She led the way from the breakfast-room and passed into the hall.
The spirit of Vernons inhabited the hall. One might have fancied it as a stout and prosperous gentleman attired in a blue coat with brass buttons, shorts, and wearing a bunch of seals at his fob. Oak, brought from England, formed the panelling, and a great old grandfather’s clock, with the maker’s name and address, “Whewel. Coggershall,” blazoned on its brass face, told the time, just as it had told the time when the Regent was ruling at St. James’s in those days which seem so spacious, yet so trivial in their pomp and vanity.
Sitting alone here of an afternoon with the sun pointing fingers through the high leaded windows, Whewel of Coggershall took you under his spell, the spell of old ghosts of long forgotten afternoons, spacious afternoons filled with the cawing of rooks and the drone of bees. English afternoons of the good old time when the dust of the post chaise was the only mark of hurry across miles of meadow land and cowslip weather. And then as you sat held by the sound of the slow-slipping seconds, maybe, from some door leading to the servants’ quarters suddenly left open a voice would come, the voice of some darky singing whilst at work.
A snatch of the South mixing with your dream of England and the past, and making of the whole a charm beyond words.
That is Charleston.
Set against the panelling and almost covering it in parts were prints, wood-cuts, engravings, portraits in black and white.
Here was a silhouette of Colonel Vernon, the founder of the house, and another of his wife. Here was an early portrait of Jeff Davis, hollow-cheeked and goatee-bearded, and here was Mayflower, the property of Colonel Seth Mascarene, the fastest trotting horse in Virginia, worshipped by her owner whose portrait hung alongside.
Phyl glanced at these pictures as she followed Miss Pinckney, who opened doors shewing the dining-room, a room rather heavily furnished, hung with portraits of long-faced gentlemen and ladies of old time, and then the drawing-room. A real drawing-room of the Sixties, a thing preserved in its entirety, in all its original stiffness, interesting as a valentine, perfumed like an old rosewood cabinet.
Keepsakes and Books of Beauty lay on the centre table, a gilt clock beneath a glass shade marked the moment when it had ceased to keep time over twenty-five years ago, the antimacassars on the armchairs were not a line out of position; not a speck of dust lay anywhere, and the Dresden shepherds and shepherdesses simpered and made love in the same old fashion, preserving unaltered the sentiment of spring, the suggestion of Love, lambs, and the song of birds.
“It’s just as it used to be,” said Miss Pinckney. “Nothing at all has been changed, and I dust it myself. I would just as soon let a servant loose here with a duster as I’d let one of the buzzards from the market-place loose in the larder. Those water-colours were done by Mary Mascarene, Juliet’s sister, who died when she was fifteen; they mayn’t be masterpieces but they’re Mary’s, and worth more’n if they were covered with gold. Mrs. Beamis sniffed when she came in here—she’s the woman whose trunk got loose on the stairs I told you about—sniffed as if the place smelt musty. She’s got a husband who’s made a million dollars out of dry goods in Chicago, and she thought the room wanted re-furnishing. Didn’t say it, but I knew. A player-piano is what she wanted. Didn’t say it, but I knew. Umph!”