Clara had been twenty when the guns had spit at Fort Sumter. Julia had been born on the day of the first Battle of Bull Run. Of their four brothers two—the twins—had been a little older than Clara, the other two, one a year, one two years younger. Naturally all four had fought for the Southern Cause. Three had fallen, as their father had, in battle; Rupert, the youngest, had died in a Northern prison. If Ruth Townsend had been without reasonableness in her hatred of the North, she had not been without cause.
But it was Clara Townsend—who lived even now, though whether she did or not her sister did not know and did not perhaps care—who had killed their mother. The death of a man, in battle, with his face to the foe and his breast set square to the guns, rarely kills a woman who loves him. Clara had married a man who had worn not a gray but a blue uniform in the terrible fratricidal war—a runaway marriage, of course. None other had been possible. The mother never had mentioned her name again; even the darkies who had adored her never whispered her name among themselves—not even the “mammy” who had suckled her—they were far too ashamed of her. And Julia, a baby still at the close of the war, soon after which it had happened, had no memory of her sister.
Almost from her birth Miss Julia had lived a solitary life. She kept her life aired, even somewhat sunned, but she shared it, or her self, with none. Every one in Washington knew her, or tried to; and she knew every one whom she considered worth knowing, or deserving it—rather different things sometimes—but she had no intimates. She lived apart.
The three persons who came nearest to intimacy with Miss Julia Townsend, so near it indeed that she had accorded them all permission to “come and see me whenever you like,” were about the last people in Washington society—needless to say they were in it—whom one might have expected her to accept, let alone welcome.
They, as it happened, as yet were unacquainted, each with the others.
Miss Julia’s most nearly intimate friends, and the three she best liked, were: a woman physician who, though of high Southern birth, had, like the not-to-be-named sister Clara, disgraced herself by becoming the wife of a Northern man; an English girl of no social position, beyond that of a nursery governess who chanced to be a relative of her titled employers; and a young man, in a minor and rather hazy position at one of the legations—a Chinese.
CHAPTER II
Miss Townsend was “At Home”—and so were the roses, the strawberries, all the delicate eggshell china and the old heavy silver. She was giving her annual garden-party. And that she might entertain her guests delicately and amply—as a Southern woman should—it had been shortened commons at Rosehill for many a week. Not the servants—they had fared as they always did, and so had the beggars who had gone to the kitchen door—but the mistress of Rosehill had discontinued the late-dinner meal—which she called “supper,” and which she liked—and had gone to bed each night at dusk, and had refrained from lighting a candle when sleep would not come. That had been a veritable sacrifice on the function-altar of hospitality. Next to drinking buttermilk the thing that Miss Julia most enjoyed was reading novels in bed—by the soft, clear light of four or five wax candles. And she, complete hostess that, true to her blood, she was, had imposed on herself other personal curtailments and economies that cost her less but saved her purse more. She had not gone to a concert or seen a play during her “retreat” of economy. But, as it chanced, there had been no play that she much wished to see at a Washington theater just then. She was an inveterate theater-goer and she rarely denied herself a matinée that called her. She always went alone, but she always sat in the best seats, and Uncle Lysander, his dear black face shining with importance and his great splay hands encased in snow-white gloves, always waited outside to escort his mistress home, whether the matinée ended in the dusk and dark of winter or in the clear light of summer—if so side-by-side a word as “escort” can be used of his attendance close behind Miss Julia. And a “good” concert she missed very rarely indeed. Miss Julia did not care for classical music, but she liked to think that she did, and she and her best bonnet, and her rose-point-lace collar, fastened carefully (not to injure the priceless mesh) by a gold and cameo breast-pin that had belonged to Martha Washington, were as sure to enrich the parquet seats as Brahms or Grieg or Haydn or Liszt were to appear in the program. In winter she wore gray or dun-colored velvet (first made in Paris for a Mrs. Townsend before Robert Edward Lee was born); in summer thin-textured silver or lilac silk. In winter she wore a costly Cashmere shawl, in summer one of heavily embroidered white Canton silk. The Cashmere shawl had a skimp, narrow, parti-colored fringe; the Chinese one had a sumptuous, knotted fringe of its own time-deepened ivory silk. But she always wore the gold and cameo breast-pin and the deep collar of rose-point; she always wore gloves of delicate kid, made by a famous French manufacturer, and exactly matching her gowns; in winter her black velvet bonnet (always the same bonnet) nodded an ostrich feather that matched her gown of the occasion as perfectly as did her gloves; in summer, her bonnet of white chip paid the hue of her dress the same ostrich feather compliment. And winter or summer, she wore uncompromisingly thick, stout leather boots—but they were well cut and with heels as high as a fashionable girl’s. She always took her program home with her. She had volumes and volumes bound in limp morocco. She often spoke of them—and sometimes she sent Lysander to purchase a piano score of some “morceau” that had charmed her, or that she thought had. But, to her credit, she never attempted their execution on her own yellow-keyed harpsichord. She “liked to have them, to think them over.” Her own greatly favorite musical compositions were “The Maiden’s Prayer” and “Her Bright Smile Haunts Me Still.” She played them both tenderly—if not too brilliantly. And “Dixie” was her anthem.
The day was perfect. The Potomac ran a “changeable-silk” glitter of blue and gold. The sky, as blue as the river, was soft and fluffed with billows of snowy clouds. The grass was almost as smooth and green as a well-kept English lawn, and the old red house was a-nod with roses, its very bricks fragrant from the magnolias nailed there. Great beds of mignonette cut great swathes of gray through the green of the grass, and lay like soft, thick rugs at the edge of the house.
Miss Julia, wearing a befrilled cream organdie delicately printed with pink wild-roses and forget-me-nots more turquoise-tinted than growing forget-me-nots ever are, stood under the giant juniper tree receiving her bidden guests. The frills of her full gown were narrowly edged with lace, and she wore Madame Washington’s brooch, pinning her befrilled organdie fichu; but the collar and heirloom of super rose-point was laid away in its tissue and lavender. To-day she wore brightly beaded bronze slippers, very high-heeled, pointed-toed. At home she never wore boots; beyond her gates she never wore anything else. A pair of shoes she did not own, and never had. She wore many valuable rings and black lace mitts on her fine white hands, and held in her right hand a valuable lace handkerchief, which nothing would have induced her to use for the purpose for which handkerchiefs are supposed to be made and bought. It had been “in the family” for six generations, and it had never been used. In her other hand she carried a tortoise-shell lorgnette which she never used either, for she had no need to—her sight still was perfectly good—and Julia Townsend was about the last woman in the world to affect an infirmity that did not afflict her. She had considerable manner, but no affectations. Her manner, always elegant, sometimes more than a little starched, was not a pose. Her manner was she, and belonged to her as legitimately as did the many good clothes she had inherited, as she had it, with birthright from several generations of Virginia ancestors. She also carried in her left hand an exceptionally fine, long-stemmed, very fragrant rose, which she sniffed frequently. If she shook hands with a guest, the lace handkerchief went for the moment to keep company with the handsome lorgnette and the big red rose. She did not shake hands with every guest that she welcomed, but to all her welcome was gracious, and she did shake hands with each guest that bade her adieu, and contrived to convey with the lingering touch of her old, maidenly fingers how much she regretted the departure.