Part 2

"I will say it. If you keep on giving in this way to a man's temper, you'll end by not daring to say your soul's your own."

"Robert is imperious, perhaps," the young wife answered slowly. "But that is between him and me. If I can stand it, my friends needn't worry."

"My dear child, you know I don't mean to be meddlesome. I might have recollected the old adage about a husband and wife being a pair of scissors, and whatever comes between the blades gets cut. But there is a principle involved here."

"Yes," assented Linda, "there is a principle involved."

"I suppose you mean your principles and mine are not the same," said the elder woman, with a little heat.

"Oh, yours are all right for you. But I must conform myself to a different rule. I can't explain it all, dear, only, right or wrong, I shall continue to give in--as you term it--to Robert. If he is high-tempered, there's all the more reason why I shouldn't be. I know what he expects of me--what he has always expected of me----"

"Expects you to be an angel!" broke in her friend, "while he is--whatever he chooses."

"Well," answered Linda, with a brilliant smile, "I'll be as near an angel as I can. You don't understand. There are compensations. Even if there is a little bitter drop now and then, he makes me very happy. And happiness is worth an effort."

"Well, well," sighed her friend, and they both fell into silence.

At the porch they parted with a warmer kiss than usual. Linda could not help feeling that she had cast herself adrift to swim alone henceforth in waters that might be cold and sullen. She went into the house and took off her hat half reluctantly. The next few hours dragged on in unbroken dulness. About four o'clock the bay horses dashed up and Mr. Meeks alighted from his buggy, followed by a fine-looking, gray-haired man who was in the midst of remarks evidently admiring and complimentary in their nature.

Mrs. Meeks stood upon the veranda, her eyes a trifle brighter than usual, her cheeks a trifle warmer; her head was held unconsciously a little high, but otherwise there was no criticism to be made upon the gracious sweetness with which she greeted her husband and his guest.

"I was in a measure prepared to meet you," said the suave Briton. "Meeks has been treating me to certain rhapsodies of description with which I now perfectly sympathize."

"In Virginia we say that an acquaintance begun with a compliment ends in a duel," said Linda, smiling.

When the guest had been ushered upstairs to wash off the dust of travel, Mr. Meeks put his arm about his wife's waist. His eyes were unshadowed by any disagreeable recollections.

"Sweetheart!" he said.

"He will never make any apologies," thought Linda. "Well, no matter. I am glad I came back."

THE WIFE OF LOTHARIO.[1]

I.

"MANDY'S jest crazy to go to New York," said Mrs. Powell to her friend Mrs. Thomas, who was spending the day with her.

The two elderly women were "kin" in that wide-reaching term that in Virginia stretches out over blood relationship to the remotest degree of fortieth cousinship. Mr. Thomas' mother had been a Powell, and it was from the Powells, she was accustomed to say with ill-concealed pride, that her son Vivian got his high spirit and his splendid eyes.

Amanda Powell had the identical dark brown eyes and apparently the same high spirit. When she was six and Vivian twelve, the two had been used to retire from family parties anywhere from one to a dozen times in the course of an afternoon to have it out, in the back hallway, or in the garret, or even, when the excitement was intense, in the "far barn," a dilapidated building a quarter of a mile away from the house.

Vivian, even at the manly age of twelve, and in the face of all the traditions of chivalry, which to a Southern boy of that period exercised a very real influence over his attitude toward the softer sex, despite the vigilance of his mother and aunts, who were perpetually admonishing him to recollect that "Mandy was little and a girl besides," Vivian was tormented by a desire to subdue his spunky, small cousin at any cost of time and ingenuity. He had once made a great flourish with a hazel switch and raised a welt on her slim bare arm, which gave him immense satisfaction at the moment, and haunted him remorsefully for weeks afterwards. Amanda had promptly pulled out a lock of his hair, and then, setting her back against the side of the barn and gritting her tiny white teeth, had bidden him "come on" in a tone ringing with belligerent probabilities.

After that day a new element was added to the attraction the two children had for each other. Their attitude was much like that of two unfledged chickens who have had a fight ending in a drawn battle, and have a thirst for satisfaction. Whoever has watched a pair of very young roosters in the act of combat, knows how each one makes a peck and then draws off and stands upon the defensive, vigilant and defiant; another peck--then another rest, neither one giving in or running away until some intruder parts them.

Vivian and Amanda had continued upon these terms until increasing years rendered actual fighting impossible, and left to their antagonistic spirits only the resource of stinging words, and to hours of repentance the mere interchange of shy glances and softer speech, added to a fierce absorption of one another's society, which left the rest of the world completely outside.

The Powell and Thomas tribe had come in the course of time to accept the alliance between the fighting cousins as one of the mysterious results of the strange similarity of the two children in looks and disposition, and all the other young cousins had learned that these two black-eyed friend-enemies belonged to one another, and tolerated no interference in their relation.

Both were fatherless, and so, in either case, the young spirit that needed wise and loving restraint, had broken through the feeble curb of motherly fondness and gained freedom before achieving the self-control that prevents liberty from degenerating into license.

Amanda was now eighteen, and Vivian--just home from a two-years' term at the College of Virginia--was twenty-four. The two mothers, sitting together that afternoon, a week after Vivian's premature return from college, were anxiously alive to all the possibilities smouldering in such a period and fanned by recent separation and the excitement of inquiry into the changes a couple of years had wrought.

I should like to dwell for a moment upon the scene of this little motherly conference. It was the "settin'-room" of a large, old-fashioned mansion in central Virginia, and was one of two ample square rooms lying on either side of a great hall that ran straight through the middle of the house and lost itself in a broad porch in the rear.

Its newly white-washed walls were half covered with dusky old family portraits interspersed with bits of what Amanda called "bric-a-brac," meaning wood-cuts from the illustrated weeklies, brilliantly colored fans, and bunches of ferns and grasses tied together with ends of sash ribbon. The worn carpet covering the middle of the floor was an ancient and costly Axminster, and the few pieces of furniture were of massive mahogany, the long sofa and two armchairs covered with black haircloth, but overlaid with so many knitted tidies and scarfs that their dreariness was well concealed. In the deep, wide fireplace a big log burned slowly this chilly April day, and on either side of a spider-legged table drawn up before the blaze, sat and rocked the elderly ladies, dividing their attention between a small decanter of Madeira and a plate of Aunt 'Liza's delicious plum cake, and the subject of Amanda's craze to go to New York.

"Mandy's always had her own way about everything up to this," said Mrs. Thomas, her cool, pale blue eyes turning their wavering glance upon the plump, handsome face of her hostess, whose blooming cheeks were framed in snowy curls and set off by a lace fichu that came up high around the neck of her gray merino dress and was fastened in front by a pin made of her husband's hair woven into the form of a bunch of grapes. The term "motherly" described her accurately; her cheery smile, her ponderous but quick motions, her rich-toned voice and large, soft hands, all made up a personnel that drew hearts to her in affectionate confidence. She laughed in responding to her cousin's remark, a mellow, rippling laugh, such as you might have expected from her.

"I dunno what 'u'd happen if anybody wuz to set 'emselves up against Mandy," she said, shaking her beautiful white curls. "And I dunno's her way is sech a bad way. She don't like to have anybody say what she shall do and what she sha'n't, but give her her head and she's generous as the day, and good-hearted. The Powell disposition always wuz to be a leetle wilful, but the Major and I always got along well, and Mandy's like her pa. She was always wild to travel, and she's not had a great opportunity to see the world. If I could leave home--or had anybody to take her! But I reckon it'll have to be managed some way. Mandy's bound to go."

"There's one person 'u'd be glad enough to take her," said Mrs. Thomas. "He'd take her anywhere she wanted to go, shore."

"You mean Edgar Chamblin?"

"You know I mean Vivian, so what's the use o' talkin' 'bout anybody else? I seen cl'ar 'nuff, Nellie, five year ago, how things wuz goin' to be when them two growed up. It's nater, and I dunno's we kin help it, even supposin' we wuz to desire to."

A troubled look passed over Mrs. Powell's face; passed and left no trace, as a cloud passes over the sun. "Whatever is, is best," she had been saying all her life, when persons about her were complaining of fate and Providence and ill-luck. But beneath her optimism was a basis of sound judgment, and she always quietly made herself sure that nothing better was attainable before acquiescing in such arrangements as Providence allotted.

"Edgar Chamblin is jest sech a young man as I'd like to see Mandy marry," she observed placidly. "I've nothin' ag'in Vivian--you know I've always been as fond of him as if he wuz my own--but put fire and tow together! Now, Edgar's one of the kind that'd let Mandy do jest what she pleased. He's easy-goin'. Not but what he's sensible too, and steady. I'd be proud to hev Mandy so well suited in a husband as Ed'd suit her."

"I should think you'd know better'n to pick out who Mandy's goin' to marry," said Vivian's mother. "And I ain't so shore as it's the best thing fur a woman to have a husband give in to her every whip-stitch. Probably you dunno what it is to have a shiftless, no-account, no-back-bone sort o' creetur 'round under foot--"

"Lord knows, all I want's my child's happiness," sighed good Mrs. Powell. "If she and Vivian air fond o' one another, I'm not the one to oppose 'em. But I can't say now as I want it so. It stands to reason two black-eyed, high-strung people, both proud as Lucifer, must expect to have a stormy life together. Why, it'd make me tremble--the idee of 'em goin' away on a weddin' tour!"

"Vivian's a good boy, Nellie," answered his mother in a tone that trembled a little. "You know, yourself, he's a gentleman. No woman need be afeard of a man if he's a gentleman."

"My dear, the Major wuz a gentleman; no man more so. But I dunno what'd happened if I hadn't known how to manage him. You've either got to manage a man or _be_ managed, and though there air women that need managin', and some that like it, I've never seen the man yet that's fit to be the head o' woman. I ain't sayin' they don't exist. I haven't been about much. But my mother had. She'd been everywhere. Her father was Commander in the Navy, as you know, and she said to me once: 'Nellie, I never yet see the man that was good enough for a good woman.' I don't go as fur as that. Ma was ruther high in her notions. But on the other hand it'd go mighty hard with me to have to stand by and see a man that married Mandy with his hand on top."

"Seems to me you needn't be afeard o' that if she has Vivian. It's been all along with them two that if one wuz ahead one day, t'other was shore to git ahead the next. You recollect the old saying: 'Pull Dick, pull deevil,' I reckon, Nellie?"

"That's the worst on it. I'm mortal afeard they'd kill one another. They ain't noways suited, Jane, and I trust to mercy that the thing's not to be."

Mrs. Powell pronounced her ultimatum with unusual energy, and rising, began to stir about the room, setting cushions and folding up pieces of sewing in a manner that evinced a wish to shake off a disagreeable impression. Never before had she felt a wish to fight the inevitable. She was not one of the thin-skinned, superstitious beings who claim to be intuitional, and she was content, ordinarily, to recognize events when they actually took place, and not spy them out beforehand in the clouds of fancy. But mothers seem to have a special sense that warns of coming danger, and this good mother had felt within the last few minutes a strange sinking at the heart in connection with thoughts of Mandy which made her very anxious and, as she put it, "fidgety," so that to sit still longer and discuss the matter of this undesired marriage was an impossibility.

"I sort o' hoped you wouldn't be averse to the children's comin' together, Nellie," were Mrs. Thomas's parting words as she settled herself in the broad carryall while the sun was still high, to drive the two miles to Bloomdale, where, standing back a little way from Main Street, was the modern brick house that her father, the general storekeeper "in town," had left her and to her eldest son George after her, the entail taking no account of Vivian, to whom she promptly gave up his father's farm the day he came of age.

As she took up the reins after this plaintive remark and turned her eyes reproachfully upon Mrs. Powell's countenance, beaming upon the parting guest from the broad doorway, another vehicle whirled around the curve and stopped, and two beautiful pairs of dark eyes smiled upon her, as Vivian himself sprang out and put his arm about Amanda with a zeal that was totally unnecessary to the furthering of that active damsel's descent to the ground.

"Where have you two been all this blessed afternoon, when I needed Mandy to hem them table-cloths?" said Mrs. Powell, her beaming countenance contradicting her complaint, as Amanda put both arms about her neck and kissed her with an affection that was as genuine as it was spontaneous.

"Been to Bear's Den," said Amanda, a rich color mantling her opal-tinted cheeks, and a shy, saucy smile curving a mouth formed for the torment of men, in more senses than one. Her voice was a modified edition of her mother's, lazy, rich and sweet, but with keener timbre. Under provocation it might become scornful, which Mrs. Powell's could not. She was tall and symmetrically built, her figure already showing the luxurious development that to girls of northern race comes only with an uncomfortable embonpoint. But there was not a trace of clumsiness in her make-up, which united energy and languor in singularly equal proportions.

A fair picture the little group made, when Vivian had placed himself beside his young kinswoman and stood, leaning against the pillar, his soft hat dangling from one hand, while the other surreptitiously held Amanda's under cover of her shawl. He was her match in beauty and very like her, but with lighter coloring, his mother's blonde tints reappearing in his ruddy skin and bronze-brown mustache. With equal fire of glance, there was yet something that was not present in her spirited countenance; a hint of petulance and selfishness. But it was counter-balanced by a wonderful tenderness of expression that now spread over his clear-cut features like a wave of moonlight, bringing out the rare charm that made Vivian at times irresistible.

His mother, watching him with all her heart in her eyes, caught her breath and dropped the reins on her lap as she met the significant look he turned toward her for a second, before bending his gaze, filled with its utmost persuasive power, upon Mrs. Powell.

"I reckon," he said slowly, his tones cutting the air decisively, yet quivering with a certain plaintiveness that recalled "Cousin Jane's" tremulous minor notes, "this is as good a time as any to tell you both that Amanda and I have made up our minds to try housekeeping together at Benvenew."

"After we come back from New York," put in Amanda with a saucy glance of reminder.

"Children," said Mrs. Powell, more solemnly than she had ever spoken in her life. She took a hand of each and looked from one to the other, while Jane Thomas scarcely breathed as she leaned out of the carryall toward them. "Children, if ye've both made up your minds, I've got no call to interfere with young folks' happiness, and I sha'n't. What I say now, I say once and for all, and I sha'n't harp on it. But I know both on ye pretty nigh as well as I know myself. I'm afeard my girl needs somethin' you can't give her, Vivian. You think you don't, honey," she added, squeezing the soft palm laid in her own, and longing for eloquence to express the meaning that was in her heart; "but you ain't a woman yet; you're only a child. And what you're a-goin' to turn out depends more'n you can think now, on the kind of marriage you make. I pity the man that sets his heart on makin' you over to suit himself. And you, my dear boy, air too rash--you ain't settled enough. And it's my duty to say, fur your own sake, that if you two try gettin' along together, you'll be ridin' over to your mother or to me some day with a mouthful of complaints 'gainst Mandy. And some of 'em 'll be just. There's a soft streak in Mandy and there's a hard streak, and I'm afeard you'll find the hard one."

"Why, mother!" said Amanda, astonished and a little alarmed at her jolly mother's grave discourse. The words meant nothing to her then. She turned a laughing glance upon her lover, who had listened with equal lack of comprehension. Now they with one accord drew closer together. Certainly, any advice which does not harmonize with the wishes of those matrimonially inclined is as the voice of one crying in the wilderness.

"We always meant to be married, Aunt Nellie," answered Vivian after a short pause. "No other girl would suit me, and she is satisfied with me. Arnt you, Mandy?"

"Yes," said Amanda without hesitation.

"Nellie," cried Mrs. Thomas, unable to contain herself any longer, "don't you make 'em feel you don't believe they'll be happy together. They ain't children now, and because they've always been sparrin' is all the more reason they'll settle down tame enough."

"I should just hate a man I couldn't have a good quarrel with, once in a while," the girl made a pretense of whispering to her mother, and giving Vivian a look which meant that he was to understand they were to have things as they wanted them.

"I've got no call to say any more," said Mrs. Powell, to whom this slight opposition had been an extraordinary effort. She felt that conscience could demand no more of her. So she kissed Amanda and then kissed Vivian, and Jane Thomas kissed them both and cried over them, as sentimental women cry when they get their heart's desire, and they all stood on the porch together for a few minutes, talking eagerly, perhaps to cover a little feeling that had been stirred up by the discussion; a foreboding that could not quite be laid to rest, whether, after all, this marriage was a wise one, a prudent one, and one from which good was to come.

Did Amanda feel this doubt? Perhaps the odd little shiver that came over her and that she shook off so lightly was a premonition she would have done well to heed, instead of turning, as she did, to lay her beautiful head on her lover's shoulder in a manner that was rather too deliberate to be altogether fond.

Did Vivian experience any fear of the future in this instant of promised fulfilment of his hopes? Not he. The time was as yet far distant when that buoyant glance which seemed to challenge fate was to be turned downward in melancholy resignation, and the impetuous outleaping of suggestion and comment that was natural to his enthusiastic temperament become hesitating appeal to one he feared to displease.

And the two mothers, watching this adored son and daughter and rejoicing in their joy, sympathizing and admiring with that admiration which is most perfectly free from envy, did their knowledge of human nature and their past experience not suggest that which must make them tremble in regarding these two heedless young creatures, both children of one haughty race, bent upon gratifying that impulse of mutual attraction which was more than likely to have its source in animal obstinacy than in reasonable, human affection?

But how limited is the outlook of elderly women in these little southern villages, where the history of a few lives constitutes their entire equipment in sociology, and to whom the idea of essential differences between sets of conditions superficially alike, can never present itself strongly. Mrs. Powell's motherly instinct had had its spasm of alarm, but had been quieted by the soothing reflection that marriage tames high spirits, and that the Rubicon of matrimony once passed, adjustment to circumstances _must_ follow. Nothing else was conceivable. As for Jane Thomas, any picture of a future into which trouble might come to her son even from the "curse of a granted prayer" was beyond her imagination. All she had asked in life since Vivian was born was that he might have whatever was necessary to make him happy, and that spirited youth had succeeded in convincing her that happiness lay in having what he wanted. He wanted Amanda, and now he had got her. Mrs. Thomas rejoiced as far as her melancholy temperament permitted, and trusted the future to Providence. And in a month Amanda Powell had become "young Mrs. Thomas." A month is a short engagement in Virginia, but Vivian was impatient to open up his closed homestead, and start the farm going according to some new theories of farming, which chiefly took shape in patent fertilizer and an improved kind of harrow; also, the introduction of white labor to supersede the "lazy darkies."

And to Amanda marriage meant the pretty pearl ring her lover had placed upon her finger, the rustling white silk gown her mother had made for her in Ryburg, and--the wedding journey. Our wildest dreams are only re-combinations of what we have experienced or read of, and how could this girl of eighteen, for all her rich and varied nature, dream of the coming of responsibilities that would shake her frail fancies of married life like an earthquake, or of mental development that would awaken critical faculties to the extent of making her rebel against what she now accepted as matters of course; nothing better having presented itself to her mind?

She was satisfied that the wedding was conventionally correct, according to Fauquier County standards; that the day was bright; that she looked her best, and that Vivian was devoted without being uncomfortably demonstrative. For without at all understanding why it was so, the young girl, so full of ardor in all her attachments, had a virginal coldness toward her young lover that made her shrink with distaste from caresses and put aside any suggestion of an intimacy other than had always existed between them, and of which she foresaw merely an extension, not a transformation into anything more exacting.

Reared by an old-fashioned southern mother, watched and shielded as maidens once were when maternal ideas of duty included an anxious supervision over a daughter's reading, amusements, and associations, Amanda was in all essentials still a child, with only her natural dignity and womanly instinct to protect her amid the various perplexities and temptations the future might hold for her.