The next day found me so robustly happy that I was allowed to dress and
walk out to the front door. Three days later the surgeons were gone, all
three, and at the approach of dew-fall Cécile and Harry, Camille and I,
walked in a field-path, gathered hedge roses, and debated the problem of
Mrs. Roy's daughter's book, which all of us were reading and none
had finished.
"A woman," I remarked, "who, for very love of a man, can say to him, 'Go
on up the hill without me, I have a ball and chain on my foot and you
shall not carry them and me, you have a race to run,'--a woman so
wonderfully good as to say that--"
"Ah, no!" interrupted Cécile, with her killing Creole accent, "not a
woman so _good_ to say that, only with the so-good _sanse_ to say it."
Harry was openly vexed. "Well, either way! would any true man leave
_that_ woman behind?" and I tried to put in that that was what I had
been leading up to; but it makes me smile yet, to recall how jauntily
she discomfited us both. She triumphed with the airy ease of a king-bird
routing a crow in the upper blue. Camille had more than once told me
that Cécile was wise beyond the hope of her two cousins to emulate her;
which had only increased my admiration for Camille; yet now I began to
see how the sisters came by their belief. In the present discussion she
was easily first among the four of us. At the same time her sensuous
graces also took unquestionable preëminence; city-bred though she was,
she had the guise of belonging to the landscape, or, rather, of the
landscape's belonging, by some fairy prerogative, to her. She seemed
just let loose into the world, yet as ready and swift to make right use
of it as any humming-bird let into a garden; as untimorous as any such,
and as elusive. In this sultry June air she had all the animation both
of mind and of frame that might have been expected of her on a keen,
clear winter day. Her face never bore the same expression at the
beginning and middle, or at either of these and the close, of any of her
speeches, yet every change was lovely, the sign of a happy play of
feeling, and proof of a mercurial intelligence. No report of them by
this untrained pen would fully bear me out, and the best tribute I can
offer is to avoid the task.
It was a sweet mercy in her to change the subject, and tactful to change
it to Charlotte, as if Charlotte were quite an unrelated theme. The
cousins vied with each other ever so prettily in telling how beautiful
the patient was on her couch of enfeeblement and pain, how her former
loveliness had increased, and what new nobility it had taken on. That
any such problem overhung her life as that which we had just been
weighing, seemed never to have entered their thought, and if they had
ever conceived of a passion already conscious between Charlotte and
Ferry, they veiled the fact with charming feminine art.
When we got back to the house Harry detained me on the veranda alone.
Camille told me how long I might tarry. It was heaven to have her bit in
my mouth, and I found it hard to be grum even when Harry beat with his
good hand the rhythm of "Maiden passing fair, turn away thine eyes."
"Dick," he said, suddenly grave as he walked me down the veranda, "her
cousin Cécile! isn't it awful? Now that poor girl's gone back to Ned's
bedside; back to her torture! Why _do_ they let her? My George! it's
merciless! Has her aunt no eyes?"
"But, Lieutenant, you don't know she loves him; there are signs, I
admit; but proofs, no. She's lost color, and her curves are more
slender, but, my goodness! a dozen things might account for that."
"Dick Smith,"--my questioner worked himself up over the rail and sat out
on the shelf that held the bucket of drinking-water and its gourd--"do
you imagine she didn't know, when we were talking about that book, that
she was arguing against the union of Ned Ferry and Charlotte Oliver?
_Didn't_ she do it bravely! Richard, my friend, she couldn't have done
it if she had suspected us of suspecting her. It's a bleeding pity! And
yet you can't side with her, for I just swear Ned's got to have
Charlotte Ol'--what? No, he won't overhear a blank word; here's his
window shut, right here. He's got to have her, I say, and he's got to
have her just as soon as the two of 'em can stand up together to be
sworn in! Don't you say so?"