She stared after the car, then signalling to Abraham, she got into the barouche, Phyl followed her and they continued their drive.
That evening after supper Miss Pinckney’s mind warmed to thoughts of the good old days when motor-cars were undreamed of, and stirred up by the recollection of Edgar Allan Poe, discharged itself of reminiscences worth much gold could they have been taken down by a stenographer.
She was sitting with Phyl in the piazza, for the night was warm, and whilst a big southern moon lit the garden, she let her mind stray over the men and women who had made American literature in the ’50’s and ’60’s, many of whom she had known when young.
Estelle Anna Lewis of Baltimore, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Cullen Bryant, Elizabeth Oakes Smith, Cornelius Mathews, Frances Sargent Osgood, N. P. Willis, Laughton Osborn. She had known Lowell and Longfellow, yet her mind seemed to cling mostly to the lesser people, writers in the Southern Literary Messenger, the Home Journal, the Mirror and the Broadway Journal.
People well-known in their day and now scarcely remembered, yet whose very names are capable of evoking the colour and romance of that fascinating epoch beyond and around the Civil War.
“They’re all dead and gone,” said she, “and folk nowadays don’t seem to trouble about the best of them, or remember their lines, yet there’s nothing they write now that’s as good—I remember poor Thomas Ward. ‘Flaccus’ was the name he wrote under, a thin skeleton of a man always with his head in the air and his mind somewhere else, used to write in the Knickerbocker Journal; I heard him recite one of his things.
| “‘And, straining, fastened on her lips a kiss, That seemed to suck the life blood from her heart.’ |
“That stuck in my head, mostly, I expect, because Thomas Ward didn’t look as if he’d ever kissed a girl, but they are good lines and a lot better than they write nowadays.”
The wind had risen a bit and was stirring in the leaves of the magnolias, white carnations growing near the sun dial shook their ruffles in the moonlight, and from near and far away came the sounds of Charleston, voices, the sound of traffic and then, a thread of tune tying moonbeams, magnolias, carnations and cherokee roses in a great southern bunch, came the notes of a banjo, plunk, plunk, and a voice from somewhere away in the back premises, the voice of a negro singing one of the old Plantation songs.
Just a snatch before some closing door cut the singer off, but enough to make Phyl raise her head and listen, listen as though a whole world vaguely guessed, a world forgotten yet still warm and loving, youthful and sunlit, were striving to reach her and speak to her—As though Charleston the mysterious city that had greeted her first in Meeting Street were trying to tell her of things delightful, once loved, once known and forever vanished.