CHAPTER XXXIV
THE BLOW THAT CLEARS
Until dawn the doctor was with her, but in the afternoon, when I went into her room, I found that she had got out of bed and was dressed for motoring.
"Oh, I'm all right. There's nothing the matter with me except that I am smothering for fresh air," she said almost irritably, in reply to my remonstrances.
"But you are ill, Sally. You are as pale as a ghost."
She shook her head impatiently, and I noticed that the furs she wore seemed to drag down her slender figure.
"The wind will bring back my colour. If I lie there and think all day, I shall go out of my mind." Her lips trembled and a quiver passed through her face, but when I made a step toward her, she repulsed me with a gesture which, gentle as it was, appeared to place me at a measured distance. "I wish – oh, I wish Aunt Euphronasia wasn't dead," she said in a whisper.
"If you go, may I go with you?" I asked.
For a minute she hesitated, then meeting my eyes with a glance in which I read for the first time since I had known her, a gentle aversion, a faint hostility, she answered quietly: —
"I am sorry, but I've just telephoned Bonny that I'd call for her."
The old bruise in my heart throbbed while I turned away; but the pain instead of melting my pride, only increased the terrible reticence which I wore now as an armour. Her face, above the heavy furs that seemed dragging her down, had in it something of the soft, uncompromising obstinacy of Miss Matoaca. So delicate she appeared that I could almost have broken her body in my grasp; yet I knew that she would not yield though I brought the full strength of my will to bear in the struggle. In the old days, doubtless, Matoaca Bland, then in her pride and beauty, had faced the General with this same firmness which was as soft as velvet yet as inflexible as steel.
A few days after this, the great man, who had grown at last too feeble for an active part in "affairs," resigned the presidency of the South Midland, and retired, as he said, "to enjoy his second childhood."
"It's about time for Theophilus to bring around his box of ants, I reckon," he observed, and added seriously after a moment, "Yes, there's no use trying to prop up a fallen tree, Ben. I've had a long life and a good life, and I am willing to draw out. It's a losing game any way you play it, when it comes to that. I've thought a lot about it, my boy, these last weeks, and I tell you the only thing that sticks by you to the last is the love of a woman. If you need a woman when you are young, you need her ten thousand times more when you're old. If Miss Matoaca had married me, we'd both of us have been a long ways better off."
That night I told Sally of the resignation, and repeated to her a part of the conversation. The sentimental allusion to Miss Matoaca she treated with scorn, but after a few thoughtful moments she said: —
"You've always wanted to be president of the South Midland more than anything in the world?"
"More than anything in the world," I admitted absently.
"There's a chance now?"
"Yes, I suppose there's a chance now."
She said nothing more, but the next morning as I was getting into my overcoat, she sent me word that she wished to speak to me again before I went out.
"I'll be up in a minute," I answered, and I had turned to follow the maid up the staircase, when a sharp ring at the telephone distracted my attention.
"Come down in five minutes if you can," said a voice. "You're wanted badly about the B. and R. deal."
"Is your mistress ill?" I enquired, turning from the telephone to take up my overcoat.
"I think not, sir," replied the woman, "she is dressing."
"Then tell her I'm called away, but I will see her at luncheon," I answered hurriedly, as I rushed out.
Upon reaching my office, I found that my presence was required in Washington before two o'clock, and as I had not time to return home, I telephoned Sally for my bag, which she sent down to the station by Micah, the coachman.
"I hope to return early to-morrow," I said to the negro from the platform, as the train pulled out.
In my anxiety over the possible collapse of the important B. and R. deal, the message that Sally had sent me that morning was crowded for several hours out of my thoughts. When I remembered it later in the afternoon, I sent her a telegram explaining my absence; and my conscience, which had troubled me for a moment, was appeased by this attention that would prove to her that even in the midst of my business worries I had not forgotten her. There was, indeed, I assured myself, no cause for the sudden throb of anxiety, almost of apprehension, I had felt at the recollection of the message that I had disregarded. She had looked stronger yesterday; I had commented at dinner on the fine flush in her cheeks; and the pain, which had caused me such sharp distress while it lasted, had vanished entirely for the last thirty-six hours. Then the sound of her voice, with its note of appeal, of helplessness, of terror, when she had called upon George at the reception, returned to me as if it were spoken audibly somewhere in my brain. I saw her eyes, wide and bright, as they had been when they looked straight beyond me in search of help, and her slender, swaying figure in its gown of a pale sea-foam shade that was stained from bosom to hem with the red streak of the wine. "Yet there is nothing to worry about," I thought, annoyed because I could not put this anxiety, this apprehension, out of my mind. "She is not ill. She is better. Only last night I heard her laughing as she has not done for weeks."
The afternoon was crowded with meetings, and it was three o'clock the next day when I reached home and asked eagerly for Sally as I went up the staircase. She had gone out, her maid informed me, but I would find a note she had left on my desk in the library. Turning hastily back, I took up the note from the silver blotter beneath which it was lying, and as I opened it, I saw that the address looked tremulous and uncertain, as if it had been written in haste or excitement.
"Dear Ben (it read), I have been in trouble, and as I do not wish to disturb you at this time, I am going away for a few days to think it over. I shall be at Riverview, the old place on James River where mamma and I used to stay – but go ahead with the South Midland, and don't worry about me, it is all right.
"Sally."
"I have been in trouble," I repeated slowly. "What trouble, and why should she keep it from me? Oh, because of the presidency of the South Midland! Damn the South Midland!" I said suddenly aloud. A time-table was on my desk, and looking into it, I found that a train left for Riverview in half an hour. I rang the bell and old Esdras appeared to announce luncheon.
"I want nothing to eat. Bring me a cup of coffee. I must catch a train in a few minutes."
"Fur de Lawd's sake, Marse Ben," exclaimed the old negro, "you ain' never gwineter res' at home agin."
Still grumbling he brought the coffee, and I was standing by the desk with the cup raised to my lips, when the front door opened and shut sharply, and the General came into the room, leaning upon two gold-headed walking-sticks. He looked old and tired, and more than ever, in his fur-lined overcoat, like a wounded eagle.
"Ben," he said, "what's this Hatty tells me about George taking Sally out motoring with him yesterday, and not bringing her back? Has there been an accident?"
My arteries drummed in my ears, and for a minute the noise shut out all other sounds. Then I heard a carriage roll by in the street, and the faint regular ticking of the small clock on the mantel.
"Sally is at Riverview," I answered, "I am going down to her on the next train."
"Then where in the devil is George? He went off with her."
"George may be there, too. I hope he is. She needs somebody with her."
A purple flush rose to the General's face, and the expression in his small, watery grey eyes held me speechless.
"Confound you, Ben!" he exclaimed, in a burst of temper, "do you mean to tell me you don't know that George's blamed foolishness is the talk of the town? Why, he hasn't let Sally out of his sight for the last two years."
"No, I didn't know it," I replied.
"Great Scott! Where are your wits?"
"In the stock market," I answered bitterly. Then something in me, out of the chaos and the darkness, rose suddenly, as if with wings, into the light. "Of course Sally is an angel, General, we both know that – but how she could have helped seeing that George is the better man of us, I don't for a minute pretend to understand."
"Well, I never had much opinion of George," responded the General. "It always seemed to me that he ought to have made a great deal more of himself than he has done."
"What he has made of himself," I answered, and my voice sounded harsh in my ears, "is the man that Sally ought to have married."
I went out hurriedly, forgetting to assist him, and limping painfully, he followed me to the porch, and called after me as I ran down into the street. Looking back, as I turned the corner, I saw him getting with difficulty into his buggy, which waited beside the curbing, and it seemed to me that his great bulky figure, in his fur-lined overcoat, was unreal and intangible like the images that one sees in sleep.
The train was about to pull out as I entered the station, and swinging on to the rear coach, I settled myself into the first chair I came to, which happened to be directly behind the shining bald head and red neck of a man I knew. As I shrank back, he turned, caught sight of me, and held out his hand with an easy air of good-fellowship.
"So General Bolingbroke has retired from the South Midland and Atlantic Railroad, I hear," he remarked. "Well, there's a big job waiting for somebody, but he'll have to be a big man to fit it."
A sudden ridiculous annoyance took possession of me; the General, the South Midland Railroad, and the bald-headed man before me, all appeared to enter my consciousness like small, stinging gnats that swarmed about larger bodies. What was the railroad to me, if I had lost Sally? Had I lost her? Was it possible to win her again? "I am in trouble," the words whirled in my thoughts, "and as I do not wish to disturb you at this time, I have gone off for a few days to think it over." Was the trouble associated with George Bolingbroke? Did she mind the gossip? Did she think I should mind it? Whatever it was, why didn't she come to me and weep it out on my breast? "I didn't want to disturb you at this time." At this time? That was because of the South Midland and Atlantic Railroad. "Damn the South Midland and Atlantic Railroad!" I said again under my breath.
The red neck of the bald-headed man in front of me suddenly turned.
"Going down for a little hunting?" he enquired genially, "there isn't much else, I reckon, to take a man like you down into this half-baked country. I hear the partridges are getting scarce, and they are going to bring a bill into the Legislature forbidding the sending of them outside of the state. Now, that's a direct slap, I say, at the small farmer. A bird is a bird, ain't it, even if it's a Virginia partridge?"
I rose and took up my overcoat. "I'll go into the smoking-car. They keep it too hot here."
He nodded cheerfully. "I was in there myself, but it's like an oven, too, so I came out." Then he unfolded his newspaper, and I passed hurriedly down the aisle of the coach.
In the smoking-car the air was like the fumes in the stemming room of a tobacco factory, but lighting a cigar, I leaned back on one of the hard, plush-covered seats, and stared out at the low, pale landscape beyond the window. It was late November, and the sombre colours of the fields and of the leafless trees showed through a fine autumnal mist, which lent an atmosphere of melancholy to the stretches of fallow land, to the harvested corn-fields, in which the stubble stood in rows, like a headless army, and to the long red-clay road winding, deep in mud, to the distant horizon.
"I am in trouble – I am in trouble," I heard always above the roar of the train, above the shrill whistle of the engine, as it rounded a curve, above the thin, drawling voices of my fellow-passengers, disputing a question in politics. "I am in trouble," ran the words. "What trouble? What trouble? What trouble?" I repeated passionately, while my teeth bit into my cigar, and the flame went out. "So George hasn't let her out of his sight for two years, and I did not know it. For two years! And in these two years how much have I seen of her – of Sally, my wife? We have been living separate lives under the same roof, and when she asked me for bread, I have given her – pearls!" A passion of remorse gripped me at the throat like the spring of a beast. Pearls for bread, and that to Sally – to my wife, whom I loved! The melancholy landscape at which I looked appeared to divide and dissolve, and she came back to me, not as I had last seen her, weighed down by the furs which were too heavy, but in her blue gingham apron with the jagged burn on her wrist, and the patient, divine smile hovering about her lips. If she went from me now, it would be always the Sally of that year of poverty, of suffering, that I had lost. In the future she would haunt me, not in her sea-green gown, with the jewels on her bosom, but in her gingham apron with the sleeves rolled back from her reddened arms and the jagged scar from the burn disfiguring her flesh.
"I'll see him in hell, before I'll vote for him!" called out a voice at my back, in a rage.
The train pulled into the little wayside station of Riverview, and getting out, I started on the walk of two miles through the flat, brown fields to the house. The road was heavy with mud, and it was like ploughing to keep straight on in the single red-clay furrow which the wheels of passing wagons had left. All was desolate, all was deserted, and the only living things I saw between the station and the house were a few lonely sheep browsing beside a stream, and the brown-winged birds that flew, with wet plumage, across the road.
When I reached the ruined gateway of Riverview, the old estate of the Blands', I quickened my pace, and went rapidly up the long drive to the front of the house, where I saw the glimmer of red firelight on the ivied window-panes in the west wing. As I ascended the steps, there was a sound on the gravel, and George Bolingbroke came around the corner of the house, in hunting clothes, with a setter dog at his heels.
"Hello, Ben!" he remarked, half angrily. "So you've turned up, have you? Has there been another panic in the market?"
"Is Sally here?" I asked. "I'm anxious about her."
"Well, it's time you were," he answered. "Yes, she's inside."
He stopped in the centre of the walk, and turning from the door, I came back and faced him in a silence that seemed alive with the beating of innumerable wings in the air.
"Something's wrong, George," I said at last, breaking through my restraint.
He looked at me with a calm, enquiring gaze while I was speaking, and by that look I understood, in an inspiration, he had condemned me.
"Yes, something's wrong," he answered quietly, "but have you just found it out?"
"I haven't found it out yet. What is it? What is the matter?"
At the question his calmness deserted him and the dark flush of anger broke suddenly in his face.
"The matter is, Ben," he replied, holding himself in with an effort, "that you've missed being a fool only by being a genius instead."
Then turning away, as if his temper had got the better of him, he strode back through a clump of trees on the lawn, while I went up the steps again, and crossing the cold hall, entered the dismantled drawing-room, where a bright log fire was burning.
Sally was sitting on the hearth, half hidden by the high arms of the chair, and as I closed the door behind me, she rose and stood looking at me with an expression of surprise. So had Miss Mitty and Miss Matoaca looked in the firelight on that November afternoon when Sally and I had gone in together.
"Why, Ben!" she said quietly, "I thought you were in Washington!"
"I got home this morning and found your note. Sally, what is the trouble?"
"You came after me?"
"I came after you. The General went wild and imagined that there had been an accident, or George had run off with you."
"Then the General sent you?"
"Nobody sent me. I was leaving the house when he found me."
She had not moved toward me, and for some reason, I still stood where I had stopped short in the centre of the room, kept back by the reserve, the detachment in her expression.
"You came believing that George and I had gone off together?" she asked, and there was a faint hostility in her voice.
"Of course I didn't believe it. I'm not a fool if I am an ass. But if I had believed it," I added passionately, "it would have made no difference. I'd have come after you if you'd gone off with twenty Georges."
"Well, there's only one," she said, "and I did go off with him."
"It makes no difference."
"We left Richmond at ten o'clock yesterday, and we've been here ever since."
"What does that matter?"
"You mean it doesn't matter that I came away with George and spent twenty-four hours?"
"I mean that nothing matters – not if you'd spent twenty-four years."
"I suppose it doesn't," she responded quietly, and there was a curious remoteness, a hollowness in the sound of the words. "When one comes to see things as they are, nothing really matters. It is all just the same."
Her face looked unsubstantial and wan in the firelight, and so ethereal, so fleshless, appeared her figure, that it seemed to me I could see through it to the shining of the flames before which she stood.
"I can't talk, Sally," I said, "I am not good at words, I believe I'm more than half a fool as George has just told me – but – but – I want you – I've always wanted you – I've never in my heart wanted anything in the world but you – "
"I don't suppose even that matters much," she answered wearily, "but if you care to know, Ben, George and Bonny found me when I was alone and – and very unhappy, and they brought me with them when they came down to hunt. They are hunting now."
"You were alone and unhappy?" I said, for George Bolingbroke and Bonny Marshall had faded from me into the region of utterly indifferent things.
"It was that I wanted to tell you the morning you couldn't wait," she returned gently; "I had kept it from you the night before because I saw that you were so tired and needed sleep. But – but I had seen two doctors, both had told me that I was ill, that I had some trouble of the spine, that I might be an invalid – a useless invalid, if I lived, that – that there would never be another child – that – "
Her voice faltered and ceased, for crossing the room with a bound, I had gathered her to my breast, and was bending over her in an intensity, a violence of love, crushing back her hands on her bosom, while I kissed her face, her throat, her hair, her dress even, as I had never kissed her in the early days of our marriage. The passion of happiness in that radiant prime was pale and bloodless beside the passion of sorrow which shook me now.
"Stop, stop, Ben," she said, struggling to be free, "let me go. You are hurting me."
"I shall never stop, I shall never let you go," I answered, "I shall hold you forever, even if it hurts you."
CHAPTER XXXV
THE ULTIMATE CHOICE
We carried her home next day in George's motor car, ploughing with difficulty over the heavy roads, which in a month's time would have become impassable. A golden morning had followed the rain; the sun shone clear, the wind sang in the bronzed tree-tops, and on the low hills to the right of us, the harvested corn ricks stood out illuminated against a deep blue sky. When the brown-winged birds flew, as they sometimes did, across the road, her eyes measured their flight with a look in which there was none of the radiant impulse I had seen on that afternoon when she gazed after the flying swallows. She spoke but seldom, and then it was merely to thank me when I wrapped the fur rug about her, or to reply to a question of George's with a smile that had in it a touching helplessness, a pathetic courage. And this helplessness, this courage, brought to my memory the sound of her voice when she had called George's name aloud in her terror. Even after we had reached home, and when she and I stood alone, for a minute, before the fire in her room, I felt still that something within her – something immaterial and flamelike that was her soul – turned from me, seeking always a clearer and a diviner air.
"Are you in pain now, Sally? What can I do for you?" I asked.
"No, I am better. Don't worry," she answered.
Then, because there seemed nothing further to say, I stood in silence, while she moved from me, as if the burden of her weight was too much for her, and sank down on the couch, hiding her face in the pillows.
Two days later there came down a great specialist from New York for a consultation; and while he was upstairs in her closed bedroom, I walked up and down the floor of the library, over the Turkish rugs, between the black oak bookcases, as I had walked in that other house on the night of my failure. How small a thing that seemed to me now compared with this! What I remembered best from that night was the look in her face when she had turned and run back to me with her arms outstretched, and the warm, flattened braid of her hair that had brushed my cheek. I understood at last, as I walked restlessly back and forth, waiting for the verdict from the closed room, that I had been happy then – if I had only known it! The warmth stifled me, and going to the window, I flung it open, and leaned out into the mild November weather. In the street below leaves were burning, and while the odour floated up to me I saw again her red shoes dancing over the sunken graves in the churchyard.
The door opened above, there was the sound of a slow heavy tread on the staircase, and I went forward to meet the great specialist as he came into the room.
For a minute he looked at me enquiringly over a pair of black-rimmed glasses, while I stood there neither thinking nor feeling, but waiting. Something in my brain, which until then had seemed to tick the slow movement of time, came suddenly to a stop like a clock that has run down.
"In my opinion an operation is unnecessary, Mr. Starr," he said, drawing out his watch as he spoke, "and in your wife's present condition I seriously advise against it. The injury to the spine may not be permanent, but there is only one cure for it – time – time and rest. To make recovery possible she should have absolute quiet, absolute freedom from care. She must be taken to a milder climate, – I would suggest southern California, – and she must be kept free from mental disturbance for a number of years."
"In that case there is hope of recovery?"
For an instant he stared at me blankly, his gaze wandering from his watch to the clock on the mantel, as if there were a discrepancy in the time, which he would like to correct.
"Ah, yes, hope," he replied suddenly, in a cheerful voice, "there is always hope." Then having uttered his confession of faith, he appeared to grow nervous. "Have you a time-table on your desk?" he enquired. "I'd like to look up an earlier train than the Florida special."
Having looked up his train, he turned to shake hands with me, while the abstracted and preoccupied expression in his face grew a trifle more human, as if he had found what he wanted.
"What your wife needs, my dear sir," he remarked, as he went out, "is not medical treatment, but daily and hourly care."
A minute later, when the front door had closed after him, and the motor car had borne him on his way to the station, I stood alone in the room, repeating his words with a kind of joy, as if they contained the secret of happiness for which I had sought. "Daily and hourly care, daily and hourly care." I tried to think clearly of what it meant – of the love, the sacrifice, the service that would go into it. I tried, too, to think of her as she was lying now, still and pale in the room upstairs, with the expression of touching helplessness, of pathetic courage, about her mouth; but even as I made the effort, the scent of burning leaves floated again through the window and I could see her only in her red shoes dancing over the sunken graves. "Daily and hourly care," I repeated aloud.
The words were still on my lips when old Esdras, stepping softly, came in and put a telegram into my hands, and as I tore it open, I said over slowly, like one who impresses a fact on the memory, "What your wife needs is daily and hourly care." Ah, she should have it. How she should have it! Then my eyes fell on the paper, and before I read the words, I knew that it was the offer of the presidency of the Great South Midland and Atlantic Railroad. The end of my ambition, the great adventure of my boyhood, lay in my grasp.
With the telegram still in my hand, I went up the staircase, and entered the bedroom where Sally was lying, with wide, bright eyes, in the dimness.
"It's good news," I said, as I bent over her, "there's only good news to-day."
She looked up at me with that searching brightness I had seen when she gazed straight beyond me for the help that I could not give.
"It means going away from everything I have ever known," she said slowly; "it means leaving you, Ben."
"It means never leaving me again in your life," I replied; "not for a day – not for an hour."
"You will go, too?" she asked, and the faint wonder in her face pierced to my heart.
"Do you think I'd be left?" I demanded.
Her eyes filled and as she turned from me, a tear fell on my hand.
"But your work, your career – oh, no, no, Ben, no."
"You are my career, darling, I have never in my heart had any career but you. What I am, I am yours, Sally, but there are things that I cannot give you because they are not mine, because they are not in me. These are the things that were George's."
Lifting my hand she kissed it gently and let it fall with a gesture that expressed an acquiescence in life rather than a surrender to love.
"I've sometimes thought that if I hadn't loved you first, Ben – if I could ever have changed, I should have loved George," she said, and added very softly, like one who seeks to draw strength from a radiant memory, "but I had already loved you once for all, I suppose, in the beginning."
"I am yours, such as I am," I returned. "Plain I shall always be – plain and rough sometimes, and forgetful to the end of the little things – but the big things are there as you know, Sally, as you know."
"As I know," she repeated, a little sadly, yet with the pathetic courage in her voice; "and it is the big things, after all, that I've wanted most all my life."
Then she shook her head with a smile that brought me to my knees at her side.
"You've forgotten the railroad," she said. "You've forgotten the presidency of the South Midland – that's what you wanted most."
My laugh answered her. "Hang the presidency of the South Midland!" I responded gaily.
Her brows went up, and she looked at me with the shadow of her old charming archness. By this look I knew that the spirit of the Blands would fight on, though always with that faint wonder. Then her eyes fell on the crumpled telegram I still held in my hand, and she reached to take it.
"What is that, dear?" she asked.
Breaking away from her, I walked to the fireplace and tossed the offer of the presidency of the South Midland and Atlantic Railroad into the grate. It caught slowly, and I stood there while it flamed up, and then crumbled with curled fiery ends among the ashes. When it was quite gone, I turned and came back to her.
"Only a bit of waste paper," I answered.