"What is your name, sir? Do you come from _him_? Or are you _he_?"
The contempt which she cast into the personal pronouns had a marked
effect upon Ellesworth. The mere fact that a woman, for whom at first
sight he felt a greater admiration than he had ever bestowed elsewhere,
should be so antagonistic to him at the start, made his heart contract
within him. Yet he managed to pull himself together and say, with
admirable feint,--
"Excuse me. You must labor under a mistake. I am a total stranger here.
I am--eh--merely looking about. I am staying at Sunshine, for my
health."
He noted with satisfaction a look of relief stealing over her face, and
a slight touch of spontaneous sympathy, too, at his last statement.
Ellesworth immediately followed the lead up.
"Yes," he said, "I am an invalid, and was ordered South for my lungs. I
have heard so much about Southern hospitality, would it be asking too
much for me to rest here awhile? I am a trifle tired after this long
ride."
He heaved a sigh and tried to look utterly fagged out as he noticed how
admirably that tack succeeded.
"Oh, I beg your pardon, sir," said the girl impulsively. "I thought you
were a lawyer or a sheriff, or perhaps a man from--_Boston_." She could
hardly pronounce the name of the cultured city. It stuck in her throat.
"I?" he asked in a tone of reproach. "Not at all," he answered,
laughing. "I told you that I have come from Sunshine," he added,
blandly.
The girl, taking his negative as a reply to all her doubts, now opened
the gate hospitably.
"Forgive my rudeness, sir, and come in and sit awhile," she said, as
prettily as a woman could. "I'll ask Aunt McCorkle to get
you--something. Would you take a glass of milk?"
She blushed as she remembered her empty wine cellar. With a
well-feigned, languid air, which he could hardly maintain, so
boisterously the blood surged through his veins, Ellesworth walked up to
the piazza and sat down.
He looked about him in a bewildered way. The passionless white camellia
blooming by his side seemed singularly out of place. He thought of the
intoxicating Jacqueminot roses he used to order at Halvin's for that
chilly Boston girl he tried to love and couldn't. The red camellia had
more of this splendid Southern creature's color, but that too, with its
waxen, expressionless petals, had no business there either. It
exasperated him. It looked at him coolly and sarcastically as if that
which happens to a man but once in his life had not come to him.
Aunt McCorkle appeared with the glass of milk. She was a vague Southern
gentlewoman, gentle and faded and appealing. She was just what he
expected the daughter of William Benson to be. He thought of the
middle-aged and elderly Boston dames with their strong profiles and keen
eyes and decisive opinions of reforms and literature and charity. Any
one of them might have put out her arms and have taken Mrs. McCorkle up
in her lap and trotted her to sleep. Yet Ellesworth liked the Southern
lady. Already he felt a queer movement of the heart toward Georgiella
Benson's "relations."
"Is it lung trouble?" inquired Aunt McCorkle sympathetically. The girl
came out of the house at this moment and sat down on the veranda under
the white camellia. She glanced at her guest with interest.
"The doctors think I shall come out all right if I am careful of my
self," replied Ellesworth, evasively.
"It is hard to be sick," said Georgiella sincerely. Illness and death
had touched her so lately and so cruelly that she could not help feeling
sorry for the sick young man.
"I have just ridden over from Sunshine, where I am living now,"
explained Ellesworth again, although his conscience gave him a twinge.
He hurried on: "You see, I'm looking for a quiet place to board in." He
made a diplomatic pause. "The Sunshine Hotel is too noisy, what with
billiards and bowling and late dances; so I rode over here to look
about, and an old lady with a pipe told me you lived here."
"That was Aunt Betsey," said the girl decisively. "But we never took
boarders," with a stately drawing up of her head, "why should she send
you here?"
"My dear," protested Mrs. McCorkle mildly, "the Randolphs of Sunshine
took boarders last winter; and I suppose we could get Aunt Betsey to
cook." She rose to carry away Ellesworth's glass, and beckoned to the
girl to follow her. Evidently the two poor ladies whispered together in
the hall, consulting upon the awful problem suddenly presented to their
empty pockets and plethoric pride. They came out on the veranda again,
and Mrs. McCorkle asked him point blank what his name was. Without
perceptible hesitation he replied:
"Bigelow, madam. Frank Bigelow." The unimagined value of a middle name
suddenly presented itself to the young man's mind, and his conscience
slipped behind the camellias and made no protest. A very irreligious
baby, black in the face from howling, had been indeed baptized Francis
Bigelow in King's Chapel, twenty-nine years ago--and had since bought a
mortgage on the Benson property.
"Couldn't you take me? It's a case of charity," he pleaded, turning to
the girl beside him. "It's so noisy at the hotel, I can't sleep."
This last shot went straight to the mark. Sympathy and need are powerful
partners, and they worked together for Ellesworth's case in the hearts
of the two poor, lonely women.
It is only in the South that one can find women--ladies, and who dress
like ladies, and who hardly have ten dollars in cash the year round. The
mystery of the maintenance of their existence is not solved outside the
walls of their own homes. Proud, refined and shy, they divulge nothing.
Who is a boarder that he should think to comprehend the pathetic
ingenuity of their eventless lives?
"Are you connected with the Bigelows of Charleston?" asked Mrs.
McCorkle, softly.
"I think we must be another branch," replied Ellesworth, boldly.
"I will--I would pay you," added Ellesworth, blushing, "just what they
would charge me at the Sunshine Hotel, if that would be satisfactory."
"How much is that, Mr. Bigelow?" inquired Mrs. McCorkle, reddening too.
"Twenty-five dollars a week."
"That is too much. We should think that enough for a month," said the
girl, turning her wonderful face upon her visitor.
"I could not think of giving less," he insisted. Still he did not look
at her.
"Perhaps," admitted Mrs. McCorkle with a sigh, "we might take you, sir,
seeing that you are one of the Bigelow family--on trial."
"I will come," returned Ellesworth, quickly, looking straight at
Georgiella, "I will come next Monday--on trial.
"You won't look upon me as a sheriff, will you?" he added, as he mounted
at the gate, to ride back to his hotel.
The girl shook her head, as he looked down at her quizzically.
"That was very stupid of me. My mind has been full of my trouble. I have
dreamed about it, and hate the man who holds that mortgage.
"Please do not think of it any more. And when you come, sir, perhaps you
can advise us what to do."
Ellesworth looked at her gravely. What would the following week, and the
next, and the winter bring forth?
"Perhaps," he said in a whisper that might have come from the Delphian
oracle; and then he cantered away.
For the first time since her father's death, Georgiella sang that
afternoon as she walked about the garden teasing her plants to bloom.
* * * * *
It was Monday, the fifteenth of December. Mrs. McCorkle ushered
Ellesworth upstairs into his own room in the cottage mortgaged in his
own name. The sun poured into it like a living blessing. The rose-bush
enveloped the windows, and when the sash was raised, delicate tendrils
insinuated themselves within, as if, in Southern fashion, they would
"shake howdy." The room was dainty and home-like. It flashed across
Ellesworth as he sank into the cushioned rocking-chair with a long
breath of content, that it might have been Georgiella's. It was in the
dreamy part of the day. The sun was dipping under the high branches of
the pines. Then the luxury of leaning out of the window in December! He
could not help but think of it as _his_ sun, and _his_ garden and _his_
trees. And now Georgiella came out, bareheaded, and swept the pine
needles and leaves from the narrow box-bordered path, and snipped dead
branches from the shrubs, and then before she went to feed the chickens
she cast up at him a shy glance that made his heart leap within him. He
did not leave his room until he was called to supper. His fancy was
feverish, and kept picturing his mortgaged girl in a Boston
drawing-room, thrilling all the people he knew with her beauty. He
called it carmine beauty; but he was young and ardent.
He felt it when he first saw her, but that eventful afternoon he
formulated it and repeated it over and over again until he became
dizzy--"I love her! I love her!" And then visions of work and strength
and success, and ambitions that had been stifled, began to spring within
him like blades from watered bulbs. The electric shock had come. He knew
it. He meant to spring to it like a man.
Dreamily he dressed for supper, and dreamily descended. Mrs. McCorkle
greeted him with her fine, thin manner. The young man looked about him
curiously. Aunt Betsey waited on the table. He tried not to think of her
hospitality in the matter of snuff. The room was worn and bare and
gray; so bereft of all but the most necessary furniture that its few
ornaments had a startling conspicuousness. He noticed a fat Chinese vase
set up like an idol in an old escritoire. Over the mantel was a
glass-case religiously protecting some coins and ancient papers. A rusty
sword hung on the wall. Biographies of Lee and Jackson, flanking the
Chinese fat vase in the dilapidated escritoire, and a villainous crayon
framed in immortelles upon the wall, that probably represented his
deceased debtor, completed the ornamentation of the room. Miss Benson
entered when he had gone as far as this, and vivaciously exhibited the
bric-a-brac of the room.
"This is a Ming." She pointed to the fat vase. "I understand there isn't
another like it in the country. It belongs to the Ming dynasty."
Although from Boston, Ellesworth was not familiar with the Ming dynasty,
but he bowed and feebly ejaculated,--
"Ah! this is a real Ming, is it?"
"And there," said the young lady, bringing him before the glass-case,
"are family possessions. That is a coin of George II.; those are
Pine-tree shillings; those yellow papers are two copies of a continental
newspaper, and this is the South Carolinian continental penny."
Ellesworth inspected the treasures gravely. He did his best not to
smile.
"Very remarkable!" he murmured. "How Southern!" he thought.
"Colonel Tom Garvin says there are nothing like them in the country. I
suppose they would bring a great deal if sold," she added, wistfully.
"But we don't like to sell them. Besides, we never saw anybody who
wanted to buy them."
Acquaintance under one roof passes quickly into intimacy. Love moves
with fleet feet when two young people breakfast and dine together with a
vague chaperone. A tropical garden, soft evenings and youthful
impetuosity shorten the span to experience thought necessary to precede
an engagement.
Georgiella was the soul of domestic comfort--as Southern women are. She
was a high-spirited, variable, bewitching creature. At first, the
Northerner could not understand her indifference to her obligations as a
mortgager. Why did she not sell the Ming vase? She looked upon debt not
as a disgrace, but as an inconvenience. Foreclosure proceedings were
under way, and it never occurred to the two women to stop them with even
a part of the fifty dollars which Ellesworth paid for his board in
advance. When Ellesworth found out that this trait was not a pauper's,
but like Georgiella's strange beauty, constitutional, he forbore to
criticise it. In truth, he was too much in love now to criticise the
girl at all. It is probable that if she had robbed his pocketbook he
would have merely said, "How interesting! it is her tropical way."
A day or two before Christmas he drove over to Sunshine and returned
with a happy, tired face.
"You would take a Christmas present from me, wouldn't you?" he asked
with unprecedented humility.
"It's in a paper," he explained.
"What is it?" she asked uncomfortably, for she felt his serious look
upon her.
"It's--eh--a trifle that I think you will like," replied Ellesworth
without a smile.
* * * * *
Christmas came cheerfully into the mortgaged house. Georgiella cried a
little for her father's sake. In spite of her bereavement, and of the
fact that she was sure the sheriff would attach the house that day of
all others, she did not feel very wretched. She felt that she was wicked
because she was so happy. There were wings in her heart.
It was not the custom to hang up stockings at the Benson's.
"My things have always been put into the Ming vase," Georgiella
explained, "and the others went on the breakfast table."
She did not look at Ellesworth often. Her eyes dropped. Her cheeks were
like red camellias. She felt in a hurry all of the time. The young man
himself took the situation out in looking at his watch. It seemed to him
as if the world were turning over too fast. He thought of what he meant
to do stolidly, notwithstanding.
They went out and gathered mistletoe in the swamps. He climbed trees and
tore his hands and fell into the water with zest. They brought home a
barrelful of it. He thought how he had bought it at twenty-five cents a
spray on Washington street. He held a great branch of it behind
Georgiella over her head, and looked at her. She started like a wild
animal, and kept ahead of him all the way home.
On Christmas morning Ellesworth got up early--he had hardly slept; he
could not rest, and went softly downstairs. The door into the
dining-room was open, and she was there before him. She stood before the
Ming vase. The mistletoe branch to which he had fastened his present,
and which he had set into the vase to look like a little Christmas tree,
lay tossed beneath her feet. The pearly white berries were scattered on
the floor. The mortgage was in her hand--trust deeds, principal notes,
interest notes, insurance policy. She was turning the papers over
helplessly. She looked scared and was quite pale. Her bosom heaved
boisterously. She heard him and confronted him. She managed to stammer
out,--
"What, sir, does this mean?"
It required a brave man to tell her in her present mood; but he did.
"It only means that I love you," said Ellesworth point blank.
The girl went from blinding white to blazing crimson, but she stood her
ground. The mortgage papers shook in her hands. He thought that she was
going to tear them up. To gain time, for he dared not approach her, he
stooped and picked up the disdained mistletoe. When he had raised
himself she shot out this awful question, looking at him as she did when
they first met.
"Are _you--He_?"
The young man bowed his head before her. If he had set fire to her
place, or robbed her father's grave, she could not have regarded him
with a more crushing scorn. She tried to speak again, but her passion
choked her.
"I--I give you back your home," he protested humbly. "It is mine no
longer. It is your own Don't blame me. I love you."
"My father did not bring me up to take valuable presents
from--Boston--gentlemen!" blazed the Southern girl.
She waved him aside, swept by him without another look, and melted out
of the room. But he noticed that she took the mortgage papers with her.
In the course of the morning he threw himself upon the mercy of Mrs.
McCorkle.
"I have a right," he said; "I want to make her my wife."
"Georgiella is not behaving prettily," said Mrs. McCorkle severely. "If
a Northerner _does act like_ a gentleman, the least a Southern girl can
do is to behave like a lady. I will speak to Georgiella, sir."
Georgiella came to the Christmas dinner with blazing eyes. She ate in
silence, looking like an offended goddess, dressed in an old black silk
gown of her mother's trimmed with aged Valenciennes lace.
But after dinner she stayed in the dining-room while Mrs. McCorkle and
Aunt Betsey went into the kitchen. She walked up to the Ming vase and
stood before it. Ellesworth followed her.
"I have been thinking it over," she began abruptly in a quaint
affectation of a business-like tone. "I will keep the mortgage--thank
you, sir. It _is_ my home, you know," she put in pugnaciously. "But I
will pay for it, if you please."
"_Pay for it!_" gasped Ellesworth.
"Yes, sir; I will sell you the Ming vase," returned Miss Benson calmly,
"and the two Revolutionary papers, and the coin of George the Second and
the rest--" She waved her hand toward the glass-case. "You may take them
to Boston with you."
These were her assets. Ellesworth looked at her for a moment, torn
between astonishment, pity, amusement and love; but love got the better
of them all, and he answered solemnly,--
"Yes, I will take the Ming vase, and the Revolutionary papers, and the
old coins and you too, my darling!"
"Well, I _do_ like you," admitted Georgiella. Suddenly she began to
droop and tremble, and then to sob. Then he held her.
"You must give me a first mortgage; you must," demanded the young man.
"I must have everything--the whole--no other claims to come in from any
quarter of the universe. You understand. You've _got_ to be my wife!" he
exploded in a kind of glorious anger.
She could not deny him, for she thought it was the Northern way of
wooing, and smiled divinely.
"And now--may I?" He took the mistletoe branch from the Ming vase and
held it over her head. Their eyes closed in ecstacy.
Mrs. McCorkle gave a funny little feminine scream of dismay. She had
heard no sound, and had come in from the kitchen to see if they were
quarreling.
"And I'll put it in the trust deed," he whispered humbly, "that I will
make you happy, dear!"
When Ellesworth rode over to Sunshine for his next mail he found the
following letter awaiting him:
1111 COURT STREET,
BOSTON, MASS., _Dec._ 22, 1890.
_Mr. Francis B. Ellesworth:_
DEAR FRANK,--What the deuce do you mean by countermanding
Benson's foreclosure at this time of day? It makes a peck of
trouble. In Boston we are too busy to fool with affairs this
way.
Messrs. Screw & Claw desire me to enclose their little bill.
Mine will keep until you get here.
Yours truly,
JOSEPH TODD.