Virginia

by Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow

At this something that was like a smile trembled for an instant on Virginia's face.

"You are good, Susan," she responded, but there was no tenderness, no gratitude even, in her voice. She had grown hard with the implacable hardness of grief.

When the door had closed behind her friend, she stood looking through the window until she saw her pass slowly, as though she were reluctant to go, down Sycamore Street in the direction of her home. "I am glad she has gone," she thought coldly. "Susan is good, but I am glad she has gone." Then, turning back to the fire, she took up the piece of embroidery and mechanically folded it before she laid it away. While her hands were still on the bag in which she kept it, a shiver went through her body, and a look of resolution passed over her features, making them appear as if they were sculptured in marble.

"He will be sorry some day," she thought. "He will be sorry when it is too late, and if I were there now—if I were to see him, it might all be prevented. It might all be prevented and we might be happy again." In her distorted mind, which worked with the quickness and the intensity of delirium, this idea assumed presently the prominence and the force of an hallucination. So powerful did it become that it triumphed over all the qualities which had once constituted her character—over the patience, the sweetness, the unselfish goodness—as easily as it obscured the rashness and folly of the step which she planned. "If I could see him, it might all be prevented," she repeated obstinately, as though some one had opposed her; and, going upstairs to her bedroom, she packed her little handbag and put on the travelling dress which she had worn in New York. Then, very softly, as though she feared to be stopped by the servants, she went down the stairs and out of the front door; and, very softly, carrying her bag, she passed into the street and walked hurriedly in the direction of the station. And all the way she was thinking, "If I can only see him again, this may not happen and everything may be as it was before when he still loved me." So just and rational did this idea appear to her, that she found herself wondering passionately why she had not thought of it before. It was so easy a way out of her wretchedness that it seemed absurd of her to have overlooked it. And this discovery filled her with such tremulous excitement, that when she opened her purse to buy her ticket, her hands shook as if they were palsied, and the porter, who held her bag, was obliged to count out the money. The whole of life, which had looked so dark an hour ago, had become suddenly illuminated.

Once in the train, her nervousness left her, and when an acquaintance joined her after they had started, she was able to talk connectedly of trivial occurrences in Dinwiddie. He was a fat, apoplectic looking man, with a bald head which shone like satin, and a drooping moustache slightly discoloured by tobacco. His appearance, which she had never objected to before, seemed to her grotesque; but in spite of this, she could smile almost naturally at his jokes, which she thought inconceivably stupid.

"I suppose you heard about Cyrus Treadwell's accident," he said at last when she rose to go to her berth. "Got knocked down by an automobile as he was getting off a street car at the bank. It isn't serious, they say, but he was pretty well stunned for a while."

"No, I hadn't heard," she answered, and thought, "I wonder why Susan didn't tell me." Then she said good-night and disappeared behind the curtains of her berth, where she lay, without undressing, until morning.

"This is the way—there is no other way to stop it," she thought, and all night the rumble of the train and the flashing of the lights in the darkness outside of her window kept up a running accompaniment to the words. "It is a sin—and there is no other way to stop it. He is committing a sin, and when I see him he will understand it, and it will be as it was before." This idea, which was as fixed as an obsession of delirium, seemed to occupy some central space in her brain, leaving room for a crowd of lesser thoughts which came and went fantastically around it like the motley throng of a circus. She thought of Cyrus Treadwell's accident, of the stupid jokes the man from Dinwiddie had told her, of the noises of the train, which would not let one sleep, of the stations which blazed out, here and there, in the darkness. But in the midst of this confusion of images and impressions, a clear voice was repeating somewhere in her brain: "This is the way—there is no other way to stop it before it is too late."

In the morning, when she got out in New York, and gave the driver the name of the little hotel at which she had stopped on her first visit, this glowing certainty faded like the excitement of fever from her mind, and she relapsed into the stricken hopelessness of the last six months. The bleakness of her spirits fell like a cloud on the brilliant October day, and the sunshine, which lay in golden pools on the pavements, appeared to increase the sense of universal melancholy which had followed so sharply on the brief exaltation of the night. "I must see him—it is the only way," her brain still repeated, but the ring of conviction was gone from the words. Her flight from Dinwiddie showed to her now in all the desperate folly with which it might have appeared to a stranger. The impulse which had brought her had ebbed away, and with the impulse had passed also the confidence and the energy of her resolve.

At the hotel, where the red bedroom into which they ushered her appeared to have waited unaltered for the second tragedy of her life, she bathed and dressed herself, and after a cup of black coffee, taken because a sensation of dizziness had alarmed her lest she should faint in the street, she put on her hat again and went out into Fifth Avenue. She remembered the name of the hotel at the head of Oliver's letter, and she directed her steps towards it now with an automatic precision of which her mind seemed almost unconscious. All thought of asking for him had vanished, yet she was drawn to the place where he was by a force which was more irresistible than any choice of the will. An instinct stronger than reason was guiding her steps.