It seemed all at once as if some wilful perversity seized Molly; at home she was so petulant Alexina dared not cross her, for to anger her was to make her cough; abroad she was gayer than any, almost to recklessness. Celeste, taciturn and secretive, kept herself between mother and daughter insistently, and often the door to Molly’s room was locked until afternoon. Mrs. Garnier must not be disturbed, she said.
One of these times, a day in late July, Alexina went out to the Carringfords’. Emily knew most of the comings and goings of Alexina and her mother. In her heartprobably she was envious, though to Alexina she was concerned.
“That picnic of last week is being talked about, Alexina,” she said.
Alexina flushed, but she was honest. “It ought to be,” she said. Gaiety can tread close upon the heels of recklessness. But if Molly went the daughter had to go, for this very reason, though she could not tell Emily this.
So she spoke of other things. “Do you know anything of Uncle Austen?” she asked. “Is he still taking his meals down-town and sleeping at the house?”
Emily looked conscious. “Yes,” she said, “I think he is.”
Somehow Alexina felt that Emily not only knew but wanted it to be felt that she knew. Then why hesitate and say only that she thought so?
“How’s Garrard?” Alexina asked suddenly. Garrard was young Doctor Ransome. Emily flushed a little, but she answered unconcernedly, “Well enough, I reckon.”
On Alexina’s return to the hotel, the clerk stopped her in the corridor, looking a little embarrassed under the clear, surprised gaze of the young lady. “It’s about a little matter with Mrs. Garnier; it’s been running two months now.”
A moment after, as she went on blindly up the stairs, a folded paper in her hand, she understood; understood what Georgy had offered to share with her, what the taciturn secretiveness of Celeste meant. She went in through the parlour to her mother’s room, from which of late she had been so much shut out.
“Molly,” she said, her voice soundingstrange to herself, as she held out the paper open.
Molly, risen on her pillow, looked at it, at her, her eyes growing big. She was frightened, and cowered a little, crumpling some letters in her lap.
“Don’t look at me like that, Malise,” she said. “I’ve some of the money you gave me left—I’ll help to pay it.”
That she was afraid only because of the bill!
“Oh—” Alexina breathed it rather than uttered it.
Molly, risen from her elbow to sitting posture, was looking at her with big, miserable eyes, her throat, so slight and pretty, swelling with the sobs coming.
But the other came first, and with it came the terror. “Malise, Malise, hold me; hold me. I’m afraid!”
Celeste was out.
Alexina, holding her mother, could reach the bell, and rang it, again and again.
“Oh,” she said to the boy when he came; “get a doctor.”
“What one?” he asked.
Alexina remembered Dr. Ransome.
Then she sat and fed ice to Molly and tried to keep her still. It is a fearful thing to feel the close, clinging touch of a person we are shrinking from. It was a hot, drowsy afternoon. The clock on the parlour mantel ticked with maddening reiteration. It seemed hours before Dr. Ransome came. Then a moment later Celeste returned. Molly flung her arms out to the old woman.
“He’s dead, mammy,” she wailed; “Jean’s dead; the letters came after you went—and I’m afraid, I’m afraid of it, I’m afraid to die!”
It was to Celeste Molly had to tell it. The daughter listened with a sudden resentment towards Celeste.
Molly was not going to be better right at once, and Alexina and Dr. Garrard Ransome had many opportunities for talk. She stopped him in the parlour, as he was going, one morning. It had been on her mind for a long time to ask him something. “It’s odd, your name being Ransome,” she said. “Mrs. Leroy, who used to live where you do, had been a Miss Ransome.”
“She’s my cousin Charlotte,” said the young fellow; “that’s how my mother came to fancy living where we do, when we came down from Woodford to Louisville. She used to visit the Leroys there you see.”
“Oh,” said Alexina, “really? They were very good to me.”
The blue eyes of the doctor were regardingher intently, but as if thought were concentrated elsewhere. “I wonder if it was you Cousin Charlotte meant? I was down there two winters ago for a month. They live in Florida, at a place called Aden.”
“Yes,” said Alexina, “Aden.”
“And she asked me about some young girl who, she said, lived across from the cottage. Of course I didn’t know.”
“I wasn’t there then,” said Alexina; “I was at school. They were good to me; are they well—and happy?” The eagerness was good to see, so dejected had the girl seemed of late.
“Well, yes, or were when mother last heard. Happy, too, I reckon, as it’s counted with us poor families used to better things.”
“Tell me about them, if you don’t mind. They were the best friends I ever had.”
“Well,” he said, looking rather helpless inthe undertaking, “there isn’t much to tell. They’re getting along. The Captain was book-keeper for a steamboat line down there, went home every week, but, somehow, a year ago, they dropped him; he’s getting old, the Captain is.”
“Yes, he must be. And Mrs. Leroy?”
“Cousin Charlotte? Well, she’s Cousin Charlotte. Some ways she’s a real child about things and mighty helpless when it comes to managing, but she never thinks about repining, and it’s funny how she’ll do whatever King tells her.”
“And he?”
“King? Oh, he’s all right. Queer fellow though, some ways, imperturbable as a young owl. Best poker player down there, and that’s saying something. It’s motley, Aden is, like all those small towns since the railroad went through ’em.”
The young man happening to glance at Miss Alexina, saw that he had said something wrong. He was the only child of his mother and so knew how ladies feel on certain subjects. Yet, on the other hand, Miss Alexina adored Major Rathbone, and the Major’s poker record, while possibly of a more local character, was scarcely less celebrated than his guerrilla past. Still, ladies are expected to be inconsistent.
“I shouldn’t have told that, I reckon,” he remarked; “you all don’t see these things as we do. He’s a fine fellow, King is. He’s a great shot, too,” cheerfully; “I went on a week’s hunt down in the glades with him. King’s all right.”
Maybe he was, but it sounded as though he was trifling. “Hasn’t he a business?” she asked with condemning brevity.
“I don’t know about calling it a business,”said William Leroy’s cousin; “I know he’s the busiest. It’s a big old place, you see, the grove they own, and he’s reclaiming it. There’s just one subject he’s discursive on, and that’s the best fertilizer for young orange trees.”
Somehow William Leroy did not shine against this background as his well-intending cousin meant he should. “And they’re poor, Mrs. Leroy and the Captain?” asked Miss Blair.
“Well,” admitted Garrard, “they aren’t rich.”
The girl sat thinking. “I’m going down there,” she said suddenly. “Is there a hotel? There is? Then I’m going to take Molly and go down to see them. There’s something I want to tell Mrs. Leroy and the Captain.”
“As good a place as any,” agreed Dr.Garrard. “I told you at the start Mrs. Garnier must not try a winter here.”
“We’ll go,” declared Alexina, then stopped. Maybe they would not be glad to see her. “But don’t mention the possibility if you should be writing,” she begged; “don’t mention knowing me—please. I—I’d like to discover it all for myself.”
After he had gone she went to the piano, near the window looking out over the warehouse roofs to the river, and, softly fingering some little melody, sat thinking.
There was a tap and Alexina turned on the piano stool as Emily Carringford came in. Somehow Emily, so prettily, daintily charming in her fresh white dress, made Alexina cross. She felt wilted and jaded, and who cared if she did? That her present state was brought about by her own choosing only made her crosser.
What was it in Emily’s manner? Had she grown more beautiful in a night? She dropped into a chair, and, holding her parasol by either end across her knee, looked over at Alexina on the stool, and, looking, laughed. It was a laugh made of embarrassment and complacency, half shy, half bold.
“Your Uncle Austen last night asked me to marry him, Alexina,” she said.
“Emily—” Alexina sprang from the stool and stood with apprehension rushing to her face in rising colour and dilated gaze. “Oh—Emily!”
Was it foreboding in her eyes as they swept Emily’s girlish loveliness?
“He didn’t seem to mind my being poor,” said Emily; “he said it was my practical and praiseworthy way of going to work that made him first—oh, Alexina,” she colouredand looked at the other, “he didn’t even mind our little house—and mother doing the work.”
A sort of rage against Emily seized Alexina. She stamped her foot.
“Oh,” she cried, “why shouldn’t he the rather go down on his unbending knees in gratitude that you’ll even listen? You’re twenty-one and he’s fifty-one. You have everything, you’re lovely, you’ve your voice, you haven’t begun to live yet—oh, I know he’s my uncle, and I remember all he’s done for me, but I’ve known him years, Emily,years, and I’ve never seen Uncle Austen laugh once.”
What on earth has laughing to do with it? Alexina always was queer. This from Emily. Not that she said it, except in the puzzled, uncomprehending stare at Alexina, while she returned to what she had cometo communicate. “We’re going to be married the first day of October,” she said. “Mr. Blair has to go East on some business then.”
Alexina drew herself together with a laugh. What was the use—yet she could not divest herself of a responsibility.
She looked at Emily, who was looking at her. Their eyes met. Alexina looked away.
“Emily,” she said, “there’s a thing”—it took effort to say it—“a thing maybe you haven’t thought of. It came to Aunt Harriet; it comes to everybody, I feel sure. Won’t you be cutting yourself off from any right to it?” The red was waving up to Alexina’s very hair.
Emily showed no resentment at this implication which both seemed to take for granted, but then she was not following Alexina very closely, her own thoughts being absorbing. “The wedding will have to bein our little house,” she said, “so it won’t make much difference about the dress; nobody’ll be there. But for the rest, I’m going to have some clothes. I told mother and father and grandfather so this morning.”
Alexina went over and seized the other’s hands as children do. A softer feeling had come over her. Perhaps Emily was doing this thing to help her people. Besides, she and Emily used to weave wonderful garbs in bygone days, for the wearing to the Prince’s ball. To be sure, one never had pictured an Uncle Austen as the possible Prince, but still Emily should have them, if she wanted them.
Alexina’s gaze fell upon a flower lying on the floor, which had dropped out of Garrard Ransome’s buttonhole. The boy loved flowers as most men from the blue grass country do, and the cottage yard was awilderness of them. She had almost forgotten Garrard’s share in this. She picked the flower up and handed it to Emily. “Dr. Ransome has been here,” she said, feeling treacherous—for the other man, after all, was her uncle.
Emily took it, and laid it against the lace of her parasol, this way and that.
“I’ve always, as far back as I can remember, meant to be somebody, something,” said Emily. She said it without emotion, as one states a fact. Then she rose and picked up her glove. “Sometimes I’ve thrown my arms out and felt I could scream, it all has seemed so poor and crowded and hateful to me,” which was large unburdening of self for Emily. Then she went. At the door she laid the flower on a chair.
The three weeks of Molly’s illness brought it to the end of August, and, as sheconvalesced, Alexina began to plan for Aden. In the midst of her preparations the Major and Harriet returned.
She went out to the house the morning of their arrival. The luggage was being unloaded at the curb as she reached the gate, and, hearing voices as she stepped on the porch, she looked in at the parlour window. Harriet, her hat yet on, was bending her head that little Stevie, urged by his mother, might kiss her. The baby was no shyer about it than the woman, yet the woman smiled as the baby’s lips touched her face.
As she rose she saw Alexina and came to the door to meet her. She kissed the girl almost with embarrassment, yet kept hold of her hands, while suddenly her eyes filled with something she tried to laugh away.
“I had your letter,” she was saying, “and resent it, too, that you are going, and so doesStephen.” Her face changed, her voice grew hesitant, hurried. “He’s never going to be better than now”—was it a sob?—“but since I may have him, may keep him, and he is willing now to live so for me, though not at first, not at first— Oh, Alexina, it has been bitter!”
Alexina followed her into the parlour. The Major was there in a wheeled chair, the babies afar off, refusing to obey the maternal pokes and pushes to go to him, and regarding him and his wheeled affair with furtive, wide-eyed suspicion. The eyes of the Major were full of the humour of it.
“Now had I been a gamboling satyr on hoofs they would have accepted me at once,” he assured Alexina. “It’s this mingling of the familiar with the unnatural—”
He was holding the girl’s hand while he spoke and looking up keenly at her pretty,tired face. There had been enough in her letters for them to have divined something of her trouble.
“To some it comes early, to others late, Alexina,” he said quite gently. He had noted the signs—the violet shadows beneath the baffled young eyes, the hint of the tragedy in their depths.
Alexina sat down suddenly and, leaning her face on the arm of the wheeled chair, began to cry, not that she meant to do it at all.
Time was when Harriet would have been at a loss, even now she was embarrassed, though she hovered over the girl, anxious and solicitous, and even touched the pretty, shining hair with her hand.
“Let her alone: let her cry it out,” said the Major.
Alexina, groping for his hand, held to it like a very child and cried on.
“Joy will be part of the Kingdom of God.”RENAN.
“Joy will be part of the Kingdom of God.”RENAN.
Immediately after the wedding Alexina and Molly went South. Molly turned petulant at sight of Aden and Alexina could not blame her; indeed, she and Celeste were of a mind with her as they drove from the station to the hotel.
The horses ploughed through loose, greyish sand, the sidewalks along the street, ostensibly the business thoroughfare, were of board, not in the best of repair, and the skyline of the street was varied according as the frame stores had or did not have a sham front simulating a second story. Men sat on tilted chairs beneath awnings along the way andstared at the occupants of the carriage as it passed. It was mid-afternoon, which, in Aden, seemed to be a glaring, shadeless hour and, but for these occasional somnolent starers, a deserted one. Yet people lived here, existed, spent their lives in this crude, poor hideousness, this mean newness; the Leroys lived here! And that their son would let them, would remain himself!
“What did we come for anyhow?” queried Molly. “The world is full of charming places. You do adopt the queerest notions, Malise.”
Malise sat convicted. It had sounded so alluring, so suggestive of charm and languor; the very name of Aden had breathed a sort of magic.
And Alexina had come, too, buoyed up by a large and epic idea of restitution. How foolish, how young, how almost insultingfrom the Leroys’ standpoint it suddenly seemed.
“We spent two winters in Italy, Jean and I, and one in Algiers,” Molly was saying plaintively. “Heavens, Malise, they’re building that house on stilts, right over a sinkhole of tin cans.”
For that matter there were tin cans everywhere. It was most depressing.
“Even Louisville was better than this,” said Molly grudgingly. “Don’t look so resigned, Malise; it’s not becoming.”
They turned a corner and the driver stopped before a long, two-storied building, painted white, which proved to be the hotel. It stood up from the street on wooden posts, the space between latticed. A railed gallery ran across the front, steps ascending midway of its length. Two giant live-oaks flanked the building either end, the wooden sidewalkcut out to encircle their great roots, and, while handbills and placards were tacked up and down the rugged, seamy trunks, yet grey moss drooped from the branches and swept the gallery posts. The building looked roomy, old-fashioned and reposeful, and Alexina’s spirits rose. She gathered up the wraps, Celeste the satchels—no one ever looked to Molly to gather up anything—and they went in.
The place seemed deserted and asleep, but just inside the doorway, where the hall broadened into an office, a man stood looking through a pile of newspapers. His clothes were black and his vest clerical; below its edge hung a small gold cross. He turned politely, then said he would go and find some one.
“Dear me,” said Molly, brightening, “he’s handsome.”
Two days after, they were settled in comfortable rooms overlooking the hotel grounds. A slope down to a small lake boasted some gnarled old live-oaks and pines, and one side was set out with a young orange grove. Across the water one could see several more or less pretentious new houses built around the shore. The breeze tasted of pine and Molly had slept a night through without coughing.
“But, Heavens!” she complained, the second afternoon, lolling back in a wooden arm-chair on the hotel gallery; “isn’t there anything to do?”
Alexina and the young man in clerical garb were her audience. He was the Reverend Harrison Henderson, and had charge of the Episcopal Church of Aden and lived at the hotel. He seemed a definite and earnest man. His blond profile was strong.It was a rather immobile face, perhaps, but it lighted with very evident pleasure as he answered Mrs. Garnier.
“How would you like to go out to Nancy?” he proposed; “it’s quite an affair for a lake down here, and a young fellow out there rents sail-boats.”
“Charming,” agreed Molly, sitting up. “You have ideas; you can’t have been here long.”
Mr. Harrison smiled, though it was an acknowledging rather than a mirthful smile. Life is too earnest for mere laughter, but his zeal to serve Mrs. Garnier was not to be doubted.
“What do you say, Miss Blair?” he asked, turning to that young person.
“Who?—I?” Alexina had been leaning forward with her elbow on the gallery railing, her eyes looking off to a line ofpines against the sky. She had been wondering how she should inquire about the Leroys, and if she really wanted to. She came back to the veranda and the present.
“I think it would be charming, too,” she replied.
“Then we’ll go right away. I’ll order the carriage, so as to see the sunset,” he said, and rose. “You will need wraps for Mrs. Garnier.” Somehow a man never thinks the other woman will need anything.
He spoke briskly and went off down the plank sidewalk towards town with a swing. The day was fair, the air was soft, and the blood in the Reverend Henderson, despite the dogmatic taint in it, was red and young.
Out at Lake Nancy Osceola, a young fellow in flannel shirt, knickerbockers and canvas shoes, was scanning the shore froma wooden pier which ran out the extent of shallow water, having just made fast the sail-boat rising and falling with the swell at the pier’s end.
A grove of well grown orange trees stretched up the slope from the water. The trees were heavy with fruit and looked sturdy and well cared for. To the right stood the frame packing sheds, and beyond, amid higher foliage against the cerulean sky, showed a house roof.
But the young fellow on the pier was gazing in the other direction, where, through the straight vistas of the grove, a carriage was being driven under the trees, the top sweeping the fruit laden branches. The young man hallooed as he started in the pier, but a negro digging among the trees had dropped his spade and was running up. The carriage stopped and the young minister of the AdenEpiscopal Church got out. Naturally, it was to be supposed that it was some person with no more common sense.
But there were others than the Reverend Mr. Henderson descending—two ladies. Some party from the hotel come for a sail, probably.
It was the duty of coloured Pete to go with sailing parties, but there was work that he should finish this afternoon. The old darky was backing the horse. The minister and the ladies were approaching.
The young fellow was just in from a sail, having been down to the sedge land with his gun, but he would go again. He gave a call. “It’s all right, Pete; go on with the ditching.”
His eyes were indifferent as he watched the approach, though their glance was straight and clear and keen. Suddenly thelook changed, intensified, and the young fellow’s shoulders squared.
The minister led the way, talking with the pretty, slight woman, who stopped with protest every step as her feet went down in sand. Behind them came a jaunty-looking girl with light-footed carriage. The wind was ruffling and tossing her hair and she held to her hat as she stopped under the orange trees to look upon the prospect.
But the eyes watching her did not turn, knowing the scene on which she was gazing. It was Lake Nancy, long and lizard-like—its sapphire water shimmering beneath the breeze—stretching westward between curving, twisting, inletted shores, fringed near at hand with the bright green of young oranges and lemons, and farther on by the darker live-oak and pine, while on the opposite side the line of forest stretched heavy andsombre, trailing grey moss hoariness into Nancy’s lapping wave.
And while the girl gazed on Nancy the young man watched her with a curious intentness but with no doubt. Then he walked in the length of the pier to meet them. As the girl’s eyes came round to him she changed to a startled pallor, white as her serge gown, and her eyes dilated, then into them came eagerness.
Except for a tightening pull on muscles about nose and mouth the young fellow stood impassive.
The colour rushed back into the girl’s face. The young man had turned and was shaking hands with Mr. Henderson. The minister was mentioning names, too, but the girl had her back to them and was studying the outstretch. Her head was high.
When she turned again Mr. Hendersonwas carefully piloting the other lady into the boat. “Malise,” that lady was calling. Malise, forced by this to come and be helped in, found herself in the stern. But her throat, because of a choked-back sob, hurt, and a vast homesickness and sense of futility was upon her.
When presently she could look up and around the little craft was skimming out across the lake to deep water, where it shifted westward and flew into the dying afternoon.
There were billowy puffs of clouds high above, softly flushing into rose with a golden fleeciness to their edges. Her mother’s talk and dulcet-toned laughter reached the girl, punctuated with the serious accents of Mr. Henderson. The two were sitting where the seats, running about, came together at the bow, and he, with an elbow onthe rail, was looking at Molly. Such a wistful, pretty child she looked in her white canvas dress, with her wind-blown, gauzy veil fluttering from her hat.
Alexina’s eyes were fixed on them, but she was conscious, too, of a gaze on her, which for all her hot pride and hurt she could not look around and meet. Once, when the sail was shifting and she knew the eyes would, perforce, be concerned therewith, she stole a hurried survey and saw a well-knit figure, quick in its movements, the muscles playing beneath the flannel shirt. A discarded coat was upon the seat near her.
“Down, please,” came in cool, deliberate tones from the owner of the coat and the gaze. The head of the girl went down, while the sail swung about. The boat dipped, righted, then flew ahead, following the curving shores of the lake.
The very air seemed flushing, the shimmering water had a thousand tints, the shores slipping by breathed out odours of mould, and leaf and vine. The western sky was triumphing, clouds of purple and of crimson lifting one above another about a golden centre. And they in the boat were speeding into the glory; the very rosiness of the air seemed stealing down upon them and enveloping them. The sense of avoirdupois, of gravitation, was lost; one felt winged, uplifted; it was good all at once, it was good to live, to be.
The eyes and the gaze were on her again; she felt them and turned suddenly and faced them. The look she met was deep and warm, but it changed, holding hers, grew cool, enigmatical, impersonal. Did he not know her then, or did he not want to know her?
This time tears of hurt and pride rushedto her eyes. He was watching, but she could not get her eyes away, even with those hateful tears welling.
The sail shifted, for no reason apparently. “Down, please,” he commanded. But as the boat dipped, shook itself, righted again, and flew on through the rosy light, his head came up near hers and his voice, in the old, boyish way, said: “Really?”
Sudden light shone through the tears in the girl’s eyes. Molly would have wrung her hands with an artist’s anguish, this was the place for coquetry!
“I thought you didn’t want to know me and I was hurt,” said Alexina.
“It was yours to know first,” said Willy Leroy stoutly, but his eyes were laughing.
“Oh,” said Alexina, doubtfully; “why, yes; perhaps it was.” And then she laughed, too, gaily.
As Molly, Alexina and Mr. Henderson sat on the front gallery of the hotel the next morning, they were joined by one Mr. Thompson Jonas, a lawyer of Aden, who lived above his office and took his meals at the hotel.
Mr. Jonas was small, wiry and muscular, of Georgia stock, with a fierce little air and a fierce moustache, and quick, bright blue eyes, never still. He had sprung to the aid of Molly and Alexina one morning and flung a door open as they passed from the dining-room, and speedily they were all good friends.
It was characteristic of him that he should have flung the door back, not merely opened it. There was something of homage in the act. Within the body of the little man was the chivalrous spirit of a Chevalier Bayard, a Cœur de Lion. The big soul of Mr. Jonas was imprisoned in his pigmy person as the spirit of the genius in the casket.
He was a Nimrod, too, and even now stood in hunting accoutrements, seeming rather to have been shaken into his natty leggings than they to have been drawn onto him, and there was a flare and dip to his wide, soft hat and a jaunty fling to his knotted tie. His dog, a Gordon setter bitch, sat on her haunches by him as he stood, his fingers playing with her silky ears.
“Now, you’d better come go with me, Henderson,” he was urging, “the buggy’shere at the door and you need it—you need this sort of thing more.”
“It’s a busy day with me, thank you,” answered the Reverend Henderson a little coldly, for this Mr. Jonas was a man of no church. His faith, he had frequently assured the young clergyman, would long ago have died for breathing space in any creed he yet had met with.
“When you’re older you’ll understand better what I mean, my dear boy,” the little man had in good part and cheerfulness assured the other. “Come around and use my books any time you like.”
For the soul of Mr. Jonas enthused—or convinced its owner that it did—over Confucius, and further revelled in the belief that it delved in occult knowledge; it also led him to place the volumes of the early Fathers on his book-shelves and the literatureof the Saints and of Kant and Comte and Swedenborg; it conducted its owner to the feet of Emerson and Thoreau; it made him talk Darwinism. Jesus Christ and Plato, Mr. Jonas loved to say, made up his ideal philosophy.
Mr. Henderson, on the other hand, spoke of church buildings in Aden other than his own as assembling places. It was inevitable he did not give his approval to Mr. Jonas. His feeling against the little man even made him enumerate the occupations ahead for the day, as if it was a sort of avowal of the faith to thus declare them.
“It’s a busy day with me, thank you. I have a feast day service and a guild meeting, besides my parochial duties and a vestry meeting for the evening.”
“Dear me,” said Molly, looking at him. “To be sure—I’d forgotten you’re a minister.”The young man looked up, instant self-arraignment in his face, for permitting it to be forgotten.
“When do you have service?” Molly was saying. “We must come over, Malise and I.”
He told her gravely.
Mr. Jonas was standing against the gallery railing, rising and falling on his neat little toes, the setter’s eyes following his every movement. He was facing Mrs. Garnier and her daughter, looking from the mother, with her red-brown hair and shadowy lashes, to the girl, quite lovely, also, when she smiled in this sweet, sudden way up at him. She had nice hair, too, something the colour of wild honey.
“Charming women, charming women,” he was summing them up.
Yet could Mr. Jonas have called to mindany women, the old or young, the forlorn or charming, who had not moved him to chivalric emotion in some form?
Alexina was looking up the street. Mr. Jonas turned, too, as a wagonette, drawn by two big, iron-grey mules, swung round the corner, a glitter of brass and a hint of red about the harness. A young fellow on the front seat was driving; a lady sat behind.
“The finest boy and best shot in Jasmine County,” said Mr. Jonas, starting forward as the mules were reined up at the hotel entrance, “and the foolishest, most profoundly wise mother.”
Alexina was going forward, too. “We—that is, I know them,” she told him; “they are old friends, the Leroys.”
For she had known Charlotte in a moment.
A darky boy lounging about came to takethe mules and Willy sprang his mother out, as lightly as ever a girl would spring, and brought her up the steps to Alexina.
Charlotte’s embrace was eager and ardent; then she cried a little, with her face against the girl’s shoulder.
“For my youth,” she said the next instant, lifting her head and smiling at the girl. “I’m almost a middle-aged woman, little Mab; I’m nearly forty-five and I don’t want to be.”
Vivacity, as of old, dwelt in Charlotte’s face and animated her lively movements, but her brilliant eyes were somewhat sunken, as happens with women of marked features and dashing beauty; the skin was growing sallow too, and as the cheeks and temples drew in the features stood large.
“I don’t know how to grow old,” saidCharlotte, and truthfully, “I don’t know how to let go. I haven’t the resourcefulness, or quiet, or repose, for an old woman.”
Always, ’way back as Charlotte Ransome, she had loved the showy, and she loved it still, as evidenced by the scarlet ribbon from which her fan hung, and the flowered muslin, showing the hand of village dressmaking. But she bore herself with the smiling pleasure of a child in them.
Willy joined them. He had been talking with Mr. Jonas, and evidently had declined the expedition too, for the little man, calling to the setter, went off grumbling and upbraiding the lot of them.
“We came early to avoid the heat,” Charlotte explained, as they went to join Molly and Mr. Henderson.
Molly’s eyes swept Mrs. Leroy’s youthful fineries wonderingly, curiously. It was nocredit to Molly that her sixth sense lay in an instinctive selection of the appropriate in the beautiful. She wondered much as a child wonders over the mysterious, at what she more often than not saw on others.
She lolled back now in her simple dress, of which Alexina had reason to know the cost, and she lolled indifferently—Celeste or some one would press out the rumples when need be—then she held out a pretty hand to Charlotte.
But Mrs. Leroy, the greetings over, spread her draperies with some care and absorption as she sat down. She was another type of helpless person, the reverse of Molly, with a carping sense of responsibility.
Molly’s gaze followed her concern with lazy interest in which lurked laughter, for the dress upon which the care was bestowed was so, well—
Alexina’s face grew hot; she hated Molly, whose every thought she was reading; and, by the girl’s arrangement, they fell into two groups, Molly and the men making one, King William perched on the railing of the gallery, and Alexina and Mrs. Leroy the other, drawn a little apart. There was so much to say.
“We see the Kentucky papers,” Charlotte told Alexina, “so I know of most of the happenings.” She drew a little breath. “And Austen Blair is married?”
“Yes,” said Alexina, “just before we came.”
Charlotte was regarding her like a child with a secret trembling on its lips. “I was engaged to him once, Alexina, and we broke it.” Light from many sides began to break in upon Alexina.
“Oh,” she said; “Mrs. Leroy!”
“It’s odd, isn’t it?” said Charlotte. “He was the only man ever caring for me that I never subjugated—except Willy here—” Her voice brightened, while she nodded, in her near-sighted way, at Mr. Henderson. “As for him, he’s ruled me and browbeat me all his life.” And Charlotte smiled contentedly at the minister.
Alexina reached out and, with a passionate sort of protectingness, took hold of the beringed hand wielding a fan with vivacity and sprightliness.
“I wish we could have given him more advantages,” Mrs. Leroy was continuing; “but he’s had to plan for us somehow instead. I remember he wasn’t eleven years old, though it seemed natural enough he should be doing it at the time, when we came over from St. Louis to Louisville without his father, and Willy had to buy the ticketsand check the trunks. I suppose I ought to have realized it, but I never had done such things in my life, and I lost my purse in the depot, I remember, and a gentleman found it, and so Willy took hold.
“We sent him into town here, after we came to Aden, to the Presbyterian minister, who taught him. He wanted to go to college, not that he’d admit it now. Then as soon as he was any size he began at his father about reclaiming the grove. That is, Willy planned and Georges listened. Willy’d got an idea from Mr. Jonas that the railroad was coming through some day, just as it has, but it’s been a long pull and a wait, for this is the first full yield for his trees. He’s been offered seven thousand for the crop as it hangs, but the mortgage is eight thousand on the place, which went for fertilizing and ditching and sheds, and living, you know,so Willy is holding for eight thousand and Mr. Jonas is urging for nine.”
Charlotte’s pride in these statements was beaming.
“As soon as the grove proves itself, the place will sell for several times its old value, and we’re going back to Kentucky, to Woodford. Willy wants to buy back my father’s farm, not that he’ll let me say that he does, he’s so afraid of admitting anything, but when he was nineteen, three years ago, he had the measles—wasn’t it dear and comical, like he was a child again—and he let me hold his hand, in the dark room, you know, and we talked about it, when we would go back.”
The girl was patting Charlotte’s hand softly and winking back tears while she laughed. Why tears? She herself had no idea.
Mrs. Leroy had a thousand questions to ask, she said, but somehow she never got to them.
“Dear me,” she said presently, “we have to go and I’ve talked of nothing but my own affairs. In my solitude down here I’ve grown a shameless egotist.”
As if she had been ever anything else, the unconscious soul!
“But to be with one of my own sex—some one linked with the past, too, is extenuation. There’s so much a woman can’t talk of with men, they have such different ways of seeing things, and let her love her men folk never so dearly, if there’s none of her own sex around, a woman’s lonesome, Alexina.”
“Yes,” said Alexina, “she is.” But she said it absently, for she was conscious of King William’s gaze being upon her. Shelooked up laughing, yet a little confused, for his look was warm.
He slipped along the railing, leaving Mrs. Garnier and the minister chatting. In this blue serge suit and straw hat he looked very like the King William of long ago, dark, keen and impatient.
“What do you think of it, Aden?” he asked.
“I like it,” said Alexina. “Somehow as soon as you are in a thing the scene changes to out of doors. It used to be Indians on the common, or Crusoe in the yard, back there in Louisville.”
“You began by saying you liked it,” he reminded her. Did he think to tease? His eyes were naughty. Here was a zest; this was no Georgy.
“And I do,” she said, standing to it. “I do like it.”
Was he always laughing at people, this William Leroy?
“They are coming to spend a day with us this week, Alexina and her mother,” Mrs. Leroy here told her son, at which, for all the imperturbability of his countenance, Alexina was conscious of something a little less happy about the son.
“They’re very good to come,” he responded. The tone might be called guarded.
Certain recollections were crowding upon Alexina. Mrs. Leroy’s management, her housekeeping, even to a child’s comprehension, had been palpably erratic and unexpected.
The girl understood his masculine helplessness. Hers were the eyes that laughed now.
“I’ve set the table in your house before,” she informed him, “while you made toast.”
His countenance cleared. He met her gaze solemnly. “It’s a bargain,” he said. “What day, mother?”
That night Alexina was chatting with Mr. Jonas. She liked him. “You said this morning,” she reminded him, “that Mrs. Leroy was the wisest, foolishest mother—what did you mean?”
“Just that,” said Mr. Jonas. “Hasn’t her very incompetency made the boy?”
For the next three days Mr. Henderson avoided them. He spoke in the hall or dining-room, to be sure, but joined them no more in plans or on the gallery.
And Molly turned petulant. Why had they ever come to Aden, she moaned. “Can’t you propose something, Malise?” she besought.
Alexina, endeavouring to write letters, felt tired. She had been up at Molly’s call a dozen times in the night.
“We’re going to spend to-morrow with Mrs. Leroy,” she reminded her mother.
“She looks like Mrs. Malaprop,” said Molly crossly.
The daughter’s face flushed. Youth is rawly sensitive to ridicule of its friends. Besides, what would they find at Lake Nancy? It would be poor, she expected that, and it might be—pitiful? Not to her, not to her, but Molly was so unable to see behind things. If a thing was poor to Molly it was only poor and she said so. Alexina hoped her mother would not go.
But when Friday came Molly, in feverish, restless state, was ready for anything and even brightened up over it, while it was Alexina who was petulant, and put on one dress and took it off, and tried another, even with William Leroy down-stairs in the wagonette, waiting.
But she felt better as she came out into the sunshine and the dress she had finally decided on seemed to settle on her into sudden jauntiness.
William shook hands. There was a comfortable sense of humour about him.
“It’s fair to divide families into component parts on occasions,” he stated, and put Alexina in a place by his own and Molly behind. Molly pouted.
“And, besides, we are going to drop Henderson at a sick parishioner’s on the way,” he said, with a naughty glance at her. “I met him starting to the livery stable just now and stopped him.”
Molly’s face cleared. She met his eyes with insouciance, but, somehow, one felt all at once that she liked him better.
Mr. Henderson came out with a satchel and climbed in. He looked stern and uninviting, Alexina thought, but the note of Molly’s random remarkings promptly brightened. Willy flicked the whip above the big grey span and off they trotted across town, westward.
The morning was keen enough that the sun’s warmth was pleasant and quickened the blood. Aden was left behind. Here and there on the outskirts frame houses, crudely and hideously cheap, were building. Land everywhere was being cleared, the felled trees lying about, the whirl of a portable sawmill telling their destiny, while burning stumps filled the air with creosote pungency.
Then the despoilments of progress were left behind and the untouched pine woods closed about them, and trees rose tall, straight, twigless, to where a never-ceasing murmur soughed, and the light came sifting, speckled, and flickering through the gloom, upon the sandy ground and scrub palmetto beneath.
Alexina breathed deep. It was quiet, and peaceful and solemn.
“Isn’t it?” said William sociably.
She looked up; she hadn’t spoken.
The trees thinned, grew sparse, and the road came out into the open. A mile farther on they entered a belt of hummock land, a wild growth of live-oak, cypress, magnolias, thicketed, intertwisted, rank. Grey moss trailed and swept their faces as they passed under, vines clambered and swung and festooned, gophers crawled out of the path, and a gleaming snake slid across the road and into the palmetto undergrowth.
He was looking at her as they came out, she flushed and ecstatic.
“But wait,” said he, “until I show it to you after a while in bloom.”
Just beyond the hummock he drew rein at a clearing before an unpainted frame house, even cheaper and more hideous than the most. Mr. Henderson got out, King handing the satchel after him.
“It’s a death-bed,” he said under his breath to the two, as the minister went toward the house; “that’s the pitiful part of it down here, people taking all they’ve got to get here, only to die.”
“Don’t—don’t tell about it,” said Molly sharply.
William Leroy touched the mules and they went on. A little later Alexina felt Molly’s hand upon her. “Come back with me, Malise,” she begged. Her face looked drawn and grey.
“But we’re there,” explained King, and a minute after turned in at an old iron gate, flanked by two ancient live-oaks. An osage hedge, cut back upon its woody stock, stretched about the place either side from the gate. Within, the driveway made a sweep off towards buildings in the rear, while a shell path led up to the house, which wasof frame, wide, with porches across the front, up-stairs and down. Bermuda grass covered the sandy surface of the yard, which was large and sloped back towards the lake, visible through the grove. Here and there a banana plant reared its ragged luxuriance and a stunted palm or two struggled upward; there was on old rustic seat beneath a gnarled wild orange tree.
As Willy helped them out, Charlotte appeared and came animatedly down the path between the borders of crepe myrtle. Alexina ran ahead to meet her. The girl’s hands were quite cold. Mrs. Leroy’s white dress, relic of bygone fashion, fluttered with rose-coloured ribbons, and suddenly Alexina seemed to see a wide old cottage in a shrub-grown yard, and on its porch a lady in a gauzy dress with rosy ribbons, gathering a little child into her lap.
The girl threw her arms about this Charlotte in the old white dress, and then, because her eyes were full of foolish tears, ran on, for the Captain was on the porch, in a cane arm-chair, a line of blue smoke trailing up from the cigar in his fingers. Laughing and breathless she went up the steps and their eyes met. Never a word spoke either, but the hand of the man closed on the girl’s and rested there until the others came up.
“Willy wouldn’t let me do a thing about your coming, Alexina,” Mrs. Leroy began, as she reached them; “he said he’d tend to it himself and wouldn’t let me give a direction. He’s fussy sometimes and notionate, like the time when the surveyors were staying with us, and Mandy set some dishes on a chair. I’d already told him she didn’t know how to clear a table for dessert, and he said I ought to have taught her.”
The girl’s eyes danced. “You’re all of you the same, the very same; not one of the three has changed.”
Charlotte beamed. She took it with undisguised pleasure that she had not changed.
King came round the house. He had taken the mules to the stable. “I’m holding you to that bargain,” he reminded Alexina.
Molly looked bored. Such things were only playful and interesting as she was part of them. Then she said she was tired, evidently having no mind for a morning with Mrs. Leroy.
“You shall go up and lie down in my room,” said Charlotte.
The three women went in. The hall dividing the house was wide and high, its floor of boards a foot wide, and bare but for a central strip of carpet; an old mahoganyhat-tree stood against one wall, a mahogany sofa against the other, with straight backed chairs flanking both. It was all labouriously clean and primly bare.
The rooms up-stairs were big, with old mahogany furniture set squarely about them.
“They didn’t want me to bring the furniture, Willy and his father, when we came,” Charlotte told Alexina; “it cost more to get it here than to buy new, but I didn’t want new; I wanted this.”
Everything was innocent of covers or hangings, nor were there any pictures. She explained this.
“I don’t know how to drive nails,” she told them, “and Willy and the Captain don’t care. Willy had the house papered this fall in case of people coming about buying, and the papering men took the nails out thewalls and he won’t bother to put them in. They’re all in here.”
Charlotte didn’t mean the nails; she threw open a closet door and ancestral Ransomes, neatly set against the walls, peered out of the dark.
Alexina put a hand over Charlotte’s on the door knob. Molly yawned.
“It seems chilly here in my room,” said Charlotte; “the sun isn’t round this side yet. Put your hats on the bed and Mrs. Garnier shall go lie on Willy’s sofa.”
They followed her across the hall. “He has his bed and things in there,” she explained, nodding towards an adjoining room, “and he keeps his books and such in here.”
On the floor, otherwise uncarpeted, lay a bearskin. There was a sofa against the wall and a plain deal table in the centre of the room, piled with papers, books and pipes,about a lamp. There were some chairs; a gun-rack, antlers, an alligator skin and some coloured prints of English hunting scenes on the walls, and an old-fashioned, brass-mounted cellarette hung in an angle. The south window looked out across the grove upon Nancy; between the two east windows stood an old secretary book-case.
Charlotte suggesting that Mrs. Garnier put on a wrapper, the two went back to her bed-room. Alexina stood hesitating. She felt a sense of surreptitiousness and embarrassment, and then took a step to the book-case—any one might do that much—and read the titles of the books.
About orange culture and fertilizing these first seemed to be, and those next were concerned with the breeding of stock. They meant Woodford and the future, probably. She skipped to the other shelves. Buckle’sIntroduction to the History of Civilization, Hallam’s Middle Ages, Wealth of Nations, Wilhelm Meister, Poems of Heinrich Heine, several volumes of Spencer and Huxley, Slaves of Paris, Lecocq, the Detective, File No. 118, The Lerouge Case, The Scotland Yard Detective, Carlyle’s French Revolution, Taxidermitology, Renan’s Life of Jesus, Pole on Whist, Hoyle, Tom Sawyer, Past and Present, Pickwick Papers, Herodotus, an unbroken shelf of Walter Scott, A Pair of Blue Eyes, Cousin Pons, Drainage, Pendennis, Small Fruit Culture.
Why, here was a world, within these glass doors, she did not know. Yet she had read diligently among Uncle Austen’s books. She looked back in memory over his shelves; Macaulay, yes, Uncle Austen cared so essentially for Macaulay, and for Bancroft and Prescott, and Whittier and Lowell. Therewere the standards in fiction and poetry in well-bound sets. Uncle Austen himself admired Alexander Pope, and Franklin’s Autobiography; he liked Charles Reade’s novels, too, bearing on institutional reforms—
Here Mrs. Leroy and Molly came back, Molly in a white wrapper and Charlotte bearing a pillow and a silk quilt.
“Willy’s calling,” Charlotte told Alexina; “he wants you.”
He was at the foot of the stairs, and, waiting for her to get down, watched her hand on the banister. The wood was dark and the hand was white and slender. Then he held out a big, checked apron. She walked into it and looked over her shoulder while he tied the strings behind.
It takes time to set a table when neither is just certain where things are to be found.Hunting together in sideboard, cupboards, and on pantry shelves brings about a feeling of knowing each other very well. There was so much, too, to talk about.
“Do you remember—” it was Alexina pausing with a goblet in hand to ask it.
“Have you forgot—” King, producing a carving set, would rejoin.
Presently she paused. Twice she started to speak, hesitated, then said, “There’s a thing I want to ask you, or, rather, want to say—” Her voice was a little tremulous and breathless.
“Yes.”
“You remember—that is, you haven’t forgot the ‘King William’?”
She was looking away from him and he looking at her, his mouth odd, yet smiling, too. She was an honest and a pleasant thing to look upon. “Yes,” he told her, “aswell as I remember the raft we put off on from the desert island and the plains back of the stable—have you forgotten the trackless plains where we sat down to starve in the snow, with never a sign of deer or buffalo for days, or even a thing on wing? We’d just lighted on Hiawatha those days. There was an Indian, by the way, came up from the grass water yesterday and brought us venison for to-day.”
It was evident he did not mean to let her return to the subject.
Presently Alexina untied the apron. “I must see your mother some,” she said.
“But she does not want you,” declared his mother’s son; “she’s overjoyed to think you’re with me. She thinks there is something deficient in her son; she insists I’ve never spoken to a girl since we left you in Louisville. Besides, she’s in the kitchen,I hear her out there now, all fluttered herself and fluttering Aunt Mandy.”
But Alexina would go. “I must call Molly in time for dinner,” she insisted.
Now William Leroy supposed Mrs. Garnier to be in his mother’s room. A moment later he followed Alexina up the stairs, meaning to get something out of his desk which he wished to show her. He was a most direct youth, considering that he was, by his mother’s confession, a timorous one. There was an odd little smile about his mouth, perhaps because all things looked pleasant right now.
His nature was practical rather than sanguine, and built in general only on things achieved, but to-day the fruit was hanging golden on the trees and the grove was one of the few new ones in bearing. He hadanticipated the railroad by several years in planting, and now the grove and house were going to bring a figure larger than he ever had hoped for.
As the Israelites yearned for Canaan, he was looking towards the pastoral lands of Kentucky. To-day, for the once, he would let this new buoyancy, this unanalyzed optimism run warm in his blood; why not? He was young, he was strong, he was master of his circumstances for the first time.
He went up the steps lightly, springily, with a sort of exuberant joy in the mere action. His canvas shoes made no sound. The stairs landed him at his own door. He brought up short.
Alexina was standing midway of the threshold; he thought he heard a sob.
She turned hurriedly, her hands outspread across the doorway as by instinct.
“Don’t,” she begged; “please go away.” Then as he wheeled, “No, wait—” She swallowed before she could speak.
“It’s Molly,” she said; “can you send us back to town? she’s—she’s—”
“Not well,” the daughter was trying to say. The boy’s straightforward eyes were fixed on hers inquiringly.
“What’s the use; I can’t lie,” the girl broke down miserably. “I ought not to have come with her.” Her arms dropped from across the doorway. In all perplexity he was waiting. He had a glimpse of Molly within, drooping against the table, and her eyes regarding them with a kind of furtive fear.
His hunting flask from out the cellarette was there on the table.
The girl was speaking with effort. “I’m sorry; she must have felt bad and found it.”
She suddenly hid her face in her hands against the casement.
That roused him. He felt dazed. It needed a woman here to feel the way.
“I’ll get mother,” he said.
“Oh,” begged the girl, and quivered; “can’t we get back to town without—must she know?”
King was growing himself again. “Why,” he said, “of all people, yes, mother.”
He went down the steps two at a time. There was no sensitive apprehension in his manner when he brought her back, as there often was concerning his mother; he knew her strength as well as her incompetencies.
She came straight up and hardly noticed Alexina as she passed but went on to Molly, whose eyes, full of shame and fear, were dully watching the scene.
Charlotte put her arms about her, drewher to the sofa, and sat by her. “Poor dear,” she said; “poor dear.”
Molly drooped, trembled, then turned and clung to her, crying piteously. “You’re sorry for me? I did it because I’m afraid. He said they all come down here to die. Malise don’t know, she don’t understand, she’s hard.”
“You go down to your dinner, Alexina,” said Charlotte; “it’s waiting. Oh, yes, yes you will go.” There was finality in the tone, very different from Charlotte’s usually indefinite directions. “Leave your mother to me; oh, you needn’t tell me anything about it; I know. And take that hardness out of your face, Alexina, it’s your own fault if you let this embitter you, it’s ourselves that let things spoil our lives, not the things. I’ll tell you something, that you may believe I know, something that I toldWilly at a time his arrogance seemed to need the knowledge. My father, my great, splendid, handsome father, all my life was this way. But he came straight home to my mother, and so she kept him from worse, and held him to his place in the world. Keep on loving them, it’s the only way. Many a time we’ve all cried together like babies, father and mother and I, by her sofa.”
“Willy,” called Charlotte. The boy ran up from below. “Take Alexina down to her dinner and afterwards take her out of doors. No, you’re not going back to the hotel, not to-night. Willy can send Peter in for your woman and your things, for you’re going to stay here till she’s better and you see this thing differently.”
That evening King and Alexina sat on theedge of the pier, the water lapping the posts beneath their swinging feet. He was peeling joints of sugar-cane and handing her sections on the blade of his knife, she trying to convince herself that they were as toothsome as he insisted they were. He could idle like a child.
But the girl’s mind was back there in the house. “According to your mother,” she was saying, “there’s got to be affection back of the doing of a duty.” Poor child, she was putting it so guardedly, so impersonally she thought.
“Well,” said he, dropping his unappreciated bits of cane, piece by piece into the water, “that’s a woman’s way of looking at it.”
“What’s a man’s?” asked the girl, at that, “how does a man do hard things?”
“He just does ’em, I should say, anddoesn’t analyze. He’s got to be at something, you know; it’s part of the creed.”
“What creed?” demanded Alexina.
“Mr. Jonas’s.”
“Oh,” said Alexina, “yes, I see.”