The Happy End Part 30

"Miss Rosemary!" he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed in palpable dismay. He drew Elim Meikeljohn aside. "Take her away," he directed; "her father ... killed, trying to save his papers."

"Where?" Elim demanded. "Their house is empty. She can't stay in Richmond alone."

"I'd forgotten that!" the other admitted. "McCall and John both gone, mother dead, and now--by heaven!" he exclaimed, low and distressed, "she has just no one. I'm without a place. Her friends have left. There's a distant connection at Bramant's Wharf, but that's almost at the mouth of the James."

Rosemary Roselle came up to them.

"Mr. Jim Haxall," she asked, direct and white, "is father dead?"

He studied her for a moment and then answered:

"Yes, Miss Rosemary."

She swayed. Indy, at her side, enveloped her in a sustaining arm.

"Indy," the girl said, her face on the woman's breast, "he, too!"

"I'm sending a few bales of leaf down the river," Haxall continued to Elim; "the sloop'll pa.s.s Bramant's Wharf; but the crew will be just anybody. Miss Rosemary couldn't go with only her n.i.g.g.e.r--"

Elim Meikeljohn spoke mechanically:

"I'll be responsible for her." The war was over; he had been ordered from the column when his wound had broken afresh, and in a maze of fever he had been irresistibly impelled toward Linden Row. "I'll take her to Bramant's Wharf."

Haxall regarded suspiciously the disordered blue uniform; then his gaze shifted to Elim's somber lined countenance.

"Miss Rosemary's rubies and gold--" he said finally. "But I believe you're honest, I believe you're a good man."

VIII

James Haxall explained this to Rosemary. Elim, standing aside, could see that the girl neither a.s.sented nor raised objection. She seemed utterly listless; a fleet emotion at the knowledge of her father's death had, in that public place, been immediately repressed. The sloop, Elim learned, was ready to start at once. The afternoon was declining; to reach Bramant's Wharf would take them through the night and into the meridian of tomorrow. They had made no preparations for the trip, there was neither bedding nor food; but Elim and Haxall agreed that it was best for Rosemary Roselle to leave the city at the price of any slight momentary discomfort.

Elim looked about for a place where he might purchase food. A near-by eating house had been completely wrecked, its floor a debris of broken crockery. Beyond, a baker's shop had been deserted, its window shattered but the interior intact. The shelves, however, had been swept bare of loaves. Elim searched behind the counters--nothing remained. But in walking out his foot struck against a round object, wrapped in paper, which on investigation proved to be a fruit cake of satisfactory solidity and size. With this beneath his arm he returned to Rosemary Roselle, and they followed Haxall to the wharf where the sloop lay.

The tiller was in charge of an old man with peering pale-blue eyes and tremulous siccated hands. Yet he had an astonishingly potent voice, and issued orders, in tones like the grating of metal edges, to a loutish youth in a ragged shirt and bare legs. The cabin, partly covered, was filled with bagged bales; a small s.p.a.ce had been left for the steersman, and forward the deck was littered with untidy ropes and swab, windla.s.s bar and other odds.

Elim Meikeljohn moved forward to a.s.sist Rosemary on to the sloop, but she evaded his hand and jumped lightly down upon the deck, Indy, grumbling and certain of catastrophe, was safely got aboard, and Elim helped the youth to push the craft's bow out into the stream. The grimy mainsail rose slowly, the jib was set, and they deliberately gathered way, slipping silently between the timbered banks, emerging from the thin pungent influence of the smoking ruins.

Behind them the sun transfused the veiled city into a coppery blur that gradually sank into a tender-blue dusk. Indy had arranged a place with the most obtainable comfort for Rosemary Roselle; she sat with her back against the mast, gazing toward the bank, stealing backward, at the darkening trees moving in solemn procession.

After the convulsed and burning city, the uproar of guns and clash of conflict, the quiet progress of the sloop was incredibly peaceful and withdrawn. Elim felt as if they had been detached from the familiar material existence and had been set afloat in a stream of silken shadows. The wind was behind them, the boom had been let far but, the old steersman drowsed at his post, and the youth had fallen instantly asleep in a strange cramped att.i.tude.

Elim was standing at the stern--he had conceived it his duty to stay as far away from Rosemary Roselle as her wish plainly indicated; but, in this irrelated phase of living, he gradually lost his sense of responsibility and restrained conduct. He wanted extravagantly to be near Rosemary, to be where he could see her clearly. Perhaps, but this was unlikely, she would speak to him. His desire gradually flooded him; it induced a species of careless heroism, and he made his way resolutely forward and sat on a heap of rope at a point where he could study her with moderate propriety and success. She glanced at him momentarily when he took his place--he saw that her under lip was capable of an extremely human and annoying expression--and returned to her veiled scrutiny of the sliding banks.

An unfamiliar emotion stirred at Elim's heart; and in his painstaking introspective manner he exposed it. He found a happiness that, at the same time, was a pain; he found an actual catch in his throat that was a nebulous desire; he found an utter loneliness together with the conviction that this earth was a place of glorious possibilities of affinity. Princ.i.p.ally he was conscious of an urging of his entire being toward the slight figure in black, staring with wide bereft eyes into the gathering evening. On the other side of the mast, Indy was sleeping with her head upon her breast. The feeling in Elim steadily increased in poignancy--faint stars appearing above the indefinite foliage pierced him with their beauty, the ashen-blue sky vibrated in a singing chord, the river divided in whispering confidences on the bow of the sloop.

Elim Meikeljohn debated the wisdom of a remark; his courage grew immeasurably reckless.

"The wind and river are shoving us along together." p.r.o.nounced, the sentence seemed appallingly compromising; he had meant that the wind and river together, not--

She made no reply; one hand, he saw, stirred slightly.

Since he had not been blasted into nothingness, he continued:

"I'm glad the war's over. Why," he exclaimed in genuine surprise, "you can hear the birds again." A sleepy twitter had floated out over the stream. Still no response. He should not, certainly, have mentioned the war. He wondered desperately what a fine and delicate being like Rosemary Roselle talked about? It would be wise to avoid serious and immediate considerations for commonplaces.

"Ellik McCosh," he said, "a girl in our village who went to Boston, learned to dance, and when she came back she taught two or three. Her communion medal was removed from her," he added with complete veracity.

"Perhaps," he went on conversationally, "you don't have communion medals in Richmond--it's a little lead piece you have when you are in good standing at the Lord's table. Mine was taken away for three months for whistling by the church door. A long while ago," he ended in a different voice. He thought of the fruit cake, and breaking off a piece offered it to the silent girl. "It's like your own," he told her, placing it on a piece of paper at her side; "it's from Richmond and wasn't even paid for with strange silver."

At this last a sudden uneasiness possessed him, and he hurriedly searched his pockets. He had exactly fifty cents. Until the present he had totally overlooked the depleted state of his fortune. Elim had some arrears of pay, but now he seriously doubted whether they were collectible. Nothing else. He had emerged from the war brevetted major but as penniless as the morning of his enlistment. He doubted whether, in the hurry of departure, Rosemary Roselle had remembered to bring any money.

Still, she would be cared for, supplied with every necessity, at Bramant's Wharf. There he would leave her ... his breathing stopped, for, incredibly, he saw that her hand was suspended over the piece of cake. She took it up and ate it slowly, absently. This, he felt, had created a bond between them; but it was a conviction in which, apparently, she had no share. She might have thanked him but she didn't.

An underhanded and indefensible expedient occurred to him, and he sat for a perceptible number of minutes concentrating his memory upon a dim and special object. Finally he raised his head.

"Indy," he quoted, "a large light mulatto, hasn't much sense but a great deal of sensibility. That," he added of himself, "is evidently very well observed." He saw that Rosemary turned her head with an impatient curiosity. "She is very unfortunate," he continued uncertainly; "she lost a present of money and couldn't work till it was given back."

"But how," demanded Rosemary Roselle, "did you know that?" Curiosity had betrayed her.

Elim Meikeljohn concealed a grin with difficulty. It was evident that she profoundly regretted the lapse, yet she would not permit herself to retreat from her position. She maintained a high intolerant aspect of query.

"Have you forgotten," he went on, "how the dread day rolled around?" He paused wickedly. "The slough of despond?" he added.

"What silly stuff!" Rosemary p.r.o.nounced.

"It was," he agreed, "mostly. But the paper about Indy was a superior production. B plus, I think."

A slow comprehension dawned on her face, blurred by the night.

"So that's where they went," she observed; "you marked them." He would have sworn that a smile hovered for the fraction of a moment on her pale lips. She drew up her shoulders slightly and turned away.

His best, his only hope had flickered for a minute and died away. Her silence was like impregnable armor. A puff of wind filled the sails, there was a straining of cordage, an augmented bubbling at the sloop's bow, and then the stir subsided. He pa.s.sed into a darkness of old distresses, forebodings, grim recollections from his boyhood, inherited bleak memories. Rosemary Roselle's upright figure gradually sank. He realized that she was asleep on her arm. Elim bent forward shamelessly and studied her worn countenance. There was a trace of tears on her cheek. She was as delicate, as helpless as a flower sleeping on its stalk.

An impulse to touch her hair was so compelling that he started back, shaken; a new discordant tumult rose within him, out of which emerged an aching hunger for Rosemary Roselle; he wanted her with a pa.s.sion cold and numbing like ether. He wanted her without reason, and in the desire lost his deep caution, his rect.i.tude of conscience. He was torn far beyond the emotional possibilities of weak men. The fact that, penniless and without a home, he had nothing to offer was lost in the beat and surge of his feelings. He went with the smashing completeness of a heavy body, broken loose in an elemental turmoil. He wanted her; her fragrant spirit, the essence that was herself, Rosemary Roselle. He couldn't take it; such consummations, he realized, were beyond will and act, they responded from planes forever above human desire--there was not even a rift of hope. The banks had been long lost in the night; the faint disembodied cry of an owl breathed across the invisible river.

IX

She woke with a little confused cry, and sat gazing distractedly into the dark, her hands pressed to her cheeks.

"Don't you remember," Elim Meikeljohn spoke, "Haxall and the sloop; your relatives at Bramant's Wharf?"

She returned to a full consciousness of her surroundings.

"I was dreaming so differently," she told him. It seemed to Elim that the antagonism had departed from her voice; he even had a feeling that she was glad of his presence. Indy, prostrate on the deck with her chin elevated to the stars, had not moved.

The darkness increased, broken only by the colored glimmer of the port and starboard lights and a wan blur about the old man bent over the tiller. Once he woke the youth and sent him forward with a sounding pole, once the sloop sc.r.a.ped heavily over a mud bank, but that was all; their imperceptible progress was smooth, unmarked.

Elim, recalling Joshua, wished that the sloop and night were anch.o.r.ed, stationary. Already he smelled the dawn in a newly stirring, cold air.

The darkness thickened. Rosemary Roselle said: