On our return to the veranda, Camille and I, we found on its front the
house's entire company except only the children of the family. Mrs.
Sessions, Estelle and Cécile formed one group, Squire Sessions and
Charlotte Oliver made a pair, and Ferry and Miss Harper another. Our
posies created a lively demonstration; Camille yielded them to Estelle,
and Estelle took them into the house to arrange them in water. Gholson
went with her; it was painful to see her zest for his society.
Miss Harper "knocked me down," as we boys used to say, to Charlotte
Oliver; "Charlotte, my dear, you already know Mr. Smith, I believe?"
I had expected to see again, and to feel, as well, the starry charms of
Coralie Rothvelt; but what I confronted was far different. The charms
were here, unquenched by this stare of daylight, but from them shone a
lustre of womanliness wholly new. It seemed to grow on even when a
tricksy gleam shot through it as she replied, "Yes, our acquaintance
dates from Gallatin."
With a spasm of eagerness I said it did: "Our
acquai'--hh--Gallatin--hh--" But my soul cried like a culprit, "No, no,
it begins only now!" and my whole being stood under arrest before the
accusing truth that from Gallatin till now my acquaintance had been
solely with that false phase of her which I knew as Coralie Rothvelt. At
the same her kind eyes sweetly granted me a stripling's acquittal--oh!
why did it have to be a stripling's?
Wonderful eyes she had; deep blue, as I have said, in color; black, in
spirit; never so wonderful as when having sparkled black they quieted to
blue again. Always then there came the slightest of contractions at the
outer corners of the delicate lids, that gave a fourfold expression of
thought, passion, tenderness and intrepidity. I never saw that silent
meaning in but one other pair of eyes; wherever it turned it said--at
the same time saying many other things but saying this always
plainest--"I see both out and in; I know myself--and thee." Never but in
one other pair of eyes? no; and whose were those? Ned Ferry's.
"Don't you love to see Charlotte and him look at each other in that
steady way when they're talking together?" Camille asked me later. But
rather coldly I inquired why I should; I felt acutely enough without
admitting it to Camille, that Charlotte and Ferry were meeting on ground
far above me; and when Gholson, in his turn, called to my notice, in
Charlotte's case, this unique gaze, and contrasted it with her beautiful
yet strangely childish mouth, I asked a second time why she was
here, anyhow.
"She's here," murmured Gholson, "because she has to live! To live she
must have means, Smith, and to have means she must either get them
herself or she must--" and again he poised his hand horizontally across
his mouth and whispered--"live with her hus'--"
I jerked my head away--"Yes, yes." Scott Gholson was the only one of us
who could give that wretch that title. "Gholson," I said, for I kept him
plied with questions to prevent his questioning me, "how did that man
ever get her?"
The rest of the company were going into the house; he glanced furtively
after them and grabbed my arm; you would have thought he was about to
lay bare the whole tragedy in five words; "Smith,--nobody knows!"
"Do you believe she has told Ned Ferry anything?"
"Never! About herself? no, sir!" He bent and whispered: "She despises
him; she keeps in with him, but it's to get the news, that's all; that's
positively all." On our way to the stable to saddle up--for we were all
going to church--he told me what he knew of her story. I had heard it
all and more, but I listened with unfeigned interest, for he recited it
with flashes of heat and rancor that betrayed a cruel infatuation eating
into his very bone and brain, the guilt of which was only intensified by
the sour legality of his moral sense.
The church we went to was in Franklin, but the preacher was a man of
note, a Vicksburg refugee. On the way back Gholson and I rode for a time
near enough to Squire Sessions and Ned Ferry to know the sermon was
being discussed by them, and something they said gave my companion
occasion to murmur to me in a tone of eager censure that Ned Ferry's
morals were better than his religion.