E-text prepared by Janet Kegg
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"Sophy," he said, "I have found the lost key of Hynds House"
A WOMAN NAMED SMITH
BY
MARIE CONWAY OEMLER
author of
SLIPPY McGEE, Etc.
GROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS NEW YORK
1919
To
ELIZABETH HEYWARD OEMLER
Sometimes my Little Girl.
When you were yet an Awful Baby,
And bawled o' bed-time, I said "Maybe
It is not best to spank or scold her:
Suppose a fairy-tale were told her?"
And gave you then, to my undoing,
The wolf Red Riding-Hood pursuing;
Sang Mother Goose her artless rhyming;
Showed Jack the Magic Beanstalk climbing;
Three Little Pigs were so appealing,
You set up sympathetic squealing!
Then, Bitsybet, you had your mother—
You bawled until I told another!
The Awful Baby's gone. Here lately
You bear your little self sedately.
You've shed your rompers; you want dresses
Prinked out with frillies; fluff your tresses;
Delight your daddy, aunts, and mother;
And sisterly set straight your brother.
Your bib-and-tucker days abolished,
Your manners and your nails are polished.
One baby trait remains, thank glory!
You're still a glutton for a story.
Still, Bitsybet, you beg another:
So here's one for you from
YOUR MOTHER.
CONTENTS
[ i. The Scarlet Witch Departs ]
[ iv. The Hyndses of Hynds House ]
[ v. "Thy Neighbor as Thyself" ]
[ vii. A Bright Particular Star ]
[ ix. The Judgment of Spring ]
[ xv. The Heart of Hynds House ]
[ xvi. The Devill His Rainbow ]
[ xvii. On the Knees of the Gods ]
[illustrations: [frontispiece] [key] [plan]]
CHARACTERS
Sophy: A woman named Smith.
Alicia Gaines: Flower o' the Peach.
Nicholas Jelnik: Peacocks and Ivory.
Doctor Richard Geddes: Cœur-de-Lion.
The Author: Himself.
The Secretary: A Pleasant Person.
Miss Emmeline Phelps-Parsons: of Boston, Massachusetts.
Miss Martha Hopkins: "Clothed in White Samite."
Judge Gatchell: The Law.
Schmetz and Riedriech: Workmen and Visionaries.
The Jinnee: A Son of the Prophet.
Sophronisba Scarlett: "The Scarlett Witch."
The Hyndses of Hynds House.
Paying Guests.
The People of Hyndsville, South Carolina.
Mary Magdalen; Queen-of-Sheeba; Fernolia: Important Persons.
Boris: A Russian Wolfhound.
The Black Family: A Witch's Cat's Kittens.
Beautiful Dog: Last but not Least.
A WOMAN NAMED SMITH
CHAPTER I
THE SCARLETT WITCH DEPARTS
If it had been humanly possible for Great-Aunt Sophronisba Scarlett to lug her place in Hyndsville, South Carolina, along with her into the next world, plump it squarely in the middle of the Elysian Fields, plaster it over with "No Trespassing" signs, and then settle herself down to a blissful eternity of serving writs upon the angels for flying over her fences without permission, and setting the saved by the ears in general, she would have done so and felt that heaven was almost as desirable a place as South Carolina. But as even she couldn't impose her will upon the next world, and there was nobody in this one she hated less than she did me—possibly because she had never laid eyes on me—she willed me Hynds House and what was left of the Hynds fortune; tying this string to her bequest: I must occupy Hynds House within six months, and I couldn't rent it, or attempt to sell it, without forfeiture of the entire estate.
I can fancy the ancient beldam sniggering sardonically the while she figured to herself the chagrined astonishment, the helpless wrath, of her watchfully waiting neighbors, when they should discover that historic Hynds House, dating from the beginning of things Carolinian, had passed into the unpedigreed hands of a woman named Smith. I can fancy her balefully exact perception of the attitude so radically conservative a community must needs assume toward such an intruder as myself, foisted upon it, so to speak, by an enemy who never failed to turn the trick.
Because I'm not a Hynds, at all. Great Aunt Sophronisba was my aunt not by blood but by marriage; she having, when she was no longer what is known as a spring chicken, met my Great-Uncle Johnny Scarlett and scandalized all Hyndsville by marrying him out of hand.
I have heard that she was insanely in love with him, and I believe it; nothing short of an over-mastering passion could have induced one of the haughty Hyndses to marry a person with such family connections as his. For my father, George Smith, was a ruddy English ship-chandler who pitched upon Boston for a home, and lived with his family in the rooms above his shop; and my grandmother Smith dropped her "aitches" with the cheerful ease of one to the manner born, bless her stout old Cockney heart! I can remember her hearing me my spelling-lesson of a night, her spectacles far down on her old button of a nose, her white curls bobbing from under her cap.
"What! Carn't spell 'saloon'? Listen, then, Miss: There's a hess and a hay and a hell and two hoes and a henn! Now, then, d 'ye spell it!"
Not that Mrs. Johnny ever accepted us. It was borne in upon the Smiths that undesirable in-laws are outlaws. This despite the fact that my mother's pink-and-white English face was a gentler copy of what her uncle's had been in his youth; and that when I came along, some years after the dear old man's death, I was named Sophronisba at Mrs. Johnny's urgent request.
After Great-Uncle Johnny died, as if the last tie which bound her to ordinary humanity had snapped, his widow retired into a seclusion from which she emerged only to sue somebody. She said the world was being turned topsyturvy by people who were allowed to misbehave to their betters, and who needed to be taught a lesson and their proper place; and that so long as she retained her faculties, she would do her duty in that respect, please God!
She did her duty so well in that respect that the Hynds fortune, which even civil war and reconstruction hadn't been able altogether to wreck, dwindled to a mere fifteen thousand dollars; and she wasn't on speaking terms with anybody but Judge Gatchell, her lawyer. She would have quarreled with him, too, had she dared.
To the minister, who bearded her for her soul's sake every now and then, she spoke in words brief and curt:
"You here again? Wanted to see me, hey? Well, you've done it. Now get out!"
And in the meantime the years passed and my own immediate family passed with them; but still the gaunt old woman lived on in her gaunt old house, becoming in time a myth to me, and to Hyndsville as well; where they referred to her, succinctly, as "the Scarlet Witch." I heard from her directly only once, and that was the year she sent me a red flannel petticoat for a Christmas present. After that, as if she'd done her worst, she ignored me altogether.
My mother had wanted me to be a school-teacher, in her eyes the acme of respectability. But as it happens, there are two things I wouldn't be: one's a school-teacher, the other a minister's wife. If I had to marry the average minister, I should infallibly hate all church-goers; if I had to teach the average school-child and wrestle with the average school-board, I should end by burning joss-sticks to Herod.
So I disappointed my mother by becoming a typist. After her death I secured a foothold in a New York house—I'd always wanted to live in New York—and went up, step by step, from what may be called a rookie in the outside office, to private secretary to the Head. And I'd been a business woman for all of seventeen years when Great-Aunt Sophronisba Scarlett departed at the age of ninety-eight years and eleven months, and willed that I should take up my life in the house where she had dropped hers.
"Oh, Sophy!" cried Alicia Gaines, the one person in the world who didn't call me Miss Smith. "Oh, Sophy, it's like a fairy-story come true! Think of falling heir to an old, old, old lady's old, old, old house, in South Carolina! I hope there's a big old door with a fan-light, and a Greeky front with white pillars, and a big old hall, and a big old garden—"
"And an old stove that smokes and old windows that rattle and an old roof that leaks, and maybe big, big old rats that squeak o' nights," I said darkly. For the first rapture of the astonishing news was beginning to wear thin, and doubt was appearing in spots.
"Sophy Smith! Why, if such a wonderful, beautiful, unexpected thing had happened to me—" Alicia's blue eyes misted. I have known her since the day she was born, next door to us in Boston, and she is the only person I have ever seen who can cry and look pretty while she's doing it; also, she can cry and laugh at the same time, being Irish. Some foolish people, who have been deceived by Alicia Gaines's baby stare and complexion, have said she hasn't sense enough to get in out of a shower of rain. This is, of course, a libel. But what's the odds, when every male being in sight would rush to her aid with an umbrella?
After her mother's death I fell heir to Alicia, who, like me, was an only child, and without relatives. Lately, I'd gotten her into our filing-department. She didn't belong in a business office, she whose proper background should have been an adoring husband and the latest thing in pink-and-white babies.
"But somebody's got to think of stoves and roofs and rats and such, or there'd be no living in any old house," I reminded her, practically. "My dear girl, don't you realize that this thing isn't all beer and skittles?"
Alicia wrinkled her white forehead.
"Consider me, a hardy late-summer plant forced to uproot and transplant myself to a soil which may not in the least agree with me. Why, this means changing all my fixed habits, to trot off to live in an old house that is probably haunted by the cross-grained ghost of a lady of ninety-nine!"
"If I were a ghost, you'd be the very last person on earth I'd want to tackle, Sophy," remarked Alicia, dimpling. "And as for that new soil, why, you'll bloom in it! You—well, Sophy dear, up to now you have been root-bound; you've never had a chance to grow, much less to blossom. Now you can do both."
I who was confidential secretary to the Head, looked at the girl who was admittedly the worst file-clerk on record; and she looked back at me, nodding her bright head with young wisdom.
"I hope," she said, wistfully, "that there'll be all sorts of lovely things in your house, Sophy,—old mirrors, old books, old pictures, old furniture, old china. Lord send you'll find an attic! All my life I've day-dreamed of finding an attic that's been shut up and forgotten for ages and ages, and discovering all sorts of lovely things in all sorts of hiding-places. When I think my day-dream may come true for you, Sophy, it almost reconciles me to the pain of parting from you; though what on earth I'm to do without you, goodness only knows!" She was sitting on my bed, kimonoed, slippered, and braided. And now she looked at me with a suddenly quivering chin.
"Alicia," said I, "ever since I discovered that there's no mistake about that lawyer's letter—that Hynds House is unaccountably, but undoubtedly mine and I've got to live in it if I want to keep it—it has been borne in upon me that you are just about the worst file-clerk on earth. You're a navy-blue failure in a business office. Business isn't your motif. Now, will you resign the job you fill execrably, and accept one you can fill beyond all praise—come South with me, share half-and-half whatever comes, and help make that old house a happy home for us both?"
"Don't joke." Her lips went white. "Please, please, Sophy dear, don't joke like that! I—well, I just couldn't bear it."
"I never joke," I said indignantly. "You little goose, did you imagine for one minute that I contemplated leaving you here by yourself, any more than I contemplate going down there by myself, if I can help it? Stop to think for a moment, Alicia. You have been like a little sister to me, ever since you were born. And—I'm alone, except for you—and not in my first youth—and not beautiful—and not gifted."
At that she hurled herself off my bed and cried upon my shoulder, with her slim arms around my neck. Those young arms were beginning to make me feel wistful. If things had been different—if I had been lovely like the Scarletts, instead of looking like the Smiths—there might have been—
Well, I don't look like the Scarletts; so there wasn't. The best I could do was to drop a kiss on Alicia's forehead, where the bright young hair begins to break into curls.
And that is how, neither of us having the faintest notion of what was in store for us, Alicia Gaines and I turned our backs upon New York and set our faces toward Hynds House.
CHAPTER II
AND ARIEL MAKES MUSIC
We had wired Judge Gatchell when to expect us, but the venerable negro hackman who was on the lookout for us explained that the judge had a "misery in the laigs" which confined him to his room, and that he advised us to go to the hotel for a while.
We couldn't, for wasn't our own house waiting for us? A minute later we had bundled into the ancient hack and were bumping and splashing through unpaved streets, getting wet, gray glimpses of old houses in old gardens, and every now and then a pink crape-myrtle blushing in the pouring rain. Hyndsville was, it seemed, one of those sprawling, easy-going old Carolina towns that liked plenty of elbow-room and wasn't particular about architectural order. Hynds House itself was on the extreme edge of things.
The hack presently stopped before a high iron gate in a waist-high brick wall with a spiked iron railing on top of it, the whole overrun with weeds and creepers. Of Hynds House itself one couldn't see anything but a stack of chimneys above a forest of trees.
The gate creaked and groaned on its rusty hinges; then we were walking up a weedy, rain-soaked path where untrimmed branches slapped viciously at our faces, and tough brambles, like snares and gins, tried to catch our feet. On each side was a jungle. Of a sudden the path turned, widened into a fairly cleared space; and Hynds House was before us.
We had expected a fair-sized dwelling-house in its garden. And there confronted us, glooming under the gray and threatening sky that seemed the only proper and fitting canopy for it, what looked like a pile reared in medieval Europe rather than a home in America. Its stained brick walls, partly covered with ivy and lichens; its smokeless chimneys; its barred doors; its many shuttered windows, like blind eyes—all appeared deliberately to thrust aside human habitancy.
A residence for woman, child, and man,
A dwelling-place,—and yet no habitation;
A House,—but under some prodigious ban
Of Excommunication.
Yet there was nothing ruinous about it, for the Hyndses had sought to build it as the old Egyptians sought to build their temples—to last forever, to defy time and decay. It was not only meant to be a place for Hyndses to be born and live and die in: it was a monument to Family Pride, a brick-and-granite symbol of place and power.
The walls were of an immense thickness, the corners further strengthened with great blocks of granite. The house had but two stories, with an attic under its sloping roofs, but it gave an effect of height as well as of solidity. Behind it was another brick building, the lower part of which had been used for stables and carriage house, and the upper portion as quarters for the house slaves, in the old days. Another smaller building, slate-roofed and ivy covered, was the spring-house, with a clear, cold little spring still bubbling away as merrily in its granite basin, as if all the Hyndses were not dead and gone. And there was a deep well, protected by a round stone wall, with a cupola-like roof supported by four slender pillars. And everything was dank and weedy and splotched with mildew and with mold.
O'er all there hung a shadow and a fear
A sense of mystery the spirit daunted
And said, as plain as whisper in the ear,
The place is Haunted!
When we opened the great front door, above which was the fan-light of Alicia's hope, just as the round front porch had the big pillars, a damp and moldy air met us. The house had not been opened since Sophronisba's funeral, and everything—stairs, settles, tables, cabinets, pictures, the chairs backed inhospitably against the wall as if to prevent anybody from sitting in them—was covered with a shrouding pall of dust.
The hall was cross-shaped, the side passage running between the back drawing-room and library on one side, and the dining-room and two locked rooms on the other. It was a nice place, that side passage, with a fireplace and settles; and beautiful windows opening upon the tangled garden. All the down-stairs walls were paneled: precious woods were not so hard to come by when Hynds House was built. It was lovely, of course, but depressingly dark.
We got one of the big windows open, and let some stale damp air out and some fresh damp air in. Then, having despatched our hackman for certain necessities, Alicia and I turned and stared at each other, another Alicia and Sophy staring back at us from a dim and dusty mirror opposite. If, at that moment, I could have heard the familiar buzzer at my elbow! If I could have heard the good everyday New York "Miss Smith, attend to this, please"! God wot, if I had not literally burned my bridges behind me—Oh, oh, I had!
"The garden around this house,"—Alicia spoke in a whisper—"stretches to the end of the world and then laps over. It hasn't been trimmed since Adam and Eve moved out. But those crape-myrtle trees are quite the loveliest things left over from Paradise, and I'm glad we came here to see them with our own eyes! Brace up, Sophy! We'll feel heaps better when we've had something to eat. Aren't you frightfully hungry, and doesn't a chill suspicion strike you, somewhere around the wishbone, that if that Ancient Mariner of a hackman doesn't get back soon we shall starve?"
At that moment, from somewhere—it seemed to us from up-stairs—a sudden flood of sweetest sound poured goldenly through that sad, dim, dusty house, as if a blithe spirit had slipped in unawares and was bidding us welcome. For a few wonderful moments the exquisite music filled the dark old place and banished gloom and neglect and decay; then, with a pattering scamper, as of the bare, rosy feet of a beloved and mischievous child making a rush for his crib, it went as suddenly as it had come. There was nothing to break the silence but the swishing downpour of the outside rain.
When I could speak: "It came from up-stairs! Somebody's playing a violin up-stairs. I'm going up-stairs to find out who it is."
Alicia demurred: "It may be a real person, Sophy!—a real person with a real violin. But I'd rather believe it's Ariel's self, come out of those pink crape-myrtles. Don't go up-stairs, please, Sophy!"
"Nonsense!" said I. "Somebody's played a violin and I mean to know who he is!"
And up-stairs I went, into a huge dark hall, with the cross-passage cutting it, and closed doors everywhere. At the front end was a most beautiful window, opening doorlike upon a tiny iron bird-cage of a balcony, hung up Southern fashion under the roof of the pillared front porch. At the rear a more ordinary door opened upon the broad veranda that ran the full width of the house. Both door and window were closed, and bolted on the inside, and the big, dark, dusty rooms which I resolutely entered were quite empty, their fireplaces boarded up, their windows close-shuttered. There was no sign anywhere of violin or player. I went down-stairs just as wise as I had gone up.
"I told you it was Ariel!" Alicia stood by the open window—our windows are sunk into the walls, and cased with solid black walnut as Impervious to decay as the granite itself—and leaned out to the wet and dripping garden.
"Sophy," said she, in her high, sweet voice that carries like a thrush's. "Sophy, the best thing about this world is, that the best things in it aren't really real. This is one of its enchanted places. Sycorax used to live in this house: that's what you feel about it yet. But now she's gone, her spell is lifting, and Hynds House is going to come alive and be young again!"
"At least," I grumbled, "admit that the dust inside and the rain outside and the weeds and mud are real; and I'm really hungry!"
"Me too!" Alicia assented instantly and ungrammatically. "Oh, for a square meal!" She thrust her charming head out far enough for the rain to splatter on her bright hair and whip it into curls, and bring a deeper shade of pink to her cheeks, and a deeper blue to her eyes. "Ariel!" she fluted, "Spirit of the Violin, I'm hungry—earthily, worm-of-the-dustly, unromantically hungry! Send us something to eat."
"Why don't you rap on one of the tables," I suggested ironically, "and call up your high spirits to do your bidding?"
"My high spirits won't be above making you a soothing cup of coffee just as soon as that ancient African returns. In the meantime, let's look around us."
People had forests to draw from when they built rooms like those in Hynds House. There were eight of them on the first floor. On one side the two drawing-rooms, the library, and behind that a room evidently used for an office. We didn't know it then, of course, but that library was treasure trove. Almost every book and pamphlet covering the early American settlements, that is of any value at all, is in Hynds House library; we have some pamphlets that even the British Museum lacks.
The rooms had enough furniture to stock half a dozen antique-shops, all of it in a shocking state, the brocades in tatters, the carvings caked with dust. You couldn't see yourself in the tarnished mirrors, the portraits were black with dirt, and most of the prints were badly stained. Alicia swooped upon a pair of china dogs with mauve eyes and black spots and sloppy red tongues, on a what-not in a corner. She said she had been aching for a china dog ever since she was born.
"Oh, Sophy!" cried she, dancing, "wasn't it heavenly of that old soul to die and leave you two whole china dogs! I wouldn't want sure-enough dogs that looked like these, but as china dogs they're perfect! And cast your eyes about you, Sophy! Have you ever in all your life seen a house that needed so much done to it as this house does?
"'If seven maids with seven mops,
Swept it for half a year,
Do you suppose,' the Walrus said,
'That that would make it clear?'
'I doubt it,' said the Carpenter,
'And—'
"Sophy! I shall clean some of these windows myself. Did you know that Queen Victoria, when she was a child, had the same virtuous inclination? Well, she had, and you see how she turned out!"
"I don't believe it!"
"Don't be skeptical!—Look at that pink mustache-cup over there on that little table! Who do you suppose had a mustache and drank out of that cup? It couldn't have been Sophronisba herself? I insist that it was a black-mustached Confederate with a red sash around his waist. I adore Confederates! They're the most glamorous, romantic figures in American history. I wish a black mustache went along with the cup and the house; don't you? It would make things so much more interesting!" And she began to sing, at the top of her voice, in the sad and faded room that hadn't heard a singing voice these many, many years:
"'Arrah, Missis McGraw,' the Captain said,
'Will ye make a sojer av your son Ted?
Wid a g-r-rand mus-tache, an' a three-cocked hat,
Wisha, Missis McGraw, wouldn't you like that!
You like that—tooroo looroo loo!
Wisha, Missis McGraw, wouldn't you like that!'"
If Great-Aunt Sophronisba's ghost, and the scandalized ghosts of all the haughy Hyndses ever intended to walk, now was the accepted time! And as if that graceless ballad were the signal for something to happen, upon the hall window-shutter sounded three loud, imperative knocks.
Alicia dashed down the hall.
"Sophy!" she called, breathlessly, "Sophy!"
Framed in the open window, with the dripping trees and the slanting rain behind him, was the bizarre, the astounding figure of a gnomelike negro in a terra-cotta robe fastened about the waist with a girdle made of a twisted black shawl with the most beautiful Persian border and fringe. A striped silk scarf was bound turban-wise about his head, from which tufts of snowy wool protruded. From his ears hung crescent-shaped silver ear-rings studded with coral and turquoise; a necklace of the same barbaric magnificence was about his neck, and his arms were covered with bracelets. His deep-set eyes, his flat nose, his mouth set in a thousand fine wrinkles, the whole aspect of him, breathed a sly and impish drollery. He glanced from Alicia to me with the smiling malice of a jinnee delighted to mystify mortals. Then with a rapid movement he shifted the umbrella he carried over a large linen-covered tray, eased the latter upon the deep window-ledge, and beckoned with a very black and beringed hand.
"For us?" breathed Alicia.
With a fine flourish he swept aside the linen covering. And there was golden-brown chicken, white rice, cream gravy, hot biscuit, cool sliced tomatoes with sprigs of green parsley, fresh butter, fresh cream, a great slab of heavenly cake, a wicker basket of Elberta peaches, rain-cooled, odorous, delicious, and a pot of steaming coffee. On the edge of the tray was a cluster of rain-washed roses.
"No," Alicia doubted, "this is not true: it can't be!—Sophy, do you see it, too?"
He motioned her to take the tray; and his ear-rings swung, and all his bracelets set up a silver tinkling. An automobile honked outside in the street shut off by our garden trees, and a dog barked. Our jinnee cocked a cautious head and a listening ear, thrust the tray upon Alicia, and with inconceivable swiftness vanished around a corner.
"Let's hurry and eat it before it, too, takes to its heels," said Alicia, practically. Without further ado we dragged forward a small table, and fell to. Aladdin probably tasted fare like that, the first time he rubbed the magic lamp.
When we had polished the last chicken bone, and had that comfortable feeling that nothing can give so thoroughly as a good meal, Alicia carefully examined the china and silver.
"Old blue-and-white English china; English silver initialed 'R.H.G.' Sophy, handle this prayerfully: it's an apostle spoon. Think of having a jinnee fetch you your coffee, and of stirring it with an apostle spoon."
She spoke reverently. Alicia is the sort who flattens her nose against antique-shop windows, and would go without dessert for a month of Sundays and trudge afoot to save carfare, if thereby she might buy an old print, or a bit of pottery; just as I am content to admire the print or the pottery in the shop window, feeling sure that when they are finally sold to somebody better able to buy them, something else I can admire just as much will take their place. Mine is a philosophy not altogether to be despised, though Alicia rejects it. She handled the blue-and-white ware with tender hands, laid the silver together, and set the tray upon the window-ledge. Then, on a leaf of my pocket memorandum—she never carries one of her own—she scribbled the following absurdity and pinned it to the linen cover:
Ariel, accept the gratitude of mortals set down hungry in the house of Sycorax. Gay and kind spirit, when we broke your bread you broke her spell: the wishbone of your chicken has cooked her goose! Maker of Music, Donator of Dinners, thanks!
"And now," said she, "having been serenaded, and satisfied with nothing short of perfection, let's go up-stairs, Sophy, and decide where we shall sleep to-night."
We chose the front room because of a gate-legged table that Alicia wanted to say her prayers beside, and because of the particularly fine portrait of a colonial gentleman above the mantel, a very handsome man in claret-colored satin, with a vest of flowered gold brocade, a gold-hilted sword upon which his fine fingers rested, and a pair of silk-stockinged legs of which he seemed complacently aware.
"I wish you weren't dead," Alicia told him regretfully. "Your taste in clothes is above all praise, though I fancy you were somewhat too vain of your legs, sir. I never knew before that men had legs like that, did you, Sophy?"
"I take no pleasure in the legs of a man." I quoted the Psalmist acridly enough.
"Don't pay any attention to Sophy," Alicia advised the portrait, naughtily. "Just to prove how much we both admire you, you shall have Ariel's roses." She had brought them up-stairs with us, and now she walked over to the mantel to place them beneath the picture.
"Why!" exclaimed Alicia, "why!" and she held up nothing more remarkable than a package of cigarettes, evidently left there recently, for it was not dusty.
"I dare say Judge Gatchell forgot it, when he was looking over the house. That reminds me: the silver you admired so much was marked 'G.' Then, in all probability, Judge Gatchell sent us that spread, and very thoughtful it was of him, I must say."
"Rheumatic old judges don't smoke superfine cigarettes, Sophy, nor send black tray-bearers in terra-cotta robes out on rainy days for the entertainment of strange ladies. No: this is something, or somebody, young. But since when did Ariel take to tobacco?"
"Let's go down-stairs," I suggested, "and wait for that old darky, if he is a real darky and ever means to return." I did not fancy those big forlorn rooms, with their great beds that didn't seem made for people to sleep and dream in, but to stay awake and worry over their sins—and then die in.
The down-stairs halls had grown darker, and the rain came down in a gray sheet, so that the open window seemed a hole cut into it. The tray we had left on the window-ledge was gone. In its place was nothing more romantic than a freshly filled and trimmed kerosene lamp, two candles, and a box of matches.
When our Jehu finally returned he rummaged out some firewood from the sooty kitchen and built us a fire in the hall. He was a pleasant old negro, garrulous and kindly, by name Adam King, or, as he informed us, "Unc' Adam" to all Hyndsville folks.
"Uncle Adam," Alicia asked, while he was drying himself before the blazing logs, "Uncle Adam, who's the violinist around here?"
Uncle Adam looked at the Yankee lady a bit doubtfully. The old fellow was slightly deaf, but he would have died rather than admit it.
"Wellum," he told us, "since ol' Mis' Scarlett's gone, folks does say de doctor is. Dat's 'cause ob de Hynds' blood in 'im. All dem Hyndses was natchelly de violentest kind o' pussons, an' Doctor, he ain't behin' de do'." He rubbed his hands and chuckled. "Lawd, yes! I know de Doctor, man an' boy, an' he suttinly rips an' ta'hs when he's riled! You ought ter seen 'im de day ol' Mis' Scarlett let fly wid 'er shot-gun an' blowed de tails spang off'n two of 'is hens an' de haid off'n 'is prize rooster! De fowls come thoo' de haidge, an' ol' Mis' grab 'er gun an' blaze away. De Doctor hear de squallation, an' come flyin' outer de office an' right ovah de haidge. I 'uz totin' fiahwood fo' ol' Mis' dat day, an' I drap een de bushes; it ain't no place fo' sensible niggahs when white folks grab shot-guns. Doctor see me an' holler: 'Adam! git outer dem bushes, you ol' fool! You my witness what dis hellion's done to my fowls!'
"Ol' Mis' Scarlett she s'anter ter de winder wid 'er gun sort o' hangin' loose, an' holler: 'Adam! Come outer dem bushes 'fo' I pickle yo' hide! You my witness ob dis ruffian trispassin' on my prop'ty an' cussin' an' seducin' a ol' woman widout 'er consent,' she says. 'Has I retched my age,' says ol' Mis' Scarlett, 'to have his fowls ruinin' my gyardin', an' him whut's a dunghill rooster himself flyin' ovah my fences unbeknownst?'
"'If there evah was a leather-hided ol' hen ripe foh roastin' on Beelzebub's own griddle, it's you, you gallows ol' witch!' says Doctor, shakin' 'is fist up at her.
"'Aha! I got a plain case!' says ol' Mis', grim-like. 'I'll have a warrant out foh you dis day, Geddes, you owdacious villyum!'
"And she done it. Yas'm. An' dey done sont de shariff atter me for witness, all two bofe o' dem."
"Well, and what did you do?" I asked, curiously. I was getting a side-light on Great-Aunt Sophronisba.
"Me? I got on muh knees an' wrastled wid de speret," said Uncle Adam. "I done tuck mah troubles to de Lawd, whichin He 'bleeged ter know I cyant deal wid ol' Mis' Scarlett an' de Doctor. Missis, I prayed!"
"Oh! And what happened then?"
The old man looked around him, cautiously, and lowered his voice: "Wellum, Mis' Scarlett she tuck an' went an' up an' died. Yessum! She done daid. An' next thing we-all heah, she 'd went an' lef de Hynds place to youna, 'stead ob de Doctor, or dat furriner."
"She had Hynds relatives, then? I didn't know."
"Wellum, de Doctor an' ol' Mis' Scarlett wuz cousins. Dat's how come dey could fight so powerful. Ain't you nevah had no relations to fight wid, ma'ams?"
We explained, regretfully, that we hadn't.
"Den you ain't nevah knowed, an' you ain't nevah gwine ter knew, whut real, sho-nough fightin' is," said Unc' Adam, with conviction.
"You mentioned a foreigner," hinted Alicia.
The old man shook his head deprecatingly. "Don't seem lak I evah able to rickermembah dat boy's name, nohow. His grampa' 'uz a Hynds, likewise his ma, but she 'sisted on marryin' er furriner, an' de boy takes atter de furriners 'stead er we-all. 'Taint de po' boy's fault, but ol' Mis' Scarlett hated 'im wuss 'n pizen. De only notice she take er de boy is ter warrant 'im fo' trispassin'. Dat 's how come folkses ter say—" he paused suddenly.
"Well, what do folks say?" I wanted to know.
"Well, Missis," he admitted, "dey say it's natchel to fight wid yo' kin whilst you 're livin', but 'taint natchel ter carry de fight inter de grave-yahd. Dat's whut she done, ma'ams. An' folks is outdone wid 'er, whichin' she ain't lef de Hynds place to de Hyndses, but done tuhn it ovah ter—uh—ah—"
"To a Yankee woman named Smith?"
"Yessum, dat's it."
"Had either the Doctor or the foreigner any real claim or right to this property, do you know?"
"No, ma'am, we-all 'lows dey ain't got no mo' law-right dan whut you's got. Ol' Mis' Scarlett ain't 'bleeged ter lef it to de Hyndses, but folks thinks she oughter done it, an' dey's powerful riled 'cause she ain't. Dey minds dis wuss'n all de warrantin' an' rampagin' an' rucusses she cut up whilst she wuz wid us."
"I see," said I, thoughtfully.
"Missises," said the old man, anxiously, "you-all ain't meanin' ter stay hyuh to-night, is you?" He seemed really distressed at the notion. "Lemme take you-all to de hotel, please, Missises! Don't stay hyuh to-night!"
"Why not? What's the matter with this house?"
Again he looked around him, stealthily.
"It's h'anted!" said he, desperately. "Missis, listen: I 'uz comin' home from prayer-meetin', 'bout two weeks ago, walkin' back er dis same place in de dark ob de moon. An' all ob a suddin I hyuh de pianner in de pahlor, ting-a-ling-a-ling! ting-a-ling-a-ling! I say, 'Who de name er Gawd in ol' Mis' Scarlett's pahlor, when dey ain't nobody in it?' I look thoo de haidge, an' dey's one weenchy light in de room, an' whilst I'm lookin', it goes out! An' de pianner, she's a-playin' right along! Yessum, de pianner, she's er tingalingin' by 'erself in de middle o' de night!"
"And who was playing it, Uncle Adam?"
"Dat's what I axin yit: who playin' Mis' Scarlett's pianner when dey wasn't nobody in de house?"
"Why didn't you find out?"
"Who, me?" cried the old man, with horror. "If I could er borried a extra pahr er laigs from er yaller dawg, I'd a did it right den, so 's I could run twict faster 'n I done!—Whichin' please, ma'ams, lemme take you-all ter de hotel."
When he saw that he couldn't prevail upon us to do so, he left us regretfully, shaking his head. He would come back early in the morning to do anything we might require. But he wouldn't stay overnight in Hynds House for any consideration. No negro in the county would.
"Alicia," said I, when we had had a cup of tea made over our spirit lamp, and firelight and lamplight made the place less depressing and eerie, "Alicia, that terrible old woman has played me, like an ace up her sleeve, against her neighbors and her family. She has left me a house that needs everything done to it except to burn it down and rebuild it, and a garden that will have to be cleared out with dynamite. And she has seen to it that I have the preconceived prejudice of all Hyndsville."
Alicia's pretty, soft lips closed firmly.
"Here we are and here we stay!" she said determinedly. "Nobody's been disinherited to make room for us. Sophy, in all our lives we have never had a chance to make a real home. Well, then, Hynds House is our chance, and I'd just like to see anybody take it away from us!"
"Up, Guards, and at 'em!" said I, smiling at her tone. I am slower than she, but even more stubborn, as the English are.
"Tell your admiral that if he gets in my way I will blow his ships out of the water!" said Alicia, gallantly.
But when we went up-stairs, we took good care to lock our door, and bolt it, too. Alicia said her prayers kneeling by the gate-legged table, snuggled into bed between the clean sheets we had brought with us, tucked a china dog under her chin, and went to sleep like the child that she was. I said the Shepherd's Psalm and went to sleep, too.
I was awakened suddenly, and found myself sitting up in bed, staring wildly about the strange room. The house was breathlessly still. My heart pounded against my ribs, the blood beat in my ears. I was oppressed with a nameless terror, an anguished sense that something had happened, something irremediable. The feeling was so strong that my throat closed chokingly.
I am particular in thus setting it down, because it was an experience that all of us under that roof had to undergo. You had to fight it, shut your mind against it, oppose your will to it like a stone wall, refuse to let it master you. Then, as if defeated, it would go as suddenly, as inexplicably, as it had come.
That's what I did then, more by instinct than reason. But I was exhausted when I finally got back to sleep.
CHAPTER III
THE DEAR LITTLE GOD!
When we went over Hynds House the next morning and took stock, I began to entertain very, very peculiar feelings toward Great-Aunt Sophronisba Scarlett, who, it would appear, had given me a white elephant which I could neither hire out for its keep, nor yet sell out of hand. I had to live in Hynds House, and Hynds House as it stood wasn't to be lived in.
The rain had ceased, and from the outside jungle came innumerable calls of birds, and fresh and woodsy odors; but the whole aspect of the place was grim and forbidding. At the back, where there wasn't such an overgrowth, the lane had been closed, barricaded with barbed-wire entanglements, and fairly bristled with thistles and "No Trespassing" signs.
"All this house needs is a mortuary tablet set up over the front door."
But Alicia demurred.
"I'm not a bit disheartened," she declared stoutly. "There's just one thing to be done to this house—first make it beautiful, and then make it pay. It can be done. It's going to be done. It's got to be done. And when it's done—we'll have a home. Vision it as it's going to be, Sophy—rosewood and mahogany and walnut, old brass and china and prints and portraits, the sort of things we've only been able to dream of up to now. Why, this house has been waiting for us! We were born to come here and make it over: it's our house!" Alicia, has the gay courage of the Irish.
The heavy iron knocker on the front door resounded clamorously.
"Uncle Adam thinks we've been ha'nted out of existence, and he's hammering to wake the dead," said I.
But it wasn't Uncle Adam to whom we opened the door. An enormous, square-shouldered man stood there, looking from me to Alicia with bright, keen blue eyes behind glasses. He was so big, so magnificently proportioned, that he held one's attention, at first, by mere size. Then one had time to observe that although he hadn't the sleek and careful grooming of successful New Yorkers, he wore his clothes as, say, Cœur de Lion must have worn mail. He hadn't the brisk business manner, either; but there radiated from him an assured authority, as of one used to having his orders obeyed without question. No one could pass him over with a casual eye. I have known people who hated him frankly and heartily; I have known people who adored him. I have never known any one who was lukewarm where he was concerned.
"Which of you is Miss Smith?" he asked, in a very pleasant voice. "Miss Smith, I'm your next-door neighbor, house to the right: Doctor Richard Geddes, at your service."
We gave him to understand, with the usual polite commonplaces, that we were pleased to make his acquaintance, and ushered him into the dilapidated drawing-room.
"I'd have come over yesterday, when I learned you'd arrived, except that my cook was suddenly seized with the notion she'd been conjured, and I had to—er—stand by and persuade her she wasn't. Swore she had my lunch ready, as usual; swore she'd placed it on a tray, left it on the kitchen table for a few minutes, and when she came back from the pantry, not ten feet away, the tray was gone. Vanished. Disappeared. Nowhere to be found. She flopped on the floor and howled. She weighs two hundred and forty pounds and I hadn't a derrick handy. I had to roll her up on bed-slats. You've never had a conjured two-hundred-and-forty-pounder on your hands, have you? No? Well, then, don't. But if you ever do, try a bed-slat. This morning she discovered the tray in its usual place, dishes and silver intact, nothing missing. She's looking for the end of the world."
"O-o-h!" quavered Alicia, while I could feel my knees knocking together. "O-o-o-h! How very, very singular! And—and was that all?"
"All! Wasn't that enough? I've had burned biscuit and muddy coffee, because my cook's got liver and nerves, and insists it's her soul," said the doctor, grimly. "I've given her to understand that if she hasn't got her soul saved before to-night, I'll physic it out of her and hang her hide on the bushes, inside out, salted." He added, hastily: "In the meantime, I hope you haven't fared too badly in this mildewed jail?"
"Thank you, no," Alicia said demurely. "We have fared very well."
"Glad to hear it." The big man looked at her with the frank pleasure all masculinity evinces at sight of Alicia. And then he asked, abruptly:
"Has Jelnik called yet?—gray house on the other side of you.—No? I dare say he's off on one of his prowls then. A bit of a lunatic, but a very charming fellow, Jelnik, though your amiable predecessor, Miss Smith, chose to consider him a sort of outlawed tom-cat, and warned him off with a shot-gun." The doctor paused, stroked his beard, and regarded me earnestly.
"Having heired the old girl's domain, I hope you won't consider it necessary to heir her—er—prejudices," he remarked hopefully. "Bad lot, Sophronisba. Very bad!"
"Mrs. Scarlett," I reminded him gently, "was my relative only by marriage."
"Cousin of mine; mother's relative. Not on speaking-, only on fighting-terms," he interjected.
I remembered what Uncle Adam had told us; and I'm afraid I eyed him a bit harder than politeness warranted.
"I discern by your eye, Miss Smith," said the doctor, "that you think a blood relation is more likely to walk in that old demon's footsteps than an outsider is. My dear lady, under ordinary circumstances and with human neighbors, I'm as meek as Moses; I am a lamb, a veritable lamb! As for your aunt, she was a man-eating, saber-toothed tigress!"
"Not my aunt, Doctor Geddes; your cousin."
"Your aunt-by-marriage. It's just as bad. Anyhow, she preferred you to any of us, didn't she?"
"Perhaps because she didn't know me."
"Have it so. But she did whatever she did because she was an old devil of a woman, and an old devil of a woman can give points to Satan. If," cried the doctor, vehemently, "there is one great reason why a man should be glad he's a man, it is because he will never live to be an old woman!"
"That depends upon one's point of view," I told him firmly. "Now, I'm glad I'm a woman because I shall never live to be an old man. Old ladies are far, far nicer. Have you ever known an old lady who thought herself captivating? Have you ever known any old man who didn't think he could be if he wished?"
"Yes," shouted the doctor, "and no!—in both cases! There is no sex in fools. There is no age limit, either."
"The Talmud says: 'An old woman in the house is a blessing; but an old man is a nuisance.'"
"I don't give a bobtailed scat what the Talmud says. I know what I know.—Miss Gaines, I leave it to you."
"Why, I like them both, when they're nice; and I'm sorry for them both when they're not." And she added, with a naïve air of confidence: "But I think I like young men better than either, as a rule."
The doctor removed his hat again, and sat down. His eyebrows went up, his eyes crinkled.
"Miss Alicia Gaines," he said genially, "I perceive you are a girl-child of fine promise.—As for us, Miss Smith, what have we to do with age and foolishness, who, as yet, have neither? Let's get down to business. What are you going to do about the lane behind Hynds House? We had the use of that lane this hundred years and more, until the devil got too strong in Sophronisba and she shut it up. Now, shall you keep the lane closed, or shall you dismiss the injunctions?"
"I shall have to consult Judge Gatchell."
"Gatchell's a fossilized remains. He's got no more blood in his liver than a flea. Gatchell would hang his grandmother on a point of law. Why should you, or any other ordinarily intelligent person, be guided by Gatchell?"
"By whom, then, shall I be guided? You?" I wondered.
"That's not in my line," replied the doctor, shortly, and thrust his hands into his gloves. "In the meantime, ladies, I'm your next-door neighbor; I have no wife to gossip about you, no children to annoy you; I'm far enough away to keep you from smelling my pipe; and I shall quarrel with you only when I can't help it. In return, I have but one favor to beg of you: don't use a shot-gun on my prize chickens! Get a dog and train him to chase them home, if they get into your yard. Or catch them and throw them over the hedge. I'll pay any damages within reason. And please send for your cat."
"We have a cat?"
"You have. After Sophronisba's death, Mandy took her in; or rather, Mandy was afraid to turn her out, for it's bad luck to cross a witch's cat. In return for this charity the hussy immediately foisted upon us two wholly unnecessary kittens. Mandy wouldn't allow them to be decently drowned, for it's worse luck yet to tamper with a witch's cat's kittens, particularly when they're as black as the hinges of Gehenna. Mandy thinks their mother had them black as a delicate mark of respect for the late crone."
"Send them over, please. Black cats will just go with this house. It was very thoughtful of that cat to have two black kittens ready for us, and very kind of you to let them stay with you until we came."
"I? I abhor the whole tribe of cats!" cried the doctor. "Don't thank my kindness: thank Mandy's idiocy, of which she has more than her just share. To my mind, the best place for cats is under the grape arbor."
"Let us strike a bargain. You keep your chickens in your own yard, and we'll keep our cats in our own house."
"Compromise: you get a dog," suggested the doctor.
"Perhaps I may. I've always wanted a poodle."
"I said a dog!" said the doctor, lifting his lip. "A poodle! In Hynds House! The lamented Sophronisba had a bloodhound."
"The lamented Sophronisba could have what she chose. This Sophronisba prefers a poodle."
"Sophronisba? What! Another one? Good God!" cried the doctor. "All right! Get a poodle. Keep the cats. Get a parrot—and an orphan with the itch—and a hyena—and a blunderbuss! Her name is Sophronisba!—I—oh, Lord, where's Jelnik? I have got to go and warn Jelnik!" And he made for the door.
At that Alicia laughed. Peal upon peal, like silver bells, irrepressibly, infectiously, irresistibly, Alicia laughed. She cries with her eyes open and her mouth shut, and she laughs with her eyes shut and her mouth open. The effect is beyond all words enchanting. The doctor paused in his headlong flight.
"All right: laugh!" he said, darkly. "But I shall warn Jelnik, none the less!" And muttering: "Sophronisba! Lord have mercy on us! Sophronisba!" he departed hastily.
"What a nice neighbor!" commented Alicia. She added, musingly: "Sophy, this is an enchanted place—a place where one has good meals, bad advice, and black cats showered on one, free and gratis. All one has to do is to stand still and take things as they come!"
"And hope one won't follow in the footsteps of one's predecessor, who was an unmitigated old devil."
"At least," said Alicia, laughing, "he'll never live to be an old woman, will he, Sophy?"
"The man has the tact of a cannibal—"
"The shoulders of a Hercules—"
"An abominable temper—"
"And a beautiful beard. Somehow, Sophy, I rather approve of a beard, on somebody his size. I decidedly approve of a beard!"
"If his miserable hens come over here, I shall most certainly—"
"Keep the eggs. We'll tell him so when he comes again."
"Comes again? What, and my name Sophronisba?"
"My own grandmother had the second sight; and I don't need spectacles," said Alicia. "Sophy, that man has come into our lives to stay. I feel it in my bones! It's not an unpleasant feeling," she finished gracelessly.
When Unc' Adam presently put in his appearance, he was profoundly impressed and respectful: we were brisk, unhaunted, and unafraid, after a night in Hynds House! The three colored women who had come with him, induced by cupidity and curiosity to enter ol' Mis' Scarlett's ill-omened domain, at first hung back. They were plainly prepared to bolt at the first unusual noise.
Of the three, one—by name Mary Magdalen—proved to be a heaven-born, predestinated cook; and her we persuaded, by bribery, cajolery, and subornation of scruples, to remain with us permanently. Only, she flatly refused to stay on the place overnight. Darkness shouldn't catch Mary Magdalen under the Scarlett Witch's roof-tree.
There are certain gifted beings who possess the secret of bringing order out of chaos; for them the total depravity of inanimate objects has no terrors; inanimate objects become docile to their will. Such a one was Mary Magdalen. In two days she had transformed a sooty cavern into a clean and orderly kitchen. For she was a singing and a scourful woman, and her Sign was the speretual and the scrubbing-brush. It is true that she put a precious old Spode tea-pot on the stove and boiled the tea in it; that she hung her wig and the dish-towel on the same nail; and that she immediately asked for a white stocking foot to use as a coffee-bag.
"But don't you-all go bust no new pai'h," she advised economically. "Ah 'd rathah make mah coffee in a ol' white stockin' foot any day, jes' so you ain't done wo' out de toes too much."
"Sophy," said the horror-struck Alicia, "that woman must be watched until we can buy a percolater. Suppose she's got 'a ol' white stockin' foot' of her own!"
Despite which there never was, never will be, such another cook as Mary Magdalen. It is true she wasn't amenable to discipline, and reason wasn't her guiding-lamp. And nothing—not bribes, threats, entreaties, prayers, orders, commands, moral suasion—could break her of doing just what she wanted to do just when and how she wanted to do it. You'd be entertaining your dearest enemies, serene in the consciousness that your house was a credit to your good management; and behold, Mary Magdalen in the drawing-room door, with her wig askew and her hands rolled in her apron:
"Oh, Miss Sophy!"
"Well?" say you, resignedly, with a feigned smile; "what is it, Mary Magdalen?"
"Miss Sophy, you know we-all's sugah?"
"Yes."
"Wellum, Miss Sophy, 't ain't any."
"I have already ordered more, Mary Magdalen."
"An' you know ouah flouah, Miss Sophy?"
"I—"
"Us ain't got a Gawd's speck!"
Then she would beam upon the visitors, all of whom were known to her.
"Howdy, Miss Sally! How you-all comin' on? Ah comin' 'round to see de baby soon 's Ah gits chanst." Or, "Lawsy me, Miss Jinny, dat boy o' yo's is jes' natchelly bustin' outer da clo'es wid growin', ain't he? He jes' de spit o' he pa, bless 'im!"
Which untoward confidence didn't seem to surprise our visitors. They had Mary Magdalens of their own.
A few days later Doctor Geddes sent us Schmetz, the gardener, a gnarled little man with a peppery temper, a torrential flow of Alsatian French, and a tireless energy. I don't know why nor how Schmetz had come to Hyndsville, except that somehow he had acquired a small farm near by and couldn't get away from it. He explained to us, gently but firmly, that if we wouldn't meddle after the manner of women, but would leave his job in his own hands, it would be better for us, and for the garden. We meekly acquiescing, he called in helpers and with a wave of his hand set hoe and ax and spade to work.
The weather had changed into days of deep blue skies, splendid days full of the warmth of potential power; and nights filled with fragrance, nights of fierce beauty, and the glamour of golden moons, and the thrilling melody of that feathered Israfel, the mocking-bird. Through our open windows immense moths, spirits of the summer nights, drifted in on enameled and jeweled wings and circled in a fire-worshiping dance around our light.
Those were wonderful days. For that was a house of surprises, a house full of laid-by things. One never knew what one was going to find. One morning it might be a Ridgway jug all delicate vine leaves and faun heads, or an old blue-and-white English platter, or a piece of fine salt-glaze. On the top shelf of a long-locked closet, pushed back in the corner, you'd discover a full set of the most beautiful sapphire glassware, and a pagoda work-box with ivory corners; and on a lower shelf, wrapped in half a moth-eaten shawl, two glowing luster jugs in proof condition. Mary Magdalen salvaged a fine china sillabub stand, with little white-and-gold covered cups on it, from a sooty box under a kitchen cupboard. A back drawer of the dusty office desk yielded up half a dozen exquisite prints. And I'm sure Alicia will remember even in heaven the ecstasy she experienced when a battered bureau gave into her hands the adorable Bow figures of Kitty Clive and Woodward the actor, she pink-and-white, petticoated and furbelowed, lovely as when London went mad over her, and he cocked-hatted and ruffled and dandified; and neither with so much as the least littlest chip to mar their perfection.
Or a hair trunk would reveal little frocks stitched by hand, and a pair of tiny flat slippers with strings gone to dust like the little feet that had worn them. With these were two dolls, one dressed in sprigged India muslin and lace, with a shepherdess hat glued on her painted head; the other dressed in a poke-bonnet, a satin sack, and a much-flounced skirt. They had evidently belonged to "Lydia, our Darling Child," whose name, in unsteady letters, was painfully set down in the printed picture-books at the bottom of the trunk. These things that had belonged to a "darling child" so long dead lent the grim old house a softening touch. Poor old house, whose little children had all gone, so long ago!
It was the day we were taking up the beautiful old carpet in the back drawing-room. Alicia was rejoicing for the thousandth time over this treasure of hand-woven French art. Of a sudden, horrible yells rose from the garden, and a shrieking negro went by the window like an arrow. We caught "Murder!—Ol' Witch!—Corpses!" as he disappeared. Uncle Adam, catching his panic, bolted with him; the two negro women followed. Only Mary Magdalen, amazonian arms bare, a rolling-pin grasped in a formidable fist, stood like a rock of defense behind us.
"Ah jes' wants to catch any ol' corpses trapesin' 'round mah kitchin, trackin' up mah clean flo', an Ah 'll suah settle day hash once fo' all!" trumpeted Mary Magdalen.
Outside, Schmetz was jumping up and down, flapping his arms, and screaming in voluble French:
"Name of a dog! Senseless Senegambians, remain! Iron-skulled offspring of the union of a black mule and a pickax, cease to fly!"
"What is the matter? For heaven's sake? what is the matter?" I shouted.
"We done dig up de corpses! We done fin' wha'h dat ol' witch 'oman bury de bodies!" howled a workman in reply.
"Imbeciles, asses, beings without brains, listen to me!" shrieked Schmetz, this time in good English. "This corpse is not alive! Never yet was he alive! Return, sons of perdition, and assist me to raise him—may he fall upon your brain-pans of donkeys!"
As if that had been all that was needed, the last wavering workman flung down his shovel and took to his heels, running like a rabbit and roaring as he ran.
"Schmetz!" called a clear and peremptory voice. "Schmetz! what's the matter over there?"
"Ah! It is Monsieur Jelnik!" bawled Schmetz. "Nom de Dieu, Monsieur Jelnik, come with a great quickness! I have dug from the earth the leetle boy of stone—you know him, hein? Those niggers, sacrement! they think they have uncovered the deceased corpse, the victim of Madame the late mistress, with which she made her spells of a sorceress."
"What!" said the voice. "You've found the statue, Schmetz? Ask, my good fellow, if it is permitted that I come and view it."
"Why, of course!" said I, quickly.
"Thank you," said the voice.
There had been a great space cleared in our garden, and on the edge of this, in removing a stubborn gum-tree, the negroes had uncovered what they supposed to be the body of one murdered. Upon our knees, with Schmetz helping us, we were trying to tear away the rotten coverings, and the dirt and mold. And there, beautiful despite the stains disfiguring him, lay the boy Love. The marble pedestal from which he had been removed lay near him. On the base, decipherable, was the sculptor's name, and on one side, in small letters, "Brought from Italy, 1803, by R.H."
"Why, he is perfect!" cried Alicia, joyfully. "Oh, who could have been so stupid and so cruel as to hide away something so lovely? Poor dear little god, aren't you glad to get out of that grave and come back to the sun? Aren't you grateful, little god, that Sophy and I came to Hynds House?"
And at that moment a tall, slim, dark-skinned young man walked up, hands behind his back, and stood there regarding us with eyes as clear and cool as mountain water when the sunlight is upon it and golden flecks come and go in its brown depths. The exquisitely aquiline features, the small black mustache, an indescribably proud and high-bred ease and grace of manner and bearing, were oddly exotic and even more oddly fascinating. His slenderness was as strong as a tempered sword-blade, his quietness was trained power in repose. And the hair of his head was so black that a purplish shadow rested upon it, and so thick that one was minded of Absalom:
... in all Israel there was none to be so much praised as Absalom for his beauty: from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head there was no blemish in him.
And when he polled his head (for it was at every year's end that he polled it: because the hair was heavy on him, therefore he polled it:), he weighed the hair of his head at two hundred shekels after the king's weight.
He was so vivid and so new to me that my whole being was breathless with the wonder of him. I knew, of course, that he did not belong to my world at all. King's sons are for princesses, for those human birds of paradise that flash, beautiful and fortunate, in larger spheres than those prosaic paths trodden by a workaday woman named Smith.
"What have you found?" he asked, in a delightful voice.
Alicia looked up. Her face was like the break of day for youngness and freshness, and a wisp of a bright curl misbehaved itself on her cheek, a flirtatious curl that knew exactly how to make the most of its opportunities. The young man's eyes approved of it.
"We have found Love!" cried Alicia, breathlessly. "Sophy and I have found Love in our garden! Isn't it wonderful and impossible and exciting and delightful? But it's true! And it just goes with this whole place!" cried Alicia, morning-eyed and May-faced.
The young man's glance came back to me. I should hate to be untruthful, and have to meet so straight a glance!
"Why, yes. It is impossible, and, like all impossible things, perfectly true," he agreed, with the golden flecks dancing in and out of his eyes and a slow and lazy smile, a sort of secret smile, curving his beautiful, mocking mouth. "Fancy finding Love, of all things, in Sophronisba's garden!" A fine black line of eyebrow went up whimsically. "And now that you have found him," said Mr. Jelnik, "hadn't you better let me help you set him up?"
CHAPTER IV
THE HYNDSES OF HYNDS HOUSE
When the fine weather had taken the kinks out of Judge Gatchell's joints, he came to see us—a tall, thin, punctilious, saturnine old gentleman with frosty Scotch eyes and the complexion of a pair of washed khaki trousers. Chaos reigned in Hynds House then, and he was forced to pick his way, like an elderly and cautious cat, between piled-up chairs, tables, and rolls of carpet. In the most stately manner he parted the tails of his skirted coat, seated himself upon the sofa, placed his hat beside him, drew up the knees of his black broadcloth trousers, took off and wiped his spectacles with great thoroughness and deliberation upon a large silk handkerchief, replaced them upon the middle of his Roman nose, cleared his throat, pursed his lips, and drily but clearly talked business.
Great-Aunt Sophronisba would have left a much larger fortune had she been less addicted to lawsuits. You wouldn't think an old soul of almost a hundred could find very much chance to brew mischief, would you? You didn't know Great-Aunt Sophronisba!
I was informed that the case of Scarlett vs. Geddes had been automatically closed by the death of the plaintiff; but I had inherited along with Hynds House:
The case of Scarlett vs. The Vestry and Pastor of St. Polycarp's Church, from whom Mrs. Scarlett sought to recover three paintings—"Faith," "Hope," and "Charity"—which her father had commissioned a visiting artist to paint, and had then presented to St. Polycarp's, with the stipulation that they should "forever hang in the sacred edifice, reminding the brethren of the Cardinal Virtues of the Christian Religion."
They did hang in the church for a century. Then, when the Ladies' Missionary Society was helping "do over" the parsonage, a faded Faith, a dulled Hope, and a fly-specked Charity were transported thither. Whereupon suit was immediately brought by the donor's daughter, who averred that the church had lost all right and title to the paintings by an action directly contrary to her father's will, and insisted that they should be turned over to herself as sole heiress. It was a nice little case, and called forth an imposing array of counsel. Mrs. Scarlett had added a codicil to her will, leaving me her claim to the three paintings "fraudulently withheld by the pastor and vestrymen of St. Polycarp's Church."
There was, too, the question of the lot on Lafayette Street, between Zion Church on the one hand, and the Y.M.C.A. on the other. Both had tried to buy it; and both had been refused with contumely. Instead, that nice old lady ran up extra-sized bill-boards. Every time the Zionist brethren looked out of their side windows of a Sunday, they had ample opportunity to learn considerable about the art of advertising on bill-boards. And if a circus happened to be coming to Hyndsville, they could count on every child in their Sunday school missing his lesson, unless the text, by a fortunate chance, happened to touch upon the prophet Daniel.
And when the Y.M.C.A. people looked out of their side windows, Sophronisba's alluring bill-boards besought them to smoke only certain cigarettes and to be sure to look for the trademark on their playing-cards. Naturally, this made the Y.M.C.A. secretaries very, very happy.
A weather-beaten picket fence protected the lot upon the street front; the bill-boards formed the side attractions; and in the center front was the monument, a stone of stumbling and offense. It was a neat, plain granite obelisk, which bore this inscription:
This Stone is Erected
By the Affection
of
Sophronisba Hynds Scarlett
To Commemorate the Many Virtues
of
The Most Perfect Gentleman in Hyndsville
Her Bloodhound
NIPPER
"There should have been an open season for Sophronisba," Alicia said with conviction. Then she put her head down and laughed.
The judge looked at her over his glasses, doubtfully. With a slight edge to his voice he referred to the several prosecutions "for wanton and wilful trespassings" upon the closed, barbed-wire lane behind Hynds House. As the strip in question was not a public thoroughfare, and Mrs. Scarlett had rock-ribbed titles covering it, she could close it; and she did, greatly to the inconvenience of her immediate neighbors, particularly Doctor Richard Geddes.
"There is something to be said for Mrs. Scarlett's methods," said the judge dryly. "The Lafayette Street bill-boards are the best-paying ones in Hyndsville. As to closing the lane, Miss Smith, let me remind you that Doctor Geddes, although an estimable man and a very able physician, is not at all backward in coming forward in a quarrel. He greatly angered my late client."
"Nevertheless, that barbed wire comes down. He may use the lane whenever he wants to," I decided.
The judge bowed. "And now," he said, politely, "let us take up the case of Mr. Nicholas Jelnik, if you please. It was Mrs. Scarlett's wish that you should be fully informed concerning Mr. Jelnik's antecedents, that you might be on your guard."
"Against Mr. Jelnik? But, good heavens, why? Why?" I was beginning to get angry. "Let me see: I am to make myself odious to Mr. Jelnik, and I am to refuse to allow a physician to run his car through a barren strip of weeds and sand, because they are her relatives and she hated her relatives. I am to vex the souls of harmless Christians with bill-posters of the world, the flesh, and the devil, and I'm to pay taxes on a lot that's been turned into a cemetery for a hound dog. I'm to fight St. Polycarp's Church, for a couple of chromos I should probably loathe.—I don't like pictures of cardinal virtues, anyhow. It altogether depends on who possesses them as to whether I can stand for the cardinal virtues themselves."
"Faith looking up, and Charity looking down, and Hope hanging to an anchor, something like Britannia-Rules-the-Waves. Make the church keep them, please, Sophy!" begged Alicia.
Judge Gatchell made an odd noise in his throat.
"One of my little granddaughters, taken to Saint Polycarp's by her mother, asked, 'Mamma, who is that big woman up there with the pick-axe?' And they told her," said the Judge, scathingly, "they told her it was Hope!
"When the vestry came to me about the case, I reminded them that Aholah and Aholibah were damned for doting upon paintings on the wall, painted in vermilion, which in plain English is Scarlett!" A covenanting gleam shot into his frosty eyes, and the old fighting Scotch blood showed for a second in his lank cheek. He was a godly man, and when he saw confusion in the ranks of the Philistines, he rejoiced.
"I can't help who was damned," said I. "My job is to live in peace with my neighbors. St. Polycarp's people may hang their Virtues wherever they please, for all of me."
Did a faint, faint shade of regret flit over the parchment-like face? It seemed so to me. But he said, composedly:
"You must act according to your best judgment. And now, please, let us go back to Mr. Nicholas Jelnik."
We rather prided ourselves upon the possession of so pleasant a neighbor, and we said so. He had helped us with our garden, and it was he who selected the spot upon which the resurrected Love should be set up.
"Ah, yes, the statue, brought from Italy by Richard Hynds, a great grandfather of his. Did he tell you anything about Richard?" asked the judge.
"Nothing."
"I shall have to go a long way back, more than a hundred years, to make you understand," said the judge. "When I was a boy some of the oldest folk here in Hyndsville used to say that Hynds House never should have come to Freeman Hynds, Mrs. Scarlett's father; but to Richard Hynds, his elder brother—that same Richard whose initials are cut in the base of the statue he brought in his pagan godlessness from Italy, and which his brother afterward buried, wishing to remove all trace of him and his follies.
"You are to understand that it was the unwritten law of the Hyndses' that this house should come to the eldest son. Primogeniture is of course foreign to American ideas, but this is an old house, Miss Smith. When it was built, American ideas hadn't been born. And the Hyndses were a law to themselves.
"The then head of the house was James Hampden Hynds, a man of an immense pride, a rigid sense of duty, and the nicest notions of honor. He had two sons, Richard, and the younger brother, Freeman. The daughters do not count: it is with these two sons we are concerned.
"From every account Freeman Hynds was a good man, a quiet, God-fearing, methodical man, attentive to his affairs, and meticulously exact in all his dealings; not warm-hearted, perhaps, but just. But as if the bad blood of the entire family had come to a head in one man, Richard was born a roisterer and a spendthrift.
"He grew up a magnificent young scapegrace, reckless to the point of madness, and with that inherent love of risk that is the very breath of life to such men. Despite these defects there is no doubt that his was one of those personalities that win love without effort. So of course it was a foregone conclusion that he should win the girl that his younger brother, among others, adored to distraction.
"His family hoped that his love for his young wife would change him for the better. But there was something tamelessly wild in Richard Hynds. He would have done very well, very well indeed, in the Golden Hind with Drake, or in the Jesus with Morgan. He did not fit in a gentler generation, and a mild life had no charm for him. Gossip buzzed with his name, even in a day when gentlemen were permitted to behave pretty much as they pleased.
"Up to this time there had never been anything altogether unpardonable charged against him. But one fine morning the Hynds jewels were missing. Remember that the Hyndses had always been a wealthy and powerful family. The theft of those jewels was no trumpery affair. For generations they had been adding to that collection—sometimes a lustrous pearl, sometimes a flawless emerald; once it was a sapphire that had belonged to a French queen, once a pair of rubies that had hung in the ears of a duchess beloved of King Charles.
"Richard's mother happened to be a meek and quiet body, deeply religious, something of a Quakeress, so she wore them but seldom. It was upon the occasion of a ball to be given in honor of Freeman's twenty-first birthday that the question of what jewels his mother should wear came up, and the strong-box in which they were kept was opened. Only the settings remained.
"When the clamor quieted and sane questions began to be asked, suspicion fastened upon Richard Hynds. His affairs were chaotic, his needs imperative and desperate. He had been heard to ask his mother if she intended wearing what he called 'the Hynds fortune' at Freeman's ball. He knew, of course, where they were kept—in the anteroom of his mother's apartment. It was not only possible but easy for him to gain access to them.
"Let us consider the case without prejudice: Here is a young man—a gambler, a wastrel—with pressing debts, and clamoring creditors threatening what might be considered dishonor. Within reach of this young man's hand are certain very valuable properties which he might even consider his own, since they would in time descend to him. His mother's resources are exhausted, his father's heart steeled against further advancements. Cause and effect, you see—debts: missing jewels.
"The case not only formed two factions in public opinion; it split the Hynds family itself. His two sisters, and his cousin Jessamine, raised in this house, believed him guilty. His mother and his wife believed in his innocence and refused to hear a word against him. These two things only did Richard Hynds salvage in that utter wreck and catastrophe—his mother's faith and his wife's love.
"He lost his father's. This was a man, who, under his pleasant exterior of a landed gentleman, was rigid and inflexible. He had already borne a great deal, remember; but this was disgrace, an indelible stain upon a stainless name. Therefore this father, who was at the same time a just and good man, disinherited his favorite child and eldest son. House, slaves, lands, money, the great position of the head of a powerful family, came to Freeman Hynds, my late client's father, born five years later than his brother, on the twentieth day of September, 1785—a long time ago! a long time ago!
"Richard was disgraced, and a beggar. And it seemed that the rod that had lain in pickle for the Hyndses for their pride, was brought forth to scourge them all. For Richard, desperate, distracted, careless of what happened to him, rode out one day through a pelting rain. Result, congested lungs; the poor wastrel, who had no wish to live, was soon satisfactorily dead.
"When James Hampden got that news, he rose up from his chair, laid the book he had been reading—it was Baxter's 'Saint's Rest'—down on the library table and fell as if lightning had struck him. Apoplexy, it was said; a thrust through the heart, I should call it. Richard the sinner was none the less Richard his first-born.
"Hard upon the heels of these two disasters came a third, the case of Jessamine Hynds. This Jessamine—a highly gifted, imperious creature, proud as Lucifer, after the manner of the Hyndses—was an orphan, reared in Hynds House. She was some several years older than her cousins, to whom she was greatly attached. The trouble so preyed upon her that she became melancholy, and one fine day disappeared and was never afterward found. There was great hue and cry made for her, and men riding hither and yon, for this was a Hynds woman, and her story touched popular imagination, so that she is supposed," said the lawyer dryly, "to wander around Hynds House o' nights, crying for Richard and searching for the lost jewels.
"After the death of James Hampden Hynds, it was discovered that he had added a singular enough codicil to his will. This codicil provided that in the event the jewels were found intact, and Richard Hynds's innocence thereby incontrovertibly established, Hynds House as it stood should revert to him as eldest son, after the custom of the family. But until the jewels were recovered, Richard and his heirs were to have exactly—nothing. And nothing is what Richard and his heirs got."
"And was he really guilty?" breathed Alicia. Her sympathy was instantly with Richard. That is exactly like Alicia, who is sorry for the fatted calf, and the Egyptians drowned in the Red Sea, and Esau swindled out of his birthright; had she been one of the wise virgins she would have trimmed the lamps of all the foolish ones and waked them up in time.
"In theory," said the judge, "a man is innocent until he is proved guilty. In practice, he is guilty until he can prove his innocence."
"And was nothing, absolutely nothing, ever heard or known further?—nothing that would justify his mother's faith, or comfort his poor young wife's heart?"
"There was but one incident to which even the most credulous could attach the slightest importance. You shall judge for yourself whether it deserved any. Freeman Hynds, riding about the plantation after his habit, was thrown from his horse and died from the injuries sustained. He recovered consciousness for a few minutes before he died; some said he never really regained it. Be that as it may, the dying man cried out, in a voice of great anguish and affliction: 'Richard! Brother Richard! The jewels—the jewels!' He struggled to say more, and failed; looked into the concerned faces around him, with the awful look of the soul about to depart; struggled to raise himself; and fell back upon his pillow a corpse.
"Some—they were in the majority—said, sensibly enough, that the pain and disgrace of his brother's downfall had haunted the poor gentleman's death-bed, and occasioned that last sad cry. Some few said he had wished to confess a thing heavy upon his conscience, who had taken his brother's place as Jacob took Esau's. Richard's wife, of course, was of these latter. She went to her grave a passionate believer in the innocence of her husband, whom she averred to have been a deeply wronged and cruelly used man; and, for heaven's sake, who do you suppose she claimed had wronged him? Freeman! She couldn't prove anything; she hadn't the ghost of a clue to hang the ghost of an accusation upon; yet, womanlike, she clung to her notion, and she taught it to her son as one teaches a holy creed.
"The Hyndses were excellent haters. Freeman's daughter, born into an atmosphere of family disruption, abhorred the very memory of her uncle, and hated her uncle's wife, the woman who doubted and led others to doubt her father's honesty. This hatred she discovered for Richard's son, who, as he grew older, referred to Freeman as 'my Uncle Judas.'
"This second Richard became in time a highly successful physician, a man honored and beloved by this community. There was no wildness in him, nor in his son, the third Richard. His granddaughter Sarah Hynds married Professor Doctor Max Jelnik, the celebrated Viennese alienist, whom she met abroad. Your next-door neighbor is Sarah's son, born somewhere in Hungary, I believe. Both the young man's parents are dead, and I understand he has led a vagrant and irresponsible life, preferring to rove about rather than follow his father's profession, to which he was educated.
"My late client, indeed, held that he had inherited the deplorable characteristics of the first Richard. She asserted—she allowed herself great freedom of speech—that you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. It displeased her that he should come to Hyndsville. She thought it showed a malignant nature and a peculiar shamelessness that he chose to reside next door to Hynds House, from which his great-great-grandfather had been so ignominously driven. Her first meeting with the young man bred in her an ineradicable dislike."
Now what really happened is this: The fences having been neglected, and in consequence fallen down, and the hedge broken in many places, Mr. Jelnik, just come to Hyndsville, thoughtlessly and perhaps ignorantly crossed the sacred Scarlett boundaries. Up-stairs behind her blind, like an ancient spider in her web, the old lady spied him. She flung open the window and leaned out.
"Who are you that prowl about other peoples' yards like a thievish cat?" she demanded peremptorily.
The young man looked up, uncovering his beautiful head.
"I am Nicholas Jelnik. And I pray your pardon, Madame: I did not mean to intrude," and he made as if to go.
"Jelnik!" said she, in a hoarse and croaking voice. "Jelnik! Aha! I know your breed! I smell the blood in you—bad blood! rotten bad blood! You've a bad face, young man: a scoundrelly face, the face of a fellow whose grandfather robbed his house and shamed his name! And why have you come near Hynds House, at this hour of the day? He, he, he! I know, I know!"
Lost in astonishment, Jelnik remained staring up at her. The apparition of this venerable vixen, who had hated Richard's son and now hated him of a later generation, who had seen those that had talked to Richard himself in his ill-fated lifetime, so stirred his imagination that it deprived him of utterance. All he could do was to stand still and stare and stare and stare. He had never seen anybody so old—she was nearly a hundred, and looked a thousand—and he stared at the old, old, wrinkled, yellow face, the unhuman face, in which the beady black eyes burned with wicked fire; at the nearly bald head, thinly covered with a floating wisp or so of wool-like white hair; at the claw-like, shriveled, yellow hands, the stringy neck, the whole sexless meager wreck of what had been a woman. It was a stare made up of wonder, and instinctive dislike, and human pity, and young disgust. She raised her voice:
"Did you not see those signs? Scoundrel, puppy, foreign-born poacher, didn't you see my sign-boards?" And as she looked down at him—Richard's blood alive and red in a youthful and beautiful body: and she what she was—she fell into one of those futile and dreadful fits of rage to which the evil old are subject; and mumbled with her skinny bags of lips, and shook and nodded her deathly head, and waved her claw-like hands, screeching insults and abuse.
The pity died out of Jelnik's face. He regarded her with his father's eyes, the calm, impersonal, passionless gaze of the trained alienist. She was an unlovely exhibition, to be studied critically. In some subtle manner she understood, for she jerked herself out of her anger, and fell silent, regarding him with a glance as brilliantly, deadly bright as a tarantula's. The cold, relentless hate of that glance chilled him. He forced himself to bow to her again, and to beat a dignified retreat, when his inclination was to take to his heels like a school-boy caught pilfering apples.
The next morning a bailiff presented Mr. Nicholas Jelnik with a notice forbidding him to enter the grounds of Hynds House without the written permission of the owner, and threatening prosecution should he disobey.
"The Hyndses, as I have said, are good haters," finished Judge Gatchell.
"And so she left Hynds House to me," said I without, I am afraid, much gratitude.
"It was hers, to dispose of as she chose." The lawyer spoke crisply. "If you have any scruples, dismiss them. My late client understood that it was far better for the estate to fall into the hands of a sensible woman like yourself than into the keeping of a young man with what foolish people like to call the artistic temperament, which in plain English means a person who can't earn his salt in any useful, sensible business.
"You doubt this? Let us consider this same artistic temperament and its results," continued the judge, making a wry face. "Once or twice it has been my bad fortune to meet it. One trifling scamp I have in mind, painted. A house, a fence, a barn, even a sign-board? Not at all, but messes he called 'The Sea,' one doesn't know why, save that the things slightly resembled raw oysters. However, the women raved over him. His laundress and his landlady had good cause to rave!
"He wrote, too. A text-book, a title, a will, a deed, a business letter? Far from it! He wrote poetry, if you please! The little wretch wrote poetry! That's what the artistic temperament leads a man to! Bah! I hate, I despise, I abhor, the artistic temperament!"
We looked at the judge, open-mouthed. "Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?"
"There have been times," admitted the judge, subsiding, "when I radically disagreed with my late client; when I opposed her strongly. But when she willed her whole estate to you, Miss Smith, instead of to Nicholas Jelnik, I heartily approved. Understand, I have no personal bias, no animosity against this young man; but he is, I am told, more or less of an artist, and one might as well leave an estate to an anarchist at once. I have expressed this opinion to the town at large, and I seldom express my opinion publicly," finished the old jurist stiffly.
I heard that opinion with mingled emotions.
"But we like Mr. Jelnik," I said at last. "The injunction against him doesn't hold water. Personally, I feel like apologizing to him."
"Oh, no! One can't afford to cuddle an old vendetta, as Abishag dry-nursed old King David. I always hated Abishag!" Alicia said naïvely.
"My late client," said the judge enigmatically, "hadn't counted on you." He almost succeeded in looking human when he said it, and his eyes upon Alicia weren't at all frosty. Then he folded his papers, replaced them in his wallet, wiped his glasses, shot his cuffs, hoped we'd find Hynds House all we'd hoped, hoped the town would be to our liking, hoped he could be of further service to us, bowed creakily, and took his departure.
"Sophy," said Alicia, after a long pause, "if ever I had to rechristen this house, I'd call it Hornets' Nest."
We had not attended church on our first Sunday, because we were too tired. But on our second Sunday we plucked up heart of grace and went to St. Polycarp's.
The old town wore an air of Sabbath peace and quietness infinitely soothing to the spirit. People passed and repassed us. We knew they knew who we were. The old gentlemen, indeed, bowed to us with stately uncoverings of the head; the rest regarded us with the sort of impersonal and perfunctory interest one bestows upon uninteresting passing strangers. Nobody spoke to us, though the eyes of the young men were not unaware of Alicia's fairness.
In a great city, of course, one takes that sort of thing for granted; but in this small town, where everybody knew and spoke to everybody else, the effect was chilling.
"Talk about the sunny South!" murmured Alicia. "Why, my teeth want to chatter!"
During the services I was conscious of covert glances in our direction, but whenever a pair of feminine eyes met mine, they slid off like lizards and glided another way, with calculated Christian indifference. They weren't hostile, nor unfriendly: they were just deliberately indifferent. Nobody had the faintest notion of being heedful of us strangers among them; and I should be sorry for angels who expected to be entertained unawares in South Carolina!
When the congregation had filed out and gone about its leisurely business, the minister and his wife came forward to greet us. They were a bit nervous, remembering the diabolic uproar about Faith, Hope, and Charity. Mr. Haile was a mild-mannered little man of the saved-sheep type, with box-plaited teeth and a bleating voice. His wife had the worried face and the anxious eyes of the minister's helpmeet, and the painfully ready smile for newcomers who might, or might not, prove desirable parishioners.
She wanted to be nice to us as a Christian woman to women, but not too nice as the minister's wife of a church whose members looked upon us as interlopers. I had deputed Judge Gatchell to inform the trustees that the suit was dropped. I suppose Mrs. Haile was timid about broaching the delicate subject, for she ignored it with a nervous intensity that made me feel sorry for her. She and Mr. Haile would call just as soon as it was convenient for us to receive visitors; and then they shook hands with us, and I think they breathed a sigh of relief.
"Oh, Sophy! And we've got to keep on going there!—next Sunday, and Sunday after next Sunday, and maybe every Sunday after that until we die! Perhaps after a while some of them will bow to us, or maybe even say, 'How do you do?' but we'll feel as if we'd been put in cold storage every time we enter that door!" wailed Alicia.
"It is our Father's house," I reminded her.
"But I don't want to be made to feel like a spanked child, in anybody's house!" Alicia said, resentfully.
"You say that because you're Irish."
"You say I say it because I'm Irish because you're English." Then she screwed up her mouth like a coral button, and squinted her eyes: "I'm Irish, and you're English, and we're both American. Sophy, let's join my Irish and your English to our Yankee, and teach this town a lesson!"
"Barkis is willin'. But in the meantime let's go home and see what Mary Magdalen has for lunch."
We walked slowly, enjoying the calm, lovely late-summer day. Hyndsville at its best was a big, green, sprawling old town, a quaint, unpainted, leisurely, flowery, bird-haunted place, with glorious trees, and do-as-they-please, independent gardens. Nobody ever seemed to be in a hurry, and at first we used to wonder how they ever got anything done, or kept pace with the moving world; yet they did. Only, they did it without haste and without noise. And they were always polite. Though they should take your substance, your reputation, or even, perhaps, your life, they would do it like ladies and gentlemen.
We paused a while, just inside the big brick-pillared gate, and looked up the oak-arched garden path toward our house. Of course one can't expect an old fortress of a brick house that's been neglected for more than three quarters of a century to look spick and span inside of a brief fortnight, but already Hynds House was sitting up, so to speak, and taking notice.
Life had begun to flow back into it. Mary Magdalen had brought a dog with her—a yellow dog of unknown ancestry, of shamefaced demeanor, a ropy tail, splay feet, and a rolling eye; named, she and heaven alone knew why, Beautiful Dog.
He shunned Alicia and me because we were white people: Beautiful Dog was intuitively aware that colored people's dogs must meet white people with suspicion, aloofness, and reserve. When we fatuously sought to make friends with him, he tucked his tail between his legs, and shivered as if we made goose-flesh come out on his spine; and once when I took him by his rope collar he fell down and shrieked. But just let Mary Magdalen roll out an unctious, "Whah is yuh, Beaut'ful Dawg?" and his ears and tail went up, he curveted, and made uncouth movements with his splay feet, and grinned from ear to ear.
Doctor Geddes's Mandy had brought over the black kittens and their mother. Mary Magdalen made sure of their staying at home by the simple process of buttering their paws. In South Carolina, when you want a cat to stay in your house, you butter its paws and let it lick the butter off leisurely, the while you whisper in its left ear: "Stay in my house for keeps, cat!" The cat will ever thereafter play Ruth to your Naomi.
Our cat was Mrs. Belinda Black, and her children were Potty Black and Sir Thomas More Black, this last being a creature of noble mien and a meditative turn of mind.
"Homage and praise to Bast, the cat-headed, the wise one, the great goddess!" purred Alicia, stroking Mrs. Belinda Black's satiny head. "And may Sekhet the Cat of the Sun aid me, a devotee at her shrine, to butter the paws of some two-legged cats in Hyndsville!"
"You-all's dinnah 's waitin'." Mary Magdalen stubbornly held to the notion that any meal eaten between breakfast and night was dinner; lunch being sandwiches and fried chicken taken out of a basket at church picnics and eaten out of one's hand, or lap, for choice. "What was de text to-day, Miss Sophy? Ah sort o' likes to chaw easy on a mout'ful o' text whilst Ah 'm washin' up mah dishes."
We gave her the text, which happened to be one that fills every negro's heart with undiluted joy: "O ye dry bones, hear the word of the Lord." And we had the satisfaction of hearing her rolling out, to the clatter of pans and pots:
"Dry bones in de valley,
Ma-a-ah, La-a-awd!
Whut yuh gwine do wid dem dry bones,
Ma-ah-ah La-a-a-w-wd"
while we went up-stairs to change our frocks. We were still sharing one room then, finding it more convenient. And there, in front of our door, in a nest of ferns and mosses, was a great cluster of wild flowers, summer's last and autumn's first children. They had been gathered in no ordered garden, but taken from the skirts of the fields and the bosom of the woods; and Carolina the opulent, the beautiful, the free-handed, does not deck herself niggardly.
Alicia's face that had been so wistful lighted with a sudden joy. She gave a happy cry:
"Ariel!" she cried, "Ariel! Oh, what a heavenly thing, what a human thing to do! And to-day, too, just when we need a little bit of friendliness!" She looked around with a queer, shy smile.
"Ariel!" she called, "Ariel, no matter who comes, or goes, or what happens in Hynds House, we believe in you. Don't leave us, Ariel! Maker of music, bringer of blossoms, stay!"
CHAPTER V
"THY NEIGHBOR AS THYSELF"
Mr. Nicholas Jelnik, with an uplift of his fine black brows and a satirical smile, once diagnosed the case of Great-Aunt Sophronisba Scarlett as "congenital Hyndsitis"; Doctor Richard Geddes said you'd only to take a glance at her house to see that she was predestined to be damned. I know that she was so hidebound in her prejudices, so virulently conservative, so constitutionally opposed to change, that anything savoring of modernity was anathema to her.
That old woman would as lief have had what remained of her teeth pulled out as have parted with anything once brought into Hynds House. She preserved everything, good, bad, indifferent. You'd find luster cider jugs, maybe a fine toby, old Chinese ginger jars, and the quaintest of Dutch schnapps bottles, cheek by jowl with an iron warming-pan, a bootjack, a rusty leather bellows, and a box packed with empty patent-medicine bottles, under the pantry shelf. A helmet creamer would be full of little rolls of twine, odd buttons, a wad of beeswax, a piece of asafetida, elastic bands, and corks. She had used a Ridgway platter with a view of the Hudson River on it, as a dinner plate for her hound, for we found it wrapped up, with "Nipper's platter" scrawled on the paper.
By and large, it wasn't an easy task to renovate a brick barracks finished in 1735, and occupied for ninety-nine years by a lady of Sophronisba's parts; though I sha'n't tell how we had to tackle it room by room, nor of the sweating hours spent in, so to speak, separating the sheep things from the goat things. I can't help stopping for a minute, though, to gloat over the front drawing-room that presently emerged, with a cleaned carpet that proved to be a marvel of hand-woven French art, rosewood sofas and chairs upholstered in royal blue and rubbed to satiny-browny blackness, two gloriously inlaid tables, and a Venetian mirror between two windows.
We gave the place of honor on the white marble mantel to a porcelain painting Alicia found in a work-box—the picture of a woman in gray brocade sprigged with pink-and-blue posies, a lace fichu about her slim shoulders, and a cap with a rose in it covering her parted brown hair. The little boy leaning against her knees had darker blue eyes, and fairer hair pushed back from a bold and manly forehead. The painting was about the size of a modern cabinet photograph, and, though pleasing and spirited, was evidently the work of a gifted amateur. What gave it potent meaning and appeal was the inscription lettered on the back:
Mrs. Lydia Hariott Hynds & Richd. Hynds Ag'd 7
Paint'd for Colnl. J. H. Hynds by his
Affec. Neece Jessamine
You couldn't help loving him, the little "Richard Ag'd 7." There was that in the face which won you instantly; it was so clear-eyed, so gallant, so brave, so honest. So we gave him and his pretty, meek mother the place of honor in the room that had once heard his laughter and seen her tears. And we brought down-stairs the fine painting of Colonel James Hampden, who was the splendid colonial in claret-color that we had so much admired, and hung him and a smaller painting marked, "Jessamine, Aged 22" where they could look down on those two.
These were the only pictures allowed in that room, and they gave to it an atmosphere flavored most sweetly of yesterday. Indeed, I think they must have approved of the room altogether, for we hadn't changed so much as we'd restored it. Even the glass shades that use'd to shield their wax candles were in their old places. There was their old-world atmosphere of stateliness; their Chinese jars, their English vases, their beautiful old Chelsea figures; and the sampler so painstakingly
Work'd by Ann Eliza Hynds
Ag'd 9 Yrs. 2 Mos., Nov'r, 1757
that had been carefully framed and mounted as a small fire-screen, perhaps for Ann Eliza's lady mama or proud grandmother. It was such human and intimate things, the mute mementoes of children who had passed, that made us begin to love Hynds House, for all its bigness and uncanniness and dilapidation.
We did discover one human touch laid upon the place by Sophronisba herself. She had gathered together a full set of small, hand-colored photographs of Confederate generals, wrapped them in a hand-made Confederate flag, into which was tucked a receipt signed by Judah Benjamin for Hynds silver melted into a bar and given to the Cause, written, "The glory is departed," across the package, and hidden it. Alicia, who had a hankering after Confederates, herself, put the photographs in a leather-covered album at least as old as themselves, and kept them sacredly. She said these were America's own vanquished and vanished Trojans, and that one got a lump in the throat remembering how
Fallen are those walls that were so good,
And corn grows now where Troy town stood.
Schmetz brought us our upholsterer, Riedriech the cabinet-maker, most cunning of craftsmen, who knew all there is to know about old furniture and just what should and shouldn't be done to it. In addition he was a grizzled, bearded, shambling old angel who clung to a reeking pipe and Utopian notions, a pestilent and whole-hearted socialist who would call the President of the United States or the president of the Plumbers' Union "Comrade" equally, and who put propagandist literature in everything but our hair.
"Mr. Riedriech," you would say reproachfully, "yesterday I discovered Karl Marx and Jean Jaurès lurking behind my coffee-pot and Fourier under the butter-dish. To-day I find Karl Kautsky in ambush behind the cream-jug and Frederick Engels under the rolls."
Riedriech would regard you paternally, placidly, benevolently, through his large, brass-rimmed spectacles:
"So? Little by little the drop of water the granite wears away. I give you the little leaflet, the little pamphlet, und by and by comes the little hole in your head."
Thank heaven the doctor next door didn't hear that!
Alicia knew how to handle the old visionary with innocent but consummate skill. Looking at the kind old bear with her Irish eyes:
"It must be a wonderful thing to have such mastery of one's tools, to know exactly what to do and how to do it," she would sigh. "'Tisn't everybody can be a master craftsman!"
"I show you in a little while what iss cabinet-making!" he said proudly. "I do more yet by you," he added charitably, "then make over for you chairs and tables and such, already: I make over for you your little mind."
The old socialist did indeed show us what cabinet-making can be. He turned the office behind the library into a workroom, and from it Sophronisba's tattered and torn and forlorn old things emerged, piece by piece, in shining rosewood and walnut and mahogany majesty. If you love old furniture; if it gives you a thrill just to touch a period chair of incomparable grace, or the smooth surface of an old table, or the curve of a carved sofa, you'll understand Alicia's open rapture and my more sedate delight.
The tiled fireplace in the library was really the feature of Hynds House. There wasn't any mantel: the fireplace was sunk into the wall, and above it and the book-cases on each side was a space filled with more relics than all the rest of the house contained—portraits, signed and framed documents, letters, old flags, and a whole arsenal of weapons. Above the fireplace hung the portrait of Freeman Hynds—thin, dark, austere, more like a Cameronian Scotsman than a Carolina gentleman of an easy habit of life.
However, it was not portrait or relics that made the room remarkable, but the tiles, each a portrait of a Revolutionary hero. Laurens, Marion, Lafayette, Pulaski, von Steuben—there they were in buff and blue, martial, in cocked hats, and with such awe-inspiring noses! The center and largest tile was, of course, the Father of his Country, without the hat, but with the nose, and above him the original flag, with the thirteen stars for the thirteen weak-kneed little states that were to grow into the great empire of freedom that the high-nosed, high-hearted soldiers fought for and founded. Alicia and I touched those tiles with reverence. They were the pride of our hearts.
As often happens in the South, there were bedrooms on the lower floor; two of them, in fact, on one side of the hall. The front one had been not only locked but padlocked; the windows had been nailed on the inside, and heavy wooden shutters nailed on the outside. So long had the room been closed that dry-rot had set in. The silk quilt on the four-poster was falling to pieces, the linen was as yellow as beeswax, and the sheets made one think of the Flying Dutchman's sails. This room was of almost monastic severity: an ascetic or a stern soldier might have occupied it. Besides the bed it contained four chairs, a clothes-press, a secretary, and a shaving-stand. On a small table near the bed were a Wedgwood mortar with a heavy pestle, a medicine glass, and a pewter candlestick turned as black as iron. The press in the corner still held a few clothes, threadbare and sleazy, and in the desk were some dry letters and a Business Book—at least, that's how it was marked—with lists of names, each having an occupation or task set down opposite it, I suppose the names of long-dead slaves. On the fly-leaf was written, in a neat and very legible hand, "Freeman Hynds."
"Sophy!" Alicia's voice had an edge of awe. "This must have been his room. I believe he died here, in this very bed. And afterward they shut the room up; and it hasn't been opened until now."
We looked at the old bed, and seemed to see him there, trying to raise himself, crying out so piteously upon dead Richard's name, only to fall back a dead man himself. What had he wanted to tell, as he lay there dying? His painted face in the library was not a bad man's face. It was proud, stern, stubborn, bigoted; a dark, unhappy face, but neither an evil nor a cruel one. What was it that really lay between those two brothers? After more than a hundred years, we were as much in the dark as they in whose day it had happened and whose lives it had wrecked.
We built a fire in the long-disused chimney to take the dampness out of the room, and forced open the windows to let in the good sun and wind. Over in one corner, pushed in between the clothes-press and the side wall, was, of all things, a prie-dieu; and upon it a dusty Bible with his name on the fly-leaf. Nor was it a book kept for idle show; it plainly had been read, perhaps wept over by a tortured heart, for it fell open at that cry of all sad hearts, the Fifty-first Psalm. I was moving this prie-dieu, when my foot slipped on the bare floor and I dropped it with a crash. Fortunately it was not injured. But what had looked like a mere line of carving on the outer edge of the small shelf—rather a thick and heavy shelf now that one examined it carefully—had been struck smartly, releasing a cunning spring. There opened out a thin slit of a drawer, just big enough to hold a flat book bound in leather and stamped with two letters, "F.H." On the fly-leaf appeared, in his own neat, fine script, "The Diary of Freeman Hynds, Esqr."
The thing seemed incredible, impossible. His own daughter had evidently been unaware of the existence of this book, which he had not had time to destroy. And we, as by a miracle, had fallen upon it—and perhaps the truth!
It was written in so fine and small a hand as was only possible to the users of goose-quill pens; and this tiny, faded, brown writing on the yellowed pages covered a period of years. He had not been one to waste words. Once or twice, as we hurriedly turned the pages, appeared the name "Emily." Mostly it seemed a dry, uninteresting thing, a mere memorandum, where a single entry might cover a whole year.
It was impossible for us to stop our work to read it then and there, or to do more than give it a cursory glance. We turned feverishly to those years that covered, as we figured, the period of the Hynds tragedy. And he had written:
This day was Accus'd Rich'd. my Bro. of robbing us of our Jewells. He protests he knows Naught & my Mthr. believes him as doth Emily. Has a true Heart, Emily. Horrid Confusion & my Fthr. Confound'd.
Impatiently I turned over the pages, raging to read the end, my heart pounding and fluttering.
Two nights since dy'd Scipio, son of old Shooba's wife, the which did send for me—
Thus far had I read, Alicia and I sitting head to head on the hall stairs. In came Schmetz the gardener, raving, gesticulating, and after him old Uncle Adam, stepping delicately, and with a placating smile on his wrinkled countenance.
"Those bulbs that I have planted under the windows of you," raved Schmetz, "the demon hens of le docteur Geddes are with their paws upturning! They upturn with rapidity and completeness, led by a shameless hog of a rooster. Is it the orders of you that I devastate those fowls, Mademoiselle?"
Schmetz was furiously angry, and small wonder. Those had been choice bulbs, some of which he had presented me from his own cherished store—freesias, daffodils, tulips, hyacinths, and the starred narcissus, "such as Proserpine let fall, from Dis's wagon."
"Oh, our flowers!" wailed Alicia, springing to her feet; "and we counting on those bulbs for Christmas!"
I shut Freeman's diary with a snap. Hens were more immediate.
"Put it in the drawer of the library table," called Alicia, running out with Schmetz at her heels. "We'll read it to-night."
When I had done so, closing the door after me, I too ran outside, where some enormous black-and-white hens, led by the biggest rooster I had ever seen, were completing the utter destruction of our flower bed.
We charged down upon them, and they ran to and fro, after the stupid fashion of fowls. Back and forth Alicia, Schmetz, and I chased those brutes; but Adam stood with folded hands, looking on from a safe and sane distance. He refused to have anything to do with Geddes fowls in ol' Mis' Scarlett's yard. Just then the huge rooster ran into my skirts, all but upsetting me. It was the work of a strenuous moment to seize him by the wings and so hold him.
Left to their own devices, the hens scuttled back to their own domain through a break in the palings on our side of the hedge, while in my hands the rooster squawked and plunged and kicked and struggled; it was like trying to hold a feathered hyena.
I was very angry. I had lost my bulb bed. I couldn't wring the neck of the raider, much as I should have liked to do so, but with an arm made strong by a just and righteous rage I lifted that big brute high above my head and hurled him over into his own yard. He sailed through the air like a black and white plane.
"Damn! Oh, damn!" said somebody on the other side of the hedge. There was a horrible grunt, as of one getting all the wind knocked out of him, a scuffle, and the squawks of the big rooster, to which the hens dutifully added a deafening chorus.
"The brute—has just about—murdered me!" grunted Doctor Richard Geddes.
We stood in stricken silence. Swiftly, noiselessly, Uncle Adam faded from sight, putting a solid section of Hynds House between himself and what he felt was coming battle. Uncle Adam had no wish to have to pray me to death, and he wasn't going to run any risks with Doctor Richard Geddes. Where that irascible gentleman was concerned, Uncle Adam, like Br'er Rabbit, would "trus' no mistakes."
A second later, red-faced, half-breathless, but with the light of battle in his eyes, Doctor Geddes appeared, mounted on a ladder on his side of the hedge.
"Who shot off that rooster?"
"Monsieur le docteur, the hens of you began this affray," explained Schmetz, politely. "They are fowls abandoned in their morals, horrible in their habits, and shameless in their behavior. And the husband of these wretches, Monsieur, is a bandit, a brigand, an assassin, fit only to be guillotined. Observe, Monsieur, it happened thus—"
"Schmetz," snapped the doctor, "shut up!—Now then, I want to know who fired off that rooster."
"I did!" I said valiantly. "Look at my bulbs! Just look at my bulbs!"
"Look at my stomach!" roared the doctor. "Just look at my stomach!"
"Mon Dieu! O mon Dieu!" cried Schmetz, dancing up and down. "Monsieur, again I implore that you will remain calm and listen to the voice of reason! Your hens, creatures malicious and accursed—"
"Why should I look at your horrid stomach?" said I, outraged. "I think you had better get down off that ladder and go away!"
"Why should you? Because, you jade, you've all but driven a twenty-pound rooster clean through it—beak, spurs and tail feathers—that's why!" bawled the doctor. "Gad! I shall be black and blue for a fortnight! I'm colicky now: I need a mustard-plaster!"
"Two mustard-plasters," I insisted severely: "one on your tongue and the other on your temper!"
"Temper?" flared the doctor, and flung up his arms. "Temper? Here's a minx that's all but murdered me, and yet has the stark effrontery to blather about temper! You've a bad one yourself, let me tell you! You've the worst, outside of your late aunt—"
"Grand-aunt-in-law; your own cousin-by-blood, whom you greatly resemble in that same matter of family temper, I am given to understand."
"Gatchell told you that!" cried the doctor, wrathfully. "Fish-blooded old mummy! His place is in a Canopic jar! Gatchell hasn't had a thought since 1845."
"Well, if he satisfied himself so long ago as 1845 that you have a frightful temper and that your hens are unutterable nuisances, I see no reason why he should change his mind," I said, frigidly. "You have; and your hens are; and your rooster is a demon!"
"Straight out of the pit; undoubtedly they were hatched under Satan's wings. Monsieur, believe me, Schmetz, when I tell you so."
"Didn't you ask me," I demanded, "to throw them over into your yard when they invaded my premises? Very well: I threw one over and you caught it. Why, then, should you complain?"
"Oh, yes, I caught it!" A horrible sneer twisted his countenance.
Schmetz fell to praying aloud. But he couldn't remember anything save the grace before meat, so he prayed that, in a sonorous voice. For he is a pious man.
The doctor's nose wrinkled and his lips stretched: "Sophronisba!" he hissed, and, having hurled this hand-grenade, scuttled down the ladder like a boy of ten.
Alicia sank upon the ground and rocked to and fro. For a minute I wanted to catch her by the shoulders and shake her soundly; but catching her eye instead, I also fell into helpless laughter. Leaning on his spade, Schmetz stared at us, shaking his grizzled head.
"Name of a cat!" murmured the puzzled Alsatian, and fell to salvaging such bulbs as weren't utterly ruined. We were all busy at this, when a head again appeared over the hedge—a big, leonine head with a tossing mane and a tameless beard. An enormous pair of shoulders followed, a tree-trunk of a leg was swung over, and Doctor Richard Geddes dropped into our garden like a great cat. He strolled over, hands in pockets, and looking down at grubbing us, asked politely: "Making a garden?"
"Oh, no," Alicia told him sweetly, "we're laying out a chicken-run."
"Er—what I came over to say, is that I've got some fine bulbs, myself, this year, particularly fine bulbs—eh, Schmetz?—and more than I need for myself. Will you share them with me, Miss Smith? Please! I—well, I'd be really grateful if you would," said this overgrown boy.
"We'll be enchanted," Alicia said instantly. "When can we have them, please?"
"Now!" cried the doctor, with brightening eyes. "By jingo, I'll get 'em this minute, and plant 'em for you, too!"
And he did. He was on his knees, trowel in hand, shouting to Riedriech, who had come outside for a few minutes' happy arguing with his good friend the doctor, that the socialist argument boiled down amounts to about this—that one should do without boiled eggs for breakfast now, in order that the proletariat may have baked hen for dinner in the millennium; which is lunacy; anybody with a modicum of brains—
"Brains!" snorted Riedriech. "What is it you know about brains? No doctor knows what is on the inside of brains! You make tinkerings mit the inside plumbings, Gott bewahre! and cut up womens and cats and such-like poor little dumb beasts and says you, 'Now I know all about the brains of man.' It is right there where you are wrong, Comrade Geddes!"
"Habet!" said Comrade Geddes.
"Look you," said the old visionary, with sudden passion, "look you on the little bulb here, so dirty and ugly you hide him in the ground quick. So! But by and by comes up green shoots, and blossoms. So it is with the great thoughts of men, the deep race-thoughts, Comrade Geddes—seeds, bulbs, germs, all of them, in the ugly husks of the common people. Out of our muck and grime they come, the little green shoots which the fool will say is poison, maybe, but which the wise know and labor and make room for. I, Riedriech, and workers like me, we go into our graves nothing but husks. But it is out of the buried hearts of us comes green things growing; and then—die Blumen! die Blumen!" said the cabinet-maker, with a still, far-away look.
"And," he finished, with a sad smile, "it is our flowers that you put in vases of gold on your altars. And you say, 'Listen: Jesus the carpenter talks plain words to his fishermen friends.' And, 'Hush! Burns the plowman makes songs in the field!'"
The doctor looked up, and his eyes were very tender; his smile made me wonder. With a swift, friendly hand he patted the rougher hand of the other. And it was at this opportune moment that Mary Magdalen led around a corner of Hynds House no less personages than Mrs. Haile and Miss Martha Hopkins. Their eyes fell upon Doctor Richard Geddes. They looked at each other. They looked at Alicia and me. And I knew their thoughts: "Sirens, both of you!" said Miss Hopkins's eyes.
"How do you do, Doctor Geddes!" said both ladies, as demurely as cats. I should have felt like a boy caught stealing jam. He went right on planting bulbs.
"Hello, Martha. What's on the carpet now?" he greeted that lady, airily. "Writing another paper on 'The Ironic Note in Chivalry'? How about 'The Effect of the Pre-Raphaelites upon the Feeble-minded'? Or is it the 'Relation of the Child to Its Mother,' this time?"
"You will have your little joke, Doctor," smiled Miss Hopkins, a dish-faced blonde with a cultured expression.
"Joke?" The doctor stared up at her. "Joke? Gad, I'd like to believe it!" He turned to Alicia and me, politely: "Miss Hopkins," he informed us, "moves among us clothed in white samite. She is our center of culture; Hyndsville revolves around her."
He went on putting a bulb in the place prepared for it. His eyebrows twitched slightly, but his mouth was smileless; Miss Hopkins was smiling, and not at all displeased. Mrs. Haile was bland and blank, as befits a minister's wife. Alicia's eyes were downcast, but a wicked dimple came and went in her cheek. She looked ravishingly pretty, the bright hair breaking into curls about her temples, her young face colored like a rose. I do not blame Doctor Richard Geddes for stopping in his work to stare at her with unabashed pleasure, but I do not think it was diplomatic.
Mrs. Haile apologized for calling when we were so very busy. They had just stopped in passing, because they were reorganizing their missionary society and wanted to see if they couldn't interest us in the good work. Their day-school in Mozambique needed another teacher, and their hospital in Bechuanaland had to have more beds.
Doctor Geddes got to his feet, slapped our garden soil from his knees, and shook his tawny mane. His eyes were no longer sweet.
"Miss Smith and Miss Gaines, thank you for the opportunity of playing in the sand in pleasant company. Mrs. Haile, Miss Hopkins, I go to attend some home-grown niggers who of course don't need a hospital, nor even a decent school, in our Christian midst. Ladies, good afternoon!" He made a fleering motion of the hand and was gone. Mrs. Haile and Miss Hopkins smiled indulgently. Evidently, Doctor Geddes was one brother they were willing to forgive though he offended them until seventy times seven.
Alicia and Miss Martha Hopkins walked down the garden path together and Mrs. Haile fell into step with me. In a low voice she thanked me, hurriedly, for having dropped that dreadful suit. And were we—she hesitated—were we going to be regular communicants?
I didn't want to go to St. Polycarp's any more, and it was on the tip of my tongue to give a politely evasive reply, when our eyes met and held each other. I saw the naked truth in hers—the pitiful truth of the slim, poor, aristocratic little parish; the old church overtaken and surpassed by its more modern and middle-class rivals; and the minister's family struggling along on a salary that would have made a hod-carrier strike. She was neatly dressed; she looked like a gentle-woman, but one in straightened circumstances. I made a rapid mental calculation.
"Why, yes, I think I can say we shall. Now, Mrs. Haile, I am a business woman, and if I speak bluntly you must pardon it. Miss Gaines and I can give two hundred dollars a year between us—fifty for the church; one hundred and fifty to be added to the minister's present salary."
I knew what that meant to her, and she must have known I knew, but she didn't show it by so much as the quiver of an eyelash. Only a faint, faint color showed in her sallow cheek, and she bowed, half-formally, half-friendly.
"Thank you, Miss Smith," said she, gallantly. And she added, with a glimmer of humor in her worried eyes: "As you say you're a business woman, may I say I hope you will get your money's worth?"
At that I laughed, and she with me.
We walked down our garden path, chatting innocuously and amiably, until of a sudden they caught sight of the little Love, the gay, charming, naked little Love, holding his torch above his curl-crowned head. You miss him, when you come up the broad drive from the front gate, for Nicholas Jelnik put him in the secretest, greenest, sweetest spot in all our garden, and you must go down a winding path to find him.
"So it wasn't an idle tale: they did find it, really!" breathed Miss Hopkins, staring with all her eyes. And I knew with great certainty why she had come to Hynds House that afternoon.
"Forgotten all these many years, and now here, like the dead come to life!" murmured Mrs. Haile, abstractedly. "How strange!"
"It was said he bought it for his mother, because it looked so like himself as a child," said Miss Hopkins. Then she remembered her duty, held up two fingers before her eyes, and squinted through them critically:
"Charming, but don't you think the pose strained? It's an example of eighteenth-century work, placid enough, but it lacks that plastic, fluidic serenity, that divine new touch of truth, that is revivifying art since the great Rodin lighted the torch anew."
Heaven knows what else she said. It sounded like a paper on art to me, and I have a terror of papers on art. They are, Alicia informs me, purple piffle. Yet Alicia drank in every word Miss Hopkins uttered, though the dimple came and went in her cheek.
"You seem interested in art, Miss Gaines." Having torn the poor little peasant Love to tatters, Miss Hopkins descended to us groundlings.
"I don't always seem to know what art is," admitted Alicia, dovelike.
The lady who "moved among us clothed in white samite" smiled encouragingly.
"That is because you are really little more than a child," she said kindly. "When you begin to grow, you will improve your mind."
Alicia puckered her brows. "Ah, but I'm Irish!" she said, seriously, "and the Irish hate to have to improve their minds. I imagine it takes an able-bodied mind to stand intensive cultivation," she added, guilelessly.
Miss Hopkins smiled: it was a masterpiece, that smile!
"But why, may I ask, did you choose such a situation for the statue?" she inquired critically. "Now, I should never dream of tucking it in such an out-of-the-way place!"
The pucker came back to Alicia's brow.
"Shouldn't you?" she wondered. "I shall make a point of mentioning that to Mr. Nicholas Jelnik, if you don't mind. You see, he chose that spot, and we rather like it, ourselves."
Miss Hopkins stopped dead short, and Mrs. Haile started in spite of herself. Evidently, the situation was beyond them. Didn't we know? How much had Judge Gatchell seen fit to tell us? Alicia had dropped a bomb-shell that before night would detonate in every house in Hyndsville. They haven't very much to talk about in small towns, except one another, and when a plump mouse of gossip frisks about whisking his tail, why, it is cat nature to pounce upon it.
"Mr. Jelnik!" said Miss Hopkins, with an accent. "Oh, I see. Well—he is a neighbor, of course. Certainly if Mr. Jelnik selected that particular spot for the statue—he of all people has the best right to do so—and to have his wishes considered."
"Of course. He has lived abroad, and seen everything of art there is to see," Alicia agreed, placidly. Which wasn't at all what Miss Hopkins meant.
We could see those two women turning the thing over and over in their minds—Nicholas Jelnik, last heir and descendant of Richard Hynds, tactily (perhaps even gladly; for had they not just witnessed the behavior of Doctor Richard Geddes?) accepting the interlopers in the house of his fathers! Nicholas Jelnik selecting the site for the statue Richard had brought home in pride, and Freeman had buried in sorrow! Miss Hopkins's stare dismissed me, shifted to Alicia, and discovered the cause of this shameless surrender of family pride. Her lips tightened. With politely cold hopes that we should like Hyndsville, and warmer hopes that we would join the missionary society, they left us.
"Wedge Number One: The poor dear heathen, Sophy!" smiled Alicia. "The P.D.H. can be a very present help in times of social trouble, can't he? I shall attend that missionary meeting, and take stock. Incidentally (For goodness' sake, don't look so scandalized, Sophy Smith! this is a fight for our lives, so to speak!) incidentally, I shan't do the P.D.H. any harm. He won't be a bit worse than he was before, which is promising." She put two fingers before her laughing eyes, squinted through them, and drawled:
"You lack subtlety, Miss Smith. Cultivate your imagination, my dear!" in Miss Hopkins's best voice.
Riedriech stuck his grizzled head out at a window, cautiously:
"Fräulein, she hass gone?" And seeing that the coast was clear, he added, vehemently: "Cultivate the mindt! Cultivate the imatchination! Ach, lieber Gott! Dornröschen, cultivate you the heart. It iss not what the woman thinks, but what she loves, what she feels, which makes of the world a home-place for men und kinder." The good old Jew nodded his head vigorously at the girl, smiled, and went back to his work. And Schmetz came and finished the bulb bed by covering it carefully with two thicknesses of chicken-wire.
That night, just before we went up-stairs, I went into the library after Freeman Hynds's diary, which we were simply burning to read. I opened the table drawer in which I had placed it. The drawer was quite empty. The little flat book was gone.
CHAPTER VI
GLAMOURY
Alicia insisted that we were living in a fairy-story, and had better enjoy every shining minute while it lasted. But, as I pointed out, the cost of restoring Hynds House was appallingly real, so real that it left a big, big hole in the bank-account. It is true that we who never really had had a home since we were little children, and then the most modest sort, had gotten such a home as comes to but few. But—one doesn't get something for nothing!
We had done our part for Hynds House; now Hynds House had to do its part for us. It had to earn its keep, and ours. We had known that from the beginning, and Alicia mapped out the entire plan of how it was to be done; a plan which I at first looked upon as the fairy-storiest part of the whole thing!
To-night we sat facing each other across the library table, with a great pile of receipted bills between us, the total of which made me feel pale. Alicia, however, was cheerfully figuring away on her own hook; and presently she shoved a list of addresses across to me.
The first two were the head of our old firm, and the one celebrity I had ever seen or spoken to, a novelist and lecturer with record-breaking best sellers to his account. He once had some business dealings with our firm, and I attended to the details, thereby winning his cantankerous approval. He had very bad manners, of which he was totally unashamed, and very good morals, of which he was somewhat doubtful, as they didn't smack of genius; a notion that he was a superior sort of Sherlock Holmes, having the truffle-hound's flair for discovering and following up clews and unraveling mysteries, most of which didn't exist outside of his own eager mind; and such a genuine passion for old and beautiful things as Balzac had. It was upon this last foundation that Alicia was building.
"He has written that the average wealthy modern home is a combination of Pullman Palace Car and Gehenna. And that the so-called crime wave which sweeps recurrently over American cities, is very likely nothing more than the inevitable reaction of our damnable house decorations upon our immature intellects." Alicia repeated it dreamily. "I have chosen for him the upper southwestern room with the sunset effect and the pineapple four-poster. It has a claw-footed desk of block mahogany, three hand-carved walnut chairs, two Rembrandt prints, and a French prie-dieu with a purple velvet cover embroidered with green and gold swastikas. He has a purple soul with gold tassels on it, himself, Sophy, and he should be willing to pay a thumping price for it. That room is worth at least two lectures and one best seller, not to mention what he'll get out of the rest of the house."
"First catch your hare," I reminded her skeptically.
"First set your trap, and you can reckon on hare nature to do the rest. A few good photographs of this house, along with the information that it runs back to the beginning of things American and has never been exploited, will fetch him at a hand-gallop. Add a hint that we have our own brand of family spook, and you couldn't keep him away if you tried. The only trouble is that he may walk off with your brass tongs up his trouser-leg, or a print or two tucked under his shirt."
We had decided that we would have a series of photographs of the house, with all particularly good points stressed; such as, say, the library fireplace, the fan-light window at the end of the upper hall, the pillared front porch, and a corner of the drawing-room.
Also—and this was the great thing, calling for a heavy outlay—we would advertise in some two or three of the ultra periodicals, the advertisement to carry a stunning little cut of our front porch. We decided to run the risk of expending more money than we could really afford, because the people that advertisement was meant to attract would in the long run pay for it.
"Our prices will be predacious, piratical, prohibitive, and profitable. We shall stop just this side of highway robbery. Therefore our demands will be cheerfully, nay, willingly met; and everybody, including you and me, Sophy, will be satisfied and happy!"
"Boarders!" said I, limply, "boarders—in Hynds House!"
"Perish the thought! We have possibly the most interesting and beautiful old house in America. It's one of the few really historic houses left in the whole South. It has seen the Indians, it has seen the British, it has seen Sherman's men, and escaped them all. Well, then, we propose to allow certain of the elect, who can afford it, to come and live in Hynds House for a while. They will be willing to pay a round sum for the privilege. That's all."
"Oh, is it, indeed! And will they?"
"Won't they, though!" Alicia spoke confidently. "Now draft me a letter to the Head, setting forth the many reasons why himself, his wife, their car, and her Chow, can't afford to miss Hynds House on their trip South this season. You might explain that Mary Magdalen is our cook, and the Queen of Sheba our hand-maid. Also, please help me decide in which of these magazines we had better advertise first."
"But the cost!" I wailed. "We have spent so sinfully much already! And the place is eating its head off, with nothing coming in. Since I took down those bill-boards, actually the price of that Lafayette Street lot has gone down. Nobody seems anxious to buy it any more."
"Change your mind about selling it; hint that you're considering an ice-cream parlor and a movie theater," said the girl who'd been the worst file-clerk. "In the meantime, Sophy, you have sense enough to understand that we've spent so much money we've got to spend more to get some of it back.—I vote we start in this one, Sophy," and she laid her finger upon the most expensive and ultra of all the magazines!
"But that is for millionaires!" said I, aghast.
"So is Hynds House," insisted Alicia, coolly. "How much did you say was in the bank?"
I was afraid to hear my own voice mention that insignificant sum; for, when one considered Hynds House, the little we had was beggarly; so I wrote it down, and pushed the paper across to her. Instead of looking scared, Alicia Gaines looked delighted!
"All that?" And round chin on pink palm, she fell to studying me with as much curiosity as if she had just met me and were puzzled to get at the real Me. Then she nodded, and snatching a sheet of paper, began to figure again, pausing every now and then to regard me with slitted eyes. At the end of ten strenuous minutes she pushed the paper over to me, and watched me grow all but apoplectic as I studied it. It was an entertaining list, beginning with a hat and ending with silk stockings. With all sorts of wonderful things in between—for me, you understand. Things like "One brown frock, with something cloudy-yellow about it." ("Sophy, blondes can stand yellow wonderfully well; I suggest a bronze, instead of a duller brown.")
"Why, I have plenty of clothes!" I protested.
"Business-woman-of-a-certain-age, general-utility, will-stand-wear-and-tear clothes. Not a stitch of Hyndshousey clothes among them. No happy, glad-I'm-alive-and-a woman clothes. Here's where you cease to look merely useful, respectable, and responsible, and begin to look the Lady of the Castle. There's quite as much philosophy and good morals in looking like a butterfly as there is in resembling a caterpillar."
"Why should I have more clothes?" I demanded.
"Because." And she added, with a fleeting smile, "And then catch your hare."
"Alicia!" said I, scandalized. "Alicia Gaines, do you realize I am thirty-six years old?"
"You wouldn't be if you just had sense enough to forget to remember it." This resentfully.
"No? Would you mind telling me how I might become such an accomplished forgetter?"
"Why, there's nothing easier! When you really wish to forget to remember something, Sophy, all you have to do is to remember to forget it!" And then, with real earnestness: "Sophy, it's the better part of wisdom to look like the job you want to hold down. Your job is holding down Hynds House. And we are up against things, Sophy, you and I. We have got to win out because it means—all this." Her eyes swept over the beautiful old room with an immense pride and affection.
"We have just got to keep Hynds House, if only to teach these Hyndsville women a lesson." She spoke after a pause. "Sophy, they flatten their ears and arch their backs at sight of us; and whenever there's a good chance for a wipe of a paw, why, we catch it across the nose. Now I," she admitted frankly, "am naturally full of cat feelings myself. I will not do what you want to do—walk off looking aggrieved, after the fashion of Old Dog Tray. I will repay in kind, retaliate in true lady-cat manner. And these,"—she began to smile—"these shall be our weapons of offense and defense. It will be a gorgeous struggle; however, my forebears came from Kilkenny!"
I laughed, but indeed I did not feel any too optimistic. Holding down Hynds House was no easy task, and the town was not disposed to make it easier for us. While we had been busy renovating, while our hands were so full of work that every minute was occupied, we hadn't felt our isolation. It was only when we had time to pause and look around us, that the stubborn, quiet hostility of the town's attitude to the new owner of Hynds House was borne in upon us.
Not that anything overt was done by any one. Nor was there the slightest breach of politeness: they were as punctiliously polite when chance brought us into contact with them, as well-bred folk are to strangers whose further acquaintance they have no desire to cultivate. The vestrymen of St. Polycarp's had expressed their appreciation of Miss Smith's action in promptly dropping the suit against them; she was welcome to come and worship God in their church, and to do her duty by the heathen. Such ladies as happened to belong to the missionary society spoke to us pleasantly in the church vestibule. The minister and his wife were as sincerely, duteously courteous. But that was all. Not a house in Hyndsville opened its doors to us. They simply would not accept the interloper that the malignity of the Scarlett Witch had put in possession of that which should have gone back to Richard's last heir, or failing him, to Richard Geddes.
The fact that these two descendants of the Hyndses did not seem to see and do their duty as members of that illustrious family, but shamelessly made friends with the aliens, did not raise us in the town's estimation. Quite the contrary. Nor were they even faintly angry with Mr. Jelnik and Doctor Geddes, who were, so to say, unsuspicious Israelites coaxed into the Canaanitish camp.
I admit that I considered Doctor Richard Geddes undiplomatic in his behavior. It never once occurred to that lordly gentleman, who had had his own way ever since he was born, that he should stop now to consider the feelings or the prejudices of Hyndsville. It wasn't that he meant to champion us. It never occurred to him that we needed championing. He simply liked us because he liked us. We pleased him. That sufficed, so far as he was concerned.
I had begun really to like the doctor, myself. But I wished to heaven he weren't, at that critical time, so tactless. For instance, I have been peremptorily taken by an elbow and led willy-nilly to his waiting car, on Lafayette Street, which is our principal thoroughfare, under the calm, appraising, watching eyes of all feminine Hyndsville. Not one of whom would fail to remark, casually:
"Oh, did you see that Miss Smith with Doctor Geddes this morning? Men are so unsuspicious, aren't they!"
I couldn't explain the situation to him, of course, any more than I could explain to Mr. Nicholas Jelnik that his presence in Hynds House, while pleasing to us, was disquieting and displeasing to others.
It was to be expected that this handsome young man, who kept his affairs so strictly to himself that nobody knew anything about them, should arouse the avid curiosity and hold the breathless interest of a little town where everybody had always known everybody else's business.
Why had he come to Hyndsville? To find the Hynds jewels, after a century? Didn't he know that the Scarlett Witch had the eye of an eagle for the glitter of gold and would long since have discovered whatever of value had been in Hynds House? Why didn't he consult older members of the community, who could furnish him with immensely interesting side-lights on the Hyndses?
Mr. Jelnik never explained. He didn't ask anybody anything. He didn't even employ Hyndsville negroes, who could be expected to gossip: his household consisted of a stately bronze-colored man-servant who was reputed to be a pagan, and the huge wolf-hound, Boris, his constant companion.
When Doctor Geddes was delicately sounded, the big man explained that he himself had but recently made the acquaintance of his young kinsman; Jelnik was a first-rate chap, declared the doctor; immensely clever, as befitted his father's son; altogether likeable, but a bit of a lunatic, like all the Hyndses.
It was natural, too, that the young ladies in a small town where young men are at a premium should have noticed this one particularly and expected a like interest on his part. The inexplicable Jelnik failed to exhibit it. There was but one house that he visited, and that was Hynds House.
Whatever his reasons for this may have been, and the town named several, the fact remains that Hynds House would never have been so beautiful, the restoration wouldn't have been so nearly perfect, had it not been for the critical taste of Mr. Jelnik. He had the European knowledge of beautiful things, and, toward the finer graces of life, the attitude of Paris, of Rome, of Vienna, rather than of New York, of Chicago, or of, say, Atlanta.
There was a glamour about the man. Whatever he did or said had an indefinable, delightful significance; what he left undone was full of meaning. His mere presence ornamented and colored common moments so that they glowed, and remained in the memory with a rainbow light upon them. He was never hurried or flurried, any more than sun and sky and trees and tides are; and he was just as vital, and quite as baffling.
We accepted him at first as part of the fairy-story into which Destiny had pitchforked us. He belonged to Hynds House, so to speak, and there one might meet him upon common ground. But sometimes when I happened to glance up I would find him watching us with those reflective eyes that were so full of light and at the same time so inscrutable. And then he would smile, his Dionysiac smile that made him all at once so far off and so foreign that I knew, with a sinking heart, that he didn't belong at all; that this beautiful and brilliant bird of passage was lightening for but a very brief space my sober skies.
Alicia said he made her think of peacocks and ivory. He delighted and dazzled her, though he did not disquiet her as he did me, perhaps because she, too, was young and beautiful, and I—wasn't.
It will be seen, then, that our position, take it by and large, wasn't one that called for flags and buntings. Life didn't look a bit rose-colored to me as I sat there that night, drafting a letter to the Head. Of a sudden arose clamor in the hall, and howls, hideously loud at that hour and in that quiet house. There came the noise of running feet, and there burst into the lighted library, with gray faces and rolling eyes, our two lately acquired colored maids, Fernolia the thin one, and Queen of Sheba, fat and brown.
"Good heavens! What's the matter?" I asked, fearfully. It had been a terrible task to break in those two handmaids, to train them not to take part in the conversation at table, not to take off cap, and hair, not to do the thousand and one undisciplined and disorderly things they did do.
"Ghostes! Sperets! Ha'nts!" chattered the colored women. "Ol' Mis' Scarlett's walkin' in de ca'iage house!"
"Nonsense!" At the same time I felt myself turning pale, and goose-flesh coming out on my spine.
"No, ma'am, Miss Sophy, 't ain't nonsense. It's ha'nts!" protested Fernolia. She was the brighter of the two, but given to embroidering her facts.
"Yessum, I done saw 'er," corroborated Queenasheeba. (That's how one pronounced her name.)
The two occupied a very pleasant room above the carriage house, a room that had overcome their unwillingness to stay overnight at Hynds House. Queenasheeba was just dozing, when she was awakened by Fernolia, who had been sitting by the window. Both of them, peering through the scrim curtains, saw a tall white figure disappear into the spring-house. A few minutes later, to their horror, they heard Something moving downstairs in the carriage house—Something like the clank of a chain—footsteps—and then silence. Almost paralyzed with terror, the two women clung together. Anything might be expected of ol' Mis' Scarlett! However, nothing further happened. With shaking hands Queenasheeba relighted the lamp. Then, snatching up such clothes as they could grab, the two fled to us.
Mary Magdalen and Beautiful Dog always departed after dinner. Except for the Black family and the two canaries, Alicia and I had big, lonesome Hynds House to ourselves. Mr. Jelnik's gray cottage, set amid Lombardy poplars and thick shrubberies, was some distance away, and we didn't know whether Doctor Geddes was at home or not. It is true we had firearms, a pair of pistols having been literally forced upon us by the doctor, who fretted and fumed about our staying there alone. Both of us were more afraid of those pistols than of any possible ghostly intruder.
Nevertheless, I went up-stairs and fetched them. Alicia took one as she might have taken a rattlesnake, and I held the other. Armed thus, carrying torch-light and lantern, and with the two gray-faced, half-clad negro women following us, one carrying our brass poker and the other the tongs, we marched upon the carriage house.
The big barnlike place, lately cleaned and whitewashed, looked painfully empty. In one of the stalls the hay purchased for our recently acquired Jersey cow gave off a pleasant odor. Over in one corner, in a neat, clean, orderly array, were Schmetz's tools. A little farther on was our chicken feed, in covered barrels.
We went from empty stall to empty stall, to reassure the women; there wasn't so much as a cobweb in any of them. All the down-stairs windows were heavily barred with iron and further protected, like the doors, with heavy oaken shutters studded with iron nail-heads. The two small rooms in the rear had once been used as a jail for recalcitrant slaves; they held now nothing deadlier than Schmetz's flower pots and seedlings. Every shutter was closed, and the iron bars looked reassuringly strong; also, the walls are three feet thick.
"You were dreaming, you silly women! I told you you were dreaming!" said I, and had turned to go, reassured and relieved, when Alicia's nose wrinkled. I could hardly keep from sniffing, myself.
In the carriage-house was a faint, indeterminable scent, the ghost of the ghost of fragrance, so elusive that one sensed rather than smelled it, so pervasive and haunting that one could not miss it. And it certainly had nothing to do with the wholesome odor of hay and cow feed, or the smell of whitewash and oiled tools.
"Yes, you were dreaming." Alicia began to edge the colored women toward the doors. "But as you've had a scare," she added pleasantly, "I'll give you a new lace collar, Queenasheeba, and you a red ribbon, Fernolia, to wear to church next Sunday, just to prove to you that being awake is heaps better than having nightmares."
We padlocked the big doors after us, and went through the rooms up-stairs. They, too, had been freshly cleaned and calcimined. And they, too, were quite empty.
Despite which, Fernolia and Queenasheeba were firmly, tearfully, shiveringly certain they had seen nothing less than ol' Mis' Scarlett's ha'nt. They had the worst possible opinion of ol' Miss Scarlett: she had been bad enough living—but as a spook! We had to let them lug their bedding over and sleep in the room next to ours; we had to give them sweet lavender to quiet their nerves. I am sure they would have bolted incontinently if they hadn't been too scared to venture outside.
"If I could catch that ghost I'd shake it!" declared Alicia. And we went back to our figuring, with a sort of desperate courage. "Now will you get those clothes, Sophy Smith?" she resumed, through her teeth, and the pink came back to her cheek, and her eyes deepened. "And do you agree to stick it out, you and I shoulder to shoulder, town or no town, ha'nts or no ha'nts; and win out?"
"Yes!" said I.
CHAPTER VII
A BRIGHT PARTICULAR STAR
Wire from The Author, New York City, to Miss S. Smith, Hyndsville, South Carolina:
Photos received. Furniture noted. It's pretty, but is it art?
Wire from Miss Smith to The Author:
What is Art?
Wire from The Author:
Sometimes an invention of the devil. Is your stuff Madison Avenue or Grand Rapids? Reply.
Wire from Miss Smith:
Madison Avenue and Grand Rapids hadn't been invented when Hynds House was furnished.
Wire from The Author:
Maybe not, but mightn't be same furniture. Have been stung before. Can't be genuine. Too much of it.
Wire from Miss Smith:
Please yourself.
Wire from The Author:
Coming to investigate. Won't sleep in anything but pineapple bed; won't sit in anything but carved chair; can't pray without prie-dieu. If spurious will publicly gibbet you and probably burn your house down. Hold southwest room my arrival.
Alicia laughed, and cuddled those yellow slips.
"I knew this was an enchanted place!" she cried. "Oh, Sophy, it's working! He's coming, he's coming, and he's the biggest ever, and he's going to stay! Sophy, think of the advertising!"
"He will probably be detestable. Geniuses are generally horrid to live with. And there will be something the matter with his digestion; there is always something the matter with their digestion."
"From swallowing all the flattery shoveled upon them, poor dears," Alicia explained charitably. "Don't worry about his digestion: leave it to Mary Magdalen's waffles. Hooray! Hynds House stock is booming!"
It was.
From the head of our firm:
My dear Miss Smith:
I have your interesting letter and the delightful photographs, which have so completely charmed Mrs. Westmacote and me that we have decided it wouldn't be good business to miss Hynds House on our trip South this year.
Mrs. Westmacote asks if you could also accommodate a cousin of hers, Miss Emmeline Phelps-Parsons, a lady deeply interested in the colonial homes of America.
You must allow me heartily to congratulate you upon your great good fortune in falling heir to such a wonderful old place; and to wish you many happy and prosperous years in it.
I shall telegraph you when to expect us. With all good wishes,
Yours faithfully,
GEORGE PEABODY WESTMACOTE.
Letter from Miss Emmeline Phelps-Parsons, of Boston:
Dear Miss Smith:
My cousin Mrs. Westmacote, whom I have been visiting, showed me your letter and the enchanting photographs of your house which you were kind enough to send Mr. Westmacote. Hynds House is just the one place I have long been looking for!—an unspoiled colonial house, with historic associations!
It is perfect! I must see with my own eyes those Chelsea figures on your drawing-room mantel, the luster and Washington jugs in the dining-room, and the cabinets in the hall.
Sincerely yours,
EMMELINE PHELPS-PARSONS.
P.S. I hope it is really true that there is an Influence in Hynds House? I do so greatly long to come in contact with the Occult and the Unknown!
"Somewhere on the firing-line of fifty," mused Alicia. "A lady with a soul. Don't you hear dear old Boston calling you, Sophy? Here's one to put Miss Martha Hopkins's light under a bushel basket!"
We had several other inquirers; and chose from them Mr. Chetwynd Harrison-Gore and his daughter, English folk "doing" America and delighted to include a Carolina colonial house in their trip; a suffrage leader, whose throat needed a rest; and Morenas, the illustrator. It seemed that Hynds House offered to each one something that had been craved for.
The Author pounced upon us two or three days before we expected him, to take stock after his own fashion. I have heard The Author commended for "the humor of his rare smile and the keen, kind intellectuality of his remarkable eyes." Well, the smile was rare enough; and of course there isn't any doubt about the man's intellectuality. For the rest, he proved to be a tall, lanky, stooping person, with a thin tanned face, outstanding ears, a high nose, and long, blue-gray eyes half-hidden under drooping lids and behind glasses. His hair was just hair. And he had the sort of mustache that bristled like a cat's when he twisted his lip.
So far as monetary success, and efficacious press-agents, and the adulation, admiration, emulation, and envy of his contemporaries went, he had nothing to complain of. He was lionized, quoted, courted, flattered, reviewed, viewed through rose-colored spectacles; and disillusioned, discontented, cynical, selfish, and, of course, most horribly bored. He was gun-shy of women; he suspected them of wanting to marry him. He was wary of men; he suspected them of wanting to exploit him. He loathed children, who were generally obstreperous and unnecessary editions of parents he didn't admire. He didn't even trust the beautiful works of men's hands. They, even they, were too often faked! If you had dug up the indubitable mummy of the first Pharaoh from under the oldest of the pyramids, The Author would have turned him over on his back and hunted for the trade-mark of The Modern Mummy-makers: London, Paris, and New York; Catalogue on Request.
He stalked through Hynds House with slitted eyes and bristling mustache—business of silent sleuth on the trail of the furniture-fakir! He'd pause at each door and with an eagle glance take a comprehensive survey; then, defensively, offensively, he examined things in detail. From our rambling attics to our vast and cavernous cellars did he go; and not a word crossed his lips until he had completed this conandoyley examination. Then:
"Telegraph form if you have one, please," he requested briefly. "I wish to wire for my car. Put Johnson in the room next mine. Johnson's my secretary." He looked at Alicia, reflectively. "Amiable ass, Johnson," he volunteered. Then he went over to the tiled fireplace—we were in the library—and bent worshipfully before it.
"The finest bit of tile-work on this continent," he said, in a hushed voice. "Absolutely perfect. And it belongs to a woman named Smith!"
"We know just how you feel about it," Alicia told him sympathetically, while The Author turned red to his ears. "I have often felt like that myself, when something I particularly wanted was bought by somebody I was sure couldn't properly appreciate it. I dare say I was mistaken," admitted Alicia, "just as mistaken as you are now in thinking that Sophy and I aren't worthy of those tiles. We are—all the more so because we never before had anything like them."
The spoiled darling of success looked at us intently; and a most curious change came over his clever, bad-tempered face. His eyes are as bright as ice, and have somewhat the same cold light in them. Now a thaw set in and melted them, and a mottled red spread over his sallow cheeks.
"Miss Gaines," he said, abruptly, "your doll-baby face does your intelligence an injustice—Miss Smith, I apologize." And before the astonished and indignant Alicia could summon a withering retort, he added heartily: "This whole place is quite the real thing, you know—almost too good to be true and too true to be good. Would you mind telling me how you happened to think of letting me in on it, eh?"
"Because we knew it was the real thing," Alicia replied, truthfully.
"Do you know,"—The Author was plainly pleased—"that that is one of the very nicest things that's ever been said to me? Because I really do know above a bit about genuine stuff."
"It must be a great relief to you to hear something pleasant about yourself that is also something true," I said with sympathy. The Author grinned like a hyena, and Alicia giggled. "Because you must be bored to extinction, having to listen to all sorts of people ascribe to you all sorts of virtues that no one man could possibly possess and remain human." I was remembering some of the fulsome flubdub I'd read about him.
"Hark to her!" grinned The Author. "What! you don't believe all the nice things you've read about me?"
"I do not."
"You don't in the least look or write like a dehumanized saint, you know," supplemented Alicia, laughing.
"What do I look like, then?" He sat on the edge of a table and cuddled a bony knee. Behind his glasses his eyes began to twinkle.
"You look more like yourself than you do like your photographs," decided Alicia.
The Author threw up his hands.
"And now, tell me this, please: How, when, where, and from whom, did you acquire the supreme art of aiding and abetting an old house to grow young again without losing its character?"
"We were born," Alicia explained, "with the inherent desire to do just what we have been able to do here. This house gave us our big chance. But it wouldn't have been so—so in keeping with itself," she was feeling for the right words, "if it hadn't been for Mr. Nicholas Jelnik."
The Author pricked up his intellectual ears. His eyes narrowed.
"Jelnik? I knew a Jelnik, an Austrian alienist; met him at dinner at the American Ambassador's in Vienna; quiet, unassuming, pleasant man, and one of the greatest doctors in Europe."
"Mr. Jelnik is Doctor Jelnik's son."
"What!" shrieked The Author. And with unfeigned amazement: "In the name of high heaven, what is Jelnik's son doing here?"
"Mr. Jelnik's mother was a Miss Hynds. She met and married your doctor abroad."
That sixth sense possessed by him to an unusual degree, warned him that he was on the trail of Copy.
"May I ask questions?" he demanded.
"Of course."
"You inherited this property from an old aunt, I believe?"
"She wasn't my aunt, really. She married my mother's uncle, Johnny Scarlett."
"I see. And Jelnik's mother was a Miss Hynds. How long has he been here?"
"For some time before we came."
"Near neighbor of yours?"
"Yes," Alicia put in; "and Doctor Richard Geddes is our neighbor on the other side. His grandmother was a Miss Hynds."
"Pardon a writer-man's curiosity," begged The Author, smiling. "But this house is unusual, very unusual. While I am here I shall look up its history. It should make good copy."
Having a pretty shrewd idea of The Author's powers of finding out what he wanted to find out, we thought it better that he should hear that history, as we knew it. If the mystery had ever been solved, the tragedy of Hynds House would have had but passing interest for The Author. But the undiscovered piqued and puzzled him and aroused his combative egotism.
From the pictured face of Freeman—dark, stern, uncommunicative—he trotted back to the drawing room to look again at the boyish face of little Richard leaning against his pretty mother's knees; at the haughty, handsome face of James Hampden; and at beautiful dark Jessamine, who had a long black curl straying across the shoulder of a blue frock, and a curled red lip, and a breast of snow.
"Freeman was not a crook; his face is hard, stern, bigoted, secretive, but honest. Yet if he didn't do it himself what was he trying to tell when death cut off his wind? If he did it, where did he hide the plunder? Here in this house? His family must have known every nook and cranny as well as he did himself, and he could be sure they'd pull it to pieces in the search that would ensue.
"If Richard were the thief, to whom did he give the loot? If the gems had been put upon the market, some trace of them must have been discovered. Remains: Who got them? Where did they go?"
"That's what the unhappy people in this house asked a century ago, and there was no answer," I remarked, soberly.
"And that poor woman Jessamine went mad trying to solve it!" he said, looking at her with commiseration. And after a pause: "And so the lady who left her husband's grandniece the house of her forebears was Freeman's daughter: and the Austrian doctor's son is Richard's great-great-grandson! I meet Jelnik père in Vienna, and come to Hyndsville, South Carolina, to meet Jelnik fils. H'm! Decidedly, the situation has nice possibilities!"
Whereupon he took note-book and fountain-pen from his coat pocket and in the most composed manner began to jot down the outstanding features of Hynds House history.
"It will give me something to puzzle over while I'm here," he remarked, complacently. It did!
The Author approved of Hynds House. It had all the charm of a new and quaint field of exploration and research, and there was nothing in it to offend his hypercritical judgment. I have a shrewd suspicion that Mary Magdalen's cooking played no mean part in his satisfaction. His prowess as a trencherman aroused the admiration and respect of Fernolia, who waited on table. Fernolia had learned to admire herself in her smart apron and cap, and to serve creditably enough. Only twice did she fall from grace; once was the morning The Author broke his own record for waffles. Fernolia, excited and astonished, placed the last platter before him, raised the cover with a flourish, and remarked with deep meaning:
"Dem's all!"
The second time was when we had what Mary Magdalen calls "mulatto rice," which is a dish built upon a firm foundation of small strips of bacon, onion, stewed tomatoes, and rice, and a later and last addition of deliciously browned country sausages. Fernolia, beaming upon The Author hospitably, broke her parole:
"You ain't called to skimp yo'self none on dat rice," she told him confidentially. "De cook done put yo' name in de pot big. She say she glad we-all got man in de house to 'preciate vittles. Yes-suh, Ma'y Magdalen aim to make you bust yo' buttonholes whilst you hab de chanst."
I am told that The Author always makes a great hit when he tells that on himself, and is considered tremendously clever because he can imitate Fernolia's soft South Carolina drawl.
Mr. Nicholas Jelnik, whom he managed to meet within the week, aroused The Author's professional interest. For once his tried and tested powers of turning other people's minds inside out failed utterly. His innocent-sounding queries, his adroit leads, were smilingly turned aside. The defense, so far as Mr. Jelnik was concerned, was ridiculously simple: he didn't want to talk about himself and he didn't do it.
He was perfectly willing to talk, when the humor seized him, and he did talk, brilliantly, wittily, freely, and impersonally. The egoistic "I" was conspicuous by its absence. And while he talked you could see the agile antennæ of The Author's winged mind feeling after the soul-string that might lead him through the mazes of this unusual character. That he could be deftly diverted filled The Author with chagrin mingled with wonder.
He manœuvered for an invitation to the gray cottage and secured it with suspicious ease; called, and had a glass of most excellent wine in his host's simplest of bachelor living-rooms; made the closer acquaintance of Boris—he didn't care for dogs—and of self-contained, dark-faced Daoud, Mr. Jelnik's East Indian man-servant; and came home dissatisfied and determined. He scented "copy," and a born writer after copy is, next to an Apache after a scalp or a Dyak after his enemy's head, the most ruthless of created beings. He will pick his mother's naked soul to pieces, bore into his wife's living brain, dissect his daughter's quivering heart, tear across his sister's mind, rip up his father's life and his best friend's character, lay bare the tomb itself, and make for himself an ink of tears and blood that he may write what he finds. Of such is the kingdom of Genius.
And in the meantime the wondrous news that The Author himself was staying at Hynds House, percolated through Hyndsville and soaked to the bone. The Author was too big a figure to be ignored, even by South Carolina people. Something had to be done. But how shall one become acquainted with a notoriously unfriendly and gun-shy celebrity, a personage of such note that every utterance means newspaper space; and at the same time manage utterly to ignore and cast into outer darkness the people with whom the great one is staying?
The town felt itself put upon its mettle. The first move was made by Miss Martha Hopkins. It was understood that if anybody could clear the way, carry a difficult position with skill and aplomb, that somebody was Miss Martha Hopkins.
She didn't bear down directly upon The Author: that would have been crude. She opened her campaign by a flank movement upon Alicia and me, in her capacity of secretary and treasurer of the missionary society.
Miss Hopkins sailed into Hynds House on a perfect afternoon, to discuss with us a proposed rummage-sale which was to benefit the heathen. She wasn't really worrying about the heathen: he had all the rest of his benighted life to get himself saved in, hadn't he? All the while she sat there and talked about him, she was really loaded to the muzzle with pertinent remarks to affluent authors.
She had come with the hope of chancing upon the great man himself; and, failing that, she meant to pump Alicia and me of enough material to, say, enable her to use a part of her stock of pet adjectives in the paper she would prepare for the next meeting of the literary society. She had a pretty stock of adjectives—plump, purple words like lyric, and liquid, and plastic, and subtile, and poignancy, with every now and then a chiaoscuro thrown in for good measure; and a whole melting-pot full of "rare emotional experiences," "art that was almost intuitive in its passion, so subtly did it"—oh, do all sorts of things!—and "handling the plastic outlines of the theme with rare emotional skill and mastery of technique," "purest lyricism lifted to heights of poignancy,"—all that sort of stuff, you know. Next time a writer, or, better still, a fiddler or a pianist comes to your town, look in your home paper the morning after, and you'll see it.
As it happened, The Author was not at home. His secretary had arrived a day or two before, and after unloading a systemful of copy upon that faithful beast of burden, The Author had given himself a half-holiday with old Riedriech, who knew quite enough about old furniture to win his interest and affection.
Miss Hopkins, then, had Alicia and me to herself. Sedately we discussed rummage-sales, and the effect of cotton shirts upon the adolescent cannibal; and all the while Miss Hopkins was stealthily watching doors and windows and hoping that high heaven would send The Author to her hands. We hadn't so much as mentioned his name. It pleased us to sit there and watch her trying to make us do so.
The iron knocker on the front door sounded. And ushered in by Queenasheeba, there stood Nicholas Jelnik with great gray Boris beside him, and beauty and glamour and romance upon him like a light. Miss Hopkins had seen him on the streets, but hadn't met him personally. I don't think she relished the fact that she had to come to Hynds House to do so. Nor could she save herself from the crudity of staring with all her eyes at this handsome offshoot of the Hyndses, with what in a less polite person might well have been called avid curiosity.
"Miss Leetchy," (he had gaily borrowed Fernolia's pronunciation of Alicia's name), "I have brought you the butter-scotch your soul hankers after. I fear you can never hope to grow up, Miss Leetchy, while you cherish a jejune passion for butter-scotch."
"Oh, I don't know. It might have been fudge!" Alicia replied airily. "But thank you, Mr. Jelnik: it was very nice of you to remember."
"Yes. I have such an excellent memory," said he, blandly. "Miss Smith, this preserved ginger is laid at your shrine. If you offer me a piece or two, I shall accept with thanks: I like preserved ginger, myself.—Boris, you'll prefer butter-scotch. You may ask Miss Gaines to give you a piece."
Miss Hopkins, it appeared, despised butter-scotch, and abhorred preserved ginger.
"I saw The Author hiking across lots a while since. Nice, open-hearted, neighborly man, The Author.—Oh, by the way, Miss Smith: is it, or is it not written in the Book of Darwin that the gadfly is one of the distinct evolutionary links in the descent of man?"
"Good heavens, certainly not!" cried Miss Hopkins. And she looked strangely upon Mr. Nicholas Jelnik.
"No? Thank you. I was in doubt," murmured Mr. Jelnik. The golden flecks danced in and out of his eyes. "But we were speaking of The Author: may I ask how The Author appeals to you as a human being, Miss Hopkins?"
"I do not know him as a human being," Miss Hopkins admitted.
Mr. Jelnik looked surprised. His eyebrows went up.
"Oh, come, now!" he demurred. "He isn't so bad as all that!"
"Oh, dear me, no!" Alicia protested, in a shocked voice. "He may have abrupt manners and say unexpected things, but he is perfectly respectable, Miss Hopkins! There's never been a breath against his character. I thought you knew," purred the hussy, demurely. "Why, he's dined at the White House, and lunched and motored and yachted with royalties, and lectured before the D.A.R.'s themselves! And he belongs to at least a dozen societies. There are,"—Alicia was enjoying her naughty self immensely—"good authors and bad authors. Sometimes the bad authors are good, and sometimes the good authors are bad. But our author is more than either: he's It!"
"You entirely and strangely misunderstand me." Miss Hopkins spoke with the deadly gentleness of suppressed fury. "I had no slightest intention of reflecting upon the character of so eminent a writer, with whose career, Miss Gaines, I am thoroughly familiar. I was merely trying to explain that I had never met him."
"Oh, I see. Of course! I should have remembered that!"
Miss Hopkins's entire contempt for Alicia's mentality overcame any suspicion she might have entertained. Also, she had come determined to discover what she could about The Author, and she was not one lightly to be put aside. She said, smiling tolerantly:
"Of course you should! But mayn't I congratulate you upon knowing him? Having him here in Hynds House almost justifies turning the old place into a boarding-house, doesn't it?"
"The Author," Mr. Jelnik remarked gently, "has a very sensitive soul. I shudder to think what the effect upon him would be were he to hear himself referred to as a boarder. My dear Miss Hopkins, never, never let him hear you designate him 'boarder'!"
"Who's talking about boarders?" asked a hearty voice, and Doctor Richard Geddes came in like a gale of mountain air.
"Miss Hopkins. She thinks The Author's presence almost justifies the turning of Hynds House into a boarding-house," answered Mr. Jelnik. He added, thoughtfully, "Curious notion; isn't it?"
"Martha has plenty more," said the doctor, bluntly. "Boarding-house? Well, supposing? What was it before? A hyena-cage, Martha, a hyena-cage, into which you'd be the last to venture your nose, my dear woman! I say, put on your bonnets, all of you, and let's have a spin in the fresh air. The roads are gorgeous. You can come too, Jelnik: there's room for five."
Mr. Jelnik was desolated: he had a pressing engagement. Miss Hopkins rose precipitately. She also had an engagement; besides, she liked to walk. People needed to walk more than they did. The reason why one saw so many bad figures nowadays, was that people lolled around in automobiles instead of walking.
"Well, walking is certainly good for you, Martha. It helps you to reduce," the doctor agreed. Miss Hopkins said dryly that the little walking she intended to do just then wouldn't affect her weight any. And that Doctor Geddes should himself take to walking: men always got fat as they neared fifty.
"Fat! Fifty!" roared the doctor, with enraged astonishment. "Why, I'm not by some years as old as you are, Martha! You were several classes ahead of me in school, don't you remember? I am exactly thirty-nine years old, and as you know everything else, you ought to know that!"
Miss Hopkins studied him with a balefully level eye.
"You really can't blame anybody for forgetting it, Richard," she said, ambiguously.
"You are to recollect, Geddes, that a woman is always as young as she looks," (Mr. Jelnik bowed, smilingly, to Miss Hopkins), "and a man is older than he feels," he added, for the doctor's benefit.
"All right. Let's say I feel as good as Martha looks," the doctor's momentary ill humor vanished. Miss Hopkins smiled. She had stuck her claws into him and drawn blood; but her fur was still ruffled.
Mr. Jelnik made his adieus, Boris offering each of us a polite paw.
"And now," the doctor ordered briskly, "to your spinning, jades, to your spinning! Into my car, the three of you! No, Martha, I will not take a refusal; you shall not walk: you've got to come along, if I have to tuck you under my arm. I don't care if you never reduce. What do you want to reduce for, anyhow? You're all right just as you are! There! are you satisfied?"
We stood by passively while the masterful doctor heckled and hustled the unhappy Center of Culture into his car. With heaven knows what feelings, she found herself seated beside me, Sophy Smith, while Alicia, beside the doctor, tossed gay remarks over her shoulder. Miss Hopkins realized that all Hyndsville would witness what she herself knew to be high-handed capture by force, but which must hideously resemble capitulation; and she also realized that explanations never explain.
I respected her misery enough to keep silent, and she made no attempt to converse. Her hat slid forward at a rakish angle over one ear, and her hair blew about her face in stringy wisps, as the doctor broke the speed laws on the long, level stretches of quiet roads. When we came to a rough spot she bounced up and down (one might hear her breath exhaled in a—well, yes, in a grunt) but she made no complaint, uttered no protest. She was a shackled and voiceless victim, until we finally drew up at her own gate, after an hour's jaunt, and allowed her to escape.
"Why, Martha, our little spin has given you a fine color!" remarked the doctor, genuinely pleased. Two conspicuously red spots shone in Miss Hopkins's cheeks, and her eyes were extremely bright. "We'll have to take you out with us again," he added, genially.
"Shall you, Richard?" muttered Miss Hopkins, and scuttled up her front path,
Like one who in a lonesome wood
Doth walk in fear and dread,
Because he knows a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread!
By and large, I should say that the honors were with Alicia.
The Author's secretary was pacing up and down the garden when we reached home, with Potty Black careering after him and every now and then dashing into the shrubbery to put to flight Beautiful Dog, who was also enamored of the young man with the nice smile and the good brown eyes. He had a great affection for animals, as they seemed to understand.
Beautiful Dog laid aside, for his sake, his fear of white people, and slunk after him fawningly, wagging what did duty as a tail, and showing every tooth in an ear-to-ear grin. At sight of us, Beautiful Dog gave a dismal yelp and disappeared.
"Let's sit in the library," coaxed the secretary. "I want you please to allow me to hold in my hands your copy of 'Purchas his Pilgrimes.' The Author dreams about that book out loud. Oh, yes, another thing I want to ask you: what sort of perfume do you use, and where do you get it?"
My scalp prickled.
"I noticed it in the upper hall last night," went on the secretary, innocently. "It was pervasive, but at the same time so delicate, so elusive, that I couldn't determine what it was. I am very sensitive to perfumes."
"So are we," Alicia told him. "And if what you think you smelled is what we think we smell, it isn't a—a regular perfume. It's a—a—a something that belongs to Hynds House."
The library was flooded with the ruddy light of sunset. Every bit of color in the big room stood out against a golden background, and a great golden spear fell across the dark, brooding face of Freeman Hynds above the old tiled fireplace. In that rosy glow he seemed to look down at us with living eyes.
"Is that so?" The secretary stopped; and his head went up and his nose wrinkled. For the "something that belonged to Hynds House" walked upon the air with invisible feet.
CHAPTER VIII
PEACOCKS AND IVORY
"Sophy, do you remember the night we talked it over, and decided to come here, and you were afraid of the new soil's effect upon yourself?"
"Of course. Why?"
"Oh, because."
"Because why?"
"Just because.—I wish to gracious you had a little saving vanity, Sophy Smith!"
"And what, then, is this?" I asked ironically, and rustled my skirts. For the Westmacotes were to arrive that night, in time for dinner, and I, standing before the mirror in my room, was what Alicia called "really dressed" for the first time in my life.
"From your point of view, this is a business necessity. From mine, it is applied morality. Why, Sophy, you're stunning! Here, sit down: I have to loosen up that hair a bit."
"Now!" said she, when she had critically surveyed her finished work and found it good, "Now, Sophy Smith, you are no longer efficient and utilitarian; you are effective and decorative, thank heaven!"
Really, clothes do make a tremendous difference, after all. Why, I—Well, I no longer looked root-bound.
"I said you'd put out new leaves and begin to bloom!" Alicia exulted. We bowed to the Sophy in the glass, a small and slender person with quantities of fair hair, a round white chin, and steady blue eyes. For the rest, she had a short nose and the rather wide mouth of a boy. She wasn't what you'd call a beautiful person, but she wasn't displeasing to the eye.
"Vale, plain Sophy Smith!" cried Alicia, "Ave, dear Lady of Hynds House! We who about to live salute you!"
The Westmacotes were delighted with Alicia. The Head had noticed her just about as much as a Head notices a pale file-clerk in a white shirt-waist and a black skirt. This radiant rose-maiden—"little Dawn-rose," old Riedriech called her—was new to him; and so, I fancy, was a Miss Smith in such a frock as I was wearing. He, as well as his wife and Miss Phelps-Parsons, accepted us at our face-value, with the background of Hynds House outlining us.
Miss Emmeline Phelps-Parsons was a lady with a soul. She said she had psychic consciousness and a clear green aura, and that she had been an Egyptian priestess in Thebes, in the time of Sesostris. In proof of this she showed us a fine little bronze Osiris holding a whip in one hand and the ankh in the other. ("My dear, the moment I saw him, I knew I had once prayed to him!") and she always wore a scarab ring. She had bought both in an antique-shop just off Washington Street. I thought this rather a far cry from Thebes, myself, but The Author insisted that if a Theban vestal of the time of Sesostris had to reincarnate, she would naturally and inevitably come to life a Boston one.
The Author hadn't taken any too kindly to the notion of other people coming to Hynds House. He grumbled that he had hoped he had at last found a quiet haven, a place that fitted him like a glove; he protested piercingly against having it "cluttered up with uninteresting, gobbling, gabbling, ordinary people."
"You came too late. You should have been here with Great-Aunt Sophronisba," Alicia told him, tartly. "You'd have been ideal companions, both of you beware-of-the-doggy, hair-trigger-tempery, all-to-your-selfish."
The Author gasped, and rubbed his eyes. Never, never, in all his pampered life, had one so spoken to him.
"Why, of all the cheek!" exploded The Author. "Am I to be flouted thus by a piece of pink-and-whiteness just escaped from the nursery pap-spoon?"
"Out of the mouths of babes—" insinuated Alicia.
The Author grinned. And his grin is redeeming.
"Sweet-and near-twenty," he explained. "I am not exactly all-to-myselfish, but I demand plenty of elbow-room in my existence. Generally speaking, my own society bores me less than the society of the mutable many. I like Hynds House. And I like you two women. You are not tiresome to the ear, wearisome to the mind, nor displeasing to the eye. I am even sensible of a distinct feeling of satisfaction in knowing that you are somewhere around the house. You belong. But I'm hanged if I want to see strangers come in. I object to strangers. Why are strangers necessary?"
"For the same reason that you were."
"I?" The Author's eyebrows were almost lost in his hair. "My dear, deluded child, I knew this house, and you, and Sophy Smith, before you were born! I knew you," The Author declared unblushingly, "before I was born! Now, am I a stranger?"
"Then you ought to know why Sophy and I have just got to have people, the sort of people who are coming." She paused. "We haven't best-seller royalties piled up to the roof!"
"No," said The Author, bitterly, "but I have. That's why I am forever plagued with strangers. That's why, when I discover a place and people that suit me to perfection, I can't keep 'em to myself! Oh, da—drat it all, anyhow!"
"But they aren't coming to see you. They're coming to see Hynds House," Alicia reminded him soothingly. "Besides, I don't think they're the sort of folks that care much for authors," she finished, encouragingly.
"They'll care about me" grumbled The Author glumly. "But let 'em come and be hanged to them! I shall take—"
"Soothing syrup?"
"Long walks!" snarled The Author. "I shall work all night and be invisible all day."
The Westmacotes, as Alicia said, didn't greatly care for authors, though they sat up and took polite notice of this one. (One owed that to one's self-respect.) Only Miss Emmeline paid more than passing attention to him, though her interest really centered in Mr. Nicholas Jelnik, who was dining with us that night, as was Doctor Richard Geddes.
Mr. Jelnik's presence had the effect of lightening The Author's gloom. His eyes brightened, his dejection changed into alertness, and there began that subtle game of under-the-surface thrust and parry that seemed inevitable when the two met. Mr. Westmacote listened with quiet enjoyment. His dinner was to his taste, Hynds House more than came up to his expectations, Alicia was Cinderella after the fairy's wand had passed over her, I had ceased to be a mere person and become a personage; and he found here such men as Doctor Geddes, The Author, and Nicholas Jelnik. The Head smiled at his wife, and was at peace with the world.
Miss Emmeline had already discovered the Lowestoft and Spode pieces in our built-in cupboards; that there were two perfect apostle jugs in the cabinet in the hall: that our Chelsea figures were lovelier than any she had heretofore seen; and that Hynds House, in which everything was genuine, had an atmosphere that appealed to her soul, or maybe matched her clear-green aura. Anyhow, the house reached out for Miss Emmeline as with hands and laid its spell upon her enduringly.
She sat beside me, with Alicia's pet album of Confederate generals on her knees.
"I never thought I'd have a sentimental regard for rebels," she confessed. "But, oh, they were gallant and romantic figures, when one looks at their old photographs here in Hynds House. I am Massachusetts to the bone, but I don't want to hear 'Marching through Georgia' while I'm here!"
Mr. Jelnik, overhearing her, laughed. "Perhaps I may find for you something more in keeping with Hynds House," he said, and sauntered over to the old piano. Unexpectedly it came to life. And he began to sing:
It was the silent, solemn hour
When night and morning meet,
In glided Margaret's grimly ghost,
And stood at William's feet.
Her face was like an April morn
Clad in a wintry cloud:
And clay-cold was her lily hand,
That held her sable shroud.
The Author shaded his eyes with his hand, his gaze riveted upon the singer. Alicia leaned forward, lips parted, face like an uplifted flower, eyes large with wonder and delight. The Confederate generals slid from Miss Emmeline's lap and lay face downward, forgotten. Westmacote's faded little wife, who had no children, crept closer to her big husband; and gently, unobtrusively, he reached out and took her hand in his warm grasp.
Why did you promise love to me
And not that promise keep?
Why did you swear mine eyes were bright,
Yet leave those eyes to weep?
Why did you say my face was fair,
And yet that face forsake?
How could you win my virgin heart,
Yet leave that heart to break?
I am sure there is no lovelier and more touching ballad in all our English treasury than that sad, simple, and most beautiful old song. And he had set it to an air as simple and as perfect as its own words, an old-world air that suited it and his rich and flexible voice.
"Why, Jelnik!" exclaimed Doctor Geddes, in a voice of pure astonishment, "I knew you could tinkle out a tune on a piano, but, man, I didn't dream it was in you to sing like this!" And he stared at his cousin.
"I'd make bold to swear that Mr. Jelnik has a dozen more surprises up his sleeve, if he chose to let us see them," The Author said pleasantly.
"My father's system of education included music. For which I praise him in the gates," Mr. Jelnik replied casually.
"'Tinkle out a tune on a piano'!" breathed Alicia, and cast a look of deep disdain upon the blundering doctor. "Why, I've never in all my life heard anybody sing like that!"
But I saw him through a mist, and felt my heart ache and burn in my breast, and wondered what he was doing here in my house that might have been his house, and how I was going to walk through my life after he had gone out of it.
I had a wild desire to run outside into the dark night and the hushed garden, away from everybody and weep and weep, despairingly. Because a veil had been torn from my eyes this night, and I knew that the cruellest thing that can happen to a woman had happened to me. There could be but one thing more bitter—that he or anybody else in the world should know it.
So I sat there, dumb, while everybody else said pleasant things to him, their voices sounding afar, far off.
After a while we went into the living-room where our new piano is, and he played for us—Hungarian things, I think. Then he drifted into Chopin, and Alicia stood by and turned his music for him.
"Those two," whispered Miss Emmeline, "are the most idyllic figures I have ever seen." I think she sighed as she said it. "Youth is the most beautiful thing in the world," she added.
The Westmacotes, weary after a long journey, retired early. Mr. Jelnik and Doctor Geddes had gone off together. The secretary had to finish a chapter. The Author lingered to ask, oddly enough, if I had the original plan of Hynds House. Did I know who designed it?
"Why don't you interview Judge Gatchell?"
"I did. He was polite and friendly enough, but knows no more than is strictly legal. He told me he found Hynds House here when he arrived and expected to leave it here when he departed. And Geddes knows no more. Geddes isn't interested in Hynds House by itself," finished The Author, with a crooked smile.
"Perhaps Mr. Jelnik may have some family papers."
"Perhaps he may. I'd give something for a whack at those papers, Miss Smith."
"Why not ask him to let you see them, then?"
"Tut, tut!" said The Author, crossly, and took himself off.
When I was kimonoed, braided, and slippered, Alicia in like raiment came in from her room next to mine, sat down on the floor, and leaned her head against my knees, with her cheek against my hand.
For a while, as women do, we discussed the events of the evening. Both of us had deep cause for gratification; yet both of us were strangely subdued.
"Sophy, Peacocks and Ivory is a very wonderful person, isn't he?" hesitated Alicia, after a long pause. She didn't lift her head; and the cheek against my hand was warmer than usual.
"Yes," I agreed, quietly, "so wonderful that something never to be replaced will have gone out of our lives when he goes away, and doesn't come back any more. For that is what the Nicholas Jelniks do, my dear."
"Is it?" Again she spoke after a pause. "I wonder! Somehow, I—Sophy, he belongs here. He's—why, Sophy, he's a part of the glamour."
"I'm afraid glamour hasn't part nor place in plain folks' lives."
"But we aren't plain folks any more, either, Sophy," she insisted. "Why—why—we're part of the glamour, too!"
"That is just about half true."
Alicia ignored this. She asked, instead:
"Did you hear what that great blundering doctor said about tinkling out a tune on a piano?"
I could hear Mr. Jelnik praised by her or doubted by The Author. But somehow I could not bear any criticism of Doctor Geddes just then. I said stiffly:
"I have learned to appreciate Doctor Geddes."
"You are far too fair-minded not to." Presently: "Sophy?"
"Uh-huh."
"We aren't ever going to be sorry we came here—together—are we, Sophy? And we won't ever let anybody come between us. Not anybody. Not The Author—nor his secretary—nor whatever guests come—nor Mr. Nicholas Jelnik—nor—nor Doctor Richard Geddes." Her head pressed closer to my knees.
"We came first, you and I," said Alicia, in a muffled whisper. "We are more to each other than any of them can be to us. You'll remember that, won't you?"
"I will remember, you absurd Alicia!" But I did not ask my dear girl what her incoherent words might mean. I did not ask why the soft cheek against my hand was wet.
As I have said before, Hynds House is but two stories high, with deep cellars under it, and an immense attic overhead; an attic all cut up into nooks and corners, and twists and turns, and sloping roofs and dormer windows, and two or three shallow steps going up here, and two or three more going down there, and passages and doors where you'd never look for them. We had never been able fully to explore our attic. It was Ali Baba's cave to us, with half its treasures unguessed and every trunk and box whispering, "Say 'Open, Sesame,' to me, and see what you'll find!"
While I was sitting with Alicia's head against my knee, a light, swift footstep sounded overhead in the attic, followed by a sort of stumble, as if somebody had slipped on one of those unexpected steps. Alicia rose quickly.
"Sophy," she breathed, "I have thought, once or twice, that I heard somebody walking in the attic."
"We will soon find out who it is, then," said I. Noiselessly we stole out into the hall, past the sleeping Westmacotes, and Miss Emmeline Phelps-Parsons who so longed to come in closer contact with the occult and unknown. We moved like ghosts, ourselves, our felt-soled mules making no sound.
The Author opened his door just as we approached it, and held up an imperious finger.
"Did you hear it, too?" he whispered. And walking ahead of us, he stole up the cork-screw stairway at the end of the side hall, lifted the latch of the attic door, and stepped inside.
It was frightfully dark up there. If you peered through the uncurtained windows you could see tree-tops tossing like black waves against the dark sky, and in between them rolling clouds, and little bright patchwork spaces of stars. And it was so quiet you could hear your heart beat, and your breathing seemed to rattle in your ears. We strained our eyes, seeking to pierce the gloom, stealing forward step by step. A board creaked, noisily; and then—I could have sworn it—then something seemed to move across one of the dormer windows. It was so vague, so shadowy, that one could not distinguish its outline; one could only think that something moved.
The Author gave an exclamation and switched on his electric torch, trying to focus the circle of light upon that particular window. There was nothing there. Only, it seemed to me that something, incredibly swift and silent, flashed down one of the bewildering turns to which our attic is addicted. But when we ran forward, the passage was empty. We brought up at the red brick square of one of the chimney stacks.
Almost savagely The Author flashed his light over every inch of wall and floor. Nothing. But on the close and musty air stole, not a sound, but a scent.
The Author swung around and trotted back. The window across which we thought we had seen something move was fastened from the inside, and there were one or two wooden boxes and a leather-covered trunk in the dormer recess. He sniffed hound-like around these, and with an exclamation leaned over. Behind the trunk crouched—Potty Black, with a mouse clamped in her jaws.
"For heaven's sake!" cried Alicia. "The cat! Sophy, what we heard was the cat!"
"Let us go," said The Author. And feeling rather silly, we trailed after him.
"You see," said I, "there is nothing. There never is anything."
"Come in my room for a minute," The Author whispered, and there was that in his voice which made us obey.
Inside his door, he opened his hand. In his palm was a soiled and crumpled scrap of tough, parchment-like paper about the size of an ordinary playing-card, so frayed and creased that one had difficulty in deciphering the writing on it. There clung to it a faint and unforgetable scent.
"It was behind the trunk, partly under the cat's black paw. I smelled it when I leaned over, and I thought we might as well have a look at it." said The Author.
And on the following page is what The Author had found.
'"Shades of E.A. Poe, and Robert Louis the Beloved! What have we here?" cried The Author, joyously, and stood on one leg like a stork. "Was there a Hynds woman named Helen? 'Turn Hellen's Key three tens and three?' Some keyhole! I say, Miss Smith, let me keep this for a while, will you?"
"Do, Sophy, let him keep it!" pleaded Alicia.
"I'll take the best care of it, Miss Smith; indeed I will!" The Author promised. "Look here: I'll lock it in the clothes-closet, in the breast pocket of my coat." As he spoke, he opened the cedar-lined closet, that was almost as big as a modern hall bedroom, and put the paper in the breast pocket of his coat. Locking the door, he placed the key under his pillow, and beside it a new and businesslike Colt automatic.
"There!" said The Author, confidently. "Nobody can get into that closet without first tackling me. Now you girls go to bed. To-morrow we'll tackle the unraveling."
And we, remembering of a sudden that we were pig-tailed and kimonoed, and that The Author himself resembled a step-ladder with a shawl draped around it, departed hurriedly.
He was late at the breakfast-table next morning. Gloom and abstraction sat visibly upon him. He left his secretary to bear the brunt of conversation with the Westmacotes and Miss Emmeline. For once he failed to do justice to Mary Magdalen's hot biscuit, and ignored Fernolia's astonished and concerned stare; even a whispered, "Honey, is you-all got a misery anywheres?" failed to rouse him. I found him, after a while, waiting for me in the library.
"Miss Smith,"—The Author strode restlessly up and down—"this house has a peculiar effect upon people; a very peculiar effect. Since I came here, I have learned to walk in my sleep." And seeing my look of astonishment, "I walked in my sleep last night. And I took that bit of doggerel out of my coat pocket, locked the closet door, and replaced the key under my pillow."
"How strange! And where did you put it?" I wondered.
"Exactly: where did I put it?" repeated The Author, rumpling his hair with both hands. "That's what I want to know, myself. I've looked everywhere in my room, and in Johnson's, and I can't find the thing. It's gone," and he stalked out, with his shoulders hunched to his ears.
I sat still, staring out at the window. There was a thing I hadn't told The Author, or even Alicia. I had no idea what the "bit of doggerel" meant, if, indeed, it meant anything. But when I had held Freeman Hynds's old diary in my hands, between the two pages following the last entry had been a creased and soiled piece of paper. I had seen it out of the tail of my eye, as the saying is. It was only a glimpse, but one trained to handle many papers, as I had been, has a quick and an accurate eye. And I knew that the paper found by The Author in the attic, and now lost again, was the paper I had seen in Freeman Hynds's diary.
CHAPTER IX
THE JUDGMENT OF SPRING
Judge Gatchell's nephews and nieces, brought by that punctilious gentleman to call upon Miss Alicia Gaines, found her enchanting and cried it to the circumambient air. It was as if the voice of April had summoned the cohorts of Spring. For fresh-faced boys of a sudden appeared in increasing numbers; and flower-faced girls came fluttering into Hynds House like butterflies. They cared for its history and its hatreds not a fig: what has April to do with last November? The faith of Youth has a clearer-eyed wisdom, a sweeter, sounder justice than the sourer verdict of the mature. For theirs is the judgment of Spring. By this sign they conquer.
Susy Gatchell enlisted Mary Meade and Helen Fenwick, and these three held all younger Hyndsville in the hollow of their pink palms. After which, as Doctor Richard Geddes told me wrathfully, you "couldn't put your foot down without running the risk of stepping on some little cockerel trying to crow around Hynds House."
The tide was turning in our direction. Also, we were in daily contact with really worth-while people, people that otherwise we should have met only in books, magazines, and newspapers. And they liked us. The amazing miracle was that we, also we, were their sort of folk!
I knew I was being given unbuyable things. One could not live under the same roof with thin dark Luis Morenas and view what magic his pencil worked, without learning somewhat of the holiness of creative work. One couldn't listen to The Author without being somewhat brightened by his daring wit, his glowing genius; nor live face to face with big Westmacote without revering the broadness of the American master spirit, to which Big Business is only a part of the Great Game. As for Miss Emmeline Phelps-Parsons, it didn't take Alicia and me long to discover what real depths underlay that Boston-spinster mind of hers.
And you simply couldn't breathe the same air with The Suffragist—who appeared with two trunks, three valises, and a type-writer, all covered with "Votes for Women!" stickers—without an expansion of the chest. She gave you the impression of having been dressed by machinery out of gear, and of then having been whacked flat with a shovel. When she clapped on what she called a hat, you wondered whether a heron hadn't built its nest on her head. But when she began to speak, you listened with the ears of your immortal soul stretched wide. Women worshiped her, though Mr. Jelnik's eyes danced, and Westmacote's military mustache bristled a bit, and she all but drove Doctor Richard Geddes, who had notions of his own, out of his senses.
"Stop trying to argue with me, my dear man," she'd say in her rich voice, "but come and let us reason together. I haven't heard one word of reason from you yet!" And she'd let loose one of her rollicking laughs that set the doctor's teeth on edge and made The Author shudder. The Author snarled to me that she laughed like a rolling-mill and reasoned like a head-on collision. He put her in his new book, clothes and all. Just as Luis Morenas, with an edged smile on his thin lips, made rapid-fire sketches of her. He called her "The Future-Maker."
Now, shouldn't Alicia and I have been happy? And yet we weren't. Alicia's laugh wasn't so frequent. I would catch her watching me, with an odd, troubled, anxious speculation in her eyes. She had a habit of blushing suddenly, and as quickly paling. And quietly, but none the less surely and definitely, she had begun to avoid Doctor Richard Geddes. It wasn't that she ceased to be friendly; but she placed between herself and him one of those women-built, impalpable, impassable barriers which baffled, puzzled men are unable to tear down. It was impossible, I thought, that she should remain blind to his open passion for herself: he was anything but subtle, was Richard of the Lionheart. A blind man could have told, from the mere sound of his voice, a deaf man from the mere expression of his eyes, that Alicia had the big doctor's whole heart.
On his side, he was in deep waters. His ruddy color faded; his face took on a fixed, grim intensity. And when he watched the girl flirting now with this boy, now with that, after the innocent fashion of natural girls, but always reserving a friendlier smile, a more eager greeting, for Mr. Nicholas Jelnik, I was so sorry for Doctor Richard that I couldn't help trying, covertly, to console him.
It so happened that Miss Emmeline Phelps-Parsons, daughter of the Puritans though she was, nevertheless had a distinct liking for what she termed Episcopacy. She was pleased with old St. Polycarp's. She liked Mrs. Haile, to whom she happened to mention that her opportunities for studying the life of native women and children in the East had been rather unusually good, since she had visited many missionary stations in China and India. Things were languishing just then, and Mrs. Haile looked at Miss Emmeline almost imploringly: would she, could she, give the ladies a little lecture?—tell us things first-hand, so to speak?
Miss Emmeline reflected. She looked at Alicia and me.
"Could we have it in your delightful library?" she wondered. "That beautiful old room has a soul which speaks to mine. Dear Miss Smith, would it be too much to ask you to let me have my little talk, a very informal little lecture, in wonderful old Hynds House?"
Mrs. Haile turned a sort of greenish pink. It wasn't for her to suggest, after that, that it might be better to have the lecture in the parsonage; any more than for me to hint, without ungraciousness, that it might be just as well not to have it in Hynds House. Alicia shot me one quizzical, Irish-blue glance when I said, "Yes."
And that's how, on a sunny Wednesday afternoon, all Hyndsville came to Hynds House to hear Miss Emmeline Phelps-Parsons tell them "How to Reach the Women of the East." Somehow, I rather think they were as curious about two Yankee women as they were about those Eastern women of whom Miss Emmeline was talking. I'm sure Hynds House was just as interesting to them as Mohammedan harems and Indian zenanas.
Miss Emmeline really spoke well, and her audience was interested in her, in her theme, and in Hynds House. The Suffragist picked up the thread where the less gifted woman dropped it, and in simple, living phrases drove home the great truth of the sisterhood of all women.
Which, of course, called for tea, and some of Mary Magdalen's cookies. It was the cookies that caught The Author. Coming in from a long and hungry prowl, he spied Fernolia crossing the hall with a huge platter, got one tantalizing, mouth-watering odor, and dashed after her, bent upon robbery. A second later he found himself in a room full of women. Hyndsville was meeting The Author!
Alicia introduced him, pleasantly. And, "Talk about angels—" said she, gaily, "We have just this minute stopped talking about the heathen! And may I give you a cup of tea?"
"And a dozen or so cookies, please. Thank heaven for the heathen! What is home without the heathen?—Without sugar, Miss Gaines, without sugar! And for charity's sake, no lemon!"
He sipped his tea and munched his cookies, with his head on one side and the air of a thievish jackdaw; and proceeded, after his wont, to extract such pith as the situation offered.
"Doctor Johnson," Miss Martha Hopkins remembered, as she watched him drinking his fourth cup of tea, "Doctor Johnson was also addicted to tea-drinking. Most great literary men are, I believe."
"It isn't possible you consider old Johnson a great literary man!" The Author's eyebrows climbed into his hair.
"Why! wasn't he?" Her eyes widened. She had as much respect for Dr. Johnson as Miss Deborah Jenkyns had, though of course she never read him. Life is too short.
"Why! was he?" asked The Author. "Outside of Boswell—and he was a fool—I've never known anybody who thought he amounted to much."
The Suffragist looked up. "Nelson had his Southey, Boswell had his Johnson, and Mr. Modern Best-seller may well profit by their example." And she smiled grimly.
The Author's lip lifted. "Oh, but you couldn't do it!" he purred. "And if I offered you the job you'd excuse your incapacity on the ground that there wasn't anything to write about. I know you!" He took another cooky.
"Yes, I dare say I'd blurt out the truth. Women are like that," admitted The Suffragist.
"The female of the species is more deadly than the male," conceded The Author. "Nevertheless," he raised his tea-cup gallantly, "To the ladies!" He got up, leisurely. "And now I go," said he, "to paint the lily and adorn the rose. In short, to set forth in adequate and remunerative language the wit, wisdom, virtue, beauty, and ornateness of woman as she thinks men think she is. Nature," reflected The Author, smiling at The Suffragist, "made me a writer. The devil, the editors, and the women have made me a best-seller." And he departed, a cooky in each hand.
That night one of the Gatchell boys took Alicia to a dance. She was in blue and white, like an angel, and the Gatchell boy trod on air. But to me came Doctor Richard Geddes, and threw himself into a wing-chair.
"Sophronisba Two," he asked, we being alone in the library, "what have I done to offend Alicia?"
"Is Alicia offended?"
"Isn't she?" wondered the doctor. "She won't let me get near enough to find out," he added gloomily. "And it isn't just. She ought to know that—well, that I'd rather cut off my right hand than give her real cause for offense. I'm going to ask you a straight, man question; is that girl a—a flirt? She is not a—jilt?"
"Heaven forbid!"
"Does she care for anybody else?"
"On my honor, I don't know."
"It couldn't be any of these whipper-snappers of boys: she's not that sort," worried the doctor. "Sophy, is it—Jelnik?"
My heart stood still. I could make no reply.
"I don't know. My dear friend, I don't know!"
"It would be the most natural thing in the world," he reflected. "Jelnik looks like Prince Charming himself. And, for all his surface indolence, there's genius in the man. Why shouldn't she be taken with him?"
We looked at each other.
"I see," said the doctor, quietly. "Now, little friend, what concerns you and me is our dear girl's happiness. Does Jelnik care, do you think?"
"I don't know!" I said again. I felt like one on the rack. It seemed to me I could hear my heart-strings stretching and snapping. "But what is one girl's affection to a man born to be loved by women?"
"He is indifferent to women, for the most part," the doctor said thoughtfully. "He is so free from vanity, and at the same time so reserved, that one has difficulty in getting at his real feelings."
"She, also, is free from petty vanity," I told him. "She has an innocent, happy pleasure in her own youth and prettiness, but hers is the unspoiled heart of a child."
"Who should know it better than I, that am a great hulking, bad-tempered fellow twice her age!" groaned the doctor. "Yet, Sophy, I could make her happier than Jelnik could. Dear and lovely as she is, she couldn't make him happy, either—Don't you think I'm a fool, Sophy?"
"No," said I, smiling wanly; "I don't."
"This business of being in love is a damnable arrangement. Here was I," he grumbled, "busy, reasonably happy, with a sound mind in a sound body, and a digestion that was a credit to me. And along comes a girl, and everything's changed! My work doesn't fill my days, my food is bitter in my mouth, and I wake up in the night saying to myself, 'You fool, you're chasing rainbows!' Sophy, don't you ever fall in love with somebody you know you can't have! It's hell!"
I didn't tell him I knew it.
One of his men came to tell him he was needed urgently. As it meant a thirty-mile trip and the night was cold, I made him wait for a cup of coffee and an omelet."
"Miss Smith—"
"You said 'Sophy' a while ago. 'Sophy' sounds all right to me."
"It sounds fine to me, too, Sophy." And he reached out and seized my hand with a grip that made me wince.
"I told you I was a bear!" he said, regretfully.
When Alicia returned, she came, as usual, to my room.
"I am tired!" she yawned, and curled herself up on the bed.
"Didn't you have a nice time?"
"Oh, I suppose so! Everybody was lovely to me, and I could have divided my dances. These Southerners are easy to love, aren't they? I find it very easy for me! And oh, Sophy, there's to be a picnic day after to-morrow, at the Meade plantation, in my honor, if you please! We go by automobile.—I never thought I could get tired dancing, Sophy. But I am. Tired!"
"Go to bed and sleep it off."
"Did you have time to make out that grocery list? They've been overcharging us on butter."
"Yes: I finished it after Doctor Geddes left"
"Oh! He was here, then?" She yawned again.
"Yes. But somebody sent for him, and he had to cut his visit short."
Alicia frowned.
"I wonder he keeps so healthy, running out at all hours of the night; and heaven knows how he manages about meals! His cook told me that sometimes he has to rush away in the middle of a meal, and sometimes he misses one altogether."
"I remembered that, so I made him wait for a cup of coffee and an omelet."
She reached over and squeezed my hand. "You're always thinking about other people's comfort, Sophy." She paused, and looked at me half-questioningly:
"I wish he had somebody to look after him," she said in a low voice, "somebody like you." She added, as if to herself: "He takes two lumps of sugar in his coffee, one in his tea, wants dry toast, and likes his omelet buttered."
And when I stared at her, she slipped nearer, and laid her cheek against mine.
"Sophy," in a soft whisper, "you've made up to me for my father and my mother, and for the sisters and brothers I never had. We're all sorts and conditions of folks, aren't we, Sophy?—but none like you, Sophy; not any one of them all like you!"
At that moment, through the open window, there stole in on the night air the faintest whisper of music. It wasn't mournful, it wasn't joyful, but both together; a singing voice, a crying voice, wild and sweet, part of the night and the trees and the wind, and part, I think, of the secretest something in the human heart. We had no idea where it came from; out of the sky, perhaps!
Somebody ran down-stairs, and a moment later the front door opened softly. The Author had heard, and was afoot. But even as he stepped outside, Ariel's ghostly music ceased. There was nothing; nobody; only the night.
CHAPTER X
THE FOREST OF ARDEN
I had seen Alicia whirl away in the Meades' big car. I had seen the Westmacotes and Miss Emmeline off on what they termed a nature-hunt. The Author and his secretary were up to the eyes in a new chapter; The Suffragist was spreading the glad tidings; and Riedriech and Schmetz had Luis Morenas in hand for the afternoon, visioning the United States of the World, while he snatched sketches of the visionaries.
The Author, Mr. Johnson, and I, lunched together.
"Miss Smith," began The Author abruptly, "did you know this house was built by British and French master masons? No? Well, it was. Judge Gatchell's father, grandfather, and great-grandfather were solicitors for this estate, and the judge at last very kindly allowed me to look through a great batch of papers in his possession. From these I discovered that one of the Hyndses visited England in 1727, joined the new lodge lately established there, and brought one of the brethren, an architect, back to America with him. Another came from France. These three planned and built this house, and did it pretty well, too.
"This house-builder, Walsingham Hynds, made his house a sort of lodge for the brethren, just as in later times his grandsons sheltered the brethren of those societies that fathered the American Revolution. Gatchell tells me there is a legend of the master of Hynds House entertaining British officers and at the same time hiding the forfeited rebels they were hunting. I'd like to know," The Author added, reflectively, "where he hid them."
"An old house like this has dozens of places where one could be hidden without much danger of detection," remarked Mr. Johnson.
"I'm pretty sure of that," agreed The Author, emphatically.
"You should be, since you did a neat little bit of hiding on your own account," Mr. Johnson reminded him.
The Author was nettled. He had never found the paper lost out of the closet in his own room, though he had never given up a tentative search for it.
"Well, it's confoundedly odd I never did such a thing before," he grumbled.
"What is odd is that I myself was waked out of my sleep that night by the most oppressive sense of misery and hopelessness I have ever experienced," Mr. Johnson said seriously. "It was so overpowering that it made me think of Saint Theresa's description of her torment in that oven in the wall of hell which had by kindly forethought on the part of the devil been arranged for her permanent tenancy. Of course, it was just a nightmare," he added, doubtfully; "or perhaps a fit of indigestion."
"Indigestion takes many forms," I remarked, as lightly as I could. "And you must remember you've been warned that Hynds House is haunted. Why, the servants insist they've seen ol' Mis' Scarlett's h'ant!"
"Ah!" nodded The Author. "And I smell a mysterious perfume, I walk in my sleep for the first and only time in my life, and I hide where it can't be found a paper with an uncouth jingle and some dots on it, Johnson and I have the same nightmare. And I have heard footsteps. All hallucinations, of course! I will say this much for Hynds House: I never had a hallucination until I came here. By the way, did I merely imagine I heard a violin last night?"
"Oh, no: I heard it, too." Mr. Johnson looked at The Author with a concerned face. "You're getting a bit off your nerves, Chief. Anybody might play a violin."
"Anybody might, but few do play it as I thought I heard it played last night. Who's the player, Miss Smith?"
"I haven't the slightest idea. Alicia thinks it's a spirit that lives in the crape-myrtle trees."
I was beginning to be aweary of The Author's shrewd eyes and persistent questioning, and I was heartily glad when he had to go back to his work.
That was a gray and windless afternoon, and the house was full of those bluish shadows that belong to gray days; it was charged, even more than usual, with mystery: the whole atmosphere tingled with it as with electricity. I couldn't read. I have never been able to play upon any musical instrument, much as I love music. I do not sing, either, except in a small-beer voice; and when I tried to sew I pricked my fingers with the needle. I went into the kitchen, consulted with Mary Magdalen as to the evening's dinner, weighed and measured such ingredients as she needed, saw that the two maids were following instructions, tried to make friends with Beautiful Dog, until he howled with anguish and affliction and fled as from pestilence; and, unable to endure the house any longer, put on my hat and set out upon one of those aimless walks one takes in a land where all walks are lovely.
Automobiles came and went upon the public road, and to escape them I crossed a wooden foot-bridge spanning a weedy ditch, struck into a path bordering a wide field followed it aimlessly for a while, and before I knew it was in the Enchanted Wood.
The Enchanted Wood was carpeted with brown and sweet-smelling pine-needles, with green clumps of honeysuckle breaking out here and there in moist spots. There were cassena bushes, full of vivid scarlet berries; and crooked, gray-green cedars; and brown boles of pine-trees; and the shallowest, gayest, absurdest little thread of a brook giggling as it went about its important business of keeping a lip of woodland green.
It was very, very still there, somewhat as Gethsemane might have been, I fancy. I had wanted to be alone, that I might wrestle with my trouble. Yet now that I was facing it, my spirit quailed. Never had I felt so desolate, or dreamed that the human heart could bear such anguish.
If I had had the faintest warning, that I might have saved myself! If I had never come to Hynds House at all, but had lived my busy, matter-of-fact, quiet life! Yet the idea of never having seen him, never having loved him, was more cruel than the cruellest suffering that loving entailed. It was harder even than the thought that Alicia and I cared for the same man, who perhaps cared for neither of us. At that I fell into an agony of weeping.
That passed. I was spent and empty. But the calm of acceptance had come. I wasn't to lose my grip, nor wear the willow. The idea of me, Sophy Smith, wearing the willow, aroused my English common-sense. I refused to be ridiculous.
And then I looked up and saw him coming toward me, his great dog trotting at his side. I pulled myself together, and smiled; for Boris was thrusting his friendly nose into my palm, and rubbing his fine head against my shoulder, and his master had dropped lightly down beside me.
I had not seen Mr. Jelnik for several days, and it struck me painfully that the man was pale, that his step dragged, and the brightness of his beauty was dimmed. He looked older, more careworn. If he was glad to see me, it was at first a troubled gladness, for he started, and bit his lip. I wondered, not with jealousy, but with pain, if there was somebody, some beautiful and high-born lady, at sight of whom his heart might have leaped as mine did now. Was it, perhaps, to forget such a one that he had exiled himself?
"You are such a serene, restful little person!" he said presently, and a change came over his tired face; "and I am such a restless one! You soothe me like a cool hand on a hot forehead."
"Restless?—you? Why, I thought you the serenest person I had ever known."
His mocking, gentle smile curved his lips. But his eyes were not laughing. For a fleeting, flashing second the whirlpools and the depths were bared in them. Then the veil fell, the surface lights came out and danced.
"My father was an excellent teacher," he said, indifferently. "The whole object of his training was self-control. He was really a very wonderful man, my father. But he overlooked one highly important factor in my make-up, my Hynds blood."
I made no reply. I was wondering, perplexedly, how I, I of all people, should have been picked up and enmeshed in the web of these Hyndses and their fate.
"Thank you," said he, gratefully, "for your silence. Most women would have talked, for the good of my soul. Why don't you talk?"
"Because I have nothing to say."
"You evidently inherited a God-sent reticence from your British forebears. The British have 'illuminating flashes of silence.' It is one of their saving graces."
I proved it.
Mr. Jelnik, with a whimsical, sidewise glance, drew nearer.
"Why, instead of sitting at the foot of a pine-tree, which is also a reticent creature, are you not sitting at the feet of our friend The Author, who is perfectly willing to illumine the universe? Very bright man, The Author. How do you like his secretary?"
"Mr. Johnson? Oh, very much indeed! He is charming!"
"I find him so myself. But he is melting wax before the fire of feminine eyes. A man in love is a sorry spectacle!"
"Is he?"
"Ach, yes! Consider my cousin Richard Geddes, for instance."
At that I winced, remembering the doctor's eyes when he had spoken of Alicia and of this man. I looked at Mr. Jelnik now, wonderingly. If he knew that much, hadn't he any heart? He stopped short. A wrinkle came between his black brows.
"I am not to speak lightly of my Cousin Richard, I perceive."
"No. Please, please, no!"
"I hadn't meant to. Richard," said Mr. Jelnik, gravely, "is a good man."
"Oh, yes! Indeed, yes! And—and he has a deep affection for you, Mr. Jelnik."
"We Hyndses are the deuce and all for affection. We take it in such deadly earnest that we store up a fine lot of trouble for ourselves." His face darkened.
I had been right, then, in supposing that there was somebody, perhaps half the world away, for whom he cared. And he didn't care for Alicia. I was sure of that.
"Don't go!" he begged, as I stirred. "Stay with me for a little while: I need you. I am tired, I am bored, I am disgusted with things as they are. There is nothing new under the sun, and all is vanity and vexation of spirit. Also, I am fronting the forks of a dilemma: Shall I shake the dust of Hyndsville from my foot, yield to the Wanderlust and go what our worthy friend Judge Gatchell calls 'tramping,' or shall I stay here yet awhile? I can't make up my mind!"
"Do you want to go?"
"Yes and no. Hold: let's toss for it and let the fall of the coin decide." He took from his pocket a thin silver foreign coin, and showed it me.
"Heads, I go. Tails, I stay," he said, and tossed it into the air. It fell beside me, out of his reach. With a swift hand I picked it up.
"Well?" he asked, indifferently.
My hand shut down upon it. There was the sound of wind in my ears, and my heart pounded, and my sight blurred. Then somebody—oh, surely not I!—in a low, clear, modulated voice spoke:
"You will have to stay, Mr. Jelnik," said the voice, pleasantly. "It is tails."
And all the while the inside Me, the real Me, was crying accusingly: "Oh, liar! liar! It is heads!"
Did he smile? I do not know. He did not look at me for the minute, but stared instead at the gray-blue, shadowed woods, the brown boles of the pines, the bright trickle of water playing it was a real brook.
"Tails it is. I stay," he said presently. And with a swift movement he reached out and lightly patted my hand with the coin in it.
"Well, it's decided. You have got me for a next-door neighbor for a while longer, Miss Smith. No, don't go yet."
So I stayed, who would have stayed in the Pit to be near him, or walked out of heaven to follow him, had he called me.
"Do you know," he spoke in a plaintive voice—"that I haven't had any lunch? I forgot to go home for lunch! Boris, go get me something to eat, old chap!"
Boris hung out a tongue like a flag, looked in his man's eyes, and vanished, running as only the thoroughbred wolf-hound can run.
"I am so tired! Should you mind if I kept my dog's place warm at your feet, Miss Smith?" And he stretched his long length on the pine-needles, his hands under his head, his face upturned.
"I wish I had a pillow!" he complained.
I scooped up an armful of the pine-needles, while he watched me lazily, and packed it over and between the roots of the pine-tree.
"You're a Sister of Charity," said he, gratefully. "But I can't afford to scratch my neck." And coolly he took a fold of my brown silk skirt, patted it over the straw, and with a sigh of satisfaction rested his head upon it.
"This is very pleasant!" he sighed. Presently: "Your hair looks just as a woman's hair ought to look, under that brown hat," he said drowsily, "soft and fair. And after this, I shall order some brown-silk cushion-covers. I never knew anything could feel so comfortable and restful!" He closed his eyes.
I sat there, hands locked tightly together, and looked down at his beautiful head, his slim and boyish body; and I felt an aching sense of resentment. No man has any business to be like that, and then come into the life of a woman named Smith.
He did not move, nor did I. We might have been creatures motionless under a spell, in that Enchanted Wood; until from the outside world came Boris, carrying a wicker basket, in which sandwiches, fruit, a small bottle of wine, and a silver drinking-cup had been carefully packed.
"Boris is used to playing courier." His master patted him affectionately. "Come, Miss Smith. By the way, that isn't your real name, though. Your name is Woman-in-the-Woods. Mine is—"
"Fortunatus."
He raised his brows. "I was about to say 'Man-who-is-Hungry,'" he finished, pleasantly. "I once knew an Indian named Tail-feathers-going-over-the-Hill. It taught me the value of being explicit as to one's name. Here, you shall have the cup, and I'll drink out of the bottle. Some of these fine days, Woman-in-the-Woods, I shall take you on a jaunt with me and Boris."
"It sounds promising," I admitted, cautiously.
"It is more. You shall learn all the fine points of out-of-door housekeeping.—Drink your wine, Woman-in-the-Woods. You were pale, very pale, when I came upon you. I was afraid something had been troubling you."
"Something troubles everybody."
"Oh, bromidic Miss Smith!—Drink your wine, please. And do not look doubtfully upon that sandwich. My man knows how to build them."
His man did. The sandwich was manna. The wine evidently came from heaven.
"Now you have a color. I say, is Morenas going to do you, too?"
"Good gracious, no! But he has sketched Alicia a dozen times at least."
"And me," said Mr. Jelnik, gloomily. "There's no evading the brute. I turn like a weathercock; and there he is, with corrugated brow and slitted eyes, studying me! And the baleful eye of The Author also pursues me. Between them, I feel skinned."
"Mr. Morenas says you are a rare but quite perfect type," I told him, mischievously.
The young man shrugged his shoulders disdainfully. "Am I a type, Woman-in-the-Woods?" he asked.
"Indeed, you are absolutely different from anybody else." And then, terrified, I turned red.
"Oh, I know! You didn't mean it either as a brick-bat or a bouquet, merely the truth as you see it. You are transparently truthful, fundamentally truthful, and at the same time the American business woman! You can't understand how that intrigues me!"
And then, quite simply and boyishly, he began to talk about himself. I got glimpses of a boyhood spent partly in a stately home in Vienna, and partly roaming about the great Hungarian estate which his mother loved, and to which the two returned summer after summer, until her death. Then student days, and after that, foot-loose wanderings up and down the earth and across the seven seas.
His grandmother had dropped courtesies to kings; and mine had dropped "aitches." His father had been a European celebrity, mine a ship-chandler in Boston, U.S.A. Yet here we two were; and he might have been a high-spirited and most beautiful little boy picnicking with a sedate and old-maidish little girl.
"How old should you imagine me?" he flung the question like a challenge, as if he had divined my thoughts.
"Oh, say, thirteen, going on fourteen."
"Dear Woman-in-the-Woods, I am thirty-three."
"You are older than I thought."
"You are younger than you think. And you betray the fact," he smiled.
"I have never been very young; probably I shall never be very old."
"You will always be exactly the right age," said Nicholas Jelnik. "For you will always be a little girl, and a young maiden, and a grown woman, and a bit of an old maid, and something of a grandmother. That is a wonderful, a very, very wonderful combination!"
I looked at him with more than doubt. But no, he was not poking fun, though the rich color had come into his cheek, and the golden lights flickered mischievously in his eyes.
"And I forgot to add, also a business woman!" he finished gaily. "Herr Gott, but it took a business woman to tackle old Hynds House and gather together such folks as you have there now!"