The leisure of a summer evening had fallen with the twilight. Along
that street in Louisville wherein stood the Blair house, with its
splendid lawn, and its carriage driveway issuing through a tall, iron
gate, front doors were opening and family groups gathering. The yards
wore the fresh green of June. A homecoming crumple-horn ambled by, her
bag swinging heavily. In the South, in 1870, cities were villages
overgrown.
In the parlour of her home Harriet Blair sat, awaiting the arrival of
her brother Austen from Washington, where he had gone to bring back
their dead brother's child.
Harriet, at twenty-six, in lustreless mourning, was handsome and,
some might have said, cold. Her face was finely chiselled, and framed
with light hair waving from its parting in curves regular as the
flutings of a shell. There was a poise, a composure about this
Harriet, making her unlike the tall, shy girl of nine years before.
As the bell rang she laid down her book and rose, and a second later
Austen entered, leading a little girl with a round, short-cropped
head. His eyes met his sister's in greeting, then he loosed the
child's hand. "This is your Aunt Harriet, Alexina," he said, and
stepped across the room to stand before the mantel and watch the two.
Harriet bent and kissed the small cheek. Demonstration, even to this
extent, meant much for a Blair. Then she crossed the room. She was
more than ordinarily tall for a woman, with form proportioned to
length of limb, and the beauty of her carriage gained by her
unconsciousness of it.
Having pulled the bell-cord she came back, smiling, calmly expectant,
looking from Austen to the child, who, seated now on the edge of a
chair, was regarding her with grave eyes.
"She has a strong look of Alexander," said Harriet, consideringly,
"and a little look of you--and of me. She is a Blair, though I can see
her mother, too, about the mouth."
The child moved under the scrutiny, but her gaze, returning the study,
did not falter.
Harriet laughed; was it at this imperturbability? "I think," she
decided, "we may consider her a Blair." Then to the white maid-servant
entering: "You may order supper, Nelly, for Mr. Blair and myself.
This is Alexina, and, I should say, tired out. Suppose you give her a
warm bath and let her go right to bed--have you her trunk key,
Austen?--and I will send a tray up with her supper afterward."
Then, as Nelly took the key and went out, Harriet addressed her
brother. "For, apart from the hygienic advantages of the bath before
the supper, I confess"--with faintly discernible amusement--"to a
fancy for the ceremony as a form, so to speak, emblematic of a moral
washing and a fresh start." She ended with a raising of her brows as
she regarded her brother.
Austen Blair had no use for levity. Mild as this was, he dismissed it
curtly. "I would suggest," he said, "that you avoid personalities; it
can but be injudicious for any child to hear itself discussed."
Again Harriet laughed; she was provokingly good-humoured. "Coming
from her nine years of life beneath Molly's expansive nature, I don't
think you need fear for what she'll gather from me." She took the
child's hand and lifted her from the chair. "Here is Nelly, Alexina;
go with her and do what she says. Say good-night to your uncle.
Supper, Austen."
The dining-room being sombre, one might have said it accorded with the
master, whose frown had not all cleared away.
Harriet was speaking. "What of Molly? Was there a scene at parting
with her voluntarily given-up offspring? For her moods, like her
tempers, used to delight in being somewhat inconsistent and mixed."
"She has in no way changed," replied Austen. Was it this flat
conciseness in all he said that made levity irresistible to Harriet in
turn? "My interview with her was confined to business. That ended,
she told me, as an afterthought, apparently, that the coloured woman
was going to remain with her, and she supposed Alexina could manage on
the train. She also told me that her husband had severed connection
with the legation and was going back to Paris. Alexina was not with
them at the hotel, but with her uncle, Senator Randolph, from whose
house Molly was married."
"And Molly's parting with the child--"
"Was a piece with it all, tears and relief, just as you would have
expected."
"And the husband's, this Mr. Garnier's, attitude?"
"Was enigmatical; how far he understands the situation I had no means
of judging."
"I'm sorry for the child, though," said Harriet suddenly, "for if
there is anything of Molly in her, life according to the Blair
standard may pall, and," whimsically, "her mixture of natures be vexed
within her."
Austen took the Blairs seriously, and at any time he disliked the
personal or the playful. He spoke coldly. "Having given the child over
to you from the moment of arrival, of this initiatory tone you are
taking I shall say no more. Duties you assume you do best your own
way."
Harriet arched her brows. "You mean, having found better results
followed the withdrawal of your oversight of me as mistress of our
house, you are going to let me alone in this?"
"Exactly," said her brother, "and therefore on the subject, now or
hereafter, I shall say no more." And it was eminently characteristic
of him that he never did.
Meanwhile up-stairs the child had gone through with the bath and the
supper like an automaton in Nelly's hands.
"She said 'yes' when I asked her anything," Nelly reported later to
the cook; "or she said 'no'. And her lips were set that hard she might
a'most have been Mr. Austen's own child."
And that was all Nelly saw in the little creature she tucked into the
huge, square bedstead under the bobinet mosquito bar. But no sooner
had Nelly's footsteps ceased along the hall than the child, as one
throwing off an armour of repression, rolled out of the high bed and
from under the bar, flinging and disarranging the neat covers with
passionate fury, sobbing wildly. A bead of gas lit the room. She
pattered across the floor to the opened trunk, and when the little
figure, stumbling over its gown, stole back to bed, a heartrendingly
battered, plaster-headed doll was clasped in its arms. And, as the
voices of children at play on the sidewalk came up through the open
windows, the child, shaken with crying--the more passionate because of
long repression--was declaring: "Sally Ann, baby, I couldn't never
have given you up, not even if I was your own truly mother, Sally Ann,
I couldn't, never."