CHAPTER TEN
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 st.u.r.dily 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, pa.s.sion.
"We put that aside the other day--discussed," said the Captain gently.
"_You_ did," 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, but the 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 w.i.l.l.y since we came down here. We talked it out then, Georges and I. It"s been hard to see w.i.l.l.y fighting things; he was born imperious, but he"s used to battling now. I see what 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 Antaeus of Lybia, if I remember my cla.s.sics, Alexina. King used to lie on the rug when you both were children and read you about him. So many times as this Antaeus was brought to earth, he arose renewed, if I recall. The boy must wrestle with his own fate."
CHAPTER ELEVEN
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, embarra.s.sed his audience. There is something almost pitiable in the sight of middle-age grown playful.
Emily, Uncle Austen"s wife--embarra.s.sing 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 and chattered 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 his quickness 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 s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 Emily is 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 servants over, 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 train while 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."