The next morning Harriet sat in Alexina's room putting criss-cross
initials on a pile of unmarked little garments. It was part of the
creed that clothes be marked.
Presently, as the child came to her aunt's knee for a completed
garment, Harriet laid a hand on the little shoulder. Demonstration
came hard and brought a flush of embarrassment with it.
"Alexina," she said, "you haven't mentioned your mother!"
The child stood silent but there came a repeated swallowing in her
throat while a slow red welled up over the little face.
Harriet had a feeling of sudden liking and understanding. "You would
rather--you prefer not?"
The child nodded, but later, as if from some fear of appearing
unresponsive, she brought an album from her trunk and spread it open
on Harriet's knee. She seemed a loyal small soul to her kinsfolk,
mainly her mother's people, and turning the leaves went through the
enumeration.
At one page--"Daddy," she said.
"Daddy" applied in a baby's cadence to Alexander! Daddy! It was a
revelation of that part of her brother's life which Harriet had
forgotten in accounting assets. "Daddy," called fearlessly, with
intonation unconsciously dear and appealing. And Alexander had been
that to his child!
There was no picture of Molly, but there was a torn and vacant space
facing Alexander. Had the child removed one? She bore resentment
then? Harriet had no idea how far a child of nine could comprehend and
feel the situation.
She would have been surprised at other things a child of nine can
feel. If the routine of the house dragged dully to Alexina, Harriet
never suspected it. The personal attention was detailed to Nelly, who
divined more--Nelly, the freckle-faced, humorous-eyed house girl,
taken from the Orphans' Home and trained by Harriet's mother. But,
then, Nelly had been orphaned herself, and had known those first days
following asylum consignment and perhaps had not forgot. Her sympathy
expressed itself through the impersonal, the Blair training not having
encouraged the other.
"Such a be-yewtiful dress," said she, laying out the clothes for her
charge.
Which was true; no child of Molly's would have suffered for clothes,
Molly loving them too well herself.
"And such be-yewtiful slippers," said Nelly, with Alexina in her lap,
pulling up the little stocking and buttoning the strap about the
ankle.
Alexina's hand held tight to Nelly's hard, firm arm, steadying
herself. Perhaps she divined the intention. "Can I come, too, when you
go to set the table?" she asked.
But Harriet never suspected. Nor again, that evening while she and
Austen read under the lamp, did Harriet know that Alexina, standing at
the open parlour window gazing at the children playing on the
sidewalk, was fighting back passionate tears of an outraged love and a
baffling sense of injustice.
All at once a child's treble came in from the pavement.
"Can't you come play?"
Alexina turned, with backward look of eager inquiry to her aunt, who
had come behind her to see who called.
"As you please; go if you want," said Harriet good-humouredly.
Austen, too, glanced out. Tip-toe on the stone curbing of the iron
fence perched a little girl, spokesman for the group of children
behind her.
"Who is the child?" he asked his sister.
"Her name is Carringford. She is a grand-daughter of the old Methodist
minister who lives at the corner; secretary of his church board, or
something, isn't he? I've noticed two or three little Carringfords
playing in the yard as I go by, and all of them handsome."
Austen placed them at once. The child's mother was the daughter of the
old minister, and, with husband and children, lived in the little
brown house with him. An interest in the details of the human affairs
about him was an unexpected phase in Austen's character. He liked to
know what a man was doing, his income, his habits, his family ties.
"I know Carringford," he remarked; "he is book-keeper for Williams, a
good, steady man. As you say, a handsome child, exceedingly so."
Harriet watched until the little niece joined the group outside.
"Gregarious little creatures they seem to be," she remarked. There was
good-humour in her tone, but there was no understanding.
The next day was Sunday. On Monday it rained. Tuesday evening Alexina
stood at the parlour window as before, looking out. The little figure
looked very solitary.
"May I go play?" suddenly she asked. The voice was low, there was no
note even of wistfulness, it was merely the question. There are
children who suffer silently.
"Why not?" Harriet rejoined, looking up from her magazine. She was the
last person to restrict any one needlessly.
The little niece went forth. The children had not come for her again.
Perhaps they did not want her, but, even with this fear upon her, go
she must.
At the gate she paused and with the big house in its immaculate yard
behind her, gazed up and down.
It was a quiet street with the houses set irregularly back from fences
of varying patterns, and the brick sidewalks were raised and broken in
places by the roots of huge sycamores and maples along the curbs.
But the cropped head of Alexina turned this way and that in vain. The
street was deserted, the stillness lonesome. She swallowed hard. She
knew where the little girl named Emily Carringford lived, for she had
pointed out the house that first evening as they ran past in play, so
Alexina slowly crossed the street, hoping Emily might be at her gate.
But first, as she went along, came a wide brick cottage, sitting high
above a basement, a porch across the front. She gazed in between the
pickets of the fence, for it seemed nice in there. The ground was
mossy under the trees, and the untrimmed bushes made bowers with their
branches. She would like to play in this yard. Her eyes travelled on
to the house. A gentleman sat in a cane arm-chair at the foot of the
steps, smoking, and on the porch was a lady in a white dress with
ribbons. The house looked old and the yard looked old, and so did the
gentleman, but the lady was young; maybe she was going to a party, for
it was a gauzy dress and the ribbons were rosy.
Alexina liked the cottage and the lady, and the big, wide yard, and
somehow did not feel as lonesome as she had. She started on to find
Emily, but at that moment the gate of the cottage swung out across her
path. How could she know that the boy upon it, lonely, too, had
planned the thing from the moment of her starting up the street?
"Oh," said Alexina, and stopped, and looked at the boy, uncomfortably
immaculate in fresh white linen clothes, but he was absorbed in the
flight of a bird across the rosy western sky.
"Come and play," said the straightforward Alexina. Companionship was
what she was in search of.
The boy, without looking at her, shook his head, not so much as if he
meant no, but as if he did not know how to say yes.
Perhaps she divined this, for approaching the gate and fingering its
hasp, she asked,
"Why?"
The boy, assuming a sort of passivity of countenance as for cover to
shyness, kicked at the gate, then scowled as he twisted his neck
within the stiff circle of his round collar with the combative air of
one who wars against starch. "There's nobody to play with," he said;
"they've all gone to the Sunday-school picnic. I don't go to that
church," nodding in the direction of a brick structure down the
street.
"You go to the same one as my Aunt Harriet and my uncle," Alexina
informed him. "I saw you there, and your name is William. I heard the
lady calling you that, coming out."
The gate which had swung in swung out again, bringing the boy nearer
this outspoken little girl, whose unconsciousness was putting him more
at his ease. He had seen her at church, too, but he could not have
told her so.
"What's the rest of your name--William what?"
Such a question makes a shy person very miserable, but the interest
was pleasing.
"William Leroy," said the boy tersely. Then, as if in amend for the
abruptness, he added: "Sometimes they call it the other way, King
William, you know."
"Who do?"
"Father and mother."
"You mean when you're pretending?"
The gate stopped in its jerkings. There had been enough about the
name. He was an imperious youngster. "No, I don't," he said; "it's
William Leroy backward."
The little girl looked mystified, but evidently thought best to change
a subject about which the person concerned seemed testy. "I saw one
once," she said sociably; "a real one. He was in a carriage, with
horses and soldiers, and a star on his coat."
"One what?" demanded the boy.
"A king, a real one, you know."
Now, this princeling on the gate knew when his own sex were guying and
he knew the remedy. He did not know this little girl, but he would not
have thought it of her.
"A real--what?" he demanded.
"A real king, but they don't say king; they say 'l'empereur.'"
William looked stern. "I don't know what you mean," he returned;
"where did you see any king?"
The grave eyes were not one bit abashed. "In Paris, where we lived,"
said the little girl. "There was a boy named Tommy watching at the
hotel window, too, and he said, 'Vive le roi,' and Marie, my bonne,
she said, 'Sh--h: l'empereur!'"
The effect of this was unexpected, for the boy, descending from the
gate, turned a keenly irradiated countenance upon her. "Do you mean
Paris, my father's Paris, Paris in France?"
"Why," said the little girl, regarding him with some surprise, "yes."
For he was taking her by the hand in a masterful fashion.
"Come in," he commanded. "I want you to tell father; that's father
there."
But Alexina, friendly soul, went willingly enough with him through the
gate and up the wide pavement between bordering beds of unflourishing
perennials.
"Listen, father," William Leroy was calling to the gentleman at the
foot of the steps; "she's been in Paris, your Paris."
The gentleman's ivory-tinted fingers removed the cigar from his lips.
As he turned the western light fell on his lean, clean-shaven face,
thin-flanked beneath high cheek-bones. From between grey brows thick
as a finger rose a Louis Philippe nose, its Roman prominence
accentuated by the hollowness of the cheeks. The iron-grey hair,
thrown back off the face, fell, square-cut, to the coat collar behind.
Never a word spoke the gentleman, only, cigar in hand, waited,
eagle-countenanced, sphinx-like. Yet straight Alexina came to his
side, and her baby eyes, quick to dilate, now confidingly calm, met
the ones looking out piercingly from their retreat beneath the heavy
brows, and quite as a matter of course a little hand rested on his
knee as she stood there, and equally as naturally, his face impassive,
did the fingers of the gentleman close upon it.
A silent compact, silently entered into, for before a word was
interchanged the animated contralto of the lady came down from above.
"Who is the little girl, son? What is your name, dear?"
Son's wince was visible. He had no knowledge of the little girl's
name, but he did not want to say so.
But she was answering for herself, looking up at the pretty lady,
dressed as though for a party. "It's Mary Alexina Blair," she was
saying, "but my Aunt Harriet says it's to be just Alexina now."
"Oh," said the lady. There was a little silence before she spoke
again. "It must be Alexander Blair's child, Georges. Come up, dear,
and let me see you."
But King William, balancing himself on the back of his father's chair,
objected. "Hurry, then, mother," he demanded; "we want to play."
But Alexina had gone up the steps obediently. The eyes of the lady
were dark and slumbrous, but in them was the slightly helpless look of
short vision. She drew the child close for inspection.
The fair hair, the even brows, the clear-gazing eyes she seemed to
have expected, but the dilation in those same wondering eyes raised to
hers, the short upper-lip, the full under one that trembled--these the
lady did not know. "A sensitiveness, a warmth," she said, half aloud.
What did she mean? Then she raised her voice.
"See, Willy Leroy, how she stands for me, while you pull away if I so
much as lay my hand on you."
"But you look so close," objected Willy, "and you fix my hair, and you
say my collar ain't straight. You've seen her now, mother; you've seen
her close, and I want her to come sit on the step."
"Go, then, little Mary Alexina Blair," said the lady; "he's a little
ingrate whose mother has to barter with him for every concession he
makes her." And, smiling at herself, her face alight and arch with the
animation of her smile, Charlotte Leroy sat back in the scarlet settee
and respread her draperies as a bird its plumage, touching the ribbons
at her waist and throat, resettling them with the air of one who takes
frank pleasure in their presence and becomingness. This done, she
viewed her hands, charming hands heavy with costly rings, and
finally, reassured at all points, she relaxed her buoyant figure and
looked around with smiling return to her surroundings. It was for no
party she was dressed but for her own satisfaction.