VII
The leisurely progress of his thoughts was interrupted by hasty feet without; the bolt was shot back and his door flung open. It was the colored woman—the Indy of the essay—quivering with anger and fear.
“Capt'n,” she exclaimed, gasping with her rapid accent, “you come right down to the dining room, and bring that big pistol of yours. There's two, two——” Words failed her. “Anyhow you shoot them! It's some of that liberty you brought along, I reckon. You come down to Miss Rosemary!”
She stood tense and ashen, and Elim rose on one elbow.
“Some of our liberty?” he queried. “Did Miss Roselle send for me?”
“No, sir, she didn't. Miss Rosemary she wouldn't send for you, not if you were the last man alive. I'm telling you to come down to the dining room.... We've tended you and—”
“Well,” he demanded impatiently, “what do you want; whom shall I shoot?”
“You'll see, quick enough. And I can't stand here talking either; I've got to go back. You get yourself right along down!”
With painful slowness Elim made his preparations to descend; his fingers could hardly buckle the stiff strap of his revolver sling, but finally he made his way downstairs through a deep narrow hall. He turned from a blank wall to a darkened reception room, with polished mahogany, somber books and engravings on the walls, and a rosy blur of fire in the hearth. A more formal chamber lay at his right, empty, but through an opposite door he caught the faint clatter of a spoon.
Rosemary Roselle was seated, rigid and white, at the end of a table that bore a scattered array of dishes. There were shadows beneath her eyes, and her hands, on the table, were clenched. On her left a man in an unmarked blue uniform sat, sagging heavily forward in his chair, breathing stertorously, with a dark flush over a pouched and flaccid countenance. Opposite him, sitting formally upright, was a negro in a carefully brushed gray suit, with a crimson satin necktie surcharged by vivid green lightning. His bony face, the deep pits of his temples, were the dry spongy black of charcoal, and behind steel-rimmed glasses his eyes rolled like yellow agates. He glanced about, furtive and startled, when Elim Meikeljohn entered, but he was immediately reassured by Elim's disordered uniform. He made a solemn obeisance.
“Colonel,” he said, “will you make one of a little informal repast? We are, you see, at the lady's table.”
Overcome by a sharp weakness, Elim slipped into the chair at his side and faced Rosemary Roselle. The latter gave no sign of his presence. She sat frozen into a species of statuesque rage. “Like you,” the negro continued pompously, “we invited ourselves. All things are free and easy for all. The glorious principle of equality instituted lately has swept away—swept away the inviderous distinctions of class and color. The millenium has come!” He made a grandiloquent gesture with a sooty hand.
“'Ray!” the sodden individual opposite unexpectedly cried.
“We came in,” the other continued, “to uphold our rights as the exponents of—of——”
“You sneaked in the kitchen,” the woman in the doorway interrupted; “and I found you rummaging in the press.”
“Silence!” the orator commanded. “Are you unaware of the dignity now resting on your kinks—hair, hair.” He rose, facing Elim Meikeljohn. “Colonel, gentleman, in a conglomeration where we are all glorious cohevals of—of—”
“Shut up!” said the apostrophized colonel, sudden and fretful. “Get out!”
The orator paused, disconcerted, in the midflow of his figures; and unaccustomed arrogance struggled with habitual servility. “Gentleman,” he repeated, “in a corposity of souls high above all narrow malignations—”
Elim Meikeljohn took his revolver from its holster and laid it before him on the table. The weapon produced an electrical effect on the figure nodding in a drunken stupor. He rose abruptly and uncertain.
“I'm going,” he asserted; “come on, Spout. You can be free and equal better somewheres else.”
The negro hesitated; his hand, Elim saw, moved slightly toward a knife lying by his plate. Elim's fingers closed about the handle of his revolver; he gazed with a steady cold glitter, a thin mouth, at the black masklike countenance above the hectic tie and neat gray suit.
The latter backed slowly, instinctively, toward the rear door. His companion had already faded from view. The negro proclaimed:
“I go momentiously. There are others of us banded to obtain equality irrespectable of color; we shall be back and things will go different.... They have gone different in other prideful domestications.”
Elim Meikeljohn raised the muzzle lying on the cloth, and the negro disappeared. Rosemary Roselle did not move; her level gaze saw, apparently, nothing of her surroundings; her hands were still clenched on the board. She was young, certainly not twenty, but her oval countenance was capable of a mature severity not to be ignored. He saw that she had wide brown eyes the color of a fall willow leaf, a high-bridged nose and a mouth—at present—a marvel of contempt. Her slight figure was in a black dress; she was without rings or ornamental gold.
“That talking trash gave me a cold misery,” the colored woman admitted. She glanced at the girl and moved a bowl of salad nearer Elim Meikeljohn. “Miss Rosemary,” she begged, “take something, my heart.”
Rosemary Roselle answered with a slow shudder; she slipped forward, with her face buried in her arms on the table. Elim regarded her with profound mingled emotions. In the fantastic past, when he had created her from the studied essays, he had thought of her—censoriously—as gay. Perhaps she danced! He wondered momentarily where the men were Indy had spoken of as present; then he realized that they had been but a precautionary figment of Indy's imagination; the girl, except for the woman with the tender brown hand caressing her shoulder, was alone in the house.
He sat with chin on breast gazing with serious speculation at the crumpled figure opposite him. Indy, corroborating his surmise, said to the girl:
“I can't make out at all why your papa don't come back. He said yesterday when he left he wouldn't be hardly an hour.”
“Something dreadful has happened,” Rosemary Roselle insisted, raising a hopeless face. “Indy, do you suppose he's dead like McCall and—and—”
“Mr. Roselle he ain't dead,” the woman responded stoutly; “he's just had to keep low trash from stealing all his tobacco.”
“He could easily be found,” Elim put in; “I could have an orderly detailed, word brought you in no time.” The girl paid not the slightest heed to his proposal. From the street came a hoarse drunken shouting, a small inflamed rabble streamed by. It wouldn't be safe to leave Rosemary Roselle alone here with Indy. He recalled the threat of the black pomposity he had driven from the house—it was possible that there were others, banded, and that they would return. It was clear to him that he must stay until its head reappeared, order had been reestablished—or, if he went out, take the girl with him.
“You let the capt'n do what he says,” the woman urged. Rosemary Roselle's eyes turned toward Elim; it was, seemingly, the first time she had become aware of his presence. She said in a voice delicately colored by hate:
“Thank you, I couldn't think of taking the—the orderly from his conquests.”
“Then I'll find your father myself,” Elim replied. “You will come with me, of course; show me where to go. It would be a good thing to start at once. I—we—might be of some assistance to him with his tobacco.”
Indy declared with an expression of instant determination:
“We'll go right along with you.” She silenced Rosemary's instinctive protest. “I'll get your hat and shawl,” she told the girl.
And, before the latter could object, the colored woman hurried from the room.
Silence enveloped the two at the table. Elim replaced his revolver in its belt. He had never before studied a girl like Rosemary Roselle; fine white frills fell about her elbows from under the black short sleeves. Her skin was incredibly smooth and white. It was evident that her hands had never done manual labor; their pointed little beauty fascinated him. He thought of the toil-hardened hands of the women of his home. This girl represented all that he had been taught to abjure, all that—by inheritance—he had in the abstract condemned. She represented the vanities; she was vanity itself; and now he was recklessly, contumaciously, glad of it. Her sheer loveliness of being intoxicated him; suddenly it seemed as absolutely necessary to life as the virtues of moral rectitude and homely labor. Personally, he discovered, he preferred such beauty to the latter adamantine qualities. He had a fleet moment of amazed self-consciousness: Elim Meikeljohn—his father an elder in the house of God—astray in the paths of condemned worldly frivolities! Then he recalled a little bush of vivid red roses his mother carefully protected and cultivated; he saw their bright fragrant patch on the rocky gray expanse of the utilitarian acres; and suddenly a light of new understanding enveloped his mother's gaunt drearily-clad figure. He employed in this connection the surprising word “starved.” ... Rosemary Roselle was a flower.
Indy returned with a small hat of honey-colored straw and a soft white-silk mantilla. The former she drew upon the girl's head and wrapped the shawl about the slim shoulders.
“Now,” she pronounced decisively, “we're going to find your papa.” She led Rosemary Roselle toward the outer door. Elim found his cap in the hall and followed them down the bricked steps to the street. It was at present deserted, quiet; and they turned to the left, making their way toward the river and warehouses.
The fires had largely subsided; below them rose blackened bare walls of brick, sullen twisting flags of smoke; an air of sooty desolation had settled over the city. Houses were tightly shuttered; some with broken doors had a trail of hastily discarded loot on the porticoes; still others were smoldering shells.
A bugle call rose clear and triumphant from the capital; at one place they passed Union soldiers, extinguishing flames.
They descended the flagged street over which Elim had come, turned into another called—he saw—Cary, and finally halted before a long somber façade. Here, too, the fire had raged; the charred timbers of the fallen roof projected desolately into air.
A small group at a main entrance faced them as they approached; a coatless man with haggard features, his clothes saturated with water, advanced quickly.
“Miss Rosemary!” he ejaculated in palpable dismay. He drew Elim Meikeljohn aside. “Take her away,” he directed; “her father ... killed, trying to save his papers.”
“Where?” Elim demanded. “Their house is empty. She can't stay in Richmond alone.”
“I'd forgotten that!” the other admitted. “McCall and John both gone, mother dead, and now—by heaven!” he exclaimed, low and distressed, “she has just no one. I'm without a place. Her friends have left. There's a distant connection at Bramant's Wharf, but that's almost at the mouth of the James.”
Rosemary Roselle came up to them.
“Mr. Jim Haxall,” she asked, direct and white, “is father dead?”
He studied her for a moment and then answered:
“Yes, Miss Rosemary.”
She swayed. Indy, at her side, enveloped her in a sustaining arm.
“Indy,” the girl said, her face on the woman's breast, “he, too!”
“I'm sending a few bales of leaf down the river,” Haxall continued to Elim; “the sloop'll pass Bramant's Wharf; but the crew will be just anybody. Miss Rosemary couldn't go with only her nigger—”
Elim Meikeljohn spoke mechanically:
“I'll be responsible for her.” The war was over; he had been ordered from the column when his wound had broken afresh, and in a maze of fever he had been irresistibly impelled toward Linden Row. “I'll take her to Bramant's Wharf.”
Haxall regarded suspiciously the disordered blue uniform; then his gaze shifted to Elim's somber lined countenance.
“Miss Rosemary's rubies and gold—” he said finally. “But I believe you're honest, I believe you're a good man.”