CHAPTER I
The benediction of God was in the sunshine that lay still and bright upon green fields and blooming gardens. The town, marshaled along the river side, nestled quietly under the caressing warmth. Down by the steamboat landing it stirred into sudden noisy activity as the up-river boat drew in and made ready to discharge cargo and passengers. But farther back, where the streets, lined with maple and butternut trees and white-blossomed locusts, climbed the long sloping hill, the May sunshine seemed to have kissed the earth into radiant peace. Here and there, from some white-painted cottage set in a grassy, tree-shaded yard, came the sound of a woman’s voice in speech or song, or the shrilly sweet accents of children at play floated out from porch or shady nook.
The lilac bushes in a yard at the top of the hill, hedging the walk from front door to gate, lazily stirred their lavender foam and sent forth waves of fragrance. The house, uncompromisingly white and square and solid-looking, with green shutters at the windows, had a wide, columned veranda across the southward front and down the eastern side. Upon the balmy stillness in whichit too was enveloped there came a sound of dancing steps and girlish laughter, and a young woman ran out of the front door, teasing with a leafy switch a gray kitten that scampered at her side. Her spreading skirts, crinolined and beruffled, tilted back and forth, and with a sudden twist she caught the kitten within their cage. As it peeked out, with a half-frightened face, ready to spring away, she caught it by the back of the neck and lifted it to the bend of her arm.
“No, you didn’t, Prince of Walesy!” she laughed. “You’re not smart enough yet to get away from me like that!” Leaning against the veranda rail she gazed watchfully down the street while she pinched the kitten’s ears until it squeaked and then stroked it into purring content. The sunlight brought out reddish and golden gleams in her dark brown hair.
“Walesy, why don’t they come!” she exclaimed with an impatient frown, pulling the cat’s tail while it protested with growl and claw. “I heard the steamboat a long time ago.” Her eyes sought the glimpses of sparkling river between the trees and she descried a thin banner of smoke moving up-stream. “Yes, there it goes! They’ll surely be here soon! Now don’t make such a fuss about having your tail pulled. You’ll just have to get used to it!”
She began to whistle softly, stopped, cast a backward glance at the open door, made a littlegrimace and struck again into her tune, louder than before. Up the street, under the drooping white masses of locust bloom, came a two-seated carriage. “Mother! They’re coming! They’re right here!” she called. Then with the kitten still in her arm she scurried down the path between the walls of fragrant lilac, her crinolined skirt giving glimpses of trimly slippered feet as it tilted from side to side. Unlatching the gate she stepped upon its lower cross-piece and swung back upon it as far as it would go. “Father! Rhoda!” she called out joyously, and was herself welcomed with “Well, Charlotte!” and a kiss by her father and a laughing embrace by her sister. One of the tall, square gate-posts bore the sign, “Dr. Amos M. Ware.”
“Now let’s take in the things!” cried Charlotte. “I’m just dying to see what you’ve brought! Here, Jim,” to the negro who was holding the horses, “come and carry in these bundles.”
Within the house there was eager cross-fire of question and answer, punctuated by frequent exclamations of delight, as the two sisters and their mother unwrapped the parcels and examined their contents.
“This is for mother,” said Rhoda, shaking out a light wool wrap. “They’re wearing these little shawls so much this spring. Charlotte, doesn’t she look nice in it!” Throwing her arms around her mother’s shoulders Rhoda kissed her twiceand then rushed back to the table piled with packages. “And I’ve got the sweetest bonnet for you, Charlotte!” she went on, opening a bandbox. “There! isn’t that lovely, mother?” She tied the strings under Charlotte’s chin and all three clustered about the mirror as the girl critically surveyed herself therein.
The bonnet covered her head, in the fashion of the days “before the war,” and the wreath of flowers inside its front made a dainty frame that seemed to be trying to compel into demureness the saucy face with its tip-tilted nose and mischievous brown eyes.
The two sisters, reflected side by side in the mirror, looked oddly unlike. Charlotte’s deep tones of hair and eyes and rich coloring paled in her elder sister into light brown and gray, and faint rose-bloom upon her cheek. But Rhoda’s straight, thin-nostriled nose gave to her countenance a certain dignity which the other’s lacked, while her mouth, with its curved upper lip, just short enough to part easily from its full red fellow, had a piquant sweetness more attractive than her sister’s more regular features. Her eyes, large and gray, and indeed all the upper part of her face, had a serious expression. At the corners of her mouth there was just the suggestion of an upward turn, like that in the Mona Lisa. It gave to the lower part of her face an expression curiously contradictory of the grave upper part, as ifsense of the joyousness of life were always hovering there and ready at any moment to break forth in laughter. When she did smile there was a sudden irradiation of her whole countenance. The short upper lip lifted above white teeth, the faint upward curve at the corners of her mouth deepened and her eyes twinkled gaily. But no one ever accounted Rhoda so handsome as her younger sister. Even those who admired her most thought her forehead too high and her cheek bones too prominent for beauty.
“And this muslin is for a dress for you, Charlotte,” Rhoda went on, holding it up for their inspection. “Isn’t this vine a lovely pattern, mother? We must make it with three wide flounces, from the foot to the waist, and the skirt even wider than these we’re wearing now. And this white silk is to make a drawn bonnet for you, mother. I saw several of them in Cincinnati—they’re quite the latest thing. I have the pattern and directions and I’m sure I can do it.”
There were only three of them, but as they moved about in their big, balloon-like skirts, examining, comparing, discussing the purchases, they seemed to pervade the whole large room with the essence of femininity and to fill it with their bodily presence.
“What’s this?” said Charlotte, taking up a small package. “It feels like a book.” And she began to undo its wrappings.
Rhoda looked, then half turned away. “It is a book—one father bought for me. You won’t care about it.”
Charlotte glanced at her curiously and with increased interest went on with the unwrapping. “Oh! ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin!’” she exclaimed disdainfully as she tossed the book away. “What do you want to read that for? Walesy, stop it!” And with a backward jump and a downward swoop she extricated the kitten from beneath her hoopskirt, boxed its ears and then cuddled it in her arm, whence in a moment more issued sounds of distress and anger.
Her mother spoke reprovingly, in soft tones that betrayed southern birth: “Charlotte, don’t hurt the little thing! Do try to remember that you’re grown up!”
The girl rubbed the kitten against her face and cooed: “Well, it was its own Charlotte’s precious Prince of Walesy kitty-cat and if it wants to say that ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ is just a nasty old Black Republican mess of lies it shall, so it shall! Shan’t you, Walesy?”
The kitten’s vehement response, slyly inspired, went unheeded as she turned again to her sister, demanding, “What do you want to read it for, Rhoda, when you know it’s just a lot of stuff with no truth in it?”
“I don’t know that, Charlotte. I’ve wanted to read it for a long time, because it’s talked aboutso much. And while we were in Cincinnati we went to Levi Coffin’s, and they told us so much about Mrs. Stowe, and how she got some of the incidents for the story and talked such a lot about—the darkies who—try to go to Canada that it made me very anxious to read the book.”
“Who’s Levi Coffin?” asked Charlotte, regarding her sister closely and noting a brief hesitation as Rhoda carefully folded the white silk before she replied: “Oh, just a friend of father’s. They’re Quakers and they wouldn’t interest you.”
Charlotte reached for the book and turned its leaves over carelessly. “Humph! If they’re friends of Mrs. Stowe they’re probably just some more nigger-stealers! You’ll soon be a black abolitionist yourself, Rhoda, if you keep on. And then we won’t associate with her, will we, Walesy! Didn’t you meet any nice people?”
Rhoda paid no heed to her sister’s aggressive tone. “Oh, yes! Mrs. Benjamin Harrison—Carrie Scott, you know—she and I were such good friends while I was at Dr. Scott’s Institute—happened to be visiting in Cincinnati and she and I had a long talk. And I saw several other girls whom I knew at Dr. Scott’s. And—oh, mother! You’ll be so pleased!” Her color warmed and her face brightened as she went on. “It was most romantic! We met Mr. Jefferson Delavan!”
“Oh, did you! Where? How did it happen?Tell me all about it!” Mrs. Ware’s eager questions and delighted face showed how nearly the information touched her heart. But Charlotte merely demanded, with puzzled interest, “Who is he?”
“Don’t you remember, Charlotte?” Rhoda went on. “His mother was Adeline Fairfax, mother’s dear friend when they were girls together in Virginia. My middle name is after her, you know, and it’s her miniature that mother has on her dressing table.”
“Oh, yes!” exclaimed Charlotte. “It was at her home that we visited, wasn’t it, a long time ago, in Kentucky?”
“Yes—Fairmount, they call it. Such a beautiful place, just beyond Lexington. Mother and you and I visited there for a month, twelve years ago, wasn’t it, mother, when we first came here to Hillside. You were only six years old then, so I suppose you don’t remember much about it. But I remember it all very well and what a good time we had.”
“Poor, dear Adeline!” Mrs. Ware was wiping her eyes. “She and I did enjoy that visit so much! And we never saw each other again, for she died the next year. If she had lived you and her children would have seen a great deal of each other. But do tell me about Jeff, Rhoda! Where did you see him? And how did he know who you were? He was such a fine boy—about twelveyears old, wasn’t he?—when we were there. Just two years older than you, Rhoda. Did you meet him in Cincinnati?”
“No. He was on the steamboat when we went down and the captain—it was Captain Laidlaw, father’s friend, you know—introduced him to us, and then he remembered who we were and we had great fun talking over the good times we had at Fairmount.”
“Was his sister Emily with him? She was named for me, you know. Is either of them married yet?”
“No, she wasn’t with him, and neither one of them is married. He told me his father’s sister has lived with them ever since his mother died. His father died too last year and now he manages the plantation.”
“Is he handsome?” queried Charlotte.
“N—no, not exactly handsome. But very fine-looking, and so courteous!”
“Then you saw more of him after you left the steamboat?”
“Yes. He called on us in Cincinnati, and we went out together several times and then it happened that he finished his business there in time to take the same steamboat back that we did.”
Charlotte regarded her sister with dancing eyes. “Is he coming up here to visit—us?” she demanded. Rhoda reddened under her scrutiny. She did not always find it easy to keep her composureunder Charlotte’s habit of making audacious deductions and voicing reckless intuitions. But she had learned long before that to betray embarrassment was to invite more questioning. She answered with apparent unconcern:
“Father asked him to come and told him how pleased mother would be to see him, and he said that he expected to be up near the river before long and he would cross over and call on us.”
“Dear boy! Indeed, I shall be glad to see him! Adeline’s son—how time does fly!”
“Does he own slaves?” said Charlotte, her eyes still on her sister’s face.
“Of course!” replied Mrs. Ware. “You evidently don’t remember the place, Charlotte. It is a large tobacco plantation, and when we were there Mr. Delavan had a great many slaves.”
Charlotte sprang to her feet and poised the kitten on her shoulder. “Then you won’t like him, Rhoda—and I shall!” Whistling merrily, she took some dancing steps toward the door.
“Charlotte!” called her mother reprovingly, “Do try to remember that you’re not a child any more! I’ve told you so often it’s not ladylike to whistle!”
Rhoda smiled at her fondly. “Don’t you know, sister, what happens to whistling women and crowing hens?”
“Oh fudge! That’s all nonsense. I heard a better one the other day—
‘Girls that whistle and hens that crowCatch the pleasures as they go.’
‘Girls that whistle and hens that crowCatch the pleasures as they go.’
‘Girls that whistle and hens that crow
Catch the pleasures as they go.’
There’s some truth in that! I’m going to show father my new bonnet, and he doesn’t care if I do whistle!”
Mrs. Ware gazed after her as she floated down the veranda and disappeared around the corner of the house, tilting her skirts and whistling.
“I did hope Charlotte wouldn’t be so trying after she became a young lady!” she said in soft, plaintive tones.
“Never mind, mother. She doesn’t really mean to be trying. She does it just the same as she pinches the kitten’s tail, to make it meaow. If you don’t pay any attention to her she’ll quit much sooner.”
Mrs. Ware crossed the room to her daughter, pressed an arm around her waist and kissed her cheek. “I’m so glad you happened to meet Jeff Delavan,” she murmured. “If he comes to see us, and I’m sure he will—” she glanced at the warmer color that flushed Rhoda’s face, smiled, and went on, “What did you buy for yourself, dear?”