"The arbour is just back of the big magnolia as you come in, on the left."
Phyl gave a little laugh. Then with half-closed eyes she kissed the letter, laid it softly on the floor beside the first and went on to the next.
"Not to-night. I have to go to the Calhouns. It is just as well, for I have a dread of people suspecting if we meet too often. No one sees us meet. No one knows, and yet I fear them finding out just by instinct.
Father said to me the other day, "What makes you seem so happy these times?" If Mary had been alive she would have found out long ago, for I never could keep anything hid from her. I was nearly saying to him, "If you want to know why I am so happy go and ask the magnolia tree by the gate."
"Sometimes I feel as if I were deceiving him and everybody. I am, and I don"t care--I don"t care if they knew. O my darling! My darling! My darling! If the whole world were against you I would love you all the more. I will love you all my life and I will love you when I am dead."
Phyl"s eyes grew half blind with tears.
This cry from the Past went to her heart like a knife. The wind, strengthening for a moment, moved the window curtains, bringing with it the drowsy afternoon sounds of Charleston, sounds that seemed to mock at this voice declaring the deathlessness of its love. It was impossible to go on reading. Impossible to expose any more this heart that had ceased to beat.
The meetings in the arbour behind the magnolia tree, the kisses, the words that the leaves and birds alone could hear--they had all ended in death.
It did not matter now if the garden gate creaked on its hinges, or if watching eyes from the piazza saw the glossy leaves stirring when no wind could shake them--nothing mattered at all to these people now.
She put all the letters back in the bureau, carefully closing them in the secret drawer.
CHAPTER VII
"Miss Pinckney," said Phyl that night as they sat at supper, "when you left me this afternoon in Juliet"s room I stopped to look at the books and things and when I opened the bureau I touched a spring by accident and a little panel fell out and I found a lot of old letters behind it. It was wrong of me to go meddling about and I thought I ought to tell you."
"Old letters," said Miss Pinckney, "you don"t say--what were they about?"
"I read one or two," said the girl. "I"d never, never have dreamed of touching them only--only they were hers--they were to him."
"Rupert?"
"Yes."
"Love letters?"
"Yes."
Miss Pinckney sighed.
"He kept all her letters," said she, "and they came back to her after he was killed. He was killed here in Charleston, at Fort Sumter, in the war; they brought him across here and carried him on a stretcher and she--well, well, it"s all done with and let it rest, but it is strange that those letters should have fallen into your hands."
"Why, strange?"
"Why?" burst out Miss Pinckney. "Why I have dusted that old bureau inside and out a hundred times, and pulled out the drawers and pushed them in and it never shewed sign of having anything in it but emptiness, and you don"t do more"n look at it and you find those letters. It"s just as if the thing had deceived me. I don"t mind, and I don"t want to see them, they weren"t intended for other eyes than his and hers--and maybe yours since they were shewn you like that."
"Was it wrong of me to look at them?" asked Phyl. "I never would have done it only--only--Oh, I don"t know, I somehow felt she wouldn"t mind. She seemed like a sister--I would never dream of looking at another person"s letters but she did not seem like another person. I can"t explain. It was just as though the letters were my own--just exactly as though they were my own when I found them in my hands."
Phyl was talking with her eyes fixed before her as though she were looking across some great distance.
Miss Pinckney gave a little shiver, then supper being over she rose from the table and led the way from the room.
Richard Pinckney had dined with them but he was out for supper somewhere or another. They went to the drawing-room and had not been there for more than a few minutes when Frances Rhett was announced.
The Rhetts were on intimate enough terms with the Pinckneys to call in like this without ceremony; Frances had called to speak to Miss Pinckney about some charity affair she was getting up in a hurry, but she had not been five minutes in the room before Phyl knew that she had called to look at her. To look at the girl who had come to live with the Pinckneys, the red headed girl. Phyl did not know that girls of Frances" type dread red haired girls, if they are pretty, as rabbits dread stoats, but she did know in some uncanny way that Frances Rhett considered Richard Pinckney as her own property to be protected against all comers.
All at once and new born, the woman awoke in her instinctive, mistrustful and armed.
Frances Rhett, despite Miss Pinckney"s dispraise of her, was a most formidable person as far as the opposite s.e.x was concerned. One of the women of whom other women say, "Well, I don"t know what he sees in her, I"m sure."
A brunette of eighteen who looked twenty, full-blooded, full lipped, full curved, sleepy-eyed, she seemed dressed by nature for the part of the world and the flesh--with a hint of the devil in those deep, dark, pansy blue eyes that seemed now by artificial light almost black.
"Well, I"ll subscribe ten dollars," said Miss Pinckney; "I reckon the darkie babies won"t be any the worse for a _creche_ and maybe not very much better for it. If you could get up an inst.i.tution to distil good manners and respect for their betters into their heads I"d give you forty.
I"m sure I don"t know what the coloured folk of Charleston are coming to, one of them nearly pushed me off the sidewalk the other day, bag of impudence! and the way they look at one in the street with that sleery leery what-d"-you-call-yourself-you-white-trash grin on their faces s"nough to raise Cain in any one"s heart."
"I know," replied the dark girl, "and they are getting worse; the whip is the only thing that as far as I can see ever made them possible, and what we have now is the result of your beautiful Abolitionists."
"Don"t call them my beautiful Abolitionists," replied the other. "I didn"t make "em. All the same I don"t believe in whipping and never did. It"s the whip that whipped us in the war. If white folk had treated black folk like Christians slavery would have been the greatest G.o.d-send to blacks. It was what stays are to women. But they didn"t. The low down white made slavery impossible with his whipping and oppression and _we_ had to suffer. Well, we haven"t ended our sufferings and if these folk go on multiplying like rabbits there"s no knowing what we"ve got to suffer yet."
Miss Rhett concurred and took her departure. "Now, that girl," said the elder lady when Frances Rhett was gone, "is just the type of the people I was telling her about. No idea but whipping. _She_ wouldn"t have much mercy on a human creature black or tan _or_ white. Thick skinned. She didn"t even see that I was telling her so to her face. Wonder what brought her here this hour with her _creche_. It"s just a fad. If they got up a charity to make alligator bait of the black babies so"s to sell the alligator skins to buy pants with texts on them for the Hottentots it"d be all the same to her. Something to gad about with. I wish I"d kept that ten dollars in my pocket."
Miss Pinckney went to bed early that night--before ten--and Phyl, who was free to do as she chose, sat for a while in the lower piazza watching the moon rising above the trees. She had a little plan in her mind, a plan that had only occurred to her just before the departure of Miss Pinckney for bed.
She sat now watching the garden growing ghostly bright, the sun dial becoming a moon dial, the carnations touched by that stillness and mystery which is held only in the light of the moon and the light of the dawn.
Phyl found herself sitting between two worlds. In the light of the northern moon in summer there is a vague rose tinge to be caught at times and in places when it falls full on house wall or the road on which one is walking. The piazza to-night had this living and warm touch. It seemed lit by a glorified ethereal day. A day that had never grown up and would never lose the charm of dawn.
Yet the garden to which she would now turn her eyes shewed nothing of this. Night reigned there from the cherokee roses moving in the wind to the carnations motionless, moon stricken, deathly white.
Sure that Miss Pinckney would not come down again, Phyl rose and crossed the garden towards the gate.
She wanted to see if the trysting place behind the magnolia and the bushes that grew about it were still there.
At the gate she paused for a moment, glancing back at the house as Juliet Mascarene might have done on those evenings when she had an appointment with her lover. Then, pushing through the bushes and past the magnolia trees she found herself in a little half moonlit s.p.a.ce, a natural arbour through whose roof of leaves the moonlight came in quavering shafts. She stood for a moment absolutely still whilst her eyes accustomed themselves to the light. Then she began to search for the seat she guessed to be there, and found it. It was between an oak bole and the wall of the garden, and the bushes behind had grown so that their branches half covered it. Neglected, forsaken, unknown, perhaps, to the people now living in Vernons it had lingered with the fidelity of inanimate things, protected by the foliage of the southern garden from prying eyes.
She pushed back the leaves and branches and bent them out of the way, then she took her seat, and as she did so several of the bent branches released themselves and closed half round her in a delightful embrace.
From here she could see brokenly the garden and the walk leading from the gate, with the light of the moon now strong upon the walk. The night sounds of the street just beyond the wall came mixed with the stir of foliage as the wind from the sea pressed over the trees like the hand of a mesmerist inducing sleep.
So it was here that Juliet Mascarene had sat with Rupert Pinckney on those summer nights when the world was younger, before the war. The war that had changed everything whilst leaving the roses untouched and the moonlight the same on the bird-haunted garden of Vernons.
Everything was the same here in this little s.p.a.ce of flowers and trees.
But the lovers had vanished.
"For man walketh in a vain shadow and disquieteth himself in vain." The words strayed across Phyl"s mind brought up by recollection. "He cometh up and is cut down like a flower, he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay."
The trees seemed whispering it, the eternal statement that leaves the eternal question unanswered.