CHAPTER EIGHT
It seemed all at once as if some wilful perversity seized Molly; at home she was so petulant Alexina dared not cross her, for to anger her was to make her cough; abroad she was gayer than any, almost to recklessness. Celeste, taciturn and secretive, kept herself between mother and daughter insistently, and often the door to Molly’s room was locked until afternoon. Mrs. Garnier must not be disturbed, she said.
One of these times, a day in late July, Alexina went out to the Carringfords’. Emily knew most of the comings and goings of Alexina and her mother. In her heart probably she was envious, though to Alexina she was concerned.
“That picnic of last week is being talked about, Alexina,” she said.
Alexina flushed, but she was honest. “It ought to be,” she said. Gaiety can tread close upon the heels of recklessness. But if Molly went the daughter had to go, for this very reason, though she could not tell Emily this.
So she spoke of other things. “Do you know anything of Uncle Austen?” she asked. “Is he still taking his meals down-town and sleeping at the house?”
Emily looked conscious. “Yes,” she said, “I think he is.”
Somehow Alexina felt that Emily not only knew but wanted it to be felt that she knew. Then why hesitate and say only that she thought so?
“How’s Garrard?” Alexina asked suddenly. Garrard was young Doctor Ransome. Emily flushed a little, but she answered unconcernedly, “Well enough, I reckon.”
On Alexina’s return to the hotel, the clerk stopped her in the corridor, looking a little embarrassed under the clear, surprised gaze of the young lady. “It’s about a little matter with Mrs. Garnier; it’s been running two months now.”
A moment after, as she went on blindly up the stairs, a folded paper in her hand, she understood; understood what Georgy had offered to share with her, what the taciturn secretiveness of Celeste meant. She went in through the parlour to her mother’s room, from which of late she had been so much shut out.
“Molly,” she said, her voice sounding strange to herself, as she held out the paper open.
Molly, risen on her pillow, looked at it, at her, her eyes growing big. She was frightened, and cowered a little, crumpling some letters in her lap.
“Don’t look at me like that, Malise,” she said. “I’ve some of the money you gave me left—I’ll help to pay it.”
That she was afraid only because of the bill!
“Oh—” Alexina breathed it rather than uttered it.
Molly, risen from her elbow to sitting posture, was looking at her with big, miserable eyes, her throat, so slight and pretty, swelling with the sobs coming.
But the other came first, and with it came the terror. “Malise, Malise, hold me; hold me. I’m afraid!”
Alexina, holding her mother, could reach the bell, and rang it, again and again.
“Oh,” she said to the boy when he came; “get a doctor.”
“What one?” he asked.
Alexina remembered Dr. Ransome.
Then she sat and fed ice to Molly and tried to keep her still. It is a fearful thing to feel the close, clinging touch of a person we are shrinking from. It was a hot, drowsy afternoon. The clock on the parlour mantel ticked with maddening reiteration. It seemed hours before Dr. Ransome came. Then a moment later Celeste returned. Molly flung her arms out to the old woman.
“He’s dead, mammy,” she wailed; “Jean’s dead; the letters came after you went—and I’m afraid, I’m afraid of it, I’m afraid to die!”
It was to Celeste Molly had to tell it. The daughter listened with a sudden resentment towards Celeste.
Molly was not going to be better right at once, and Alexina and Dr. Garrard Ransome had many opportunities for talk. She stopped him in the parlour, as he was going, one morning. It had been on her mind for a long time to ask him something. “It’s odd, your name being Ransome,” she said. “Mrs. Leroy, who used to live where you do, had been a Miss Ransome.”
“She’s my cousin Charlotte,” said the young fellow; “that’s how my mother came to fancy living where we do, when we came down from Woodford to Louisville. She used to visit the Leroys there you see.”
“Oh,” said Alexina, “really? They were very good to me.”
The blue eyes of the doctor were regarding her intently, but as if thought were concentrated elsewhere. “I wonder if it was you Cousin Charlotte meant? I was down there two winters ago for a month. They live in Florida, at a place called Aden.”
“Yes,” said Alexina, “Aden.”
“And she asked me about some young girl who, she said, lived across from the cottage. Of course I didn’t know.”
“I wasn’t there then,” said Alexina; “I was at school. They were good to me; are they well—and happy?” The eagerness was good to see, so dejected had the girl seemed of late.
“Well, yes, or were when mother last heard. Happy, too, I reckon, as it’s counted with us poor families used to better things.”
“Tell me about them, if you don’t mind. They were the best friends I ever had.”
“Well,” he said, looking rather helpless in the undertaking, “there isn’t much to tell. They’re getting along. The Captain was book-keeper for a steamboat line down there, went home every week, but, somehow, a year ago, they dropped him; he’s getting old, the Captain is.”
“Yes, he must be. And Mrs. Leroy?”
“Cousin Charlotte? Well, she’s Cousin Charlotte. Some ways she’s a real child about things and mighty helpless when it comes to managing, but she never thinks about repining, and it’s funny how she’ll do whatever King tells her.”
“And he?”
“King? Oh, he’s all right. Queer fellow though, some ways, imperturbable as a young owl. Best poker player down there, and that’s saying something. It’s motley, Aden is, like all those small towns since the railroad went through ’em.”
The young man happening to glance at Miss Alexina, saw that he had said something wrong. He was the only child of his mother and so knew how ladies feel on certain subjects. Yet, on the other hand, Miss Alexina adored Major Rathbone, and the Major’s poker record, while possibly of a more local character, was scarcely less celebrated than his guerrilla past. Still, ladies are expected to be inconsistent.
“I shouldn’t have told that, I reckon,” he remarked; “you all don’t see these things as we do. He’s a fine fellow, King is. He’s a great shot, too,” cheerfully; “I went on a week’s hunt down in the glades with him. King’s all right.”
Maybe he was, but it sounded as though he was trifling. “Hasn’t he a business?” she asked with condemning brevity.
“I don’t know about calling it a business,” said William Leroy’s cousin; “I know he’s the busiest. It’s a big old place, you see, the grove they own, and he’s reclaiming it. There’s just one subject he’s discursive on, and that’s the best fertilizer for young orange trees.”
Somehow William Leroy did not shine against this background as his well-intending cousin meant he should. “And they’re poor, Mrs. Leroy and the Captain?” asked Miss Blair.
“Well,” admitted Garrard, “they aren’t rich.”
The girl sat thinking. “I’m going down there,” she said suddenly. “Is there a hotel? There is? Then I’m going to take Molly and go down to see them. There’s something I want to tell Mrs. Leroy and the Captain.”
“As good a place as any,” agreed Dr. Garrard. “I told you at the start Mrs. Garnier must not try a winter here.”
“We’ll go,” declared Alexina, then stopped. Maybe they would not be glad to see her. “But don’t mention the possibility if you should be writing,” she begged; “don’t mention knowing me—please. I—I’d like to discover it all for myself.”
After he had gone she went to the piano, near the window looking out over the warehouse roofs to the river, and, softly fingering some little melody, sat thinking.
There was a tap and Alexina turned on the piano stool as Emily Carringford came in. Somehow Emily, so prettily, daintily charming in her fresh white dress, made Alexina cross. She felt wilted and jaded, and who cared if she did? That her present state was brought about by her own choosing only made her crosser.
What was it in Emily’s manner? Had she grown more beautiful in a night? She dropped into a chair, and, holding her parasol by either end across her knee, looked over at Alexina on the stool, and, looking, laughed. It was a laugh made of embarrassment and complacency, half shy, half bold.
“Your Uncle Austen last night asked me to marry him, Alexina,” she said.
“Emily—” Alexina sprang from the stool and stood with apprehension rushing to her face in rising colour and dilated gaze. “Oh—Emily!”
Was it foreboding in her eyes as they swept Emily’s girlish loveliness?
“He didn’t seem to mind my being poor,” said Emily; “he said it was my practical and praiseworthy way of going to work that made him first—oh, Alexina,” she coloured and looked at the other, “he didn’t even mind our little house—and mother doing the work.”
A sort of rage against Emily seized Alexina. She stamped her foot.
“Oh,” she cried, “why shouldn’t he the rather go down on his unbending knees in gratitude that you’ll even listen? You’re twenty-one and he’s fifty-one. You have everything, you’re lovely, you’ve your voice, you haven’t begun to live yet—oh, I know he’s my uncle, and I remember all he’s done for me, but I’ve known him years, Emily, years, and I’ve never seen Uncle Austen laugh once.”
What on earth has laughing to do with it? Alexina always was queer. This from Emily. Not that she said it, except in the puzzled, uncomprehending stare at Alexina, while she returned to what she had come to communicate. “We’re going to be married the first day of October,” she said. “Mr. Blair has to go East on some business then.”
Alexina drew herself together with a laugh. What was the use—yet she could not divest herself of a responsibility.
She looked at Emily, who was looking at her. Their eyes met. Alexina looked away.
“Emily,” she said, “there’s a thing”—it took effort to say it—“a thing maybe you haven’t thought of. It came to Aunt Harriet; it comes to everybody, I feel sure. Won’t you be cutting yourself off from any right to it?” The red was waving up to Alexina’s very hair.
Emily showed no resentment at this implication which both seemed to take for granted, but then she was not following Alexina very closely, her own thoughts being absorbing. “The wedding will have to be in our little house,” she said, “so it won’t make much difference about the dress; nobody’ll be there. But for the rest, I’m going to have some clothes. I told mother and father and grandfather so this morning.”
Alexina went over and seized the other’s hands as children do. A softer feeling had come over her. Perhaps Emily was doing this thing to help her people. Besides, she and Emily used to weave wonderful garbs in bygone days, for the wearing to the Prince’s ball. To be sure, one never had pictured an Uncle Austen as the possible Prince, but still Emily should have them, if she wanted them.
Alexina’s gaze fell upon a flower lying on the floor, which had dropped out of Garrard Ransome’s buttonhole. The boy loved flowers as most men from the blue grass country do, and the cottage yard was a wilderness of them. She had almost forgotten Garrard’s share in this. She picked the flower up and handed it to Emily. “Dr. Ransome has been here,” she said, feeling treacherous—for the other man, after all, was her uncle.
Emily took it, and laid it against the lace of her parasol, this way and that.
“I’ve always, as far back as I can remember, meant to be somebody, something,” said Emily. She said it without emotion, as one states a fact. Then she rose and picked up her glove. “Sometimes I’ve thrown my arms out and felt I could scream, it all has seemed so poor and crowded and hateful to me,” which was large unburdening of self for Emily. Then she went. At the door she laid the flower on a chair.
The three weeks of Molly’s illness brought it to the end of August, and, as she convalesced, Alexina began to plan for Aden. In the midst of her preparations the Major and Harriet returned.
She went out to the house the morning of their arrival. The luggage was being unloaded at the curb as she reached the gate, and, hearing voices as she stepped on the porch, she looked in at the parlour window. Harriet, her hat yet on, was bending her head that little Stevie, urged by his mother, might kiss her. The baby was no shyer about it than the woman, yet the woman smiled as the baby’s lips touched her face.
As she rose she saw Alexina and came to the door to meet her. She kissed the girl almost with embarrassment, yet kept hold of her hands, while suddenly her eyes filled with something she tried to laugh away.
“I had your letter,” she was saying, “and resent it, too, that you are going, and so does Stephen.” Her face changed, her voice grew hesitant, hurried. “He’s never going to be better than now”—was it a sob?—“but since I may have him, may keep him, and he is willing now to live so for me, though not at first, not at first— Oh, Alexina, it has been bitter!”
Alexina followed her into the parlour. The Major was there in a wheeled chair, the babies afar off, refusing to obey the maternal pokes and pushes to go to him, and regarding him and his wheeled affair with furtive, wide-eyed suspicion. The eyes of the Major were full of the humour of it.
“Now had I been a gamboling satyr on hoofs they would have accepted me at once,” he assured Alexina. “It’s this mingling of the familiar with the unnatural—”
He was holding the girl’s hand while he spoke and looking up keenly at her pretty, tired face. There had been enough in her letters for them to have divined something of her trouble.
“To some it comes early, to others late, Alexina,” he said quite gently. He had noted the signs—the violet shadows beneath the baffled young eyes, the hint of the tragedy in their depths.
Alexina sat down suddenly and, leaning her face on the arm of the wheeled chair, began to cry, not that she meant to do it at all.
Time was when Harriet would have been at a loss, even now she was embarrassed, though she hovered over the girl, anxious and solicitous, and even touched the pretty, shining hair with her hand.
“Let her alone: let her cry it out,” said the Major.
Alexina, groping for his hand, held to it like a very child and cried on.