“Maybe so,” she said. She could feel her anger rising and spreading within, a subtle fuel in her body mounting to a swift burning in her face. “Maybe so, but I know what I don’t want.”
Charles went away from the town at some time after that and did not return. Anthony was palsied in his hands, but he would stop in his stroll along the path and beat the ground sharply with his cane, tapping on the bricks or on the boards under his feet. “Oh, tut!” he would say. Sometimes Theodosia would see him in his mantle of old age as he stepped uncertainly along, and a pang of pity, self-pity, fear, and apprehension would assail her. Or, seeing his shrunken form, his feet questioning the path for a place, she herself would walk there and she would see through her present self as through a swift glass, quickly adjusted for vision, as would say, “See, bent spine, eyes fixed, gestures squared at their turnings, the up-and-down jog of age.” But her life ran upon itself eagerly and there were other things to see.
He would begin to sing as formerly, letting his voice fall away to a whisper when it failed in its tone. “Oh, tut!” he would say, returning to mumble his old knowledge, reiterating himself endlessly. “Yet hath the shepherd boy at some times raised his rustic reed to rhymes more rumbling than rural, more rumbling than rural.” Theodosia had won a diploma at the Seminary. She was a tall girl now, fragile but quick, swift at the girls’ sports. “She must study to play the fiddle. She’s a master fiddler,” the old man said, stepping more briskly over the boards. “With rhymes more rumbling than rural.... She must. She gets her music two ways, Charlotte and the Trotters. Old Matthew Trotter was a master musicianer in his day, and had red hair.... Yet hath the shepherd boy.... I’ll see to the matter myself.... A small matter, a few paltry dollars to buy instruction for a girl of talent.... Oh, tut! What became of the farmland, sixteen hundred broad acres, I had? Well, I’ll say, ask her aunt Doe for the small sum. A rich farm, she’s got, and not a chick or a child to spend on. ‘Madam, your one namesake, your only godchild, has a rare musical gift. Madam, are you aware that your namesake has a bit of a musical talent? Has it ever occurred to you to give the child a gift, a year in the metropolis maybe? Madam! Your humble servant. Yours very truly, Anthony Bell. Give the child a big red apple. A peach plucked from the peach orchard. Send the child the first peach of the season. Namesake! For God’s sake! Has it ever occurred to you, Madam, to do something you might call substantial for the baby, your namesake? If your husband, Tom Singleton, had lived it would occur to him. To reward his wife’s namesake. God knows it would!’ ... Oh tut!... What became of the farmland, my patrimony? ‘Young Man, your only daughter.’ ... God’s sake!... As well talk to a jacksnipe. ‘Horace, your daughter approaches her maturity lacken a few miserable pennies to buy her a bit of a finish in music.’ I’ll see to the matter myself.”
TWO
A young woman named Jane Moore played accompaniments for Theodosia. They played in the parlor of the Bell house, the piano standing against the east wall and running back into the bay of the windows. Jane Moore laughed a great deal as she played, and she played many notes wrong, but she offered Theodosia a steady tinkle-tinkle of piano rhythms against which to set her fiddle. Over the chimney hung a steel engraving of Henry Clay in some congressional pose, and the insignia of the Trotters and the Montfords, done in color by some artist and neatly framed, hung near together on the north wall. Through the freshly curtained windows the scent of locust blossoms would come, and outside, from garden to garden, up the street, the locust trees had their flower.
Sometimes the piano outdid itself, as when Jane Moore was caught on some rapture which swept her beyond her nervous inattention. Then she would go steadily on, without a giggle or a blunder, one with Theodosia, the piano married to the fiddle, rhythm after rhythm, measure after measure, and Theodosia’s fervid “Repeat!” as she struck the music with her bow and marched the melodies forward and marshalled them forth, would hold the good spell to the end of the piece.
“Oh, Jane Moore, Jane Moore!” Theodosia would say. “Why in the name of the Lord, why can’t you play like that every day?”
They would laugh until their eyes ran tears, laughter induced by Jane Moore’s concentrated interval. She had soft white skin and a round soft body, an inattentive mind. It was, as the flowering locust trees attested, the spring of the year.
There were garden parties in the evenings, all the boys and all the girls gathering to laugh and joke and play with light caresses among the shrubs that were lit with paper lanterns. The girls would come walking with the young men, and their little shining shoes would tap on the village pavements. Catherine Lovell had curling yellow hair that stood in a soft roll on the top of her head, and in her bright organdie dress she was fair in the way of a pink in a garden. She was lovely to know, always coming to Theodosia with her smiles and her pretty little jokes, always wanting Theodosia to play her fiddle again. She would come running to Theodosia’s room on a morning after a party to talk over all the happenings of the occasion, and she would sit on the foot of the bed while Theodosia had her breakfast from the tray Aunt Bet had brought upstairs. Then they would tell over the names of all who had been present and repeat the bright sayings of the young men, Conway and Albert, whose names they called often, and they would praise the girls for their loveliness in the fullness of their own self-admiration and self-love.