IX
Itis four o’clock of a September afternoon and brightly still. Over on the clean rolling golf course tiny figures in all combinations of white and grey and brown move like insects soundlessly from one point to another making odd motions. Even the jays which have been haggling and shrieking all day are quiet. An occasional tree-toad or katydid creaks from the false dusk of the Eastern woods. Locusts drone, and from a long way off comes the faint click of a reaping machine at intervals, but all these sounds only accentuate the silence. An eternal, slow-breathing calm rests upon the treetops waiting patiently for the cold of autumn.
With a murmur that grows into a rumble the stillness is broken by a monstrous motor truck which swerves into the driveway from the road a quarter of a mile away and comes tumbling down the white track, its racket increasing with its nearness. The driver noisily shunts his gears at the kitchen door, and Ellen Sydney comes out to superintend the unloading and disposition of supplies. This done and the truckman sent away with a laugh, she strolls into the garden on that side of the house and is presently at work with apair of shears snipping asters and marigolds for the table. There are many of them, so many they must be gathered in profusion. She has the air of one who is at home among the beds, who has worked on them and cherished them with her own hands.
She is a handsomer woman than before. Her figure has decidedly taken on dignity, and the colour of her face is a healthy brown pink. Her cheeks, thanks to the best skill of the Blaydon dentist, have lost their sunken hollows and her eyes have deepened from the effect of well-being and contented activity. She bears herself with some authority too, having taken a favoured place in her division of the housework. Her hair is greying very slightly over the ears and temples, but her step is as quick and her back as straight as a girl’s. She wears a blue uniform with sleeves rolled up and a white apron.
As she reaches the entrance portico, her arms overflowing with the yellow and brown and purple flowers, a little girl of six or so with dark hair bursts from the screen door.
“Ellney, Ellney. Give me a cookie. I’m hungry.”
“Can’t you wait till dinner, Miss Moira? Your mother wouldn’t like it.”
“Oh, what’s one cookie?Mamanwon’t mind just one.”
“She will if she finds out, and if you don’t eatyour dinner. It’s me that will get the lecture, not you!”—and with a look backward into the past, Ellen thinks of a boy who was once always asking for something to eat. The boy’s face has so dimmed in her mind now that if there is a resemblance she does not notice it.
“Mamanshan’t lecture you, Ellney. I shan’t ever let her lecture you.”
Ellen laughs, not only at what Moira says, but at the way she says it. She cannot ever get over the fact that her own child—who is now no longer her child—speaks the King’s English quite as carefully as her well-bred elders, and has adopted an air of superiority in her own right. But in Ellen’s laughter there is no ridicule. It is the sheer pleasure of maternal pride. Does not Moira, they say, speak French almost as well as English?
“You little darling,” she cries, stooping and endeavouring to take the child’s hand in spite of her overflowing burden, “I’ll give you just one.”
“No, two, Ellney—but one is for Hal, on my word. Isn’t it funny, he’s afraid to ask!”
Ellen thought there never had been a child whose laughter was more like everything good and who laughed more often than Moira....
Turning in from the Marquette road to Sterling Blaydon’s new country house, “Thornhill” as they called it, a visitor with a sculptor’s eye mightdescribe the formation of the land as the huge thigh of a woman, resting horizontally on the earth. The private driveway ran along the crest which sloped on both sides downward to gentle valleys, while the whole ridge tapered in width gradually to a round end or knee on which rested the house in a semi-circle of green. Beyond the house lay a few hundred feet of clipped lawn and well spaced trees, and then the Titan calf plunged into the earth, its declivitous sides covered with exposed rock and a thick undergrowth of every imaginable scrub and bramble, with a plentiful scattering of dogwood and plumb and thorn. It was holy with blossoms in the Spring, beginning with the ghostly shad-bush. The edge of the hill overlooked a broad meadow fifty yards below, as flat as a lake.
Spread out in three directions from this crowning point lay Blaydon’s land, perhaps a third of it in rocky knolls and wood, and the remainder under cultivation by tenant farmers. The driveway to the site led almost due west but the axis of the house itself, which was narrow and long despite its irregularities, turned toward the south. It was built to the shingle eaves of rubble-rock and dominated at either end by two enormous chimneys of the same gorgeous, parti-coloured material, all of which had been found on the place. Broad verandahs, a wide, tiled terrace reached by French windows; a quaint Dutch Colonial doorand portico facing the road; screened balconies skilfully masked by the eaves; the great living and dining rooms and library which took up almost all of the lower floor; the correspondingly spacious chambers overhead, attested its inhabitants’ means and love of comfort. The entrance lawn and slopes to the north were laid out in series of irregular, charming gardens. On the southeast the hill descended almost horizontally from the tiled and parapeted terrace near the house, so that from the living room windows one looked through the tops of trees to the Country Club on another hill less than a mile away.
With greater spaces had come more movement, more things to be interested in, more excitement and sound, all of which Ellen had welcomed. She meddled in everything. She had become a creditable sub-assistant gardener and something of a bee-keeper, having watched the professionals at work. The four dogs were her especial care. Two were morbidly shy collies called “Count” and “Countess” by Mathilda, and Ellen won the privilege of touching their magnificent coats and standing by while they fed, only after many months of gentleness and coaxing. They seldom allowed the other members of the household to come near them and ran wild in the woods. On the other hand the beagle and setter were almost annoyingly chummy. The animals in the stable had their daily histories also, which concernedher intimately. She was a splendid milker in emergencies and would have liked to keep fowls, but this Mathilda, who respected sleep in the mornings, would not permit.
Of the two boys in the house, Hal, nine and a half, was the keener-witted and the more attractive. He was already at home among the horses and rode bare-back as well as in the saddle. She often felt sorry for Rob, who was left behind much of the time by his older brother and the swift, tiny Moira, but she did not humour him as much as she did Hal.
It was Hal, however, who had ridden a cow so successfully one day that Moira pleaded to be helped up herself, and whether the beast thought her a less formidable antagonist, or was frightened by her skirts, the little girl was thrown off and severely jolted. Hal supported her into the house, himself more frightened than she, and vowed to his aunt solemnly that from that day he would never lead her into danger again, and if she got into it he would get her out. Yet she and the boy quarrelled too and sometimes went for days without speaking. Moira would take up with Rob then, scheming with all her mind to devise adventures that would make his brother envious. She often succeeded in these stratagems, until a time came when he did not concern himself with her at all, being grown beyond little girls.
The elaborate arrangements which had beenmade for Moira from the first, and the increasing complexity of the child’s education, which had been undertaken very early by Mrs. Seymour, made it easier for Ellen to regard her as a member of the Blaydon family. It was only when Moira misbehaved within her knowledge or in her sight, that the true mother felt it hard to play her neutral rôle. While Moira was good she was a Seymour, naturally, but when she was bad she seemed to Ellen to be wholly her own. Ellen’s impulse then, in spite of the habit of suppression, was to correct her as a mother would.
When these occasions had passed and she could reflect back on them, she thought it a blessing that Moira’s correction was in the hands of others than herself. One instance of Mrs. Seymour’s wise manner of dealing with unusual conduct filled her mind with wonder and created for her almost a new conception of life.
Aunt Mathilda was consulting with her in the kitchen when Moira burst in and cried:
“Maman, oh,Maman, the calf came right out of the cow! I saw it. I did.”
The child’s face was a study. She did not apparently know whether to be very grave, or a little frightened or to laugh, and in one who was so rarely puzzled it would have seemed pathetic had her sudden announcement been less shocking than it was. As they learned afterward, she had witnessed the birth, by sheer accident, while inthe stables with Harvey. Ellen blushed scarlet and was on the point of exclaiming indignantly, but Mrs. Seymour checked her with a gesture and took the child in her lap. Then she said in a tone the most natural in the world:
“Why, certainly, my dear. That is what happens when all animals are born, and people too. First we are carried in our mothers. Then we walk by ourselves, just as the calf will in a day or two. Now you won’t ever forget that, will you?”
Beginning the middle of September and for eight months each year, Miss Cheyney, the governess, came every morning at nine, and quiet reigned while she went over the lessons with the three children shut up in the library. After luncheon, Eberhard, the man, took her back by motor to the train as he had brought her.
Ellen was always glad to see her visits begin, not only because Miss Cheyney was very democratic and “nice” to her, and proud of Moira’s progress, but because they ushered in the Fall. She loved the glorious colours that spread out in widening and deepening hues over the wooded hills, until all the world seemed to have put on a flaming cloak. She and the children would fill the house with sumach and maple branches then. And when the men began bringing up the heavy logs that had lain drying in the woods all summer and sawing and splitting them for the fireplaces in the house, she could see in anticipationthe flames leaping in the chimney and hear the crackling of the wood in the fierce heat, and watch the glow of dancing light on the children’s faces. She had not seen open fireplaces since the New Orleans days, when they were lighted only for a few weeks in the year; and never had she seen anything to compare with the one in the Blaydon living room which was so high a woman could stand in it while she cleaned.
And then the parties began. There were nearly always two big ones each Winter, and between them a constant stream of dinners and late motor parties, and informal crowds who tramped over from the Club to dance. Ellen loved to hear the music going at full tilt, the new jazz music that was just coming in. She didn’t mind, as much as she should have, the young men getting tipsy. She was thrilled to watch the couples disappear down through the trees, laughing and chatting, eager to escape the floods of light that poured from every window in the house; or slip into their motors for a drive along the dark roads.
She had always thought of Sterling Blaydon as a reserved and serious man, and she wondered how he stood so much excitement. Then she realized that she was dealing with a new Sterling Blaydon, who not only stood it but encouraged it. His pride in the place and his love of filling it with people was like a boy’s.
A great part of the pleasure she took in theseaffairs arose from the fact that her daughter was a favourite. Tall, important men and dazzling young women were attentive to Moira and Moira enjoyed it as much as they did. She was growing extraordinarily self-possessed, particularly with her elders. Often enough the frank equality she adopted toward them made Ellen gasp.
Only in the dead of winter, when the snow piled up a foot or two everywhere and the drifts sometimes were up to a man’s middle, would they be without company for many days at a time. During this brief closed season—for it did not last long at the worst—Mr. Blaydon usually lived in town, and sometimes Mrs. Seymour would join him there, when engagements came in bunches or the theatres were particularly interesting. And the children, freed from their teacher, would be idle.
Coming upon Moira alone at such times, with her constituted guardians away and out of mind, Ellen experienced her moments of gravest temptation. How she longed then to take the youngster in her arms and pour out the floods of love pent up within her. These yearnings were made all the more unbearable by the simple affection with which she was nearly always greeted by her daughter; yet at the same time the child’s own attitude strengthened her resistance. For Ellen stood in awe of her. The force of training, the sedulously cultivated point of view, the entirelydifferent environment had already stamped her with the mark of another caste. Ellen could not look upon her for more than an instant as simply the object of possessive human feeling. It would sweep over her at some childlike expression, some quaint, serious look. It would be checked by some unlooked for sophistication of gesture or remark.
Moira familiarly uttered the names of grown young men who to Ellen were no more than shadows from an upper world, coldly courteous ghosts who did not see her even when they looked at her. Every season the little girl extended her interests and knowledge into a wider world and grew more alien. And gradually as the years flew by even the servants who had been in the old Trezevant place when they came there, and who somehow seemed to preserve for her, by their presence, the actuality of her motherhood, passed, until there was not one left. Gina, whose sympathy she had felt most keenly, though the sprightly Italian said nothing, was the last. And Gina went away to be married....