On entering Uncle Austen's house, self-consciousness and constraint
closed in like bars across the door of spontaneity. Alexina had
arrived the night before and they were at breakfast. Uncle Austen was
facetiously affable, and his sportive sallies, not being natural with
him, embarrassed his audience. There is something almost pitiable in
the sight of middle-age grown playful.
Emily, Uncle Austen's wife--embarrassing realization in itself--looked
in her plate constrainedly, so that Alexina, if only that his further
playfulness might be prevented, threw herself into the conversation
and chattered volubly, but in vain, for Uncle Austen found chance to
reply.
There was complacency in his facetiousness, too. He had married him a
wife, and the pride of the thing coming to him this late made him a
little absurd, and yet, Alexina reflected, he was a man of big ability
and varied interests, prominent in whatever large enterprises the city
boasted, banks, railroads, bridges; a power in the Republican party of
his state, his name standing for respectability, wealth, and
conservatism.
"I'm taking pretty good care of your old friend Emily, Alexina?" Uncle
Austen was demanding playfully, as he arose from the table; "she's
standing transplanting pretty well, eh?"
Emily got up abruptly, so abruptly her chair would have turned over
but for his quickness in getting there to catch it, but his good
humour was proof even against this, though he ordinarily frowned at
awkwardness. He set the chair in place, and taking Emily's hand as
they all went from the room, patted it ostentatiously. Alexina grew
hot.
"A pretty hand, a hand for a man to be proud to own, eh, Alexina?"
Emily almost snatched it away and paused at the foot of the stairs.
"Good-by," she said.
He was finding his overcoat and feeling for his gloves. Then he took a
little whisk-broom from the rack drawer and brushed his hat with
nicety. He was smiling with high humour. The man's content was almost
fatuous.
"I'm glad to have you here, Alexina," he said; "very glad. I will feel
that Emily is having the companionship she ought to have in my
absence."
The click of the door as he closed it seemed to breathe a brisk and
satisfied complacency. Emily had fled up-stairs. Alexina followed her
slowly.
How strange it seemed to hear her moving about in what had been Aunt
Harriet's room.
"Come in," she called.
Alexina went in.
"He might at least have refurnished it, mightn't he?" said Emily, with
a laugh. It was not a pleasant laugh.
"What would you like for dinner?" she asked Alexina, her hand on the
bell.
"I don't care," said Alexina; "anything."
"So it doesn't cost too much," said Emily, laughing the laugh that was
not pleasant.
Later, the conferences with the servants over, she sat down to make
certain entries in the ledger, open on the desk. Alexina picked up a
magazine.
"He asked me one day," said Emily, turning, "what had become of an end
of roast that ought to have come back made over, and said there must
be waste in the kitchen."
"Don't," said Alexina. "I wouldn't, Emily."
"Why not? You knew it all before."
Alexina flushed. "Yes," she said slowly, "I did. I knew it--before.
How are your mother and the little girls, Emily?"
"Mother--oh, all right. He told me to ask Nan and Nell over every
Friday from school to supper, and mother and father and Oliver over to
Sunday night tea. 'It ought, in the end,' he told me, 'to make an
appreciable saving in your mother's providing, these continued
absences from stated meals.'"
"You mustn't, Emily. Tell me about the winter. Have you been gay?"
"Gay?" Emily wheeled from the desk. She gazed at Alexina almost
wildly. Then she laughed again. "Gay! oh, my great Heaven--gay! Then
you don't know? I am going to bear him a child--and, oh, help me
somehow; Alexina, I loathe him."
A child, Uncle Austen and Emily a child! A warmth swept out of
Alexina's very soul and enveloped her. She knew, and she did not know.
Other women and girls had taken it for granted always that she knew,
and talked on before her. It meant to her something vague,
unapproachable, veiled, and a great, overwhelming consciousness
stifled and choked her.
"I went out on the platform of the train while we were away," Emily
was saying, Emily who never, even in childhood, had curbed a mood, a
dislike, a humour, "and tried to throw myself off, but I was afraid."
Alexina shrank. "I mustn't listen--you mustn't tell me--it's between
you and him, Emily."
Emily had gotten up and was walking about.
"He offered Oliver a place in the bank, to please me, I thought.
Oliver's nineteen now. The place had been paying eighteen dollars a
week, and Oliver had only been making twelve. So he offered it to him
at fifteen. 'To the benefiting of both sides,' he came home and told
me."
Emily stood still, her eyes tearless and hard. "Put on your wraps,
Alexina, and we'll go drive. It's like a duty, a task, the exercising
of the horses. It hangs over me like a nightmare that I've got it to
do, until I've gone out and gotten it over."
"Yes," said Alexina, on familiar ground, "I know. I've hated those
horses too, before you. But you ought to be like Aunt Harriet, Emily;
don't be like me--tell him so."
Emily, unlocking the wardrobe door, suddenly flung up her arms against
it and hid her face in them. "I've tried, I have tried, and I can't--I
can't; I'm afraid of him, Alexina."
But the child coming--their child? Perhaps the child would make it
right. When it came, Emily would love her child? Perhaps she did; she
never talked about it afterwards, and Alexina never saw her with it;
it died in the summer, soon after its coming.
When she did see the two again, her uncle and Emily, on her own
return to Louisville in the late fall, the embarrassing playfulness
had left Uncle Austen. Perhaps the steely coldness of his manner was
worse. Had Emily dared--even in her mourning there was something about
her that was reckless. But she did not dare. She was twenty-two and he
was fifty-two, and she was to live afraid of him, to see him an old
man, for he is living now.