“Best French spirits! The Landrays always was gentlemen when it came to their drinks.”
“We are expecting things, we are,” said his wife. “You're to be ready to go into town after supper for the doctor, if he's wanted.”
In the dining-room with its dark walnut wainscoating, doubly sombre in the half light of the flickering candles that burnt on the mantel, Virginia watched and waited alone. No sound came from the room above; silence filled the house with a hush that was like expectation. But a moment before she had heard Martha moving to and fro; a chair had been pushed across the floor; and she had heard the sound of voices. She had listened intently but the words they spoke had been indistinguishable; perhaps Jane was resting more quietly now.
An hour had elapsed since Sam had rattled out of the yard in the covered cart, the beat of his horse's hoofs on the spongy earth soon dying away in the distance. He had been dispatched in urgent haste into town to bring Dr. Harrison.
Meanwhile Martha had the care of the sick woman; for Virginia had no heart to go near her. If she should be needed, or if Jane asked for her, then she would go; but not unless. The situation with its hope and uncertainty baffled her usually ready courage; she could only think of that boyish husband, for so Jane described him, and his absence and silence. Why had he gone—he of all men? What fitness had he, with his impractical Latin and Greek, for the hard actualities of the plains?
From her seat before the fire, she heard the sullen insistent rush of the wind outside; and at intervals the dull surging echoes the wooded heights of Landray's Hill gave to the storm. They had roared among those oaks for perhaps a thousand years, as now, when the grey clouds and slanted mists of the equinox were tossed and twisted in the face of the night. She rested her cheek in the palm of her hand; she heard the fall of the rain in a lull of the storm; and again rising out of the silence, the wind, as it roared on the hill and sweeping nearer beat against the shuttered windows high up in the gable of the old stone mill: then it dribbled and died away on the brown meadow land of the Little River bottom.
Jane was quite happy; how happy, Virginia had only her woman's instinct to tell her; she had talked incessantly all day of the future when her husband should have returned. But what if he did not return, what was in store for her then? This doubt now took possession of Virginia's fancy, for her own hope had crumbled; perhaps it was only the night, the loneliness; perhaps later when all was over, her courage would come back; and then there was the morrow, it might bring the looked-for letters; it surely would, she had waited patiently; but now—now she could endure no longer.
Presently disturbing her revery the brass knocker on the front door sounded discordantly. She rose hurriedly, and picking up a candle hastened out into the hall to admit Dr. Harrison; but she admitted more than the doctor; for there in the portly physician's shadow, bowing and smiling, not quite diffident and not quite confident, stood young Jacob Benson.
The doctor was saying as Virginia opened the door, “So it was you, Jacob; we heard your horse floundering through the mud after us all the way out from town and wondered who it was.”
“Yes, it was I, doctor,” but Benson looked past him to Virginia, who stood in the doorway shading the light she held with one hand. There was a brief silence; the doctor seemed to smile behind the turned-up collar of his great coat. The lawyer spoke first.