CHAPTER IV
Phyl awoke to the early morning sunlight and the sounds of Charleston.
The chimes of St. Michael’s were striking six and through the summery sunlit air carried by the sea wind stirring the curtains came the cries of the streets and the rumbling of early morning carts.
Oh, those negro cries! the cry of the crab-seller, the orange vendor, the man who sells “monkey meat” dolorous, long drawn out, lazy, you do not know the South till you have heard them.
The sound of a mat being shaken and beaten on the piazza, adjoining that on which her window opened came now, and two voices in dispute.
“Mistress Pinckney she told me to tell you—she mos’ sholey did.”
“Go wash yo’ face, yo’ coloured trash, cummin’ here wid yo’ orders—skip out o’ my piazza—’clar’ to goodness I dunno what’s cummin’ to niggers dese days.”
Then Miss Pinckney’s voice as from an upper window:
“Dinah! Seth! what’s that I hear? Get on with your work the pair of you and stop your chattering. You hear me?”
When Phyl came down Richard Pinckney was inthe garden smoking a cigarette and gathering some carnations.
“They’re for aunt,” said he, “to propitiate her for my being late last night. I wasn’t in till one. I’m worse even than you, you see, and the next time you are out till eleven and I let you in and grumble at you, you can hit back. Have a flower.”
He gave her the finest in his bunch and Phyl put it in her belt. If she had any doubt as to the sincerity of his welcome his manner this morning ought to have set her mind at rest.
She stood looking at him as he tied the stalks of the flowers together and he was worth looking at, a fresh, bright figure, the very incarnation of youth and health and one might almost say innocence. Clear eyed, well-groomed, good to look upon.
“I generally pick a flower and put it on her plate,” said he, “but this morning she shall have a whole bunch—hope you slept all right?”
“Rather,” said Phyl, “I never sleep much the first night in a new place—but somehow—oh, I don’t know how to express it—but nothing here seems new.”
“Nothing is,” said he laughing, “it’s all as old as the hills—you like it, don’t you?”
“It’s not a question of liking—of course I like it, who could help liking it—it’s more than that. It’s a feeling I have that I will either love it or hate it, and I don’t know which yet, all sorts of things come back to me here, you see, my mother knew the place—do people remember what their mothers and fathers knew, I wonder? But, if you understoodme, it’s not so much remembering as feeling. All yesterday it seemed to me that I had only to turn some corner and come upon something waiting for me, something I knew quite well, and the smells and sounds and things are always reminding me of something—you know how it is when you have forgotten a name and when it’s lying just at the back of your mind—that’s how I feel here, about nearly everything—strange, isn’t it?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said the practical Pinckney. “This place is awfully English for one thing, sure to remind you of a lot of things in Ireland and England, and then there’s of course the fact that you are partly American, but I don’t see why you should ever hate it.”
“Indeed, I didn’t mean that,” said she flushing up at the thought that in trying to express herself she had made such a blunder. “I meant—I meant, that this something about the place that is always reminding me of itself might make me hateit.”
“Or love it?”
“Yes, but I can’t explain—the place itself no one could hate, you must have thought me rude.”
“Not a bit—not the least little bit in the world. Well, I believe you’ll come to love it, not hate it.”
“It,” said Phyl. “I don’t know that, because I don’t know what it is—this something that is always peeping round corners at me yet hiding itself.”
“Richard!” came Miss Pinckney’s voice from the piazza where she had just appeared, “smoking cigarettes before breakfast, how often have I told you I won’t have you smoking beforebreakfast—why, God bless my soul, what are you doing with all those carnations?”
He flung the cigarette-end away, but she refused to kiss him on account of the tobacco fumes, though she took the flowers.
Cigarettes, like telephones, automobiles, and the memory of Edgar Allan Poe, formed a subject upon which once started Miss Pinckney was hard to check, and whilst she poured out the tea, she pursued it.
“Dr. Cotton it was who told me, the one who used to live in Tradd Street, he was a relative of Dr. Garden the man that gave his name to that flower they call the gardenia—had it sent him from somewhere in the South, but I’m sure I don’t know where—New Orleans, I think, but it doesn’t matter. I was saying about Dr. Cotton,oldDr. Cotton of Tradd Street, he told me that the truth about young William Pringle’s death was that he was black when he died, from cigarette smoking, black as a crow. Used to smoke before breakfast, used to smoke all day, used to smoke in his sleep, I b’lieve. Couldn’t get rid of the pesky habit and died clinging to it, black as a crow. I can’t abide the things. Your father used to smoke Bull Durham in a corn cob, or a cigar, he’d a’ soon have smoked one of those cigarettes of yours as soon as he’d have been caught doing tatting. Don’t tell me, there’s no manhood in them, it’s just vice in thimble-fulls. I’d much sooner see a man lying healthily under the table once in a way than always half fuddled, and I’d sooner be poisoned out by a green cigar now andthen, than always having that nasty sickly cigarette smell round the place.”
“But good gracious, Aunt, I’m not a cigarette smoker, only once and away and at odd times.”
“I wasn’t talking about you so much as the young men of to-day, and the young women, they’re the worst, for they encourage the others to make fools of themselves, and if they’re not smoking themselves they’re sucking candy. Candy sucking and cigarette smoking is the ruin of the States. Those Rhett girlsliveon candy, and they look it—pasty faces.”
“Why!” said he, “what grudge have you got against the Rhetts now, Aunt—it’s as bad to take a girl’s complexion away as a man’s character—what have the Rhetts been doing to you?”
Miss Pinckney did not seem to hear the question for a moment, then she said, speaking as if to some invisible person:
“That Frances Rhett may be reckoned the belle of Charleston, that’s what I heard old Mr. Outhwaite call her, but she’s a belle I wouldn’t care to have tied round my neck. Belle! She’s no more a belle than I am, there are hundreds of prettier girls between here and the Battery, but she’s one of those sort that have the knack of setting young men against each other and making them fight for her; she’s labelled herself as a prize, which she isn’t. I declare to goodness the world frightens me at times, the way I see fools going about labelled as clever men, and women your grandfathers wouldn’t have cast an eye at going about labelled as beauties. Ido believe if I was to give myself out as a beauty to-morrow I’d have half the young idiots in Charleston after me, believing me.”
“They’re after you already,” said Pinckney, “only yesterday I heard young Reggy Calhoun saying—”
“I know,” said Miss Pinckney, “and I want no more of your impudence. Now take yourself off if you’ve finished your breakfast, for Phyl and I have work to do.”
He got up and went off laughing by way of the piazza and they could hear his cheery voice in the garden talking to the old negro gardener.
Miss Pinckney’s eyes softened. She was fiddling with a spoon and when she spoke she seemed speaking to it, turning it about as if to examine its pattern all the time.
“I don’t know what mothers with boys feel like, but I do want to see that boy safe and married before I go. He’s just the sort to be landed in unhappiness; he is, most surely; well, I don’t know, there’s no use in warning young folk, you may spank ’em for stealing the jam but you can’t spank ’em from fooling with the wrong sort of girl.”
Miss Pinckney had talked the night before of Phyl’s father and had proposed taking her this morning to the Magnolia cemetery to see the grave. She broke off the conversation suddenly as this fact strayed into her mind, and, rising up, invited Phyl to follow her to the kitchen premises where she had orders to give before starting.
“I always look after my own house,” said she,“and always will. Fine ladies nowadays sit in their drawing-rooms and ring their bells for the servants to rob them and they aren’t any more respected. That’s what makes the Charleston negro the impudentest lump of blackness under the sun, that and knowing they’re emancipated. They’ve got to look on themselves as part of the Heavenly Host. Well, I’ll have no emancipated rubbish in my house, and the consequence is I never lose a servant and I never get impudence. They’ll all get a pension when they’re too old to work, and good food and good pay whilst they’re working, and I’ve said to them ‘you’re no more emancipated than I am, we’re all slaves to our duty and the only difference between now and the old days is I can’t sell you—and if you were idle enough to make me want to sell you there’s no one would buy such rubbish nowadays.’ Half the trouble is that people these times don’t know how to talk to coloured folk, and the other half is that they don’t want to talk to them.”
She led the way down passages to the great kitchen, stonebuilt, clean and full of sunlight. The door was open on to the yard and through an open side door one could get a glimpse of the scullery, the great washing up sink, generations old, and worn with use, and above it the drying dresser.
There were no new-fangled cooking inventions at Vernons, everything was done at an open range of the good old fashion still to be found in many an English country house.
Miss Pinckney objected to “baked meat” and thejoints at Vernons were roast, swinging from a clockwork Jack and basted all the time with a long metal ladle.
By the range this morning was seated an old coloured woman engaged in cutting up onions. This was Prue the oldest living thing in Vernons and perhaps in Charleston; she had been kitchen maid before Miss Pinckney was born, then cook, and now, long past work, she was just kept on. Twenty-five years ago she had been offered a pension and a cottage for herself but she refused both. She wanted to die where she was, so she said. So they let her stay, doing odd jobs and bossing the others just as though she were still mistress of the kitchen—as in fact she was. She had become a legend and no one knew her exact age, she was creepin’ close to a hundred, and her memory which carried her back to the slave days was marvellous in its retentiveness.
She had cooked a dinner for Jeff Davis when he was a guest at Vernons, she could still hear the guns of the Civil War, so she said, and the Mascarene family history was her Bible.
She looked down on the Pinckneys as trash beside the Mascarenes, and interlopers, and this attitude and point of view though well known to Miss Pinckney was not in the least resented by her.
But during the last few years this old lady’s intellect had been steadily coming under eclipse; still insisting on doing little jobs in a futile sort of way, silence had been creeping upon her so that sherarely spoke now, and when she did, by chance, her words revealed the fact that her mind was dwelling in the past.
Rachel, the cook, a sturdy coloured woman with her head bound up in an isabelle-coloured handkerchief was standing by the kitchen table on which she was resting the fore-finger of her left hand, whilst with the right she was turning over some fish that had just been sent in from the fishmonger’s. She seemed in a critical mood, but what she said to Miss Pinckney was lost to Phyl whose attention was attracted by a chuckling sound from near the range.
It was Prue.
The old woman at sight of Phyl had dropped the knife and the onion on which she had been engaged. She was now seated, hands on knees, chuckling and nodding to the girl, then, scarcely raising her right hand from her knee, she made a twiddling movement with the fore-finger as if to say, “come here—come here—I have something to tell you.”
Phyl glanced at Miss Pinckney who was so taken up with what Rachel was saying about the fish that she noticed nothing. Then she looked again at Prue and, unable to resist the invitation, came towards her. The old woman caught her by the arm so that she had to bend her head.
“Miss Julie,” whispered Prue, “Massa Pinckney told me tell yo’ he be at de gate t’night same time ’slas’ night. Done you let on ’s I told yo’,” she gave the arm a pinch and relapsed into herself chuckling whilst Phyl stood with a little shiver, half of relief at her escape from that bony clutch, half ofdread—a vague dread as though she had come in contact with something uncanny.
She came to the table again and stood without looking at Prue, whilst Miss Pinckney completed her orders, then, that lady, having finished her business and casting an eye about the place on the chance of finding any dirt or litter, saw Prue and asked how she was doing.
“Well, miss, she’s doin’ fa’r,” replied Rachel, “but I’m t’inking she’s not long fore de new Jerusalem. Sits didderin’ dere ’n’ smokin’ her pipe, ’n’ lays about her wid her stick times, fancyin’ there’er dogs comin’ into de kitchen.”
“A dog bit her once way back in the ’60’s,” said Miss Pinckney; “they used to keep dogs here then. She don’t want for anything?”
“Law no, miss,shedone want for nothin’; look at her now laffin’ to herself. Haven’t seen her do that way dis long time. Hi, Prue, what yo’ laffin’ at?”
Prue, instead of answering leant further forward hiding her face without checking her merriment.
“Crazy,” said Miss Pinckney, “but it’s better to be laughing crazy than crying crazy like some folk—here’s a quarter and get her some candy.”
She put the coin on the table and marched off followed by Phyl.
“She wanted to tell me something,” said Phyl as they were driving to the cemetery; “she beckoned me to her and took hold of my arm and whispered something.”
“What did she say?”
Phyl, somehow, could not bring herself to betray that crazy confidence.
“I don’t know, exactly, but she called me Miss Julie.”
“Oh—she called you Miss Julie,” said the other. Then she relapsed into thought and nothing more was said till they reached their destination.
CHAPTER V
Charleston’s Magnolia Cemetery like everything else about Charleston shows the touch of the War. Here the soldiers lie who fought so bravely under Wade Hampton and here lies the general himself.
Go south, go north, and you will not find a place touched by the War where you will not find noble memories, echoes of heroic deeds, legends of brave men.
Miss Pinckney was by no means a peace party and this thought was doubtless in her head as she stood surveying the confederate graves. There were relations here and men whom she had known as a child.
“That’s the War,” said she, “and people abuse war as if it was the worst thing in the world, insulting the dead. ’Clare to goodness it makes me savage to hear the pasty-faces talking of war and making plans to abolish it. It’s like hearing a lot of children making plans to abolish thunder storms. Where would America be now without the War, and where’d her history be? You tell me that. It’d just be the history of a big canning factory. These men aren’t dead, they’re still alive and fighting—fighting Chicago; fighting pork, and wheat,and cotton and railway-stock and everything else that’s abolishing the soul of the nation.
“There’s Matt Carey’s grave. He had everything he wanted, and he wasn’t young. Now-a-days he’d have been driving in his automobile killing old women and chickens, or tarpoon fishing down ’n Florida letting the world go rip, or full of neur—what do they call it—that thing that gets on their nerves and makes crazy old men of them at forty—I’ve forgotten.Hedidn’t. He took up a gun and died like a lion, and he was a middle-aged business man. No one remembers him, I do believe, except, maybe me, clean forgotten—and yet he helped to put a brick into the only monument worth ten cents that America has got—The War.
“And some northern people would say ‘nice sort of brick, seeing he was fighting on the wrong side.’ Wrong side or right side he was fighting for something else than his own hand.That’sthe point.”
She closed up her lips and they went on. Phyl found her father’s grave in a quiet spot where the live-oaks stood, the long grey moss hanging from their branches.
Miss Pinckney, having pointed out the grave, strayed off, leaving the girl to herself.
The gloomy, strange-looking trees daunted Phyl, and the grave, too young yet to have a headstone, drew her towards it, yet repelled her.
It was like meeting in a dream some one she had loved and who had turned into a stranger in a strange place.
Just as Charleston had dimmed Ireland in hermind as a bright light dims a lesser light, so had some influence come between her and the memory of her father. That memory was just as distinct as ever, but grief had died from it, as though Time had been at work on it for years and years.
The Phyl who had stepped out of the south-bound express and the girl of this morning were the same in mind and body, but in soul and outlook they had changed and were changing as though the air of the south had some magic in it, some food that had always been denied her and which was necessary for her full being.
Miss Pinckney returned from her wanderings amongst the graves and they turned to the gate.
“It used to seem strange to me coming here when I was a girl,” said she. “It always seemed as if I was come to visit people who could never come to see me. I used to pity them, but one gets older and one gets wiser, and I fancy it’s they that pity us, if they can see us at all, which isn’t often likely.”
“D’you think they come back?” said Phyl.
“My dear child, if I told you what I thought, you’d say I was plum crazy. But I’ll say this. What do you think the Almighty made folk for? to live a few years and then lie in a grave with folk heaping flowers on them? There’s no such laziness in nature. I don’t say there aren’t folk who live their lives like as if they were dead, covered with flowers and never moving a hand to help themselves like some of those N’York women—but they don’t count. They’re against nature and I guess when they die they die, for they haven’t ever lived.”Then, vehemently: “Of course, they come back, not as ghosts peekin’ about and making nuisances of themselves, but they come back as people—which is the sensible way and there’s nothing unsensible in nature. Mind you, I don’t say there aren’t ghosts, there are, for I’ve seen ’em; I saw Simon Pinckney, the one that died of drink, as plain as my hand same day he died, but he was a no account. He hadn’t the making of a man, so he couldn’t come back as a man, and he wasn’t a woman, so he couldn’t come back as a woman; so he came back as a ghost. He was always an uneasy creature, else I don’t suppose he’d have come back as anything. When a man wears out a suit of clothes he doesn’t die, he gets a new one, and when he wears out a body—which isn’t a bit more than a suit of clothes—he gets a new one. If he hasn’t piled up grit enough in life to pay for a new body, he goes about without one and he’s a ghost. That’s my way of thinking and I know—I know—n’matter.”
She put up her sunshade and they returned, driving through the warm spring weather. Phyl was silent, the day had taken possession of her. The scent of pink mimosa filled the air, the blue sky shewed here and there a few feather traces of white cloud and the wind from the sea seemed the very breath of the southern spring.
It seemed to Phyl as they drove that never before had she met or felt the loveliness of life, never till this moment when turning a corner the song of a bird from a garden met them with the perfume of jessamine.
Charleston is full of surprises like that, things that snatch you away from the present or catch you for a moment into the embrace of some old garden lurking behind a wrought iron gate, or tell you a love story no matter how much you don’t want to hear it—or tease you, if you are a practical business man, with some other futility which has nothing at all to do with “real” life.
It seemed to Phyl as though, somehow, the whole of the morning had been working up to that moment, as though the perfume of the jessamine and the song of the birds were the culmination of the meaning of all sorts of things seen and unseen, heard and unheard.
The message of the crazy old negress came back to her. Who was Miss Julie? and who was the Mr. Pinckney that was to meet her, and where was the gate at which they were to meet in such a secretive manner? Was it just craziness, or was it possible that this was some real message delivered years and years ago. A real lover’s message which the old woman had once been charged to deliver and which she had repeated automatically and like a parrot.
Miss Julie—could it be possible that she meant Miss Juliet—The Juliet Mascarene to whom she, Phyl, bore such a strong family likeness, could it be possible that the likeness had started the old woman’s mind working and had recalled the message of a half-a-century ago to her lips.
It was a fascinating thought. Juliet had been in love with one of the Pinckneys and this message was from a Pinckney and one day, perhaps, most likelya fine spring day like to-day, Pinckney had given the negro girl a message to give to Juliet, and the lovers and the message and the bright spring day had vanished utterly and forever leaving only Prue.
The gate would no doubt be the garden gate. Phyl in all her life had never given a thought to Love, she had known nothing of sentiment, that much abused thing which is yet the salt of life, and Romance for her had meant Adventure; all the same she was now weaving all sorts of threads into dreams and fancies. What appealed to her most was her own likeness to Juliet, the girl who had died so many, many years ago. A likeness incomplete enough, according to Miss Pinckney, yet strong enough to awaken memories in the mind of Prue.
CHAPTER VI
“Miss Pinckney,” said Phyl, as they sat at luncheon that day, “you remember you said yesterday that I was like Juliet Mascarene?”
“So you are,” replied the other, “though the likeness is more noticeable at first sight as far as the face goes—I’ve got a picture of her I will show you, it’s upstairs in her room, the one next yours on the same piazza—why do you ask me?”
“I was thinking,” replied Phyl, “that the old woman in the kitchen—Prue—may have meant Juliet when she called me Julie, and that it was the likeness that set her mind going.”
“It’s not impossible. Prue’s like that crazy old clock Selina Pinckney left me in her will. It’d tell you the day and the hourandthe minute and the year and the month and the weather. A little man came out if it was going to rain and a little woman if it was going to shine. But if you wanted to know the time, it couldn’t tell you nearer than the hour before last of the day before yesterday, and if you sneezed near it, it’d up and strike a hundred and twenty. I gave it to Rachel. She said it was ‘some’ clock, said it was a dandy for striking and the time didn’t matter as the old kitchen clock saw to that. It’s the same with Prue, the time doesn’t matter, and they look up to her in the kitchenmostly, I expect, because she’s an oddity, same as Selina Pinckney’s clock. Seems to me anything crazy and useless is reckoned valuable these days, and not only among coloured folk but whites—Dinah, hasn’t Mr. Richard come in yet?”
“No, Mistress Pinckney,” replied the coloured girl, who had just entered the room, “I haven’t seen no sign of him.”
“Running about without his luncheon,” grumbled the lady, “said he had a deal in cotton on. I might have guessed it.” Then when Dinah had left the room and talking half to herself, “There’s nothing Richard seems to think of but business or pleasure. I’m not saying anything against the boy, he’s as good and better than any of the rest, but like the rest of them his character wants forming round something real. It wasn’t so in the old days, they were bad enough then and drank a lot more, but they had in them something that made for something better than business or pleasure. Matt Curry didn’t go out and get killed for business or pleasure, and all the old Pinckneys didn’t fight in the war or fight with one another for business or pleasure. There’s more in life than fooling with girls or buying cotton or sailing yacht races, but Richard doesn’t seem to see it. I did think that having a ward to look after would have sobered him a bit and helped to form his character—well, maybe it will yet.”
“I don’t want to be looked after,” said Phyl flushing up, “and if Mr. Pinckney—” she stopped. What she was going to say about Pinckney was not clear in her mind, clouded as it was with anger—angerat the thought that she was an object to be looked after by her “guardian,” anger at the implication that he was not bothering to look after her, being too much engaged in the business of fooling with girls and buying cotton, and a reasonable anger springing from and embracing the whole world that held his beyond Vernons.
“Yes?” said Miss Pinckney.
“Oh, nothing,” replied the other, trying to laugh and making a failure of the business. “I was only going to say that Mr. Pinckney must have lots to do instead of wasting his time looking after strangers, and if he hadn’t I don’t want to be looked after. I don’t want him to bother about me—I—I—” It did not want much more to start her off in a wild fit of weeping about nothing, her mind for some reason or other unknown even to herself was worked up and seething just as on that day at Kilgobbin when the woes of Rafferty had caused her to make such an exhibition of herself in the library. Anything was possible with Phyl when under the influence of unreasoning emotion like this, anything from flinging a knife at a person to breaking into tears.
Miss Pinckney knew it. Without understanding in the least the psychological mechanism of Phyl, she knew as a woman and by some electrical influence the state of her mind.
She rose from the table.
“Stranger,” said she, taking the other by the arm, “you call yourself a stranger. Come along upstairs with me. I want to show you something.”
Still holding her by the arm, caressingly, she led her off across the hall and up the stairs; on the first floor landing she opened a door; it was the door of the bedroom next to Phyl’s, a room of the same shape and size and with the same view over the garden.
Just as the drawing-room had been kept in its entirety without alteration or touch save the touch of a duster, so had this room, the bedroom of a girl of long ago, a girl who would now have been a woman old and decrepit—had she lived.
“Here’s the picture you wanted to see,” said Miss Pinckney leading Phyl up to a miniature hanging on the wall near the bed. “That’s Juliet, and if you don’t see the family likeness, well, then, you must be blind.—And you calling yourself a stranger!”
Phyl looked. It was rather a stiff and finicking little portrait; she fancied it was like herself but was not sure, the colour of the hair was almost the same but the way it was dressed made a lot of difference, and she said so.
“Well, they did their hair different then,” replied Miss Pinckney, “and that reminds me, it’s near time you put that tail up.” She sat down in a rocker by the window and with her hands on her knees contemplated Phyl. “I’m your only female relative, and Lord knows I’m far enough off, anyhow I’m something with a skirt on it, and brains in its head, and that’s what a girl most wants when she comes to your age. You’ll be asked to parties and things here and you’ll find that tail in the way; it’s good enough for a schoolgirl, but you aren’tthat any longer. I’ll get Dinah to do your hair, something simple and not too grown-up—you don’t mind an old woman telling you this—do you?”
“Indeed I don’t,” said Phyl. “I don’t care how my hair is done, you can cut it off if you like, but I don’t want to go to parties.”
“Well, maybe you don’t,” said Miss Pinckney, “but, all the same, we’ll get Dinah to look to your hair. Dinah can do most anything in that way; she’d get twice the wages as a lady’s maid elsewhere and she knows it, but she won’t go. I’ve told her over and again to be off and better herself, but she won’t go, sticks to me like a mosquito. Well, this was Juliet’s room just as that’s her picture; she died in that bed and everything is just exactly as she left it. It was kept so after her death. You see, it wasn’t like an ordinary person dying, it was the tragedy of the whole thing that stirred folk so, dying of a broken heart for the man she was in love with. It set all the crazy poets off like that clock of Selina Pinckney’s I was telling you of. TheNews and Courierhad yards of obituary notice and verses. It made people forget the war for a couple of days. There’s all her books on that shelf and the diary the poor thing used to keep. Open one of the drawers in that chest.”
Phyl did so. The drawer was packed with clothes neatly folded. The air became filled with the scent of lavender.
“There are her things, everything she ever had when she died. It may seem foolish to keep everything like that, foolish and sentimental, and if she’ddied of measles or fallen down the stairs and killed herself maybe her old things would have been given away, but dying as she did—well, somehow, it didn’t seem right for coloured girls to be parading about in her things. Mrs. Beamis sniffed here just as she sniffed in the drawing-room, and she said, one night, something about sentiment, as if she was referring to chicken cholera. I knew what she meant. She meant we were a pack of fools. Well, she ought to know. I reckon she ought to be a judge of folly—the life she leads in Chicago. Umph!—Now I’m going to lie down for an hour, and if you take my advice you’ll do the same. The middle of the day was meant to rest in. You can get to your room by the window.”
She kissed Phyl and went off.
Phyl, instead of going to her room, took her seat in the rocker and looked around her. The place held her, something returned to it that had been driven away perhaps by Miss Pinckney’s cheerful and practical presence, the faint odour of lavender still clung to the air, and the silence was unbroken except for a faint stirring of the window curtains now and then to the breeze from outside. Everything was, indeed, just as it had been left, the toilet tidies and all the quaint contraptions of the ’50’s and ’60’s in their places. On the wall opposite the bed hung several water colours evidently the work of that immature artist Mary Mascarene, a watch pocket hung above the bed, a thing embroidered with blue roses, enough to disturb the sleep of any æsthete,yet beautiful enough in those old days. There was only one stain mark in the scrupulous cleanliness and neatness of the place—a panel by the window, once white painted but now dingy-grey and scored with lines. Phyl got up and inspected it more closely. Children’s heights had evidently been measured here. There was a scale of feet marked in pencil, initials, and dates. Here was “M. M.,” probably Mary Mascarene, “2 ft. 6 inches. Nineteen months,” and the date “April, 1845,” and again a year later, “M. M. 2 ft. 9-1/2 inches, May, 1846.” So she had grown three and a half inches in a year. “J. M.”—Juliet without doubt—“3 feet, 3 years old, 1845.” Juliet was evidently the elder—so it went on right into the early ’60’s, mixed here and there with other initials, amongst which Phyl made out “J. J.” and “R. P.,” children maybe staying at the house and measured against the Mascarene children—children now old men and women, possibly not even that. It was in the kindly spirit of Vernons not to pass a painter’s brush over these scratchings, records of the height of a child that lingered only in the memory of the old house.
Phyl turned from them to the bookshelf and the books it contained. “Noble Deeds of American Women,” “Precept on Precept,” “The Dairyman’s Daughter,” and the “New England Primer”—with a mark against the verses left “by John Rogers to his wife and nine small children, and one at the breast, when he was burned at the stake at Smithfield in 1555.” There were also books of poetry,Bryant, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “Powhatan, a metrical romance in seven cantos by Seba Smith,” and several others.
Phyl did something characteristic. She gathered every single book into a pile in her arms and sat down on the floor with them to have a feast. This devourer of books was omnivorous in her tastes, especially if it were a question of sampling, and she had enough critical faculty to enable her to enjoy rubbish. She lingered over Powhatan and its dedication to the “Young People of the United States” and then passed on to the others till she came to a little black book. It was Juliet Mascarene’s diary and proclaimed the fact openly on the first page with the statements: “I am twelve years old to-day and Aunt Susan has given me this book to keep as my diary and not to forget to write each day my evil deeds as well as my good, which I will if I remember them. She didn’t give me anything else. I had to-day a Paris doll from Cousin Jane Pinckney who has winking eyes which shut when you lay her on her back and pantalettes with scallops which take off and on and a trunk of clothes with a little key to it. Father gave me a Bible and I have had other things too numerous for mension.
“Signed Juliet Mascarene.”
“Signed Juliet Mascarene.”
with never a date.
Then:
“I haven’t done any evil deeds, or good ones that I can remember, so I haven’t written in this book for maybe a week. Mary and I, we went to a partyat the Pinckneys to-day at Bures, the Calhoun children and the Rutledges were there and we had Lady Baltimore cake and a good time. Mary wore her blue organdie and looked very nice and Rupert Pinckney was there, he’s fourteen and wouldn’t talk to the children because they were too small for him, I expect. He told me he was going to have a pony same as Silas Rhett that threw him in the market place Wednesday last and galloped all the way to Battery before he was stopped, only his was to be a better one with more shy in it, said Silas Rhett ought to be tied on next time. Then old Mr. Pinckney came in and shewed us a musical snuff-box and we went home, and driving back Mary kicked me on the shin by axident and I pinched her and she didn’t cry till we’d got home, then she began to roar and mother said it was my ungovernable temper, and I said I wished I was dead.
“I shan’t go to any more parties because it’s always like that after them. Father told me I was to pray for a new heart and not to have any supper but Prue has brought me up a cake of her own making. So that’s one evil deed to put down—It’s just like Mary, any one else would have cried right out in the carriage and not bottled it up and kept it up till she got home.
“This is a Friday and Prue says Friday parties are always sure to end in trouble for the devil puts powder in the cakes and the only way to stop him is to turn them three times round when they’re baking and touch them each time with a forked hazel twig.”
Phyl read this passage over twice. The mentionof Prue interested her vastly. Prue even then had evidently been a favourite of Juliet’s.
She read on hoping to find the name of the coloured woman again, but it did not occur.
The diary, indeed, did not run over more than a year and a half, but scrappy as it was and short in point of time, the character of Juliet shone forth from it, uneasy, impetuous, tormenting and loving.
Many books could not have depicted the people round Vernons so well as this scribbling of a child. Mary Mascarene, quiet, rather a spoil-sport and something of a tale-teller, dead and gone Pinckneys and Rhetts. Aunt Susan, Cousin Jane Pinckney, Uncle George who beat his coloured man, Darius, because the said Darius had let him go out with one brass button missing from his blue coat. Simon Pinckney—the one whose ghost walked—and who “fell down in the garden because he had the hiccups,” these and others of their time lived in the little black book given by the miserly Aunt Susan “to keep as my diary and not to forget to write each day my evil deeds as well as my good.”
Towards the end there was another reference to Rupert Pinckney, the tragic lover of the future:
“Rupert Pinckney was here to-day with his mother to luncheon and we had a palmetto salad and mother said when he was gone he was the most frivulus boy in Charleston, whatever that was, and too much of a dandy, but father said he had stuff in him and Aunt Susan, who was here too, said ‘Yes, stuff and nonsense,’ and I said he could ride his pony without tumbling off like Silas Rhett, anyhow.
“Then they went on talking about his people and how they hadn’t as much money as they used to have, and Aunt Susan said that was so, and the worst of it is they’re spending more money than they used to spend, and father said, well, anyhow, that wasn’t a very common complaint withsomepeople and he left the room. He never stays long in the room with Aunt S.
“I think the Pinckneys are real nice.”
“Mr. Simon Mascarene from Richmond and his wife came to see us to-day and stay for a week. They drove here in their own carriage with four brown horses and you could not tell which horse was which, they are so alike, they are very fine people and Mr. M. has a red face—not the same red as Mr. Simon Pinckney’s, but different somehow—more like an apple, and a high nose which makes him look very grand and fine.” The same Simon Mascarene, no doubt, that came to the wedding of Charles Pinckney in 1880 as old Simon Mascarene, the one whose flowered carpet bag still lingered in the memory of Miss Pinckney.
“Mrs. M. is very fine too and beautifully dressed and mother gave her a great bouquet of geraniums and garden flowers with a live green caterpillar looping about in the green stuff which nobody saw but me, till it fell on Mrs. M.’s knee and she screamed. There is to be a big party to-morrow and the Pinckneys are coming and Rupert.”
There the diary ended.
Phyl put it back on the shelf with the books.
She had not the knowledge necessary to visualise the people referred to, those people of another day when Planters kept open house, when slaves were slaves and Bures the home of the old gentleman with the musical snuff-box, but she could visualise Juliet as a child. The writing in the little book had brought the vision up warm from the past and it seemed almost as though she might suddenly run in from the sunlit piazza that lay beyond the waving window curtains.
There was a bureau in one corner, or rather one of those structures that went by the name of Davenports in the days of our fathers. Phyl went to it and raised the lid. She did so without a second thought or any feeling that it was wrong to poke about in a place like this and pry into secrets. Juliet seemed to belong to her as though she had been a sister, her own likeness to the dead girl was a bond of attraction stronger than a family tie, and Juliet’s mournful love story completed the charm.
The desk contained very little, a seal with a dove on it, some sticks of spangled sealing-wax, a paper knife of coloured wood with a picture of Benjamin Franklin on the handle and some sheets of note-paper with gilt edges.
Phyl noticed that the gilt was still bright.
She took out the paper knife and looked at it, and then held the blade to her lips to feel the smoothness of it, drawing it along so that her lips touched every part of the blade.
Then she put it back, and as she did so a little panel at the back of the desk fell forward disclosinga cache containing a bundle of letters tied round with ribbon.
Phyl started as though a hand had been laid on her arm. The point of the paper knife must have touched the spring of the panel, but it seemed as though the desk had suddenly opened its hand, closed and clasping those letters for so many years. For a moment she hesitated to touch them. Then she thought of all the time they had lain there and a feeling that Juliet wouldn’t mind and that the old bureau had told its secret without being asked, overcame her scruples. She took the letters and sitting down again on the floor, untied the ribbon.
There were no envelopes. Each sheet of paper had been carefully folded and sealed with green wax, with the seal leaving the impression of the dove. There was no address, and they had evidently been tied together in chronological order. But the handwriting was the handwriting of Juliet Mascarene fully formed now.
The first of these things ran:
“It wasn’t my fault. I didn’t create old Mr. Gadney and send him to church to keep us talking in the street like that. I didnotsee you. You couldn’t have passed, and if you did you must have been invisible. I feel dreadfully wicked writing to you. Do you know this is a clandestine correspondence and must stop at once? You mustn’teverwrite to me again, nor I mustn’t see you. Of course I can’t help seeing you in church and on the street—and I can’t help thinking about you. They’ll be making me try and stop breathing next. I don’t care a buttonfor the whole lot of them. It was all Aunt Susan’s doing, only for her my people would never have quarrelled with yours and I wouldn’t have been so miserable. I feel sometimes as if I could just take a boat and sail off to somewhere where I would never see any people again.
“It was clever of you to send your letter by P. This goes to you by the same hand.”
There was no signature and no date.
Phyl turned the sheet of paper over to make sure again that there was no address. As she did so a faint, quaint perfume came to her as though the old-fashioned soul of the letter were released for a moment. It was vervain, the perfume of long ago, beloved of the Duchesse de Chartres and the ladies of the forties.
She laid the letter down and took up the next.
“It iswickedof you. My people never would be so mean as to quarrel with your people or look down on them because they have lost money. Why did you say that—and you know I said in my last letter that I could not write to you again. I was shocked when P. pinched my arm as I was passing her on the stairs and handed me your note—Don’t you—don’t you—how shall I say it? Don’t you think you and I could meet and speak to one another somewhere instead of always writing like this? Somewhere where no one could see us. Do you know—do you know—do you, ahem! O dear me—know that just inside our gate there’s a little arbour. The tiniest place. When I was a child I used to play there with Mary at keeping house, there’s a seat justbig enough for two and we used to sit there with our dolls. No one can see the gate from the lower piazza, and the gate doesn’t make any noise opening, for father had it oiled—it used to squeak a bit from rust, but it doesn’t now and I’ll be there to-morrow night at nine—in the arbour—at least Imaybe there. I just want to tell you in a way I can’t in a letter that my people aren’t the sort of folk to sneer at any one because they have lost money.
“I am sending this by P.
“The arbour is just back of the big magnolia as you come in, on the left.”
Phyl gave a little laugh. Then with half-closed eyes she kissed the letter, laid it softly on the floor beside the first and went on to the next.
“Not to-night. I have to go to the Calhouns. It is just as well, for I have a dread of people suspecting if we meet too often. No one sees us meet. No one knows, and yet I fear them finding out just by instinct. Father said to me the other day, ‘What makes you seem so happy these times?’ If Mary had been alive she would have found out long ago, for I never could keep anything hid from her. I was nearly saying to him, ‘If you want to know why I am so happy go and ask the magnolia tree by the gate.’
“Sometimes I feel as if I were deceiving him and everybody. I am, and I don’t care—I don’t care if they knew. O my darling! My darling! My darling! If the whole world were against you I would love you all the more. I will love you all my life and I will love you when I am dead.”
Phyl’s eyes grew half blind with tears.
This cry from the Past went to her heart like a knife. The wind, strengthening for a moment, moved the window curtains, bringing with it the drowsy afternoon sounds of Charleston, sounds that seemed to mock at this voice declaring the deathlessness of its love. It was impossible to go on reading. Impossible to expose any more this heart that had ceased to beat.
The meetings in the arbour behind the magnolia tree, the kisses, the words that the leaves and birds alone could hear—they had all ended in death.
It did not matter now if the garden gate creaked on its hinges, or if watching eyes from the piazza saw the glossy leaves stirring when no wind could shake them—nothing mattered at all to these people now.
She put all the letters back in the bureau, carefully closing them in the secret drawer.