him. You've got a jewel, my boy, there's no doubt of that. When I looked
at her sailing down the room on his arm last night, by George, I wished
I was forty years younger and married to her myself."

Some hours later I repeated his remark to Sally, when I went home at
dusk and found her sitting before a wood fire in her bedroom, with her
hat and coat on, just as she had dropped there after a drive with
President.

"Well, I wouldn't have the General at any age. You needn't be jealous,
Ben," she responded. "I'm too much like Aunt Matoaca."

"He always said you were," I retorted, "but, oh, Sally, you are an
angel! When I saw you rise at dinner last night, I wanted to squeeze you
in my arms and kiss you before them all."

The little scar by her mouth dimpled with the old childish expression of
archness.

"Suppose you do it now, sir," she rejoined, with the primness of Miss
Mitty, and a little later, "What else was there to do but rise, you
absurd boy? Poor mamma used to tell me that grandpapa always said to
her, 'When in doubt choose the kindest way.'"

"And yet he disinherited his favourite daughter."

"Which only proves, my dear, how much easier it is to make a proverb
than to practise it."

"Do you know, Sally," I began falteringly, after a minute, "there is
something I ought to tell you, and that is, that when I looked up at the
table last night and saw President in the doorway, my first feeling was
one of shame."

She rubbed her cheek softly against my sleeve.

"Shall I confess something just as dreadful?" she asked. "When I looked
up and saw him standing there my first feeling was exactly the same."

"Sally, I am so thankful."

"You wicked creature, to want me to be as bad as yourself."

"It couldn't have lasted with you but a second."

"It didn't, but a second is an hour in the mind of a snob."

"Well, we were both snobs together, and that's some comfort, anyway."

For the three days that President remained with us he wore my clothes,
in which he looked more than ever like a miner attired for church, and
carried himself with a resigned and humble manner.

Sally took him to the theatre and to drive with her in the afternoon,
and I carried him to the General's office and over the Capitol, which he
surveyed with awed and admiring eyes. Only Jessy still shrank from him,
and not once during his visit were we able to prevail upon her to appear
with him in the presence of strangers. There was always an excuse ready
to trip off her tongue--she had a headache, she was going to the
dressmaker's, the milliner's, the dentist's even; and I honestly believe
that she sought cheerfully this last place of torture as an escape. To
the end, however, he regarded her with an affection that fell little
short of adoration.

"Who'd have thought that little Jessy would have shot up into a regular
beauty!" he exclaimed for the twentieth time as he stood ready to
depart. "She takes arter pa, and I always said the only thing against pa
was that he wa'nt born a female."

He kissed her good-by in a reverential fashion, and after a cordial,
though exhausted, leave-taking from Sally, we went together to West
Virginia. In spite of the General's advice, I had decided to take a look
at the coal fields of Wyanoke, and a week later, when I returned to
Richmond, I was the owner of a control of the little West Virginia and
Wyanoke Railroad. It was a long distance from the presidency of the
Great South Midland and Atlantic, but I watched still from some vantage
ground in my imagination, the gleaming tracks of the big road sweeping
straight on to the southern horizon.

For the next few years there was hardly a shadow on the smiling surface
of our prosperity. Society had received us in spite of my father, in
spite even of my brother; and the day that had made me Sally's husband
had given me a place, if an alien one, in the circle in which she moved.
I was there at last, and it was neither her fault nor mine if I carried
with me into that stained-glass atmosphere something of the
consciousness of the market boy, who seemed to stand always at the
kitchen door. Curiously enough there were instants even now when I felt
vaguely aware that, however large I might appear to loom in my physical
presence, a part of me was, in reality, still on the outside, hovering
uncertainly beyond the threshold. There were things I had never
learned--would never learn; things that belonged so naturally to the
people with whom I lived that they seemed only aware of them when
brought face to face with the fact of their absence. The lightness of
life taught me nothing except that I was built in mind and in body upon
a heavier plan. At the dinner-table, when the airy talk floated about
me, I felt again and again that the sparkling trivialities settled like
thistledown upon the solid mass I presented, and remained there because
of my native inability to waft them back. It was still as impossible for
me to entertain pretty girls in pink tarlatan as it had been on the
night of my first party; and the memory of that disastrous social
episode stung me at times when I stood large and awkward before a gay
and animated maiden, or sat wedged in, like a massive block, between two
patient and sleepy mothers. These people were all Sally's friends, not
mine, and it was for her sake, I never forgot for a minute, that they
had accepted me. With just such pleasant condescension they would still
have accepted me, I knew, if I had, in truth, entered their company with
my basket of potatoes or carrots on my arm. One alone held out
unwaveringly through the years; for Miss Mitty, shut with her pride and
her portraits in the old grey house, obstinately closed her big mahogany
doors against our repeated friendly advances. Sometimes at dusk, as I
passed on the crooked pavement under the two great sycamores, I would
glance up at the windows, where the red firelight glimmered on the small
square panes, and fancy that I saw her long, oval face gazing down on me
from between the parted lace curtains. But she made no sign of
forgiveness, and when Sally went to see her, as she did sometimes, the
old lady received her formally in the drawing-room, with a distant and
stately manner. She, who was the mixture of a Bland and a Fairfax, sat
enthroned upon her traditions, while we of the common, outside world
walked by under the silvery boughs of her sycamores.

"Aunt Mitty has told Selim not to admit me," said Sally one day at
luncheon. "I know she wasn't out in this dreadful March wind--she never
leaves the house except in summer--and yet when I went there, he told me
positively she was not at home. When I think of her all alone hour after
hour with Aunt Matoaca's things around her, I feel as if it would break
my heart. George says she is looking very badly."

"Does George see her?" I asked, glancing up from my cup of coffee, while
I waited for the light to a cigar. "I didn't imagine he had enough
attentions left over from his hunters to bestow upon maiden ladies."

The sugar tongs were in her hand, and she looked not at me, but at the
lump of sugar poised above her cup, as she answered,

"He is so good."

"Good?" I echoed lightly; "do you call George good? The General thinks
he's a sad scamp."

The lump of sugar dropped with a splash into her cup, and her eyes were
dark as she raised them quickly to my face. Instinctively I felt, with a
blind groping of perception, that I had wounded her pride, or her
loyalty, or some other hereditary attribute of the Blands and the
Fairfaxes that I could not comprehend.

"If I wanted an estimate of goodness, I don't think I'd go to the
General as an authority," she retorted.

"I'm sorry you never liked him, Sally. He's a great man."

"Well, he isn't _my_ great man anyway," she retorted. "I prefer Dr.
Theophilus or George."

I laughed gayly. "The doctor is a mollycoddle and George is a fop." My
tone was jaunty, yet her words were like the prick of a needle in a
sensitive place. What was her praise of George except the confession of
an appreciation of the very things that I could never possess? I knew
she loved me and not George--was not her marriage a proof of this
sufficient to cover a lifetime?--yet I knew also that the external
graces which I treated with scorn because I lacked them, held for her
the charm of habit, of association, of racial memory. Would the power in
me that had captured her serve as well through a future of familiar
possession as it had served in the supreme moment of conquest? I could
not go through life, as I had once said, forever pushing a wheel up a
hill, and the strength of a shoulder might prove, after all, less
effective in the freedom of daily intercourse than the quickness or
delicacy of a manner. Would she begin to regret presently, I wondered,
the lack in the man she loved of those smaller virtues which in the
first rosy glow of romance had seemed to her insignificant and of little
worth?

"There are worse things than a mollycoddle or a fop," she rejoined after
a pause, and added quickly, while old Esdras left the dining-room to
answer a ring at the bell, "That's either Bonny Page or George now. One
of them is coming to take me out."

For a moment I hoped foolishly that the visitor might be Bonny Page, but
the sound of George's pleasant drawling voice was heard speaking to old
Esdras, and as the curtains swung back, he crossed the threshold and
came over to take Sally's outstretched hand.

"You're lunching late to-day," he said. "I don't often find you here at
this hour, Ben."

"No, I'm not a man-about-town like you," I replied, pushing the cigars
and the lamp toward him; "the business of living takes up too much of my
time."

He leaned over, without replying to me, his hand on the back of Sally's
chair, his eyes on her face.

"It's all right, Sally," he said in a low voice, and when he drew back,
I saw that he had laid a spray of sweet alyssum on the table beside her
plate.

Her eyes shone suddenly as if she were looking at sunlight, and when she
smiled up at him, there was an expression in her face, half gratitude,
half admiration, that made it very beautiful. While I watched her, I
tried to overcome an ugly irrational resentment because George had been
the one to call that tremulous new beauty into existence.

"How like you it was," she returned, almost in a whisper, with the spray
of sweet alyssum held to her lips, "and how can I thank you?"

His slightly wooden features, flushed now with a fine colour, as if he
had been riding in the March wind, softened until I hardly knew them.
Standing there in his immaculate clothes, with his carefully groomed
mustache hiding a trembling mouth, he had become, I realised vaguely, a
George with whom the General and I possessed hardly so much as an
acquaintance. The man before me was a man whom Sally had invoked into
being, and it seemed to me, as I watched them, that she had awakened in
George, who had lost her, some quality--inscrutable and elusive--that
she had never aroused in the man to whom she belonged. What this quality
was, or wherein it lay, I could not then define. Understanding,
sympathy, perception, none of these words covered it, yet it appeared to
contain and possess them all. The mere fact of its existence, and that I
recognised without explaining it, had the effect of a barrier which
separated me for the moment from my wife and the man to whom she was
related by the ties of race and of class. Again I was aware of that
sense of strangeness, of remoteness, which I had felt on the night of
our home-coming when I had stood, spellbound, before Bonny Page's
exquisite grooming and the shining gloss on her hair and boots.
Something--a trifle, perhaps, had passed between Sally and George--and
the reason I did not understand it was because I belonged to another
order and had inherited different perceptions from theirs. The
trifle--whatever it was--appeared visibly, I knew, before us; it was
evident and on the surface, and if I failed to discern it what did that
prove except the shortness of the vision through which I looked? A
physical soreness, like that of a new bruise, attacked my heart, and
rising hastily from the table, I made some hurried apology and went out,
leaving them alone together. Glancing back as I got into my overcoat in
the hall, I saw that Sally still held the spray of sweet alyssum to her
lips, and that the look George bent on her was transfigured by the
tenderness that flooded his face with colour. She loved me, she was
mine, and yet at this instant she had turned to another man for a keener
comprehension, a subtler sympathy, than I could give. A passion, not of
jealousy, but of hurt pride, throbbed in my heart, and by some curious
eccentricity of emotion, this pride was associated with a rush of
ambition, with the impelling desire to succeed to the fullest in the
things in which success was possible. If I could not give what George
gave, I would give, I told myself passionately, something far better.
When the struggle came closer between the class and the individual, I
had little doubt that the claims of tradition would yield as they had
always done to the possession of power. Only let that power find its
fullest expression, and I should stand to George Bolingbroke as the
living present of action stands to the dead past of history. After all,
what I had to give was my own, hewn by my own strength out of life,
while the thing in which he excelled was merely a web of delicate fibre
woven by generations of hands that had long since crumbled to dust.
Triumph over him, I resolved that I would in the end, and the way to
triumph led, I knew, through a future of outward achievement to the
dazzling presidency of the South Midland and Atlantic Railroad.

As time went on this passionate ambition, which was so closely bound up
with my love for Sally, absorbed me even to the exclusion of the feeling
from which it had drawn its greatest strength. The responsibilities of
my position, the partial control of the large sums of money that passed
through my hands, crowded my days with schemes and anxieties, and kept
me tossing, sleepless yet with wearied brain, through many a night. For
pleasure I had no time; Sally I saw only for a hurried or an
absent-minded hour or two at meals, or when I came up too tired to think
or to talk in the evenings. Often I fell asleep over my cigar after
dinner, while she dressed and hastened, with her wreathed head and bare
shoulders, to a reception or a ball. A third of my time was spent in New
York, and during my absence, it never occurred to me to enquire how she
filled her long, empty days. She was sure of me, she trusted me, I knew;
and in the future, I told myself when I had leisure to think of it--next
year, perhaps--I should begin again to play the part of an ardent lover.
She was as desirable--she was far dearer to me than she had ever been in
her life, but while I held her safe and close in my clasp, my mind
reached out with its indomitable energy after the uncertain, the
unattained. I had my wife--what I wanted now was a fortune and a great
name to lay at her feet.

And all these months did she ever question, ever ask herself, while she
watched me struggling day after day with the lust for power, if the
thing that I sought to give her would in the end turn to Dead Sea fruit
at her lips? Question she may have done in her heart, but no hint of it
ever reached me--no complaint of her marriage ever disturbed the outward
serenity in which we lived. Yet, deep in myself, I heard always a still
small voice, which told me that she demanded something far subtler and
finer than I had given--something that belonged inherently to the nature
of George Bolingbroke rather than to mine. Even now, though she loved me
and not George, it was George who was always free, who was always
amiable, who was always just ready and just waiting to be called. On
another day, a month or two later, he came in again with his blossom of
sweet alyssum, and again her eyes grew shining and grateful, while the
old bruise throbbed quickly to life in my heart.

"Is it all right still?" she asked, and he answered, "All right," with
his rare smile, which lent a singular charm to his softened features.

Then he glanced across at me and made, I realised, an effort to be
friendly.

"You ought to get a horse, Ben," he remarked, "it would keep you from
getting glum. If you'd hunted with us yesterday, you would have seen
Bonny Page take a gate like a bird."

"I tried to follow," said Sally, "but Prince Charlie refused."

"You mean I wouldn't let go your bridle," returned George, in a
half-playful, half-serious tone.

The bruise throbbed again. Here, also, I was shut out--I who had carried
potatoes to George's door while he was off learning to follow the
hounds. His immaculate, yet careless, dress; the perfection of his
manner, which seemed to make him a part of the surroundings in which he
stood; the very smoothness and slenderness of the hand that rested on
Sally's chair--all these produced in me a curious and unreasonable
sensation of anger.

"I forbid you to jump, Sally," I said, almost sharply; "you know I hate
it."

She leaned forward, glancing first at me and then at George, with an
expression of surprise.

"Why, what's the matter, Ben?" she asked. "He's a perfect bear, isn't
he, George?"

"The best way to keep her from jumping," observed George, pleasantly
enough, though his face flushed, "is to be on the spot to catch her
bridle or her horse's mane or anything else that's handy. It's the only
means I've found successful, for there was never a Bland yet who didn't
go straight ahead and do the thing he was forbidden to. Miss Mitty told
me with pride that she had been eating lobster, which she always hated,
and I discovered her only reason was that the doctor had ordered her not
to touch it."

"Then I shan't forbid, I'll entreat," I replied, recovering myself with
an effort. "Please don't jump, Sally, I implore it."

"I won't jump if you'll come with me, Ben," she answered.

I laughed shortly, for how was it possible to explain to two Virginians
of their blood and habits that a man of six feet two inches could not
sit a horse for the first time without appearing ridiculous in the eyes
even of the woman who loved him? They had grown up together in the
fields or at the stables, and a knowledge of horse-flesh was as much a
part of their birthright as the observance of manners. The one I could
never acquire; the other I had attained unaided and in the face of the
tremendous barriers that shut me out. The repeated insistence upon the
fact that Sally was a Bland aroused in me, whenever I met it, an
irritation which I tried in vain to dispel. To be a Bland meant, after
all, simply to be removed as far as possible from any temperamental
relation to the race of Starrs.

"I wish I could, dear," I answered, as I rose to go out, "but remember,
I've never been on a horse in my life and it's too late to begin."

"Oh, I forgot. Of course you can't," she rejoined. "So if George isn't
strong enough to hold me back, I'll have to go straight after Bonny."

"I promise you I'll swing on with all my might, Ben," said George, with
a laugh in which I felt there was an amiable condescension, as from the
best horseman in his state to a man who had never ridden to hounds.

A little later, as I walked down the street, past the old grey house,
under the young budding leaves of the sycamores, the recollection of
this amiable condescension returned to me like the stab of a knife. The
image of Sally, mounted on Prince Charlie, at George's side, troubled my
thoughts, and I wondered, with a pang, if the people who saw them
together would ask themselves curiously why she had chosen me. To one
and all of them,--to Miss Mitty, to Bonny Page, to Dr. Theophilus,--the
mystery, I felt, was as obscure to-day as it had been in the beginning
of our love. Why was it? I questioned angrily, and wherein lay the
subtle distinction which divided my nature from George Bolingbroke's and
even from Sally's? The forces of democracy had made way for me, and yet
was there something stronger than democracy--and this something, fine
and invincible as a blade, I had felt long ago in the presence of Miss
Mitty and Miss Matoaca. Over my head, under the spreading boughs of the
sycamore, a window was lifted, and between the parted lace curtains, the
song of Miss Mitty's canary floated out into the street. As the music
entered my thoughts, I remembered suddenly the box of sweet alyssum
blooming on the window-sill under the swinging cage, and there flashed
into my consciousness the meaning of the flowers George had laid beside
Sally's plate. For her sake he had gone to Miss Mitty in the sad old
house, and that little blossom was the mute expression of a service he
had rendered joyfully in the name of love. The gratitude in Sally's eyes
was made clear to me, and a helpless rage at my own blindness, my own
denseness, flooded my heart. George, because of some inborn fineness of
perception, had discerned the existence of a sorrow in my wife to which
I, the man whom she loved and who loved her, had been insensible. He had
understood and had comforted--while I, engrossed in larger matters, had
gone on my way unheeding and indifferent. Then the anger against myself
turned blindly upon George, and I demanded passionately if he would
stand forever in my life as the embodiment of instincts and perceptions
that the generations had bred? Would I fail forever in little things
because I had been cursed at birth by an inability to see any except big
ones? And where I failed would George be always ready to fill the
unspoken need and to bestow the unasked-for sympathy?

CHAPTER XXIII

IN WHICH I WALK ON THIN ICE

On a November evening, when we had been married several years, I came
home after seven o'clock, and found Sally standing before the bureau
while she fastened a bunch of violets to the bosom of her gown.

"I'm sorry I couldn't get up earlier, but there's a good deal of
excitement over a failure in Wall Street," I said. "Are you going out?"

Her hands fell from her bosom, and as she turned toward me, I saw that
she was dressed as though for a ball.

"Not to-night, Ben. I had an engagement, but I broke it because I wanted
to spend the evening with you. I thought we might have a nice cosy time
all by ourselves."

"What a shame, darling. I've promised Bradley I'd do a little work with
him in my study. He's coming at half-past eight and will probably keep
me till midnight. I'll have to hurry. Did you put on that gorgeous gown
just for me?"

"Just for you." There was an expression on her face, half humorous, half
resentful, that I had never seen there before. "What day is this, Ben?"
she asked, as I was about to enter my dressing-room.

"The nineteenth of November," I replied carelessly, looking back at her
with my hand on the door.

"The nineteenth of November," she echoed slowly, as if saying the words
to herself.

I was already on the threshold when light broke on me in a flash, and I
turned, blind with remorse, and seized her in my arms.

"Sally, Sally, I am a brute!"

She laughed a little, drawing away, not coming closer.

"Ben, are you happy?"

"As happy as a king. I'll telephone Bradley not to come."

"Is it important?"

"Yes, very important. That failure I told you of is a pretty serious
matter."

"Then let him come. All days are the same, after all, when one comes to
think of it."

Her hand went to the violets at her breast, and as my eyes followed it,
a sudden intuitive dread entered my mind like an impulse of rage.

"I intended to send you flowers, Sally, but in the rush, I forgot. Whose
are those you are wearing?"

She moved slightly, and the perfume of the violets floated from the
cloud of lace on her bosom.

"George sent them," she answered quietly.

Before she spoke I had known it--the curse of my life was to be that
George would always remember--and the intuitive dread I had felt
changed, while I stood there, to the dull ache of remorse.

"Take them off, and I'll get you others if there's a shop open in the
city," I said. Then, as she hesitated, wavering between doubt and
surprise, I left the room, descended the steps with a rush, and picking
up my hat, hurried in search of a belated florist who had not closed. At
the corner a man, going out to dine, paused to fasten his overcoat under
the electric light, which blazed fitfully in the wind; and as I
approached and he looked up, I saw that it was George Bolingbroke.

"It's time all sober married men were at home dressing for dinner," he
observed in a whimsical tone.

The wind had brought a glow of colour into his face, and he looked very
handsome as he stood there, in his fur-lined coat, under the blaze of
light.

"I was kept late down town," I replied. "The General and I get all the
hard knocks while you take it easy."

"Well, I like an easy world, and I believe your world is pretty much
about what you make it. Where are you rushing? Do you go my way?"

"No, I'm turning off here. There's something I forgot this morning and I
came out to attend to it."

"Don't fall into the habit of forgetting. It's a bad one and it's sure
to grow on you--and whatever you forget," he added with a laugh as we
parted, "don't forget for a minute of your life that you've married
Sally."

He passed on, still laughing pleasantly, and quickening my steps, I went
to the corner of Broad Street, where I found a florist's shop still
lighted and filled with customers. There were no violets left, and while
I waited for a sheaf of pink roses, with my eyes on the elaborate
funeral designs covering the counter, I heard a voice speaking in a low
tone beyond a mass of flowering azalea beside which I stood.

"Yes, her mother married beneath her, also," it said; "that seems to be
the unfortunate habit of the Blands."

I turned quickly, my face hot with anger, and as I did so my eyes met
those of a dark, pale lady, through the thick rosy clusters of the
azalea. When she recognised me, she flushed slightly, and then moving
slowly around the big green tub that divided us, she held out her hand
with a startled and birdlike flutter of manner.

"I missed you at the reception last night, Mr. Starr," she said; "Sally
was there, and I had never seen her looking so handsome."

Then as the sheaf of roses was handed to me, she vanished behind the
azaleas again, while I turned quickly away and carried my fragrant
armful out into the night.

When I reached home, I was met on the staircase by Jessy, who ran,
laughing, before me to Sally, with the remark that I had come back
bringing an entire rose garden in my hands.

"There weren't any violets left, darling," I said, as I entered and
tossed the flowers on the couch, "and even these roses aren't fresh."

"Well, they're sweet anyway, poor things," she returned, gathering them
into her lap, while her hands caressed the half-opened petals. "It was
like you, Ben, when you did remember, to bring me the whole shopful."

Breaking one from the long stem, she fastened it in place of the violets
in the cloud of lace on her bosom.

"Pink suits me better, after all," she remarked gayly; "and now you must
let Bradley come, and Jessy and I will go to the theatre."

"I suppose he'll have to come," I said moodily, "but I'll be up earlier
to-morrow, Sally, if I wreck the bank in order to do it."

All the next day I kept the importance of fulfilling this promise in my
mind, and at five o'clock, I abruptly broke off a business appointment
to rush breathlessly home in the hope of finding Sally ready to walk or
to drive. As I turned the corner, however, I saw, to my disappointment,
that several riding horses were waiting under the young maples beside
the pavement, and when I entered the house, I heard the merry flutelike
tones of Bonny Page from the long drawing-room, where Sally was serving
tea.

For a minute the unconquerable shyness I always felt in the presence of
women held me, rooted in silence, on the threshold. Then, "Is that you,
Ben?" floated to me in Sally's voice, and pushing the curtains aside, I
entered the room and crossed to the little group gathered before the
fire. In the midst of it, I saw the tall, almost boyish figure of Bonny
Page, and the sight of her gallant air and her brilliant, vivacious
smile aroused in me instantly the oppressive self-consciousness of our
first meeting. I remembered suddenly that I had dressed carelessly in
the morning, that I had tied my cravat in a hurry, that my coat fitted
me badly and I had neglected to send it back. All the innumerable
details of life--the little things I despised or overlooked--swarmed,
like stinging gnats, into my thoughts while I stood there.

"You're just in time for tea, Ben," said Sally; "it's a pity you don't
drink it."

"And you're just in time for a scolding," remarked Bonny. "Do you know,
if I had a husband who wouldn't ride with me, I'd gallop off the first
time I went hunting with another man."

"You'd better start, Ben. It wouldn't take you three days to follow
Bonny over a gate," said Ned Marshall, one of her many lovers, eager, I
detected at once, to appear intimate and friendly. He was a fine,
strong, athletic young fellow, with a handsome, smooth-shaven face, a
slightly vacant laugh, and a figure that showed superbly in his
loose-fitting riding clothes.

"When I get the time, I'll buy a horse and begin," I replied; "but all
hours are working hours to me now, Sally will tell you."

"It's exactly as if I'd married a railroad engine," remarked Sally,
laughing, and I realised by the strained look in their faces, that this
absorption in larger matters--this unchangeable habit of thought that I
could not shake off even in a drawing-room--puzzled them, because of
their inherent incapacity to understand how it could be. My mind, which
responded so promptly to the need for greater exertions, was reduced to
mere leaden weight by this restless movement of little things. And this
leaden weight, this strained effort to become something other than I was
by nature, was reflected in the smiling faces around me as in a mirror.
The embarrassment in my thoughts extended suddenly to my body, and I
asked myself the next minute if Sally contrasted my heavy silence with
the blithe self-confidence and the sportive pleasantries of Ned
Marshall? Was she beginning already, unconsciously to her own heart,
perhaps, to question if the passion I had given her would suffice to
cover in her life the absence of the unspoken harmony in outward things?
With the question there rose before me the figure of George Bolingbroke,
as he bent over and laid the blossom of sweet alyssum beside her plate;
and, as at the instant in which I had watched him, I felt again the
physical soreness which had become a part of my furious desire to make
good my stand.

When Bonny and Ned Marshall had mounted and ridden happily away in the
dusk, Sally came back with me from the door, and stood, silent and
pensive, for a moment, while she stroked my arm.

"You look tired, Ben. If you only wouldn't work so hard."

"I must work. It's the only thing I'm good for."

"But I see so little of you and--and I get so lonely."

"When I've won out, I'll stop, and then you shall see me every living
minute of the day, if you choose."

"That's so far off, and it's now I want you. I'd like you to take me
away, Ben--to take me somewhere just as you did when we were married."

Her face was very soft in the firelight, and stooping, I kissed her
cheek as she looked up at me, with a grave, almost pensive smile on her
lips.

"I wish I could, sweetheart, but I'm needed here so badly that I don't
dare run off for a day. You've married a working-man, and he's obliged
to stick to his place."

She said nothing more to persuade me, but from that evening until the
spring, when our son was born, it seemed to me that she retreated
farther and farther into that pale dream distance where I had first seen
and desired her. With the coming of the child I got her back to earth
and to reality, and when the warm little body, wrapped in flannels, was
first placed in my arms, it seemed to me that the thrill of the mere
physical contact had in it something of the peculiar starlike radiance
of my bridal night. Sally, lying upon the pillow under a blue satin
coverlet, smiled up at me with flushed cheeks and eyes shining with
love, and while I stood there, some divine significance in her look, in
her helplessness, in the oneness of the three of us drawn together in
that little circle of life, moved my heart to the faint quiver of
apprehension that had come to me while I stood by her side before the
altar in old Saint John's.

When she was well, and the long, still days of the summer opened, little
Benjamin was wrapped in a blue veil and taken in Aunt Euphronasia's arms
to visit Miss Mitty in the old grey house.

"What did she say, mammy? How did she receive him?" asked Sally eagerly,
when the old negress returned.

"She ain' said nuttin' 'tall, honey, cep'n 'huh,'" replied Aunt
Euphronasia, in an aggrieved and resentful tone. "Dar she wuz a-settin'
jes' ez prim by de side er dat ar box er sweet alyssum, en ez soon ez I
lay eyes on her, I said, 'Howdy, Miss Mitty, hyer's Marse Ben's en Miss
Sally's baby done come to see you.' Den she kinder turnt her haid, like
oner dese yer ole wedder cocks on a roof, en she looked me spang in de
eye en said 'huh' out right flat jes' like dat."

"But didn't you show her his pretty blue eyes, mammy?" persisted Sally.

"Go way f'om hyer, chile, Miss Mitty done seen de eyes er a baby befo'
now. I knowed dat, en I lowed in my mind dat you ain' gwinter git aroun'
her by pretendin' you kin show her nuttin'. So I jes' begin ter sidle up
ter her en kinder talk sof ez ef'n I 'uz a-talkin' ter myself. 'Dish yer
chile is jes' de spi't er Marse Bland,' I sez, 'en dar ain' noner de po'
wite trash in de look er him needer.'"

"Aunt Euphronasia, how dare you!" said Sally, sternly.

"Well, 'tis de trufe, ain't hit? Dar ain' nuttin er de po' wite trash in
de look er him, is dar?"

"And what did she say then, Aunt Euphronasia?"

"Who? Miss Mitty? She sez 'huh' again jes' ez she done befo'. Miss Mitty
ain't de kind dat's gwinter eat her words, honey. W'at she sez, she sez,
en she's gwinter stick up ter hit. The hull time I 'uz dar, I ain' never
yearn nuttin' but 'huh!' pass thoo her mouf."

"I knew she was proud, Ben, but I didn't know she was so cruel as to
visit it on this precious angel," said Sally, on the point of tears;
"and I believe Jessy is the same way. Nobody cares about him except his
doting mother."

"What's become of his doting father?"

"Oh, his doting father is entirely too busy with his darling stocks."

"Sally," I asked seriously, "don't you understand that all
this--everything I'm doing--is just for you and the boy?"

"Is it, Ben?" she responded, and the next minute, "Of course, I
understand it. How could I help it?"

She was always reasonable--it was one of her greatest charms, and I knew
that if I were to open my mind to her at the moment, she would enter
into my troubles with all the insight of her resourceful sympathy. But I
kept silence, restrained by some masculine instinct that prompted me to
shut the business world outside the doors of home.

"Well, I must go downtown, dear; I don't see much of you these days, do
I?"

"Not much, but I know you're here to stay and that's a good deal of
comfort."

"I'm glad you've got the baby. He keeps you company."

She looked up at me with the puzzling expression, half humour, half
resentment, I had seen frequently in her face of late. If she stopped to
question whether I really imagined that a child of three months was all
the companionship required by a woman of her years, she let no sign of
it escape the smiling serenity of her lips. On her knees little Benjamin
lay perfectly quiet while he stared straight up at the ceiling with his
round blue eyes like the eyes of an animated doll.

"Yes, he is company," she answered gently; and stooping to kiss them
both, I ran downstairs, hurried into my overcoat, and went out into the
street.

As I closed the door behind me, I saw the General's buggy turning the
corner, and a minute later he drew up under the young maples beside the
pavement, and made room for me under the grey fur rug that covered his
knees.

"I don't like the way things are behaving in Wall Street, Ben," he said.
"Did that last smash cost you anything?"

"About two hundred thousand dollars, General, but I hadn't spoken of
it."

"I hope the bank hasn't been loaning any more money to the Cumberland
and Tidewater. I meant to ask you about that several days ago."

"The question comes up before the directors this afternoon. We'll
probably refuse to advance any further loans, but they've already drawn
on us pretty heavily, you understand, and we may have to go in deeper to
save what we've got."

"Well, it looks pretty shaky, that's all I've got to say. If Jenkins
doesn't butt in and reorganise it, it will probably go into the hands of
a receiver before the year is up. Is it the bank or your private
investments you've been worrying over?"

"My own affairs entirely. You see I'd dealt pretty largely through Cross
and Hankins, and I don't know exactly what their failure will mean to
me."

"A good many men in the country are asking themselves that question. A
smash like that isn't over in a day or a night. But I'm afraid you've
been spending too much money, Ben. Is your wife extravagant?"

"No, it's my own fault. I've never liked her to consider the value of
money."

"It's a bad way to begin. Women have got it in their blood, and I
remember my poor mother used to say she never felt that a dollar was
worth anything until she spent it. If I were you, I'd pull up and go
slowly, but it's mighty hard to do after you've once started at a
gallop."

"I don't think I'll have any trouble, but I hate like the deuce to speak
of it to Sally."

"That's your damned delicacy. It puts me in mind of my cousin, Jenny
Tyler, who married that scamp who used to throw his boots at her. Once
when she was a girl she stayed with us for a summer, and old Judge Lacy,
one of the ugliest men of his day, fell over head and heels in love with
her. She couldn't endure the sight of him, and yet, if you'll believe my
word, though she was as modest as an angel, I actually found him kissing
her one day in a summer-house. 'Bless my soul, Jenny!' I exclaimed, 'why
didn't you tell that old baboon to stop hugging you and behave himself?'
'O Cousin George,' she replied, blushing the colour of a cherry, 'I
didn't like to mention it.' Now, that's the kind of false modesty you've
got, Ben."

"Well, you see, General," I responded when he had finished his sly
chuckle, "I've always felt that money was the only thing that I had to
offer."

"You may feel that way, Ben, but I don't believe that Sally does. My
honest opinion is that it means a lot more to you than it does to her.
There never was a Bland yet that didn't look upon money as a vulgar
thing. I've known Sally's grandfather to refuse to invite a man to his
house when the only objection he had to him was that he was too rich to
be a gentleman. If you think it's wealth or luxury or their old house
that the Blands pride themselves on, you haven't learned a thing about
'em in spite of the fact that you've married into the family. What
they're proud of is that they can do without any of these things;
they've got something else--whatever it is--that they consider a long
sight better. Miss Mitty Bland would still have it if she went in rags
and did her own cooking, and it's this, not any material possessions,
that makes her so terribly important. Look here, now, you take my advice
and go home and tell Sally to stop spending money. How's that boy of
yours? Is he wanting to become a bank president already?"

The old grey horse, rounding the corner at an amble, came suddenly to a
stop as he recognised the half-grown negro urchin waiting upon the
pavement. As if moved by a mechanical spring, the General's expression
changed at once from its sly and jolly good nature to the look of
capable activity which marked the successful man of affairs. The twinkle
in his little bloodshot eyes narrowed to a point of steel, the loose
lines of his mouth, which was the mouth of a generous libertine, grew
instantly sober, and even his crimson neck, sprawling over his puffy,
magenta-coloured tie, stiffened into an appearance of pompous dignity.

"Look sharp about the Cumberland and Tidewater, Ben," he remarked as he
turned to limp painfully into the railroad office. Then the glass doors
swung together behind him, and he forgot my existence, while I crossed
the street in a rush and entered the Union Bank, which was a block
farther down on the opposite side.

On the way home that afternoon, I told myself with determination that I
would tell Sally frankly about the money I had lost; but when a little
later she slipped her hand into my arm, and led me into the nursery to
show me a trunk filled with baby's clothes that had come down from New
York, my courage melted to air, and I could not bring myself to dispel
the pretty excitement with which she laid each separate tiny garment
upon the bed.

"Oh, of course, you don't enjoy them, Ben, as I do, but isn't that
little embroidered cloak too lovely?"

"Lovely, dear, only I've had a bad day, and I'm tired."

"Poor boy, I know you are. Here, we'll put them away. But first there's
something really dreadful I've got to tell you."

"Dreadful, Sally?"

"Yes, but it isn't about us. Do you know, I honestly believe that Jessy
intends to marry Mr. Cottrel."

"What? That old rocking-horse? Why, he's a Methusalah, and knock-kneed
into the bargain."

"It doesn't matter. Nothing matters to her except clothes. I've heard of
women who sold themselves for clothes, and I believe she's one of them."

"Well, we're an eccentric family," I said wearily, "and she's the
worst."

At any other time the news would probably have excited my indignation,
but as I sat there, in the wicker rocking-chair, by the nursery fire, I
was too exhausted to resent any manifestation of the family spirit. The
last week had been a terrible strain, and there were months ahead which
I knew would demand the exercise of every particle of energy that I
possessed. In the afternoon there was to be a meeting of the directors
of the bank, called to discuss the advancing of further loans to the
Cumberland and Tidewater Railroad, and at eight o'clock I had promised
to work for several hours with Bradley, my secretary. To go slowly now
was impossible. My only hope was that by going fast enough I might
manage to save what remained of the situation.

As the winter passed I went earlier to my office and came up later.
Failure succeeded failure in Wall Street, and the whole country began
presently to send back echoes of the prolonged crash. The Cumberland and
Tidewater Railroad, to which we had refused a further loan, went into
the hands of a receiver, and the Great South Midland and Atlantic
immediately bought up the remnants at its own price. The General, who
had been jubilant about the purchase, relapsed into melancholy a week
later over the loss of "a good third" of his personal income.

"I'm an old fool or I'd have stopped dabbling in speculations and put
away a nest-egg for my old age," he remarked, wiping his empurpled lids
on his silk handkerchief. "No man over fifty ought to be trusted to
gamble in stocks. Thank God, I'm the one to suffer, however, and not the
road. If there's a more solid road in the country, Ben, than the South
Midland, I've got to hear of it. It's big, but it's growing--swallowing
up everything that comes in its way, like a regular boa constrictor.
Think what it was when I came into it immediately after the war; and
to-day it's one of the few roads that is steadily increasing its
earnings in spite of this blamed panic."

"You worked regeneration, General, as I've often told you."

"Well, I'm too old to see what it's coming to. I hope a good man will
step into my place after I'm gone. I'm sometimes sorry you didn't stick
by me, Ben."

He spoke of the great road in a tone of regretful sentiment which I had
never found in his allusions to his lost Matoaca. The romance of his
life, after all, was not a woman, but a railroad, and his happiest
memory was, I believe, not the Sunday upon which he had stood beside the
rose-lined bonnet of his betrothed and sung lustily out of the same
hymn-book, but the day when the stock of the Great South Midland and
Atlantic had sold at 180 in the open market.

"I'll tell you what, my boy," he remarked with a quiver of his lower
lip, which hung still farther away from his bloodless gum, "a woman may
go back on you, and the better the woman the more likely she is to do
it,--but a road won't,--no, not if it is a good road."

"Well, I'm not getting much return out of the West Virginia and Wyanoke
just now," I replied. "It's no fun being a little road at the mercy of a
big one when the big one is a boa constrictor. Even if you get a fair
division of the rates, you don't get your cars when you want them."

"The moral of that," returned the General, with a chuckle, "is, to quote
from my poor old mammy again, 'Don't hatch until you're ready to hatch
whole.'"

We parted with a laugh, and I dismissed the affairs of the little
railroad as I entered my office at the bank, where my private wire
immediately ticked off the news of a state of panic in the money market.
That was in February, and it was not until the end of March that the ice
on which I was walking cracked under my feet and I went through.

CHAPTER XXIV

IN WHICH I GO DOWN

I had just risen from breakfast on the last day of March when I was
called to the telephone by Cummins, the cashier of the bank.

"Things are going pretty queer down here. Looks as if a run were
beginning. Some old fool started it after reading about that failure of
the Darlington Trust Company in New York. Wish you'd hurry."

"Call up the directors, and look here!--pay out all deposits slowly
until I get there."

The telephone rang off, and picking up my hat, I went down the front
steps to the carriage, which had been ordered by Sally for an early
appointment. As I stepped in, she appeared in her hat and coat and
joined me.

"Drive to the bank, Micah," I said, "I want to get there like
lightning."

"Can you wait till I speak to mammy? She is bringing the baby."

For the first time since our marriage my nerves got the better of me,
and I answered her sharply.

"No, I can't wait--not a minute, not a second. Drive on, Micah."

In obedience to my commands, Micah touched the horses, and as we sped
down Franklin Street, Sally looked at me with an expression which
reminded me of the faint wonder under the fixed smile about Miss Mitty's
mouth.

"What's the matter, Ben? Are you working too hard?" she enquired.

"I'm tired and I'm anxious. Do you realise that we are living in the
midst of a panic?"

"Are we?" she asked quietly, and arranged the fur rug over her knees.

"Do you mean to tell me you hadn't heard it?" I demanded, in pure
amazement that the thing which had possessed me to madness for three
months should have escaped the consciousness of the wife with whom I
lived.

"How was I to hear of it? You never told me, and I seldom read the
papers now since the baby came. Of course I knew something was wrong.
You were looking so badly and so much older."

To me it had needed no telling, because it had become suddenly the most
obvious fact in the world in which I moved. Only a fool would gaze up at
the sky during a storm burst and remark to a bystander, "It thunders."
Yet even now I saw that what she realised was not the gravity of the
financial crisis, but its injurious effect upon my health and my
appearance.

"You've been on too great a strain," she remarked sympathetically; "when
it's all over you must come away and we'll go to Florida in the
General's car."

To Florida! and at that instant I was struggling in the grip of
failure--the failure of the successful financier, which is of all
failures the hardest. Not a few retrenchments, not the economy of a
luxury here and there, but ultimate poverty was the thing that I faced
while I sat beside her on the soft cushions under the rich fur rug. One
by one the familiar houses whirled by me. I saw the doors open and shut,
the people come out of them, the sunshine fall through the budding trees
on the sidewalk; and the houses and the moving people and the budding
trees, all seemed to me detached and unreal, as if they stood apart
somewhere in a world of quiet, while I was sucked in by the whirlpool.
Though I lifted my voice and called aloud to them, I felt that the
people I passed would still go quietly in and out of the opening doors
in the placid spring sunshine.

"There's Bonny Page," said Sally, waving her hand; "she's to marry Ned
Marshall next month, you know, and they are going to Europe. Did you
notice that baby in the carriage--the one with blue bows and the Irish
lace afghan?--it is Bessy Munford's,--the handsomest in town, they say,
after little Benjamin."

The sight of the baby carriage, with its useless blue fripperies,
trundled on the pavement under the budding trees, had aroused in me a
sudden ridiculous anger, as though it represented the sinful
extravagance of an entire nation. That silly carriage with its blue
ribbons and its lace coverlet! And over the whole country factory after
factory was shutting down, and thousands of hungry mothers and children
were sitting on door-steps in this same sunshine. My nerves were bad. It
had been months since I had a good night's sleep, and I knew that in the
condition of my temper a trifle might be magnified out of all due
proportion to its relative significance.

The horses stopped at the bank, and Sally leaned out to bow smilingly to
one of the directors, who was coming along the sidewalk.

"I never saw so many people about here, Ben," she remarked; "it looks
exactly as if it were a theatre. Ah, there's the General now going into
his office. He hobbles so badly, doesn't he? When do you think you'll be
home?"

"I don't know," I returned shortly, "perhaps at midnight--perhaps next
week."

My tone brought a flush to her cheek, and she looked at me with the
faint wonder that I had seen first on the face of Miss Mitty when I went
in to breakfast with her on that autumn morning. It was the look of
race, of the Bland breeding, of the tradition that questioned, not
violently, but gently, "Can this be possible?"

She drove on without replying to me, and as I entered my office, the
faces of Miss Mitty and of Sally were confused into one by my disordered
mind.

The run had already started--a depositor, who had withdrawn ten thousand
dollars after reading of the failure of the Darlington Trust Company,
had been paid off first, and following him the line had come, crawling
like black ants on the pavement. As I entered the doors, it seemed to me
that the face of each man or woman in the throng stood out, separate and
distinct, as though an electric search-light had passed over it; and I
saw one and all, frightened, satisfied, or merely ludicrous, with a
vividness of perception which failed me when I remembered the features
of my own wife.

"We can pay them off slowly till three o'clock," said Bingley, the
vice-president, whom I found, with five or six of the directors, already
in my office. "I've got only one paying teller's window open. The
trouble, of course, began with the small accounts, of which we carry
such a blamed lot. Mark my words, it is the little depositor that
endangers a bank."

He looked nervous, and swallowed hastily while he talked, as if he had
just rushed in from breakfast, with his last mouthful still unchewed. As
I entered and faced the men sitting in different attitudes, but all
wearing the same strained and helpless expression, a feeling of
irritation swept over me, and I paused in the middle of the floor, with
my hat and a folded newspaper in my hand.

"A quarter of a million in hard cash would tide us over, I believe,"
pursued Bingley, swallowing faster; "but the question is how in thunder
are we to lay hands on it by nine o'clock to-morrow morning?"

I drew out my watch, and with the simple, mechanical action, I was
conscious of an immediate quickening of the blood, a clearing of the
brain. A certain readiness for decision, a power of dealing with an
emergency, of handling a crisis, a response of pulse and brain to the
call for action, stood me service now as in every difficult instant of
my career. They were picked business men and shrewd financiers before
me, yet I was aware that I dominated them, all and each, by some quality
of force, of aggressiveness, of inflated self-confidence. The secret of
my success, I had once said to the General, was that I began to get cool
when I saw other people getting scared.

"It is now a quarter of ten, gentlemen," I said, "and I pledge my word
of honour that I will have a quarter of a million dollars in bank by ten
o'clock to-morrow."

"For God's sake, Ben, where is it coming from?" demanded Judge Kenton,
an old Confederate, with the solemn face I had sometimes watched him
assume in church during the singing of the hymns. As I looked at him the
humour of his expression struck me, and I broke into a laugh.

"I beg your pardon," I returned the next minute, "but I'll get
it--somewhere--if it's in the city."

One of the men--I forget which, though I remember quite clearly that he
wore a red necktie--got up from the table and slapped me on the
shoulder.

"Go ahead, Ben, and get it," he said. "We take your word."

On the pavement the crowd had thickened, and when it caught sight of me,
a confused murmur rose, and I was surrounded by half-hysterical women.
The trouble, as Bingley had said, had begun with the small depositors;
and in the line that pressed now like black ants to the doors, there
were many evidently who had entrusted their nest-eggs to us for
safe-keeping. I was not gentle by nature, and the sight of a woman's
tears always aroused in me, not the angel, but the brute. For five years
I had been married to a descendant of the Blands and the Fairfaxes, and
yet, as I stood there, held at bay, in the midst of those sobbing women,
the veneer of refinement peeled off from me, and the raw strength of the
common man showed on the surface, and triumphed again as it had
triumphed over the frightened directors in my office.

"What are you whining about?" I said with a laugh, "your money is all
there. Go in and get it."

An old woman in a plaid shawl, with her mouth twisted sideways by a
recent stroke of paralysis, barred my way with an outstretched hand, in
which she held the foot of a grey yarn stocking.

"I'd laid it up for my old age, Mister," she mumbled, through her
toothless gums, "an' they told me it was safer in the bank, so I put it
there. But I reckon I'd feel easier if I had it back--I reckon I'd feel
easier."

"Then go after it," I replied harshly, pushing her out of my way. "If
you don't get it before I come back, I'll give it to you with my own
hands."

For a minute my presence subdued the crowd; but the panic terror had
gripped it, and while I crossed the street the hysterical murmurs were
in my ears. A desire to turn and throttle the sound as I might a howling
wild beast took possession of me. It was true, I suppose, as Dr.
Theophilus had once told me, that the quality I lacked was tenderness.

The General fortunately was alone in his private office, and when I went
in he glanced up enquiringly from a railroad report he was reading.

"It's you, Ben, is it?" he remarked, and went back to his paper.

"General," I said bluntly, and stopped short in the centre of the room,
"I want a quarter of a million dollars in cash by nine o'clock to-morrow
morning."

For a moment he sat speechless, blinking at me with his swollen eyelids,
while his lower lip protruded angrily, like the lip of a crying child.
Then the old war-horse in him responded gallantly to the scent of
battle.

"Damn you, Ben, do you know cash is as tight as wax?" he enquired. "You
ain't dozing in the midst of a panic?"

"There's trouble at the bank," I replied. "A run has started, but so far
it is almost entirely among the small depositors. We can manage to pay
off till three o'clock, and if we open to-morrow with a quarter of a
million, we shall probably keep on our feet, unless the excitement
spreads."

"When do you want it?"

"By nine o'clock to-morrow morning; and I want it, General," I added,
"on my personal credit."

He rose from his chair and stood swaying unsteadily on his gouty foot.

"I'll give you every penny that I've got, Ben," he answered, "but it
ain't that much."

"You have access to the cash of both the Tilden Bank and the Bonfield
Trust Company. If there's a dollar in the city you can get it."

A hint of his sly humour appeared for an instant in his eyes. "It wasn't
any longer ago than breakfast that I remarked I didn't believe there was
a blamed dollar in the whole country," he returned. Then his swaying
stopped and he became invested suddenly with the dignity of the greatest
financier in the state.

"Hand me my stick, Ben, and I'll go and see what I can do about it," he
said.

I gave him his stick and my arm, and with my assistance he limped to the
offices of the Bonfield Trust Company on the next block. When I returned
to the bank the directors were talking excitedly, but at my entrance a
hush fell, and they sat looking at me with a row of vacant, expectant
faces that waited apparently to be filled with expression.

"By ten o'clock to-morrow morning," I said, "a quarter of a million in
cash will be brought in through the door in bags."

"I told you he'd do it," exclaimed Bingley, as he grasped my hand, "and
I hope to God it will stay 'em off."

"You need a drink, Ben," observed Judge Kenton, "and so do I. Let's go
and get it. A soft-boiled egg was all I had for breakfast, and I've gone
faint."

I remember that I went to a restaurant with him, that a few old women
sitting on the curbing spoke to us as we passed, that we ate oysters,
and returned in half an hour to another meeting, that we discussed ways
and means until eight o'clock and decided nothing. I know also that when
we came out again several of the old women were still crouching there,
and that when they came whining up to me, I turned on them with an oath
and ordered them to be off. As clearly as if it were yesterday, I can
see still the long, solemn face of the Judge as he glanced up at me, and
I see written upon it something of the faint wonder that I had grown to
regard as the peculiar look of the Blands.

I had telephoned Sally not to wait, and when I reached home I found that
she had dismissed the servants and was preparing a little supper for me
herself. While she served me, I sat perfectly silent, too exhausted to
talk or to think, trying in vain to remember the more important events
of the day. Only once did Sally speak, and that was to beg me to eat the
slice of cold turkey she had laid on my plate.

"I'm not hungry, I got something with Judge Kenton down town," I
returned as I pushed back my chair and rose from the table; "what I need
is sleep, sleep, sleep. If I don't get to bed, I'll drop to sleep on the
hearth-rug."

"Then go, dear," she answered, and not until I reached the landing above
did I realise that through it all she had not put a single question to
me. With the realisation I knew that I ought to have told her what in
her heart she must have felt it to be her right to know; but a nervous
shrinking, which seemed to be a result of my complete physical
exhaustion, held me back when I started to retrace my steps.

She might cry, and the sight of tears would unman me. There's time
enough, I thought. Why not to-morrow instead? Yet in my heart I knew it
would be no easier to do it to-morrow than it was to-day. By some
strange freak of the imagination those unshed tears of hers seemed
already dropping upon my nerves. "There's time enough, she'll be obliged
to hear it in the end," something within me repeated with a kind of
dulness. And with the words, while my head touched the pillow, I started
suddenly wide awake as though from the flash of a lantern that was
turned inward. Trivial impressions of the afternoon stood out as if
illuminated against the outer darkness, and there hovered before me the
face of the old woman, in the plaid shawl, with her twisted mouth, and
the foot of her grey yarn stocking held out in her palsied hand. "I
reckon I'd feel easier if I had it back," said a voice somewhere in my
brain.

CHAPTER XXV

WE FACE THE FACTS AND EACH OTHER

The panic which had begun with the depositors of small accounts, spread
next day to the holders of larger ones, and even while I stood at my
window and watched the cash brought in in bags through the cheering
crowd on the sidewalk, I knew that the quarter of a million dollars
would go down with the rest. My financial insight had misled me, and the
bank funds, which I had believed so carefully guarded, had suffered the
same fate as my private fortune. There were more serious questions
behind the immediate need of currency, and these questions drummed in my
mind now, dull and regular as the beat of a hammer.

For three days we paid off our accounts, and at the end of that time,
when I left the building, after the run had stopped, it seemed to me
that the city had a deserted and trampled look, as if some enormous
picnic had been held in the streets. A few loose shreds of paper, a
banana peel here and there, the ends of numerous cigars, and the white
patch torn from a woman's petticoat littered the pavement. Over all
there was a thick coating of dust, and the wind, blowing straight from
the east, whipped swirls of it into our faces, as the General and I
drove slowly up-town in his buggy.

"You look down in the mouth, Ben," he remarked, as I took the reins.

"I've got an infernal toothache, General; it kept me awake all night."

"Well, bless my soul, you ought to be thankful if it takes your mind off
the country. I haven't seen such a state of affairs since the days of
reconstruction. I tell you, my boy, the only thing on earth to do is to
take a julep. Lithia water is well enough in times of prosperity, but
you can't support a panic on it. I've gone back to my julep, and if I
die of it, I'll die with a little spirit in me."

"There're worse things than death ahead of me, General, there's ruin."

"It's the toothache, Ben. Don't let it take all the spirit out of you."

"No, it's more than the toothache, confound it!--it never leaves off.
The truth is, I'm in the tightest place of my life, and to keep what I
own would cost me more than I've got. I haven't the money to pay up--and
if I can't buy outright, you see that I must let go."

"I've done what I could for you, Ben, and if there is more I can do,
heaven knows I'll be thankful enough."

"You've already done too much, General, but I've made sure that you
shan't suffer by it. I've simply gone down, that's all, and I've got to
stay there till I can get on my feet. The bank will close temporarily, I
suppose, but when it starts again, it will have to start with another
man. I shall look out for a smaller job."

"If you come back to the road, I'll find a place for you--but it won't
be like being a bank president, you know."

"Well, when the time comes, I'll let you know," I added, when the buggy
stopped before my door, and I handed him the reins.

"Listen to me, my boy," he called back, as he drove off and I went up
the brown stone steps, "and take a julep."

But the support I needed was not that of whiskey, and though I swallowed
a dozen juleps, the thought of Sally's face when I broke the news would
suffer no blessed obscurity.

"Shall I tell her now, or after dinner?" I asked, while I drew out my
latch-key; and then when she met me at the head of the staircase, with
her shining eyes, I grew cowardly again, and said, "Not now--not now.
To-night I will tell her."

At night, when we sat opposite to each other, with a silver bowl of
jonquils between us, she began talking idly about the marriage of Bonny
Page, inspired, I felt, by a valiant determination to save the situation
in the eyes of the servants at least. The small yellow candle shades,
made to resemble flowers, shone like suns in a mist before my eyes; and
all the time that my thoughts worked over the approaching hour, I heard,
like a muffled undertone, the soft, regular footfalls of old Esdras, the
butler, on the velvet carpet.

"I'll tell her after the servants have gone, and the house is
quiet--when she has taken off her dinner gown--when she may turn on her
pillow and cry it out. I'll say simply, 'Sally, I am ruined. I haven't a
penny left of my own. Even the horses and the carriages and the
furniture are not mine!' No, that is a brutal way. It will be better to
put it like this"--"What did you say, dear?" I asked, speaking aloud.

"Only that Bonny Page is to have six bridesmaids, but the wedding will
be quiet, because they have lost money."

"They've lost money?"

"Everybody has lost money--everybody, the General says. Ben, do you
know," she added, "I've never cared truly about money in my heart."

In some vague woman's way she meant it, I suppose, yet as I looked at
her, where she sat beyond the bowl of jonquils, in one of her old Paris
gowns, which she had told me she was wearing out, I broke into a short,
mirthless laugh. She held her head high, with its wreath of plaits that
made a charming frame for her arched black eyebrows and her full red
mouth. On her bare throat, round and white as a marble column, there was
an old-fashioned necklace of wrought gold, which had belonged to some
ancestress, who was doubtless the belle and beauty of her generation.
Was it possible to picture her in a common gown, with her sleeves rolled
up and the perplexed and anxious look that poverty brings in her eyes?
For the first time in my life I was afraid to face the moment before me.

The roast was removed, the dessert served, and played with in silence.
The footfalls of old Esdras, the butler, sounded softer on the carpet,
as he carried away the untasted pudding and brought coffee and an
apricot brandy, which he placed before me with a persuasive air. I lit a
cigar at the flame of the little silver lamp he offered me, drank my
coffee hurriedly, and rose from the table.

"Are you going to work, Ben?" asked Sally, following me to the door of
the library.

"Yes, I am going to work."

Without a word she raised her lips to mine, and when I had kissed her,
she turned slowly away, and went up the staircase, with the branching
lights in the hall shining upon her head.

I closed the door, lowered the wick of the oil lamp on my desk, and
began walking up and down the length of the room, between the black oak
bookcases filled with rows of calf-bound volumes. I tried to think, but
between my thoughts and myself there obtruded always, like some small,
malignant devil, the face of the old woman on the pavement before the
bank, with her distorted and twisted mouth. "This will have to
go--everything will have to go--when I've sold every last stick I have
in the world, I shall still owe a debt of some cool hundreds of
thousands. I'll pay that, too, some day. Of course, of course, but when?
Meanwhile, we've got to live somewhere, somehow. There's the child,
too--and there's Sally. I always said I'd only money to give her, and
now I haven't that. We'll have to go into some cheap place, and I'll
begin over again, with the disadvantages of a failure behind me, and a
burden of debt on my shoulders. She's got to know--I've got to tell her.
Confound that old woman! Why can't I keep her out of my thoughts?"

The hours went by, and still I walked up and down between the black oak
bookcases, driven by some demon of torture to follow the same line in
the Turkish rug, to turn always at the same point, to measure always the
same number of steps.

"Well, she got her money--they all got their money," I said at last. "I
am the only one who is ruined--no, not the only one--there is Sally and
there is the child. I'd feel easier," I added, echoing the words of the
old woman aloud, "I'd feel easier if I were the only one."

A clock somewhere in the city struck the hour of midnight, and while the
sound was still in the air, the door opened softly and Sally came into
the room. She had slipped on a wrapper over her nightdress, and her
hair, flattened and warmed by the pillow, hung in a single braid over
her bosom. There were deep circles under her eyes, which shone the more
brilliantly because of the heavy shadows.

"What is the matter, Ben? Why don't you come upstairs?"

"I couldn't sleep--I am thinking," I answered, almost roughly, oppressed
by my weight of misery.

"Would you rather be alone? Shall I go away again?"

"Yes, I'd rather be alone."

She went silently to the door, stood there a minute, and then ran back
with her arms outstretched.

"Oh, Ben, Ben, why are you so hard? Why are you so cruel?"

"Cruel? Hard? To you, Sally?"

"You treat me as if--as if I'd married you for your money and you've
made me hate and despise it. I wish--I almost wish we hadn't a penny."

I laughed the bitter, mirthless laugh that had broken from me at dinner.

"As a matter of fact we haven't--not a single penny that we can honestly
call our own."

She drew back instantly, her head held high under the branching electric
jet in the ceiling.

"Well, I'm glad of it," she responded defiantly.

"You don't in the least understand what it means, Sally. It isn't merely
giving up a few luxuries, it is actually going without the necessities.
It is practically beginning again."

"I am glad of it," she repeated, and there was no regret in her voice.

"Oh, can't you understand?"

"Tell me and I will try."

"I've lost everything. I'm ruined."

"There is nothing left?"

"There is honour," I said bitterly, "a couple of hundred thousand
dollars of debt, and a little West Virginia railroad too poor to go
bankrupt."

"Then we must start from the very bottom?"

"From the very bottom. Nothing that you are likely to imagine can be
worse than the facts--and I've brought you to it."

Something that was like a sob burst from me, and turning away, I flung
myself into the chair on the hearth-rug.

"Can't you think of anything that would be worse?" she asked quietly.

I shook my head, "The worst thing about it is that I've brought you to
it."

"Wouldn't it be worse," she went on in the same level voice, "if you had
lost me?"

"Lost you!" I cried, and my arms were open at the thought.

"I'm glad, I'm glad." With the words she was on her knees at my side,
and her mouth touched my cheek. "I knew it wasn't the worst, Ben,--I
knew you'd rather give up the money than give up me. Ah, can't you
see--can't you see, that the worst can't come to us while we are still
together?"

Leaning over her, I gathered her to me with a hunger for comfort,
kissing her eyes, her mouth, her throat, and the loosened braid on her
bosom.

"Oh, you witch, you've almost made me happy!" I said.

"I am happy, Ben."

"Happy? The horses must go, and the carriage and the furniture even.
We'll have to move into some cheap place. I'll get a position of some
kind with the railroad, and then we'll have to scrimp and save for an
eternity, until we pay off this damned burden of debt."

She laughed softly, her mouth at my ear. "I'm happy, Ben."

"We shan't be able to keep servants. You'll have to wear old clothes,
and I'll go so shabby that you'll be ashamed of me. We'll forget what a
bottle of wine looks like, and if we were ever to see a decent dinner,
we shouldn't recognise it."

Again she laughed, "I'm still happy, Ben."

"We'll live in some God-forsaken, out-of-the-way little hole, and never
even dare ask a person in to a meal for fear there wouldn't be enough
potatoes to go around. It will be a daily uphill grind until I've
managed to pay off honestly every cent I owe."

Her arms tightened about my neck, "Oh, Ben, I'm so happy."

"Then you are a perfectly abandoned creature," I returned, lifting her
from the rug until she nestled against my heart. "I've given up trying
to make you as miserable as a self-respecting female ought to be. If you
won't be proper and wretched, I can't help it, for I've done my best.
And the most ridiculous part of it is, darling, that I actually believe
I'm happy, too!"

She laughed like a child between her kisses. "Then, you see, it isn't
really the thing, but the way you take it that matters."

"I'm not sure about the logic of that--but I'm inclined to think just
now that the only thing I've ever taken is you."

"If you'll try to remember that, you'll be always happy."

"But I must remember also that I've brought you to poverty--I, who had
only money to give you."

"Do you dare to tell me to my face that I married you for money?"

"You couldn't very well have married me without it."

"I don't know about the 'very well,' but I know that I'd have done it."

"Do you think that, Sally?"

Turning in my arms, she lifted her head, and looked steadily into my
face.

"Have I ever lied to you since we were married, Ben?"

"No, darling."

"Have I ever deceived you?"

"Never, I am sure," I responded with a desperate levity, "except for my
good."

"Have I ever deceived you," she demanded sternly, "even for your good?"

"To tell the truth, I don't believe you ever have."

The warm pressure of her body was withdrawn, and rising to her feet, she
stood before me under the blazing light.

"Then I'm not lying to you when I say that I'd have married you if you
hadn't possessed a penny to your name--I'd have married you if--if I'd
had to take in washing."

"Sally!" I cried, and made a movement to recapture her; but pushing me
back, she stood straight and tall, with the fingers of her outstretched
hand touching my breast.

"No, listen to me, listen to me," she said gravely. "As long as I have
you and you love me, Ben, nothing can break my spirit, because the thing
that makes life of value to me will still be mine. If you ever ceased to
love me, I might get desperate, and do something wild and foolish--even
run off with another man, I believe--I don't know, but I am my father's
daughter, as well as my mother's. Until that time comes, I can bear
anything, and bear it with courage--with gaiety even. I can imagine
myself without everything else, but not without you. I love my
child--you know I love my child--but even my child isn't you. If I had
to choose to-night between my baby and you, I'd give him up,--and cling
the closer to you. You are myself, and if I had to choose between
everything else I've ever known in my life and you, I'd let everything
else go and follow you anywhere--anywhere. There is nothing that you can
endure that I cannot share with you. I can bear poverty, I could even
have borne shame. If we had to go to some strange country far away from
all I have ever known, I could go and go cheerfully. I can work beside
you, I can work for you--oh, my dear, my dearest, I am your wife, do you
still doubt me?"

I had fallen on my knees before her, with her open palms pressed to my
forehead, in which my very brain seemed throbbing. As I looked up at
her, she stooped and gathered me to her bosom.

"Do you know me now?" she asked in a whisper.

Then her voice broke, and the next instant she would have sunk down
beside me, if I had not sprung to my feet and lifted her in my arms.
While I held her thus, pressed close against me, something of her
radiant strength entered into me, and I was aware of a power in myself
that was neither hers nor mine, but the welding of the finer qualities
in both our natures.

CHAPTER XXVI

THE RED FLAG AT THE GATE

Sally was not beside me when I awoke in the morning, nor was she sipping
her coffee by the window, as I had sometimes found her doing when I
slept late. Going downstairs an hour afterwards, I discovered her, for
the first time since our marriage, awaiting me in the dining-room. In
her dainty breakfast jacket of blue silk, with a bit of lace and ribbon
framing her wreath of plaits, she appeared to my tired eyes as the
embodied freshness and buoyancy of the morning. Would her sparkling
gaiety endure, I wondered, through the monotonous days ahead, when
poverty became, not a child's play, not a game tricked out by the
imagination, but the sordid actuality of hard work and hourly
self-denial?

"I am practising early rising, Ben," she said, "and it's astonishing
what an appetite it gives one. I've made the coffee myself, and Aunt
Mehitable has just taught me how to make yeast. One can never tell what
may come useful, you know, and if we go to live somewhere in a jungle,
which I'm quite prepared to do, you'd be glad to know that I could make
yeast, wouldn't you?"

"I suppose so, sweetheart, and as a matter of fact," I added presently,
"this is the best cup of coffee I've had for many a month."

Laughing merrily, she perched herself on the arm of my chair, and sipped
out of the cup I held toward her. "Of course it is. So you've gained
that much by losing everything. It's very strange, Ben, and you may
consider it presumptuous, but I've a profound conviction somewhere in
the bottom of my heart that I can do everything better than anybody
else, if I once turn my hand to it. At this minute I haven't a doubt
that my yeast is better than Aunt Mehitable's. I'm going to cook dinner,
too, and she'll be positively jealous of my performance. How do we know
whether or not we'll meet any cooks in the jungle? And if we do, they'll
probably be tigers--"

"Oh, Sally, Sally! You think it play now, but what will you feel when
you know it's earnest?"

"Of course it's earnest. Do you imagine I'd get out of my bed at seven
o'clock and cut up a slimy potato if it wasn't earnest? That may be your
idea of play, but it's not mine."

"And you expect to flutter about a stove in a pale blue breakfast jacket
and a lace cap?"

"Just as long as they last. When they go, I suppose I'll have to take to
calico, but it will be pretty calico, and pink. Pink calico don't cost a
penny more than drab--and there's one thing I positively decline to do,
even in a jungle, and that is look ugly."

"You couldn't if you tried, my beauty."

"Oh, yes, I could--I could look hideous--any woman could if she tried.
But as long as it doesn't cost any more, you've no objection to my
cooking in pink instead of drab, I suppose?"

"I've an objection to your cooking in anything. Another cup of coffee,
please."

"Ben."

"Yes, dear."

"You never drank but one of Aunt Mehitable's."

"I'm aware of it, and I'm aware of something else. It's worth being
poor, Sally, to be poor with you."

"Then give me another taste of your coffee. But you don't call this
being poor, do you, you silly boy?--with all this beautiful mahogany
that I can use for a mirror? This isn't any fun in the world. Just wait
until I spread the cloth over a pine table. Then we'll have something to
laugh at sure enough, Ben."

"And I thought you'd cry!"

"You thought a great many very foolish things, my dear. You even thought
I'd married you because I wanted to be rich, and it seemed an easy way."

"Only it turned out to be an easier way of getting poor."

"Well, rich or poor, what I married you for, after all, was the
essential thing."

"And you've got it, sweetheart?"

"Of course I've got it. If I didn't have it, do you think I'd be able to
laugh at a pine table?"

"If I were only sure you realised it!"

"You'll be sure enough when we are in the midst of it, and we'll be in
the midst of it, I don't doubt, in a little while. I've been thinking
pretty hard since last night, and this is what I worked out while I was
making yeast."

"Let's have it, then."

"Now, the first thing we've got to do is to get out of debt, isn't it?"

"The very first thing, if it can be managed."

"We'll manage it this way. The furniture and the silver and my jewels
must all be sold, of course; that's easy. But even after we've done
that, there'll still be a great big burden to carry, I suppose?"

"Pretty big, I'm afraid, for your shoulders."

"Oh, we'll pay it every bit in the end. We won't go bankrupt. You'll go
back to the railroad on a salary, and we'll begin to pinch on the spot."

"Yes, but times are hard and salaries are low."

"Anyway they're salaries, there's that much to be said for them. And
while we're pinching as hard as we can pinch, we'll move over to Church
Hill and rent two or three rooms in the old house with the enchanted
garden. All the servants will have to go except Aunt Euphronasia, who
couldn't go very far, poor thing, because she's rheumatic and can't
stand on her feet. She can sit still very well, however, and rock the
baby, and I'll look after the rooms and get the meals--I'm glad they'll
be simple ones--and we'll put by every penny that we can save."

"The mere interest on the debt will take almost as much as we can save.
There'll be some arrangement made, of course, and the payments will be
easy, but there's one thing I'm determined on, and that is that I'll pay
it, every cent, if I live. Then, too, there's chance, you know.
Something may turn up--something almost always turns up to a man like
myself."

"Well, if it turns up, we'll welcome it with open arms. But in the
meantime we'll see if we can't scrape along without it. I'm going over
this morning to look for rooms. How soon, Ben, do you suppose they will
evict us?"

"Does there exist a woman," I demanded sternly, "who can be humorous
over her own eviction?"

"It's better to be humorous over one's own than over one's neighbour's,
isn't it? And besides, a laugh may help things, but tears never do. I
was born laughing, mamma always said."

"Then laugh on, sweetheart."

I had risen from the table, and was moving toward the door, when she
caught my arm.

"There's only one thing I'll never, never consent to," she said, "you
remember Dolly?"

"Your old mare?"

"I've pensioned her, you know, and I'll pay that pension as long as she
lives if we both have to starve."

"You shall do it if we're hanged and drawn for it--and now, Sally, I
must be off to my troubles!"

"Then, good-by and be brave. Oh, Ben, my dearest, what is the matter?"

"It's my head. I've been worrying too much, and it's gone back on me
like that twice in the last few days."

I went out hurriedly, convinced that even failure wasn't quite so bad as
it had appeared from a distance; and Sally, following me to the door,
stood smiling after me as I went down the block toward the car line.
Looking back at the corner, I saw that she was still standing on the
threshold, with the sun in her eyes and her head held high under the
ruffle of lace and ribbon that framed her hair.

The street was filled with people that morning, and at the end of the
first block Bonny Page nodded to me jauntily, as she passed on her early
ride with Ned Marshall. Turning, almost unconsciously, my eyes followed
her graceful, very erect figure, in its close black habit, swaying so
perfectly with the motion of her chestnut mare. An immeasurable,
wind-blown space seemed to stretch between us, and the very sound of the
horse's hoofs on the cobblestones in the street came to me, faint and
thin, as if it had floated back from some remote past which I but dimly
remembered. I had never felt, even when standing at Bonny's side, that I
was within speaking distance of her, and to-day, while I looked after
the vanishing horses, I knew that odd, baffling sensation of struggling
to break through an inflexible, yet invisible barrier. Why was it that I
who had won Sally should still remain so hopelessly divided from all
that to which Sally by right and by nature belonged?

Farther down the two great sycamores, still gaunt and bare as skeletons,
stood out against a sky of intense blueness; and on the crooked pavement
beneath, the shadows, fine and delicate as lace-work, rippled gently in
the wind that blew straight in from the river. Looking up from under the
silvery boughs, I saw the wire cage of the canary between the parted
curtains, and beyond it the pale oval face of Miss Mitty, with its
grave, set smile, so like the smile of the painted Blands and Fairfaxes
that hung, in massive frames, on the drawing-room walls. In the midst of
my own ruin an impulse of compassion entered my heart. The vacancy of
the old grey house was like the vacancy of a tomb in which the ashes
have scattered, and the one living spirit seemed that of the canary
singing joyously in his wire cage. Something in the song brought Sally
to my mind as she had appeared that morning at breakfast, and I felt
again the soft, comforting touch of the hand she had laid on my face.
Then I turned my eyes to the street, and saw George Bolingbroke coming
slowly toward me, beyond the last great sycamore, which grew midway of
the bricks. At the sight of him all that had comforted or supported me
crumbled and fell. In its place came that sharp physical soreness--like
the soreness from violent action--that the shock of my failure had
brought. I, who had meant so passionately to win in the race, was
suddenly crippled. Money, I had said, was all that I had to give, and
yet I was beggared now even of that. Shorn of my power, what remained to
me that would make me his match?

He came up, taking his cigar from his mouth as he stopped, and flicking
the ashes away, while he stood looking at me with an expression of
sympathy which he struggled in vain, I saw, to dissemble. On his finely
coloured, though rather impassive features, there was the same darkening
of a carefully suppressed emotion--the same lines of anger drawn, not by
temper, but by suffering--that I had seen first at the club when his
favourite hunter had died, and next on the day when the General had
spoken to him, in my presence, of my engagement to Sally. Under his
short dark mustache, his thin, nervous lips were set closely together.

"I'm awfully cut up, Ben," he said, "I declare I don't know when I was
ever so cut up about anything before."

"I'm cut up too, George, like the deuce, but it doesn't appear to help
matters, somehow."

"That's the worst thing about being a man of affairs like you--or like
Uncle George," he observed, making an amiable effort to assure me that
even in the hour of adversity, I still held my coveted place in the
General's class; "when the crash comes, you big ones have to pay the
piper, while the rest of us small fry manage to go scot-free."

It was put laboriously, but beneath the words I felt the force of that
painful sympathy, too strong for concealment, and yet not strong enough
to break through the inherited habit of self-command. The General had
broken through, I acknowledged, but then was not the very greatness of
the great man the expression of an erratic departure from traditions
rather than of the perfect adherence to the racial type?

"And the louder the music the bigger the cost of the piper," I observed,
with a laugh.

"Oh, you'll come out all right," he rejoined cheerfully, "things are
never so bad as they might be."

"Well, I don't know that there's much comfort in reflecting that a
thunder-storm might have been accompanied by an earthquake."

For a moment he stood in silence watching the end of his cigar, which
went out in his hand. Then without meeting my eyes he asked in a voice
that had a curiously muffled sound:--

"It's rough on Sally, isn't it? How does she stand it?"

"As she stands everything--like an angel out of heaven."

"Yes, you're right--she is an angel," he returned, still without looking
into my face. An instant later, as if in response to an impulse which
for once rose superior to the dead weight of custom, he blurted out with
a kind of suffering violence, "I say, Ben, you know it's really awful.
I'm so cut up about it I don't know what to do. I wish you'd let me help
you out of this hole till you're on your feet. I've got nobody on me,
you see, and I can't spend half of my income."

For the first time in our long acquaintance the tables were turned; it
was George who was awkward now, and I who was perfectly at my ease.

"I can't do that, George," I said quietly, "but I'm grateful to you all
the same. You're a first-rate chap."

We shook hands with a grip, and while he still lingered to strike a
match and light the fresh cigar he had taken from his case, the little
yellow flame followed, like an illuminated pointer, the expression of
suffering violence which showed so strangely upon his face. Then,
tossing the match into the gutter, he went on his way, while I passed
the great scarred body of the sycamore and hurried down the long hill,
which I never descended without recalling, as the General had said, that
I had once "toted potatoes for John Chitling."

At the beginning of the next block, I saw the miniature box hedge and
the clipped yew in the little garden of Dr. Theophilus, and as I turned
down the side street, the face of the old man looked at me from the
midst of some leafless red currant bushes that grew in clumps at the end
of the walk.

"Come in, Ben, come in a minute," he called, beaming at me over his
lowered spectacles, "there's a thing or two I should like to say."

As I entered the garden and walked along the tiny path, bordered by
oyster shells, to the red currant bushes beyond, he laid his
pruning-knife on the ground, and sat down on an old bench beside a
little green table, on which a sparrow was hopping about. On his
seventy-fifth birthday he had resigned his profession to take to
gardening, and I had heard from no less an authority than the General
that "that old fool Theophilus was spending more money in roses than
Mrs. Clay was making out of pickles."

"What is it, doctor?" I asked, for, oppressed by my own burdens, I
waited a little impatiently to hear "the thing or two" he wanted to say.

"You see I've given up people, Ben, and taken to roses," he began, while
I stood grinding my heel into the gravelled walk; "and it's a good
change, too, when you come to my years, there's no doubt of that. If you
weed and water them and plant an occasional onion about their roots you
can make roses what you want--but you can't people--no, not even when
you've helped to bring them into the world. No matter how straight they
come at birth, they're all just as liable as not to take an inward crank
and go crooked before the end." He looked thoughtfully at the sparrow
hopping about on the green table, and his face, beautiful with the
wisdom of more than seventy years, was illumined by a smile which seemed
in some way a part of the April sunshine flooding the clumps of red
currant bushes and the miniature box. "George--I mean old George--was
telling me about you, Ben," he went on after a minute, "and as soon as I
heard of your troubles, I said to Tina--'We've got a roof and we've got
a bite, so they'll come to us.' What with Tina's pickling and preserving
we manage to keep a home, my boy, and you're more than welcome to share
it with us--you and Sally and your little Benjamin--"

"Doctor--doctor--" was all I could say, for words failed me, and I,
also, stood looking thoughtfully at the sparrow hopping about on the
green table, with eyes that saw two small brown feathered bodies in the
place where, a minute before, there had been but one.

"Come when you're ready, come when you're ready," he repeated, "and
we'll make you welcome, Tina and I."

I grasped his hand without speaking, and as I wrung it in my own, I felt
that it was long and fine and nervous,--the hand, not of a worker, but
of a dreamer. Then tearing my gaze from the sparrow, I went back through
the clump of red currant bushes, and between the shining rows of oyster
shells, to the busy street which led to a busy world and my office door.

A fortnight later the house was sold over our heads, and when I came up
in the afternoon, I found a red flag flying at the gate, and the dusty
buggies of a few real estate men tied to the young maples on the
sidewalk. Upstairs Sally was sitting on a couch, in the midst of the
scattered furniture, while George Bolingbroke stood looking ruefully at
a pile of silver and bric-a-brac that filled the centre of the floor.

"Are you laughing now, Sally?" I asked desperately, as I entered.

"Not just this minute, dear, because that awful man and a crowd of
people have been going over the house, and Aunt Euphronasia and I locked
ourselves in the nursery. I'll begin again, however, as soon as they've
gone. All these things belong to George. It was silly of him to buy
them, but he says he had no idea of allowing them to go to strangers."

"Well, George as well as anybody, I suppose," I responded, moodily.

Beside the window Aunt Euphronasia was rocking slowly back and forth,
with little Benjamin fast asleep on her knees, and her great rolling
eyes, rimmed with white, passed from me to George and from George to me
with a defiant and angry look.

"I ain' seen nuttin' like dese yer doin's sence war time," she grumbled;
"en hit's wuss den war time, caze war time hit's fur all, en dish yer
hit ain't fur nobody cep'n us."

Throwing herself back on the pillow, Sally lay for a minute with her
hand over her eyes.

"I can laugh now," she said at last, raising her head, and she, also, as
she sat there, pale and weary but bravely smiling, glanced from me to
George with a perplexed, inscrutable look. A minute later, when George
made some pleasant, comforting remark and went down to join the crowd
gathered before the door, her gaze still followed him, a little
pensively, as he left the room. The bruise throbbed again; and walking
to the window, I stood looking through the partly closed blinds to the
street below, where I could see the dusty buggies, the switching tails
of the horses, bothered by flies, and the group of real estate men,
lounging, while they spat tobacco juice, by the red flag at the gate. In
the warm air, which was heavy with the scent of a purple catalpa tree on
the corner, the drawling voice of the auctioneer could be heard like the
loud droning of innumerable bees. A carriage passed down the street in a
cloud of dust, and the very dust, as it drifted toward us, was drenched
with the heady perfume of the catalpa.

"That tree makes me dizzy," I said; "it's odd I never minded it before."

"You aren't well--that's the trouble--but even if you were, the voice of
that man down there is enough to drive any sane person crazy. He sounds
exactly as if he were intoning a church service over our misfortunes.
That is certainly adding horror to humiliation," she finished with
merriment.

"At any rate he doesn't humiliate you?"

"Of course he doesn't. Imagine one of the Blands and the Fairfaxes being
humiliated by an auctioneer! He amuses me, even though it is our woes he
is singing about. If I were Aunt Mitty, I'd probably be seated on the
front porch with my embroidery at this minute, bowing calmly to the
passers-by, as if it were the most matter-of-fact occurrence in the
world to have an auctioneer selling one's house over one's head."

"Dear old enemy, I wonder what she thinks of this?"

"She hasn't heard it, probably. A newspaper never enters her doors, and
do you believe she has a relative who would be reckless enough to break
it to her?"

"I hope she hasn't, anyhow."

"They haven't had time to go to her. They have all been here. People
have been coming all day with offers of help--even Jessy's Mr.
Cottrel--and oh, Ben, she told me she meant to marry him! Bonny Page," a
little sob broke from her, "Bonny Page wanted to give up her trip to
Europe and have me take the money. Then everybody's been sending me
luncheons and jellies and things just exactly as if I were an invalid."

"Hit's de way dey does in war time, honey," remarked Aunt Euphronasia,
shaking little Benjamin with the slow, cradling movement of the arms
known only to the negroes.

Downstairs the auction was over, the drawling monologue was succeeded by
a babel of voices, and glancing through the blinds, I saw the real
estate men untying their horses from the young maples. A swirl of dust
laden with the scent of the catalpa blew up from the street.

"But we can't take help, Sally," I said, almost fiercely.

"No, we can't take help, I told them so--I told them that we didn't need
it. In a few years we'd be back where we were, I said, and I believed
it."

"Do you believe it after listening to that confounded fog-horn on the
porch?"

"Well, it's a trial to faith, as Aunt Mitty would say, but, oh, Ben, I
really _do_ believe it still."

CHAPTER XXVII

WE CLOSE THE DOOR BEHIND US

It was a warm spring afternoon when we closed the door behind us for the
last time, and took the car for Church Hill, where we had rented several
rooms on the first floor of the house with the enchanted garden. As the
car descended into the neighbourhood of the Old Market, with its tightly
packed barrooms, its squalid junk shops, its strings of old clothes
waving before darkened, ill-smelling doorways, I seemed to have stepped
suddenly backward into a place that was divided between the dream and
the actuality. I remembered my awakening on the pile of straw, with the
face of John Chitling beaming down on me over the wheelbarrow of
vegetables; and the incidents of that morning--the long line of stalls
giving out brilliant flashes from turnips and onions, the sharp, fishy
odour from the strings of mackerel and perch, the very bloodstains on
the apron and rolled-up sleeves of the butcher--all these things were
more vivid to my consciousness than were the faces of Sally and of Aunt
Euphronasia, or the fretful cries of little Benjamin, swathed in a blue
veil, in the old negress's lap. I had meant to make good that morning,
when I had knelt there sorting the yellow apples. I had made good for a
time, and yet to-day I was back in the place from which I had started.
Well, not in the same place, perhaps, but my foot had slipped on the
ladder, and I must begin again, if not from the very bottom, at least
from the middle rung. The market wagons, covered with canvas, were still
standing with empty shafts in the littered street, as if they had waited
there, a shelter for prowling dogs, until my return. Mrs. Chitling's
slovenly doorstep I could not see, but as we ascended the long hill on
the other side, I recognised the musty "old clothes" shop, in which I
had stumbled on "Sir Charles Grandison" and Johnson's Dictionary. That
minute, I understood now, had been in reality the turning-point in my
career. In that close-smelling room I had come to the cross-roads of
success or failure, and swerving aside from the dull level of ignorance,
I had rushed, almost by accident, into the better way. The very odour of
the place was still in my nostrils--a mixture of old clothes, of stale
cheese, of overripe melons. A sudden dizziness seized me, and a wave of
physical nausea passed over me, as if the intense heat of that past
summer afternoon had gone to my head.

The car stopped at the corner of old Saint John's; we got out, assisting
Aunt Euphronasia, and then turned down a side street in the direction of
our new home. As we mounted the curving steps, Sally passed a little
ahead of me, and looked back with her hand on the door.

"I am happy, Ben," she said with a smile; and with the words on her
lips, she crossed the threshold and entered the wide hall, where the
moth-eaten stags' heads, worn bare of fur, still hung on the faded
plaster.

My first impression upon entering the room was that the strange
surroundings struck with a homelike and familiar aspect upon my
consciousness. Then, as bewilderment gave place before a closer
scrutiny, I saw that this aspect was due to the presence of the objects
by which I had been so long accustomed to see Sally surrounded. Her
amber satin curtains hung at the windows; the deep couch, with the amber
lining, upon which she rested before dressing for dinner, stood near the
hearth; and even the two crystal vases, which I had always seen holding
fresh flowers upon her small, inlaid writing desk, were filled now with
branching clusters of American Beauty roses. Beyond them, and beyond the
amber satin curtains at the long window, I saw the elm boughs arching
against a pale gold sunset into which a single swallow was flying. And I
remember that swallow as I remember the look, swift, expectant, as if
it, also, were flying, that trembled, for an instant, on Sally's face.

"It is George," she said, turning to me with radiant eyes; "George has
done this. These are the things he bought, and I wondered so what he
would do with them." Then before something in my face, the radiance died
out of her eyes. "Would you rather he didn't do it? Would you rather I
shouldn't keep them?" she asked.

A struggle began within me. Through the window I could see still the
pale gold sunset beyond the elms, but the swallow was gone, and gone,
also, from Sally's face was the look as of one flying.

"Would you rather that I shouldn't keep them?" she asked again, and her
voice was very gentle.

At that gentleness the struggle ceased as sharply as it had begun.

"Do as you choose, darling, you know far better than I," I replied; and
bending over her, I raised her chin that was lowered, and kissed her
lips.

A light, a bloom, something that was fragrant and soft as the colour and
scent of the American Beauty roses, broke over her as she looked up at
me with her mouth still opening under my kiss.

"Then I'll keep them," she answered, "because it would hurt him so, Ben,
if I sent them back."

The colour and bloom were still there, but in my heart a chill had
entered to drive out the warmth. My ruin, my failure, the poverty to
which I had brought Sally and the child through my inordinate ambition,
and the weight of the two hundred thousand dollars of debt on my
shoulders--all these things returned to my memory, with an additional
heaviness, like a burden that has been lifted only to drop back more
crushingly. And as always in my thoughts now, this sense of my failure
came to me in the image of George Bolingbroke, with his air of generous
self-sufficiency, as if he needed nothing because he had been born to
the possession of all necessary things.

Sally drew the long pins from her hat, laid them, with the floating
white veil and her coat, on a chair in one corner, and began to move
softly about in her restful, capable way. Her very presence, I had once
said of her, would make a home, and I remembered this a little later as
I watched the shadow of her head flit across the faded walls above the
fine old wainscoting, from which the white paint was peeling in places.
Her touch, swift and unfaltering, released some spirit of beauty and
cheerfulness which must have lain imprisoned for a generation in the
superb old rooms. On the floor with us there were no other tenants, but
when I heard an occasional sound in the room above, I remembered that
the agent had told me of an aristocratic, though poverty-stricken,
maiden lady, who was starving up there in the midst of some rare pieces
of old Chippendale furniture, and with the portrait of an English
ancestress by Gainsborough hanging above her fireless hearth.

"The baby is asleep, so Aunt Euphronasia and I are cooking supper," said
Sally, when she had spread the cloth over the little table, and laid
covers for two on either side of the shaded lamp; "at least she's
cooking and I'm serving. Come into the garden, Ben, before it's ready,
and run with me down the terrace."

"The garden is ruined. I saw it when I came over with the agent."

"Ruined? And with such lilacs! They are a little late because of the
cold spring, but a perfect bower."

She caught my hand as she spoke, and we passed together through the long
window leading from our bedroom to the porch, where a few startled
swallows flew out, crying harshly, from among the white columns. Many of
the elms had died; the magnolias and laburnums, with the exception of a
few stately trees, had decayed on the terrace, and the thick maze of box
was now thin and rapidly dwindling away from the gravelled paths. On the
ground, under the young green of dandelion and wild violets, the rotting
leaves of last year were still lying; and as we descended the steps, and
followed the littered walks down the hill-side, broken pieces of pottery
crumbled beneath our feet.

Clasping hands like two children, we stood for a minute in silence, with
our eyes on the ruin before us, and the memory of the enchanted garden
and our first love in our thoughts. Then, "Oh, Ben, the lilacs!" said
Sally, softly.

They were there on all sides, floating like purple and white clouds in
the wind, and shedding their delicious perfume over the scattered rose
arbours and the dwindling box. Light, delicate, and brave, they had
withstood frost and decay, while the latticed summer houses had fallen
under the weight of the microphylla roses that grew over them. The wind
now was laden with their sweetness, and the golden light seemed aware of
their colour as it entered the garden softly through the screen of
boughs.

"Do you remember the first day, Ben?"

"The first day? That was when President lifted me on the wall--and even
the wall has gone."

"Did you dream then that you'd ever stand here with me like this?"

"I dreamed nothing else. I've never dreamed anything else."

"Then you aren't so very unhappy as long as we are together?"

"Not so unhappy as I might be, but, remember, I'm a man, Sally, and I
have failed."

"Yes, you're a man, and you couldn't be happy even with me--without
something else."

"The something else is a part of you. It belongs to you, and that's
mostly why I want to make good. These debts are like a dead weight--like
the Old Man of the Sea--on my shoulders. Until I'm able to shake them
off, I shall not stand up straight."

"I'm glad you've gone back to the railroad."

"There are a lot of men in the railroad, and very few places. The
General found me this job at six thousand a year, which is precious
little for a man of my earning capacity. They'll probably want to send
me down South to build up the traffic on the Tennessee and Carolina,--I
don't know. It will take me a month anyway to wind up my affairs and
start back with the road. Oh, it's going to be a long, hard pull when it
once begins."

Pressing her cheek to my arm, she rubbed it softly up and down with a
gentle caress. "Well, we'll pull it, never fear," she responded.

At our feet the twilight rose slowly from the sunken terrace, and the
perfume of the lilacs seemed to grow stronger as the light faded. For a
moment we stood drawn close together; then turning, with my arm still
about her, we went back over the broken pieces of pottery, and ascending
the steps, left the pearly afterglow and the fragrant stillness behind
us.

Half an hour later, when we were in the midst of our supper, which she
had served with gaiety and I had eaten with sadness, a hesitating knock
came at the door leading into the dim hall, and opening it with
surprise, I was confronted by a small, barefooted urchin, who stood,
like the resurrected image of my own childhood, holding a covered dish
at arm's length before him.

"If you please, ma'am," he said, under my shoulder, to Sally, who was
standing behind me, "ma's jest heard you'd moved over here, an' she's
sent you some waffles for supper."

"And what may ma's name be?" enquired Sally politely, as she removed the
red and white napkin which covered the gift.

"Ma's Mrs. Titterbury, an' she lives jest over yonder. She says she's
been a-lookin' out for you an' she hopes you've come to stay."

"That's very kind of her, and I'm much obliged. Tell her to come to see
me."

"She's a-comin', ma'am," he responded cheerfully, and as he withdrew,
his place was immediately filled by a little girl in a crimson calico,
with two very tight and very slender braids hanging down to her waist in
the back.

"Ma's been makin' jelly an' syllabub, an' she thought you might like a
taste," she said, offering a glass dish. "Her name is Mrs. Barley, an'
she lives around the corner."

"These are evidently our poorer neighbours," observed Sally, as the door
closed after the crimson calico and the slender braids; "where are the
well-to-do ones that live in all the big houses around us?"

"It probably never occurred to them that we might want a supper. It's
the poor who have imagination. By Jove! there's another!"

This time it was a stout, elderly female in rusty black, with a very red
face, whom, after some frantic groping of memory, I recognised as Mrs.
Cudlip, unaltered apparently by her thirty years of widowhood.

"I jest heard you'd moved back over here, Benjy," she remarked, and at
the words and the voice, I seemed to shrink again into the small,
half-scared figure clad in a pair of shapeless breeches which were made
out of an old dolman my mother had once worn to funerals, "an' I thought
as you might like a taste of muffins made arter the old receipt of yo'
po' ma's--the very same kind of muffins she sent me by you on the
mornin' arter I buried my man."

Placing the dish upon the table, she seated herself, in response to an
invitation from Sally, and spread her rusty black skirt, with a
leisurely movement, over her comfortable lap. As I looked at her, I
forgot that I stood six feet two inches in my stockings; I forgot that I
had married a descendant of the Blands and the Fairfaxes; and I
remembered as plainly as if it were yesterday, the morning of the
funeral, when, with my mother's grey blanket shawl pinned on my
shoulders, I had sat on the step outside and waited for the service to
end, while I made scornful faces at the merry driver of the hearse.

"It's been going on thirty years sence yo' ma died, ain't it, Benjy?"
she enquired, while I struggled vainly to recover a proper consciousness
of my size and my importance.

"I was a little chap at the time, Mrs. Cudlip," I returned.

"An' it's been twenty, I reckon," she pursued reminiscently, "sence yo'
pa was took. Wall, wall, time does fly when you come to think of deaths,
now, doesn't it? I al'ays said thar wa'nt nothin' so calculated to put
cheer an' spirit into you as jest to remember the people who've dropped
off an' died while you've been spared. You didn't see much of yo' pa
durin' his last days, did you?"

"Never after I ran away, and that was the night he brought his second
wife home."

"He had a hard time toward the end, but I reckon she had a harder. It
wa'nt that he was a bad man at bottom, but he was soft-natured an' easy,
an' what he needed was to be helt an' to be helt steady. Some men air
like that--they can't stand alone a minute without beginnin' to wobble.
Now as long as yo' ma lived, she kept a tight hand on yo' pa, an' he
stayed straight; but jest as soon as he was left alone, he began to
wobble, an' from wobblin' he took to the bottle, and from the bottle he
took to that brass-headed huzzy he married. She was the death of him,
Benjy; I ought to know, for I lived next do' to 'em to the day of his
burial. As to that, anyway, ma'am," she added to Sally, "my humble
opinion is that women have killed mo' men anyway than they've ever
brought into the world. It's a po' thought, I've al'ays said, in which
you can't find some comfort."

"You were very kind to him, I have heard," I observed, as she paused for
breath and turned toward me.

"It wa'nt mo'n my duty if I was, Benjy, for yo' ma was a real good
neighbour to me, an' many's the plate of buttered muffins you've brought
to my do' when you wa'nt any higher than that."

It was true, I admitted the fact as gracefully as I could.

"My mother thought a great deal of you," I remarked.

"You don't see many of her like now," she returned with a sigh, "the
mo's the pity. 'Thar ain't room for two in marriage,' she used to say,
'one of 'em has got to git an' I'd rather 'twould be the other!' 'Twa'nt
that way with the palaverin' yaller-headed piece that yo' pa married
arterwards. She'd a sharp enough tongue, but a tongue don't do you much
good with a man unless he knows you've got the backbone behind to drive
it. It ain't the tongue, but the backbone that counts in marriage. At
first he was mighty soft, but befo' two weeks was up he'd begun to beat
her, an' I ain't got a particle of respect for a woman that's once been
beaten. Men air born mean, I know, it's thar natur, an' the good Lord
intended it; but, all the same, it's my belief that mighty few women
come in for a downright beatin' unless they've bent thar backs to
welcome it. It takes two to make a beatin' the same as a courtin', an'
whar the back ain't ready, the blows air slow to fall."

"I never saw her but once, and then I ran away," I remarked to fill in
her pause.

"Wall, you didn't miss much, or you either, ma'am," she rejoined
politely; "she was the kind that makes an honest woman ashamed to belong
to a sex that's got to thrive through foolishness, an' to git to a place
by sidlin' backwards. That wa'nt yo' ma's way, Benjy, an' I've often
said that I don't believe she ever hung back in her life an' waited for
a man to hand her what she could walk right up an' take holt of without
his help. 'The woman that waits on a man has got a long wait ahead of
her,' was what she used to say."

Rising to her feet, she stood with the empty plate in her hand, and her
back ceremoniously bent in a parting bow.

"Is that yo' youngest? Now, ain't he a fine baby!" she burst out, as
little Benjamin appeared, crowing, in the arms of Aunt Euphronasia, "an
he's got all the soft, pleasant look of yo' po' pa a'ready."

I opened the door, and with a last effusive good-by, she passed out in
her stiff, rustling black, which looked as if she had gone into
perpetual mourning.

"Will you have some syllabub, Ben?" enquired Sally primly, as the door
closed.

"Sally, how will you stand it?"

"She wants to be kind--she really wants to be."

Crossing moodily to the table, I pushed aside the waffles, the muffins,
and the syllabub, with an angry gesture.

"It is what I came from, after all. It is my class."

"Your class?" she repeated, laughing and sobbing together with her arms
on my shoulders. "There's nobody else in the whole world in your class,
Ben."

CHAPTER XXVIII

IN WHICH SALLY STOOPS

A week or two later the General stopped me as I was leaving his office.

"I don't like the look of you, Ben. What's the matter?"

"My head has been troubling me, General. It's been splitting for a week,
and I can't see straight."

"You've thought too much, that's the mischief. Why not cut the whole
thing and go West with me to-morrow in my car? I'll be gone for a
month."

"It's out of the question. A man who is over head and ears in debt
oughtn't to be spinning about the country in a private car."

"I don't see the logic of that as long as it's somebody else's car."

"You'd see it if you had two hundred thousand dollars of debt."

"Well, I've been worse off. I've had two hundred thousand devils of
gout. Here, come along with me. Bring Sally, bring the youngster. I'll
take the whole bunch of 'em."

When I declined, he still urged me, showing his annoyance plainly, as a
man does in whom opposition even in trifles arouses a resentful, almost
a violent, spirit of conquest. So, I knew, he had pursued every aim,
great or small, of his life, with the look in his face of an intelligent
bulldog, and the conviction somewhere in his brain that the only method
of overcoming an obstacle was to hang on, if necessary, until the
obstacle grew too weak to put forth further resistance. Once, and once
only, to my knowledge, had this power to hang on, this bulldog grip,
availed him but little, and that was when his violence had encountered a
gentleness as soft as velvet, yet as inflexible as steel. In his whole
life only poor little Miss Matoaca had withstood him; and as I met the
angry, indomitable spirit in his eyes, there rose before me the figure
of his old love, with her look of meek, unconquerable obstinacy and with
the faint fragrance and colour about her that was like the fragrance and
colour of faded rose-leaves.

"There's no use, General. I can't do it," I said at last; and parting
from him at the corner, I signalled the car for Church Hill, while he
drove slowly up-town in his buggy.

It was a breathless June afternoon. A spell of intense early heat had
swept over the country, and the summer flowers were unfolding as if
forced open in the air of a hothouse. At the door Sally met me with a
telegram from Jessy announcing her marriage to Mr. Cottrel in New York;
but the words and the fact seemed to me to have no nearer relation to my
life than if they had described the romantic adventures of a girl, in a
crimson blouse, who was passing along the pavement.

"Well, she's got what she wanted." I remarked indifferently, "so she's
to be congratulated, I suppose. My head is throbbing as if it would
break open. I'll go in and lie down in the dusk, before supper."

"Do the flowers bother you? Shall I take them away?" she asked,
following me into the bedroom, and closing the shutters.

"I don't notice them. This confounded headache is the only thing I can
think of. It hasn't let up a single minute."

Bending over me, she laid her cheek to mine, and stroked the hair back
from my forehead with her small, cool hand, which reminded me of the
touch of roses. Then going softly out, she closed the door after her,
while I turned on my side, and lay, half asleep, half awake, in the
deepening twilight.

From the garden, through the open blinds of the green shutters, floated
the strong, sweet scent of the jessamine blooming on the columns of the
piazza; and I heard, now and then, as if from a great distance, the
harsh, frightened cry of a swallow as it flew out from its nest under
the roof. A sudden, sharp realisation of imperative duties left undone
awoke in my mind; and I felt impelled, as if by some outward pressure,
to rise and go back again down the long, hot hill into the city.
"There's something important I meant to do, and did not," I thought; "as
soon as this pain stops, I suppose I shall remember it, and why it is so
urgent. If I can only sleep for a few minutes, my brain will clear, and
then I can think it out, and everything that is so confused now will be
easy." In some way, I knew that this neglected duty concerned Sally and
the child. I had been selfish with Sally in my misery. When I awoke with
a clear head, I would go to her and say I was sorry.

The scent of the jessamine became suddenly so intense that I drew the
coverlet over my face in the effort to shut it out. Then turning my eyes
to the wall, I lay without thinking or feeling, while my consciousness
slowly drifted outside the closed room and the penetrating fragrance of
the garden beyond. Once it seemed to me that somebody came in a dream
and bent over me, stroking my forehead. At first I thought it was Sally,
until the roughness of the hand startled me, and opening my eyes, I saw
that it was my mother, in her faded grey calico, with the perplexed and
anxious look in her eyes, as if she, too, were trying to remember some
duty which was very important, and which she had half forgotten. "Why, I
thought you were dead!" I exclaimed aloud, and the sound of my own voice
waked me.

It was broad daylight now; the shutters were open, and the breeze,
blowing through the long window, brought the scent of jessamine
distilled in the sunshine beyond. It seemed to me that I had slept
through an eternity, and with my first waking thought, there revived the
same pressure of responsibility, the same sense of duties, unfulfilled
and imperative, with which I had turned to the wall and drawn the
coverlet over my face. "I must get up," I said aloud; and then, as I
lifted my hand, I saw that it was wasted and shrunken, and that the blue
veins showed through the flesh as through delicate porcelain. Then,
"I've been ill," I thought, and "Sally? Sally?" The effort of memory was
too great for me, and without moving my body, I lay looking toward the
long window, where Aunt Euphronasia sat, in the square of sunshine,
crooning to little Benjamin, while she rocked slowly back and forth,
beating time with her foot to the music.

    "Oh, we'll ride in de golden cha'iot, by en bye, lil' chillun,
    We'll ride in de golden cha'iot, by en bye.

    Oh, we'se all gwine home ter glory, by en bye, lil' chillun,
    We'se all gwine home ter glory by en bye.

    Oh, we'll drink outer de healin' fountain, by en bye, lil' chillun,
    We'll drink outer de healin' fountain by en bye."

"Sally!" I called aloud, and my voice sounded thin and distant in my own
ears.

There was the sound of quick steps, the door opened and shut, and Sally
came in and leaned over me. She wore a blue gingham apron over her
dress, her sleeves were rolled up, and her hand, when it touched my
face, felt warm and soft as if it had been plunged into hot soapsuds.
Then my eyes fell on a jagged burn on her wrist.

"What is that?" I asked, pointing to it. "You've hurt yourself."

"Oh, Ben, my dearest, are you really awake?"

"What is that, Sally? You have hurt yourself."

"I burned my hand on the stove--it is nothing. Dearest, are you better?
Wait. Don't speak till you take your nourishment."

She went out, returning a moment later with a glass of milk and whiskey,
which she held to my lips, sitting on the bedside, with her arm slipped
under my pillow.

"How long have I been ill, Sally?"

"Several weeks. You became conscious and then had a relapse. Do you
remember?"

"No, I remember nothing."

"Well, don't talk. Everything is all right--and I'm so happy to have you
alive I could sing the Jubilee, as Aunt Euphronasia says."

"Several weeks and there was no money! Of course, you went to the
General, Sally--but I forgot, the General is away. You went to somebody,
though. Surely you got help?"

"Oh, I managed, Ben. There's nothing to worry about now that you are
better. I feel that there'll never be anything to worry about again."

"But several weeks, Sally, and I lying like a log, and the General away!
What did you do?"

"I nursed you for one thing, and gave you medicine and chicken broth and
milk and whiskey. Now, I shan't talk any more until the doctor comes.
Lie quiet and try to sleep."

But the jagged burn on her wrist still held my gaze, and catching her
hand as she turned away, I pressed my lips to it with all my strength.

"Your hand feels so queer, Sally. It's as red as if it had been
scalded."

"I've been cooking my dinner, and you see I eat a great deal. There,
now, that's positively my last word."

Bending over, she kissed me hurriedly, a tear fell on my face, and then
before I could catch the fluttering hem of her apron, she had broken
from me, and gone out, closing the door after her. For a minute I lay
perfectly motionless, too weak for thought. Then opening my eyes with an
effort, I stared straight up at the white ceiling, against which a green
June beetle was knocking with a persistent, buzzing sound that seemed an
accompaniment to the crooning lullaby of Aunt Euphronasia.

    "Oh, we'se all gwine home ter glory, by en bye, lil' chillun,
    We'se all gwine home ter glory, by en bye."

"Will he break his wings on the ceiling, or will he fly out of the
window?" I thought drowsily, and it appeared to me suddenly that my
personal troubles--my illness, my anxiety for Sally, and even the
poverty that must have pressed upon her--had receded to an obscure and
cloudy distance, in which they became less important in my mind than the
problem of the green June beetle knocking against the ceiling. "Will he
break his wings or will he fly out?" I asked, with a dull interest in
the event, which engrossed my thoughts to the exclusion of all personal
matters. "I ought to think of Sally and the child, but I can't. My head
won't let me. It has gone wrong, and if I begin to think hard thoughts
I'll go delirious again. There is jessamine blooming somewhere. Did she
have a spray in her hair when she bent over me? Why did she wear a
gingham apron at a ball instead of pink tarlatan? No, that was not the
problem I had to solve. Will he break his wings or will he fly out?"

    "Oh, we'll fit on de golden slippers, by en bye, lil' chillun,"

crooned Aunt Euphronasia, rocking little Benjamin in the square of
sunlight.

The song soothed me and I slept for a minute. Then starting awake in the
cold sweat of terror, I struggled wildly after the problem which still
eluded me.

"Has he flown out?" I asked.

"Who, Marse Ben?" enquired the old negress, stopping her rocking and her
lullaby at the same instant.

"The June beetle. I thought he'd break his wings on the ceiling."

"Go 'way f'om hyer, honey, he ain' gwine breck 'is wings. Dar's moughty
little sense inside er dem, but dey ain' gwine do dat. Is yo' wits done
come back?"

"Not quite. I feel crazy. Aunt Euphronasia!"

"W'at you atter, Marse Ben?"

"How did Sally manage?"

"Ef'n hit's de las' wud I speak, she's done managed jes exactly ez ef'n
she wuz de Lawd A'moughty."

"And she didn't suffer?"

"Who? She? Dar ain' none un us suffer, honey, we'se all been livin' on
de ve'y fat er de lan', we is. Dar's been roas' pig en shoat e'vy
blessed day fur dinner."

She had talked me down, and I turned over again and lay in silence,
until Sally came in with a dose of medicine and a cup of broth.

"Have I been very ill, Sally?"

"Very ill. It was the long mental strain, followed by the intense heat.
At one time we feared that a blood vessel was broken. Now, put
everything out of your mind, and get well."

She had taken off her gingham apron, and was wearing one of her last
summer's dresses of flowered organdie. I remembered that I had always
liked it because it had blue roses over it.

"How can I get well when I know that you have been starving?"

"But we haven't been. We've had everything on earth we wanted."

"Then thank God you got help. Whom did you go to?"

Putting the empty glass aside, she began feeding me spoonfuls of broth,
with her arm under my pillow.

"If you will be bad and insist upon knowing--I didn't go to anybody. You
said you couldn't bear being helped, you know."

"I said it--oh, darling--but I didn't think of this!"

"Well, I thought of it, anyway, and I wasn't going to do while you were
ill and helpless what you didn't want me to do when you were well."

"You mean you told nobody all these weeks?"

"Well, I told one or two people, but I didn't accept charity from them.
The General was away, you know, but some people from the office came
over with offers of help--and I told them we needed nothing. Dr.
Theophilus was too far away to treat you, but he has come almost every
day with a pitcher of Mrs. Clay's chicken broth. Oh, we've prospered,
Ben, there's no doubt of that, we've prospered!"

"How soon may I get up?"

"Not for three weeks, and it will be another three weeks even if you're
good, before you can go back to the office."

A sob rose in my throat, but I bit it back fiercely before it passed my
lips.

"Oh, Sally, my darling, why did you marry me?"

"You cruel boy," she returned cheerfully, as she smoothed my pillows,
"when you know that if I hadn't married you there wouldn't be any little
Benjamin in the world."

After this the slow days dragged away, while I consumed chicken broth
and milk punches with a frantic desire to get back my strength. Only to
be on my feet again, and able to lift the burden from Sally's shoulders!
Only to drive that tired look from her eyes, and that patient, divine
smile from her lips! I watched her with jealous longing while I lay
there, helpless as a fallen tree, and I saw that she grew daily thinner,
that the soft redness never left her small, childlike hands, that three