“Perhaps he, too, stopped at the Haleys’,” said Alison. “Hannah Maria would not let him go by if she could help it.”
“That is quite true.” So this was accepted as the excuse for Blythe’s absence, although supper was on the table and all were ready to sit down before the young man appeared with John.
“I met Blythe just as he was coming away from our place,” said John, “and he persuaded me to ride back with him.”
Blythe looked embarrassed and murmured something about its being too warm to ride very fast, but it was not till later in the evening that Alison discovered the cause of his tardy appearance.
CHAPTER XIV
WHY BLYTHE WAS LATE
WHEN Blythe started forth on that summer day it was with all good and dutiful intention to call for Christine and Alison and duly escort them to his home, and he took pleasure in the errand although of late his ardor had somewhat abated in Alison’s direction, a fact which he did not confess to himself and would have repudiated had he been charged with it. The young man was now twenty-one, entirely a marriageable age in that southern country where eighteen was none too young for a man to marry and where girls of fifteen were often wives. At twenty-five John Ross and Neal Jordan were considered quite old bachelors. Blythe had paid court to Alison from the time of his arrival in the neighborhood, but had been treated as a mere comrade by the girl. During the period of his enforced stay in Pedro’s little cabin when his mother was established under the Rosses’ roof, he began to weary a little of hearing Alison’s praises sung constantly by his mother and sisters, and finally, in that spirit of contradiction which is so very human, he wished that they could find her less desirable. What a young man’s family are eager for him to possess seldom seems attractive to him, however much he may have thought of the object in the first place. And so because every one said what an admirable wife Alison Boss would make for Blythe Van Dorn, he began to wonder if she would. Nevertheless he did not cease his attentions and always enjoyed being in her company, while she, never sentimentally inclined, had no disposition to alter their relation.
Blythe pondered over the situation as he rode slowly along. There was no other girl whom he had met who was so well suited to be his wife, he was obliged to admit, yet while he gravely considered the question of trying his fate, ever and anon in place of her merry face came a more serious one, Madonna-like in its beauty, a pair of wonderful dark eyes shaded by long lashes looked into his, and a gently anxious voice said in hesitating English: “You are better, señor?” He persistently put away the image and as persistently it recurred. He recalled days of dull pain when the only pleasures were his mother’s presence and the fleeting vision of that beautiful, serious face appearing once in a while at the door. Later on, when only the languor and weariness of convalescence possessed him, little Lolita sometimes sat an hour with him while his mother took her meals, and then he found pleasure in watching the fringe of eyelash droop over the clear pallor of the cheek, and the grave red lips curve into a smile at some word of his. The pretty hesitating English, too, amused him and at last became truly fascinating, more so than Alison’s direct speech.
Yet anything more than a passing interest in pretty Lolita never entered the lad’s mind, and when he finally returned to his own home it was with no regret, though up to the last he could not resist making pretty speeches for the sake of the drooping lids and the sudden smile. Therefore it was no great disappointment to him when, upon reaching the Rosses’ rancho, he found that Christine and Alison had departed. Without inquiring into his motive he turned his horse towards Pedro’s cabin; it was silent and deserted. In the fields beyond he saw Pedro with the negro hands John had lately employed.
Blythe looked up and down at the closed door, at the window, half open, in which stood a pot of flowers. “Lolita,” he called softly, hoping to see the lovely face appear at door or window. But the silence continued. The whir of insects in the grass, the note of a bird, the laugh of one of the negroes working in the corn-field, alone broke the stillness. The young man turned himself towards the flowery stretch of prairie, his eyes seeking for some moving object. Was it the flowers stirred by the wind or did he see afar off some one stooping then rising? He let his horse fall into a walk and followed the road till he came abreast of the bending figure. Then he perceived a dark head against the background of mottled red and pink and purple. A figure in the loose white costume worn by the Mexican women was moving towards the small bayou where the magnolia-trees were at the last of their bloom, sending forth a delicate odor from their large white blossoms. Lolita was making her way towards one tree in particular; her hands were already full of flowers, but these she laid down on a stone near by.
Blythe alighted from his horse and tethered him, then started on foot to the spot where the girl was standing on tiptoe reaching up for the white blooms. The simple garment she wore, low-necked and sleeveless, did not disguise the roundness of her arms, nor the graceful turn of her throat as she clasped the bough overhead to bring it within her grasp.