He found that she had just returned from a near-by place in Virginia, where her family had been established many generations before the Louisiana Purchase had sent them toward the Gulf of Mexico. Constance was full of her Virginia trip, and told Thorndyke that she meant to take, for the summer, the old family place, Malvern Court, at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains, where many generations of dead and gone Maitlands had lived and flourished, after their migration from their first American home on the shores of the Chesapeake. She showed him a photograph of the place. It was an old brick manor-house, very tumble-down, but picturesque, with noble old trees around it, and even in the picture it conveyed a delicious look of repose. It was the sort of a place where nothing startling had ever happened except the Civil War, and nothing ever could happen again. The present owner of the place, an elderly maiden lady, “Cousin Phillis,” was the last of her race. She had taken up the notion that, she would like to spend the summer at “the Springs,” as she had done “in papa’s time, and grandpapa’s time;” and Constance, meaning to confer a benefit on her, had offered to rent Malvern for the summer at a price which would have been dear for a Newport cottage. The old lady, after a long struggle, had agreed. Constance did not tell all of this, but Thorndyke shrewdly suspected that the arrangement was designed to help Cousin Phillis far more than she imagined.
“And Cousin Phillis thinks she is doing me the greatest favour in the world, and that she is giving me the place for nothing,” Constance explained, smiling, to Thorndyke.
Then she went on to tell of her battles with Cousin Phillis regarding what was necessary for the house. Cousin Phillis could not conceive that anything should be wanting at Malvern Court, which stood exactly as it was at the beginning of the war, minus forty odd years of wear and tear; and Constance had only got the old lady’s consent to fit up the house somewhat, according to modern ideas, by promising to remove every one of the new-fangled fallals and gewgaws when she should give up the place. By hard fighting she had got Cousin Phillis to agree to have some painting and papering done, and hoped when once Cousin Phillis was out of the way, that the house could be made as comfortable as it was picturesque.
It was two hours by train from Washington and six miles from the nearest railway-station.
“Will it not be very lonely for you up there?” asked Thorndyke, smiling at Constance’s description of her efforts to benefit Cousin Phillis against her will.
“Ah, you do not know Virginia cousins,” answered Constance. “Nobody yet was ever known to want for company in Virginia. The two days I was at Malvern it rained cousins. Each one had to be treated with distinguished consideration, and after I had worn myself out with civility to them—for they were coming all day and half the night to call on me—Cousin Phillis gently intimated to me that if I wasn’t more attentive to my relations I might find myself very unpopular with them; and I find that in Virginia to be unpopular with one’s relations is to be an outcast. They regard me with great suspicion; my Louisiana ways and my Louisiana accent only half please them; and they seem to think me a very forgetful person because I do not remember every birth and death in the family which occurred during the seventy or eighty years that the Maitlands have been established in Louisiana. I hope,” she continued, smiling, “that you will have the opportunity to meet some of my Virginia cousins. I shall have a great many house-parties during the summer, and you are among those I shall invite. I hope you may accept.”
“I accept now,” replied Thorndyke, and in a breath his trip to Europe melted away and was as if it had never been. Then Thorndyke very artfully found out the hour of her departure, which was to be three days later.
When Constance, on a warm June morning, arrived at the station, with her five negro servants and her household and personal paraphernalia, to start for her summer in Virginia, she found Thorndyke waiting for her. In the station he had met Annette Crane, who had just seen a constituent off on the train. At the same moment they caught sight of Constance.
“Come,” said Thorndyke, “go with me and say good-bye to Miss Maitland. She is a real friend of yours, and I know she will be glad to see you before she goes.”
“I feel that she is a real friend,” answered Annette. “I never knew a woman in whom I felt greater confidence.”