The Tinder-Box Part 12

I have always been able to get up at the break of day to go sketching--it was at daybreak that I made my sketch in the Defleury gardens that captured the French art eye enough to get me my Salon mention. If I could get up to splash water-colors at that hour, I surely could rush to the protection of my own roses, so I went to bed with gray dawn on my mind and the shutters wide open so the first light would get full in my eyes.

I am glad that it was a good bright ray that woke me and partly dazzled me, for the sight I had, after I had been kneeling down in the rose bed for fifteen minutes, was something of a shock to me, though no reason in the world why it should have been. I can't remember that I ever speculated as to whether the Crag wore pajamas or not, and I don't see that I should have been surprised that he did instead of the night shirt of our common ancestry.

He came around the side of the house out of the sun-shot mist and was half way down the garden path before I saw him or he saw me, and I must say that his unconcern under the circ.u.mstances was rather remarkable.

He was attired in a light blue silk pajama jacket that was open at the throat and half way down his broad breast. He had on his usual gray trousers, but tag's of blue trailed out and ruffled around his bare ankles, and across his bare heels that protruded from his slippers. His hair was in heavy tousled black curls all over his head and his gray eyes were positively mysterious with interrupted dreams. In one hand he carried a tin can and in the other a small pointed stick, which looked murderously fitted for the extermination of the marauders.

I was positively nervous over the prospect of his embarra.s.sment when he should catch sight of me, but there was none.

"Eve!" he exclaimed, with surprise, and a ray of pure delight drove away the dreams in his eyes. n.o.body in the wide world calls me Eve but just the Crag, and he does it in a queer, still way when he is surprised to see me, or glad, or sorry, or moved with any kind of sudden emotion.

And queer as it is I have to positively control the desire to answer him with the correlated t.i.tle--Adam!

"I forgot to tell you yesterday that I was coming over to get the slugs for you, dear," he said as he came down the row of roses next to mine, squatted opposite to where I was kneeling by the bushy, suffering Neron and began to examine the under side of each leaf carefully. He was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen in the early light with his great chest bare and the blue of the pajamas melting into the bronze of his throat and calling out the gray in his eyes. I had to force myself into being gardener rather than artist, as we laughed together over the gla.s.s bowl and silver spoon I had brought out for the undoing of the slugs.

Some day I'm going to paint him like that!

[Ill.u.s.tration: His gray eyes were positively mysterious with interrupted dreams]

I found out about the pajamas from questioning Aunt Martha discreetly.

They seemed so incongruous in relation to the usual old Henry Clay coat and stock collar, that I had to know the reason why. Mrs. Hargrove's son was a very worldly man, she says, and wore them. It comforts her to make them for the Crag to wear in memoriam. He wears the collars Cousin Martha makes him with her own fingers after the pattern she made his father's by, for the same reason, and lets Cousin Jasmine cut his hair because she always cut her father's, Colonel Horton's, until his death.

That accounts for the ante-bellum curls and the irregular tags in the back. I almost laughed when Cousin Martha was telling me, but I remembered how a glow rose in my heart when I saw that he still had Father's little old Confederate comrade tailor cut his coats on the same pattern on which he had cut Father's, since the days of reconstruction.

Sometimes it startles me to find that with all my emanc.i.p.ation I am very like other women.

But I wonder what I would do if Sallie attired him in any of the late Henry's wearing apparel?

"What do you suppose is the why of such useless things as slugs?" I speculated to stop that thought off sharp as we crawled down the row together, he searching one side of each bush and I the other.

"Well, they brought on this nice companionable hunt for them, didn't they?" he asked, looking over into my eyes with a laugh.

"I wanted to see you early this morning anyway," he hastily resumed.

"Sallie and the Dominie sat talking to you so late last night that I didn't feel it was fair to come across after they left. But I wanted you so I could hardly get to sleep, and I was just half awake from a dream of you, when I came into the garden."

"My evenings don't belong to anybody, if you need them, Jamie, and you don't have to be told that," I answered crossly when I thought what a grand time I might have been having talking about real things with the Crag, instead of wrestling with Polk's romantics or Sallie's and Mr.

Haley's gush.

"Go on and tell me all about it, while I crawl after you like a worm myself," I snapped still further.

"Well, here goes! In the City Council meeting last night your Uncle Peter told us about the plans that they have made up at Bolivar for entertaining the C. & G. Commission, and the gloom of Polk and Lee, Ned and the rest of them could have easily been cut in blocks and used for cold storage purposes. They are just all down and out about it and no fight left. Of course, they all lose by the bond issue, but I can't see that it is bad enough to knock them all out like this. I got up in mighty wrath and--and I have got myself into one job. My eloquence landed me right into one large hole, and I am reaching out for a hand from you."

"Here it is," and I reached over and left a smear of loam across the back of his hand, while I brought away a brown circle around my wrist that the responsive grasp of his fingers left. "Do you want me single-handed to get the bluff line chosen?"

"Not quite, but almost," he answered with another laugh. "You would if you tried. I haven't a doubt. Do you remember the talk we had the other night about its seeming inhospitable of you not to invite the other gentlemen in the Commission over to see you when you invite Hall and his father? And you know you had partly planned some sort of entertainment for the whole bunch. You had the right idea at the right place, as you always do. As you said, we don't want Bolivar to see us with what looks like a grouch on us at their good fortune, and I think that as the Commission are all to be here as the guests of a private citizen, Glendale ought to entertain them publicly. There is no hope to get the line for us, but I would like those men at least to see what the beauty of that bluff road would be. The line across the river runs through the only ugly part of the valley, and while I know in the balance between dollars and scenery, scenery will go down and out, still it would be good for them to see it and at least get a vision of what might have been, to haunt them when they take their first trip through the swamps across the country there. Now, as you are to have them anyway, I want to have the whole town entertain the whole Commission and Bolivar with what is cla.s.sically called among us a barbecue-rally, the countryside to be invited. Bolivar is going to give them a banquet, to be as near like what the Bolivarians imagine they have in New York as possible, and Mrs.

Doctor Henderson is to give them a pink tea reception to which carefully chosen presentables, like you and me, are to be invited. You remember that circus day in July?--a rally will be like that or more so. What do you think?"

"Oh, I think you are a genius to think about it," I gasped, as I sat down on a very cruet Killarney branch and just as quickly sat up again, receiving comforting expressions of sympathy from across the bush, to which I paid no heed. "Those blase city men will go crazy about it. We can have the barbecue up on the bluff, where we have always had it for the political rallies, and a fish-fry and the country people in their wagons with children tumbling all over everything and--and you will make a great speech with all of us looking on and being proud of you, because n.o.body in New York or beyond can do as well. We can invite a lot of people up from the City and over from Bolivar and Hillsboro and Providence to hear you tell them all about Tennessee while things are cooking and--"

"This rally is to show off Glendale not--the Crag," he interrupted me with a quizzical laugh.

Now, how did he know I called him the Crag in my heart? I suppose I did it to his face and never knew. I seem to think right out loud when I am with him and feel out loud, too. I ignored his levity, that was out of place when he saw how my brain was beginning to work well and rapidly.

"You mean, don't you, Jamie, that you want to get Glendale past this place that is--humiliating--swimming with her head up?" I asked softly past a rose that drooped against my cheek.

Perfectly justifiable tears came to my lashes as I thought what a humiliation it all was to him and the rest of them, to be pa.s.sed by an opportunity like that and left to die in their gray moldiness off the main line of life--shelved.

"That is one of my prayers, to get past humiliations, swimming with my head up," I added softly, though I blushed from my toes to my top curl at the necessity that had called out the prayer the last time. It's awful on a woman to feel herself growing up stiff and st.u.r.dy by a man's side and then to get sight of a gourd-vine tangling itself up between them. I'm the dryad out of one of my own twin oaks down by the gate, and I want the other twin to be--

I wonder if his eyes really look to other women like deep gray pools that you can look deeper and deeper into and never seem to get to the bottom, no matter if the look does seem to last forever and you feel yourself blushing and wanting to take your eyes away, or if it is just I that get so drowned in them!

"You've a gallant stroke, Evelina," he said softly, as I at last gained possession of my own sight. "And here I am with a hand out to you for a.s.sistance in carrying out your own plan that seems to be just the thing to--"

"Say, Cousin James. Aunt Marfy says for you to come home to breakfast right away. Mis' Hargrove won't let n.o.body begin until you says the blessing, and Cousin Jasmine have got the headache from waiting for her coffee. What do you want to fool with Evelina this time of day for anyway?" And with the delivery of which message and reproof Henrietta stood on the edge of the path looking down upon us with great and scornful interest.

"You've got on your night shirt and haven't combed your hair or washed your face," she continued sternly. "There'll be h.e.l.l to pay with all the breakfast getting cold, and I'm empty down to my feet. Come on, quick!"

"Henrietta," I said, sternly, as I rose to my feet, "I've asked you once not to say ugly words like that."

"I'll go make the lightning toilet, Henrietta. Do run like a good girl and ask Mrs. Hargrove to let Cousin Jasmine have her cup of coffee right away. I'll be there before the rest are dead from hunger," and Cousin James skilfully interrupted the threatened feminine clash as he emptied my gla.s.s bowl into his tin can and stuck the sharp stick in the ground for future reference. Even Henrietta's pointed allusion to his toilet had not in the least ruffled his equanimity or brought a shade of consciousness to his face.

"Mis' Hargrove said that the Bible said not for any woman to say a blessing at any table or at any place that anybody can hear her, when Cousin Marfy wanted to be polite to the Lord by saying just a little one and go on before we was all too hungry," answered Henrietta, in her most scornfully tolerant voice. "If women eat out loud before everybody why can't they pray their thank-you out loud like any man?"

"Answer her, Evelina," laughed Cousin James, as he hurried down the walk away from us.

"Henrietta," I asked, in a calmly argumentative tone of voice as she and I walked up the path to the house, "didn't Mr. Haley talk to you just yesterday and tell you how wicked it is for you to use--use such strong words as you do?"

Mr. Haley had told me just a few days ago that he and Aunt Augusta had agreed to open their campaign of reform on Henrietta by a pastoral lecture from him, to be followed strongly by a neighborly one from her.

"No, he never did any such thing," answered Henrietta, promptly--and what Henrietta says is always the truth, because she isn't afraid of anybody or anything enough to tell a lie---"he just telled me over and over in a whole lot of words how I ought to love and be good to Sallie.

If I was to love Sallie that kind of way, he said, I would be so busy I couldn't do none of the things Sallie don't like to do herself and makes me do. 'Stid er saying, 'my precious mother, I love you and want to be good because you want me to,' about every hour, I had better wipe the twins' noses, and wash the dirt often them, and light Aunt Dilsie's phthisic pipe, and get things upstairs for Sallie and Miss Jasmine and everybody when they are downstairs. I'm too busy, I am, to be so religious. And I'm too hungry to talk any more about it." With which she departed.

I sank on the side steps and laughed until a busy old b.u.mble-bee came down from a late honeysuckle blossom and buzzed around to see what it was all about. Henrietta's statement of the case was a graphic and just one. Sallie has got a tendril around Henrietta which grows by the day.

Poor tot, she does have a hard and hardening time--and how can I lecture her for swearing?

With a train of thought started by Henrietta I sat at my solitary breakfast in a deeply contemplative mood. Life was going to press hard on Henrietta. And reared in the fossilized atmosphere of Widegables, which tried to draw all its six separate feminine breaths as one with a lone, supporting man, how was she to develop the biceps of strength of mind and soul, as well as body, to meet the conditions she was likely to have to meet? Still her coming tussle with Aunt Augusta would be a tonic at least. I was just breaking a last m.u.f.fin and beginning to smile when I saw a delegation coming down the street and turning into my front gate; I rose to meet it with distinction.

Aunt Augusta marched at the head and Nell and Caroline were on each side of her, while Sallie and Mamie Hall brought up the rear, walking more deliberately and each carrying a baby, comparing some sort of white tags of sewing. Cousin Martha was crossing the Road in their wake with her knitting bag and palm leaf fan.

One thing I am proud of having accomplished this summer is the establishing of friendly relations with Aunt Augusta. I made up my mind that she probably needed to have some of my affection ladled out to her more than anybody in Glendale, and I worked on all the volatile fear and resentment and dislike I had ever had for her all my life, and I have succeeded in liquefying it into a genuine liking for the martial old personality. If Aunt Augusta had been a man she would have probably led a regiment up San Juan Hill, died in the trenches, and covered herself and family with glory. She is the newest woman in the Harpeth Valley, and though sixty years old, she is lineally Sallie Carruthers's own granddaughter.

"Evelina," she began, as soon as she had martialed her forces into rocking-chairs, though she had Jasper bring her the stiffest and straightest-backed one in the house, "I have collected as many women as I had time to, and have come up here to tell you, and them, that the men in Glendale are so lacking in sense and judgment that the time has come for women to stand forth and a.s.sume the responsibility of them and Glendale in general. As the wife of the poor decrepit Mayor, I appoint myself chairman of the meeting pro tem and ask you to take the first minutes. If disgrace is threatening us we must at least face it in an orderly and parliamentary way. And I--"

"Oh, Mrs. Shelby, is it--is it smallpox?" and as Sallie spoke she hugged up the Puppy baby, who happened to be the twin in her arms, so that she bubbled and giggled, mistaking her embraces for those of frolicsome affection.

Mamie turned pale and held her baby tight and I could see that she was having light spasms of alarm, one for each one of the children and one for Ned.

"Smallpox, fiddlesticks--I said disgrace, Sallie Carruthers, and the worst kind of disgrace--munic.i.p.al disgrace." And as Aunt Augusta named the plague that was to come upon us, she looked as if she expected it to wilt us all into sear and dried leaves. And in point of fact, we all did rustle.

"Tell us about it," said Nell, with sparkling eyes and sitting up in her low rocker as straight as Aunt Augusta did in her uncompromising seat.

The rest of them just looked helpless and undecided as to whether to be relieved or not.