As Molly, Alexina and Mr. Henderson sat on the front gallery of the
hotel the next morning, they were joined by one Mr. Thompson Jonas, a
lawyer of Aden, who lived above his office and took his meals at the
hotel.
Mr. Jonas was small, wiry and muscular, of Georgia stock, with a
fierce little air and a fierce moustache, and quick, bright blue eyes,
never still. He had sprung to the aid of Molly and Alexina one morning
and flung a door open as they passed from the dining-room, and
speedily they were all good friends.
It was characteristic of him that he should have flung the door back,
not merely opened it. There was something of homage in the act. Within
the body of the little man was the chivalrous spirit of a Chevalier
Bayard, a Coeur de Lion. The big soul of Mr. Jonas was imprisoned in
his pigmy person as the spirit of the genius in the casket.
He was a Nimrod, too, and even now stood in hunting accoutrements,
seeming rather to have been shaken into his natty leggings than they
to have been drawn onto him, and there was a flare and dip to his
wide, soft hat and a jaunty fling to his knotted tie. His dog, a
Gordon setter bitch, sat on her haunches by him as he stood, his
fingers playing with her silky ears.
"Now, you'd better come go with me, Henderson," he was urging, "the
buggy's here at the door and you need it--you need this sort of thing
more."
"It's a busy day with me, thank you," answered the Reverend Henderson
a little coldly, for this Mr. Jonas was a man of no church. His faith,
he had frequently assured the young clergyman, would long ago have
died for breathing space in any creed he yet had met with.
"When you're older you'll understand better what I mean, my dear boy,"
the little man had in good part and cheerfulness assured the other.
"Come around and use my books any time you like."
For the soul of Mr. Jonas enthused--or convinced its owner that it
did--over Confucius, and further revelled in the belief that it delved
in occult knowledge; it also led him to place the volumes of the early
Fathers on his book-shelves and the literature of the Saints and of
Kant and Comte and Swedenborg; it conducted its owner to the feet of
Emerson and Thoreau; it made him talk Darwinism. Jesus Christ and
Plato, Mr. Jonas loved to say, made up his ideal philosophy.
Mr. Henderson, on the other hand, spoke of church buildings in Aden
other than his own as assembling places. It was inevitable he did not
give his approval to Mr. Jonas. His feeling against the little man
even made him enumerate the occupations ahead for the day, as if it
was a sort of avowal of the faith to thus declare them.
"It's a busy day with me, thank you. I have a feast day service and a
guild meeting, besides my parochial duties and a vestry meeting for
the evening."
"Dear me," said Molly, looking at him. "To be sure--I'd forgotten
you're a minister." The young man looked up, instant self-arraignment
in his face, for permitting it to be forgotten.
"When do you have service?" Molly was saying. "We must come over,
Malise and I."
He told her gravely.
Mr. Jonas was standing against the gallery railing, rising and falling
on his neat little toes, the setter's eyes following his every
movement. He was facing Mrs. Garnier and her daughter, looking from
the mother, with her red-brown hair and shadowy lashes, to the girl,
quite lovely, also, when she smiled in this sweet, sudden way up at
him. She had nice hair, too, something the colour of wild honey.
"Charming women, charming women," he was summing them up.
Yet could Mr. Jonas have called to mind any women, the old or young,
the forlorn or charming, who had not moved him to chivalric emotion in
some form?
Alexina was looking up the street. Mr. Jonas turned, too, as a
wagonette, drawn by two big, iron-grey mules, swung round the corner,
a glitter of brass and a hint of red about the harness. A young fellow
on the front seat was driving; a lady sat behind.
"The finest boy and best shot in Jasmine County," said Mr. Jonas,
starting forward as the mules were reined up at the hotel entrance,
"and the foolishest, most profoundly wise mother."
Alexina was going forward, too. "We--that is, I know them," she told
him; "they are old friends, the Leroys."
For she had known Charlotte in a moment.
A darky boy lounging about came to take the mules and Willy sprang
his mother out, as lightly as ever a girl would spring, and brought
her up the steps to Alexina.
Charlotte's embrace was eager and ardent; then she cried a little,
with her face against the girl's shoulder.
"For my youth," she said the next instant, lifting her head and
smiling at the girl. "I'm almost a middle-aged woman, little Mab; I'm
nearly forty-five and I don't want to be."
Vivacity, as of old, dwelt in Charlotte's face and animated her lively
movements, but her brilliant eyes were somewhat sunken, as happens
with women of marked features and dashing beauty; the skin was growing
sallow too, and as the cheeks and temples drew in the features stood
large.
"I don't know how to grow old," said Charlotte, and truthfully, "I
don't know how to let go. I haven't the resourcefulness, or quiet, or
repose, for an old woman."
Always, 'way back as Charlotte Ransome, she had loved the showy, and
she loved it still, as evidenced by the scarlet ribbon from which her
fan hung, and the flowered muslin, showing the hand of village
dressmaking. But she bore herself with the smiling pleasure of a child
in them.
Willy joined them. He had been talking with Mr. Jonas, and evidently
had declined the expedition too, for the little man, calling to the
setter, went off grumbling and upbraiding the lot of them.
"We came early to avoid the heat," Charlotte explained, as they went
to join Molly and Mr. Henderson.
Molly's eyes swept Mrs. Leroy's youthful fineries wonderingly,
curiously. It was no credit to Molly that her sixth sense lay in an
instinctive selection of the appropriate in the beautiful. She
wondered much as a child wonders over the mysterious, at what she more
often than not saw on others.
She lolled back now in her simple dress, of which Alexina had reason
to know the cost, and she lolled indifferently--Celeste or some one
would press out the rumples when need be--then she held out a pretty
hand to Charlotte.
But Mrs. Leroy, the greetings over, spread her draperies with some
care and absorption as she sat down. She was another type of helpless
person, the reverse of Molly, with a carping sense of responsibility.
Molly's gaze followed her concern with lazy interest in which lurked
laughter, for the dress upon which the care was bestowed was so,
well--
Alexina's face grew hot; she hated Molly, whose every thought she was
reading; and, by the girl's arrangement, they fell into two groups,
Molly and the men making one, King William perched on the railing of
the gallery, and Alexina and Mrs. Leroy the other, drawn a little
apart. There was so much to say.
"We see the Kentucky papers," Charlotte told Alexina, "so I know of
most of the happenings." She drew a little breath. "And Austen Blair
is married?"
"Yes," said Alexina, "just before we came."
Charlotte was regarding her like a child with a secret trembling on
its lips. "I was engaged to him once, Alexina, and we broke it." Light
from many sides began to break in upon Alexina.
"Oh," she said; "Mrs. Leroy!"
"It's odd, isn't it?" said Charlotte. "He was the only man ever
caring for me that I never subjugated--except Willy here--" Her voice
brightened, while she nodded, in her near-sighted way, at Mr.
Henderson. "As for him, he's ruled me and browbeat me all his life."
And Charlotte smiled contentedly at the minister.
Alexina reached out and, with a passionate sort of protectingness,
took hold of the beringed hand wielding a fan with vivacity and
sprightliness.
"I wish we could have given him more advantages," Mrs. Leroy was
continuing; "but he's had to plan for us somehow instead. I remember
he wasn't eleven years old, though it seemed natural enough he should
be doing it at the time, when we came over from St. Louis to
Louisville without his father, and Willy had to buy the tickets and
check the trunks. I suppose I ought to have realized it, but I never
had done such things in my life, and I lost my purse in the depot, I
remember, and a gentleman found it, and so Willy took hold.
"We sent him into town here, after we came to Aden, to the
Presbyterian minister, who taught him. He wanted to go to college, not
that he'd admit it now. Then as soon as he was any size he began at
his father about reclaiming the grove. That is, Willy planned and
Georges listened. Willy'd got an idea from Mr. Jonas that the railroad
was coming through some day, just as it has, but it's been a long pull
and a wait, for this is the first full yield for his trees. He's been
offered seven thousand for the crop as it hangs, but the mortgage is
eight thousand on the place, which went for fertilizing and ditching
and sheds, and living, you know, so Willy is holding for eight
thousand and Mr. Jonas is urging for nine."
Charlotte's pride in these statements was beaming.
"As soon as the grove proves itself, the place will sell for several
times its old value, and we're going back to Kentucky, to Woodford.
Willy wants to buy back my father's farm, not that he'll let me say
that he does, he's so afraid of admitting anything, but when he was
nineteen, three years ago, he had the measles--wasn't it dear and
comical, like he was a child again--and he let me hold his hand, in
the dark room, you know, and we talked about it, when we would go
back."
The girl was patting Charlotte's hand softly and winking back tears
while she laughed. Why tears? She herself had no idea.
Mrs. Leroy had a thousand questions to ask, she said, but somehow she
never got to them.
"Dear me," she said presently, "we have to go and I've talked of
nothing but my own affairs. In my solitude down here I've grown a
shameless egotist."
As if she had been ever anything else, the unconscious soul!
"But to be with one of my own sex--some one linked with the past, too,
is extenuation. There's so much a woman can't talk of with men, they
have such different ways of seeing things, and let her love her men
folk never so dearly, if there's none of her own sex around, a woman's
lonesome, Alexina."
"Yes," said Alexina, "she is." But she said it absently, for she was
conscious of King William's gaze being upon her. She looked up
laughing, yet a little confused, for his look was warm.
He slipped along the railing, leaving Mrs. Garnier and the minister
chatting. In this blue serge suit and straw hat he looked very like
the King William of long ago, dark, keen and impatient.
"What do you think of it, Aden?" he asked.
"I like it," said Alexina. "Somehow as soon as you are in a thing the
scene changes to out of doors. It used to be Indians on the common, or
Crusoe in the yard, back there in Louisville."
"You began by saying you liked it," he reminded her. Did he think to
tease? His eyes were naughty. Here was a zest; this was no Georgy.
"And I do," she said, standing to it. "I do like it."
Was he always laughing at people, this William Leroy?
"They are coming to spend a day with us this week, Alexina and her
mother," Mrs. Leroy here told her son, at which, for all the
imperturbability of his countenance, Alexina was conscious of
something a little less happy about the son.
"They're very good to come," he responded. The tone might be called
guarded.
Certain recollections were crowding upon Alexina. Mrs. Leroy's
management, her housekeeping, even to a child's comprehension, had
been palpably erratic and unexpected.
The girl understood his masculine helplessness. Hers were the eyes
that laughed now.
"I've set the table in your house before," she informed him, "while
you made toast."
His countenance cleared. He met her gaze solemnly. "It's a bargain,"
he said. "What day, mother?"
That night Alexina was chatting with Mr. Jonas. She liked him. "You
said this morning," she reminded him, "that Mrs. Leroy was the wisest,
foolishest mother--what did you mean?"
"Just that," said Mr. Jonas. "Hasn't her very incompetency made the
boy?"