Oldfield: A Kentucky Tale of the Last Century

by Nancy Huston Banks

"This certainly must have been identical with our own heraldic pennyroyal," Miss Judy declared. "For that surely is the honestest little thing growing out of the earth. So upright, so downright. So absolutely uncompromising! Sturdy, erect, wholesome, useful, clean, bristly, and square of stem, it holds its rough leaves steady and level at the full height of its reach; standing thus, it never bends; falling, it always goes the whole way down; pulled up, its roots come all at once. So that there is no half-heartedness of any sort in this most characteristic product of southwestern Kentucky."

There was a shade of uneasiness in the proud glance which Doris now stole at Lynn, with a sudden uplifting of her lovely dark eyes. He could but admire Miss Judy's learning, she thought, and yet she could not help seeing, with a tender sense of humor, how exquisitely quaint the little lady's manner was.

Lynn grew bold, reading the look and the unconscious, embarrassed, half smile. "But, Miss Bramwell, pray tell me, does not the pennyroyal belong to the whole state? I have always taken it to be a member of the mint family."

Miss Judy, stepping still more mincingly, and holding the pinch of black bombazine higher than ever, tossed her little head as she acknowledged the possibility of a distant relationship. She intimated that she considered this too far off to count, even in Kentucky, where kinship appeared to stretch farther than anywhere else in the world. And she forthwith repudiated for the sturdy pennyroyal all the traits and the habits of the whole disreputable mint tribe—root and branch.

"Never under any circumstances will the honest pennyroyal be found lolling supinely in the low, shady, wet haunts of the mint. The true pennyroyal—you should know, my dear sir—stands high and dry, straight out in the open. And it stands on its native heath, too," Miss Judy said, smiling herself now, and quite forgetting all discomfiture and all displeasure. "The pennyroyal never had to be fetched from somewhere else—as the blue grass was—to give its name to its region!"

They had reached Miss Judy's gate by this time, and when Lynn mechanically opened it, the little lady passed through it before she realized that propriety required her to go all the way home with Doris, since the young gentleman evidently did not intend stopping short of Sidney's threshold. But the shyness which was natural to her, and which had dropped away from her only at Doris's need, suddenly came over her again. She stood still, uneasy, blushing, and gazing after the young couple who were strolling on under the flowering locusts. A look of apprehension quickly clouded the blue of her sweet old eyes with real distress. It was clearly wrong for her to have left them. She had made another mistake; her neglect had again placed Doris in a false light. It would be hard, indeed, to set this worst remissness right. She would gladly have called to Doris even then, had she not feared to embarrass her further. The tears welled up, but she brushed them away, so that not one step of the young people's progress up the hill might be lost to her wistful sight. Suddenly she cried out in such dismay that Miss Sophia, dozing as usual, was startled wide awake, and came to see what was the matter, as soon as she could rise from her chair and reach the door.

"Look at that poor, dear child!" cried Miss Judy, quite overcome. "Just see what she is doing, sister Sophia! And that, too, is all my fault. How was Doris—dear, dear little one—to know that she must never dream of taking off her gloves in the presence of a gentleman, when I have never thought to point out to her the indelicacy of doing such a thing?"

And Doris would not know what to do when they reached the house. If Sidney were only at home, it would not be so bad—so Miss Judy said. But Sidney was sure to be out "on-the-pad," as she herself described her professional rounds, never suspecting that she might be using a corruption from the French of en balade. Miss Judy knew Sidney's habits too well to hope for any help from the chance of her being at home. She—dear little lady—was quite in tears now and almost ready to wring her hands.

Meanwhile, the young man and the young maid went happily along under the white-tasselled locusts, between the sweet-scented green fields and the blooming gardens, toward the silver poplars. They, themselves, were not thinking of the conventionalities, nor troubling their handsome heads about the proprieties. Doris was chatting shyly, expressing Miss Judy's thoughts in Miss Judy's phrases with most winning quaintness, and at the same time with an unconscious revelation now and then of her innocent self. A gleam of sweet humor shone fitfully from her soft, dark eyes as firelight flickers through the dusk, and in this, at least, gentle Miss Judy had no part. Doris told, with the dimple coming and going and many swift, shy, upward glances, of Monsieur Beauchamp's bordering the lettuce beds with fleur-de-lis because—as he said—they were the imperial lilies of France; and of the scorn of the Empress Maria, who pulled them up as soon as his back was turned,—so that his feelings should not be wounded,—although she was quite determined thus to make room for the early turnips. And then, gaining confidence from Lynn Gordon's rapt attention, Doris went on to approach literature. She had an instinctive feeling that Miss Judy would have advised books as a theme for polite conversation with a stranger. She had read, so she said, Goldsmith's poems and some of Moore's; Miss Judy thought Burns's poetry better suited to a gentleman's than to a lady's taste, so Doris said. She acknowledged knowing very little about novels, except The Children of the Abbey and some of Miss Jane Austen's tales. Miss Judy thought, so Doris went on to say, that prose was less refined than poetry and more apt to be worldly; so that she considered it best to wait till one's ideals were well formed and firmly fixed, before reading very many novels. Miss Judy thought a great deal of ideals; she considered them, next to principles, the most important things in the world, Doris said earnestly, looking gravely up in Lynn Gordon's face. There was one novel, however, that Doris was most eager to read. It was a very, very new one, and it was called Vanity Fair. Perhaps Mr. Gordon might have heard of it—then quickly—possibly he had even read it. She colored faintly when he said that he had read it and that he scarcely thought her quite old enough yet to enjoy it, although it was a great book.

"So Miss Judy thinks," sighed Doris. "Perhaps she will allow me to read it when I am older. Anyway, she lets me read all the poetry in her mother's dear old Beauty Books, and it's beautiful. The poems haven't any names signed to them, but that doesn't matter. They go with the pictures of the lovely, lovely ladies—all with such small waists and such long curls, the whole picture in a wreath of little pink roses and tiny blue forget-me-nots—those dear old Beauty Books that smell so sweet of dried rose leaves!"