CHAPTER IX
The thing was settled definitely that night, Mrs. Hennessey resisting the idea at first, more, one might have fancied from her talk, because the idea was anti-national than from love of Phyl, though, as a matter of fact, she was fond enough of the girl.
“It’s what’s left Ireland what it is,” went on the good lady. “Cripples and lunatics, that’s all that’s left of us with your emigration; all the good blood of Ireland flowing away from her and not a drop, scarcely, coming back.”
“I’ll come back,” said Phyl, “you need not fear about that—some day.”
“Ay, some day,” said Mrs. Hennessey, and stared into the fire. Then the spirit moving her, she began to discant on things past and people vanished.
Synge, and Oscar Wilde and Willie Wilde, who was the real genius of the family, only his genius “stuck in him somehow and wouldn’t come out.” She passed from people who had vanished to places that had changed, and only stopped when the servant came in with the announcement that supper was ready.
Then at supper, lo and behold! she discussed the going away of Phyl, as though it were a matterarranged and done with and carrying her full consent and approval.
During the weeks following, Phyl’s impending journey kept Mrs. Hennessey busy in a spasmodic way. One might have fancied from the preparations and lists of things necessary that the girl was off to the wilds of New Guinea or some region equally destitute of shops.
Hennessey remonstrated, and then let her have her way—it kept her quiet, and Phyl, nothing loath, spent most of her time now in shops, Tod and Burns, and Cannock and White’s, examining patterns and being fitted, varying these amusements by farewell visits. She was invited out by all the Hennesseys’ friends, the Farrels and the Rourkes, and the Longs and the Newlands, and the Pryces and the Oldhams, all prepared tea-parties in her honour, made her welcome, and made much of her, just as we make much of people who have not long to live.
She was the girl that was going to America. She did not appreciate the real kindness underlying this terrible round of festivities till she was standing on the deck of theHyberniaat Kingstown saying good-bye to Hennessey.
Then, as the boat drew away from the Carlisle pier, as it passed the guardship anchorage and the batteries at the ends of the east and west piers, all those people from whom she had longed to escape seemed to her the most desirable people on earth.
Bound for a world unknown, peopled with utter strangers, Ireland, beloved Ireland, called after her as a mother calls to her child.
Oh, the loneliness! the desolation!
As she stood watching the Wicklow mountains fading in the grey distance, she knew for the first time the meaning of those words, “Gone West”; and she knew what the thousands suffered who, driven from their cabins on the hillside or the moor, went West in the old days when the emigrant ship showed her tall masts in Queenstown Harbour and her bellying canvas to the sunset of the Atlantic.
At Liverpool, she found Mrs. Van Dusen, a tall, rather good-looking, rather hard-looking but exceedingly fashionable individual, at the hotel where it was arranged they should meet.
Phyl, looking like a lost dog, confused by travel and dumb from dejection, had little in common with this lady, nor did a rough passage across the Atlantic extend their knowledge of one another, for Mrs. Van Dusen scarcely appeared from her state-room till the evening when, the great ship coming to her moorings, New York sketched itself and its blazing skyscrapers against the gloom before the astonished eyes of Phyl.
PART II
PART II
CHAPTER I
Holyhead, Liverpool, New York, each of these stopping places had impressed upon Phyl the distance she was putting between herself and her home, making her feel that if this business was not death it was, at least, a very good imitation of dying.
But the south-bound express from New York was to show her just what people may be expected to feelafterthey are dead.
America had been for Phyl little more than a geographical expression. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” “The Last of the Mohicans,” “The Settlers in Canada” and “Round the World in Eighty Days,” had given her pictures, and from these she had built up a vague land of snow and forests, log huts, plains, Red Indians, runaway negroes and men with bowie knives.
New York had given this fantastic idea a rough joggle, the south-bound express tumbled it all to pieces.
Forests and mountains and plains would have been familiar to her imagination, but the south-bound express was producing for her inspection quite different things from these.
New Jersey with its populous towns, for instance, towns she never could have imagined or dreamed of, filled with people whose existence she could not picture.
What gave her a cold grue was the suddenly grasped fact that all this great mechanism of life, cities, towns, roaring railways, agricultural lands, manufacturing districts filled with English speaking people—that all this was alien, knew nothing of Ireland or England, except as it might know of Japan or a dream of the past.
The people in the train were talking English—were English to all intents and purposes, and yet, as far as England and Ireland were concerned, she knew them to be dead.
It had been freezing in New York, a great rainstorm was blowing across the world as they crossed the Delaware; it passed, sweeping away east under the arch of a vast rainbow, even the rainbow seemed alien and different to Irish rainbows—it was too big.
Then came Philadelphia, where some of the dead folk left the train and others got in. One had an Irish voice and accent. He was a big man with a hard, pushful face and a great under jaw. Phyl knew him at once for what he was, and that he had died to Ireland long years ago.
Then came Wilmington and Baltimore, and then, long after sunset in the dark, a warmer air that entered the train like a viewless passenger, nerve soothing and mind lulling—the first breath of the South.
Next morning, looking from the windows of thecar, she saw the South. Vast spaces of low-lying land broken by river and bayou, flooded by the light of the new risen sun and touched by a vague mist from the sea, soft as a haze of summer, warm with light and everywhere hinting at the blue deep sky beyond.
Youth, morning, and the spirit of the sea all lay in that luminous haze, that warm light filled with the laziness of June; and, for one delightful moment, it seemed to Phyl that summer days long forgotten, rapturous mornings half remembered were here again.
The rumble of trestle and boom of bridge filled the train, and now the masts of ships showed thready against the hazy blue of the sky; frame houses sprang up by the track and fences with black children roosting on them; then the mean streets of the coloured quarter and now, as the cars slackened speed, came the bustle that marks the end of a journey. People were getting their light luggage together, and as Phyl was strapping the bundle that held her travelling rug and books, a waft of tepid, salt-scented air came through the compartment and on it the voice of the negro attendant rousing some drowsy passenger.
“Charleston, sah.”
She got out, dazed and numbed by the journey, and stood with the rug bundle in her hand looking about her, half undecided what to do, half absorbed by the bustle and movement of the platform.
Then, pushing towards her through the crowd, she saw Pinckney.
He had come to meet her, and as they shook hands, Phyl laughed.
He seemed so bright and cheerful, and the relief at finding a friend after that long, friendless journey was so great that she laughed right out with pleasure, like a little child—laughed right into his eyes.
It seemed to Pinckney that he had never seen the real Phyl before.
He took the bundle from her and gave it to a negro servant, and then, giving the luggage checks to the servant and leaving him to bring on the luggage, he led the girl through the crowd.
“We’ll walk to the house,” said he, “if you are not too tired; it’s only a few steps away—well—how do you like America?”
“America?” she replied. “I don’t know—it’s different from what I thought it would be, ever so much different—and this place—why, it is like summer here.”
“It’s the South,” said Pinckney. “Look, this is Meeting Street.”
They had turned from the street leading from the station into a broad, beautiful highway, placid, sun flooded, and leading away to the Battery, that chief pride and glory of Charleston.
On either side of the street, half hidden by their garden walls, large stately houses of the Georgian era showed themselves. Mansions that had slumbered in the sun for a hundred years, great, solid houses whose yellow-wash seemed the incrustation left by golden and peaceful afternoons, houses of old English solidity yet with the Southern touch of deepverandas and the hint of palm trees in their jealously walled gardens.
“Oh, how beautiful!” said Phyl. She stopped, looked about her, and then gazed away down the street. It was as though the old stately street—and surely the Street of Other Days might be its name—had been waiting for her all her life, waiting for her to turn that corner leading from the commonplace station, waiting to greet her like the ghost of some friend of childhood. Surely she knew it! Like the recollection of a dream once dreamed, it lay before her with its walled gardens, its vaguely familiar houses, its sunlight and placidity.
Pinckney, proud of his native town and pleased at this appreciation of it, stood by without speaking, watching the girl who seemed to have forgotten his existence for a moment. Her head was raised as if she were inhaling the sea wind lazily blowing from the Battery, and bearing with it stray scents from the gardens by the way.
Then she came back to herself, and they walked on.
“It’s just as if I knew the place,” said she, “and yet I never remember seeing anything like it before.”
“I’ve felt that way sometimes about places,” said Pinckney. “It seemed to me that I knew Paris quite well when I went there, though I’d never been there before. Charleston is pretty English, anyway, and maybe it’s that that makes it seem familiar. But I’m glad you like it. You like it, don’t you?”
“Like it!” said she. “I should think I did—It’s more than liking—I love it.”
He laughed.
“Better than Dublin?”
It was her turn to laugh.
“I never loved Dublin.” She turned her head to glance at a peep of garden showing through a wrought iron gate. “Oh, Dublin!—don’t talk to me about it here. I want to keep on feeling I’m here really and that there’s nowhere else.”
“There isn’t,” said he, disclosing for the first time in his life, and quite unconsciously, his passion for the place where he had been born. “There’s nowhere else but Charleston worth anything—I don’t know what it is about, but it’s so.”
They were passing a wall across whose top peeped an elbow of ivy geranium. It was as though the unseen garden beyond, tired of constraint and drowsily stretching, had disclosed this hint of a geranium coloured arm.
Pinckney paused at a wrought iron gate and opened it.
“This is Vernons,” said he.
CHAPTER II
A grosbeak was singing in the magnolia tree by the gate and the warmth of the morning sun was filling the garden with a heart-snatching perfume of jessamine.
Jessamine and the faint bitterness of sun warmed foliage.
It was a garden sure to be haunted by birds; not large and, though well kept, not trim, and sing the birds as loud as they might, they never could break the charm of silence cast by Time on this magic spot.
In the centre of the lawn stood a dial, inscribed with the old dial motto:
The Hours Pass and are Numbered.
Phyl paused for a moment just as she had paused in the street, and Pinckney looking at her noticed again that uptilt of the head, and that far away look as of a person who is trying to remember or straining to hear.
Then a voice from the house came across the broad veranda leading from the garden to the lower rooms.
A female voice that seemed laughing and scolding at the same time.
“Dinah! Dinah! bless the girl, will she never learn sense— Dinah! Ah, there you are. How often have I told you to put General Grant in thesun first thing in the morning?— You’ve been dusting! I’ll dust you. Here, get away.”
Out on the veranda, parrot cage in hand, came a most surprising lady. Antique yet youthful, dressed as ladies were wont to dress of a morning in long forgotten years, bright eyed, and wrathfully agitated.
“Aunt,” cried Pinckney. “Here we are.”
The sun was in Miss Pinckney’s eyes; she put the cage down, shaded her eyes and stared full at Phyl.
“God bless me!” said Miss Pinckney.
“This is Phyl,” said he, as they came up to the verandah steps.
Miss Pinckney, seeming not to hear him in the least, took the girl by both hands, and holding her so as if for inspection stared at her.
Then she turned on Pinckney with a snap.
“Why didn’t you tell me—she’s—why, she’s a Mascarene. Well, of all the astonishing things in the world— Child—child, where did you get that face?”
Before Phyl could answer this recondite question, she found herself enveloped in frills and a vague perfume of stephanotis. Maria Pinckney had taken her literally to her heart, and was kissing her as people kiss small children, kissing her and half crying at the same time, whilst Pinckney stood by wondering.
He thought that he knew everything about Maria Pinckney, just as he had fancied he knew himself till Phyl had shewn him, over there in Ireland, that there were a lot of things in his mind and characterstill to be known by himself. This, as regards him, seemed the special mission of Phyl in the world.
“It’s the likeness,” said Miss Pinckney. “I thought it was Juliet Mascarene there before me in the sun, Juliet dead those years and years.” Then commanding herself, and with one of those reverses, sudden changes of manner and subject peculiar to herself:
“Where’s your luggage?”
“Abraham is bringing it along.”
“Abraham! Do you mean you didn’t drive,walkedhere from the station?”
“Yes,” said Pinckney shamefacedly, almost, and wondering what sin against thecovenanceshe had committed now.
“And she after that journey from N’York. Richard Pinckney, you are a—man—I was going to have called you a fool—but it’s the same thing. Here, come on both of you—the child must be starving. This is the breakfast room, Phyl—Phyl! I will never get used to that name; no matter, I’m getting an old woman, and mustn’t grumble—mustn’t grumble—umph!”
She took Pinckney’s walking-stick from him and, with the end of it, picked up a duster that the mysterious Dinah, evidently, had left lying on the floor.
She put the duster out on the veranda, rang a bell and ordered the coloured boy who answered it to send in breakfast.
Phyl, commanded by Miss Pinckney, sat down to table just as she was without removing her hat.
The old lady had come to the conclusion that thenewcomer must be faint with hunger after her journey, and when Miss Pinckney came to one of her conclusions, there was nothing more to be said on the matter.
It was a pleasant room, chintzy and sunny; they sat down to a gate-legged table that would just manage to seat four comfortably whilst the urn was brought in, a copper urn in which the water was kept at boiling point by a red hot iron contained in a cylinder.
Phyl knew that urn. They had one like it at Kilgobbin and she said so, but Miss Pinckney did not seem to hear her. There were times when this lady was almost rude—or seemed so owing to inattention, her bustling mind often outrunning the conversation or harking back to the past when it ought to have been in the present.
Tea making, and the making of tea was a solemn rite at Vernons, absorbed her whole attention, but Pinckney noticed this morning that the hand, that old, perfect, delicately shaped hand, trembled ever so slightly as it measured the tea from the tortoise-shell covered tea caddy, and that the thin lips, lips whose thinness seemed only the result of the kisses of Time, were moving as though debating some question unheard.
He recognised that the coming of Phyl had produced a great effect on Maria Pinckney. No one knew her better than he, for no one loved her so well.
It was she who ordered him about, still, just as though he were a small boy, and sometimes as hesat watching her, so fragile, so indomitable, like the breath of winter would come the thought that a day would come—a day might come soon when he would be no longer ordered about, told to put his hat in the hall—which is the proper place for hats—told not to dare to bring cigars into the drawing-room.
To Phyl, Maria Pinckney formed part of the spell that was surrounding her; Meeting Street had begun the weaving of this spell, Vernons was completing it with the aid of Maria Pinckney.
The song of the Cardinal Grosbeak in the garden, the stirring of the window curtains in the warm morning air, the feel of morning and sunlight, the scent of the tea that was filling the room, the room itself old-fashioned yet cheerful, chintzy and sunny, all the things had the faint familiarity of the street. It was as though the blood of her mother’s people coursing in her veins had retained and brought to her some thrill and warmth from all these things; these things they knew and loved so well.
“There’s the carriage,” said Miss Pinckney, whose ears had picked out the sound of it drawing up at the front door. “They know where to take the luggage. Richard, go and see that they don’t knock the bannisters about. Abraham is all thumbs and has no more sense in moving things than Dinah has’n dusting them. Only last week when Mrs. Beamis was going away, he let that trunk of hers slip and I declare to goodness I thought it was a church falling down the stairs and tearing the place to pieces.”
There was little of the stately languor of the South in Miss Pinckney’s speech. She was Northern on the mother’s side. But in her prejudices she was purely Southern, or, at least, Charlestonian.
Pinckney laughed.
“I don’t think Phyl’s luggage will hurt much even if it falls,” said he. “English luggage is generally soft.”
“It’s only a trunk and a portmanteau,” said Phyl, as he left the room, but Miss Pinckney did not seem to hear; pouring herself out another cup of tea (she was the best and the worst hostess in the whole world) and seeming not to notice that Phyl’s cup was empty, she was off on one of her mind wandering expeditions, a state of soul that sometimes carried her into the past, sometimes into the future, that led her anywhere and to the wrapt, inward contemplation of all sorts of things and subjects from the doings of the Heavenly Host to the misdoings of Dinah.
She talked on these expeditions.
“Well, I’m sure and I’m sure I don’t know what folk want with the luggage they carry about with them nowadays— The old folk didn’t. Not Saratoga trunks, anyhow. I remember ’swell as if it was yesterday way back in 1880, when Richard’s father and mother were married, old Simon Mascarene—he belonged to your mother’s lot, the Mascarenes of Virginia— He came to the wedding, and all he brought was a carpet-bag. I can see the roses on it still. He wore a beaver hat. They’d been out of fashion for years and years. So was he.Twenty dollars apiece they cost him, and his clothes were the same. Looked like a picture out of Dickens. Your grandmother was there, too, came from Richmond for the wedding, drove here in her own carriage. She and Simon were the last of the Virginia Mascarenes and they looked it. Seems to me some people never can be new nor get away from their ancestors. If you’d dressed Simon in kilts it wouldn’t have made any difference, much, he’d still have been Simon Mascarene of Virginia, just as stiff and fine and proud and old-fashioned.”
“It seems funny that my people should have been the Virginia Mascarenes,” said Phyl, “because—because—well, I feel as if my people had always lived here—this feels like home—I don’t know what it is, but just as I came into the street outside there I seemed to know it, and this house—”
“Why, God bless my soul,” said Miss Pinckney, whose eyes had just fallen on the girl’s empty cup, “here have I been talking and talking, and you waiting for some more tea. Why didn’t you ask, child?—What were you saying? The Virginia Mascarenes— Oh, they often came here, and your mother knew this house as well as Planters. That was the name of their house in Richmond. But what I can’t get over is your likeness to Juliet. She might have been your sister to look at you both—and she dead all these years.”
“Who was Juliet?”
“She was the girl who died,” said Miss Pinckney. “You know, although Richard calls me Aunt, I am not really his aunt; it’s just an easy name for an oldwoman who is an interloper, a Pinckney adrift. It was this way I came in. Long before the Civil War, the Pinckneys lived at a house called Bures in Legare Street. A fine old house it was, and is still. Well, I was a cousin with a little money of my own, and I was left lonely and they took me in. James Pinckney was head of the family then, and he had two sons, Rupert and Charles. I might have been their sister the way we all lived together and loved each other—and quarrelled. Dear me, dear me, what is Time at all that it leaves everything the same? The same sun, and flowers and houses, and all the people gone or changed— Well, I am trying to tell you— Rupert fell in love with Juliet Mascarene, who lived here. He was killed suddenly in ’61— I don’t want to talk of it—and she died of grief the year after. She died of grief—simply died of grief. Charles lived and married in 1880 when he was forty years old. He married Juliet’s brother’s daughter and Vernons came to him on the marriage. He hadn’t a son till ten years later. That son was Richard. Charles left Richard all his property and Vernons on the condition that I always lived here—till I died, and that’s how it is. I’m not Richard’s aunt, it’s only a name he gives me—I’m only just an old piece of furniture left with the house to him. I’m so fond of the place, it would kill me to leave it; places grow like that round one, though I’m sure I don’t know why.”
“I don’t wonder at you loving Vernons,” said Phyl. “I was just the same about our place in Ireland,Kilgobbin—I thought it would kill me to leave it.”
“Tell me about it,” said Miss Pinckney. Phyl told, or tried to tell.
Looking back, she found between herself and Ireland the sunlight of Charleston, the garden with the magnolia trees where the red bird was singing and the jessamine casting its perfume. Ireland looked very far away and gloomy, desolate as Kilgobbin without its master and with the mist of winter among the trees.
All that was part of the Past gone forever, and so great was the magic of this new place that she found herself recognising with a little chill that this Past had separated itself from her, that her feeling towards it was faintly tinged by something not unlike indifference.
“Well,” said Miss Pinckney, when she had finished, “it must be a beautiful old place, though I can’t seem to see it— You see, I’ve never been in Ireland and I can’t picture it any more than the new Jerusalem. Now Dinah knows all about the new Jerusalem, from the golden slippers right up she sees it—I can’t. Haven’t got the gift of seeing things, and it seems strange that the A’mighty should shower it on a coloured girl and leave a white woman wanting; but it appears to be the A’mighty knows his own business, so I don’t grumble. Now I’m going to show you the house and your room. I’ve given you a room looking right on the garden, this side. You’ve noticed how all our houses here are built with their sides facing the street and their frontsfacing the garden, or maybe you haven’t noticed it yet, but you will. ’Pears to me our ancestors had some sense in their heads, even though they didn’t invent telegraphs to send bad news in a hurry and railway cars to smash people to bits, and telephones to let strangers talk right into one’s house just by ringing a bell. Not that I’d let one into Vernons. You may hunt high or low, garret or basement, you won’t find one of those boxes of impudence in Vernons—not while I have servants to go my messages.”
Miss Pinckney was right. For years she had fought the telephone and kept it out, making Richard Pinckney’s life a tissue of small inconveniences, and suffering this epitaph on her sanity to be written by all sorts of inferior people, “Plumb crazy.”
She led the way from the breakfast-room and passed into the hall.
The spirit of Vernons inhabited the hall. One might have fancied it as a stout and prosperous gentleman attired in a blue coat with brass buttons, shorts, and wearing a bunch of seals at his fob. Oak, brought from England, formed the panelling, and a great old grandfather’s clock, with the maker’s name and address, “Whewel. Coggershall,” blazoned on its brass face, told the time, just as it had told the time when the Regent was ruling at St. James’s in those days which seem so spacious, yet so trivial in their pomp and vanity.
Sitting alone here of an afternoon with the sun pointing fingers through the high leaded windows, Whewel of Coggershall took you under his spell, the spell of old ghosts of long forgotten afternoons,spacious afternoons filled with the cawing of rooks and the drone of bees. English afternoons of the good old time when the dust of the post chaise was the only mark of hurry across miles of meadow land and cowslip weather. And then as you sat held by the sound of the slow-slipping seconds, maybe, from some door leading to the servants’ quarters suddenly left open a voice would come, the voice of some darky singing whilst at work.
A snatch of the South mixing with your dream of England and the past, and making of the whole a charm beyond words.
That is Charleston.
Set against the panelling and almost covering it in parts were prints, wood-cuts, engravings, portraits in black and white.
Here was a silhouette of Colonel Vernon, the founder of the house, and another of his wife. Here was an early portrait of Jeff Davis, hollow-cheeked and goatee-bearded, and here was Mayflower, the property of Colonel Seth Mascarene, the fastest trotting horse in Virginia, worshipped by her owner whose portrait hung alongside.
Phyl glanced at these pictures as she followed Miss Pinckney, who opened doors shewing the dining-room, a room rather heavily furnished, hung with portraits of long-faced gentlemen and ladies of old time, and then the drawing-room. A real drawing-room of the Sixties, a thing preserved in its entirety, in all its original stiffness, interesting as a valentine, perfumed like an old rosewood cabinet.
Keepsakes and Books of Beauty lay on the centretable, a gilt clock beneath a glass shade marked the moment when it had ceased to keep time over twenty-five years ago, the antimacassars on the armchairs were not a line out of position; not a speck of dust lay anywhere, and the Dresden shepherds and shepherdesses simpered and made love in the same old fashion, preserving unaltered the sentiment of spring, the suggestion of Love, lambs, and the song of birds.
“It’s just as it used to be,” said Miss Pinckney. “Nothing at all has been changed, and I dust it myself. I would just as soon let a servant loose here with a duster as I’d let one of the buzzards from the market-place loose in the larder. Those water-colours were done by Mary Mascarene, Juliet’s sister, who died when she was fifteen; they mayn’t be masterpieces but they’re Mary’s, and worth more’n if they were covered with gold. Mrs. Beamis sniffed when she came in here—she’s the woman whose trunk got loose on the stairs I told you about—sniffed as if the place smelt musty. She’s got a husband who’s made a million dollars out of dry goods in Chicago, and she thought the room wanted re-furnishing. Didn’t say it, but I knew. A player-piano is what she wanted. Didn’t say it, butIknew. Umph!”
Miss Pinckney, having shown Phyl out, looked round the room as if to make sure that all the familiar ghosts were in their places, then she shut the door with a snap, and turning, led the way upstairs murmuring to herself, and with the exalted and far away look which she wore when put out.
Phyl’s room lay on the first landing, a bright and cheerful room papered with a rather cheap flower and sprig patterned paper, spring-like for all its cheapness, and just the background for children’s heads when they wake up on a bright morning.
A bowl of flowers stood on the dressing-table, and the open window shewed across the verandah a bit of the garden, where the cherokee roses were blooming.
“This is your room,” said Miss Pinckney. “It’s one of the brightest in the house, and I hope you’ll like it— Listen!”
Through the open window came the chime of church-bells.
“It’s the chimes of St. Michael’s. You’ll never want a clock here, the bells ring every quarter, just as they’ve rung for the last hundred years; they’re the first thing I remember, and maybe they’ll be the last. Well, come on and I’ll show you some more of the house, if you’re not tired and don’t want to rest.”
She led the way from the room and along the corridor, opening doors and shewing rooms, and then up a back stairs to the top floor beneath the attics.
The house seemed to grow in age as they ascended. Not a door in Vernons was exactly true in line; the old house settling itself down quietly through the years and assisted perhaps by the great earthquake, though that had left it practically unharmed, shewed that deviation from the right line in cornice and wainscoting and door space, which is the hall mark left on architecture by genius or age. The buildersof the Parthenon knew this, the builders of Vernons did not— Age supplied their defects.
Up here the flooring of the passages and rooms frankly sagged in places, and the beams bellied downwards ever so little and the ceilings bowed.
“I’ve seen all these bed-rooms filled in the old days,” said Miss Pinckney. “We had wounded soldiers here in the war. What Vernons hasn’t seen of American history isn’t worth telling—much. Here’s the nursery.”
She opened a door with bottle-glass panels, real old bottle-glass worth its weight in minted silver, and shewed Phyl into a room.
“This is the nursery,” said she.
It was a large room with two windows, and the windows were barred to keep small people from tumbling into the garden. The place had the air of silence and secrecy that haunts rooms long closed and deserted. An old-fashioned paper shewing birds of Paradise covered the walls. A paper so old that Miss Pinckney remembered it when, as a child, she had come here to tea with the Mascarene children, so good that the dye of the gorgeous Paradise birds had scarcely faded.
A beam of morning sun struck across the room, a great solid, golden bar of light. Phyl, as she stood for a moment on the threshold, saw motes dancing in the bar of light; the air was close and almost stuffy owing to the windows being shut. A rocking-horse, much, much the worse for wear stood in one corner, he was piebald and the beam of light just failed to touch his brush-like tail. A Noah’s Arkof the good old pattern stood on the lid of a great chest under one of the windows, and in the centre of the room a heavy table of plain oak nicked by knives and stained with ink told its tale.
There were books in a little hanging book-case, books of the ‘forties’ and ‘fifties’: “Peter Parley,” “The Child’s Pilgrim’s Progress,” “The Dairy-Maid’s Daughter,” an odd volume ofHarper’sMagazinecontaining an instalment of “Little Dorrit,” Caroline Chesebro’s “Children of Light,” and Samuel Irenæus Prime’s “Elizabeth Thornton or the Flower and Fruit of Female Piety, and other Sketches.” Miss Pinckney opened one of the windows to let in air; Phyl, who had said nothing, stood looking about her at the forsaken toys, the chairs, and the little three-legged stool most evidently once the property of some child.
All nurseries have a generic likeness. It seemed to her that she knew this room, from the beam of light with the motes dancing in it to the bird-patterned paper. Kilgobbin nursery was papered with a paper giving an endless repetition of one subject—a man driving a pig to market—with that exception, the two rooms were not unlike. Yet those birds were the haunting charm of this place, the things that most appealed to her, things that seemed the ghosts of old friends.
She came to the window and looked out through the bars. Across the garden of Vernons one caught a glimpse of other gardens, palmetto-tree tops, and away, beyond the battery, a hint of the blue harbour. Just the picture to fill an imaginative child’smind with all sorts of pleasant fancies about the world, and Phyl, forgetting for a moment Miss Pinckney, herself, and the room in which she was, stood looking out, caught in a momentary day dream, just like a child in one of those reveries that are part of the fairy tale of childhood.
That touch of blue sea beyond the red roofs and green palmetto fronds gave her mind wings for a moment and a world to fly through. Not the world we live in, but the world worth living in. Old sailor-stories, old scraps of thought and dreams from nowhere pursued her, haunted her during that delightful and tantalising moment, and then she was herself again and Miss Pinckney was saying:
“It’s a pretty view and hasn’t changed since I was a child. Now, in N’York they’d have put up skyscrapers; Lord bless you, they’d have put them up at alossso’s to seem energetic and spoil the view. That’s a N’Yorker in two words, happy so long as he’s energetic and spoiling views—” Then gazing dreamily towards the touch of blue sea. “Well, I guess the Lord made N’Yorkers same as he made you and me. His ways areinscrutable and past finding out; so’r the ways of some of his creatures.”
She turned from the window, and her eye fell on the great chest by the other window.
Going to it, she opened the lid.
It was full of old toys, mostly broken. She seemed to have forgotten the presence of Phyl. Holding the chest’s lid open, she gazed at the coloured and futile contents.
Then she closed the lid of the chest with a sigh.
CHAPTER III
The South dines at four o’clock—at least Charleston does.
It was the old English custom and the old Irish custom, too.
In the reign of William the Conqueror people dined at elevena.m.or was it ten? Then, as civilisation advanced, the dinner hour stole forward. In the time of the Georges it reached four o’clock. In Ireland, the most conservative country on earth, some people even still sit down to table at four—in Charleston every one does.
One would not change the custom for worlds, just as one would not change the old box pews of St. Michael’s or replace the cannon on the Battery with modern ordinance.
Richard Pinckney did not dine at home that day. He was dining with the Rhetts in Calhoun Street, so Miss Pinckney said as they sat down to table. She sniffed as she said it, for the Rhetts, though one of the best families in the town, were people not of her way of thinking. The two Rhett girls had each a motor-car of her own and drove it—abomination!
The automobile ranked in her mind with the telephone as an invention of the devil.
Phyl had not seen Richard Pinckney since themorning and now he was dining out. Her heart had warmed to him at the station on the way to Vernons, and at breakfast he had appeared to her as a quite different person to the Richard Pinckney who had come to Kilgobbin, more boyish and frank, less of a man of the world. She had not seen him since he left the room at breakfast-time to look after her luggage. Miss Pinckney said he had gone off “somewhere or another” and grumbled at him for going off leaving his breakfast not quite finished, she said that he was always “scatter braining about” either at the yacht club or somewhere else.
Phyl, as she sat now at the dining-table with the dead and gone Mascarene men and women looking at her from the canvases on the wall, felt ever so slightly hurt.
Youth calls to youth irrespective of sex. She felt as a young person feels when another young person shows indifference. Then came the thought: was he avoiding her? Was he angry still about the affair at Kilgobbin, or was it just that he did not want to be bothered talking to her, looked on her as a nuisance in the house, a guest of no interest to him and yet to whom he had to be polite?
She could not tell. Neither could she tell why the problem exercised her mind in the way it did. Even at Kilgobbin, despite the fact of her antagonism towards him, Pinckney had possessed the power of disturbing her mind and making her think about him in a way that no one else had ever succeeded in doing. No one else had made her feel the short-comings in the householdménageat Kilgobbin,no one else had made her so fiercely critical of herself and her belongings.
She did not recognise the fact, but the fact was there, that it was a necessity of her being to stand well in this man’s eyes.
When a woman falls in love with a man or a man with a woman, the first necessity of his or her being is to stand well in the eyes of the loved one, anything that may bring ridicule or adverse criticism or disdain is death.
Phyl was not in love with Richard Pinckney, nor had she been in love with him at Kilgobbin, all the same the sensitiveness to appearances felt by a lover was there. Her anger that night when he had let her in at eleven o’clock was due, perhaps, less to his implied reproof then the fact that she had felt cheap in his eyes, and now, sitting at dinner with Miss Pinckney the idea that he was still angry with her was obscured by the far more distasteful idea that she was of absolutely no account in his eyes, a creature to whom he had to be civil, an interloper.
Her cheeks flushed and her eyes brightened at the thought, but Miss Pinckney did not notice it. She had turned from the subject of the Rhetts and their automobiles to Charleston society in general.
“Now that you’ve come,” said she, “you will find there’s not a moment you won’t enjoy yourself if you’re fond of gadding about. All the society here is in the hands of young people, balls and parties! The St. Cecilias give three balls a year. I go always, not to dance but to look on. Richard is aSt. Cecilia—St. Cecilias? Why, it’s just a club a hundred-and-forty years old. There are two hundred of them, all men, and they know how to entertain. I have been at every ball for the last half century. Not one have I missed. Then there’s the yacht club and picnics to Summerville and the Isle of Palms, and bathing parties and boating by moonlight. If you are a gad-about you will enjoy all that.”
“But I’m not,” said Phyl. “I’ve never been used to society, much. I like books better than people, unless they’re—”
“Unless they’re what?”
“Well—people I really like.”
“Well,” said Miss Pinckney, “one wouldn’t expect you to like people youdidn’tlike—there’s no ‘really’ in liking, it’s one thing or the other—you don’t care for girls, maybe?”
“I haven’t seen much of them,” replied Phyl, “except at school, and that was only for a short time. I—I ran away.”
“Ran away! And why did you run away?”
“I was miserable; they were kind enough to me, but I wanted to get home—Father was alive then—I felt I had to get home or die—I can’t explain it—It felt like a sort of madness. I had to get back home.”
Miss Pinckney was watching the girl, she scarcely seemed listening to her—Then she spoke:
“Impulsive. If I wasn’t sitting here in broad daylight, I’d fancy it was Juliet Mascarene. What makes you so like her? It’s not the face so much,though the family likeness runs strong, still, the face is different, though like—It’s just you yourself—well, I’m sure I don’t know, seems to me there’s a lot of things hid from us. Look at the Pringles, Anthony’s family, the ones that live in Tradd Street. If you put their noses together, they’d reach to Legare Street. It runs in the family. Julian Pringle, he died in ’70, he was just the same. Now why should a long nose run through a family like that, or a bad temper, or the colour of hair? I don’t know. The world’s a puzzle and the older one grows, the more it puzzles one.”
After dinner, Miss Pinckney ordered Phyl to put on her hat and they started out for a drive.
Every day at five o’clock, weather permitting, Miss Pinckney took an airing. She was one of the sights of Charleston, she, and the dark chestnut horses driven by Abraham the coloured coachman, and the barouche in which she drove; a carriage of other times, one of those deathless conveyances turned out in Long Acre in the days when varnish was varnish and hand labour had not been ousted by machinery. It was painted in a basket-work pattern, the pattern peculiar to the English Royal carriages, and the whole turn-out had an excellence and a style of its own—a thing unpurchasable as yesterday.
They drove in the direction of the Battery and here they drew up to look at the view. On one side of them stood the great curving row of mansions facing the sea, old Georgian houses and houses more modern, yet without offence, set in gardenswhere the palmetto leaves shivered in the sea wind and the pink mimosa mixed its perfume with the salt-scented air. On the other side lay the sea. Afternoon, late afternoon, is the time of all times to visit this spacious and sunlit place. It is then that the old ghosts return, if ever they return, to discuss the news brought by the last packet from England, the doings of Mr. Pitt, the Paris fashions.
Looking seaward they would see no change in the changeless sea and little change in the city if they turned their eyes that way.
Miss Pinckney got out and they walked a bit, inspecting the guns, each with its brass plate and its story.
Far away in the haze stood Fort Sumter,—a fragment of history, a sea warrior of the past, voiceless and guarding forever the viewless. It may have been some recollection of the Brighton front and of the great harbour of Kingstown with the sun upon it, and all this seemed vaguely familiar to Phyl, pleasantly familiar and homely. She breathed the sea air deeply and then, as she turned, glancing towards the land, a recollection came to her of the story she had been reading that evening in the library at Kilgobbin—“The Gold Bug.” It was near here that Legrand had found the treasure. He had come to Charleston to buy the mattocks and picks—no, it was Jupp the negro who had come to buy them.
She turned to Miss Pinckney.
“Did you ever read a story called ‘The Gold Bug’ by Edgar Allan Poe?” she asked. “It isabout a place near here—Sullivan’s Island—that’s it—I remember now.”
“Why, I knew him,” said Miss Pinckney.
“Knew Edgar Allan Poe!” said Phyl.
“I knew him when I was a child and I have sat on his knee and I can see his face—what a face it was! and the coat he wore—it had a velvet collar—his teeth were beautiful, and his hair—beautiful glossy hair it was, but he was not handsome as people use that expression, he was extraordinary, such eyes—and the most wonderful voice in the world. I’m seventy-five years of age and he died in October ’49, and I met him three years before he died, so you see I was a pretty small child. It was at Fordham. He’d just taken a cottage there for his wife, who was ailing with consumption, and my aunt, Mary Pinckney, who was a friend of the Osgoods, took me there. It must have been summer for I remember a bird hanging in a cage in the sunshine, a bob-o’-link it was, he had caught it in the woods.
“Dear Lord! I wonder where that summer day’s gone to, and the bob-o’-link—’pears to me we aren’t even memories, for memories live and we don’t.”
They were walking along, Abraham slowly following with the carriage, and Miss Pinckney was walking in an exultant manner as though she saw nothing about her, as though she were treading air. Phyl had unconsciously set free a train of thought in the mind of Miss Pinckney, a train that always led to an explosion, and this is exactly how it happened and what she said.
“But his memory will live. Look right round you, do you see his statue?”
“No,” said Phyl, sweeping the view. “Where is it?”
“Just so, where is it? It’s not here, it’s not in N’York, it’s not in Baltimore, it’s not in Philadelphia, it’s not in Boston. The one real splendid writing man that America has produced she’s ashamed to put up a statue to. Why? Because he drank! Why, God bless my soul, Grant drank. No, it wasn’t drink, it was Griswold. The man who hated him, the man who crucified his reputation and sold the remains for thirty pieces of silver to a publisher, Griswold, Rufus Griswold—Judas Griswold that was his real name, and he hid it—”
Miss Pinckney had lowered her parasol in her anger, she shut it with a snap and then shot it up again; as she did so an automobile driven by a girl and which was approaching them, passed, and a young man seated by the girl raised his hat.
It was Richard Pinckney.
The girl was a very pretty brunette. This thing was too much for Miss Pinckney in her present temper; all her anger against Griswold seemed suddenly diverted to the automobile. She snorted.
“There goes Richard with Venetia Frances Rhett,” said she. “Ought to be ashamed of herself driving along the Battery in that outrageous thing; goodness knows, they’re bad enough driven by men, scaring people to death and killing dogs and chickens, without girls taking to them—”
She stared after the car, then signalling to Abraham,she got into the barouche, Phyl followed her and they continued their drive.
That evening after supper Miss Pinckney’s mind warmed to thoughts of the good old days when motor-cars were undreamed of, and stirred up by the recollection of Edgar Allan Poe, discharged itself of reminiscences worth much gold could they have been taken down by a stenographer.
She was sitting with Phyl in the piazza, for the night was warm, and whilst a big southern moon lit the garden, she let her mind stray over the men and women who had made American literature in the ’50’s and ’60’s, many of whom she had known when young.
Estelle Anna Lewis of Baltimore, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Cullen Bryant, Elizabeth Oakes Smith, Cornelius Mathews, Frances Sargent Osgood, N. P. Willis, Laughton Osborn. She had known Lowell and Longfellow, yet her mind seemed to cling mostly to the lesser people, writers in theSouthern Literary Messenger, theHome Journal, theMirrorand theBroadway Journal.
People well-known in their day and now scarcely remembered, yet whose very names are capable of evoking the colour and romance of that fascinating epoch beyond and around the Civil War.
“They’re all dead and gone,” said she, “and folk nowadays don’t seem to trouble about the best of them, or remember their lines, yet there’s nothing they write now that’s as good—I remember poor Thomas Ward. ‘Flaccus’ was the name he wrote under, a thin skeleton of a man always with his headin the air and his mind somewhere else, used to write in theKnickerbocker Journal; I heard him recite one of his things.
“‘And, straining, fastened on her lips a kiss,
That seemed to suck the life blood from her heart.’
“That stuck in my head, mostly, I expect, because Thomas Ward didn’t look as if he’d ever kissed a girl, but they are good lines and a lot better than they write nowadays.”
The wind had risen a bit and was stirring in the leaves of the magnolias, white carnations growing near the sun dial shook their ruffles in the moonlight, and from near and far away came the sounds of Charleston, voices, the sound of traffic and then, a thread of tune tying moonbeams, magnolias, carnations and cherokee roses in a great southern bunch, came the notes of a banjo, plunk, plunk, and a voice from somewhere away in the back premises, the voice of a negro singing one of the old Plantation songs.
Just a snatch before some closing door cut the singer off, but enough to make Phyl raise her head and listen, listen as though a whole world vaguely guessed, a world forgotten yet still warm and loving, youthful and sunlit, were striving to reach her and speak to her—As though Charleston the mysterious city that had greeted her first in Meeting Street were trying to tell her of things delightful, once loved, once known and forever vanished.
As she lay awake that night with the moonlight showing through the blinds, the whole of thatstrange day came before her in pictures: the face of Frances Rhett troubled her, yet she did not know in the least why; it seemed part of the horribleness of automobiles and the anger of Miss Pinckney and the tribulations of Edgar Allan Poe.
Then the fantastic band of forgottenliteratitrooped before her, led by “Flaccus,” the man who didn’t look as if he had ever kissed a girl, yet who wrote:
“And, straining, fastened on her lips a kiss,
That seemed to suck the life blood from her heart.”