Kesiah, still grasping her small black bag, went into the dining-room and returned, bearing a beaten egg, which she handed to her sister.
In her walk there was the rigid austerity of a saint who has adopted saintliness not from inclination, but from the force of a necessity against which rebellion has been in vain. Her plain, prominent features wore, from habit, a look of sullen martyrdom that belied her natural kindness of heart; and even her false brown front was arranged in little hard, flat curls, as though an artificial ugliness were less reprehensible in her sight than an artificial beauty.
In the midst of the long room flooded with sunshine, the little lady reclined on her couch and sipped gently from the gla.s.s Kesiah had handed her. The tapestried furniture was all in soft rose, a little faded from age, and above the high white wainscoting on the plastered walls, this same delicate colour was reflected in the rich brocaded gowns in the family portraits. In the air there was the faint sweet scent of cedar logs that burned on the old andirons.
"So you came all the way home to see your poor useless mother,"
murmured Mrs. Gay, shielding her cheek from the firelight with a peac.o.c.k hand-screen.
"I wanted to see for myself how you stand it down here--and, by Jove, it"s worse even than I imagined! How the deuce have you managed to drag out twenty years in a wilderness like this among a tribe of barbarians?"
"It is a great comfort to me, dear, to think that I came here on your uncle"s account and that I am only following his wishes in making the place my home. He loved the perfect quiet and restfulness of it."
"Quiet! With that population of roosters making the dawn hideous! I"d choose the quiet of Piccadilly before that of a barnyard."
"You aren"t used to country noises yet, and I suppose at first they are trying."
"Do you drive? Do you walk? How do you amuse yourself?"
"One doesn"t have amus.e.m.e.nt when one is a hopeless invalid; one has only medicines. No, the roads are too heavy for driving except for a month or two in the summer. I can"t walk of course, because of my heart, and as there has been no man on the place for ten years, I do not feel that it is safe for Kesiah to go off the lawn by herself. Once she got into quite a dreadful state about her liver and lack of exercise--(poor dear mother used to say that the difference between the liver of a lady and that of another person, was that one required no exercise and the other did)--but Kesiah, who is the best creature in the world, is very eccentric in some ways, and she imagines that her health suffers when she is kept in the house for several years. Once she got into a temper and walked a mile or two on the road, but when she returned I was in such a state of nervousness that she promised me never to leave the lawn again unless a gentleman was with her."
"What an angel you must be to have suffered so much and complained so little!" he exclaimed with fervour, kissing her hand.
Her eyes, which reminded him of dying violets, drooped over him above the peac.o.c.k feathers she waved gently before her.
"Poor Kesiah, it is hard on her, too," she observed, "and I sometimes think she is unjust enough to blame me in her heart."
"But she doesn"t feel things as you do, one can tell that to look at her."
"She isn"t so sensitive and silly, you dear boy, but my poor nerves are responsible for that, you must remember. If Kesiah had been a man she would have been an artist, and it was really a pity that she happened to be born a woman. When she was young she had a perfect mania for drawing, and it used to distress mother so much. A famous portrait painter--I can"t recall his name though I am sure it began with S--saw one of her sketches by accident and insisted that we ought to send her to Paris to study. Kesiah was wild to go at the time, but of course it was out of the question that a Virginia lady should go off by herself and paint perfectly nude people in a foreign city. There was a dreadful scene, I remember, and Kesiah even wrote to Uncle William Burwell and asked him to come down and win mother over. He came immediately, for he was the kindest soul, but, of course after he understood, he decided against it. Why on earth should a girl want to go streaking across the water to study art, he asked, when she had a home she could stay in and men folk who could look after her? They both told her she made herself ridiculous when she talked of ambition, and as they wouldn"t promise her a penny to live on, she was obliged in the end to give up the idea. She nursed mother very faithfully, I must say, as long as she lived, never leaving her a minute night or day for the last year of her illness. Don"t misjudge poor Kesiah, Jonathan, she has a good heart at bottom, though she has always been a little soured on account of her disappointment."
"Oh, she was cut out for an old maid, one can see that," rejoined Gay, only half interested in the history of his aunt, for he seldom exerted his imagination except under pressure of his desires, "and, by the way, mother, what kind of man was my Uncle Jonathan?"
"The dearest creature, my son, heaven alone knows what his loss meant to me! Such consideration! Such generosity! Such delicacy! He and Kesiah never got on well, and this was the greatest distress to me."
"Did you ever hear any queer stories about him? Was he--well--ah, wild, would you say?"
"Wild? Jonathan, I am surprised at you! Why, during the twenty years that I knew him he never let fall so much as a single indelicate word in my presence."
"I don"t mean that exactly--but what about his relations with the women around here?"
She flinched as if his words had struck her a blow.
"Dear Jonathan, your poor uncle would never have asked such a question."
Above the mantel there was an oil portrait of the elder Jonathan at the age of three, painted astride the back of an animal that disported the shape of a lion under the outward covering of a lamb.
"Ah, that"s just it," commented Gay, while his inquiring look hung on the picture. After a minute of uncertainty, his curiosity triumphed over his discretion and he put, in an apologetic tone, an equally indelicate question. "What about old Reuben Merryweather"s granddaughter? Has she been provided for?"
For an instant Mrs. Gay looked at him with shining, reproachful eyes under a loosened curl of fair hair which was threaded with sliver. Those eyes, very blue, very innocent, seemed saying to him, "Oh, be careful, I am so sensitive. Remember that I am a poor frail creature, and do not hurt me. Let me remain still in my charmed circle where I have always lived, and where no unpleasant reality has ever entered." The quaint peac.o.c.k screen, brought from China by old Jonathan, cast a shadow on her cheek, which was flushed to the colour of a faded rose leaf.
"Yes, the girl is an orphan, it is very sad," she replied, and her tone added, "but what can I do about it? I am a woman and should know nothing of such matters!"
"Was she mentioned in my uncles"s will, do you remember?"
His handsome, well-coloured face had taken a sudden firmness of outline, and even the sagging flesh of his chin appeared to harden with the resolve of the moment. Across his forehead, under the fine dark hair which had worn thin on the temples, three frowning wrinkles leaped out as if in response to some inward pressure.
"There was something--I can"t remember just what it was--Mr.
Chamberlayne will tell you about it when he comes down to-morrow to talk over business with Kesiah. They keep all such things away from me out of consideration for my heart. But I"ve never doubted for an instant that your uncle did everything that was just and generous in the matter. He sent the girl to a good school in Applegate, I remember, and there was a bequest of some sort, I believe--something that she comes into on her twenty-first birthday."
"She isn"t twenty-one then, is she?"
"I don"t know, Jonathan, I really can"t remember."
"Perhaps Aunt Kesiah can tell me something about her?"
"Oh, she can and she will--but Kesiah is so violent in all her opinions!
I had to ask her never to mention Brother Jonathan"s name to me because she made me quite ill once by some dreadful hints she let fall about him."
She leaned back wearily as if the conversation had exhausted her, while the peac.o.c.k firescreen slipped from her hand and dropped on the white fur rug at her feet.
"If you"ll call Kesiah, Jonathan, I"ll go upstairs for a rest," she said gently, yet with a veiled reproach. "The journey tired me, but I forgot it in the pleasure of seeing you."
All contrition at once, he hastily summoned Kesiah from the storeroom, and between them, with several solicitous maids in attendance, they carried the fragile little lady up to her chamber, where a fire of resinous pine was burning in the big colonial fireplace.
An hour afterwards, when Kesiah had seen her sister peacefully dozing, she went, for the first time since her return, into her own bedroom, and stood looking down on the hearth, where the servants had forgotten to light the sticks that were laid cross-wise on the andirons. It was the habit of those about her to forget her existence, except when she was needed to render service, and after more than fifty years of such omissions, she had ceased, even in her thought, to pa.s.s judgment upon them. In her youth she had rebelled fiercely--rebelled against nature, against the universe, against the fundamental injustice that divided her sister"s lot from her own. Generations existed only to win love or to bestow it. Inheritance, training, temperament, all combined to develop the racial instinct within her, yet something stronger than these--some external shaping of clay--had unfitted her for the purpose for which she was designed. And since, in the eyes of her generation, any self-expression from a woman, which was not a.s.sociated with s.e.x, was an affront to convention, that single gift of hers was doomed to wither away in the hot-house air that surrounded her. A man would have struck for freedom, and have made a career for himself in the open world, but her nature was rooted deep in the rich and heavy soil from which she had tried to detach it. Years after her first fight, on the day of her mother"s death, she had suffered a brief revival of youth; and then she had pulled in vain at the obstinate tendrils that held her to the spot in which she had grown. She was no longer penniless, she was no longer needed, but she was crushed. The power of revolt was the gift of youth. Middle-age could put forth only a feeble and ineffectual resistance--words without pa.s.sion, acts without abandonment. At times she still felt the old burning sense of injustice, the old resentment against life, but this pa.s.sed quickly now, and she grew quiet as soon as her eyes fell on the flat, spare figure, a little bent in the chest, which her mirror revealed to her. The period was full of woman"s advancement--a peaceful revolution had triumphed around her--yet she had taken no part in it, and the knowledge left her unmoved. She had read countless novels that acclaimed hysterically the wrongs of her s.e.x, but beneath the hysterics she had perceived the fact that the newer woman who grasped successfully the right to live, was as her elder sister who had pet.i.tioned merely for the privilege to love. The modern heroine could still charm even after she had ceased to desire to. Neither in the new fiction nor in the old was there a place for the unhappy woman who desired to charm but could not; she remained what she had always been--a tragic perversion of nature which romance and realism conspired to ignore. Women in novels had revolted against life as pa.s.sionately as she--but one and all they had revolted in graceful att.i.tudes and with abundant braids of hair. A false front not only extinguished sentiment--it put an end to rebellion.
"Miss Kesiah, dar"s Ma.r.s.e Reuben in de hall en he sez he"d be moughty glad ef"n you"d step down en speak a wud wid "im."
"In a moment, Abednego. I must take off my things."
Withdrawing the short jet-headed pins from her bonnet with a hurried movement, she stabbed them into the hard round pincushion on her bureau, and after throwing a knitted cape over her shoulders, went down the wide staircase to where Reuben awaited her in the hall. As she walked she groped slightly and peered ahead of her with her nervous, short-sighted gaze.
At the foot of the staircase, the old man was standing in a patient att.i.tude, resting upon his wooden leg, which was slightly in advance of his sound one. His fine bearded face might have been the face of a scholar, except for its roughened skin and the wistful, dog-like look in the eyes.
In response to Kesiah"s greeting, he explained that he had come at once to acknowledge the gift of the overcoat and to "pay his respects."
"I am glad you like it," she answered, and because her heart was swelling with kindness, she stammered and grew confused while the anxious frown deepened between her eyebrows. A morbid horror of making herself ridiculous prevented her always from making herself understood.
"It will be very useful to me, ma"am, when I am out of doors in bad weather," he replied, wondering if he had offended her by his visit.
"We got it for that purpose," and becoming more embarra.s.sed, she added hastily, "How is the red cow, Mr. Merryweather?"
"She mends slowly, ma"am. I am givin" her bran mash twice a day and keepin" her in the barn. Have you noticed the hogs? They"re a fine lot this year and we"ll get some good hams at the killin"."
"No, I hadn"t looked at them, but I"ve been struck with the corn you"ve brought up recently from the low grounds."
For a minute or two they discussed the crops, both painfully ill at ease and uncertain whether to keep up the conversation or to let it trail off into silence. Then at the first laboured pause, Reuben repeated his message to Mrs. Gay and stamped slowly out of the back door into the arms of Jonathan, who was about to enter.
"Halloo! So it"s you!" exclaimed the young man in the genial tone which seemed at once to dispel Kesiah"s embarra.s.sment. "I"ve wanted to talk with you for two days, but I shan"t detain you now for I happen to know that your granddaughter is hunting for you already. I"ll come up to-morrow and chat awhile in the barn."