Part 14

Mary Louise received his advances with curious reservations, as though there were positions and premises she defended against him.

It was when the girl's visit was three weeks old that the fine-looking, broad-shouldered, young colored man in his well-fitting business suit--a goodly figure in the eyes of the mother watching from her own room across the hall--left the parlor where he and Mary Louise had been sitting all evening, with so doleful a countenance that the older woman had a quickly suppressed impulse to go to him and speak. She did open the subject to the girl next morning, approaching it obliquely. In her own day a very progressive person, she felt that her daughter had far outstripped her, and she offered advice but timidly to this tall, perfectly dressed young woman who seemed so competent in all the affairs of life, and who knew so much more than she did upon many subjects. But after a little profitless skirmishing she came out with:

"Looks like you must have said something hard to Grant last night--he never came in to say good-by to me. Ain't you going to have him, Ma'Lou? Don't you care anything about him?"

"I care a great deal about Grant," Mary Louise told her, in a voice of pain. "I could love him dearly--if I'd let myself. But, mother, I just can't settle down to live here in Watauga. There's nobody and nothing here for me."

The woman looked at her child, and her mind misgave her sorely that she had done wrong to send the girl away among an alien people, where she would learn to despise her own.

"You're still grievin' about Ellen Kendrick," she said finally. "If I were you I wouldn't let that go the way it has. Don't--" she hesitated, with eyes full of helpless solicitude upon her daughter's face--"honey, don't wait for any sign from Ellen, because you won't get it. You just take those postal cards that you got for her on your Canadian trip, and some morning you step over to the side door and ask for her, if you want to see her. I know she thinks a great deal of you. She's stopped me on the street more than once and asked all about you and what you were doing. I don't see why you shouldn't go to the side door and go in and have a nice little visit with her."

Mary Louise considered this suggestion at some length. She had the wider outlook which some travel gives, and, in Oberlin, she had been where the race question was relatively negligible. Her mother's way of putting it jarred on her; yet the hungry craving she felt at this time for a touch of companionship with a girl of her own age, her longing for the beloved Ellen of her childhood, overbore all shrinking. That afternoon she brought the cards down in her hand, and, full of an unwelcome timidity, made her way to the side door of the Kendrick house and rapped. Mrs. Kendrick answered and received her with a certain thin cordiality that suggested reservations. The fact was that Ellen was having a little party that evening, and the colored girl would perhaps be in the way. Among the guests bidden were two young men, upon either one of whom Mrs. Kendrick looked with a hopeful maternal eye, and nothing could be less desirable than for her daughter to seem to "even herself with negroes" in the eyes of these possible suitors.

"Shall I stop and see Ellen a minute, or may I just leave these with you, Mrs. Kendrick?" asked the tall, brown-skinned young woman finally.

"Oh, come in--come right in here to the dining room and sit down," said the mistress of the house, remembering with a twinge how much she owed to this girl. "Ellen will be crazy about these. She's got a postal card album, and she hasn't anything in it from Canada. Ellen! Come downstairs, honey; Ma'Lou Jackson has brought you something pretty."

But even as she called up the stairway, and heard the quick response from above, it crossed Mrs. Kendrick's mind that her daughter would not be willing to put these postal cards in her album, for she would be ashamed to tell from whom they came.

She was annoyed when Ellen came flying down the stairs, her thin, blond hair all about her shoulders, and caught both the newcomer's hands--the mother feared for a moment that she would kiss her old playmate.

"And then if somebody saw it through the window, and went and told young Emery Ford or Mr. Hyatt, I don't know what on earth I should do," reflected the careworn matron.

"Mamma, do come and look at these lovely postals," Ellen cried effusively a little later, as her mother, plainly ill at ease, passed through the room. "I'm going to pull out those that Cousin Rob sent me from Texas, and put these in right after the California ones. See here, mamma; isn't this one beautiful? Ma'Lou was there a week. She's put a little cross over the hotel where they stayed."

Mrs. Kendrick looked at the strong, well-developed figure of her guest, and a certain dull anger arose in her mind. Why did health and money both go to this inferior creature, when they were lacking in higher quarters? Perhaps this prompted her query; "That hotel? It's a big one, isn't it? Did they--could you----?"

She broke off, and Mary Louise supplied, innocently enough: "Oh, they didn't let us travel during school term. This was a vacation trip."

She had been long away from the South; in the protective conditions of Oberlin she had been measurably free from the wounding of race prejudice; and now she failed to realize that Mrs. Kendrick's curiosity was as to whether she had been permitted to go to a hotel with white people.

Old Dicey's place in the kitchen had long been supplied by a negress of the newer generation--"the worst gossip and tattler in town," if you might take her mistress's word for it. Mrs. Kendrick now made her way thither, ostensibly to superintend the preparation of the evening's refreshments, but in reality to try to fix up an explanation of why Ezra Jackson's daughter sat visiting in the dining room with the young lady of the house. "Because if Penny goes out and tells her friends, every darky in town'll be retailing the story to the folks that hire them, and it'll soon be all over the place."

She came back into the dining room to find Ellen glowing with enthusiasm. Yes, her mind was still that of a sick child; she had dropped back into her old-time attitude toward Mary Louise.

"Mamma, Ma'Lou says that they used to give lunches at the college, and fix the floral centerpiece so it would all come apart, and each guest could draw a bunch of it with a ribbon. Oh, I don't understand very well, but she can tell you--it's just beautiful, and we could make it out of the chrysanthemums in the side yard, she says."

Mrs. Kendrick looked uneasy. But there was no window in the dining room which commanded the street except the side light of the bay, and at it Ellen herself sat. Nobody passing would be apt to see Mary Louise over in the room.

"I reckon we can't go into those things," she objected, a little irritably. "I suppose Ma'Lou has seen a heap of fine doings up North that we couldn't possibly attempt."

"But she's promised to make me a lot of cute little candies--like potatoes, and put them in paper baskets--to go at each plate," put in Ellen, jealously.

The brown-faced girl nodded and laughed, with a quick flash of white teeth. It was plain she was taking the attitude of an older person talking to a child about a juvenile party to which there could be no question of invitation, and Mrs. Kendrick's fears rather subsided. She was safe, if only Ellen would show some sense and judgment.

"Well, I must go on home, now, if I'm to make those candies and have them ready by this evening," said Ezra Jackson's daughter, getting to her feet. "They take a good while to harden properly."

Ellen went with her to the side door, clinging to her arm and insisting on some last remark. Mrs. Kendrick, in an agony of apprehension, hovered in the background.

"Oh, well," said the daughter of the house finally, "I won't bother you any more about it now, Ma'Lou. It's hard for you to explain just how to fix it, but you can show me when you come over this evening. I'll have the chrysanthemums ready. You come a little early--won't you, please?"

Mary Louise, in the doorway, glanced from mother to daughter in some confusion. Would this do? Her own mother had cautioned her to be certain to go to the side door.

"I--I don't know," she hesitated doubtfully. "I'll bring the candies over, if you like, and I might be able to show you a little about the table then." And again she looked from the face of the girl who had been her childhood's most intimate friend and associate to that of the woman who had accepted so much at her childish hands.