V
EMILY and Dade had kept up a correspondence that gushed from their pens with all the olden spontaneity of their girlhood, though in the latter days this thin black-gowned matron who paused in her household duties to sit down to epistolary labors found it an effort which caused her rueful smiles to assume a character that was akin to her ancient self. Dade in her letters from Washington had hinted darkly at a secret she had to impart when they were, as she put it, heart to heart again, though her constant and enthusiastic celebration of Lieutenant Beck of the cavalry detracted somewhat from the mystery she was saving for Emily’s stupefaction.
When it was at last announced to her that the Emersons were about to start for Grand Prairie, Emily welcomed the news with joy, and fondly expected to renew in Dade that blithe girlhood which, as she sadly realized, had gone from her. But when Dade appeared one morning at the bottom of the broad steps that led to the veranda of Congressman Garwood’s place, as the old home of the Harknesses so soon had come to be called, and mounted them with anything but continental stateliness, Emily, standing in the doorway to meet her, saw in a flash, that however ardent and however intimate their letters may have been, their diverging lives could never meet again.
To Emily the recognition was prompter than to Dade, to whom, indeed, it never came at all. Though she had roamed all over the world, Dade had not grown in experience, unless a cosmopolite’s knowledge of the conveniences of travel, a guide-book acquaintance with art galleries, and a smattering of gossip about, if not of, the fashionable courts of Europe could be called experience. She still looked out upon the world with the wide eyes of her girlhood; while Emily, though immured in all the provincialism of her little prairie town, had known the daily heart-ache and the sleepless nights in which the soul sounds all the deeps of life. So it was that out of eyes from which the scales had fallen she looked upon Dade’s glowing and radiant face this May morning, and the smile that came to her was of a longing sympathy with the youth and girlhood that stood revealed before her.
Dade, swinging the jacket she had been carrying on her arm, caught Emily about the waist and led her into the house at a livelier step than she had known for many a day. Emily took her upstairs, where they could be near the new baby, who was taking a morning nap, and once in the old familiar room that Dade had known as Emily’s in their girlhood, she plumped Emily down on the box couch, then plumped herself down beside her, and when the vibration of the springs had spent itself, and she had ceased to bounce up and down, Dade impetuously turned, and fixing her eyes on Emily under the brim of the mannish alpine hat she wore, she seized the matron by both shoulders and said:
“Em, Ah’m engaged!”
“Again?” smiled Emily, with the indulgence of the elder woman to a girl.
“Again!” cried Dade, repeating Emily’s word, and arching her brows. She released her hold of Emily’s shoulders, and throwing her arms behind her, rested on them like two props, while she regarded Emily with a mimicry of reproach. But her black eyebrows twitched disobediently in the mirth that was turbulent that day in her whole being.
“Again!” she repeated, trying to prolong the pose. “Yo’ speak as if mah husband was d’aid, and Ah’d been mah’ied the second tahm!”
Emily gave a little distant laugh.
“I’m glad, dear,” she said.
Dade regarded her curiously, and then instantly voiced her thought.
“Yo’ all talk lak some kind old auntie!” she said. “Why, gyrl, yo’ ahn’t old’s Ah am. Mah heaht’s wohn to a frazzle. Ah’ve been engaged befo’, oh, a dozen tahms, Ah reckon—mo’n yo’ all evah dreamed of!”
“A dozen times!” exclaimed Emily, in real amazement, and then with a touch of the spirit of their old intimacy she said:
“But you never told me, Dade, only that once!”
“Co’se not,” said Dade; “they really didn’t count. Ah was on and off with them so quick. Ah wanted to wait to see if—if—the’d take befo’ writing yo’, but they nevah did, only the one with the baron, po’ ol’ soul!”
“Did that one take?” asked Emily, with a languid return to the remoteness her own experience had drawn her to, and with a sigh, also, that her heart so quickly lost the perfume of the youth that a moment before had been wafted into it.
Dade was serious an instant.
“Well, yes. Ah thought it did, but yo’ know, Em, those Eu’opeans ah simply im-possible, that’s all.”
“And you were engaged to twelve of them! I thought the chaperon was an institution in Europe. Yours couldn’t have watched you very carefully.”
“Oh, they’re just to see that the gyrls dew mah’y some one—that’s all—but——”
“You escaped?”
“Yes, it’s different with an Ame’ican gyrl, yo’ know; they won’t be watched, and Ah escaped.”
Dade had raised her arms to her head, with a graceful preliminary flourish to loosen her sleeves at the elbows, and was withdrawing the pins that fastened her hat. Emily noticed that the pins were all headed with army buttons, with the “C” on their bright little shields that told of the despoilment of some cavalryman’s forage cap. She connected these with the buckle Dade wore on her belt, the plain buckle of the West Point cadet’s belt, though over the washed gold of this one was a monogram of the initials of Dade’s name, “D.E.,” in silver.
“Ahthu’ says——” Dade began, stabbing the pins back into the hat, and flinging it beside her on the couch, “Oh, Em, he’s the deahest man—pe’fectly scrumptious! Ah must tell yo’ abaout him.”
And she began a celebration of the young soldier, setting him in what was to her the picturesque atmosphere of a western army post, and drawing once more, in all its details, the picture she had imagined of him, booted and spurred and gauntleted, riding forth with his dusty troopers clattering behind to do the ungentle deeds that somehow have always filled the mind of the gentler sex with a sentimental pleasure.
“And oh,” she said, “Ah must tell yo’ abaout his being o’dehed to proceed along the South Fo’k of the—something-oah-othah—Ah must write to-day and get the name of that rivah—all hidden by cottonwoods along its banks, just lak in the books, yo’ know—and destroy all Piegan Indians. He was a shavetail then, and didn’t know a Piegan Indian from a Sioux, and he nea’ly brought on a wah. If it hadn’t been fo’ his old first se’geant—Oh, his men all love him, Ah know—eve’ybody does!”
And so she flowed on, while Emily sat and listened with the mellowed smile of an indulgence almost motherly.
“And we ah going to live in Washington at first, he’s General—What’s-his-name’s aide now, yo’ know. That’s why he’s allowed to weah aiguillettes; Ah must show them to yo’ in his photograph. But when he’s changed, we’ll probably have to go to some weste’n post. Think of mah living aout theah—an ahmy woman! Ah’ll have an Indian to cook fo’ us, and yo’ and Je—Mistuh Gahwood must come aout and visit us. He can get himself appointed on a committee to inspect ahmy posts, yo’ know, yo’ all can save lots of money that way. Ah’ve grown economical since Ah’m going to mah’y an ahmy officeh. They get awfully small salaries; it’s a shame. But Mistuh Gahwood can have himself put on the committee——”
“I’m afraid Washington has corrupted you, Dade,” said Emily.
“Corrupted me?” the girl repeated. “Co’se it has, it corrupts eve’ybody. That’s what eve’ybody does down theah. It’s all pull—that’s the way Ahthu’ got his detail as aide.”
Emily’s face had lost its smile, and had sobered.
“Yes,” she breathed with a sigh. “Did you see Jerome there?”
Dade looked at Emily questioningly an instant, and then she hastened to say:
“How stupid of me! To sit heah and talk of Ahthu’ when Ah ought to have known that yo’ all weh dying to heah abaout yoah husband. Oh, yes, Ah saw him at a distance a numbah of times, and one day Ah met him in the rotunda of the Capitol. We weh in the gallery, Ahthu’ and Ah, and had heahd him make a speech.”
Emily had leaned forward a little; her lips were parted, and her teeth showed in the first smile of real interest she had displayed. She laid her hand lightly on Dade’s arm, finding it a comfort to touch some one who had been there in Washington, some one who had seen him in his proper place, some one who had heard him speak, who had spoken to him and touched his hand.
“What speech was it, Dade?” she asked, eagerly. “The one in the tariff debate, or——”
“Oh, goodness me’cy me!” ejaculated Dade. “Ah don’t know what it was on—yo’ can’t tell a wo’d they say, they all make so much noise. Ahthu’ said it was lak a sun dance of the Ogallalla Sioux.”
“Tell me, how did he look?” Emily’s eyes were glistening.
“He looked splendid, Emily, splendid. He rose, yo’ know, suddenly, and began to speak befo’ Ah knew it was he at all. And he grew excited, and all the othahs crowded in to heah—it must have been a great speech.”
Emily made Dade tell her all she could recall out of her scattered memories of that scene, and the glow in her eyes mingled all the love she had borne him, all the hopes she had cherished, and all the high envy of Dade, to whom it had been given to be there and behold that scene.
“And how is he looking, tell me that?” asked Emily when Dade had told her at last that she could think of no more to tell.
Dade turned toward her as if she had an unpleasant revelation to make, and said, hesitatingly:
“Well, Emily—he’s grown fat!”
She thought of the trim, narrow-waisted figure of her own brown soldier lover. But Emily only laughed.
“Yes,” she observed, “Mother Garwood says his father filled out at his age.”
Then Dade resumed her celebration of Beck once more, and described for Emily the glories of the Army and Navy ball. And when she had done, she sat, her chin on her little white fist, and looked dreamily out of the open window into the cool green foliage of the trees, where some robins were building a nest. Emily likewise fell into reverie, and they sat there a long time before the reverie was broken. It was Dade at last who said:
“Emily, ah mah’ied people happieh than single people?”
The childishness of the question was lost upon Emily, whose thoughts had been busy with the unpleasant task of contrasting her own girlhood’s dreams and their fulfilment with the dreams of Dade and their promise.
“No,” she said in reply. Her voice was a mere hollow note.
“Ah yo’ all happy?” said Dade.
“Y-yes,” Emily answered. Her voice was still pitched on that hollow note.
Dade turned her head and looked at Emily. She saw her great eyes blinking, the tears brimming to their long lashes. She looked and wondered, looked as long as she dared. And the wide, wide distance between them she did not try to span by any words, but together they sat, and pondered on the great thing that had come into their lives, as it comes into all lives, with its hope and its frustration of hope, its joy and its death of joy, its peace and its tragedy.