"Going down for a little hunting?" he enquired genially, "there isn't much else, I reckon, to take a man like you down into this half-baked country. I hear the partridges are getting scarce, and they are going to bring a bill into the Legislature forbidding the sending of them outside of the state. Now, that's a direct slap, I say, at the small farmer. A bird is a bird, ain't it, even if it's a Virginia partridge?"

I rose and took up my overcoat. "I'll go into the smoking-car. They keep it too hot here."

He nodded cheerfully. "I was in there myself, but it's like an oven, too, so I came out." Then he unfolded his newspaper, and I pa.s.sed hurriedly down the aisle of the coach.

In the smoking-car the air was like the fumes in the stemming room of a tobacco factory, but lighting a cigar, I leaned back on one of the hard, plush-covered seats, and stared out at the low, pale landscape beyond the window. It was late November, and the sombre colours of the fields and of the leafless trees showed through a fine autumnal mist, which lent an atmosphere of melancholy to the stretches of fallow land, to the harvested corn-fields, in which the stubble stood in rows, like a headless army, and to the long red-clay road winding, deep in mud, to the distant horizon.

"I am in trouble--I am in trouble," I heard always above the roar of the train, above the shrill whistle of the engine, as it rounded a curve, above the thin, drawling voices of my fellow-pa.s.sengers, disputing a question in politics. "I am in trouble," ran the words. "What trouble?

What trouble? What trouble?" I repeated pa.s.sionately, while my teeth bit into my cigar, and the flame went out. "So George hasn't let her out of his sight for two years, and I did not know it. For two years! And in these two years how much have I seen of her--of Sally, my wife? We have been living separate lives under the same roof, and when she asked me for bread, I have given her--pearls!" A pa.s.sion of remorse gripped me at the throat like the spring of a beast. Pearls for bread, and that to Sally--to my wife, whom I loved! The melancholy landscape at which I looked appeared to divide and dissolve, and she came back to me, not as I had last seen her, weighed down by the furs which were too heavy, but in her blue gingham ap.r.o.n with the jagged burn on her wrist, and the patient, divine smile hovering about her lips. If she went from me now, it would be always the Sally of that year of poverty, of suffering, that I had lost. In the future she would haunt me, not in her sea-green gown, with the jewels on her bosom, but in her gingham ap.r.o.n with the sleeves rolled back from her reddened arms and the jagged scar from the burn disfiguring her flesh.

"I'll see him in h.e.l.l, before I'll vote for him!" called out a voice at my back, in a rage.

The train pulled into the little wayside station of Riverview, and getting out, I started on the walk of two miles through the flat, brown fields to the house. The road was heavy with mud, and it was like ploughing to keep straight on in the single red-clay furrow which the wheels of pa.s.sing wagons had left. All was desolate, all was deserted, and the only living things I saw between the station and the house were a few lonely sheep browsing beside a stream, and the brown-winged birds that flew, with wet plumage, across the road.

When I reached the ruined gateway of Riverview, the old estate of the Blands', I quickened my pace, and went rapidly up the long drive to the front of the house, where I saw the glimmer of red firelight on the ivied window-panes in the west wing. As I ascended the steps, there was a sound on the gravel, and George Bolingbroke came around the corner of the house, in hunting clothes, with a setter dog at his heels.

"h.e.l.lo, Ben!" he remarked, half angrily. "So you've turned up, have you?

Has there been another panic in the market?"

"Is Sally here?" I asked. "I'm anxious about her."

"Well, it's time you were," he answered. "Yes, she's inside."

He stopped in the centre of the walk, and turning from the door, I came back and faced him in a silence that seemed alive with the beating of innumerable wings in the air.

"Something's wrong, George," I said at last, breaking through my restraint.

He looked at me with a calm, enquiring gaze while I was speaking, and by that look I understood, in an inspiration, he had condemned me.

"Yes, something's wrong," he answered quietly, "but have you just found it out?"

"I haven't found it out yet. What is it? What is the matter?"

At the question his calmness deserted him and the dark flush of anger broke suddenly in his face.

"The matter is, Ben," he replied, holding himself in with an effort, "that you've missed being a fool only by being a genius instead."

Then turning away, as if his temper had got the better of him, he strode back through a clump of trees on the lawn, while I went up the steps again, and crossing the cold hall, entered the dismantled drawing-room, where a bright log fire was burning.

Sally was sitting on the hearth, half hidden by the high arms of the chair, and as I closed the door behind me, she rose and stood looking at me with an expression of surprise. So had Miss Mitty and Miss Matoaca looked in the firelight on that November afternoon when Sally and I had gone in together.

"Why, Ben!" she said quietly, "I thought you were in Washington!"

"I got home this morning and found your note. Sally, what is the trouble?"

"You came after me?"

"I came after you. The General went wild and imagined that there had been an accident, or George had run off with you."

"Then the General sent you?"

"n.o.body sent me. I was leaving the house when he found me."

She had not moved toward me, and for some reason, I still stood where I had stopped short in the centre of the room, kept back by the reserve, the detachment in her expression.

"You came believing that George and I had gone off together?" she asked, and there was a faint hostility in her voice.

"Of course I didn't believe it. I'm not a fool if I am an a.s.s. But if I had believed it," I added pa.s.sionately, "it would have made no difference. I'd have come after you if you'd gone off with twenty Georges."

"Well, there's only one," she said, "and I did go off with him."

"It makes no difference."

"We left Richmond at ten o'clock yesterday, and we've been here ever since."

"What does that matter?"

"You mean it doesn't matter that I came away with George and spent twenty-four hours?"

"I mean that nothing matters--not if you'd spent twenty-four years."

"I suppose it doesn't," she responded quietly, and there was a curious remoteness, a hollowness in the sound of the words. "When one comes to see things as they are, nothing really matters. It is all just the same."

Her face looked unsubstantial and wan in the firelight, and so ethereal, so fleshless, appeared her figure, that it seemed to me I could see through it to the shining of the flames before which she stood.

"I can't talk, Sally," I said, "I am not good at words, I believe I'm more than half a fool as George has just told me--but--but--I want you--I've always wanted you--I've never in my heart wanted anything in the world but you--"

"I don't suppose even that matters much," she answered wearily, "but if you care to know, Ben, George and Bonny found me when I was alone and--and very unhappy, and they brought me with them when they came down to hunt. They are hunting now."

"You were alone and unhappy?" I said, for George Bolingbroke and Bonny Marshall had faded from me into the region of utterly indifferent things.

"It was that I wanted to tell you the morning you couldn't wait," she returned gently; "I had kept it from you the night before because I saw that you were so tired and needed sleep. But--but I had seen two doctors, both had told me that I was ill, that I had some trouble of the spine, that I might be an invalid--a useless invalid, if I lived, that--that there would never be another child--that--"

Her voice faltered and ceased, for crossing the room with a bound, I had gathered her to my breast, and was bending over her in an intensity, a violence of love, crushing back her hands on her bosom, while I kissed her face, her throat, her hair, her dress even, as I had never kissed her in the early days of our marriage. The pa.s.sion of happiness in that radiant prime was pale and bloodless beside the pa.s.sion of sorrow which shook me now.

"Stop, stop, Ben," she said, struggling to be free, "let me go. You are hurting me."

"I shall never stop, I shall never let you go," I answered, "I shall hold you forever, even if it hurts you."

CHAPTER x.x.xV

THE ULTIMATE CHOICE

We carried her home next day in George's motor car, ploughing with difficulty over the heavy roads, which in a month's time would have become impa.s.sable. A golden morning had followed the rain; the sun shone clear, the wind sang in the bronzed tree-tops, and on the low hills to the right of us, the harvested corn ricks stood out illuminated against a deep blue sky. When the brown-winged birds flew, as they sometimes did, across the road, her eyes measured their flight with a look in which there was none of the radiant impulse I had seen on that afternoon when she gazed after the flying swallows. She spoke but seldom, and then it was merely to thank me when I wrapped the fur rug about her, or to reply to a question of George's with a smile that had in it a touching helplessness, a pathetic courage. And this helplessness, this courage, brought to my memory the sound of her voice when she had called George's name aloud in her terror. Even after we had reached home, and when she and I stood alone, for a minute, before the fire in her room, I felt still that something within her--something immaterial and flamelike that was her soul--turned from me, seeking always a clearer and a diviner air.