“I’m glad,” she said simply. “Nicholas is back. The fish weighed—”
“I think I’d better not know,” he interrupted. “I might be tempted to mention it in the future, when it would take on the historic suspicion of the fish story.”
“But it was imposing,” she protested. “Let’s go to the sea; it’s so limitless in the moonlight.”
He followed her over the path to where the remains of the wharf projected into a sea as black, and as solid apparently, as ebony, and across which the moon flung a narrow way like a chalk mark. Millie Stope seated herself on the boarding and he found a place near by. She leaned forward, with her arms propped up and her chin couched on her palms. Her potency increased rather than diminished with association; her skin had a rare texture; her movements, the turn of the wrists, were distinguished. He wondered again at the strangeness of her situation.
She looked about suddenly and surprised his palpable questioning.
“You are puzzled,” she pronounced. “Perhaps you are setting me in the middle of romance. Please don’t! Nothing you might guess—” She broke off abruptly, returned to her former pose. “And yet,” she added presently, “I have a perverse desire to talk about myself. It’s perverse because, although you are a little curious, you have no real interest in what I might say. There is something about you like—yes, like the cast-iron dog that used to stand in our lawn. It rusted away, cold to the last and indifferent, although I talked to it by the hour. But I did get a little comfort from its stolid painted eye. Perhaps you’d act in the same way.
“And then,” she went on when Woolfolk had somberly failed to comment, “you are going away, you will forget, it can’t possibly matter. I must talk, now that I have urged myself this far. After all, you needn’t have come back. But where shall I begin? You should know something of the very first. That happened in Virginia.... My father didn’t go to war,” she said, sudden and clear. She turned her face toward him, and he saw that it had lost its flower-like quality; it looked as if it had been carved in stone.
“He lived in a small, intensely loyal town,” she continued; “and when Virginia seceded it burned with a single high flame of sacrifice. My father had been always a diffident man; he collected mezzotints and avoided people. So, when the enlistment began, he shrank away from the crowds and hot speeches, and the men went off without him. He lived in complete retirement then, with his prints, in a town of women. It wasn’t impossible at first; he discussed the situation with the few old tradesmen that remained, and exchanged bows with the wives and daughters of his friends. But when the dead commenced to be brought in from the front it got worse. Belle Semple—he had always thought her unusually nice and pretty—mocked at him on the street. Then one morning he found an apron tied to the knob of the front door.
“After that he went out only at night. His servants had deserted him, and he lived by himself in a biggish, solemn house. Sometimes the news of losses and deaths would be shouted through his windows; once stones were thrown in, but mostly he was let alone. It must have been frightful in his empty rooms when the South went from bad to worse.” She paused, and John Woolfolk could see, even in the obscurity, the slow shudder that passed over her.
“When the war was over and what men were left returned—one with hands gone at the wrists, another without legs in a shabby wheelchair—the life of the town started once more, but my father was for ever outside of it. Little subscriptions for burials were made up, small schemes for getting the necessities, but he was never asked. Men spoke to him again, even some of the women. That was all.