CHAPTER II
Outside Phyl stood for a moment to breathe the warm scented air and look around her.
To be treated like a child by any other person than Maria Pinckney would have incensed her, all the same to be told to do a thing because it was good for her, or because it was a pleasant thing to do, in the teller’s opinion, was an almost certain way of making her do the exact opposite.
The garden did not attract her, the place did.
That cypress avenue with the sun upon it, that broad sweep of drive in front of the house, the distant peeps of country between trees and the languorous lazy atmosphere of the perfect day fascinated her mind. She came along the house front to the right, and found herself at the gate of the stable yard.
The stable yard of Grangersons was an immense flagged quadrangle bounded on the right, counting from the point of entrance, by the kitchen premises.
There was stable room for forty horses, coach-house accommodation for a dozen or more carriages.
The car had been run into one of the coach-houses and the yard stood empty, sunlit, silent, save for the voices of the pigeons wheeling in the air, or strutting on the roof of the great barn adjoining the stables.
One of the stable doors was open and as Phyl crossed the yard a young man appeared at the open door, shaded his eyes and looked at her. Then he came forward. It was Silas Grangerson, and Phyl thought he was the handsomest and most graceful person she had ever seen in her life.
Silas was a shade over six feet in height, dark, straight, slim yet perfectly proportioned; his face was extraordinary, the most vivid thing one would meet in a year’s journey, and with a daring, and at times, almost a mad look unforgettable when once glimpsed. Like the Colonel and like his ancestors Silas had a direct way with women.
“Hallo,” said he, with the sunny smile of old acquaintanceship, “where haveyousprung from?”
Phyl was startled for a moment, then almost instantly she came in touch with the vein and mood and mind of the other and laughed.
“I came with Miss Pinckney,” said she.
“You’re not from Charleston?”
“Yes, indeed I am.”
“But where do you live in Charleston? I’ve never seen you and I know every—besides you don’t look as if you belonged to Charleston—I don’t believe you’ve come from there.”
“Then where do you think I’ve come from?”
“I don’t know,” said Silas laughing, “but it doesn’t matter as long as you’re here, does it? ’Scuse my fooling, won’t you—I wouldn’t with a stranger, but you don’t seem a stranger somehow—though I don’t know your name.”
“Phylice Berknowles,” said Phyl, glancing up athim and half wondering how it was that, despite his good looks, his manhood, and their total unacquaintanceship, she felt as little constrained in his presence as though he were a boy.
“And my name is Silas Grangerson. Say, is Maria Pinckney in the house with father?”
“She is.”
“Talking over old times, I s’pose?” said Silas.
“Yes!”
“I can hear them. It’s always the same when they get together—and I suppose you got sick of it and came out?”
“No, they put me out—asked me wouldn’t I like to look at the garden.”
Already she had banded herself with him in mild opposition to the elders.
“Great—Jerusalem. They’re just like a pair of old horses wanting to be left quiet and rub their nose-bags together. Look at the garden! I can hear them—come on and look at the horses.”
He led the way to a loose box and opened the upper door.
“That’s Flying Fox, she’s mine, the fastest trotter in the Carolinas—you know anything about horses?”
“Rather!”
“I thought you did, somehow. Mind! she doesn’t take to strangers. Mind! she bites like an alligator.”
“Not me,” said Phyl, fondling the lovely but fleering-eyed head protruding above the lower door.
“So she doesn’t,” said Silas admiringly, “she’staken to you—well, I don’t blame her. Here’s John Barleycorn,” opening another door, “own brother to the Fox, he’s Pap’s; he’s a bolter, and kicks like a duck gun. She’s got all her vice at one end of her and he at the other, match pair.” He whistled between his teeth as he put up the bars, then he shewed other horses, Phyl watching his every movement, and wondering what it was that gave pleasure to her in watching. Silas moved, or seemed to move, absolutely without effort, and his slim brown hands touched everything delicately, as though they were touching fragile porcelain, yet those same hands could bend an iron bar, or rein in John Barleycorn even when the bit was between the said J. B.’s teeth.
“That’s the horses,” said he, flinging open a coach-house door, “and that’s the shandrydan the governor still drives in when he goes to Charleston. Look at it. It was made in the forties, and you should see it with a darkey on the box and Pap inside, and all his luggage behind, and he going off to Charleston, and the nigger children running after it.”
Phyl inspected the mustard-yellow vehicle. Then he closed the door on it, put up the bar, and, the business of showing things over, did a little double shuffle as though Phyl were not present, or as though she were a boy friend and not a strange young woman.
“Say, do you like poetry?” said he, breaking off and seeming suddenly to remember her presence.
“No,” said Phyl. “At least—”
“Well, here’s some.
“‘There was an old hen and she had a wooden leg, She went to the barn and she laid a wooden egg, She laid it right down by the barn—don’t you think.’”
“‘There was an old hen and she had a wooden leg, She went to the barn and she laid a wooden egg, She laid it right down by the barn—don’t you think.’”
“Well?” said she, laughing.
“‘It’s just about time for another little drink—’ some sense in poetry like that, isn’t there? But all the drinks are in the house and I don’t want to go in. I’m hiding from Pap. Last night when he was ratty with rheumatism, he let out at me, saying the young people weren’t any good, saying Maria Pinckney was the only person he knew with sense in her head, called me a name because I poured him out a dose of liniment instead of medicine, by mistake—though he didn’t swallow it—and wished Maria was here. So I just sent Jake, the page boy, off with a wire to her; didn’t tell any one, just sent it. Come on and look at the garden—you’ve got to look at the garden, you know.”
He led the way past the barn to a farmyard, where hens were clucking and scratching and scraping in the sunshine; the deep double bass grunting of pigs came from the sties, by the low wall across which one could see the country stretching far away, the cotton fields, the woods, all hazed by the warmth of the afternoon.
“Let’s sit down and look at the garden,” said he, pointing to a huge log by the near wall—“and aren’t the convolvuluses beautiful?”
“Beautiful,” said Phyl, falling into the vein of the other. “And listen to the roses.”
“They grunt like that because it’s near dinnertime—they’re pretty much like humans.” He took a cigarette case from his pocket and a cigarette from the case.
“You don’t mind smoking, do you?”
“Not a bit.”
“Have one?”
“I daren’t.”
“Maria Pinckney won’t know.”
“It’s not her—I smoked one once and it made me sick.”
“Well, try another—I won’t look if you are.”
“They’ll—she’ll smell it.”
“Not she, you can eat some parsley, that takes the smell away.”
“Oh, I don’t mind telling her—it’s only—well, there.”
She took a cigarette and he lit it for her.
“Blow it through your nose,” he commanded, “that’s the way. Now let’s pretend we’re two old darkies sitting on a log, you push against me and I’ll push against you, you’re Jim and I’m Uncle Joseph. ‘What yo’ crowding me for, Jim,’” he squeezed up gently against her, and Phyl jumped to her feet.
He glanced up at her, sideways, laughing, and for the life of her she could not be angry.
“Don’t you think we’d better go and look at the garden?” said she.
“In a minute, sit down again. I won’t knock against you. It was only my fun. We’ll pretend I’m Pap, and you’re Maria Pinckney, if you like. You’ve let your cigarette go out.”
“So I have.”
“You can light it from mine.”
Phyl hesitated and was lost.
It was the nearest thing to a kiss, and as she drew back with the lighted cigarette between her lips, she felt a not unpleasant sense of wickedness, such as the virtuous boy feels when led to adventure by the bad boy. Sitting on a log, smoking cigarettes, talking familiarly with a stranger, taking a light from him in such a fashion with her face so close to his that his eyes— They smoked in silence for a moment.
Then Silas spoke:
“Do you ever feel lonesome?” said he.
“Awfully—sometimes.”
“So do I.”
Silence for a moment. Then:
“I go off to Charleston when I feel like that—once in a fortnight or so—Where do you live in Charleston?”
“I live with Miss Pinckney—I thought you knew.”
“You didn’t say that. You only said you came with her.”
“Well, I live with her at Vernons. I’m Irish, y’ know. My—my father died in Charleston, and I came from Ireland to live with Miss Pinckney. Mr. Richard Pinckney is my guardian.”
“Your which? Dick Pinckney your guardian! Why, he’s not older than I am—that fellow your guardian—why, he wears a flannel petticoat.”
“He doesn’t,” cried Phyl, flinging away the cigarette, which had become noxious, and roused tosudden anger by the slighting tone of the other. “What do you mean by saying such a thing?”
“Oh, I only meant that he’s too awfully proper for this life. He goes to Charleston races, but never backs a horse, scarcely, and one Mint Julep would make him see two crows. He’s a sort of distant relation of ours.”
Phyl was silent. She resented his criticism of her friend, and just in this moment the something mad and harum scarum in the character of Silas seemed shown up to her with electrical effect. Criticism is a most dangerous thing to indulge in, unless anonymously in the pages of a journal, for the right to criticise has to be made good in the mind of the audience, unless the audience is hostile to the criticised.
Then she said: “I don’t know anything about Mint Juleps or race courses, but I do know that Mr. Pinckney has been—is—is my friend, and I’d rather not talk about him, if you please.”
“Now, you’re huffed,” cried Silas exultingly, as though he had scored a point at some game.
“I’m not.”
“You are—you’ve flushed.”
Phyl turned pale, a deadly sign.
“I’d never dream of getting out of temper withyou,” said she.
It was his turn to flush. You might have struck Silas Grangerson without upsetting his balance, but the slightest suspicion of a sneer raised all the devil in him. Had Phyl been a man he would haveknocked him off the log. He cast the stump of his cigarette on the ground and pounded it with his heel. Had there been anything breakable within reach he would have broken it. Her anger with him vanished and she laughed.
“You’ve flushed now,” said she.
CHAPTER III
When they came round to the front of the house they found Colonel Grangerson and Miss Pinckney coming down the steps.
They were going to the garden in search of Phyl.
“We’ve been looking at the horses,” said Silas, after he had greeted Miss Pinckney. “No, sir, I did not leave any of the doors open, but I’ve been looking for Sam with a blacksnake whip to liven him up. He left the grey without grooming after she was brought in this morning, and I was rubbing her down myself when this lady came into the yard.”
“I’ll skin that nigger,” cried the Colonel.
“I reckon I’ll save you that trouble, sir,” replied the son, as they turned garden-wards.
Silas had little use for “r’s” and said “suh” for “sir” and “wah” for “war.” He was also quite a different person in the presence of his father from what he was when alone or in the presence of strangers.
In the presence of his father, past generations spoke in his every word and action, he became sedate, deferential, leisurely. It was not fear of the elder man that caused this change, it was reflection from him.
The shadows were long in the garden, and awayacross the pastures, glimpsed beyond the cypress hedge and bordering the cotton fields, the pond-shadows cast by the live oaks at noon had become river shadows, flowing eastward; the murmur of bees filled the air like a haze of sound, and here and there as they passed a bush coloured flowers detached themselves and became butterflies.
They sat down on a great old stone bench lichened and sun warmed to enjoy the view, and the Colonel talked of tobacco and politics and cotton, including them all in his conversation in the grand patriarchal manner.
Phyl understanding little, and half drowsed by the warmth and the buzzing of the bees and the voice of the speaker, had given herself up to that lazy condition of mind which is the next best thing to sleep, when she was suddenly aroused. She was seated between Miss Pinckney and Silas. Silas had pinched her little finger.
She snatched her hand away, and turned towards him. He was looking away over the pastures; his profile showed nothing but its absolute correctness. Miss Pinckney had noticed nothing, and the Colonel, who had finished with cotton, looking at his watch, declared that it was close on dinner time.
After supper that night, Phyl found herself in the garden. Silas had not appeared at supper; the Colonel had brought down a book of old photographs, photographs of people and places dead or changed, and he and Miss Pinckney became so absorbed in them that they had little thought for the girl.
She went out to look at the moon, and it wasworth looking at, rising like a honey coloured shield above the belt of the eastern woods.
The whole world was filled with the moonlight, warm tinted, and ghostly as the light of vanished days, white moths were flitting above the bushes, and on the almost windless air the voice of an owl came across the cotton fields.
Phyl reached the seat where they had all sat that afternoon. It was still warm from the all-day sunshine, and she sat down to rest and listen.
The owl had ceased crying, and through the league wide silence faint sounds far and near told of the life moving and thrilling beneath the night; the boom of a beetle, voices from the distant road, and now and then a whisper of wind rising and dying out across the garden and the trees.
A faint sound came from behind the seat, and before Phyl could turn two warm hands covered her eyes.
She plucked them away and stood up.
“Iwishyou wouldn’t do things like that,” she cried. “Howdareyou?”
“I couldn’t help it,” replied the other, “you looked so comfortable. I didn’t mean to startle you. I thought you must have heard me coming across the grass.”
“I didn’t—and you shouldn’t have done it.”
“Well, I’m sorry. There, I’ve apologised, make friends.”
“There is nothing to make friends about,” she replied stiffly. “No, I don’t want to shake hands—I’m not angry, let us go into the house.”
“Don’t,” said Silas imploringly. “He and she are sitting over that old album, comparing notes. I saw them through the window, that’s why I came to look for you in the garden. Do you know, I believe the Governor was gone once on Maria, years ago, but they never got married. He married my mother instead.”
Phyl forgot her resentment.
The faint idea that Colonel Grangerson and Maria Pinckney had perhaps been more than friends in long gone days, had strayed across her mind, to be dismissed as a fancy. It interested her to find Silas confirming it.
“Of course, I can’t say for certain,” he went on, lighting a cigarette. “I only judge by the way they go on when they’re together, and the way he talks of her. Say, do you ever want to grow old?”
“No, I don’t—ever.”
“Neither do I. I hope I’ll be kicked to death by a horse, or drowned or shot before I’m forty. I don’t want to die in any beds with doctors round me. I reckon if I’m ever like that I’ll drink the liniment instead of the medicine—same as I nearly drenched Pap—and go to heaven with a red label for my ticket. Sit down for a while and let’s talk.”
“No, I don’t care to sit down.”
“I won’t touch you. I promise.”
Phyl hesitated a moment and then sat down. She was not afraid of Silas in the least, but his tricks of an overgrown boy did not please her; it seemed to her sometimes as though his irresponsibility was less an inheritance from youth, than from some ancestorill-balanced to the point of craziness. If any other man of his age had acted and spoken to her as he had done she would have smacked his face, but Silas was Silas, and his good looks and seeming innocence, and something really charming that lay away at the back of his character and gave colour to this personality, managed, somehow, to condone his queerness of conduct.
All the same she sat a foot away from him on the seat, and kept her hands folded on her lap.
Silas sat for a while smoking in silence, then he spoke.
“Where’s this you said you came from?”
“Ireland.”
“You don’t talk like a Paddy a bit.”
“Don’t I?”
“Not a bit, nor look like one.”
“Have you seen many Irish people?”
“No, mostly in pictures—comic papers, you know, likePuck.”
“I think it’s a shame,” broke out Phyl. “People are always making fun of the Irish, drawing them like monkeys with great upper lips—but it’s only ignorant people who never travel who think of them like that.”
“That’s so, I expect,” replied Silas, either unconscious of the dig at himself or undesirous of a quarrel, “and the next few dollars I have to spare I’ll go to Ireland. I’m crazy now to see it.”
“What’s made you crazy to see it?”
“Because it’s the place you come from.”
Phyl sniffed.
“I hate compliments.”
“I wasn’t complimenting you, I was complimenting Ireland,” said Silas sweetly. She was silent, a white moth passing close to her held her gaze for a moment, then it flitted away across the bushes.
“Let’s forget Ireland for a moment,” said she, “and talk of Charleston. Do you know many people there?”
“I know most every one. The Pinckneys and Calhouns and Tredegars and Revenalls and—”
“Rhetts.”
“Yes—but there are a dozen Rhetts; same as there’s half a hundred Pinckneys and Calhouns, families, I mean. What’s his name—Richard Pinckney, your guardian, is engaged to a Rhett.”
“He is not.”
“He is—Venetia Frances, the one that lives in Legare Street. Why, I’ve seen them canoodling often, and every one says they are engaged.”
“Well, he’s not, or Miss Pinckney would have told me.”
“Oh, she’s blind. I tell you he is, and she’ll be your guardian when he’s married her.”
“That she won’t,” said Phyl.
“How’ll you help it? A man and wife are one.”
“He’s only guardian of my property.”
“Well, Heaven help your property when she gets a finger in the pie; she’ll spend it on hats—sure.”
This outrageous statement, uttered with a laugh, left Phyl cold. The statement about Frances Rhett had disturbed her, she could not tell exactly why, for it was none of her business whom Pinckney mightchoose to marry—still—Frances Rhett! It was almost as though an antagonism had existed between them since that afternoon when she had seen Frances first, driving in the car with Richard Pinckney.
She rose to her feet and Silas rose also, throwing away the end of his cigarette.
“Going into the house?” said he.
“Yes!”
“Well, you’ll be off to-morrow morning, and I won’t see you, for I have to be out early, but I’ll see you in Charleston, though not at Vernons maybe, for I’m not in love with Richard Pinckney, and I don’t care much for visiting his house. But I’ll see you somewhere, sure.”
“Good-bye,” said she holding out her hand. He took it, held it, and then, all of a sudden, she found herself in his arms.
Helpless as a child, in his arms and smothered with kisses. He kissed her on the mouth, on the forehead, on the chin, and with a last kiss on the mouth that made her feel as though her life were going from her, he vanished. Vanished amidst the bushes whilst she stood, tottering, dazed, breathless, outraged, yet—in some extraordinary way not angry. Pulled between tears and laughter, resentment, and a strange new feeling suddenly born in her from his burning lips, and the strength that had held her for a moment to itself.
In one moment, and as though with the stroke of a sword, Silas had cut down the barrier that had divided her from the reality of things. He had kissed away her childhood.
Then throwing out her hands as though pushing away some presence that was surrounding her, she ran to the house. In the hall she sat down for a moment to recover herself before going into the drawing room, where Miss Pinckney and the Colonel were closing the book which held for them the people and the places they had known in youth, and between its leaves who knows what old remembrances, like the withered flower that has once formed part of a summer’s day.
CHAPTER IV
They started at ten o’clock next morning for Charleston, the Colonel standing on the house steps and waving his hand to them as they drove off. Silas was nowhere to be seen, he had gone out before breakfast, so the butler said, and had not returned. Miss Pinckney resented this casual treatment.
“He ought to have been here to bid us good-bye,” said she, as they cleared the avenue. “He’s got the name for being a mad creature, but even mad creatures may show common courtesy. I’m sure I don’t know where he gets his manners from unless it’s his mother’s lot, same place as he got his good looks.”
“Why do you say he’s mad?” asked Phyl.
“Because he is. Not exactly mad, maybe, but eccentric, he swum Charleston harbour with his clothes on because some one dared him, and was nearly drowned with the tide coming in or going out, I forget which; and another day he got on the engine at Charleston station and started the train, drove it too, till they managed to climb over the top of the carriages or something and stop him—at least that’s the story. He’ll come to a bad end, that boy, unless he mends his ways. Lots of people say he’s got good in him. So he has, perhaps, but it’s justthat sort that come to the worst end, unless the good manages to fight the bad and get it under in time.”
Phyl said nothing. Her mind was disturbed. She had slept scarcely at all during the night, and her feelings towards Silas Grangerson, now that she was beyond his reach, were alternating in the strangest way between attraction and repulsion.
They would have repelled the thought of him entirely but for the instinctive recognition of the fact that his conduct had been the result of impulse, the impulse of a child, ill governed, and accustomed to seize what it wanted. Added to that was the fact of his entire naturalness. From the moment of their first meeting he had talked to her as though they were old acquaintances. Unless when talking to his father, everything in his manner, tone, conversation was free, unfettered by convention, fresh, if at times startling. This was his great charm, and at the same time his great defect, for it revealed his want of qualities no less than his qualities.
Do what she could she was unable to escape from the incident of last night, it was as though those strong arms had not quite released their hold upon her, as though Pan had broken from the bushes, shown her by his magic things she had never dreamed of, and vanished.
It was nearly two o’clock when they reached Vernons. Richard Pinckney was at home, and at the sight of him Phyl’s heart went out towards him. Clean, well groomed, honest, kindly, he was like a breath of fresh sea air after breathing tropical swamp atmosphere.
Strange to say Miss Pinckney seemed to feel somewhat the same.
“Yes, we’re back,” said she, as they passed into the dining-room where some refreshments were awaiting them, “and glad I am to be back. Vernons smells good after Grangersons. Oh, dear me, what is it that clings to that place? It’s like opening an old trunk that’s been shut for years. I told Seth Grangerson, right out flat, he ought to get away from there into the world somewhere, but there he sits clinging to his rheumatism and the past. I declare I nearly cried last night as he was showing me all those old pictures.”
“He’s not very ill then,” said Richard.
“Ill! Not he. It was that fool Silas sent the telegram. Just an attack of rheumatism.”
She went upstairs to change and the two young people went into the garden, where Richard Pinckney was having some alterations done.
On the day Phyl’s hair went up it seemed to Richard that a new person had come to live with them. Phyl had suddenly turned into a young woman—and such a young woman! He had never considered her looks before, to young men of his age and temperament girls in pigtails are, as far as the manhood in them is concerned, little more and sometimes less than things. But Phyl with her hair up was not to be denied, and had he not been philandering after Frances Rhett, and had Phyl been a total stranger suddenly seen, it is quite possible that a far warmer feeling than admiration might have been the result. As it was she formed a new interest in life.
He showed her the alterations he was making, slight enough and causing little change in the general plan of the garden.
“I scarcely like doing anything,” said he, “but that new walk will be no end of an improvement, and it will save that bit of grass which is being trodden to death by people crossing it, then there’s all those bushes by the gate, they’re going, those behind the tree,—a little space there will make all the difference in the world.”
“Behind the magnolia?”
“Yes.”
“I wish you wouldn’t,” said Phyl.
“Why?”
“Because they have been there always and—well, look!”
She led the way behind the tree, pushed the bushes aside and disclosed the seat.
She no longer felt that she was betraying a secret. Her experience at Grangersons had in some way made Vernons seem to her now really her home, and Richard Pinckney closer to her in relationship.
“Why, how did you know that was there?” said Richard. “I’ve never seen it.”
“Juliet Mascarene used to sit there with—with some one she was in love with. I found some of her old letters and they told about it—see, it’s a little arbour, used to be, though it’s all so overgrown now.”
“Juliet,” said he. “That was the girl who died. I have heard Aunt Maria talk about her and shekeeps her room just as it used to be. Who was the somebody?”
“It was a Mr. Rupert Pinckney.”
“I knew there was a love story of some sort connected with her, but I never worried about the details. So they used to come and sit here.”
“Yes, he’d come to the gate at night and she’d meet him. Her people did not want her to marry him and so they had to meet in secret.”
“That was a long time ago.”
“Before you were born,” said Phyl.
He looked at her.
“Aunt is always saying how like you are to her,” said he, “but she’s mad on family likenesses, and I never thought of it. It may be a want in me but I’ve never taken much interest in dead relatives; but somehow, finding this little place tucked away here gives one a jog. It’s like finding a nest in a tree. How long have you known of it?”
“Oh, some time. I found a bundle of her old letters—” she paused. Richard Pinckney had taken his place on the little seat, just as one sits down in an armchair to see if it is comfortable, and was leaning back amidst the bush branches.
“This is all right,” said he, “sit down, there’s lots of room—you found her letter, tell us all about it.”
Phyl sat down and told the little story. It seemed to interest him.
“The Pinckneys lost money,” said he, “and that’s why the old Mascarene birds were set against her marrying him, I suppose. Makes one wild that sort of thing. What right have people to interfere?”
“Money seems everything in this world,” said Phyl.
“It’s not—it seems to be, but it’s not. Money can’t buy happiness after one is grown up. You remember I told you that over in Ireland; when candy and fishing rods mean happiness money is all right—after that money is useful enough, but it’s the making of it and not the spending it that counts,—that and a lot of things that have nothing to do with money. If the Mascarenes hadn’t been fools they’d have seen that a poor man with kick in him—and the Pinckneys always had that—was as good as a rich man, and those two might have got married.”
“No,” said Phyl, “they never could have got married, he had to die. He was killed, you know, at the beginning of the war.”
“You’re a fatalist.”
“Well, things happen.”
“Yes, but you can stop them happening very often.”
“How?”
“Just by willing it.”
“Yes,” said Phyl meditatively, “but how are you to use your will against what comes unexpectedly. Now that telegram yesterday morning took me to Grangersons with Miss Pinckney. Suppose—suppose I had broken my leg or, say, fallen into a well there and got drowned—that would have been Fate.”
“No,” said Pinckney, “carelessness, the telegram would not have drowned you, but your carelessness in going too close to the well.”
“Suppose,” said Phyl, “instead of that, Mr. Silas Grangerson had shot me by accident with a gun—the telegram would have brought me to that without any carelessness of mine.”
“No, it couldn’t,” said Pinckney lightly, “it would still have been your own fault for going near such a hare-brained scamp. Oh, I’m only joking, what I really mean is that nine times out of ten the thing people call Fate is nothing more than want of foresight.”
“And the tenth time it is Fate,” said Phyl rising.
CHAPTER V
Next morning brought Phyl a letter. It came by the early post, so that she got it in her bedroom before coming down.
Phyl had few correspondents and she looked at the envelope curiously before opening it.
“Miss Berknowles,
at Vernons. Charleston.”
ran the address written in a large, boyish, yet individual hand. She knew at once and by instinct whom it was from.
“I’m coming to Charleston in a day or two, and I want to see you,” ran the letter which had neither address nor date, “but I’m not coming to Pinckneys. I’ll be about town and sure to find you somewhere. I can’t get you out of my mind since last night. Tried to, but can’t.”
That was all. Phyl put the letter back in its envelope. She was not angry, she was disturbed. There was an assurance about Silas Grangerson daunting in its simplicity and directness. Something that raised opposition to him in her heart, yet paralysed it. Instinct told her to avoid him, to drive him from her mind, ay and something more than instinct. The spirit of Vernons, the calm sweet soul of the place, that seemed to hold the past and the present, Juliet and herself, peace and happinesswith the promise of all good things in the future, this spirit rose up against Silas Grangerson as though he were the antagonist to happiness and peace, Juliet and herself, the present and the past.
Rose up, without prevailing entirely.
Silas had impressed himself upon her mind in such a manner that she could not free herself from the impression. Young as she was, with the terribly clear perception of the male character which all women possess in different degrees, she recognised that Silas was dangerous to that logical and equitable state of existence we call happiness, not on account of his wildness or his eccentricities, but because of some want inherent in his nature, something that spoke vaguely in his words and his actions, in his handsome face and in his careless and graceful manner.
All the same she could not free herself from the impression he had made upon her, she could not drive him from her mind, he had in some way paralysed her volition, called forces to his aid from some unknown part of her nature, perhaps with those kisses which she still felt upon the very face of her soul.
She came down to breakfast, and afterwards finding herself alone with Miss Pinckney, she took Silas’s letter from her pocket and handed it to her. She had been debating in her own mind all breakfast time as to whether she ought to show the letter; the struggle had been between her instinct to do the right thing, and a powerful antagonism to this instinct which was a new thing in her.
The latter won.
And then, lo and behold, when she found herself alone with Miss Pinckney in the sunlit breakfast room, almost against her will and just as though her hand had moved of its own volition, she put it in her pocket and produced the letter.
Miss Pinckney read it.
“Well, of all the crazy creatures!” said she. “Why, he has only met you once. He’s mad! No, he isn’t—he’s a Grangerson. I know them.”
She stopped short and re-read the letter, turned it about and then laid it down.
“Just as if he’d known you for years. And you scarcely spoke to him. Did hesayanything to you as if he cared for you?”
“No, he didn’t,” said Phyl quite truthfully.
“Did he look at you as if he cared for you?”
“No,” replied the other, dreading another question. But Miss Pinckney did not put it. She could not conceive a man kissing a girl who had never betrayed his feelings for her by word or glance.
“Well, it gets me. It does indeed; acting like a dumb creature and then writing this— Do you care forhim?”
“I—I—no—you see, I don’t know him—much.”
“Well, he seems to know you pretty well, there’s no doubt about one thing, Silas Grangerson can make up his mind pretty quick. He won’t come to Vernons, won’t he? Well, maybe it’s better for him not, for I’ve no patience with oddities. That’s what’s wrong with him, he’s an oddity, and it’s those sort of people make the trouble in life—they’reworse than whisky and cards for bringing unhappiness. Years and years and years ago—I’m telling you this though I’ve never told it to any one else—Seth Grangerson, Silas’s father, seemed to care for me, not much, still he seemed to care. Then one day all at once he came into the room where I was, through the window, and told me to come off and get married to him, wanted me to go away right off. I was a fool in those days, but not all a fool, and when he tried to put his arm round my waist, my hand went up and smacked his face.
“We are good enough friends now, but I’ve often thought of what I escaped by not marrying him. You saw him and the life he’s leading at that out of the way place, but you didn’t see his obstinacy and his queerness, and Silas is ten times worse, more crazy—well, there, you’re warned—but mind you I don’t want to be meddling. I’ve seen so many carefully prepared marriages turn out pure miseries, and so many crazy matches turn out happily, that I’m more than cautious in giving advice. Seems to me that people before they are married are quite different creatures to what they turn out after they are married.”
“But I don’t want to get married,” said Phyl.
“No, but, seems to me, Silas does,” replied the other.
CHAPTER VI
One bright morning three days later, as Phyl was crossing Meeting Street near the Charleston Hotel, whom should she meet but Silas.
Silas in town get up, quite a different looking individual from the Silas of Grangersons, dressed in perfectly fitting light grey tweed, a figure almost condoning one for the use of that old-time, half-discredited word “Elegant.”
“There you are,” said Silas, his face lighting up. “I thought it wouldn’t be long before I met you. Meeting Street is like a rabbit run, and I reckon the whole of Charleston passes through it twice a day.”
His manner was genuinely frank and open, and he seemed to have completely forgotten the incident of the kissing. Phyl said nothing for a moment; she felt put out, angry at having been caught like a rabbit, and not over pleased at being compared to one.
Then she spoke freezingly enough:
“I don’t know much about the habits of Charleston; you will not findmehere every day. I have only been out twice here alone and—I’m in a hurry.”
“Why, what’s the matter with you?” cried Silas in a voice of astonishment.
“Nothing.”
“But there is, you’re not angry with me, are you?”
“Not in the least,” replied the other, quite determined to avoid being drawn into explanations.
“Well, that’s all right. You don’t mind my walking with you a bit?”
“No!”
“I only came here last night, and I’m putting up at the Charleston,” said Silas. “Of course there are a lot of friends I could stay with but I always prefer being free; one is never quite free in another person’s house; for one thing you can’t order the servants about, though, upon my word, now-a-days one can’t do that, much, anywhere.”
“I suppose not,” said Phyl.
The fact was being borne in upon her that Silas in town was a different person from Silas in the country, or seemed so; more sedate and more conventional. She also noticed as they walked along that he was saluted by a great many people, and also, before she had done with him that morning, she noticed that the leery, impudent looking, coloured folk seemed to come under a blight as they passed him, giving him the wall and yards to spare. It was as though the impersonification of the blacksnake whip were walking with her as well as a most notoriously dangerous man, a man who would strike another down, white or coloured, for a glance, not to say a word.
She had come out on business, commissioned by Miss Pinckney to purchase a ball of magenta Berlin wool. Miss Pinckney still knitted antimacassars, and the construction of antimacassars is impossiblewithout Berlin wool—that obsolete form of German Frightfulness.
She bestowed the things on poor folk to brighten their homes.
When Phyl went into the store to buy the wool Silas waited outside, and when she came out they walked down the street together.
She had intended returning straight home after making her purchase but they were walking now not towards Vernons but towards the Battery.
“What do you do with yourself all day?” asked Silas, suddenly breaking silence.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she replied, “nothing much—we go out for drives.”
“In that old basket carriage thing?”
“With Miss Pinckney.”
“I know, I’ve seen her often—what else do you do?”
“Oh, I read.”
“What do you read?”
“Books.”
“Doesn’t Pinckney ever take you out?”
“No, I don’t go out much with Mr. Pinckney; you see, he’s generally so busy.”
Silas sniffed. They had reached the Battery and were standing looking over the blue water of the harbour. The day was perfect, dreamy, heavenly, warm and filled with sea scents and harbour sounds; scarcely a breath of wind stirred across the water where a three-master was being towed to her moorings by a tug.
“She’s coming up to the wharves,” said Silas.“They steer by the spire of St. Philips, the line between there and Fort Sumpter is all deep water. How’d you like to be a sailor?”
“Wouldn’t mind,” said Phyl.
“How’d you like to take a boat—I mean a decent sized fishing yawl and go off round the world, or even down Florida way? Florida’s fine, you don’t know Florida, it’s got two coasts and it’s hard to tell which is the best. From Indian River right round and up to Cedar Keys there’s all sorts of fishing, and you can camp out on the reefs; one cooks one’s own food and you can swim all day. There’s tarpon and barracuda and sword fish, and nights when there’s a moon you could see to read a book.”
“How jolly!”
“Let’s go there?”
“How do you mean?”
“Oh, just you and I. I’m fed up with everything. We could have a boatman to help sail and steer.”
He spoke lightly and laughingly, and without much enthusiasm and as though he were talking to some one of his own sex, and Phyl, not knowing how to take him, said nothing.
He went on, his tone growing warmer.
“I’m not joking, I’m dead sick of Grangersons and Charleston, and I reckon you are too—aren’t you?”
“No.”
“You may think so, but you are, all the same, without knowing it.”
“I think you are talking nonsense,” said Phyl hurriedly,fighting against a deadly sort of paralysis of mind such as one may suppose comes upon the mind of a bird under the spell of a serpent.
“No one could be kinder than Miss Pinckney, and so no one could be happier than I am. I love Vernons.”
“All the same,” said Silas, “you are not really alive there. It’s the life of a cabbage, must be, there’s only you and Maria and—Pinckney. Maria is a decent old sort but she’s only a woman, and as for Pinckney—he doesn’t care for you.”
This statement suddenly brought Phyl to herself. It went through her like a knife. She had ceased to think of Richard Pinckney in any way but as a friend. At one time, during the first couple of days at Vernons, her heart had moved mysteriously towards him; the way he had connected himself through Prue’s message with the love story of Juliet had drawn her towards him, but that spell had snapped; she was conscious only of friendliness towards Richard Pinckney. Why, then, this sudden pain caused by Silas’s words?
“How do you know?” she flashed out. “What right have you to dare—” She stopped.
The blaze of her anger seemed to Silas evidence that she cared for Pinckney.
“You’re in love with him,” said he, flying out. The bald and brutal statement took Phyl’s breath from her. She turned on him, saw the anger in his face, and then—turned away.
His state of mind condoned his words. To awoman a blow received from the passion she has roused is a rude sort of compliment, unlike other compliments it is absolutely honest.
“I am in love with no one,” said she; “you have no right to say such things—no right at all—they are insulting.”
A gull, white as snow, came flitting by and wheeled out away over the harbour; as her eyes followed it he stood looking at her, his anger gone, but his mind only half convinced by her feeble words.
“I didn’t mean to insult you,” he said; “don’t let us quarrel. When I’m in a temper I don’t know what I say or do—that’s the truth. I want to have you all for myself, have ever since the first moment I saw you over there at Grangersons.”
“Don’t,” said Phyl. “I can’t listen to you if you talk like that—Please don’t.”
“Very well,” said Silas.
The quick change that was one of his characteristics showed itself in his altered voice. His was a mind that seemed always in ambush, darting out on predatory expeditions and then vanishing back into obscurity.
They turned away from the sea front and began to retrace their steps, silently at first, and then little by little falling into ordinary conversation again as though nothing had happened.
Silas knew every corner of Charleston, and the history of every corner, and when he chose he could make his knowledge interesting. In this mood he was a pleasant companion, and Phyl, her recent experiencealmost forgotten, let herself be led and instructed, not knowing that this armistice was the equivalent of a defeat.
She had already drawn much closer to him in mind, this companionship and quiet conversation was a more sure and deadly thing than any kisses or wild words. It would linger in her mind warm and quietly. Put in a woman’s mind a pleasant recollection of yourself and you have established a force whose activity may seem small, but is in reality great, because of its permanency.
They did not take a direct line in the direction of Vernons, and so presently found themselves in front of St. Michael’s. The gate of the cemetery was open and they wandered in.
The place was deserted, save by the birds, and the air perfumed by all manner of Southern growing things. Sun, shadow, silence, and that strange peace which hangs over the homes of the dead, all were here, ringed in by the old walls and the faint murmur of the living city beyond.
They walked along the paths, looking at the tombstones, and pausing to read the inscriptions, Phyl gradually entering into that state of mind wherein reality and material things fall out of perspective. The fragrant elusive poetry of death, which can speak in the songs of birds and the scent of flowers in the sunshine and the shade of trees more clearly than in the voice of man, was speaking to her now.
All these people here lying, all these names here inscribed, all these were the representatives of daysonce bright and now forgotten, love once sweet and now unknown.
Then, as though something had led or betrayed her to the place, she paused where the graves lay half shadowed by a magnolia, she read the nearest inscription with a little catch of her breath. Then the further one. They were the graves of Juliet Mascarene and Rupert Pinckney, the dead lovers who had passed from the world almost together, whose bodies lay side by side in the cold bed of earth.
In a moment the spell of the little arbour was around her again, in a moment the pregnant first impression of Vernons had re-seized her, fresh as though the commonplace touch of everyday life had never spoiled it.
It was as though the spirit of Juliet and the spirit of the old house were saying to her “Have you forgotten us?”
Tears welled to her eyes. Silas standing beside her was saying something, she did not know what. She scarcely heard him.
Misinterpreting her silence, unconscious as an animal of her state of mind and the direction of her thoughts, the man at her side moved towards her slightly, seemed to hesitate, and then, suddenly clasping her by the waist kissed her upon the side of the neck.
Phyl straightened like a bow when the string is released. Then she struck him, struck him open handed in the face, so that the sound of the blow might have been heard beyond the wall.
His face blanched so that the mark on it showed up, he took a step back. For a moment Phyl thought he was going to spring upon her. Then he mastered himself, but if murder ever showed itself upon the countenance of man it showed itself in that half second on the countenance of Silas Grangerson.
“You’ll be sorry for that,” said he.
“Don’t speak to me,” said Phyl. “You are horrible—bad—wicked—I will tell Richard Pinckney.”
“Do,” said Silas. “Tell him also I’ll be even with him yet. You’re in love with him, that’s what’s the matter with you—well, wait.”
He turned on his heel and walked off. He did not look back once. As he vanished from sight Phyl clasped her hands together.
It was as though she had suddenly been shown the real Silas—or rather the something light and evil and dangerous, the something inscrutable and allied to insanity that inhabited his mind.
She was not thinking of herself, she was thinking of Richard Pinckney. She felt that she had been the unconscious means of releasing against him an evil force. A force that might injure or destroy him.