Yet the data concerning her two aunts, Georgina and Lavinia Keswick, was less ambiguous in coloring. These two antique maiden-ladies were variously described as “a couple of old crows,” “a pair o’ bloodless old hardheads,” and “a team o’ skinflints who put pennies in the collection plate of a Sunday.” There had been a brother once, a rolling stone who wasted the family substance and went off to Europe once a year to buy marble lions and tombstones and paint little pictures on pieces of canvas. He had been a poor sort, this brother, and it couldn’t have been much loss when he died of Roman fever somewhere in Italy, for he had always preferred daubing a picture of a field to driving a plow up and down its landsides. And you can’t farm in a country like Canada with a camel’s-hair brush! Not by a long shot! The two old crows still tried to run that farm, for they would endure no man about the place, but they couldn’t even pay the interest on the mortgage, and year by year things were only getting worse. They’d be foreclosing on ’em any time now.
It would make great tobacco land, the upper half of the farm, once it was worked right. They could get five or six hundred a year out of it, easy, growing Burley on shares, but the two elderly Keswick women had religious scruples about surrendering land for the cultivation of the filthy weed.
Yet Belinda Brittner, who had been in service with them in the old days, claimed their religion to be a pretense and a mockery, remembering as she did how Miss Lavinia had turned the clock back on Saturday night so as to finish her strawberry jam without breaking the Sabbath, as she put it. And their believing themselves to be better than other folks was likewise a deception and a mockery before the Lord, for Belinda wasn’t so blind that she didn’t know they dined on dog-fish discarded on the beach by the pound-net fisherman, and frugally bought cat-meat which went to no cats, but was frugally stewed with sour-dock for their own parsimonious table. And when the Annie Huff missed the harbor mouth at Rond-Eau and pounded to pieces in a south-easter on the beach just below the Keswick farm the two old vultures had been discovered by certain midnight wanderers frugally salvaging everything washed up from the wreck.
Just why this was held against them Conkling could not quite define, just as he could not actively share in the rural indignation against Kendal Keswick’s fifteen-year-old crime of importing a figure model from New York. A justice of the peace had taken a hand in that affair and there had been high words in the attic studio of the old manor-house, where the model had been ordered in the name of the law to put on her clothes and take her departure by the first train to the States. And Kendal Keswick, after roundly cursing the country, had also taken his departure. That eccentric dilettante went morosely off to Italy, for a chance, as he put it, to breathe again. But there, ironically enough, he breathed his last before the end of the year.
All this, piled up before Conkling in a garrulous campaign of discouragement, only added a razor edge to that cool-eyed connoisseur’s determination to revisit the Keswick manor-house. There was, he kept reminding himself, every reason to assume that this old house might be rich in the things he was most eager to obtain. But that purely antiquarian curiosity became perplexingly involved with the memory of an intense-eyed girl with mahogany-tinted hair.
So two days later, when he parked his car in the deep shadow of a horse-chestnut beside the Lake Road, he felt that luck was with him when he caught sight of a lilac sunbonnet on the far side of the half-strangled cedar hedge. Yet his heart skipped a beat as he pushed open the broken gate, and in stepping through it seemed to step back a century in time.
The girl, who had a garden rake in her hand, paled a little as she caught sight of him.
“It was good of you to come back,” she said quite simply. But that acknowledgment seemed enriched by the look of intensity on her face. It was a look, he was beginning to see, which was habitual with her, and had much to do with her persistent aura of childishness.
“I call it good of you to let me,” he protested. Yet his eyes, as he spoke, were on the faded front of the old manor-house.
“They didn’t understand,” she said with her childlike immediacy.