"Charming women, charming women," he was summing them up.
Yet could Mr. Jonas have called to mind any women, the old or young, the forlorn or charming, who had not moved him to chivalric emotion in some form?
Alexina was looking up the street. Mr. Jonas turned, too, as a wagonette, drawn by two big, iron-grey mules, swung round the corner, a glitter of bra.s.s and a hint of red about the harness. A young fellow on the front seat was driving; a lady sat behind.
"The finest boy and best shot in Jasmine County," said Mr. Jonas, starting forward as the mules were reined up at the hotel entrance, "and the foolishest, most profoundly wise mother."
Alexina was going forward, too. "We--that is, I know them," she told him; "they are old friends, the Leroys."
For she had known Charlotte in a moment.
A darky boy lounging about came to take the mules and w.i.l.l.y sprang his mother out, as lightly as ever a girl would spring, and brought her up the steps to Alexina.
Charlotte"s embrace was eager and ardent; then she cried a little, with her face against the girl"s shoulder.
"For my youth," she said the next instant, lifting her head and smiling at the girl. "I"m almost a middle-aged woman, little Mab; I"m nearly forty-five and I don"t want to be."
Vivacity, as of old, dwelt in Charlotte"s face and animated her lively movements, but her brilliant eyes were somewhat sunken, as happens with women of marked features and dashing beauty; the skin was growing sallow too, and as the cheeks and temples drew in the features stood large.
"I don"t know how to grow old," said Charlotte, and truthfully, "I don"t know how to let go. I haven"t the resourcefulness, or quiet, or repose, for an old woman."
Always, "way back as Charlotte Ransome, she had loved the showy, and she loved it still, as evidenced by the scarlet ribbon from which her fan hung, and the flowered muslin, showing the hand of village dressmaking. But she bore herself with the smiling pleasure of a child in them.
w.i.l.l.y joined them. He had been talking with Mr. Jonas, and evidently had declined the expedition too, for the little man, calling to the setter, went off grumbling and upbraiding the lot of them.
"We came early to avoid the heat," Charlotte explained, as they went to join Molly and Mr. Henderson.
Molly"s eyes swept Mrs. Leroy"s youthful fineries wonderingly, curiously. It was no credit to Molly that her sixth sense lay in an instinctive selection of the appropriate in the beautiful. She wondered much as a child wonders over the mysterious, at what she more often than not saw on others.
She lolled back now in her simple dress, of which Alexina had reason to know the cost, and she lolled indifferently--Celeste or some one would press out the rumples when need be--then she held out a pretty hand to Charlotte.
But Mrs. Leroy, the greetings over, spread her draperies with some care and absorption as she sat down. She was another type of helpless person, the reverse of Molly, with a carping sense of responsibility.
Molly"s gaze followed her concern with lazy interest in which lurked laughter, for the dress upon which the care was bestowed was so, well--
Alexina"s face grew hot; she hated Molly, whose every thought she was reading; and, by the girl"s arrangement, they fell into two groups, Molly and the men making one, King William perched on the railing of the gallery, and Alexina and Mrs. Leroy the other, drawn a little apart. There was so much to say.
"We see the Kentucky papers," Charlotte told Alexina, "so I know of most of the happenings." She drew a little breath. "And Austen Blair is married?"
"Yes," said Alexina, "just before we came."
Charlotte was regarding her like a child with a secret trembling on its lips. "I was engaged to him once, Alexina, and we broke it." Light from many sides began to break in upon Alexina.
"Oh," she said; "Mrs. Leroy!"
"It"s odd, isn"t it?" said Charlotte. "He was the only man ever caring for me that I never subjugated--except w.i.l.l.y here--" Her voice brightened, while she nodded, in her near-sighted way, at Mr.
Henderson. "As for him, he"s ruled me and browbeat me all his life."
And Charlotte smiled contentedly at the minister.
Alexina reached out and, with a pa.s.sionate sort of protectingness, took hold of the beringed hand wielding a fan with vivacity and sprightliness.
"I wish we could have given him more advantages," Mrs. Leroy was continuing; "but he"s had to plan for us somehow instead. I remember he wasn"t eleven years old, though it seemed natural enough he should be doing it at the time, when we came over from St. Louis to Louisville without his father, and w.i.l.l.y had to buy the tickets and check the trunks. I suppose I ought to have realized it, but I never had done such things in my life, and I lost my purse in the depot, I remember, and a gentleman found it, and so w.i.l.l.y took hold.
"We sent him into town here, after we came to Aden, to the Presbyterian minister, who taught him. He wanted to go to college, not that he"d admit it now. Then as soon as he was any size he began at his father about reclaiming the grove. That is, w.i.l.l.y planned and Georges listened. w.i.l.l.y"d got an idea from Mr. Jonas that the railroad was coming through some day, just as it has, but it"s been a long pull and a wait, for this is the first full yield for his trees. He"s been offered seven thousand for the crop as it hangs, but the mortgage is eight thousand on the place, which went for fertilizing and ditching and sheds, and living, you know, so w.i.l.l.y is holding for eight thousand and Mr. Jonas is urging for nine."
Charlotte"s pride in these statements was beaming.
"As soon as the grove proves itself, the place will sell for several times its old value, and we"re going back to Kentucky, to Woodford.
w.i.l.l.y wants to buy back my father"s farm, not that he"ll let me say that he does, he"s so afraid of admitting anything, but when he was nineteen, three years ago, he had the measles--wasn"t it dear and comical, like he was a child again--and he let me hold his hand, in the dark room, you know, and we talked about it, when we would go back."
The girl was patting Charlotte"s hand softly and winking back tears while she laughed. Why tears? She herself had no idea.
Mrs. Leroy had a thousand questions to ask, she said, but somehow she never got to them.
"Dear me," she said presently, "we have to go and I"ve talked of nothing but my own affairs. In my solitude down here I"ve grown a shameless egotist."
As if she had been ever anything else, the unconscious soul!
"But to be with one of my own s.e.x--some one linked with the past, too, is extenuation. There"s so much a woman can"t talk of with men, they have such different ways of seeing things, and let her love her men folk never so dearly, if there"s none of her own s.e.x around, a woman"s lonesome, Alexina."
"Yes," said Alexina, "she is." But she said it absently, for she was conscious of King William"s gaze being upon her. She looked up laughing, yet a little confused, for his look was warm.
He slipped along the railing, leaving Mrs. Garnier and the minister chatting. In this blue serge suit and straw hat he looked very like the King William of long ago, dark, keen and impatient.
"What do you think of it, Aden?" he asked.
"I like it," said Alexina. "Somehow as soon as you are in a thing the scene changes to out of doors. It used to be Indians on the common, or Crusoe in the yard, back there in Louisville."
"You began by saying you liked it," he reminded her. Did he think to tease? His eyes were naughty. Here was a zest; this was no Georgy.
"And I do," she said, standing to it. "I do like it."
Was he always laughing at people, this William Leroy?
"They are coming to spend a day with us this week, Alexina and her mother," Mrs. Leroy here told her son, at which, for all the imperturbability of his countenance, Alexina was conscious of something a little less happy about the son.
"They"re very good to come," he responded. The tone might be called guarded.
Certain recollections were crowding upon Alexina. Mrs. Leroy"s management, her housekeeping, even to a child"s comprehension, had been palpably erratic and unexpected.
The girl understood his masculine helplessness. Hers were the eyes that laughed now.
"I"ve set the table in your house before," she informed him, "while you made toast."
His countenance cleared. He met her gaze solemnly. "It"s a bargain,"
he said. "What day, mother?"
That night Alexina was chatting with Mr. Jonas. She liked him. "You said this morning," she reminded him, "that Mrs. Leroy was the wisest, foolishest mother--what did you mean?"