CHAPTER XV
MRS. POLY GIFFORD PAYS A CALL
The brown ivied house in the village was big and square and faced the sleepy street. Its front was gay with pink oleanders in green tubs and the yard spotted with annual encampments of geraniums and marigolds. A one-storied wing contained a small door with a doctor’s brass plate on the clapboarding beside it. Doctor Southall was one of Mrs. Merryweather Mason’s paying guests—for she would have deemed the word boarder a gratuitous insult, no less to them than to her. Another was the major, who for a decade had occupied the big old-fashioned corner-room on the second floor, companioned by a monstrous gray cat and waited on by an ancient negro named Jereboam, who had been a slave of his father’s.
The doctor was a sallow taciturn man with a saturnine face, eyebrows like frosted thistles, a mouth as if made with one quick knife-slash and a head nearly bald, set on a neck that would not have disqualified a yearling ox. His broad shoulders were slightly stooped, and his mouth wore habitually an expression half resentful, half sardonic, conveying a cynical opinion of the motives of the race in general and of the special depravity of that particular countryside. Altogether he exhaled an air in contrast to which the major’s old-school blend of charm and courtesy seemed an almost ribald frivolity.
On this particular morning neither the major nor the doctor was in evidence, the former having gone out early, and the latter being at the moment in his office, as the brassy buzz of a telephone from time to time announced. Two of the green wicker rocking-chairs on the porch, however, were in agitant commotion. Mrs. Mason was receiving a caller in the person of Mrs. Napoleon Gifford.
The latter had a middle-aged affection for baby-blue and a devouring penchant for the ages and antecedents of others, at times irksome to those to whom her “Let me see. You went to school with my first husband’s sister, didn’t you?” or “Your daughter Jane must have been married the year the old Israel Stamper place was burned,” were unwelcome reminders of the pace of time. To-day, of course, the topic was the new arrival at Damory Court.
“After all these years!” the visitor was saying in her customary italics. (The broad “a” which lent a dulcet softness to the speech of her hostess was scorned by Mrs. Poly, her own “a’s” being as narrow as the needle through which the rich man reaches heaven.) “We came here from Richmond when I was a bride—that’s twenty-one years ago—and Damory Court was forsaken then. And think what a condition the house must be in now! Cared for by an agent who comes every other season from New York. Trust a man to do work like that!”
“I’m glad a Valiant is to occupy it,” remarked Mrs. Mason in her sweet flute-like voice. “It would be sad to see any one else there. For after all, the Valiants were gentlemen.”
Mrs. Gifford sniffed. “Would you have called Devil-John Valiant a gentleman? Why, he earned the name by the dreadful things he did. My grandfather used to say that when his wife lay sick—he hated her, you know—he would gallop his horse with all his hounds full-cry after him under her windows. Then that ghastly story of the slave he pressed to death in the hogshead of tobacco.”