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Updated: May 18, 2025
He thought of himself lying under the crepe-myrtle bush through the hot, droning afternoon, watching the pale magenta flowers flutter down into the dry grass, and felt, again, wrapped in his warm blankets among all these sleepers, the straining of limbs burning with desire to rush untrammelled through some new keen air. Suddenly darkness overspread his mind. He woke with a start.
And there was the music of the crepe-myrtle in the air the music of it, wet with the night dew for there are flowers so delicate in their sweetness that they pass out of the realm of sight and smell, into the unheard world of rhythm. Their very existence is the poetry of perfume.
Travis led his saddle horse, and as they walked to the gate, the sweet and scarcely perceptible odor of the crepe-myrtle floated out on the open air.
From the garden below the night wind brought soft fragrance of lilacs and crepe-myrtle, of bleeding-heart and wall-flower, of cow-slips and candy-tuft, and as they blew in and out, like the touch of unseen hands, they stirred old memories made that which was dead, alive again. "You're a fool, Gibbie Gault a fool!
And half-unconscious she felt another one come to his aid, one who took her in his arms and kissed her lips and her eyes ... and carried her into the bright fire-lighted cabin, ... carried her in strength and happiness that made her lay her cheek against his, ... and there were tears on it, and somehow she lay as if she were a child in his arms, ... a child again and she was happy, ... and there were silence and sweet dreams and the long-dead smell of the crepe-myrtle.... She did not remember again until she sat up on the cot in the clean little cabin, and Tom Travis, tall and in the splendor of manhood, sat holding her hands and stroking her hair and whispering: "Alice, my darling it is all well and I have come back for you, at last!"
How long they sat on the rustic bench under the crepe-myrtle they did not know. At parting there was the light clasp of hands, and Cousin Tom drew her to him and put his lips reverently to hers. When he had ridden off there was a slender ring on her finger.
The crepe-myrtle has a way of surprising us now and then, and often after a wet fall, it gives us the swan-song of a bloom, ere its delicate blossoms, touched to death by frost, close forever their scalloped pink eyes, on the rare summer of a life as spiritual as the sweet soft gulf winds which brought it to life.
She had thrown back her head, and, half turned, was looking toward the crepe-myrtle tree from which the faint odor came. "You had better go, Richard," was all she said. "I'll come for my answer soon?" he asked. She was silent. "Soon?" he repeated as he rose in the stirrup "soon and to claim you always, Alice."
He rode off and left her standing with her head still thrown back, her thoughtful face drinking in the odor of the crepe-myrtle. Travis did not understand, for no crepe-myrtle had ever come into his life. It could not come.
He had had so many dreams; lying under the crepe-myrtle bush at the end of the overgrown garden he had passed the long Virginia afternoons, thinking, while the dryflies whizzed sleepily in the sunlight, of the world he would live in when he grew up.
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