"Well, well, my faculties must be growing rusty." Anger softened while he spoke into perplexed wonder. "Why I thought you and George were friendly enough." After all, one could trust to the intuitions of youth. When he was young himself, he had disputed the truth of this precept; but as age fastened upon him, he had returned to the worship of adolescence and other myths of primitive culture. Yet he had believed that he was still young for his years. Young, except in his legs, and in the way important things sifted out of his mind and left an accumulation of rubbish. Curl-papers, and the look in his grandfather's face when he blooded him, and the stench of that runaway slave he had found in the forest at Stillwater. Queer how trifling impressions, the merest snatches of sensation, flickered to life again. Even now, he could not walk in a dim light through a negro quarter, he could not stumble upon the acrid smell of old sweat anywhere, without having some dark corner of his memory unfold like the radiating sticks of a fan, and that autumn scene spread out before him as vividly as if it were painted.
"Are you tired, Grandfather?" Jenny Blair asked, as they crossed the pavement on the way to the house.
"Not tired, my dear, only feeling my years."
"But you aren't really old. You don't act old—not very old."
The General laughed. "Thank you, my dear. You are almost but not quite, as tactful as your mother. Well, we'll go in and see if William is still alive. He's approaching the end, too, and he knows it."
As they stood in the hall, the girl inquired in her softest tone, "Do you need me any longer?"
"Why, no, I don't need anybody. I'll speak a few words to your mother, and then William and I will go out into the park."
"I was going to do a little shopping, but, of course, if you want me--"
"Not a bit. I know my own way about."
Flying upstairs, Jenny Blair remembered, with an exquisite suspense, a joyous abandonment, that she had only three days to wait. Safe within her own room, she collected her faculties, paused on a note of pure rapture, and asked herself uneasily, "Waiting for what?" For she did not mean anything, she insisted, gazing through the back window down on the garden, where little Erminia was building a house of pebbles and sticks in the deep roots of the sycamore. All she wanted was to live her own life and be happy, without hurting anybody or making the least bit of trouble. Nobody, not even her mother, could reproach her for that. Suddenly her heart cried out, and she spoke in a whisper. "I want to be happy! If I can't be happy, I'd rather be dead!" Even though she despised him, she knew that she couldn't be happy again so long as he was away. "I hate him so much that I cannot bear it if he does not come back. It is just like love, only it isn't love." Nothing could be more amazing than the way love and hate ran into each other, and melted and blended, and felt so exactly alike when they caught fire and flamed up.
The door into the hall was ajar, and Aunt Etta's voice floated plaintively from the back room on the opposite side of the house. "Is that you, Jenny Blair?"
"Yes, I'm going out." Crossing the hall, she entered the room and stood beside the couch on which Aunt Etta was lying. "Do you need anything?"
"Nothing but some thinner nightgowns. But I told Isabella. She is going to look for them."
"Has she been here this morning?"
"Yes, she's just gone out shopping. All the children are downstairs, and they make such a noise I can't hear myself think. They must drive Isabella out of her senses."
"Oh, she doesn't mind. She always liked noise."
"I know she does. It's a pity Joseph doesn't talk more."
"Well, I like Joseph. I always did."
"Do you know where little Erminia is? She is quiet for once."
"That's because she is playing by herself. She is building a house in the roots of the sycamore. Isn't your head better this morning, Aunt Etta?"
Aunt Etta sat up on the couch and smoothed the hair from her forehead. She held a novel with a yellow back in her long thin hands, and her eyes, the colour of frosted plums, were fixed on the feathery blossoms of a mimosa tree. When she came home every day from the doctor's office, her nostrils were packed with an ointment which was supposed to relieve her pain, but had never done so except for a few minutes. She was interested now, Jenny Blair knew, in the strange young physician who treated her every morning, and then forgot all about her until he saw her again. Poor Aunt Etta's infatuations began always with this kind of false dawn and ended in a sultry twilight of disappointment. It did not seem fair that she should have exactly the same mistake happen over and over again; but, then, did anything ever seem fair? Mamma said she had fallen into the habit of being disappointed in love, and that it was one of the very hardest habits to break.
"Perhaps," Jenny Blair said, trying to sound sympathetic, though, as she told herself impatiently, one could not go on feeling sympathetic for ever, "perhaps Doctor Pembroke will really cure you."
With her thumb keeping the place in her book, Aunt Etta lay back on the high pillows and withdrew her moody gaze from the mimosa tree. There were times, her look said, when she preferred ugliness, when ugliness hurt less than beauty, which was too much alive. For ugliness demanded nothing, had no exactions, left one, without effort or excitement, in the long peace of futility.
"He is simply wonderful," she replied. "I've never seen any one so skilful. He thinks he can cure me if I give him time."
"Oh, I hope so. Please give him all the time he needs. Has he said when he thinks you may go to the White?"
"He doesn't know. Not until the first of August anyway. But I wish you would take Father. Cora might go, too, perfectly well. I don't mind being left with the servants."
"Well, I'd just as soon stay with you. I don't care about going."
"But you ought to go. It is dull for you in town. Father is feeling the heat dreadfully. Won't you try to persuade him to go next week?"
"I thought old people didn't suffer from heat. He is always insisting that he finds the summers pleasant in Queenborough. He says he has even got used to that bad smell."
"He is just saying that on my account." Aunt Etta's tone was almost peevish. "He thinks he has to stay with me; but I don't need him. The house is so much quieter when I am here by myself, and Isabella's children aren't making all that noise in the garden. Besides, Doctor Pembroke will look after me. He says he'll come any hour, day or night, that I need him."
"I know," Jenny Blair assented. "But it isn't any use trying. Families are like that. They are always there, whether you want them or not. Aunt Isabella is going Saturday, and all the rest of us will go the first of August, if the doctor is through with you."
"I wish," Aunt Etta complained querulously, "that I might sometimes do as I please."
"You can't. Nobody can. I don't believe even Grandfather ever did as he pleased. I suppose coloured people do," the girl added desperately, "but I'm not sure. It seems to me everybody is bent on crossing everybody else. Now, I'm going. Are you sure you don't want anything? There are some old men talking to Grandfather downstairs, and I want to slip out before they see me. Old men are so silly. Not just older men, but really old men, the sort that come to see Grandfather and are always wanting to kiss you."
"No, nothing at all." Aunt Etta's face sagged like an empty pouch, and she opened her French novel with a gesture of spiritless defiance.
"I wonder," Jenny Blair thought, turning away, "why her face stays so puffy when she is thin everywhere else? When she gets old, she will look exactly like a pudding. Oh, well! I do hope when I'm old I shan't have a face like a pudding. Not that she's really old. Oh, well--"