CHAPTER XV.
Mistress Mehitable liked Robert, whose bearing and breeding were in all ways much to her taste. She had seen him when a babe in arms, just before his father and mother had taken him away from Gault House to New York. So gracious was she, that Robert was filled with wonder as he thought of the piteous story which Barbara had told him in the canoe. But this wonder was as nothing, compared to the amazement with which he viewed the warm affection between Barbara and her aunt. What could it all mean? It was plain that they two understood each other, trusted each other, admired each other, loved each other. He had an uneasy feeling that Barbara had made a fool of him. Then, as his dignity was beginning to feel ruffled, and his grave young face to darken, he would remember other details of that eventful afternoon which forbade him to question the girl's sincerity. At this the cloud would lift. There was a mystery behind it all, of course, which he would doubtless, in his determined fashion, succeed in penetrating. Meanwhile, every one seemed extremely happy,—Barbara gaily, whimsically gracious, Mistress Mehitable composedly glad, Doctor Jim as boisterous in his joy as good manners would permit, Doctor John quizzically approving, and filled with mellow mirth. Robert was made to feel himself an honoured guest, for his own sake as well as for the sake of his parents; and in this cordial atmosphere he soon justified all good opinions. Barbara was intensely gratified with him. She audaciously claimed credit for having discovered him, and rescued him from the barbaric wilderness that lay beyond Second Westings. She began to plan expeditions and amusements to make his visit memorable; and when he announced his intention of returning to Gault House on the morrow, there was a unanimous protest. Mistress Mehitable said it was not to be heard of, for one moment. Doctor Jim growled that his hospitality was not to be flouted in any such fashion. Doctor John levelled bushy eyebrows at him, and suggested that no true Gault would run away in the hour of triumph.
"You will do nothing of the kind, Robert," decreed Barbara, with finality. "We want you here. I wonder you are not ashamed, after all the trouble you made for us so lately, when you were old enough and big enough to know better!"
Robert's face flushed with pleasure at all this warmth; and he hugely wanted to stay. But with astonishing discretion he refused to be persuaded. Some intuition taught him the wisdom of timely reserve. Without at all formulating any theory on the subject, which would have been impossible to such inexperience as his, he felt instinctively that at this moment, when she was most gracious to him, a judicious absence would best fix him in Barbara's interest. He said there were matters to be attended to for his grandmother which would not well bear delay. At this unexpected firmness on the part of her cavalier, Barbara was so annoyed that for nearly an hour she seemed to forget his existence; but Robert hid his discomfort under an easy cheerfulness, and no one else seemed to notice the passing shadow. Mistress Mehitable insisted that the guests should stay to sup with her and Barbara; and the boy's coming was made a little festival. Mistress Mehitable was one of those notable housekeepers who seem to accomplish great things with little effort by being craftily forehanded. Before anything was said of supper she had vanished for a few minutes to the kitchen; and in those few minutes she had planned with Abby for a repast worthy the event. The larder of the Ladd homestead was kept victualled beyond peril of any surprise; and Mistress Mehitable, for all her ethereal mould and mien, believed in the efficacy of good eating and good drinking. Well regulated lives, she held, should also be well nourished, and her Puritan conscience was not illiberal in regard to the seemly pleasures of the board.
Both Doctor John and Doctor Jim, as befitted their stature, were valiant trenchermen; and Robert was a boy; and the lavish delicacies of Abby's serving met with that reception which was the best tribute to their worth. Gaiety made herself handmaid to appetite; and the ale was nutty-mellow from last October; and Mistress Mehitable's old Madeira wine, of which herself partook but sparingly, was fiery-pungent on the tongue. As she toasted him, and her blue eyes sparkled upon him over the glass, Robert wondered anew how Barbara could have wanted to run away from so admirable an aunt. As for Barbara, reduced for a little to silence by supreme content, she sipped at her Angelica cordial, surveyed Mistress Mehitable with grateful ardour, and took it all as largess to herself.
At last, with a happy sigh, she cried, "Oh, if only Uncle Bob could have come in time for this!" And so electric with sympathy was the air that on the word every eye turned and glanced at the door, as if expecting that a wish so well-timed might bring fruition on the instant. There was silence for some seconds.
Then Mistress Mehitable said, "He will be here in a very few days, dear! And then you, Robert, must come to us again without delay. I agree with Barbara that nothing I can think of except Mr. Glenowen's presence could add to our happiness to-night!"
After supper there was music in the candle-lit drawing-room, Mistress Mehitable having a rare gift for the harpsichord, and Doctor Jim a nice art in the rendering of certain old English ballads of the robuster sort. Where they might have seemed to the ladies' ears a trifle more robust than nice, Doctor Jim had fined them down to a fitting delicacy. But they suited his rolling bass, and he loved them because, being Cavalier-born, they appealed to his king-loving sympathies. Doctor Jim was an exemplary Congregationalist, but solely by force of environment, Congregationalism being the creed of all the gentry of that region. Episcopalianism he looked upon with a distrust mingled with affection; but in all other respects he was a king's man, through and through, an aristocrat, and a good-natured scorner of the masses. It was a stupendous triumph for accident and atmosphere to have succeeded in fitting Doctor Jim to his inherited environment of Second Westings. His Congregationalism was a thing that might conceivably be changed to meet changed conditions; while his Toryism was bred in the bone. With Mistress Mehitable, on the other hand, her Congregationalism was deep-rooted, a matter of conscience. It was by conscience, too, no less than by blood, that she was an aristocrat. She was a royalist, a Tory, no less unquestioning than Doctor Jim, but this by a chance election of that strenuous conscience which, by a different chance twist, would have made her an equally sincere Whig.
When Doctor Jim had sung till Doctor John told him he was getting hoarse and spoiling his voice, Barbara, in a burst of daring, started up a wild plantation song, patting her accompaniment. To Mistress Mehitable, as to Robert, this was an undreamed novelty, and their eyes opened wide in wonder. At first they thought it barbarous, but in a few minutes the piquing rhythms and irresponsible cadences caught them, and they listened in rapture. Barbara's store of these songs was a rich one, and she had perfected the rendering in many a secret performance to the audience of Doctor John and Doctor Jim. When she was quite sure of the effect she was producing, she sprang to her feet, flung her hair loose by a quick movement of both hands, and began to dance as she sang. And now, to the ever-growing amazement of Mistress Mehitable, Doctor Jim took up the patting, while Doctor John, seating himself at the harpsichord, began a strange staccato picking of the keys. Then Barbara stopped singing, and gave herself up wholly to the dance. She danced with arms and hands and head and feet, and every slender curve of her young body. She moved like flames. Her eyes and lips and teeth were a radiance through the live, streaming darknesses of her hair. Light, swift, unerring, ecstatic, it was like the most impassioned of bird-songs translated into terms of pure motion. Doctor John played faster and faster his wild, monotonous melody. Doctor Jim patted harder and harder. Barbara's dance grew madder and stranger, till at last, with a little breathless cry that was half a sob, she stopped, darted across the room, flung herself down, and buried her dishevelled head in Mistress Mehitable's lap.
On ordinary occasions Mistress Mehitable would have felt inclined to hold that anything so extraordinary, so utterly outside the range of all conceptions, and at the same time so very beautiful, must be wrong. Now, however, she was under the spell of Barbara and under the spell of the whole situation. "I cannot see any possible harm in it!" she said to herself. And to Barbara she said, tenderly and deftly arranging the disordered locks:
"Most beautiful, and most singular, dear. I suppose that is your dance of 'Maryland Memories,' is it not? It seems to me not only amazingly beautiful, but as if it might be the most wholesome and desirable of exercises."
Barbara gurgled a gasping laugh from the depths of Mistress Mehitable's taffeta. It had never occurred to her that these mad negro dances, in which she found expression for so much in herself which she did not understand, could be regarded in the light of exercise. But she was glad indeed if they could be so regarded by Aunt Hitty.
"Oh, yes, honey," she agreed, in haste. "I'm sure it's wholesome; and I know it's desirable,—isn't it?"
This appeal was to every one, but it was Robert, at last awaking from his rapture and finding breath, who answered:
"There was never anything else so wonderful in all the world," he said, solemnly.
Doctor John and Doctor Jim, with one impulse, jumped up, each seized one of Barbara's hands, and plucked her to her feet. They then stood hand in hand in a row before Mistress Mehitable and Robert, bowing their thanks for such appreciation of their poor efforts to please.
"We are going to London to perform before the king!" declared Doctor Jim.
Mistress Mehitable gravely took a shilling from her purse, and bestowed it upon Doctor John because he was the tallest. He pretended to spit on it, for luck, but kissed it instead, and slipped it into the bosom of his ruffled shirt. When the approving laughter had subsided, Mistress Mehitable said, musingly:
"I see now how you have been teaching Barbara her Latin. It was that peculiar dialect of Latin that prevails in Maryland!"
After this a sack posset was mixed by Mistress Mehitable, with the eager assistance of every one but Robert, who was still too much possessed by Barbara's dancing to do more than stand about and get in the way, and smile a gravely fatuous smile whenever spoken to.
When the posset began to go around, calling forth encomiums at every sip, Doctor Jim demanded the cards. There was silence. To Robert, just from the Tory circles of New York, it seemed the most natural thing in the world. To Barbara it seemed natural, but foreign to Mistress Mehitable and Second Westings. To Doctor John it seemed right and desirable, but he chuckled and said nothing, being aware of Mistress Mehitable's views. And this time Mistress Mehitable was firm.
"No, Jim," said she, "we won't play. I know good people do play,—people who know just as well as I do what is right and what is wrong. But for some reason card-playing does not seem right to me. You know Doctor Sawyer would strongly disapprove!"
"Officially, that's all, dear lady!" corrected Doctor John.
"But you have them in the house,—yonder in that very drawer, most gracious mistress!" persisted Doctor Jim.
"My dear father used them," confessed Mistress Mehitable. "Therefore I would not for a moment think of refusing to have them in my house. But I think it is better not to play, Jim."
And though Mistress Mehitable spoke with appeal and apology rather than with decision, the matter was plainly settled. There was nothing to do but tell riddles and drink up the rest of the posset. The pervading satisfaction was in no way checked by Doctor Jim's failure, for all agreed that cards were stupid anyway. Barbara, in spite of her excitement, and to her intense self-disgust, began to grow sleepy. She was horribly afraid she might show it, which, for one but forty-eight hours grown-up, would have been humiliating beyond words. She felt herself divided between a fear lest so perfect an evening should end too soon, and an equally harassing fear lest it should end not soon enough. At length the keen and loving eyes of Doctor John discerned her trouble; and at the dissolute hour of half-past ten he broke up the party. Adieux were made with a warmth, an abandon of homage held in fetters of elaborate courtliness, which might have seemed excessive at a less propitious conjunction of time and sentiment. At last the three, Doctor John, Doctor Jim, and Robert, found themselves arm-in-arm on the street, and all talking at once, overbrimming with happiness and reciprocal congratulations, as they took their discreet way homeward.
Barbara and Mistress Mehitable, left alone, silently put out the lights. Then, each lighting her candle, they paused at the head of the stairs to say good night. Each set down her candle on the little mahogany table under the clock, and looked into the other's eyes. Barbara was first to break the sweet but too searching scrutiny. She flung both arms around Mistress Mehitable's neck, and kissed her with a tremulous fervour that told much. Mistress Mehitable, whose eyes were brighter than Barbara had ever guessed that they could be, pressed her in a close embrace which concealed much, even from Mistress Mehitable herself. Then Barbara, after whispering something to the kittens, went straight to bed, and straight to sleep. But Mistress Mehitable sat looking out of her window.