"What do you say, Miss Blair?" he asked, turning to that young person.
"Who?--I?" Alexina had been leaning forward with her elbow on the gallery railing, her eyes looking off to a line of pines against the sky. She had been wondering how she should inquire about the Leroys, and if she really wanted to. She came back to the veranda and the present.
"I think it would be charming, too," she replied.
"Then we"ll go right away. I"ll order the carriage, so as to see the sunset," he said, and rose. "You will need wraps for Mrs. Garnier."
Somehow a man never thinks the other woman will need anything.
He spoke briskly and went off down the plank sidewalk towards town with a swing. The day was fair, the air was soft, and the blood in the Reverend Henderson, despite the dogmatic taint in it, was red and young.
Out at Lake Nancy Osceola, a young fellow in flannel shirt, knickerbockers and canvas shoes, was scanning the sh.o.r.e from a wooden pier which ran out the extent of shallow water, having just made fast the sail-boat rising and falling with the swell at the pier"s end.
A grove of well grown orange trees stretched up the slope from the water. The trees were heavy with fruit and looked st.u.r.dy and well cared for. To the right stood the frame packing sheds, and beyond, amid higher foliage against the cerulean sky, showed a house roof.
But the young fellow on the pier was gazing in the other direction, where, through the straight vistas of the grove, a carriage was being driven under the trees, the top sweeping the fruit laden branches. The young man hallooed as he started in the pier, but a negro digging among the trees had dropped his spade and was running up. The carriage stopped and the young minister of the Aden Episcopal Church got out.
Naturally, it was to be supposed that it was some person with no more common sense.
But there were others than the Reverend Mr. Henderson descending--two ladies. Some party from the hotel come for a sail, probably.
It was the duty of coloured Pete to go with sailing parties, but there was work that he should finish this afternoon. The old darky was backing the horse. The minister and the ladies were approaching.
The young fellow was just in from a sail, having been down to the sedge land with his gun, but he would go again. He gave a call. "It"s all right, Pete; go on with the ditching."
His eyes were indifferent as he watched the approach, though their glance was straight and clear and keen. Suddenly the look changed, intensified, and the young fellow"s shoulders squared.
The minister led the way, talking with the pretty, slight woman, who stopped with protest every step as her feet went down in sand. Behind them came a jaunty-looking girl with light-footed carriage. The wind was ruffling and tossing her hair and she held to her hat as she stopped under the orange trees to look upon the prospect.
But the eyes watching her did not turn, knowing the scene on which she was gazing. It was Lake Nancy, long and lizard-like--its sapphire water shimmering beneath the breeze--stretching westward between curving, twisting, inletted sh.o.r.es, fringed near at hand with the bright green of young oranges and lemons, and farther on by the darker live-oak and pine, while on the opposite side the line of forest stretched heavy and sombre, trailing grey moss h.o.a.riness into Nancy"s lapping wave.
And while the girl gazed on Nancy the young man watched her with a curious intentness but with no doubt. Then he walked in the length of the pier to meet them. As the girl"s eyes came round to him she changed to a startled pallor, white as her serge gown, and her eyes dilated, then into them came eagerness.
Except for a tightening pull on muscles about nose and mouth the young fellow stood impa.s.sive.
The colour rushed back into the girl"s face. The young man had turned and was shaking hands with Mr. Henderson. The minister was mentioning names, too, but the girl had her back to them and was studying the outstretch. Her head was high.
When she turned again Mr. Henderson was carefully piloting the other lady into the boat. "Malise," that lady was calling. Malise, forced by this to come and be helped in, found herself in the stern. But her throat, because of a choked-back sob, hurt, and a vast homesickness and sense of futility was upon her.
When presently she could look up and around the little craft was skimming out across the lake to deep water, where it shifted westward and flew into the dying afternoon.
There were billowy puffs of clouds high above, softly flushing into rose with a golden fleeciness to their edges. Her mother"s talk and dulcet-toned laughter reached the girl, punctuated with the serious accents of Mr. Henderson. The two were sitting where the seats, running about, came together at the bow, and he, with an elbow on the rail, was looking at Molly. Such a wistful, pretty child she looked in her white canvas dress, with her wind-blown, gauzy veil fluttering from her hat.
Alexina"s eyes were fixed on them, but she was conscious, too, of a gaze on her, which for all her hot pride and hurt she could not look around and meet. Once, when the sail was shifting and she knew the eyes would, perforce, be concerned therewith, she stole a hurried survey and saw a well-knit figure, quick in its movements, the muscles playing beneath the flannel shirt. A discarded coat was upon the seat near her.
"Down, please," came in cool, deliberate tones from the owner of the coat and the gaze. The head of the girl went down, while the sail swung about. The boat dipped, righted, then flew ahead, following the curving sh.o.r.es of the lake.
The very air seemed flushing, the shimmering water had a thousand tints, the sh.o.r.es slipping by breathed out odours of mould, and leaf and vine. The western sky was triumphing, clouds of purple and of crimson lifting one above another about a golden centre. And they in the boat were speeding into the glory; the very rosiness of the air seemed stealing down upon them and enveloping them. The sense of avoirdupois, of gravitation, was lost; one felt winged, uplifted; it was good all at once, it was good to live, to be.
The eyes and the gaze were on her again; she felt them and turned suddenly and faced them. The look she met was deep and warm, but it changed, holding hers, grew cool, enigmatical, impersonal. Did he not know her then, or did he not want to know her?
This time tears of hurt and pride rushed to her eyes. He was watching, but she could not get her eyes away, even with those hateful tears welling.
The sail shifted, for no reason apparently. "Down, please," he commanded. But as the boat dipped, shook itself, righted again, and flew on through the rosy light, his head came up near hers and his voice, in the old, boyish way, said: "Really?"
Sudden light shone through the tears in the girl"s eyes. Molly would have wrung her hands with an artist"s anguish, this was the place for coquetry!
"I thought you didn"t want to know me and I was hurt," said Alexina.
"It was yours to know first," said w.i.l.l.y Leroy stoutly, but his eyes were laughing.
"Oh," said Alexina, doubtfully; "why, yes; perhaps it was." And then she laughed, too, gaily.
CHAPTER TWO
As Molly, Alexina and Mr. Henderson sat on the front gallery of the hotel the next morning, they were joined by one Mr. Thompson Jonas, a lawyer of Aden, who lived above his office and took his meals at the hotel.
Mr. Jonas was small, wiry and muscular, of Georgia stock, with a fierce little air and a fierce moustache, and quick, bright blue eyes, never still. He had sprung to the aid of Molly and Alexina one morning and flung a door open as they pa.s.sed from the dining-room, and speedily they were all good friends.
It was characteristic of him that he should have flung the door back, not merely opened it. There was something of homage in the act. Within the body of the little man was the chivalrous spirit of a Chevalier Bayard, a Coeur de Lion. The big soul of Mr. Jonas was imprisoned in his pigmy person as the spirit of the genius in the casket.
He was a Nimrod, too, and even now stood in hunting accoutrements, seeming rather to have been shaken into his natty leggings than they to have been drawn onto him, and there was a flare and dip to his wide, soft hat and a jaunty fling to his knotted tie. His dog, a Gordon setter b.i.t.c.h, sat on her haunches by him as he stood, his fingers playing with her silky ears.
"Now, you"d better come go with me, Henderson," he was urging, "the buggy"s here at the door and you need it--you need this sort of thing more."
"It"s a busy day with me, thank you," answered the Reverend Henderson a little coldly, for this Mr. Jonas was a man of no church. His faith, he had frequently a.s.sured the young clergyman, would long ago have died for breathing s.p.a.ce in any creed he yet had met with.
"When you"re older you"ll understand better what I mean, my dear boy,"
the little man had in good part and cheerfulness a.s.sured the other.
"Come around and use my books any time you like."
For the soul of Mr. Jonas enthused--or convinced its owner that it did--over Confucius, and further revelled in the belief that it delved in occult knowledge; it also led him to place the volumes of the early Fathers on his book-shelves and the literature of the Saints and of Kant and Comte and Swedenborg; it conducted its owner to the feet of Emerson and Th.o.r.eau; it made him talk Darwinism. Jesus Christ and Plato, Mr. Jonas loved to say, made up his ideal philosophy.
Mr. Henderson, on the other hand, spoke of church buildings in Aden other than his own as a.s.sembling places. It was inevitable he did not give his approval to Mr. Jonas. His feeling against the little man even made him enumerate the occupations ahead for the day, as if it was a sort of avowal of the faith to thus declare them.
"It"s a busy day with me, thank you. I have a feast day service and a guild meeting, besides my parochial duties and a vestry meeting for the evening."
"Dear me," said Molly, looking at him. "To be sure--I"d forgotten you"re a minister." The young man looked up, instant self-arraignment in his face, for permitting it to be forgotten.
"When do you have service?" Molly was saying. "We must come over, Malise and I."
He told her gravely.
Mr. Jonas was standing against the gallery railing, rising and falling on his neat little toes, the setter"s eyes following his every movement. He was facing Mrs. Garnier and her daughter, looking from the mother, with her red-brown hair and shadowy lashes, to the girl, quite lovely, also, when she smiled in this sweet, sudden way up at him. She had nice hair, too, something the colour of wild honey.