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 me like 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 uncle and Emily, on her own return to Louisville in the late fall, the embarra.s.sing 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.
CHAPTER TWELVE
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 and personality 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 goodness of 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.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
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. w.i.l.l.y, he"s been gone for a week now, down to the gra.s.swater 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 promised we"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.
"w.i.l.l.y 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 head in 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 cafe, 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 until afterward 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 w.i.l.l.y come along, she would have seen it as speedily after his will, be that what it might.