Molly, Alexina and Celeste stayed a week at Nancy with the Leroys. It was a household wherein there was no strain, no tension, though, to be sure, there was small management. One had a comical comprehension that Mandy the cook and Tina the wash-woman kept their families off the gullibility and good faith of their mistress.
Alexina was sent into the sunshine.
“Keep her outdoors,” Charlotte commanded Willy; “the child’s morbid.”
Mr. Jonas drove out with trophies of game as offerings to Mrs. Garnier. One morning Mr. Henderson came with him in thebuckboard, and Molly and the two men sat in the sunshine on the porch and talked.
“Did he die?” she asked the minister presently.
“Who?”
“The man at the house where you stopped that day?” She asked it as one driven to know, even while apprehensive of the answer.
Exultation leaped for an instant to the young man’s face, a stern joy. “He died,” he told her, “but in the faith at the end.”
“In what faith?” Molly asked curiously. She was a child in so many things.
“The Church,” he told her, with reproof in his tone.
The click of Mr. Jonas’s incisors upon incisors chopped the air.
But Molly moved a little nearer the minister.
“Yes,” she agreed slowly, unwillingly almost; “they all do. Father Bonot used to say it over and over. They all come back to the Church to—to die.”
She was shivering.
There was a quick, snapped off h’ah from Mr. Jonas.
Mr. Henderson looked bewildered. “I did not know; then, Mrs. Garnier, you are—”
“I’m a Catholic,” said Molly, a little in wonder.
“Romanist?” said the other gently.
But Molly wasn’t listening, nor would she have known what the distinction meant, had she been. It was Mr. Jonas who gave forth another sound that was almost a snort, and marched off to where King and Alexina were sitting on the step.
Molly watched him go, then glancedaround as if to insure aloofness, and leaned forward, her fingers pulling at the edge of her handkerchief.
“You helped him to die, and you’re a priest—one sort of a priest—and I want to tell you—”
“No,” said the other, “you do not understand; let me make you see.”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Molly; “no,” hurriedly, “let me tell you. I want to tell you. It will help me. I take things—I have to; anything that will make me forget and make me sleep. I’m afraid—I take it because I’m afraid to die.”
He looked at her out of dull eyes. She was, self-avowedly, everything he held abhorrent—alien, worldly, and weak. He stammered something—was he asking God to help her, or himself?—and left her.
Later, as he and Mr. Jonas drove back to Aden, the eyes of Mr. Jonas snapped. “You’re brewing mischief to your own or somebody else’s peace of mind; you always are when you look like that. Out with it, man.”
Why Mr. Henderson should out with it, he himself knew less than any, but Mr. Jonas had a way.
The minister’s words came forth with effort.
“I’ve been seeking light to know why Mrs. Garnier was sent down here. I’ve never cared for a woman before; I can’t seem to tear it out. But to-day it’s made clear: she was sent to me to be saved.”
“From her faith?” inquired Mr. Jonas.
But the minister was impervious to the sarcasm.
“To the faith,” said Mr. Henderson.
The others gone, Alexina, King William and the Captain sat on the porch. The girl who was on the step reached up and put a hand on the locket swinging from the Captain’s fob. “May I?” she asked, “I used to, often, you know.”
The Captain slipped the watch out and handed it to her, the rest depending, and she opened the locket, a large, thin, plain gold affair. “This,” she said, bending over it, then looking up at the Captain archly, “this is Julie Piquet, your mother, wife of Aristide Leroy, refugee and Girondist.”
She recited it like a child proud of knowing its lesson, then regarded him out of the corners of her eyes, laughing.
There answered the faintest flicker of a smile somewhere in the old Roman face.
The girl returned to the study of the dark beauty on the ivory again, its curly tressesfillet bound, its snowy breasts the more revealed than hidden by the short-waisted, diaphanous drapery.
“And because it had been your father’s locket, with you and your mother in it, Mrs. Leroy wouldn’t let you change it to put her in; and so this on the other side is you, young Georges Gautier Hippolyte Leroy—”
“Written G. Leroy in general,” interpolated the gentleman’s son.
“And this is how you looked at twenty, dark and rosy-cheeked, with a handsome aquiline nose. You never were democratic, for all your grand pose at being; do you believe he was?” This to King. “Look at him here; if ever there was an inborn, inbred aristocratic son of a revolutionist—”
“He barricaded the streets of Paris with his fellow-students in his turn, don’t forget,” said King.
“Where his papa had sent him for a more cosmopolitan knowledge of life than Louisville could afford,” supplemented Alexina gaily.
“And where he wrote verses to a little dressmaker across the hall,” said William.
“Verses?” said Alexina. “Did he write verses? I never heard about the verses.”
“No?” said the son; “hasn’t he ever written verses to you? Well, since I’ve opened the way to it, I was leading up to it all the while, whyI have. I’ll show ’em to you. I’ve had ’em in my pocket waiting the opportunity three days now.” Which was true. He had been going for them that first day.
He produced a small card photograph, somewhat faded, which, taken in Alexina’s hand, showed her a little girl’s serious face, with short-cropped hair.
“She had a nice, straight little nose,anyhow,” said Alexina approvingly, studying the card.
“Turn it over,” said William Leroy. He had a way of commanding people. Some day Alexina intended warring with him about it, but she turned it over now. The lines inscribed on its reverse were in a round and laboured script that, despite effort, staggered down hill.
“I wrote ’em,” said Willy Leroy, “moi—myself, with gulped-down tears at leaving you. I’ve never written any since.”
She was reading them.
“Out loud,” he commanded.
She read them aloud. She was laughing, but she was blushing absurdly, too.
“This is Alexina and sheIs a girl but shePlays like I tell her and sheCried because we had to come awayAnd this is Alexina.”
“This is Alexina and sheIs a girl but shePlays like I tell her and sheCried because we had to come awayAnd this is Alexina.”
“He thinks, your son does,” said Alexina, addressing herself to the Captain, “that he was a precocious person, whereas he was only—”
“Young,” said the Captain.
“Lamentably egotistical,” said Alexina.
“Give it to me,” said Willy, “my picture and my feelings thereon.”
“No,” said the girl; “I want it.”
“Yes.” He said it with the King William air. She made a little mouth, but gave him the card, which he put back in his wallet and the wallet into his pocket. “You’re welcome to a copy of the lines,” he said.
Alexina, bestowing on him a glance of lofty disdain, departed, high-headed, into the house.
But he ran after her and stooped, that he might look into her face; was he laughing at her?
“Oh,” she said, and wheeled upon him, but had to laugh too, such was the high glee behind the sweet gravity on William Leroy’s countenance. Glee there was, yet, too, something else in the dark eyes laughing at her, something unconsciously warm and caressing.
The girl ran quickly up-stairs.
And William Leroy, brought to himself, stood where she left him. The hand on the newel-post suddenly closed hard upon it, then he straightened and walked into the parlour, and, sitting down, stared at the embers of the wood fire, as one bewildered. Then his head lifted as with one who understands. On his face was a strange look and a light.
Alexina went up to her mother and Mrs. Leroy. Molly was lolling in a big chair in the sunshine, idly swinging the tassel of her wrapper to and fro. The shadows about her eyes were other than those lent by the sweep of her childlike lashes, and she looked wan. But she looked at peace, too. In her present state the flow of Mrs. Leroy’s personal chat was entertainment. Now, there was always one central theme to Charlotte’s talk, whatever the variations.
“He hasn’t a bit of false pride, Willy hasn’t,” she was stating. “After his father lost his position, those two years before thetrees began paying, there’s nothing Willy wouldn’t turn his hand to. He carried a chain for the surveyors and went as guide for parties hunting and fishing in the glades.”
Molly’s attention sometimes wandered from these maternal confidences.
“You were Charlotte Ransome before you were married, weren’t you?” she asked irrelevantly. “You used to come to New Orleans winters, didn’t you? You were at a party at my Uncle Randolph’s once when I was a girl and you were spoken of as a great beauty, I remember. There was a pompon head-dress too, one winter, called the Charlotte Ransome.”
The Charlotte listening, only the vivacity of smile and eyes left of her beauty, the Charlotte living the obscure life of a little raw Southern town, let her needle fall,the needle she handled with the awkwardness of a craft acquired late. She was darning an old tablecloth, come down from her mother’s day, that day when triumphs and adulation made up life, and when cost or reckoning was a thing she troubled not herself about. She was that Charlotte Ransome again, called up by Mrs. Garnier, the beauty, the fashion, and the belle.
“Oh,” she said, “the joy of youth, the joy! Old Madame d’Arblay, the Louisville milliner, devised that pompon head-dress out of her own cleverness, and I remember my old Aunt Polly Ann Love tried to talk her down on the price. How it comes back, the intoxication of it, and the living. Drink deep, little Mab, it never offers twice. I seemed to have divined it never would be again.”
The girl looked from one woman to theother. Molly still pursued this thing called adulation, and Mrs. Leroy, big-hearted, simple-souled as she was, looked yearningly back on that which was gone.
Was this all, then? Was life forever after empty, except as with Mrs. Leroy, of duties that occupied but did not satisfy? And what of women who are neither beauties nor belles? What has life to offer them?
A vast depression came over the girl. And was this all? Both women bore witness that it was.
“I heard tell in those days,” Molly was saying to Mrs. Leroy, “of a dozen men in the South you might have married. How did you come”—curiously—“in the end to marry Captain Leroy, so much older, and so quiet, and—er—”
Charlotte was too simple to resent the question, which to her meant only affectionateinterest. Besides, she was an egotist, and livened under talk of herself. She had no concealment; indeed, had she been cognizant of any skeleton in the family closet, it must speedily have lost its gruesomeness to her, so constantly would she have it out, annotating its anatomy to any who showed interest.
“Because he came to us in our trouble,” said Charlotte, “to mother and me when father died. He was shot, my father, you know, in a political quarrel on the street in Lexington, the year before the war. And Captain Georges came to us. We’d always known him. His father and my Uncle Spottswood Love operated the first brandy distillery in Kentucky. Captain Georges had brought me pretty things from New Orleans and Paris all my life. I meant never to marry, then; I’d been unhappy. But itturned out we were poor, and so when Georges said for me to marry him that he might care for mother and me, why—”
“Oh,” breathed Alexina. It was denunciation. Certain scenes of childhood had burned into her memory, which she had interpreted later. Molly had not loved daddy, either.
“No one was ever so good, so nobly, generously good to a woman as Georges has been to me,” Mrs. Leroy was saying; “and even in our poverty he and Willy have managed, and kept it somehow from me, and long, oh, long ago, I came to love him dearly.”
The young arraigner, hearing, gazed unconvinced. She pushed the weight of her hair back off her forehead, as she always did when impatient. “Came to love him dearly.” With that mere affection which growsfrom association, and dependence and habit.
The girl sitting on the window-sill in the sunshine drew a long breath. There was more in life than these two had found; all unknowingly, they had proved it.
Charlotte kept them with her the week, then Molly turned restless.
“I can’t stand hearing another thing about Willy, Malise,” she declared. “I think he’s a very dictatorial and outspoken person myself.”
So Molly and Alexina and Celeste went back to the hotel, which had filled during the week of their absence. There was life and bustle in the halls as they went in and, from their windows up-stairs, they could see the lake gay with sail-boats.
The talk down-stairs concerned dances, picnics, fishing parties. The somnolentMolly awoke, languor fell from her and she stepped to the centre of the gay little whirl, the embodied spirit of festivity. Mr. Henderson, incongruous element, was there, too, with deliberate election it would seem, for Molly’s eyes did no inviting or encouraging. She did not need him in capacity of attendant or diverter these days, and it was clear that in any other capacity he embarrassed her. But he was not deterred because of that.
“You are coming to church, remember,” he told her on Sunday morning.
Molly did not even play at archness with him now; she looked timid. And at the hour she went, and Alexina with her. They had heard him officiate before, and it seemed the mere performance of the law; but into the dogmatic assertions of his discourse to-day glowed that fire which is called inspiration.The Reverend Henderson was living these days.
Molly, slim and elegant in her finery, moved once or twice in the pew. Alexina could not quite tell if she was listening. But she was. “Dear me,” she said, from under the shadow of her lace parasol, as they walked home, “how wearing it must be to be so—er—intense.” She spoke lightly, but she shivered a little. The Reverend Henderson had laid stress upon his text, “In the midst of life we are in death!”
As they went up the hotel steps Molly turned and looked around her and Alexina turned too, since it was Molly’s mood. The sky was blue, the air breathed with life and glow and sparkle. There was a taste almost of sea about it. On the prim young orange trees about the new houses across the street the fruit hung golden.
“He used to reach them for me—Father Bonot did,” said Molly, slowly, “before I was tall enough. They’re sweeter—Louisiana oranges are. I used to run and hide behind his skirts, too, when I was afraid my mother was going to whip me.”
They went in. Half way up the stairs Molly paused. “You Blairs, you’re all likehim—not like Father Bonot.”
“Like who?” asked Alexina.
“Like Mr. Henderson. You Blairs and Mr. Henderson would have pulled aside your skirts so my mother could have caught me and whipped me.”
Something like apprehension sprang into Alexina’s eyes. “Oh,” she said anxiously, “no; surely I’m not like that, and Aunt Harriet’s not!”
“Yes, you are,” said Molly stubbornly, “you all of you are. It’s because”—asort of childish rage seized on her—“it’s because you’re all of you so—so damnably sure of your duty.” And Molly’s foot stamped the landing in her little fury.
It was funny, so funny that Alexina laughed. And perhaps it was true. She could have hugged Molly; she never came so near to being fond of Molly before.
December arrived, Christmas came and went. Life was almost pastoral—no, hardly that; it was moreun fete champetre. Each day after breakfast the hotel emptied itself into the sunshine and merriment, emptied itself, that is, of all but the invalids. Molly shunned these. She never even looked the way of one if she could help it.
There was a lake party one night. They took boat at the hotel pier in various small craft and followed the chain of lakes to anisland midway of the farthest. The moon was up as they started.
The party was of the gayest, and one might have said that Mr. Henderson was out of his element. Certainly his face was hardly suggestive of hilarity. But he followed Mrs. Garnier into one of the larger boats and took his place with a sort of doggedness. Even in the moonlight the sharpening angle of his cheek-bone was visible, and the deepening of the sockets in which his eyes were set, eyes that followed Mrs. Garnier insistently.
Molly being of the party, it followed that Alexina was, too, but that William Leroy was of it seemed to quicken something in his own sense of humour. His manner with the gay world was perhaps a little stony. He avowed, when thus accused by Alexina and Mr. Jonas, that it was to cover bashfulness.
“I hate people,” he declared.
Yet, for a bashful youth, he was singularly deliberate and masterful, seeming to know what he wanted and how to get it. To-night it was that Alexina go with him in a small boat. The others started first, a youth in a striped flannel coat, strumming a guitar.
King put out last. He rowed slowly and often the boat drifted. When they entered the lock connecting the first lake with the next, the other boats had all passed through. The moon scarcely penetrated the dense foliage on the banks above them, and the ripple of the water against the boat seemed only to emphasize the silence, the aloofness. There must have been an early blossom of jasmine about, so sweet was the gloom.
When they passed out into the vaultedspace and open water of the next lake, the other boats were far ahead. The tinkling cadence of the guitar floated back to them.
He rowed lazily on. Presently he spoke. “I wonder if you remember how we used to talk, ’way back yonder, about the Land of Colchis?”
“Yes,” said Alexina; “I remember.”
“I believe we are there at last. We closed the contract for our oranges to-day. It’s pretty fair gold, the fruit in Colchis. We pick for delivery on Monday.”
He never had talked to her of personal affairs before, it was Mrs. Leroy who had told her what she knew.
“There are several purchasers looking at the place we are going to sell, for dwellers in Colchis, you know, are only sojourners; they long for home.”
“The Jasons, too?”
“This Jason at any rate. He wants four seasons to his year, and to hear his horse’s feet on pike, and to put his seed into loam.”
They slipped through the next lock and out upon the long length of Cherokee, the lake of the island which was their destination. It seemed to bring self-consciousness upon the speaker.
“You are so the same as you used to be,” he said, “I forget. How do I know you want to hear all this?”
“You do know,” said Alexina, honestly.
He did not answer. They were coming up to the other boats now, beached at the island. Lights were flickering up and down the sand and the rosy glare of a beach fire shone out from under the darkness of the trees. Figures were moving between it and them and they could hear voices and laughter.
“You do know,” repeated the girl.
They had grounded. He was shipping the oars. Then he got up and held out a hand to steady her. She, standing, put hers into it. They did not look at each other.
“Yes,” he said, “I do know. You’re too honest to pretend.”
He helped her along and out upon the sand. There was a negro boy awaiting to take charge of the boat. They went up the slight declivity. He had not loosed her hand, she had not withdrawn it. The laughter, the chat, the aroma of boiling coffee, the rattle of dishes being unpacked reached them. They stood for a moment in the shadow, then her hand left his and they went to join the others.
The dozen men and women were grouped about the pine-knot fire, for the warmth was grateful.
There was badinage and sally, light, foolish stuff, perhaps, but flung like shining nebulæ along the way by youth in its whirl of mere being. It is good to know how to be frivolous sometimes. Alexina felt the exhilaration of sudden gaiety, daring. She sat down by the youth with the guitar and the striped flannel coat.
“‘And both were young, and one was beautiful,’”
“‘And both were young, and one was beautiful,’”
warbled the owner to his guitar, making room for her. “Right here, Miss Blair, by me.”
More than one presently stole a look at the tall, rather handsome Miss Blair, hitherto conceded reserved and different from her mother. She was laughing contagiously with the youth, and in the end she gained the guitar over which they were wrangling. She knew a thing or two about a guitarherself, it seemed—Charlotte Leroy could have explained how—as many chords as the owner anyhow. But the young Leroy, it would appear, was sulky, certainly unsociable, sitting there, removed to the outskirts of things, to smoke and stare at the moon. Yet never once did the girl look his way. It was enough that they were to return together.
Nor was she paying attention to Molly either. There are times when the mad leap and rush of one’s own blood absorbs all consciousness.
Molly was gay, too, feverishly gay. Some one had brewed a hot something for the delectation and comforting of the chilly ones, and Molly’s thin little hand was holding out her picnic cup as often as any one would fill it. It was Mr. Jonas who presently took the cup away and tried towipe a stain off the pretty dress with his handkerchief.
When the start homeward was made, King came over to Alexina.
“I have to ask you to change to the large boat going back,” he said, a little stiffly perhaps; “Mr. Jonas is taking Mrs. Garnier in the small one, and Mr. Henderson says he will see to you.”
When she answered her voice was lightly nonchalant.
“Why not?” she said, absorbed in putting on her jacket.
She took her place in the boat by Mr. Henderson. Evidently the evening had gone wrong with him, for his face was ghastly in the moonlight, and his long, nervous fingers never stopped fingering the little gold cross hanging below the line of his vest.
William Leroy did not return with the party at all. Not that she was concerned with that, Alexina assured herself proudly, it was only that she could not help hearing the others wondering at his entering a boat with the negro boy and rowing swiftly away up the lake. It was clear to her. Lake Nancy would have been the next lake on the chain had the channel been cut. He meant to tramp across home to save himself the trouble of going back to town. She did not think he had very good manners at any rate. Yet, when the boats came in at the hotel pier, it was William Leroy who met them. He waited for Alexina and walked with her a little ahead of the others up through the yard.
“Mrs. Garnier is not well,” he told her. “I went home and drove in and Mr. Jonas is putting her in the wagon now. We’ll takeher out to mother; she’s all upset over something.”
She stopped short, having forgotten her mother. “I can’t let you,” she declared; “it isn’t right to Mrs. Leroy.”
“Mother’s waiting,” he said. “You’d better go in and say something to somebody, and get Celeste.”
Mrs. Leroy said that people always obeyed the King William tone. Alexina stood, hesitating. He waited.
Then she went.
He was in the wagonette when she and Celeste came out. The place was still and deserted, even Mr. Jonas gone, for which Alexina was grateful.
Molly was on the back seat, and Celeste, gaunt and taciturn, started to mount beside her.
Molly protested. “Not you, mammy;go in front. I want Malise—not the big Malise, you know—the little one.”
The girl, taking the wraps from the old woman, got in by her mother and began to put a shawl about her. The dew was falling heavily. Molly touched her hand. “Once Alexander said to me, ‘Let Malise keep tight hold on you, Molly.’”
William Leroy was flicking the mules travelling briskly through the sandy streets, and talking to the old woman, but she was sullen and the conversation died.
Alexina’s heart was choking her. Her father—daddy—Molly had spoken to her of daddy.
And all the while Molly was talking on, feverishly, incessantly. “You must keep him away, Malise, that minister, he worries me and his eyes make me uncomfortable, following me. He makes me remember things,and I don’t want to. He says it’s his duty. He said to-night I’m not going to get well and that he had to tell me in order to save me from myself. Make him keep away from me, Malise; I’m afraid of him. I took it,that, to-night, to forget what he said; say it isn’t so, Malise—say it.”
Willy leaned back over the seat, talking in steady, everyday fashion. “There’s the moon setting ahead of us; see it, Mrs. Garnier? Everything’s so still, you say? Why, no; it’s not so still. There is a cock crowing somewhere, and that must be a gopher scuttling under the palmetto. Now, look backward. See that line of light? It’s the dawn.”
The next evening at Nancy, an hour or two after supper, King William was tapping at Mrs. Garnier’s door, which was ajar.
“She is asleep,” warned Alexina from within.
“Then come on out,” he begged, “the moon’s up.”
“Go on,” Mrs. Leroy told her, “Willy wants you,” which to Charlotte was reason for all things.
“It’s windy,” he called softly, “bring a wrap.”
The girl came, bringing her reefer jacket and her Tam and put them on in the hall.The jacket was blue, the Tam was scarlet, and both were jaunty. He regarded her in them with satisfaction.
“Now, there,” said he, with King William approval, “I like that.”
They went down and out. She was tired, she said, so they sat on the bench under the wild orange. The moss, drooping from the branches, fluttered above them. The wind was fitful, lifting and dying. It was a grey night, with scattered mists lying low over the lake, while a shoal of little clouds were slipping across the face of the moon.
“It’s been too soft and warm,” said he; “it can’t last.”
But Alexina shivered a little, for there was a chill whenever the wind rose.
“Walk down to the pier,” he begged, “and back. Then you shall go in.”
The path led through the grove. Stoppingto select an orange for her, he passed his hand almost caressingly up and down a limb of the tree.
“And you begin to pick the oranges Monday?” said Alexina.
“Monday.”
“And this is Thursday.”
They walked on. He was peeling away the yellow rind that she might have a white cup to drink from.
“I won’t be here to see the picking,” said Alexina. “I have to go to Kentucky for two weeks, something about business. Uncle Austen wrote me in the letter you brought out to-day, that it would simplify things if I could come. And Emily—Emily Carringford, you know—Uncle Austen’s wife, wrote too, asking me to stay with them.”
“So,” said he, “you go—”
“Monday. I’ve been talking to yourmother, and she’s willing, if Captain Leroy and you are; I came out to ask you—I am always to be asking favors of your family, it seems—if you will let me leave Molly here instead of at the hotel. Celeste can attend to everything.”
“Why not?” asked Willy.
“It’s—it’s a business proposition,” said Alexina. But it took a bit of courage to bring it out.
“Is it?” said he.
“Or I can’t do it, you know.”
They had reached the lake and were sitting like children on the edge of the pier. The water was ruffled, the incoming waves white-crested, and the wind was soughing a little around the boat-house behind them. He was breaking bits off a twig and flinging them out to see them drift in.
“Great country this,” he said, “that can’t produce a pebble for a fellow to fling.”
He looked off toward the shining, shadowy distance, where the moon gleamed against the mists. “You are”—then he changed the form of his question—“are you very rich?”
“Leave the very out, and, yes, I suppose I am rich,” said Alexina.
“You are so—well—yourself,” he said, “sometimes I find myself forgetting it.”
The girl swallowed once, twice, as if from effort to speak. She was looking off, too, against the far shore. “Is it a thing to have to be remembered?” then she asked.
“Isn’t it?” said King William, turning on her suddenly. There was a sharp harshness in his tones. “I wish to God it wasn’t.”
She got up, and he sprang up, too, facing her. Suddenly she stamped her foot. Thewind, rising to a gale now, was blowing her hair about her face and she was angry. It made her beautiful. She might have been a Valkyr, tall, wind-tossed.
But the sob in her voice was human. “I’ve had Uncle Austen say such things to me in his fear I might let other people forget it, and a girl I cared for at school let it come between us, but I thought you—I had a right to think you were bigger. Your mother is, oh, yes, she is, and your father is. Not that I despise the other, either.” She lifted her head defiantly. “It’s a grand and liberating thing, though it was shackles on me in Uncle Austen’s hands. I don’t despise it; I couldn’t; but that it should have to be remembered—”
“Just so,” said Willy Leroy, in his father’s phrase.
Her head went up again and she looked athim full, straight, then turned and fled towards the house.
He ran after her, came abreast, and after the fashion he had, stooped to see into her face. “Don’t go away, in from me—mad,” he begged. Was he laughing?
“But I am mad,” she returned promptly.
“But don’t go in either way,” he said; “stay, mad if you will, but stay. Oh, I’m not proud,” he was breathing hard again, “that is—only this proud; I shall build onto my little gold of Colchis until we stand at least nearer equal—and then—”
Each looked at the other, with defiance almost. She was as beautiful as Harriet Blair.
“Then,” said the girl, “then you’ll be that far less my equal. Let me go.” And she jerked her sleeve from his hand and ran into the house.
The morning after dawned sunless and chill. The sky was a pale leaden, below which darker masses of clouds scurried. The wind blew strong, steady, resistless. At breakfast they all sat shivering.
“Have Pete start fires,” said King William to Charlotte, “and you had better move Mrs. Garnier over to my room before night.” For there were not fire-places in all the rooms.
It was a dreary morning every way. The breakfast was poor and scant. Aunt Mandy defended herself. “Ev’y thing done give out,” she declared. “Mis’ Charlotte beenso occapied she done forgot to order things f’om town.”
Convicted, Charlotte looked at Willy, then hastily took the defensive. “Mandy ought to have reminded me,” she declared.
“No,ma’am,” responded Mandy. “I done quit this thing uv tellin’ an’ havin’ you say things give out too soon.”
Willy sat stony. The Captain shivered. One realized all at once that he was an old man. “The thermometer is at forty-six, King,” he remarked.
“Yes,” said the son, “and falling.”
All morning it fell. At noon it registered forty degrees. The wind still swept a gale that whistled and shrieked at the corners of the house, and the three women passed the morning in Charlotte’s room, shivering about the open fire-place. Pete spent his day chopping and bringing in arm-loads offat pine wood. All the sense of dissatisfaction with Aden returned. Desolate grey sand is a hideous exchange for sward, and orange trees look like toys from a Noah’s ark.
At dinner there was a furrow between King’s straight, dark brows. “It’s thirty-eight,” he told his father, “and falling. It’s clearing, too.”
Afterwards he was talking to Pete in the hall.
“No, sir,” reiterated Pete, “we’s too far below the line, ain’t never heard of sech a thing down here.”
At four o’clock King came in to say he was going to town. “It’s down to thirty-four,” he told his father. “I’m going in and telegraph up the river for reports.”
“And what then, son?” asked the Captain. “What can you do?”
It was a hitherto unexperienced danger threatening Aden. But youth cannot sit and wait. Alexina, from the window in Charlotte’s room, saw King William fling himself on his horse at the gate and gallop off. The wind had ceased. The live-oaks on either side of the old iron gate stood motionless, their moss hanging in dreary, sombre lengths. There was no sound of bird or insect. And it was cold—cold. Alexina had a jacket over her woollen dress, for Aden houses are not built for cold, which poured in at casements, beneath doors, at keyholes. Molly, on the couch drawn up to the fire, coughed and coughed again. Alexina went to her. “I’m cold,” she complained; “and how dreary it is.”
It had cleared and the sky was a pale, chilly blue. The sun set in a yellow pallor. The night fell.
King came in and warmed his hands at the parlour fire. Alexina and Charlotte had come down now.
“Thirty-two,” he told his father, “and falling.”
Neither the Captain nor his son ate much supper, but near-sighted Charlotte, absorbed in things at hand, seemed unconscious of anything more amiss than discomfort from the cold. After supper the son disappeared.
Molly was coughing sadly. They had moved her bed across to Willy’s sitting-room, and a fire crackled on the stone hearth; but it was to be one of the nights when she would not sleep, or but fitfully, and when Celeste and Alexina would not sleep either. At nine o’clock they persuaded her to bed.
“But talk, Malise, you and mammy talk. I don’t have chance to think when peoplekeep on talking; and, mammy, rub my hands; it helps, to have some one rub them.”
At ten she wanted a drink of water. Alexina went to the window where she had set a tumbler outside. The night was still and clear, the stars glittering. The moon would rise soon now. How large the grove showed itself from this south window, stretching away to the southwest around the curving shores of Nancy. As Alexina opened the window she shivered, despite the heavy wool of her white wrapper. As she took in the glass—was it? Yes, over the surface of the water radiated a ferny, splintery film, which was ice.
Molly, feverish and restless, drank it thirstily, and said it was good, but it roused her so that she began to talk again.
“He said I couldn’t prevent his praying for me,” she was harping on the minister.“For my soul,” she laughed uneasily. “I told him to let my soul alone. It’s perfectly funny, Malise, that I’ve got to be prayed over when I don’t want to be.”
The night wore on. Celeste was nodding, even while her brown hands went on rubbing up and down the slim white wrist and arm.
The wood on the andirons broke and fell apart. The room grew shadowy. “Build it up, Malise,” begged Molly; “I like it light.”
There was no more wood up-stairs. It was past twelve o’clock and the house was still. Alexina opened the door into the hall. A lamp in case of need, because of Molly, was burning on a stand. Alexina had remembered that there was wood piled on the parlour hearth. Her slippers were noiseless.
Down-stairs she paused, then tip-toed tothe front door. The big thermometer and barometer in one hung against a side of the recess and could be seen through the glass side-lights. It was bright moonlight now, the shadows of the rose vine clear cut on the porch floor. She looked at the thermometer.
She looked again.
It had come, then, what never had come to Aden before. From the talk of the day she had gleaned enough to know that the fruit hanging on William Leroy’s trees was but so much sodden, worthless pulp.
She turned back towards the parlour where the firelight was flickering out the doorway, then stopped. He was in his father’s chair before the hearth. His elbow was on his knee and the hand on which his chin was propped was clenched. The flame flared up. His face was haggard and harsh.
She fled back up-stairs. Molly had fallen asleep, Celeste was nodding.
The girl shut the door and dropped in a little heap on the bearskin before the fire. She was shivering, but in her eyes, fixed on the embers, was a yearning, brooding light that made them beautiful. Then suddenly she hid her face in her hands, her head bowed on her knees, and began to sob.
The Captain, Mrs. Leroy and Alexina, on the gallery, watched King as he trudged across the yard. He was going for his horse that he might take a telegram into Aden for Alexina, who was to leave the following morning.
He trudged sturdily and was whistling under his breath as he went.
“But it’s a debt—I owe it to you,” said the girl suddenly, turning on the Captain. She spoke with vehemence, entreaty, passion.
“We put that aside the other day—discussed,” said the Captain gently.
“Youdid,” declared the girl; “but not—you can’t say I did. And Mrs. Leroy saw the right, the justice of it, when I talked to her up-stairs.”
“But I hadn’t heard Georges then,” Charlotte hastened to say, “and I see now how you’re trying to make a purely business affair a personal one.” Poor Charlotte, she did not see anything of the kind; she was quoting the Captain.
“But it is a debt,” declared the girl, crying a little against her will, “and you have no right to refuse me. The whole transaction was a taking advantage, and hard, and mean; it was the pound of flesh, and you said, Mrs. Leroy, that if the grove could be held a year or two, and not sacrificed right away—”
“The boy will fight that part out,” said the Captain. The words sounded final, butthe hand laid on the girlish one clasping the arm of his chair made it right.
“How can he?” she insisted, with stubbornness.
“I don’t know,” said the father.
The three sat silent. King, waving his hat at them as he rode around, stooped from his horse, opened the gate and went through. He was not a person to be offered sympathy. Right now he was absorbingly cheerful.
“But Mrs. Leroy admitted,” Alexina began again, her under lip trembling.
“No, Alexina,” said Charlotte hastily; “I didn’t. Or I ought not to have,” she added honestly. “I’ve never set myself against Georges in things concerning Willy since we came down here. We talked it out then, Georges and I. It’s been hard to see Willy fighting things; he was born imperious, but he’s used to battling now. I seewhat Georges meant. It’s better for people to learn how to battle. If I had ever been taught—”
The sun was slanting in under the old, wild orange tree on to the gallery. Again the three sat silent. Then out of the silence the Captain spoke. He was an old man who had laid down the burden of labour to lift and carry the heavier load of inaction in silence, as he had carried the other. His tone was impersonal.
“There was a giant wrestler, one Antæus of Lybia, if I remember my classics, Alexina. King used to lie on the rug when you both were children and read you about him. So many times as this Antæus was brought to earth, he arose renewed, if I recall. The boy must wrestle with his own fate.”
On entering Uncle Austen’s house, self-consciousness and constraint closed in like bars across the door of spontaneity. Alexina had arrived the night before and they were at breakfast. Uncle Austen was facetiously affable, and his sportive sallies, not being natural with him, embarrassed his audience. There is something almost pitiable in the sight of middle-age grown playful.
Emily, Uncle Austen’s wife—embarrassing realization in itself—looked in her plate constrainedly, so that Alexina, if only that his further playfulness might be prevented, threw herself into the conversation andchattered volubly, but in vain, for Uncle Austen found chance to reply.
There was complacency in his facetiousness, too. He had married him a wife, and the pride of the thing coming to him this late made him a little absurd, and yet, Alexina reflected, he was a man of big ability and varied interests, prominent in whatever large enterprises the city boasted, banks, railroads, bridges; a power in the Republican party of his state, his name standing for respectability, wealth, and conservatism.
“I’m taking pretty good care of your old friend Emily, Alexina?” Uncle Austen was demanding playfully, as he arose from the table; “she’s standing transplanting pretty well, eh?”
Emily got up abruptly, so abruptly her chair would have turned over but for hisquickness in getting there to catch it, but his good humour was proof even against this, though he ordinarily frowned at awkwardness. He set the chair in place, and taking Emily’s hand as they all went from the room, patted it ostentatiously. Alexina grew hot.
“A pretty hand, a hand for a man to be proud to own, eh, Alexina?”
Emily almost snatched it away and paused at the foot of the stairs.
“Good-by,” she said.
He was finding his overcoat and feeling for his gloves. Then he took a little whisk-broom from the rack drawer and brushed his hat with nicety. He was smiling with high humour. The man’s content was almost fatuous.
“I’m glad to have you here, Alexina,” he said; “very glad. I will feel that Emilyis having the companionship she ought to have in my absence.”
The click of the door as he closed it seemed to breathe a brisk and satisfied complacency. Emily had fled up-stairs. Alexina followed her slowly.
How strange it seemed to hear her moving about in what had been Aunt Harriet’s room.
“Come in,” she called.
Alexina went in.
“He might at least have refurnished it, mightn’t he?” said Emily, with a laugh. It was not a pleasant laugh.
“What would you like for dinner?” she asked Alexina, her hand on the bell.
“I don’t care,” said Alexina; “anything.”
“So it doesn’t cost too much,” said Emily, laughing the laugh that was not pleasant.
Later, the conferences with the servantsover, she sat down to make certain entries in the ledger, open on the desk. Alexina picked up a magazine.
“He asked me one day,” said Emily, turning, “what had become of an end of roast that ought to have come back made over, and said there must be waste in the kitchen.”
“Don’t,” said Alexina. “I wouldn’t, Emily.”
“Why not? You knew it all before.”
Alexina flushed. “Yes,” she said slowly, “I did. I knew it—before. How are your mother and the little girls, Emily?”
“Mother—oh, all right. He told me to ask Nan and Nell over every Friday from school to supper, and mother and father and Oliver over to Sunday night tea. ‘It ought, in the end,’ he told me, ‘to make an appreciable saving in your mother’s providing,these continued absences from stated meals.’”
“You mustn’t, Emily. Tell me about the winter. Have you been gay?”
“Gay?” Emily wheeled from the desk. She gazed at Alexina almost wildly. Then she laughed again. “Gay! oh, my great Heaven—gay! Then you don’t know? I am going to bear him a child—and, oh, help me somehow; Alexina, I loathe him.”
A child, Uncle Austen and Emily a child! A warmth swept out of Alexina’s very soul and enveloped her. She knew, and she did not know. Other women and girls had taken it for granted always that she knew, and talked on before her. It meant to her something vague, unapproachable, veiled, and a great, overwhelming consciousness stifled and choked her.
“I went out on the platform of the trainwhile we were away,” Emily was saying, Emily who never, even in childhood, had curbed a mood, a dislike, a humour, “and tried to throw myself off, but I was afraid.”
Alexina shrank. “I mustn’t listen—you mustn’t tell me—it’s between you and him, Emily.”
Emily had gotten up and was walking about.
“He offered Oliver a place in the bank, to please me, I thought. Oliver’s nineteen now. The place had been paying eighteen dollars a week, and Oliver had only been making twelve. So he offered it to him at fifteen. ‘To the benefiting of both sides,’ he came home and told me.”
Emily stood still, her eyes tearless and hard. “Put on your wraps, Alexina, and we’ll go drive. It’s like a duty, a task, the exercising of the horses. It hangs over melike a nightmare that I’ve got it to do, until I’ve gone out and gotten it over.”
“Yes,” said Alexina, on familiar ground, “I know. I’ve hated those horses too, before you. But you ought to be like Aunt Harriet, Emily; don’t be like me—tell him so.”
Emily, unlocking the wardrobe door, suddenly flung up her arms against it and hid her face in them. “I’ve tried, I have tried, and I can’t—I can’t; I’m afraid of him, Alexina.”
But the child coming—their child? Perhaps the child would make it right. When it came, Emily would love her child? Perhaps she did; she never talked about it afterwards, and Alexina never saw her with it; it died in the summer, soon after its coming.
When she did see the two again, her uncleand Emily, on her own return to Louisville in the late fall, the embarrassing playfulness had left Uncle Austen. Perhaps the steely coldness of his manner was worse. Had Emily dared—even in her mourning there was something about her that was reckless. But she did not dare. She was twenty-two and he was fifty-two, and she was to live afraid of him, to see him an old man, for he is living now.
Harriet laughed at Alexina’s wonder over her. “It took me a time to realize that hospitality means the incidental oftener than the invited,” she confessed. “My guests, you know, Alexina, were formally asked, and the other would have fretted me. That was why, I suppose, I had no intimates.”
Harriet never knew, it would seem, these days, whether the Judge, the Colonel, Father Ryan, the man from the office chatting in the library with the Major, one or all, were going to stay for supper or were not; yet she had come to the place where she could smile in serene and genuine welcome,the while everybody moved up and the coloured housemaid slipped in an extra chair and plate.
And she only laid a hand on the spoon with which little Stevie hammered his plate.
“I’d take it away and spank him myself, you know,” confided Louise, Stevie’s mother, to Alexina; “I do spank William.”
But all of life seemed to be moving for Harriet with serenity. Every trivial happening was swallowed up in the joy that death had spared her her husband. And the Major, whatever the agony, the horror, preceding the acceptation of a maimed life, had not lost the vital grace of humour. Life flowed in and out of the Rathbone home with him for centre as it had used to do in and out of his office. The room where he sat amid his papers and books was a rallying place because the strong will andpersonality of the man in the wheeled chair made it so.
“He’s been meaning for years to do a series of guerrilla articles a magazine has wanted of him, and now he’s at them,” said Harriet, “and he has given in this far, in his stiff-necked pride, that he’s bought an interest in the paper for me, and it keeps him in touch and absorbed.”
The Major had been watching Alexina. At the end of several days’ observations he leaned back in his chair and addressed her. His eyes were humorous. “There’s an encouraging promise about you, Alexina,” he informed her. Then he caressed his lean chin with his lean, smooth hand. “A promise that gives me hope. You’ve laughed at my jokes since you’ve been here, and not from mere politeness either. Now, Harriet smiles out of the goodnessof her heart because she thinks she ought to.”
But he caught at Harriet’s hand even while they all three laughed, for it was patent to everybody that Harriet had no idea what his jokes were about, which was the amusing thing of all, seeing that it was the Major’s humour that she confessed had attracted her.
And yet the eyes of the man often deepened and glowed as he watched her move about the house, for she made even the trivial duties seem beautiful because of her unconscious earnestness and her joy in their doing.
On the return to Aden, that last hour on the train, Alexina was trembling. She was glad, glad to be back, yet of the actual moment of arrival she was afraid.
It was Peter, and alone, who met her at the station with the wagonette. The high ecstasy of her shrinking fell like collapsing walls beneath her. Life was grey, level, flat.
“Mrs. Garnier’s po’ly this mornin’,” Pete told her as they drove homeward. “Mis’ Cha’lotte wouldn’t leave her to come, and Mr. Willy, he’s been gone for a week now, down to the grasswater with a pahty of gen’l’men, as guide.”
She felt strangely tired and quiet. It was going to be hard to seem as glad to be back as she ought. Yet the world, as they drove out to Nancy, was rioting in bud, and new leaf and bloom. Magnolias were uplifting giant ivory cups of heavy sweetness; every tree-trunk, rail and stump bore a clambering weight of yellow jasmine bloom; the tai-tai drooped pendulous fringes of faintest fragrance, and wild convolvulus ran riot over the palmetto. There were bird-song and sunshine and ecstasy everywhere.
And she could not feel glad, she could not feel glad.
Promptly Molly dragged the girl off to their room. She looked slighter and more wistful-eyed and bored to death. “You promised me that we would go early in March, if I stayed out here—you promised, Malise. And I’ve stayed. You promisedwe’d go to The Bay, where there are people and hotels and it’s gay. And it’s March now. You look so tall and cold, Malise! what’s the matter?”
Alexina, restless and absent, wandered out on the porch to the Captain. She chatted to him about Louisville, but there were sharpening angles about his face that made her heart ache. She went up to Mrs. Leroy’s room.
“I don’t know what we are going to do, Alexina,” Charlotte told her. “Willy said I was not to think or worry about it, I was to put it all aside until he got back. But it hurts. He went off looking so gaunt. I don’t believe he slept a night through after the freeze; all hours I could hear him up, walking around, but he don’t like it if I notice, you know.”
Alexina dropped down and put her headin Charlotte’s lap and cried, and Charlotte patted the girl’s wealth of shining hair and cried too.
But since he could go without a sign to her, Alexina could go too. That day she wrote for rooms at The Bay Hotel. The answer came that she could have what she wanted by the eighth. She told Mrs. Leroy she and Molly would go on that date.
She could leave without a sign too, she had said, but in her heart there was joy that Fate had given her to the eighth. She would not have moved a finger to stay, but since he was to return on the sixth, why—
But the very day the letter from The Bay reached her, a Seminole came up from the glades with game from King and a note. The party was considering making a longer stay, he wrote to his mother, so she need not worry in case he did not return.
“I told him in my answer,” said Charlotte, “that you all were going. Dear me, I’ll miss you so.”
Then he would know, he would know, and if he did not come it would be because it was his desire not to.
Molly confessed to a few bills in town. Malise had left money, yet Molly had managed to make accounts at a fruiterer’s, the café, as it called itself, the drug store, the stationer’s, and the two dry-goods establishments.
“I’m glad you’re not stingy like the Blairs,” Molly told her; “you know, Malise, they’re really mean. Your grandfather Blair carried you out to their gate once to see a hand-organ man and his monkey. You were too pleased for anything, and when the man finally moved away your grandfather told you, ‘Say good-by to the monkey, Alexina.’”
Truth to tell, Molly and Charlotte seemed to have had a fine time in the absence of their two youthful monitors. Charlotte was as wax in the naughty Molly’s hands. Even now, with Alexina on the scene, Molly proceeded to put Mrs. Leroy up to a thing that never would have entered that innocent soul’s head.
Charlotte went mysteriously to town one morning, Peter in his best clothes driving her, and came back beaming.
“I’ve asked some of the Aden young people out for the evening before you go,” she told Alexina. “The halls and the parlours are so big, you can dance.”
Charlotte beamed and Molly looked innocent. Alexina gazed at Mrs. Leroy dismayed. What would the Captain, what would King William think? It would never occur to Mrs. Leroy untilafterward that she could not afford such a thing.
“I think we ought to do it together,” said Alexina privately to her. “Molly and I owe Aden some return.”
Charlotte was made to see it. Had Willy come along, she would have seen it as speedily after his will, be that what it might.
Whatever the Captain thought, he sat unmoved in the midst of the deluge of water and mopping that suddenly swept about him on the porch. There must have been Dutch in Charlotte somewhere, for hospitality with her meant excess of cleaning.
It was a miserable week altogether to Alexina. The days dragged through to their nights, and the nights to morning. She had never known so hateful a time. She hated the grove, where thousands of oranges, gathered into piles, lay rotting, and wherethe smiling trees, wherever their buds had escaped injury, were putting out scattered blooms; she hated the lake, and the Cherokee roses in bloom, she hated the crepe myrtles and the camelias in the yard. To walk meant wading through sand; there was nothing in town to make the drive worth while. The shame, the sting was in everything that was beautiful. That she should care!
Mr. Jonas and Mr. Henderson drove out one evening, Mr. Jonas to talk over matters with the Captain. Alexina wandered off by herself.
Presently she heard Mrs. Leroy calling softly. “It’s your mother,” she told Alexina in a whisper, as the girl came back to the house. “I don’t believe Mr. Henderson is good for her.”
Molly was talking to Mr. Jonas rapidly, eagerly, like one defending self, as Alexinareached them. Mr. Henderson was regarding her out of sombre eyes.
“It’s not that I think I’m sick,” Molly was saying, “like he says I am. I’m better, really, much better, only while he was talking about, about things—it’s a dreadful religion his; I’d rather be without any, like Jean, than have one like his—I remembered how Father Bonot used to pull the oranges for me I couldn’t reach. Here’s Malise come back. Malise, let’s not go to The Bay after all; I’m tired; let’s go to Cannes Brulée. He’s there, Father Bonot is, they told me in Washington. He’s an old, old man. Let’s go back home there.”