CHAPTER XI
THE GUITAR
"Page," whispered Dee to me, "do you know, I can't sleep tonight unless I know that the awful rope hanging to that chandelier has been taken away. I have a terrible feeling that Louis might get despondent again and go back there and try to do the same thing. I can't call the thing by name—it seems so horrible."
I knew that Dee was still laboring under quite a strain. During dinner she had been very quiet, and now that we had adjourned to the pleasant courtyard on which the dining room opened, where the gentlemen were indulging in coffee and cigars and the rest of us were contenting ourselves with just coffee, she seemed to be nervous and fidgety. Zebedee noticed it, too, and every now and then I caught him watching her with some anxiety.
To catch a young man in the nick of time and keep him from making away with himself is cause for congratulation but not conducive to calmness, when one happens to be only seventeen and not overly calm at that.
"Why don't you tell your father?" I whispered back.
"He'll think I am silly, and then, too, I don't want him to think that I think Louis is likely to repeat his performance. It might give him an idea that Louis is weak and make him lose interest in him. I don't consider him weak, but he is so down in the mouth there is no telling how the thing will work out. Can't you make up some plan? Couldn't we sneak off and go down there? Would you be afraid?"
"Afraid! Me? You know I am not afraid on the street, but I must say that old custard-colored house is some gruesome."
While I was wavering as to whether I could or couldn't go into the deserted hotel at night with no one but Dee, Professor Green proposed that all of us should take a walk down on the Battery.
"There is a wonderful moon rising this minute over there in the ocean and not one soul to welcome it."
So we quickly got into some wraps, as we remembered what a breeze could blow on the Battery, and Dee concealed under her coat her electric flashlight and I put my scissors in my pocket.
"We can shake the crowd and get our business attended to without anyone's being the wiser," I whispered.
A place that is ugly by day can be beautiful by moonlight, and a place that is beautiful by day can be so wonderful by moonlight that it positively hurts like certain strains of the violin in the "Humoresque" or tones of a great contralto's voice. Charleston on that night was like a dream city. We passed old St. Michael's churchyard, where the old cedar bed loomed like a soft, dark shadow among the white tombstones.
"How it shows up even at night!" said Zebedee. "It reminds me of what a friend of mine once said: that the way to make yourself heard in a noisy crowd and to attract the attention of everyone is to whisper. The noisy crowd will be quiet in a moment and everybody will try to hear what you are saying. The low-toned whisper of that old bedstead is heard above all the clamor of the snow-white, high-toned tombstones."
"Humph! Isn't our pa poetical tonight!" teased Dum.
"I should say I am! I bet you are, too, but you are too old to confess it. I glory in it."
We turned down Tradd Street to Legare, which is, I fancy, the most picturesque street in the United States. We had learned that afternoon to pronounce Legare properly. We had naturally endeavored to give it the finest French accent, but were quietly put on the right track by Claire Gaillard. "Lagree" is the way, and now we aired our knowledge to the Greens, who were pronouncing it wrong just as we had.
"Tradd Street was named for the first male child born in the Colony, so the guide-book tells me," said Mrs. Green. "If there were any females born, they did not see fit to commemorate the fact."
"Perhaps the early settlers did not consider the female of the race anything to be walked on—maybe they were not the downtrodden sex that they are in the present day. A street is no good except to walk on or ride over, and surely a female's name would not be appropriate for such an object. My wife is very jealous for the rights of women, whether they be alive or dead," said Professor Green.
"They might at least name something after us besides things to eat. Sally Lunn and Lady Baltimore cake are not much of a showing, to my mind," laughed Mrs. Green.
"There's Elizabethan ruff, and de Medici collar, and Queen Anne cottage, and Alice blue," I suggested.
"Yes, and Catherine wheels, and Minnie balls, and Molly-coddles——"
"I give up! I give up! I was thinking of Charleston and the first male baby."
And so we chatted on as we turned the corner into Legare. We soon came to the beautiful Smyth gateway and then to the Simonton entrance. They vie with each other in beauty of design. The shutters of all the houses on the street were tightly closed, although it was a very mild evening, but we could hear light laughter and gay talk from some of the walled gardens; and occasionally through the grilles we caught glimpses of girls in light dresses seated on garden benches among the palmettos and magnolias, their attendant swains behaving very much as attendant swains might behave in more prosaic surroundings.
"I can't think of the girls who live in these walled gardens as ever being dressed in anything but diaphanous gauze, playing perhaps with grace hoops or tossing rose leaves in the air," said the professor. "It seems like a picture world, somehow."
"Yes, but behind the picture no doubt there is a dingy canvas and even cobwebs, and maybe it is hung over an ugly old scar on the paper and has to stay there to hide the eye-sore—there might even be a stovepipe hole behind it," I said, sadly thinking of the Gaillards and how picturesque they were and what sad things there were in their lives.
"Mercy, how forlorn we are!" exclaimed Zebedee. "Let's cheer up and merrily sing tra-la! Right around the corner here on King Street is the old Pringle House. They say there has been more jollity and revel in that mansion than almost anywhere in the South."
The Pringle House looked very dignified and beautiful in the mellow light that the moon cast over it. It is of very solid and simple design, with broad, hospitable door and not quite so formidable a wall as some of its neighbors; at least one can see the entrance without getting in a flying machine.
"Ike Marvel was married in that front parlor there—the room to the right, I believe it was," said Professor Green. "I wonder if he wrote his 'Reveries of a Bachelor' before or after the ceremony?"
"I'd like to get in there and poke around," I sighed.
"And so should I," chimed in Mrs. Green. "I am sure it is full of possible plots and counterplots for you and me, my dear."
"Do you young ladies know where the Misses Laurens live?" questioned the professor. "We might take a view of our possible abode as 'paying guests' and see how it looks by moonlight."
And so we left the Pringle House and wended our way back to Meeting Street, where we had only that morning seen the pale, sad ladies buying ten cents' worth of shrimps and regretting that they were not as big as lobsters. We hoped when they got the paying guests they would not be quite so economical in their purchases.
The house was still and dark except for a gleam of light from an upper chamber.
"A wax candle, I'll be bound, in an old silver candlestick!" I thought.
The unpainted board gates were uncompromisingly ugly by moonlight as well as by day; but the old house with its long galleries and chaste front door was even more beautiful.
"Oh, Edwin, do you think we will really get into that house? It is to me even lovelier than the much-vaunted Pringle place. But how sad about these gates! They look so new and ugly."
"Page has a lovely story she has made up about the gates," said Dum. Dee was still quiet, with little to say on that moonlight walk. "She is sure the pale old ladies sold them for a fabulous sum to some rich Yankee. She also says she knows the younger and less pale of the old ladies used to kiss her beau through the grille of the old wrought-iron gate——"
"Beau! Why, Dum Tucker, I never used such a word in connection with an inmate of this old aristocratic mansion! I said lover. Beau, indeed! I should as soon think of saying she was chewing gum or doing something else equally plebeian."
"Hush! Listen! I hear a guitar," from Zebedee.
From the stillness of the garden behind the high brick wall where the ugly board gate flaunted its newness we could hear the faint twanging of a guitar. It sounded faint and cracked, but very sweet and true, and then a plaintive old soprano voice began to sing. We were afraid to breathe or move. It had the quality of a lunar rainbow it was once my joy and privilege to behold: a reflection of a reflection, the raindrops reflecting the moon, the moon reflecting the sun. I can give no idea of that experience without repeating the song she sang. I could not remember it, and had never seen it in print, but Professor Green, who seemed to be a person who knew many things worth while knowing, told us it was a poem of Dinah Maria Mulock Craik's, called "In Our Boat." He sent me a copy of it after we got back to Richmond:
"'Stars trembling o'er us and sunset before us,
Mountains in shadow and forests asleep;
Down the dim river we float on forever,
Speak not, ah, breathe not—there's peace on the deep.
"'Come not, pale sorrow, flee till tomorrow;
Rest softly falling o'er eyelids that weep;
While down the river we float on forever,
Speak not, ah, breathe not—there's peace on the deep.
"'As the waves cover the depths we glide over,
So let the past in forgetfulness sleep,
While down the river we float on forever,
Speak not, ah, breathe not—there's peace on the deep.
"'Heaven shine above us, bless all that love us;
All whom we love in thy tenderness keep!
While down the river we float on forever,
Speak not, ah, breathe not—there's peace on the deep.'"
Nobody said a word. We softly crept down the street.
"Now you understand how we happened to listen when Claire and her father were talking," I whispered to Zebedee. "It seemed no more real than this old lady's song did."
Zebedee wiped his eyes. Of course the song and its setting had made all the Tuckers weep. Molly Brown was not dry-eyed, and one might have spied a lunar rainbow in my eyes, too.