Part 15 (1/2)
The far-carrying voice rose shrilly and scornfully. ”Well, let him!
Dat's his privilege. Jes' let him keep on objectin' long ez he's a mind to. 'Tain't gwine 'fluence me none. . . . I don't keer none ef he do heah me. Mebbe it mout do him some good ef he do heah me. Hit'll do him good, too, ef he heed me, I lay to dat. Mebbe he ain't been raised de way we is down yere. Ef so, dat's his misfortune.” The voice changed. ”Whut would yore pore daid mother say ef she knowed I wuz neglectin' my plain duty to you two lone chillen? Think I gwine run ary chancet of havin'
you two gals talked about by all de low-down pore w'ite trash scandalisers in dis town? Well, I ain't, an' dat's flat. No, sir-ree, honey! You mout jes' ez well run 'long back out dere on dat front po'ch, 'ca'se I'm tellin' you I ain't gwine stir nary inch f'um whar I is twell yore sister git back yere.”
Beaten and discomfited, with one hand up to a burning cheek, Emmy Lou returned to her young man. On his face was a queer smile.
”Did--did you hear what she said?” she asked, bending over him.
”Not being deaf I couldn't well help hearing. I imagine the people next door heard it, too, and are no doubt now enjoying the joke of it.”
”Oh, I know she's impossible,” admitted Emmy Lou, repeating her lament of a little while before, but taking care even in her mortification to keep her voice discreetly down. ”There's no use trying to do anything with her. We've tried and tried and tried, but she just will have her way. She doesn't seem to understand that we've grown up--Mildred and I.
She still wants to boss us just as she did when we were children. And she grows more crotchety and more exacting every day.”
”And I--poor benighted Yank that I am--came down here filled with a great and burning sympathy for the down-trodden African.” Harvey said this as though speaking to himself.
The girl forgot her annoyance in her instinct to come to the defence of her black mentor.
”Oh, but she has been like a mother to us! After mamma died I don't know what we should have done--two girls left alone in this old house--if it hadn't been for Aunt Sharley. She petted us, she protected us, she nursed us when we were sick. Why, Harvey, she couldn't have been more loyal or more devoted or more self-sacrificing than she has been through all these years while we were growing up. I know she loves us with every drop of blood in her veins. I know she'd work her fingers to the bone for us--that she'd die in her tracks fighting for us. We try to remember the debt of grat.i.tude we owe her now that she's getting old and fussy and unreasonable and all crippled with rheumatism.”
She paused, and then, womanlike, she added a qualifying clause: ”But I must admit she's terribly aggravating at times. It's almost unbearable to have her playing the noisy old tyrant day in and day out. I get awfully out of patience with her.”
Over on Franklin Street the town clock struck.
”Six o'clock,” said Harvey. Reluctantly he stirred and sat up in the hammock and reached for his hat.
”I could be induced, you know, if sufficiently pressed, to stay on for supper,” he hinted. For one Northern born, young Mr. Harvey Winslow was fast learning the hospitable customs of the town of his recent adoption.
”I'd love to have you stay,” stated Emmy Lou, ”but--but”--she glanced over her shoulder toward the open door--”but I'm afraid of Auntie. She might say she wasn't prepared to entertain a visitor--'not fixed fur company' is the way she would put it. You see, she regards you as a person of great importance. That's why she's putting on so many airs now. If it was one of the home boys that I've known always that was here with me she wouldn't mind it a bit. But with you it's different, and she's on her dignity--riding her high horse. You aren't very much disappointed, are you? Besides, you're coming to supper to-morrow night.
She'll fuss over you then, I know, and be on tiptoe to see that everything is just exactly right. I think Auntie likes you.”
”Curious way she has of showing it then,” said Harvey. ”I guess I still have a good deal to learn about the quaint and interesting tribal customs of this country. Even so, my education is progressing by leaps and bounds--I can see that.”
After further remarks delivered in a confidential undertone, the purport of which is none of our business, young Mr. Winslow took his departure from the Dabney homestead. Simultaneously the vigilant warder abandoned her post in the front hall and returned to her special domain at the back of the house. Left alone, the girl sat on the porch with her troubled face cupped in her hands and a furrow of perplexity spoiling her smooth white brow. Presently the gate latch clicked and her sister, a year and a half her junior, came up the walk. With half an eye anyone would have known them for sisters. They looked alike, which is another way of saying both of them were pretty and slim and quick in their movements.
”h.e.l.lo, sis,” said Mildred by way of greeting. She dropped into a chair, smoothing down the front of her white middy blouse and fanning her flushed face with the broad ends of her sailor tie. Then observing her sister's despondent att.i.tude: ”What are you in the dumps about? Has that new beau of yours turned out a disappointment? Or what?”
In a pa.s.sionate little burst Emmy Lou's simmering indignation boiled up and overflowed.
”Oh, it's Aunt Sharley again! Honestly, Mil, she was absolutely unbearable this evening. It was bad enough to have her go stalking across the lawn with that old snuff stick of hers stuck in the corner of her mouth, and singing that terrible song of hers at the very top of her lungs and wearing that scandalous old straw hat stuck up on her topknot--that was bad enough, goodness knows! I don't know what sort of people Har--Mr. Winslow thinks we must be! But that was only the beginning.”
Followed a recapitulation of the greater grievance against the absent offender. Before Emmy Lou was done baring the burden of her complaint Mildred's lips had tightened in angered sympathy.
”It must have been just perfectly awfully horrible, Em,” she said with a characteristic prodigality of adjectives when the other had finished her recital. ”You just ought to give Aunt Sharley a piece of your mind about the way she behaves. And the worst of it is she gets worse all the time.
Don't you think you're the only one she picks on. Why, don't you remember, Em, how just here only the other day she jumped on me because I went on the moonlight excursion aboard the _Sophie K. Foster_ with Sidney Baumann?--told me right to my face I ought to be spanked and put to bed for daring to run round with 'codfish aristocracy'--the very words she used. What right has she, I want to know, to be criticising Sidney Baumann's people? I'm sure he's as nice a boy as there is in this whole town; seems to me he deserves all the more credit for working his way up among the old families the way he has. I don't care if his father was a n.o.body in this town when he first came here.
”Quality folks--quality folks! She's always preaching about our being quality folks and about it being wrong for us to demean ourselves by going with anybody who isn't quality folks until I'm sick and tired of the words. She has quality folks on the brain! Does she think we are still babies? You're nearly twenty-three and I'm past twenty-one. We have our own lives to live. Why should we be so----”
She broke off at the sound of a limping footstep in the hall.
”Supper's ready,” announced Aunt Sharley briefly. ”You chillen come right in an' eat it whilst it's hot.”
Strangely quiet, the two sisters followed the old negress back to the dining room. Aunt Sharley, who had prepared the meal, now waited upon them. She was glumly silent herself, but occasionally she broke, or rather she punctuated, the silence with little sniffs of displeasure.