CHAPTER III.
Sofar, Skelton was a magnificent promise. He remained at Deerchase a year, which he spent chiefly in improving the house and grounds, which were already beautiful. This gave him a very good excuse for keeping strictly to himself. Then he determined to go to Europe. His old flame, Mrs. Jack Blair, now lived at Newington, and every time she looked out of her windows she could see the noble brick pile of Deerchase. The house was a fine old colonial mansion, with walls three feet thick, and numbers of large and lofty rooms. Skelton added to it with great taste, and had his grounds laid out by a famous landscape gardener. Newington was very shabby; and if Mrs. Blair had been an envious woman—which she was not—she might have suffered many pangs because of the contrast between the two places. Mrs. Shapleigh declared that Skelton’s only object in improving Deerchase was to spite Mrs. Blair. But it certainly spited Mrs. Shapleigh dreadfully. She was seized with a desire that Belfield should rival Deerchase. Now, the Shapleighs were very well off, and Belfield was a large and handsome country house, but there was no rivalling Deerchase in the matter. Skelton had dollars where old TomShapleigh had dimes. Whenever Mrs. Shapleigh would start the subject of improving Belfield, Mr. Shapleigh would become so totally and obstinately deaf that there was no making him hear at all; so, as Mrs. Shapleigh was a much-indulged woman, she went to work on her own book to do landscape gardening, and to make Belfield as smart as Deerchase. The effect was fearful and wonderful. A Chinese pagoda was clapped on to one wing of the Belfield house. This was meant for a tower. Much red velvet furniture was bought, and old Tom paid the bills, grinning sardonically as he did it.
“I declare, Mr. Shapleigh,� Mrs. Shapleigh bewailed, “you’ve got no feeling for your own flesh and blood. There’s nothing more likely than that Sylvia will one day marry Richard Skelton, and then if we don’t furnish up some and improve the place, everybody will say she never was accustomed to anything until she went to Deerchase.�
Mr. Shapleigh declined to weep over this terrible prospect. Then came the ornamentation of the grounds. Mrs. Shapleigh’s idea of decorative art was a liberal supply of fresh paint of every hue of the rainbow. She had an elaborate affair of knobs and latticework, painted a vivid green, put up in the river between Deerchase and Belfield, in place of the old water fence of posts and rails. A fence of some sort was necessary to keep the cattle from wading down the salt marshes and following the river shore into forbidden fields. The cows came tramping placidly down the marshy creek until they got to the wonderful water fence, where they turned tail and trotted rapidly off, their frightened calves bleatingafter them. The picturesque, unpainted bridge across the creek was metamorphosed into a highly ornate construction with a summerhouse in the middle, expressly designed for Sylvia, who was then in short frocks, and Skelton to do their courting in eventually. Never was there such general overhauling and painting. The pigeon house was painted red and the turnstiles blue. When everything was done, and Mrs. Shapleigh was felicitating herself that Richard Skelton could no longer have the satisfaction of thinking Deerchase was unsurpassed, Skelton could not look toward Belfield without laughing, nor could anybody else, for that matter.
Skelton spent a full year at Deerchase, and just as he had brought the house and grounds to perfection this sudden idea of going to Europe possessed him. It was a great undertaking in those days. He had nobody to consult, nobody knew he was going, and nobody would grieve for him except some of the older house servants. Although Skelton was an indulgent master, he never exchanged a word with his negroes, who were entirely managed by overseers. The afternoon before he left he was on the river in his boat. It was a cloudy September day. Usually the scene was full of light and glow—the broad, bright river, the cheerful homesteads, his own beautiful Deerchase, and not even Mrs. Shapleigh, had been able to spoil the fair face of Nature with her miscalled ornamentation; but on that day it was dull and inexpressibly gloomy. A grey mist folded the distant landscape. The river went sullenly to the sea. Afar off in the marshes could be heard the booming of the frogs—the most doleful of sounds—andthe occasional fugitive cry of birds going south rang shrilly from the leaden sky.
Skelton sailed up and down, almost up to Newington, and down again to Lone Point—a dreary, sandy point, where three tall and melancholy pine trees grew almost at the water’s edge, and where the river opened widely into the bay. He felt that strange mixture of sadness and exultation which people felt in those far-off days when they were about to start for distant countries. There was not a soul in sight, except in the creek by the water fence; Sylvia Shapleigh was standing barefooted, with her skirts tucked up. Her shoes and stockings lay on the bank. She had on a white sunbonnet, much beruffled, and was holding something down in the water with a forked stick.
She was then about twelve years old, with a delicate, pretty, thoughtful face, and beautiful grey eyes. So unlike was she to her father and mother that she might have been a changeling.
Skelton guessed at once what she was after. She was catching the crabs that came up to feed in these shallow, marshy creeks; but after pinning her crab down she was evidently in a quandary how to get at him. As Skelton watched her with languid interest she suddenly gave a faint scream, her sunbonnet fell off into the water, and she stood quite still and began to cry.
Skelton ran the boat’s nose ashore within twenty yards of her, and, jumping out, went to her, splashing through the water.
“Oh, oh!� screamed poor Sylvia, “my foot—he’s got my foot!�
Skelton raised her small white foot out of the water, and in half a minute the crab was dexterously “spancelled� and thrown away, but there was a cruel mark on the child’s foot, and blood was coming. She looked at Skelton with wide, frightened eyes, crying bitterly all the time.
“Come, my dear,� said Skelton, soothingly, “let me pick you up and carry you home.�
“I d-d-don’t want to go home,� wailed Sylvia.
“But something must be done for your foot, child.�
“Then take me to Deerchase, and let Mammy Kitty do it.�
Skelton was puzzled by the child’s unwillingness to go home. But Sylvia soon enlightened him.
“If I g-go home mamma will scold me, and she will cry over me, and make me keep on crying, and that will make my head ache; and if I can get s-something done for my foot—�
“But won’t your mother be frightened about you if I take you to Deerchase?� asked Skelton.
“No—ooo—oo!� bawled Sylvia, still weeping; “she lets me stay out until sundown. And she’ll makesucha fuss over my foot if I go home!�
Determination was expressed in every line of Sylvia’s tearful, pretty face. Skelton silently went back to the shore, got her shoes and stockings, went to his boat and brought it up, Sylvia meanwhile keeping up a furious beating of the water with her forked stick to frighten the crabs off. Skelton lifted her in the boat, and they sailed along to the Deerchase landing. Sylvia wiped her feet on the curtain of her sunbonnet, put on her stockings and one shoe, andnursed the injured foot tenderly. Skelton lifted her out on the little stone pier he had had built, and then proceeded to take down the sail and tie the boat.
“I think,� said Sylvia calmly, “you’ll have to carry me to the house.�
“Hadn’t you better let me send for mycalècheand pair for you?� gravely asked Skelton.
“Oh, no,� cried Sylvia briskly, and Skelton without a word picked her up and walked across the grassy lawn to the house. She was very light, and, except for flapping her wet sunbonnet in his face, he had no objection whatever to her. He carried her up the steps into the hall, and then turned her over to Mammy Kitty, who wrapped her foot in wet cabbage-leaves. Skelton went to the library. Presently, Bob Skinny’s woolly head was thrust in the door.
“Please, sah, Mr. Skelton, de young lady say will you please to come d’yar?�
Skelton, smiling at himself, rose and went back to the hall. Sylvia was perched on one foot, like a stork.
“I think,� she said, “if you’ll give me your arm I can walk around and look at the pretty things. Whenever I’ve been here with mamma she has always asked so many questions that I didn’t like to ask any myself.�
“You may ask any questions you like,� replied Skelton, still smiling. He never remembered exchanging a word with the child before. He had taken for granted that she was her mother’s own daughter, and as such he had no wish to cultivate her.
But Sylvia was not at all like her mother. She limped around the hall, looking gravely at the portraits.
The Skeltons were a handsome family, if the portraits could be believed. They were all dark, with clear-cut faces and high aquiline noses like Skelton’s, and they were all young.
“Wehave some portraits, you know,� remarked Sylvia, “but they are all old and ugly. Now, all of these are of pretty little girls and boys or handsome young ladies.�
“The Skeltons are not a long-lived family,� said Skelton. “They generally die before forty. Here is one—Janet Skelton—a little girl like you. She died at eighteen.�
Sylvia turned her grey eyes full of a limpid green light towards him pityingly.
“Aren’t you going to live long?�
“Perhaps,� replied Skelton, smiling.
“I think,� said Sylvia calmly, after a while, “if I were grown up I should like to live here.�
“Very well,� answered Skelton, who at twenty-two thought the twelve-year-old Sylvia a toddling infant; “as I intend to be an old bachelor, you may come and be my little sister. You may have my mother’s room—here it is.�
He opened a door close by, and they entered a little sitting room, very simple and old-fashioned, and in no way corresponding to the rest of the house. It had whitewashed walls above the wainscoting, and the furniture was in faded yellow damask.
“I intend to let this room remain as it is, to remindme that I was once a boy, for this is the first room I remember in the Deerchase house.�
Sylvia looked around with calmly contemptuous eyes.
“When I come to Deerchase to live I shall make this room as fine as the rest. But I must go home now. I can get my shoe on, and perhaps mamma won’t notice that I limp a little. You’d better take me in the boat, so I can get back to the house from the river shore.�
Skelton, who thought it high time she was returning, at once agreed. As he lifted her out of the boat on the Belfield shore a sudden impulse made him say:
“Sylvia, can you keep a secret?�
“Of course I can,� answered Sylvia promptly.
“Then—I am going away to-morrow morning, to be gone a year, perhaps longer. This is the last sail I shall take upon the river for a long, long time.�
Sylvia’s eyes were full of regret. Although she had seen Skelton at a distance nearly every day of her life when he was at Deerchase, and had also seen him upon the rare occasions that visits were exchanged between the two places, yet he had all the charm of a new and dazzling acquaintance to her. She never remembered speaking a word with him before, but there was a delightful intimacy between them now, she thought. She expressed her regret at his going so volubly that Skelton was forced to laugh; and she wound up by flinging her arms around his neck and kissing him violently. At this Skelton thought it time to leave. His last glimpseof Sylvia was as she stood swinging her wet, white sunbonnet dolefully on the sandy shore.
That night a terrible storm came up. It flooded all the low-lying fields, swept over the prim gardens at Deerchase, and washed away a part of the bridge between Deerchase and Belfield. When, at daylight in the morning, Skelton, with Bob Skinny, left Deerchase, everything was under water, and trees and shrubs and fences and hedges bore witness of the fury of the wind and the rain. Skelton’s last view of Deerchase was a gloomy one. He meant then to be gone a year; he remained away fifteen years.