The Trumpeter Swan
by Temple Bailey · English · Gutenberg #17697 · 455,206 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Trumpeter Swan
Author: Temple Bailey
Illustrator: Alice Barber Stephens
Release date: February 7, 2006 [eBook #17697]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/17697
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TRUMPETER SWAN ***
Produced by Sjaani, Beginners Projects and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
[Illustration: "WHEN I AM MARRIED WILL YOU SOUND YOUR TRUMPET HIGH UP
NEAR THE MOON?"]
The
Trumpeter Swan
By
TEMPLE BAILEY
_Author of "The Tin Soldier" "Contrary Mary"
"Mistress Anne" "Glory of Youth"_
_Sonus ex nubibus te revocabit a mundo_
A sound from the clouds shall call thee from this earth
Illustrated by
ALICE BARBER STEPHENS
THE PENN PUBLISHING
COMPANY PHILADELPHIA
1920
COPYRIGHT
1920 BY
THE PENN
PUBLISHING
COMPANY
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. A Major and Two Minors 7
II. Stuffed Birds 33
III. A Wolf in the Forest 61
IV. Rain and Randy's Soul 88
V. Little Sister 108
VI. Georgie-Porgie 127
VII. Mademoiselle Midas 147
VIII. Ancestors 161
IX. "T. Branch" 181
X. A Gentleman's Lie 214
XI. Wanted--a Pedestal 245
XII. Indian--Indian 263
XIII. The Whistling Sally 289
XIV. The Dancer on the Moor 313
XV. The Trumpeter Swan 333
XVI. The Conqueror 361
ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE
"When I am Married Will You Sound Your
Trumpet High Up Near the Moon?" _Frontispiece_
"It's So Heavenly to Have You Home" 9
Becky Drew A Sharp Breath--Then Faced
Dalton Squarely--"I Am Going to Marry Randy" 143
"Oh, Oh," She Whispered, "You Don't Know
How I Have Wanted You" 257
THE TRUMPETER SWAN
CHAPTER I
A MAJOR AND TWO MINORS
I
It had rained all night, one of the summer rains that, beginning in a
thunder-storm in Washington, had continued in a steaming drizzle until
morning.
There were only four passengers in the sleeper, men all of them--two in
adjoining sections in the middle of the car, a third in the
drawing-room, a fourth an intermittent occupant of a berth at the end.
They had gone to bed unaware of the estate or circumstance of their
fellow-travellers, and had waked to find the train delayed by washouts,
and side-tracked until more could be learned of the condition of the
road.
The man in the drawing-room shone, in the few glimpses that the others
had of him, with an effulgence which was dazzling. His valet, the
intermittent sleeper in the end berth, was a smug little soul, with a
small nose which pointed to the stars. When the door of the compartment
opened to admit breakfast there was the radiance of a brocade
dressing-gown, the shine of a sleek head, the staccato of an imperious
voice.
Randy Paine, long and lank, in faded khaki, rose, leaned over the seat
of the section in front of him and drawled, "'It is not raining rain to
me--it's raining roses--down----'"
A pleasant laugh, and a deep voice, "Come around here and talk to me.
You're a Virginian, aren't you?"
"By the grace of God and the discrimination of my ancestors," young
Randolph, as he dropped into the seat opposite the man with the deep
voice, saluted the dead and gone Paines.
"Then you know this part of it?"
"I was born here. In this county. It is bone of my bone and flesh of my
flesh," there was a break in the boy's voice which robbed the words of
grandiloquence.
"Hum--you love it? Yes? And I am greedy to get away. I want wider
spaces----"
"California?"
"Yes. Haven't seen it for three years. I thought when the war was over I
might. But I've got to be near Washington, it seems. The heat drove me
out, and somebody told me it would be cool in these hills----"
"It is, at night. By day we're not strenuous."
"I like to be strenuous. I hate inaction."
He moved restlessly. There was a crutch by his side. Young Paine noticed
it for the first time. "I hate it."
He had a strong frame, broad shoulders and thin hips. One placed him
immediately as a man of great physical force. Yet there was the crutch.
Randy had seen other men, broad-shouldered, thin-hipped, who had come to
worse than crutches. He did not want to think of them. He had escaped
without a scratch. He did not believe that he had lacked courage, and
there was a decoration to prove that he had not. But when he thought of
those other men, he had no sense of his own valor. He had given so
little and they had given so much.
Yet it was not a thing to speak of. He struck, therefore, a note to
which he knew the other might respond.
"If you haven't been here before, you'll like the old places."
"I am going to one of them."
"Which?"
"King's Crest."
A moment's silence. Then, "That's my home. I have lived there all my
life."
The lame man gave him a sharp glance. "I heard of it in
Washington--delightful atmosphere--and all that----"
"You are going as a--paying guest?"
"Yes."
A deep flush stained the younger man's face. Suddenly he broke out. "If
you knew how rotten it seems to me to have my mother keeping--boarders----"
"My dear fellow, I hope you don't think it is going to be rotten to have
me?"
"No. But there are other people. And I didn't know until I came back
from France---- She had to tell me when she knew I was coming."
"She had been doing it all the time you were away?"
"Yes. Before I went we had mortgaged things to help me through the
University. I should have finished in a year if I hadn't enlisted. And
Mother insisted there was enough for her. But there wasn't with the
interest and everything--and she wouldn't sell an acre. I shan't let her
keep on----"
"Are you going to turn me out?"
His smile was irresistible. Randy smiled back. "I suppose you think I'm
a fool----?"
"Yes. For being ashamed of it."
Randy's head went up. "I'm not ashamed of the boarding-house. I am
ashamed to have my mother work."
"So," said the lame man, softly, "that's it? And your name is Paine?"
"Randolph Paine of King's Crest. There have been a lot of us--and not a
piker in the lot."
"I am Mark Prime."
"Major Prime of the 135th?"
The other nodded. "The wonderful 135th--God, what men they were----" his
eyes shone.
Randy made his little gesture of salute. "They were that. I don't wonder
you are proud of them."
"It was worth all the rest," the Major said, "to have known my men."
He looked out of the window at the drizzle of rain. "How quiet the world
seems after it all----"
Then like the snap of bullets came the staccato voice through the open
door of the compartment.
"Find out why we are stopping in this beastly hole, Kemp, and get me
something cold to drink."
Kemp, sailing down the aisle, like a Lilliputian drum major, tripped
over Randy's foot.
"Beg pardon, sir," he said, and sailed on.
Randy looked after him. "'His Master's voice----'"
"And to think," Prime remarked, "that the coldest thing he can get on
this train is ginger ale."
Kemp, coming back with a golden bottle, with cracked ice in a tall
glass, with a crisp curl of lemon peel, ready for an innocuous
libation, brought his nose down from the heights to look for the foot,
found that it no longer barred the way, and marched on to hidden music.
"Leave the door open, leave it open," snapped the voice, "isn't there an
electric fan? Well, put it on, put it on----"
"He drinks nectar and complains to the gods," said the Major softly,
"why can't we, too, drink?"
They had theirs on a table which the porter set between them. The train
moved on before they had finished. "We'll be in Charlottesville in less
than an hour," the conductor announced.
"Is that where we get off, Paine?"
"One mile beyond. Are they going to meet you?"
"I'll get a station wagon."
Young Paine grinned. "There aren't any. But if Mother knows you're
coming she'll send down. And anyhow she expects me."
"After a year in France--it will be a warm welcome----"
"A wet one, but I love the rain, and the red mud, every blooming inch of
it."
"Of course you do. Just as I love the dust of the desert."
They spoke, each of them, with a sort of tense calmness. One doesn't
confess to a lump in one's throat.
The little man, Kemp, was brushing things in the aisle. He was hot but
unconquered. Having laid out the belongings of the man he served, he
took a sudden recess, and came back with a fresh collar, a wet but
faultless pompadour, and a suspicion of powder on his small nose.
"All right, sir, we'll be there in fifteen minutes, sir," they heard him
say, as he was swallowed up by the yawning door.
II
Fifteen minutes later when the train slowed up, there emerged from the
drawing-room a man some years older than Randolph Paine, and many years
younger than Major Prime. He was good-looking, well-dressed, but
apparently in a very bad temper. Kemp, in an excited, Skye-terrier
manner, had gotten the bags together, had a raincoat over his arm, had
an umbrella handy, had apparently foreseen every contingency but one.
"Great guns, Kemp, why are we getting off here?"
"The conductor said it was nearer, sir."
Randolph Paine was already hanging on the step, ready to drop the moment
the train stopped. He had given the porter an extra tip to look after
Major Prime. "He isn't used to that crutch, yet. He'd hate it if I tried
to help him."
The rain having drizzled for hours, condensed suddenly in a downpour.
When the train moved on, the men found themselves in a small and stuffy
waiting-room. Around the station platform was a sea of red mud. Misty
hills shot up in a circle to the horizon. There was not a house in
sight. There was not a soul in sight except the agent who knew young
Paine. No one having come to meet them, he suggested the use of the
telephone.
In the meantime Kemp was having a hard time of it. "Why in the name of
Heaven didn't we get off at Charlottesville," his master was demanding.
"The conductor said this was nearer, sir," Kemp repeated. His response
had the bounding quality of a rubber ball. "If you'll sit here and make
yourself comfortable, Mr. Dalton, I'll see what I can do."
"Oh, it's a beastly hole, Kemp. How can I be comfortable?"
Randy, who had come back from the telephone with a look on his face
which clutched at Major Prime's throat, caught Dalton's complaint.
"It isn't a beastly hole," he said in a ringing voice, "it's God's
country---- I got my mother on the 'phone, Major. She has sent for us
and the horses are on the way."
Dalton looked him over. What a lank and shabby youth he was to carry in
his voice that ring of authority. "What's the answer to our getting off
here?" he asked.
"Depends upon where you are going."
"To Oscar Waterman's----"
"Never heard of him."
"Hamilton Hill," said the station agent.
Randy's neck stiffened. "Then the Hamiltons have sold it?"
"Yes. A Mr. Waterman of New York bought it."
Kemp had come back. "Mr. Waterman says he'll send the car at once. He is
delighted to know that you have come, sir."
"How long must I wait?"
"Not more than ten minutes, he said, sir," Kemp's optimism seemed to
ricochet against his master's hardness and come back unhurt. "He will
send a closed car and will have your rooms ready for you."
"Serves me right for not wiring," said Dalton, "but who would believe
there is a place in the world where a man can't get a taxi?"
Young Paine was at the door, listening for the sound of hoofs, watching
with impatience. Suddenly he gave a shout, and the others looked to see
a small object which came whirling like a bomb through the mist.
"Nellie, little old lady, little old lady," the boy was on his knees,
the dog in his arms--an ecstatic, panting creature, the first to welcome
her master home!
Before he let her go, the little dog's coat was wet with more than rain,
but Randy was not ashamed of the tears in his eyes as he faced the
others.
"I've had her from a pup--she's a faithful beast. Hello, there they
come. Gee, Jefferson, but you've grown! You are almost as big as your
name."
Jefferson was the negro boy who drove the horses. There was a great
splashing of red mud as he drew up. The flaps of the surrey closed it
in.
Jefferson's eyes were twinkling beads as he greeted his master. "I sure
is glad to see you, Mr. Randy. Miss Caroline, she say there was another
gemp'mun?"
"He's here--Major Prime. You run in there and look after his bags."
Randy unbuttoned the flaps and gave a gasp of astonishment:
"_Becky_--Becky Bannister!"
In another moment she was out on the platform, and he was holding her
hands, protesting in the meantime, "You'll get wet, my dear----"
"Oh, I want to be rained on, Randy. It's so heavenly to have you home. I
caught Jefferson on the way down. I didn't even wait to get my hat."
[Illustration: "IT'S SO HEAVENLY TO HAVE YOU HOME"]
She did not need a hat. It would have hidden her hair. George Dalton,
watching her from the door, decided that he had never seen such hair,
bronze, parted on the side, with a thick wave across the forehead, it
shaded eyes which were clear wells of light.
She was a little thing with a quality in her youth which made one think
of the year at the spring, of the day at morn, of Botticelli's
Simonetta, of Shelley's lark, of Wordsworth's daffodils, of Keats' Eve
of St. Agnes--of all the lovely radiant things of which the poets of the
world have sung----
Of course Dalton did not think of her in quite that way. He knew
something of Browning and little of Keats, but he had at least the wit
to discern the rareness of her type.
As for the rest, she wore faded blue, which melted into the blue of the
mists, stubbed and shabby russet shoes and an air of absorption in her
returned soldier. This absorption Dalton found himself subconsciously
resenting. Following an instinctive urge, he emerged, therefore, from
his chrysalis of ill-temper, and smiled upon a transformed universe.
"My raincoat, Kemp," he said, and strode forth across the platform, a
creature as shining and splendid as ever trod its boards.
Becky, beholding him, asked, "Is that Major Prime?"
"No, thank Heaven."
Jefferson, steering the Major expertly, came up at this moment. Then,
splashing down the red road whirled the gorgeous limousine. There were
two men on the box. Kemp, who had been fluttering around Dalton with an
umbrella, darted into the waiting-room for the bags. The door of the
limousine was opened by the footman, who also had an umbrella ready.
Dalton hesitated, his eyes on that shabby group by the mud-stained
surrey. He made up his mind suddenly and approached young Paine.
"We can take one of you in here. You'll be crowded with all of those
bags."
"Not a bit. We'll manage perfectly, thank you," Randy's voice dismissed
him.
He went, with a lingering glance backward. Becky, catching that glance,
waked suddenly to the fact that he was very good-looking. "It was kind
of him to offer, Randy."
"Was it?"
Nothing more was said, but Becky wondered a bit as they drove on. She
liked Major Prime. He was an old dear. But why had Randy thanked Heaven
that the other man was not the Major?
III
The Waterman motor passed the surrey, and Dalton, straining his eyes for
a glimpse of the pretty girl, was rewarded only by a view of Randy on
the front seat with his back turned on the world, while he talked with
someone hidden by the curtains.
Perhaps the fact that she was hidden by the curtains kept Dalton's
thoughts upon her. He felt that her beauty must shine even among the
shadows--he envied Major Prime, who sat next to her.
The Major was aware that his position was enviable. It was worth much to
watch these two young people, eager in their reunion. "Becky Bannister,
whom I have known all my life," had been Randy's presentation of the
little lady with the shining hair.
"Grandfather doesn't know that I came, or Aunt Claudia. They felt that
your mother ought to see you first and so did I. Until the last minute.
Then I saw Jefferson driving by--I was down at the gate to wave to you,
Randy--and I just came----" her gay laugh was infectious--the men
laughed with her.
"You must let me out when we get to Huntersfield, and you mustn't
tell--either of you. We are all to dine together to-night at your house,
Randy, and when you meet me, you are to say--'_Becky_'--just as you did
to-day, as if I had fallen from the skies."
"Well, you did fall--straight," Randy told her. "Becky, you are too good
to be true; oh, you're too pretty to be true. Isn't she, Major?"
"It is just because I am--American. Are you glad to get back to us,
Randy?"
"Glad," he drew a long breath. Nellie, who had wedged herself in tightly
between her master and Jefferson, wriggled and licked his hand. He
looked down at her, tried to say something, broke a little on it, and
ended abruptly, "It's Heaven."
"And you weren't hurt?"
"Not a scratch, worse luck."
She turned to Major Prime and did the wise thing and the thing he liked.
"You were," she said, simply, "but I am not going to be sorry for you,
shall I?"
"No," he said, "I am not sorry for--myself----"
For a moment there was silence, then Becky carried the conversation into
lighter currents. "Everybody is here for the Horse Show next week. Your
mother's house is full, and those awful Waterman people have guests."
"One of them came down with us."
"The good-looking man who offered us a ride?"
"Oh, of course if you like that kind of looks, he's the kind of man
you'd like," said Randy, "but coming down he seemed rather out of tune
with the universe."
"How out of tune?"
"Well, it was hot and he was hot----"
"It _is_ hot, Randy, and perhaps he isn't used to it."
"Are you making excuses for him?"
"I don't even know him."
Major Prime interposed. "His man was a corking little chap, never turned
a hair, as cool as a cucumber, with everybody else sizzling."
They were ascending a hill, and the horse went slowly. Ahead of them was
a buggy without a top. In the buggy were a man and a woman. The woman
had an umbrella over her, and a child in her arms.
"It's Mary Flippin and her father. See if you can't overtake them,
Jefferson. I want you to see Fiddle Flippin, Randy."
"Who is Fiddle Flippin?"
"Mary's little girl. Mary is a war bride. She was in Petersburg teaching
school when the war broke out, and she married a man named Branch. Then
she came home--and she called the baby Fidelity."
"I hope he was a good husband."
"Nobody has seen him, he was ordered away at once. But she is very
proud of him. And the baby is a darling. Just beginning to walk and
talk."
"Stop a minute, Jefferson, while I speak to them."
Mr. Flippin pulled up his fat horse. He was black-haired, ruddy, and
wide of girth. "Well, well," he said, with a big laugh, "it is cert'n'y
good to see you."
Mary Flippin was slender and delicate and her eyes were blue. Her hair
was thick and dark. There was Scotch-Irish blood in the Flippins, and
Mary's charm was in that of duskiness of hair and blueness of eye. "Oh,
Randy Paine," she said, with her cheeks flaming, "when did you get
back?"
"Ten minutes ago. Mary, if you'll hand me that corking kid, I'll kiss
her."
Fiddle was handed over. She was rosy and round with her mother's blue
eyes. She wore a little buttoned hat of white piqué, with strings tied
under her chin.
"So," said Randy, after a moist kiss, "you are Fiddle-dee-dee?"
"Ess----"
"Who gave you that name?"
"It is her own way of saying Fidelity," Mary explained.
"Isn't she rather young to say anything?"
"Oh, Randy, she's a year and a half," Becky protested. "Your mother says
that you talked in your cradle."
Randy laughed, "Oh, if you listen to Mother----"
"I'm glad you're in time for the Horse Show," Mr. Flippin interposed,
"I've got a couple of prize hawgs--an' when you see them, you'll say
they ain't anything like them on the other side."
"Oh, Father----"
"Well, they ain't. I reckon Virginia's good enough for you to come back
to, ain't it, Mr. Randy----?"
"It is good enough for me to stay in now that I'm here."
"So you're back for good?"
"Yes."
"Well, we're mighty glad to have you."
Fiddle Flippin, dancing and doubling up on Randy's knee like a very soft
doll, suddenly held out her arms to her mother.
As Mary leaned forward to take her, Randy was aware of the change in
her. In the old days Mary had been a gay little thing, with an
impertinent tongue. She was not gay now. She was a Madonna, tender-eyed,
brooding over her child.
"She has changed a lot," Randy said, as they drove on.
"Why shouldn't she change?" Becky demanded.
"Wouldn't any woman change if she had loved a man and had let him go to
France?"
IV
It was still raining hard when the surrey stopped at a high and rusty
iron gate flanked by brick pillars overgrown with Virginia creeper.
"Becky," said young Paine, "you can't walk up to the house. It's
pouring."
"I don't see any house," said Major Prime.
"Well, you never do from the road in this part of the country. We put
our houses on the tops of hills, and have acres to the right of us, and
acres to the left, and acres in front, and acres behind, and you can
never visit your neighbors without going miles, and nobody ever walks
except little Becky Bannister when she runs away."
"And I am going to run now," said Becky. "Randy, there's a raincoat
under that seat. I'll put it on if you will hand it out to me."
"You are going to ride up, my dear child. Drive on, Jefferson."
"Randy, _please_, your mother is waiting. She didn't come down to the
station because she said that if she wept on your shoulder, she would
not do it before the whole world. But she is _waiting_---- And it isn't
fair for me to hold you back a minute."
He yielded at last reluctantly. "Remember, you are to act as if you had
never met me," she said to Major Prime as she gave him her hand at
parting, "when you see me to-night."
"Becky," Randy asked, in a sudden panic, "are the boarders to be drawn
up in ranks to welcome me?"
"No, your mother has given you and Major Prime each two rooms in the
Schoolhouse, and we are to dine out there, in your sitting-room--our
families and the Major. And there won't be a soul to see you until
morning, and then you can show yourself off by inches."
"Until to-night then," said Randy, and opened the gate for her.
"Until to-night," she watched them and waved her hand as they drove off.
"A beautiful child," the Major remarked from the shadow of the back
seat.
"She's more than beautiful," said Randy, glowing, "oh, you wait till you
really know her, Major."
V
The Schoolhouse at King's Crest had been built years before by one of
the Paines for two sons and their tutor. It was separated from the old
brick mansion by a wide expanse of unmowed lawn, thick now in midsummer
with fluttering poppies. There was a flagged stone walk, and an orchard
at the left, beyond the orchard were rolling fields, and in the distance
one caught a glimpse of the shining river.
On the lower floor of the Schoolhouse were two ample sitting-rooms with
bedrooms above, one of which was reached by outside stairs, and the
other by an enclosed stairway. Baths had been added when Mrs. Paine had
come as a widow to King's Crest with her small son, and had chosen the
Schoolhouse as a quiet haven. Later, on the death of his grandparents,
Randy had inherited the estate, and he and his mother had moved into the
mansion. But he had kept his rooms in the Schoolhouse, and was glad to
know that he could go back to them.
Major Prime had the west sitting-room. It was lined with low bookcases,
full of old, old books. There was a fireplace, a winged chair, a broad
couch, a big desk of dark seasoned mahogany, and over the mantel a steel
engraving of Robert E. Lee. The low windows at the back looked out upon
the wooded green of the ascending hill; at the front was a porch which
gave a view of the valley.
Randolph's arrival had had something of the effect of a triumphal entry.
Jefferson had driven him straight to the Schoolhouse, but on the way
they had encountered old Susie, Jefferson's mother, who cooked, and old
Bob, who acted as butler, and the new maid who waited on the table.
These had followed the surrey as a sort of ecstatic convoy. Not a
boarder was in sight but behind the windows of the big house one was
aware of watching eyes.
"They are all crazy to meet you," Randy's mother had told him, as they
came into the Major's sitting-room after those first sacred moments when
the doors had been shut against the world, "they are all crazy to meet
you, but you needn't come over to lunch unless you really care to do it.
Jefferson can serve you here."
"What do you want me to do?"
"My dear, I'm so proud of you, I'd like to show you to the whole world."
"But there are so many of us, Mother."
"There's only one of you----"
"And we haven't come back to be put on pedestals."
"You were put on pedestals before you went away."
"I'll be spoiled if you talk to me like that."
"I shall talk as I please, Randy. Major Prime, isn't he as handsome as
a--rose?"
"_Mother_----"
"Well, you are----"
"Mother, if you talk like this to the boarders, I'll go back and get
shot up----"
She clung to him. "Randy, don't say such a thing. He mustn't talk like
that, must he, Major?"
"He doesn't mean it. Paine, this looks to me like the Promised Land----"
"I'm glad you like it," said Mrs. Paine, "and now if you don't mind,
I'll run along and kill the fatted calf----"
She kissed her son, and under a huge umbrella made her way through the
poppies that starred the grass----
"_On Flanders field--where poppies blow_"--the Major drew a sudden quick
breath---- He wished there were no poppies at King's Crest.
"I hate this hero stuff," Randy was saying, "don't you?"
"I am not so sure that I do. Down deep we'd resent it if we were not
applauded, shouldn't we?"
Randy laughed. "I believe we should."
"I fancy that when we've been home for a time, we may feel somewhat
bitter if we find that our pedestals are knocked from under us. Our
people don't worship long. They have too much to think of. They'll put
up some arches, and a few statues and build tribute houses in a lot of
towns, and then they'll go on about their business, and we who have
fought will feel a bit blank."
Randy laughed, "You haven't any illusions about it, have you?"
"No, but you and I know that it's all right however it goes."
Randy, standing very straight, looked out over the valley where the
river showed through the rain like a silver thread. "Well, we didn't do
it for praise, did we?"
"No, thank God."
Their eyes were seeing other things than these quiet hills. Things they
wanted to forget. But they did not want to forget the high exaltation
which had sent them over, or the quiet conviction of right which had
helped them to carry on. What the people at home might do or think did
not matter. What mattered was their own adjustment to the things which
were to follow.
Randy went up-stairs, took off his uniform, bathed and came down in the
garments of peace.
"Glad to get out of your uniform?" the Major asked.
"I believe I am. Perhaps if I'd been an officer, I shouldn't."
"Everybody couldn't be. I've no doubt you deserved it."
"I could have pulled wires, of course, before I went over, but I
wouldn't."
From somewhere within the big house came the reverberation of a Japanese
gong.
Randy rose. "I'm going over to lunch. I'd rather face guns, but Mother
will like it. You can have yours here."
"Not if I know it," the Major rose, "I'm going to share the fatted
calf."
VI
It was late that night when the Major went to bed. The feast in Randy's
honor had lasted until ten. There had been the shine of candles, and the
laughter of the women, the old Judge's genial humor. Through the windows
had come the fragrance of honeysuckle and of late roses. Becky had sung
for them, standing between two straight white candles.
"In the beauty of the lilies, Christ was born across the sea,
With the glory in his bosom which transfigures you and me.
As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free
While God is marching on----"
The last time the Major had heard a woman sing that song had been in a
little French town just after the United States had gone into the war.
She was of his own country, red-haired and in uniform. She had stood on
the steps of a stone house and weary men had clustered about
her--French, English, Scotch, a few Americans. Tired and spent, they had
gazed up at her as if they drank her in. To them she was more than a
singing woman. She was the daughter of a nation of dreamers, _the
daughter of a nation which made its dreams come true_! Behind her stood
a steadfast people, and--God was marching on----!
He had had his leg then, and after that there had been dreadful
fighting, and sometimes in the midst of it the voice of the singing
woman had come back to him, stiffening him to his task.
And here, miles away from that war-swept land, another woman sang. And
there was honeysuckle outside, and late roses--and poppies, and there
was Peace. And the world which had not fought would forget. But the men
who had fought would remember.
He heard Randy's voice, sharp with nerves. "Sing something else, Becky.
We've had enough of war----"
The Major leaned across the table. "When did you last hear that song,
Paine?"
"On the other side, a red-haired woman--whose lover had been killed. I
never want to hear it again----"
"Nor I----"
It was as if they were alone at the table, seeing the things which they
had left behind. What did these people know who had stayed at home? The
words were sacred--not to be sung; to be whispered--over the graves
of--France.
CHAPTER II
STUFFED BIRDS
I
The Country Club was, as Judge Bannister had been the first to declare,
"an excrescence."
Under the old régime, there had been no need for country clubs. The
houses on the great estates had been thrown open for the county families
and their friends. There had been meat and drink for man and beast.
The servant problem had, however, in these latter days, put a curb on
generous impulse. There were no more niggers underfoot, and hospitality
was necessarily curtailed. The people who at the time of the August
Horse Show had once packed great hampers with delicious foods, and who
had feasted under the trees amid all the loveliness of mellow-tinted
hills, now ordered by telephone a luncheon of cut-and-dried courses, and
motored down to eat it. After that, they looked at the horses, and with
the feeling upon them of the futility of such shows yawned a bit. In due
season, they held, the horse would be as extinct as the Dodo, and as
mythical as the Centaur.
The Judge argued hotly for the things which had been. Love of the horse
was bred in the bone of Old Dominion men. He swore by all the gods that
when he had to part with his bays and ride behind gasoline, he would be
ready to die.
Becky agreed with her grandfather. She adored the old traditions, and
she adored the Judge. She spent two months of every year with him in his
square brick house in Albemarle surrounded by unprofitable acres. The
remaining two months of her vacation were given to her mother's father,
Admiral Meredith, whose fortune had come down to him from whale-hunting
ancestors. The Admiral lived also in a square brick house, but it had no
acres, for it was on the Main Street of Nantucket town, with a Captain's
walk on top, and a spiral staircase piercing its middle.
The other eight months of the year Becky had spent at school in an old
convent in Georgetown. She was a Protestant and a Presbyterian; the
Nantucket grandfather was a Unitarian of Quaker stock, Judge Bannister
was High Church, and it was his wife's Presbyterianism which had been
handed down to Becky. Religion had therefore nothing to do with her
residence at the school. A great many of the Bannister girls had been
educated at convents, and when a Bannister had done a thing once it was
apt to be done again.
Becky was nineteen, and her school days were just over. She knew nothing
of men, she knew nothing indeed of life. The world was to her an open
sea, to sail its trackless wastes she had only a cockle-shell of dreams.
"If anybody," said Judge Bannister, on the first day of the Horse Show,
"thinks I am going to eat dabs of things at the club when I can have
Mandy to cook for me, they think wrong."
He gave orders, therefore, which belonged to more opulent days, when his
father's estate had swarmed with blacks. There was now in the Judge's
household only Mandy, the cook, and Calvin, her husband. Mandy sat up
half the night to bake a cake, and Calvin killed chickens at dawn, and
dressed them, and pounded the dough for biscuits on a marble slab, and
helped his wife with the mayonnaise.
When at last the luncheon was packed there was coffee in the thermos
bottle. Prohibition was an assured fact, and the Judge would not break
the laws. The flowing glass must go into the discard with other
picturesque customs of the South. His own estate that had once been sold
by John Randolph to Thomas Jefferson for a bowl of arrack punch----! Old
times, old manners! The Judge drank his coffee with the air of one who
accepts a good thing regretfully. He stood staunchly by the
Administration. If the President had asked the sacrifice of his head, he
would have offered it on the platter of political allegiance.
So on this August morning, an aristocrat by inheritance, and a democrat
by assumption, he drove his bays proudly. Calvin, in a worn blue coat,
sat beside him with his arms folded.
Becky was on the back seat with Aunt Claudia. Aunt Claudia was a widow
and wore black. She was small and slight, and the black was made smart
by touches of white crepe. Aunt Claudia had not forgotten that she had
been a belle in Richmond. She was a stately little woman with a firm
conviction of the necessity of maintaining dignified standards of
living. She was in no sense a snob. But she held that women of birth and
breeding must preserve the fastidiousness of their ideals, lest there be
social chaos.
"There would be no ladies left in the world," she often told Becky, "if
we older women went at the modern pace."
Becky, in contrast to Aunt Claudia's smartness, showed up rather
ingloriously. She wore the stubbed russet shoes, a not too fresh cotton
frock of pale yellow, and a brown straw sailor.
"You might at least have stopped to change your shoes," Aunt Claudia
told her, as they left the house behind.
"I was out with Randy and the dogs. It was heavenly, Aunt Claudia."
"My dear, if a walk with Randy is heavenly, what will you call Heaven
when you get to it?"
They drove through the first gate, and Calvin climbed down to open it.
Beyond the gate the road descended gradually through an open pasture,
where sheep grazed on the hillside or lay at rest in the shade. The
bells of the leaders tinkled faintly, the ewes and the lambs were
calling. Beyond the big gate, the highroad was washed with the recent
rains. From the gate to the club was a matter of five miles, and the
bays ate up the distance easily.
The people on the porch of the Country Club were very gay and gorgeous,
so that Becky in her careless frock and shabby shoes would have been a
pitiful contrast if she had cared in the least what the people on the
porch thought of her. But she did not care. She nodded and smiled to a
friend or two as the Judge stopped for a moment in the crush of motors.
George Dalton was on the porch. When he saw Becky he leaned forward for
a good look at her.
"Some girl," he said to Waterman, as the surrey moved on, "the one in
the sailor hat. Who is she?"
Oscar Waterman was a newcomer in Albemarle. He had bought a thousand
acres, with an idea of grafting on to Southern environment his own
ideas of luxurious living. The county families had not called, but he
was not yet aware of his social isolation. He was rich, and most of the
county families were poor--from his point of view the odds were in his
favor--and it was never hard to get guests. He could always motor up to
Washington and New York, and bring a crowd back with him. His cellars
were well stocked, and his hospitality undiscriminating.
"I don't know the girl," he told Dalton, "but the old man is Judge
Bannister. He's one of the natives--no money and oodles of pride."
In calling Judge Bannister a "native," Oscar showed a lack of
proportion. A native, in the sense that he used the word, is a South Sea
Islander, indigenous but negligible. Oscar was fooled, you see, by the
Judge's old-fashioned clothes, and the high surrey, and the horses with
the flowing tails. His ideas of life had to do with motor cars and
mansions, and with everybody very much dressed up. He felt that the only
thing in the world that really counted was money. If you had enough of
it the world was yours!
II
Year after year the Bannisters of Huntersfield had eaten their Horse
Show luncheon under a clump of old oaks beneath which the horses now
stopped. The big trees were dropping golden leaves in the dryness. From
the rise of the hill one looked down on the grandstand and the crowd as
from the seats of an amphitheater.
Judge Bannister remembered when the women of the crowd had worn hoops
and waterfalls. Aunt Claudia's memory went back to bustles and bonnets.
There were deeper memories, too, than of clothes--of old friends and
young faces--there was always a moment of pensive retrospect when the
Bannisters stopped under the old oak on the hill.
Randolph Paine, his mother and Major Prime were to join them at
luncheon. Separate plans had been made by the boarders who had packed
themselves into various cars and carriages, and had their own boxes and
baskets.
"Caroline Paine is always late," the Judge said with some impatience;
"if we don't eat on time, we shall have to hurry. I have never hurried
in my life and I don't want to begin now."
Claudia Beaufort was accustomed to impatience in men, and she was
inflexible as a hostess. "Well, of course, we couldn't begin without
them, could we?" she asked. "There they come now, Father. William, you'd
better help Major Prime."
Randy was driving the fat mare, Rosalind. Nellie Custis, Randolph's wiry
hound, loped along with flapping ears in the rear of the low-seated
carriage. Major Prime was on the back seat with Mrs. Paine.
"My dear Judge," he said, as the old gentleman came to the side of the
carriage, "I can't tell you how honored I am to be included in your
party. This is about the best thing that has happened to me in a long
time."
"I wanted you to get the old atmosphere. You can't get it at the Country
Club. We Bannisters have lunched up here for sixty years--older than you
are, eh?"
"Twenty years----"
"We used to call it the races, but now they tack on the Horse Show. It
was different, of course, when all the old places were owned by the old
families. But they can't change the oaks and the sweep of the hills, and
the mettle of the horses, thank God."
"I am sorry I was late," said Caroline Paine, as they settled themselves
under the trees, "but I went to town to have my hair waved."
"I wish you wouldn't, Caroline," Mrs. Beaufort told her, "your hair is
nice enough without it."
Caroline Paine took off her hat, "I couldn't get it up to look like
this, could I?"
The Judge surveyed the undulations critically. "Caroline," he said, "you
are too pretty to need it."
"I want to keep young for Randolph's sake," Mrs. Paine told him, "then
he'll like me better than any other girl."
"You needn't think you have to get your hair curled to make me love
you," said her tall son; "you are ducky enough as you are."
Major Prime, delighting in their lack of self-consciousness, made a
diplomatic contribution. "Why quarrel with such a charming coiffure?"
Mrs. Paine smiled at him, comfortably. "I feel much better," she said;
"they are always trying to hold me back."
She was a woman of ample proportions and of leisurely habit. Life had of
late hurried her a bit, but she still gave the effect of restful calm.
She was of the same generation as Aunt Claudia, and a widow. But she
wore her widowhood with a difference. She had on to-day a purple hat.
Her hair was white, her dress was white, and her shoes. She was prettier
than Aunt Claudia but she lacked her distinction of manner and of
carriage.
"They always want to hold me back when I try to be up-to-date," she
repeated.
Randy threw an acorn at her. "Nobody can hold you back, Mother," he
said, "when you get your mind on a thing. Aunt Claudia, what do you
hear from Truxton?"
"A letter came this morning," said Mrs. Beaufort, lighting up with the
thought of it. "I hadn't heard for days before that. And I was worried."
"Truxton hasn't killed himself writing letters since he went over," the
Judge asserted. "Claudia, can't we have lunch?"
"William is unpacking the hamper now, Father. And I think Truxton has
done very well. It isn't easy for the boys to find time."
"Randy wrote to me every week."
"Now, Mother----"
"Well, you did."
"But I'm that kind. I have to get things off my mind. Truxton isn't. And
I'll bet when Aunt Claudia does get his letters that they are worth
reading."
Mrs. Beaufort nodded. "They are lovely letters. I have the last one with
me; would you like to hear it?"
"Not before lunch, Claudia," the Judge urged.
"I will read it while the rest of you eat." There were red spots in Mrs.
Beaufort's cheeks. She adored her son. She could not understand her
father's critical attitude. Had she searched for motives, however, she
might have found them in the Judge's jealousy.
It was while she was reading Truxton's letter that the Flippins came
by--Mr. Flippin and his wife, Mary, and little Fidelity. A slender
mulatto woman followed with a basket.
The Flippins were one of the "second families." Between them and the
Paines of King's Crest and the Bannisters of Huntersfield stretched a
deep chasm of social prejudice. Three generations of Flippins had been
small farmers on rented lands. They had no coats-of-arms or family
trees. They were never asked to dine with the Paines or Bannisters, but
there had been always an interchange of small hospitalities, and much
neighborliness, and as children Mary Flippin, Randy and Becky and
Truxton had played together and had been great friends.
So it was now as they stopped to speak to the Judge's party that Mrs.
Beaufort said graciously, "I am reading a letter from Truxton. Would you
like to hear it?"
Mary, speaking with a sort of tense eagerness, said, "Yes."
So the Flippins sat down, and Mrs. Beaufort read in her pleasant voice
the letter from France.
Randy, lying on his back under the old oak, listened. Truxton gave a
joyous diary of the days--little details of the towns through which he
passed, of the houses where he was billeted, jokes of the men, of the
food they ate, of his hope of coming home.
"He seems very happy," said Mrs. Beaufort, as she finished.
"He is and he isn't----"
"You might make yourself a little clearer, Randolph," said the Judge.
"He is happy because France in summer is a pleasant sort of
Paradise--with the cabbages stuck up on the brown hillsides like
rosettes--and the minnows flashing in the little brooks and the old
mills turning--and he isn't happy--because he is homesick."
Randy raised himself on his elbow and smiled at his listening
audience--and as he smiled he was aware of a change in Mary Flippin. The
brooding look was gone. She was leaning forward, lips parted--"Then you
think that he is--homesick?"
"I don't _think_. I know. Why, over there, my bones actually ached for
Virginia."
The Judge raised his coffee cup. "Virginia, God bless her," he murmured,
and drank it down!
The Flippins moved on presently--the slender mulatto trailing after
them.
"If the Flippins don't send that Daisy back to Washington," Mrs. Paine
remarked, "she'll spoil all the negroes on the place."
Mrs. Beaufort agreed, "I don't know what we are coming to. Did you see
her high heels and tight skirt?"
"Once upon a time," the Judge declaimed, "black wenches like that wore
red handkerchiefs on their heads and went barefoot. But the world moves,
and some day when we have white servants wished on us, we'll pray to God
to send our black ones back."
Calvin was passing things expertly. Randy smiled at Becky as he filled
her plate.
"Hungry?"
"Ravenous."
"You don't look it."
"Don't I?"
"No. You're not a bread and butter sort of person."
"What kind am I?"
"Sugar and spice and everything nice."
"Did you learn to say such things in France?"
"Haven't I always said them?"
"Not in quite the same way. You've grown up, Randy. You seem _years_
older."
"Do you like me--older?"
"Of course." There was warmth in her voice but no coquetry. "What a
silly thing to ask, Randy."
Calvin, having served the lunch, ate his own particular feast of chicken
backs and necks under the surrey from a pasteboard box cover. Having
thus separated himself as it were from those he served, he was at his
ease. He knew his place and was happy in it.
Mary Flippin also knew her place. But she was not happy. She sat higher
up on the hill with her child asleep in her arms, and looked down on the
Judge's party. Except for an accident of birth, she might be sitting now
among them. Would she ever sit among them? Would her little daughter,
Fidelity?
III
"We are the only one of the old families who are eating lunch out of a
basket," said Caroline Paine; "next year we shall have to go to the
Country Club with the rest of them."
"I shall never go to the Country Club," said Judge Bannister, "as long
as there is a nigger to fry chicken for me."
"We may have to swim with the tide."
"Don't tell me that you'd rather be up there than here, Caroline."
"I'd like it for some things," Mrs. Paine admitted frankly; "you should
see the clothes that those Waterman women are wearing."
"What do you care what they wear. You don't want to be like them, do
you?"
"I may not care to be like them, but I want to look like them. I got the
pattern of this sweater I am knitting from one of my boarders. Do you
want it, Claudia?"
Mrs. Beaufort winced at the word "boarders." She hated to think that
Caroline must---- "I never wear sweaters, Caroline. They are not my
style. But I am knitting one for Becky."
"Is it blue?" Randy asked. "Becky ought always to wear blue, except when
she wears pale yellow. That was a heavenly thing you had on at dinner
the night we arrived, wasn't it, Major?"
"Everything was heavenly. I felt like one who expecting a barren plain
sees--Paradise."
It was not flattery and they knew it. They were hospitable souls, and in
a week he had become, as it were, one of them.
Randy, returning to the subject in hand, asked, "Will you wear the blue
if I come up to-night, Becky?"
"I will not." Becky was making herself a chaplet of yellow leaves, and
her bronze hair caught the light. "I will not. I shall probably put on
my old white if I dress for dinner."
"Of course you'll dress," said Mrs. Beaufort; "there are certain things
which we must always demand of ourselves----"
Caroline Paine agreed. "That's what I tell Randy when he says he
doesn't want to finish his law course. His father was a lawyer and his
grandfather. He owes it to them to live up to their standards."
Randy was again flat on his back with his hands under his head. "If I
stay at the University, it means no money for either of us except what
you earn, Mother."
The war had taken its toll of Caroline Paine. Things had not been easy
since her son had left her. They would not be easy now. "I know," she
said, "but you wouldn't want your father to be ashamed of you."
Randy sat up. "It isn't that--but I ought to make some money----"
The word was a challenge to the Judge. "Don't run with the mob, my boy.
The world is money-mad."
"I'm not money-mad," said Randy; "I know what I should like to do if my
life was my own. But it isn't. And I'm not going to have Mother twist
and turn as she has twisted and turned for the last fifteen years in
order to get me educated up to the family standard."
"If you don't mind I shouldn't." Caroline Paine was setting her feet to
a rocky path, but she did not falter. "You shouldn't mind if I don't."
Becky laid down the chaplet of leaves. She knew some of the things
Caroline Paine had sacrificed and she was thrilled by them. "Randy," she
admonished, with youthful severity, "it would be a shame to disappoint
your mother."
Randolph flushed beneath his dark skin. The Paines had an Indian strain
in them--Pocahontas was responsible for it, or some of the other
princesses who had mixed red blood with blue in the days when Virginia
belonged to the King. Randy showed signs of it in his square-set jaw,
the high lift of his head, his long easy stride, the straightness of his
black hair. He showed it, too, in a certain stoical impassiveness which
might have been taken for indifference. His world was, for the moment,
against him; he would attempt no argument.
"I am afraid this doesn't interest Major Prime," he said.
"It interests me very much," said the Major. "It is only another case of
the fighting man's adjustment to life after his return. We all have to
face it in one way or another." His eyes went out over the hills. They
were gray eyes, deep set, and, at this moment, kindly. They could blaze,
however, in stress of fighting, like bits of steel. "We all have to face
it in one way or another. And the future of America depends largely on
our seeing things straight."
"Well, there's only one way for Randy to face it," said Caroline Paine,
firmly, "and that is to do as his fathers did before him."
"If I do," Randy flared, "it will be three years before I can make a
living, and I'll be twenty-five."
Becky put on the chaplet of leaves. It fitted like a cap. She might have
been a dryad, escaped for a moment from the old oak. "Three years isn't
long."
"Suppose I should want to marry----"
"Oh, you--Randy----"
"But why shouldn't I?"
"I don't want you to get married," she told him; "when I come down we
couldn't have our nice times together. You'd always be thinking about
your wife."
IV
From the porch of the Country Club, George Dalton had seen the Judge's
party at luncheon. According to George's lexicon no one who could afford
to go to the club would eat out of a basket. He rather blushed for Becky
that she must sit there in the sight of everybody and share a feast with
a shabby old Judge, a lean and lank stripling with straight hair, a lame
duck of an officer, and two middle-aged women, who made spots of black
and purple on the landscape. Like Oscar, George's ideas of life had to
do largely with motor cars and yachts, and estates on Long Island,
palaces at Newport and Len ox and Palm Beach. During the war he had
served rather comfortably in a becoming uniform in the Quartermaster's
Department in Washington. Now that the war was over, he regretted the
becomings of the uniform. He felt to-day, however, that there were
compensations in his hunting pink. He was slightly bronzed and had blue
eyes. He was extremely popular with the women of the Waterman set, but
was held to be the especial property of Madge MacVeigh.
Madge had observed his interest in the party on the hill.
"George," she said, "what are you looking at?"
"I am looking at those people who are picnicking. They probably have
ants in the salad and spiders in their coffee."
"They are getting more out of it than you and I," said Madge.
"How getting more?"
"We are tired of things, Georgie-Porgie."
"Speak for yourself, Madge."
"I am speaking for both of us. You are tired of me, for example."
"My dear girl, I am not."
"You are. And I am tired of you. It's not your fault, and it's not mine.
It is the fault of any house-party. People see too much of each other.
I am glad I am going away to-morrow, and you'll be glad. And when we
have been separated a month, you will rush up to see me, and say you
couldn't live without me."
She dissected him coolly. Madge had a modern way of looking at things.
She was not in the least sentimental. But she had big moments of
feeling. It was because of this deep current which swept her away now
and then from the shallows that she held Dalton's interest. He never
knew in what mood he should find her, and it added spice to their
friendship.
"I didn't know you were going to-morrow."
"Neither did I till this morning, but I am bored to death, Georgie."
She did not look it. She was long-limbed, slender, with heavy
burned-gold hair, a skin which was pale gold after a July by the sea.
The mauve of her dress and hat emphasized the gold of hair and skin.
Some one had said that Madge MacVeigh at the end of a summer gave the
effect of a statue cast in new bronze. Dalton in the early days of their
friendship had called her his "Golden Girl." The name had stuck to her.
She had laughed at it but had liked it. "I should hate it," she had
said, "if I were rich. Perhaps some day some millionaire will turn me
into gold and make it true."
"Just because you are bored to death," Dalton told her, "is no reason
why you should accuse me of it."
"It isn't accusation. It's condolence. I am sorry for both of us,
George, that we can't sit there under the trees and eat out of a basket
and have spiders and ants in things and not mind it. Here we are in the
land of Smithfield hams and spoon-bread and we ate canned lobster for
lunch, and alligator pear salad."
"Baked ham and spoon-bread--for our sins?"
"It is because you and I have missed the baked ham and spoon-bread
atmosphere, that we are bored to death, Georgie. Everything in our lives
is the same wherever we go. When we are in Virginia we ought to do as
the Virginians do, and instead Oscar Waterman brings a little old New
York with him. It's Rome for the Romans, Georgie, lobsters in New
England, avocados in Los Angeles, hog and hominy here."
There were others listening now, and she was aware of her amused
audience.
"If you don't like my little old New York," Waterman said, "I'll change
it."
"No, I am going back to the real thing, Oscar. To my sky-scrapers and
subways. You can't give us those down here--not yet. Perhaps some day
there will be a system of camouflage by which no matter where we are--in
desert or mountain, we can open our windows to the Woolworth Building
on the skyline or the Metropolitan Tower, or to Diana shooting at the
stars,--and have some little cars in tunnels to run us around your
estate."
"By Jove, Jefferson nearly did it," said Waterman; "you should see the
subterranean passages at Monticello for the servants, so that the guests
could look over the grounds without a woolly head in sight."
"Great old boob, Jefferson," said Waterman's wife, Flora.
"No," Madge's eyes went out over the hills to where Monticello brooded
over great memories, "he was not a boob. He was so big that little
people like us can't focus him, Flora."
She came down from her perch. "I adore great men," she said; "when I go
back, I shall make a pilgrimage to Oyster Bay. I wonder how many of us
who weep over Great heart's grave would have voted for him if he had
lived. In a sense we crucified him."
"Madge is serious," said Flora Waterman, "now what do you think of
that?"
"I have to be serious sometimes, Flora, to balance the rest of you. You
can be as gay as you please when I am gone, and if you perish, you
perish."
George walked beside her as the party moved towards the grandstand.
"I've half a mind to go to New York with you, Madge. I came down on your
account."
"It's because you followed me that I'm tired of you, Georgie. If you go,
I'll stay."
She was smiling as she said it. But he did not smile. "Just as you wish,
of course. But you mustn't expect me to come running when you crook your
finger."
"I never expect things, but you'll come."
Perhaps she would not have been so sure if she could have looked into
his mind. The day that Becky had ridden away, hidden by the flaps of the
old surrey, the spark of his somewhat fickle interest had been lighted,
and the glimpse that he had had of her this morning had fanned the spark
into a flame.
"Did you say the old man's name is Bannister?" he asked Oscar as the
Judge's party passed them later on their way to their seats.
"Yes. Judge Bannister. I tried to buy his place before I decided on
Hamilton Hill. But he wouldn't sell. He said he wouldn't have any place
for his stuffed birds."
"Stuffed birds?"
"His hobby is the game birds of Virginia. He has a whole room of them. I
offered him a good price, but I suppose he'd rather starve than take
it."
The Judge's box was just above Oscar Waterman's. Becky, looking up, saw
Dalton's eyes upon her.
"It's the man who came with you on the train," she told Randy.
"What's he wearing a pink coat for?" Randy demanded. "He isn't riding."
"He probably knows that he looks well in it."
"That isn't a reason."
Becky took another look. "He has a head like the bust of Apollo in our
study hall."
"I'd hate to have a head like that."
"Well, you haven't," she told him; "you may hug that thought to yourself
if it is any consolation, Randy."
V
Caroline Paine's boarders sat high up on the grandstand. If the boarders
seem in this book to be spoken of collectively, like the Chorus in a
Greek play, or the sisters and aunts and cousins in "Pinafore," it is
not because they are not individually interesting. It is because, _en
Massey_ only, have they any meaning in this history.
Now as they sat on the grandstand, they discerned Mrs. Paine in the
Judge's box. They waved at her, and they waved at Randy, they waved also
at Major Prime. They demanded recognition--some of the more enthusiastic
detached themselves finally from the main group and came down to visit
Caroline. The overflow straggled along the steps to the edge of the
Waterman box. One genial gentleman was forced finally to sit on the
rail, so that his elbow stuck straight into the middle of the back of
George's huntsman's pink.
George moved impatiently. "Can't you find any other place to sit?"
The genial gentleman beamed on him. "I have a seat over there. But we
came down to see Mrs. Paine. She is in Judge Bannister's box and we
board with her--at King's Crest. And say, she's a corker!"
George, surveying Becky with increasing interest, decided that she was a
bit above her surroundings. She sat as it were with--Publicans. George
may not have used the Scriptural phrase, but he had the feeling. He was
Pharisaic ally thankful that he was not as that conglomerate group in
the Bannister box. A cheap crowd was his estimate. It would be rather
nice to give the little girl a good time!
Filled, therefore, with a high sense of his philanthropic purpose, he
planned a meeting. With his blue eyes on the flying horses, with his
staccato voice making quick comments, he had Becky in the back of his
mind. He found a moment, when the crowd went mad as the county favorite
came in, to write a line on the back of an envelope, and hand it to
Kemp, who hovered in the background, giving him quiet instructions.
"Yes, sir," said Kemp guardedly, and stood at attention until the races
were over, and the crowd began to move, and then he handed the note to
Judge Bannister.
The Judge put on his glasses and read it. "Where is he?" he asked Kemp.
"In the other box, sir. The one above."
"Tell him to come down."
"Yes, sir, thank you, sir."
The Judge was as pleased as Punch. "That man up there in Waterman's box
has heard of my collection," he explained to his party. "He wants me to
settle a point about the Virginia partridge."
"Which man?" Randy's tone was ominous.
Dalton's arrival saved the Judge an answer. In his hunting pink, with
his Apollo head, Dalton was upon them. The Judge, passing him around to
the members of his party, came at last to Becky.
"My granddaughter, Becky Bannister."
With George's sparkling gaze bent full upon her, Becky blushed.
Randy saw the blush. "Oh, Lord," he said, under his breath, and stuck
his hands in his pockets.
"I've always called it a quail," Dalton was saying.
"You would if you come from the North. To be exact, it isn't either,
it's an American Bob-white. I'd be glad to have you come up and look at
my collection. There is every kind of bird that has been shot in
Virginia fields or Virginia waters. I've got a Trumpeter Swan. The last
one was seen in the Chesapeake in sixty-nine. Mine was killed and
stuffed in the forties. He is in a perfect state of preservation, and in
the original glass case."
"I'd like to come," George told him. "Could I--to-night? I don't know
just how long I shall be staying down."
"Any time--any time. To-night, of course. There's nothing I like better
than to talk about my birds, unless it is to eat them. Isn't that so,
Claudia?"
"Yes, Father." Mrs. Beaufort was studying Dalton closely. His manner was
perfect. It was, indeed, she decided, too perfect. "He is thinking too
much of the way he does it." The one sin in Aunt Claudia's mind was
social self-consciousness. People who thought all of the time about
manners hadn't been brought up to them. They must have them without
thinking. George was not, she decided, a gentleman in the Old Dominion
sense. Dalton would have been amazed could he have looked into Aunt
Claudia's mind and have seen himself a--Publican.
"Father," she said, after Dalton had left them, "did I hear you invite
him to dinner?"
"Yes, my dear, but he could not come----"
"I'm glad he couldn't."
"Why?"
"I'm not sure that he's--our kind----"
"Nonsense, he's a very fine fellow."
"How do you know?"
"Well, I know this," testily, "that I am not to be instructed as to the
sort of person I can ask to my house."
"Oh, Father, I didn't mean that. Of course you can do as you please."
"Of course I shall, Claudia."
"I think he is charming," said Mrs. Paine. "He has lovely eyes."
"Hasn't he?" said little Becky.
CHAPTER III
THE WOLF IN THE FOREST
I
The Bird Room at Judge Bannister's was back of the library. It was a big
room lined with glass cases. There hung about it always the faint odor
of preservatives. The Trumpeter Swan had a case to himself over the
mantel. He had been rather stiffly posed on a bed of artificial moss,
but nothing could spoil the beauty of him--the white of his plumage, the
elegance of his lines. He was one of a dying race--the descendants of
the men who had once killed for food had killed later to gratify the
vanity of women who must have swans down to set off their beauty, puffs
to powder their noses. No more did great flocks wing an exalted flight,
high in the heavens, or rest like a blanket of snow on river banks. The
old kings were dead--the glassy eyes of the Trumpeter looked out upon a
world which knew his kind no more.
In the other cases were the little birds and big ones--ducks, swimming
on crystal pools, canvas-backs and redheads, mallards and teal;
Bob-whites, single and in coveys; sandpipers, tip-ups and peeps, those
little ghosts of the seashore, shadows on the sand; there were soar and
other rails, robins and blackbirds, larks and sparrows, wild turkeys and
wild geese, all the toll which the hunter takes from field and stream
and forest.
It was in a sense a tragic room, but it had never seemed that to Becky.
She came of a race of men who had hunted from instinct but with a sense
of honor. The Judge and those of his kind hated wanton killing. Their
guns would never have swept away the feathered tribes of tree and sky.
It was the trappers and the pot-hunters who had done that. There had
motored once to the Judge's mansion a man and his wife who had raged at
the brutes who hunted for sport. They had worn fur coats and there had
been a bird's breast on the woman's hat.
The Judge, holding on to his temper, had exploded finally. "If you were
consistent," he had flung at them, "you would not be decked in the
bodies of birds and beasts."
Becky loved the birds in the glass cases, the peeps and the tip-ups, the
old owl who did not belong among the game birds, but who, with the great
eagle with the outstretched wings, had been admitted because they had
been shot within the environs of the estate. She loved the little nests
of tinted eggs, the ducks on the crystal pools.
But most of all she loved the Trumpeter. Years ago the Judge had told
her of the wild swans who flew so high that no eye could see them. Yet
the sound of their trumpets might be heard. It was like the fairy tale
of "The Seven Brothers," who were princes, and who were turned into
swans and wore gold crowns on their heads. She was prepared to believe
anything of the Trumpeter. She had often tiptoed down in the night,
expecting to see his case empty, and to hear his trumpet sounding high
up near the moon.
There was a moon to-night. Dinner was always late at Huntersfield. In
the old days three o'clock had been the fashionable hour for dining in
the county, with a hot supper at eight. Aunt Claudia, keeping up with
the times, had decided that instead of dining and supping, they must
lunch and dine. The Judge had agreed, stipulating that there should be
no change in the evening hour. "Serve it in courses, if you like, and
call it dinner. But don't have it before candle-light."
So the moon was up when Becky came down in her blue dress. She had not
expected to wear the blue. In spite of the fact that Randy and his
mother and Major Prime had come back with them for dinner, she had
planned to wear her old white, which had been washed and laid out on the
bed by Mandy. But the blue was more becoming, and the man with the
Apollo head had eyes to see.
She came into the Bird Room with a candle in her hand. There was a lamp
high up, but she could not reach it, so she always carried a candle. She
set it down on the case where the Bob-whites were cuddled in brown
groups. She whistled a note, and listened to catch the answer. It had
been a trick of hers as a child, and she had heard them whistle in
response. She had been so sure that she heard them--a far-off silvery
call----
Well, why not? Might not their little souls be fluttering close? "You
darlings," she said aloud.
Randy, arriving at that moment on the threshold, heard her. "You are
playing the old game," he said.
"Oh, yes," she caught her breath, "do you remember?"
He came into the room. "I remembered a thousand times when I was in
France. I thought of this room and of the Trumpeter Swan, and of how you
and I used to listen on still nights and think we heard him. There was
one night after an awful day--with a moon like this over the
battlefield, and across the moon came a black, thin streak--and a bugle
sounded--far away. I was half asleep, and I said, 'Becky, there's the
swan,' and the fellow next to me poked his elbow in my ribs, and said,
'You're dreaming.' But I wasn't--quite, for the thin black streak was a
Zeppelin----"
She came up close to him and laid her hand on his arm. He towered above
her. "Randy," she asked, "was the war very dreadful?"
"Yes," he said, "it was. More dreadful than you people at home can ever
grasp. But I want you to know this, Becky, that there isn't one of us
who wouldn't go through it again in the same cause."
There was no swagger in his statement, just simple earnestness. The room
was very still for a moment.
Then Becky said, "Well, it's awfully nice to have you home again," and
Randy, looking down at the little hand on his arm, had to hold on to
himself not to put his own over it.
But she was too dear and precious----! So he just said, gently, "And I'm
glad to be at home, my dear," and they walked to the window together,
and stood looking out at the moon. Behind them the old eagle watched
with outstretched wings, the great free bird which we stamp on American
silver, backed with "In God We Trust." It is not a bad combination, and
things in this country might, perhaps, have been less chaotic if we had
taught newcomers to link love of God with love of liberty.
"Mr. Dalton is coming to see the birds," said Becky, and in a moment she
had spoiled everything for Randy.
"Is that why you put on your blue dress?"
She was honest. "I am not sure. Perhaps."
"Yet you thought the old white one was good enough for me."
"Well, don't you like me just as well in my old white as in this?"
"Yes, of course."
"Well, then," Becky was triumphant, "why should I bother to change for
you, Randy, when you like me just as well in anything?"
The argument was unanswerable, but Randy was not satisfied. "It is a
mistake," he said, "not to be as nice to old friends as new ones."
"But I am nice. You said so yourself this afternoon. That I was sugar
and spice and everything--nice----"
He laughed. "You are, of course. And I didn't come all the way from
France to quarrel with you----"
"We've always quarreled, Randy."
"I wonder why?"
"Sister Loretta says that people only argue when they like each other.
Otherwise they wouldn't want to convince."
"Do you quarrel with Sister Loretta?"
"Of course not. Nuns don't. But she writes notes when she doesn't agree
with me--little sermons--and pins them on my pillow. She's a great
dear. She hates to have me leave the school. She has the feeling that
the world is a dark forest, and that I am Red Riding Hood, and that the
Wolf will get me."
II
Dalton found them all at dinner when he reached Huntersfield. He was not
in the least prepared for the scene which met his eyes--shining
mahogany, old silver and Sheffield, tall white candles, Calvin in a
snowy jacket, Mrs. Beaufort and Mrs. Paine in low-necked gowns, the
Judge and Randy in dinner coats somewhat the worse for wear, Becky in
thin, delicate blue, with a string of pearls which seemed to George an
excellent imitation of the real thing.
He had thought that the trail of Mrs. Paine's boarding-house might be
over it all. He had known boarding-houses as a boy, before his father
made his money. There had been basement dining-rooms, catsup bottles,
and people passing everything to everybody else!
"I'm afraid I'm early," he said in his quick voice.
"Not a bit. Calvin, place a chair for Mr. Dalton."
There were fruit and nuts and raisins in a great silver Pegeen, with fat
cupids making love among garlands. There was coffee in Severus cups.
Back among the shadows twinkled a priceless mirror; shutting off
Calvin's serving table was a painted screen worth its weight in gold. It
was a far cry from the catsup bottles and squalid service of George's
early days. The Bannisters of Huntersfield wore their poverty like a
plume!
The Judge carried Dalton off presently to the Bird Boom. George went
with reluctance. This was not what he had come for. Becky, slim and
small, with her hair peaked up to a topknot, Becky in pale blue, Becky
as fair as her string of imitation pearls, Becky in the golden haze of
the softly illumined room, Becky, Becky Bannister--the name chimed in
his ears.
Dalton had had some difficulty in getting away from Hamilton Hill.
"It's my last night," Madge had said; "shall we go out in the garden and
watch the moon rise?"
"Sorry," George had told her, "but I've promised Flora to take a fourth
hand at bridge."
"And after that?" asked Madge softly.
"What do you mean?"
"Who is the new--little girl?"
It was useless to pretend. "She's a beauty, rather, isn't she?"
"Oh, Georgie-Porgie, I wish you wouldn't."
"Wouldn't what?"
"Kiss the girls--and make them--cry----"
"You've never cried----"
She laughed at that. "If I haven't it is because I know that afterwards
you always--run away."
He admitted it. "One can't marry them all."
"I wonder if you are ever serious," she told him, her chin in her hand.
"I am always serious. That's what makes it--interesting----"
"But the poor little--hearts?"
"Some one has to teach, them," said George, "that it's a pretty
game----"
"Will it be always a game--to you--Georgie?"
"Who knows?" he said. "So far I've held trumps----"
"Your conceit is colossal, but somehow you seem to get away with it."
She smiled and stood up. "I'm going to bed early. I have been losing my
beauty sleep lately, Georgie."
He chose to be gallant. "You are not losing your beauty, if that's what
you mean."
Her dinner gown was of the same shade of mauve that she had worn in the
afternoon. But it was of a material so sheer that the gold of her skin
seemed to shine through.
"Good-night, Golden Girl," said Dalton, and kissed the tips of her
fingers as she stood on the stairs. Then he went off to join the others.
Madge did not go to bed. She went out alone and watched the moon rise.
Oscar Waterman's house was on a hill which gave a view of the whole
valley. Gradually under the moon the houses of Charlottesville showed
the outlines of the University, and far beyond the shadowy sweep of the
Blue Ridge. What a world it had been in the old days--great men had
ridden over these red roads in swaying carriages, Jefferson, Lafayette,
Washington himself.
If she could only meet men like that. Men to whom life was more than a
game--a carnival. From the stone bench where she sat she had a view
through the long French windows of the three tables of bridge--there
were slender, restless girls, eager, elegant youths. "Perhaps they are
no worse than those who lived here before them," Madge's sense of
justice told her. "But isn't there something better?"
From her window later, she saw Dalton's car flash out into the road. The
light wound down and down, and appeared at last upon the highway. It was
not the first time that George had played the game with another girl.
But he had always come back to her. She had often wondered why she let
him come. "Why do I let him?" she asked the moon.
III
It really was a great moon. It shone through the windows of the Bird
Room at Huntersfield, wooing George out into the fragrant night. He
could hear voices on the lawn--young Paine's laugh--Becky's. Once when
he looked he saw them on the ridge, silhouetted against the golden sky.
They were dancing, and Randy's clear whistle, piping a modern tune, came
up to him, tantalizing him.
But the Judge held him. It took him nearly an hour to get through with
the Bob-whites and the sandpipers, the wild turkeys, the ducks and the
wild geese. And long before that time George was bored to extinction. He
had little imagination. To him the Trumpeter was just a stuffed old
bird. He could not picture him as blowing his trumpet beside the moon,
or wearing a golden crown as in "The Seven Brothers." He had never heard
of "The Seven Brothers," and nobody in the world wore crowns except
kings. As for the old eagle, it is doubtful whether George had ever felt
the symbolism of his presence on a silver coin, or that he had ever
linked him in his heart with God.
Then, suddenly, the whole world changed. Becky appeared on the
threshold.
"Grandfather," she said, "Aunt Claudia says there is lemonade on the
lawn."
"In a moment, my dear."
George rose hastily. "Don't let me keep you, Judge----"
Becky advanced into the room. "Aren't the birds wonderful?"
"They are," said George, seeing them wonderful for the first time.
"I always feel," she said, "as if some time they will flap their wings
and fly away--on a night like this--the swans going first, and then the
ducks and geese, and last of all the little birds, trailing across the
moon----" Her hands fluttered to show them trailing. Becky used her
hands a great deal when she talked. Aunt Claudia deplored it as
indicating too little repose. The nuns, she felt, should have corrected
the habit. But the nuns had loved Becky's descriptive hands, poking,
emphasizing, and had let her alone.
The three of them, the Judge and Becky and Dalton, went out together.
The little group which sat in the wide moonlighted space in front of the
house was dwarfed by the great trees which hung in masses of black
against the brilliant night. The white dresses of the women seemed
touched with silver.
The lemonade was delicious, and Aunt Claudia forced herself to be
gracious. Caroline Paine was gracious without an effort. She liked
Dalton. Not in the same way, perhaps, that she liked Major Prime, but
he was undoubtedly handsome, and of a world which wore lovely clothes
and did not have to count its pennies.
Major Prime had little to say. He was content to sit there in the
fragrant night and listen to the rest. A year ago he had been jolted
over rough roads in an ambulance. There had been a moon and men
groaning. There had seemed to him something sinister about that white
night with its spectral shadows, and with the trenches of the enemy
wriggling like great serpents underground. The trail of the serpent was
still over the world. He had been caught but not killed. There was still
poison in his fangs!
He spoke sharply, therefore, when Dalton said, "It was a great adventure
for a lot of fellows who went over----"
"Don't," said the Major, and sat up. "Does it matter what took them?
_The thing that matters is how they came back_----"
"What do you mean?"
"A thousand reasons took them over. Some of them went because they had
to, some of them because they wanted to. Some of them dramatized
themselves as heroes and hoped for an opportunity to demonstrate their
courage. Some of them were scared stiff, but went because of their
consciences, some of them wanted to fight and some of them didn't, but
whatever the reason, _they went_. And now they are back, and it is much
more important to know what they think now about war than what they
thought about it when they were enlisted or drafted. If their baptism of
fire has made them hate cruelty and injustice, if it has opened their
eyes to the dangers of a dreaming idealism which refuses to see evil
until evil has had its way, if it has made them swear to purge America
of the things which has made Germany the slimy crawling enemy of the
universe, if they have come back feeling that God is in His Heaven but
that things can't be right with the world until we come to think in
terms of personal as well as of national righteousness--if they have
come back thus illumined, then we can concede to them their great
adventure. But if they have come back to forget that democracy is on
trial, that we have talked of it to other nations and do not know it
ourselves, if they have come back to let injustice or ignorance
rule--then they had better have died on the fields of France----"
He stopped suddenly amid a startled silence. Not a sound from any of
them.
"I beg your pardon," he laughed a bit awkwardly, "I didn't mean to
preach a sermon."
"Don't spoil it, _please_," Aunt Claudia begged brokenly; "I wish more
men would speak out."
"May I say this, then, before I stop? The future of our country is in
the hands of the men who fought in France. On them must descend the
mantles of our great men, Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt--we must walk
with these spirits if we love America----"
"Do you wonder," Randy said, under his breath to Becky, "that his men
fought, and that they died for him?"
She found her little handkerchief and wiped her eyes. "He's
a--perfect--darling," she whispered, and could say no more.
Dalton was for the time eclipsed. He knew it and was not at ease. He was
glad when Mrs. Paine stood up. "I am sorry to tear myself away. But I
must. I can't be sure that Susie has made up the morning rolls. There's
a camp-meeting at Jessica, and she's lost the little mind that she
usually puts on her cooking."
Randy and the Major went with her in the low carriage, with Rosalind
making good time towards the home stable, and with Nellie Custis
following with flapping ears.
Dalton stayed on. The Judge urged him. "It's too lovely to go in," he
said; "what's your hurry?"
Aunt Claudia, who was inexpressibly weary, felt that her father was
exceeding the bounds of necessary hospitality. She felt, too, that the
length of Dalton's first call was inexcusable. But she did not go to
bed. As long as Becky was there, she should stay to chaperon her. With a
sense of martyrdom upon her, Mrs. Beaufort sat stiffly in her chair.
The Judge was talkative and brilliant, glad of a new and apparently
attentive listener. Becky had little to say. She sat with her small feet
set primly on the ground. Her hands were folded in her lap. Dalton was
used to girls who lounged or who hung fatuously on his words, as if they
had set themselves to please him.
But Becky had no arts. She was frank and unaffected, and apparently not
unconscious of Dalton's charms. The whole thing was, he felt, going to
be rather stimulating.
When at last he left them, he asked the Judge if he might come again.
"I'd like to look at those birds by daylight."
Becky, giving him her hand, hoped that he might come. She had been all
the evening in a sort of waking dream. Even when Dalton had been silent,
she had been intensely aware of his presence, and when he had talked, he
had seemed to speak to her alone, although his words were for others.
"I saw you dancing," he said, before he dropped her hand.
"Oh, did you?"
"Yes."
Back of the house the dogs barked.
"Will you dance some time with me?"
"Oh, could I?"
"Why not?"
A moment later he was gone. The light of his motor flashed down the
hills like a falling star.
"I wonder what made the dogs bark," the Judge said as they went in.
"They probably thought it was morning," was Mrs. Beaufort's retort, as
she preceded Becky up the stairs.
IV
The dogs had barked because Randy after a quick drive home had walked
back to Huntersfield.
"Look here," he burst out as he and the Major had stood on the steps of
the Schoolhouse, "do you like him?"
"Who? Dalton?"
"Yes."
"He's not a man's man," the Major said, "and he doesn't care in the
least what you and I think of him."
"Doesn't he?"
"No, and he doesn't care for--stuffed birds--and he doesn't care for the
Judge, and he doesn't care for Mrs. Beaufort----"
"Oh, you needn't rub it in. I know what he's after."
"Do you?"
"Yes----"
The Major whistled softly a lilting tune. He had been called "The
Whistling Major" by his men and they had liked his clear piping.
He stopped abruptly. "Well, you can't build fences around lovely little
ladies----"
"I wish I could. I'd like to shut her up in a tower----"
They left it there. It was really not a thing to be talked about. They
both knew it, and stopped in time.
Randy, climbing the outside stairs, presently, to his bedroom, turned at
the upper landing to survey the scene spread out before him. The hills
were steeped in silence. The world was black and gold--the fragrance of
the honeysuckle came up from the hedge below. On such a night as this
one could not sleep. He felt himself restless, emotionally keyed up. He
descended the stairs. Then, suddenly, he found himself taking the trail
back towards Huntersfield.
He walked easily, following the path which led across the hills. The
distance was not great, and he had often walked it. He loved a night
like this. As he came to a stretch of woodland, he went under the trees
with the thrill of one who enters an enchanted forest.
An owl hooted overhead. A whip-poor-will in a distant swamp sounded his
plaintive call.
Randy could not have analyzed the instinct which sent him back to Becky.
It was not in the least to spy upon her, nor upon Dalton. He only knew
that he could not sleep, that something drew him on and on, as Romeo was
drawn perchance to Capulet's orchard.
He came out from under the trees to other hills. He was still on his own
land. These acres had belonged to his father, his grandfather, his
great-grandfather, and back of that to a certain gallant gentleman who
had come to Virginia with grants from the King. There had been, too, a
great chief, whose blood was in his veins, and who had roamed through
this land before Europe knew it. Powhatan was a rare old name to link
with one's own, and Randy had a Virginian's pride in his savage strain.
So, as he went along, he saw canoes upon the shining river. He saw tall
forms with feathers blowing. He saw fires on the heights.
The hill in front of him dipped to a little stream. He and Becky had
once waded in that stream together. How white her feet had been on the
brown stones. His life, as he thought of it, was bound up in memories of
Becky. She had come down from school for blissful week-ends and
holidays, and she and Randy had tramped over the hills and through the
pine woods, finding wild-flowers in the spring, arbutus, flushing to
beauty in its hidden bed, blood-root, hepatica, wind-flowers, violets in
a purple glory; finding in the summer wild roses, dewberries,
blackberries, bees and butterflies, the cool shade of the little groves,
the shine and shimmer of the streams; finding in the fall a golden
stillness and the redness of Virginia Creeper. They had ridden on
horseback over the clay roads, they had roamed the stubble with a pack
of wiry hounds at their heels, they had gathered Christmas greens, they
had sung carols, they had watched the Old Year out and the New Year in,
and their souls had been knit in a comradeship which had been a very
fine thing indeed for a boy like Randy and a girl like Becky.
There had been, too, about their friendship a rather engaging
seriousness. They had talked a great deal of futures. They had dreamed
together very great dreams. Their dreams had, of course, changed from
time to time. There had been that dream of Becky's when she first went
to the convent, that she wanted some day to be a nun like Sister
Loretto. The fact that it would involve a change of faith was thrashed
over flamingly by Randy. "It is all very well for an old woman, Becky.
But you'd hate it."
Becky had been sure that she would not hate it. "You don't know how
lovely she looks in the chapel."
"Well, there are other ways to look lovely."
"But it would be nice to be--good."
"You are good enough."
"I am not really, Randy. Sister Loretto says her prayers all day----"
"How often do you say yours?"
"Oh, at night. And in the mornings--sometimes----"
"That's enough for anybody. If you say them hard enough once, what more
can the Lord ask?"
He had been a rather fierce figure as he had flung his questions, but he
had not swerved her in the least from her thought of herself as a novice
in a white veil, and later as a full-fledged sister, with beads and a
black head-dress.
This dream had, in time, been supplanted by one imposed upon her by the
ambitions of a much-admired classmate.
"Maude and I are going to be doctors," Becky had announced as she and
Randy had walked over the fields with the hounds at their heels. "It's a
great opportunity for women, Randy, and we shall study in Philadelphia."
"Shall you like cutting people up?" he had demanded brutally.
She had shuddered. "I shan't have to cut them up very much, shall I?"
"You'll have to cut them up a lot. All doctors do, and sometimes they
are dead."
She had argued a bit shakily after that, and that night she had slept
badly. The next morning they had gone over it again. "You fainted when
the kitten's paw was crushed in the door."
"It was dreadful----"
"And you cried when I cut my foot with the hatchet and we were out in
the woods. And if you are going to be a doctor you'll have to look at
people who are crushed and cut----"
"Oh, please, Randy----"
Three days of such intensive argument had settled it. Becky decided that
it was, after all, better to be an authoress. "There was Louisa Alcott,
you know, Randy."
He was scornful. "Women weren't made for that--to sit in an attic and
write. Why do you keep talking about doing things, Becky? You'll get
married when you grow up and that will be the end of it."
"I am not going to get married, Randy."
"Well, of course you will, and I shall marry and be a lawyer like my
father, and perhaps I'll go to Congress."
Later he had a leaning towards the ministry. "If I preached I could make
the world better, Becky."
That was the time when she had come down for Hallowe'en, and it was on
Sunday evening that they had talked it over in the Bird Room at
Huntersfield. There had been a smouldering fire on the wide hearth, and
the Trumpeter Swan had stared down at them with shining eyes. They had
been to church that morning and the text had been, "The harvest is past,
the summer is ended, and we are not saved."
"I want to make the world better, Becky," Randy had said in the still
twilight, and Becky had answered in an awed tone, "It would be so
splendid to see you in the pulpit, Randy, wearing a gown like Dr.
Hodge."
But the pulpit to Randy had meant more than that. And the next day when
they walked through the deserted mill town, he had said, "Everybody is
dead who lived here, and once they were alive like us."
She had shivered, "I don't like to think of it."
"It's a thing we've all got to think of. I like to remember that Thomas
Jefferson came riding through and stopped at the mill and talked to the
miller."
"How dreadful to know that they are--dead."
"Mother says that men like Jefferson never die. Their souls go marching
on."
The stream which ground the county's corn was at their feet. "But what
about the miller?" Becky had asked; "does his soul march, too?"
Randy, with the burden of yesterday's sermon upon him, hoped that the
miller was saved.
He smiled now as he thought of the rigidness of his boyish theology. To
him in those days Heaven was Heaven and Hell was Hell.
The years at school had brought doubt--apostasy. Then on the fields of
France, Randy's God had come back to him--the Christ who bound up
wounds, who gave a cup of cold water, who fought with flaming sword
against the battalions of brutality, who led up and up that white
company who gave their lives for a glorious Cause. Here, indeed, was a
God of righteousness and of justice, of tenderness and purity. To other
men than Randy, Christ had in a very personal and specific sense been
born across the sea.
It was in France, too, that the dream had come to him of a future of
creative purpose. He had always wanted to write. Looking back over his
University days, he was aware of a formative process which had led
towards this end. It was there he had communed with the spirit of a
tragic muse. There had been all the traditions of Poe and his
tempestuous youth--and Randy, passing the door which had once opened and
closed on that dark figure, had felt the thrill of a living
personality--of one who spoke still in lines of ineffable
beauty--"_Banners yellow, glorious, golden, On its roof did float and
flow_----" and again "_A dirge for her the doubly dead, in that she died
so young_----" with the gayety and gloom and grandeur of those chiming,
rhyming, tolling bells--"_Keeping time, time, time, In a sort of Runic
rhyme_----" and that "_grim and ancient Raven wandering from the Nightly
shore_----"
"Do you think I could write?" Randy had asked one of his teachers,
coming verse-saturated to the question.
The man had looked at him with somber eyes. "You have an ear for it--and
an eye---- But genius pays a price."
"What do you mean?"
"It shows its heart to the world, dissects its sacred thoughts, has no
secrets----"
"But think of leaving a thing behind you like--'To Helen----'"
"Do you think the knowledge that he had written a few bits of
incomparable verse helped Poe to live? If he had invented a pill or a
headache powder, he would have slept on down and have dined from gold
dishes."
"I'd rather write 'Ulalume' than dine from gold dishes."
"You think that now. But in twenty years you will sigh for a--feather
bed----"
"You don't believe that."
There had come a lighting of the somber eyes. "My dear fellow, if you,
by the grace of God, have it in you to write, what I believe won't have
anything to do with it. You will crucify yourself for the sake of a
line--starve for the love of a rhythm."
Randy had not yet starved for love of a rhythm, but he had lost sleep
during those nights in France, trying to put into words the things that
gripped his soul. There had been beauty as well as horror in those days.
What a world it had been, a world of men--a striving, eager group,
raised for the moment above sordidness, above self----
He had not found verse his medium, although he had drunk eagerly of the
golden cups which others had to offer him. But his prose had gained
because of his belief in beauty of structure and of singing lovely
words. As yet he had nothing to show for his pains, but practice had
given strength to his pen--he felt that some day with the right theme he
might do--wonders----
The trees had again closed in about him. A shadow flitted by--a fox,
unafraid and in search of a belated meal. Randy remembered the days
when he and Becky had thought that there might be wolves in the forest.
He laughed a little, recalling Becky's words. "Sister Loretto has the
feeling that the world is a dark forest, and that I am Red Riding Hood."
Was it that which had brought him back? Was there, indeed, a Wolf?
When he reached Huntersfield, and the dogs barked, he had feared for the
moment discovery. He was saved, however, by the friendly silence which
followed that first note of alarm. The dogs knew him and followed him
with wagging tails as he skirted the lawn and came at last to the gate
which had closed a few minutes before on Dalton's car. He saw the Judge
go in, Aunt Claudia, Becky--shadowy figures between the white pillars.
Then, after a moment, a room on the second floor was illumined. The
shade was up and he saw the interior as one sees the scene of a play.
There was the outline of a rose-colored canopy, the gleam of a mirror,
the shine of polished wood, and in the center, Becky in pale blue, with
a candle in her hand.
And as he saw her there, Randolph knew why he had come. To worship at a
shrine. That was where Becky belonged--high above him. The flame of the
candle was a sacred fire.
CHAPTER IV
RAIN AND RANDY'S SOUL
I
Madge came down the next morning dressed for her journey. "Oscar and
Flora are going to take me as far as Washington in their car. They want
you to make a fourth, Georgie."
Dalton was eating alone. Breakfast was served at small tables on the
west terrace. There was a flagged stone space with wide awnings
overhead. Except that it overlooked a formal garden instead of streets,
one might have been in a Parisian café. The idea was Oscar's. Dalton had
laughed at him. "You'll be a _boulevardier_, Oscar, until you die."
Oscar had been sulky. "Well, how do you want me to do it?"
"Breakfast in bed--or in a breakfast room with things hot on the
sideboard, luncheon, out here on the terrace when the weather permits,
tea in the garden, dinner in great state in the big dining-room."
"I suppose you think you know all about it. But the thing that I am
always asking myself is, were you born to it, Dalton?"
"I've been around a lot," Dalton evaded. "Of course if you don't want me
to be perfectly frank with you, I won't."
"Be as frank as you please," Oscar had said, "but it's your air of
knowing everything that gets me."
Dalton's breakfast was a hearty one--bacon and two eggs, and a pile of
buttered toast. There had been a melon to begin with, and there was a
pot of coffee. He was eating with an appetite when Madge came down.
"I had mine in bed," Madge said, as George rose and pulled out a chair
for her. "Isn't this the beastliest fashion, having little tables?"
"That's what I told Oscar."
"Oscar and Flora will never have too much of restaurants. They belong to
the class which finds all that it wants in a jazz band and scrambled
eggs at Jack's at one o'clock in the morning. Georgie, in my next
incarnation, I hope there won't be any dansants or night frolics. I'd
like a May-pole in the sunshine and a lot of plump and rosy women and
bluff and hearty men for my friends--with a fine old farmhouse and
myself in the dairy making butter----"
George smiled at her. "I should have fancied you an Egyptian princess,
with twin serpents above your forehead instead of that turban."
"Heavens, no. I want no ardours and no Anthonys. Tell me about the new
little girl, Georgie."
"How do you know there is a--new little girl?"
"I know your tricks and your manners, and the way you managed to meet
her at the Horse Show. And you saw her last night."
"How do you know?"
"By the light in your eyes."
"Do I show it like that? Well, she's rather--not to be talked about,
Madge----"
She was not in the least affronted. "So that's it? You always begin that
way--putting them on a pedestal---- If you'd only keep one of us there
it might do you good."
"Which one--you?" he leaned a little forward.
"No." Indignation stirred within her. How easy it was for him to play
the game. And last night she had lain long awake, listening for the
sound of his motor. She had seen the moon set, and spectral dawn steal
into the garden. "No, I'm running away. I am tired of drifting always on
the tides of other people's inclination. We have stayed down here where
it is hot because Oscar and Flora like it, yet there's all the coolness
of the North Shore waiting for us----"
She rose and walked to the edge of the terrace. The garden was splashed
now with clear color, purple and rose and gold. The air was oppressive,
with a gathering haze back of the hills.
"I'm tired of it. Some day I'm going to flap my wings and fly away where
you won't be able to find me, Georgie. I'd rather be a wild gull to the
wind-swept sky, than a tame pigeon--to eat from your hand----" She said
it lightly; this was not a moment for plaintiveness.
There was a dancing light in his eyes. "You're a golden pheasant--and
you'll never fly so far that I shan't find you."
Oscar arriving at this moment saved a retort. "Flora's not well. We
can't motor up, Madge."
"I am sorry but I can take a train."
"There's one at three. I don't see why you are going," irritably; "Flora
won't stay here long after you leave."
"I am not as necessary as you think, Oscar. There are plenty of others,
and I must go----"
"Oh, very well. Andrews will drive you down."
"I'll drive her myself," said Dalton.
II
Aunt Claudia was going to Washington also on the three o'clock train.
She had had a wireless from Truxton who had sailed from Brest and would
arrive at New York within the week.
"Of course you'll go and meet him, Aunt Claudia," Becky had said; "I'll
help you to get your things ready."
Aunt Claudia, quite white and inwardly shaken by the thought of the
happiness which was on its way to her, murmured her thanks.
Becky, divining something of the tumult which was beneath that outward
show of serenity, patted the cushions of the couch in Mrs. Beaufort's
bedroom. "Lie down here, you darling dear. It was such a surprise,
wasn't it?"
"Well, my knees are weak," Mrs. Beaufort admitted.
The nuns had taught Becky nice ways and useful arts, so she folded and
packed under Aunt Claudia's eye and was much applauded.
"Most girls in these days," said Mrs. Beaufort, "throw things in. Last
summer I stayed at a house where the girls sat on their trunks to shut
them, and sent parcel-post packages after them of the things they had
left out."
"Sister Loretto says that I am not naturally tidy, so she keeps me at
it. I used to weep my eyes out when she'd send me back to my room----
But crying doesn't do any good with Sister Loretto."
"Crying is never any good," said Aunt Claudia. She was of Spartan mold.
"Crying only weakens. When things are so bad that you must cry, then do
it where the world can't see."
Becky found herself thrilled by the thought of Aunt Claudia crying in
secret. She was a martial little soul in spite of her distinctly
feminine type of mind.
Aunt Claudia's lingerie, chastely French-embroidered in little scallops,
with fresh white ribbons run in, was laid out on the bed in neat piles.
There was also a gray corduroy dressing-gown, lined with silk.
"This will be too warm," Becky said; "please let me put in my white
crepe house-coat. It will look so pretty, Aunt Claudia, when Truxton
comes in the morning to kiss you----"
Aunt Claudia had been holding on to her emotions tightly. The thought of
that morning kiss which for three dreadful years had been denied
her--for three dreadful years she had not known whether Truxton would
ever breeze into her room before breakfast with his "Mornin' Mums." She
felt that if she allowed herself any softness or yielding at this moment
she would spoil her spotless record of self-control and weep in maudlin
fashion in Becky's arms.
So in self-defense, she spoke with coldness. "I never wear borrowed
clothes, my dear."
Becky, somewhat dishevelled and warm from her exertions, sat down to
argue it. "I haven't had it on. And I'd love to give it to you----"
"My dear, of course not. It's very generous of you--very----" Aunt
Claudia buried her face suddenly in the pillows and sobbed stormily.
Becky stood up. "Oh, Aunt Claudia," she gasped. Then with the
instinctive knowledge that silence was best, she gave her aunt a little
pat on the shoulder and crept from the room.
She crept back presently and packed the crepe house-coat with the other
things. Then, since Aunt Claudia made no sign, she went down-stairs to
the kitchen.
Mandy, the cook, who had a complexion like an old copper cent, and who
wore a white Dutch cap in place of the traditional bandana, was cutting
corn from the cob for fritters.
"If you'll make a cup of tea," Becky said, "I'll take it up to Aunt
Claudia. She's lying down."
"Is you goin' wid her?" Mandy asked.
"To New York? No. She'll want Truxton all to herself, Mandy."
"Well, I hopes she has him," Mandy husked an ear of corn viciously. "I
ain' got my boy. He hol's his haid so high, he ain' got no time fo' his
ol' Mammy."
"You know you are proud of him, Mandy."
"I ain' sayin' I is, and I ain' sayin' I isn't. But dat Daisy down the
road, she ac' like she own him."
"Oh, Daisy? Is he in love with her?"
"Love," with withering scorn, "_love_? Ain' he got somefin' bettah to do
than lovin' when he's jes' fit and fought fo' Uncle Sam?" She beat the
eggs for her batter as if she had Daisy's head under the whip. "He fit
and fought fo' Uncle Sam," she repeated, "and now he comes home and
camps hisse'f on Daisy's do'-step."
Against the breeze of such high indignation, any argument would be blown
away. Becky changed the subject hastily. "Mandy," she asked, "are you
making corn fritters?"
"I is----"
"What else for lunch?"
"An omlec----"
"Mandy, I'm so hungry I could eat a house----"
"You look it," Mandy told her; "effen I was you, I'd eat and git fat."
"It isn't fashionable to be fat, Mandy."
"Skeletums may be in style," said Mandy, breaking eggs for the omelette,
"but I ain' ever found good looks in bones."
"Don't you like _my_ bones, Mandy?"
"You ain't got none, honey."
"You called me a skeleton."
The kettle boiled. "Effen I called you a skeletum," Mandy said as she
placed a cup and saucer on a small napkined tray, "my min' was on dat-ar
Daisy. You ain' got no bones, Miss Becky. But Daisy, she's got a neck
like a picked tukkey, and her shoulder-blades stan' out like wings."
III
Becky went to the train with her aunt. George Dalton drove Madge down
and passed the old surrey on the way.
Later Madge met Mrs. Beaufort and Becky on the station platform, and it
was when Dalton settled her in her chair in the train that she said,
"She's a darling. Keep her on a pedestal, Georgie----"
"You're a good sport," he told her; "you know you'd hate it if I did."
"I shouldn't. I'd like to think of you on your knees----"
It was time for him to leave her. She gave him her hand. "Until we meet
again, Georgie."
Her eyes were cool and smiling. Yet later as she looked out on the
flying hills, there was trouble in them. There had been a time when
Dalton had seemed to square with her girlish dreams.
And now, there was no one to warn this other girl with dreams in her
eyes. George was not a vulture, he was simply a marauding bee----!
Becky was already in the surrey when George came back, and Calvin was
gathering up his reins.
"Oh, look here, I wish you'd let me drive you up, Miss Bannister,"
George said, sparkling; "there's no reason, is there, why you must ride
alone?"
"Oh, no."
"Then you will?"
Her hesitation was slight. "I should like it."
"And can't we drive about a bit? You'll show me the old places? It is
such a perfect day. I hope you haven't anything else to do."
She had not. "I'll go with Mr. Dalton, Calvin."
Calvin, who had watched over more than one generation of Bannister
girls, and knew what was expected of them, made a worried protest.
"Hit's gwine rain, Miss Becky."
Dalton dismissed him with a wave of the hand. "I won't let her get wet,"
he lifted Becky from the surrey and walked with her to his car.
Kemp, who had come down in the house truck with Madge's trunks, stood
stiff and straight by the door. Being off with Miss MacVeigh he was on
with Miss Bannister. Girls might come and girls might go in his master's
life, but Kemp had an air of going on forever.
When he had seated Becky, Dalton stepped back and gave hurried
instructions.
"At four, Kemp," he said, "or if you are later, wait until we come."
"Very well, sir." Kemp stood statuesquely at attention until the car
whirled on. Then he sat down on the station platform, and talked to the
agent. He was no longer a servant but a man.
As the big car whirled up the hill, Becky, looking out upon the familiar
landscape, saw it with new eyes. There was a light upon it which had
never been for her on sea or land. She had not believed that in all the
world there could be such singing, blossoming radiance.
They drove through the old mill town and the stream was bright under the
willows. They stopped on the bridge for a moment to view the shining
bend.
"There are old chimneys under the vines," Becky said; "doesn't it seem
dreadful to think of all those dead houses----"
George gave a quick turn. "Why think of them? You were not made to think
of dead houses, you were made to live."
On and on they went, up the hills and down into the valleys, between
rail fences which were a riot of honeysuckle, and with the roads in
places rough under their wheels, with the fields gold with stubble, the
sky a faint blue, with that thick look on the horizon.
George talked a great deal about himself. Perhaps if he had listened
instead to Becky he might have learned things which would have surprised
him. But he really had very interesting things to tell, and Becky was
content to sit in silence and watch his hands on the wheel. They were
small hands, and for some tastes a bit too plump and well-kept, but
Becky found no fault with them. She felt that she could sit there
forever, and watch his hands and listen to his clear quick voice.
At last George glanced at the little clock which hung in front of him.
"Look here," he said, "I told Kemp to have tea for us at a place which I
found once when I walked in the woods. A sort of summer house which
looks towards Monticello. Do you know it?"
"Yes. Pavilion Hill. It's on Randy Paine's plantation--King's Crest."
"Then you've been there?"
"A thousand times with Randy."
"I thought it was Waterman's. We shan't be jailed as trespassers, shall
we?"
"No. But how could you tell your man to have tea for us when you didn't
know that I'd be--willing?"
"But I did--know----"
A little silence, then "How?"
"Because when I put my mind on a thing I usually get my way."
She sat very still. He bent down to her. "You're not angry?"
"No." Her cheeks were flaming. She was thrilled by his masterfulness. No
man had ever spoken to her like that. She was, indeed, having her first
experience of ardent, impassioned pursuit. So might young Juliet have
given ear to Romeo. And if Romeo had been a Georgie-Porgie, then alas,
poor Juliet!
The Pavilion had been built a hundred and fifty years before of cedar
logs. There had been a time when Thomas Jefferson had walked over to
drink not tea, but something stronger with dead and gone Paines. Its
four sides were open, but the vines formed a curtain which gave within a
soft gloom. They approached it from the east side, getting out of their
car and climbing the hill from the roadside. They found Kemp with
everything ready. The kettle was boiling, and the tea measured into the
Canton teapot which stood in its basket----
"Aren't you glad you came?" Dalton asked. "Kemp, when you've poured the
tea, you can look after the car."
The wind, rising, tore the dry leaves from the trees. Kemp, exiled, as
it were, from the Pavilion, sat in the big car and watched the
gathering blackness. Finally he got out and put up the curtains.
Everything would be ready when Dalton came. He knew better, however,
than to warn his master. George was apt to be sharp when his plans were
spoiled.
And now throughout the wooded slope there was the restless movement of
nature disturbed in the midst of peaceful dreaming. The trees bent and
whispered. The birds, flying low, called sharp warnings. A small dog,
spurning the leaves, as she followed a path up the west side of the
hill, stopped suddenly and looked back at the man who followed her.
"We'll make the Pavilion if we can, old girl," he told her, and as if
she understood, she went up and up in a straight line, disregarding the
temptation of side tours into bush and bramble.
George and Becky had finished their tea. There had been some rather
delectable sweet biscuit which Kemp kept on hand for such occasions, and
there was a small round box of glacé nuts, which George had insisted
that Becky must keep. The box was of blue silk set off by gold lace and
small pink roses.
"Blue is your color," George had said as he presented it.
"That's what Randy says."
"You are always talking of Randy."
She looked her surprise. "I've always known him."
"Is he in love with you?"
She set down the box and looked at him. "Randy is only a boy. I am very
fond of him. But we aren't either of us--silly."
She brought the last sentence out with such scorn that George had a
moment of startled amaze.
Then, recovering, he said with a smile, "Is being in love silly?"
"I think it's rather sacred----"
The word threw him back upon himself. Love was, you understand, to
George, a game. And here was Becky acting as if it were a ritual.
Yet the novelty of her point of view made her seem more than ever
adorable. In his heart he found himself saying, "Oh, you lovely, lovely
little thing."
But he did not say it aloud. Indeed he, quite unaccountably, found
himself unable to say anything, and while he hesitated, there charged up
the west hill a panting dog with flapping ears. At the arched opening of
the Pavilion she paused and wagged a tentative question.
"It's Nellie Custis----" Becky rose and ran towards her. "Where's your
master, darling? _Randy_----"
In response to her call came an eerie cry--the old war cry of the Indian
chiefs. Then young Paine came running up. "Becky! Here? There's going to
be a storm. You better get home----"
He stopped short. Dalton was standing by the folding table.
"Hello, Paine," he said, with ease. "We're playing 'Babes in the Wood.'"
"You seem very comfortable," Randy was as stiff as a wooden tobacco
sign.
"We are," Becky said. "Mr. Dalton waved his wand like the Arabian
nights----"
"My man did it," said Dalton; "he's down there in the car."
Randy felt a sense of surging rage. The Pavilion was his. It was old and
vine-covered, and hallowed by a thousand memories. And here was Dalton
trespassing with his tables and chairs and his Canton teapot. What right
had George Dalton to bring a Canton teapot on another man's acres?
Becky was pouring tea for him. "Two lumps, Randy?"
"I don't want any tea," he said ungraciously. His eyes were appraising
the flame of her cheeks, the light in her eyes. What had Dalton been
saying? "I don't want any tea. And there's a storm coming."
All her life Becky had been terrified in a storm. She had cowered and
shivered at the first flash of lightning, at the first rush of wind, at
the first roll of thunder. And now she sat serene, while the trees waved
despairing arms to a furious sky, while blackness settled over the
earth, while her ears were assailed by the noise of a thousand guns.
What had come over her? More than anything else, the thing that struck
against Randy's heart was this lack of fear in Becky!
IV
Of course it was Dalton who took Becky home. There had been a sharp
summons to Kemp, who came running up with raincoats, a rush for the car,
a hurried "Won't you come with us, Randy?" from Becky, and Randy's curt
refusal, and then the final insult from Dalton.
"Kemp will get you home, Paine, when he takes the tea things."
Randy wanted to throw something after him--preferably a tomahawk--as
Dalton went down the hill, triumphantly, shielding Becky from the
elements.
He watched until a curtain of rain shut them out, but he heard the roar
of the motor cutting through the clamor of the storm.
"Well, they're off, sir," said Kemp cheerfully.
He was packing the Canton teapot in its basket and was folding up the
chairs and tables. Randy had a sense of outrage. Here he was, a
Randolph Paine of King's Crest, left behind in the rain with a man who
had his mind on--teapots---- He stood immovable in the arched opening,
his arms folded, and with the rain beating in upon him.
"You'll get wet," Kemp reminded him; "it's better on this side, sir."
"I don't mind the rain. I won't melt; I've had two years in France."
"You have, sir?" something in Kemp's voice made Randy turn and look at
him. The little man had his arms full of biscuit boxes, and he was
gazing at Randy with a light in his eyes which had not been for Dalton.
"I had three years myself. And the best of my life, sir."
Randy nodded. "A lot of us feel that way."
"The fighting," said Kemp, "was something awful. But it was--big--and
after it things seem a bit small, sir." He drew a long breath and came
back to his Canton teapot and his folding table and his plans for
departure.
"I'll be glad to take you in the little car, Mr. Paine."
"No," said Randy; "no, thank you, Kemp. I'll wait here until the storm
is over."
Kemp, with a black rubber cape buttoned about his shoulders and standing
out over his load like a lady's hoopskirts, bobbed down the path and
was gone.
Randy was glad to be alone. He was glad to get wet, he was glad of the
roar and of the tumult which matched the tumult in his soul.
Somehow he had never dreamed of this--that somebody would come into
Becky's life and take her away----
Nellie Custis shivered and whined. She hated thunder-storms. Randy sat
down on the step and she crept close to him. He laid his hand on her
head and fear left her--as fear had left Becky in the presence of
Dalton.
After that the boy and the dog sat like statues, looking out, and in
those tense and terrible moments a new spirit was born in Randolph
Paine. Hitherto he had let life bring him what it would. He had scarcely
dared hope that it would bring him Becky. But now he knew that if he
lost her he would face--chaos----
Well, he would not lose her. Or if he did, it would not be to let her
marry a man like Dalton. Surely she wouldn't. She _couldn't_---- But
there had been that light in her eyes, that flame in her cheek--that
lack of fear--Dalton's air of assurance, the way she had turned to him.
"Oh, God," he said suddenly, out loud, "don't let Dalton have her."
He was shaken by an emotion which bent his head to his knees. Nellie
Custis pressed close against him and whined.
"He shan't have her, Nellie. He shan't----"
He burned with the thought of Dalton's look of triumph. Dalton who had
carried Becky off, and had left him with Kemp and a Canton teapot.
He recalled Kemp's words. "After it things seem a bit small, sir."
Well, it shouldn't be small for him. It had seemed so big--over there.
So easy to--carry on.
If he only had a fighting chance. If he had only a half of Dalton's
money. A little more time in which to get on his feet.
But in the meantime here was Dalton--with his money, his motors, and his
masterfulness. And his look of triumph----
In a sudden fierce reaction he sprang to his feet. He stood in the
doorway as if defying the future. "Nobody shall take her away from me,"
he said, "she's mine----"
His arms were folded over his chest, his wet black locks almost hid his
eyes. So might some young savage have stood in the long ago, sending his
challenge forth to those same hills.
CHAPTER V
LITTLE SISTER
I
It is one thing, however, to fling a challenge to the hills, and another
to live up to the high moment. Looking at it afterwards in cold blood,
Randy was forced to admit that his chances of beating George Dalton in a
race for Becky were small.
There seemed some slight hope, however, in the fact that Becky was a
Bannister and ought to know a gentleman when she saw one.
"And Dalton's a--a bounder," said Randy to Nellie Custis.
Nellie Custis, who was as blue-blooded as any Bannister, cocked a
sympathetic ear. Cocking an ear with Nellie was a weighty matter. Her
ears were big and unmanageable. When she got them up, she kept them
there for some time. It was a rather intriguing habit, as it gave her an
air of eager attention which wooed confidence.
"He's a bounder," said Randy as if that settled it.
But it did not settle it in the least. A man with an Apollo head may not
be a gentleman under his skin, but how are you to prove it? The world,
spurning Judy O'Grady, sanctions the Colonel's lady, and their
sisterhood becomes socially negligible. Randy should have known that he
could not sweep George Dalton away with a word. Perhaps he did know it,
but he did not care to admit it.
He and Nellie Custis were in the garage. It had once been a barn, but
the boarders had bought cars, so there was now the smell of gasoline
where there had once been the sweet scent of hay. And intermittently the
air was rent with puffs and snorts and shrieks which drowned the music
of that living chorus which has been sung in stables for centuries.
There were three cars. Two of them have nothing to do with this story,
but the third will play its part, and merits therefore description.
It was not an expensive car, but it was new and shining, and had a perky
snub-nosed air of being ready for anything. It belonged to the genial
gentleman who used it without mercy, and thus the little car wove back
and forth over the hills like a shuttle, doing its work sturdily, coming
home somewhat noisily, and even at rest, seeming to ask for something
more to do.
The genial gentleman was very proud of his car. He talked a great deal
about it to Randy, and on this particular morning when he came out and
found young Paine sitting on a wheelbarrow with Nellie Custis lending
him a cocked ear, he grew eloquent.
"Look here, I've been thinking. There ought to be a lot of cars like
this in the county."
To Randy the enthusiasms of the genial gentleman were a constant source
of amazement. He was always wanting the world to be glad about
something. Randy felt that at this moment any assumption of gladness
would be a hollow mockery.
"Any man," said the genial gentleman, rubbing a cloth over the enamel of
the little car, "any man who would start selling this machine down here
would make a fortune."
Randy pricked up his ears.
"How could he make a fortune?"
"Selling cars. Why, the babies cry for them----" he chuckled and rubbed
harder.
"How much could he make?" Randy found himself saying.
The genial gentleman named a sum, "Easy."
Randy got up from the wheelbarrow and came over. "Is she really as good
as that?"
"Is she really? Oh, say----" the genial gentleman for the next ten
minutes dealt in superlatives.
Towards the end, Randy was firing questions at him.
"Could I own a car while I was selling them?"
"Sure--they'd let you have it on installments to be paid for out of your
commissions----"
"And I'd have an open field?"
"My dear boy, in a month you could have cars like this running up and
down the hills like ants after sugar. They speak for themselves, and
they are cheap enough for anybody."
"But it is a horse-riding country, especially back in the hills. They
love horse-flesh, you know."
"Oh, they'll get the gasoline bug like the rest of us," said the genial
gentleman and slapped him on the back.
Randy winced. He did not like to be slapped on the back. Not at a
moment--when he was selling his soul to the devil----
For that was the way he looked at it.
"I shall have to perjure myself," he said to Major Prime later, as they
talked it over in the Schoolhouse, "to go through the country telling
mine own people to sell their horses and get cars."
"If you don't do it, somebody else will."
"But a man can't be convincing if he doesn't believe in a thing."
"No, of course. But you've got to look at it this way, the world moves,
and horses haven't had an easy time. Perhaps it is their moment of
emancipation. And just for the sake of a sentiment, a tradition, you
can't afford to hold back."
"I can't afford to lose this chance if there is money in it. But it
isn't what I had planned."
As he sat there on the step and hugged his knees, every drop of blood in
Randy seemed to be urging "Hurry, hurry." He felt as a man might who,
running a race, finds another rider neck and neck and strains towards
the finish.
To sell cars in order to win Becky seemed absurd on the face of it. But
he would at least be doing something towards solving the problem of
self-support, and towards increasing the measure of his own
self-respect.
"What had you planned?" the Major was asking.
"Well of course there is the law---- And I like it, but there would be a
year or two before I could earn a living---- And I've wanted to
write----"
"Write what? Books?"
"Anything," said Randy, explosively, "that would make the world sit up."
"Ever tried it?"
"Yes. At school. I talked to a teacher of mine once about it. He said I
had better invent a--pill----"
The Major stared, "A pill?"
Randy nodded. "He didn't quite mean it, of course. But he saw the modern
trend. A poet? A poor thing! But hats off to the pillmaker with his
multi-millions!"
"Stop that," said the Major.
"Stop what?"
"Blaming the world for its sordidness. There is beauty enough if we look
for it."
"None of us has time to look for it. We are too busy trying to sell cars
to people who love horses."
II
In the end Randy got his car. And after that he, too, might have been
seen running shuttle-like back and forth over the red roads. Nellie
Custis was usually beside him on the front seat. She took her new honors
seriously. For generations back her forbears had loped with flapping
ears in the lead of a hunting pack. To be sitting thus on a leather seat
and whirled through the air with no need of legs from morning until
night required some readjustment on the part of Nellie Custis. But she
had always followed where Randy led. And in time she grew to like it,
and watched the road ahead with eager eyes, and with her ears
perpetually cocked.
Now and then Becky sat beside Randy, with Nellie at her feet. The
difference between a ride with Randy and one with George Dalton was,
Becky felt, the difference a not unpleasant commonplace and the stuff
that dreams are made of.
"It is rather a duck of a car," she had said, the first time he took her
out in it.
"Yes, it is," Randy had agreed. "I am getting tremendously fond of her.
I have named her 'Little Sister.'"
"Oh, Randy, you haven't."
"Yes, I have. She has such confiding ways. I never believed that cars
had human qualities, Becky."
"They are not horses of course."
"Well, they have individual characteristics. You take the three cars in
our barn. The Packard reminds one of that stallion we owned three years
ago--blooded and off like the wind. The Franklin is a grayhound--and
Little Sister is a--duck----"
"Mr. Dalton's car is a--silver ship----"
"Oh, does he call it that?" grimly.
"No----"
"Was it your own--poetic--idea?"
"Yes."
"And you called Little Sister a duck," he groaned. "And when my little
duck swims in the wake of his silver ship, and he laughs, do you laugh,
too?"
There was a dead silence. Then she said, "Oh, Randy----"
He made his apology like a gentleman. "That was hateful of me, Becky.
I'm sorry----"
"You know I wouldn't laugh, Randy, and neither would he."
"Who?"
"Mr. Dalton."
"Wouldn't what?"
"Laugh."
He hated her defense of young Apollo--but he couldn't let the subject
alone.
"You never have any time for me."
"Randy, are you going to scold me for the rest of our ride?"
"Am I scolding?"
"Yes."
"Then I'll stop it and say nice things to you or you won't want to come
again."
Yet after that when he saw her in Dalton's car, her words would return
to him, and gradually he began to think of her as sailing in a silver
ship farther and farther away in a future where he could not follow.
Little Sister was a great comfort in those days. She gave him occupation
and she gave him an income. He was never to forget his first sale. He
had not found it easy to cry his wares. The Paines of King's Crest had
never asked favors of the country-folk, or if they had, they had paid
generously for what they had received. To go now among them saying, "I
have something to sell," carried a sting. There had been nothing
practical in Randy's education. He had no equipment with which to meet
the sordid questions of bargain and sale.
He had thought of this as he rode over the hills that morning to the
house of a young farmer who had been suggested by the genial gentleman
as a good prospect. He turned over in his mind the best method of
approach. It was a queer thing, he pondered, to visualize himself as a
salesman. He wondered how many of the other fellows who had come back
looked at it as he did. They had dreamed such dreams of valor, their
eyes had seen visions. To Randy when he had enlisted had come a singing
sense that the days of chivalry were not dead. He had gone through the
war with a laugh on his lips, but with a sense of the sacredness of the
crusade in his heart. He had returned--still dreaming--to sell
snub-nosed cars to the countryside!
Why, just a year ago----! He remembered a black night of storm, when,
hooded like a falcon--he had ridden without a light on his motorcycle,
carrying dispatches from the Argonne, and even as he had ridden, he had
felt that high sense of heroic endeavor. On the success of his mission
depended other lives, the saving of nations--victory----!
And now he, with a million others, was faced by the problem of the
day's work. He wondered how the others looked at it--those gallant young
knights in khaki who had followed the gleam. Were they, too, grasping at
any job that would buy them bread and butter, pay their bills, keep them
from living on the bounty of others?
He felt that in some way the thing was all wrong. There should have been
big things for these boys to do. There seemed something insensate in a
civilization which would permit a man who wore medals of honor to sell
ribbon over a counter, or weigh out beef at a butcher's. Yet he supposed
that many of them were doing it. Indeed he knew that some of them were.
The butcher's boy, who brought the meat over every morning to King's
Crest, wore two decorations, and when Randy had stopped for breakfast
supplies, the hero of Belleau Woods had cut off sausages as calmly as he
had once bayonetted Huns.
Randy wondered what the butcher's boy was feeling under that apparently
stolid surface. Was his horizon bounded by beef and sausages, or did his
soul expand with memories of the shoulder-to-shoulder march, the
comradeship of the trenches, the laughter and songs? Did his pulses
thrill with the thought of the big things he might yet do in these days
of peace, or was he content to play safe and snip sausages?
Randy felt that he was not content. It was not that he loved war. But he
loved the visions that the war had brought him. There had seemed no
limit then to America's achievement. She had been a laggard--he thanked
God that he had not been a party to that delay. But when she had come
in, she had come in with all her might and main. And her young men had
fought and the future of the whole world had been in their hands, and
since peace had come the future of the world must still be reckoned in
the terms of their glorious youth.
And now, something within Randy began to sing and soar. He felt that
here were things to be put on paper--the questions which he flung at
himself should be written for other men to read. That was what men
needed--questions. Questions which demanded answers not only in words
but in deeds. This was a moment for men of high thoughts and high
purposes.
And he was selling cars----!
Well, some day he would write. He was writing a little now, at night. In
his room at the top of the Schoolhouse. Yet the things that he had
written seemed trivial as he thought of them. What he wanted was to
strike a ringing note. To have the fellows say when they read it, "If it
is true for him it is true for me."
Yet when one came to think of it, there were really not any "fellows."
Not in the sense that it had been "over there." They were scattered to
the four winds, dispersed to the seven seas--the A. E. F. was
extinct--as extinct--as the Trumpeter Swan!
And now his thoughts ran fast, and faster. Here was his theme. Where was
that glorious company of young men who had once sounded their trumpets
to the world? Gone, as the swans were gone--leaving the memory of their
whiteness--leaving the memory of their beauty--leaving the memory of
their--song----
He wanted to turn back at once. To drive Little Sister at breakneck
speed towards pen and paper. But some instinct drove him doggedly
towards the matter on hand. One might write masterpieces, but there were
cars to be sold.
He sold one----; quite strangely and unexpectedly he found that the
transaction was not difficult. The man whom he had come to see was on
the front porch and was glad of company. Randy explained his errand. "It
is new business for me. But I've got something to offer you that you'll
find you'll want----"
He found that he could say many things truthful about the merits of
Little Sister. He had a convincing manner; the young farmer listened.
"Let me take you for a ride," Randy offered, and away they went along
the country roads, and through the main streets of the town in less time
that it takes to say--"Jack Robinson."
When they came back, the children ran out to see, and Randy took them
down the road and back again. "You can carry the whole family," he said,
"when you go----"
The man's wife came out. She refused to ride. She was afraid.
But Randy talked her over. "My mother felt like that. But once you are
in it is different."
She climbed in, and came back with her face shining.
"I am going to buy the car," her husband said to her.
Randy's heart jumped. Somehow he had felt that it would not really
happen. He had had little faith in his qualities as salesman. Yet, after
all, it had happened, and he had sold his car.
Riding down the hill, he was conscious of a new sense of achievement. It
was all very well to dream of writing masterpieces. But here was
something tangible.
"Nellie," he said, "things are picking up."
Nellie laid her nose on his knee and looked up at him. It had been a
long ride, and she was glad they were on the homeward stretch. But she
wagged her tail. Nellie knew when things were going well with her
master. And when his world went wrong, her sky darkened.
III
The sale of one car, however, does not make a fortune. Randy realized as
the days went on that if he sold them and sold them and sold them,
Dalton would still outdistance him financially.
There remained, therefore, fame, and the story in the back of his mind.
If he could lay a thing like that at Becky's feet! He had the lover's
urge towards some heaven-kissing act which should exalt his mistress----
A book for all the world to read--a picture painted with a flaming
brush, a statue carved with a magic instrument. It was for Becky that
Randy would work and strive hoping that by some divine chance he might
draw her to him.
He worked at night until the Major finally remonstrated.
"Do you ever go to bed?"
Randy laughed. "Sometimes."
"Are you writing?"
"Trying to."
"Hard work?"
"I like it,"--succinctly.
The Major smoked for a while in silence. Then he said, "I suppose you
don't want to talk about it."
It was a starry night and a still one. The younger boarders had gone for
a ride. The older boarders were in bed. The Major was stretched in his
long chair. Randy sat as usual on the steps.
"Yes," he said, "I'd like to talk about it. I have a big idea, and I
can't put it on paper."
He hugged his knees and talked. His young voice thrilled with the
majesty of his conception. Here, he said, was the idea. Once upon a time
there had been a race of wonderful swans, with plumage so white that
when they rested in flocks on the river banks they made a blanket of
snow. Their flight was a marvellous thing--they flew so high that the
eye of man could not see them--but the sound of their trumpets could be
heard. The years passed and the swans came no more to their old haunts.
Men had hunted them and killed them--but there were those who held that
on still nights they could be heard--sounding their trumpets----
"I want to link that up with the A. E. F. We were like the swans--a
white company which flew to France---- Our idealism was the song which
we sounded high up. And the world listened--and caught the sound---- And
now, as a body we are extinct, but if men will listen, they may still
hear our trumpets--sounding----!"
As he spoke the air seemed to throb with the passion of his phrases. His
face was uplifted to the sky. The Major remembered a picture in the
corridor of the Library of Congress--the Boy of Winander---- Oh, the
boys of the world--those wonderful boys who had been drawn out from
among the rest, set apart for a time, and in whose hands now rested the
fate of nations!
"It is epic," he said, slowly. "Take your time for it."
"It's too big," said Randy slowly, "and I am not a genius---- But it is
my idea, all right, and some day, perhaps, I shall make it go."
"You must make it clear to yourself. Then you can make it clear to
others."
"Yes," Randy agreed, "and now you can see why I am sitting up nights."
"Yes. How did you happen to think of it, Paine?"
"I've been turning a lot of things over in my mind----; what the other
fellows are doing about their jobs. There's that boy at the butcher's,
and a lot of us went over to do big things. And now we have come back to
the little things. Why, there's Dalton's valet--Kemp--taking orders from
that--cad."
His scorn seemed to cut into the night. "And I am selling cars---- I
sold one to-day to an old darkey, and I felt my grandsires turn in
their graves. But I like it."
The Major sat up. "Your liking it is the biggest thing about you,
Paine."
"What do you mean?"
"A man who can do his day's work and not whine about it, is the man that
counts. That butcher's boy may have a soul above weighing meat and
wrapping sausages, but at the moment that's his job, and he is doing it
well. There may be a divine discontent, but I respect the man who keeps
his mouth shut until he finds a remedy or a raise.
"I don't often speak of myself," he went on, "but perhaps this is the
moment. I am as thirsty for California, Paine, as a man for drink. It is
the dry season out there, and the hills are brown, but I love the brown,
and the purple shadows in the hollows. I have ridden over those hills
for days at a time,--I shall never ride a horse over them again." He
stopped and went on. "Oh, I've wanted to whine. I have wanted to curse
the fate that tied me to a chair like this. I have been an active
man--out-of-doors, and oh, the out-of-doors in California. There isn't
anything like it--it is the sense of space, the clear-cut look of
things. But I won't go back. Not till I have learned to do my day's
work, and then I will let myself play a bit. I'd like to take you with
me, Paine--you and a good car--and we'd go over the hills and far
away----
"I haven't told you much of my life. And there's not a great deal to
tell. Fifteen years ago I married a little girl and thought I loved her.
But what I really loved was the thought of doing things for her. I had
money and she was poor. It was pleasant to see her eyes shine when I
gave her things---- But money hasn't anything to do with love, Paine,
and that is where we American men fall down. When we love a woman we
begin to tell her of our possessions and to tempt her by them. And the
thing that we should do is to show her ourselves. We should say, 'If I
were stripped of all my worldly goods what would there be in me for you
to like?' My little wife and I had not one thing in common. And one day
she left me. She found a man who gave her love for love. I had given her
cars and flowers and boxes of candy and diamonds and furs. But she
wanted more than that. She died--two years ago. I think she had been
happy in those last years. I never really loved her, but she taught me
what love is--and it is not a question of barter and sale----"
He seemed to be thinking aloud. Randy spoke after a silence. "But a man
must have something to offer a woman."
"He must have himself. Oh, we are all crooked in our values, Paine. The
best that a man can give a woman is his courage, his hope, his
aspiration. That's enough. I learned it too late. I don't know why I am
saying all this to you, Paine."
But Randy knew. It was on such nights that men showed their souls to
each other. It was on such nights that his comrades had talked to him in
France. Under the moon they had seemed self-conscious. But beneath a sky
of stars, the words had come to them.
As he sat at his desk later, he thought of all that the Major had said
to him: that possessions had nothing to do with love; that the test must
be, "What would there be in me to like if I were stripped of all my
worldly goods?"
Well, he had nothing. There were only his hopes, his dreams, his
aspiration--himself.
Would these weigh with any woman in the balance against George Dalton's
splendid trappings?
The dawn crept in and found him still sitting at his desk. He had not
written a dozen lines. But his thoughts had been the long, long thoughts
of youth.
CHAPTER VI
GEORGIE-PORGIE
I
It would never have happened if Aunt Claudia had been there. Aunt
Claudia would have built hedges about Becky. She would have warned the
Judge. She would, as a last resort, have challenged Dalton. But Fate,
which had Becky's future well in hand, had sent Aunt Claudia to meet
Truxton in New York. And she was having the time of her life.
Her first letter was a revelation to her niece. "I didn't know," she
told the Judge at breakfast, "that Aunt Claudia could be like this----"
"Like what?"
"So young and gay----"
"She is not old. And when she was young she was gayer than you."
"Oh, not really, Grandfather."
"Yes. And she looked like you--and had the same tricks with her hands,
and her hair was bright and brown. And she was very pretty."
"She is pretty yet," said Becky, loyally, but she was quite sure that
whatever might have been Aunt Claudia's likeness to herself in the past,
her own charms would not in the future shrink to fit Aunt Claudia's
present pattern. It was unthinkable that her pink and white should fade
to paleness, her slenderness to stiffness, her youthful radiance to a
sort of weary cheerfulness.
There was nothing weary in the letter, however. "Oh, my dear, my dear,
you should see Truxton. He is so perfectly splendid that I am sure he is
a changeling and not my son. I tell him that he can't be the bundle of
cuddly sweetness that I used to carry in my arms. I wore your white
house-coat that first morning, Becky, and he sent some roses, and we had
breakfast together in my rooms at the hotel. I believe it is the first
time in years that I have looked into a mirror to really like my looks.
You were sweet, my dear, to insist on putting it in. Truxton must stay
here for two weeks more, and he wants me to stay with him. Then we shall
come down together. Can you get along without me? We are going to the
most wonderful plays, and to smart places to eat, and I danced last
night on a roof garden. Should I say 'on' or 'in' a roof garden? Truxton
says that my step is as light as a girl's. I think my head is a little
turned. I am very happy."
Becky laid the letter down. "Would anyone have believed that Aunt
Claudia _could_----"
"You have said that before, my dear. Your Aunt Claudia wasn't born in
the ark----"
"But, Grandfather, I didn't mean that."
"It sounded like it. I shall write to her to stay as long as she can. We
can get along perfectly without her."
"Of course," said Becky slowly. She had a feeling that, at all costs,
she ought to call Aunt Claudia back.
For Dalton, after that first ride in the rain from Pavilion Hill, had
speeded his wooing. He had swept Becky along on a rushing tide. He had
courted the Judge, and the Judge had pressed upon him invitation after
invitation. Day and night the big motor had flashed up to Huntersfield,
bringing Dalton to some tryst with Becky, or carrying her forth to some
gay adventure. Her world was rose-colored. She had not dreamed of life
like this. She seemed to have drunk of some new wine, which lighted her
eyes and flamed in her cheeks. Her beauty shone with an almost
transcendent quality. As the dove's plumage takes on in the spring an
added luster, so did the bronze of Becky's hair seem to burn with a
brighter sheen.
Yet the Judge noticed nothing.
"Did you ask him to dine with us?" he had demanded, when Dalton had
called Becky up on the morning of the receipt of Aunt Claudia's letter.
"No, Grandfather."
"Then I'll do it," and he had gone to the telephone, and had urged his
hospitality.
II
When Dalton came Becky met him on the front steps of the house.
"Dinner is late," she said, "let's go down into the garden."
The garden at Huntersfield was square with box hedges and peaked up with
yew, and there were stained marble statues of Diana and Flora and Ceres,
and a little pool with lily pads.
"You are like the pretty little girls in the picture books," said
George, as they walked along. "Isn't that a new frock?"
"Yes," said Becky, "it is. Do you like it?"
"You are a rose among the roses," he said. He wondered a bit at its
apparent expensiveness. Perhaps, however, Becky was skillful with her
needle. Some women were. He did not care greatly for such skill, but he
was charmed by the effect.
"You are a rose among the roses," he said again, and broke off a big
pink bud from a bush near by.
"Bend your head a little. I want to put it in your hair."
His fingers caught in the bronze mesh. "It is wound around my ring." He
fumbled in his pockets with his free hand and got his knife. "It may
pull a bit."
He showed her presently the lock which he had cut. "It seems alive," he
kissed it and put it in his pocket.
Her protest was genuine. "Oh, please," she said, "I wish you wouldn't."
"Wouldn't what?"
"Keep it."
"Shall I throw it away?"
"You shouldn't have cut it off."
"Other men have been tempted--in a garden----"
It might have startled George could he have known that old Mandy, eyeing
him from the kitchen, placed him in Eden's bower not as the hero of the
world's initial tragedy, but as its Satanic villain.
"He sutt'n'y have bewitched Miss Becky," she told Calvin; "she ain'
got her min' on nothin' but him."
"Yo' put yo' min' on yo' roas' lamb, honey," Calvin suggested. "How-cum
you got late?"
"That chile kep' me fixin' that pink dress. She ain' never cyard what
she wo'. And now she stan' in front o' dat lookin'-glass an' fuss an'
fiddle. And w'en she ain' fussin' an' fiddlin', she jus' moons around,
waitin' fo' him to come ridin' up in that red car like a devil on
greased light'in'. An' I say right heah, Miss Claudia ain' gwine like
it."
"Why ain' she?"
"Miss Claudia know black f'um w'ite. An' dat man done got a black
heart----"
"Whut you know 'bout hit, Mandy?"
"Lissen. You wait. He'll suck a o'ange an' th'ow it away. He'll pull a
rose, and scattah the leaves." Mandy, stirring gravy, was none the less
dramatic. "You lissen, an' wait----"
"W'en Miss Claudia comin'?"
"In one week, thank the Lord," Mandy pushed the gravy to the back of the
stove and pulled forward an iron pot. "The soup's ready," she said; "you
go up and tell the Jedge, Calvin."
All through dinner, Becky was conscious of that lock of hair in George's
pocket. The strand from which the lock had been cut fell down on her
cheek. She had to tuck it back. She saw George smile as she did it. She
forgave him.
It was after dinner that George spoke of Becky's gown.
"It is perfect," he said, "all except the pearls----?"
She gave him a startled glance. "The pearls?"
"I want to see you without them."
She unwound them and they dripped from her hand in milky whiteness.
He made his survey. "That's better," he said, "if they were real it
would be different--I don't like to have you cheapened by anything less
than--perfect----"
"Cheapened?" She smiled inscrutably, then dropped the pearls into a
small box on the table beside her. "Yes," she said, "if they were real
it would be different----"
There was something in her manner which made him say hurriedly, "You
must not think that I am criticizing your taste. If I had my way you
should have everything that money can buy----"
Her candid eyes came up to his. "There are a great many things that
money cannot buy."
"You've got to show me," George told her; "I've never seen anything yet
that I couldn't get with money."
"Could you buy--dreams----"
"I'd rather buy--diamonds."
"And money can't buy happiness."
"It can buy a pretty good imitation."
"But imitation happiness is like imitation pearls."
He laughed and sat down beside her. "You mustn't be too clever."
"I am not clever at all."
"I believe you are. And you don't have to be. There are plenty of clever
women but only one Becky Bannister."
It was just an hour later that Georgie-Porgie kissed her. She was at the
piano in the music-room, and there was no light except the glimmer of
tall white candles, and the silver moonlight which fell across the
shining floor.
Her grandfather was nodding in the room beyond, and through the open
window came the dry, sweet scent of summer, as if nature had opened her
pot-pourri to give the world a whiff of treasured fragrance.
Becky had been singing, and she had stopped and looked up at him.
"Oh, you lovely--lovely, little thing," he said, and bent his head.
To Becky, that moment was supreme, sacred. She trembled with happiness.
To her that kiss meant betrothal--ultimate marriage.
To George it meant, of course, nothing of the kind. It was only one of
many moments. It was a romance which might have been borrowed from the
Middle Ages. A rare tale such as one might read in a book. A pleasant
dalliance--to be continued until he was tired of it. If he ever
married, it must be a spectacular affair--handsome woman, big fortune,
not an unsophisticated slip of a child from an impoverished Virginia
farm.
III
In the days that followed, Becky's gay lover came and rode away, and
came again. He sparkled and shone and worshipped, but not a word did he
say about the future. He seemed content with this idyl of old gardens,
scented twilights, starlight nights, with Beauty's eyes for him alone
radiant eyes that matched the stars.
Yet as the days went on the radiance was dimmed. Becky was in a state of
bewilderment which bordered on fear. George showed himself an
incomparable lover, but always he was silent about the things which she
felt cried for utterance.
So at last one day she spoke to the Judge.
"Granddad, did you kiss Grandmother before you asked her to marry you?"
"Asking always comes first, my dear. And you are too young to think of
such things."
Grandfather was, thus obviously, no help. He sat in the Bird Room and
dreamed of the days when the stuffed mocking-bird on the wax branch sang
to a young bride, and his ideal of love had to do with the courtly
etiquette of a time when men knelt and sued and were rewarded with the
touch of finger tips.
As for George, he found himself liking this affair rather more than
usual. There was no denying that the child was tremendously
attractive--with her youth and beauty and the reserve which like a stone
wall seemed now and then to shut her in. He had always a feeling that he
would like to climb over the wall. It had pricked his interest to find
in this little creature a strength and delicacy which he had found in no
other woman.
He had had one or two letters from Madge, and had answered them with a
line. She gave rather generously of her correspondence and her letters
were never dull. In the last one she had asked him to join her on the
North Shore.
"I am sorry," she said, "for the new little girl. I have a feeling
that she won't know how to play the game and that you'll hurt her.
You will probably think that I am jealous, but I can't help that.
Men always think that women are jealous when it comes to other
women. They never seem to understand that we are trying to keep the
world straight.
"Oscar writes that Flora isn't well, that all her other guests are
gone except you--and that she wants me. But why should I come? I
wish he wouldn't ask me. Something always tugs at my heart when I
think of Flora. She has so much and yet so little. She and Oscar
would be much happier in a flat on the West Side with Flora cooking
in a kitchenette, and Oscar bringing things home from the
delicatessen. He would buy bologna and potato salad on Sunday
nights, and perhaps they would slice up a raw onion. It sounds
dreadful, doesn't it? But there are thousands of people doing just
that thing, Georgie, and being very happy over it. And it wouldn't
be dreadful for Flora and Oscar because they would be right where
they belong, and the potato salad and the bologna and the little
room where Oscar could sit with his coat off would be much more to
their liking than their present pomp and elegance. You and I are
different. You could never play any part pleasantly but that of
Prince Charming, and I should hate the kitchenette. I want wide
spaces, and old houses, and deep fireplaces--my people far back
were like that--I sometimes wonder why I stick to Flora--perhaps it
is because she clung to me in those days when Oscar was drafted and
had to go, and she cried so hard in the Red Cross rooms that I took
her under my wing---- Take it all together, Flora is rather worth
while and so is Oscar if he didn't try so hard to be what he is
not.
"But then we are all trying rather hard to be what we are not. I am
really and truly middle-class. In my mind, I mean. Yet no one would
believe it to look at me, for I wear my clothes like a Frenchwoman,
and I am as unconventional as English royalty. And two generations
of us have inherited money. But back of that there were nice
middle-class New Englanders who did their own work. And the women
wore white aprons, and the men wore overalls, and they ate
doughnuts for breakfast, and baked beans on Sunday, and they milked
their own cows, and skimmed their own cream, and they read Hamlet
and the King James version of the Bible, and a lot of them wrote
things that will be remembered throughout the ages, and they had
big families and went to church, and came home to overflowing
hospitality and chicken pies--and they were the salt of the earth.
And as I think I remarked to you once before, I want to be like my
great-grandmother in my next incarnation, and live in a wide, low
farmhouse, and have horses and hogs and chickens and pop-corn on
snowy nights, and go to church on Sunday.
"I don't know why I am writing like this, except that I went to
Trinity to vespers, when I stopped over in Boston. It was dim and
quiet and the boys' voices were heavenly, and over it all brooded
the spirit of the great man who once preached there--and who still
preaches----
"And now it is Sunday again, and I am back at the Crossing, and I
played golf all the morning, and bridge this afternoon, and all the
women smoked and all the men, and I was in a blue haze, and I
wanted to be back in the quiet church where the boys sang, and the
lights were like stars----
"I wish you and I could go there some day and that you could feel
as I do about it. But you wouldn't. You are always so sure and
smug--and you have a feeling that money will buy anything--even
Paradise. I wonder what you will be like on the next plane. You
won't fit into my farmhouse. I fancy that you'll be something
rather--devilish--like Don Juan--or perhaps you'll be just an
'ostler in a courtyard, shining boots and--kissing maids----
"Of course I don't quite mean that. But I do feel that you'd be
rather worth while if you'd stop philandering and discover your
soul.
"I am a bit homesick, and I haven't any home. If Dad hadn't married
a second time, I believe he would still love me a bit. But his wife
doesn't. And so here I am--and as restless as ever--seeking
something--always seeking.
"And now, once more, don't break the heart of the new little girl.
I don't need to warn you not to break your own. You are the
greatest example of the truth of 'he who loves and runs away will
live to love another day.' Oh, Georgie-Porgie, will you ever love
any woman enough to rise with her to the heights?
"Perhaps there aren't any heights for you or me. But I should like
to think there were. Different hilltops, of course, so that we
could wave across. We shall never climb together, Georgie. Perhaps
we are too much alike to help each other up the hills. We need
stronger props.
"Tell me about Flora. Is she really ill? If she is, I'll come. But
I'd rather not.
"I hope you won't read this aloud to Oscar. You might, you know,
and it wouldn't do. He would hate to believe that he'd be happier
buying things at a delicatessen, and he wouldn't believe it. But
it's true, just as it is true that you would be happy shining
boots and making love to the maids like a character in Dickens.
"Come on up, and we'll motor to Boston on Sunday afternoon and
we'll go to Trinity; I want somebody to be good with me, Georgie,
and there are so many of the other kind.
"Ever wistfully,
"Madge."
George knew that he ought to go, but he was not ready yet to run away.
He was having the time of his life, and as for Becky, he would teach her
how to play the game.
IV
Aunt Claudia was away for three weeks.
"I wish she would come home," young Paine said one morning to his
mother.
"Why?" Caroline Paine was at her desk with her mind on the dinner. "Why,
Randy?"
"Oh, Dalton's going there a lot."
Mrs. Paine headed her list with gumbo soup. "Do you think he goes to see
Becky?"
"Does a duck swim? Of course he goes there to see her, and he's turning
her head."
"He is enough to turn any woman's head. He has nice eyes." Mrs. Paine
left the topic as negligible, and turned to more important things.
"Randy, would you mind picking a few pods of okra for the soup? Susie is
so busy and Bob and Jefferson are both in the field."
"Certainly, Mother," his cool answer gave no hint of the emotions which
were seething within him. Becky's fate was hanging in the balance, and
his mother talked of okra! He had decided some weeks ago that boarders
were disintegrating--and that a mother was not a mother who had three
big meals a day on her mind.
He went into the garden. An old-fashioned garden, so common at one time
in the South--with a picket fence, a little gate, orderly paths--a blaze
of flowers to the right, and to the left a riot of vegetables--fat
tomatoes weighing the vines to the ground, cucumbers hiding under their
sheltering leaves, cabbages burgeoning in blue-green, and giving the
promise of unlimited boiled dinners, onions enough to flavor a thousand
delectable dishes, sweet corn running in countless rows up the hill,
carrots waving their plumes, Falstaffian watermelons. It was evident
with the garden as an index that the boarders at King's Crest were fed
on more than milk and honey.
Randy picked the okra and carried it to the kitchen, and returning to
the Schoolhouse found the Major opening his morning mail.
Randy sat down on the step. "Once upon a time," he said, "we had
niggers to work in our gardens. And now we are all niggers."
The Major's keen eyes studied him. "What's the matter?"
"I've been picking okra--for soup, and I'm a Paine of King's Crest."
"Well, you peeled potatoes in France."
"That's different."
"Why should it be different? If a thing is for the moment your job you
are never too big for it."
"I wish I had stayed in the Army. I wish I had never come back."
The Major whistled for a moment, thoughtfully. Then he said, "Look here,
Paine, hadn't you better talk about it?"
"Talk about what?"
"That's for you to tell me. There's something worrying you. You are more
tragic than--Hamlet----"
"Well--it's--Becky----"
"And Dalton, of course. Why don't you cut him out, Paine----"
"Me? Oh, look here, Major, what have I to offer her?"
"Youth and energy and a fighting spirit," the Major rapped out the
words.
"What is a fighting spirit worth," Randy asked with a sort of weary
scorn, "when a man is poor and the woman's rich?"
The Major had been whistling a silly little tune from a modern opera. It
was an air which his men would have recognized. It came to an end
abruptly.
"Rich? Who is rich?"
"Becky."
The Major got up and limped to the porch rail. "I thought she was as
poor as----"
"The rest of us? Well, she isn't."
It appeared that Becky's fortune came from the Nantucket grandmother,
and that there would be more when the Admiral died. It was really a very
large fortune, well invested, and yielding an amazing income. One of the
clauses of the grandmother's will had to do with the bringing up of
Becky. Until she was of age she was to be kept as much as possible away
from the distractions and temptations of modern luxury. The Judge and
the Admiral had agreed that nothing could be better. The result, Randy
said, was that nobody ever thought of Becky Bannister as rich.
"Yet those pearls that she wears are worth more than I ever expect to
earn."
"It is rather like a fairy tale. The beggar-maid becomes a queen."
"You can see now why I can't offer her just youth and a fighting
spirit."
"I wonder if Dalton knows."
"I don't believe he does," Randy said slowly. "I give him credit for
that."
"He might have heard----"
"I doubt it. He hasn't mingled much, you know."
"It will be rather a joke on him----"
"To find that he has married--Mademoiselle Midas?"
"To find that she is Mademoiselle Midas, whether he marries her or not."
V
Of course Georgie-Porgie ran away. It was the inevitable climax. Flora's
illness hastened things a bit.
"She wants to see her New York doctors," Waterman had said. "I think we
shall close the house, and join Madge later at the Crossing."
George felt an unexpected sense of shock. The game must end, yet he
wanted it to go on. The cards were in his hands, and he was not quite
ready to turn the trick.
"When do we go?" he asked Oscar.
"In a couple of days if we can manage it. Flora is getting worried about
herself. She thinks it is her heart."
George rode all of that afternoon with Becky. But not a word did he say
about his departure. He never spoiled a thing like this with "Good-bye."
Back at Waterman's, Kemp was packing trunks. In forty-eight hours there
would be the folding of tents, and Hamilton Hill would be deserted. It
added a pensiveness to his manner that made him more than ever charming.
It rained on the way home, and it seemed to him significant that his
first ride and his last with Becky should have been in the rain.
He stayed to dinner, and afterwards he and Becky walked together in the
fragrance of the wet garden. A new moon hung low for a while and was
then lost behind the hills.
"My little girl," George said when the moment came that he must go, "My
dear little girl." He gathered her up in his arms--but did not kiss her.
For once in his life, Georgie-Porgie was too deeply moved for kisses.
After he had gone, Becky went into the Bird Room, and stood on the
hearth and looked up at the Trumpeter Swan. There was no one to whom she
could speak of the ecstasy which surged through her. As a child she had
brought her joys here, and her sorrows--her Christmas presents in the
early morning--the first flowers of the spring. She had sat here often
in her little black frock and had felt the silent sympathy of the wise
old bird.
He gazed down at her now with an almost uncanny intelligence. She
laughed a little and standing on tiptoe laid her cheek against the cool
glass. "When I am married," was her wordless question, "will you sound
your trumpet high up near the moon?"
CHAPTER VII
MADEMOISELLE MIDAS
I
There came to Huntersfield the next morning at about the same moment,
Kemp in his little car with a small parcel for Becky, and Calvin with a
big box from the express office.
Becky was in her room at breakfast when Calvin brought the boxes up to
her. It was a sunshiny morning, and the Judge had gone a-fishing with
Mr. Flippin. Becky, in a lace cap and a robe that was delicately blue,
sat in a big chair with a low table in front of her.
There were white roses on the table in a silver bowl. The Judge had sent
them to her. The Judge had for the women of his family a feeling that
was almost youthfully romantic, and which was, unquestionably,
old-fashioned. He liked to think that they had roses for their little
noses, ribbons and laces for their pretty faces. He wanted no harsh
winds to blow on them. And in return for the softness and ease with
which he would surround them, he wanted their deference to his masculine
point of view.
With the box which George sent was a note. It was the first that Becky
had ever received from her lover. George's code did not include much
correspondence. Flaming sentiment on paper was apt to look silly when
the affair ended.
To Becky, her name on the outside of the envelope seemed written in
gold. She was all blushing expectation.
"There ain't no answer," Calvin said, and she waited for him to go
before she opened it.
She read it and sat there drained of all feeling. She was as white as
the roses on her table. She read the note again and her hands shook.
"Flora is very ill. We are taking her up to New York. After that we
shall go to the North Shore. There isn't time for me to come and
say, 'Good-bye.' Perhaps it is better not to come. It has been a
wonderful summer, and it is you who have made it wonderful for me.
The memory will linger with me always--like a sweet dream or a rare
old tale. I am sending you a little token--for remembrance. Think
of me sometimes, Becky."
That was all, except a scrawled "G. D." at the end. No word of coming
back. No word of writing to her again. No word of any future in which
she would have a part.
She opened the box. Within on a slender chain was a pendant--a square
sapphire set in platinum, and surrounded by diamonds. George had
ordered it in anticipation of this crisis. He had, hitherto, found such
things rather effective in the cure of broken hearts.
Now, had George but known it, Becky had jewels in leather cases in the
vaults of her bank which put his sapphire trinket to shame. There were
the diamonds in which a Meredith great-grandmother had been presented at
the Court of St. James, and there were the pearls of which her own
string was a small part. There were emeralds and rubies, old corals and
jade--not for nothing had the Admiral sailed the seas, bringing back
from China and India lovely things for the woman he loved. And now the
jewels were Becky's, and she had not cared for them in the least. If
George had loved her she would have cherished his sapphire more than all
the rest.
But he did not love her. She knew it in that moment. All of her doubts
were confirmed.
The thing that had happened to her seemed incredible.
She put the sapphire back in its box, wrapped it, tied the string
carefully and called Mandy.
"Tell Calvin to take this to Mr. Dalton."
Mandy knew at once that something was wrong. But this was not a moment
for words. The Bannisters did not talk about things that troubled them.
They held their heads high. And Becky's was high at this moment, and her
eyes were blazing.
As she sat there, tense, Becky wondered what Dalton could have thought
of her. If she had not had a jewel in the world, she would not have kept
his sapphire. Didn't he know that?
But how could he know? To him it had been "a sweet dream--a rare old
tale," and she had thought him a Romeo ready to die for her sake, an
Aucassin--willing to brave Hell rather than give her up, a Lohengrin
sent from Heaven!
She shuddered and hid her face in her hands. At last she crept into bed.
Mandy, coming in to straighten the room, was told to lower the curtains.
"My--my head aches, Mandy."
Mandy, wise old Mandy, knew of course that it was her heart. "You res'
an' sleep, honey," she said, and moved about quietly setting things in
order.
But Becky did not sleep. She lay wide awake, and tried to get the thing
straight in her mind. How had it happened? Where had she failed? Oh, why
hadn't Sister Loretto told her that there were men like this? Why hadn't
Aunt Claudia returned in time?
In the big box which Mandy had brought up were clothes--exquisite things
which Becky had ordered from New York. She had thought it a miracle
that George should have fallen in love with her believing her poor. It
showed, she felt, his splendidness, his kingly indifference to--poverty.
Yet she had planned a moment when he should know. When their love was
proclaimed to the world he should see her in a splendor which matched
his own. He had loved her in spite of her faded cottons, in spite of her
shabby shoes. She had made up her list carefully, thinking of his
sparkling eyes when he beheld her.
She got out of bed and opened the box. The lovely garments were wrapped
in rosy tissue paper, and tied with ribbons to match. It seemed to Becky
as if those rosy wrappings held the last faint glow of her dreams.
She untied the ribbons of the top parcel, and disclosed a frock of fine
white lace--there was cloth of silver for a petticoat, and silver
slippers. She would have worn her pearls, and George and she would have
danced together at the Harvest Ball at the Merriweathers. It was an
annual and very exclusive affair in the county. It was not likely that
the Watermans and their guests would be invited, but there would have
been a welcome for Dalton as her friend--her more than friend.
There was a white lace wrap with puffs of pink taffeta and knots of
silver ribbon which went with the gown. Becky with a sudden impulse put
it on. She stripped the cap from her head, and wound her bronze locks
in a high knot. She surveyed herself.
Well, she was Becky Bannister of Huntersfield--and the mirror showed her
beauty. And Dalton had not known or cared. He thought her poor, and had
thrown her aside like an old glove!
Down-stairs the telephone rang. Old Mandy, coming up to say that Mr.
Randy was on the wire, stood in amazement at the sight of Becky in the
rosy wrap with her hair peaked up to a topknot.
"Ain' you in baid?" she asked, superfluously.
"No. Who wants me, Mandy?"
"I tole you--Mr. Randy."
Becky deliberated. "I'll go down. When I come up we'll unpack all this,
Mandy."
Randy at the other end of the wire was asking Becky to go to a barbecue
the next day.
"The boarders are giving it--it is Mother's birthday and they want to
celebrate. It is to be on Pavilion Hill. They want you and the
Judge----"
"To-morrow? Oh, I don't know, Randy."
"Why not? Have you another engagement?"
"No."
"Then what's the matter? Can't you tear yourself away from your shining
knight?"
Silence.
"Becky--oh, I didn't mean that. I'm sorry--_Becky_----"
Her answer came faintly, "I'll come."
"What's the matter with the wire? I can't hear you."
There was nothing the matter with the wire. The thing that was the
matter was Becky's voice. She found it suddenly unmanageable. "We'll
come," she told him finally, and hung up the receiver.
She ascended the stairs as if she carried a burden on her back. Mandy
was on her knees before the hamper, untying the rosy packages.
"Is you goin' to try 'em on, honey?" she asked.
Becky stood in the doorway, the lace wrap hanging from her shoulders and
showing the delicate blue of the negligee beneath--her face was like
chalk but her eyes shone. "Yes," she said, "there's a pink gingham I
want to wear to the barbecue to-morrow. There ought to be a hat to match.
Did the hats come, Mandy?"
"Calvin he say there's another box, but he ain' brought it up from the
deepot. He was ridin' dat Jo-mule, and this yer basket was all he could
ca'y."
In the pink frock Becky looked like a lovely child.
"Huc-cum you-all gettin' eve'y thing pink, Miss Becky?" Mandy asked.
"For a change," said Becky.
And how could she tell old Mandy that she had felt that in a
rose-colored world everything should be rose-color?
She tried on each frock deliberately. She tried on every pair of
slippers. She tried on the wraps, and the hats which came up finally
with Calvin staggering beneath the bulkiness of the box. She was lovely
in everything. And she was no longer the little Becky Bannister whom
Dalton had wooed. She was Mademoiselle Midas, appraising her beauty in
her lovely clothes, and wondering what Dalton would think if he could
see her.
II
Becky did not, after all, wear the pink gingham. The Judge elected to go
on horseback, so Becky rode forth by his side correctly and smartly
attired in a gray habit, with a straight black sailor and a high stock
and boots that made her look like a charming boy.
They came to Pavilion Hill to find the boarders like the chorus in light
opera very picturesque in summer dresses and summer flannels, and with
Mrs. Paine in a broad hat playing the part of leading lady. Mr. Flippin,
who was high-priest at all of the county barbecues, was superintending
the roasting of a whole pig, and Mrs. Flippin had her mind on hot
biscuits. The young mulatto, Daisy, and Mandy's John, with the negroes
from the Paine household, were setting the long tables under the trees.
There was the good smell of coffee, much laughter, and a generally
festive atmosphere.
The Judge, enthroned presently in the Pavilion, was the pivotal center
of the crowd. Everybody wanted to hear his stories, and with this fresh
audience to stimulate him, he dominated the scene. He wore a sack suit
and a Panama hat and his thin, fine face, the puff of curled white hair
at the back of his neck, the gayety of his glance gave an almost
theatric touch to his appearance, so that one felt he might at any
moment come down stage and sing a topical song in the best Gilbertian
manner.
It was an old scene with a new setting. It was not the first time that
Pavilion Hill had been the backgrounds of a barbecue. But it was the
first time that a Paine of King's Crest had accepted hospitality on its
own land. It was the first time that it had echoed to the voices of an
alien group. It was the first time that it had seen a fighting black man
home from France. The old order had changed indeed. No more would there
be feudal lords of Albemarle acres.
Yet old loyalties die hard. It was the Judge and Mrs. Paine and Becky
and Randy who stood first in the hearts of the dusky folk who served at
the long tables. The boarders were not in any sense "quality." Whatever
they might be, North, East and West, their names were not known on
Virginia records. And what was any family tree worth if it was not
rooted in Virginia soil?
"Effen the Jedge was a king and wo' a crown," said Mandy's John to
Daisy, "he couldn't look mo' bawn to a th'one."
Daisy nodded. "Settin' at the head o' that table minds me o' whut my old
Mammy used to say, 'han'some is as han'some does.' The Bannisters _done_
han'some and they _is_ han'some."
"They sure is," John agreed; "that-all's whut makes you so good-lookin',
Daisy."
He came close to her and she drew away. "You put yo' min' on passin'
them plates," she said with severity, "or you'll be spillin' po'k gravy
on they haids." Her smile took away the sting of her admonition. John
moved on, murmuring, "Well, yo' does han'some and yo' is han'some,
Daisy, and that's why I loves you."
There were speeches after dinner. One from Randy, in which he thanked
them in the name of his mother, and found himself quite suddenly and
unexpectedly being fond of the boarders. Major Prime was not there. He
had been summoned back to Washington, but would return, he hoped, for
the week-end.
It was after lunch that Randy and Becky walked in the woods. Nellie
Custis followed them. They sat down at last at the foot of a hickory
tree. Becky took off her hat and the wind blew her shining hair about
her face. She was pale and wore an air of deep preoccupation.
"Randy," she asked suddenly out of a long silence, "did you ever kiss a
girl?"
Her question did not surprise him. He and Becky had argued many matters.
And they usually plunged in without preliminaries. He fancied that Becky
was discussing kisses in the abstract. It never occurred to him that the
problem was personal.
"Yes," he said, "I have. What about it?"
"Did you--ask her to marry you?"
"No."
"Why not?"
He pulled Nellie Custis' ears. "One of them wasn't a nice sort of
girl--not the kind that I should have cared to introduce to--you."
"Yet you cared to--kiss her?"
Randy flushed faintly. "I know how it looks to you. I hated it
afterwards, but I couldn't marry a girl--like that----"
"Who was the other girl?"
For a moment he did not reply, then he said with something of an effort,
"It was you, Becky."
"Me? When?" She turned on him her startled gaze.
"Do you remember at Christmas--oh, ten years ago--and your grandfather
had a party for you. There was mistletoe in the hall, and we danced and
stopped under the mistletoe----"
"I remember, Randy--how long ago it seems."
"Yet ten years isn't really such a long time, is it, Becky? I was only a
little boy, but I told myself then that I would never kiss any other
girl. I thought then that--that some day I might ask you to marry me.
I--I had a wild dream that I might try to make you love me. I didn't
know then that poverty is a millstone about a man's neck." He gave a
bitter laugh.
Becky's breath came quickly. "Oh, Randy," she said, "poverty wouldn't
have had anything to do with it--not if we had--cared----"
"I care," said Randy, "and I think the first time I knew how much I
cared was when I kissed that other girl. Somehow you came to me that
night, a little white thing, so fine and different, and I loathed her."
He was standing now--tall and lean and black-haired, but with the look
of race on his thin face, a rather princely chap in spite of his shabby
clothes. "Of course you don't care," he said; "I think if I had money I
should try to make you. But I haven't the right. I had thought that,
perhaps, if no other man came that some time I might----"
Becky picked up her riding crop, and as she talked she tapped her boot
in a sort of staccato accompaniment.
"That other man has come," _tap-tap_, "he kissed me," _tap-tap_, "and
made me love him," _tap-tap_, "and he has gone away--and he hasn't asked
me to marry him."
One saw the Indian in Randy now, in the lifted head, the square-set jaw,
the almost cruel keenness of the eyes.
"Of course it is George Dalton," he said.
"Yes."
"I could kill him, Becky."
She laughed, ruefully. "For what? Perhaps he thinks I'm not a nice sort
of girl--like the one you kissed----"
"For God's sake, Becky."
He sat down on a flat rock. He was white, and shaking a little. He
wanted more than anything else in the wide world to kill George Dalton.
Of course in these days such things were preposterous. But he had murder
in his heart.
"I blame myself," Becky said, _tap-tap_, "I should have known that a man
doesn't respect," _tap-tap_, "a woman he can kiss."
He took the riding crop forcibly out of her hands. "Look at me, look at
me, Becky, do you love him?"
She whispered, "Yes."
"Then he's got to marry you."
But her pride was up. "Do you think I want him if he doesn't want--me?"
"He shall want you," said Randy Paine; "the day shall come when he shall
beg on his knees."
Randy had studied law. But there are laws back of the laws of the white
man. The Indian knows no rest until his enemy is in his hands. Randy lay
awake late that night thinking it out. But he was not thinking only of
Georgie. He was thinking of Becky and her self-respect. "She will never
get it back," he said, "until that dog asks her to marry him."
He had faith enough in her to believe that she would not marry Dalton
now if he asked her. But she must be given the chance.
CHAPTER VIII
ANCESTORS
I
The Judge and Mr. Flippin were fishing, with grasshoppers for bait. The
fish that they caught they called "shiners." As an edible product
"shiners" were of little account. But the Judge and Mr. Flippin did not
fish for food, they fished for sport. It was mild sport compared to the
fishing of other days when the Judge had waded into mountain streams
with the water coming up close to the pocket of his flannel shirt where
he kept his cigars, or had been poled by Bob Flippin from "riffle" to
pool. Those had been the days of speckled trout and small-mouthed bass,
and Bob had been a boy and the Judge at middle age. Now Bob Flippin had
reached the middle years, and the Judge was old, but they still fished
together. They were comrades in a very close and special sense. What Bob
Flippin lacked in education and culture he made up in wisdom and
adoration of the Judge. When he talked he had something to say, but as
a rule he let the Judge talk and was always an absorbed listener.
There was in their relations, however, a complete adjustment to the
class distinctions which separated them. The Judge accepted as his right
the personal service with which Bob Flippin delighted to honor him. It
was always Bob who pulled the boat and carried the basket. It was Bob
who caught the grasshoppers and cooked the lunch.
There was one dish dedicated to a day's fishing--fried ham and eggs. Bob
had a long-handled frying-pan, and the food was seasoned with the salt
and savor of the out-of-doors.
There were always several dogs to bear their masters company. The
Judge's three were beagles--tireless hunters of rabbits, and somewhat in
disgrace as a species since Germany had gone to war with the world.
Individually, however, they were beloved by the Judge because they were
the children and grandchildren of a certain old Dinah who had slept in a
basket by his bed until she died.
Bob Flippin had a couple of setters, and the five canines formed a
wistful semicircle around the lunch basket.
The lunch basket was really a fishing-basket, lined with tin. In one end
was a receptacle for ice. After the lunch was eaten, the fish were put
next to the ice, and the basket thus served two purposes. Among the
other edibles there were always corn-cakes for the dogs. They knew it,
and had the patience of assured expectation.
"Truxton comes on Saturday," said the Judge as he watched Bob turn the
eggs expertly in the long-handled pan, "and Claudia. I told Becky to
ride over this morning and ask your wife if she could help Mandy.
Mandy's all right when there's nobody but the family, but when there's
company in prospect she moans and groans."
"Mollie's up at the Watermans'; Mrs. Waterman is worse. They expected to
take her to New York, but she is too ill, and they are going to have the
doctors bring another nurse."
"I had a note from Mr. Dalton," said the Judge, "saying they were going.
It was rather sudden, and he was sorry. Nice fellow. He liked to come
over and look at my birds."
Bob Flippin's eyes twinkled. "I reckon he liked to look at a pretty
girl----"
The Judge stared at him. "At Becky?"
Flippin nodded. "Didn't you know it?"
"Bless my soul." The Judge was unquestionably startled. "But I don't
know anything about him. I can't have him running after Becky."
"Seems to me he's been a-runnin'."
"But what would Claudia say? I don't know anything about his family.
Maybe he hasn't any family. How do I know he isn't a fortune-hunter?"
"Well, he isn't a bird hunter, I can tell you that. I saw him kick one
of your dogs. A man that will kick a dog isn't fit to hold a gun."
"No, he isn't," said the Judge, soberly. "I'm upset by what you've said,
Flippin. Dalton's all right as far as I can see as a friend of mine. But
when anybody comes courting at Huntersfield he's got to show
credentials."
He ate his lunch without much appetite. He was guiltily aware of what
Claudia would say if she knew what had happened.
But perhaps nothing had happened and perhaps she need not know. He
cheered up and threw a bit of ham to the waiting dogs. Perhaps Becky
wasn't interested. Perhaps, after all, Dalton had been genuine in his
interest in the stuffed birds.
"Becky's too young for things like that," he began hopefully.
But Bob Flippin shook his head. "Girls are queer, Judge, and you never
can tell what they're goin' to do next. Now, there's my Mary--running
off and getting married, and coming home and not talking much about it.
She--didn't even bring her marriage certificate. Said that he had kept
it. But she's never lied to me, and I know when she says she's married,
she's--married--but it's queer. He ain't written now for weeks, but she
ain't worried. She says she knows the reason, but she can't tell me. And
when I try to ask questions, she just looks me straight in the eye and
says, 'I never lied to you, Father, did I? And it's all right.'"
"He has a good name," said the Judge. "Branch--it's one of our names--my
wife's family."
"But I reckon there ain't never been any Truelove Branches in your
family tree. I laugh at Mary when she calls him that. '"Truelove" ain't
any name for a man, Mary,' I tell her. But she says there couldn't be a
better one. And she insisted on naming the child 'Fidelity.' But if
anybody had told me that my little Mary--would take things into her own
hands like that--why, Judge, before she went away to teach school, she
leaned on me and her mother--and now she's as stiff as a poker when we
try to ask about her affairs----"
"Does he support her?" the Judge asked.
"Sends her plenty of money. She always seems to have enough, even when
he doesn't write. He'll be coming one of these days--and then we'll get
the thing straight, but in the meantime there ain't any use in asking
Mary."
He brought out the bag of corn-cakes and fed the dogs. They were a
well-bred crew and took their share in turn, sitting in a row and going
through the ceremony with an air of enjoying not only the food but the
attention they attracted from the two men.
"Of course," said Mr. Flippin as he gathered up the lunch things, "I'm
saying to you what I wouldn't say to another soul. Mary's my girl, and
she's all right. But I naturally have the feelings of a father."
The Judge stretched himself on the grass, and pulled his hat over his
eyes. "Girls are queer, and if that Dalton thinks he can court my
Becky----" He stopped, and spoke again from under his hat, "Oh, what's
the use of worrying, Bob, on a day like this?"
The Judge always napped after lunch, and Bob Flippin, stretched beside
him, lay awake and watched the stream slip by in a sheet of silver, he
watched a squirrel flattened on the limb above him, he watched the birds
that fluttered down to the pools to bathe, he watched the buzzards
sailing high above the hills.
And presently he found himself watching his own daughter Mary, as she
came along the opposite bank of the stream.
She was drawing Fiddle-dee-dee in a small red cart and was walking
slowly.
She walked well. Country-born and country-bred, there was nothing about
her of plodding peasant. All her life she had danced with the
Bannisters and the Beauforts. Yet she had never been invited to the big
balls. When the Merriweathers gave their Harvest Dance, Mary and her
mother would go over and help bake the cakes, and at night they would
sit in the gallery of the great ballroom and watch the dancers, but Mary
would not be asked out on the floor.
Seeing the Judge asleep, Mary stopped and beckoned from the other side.
Flippin rose and made his way across the stream, stepping from stone to
stone.
"Mother wants you to come right up to the Watermans', Father. Mrs.
Waterman is to have an operation, and you are to direct the servants in
fitting up a room for the surgeons. The nurse will tell you what to do."
Mr. Flippin rubbed his face with his handkerchief. "I don't like to wake
the Judge."
"I'll stay here and tell him," Mary said. "And you can send Calvin down
to carry the basket."
She was standing beside him, and suddenly she laid her cheek against his
arm. "I love you," she said, "you are a darling, Daddy."
He patted her cheek. "That sounds like my little Mary."
"Don't I always sound like your little Mary?"
"Not always."
"Well--I've had things on my mind." Her blue eyes met his, and she
flushed a bit. "Not things that I am sorry for, but things that I am
worried about. But now--well, I am very happy in my heart, Daddy."
He smiled down at her. "Have you heard from T. Branch?"
"Yes, by wireless----"
He looked his astonishment. "Wireless?"
"Heart-wireless, Daddy. Didn't you get messages that way when you were
young--from Mother?"
"How do I know? It's been twenty-five years since then, and we haven't
had to send messages. We've just held on to each other's hands, thank
God." He bent and kissed her. "You stay and tell the Judge, Mary. He'll
sleep for a half-hour yet; he's as regular as the clock."
His own two dogs followed him, but the Judge's beagles lay with their
noses on their paws at their master's feet. Now and then they snapped at
flies but otherwise they were motionless.
Before the half hour was up Fiddle-dee-dee fell asleep, and the Judge
waking, saw on the other side of a stream propped against the gray old
oak, the young mother cool in her white dress, her child in her arms.
"Father had to go," she told him, and explained the need; "he'll send
Calvin for the basket."
"I can carry my own basket, Mary; I'm not a thousand years old."
"It isn't that. But you've never carried baskets, Judge."
The Judge chuckled. "You say that is if it were an accusation."
"It isn't. Only some of us seem born to carry baskets and others are
born to--let us carry them." Her smile redeemed her words from
impertinence.
"Are you a Bolshevik, Mary?"
"No. I believe in the divine rights of kings and--Judges. I'd hate to
see you carry a basket. It would rob you of something--just as I would
hate to see a king without his crown or a queen without her scepter."
"Oh, Mary, Mary, your father has never said things like that to me."
"He doesn't feel them. Father believes in The God of Things as They
are----"
"And don't you?"
"I believe in you," she rose and carrying her sleeping child, crossed
the stream on the stones as easily as if she carried no burden; "you
know I believe in you, don't you--and in all the Bannisters?"
It was said so lightly that he took it lightly. No one was so touchy as
the Judge about his dignity if it were disregarded. But here was little
Mary smiling up at him and telling him that he was a king with a crown
and she liked it.
"Well, well. Let's sit down, Mary."
"Fish, if you want to, and I'll watch."
He baited his hook and cast his line into the stream. It had a bobbing
red cork which fascinated Fiddle-dee-dee. She tried to wade out and get
it, and had to be held by her very short skirts lest she drown in the
attempt.
"So I'm a confounded autocrat," the Judge chuckled. "Nobody ever said
that to me before, but maybe some of them have been thinking it."
"Maybe they have," said Mary gravely, "but they haven't really cared.
Having the Bannisters at Huntersfield is like the English having a
Victoria or an Edward or a George at Buckingham Palace or at Windsor; it
adds flavor to their--democracy----"
"Mary--who's been saying all this to you?" he demanded.
"My husband."
"Truelove Branch?"
She nodded.
"I'd like to meet him, by Jove, I'd like to meet him. He has been
teaching his wife to poke fun at her old friend----"
She faced him fearlessly. "I'm not poking fun. I--I'd hate to have the
Bannisters lose one little bit of their beautiful traditions. I--I----
Some day I'm going to teach little Fiddle those traditions, and tell her
what it means when--when people have race back of them. You see, I
haven't it, Judge, but I know what it's worth."
He was touched by her earnestness. "My dear Mary," he said, "I wish my
own grandson looked at it that way. His letters of late have been very
disturbing."
A little flush crept into her cheeks. "Disturbing?"
"He writes that we Americans have got to fit our practice to our
theories. He says that we shout democracy and practice autocracy. That
we don't believe that all men are free and equal, and that, well, in
your words, Mary--we let other people carry our baskets."
Mary was smiling to herself. "You are glad he is coming home?"
"Truxton? Yes. On Saturday."
"Becky told me. She rode over to get Mother to help Mandy."
"I am going to have a lot of people to dine the day he arrives," said
the Judge, "and next week there'll be the Merriweathers' ball. He will
have a chance to see his old friends."
"Yes," said Mary, "he will."
They talked a great deal about Truxton after that.
"I wish he bore the Bannister name," said the Judge. "Becky is the only
Bannister."
After the death of her husband Mrs. Beaufort had come to live with the
Judge. Truxton's boyhood had been spent on the old estate. The Judge's
income was small, and Truxton had known few luxuries. Like the rest of
the boys of the Bannister family he was studying law at the University.
He and Randy had been classmates, but had gone into different branches
of the service.
"When he comes back," the Judge told Mary, "he must show the stuff he is
made of. I can't have him selling cars around the county like Randy
Paine."
"Well, Randy has sold a lot of them," said Mary. "Father has given him
an order----"
"You don't mean to say that Bob Flippin is going to buy a car----"
"He is."
"He didn't dare tell me," the Judge said; "what's he going to do with
his horses?"
"Keep them," said Mary serenely; "the car is for Mother--she's going to
drive it herself."
The Judge, with a vision of Mollie Flippin's middle-aged plumpness upon
him, exclaimed: "You don't mean that your mother is going to--drive a
car?"
"Yes," said Mary, "she is."
"I would as soon think of Claudia----"
"No," said Mary, "Mrs. Beaufort will never drive her own car. She has
the coachman habit, and if she ever gets a car, there'll be a man at the
wheel."
She brought the conversation back to Truxton. "Do you remember how we
had a picnic here years ago, Mother packed the lunch, and Truxton ate up
all the raspberry tarts?"
"He loved tarts," said the Judge, "and chocolate cake. Well, well, I
shall be glad to see him."
"Perhaps--perhaps when he gets here you'll be disappointed."
"Why," sharply, "why should I?"
Mary did not answer. She stood up with Fiddle in her arms. "Calvin's
coming for the basket," she said, "and I shall have to go up on the
other side--I left the cart."
She said "good-bye" and crossed by the stepping-stones. The Judge wound
up his fishing tackle. The day's sport resulted in three small
"shiners." But he had enjoyed the day--there had been the stillness and
the sunlight, and the good company of Bob Flippin and his daughter
Mary.
The dogs followed, and Mary from the other side of the stream watched
the little procession, Calvin in the lead with the load, the Judge
straight and slim with his fluff of white hair, the three little dogs
paddling on their short legs.
"Judge Bannister of Huntersfield," said Mary Flippin. Then she raised
Fiddle high in her arms. "Say _Granddad_, Fiddle," she whispered, "say
_Granddad_."
II
The Flippin farmhouse was wide and rambling. It had none of the classic
elegance of the old Colonial mansions, but it had a hall in the middle
with the sitting-room on one side and on the other an old-fashioned
parlor with a bedroom back of it. The dining-room was back of the
sitting-room, and beyond that was the kitchen, and a succession of
detached buildings which served as dairy, granary, tool-house and
carriage house in the old fashion. There was much sunlight and
cleanliness in the farmhouse, and beauty of a kind, for the Flippins had
been content with simple things, and Mary's taste was evidenced in the
restraint with which the new had been combined with the old. She and her
mother did most of the work. It was not easy in these days to get
negroes to help. Daisy, the mulatto, had come down for the summer, but
they had no assurance that when the winter came they could keep her.
Divested of her high heels and city affectations, Daisy was just a
darkey, of a rather plain, comfortable, efficient type. When Mary went
in, she was getting supper.
"Has Mother come, Daisy?"
"No, Miss, she ain', an' yo' Poppa ain' come. An' me makin' biscuits."
"Your biscuits are always delicious, Daisy."
"An' me and John wants to go to the movies, Miss Mary. An' efen the
supper is late."
"You can leave the dishes until mornin', Daisy."
Mary smiled and sighed as she went on with Fiddle to her own room. The
good old days of ordered service were over.
She went into the parlor bedroom. It was the one which she and Fiddle
occupied. She bathed and dressed her baby, and changed her own frock.
Then she entered the long, dim parlor. There was a family Bible on the
table. It was a great volume with steel engravings. It had belonged to
her father's father. In the middle of the book were pages for births and
deaths. The records were written legibly but not elegantly. They went
back for two generations. Beyond that the Flippins had no family tree.
Mary had seen the family tree at Huntersfield. It was rooted in
aristocratic soil. There were Huguenot branches and Royalist
branches--D'Aubignes and Moncures, Peytons and Carys, Randolphs and
Lees. And to match every name there was more than one portrait on the
walls of Huntersfield.
Mary remembered a day when she and Truxton Beaufort had stood in the
wide hall.
"A great old bunch," Truxton had said.
"If they were my ancestors I should be afraid of them."
"Why, Mary?"
"Oh, they'd expect so much of me."
"Oh, that," Truxton said airily, "who cares what they expect?"
Mr. and Mrs. Flippin came home in time for supper. The nurse had arrived
and the surgeons would follow in the morning. "It's dreadful, Mary,"
Mrs. Flippin said, "to see her poor husband; money isn't everything. And
he loves her as much as if they were poor."
Daisy washed the dishes in a perfect whirl of energy, donned her
high-heeled slippers and her Washington manner, and went off with John.
It was late that night when Mrs. Flippin went out to find Mary busy.
"My dear," she said, "what are you doing?"
Mary was rolling out pastry, with ice in a ginger-ale bottle. "I am
going to make some tarts. There was a can of raspberries left--and--and
well--I'm just hungry for--raspberry tarts, Mother."
III
It was the Judge who told Becky that Dalton had not gone. "Mrs. Waterman
is very ill, and they are all staying down."
Becky showed no sign of what the news meant to her, but that night pride
and love fought in the last ditch. It seemed to Becky that with Dalton
at King's Crest the agony of the situation was intensified.
"Oh, why should I care?" she kept asking herself as she sat late by her
window. "He doesn't. And I have known him only three weeks. Why should
he count so much?"
She knew that he counted to the measure of her own constancy. "I can't
bear it," she said over and over again pitifully, as the hours passed.
"I think I shall--die."
It seemed to her that she wanted more than anything in the whole wide
world to see him for a moment--to hear the quick voice--to meet the
sparkle of his glance.
Well, why not? If she called him--he would come. She was sure of that.
He was staying away because he thought that she cared. And he didn't
want her to care. But he was not really--cruel--and if she called
him----
She wandered around the room, stopping at a window and going on,
stopping at another to stare out into the starless night. There had been
rain, and there was that haunting wet fragrance from the garden. "I must
see him," she said, and put her hand to her throat.
She went down-stairs. Everybody was in bed. There was no one to hear.
Her grandfather's room was over the library; Mandy and Calvin slept in
servants' quarters outside. To-morrow the house would be full of
ears--and it would be too late.
A faint light burned in the lower hall. The stairway swept down from a
sort of upper gallery, and all around the gallery and on the stairs and
along the lower hall were the portraits of Becky's dead and gone
ancestors.
They were really very worth-while ancestors, not as solid and
substantial perhaps as those whose portraits hung in the Meredith house
on Main Street in Nantucket, but none the less aristocratic, with a bit
of dare-devil about the men, and a hint of frivolity about the
women--with a pink coat here and a black patch there, with the sheen of
satin and the sparkle of jewels--a Cavalier crowd, with the greatest
ancestor of all in his curly wig and his sweeping plumes.
They stared at Becky as she went down-stairs, a little white figure in
her thin blue dressing-gown, her bronze hair twisted into a curly
topknot, her feet in small blue slippers.
The telephone was on a small table under the portrait of the greatest
grandfather. He had a high nose, and a fine clear complexion, and he
looked really very much alive as he gazed down at Becky.
She found the King's Crest number. It was a dreadful thing that she was
about to do. Yet she was going to do it.
She reached for the receiver. Then suddenly her hand was stayed, for it
seemed to her that into the silence her greatest grandfather shouted
accusingly:
_"Where is your pride?"_
She found herself trying to explain. "But, Grandfather----"
The clamour of other voices assailed her:
_"Where is your pride?"_
They were flinging the question at her from all sides, those gentl
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