"All right, Gabriel." Claudia nodded to the boy. "Run on, now, and tell Jeptha to come for the horse." She laughed in Laine's puzzled eyes. "He's Mammy Malaprop's grandson. He thinks he's the real Gabriel and it's his duty to blow. He sings like an angel, but can't learn to spell his name. There they are!" She waved her hand gaily to the group on the porch.
As he saw them Laine thought of Claudia's arrival in New York, and his face flushed. The men came down the steps, and a moment later he was presented to Claudia's mother, gracious, gentle, and of a dignity fine and sweet; to her sister, home for the holidays with her husband and children; to an engineer cousin from the West, and a girl from Philadelphia; and once more his hands were shaken by Colonel Bushrod Ball. It was a Christmas guest who was being welcomed, not Winthrop Laine alone, and he wondered if he were indeed himself.
More than once he wondered before the day was done. Under the leadership of the Colonel the men were shown their rooms, by way of the dining-room, for, like Moses, Uncle Bushrod believed inward cheer essential after outdoor chill; and, moreover, the apple toddy must be tested. It was an old world he was in, but to him a very new one. The happy stir of Christmas preparations, the coming and going of friends and neighbors, the informality and absence of pretense, the gay chatter and genuine interest, was warm and sweet; and as one who watches a play he wondered at it, and something long thought dead thrilled and throbbed and stirred within him.
In former days the house had doubtless been the scene of lavish living, he thought from time to time, and he would have liked to explore the many rooms with their polished floors and deep window-seats, their carved paneling and marble mantels; and when, in the afternoon, he found himself alone for a few minutes in the vast hall, he paced off its sixty feet of length and its twenty of width to know their number, studied the winding staircase with its white pilasters and mahogany rails, scanned hurriedly the portraits in their tarnished frames, some with the signatures of Sir Joshua Reynolds, some with Stuart, and others of lesser fame, which hung above the wainscoted walls; and as he looked he did not wonder at Claudia's love for her home.
"You care for these things, too, do you?"
The voice behind made him turn quickly. The girl from Philadelphia nodded to him and hugged her crossed arms closely to her bosom. "I don't. That is, not in weather like this, I don't. Ancestral halls sound well, but, unheated, they're horrors. I'm frozen, and the doors are open, of course. Have you been in the big parlors? Some pretty things are in them, but faded and rather shabby now. Why don't you go in the library? There's a roaring fire in there, and a chair you can sit on. Every other one in the house has something in it."
Laine followed the girl into the library, and as she held her hands to the blaze she motioned him to sit down. "I don't believe anybody in the world is as crazy about Christmas as Claudia. She gets the whole county on the jump, and to-morrow night everything in it will be here. Giving is all right, but Claudia takes it too far. The house needs painting, and a furnace would make it a different place, but she will do nothing until she has the money in the bank to pay for it; and yet she will give everybody within miles a Christmas present. When she took hold of things the place was dreadfully mortgaged, and she's paid off every dollar; but, for chance, stock-markets aren't in it with farming. Isn't that a pretty old desk? I could sell lots of this furniture for them and get big money for it, but I don't dare say so. They never talk money here. My room hasn't a piece of carpet on it, and one of those old Joshua Reynoldses in the hall would get so many things the house needs. I'm a Philistine, I guess, as well as a Philadelphian, and I like new things: plenty of bath-rooms and electric lights and steam heat. I don't blame them for not selling the old silver and china or the dining-room furniture, though it needs doing over pretty badly; but some of those old periwigged pictures I'd sell in a minute. Plenty of people would pay well for ancestors, and it's about all they've got down here. Hello, Claudia; we were just talking about you!"
Claudia put down the armful of red roses she was carrying and began to fill a tall vase with them. "Did you say anything that wasn't nice?" She bit a piece of stem off. "If you did, it wasn't so." She turned to Laine. "You ought to see mother. She rarely has such flowers as you brought down—You have made her so happy. It was very good of you."
"Good!" The girl from Philadelphia went out of the room. "If only—" In his eyes no longer was restraint, and Claudia turned her head as if listening to something outside.
"I believe mother is calling me," she said. "Would you mind telling her, Mr. Laine, I am coming right away?"