“My daughter-in-law!” sobbed Mrs. Carter under her breath. “My Willie’s wife, and—and she chalks her nose—I saw it myself!”
V
The Carters, after a few days, tried to settle down and get used to it, but the new Mrs. Carter never quite let them do it. She kept taking them by surprise, with a kind of flying grace that left them speechless. She was making rapid conquests, too. Leigh had become her slave. He followed her about in an embarrassed state of subjugation, and spent long hours in his room writing sonnets, dedicated to Fanchon, or, more often, to “another’s wife.”
Emily, meanwhile, was making some curiously subtle alterations in her own appearance, as yet undiscovered by her anxious mother. She had successfully negotiated a loan of three dollars from Daniel—for purposes unknown.
In one way or another, the bride had made progress with them all; she had fascinated, or dazzled, or perplexed first one member of the family and then another. It was only Daniel, the student and philosopher, who still resisted. In the rôle of an observer, he maintained an unruffled tranquillity.
It was this very thing—his inaccessibility, his aloofness—that ruffled young Mrs. Carter. At first she had not noticed him—a pale young man who limped; but after a while she caught herself watching him, expecting something, she knew not what. She was tantalized by his silence, his drawling Southern speech, his quiet observation. In a hundred little ways she had tried to take him unawares and failed. Then he grew interesting, and she studied him. She had that love of conquest that some women have, and she had not conquered Daniel.
Quite unaware of the interest he had excited, Daniel pursued his usual course, except in one direction. He had had neither the heart nor the courage to go to the Denbighs. It seemed to him that he could never bear to see again that look in Virginia’s eyes, a look that was not for him—and not caused by him, thank God! It followed him when he worked in Judge Jessup’s office, on briefs that were soon to make him famous, and when he walked, meditating, under the stars. It could not be shut out, because Virginia’s face, her eyes, her smile, had been with him so long in secret.
He had tried to thrust the image out when he thought she was to be his brother’s wife, but now he did not try to battle with it. He would, indeed, have loved to dwell upon it, but for that look of doubt and pain in her eyes when she first heard of William’s marriage. Love’s vision is excruciatingly clear when it is looking at love revealed. He knew now! And he had found it too hard to go there; he felt as if he had, in some mysterious way, become heir to his brother’s falsehood. He was bearing a vicarious punishment by denying himself a sight of Virginia’s face; but he thought of her with a constancy that shut out his brother’s bride.
He was thinking of Virginia one day when he came in rather earlier than usual, and, finding the library empty, sat down to write a letter or two. He chose his place, too, because there was a picture of Virginia on the mantelpiece—a small photograph of her as a schoolgirl, which she had given to his mother. It was framed and standing there beside the old ormolu clock.
As Daniel wrote he looked up at the picture with that curious sense of companionship that lonely people, people who have suffered, draw from such inanimate images of those they love. It comforted him. He lit his pipe and began to write. For the moment he forgot his lameness, that lameness which seemed to him such an insuperable barrier to his own hopes of happiness.