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. Willy, he’s been gone for a week now, down to the grasswater 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. “Willy 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 café, 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 Willy come along, she would have seen it as speedily after his will, be that what it might.
Whatever the Captain thought, he sat unmoved in the midst of the deluge of water and mopping that suddenly swept about him on the porch. There must have been Dutch in Charlotte somewhere, for hospitality with her meant excess of cleaning.
It was a miserable week altogether to Alexina. The days dragged through to their nights, and the nights to morning. She had never known so hateful a time. She hated the grove, where thousands of oranges, gathered into piles, lay rotting, and where the smiling trees, wherever their buds had escaped injury, were putting out scattered blooms; she hated the lake, and the Cherokee roses in bloom, she hated the crepe myrtles and the camelias in the yard. To walk meant wading through sand; there was nothing in town to make the drive worth while. The shame, the sting was in everything that was beautiful. That she should care!
Mr. Jonas and Mr. Henderson drove out one evening, Mr. Jonas to talk over matters with the Captain. Alexina wandered off by herself.
Presently she heard Mrs. Leroy calling softly. “It’s your mother,” she told Alexina in a whisper, as the girl came back to the house. “I don’t believe Mr. Henderson is good for her.”
Molly was talking to Mr. Jonas rapidly, eagerly, like one defending self, as Alexina reached them. Mr. Henderson was regarding her out of sombre eyes.
“It’s not that I think I’m sick,” Molly was saying, “like he says I am. I’m better, really, much better, only while he was talking about, about things—it’s a dreadful religion his; I’d rather be without any, like Jean, than have one like his—I remembered how Father Bonot used to pull the oranges for me I couldn’t reach. Here’s Malise come back. Malise, let’s not go to The Bay after all; I’m tired; let’s go to Cannes Brulée. He’s there, Father Bonot is, they told me in Washington. He’s an old, old man. Let’s go back home there.”
“Why, yes,” said the girl, “if you want, we’ll go.”
“You were a little baby at Cannes Brulée—yes,” animatedly, “that’s what we’ll do. We’ll go home to Father Bonot, Malise.”
At the touch of Mr. Jonas the minister started. His face was grey. Then he got up and followed the other. On the way in to Aden in the buckboard he hardly spoke until the hotel was reached.
Mr. Jonas stopped the mare before the plank sidewalk. The minister came to himself as out of chaos.
“My God,” he said.
Mr. Jonas turned the wheel. “Only yours?” he rejoined briskly.
The minister, on the sidewalk now, looked up at him dazedly. “I don’t know what you mean,” he said.
“Not yet,” returned Mr. Jonas, with cheerful reassurance; “you will, you will, though.”
So again Alexina made plans. They would go on the eighth as before, she and Celeste and Molly, but they would go to Cannes Brulée.
Supper was over and the Captain sat smoking in his cane chair on the gallery. If King was coming, it would be to-night; the train from the South came in at seven, and he knew that they were going.
Alexina, sitting on the steps below him, was glad it was the Captain out here with her, rather than the others. It was like the quiet and cover of twilight, the silence of the Captain. Moving a little, she put a hand upon the arm of his chair. His closed upon it and his eyes rested on her young, beautiful profile, though she did not know it.
The moon came up. The clock in the hall struck eight. Molly was lying on the sofa inside, Mrs. Leroy moving about as was her wont, straightening after the servants had gone, and innocently unsystematizing what little system they employed.
Outside sat the man and the girl. There were night calls from birds and insects, but beyond these sounds the girl’s heart listening, heard—
Between where the road emerged from the hummock and the gate to Nancy was a stretch of old corduroy road over a marshy strip. Elsewhere a horse’s hoofs sank into sand. Willy Leroy would ride out, if he came, probably on Mr. Jonas’s mare.
The girl sat, all else abeyant, listening. She heard the first hoof-beat, the first clattering thud on wood. Her hand slipped from the Captain’s; she sat still.
She sat stiller even as Willy rode in and called halloo to the house, while his mother and Molly, and even Celeste, came out. She hardly moved as he touched her hand and went past her with the others into the house, and left her there.
She did not know how long it was they came and went, Pete with the horse to the stable, Mrs. Leroy getting the boy his supper. The talk of the father and mother and son rose and fell within.
She heard them closing shutters, hunting lamps, and moving up the steps. But he came out and sat on the step near her, and yet far away.
They did not look toward each other. And yet he knew how she looked, fair, still, perhaps a little cold; and she knew how he looked, tanned and bronzed, yet good to see in his hunting clothes.
Shy as two young, wild things they sat, and wordless.
Presently he spoke, looking away from her.
“Mother wrote me you were going. I came up to say good-by. They’re to wait for me in camp.”
After that they both were silent, how long neither knew. Then the girl stood up.
“It must be late,” she said.
“Oh,” he said, “no—”
“Yes,” she said; “I think you’ll find it is. Good-night.”