Chapter 33. The Growing Distance

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_ CHAPTER XXXIII. THE GROWING DISTANCE

The memory of this look was with me as I went, a little later, down the block to the car line, but meeting the General at the corner, all other matters were crowded out of my mind by the gravity of the news he leaned out of his buggy to impart.

"Well, it's come at last, Ben, just as I said it would," he remarked cheerfully; "Theophilus is to be sold out at four o'clock this afternoon."

"I'd forgotten all about it, General, but do you really mean you will let it come to a public auction?"

"It's the only way on God's earth to stop his extravagance. Of course I'm going to buy the house in at the end. I've given the agent orders. Theophilus ain't going to suffer, but he's got to have a lesson and I'm the only one who can teach it. A little judicious discipline right now will make him a better and a happier man for the remainder of his life. He's too opinionated, that's the trouble with him and always has been. He's got some absurd idea in his head now that I ought to quit the railroad and begin watching insects. Actually brought me a microscope and some ants in a little box that he had had sent all the way from California. Wanted me to build 'em a glass house in my garden, and spend my time looking at 'em. 'Look here, Theophilus,' I said, 'I haven't come to my dotage yet, and when I get there, I'm going to take up something a little bigger than an insect. From a railroad to an ant is too long a jump."

"But this auction, General, I'm very much worried about it. You know I'd always intended to take over that mortgage, but, to tell the truth, it escaped my memory."

"Oh, leave that to me, leave that to me," responded the great man serenely. "Theophilus ain't going to suffer, but a little discipline won't do him any harm."

His plan was well laid, I saw, but the best-laid plans, as the great man himself might have informed me, are not always those that are destined to reach maturity. When I had parted from him, I fell, almost unconsciously, to scheming on my own account, and the result was that before going into my office, I looked up the real estate agent who had charge of the auction, and took over the mortgage which too great an indulgence in roses had forced upon Dr. Theophilus. In my luncheon hour I rushed up to the house, where I found Mrs. Clay, with a big wooden ladle in her hand, wandering distractedly between the outside kitchen and the little garden, where the doctor was placidly spraying his roses with a solution of kerosene oil.

"I knew it would come," said the poor lady, in tears; "no amount of preserves and pickles could support the extravagance of Theophilus. More than two years ago George Bolingbroke warned me that I should end my days in the poorhouse, and it has come at last. As for Theophilus, even the thought of the poorhouse does not appear to disturb him. He does nothing but walk around and repeat some foolish Latin verse about AEquam--aequam--until I am sick of the very sound--"

When I explained to her that the auction would be postponed, at least for another century, she recovered her temper and her spirit, and observed emphatically that she hoped the lesson would do Theophilus good.

"May I go out to him now?"

"Oh, yes, you'll find him somewhere in the garden. He has just been in with a watering-pot to ask for kerosene oil."

In the centre of the gravelled walk, between the shining rows of oyster shells, the doctor stood energetically spraying his roses. At the sound of my step he looked round with a tranquil face, his long white hair blowing in the breeze above his spectacles, which he wore, as usual when he was not reading, pushed up on his forehead.

"Ah, Ben, you find us afflicted, but not despondent," he observed. "Now is the time, as I just remarked to Tina a minute ago, to prove the unfailing support of a knowledge of Latin and of the poet Horace. _AEquam memento_--"

"I'm afraid, doctor, I haven't time for Horace," I returned, ruthlessly cutting short his enjoyment, while the sonorous sentence still rolled in his mouth; "but I've attended to this affair of the mortgage, and you shan't be bothered again. Why on earth didn't you come to me sooner about it?"

Bending over, he plucked a rosebud with a canker at the heart, and stood meditatively surveying it. "An Anna von Diesbach," he observed, "and when perfect a most beautiful rose. The truth was, my boy, that I felt a delicacy about approaching my friends in the hour of my misfortunes. Old George I did go to in my extremity, but I fear, Ben,--I seriously fear that I have estranged old George by making him a present of a little box of ants. He imagines, I fancy, that I intended a reflection upon his intelligence. Because the ant is small, he concludes, unreasonably, that it is unworthy. On the contrary, as I endeavoured to convince him, it possesses a degree of sagacity and foresight the human being might well envy--"

"I can't stop now, doctor, I'm in too great a rush, but remember, if you ever have a few hundred dollars you'd like me to turn over for you, I'm at your service. At all events, preserve your calm soul and leave me to contend with your difficulties--"

"The word 'preserve,'" commented the doctor, "though used in a different and less practical sense, reminds me of Tina. She has sacrificed her peace of mind to preserves, as I told her this morning. Even I should find it impossible to maintain an equable character, if I lived in the atmosphere of a stove and devoted my energies to a kettle. One's occupation has, without doubt, a marked influence upon one's attitude towards the universe. This was in my thoughts entirely when I suggested to a man of old George's headstrong and undisciplined nature that he would do well to investigate the habits of a sober and industrious insect like the ant. He has led an improvident life, and I thought that as he neared his end, whatever would promote a philosophic cast of mind would inevitably benefit his declining years--"

"He doesn't like to be reminded that they are declining, doctor, that's the trouble," I returned, as I shook hands hurriedly, and went on down the gravelled walk between the oyster shells to the gate that opened, beyond the currant bushes, out into the street.

My readjustment of the doctor's affairs had occupied no small part of my working day, and it was even later than usual when I arrived at home, too tired to consider dressing for dinner. At the door old Esdras announced that Sally had already gone to dine with Bonny Marshall, and would go to the theatre afterwards.

"Was she alone, Esdras?"

"Naw, suh, Marse George he done come fur her en ca'ried her off."

"Well, I'll dine just as I am, and as soon as it's ready."

The house was empty and deserted without Sally, and the perfume of a mimosa tree, which floated in on the warm breeze as I entered the drawing-room, came to me like the sweet, vague scent of her hair and her gown. A dim light burned under a pink shade in one corner, and so quiet appeared the quaint old room, with its faded cashmere rugs and its tapestried furniture, that the eyes of the painted Blands and Fairfaxes seemed alive as they looked down on me from the high white walls. From his wire cage, shrouded in a silk cover, the new canary piped a single enquiring note as he heard my step.

I dined alone, waited on in a paternal, though condescending, manner by old Esdras, and when I had finished my coffee I sat for a few minutes with a cigar on the porch, where the branches of the mimosa tree in full bloom drooped over the white railing. While I sat there, I thought drowsily of many things--of the various financial schemes in which I was now involved; of the big railroad deal which I had refused to shirk and which meant possible millions; of the fact that the General was rapidly aging, and had already spoken of resigning the presidency of the Great South Midland and Atlantic. Then there flashed before me suddenly, in the midst of my business reflections, the look with which Sally had regarded me that morning while she lay, in her blue satin jacket, on the embroidered pillows.

"How alike all the Blands are," I thought sleepily, as I threw the end of my cigar out into the garden and rose to go upstairs to bed; "I never noticed until of late how much Sally is growing to resemble her Aunt Matoaca."

At midnight, after two hours' restless sleep, I awoke to find her standing before the bureau, in a gown of silver gauze, which gave her an illusive appearance of being clothed in moonlight. When I called her, and she turned and came toward me, I saw that there was a brilliant, unnatural look in her face, as though she had been dancing wildly or were in a fever. And this brilliancy seemed only to accentuate the sharpened lines of her features, with their suggestion of delicacy, of a too transparent fineness.

"You were asleep, Ben. I am sorry I waked you," she said.

"What is the matter, you are so flushed?" I asked.

"It was very warm in the theatre. I shan't go again until autumn."

"I don't believe you are well, dear. Isn't it time for you to get out of the city?"

Her arms were raised to unfasten the pearl necklace at her throat, and while I watched her face in the mirror, I saw that the flush suddenly left it and it grew deadly white.

"It's that queer pain in my back," she said, sinking into a chair, and hiding her eyes in her hands. "It comes on like this without warning. I've had it ever--ever since that year on Church Hill."

In an instant I was beside her, catching her in my arms as she swayed toward me.

"What can I do for you, dearest? Shall I get you a glass of wine?"

"No, it goes just as it comes," she answered, letting her hands fall from her face, and looking at me with a smile. "There, I'm better now, but I think you're right. I need to go out of the city. Even if I were to stay here," she added, "you would be almost always away."

"Go North with Bonny Marshall, as she suggested, and I'll join you for two weeks in August."

Shrinking gently out of my arms, she sat with the unfastened bodice of her gown slipping away from her shoulders, and her face bent over the pearl necklace which she was running back and forth through her fingers.

"Bonny and Ned and George all want me to go to Bar Harbor," she said, after a moment. Then she raised her eyes and looked at me with the expression of defiance, of recklessness, I had seen in them first on the afternoon when Beauchamp had thrown her. "If you want me to go, too, that will decide it."

"Of course I shall miss you,--I missed you this evening,--but I believe it's the thing for you."

"Then I'll go," she responded quietly, and turning away, as if the conversation were over, she went into her dressing-room to do her hair for the night.

Two weeks later she went, and during her absence the long hot summer dragged slowly by while I plunged deeper and deeper into the whirlpool of affairs. In August I made an effort to spend the promised two weeks with her, but on the third day of my visit, I was summoned home by a telegram; and once back in the city, the General's rapidly failing health kept me close as a prisoner at his side. When October came and I met her at the station, I noticed, with my first glance, that the look of excitement, of strained and unnatural brilliancy, had returned to her appearance. Some inward flame, burning steadily at a white heat, shone in her eyes and in her altered, transparent features.

"It's good to have you back again, heaven knows," I remarked, as we drove up the street between the scattered trees in their changing October foliage. "The house has been like a prison."

For the first time since she had stepped from the train, she leaned nearer and looked at me attentively, as if she were trying to recall some detail to her memory.

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

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

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

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

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

She laughed softly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Then you won't be here?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read next: Chapter 34. The Blow That Clears

Read previous: Chapter 32. I Come To The Surface

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