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She was more foreign than anything I had ever seen and she meant to me what she did to plenty of others romance. She must have meant it to my aunt, sick as she was and needing a hired girl. So when Deolda asked, in that soft way of hers: "Shall I stay?" "Yes," answered my aunt, reluctantly, her eyes on the girl's lovely mouth.
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 Deolda said to him: "Good for you, Johnny Deutra!" and put out her hand, and he laid his in hers and they shook on it, though no word had passed between them. And all this time my aunt and I sat motionless on the haircloth sofa next to the wall. And I tell you as I watched them my blood ran cold, though I didn't understand what it was about. But later I understood well enough.
That was one of the worst things about Deolda. We cover our bodies decently with clothes, and we ought to cover up our thoughts decently with words. But Deolda had no shame, and people with her didn't, either. They'd say just what they were thinking about. After they left Deolda came to Aunt Josephine and put her arms around her like a good, sweet child. "What's the matter, Auntie?" she asked.
She never gave one any chance for an illusion about her, for there was handsome Johnny Deutra still hanging round the gate watching Deolda, and she already held my aunt's heart in her slender hand. My aunt went around muttering, "One-armed Manel's girl!" She appealed to me: "She's got to live somewhere, hasn't she?"
And I wouldn't wonder a mite if 'twas true. She was a queer looking old hag with black, piercing eyes and a proud way of walking. The boys are a wild crew. Why, I remember this girl Deolda, like a little leopard cat with blue-black shadows in her hair and eyes like saucers, selling berries at the back door!" My uncle Ariel, Aunt Josephine's brother, came in after a while.
I suppose what Uncle Ariel meant was that Deolda made him think of Eastern queens and Araby. But my attention was distracted by the appearance of two wild-looking boys with a green-blue sea chest which served Deolda as a trunk. I followed it to her room and started making friends with Deolda, who opened the trunk, and I glimpsed something embroidered in red flowers. "Oh, Deolda, let me see.
"I want to write out a weddin' present for Deolda," he said. "Wouldn't do to have her without a penny." So he wrote out a check for her. And then in two months old Conboy died and left every other cent to Deolda. You might have imagined him sardonic and grinning over it, looking across at Deolda's luck from the other side of the grave. But what had happened wasn't luck.
Oh, let me see!" I cried. It was a saffron shawl all embroidered with splotchy red flowers as big as my hand. It made me tingle as it lay there in its crinkly folds, telling of another civilization and other lands than our somber shores. The shawl and its crawling, venomous, alluring flowers marked Deolda off from us. She seemed to belong to the shawl and its scarlet insinuations.
Lights, like warning eyes, flashed at night, and through the drenching fog, bells on reefs talked to invisible ships. Old men who told tales of storm and strange, savage islands, of great catches of fish, of smuggling, visited my aunt. Then, as if this were merely the background of a drama, Deolda Costa came to live with us in a prosaic enough fashion, as a "girl to help out."
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