For the next three days Mr. Henderson avoided them. He spoke in the
hall or dining-room, to be sure, but joined them no more in plans or
on the gallery.
And Molly turned petulant. Why had they ever come to Aden, she moaned.
"Can't you propose something, Malise?" she besought.
Alexina, endeavouring to write letters, felt tired. She had been up at
Molly's call a dozen times in the night.
"We're going to spend to-morrow with Mrs. Leroy," she reminded her
mother.
"She looks like Mrs. Malaprop," said Molly crossly.
The daughter's face flushed. Youth is rawly sensitive to ridicule of
its friends. Besides, what would they find at Lake Nancy? It would be
poor, she expected that, and it might be--pitiful? Not to her, not to
her, but Molly was so unable to see behind things. If a thing was poor
to Molly it was only poor and she said so. Alexina hoped her mother
would not go.
But when Friday came Molly, in feverish, restless state, was ready for
anything and even brightened up over it, while it was Alexina who was
petulant, and put on one dress and took it off, and tried another,
even with William Leroy down-stairs in the wagonette, waiting.
But she felt better as she came out into the sunshine and the dress
she had finally decided on seemed to settle on her into sudden
jauntiness.
William shook hands. There was a comfortable sense of humour about
him.
"It's fair to divide families into component parts on occasions," he
stated, and put Alexina in a place by his own and Molly behind. Molly
pouted.
"And, besides, we are going to drop Henderson at a sick parishioner's
on the way," he said, with a naughty glance at her. "I met him
starting to the livery stable just now and stopped him."
Molly's face cleared. She met his eyes with insouciance, but, somehow,
one felt all at once that she liked him better.
Mr. Henderson came out with a satchel and climbed in. He looked stern
and uninviting, Alexina thought, but the note of Molly's random
remarkings promptly brightened. Willy flicked the whip above the big
grey span and off they trotted across town, westward.
The morning was keen enough that the sun's warmth was pleasant and
quickened the blood. Aden was left behind. Here and there on the
outskirts frame houses, crudely and hideously cheap, were building.
Land everywhere was being cleared, the felled trees lying about, the
whirl of a portable sawmill telling their destiny, while burning
stumps filled the air with creosote pungency.
Then the despoilments of progress were left behind and the untouched
pine woods closed about them, and trees rose tall, straight, twigless,
to where a never-ceasing murmur soughed, and the light came sifting,
speckled, and flickering through the gloom, upon the sandy ground and
scrub palmetto beneath.
Alexina breathed deep. It was quiet, and peaceful and solemn.
"Isn't it?" said William sociably.
She looked up; she hadn't spoken.
The trees thinned, grew sparse, and the road came out into the open. A
mile farther on they entered a belt of hummock land, a wild growth of
live-oak, cypress, magnolias, thicketed, intertwisted, rank. Grey moss
trailed and swept their faces as they passed under, vines clambered
and swung and festooned, gophers crawled out of the path, and a
gleaming snake slid across the road and into the palmetto undergrowth.
He was looking at her as they came out, she flushed and ecstatic.
"But wait," said he, "until I show it to you after a while in bloom."
Just beyond the hummock he drew rein at a clearing before an unpainted
frame house, even cheaper and more hideous than the most. Mr.
Henderson got out, King handing the satchel after him.
"It's a death-bed," he said under his breath to the two, as the
minister went toward the house; "that's the pitiful part of it down
here, people taking all they've got to get here, only to die."
"Don't--don't tell about it," said Molly sharply.
William Leroy touched the mules and they went on. A little later
Alexina felt Molly's hand upon her. "Come back with me, Malise," she
begged. Her face looked drawn and grey.
"But we're there," explained King, and a minute after turned in at an
old iron gate, flanked by two ancient live-oaks. An osage hedge, cut
back upon its woody stock, stretched about the place either side from
the gate. Within, the driveway made a sweep off towards buildings in
the rear, while a shell path led up to the house, which was of frame,
wide, with porches across the front, up-stairs and down. Bermuda grass
covered the sandy surface of the yard, which was large and sloped back
towards the lake, visible through the grove. Here and there a banana
plant reared its ragged luxuriance and a stunted palm or two struggled
upward; there was on old rustic seat beneath a gnarled wild orange
tree.
As Willy helped them out, Charlotte appeared and came animatedly down
the path between the borders of crepe myrtle. Alexina ran ahead to
meet her. The girl's hands were quite cold. Mrs. Leroy's white dress,
relic of bygone fashion, fluttered with rose-coloured ribbons, and
suddenly Alexina seemed to see a wide old cottage in a shrub-grown
yard, and on its porch a lady in a gauzy dress with rosy ribbons,
gathering a little child into her lap.
The girl threw her arms about this Charlotte in the old white dress,
and then, because her eyes were full of foolish tears, ran on, for the
Captain was on the porch, in a cane arm-chair, a line of blue smoke
trailing up from the cigar in his fingers. Laughing and breathless she
went up the steps and their eyes met. Never a word spoke either, but
the hand of the man closed on the girl's and rested there until the
others came up.
"Willy wouldn't let me do a thing about your coming, Alexina," Mrs.
Leroy began, as she reached them; "he said he'd tend to it himself and
wouldn't let me give a direction. He's fussy sometimes and notionate,
like the time when the surveyors were staying with us, and Mandy set
some dishes on a chair. I'd already told him she didn't know how to
clear a table for dessert, and he said I ought to have taught her."
The girl's eyes danced. "You're all of you the same, the very same;
not one of the three has changed."
Charlotte beamed. She took it with undisguised pleasure that she had
not changed.
King came round the house. He had taken the mules to the stable. "I'm
holding you to that bargain," he reminded Alexina.
Molly looked bored. Such things were only playful and interesting as
she was part of them. Then she said she was tired, evidently having no
mind for a morning with Mrs. Leroy.
"You shall go up and lie down in my room," said Charlotte.
The three women went in. The hall dividing the house was wide and
high, its floor of boards a foot wide, and bare but for a central
strip of carpet; an old mahogany hat-tree stood against one wall, a
mahogany sofa against the other, with straight backed chairs flanking
both. It was all labouriously clean and primly bare.
The rooms up-stairs were big, with old mahogany furniture set squarely
about them.
"They didn't want me to bring the furniture, Willy and his father,
when we came," Charlotte told Alexina; "it cost more to get it here
than to buy new, but I didn't want new; I wanted this."
Everything was innocent of covers or hangings, nor were there any
pictures. She explained this.
"I don't know how to drive nails," she told them, "and Willy and the
Captain don't care. Willy had the house papered this fall in case of
people coming about buying, and the papering men took the nails out
the walls and he won't bother to put them in. They're all in here."
Charlotte didn't mean the nails; she threw open a closet door and
ancestral Ransomes, neatly set against the walls, peered out of the
dark.
Alexina put a hand over Charlotte's on the door knob. Molly yawned.
"It seems chilly here in my room," said Charlotte; "the sun isn't
round this side yet. Put your hats on the bed and Mrs. Garnier shall
go lie on Willy's sofa."
They followed her across the hall. "He has his bed and things in
there," she explained, nodding towards an adjoining room, "and he
keeps his books and such in here."
On the floor, otherwise uncarpeted, lay a bearskin. There was a sofa
against the wall and a plain deal table in the centre of the room,
piled with papers, books and pipes, about a lamp. There were some
chairs; a gun-rack, antlers, an alligator skin and some coloured
prints of English hunting scenes on the walls, and an old-fashioned,
brass-mounted cellarette hung in an angle. The south window looked out
across the grove upon Nancy; between the two east windows stood an old
secretary book-case.
Charlotte suggesting that Mrs. Garnier put on a wrapper, the two went
back to her bed-room. Alexina stood hesitating. She felt a sense of
surreptitiousness and embarrassment, and then took a step to the
book-case--any one might do that much--and read the titles of the
books.
About orange culture and fertilizing these first seemed to be, and
those next were concerned with the breeding of stock. They meant
Woodford and the future, probably. She skipped to the other shelves.
Buckle's Introduction to the History of Civilization, Hallam's Middle
Ages, Wealth of Nations, Wilhelm Meister, Poems of Heinrich Heine,
several volumes of Spencer and Huxley, Slaves of Paris, Lecocq, the
Detective, File No. 118, The Lerouge Case, The Scotland Yard
Detective, Carlyle's French Revolution, Taxidermitology, Renan's Life
of Jesus, Pole on Whist, Hoyle, Tom Sawyer, Past and Present, Pickwick
Papers, Herodotus, an unbroken shelf of Walter Scott, A Pair of Blue
Eyes, Cousin Pons, Drainage, Pendennis, Small Fruit Culture.
Why, here was a world, within these glass doors, she did not know. Yet
she had read diligently among Uncle Austen's books. She looked back in
memory over his shelves; Macaulay, yes, Uncle Austen cared so
essentially for Macaulay, and for Bancroft and Prescott, and Whittier
and Lowell. There were the standards in fiction and poetry in
well-bound sets. Uncle Austen himself admired Alexander Pope, and
Franklin's Autobiography; he liked Charles Reade's novels, too,
bearing on institutional reforms--
Here Mrs. Leroy and Molly came back, Molly in a white wrapper and
Charlotte bearing a pillow and a silk quilt.
"Willy's calling," Charlotte told Alexina; "he wants you."
He was at the foot of the stairs, and, waiting for her to get down,
watched her hand on the banister. The wood was dark and the hand was
white and slender. Then he held out a big, checked apron. She walked
into it and looked over her shoulder while he tied the strings behind.
It takes time to set a table when neither is just certain where things
are to be found. Hunting together in sideboard, cupboards, and on
pantry shelves brings about a feeling of knowing each other very well.
There was so much, too, to talk about.
"Do you remember--" it was Alexina pausing with a goblet in hand to
ask it.
"Have you forgot--" King, producing a carving set, would rejoin.
Presently she paused. Twice she started to speak, hesitated, then
said, "There's a thing I want to ask you, or, rather, want to say--"
Her voice was a little tremulous and breathless.
"Yes."
"You remember--that is, you haven't forgot the 'King William'?"
She was looking away from him and he looking at her, his mouth odd,
yet smiling, too. She was an honest and a pleasant thing to look upon.
"Yes," he told her, "as well as I remember the raft we put off on
from the desert island and the plains back of the stable--have you
forgotten the trackless plains where we sat down to starve in the
snow, with never a sign of deer or buffalo for days, or even a thing
on wing? We'd just lighted on Hiawatha those days. There was an
Indian, by the way, came up from the grass water yesterday and brought
us venison for to-day."
It was evident he did not mean to let her return to the subject.
Presently Alexina untied the apron. "I must see your mother some," she
said.
"But she does not want you," declared his mother's son; "she's
overjoyed to think you're with me. She thinks there is something
deficient in her son; she insists I've never spoken to a girl since we
left you in Louisville. Besides, she's in the kitchen, I hear her out
there now, all fluttered herself and fluttering Aunt Mandy."
But Alexina would go. "I must call Molly in time for dinner," she
insisted.