CHAPTER VII
“Miss Pinckney,” said Phyl that night as they sat at supper, “when you left me this afternoon in Juliet’s room I stopped to look at the books and things and when I opened the bureau I touched a spring by accident and a little panel fell out and I found a lot of old letters behind it. It was wrong of me to go meddling about and I thought I ought to tell you.”
“Old letters,” said Miss Pinckney, “you don’t say—what were they about?”
“I read one or two,” said the girl. “I’d never, never have dreamed of touching them only—only they were hers—they were to him.”
“Rupert?”
“Yes.”
“Love letters?”
“Yes.”
Miss Pinckney sighed.
“He kept all her letters,” said she, “and they came back to her after he was killed. He was killed here in Charleston, at Fort Sumter, in the war; they brought him across here and carried him on a stretcher and she—well, well, it’s all done with and let it rest, but it is strange that those letters should have fallen into your hands.”
“Why, strange?”
“Why?” burst out Miss Pinckney. “Why I have dusted that old bureau inside and out a hundred times, and pulled out the drawers and pushed them in and it never shewed sign of having anything in it but emptiness, and you don’t do more’n look at it and you find those letters. It’s just as if the thing had deceived me. I don’t mind, and I don’t want to see them, they weren’t intended for other eyes than his and hers—and maybe yours since they were shewn you like that.”
“Was it wrong of me to look at them?” asked Phyl. “I never would have done it only—only—Oh, I don’t know, I somehow felt she wouldn’t mind. She seemed like a sister—I would never dream of looking at another person’s letters but she did not seem like another person. I can’t explain. It was just as though the letters were my own—just exactly as though they were my own when I found them in my hands.”
Phyl was talking with her eyes fixed before her as though she were looking across some great distance.
Miss Pinckney gave a little shiver, then supper being over she rose from the table and led the way from the room.
Richard Pinckney had dined with them but he was out for supper somewhere or another. They went to the drawing-room and had not been there for more than a few minutes when Frances Rhett was announced.
The Rhetts were on intimate enough terms with the Pinckneys to call in like this without ceremony;Frances had called to speak to Miss Pinckney about some charity affair she was getting up in a hurry, but she had not been five minutes in the room before Phyl knew that she had called to look at her. To look at the girl who had come to live with the Pinckneys, the red headed girl. Phyl did not know that girls of Frances’ type dread red haired girls, if they are pretty, as rabbits dread stoats, but she did know in some uncanny way that Frances Rhett considered Richard Pinckney as her own property to be protected against all comers.
All at once and new born, the woman awoke in her instinctive, mistrustful and armed.
Frances Rhett, despite Miss Pinckney’s dispraise of her, was a most formidable person as far as the opposite sex was concerned. One of the women of whom other women say, “Well, I don’t know what he sees in her, I’m sure.”
A brunette of eighteen who looked twenty, full-blooded, full lipped, full curved, sleepy-eyed, she seemed dressed by nature for the part of the world and the flesh—with a hint of the devil in those deep, dark, pansy blue eyes that seemed now by artificial light almost black.
“Well, I’ll subscribe ten dollars,” said Miss Pinckney; “I reckon the darkie babies won’t be any the worse for acrêcheand maybe not very much better for it. If you could get up an institution to distil good manners and respect for their betters into their heads I’d give you forty. I’m sure I don’t know what the coloured folk of Charleston are coming to, one of them nearly pushed me off the sidewalkthe other day, bag of impudence! and the way they look at one in the street with that sleery leery what-d’-you-call-yourself-you-white-trash grin on their faces s’nough to raise Cain in any one’s heart.”
“I know,” replied the dark girl, “and they are getting worse; the whip is the only thing that as far as I can see ever made them possible, and what we have now is the result of your beautiful Abolitionists.”
“Don’t call them my beautiful Abolitionists,” replied the other. “I didn’t make ’em. All the same I don’t believe in whipping and never did. It’s the whip that whipped us in the war. If white folk had treated black folk like Christians slavery would have been the greatest god-send to blacks. It was what stays are to women. But they didn’t. The low down white made slavery impossible with his whipping and oppression andwehad to suffer. Well, we haven’t ended our sufferings and if these folk go on multiplying like rabbits there’s no knowing what we’ve got to suffer yet.”
Miss Rhett concurred and took her departure. “Now, that girl,” said the elder lady when Frances Rhett was gone, “is just the type of the people I was telling her about. No idea but whipping.Shewouldn’t have much mercy on a human creature black or tanorwhite. Thick skinned. She didn’t even see that I was telling her so to her face. Wonder what brought her here this hour with hercrêche. It’s just a fad. If they got up a charity to make alligator bait of the black babies so’s to sell the alligator skins to buy pants with texts on them for the Hottentots it’d be all the same to her. Somethingto gad about with. I wish I’d kept that ten dollars in my pocket.”
Miss Pinckney went to bed early that night—before ten—and Phyl, who was free to do as she chose, sat for a while in the lower piazza watching the moon rising above the trees. She had a little plan in her mind, a plan that had only occurred to her just before the departure of Miss Pinckney for bed.
She sat now watching the garden growing ghostly bright, the sun dial becoming a moon dial, the carnations touched by that stillness and mystery which is held only in the light of the moon and the light of the dawn.
Phyl found herself sitting between two worlds. In the light of the northern moon in summer there is a vague rose tinge to be caught at times and in places when it falls full on house wall or the road on which one is walking. The piazza to-night had this living and warm touch. It seemed lit by a glorified ethereal day. A day that had never grown up and would never lose the charm of dawn.
Yet the garden to which she would now turn her eyes shewed nothing of this. Night reigned there from the cherokee roses moving in the wind to the carnations motionless, moon stricken, deathly white.
Sure that Miss Pinckney would not come down again, Phyl rose and crossed the garden towards the gate.
She wanted to see if the trysting place behind the magnolia and the bushes that grew about it were still there.
At the gate she paused for a moment, glancingback at the house as Juliet Mascarene might have done on those evenings when she had an appointment with her lover. Then, pushing through the bushes and past the magnolia trees she found herself in a little half moonlit space, a natural arbour through whose roof of leaves the moonlight came in quavering shafts. She stood for a moment absolutely still whilst her eyes accustomed themselves to the light. Then she began to search for the seat she guessed to be there, and found it. It was between an oak bole and the wall of the garden, and the bushes behind had grown so that their branches half covered it. Neglected, forsaken, unknown, perhaps, to the people now living in Vernons it had lingered with the fidelity of inanimate things, protected by the foliage of the southern garden from prying eyes.
She pushed back the leaves and branches and bent them out of the way, then she took her seat, and as she did so several of the bent branches released themselves and closed half round her in a delightful embrace.
From here she could see brokenly the garden and the walk leading from the gate, with the light of the moon now strong upon the walk. The night sounds of the street just beyond the wall came mixed with the stir of foliage as the wind from the sea pressed over the trees like the hand of a mesmerist inducing sleep.
So it was here that Juliet Mascarene had sat with Rupert Pinckney on those summer nights when the world was younger, before the war. The war that had changed everything whilst leaving the roses untouchedand the moonlight the same on the bird-haunted garden of Vernons.
Everything was the same here in this little space of flowers and trees. But the lovers had vanished.
“For man walketh in a vain shadow and disquieteth himself in vain.” The words strayed across Phyl’s mind brought up by recollection. “He cometh up and is cut down like a flower, he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay.”
The trees seemed whispering it, the eternal statement that leaves the eternal question unanswered.
The garden was talking to her, the night, the very bushes that clasped her in a half embrace; perfumes, moonlight, the voice of the wind, all were part of the spell that bound her, held her, whispered to her. It was as though the love letter of Juliet had led her here to show her as in a glass darkly the vainness of love in the vainness of life.
Vainly, for as she sat watching in imagination the forms of the lost lovers parting there at the gate, suddenly there came upon her a stirring of the soul, a joyous uplifting as though wings had been given to her mind for one wild second raising it to the heights beyond earthly knowledge.
“Love can never die.”
It was as though some ghostly voice had whispered this fact in her ear.
Juliet was not dead nor the man she loved, changed maybe but not dead. In some extraordinary way she knew it as surely as though she herself had once been Juliet.
Religion to Phyl had meant little, the Bible a bookof fair promises and appalling threats, vague promises but quite definite threats. As a quite small child she had gathered the impression that she was sure to be damned unless she managed to convert herself into a quite different being from the person she knew herself to be. Death was the supreme bogey, the future life a thing not to be thought of if one wanted to be happy.
Yet now, just as if she had been through it all, the truth came flooding on her like a golden sea, the truth that life never loses touch with life, that the body is only a momentary manifestation of the ever living spirit.
Meeting Street, the old house so full of memories, Juliet’s letters, the garden, they had all been stretching out arms to her, trying to tell her something, whispering, suggesting, and now all these vague voices had become clear, as though strengthened by the moonlight and the mystery of night.
Clear as lip-spoken words came the message:
“You have lived before and we say this to you, we, the things that knew you and loved you in a past life.”
A step that halted outside close to the garden gate broke the spell, the gate turned on its hinges shewing through its trellis work the form of a man. It was Pinckney just returned from some supper-party or club.
Phyl caught her breath back. Suddenly, and at the sight of Pinckney, Prue’s words of that morning entered her mind.
“Miss Julie, Massa Pinckney told me tell yo’ hebe at de gate t’night same’s las’ night. Done you let on as I told you.”
And here he was, the man who had been occupying her thoughts and who was beginning to occupy her dreams, and here she was as though waiting for him by appointment.
But there was much more than that. Worlds and worlds more than that, a whole universe of happiness undreamed of.
She rose from the seat and the parted bushes rustled faintly as they closed behind her.
Pinckney, who had just shut the gate, heard the whisper of the leaves, he turned and saw a figure standing half in shadow and half in moonlight. For a moment he was startled, fancying it a stranger, then he saw that it was Phyl.
“Hullo,” said he. “Why, Phyl, what are you doing here?”
The commonplace question shattered everything like a false note in music.
“Nothing,” she answered. Then without a word more she ran past him and vanished into the house.
Pinckney cast the stump of his cigar away.
“What on earth is the matter with her now?” said he to himself. “What on earth have I done?”
The word she had uttered carried half a sob with it, it might have been the last word of a quarrel.
He stood for a moment glancing around. The wild idea had entered his mind that she had been there to meet some one and that his intrusion had put her out.
But there was no one in the garden; nothing butthe trees and the flowers, wind shaken and lit by the moon, the same placid moon that had lit the garden of Vernons for the lovers of whom he knew nothing except by hearsay, and for whom he cared nothing at all.
CHAPTER VIII
When Phyl awoke from sleep next morning, the brightness of the South had lost some of its charm.
Something magical that had been forming in her mind and taking its life from Vernons had been shattered last night by Pinckney’s commonplace question.
This morning, looking back on yesterday, she could remember details but she could not recapture the essence. The exaltation that had raised her above and beyond herself. It was like the remembrance of a rose contrasted with the reality.
The whole day had been working up to that moment in the little arbour, when her mind, tricked or led, had risen to heights beyond thought, to happiness beyond experience, only to be cast down from those heights by the voice of reality.
The thing was plain enough to common sense; she had let herself be over-ruled by Imagination, working upon splendid material. Prue’s message, her own likeness to Juliet, Juliet’s letters, the little arbour, those and the magic of Vernons had worked upon her mind singly and together, exalting her into a soul-state utterly beyond all previous experience.
It was as though she had played the part of Juliet for a day, suffered vaguely and enjoyed in imagination what Juliet had suffered and enjoyed in life,known Love as Juliet had known it—for a moment.
The brutal touch of the Real coming at the supreme moment to shatter and shrivel everything.
And the strange thing was that she had no regrets.
Looking back on yesterday, the things that had happened seemed of little interest. Sleep seemed to have put an Atlantic ocean between her and them.
Coming down to breakfast she found Pinckney just coming in from the garden; he said nothing about the incident of the night before, nor did she, there were other things to talk about. Seth, one of the darkies, had been ‘kicking up shines,’ he had given impudence to Miss Pinckney that morning. Impudence to Miss Pinckney! You can scarcely conceive the meaning of that statement without a personal knowledge of Miss Pinckney, and a full understanding of the magic of her rule.
Seth was, even now, packing up the quaint contraptions he called his luggage, and old Darius, the coloured odd job man, was getting a barrow out of the tool-house to wheel the said luggage to Seth’s grandmother’s house, somewhere in the negro quarters of the town. The whole affair of the impudence and dismissal had not taken two minutes, but the effects were widespread and lasting. Dinah was weeping, the kitchen in confusion; one might have thought a death had occurred in the house, and Miss Pinckney presiding at the breakfast table was voluble and silent by turns.
“Never mind,” said Pinckney with all the light-heartedness of a man towards domestic affairs. “Seth’s not the only nigger in Charleston.”
“I’m not bothering about his going,” replied Miss Pinckney. “He was all thumbs and of no manner of use but to make work; what upsets me is the way he hid his nature. Time and again I’ve been good to that boy. He looked all black grin and frizzled head, nothing bad in him you’d say—and then! It’s like opening a cupboard and finding a toad, and there’s Dinah going on like a fool; she’s crying because he’s going, not because he gave me impudence. Rachel’s the same, and I’m just going now to the kitchen to give them a talking to all round.”
Off she went.
“I know what that means,” said Pinckney. “It’s only once in a couple of years that there’s any trouble with servants and then—oh, my! You see Aunt Maria is not the same as other people because she loves every one dearly, and looks on the servants as part of the family. I expect she loves that black imp Seth, for all his faults, and that’s what makes her so upset.”
“Same as I was about Rafferty,” said Phyl with a little laugh.
Pinckney laughed also and their eyes met. Just like a veil swept aside, something indefinable that had lain between them, some awkwardness arising, maybe, from the Rafferty incident, vanished in that moment.
Phyl had been drawing steadily towards him lately, till, unknown to her, he had entered into the little romance of Juliet, so much so that if last night, at that magical moment when he met her on entering the gate—if at that moment he had taken her in hisarms and kissed her, Love might have been born instantly from his embrace.
But the psychological moment had passed, a crisis unknown to him and almost unknown to her.
And now, as if to seal the triumph of the commonplace, suddenly, the vague reservation that had lain between them, disappeared.
“Do you know,” said he, “you taught me a lesson that day, a lesson every man ought to be taught before he leaves college.”
“What was that?” asked Phyl.
“Never to interfere in household affairs. Of course Rafferty wasn’t exactly a household affair because he belonged mostly to the stable, still he was your affair more than mine. Household affairs belong to women, and men ought to leave them alone.”
“Maybe you’re right,” said Phyl, “but all the same I was wrong. Do you know I’ve never apologised for what I said.”
“What did you say?” asked he with an artless air of having forgotten.
“Oh, I said—things, and—I apologise.”
“And I said—things, and I apologise—come on, let’s go out. I have no business this morning and I’d like to show you the town—if you’d care to come.”
“What about Miss Pinckney?” asked Phyl.
“Oh, she’s all right,” he replied. “The Seth trouble will keep her busy till lunch time and I’ll leave word we’ve gone out for a walk.”
Phyl ran upstairs and put on her hat. As theywere passing through the garden the thought came to her just for a moment to show him the little arbour; then something stopped her, a feeling that this humble little secret was not hers to give away, and a feeling that Pinckney wouldn’t care. Dead lovers vanished so long and their affairs would have little interest for his practical mind.
The morning was warmer even than yesterday. The joyous, elusive, intoxicating spirit of the Southern spring was everywhere, the air seemed filled with the dust of sunbeams, filled with fragrance and lazy sounds. The very business of the street seemed part of a great universal gaiety over which the sky heat hazy beyond the Battery rose in a dome of deep, sublime tranquil blue.
They stopped to inspect the old slave market.
Then the remains of the building that had once been the old Planters Hotel held Phyl like a wizard whilst Pinckney explained its history. Here in the old days the travelling carriages had drawn up, piled with the luggage of fine folk on a visit to Charleston on business or pleasure. The Planters was known all through the Georgias and Virginia, all through the States in the days when General Washington and John C. Calhoun were living figures.
The ghost of the place held Phyl’s imagination. Just as Meeting Street seemed filled with friendly old memories on her first entering it, so did the air around the ruins of the “Planters.”
Then having paused to admire the gouty pillars of St. Michael’s they went into the church.
The silence of an empty church is a thing apartfrom all other silences in the world. Deeper, more complete, more filled with voices.
As they were entering a negro caretaker engaged in dusting and tidying let something fall, and as the silence closed in on the faint echo that followed the sound they stopped, just by the font to look around them. Here the spirit of spring was not. The shafts of sunlight through the windows lit the old fashioned box pews, the double decked pulpit, and the font crowned with the dove with the light of long ago. Sunday mornings of the old time assuredly had found sanctuary here and the old congregations had not yet quite departed.
The occasional noise of the caretaker as he moved from pew to pew scarcely disturbed the tranquillity, the scene was set beyond the reach of the sounds and daily affairs of this world, and the actors held in a medium unshakable as that which holds the ghostly life of bees in amber and birds in marqueterie.
“That was George Washington’s pew,” whispered Pinckney, “at least the one he sat in once. That’s the old Pinckney pew, belonged to Bures—other people sit there now. This is our pew—Vernons. The Mascarenes had it in the old days, of course.”
Phyl looked at the pew where Juliet Mascarene had sat often enough, no doubt, whilst the preacher had preached on the vanity of life, on the delusions of the world and the shortness of Time.
Many an eloquent divine had stood in the pulpit of St. Michael’s, but none have ever preached a sermon so poignant, so real, so searching as that which the old church preaches to those who care to hear.
They turned to go.
Outside Phyl was silent and Pinckney seemed occupied by thoughts of his own. They had got to that pleasant stage of intimacy where conversation can be dropped without awkwardness and picked up again haphazard, but you cannot be silent long in the streets of Charleston on a spring day. They visited the market-place and inspected the buzzards and then, somehow, without knowing it, they drifted on to the water side. Here where the docks lie deserted and the green water washes the weed grown and rotting timbers of wharves they took their seats on a baulk of timber to rest and contemplate things.
“There used to be ships here once,” said he. “Lots of ships—but that was before the war.”
He was silent and Phyl glanced sideways at him, wondering what was in his mind. She soon found out. A struggle was going on between his two selves, his business self that demanded up-to-dateness, bustle, and the energetic conduct of affairs, and his other self that was content to let things lie, to see Charleston just as she was, unspoiled by the thing we call Business Prosperity. It was a battle between the South and the North in him.
He talked it out to her. Went into details, pointed to Galveston and New Orleans, those greedy sea mouths that swallow the goods of the world and give out cotton, whilst Charleston lay idle, her wharves almost deserted, her storehouses empty.
He spoke almost vehemently, spoke as a business man speaks of wasted chances and things neglected. Then, when he had finished, the girl put in her word.
“Well,” said she, “it may be so but I don’t want it any different from what it is.”
Pinckney laughed, the laugh of a man who is confessing a weakness.
“I don’t know that I do either,” said he.
It was rank blasphemy against Business. At the club you would often find him bemoaning the business decay of the city he loved, but here, sitting by the girl on the forsaken wharf, in the sunshine, the feeling suddenly came to him that there was something here that business would drive away. Something better than Prosperity.
It was as though he were looking at things for a moment through her eyes.
They came back through the sunlit streets to find Miss Pinckney recovered from the Seth business, and after luncheon that day, assisted by Dinah and the directions of Miss Pinckney, Phyl’s hair “went up.”
“It’s beautiful,” said the old lady, as she contemplated the result, “and more like Juliet than ever. Take the glass and look at yourself.”
Phyl did.
She did not see the beauty but she saw the change. Her childhood had vanished as though some breath had blown it away in the magic mirror.
PART III
PART III
CHAPTER I
In a fortnight Phyl had adjusted herself to her new environment so completely that to use Pinckney’s expression, she might have been bred and born in Charleston.
Custom and acquaintanceship had begun to dull without destroying the charm of the place and the ghostly something, the something that during the first two days had seemed to haunt Vernons, the something indefinable she had called “It” had withdrawn.
The spell, whatever it was, had been broken that night in the garden, when Pinckney’s commonplace remark had shattered the dream-state into which she had worked herself with the assistance of Prue, Juliet’s letters, the little secret arbour and the moonlight of the South.
One morning, coming down to breakfast, she found Miss Pinckney in agitation, an open telegram in one hand and a feather duster in the other.
It was one of the early morning habits of Miss Pinckney to range the house superintending things with a feather duster in hand, not so much for use as for the purpose of encouraging others. She was inthe breakfast room now dusting spasmodically things that did not require dusting and talking all the time, pausing every now and then to have another glance at the telegram whilst Richard Pinckney, unable to get a word in, sat on a chair, and Jim, the little coloured page, who had brought in the urn, stood by listening and admiring.
“Forty miles from here and ten from a railway station,” said Miss Pinckney, “and how am I to get there?”
“Automobile,” said Pinckney.
It was evidently not his first suggestion as to this means of locomotion, for the suggestion was received without an outburst, neither resented nor assented to in fact. They took their seats at table and then it all came out.
Colonel Seth Grangerson of Grangerson House, Grangerville, S. Carolina, was ill. Miss Pinckney was his nearest relative, the nearest at least with whom he was not fighting, and he had wired to her, or rather his son had wired to her, to come at once.
“As if I were a bird,” said the old lady. Grangerville was a backwater place, badly served by the railway, and it would take the best part of a day to get there by ordinary means.
“A car will get you there inside a couple of hours,” said Pinckney.
“As if he couldn’t have sent for Susan Revenall,” went on she as though oblivious to the suggestion, “but I suppose he’s fought with them again. I patched up a peace between them last midsummer, but I suppose the patches didn’t stick; he’s foughtwith the Revenalls, he’s fought with the Calhouns, he’s fought with the Beauregards, he’s fought with the Tredegars—that man would fight with his own front teeth if he couldn’t get anything better to fight with, and now he’s dying I expect he reckons to have a fight with me, just to finish off with. He killed his poor wife, and Dick Grangerson would never have gone off and got drowned only for him—Oh, he’s not so bad,” turning to Phyl, “he’s good enough only for that—will fight.”
“Too much pep,” said Pinckney.
“I’m sure I don’t know what it is. They’re the queerest lot the Almighty ever put feet on, and I don’t mind saying it, even though they are relatives.” Turning to Phyl. “I suppose you know, least I suppose you think, that the Civil War was fought for the emancipation of the darkies and that theywereemancipated.”
“Yes!”
“Well, they weren’t—at least not at Grangersons. While the Colonel’s father was fighting in the Civil War, his first wife, she was a Dawson, kept things going at home, and after the war was over and he was back he took up the rule again. Emancipation—no one would have dared to say the word to him, he’d have killed you with a look. The North never beat Grangerson, it beat Davis and one man and another but it never beat Grangerson, he carried on after the war just as he carried on before, told the darkies that emancipation was nigger talk and they believed him. People came round telling them they were free, and all they got was broken heads. Theywere a very tetchy lot, those niggers, are still what are left of them. You see, they’ve always been proud of being Grangerson’s niggers, that’s the sort of man he is, able to make them feel like that.”
“Silas helps to carry on the place, doesn’t he?” asked Pinckney.
“Yes, and just in the same tradition, only he’s finding it doesn’t work, I suspect. You see, the old darkies are all right, but when he’s forced to get new labour he has to get the new darkies and they’re all wrong, and he thrashes them and they run away. They never take the law of him either. I reckon when they get clear of Silas they don’t stop running till they get to Galveston.”
They talked of other things and then, breakfast over, Miss Pinckney turned to Richard.
“Well, what about that automobile?”
“I’ll have one at the door for you at ten,” said he.
She turned to Phyl.
“You’d better go with me—if you’d like to; you’d be lonely here all by yourself, and you may as well see Grangersons whilst the old man’s there, though maybe he’ll be gone before we arrive. We may be there for a couple of days, so you’d better take enough things.”
Then she went off to dress herself for the journey, and an hour later she appeared veiled and apparelled, Dick following her with the luggage, a bandbox and a bag of other days.
She got into the big touring car without a word. Phyl followed her and Pinckney tucked the rug round their knees.
“You’ve got the most careful driver in Charleston,” said he, “and he knows the road.”
Miss Pinckney nodded.
She was flying straight in the face of her pet prejudice. She was not in the least afraid of a break down or an overset. An accident that did not rob her of life or limb would indeed have been an opportunity for saying “I told you so.” She was chiefly afraid of running over things.
As Pinckney was closing the door on them who should appear but Seth—Seth in a striped sleeved jacket, all grin and frizzled head and bearing a bunch of flowers in his hand. He had not been dismissed after all. When Miss Pinckney had gone into the kitchen to pay him his wages he had carried on so that she forgave him. The flowers—her own flowers just picked from the garden—were an offering, not to propitiate but to please.
Pinckney laughed, but Miss Pinckney as she took the bouquet scarcely noticed either him or Seth, her mind was busy with something else.
She leaned over towards the chauffeur.
“Mind you don’t run over any chickens,” said she.
It was a gorgeous morning, with the sea mists blowing away on the sea wind, swamp-land and river and bayou showing streets and ponds of sapphire through the vanishing haze.
Phyl was in high spirits; the tune of Camptown Races, which a street boy had been whistling as they started, pursued her. Miss Pinckney, dumb through the danger zone where chickens and dogs and niggerchildren might be run over, found her voice in the open country.
The bunch of flowers presented to her by Seth and which she was holding on her lap started her off.
“I hope it is not a warning,” said she; “wouldn’t be a bit surprised to find Seth Grangerson in his coffin waiting for the flowers to be put on him; what put it in to the darkey’s head to give me them! I don’t know, I’m sure, same thing I suppose that put it into his head to give me impudence.”
“You’ve taken him back,” said Phyl.
“Well, I suppose I have,” said the other in a resigned voice, “and likely to pay for my foolishness.”
Pinckney had said that it was only a two hours’ run from Charleston to Grangerville, but he had reckoned without taking into consideration the badness of some of the roads, and the intricacies of the way, for it was after one o’clock when they reached the little town beyond which, a mile to the West, lay the Colonel’s house.
Grangerville lies on the border of Clarendon county, a tiny place that yet supports a newspaper of its own, theGrangerville Courier. TheCourieroffice, the barber’s shop and the hotel are the chief places in Grangerville, and yellow dogs and black children seem the bulk of the population, at least of a warm afternoon, when drowsiness holds the place in her keeping, and the light lies broad and steadfast and golden upon the cotton fields, and the fields of Indian corn, and the foliage of the woods that spread to southward, enchanted woods, fading away into an enchanted world of haze and sun and silence.
When the great Southern moon rises above the cotton fields, Romance touches even Grangerville itself, the baying of the yellow dog, darkey voices, the distant plunking of a banjo, the owl in the trees—all are the same as of old—and the houses are the same, nearly, and the people, and it is hard to believe that over there to the North the locomotives of the Atlantic Coast railway are whistling down the night, that men are able to talk to one another at a distance of a thousand miles, fly like birds, live like fish, and perpetuate their shadows in the “movies.”
Grangersons lay a mile beyond the little town, a solidly built mansion set far back from the road, and approached by an avenue of cypress. As they drew up before the pillared piazza, upon which the front door opened, from the doorway, wide open this warm day, appeared an old gentleman.
A very fine looking old man he was. His face, with its predominant nose, long white moustache and firm cleft chin, was of that resolute and obstinate type which seems a legacy of the Roman Empire, whose legionaries left much more behind them in Gaul and Britain than Trajan arches and Roman roads. He was dressed in light grey tweeds, his linen was immaculate—youthful and still a beau in point of dress, and bearing himself erect with the aid of a walking stick, a crutch handled stick of clouded malacca, Colonel Seth Grangerson, for he it was, had come to his front door, drawn by the sound of the one thing he detested more than anything in life, a motor car.
“Why, Lord! He’s not even in bed,” cried theoutraged Miss Pinckney, who recognised him at once. “All this journey and he up and about—it beats Seth and his impudence!”
The Colonel, whose age dimmed eyes saw nothing but the automobile, came down the steps, panama hat in hand, courtly, freezing, yet ready to explode on the least provocation. Within touch of the car he recognised the chief occupant.
“Why, God bless my soul,” cried he, “it’s Maria Pinckney.”
“Yes, it’s me,” said the lady, “and I expected to find you in bed or worse, and here you are up. Silas sent me a telegram.”
“He’s a fool,” cut in the old gentleman. “I had one of my old attacks last night, and I told him I’d be up and about in the morning—and I am. Good Gad! Maria, you’re the last person in the world I’d ever have expected to see in one of these outrageous things.” He had opened the door of the car and was presenting his arm to the lady.
“You can shut the door,” said Miss Pinckney. “I’m not getting out. The thing’s not more outrageous than your getting up like that right after an attack and dragging me a hundred miles from Charleston over hill and dale—I’m not getting out, I’m going right back—right back to Charleston.”
The Colonel turned his head and called to a darkey that had appeared at the front door.
“Take the luggage in,” said he. Miss Pinckney got out of the car despite herself, half laughing, half angry, and taking the gallantly proffered arm found herself being led up the steps of Grangersons, pausinghalf way up to introduce Phyl, whom she had completely forgotten till now.
The Colonel, like his son Silas, as will presently be seen, had a direct way with women; the Grangersons had pretty nearly always fallen in love at sight and run away with their wives. Colonel Seth’s father had done this, meeting, marrying and fascinating the beautiful Maria Tredegar, and carrying her off under his arm like a hypnotised fowl, and from under the noses of half a dozen more eligible suitors, just as now, the Colonel was carrying Maria Pinckney off into his house half against her will. Phyl following them, gazed round at the fine old oak panelled hall, from which they were led into the drawing room, a room not unlike the drawing room at Vernons, but larger and giving a view of the garden where the oleanders and cherokee money and the crescent leaves of the blue gum trees were moving in the wind. Colonel Seth, despite the war, had plenty of roses and Grangersons was kept up in the old style. Just as in Nuremberg and Vittoria we see mediæval cities preserved, so to speak, under glass, so at Grangersons one found the old Plantation, house and all, miraculously intact, living, almost, one might say, breathing.
The price of cotton did not matter much to the Colonel, nor the price of haulage. This son of the Southerner who had refused to be beaten by the North in the war, cared for nothing much beyond the ring of sky that made his horizon. Twice a year he made a visit to Charleston, driving in his own carriage, occasionally he visited Richmond or Durham,where he had an interest in tobacco; New York he had never seen. He loathed railways and automobiles, mainly, perhaps, because they were inventions of the North, that is to say the devil. He had a devilish hatred of the North. Not of Northerners, but just of the North.
The word North set his teeth on edge. It did not matter to him that Charleston was picking up some prosperity in the way of phosphates, or that Chattanooga was smelting ore into money, or that industrial prosperity was abroad in the land; he was old enough to have a recollection of old days, and from the North had come the chilly blast that had blown away that age.
A servant brought in cake and wine to stay the travellers till dinner time, refreshment that Miss Pinckney positively refused at first.
“You will stay the night,” said the Colonel, as he helped her, “and Sarah will show you to your rooms when we have had a word together.”
Miss Pinckney, sipping her wine, made no reply, then placing the scarcely touched glass on the table and with her bonnet strings thrown back, she turned to the Colonel.
“Do you see the likeness?” said she.
“What likeness?” asked the old gentleman.
“Why, God bless my soul, the likeness to Juliet Mascarene. Phyl, turn your face to the light.”
The Colonel, searching in his waistcoat pocket, found a pair of folding glasses and put them on.
“She gets it from her mother’s side,” said MissPinckney, “the Lord knows how it is these things happen, but it’s Juliet, isn’t it?”
The Colonel removed his glasses, wiped them with his handkerchief, and returned them to his pocket.
“It is,” said he. Then in the fine old fashion he turned to the girl, raised her hand to his lips and kissed it.
“Phyl,” said Miss Pinckney, “would not you like to have a look at the garden whilst we have a chat? Old people’s talk isn’t of much interest to young people.”
“Old people,” cried the warrior. “There are no old people in this room.” He made for the door and opened it for Phyl, then he accompanied her into the hall, where at the still open door he pointed the way to the garden.