IX
She woke with a little confused cry, and sat gazing distractedly into the dark, her hands pressed to her cheeks.
“Don't you remember,” Elim Meikeljohn spoke, “Haxall and the sloop; your relatives at Bramant's Wharf?”
She returned to a full consciousness of her surroundings.
“I was dreaming so differently,” she told him. It seemed to Elim that the antagonism had departed from her voice; he even had a feeling that she was glad of his presence. Indy, prostrate on the deck with her chin elevated to the stars, had not moved.
The darkness increased, broken only by the colored glimmer of the port and starboard lights and a wan blur about the old man bent over the tiller. Once he woke the youth and sent him forward with a sounding pole, once the sloop scraped heavily over a mud bank, but that was all; their imperceptible progress was smooth, unmarked.
Elim, recalling Joshua, wished that the sloop and night were anchored, stationary. Already he smelled the dawn in a newly stirring, cold air. The darkness thickened. Rosemary Roselle said:
“I'm dreadfully hungry.”
He immediately produced the fruit cake.
“It's really quite satisfactory,” she continued, eating; “It's like the rest of this—unreal.... What is your name?” she demanded unexpectedly.
“Elim Meikeljohn.”
“That's a very Northern sort of name.”
“It would be hard to come by one more so,” he agreed. “It's from the highlands of Scotland.”
“Then if you don't mind, I'll think of you as Scotch right now.”
He conveyed to her the fact that he didn't.
“Look!” she exclaimed. “There's the morning!”
A thin gray streak widened across the east. Almost immediately the night dissolved. They were sweeping down the middle of a river that surprised Elim with its width and majesty. The withdrawn banks bore clustered trees, undulating green reached inland, the shaded facades of houses sat back on lawns that dipped to the stream.
Rosemary Roselle's face was pale with fatigue; her eyes appeared preternaturally large; and this, for Elim, made her charm infinitely more appealing. She smoothed her dress, touched her hair with light fingers. The intimacy of it all thrilled him. A feeling of happy irresponsibility deepened. He lost sight of the probable unhappiness of tomorrow, the catastrophe that was yesterday; Elim was radiantly content with the present.
“You look Northern too,” she went on; “you are so much more solemn than the Virginia men—I mean your face is.”
“I suppose I've had a solemn sort of existence,” he agreed. “Life's an awful serious thing where I was born. The days are not long enough, life's too short, to get your work done. It's a stony pasture,” he admitted. He described the Meikeljohn farm land, sloping steeply to swift rocky streams, the bare existence of the sheep, the bitter winters. He touched briefly on Hester and his marriage.
“It's no wonder,” she pronounced, “that you have shadows in your eyes. You can't imagine,” she continued, “how wonderful everything was in Richmond, before—I simply can't talk about it now. I suppose we are ruined, but there isn't a man or woman who wouldn't do the same thing all over again. I'm almost glad that father isn't—isn't here; misery of any kind made him so wretched ... perfect memories.” She closed her eyes.
Her under lip, he saw, projected slightly, her chin was fine but stubborn. These details renewed his delight; they lent a warm humanity to her charm.
“Any one would know,” she said, regarding him, “that you are absolutely trustworthy. It's a nice quality now, but I don't think I would have noticed it even a month ago. You can see that I have grown frightfully old in the littlest while. Yes, you are comfortable to be with, and I suspect that counts for a great deal. It's quite sad, too, to grow old. Oh, look, we've changed! Where do you suppose he is going? This can't nearly be Bramant's.”
The mainsail had been hauled in, and the course of the sloop changed, quartering in toward the shore. The youth, moving forward, stopped to enlighten them. He jerked a thumb in the direction of the old man.
“He's got kin here at Jerico,” he explained; “and we're setting in to see them. We won't stop long.”
The mainsail came smoothly down, the jib fluttered, and the sloop slid in beside a sturdy old wharf, projecting from a deep fringe of willows. No sign of life or habitation was visible.
The youth made fast a hawser, the old man mounted painfully to the dock, and Indy stirred and rose.
“I must have just winked asleep,” she declared in consternation.
Rosemary Roselle lightly left the boat, and Elim followed. “If we explored,” he proposed, “perhaps we could get you a cup of coffee.” She elected, however, to stay by the river, and Elim went inward alone. Beyond the willows was an empty marshland. The old man had disappeared, with no trace of his objective kin. A road, deep in yellow mire, mounted a rise beyond and vanished a hundred yards distant. Elim, unwilling to get too far away from the sloop, had turned and moved toward the wharf, when he was halted by the sound of horses' hoofs.
He saw approaching him over the road a light open carriage with a fringed canopy and a pair of horses driven by a negro in a long white dust coat. In the body of the carriage a diminutive bonneted head was barely visible above an enormous circumference of hoops. Elim saw bobbing gray curls, peering anxious eyes, and a fluttering hand in a black silk-thread mit.
“Gossard,” a feminine voice cried shrilly to the driver, at the sight of Elim on the roadside, “here's a Yankee army; lick up those horses!”
The negro swung a vicious whip, the horses started sharply forward, but the carriage wheels, sinking in a deep slough, remained fixed; the harness creaked but held; the equipage remained stationary. The negro dismounted sulkily, and Elim crossed the road and put his shoulder to a wheel. Together with the driver, he lifted the carriage on to a firmer surface. The old lady was seated with tightly shut eyes.
“This here man ain't going to hurt you,” the driver exclaimed impatiently. “This exdus is all nonsense anyways,” he grumbled. “I got a mind to stop—I'm free.”
She directed upon him a beady black gaze.
“You get right into this carriage,” she commanded; “you'd be free to starve. You are a fool!” The man reluctantly obeyed her. “I thank you for your clemency,” she said to Elim. She fumbled among her flounces and hoops and produced an object carefully wrapped and tied. “Here,” she proclaimed; “I can still pay for a service. Gossard—” the carriage moved forward, was lost in the dip in the road. Elim opened the package in his hand and regarded, with something like consternation, a bottle of champagne.
Beyond the wharf the great yellow flood of the river gleamed in the sun; choirs of robins whistled in trees faintly green. Rosemary Roselle was seated with her feet hanging over the water.
“Champagne for breakfast,” she observed, shaking her head; “only the most habitual sports manage that.” He recounted the episode of the “Yankee army,” delighted by her less formal tone, then the old man returned as enigmatically as he had disappeared. The ropes were cast off, the sloop swung out into the current, and their smooth progress was resumed.
A few more hours and they would be at Bramant's Wharf. There, Elim knew, he would be expected to leave Rosemary. There would be a perfunctory gratitude from her relatives, perhaps a warmer appreciation from herself—a moment—a momentary pressure of her hand—and then—where? He would never again come in contact with so exquisite a girl; they were, he realized, customarily held in a circle where men like himself, outsiders, rarely penetrated; once more with her family and he would be forgotten. Anyhow, he had nothing.
But in spite of these heavy reflections his irresponsible happiness increased. In this segment of existence no qualifications from the shore were valid. Time, himself, at the tiller, seemed drifting, unconcerned. Rosemary Roselle regarded Elim with a franker interest. She took off a small slipper and emptied some sand from the shore; the simple act seemed to him burdened with gracious warmth. Now she was infinitely easier than any girl he had known before. Those about his home met the younger masculine world either with a blunt sarcasm or with an uneasy voiceless propriety. Rosemary, propped on an elbow, was as unconcerned as a boy. This made her infinitely more difficult of approach. Her slight beautiful body, not hidden by clothes—as decency demanded in the more primitive state—was delightfully marked, suggested. Here was beauty admitted, lauded, even studied, in place of the fierce masking and denouncement of his father and the fellow elders.
He remembered, from collegiate hours, the passion of the Greeks for sheer earthly strength and loveliness—Helen and Menelaus, Sappho on the green promontories of Lesbos. At the time of his reading he had maintained a wry brow ... now Elim Meikeljohn could comprehend the siege of Troy.
He said aloud, without thinking and instantly aghast at his words:
“You are like a bodied song.” He was horrified; then his newer spirit utterly possessed him, he didn't care; he nodded his long solemn head.
Rosemary Roselle turned toward him with a cool stare that was lost in irresistible ringing peals of laughter.
“Oh!” she gasped; “what a face for a compliment. It was just like pouring sirup out of a vinegar cruet.”
He became annoyed and cleared his throat in an elder-like manner, but her amusement strung out in silvery chuckles.
“It's the first I've said of the kind,” he admitted stiffly; “I've no doubt it came awkward.”
She grew more serious, studied him with thoughtful eyes. “Do you know,” she said slowly, “I believe you. Compliments in Virginia are like cherries, the trees are full of them; they're nice but worth—so much.” She measured an infinitesimal degree with a rosy nail against a finger. “But I can see that yours are different. They almost hurt you, don't they?”
He made no reply, struggling weakly against what, he perceived, was to follow.
“You're like a song that to hear would draw a man about the world,” said Elim Meikeljohn, pagan. “He would leave his sheep and byre, he'd drop his duty and desert his old, and follow. I'm lost,” he decided, in a last perishing flicker of early teaching; and then he smiled inexplicably at the wrath to come.
Rosemary Roselle grew more serious.
“But that's not a compliment at all,” she discovered; “it's more, and it makes me uncomfortable. Please stop!”
“About the world,” echoed Elim, “and everything else forgotten.”
“Please,” she repeated, holding up a prohibitory palm.
“Rose petals,” he said, regarding it. His madness increased. She withdrew her hand and gazed at him with a small frown. She was sitting upright, propped on her arms. Her mouth, with its slightly full under lip, was elevated, and an outrageous desire possessed him. His countenance slowly turned hotly red, and slowly a faint tide of color stained Rosemary Roselle's cheeks. She looked away; Elim looked away. He proceeded aft and learned that Bramant's Wharf lay only a few miles ahead.
The old man cursed the wind in his stringent tones. Elim hadn't noticed anything reprehensible in the wind. It appeared that for a considerable time there hadn't been any. A capful was stirring now, and humanity—ever discontented—silently cursed that.
“We're nearly there,” he said, returning to Rosemary Roselle.
He was unable to gather any intelligence from her expression.
She rose, and stood with a hand on Indy's shoulder, murmuring affectionately in the colored woman's ear. The sloop once more headed at a long angle for the shore. Bramant's Wharf grew visible, projecting solidly from a verdant bank. They floated silently up to the dock, and the youth held the sloop steady while Rosemary Roselle and Indy mounted from its deck. Elim followed, but suddenly he stopped, and his hand went into his pocket. A half dollar fell ringing into the boat. Elim indicated the youth; he was now penniless.