The Romance of a Plain Man

"You're different, Ben," she said; "you look so – so careless."

Her tone was gentle, yet it fell on my ears with a curious detachment, a remoteness, as if in thought, at least, she were standing off somewhere in an unapproachable place.

"I've had nobody to keep me up and I've grown seedy," I replied, trying to speak with lightness. "Now I'll begin grooming again, but all the same, I've made a pretty pile of money for you this summer."

"Oh, money!" she returned indifferently, "I've heard nothing but money since I went away. Is there a spot on earth, I wonder, where in this age they worship another God?"

"I know one person who doesn't worship it, and that's Dr. Theophilus."

She laughed softly.

"Well, the doctor and I will have to set up a little altar of our own."

For the first month after her return, I hoped that she had come back to a quieter and a more healthful life; but with the beginning of the winter season, she resumed the ceaseless rush of gaiety in which she had lived for the last two years. She was rarely at home now in the evenings; I came up always too tired or too busy to go out with her, and after dining alone, without dressing, I would hurry into my study for an hour's work with Bradley, or more often doze for a while before the cedar logs, with a cigar in my hand. On the few occasions when she remained at home, our conversation languished feebly because the one subject which engrossed my thoughts was received by her with candid, if smiling, scorn.

"I sometimes wish, Ben," she remarked one evening while we sat by the hearth for a few minutes before going upstairs, "that you'd begin to learn Johnson's Dictionary again. I'm sure it's more interesting than stocks."

The red light of the flames shone on her exquisite fineness, on that "look of the Blands," which lent its peculiar distinction, its suggestion of the "something else," to her delicate features and to her long slender figure, which had grown a little too thin. Between her and myself, divided as we were merely by the space of the fireside, I felt suddenly that there stretched both a mental and a physical distance; and this sense of unlikeness, – which I had become aware of for the first time, when she stepped from the train that October morning, between Bonny and George, – grew upon me until I could no longer tell whether it was my pride or my affection that suffered. I had grown careless, I knew, of "the little things" that she prized, while I so passionately pursued the big ones to which she appeared still indifferent. Meeting my image in one of the old gilt-framed mirrors between the windows, I saw that my features had taken the settled and preoccupied look of the typical man of affairs, that my figure, needing the exercise I had had no time for of late, had grown already unelastic and heavy. Had she noticed, I wondered, that the "magnificent animal" was losing his hold? Only that afternoon I had heard her laughing with George over some trivial jest which they had not explained; and this very laughter, because I did not understand it, had seemed, in some subtle way, to draw them to each other and farther from me. Yet she was mine, not George's, and the gloss on her hair, the scent of her gown, the pearls at her throat, were all the things that my money had given her.

"I've got terribly one-ideaed, Sally, I know," I said, answering her remark after a long silence; "but some day, in a year or two perhaps, when I'm stronger, more successful, I'll cut it all for a time, and we'll go to Europe together. We'll have our second honeymoon as soon as I can get away."

"Remember I've a reception Thursday night, please, Ben," she responded, brushing my sentimental suggestion lightly aside.

"By Jove, I'm awfully sorry, but I've arranged to meet a man in New York on Wednesday. I simply had to do it. There was no way out of it."

"Then you won't be here?"

"I'll make a desperate effort to get back on the seven o'clock train from Washington. That will be in time?"

"Yes, that will be in time. You are in New York and Washington two-thirds of the month now."

"It's a beastly shame, too, but it won't last."

With a smothered yawn, she rose from her chair, and went over to the canary cage, raising the silk cover, while she put her lips to the wires and piped softly.

"Dicky is fast asleep," she remarked, turning away, "and you, Ben, are nodding. How dull the evenings are when one has nothing to do."

The next day I went to New York, and leaving Washington on Thursday afternoon, I had expected to reach Richmond in time to appear at Sally's reception by nine o'clock that evening. But a wreck on the road caused the train to be held back for several hours, and it was already late when I jumped from the cab at my door, and hurried under the awning across the pavement. The sound of stringed instruments playing softly reached me as it had done so many years ago on the night when I first crossed the threshold; and a minute afterwards, when I went hastily up the staircase, in its covering of white, and its festoons of smilax, pretty girls made way for me, with laughing reprimands on their lips. Dressing as quickly as I could, I came down again and met the same rebukes from the same charming and smiling faces.

"You are really the most outrageous man I know," observed Bonny Marshall, stopping me at the foot of the staircase. "Poor Sally has been so awfully worried that she hasn't any colour, and I've advised her simply to engage George as permanent proxy. He is taking your place this evening quite charmingly."

The splendour of her appearance, rather than the severity of her words, held me bound and speechless. She was the most beautiful woman, it was generally admitted, in all Virginia, and in her spangled gown, which fell away from her superb shoulders, there was something brilliant and barbaric about her that went like strong wine to the head. A minute later she passed on, surrounded by former discarded lovers; and before entering the drawing-room – where Sally was standing between George Bolingbroke and a man whom I did not know – I paused behind a tub of flowering azalea, and watched the brightly coloured gowns of the women as they flitted back and forth over the shining floor. It was a year since I had been out even to dine, and while I stood there, the music, the lights, and the gaily dressed, laughing women produced in me the old boyish consciousness of the disadvantage of my size, of my awkwardness, of my increasing weight. I remembered suddenly the figure of President as he had loomed on the night of our first dinner party between the feathery palm branches in the brilliantly lighted hall; and a sense of kinship with my own family, with my own past, awoke not in my thoughts, but in my body. Across the threshold, only a few steps away, I could see Sally receiving her guests in her gracious Fairfax manner, with George and the man whom I did not know at her side; and whenever George turned and spoke, as he did always at the right instant, I was struck by the perfect agreement, the fitness, in their appearance. These things that she valued – these adornments of the outside of existence – were not in my power to bestow except when they could be bought with money. How large, how heavy, I should have appeared there in George's place, which was mine. For the first time in my life a contempt for mere wealth, and for the position which the amassment of wealth confers, entered my heart. In seeking to give money had I, in reality, sacrificed the ability to give the things that she valued far more? Surrounded by the flowers and the lights and the music of the stringed instruments, I saw her in my memory framed in the long window of our bedroom on Church Hill, with the dim grey garden behind her, and the breeze, fragrant with jessamine, blowing the thin folds of her gown. Some clairvoyant insight, purchased, not by success, but by the suffering of those months, opened my eyes. What I had lost, I saw now, was Sally herself – not the outward woman, but the inner spirit, the fineness of sympathy, the quickness of understanding. The things that she could have taught me were the finer beauties of life – and these I had scorned to learn because they could not be grasped in the hands. The objective, the external, was what I had worshipped, and our real division had come, not from the accident of our different beginnings, but from the choice that had committed us to opposite ends.

Some of the guests I knew, and these spoke to me as they passed; others I had never seen, and these walked by with level abstracted eyes fixed on the little group surrounding Sally and George. It was not only Sally's "set" – the older aristocratic circle – that was represented, I knew, for in the throng I recognised many of "the new people" – of the "mushrooms," of whom Bonny's grandmama had spoken with scorn. Once George turned and came toward the doorway, and the General, starting somewhere from a corner, observed in his loud hilarious voice, "I don't know what kind of husband you'd have made, George, but, by Jove, you do mighty well as a 'hanger-on'!"

What George's response was I could not hear, but from the dark flushed look of his features, I judged that he had not received the attack with his accustomed amiability. Then, as he was about to pass into the hall, his eyes fell on me, standing behind the tub of azalea, and a low whistle of surprise broke from his lips.

"So here you are, Ben! We'd given you up at least three hours ago."

"There was a wreck, and the train was delayed."

"Well, come in and do your duty, or what remains of it. It's no fun acting host in another man's house, when you don't know where he keeps his cigars. Sally, Ben's turned up, after all, at the last minute, when the hard work is over."

Crossing the threshold, I joined the little group, shaking hands here and there, while Sally made running comments in a voice that sounded hopelessly animated and cheerful. She was looking very pale, there were dark violet circles under her eyes, and her gown of some faint sea-green shade brought out the delicate sharpened lines of her face and throat. The flame, which had burnt so steadily for the last year, seemed to die out slowly, in a waning flicker, while she stood there.

George, pushing me aside, came back with a glass of wine and a biscuit.

"Drink this, Sally," he said. "No, don't shake your head, drink it."

She held out her hand for the glass, but after she had taken it from him, before she could raise it to her lips, a tremor of anguish that was almost like a convulsion passed into her face. The glass fell from her hand, and the wine, splashing over her gown, stained it in a red streak from bosom to hem. Her figure swayed slightly, but when I reached out my arms to catch her, she gazed straight beyond me, with eyes which had grown wide and bright from some physical pain.

"George!" she said, "George!" and the name as she uttered it was an appeal for help.

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."