General Brandon had no knowledge of the words “getting on in society,” or anything like them. He belonged to that sturdy oligarchy in Virginia which, whatever might be its shortcomings, knew nothing of snobs or snobbery, because everybody was just as good as everybody else. But his social career had been such that the newly rich might have asked him his patent for knowing everybody worth knowing. He was asked everywhere in those days, which he took as a matter of course, just as, during his occasional brief sojourns in England during his Egyptian days, he was asked everywhere and took it as a matter of course. Your true Virginian has many faults and some vices, but he is socially the wisest person in the world because he is the simplest. Nobody can patronize him, nobody can snub him. He takes the notice of royalty with the same unconscious ease that he does the rapturous salutation of a negro barber who belonged to him “befo’ de war, sir,”—always polite, considerate, mindful of the small, sweet courtesies of life.
There is but one section of society with which he cannot get on. This is the newly rich smart set, fresh from the forge, the shop, the mine, the liquor saloon—that rapid fungus which has grown up in America during the last forty years, of which it has been said that no parallel exists to its license and irresponsibility, unless one goes back to the later Roman and Byzantine emperors. This class is free with a freedom that is staggering to contemplate; free from any traditions of the past, any responsibility in the present, any accountability to the future; free to marry, to be divorced, to live where it likes, to change its residence every week in the year; free from the care of the few children they have, free from taxes as far as rank perjury goes, and free to command all the science of the world to keep death at bay as long as possible. The advent of this class anywhere changes the aspect of things, and therefore when it moved in columns upon Washington, the people of General Brandon’s class and Elizabeth’s time became “Cave-dwellers,” and the General was asked “nowhere,”—that is, he was still asked, but it was “nowhere.” The General, however, did not know this at the time, or ever afterwards.
Elizabeth sat at the window and, looking out upon the murky evening, continued that sad review of her life.
There is a French school of moralists which says that a man may love two women at once. Elizabeth Darrell had certainly loved two men at once. Pelham was always and forever the man she would have married, but Darrell’s honest love was not thrown away on her. She mourned him as she had mourned for her child, neither one infringing in the least on Pelham’s place in her heart. She had been a wife and a mother, she had suffered a real and lasting passion for a man not her husband, but she had not transgressed a hair’s-breadth; she had experienced both poverty and wealth, she had known and felt more in her thirty years than most women do in a lifetime; and yet it seemed to her as if she had only turned over, without the opportunity to read and study, those glowing pages in the book of a woman’s life—the love of a man, the love of a child, the beauty of the world. Now all was over—even Pelham’s love and tender consideration, which had been hers for so long that she scarcely recognized the face of life without them. Nothing was left for her except her father, the best of men and fathers; but this was not enough for a nature like Elizabeth Darrell’s.
While these thoughts were passing through Elizabeth’s mind, darkness had fallen. Lights were twinkling everywhere. The great house opposite radiated brightness from many windows, and it occurred to Elizabeth, as to every sorrowful and disappointed person, that every one in that luxurious and brilliant home must be happy. Probably the girl of the boudoir, whose attitude had expressed such dejection, was grieving over some trifle like a disappointment in a dance or the failure of some plan of pleasure. Then she heard the street door open and a step which she recognized as her father’s, and she had the first sensation of gladness she had felt for so long that she had almost forgotten what gladness was.
General Brandon, standing under the flaring gas-jet in the narrow hall, saw the black figure flying down the stairs towards him. He stopped, trembling with emotion; he who had without a tremor faced death a hundred times was shaken at the sight of his child in her mourning garments. The next minute her head was on his shoulder and he was patting it, saying, “My child,—my ever dear child,—welcome at all times, more welcome in your sorrow.”
Elizabeth looked up, smiling and weeping. It was the first time since her husband’s death that she had not seemed in everybody’s way. General Brandon gazed at her, at the changes that ten years had made, at the marks of the recent shipwreck of her hopes and joys, at the pallor and thinness that brooding over her misfortunes had brought upon her; and then he said, with a tremulous smile and with tears in his honest eyes, “It is doubly sweet to have you back unchanged.”
He led her into the dingy, well-remembered drawing-room, and they sat hand in hand on the sofa, talking, Elizabeth dwelling upon her husband’s goodness to her, and mentioning none of her woes and perplexities in that first hour of meeting. Then Serena announced dinner, and General Brandon, with the air of escorting a queen regent, placed his daughter at the head of the table. “And never, since the day of your marriage, my love, have I ever sat down to this table without remembering you and wishing that you were seated at this place,” he said.
To Elizabeth it seemed that the place she had in that dull dining room was the only spot she had had any right to, except under sufferance, since that June morning, now nearly a year and a half past, when her husband had died. Not only was General Brandon glad to see her, but Serena seemed equally so. Serena was a distinct acquisition to Elizabeth. When the dinner was fairly begun the General produced a bottle of that doubtful champagne which had been served at Elizabeth’s wedding. “Saved to celebrate your return, my dearest,” he said. Elizabeth could scarcely drink it for the tears that threatened to overflow.