Alexina came to Harriet with information.
"Emily goes to school to her aunt, and King William goes there, too."
"Do they?" returned Harriet. Her interest was good-humoured rather
than ardent.
"I'd like to go, too," said her niece.
"Oh," from Harriet, understanding at last; "but isn't school about
over?"
"There's two weeks more."
"If it will make you happy, why not, if the teacher does not object?"
So Alexina went with Emily to school. King William was there, but he
hardly noticed her, seeming gloomy and given to taking his slate off
into corners.
"He don't want to come," explained Emily; "he's the only boy."
"Then what does he come for?" queried the practical Alexina.
"His mother won't let him go to a public school."
There was more to be learned about William. He fought the boys who
went to the public school, because they jeered him in his ignominy.
Alexina saw it happening up the alley but, strangely enough, when
William appeared at school, he seemed cheered up, though something of
a wreck.
Out of school, Alexina often went over to Emily's house to play. There
were no servants there, but her mamma beat up things in crocks, and
her great-aunty, a brisk little old woman with sharp eyes, made yeast
cakes and dried them out under the arbour and milked the cow, too, and
Emily's little brother, Oliver, carried milk to the neighbours. Once
in the spotless, shining kitchen, Alexina was allowed to wield a mop
in a dish-pan and, still again, to stir at batter in a bowl.
In the room which would have been the parlour in another house,
Emily's grandfather Pryor sat at a table with books around him, and
wrote on big sheets of paper in close writing. He was a stern old man
and his hair stood out fine and white about his head. Once, as he
passed across the front porch, he looked at Emily, then stopped,
pointing to the chain about her neck. It was Alexina's little gold
necklace which Emily had begged to wear.
"Take it off," he said.
Emily obeyed, but her checks were flaming, and when he had gone she
threw her head back. "When I'm grown, I mean to have them of my own,
and wear them, too," she said.
She seemed happier away from home. "Let's go over to your house," she
always said. She liked grown people, too, and Uncle Austen once patted
her head, and after she had gone said to Aunt Harriet: "A handsome
child, an unusually pleasing child."
But while Alexina played thus with Emily, more often she trudged
across to King William's.
The nature of engrossment was different over there. Often as not it
was theology, though this, to be sure, was the Captain's word for it,
not his son's.
Willy's mother, like Aunt Harriet, was a Presbyterian. "If I had been
a better one," she lamented to her husband one evening, "I would know
how to meet his questions now. You don't take one bit of the
responsibility of his religious training, Captain Leroy."
The creed of King William's mamma, when she came to formulate it,
seemed a stern one, and it lost nothing in its setting forth by reason
of her determination to do her duty by her son.
"Thank Heaven I had to sit under these things when I was a child,
however I hated it then, or I could not do my part by him now," she
told the Captain. "I want him," fervently, "to be everything I am
not."
"Which might," suggested the Captain, "be a prig, you know."
But King William, listening, drank in these things. He had a garden
patch in the back yard and knew the nature and habits of every
vegetable in it, and being strictly a utilitarian, he weeded out
sickly plants and unknown cotyledons with a ruthless hand.
Alexina expostulated. "Maybe it hurts 'em," she feared.
"Maybe it does," said the inexorable William; "but they are like the
souls born to be damned. Put 'em on the brush pile there, and after a
while we'll burn 'em."
At other times the yard was a sea-girt coral reef and they the
stranded mariners. Generally Alexina accepted everything. The stories
were new to her. But when she did have knowledge of a thing she stood
firm; for instance, about the ocean, that you could not land every few
moments of your progress and throw out gang-planks.
"For I've been there," she insisted, "and you couldn't, you know."
At times they adjourned to the commons behind the stable, which, in
reality, were plains frequented by Indians, or, if the yard palled or
rain drove them in, there was fat, black, plausible Aunt Rose in the
basement kitchen to talk to, and if Aunt Rose proved fractious and
drove them out, together with her own brood generally skulking around,
before a threatening dish-rag or broom, there was Charlotte to be
beguiled from more serious occupation into doing her son's bidding.
Charlotte was always busy. The cottage and all in it had come to her
from her father's aunt. She had been accustomed to seeing the windows,
the furniture, the mirrors, the silver door knobs shining; therefore,
she knew such things ought to shine, and since there was no one in
these days but herself to do it, she cleaned, polished, rubbed, and
went to bed limp.
One afternoon in the late fall, when the children sought her, she was
pasting papers over glasses of jelly. "We went over the river to see
the boat yesterday," King William was saying to Alexina as they came
in. "Tell her about it, mother; about the gold star at the bow."
The papers did not want to stick. "He's a bad boy, little Mab,"
Charlotte informed her. "He made me take him over before he'd promise
to go to the party he's asked to. He wants to be a little boor who
won't know how to act when he grows up."
"I'm never goin' to parties when I'm grown up, so what's the use
learning how to act at 'em now?" argued her son.
Charlotte dropped a mucilaged paper. "But you promised," she reminded
him anxiously; "you promised--"
"Oh, well--" admitted her son.
Charlotte kept a fire in her parlour. Coal was at a fabulous price in
the South that winter, but she had never known a parlour without a
fire, and here she and the children sat in the afternoons, the Captain
often returning early and joining them.
"Georges," said Charlotte upon one of these occasions, "we are poor."
The Captain smoked in silence. Perhaps he had realized it before. His
keen eyes, however, were regarding her.
"But," said Charlotte, "we go on acting as though we were rich."
"Just so," said the Captain.
"When your trousers get shabby, you order more like them. Did you ever
ask your tailor if he has anything cheaper?"
Now, trousers of that pearl tint peculiar to the finest fabrics were
as characteristic a part of the Captain's garb as were the black
coat, the low-cut vest, the linen cambric handkerchiefs like small
tablecloths for size, the tall silk hat, and the Henry Clay collar
above the black silk stock.
"Did you ever ask him if he had anything cheaper, Georges?"
"I can't say," admitted Georges, "that I ever did." For the Captain
had never asked his tailor a price in his life. When the bill came he
paid it. But it takes income to meet eccentricities of this sort,
while now--
Did the Captain, glancing from his wife to the boy on the floor, seem
to age, to shrink in his chair? For Charlotte was thirty-two and the
boy was ten and the Captain was nearing sixty.
"And when your shirts and Willy's things and mine give out, I've been
going right on to the sisters ordering more. Convent prices are high,
Georges."
The Captain had nothing to say.
"Adele has been telling me that she cuts down her eldest boy's things
for the little one." Adele was the widow of a Confederate general. "So
I borrowed her patterns. Listening to Adele talk, I realized, Georges,
that you and Willy and I have to learn how to be poor."
It was at this point that Charlotte brought forth from the chair
behind her a voluminous broadcloth cape, such as men then wore for
outer wrap, and spread it on the mahogany centre-table.
"It's perfectly good, if you did discard it, and I'm going to cut it
into something for Willy; I didn't tell Adele I never had tried, she
is so capable, but I borrowed her patterns." And Charlotte brought
forth a paper roll.
The Captain, in the arm-chair, sat and watched. Alexina, from his
knee, where he had a way of lifting her, watched too. Willy, from a
perch on the arm of the sofa, offered suggestions.
This was early in the afternoon. At six o'clock the Captain, lighting
another of an uninterrupted series of cigars, was still watching
silently. On the sofa sat Charlotte, in tears. On the table, tailor
fashion, sat King William, sorting patterns, while Nelly, who had come
for Alexina, stood by and directed.
"How does he know?" Mrs. Leroy, watching her son a little anxiously,
asked the Captain. "I wouldn't like him to develop such a bent. He
doesn't get it from you--or from me."
"I look at my legs," said William, "and then I build it that way."
Another afternoon the Captain looked up from his smoking and spoke to
Charlotte. The children were on the floor turning the pages of a
picture paper.
"We have succeeded in securing the loan on a mortgage on the boat.
Cowan arranged it through his bank. It was at a higher rate than we
had agreed on, but we'd lost all the time we could spare. We'll push
ahead now and have things finished by spring."
That night, over at the Blairs', as Alexina climbed into her place at
the table Austen was speaking to Harriet. "You remember I told you I
was looking for an investment of the proceeds of those bonds of
Alexina's which matured the other day? This morning I took a mortgage
on a boat Cowan is building at his yard."
Alexina heard her name, but did not understand.