Virginia - Glasgow Ellen Anderson Gholson

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you think he wants to do that?" she asked, with a little sound as if she had drawn her breath so sharply that it whistled. What in thunder was the matter with the woman? he wondered irritably. Of course she was a fool about the scamp – all the women, even Susan, lost their heads over him – but, after all, why should it make any difference to her whether he wrote plays or took freight orders, as long as he managed to feed himself?

      "Well, I don't reckon it has come to a question of what he wants," he rejoined shortly.

      "But the boy's heart is bound up in his ambition," urged Belinda, with an energy he had witnessed in her only once before in her life, and that was on the occasion of her historic defence of the seamstress.

      For a moment Cyrus stared at her with attention, almost with curiosity. Then he opened his lips for a crushing rejoinder, but thinking better of his impulse, merely repeated dryly, "His heart?" before he turned toward the door. On the threshold he looked back and added, "The next time you see him, tell him I'd like a word with him."

      Left alone in her room, Mrs. Treadwell sat down in a rocking-chair by the window, and clasped her hands tightly in her lap with a nervous gesture which she had acquired in long periods of silent waiting on destiny. Her mental attitude, which was one of secret, and usually passive, antagonism to her husband, had stamped its likeness so indelibly upon her features, that, sitting there in the wan light, she resembled a woman who suffers from the effects of some slow yet deadly sickness. Lacking the courage to put her revolt into words, she had allowed it to turn inward and embitter the hidden sources of her being. In the beginning she had asked so little of life that the denial of that little by Fate had appeared niggardly rather than tragic. A man – any man who would have lent himself gracefully as an object of worship – would have been sufficient material for the building of her happiness. Marriage, indeed, had always appeared to her so desirable as an end in itself, entirely apart from the personal peculiarities or possibilities of a husband, that she had awakened almost with surprise one morning to the knowledge that she was miserable. It was not so much that her romance had met with open disaster as that it had simply faded away. This gradual fading away of sentiment, which she had accepted at the time as only one of the inevitable stages in the slow process of emotional adjustment, would perhaps have made but a passing impression on a soul to whom every other outlet into the world had not been closed by either temperament or tradition. But love had been the one window through which light could enter her house of Life; and when this darkened, her whole nature had sickened and grown morbid. Then at last all the corroding bitterness in her heart had gathered to a canker which ached ceaselessly, like a physical sore, in her breast.

      "He saw I'd taken to Oliver – that's why he's anxious to spite him," she thought resentfully as she stared with unseeing eyes out into the gray twilight. "It's all just to worry me, that's why he is doing it. He knows I couldn't be any fonder of the boy if he had come of my own blood." And she who had been a Bolingbroke set her thin lips together with the only consciousness of superiority to her husband that she had ever known – the secret consciousness that she was better born. Out of the wreck of her entire life, this was the floating spar to which she still clung with a sense of security, and her imagination, by long concentration upon the support that it offered, had exaggerated its importance out of all proportion to the other props among which it had its place. Like its imposing symbol, the Saint Memin portrait of the great Archibald Bolingbroke, which lent distinction, by its very inappropriateness, to the wall on which it hung, this hidden triumph imparted a certain pathetic dignity to her manner.

      "That's all on earth it is," she repeated with a kind of smothered fierceness. But, even while the words were on her lips, her face changed and softened, for in the adjoining room a voice, full of charm, could be heard saying: "Sewing still, Miss Willy? Don't you know that you are guilty of an immoral act when you work overtime?"

      "I'm just this minute through, Mr. Oliver," answered the seamstress in fluttering tones. "As soon as I fold this skirt, I'm going to quit and put on my bonnet."

      A few more words followed, and then the door opened wider and Oliver entered – with his ardent eyes, his irresolute mouth, and his physical charm which brought an air of vital well-being into the depressing sultriness of the room.

      "I missed you downstairs, Aunt Belinda. You haven't a headache, I hope," he said, and there was the same caressing kindness in his tone which he had used to the dressmaker. It was as if his sympathy, like his charm, which cost him so little because it was the gift of Nature, overflowed in every casual expression of his temperament.

      "No, I haven't a headache, dear," replied Mrs. Treadwell, putting up her hand to his cheek as he leaned over her. "Your uncle is waiting for you in the library, so you'd better go down at once," she added, catching her breath as she had done when Cyrus first spoke to her about Oliver.

      "Have you any idea what it means? Did he tell you?"

      "Yes, he wants to talk to you about business."

      "The deuce he does! Well, if that's it, I'd be precious glad to get out of it. You don't suppose I could cut it, do you? Susan is going to take me to the Pendletons' after supper, and I'd like to run upstairs now and make a change."

      "No, you'd better go down to him. He doesn't like to be kept waiting."

      "All right, then – since you say so."

      Meeting the dressmaker on the threshold, he forgot to answer her deprecating bow in his eagerness to have the conversation with Cyrus over and done with.

      "I declare, he does startle a body when you ain't used to him," observed Miss Willy, with a bashful giggle. She was a diminutive, sparrow-like creature, with a natural taste for sick-rooms and death-beds, and an inexhaustible fund of gossip. As Mrs. Treadwell, for once, did not respond to her unspoken invitation to chat, she tied her bonnet strings under her sharp little chin, and taking up her satchel went out again, after repeating several times that she would be "back the very minute Mrs. Pendleton was through with her." A few minutes later, Belinda, still seated by the window, saw the shrunken figure ascend the area steps and cross the dusty street with a rapid and buoyant step, as though she, also, plain, overworked and penniless, was feeling the delicious restlessness of the spring in her blood. "I wonder what on earth she's got to make her skip like that," thought Belinda not without bitterness. "I reckon she thinks she's just as important as anybody," she added after an instant, touching, though she was unaware of it, the profoundest truth of philosophy. "She's got nothing in the world but herself, yet I reckon to her that is everything, even if it doesn't make a particle of difference to anybody else whether she is living or dead."

      Her eyes were still on Miss Willy, who stepped on briskly, swinging her bag joyously before her, when the sound of Cyrus's voice, raised high in anger, came up to her from the library. A short silence followed; then a door opened and shut quickly, and rapid footsteps passed up the staircase and along the hall outside of her room. While she waited, overcome by the nervous indecision which attacked her like palsy whenever she was forced to take a definite action, Susan ran up the stairs and called her name in a startled and shaking voice.

      "Oh, mother, father has quarrelled dreadfully with Oliver and ordered him out of the house!"

      CHAPTER V

      OLIVER, THE ROMANTIC

      An hour later Oliver stood before the book-shelves in his room, wrapping each separate volume in newspapers. Downstairs in the basement, he knew, the family were at supper, but he had vowed, in his splendid scorn of material things, that he would never eat another morsel under Cyrus's roof. Even when his aunt, trembling in every limb, had brought him secretly from the kitchen a cup of coffee and a plate of waffles, he had refused to unlock his door and permit her to enter. "I'll come out when I am ready to leave," he had replied to her whispered entreaties.

      It was a small room, furnished chiefly by book-shelves, which were still unfinished, and with a depressing view from a single window of red tin roofs and blackened chimneys. Above the chimneys a narrow band of sky, spangled with a few stars, was visible from where Oliver stood, and now and then he stopped in his work and gazed up at it with an exalted and resolute look. Sometimes a thin shred of smoke floated in from the kitchen chimney, and hung, as if drawn and held there by some magnetic attraction, around the kerosene lamp on a corner of the washstand.

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