CHAPTER V
"THY NEIGHBOR AS THYSELF"
Mr. Nicholas Jelnik, with an uplift of his fine black brows and a satirical smile, once diagnosed the case of Great-Aunt Sophronisba Scarlett as "congenital Hyndsitis"; Doctor Richard Geddes said you'd only to take a glance at her house to see that she was predestined to be damned. I know that she was so hidebound in her prejudices, so virulently conservative, so constitutionally opposed to change, that anything savoring of modernity was anathema to her.
That old woman would as lief have had what remained of her teeth pulled out as have parted with anything once brought into Hynds House. She preserved everything, good, bad, indifferent. You'd find luster cider jugs, maybe a fine toby, old Chinese ginger jars, and the quaintest of Dutch schnapps bottles, cheek by jowl with an iron warming-pan, a bootjack, a rusty leather bellows, and a box packed with empty patent-medicine bottles, under the pantry shelf. A helmet creamer would be full of little rolls of twine, odd buttons, a wad of beeswax, a piece of asafetida, elastic bands, and corks. She had used a Ridgway platter with a view of the Hudson River on it, as a dinner plate for her hound, for we found it wrapped up, with "Nipper's platter" scrawled on the paper.
By and large, it wasn't an easy task to renovate a brick barracks finished in 1735, and occupied for ninety-nine years by a lady of Sophronisba's parts; though I sha'n't tell how we had to tackle it room by room, nor of the sweating hours spent in, so to speak, separating the sheep things from the goat things. I can't help stopping for a minute, though, to gloat over the front drawing-room that presently emerged, with a cleaned carpet that proved to be a marvel of hand-woven French art, rosewood sofas and chairs upholstered in royal blue and rubbed to satiny-browny blackness, two gloriously inlaid tables, and a Venetian mirror between two windows.
We gave the place of honor on the white marble mantel to a porcelain painting Alicia found in a work-box—the picture of a woman in gray brocade sprigged with pink-and-blue posies, a lace fichu about her slim shoulders, and a cap with a rose in it covering her parted brown hair. The little boy leaning against her knees had darker blue eyes, and fairer hair pushed back from a bold and manly forehead. The painting was about the size of a modern cabinet photograph, and, though pleasing and spirited, was evidently the work of a gifted amateur. What gave it potent meaning and appeal was the inscription lettered on the back:
Mrs. Lydia Hariott Hynds & Richd. Hynds Ag'd 7
Paint'd for Colnl. J. H. Hynds by his
Affec. Neece Jessamine
You couldn't help loving him, the little "Richard Ag'd 7." There was that in the face which won you instantly; it was so clear-eyed, so gallant, so brave, so honest. So we gave him and his pretty, meek mother the place of honor in the room that had once heard his laughter and seen her tears. And we brought down-stairs the fine painting of Colonel James Hampden, who was the splendid colonial in claret-color that we had so much admired, and hung him and a smaller painting marked, "Jessamine, Aged 22" where they could look down on those two.
These were the only pictures allowed in that room, and they gave to it an atmosphere flavored most sweetly of yesterday. Indeed, I think they must have approved of the room altogether, for we hadn't changed so much as we'd restored it. Even the glass shades that use'd to shield their wax candles were in their old places. There was their old-world atmosphere of stateliness; their Chinese jars, their English vases, their beautiful old Chelsea figures; and the sampler so painstakingly
Work'd by Ann Eliza Hynds
Ag'd 9 Yrs. 2 Mos., Nov'r, 1757
that had been carefully framed and mounted as a small fire-screen, perhaps for Ann Eliza's lady mama or proud grandmother. It was such human and intimate things, the mute mementoes of children who had passed, that made us begin to love Hynds House, for all its bigness and uncanniness and dilapidation.
We did discover one human touch laid upon the place by Sophronisba herself. She had gathered together a full set of small, hand-colored photographs of Confederate generals, wrapped them in a hand-made Confederate flag, into which was tucked a receipt signed by Judah Benjamin for Hynds silver melted into a bar and given to the Cause, written, "The glory is departed," across the package, and hidden it. Alicia, who had a hankering after Confederates, herself, put the photographs in a leather-covered album at least as old as themselves, and kept them sacredly. She said these were America's own vanquished and vanished Trojans, and that one got a lump in the throat remembering how
Fallen are those walls that were so good,
And corn grows now where Troy town stood.
Schmetz brought us our upholsterer, Riedriech the cabinet-maker, most cunning of craftsmen, who knew all there is to know about old furniture and just what should and shouldn't be done to it. In addition he was a grizzled, bearded, shambling old angel who clung to a reeking pipe and Utopian notions, a pestilent and whole-hearted socialist who would call the President of the United States or the president of the Plumbers' Union "Comrade" equally, and who put propagandist literature in everything but our hair.
"Mr. Riedriech," you would say reproachfully, "yesterday I discovered Karl Marx and Jean Jaurès lurking behind my coffee-pot and Fourier under the butter-dish. To-day I find Karl Kautsky in ambush behind the cream-jug and Frederick Engels under the rolls."
Riedriech would regard you paternally, placidly, benevolently, through his large, brass-rimmed spectacles:
"So? Little by little the drop of water the granite wears away. I give you the little leaflet, the little pamphlet, und by and by comes the little hole in your head."
Thank heaven the doctor next door didn't hear that!
Alicia knew how to handle the old visionary with innocent but consummate skill. Looking at the kind old bear with her Irish eyes:
"It must be a wonderful thing to have such mastery of one's tools, to know exactly what to do and how to do it," she would sigh. "'Tisn't everybody can be a master craftsman!"
"I show you in a little while what iss cabinet-making!" he said proudly. "I do more yet by you," he added charitably, "then make over for you chairs and tables and such, already: I make over for you your little mind."
The old socialist did indeed show us what cabinet-making can be. He turned the office behind the library into a workroom, and from it Sophronisba's tattered and torn and forlorn old things emerged, piece by piece, in shining rosewood and walnut and mahogany majesty. If you love old furniture; if it gives you a thrill just to touch a period chair of incomparable grace, or the smooth surface of an old table, or the curve of a carved sofa, you'll understand Alicia's open rapture and my more sedate delight.
The tiled fireplace in the library was really the feature of Hynds House. There wasn't any mantel: the fireplace was sunk into the wall, and above it and the book-cases on each side was a space filled with more relics than all the rest of the house contained—portraits, signed and framed documents, letters, old flags, and a whole arsenal of weapons. Above the fireplace hung the portrait of Freeman Hynds—thin, dark, austere, more like a Cameronian Scotsman than a Carolina gentleman of an easy habit of life.
However, it was not portrait or relics that made the room remarkable, but the tiles, each a portrait of a Revolutionary hero. Laurens, Marion, Lafayette, Pulaski, von Steuben—there they were in buff and blue, martial, in cocked hats, and with such awe-inspiring noses! The center and largest tile was, of course, the Father of his Country, without the hat, but with the nose, and above him the original flag, with the thirteen stars for the thirteen weak-kneed little states that were to grow into the great empire of freedom that the high-nosed, high-hearted soldiers fought for and founded. Alicia and I touched those tiles with reverence. They were the pride of our hearts.
As often happens in the South, there were bedrooms on the lower floor; two of them, in fact, on one side of the hall. The front one had been not only locked but padlocked; the windows had been nailed on the inside, and heavy wooden shutters nailed on the outside. So long had the room been closed that dry-rot had set in. The silk quilt on the four-poster was falling to pieces, the linen was as yellow as beeswax, and the sheets made one think of the Flying Dutchman's sails. This room was of almost monastic severity: an ascetic or a stern soldier might have occupied it. Besides the bed it contained four chairs, a clothes-press, a secretary, and a shaving-stand. On a small table near the bed were a Wedgwood mortar with a heavy pestle, a medicine glass, and a pewter candlestick turned as black as iron. The press in the corner still held a few clothes, threadbare and sleazy, and in the desk were some dry letters and a Business Book—at least, that's how it was marked—with lists of names, each having an occupation or task set down opposite it, I suppose the names of long-dead slaves. On the fly-leaf was written, in a neat and very legible hand, "Freeman Hynds."
"Sophy!" Alicia's voice had an edge of awe. "This must have been his room. I believe he died here, in this very bed. And afterward they shut the room up; and it hasn't been opened until now."
We looked at the old bed, and seemed to see him there, trying to raise himself, crying out so piteously upon dead Richard's name, only to fall back a dead man himself. What had he wanted to tell, as he lay there dying? His painted face in the library was not a bad man's face. It was proud, stern, stubborn, bigoted; a dark, unhappy face, but neither an evil nor a cruel one. What was it that really lay between those two brothers? After more than a hundred years, we were as much in the dark as they in whose day it had happened and whose lives it had wrecked.
We built a fire in the long-disused chimney to take the dampness out of the room, and forced open the windows to let in the good sun and wind. Over in one corner, pushed in between the clothes-press and the side wall, was, of all things, a prie-dieu; and upon it a dusty Bible with his name on the fly-leaf. Nor was it a book kept for idle show; it plainly had been read, perhaps wept over by a tortured heart, for it fell open at that cry of all sad hearts, the Fifty-first Psalm. I was moving this prie-dieu, when my foot slipped on the bare floor and I dropped it with a crash. Fortunately it was not injured. But what had looked like a mere line of carving on the outer edge of the small shelf—rather a thick and heavy shelf now that one examined it carefully—had been struck smartly, releasing a cunning spring. There opened out a thin slit of a drawer, just big enough to hold a flat book bound in leather and stamped with two letters, "F.H." On the fly-leaf appeared, in his own neat, fine script, "The Diary of Freeman Hynds, Esqr."
The thing seemed incredible, impossible. His own daughter had evidently been unaware of the existence of this book, which he had not had time to destroy. And we, as by a miracle, had fallen upon it—and perhaps the truth!
It was written in so fine and small a hand as was only possible to the users of goose-quill pens; and this tiny, faded, brown writing on the yellowed pages covered a period of years. He had not been one to waste words. Once or twice, as we hurriedly turned the pages, appeared the name "Emily." Mostly it seemed a dry, uninteresting thing, a mere memorandum, where a single entry might cover a whole year.
It was impossible for us to stop our work to read it then and there, or to do more than give it a cursory glance. We turned feverishly to those years that covered, as we figured, the period of the Hynds tragedy. And he had written:
This day was Accus'd Rich'd. my Bro. of robbing us of our Jewells. He protests he knows Naught & my Mthr. believes him as doth Emily. Has a true Heart, Emily. Horrid Confusion & my Fthr. Confound'd.
Impatiently I turned over the pages, raging to read the end, my heart pounding and fluttering.
Two nights since dy'd Scipio, son of old Shooba's wife, the which did send for me—
Thus far had I read, Alicia and I sitting head to head on the hall stairs. In came Schmetz the gardener, raving, gesticulating, and after him old Uncle Adam, stepping delicately, and with a placating smile on his wrinkled countenance.
"Those bulbs that I have planted under the windows of you," raved Schmetz, "the demon hens of le docteur Geddes are with their paws upturning! They upturn with rapidity and completeness, led by a shameless hog of a rooster. Is it the orders of you that I devastate those fowls, Mademoiselle?"
Schmetz was furiously angry, and small wonder. Those had been choice bulbs, some of which he had presented me from his own cherished store—freesias, daffodils, tulips, hyacinths, and the starred narcissus, "such as Proserpine let fall, from Dis's wagon."
"Oh, our flowers!" wailed Alicia, springing to her feet; "and we counting on those bulbs for Christmas!"
I shut Freeman's diary with a snap. Hens were more immediate.
"Put it in the drawer of the library table," called Alicia, running out with Schmetz at her heels. "We'll read it to-night."
When I had done so, closing the door after me, I too ran outside, where some enormous black-and-white hens, led by the biggest rooster I had ever seen, were completing the utter destruction of our flower bed.
We charged down upon them, and they ran to and fro, after the stupid fashion of fowls. Back and forth Alicia, Schmetz, and I chased those brutes; but Adam stood with folded hands, looking on from a safe and sane distance. He refused to have anything to do with Geddes fowls in ol' Mis' Scarlett's yard. Just then the huge rooster ran into my skirts, all but upsetting me. It was the work of a strenuous moment to seize him by the wings and so hold him.
Left to their own devices, the hens scuttled back to their own domain through a break in the palings on our side of the hedge, while in my hands the rooster squawked and plunged and kicked and struggled; it was like trying to hold a feathered hyena.
I was very angry. I had lost my bulb bed. I couldn't wring the neck of the raider, much as I should have liked to do so, but with an arm made strong by a just and righteous rage I lifted that big brute high above my head and hurled him over into his own yard. He sailed through the air like a black and white plane.
"Damn! Oh, damn!" said somebody on the other side of the hedge. There was a horrible grunt, as of one getting all the wind knocked out of him, a scuffle, and the squawks of the big rooster, to which the hens dutifully added a deafening chorus.
"The brute—has just about—murdered me!" grunted Doctor Richard Geddes.
We stood in stricken silence. Swiftly, noiselessly, Uncle Adam faded from sight, putting a solid section of Hynds House between himself and what he felt was coming battle. Uncle Adam had no wish to have to pray me to death, and he wasn't going to run any risks with Doctor Richard Geddes. Where that irascible gentleman was concerned, Uncle Adam, like Br'er Rabbit, would "trus' no mistakes."
A second later, red-faced, half-breathless, but with the light of battle in his eyes, Doctor Geddes appeared, mounted on a ladder on his side of the hedge.
"Who shot off that rooster?"
"Monsieur le docteur, the hens of you began this affray," explained Schmetz, politely. "They are fowls abandoned in their morals, horrible in their habits, and shameless in their behavior. And the husband of these wretches, Monsieur, is a bandit, a brigand, an assassin, fit only to be guillotined. Observe, Monsieur, it happened thus—"
"Schmetz," snapped the doctor, "shut up!—Now then, I want to know who fired off that rooster."
"I did!" I said valiantly. "Look at my bulbs! Just look at my bulbs!"
"Look at my stomach!" roared the doctor. "Just look at my stomach!"
"Mon Dieu! O mon Dieu!" cried Schmetz, dancing up and down. "Monsieur, again I implore that you will remain calm and listen to the voice of reason! Your hens, creatures malicious and accursed—"
"Why should I look at your horrid stomach?" said I, outraged. "I think you had better get down off that ladder and go away!"
"Why should you? Because, you jade, you've all but driven a twenty-pound rooster clean through it—beak, spurs and tail feathers—that's why!" bawled the doctor. "Gad! I shall be black and blue for a fortnight! I'm colicky now: I need a mustard-plaster!"
"Two mustard-plasters," I insisted severely: "one on your tongue and the other on your temper!"
"Temper?" flared the doctor, and flung up his arms. "Temper? Here's a minx that's all but murdered me, and yet has the stark effrontery to blather about temper! You've a bad one yourself, let me tell you! You've the worst, outside of your late aunt—"
"Grand-aunt-in-law; your own cousin-by-blood, whom you greatly resemble in that same matter of family temper, I am given to understand."
"Gatchell told you that!" cried the doctor, wrathfully. "Fish-blooded old mummy! His place is in a Canopic jar! Gatchell hasn't had a thought since 1845."
"Well, if he satisfied himself so long ago as 1845 that you have a frightful temper and that your hens are unutterable nuisances, I see no reason why he should change his mind," I said, frigidly. "You have; and your hens are; and your rooster is a demon!"
"Straight out of the pit; undoubtedly they were hatched under Satan's wings. Monsieur, believe me, Schmetz, when I tell you so."
"Didn't you ask me," I demanded, "to throw them over into your yard when they invaded my premises? Very well: I threw one over and you caught it. Why, then, should you complain?"
"Oh, yes, I caught it!" A horrible sneer twisted his countenance.
Schmetz fell to praying aloud. But he couldn't remember anything save the grace before meat, so he prayed that, in a sonorous voice. For he is a pious man.
The doctor's nose wrinkled and his lips stretched: "Sophronisba!" he hissed, and, having hurled this hand-grenade, scuttled down the ladder like a boy of ten.
Alicia sank upon the ground and rocked to and fro. For a minute I wanted to catch her by the shoulders and shake her soundly; but catching her eye instead, I also fell into helpless laughter. Leaning on his spade, Schmetz stared at us, shaking his grizzled head.
"Name of a cat!" murmured the puzzled Alsatian, and fell to salvaging such bulbs as weren't utterly ruined. We were all busy at this, when a head again appeared over the hedge—a big, leonine head with a tossing mane and a tameless beard. An enormous pair of shoulders followed, a tree-trunk of a leg was swung over, and Doctor Richard Geddes dropped into our garden like a great cat. He strolled over, hands in pockets, and looking down at grubbing us, asked politely: "Making a garden?"
"Oh, no," Alicia told him sweetly, "we're laying out a chicken-run."
"Er—what I came over to say, is that I've got some fine bulbs, myself, this year, particularly fine bulbs—eh, Schmetz?—and more than I need for myself. Will you share them with me, Miss Smith? Please! I—well, I'd be really grateful if you would," said this overgrown boy.
"We'll be enchanted," Alicia said instantly. "When can we have them, please?"
"Now!" cried the doctor, with brightening eyes. "By jingo, I'll get 'em this minute, and plant 'em for you, too!"
And he did. He was on his knees, trowel in hand, shouting to Riedriech, who had come outside for a few minutes' happy arguing with his good friend the doctor, that the socialist argument boiled down amounts to about this—that one should do without boiled eggs for breakfast now, in order that the proletariat may have baked hen for dinner in the millennium; which is lunacy; anybody with a modicum of brains—
"Brains!" snorted Riedriech. "What is it you know about brains? No doctor knows what is on the inside of brains! You make tinkerings mit the inside plumbings, Gott bewahre! and cut up womens and cats and such-like poor little dumb beasts and says you, 'Now I know all about the brains of man.' It is right there where you are wrong, Comrade Geddes!"
"Habet!" said Comrade Geddes.
"Look you," said the old visionary, with sudden passion, "look you on the little bulb here, so dirty and ugly you hide him in the ground quick. So! But by and by comes up green shoots, and blossoms. So it is with the great thoughts of men, the deep race-thoughts, Comrade Geddes—seeds, bulbs, germs, all of them, in the ugly husks of the common people. Out of our muck and grime they come, the little green shoots which the fool will say is poison, maybe, but which the wise know and labor and make room for. I, Riedriech, and workers like me, we go into our graves nothing but husks. But it is out of the buried hearts of us comes green things growing; and then—die Blumen! die Blumen!" said the cabinet-maker, with a still, far-away look.
"And," he finished, with a sad smile, "it is our flowers that you put in vases of gold on your altars. And you say, 'Listen: Jesus the carpenter talks plain words to his fishermen friends.' And, 'Hush! Burns the plowman makes songs in the field!'"
The doctor looked up, and his eyes were very tender; his smile made me wonder. With a swift, friendly hand he patted the rougher hand of the other. And it was at this opportune moment that Mary Magdalen led around a corner of Hynds House no less personages than Mrs. Haile and Miss Martha Hopkins. Their eyes fell upon Doctor Richard Geddes. They looked at each other. They looked at Alicia and me. And I knew their thoughts: "Sirens, both of you!" said Miss Hopkins's eyes.
"How do you do, Doctor Geddes!" said both ladies, as demurely as cats. I should have felt like a boy caught stealing jam. He went right on planting bulbs.
"Hello, Martha. What's on the carpet now?" he greeted that lady, airily. "Writing another paper on 'The Ironic Note in Chivalry'? How about 'The Effect of the Pre-Raphaelites upon the Feeble-minded'? Or is it the 'Relation of the Child to Its Mother,' this time?"
"You will have your little joke, Doctor," smiled Miss Hopkins, a dish-faced blonde with a cultured expression.
"Joke?" The doctor stared up at her. "Joke? Gad, I'd like to believe it!" He turned to Alicia and me, politely: "Miss Hopkins," he informed us, "moves among us clothed in white samite. She is our center of culture; Hyndsville revolves around her."
He went on putting a bulb in the place prepared for it. His eyebrows twitched slightly, but his mouth was smileless; Miss Hopkins was smiling, and not at all displeased. Mrs. Haile was bland and blank, as befits a minister's wife. Alicia's eyes were downcast, but a wicked dimple came and went in her cheek. She looked ravishingly pretty, the bright hair breaking into curls about her temples, her young face colored like a rose. I do not blame Doctor Richard Geddes for stopping in his work to stare at her with unabashed pleasure, but I do not think it was diplomatic.
Mrs. Haile apologized for calling when we were so very busy. They had just stopped in passing, because they were reorganizing their missionary society and wanted to see if they couldn't interest us in the good work. Their day-school in Mozambique needed another teacher, and their hospital in Bechuanaland had to have more beds.
Doctor Geddes got to his feet, slapped our garden soil from his knees, and shook his tawny mane. His eyes were no longer sweet.
"Miss Smith and Miss Gaines, thank you for the opportunity of playing in the sand in pleasant company. Mrs. Haile, Miss Hopkins, I go to attend some home-grown niggers who of course don't need a hospital, nor even a decent school, in our Christian midst. Ladies, good afternoon!" He made a fleering motion of the hand and was gone. Mrs. Haile and Miss Hopkins smiled indulgently. Evidently, Doctor Geddes was one brother they were willing to forgive though he offended them until seventy times seven.
Alicia and Miss Martha Hopkins walked down the garden path together and Mrs. Haile fell into step with me. In a low voice she thanked me, hurriedly, for having dropped that dreadful suit. And were we—she hesitated—were we going to be regular communicants?
I didn't want to go to St. Polycarp's any more, and it was on the tip of my tongue to give a politely evasive reply, when our eyes met and held each other. I saw the naked truth in hers—the pitiful truth of the slim, poor, aristocratic little parish; the old church overtaken and surpassed by its more modern and middle-class rivals; and the minister's family struggling along on a salary that would have made a hod-carrier strike. She was neatly dressed; she looked like a gentle-woman, but one in straightened circumstances. I made a rapid mental calculation.
"Why, yes, I think I can say we shall. Now, Mrs. Haile, I am a business woman, and if I speak bluntly you must pardon it. Miss Gaines and I can give two hundred dollars a year between us—fifty for the church; one hundred and fifty to be added to the minister's present salary."
I knew what that meant to her, and she must have known I knew, but she didn't show it by so much as the quiver of an eyelash. Only a faint, faint color showed in her sallow cheek, and she bowed, half-formally, half-friendly.
"Thank you, Miss Smith," said she, gallantly. And she added, with a glimmer of humor in her worried eyes: "As you say you're a business woman, may I say I hope you will get your money's worth?"
At that I laughed, and she with me.
We walked down our garden path, chatting innocuously and amiably, until of a sudden they caught sight of the little Love, the gay, charming, naked little Love, holding his torch above his curl-crowned head. You miss him, when you come up the broad drive from the front gate, for Nicholas Jelnik put him in the secretest, greenest, sweetest spot in all our garden, and you must go down a winding path to find him.
"So it wasn't an idle tale: they did find it, really!" breathed Miss Hopkins, staring with all her eyes. And I knew with great certainty why she had come to Hynds House that afternoon.
"Forgotten all these many years, and now here, like the dead come to life!" murmured Mrs. Haile, abstractedly. "How strange!"
"It was said he bought it for his mother, because it looked so like himself as a child," said Miss Hopkins. Then she remembered her duty, held up two fingers before her eyes, and squinted through them critically:
"Charming, but don't you think the pose strained? It's an example of eighteenth-century work, placid enough, but it lacks that plastic, fluidic serenity, that divine new touch of truth, that is revivifying art since the great Rodin lighted the torch anew."
Heaven knows what else she said. It sounded like a paper on art to me, and I have a terror of papers on art. They are, Alicia informs me, purple piffle. Yet Alicia drank in every word Miss Hopkins uttered, though the dimple came and went in her cheek.
"You seem interested in art, Miss Gaines." Having torn the poor little peasant Love to tatters, Miss Hopkins descended to us groundlings.
"I don't always seem to know what art is," admitted Alicia, dovelike.
The lady who "moved among us clothed in white samite" smiled encouragingly.
"That is because you are really little more than a child," she said kindly. "When you begin to grow, you will improve your mind."
Alicia puckered her brows. "Ah, but I'm Irish!" she said, seriously, "and the Irish hate to have to improve their minds. I imagine it takes an able-bodied mind to stand intensive cultivation," she added, guilelessly.
Miss Hopkins smiled: it was a masterpiece, that smile!
"But why, may I ask, did you choose such a situation for the statue?" she inquired critically. "Now, I should never dream of tucking it in such an out-of-the-way place!"
The pucker came back to Alicia's brow.
"Shouldn't you?" she wondered. "I shall make a point of mentioning that to Mr. Nicholas Jelnik, if you don't mind. You see, he chose that spot, and we rather like it, ourselves."
Miss Hopkins stopped dead short, and Mrs. Haile started in spite of herself. Evidently, the situation was beyond them. Didn't we know? How much had Judge Gatchell seen fit to tell us? Alicia had dropped a bomb-shell that before night would detonate in every house in Hyndsville. They haven't very much to talk about in small towns, except one another, and when a plump mouse of gossip frisks about whisking his tail, why, it is cat nature to pounce upon it.
"Mr. Jelnik!" said Miss Hopkins, with an accent. "Oh, I see. Well—he is a neighbor, of course. Certainly if Mr. Jelnik selected that particular spot for the statue—he of all people has the best right to do so—and to have his wishes considered."
"Of course. He has lived abroad, and seen everything of art there is to see," Alicia agreed, placidly. Which wasn't at all what Miss Hopkins meant.
We could see those two women turning the thing over and over in their minds—Nicholas Jelnik, last heir and descendant of Richard Hynds, tactily (perhaps even gladly; for had they not just witnessed the behavior of Doctor Richard Geddes?) accepting the interlopers in the house of his fathers! Nicholas Jelnik selecting the site for the statue Richard had brought home in pride, and Freeman had buried in sorrow! Miss Hopkins's stare dismissed me, shifted to Alicia, and discovered the cause of this shameless surrender of family pride. Her lips tightened. With politely cold hopes that we should like Hyndsville, and warmer hopes that we would join the missionary society, they left us.
"Wedge Number One: The poor dear heathen, Sophy!" smiled Alicia. "The P.D.H. can be a very present help in times of social trouble, can't he? I shall attend that missionary meeting, and take stock. Incidentally (For goodness' sake, don't look so scandalized, Sophy Smith! this is a fight for our lives, so to speak!) incidentally, I shan't do the P.D.H. any harm. He won't be a bit worse than he was before, which is promising." She put two fingers before her laughing eyes, squinted through them, and drawled:
"You lack subtlety, Miss Smith. Cultivate your imagination, my dear!" in Miss Hopkins's best voice.
Riedriech stuck his grizzled head out at a window, cautiously:
"Fräulein, she hass gone?" And seeing that the coast was clear, he added, vehemently: "Cultivate the mindt! Cultivate the imatchination! Ach, lieber Gott! Dornröschen, cultivate you the heart. It iss not what the woman thinks, but what she loves, what she feels, which makes of the world a home-place for men und kinder." The good old Jew nodded his head vigorously at the girl, smiled, and went back to his work. And Schmetz came and finished the bulb bed by covering it carefully with two thicknesses of chicken-wire.
That night, just before we went up-stairs, I went into the library after Freeman Hynds's diary, which we were simply burning to read. I opened the table drawer in which I had placed it. The drawer was quite empty. The little flat book was gone.
CHAPTER VI
GLAMOURY
Alicia insisted that we were living in a fairy-story, and had better enjoy every shining minute while it lasted. But, as I pointed out, the cost of restoring Hynds House was appallingly real, so real that it left a big, big hole in the bank-account. It is true that we who never really had had a home since we were little children, and then the most modest sort, had gotten such a home as comes to but few. But—one doesn't get something for nothing!
We had done our part for Hynds House; now Hynds House had to do its part for us. It had to earn its keep, and ours. We had known that from the beginning, and Alicia mapped out the entire plan of how it was to be done; a plan which I at first looked upon as the fairy-storiest part of the whole thing!
To-night we sat facing each other across the library table, with a great pile of receipted bills between us, the total of which made me feel pale. Alicia, however, was cheerfully figuring away on her own hook; and presently she shoved a list of addresses across to me.
The first two were the head of our old firm, and the one celebrity I had ever seen or spoken to, a novelist and lecturer with record-breaking best sellers to his account. He once had some business dealings with our firm, and I attended to the details, thereby winning his cantankerous approval. He had very bad manners, of which he was totally unashamed, and very good morals, of which he was somewhat doubtful, as they didn't smack of genius; a notion that he was a superior sort of Sherlock Holmes, having the truffle-hound's flair for discovering and following up clews and unraveling mysteries, most of which didn't exist outside of his own eager mind; and such a genuine passion for old and beautiful things as Balzac had. It was upon this last foundation that Alicia was building.
"He has written that the average wealthy modern home is a combination of Pullman Palace Car and Gehenna. And that the so-called crime wave which sweeps recurrently over American cities, is very likely nothing more than the inevitable reaction of our damnable house decorations upon our immature intellects." Alicia repeated it dreamily. "I have chosen for him the upper southwestern room with the sunset effect and the pineapple four-poster. It has a claw-footed desk of block mahogany, three hand-carved walnut chairs, two Rembrandt prints, and a French prie-dieu with a purple velvet cover embroidered with green and gold swastikas. He has a purple soul with gold tassels on it, himself, Sophy, and he should be willing to pay a thumping price for it. That room is worth at least two lectures and one best seller, not to mention what he'll get out of the rest of the house."
"First catch your hare," I reminded her skeptically.
"First set your trap, and you can reckon on hare nature to do the rest. A few good photographs of this house, along with the information that it runs back to the beginning of things American and has never been exploited, will fetch him at a hand-gallop. Add a hint that we have our own brand of family spook, and you couldn't keep him away if you tried. The only trouble is that he may walk off with your brass tongs up his trouser-leg, or a print or two tucked under his shirt."
We had decided that we would have a series of photographs of the house, with all particularly good points stressed; such as, say, the library fireplace, the fan-light window at the end of the upper hall, the pillared front porch, and a corner of the drawing-room.
Also—and this was the great thing, calling for a heavy outlay—we would advertise in some two or three of the ultra periodicals, the advertisement to carry a stunning little cut of our front porch. We decided to run the risk of expending more money than we could really afford, because the people that advertisement was meant to attract would in the long run pay for it.
"Our prices will be predacious, piratical, prohibitive, and profitable. We shall stop just this side of highway robbery. Therefore our demands will be cheerfully, nay, willingly met; and everybody, including you and me, Sophy, will be satisfied and happy!"
"Boarders!" said I, limply, "boarders—in Hynds House!"
"Perish the thought! We have possibly the most interesting and beautiful old house in America. It's one of the few really historic houses left in the whole South. It has seen the Indians, it has seen the British, it has seen Sherman's men, and escaped them all. Well, then, we propose to allow certain of the elect, who can afford it, to come and live in Hynds House for a while. They will be willing to pay a round sum for the privilege. That's all."
"Oh, is it, indeed! And will they?"
"Won't they, though!" Alicia spoke confidently. "Now draft me a letter to the Head, setting forth the many reasons why himself, his wife, their car, and her Chow, can't afford to miss Hynds House on their trip South this season. You might explain that Mary Magdalen is our cook, and the Queen of Sheba our hand-maid. Also, please help me decide in which of these magazines we had better advertise first."
"But the cost!" I wailed. "We have spent so sinfully much already! And the place is eating its head off, with nothing coming in. Since I took down those bill-boards, actually the price of that Lafayette Street lot has gone down. Nobody seems anxious to buy it any more."
"Change your mind about selling it; hint that you're considering an ice-cream parlor and a movie theater," said the girl who'd been the worst file-clerk. "In the meantime, Sophy, you have sense enough to understand that we've spent so much money we've got to spend more to get some of it back.—I vote we start in this one, Sophy," and she laid her finger upon the most expensive and ultra of all the magazines!
"But that is for millionaires!" said I, aghast.
"So is Hynds House," insisted Alicia, coolly. "How much did you say was in the bank?"
I was afraid to hear my own voice mention that insignificant sum; for, when one considered Hynds House, the little we had was beggarly; so I wrote it down, and pushed the paper across to her. Instead of looking scared, Alicia Gaines looked delighted!
"All that?" And round chin on pink palm, she fell to studying me with as much curiosity as if she had just met me and were puzzled to get at the real Me. Then she nodded, and snatching a sheet of paper, began to figure again, pausing every now and then to regard me with slitted eyes. At the end of ten strenuous minutes she pushed the paper over to me, and watched me grow all but apoplectic as I studied it. It was an entertaining list, beginning with a hat and ending with silk stockings. With all sorts of wonderful things in between—for me, you understand. Things like "One brown frock, with something cloudy-yellow about it." ("Sophy, blondes can stand yellow wonderfully well; I suggest a bronze, instead of a duller brown.")
"Why, I have plenty of clothes!" I protested.
"Business-woman-of-a-certain-age, general-utility, will-stand-wear-and-tear clothes. Not a stitch of Hyndshousey clothes among them. No happy, glad-I'm-alive-and-a woman clothes. Here's where you cease to look merely useful, respectable, and responsible, and begin to look the Lady of the Castle. There's quite as much philosophy and good morals in looking like a butterfly as there is in resembling a caterpillar."
"Why should I have more clothes?" I demanded.
"Because." And she added, with a fleeting smile, "And then catch your hare."
"Alicia!" said I, scandalized. "Alicia Gaines, do you realize I am thirty-six years old?"
"You wouldn't be if you just had sense enough to forget to remember it." This resentfully.
"No? Would you mind telling me how I might become such an accomplished forgetter?"
"Why, there's nothing easier! When you really wish to forget to remember something, Sophy, all you have to do is to remember to forget it!" And then, with real earnestness: "Sophy, it's the better part of wisdom to look like the job you want to hold down. Your job is holding down Hynds House. And we are up against things, Sophy, you and I. We have got to win out because it means—all this." Her eyes swept over the beautiful old room with an immense pride and affection.
"We have just got to keep Hynds House, if only to teach these Hyndsville women a lesson." She spoke after a pause. "Sophy, they flatten their ears and arch their backs at sight of us; and whenever there's a good chance for a wipe of a paw, why, we catch it across the nose. Now I," she admitted frankly, "am naturally full of cat feelings myself. I will not do what you want to do—walk off looking aggrieved, after the fashion of Old Dog Tray. I will repay in kind, retaliate in true lady-cat manner. And these,"—she began to smile—"these shall be our weapons of offense and defense. It will be a gorgeous struggle; however, my forebears came from Kilkenny!"
I laughed, but indeed I did not feel any too optimistic. Holding down Hynds House was no easy task, and the town was not disposed to make it easier for us. While we had been busy renovating, while our hands were so full of work that every minute was occupied, we hadn't felt our isolation. It was only when we had time to pause and look around us, that the stubborn, quiet hostility of the town's attitude to the new owner of Hynds House was borne in upon us.
Not that anything overt was done by any one. Nor was there the slightest breach of politeness: they were as punctiliously polite when chance brought us into contact with them, as well-bred folk are to strangers whose further acquaintance they have no desire to cultivate. The vestrymen of St. Polycarp's had expressed their appreciation of Miss Smith's action in promptly dropping the suit against them; she was welcome to come and worship God in their church, and to do her duty by the heathen. Such ladies as happened to belong to the missionary society spoke to us pleasantly in the church vestibule. The minister and his wife were as sincerely, duteously courteous. But that was all. Not a house in Hyndsville opened its doors to us. They simply would not accept the interloper that the malignity of the Scarlett Witch had put in possession of that which should have gone back to Richard's last heir, or failing him, to Richard Geddes.
The fact that these two descendants of the Hyndses did not seem to see and do their duty as members of that illustrious family, but shamelessly made friends with the aliens, did not raise us in the town's estimation. Quite the contrary. Nor were they even faintly angry with Mr. Jelnik and Doctor Geddes, who were, so to say, unsuspicious Israelites coaxed into the Canaanitish camp.
I admit that I considered Doctor Richard Geddes undiplomatic in his behavior. It never once occurred to that lordly gentleman, who had had his own way ever since he was born, that he should stop now to consider the feelings or the prejudices of Hyndsville. It wasn't that he meant to champion us. It never occurred to him that we needed championing. He simply liked us because he liked us. We pleased him. That sufficed, so far as he was concerned.
I had begun really to like the doctor, myself. But I wished to heaven he weren't, at that critical time, so tactless. For instance, I have been peremptorily taken by an elbow and led willy-nilly to his waiting car, on Lafayette Street, which is our principal thoroughfare, under the calm, appraising, watching eyes of all feminine Hyndsville. Not one of whom would fail to remark, casually:
"Oh, did you see that Miss Smith with Doctor Geddes this morning? Men are so unsuspicious, aren't they!"
I couldn't explain the situation to him, of course, any more than I could explain to Mr. Nicholas Jelnik that his presence in Hynds House, while pleasing to us, was disquieting and displeasing to others.
It was to be expected that this handsome young man, who kept his affairs so strictly to himself that nobody knew anything about them, should arouse the avid curiosity and hold the breathless interest of a little town where everybody had always known everybody else's business.
Why had he come to Hyndsville? To find the Hynds jewels, after a century? Didn't he know that the Scarlett Witch had the eye of an eagle for the glitter of gold and would long since have discovered whatever of value had been in Hynds House? Why didn't he consult older members of the community, who could furnish him with immensely interesting side-lights on the Hyndses?
Mr. Jelnik never explained. He didn't ask anybody anything. He didn't even employ Hyndsville negroes, who could be expected to gossip: his household consisted of a stately bronze-colored man-servant who was reputed to be a pagan, and the huge wolf-hound, Boris, his constant companion.
When Doctor Geddes was delicately sounded, the big man explained that he himself had but recently made the acquaintance of his young kinsman; Jelnik was a first-rate chap, declared the doctor; immensely clever, as befitted his father's son; altogether likeable, but a bit of a lunatic, like all the Hyndses.
It was natural, too, that the young ladies in a small town where young men are at a premium should have noticed this one particularly and expected a like interest on his part. The inexplicable Jelnik failed to exhibit it. There was but one house that he visited, and that was Hynds House.
Whatever his reasons for this may have been, and the town named several, the fact remains that Hynds House would never have been so beautiful, the restoration wouldn't have been so nearly perfect, had it not been for the critical taste of Mr. Jelnik. He had the European knowledge of beautiful things, and, toward the finer graces of life, the attitude of Paris, of Rome, of Vienna, rather than of New York, of Chicago, or of, say, Atlanta.
There was a glamour about the man. Whatever he did or said had an indefinable, delightful significance; what he left undone was full of meaning. His mere presence ornamented and colored common moments so that they glowed, and remained in the memory with a rainbow light upon them. He was never hurried or flurried, any more than sun and sky and trees and tides are; and he was just as vital, and quite as baffling.
We accepted him at first as part of the fairy-story into which Destiny had pitchforked us. He belonged to Hynds House, so to speak, and there one might meet him upon common ground. But sometimes when I happened to glance up I would find him watching us with those reflective eyes that were so full of light and at the same time so inscrutable. And then he would smile, his Dionysiac smile that made him all at once so far off and so foreign that I knew, with a sinking heart, that he didn't belong at all; that this beautiful and brilliant bird of passage was lightening for but a very brief space my sober skies.
Alicia said he made her think of peacocks and ivory. He delighted and dazzled her, though he did not disquiet her as he did me, perhaps because she, too, was young and beautiful, and I—wasn't.
It will be seen, then, that our position, take it by and large, wasn't one that called for flags and buntings. Life didn't look a bit rose-colored to me as I sat there that night, drafting a letter to the Head. Of a sudden arose clamor in the hall, and howls, hideously loud at that hour and in that quiet house. There came the noise of running feet, and there burst into the lighted library, with gray faces and rolling eyes, our two lately acquired colored maids, Fernolia the thin one, and Queen of Sheba, fat and brown.
"Good heavens! What's the matter?" I asked, fearfully. It had been a terrible task to break in those two handmaids, to train them not to take part in the conversation at table, not to take off cap, and hair, not to do the thousand and one undisciplined and disorderly things they did do.
"Ghostes! Sperets! Ha'nts!" chattered the colored women. "Ol' Mis' Scarlett's walkin' in de ca'iage house!"
"Nonsense!" At the same time I felt myself turning pale, and goose-flesh coming out on my spine.
"No, ma'am, Miss Sophy, 't ain't nonsense. It's ha'nts!" protested Fernolia. She was the brighter of the two, but given to embroidering her facts.
"Yessum, I done saw 'er," corroborated Queenasheeba. (That's how one pronounced her name.)
The two occupied a very pleasant room above the carriage house, a room that had overcome their unwillingness to stay overnight at Hynds House. Queenasheeba was just dozing, when she was awakened by Fernolia, who had been sitting by the window. Both of them, peering through the scrim curtains, saw a tall white figure disappear into the spring-house. A few minutes later, to their horror, they heard Something moving downstairs in the carriage house—Something like the clank of a chain—footsteps—and then silence. Almost paralyzed with terror, the two women clung together. Anything might be expected of ol' Mis' Scarlett! However, nothing further happened. With shaking hands Queenasheeba relighted the lamp. Then, snatching up such clothes as they could grab, the two fled to us.
Mary Magdalen and Beautiful Dog always departed after dinner. Except for the Black family and the two canaries, Alicia and I had big, lonesome Hynds House to ourselves. Mr. Jelnik's gray cottage, set amid Lombardy poplars and thick shrubberies, was some distance away, and we didn't know whether Doctor Geddes was at home or not. It is true we had firearms, a pair of pistols having been literally forced upon us by the doctor, who fretted and fumed about our staying there alone. Both of us were more afraid of those pistols than of any possible ghostly intruder.
Nevertheless, I went up-stairs and fetched them. Alicia took one as she might have taken a rattlesnake, and I held the other. Armed thus, carrying torch-light and lantern, and with the two gray-faced, half-clad negro women following us, one carrying our brass poker and the other the tongs, we marched upon the carriage house.
The big barnlike place, lately cleaned and whitewashed, looked painfully empty. In one of the stalls the hay purchased for our recently acquired Jersey cow gave off a pleasant odor. Over in one corner, in a neat, clean, orderly array, were Schmetz's tools. A little farther on was our chicken feed, in covered barrels.
We went from empty stall to empty stall, to reassure the women; there wasn't so much as a cobweb in any of them. All the down-stairs windows were heavily barred with iron and further protected, like the doors, with heavy oaken shutters studded with iron nail-heads. The two small rooms in the rear had once been used as a jail for recalcitrant slaves; they held now nothing deadlier than Schmetz's flower pots and seedlings. Every shutter was closed, and the iron bars looked reassuringly strong; also, the walls are three feet thick.
"You were dreaming, you silly women! I told you you were dreaming!" said I, and had turned to go, reassured and relieved, when Alicia's nose wrinkled. I could hardly keep from sniffing, myself.
In the carriage-house was a faint, indeterminable scent, the ghost of the ghost of fragrance, so elusive that one sensed rather than smelled it, so pervasive and haunting that one could not miss it. And it certainly had nothing to do with the wholesome odor of hay and cow feed, or the smell of whitewash and oiled tools.
"Yes, you were dreaming." Alicia began to edge the colored women toward the doors. "But as you've had a scare," she added pleasantly, "I'll give you a new lace collar, Queenasheeba, and you a red ribbon, Fernolia, to wear to church next Sunday, just to prove to you that being awake is heaps better than having nightmares."
We padlocked the big doors after us, and went through the rooms up-stairs. They, too, had been freshly cleaned and calcimined. And they, too, were quite empty.
Despite which, Fernolia and Queenasheeba were firmly, tearfully, shiveringly certain they had seen nothing less than ol' Mis' Scarlett's ha'nt. They had the worst possible opinion of ol' Miss Scarlett: she had been bad enough living—but as a spook! We had to let them lug their bedding over and sleep in the room next to ours; we had to give them sweet lavender to quiet their nerves. I am sure they would have bolted incontinently if they hadn't been too scared to venture outside.
"If I could catch that ghost I'd shake it!" declared Alicia. And we went back to our figuring, with a sort of desperate courage. "Now will you get those clothes, Sophy Smith?" she resumed, through her teeth, and the pink came back to her cheek, and her eyes deepened. "And do you agree to stick it out, you and I shoulder to shoulder, town or no town, ha'nts or no ha'nts; and win out?"
"Yes!" said I.