Gita warmed to him for a moment. “If I’ve got to be introduced to this Eastern Society I’ve got to, I suppose, but I shall live here and only go to New York occasionally. And I’ll not be invited to parties because I don’t dance. I don’t fancy I’ll be run after for dinners either. I wish I were rich enough to have an apartment in town to spend half the week in. I do want to go to the opera and all the new plays. But my lawyer says I must be careful for a year or two.”
“Why don’t you rent the manor? I fancy there are a good many of the backgroundless on the lookout for an incongruous setting. They would give you a fancy price.”
Gita shook her head vigorously. “I did think of it once but I never could do it now. It’s too much mine in too many ways. It seems to have a soul of its own, a distillation of all the Carterets, perhaps. I could as easily have rented out my grandmother.”
Bylant laughed heartily. He had a mellow laugh and it struck no false note in the wood. “I have heard a good deal of Mrs. Carteret and I fancy your old manor house would appreciate the compliment. I understand exactly what you mean, for I too have an old house—in Albany—and my mother would not live anywhere else. She insisted that old houses, particularly old family mansions, had a very real and complex personality, made up not only of those who had lived there—the direct inheritors and the diverse strains introduced by marriage—but because the windows, she said, were so many eyes looking out on history in the process of making; the family ghost, perhaps, recording it all in the invisible volumes that atmosphere shares with the subconsciousness of man. An old house must have an atmospheric library as extensive as the British Museum, and could hardly fail to have a personality. My mother—Bladina, I called her, for, although she was the consummate mother, she seemed little older than myself—used to say that if anything could convert her to spiritualism it would be the hope of making her old walls speak; the house was built by a Dutch ancestor when Albany was Fort Orange and she refused to leave it when she married.”
Gita was regarding him with interested eyes. “How odd!” she exclaimed. “I’ve been feeling just like that lately. Been reading a history of New Jersey; and my old manor must have accumulated tomes. Primeval wilderness and Indians. Dutch—West India Company. Swedes. English. Dutch once more. English again. Constant disputes between governors and between East and West New Jersey before they were reunited. Always on the verge of war with New England. Jealousies, heart-burnings, shattered careers. Governors who oppressed and provoked the people to rebellion, and one who ‘dressed himself in a woman’s habit and patrolled his fort.’ Quakers. Witches. Lords Proprietors. Negro risings, and negro slaves burned alive for assault. Then the American Revolution; there was a good deal of fighting around here. And all the rest. And the Carterets lived a wild life of their own. My baronial hall, as the historian calls it, has an aloof, brooding, almost intolerably self-satisfied air, as if it knew so much more than any mere mortal could ever learn. It is quite haughtily reserved and withdrawn and only condescends to me because I was born a Carteret. But it really makes me feel more at home than I ever felt anywhere else, and I’d starve before I’d have its atmosphere damaged by aliens.”
“I understand. I understand—perfectly.” He had turned a little pale, but he continued to regard her with eyes that evinced mere friendly interest. And as he had evidently been as devoted to his mother as she to poor Millicent, and as he had without conscious effort made her talk freely, and understood her at that, she decided—particularly as there seemed to be no prospect of getting rid of him—to tolerate him for the morning at least.
“I’m rather tired,” she said. “Let’s sit down.”
They had come to the edge of the pool, an oval sheet of water in the heart of the wood, so densely surrounded by pines that their branches were reflected in the water and there was hardly room to sit on the turf. She propped herself against a tree and he selected one close by.
“Now,” she said, “tell me more of your mother. What did she look like?”
“Very much like you,” said Bylant.