The Romance of a Plain Man Part 50

"This is a nice party, isn't it?" she asked, when she had brought the hot b.u.t.tered toast from the kitchen and cut it into very small slices on my plate; "the tea smells deliciously. I paid a dollar and a quarter for a pound of it this morning."

"If I'm ever rich again you shall pay a million and a quarter, if you want to."

The charming archness awoke in her eyes, while she looked at me over the brim of the cup.

"Isn't this just as nice as being rich, Ben?" she asked; "I am really, you know, a far better cook than Aunt Mehitable."

"All the same I'd rather live on bread and water than have you do it," I answered.

She lifted her hand, pushing the heavy hair from her forehead, and my gaze fell on the jagged scar on her wrist. Then, as she caught my glance, her arm dropped suddenly under the table, and she pulled her loose muslin sleeve into place.

"Does the burn hurt you, Sally?"

"Not now--it is quite healed. At first it smarted a little."

"Darling, how did you do it?"

"I've forgotten. On the stove, I think."

I fell back on the pillow, too faint, in spite of the tea I had taken, to follow a thought in which there was so sharp and so incessant a pang.

Before my eyes the little table, with its white cloth and its fragile china service, decorated with moss rosebuds, appeared to dissolve into some painful dream distance, in which the sound of the humming-birds at the jessamine grew gradually louder.

Six days longer I remained in bed, too weak to get into my clothes, or to stand on my feet, but at the end of that time I was permitted to struggle to the square of sunlight by the window, where I sat for an hour with the warm breeze from the garden blowing into my face. For the first day or two I was unable to rise from the deep chintz-covered chair, in which Aunt Euphronasia and Sally had placed me; but one afternoon, when the old negress had returned to the kitchen, and Sally had gone out on an errand, I disobeyed their orders and crawled out on the porch, where the scent of the jessamine seemed a part of the summer sunshine. The next day I ventured as far as the kitchen steps, and found Aunt Euphronasia plucking a chicken for my broth, with little Benjamin asleep in his carriage at her side.

"Aunt Euphronasia, do you know where Sally goes every afternoon?" I enquired.

"Hi! Ma.r.s.e Ben, ain't un 'oman erbleeged ter teck her time off de same ez a man?" she demanded indignantly. "She cyarn' be everlastin'ly a-settin' plum at yo' elbow."

"You know perfectly well I'm not such a brute as to be complaining, mammy."

"Mebbe you ain't, honey, but hit sounds dat ar way ter me."

"If I could only make sure she'd gone to walk, I'd be jolly glad."

"Ef'n you ax me," she retorted contemptuously, "she ain't de sort, suh, dat's gwineter traipse jes' fur de love er traipsing.'"

There was small comfort, I saw, to be had from her, so turning away, while she resumed her plucking, I crawled slowly back through the bedroom into the hall, and along the hall to the front door, which stood open. Here the dust of the street rose like steam to my nostrils, and the stone steps and the brick pavement were thickly coated. A watering-cart turned the corner, scattering a refreshing spray, and behind it came a troop of thirsty dogs, licking greedily at the water before it sank into the dust. The foliage of the trees was scorched to a livid shade, and the ends of the leaves curled upward as if a flame had blown by them. Down the street, as I stood there, came the old familiar cry from a covered wagon: "Water-million! Hyer's yo' watermillion fresh f'om de vine!"

Clinging to the iron railing, which burned my hand, I descended the steps with trembling limbs, and stood for a minute in the patch of shade at the bottom. A negro, seated on the curbing, was drinking the juice from a melon rind, and he looked up at me with rolling eyes, his gluttonous red lips moving in rapture.

"Dish yer's a moughty good melon, Marster," he said, and returned to his feast.

As I was about to place my foot on the bottom step and begin the difficult ascent, my eyes, raised to our sitting-room window, hung spellbound on a black and white sign fastened against the panes:

"Fine laundering. Old laces a specialty. Desserts made to order."

"Old laces a specialty," I repeated, as if struck by the phrase. Then, as my strength failed me, I sank on the stone step in the patch of shade, and buried my face in my hands.

CHAPTER XXIX

IN WHICH WE RECEIVE VISITORS

I was still sitting there, with my head propped in my hands, when my eyes, which had seen nothing before, saw Sally coming through the hot dust in the street, with George Bolingbroke, carrying a bundle under his arm, at her side. As she neared me a perplexed and anxious look--the look I had seen always on the face of my mother when the day's burden was heavy--succeeded the smiling brightness with which she had been speaking to George.

"Why, Ben!" she exclaimed, quickening her steps, "what are you doing out here in this terrible heat?"

"I got down and couldn't get back," I answered.

"Well, you ought to be ashamed of yourself. Here, George, give me the bundle and help him up."

"He deserves to be left here," remarked George, laughing good-humouredly as he grasped my arm, and half led, half dragged me up the steps and into the house. Then, when I was placed in the deep chintz-covered chair by the window, Sally came in with a milk punch, which she held to my lips while I drank.

"You're really very foolish, Ben."

"I know all, Sally," I replied, sitting up and pushing the gla.s.s and her hand away, "and I'm going to get up and go back to work to-morrow."

"Then drink this, please, so you will be able to go. I suppose you saw the sign," she pursued quietly, when I had swallowed the punch; "George saw it, too, and it put him into a rage."

"What has George got to do with it?" I demanded with a pang in my heart.

"He hasn't anything, of course, but it was kind of him all the same to want to lend me his money. You see, the way of it was that when you fell ill, and there wasn't a penny in the house, I remembered how bitterly you'd hated the idea of taking help."

I caught her hand to my lips. "I'd beg, borrow, or steal for you, darling."

"You'd neglected to tell me that, so I didn't know. What I did was to sit down and think hard for an hour, and at the end of that time, when you were well enough to be left, I got on the car and went over to see several women, who, I knew, were so rich that they had plenty of old lace and embroidery. I told them exactly how it was and, of course, they all wanted to give me money, and Jennie Randolph even sat down and cried when I wouldn't take it. Then they agreed to let me launder all their fine lace and embroidered blouses, and I've made desserts and cakes for some of them and--and--"

"Don't go on, Sally, I can't stand it. I'm a crackbrained fool and I'm going to cry."

"Of course, the worst part was having to leave you, but when George found out about it, he insisted upon fetching and carrying my bundles."

"George!" I exclaimed sharply, and a spasm of pain, like the entrance of poison into an unhealed wound, contracted my heart. "Was that confounded package under his arm," I questioned, almost angrily, "some of the stuff?"

"That was a blouse of Maggie Tyler's. He is going to take it back to her on Friday. There, now, stay quiet, while I run and speak to him. He is waiting for me in the kitchen."

She went out, as if it were the most natural thing in the world for her to take in washing and for George to deliver it, while, opening the long green shutters, I sat staring, beyond the humming-birds and the white columns, to the shimmering haze that hung over the old tea-roses and the dwindled box in the garden. Here the heat, though it was still visible to the eyes, was softened and made fragrant by the greenness of the trees and the gra.s.s and by the perfume of the jessamine and the old tea-roses, dropping their faintly coloured leaves in the sunshine. From time to time the sounds of the city, grown melancholy and discordant, like the sounds that one hears in fever, reached me across the shimmering vagueness of the garden.

And then as I sat there, with folded hands, there came to me, out of some place, so remote that it seemed a thousand miles away from the sunny stillness, and yet so near that I knew it existed only within my soul, a sense of failure, of helplessness, of humiliation. A hundred casual memories thronged through my mind, and all these memories, gathering significance from my imagination, plunged me deeper into the bitter despondency which had closed over my head. I saw the General, with his little, alert bloodshot eyes, like the eyes of an intelligent bulldog, with that look of stubbornness, of tenacity, persisting beneath the sly humour that gleamed in his face, as if he were thinking always somewhere far back in his brain, "I'll hang on to the death, I'll hang on to the death." His figure, which, because of that legendary glamour I had seen surrounding it in childhood, still personified shining success in my eyes, appeared to add a certain horror to this sense of helplessness, of failure, that dragged me under. Deep down within me, down below my love for Sally or for the child, something older than any emotion, older than any instinct except the instinct of battle, awakened and pa.s.sed from pa.s.siveness into violence. "Let me but start again in the race," said this something, "let me but stand once more on my feet."

The despondency, which had been at first formless and vague as mere darkness, leaped suddenly into a tangible shape, and I felt that the oppressive weight of the debt on my shoulders was the weight, not of thought, but of metal. Until that was lifted--until I had struggled free--I should be crippled, I told myself, not only in ambition, but in body.

From the detached kitchen, at the end of the short brick walk, overgrown with wild violets, that led to it, the sound of George's laugh fell on my ears. Rising to my feet with an effort, I stood, listening, without thought, to the sound, which seemed to grow vacant and sad as it floated to me in the warm air over the sunken bricks. Then pa.s.sing through the long window, I descended the steps slowly, and stopped in the shadow of a pink c.r.a.pe myrtle that grew near the kitchen doorway. Again the merriment came to me, Sally's laughter mingling this time with George's.

"No, that will never do. This is the way," she said, in her sparkling voice, which reminded me always of running water.

"Sally!" I called, and moving nearer, I paused at the kitchen step, while she came quickly forward, with some white, filmy stuff she had just rinsed in the tub still in her hands.