A few moments afterward, Lily, the negro maid, came hurrying down-stairs, her eyes rolling.
"Laws, Miss Sue! Dey wants a bath! Dey axed me where wuz de bathroom, en I sez, 'Ev'ry room is a bathroom while y'all is takin' a bath in it.' En Miss Sue, Miss Calline, she busted right out laffin'."
"They want a bath?" cried Miss Sue. "Well, go tell Angeline to heat some water quick, and you fill this pitcher and take it up to them. But mind that you wash it out first,--if you don't, you'll hear from me,--and don't be all day about it. Now, see if you can hurry, Lily."
When the sun went down, the oppressive quality in the heat seemed to disappear, and when Cousin Lois and Carolina came down in their cool, thin dresses, they found themselves in the midst of the most delightful part of a Southern summer day.
Miss Sue was nowhere to be seen, but another lady, as thin as she was fat, came out of the dimness and introduced herself.
"I am Mrs. Elliott Pringle, ladies, though you will nearly always hear me called Miss Sallie Yancey. Sister Sue is out in the garden. Shall we join her? I know she wants you to see her roses."
Carolina's spirits began to rise. She felt ashamed of her hasty disillusionment. Where was her courage that she should be depressed by clouds of dust and the lack of a bathroom?
In the early evening, with the shadows lengthening on the grass and the pitiless sun departed, the ruin everywhere apparent seemed only picturesque, while the warm, sweet odours from the garden were such as no Northern garden yields.
There were narrow paths bordered with dusty dwarf-box, with queer-shaped flower-beds bearing four-o'clocks, touch-me-nots, phlox, azaleas, and sweet-william. Then there were beds upon beds of a flower no Northerner ever sees,--the old-fashioned pink, before gardeners, wiser than their Maker, attempted to graft it. In its heavy, double beauty it always bursts its calyx and falls of its own weight of fragrance, to lie prostrate on the ground, dying of its own heavy sweetness. Against a crumbling wall were tea-roses. In another spot grew a great pink cabbage rose, as flat as a plate when in full bloom, with its inner leaves still so tightly crinkled that its golden heart was never revealed except by a child's curious investigating fingers. And curiously twisting in and out of the branches of this rose-tree was a honeysuckle vine. Over one end of the porch climbed a purple clematis. Over the other a Cherokee rose. But the great glory of the garden was over against the southern wall, where roses of every sort bloomed in riotous profusion. Evidently they bloomed of their own sweet will, and with little care, for the garden was almost as neglected as the rest of the place.
Still it was the first thing which brought back to Carolina "a memory of something" she "never had seen," as she told Cousin Lois when she went in, and she made an excuse to go out alone after supper was over and the three ladies were comfortably seated in rocking-chairs on the front porch.