She had not been exactly shy of him, not in the least unfriendly; but he had not readily understood her attitude towards him. A sort of gracious reserve, as he was inclined to term it, a sweet, unstudied, smiling dignity, so marked her manner that he all the time was half wondering if his presence in the house was not to her a constant annoyance, or, at least, a constant tax upon her patience.
At table she took small part in the conversations; but she seemed attentive and appreciative, often betraying a sharp desire for knowledge of the ways of the world. When he would touch upon the whirling currents of fashion at the great Northern and Eastern centres, she would lean forward with parted lips and beaming eyes, lending her ear to every word he said.
If he addressed any part of his talk to her, she was always ready with some short, well-turned reply, which seemed to need no rejoinder; and yet he could not feel that she had avoided conversation. One thing he was sure of: she disclosed new beauties of form and face, new graces of manner, every day. He found himself so interested in her that the garrulity and unbounded courtesy and solicitude of her father were considered as ills to be borne for her sake.
He was touched by a furtive attention she bestowed upon the arrangement of things in his room. Whenever he walked out to be gone for an hour or two, he found upon his return certain evidences of her delicate taste; a saucer of cut flowers upon his table, the current copy of a magazine, a plate of choice oranges, some little Floridian curiosity, a sea-bean, or a bit of native carving. Finally a little spirit-lamp, a stick of sealing-wax, and the family monogram stamp appeared; as if, in accordance with an old Southern custom, his letters were henceforth expected to bear testimony to his thorough acceptance into the household.
Willard's ready imagination caught strong hold on the romance of his surroundings; and it was with a certain trepidation wholly new to him, a sense of tender hesitancy, that he found himself addressing even the commonest small-talk to Lucie. His consciousness acknowledged her vestal purity, and went a world further to clothe her in a saintly innocence, so childlike, so utterly her own, that he would have given all his wealth to be able to express it on canvas. He compared her with the young ladies he had known, rummaging in his memory for the most beautiful among them, but there was none at all like her.
When he asked her to go with him to see the grave of Murat, it was more to have her by him in the walk, than on account of any great desire to visit the noted little cemetery where the son of the King of Italy lies buried beside his Virginia bride.
He met her on the broad steps of the front veranda. She was coming in from a stroll in the grove, loaded with jasmine-flowers, sprays of bridal-wreath, and great clusters of the lovely Cherokee-rose. She carried her hat by its ribbons, and her face was slightly flushed with exercise. As he stood beside her on the step, he discovered that she was not so tall as she had appeared. Her perfect symmetry, and the grace and dignity of her bearing, had added to the effect of her stature, which was really only medium. Her forehead was broad and low; her eyes not black, but very dark gray; her complexion almost olive, delicate as a babe's; and her mouth sweet and red, almost thin-lipped, with just a perceptible droop at the corners.
"I was just coming to look for you," he said, taking a rose, and drawing its stem through his button-hole. "I wanted to ask a great favor of you."
"I will be very glad to render you any service," she said, using will in place of shall, as even educated Southerners almost always do.
"I fear you are too tired now," he said: "you seem to have been walking. But when you can, I hope you will go with me to the cemetery, and show me the grave of Prince Murat."
After a moment's pause he continued, "It is not a particularly cheering thing, this rambling among tombs; but"—
"Oh, the place is small!" she hastened to say; "and it is scarcely well enough kept to have the usual solemnity of appearance. I will see if I can go with you when I have put away my flowers."
She passed on into the hall, leaving in the air about him the rich perfume of the jasmine, and, something sweeter still, the influence of her gentle loveliness.
Willard looked away between the trees to the westward, and saw the sunlight flaming on the hills that notched the horizon. The mocking-birds were singing, as they sing nowhere else in the world. The wind, setting steadily from the south, poured over him gently, with a smack of saltness in its current. In his heart some new sentiment blew open like a flower. His nature took in a new element.
When Lucie returned she had her hat on, with the strings tied under her pretty chin. She stopped suddenly, and, loosing a large bunch of keys from her belt, said with a little laugh, —
"Oh, I've brought away the keys! Aunt will want to look to supper before I return. I must take them back to her."
She again turned into the house. Willard had often heard his father tell how every thing in the South has its lock, and how the housekeepers go about loaded with keys. To him this wearing at her belt the evidence of her domestic authority and power was a new and very charming thing, distinguishing the Southern woman from the Northern one. In the case of Lucie it was picturesque; it was strikingly becoming; it was, he thought, perfectly bewitching.
"I have fetched this for you," she said, when she came out again, holding in her hand a slender orange wand. "Gentlemen seem to find great comfort in canes. This was a tree I planted and cared for with my own hands, and last autumn it died."
Willard took the yellow-green stick, and whisking it in the air said, —
"It could not bear your tender kindness: it died of great good fortune."
"I forgot to cover it," she said gravely; "and there came a little frost."
"Ah!" he said, "you have ruined my pretty speech. Which way do we go?"
"Out through the south gate yonder. My dog is showing us the way."
A beautiful brown pointer was ambling along the half-obliterated walk, pausing now and then to look back at them. Col. Vance had given her this dog, three or four years ago, when he was regarding her as a little girl.
It was a very satisfying thing, this walking under the broad-armed trees, with the dark winsome girl so close beside him; and for a time Willard did not speak. He was in no lover-like, sentimental mood; but silence was golden for its own sake.
It chanced that just before they reached the gate he glanced to one side, and saw a little flower shining among some knotted live-oak roots. "A sand-lily," he ejaculated, turning to pluck it.
"It is like those I gathered by the way on our drive from Thomasville," he added, holding out the lily for her to take. This was the first time their journey had been mentioned. "You said you liked them."
"I do think them beautiful," she said, not seeming to notice that he was offering the flower, and turning to wave her hand at her dog in a half-caressing, half-idle way.
Willard let the lily fall when he opened the gate. They passed on, and left it there to wither. But the pointer, which, with more than dog-politeness, had allowed them to precede him through the gate, snatched up the fallen bloom, and ran round his mistress, looking saucily up at her with it shining in his mouth.
The man and the girl looked at each other, and smiled; but nothing was said.
Their way now led them in a narrow street hedged on one side with thick-growing trees. The sun was far down the west slope of the sky, its rays much softened by a sort of Indian-summer mist which often hangs on the Floridian horizon.
Lucie was aware of something in Willard's manners, in his personal bearing, in the modulations of his voice, very different from any thing she had ever seen in any one else. She was not sure what it was, but it was fascinating. She felt that he was in some sort a medium of revelation, through whose agency she was to look, if only for a momentary glance, over into some romantic field of experience, a field lying ever so far away from the happy, dull little eddy of Tallahassee life. As she walked by his side she noted with a girl's quick eyes how perfectly his clothes fitted him from head to foot, and how easily and gracefully he did every thing, even to holding the little cane in the hollows of his elbows behind him. He seemed to have so little consciousness of himself, and such a light way of regarding her, which way, however, was as manly and sincere as it was light. She found herself voluntarily susceptible and receptive when he addressed her: he had had such wide experience for so young a man; he could so ably explain the mysteries of New York and London and Parisian society. The horizon of his worldly knowledge seemed to be the periphery of highest civilization. She was young, she was childlike in her imagination. She was healthily hungry for just such information, just such kaleidoscopic glimpses of the great outer world, as he voluntarily, and without an effort, gave her. Natures like hers, young, intense, receptive, keep what they get. They are not deletitious, and they are long-lived; and he who first impresses them impresses them for the longest time.
As they passed along, beautiful views were opened to them of deep vales with hills beyond. The yellowish building known as the Academy— a high school, so called, for boys — crowned an eminence; near by were some shapeless mounds, probably former military defences. They turned from one street to another, passing under enormous live-oak trees, and in front of low-roofed, reposeful-looking houses, and came at last to a sort of stile giving into a small enclosure, where, amid a wild tangle of vines, bushes, and flowers, gleamed the ugly snow of the tombstones.
Murat and his wife sleep side by side under simple slabs. At the head of each grave, rises a white-marble shaft. A stuccoed brick wall had once protected the spot; but now a large part of a side had fallen down, and a big pine stump, where a tree had recently been cut, stood in the ragged breach. It was a pitifully neglected and unkempt spot. Some bridal-wreath bushes, heavy with bloom, hung over the little wooden gate now falling off its hinges."It is nothing to see," said Lucie, seating herself upon a projection of the broken wall, and taking a charmingly listless attitude.
Willard looked at her instead of the graves. Until now he had not noticed how picturesquely she was dressed, — a simple gown of white stuff, with a crimson ruffle at the neck and wrists; a palmetto hat, beautifully braided, lined with the same deep color of the ruffles.
His eyes filled with a strange light, half smile, half wonder. A few months ago he had been at the Grosvenor private view; and now he was rapidly thinking what a triumph this girl with her litheness and languor, her strength, her immobility, her intensity, her simplicity, her complexity, her picturesqueness, might win among the artistic aesthetes of London.
He sat down at her feet. She hung above him like a study in white and scarlet against a shimmering background of pale green foliage. In that foliage a mocking-bird was whistling and trilling. Lucie smiled down at the young man, and said, —
"Are you through with sight-seeing? shall we return?"
"The scene has overpowered me; let me rest," he answered, his half-closed eyes fixed steadily upon her. "There is untold luxury in lying here."
She got up, and stepped in between the pyramidal gravestones, shaking a cloud of white petals from a little tree as she passed. Willard thought Oscar Wilde had never been caught in such a shower of fragrant flakes.
"Will you read the inscriptions before we go?" called Lucie.
Slowly pulling himself back from his artistic dreaming, he arose and joined her.
They were half-kneeling side by side, deciphering the difficult carvings, when, with a sharp clatter of iron shoes, a horse passed swiftly in the street. They looked up. Col. Vance lifted his hat, and bent low in his saddle. Lucie blushed.
"It is quite time to return, if you please," she said, rising almost hurriedly.
The mellow sunlight was going in a level flood from the hill-top at Bellevue, the Murat homestead, to the hill-top where they stood by the Murat tombs. The intervening valley was dark with shadows, like the valley all must cross.
Going back by the way they had come, Willard noticed that he must often quicken his step to keep pace with Miss La Rue. She was inclined to monosyllables in replying to his remarks. A great reserve had suddenly mastered her. She had removed herself from him just as far as she had been on the day they journeyed together from Thomasville.
As often happens, the wings of the escaping bird disclosed the most beautiful colors. A tremor began in Willard's breast.
They reached the steps of the old gray house. She started to trip up ahead of him. She was eager to be alone for a while. Her impulse startled him. He put out his hand, and, gently holding her back, looked into her face. In a second, a sense of the unpardonable rudeness of his involuntary act rushed upon him. He saw a flare of surprise overspread her face.
"Pardon," he said, by a supreme effort mastering himself. "I thought there was a spider on your hat-ribbon. I hate insects. They almost frighten me."
She smiled, very deftly loosed the knot of ribbon at her chin, and slipped off her hat. His agitation amused her.
"You were mistaken," she said, and went into the house.
When Willard reached his room, he took a pencil, and made a hasty sketch from memory of Lucie as she had appeared to him while lying for those brief moments at her feet. There was a rustling, velvet-like sound at his window: it was the wind dragging the magnolia spray across the upper panes.
