“It seems funny that my people should have been the Virginia Mascarenes,” said Phyl, “because—because—well, I feel as if my people had always lived here—this feels like home—I don’t know what it is, but just as I came into the street outside there I seemed to know it, and this house—”
“Why, God bless my soul,” said Miss Pinckney, whose eyes had just fallen on the girl’s empty cup, “here have I been talking and talking, and you waiting for some more tea. Why didn’t you ask, child?—What were you saying? The Virginia Mascarenes— Oh, they often came here, and your mother knew this house as well as Planters. That was the name of their house in Richmond. But what I can’t get over is your likeness to Juliet. She might have been your sister to look at you both—and she dead all these years.”
“Who was Juliet?”
“She was the girl who died,” said Miss Pinckney. “You know, although Richard calls me Aunt, I am not really his aunt; it’s just an easy name for an old woman who is an interloper, a Pinckney adrift. It was this way I came in. Long before the Civil War, the Pinckneys lived at a house called Bures in Legare Street. A fine old house it was, and is still. Well, I was a cousin with a little money of my own, and I was left lonely and they took me in. James Pinckney was head of the family then, and he had two sons, Rupert and Charles. I might have been their sister the way we all lived together and loved each other—and quarrelled. Dear me, dear me, what is Time at all that it leaves everything the same? The same sun, and flowers and houses, and all the people gone or changed— Well, I am trying to tell you— Rupert fell in love with Juliet Mascarene, who lived here. He was killed suddenly in ’61— I don’t want to talk of it—and she died of grief the year after. She died of grief—simply died of grief. Charles lived and married in 1880 when he was forty years old. He married Juliet’s brother’s daughter and Vernons came to him on the marriage. He hadn’t a son till ten years later. That son was Richard. Charles left Richard all his property and Vernons on the condition that I always lived here—till I died, and that’s how it is. I’m not Richard’s aunt, it’s only a name he gives me—I’m only just an old piece of furniture left with the house to him. I’m so fond of the place, it would kill me to leave it; places grow like that round one, though I’m sure I don’t know why.”
“I don’t wonder at you loving Vernons,” said Phyl. “I was just the same about our place in Ireland, Kilgobbin—I thought it would kill me to leave it.”
“Tell me about it,” said Miss Pinckney. Phyl told, or tried to tell.
Looking back, she found between herself and Ireland the sunlight of Charleston, the garden with the magnolia trees where the red bird was singing and the jessamine casting its perfume. Ireland looked very far away and gloomy, desolate as Kilgobbin without its master and with the mist of winter among the trees.
All that was part of the Past gone forever, and so great was the magic of this new place that she found herself recognising with a little chill that this Past had separated itself from her, that her feeling towards it was faintly tinged by something not unlike indifference.
“Well,” said Miss Pinckney, when she had finished, “it must be a beautiful old place, though I can’t seem to see it— You see, I’ve never been in Ireland and I can’t picture it any more than the new Jerusalem. Now Dinah knows all about the new Jerusalem, from the golden slippers right up she sees it—I can’t. Haven’t got the gift of seeing things, and it seems strange that the A’mighty should shower it on a coloured girl and leave a white woman wanting; but it appears to be the A’mighty knows his own business, so I don’t grumble. Now I’m going to show you the house and your room. I’ve given you a room looking right on the garden, this side. You’ve noticed how all our houses here are built with their sides facing the street and their fronts facing the garden, or maybe you haven’t noticed it yet, but you will. ’Pears to me our ancestors had some sense in their heads, even though they didn’t invent telegraphs to send bad news in a hurry and railway cars to smash people to bits, and telephones to let strangers talk right into one’s house just by ringing a bell. Not that I’d let one into Vernons. You may hunt high or low, garret or basement, you won’t find one of those boxes of impudence in Vernons—not while I have servants to go my messages.”
Miss Pinckney was right. For years she had fought the telephone and kept it out, making Richard Pinckney’s life a tissue of small inconveniences, and suffering this epitaph on her sanity to be written by all sorts of inferior people, “Plumb crazy.”