The Crocodile | Page 7

my father and said gravely: "Did anything happen, Uncle Richard, when you called? Did you see the -- the face -- of ----"
"No, child," said my father sadly. "I was so foolish, I may say undignified, as to try a childish and foolish experiment. It is unnecessary to say that the tall and stately form and classic face of Richard's dear mother did not appear to me. But I caught a glimpse of another face, Virginia ---- a face white and broken by sorrow and regret, a face that it was not pleasant to see...How it all comes back to me," he went on. "Here I stood by her casket, ignorant of time and place -- ignorant of all earthly things but loss -- and for the last time looked upon her beauty. No, not for the last time,

For all my daily trances
And all my nightly dreams
Are where thy bright eye glances
And where thy footstep gleams.
"Ay, child, but she was bonny! Was she not bonny, Richard?"
I do not know what prompted Virginia to ask the sudden question which turned my father's face for a moment into a painful blank and placed him in a position from which he extricated himself, I am forced to believe, only by a real and searching act of memory.
"What was her name?" said Virginia quickly.
It was a full half minute before my father managed to stammer my mother's name. But during the ensuing days it was constantly on his lips, as if he wished to make up to it for the oblivion into which it had been allowed to drop.
That afternoon it rained violently, and Virginia persuaded me to explore with her the mysteries of the ancient and cobwebby attic that occupied the whole upper floor of our house. It was a place in whose slatted window blinds sparrows built their nests, and in which a period, that of my mother's brief mistressship, had been perfectly preserved. It was the most cheerful part of the house.
Among other things we found in a trunk of old fashion my mother's wedding regalia. A dress of apple-green silk embroidered about the neck and wrists with tiny forget-me-nots, faded to the palest shade of lilac; a pair of tiny shoes of the same apple-green silk, with square toes and dark jade buttons; a veil of venetian point, from which a large square had been cut, and the brittle remnants of a wreath my mother's wedding wreath, which old Ann had often told me was combined of apple and orange flowers. When Virginia stood up and held the neck of my mother's dress level with the neck of her own, it did not reach to her ankles, and she smiled at me.
"Richard," she said, "I could not get into this dress. Your tall and stately mother was no bigger than I."
"And no sweeter, I fancy," said I. For the being together with Virginia over my mother's things had suddenly opened my heart to her.
"Oh, Virginia," I went on, "it makes me sick to think of your living on in this dead house. I want you to be happy. I want to make you happy. You are the only good thing that was ever in my life. I know it now. And I -- I want to be happy, too...."
We explored the attic no more that day, and after supper we told my father.
From the very announcement to him of our engagement a marked change came over my father. Hitherto his influence had been for darkness, but of a silent and quiet character, like that which clouds spread through a wood at noon; but now he had become baleful and pointed in his efforts to make us unhappy.
To set in motion any machinery of escape was too impracticable and tedious to be thought of. Had I been for myself alone, I would have left him at this period and endeavored to support myself. But with Virginia to care for -- and I could not leave her while I made my own way the impulse was empty. He made attacks on our happiness with tongue and contrivance. He descended to raillery and sneers, even to coarseness. Yet when the confines of endurance had been approached too closely, and I threatened to cross them, he clung to me with such a seeming of feeling and patheticness that I was forced to hold back. Through these harsh times Virginia was all sweetness and patience, but her cheeks lost their color and her body the delicious fullness of its lines.
My father was at times so eccentric in his behavior that I had it often in mind to ask the investigations of a physician. But as often the horror of a son prying after madness in his father withheld me. As always, his actions centered around