A Republic Without a President and Other Stories Part 20

With a sigh of longing and of self-reproach he turned his face toward the house again. Before him, with one hand on the gate, stood a woman.

She was looking at him. Questions were in her eyes. Ellesworth stared at her in amazement, and only superlatives crowded into his mind; for she was the most glorious woman he had ever seen. She was tall, almost to his own height, and with a proportional figure. Dressed without ornament, without ruffle, or frill or white at the throat, in plain black, her face revealed itself on the green background as if it were upon a canvas by Bastien Lepage. It was a face in which there seemed to be many nationalities blended: Italian eyes, Spanish coloring of the cheeks, black Indian hair, rich Mexican lips,--these coordinated into the most startling type he had ever seen, through a quick, sensitive, high-spirited intelligence, the inheritance of Southern blood. He could not a.n.a.lyze this beauty; he could only gasp at it.

Francis B. Ellesworth was, as has been intimated, not a captivating man _per se_; but as he sat upon his horse, with the flush of excitement upon his face, and a certain refinement in his carriage that looked as much out of place in Cherokee Garden as the face of the girl before him, he was not an unattractive fellow. Now, as the two were not over fifteen feet apart, and were both looking at each other, one of them had to speak. She waited for him to do so. He simply couldn't. So she spoke first.

"Have you lost your way, sir?"

The tremor of the dimple in her chin and the marked effort which she made to steady her voice, showed that she was much agitated. Had she not been expecting the man who was to take away her home for a paltry sum of unpaid money? She had looked upon the Yankee who held her fathers notes as little more than a thief. And now that her father had died, she seriously considered him in the light of a murderer. She thought of his agent as his "minion," whom it was clearly due her dignity to resist.

The case had been the talk of the scraggly village, and the judge of the district, who was reputed to know the intricacies of all the law that ever was tabulated, a.s.serted vehemently in her presence that to eject her from her home was an outrage that could not and would not be permitted as long as the able-bodied men of Cherokee could carry a gun.

This testimony of Southern chivalry the girl fully believed.

And now the invader had come at last. She clutched the gate and collected herself to meet him.

"No, miss, that is--is this William Benson's?--I mean----" Ellesworth halted, remembering that his debtor was no more, and not wis.h.i.+ng to remind her of the fact. "_Was_ this his place?"

The magnificent girl looked at him over that fence and measured him.

Yes, the worst had come at last, and an uncalled-for insult with it. How the stranger gloated over the fact that the place was _not_ her father's! She drew herself to her full height; her black eyes blazed; her cheeks became carmine. She could hardly control her voice from indignation.

"You mistake, sir. This _is_ his place, and I think, sir, it will remain so."

She looked at him fiercely and waited to let that sentiment fructify in the young man's soul.

"Indeed, I--I hope so," ventured Ellesworth.

Disregarding this as a feeble attempt at apology, she asked,--

"What is your name, sir? Do you come from _him_? Or are you _he_?"

The contempt which she cast into the personal p.r.o.nouns had a marked effect upon Ellesworth. The mere fact that a woman, for whom at first sight he felt a greater admiration than he had ever bestowed elsewhere, should be so antagonistic to him at the start, made his heart contract within him. Yet he managed to pull himself together and say, with admirable feint,--

"Excuse me. You must labor under a mistake. I am a total stranger here.

I am--eh--merely looking about. I am staying at Suns.h.i.+ne, for my health."

He noted with satisfaction a look of relief stealing over her face, and a slight touch of spontaneous sympathy, too, at his last statement.

Ellesworth immediately followed the lead up.

"Yes," he said, "I am an invalid, and was ordered South for my lungs. I have heard so much about Southern hospitality, would it be asking too much for me to rest here awhile? I am a trifle tired after this long ride."

He heaved a sigh and tried to look utterly f.a.gged out as he noticed how admirably that tack succeeded.

"Oh, I beg your pardon, sir," said the girl impulsively. "I thought you were a lawyer or a sheriff, or perhaps a man from--_Boston_." She could hardly p.r.o.nounce the name of the cultured city. It stuck in her throat.

"I?" he asked in a tone of reproach. "Not at all," he answered, laughing. "I told you that I have come from Suns.h.i.+ne," he added, blandly.

The girl, taking his negative as a reply to all her doubts, now opened the gate hospitably.

"Forgive my rudeness, sir, and come in and sit awhile," she said, as prettily as a woman could. "I'll ask Aunt McCorkle to get you--something. Would you take a gla.s.s of milk?"

She blushed as she remembered her empty wine cellar. With a well-feigned, languid air, which he could hardly maintain, so boisterously the blood surged through his veins, Ellesworth walked up to the piazza and sat down.

He looked about him in a bewildered way. The pa.s.sionless white camellia blooming by his side seemed singularly out of place. He thought of the intoxicating Jacqueminot roses he used to order at Halvin's for that chilly Boston girl he tried to love and couldn't. The red camellia had more of this splendid Southern creature's color, but that too, with its waxen, expressionless petals, had no business there either. It exasperated him. It looked at him coolly and sarcastically as if that which happens to a man but once in his life had not come to him.

Aunt McCorkle appeared with the gla.s.s of milk. She was a vague Southern gentlewoman, gentle and faded and appealing. She was just what he expected the daughter of William Benson to be. He thought of the middle-aged and elderly Boston dames with their strong profiles and keen eyes and decisive opinions of reforms and literature and charity. Any one of them might have put out her arms and have taken Mrs. McCorkle up in her lap and trotted her to sleep. Yet Ellesworth liked the Southern lady. Already he felt a queer movement of the heart toward Georgiella Benson's "relations."

"Is it lung trouble?" inquired Aunt McCorkle sympathetically. The girl came out of the house at this moment and sat down on the veranda under the white camellia. She glanced at her guest with interest.

"The doctors think I shall come out all right if I am careful of my self," replied Ellesworth, evasively.

"It is hard to be sick," said Georgiella sincerely. Illness and death had touched her so lately and so cruelly that she could not help feeling sorry for the sick young man.

"I have just ridden over from Suns.h.i.+ne, where I am living now,"

explained Ellesworth again, although his conscience gave him a twinge.

He hurried on: "You see, I'm looking for a quiet place to board in." He made a diplomatic pause. "The Suns.h.i.+ne Hotel is too noisy, what with billiards and bowling and late dances; so I rode over here to look about, and an old lady with a pipe told me you lived here."

"That was Aunt Betsey," said the girl decisively. "But we never took boarders," with a stately drawing up of her head, "why should she send you here?"

"My dear," protested Mrs. McCorkle mildly, "the Randolphs of Suns.h.i.+ne took boarders last winter; and I suppose we could get Aunt Betsey to cook." She rose to carry away Ellesworth's gla.s.s, and beckoned to the girl to follow her. Evidently the two poor ladies whispered together in the hall, consulting upon the awful problem suddenly presented to their empty pockets and plethoric pride. They came out on the veranda again, and Mrs. McCorkle asked him point blank what his name was. Without perceptible hesitation he replied:

"Bigelow, madam. Frank Bigelow." The unimagined value of a middle name suddenly presented itself to the young man's mind, and his conscience slipped behind the camellias and made no protest. A very irreligious baby, black in the face from howling, had been indeed baptized Francis Bigelow in King's Chapel, twenty-nine years ago--and had since bought a mortgage on the Benson property.

"Couldn't you take me? It's a case of charity," he pleaded, turning to the girl beside him. "It's so noisy at the hotel, I can't sleep."

This last shot went straight to the mark. Sympathy and need are powerful partners, and they worked together for Ellesworth's case in the hearts of the two poor, lonely women.

It is only in the South that one can find women--ladies, and who dress like ladies, and who hardly have ten dollars in cash the year round. The mystery of the maintenance of their existence is not solved outside the walls of their own homes. Proud, refined and shy, they divulge nothing.

Who is a boarder that he should think to comprehend the pathetic ingenuity of their eventless lives?

"Are you connected with the Bigelows of Charleston?" asked Mrs.

McCorkle, softly.

"I think we must be another branch," replied Ellesworth, boldly.

"I will--I would pay you," added Ellesworth, blus.h.i.+ng, "just what they would charge me at the Suns.h.i.+ne Hotel, if that would be satisfactory."

"How much is that, Mr. Bigelow?" inquired Mrs. McCorkle, reddening too.

"Twenty-five dollars a week."

"That is too much. We should think that enough for a month," said the girl, turning her wonderful face upon her visitor.

"I could not think of giving less," he insisted. Still he did not look at her.

"Perhaps," admitted Mrs. McCorkle with a sigh, "we might take you, sir, seeing that you are one of the Bigelow family--on trial."

"I will come," returned Ellesworth, quickly, looking straight at Georgiella, "I will come next Monday--on trial.

"You won't look upon me as a sheriff, will you?" he added, as he mounted at the gate, to ride back to his hotel.

The girl shook her head, as he looked down at her quizzically.