement; there was a soft pink flush in her cheeks; and it seemed to Susan that the presence of her grandchildren had made her almost a girl again. She sat on the edge of a trundle-bed slipping a nightgown over the plump shoulders of little Lucy, who held herself very still and prim, for she was a serious child, with a natural taste for propriety. Her small plain face, with its prominent features and pale blue eyes, had a look of intense earnestness and concentration, as though the business of getting to bed absorbed all her energies; and the only movement she made was to toss back the slender and very tight braid of brown hair from her shoulders. She said her prayer as if it were the multiplication table, and having finished, slid gently into bed, and held up her face to be kissed.

"Jenny wouldn't drink but half of her bottle, Miss Virginia," said Marthy, appearing suddenly on the threshold of Virginia's bedroom, for the youngest child slept in the room with her mother. "She dropped off to sleep so sound that I couldn't wake her."

"I hope she isn't sick, Marthy," responded Virginia in an anxious tone. "Did she seem at all feverish?"

"Naw'm, she ain't feverish, she's jest sleepy headed."

"Well, I'll come and look at her as soon as I can persuade Harry to finish his prayers. He stopped in the middle of them, and he refuses to bless anybody but himself."

She spoke gravely, gazing with her exhaustless patience over the impish yellow head of Harry, who knelt, in his little nightgown, on the rug at her feet. His roving blue eyes met Susan's as she came over to him, while his chubby face broke into a delicious smile.

"Don't notice him, Susan," said Virginia, in her lovely voice which was as full of tenderness and as lacking in humour as her mother's. "Harry, you shan't speak to Aunt Susan until you've been good and finished your prayers."

"Don't want to speak to Aunt Susan," retorted the monster of infant depravity, slipping his bare toes through a rent in the rug, and doubling up with delight at his insubordination.

"I never knew him to behave like this before," said Virginia, almost in tears from shame and weariness. "It must be the excitement of getting here. He is usually so good. Now, Harry, begin all over again. 'God bless dear papa, God bless dear mamma, God bless dear grandmamma, God bless dear grandpapa, God bless dear Lucy, God bless dear Jenny, God bless all our dear friends.'"

"God bless dear Harry," recited the monster.

"He has gone on like that ever since I started," said poor Virginia. "I don't know what to do about it. It seems dreadful to let him go to bed without saying his prayers properly. Now, Harry, please, please be good; poor mother is so tired, and she wants to go and kiss little Jenny good-night. 'God bless dear papa,' and I'll let you get in bed."

"God bless Harry," was the imperturbable rejoinder to this pleading.

"Don't you want your poor mother to have some supper, Harry?" inquired Susan severely.

"Harry wants supper," answered the innocent.

"I suppose I'll have to let him go," said Virginia, distractedly, "but Oliver will be horrified. He says I don't reason with them enough. Harry," she concluded sternly, "don't you understand that it is naughty of you to behave this way and keep mamma away from poor little Jenny?"

"Bad Jenny," said Harry.

"If you don't say your prayers this minute, you shan't have any preserves on your bread to-morrow."

"Bad preserves," retorted Harry.

"Well, if he won't, I don't see how I can make him," said Virginia. "Come, then, get into bed, Harry, and go to sleep. You have been a bad boy and hurt poor mamma's feelings so that she is going to cry. She won't be able to eat her supper for thinking of the way you have disobeyed her."

Jumping into bed with a bound, Harry dug his head into the pillows, gurgled, and then sat up very straight.

"God bless dear papa, God bless dear mamma, God bless dear grandmamma, God bless dear grandpapa, God bless dear Lucy, God bless dear Jenny, God bless our dear friends everywhere," he repeated in a resounding voice.

"Oh, you precious lamb!" exclaimed Virginia. "He couldn't bear to hurt poor mamma, could he?" and she kissed him ecstatically before hastening to the slumbering Jenny in the adjoining room.

"I like the little scamp," said Susan, when she reported the scene to John Henry on the way home, "but he manages his mother perfectly. Already his sense of humour is better developed than hers."

"I can't get over seeing Virginia with children," observed John Henry, as if the fact of Virginia's motherhood had just become evident to him. "It suits her, though. She looked happier than I ever saw her – and so, for that matter, did Aunt Lucy."

"It made me wonder how Mrs. Pendleton had lived away from them for seven years. Why, you can't imagine what she is – she doesn't seem to have any life at all until you see her with Virginia's children."

"It's a wonderful thing," said John Henry slowly, "and it taught me a lot just to look at them. I don't know why, but it seemed to make me understand how much I care about you, Susan."

"Hadn't you suspected it before?" asked Susan as calmly as he had spoken. Emotionalism, she knew, she would never find in John Henry's wooing, and, though she could not have explained the reason of it to herself, she liked the brusque directness of his courtship. It was part of that large sincerity of nature which had first attracted her to him.

"Of course, in a way I knew I cared more for you than for anybody else – but I didn't realize that you were more to me than Virginia had ever been. I had got so in the habit of thinking I was in love with her that it came almost as a surprise to me to find that it was over."

"I knew it long ago," said Susan.

"Why didn't you make me see it?"

"Oh, I waited for you to find it out yourself. I was sure that you would some day."

"Do you think you could ever care for me, Susan?"

A smile quivered on Susan's lips as she looked up at him, but with the reticence which had always characterized her, she answered simply:

"I think I could, John Henry."

His hand reached down and closed over hers, and in the long look which they exchanged under the flickering street lamp, she felt suddenly that perfect security which is usually the growth of happy years. Whatever the future brought to them, she knew that she could trust John Henry's love for her.

"And we've lost seven years, dearest," he said, with a catch in his voice. "We've lost seven years just because I happened to be born a fool."

"But we've got fifty ahead of us," she replied with a joyous laugh.

As she spoke, her heart cried out, "Fifty years of the thing I want!" and she looked up into the kind, serious face of John Henry as if it were the face of incarnate happiness. A tremendous belief in life surged from her brain through her body, which felt incredibly warm and young. She thought exultantly of herself as of one who did not accept destiny, but commanded it.

They walked the rest of the way in silence, but he held her hand pressed closely against his heart, and once or twice he turned in the deserted street and looked into her eyes as if he found there all the words that he needed.

"We won't waste any more time, will we, Susan?" he asked when they reached the house. "Let's be married in December."

"If mother is better by then. She hasn't been well, and I am anxious about her."

"We'll go to housekeeping at once. I'll begin looking about to-morrow. God bless you, darling, for what you are giving me."

She caressed his hand gently with her fingers, and he was about to speak again, when the door behind them opened and the head of Cyrus appeared like that of a desolate bird of prey.

"Is that you, Susan?" he inquired. "Where have you been all this time? Your mother was taken ill more than an hour ago, and the doctor says that she has been paralyzed."

Breaking away from John Henry, Susan ran up the steps and past her father into the hall, where Miss Willy stood weeping.

"I was all by myself with her. There wasn't another living soul in the house," sobbed the little dressmaker. "She fell over just like that, with her face all twisted, while I was talking to her."

"Oh, poor mother, poor mother!" cried the girl as she ran upstairs. "Is she in her room, and who is with her?"

"The doctor has been there for over an hour, and he says that she'll never be able to move again. Oh, Susan, how will she stand it?"

But Susan had already outstripped her, and was entering the sick-room, where Mrs. Treadwell lay unconscious, with her distorted face turned toward the door, as though she were watching expectantly for some one who would never come. As the girl fell on her knees beside the couch, her happiness seemed to dissolve like mist before the grim facts of mortal anguish and death. It was not until dawn, when the night's watch was over and she stood alone beside her window, that she said to herself with all the courage she could summon:

"And it's over for me, too. Everything is over for me, too. Oh, poor, poor mother!"

Love, which had seemed to her last night the supreme spirit in the universe, had surrendered its authority to the diviner image of Duty.