Chapter 16

“I'm sending a few bales of leaf down the river,” Haxall continued to Elim; “the sloop'll pass Bramant's Wharf; but the crew will be just anybody. Miss Rosemary couldn't go with only her nigger--”

Elim Meikeljohn spoke mechanically:

“I'll be responsible for her.” The war was over; he had been ordered from the column when his wound had broken afresh, and in a maze of fever he had been irresistibly impelled toward Linden Row. “I'll take her to Bramant's Wharf.”

Haxall regarded suspiciously the disordered blue uniform; then his gaze shifted to Elim's somber lined countenance.

“Miss Rosemary's rubies and gold--” he said finally. “But I believe you're honest, I believe you're a good man.”

VIII

James Haxall explained this to Rosemary. Elim, standing aside, could see that the girl neither assented nor raised objection. She seemed utterly listless; a fleet emotion at the knowledge of her father's death had, in that public place, been immediately repressed. The sloop, Elim learned, was ready to start at once. The afternoon was declining; to reach Bramant's Wharf would take them through the night and into the meridian of tomorrow. They had made no preparations for the trip, there was neither bedding nor food; but Elim and Haxall agreed that it was best for Rosemary Roselle to leave the city at the price of any slight momentary discomfort.

Elim looked about for a place where he might purchase food. A near-by eating house had been completely wrecked, its floor a debris of broken crockery. Beyond, a baker's shop had been deserted, its window shattered but the interior intact. The shelves, however, had been swept bare of loaves. Elim searched behind the counters--nothing remained. But in walking out his foot struck against a round object, wrapped in paper, which on investigation proved to be a fruit cake of satisfactory solidity and size. With this beneath his arm he returned to Rosemary Roselle, and they followed Haxall to the wharf where the sloop lay.

The tiller was in charge of an old man with peering pale-blue eyes and tremulous siccated hands. Yet he had an astonishingly potent voice, and issued orders, in tones like the grating of metal edges, to a loutish youth in a ragged shirt and bare legs. The cabin, partly covered, was filled with bagged bales; a small space had been left for the steersman, and forward the deck was littered with untidy ropes and swab, windlass bar and other odds.

Elim Meikeljohn moved forward to assist Rosemary on to the sloop, but she evaded his hand and jumped lightly down upon the deck, Indy, grumbling and certain of catastrophe, was safely got aboard, and Elim helped the youth to push the craft's bow out into the stream. The grimy mainsail rose slowly, the jib was set, and they deliberately gathered way, slipping silently between the timbered banks, emerging from the thin pungent influence of the smoking ruins.

Behind them the sun transfused the veiled city into a coppery blur that gradually sank into a tender-blue dusk. Indy had arranged a place with the most obtainable comfort for Rosemary Roselle; she sat with her back against the mast, gazing toward the bank, stealing backward, at the darkening trees moving in solemn procession.

After the convulsed and burning city, the uproar of guns and clash of conflict, the quiet progress of the sloop was incredibly peaceful and withdrawn. Elim felt as if they had been detached from the familiar material existence and had been set afloat in a stream of silken shadows. The wind was behind them, the boom had been let far but, the old steersman drowsed at his post, and the youth had fallen instantly asleep in a strange cramped attitude.

Elim was standing at the stern--he had conceived it his duty to stay as far away from Rosemary Roselle as her wish plainly indicated; but, in this irrelated phase of living, he gradually lost his sense of responsibility and restrained conduct. He wanted extravagantly to be near Rosemary, to be where he could see her clearly. Perhaps, but this was unlikely, she would speak to him. His desire gradually flooded him; it induced a species of careless heroism, and he made his way resolutely forward and sat on a heap of rope at a point where he could study her with moderate propriety and success. She glanced at him momentarily when he took his place--he saw that her under lip was capable of an extremely human and annoying expression--and returned to her veiled scrutiny of the sliding banks.

An unfamiliar emotion stirred at Elim's heart; and in his painstaking introspective manner he exposed it. He found a happiness that, at the same time, was a pain; he found an actual catch in his throat that was a nebulous desire; he found an utter loneliness together with the conviction that this earth was a place of glorious possibilities of affinity. Principally he was conscious of an urging of his entire being toward the slight figure in black, staring with wide bereft eyes into the gathering evening. On the other side of the mast, Indy was sleeping with her head upon her breast. The feeling in Elim steadily increased in poignancy--faint stars appearing above the indefinite foliage pierced him with their beauty, the ashen-blue sky vibrated in a singing chord, the river divided in whispering confidences on the bow of the sloop.

Elim Meikeljohn debated the wisdom of a remark; his courage grew immeasurably reckless.

“The wind and river are shoving us along together.” Pronounced, the sentence seemed appallingly compromising; he had meant that the wind and river together, not--

She made no reply; one hand, he saw, stirred slightly.

Since he had not been blasted into nothingness, he continued:

“I'm glad the war's over. Why,” he exclaimed in genuine surprise, “you can hear the birds again.” A sleepy twitter had floated out over the stream. Still no response. He should not, certainly, have mentioned the war. He wondered desperately what a fine and delicate being like Rosemary Roselle talked about? It would be wise to avoid serious and immediate considerations for commonplaces.

“Ellik McCosh,” he said, “a girl in our village who went to Boston, learned to dance, and when she came back she taught two or three. Her communion medal was removed from her,” he added with complete veracity. “Perhaps,” he went on conversationally, “you don't have communion medals in Richmond--it's a little lead piece you have when you are in good standing at the Lord's table. Mine was taken away for three months for whistling by the church door. A long while ago,” he ended in a different voice. He thought of the fruit cake, and breaking off a piece offered it to the silent girl. “It's like your own,” he told her, placing it on a piece of paper at her side; “it's from Richmond and wasn't even paid for with strange silver.”

At this last a sudden uneasiness possessed him, and he hurriedly searched his pockets. He had exactly fifty cents. Until the present he had totally overlooked the depleted state of his fortune. Elim had some arrears of pay, but now he seriously doubted whether they were collectible. Nothing else. He had emerged from the war brevetted major but as penniless as the morning of his enlistment. He doubted whether, in the hurry of departure, Rosemary Roselle had remembered to bring any money.

Still, she would be cared for, supplied with every necessity, at Bramant's Wharf. There he would leave her ... his breathing stopped, for, incredibly, he saw that her hand was suspended over the piece of cake. She took it up and ate it slowly, absently. This, he felt, had created a bond between them; but it was a conviction in which, apparently, she had no share. She might have thanked him but she didn't.

An underhanded and indefensible expedient occurred to him, and he sat for a perceptible number of minutes concentrating his memory upon a dim and special object. Finally he raised his head.

“Indy,” he quoted, “a large light mulatto, hasn't much sense but a great deal of sensibility. That,” he added of himself, “is evidently very well observed.” He saw that Rosemary turned her head with an impatient curiosity. “She is very unfortunate,” he continued uncertainly; “she lost a present of money and couldn't work till it was given back.”

“But how,” demanded Rosemary Roselle, “did you know that?” Curiosity had betrayed her.

Elim Meikeljohn concealed a grin with difficulty. It was evident that she profoundly regretted the lapse, yet she would not permit herself to retreat from her position. She maintained a high intolerant aspect of query.

“Have you forgotten,” he went on, “how the dread day rolled around?” He paused wickedly. “The slough of despond?” he added.

“What silly stuff!” Rosemary pronounced.

“It was,” he agreed, “mostly. But the paper about Indy was a superior production. B plus, I think.”

A slow comprehension dawned on her face, blurred by the night.

“So that's where they went,” she observed; “you marked them.” He would have sworn that a smile hovered for the fraction of a moment on her pale lips. She drew up her shoulders slightly and turned away.

His best, his only hope had flickered for a minute and died away. Her silence was like impregnable armor. A puff of wind filled the sails, there was a straining of cordage, an augmented bubbling at the sloop's bow, and then the stir subsided. He passed into a darkness of old distresses, forebodings, grim recollections from his boyhood, inherited bleak memories. Rosemary Roselle's upright figure gradually sank. He realized that she was asleep on her arm. Elim bent forward shamelessly and studied her worn countenance. There was a trace of tears on her cheek. She was as delicate, as helpless as a flower sleeping on its stalk.

An impulse to touch her hair was so compelling that he started back, shaken; a new discordant tumult rose within him, out of which emerged an aching hunger for Rosemary Roselle; he wanted her with a passion cold and numbing like ether. He wanted her without reason, and in the desire lost his deep caution, his rectitude of conscience. He was torn far beyond the emotional possibilities of weak men. The fact that, penniless and without a home, he had nothing to offer was lost in the beat and surge of his feelings. He went with the smashing completeness of a heavy body, broken loose in an elemental turmoil. He wanted her; her fragrant spirit, the essence that was herself, Rosemary Roselle. He couldn't take it; such consummations, he realized, were beyond will and act, they responded from planes forever above human desire--there was not even a rift of hope. The banks had been long lost in the night; the faint disembodied cry of an owl breathed across the invisible river.

IX

She woke with a little confused cry, and sat gazing distractedly into the dark, her hands pressed to her cheeks.

“Don't you remember,” Elim Meikeljohn spoke, “Haxall and the sloop; your relatives at Bramant's Wharf?”

She returned to a full consciousness of her surroundings.

“I was dreaming so differently,” she told him. It seemed to Elim that the antagonism had departed from her voice; he even had a feeling that she was glad of his presence. Indy, prostrate on the deck with her chin elevated to the stars, had not moved.

The darkness increased, broken only by the colored glimmer of the port and starboard lights and a wan blur about the old man bent over the tiller. Once he woke the youth and sent him forward with a sounding pole, once the sloop scraped heavily over a mud bank, but that was all; their imperceptible progress was smooth, unmarked.

Elim, recalling Joshua, wished that the sloop and night were anchored, stationary. Already he smelled the dawn in a newly stirring, cold air. The darkness thickened. Rosemary Roselle said:

“I'm dreadfully hungry.”

He immediately produced the fruit cake.

“It's really quite satisfactory,” she continued, eating; “It's like the rest of this--unreal.... What is your name?” she demanded unexpectedly.

“Elim Meikeljohn.”

“That's a very Northern sort of name.”

“It would be hard to come by one more so,” he agreed. “It's from the highlands of Scotland.”

“Then if you don't mind, I'll think of you as Scotch right now.”

He conveyed to her the fact that he didn't.

“Look!” she exclaimed. “There's the morning!”

A thin gray streak widened across the east. Almost immediately the night dissolved. They were sweeping down the middle of a river that surprised Elim with its width and majesty. The withdrawn banks bore clustered trees, undulating green reached inland, the shaded facades of houses sat back on lawns that dipped to the stream.

Rosemary Roselle's face was pale with fatigue; her eyes appeared preternaturally large; and this, for Elim, made her charm infinitely more appealing. She smoothed her dress, touched her hair with light fingers. The intimacy of it all thrilled him. A feeling of happy irresponsibility deepened. He lost sight of the probable unhappiness of tomorrow, the catastrophe that was yesterday; Elim was radiantly content with the present.

“You look Northern too,” she went on; “you are so much more solemn than the Virginia men--I mean your face is.”

“I suppose I've had a solemn sort of existence,” he agreed. “Life's an awful serious thing where I was born. The days are not long enough, life's too short, to get your work done. It's a stony pasture,” he admitted. He described the Meikeljohn farm land, sloping steeply to swift rocky streams, the bare existence of the sheep, the bitter winters. He touched briefly on Hester and his marriage.

“It's no wonder,” she pronounced, “that you have shadows in your eyes. You can't imagine,” she continued, “how wonderful everything was in Richmond, before--I simply can't talk about it now. I suppose we are ruined, but there isn't a man or woman who wouldn't do the same thing all over again. I'm almost glad that father isn't--isn't here; misery of any kind made him so wretched ... perfect memories.” She closed her eyes.

Her under lip, he saw, projected slightly, her chin was fine but stubborn. These details renewed his delight; they lent a warm humanity to her charm.

“Any one would know,” she said, regarding him, “that you are absolutely trustworthy. It's a nice quality now, but I don't think I would have noticed it even a month ago. You can see that I have grown frightfully old in the littlest while. Yes, you are comfortable to be with, and I suspect that counts for a great deal. It's quite sad, too, to grow old. Oh, look, we've changed! Where do you suppose he is going? This can't nearly be Bramant's.”

The mainsail had been hauled in, and the course of the sloop changed, quartering in toward the shore. The youth, moving forward, stopped to enlighten them. He jerked a thumb in the direction of the old man.

“He's got kin here at Jerico,” he explained; “and we're setting in to see them. We won't stop long.”

The mainsail came smoothly down, the jib fluttered, and the sloop slid in beside a sturdy old wharf, projecting from a deep fringe of willows. No sign of life or habitation was visible.

The youth made fast a hawser, the old man mounted painfully to the dock, and Indy stirred and rose.

“I must have just winked asleep,” she declared in consternation.

Rosemary Roselle lightly left the boat, and Elim followed. “If we explored,” he proposed, “perhaps we could get you a cup of coffee.” She elected, however, to stay by the river, and Elim went inward alone. Beyond the willows was an empty marshland. The old man had disappeared, with no trace of his objective kin. A road, deep in yellow mire, mounted a rise beyond and vanished a hundred yards distant. Elim, unwilling to get too far away from the sloop, had turned and moved toward the wharf, when he was halted by the sound of horses' hoofs.

He saw approaching him over the road a light open carriage with a fringed canopy and a pair of horses driven by a negro in a long white dust coat. In the body of the carriage a diminutive bonneted head was barely visible above an enormous circumference of hoops. Elim saw bobbing gray curls, peering anxious eyes, and a fluttering hand in a black silk-thread mit.

“Gossard,” a feminine voice cried shrilly to the driver, at the sight of Elim on the roadside, “here's a Yankee army; lick up those horses!”

The negro swung a vicious whip, the horses started sharply forward, but the carriage wheels, sinking in a deep slough, remained fixed; the harness creaked but held; the equipage remained stationary. The negro dismounted sulkily, and Elim crossed the road and put his shoulder to a wheel. Together with the driver, he lifted the carriage on to a firmer surface. The old lady was seated with tightly shut eyes.

“This here man ain't going to hurt you,” the driver exclaimed impatiently. “This exdus is all nonsense anyways,” he grumbled. “I got a mind to stop--I'm free.”

She directed upon him a beady black gaze.

“You get right into this carriage,” she commanded; “you'd be free to starve. You are a fool!” The man reluctantly obeyed her. “I thank you for your clemency,” she said to Elim. She fumbled among her flounces and hoops and produced an object carefully wrapped and tied. “Here,” she proclaimed; “I can still pay for a service. Gossard--” the carriage moved forward, was lost in the dip in the road. Elim opened the package in his hand and regarded, with something like consternation, a bottle of champagne.

Beyond the wharf the great yellow flood of the river gleamed in the sun; choirs of robins whistled in trees faintly green. Rosemary Roselle was seated with her feet hanging over the water.

“Champagne for breakfast,” she observed, shaking her head; “only the most habitual sports manage that.” He recounted the episode of the “Yankee army,” delighted by her less formal tone, then the old man returned as enigmatically as he had disappeared. The ropes were cast off, the sloop swung out into the current, and their smooth progress was resumed.

A few more hours and they would be at Bramant's Wharf. There, Elim knew, he would be expected to leave Rosemary. There would be a perfunctory gratitude from her relatives, perhaps a warmer appreciation from herself--a moment--a momentary pressure of her hand--and then--where? He would never again come in contact with so exquisite a girl; they were, he realized, customarily held in a circle where men like himself, outsiders, rarely penetrated; once more with her family and he would be forgotten. Anyhow, he had nothing.

But in spite of these heavy reflections his irresponsible happiness increased. In this segment of existence no qualifications from the shore were valid. Time, himself, at the tiller, seemed drifting, unconcerned. Rosemary Roselle regarded Elim with a franker interest. She took off a small slipper and emptied some sand from the shore; the simple act seemed to him burdened with gracious warmth. Now she was infinitely easier than any girl he had known before. Those about his home met the younger masculine world either with a blunt sarcasm or with an uneasy voiceless propriety. Rosemary, propped on an elbow, was as unconcerned as a boy. This made her infinitely more difficult of approach. Her slight beautiful body, not hidden by clothes--as decency demanded in the more primitive state--was delightfully marked, suggested. Here was beauty admitted, lauded, even studied, in place of the fierce masking and denouncement of his father and the fellow elders.

He remembered, from collegiate hours, the passion of the Greeks for sheer earthly strength and loveliness--Helen and Menelaus, Sappho on the green promontories of Lesbos. At the time of his reading he had maintained a wry brow ... now Elim Meikeljohn could comprehend the siege of Troy.

He said aloud, without thinking and instantly aghast at his words:

“You are like a bodied song.” He was horrified; then his newer spirit utterly possessed him, he didn't care; he nodded his long solemn head.

Rosemary Roselle turned toward him with a cool stare that was lost in irresistible ringing peals of laughter.

“Oh!” she gasped; “what a face for a compliment. It was just like pouring sirup out of a vinegar cruet.”

He became annoyed and cleared his throat in an elder-like manner, but her amusement strung out in silvery chuckles.

“It's the first I've said of the kind,” he admitted stiffly; “I've no doubt it came awkward.”

She grew more serious, studied him with thoughtful eyes. “Do you know,” she said slowly, “I believe you. Compliments in Virginia are like cherries, the trees are full of them; they're nice but worth--so much.” She measured an infinitesimal degree with a rosy nail against a finger. “But I can see that yours are different. They almost hurt you, don't they?”

He made no reply, struggling weakly against what, he perceived, was to follow.

“You're like a song that to hear would draw a man about the world,” said Elim Meikeljohn, pagan. “He would leave his sheep and byre, he'd drop his duty and desert his old, and follow. I'm lost,” he decided, in a last perishing flicker of early teaching; and then he smiled inexplicably at the wrath to come.

Rosemary Roselle grew more serious.

“But that's not a compliment at all,” she discovered; “it's more, and it makes me uncomfortable. Please stop!”

“About the world,” echoed Elim, “and everything else forgotten.”

“Please,” she repeated, holding up a prohibitory palm.

“Rose petals,” he said, regarding it. His madness increased. She withdrew her hand and gazed at him with a small frown. She was sitting upright, propped on her arms. Her mouth, with its slightly full under lip, was elevated, and an outrageous desire possessed him. His countenance slowly turned hotly red, and slowly a faint tide of color stained Rosemary Roselle's cheeks. She looked away; Elim looked away. He proceeded aft and learned that Bramant's Wharf lay only a few miles ahead.

The old man cursed the wind in his stringent tones. Elim hadn't noticed anything reprehensible in the wind. It appeared that for a considerable time there hadn't been any. A capful was stirring now, and humanity--ever discontented--silently cursed that.

“We're nearly there,” he said, returning to Rosemary Roselle.

He was unable to gather any intelligence from her expression.

She rose, and stood with a hand on Indy's shoulder, murmuring affectionately in the colored woman's ear. The sloop once more headed at a long angle for the shore. Bramant's Wharf grew visible, projecting solidly from a verdant bank. They floated silently up to the dock, and the youth held the sloop steady while Rosemary Roselle and Indy mounted from its deck. Elim followed, but suddenly he stopped, and his hand went into his pocket. A half dollar fell ringing into the boat. Elim indicated the youth; he was now penniless.

X

“The house,” Rosemary explained, “is almost a mile in. There is a carriage at the wharf when they expect you. And usually there is some one about.”

Elim, carrying the cake and bottle, followed over a grassy road between tangles of blackberry bushes. On either hand neglected fields held a sparse tangle of last year's weeds; beyond, trees closed in the perspective. The sun had passed the zenith, and the shadows of walnut trees fell across the road. Elim's face was grim, a dark tide rose about him, enveloping his heart, bothering his vision. He wanted to address something final to the slim girl in black before him, something now, before she was forever lost in the gabble of her relatives; but he could think of nothing appropriate, expressive of the tumult within him. His misery deepened with every step, grew into a bitterness of rebellion that almost forced an incoherent reckless speech. Rosemary Roselle didn't turn, she didn't linger, there were a great many things that she might say. The colored woman was positively hurrying forward. A great loneliness swept over him. He had not, he thought drearily, been made for joy.