THE SWAN-SONG OF THE CREPE-MYRTLE
It was twilight when Mrs. Westmore heard the clatter of horses' hoofs
up the gravelled roadway, and two riders cantered up.
Richard Travis sat his saddle horse in the slightly stooping way of
the old fox-hunter--not the most graceful seat, but the most natural
and comfortable for hard riding. Alice galloped ahead--her fine
square shoulders and delicate but graceful bust silhouetted against
the western sky in the fading light.
Mrs. Westmore sat on the veranda and watched them canter up. She
thought how handsome they were, and how well they would look always
together.
Alice sprang lightly from her mare at the front steps.
"Did you think we were never coming back? Richard's new mare rides so
delightfully that we rode farther than we intended. Oh, but she
canters beautifully!"
She sat on the arm of her mother's chair, and bent over and kissed
her cheek. The mother looked up to see her finely turned profile
outlined in a pale pink flush of western sky which glowed behind her.
Her cheeks were of the same tinge as the sky. They glowed with the
flush of the gallop, and her eyes were bright with the happiness of
it. She sat telling of the new mare's wonderfully correct saddle
gaits, flipping her ungloved hand with the gauntlet she had just
pulled off.
Travis turned the horses over to Jim and came up.
"Glad to see you, Cousin Alethea," he said, as she arose and advanced
gracefully to meet him--"no, no--don't rise," he added in his half
jolly, half commanding way. "You've met me before and I'm not such a
big man as I seem." He laughed: "Do you remember Giant Jim, the big
negro Grandfather used to have to oversee his hands on the lower
place? Jim, you know, in consideration of his elevation, was granted
several privileges not allowed the others. Among them was the
privilege of getting drunk every Saturday night. Then it was he would
stalk and brag among those he ruled while they looked at him in awe
and reverence. But he had the touch of the philosopher in him and
would finally say: 'Come, touch me, boys; come, look at me; come,
feel me--I'm nothin' but a common man, although I appear so big.'"
Mrs. Westmore laughed in her mechanical way, but all the while she
was looking at Alice, who was watching the mare as she was led off.
Travis caught her eye and winked mischievously as he added: "Now,
Cousin Alethea, you must promise me to make Alice ride her whenever
she needs a tonic--every day, if necessary. I have bought her for
Alice, and she must get the benefit of her before it grows too cold."
He turned to Alice Westmore: "You have only to tell me which days--if
I am too busy to go with you--Jim will bring her over."
She smiled: "You are too kind, Richard, always thinking of my
pleasure. A ride like this once a week is tonic enough."
She went into the house to change her habit. Her brother Clay, who
had been sitting on the far end of the porch unobserved, arose and,
without noticing Travis as he passed, walked into the house.
"I cannot imagine," said Mrs. Westmore apologetically, "what is the
matter with Clay to-day."
"Why?" asked Travis indifferently enough.
"He has neglected his geological specimens all day, nor has he ever
been near his laboratory--he has one room he calls his laboratory,
you know. To-night he is moody and troubled."
Travis said nothing. At tea Clay was not there.
When Travis left it was still early and Alice walked with him to the
big gate. The moon shone dimly and the cool, pure light lay over
everything like the first mist of frost in November. Beyond, in the
field, where it struck into the open cotton bolls, it turned them
into December snow-banks.
Travis led his saddle horse, and as they walked to the gate, the
sweet and scarcely perceptible odor of the crepe-myrtle floated out
on the open air.
The crepe-myrtle has a way of surprising us now and then, and often
after a wet fall, it gives us the swan-song of a bloom, ere its
delicate blossoms, touched to death by frost, close forever their
scalloped pink eyes, on the rare summer of a life as spiritual as the
sweet soft gulf winds which brought it to life.
Was it symbolic to-night,--the swan-song of the romance of Alice
Westmore's life, begun under those very trees so many summers ago?
They stopped at the gate. Richard Travis lit a cigar before mounting
his horse. He seemed at times to-night restless, yet always
determined.
She had never seen him so nearly preoccupied as he had been once or
twice to-night.
"Do you not think?" he asked, after a while as they stood by the
gate, "that I should have a sweet answer soon?"
Her eyes fell. The death song of the crepe-myrtle, aroused by a south
wind suddenly awakened, smote her painfully.
"You know--you know how it is, Richard"--
"How it was--Alice. But think--life is a practical--a serious thing.
We all have had our romances. They are the heritage of dreaming
youth. We outlive them--it is best that we should. Our spiritual life
follows the law of all other life, and spiritually we are not the
same this year that we were last. Nor will we be the next. It is
always change--change--even as the body changes. Environment has
more to do with what we are, what we think and feel--than anything
else. If you will marry me you will soon love me--it is the law of
love to beget love. You will forget all the lesser loves in the great
love of your life. Do you not know it, feel it, Sweet?"
She looked at him surprised. Never before had he used any term of
endearment to her. There was a hard, still and subtle yet determined
light in his eyes.
"Richard--Richard--you--I"--
"See," he said, taking from his vest pocket a magnificent ring set in
an exquisite old setting--inherited from his grandmother, and it had
been her engagement ring. "See, Alice, let me put this on to-night."
He took her hand--it thrilled him as he had never been thrilled
before. This impure man, who had made the winning of women a
plaything, trembled with the fear of it as he took in his own the
hand so pure that not even his touch could awaken sensuality in it.
The odor of her beautiful hair floated up to him as he bent over. A
wave of hot passion swept over him--for with him love was
passion--and his reason, for a moment, was swept from its seat. Then
almost beside himself for love of this woman, so different from any
he had ever known, he opened his arms to fold her in one
overpowering, conquering embrace.
It was but a second and more a habit than thought--he who had never
before hesitated to do it.
She stepped back and the hot blood mounted to her cheek. Her eyes
shone like outraged stars, dreaming earthward on a sleeping past,
unwarningly obscured by a passing cloud, and then flashing out into
the night, more brightly from the contrast.
She did not speak and he crunched under his feet, purposely, the turf
he was standing on, and so carrying out, naturally, the gesture of
clasping the air, in establishing his balance--as if it was an
accident.
She let him believe she thought it was, and secured relief from the
incident.
"Alice--Alice!" he exclaimed. "I love you--love you--I must have you
in my life! Can you not wear this now? See!"
He tried to place it on her finger. He held the small beautiful hand
in his own. Then it suddenly withdrew itself and left him holding his
ring and looking wonderingly at her.
She had thrown back her head, and, half turned, was looking toward
the crepe-myrtle tree from which the faint odor came.
"You had better go, Richard," was all she said.
"I'll come for my answer--soon?" he asked.
She was silent.
"Soon?" he repeated as he rose in the stirrup--"soon--and to claim
you always, Alice."
He rode off and left her standing with her head still thrown back,
her thoughtful face drinking in the odor of the crepe-myrtle.
Travis did not understand, for no crepe-myrtle had ever come into his
life. It could not come. With him all life had been a passion flower,
with the rank, strong odor of the sensuous, wild honeysuckle, which
must climb ever upon something else, in order to open and throw off
the rank, brazen perfume from its yellow and streaked and variegated
blossoms.
And how common and vulgar and all-surfeiting it is, loading the air
around it with its sickening imitation of sweetness, so that even the
bees stagger as they pass through it and disdain to stop and shovel,
for the mere asking, its musky and illicit honey.
But, O mystic odor of the crepe-myrtle--O love which never dies--how
differently it grows and lives and blooms!
In color, constant--a deep pink. Not enough of red to suggest the
sensual, nor yet lacking in it when the full moment of ripeness
comes. How delicately pink it is, and yet how unfadingly it stands
the summer's sun, the hot air, the drought! How quickly it responds
to the Autumn showers, and long after the honeysuckle has died, and
the bees have forgotten its rank memory, this beautiful creature of
love blooms in the very lap of Winter.
O love that defies even the breath of death!
The yellow lips of the honeysuckle are thick and sensual; but the
beautiful petals of this cluster of love-cells, all so daintily
transparent, hanging in pink clusters of loveliness with scalloped
lips of purity, that even the sunbeam sends a photograph of his heart
through them and every moonbeam writes in it the romance of its life.
And the skies all day long, reflecting in its heart, tells to the
cool green leaves that shadow it the story of its life, and it
catches and holds the sympathy of the tiniest zephyr, from the way it
flutters to the patter of their little feet.
All things of Nature love it--the clouds, the winds, the very stars,
and sun, because love--undying love--is the soul of God, its Maker.
The rose is red in the rich passion of love, the lily is pale in the
poverty of it; but the crepe-myrtle is pink in the constancy of it.
O bloom of the crepe-myrtle! And none but a lover ever smelled
it--none but a lover ever knew!
She ran up the gentle slope to the old-fashioned garden and threw
herself under the tree from whence the dying odor came. She fell on
her knees--the moonlight over her in fleckings of purification. She
clung to the scaly weather-beaten stem of the tree as she would have
pressed a sister to her breast. Her arms were around it--she knew
it--its very bark.
She seized a bloom that had fallen and crushed it to her bosom and
her cheek.
"O Tom--Tom--why--why did you make me love you here and then leave me
forever with only the memory of it?"
"Twice does it bloom, dear Heart,--can not my love bloom like
it--twice?"
"A-l-i-c-e!"
The voice came from out the distant woods nearby.
The blood leaped and then pricked her like sharp-pointed icicles, and
they all seemed to freeze around and prick around her heart. She
could not breathe.... Her head reeled.... The crepe-myrtle fell on
her and smothered her....
When she awoke Mrs. Westmore sat by her side and was holding her head
while her brother was rubbing her arms.
"You must be ill, darling," said her mother gently. "I heard you
scream. What--"
They helped her to rise. Her heart still fluttered violently--her
head swam.
"Did you call me before--before"--she was excited and eager.
"Why, yes"--smiled her mother. "I said, 'Alice--Alice!'"
"It was not that--no, that was not the way it sounded," she said as
they led her into the house.