Well, all news was good news to-day, Maggie declared. She was happy because Miss Etta was mending; she was happy because they had had a cheerful word from Miss Eva (who was doing as well as could be expected, though naturally she was homesick and missed Maggie's hand in the dough); she was happy, too, because Jenny Blair would have a good time and catch all the beaux at the White.
"I don't care for beaux, Maggie." There was no use, of course, in saying that. Maggie would not believe her; and whether she believed her or not made little difference. "I've run over to say good-bye," she added, as she entered the hall. "Is Mr. Birdsong at home?" The question was out. She had spoken his name to Maggie and the empty house, and nothing had happened.
"Who? Marse George? Yas, ma'am, he's heah. He's settin' right out dar on de back po'ch." Berry, who belonged to the new school, would never have called Mr. Birdsong "Marse George," and this, Jenny Blair suspected, was one of the reasons he preferred Maggie—this and the way she spoiled him and never minded slaving over her stove on hot summer evenings, if only he rewarded her with an appetite and praise of her dishes.
So he was really there! Already, even before she knew, her senses had warned her that he was near. "You needn't wait, Maggie," she said boldly. "I'll see you before I go, but I want to run upstairs and look at Ariel a minute. Is he all right to-day?"
"Yas'm, but I'se moughty feared he's gwinter mope w'en dar ain' nobody but me left in de house."
She went back to the kitchen, untying her apron as she passed out of sight, and Jenny Blair, spurred by a sense of panic, darted through the library and out on the little square porch beyond the lattice-door.
"I've come to tell you good-bye," she called, before she descended the single step from the door to the porch. "We're going to the White on Saturday morning."
At her step, at her voice, he spun round. "If it isn't Jenny Blair!" His kind and charming face beamed down on her. She looked into his smiling grey eyes and thought, in an ecstasy shot with terror, "This is what I was waiting for. This is what I expected." As he took her hand in his, she saw his eyes and his smile, and beyond his eyes and his smile, she saw the blue of the sky, the wind whitening the leaves of the mulberry tree, and the sunshine that struck downward like a blade of light on a border of red lilies.
"So you're going away, Jenny Blair?" He had drawn her to a bench, and stood gazing down on her, sunburned, eager, glowing with pleasure; yet, in spite of his pleasure, a little reserved, distant, inscrutable. Never had he seemed so gay or so splendid. All the lustre was there, but something was wanting. Oh, well, what did life, what did anything matter? She was blissfully happy. She knew that he remembered. The sky fell; the red lilies soared; and a radiant spray of sky, sun, flowers, saturated her mind. "Here, now, at this instant," she felt without thinking, "I know what ecstasy is." Not to-morrow, not next year when she was grown up, but while she stood here, while she looked into his eyes, while he held her hand, she was living her moment.
"That's nice, my dear child," he said quietly, standing very straight in the last sunbeams. "That's very nice for you. I hope you'll have all the fun in the world."
She looked up at him reproachfully. "Are you glad?"
"Of course I'm glad. I want you to have all the happiness there is anywhere."
His voice was firm and gentle, but it killed ecstasy. With his first words, ecstasy paled, flickered, died, and was lost. In a flash so brief that it was gone before she had seized it, the light was over, was done with, was nothing more than a fog of unhappiness. "I'm only seventeen," she thought, sitting on the bench, with her bag and fan in her lap, "and I may live for ever. I may live to be seventy." She might even live to be ninety. One of her grandmothers (she couldn't have been in love) had lived to be a hundred and one.
The shock was more than she could bear. "I can't--" she began suddenly, "I can't--" Sitting on the bench, with her hands clasped over her beaded bag and her fan, she began to cry quietly, without sound or movement, as a child cries when it has been punished. Her eyes were filled with reproach; her mouth fell open; her features were so immobile that the tears might have flowed over a painted mask.
"God!" he exclaimed, more in anger than invocation. For a breathless second he stared at her as if he expected her to burst like a bubble and vanish. Then he asked sharply, "Why are you doing that? What is the matter?"
A whimper broke from her, but she cried all the faster. Without lifting her hand, without making the slightest effort to check her tears or wipe the drops from her lashes, without even twitching her lips, she sat motionless on the bench and looked up at him.
"What do you want, Jenny Blair?" he demanded again more angrily.
"I don't want anything." The words rushed out in a low whimper of distress. "But I can't bear it. I can't bear it if you treat me this way."
"If I do what?" A sound that resembled profanity but may have been an endearment burst from him. "You're an idiot," he groaned softly. "You're a precious little idiot."
"I don't care." She was sobbing now, and her features were convulsed. "I can't bear it."
"Can't bear what?"
"Can't bear—everything."
He caught his breath sharply. "But don't you see how childish, how perfectly absurd all this is? Why, I'm old enough to be your father; I've known you ever since you were born; I am devoted to your family, especially to your grandfather. You're in love with love, you little goose."
"I don't care. I don't care how old you are." She looked up at him with her wide, shallow, devouring gaze. Beneath the stains of tears, her face was as soft as a baby's, and her small, vivid mouth, which was round and open and insatiable, was as innocent of meaning as if the hole had been drawn with two hasty strokes of red chalk.
"It isn't as if I wanted anything," she said presently. "I'm not asking for anything in the world." Her lips closed, relaxed, and then dropped back into that look of incredible vacancy.
"Oh, yes, you are." His tone was aggrieved and roughened by a sense of injury. "That's the way with all you young things. You never think of a human being but yourselves. I don't want to hurt anybody. I never wanted to hurt anybody. The trouble with you, my dear little girl," he added, unconsciously repeating her mother, "is that you don't know the first thing about life."
Her eyelids flickered and a single tear on her lashes trembled and fell. The taste was as sharp and salt as the sea. She had forgotten that tears were so briny. "I do," she replied, with an obstinate whimper. "I know more than you think."
"Well, you don't act like it. If you could see what a baby you look, you'd stop whimpering. Can't you stop it?" he exclaimed, with sudden exasperation. Still watching her, but drawing no nearer, he added resentfully, "And there are some fools who think men make all the trouble in life!"
Without lowering her eyelids, which might have been plastered back by her wet lashes, she fumbled in her bag and brought out a wisp of a handkerchief. While she dabbed aimlessly at her eyes and cheeks, she rose from the bench and made a single faltering step toward the door. As he did not try to detain her, she stopped of her own accord and turned round. "I am not," she retorted in vehement despair, "I am not trying to make trouble."
"Oh, yes, you are." Big as he was, his tone was one of injured helplessness. "You're not only trying, you're making it as fast as you can." The heat—or was it anger?--had whipped a dark wine-colour into his face; there were moist splotches round his mouth and under his eyes; and it seemed to her that his features had swollen, as if his lower lip had been stung by a hornet. But there was no hornet about, there was not a mosquito, there was not even a gnat; and she decided, while she looked up at him, that it must be either the hot spell or that curious resentment which made him appear suddenly so much less attractive. Yet it astonished her to discover that his overheated face made not the faintest difference in her desire to be close to him. "You're tempting me," he added hoarsely, "and you know it."