The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story Part 68

"That was my mother's," she said. Then she added this astounding thing: "My mother was a great dancer. All Lisbon went wild about her. When she danced the whole town went crazy. The bullfighters and the princes would come--"

"But how--?" I started, and stopped, for Deolda had dropped beside the chest and pressed her face in the shawl, and I remembered that her mother was dead only a few days ago, and I couldn't ask her how the great dancer came to be in Dennisport in the cabin under the dunes. I tiptoed out, my heart thrilled with romance for the gypsy dancer's daughter.

When my aunt was ready for bed there was no Deolda. Later came the sound of footsteps and my aunt's voice in the hall outside my room.

"That you, Deolda?"

"Yes'm."

"Where were you all evening?"

"Oh, just out under the lilacs."

"For pity's sake! Out under the lilacs! What were you doing out there?"

Deolda's voice came clear and tranquil. "Making love with Johnny Deutra."

I held my breath. What can you do when a girl tells the truth unabashed.

"I've known Johnny Deutra ever since he came from the Islands, Deolda,"

my aunt said, sternly. "He'll mean it when he falls in love."

"I know it," said Deolda, with a little breathless catch in her voice.

"He's only a kid. He's barely twenty," my aunt went on, inexorably.

"He's got to help his mother. He's not got enough to marry; any girl who married him would have to live with the old folks. Look where you're going, Deolda."

There was silence, and I heard their footsteps going to their rooms.

The next day Deolda went to walk, and back she came, old Conboy driving her in his motor. Old Conboy was rich; he had one of the first motors on the Cape, when cars were still a wonder. After that Deolda went off in Conboy's motor as soon as her dishes were done and after supper there would be handsome Johnny Deutra. We were profoundly shocked. You may be sure village tongues were already busy after a few days of these goings on.

"Deolda," my aunt said, sternly, "what are you going out with that old Conboy for?"

"I'm going to marry him," Deolda answered.

"You're _what_?"

"Going to marry him," Deolda repeated in her cool, truthful way that always took my breath.

"Has he asked you?" my aunt inquired, sarcastically.

"No, but he will," said Deolda. She looked out under her long, slanting eyes that looked as if they had little red flames dancing in the depths of them.

"But you love Johnny," my aunt went on.

She nodded three times with the gesture of a little girl.

"Do you know what you're headed for, Deolda?" said my aunt. "Do you know what you're doing when you talk about marrying old Conboy and loving that handsome, no-account kid, Johnny?"

We were all three sitting on the bulkheads after supper. It was one of those soft nights with great lazy yellow clouds with pink edges sailing down over the rim of the sea, fleet after fleet of them. I was terribly interested in it all, but horribly shocked, and from my vantage of fifteen years I said.

"Deolda, I think you ought to marry Johnny."

"Fiddledeedee!" said my aunt. "If she had sense she wouldn't marry either one of 'em--one's too old, one's too young."

"She ought to marry Johnny and make a man of him," I persisted, for it seemed ridiculous to me to call Johnny Deutra a boy when he was twenty and handsome as a picture in a book.

My prim words touched some sore place in Deolda. She gave a brief gesture with her hands and pushed the idea from her.

"I can't," she said, "I can't do it over again. Oh, I can't--I can't.

I'm afraid of emptiness--empty purses, empty bellies. The last words my mother spoke were to me. She said, '_Deolda, fear nothing but emptiness--empty bellies, empty hearts._' She left me something, too."

She went into the house and came back with the saffron shawl, its long fringe trailing on the floor, its red flowers venomous and lovely in the evening light.

"You've seen my mother," she said, "but you've seen her a poor old woman. She had everything in the world once. She gave it up for love.

I've seen what love comes to. I've seen my mother with her hands callous with work and her temper sharp as a razor edge nagging my father, and my father cursing out us children. She had a whole city in love with her and she gave up everything to run away with my father. He was jealous and wanted her for himself. He got her to marry him. Then he lost his arm and they were poor and her voice went. I've seen where love goes. If I married Johnny I'd go and live at Deutra's and I'd have kids, and old Ma Deutra would hate me and scream at me just like my mother used to. It would be going back, right back in the trap I've just come out of."

What she said gave me an entirely new vision of life and love. "They were married and lived happy ever afterward" was what I had read in books. Now I saw all at once the other side of the medal. It was my first contact, too, with a nature strong enough to attempt to subdue life to will. I had seen only the subservient ones who had accepted life.

Deolda was a fierce and pa.s.sionate reaction against destiny. It's a queer thing, when you think of it, for a girl to be brought up face to face with the wreck of a tragic pa.s.sion, to grow up in the house with love's ashes and to see what were lovers turned into an old hag and a cantankerous, one-armed man nagging each other.

My aunt made one more argument. "What makes you get married to any of 'em, Deolda?"

Now Deolda looked at her with a queer look; then she gave a queer laugh like a short bark.

"I can't stay here forever. I'm not going back to the mill."

Then my aunt surprised me by throwing her arms around Deolda and kissing her and calling her "my poor lamb," while Deolda leaned up against my aunt as if she were her own little girl and snuggled up in a way that would break your heart.

One afternoon soon after old Conboy brought Deolda home before tea time, and as she jumped out:

"Oh, all right!" he called after her. "Have your own way; I'll marry you if you want me to!"

She made him pay for this. "You see," she said to my aunt, "I told you I was going to marry him."

"Well, then come out motoring tonight when you've got your dishes done,"

called old Conboy.

"I'm going to the breakwater with Johnny Deutra tonight," said Deolda, in that awful truthful way of hers.

"You see what you get," said my aunt, "if you marry that girl."

"I'll get worse not marrying her," said Conboy. "I may die any minute; I've a high blood pressure, and maybe a stroke will carry me off any day. But I've never wanted anything in many years as I want to hold Deolda in my arms."

"Shame on you!" cried my aunt. "An old man like you!"

So things went on. Johnny kept right on coming. My aunt would fume about it, but she did nothing. We were all under Deolda's enchantment. As for me, I adored her; she had a look that always disarmed me. She would sit brooding with a look I had come to know as the "Deolda look." Tears would come to her eyes and slide down her face.

"Deolda," I would plead, "what are you crying about?"