ONE day, late in November, when they were sitting in the hall at Portobello, Duncan walked in. For months, every afternoon when she had heard the train blow for the crossing this side of Natchez, his mother had waited for him on the front gallery, but he had not come. Today she had re-entered the house and taken up her sewing as she listened to Miss Mary and the children talking. “Well,” Miss Mary was saying to them, about something or other, “I’ve told you repeatedly—” when Duncan appeared.
There were voices raised, exclamations, sobs, the children clinging to Duncan’s legs, and then Middleton running up the stair, sliding down the banisters, and up again and again down, shrieking and whistling, with Miss Mary scowling at him and then at Duncan and giving orders, while some of the negroes, who by some means had got wind of Duncan’s arrival, began to crowd at the back door and on the gallery. It was such a commotion that a good deal of time had passed and still nobody knew what they wanted to know, which was where Duncan had been all this while. Four or five times he answered the question, “In jail,” he said, “I’ve been in jail.” But nobody seemed to think that this was an answer. “You rascal,” his mother said, taking up his hand to examine it and tapping the knuckle bones for the thinness on them, “Eh, Miss Mary?”
“Aye. ’Tain’t as if the war hadn’t been over and done with for months.”
Duncan himself was wondering where Valette was. Where was Valette?
“Look here, Duncan Bedford—,” Miss Mary called to him, as he turned from the hug that Mammy Tildy gave him to shake hands with some of the field hands who had just come in, “when are you going to answer? Your mother wants to know where you’ve been all these months; it’s plain as day you’ve been somewheres. Great Cæsar, now we’ll never know,” she went on, turning her good eye toward the stair landing. “Look at that.”
Valette, in a white dress sprigged with yellow, came running down and threw her arms about Duncan’s neck, covering his face with kisses. Duncan felt the blood rush faster into his heart. “Tell me—” he tried to say, but as he thought of what words would be most like those he had often fancied himself saying to her, Valette slipped from him and, dropping on her knees beside Middleton, pressed the little body to her bosom.
“Well, what carryin’ on do you call that?” Miss Mary said. “Duncan, I don’t know where yet you’ve been, and meanwhile all of us have been thinkin’ that——”
“Well, you needn’t expect Duncan now to tell you anything he’s not going to tell you,” his mother said.
“Lette, why did you take off the black dress,” said Middleton, stroking her hair and leaning back to look at her.
“Did I?”
“Oh, shucks! I saw you runnin’ in from the garden, and you had your black dress.”
Mrs. Bedford saw Valette glance up timidly at Duncan and then away as if at some one that had been betrayed; but at the same moment she saw that Duncan meant to show no sign that he had understood. The proud boyish scowl left his face, into which came an expression of such tender sweetness and joy that his mother felt blessed by it. But the words that she would have said were, “He’s handsomer than ever. You can see how beautiful he is.”
They had all of them observed Duncan well. A trifle thinner and more sunburnt, but looking more of a man; the same brown hair and gray eyes, with the boyish scowl, the mouth fierce and delicate. His clothes were faded and worn, he had pinned up the rent in his coat with two thorns, and his boots were old. Mammy Tildy several times went near to him, running her eye over him and shaking her head, but so far as it seemed to concern Duncan he might as well have been in either ermine or rags.
That night in the parlor, Middleton, sitting in Mammy Tildy’s lap, listening to Duncan tell of all the things that had happened with him, cried and squealed so every time they tried to take him up to bed, that they had to let him stay; he was nodding at last when Mrs. Bedford had everybody to bed, and Valette and Duncan were left alone. Duncan went to fetch the dolman and put it about her shoulders, and they walked together a long time up and down one of the walks by the statues, under the trees. His feet were calloused from the stretches of walking that he had done on the journey home, and he had got the habit of long strides; but presently was able to change that and keep step with Valette, whose arm through his and hand in his seemed to his mind that night a sufficient explanation of the world. When she looked up at him in the darkness he could feel her eyes, and what she left unsaid told everything.
“This old dolman,” Valette said, “we used to think it was very fine. It came from Paris. But pinning up two children in it on a mule to go to school hasn’t helped its style or shine. It’s a good thing it’s dark.”
“I reckon it is dark,” said Duncan. “I hadn’t thought about it much.”
“Are you tired as blazes comin’ from so far?”
“I hadn’t thought about that much, either.”
“You’ve just given up thinkin’ about everything?”
“Do you sing still?”
“Yes. You knew Clifton was blown up?”
“Mamma wrote me.”
“Because Doctor Martin, when he gave a dinner for the officers, forgot to invite the chief engineer, Captain Hays.”
“Why’d he give the dinner in the first place?”
“I never thought of that. Smell the sweet-olive? My Dumplin’ thinks the fragrance is too heavy. But I don’t. There’s nothing too sweet as far as I’m concerned.”
“So it’s sweet-olive I smell so sweet?”
“What else could it be, Duncan?”
“If I had died in Virginia I’d have smelled this night.”
But this was after Duncan had told them about himself and his mother had read the letter from their Cousin Marshall, in reply to hers begging for news of Duncan, as to whether he was dead or what?”