CHAPTER VII
She came out of the cemetery. There was no sign of Silas in the street nor on the front of the church.
Phyl had a full measure of the Celtic power to meet trouble halfway, to imagine disaster. As she hurried home she saw all manner of trouble, things happening to Richard Pinckney, and all brought about through herself. Amidst all these fancies she saw one fact: He must be warned.
She found Miss Pinckney in the linen room. The linen room at Vernons was a treasure house beyond a man’s description, perhaps even beyond his true appreciation. There in the cupboards with their thin old fashioned ring handles and on the shelves of red cedar reposed damask and double damask of the time when men paid for their purchases in guineas, miraculous preservations. Just as the life of a china vase is a perpetual escape from the stupidity of servant maids and the heaviness of clumsy fingers, so the life of these cream white oblongs, in which certain lights brought forth miraculous representations of flowers, festoons and birds, was a perpetual preservation from the moth, from damp, from dryness, from the dust that corrupts.
A house like Vernons exists not by virtue of itsbrick and mortar; to keep it really alive it must be preserved in all its parts, not only from damp and decay, but from innovation; one can fancy a gas cooker sending a perpetual shudder through it, a telephone destroying who knows what fragrant old influences; the store cupboards and still room are part of its bowels, its napery, bed sheets, and hangings part of its dress. The man knew what he was doing who left Miss Pinckney a life interest in Vernons, it was that interest that kept Vernons alive.
She was exercising it on the critical examination of some sheets when Phyl came into the room, now, with the wool she had purchased and the tale she had to tell.
Miss Pinckney carefully put the sheet she was examining on one side, opened the parcel and looked at the wool.
“I met Silas Grangerson,” said Phyl as the other was examining the purchase with head turned on one side, holding it now in this light, now in that.
“Silas Grangerson! Why, where on earth has he sprung from?” asked Miss Pinckney in a voice of surprise.
“I don’t know, but I met him in the street and we walked as far as the Battery and—and—”
She hesitated for a moment, then it all came out. To no one but Maria Pinckney could she have told that story.
“Well, of all the astounding creatures,” said Miss Pinckney at last. “Did he ask you to marry him?”
“No.”
“Just to run away with him—kissed you.”
“He kissed me at Grangersons.”
“At Grangersons. When?”
“That night. I went into the garden and he came out from amongst some bushes.”
“Umph— It’s the family disease— Well, if I get my fingers in his hair I promise to cure him. He wants curing. He’ll just apologise, and that before he’s an hour older. Where’s he staying?”
“No, no,” said Phyl, “you mustn’t ever say I told you. I don’t mind. I would have said nothing only for Mr. Pinckney.”
“You mean Richard?”
“Yes.”
“What has he to do with it?”
Phyl did not hesitate nor turn her head away, though her cheeks were burning.
“Silas Grangerson thinks I care for Mr. Pinckney, he said he would be even with him. I know he intends doing him some injury. I feel it—and I want you to warn him to be careful—without telling him, of course, what I have said.”
Miss Pinckney was silent for a moment. She had already matched Phyl and Richard in her mind. She had come to a very full understanding of her character, and she would have given all the linen at Vernons for the certainty that those two cared for one another.
Frances Rhett rode her like an obsession. Life and nature had given Maria Pinckney an acquired and instinctive knowledge of character, and in the union of Richard and Frances Rhett she divinedunhappiness, just as a clever seaman divines the unseen ice-berg in the ship’s track. She smelt it.
“Phyl,” said she, “do you care for Richard?”
The question quickly put and by those lips caused no confusion in the girl’s mind.
“No,” said she. “At least— Oh, I don’t know how to explain it—I care for everything here, for Vernons and everything in it, it is all like a story that I love—Juliet and Vernons and the past and the present. He’s part of it too. I want to have it always just as it is. I didn’t tell you, but when that happened in the cemetery, I was looking at her grave; you never told me it was there with his. I came on it by accident and she was seeming to speak to me out of it. I was thinking of her and him, when—that happened. It was just as though some one had struckherand him. I can’t explain exactly.”
“Strange,” said Miss Pinckney.
She turned and began to put away with a thoughtful air the linen she had been examining. Then she said:
“I’ll tell Richard and warn him to keep away from that fool, not that there is any danger—but it is just as well to warn him.”
Phyl helped to put away the linen and then she went upstairs to her room. She felt easier in her mind and taking her seat on a cane couch by the window she fell into a book. The History of the Civil War. This bookworm had always one sure refuge in trouble—books.
Books! Have we ever properly recognised themystery and magic that lies in that word, the magic that allows a man to lead ever so many other lives than his own, to be other people, to travel where he has never been, to laugh with folk he has never seen, to know their sorrows as he can never know the sorrows of “real people”—and their joys.
Phyl had been Robinson Crusoe and Jane Eyre, Monte Cristo and Jo.
History which is so horribly unreal because it deals with real people had never appealed to her, but the history of the Civil War was different from others.
It had to do with Vernons.
CHAPTER VIII
After luncheon that day Phyl, having nothing better to do, went up to her room and resumed her book.
Richard Pinckney had not come in to luncheon, he rarely returned home for the meal, yet all the same, his absence made her uneasy. Suppose Silas Grangerson had met him—suppose they had fought? She called to recollection Silas’s face just after she had struck him, the insane malevolence in it, the ugliness that had suddenly destroyed his good looks. Silas was capable of anything, he would never forgive that blow and he would try to return it, of that she felt certain. He could not avenge himself on her but he could on Richard. He imagined that she cared for Richard Pinckney. Did she? The question came to her again in Miss Pinckney’s voice—she did not even try to answer it. As though it irritated her, she tossed the book she was holding in her hand to the floor and lay with her eyes fixed on the lace window curtains that were moving slightly to the almost imperceptible stirring of the air from outside.
Beyond the curtains lay the golden afternoon. Sometimes a bird shadow, the loveliest thing in shadow-land, would cross the curtains, sometimes anote of song or the sound of a bird’s flight from tree to tree would tell that there was a garden down below. The street beyond the garden and the city beyond the street could be heard, but were little more evident to the senses than those things in a picture which we guess but cannot see.
Phyl, allowing her mind to be led by these faint and fugitive sounds, fell into a reverie. Then she fell asleep and straight way began to dream.
She dreamed that Miss Pinckney was in the room moving about dusting things, a duster in one hand, an open letter in the other. There was troublous news of some sort in the letter, but what it was Miss Pinckney would not say. Then the room turned into the piazza, where Juliet Mascarene was standing with her hands on the rail, looking down on the garden.
She seemed to know Juliet quite well and was not a bit surprised to see her there; she touched her but she did not turn. Phyl slipped her arm round Juliet’s waist and stood with her looking at the garden, and as they stood thus the most curious dream feeling came upon her, a feeling of duality, Juliet was herself, she was Juliet. Then as this feeling died away Juliet vanished and she was standing alone on the piazza.
Then she half woke, falling asleep again to be awakened fully by a sound.
A sound, deep, sonorous, now rhythmical, now confused. It was the sound of guns.
She had heard it once long ago on the Brighton coast, and now as she sat up every nerve and muscletense, and her mind filled with a vague dread, it came so heavily that the walls of Vernons shook.
She ran on to the piazza. There was no one there. The garden gate was wide open, there was no one in the garden, and she noticed, though without any astonishment, that some one had been at work in the garden altering the paths. A white butterfly was flittering above the flowers, and a red bird leaving the magnolia tree by the gate, flew, a splash of colour, across to the garden beyond.
These things she saw but did not heed. She was under the spell of the guns, the sound rose against the brightness of the day as a black cloud rises across the sky or a sorrow across one’s life, insistent, rhythmical, a pall of sound now billowing, now sinking, as though blown under by a wind.
She sought the piazza stairs and next moment was in the garden, then she found herself in the street.
Meeting Street was almost deserted. On the opposite side two stout, elderly and rather quaintly dressed gentlemen were walking along in the direction of the station, but away down towards the Charleston Hotel there was a crowd.
The sight of this crowd filled her with terror, a terror remote from reason, an impersonal terror, as though the deadliest peril were threatening not herself but all things and everything she loved.
She ran, and as she drew close to the striving mass of people she saw men bearing stretchers.
They were pushing their way through the crowd, making to enter a house on the right.
Then came a voice. The voice of one man shouting to another.
“Young Pinckney’s killed.”
The words pierced her like a sword, she felt herself falling. Falling through darkness to unconsciousness, from which she awoke to find herself lying on the cane couch in her room.
She sat up.
The curtains were still stirring gently to the faint wind from outside, on the floor lay the history of the Civil War open just as she had cast it there before falling asleep. The sound of the guns had ceased, and nothing was to be heard but the stray accustomed sounds of the city and the street.
She struggled to her feet and came out on the piazza. The garden gate was closed and the garden was unaltered. She had dreamt all that, then.
For a minute she tried to persuade herself that it was a dream, then she gave up the attempt. That was no dream. Everything in it was four square. She could still see the shadows of the two gentlemen who had been walking on the other side of the street, shadows cast clearly before them by the sun.
The first part of her experience had been a dream, all that about Miss Pinckney and Juliet. But right from the sound of the guns all had been reality. She had seen, touched, heard.
Glancing back into the room she saw the book lying on the floor, the sight of it was like a crystallising thread for thought.
She had seen the past, she had heard the guns of the war.
She went back into the room and took her seat on the couch and held her head between her hands. She recalled the terror that told her that everything she loved was in danger. When the man had cried out that young Pinckney was killed, it was the thought of the death of Richard Pinckney that struck her into unconsciousness. Yet she knew that what she had seen was the day of the death of Rupert Pinckney, that one of those figures carried on the stretchers was his figure, that her grief was for him.
Had she then experienced what Juliet once experienced, seen what she saw, suffered what she suffered?
Was she Juliet?
The thought had approached her vaguely before this, so vaguely and so stealthily that she had not really perceived it. It stood before her now frankly in the full light of her mind.
Was she Juliet, and was Richard Rupert Pinckney? She recalled that evening in Ireland when she had heard his voice for the first time, and the thrill of recognition that had passed through her, how, at the Druids’ Altar that night she had heard her name called by his voice, the feeling in Dublin that something was drawing her towards America. Her feelings when she had first entered Meeting Street and the garden of Vernons, Miss Pinckney’s surprise at her likeness to Juliet. Prue’s recognition of her, the finding of those letters, the finding of the little arbour—any one of these things meantlittle in itself, taken all together they meant a great deal—and then this last experience.
Her mind like a bird caught in a trap made frantic efforts to escape from the bars placed around it by conclusion; the idea seemed hateful, monstrous, viewed as reality. Fateful too, for that feeling of terror in the vision had all the significance of a warning.
Then as she sat fighting against the unnatural, her imaginative and superstitious mind trembling at that which seemed beyond imagination, a miracle happened.
The thought of danger to Richard Pinckney brought it about. All at once fear vanished, the fantastic clouds surrounding her broke, faded, passing, showing the blue sky, and Truth stood before her in the form of Love.
It was as though the vision had brought it to her wrapped up in that terror she had felt for him. In a moment the fantasy of Juliet became as nothing beside the reality. If it were a thousand times true that she had once been Juliet what did it matter? She had loved Richard Pinckney always, so it seemed to her, and nothing at all mattered beside the recognition of that fact.
Perfect love casteth out fear, even fear of the supernatural, even fear of Fate.
“Richard,” said Miss Pinckney that night, finding herself alone with him, “that Silas Grangerson is in town and I want you to beware of him.”
“Silas,” said he, “why I saw him at the club, he’s gone back home by this, I expect, at least he said he was going back to-night. Why should I beware of him?”
“He’s such an irresponsible creature,” she replied. “I’m going to tell you something, and mind, what I’m going to tell you is a secret you mustn’t breathe to any one: he’s in love with Phyl.”
“Silas?”
“Yes. I knew it wouldn’t be long before some one was after her. She’s the prettiest girl in Charleston, and she’s different from the others somehow.”
The cunning of the woman held her from praise of Phyl’s goodness and mental qualities, or any over praise of the goods she was bringing to his attention.
“Has he spoken to her about it?” asked he.
“I’m sure to goodness I don’t know what I’m about telling you a thing that was told to me in confidence,” said the other. “Well, you promise never to say a word to Phyl or to any one else if I tell you.”
“I promise.”
“Well, he’s—he’s kissed her.”
Richard Pinckney leaned forward in his chair. He seemed very much disturbed in his mind.
“Does she care for him?”
“I don’t believe she does—yet. They always begin like that; girls don’t know their minds till all of a sudden they find some man who does.”
“Well, let’s hope she never cares for Silas Grangerson,” said he rising from his chair. “You know what he is.”
He left the room and went out on the piazza where the girl was sitting. He sat down beside her and they fell into talk.
Richard Pinckney’s mind was disturbed.
Only the day before he had proposed to Frances Rhett and had been accepted. No one knew anything of the engagement; they had decided to say nothing about it for a while, but just keep it to themselves. The trouble with Pinckney was that Frances had, so to say, put the words of the proposal into his mouth. Frances had flirted with every man in Charleston; out of them all she had chosen Pinckney as a permanent attaché, not because she was in love with him but because he pleased her best. She matched him against the others, as a woman matches silk.
Pinckney had allowed himself to be led along; there is nothing easier than to be led along by a pretty woman. When the trap had closed on him he recognised the fact without resenting it. He was no longer a free man.
Phyl had told him this without speaking. For some time past he had been admiring her, and yesterday on returning in chains from Calhoun Street, Phyl picking roses in the garden seemed to him the prettiest picture he had seen for a long time, but it did not give him pleasure; it stirred the first vague uneasy recognition that his chains had wrought. He had no right to look at any girl but Frances—and he had been looking at her for a year without the picture stirring any wild enthusiasm in his mind.
Miss Pinckney’s revelation as to Silas had cometo him as a blow. He could not tell what had hit him or exactly where he had been hit. What did it matter to him if a dozen men were in love with Phyl? What right had he to feel injured? None, yet he felt injured all the same.
As he sat by her now in the lamp-lit piazza, the thought that would not leave his mind was the thought that Silas had kissed her.
Behind the thought was the feeling of the boy who sees the other boy going off with the ripest and rosiest apple.
And Phyl was charming to-night. Something seemed to have happened to her, increasing the power of her personality, her voice seemed ever so slightly changed, her manner was different.
This was a woman, distinct from the girl of yesterday, as the full blown from the half blown flower.
They talked of trifles for a while, and then he remembered something that he ought to have mentioned before. The Rhetts were giving a dance and they had sent an invitation to Phyl as well as Miss Pinckney.
“It will be here by the morning post, I expect,” said he. “You’d like to go, wouldn’t you?”
Phyl hesitated for a moment. “Is that—I mean is that young lady Miss Frances Rhett—the one who called here?”
“Yes,” cut in Pinckney, “those are the people. You’ll come, won’t you?”
“Is Miss Pinckney going?”
“She—of course she’s going, she goes to everything, and old Mrs. Rhett is anxious to meet you.”
“It is very kind of them,” said Phyl. “Yes, I’ll come.” But she spoke without enthusiasm, and it seemed to him that a chill had come over her.
Did she know of his entanglement with Frances Rhett? And could it be—
He put the question aside. He had no right to indulge in any fancies at all about Phyl as regarded himself.
Then Miss Pinckney came out on the piazza and Phyl rose to go into the house.
CHAPTER IX
When Silas Grangerson left the cemetery of St. Michael’s he walked for half a mile without knowing or caring in what direction he was going.
Phyl had done more than slap his face. She had slapped his pride, his assurance of himself, and his desire for her all at the same time.
Silas rarely bothered about girls, yet he knew that he had the power to fascinate any woman once he put his mind to the work. He had not tried his powers of fascination on Phyl. It was the other way about. Phyl absolutely unconsciously had used her fascination upon him.
Something in her, recognised by him on their first meeting in the stable yard, had put away the barrier of sex. He had talked to her as if she had been a boy. Sitting on the seat beside her whilst the Colonel had been prosing over politics and tobacco, the prompting came to Silas to pinch her finger just for fun; when he had put his hands over her eyes that night it was in obedience to the same prompting, but at the moment of parting from her, a desire quite new had overmastered him.
He had kissed a good many girls, but never in his life had he kissed a girl as he kissed Phyl.
Something cynical in his feelings for the othersex had always left him somewhat cold, but Phyl was different from the others, she had in some way struck straight at his real being.
When he left her that night at Grangersons he was almost as disturbed as she.
He scarcely slept. He was out at dawn and on his return after she had left he sat down and wrote the letter which Phyl received next morning.
Silas was in love for the first time in his life, but love with Silas was a thing apart from the love of ordinary men.
There was no worship of the object; the something that crystallises out in the form of love-letters, verses, bouquets, and candy was not there. He wanted Phyl.
He had no more idea of marriage than the great god Pan. If she had consented he would have taken her off on that yawl of his imagination round the world or down to Florida, without thought of the morrow or theconvenances, or Society; but please do not imagine this rather primitive gentleman a chartered libertine. He would have married her as soon as not, but he had neither the genius nor the inclination for the courtship that leads by slow degrees up to the question, “Will you marry me?”
He wanted her at once.
As he walked along now with the devil awake in his heart, he felt no anger towards Phyl; all his rage was against Pinckney; he had never liked Pinckney, he more than suspected that Phyl cared for him and he wanted some one to hate badly.
He had walked himself into a reasonable state of mind when he found himself outside the Queen City Club. He went in and one of the first men he met was Pinckney.
So well did he hold himself in hand that Pinckney suspected nothing of his feelings. Silas was far too good a sportsman to shout at the edge of the wood, too much of a gentleman to desire a brawl in public. He was going to knife Pinckney, he was also going to capture Phyl, but the knifing of Pinckney was the main objective and that required time and thought. He did not desire the blood of the gentleman; he wanted his pride andamour propre. He wanted to hit him on the raw, but he did not know yet where, exactly, the raw was nor how to hit it. Time would tell him.
He was specially civil to his intended victim, and he went off home that evening plotting all the way, but arriving at nothing. He was trying to make bricks without straw. Pinckney did not drink, nor did he gamble, and he was far too good a business man to be had in that way. However, all things come to him who waits, and next morning’s post brought him a ray of light in the midst of his darkness.
It brought him an invitation to the Rhetts’ dance on the following Wednesday; nearly a week to wait, but, still, something to wait for.
“What are you thinking about, Silas?” asked old Seth Grangerson as they sat at breakfast.
“I’m thinking of a new rabbit trap, suh,” responded the son.
The rabbit trap seemed to give him a good deal of food for thought during the week that followed; food that made him hilarious and gloomy by turns, restless also.
Had he known it, Phyl away at Charleston, was equally restless. She no longer thought of Silas. She had dismissed him from her mind, she no longer feared him as a possible source of danger to the man she loved. Love had her entirely in his possession to torture as he pleased. She knew only one danger, the danger that Richard Pinckney did not care in the least for her, and as day followed day that danger grew more defined and concrete. Richard had taken to avoiding her, she became aware of that.
She fancied that she displeased him.
If she had only known!
CHAPTER X
Silas Grangerson came to town on the Wednesday, driving in and reaching the Charleston Hotel about five o’clock in the afternoon.
The Grangersons scarcely ever used the railway. Silas, often as he had been in Charleston, had never put foot in a street car; even a hired conveyance was against the prejudices of these gentlemen.
This antagonism towards public means of locomotion was not in the least the outcome of snobbishness or pride; they had come from a race of people accustomed to move in a small orbit in their own particular way, an exclusive people, breeders and lovers of horses, a people to whom locomotion had always meant pride in the means and the method; to take a seat in a stuffy railway car at so much a mile, to grab a ticket and squeeze into a tram car, to drive in a cab drawn by an indifferent horse would have been hateful to these people; it was scarcely less so to their descendants.
So Silas came to Charleston driving a pair of absolutely matched chestnuts, a coloured manservant in the Grangerson livery in attendance.
After dinner he strolled into the bar of the hotel, met some friends, made some bets on the forthcoming races and at eight o’clock retired upstairs to dress.
He was one of the first of the guests to arrive.
The Rhetts’ house in Legare Street was about the same size as Vernons and equally old, but it had not the same charm, the garden was much larger than that at Vernons, but it had not the same touch of the past. Houses, like people, have personalities and the house of the Rhetts had a telephone without resenting the intruder, electric everythings, even to an elevator, modern cookers, modern stoves, everything in a modern way to save labour and make life easy, and all so cunningly and craftily done that the air of antiquity was supposed not to be disturbed.
Illusion! Nothing is gained without some sacrifice; you cannot hold the past and the present in the same hand, the concealed elevator spoke in all the rooms once its presence was betrayed, the telephone talked—everywhere was evident the use of yesterday as a veneer of to-day.
However that may be, the old house was gay enough to-night with flowers and lights, and Silas, looking better perhaps than he had ever looked in his life, found himself talking to Frances Rhett with an animation that surprised himself.
Frances had never had a chance of leading Silas behind her chariot; to fool with her would have meant an expenditure of time and energy in journeys to Charleston quite beyond his inclination. This aloofness coupled with his good looks had set him apart from others.
But to-night he was quite a different being; to-night, in some mysterious way, he managed to conveythe impression, pleasing enough, that he had come to see her and her alone.
As they stood together for a moment, he led the talk into Charleston channels, asking about this person and that till the folk at Vernons came on thetapis.
“Is it true what I hear, that Richard Pinckney has become engaged to the girl who is staying there?” asked Silas.
Frances smiled.
“I don’t think so,” she replied. “Who told you?”
“Upon my word I forget,” said he, “but I judged mostly by my own eyes—they seemed like an engaged couple when I saw them last.”
New guests were arriving and she had to go forward to help in receiving them. Silas moved towards her, but in the next moment they had for a snatch of conversation, she did not refer to the subject, nor did he.
The Vernons people were late, so late that when they arrived they were the last of the guests; dancing was in progress and, on entering the ballroom, Richard Pinckney was treated to the pleasing sight of hisfiancéewhirling in the arms of Silas Grangerson.
Phyl, looking lovely in the simple, rather old-fashioned dress evolved for her by the combined geniuses of Maria Pinckney and Madame Organdie, produced that sensation which can only be evoked by newness, her effect was instantaneous and profound, it touched not only every one of these strangers but also Maria Pinckney and Richard.They had come with her, but it was only in the ballroom that they recognised with whom they had come.
So with a book, a picture, a play, the producer and his friends only recognise its merits fully when it is staged and condemned or praised by the public.
Adébutantefails or succeeds at first glance, and the instantaneous success of Phyl was a record in successes.
And Frances Rhett had to watch it and dance. The Inquisition had its torments; Society has improved on them, for her victims cannot cry out and the torments of Frances Rhett were acute. Not that she was troubling much about Richard Pinckney and what the poisonous Silas had said; she was not in love with Richard Pinckney, but she was passionately in love with herself. She was the belle of Charleston; had been for the last year; and one of her chief incentives to marriage was an intuitive knowledge that prestige fades, that the position of principal girl in any society is like the position of the billiard ball the juggler balances on the end of a cue—precarious. She wanted to get married and ring down the curtain on an unspoiled success, and now in a moment she saw herself dethroned.
In a moment. For no jeweller of Amsterdam ever had an eye for the quality of diamonds surer than the eye of Frances Rhett for the quality of other women’s beauty. At the first glance to-night, she saw what others saw, though more clearly than they, that it was the touch of the past that gave Phyl hercachet, a something indefinable from yesterday,the lack of which made the other girls, by contrast, seem cheap.
Never could she have imagined that the “red-headed girl at Vernons” could gain so much from setting, a setting due to the instinct as well as the taste of “that old Maria Pinckney.”
She had always laughed at Maria, as young people sometimes will at the old.
When Richard came up to her a little later on, he found himself coldly received; she had no dances for him except a few at the bottom of the programme.
“You shouldn’t have been late,” said she.
“Well,” he said, “it was not my fault. You know what Aunt Maria is, she kept us ten minutes after the carriage was round, and then Phyl wasn’t ready.”
“She looks ready enough now,” said the other, looking at Phyl and the cluster of young men around her. “What delayed her? Was she dyeing her head? It doesn’t look quite so loud as when I saw her last.”
“Her head’s all right,” replied Pinckney, irritated by the manner of the other, “inside and out, and one can’t say the same for every one.”
Frances looked at him.
“Do you know what Silas Grangerson asked me to-night?” she said.
“No.”
“He asked me were you engaged to her.”
“Phyl?”
“Miss Berknowles. I don’t know her well enough to call her Phyl.”
“He asked you that?”
“Yes, said every one was talking of it, and the last time he saw you together you looked like an engaged couple the way you were carrying on.”
“But he has never seen us together,” cried the outraged Pinckney; “that was a pure lie.”
“I expect he saw you when you didn’t see him; anyhow, that’s the impression people have got, and it’s not very pleasant for me.”
Richard Pinckney choked back his anger. He fell to thinking where Silas could have seen them together.
“I don’t know whether he saw us or not,” said he, “but I am certain of one thing; he never saw us ‘carrying on’ as you call it; anyhow, I’ll have a personal explanation from Silas to-morrow.”
“Pleasedon’t imagine that I object to your flirting with any one you like,” said Frances with exasperating calm. “If you have a taste for that sort of thing it is your own business.”
Pinckney flushed.
“I don’t know if youwantto quarrel with me,” said he, “if you do, say so at once.”
“Not a bit,” she replied, “you know I never quarrel with any one, it’s bad form for one thing and it is waste of energy for another.”
A man came up to claim her for the next dance and she went off with him, leaving Pinckney upset and astonished at her manner and conduct.
It was their first quarrel, the first result of their engagement. Frances had seemed all laziness and honey up to this; like many another woman she beganto show her real nature now that Pinckney was secured.
But it was not an ordinary lovers’ quarrel; her anger had less to do with Richard Pinckney than with Phyl. Her hatred of Phyl, big as a baobab tree, covered with its shadow Vernons, Miss Pinckney, and Richard.
He was part of the business of her dethronement.
Richard wandered off to where Maria Pinckney was seated watching the dancers.
“Why aren’t you dancing?” asked she.
“Oh, I don’t know,” he replied. “I’m not keen on it and there are loads of men.”
Miss Pinckney had watched him talking to Frances Rhett and she had drawn her own deductions, but she said nothing. He sat down beside her. He had been wanting to tell her of his engagement for a long time past, but had put it off and put it off, waiting for the psychological moment. Maria Pinckney was a very difficult person to fit into a psychological moment.
“I want to tell you something,” said he. “I’m engaged to Frances Rhett.”
“Engaged to be married to her?”
“Yes.”
Miss Pinckney was dumb.
What she had always dreaded had come to pass, then.
“You don’t congratulate me?”
“No,” she replied. “I don’t.”
Then, all of a sudden, she turned on him.
“Congratulate you! If I saw you drowning inthe harbour, would you expect me to stand at the Battery waving my hand to you and congratulating you? No, I don’t congratulate you. You had the chance of being happy with the most beautiful girl in the world, and the best, and you’ve thrown it away to pick up withthatwoman. Phyl would have married you, I know it, she would have made you happy, I know it, for I know her and I know you. Now it’s all spoiled.”
He rose to his feet. It was the first time in his life that he had seen Maria Pinckney really put out.
“I’ll talk to you again about it,” said he. Then he moved away.
He had the pleasure of watching Frances dancing the next waltz with Silas Grangerson, and Silas had the pleasure of watching him as he stood talking to one of the elderly ladies and looking on.
Silas’s rabbit trap was in reality a very simple affair, it was a plan to pick a quarrel with Richard through Frances, if possible; to make the imperturbable Pinckney angry, knowing well how easily an angry man can be induced to make a fool of himself. To keep cool and let Richard do the shouting.
Unfortunately for Silas, the sight of Phyl in all her beauty had raised his temperature far above the point of coolness. There were moments when he was dancing, when he could have flung Frances aside, torn Phyl from the arms of her partner and made off with her through the open window.
This dance was a deadly business for him. It was the one thing needed to cap and complete the strange fascination this girl exercised upon his mind,his imagination, his body. It was only now that he realised that nothing else at all mattered in the world, it was only now that he determined to have her or die.
Silas was of the type that kills under passion, the type that, unable to have, destroys.
Preparing a trap for another, he himself had walked into a trap constructed by the devil, stronger than steel.
Yet he never once approached or tried to speak to Phyl. He fed on her at a distance. Fleeting glimpses of the curves of her figure, the Titian red of her hair, the face that to-night might have turned a saint from his vows, were snatched by him and devoured. He would not have danced with her if he could. To take her in his arms would have meant covering her face with kisses. Nor did he feel the least anger against the men with whom she danced. All that was a sham and an unreality, they were shadows. He and Phyl were the only real persons in that room.
Later on in the evening, Richard Pinckney, tired with the lights and the noise, took a stroll in the garden.
The garden was lit here and there with fairy lamps and there were coigns of shadow where couples were sitting out chatting and enjoying the beauty of the night.
The moon was nearing the full and her light cut the tree shadows distinctly on the paths. Passing a seat occupied by one of the sitting out couples, Pinckney noticed the woman’s fan which her partnerwas playing with; it was his own gift to Frances Rhett. The man was Silas Grangerson and the woman was Frances. They were talking, but as he passed them their voices ceased.
He felt their eyes upon him, then, when he had got twenty paces or so away, he heard Frances laugh.
He imagined that she was laughing at him. Already angry with Silas, he halted and half turned, intending to go back and have it out with him, then he thought better of it and went his way. He would deal with Silas later and in some place where he could get him alone or in the presence of men only. Pinckney had a horror of scenes, especially in the presence of women.
Twenty minutes later he had his opportunity. He was crossing the hall from the supper room, when he came face to face with Silas. They were alone.
“Excuse me,” said Richard Pinckney, halting in front of the other, “I want a word with you.”
“Certainly,” answered Silas, guessing at once what was coming.
“You made some remarks about me to Miss Rhett this evening,” went on the other. “You coupled my name with the name of a lady in a most unjustifiable manner and I want your explanation here and now.”
“Who was the lady?” asked Silas, seemingly quite unmoved.
“Miss Berknowles.”
“In what way did I couple your name with her, may I ask?”
“No, you mayn’t.” Richard had turned pale before the calm insolence of the other. “You know quite well what you said and if you are a gentleman you will apologise— If you aren’t you won’t and I will deal with you in Charleston accordingly.”
Phyl was at that moment coming out of the supper room with young Reggie Calhoun—the same who, according to Richard that morning at breakfast long ago, was an admirer of Maria Pinckney.
She saw the two men, in profile, facing one another, and she saw Silas’s right hand, which he was holding behind his back, opening and shutting convulsively.
She saw the blow given by Pinckney, she saw Silas step back and the knife which he always carried, as the wasp carries its sting, suddenly in his hand.
Then she was gripping his wrist.
Face to face with madness for a moment, holding it, fighting eye to eye.
Had she faltered, had her gaze left his for the hundredth part of a second, he would have cast her aside and fallen upon his prey.
It was her soul that held him, her spirit—call it what you will, the something that speaks alone through the eye.
Calhoun and Pinckney stood, during that tremendous moment, stricken, breathless, without making the slightest movement. They saw she was holding him by the power of her eye alone; so vividly did this fact strike them that for a dazed moment it seemed to them that the battle was not theirs, thatthe contest was beyond the earthly plane, that this was no struggle between human beings, but a battle between sanity and madness.
Its duration might have been spanned by three ticks of the great old clock that stood in the corner of the hall telling the time.
Then came the ring of the knife falling on the floor. It was like the breaking of a spell. Silas, white and bewildered-looking as a man suddenly awakened from sleep, stood looking now at his released hand as though it did not belong to him, then at Pinckney, and then at Phyl who had turned her back upon him and was tottering as though about to fall. Pinckney, stepping forward, was about to speak, when at that moment the door of the supper room opened and a band of young people came out chatting and laughing.
Calhoun, who was a man of resource, kicked the knife which slithered away under one of the seats. Phyl, recovering herself, walked away towards the stairs; Silas without a word, turned and vanished from sight past the curtain of the corridor that led to the cloakroom.
Calhoun and Pinckney were left alone.
“What are you going to do?” asked Calhoun.
“I am at his disposal,” replied the other. “I struck him.”
“Struck him, damnation! He drew a knife on you; he ought to be hoofed out of the club; he’d have had you only for that girl. I never saw anything so splendid in my life.”
“Yes,” said Pinckney, “she saved my life. He was clean mad, but thank God no one knows anything about it and we avoided a scene. Say nothing to any one unless he wants to push the matter further. I am quite at his disposal.”