The Tinder-Box. Maria Thompson Daviess

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СКАЧАТЬ Carruthers?" came in a deep raven croak of a voice that sounded as if it had harked partly from the tomb, as Aunt Augusta Shelby stood in the doorway, with reproof on her lips and sternness on her brow. "Peter and I will have Evelina move down immediately with us. James Hardin has as much in the way of a family as he can very well stand up under now."

      And as she spoke, Aunt Augusta glared at Sallie with such ferocity that even Sallie's sunshiny presence was slightly dimmed.

      "Are you ready, Evelina? Peter will send the surrey for your baggage," she continued, and for a moment I quailed, for Aunt Augusta's determination of mind is always formidable, but I summoned my woman's wit and man's courage, and answered quickly before she fairly snatched me from under my own roof-tree.

      "That would be lovely, Aunt Augusta, and how are you?" I answered and asked in the same breath, as I drew near enough to her to receive a business-like peck on my cheek. "I expect to have you and Uncle Peter to look after me a lot, but somehow I feel that Father would have liked—liked for me to live here and keep my home—his home—open. Some way will arrange itself. I haven't talked with Cousin James yet," I felt white feathers sprouting all over me, as I thus invoked the masculine dominance I had come to lay.

      "You'll have to settle that matter with your Uncle Peter, then, for, following his dictates of which I did not approve, I have done our duty by the orphan. Now, Evelina, let me say in my own person, that I thoroughly approve of your doing just as you plan." And as she uttered this heresy, she looked so straight and militant and altogether commanding, that both Cousin Martha and Sallie quailed. I felt elated, as if my soul were about to get sight of a kindred personality. Or rather a soul-relative of yours, Jane.

      "Oh, she would be so lonely, Mrs. Shelby, and she—" Sallie was venturing to say with trepidation, when Aunt Augusta cut her short without ceremony.

      "Lonely, nonsense! Such a busy woman as I now feel sure Evelina is going to be, will not have time to be lonely. I wish I could stay and talk with you further about your plans, but I must hurry back and straighten out Peter's mind on that question of the town water-supply that is to come up in the meeting of the City Council to-day. He let it be presented all wrong last time, and they got things so muddled that it was voted on incorrectly. I will have to write it out for him so he can explain it to them. I will need you in many ways to help me help Peter be Mayor of Glendale, Evelina. I am wearied after ten years of the strain of his office. I shall call on you for assistance often in the most important matters," with which promise, that sounded like a threat, she proceeded to march down the front path, almost stepping on Henrietta, who was coming up the same path, with almost the same emphasis. There was some sort of an explosion, and I hope the kind of words I heard hurled after the train were not used.

      "That old black crow is a-going to git in trouble with me some day, Marfy," Henrietta remarked, as she settled herself on the arm of Cousin Martha's chair, after bestowing a smudgy kiss on the little white curl that wrapped around one of the dear old lady's pink little ears. I had felt that way about Cousin Martha myself at the Bunch's age, and we exchanged a sympathetic smile on the subject.

      "Well, what are you going to do, Evelina?" asked Sallie, and she turned such a young, helpless, wondering face up to me from the center of her cluster of babies, that my heart almost failed me at the idea of pouring what seemed to me at that moment the poison of modernity into the calm waters of her and Cousin Martha's primitive placidity.

      "You'll have to live some place where there is a man," she continued, with worried conviction.

      My time had come, and the fight was on. Oh, Jane!

      "I don't believe I really feel that way about it," I began in the gentlest of manners, and slowly, so as to feel my way. "You see, Sallie dear, and dearest Cousin Martha, I have had to be out in the world so much—alone, that I am—used to it. I—I haven't had a man's protection for so long that I don't need it, as I would if I were like you two blessed sheltered women."

      "I know it has been hard, dear," said Cousin Martha gently looking her sympathy at my lorn state, over her glasses.

      "I don't see how you have stood it at all," said Sallie, about to dissolve in tears. "The love and protection and sympathy of a man are the only things in life worth anything to a woman. Since my loss I don't know what I would have done without Cousin James. You must come into his kind care, Evelina."

      "I must learn to endure loneliness," I answered sadly, about to begin to gulp from force of example, and the pressure of long hereditary influence.

      I'm glad that I did not dissolve, however, before what followed happened, for in the twinkling of two bare feet I was smothered in the embrace of Henrietta, who in her rush brought either the Pup or the Kit, I can't tell which yet, along to help her enfold me.

      "I'll come stay with you forever, and we don't need no men! Don't like 'em no-how!" she was exclaiming down my back, when a drawl from the doorway made us all turn in that direction.

      "Why, Henrietta, my own, can it be you who utter such cruel sentiments in my absence?" and Polk Hayes lounged into the room, with the same daring listlessness that he had used in trying to hold me in his arms out on the porch the night I had said good-by to him and Glendale, four years ago.

      Henrietta's chubby little body gave a wriggle of delight, and much sentiment beamed in her rugged, small face, as she answered him with enthusiasm, though not stopping to couch her reply in exactly complimentary terms.

      "You don't count, Pokie," she exclaimed, as she made a good-natured face at him.

      "That's what Evelina said four years ago—and she has proved it," he answered her, looking at me just exactly as if he had never left off doing it since that last dance.

      "How lovely to find you in the same exuberant spirits in which I left you, Polk, dear," I exclaimed, as I got up to go and shake hands with him, as he had sunk into the most comfortable chair in the room, without troubling to bestow that attention upon me.

      Some men's hearts beat with such a strong rhythm that every feminine heart which comes within hearing distance immediately catches step, and goes to waltzing. It has been four years since mine swung around against his, at that dance, but I'm glad Cousin Martha was there, and interrupted, us enough to make me drag my eyes from his, as he looked up and I looked down.

      "Please help us to persuade Evelina to come and live with James and me, Polk, dear," she said, glancing at him with the deepest confidence and affection in her eyes. There is no age-limit to Polk's victims, and Cousin Martha had always adored him.

      "All women do, Evelina, why not you—live with James?" he asked, and I thought I detected a mocking flicker in his big, hazel, dangerous eyes.

      "If I ever need protection it will be James—and Cousin Martha I will run to for it—but I never will," I answered him, very simply, with not a trace of the defiance I was fairly flinging at him in either my voice or manner.

      Paris and London and New York are nice safe places to live in, in comparison with Glendale, Tennessee, in some respects. I wonder why I hadn't been more scared than I was last night, as the train whirled me down into proximity to Polk Hayes. But then I had had four years of forgetting him stored up as a bulwark.

      "But what are you going to do, Evelina?" Sallie again began to question, with positive alarm in her voice, and I saw that it was time for me to produce some sort of a protector then and there—or capitulate.

      And I record the fact that I wanted to go home with Sallie and Cousin Martha and the babies and—and live under СКАЧАТЬ