Alexina went up to her mother and Mrs. Leroy. Molly was lolling in a
big chair in the sunshine, idly swinging the tassel of her wrapper to
and fro. The shadows about her eyes were other than those lent by the
sweep of her childlike lashes, and she looked wan. But she looked at
peace, too. In her present state the flow of Mrs. Leroy's personal
chat was entertainment. Now, there was always one central theme to
Charlotte's talk, whatever the variations.
"He hasn't a bit of false pride, Willy hasn't," she was stating.
"After his father lost his position, those two years before the trees
began paying, there's nothing Willy wouldn't turn his hand to. He
carried a chain for the surveyors and went as guide for parties
hunting and fishing in the glades."
Molly's attention sometimes wandered from these maternal confidences.
"You were Charlotte Ransome before you were married, weren't you?" she
asked irrelevantly. "You used to come to New Orleans winters, didn't
you? You were at a party at my Uncle Randolph's once when I was a girl
and you were spoken of as a great beauty, I remember. There was a
pompon head-dress too, one winter, called the Charlotte Ransome."
The Charlotte listening, only the vivacity of smile and eyes left of
her beauty, the Charlotte living the obscure life of a little raw
Southern town, let her needle fall, the needle she handled with the
awkwardness of a craft acquired late. She was darning an old
tablecloth, come down from her mother's day, that day when triumphs
and adulation made up life, and when cost or reckoning was a thing she
troubled not herself about. She was that Charlotte Ransome again,
called up by Mrs. Garnier, the beauty, the fashion, and the belle.
"Oh," she said, "the joy of youth, the joy! Old Madame d'Arblay, the
Louisville milliner, devised that pompon head-dress out of her own
cleverness, and I remember my old Aunt Polly Ann Love tried to talk
her down on the price. How it comes back, the intoxication of it, and
the living. Drink deep, little Mab, it never offers twice. I seemed to
have divined it never would be again."
The girl looked from one woman to the other. Molly still pursued this
thing called adulation, and Mrs. Leroy, big-hearted, simple-souled as
she was, looked yearningly back on that which was gone.
Was this all, then? Was life forever after empty, except as with Mrs.
Leroy, of duties that occupied but did not satisfy? And what of women
who are neither beauties nor belles? What has life to offer them?
A vast depression came over the girl. And was this all? Both women
bore witness that it was.
"I heard tell in those days," Molly was saying to Mrs. Leroy, "of a
dozen men in the South you might have married. How did you
come"--curiously--"in the end to marry Captain Leroy, so much older,
and so quiet, and--er--"
Charlotte was too simple to resent the question, which to her meant
only affectionate interest. Besides, she was an egotist, and livened
under talk of herself. She had no concealment; indeed, had she been
cognizant of any skeleton in the family closet, it must speedily have
lost its gruesomeness to her, so constantly would she have it out,
annotating its anatomy to any who showed interest.
"Because he came to us in our trouble," said Charlotte, "to mother and
me when father died. He was shot, my father, you know, in a political
quarrel on the street in Lexington, the year before the war. And
Captain Georges came to us. We'd always known him. His father and my
Uncle Spottswood Love operated the first brandy distillery in
Kentucky. Captain Georges had brought me pretty things from New
Orleans and Paris all my life. I meant never to marry, then; I'd been
unhappy. But it turned out we were poor, and so when Georges said for
me to marry him that he might care for mother and me, why--"
"Oh," breathed Alexina. It was denunciation. Certain scenes of
childhood had burned into her memory, which she had interpreted later.
Molly had not loved daddy, either.
"No one was ever so good, so nobly, generously good to a woman as
Georges has been to me," Mrs. Leroy was saying; "and even in our
poverty he and Willy have managed, and kept it somehow from me, and
long, oh, long ago, I came to love him dearly."
The young arraigner, hearing, gazed unconvinced. She pushed the weight
of her hair back off her forehead, as she always did when impatient.
"Came to love him dearly." With that mere affection which grows from
association, and dependence and habit.
The girl sitting on the window-sill in the sunshine drew a long
breath. There was more in life than these two had found; all
unknowingly, they had proved it.