Chapter 32. I Come To The Surface

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_ CHAPTER XXXII. I COME TO THE SURFACE

It was a bright June day, I remember, when I came to the surface again, and saw clear sky for the first time for more than two years. I had entered the office a little late, and the General had greeted me with an outstretched hand in which I felt the grip of the bones through the flabby flesh.

"Look here, Ben, have you kept control of the West Virginia and Wyanoke?" he enquired, and I saw the pupils of his eyes contract to fine points of steel, as they did when he meant business.

"Nobody wanted it, General. I still own control--or rather I still practically own the road."

"Well, take my advice and don't sell to the first man that asks you, even if he comes from the South Midland. I've just heard that they've been tapping those undeveloped coal fields at Wyanoke, and I shouldn't be surprised if they turned out, after all, to be the richest in West Virginia."

It was then that I saw clear sky.

"I'll hold on, General, as long as you say," I replied. "Meanwhile, I'll run out there and have a look."

"Oh, have a look by all means. I say, Ben," he added after a minute, with a worried expression in his face, "have you heard about the trouble that old fool Theophilus has been getting into? Mark my words, before he dies, he'll land his sister in the poorhouse, as sure as I sit here. Garden needed moisture, he said, couldn't raise some of those scraggy, new-fangled things that nobody can pronounce the names of except himself, so he went to work and had pipes laid from one end to the other. When the bill came in there was no way to pay it except by mortgaging his house, so he's gone and mortgaged it. Mrs. Clay, poor lady, came to me on the point of tears--she'll be in the poorhouse yet, I was obliged to tell her so--and entreated me to make an effort to restrain Theophilus. 'I try to keep the catalogues from reaching him,' she said, 'but sometimes the postman slips in without my seeing him, and then he's sure to deliver one. Whenever Theophilus reads about any strange specimen, or any hybridising nonsense that nobody heard of when I was young, he seems to go completely out of his head, and the worst of 'em is,' she added," concluded the General, chuckling under his breath, "'there isn't a single pretty, sweet-smelling flower in the lot.'"

"I'm awfully sorry about the house, General. Isn't there some way of curbing him?"

"I never saw the bit yet that could curb an old fool," replied the great man, indignantly; "the next thing his roof will be sold over his head, and they'll go to the poorhouse, that's what I told Mrs. Clay. Poor lady, she was really in a terrible state of mind."

"Surely you won't let it come to that. Wait till these dreamed-of coal fields materialise and I'll take over that mortgage."

The General's lower lip shot out with a sulky and forbidding expression.

"The best thing that could happen to the old fool would be to have his house sold above him, and by Jove, if he doesn't cease his extravagance, I'll stand off and let them do it as sure as my name is George Bolingbroke. What Theophilus needs," he concluded angrily, "is discipline."

"It's too late to begin to discipline a man of over eighty."

"No, it ain't," retorted the General; "it's never too late. If it doesn't do him any good in this world, it will be sure to benefit him in the next. He's entirely too opinionated, that's the trouble with him. Do you remember the way he sat up over there on Church Hill, and tried to beat me down that Robert Carrington lived in Bushrod's house, and that he'd attended him there in his last illness? As if I didn't know Bushrod Carrington as well as my own brother. Got all his clothes in Paris. Can see him now as he used to come to church in one of his waistcoats of peaehblow brocade. Yet you heard Theophilus stick out against me. Wouldn't give in even when I offered to take him straight to Bushrod's grave in Saint John's Churchyard, where I had helped to lay him. That's at the back of the whole thing, I tell you. If Theophilus had had a little discipline, this would never have happened."

"All the same I hope you won't let it come to a sale," I responded, as a bunch of telegrams was brought to him, and we settled down to our morning's work.

In the afternoon when I went back to the doctor's, I found Sally in the low canvas chair between the giant-of-battle rose-bush and the bleeding hearts, with George Bolingbroke on the ground at her feet, reading to her, I noticed at a glance, out of a book of poems. George hated poetry--I had never forgotten his contemptuous boyish attitude toward Latin--and the sight of him stretched there, his handsome figure at full length, his impassive face flushed with a fine colour, produced in me a curious irritation, which sounded in my voice when I spoke.

"I thought you scorned literature, George. Are you acting the part of a gay deceiver?"

"Oh, it goes well on a day like this," he rejoined in his amiable drawling manner; "the doctor has been quoting his favourite verse of Horace to us. He has had trouble with his hybridising or something, so he tells us--what is it, doctor? I'm no good at Latin."

Dr. Theophilus, who was planting oysters at the roots of a calla lily, having discovered, as he repeatedly informed us, that such treatment increased the number and size of the blossoms, raised his fine old head, and stood up after wiping his trowel on the trimly mown grass in the border.

"_AEquam memento rebus in arduis servare mentem_," he replied, rolling the Latin words luxuriously on his tongue, as if he relished the flavour. "That verse of the poet has sustained me in many and varied afflictions. Not to know it is to dispense with an unfailing source of consolation in trouble. When using it at a patient's bedside, I have found that it invariably acted as a sedative to an excited mind. I sometimes think," he added gently, "that if Tina had not been ignorant of Latin, she would have had a--a less practical temper."

Picking up the trowel, which he had laid on the grass, he returned with a calm soul to his difficulties, while Sally, looking up at me with anxious eyes, said:--

"Something has happened, Ben. What is it?"

I broke into a laugh. "Only that that little dead-beat road in West Virginia may restore my fortune, after all," I replied.

The next day I went to Wyanoke and reorganised the affairs of the little road. Shortly afterwards orders for freight cars came in faster than we were able to supply them, and we called at once on the cars of the Great South Midland and Atlantic.

"If you weren't a friend, this would be a mighty good chance to squeeze you," remarked the General; "we could keep your cars back until we'd clean squelched your traffic, and then buy the little road up for a song. It's business, but it isn't fair, and I'll be blamed if I'm going to squelch a friend."

He did not squelch us, being as good as his word; the undeveloped coal fields developed amazingly and the result was that before the year was over, I had sold the little road at my own price to the big one. Then I stood up and drew breath, like a man released from the weight of irons.

"We can go into our own home," I said joyfully to Sally. "In a year or two, if all goes well, and I work hard, we'll be back again where we were."

"Where we were?" she repeated, and there was, I thought, a listless note in her voice.

"Doesn't it make you happy?" I asked.

"Oh, I'm glad, glad the debt is gone, and now you'll look young and splendid again, won't you?"

"I'll try hard if you want me to."

"I do want you to," she answered, looking up at me with a smile.

The window was open, and a flood of sunshine fell on her pale brown hair, as it rested against the high arm of a chintz-covered sofa. Her hand, small and childlike, though less round and soft than it had been two years ago, caressed my cheek when I bent over her. She was well again, she was blooming, but the bloom was paler and more delicate, and there was a fragility in her appearance which was a new and disturbing sign of diminished strength. Would she ever, even when cradled in luxuries, recover her buoyant health, her sparkling vitality, I wondered.

The old Bland house, with the two great sycamores growing beside it, was for sale; and thinking to please Sally, I bought it without her knowledge, filled, as it was, with the Bland and Fairfax furniture, which had surrounded Miss Mitty and Miss Matoaca. On the day some eight or nine months later that we moved into it the sycamores were budding, and there were faint spring scents in the air.

"This is where you belong. This is home to you," I said as we stood on the wide porch at the back, and looked down on the garden. "You will be happy here, dearest."

"Oh, yes, I'll be happy here."

"It won't be so hard for you when I'm obliged to leave you alone. I'm sorry I've had to be away so much of late. Have you been lonely?"

"I've taken up riding again. George has found me a new horse, a beauty. To-morrow I shall follow the hounds with Bonny."

"Oh, be careful, Sally, promise me that you will be careful."

She turned with a laugh that sounded a little reckless.

"There's no pleasure in being careful, and I'm seeking pleasure," she answered.

The next morning I went to New York for a couple of days, and when I returned late one afternoon, I found Sally, in her riding habit, pouring tea for Bonny Marshall and George Bolingbroke in the drawing-room.

I was very tired, my mind was engrossed in business, as it had been engrossed since the day of the sale of the West Virginia and Wyanoke Railroad, and I was about to pass upstairs to my dressing-room, when George, catching sight of me, called to me to come in and exert my powers of persuasion.

"I'm begging Sally to sell that horse, Beauchamp," he said. "She tried to make him take a fence this afternoon and he balked and threw her. At first we were frightened out of our wits, but she got up laughing and insisted upon mounting him again on the spot."

"Of course you didn't let her," I retorted, with anger.

"Let her? Great Scott! have you been married to a Bland for nearly eight years and are you still saying, 'let her'?"

"I mounted and rode on with the hunt," said Sally, looking at me with shining eyes in which there was a defiant and reckless expression. "He got quite away with me, but I held on and came in at the death, though without a hat. Now my arms are so sore I shall hardly be able to do my hair."

"Of course you're not to ride that horse again, Sally," I responded sternly, forgetting my dusty clothes, forgetting Bonny's dancing black eyes that never left my face while I stood there.

"Of course I am, Ben," rejoined Sally, laughing, while a high colour rose to her forehead. "Of course I'm going to ride him to-morrow afternoon when I go out with Bonny."

"Ah, don't, please," entreated Bonny, in evident distress; "he's really an ugly brute, you know, dear, if he is so beautiful."

"I feel awfully mean about it, Ben," said George, "because, you see, I got him for her."

"And you got him," I retorted, indignantly, "without knowing evidently a thing about him."

"One can never know anything about a brute like that. He went like a lamb as long as I was on him, but the trouble is that Sally has too light a hand."

"He'd be all right with me," remarked Bonny, stretching out her arm, in which the muscle was hard as steel. "See what a grip I have."

"I'll never give up, I'll never give up," said Sally, and though she uttered the words with gaiety, the expression of defiance, of recklessness, was still in her eyes.

When George and Bonny had gone, I tried in vain to shake this resolve, which had in it something of the gentle, yet unconquerable, obstinacy of Miss Matoaca.

"Promise me, Sally, that you will not attempt to ride that horse again," I entreated.

Turning from me, she walked slowly to the end of the room and bent over the box of sweet alyssum, which still blossomed under a canary cage on the window-sill. A cedar log was burning on the andirons, and the red light of the flames fell on the tapestried furniture, on the quaint inlaid spinet in one corner, and on the portrait above it of Miss Mitty and Miss Matoaca clasping hands under a garland of roses.

"Will you promise me, dearest?" I asked again, for she did not answer.

Lifting her head from the flowers, she stood with her hand on one of the delicate curtains, and her figure, in its straight black habit, drawn very erect.

"I'll ride him," she responded quietly, "if--if he kills me."

"But why--why--what on earth is the use of taking so great a risk?" I demanded.

A humorous expression shot into her face, and I saw her full, red lips grow tremulous with laughter.

"That," she answered, after a moment, "is my ambition. All of us have an ambition, you know, women as well as men."

"An ambition?" I repeated, and looked in mystification at the portrait above the spinet.

"It sounds strange to you," she went on, "but why shouldn't I have one? I was a very promising horsewoman before my marriage, and my ambition now is to--to go after Bonny. Only Bonny says I can't," she added regretfully, "because of my hands."

"They are too small?"

"Too small and too light. They can't hold things."

"Well, they've managed to hold one at any rate," I responded gaily, though I added seriously the minute afterward, "If you'll let me sell that horse, darling, I'll give you anything on God's earth that you want."

"But suppose I don't want anything on God's earth except that horse?"

"There's no sense in that," I blurted out, in bewilderment. "What in thunder is there about the brute that has so taken your fancy?"

Her hand fell from the curtain, and plucking a single blossom of sweet alyssum, she came back to the hearth holding it to her lips.

"He has taken my fancy," she replied, "because he is exciting--and I am craving excitement."

"But you never used to want excitement."

"People change, all the poets and philosophers tell us. I've wanted it very badly indeed for the last six or eight months."

"Just since we've recovered our money?"

"Well, one can't have excitement without money, can one? It costs a good deal. Beauchamp sold for sixteen hundred dollars."

"He'd sell for sixteen to-morrow if I had my way."

"But you haven't. He's the only excitement I have and I mean to keep him. I shall go out again with the hounds on Saturday."

"If you do, you'll make me miserable, Sally. I shan't be able to do a stroke of work."

"Then you'll be very foolish, Ben," she responded, and when I would have still pressed the point, she ran out of the room with the remark that she must have a hot bath before dinner. "If I don't I'll be too stiff to mount," she called back defiantly as she went up the staircase.

All night I worried over the supremacy of Beauchamp, but on the morrow she was kept in bed by the results of her fall, and before she was up again, George had spirited the horse off somewhere to a farm in the country.

"I'd have turned horse thief before I'd have let her get on him again," he said. "I bought the brute, so I had the best right to dispose of him as I wanted to."

"Well, I hope you'll do better next time," I returned. "Sally has got some absurd idea in her head about rivalling Bonny Marshall, but she never will because she isn't built that way."

"No, she isn't built that way," he agreed, "and I'm glad of it. When I want a boy I'd rather have him in breeches than in skirts. Is she out of bed yet?"

"She was up this morning, and on the point of telephoning to the stables when I left the house."

He laughed softly. "Well, my word goes at the stables," he rejoined, "so you needn't worry. I'll not let any harm come to her."

The tone in which he spoke, pleasant as it was, wounded my pride of possession in some inexplicable manner. Sally was safe! It was all taken out of my hands, and the only thing that remained for me was to return with a tranquil mind to my affairs. In spite of myself this constant beneficent intervention of George in my life fretted my temper. If he would only fail sometimes! If he would only make a mistake! If he would only attend to his own difficulties, and leave mine to go wrong if they pleased!

This was on my way up-town in the afternoon, and when I reached home, I found Sally lying on a couch in her upstairs sitting-room, with an uncut novel in her hands.

"Ben, did you sell Beauchamp?" she asked, as I entered, and her tone was full of suppressed resentment, of indignant surprise.

"I'm sorry to say I didn't, dear," I responded cheerfully, "for I should certainly have done so if George hadn't been too quick for me."

"It was George, then," she said, and her voice lost its resentment.

"Yes, it was George--everything is George," I retorted, in an irascible tone.

Her eyebrows arched, not playfully as they were used to do, but in surprise or perplexity.

"He has been very good to me all my life," she answered quietly.

"I know, I know," I said, repenting at once of my temper, "and if you want another horse, Sally, you shall have it--George will find you a gentle one this time."

She shook her head, smiling a little.

"I don't want a gentle one. I wanted Beauchamp, and since he has gone I don't think I care to ride any more. Bonny is right, I suppose, I could never keep up with her."

"Just as you like, sweetheart, but for my part, I feel easier, somehow, when you don't go out with the hounds. I'd rather you wouldn't do such rough riding."

"That's because like most men you have an ideal of a 'faire ladye,'" she answered, mockingly. "I'm not sure, however, that the huntress hasn't the best of it. What an empty existence the 'faire ladye' must have led!"

At first I thought her determination was uttered in jest, and would not endure through the night; but as the weeks and the months went by and she still refused to consider the purchase of the various horses George put through their paces before her, I realised that she really meant, as she had said, to give up her brief dream of excelling Bonny. Then, for a few months in the spring and summer, she turned to gardening with passion, and aided by Dr. Theophilus and George, she planted a cart-load of bulbs in our square of ground at the back. When I came up late now, I would find the three of them poring over flower catalogues, with gathered brows and thoughtful, enquiring faces.

"There's nothing like a love of the trowel for making friends," remarked the old man, one May afternoon, when I found them resting from their labours while they drank tea on the porch; "it's a pity you haven't time to take it up, Ben. Now, young George there has developed a most extraordinary talent for gardening that he never knew he possessed until I cultivated it. I shouldn't wonder if it took the place of the horse with him in the end. What do you say, Sally?" he added, turning to where Sally and George were leaning together over the railing, with their eyes on a bed of Oriental poppies. "I was telling Ben that I shouldn't wonder if George's taste for flowers would not finally triumph over his fancy for the horse."

For a minute Sally did not look round, and when at last she turned, her face wore a defiant and reckless expression, as it had done that afternoon when Beauchamp had thrown her.

"I'm not sure, doctor," she answered; "after all flowers are tame sport, aren't they? And George is like me--what he wants is excitement."

"I'm sorry to hear that, my dear, a gentle and quiet pursuit is a source of happiness. You remember what Horace says--"

"Ah, I know, doctor, but did even Horace remember what he said while he was young?"

George was still gazing attentively down on the bed of Oriental poppies at the foot of the steps, and though he had taken no part in the conversation, something in his back, in the rigid look of his shoulders, as though his muscles were drawn and tense, made me say suddenly:

"If George has changed his hobby from horse-racing to flowers, I'll begin to expect the General to start collecting insects."

At this George wheeled squarely upon me, and in his dark, flushed face there was the set look of a man that has taken a high jump.

"It's a bad plan to pin all your pleasure on one thing, Ben," he said. "If you put all your eggs in one basket you're more than likely to stub your toe."

"Well, a good deal depends upon how wisely you may have chosen your pursuit," commented the doctor, pushing his spectacles away from his eyes to his hair, which was still thick and long; "I don't believe that a man can make a mistake in selecting either flowers or insects for his life's interest. The choice between the two is merely a question of temperament, I suppose, and though I myself confess to a leaning toward plants, I seriously considered once devoting my declining years to the study of the habits of beetles. Your suggestion as to George, however,--old George, I am alluding to,--is a capital one, and I shall call his attention to it the next time I see him. He couldn't do better, I am persuaded, than bend his remaining energies in the direction of insects."

He paused to drink his tea, nodding gently over the rim of his cup to Bonny Marshall and Bessy Dandridge, who came through one of the long windows out upon the porch.

"So you've really stopped for a minute," remarked Bonny merrily, swinging her floating silk train as if it were the skirt of a riding habit, "and even Ben has fallen out of the race long enough to get a glimpse of his wife. Have stocks tripped him up again, poor fellow? Do you know, Sally, it's perfectly scandalous the way you are never seen in public together. At the reception at the Governor's the other night, one of those strange men from New York asked me if George were your husband. Now, that's what I call positively improper--I really felt the atmosphere of the divorce court around me when he said it--and my grandmama assures me that if such a thing had happened to _your_ grandmama, Caroline Matilda Fairfax, she would never have held up her head again. 'But neither morals nor manners are what they were when Caroline Matilda and I were young,' she added regretfully, 'and it is due, I suppose, to the war and to the intrusion into society of all these new people that no one ever heard of.' When I mentioned the guests at the two last receptions I'd been to, if you will believe me, she had never heard of a single name,--'all mushrooms,' she declared."

Her eyes, dancing roguishly, met mine over the tea-table, and a bright blush instantly overspread her face, as if a rose-coloured search-light had fallen on her.

The embarrassment which I always felt in her presence became suddenly as acute as physical soreness, and the blush in her face served only to illuminate her consciousness of my difference, of my roughness, of the fact that externally, at least, I had never managed to shake myself free from a resemblance to the market boy who had once brought his basket of potatoes to the door of this very house. The "magnificent animal," I knew, had never appealed to her except as it was represented in horse-flesh; and yet the "magnificent animal" was what in her eyes I must ever remain. I looked at George, leaning against a white column, and his appearance of perfect self-sufficiency, his air of needing nothing, changed my embarrassment into a smothered sensation of anger. And as in the old days of my first great success, this anger brought with it, through some curious association of impulses, a fierce, almost a frenzied, desire for achievement. Here, in the little world of tradition and sentiment, I might show still at a disadvantage, but outside, in the open, I could respond freely to the lust for power, to the passion for supremacy, which stirred my blood. Turning, with a muttered excuse about letters to read, I went into the house, and closed my study door behind me with a sense of returning to a friendly and familiar atmosphere.

Through the rest of the year Sally devoted herself with energy to the cultivation of flowers; but when the following spring opened, after a hard winter, she seemed to have grown listless and indifferent, and when I spoke of the garden, she merely shook her head and pointed to an unworked border at the foot of the grey-wall.

"I can't make anything grow, Ben. All those brown sticks down there are the only signs of the bulbs I set out last autumn with my own hands. Nothing comes up as it ought to."

"Perhaps you need pipes like the doctor," I suggested.

"Oh, no, that would uproot the old shrubs, and besides, I am tired of it, I think."

She was lying on the couch in her sitting-room, a pile of novels on a table beside her, and the delicacy in her appearance, the transparent fineness of her features, of her hands, awoke in me the feeling of anxiety I had felt so often during the year after little Benjamin's death.

"I'm sorry I can't get up to luncheon now, darling, but we are making a big railroad deal. What have you been doing all day long by yourself?"

She looked up at me, and I remembered the face of Miss Matoaca, as I had seen it against the red firelight on the afternoon when Sally and I had gone in to tell her of our engagement.

"I didn't go out," she answered. "It was raining so hard that I stayed by the fire."

"You've been lying here all day alone?"

"Bonny Page came in for a few minutes."

"Have you read?"

"No, I've been thinking."

"Thinking of what, sweetheart?"

"Oh, so many things. You've come up again, haven't you, Ben, splendidly! Luck is with you, the General says, and whatever you touch prospers."

"Yes, I've come up, but this is the crisis. If I slip now, if I make a false move, if I draw out, I'm as dead as a door-nail. But give me five or ten years of hard work and breathless thinking, and I'll be as big a man as the General."

"As the General?" she repeated gently, and played with the petals of an American Beauty rose on the table beside her.

"As soon as I'm secure, as soon as I can slacken work a bit, I'm going to cut all this and take you away. We'll have a second honeymoon when that time comes."

"In five or ten years?"

"Perhaps sooner. Meanwhile, isn't there something that I can do for you? Is there anything on God's earth that you want? Would you like a string of pearls?"

She shook her head with a laugh. "No, I don't want a string of pearls. Is it time now to dress for dinner?"

"Would you mind if I didn't change, dear? I'm so tired that I shall probably fall asleep over the dessert."

An evening or two later, when I came up after seven o'clock, I thought that she had been crying, and taking her in my arms, I passionately kissed the tear marks away.

"There's but one thing to do, Sally. You must go away. What do you say to Europe?"

"With you?"

"I wish to heaven it could be with me, but if I shirk this deal now, I'm done for, and if I stick it out, it may mean future millions. Why not ask Bessy Dandridge?"

"I don't think I want to go with Bessy Dandridge."

Her tone troubled me, it was so gentle, so reserved, and walking to the window, I stood gazing out upon the April rain that dripped softly through the budding sycamores. I felt that I ought to go, and yet I knew that unless I gave up my career, it was out of the question. The railroad deal was, as I had said, very important, and if I were to withdraw from it now, it would probably collapse and bring down on me the odium of my associates. After my desperate failure of less than five years ago, I was just recovering my ground, and the incidents of that disaster were still too recent to permit me to breathe freely. My name had suffered little because my personal tragedy had been regarded as a part of the general panic, and I had, in the words of George Bolingbroke, "gone to smashes with honour." Yet I was not secure now; I had not reached the top of the ladder, but was merely mounting. "It's for Sally's sake that I'm doing it," I said to myself, suddenly comforted by the reflection; "without Sally the whole thing might go to ruin and I wouldn't hold up my hand. But I must make her proud of me. I must justify her choice in the eyes of her friends." And the balm of this thought seemed to lighten my weight of trouble and to appease my conscience. "It isn't as if I were doing it for myself, or my own ambition. I am really doing it for her--everything is for her. If I can hold on now, in a few years I'll give her millions to spend." Then I remembered that the last time I had gone motoring with her it had appeared to do her good, and that she had remarked she preferred a car with a red lining.

"I tell you what, sweetheart," I said, going back to her, "as I can't take you away, I'll buy you a new motor car with a red lining and I'll take you out every blessed afternoon I can get off from the office. You'll like that, won't you?" I asked eagerly.

"Yes, I'll like that," she replied, with an effort at animation, while she bent her face over the rose in her hand.

A week later I bought the motor car, the handsomest I could find, with the softest red lining; and when May came, I went out with her whenever I could break away from my work. But the pressure was great, the General was failing and leaned on me, and I was over head and ears in a dozen outside schemes that needed only my amazing energy to push them to success. Never had my financial insight appeared so infallible, never had my "genius" for affairs shone so brilliantly. The years of poverty had increased, not dissipated, my influence, and I had come up all the stronger for the experience that had sent me down. The lesson that a weaker man might have succumbed beneath, I had absorbed into myself, and was now making use of as I had made use of every incident, bad or good, in my life. I passed on, I accumulated, but I did not squander. Little things, as well as great things, served me for material, and during those first years of my recovery, I became by far the most brilliant figure in my world of finance. "Pile all the bu'sted stocks in the market on his shoulders, and he'll still come out on top," chuckled the General. "The best thing that ever happened to you, Ben, barring the toting of potatoes, was the blow on the head that sent you under water. A little fellow would have drowned, but you knew how to float."

"I'd agree with you about its being the best thing, except--except for Sally."

"What's the matter with Sally? Is she going cracked? You know I always said she was the image of her aunt--Miss Matoaca Bland."

"She has never recovered. Her health seems to have given way."

"She needs coddling, that's the manner of women and babies. Do you coddle her? It's worth while, though some men don't know how to do it. Lord, Lord, I remember when my poor mother was on her death-bed and my father got on his knees and asked her if he'd been a good husband (she was his third wife and died of her tenth child), she looked at him with a kind of gentle resentment and replied: 'You were a saint, I suppose, Samuel, but I'd rather have had a sinner that would have coddled me.' She was the prim, flat-bosomed type, too, just like Miss Mitty Bland, and my father said afterwards, crying like a baby, that he had so much respect for her he would as soon have thought of trying to coddle a Lombardy poplar. Poplar or mimosa tree, I tell you, they are all made that way, every last one of them--and nothing on earth made poor Miss Matoaca a fire-eater and a disturber of the peace except that she didn't have a man to coddle her."

"I give Sally everything under heaven I can think of, but she doesn't appear to want it."

"Keep on giving, it's the only way. You'll see her begin to pick up presently before you know it. They ain't rational, my boy, that's the whole truth about 'em, they ain't rational. If Miss Matoaca had belonged to a rational sex, do you think she'd have killed herself trying to get on an equality with us? You can't make a pullet into a rooster by teaching it to crow, as my old mammy used to say." For a minute he was silent, and appeared to be meditating. "I tell you what I'll do, Ben," he said at last, with a flash of inspiration, "I'll go in with you and see if I can't cheer up Sally a bit."

When we reached my door, he let the reins fall over the back of his old horse, and getting out, hobbled, with my assistance, upstairs, and into Sally's sitting-room, where we found George Bolingbroke, looking depressed and sullen.

She was charmingly dressed, as usual, and as the General entered, she came forward to meet him with the gracious manner which some one had told me was a part, not of her Bland, but of her Fairfax inheritance. "That's a pretty tea-gown you've got on," observed the great man, in the playful tone in which he might have remarked to a baby that it was wearing a beautiful bib. "You haven't been paying much attention to fripperies of late, Ben tells me. Have you seen any hats? I don't know anything better for a woman's low spirits, my dear, than a trip to New York to buy a hat."

She laughed merrily, while her eyes met George Bolingbroke's over the General's head.

"I bought six hats last month," she replied.

"And you didn't feel any better?"

"Not permanently. Then Ben got me a diamond bracelet." She held out her arm, with the bracelet on her wrist, which looked thin and transparent.

The General bent his bald head over the trinket, which he examined as attentively as if it had been a report of the Great South Midland and Atlantic Railroad.

"Ben's got good taste," he observed; "that's a pretty bracelet."

"Yes, it's a pretty bracelet."

"But that didn't make you feel any brighter?"

"Oh, I'm well," she responded, laughing. "I've just been telling George I'm so well I'm going to a ball with him."

"To a ball," I said; "are you strong enough for that, Sally?"

"I'm quite strong, I'm well, I feel wildly gay."

"It's the best thing for her," remarked the General. "Don't stop her, Ben, let her go."

At dinner that night, in a gorgeous lace gown, with pearls on her throat and in her hair, she was cheerful, animated, almost, as she had said, wildly gay. When George came for her, I put her into the carriage.

"Are you all right?" I asked anxiously. "Are you sure you are strong enough, Sally?"

"Quite strong. What will you do, Ben?"

"I've got to work. There are some papers to draw up. Don't let her stay late, George."

"Oh, I'll take care of her," said George. "Good-night."

She leaned out, touching my hand. "You'll be in bed when I come back. Good-night."

The carriage rolled off, and entering the house I went into the library, where I worked until twelve o'clock. Then as Sally had not returned and I had a hard day ahead of me, I went upstairs to bed.

She did not wake me when she came in, and in the morning I found her sleeping quietly, with her cheek pillowed on her open palm, and a pensive smile on her lips. After breakfast, when I came up to speak to her before going out, she was sitting up in bed, in a jacket of blue satin and a lace cap, drinking her coffee.

"Did you have a good time?" I asked, kissing her. "Already you look better."

"I danced ever so many dances. Do you know, Ben, I believe it was diversion I needed. I've thought too much and I'm going to stop."

"That's right, dance on if it helps you."

"I can't get that year on Church Hill out of my mind."

"Forget it, sweetheart, it's over; forget it."

"Yes, it's over," she repeated, and then as she lay back, in her blue satin jacket, on the embroidered pillows and smiled up at me, I saw in her face a reflection of the faint wonder which was the inherited look of the Blands in regarding life. _

Read next: Chapter 33. The Growing Distance

Read previous: Chapter 31. The Deepest Shadow

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