He talked on, of farming, and of his grandfather who destroyed good land by cropping it with tobacco till it would no longer yield. “He wanted land just for the sake of making money out of it,” he explained. “He was always money-hungry.” He laughed at sudden memory. “He thought he’d make a fortune out of Moris Multicaulis. That’s a special kind of mulberry, and there was a time when everybody was either buying mulberry shoots or selling them. They used to sell shoots at so much for each bud; and the price kept going up till it was three or four and finally six cents per bud. The shoots were wonderful to sprout, but the sprouts wouldn’t grow up; they just kept putting out more sprouts. And the silkworms wouldn’t eat them, and the sprouts couldn’t be killed, till finally everyone had mulberry shoots to sell and no one wanted to buy them. Papa lost a lot of money. It was just a crazy speculation.” He added, his thoughts drifting: “Then after that excitement blew over, people got the gold fever and headed for the mountain country down south of Chimneys. They found quite a lot of gold, too. There was a man there, Bechler or Bechtler or some such name, used to coin gold pieces down there for the Government.”
His voice droned on, but Enid no longer heard him. Sun on the water and the warm wind against her cheek had made her drowsy, and even while he spoke she fell asleep. She slept past Dancing Point and did not wake till Trav roused her to see Great Oak, the big house on the clay bluffs above the river set well back and half-hidden by trees; and after that she was full of eagerness. He had sent word ahead that they were coming, so when they landed at Allen’s Wharf, the carriage and a cart for their belongings were waiting to meet them. They came into Williamsburg by Francis Street and angled past Capitol Square; and as the horses trotted westward through the town, Trav pointed out the court house in Market Square and the old Magazine across the way, and the college building with ugly square towers defacing its front; and he told her of the town’s great days until she protested:
“But, Trav, all that was seventy or eighty years ago. Doesn’t anything ever happen here now?”
“Well, I suppose Williamsburg has to be satisfied with having been important once.”
Sudden misgivings touched her and she clung to his arm. “Trav, will your Mama like me?”
“Of course, Honey.”
“Oh, I hope so.”
He pressed her hand, gently reassuring. “Don’t worry. You and she’ll get along just fine.”
Uneasy silence briefly held her. They took the Barrett’s Ferry road. “Is she big and stern, Trav?”
He laughed. “About as big as a minute! She won’t come much higher than your shoulder.”
“You’re big, and I remember Tony was tall and lanky, and Cinda’s sort of big, too.” Brett and Cinda had come from the Plains for their wedding, and Tony from Great Oak. I’ve never seen Faunt or Tilda.”
“Father was tall,” Trav explained. “Tony’s like him. But Mama’s a little bit of a thing.”
They turned into an oak wood, and Enid sat breathless, watching the drive ahead. The oaks gave way to an avenue of tulip trees which passed stables and poultry yard and the overseer’s house on one side, the smoke house and the corn cribs on the other. At the head of the avenue the big house was at first concealed; then as they drew near it came more and more clearly into view, till the circle of the driveway brought them to the hospitable door and the waiting welcome.
“There’s Mama,” Trav said. Mrs. Currain, small and exquisite and smiling, stood at the head of the steps, and at her shoulder a fat old Negro woman beaming with love and pride. “And April,” Trav exclaimed. Then the carriage pulled up and he swung Enid to the ground, and her fears were forgotten. She took Mrs. Currain in her arms, and the little old lady returned her kiss with ready affection.
“Welcome to Great Oak, my dear!” she said, and held Enid at arm’s length to survey her approvingly, and turned to take Trav’s kiss, and to welcome Lucy and Peter. While Trav stayed a moment in talk with April, Enid and Mrs. Currain turned into the great hall, and Enid uttered a cry of delight.
“Oh, Mama, it’s so big; so big, and so beautiful!”
Mrs. Currain smiled at her happiness. “My husband used to say you could drive a coach-and-four through the hall, if you could get them through the doors. Well, now, I’m glad you’ve come, my dears; I’m happy you’re here.”
Vigil at Enid’s command brought the baby to be admired; and then April and Vigil took the children away and Enid went whirling through the lofty rooms, admiring everything, exclaiming and asking questions and not waiting for answers. She saw Trav watching her with content in his eyes, and called to him: “Oh, Honey, I never was so happy in my life before!”
During the summer days that followed, Enid explored everywhere, indoors and out, with a delicious secret sense of ownership; for surely, some day, all this would be Trav’s, and she would be its mistress. The big house, though it needed painting, though the roof sometimes leaked, though it was shabby here and there, was a continuing wonder. The lofty arched hall with fluted pilasters, the marble mantels, the carved panelling, the wide curving stairs, the high-ceiled rooms with wall paper brought from England a hundred years before, all these were beyond superlatives. Side halls connected the central part of the house with what had once been separate wings, so that the whole structure was now full two hundred feet from one end to the other. The drawing room, its windows hung with bright damask, caught the sun all day long; and old portraits, richly shadowed, hung between the windows that reached from the floor almost to the ceiling.
Mrs. Currain was in these days as happy as Enid. “You musn’t let me wear you out with so many questions, Mama,” Enid warned her; and the little old lady said smilingly:
“Why, my dear, there’s nothing I like so much as having you love this house. I do too, you know.” She knew all there was to know about the old mansion. “Mr. Bexley built it, more than a hundred years ago. My husband’s father bought it from Mrs. Bexley. She was Martha Foxhall, and my mother was a Foxhall, so we were distant cousins, so I’ve always felt at home here since the day Mr. Currain carried me up the steps and across the threshold.” She knew the architectural features by their proper names and spoke of the hipped roof with its dormers, of pilasters and pediments and finials, and of flutings and entablatures, of modillions and rosettes and soffits, of balusters and balustrades, till Enid was lost in amused bewilderment.
“I declare, Mama, you’ve got me so mixed up I don’t know windows from doors,” she confessed. “I can hardly remember which are mantels and which are panels.”
Mrs. Currain smiled at her pretty confusion. “The mantels are marble,” she pointed out. “Carved in England before they were brought here. And the panels are heart-pine like the floors, cut and sawed and shaped here on the place.”
“The floors are hardly worn at all,” Enid commented. “Pine must be like iron.”
Mrs. Currain nodded. “Yes, but of course it would burn like gunpowder. We’re always afraid of fire. If one ever started, the whole house would go. That’s why we never take lamps upstairs at all. Candles are so much safer.”
Enid liked best of all the drawing room, so full of warm lights and rich shadows. She and Mrs. Currain received callers there, Mrs. Currain presiding at the tea table where silver and glass and eggshell china gleamed and shone; and after the stately ladies had gone she told Enid all about them, and her own words forever led her into memories. “My husband brought me home here fifty-two years ago, you know,” she might say, with perhaps a smiling apology for her garrulity. “I was nineteen—he was much older, of course—so I’ve lived almost a lifetime here. But even when I first came the people loved to talk about the days before the Revolution, when Williamsburg was a great town.” And she would drift into interminable tales, of old Mrs. Wills and other famous gossips, and of Mrs. Davis whose passion was collecting bonnets through long bedridden years, and how Decimus Ultimus Barziza came by that strange name, and of the Reverend Scervant Jones who would rather write a p
oem than a sermon, and of a dozen more.
Enid, though she might protest to Trav that his mother would talk her to death, yet enjoyed these hours with the older woman; and she took a sensuous delight in the big house and its noble setting. The service buildings were on the side away from the river, receding among concealing oaks. To right and left of the lawns toward the river, the gardens were enclosed in a hedge of tree box, and enriched by lush masses of bush box and with each bed framed in its own dwarf border. Now in midsummer there was not much bloom; but Mrs. Currain, to whom each plant was an old loved friend, saw with the eyes of memory and spoke of wistaria and jasmine, sweet shrub and calycanthus, mock orange and dogwood, smoke trees and lilacs, crape myrtle and Cape jessamine, roses by a hundred names, lesser blossoms by the score. Enid never tired of this talk of what had been and would be again.
On the river side, wide lawns were protected by ha-has against the incursion of the horses which grazed freely across the further levels. Solitary in the middle of the lawn which its spreading shade over a considerable space discouraged stood the huge oak tree that gave the plantation its name. The great trunk was more than twenty feet around, the lofty crown almost a hundred feet above the ground, the widest spread of the heavy branches a hundred and thirty feet from side to side. Within the trunk there was a hollow where a man could stand erect, extending upward into darkness. Lucy, although she was ten, was not too grown up to begin to make a play house in this ample cavity; and old April, who since Vigil was busy with little Henrietta made Trav’s other children her special charge, helped her find furnishings for her retreat, and set one of the Negroes to make two small split bottom chairs just big enough for Lucy and Peter and to construct a tiny cradle; and she herself fabricated—out of a corn cob and some bright calico—a doll baby for Little Missy.
Enid did not interfere with Lucy’s make-believe. She had her own delights, savoring every hour, never forgetting that if she were careful to keep Mrs. Currain’s good will, she would some day be mistress here. Mrs. Currain was a scrupulous housekeeper. At Great Oak the bed rooms were aired daily, the mattresses put out in the sun twice each month. Every implement in the kitchen, whether it had been used or not, once a week was scrubbed and scoured. Daily, her keys at her waist, Mrs. Currain inspected her domain; she visited the dairy and the laundry, she went to the smoke house and the cupboard to measure out the day’s supply of butter, sugar, lard, meal, and flour, and doled out whatever ingredients the coming meals required. Every cupboard and every outbuilding had lock and key. “The people don’t think it’s stealing,” she told Enid. “So we keep temptation away from them.” She supervised the making of starch and of soap; she oversaw the dipping of candles, and she kept the trash gang—men and women too old to labor in the fields, children too young—at work all day raking drives and paths or grooming the wide lawns and terraces. Each leaf that fell must be removed.
Enid, who except in the flurry of preparation for her mother’s visit had let Trav oversee everything at Chimneys, was half astonished, half amused by Mrs. Currain’s insistences. She herself did not escape the old lady’s discipline, for she was expected to keep Trav’s clothes in order, his buttons secure, his socks free from holes and smoothly darned. She and Mrs. Currain spent long hours together, their needles busy; and often the children were near-by, for the older woman enjoyed them, laughed at their play, relished the memories they aroused in her.
“Little Peter’s so like Tony when he was a baby,” she said once. “Always wanting to be the center of everything, forever shouting: ‘Mama, look at me! Look at me, Mama! Look at me!’ Tony would do all sorts of absurd things, jumping around like a jack-in-the-box—anything to attract attention.”
Enid had seen Tony only once, years ago when he came to her wedding and devoted himself to her mother; but she had at once disliked him and she resented this comparison. “Peter’s not like that usually! It’s just that you laugh at him!”
“Oh, my dear, that’s a grandmother’s privilege, to spoil her grandchildren.” But Mrs. Currain had guessed Enid’s resentment. “I spoiled Tony, too,” she confessed. “I shouldn’t have done it; but you see my next baby died.” Her eyes were on her needle. “Mr. Currain was in Richmond the night the theatre burned, and he was in the audience. The Placide stock company presented a pantomime called The Bleeding Nun, and fire started during the performance, and scores of people were burned to death; Governor Smith, and Sally Conyers, and the young man she was to marry, and so many of our friends. Mr. Currain was not hurt, but he came home and told me about it, and I was so horrified that my baby was born too soon and died, and the next one died too. So till Travis was born, Tony was all we had, and we spoiled him sadly.” She added, smiling quickly: “But I don’t mean Peter’s spoiled! He just likes to be the center of things.”
One day she took down from above the mantel in the library a sword in its scabbard, a long, straight, double-edged weapon, and belted it around the youngster, and laughed at Peter’s delighted strutting. “It was Mr. Currain’s father’s,” she explained. “He brought it from France when he went over with Mr. Oswald to help make the peace with England. Mr. Currain would have gone with him to be his secretary, but his horse refused a fence and threw him and broke his leg. There, look at Peter swagger!” But when Peter without permission one day helped himself to the long blade and went into the garden and slashed at a young rose bush with it, she restored it to its place of honor above the mantel and said he must not touch it again. “But you may have it when you grow up and go to war,” she promised him, and she told Enid: “Travis used to love to wear the sword when he was little; yes, and after he grew up, too. I came to the door one day and caught him brandishing it, lunging and stabbing.” Her voice suddenly was thoughtful. “He was surprisingly graceful, Enid, like a fencer.” Then she smiled. “He saw me presently in the long mirror, and he was so embarrassed. I suppose he imagined himself fighting a duel or something.”
Enid remembered Trav’s confession the day they came down the river from Richmond. “He used to like to read old love stories and pretend to himself he was the hero. Peter’s always imagining things, too.”
“He’s such a sturdy little boy.” Mrs. Currain loved Peter, but she was fond of Lucy too. “I’m glad you named Lucy after me, Enid.” She smiled over her needlework. “You know, it was because my name is Lucy that Mr. Currain fell in love with me.” And to Enid’s quick, amused question. “Well, he used to tell me—teasing me, to be sure—that his first sweetheart, years before he met me, even before I was born, was a girl named Lucy.”
“Why, I declare, Mama, that’s real romantic. Did he marry her?”
“No, she wasn’t of a good family, so his father wouldn’t let him.”
“Of course not! I reckon she was a hussy.”
“I’m not so sure. Mr. Currain said she was really very sweet. But her father took her away to Kentucky and they never saw each other again.”
“So then he married you?”
“Not till long afterward. First he married Sally Williber. They never had any children. She was an invalid for a long time, and I never knew him till after she died. He always said he fell in love with my name before he ever saw me; always declared I reminded him of that first sweetheart.”
“Weren’t you jealous?”
Mrs. Currain tossed her head. “Oh, to be sure; but he never told me till long after we were married!”
Trav and Enid and the children arrived at Great Oak in early August; and late that month Tilda, Trav’s sister, wrote that she and Dolly would come down from Richmond for a visit. Enid said when she heard: “I’ve never met Cousin Tilda. Is she as nice as Cousin Cinda?”
Mrs. Currain hesitated, smiling in a wistful way. “I ought to be ashamed of myself for saying so, but—well, no, she isn’t. It’s not her fault, probably. You see, Cinda was always the popular one, and Tilda couldn’t help knowing it. When she was little, even old May used to hold Cinda up to her as an example.”
> “Who is May?”
“She nursed Tilda when she was a baby. She’s dead now. June took care of Cinda, and of course old April was Trav’s, and May was Tilda’s.”
Enid laughed. “April and May and June! Were they sisters?”
“Yes.” Mrs. Currain chuckled in the way which always reminded Enid of a chipmunk’s chirp. “Yes, their mother was named Calendar; and she had a January and an August too. But May was bad for Tilda. I tried to put a stop to it, but you can’t do anything with nurses.”
“I know,” Enid agreed. “Vigil doesn’t pay the least bit of attention to anything I say.” She asked curiously: “Didn’t Tilda hate having Cinda thrown up to her all the time?”
“If she did, she didn’t let on. She’s devoted to Cinda even now. I’m afraid I couldn’t be as Christian as she is. Cinda’s always had the best of everything. They both fell in love with Brett Dewain, you know. Tilda was only sixteen at the time, but girls that age take things hard——”
“I was only sixteen when I married Trav!”
Mrs. Currain nodded. “Then when Brett married Cinda, Tilda was sure her heart was broken, till one day Tony brought Mr. Streean home from Richmond.” The old woman wandered so easily among her memories. “I wouldn’t have chosen him for Tilda. His people were nobodies; but she was so grateful for his attentions that I hadn’t the heart to put my foot down. Sometimes I wish I had. He was very businesslike. I never told Tilda this, and you musn’t, but before he spoke to her, he came to me about a settlement. I gave them a house in Richmond and an income, and they live on Tilda’s money—though of course it’s his now—and he went into politics. He takes himself ever so seriously—” She broke off. “There, I shouldn’t talk so about my son-in-law, but he really is tiresome!”
House Divided Page 8