Stubble Part 2

Mary Louise's tight little mouth relaxed but she did not s.h.i.+ft her gaze. "You forget. It was not planned--by me." On rare occasions Mary Louise could slip from her matter-of-fact self into coquetry and back again before one realized. It was like the play of a lightning shuttle, so quick that one rarely caught the flash of the back stroke.

Joe had erred before. He was discreetly silent.

"I love it," Mary Louise went on, flinging back her head, "every stick, every stone of it. That half mile of turf down Blue Bottle Lane! I'd give ten years of my life to gallop the rest of it through country like that." And then, as though startled, she bit her lip and was still.

Joe smiled as he watched her narrowly. "A woman's a mess o'

contradictions. Whoa! You, too," he called sharply to his mare.

"Thought you wanted to eat gra.s.s a little. Whoa!" He reined up the tossing head with difficulty. And then to Mary Louise, "You're a sort of self-inflicted exile, aren't you?"

Mary Louise turned from her musing and gave him a look of most effective scorn. "Put your hat on," she said coldly. "You talk better through it." She was backing her mount out from the thicket whence he had thrust his nose and was wheeling him about to point him toward home. "I suppose you'd leave your job in Louisville and come back here to live yourself--just because you loved the scenery!"

"Not such a bad swap at that." But she was off and away. One rearing plunge and he was after her. Down across the gra.s.sy sweep of turf they fled, across a shallow ditch, past a stretch of willow thicket, around a jutting k.n.o.b of rock, into an arching avenue of trees. It was like dropping into a cool, shadowy bowl, the first shoots and sproutings of baby leaves from the branches casting a delicate tracery of shadow on the golden-green s.h.i.+mmer of the gra.s.s. Through an open gate they shot, he close behind, out upon a hard metallic roadway of macadam. Here Mary Louise reined in her horse and Joe instantly drew up alongside.

"It's lucky the street came along to help," he breathed. "Twenty yards more----"

Mary Louise reached up a hand to her hair in a futile effort to stem the havoc there. A moment of furious attempt to quiet the racing in her veins, and then, quite calmly, "It's all as it should be. We've got to look out for such things and take advantage of them. There are no ifs and buts about being caught. You didn't--that's all."

Joe opened his mouth to speak, stared at her a moment, and then turned away his eyes. They trotted along in silence, the shadows deepening and lengthening.

Directly: "When does your tea room open?"

"To-morrow. I'll be fine and stiff to start it off." Both question and answer had taken on a fine flavour of impersonality. Quiet again, with only the clatter of hoofs on the roadway. Directly they turned a wide sweeping curve and before them appeared a wooden gateway set at the end of an avenue of elms, at the other end of which showed, dim and forbidding, a house with columns and a green roof. Joe dismounted and, unlatching the gate, turned and stood grinning at her.

"So you're really goin' to try it out?" His voice had the quality of self-questioning.

It broke in on her musings and she seemed a bit impatient. "Of course I'm going to try it out. Only there isn't much 'try' to it. It's bound to make a go."

"Some little difference between a merely commercial proposition and a popular charity like the Red Cross. There's no percentage in just guzzlin' tea for fun unless you're doin' it to keep Americans from starvin' or doughboys from itchin'. You know what I believe?" He turned on her suddenly. "You're just sc.r.a.pin' up an excuse to--to----"

He stammered, hesitated in indecision. "Tea!"

"Don't be maudlin, Joe!" Her tone was very cold. "If you must know, we need the money and----Well, I guess I learned enough about _tea_ and _tea rooms_ in the past ten or eleven months to know whether one will pay or not--if it's properly run. Got awfully hardboiled while you were in the army, didn't you? Come, open the gate."

He was silent. Mary Louise usually could put him in his place. But thus put in his place, Joe could a.s.sume all the irritable stick-to-itiveness of a child. "How about Miss Susie?"

He watched the shot. For a moment it had no seeming effect, and then Mary Louise, turning loose all the pent-up outpourings to inner questionings, in a fury of righteous self-justification: "You needn't think I haven't thought about that. You needn't think I'm s.h.i.+rking my duty in any way. If you _knew_, you wouldn't ask such a question.

Before you left we were just on the ragged edge, and now--well, somebody's got to do something to bring the money in. The place don't make it." Her voice quieted down a little. "It hasn't been an easy question to solve. Come, Joe! Open the gate."

He watched her curiously. "But the servants? You've still got the servants, Matty, and Old Landy, and that half-baked gorilla, Omar. Why not----"

"Yes, why not?" She turned on him. "Why not shut down the place, too, as well as dismiss all the servants, and live in one of the old stone quarters? Why not? Why not let your heels run down if they want to?

It's much easier."

Quietly he pushed the gate open and stood waiting, holding it for her.

Something in his manner struck her, and she reached out her hand from her seat in the saddle and touched him lightly as her horse swerved past. "There, I'm sorry, Joe. But you just hounded me into it somehow.

I didn't mean it's that way with you. You know I didn't. You see what I mean? One ought to try. Ought to try everything first, not just give up because everything doesn't seem just right. I _have_ thought about Aunt Susie, and it breaks me all up. But it can't be helped."

She waited till he closed the gate and with a quick swing-up into the saddle drew alongside. Slowly they walked their horses up the avenue.

"I s'pose you're right," he said at length. "Only--only it has seemed to me that there's a lot of good time wasted doing useless things.

Would you rather run a tea room than do anything else in the world?"

She looked at him but they were pa.s.sing a bend in the road, and the sun, having dipped behind a jutting hill, no longer lighted up the dusky avenue, and Joe's face was in semi-shadow. "I'd rather hold on to what I've got than lose the tiniest portion of it," was all she said.

Suddenly he threw back his head and laughed. "If they could only see me now!"

"They? Who, they?"

His face sobered, but there was a momentary twinkle about the eyes.

"Who? Oh, at the office." And then, as dismissing the thought, "Uncle Buzz know you're openin' the tea room?"

"No."

"Then you ought to tell him. Give you a lot of invaluable suggestions as to how to mix up little 'what-for-you's.' Get 'em comin' and goin'.

Also, Uncle Buzz's got a mint bed that has parts."

"There's some patronage we will be forced to do without," Mary Louise replied primly. They were nearing the house and as they approached, someone in one of the front rooms struck a light and it could be seen moving, the shadows dancing on the walls.

"Don't overlook Uncle Buzz," said Joe with a chuckle. "Don't overlook any discriminatin' taste. You can't beat those horses of his."

"No," agreed Mary Louise, "nor----" and then checked herself.

The roadway turned sharply to the left and finished off in a circle, one arc of which touched the steps of an open porch. These steps were sagging and decayed, and the porch was swept by the gentle eddyings of leaves of past summers that had sought refuge there and had been undisturbed by the ruthless sweepings of winds or brooms. There was a haunting odour of pine and something else that was damp and old and weary and forgotten, and a shrivelled wisteria vine that clung with withered fingers to a trellis at the house corner began to whisper at their approach. A yellow bar of light shot for a moment across the porch floor to their feet, then disappeared. It was the lamp Mary Louise had seen farther down the driveway, and directly the side door opened and the mellow glow of it sent shadowy rings of light out toward them.

"Joe! Joe!" called out an anxious voice. "Don't make noise. Keep 'way from the back." There was a moment's silence and as Joe made no reply: "Come in this way, why don't you? Better way come in."

And then Mary Louise saw a hand shade the uppermost part of the lamp.

Then there was a pause, and then a figure came across the porch, a short figure casting grotesque shadows, a bit stiff, a bit unsteady, like the rings of light that went out in circling waves behind it. It was Uncle Buzz. He came and stood on the topmost rotting step. He bowed. With one hand holding the wavering lamp, the other bravely cupped before his chest, he bowed.

"Pardon," he said. "'N't know there were ladies."

"Miss McCallum, Uncle Buzz," interposed Joe.

"Honoured, 'm sure," Uncle Buzz responded with another bow, lower if anything than the first, so that the tip of his little goatee came within singeing distance of the lamp chimney, and he straightened back with a start, only to stare about him again, vaguely hurt. Collecting himself again, "Knew there was reason shouldn't go 'roun' th' back.

Le' Zeke take horses. Zeke! Zeke!" he called in a falsetto quaver.

"Come in this way, madam," he added with grave dignity, but curtailing the bow.

For a moment Mary Louise was fascinated. Old Mr. Bushrod Mosby she had known for years--a veritable rustic macaroni, a piece of tinselled flotsam floating on backwater. He had always called her M'Lou; later occasionally Miss M'Lou. Now the rhythm of some ancient rout was stirring old memories, and the obligations of host sat pleasantly heavy upon his befogged consciousness. He bowed again.

"No, thank you," she summoned her resources. "We'll be getting home.

But we'll just leave the horses here," she added a bit hurriedly, anxious to be off. Echoes were sounding along a length of hallway and she was not desirous of the prospect of seeing Mrs. Mosby--Aunt Loraine--who was apt to prove a most discordant fly in the ointment of harmonious hospitality. So she turned to go, but turned too late. The door opened again and another figure appeared, a brisk figure, at which the dead leaves of the porch bestirred themselves in vague, uneasy rustlings. Uncle Buzz stepped meekly aside and Mrs. Mosby--Aunt Loraine--joined the group, giving him a momentary withering glance.

She was an inexorable woman, an inch taller than Uncle Buzz, who stood five feet three, but she matched him whim for whim in her attire. Her hair looked black in the graying light; in reality it was splotched and streaked with a chestnut red, colour not so ill as misapplied. Her dress rustled as she swept forward and there were numberless faint clickings and clackings of chains and bangles about her. A high boned collar with white ruching helped her hold her head even more proudly straight, and the smile she shot Mary Louise was heavily fraught with a sickly sweet though rigorous propriety.

"You must come in, my dear," she lisped. "Such exhausting exercise!

You wouldn't think of going one step further without resting.

Here"--she reached out one hand toward Mary Louise, testing the meanwhile the security of the upper step with the tip of a s.h.i.+ny shoe--"the man will attend to the horses."

"Man! Yes," Uncle Buzz recollected with a start. "Zeke! Zeke!" he began to shout again. "Come here, suh!"

"Bushrod! Be still!" hissed Mrs. Mosby.