CHAPTER XVI
VIRGINIA MUST GO
Virginia sank limply into the parlor car seat. After a moment she raised herself and looked out through the wide window upon the busy platform of the South Ridgefield station. Serena and Ike waited by the car nervously, endeavoring to locate the position of their mistress by peering into the coach. The old negress was publicly weeping.
As they caught sight of the girl, the train started and with rapidly increasing speed moved down the platform. Ike grinned a cheerful farewell while Serena screamed her adieu, and, as if unable to bear the separation, started to waddle along with the train, frantically waving her black hands.
Virginia signaled back and shouted embarrassed little good byes, subconsciously aware that they would be heard by no one except her traveling companions. As the two negroes were swept from her sight, a feeling of utter loneliness wrapped her in its gloomy folds. Pent up tears flooded her eyes, and so, through a mist, she saw at the end of the platform a man and woman, waving handkerchiefs from an automobile, who looked remarkably like Hezekiah Wilkins and Mrs. Henderson. Likewise, through a curtain of moisture, when the train crossed the bridge, she perceived the stranded Nancy Jane, symbolical of her own wrecked efforts.
As the roar of the train upon the bridge died away, the girl sank back again into her seat and succumbed completely to her grief. During those last few hours at home she had steeled herself not to display her feelings. She had met her father on the previous day and explained her plans quite as calmly as if she were about to take an ordinary vacation trip.
The decision of his daughter to leave him, based as it was upon the inspiration of her mother, dead these seventeen years, had left him strangely helpless. In his passion he had thrust aside the cloak of idealism in which she had arrayed him and exposed his true character. She had struck back, unwittingly selecting a weapon which had swept aside his momentary anger and left him shaken and perplexed at the edge of the abyss which had opened between them. Obadiah, too, had been unhappy in those hours. He loved Virginia with all the affection of which his nature was capable. There had been moments when he would have surrendered abjectly to his daughter on her own terms but for the grim obstinacy which obsessed him.
It may be that she intuitively appreciated his mental struggles, because, excepting only her determination to leave home, she treated him with the tenderest consideration. In his perplexity, Obadiah drifted for the moment and blindly followed the girl’s lead, as if through her alone could come the solution of the problem which separated them. Their breakfast that morning had been a difficult ordeal as had been their leave taking. He had displayed no desire to accompany her to the train and had parted from her with a grim indifference which his troubled face belied.
Now, at least, there was relief in the luxury of a good cry; but after a time the tears ceased and a weary peace came. Resting her head against the back of her chair she gave herself up to thoughts of the few little happinesses which gleamed like bright stars in the darkness with which she was surrounded.
She thought of Joe Curtis and thrilled when she remembered the long hand clasp. His picture of Old Rock comforted her anew as she assured herself that such a place could not be lonely. She reviewed the few moments in which she had bidden farewell to Mrs. Henderson. She had dreaded Hennie’s embarrassing questions. But, strangely, Hennie was not inquisitive. She had broken away to rush into her kitchen crying loudly that something was burning. This belief, from certain remarks which had floated back, had irritated Carrie, her cook, exceedingly. Returning, she had enveloped the girl in a wealth of motherly tenderness, so that in reality the visit had consisted of much sobbing upon the older woman’s shoulder to an accompaniment of soothing endearments and a train of explosive exclamations from which little could be gathered.
Soon she began to think of her Aunt Kate and of the new home to which she was going. Little enough she knew. Once, shortly before the death of Elinor Dale, Mrs. Kate Baker had visited South Ridgefield. At the time, she had a baby daughter of Virginia’s age and was mourning the death of her husband. For years there had been irregular correspondence; but, as far as Virginia was concerned, her father’s sister and her cousin were merely names.