The Father gazed at her thoughtfully. Then he nodded. “No,” he said; “you are right; nothing will.”
Just then the two other physicians came down the stairs.
“A word with you first, gentlemen, please,” said the Father. The four men gathered at the foot of the stairway.
Watching, an outsider would have said that the priest and the young doctor were pleaders with the others for the cause of Miss Blair.
Later, the Mother herself led Harriet up the stairs and along a corridor, the young doctor following with Alexina.
“I think I—do you think I ought to go with her?” Alexina had faltered to him.
The two young things gazed at each otherindeterminate. Alexina’s eyes were swimming, like a child’s, with unshed tears. Never has tragedy such epic qualities as in youth. Then he turned and led the way. “Yes,” he told her, “I think if I were you I would.”
Harriet was by the bed when they entered, gazing down on the lean, brown face of the man, whose eyes were closed. The Sister in charge, sitting on the other side, was speaking in a low voice. Had she seen fit to tell what she knew?
For Harriet turned as they entered and looked at them. Her face was set as in marble. It was cold, it was stern; only, the eyes fixed on the young doctor’s face were imploring.
“Will he wake first?” she asked.
The young fellow seemed to shrink before the majesty of her suffering. Alexina putout a hand to touch her and drew it back, afraid. If only she were not so superbly self-controlled.
“Yes, he will most likely awake,” he assured her, and must have done so even if he had not thought it.
She took off her hat, a large, festive affair with plumes and jewelled buckles, and dropped her wrap. There was a low chair near the bed. She drew it close and sat down, her eyes on the face on the pillow. Jewels gleamed in the lace of her gown, and the shining silk of its folds trailed the floor about her.
Alexina stole across to a far and shadowed corner of the room and sat down by a table. She was crying and striving to keep it noiseless.
The doctor stood irresolute, then made a movement.
“Do you have to go?” said Harriet, turning.
“No; I expect to be here in the building all night. There might come a—change.”
“Stay, please,” she asked him; “here.”
He sat down by the open fire and she turned again to the face on the pillow.
The night passed. Now and then the Sister moved noiselessly about, or the doctor came to the bedside, lifted the inert hand, laid it down, and went back to the fire.
Alexina moved from her chair to the window or to the fire and back again. Now and again she knew that she must have slept a little, her head against the table. So the night passed.
The square framed by the window sash was turning grey when there came a movement, and the eyelids of the face on the pillow lifted. Harriet was leaning over beforethe others, the nurse or doctor, got to the bed, and must have been there when the eyes opened. She must have seen consciousness of her presence in them, too, and possibly questioning, for she spoke rapidly, eagerly, like one who had said the thing over and over in readiness for the moment, though her voice shook. “You said you loved me from your soul, and, living or dead, would go on loving and wanting my love?”
There seemed no wonder in the voice replying, only content. There was even the usual touch of humour in his reply. “And will go on wanting your love,” he said.
“But I am here to tell you how I love you,” she returned.
The room was still, like death. Then in the man’s voice: “Is this pity, Harriet?”
Her voice hurried on. “And how, living or dead, I will go on loving and wanting you.”
It was no pity that trembled in her voice, it was passion. He moved.
After a time he spoke again. It was to call her name, to say it as to himself. This time he knew it was love this woman was talking of, not pity.
“I could not bear it that you should not know,” she hurried on to tell him. “I made them let me come to you.”
“You know then, Harriet; they have told you?”
She was human; the sound that broke from her was the cry of a rent soul.
The doctor, who had gone back to the mantel, crouched over the fire. The Sister seemed to shrink into the shadows beyond the narrow bed. Alexina clenched her hands, her head on her arms outstretched on the table.
But Harriet had regained herself. “Iam here to ask you something. May I be married to you—now—at once, I mean?”
His response was not audible, only her reply. “Oh, surely you will. For the rest of my life—to have been—you will give me this, won’t you?”
There was a quick movement from him, and a sound of warning from the nurse who moved forward out of the shadow.
Material things seemed to come back to Harriet. Alarm sprang into her voice. “Shall I go away?” she asked the nurse, even timidly.
The answer came from him. “No; oh, no. Since it may be for so little time I may ask it of you; stay with me, Harriet.”
She turned to the doctor.
“Stay,” he told her, poor boy, new to these things.
“Then give me my way,” Harriet begged, turning back again. She had forgotten the others already. “You said that after what happened between you and Austen you wanted it known how you felt to me. Haven’t I the same right and more, since it was my brother who said it, to want the world to know how I feel to you?”
They could feel the laugh in his reply. “The world, the world, as if you ever cared for what the world—come, be honest, Harriet; you say this in the generous desire of making it up to me.”
“But I do—I do care. I could clap my hands, I could glory to cry it from the house-tops, how I care, how I am here, on my knees, begging you will marry me.”
“You are kneeling? Yes? Kneel then; even that, since it brings you closer. But let’s not talk of this now. I’m not used tothe knowledge of the first yet. Will you put your hand in mine, Harriet?”
The girl over in the shadow felt that her heart would break. And this was love. The great, sad thing was love!
He was talking again. “I never thought, surely, to be a stick of a man like this. I could have made a royal lover, Harriet. A man’s blood at forty is like wine at its fulness. My head—won’t lift—God, that it should come to find me like this! yet, kiss me, will you, Harriet?”
But a moment and she returned to her pleading. “They will send me away from you, you know, I have no right to be here—unless you give it to me?”
Was she using this, the inference, to move him?
For he caught it at once. “You came—I see, I see.”
But she had fled from her position. “It’s not that, as if I cared, as if you thought I cared, it’s because I want to have been—”
But the other had stuck. “Is the doctor there?” he asked.
The young fellow came to the bed.
“I would like to see Father Ryan,” said the Major.
The priest came. The two were intimates. He listened to the instructions, the exigencies of the case to be met by him. A license was necessary. “And try and get Miss Blair’s brother to accompany you, and to come here with you; you will make it all clear to him.”
Harriet was looking up at the priest, whom she saw as the friend of the man she loved. “And you will come back and marry us yourself, won’t you?” she asked.
He was looking down at her. Even afterthe long night, in the cold light of a winter dawn, and in the garishness of an evening gown in daylight, she was triumphantly beautiful. With her hand on the smooth brown hand of the Major, she sat and looked up at the cassocked priest. The marble of her face had given way to a divine light and radiance.
He looked down on her.
“I will come,” he told her.
It was some hours before he was back. The young doctor had gone and come. Dawn had broadened into a grey and sullen day. Breakfast was sent up and placed in an adjoining room for Harriet and Alexina. The girl tried to eat, if only to seem grateful to the Sister bringing it, but Harriet wandered about the room, and, when Alexina brought her a cup of coffee, shook her head. She watched the door until thedoctors were gone and she might return to him, then went in and sat by him again. His eyes were closed, but his hand, seeking as she sat down, found hers. Later, as the priest returned, the gaze from the pillow turned to the door eagerly. Austen was not with him. The face steeled.
The Mother came in, and at a sign from the priest they gathered around, Alexina, the young doctor, the nurse.
With his hand in Harriet’s the Major followed to the end.
Nor was he going to die. There was deeper knowledge of life yet for the woman by him to learn.
Afterward, Doctor Ransome drove Alexina home in his buggy, where she and the voluble, excited Katy packed some things for Harriet.
“And Miss Harriet never to let us heara word, and Maggie and me never closing our eyes all the night, Miss Alexina,” Katy said.
And Harriet Blair a person usually so observant and punctilious about everything!
“And Mr. Blair, he asked where you were, Miss Harriet and you, when he came, and then he dressed and went to the party he was going to take you to, as if nothing had happened. And the Father came this morning and talked, but Mr. Blair hardly said a word, and when they left the priest went one way and Mr. Blair he went the other.”
Doctor Ransome came in his buggy and took Alexina back. On reaching the infirmary they found that Major Rathbone’s sister from Bardstown, who had been sent for, had arrived. Alexina had not known that he had a sister until she found her in the room next to the Major’s, with Harriet.
She was childlike and small and was looking at Harriet, helpless and frightened. She was, it proved, twenty-three years old, and a widow with two children.
“And Stevie takes care of us,” she explained. “Stevie” was the Major; “us” was herself and the babies.
She had brought both the babies. “I couldn’t leave them and come, you know,” she said.
One of them lay on the bed, asleep, a little chap four years old, his coat unfastened, his hair tumbled. The other, the younger, asleep too, lay on the mother’s knee, Harriet regarding him. He was aquiline, lean and handsome, baby as he was, like a little deer hound.
“His name is Stevie,” said Stephen’s sister.
Harriet looked up from the child to themother, almost jealously. “Then he is mine, too; I have some part in him too, since his name is Stephen.”
For two months Austen Blair and his niece lived on in the big house.
Alexina wondered if her uncle were not different from other people, for it must be the abnormal human who would not ask one question about his sister; mere curiosity must have demanded that much, Alexina thought, having a lively curiosity herself. To be sure, Aunt Harriet, from Uncle Austen’s standpoint, had outraged every convention to which they had been bred; she had married a man between whom and her family there had been bitterest enmity, between whom and her brother there had been personal encounter; she had gone from herbrother’s roof to be married in a Catholic institution, by a Catholic priest.
It almost made Alexina laugh when she summed up the enormity of the offending. She gloried in it herself; she adored Aunt Harriet and loved her for it.
But the fact that her uncle could thus ignore the whole subject made it harder for Alexina to go to him about a matter which had arisen concerning herself.
A letter had come to her from her mother. Though it was eleven years since she had seen the handwriting, she knew it, as Katy, bringing the mail, handed it to her.
It seemed to Alexina that her pulses stopped and the tide of her blood flowed backward. Katy, closing the door as she went, brought her to herself, and she flung the letter from her the width of the room, her gaze following it.
She sat like one stunned with horror. Then rage succeeded. “What right had this—this so-called mother to write to her?”
But she need not read it, and Alexina sprang up and went about her household duties, as if in interviews with grocery-man and butcher, with cook and laundress, she could forget that her mother had written her, that the letter lay up-stairs awaiting her.
She would not read it, she assured herself; but all the while she knew that she would, and when the time came she opened it quietly and read it through. Then she put it in its envelope and threw it from her again across the room, and sat immovable, the lines of her young face setting as though by some steeling process. Suddenly she caught sight of her face in the glass. On it was the look of Uncle Austen.
She sprang up and, dragging forth hercloak and hat and furs, fled from the house. She must turn to some one, she must get away from the horror that was upon her. She would go to Aunt Harriet.
It was a frosty day and a light fall of snow was on the pavements. She met Dr. Ransome and Emily Carringford strolling along as though it were summer. She had introduced him to Emily, and one would say she had done him a good turn. She smiled as they called to her from across the street. He admired Emily and it looked as if Emily—but, then, Emily sparkled and glowed for any man, even for Uncle Austen.
She saw Georgy wave his hat gaily from the platform of a street-car and look as though he meant to swing off and join her. She was seeing a good deal of him these days. She shook her head and pointed with her muff, and a moment later turned in atthe Infirmary gate. She had walked rapidly and felt better somehow. The Major was daily growing stronger, though the fear was that he might never walk again, but, rather than accept this verdict, he and Aunt Harriet were going East for advice or, if need be, to Paris.
Paris! The horror surged back upon her. She stopped short in her very turning to close the gate and stood engrossed with the misery of it, for it was from Paris her mother had written to say she was coming to her.
“I have reached the end of my money, ma chere,” she wrote, “as you come into yours, which Austen, being a Blair, will have cared for. I will teach you to love life, now that you are grown. When you were a child you were impossible, you disconcerted and judged me, but it is unfair to let you taste life according to Blair seasoning only.So write me, ma fille, mon enfant, of your whereabouts, in the care of your Uncle Randolph in Washington, for I follow this steamer across.”
And then, as though her mood had changed: “In any case, I shall not trouble you long. It is my lungs, they tell me. It is a curious sensation, may you never know it, having your furniture seized. Le bon Dieu and Celeste have stood between me and much.”
Celeste! Tall, gaunt, and taciturn—negro mammy to Alexina and to Molly before her. Celeste! It all stifled the girl. She hated Celeste. Celeste had chosen to go with the mother, and the child had been left by both.
And where was M. Garnier, the husband—“the promising young French poet,” as Uncle Randolph had termed him to someone, in the child Alexina’s hearing, those years ago? The letter made no mention of him.
Alexina closed the Infirmary gate and walked up the wide pavement to the entrance. The little Sister knew her well now and smiled a welcome as she let her in. Passing along the hall Alexina hesitated before the marble saint in his niche. Hers was no controversial soul; what she wanted was comfort. Perhaps the blend of Presbyterianism and Catholicism may be tolerance. Then she went on through the spotless halls to the second floor.
As the door opened Harriet looked around. She had been writing by the Major’s couch, and he had fallen asleep, his hand on hers, the portfolio lying open on her lap. She smiled at Alexina, then nodded at the hand detaining her.
Could it be the same Aunt Harriet, this yearning-eyed woman? Her hair, always beautiful, had loosened and drooped over her temple, and the thought swept upon Alexina, how human, how sweetly dear it made her look, this touch of carelessness because of greater concern. It moved the girl, bending to kiss her, to slip to her knees instead and throw adoring young arms about her.
And then a strange thing happened; the head of the woman drooped for support against the girl’s shoulder and, with a sudden trembling all through her, Harriet began to cry. Only for a moment; then, lifting her head and putting the hand of the sleeper gently on the couch, she arose and drew the girl over to the window.
“You go to-morrow?” asked Alexina.
“Yes; Dr. Ransome has arranged to gowith us then. I don’t know why I cry, for he’s better. He’s been dictating an editorial. I’m unnerved, I suppose, and it’s beginning to tell.”
“You are worn out with the two months of strain, Aunt Harriet, and the worry and unhappiness.”
“Unhappiness?” Harriet laughed a little wildly. “Unhappiness? I thought you understood better than that. I’m happy, for the first time in all my easy, prosperous, level life. It’s out of the depths we bring up happiness, Alexina. And come what may, I’ve known, am knowing it—nothing can take the knowledge from me now.”
She was crying again, her head bent against the window pane. “I never knew how to get near to any one; I’ve been alone all my life till now. Maybe you have been lonely all along. I didn’t know. Livingwith Austen and me—oh, I’m sorry for you, Alexina. I’m going away now with Stephen; but when we come back I mean to make it up to you and see that you have opportunities and friends. Oh, Alexina, we do all require it, the joy of having some one needing us. And you’ll be nice to Louise for me, won’t you, while we’re gone?”
Louise was the sister of Stephen, and she and the babies were to remain in Louisville in the house the Major and Harriet had taken against their return, an unpretentious house on a cross street.
“Stephen has arranged it all,” Harriet was saying; “he won’t let me do a thing. He will not consider for a moment that he isn’t going to be able to keep his position on the paper; they’re filling it for him among themselves still. If he wasn’t so—so fiercely proud! It’s Austen that rankles, you see.”
There was a movement on the couch. Harriet went swiftly over to the waker. It is on Olympus they take time for deliberate and stately progression; Harriet had come down to the human world.
“It’s a soporific thing,” quoth the Major, “listening to one’s own editorials. I never heard one through before. You there, Alexina? Where have you been these two days? I hope you’re not holding it against us that Georgy is sending all his flowers to me? It’s his delicate way, you see; reaching round through me via Harriet to you.”
There was a tap and the little Sister entered. It was company. It was always company. The Major’s life had been close to the heart and centre of things. It was laughable to see the reserved Harriet’s pride in his popularity. It was a certain judge this time, and with him an old comrade-at-arms,come up from the Pennyroyal to see him.
“But had you better?” Harriet expostulated.
The Major caught her hand and laughed at her. “But these are fond farewells, you see, dear lady,” he explained.
Was he drawing her to him by the hand he held? For suddenly Harriet bent over and kissed him; nor did Alexina feel any consciousness or shame, and the little Sister went out softly with glistening eyes.
So it came about that Alexina did not open her heart to Harriet after all, and the aunt went away next day without knowing.
Yet Harriet influenced the girl in her decision.
Alexina, standing at her window, watched a sparrow tugging at some morsel that had fallen upon the snow and essaying to flyupward and away with it. She was lonesome; the house was so big; it seemed so empty. She was thinking about Aunt Harriet, who was giving her strength out to some one, who had opened her arms to Louise and the babies, whose days were full of thought and planning, and through whose eyes shone something never there before.
Alexina left the window and re-read the postscript of her letter. “In any case I shall not trouble you long. It is my lungs, they tell me. It is a curious sensation, may you never know it, having your furniture seized. Le bon Dieu and Celeste have stood between me and much.”
It was to her uncle after all that Alexina went with the matter that night. He was in the parlour reading and laid down his paper to give attention. The substance of theletter heard, the two perpendicular lines between his brow relaxed, for it was a case of his judgment being justified, and a man likes to feel he has been right.
“It is what I expected,” he said, “only it has been longer coming. She has her father’s people in Washington, she has no claim on you.” He lifted his paper.
“But—” said Alexina.
He lowered it and waited.
Her mouth grew set. He always made her stubborn. Fingering the upholstery of his chair, she looked at him, though it took courage to look at Austen Blair under some circumstances. She found herself suddenly disposed to defend her mother. “But if I feel a claim, Uncle Austen? I wanted to tell you I think I ought to write to her to come.”
“Come where?” asked Austen Blair.
To be sure—where could she write her to come? There fell a silence.
Then he spoke, and curtly. “In three months you will be of age, a fact which no doubt your mother has remembered. Until then I forbid it; after that it is your affair. In the interim, it has been my intention, and I meant to say as much to you, to make you acquainted with your affairs. I had expected you to live on in my house. Under the conditions you propose you will, of course, make your own arrangements.”
Alexina, listening, looked at him. One would have said tears were welling. Had he raised his eyes to hers, put out a hand—
But he returned to his paper.
Her cheeks blazed, her head went up, and something ran like a vivifying flame over her face. It was a pity Austen did not see her then. He demanded beauty in a woman.He should have seen his young niece angry. Then she turned and went up to her room and wrote her mother to come. But, the letter written, she leaned upon the desk and broke into wild and passionate crying.
Alexina for several years had been made partially acquainted with her affairs.
The evening her uncle chose to go over the whole with her, Alexina, in the midst of it, put a hand timidly on his. “I am grateful, Uncle Austen, you know that,” she said.
The matter of the mother was fresh between them. “I have been paid, as any one else, for my services,” he answered.
She drew her hand back.
The books were a clear record of what had been done year by year.
“Cowan Steamboat Mortgage,” readAlexina from a page of early entries. “What was that?”
“A mortgage held for you on a boat built at the Cowan shipyards.”
“What was the name of the boat?” Alexina’s voice sounded suddenly strained and odd.
“The ‘King William,’” said Austen. “The boat never paid for itself, and the mortgage was foreclosed and the boat sold.”
The girl’s eyes narrowed with curious intentness. As she listened she pushed her hair back with the hand propping her head as if its weight oppressed her. “And then?” she asked. “Here are more entries.”
“I bought the boat in at a figure a little over the mortgage; river affairs were down. Later, a couple of years—you’ll find it there—the boat sold for double the price.”
She closed the book. “That’s enough, Ibelieve,” she said, “for one evening.” But it is doubtful if he was at all aware of anything strange in her tone.
She tripped on her skirts, so impetuous was her flight up the stairs, and, in her room, flung herself upon the bed. Her hands even beat fiercely as she cried, but there was no doll Sally Ann to be gathered in for comfort now.
They had loved her, they had been good to her. Mrs. Leroy had rocked her, the Captain had held her on his knee.
She sprang up and went to bathe her eyes. If she knew where they were, or how to find them, she would go—
She wondered if Emily or her mother had known about this.
She went to the Carringfords’ the next afternoon. She liked to go over to the little brown house and she liked Emily’s strong-featured, outspoken mother; there was acertain homely charm even in the clear-starched fresh calico dresses she wore.
Mrs. Carringford was drawing large loaves of golden-brown bread from the oven as Alexina came in by way of the kitchen door. The smell of it was good.
“Wait a moment, Alexina,” she said, as she rose and turned the loaves out onto a clean crash towel spread upon the table. “I want a word with you before you go up-stairs. It’s about Emily; you know, I suppose, that your uncle is coming over right often to see her?—That big hat looks well on your yellow hair, Alexina—And I’m going to be plain: it’s bad for Emily; she’s discontented with things now, she always has been.”
Alexina’s eyes dilated. “Coming to see Emily? Does—does Emily want him to come?”
“Alexina,” called Emily down the stairs; “aren’t you coming up?”
Alexina went up to the room which Emily shared with her two little sisters. It was hard on her. There were various attempts to have it as a girl fancies her room. The airiness of Swiss muslins, however cheap, the sheen of the colour over which the airiness lies, the fluttering of ruffled edges—these seem to be expressions of girlhood. But Emily’s little sisters shared the room with her. They were there when Alexina entered.
“Now go out,” Emily told them; “we want to be alone.”
The little girls looked up. Miss Alexina was tall and fair and friendly, she wore lovely dresses, she went to balls, and they adored her. She felt the flattery and liked it too. “Oh,” she interceded, “no, don’t, Emily.”
“Yes,” said Emily; “we want to talk. Go on, Nan—Nell; don’t you hear?”
The little sisters gathered up books and slates with some show of resentment; it was their room too. Emily shut the door behind them.
The breadths of a light-hued silk dress were lying about the room. Emily was ripping on the waist. “It’s a dress Miss Harriet gave mother for a quilt while you were away, but I told her it would be no such thing if I could devise it otherwise.”
She frowned, then threw the waist down. “Not that I don’t hate it—the devising, the scheming.”
“I wouldn’t do it,” said Alexina bluntly.
“Which is easy for you to say,” retorted Emily, her eyes sweeping Alexina from top to toe. Harriet Blair knew how to dress the girl.
“Yes,” said Alexina; “I suppose that’s true.” It was part of her hold on Emily, her fairness. “But you’re welcome to anything of mine; I’ve reason somehow to hate ’em all.”
The colour heightened on Emily’s face and she looked eager. Passion expresses itself variously. The stern old grandfather abased and denied the physical and material needs. Emily exulted in the very sheen of rich fabric, in the feel of satin laid to cheek. Was the grandchild but fulfilling the law of reaction? The soul of Emily and the soul of the old preacher saw each other across a vast abyss.
“It’s for the Orbisons’ I need a dress,” said Emily. “Of course, I know it’s because I have a voice I’m asked.”
Yet, knowing that for herself she never would have been asked, there was exultation in Emily’s tone.
Alexina got up suddenly. Somehow she didn’t want to discuss the Leroys with Emily after all.
Down-stairs she stopped again in the spotless, shining kitchen, the clean odour where soft-soap is used always lingering. Alexina liked it; all her knowledge of the dear homely details of life she was familiar with, she had gotten here.
“You remember the Leroys?” she asked Mrs. Carringford.
“Why, yes; I sent them milk twice a day.”
“Did you know why they went away?”
“Wasn’t it because they had put everything into that—er—” She stopped.
“Boat?” suggested the girl.
“Boat”—Mrs. Carringford accepted the word—“and so had to, after it was—er—”
“Sold,” supplied Alexina. “Did you—did people know who it was held the mortgage?”
The plain-spoken Mrs. Carringford looked embarrassed. “Well, Alexina, you know how it is in a neighbourhood.”
“Then you knew the boat was bought in for me?”
“Why, yes; I did.”
“Did the Leroys know it?”
“Why, naturally, I should suppose so.”
That was all that Alexina wanted to know, yet not all, either. Her colour rose a little. It made her pretty. “Do you know anything of the Leroys since?”
“Not a word,” said Mrs. Carringford.
“What do you hear from Miss Harriet and Major Rathbone?”
“They are still East. Dr. Ransome came back yesterday.”
“Yes; I know he did,” said Mrs. Carringford. “He was here to see Emily last night. He’s a nice boy.” There was emphasis in her way of making the statement. Harriet Blair had once remarked that Mrs. Carringford was that anomaly—a sane woman. Yet she opposed the visits of Austen Blair and spoke heartily concerning the other one. “Garrard is a nice boy; I like him.”
Alexina became twenty-one in May. She had found that in the settling of her affairs it would be necessary for her to remain in Louisville and so had written her mother to come to her there. She explained about the change in her life to the Carringfords, to find that they knew all about her mother; probably her little world, Georgy, Dr. Ransome, knew it, too, while these years she had comforted herself with the thought that, at least, it was her secret shame.
Mrs. Carringford put an arm about her and kissed her. There was approval in the action.
Emily looked at her, then laughed nervously, while a vivid scarlet rose to the roots of her chestnut hair.
As Alexina passed through the front-room study going home, the old minister glanced up from his writing and called her name. He pushed his spectacles back onto his leonine head, looking up as she came toward him. She was surprised, for he never had seemed conscious even of her comings and goings.
“There are two ties that are not of our making,” he told her; “the spiritual tie between the Creator and the created, and the material tie between the parent and the child. They are ties not of duty but of nature, as indestructible as matter. God go with you.”
She felt strange and choked, though she was not sure she knew what he meant.
A week after she became of age she wasdismantling the bay-windowed room of such things as were hers. Little by little it grew as cold and cheerless as the one adjoining, now the personality of Aunt Harriet was gone out of it. What would become of Uncle Austen after both were gone?
She had tried to force from him some expression of feeling, at first wistfully, then determinedly. There is a chance, had he responded, that she would have made other arrangements for her mother. Then she told herself she did not care and went hotly on with her preparations.
She had taken two bedrooms and a parlour at a hotel, and had written her mother to go directly there, but the night of her arrival the girl felt she could not go to meet her. It was too late an hour anyhow, she would wait until morning, but she shrank so from that first moment she could not sleep.
She and her uncle met at the breakfast table the next morning. She made one or two attempts at conversation. “I go to-day, Uncle Austen,” she said at last, and, leaning forward, pushed a paper across the table to him. It was the final statement of the household expenditures under her management.
Her board from her first coming had been paid into the general house fund, and, accordingly, she had included against herself charge for these several days in the new month.
Noting it, Austen Blair nodded; it was the first approval accorded her for some time.
She laughed. “I go to-day,” she repeated.
Her uncle, who had risen, put the paper, neatly folded, into his wallet, then crossed to her and put out his hand.
“I will not see you again then?” he said, and shook hands.
A moment after she heard the front door close.
There were the servants to bid good-by, and that being done there was no excuse to linger.
It was a warm May day; the magnolia in the yard, the pirus japonicas, the calycanthus, the horse chestnuts, were in bloom. The lawn was green, the edges of the gravel paths were newly cut and trim. Alexina, in her muslin dress and Leghorn hat, turned on the stone flagging and looked back at the home she was leaving. Home?
The girl, pausing in the yard of the big house, glanced across the street to a shabby old brick cottage. Her affection was for it.
The hotel was in the business part of the city near the river. A street-car would havetaken her directly there but she walked, as if seeking to put the moment off. The way took her past the house furnished and waiting for Aunt Harriet and the Major. Louise was sitting on an up-stairs window-sill with little Stevie, and caught his small fist and waved it to her. A curtain was fluttering out an opened window and a comfortable looking coloured woman was sweeping the pavement. The place had an air of relaxation, of comfort, already. Aunt Harriet was going to have a home.
The arrangements had been made at the hotel, and the child, for a very child she was, went in at the ladies’ entrance where a sleepy bell-boy sat, always nodding, past the pillared corridor, on up-stairs, and along the crimson-carpeted hallways. She was trembling, her throat was dry.
In the suite she had taken, a bed-roomeither side opened into a connecting parlour. It was the knob of the parlour door she turned after a tap. Then she went in.
“Why, you tall, charming, baby-faced—! Celeste, Celeste, here’s your baby! Come here to me, Malise. Why the child’s hands are cold!”
How foolish to have dreaded it so! It was all gone—even the constraint. The twelve years were as nothing. She was again the baby child, Malise, so-called by her mother’s people.
And her mother? The linen pillows on the sofa beneath her head looked cool and pleasantly rumpled, and the sheer white wrapper was fine and softly laundered as a baby’s. Her hair, hanging in two plaits over the pillows, had no suggestion of carelessness; it looked fascinating, it looked lovely.
The mother, holding her daughter’s hands, was gazing up curiously, interestedly, her lips parted, as pleased interest will part any child’s. There was contagious laughter in the eyes, too, the laugh of expectancy about to be gratified, as with children while the curtain goes up on a new scene. “You are as pretty as you can be, Malise; the Blair features used to look so solemn on a baby!”
“Lil’ missy—”
Alexina looked around. It was Celeste, tall, brown, regarding her with covert eyes as of old. Celeste had never loved her, the child had known that; her love belonged to the mother, her first charge, her Southern born, all her own. The father’s blood in this second child was alien; Celeste had resented it as she had resented that father and all his kind. She had been jealous for themother against the father and child from the first.
Alexina, drawing a hand from her mother’s, gave it to Celeste. The old woman took it loosely, then let it drop. Things were to be as of old, then, between them.
The girl turned back to her mother. “But, Molly,” the name came naturally, she had known her mother by no other, “your health, you know; tell me about that.”
What did this dilation in Molly’s eyes mean? And she glanced sidewise, secretly, as if at fear of some dreaded thing, lurking.
“Did I write about that? Oh, well, perhaps I was, then, but not now; not at all now.”
The haste to disclaim was feverish, and the look directed by Celeste at Alexina was sullen, even while the old woman’s strong,resistless brown hand was pushing her mistress back onto the pillows.
“Got to res’ lil’ while, p’tite; got to min’ Celeste an’ lay back an’ res’ now.”
Then to her daughter, who suddenly felt herself a little compelled creature again, so was she carried into the past by the old woman’s soft, Creole slurring: “’Tain’, lil’ missy, ’tain’ like Madame Garnier she aire seeck actual, but jus’ she taire, easy like.”
Madame Garnier! That meant Molly! The illusions were all gone. The girl backed from the couch. Twelve years rolled between Molly and herself, years full of resentment. A slow red came up and over the daughter’s face.
But Molly, back upon the pillows, gave no sign. She flung her plaits out of the way and slipped her arms under her head. There is a slenderness that is not meagreness, butdelicacy; thus slight, thus pretty, were Molly’s wrists. The arms under her head tilted her face so the light fell on it. It was a narrow, piquant face, with no lines to mar its delicacy. The odd difference in the eyebrows, which had fascinated Alexina as a child, one arched, one straight, lent laughter to it even in repose. Yet the mouth drooped, like a child’s, with pathos and appeal. Could one say no to that mouth, it was so wistful? It was an alluring face, and moved you so to tenderness, to do battle, to give protection, that it hurt.
“Throw off your hat, Malise,” suggested Molly. “Celeste, take her parasol from that chair. There is so much to hear about. I asked la femme de charge, when she was in this morning, if she’d ever heard of the Blairs. Everybody used to know everything about everybody when I was herebefore and the servants most of all, and, mon Dieu, she knew all about them. ‘Miss Blair is married,’ she told me. ‘I know that,’ said I, for you’d mentioned that much in your letter, Malise. ‘She ran off to get married,’ said she. ‘Oh, hush,’ I told her.”
She had retained her very colloquialisms, this Molly, too unconscious and too indolent to know she had them, probably, or to care.
“So she told me all about it, how tall, cold, proper Harriet had run off from Blair proprieties and Austen, to marry a Southerner and a Catholic! It’s as if the virgin in marble had stepped down and done it!”
Molly was amused. It narrowed her eyes till they laughed through the lashes.
“I never heard anything so funny in my life, Malise, as—as Harriet eloping. What is it Jean Garnier would quote from his adored Shakespeare about Diana and hericicles? Make me stop! It hurts me—to laugh. Oh-o-h, mammy—God, mammy!”
The appeal died in a little choke, and the morsel of handkerchief pressed to her mouth showed a spot of crimson, but Celeste was already there, putting Alexina aside. “You can ring fo’ lil’ ice—yonder,” she told the girl jealously. “Then, efen I were lil’ missy, I’d go in there—that one is yo’ room—an’ I’d shet my do’h. When it’s over with, p’tite won’t want fo’ you to have been in heah.”
But pushed into the adjoining room and with the door shut between, Malise still could hear. She did not want to hear; she tried not to hear. She was awed and frightened.
“Am I going to die this time, Celeste? I’m afraid, mammy; my hands are cold. Don’t rub them with the rings on, you fool;you hurt. No, no; don’t go away, mammy! mammy! I couldn’t sleep last night; that’s why I’m—I’m tired. The night was so long and I was afraid. I see Jean when I try to sleep. I hear him cough. Give me something to make me sleep—oh, mammy, give it to me.”
The girl in the next room stood gazing out the window over the roofs and chimney stacks at the yellow tide of the river sweeping down towards the pier bridge spanning it, but she was not seeing it. She was filled with pity and terror.
It grew quieter in the next room, then still, then the door between opened and closed. It was Celeste, outwardly unmoved and taciturn.
“P’tite’s gone to sleep. Shall I help lil’ missy unpack her things?”
Summer in a half-grown Southern city is full of charm; pretty girls in muslin dresses stroll the shopping streets and stop on the sidewalks to chat with each other and with callow youths; picnic parties board the street cars, and in the evenings sounds of music and dancing float out from open doors and windows along the residence streets.
Alexina, chaperoned by Harriet Blair, would have found herself in these things, yet never quite of them.
“Malise,” Molly said quite earnestly, a day or so after her coming, “don’t you think it’s stuffy here?”
It was stuffy; hotel rooms in summer are apt to be; Alexina felt as apologetic as if Molly were the one who had given up a spacious, comfortable home to come and live in rooms for her. “I’m sorry,” she said. She had explained the necessity for it before.
“I thought you’d gotten the bank to take charge of your affairs,” Molly reminded her; “so why do we have to stay?”
“I have, but it’s a different thing, very, from having Uncle Austen, personally—”
She stopped; it might seem to be reminding Molly that she had caused the break with Austen Blair.
But Molly never took disagreeable things personally. She threw her arms back of her head. “Can’t you propose something to do?” she entreated.
“We might go round to the stores,”suggested Alexina doubtfully. She hated stores herself.
Molly brightened. “I need some summer things.”
Alexina agreed, yet she wondered. Seven trunks can disgorge a good many clothes; “mere debris from the wreckage of things,” Molly explained, though they didn’t look it. Yet in a way Alexina understood. It wasn’t the actual things Molly wanted; it was the diversion, and so at the suggestion Molly cheered up. “You look pretty in summer clothes, Malise,” she stated with graciousness, as they started. On the way she went in and bought chocolates; not that she wanted them either—it was too hot for candy, she said—but one must be doing something.
Coming out the door they met Georgy, who promptly stopped. He was a beautifulyoungster, with a buoyant and splendid heartiness, and now he was flushing ruddily with pleasure up to his yellow hair.
Alexina blushed, too; she hardly knew why, except that he did, and told his name to Molly, who regarded him with smiling eyes and gave him her hand, whereupon he blushed still more and then suggested that he go along with them.
A group of young matrons and their daughters stood at the door of the shop to which they were bound, chatting in easy, warm weather fashion. Alexina knew them slightly but Georgy knew them well, and they were greeted with salutations and laughter.
Molly smiled, too, an interested smile that brightened as she was introduced, and she remembered having known the mother of this one when she, Molly, had lived in Louisvillebefore, and the husband of another one, and all the while she was letting her eyes smile from one to the other of the group, who meanwhile were telling Georgy that they were planning a dance.
Dance? Molly’s eyes grew inquiringly eager. Favors were they speaking of? She had a trunk full of Parisian knick-knacks, she told them. “Come around to the hotel,” she suggested, “all of you: why not now?”
And so it was that the stream of things gayest caught Molly and Molly’s daughter into its swirl. The banks along the way were flowery, the sky was blue, and Alexina began to find the waters of dalliance sweet. Hitherto girlish groups had seemed to make themselves up and leave her out, and there always had been a disconcerting lack of things to talk about in dressing-roomsand strictly feminine assemblies. Now she found herself in the planning and the whirl, happy as any.
There was exhilaration, too, in this sudden realization of what an income meant, which she had not had much opportunity of learning before, and these days she laughed out of very exuberance and sudden joy in living.
“It seems as if I didn’t really know you, sometimes,” said the literal Georgy, out calling with her one evening. “It makes you awful pretty, you know, to be jolly this way,” which was meant to be more complimentary than it sounded.
They were stepping up on the porch of the house to which they were bound. Alexina laughed and caught a handful of rose petals from a blossoming vine clambering the post and cast them on Georgy.
There were other swains than Georgy these days, too, and not all of them were youths, either, not that it mattered in the least who they were; for in the beginning it is the homage, not the individual, that counts.
She hung over the offerings which came to her from them with a rapture which was more than any mere joy; it was relief. Suppose such things had been denied her? There are maidens, worthy maidens, who never know them, and so Alexina blushed divinely with relief. Roses to her!
And Molly, watching, would grow peevish—not over the flowers; Molly was too sure of her own charm for that. Alexina really did not know what it was about, and she did not believe Molly quite knew herself.
There was a lazy-eyed personage the young people called Mr. Allie. Theirmothers had called him Mr. Randall, but then he had been the contemporary of the mothers.
No daughter of these bygone belles was secure in her place to-day until the seal of Mr. Allie’s half-serious, half-lazy approval was upon her, or so the mothers and the daughters felt. Mr. Allie was perennial, indolently handsome, an idler in the gay little world, yet somehow one believed he could have gone at life in earnest had there been need.
He, too, sent roses to Alexina, and flowers from him meant something subtly flattering, and he came strolling around at places and sat down by her, saying pretty things to make her blush, apparently to watch her doing it. Not that she minded as much as she worried, because she felt she ought to mind, and in her heart she knew she didn’t really.
She had gone out with him half a dozen times perhaps, when, one evening at a dance, Mr. Allie, seeking, found her at the far end of a veranda where the side steps went down to the gravel. She and Georgy were sitting there together. Georgy was telling her of his aspirations and, in passing, dwelling on the lack of any civic spirit in the town, the inference seeming to be that Georgy, modest as he was, some day himself meant to supply it.
Mr. Allie told Georgy that a waiting damsel was expecting him, then took Georgy’s place. He did not speak for a while, and Alexina never was talkative.
“Would you rather go in and dance?” at last he asked.
“Why,” said Alexina; “no.” Which was not quite true for she loved to dance these days. She used to be afraid she was notgoing to have a successive partner and it marred the full enjoyment of the one she had, but now—
Still, any one would be flattered to have Mr. Allie asking, so she said no.
“Then we’ll stay,” he said; which was not brilliant, to be sure, but it was the way in which Mr. Allie said things which made them seem pregnant of many meanings.
After that neither of them spoke, yet Alexina’s pulses began to beat. The big side yard upon which the steps descended was flooded with moonlight, and a mockingbird was sending forth a trial note or two. And it was June.
“For you know, really, you’re the very dearest of them all,” said Mr. Allie, with soft decision, as if he had been arguing about it.
There was not a thing to say, and she could not have said it if there had been.
“And I’ve known a good many,” continued Mr. Allie, which probably was true, only Mr. Allie knew how true; “but I’ve never felt just this way about any of them before.”
Then they sat very still, and the bird note rose and fell.
“Maybe you’d rather go in,” said Mr. Allie as the music began again. Was it hurt in his tone?
“Oh,” said Alexina, “no.”
Mr. Allie picked up the end of the scarf which had fallen to the steps and put it about her shoulders again. It brought his face around where he could see hers. Was he laughing? Or were his eyes full of reproach? For what? He did not look a bit like a contemporary of anybody’s mother. Yet perhaps the moustache that drooped over the mouth did hide—lines, and the lazyeyes sometimes did look tired. Youth has its dreams, vague, secret, yet the Prince of the dreams should be no Mr. Allie with eyes that look weary and tired.
“If I thought,” said Mr. Allie softly, oh, so softly; “if I thought that you could care?”
“Oh,” said Alexina, “no, I couldn’t.”
She sobbed. It seemed cruel to Mr. Allie.
Then they talked it over, he so gently, she with self-reproach and little chokes against tears. He even held her hand, she too tender-hearted to know how to take it away, though the remorse eating into her heart was forgotten somewhat in the glow, the wonder that this thing, this sad but beautiful thing should come to her. Presently he took her in. The rest of the evening sped hazily. Going home, she talked to Mr. Allie and Molly as in a dream.
Reaching the hotel, and in their own apartment, Alexina sank down on the sofa, her wrap and fan falling unobserved, and sat, chin on palm, shyly remembering, shrinking a little, and blushing. Suddenly conscious, she turned and found Molly in her doorway between, undressing, and looking at her with knowledge and with laughter. She had forgotten Molly, who had been rummaging and had brought out some olives and crackers and wine. Molly lunched at all unheard-of hours.
Alexina sprang up. She turned white, then scarlet.
“‘Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck,’ Jean Garnier would say,” Molly began, unloosing her waist and laughing again. “Mais non, mon enfant, you take these things too seriously; it is time you understood. He has said as much to every prettygirl there, one time and another, and to most of their mothers before them, only they all understood. It’s very charming in you, of course, right now, and to a man like him, irresistible but, still—Malise—”
Alexina looked at Molly. Then up welled a red that rose to her hair and spread down her throat and over her bare young shoulders. She would never misunderstand again. It is a cruel thing, the hotness of shame. But Molly was staring. Malise was beautiful with her head so proudly up and her cheeks flaming.
There was more to understand. They were a gay crowd, the young people and their elders with whom Molly and Alexina and Georgy were going. Things came to Alexina slowly.
“It isn’t just nice,” she told Molly anxiously, an evening at the Willy Fields’;“Georgy says you’ve all been in the pantry opening more champagne. I’m sure they’re acting like there’s been enough, and he thinks, too, we ought to go home.”
“Good Lord,” said Molly. She looked so slender, so childishly innocent standing there where the daughter had drawn her aside, one couldn’t believe she had said it. “This is the way you used to go on when you were a child. One would think you’d had your fill of what people ought to do, living with the Blairs.”
Alexina looked at her. That Molly should dare allude to that past this way! Then she went and found her mother’s wrap and brought it.
“Put it on,” she said.
Molly laughed rebelliously, then waveringly.
“We are going home,” said the daughter.
Molly essayed to put it on but didn’t seem able to find the hooks, and Alexina, hardening her heart, would not help her, but went to find Georgy. He was looking stern himself, and forlorn and young, and the fact that she knew why did not serve to make Alexina happier.
The cars had stopped running and they walked home, leaving hilarity behind them. Molly was acting stubbornly, her tones were injured, and her talk incessant. Alexina couldn’t make her stop.
“Jean was just such another clog as Malise,” she told Georgy. “He was forever harping about proprieties, and he wore me out trying to make me tie my money up; Malise isn’t stingy, I’ll say that, though she might have been—she’s a Blair. Jean shivered over spending money. And after there wasn’t any left, he used to sit andcough and cry over his Shakespeare about it. He had thought he was going to be a great poet once, himself, Jean had.”
In the light of the setting moon one could see Molly’s childlike face; and her voice, with its upward cadence, was more plaintive than the face. The very look and the sound of her were sweet, seductively sweet.
“He liked to believe himself a Gascon, too, Jean did, and he loved his Villon too. He wasn’t well ever; he couldn’t always breathe, Jean couldn’t, but,vraiment, he could swagger as well as any.”
The night was still, the streets asleep. Nearing the hotel now, the way led past blocks of warehouses and wholesale establishments. Molly stumbled over a grating. Georgy steadied her. They went on, their footsteps echoing up from the flagging as from a vault.
“I’m cold,” complained Molly, “and,” querulously, “you know, Malise, it will make me cough if I take cold. Jean coughed. After he coughed for a year and the money was gone, he raised more on our things. Then they came and seized them, except my trunks; Jean had sent those away. I was sick, too; I took the cough from Jean, and I was afraid after I heard one could take it, so he made me come away. Celeste had some money. He made us come; he said it would be easier to know I was over here, and it would be better for him at the hospital—‘les sœurs sont bonnes,’ Jean said over and over.”
Alexina was hearing it for the first time. People like Molly supply no background, the present is the only moment, and Alexina was not one to ask.
At the hotel entrance, in the ladies’deserted hallway, even the nodding bell-boy gone, Georgy paused. Molly went and sat down in a chair against the wall. She laughed unsteadily, though there was nothing to laugh about. Her lids were batting and fluttering like a sleepy child’s. “I thought you said it was late, Malise,” she remarked.
“Wait,” entreated Georgy of Alexina, and squared himself between her and her mother. He was a dear, handsome boy. He gazed pleadingly at the tall, fair-haired girl whose eyes were meeting his so apologetically.
“You said to me there, to-night, you couldn’t care for me that way,” he told her, “but couldn’t you marry me anyhow, Alexina, and we’ll take care of her together?”
For he thought she knew what he did. Her eyes, which had lowered, lifted again, doubtfully, wistfully. Was she wishing shecould? They met his. Perhaps his were too humble.
A shiver went through the girl. Then came a sobbing utterance. “I can’t, I can’t; but oh, if you only knew how I wish I could!”
She broke down in tears. “Don’t be mad with me, Georgy.”
“Oh,” said Georgy, preparing to go, “it’s not that I’m mad. I reckon you don’t understand these things yet, Alexina.”