Mr. Opp

								

act of holding up their skirts preparatory to wading forth into the
water.
On this particular summer afternoon Cove City was less out of crimp than
usual. The gathering of loafers that generally decorated the empty boxes
piled along the sidewalk was missing. The old vehicles and weary-looking
mules which ordinarily formed an irregular fringe along the hitching
rail were conspicuously absent. A subdued excitement was in the air, and
at the slightest noise feminine heads appeared at windows, and masculine
figures appeared in doorways, and comments were exchanged in low tones
from one side of the street to the other. For the loss of a citizen,
even a poor one, disturbs the surface of affairs, and when the event
brings two relatives from a distance, the ripples of excitement increase
perceptibly.
Mr. Moore had been a citizen-in-law, as it were, and had never been
considered in any other light than poor Mrs. Opp's widower. Mrs. Opp's
poor widower might have been a truer way of stating it, but even a town
has its parental weaknesses.
For two generations the Opp family had been a source of mystery and
romance to the Cove. It stood apart, like the house that held it, poor
and shabby, but bearing a baffling atmosphere of gentility, of
superiority, and of reserve.
Old women recalled strange tales of the time when Mrs. Opp had come to
the Cove as a bride, and how she refused to meet any of the townspeople,
and lived alone in the old house on the river-bank, watching from hour
to hour for the wild young husband who clerked on one of the river
steamers. They told how she grew thin and white with waiting, and how,
when her two boys were small, she made them stand beside her for hours
at a time, watching the river and listening for the whistle of his boat.
Then the story went that the gay young husband stopped coming
altogether, and still she watched and waited, never allowing the boys
out of her sight, refusing to send them to school, or to let them play
with other children. By and by word was brought that her husband had
been killed in a quarrel over cards, and little Mrs. Opp, having nothing
now to watch for and to wait for, suddenly became strangely changed.
Old Aunt Tish, the negro servant, was the only person who ever crossed
the threshold, and she told of a strange life that went on behind the
closely curtained windows, where the sunlight was never allowed to
enter, and lamps burned all day long.
"Yas, 'm," she used to say in answer to curious questionings; "hit's jes
like play-actin' all de time. The Missis dress herself up, an' 'tend
like she's a queen or a duke or somethin', an' dat little D. he jes
acts out all dem fool things she tells him to, an' he ain't never bein'
hisself at all, but jes somebody big and mighty and grand-like."
When the boys were half-grown, a stranger appeared in the Cove, a dapper
little man of about fifty in a shabby frock-coat and a shabbier high