Ailsa, down on her knees again, dabbled thoughtfully in the soil, exploring the masses of matted spider-wort for new shoots.
Camilla looked on, resignedly, her fingers playing with the loosened masses of her glossy black hair. Each was following in silence the idle drift of thought which led Camilla back to her birthday party.
“Twenty!” she said still more resignedly— “four years younger than you are, Ailsa Paige! Oh dear — and here I am, absolutely unmarried. That is not a very maidenly thought, I suppose, is it Ailsa?”
“You always were a romantic child,” observed Ailsa, digging vigorously in the track of a vanishing May beetle. But when she disinterred him her heart failed her and she let him scramble away.
“There! He’ll probably chew up everything,” she said. “What a sentimental goose I am!”
“The first trace of real sentiment I ever saw you display,” began
Camilla reflectively, “was the night of my party.”
Ailsa dug with energy. “That is absurd! And not even funny.”
“You were sentimental!”
“I — well there is no use in answering you,” concluded Ailsa.
“No, there isn’t. I’ve seen women look at men, and men look back again — the way he did!”
“Dear, please don’t say such things!”
“I’m going to say ‘em,” insisted Camilla with malicious satisfaction. “You’ve jeered at me because I’m tender-hearted about men. Now my chance has come!”
Ailsa began patiently: “There were scarcely a dozen words spoken — —”
Camilla, delighted, shook her dark curls.
“You’ve said that before,” she laughed. “Oh, you pretty minx! — you and your dozen words!”
Ailsa Paige arose in wrath and stretched out a warning arm among her leafless roses; but Camilla placed both hands on the fence top and leaned swiftly down from the veranda steps,
“Forgive me, dear,” she said penitently. “I was only trying to torment you. Kiss me and make up. I know you too well to believe that you could care for a man of that kind.”
Ailsa’s face was very serious, but she lifted herself on tiptoe and they exchanged an amicable salute across the fence.
After a moment she said: “What did you mean by ‘a man of that kind’?”
Camilla’s shrug was expressive. “There are stories about him.”
Ailsa looked thoughtfully into space. “Well you won’t say such things to me again, about any man — will you, dear?”
“You never minded them before. You used to laugh.”
“But this time,” said Ailsa Paige, “it is not the least bit funny.
We scarcely exchanged — —”
She checked herself, flushing with annoyance. Camilla, leaning on the garden fence, had suddenly buried her face in both arms. In feminine plumpness, when young, there is usually something left of the schoolgirl giggler.
The pretty girl below remained disdainfully indifferent. She dug, she clipped, she explored, inhaling, with little thrills, the faint mounting odour of forest loam and sappy stems.
“I really must go back to New York and start my own garden,” she said, not noticing Camilla’s mischief. “London Terrace will be green in another week.”
“How long do you stay with the Craigs, Ailsa?”
“Until the workmen finish painting my house and installing the new plumbing. Colonel Arran is good enough to look after it.”
Camilla, her light head always ringing with gossip, watched Ailsa curiously.
“It’s odd,” she observed, “that Colonel Arran and the Craigs never exchange civilities.”
“Mrs. Craig doesn’t like him,” said Ailsa simply.
“You do, don’t you?”
“Naturally. He was my guardian.”
“My uncle likes him. To me he has a hard face.”
“He has a sad face,” said Ailsa Paige.
CHAPTER III
Ailsa and her sister-in-law, Mrs. Craig, had been unusually reticent over their embroidery that early afternoon, seated together in the front room, which was now flooded with sunshine — an attractive, intimate room, restful and pretty in spite of the unlovely Victorian walnut furniture.
Through a sunny passageway they could look into Ailsa’s bedroom — formerly the children’s nursery — where her maid sat sewing.
Outside the open windows, seen between breezy curtains, new buds already clothed the great twisted ropes of pendant wistaria with a silvery-green down.
The street was quiet under its leafless double row of trees, maple, ailanthus, and catalpa; the old man who trudged his rounds regularly every week was passing now with his muffled shout:
Any old hats
Old coats
Old boots!
Any old mats
Old suits,
Old flutes! Ca-ash!
And, leaning near to the sill, Ailsa saw him shuffling along, green-baize bag bulging, a pyramid of stove-pipe hats crammed down over his ears.
At intervals from somewhere in the neighbourhood sounded the pleasant bell of the scissors grinder, and the not unmusical call of “Glass put in!” But it was really very tranquil there in the sunshine of Fort Greene Place, stiller even for the fluted call of an oriole aloft in the silver maple in front of the stoop.
He was a shy bird even though there were no imported sparrows to drive this lovely native from the trees of a sleepy city; and he sat very still in the top branches, clad in his gorgeous livery of orange and black, and scarcely stirred save to slant his head and peer doubtfully at last year’s cocoons, which clung to the bark like shreds of frosted cotton.
Very far away, from somewhere in the harbour, a deep sound jarred the silence. Ailsa raised her head, needle suspended, listened for a moment, then resumed her embroidery with an unconscious sigh.
Her sister-in-law glanced sideways at her.
“I was thinking of Major Anderson, Celia,” she said absently.
“So was I, dear. And of those who must answer for his gove’nment’s madness, — God fo’give them.”
There was no more said about the Major or his government. After a few moments Ailsa leaned back dreamily, her gaze wandering around the sunny walls of the room. In Ailsa Paige’s eyes there was always a gentle caress for homely things. Just now they caressed the pictures of “Night” and “Morning,” hanging there in their round gilt frames; the window boxes where hyacinths blossomed; the English ivy festooned to frame the window beside her sister-in-law’s writing-desk; the melancholy engraving over the fireplace— “The Motherless Bairn” — a commonplace picture which harrowed her, but which nobody thought of discarding in a day when even the commonplace was uncommon.
She smiled in amused reminiscence of the secret tears she had wept over absurd things — of the funerals held for birds found dead — of the “Three Grains of Corn” poem which, when a child, elicited from her howls of anguish.
Little golden flashes of recollection lighted the idle path as her thoughts wandered along hazy ways which led back to her own nursery days; and she rested there, in memory, dreaming through the stillness of the afternoon.
She missed the rattle and noise of New York. It was a little too tranquil in Fort Greene Place; yet, when she listened intently, through the city’s old-fashioned hush, very far away the voices of the great seaport were always audible — a ceaseless harmony of river whistles, ferry-boats signalling on the East River, ferry-boats on the North River, perhaps some mellow, resonant blast from the bay, where an ocean liner was heading for the Narrows. Always the street’s stillness held that singing murmur, vibrant with deep undertones from dock and river and the outer sea.
Strange spicy odours, too, sometimes floated inland from the sugar wharves, miles away under the Heights, to mingle with the scent of lilac and iris in quiet, sunny backyards where whitewashed fences reflected the mid-day glare, and cats dozed in strategical positions on grape trellis and tin roofs of extensions, prepared for war or
peace, as are all cats always, at all times.
“Celia!”
Celia Craig looked up tranquilly.
“Has anybody darned Paige’s stockings?”
“No, she hasn’t, Honey-bell. Paige and Marye must keep their stockings da’ned. I never could do anything fo’ myse’f, and I won’t have my daughters brought up he’pless.”
Ailsa glanced humorously across at her sister-in-law.
“You sweet thing,” she said, “you can do anything, and you know it!”
“But I don’t like to do anything any mo’ than I did befo’ I had to,” laughed Celia Craig; and suddenly checked her mirth, listening with her pretty close-set ears.
“That is the do’-bell,” she remarked, “and I am not dressed.”
“It’s almost too early for anybody to call,” said Ailsa tranquilly.
But she was wrong, and when, a moment later, the servant came to announce Mr. Berkley, Ailsa regarded her sister-in-law in pink consternation.
“I did not ask him,” she said. “We scarcely exchanged a dozen words. He merely said he’d like to call — on you — and now he’s done it, Celia!”
Mrs. Craig calmly instructed the servant to say that they were at home, and the servant withdrew.
“Do you approve his coming — this way — without anybody inviting him?” asked Ailsa uneasily.
“Of co’se, Honey-bell. He is a Berkley. He should have paid his respects to us long ago.”
“It was for him to mention the relationship when I met him. He did not speak of it, Celia.”
“No, it was fo’ you to speak of it first,” said Celia Craig gently.
“But you did not know that.”
“Why?”
“There are reasons, Honey-bud.”
“What reasons?”
“They are not yo’ business, dear,” said her sister-in-law quietly.
Ailsa had already risen to examine herself in the mirror. Now she looked back over her shoulder and down into Celia’s pretty eyes — eyes as unspoiled as her own.
In Celia Craig remained that gracious and confident faith in kinship which her Northern marriage had neither extinguished nor chilled. The young man who waited below was a Berkley, a kinsman. Name and quality were keys to her hospitality. There was also another key which this man possessed, and it fitted a little locked compartment in Celia Craig’s heart. But Ailsa had no knowledge of this. And now Mrs. Craig was considering the advisability of telling her — not all, perhaps, — but something of how matters stood between the House of Craig and the House of Berkley. But not how matters stood with the House of Arran.
“Honey-bud,” she said, “you must be ve’y polite to this young man.”
“I expect to be. Only I don’t quite understand why he came so unceremoniously — —”
“It would have been ruder to neglect us, little Puritan! I want to see Connie Berkley’s boy. I’m glad he came.”
Celia Craig, once Celia Marye Ormond Paige, stood watching her taller sister-in-law twisting up her hair and winding the thick braid around the crown of her head a la coronal. Little wonder that these two were so often mistaken for own sisters — the matron not quite as tall as the young widow, but as slender, and fair, and cast in the same girlish mould.
Both inherited from their Ormond ancestry slightly arched and dainty noses and brows, delicate hands and feet, and the same splendid dull-gold hair — features apparently characteristic of the line, all the women of which had been toasts of a hundred years ago, before Harry Lee hunted men and the Shadow of the Swamp Fox flitted through the cypress to a great king’s undoing.
Ailsa laid a pink bow against her hair and glanced at her sister-in-law for approval.
“I declare. Honey-bud, you are all rose colour to-day,” said Celia Craig, smiling; and, on impulse, unpinned the pink-and-white cameo from her own throat and fastened it to Ailsa’s breast.
“I reckon I’ll slip on a gay gown myse’f,” she added mischievously. “I certainly am becoming ve’y tired of leaving the field to my sister-in-law, and my schoolgirl daughters.”
“Does anybody ever look at us after you come into a room?” asked Ailsa, laughing; and, turning impulsively, she pressed Celia’s pretty hands flat together and kissed them. “You darling,” she said. An unaccountable sense of expectancy — almost of exhilaration was taking possession of her. She looked into the mirror and stood content with what she saw reflected there.
“How much of a relation is he, Celia?” balancing the rosy bow with a little cluster of pink hyacinth on the other side.
Celia Craig, forefinger crooked across her lips, considered aloud.
“His mother was bo’n Constance Berkley; her mother was bo’n Betty Ormond; her mother was bo’n Felicity Paige; her mother — —”
“Oh please! I don’t care to know any more!” protested Ailsa, drawing her sister-in-law before the mirror; and, standing behind her, rested her soft, round chin on her shoulder, regarding the two reflected faces.
“That,” observed the pretty Southern matron, “is conside’d ve’y bad luck. When I was a young girl I once peeped into the glass over my ole mammy’s shoulder, and she said I’d sho’ly be punished befo’ the year was done.”
“And were you?”
“I don’t exactly remember,” said Mrs. Craig demurely, “but I think
I first met my husband the ve’y next day.”
They both laughed softly, looking at each other in the mirror.
So, in her gown of rosy muslin, bouffant and billowy, a pink flower in her hair, and Celia’s pink-and-white cameo at her whiter throat Ailsa Paige descended the carpeted stairs and came into the mellow dimness of the front parlour, where there was much rosewood, and a French carpet, and glinting prisms on the chandeliers, — and a young man, standing, dark against a bar of sunshine in which golden motes swam.
“How do you do,” she said, offering her narrow hand, and: “Mrs. Craig is dressing to receive you. . . . It is warm for April, I think. How amiable of you to come all the way over from New York. Mr. Craig and his son Stephen are at business, my cousins, Paige and Marye, are at school. Won’t you sit down?”
She had backed away a little distance from him, looking at him under brows bent slightly inward, and thinking that she had made no mistake in her memory of this man. Certainly his features were altogether too regular, his head and body too perfectly moulded into that dark and graceful symmetry which she had hitherto vaguely associated with things purely and mythologically Olympian.
Upright against the doorway, she suddenly recollected with a blush that she was staring like a schoolgirl, and sat down. And he drew up a chair before her and seated himself; and then under the billowy rose crinoline she set her pretty feet close together, folded her hands, and looked at him with a smiling composure which she no longer really felt.
“The weather,” she repeated, “is unusually warm. Do you think that Major Anderson will hold out at Sumter? Do you think the fleet is going to relieve him? Dear me,” she sighed, “where will it all end, Mr. Berkley?”
“In war,” he said, also smiling; but neither of them believed it, or, at the moment, cared. There were other matters impending — since their first encounter.
“I have thought about you a good deal since Camilla’s theatre party,” he said pleasantly.
“Have you?” She scarcely knew what else to say — and regretted saying anything.
“Indeed I have. I dare not believe you have wasted as much as one thought on the man you danced with once — and refused ever after.”
She felt, suddenly, a sense of uneasiness in being near him.
“Of course I have remembered you, Mr. Berkley,” she said with composure. “Few men dance as well. It has been an agreeable memory to me.”
“But you would not dance with me again.”
“I — there were — you seemed perfectly contented to sit out — the rest — with me.”
He considered the carpet attentively. Then loo
king up with quick, engaging smile:
“I want to ask you something. May I?”
She did not answer. As it had been from the first time she had ever seen him, so it was now with her; a confused sense of the necessity for caution in dealing with a man who had inspired in her such an unaccountable inclination to listen to what he chose to say.
“What is it you wish to ask?” she inquired pleasantly.
“It is this: are you really surprised that I came? Are you, in your heart?”
“Did I appear to be very much agitated? Or my heart, either, Mr. Berkley?” she asked with a careless laugh, conscious now of her quickening pulses. Outwardly calm, inwardly Irresolute, she faced him with a quiet smile of confidence.
“Then you were not surprised that I came?” he insisted.
“You did not wait to be asked. That surprised me a little.”
“I did wait. But you didn’t ask me.”
“That seems to have made no difference to you,” she retorted, laughing.
“It made this difference. I seized upon the only excuse I had and came to pay my respects as a kinsman. Do you know that I am a relation?”
“That is a very pretty compliment to us all, I think.”
“It is you who are kind in accepting me.”
“As a relative, I am very glad to — —”
“I came,” he said, “to see you. And you know it.”
“But you couldn’t do that, uninvited! I had not asked you.”
“But — it’s done,” he said.
She sat very still, considering him. Within her, subtle currents seemed to be contending once more, disturbing her equanimity. She said, sweetly:
“I am not as offended as I ought to be. But I do not see why you should disregard convention with me.”
“I didn’t mean it that way,” he said, leaning forward. “I couldn’t stand not seeing you. That was all. Convention is a pitiful thing — sometimes—” He hesitated, then fell to studying the carpet.
She looked at him, silent in her uncertainty. His expression was grave, almost absent-minded. And again her troubled eyes rested on the disturbing symmetry of feature and figure in all the unconscious grace of repose; and in his immobility there seemed something even of nobility about him which she had not before noticed.
Works of Robert W Chambers Page 481