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, embarrassed his audience. There is something almost pitiable in the sight of middle-age grown playful.
Emily, Uncle Austen’s wife—embarrassing 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 snatched 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.”
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 embarrassing 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.