“Would you mind not calling me ‘my dear’?” she asked.
“Have I done that? I believe I have. I beg your pardon, Miss Holly!
Really, I had no intention of being――what shall I say?――familiar.”
“Oh, it isn’t that,” replied Holly earnestly, “but it makes me feel so
terribly young! If you’d like to call me Holly, you may.”
“Thank you,” answered Winthrop as they entered the gate and passed into
the noonday twilight of the oleander path. “But that is a privilege I
don’t deserve, at all events, not yet. Perhaps some day, maybe the day
I dance at your wedding, I’ll accept the honor.”
“Just see how many, many roses are out!” cried Holly.
They went on to the house in silence.
Dinner was a pleasanter meal for Winthrop than breakfast had been,
principally because the Major and a Miss Virginia Parish, a maiden lady
of uncertain age and much charm of manners, were present. The Major
observed and resented Julian’s polite disregard of Winthrop and after
dinner took him to task for it. The ladies were in the parlor, Winthrop
had gone up-stairs to get some cigars, and the Major and Julian were at
the end of the porch. It was perhaps unfortunate that Winthrop should
have been forced to overhear a part of the conversation under his
window.
“You don’t treat the gentleman with common civility,” remonstrated the
Major, warmly.
“I am not aware that I have been discourteous to him,” responded Julian
in his drawling voice.
The Major spluttered.
“Gad, sir, what do you mean by discourteous? You can’t turn your back
on a man at his own table without being discourteous! Confound it, sir,
remember that you’re under his roof!”
“I do remember it,” answered Julian quickly. “I’m not likely to forget
it, sir. But how did it become his roof? How did he get hold of it?
Some damned Yankee trick, I’ll wager; stole it, as like as not!”
“Tut, tut, sir! What language is that, Julian? Mr. Winthrop――――”
But Winthrop waited to hear no more. With the cigars he joined them
on the porch, finding the Major very red of face and looking somewhat
like an insulted turkey-cock, and Julian with a sombre sneer on his
dark face. Julian declined the proffered cigar and presently left the
others alone, taking himself off in search of Holly. The Major waved a
hand after him, and scowled angrily.
“Just like his father,” he grunted. “Hot-headed, stubborn, badly
balanced, handsome as the devil and bound to come just such a cropper
in the end.”
“You mean that his father was unfortunate?” asked Winthrop idly, as he
lighted his cigar.
“Shot himself for a woman, sir. Most nonsensical proceeding I ever
heard of. The woman wasn’t worth it, sir.”
“They seldom are,” commented Winthrop, gravely, “in the opinion of
others.”
“She was married,” continued the Major, unheeding the remark, “and had
children; fine little tots they were, too. Husband was good as gold to
her. But she had to have Fernald Wayne to satisfy her damned vanity. I
beg your pardon, Mr. Winthrop, but I have no patience with that sort of
women, sir!”
“You don’t understand them.”
“I don’t want to, sir.”
“You couldn’t if you did,” replied Winthrop.
The Major shot a puzzled glance at him, rolling his unlighted cigar
swiftly around in the corner of his mouth. Then he deluged the
Baltimore Bell with tobacco-juice and went on:
“Fernald was plumb out of his head about her. His own wife had been
dead some years. Nothing would do but she must run away with him.
Well――――”
“Did the lady live here?” asked Winthrop.
“Godamighty, no, sir! We don’t breed that kind here, sir! She lived
in New Orleans; her husband was a cotton factor there. Well, Fernald
begged her to run away with him, and after a lot of hemming and hawing
she consented. They made an appointment for one night and Fernald was
there waiting. But the lady didn’t come. After awhile he went back to
his hotel and found a note. She was sorry, but her husband had bought
tickets for the opera for that evening. Eh? What? There was soul for
you, Mr. Winthrop!”
Winthrop nodded.
“So the lover blew his brains out, eh?”
“Shot a hole in his chest; amounted to about the same thing, I reckon,”
answered the Major, gloomily. “Now what do you think of a woman that’ll
do a thing like that?”
“Well, I don’t know but what a good opera is to be preferred to an
elopement,” answered Winthrop. “There, there, Major, I don’t mean to be
flippant. The fact is we hear of so many of these ‘crimes of passion’
up our way nowadays that we take them with the same equanimity that we
take the weather predictions. The woman was just a good sample of her
sort as the man was doubtless a good sample of his. He was lucky to be
out of it, only he didn’t realize it and so killed himself. That’s the
deuce of it, you see, Major; a man who can look a thousand fathoms into
a woman’s eyes and keep his judgment from slipping a cog is――well, he
just isn’t; he doesn’t exist! And if he did you and I, Major, wouldn’t
have anything to do with him.”
“Shucks!” grunted the Major, half in agreement, half in protest.
“But I hope this boy won’t follow his father’s lead, just the same,”
said Winthrop.
“No, no,” answered the Major, energetically; “he won’t, he won’t.
He――he’s better fitted for hard knocks than his dad was. I――we had just
had a few words and I was――ah――displeased. Shall we join the ladies
inside, Mr. Winthrop?”
The Major drove back to town in his side-bar buggy behind his aged
gray mule at sunset, taking Miss Parish with him. Miss India retired
to her room, and Julian and Holly strolled off together down the
road. Winthrop drew the arm-chair up to the fireplace in his room and
smoked and read until supper time. At that meal only he and Holly and
Julian were present, and the conversation was confined principally
to the former two. Julian was plainly out of sorts and short of
temper; his wooing, Winthrop concluded, had not gone very well that
day. Holly seemed troubled, but whether over Julian’s unhappiness or
his impoliteness Winthrop could not guess. After supper they went
out to the porch for a while together, but Winthrop soon bade them
good-night. For some time through the opened windows he could hear the
faint squeaking of the joggling-board and the fainter hum of their low
voices. At ten Julian’s horse was brought around, and he clattered away
in the starlit darkness toward Marysville. He heard Holly closing the
door down-stairs, heard her feet patter up the uncarpeted stairway,
heard her humming a little tune under her breath. The lamp was still
lighted on his table, and doubtless the radiance of it showed under
the door, for Holly’s footsteps came nearer and nearer along the hall
until――
“Good-night, slave!” she called, softly.
“Good-night, Miss Holly,” he answered.
He heard her footsteps dying away, and finally the soft closing of a
door. Thoughtfully he refilled his pipe and went back to the chair in
front of the dying fire....
The ashes were cold and a chill breeze blew through the open casements.
Winthrop arose with a shiver, knocked the ashes from his pipe and
dropped it on the mantel.
“There’s no fool like an old――like a middle-aged fool,” he muttered, as
he blew out the lamp.