‘No, no: here. I have waited so long for him.’
The other woman was kind but obdurate. And she led the girl into the house. Cecily reluctant, with reverted head cried: ‘Uncle Joe! his face! is he sick?’
The divine’s face was grey and slack as dirty snow. At the steps he stumbled slightly and Jones sprang forward, taking his arm. ‘Thanks, buddy,’ said the third man, in a private’s uniform, whose hand was beneath Mahon’s elbow. They mounted the steps and crossing the porch passed under the fanlight, into the dark hall.
‘Take your cap, Loot,’ murmured the enlisted man. The other removed it and handed it to him. They heard swift tapping feet crossing a room and the study door opened letting a flood of light fall upon them, and Cecily cried:
‘Donald! Donald! She says your face is hur — oooooh!’ she ended, screaming as she saw him.
The light passing through her fine hair gave her a halo and lent her frail dress a fainting nimbus about her crumpling body like a stricken poplar. Mrs Powers moving quickly caught her, but not before her head had struck the door jamb.
CHAPTER THREE
1
MRS SAUNDERS SAID: ‘You come away now, let your sister alone.’
Young Robert Saunders fretted but optimistic, joining again that old battle between parent and child, hopeful in the face of invariable past defeat:
‘But can’t I ask her a civil question? I just want to know what his scar l—’
‘Come now, come with mamma.’
‘But I just want to know what his sc—’
‘Robert.’
‘But mamma,’ he essayed again, despairing. His mother pushed him firmly doorward.
‘Run down to the garden and tell your father to come here. Run, now.’
He left the room in exasperation. His mamma would have been shocked could she have read his thoughts. It wasn’t her especially. They’re all alike, he guessed largely, as has many a man before him and as many will after him. He wasn’t going to hurt the old ‘fraid cat.
Cecily freed of her clothing lay crushed and pathetic between cool linen, surrounded by a mingled scent of cologne and ammonia, her fragile face coiffed in a towel. Her mother drew a chair to the side of the bed and examined her daughter’s pretty shallow face, the sweep of her lashes upon her white cheek, her arms paralleling the shape of her body beneath the covers, her delicate blue-veined wrists and her long slender hands relaxed and palm-upwards beside her. Then young Robert Saunders, without knowing it, had his revenge.
‘Darling, what did his face look like?’
Cecily shuddered, turning her head on the pillow. ‘Ooooh, don’t, don’t, mamma! I c-can’t bear to think of it.’
(But I just want to ask you a civil question.) ‘There there. We won’t talk about it until you feel better.’
‘Not ever, not ever. If I have to see him again I’ll — I’ll just die. I can’t bear it, I can’t bear it.’
She was crying again frankly like a child, not even concealing her face. Her mother rose and leaned over her. ‘There, there. Don’t cry any more. You’ll be ill.’ She gently brushed the girl’s hair from her temples, rearranging the towel. She bent down and kissed her daughter’s pale cheek. ‘Mamma’s sorry, baby. Suppose you try to sleep. Shall I bring you a tray at supper time?’
‘No, I couldn’t eat. Just let me lie here alone and I’ll feel better.’
The older woman lingered, still curious. (I just want to ask her a civil question.) The telephone rang, and with a last ineffectual pat at the pillow she withdrew.
Lifting the receiver, she remarked her husband closing the garden gate behind him.
‘Yes? . . . Mrs Saunders. . . . Oh, George? . . . Quite well, thank you. How are you . . . no, I am afraid not. . . . What? . . . yes, but she is not feeling well . . . later, perhaps. . . . Not tonight. Call her tomorrow . . . yes, yes, quite well, thank you. Good-bye.’
She passed through the cool darkened hall and on to the veranda letting her tightly corseted figure sink creaking into a rocking chair as her husband, carrying a sprig of mint and his hat, mounted the steps. Here was Cecily in the masculine and gone to flesh: the same slightly shallow good looks and somewhere an indicated laxness of moral fibre.
He had once been precise and dapper but now he was clad slovenly in careless uncreased grey and earthy shoes. His hair still curled youthfully upon his head and he had Cecily’s eyes. He was a Catholic, which was almost as sinful as being a republican; his fellow townsmen, while envying his social and financial position in the community, yet looked askance at him because he and his family made periodical trips to Atlanta to attend church.
‘Tobe!’ he bellowed, taking a chair near his wife.
‘Well, Robert,’ she began with zest, ‘Donald Mahon came home today.’
‘Government sent his body back, did they?’
‘No, he came back himself. He got off the train this afternoon.’
‘Eh? Why, but he’s dead.’
‘But he isn’t dead. Cecily was there and saw him. A strange fat young man brought her home in a cab — completely collapsed. She said something about a scar on him. She fainted, poor child. I made her go to bed at once. I never did find who that strange young man was,’ she ended fretfully.
Tobe in a white jacket appeared with a bowl of ice, sugar, water, and a decanter. Mr Saunders sat staring at his wife. ‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ he said at last. And again, ‘I’ll be damned.’
His wife rocked complacent over her news. After a while Mr Saunders, breaking his trance, stirred. He crushed his mint spring between his fingers and taking a cube of ice he rubbed the mint over it, then dropped both into a tall glass. Then he spooned sugar into the glass and dribbled whisky from the decanter slowly, and slowly stirring it he stared at his wife. ‘I’ll be damned,’ he said for the third time.
Tobe filled the glass from a water-bottle and withdrew.
‘So he come home. Well, well, I’m glad on the parson’s account. Pretty decent feller.’
‘You must have forgotten what it means.’
‘Eh?’
‘To us.’
‘To us?’
‘Cecily was engaged to him, you know.’
Mr Saunders sipped and, setting his glass on the floor beside him, he lit a cigar. ‘Well, we’ve given our consent, haven’t we? I ain’t going to back out now.’ A thought occurred to him. ‘Does Sis still want to?’
‘I don’t know. It was such a shock to her, poor child, his coming home and the scar and all. But do you think it is a good thing?’
‘I never did think it was a good thing. I never wanted it.’
‘Are you putting it off on me? Do you think I insisted on it?’
Mr Saunders from long experience said mildly: ‘She ain’t old enough to marry yet.’
‘Nonsense. How old was I when we married?’
He raised his glass again. ‘Seems to me you are the one insisting on it.’ Mrs Saunders rocking, stared at him: he was made aware of his stupidity. ‘Why do you think it ain’t a good thing, then?’
‘I declare, Robert. Sometimes . . .’ she sighed and then as one explains to a child in fond exasperation at its stupidity: ‘Well, an engagement in wartime and an engagement in peacetime are two different things. Really, I don’t see how he can expect to hold her to it.’
‘Now look here, Minnie. If he went to war expecting her to wait for him and come back expecting her to take him, there’s nothing else for them to do. And if she still wants to don’t you go persuading her out of it, you hear?’
‘Are you going to force your daughter into marriage? You just said yourself she is too young.’
‘Remember, I said if she still wants to. By the way, he ain’t lame or badly hurt, is he?’ he asked quickly.
‘I don’t know. Cecily cried when I tried to find out.’
‘Sis is a fool, sometimes. But don’t you go monkeying with them, now.’ He raised his glass and took a long draught, then he puffed his cigar furiously, righteously.
‘I declare, Robert, I don’t understand you sometimes. The idea of you driving your own daughter into marriage with a man who has nothing and who may be half dead, and who probably won’t work anyway. You know yourself how these ex-soldiers are.’
‘You are the one wants her to get married. I ain’t. Who do you want her to take, then?’
‘Well, there’s Dr Gary. He likes her, and Harrison Maurier from Atlanta. Cecily likes him, I think.’
Mr Saunders inelegantly snorted. ‘Who? That Maurier feller? I wouldn’t have that damn feller around here at all. Slick hair and cigarettes all over the place. You better pick out another one.’
‘I’m not picking out anybody. I just don’t want you to drive her into marrying that Mahon boy.’
‘I ain’t driving her, I tell you. You have already taught me better than to try to drive a woman to do anything. But I don’t intend to interfere if she does want to marry Mahon.’
She sat rocking and he finished his julep. The oaks on the lawn became still with dusk, and the branches of trees were as motionless as coral fathoms deep under seas.
A tree frog took up his monotonous trilling and the west was a vast green lake, still as eternity. Tobe appeared silently. ‘Supper served, Miss Minnie.’
The cigar arced redly into a canna bed, and they rose.
‘Where is Bob, Tobe?’
‘I don’t know’m. I seed him gwine to’ds de
