Mary Virginia

“ It was well for Mary Virginia that those brave eyes had caught something from the great faces that hung upon his walls and kept company and counsel with him day and night, they that conquered life and death and turned defeat into victory because they had first conquered themselves! ”

“ From the nook where Mary Virginia sat, one could hear every word spoken in the flower-room, though the hearer remained hidden by the paneled stairway.
Hands in her lacy lap, eyes abstracted, she fell into the dreams that youth dreams; in which a girl—one's self, say,—walks hand in hand through an enchanted world with a being very, very little lower than the angels and twice as dear. ”

“ Those who loved Mary Virginia had cause for painful reflections.
Blinded by her beauty, were we judging her by the light of affection, instead of the colder light of reason? We couldn't approve of her behavior to Laurence, nor was it easy to refrain from disapproval of what appeared to be a tacit endurance of Inglesby's attention. She couldn't plead ignorance of what was open enough to be town talk—the man's shameless passion for herself, a passion he seemed to take delight in flaunting. ”

“ Not I, but Love, had transformed a sinner and an outlaw into a great scientist and a greater lover. And I remembered Mary Virginia's childish hand putting into his the gray-winged Catocala, and how the little moth, raising the sad-colored wings worn to suit his surroundings, revealed beneath that disfiguring and disguising cloak the exquisite and flower-like loveliness of the underwings. ”

“ If it be true that the boy is father to the man, it is even more tritely true that the girl is mother to the woman, there being here less chance for change. So it was with Mary Virginia. That gracious little girlhood of hers, lived among the birds and bees and blossoms of an old Carolina garden, had sent her into the Church School with a settled and definite idealism as part of her nature. Her creed was simple enough: The world she knew was the best of all possible worlds, its men good, its women better; and to be happy and loved one had only to be good and loving. ”

“ But, although she had at last finished and done with school, Mary Virginia didn't come home to us as we had hoped she would. Her mother had other plans, which failed to include little Appleboro. Why should a girl with such connections and opportunities be buried in a little town when great cities waited for just such with open and welcoming arms? The best we got then was a photograph of our girl in her graduation frock—slim wistful Mary Virginia, with much of her dear angular youthfulness still clinging to her. ”

“ Mary Virginia found herself smarting under that horrible sureness.
Perfectly at his ease, inclined to be familiar and jocose, he looked insolently about the lovely old room that had never before held such a suitor for a daughter of that house. Watching her with the complacent eyes of an accepted lover, assuming odious airs of proprietorship such as made one wish to throttle him, he was in no hurry to go. It seemed to her that black and withering years rolled over her head before he could bring himself to rise to take his departure. ”

“ She seemed perfectly unconscious of the evil unloveliness of him; Mary Virginia always seemed to miss the evil, passing it over as if it didn't exist. Instead, diving into the depths of other personalities, always she brought to the surface whatever pearl of good might lie concealed at the bottom. To her this sinister cripple was simply another human being, with whose misfortune one must sympathize humanly. ”

“ The color had come back into his face and a new light flashed into his cold blue eyes. He laughed. "Why, you game little angel!" he said delightedly. "Gad, I never thought you had it in you—never. I begin to adore you, Mary Virginia, upon my soul I do! Now listen to reason, my too-good child, and don't be so puritanical. You've got to take folks as they are and not as you'd like them to be, you know. Men are not angels, no, nor women, either. You must learn to be charitable—a virtue very good people seldom practice and never properly appreciate." And he added, leaning lower: "Mary Virginia! ”

“ A swift red had dyed Mary’s face at the first reception of her kindly meant advances. It faded out now, leaving her very pale.
“Every one who is a friend of Mr. Roden ought to thank you, if they do not,” she said, with great dignity. “I am sorry I spoke, since it has been so disagreeable to you. Good-morning.”
Virginia was dismissed—she felt it. The knowledge went scorching through her veins as kirsch through the veins of one not accustomed to its fire. She hated the girl with a mad, barbaric impulse, which was as much beyond her control as its tides are beyond the control of the ocean ”

“ Miss Mary Erroll was walking up and down the “front hall” in her Quorn-cloth habit, whistling softly to herself. Her short riding-skirt needed no holding up to enable her to move comfortably, and her hands were clasped behind her about her hunting-crop.
Virginia, coming slowly down the many convolutions of the broad stair-way, noticed the dark sheen of the thick braid folded away under the smart little hat, the glimpse of fair cheek and throat, the thorough-bred lines of the slight figure. ”

“ We don’t have girls from Wyoming every day, do we, Mary? You like my room, Virginia?” For Virginia’s eyes were wandering about the room, charmed with everything.
“I just love it, Miss King,” she said, in her natural, unaffected way. “It makes me think of a sunny autumn afternoon at home. The walls are just the color of our brown foot-hills, and the yellow curtains against them are like the sunlight on the hills. ”

“ Doesn't charity cover a multitude of skins, though? And doesn't it beat a jimmy when it comes to breaking into society!"
Mary Virginia, he added in an altered voice, had been exquisite in a frock all silver lace and shimmery stuffs like moonbeams, and with a rope of pearls about her throat, and in her black hair. Appleboro folks do not affect orchids, but Mary Virginia wore a huge cluster of those exotics. ”

“ I had my hand on her bridle-rein, ready to do my best should any rudeness be offered her, when suddenly she raised her hand and made a motion, and to my utter astonishment the brawling throng, save for some on the outskirts, which quieted presently, became still. Then Mistress Mary's voice arose, clear and sweet, with a childish note of innocence in it:
"Good people," said she, "fain would I be your Maid Marion, and fain would I be your queen of May, if you would hold with me this Kingdom of Virginia against tyrants and oppressors." ”

“ She was as slender as a reed in this marshy country of Virginia, and her voice was a sweet whisper, like the voice of one in a wind, and she had a curious gracefulness of leaning toward one she loved when in his presence, as if, whether she would or no, her heart of affection swayed her body toward him. Always, in thinking of my mother, I see her leaning with that true line of love toward my stepfather or my brother John, her fair hair drooping over her delicate cheeks, her blue eyes wistful with the longing to give more and more for their happiness. ”

“ Seventeen suffers frightfully, when it suffers at all. Eighteen enjoys its blighted affection, revels in its broken heart, would like to crochet a black edging on its immortal soul, and wouldn't exchange its secret sorrow for a public joy. Nineteen is convalescent—pride would come to its rescue even if life itself did not beguile it into being happy.
Mary Virginia got back her color and her appetite and forgot to remember that her heart was incurably broken and that she could never love again. ”

“ Mistress Mary wore a mask of black velvet to screen her face from the sun, and only her sweet forehead and her great blue eyes and the rose-leaf tip of her chin showed.
All that low, swampy country was lush and green that April morning, with patches of grass gleaming like emeralds in the wetness of sunken places and unexpected pools of marsh water gleaming out of the distances like sapphires. The blossoms thrust out toward us from every hand like insistent arms of beauty. ”

“ The hours I spent with the little girl and Laurence helped me as well as them; these fresh souls and growing minds freshened and revived mine, and kept me young in heart.
"We are all made of dust," said my mother once. "But Mary Virginia's is star dust. ”

“ And I've had the nerve to give a few insects to the Queen of Sheba!"
"Bosh!" said Laurence, sturdily. "She ought to be glad and proud to get that tray, and I'll bet you Mary Virginia's delighted with it. She's her father's daughter as well as her mother's, please. As for Appleboro not being good enough for her, that's piffle, too, p'tite Madame, and I'm surprised at you! Her own town is good enough for any girl. If it isn't, let her just pitch in and help make it good enough, if she's worth her salt. Not that Mary Virginia isn't scrumptious, though. ”

“ All around us the rank, woody growth was full of murmurs and movements of life, and perfumes from unseen blossoms disturbed one's thoughts with sweet insistence at every gust of wind, and always one heard the lapping of the sea-water through all its countless ways, for well it loves this country of Virginia and steals upon it, like a lover who will not be gainsaid, through meadows and thick woods and coarse swamps, until it is hard sometimes to say, when the tide be in, whether it be land or sea, and we who dwell therein might well account ourselves in a Venice of the New World. ”

“ It's Mary Virginia at stake, and I can't take chances, can I? And this afternoon she sent this.
"Oh, Laurence, be generous and spare me the torment of questions. So far you have not reproached me; spare me that, too! Don't you understand? I cannot marry you. Accept the inevitable as I do. Forgive me and forget me. M.V.E."
The writing showed extreme nervousness, haste, agitation. ”

“ Then Mary rolled her piteous blue eyes at her over Sir Humphrey's shoulder from her gold tangle of hair.
"What mean you?" she cried. "I tell you, Catherine, I will never leave him!"
"If we remain, we shall all be in custody," replied Catherine in her clear voice, though her face was white as if she were dead, "and our estates may be forfeited, and we have no power to help him. And he must be taken in the end in any case. And if we be free, we can save him."
"I will not go without him," cried Mary. "Set me down, Humphrey, and take up Harry, and I will help thee carry him. ”

“ As we came up with Mary, she looked at us over her shoulder with a brightness of triumph and withal something of merriment, like a child successful in mischief, and laughed, and waved her hand in which, as I live, she held a sword which had long graced the hall at Drake Hill, and I believe she meditated cutting the tobacco herself.
Then a great cheer went up for her, in which we, in spite of our misgivings, joined. Something so wonderful and innocent there was in the fresh enthusiasm of the maid. ”

“ Mrs. Erroll stepped out upon the front porch at Caryston with the ruffle at her throat, and a little damp, and the plumes in her bonnet somewhat limp; but Mary’s dress of white wool was soaked through and through, and her hat a sodden mass of white lace and straw.
Roden relapsed at once into the agonies of alarm in which newly engaged men are apt to indulge when the health of their fiancées is called into question. He went again to Virginia, and overwhelmed her with instruction and entreaties. ”

“ White’s pleadings were stubbornly resisted. He was forced to give in and they sailed for England.
Meanwhile, what had become of little Virginia whom Winginia had taken captive?
Carried to conquered Croatan, she was placed in the keeping of the women. What a strange little one had been brought to them to mother! Baby ringlets of sunny brown, skin like the petals of a lily formed a frame out of which looked eyes like pools of water on a cloudy day when the shadows drift over them. ”

“ Roden’s meals were generally presided over by Virginia, and she came forward to meet him now with a little silver dish of apples in one hand, evidently utterly ignorant of the presence of Mary Erroll. She stopped short, half-way across the room. A shadow as definite and sombre as the shadow [95] from a brilliant cloud upon a laughing grass-field in May settled over her face. ”

“ I guess I was born grown up." His face darkened.
"That wasn't a bit fair," said she, with instant sympathy.
"There's a lot not fair," he told her, "when you're born and brought up like I was. The worst is not so much what happens to you, though that's pretty bad; it's that you don't know it's happening—and there's nobody to put you wise. Why," his forehead puckered as if a thought new to him had struck him, "why, your very looks get to be different!"
Mary Virginia started. ”

“ Little Mary, tired out but satisfied, fell asleep, her head in Virginia’s lap. To Virginia’s joy, and to the unspeakable gratitude of Mrs. Michael Murphy, whom the world had used none too kindly, Miss King decided that St. Helen’s needed just such a person to do repairing and mending; and Mrs. Murphy, her face bright with thankfulness, was installed that very evening in her new and comfortable quarters.
An hour later, Virginia, the supper table atmosphere almost forgotten in her glad relief over Mrs. Murphy’s immediate future, ran up-stairs and down the hall to her own room. ”