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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Ghost Girl, by H. De Vere Stacpoole
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Ghost Girl
+
+Author: H. De Vere Stacpoole
+
+Release Date: October 21, 2008 [EBook #26986]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GHOST GIRL ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE GHOST GIRL
+
+
+
+
+BY THE SAME AUTHOR
+
+Sea Plunder         $1.30 net
+The Gold Trail      $1.30 net
+The Pearl Fishers   $1.30 net
+The Presentation    $1.30 net
+The New Optimism    $1.00 net
+Poppyland           $2.00 net
+
+The Poems of Francois Villon
+Translated by
+H. DE VERE STACPOOLE
+
+Boards              $3.00 net
+Half Morocco        $7.50 net
+
+
+
+
+THE GHOST GIRL
+
+BY
+H. DE VERE STACPOOLE
+
+AUTHOR OF
+"THE MAN WHO LOST HIMSELF," "SEA PLUNDER,"
+"THE PEARL FISHERS," "THE GOLD TRAIL," ETC.
+
+NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY
+LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD
+TORONTO: S. B GUNDY--MCMXVIII
+
+
+
+
+Copyright, 1918
+By JOHN LANE COMPANY
+
+PRESS OF
+VAIL-BALLOU COMPANY
+BINGHAMTON, N. Y.
+U. S. A.
+
+
+
+
+THE GHOST GIRL
+
+PART I
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+It was a warm, grey, moist evening, typical Irish weather, and Miss
+Berknowles was curled up in a window-seat of the library reading a book.
+Kilgobbin Park lay outside with the rooks cawing in the trees, miles of
+park land across which the dusk was coming, blotting out all things from
+Arranakilty to the Slieve Bloom Mountains.
+
+The turf fire burning on the great hearth threw out a rich steady glow
+that touched the black oak panelling of the room, the book backs, and the
+long-nosed face of Sir Nicholas Berknowles "attributed to Lely" and
+looking down at his last descendant from a dusty canvas on the opposite
+wall.
+
+The girl made a prettier picture. Red hair when it is of the right colour
+is lovely, and Phylice Berknowles' hair was of the right red, worn in a
+tail--she was only fifteen--so long that she could bite the end with ease
+and comfort when she was in a meditative mood, a habit of perdition that
+no schoolmistress could break her of.
+
+She was biting her tail now as she read, up to her eyes in the marvellous
+story of the Gold Bug, and now, unable to read any more by the light from
+the window, she came to the fire, curled herself on the hearthrug and
+continued the adventures of the treasure-seekers by the light of the
+burning turf.
+
+What a pretty face it was, seen by the full warm glow of the turf, and
+what a perfectly shaped head! It was not the face and head of a Berknowles
+as you could easily have perceived had you compared it with the portraits
+in the picture gallery, but of a Mascarene.
+
+Phyl's mother had been a Mascarene, a member of the old, adventurous
+family that settled in Virginia when Virginia was a wilderness and spread
+its branches through the Carolinas when the Planter was king of the South.
+Red hair had run among the Mascarenes, red hair and a wild spirit that
+brooked no contradiction and knew no fear. Phyl had inherited something of
+this restless and daring spirit. She had run away from the Rottingdean
+Academy for the Daughters of the Nobility and Gentry where she had been
+sent at the age of twelve; making her way back to Ireland like a homing
+pigeon, she had turned up one morning at breakfast time, quite unshaken by
+her experiences of travel and with the announcement that she did not like
+school.
+
+Had her mother been alive the traveller would have been promptly returned,
+but Phyl's father, good, easy man, was too much taken up with agrarian
+disputes, hunting, and the affairs of country life to bother much about
+the small affair of his daughter's future and education. He accepted her
+rejection of his plans, wrote a letter of apology to the Rottingdean
+Academy, and hired a governess for her. She wore out three in eighteen
+months, declared herself dissatisfied with governesses and competent to
+finish the process of educating and polishing herself.
+
+This she did with the aid of all the books in the library, old Dunn, the
+rat-catcher of Arranakilty, a man profoundly versed in the habits of
+rodents and birds, Larry the groom, and sundry others of low estate but
+high intelligence in matters of sport and woodcraft.
+
+Now it might be imagined from the foregoing that hardihood,
+self-assertion, and other unpleasant characteristics would be indicated in
+the manner and personality of this lover of freedom and rebel against
+restraint. Not at all. She was a most lovable and clinging person, when
+she could get hold of anything worth clinging to, with a mellifluous Irish
+voice at once soothing and distracting, a voice with pockets in it but not
+a trace of a brogue or only the very faintest suspicion. Yet when she
+spoke she had the Irish turn of words and she used the word "sure" in a
+manner strange to the English.
+
+She had reached the point in the "Gold Bug" where Jupp is threatening to
+beat Legrand, when, laying the book down beside her on the hearthrug, she
+sat with her hands clasping her knees and her eyes fixed on the fire.
+
+The tale had suddenly lost interest. She was thinking of her dead father,
+the big, hearty man who had gone to America only eight weeks ago and who
+would never return. He had gone on a visit to some of his wife's people,
+fallen ill, and died.
+
+Phyl could not understand it at all. She had cried her heart out amongst
+the ruins of her little world, but she could not understand why it had
+been ruined, or what her father had done to be killed like that, or what
+she had done to deserve such misery. The Reverend Peter Graham of
+Arranakilty could explain nothing about the matter to her understanding.
+She nearly died and then miraculously recovered. Acute grief often ends
+like that, suddenly. The mourner may be maimed for life but the sharpness
+of the pain of that dreadful, dreadful disease is gone.
+
+Phyl found herself one morning discussing rats with old Dunn, asking him
+how many he had caught in the barn and taking a vague sort of interest in
+what the old fellow was saying; books began to appeal to her again and the
+old life to run anew in a crippled sort of way. Then other things
+happened. Mr. Hennessey, the family lawyer, who had been a crony of her
+father's and who had known her from infancy, came down to Kilgobbin to
+arrange matters.
+
+It seemed that Mr. Berknowles before dying had made a will and that the
+will was being brought over from the States by Mr. Pinckney, his wife's
+cousin in whose house he had died.
+
+"I'm sure I don't know what the chap wants coming over with it for," said
+Mr. Hennessey. "He said it was by your father's request he was coming, but
+it's a long journey for a man to take at this season of the year--and I
+hope the will is all right."
+
+There was an implied distrust in his tone and an antagonism to Mr.
+Pinckney that was not without its effect on Phyl.
+
+She disliked Mr. Pinckney. She had never seen him but she disliked him all
+the same, and she feared him. She felt instinctively that this man was
+coming to make some alteration in her way of life. She did not want any
+change, she wanted to go on living just as she was with Mrs. Driscoll the
+housekeeper to look after her and all the old servants to befriend her and
+Mr. Hennessey to pay the bills.
+
+Mr. Hennessey was in the house now. He had come down that morning from
+Dublin to receive Mr. Pinckney, who was due to arrive that night.
+
+Phyl, sitting on the hearthrug, was in the act of picking up her book when
+the door opened and in came Mr. Hennessey.
+
+He had been out in the grounds overlooking things and he came to the fire
+to warm his hands, telling Phyl to sit easy and not disturb herself. Then,
+as he held a big foot to the warmth he talked down at the girl, telling
+her of what he had been about and the ruination Rafferty was letting the
+greenhouses go to.
+
+"Half-a-dozen panes of glass out--and 'I've no putty,' says he. 'Putty,'
+said I to him, 'and what's that head of yours made of?' The stoves are all
+out of order and there's a hole in one of the flues I could get my thumb
+in."
+
+"Rafferty's awfully good to the dogs," said Phyl in her mellow voice, so
+well adapted for intercession. "He may be a bit careless, but he never
+does forget to feed the animals. He's got the chickens to look after, too,
+and then there's the beagles, he knows every dog in the pack and every dog
+knows him--oh, dear, what's the good of it all!"
+
+The thought of the beagles had brought up the vision of their master who
+would never hunt with them again. Her voice became tinged with melancholy
+and Hennessey changed the subject, taking his seat in one of the armchairs
+that stood on either side of the fireplace.
+
+He was a big, loosely-made man, an easy going man with a kind heart who
+would have come to financial disaster long ago only for his partner,
+Niven.
+
+"He's almost due to be here by now," said he, taking out his watch and
+looking at it, "unless the express from Dublin is late."
+
+"What'll he be like, do you think?" said Phyl.
+
+"There's no saying," replied Mr. Hennessey. "He's an American and I've
+never had much dealings with Americans except by letter. By all accounts
+they are sharp business men, but I daresay he is all right. The thing that
+gets me is his coming over. Americans don't go thousands of miles for
+nothing, but if it's after any hanky-panky business about the property,
+maybe he'll find Jack Hennessey as sharp as any American."
+
+"He's some sort of a relation of ours," said Phyl. "Father said he was a
+sort of cousin."
+
+"On your mother's side," said Hennessey.
+
+"Yes," said Phyl. Then, after a moment's pause, "D'you know I've often
+thought of all those people over there and wondered what they were like
+and how they lived--my mother's people. Father used to talk of them
+sometimes. He said they kept slaves."
+
+"That was in the old days," said Hennessey. "The slaves are all gone long
+ago. They used to have sugar plantations and suchlike, but the war stopped
+all that."
+
+"It's funny," said Phyl, "to think that my people kept slaves--my mother's
+people--Oh, if one could only see back, see all the people that have gone
+before one so long ago-- Don't you ever feel like that?"
+
+Mr. Hennessey never had; his forebears had been liquor dealers in Athlone
+and he was content to let them lie without a too close inquisition into
+the romances of their lives.
+
+"Mr. Hennessey," said Phyl, after a moment's silence, "suppose Father has
+left Mr. Pinckney all his money--what will become of me?"
+
+"The Lord only knows," said Hennessey; "but what's been putting such
+fancies in your head?"
+
+"I don't know," replied the girl. "I was just thinking. Of course he
+wouldn't do such a thing--It's your talking of the will the last time you
+were here set me on, I suppose, but I dreamed last night Mr. Pinckney came
+and he was an American with a beard like Uncle Sam in _Punch_ last week,
+and he said Father had made a will and left him everything--he'd left him
+me as well as everything else, and the dogs and all the servants and
+Kilgobbin--then I woke up."
+
+"Well, you were dreaming nonsense," said the practical Hennessey. "A man
+can't leave his daughter away from him, though I'm half thinking there's
+many a man would be willing enough if he could."
+
+Phyl raised her head. Her quick ear had caught a sound from the avenue.
+Then the crash of wheels on gravel came from outside and her companion,
+rising hurriedly from his chair, went to the window.
+
+"That's him," said the easy-speaking Hennessey.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+He left the room and Phyl, rising from the hearthrug, stood with her hand
+on the mantelpiece listening.
+
+Hennessey had left the door open and she could hear a confused noise from
+the hall, the sound of luggage being brought in, the bustle of servants
+and a murmur of voices.
+
+Then a voice that made her start.
+
+"Thanks, I can carry it myself."
+
+It was the newcomer's voice, he was being conducted to his room by
+Hennessey. It was a cheerful, youthful voice, not in the least suggestive
+of Uncle Sam with the goatee beard as depicted by the unimaginative artist
+of _Punch_. And it was a voice she had heard before, so she fancied, but
+where, she could not possibly tell--nor did she bother to think,
+dismissing the idea as a fancy.
+
+She stood listening, but heard nothing more, only the wind that had risen
+and was shaking the ivy outside the windows.
+
+Byrne, the old manservant, came in and lit the lamps and then after a few
+minutes Hennessey entered. He looked cheerful.
+
+"He seems all right and he'll be down in a minute," said the lawyer; "not
+a bit of harm in him, though I haven't had time to tackle him over money
+affairs."
+
+"How old is he?" asked the girl.
+
+"Old! Why, he's only a boy, but he's got all a man's ways with him--he's
+American, they're like that. I've heard say the American children order
+their own mothers and fathers about and drive their own motor-cars and
+gamble on the Stock Exchange." He pulled out his watch and looked at it;
+it pointed to ten minutes past seven; then he lit a cigar and sat smoking
+and smoking without a word whilst Phyl sat thinking and staring at the
+fire. They were seated like this when the door opened and Byrne shewed in
+Mr. Pinckney.
+
+Hennessey had called him a boy. He was not that. He was twenty-two years
+of age, yet he looked only twenty and you would not have been particularly
+surprised if you had been told that he was only nineteen. Good-looking,
+well-groomed and well-dressed, he made a pleasant picture, and as he came
+across the room to greet Phyl he explained without speaking what Mr.
+Hennessey meant about "all the manners of a man."
+
+Pinckney's manner was the manner of a man of the world of thirty,
+easy-going, assured, and decided.
+
+He shook hands with Phyl as Hennessey introduced them, and then stood with
+his back to the fireplace talking, as she took her seat in the armchair on
+the right, whilst the lawyer remained standing, hands in pockets and foot
+on the left corner of the fender.
+
+The newcomer did most of the talking. By a downward glance every now and
+then he included Phyl in the conversation, but he addressed most of his
+remarks to Mr. Hennessey.
+
+"And you came over by the Holyhead route?" said the lawyer.
+
+"I did," replied Pinckney.
+
+"And what did you think of Kingstown?"
+
+"Well, upon my word, I saw less of it than of a gentleman with long hair
+and a bundle of newspapers under his arm who received me like a mother
+just as I landed, hypnotised me into buying half-a-dozen newspapers and
+started me off for Dublin with his blessing."
+
+"That was Davy Stevens," said Phyl, speaking for the first time.
+
+Pinckney's entrance had produced upon her the same effect as his voice.
+
+You know the feeling that some places produce on the mind when first
+seen--
+
+                  "I have been here before
+                  But when or how I cannot tell
+                  I know the lights along the shore--"
+
+It seemed to her that she had known Pinckney and had met him in some
+place, but when or how she could not possibly remember. The feeling had
+almost worn off now. It had thrilled her, but the thrill had vanished and
+the concrete personality of the man was dominating her mind--and not very
+pleasantly.
+
+There was nothing in his manner or his words to give offence; he was quite
+pleasant and nice but--but--well, it was almost as though she had met some
+one whom she had known and liked and who had changed.
+
+The little jump of the heart that his voice caused in her had been
+followed by a chill. His manner displeased her vaguely. He seemed so
+assured, so every day, so cold.
+
+It seemed to her that not only did he hold his entertainers at a critical
+distance, but that he was somehow wanting in respectfulness to
+herself--Lunatic ideas, for the young man could not possibly have been
+more cordial towards two utter strangers and as for respectfulness, one
+does not treat a girl in a pigtail exactly as one treats a full-grown
+woman.
+
+"Oh, Davy Stevens, was it?" said Pinckney, glancing down at Phyl. "Well, I
+never knew the meaning of peaceful persuasion till he had sold out his
+stock on me. Now in the States that man would likely have been President
+by this--Things grow quicker over there."
+
+"And what did you think of Dublin?" asked Hennessey.
+
+"Well," said the young man, "the two things that struck me most about
+Dublin were the dirt and the want of taxicabs."
+
+A dead silence followed this remark.
+
+Never tell an Irishman that Dublin is dirty.
+
+Hennessey was dumb, and as for Phyl, she knew now that she hated this
+man.
+
+"Of course," went on the other, "it's a fine old city and I'm not sure
+that I would alter it or even brush it up. I should think it's pretty much
+the same to-day as when Lever wrote of it. It's a survival of the past,
+like Nuremberg. All the same, one doesn't want to live in a survival of
+the past--does one?"
+
+"I've lived there a good many years," said Hennessey; "and I've managed to
+survive it. It's not Chicago, of course; it's just Dublin, and it doesn't
+pretend to be anything else."
+
+"Just so," said Pinckney. He felt that he had put his foot in it;
+recalling his own lightly spoken words he felt shocked at his want of
+tact, and he was casting about for something to say about the sacred city
+of a friendly nature but not too fulsome, when Byrne opened the door and
+announced that dinner was served.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+Phyl led the way and they crossed the hall to the dining-room, a room
+oak-panelled like the library and warm with the light of fire and
+candles.
+
+Once upon a time there had been high doings in this sombre room, hunt
+breakfasts and dinners, rousing songs, laughter, and the toasting of
+pretty women--now dust and ashes.
+
+Here highly coloured gentlemen had slept the sleep of the just, under the
+table, whilst the ladies waited in vain for them in the drawing-room, here
+Colonel Berknowles had drunk a glass of mulled wine on that black morning
+over a hundred-and-thirty years ago when he went out with Councillor
+Kinsella and shot him through the lungs by the Round House on the
+Arranakilty Road. The diminutive Tom Moore had sung his songs here "put
+standing on the table" by the other guests, and the great Dan had held
+forth and the wind had dashed the ivy against the windows just as it did
+to-night with fist-fulls of rain from the Slieve Bloom Mountains. Byrne
+had put the big silver candlesticks on the table in honour of the guest,
+and he now appeared bearing in front of him a huge dish with a cover a
+size too small for it.
+
+He placed the dish before Mr. Hennessey and removed the cover, disclosing
+a cod's "head and shoulders" whilst a female servant appeared with a dish
+of potatoes boiled in their jackets and a tureen of oyster sauce.
+
+Now a cod's head and shoulders served up like this in the good old Irish
+way is, honestly, a ghastly sight. The thing has a countenance and an
+expression most forbidding and all its own.
+
+The appearance of the old dish cover, clapped on by the cook in a hurry in
+default of the proper one, had given Phyl a turn and now she was wondering
+what Mr. Pinckney was thinking of the fish and the manner of its serving.
+
+All at once and as if stimulated into life by the presence of the new
+guest, all sorts of qualms awoke in her mind. The dining arrangements of
+the better class Irish are, and always have been, rather primitive,
+haphazard, and lacking in small refinements. Phyl was conscious of the
+fact that Byrne had placed several terrible old knives on the table,
+knives that properly belonged to the kitchen, and when the second course,
+consisting of a boiled chicken, faced by a piece of bacon reposing on a
+mat of boiled cabbage, appeared, the fact that one of the dishes was
+cracked confronted her with the equally obvious fact that the cook in her
+large-hearted way had sent up the chicken with the black legs unremoved.
+
+It seemed to Phyl's vision--now thoroughly distorted--that the eyes of the
+stranger were everywhere, cool, critical, and amused; so obsessed was her
+mind with this idea that it could take no hold upon the conversation.
+Pinckney was talking of the States; he might just as well have been
+talking about Timbuctoo for all the impression he made on her with her
+unfortunate head filled with cracked dishes, chickens' black legs, Byrne's
+awkwardness and the suddenly remembered crumb-brush.
+
+It was twenty years old and it had lost half of its bristles in the
+service of the Berknowles who had clung to it with a warm-hearted tenacity
+purely Irish.
+
+"Sure, that old brush is a disgrace to the table," was the comment Phyl's
+father had made on it once, just as though he were casually referring to
+some form of the Inevitable such as the state of the weather.
+
+The disgrace had not been removed and it was coming to the table, now, in
+the hand of Byrne. Phyl watched the crumbs being swept up, she watched the
+cloth being taken off and the wine and dessert placed in the good old
+fashion, on the polished mahogany, then leaving the gentlemen to their
+wine, she retired upstairs and to her bedroom.
+
+She felt angry with Byrne, with the cook, with Mr. Hennessey and with
+herself. Plenty of people had been to dinner at Kilgobbin, yet she had
+never felt ashamed of the _menage_ till now. This stranger from over the
+water, notwithstanding her dislike for him, had the power to disturb her
+mind as few other people had disturbed it in the course of her short life.
+Other people had put her into worse tempers, other people had made her
+dislike them, but no one else had ever roused her into this feeling of
+unrest, this criticism of her belongings, this irritation against
+everything including herself.
+
+Her bedroom was a big room with two windows looking upon the park; it was
+almost in black darkness, but the windows shewed in dim, grey oblongs and
+she made her way to one of them, took her place in the window-seat and
+pressed her forehead against the glass. The rain had ceased and the clouds
+had risen, but the moon was not yet high enough to pierce them. Phyl could
+just make out the black masses of the distant woods and the movement of
+the near fir-trees shaking their tops like hearse plumes to the wind.
+
+The park always fascinated her when it was like that, almost blotted out
+by night. These shapes in the dark were akin to shapes in the fire in
+their power over the fancy of the gazer. Phyl as she watched them was
+thinking: not one word had this stranger said about her dead father.
+
+Mr. Berknowles had died in his house and this man had buried him in
+Charleston; he had come over here to Ireland on the business of the will
+and he had come into the dead man's house as unconcernedly as though it
+were an hotel, and he had laughed and talked about all sorts of things
+with never a word of Him.
+
+If Phyl had thought over the matter, she might have seen that, perhaps,
+this silence of Pinckney's was the silence of delicacy, not of
+indifference, but she was not in the humour to hold things up to the light
+of reason. She had decided to dislike this man and when the Mascarenes
+came to a decision of this sort they were hard to be shaken from it.
+
+She had decided to dislike him long before she saw him.
+
+What Phyl really wanted now was perhaps a commonsense female relative to
+stiffen her mind against fancies and give her a clear-sighted view of the
+world, but she had none. Philip Berknowles was the last of his race, the
+few distant connections he had in Ireland lived away in the south and were
+separated from him by the grand barrier that divides Ireland into two
+opposing camps--Religion. Berknowles was a Protestant, the others
+Papists.
+
+Phyl, as she sat watching saw, now, the line of the woods strengthen
+against the sky; the moon was breaking through the clouds and its light
+increasing minute by minute shewed the parkland clearly defined, the
+leafless oaks standing here and there, oaks that of a summer afternoon
+stood in ponds of shadow, the clumps of hazel, and away to the west the
+great dip, a little valley haunted by a fern-hidden river, a glen
+mysterious and secretive, holding in its heart the Druids' altar.
+
+The Druids' altar was the pride of Kilgobbin Park; it consisted of a vast
+slab of stone supported on four other stones, no man knew its origin, but
+popular imagination had hung it about with all sorts of gruesome fancies.
+Victims had been slaughtered there in the old days, a vein of ironstone in
+the great slab had become the bloodstain of men sacrificed by the Druids;
+the glen was avoided by day and there were very few of the country people
+round about who would have entered it by night. Phyl, who had no fear of
+anything, loved the place; she had known it from childhood and had been
+accustomed to take her worries and bothers there and bury them.
+
+It was a friend, places can become friends and, sometimes, most terrific
+enemies.
+
+The girl listening, now, heard voices below stairs. Hennessey and his
+companion were evidently leaving the dining-room and crossing the hall to
+the library. Going out on the landing she caught a glimpse of them as they
+stood for a moment looking at the trophies in the hall, then they went
+into the library, the door was closed, and Phyl came downstairs.
+
+In the hall she slipped on a pair of goloshes over her thin shoes, put on
+a cloak and hat and came out of the front door, closing it carefully
+behind her.
+
+To put it in her own words, she couldn't stand the house any longer. Not
+till this very evening did she feel the great change that her father's
+death had brought in her life, not till now did she fully know that her
+past was dead as well as her father, and not till she had left the house
+did the feeling come to her that Pinckney was to prove its undertaker.
+
+There was something alike cold and fateful in the impression that this man
+had made upon her, an extraordinary impression, for it would be impossible
+to imagine anything further removed from the ideas of Coldness and Fate
+than the idea of the cheerful and practical Pinckney. However, there it
+was, her heart was chilled with the thought of him and the instinctive
+knowledge that he was going to make a great alteration in her life.
+
+She crossed the gravelled drive to the grass sward beyond. The night had
+altered marvellously; nearly every vestige of cloud had vanished, blown
+away by the wind. The wind and the moon had the night between them and the
+air was balmy as the air of summer.
+
+Phyl turned and looked back at the house with all its windows glittering
+in the moonlight, then she struck across the grass now almost dried by the
+wind.
+
+Phyl had something of the night bird in her composition. She had often
+been out long before dawn to pick up night lines in the river and she knew
+the woods by dark as well as by day. She was out now for nothing but a
+breath of fresh air, she did not intend to stay more than ten minutes, and
+she was on the point of returning to the house when a cry from the woods
+made her pause.
+
+One might have fancied that some human being was crying out in agony, but
+Phyl knew that it was a fox, a fox caught in a trap. She was confirmed in
+her knowledge by the barking of its mates; they would be gathered round
+the trapped one lending all the help they could--with their voices.
+
+The girl did not pause to think; forgetting that she had no weapon with
+which to put the poor beast out of its misery, and no means of freeing it
+without being bitten, she started off at a run in the direction of the
+sound, entering the woods by a path that led through a grove of hazel;
+leaving this path she struck westward swift as an Indian along the road of
+the call.
+
+Her mother's people had been used to the wilds, and Phyl had more than a
+few drops of tracker blood in her veins; better than that, she had a trace
+of the wood instinct that leads a man about the forest and makes him able
+to strike a true line to the west or east or north or south without a
+compass.
+
+The trees were set rather sparsely here and the moonlight shewed vistas of
+withered fern. The wind had fallen, and in the vast silence of the night
+this place seemed unreal as a dream. The fox had evidently succeeded in
+liberating itself from the trap, for its cries had ceased, cut off all of
+a sudden as though by a closing door.
+
+Phyl paused to listen and look around her. Through all the night from
+here, from there, came thin traces of sound, threads fretting the silence.
+The trotting of a horse a mile away on the Arranakilty road, the bark of a
+dog from near the Round House, the shaky bleat of a sheep from the fold at
+Ross' farm came distinct yet diminished almost to vanishing point. It was
+like listening to the country sounds of Lilliput. With these came the
+vaguest whisper of flowing water, broken now and again by a little shudder
+of wind in the leafless branches of the trees.
+
+"He's out," said Phyl to herself. She was thinking of the fox. She knew
+that the trap must be somewhere about and she guessed who had set it.
+Rafferty, without a doubt, for only the other day he had been complaining
+of the foxes having raided the chickens, but there was no use in hunting
+for the thing by this light and without any indication of its exact
+whereabouts, so she struck on, determined to return to the house by the
+more open ground leading through the Druids' glen.
+
+She had been here before in the very early morning before sunrise on her
+way to the river, Rafferty following her with the fish creel, but she had
+never seen the place like this with the moonlight on it and she paused for
+a moment to rest and think, taking her seat on a piece of rock by the
+cromlech.
+
+Phyl, despite her American strain, was very Irish in one particular:
+though cheerful and healthy and without a trace of morbidness in her
+composition, she, still, was given to fits of melancholy--not depression,
+melancholy. It is in the air of Ireland, the moist warm air that feeds the
+shamrock and fills the glens with soft-throated echoes and it is in the
+soul of the people.
+
+Phyl, seated in this favourite spot of hers, where she had played as a
+child on many a warm summer's afternoon, gave herself over to the
+moonlight and the spirit of Recollection.
+
+She had forgotten Pinckney, and the strange disturbance that he had
+occasioned in her mind had sunk to rest; she was thinking of her father,
+of all the pleasant days that were no more--she remembered her dolls, the
+wax ones with staring eyes, dummies and effigies compared with that
+mysterious, soulful, sinful, frightful, old rag doll with the inked face,
+true friend in affliction and companion in joy, and even more, a Ju-ju to
+be propitiated. That thing had stirred in her a sort of religious
+sentiment, had caused in her a thrill of worship real, though faint, far
+more real than the worship of God that had been cultivated in her mind by
+her teachers. The old Druid stone had affected her child's mind in
+somewhat the same way, but with a difference. The Ju-ju was a familiar,
+she had even beaten and punched it when in a temper; the stone had always
+filled her with respect.
+
+There are some people the doors of whose minds are absolutely closed on
+the past; we call them material and practical people; there are others in
+which the doors of division are a wee crack open, or even ajar, so that
+their lives are more or less haunted by whisperings from that strange land
+we call yesterday.
+
+In some of the Burmese and Japanese children the doors stand wide open so
+that they can see themselves as they were before they passed through the
+change called death, but the Westerners are denied this. In Phyl's mind as
+a child one might suppose that through the doors ajar some recollections
+of forgotten gods once worshipped had stolen, and that the power of the
+Ju-ju and the Druids' stone lay in their power of focussing those vague
+and wandering threads of remembrance.
+
+To-night this power seemed regained, for she passed from the contemplation
+of concrete images into a vague and pleasant state, an absolute idleness
+of the intellect akin to that which people call daydreaming.
+
+With her cloak wrapped round her she sat, elbows on knees and her chin in
+the palms of her hands giving herself up to Nothing before starting to
+resume her way to the house.
+
+Sitting like this she suddenly started and turned. Some one had called
+her:
+
+"Phylice!"
+
+For a moment she fancied that it was a real voice, and then she knew that
+it was only a voice in her head, one of those sounds we hear when we are
+half asleep, one of those hails from dreamland that come now as the
+ringing of a bell that never has rung, or the call of a person who has
+never spoken.
+
+She rose up and resumed her way, striking along the glen to the open park,
+yet still the memory of that call pursued her.
+
+"Phylice!"
+
+It seemed Mr. Pinckney's voice, it _was_ his voice, she was sure of that
+now, and she amused herself by wondering why his voice had suddenly popped
+up in her head. She had been thinking about him more than about any one
+else that evening and that easily accounted for the matter. Fancy had
+mimicked him--yet why did Fancy use her name and clothe it in Pinckney's
+voice?--and it was distinctly a call, the call of a person who wishes to
+draw another person's attention.
+
+Pinckney had never called her by her name and she felt almost irritated at
+the impertinence of the phantom voice in doing so.
+
+This same irritation made her laugh when she realised it. Then the idea
+that Byrne might lock the hall door before she could get back drove every
+other thought away and she began to run, her shadow running before her
+over the moonlit grass.
+
+Half way across the sward, which was divided from the grass land proper by
+a Ha-ha, she heard the stable clock striking eleven.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+When Phyl withdrew from the dining-room, Hennessey filled his glass with
+port, Pinckney, who took no wine, lit a cigarette and the two men drew
+miles closer to one another in conversation.
+
+They were both relieved by the withdrawal of the girl, Hennessey because
+he wanted to talk business, Pinckney because her presence had affected him
+like a wet blanket.
+
+His first impression of Phyl had been delightful, then, little by little,
+her stiffness and seeming lifelessness had communicated themselves to him.
+It seemed to him that he had never met a duller or more awkward
+schoolgirl. His mind was of that quick order which requires to be caught
+in the uptake rapidly in order to shine. Slowness, coldness, dulness or
+hesitancy in others depressed him just as dull weather depressed him. He
+did not at all know with what a burning interest his arrival had been
+awaited, or the effect that his voice had produced and his first
+appearance. He did not know how the dull schoolgirl had weighed him in a
+mysterious balance which she herself did not quite comprehend and had
+found him slightly wanting. Neither could he tell the extent of the
+paralyses produced in that same mind of hers by the cracked china, the old
+dish cover, Byrne's awkwardness, and the deboshed crumb-brush.
+
+He should have kept to his first impression of her, for first impressions
+are nearly always right; he should have sought for the reason of so much
+charm proving charmless, so much positive attraction proving so negative
+in effect. But he did not. He just took her as he found her and was glad
+she was gone.
+
+"And I believe," said Hennessey, "the South is different now. It used to
+be all cotton before the war."
+
+"Oh, no," said Pinckney. "Before the war there was a lot of cotton grown
+but we used to grow other things as well, we used to feed ourselves, the
+plantation was economically independent. The war broke us. We had to get
+money, so we grew cotton as cotton was never grown before; the South
+became a great sheet of cotton. You see, cotton is the only crop you can
+mortgage, so we grew cotton and mortgaged it. Of course the old-time
+planter is gone, everything is done now by companies, and that's the devil
+of it--"
+
+Pinckney was silent for a moment and sat staring before him as though he
+were looking at the Past.
+
+"Companies, you see, don't grow sunflowers to look at, don't grow trees to
+shade them, don't make love in a wild and extravagant manner and shoot
+other companies for crossing them in their affections--don't play the
+guitar, in short.
+
+"Companies don't breed trotting horses and wear panama hats and put
+flowers in their buttonholes. The old Planter used to do these things and
+a lot of others. He was a bit of a patriarch in his way, too--well, he's
+gone and more's the pity. He's like an old house pulled down. No one can
+ever build it again as it was. The South's a big industrial region now.
+Not only cotton--ore and coal and machinery. We supply the North and East
+with pig-iron, machinery, God knows what. Berknowles was very keen on
+Southern industries, regularly bitten. He was talking of selling off here
+and coming to settle in Charleston when the illness took him-- and that
+reminds me."
+
+He took a document from his pocket. "This is the will. I've kept it on my
+person since I started for here. It's not the thing to trust to a handbag.
+It's in correct form, I believe. Temperley, our solicitor, made it out for
+him and it leaves everything to the girl when she's twenty--but just read
+it and see what you think."
+
+He lit another cigarette whilst Hennessey, putting on his glasses and
+pushing his dessert plate away, spread the will on the table.
+
+Pinckney watched him as he read it. Hennessey was a new order of being to
+him. This easy-going, slipshod, garrulous gentleman, fond of his glass of
+wine, contrasted strangely with the typical lawyer of the States. Flushed
+and not in his business mood, the man of law cast his eyes over the
+document before him, reading bits of it here and there and seeming not
+inclined to bother himself by a concentration of his full energies on the
+matter.
+
+Then, suddenly, his eyes became fixed on a paragraph which he re-read as
+though puzzled by the meaning of it. Then he looked up at the other over
+his glasses.
+
+"Why, what's this?" said he. "He has made _you_ Phyl's guardian. _You!_"
+
+Pinckney laughed.
+
+"Yes, that was the chief thing that brought me over. He has made me her
+guardian, till she's twenty, and he made me promise to look after her
+interests and see to all business arrangements. He said he had no near
+relations in Ireland, and he said that he'd sooner trust the devil than
+the few relatives he had, that they were Papists--that is to say Roman
+Catholics--he seemed to fear them like the deuce and their influence on
+the girl. I couldn't understand him. I've never seen any harm in Roman
+Catholics; there are loads in the States and they seem to be just as good
+citizens as the others, better, for they seem to stick tighter by their
+religion. Anyhow, there you are. Berknowles had them on the brain and
+nothing would do him but I must come over to look after the business
+myself."
+
+Hennessey, with his finger on the will, had been staring at Pinckney
+during this. He looked down now at the document and then up again.
+
+"But you--her guardian--why, it's absurd," said he. "You aren't old enough
+to be a guardian, why, Lord bless my soul, what'll people be doing next? A
+young chap like you to be the guardian of a girl like Phyl--why, it's not
+proper."
+
+"Not only am I to be her guardian," said Pinckney with a twinkle in his
+eyes, "but she's to come and live under my roof at Charleston. I promised
+Berknowles that--He was dying, you see, and one can refuse nothing to a
+dying man."
+
+Hennessey rose up in an abstracted sort of way, went to the sideboard,
+poured himself out a whisky and soda, took a sip, and sat down again.
+
+"Extraordinary, isn't it?" said Pinckney, tapping the ash off his
+cigarette. "All the same, you need not be worried at the impropriety of
+the business; there's none, nothing improper could live in the same house
+with my aunt, Maria Pinckney. Vernons belongs to her though I live
+there."
+
+"Vernons," put in the other. "What's that?"
+
+"It's the name of our house in Charleston. It's mine, really, but my
+father left it to Maria to live in; it comes to me at her death. I don't
+want that house at all. I want her to keep it forever, but it's such a
+pleasant old place, I like to live there instead of buying a house of my
+own. Vernons isn't exactly a house, it's more like a family
+tree--hollow--with all the ancestors inside instead of hanging on the
+branches."
+
+"But why on earth didn't Berknowles make your aunt guardian to the girl?"
+asked Hennessey. "There'd have been some sense in that--a middle-aged
+woman--"
+
+"I beg your pardon," said Pinckney, "my aunt is not a middle-aged woman,
+she's not fifteen."
+
+"Not what?" said Hennessey.
+
+"Not fifteen--in years of discretion, though she's over seventy as time
+goes. She has no knowledge at all of what money is or what money
+means--she flings it away, doesn't spend it--just flings it away on
+anything and everything but herself. I don't believe there's a charity in
+the States that hasn't squeezed her, or a beggar-man in the South that
+hasn't banked on her. She was sent into the world to grow flowers and look
+after stray dogs and be robbed by hoboes; she has been nearly seventy
+years at it and she doesn't know she has ever been robbed. She's not a
+fool by any manner of means, and she rules the servants at Vernons in the
+good old patriarchal way, but she's lost where money is concerned. That's
+why Berknowles wanted me to look after the girl's interests. As for
+anything else, I guess Maria Pinckney will be the real guardian."
+
+"Well, I don't know," said Hennessey. He was confused by all these new
+ideas shot into his mind suddenly like this after dinner, he could see
+that Pinckney was genuine enough, all the same it irritated him to think
+that Philip Berknowles should have chosen a youth like this to be second
+father to Phyl. What was the matter with himself, Hennessey? Hadn't he a
+fine house in Merrion Square and a wife who would have treated the girl
+like a daughter?
+
+"Well, I don't know," said he. "It's not for me to dispute the wishes of a
+client, but I've known Phyl since she was born and I've known her father
+since we were together at Trinity College and I'd have taken it more
+handsome if he'd left the looking after of her to me."
+
+"I wonder he didn't," said Pinckney. "He spoke of you a good deal to me,
+spoke of you as his best friend; all the same he seemed set on the idea of
+us taking care of the girl. He fell in love with Charleston and he
+cottoned to us; then, of course, there were the family reasons. Phyl's
+mother was a Mascarene; my mother was her mother's first cousin. Vernons
+belonged to the Mascarenes, my mother brought it to my father as part of
+her wedding portion. The Pinckneys' old house was lost to us in the smash
+up after the war. So, you see, Phyl ought to be as much at home at Vernons
+as I am. Funny, isn't it, how things get mixed up and old family houses
+change hands?"
+
+"And when do you want to take her away?" asked Hennessey.
+
+"Upon my word, I've never thought of that," replied the other. "I want to
+see things settled up here and to go over the accounts with you.
+Berknowles said the house had better be let--I should think it would be
+easy to find a good tenant--then I want to go to London on business and
+get back as quick as possible. She need not come back with me, it would
+scarcely give her time to get things ready. There's a Mrs. Van Dusen, a
+friend of ours who lives in New York, she's coming over in a month or so
+and Phyl might come with her as far as New York. It's all plain sailing
+after that."
+
+"Well," said Hennessey, folding up the will and putting it in his pocket.
+"I suppose it's all for the best, but it's hard lines for a man to lose
+his best friend and see a good old estate like Kilgobbin taken off to the
+States--Oh, you needn't tell me, if Phyl goes out there she's done for as
+far as Ireland is concerned. Sure, they never come back, the people that
+go there, and if she does come back it'll be with an American husband and
+he master of Kilgobbin. I know what America is, it never lets go of the
+man or woman it catches hold of."
+
+"You're not far wrong there," said Pinckney. "You see, life is set to a
+faster pace in America than over here and once you learn to step that pace
+you feel coming back here as if you were living in a country where people
+are hobbled. At least that's my experience. Then the air is different.
+There's somehow a feeling of morning in America that goes through the
+whole day--almost--here, afternoon begins somewhere about eleven."
+
+Hennessey yawned, and the two men, rising from the table, left the room
+and crossed the hall to the library.
+
+Here, after a while, Hennessey bade the other good night and departed for
+bed, whilst Pinckney, leaning back in his armchair, fell into a lazy and
+contemplative mood, his eyes wandering from point to point.
+
+All this business was very new to him. Pinckney had inherited his father's
+brains as well as his money. He had discovered that a large fortune
+requires just as much care and attention as a large garden and that a man
+can extract just as much interest and amusement and the physical health
+that comes from both, out of money-tending as out of flower and vegetable
+growing. Knowing all about cotton and nearly everything about wheat, he
+managed occasionally to do a bit of speculative dealing without the least
+danger of burning his fingers. Self-reliant and self-assured, knowing his
+road and all its turnings, he had moved through life up to this with the
+ease of a well-oiled and almost frictionless mechanism.
+
+But here was a new thing of which he had never dreamed. Here was another
+destiny suddenly thrust into his charge and another person's property to
+be conserved and dealt with. Never, never, did he dream when acceding to
+Berknowles' request, of the troubles, little difficulties and causes of
+indecision that were preparing to meet him.
+
+Up till now, one side of his character had been almost unknown to him. He
+had been quite unaware that he possessed a conscience most painfully
+sensitive with regard to the interests of others, a conscience that would
+prick him and poison his peace were he to leave even little things undone
+in the fulfilment of the trust he had undertaken so lightheartedly.
+
+Possessing a keen eye for men he began to recognise now why Berknowles had
+not chosen the easy-going Hennessey to look after Phyl and her affairs,
+and he guessed, just by the little bit he had seen of Kilgobbin and the
+servants, the slipshoddedness and waste going on behind the scenes in the
+absence of a master and mistress.
+
+Pinckney loathed waste as he loathed inefficiency and as he loathed dirt.
+They were all three brothers with Drink in his eyes and as he leaned back
+in the chair now, his gaze travelling about the room, he could not but
+perceive little things that would have brought exclamations from the soul
+of a careful housekeeper. The furniture had been upholstered, or rather
+re-upholstered in leather some five years ago. There is nothing that cries
+out so much against neglect as leather, and the chairs and couch in the
+library of Kilgobbin, without exactly crying out, still told their tale.
+Some of the buttons were gone, and some of them hung actually by the
+thread in the last stage of departure. There was a tiny triangular rent in
+the leather of the armchair wherein Phyl had been sitting and another
+armchair wanted a castor. The huge Persian rug that covered the centre of
+the floor shewed marks left by cigar and cigarette ash, and under a
+Jacobean book-case in the corner were stuffed all sorts of odds and ends,
+old paper-backed novels, a pair of old shoes, a tennis racquet and a
+boxing glove--besides other things.
+
+Pinckney rose up, went to the book-case and placed his fingers on top of
+it, then he looked at his fingers and the bar of dust upon them, brushed
+his hand clean and came back to his chair by the fire. He heard the stable
+clock striking eleven. The sound of the wind that had been raging outside
+all during dinner time had died away and the sounds of the house made
+themselves manifest, the hundred stealthy accountable and unaccountable
+little sounds that night evolves from an old house set in the stillness of
+the country. Just as the night jasmine gives up its perfume to the night,
+so does an old house its past in the form of murmurs and crackings and
+memories and suggestions. Notwithstanding Dunn's attentions there were
+rats alive in the cellars and under the boarding--and mice; the passages
+leading to the kitchen premises made a whispering gallery where murderers
+seemed consulting together if the scullery window were forgotten and left
+open--as it usually was, and boards in the uneven flooring that had been
+preparing for the act for weeks and months would suddenly "go off with a
+bang," a noise startling in the dead of night as the crack of a pistol,
+and produced, heaven knows how, but never by daylight.
+
+Even Pinckney, who did not believe in ghosts, became aware as he sat now
+by the fire that the old house was feeling for him to make him creep,
+feeling for him with its old disjointed fingers and all the artfulness of
+inanimate things.
+
+He was aware that Sir Nicholas Berknowles was looking down at him with the
+terrible patient gaze of a portrait, and he returned the gaze, trying to
+imagine what manner of man this might have been and how he had lived and
+what he had done in those old days that were once real sunlit days filled
+with people with real voices, hearts, and minds.
+
+A gentle creak as though a light step had pressed upon the flooring of the
+hall brought his mind back to reality and he was rising from his chair to
+retire for the night when a sound from outside the window made him sit
+down again. It was the sound of a step on the gravel path, a step stealthy
+and light, a real sound and no contraption of the imagination.
+
+The idea of burglars sprang up in his mind, but was dismissed; that was no
+burglar's footstep--and yet! He listened. The sound had ceased and now
+came a faint rubbing as of a hand feeling for the window followed by the
+sharp rapping of a knuckle on the glass.
+
+"Hullo," cried Pinckney, jumping to his feet and approaching the shuttered
+window. "Who's there?"
+
+"It's me," said a voice. "I'm locked out. Byrne's bolted the front door.
+Go to the hall door, will you, please, and let me in?"
+
+"Phyl," said Pinckney to himself. "Good heavens!" Then to the other, "I'm
+coming."
+
+Byrne had left a lamp lighted in the hall and the guest's candlestick
+waiting for him on the table. The lamp was sufficient to show him the
+executive side of the big front door that had been nearly battered in in
+the time of the Fenians and still possessed the ponderous locks and bars
+of a past day when the tenants of Kilgobbin had fought the pikemen of
+Arranakilty and Rupert Berknowles had hung seventeen rebels, no less, on
+the branches of the big oak "be the gates."
+
+Pinckney undid bolt and bar, turned the key in the great lock and flung
+the door open, disclosing Phyl standing in the moonlight. The contrast
+between the forbidding and ponderous door and the charming little figure
+against which it had stood as a barrier might have struck him had his mind
+been less astonished. As it was he could think of nothing but the
+strangeness of the business in hand.
+
+"Where on earth have you been?" said he.
+
+"Out in the woods," said Phyl, entering quite unconcerned and removing her
+cloak. "A fox got trapped in the woods and I went to let it out and
+couldn't find it, then that old fool Byrne locked the door; lucky you were
+up. I saw the light in the library shining through a crack in the shutters
+and knocked."
+
+Pinckney was putting up the bar and sliding the bolts. He said nothing.
+Had Phyl been another girl, he might have laughed and joked over the
+matter, but care of Phyl's well-being was now part of his business in life
+and that consideration just checked his speech. There was nothing at all
+wrong in the affair, and never for a moment did he dream of making the
+slightest remonstrance; still, the unwisdom of a young girl wandering
+about in the woods at night after trapped foxes was a patent fact which
+disturbed the mind of this guardian unto dumbness.
+
+Phyl, who was as sensitive to impressions as a radiometer to light, noted
+the silence of the other and resented it as she hung up her old hat and
+cloak. She knew nothing of the true facts of the case, she looked on
+Pinckney as a being almost of her own age, and that he should dare to
+express disapproval of an act of hers not concerning him, even by silence,
+was an intolerable insult. She knew that she loathed him now.--Prig!
+
+This was the first real meeting of these two and Fate, with the help of
+Irish temper and the Pinckney conscience, was making a fine fiasco of it.
+
+Phyl, having hung up the hat and coat, turned without a word, marched into
+the library and finding the book she had been reading that day, put it
+under her arm.
+
+"Good night," said she as she passed him in the hall.
+
+"Good night," he replied.
+
+He watched her disappearing up the stairs, stood for a moment irresolute,
+and then went into the library. He knew he had offended her and he knew
+exactly how he had offended her. There are silences that can be more
+hurting than speech--yet what could he have said? He rummaged in his mind
+to find something he might have said and could find nothing more
+appropriate than a remark about the weather and the fineness of the night.
+Yet a bald and decrepit remark like that would have been as bad almost as
+silence, for it would have ignored the main point at issue--the
+night-wandering of his ward.
+
+He sat down again for a moment in the armchair by the fireplace and began
+to wrestle with the position in which he found himself. This was a small
+business, but if Phyl in the future was to do things that he did not
+approve of it would be his plain duty to remonstrate with her. An odious
+position for youth to be placed in. How she would loathe and hate him!
+
+Pinckney, though a man of the world in many ways and a good business man,
+was still at heart a boy just as young as Phyl; even in years he was very
+little older than she, and the boy side of his mind was in full revolt at
+the job set before him by fate.
+
+Then he came to a resolution.
+
+"She can do jolly well what she pleases," said he to himself, "without my
+interference. Aunt Maria can attend to that. My business will be to look
+after her property and keep sharks off it. _I'm_ not going to set up in
+business to tell a girl what she ought or oughtn't to do--that's a woman's
+job."
+
+Satisfied with this seeming solution of the difficulty he went to bed.
+
+Meanwhile, Phyl, having marched off with the book under her arm found,
+when she reached her room, that she had forgotten a matchbox, and, too
+proud to return to the hall for one, went to bed in the dark.
+
+She lay awake for an hour, her mind obsessed by thoughts of this man who
+had suddenly stepped into her life, and who possessed such a strange power
+to disturb her being and fill it with feelings of unrest, irritation and,
+strangely enough, a vague attraction.
+
+The attraction one might fancy the iron to feel for the distant magnet, or
+the floating stick for the far-off whirlpool.
+
+Then she fell asleep and dreamed that they were at dinner and Mr.
+Hennessey was waiting at table. Her father was there and, before the dream
+converted itself into something equally fatuous she heard Pinckney's
+voice, also in the dream; he seemed looking for her in the hall and he was
+calling to her, "Phyl--Phyl!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+Next morning came with a burst of sunshine and a windy, cloudless sky.
+Pinckney, dressing with his window open, could see the park with the rooks
+wheeling and cawing over the trees, whilst the warm wind brought into the
+room all sorts of winter scents on the very breath of summer.
+
+This rainy land where the snow rarely comes has all sorts of surprises of
+climate and character. Nothing is truly logical in Ireland, not even
+winter. That is what makes the place so delightful to some minds and so
+perplexing to others.
+
+Hennessey was staying for a day or two to go over accounts and explain the
+working of the estate to Pinckney.
+
+He was in the hall when the latter came down, and gave him good morning.
+
+"Where's your mistress?" said Hennessey to old Byrne, as they took their
+seats at the breakfast table.
+
+"Faith, she's been out since six," said Byrne. "She came down threatenin'
+to skin Rafferty alive for layin' fox thraps in the woods, then she had a
+bite of bread and butter and a cup of tea Norah made for her, and off she
+went with Rafferty to hunt out the thraps and take them up. It's little
+she cares for breakfast."
+
+"I was the same way myself when I was her age," said Hennessey to
+Pinckney. "Up at four in the morning and out fishing in Dublin Bay--it's
+well to be young."
+
+"Look here," said the young man, as Byrne left the room, "she was out till
+eleven last night in the woods; she knocked me up as I was sitting in the
+library and I let her in. _I_ don't see anything wrong in the business,
+but all the same, it's not a particularly safe proceeding and I suppose a
+mother or father would have jawed her--I couldn't. I suppose I showed by
+my manner that I didn't approve of her being out so late, for she seemed
+in a huff as she went up to bed. My position is a bit difficult, but I'm
+hanged if I'm going to do the heavy father or careful mother business. If
+she was only a boy, I could talk to her like a Dutch uncle, but I don't
+know anything about girls. I wish--"
+
+Pinckney's wish remained forever unexpressed, for at the moment the door
+opened and in came Phyl.
+
+Her face was glowing with the morning air and she seemed to have forgotten
+the business of the night before as she greeted Pinckney and the lawyer
+and took her place at the table.
+
+"Phyl," said the lawyer, half jocularly, "here's Mr. Pinckney been
+complaining that you were wandering about all night in the woods, knocking
+him up to let you in at two o'clock in the morning."
+
+Phyl, who was helping herself to bacon, looked up at Pinckney.
+
+"Oh, you cad," said her eyes. Then she spoke:
+
+"I came in at eleven. If I had known, I would have called up Byrne or one
+of the servants to let me in."
+
+Pinckney could have slain Hennessey.
+
+"Good gracious," he said. "_I_ wasn't complaining. I only just mentioned
+the fact."
+
+"The fact that I was out till two," said Phyl, with another upward glance
+of scorn.
+
+"I never said any such thing. I said eleven."
+
+"It was my loose way of speaking; but, sure, what's the good of getting
+out of temper?" put in Hennessey. "Mr. Pinckney wasn't meaning anything,
+but you see, Phyl, it's just this way, your father has made him your
+guardian."
+
+"My _what!_" cried the girl.
+
+"_Oh_, Lord!" said Pinckney, in despair at the blundering way of the
+other. Then finding himself again and the saving vein of humour, without
+which man is just a leaden figure:
+
+"Yes, that's it. I'm your guardian. You must on no account go out without
+my permission, or cough or sneeze without a written permit--Oh, Phyl,
+don't be thinking nonsense of that sort. I _am_ your guardian, it seems,
+and by your father's special request, but you are absolutely free to do as
+you like."
+
+"A nice sort of guardian," put in Hennessey with a grin.
+
+"I am only, really, guardian of your money and your interests," went on
+the other, "and your welfare. When you came in last night late, I was a
+bit taken aback and I thought--as a matter of fact, I thought it might be
+dangerous being out alone in this wild part of the country so late at
+night, but I did not want to interfere; you can understand, can't you?
+What I want you to get out of your mind is, that I am that odious thing, a
+meddling person. I'm not."
+
+Phyl was very white. She had risen from the table and was at the window.
+
+Here was her dream come true of the bearded American who had suddenly
+appeared to claim her and Kilgobbin and the servants and everything.
+
+Pinckney had not a beard, but he was an American and he had come to claim
+everything. The word guardian carried such a force and weight and was so
+filled with fantastic possibilities to the mind of Phyl, that she scarcely
+heard his soft words and excuses.
+
+Phyl had the Irish trick of running away with ideas and embroidering the
+most palpable truths with fancies. It was an inheritance from her father,
+and she stood by the window now unable to speak, with the word "Guardian"
+ringing in her ears and the idea pressing on her mind like an incubus.
+
+Hennessey had risen up. He was the first to break silence.
+
+"There's no use in meeting troubles half way," said he vaguely. "You and
+Phyl will get along all right when you know each other better. Come out,
+the two of you, and we'll go round the grounds and you will be able to see
+for yourself the state of the house and what repairs are wanting."
+
+"One moment," said Pinckney. "I want to tell Phyl something--I'm going to
+call you Phyl because I'm your guardian--d'you mind?"
+
+"No," said Phyl, "you can call me anything you like, I suppose."
+
+"I'm not going to call you anything I like--just Phyl-- Well, then, I want
+to tell you what we have to do. It's not my wishes I have to carry out but
+your father's. He wanted to let this house."
+
+"Let Kilgobbin!"
+
+"Yes, that is what he said. He wanted to let it to a good tenant who would
+look after it till you are of age. I think he was right. You see, you
+could not live here all alone, and if the place was shut up it would
+deteriorate."
+
+"It would go to wrack and ruin," said Hennessey.
+
+"And the servants?" said Phyl.
+
+"We will look after them," said Pinckney, "the new tenant might take them
+on; if not, we'll give them time to get new places."
+
+"Byrne's been here before I was born," said the girl, with dry lips, "so
+has Mrs. Driscoll. They are part of the place; it would ruin their lives
+to send them away."
+
+"Well," said Pinckney, "I don't want to be the ogre to ruin their lives;
+you can do anything you like about them. If the new tenant didn't take
+them, you might pension them. I want you to be perfectly happy in your
+mind and I want you to feel that though I am, so to speak, the guardian of
+your money, still, that money is yours."
+
+She was beginning to understand now that not only was he striving to
+soothe her feelings and propitiate her, but that he was very much in
+earnest in this business, and crowding through her mind came a great wave
+of revulsion against herself.
+
+Phyl's nature was such that whilst always ready to fly into wrath and
+easily moved to bitter resentment, one touch of kindness, one soft word,
+had the power to disarm her.
+
+One soft word from an antagonist had the power to wound her far more than
+a dozen words of bitterness.
+
+Filled now with absolutely superfluous self-reproach, she stood for a
+moment unable to speak. Then she said, raising her eyes to his:
+
+"I am sure you mean to do what is for the best.--It was stupid of me--"
+
+"Not a bit," said the other, cheerfully. "I want to do the things that
+will make you happy--that's all. I'm a business man and I know the value
+of money. Money is just worth the amount of happiness it brings."
+
+"Faith, that's true," said Hennessey, who had taken his seat again and was
+in the act of lighting a cigar.
+
+"When I was a boy," went on the other. "I was always kept hard up by my
+father. It was like pulling gum teeth to get the price of a fishing rod
+out of him. When I think of all the fun I might have bought with a few
+dollars, it makes me wild. You can't buy fun when you get old; you may buy
+an opera house or a yacht, but you can't buy the real stuff that makes
+life worth living."
+
+Phyl glanced out of the window at the park, then as though she had found
+some inspiration there, she turned to Pinckney.
+
+"If you don't mind about the money, then why don't you let me live here
+instead of letting the place? I can live here by myself and I would be
+happy here. I won't be happy if I leave it."
+
+"Well," said Pinckney, "there's your father's wish, first of all."
+
+"I'm sure if he knew how I felt, he wouldn't mind," said Phyl mournfully,
+turning her gaze again to the park.
+
+"On top of that," went on Pinckney, "there's--your age. Phyl, it wouldn't
+ever do; it's not I that am saying it, it's custom, the world, society."
+
+Phyl, like the hooked salmon that has taken the gaudy fly, felt a check
+and recognised that a Power had her in hand, recognised in the light-going
+and fair-speaking Pinckney something of adamant, a will not to be broken
+or bent.
+
+She felt for a moment a revolt against herself for having fallen to the
+lure and allowed herself to come to friendly terms with him. Then this
+feeling faded a bit. The very young are very weak in the face of
+constituted authority--besides, there was always at the back of Pinckney
+her father's wish.
+
+"And then again, on top of that," he went on, "there's the question of
+your coming to live with us; your father wished it."
+
+"In America!" cried Phyl. "Do you mean I am to live in America?"
+
+"Well, we live there; why not? It's not a bad place to live in--and what
+else are you to do?"
+
+She could not answer him. This time she saw that the bogey man had got her
+and no mistake. America to her seemed as far as the moon and far less
+familiar. If Pinckney had declared that it was necessary for her to die,
+she would have been a great deal more frightened, but the prospect would
+not have seemed much more desolate and forbidding and final.
+
+He saw at once the trouble in her mind and guessed the cause. He had a
+rare intuition for reading minds, and it seemed to him he could read
+Phyl's as easily as though the outside of her head were clear glass--he
+had cause to modify this cocksure opinion later on.
+
+"Don't worry," he said. "If you don't like America when you see it, you
+can come back to Ireland. I daresay we can arrange something; anyhow,
+don't let us meet troubles half way."
+
+"When am I to go?" said Phyl.
+
+"Sure, Phyl, you can stay as long as you like with us," said Mr.
+Hennessey. "The doors of 10, Merrion Square, are always open to you, and
+never will they be shut on you except behind your back."
+
+Pinckney laughed; and a servant coming in to clear the breakfast things,
+Hennessey led the way from the room to show Pinckney the premises.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+They crossed the hall, and passing through a green-baize covered door went
+down a passage that led to the kitchen.
+
+"This is the housekeeper's room," said Hennessey, pointing to a half open
+door, "and the servants' hall is that door beyond. This is the kitchen."
+
+They paused for a moment in the great old-fashioned kitchen, with an open
+range capable of roasting a small ox, one might have fancied. Norah, the
+cook, was busy in the scullery with her sleeves tucked up, and under the
+table was seated Susie Gallagher, a small and grubby hanger-on engaged in
+the task of washing potatoes. The potatoes were beside her on the floor
+and she was washing them in a tin basin of water with the help of an old
+nail-brush.
+
+There was a horse-shoe hung up, for luck, on the wall over the range, and
+a pile of dinner plates, from last night's dinner and still unwashed,
+stood on the dresser, where also stood a half-bottle of Guinness' stout
+and a tumbler; an old setter bitch lay before the fire and a jackdaw in a
+wicker cage set up a yell at the sight of the visitors, that brought Norah
+out of the scullery to receive them, a broad smile on her face and her
+arms tucked up in her apron.
+
+"He always yells like that at the sight of tramps or stray people about,"
+apologised the cook. "He's better than a watch-dog. Hold your tongue, you
+baste; don't you know your misthress when you see her?"
+
+"Rafferty caught him in the park," said Phyl, "and cut his tongue with a
+sixpence so as to make him able to speak."
+
+They left the kitchen and came into the yard. A big tin can of refuse was
+standing by the kitchen door, and on top of all sorts of rubbish, potato
+peelings, cabbage stalks and so forth, lay the carcass of a boiled fowl.
+It was the fowl they had dined off the night before and it lay there just
+as it had gone from the table, that is to say, minus both wings and the
+greater part of the breast, but with the legs intact.
+
+Pinckney stared at this sinful sight. Then he pointed to it.
+
+"What's that doing there?" he asked.
+
+"Waitin' to be took away be the stable boy, sor," replied the cook, who
+had followed them to the door. "All the rubbish is took away in that ould
+can every mornin'."
+
+"Good God!" said Pinckney under his breath. The expression was shaken out
+of him, so to speak, and out of a pocket of his character which had never
+been fully explored, of whose existence, indeed, he was not particularly
+aware. This Irish expedition was to show him a good many things in life
+and in himself of which up to this he had been in ignorance. He had never
+been brought face to face with waste, bald waste without a hat on or
+covering of any sort, before.
+
+"Haven't you any poor people about here?" he asked.
+
+"Hapes, sor."
+
+Pinckney was on the point of saying something more, but he checked
+himself, remembering that in the eyes of the servants he was here in the
+position of a guest.
+
+He followed Hennessey across to the stable yard, where Larry, the groom,
+was washing the carriage that had fetched him from the station the night
+before.
+
+"The servants won't eat chicken," said Phyl, in an apologetic way. She had
+noted everything and she guessed his thoughts. "They won't eat game
+either--and they throw things away if they don't like them--of course,
+it's wasteful, but they _do_ give things to the poor. Lots of poor people
+come here, every day nearly, but they don't care for scraps--you see, it
+_is_ insulting to give a poor person scraps, just as though they were
+animals. I remember the cook we had before Norah did it when she came
+first, and all the poor people stopped coming to the house. Said she ought
+to know better than to offer them the leavings."
+
+"Cheek!"
+
+"Well, I don't know," said Phyl. "We've done it for hundreds of years."
+
+She closed her mouth in a way she had when she did not wish to pursue a
+subject further. Despite the fact that she had made friends with Pinckney,
+she was galled by his attitude of criticism. Guardian or no guardian, he
+was a stranger; relation or no relation, he was a stranger, and what right
+had a stranger to dare to come and turn up his nose at the poor people or
+make remarks--he hadn't said a word--about the wastefulness of the
+servants?
+
+The redoubtable Rafferty was standing in the yard chewing a straw and
+watching Larry at work.
+
+Rafferty was a man of genius, who had started as a helper and odd job
+person, and had risen to the position of factotum. He had ousted the
+Scotch gardener and insinuated a relation of his own in his place. There
+was scarcely a servant about the estate that was not a relation of
+Rafferty's. Philip Berknowles had put up with a lot from Rafferty simply
+because Rafferty was an invaluable person in his way when not crossed.
+Everything went smoothly when the factotum was not interfered with. Cross
+him and there were immediate results ranging from ill-groomed horses to
+general unrest. He was a dark individual, half groom, half game-keeper in
+dress, a "wicked-looking divil," according to the description of his
+enemies, and an exceedingly foxy-looking individual in the eyes of
+Pinckney.
+
+"Rafferty," said Mr. Hennessey, "I want to show this gentleman round.
+Let's see the stables."
+
+Rafferty touched his cap and led the way, showing first the stalls and
+boxes where four or five horses were stabled, and then leading the way
+through the coach-house to the path from which opened the kitchen
+gardens.
+
+They were immense and walled in with red brick, capable, one might fancy,
+of supplying the wants of three or four houses the size of Kilgobbin.
+
+Pinckney noted this fact, also that the home farm to which the kitchen
+gardens led was apparently a prosperous and going little concern, with its
+fowls and chickens penned or loose, styes filled with grunting pigs, and
+turkeys gobbling and spreading their tails in the sun.
+
+"Who looks after all this?" asked Pinckney.
+
+"I do, sor," replied Rafferty.
+
+"What are the takings?"
+
+"I beg your pardon, sor?"
+
+"The profits, I mean. You sell these things, don't you?"
+
+"Kilgobbin isn't a farm, sor, it's a gintleman's estate."
+
+Pinckney, not at all set back by this snub, turned and looked the factotum
+in the face.
+
+"Just so," said he, "but I've never heard of gentlemen growing pigs to
+look at; peacocks, maybe, but not pigs. However, we'll have another look
+at the business later."
+
+He turned and they went on, Rafferty disturbed in his mind and much put
+about by the manner of the other in whom he began to divine something more
+than a casual guest, Phyl almost as much put out as Rafferty.
+
+The idea that the factotum might have been robbing her father right and
+left never occurred to her; even if it had, it would not have softened the
+fact that a strange hand was at work in her old home turning over things,
+inspecting them, holding them up for comment.
+
+She managed to drop behind as they left the farm yard for the paddocks,
+then turning down the yew lane that led back to the house, she ran as
+though hounds were after her, reached the house, locked herself in her
+bedroom, and flung herself on the bed in a tempest of weeping, dragging a
+pillow over her head as if to shield herself from the blows that the world
+was aiming at her.
+
+Phyl, without mother, brothers or sisters, had centred all her affection
+on her father and Kilgobbin; the servants, the place itself and all the
+things and people about it were part and parcel with her life, and the
+death of her father had intensified her love of the place and the people.
+
+If Pinckney had only known, he might have put the business of the
+inspection of the property and the dealing with the servants into other
+hands, but Pinckney was young and full of energy and business ability; he
+was full of conscientiousness and the determination to protect his ward's
+interests; he had scented a rogue in Rafferty, and at this very minute
+returning to the house with Hennessey, he was declaring his intention to
+make an overhaul of the working of the estate.
+
+Rafferty was to appear before him and produce his accounts and make
+explanations. Mrs. Driscoll was to be examined as to the expenditure,
+etc.
+
+He little knew the hornet's nest into which he was about to poke his
+finger.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+The grand inquisition began that evening after dinner--Phyl did not appear
+at dinner, alleging a headache--and Rafferty, summoned to the library, had
+to stand whilst Pinckney, seated at the table with a pen in his hand and a
+sheet of paper before him, went into the business of accounts.
+
+Mark how the unexpected occurs in life. Rafferty, who had been pilfering
+for years, selling garden produce and keeping the profits, robbing corn
+from the corn bin in the stable, poaching and selling birds and ground
+game to a dealer in Arranakilty, receiving illicit commissions and so
+forth, had on the death of his master shaken off all restraint and
+prepared for a campaign of open plunder. The very last thing he could have
+imagined was the sudden appearance of an American business man on the
+scene, armed with absolute power and possessing the eye of a hawk.
+
+"Your master asked me just before he died to look after this estate,"
+began Pinckney; "in fact, he has appointed me to act as guardian to Miss
+Berknowles, so I just want to see how things stand. Now, to begin with the
+horses. I want to know everything about the stables during the last--shall
+we say--six months. Who supplies the corn and the hay and the straw?"
+
+"I've been gettin' some from Faulkner of Arranakilty, sor, and some from
+Doyle of Bally-brack."
+
+"Don't you grow any horse food on the estate?"
+
+"We don't grow no corn, sor."
+
+"Well, hay and straw?"
+
+"You can't get straw, sor, widout you grow corn."
+
+"I know that--but how about hay--surely you grow lots of grass?"
+
+"We graze the grass, sor."
+
+"Do you let the grazing?"
+
+"Well, sor, it's this way; the masther was never very shtrict about the
+grazin'; we puts some of the horses out to grass, ourselves, and we lets
+poor folk have a bit of grazin' now and then for their cattle, though
+master was never after makin' money from the estate--"
+
+"Just so. Have you the receipted bills for the fodder during the last six
+months?"
+
+"Yes, sor. The master always sent me wid the money to pay the bills."
+
+"You have got the receipts?"
+
+"The which, sor?"
+
+"The bills receipted."
+
+"Bills, sure, what's the good of keepin' bills, sor, when the money's
+paid. I b'lave they're somewhere in an ould crock in the stable, at laste
+that's where I saw thim last."
+
+"Well," said Pinckney, "you can fetch them for me to-morrow morning, and
+now let's talk about the garden."
+
+Rafferty, not knowing what Pinckney might discover and so being unable to
+lie with confidence, had a very bad quarter of an hour over the garden.
+
+Pinckney was not a man to press another unduly, nor was he a man to haggle
+about halfpence or worry servants over small peccadillos. He knew quite
+well that grooms are grooms, and will be so as long as men are men. He
+would never have bothered about little details had Rafferty been an
+ordinary servant. He recognised in Rafferty, not a servant to be dismissed
+or corrected, but an antagonist to be fought. It was the case of the dog
+and badger. Rafferty was Graft and all it implies, Pinckney was Straight
+Dealing. And Straight Dealing knew quite well that the only way to get
+Graft by the throat is to ferret out details, no matter how small.
+
+So Rafferty was taken over details. He had to admit that he had "given
+away" some of the stuff from the garden and sold "a bit," sending it up to
+Dublin for that purpose; but he was not to be caught.
+
+"And the profits," said Pinckney. "I suppose you handed them over to Mr.
+Berknowles?"
+
+"No, sor; the master always tould me to keep any bit of money I might draa
+from anything I planted extra for me perkisites, that was the
+understandin' I had with him."
+
+"And over the farmyard, I suppose anything you could make by selling any
+extra animals you planted was your perquisite?"
+
+"Yes, sor."
+
+"Very well, Rafferty, that will do for to-night; get me those receipted
+bills to-morrow morning. Come here at ten o'clock and we will have another
+talk."
+
+Rafferty went off, feeling more comfortable in his mind.
+
+The word Perquisites might be made to cover a multitude of sins, but he
+would not have been so easy if he had known that Mrs. Driscoll had been
+called up immediately after his departure. Mrs. Driscoll was one of those
+terrible people who say nothing yet see everything; for the last year and
+a half she had been watching Rafferty; knowing it to be quite useless to
+report what she knew to her easy-going master, she had, none the less,
+kept on watching. As a result, she was now able to bring up a hard fact, a
+small hard fact more valuable than worlds of ductile evidence. Rafferty
+had "nicked"--it was the lady's expression--a brand-new lawn mower.
+
+"I declare to God, sir, I don't know what he _has_ took, for me eyes can't
+be everywhere, but I do know he's took the mower."
+
+"Why did you not tell Miss Phyl?"
+
+"I did, sir, and she only said, 'Oh, there must be a mistake--what would
+he be doin' with it,' says she. 'Sellin' it,' says I. 'Nonsense,' says
+she. You see, sir, Rafferty and she has always been hand in glove, what
+with the fishin' and shootin', and the horses and such like, and she won't
+hear a word against him."
+
+Mrs. Driscoll had called Rafferty a sly devil--he was.
+
+At eleven o'clock next morning, Phyl, crossing the stable yard with some
+sugar for the horses, met Rafferty. He was crying.
+
+"Why, what on earth's the matter, Rafferty?" asked the girl.
+
+"I've got the shove, miss," replied Rafferty, "after all me years of
+service, I'm put out to end me days in a ditch."
+
+"You mean you're discharged!" she cried. "Was it Mr. Pinckney?"
+
+"That's him," replied Rafferty. "Says he's the masther of us all. 'Out you
+get,' says he, 'or it's I that'll be callin' a p'leeceman to put you,'
+says he. Flung it in me face that I'd stolen a laan mower. Me that's ben
+on the estate man and boy for forty year. A laan mower! Sure, Miss Phyl,
+what would I be doin' with a laan mower?"
+
+Phyl turned from him and ran to the house. Pinckney and Hennessey were
+seated in the library when the door burst open and in came Phyl. Her eyes
+were bright and her lips were pale.
+
+"You told me you would keep all the servants," said she. "Rafferty tells
+me you have dismissed him."
+
+"I should think I had," said Pinckney lightly, and not gauging the mad
+disturbance of the other, "and it's lucky for him I haven't put him in
+prison."
+
+The word prison was all that was wanted to fire the mine. Pinckney stood
+for a moment aghast at the change in the girl.
+
+"I _hate_ you," she cried, coming a step closer to him. "I loathe
+you--master of us all, are you? Dare to touch any one here and I'll burn
+the house down with my own hands--you--you--"
+
+She paused for want of breath, her chest heaving and her hands clenched.
+
+Then Pinckney exploded.
+
+The good old fiery Pinckney blood was up. Oh, without any manner of doubt
+our ancestors are still able to speak, and it was old Roderick
+Pinckney--"Pepper Pinckney" was his nickname--that blazed out now. It was
+also the fire of youth answering the fire of youth.
+
+"Damn it!" he cried. "I've come here to do my best--I don't care--keep who
+you want--be robbed if you like it--I'm off--" He caught up all the sheets
+of paper he had been covering with figures and tore them across.
+
+"Beast!" cried Phyl.
+
+She rushed from the room and upstairs like a mad creature. The bang of her
+bedroom door closed the incident.
+
+"Now don't be taking on so," said Hennessey. "You've both of you lost your
+temper."
+
+"Lost my temper--maybe. I'm going all the same. Right back to the States.
+I'm off to Dublin by the next train and you'd better come and finish the
+business there. You'd better have her to stay with you in Dublin. I don't
+want to see her again. Anyhow, we'll settle all that later."
+
+"Maybe that's the best," said Hennessey. "My wife will look after her till
+she's ready to go to the States--if she wants to."
+
+"Please God she doesn't," replied the other.
+
+Phyl did not see Pinckney again. He went off to Dublin by the two-ten
+train with Hennessey, the latter promising to be back on the morrow to
+arrange things.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+Dublin can never have been a cheerful city. Even in the days when the
+butchers joined in street fights and hung their antagonists when caught on
+steel hooks--like legs of mutton--the gaiety of Dublin one may fancy to
+have been more a matter of spirits than of spirit.
+
+Echoes from the days when the Parliament sat in Stephen's Green come down
+to us through the works of Charles Lever, but the riotous gaiety of the
+old days when Barrington was a judge of the Admiralty Court, the Hell Fire
+Club an institution, and Count Considine a figure in society, must be
+taken with a grain of salt.
+
+Mangan shows you the old Dublin as it was in those glorious times, and in
+the new Dublin of to-day the shade of Mangan seems still to walk arm in
+arm with the shade of Mathurin. Gloomy ghosts addicted to melancholy,
+noting with satisfaction that the streets are as dirty as ever, the old
+Public Houses still standing, that, despite the tramways--those
+extraordinary new modern inventions--the tide of life runs pretty much the
+same as of old. The ghosts of Mangan and Mathurin have never seen a taxi
+cab.
+
+Dublin at the present day is a splendid city for old ghosts to wander in
+without having their corns trodden on or their susceptibilities injured.
+Phyl had come to Dublin to live with the Hennesseys in Merrion Square.
+
+"Never shall my door be shut on you except behind your back," Hennessey
+had said, and he meant it.
+
+The girl was worth several thousand a year; had she been penniless it
+would have been just the same.
+
+You may meet many geniuses in your journey through life, many brilliant
+people, many beautiful people, many fascinating people, but you will not
+meet many friends. Hennessey belonged to the society of Friends, his wife
+was a member of the same community, and he would have been ruined only for
+his partner Niven, who was an ordinary lowdown human creature who believed
+in no one and kept the business together.
+
+On the day of her arrival at Merrion Square and during her first interview
+with Mrs. Hennessey in the large, cheerless drawing-room where
+decalcomanied flower pots lingered like relics of the Palaeolithic age of
+Art, Phyl kept herself above tears, just as a swimmer keeps his head above
+water in a choppy sea.
+
+It was all so gloomy, yet so friendly, that the mind could not openly
+revolt at the gloom; it was all so different from the wind and trees and
+freedom of Kilgobbin, and Mrs. Hennessey, whom she had only seen once
+before, was so different, on closer acquaintance, from any of the people
+she had hitherto met in her little world.
+
+Mrs. Hennessey, with a soul above dust and housekeeping, a faded woman,
+not very tidy, with an exalted air, pouring out tea from a Britannia metal
+ware teapot and talking all the time about Willy Yeates, the Irish Players
+and Lady Gregory's last play, fascinated the girl, who did not know who
+Willy Yeates was and who had never seen the Irish Players.
+
+Nor could she learn from Mrs. Hennessey. It was impossible to get a word
+in edgeways with that lady. Sometimes, indeed, during a lull in her mind
+disturbance, she would remain quiet whilst you answered some question,
+only to find that she had totally forgotten the question and was not
+listening to your reply.
+
+Phyl got so used to Mrs. Hennessey after a few days that she did not
+listen to her questions, and so the two being matched, they got on well
+together. Young people soon accommodate themselves to their surroundings,
+and in a month the girl had grown to the colour of her new life, at least,
+on the outside of her mind. It seemed to her that she had lived years in
+Merrion Square. Kilgobbin--Hennessey had managed to let the place--seemed
+a dream of her childhood. She saw no future, and rebellion was impossible;
+there was nothing to rebel against--except the dulness and greyness of
+life. No people could have been kinder than the Hennesseys; unfortunately
+they had numerous friends, and the friends of the Hennesseys did not
+appeal to Phyl.
+
+A boy in her position would have adapted himself quickly enough, and been
+hail fellow well met with Mr. Mattram, the dentist of Westland Row, or the
+young Farrels, whose father owned one of the biggest wine merchants'
+businesses in the city; but the feminine instinct told Phyl that these
+were not the sort of people from whose class she had sprung, that their
+circle was not her circle and that she had stepped down in life in some
+mysterious way. This fact was brought sharply home to her by a young
+Farrel, a male of the Farrel brood, a hobbledehoy, good-looking enough but
+with a Dublin accent and a cheeky manner.
+
+This immature wine merchant at a party given by Mrs. Hennessey had made
+love to Phyl and had tried to kiss her behind the dining-room door.
+
+The recollection of the smack in the face she had given him soothed her
+that night as she lay tossing in her bed, and it was on this night and for
+the first time since she left Kilgobbin that the recollection of Pinckney
+came before her otherwise than as a shadow. He stood with the Hennessey
+circle as his background, a bright, good-looking figure and a gentleman to
+his finger-tips.
+
+Why had she cast aside her own people--even though they were distant
+relations? What stupidity had caused her to insult Pinckney by telling him
+she hated him? She found herself asking that question without being able
+to answer it.
+
+After all that fuss at Kilgobbin and Pinckney's departure, Mr. Hennessey
+had proved to her that Rafferty was a rogue who deserved no quarter; the
+man had been dismissed, the whole business was done with and over, and
+now, looking back in cool blood, she was utterly unable to reconstruct and
+put together the reasons for the outburst of anger that had severed her
+from the one kinsman who had put out his hand to help her.
+
+She could no longer conjure up the feeling that Pinckney was an interloper
+come to break up Kilgobbin and spoil the home she had known from
+childhood.
+
+Fate had done that. Kilgobbin was gone--let to strangers; Hennessey had
+taken over her guardianship _pro tem_, and it was entirely owing to
+herself that she was in her present position. She had no right to
+criticise the friends of the Hennesseys; she had deliberately walked into
+that circle from which she felt she never could escape now.
+
+Just as Pinckney had discovered that guardianship was showing him traits
+in his character hitherto unknown to him, Phyl was discovering her woman's
+instinct as regards social matters.
+
+She recognised that once having taken her place amongst the Hennessey set,
+her position for life was fixed, as far as Ireland was concerned. She was
+branded.
+
+The Berknowles were an old family, but she was the last of them. The
+relatives living in the south could be no help to her; they were poor,
+rabid Catholics and had fallen to little account, owing to unwise
+marriages and that irresponsible fatuous apathy in affairs which is the
+dry rot of Ireland and the Irish people. They were proud as Lucifer, but
+no one was proud of them.
+
+If only Philip Berknowles had been a man to make fast friends amongst his
+own class, some of those friends might have come to his daughter's rescue
+now. But Berknowles had lived his own life since the death of his wife, an
+easy-going country gentleman in a county mostly inhabited by squireens and
+cottage folk, caring little for the _convenances_ and with no taste for
+women's society.
+
+Thoughts born of all these facts, some of which were only half understood,
+filled the mind of the girl as she lay awake with the noise of that
+raucous party ringing in her ears; and when she fell asleep, it was only
+to awake with a sense of despondency weighing upon her and the odious
+Farrel incident waiting to follow her through the day.
+
+About a week later, coming down to breakfast one morning, she found a
+letter on her plate. A letter with American stamps on it and the address,
+Miss Phylice Berknowles, Merrion Square, Dublin, Ireland, written in a
+firm, bold hand.
+
+Mrs. Hennessey was not down and Mr. Hennessey had departed for the office,
+so Phyl had the breakfast table to herself--and the letter.
+
+She knew at once whom it was from, even before she read the postmark,
+"Charleston."
+
+Pinckney, the man who had been in her thoughts during the past six or
+seven days, the man who had left Ireland righteously disgusted with her,
+the man to whom she had said, "I hate you!"
+
+The scene flashed before her as she tore the envelope open, his sudden
+blaze of anger, the way he had torn the papers up, his departure. What was
+he going to say to her now? She flushed at the thought that this thing in
+her hand might prove to be his opinion of her in cold blood, a reproof, a
+remonstrance--she opened the folded sheet--ah!
+
+  "Dear Phyl,
+
+  "Aunt Maria was greatly disappointed when I returned here without
+  you, she had quite made up her mind that you were coming back with
+  me. We both lost our temper that day, but I was the worse, for I said
+  a word I shouldn't have said, and for which I apologise. Aunt Maria
+  says it was the Pinckney temper. However that may be, we shall be
+  delighted to see you. Mrs. Van Dusen leaves on the 6th of next month.
+  I am sending all particulars to Mr. Hennessey. You could meet Mrs.
+  Van Dusen at Liverpool and go with her as far as New York. Let me
+  have a cable to know if you are coming. Pinckney, Vernons,
+  Charleston, U. S. A., is the cable address.
+
+                        "Your affectionate guardian--also cousin--
+                                                      "R. Pinckney."
+
+Then underneath, in an angular, old-fashioned hand, one of those
+handwritings we associate with crossed letters, rosewood desks, valentines
+and wafers:
+
+  "Be sure to come. I am very anxious to see you, and I only hope you
+  will like me as much as I am sure to like you.
+
+                                                   "Maria Pinckney."
+
+Phyl caught her breath back when she read this and her eyes filled with
+tears. It was the woman's voice that touched her, coming after Pinckney's
+business-like and jerky sentences.
+
+Then she sat with the letter before her, looking at the new prospect it
+had opened for her.
+
+Was Pinckney still angry, despite his talk about the Pinckney temper; had
+he written not of his own free will but at the desire of Maria Pinckney?
+She read the thing over again without finding any solution to this
+question.
+
+But one fact was clear. Maria Pinckney was genuine in her invitation.
+
+"I'll go," said Phyl.
+
+She rose up from the table as though determined then and there to start
+off for America, left the room, went upstairs and knocked at Mrs.
+Hennessey's door.
+
+That lady was sitting up in bed with a stocking tied round her throat--she
+was suffering from a slight attack of tonsilitis--and the Irish _Times_
+spread on her knees.
+
+"Mrs. Hennessey," said Phyl, "I have just had a letter from my cousins in
+America, and they want me to go out to them."
+
+"Want you to go to America!" said Mrs. Hennessey. "On a visit, I
+suppose?"
+
+"No, to stay there."
+
+"To stay in America; but what on earth do they want you to do that for?
+Who on earth would dream of leaving Dublin to live in America! It's
+extraordinary the ideas some people get hold of. Then, of course, they
+don't know, that's all that's to be said for them. It's like hearing
+people talking and talking of all the fine views abroad, and you'd think
+they'd never seen the Dargle or the Glen of the Downs; they don't know the
+beauty of their own country or haven't eyes to see it, and they must go
+raving of the Bay of Naples with Kiliney Bay a stone's throw away from
+them, and talking of Paris with Dublin outside their doors, and praising
+up foreign actors with never a word of the Irish Players. Dublin giving
+her best to them, and they with deaf ears to her music and blind eyes to
+her sons."
+
+"But, you see, Mrs. Hennessey, the Pinckneys are my relations."
+
+"Irish?" cried the good woman, absolutely unconscious of everything but
+the vision before her. "Those that can't see their own land aren't Irish.
+Mongrels is the name for them, without pride of heart or light of
+understanding."
+
+She was off.
+
+With a far, fixed gaze and her mind in a state of internal combustion, she
+seemed a thousand miles away from Phyl and her affairs, fighting the
+battles of Ireland.
+
+Phyl gathered the impression that, if she went to America Mrs. Hennessey
+would grieve less over the fact that she (Phyl) was leaving Merrion
+Square, than over the fact that she was leaving Dublin. She escaped,
+carrying this impression with her, went upstairs, dressed, and then
+started off for Mr. Hennessey's office.
+
+It was a cold, bright day and Dublin looked almost cheerful in the
+sunlight.
+
+The lawyer looked surprised when she was shown into his private room;
+then, when she had told him her business, he fumbled amongst the papers on
+his desk and produced a letter.
+
+"This is from Pinckney," said he. "It came by the same post as yours, only
+it was directed to the office. It's the same story, too. He wants you to
+go over."
+
+"I've been thinking over the whole business," said Phyl, "and I feel I
+ought to go."
+
+"Aren't you happy in Dublin?" asked he.
+
+"M'yes," answered the other. "But, you see--at least, I'm as happy as I
+suppose I'll be anywhere, only they are my people and I feel I ought to go
+to them. It's very lonely to have no people of one's own. You and Mrs.
+Hennessey have been very kind to me, and I shall always be grateful,
+but--"
+
+"But we aren't your own flesh and blood. You're right. Well, there it is.
+We'll be sorry to lose you, but, maybe, though you haven't much experience
+of the world, you've hit the nail on the head. We aren't your flesh and
+blood, and though the Pinckneys aren't much more to you, still, one drop
+of blood makes all the difference in the world. Then again, you're a cut
+above us; we're quite simple people, but the Berknowles were always in the
+Castle set and a long chalk above the Hennesseys. I was saying that to
+Norah only last night when I was reading the account of the big party at
+the Viceregal Lodge and the names of all the people that were there, and I
+said to her, 'Phyl ought to be going to parties like that by and by when
+she grows older, and we can't do much for her in that way,' and off she
+goes in a temper. 'Who's the Aberdeens?' says she. 'A lot of English
+without an Irish feather in their tails, and he opening the doors to
+visitors in his dressing gown--Castle,' she says, 'it's little Castle
+there'll be when we have a Parliament sitting in Dublin.'"
+
+"I don't want to go to parties at the Viceregal Lodge," said Phyl,
+flushing to think of what a snob she had been when only a few days back
+she had criticised the Hennesseys and their set in her own mind. These
+honest, straightforward good people were not snobs, whatever else they
+might be, and if her desire for America had been prompted solely by the
+desire to escape from the social conditions that environed her friends,
+she would now have smothered it and stamped on it. But the call from
+Charleston that had come across the water to her was an influence far more
+potent than that. That call from the country where her mother had been
+born and where her mother's people had always lived had more in it than
+the voices that carried the message.
+
+"Well," said Hennessey, "you mayn't want to go to parties now, but you
+will when you are a bit older. However, you can please yourself--Do you
+want to go to America?"
+
+"I do," said Phyl. "It's not that I want to leave you, but there is
+something that tells me I have got to go. When I read the letter first
+this morning, I was delighted to think that Mr. Pinckney was not still
+angry with me, and I liked the idea of the change, for Dublin is a bit
+dreary after Kilgobbin and--and well, I _will_ say it--I don't care for
+some of the people I have met in Dublin. But since then a new feeling has
+come over me. I think it came as I was walking down here to the office.
+It's a feeling as if something were pulling me ever so slightly, yet still
+pulling me from over there. My father said that there was more of mother
+in me than him. I remember he said that once--well, perhaps it's that. She
+came from over there."
+
+"Maybe it is," said Hennessey.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+The thing was settled definitely that night, Mrs. Hennessey resisting the
+idea at first, more, one might have fancied from her talk, because the
+idea was anti-national than from love of Phyl, though, as a matter of
+fact, she was fond enough of the girl.
+
+"It's what's left Ireland what it is," went on the good lady. "Cripples
+and lunatics, that's all that's left of us with your emigration; all the
+good blood of Ireland flowing away from her and not a drop, scarcely,
+coming back."
+
+"I'll come back," said Phyl, "you need not fear about that--some day."
+
+"Ay, some day," said Mrs. Hennessey, and stared into the fire. Then the
+spirit moving her, she began to discant on things past and people
+vanished.
+
+Synge, and Oscar Wilde and Willie Wilde, who was the real genius of the
+family, only his genius "stuck in him somehow and wouldn't come out." She
+passed from people who had vanished to places that had changed, and only
+stopped when the servant came in with the announcement that supper was
+ready.
+
+Then at supper, lo and behold! she discussed the going away of Phyl, as
+though it were a matter arranged and done with and carrying her full
+consent and approval.
+
+During the weeks following, Phyl's impending journey kept Mrs. Hennessey
+busy in a spasmodic way. One might have fancied from the preparations and
+lists of things necessary that the girl was off to the wilds of New Guinea
+or some region equally destitute of shops.
+
+Hennessey remonstrated, and then let her have her way--it kept her quiet,
+and Phyl, nothing loath, spent most of her time now in shops, Tod and
+Burns, and Cannock and White's, examining patterns and being fitted,
+varying these amusements by farewell visits. She was invited out by all
+the Hennesseys' friends, the Farrels and the Rourkes, and the Longs and
+the Newlands, and the Pryces and the Oldhams, all prepared tea-parties in
+her honour, made her welcome, and made much of her, just as we make much
+of people who have not long to live.
+
+She was the girl that was going to America. She did not appreciate the
+real kindness underlying this terrible round of festivities till she was
+standing on the deck of the _Hybernia_ at Kingstown saying good-bye to
+Hennessey.
+
+Then, as the boat drew away from the Carlisle pier, as it passed the
+guardship anchorage and the batteries at the ends of the east and west
+piers, all those people from whom she had longed to escape seemed to her
+the most desirable people on earth.
+
+Bound for a world unknown, peopled with utter strangers, Ireland, beloved
+Ireland, called after her as a mother calls to her child.
+
+Oh, the loneliness! the desolation!
+
+As she stood watching the Wicklow mountains fading in the grey distance,
+she knew for the first time the meaning of those words, "Gone West"; and
+she knew what the thousands suffered who, driven from their cabins on the
+hillside or the moor, went West in the old days when the emigrant ship
+showed her tall masts in Queenstown Harbour and her bellying canvas to the
+sunset of the Atlantic.
+
+At Liverpool, she found Mrs. Van Dusen, a tall, rather good-looking,
+rather hard-looking but exceedingly fashionable individual, at the hotel
+where it was arranged they should meet.
+
+Phyl, looking like a lost dog, confused by travel and dumb from dejection,
+had little in common with this lady, nor did a rough passage across the
+Atlantic extend their knowledge of one another, for Mrs. Van Dusen
+scarcely appeared from her state-room till the evening when, the great
+ship coming to her moorings, New York sketched itself and its blazing
+skyscrapers against the gloom before the astonished eyes of Phyl.
+
+PART II
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+Holyhead, Liverpool, New York, each of these stopping places had impressed
+upon Phyl the distance she was putting between herself and her home,
+making her feel that if this business was not death it was, at least, a
+very good imitation of dying.
+
+But the south-bound express from New York was to show her just what people
+may be expected to feel _after_ they are dead.
+
+America had been for Phyl little more than a geographical expression.
+"Uncle Tom's Cabin," "The Last of the Mohicans," "The Settlers in Canada"
+and "Round the World in Eighty Days," had given her pictures, and from
+these she had built up a vague land of snow and forests, log huts, plains,
+Red Indians, runaway negroes and men with bowie knives.
+
+New York had given this fantastic idea a rough joggle, the south-bound
+express tumbled it all to pieces.
+
+Forests and mountains and plains would have been familiar to her
+imagination, but the south-bound express was producing for her inspection
+quite different things from these.
+
+New Jersey with its populous towns, for instance, towns she never could
+have imagined or dreamed of, filled with people whose existence she could
+not picture.
+
+What gave her a cold grue was the suddenly grasped fact that all this
+great mechanism of life, cities, towns, roaring railways, agricultural
+lands, manufacturing districts filled with English speaking people--that
+all this was alien, knew nothing of Ireland or England, except as it might
+know of Japan or a dream of the past.
+
+The people in the train were talking English--were English to all intents
+and purposes, and yet, as far as England and Ireland were concerned, she
+knew them to be dead.
+
+It had been freezing in New York, a great rainstorm was blowing across the
+world as they crossed the Delaware; it passed, sweeping away east under
+the arch of a vast rainbow, even the rainbow seemed alien and different to
+Irish rainbows--it was too big.
+
+Then came Philadelphia, where some of the dead folk left the train and
+others got in. One had an Irish voice and accent. He was a big man with a
+hard, pushful face and a great under jaw. Phyl knew him at once for what
+he was, and that he had died to Ireland long years ago.
+
+Then came Wilmington and Baltimore, and then, long after sunset in the
+dark, a warmer air that entered the train like a viewless passenger, nerve
+soothing and mind lulling--the first breath of the South.
+
+Next morning, looking from the windows of the car, she saw the South. Vast
+spaces of low-lying land broken by river and bayou, flooded by the light
+of the new risen sun and touched by a vague mist from the sea, soft as a
+haze of summer, warm with light and everywhere hinting at the blue deep
+sky beyond.
+
+Youth, morning, and the spirit of the sea all lay in that luminous haze,
+that warm light filled with the laziness of June; and, for one delightful
+moment, it seemed to Phyl that summer days long forgotten, rapturous
+mornings half remembered were here again.
+
+The rumble of trestle and boom of bridge filled the train, and now the
+masts of ships showed thready against the hazy blue of the sky; frame
+houses sprang up by the track and fences with black children roosting on
+them; then the mean streets of the coloured quarter and now, as the cars
+slackened speed, came the bustle that marks the end of a journey. People
+were getting their light luggage together, and as Phyl was strapping the
+bundle that held her travelling rug and books, a waft of tepid,
+salt-scented air came through the compartment and on it the voice of the
+negro attendant rousing some drowsy passenger.
+
+"Charleston, sah."
+
+She got out, dazed and numbed by the journey, and stood with the rug
+bundle in her hand looking about her, half undecided what to do, half
+absorbed by the bustle and movement of the platform.
+
+Then, pushing towards her through the crowd, she saw Pinckney.
+
+He had come to meet her, and as they shook hands, Phyl laughed.
+
+He seemed so bright and cheerful, and the relief at finding a friend after
+that long, friendless journey was so great that she laughed right out with
+pleasure, like a little child--laughed right into his eyes.
+
+It seemed to Pinckney that he had never seen the real Phyl before.
+
+He took the bundle from her and gave it to a negro servant, and then,
+giving the luggage checks to the servant and leaving him to bring on the
+luggage, he led the girl through the crowd.
+
+"We'll walk to the house," said he, "if you are not too tired; it's only a
+few steps away--well--how do you like America?"
+
+"America?" she replied. "I don't know--it's different from what I thought
+it would be, ever so much different--and this place--why, it is like
+summer here."
+
+"It's the South," said Pinckney. "Look, this is Meeting Street."
+
+They had turned from the street leading from the station into a broad,
+beautiful highway, placid, sun flooded, and leading away to the Battery,
+that chief pride and glory of Charleston.
+
+On either side of the street, half hidden by their garden walls, large
+stately houses of the Georgian era showed themselves. Mansions that had
+slumbered in the sun for a hundred years, great, solid houses whose
+yellow-wash seemed the incrustation left by golden and peaceful
+afternoons, houses of old English solidity yet with the Southern touch of
+deep verandas and the hint of palm trees in their jealously walled
+gardens.
+
+"Oh, how beautiful!" said Phyl. She stopped, looked about her, and then
+gazed away down the street. It was as though the old stately street--and
+surely the Street of Other Days might be its name--had been waiting for
+her all her life, waiting for her to turn that corner leading from the
+commonplace station, waiting to greet her like the ghost of some friend of
+childhood. Surely she knew it! Like the recollection of a dream once
+dreamed, it lay before her with its walled gardens, its vaguely familiar
+houses, its sunlight and placidity.
+
+Pinckney, proud of his native town and pleased at this appreciation of it,
+stood by without speaking, watching the girl who seemed to have forgotten
+his existence for a moment. Her head was raised as if she were inhaling
+the sea wind lazily blowing from the Battery, and bearing with it stray
+scents from the gardens by the way.
+
+Then she came back to herself, and they walked on.
+
+"It's just as if I knew the place," said she, "and yet I never remember
+seeing anything like it before."
+
+"I've felt that way sometimes about places," said Pinckney. "It seemed to
+me that I knew Paris quite well when I went there, though I'd never been
+there before. Charleston is pretty English, anyway, and maybe it's that
+that makes it seem familiar. But I'm glad you like it. You like it, don't
+you?"
+
+"Like it!" said she. "I should think I did--It's more than liking--I love
+it."
+
+He laughed.
+
+"Better than Dublin?"
+
+It was her turn to laugh.
+
+"I never loved Dublin." She turned her head to glance at a peep of garden
+showing through a wrought iron gate. "Oh, Dublin!--don't talk to me about
+it here. I want to keep on feeling I'm here really and that there's
+nowhere else."
+
+"There isn't," said he, disclosing for the first time in his life, and
+quite unconsciously, his passion for the place where he had been born.
+"There's nowhere else but Charleston worth anything--I don't know what it
+is about, but it's so."
+
+They were passing a wall across whose top peeped an elbow of ivy geranium.
+It was as though the unseen garden beyond, tired of constraint and
+drowsily stretching, had disclosed this hint of a geranium coloured arm.
+
+Pinckney paused at a wrought iron gate and opened it.
+
+"This is Vernons," said he.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+A grosbeak was singing in the magnolia tree by the gate and the warmth of
+the morning sun was filling the garden with a heart-snatching perfume of
+jessamine.
+
+Jessamine and the faint bitterness of sun warmed foliage.
+
+It was a garden sure to be haunted by birds; not large and, though well
+kept, not trim, and sing the birds as loud as they might, they never could
+break the charm of silence cast by Time on this magic spot.
+
+In the centre of the lawn stood a dial, inscribed with the old dial
+motto:
+
+                      The Hours Pass and are Numbered.
+
+Phyl paused for a moment just as she had paused in the street, and
+Pinckney looking at her noticed again that uptilt of the head, and that
+far away look as of a person who is trying to remember or straining to
+hear.
+
+Then a voice from the house came across the broad veranda leading from the
+garden to the lower rooms.
+
+A female voice that seemed laughing and scolding at the same time.
+
+"Dinah! Dinah! bless the girl, will she never learn sense-- Dinah! Ah,
+there you are. How often have I told you to put General Grant in the sun
+first thing in the morning?-- You've been dusting! I'll dust you. Here,
+get away."
+
+Out on the veranda, parrot cage in hand, came a most surprising lady.
+Antique yet youthful, dressed as ladies were wont to dress of a morning in
+long forgotten years, bright eyed, and wrathfully agitated.
+
+"Aunt," cried Pinckney. "Here we are."
+
+The sun was in Miss Pinckney's eyes; she put the cage down, shaded her
+eyes and stared full at Phyl.
+
+"God bless me!" said Miss Pinckney.
+
+"This is Phyl," said he, as they came up to the verandah steps.
+
+Miss Pinckney, seeming not to hear him in the least, took the girl by both
+hands, and holding her so as if for inspection stared at her.
+
+Then she turned on Pinckney with a snap.
+
+"Why didn't you tell me--she's--why, she's a Mascarene. Well, of all the
+astonishing things in the world-- Child--child, where did you get that
+face?"
+
+Before Phyl could answer this recondite question, she found herself
+enveloped in frills and a vague perfume of stephanotis. Maria Pinckney had
+taken her literally to her heart, and was kissing her as people kiss small
+children, kissing her and half crying at the same time, whilst Pinckney
+stood by wondering.
+
+He thought that he knew everything about Maria Pinckney, just as he had
+fancied he knew himself till Phyl had shewn him, over there in Ireland,
+that there were a lot of things in his mind and character still to be
+known by himself. This, as regards him, seemed the special mission of Phyl
+in the world.
+
+"It's the likeness," said Miss Pinckney. "I thought it was Juliet
+Mascarene there before me in the sun, Juliet dead those years and years."
+Then commanding herself, and with one of those reverses, sudden changes of
+manner and subject peculiar to herself:
+
+"Where's your luggage?"
+
+"Abraham is bringing it along."
+
+"Abraham! Do you mean you didn't drive, _walked_ here from the station?"
+
+"Yes," said Pinckney shamefacedly, almost, and wondering what sin against
+the _covenances_ he had committed now.
+
+"And she after that journey from N'York. Richard Pinckney, you are
+a--man--I was going to have called you a fool--but it's the same thing.
+Here, come on both of you--the child must be starving. This is the
+breakfast room, Phyl--Phyl! I will never get used to that name; no matter,
+I'm getting an old woman, and mustn't grumble--mustn't grumble--umph!"
+
+She took Pinckney's walking-stick from him and, with the end of it, picked
+up a duster that the mysterious Dinah, evidently, had left lying on the
+floor.
+
+She put the duster out on the veranda, rang a bell and ordered the
+coloured boy who answered it to send in breakfast.
+
+Phyl, commanded by Miss Pinckney, sat down to table just as she was
+without removing her hat.
+
+The old lady had come to the conclusion that the newcomer must be faint
+with hunger after her journey, and when Miss Pinckney came to one of her
+conclusions, there was nothing more to be said on the matter.
+
+It was a pleasant room, chintzy and sunny; they sat down to a gate-legged
+table that would just manage to seat four comfortably whilst the urn was
+brought in, a copper urn in which the water was kept at boiling point by a
+red hot iron contained in a cylinder.
+
+Phyl knew that urn. They had one like it at Kilgobbin and she said so, but
+Miss Pinckney did not seem to hear her. There were times when this lady
+was almost rude--or seemed so owing to inattention, her bustling mind
+often outrunning the conversation or harking back to the past when it
+ought to have been in the present.
+
+Tea making, and the making of tea was a solemn rite at Vernons, absorbed
+her whole attention, but Pinckney noticed this morning that the hand, that
+old, perfect, delicately shaped hand, trembled ever so slightly as it
+measured the tea from the tortoise-shell covered tea caddy, and that the
+thin lips, lips whose thinness seemed only the result of the kisses of
+Time, were moving as though debating some question unheard.
+
+He recognised that the coming of Phyl had produced a great effect on Maria
+Pinckney. No one knew her better than he, for no one loved her so well.
+
+It was she who ordered him about, still, just as though he were a small
+boy, and sometimes as he sat watching her, so fragile, so indomitable,
+like the breath of winter would come the thought that a day would come--a
+day might come soon when he would be no longer ordered about, told to put
+his hat in the hall--which is the proper place for hats--told not to dare
+to bring cigars into the drawing-room.
+
+To Phyl, Maria Pinckney formed part of the spell that was surrounding her;
+Meeting Street had begun the weaving of this spell, Vernons was completing
+it with the aid of Maria Pinckney.
+
+The song of the Cardinal Grosbeak in the garden, the stirring of the
+window curtains in the warm morning air, the feel of morning and sunlight,
+the scent of the tea that was filling the room, the room itself
+old-fashioned yet cheerful, chintzy and sunny, all the things had the
+faint familiarity of the street. It was as though the blood of her
+mother's people coursing in her veins had retained and brought to her some
+thrill and warmth from all these things; these things they knew and loved
+so well.
+
+"There's the carriage," said Miss Pinckney, whose ears had picked out the
+sound of it drawing up at the front door. "They know where to take the
+luggage. Richard, go and see that they don't knock the bannisters about.
+Abraham is all thumbs and has no more sense in moving things than Dinah
+has'n dusting them. Only last week when Mrs. Beamis was going away, he let
+that trunk of hers slip and I declare to goodness I thought it was a
+church falling down the stairs and tearing the place to pieces."
+
+There was little of the stately languor of the South in Miss Pinckney's
+speech. She was Northern on the mother's side. But in her prejudices she
+was purely Southern, or, at least, Charlestonian.
+
+Pinckney laughed.
+
+"I don't think Phyl's luggage will hurt much even if it falls," said he.
+"English luggage is generally soft."
+
+"It's only a trunk and a portmanteau," said Phyl, as he left the room, but
+Miss Pinckney did not seem to hear; pouring herself out another cup of tea
+(she was the best and the worst hostess in the whole world) and seeming
+not to notice that Phyl's cup was empty, she was off on one of her mind
+wandering expeditions, a state of soul that sometimes carried her into the
+past, sometimes into the future, that led her anywhere and to the wrapt,
+inward contemplation of all sorts of things and subjects from the doings
+of the Heavenly Host to the misdoings of Dinah.
+
+She talked on these expeditions.
+
+"Well, I'm sure and I'm sure I don't know what folk want with the luggage
+they carry about with them nowadays-- The old folk didn't. Not Saratoga
+trunks, anyhow. I remember 'swell as if it was yesterday way back in 1880,
+when Richard's father and mother were married, old Simon Mascarene--he
+belonged to your mother's lot, the Mascarenes of Virginia-- He came to the
+wedding, and all he brought was a carpet-bag. I can see the roses on it
+still. He wore a beaver hat. They'd been out of fashion for years and
+years. So was he. Twenty dollars apiece they cost him, and his clothes
+were the same. Looked like a picture out of Dickens. Your grandmother was
+there, too, came from Richmond for the wedding, drove here in her own
+carriage. She and Simon were the last of the Virginia Mascarenes and they
+looked it. Seems to me some people never can be new nor get away from
+their ancestors. If you'd dressed Simon in kilts it wouldn't have made any
+difference, much, he'd still have been Simon Mascarene of Virginia, just
+as stiff and fine and proud and old-fashioned."
+
+"It seems funny that my people should have been the Virginia Mascarenes,"
+said Phyl, "because--because--well, I feel as if my people had always
+lived here--this feels like home--I don't know what it is, but just as I
+came into the street outside there I seemed to know it, and this house--"
+
+"Why, God bless my soul," said Miss Pinckney, whose eyes had just fallen
+on the girl's empty cup, "here have I been talking and talking, and you
+waiting for some more tea. Why didn't you ask, child?--What were you
+saying? The Virginia Mascarenes-- Oh, they often came here, and your
+mother knew this house as well as Planters. That was the name of their
+house in Richmond. But what I can't get over is your likeness to Juliet.
+She might have been your sister to look at you both--and she dead all
+these years."
+
+"Who was Juliet?"
+
+"She was the girl who died," said Miss Pinckney. "You know, although
+Richard calls me Aunt, I am not really his aunt; it's just an easy name
+for an old woman who is an interloper, a Pinckney adrift. It was this way
+I came in. Long before the Civil War, the Pinckneys lived at a house
+called Bures in Legare Street. A fine old house it was, and is still.
+Well, I was a cousin with a little money of my own, and I was left lonely
+and they took me in. James Pinckney was head of the family then, and he
+had two sons, Rupert and Charles. I might have been their sister the way
+we all lived together and loved each other--and quarrelled. Dear me, dear
+me, what is Time at all that it leaves everything the same? The same sun,
+and flowers and houses, and all the people gone or changed-- Well, I am
+trying to tell you-- Rupert fell in love with Juliet Mascarene, who lived
+here. He was killed suddenly in '61-- I don't want to talk of it--and she
+died of grief the year after. She died of grief--simply died of grief.
+Charles lived and married in 1880 when he was forty years old. He married
+Juliet's brother's daughter and Vernons came to him on the marriage. He
+hadn't a son till ten years later. That son was Richard. Charles left
+Richard all his property and Vernons on the condition that I always lived
+here--till I died, and that's how it is. I'm not Richard's aunt, it's only
+a name he gives me--I'm only just an old piece of furniture left with the
+house to him. I'm so fond of the place, it would kill me to leave it;
+places grow like that round one, though I'm sure I don't know why."
+
+"I don't wonder at you loving Vernons," said Phyl. "I was just the same
+about our place in Ireland, Kilgobbin--I thought it would kill me to leave
+it."
+
+"Tell me about it," said Miss Pinckney. Phyl told, or tried to tell.
+
+Looking back, she found between herself and Ireland the sunlight of
+Charleston, the garden with the magnolia trees where the red bird was
+singing and the jessamine casting its perfume. Ireland looked very far
+away and gloomy, desolate as Kilgobbin without its master and with the
+mist of winter among the trees.
+
+All that was part of the Past gone forever, and so great was the magic of
+this new place that she found herself recognising with a little chill that
+this Past had separated itself from her, that her feeling towards it was
+faintly tinged by something not unlike indifference.
+
+"Well," said Miss Pinckney, when she had finished, "it must be a beautiful
+old place, though I can't seem to see it-- You see, I've never been in
+Ireland and I can't picture it any more than the new Jerusalem. Now Dinah
+knows all about the new Jerusalem, from the golden slippers right up she
+sees it--I can't. Haven't got the gift of seeing things, and it seems
+strange that the A'mighty should shower it on a coloured girl and leave a
+white woman wanting; but it appears to be the A'mighty knows his own
+business, so I don't grumble. Now I'm going to show you the house and your
+room. I've given you a room looking right on the garden, this side. You've
+noticed how all our houses here are built with their sides facing the
+street and their fronts facing the garden, or maybe you haven't noticed it
+yet, but you will. 'Pears to me our ancestors had some sense in their
+heads, even though they didn't invent telegraphs to send bad news in a
+hurry and railway cars to smash people to bits, and telephones to let
+strangers talk right into one's house just by ringing a bell. Not that I'd
+let one into Vernons. You may hunt high or low, garret or basement, you
+won't find one of those boxes of impudence in Vernons--not while I have
+servants to go my messages."
+
+Miss Pinckney was right. For years she had fought the telephone and kept
+it out, making Richard Pinckney's life a tissue of small inconveniences,
+and suffering this epitaph on her sanity to be written by all sorts of
+inferior people, "Plumb crazy."
+
+She led the way from the breakfast-room and passed into the hall.
+
+The spirit of Vernons inhabited the hall. One might have fancied it as a
+stout and prosperous gentleman attired in a blue coat with brass buttons,
+shorts, and wearing a bunch of seals at his fob. Oak, brought from
+England, formed the panelling, and a great old grandfather's clock, with
+the maker's name and address, "Whewel. Coggershall," blazoned on its brass
+face, told the time, just as it had told the time when the Regent was
+ruling at St. James's in those days which seem so spacious, yet so trivial
+in their pomp and vanity.
+
+Sitting alone here of an afternoon with the sun pointing fingers through
+the high leaded windows, Whewel of Coggershall took you under his spell,
+the spell of old ghosts of long forgotten afternoons, spacious afternoons
+filled with the cawing of rooks and the drone of bees. English afternoons
+of the good old time when the dust of the post chaise was the only mark of
+hurry across miles of meadow land and cowslip weather. And then as you sat
+held by the sound of the slow-slipping seconds, maybe, from some door
+leading to the servants' quarters suddenly left open a voice would come,
+the voice of some darky singing whilst at work.
+
+A snatch of the South mixing with your dream of England and the past, and
+making of the whole a charm beyond words.
+
+That is Charleston.
+
+Set against the panelling and almost covering it in parts were prints,
+wood-cuts, engravings, portraits in black and white.
+
+Here was a silhouette of Colonel Vernon, the founder of the house, and
+another of his wife. Here was an early portrait of Jeff Davis,
+hollow-cheeked and goatee-bearded, and here was Mayflower, the property of
+Colonel Seth Mascarene, the fastest trotting horse in Virginia, worshipped
+by her owner whose portrait hung alongside.
+
+Phyl glanced at these pictures as she followed Miss Pinckney, who opened
+doors shewing the dining-room, a room rather heavily furnished, hung with
+portraits of long-faced gentlemen and ladies of old time, and then the
+drawing-room. A real drawing-room of the Sixties, a thing preserved in its
+entirety, in all its original stiffness, interesting as a valentine,
+perfumed like an old rosewood cabinet.
+
+Keepsakes and Books of Beauty lay on the centre table, a gilt clock
+beneath a glass shade marked the moment when it had ceased to keep time
+over twenty-five years ago, the antimacassars on the armchairs were not a
+line out of position; not a speck of dust lay anywhere, and the Dresden
+shepherds and shepherdesses simpered and made love in the same old
+fashion, preserving unaltered the sentiment of spring, the suggestion of
+Love, lambs, and the song of birds.
+
+"It's just as it used to be," said Miss Pinckney. "Nothing at all has been
+changed, and I dust it myself. I would just as soon let a servant loose
+here with a duster as I'd let one of the buzzards from the market-place
+loose in the larder. Those water-colours were done by Mary Mascarene,
+Juliet's sister, who died when she was fifteen; they mayn't be
+masterpieces but they're Mary's, and worth more'n if they were covered
+with gold. Mrs. Beamis sniffed when she came in here--she's the woman
+whose trunk got loose on the stairs I told you about--sniffed as if the
+place smelt musty. She's got a husband who's made a million dollars out of
+dry goods in Chicago, and she thought the room wanted re-furnishing.
+Didn't say it, but I knew. A player-piano is what she wanted. Didn't say
+it, but _I_ knew. Umph!"
+
+Miss Pinckney, having shown Phyl out, looked round the room as if to make
+sure that all the familiar ghosts were in their places, then she shut the
+door with a snap, and turning, led the way upstairs murmuring to herself,
+and with the exalted and far away look which she wore when put out.
+
+Phyl's room lay on the first landing, a bright and cheerful room papered
+with a rather cheap flower and sprig patterned paper, spring-like for all
+its cheapness, and just the background for children's heads when they wake
+up on a bright morning.
+
+A bowl of flowers stood on the dressing-table, and the open window shewed
+across the verandah a bit of the garden, where the cherokee roses were
+blooming.
+
+"This is your room," said Miss Pinckney. "It's one of the brightest in the
+house, and I hope you'll like it-- Listen!"
+
+Through the open window came the chime of church-bells.
+
+"It's the chimes of St. Michael's. You'll never want a clock here, the
+bells ring every quarter, just as they've rung for the last hundred years;
+they're the first thing I remember, and maybe they'll be the last. Well,
+come on and I'll show you some more of the house, if you're not tired and
+don't want to rest."
+
+She led the way from the room and along the corridor, opening doors and
+shewing rooms, and then up a back stairs to the top floor beneath the
+attics.
+
+The house seemed to grow in age as they ascended. Not a door in Vernons
+was exactly true in line; the old house settling itself down quietly
+through the years and assisted perhaps by the great earthquake, though
+that had left it practically unharmed, shewed that deviation from the
+right line in cornice and wainscoting and door space, which is the hall
+mark left on architecture by genius or age. The builders of the Parthenon
+knew this, the builders of Vernons did not-- Age supplied their defects.
+
+Up here the flooring of the passages and rooms frankly sagged in places,
+and the beams bellied downwards ever so little and the ceilings bowed.
+
+"I've seen all these bed-rooms filled in the old days," said Miss
+Pinckney. "We had wounded soldiers here in the war. What Vernons hasn't
+seen of American history isn't worth telling--much. Here's the nursery."
+
+She opened a door with bottle-glass panels, real old bottle-glass worth
+its weight in minted silver, and shewed Phyl into a room.
+
+"This is the nursery," said she.
+
+It was a large room with two windows, and the windows were barred to keep
+small people from tumbling into the garden. The place had the air of
+silence and secrecy that haunts rooms long closed and deserted. An
+old-fashioned paper shewing birds of Paradise covered the walls. A paper
+so old that Miss Pinckney remembered it when, as a child, she had come
+here to tea with the Mascarene children, so good that the dye of the
+gorgeous Paradise birds had scarcely faded.
+
+A beam of morning sun struck across the room, a great solid, golden bar of
+light. Phyl, as she stood for a moment on the threshold, saw motes dancing
+in the bar of light; the air was close and almost stuffy owing to the
+windows being shut. A rocking-horse, much, much the worse for wear stood
+in one corner, he was piebald and the beam of light just failed to touch
+his brush-like tail. A Noah's Ark of the good old pattern stood on the lid
+of a great chest under one of the windows, and in the centre of the room a
+heavy table of plain oak nicked by knives and stained with ink told its
+tale.
+
+There were books in a little hanging book-case, books of the 'forties' and
+'fifties': "Peter Parley," "The Child's Pilgrim's Progress," "The
+Dairy-Maid's Daughter," an odd volume of _Harper's_ _Magazine_ containing
+an instalment of "Little Dorrit," Caroline Chesebro's "Children of Light,"
+and Samuel Irenaeus Prime's "Elizabeth Thornton or the Flower and Fruit of
+Female Piety, and other Sketches." Miss Pinckney opened one of the windows
+to let in air; Phyl, who had said nothing, stood looking about her at the
+forsaken toys, the chairs, and the little three-legged stool most
+evidently once the property of some child.
+
+All nurseries have a generic likeness. It seemed to her that she knew this
+room, from the beam of light with the motes dancing in it to the
+bird-patterned paper. Kilgobbin nursery was papered with a paper giving an
+endless repetition of one subject--a man driving a pig to market--with
+that exception, the two rooms were not unlike. Yet those birds were the
+haunting charm of this place, the things that most appealed to her, things
+that seemed the ghosts of old friends.
+
+She came to the window and looked out through the bars. Across the garden
+of Vernons one caught a glimpse of other gardens, palmetto-tree tops, and
+away, beyond the battery, a hint of the blue harbour. Just the picture to
+fill an imaginative child's mind with all sorts of pleasant fancies about
+the world, and Phyl, forgetting for a moment Miss Pinckney, herself, and
+the room in which she was, stood looking out, caught in a momentary day
+dream, just like a child in one of those reveries that are part of the
+fairy tale of childhood.
+
+That touch of blue sea beyond the red roofs and green palmetto fronds gave
+her mind wings for a moment and a world to fly through. Not the world we
+live in, but the world worth living in. Old sailor-stories, old scraps of
+thought and dreams from nowhere pursued her, haunted her during that
+delightful and tantalising moment, and then she was herself again and Miss
+Pinckney was saying:
+
+"It's a pretty view and hasn't changed since I was a child. Now, in N'York
+they'd have put up skyscrapers; Lord bless you, they'd have put them up at
+a _loss_ so's to seem energetic and spoil the view. That's a N'Yorker in
+two words, happy so long as he's energetic and spoiling views--" Then
+gazing dreamily towards the touch of blue sea. "Well, I guess the Lord
+made N'Yorkers same as he made you and me. His ways are _in_scrutable and
+past finding out; so'r the ways of some of his creatures."
+
+She turned from the window, and her eye fell on the great chest by the
+other window.
+
+Going to it, she opened the lid.
+
+It was full of old toys, mostly broken. She seemed to have forgotten the
+presence of Phyl. Holding the chest's lid open, she gazed at the coloured
+and futile contents.
+
+Then she closed the lid of the chest with a sigh.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+The South dines at four o'clock--at least Charleston does.
+
+It was the old English custom and the old Irish custom, too.
+
+In the reign of William the Conqueror people dined at eleven A.M. or was
+it ten? Then, as civilisation advanced, the dinner hour stole forward. In
+the time of the Georges it reached four o'clock. In Ireland, the most
+conservative country on earth, some people even still sit down to table at
+four--in Charleston every one does.
+
+One would not change the custom for worlds, just as one would not change
+the old box pews of St. Michael's or replace the cannon on the Battery
+with modern ordinance.
+
+Richard Pinckney did not dine at home that day. He was dining with the
+Rhetts in Calhoun Street, so Miss Pinckney said as they sat down to table.
+She sniffed as she said it, for the Rhetts, though one of the best
+families in the town, were people not of her way of thinking. The two
+Rhett girls had each a motor-car of her own and drove it--abomination!
+
+The automobile ranked in her mind with the telephone as an invention of
+the devil.
+
+Phyl had not seen Richard Pinckney since the morning and now he was dining
+out. Her heart had warmed to him at the station on the way to Vernons, and
+at breakfast he had appeared to her as a quite different person to the
+Richard Pinckney who had come to Kilgobbin, more boyish and frank, less of
+a man of the world. She had not seen him since he left the room at
+breakfast-time to look after her luggage. Miss Pinckney said he had gone
+off "somewhere or another" and grumbled at him for going off leaving his
+breakfast not quite finished, she said that he was always "scatter
+braining about" either at the yacht club or somewhere else.
+
+Phyl, as she sat now at the dining-table with the dead and gone Mascarene
+men and women looking at her from the canvases on the wall, felt ever so
+slightly hurt.
+
+Youth calls to youth irrespective of sex. She felt as a young person feels
+when another young person shows indifference. Then came the thought: was
+he avoiding her? Was he angry still about the affair at Kilgobbin, or was
+it just that he did not want to be bothered talking to her, looked on her
+as a nuisance in the house, a guest of no interest to him and yet to whom
+he had to be polite?
+
+She could not tell. Neither could she tell why the problem exercised her
+mind in the way it did. Even at Kilgobbin, despite the fact of her
+antagonism towards him, Pinckney had possessed the power of disturbing her
+mind and making her think about him in a way that no one else had ever
+succeeded in doing. No one else had made her feel the short-comings in the
+household _menage_ at Kilgobbin, no one else had made her so fiercely
+critical of herself and her belongings.
+
+She did not recognise the fact, but the fact was there, that it was a
+necessity of her being to stand well in this man's eyes.
+
+When a woman falls in love with a man or a man with a woman, the first
+necessity of his or her being is to stand well in the eyes of the loved
+one, anything that may bring ridicule or adverse criticism or disdain is
+death.
+
+Phyl was not in love with Richard Pinckney, nor had she been in love with
+him at Kilgobbin, all the same the sensitiveness to appearances felt by a
+lover was there. Her anger that night when he had let her in at eleven
+o'clock was due, perhaps, less to his implied reproof then the fact that
+she had felt cheap in his eyes, and now, sitting at dinner with Miss
+Pinckney the idea that he was still angry with her was obscured by the far
+more distasteful idea that she was of absolutely no account in his eyes, a
+creature to whom he had to be civil, an interloper.
+
+Her cheeks flushed and her eyes brightened at the thought, but Miss
+Pinckney did not notice it. She had turned from the subject of the Rhetts
+and their automobiles to Charleston society in general.
+
+"Now that you've come," said she, "you will find there's not a moment you
+won't enjoy yourself if you're fond of gadding about. All the society here
+is in the hands of young people, balls and parties! The St. Cecilias give
+three balls a year. I go always, not to dance but to look on. Richard is a
+St. Cecilia--St. Cecilias? Why, it's just a club a hundred-and-forty years
+old. There are two hundred of them, all men, and they know how to
+entertain. I have been at every ball for the last half century. Not one
+have I missed. Then there's the yacht club and picnics to Summerville and
+the Isle of Palms, and bathing parties and boating by moonlight. If you
+are a gad-about you will enjoy all that."
+
+"But I'm not," said Phyl. "I've never been used to society, much. I like
+books better than people, unless they're--"
+
+"Unless they're what?"
+
+"Well--people I really like."
+
+"Well," said Miss Pinckney, "one wouldn't expect you to like people you
+_didn't_ like--there's no 'really' in liking, it's one thing or the
+other--you don't care for girls, maybe?"
+
+"I haven't seen much of them," replied Phyl, "except at school, and that
+was only for a short time. I--I ran away."
+
+"Ran away! And why did you run away?"
+
+"I was miserable; they were kind enough to me, but I wanted to get
+home--Father was alive then--I felt I had to get home or die--I can't
+explain it--It felt like a sort of madness. I had to get back home."
+
+Miss Pinckney was watching the girl, she scarcely seemed listening to
+her--Then she spoke:
+
+"Impulsive. If I wasn't sitting here in broad daylight, I'd fancy it was
+Juliet Mascarene. What makes you so like her? It's not the face so much,
+though the family likeness runs strong, still, the face is different,
+though like--It's just you yourself--well, I'm sure I don't know, seems to
+me there's a lot of things hid from us. Look at the Pringles, Anthony's
+family, the ones that live in Tradd Street. If you put their noses
+together, they'd reach to Legare Street. It runs in the family. Julian
+Pringle, he died in '70, he was just the same. Now why should a long nose
+run through a family like that, or a bad temper, or the colour of hair? I
+don't know. The world's a puzzle and the older one grows, the more it
+puzzles one."
+
+After dinner, Miss Pinckney ordered Phyl to put on her hat and they
+started out for a drive.
+
+Every day at five o'clock, weather permitting, Miss Pinckney took an
+airing. She was one of the sights of Charleston, she, and the dark
+chestnut horses driven by Abraham the coloured coachman, and the barouche
+in which she drove; a carriage of other times, one of those deathless
+conveyances turned out in Long Acre in the days when varnish was varnish
+and hand labour had not been ousted by machinery. It was painted in a
+basket-work pattern, the pattern peculiar to the English Royal carriages,
+and the whole turn-out had an excellence and a style of its own--a thing
+unpurchasable as yesterday.
+
+They drove in the direction of the Battery and here they drew up to look
+at the view. On one side of them stood the great curving row of mansions
+facing the sea, old Georgian houses and houses more modern, yet without
+offence, set in gardens where the palmetto leaves shivered in the sea wind
+and the pink mimosa mixed its perfume with the salt-scented air. On the
+other side lay the sea. Afternoon, late afternoon, is the time of all
+times to visit this spacious and sunlit place. It is then that the old
+ghosts return, if ever they return, to discuss the news brought by the
+last packet from England, the doings of Mr. Pitt, the Paris fashions.
+
+Looking seaward they would see no change in the changeless sea and little
+change in the city if they turned their eyes that way.
+
+Miss Pinckney got out and they walked a bit, inspecting the guns, each
+with its brass plate and its story.
+
+Far away in the haze stood Fort Sumter,--a fragment of history, a sea
+warrior of the past, voiceless and guarding forever the viewless. It may
+have been some recollection of the Brighton front and of the great harbour
+of Kingstown with the sun upon it, and all this seemed vaguely familiar to
+Phyl, pleasantly familiar and homely. She breathed the sea air deeply and
+then, as she turned, glancing towards the land, a recollection came to her
+of the story she had been reading that evening in the library at
+Kilgobbin--"The Gold Bug." It was near here that Legrand had found the
+treasure. He had come to Charleston to buy the mattocks and picks--no, it
+was Jupp the negro who had come to buy them.
+
+She turned to Miss Pinckney.
+
+"Did you ever read a story called 'The Gold Bug' by Edgar Allan Poe?" she
+asked. "It is about a place near here--Sullivan's Island--that's it--I
+remember now."
+
+"Why, I knew him," said Miss Pinckney.
+
+"Knew Edgar Allan Poe!" said Phyl.
+
+"I knew him when I was a child and I have sat on his knee and I can see
+his face--what a face it was! and the coat he wore--it had a velvet
+collar--his teeth were beautiful, and his hair--beautiful glossy hair it
+was, but he was not handsome as people use that expression, he was
+extraordinary, such eyes--and the most wonderful voice in the world. I'm
+seventy-five years of age and he died in October '49, and I met him three
+years before he died, so you see I was a pretty small child. It was at
+Fordham. He'd just taken a cottage there for his wife, who was ailing with
+consumption, and my aunt, Mary Pinckney, who was a friend of the Osgoods,
+took me there. It must have been summer for I remember a bird hanging in a
+cage in the sunshine, a bob-o'-link it was, he had caught it in the
+woods.
+
+"Dear Lord! I wonder where that summer day's gone to, and the
+bob-o'-link--'pears to me we aren't even memories, for memories live and
+we don't."
+
+They were walking along, Abraham slowly following with the carriage, and
+Miss Pinckney was walking in an exultant manner as though she saw nothing
+about her, as though she were treading air. Phyl had unconsciously set
+free a train of thought in the mind of Miss Pinckney, a train that always
+led to an explosion, and this is exactly how it happened and what she
+said.
+
+"But his memory will live. Look right round you, do you see his statue?"
+
+"No," said Phyl, sweeping the view. "Where is it?"
+
+"Just so, where is it? It's not here, it's not in N'York, it's not in
+Baltimore, it's not in Philadelphia, it's not in Boston. The one real
+splendid writing man that America has produced she's ashamed to put up a
+statue to. Why? Because he drank! Why, God bless my soul, Grant drank. No,
+it wasn't drink, it was Griswold. The man who hated him, the man who
+crucified his reputation and sold the remains for thirty pieces of silver
+to a publisher, Griswold, Rufus Griswold--Judas Griswold that was his real
+name, and he hid it--"
+
+Miss Pinckney had lowered her parasol in her anger, she shut it with a
+snap and then shot it up again; as she did so an automobile driven by a
+girl and which was approaching them, passed, and a young man seated by the
+girl raised his hat.
+
+It was Richard Pinckney.
+
+The girl was a very pretty brunette. This thing was too much for Miss
+Pinckney in her present temper; all her anger against Griswold seemed
+suddenly diverted to the automobile. She snorted.
+
+"There goes Richard with Venetia Frances Rhett," said she. "Ought to be
+ashamed of herself driving along the Battery in that outrageous thing;
+goodness knows, they're bad enough driven by men, scaring people to death
+and killing dogs and chickens, without girls taking to them--"
+
+She stared after the car, then signalling to Abraham, she got into the
+barouche, Phyl followed her and they continued their drive.
+
+That evening after supper Miss Pinckney's mind warmed to thoughts of the
+good old days when motor-cars were undreamed of, and stirred up by the
+recollection of Edgar Allan Poe, discharged itself of reminiscences worth
+much gold could they have been taken down by a stenographer.
+
+She was sitting with Phyl in the piazza, for the night was warm, and
+whilst a big southern moon lit the garden, she let her mind stray over the
+men and women who had made American literature in the '50's and '60's,
+many of whom she had known when young.
+
+Estelle Anna Lewis of Baltimore, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Cullen
+Bryant, Elizabeth Oakes Smith, Cornelius Mathews, Frances Sargent Osgood,
+N. P. Willis, Laughton Osborn. She had known Lowell and Longfellow, yet
+her mind seemed to cling mostly to the lesser people, writers in the
+_Southern Literary Messenger_, the _Home Journal_, the _Mirror_ and the
+_Broadway Journal_.
+
+People well-known in their day and now scarcely remembered, yet whose very
+names are capable of evoking the colour and romance of that fascinating
+epoch beyond and around the Civil War.
+
+"They're all dead and gone," said she, "and folk nowadays don't seem to
+trouble about the best of them, or remember their lines, yet there's
+nothing they write now that's as good--I remember poor Thomas Ward.
+'Flaccus' was the name he wrote under, a thin skeleton of a man always
+with his head in the air and his mind somewhere else, used to write in the
+_Knickerbocker Journal_; I heard him recite one of his things.
+
+          "'And, straining, fastened on her lips a kiss,
+          That seemed to suck the life blood from her heart.'
+
+"That stuck in my head, mostly, I expect, because Thomas Ward didn't look
+as if he'd ever kissed a girl, but they are good lines and a lot better
+than they write nowadays."
+
+The wind had risen a bit and was stirring in the leaves of the magnolias,
+white carnations growing near the sun dial shook their ruffles in the
+moonlight, and from near and far away came the sounds of Charleston,
+voices, the sound of traffic and then, a thread of tune tying moonbeams,
+magnolias, carnations and cherokee roses in a great southern bunch, came
+the notes of a banjo, plunk, plunk, and a voice from somewhere away in the
+back premises, the voice of a negro singing one of the old Plantation
+songs.
+
+Just a snatch before some closing door cut the singer off, but enough to
+make Phyl raise her head and listen, listen as though a whole world
+vaguely guessed, a world forgotten yet still warm and loving, youthful and
+sunlit, were striving to reach her and speak to her--As though Charleston
+the mysterious city that had greeted her first in Meeting Street were
+trying to tell her of things delightful, once loved, once known and
+forever vanished.
+
+As she lay awake that night with the moonlight showing through the blinds,
+the whole of that strange day came before her in pictures: the face of
+Frances Rhett troubled her, yet she did not know in the least why; it
+seemed part of the horribleness of automobiles and the anger of Miss
+Pinckney and the tribulations of Edgar Allan Poe.
+
+Then the fantastic band of forgotten _literati_ trooped before her, led by
+"Flaccus," the man who didn't look as if he had ever kissed a girl, yet
+who wrote:
+
+           "And, straining, fastened on her lips a kiss,
+           That seemed to suck the life blood from her heart."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+Phyl awoke to the early morning sunlight and the sounds of Charleston.
+
+The chimes of St. Michael's were striking six and through the summery
+sunlit air carried by the sea wind stirring the curtains came the cries of
+the streets and the rumbling of early morning carts.
+
+Oh, those negro cries! the cry of the crab-seller, the orange vendor, the
+man who sells "monkey meat" dolorous, long drawn out, lazy, you do not
+know the South till you have heard them.
+
+The sound of a mat being shaken and beaten on the piazza, adjoining that
+on which her window opened came now, and two voices in dispute.
+
+"Mistress Pinckney she told me to tell you--she mos' sholey did."
+
+"Go wash yo' face, yo' coloured trash, cummin' here wid yo' orders--skip
+out o' my piazza--'clar' to goodness I dunno what's cummin' to niggers
+dese days."
+
+Then Miss Pinckney's voice as from an upper window:
+
+"Dinah! Seth! what's that I hear? Get on with your work the pair of you
+and stop your chattering. You hear me?"
+
+When Phyl came down Richard Pinckney was in the garden smoking a cigarette
+and gathering some carnations.
+
+"They're for aunt," said he, "to propitiate her for my being late last
+night. I wasn't in till one. I'm worse even than you, you see, and the
+next time you are out till eleven and I let you in and grumble at you, you
+can hit back. Have a flower."
+
+He gave her the finest in his bunch and Phyl put it in her belt. If she
+had any doubt as to the sincerity of his welcome his manner this morning
+ought to have set her mind at rest.
+
+She stood looking at him as he tied the stalks of the flowers together and
+he was worth looking at, a fresh, bright figure, the very incarnation of
+youth and health and one might almost say innocence. Clear eyed,
+well-groomed, good to look upon.
+
+"I generally pick a flower and put it on her plate," said he, "but this
+morning she shall have a whole bunch--hope you slept all right?"
+
+"Rather," said Phyl, "I never sleep much the first night in a new
+place--but somehow--oh, I don't know how to express it--but nothing here
+seems new."
+
+"Nothing is," said he laughing, "it's all as old as the hills--you like
+it, don't you?"
+
+"It's not a question of liking--of course I like it, who could help liking
+it--it's more than that. It's a feeling I have that I will either love it
+or hate it, and I don't know which yet, all sorts of things come back to
+me here, you see, my mother knew the place--do people remember what their
+mothers and fathers knew, I wonder? But, if you understood me, it's not so
+much remembering as feeling. All yesterday it seemed to me that I had only
+to turn some corner and come upon something waiting for me, something I
+knew quite well, and the smells and sounds and things are always reminding
+me of something--you know how it is when you have forgotten a name and
+when it's lying just at the back of your mind--that's how I feel here,
+about nearly everything--strange, isn't it?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know," said the practical Pinckney. "This place is awfully
+English for one thing, sure to remind you of a lot of things in Ireland
+and England, and then there's of course the fact that you are partly
+American, but I don't see why you should ever hate it."
+
+"_Indeed_, I didn't mean that," said she flushing up at the thought that
+in trying to express herself she had made such a blunder. "I meant--I
+meant, that this something about the place that is always reminding me of
+itself might make me hate _it_."
+
+"Or love it?"
+
+"Yes, but I can't explain--the place itself no one could hate, you must
+have thought me rude."
+
+"Not a bit--not the least little bit in the world. Well, I believe you'll
+come to love it, not hate it."
+
+"It," said Phyl. "I don't know that, because I don't know what it is--this
+something that is always peeping round corners at me yet hiding itself."
+
+"_Richard_!" came Miss Pinckney's voice from the piazza where she had just
+appeared, "smoking cigarettes before breakfast, how often have I told you
+I won't have you smoking before breakfast--why, God bless my soul, what
+are you doing with all those carnations?"
+
+He flung the cigarette-end away, but she refused to kiss him on account of
+the tobacco fumes, though she took the flowers.
+
+Cigarettes, like telephones, automobiles, and the memory of Edgar Allan
+Poe, formed a subject upon which once started Miss Pinckney was hard to
+check, and whilst she poured out the tea, she pursued it.
+
+"Dr. Cotton it was who told me, the one who used to live in Tradd Street,
+he was a relative of Dr. Garden the man that gave his name to that flower
+they call the gardenia--had it sent him from somewhere in the South, but
+I'm sure I don't know where--New Orleans, I think, but it doesn't matter.
+I was saying about Dr. Cotton, _old_ Dr. Cotton of Tradd Street, he told
+me that the truth about young William Pringle's death was that he was
+black when he died, from cigarette smoking, black as a crow. Used to smoke
+before breakfast, used to smoke all day, used to smoke in his sleep, I
+b'lieve. Couldn't get rid of the pesky habit and died clinging to it,
+black as a crow. I can't abide the things. Your father used to smoke Bull
+Durham in a corn cob, or a cigar, he'd a' soon have smoked one of those
+cigarettes of yours as soon as he'd have been caught doing tatting. Don't
+tell me, there's no manhood in them, it's just vice in thimble-fulls. I'd
+much sooner see a man lying healthily under the table once in a way than
+always half fuddled, and I'd sooner be poisoned out by a green cigar now
+and then, than always having that nasty sickly cigarette smell round the
+place."
+
+"But good gracious, Aunt, I'm not a cigarette smoker, only once and away
+and at odd times."
+
+"I wasn't talking about you so much as the young men of to-day, and the
+young women, they're the worst, for they encourage the others to make
+fools of themselves, and if they're not smoking themselves they're sucking
+candy. Candy sucking and cigarette smoking is the ruin of the States.
+Those Rhett girls _live_ on candy, and they look it--pasty faces."
+
+"Why!" said he, "what grudge have you got against the Rhetts now,
+Aunt--it's as bad to take a girl's complexion away as a man's
+character--what have the Rhetts been doing to you?"
+
+Miss Pinckney did not seem to hear the question for a moment, then she
+said, speaking as if to some invisible person:
+
+"That Frances Rhett may be reckoned the belle of Charleston, that's what I
+heard old Mr. Outhwaite call her, but she's a belle I wouldn't care to
+have tied round my neck. Belle! She's no more a belle than I am, there are
+hundreds of prettier girls between here and the Battery, but she's one of
+those sort that have the knack of setting young men against each other and
+making them fight for her; she's labelled herself as a prize, which she
+isn't. I declare to goodness the world frightens me at times, the way I
+see fools going about labelled as clever men, and women your grandfathers
+wouldn't have cast an eye at going about labelled as beauties. I do
+believe if I was to give myself out as a beauty to-morrow I'd have half
+the young idiots in Charleston after me, believing me."
+
+"They're after you already," said Pinckney, "only yesterday I heard young
+Reggy Calhoun saying--"
+
+"I know," said Miss Pinckney, "and I want no more of your impudence. Now
+take yourself off if you've finished your breakfast, for Phyl and I have
+work to do."
+
+He got up and went off laughing by way of the piazza and they could hear
+his cheery voice in the garden talking to the old negro gardener.
+
+Miss Pinckney's eyes softened. She was fiddling with a spoon and when she
+spoke she seemed speaking to it, turning it about as if to examine its
+pattern all the time.
+
+"I don't know what mothers with boys feel like, but I do want to see that
+boy safe and married before I go. He's just the sort to be landed in
+unhappiness; he is, most surely; well, I don't know, there's no use in
+warning young folk, you may spank 'em for stealing the jam but you can't
+spank 'em from fooling with the wrong sort of girl."
+
+Miss Pinckney had talked the night before of Phyl's father and had
+proposed taking her this morning to the Magnolia cemetery to see the
+grave. She broke off the conversation suddenly as this fact strayed into
+her mind, and, rising up, invited Phyl to follow her to the kitchen
+premises where she had orders to give before starting.
+
+"I always look after my own house," said she, "and always will. Fine
+ladies nowadays sit in their drawing-rooms and ring their bells for the
+servants to rob them and they aren't any more respected. That's what makes
+the Charleston negro the impudentest lump of blackness under the sun, that
+and knowing they're emancipated. They've got to look on themselves as part
+of the Heavenly Host. Well, I'll have no emancipated rubbish in my house,
+and the consequence is I never lose a servant and I never get impudence.
+They'll all get a pension when they're too old to work, and good food and
+good pay whilst they're working, and I've said to them 'you're no more
+emancipated than I am, we're all slaves to our duty and the only
+difference between now and the old days is I can't sell you--and if you
+were idle enough to make me want to sell you there's no one would buy such
+rubbish nowadays.' Half the trouble is that people these times don't know
+how to talk to coloured folk, and the other half is that they don't want
+to talk to them."
+
+She led the way down passages to the great kitchen, stonebuilt, clean and
+full of sunlight. The door was open on to the yard and through an open
+side door one could get a glimpse of the scullery, the great washing up
+sink, generations old, and worn with use, and above it the drying
+dresser.
+
+There were no new-fangled cooking inventions at Vernons, everything was
+done at an open range of the good old fashion still to be found in many an
+English country house.
+
+Miss Pinckney objected to "baked meat" and the joints at Vernons were
+roast, swinging from a clockwork Jack and basted all the time with a long
+metal ladle.
+
+By the range this morning was seated an old coloured woman engaged in
+cutting up onions. This was Prue the oldest living thing in Vernons and
+perhaps in Charleston; she had been kitchen maid before Miss Pinckney was
+born, then cook, and now, long past work, she was just kept on.
+Twenty-five years ago she had been offered a pension and a cottage for
+herself but she refused both. She wanted to die where she was, so she
+said. So they let her stay, doing odd jobs and bossing the others just as
+though she were still mistress of the kitchen--as in fact she was. She had
+become a legend and no one knew her exact age, she was creepin' close to a
+hundred, and her memory which carried her back to the slave days was
+marvellous in its retentiveness.
+
+She had cooked a dinner for Jeff Davis when he was a guest at Vernons, she
+could still hear the guns of the Civil War, so she said, and the Mascarene
+family history was her Bible.
+
+She looked down on the Pinckneys as trash beside the Mascarenes, and
+interlopers, and this attitude and point of view though well known to Miss
+Pinckney was not in the least resented by her.
+
+But during the last few years this old lady's intellect had been steadily
+coming under eclipse; still insisting on doing little jobs in a futile
+sort of way, silence had been creeping upon her so that she rarely spoke
+now, and when she did, by chance, her words revealed the fact that her
+mind was dwelling in the past.
+
+Rachel, the cook, a sturdy coloured woman with her head bound up in an
+isabelle-coloured handkerchief was standing by the kitchen table on which
+she was resting the fore-finger of her left hand, whilst with the right
+she was turning over some fish that had just been sent in from the
+fishmonger's. She seemed in a critical mood, but what she said to Miss
+Pinckney was lost to Phyl whose attention was attracted by a chuckling
+sound from near the range.
+
+It was Prue.
+
+The old woman at sight of Phyl had dropped the knife and the onion on
+which she had been engaged. She was now seated, hands on knees, chuckling
+and nodding to the girl, then, scarcely raising her right hand from her
+knee, she made a twiddling movement with the fore-finger as if to say,
+"come here--come here--I have something to tell you."
+
+Phyl glanced at Miss Pinckney who was so taken up with what Rachel was
+saying about the fish that she noticed nothing. Then she looked again at
+Prue and, unable to resist the invitation, came towards her. The old woman
+caught her by the arm so that she had to bend her head.
+
+"Miss Julie," whispered Prue, "Massa Pinckney told me tell yo' he be at de
+gate t'night same time 'slas' night. Done you let on 's I told yo'," she
+gave the arm a pinch and relapsed into herself chuckling whilst Phyl stood
+with a little shiver, half of relief at her escape from that bony clutch,
+half of dread--a vague dread as though she had come in contact with
+something uncanny.
+
+She came to the table again and stood without looking at Prue, whilst Miss
+Pinckney completed her orders, then, that lady, having finished her
+business and casting an eye about the place on the chance of finding any
+dirt or litter, saw Prue and asked how she was doing.
+
+"Well, miss, she's doin' fa'r," replied Rachel, "but I'm t'inking she's
+not long fore de new Jerusalem. Sits didderin' dere 'n' smokin' her pipe,
+'n' lays about her wid her stick times, fancyin' there'er dogs comin' into
+de kitchen."
+
+"A dog bit her once way back in the '60's," said Miss Pinckney; "they used
+to keep dogs here then. She don't want for anything?"
+
+"Law no, miss, _she_ done want for nothin'; look at her now laffin' to
+herself. Haven't seen her do that way dis long time. Hi, Prue, what yo'
+laffin' at?"
+
+Prue, instead of answering leant further forward hiding her face without
+checking her merriment.
+
+"Crazy," said Miss Pinckney, "but it's better to be laughing crazy than
+crying crazy like some folk--here's a quarter and get her some candy."
+
+She put the coin on the table and marched off followed by Phyl.
+
+"She wanted to tell me something," said Phyl as they were driving to the
+cemetery; "she beckoned me to her and took hold of my arm and whispered
+something."
+
+"What did she say?"
+
+Phyl, somehow, could not bring herself to betray that crazy confidence.
+
+"I don't know, exactly, but she called me Miss Julie."
+
+"Oh--she called you Miss Julie," said the other. Then she relapsed into
+thought and nothing more was said till they reached their destination.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+Charleston's Magnolia Cemetery like everything else about Charleston shows
+the touch of the War. Here the soldiers lie who fought so bravely under
+Wade Hampton and here lies the general himself.
+
+Go south, go north, and you will not find a place touched by the War where
+you will not find noble memories, echoes of heroic deeds, legends of brave
+men.
+
+Miss Pinckney was by no means a peace party and this thought was doubtless
+in her head as she stood surveying the confederate graves. There were
+relations here and men whom she had known as a child.
+
+"That's the War," said she, "and people abuse war as if it was the worst
+thing in the world, insulting the dead. 'Clare to goodness it makes me
+savage to hear the pasty-faces talking of war and making plans to abolish
+it. It's like hearing a lot of children making plans to abolish thunder
+storms. Where would America be now without the War, and where'd her
+history be? You tell me that. It'd just be the history of a big canning
+factory. These men aren't dead, they're still alive and fighting--fighting
+Chicago; fighting pork, and wheat, and cotton and railway-stock and
+everything else that's abolishing the soul of the nation.
+
+"There's Matt Carey's grave. He had everything he wanted, and he wasn't
+young. Now-a-days he'd have been driving in his automobile killing old
+women and chickens, or tarpoon fishing down 'n Florida letting the world
+go rip, or full of neur--what do they call it--that thing that gets on
+their nerves and makes crazy old men of them at forty--I've forgotten.
+_He_ didn't. He took up a gun and died like a lion, and he was a
+middle-aged business man. No one remembers him, I do believe, except,
+maybe me, clean forgotten--and yet he helped to put a brick into the only
+monument worth ten cents that America has got--The War.
+
+"And some northern people would say 'nice sort of brick, seeing he was
+fighting on the wrong side.' Wrong side or right side he was fighting for
+something else than his own hand. _That's_ the point."
+
+She closed up her lips and they went on. Phyl found her father's grave in
+a quiet spot where the live-oaks stood, the long grey moss hanging from
+their branches.
+
+Miss Pinckney, having pointed out the grave, strayed off, leaving the girl
+to herself.
+
+The gloomy, strange-looking trees daunted Phyl, and the grave, too young
+yet to have a headstone, drew her towards it, yet repelled her.
+
+It was like meeting in a dream some one she had loved and who had turned
+into a stranger in a strange place.
+
+Just as Charleston had dimmed Ireland in her mind as a bright light dims a
+lesser light, so had some influence come between her and the memory of her
+father. That memory was just as distinct as ever, but grief had died from
+it, as though Time had been at work on it for years and years.
+
+The Phyl who had stepped out of the south-bound express and the girl of
+this morning were the same in mind and body, but in soul and outlook they
+had changed and were changing as though the air of the south had some
+magic in it, some food that had always been denied her and which was
+necessary for her full being.
+
+Miss Pinckney returned from her wanderings amongst the graves and they
+turned to the gate.
+
+"It used to seem strange to me coming here when I was a girl," said she.
+"It always seemed as if I was come to visit people who could never come to
+see me. I used to pity them, but one gets older and one gets wiser, and I
+fancy it's they that pity us, if they can see us at all, which isn't often
+likely."
+
+"D'you think they come back?" said Phyl.
+
+"My dear child, if I told you what I thought, you'd say I was plum crazy.
+But I'll say this. What do you think the Almighty made folk for? to live a
+few years and then lie in a grave with folk heaping flowers on them?
+There's no such laziness in nature. I don't say there aren't folk who live
+their lives like as if they were dead, covered with flowers and never
+moving a hand to help themselves like some of those N'York women--but they
+don't count. They're against nature and I guess when they die they die,
+for they haven't ever lived." Then, vehemently: "Of course, they come
+back, not as ghosts peekin' about and making nuisances of themselves, but
+they come back as people--which is the sensible way and there's nothing
+unsensible in nature. Mind you, I don't say there aren't ghosts, there
+are, for I've seen 'em; I saw Simon Pinckney, the one that died of drink,
+as plain as my hand same day he died, but he was a no account. He hadn't
+the making of a man, so he couldn't come back as a man, and he wasn't a
+woman, so he couldn't come back as a woman; so he came back as a ghost. He
+was always an uneasy creature, else I don't suppose he'd have come back as
+anything. When a man wears out a suit of clothes he doesn't die, he gets a
+new one, and when he wears out a body--which isn't a bit more than a suit
+of clothes--he gets a new one. If he hasn't piled up grit enough in life
+to pay for a new body, he goes about without one and he's a ghost. That's
+my way of thinking and I know--I know--n'matter."
+
+She put up her sunshade and they returned, driving through the warm spring
+weather. Phyl was silent, the day had taken possession of her. The scent
+of pink mimosa filled the air, the blue sky shewed here and there a few
+feather traces of white cloud and the wind from the sea seemed the very
+breath of the southern spring.
+
+It seemed to Phyl as they drove that never before had she met or felt the
+loveliness of life, never till this moment when turning a corner the song
+of a bird from a garden met them with the perfume of jessamine.
+
+Charleston is full of surprises like that, things that snatch you away
+from the present or catch you for a moment into the embrace of some old
+garden lurking behind a wrought iron gate, or tell you a love story no
+matter how much you don't want to hear it--or tease you, if you are a
+practical business man, with some other futility which has nothing at all
+to do with "real" life.
+
+It seemed to Phyl as though, somehow, the whole of the morning had been
+working up to that moment, as though the perfume of the jessamine and the
+song of the birds were the culmination of the meaning of all sorts of
+things seen and unseen, heard and unheard.
+
+The message of the crazy old negress came back to her. Who was Miss Julie?
+and who was the Mr. Pinckney that was to meet her, and where was the gate
+at which they were to meet in such a secretive manner? Was it just
+craziness, or was it possible that this was some real message delivered
+years and years ago. A real lover's message which the old woman had once
+been charged to deliver and which she had repeated automatically and like
+a parrot.
+
+Miss Julie--could it be possible that she meant Miss Juliet--The Juliet
+Mascarene to whom she, Phyl, bore such a strong family likeness, could it
+be possible that the likeness had started the old woman's mind working and
+had recalled the message of a half-a-century ago to her lips.
+
+It was a fascinating thought. Juliet had been in love with one of the
+Pinckneys and this message was from a Pinckney and one day, perhaps, most
+likely a fine spring day like to-day, Pinckney had given the negro girl a
+message to give to Juliet, and the lovers and the message and the bright
+spring day had vanished utterly and forever leaving only Prue.
+
+The gate would no doubt be the garden gate. Phyl in all her life had never
+given a thought to Love, she had known nothing of sentiment, that much
+abused thing which is yet the salt of life, and Romance for her had meant
+Adventure; all the same she was now weaving all sorts of threads into
+dreams and fancies. What appealed to her most was her own likeness to
+Juliet, the girl who had died so many, many years ago. A likeness
+incomplete enough, according to Miss Pinckney, yet strong enough to awaken
+memories in the mind of Prue.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+"Miss Pinckney," said Phyl, as they sat at luncheon that day, "you
+remember you said yesterday that I was like Juliet Mascarene?"
+
+"So you are," replied the other, "though the likeness is more noticeable
+at first sight as far as the face goes--I've got a picture of her I will
+show you, it's upstairs in her room, the one next yours on the same
+piazza--why do you ask me?"
+
+"I was thinking," replied Phyl, "that the old woman in the
+kitchen--Prue--may have meant Juliet when she called me Julie, and that it
+was the likeness that set her mind going."
+
+"It's not impossible. Prue's like that crazy old clock Selina Pinckney
+left me in her will. It'd tell you the day and the hour _and_ the minute
+and the year and the month and the weather. A little man came out if it
+was going to rain and a little woman if it was going to shine. But if you
+wanted to know the time, it couldn't tell you nearer than the hour before
+last of the day before yesterday, and if you sneezed near it, it'd up and
+strike a hundred and twenty. I gave it to Rachel. She said it was 'some'
+clock, said it was a dandy for striking and the time didn't matter as the
+old kitchen clock saw to that. It's the same with Prue, the time doesn't
+matter, and they look up to her in the kitchen mostly, I expect, because
+she's an oddity, same as Selina Pinckney's clock. Seems to me anything
+crazy and useless is reckoned valuable these days, and not only among
+coloured folk but whites--Dinah, hasn't Mr. Richard come in yet?"
+
+"No, Mistress Pinckney," replied the coloured girl, who had just entered
+the room, "I haven't seen no sign of him."
+
+"Running about without his luncheon," grumbled the lady, "said he had a
+deal in cotton on. I might have guessed it." Then when Dinah had left the
+room and talking half to herself, "There's nothing Richard seems to think
+of but business or pleasure. I'm not saying anything against the boy, he's
+as good and better than any of the rest, but like the rest of them his
+character wants forming round something real. It wasn't so in the old
+days, they were bad enough then and drank a lot more, but they had in them
+something that made for something better than business or pleasure. Matt
+Curry didn't go out and get killed for business or pleasure, and all the
+old Pinckneys didn't fight in the war or fight with one another for
+business or pleasure. There's more in life than fooling with girls or
+buying cotton or sailing yacht races, but Richard doesn't seem to see it.
+I did think that having a ward to look after would have sobered him a bit
+and helped to form his character--well, maybe it will yet."
+
+"I don't want to be looked after," said Phyl flushing up, "and if Mr.
+Pinckney--" she stopped. What she was going to say about Pinckney was not
+clear in her mind, clouded as it was with anger--anger at the thought that
+she was an object to be looked after by her "guardian," anger at the
+implication that he was not bothering to look after her, being too much
+engaged in the business of fooling with girls and buying cotton, and a
+reasonable anger springing from and embracing the whole world that held
+his beyond Vernons.
+
+"Yes?" said Miss Pinckney.
+
+"Oh, nothing," replied the other, trying to laugh and making a failure of
+the business. "I was only going to say that Mr. Pinckney must have lots to
+do instead of wasting his time looking after strangers, and if he hadn't I
+don't want to be looked after. I don't want him to bother about
+me--I--I--" It did not want much more to start her off in a wild fit of
+weeping about nothing, her mind for some reason or other unknown even to
+herself was worked up and seething just as on that day at Kilgobbin when
+the woes of Rafferty had caused her to make such an exhibition of herself
+in the library. Anything was possible with Phyl when under the influence
+of unreasoning emotion like this, anything from flinging a knife at a
+person to breaking into tears.
+
+Miss Pinckney knew it. Without understanding in the least the
+psychological mechanism of Phyl, she knew as a woman and by some
+electrical influence the state of her mind.
+
+She rose from the table.
+
+"Stranger," said she, taking the other by the arm, "you call yourself a
+stranger. Come along upstairs with me. I want to show you something."
+
+Still holding her by the arm, caressingly, she led her off across the hall
+and up the stairs; on the first floor landing she opened a door; it was
+the door of the bedroom next to Phyl's, a room of the same shape and size
+and with the same view over the garden.
+
+Just as the drawing-room had been kept in its entirety without alteration
+or touch save the touch of a duster, so had this room, the bedroom of a
+girl of long ago, a girl who would now have been a woman old and
+decrepit--had she lived.
+
+"Here's the picture you wanted to see," said Miss Pinckney leading Phyl up
+to a miniature hanging on the wall near the bed. "That's Juliet, and if
+you don't see the family likeness, well, then, you must be blind.--And you
+calling yourself a stranger!"
+
+Phyl looked. It was rather a stiff and finicking little portrait; she
+fancied it was like herself but was not sure, the colour of the hair was
+almost the same but the way it was dressed made a lot of difference, and
+she said so.
+
+"Well, they did their hair different then," replied Miss Pinckney, "and
+that reminds me, it's near time you put that tail up." She sat down in a
+rocker by the window and with her hands on her knees contemplated Phyl.
+"I'm your only female relative, and Lord knows I'm far enough off, anyhow
+I'm something with a skirt on it, and brains in its head, and that's what
+a girl most wants when she comes to your age. You'll be asked to parties
+and things here and you'll find that tail in the way; it's good enough for
+a schoolgirl, but you aren't that any longer. I'll get Dinah to do your
+hair, something simple and not too grown-up--you don't mind an old woman
+telling you this--do you?"
+
+"Indeed I don't," said Phyl. "I don't care how my hair is done, you can
+cut it off if you like, but I don't want to go to parties."
+
+"Well, maybe you don't," said Miss Pinckney, "but, all the same, we'll get
+Dinah to look to your hair. Dinah can do most anything in that way; she'd
+get twice the wages as a lady's maid elsewhere and she knows it, but she
+won't go. I've told her over and again to be off and better herself, but
+she won't go, sticks to me like a mosquito. Well, this was Juliet's room
+just as that's her picture; she died in that bed and everything is just
+exactly as she left it. It was kept so after her death. You see, it wasn't
+like an ordinary person dying, it was the tragedy of the whole thing that
+stirred folk so, dying of a broken heart for the man she was in love with.
+It set all the crazy poets off like that clock of Selina Pinckney's I was
+telling you of. The _News and Courier_ had yards of obituary notice and
+verses. It made people forget the war for a couple of days. There's all
+her books on that shelf and the diary the poor thing used to keep. Open
+one of the drawers in that chest."
+
+Phyl did so. The drawer was packed with clothes neatly folded. The air
+became filled with the scent of lavender.
+
+"There are her things, everything she ever had when she died. It may seem
+foolish to keep everything like that, foolish and sentimental, and if
+she'd died of measles or fallen down the stairs and killed herself maybe
+her old things would have been given away, but dying as she did--well,
+somehow, it didn't seem right for coloured girls to be parading about in
+her things. Mrs. Beamis sniffed here just as she sniffed in the
+drawing-room, and she said, one night, something about sentiment, as if
+she was referring to chicken cholera. I knew what she meant. She meant we
+were a pack of fools. Well, she ought to know. I reckon she ought to be a
+judge of folly--the life she leads in Chicago. Umph!--Now I'm going to lie
+down for an hour, and if you take my advice you'll do the same. The middle
+of the day was meant to rest in. You can get to your room by the window."
+
+She kissed Phyl and went off.
+
+Phyl, instead of going to her room, took her seat in the rocker and looked
+around her. The place held her, something returned to it that had been
+driven away perhaps by Miss Pinckney's cheerful and practical presence,
+the faint odour of lavender still clung to the air, and the silence was
+unbroken except for a faint stirring of the window curtains now and then
+to the breeze from outside. Everything was, indeed, just as it had been
+left, the toilet tidies and all the quaint contraptions of the '50's and
+'60's in their places. On the wall opposite the bed hung several water
+colours evidently the work of that immature artist Mary Mascarene, a watch
+pocket hung above the bed, a thing embroidered with blue roses, enough to
+disturb the sleep of any aesthete, yet beautiful enough in those old days.
+There was only one stain mark in the scrupulous cleanliness and neatness
+of the place--a panel by the window, once white painted but now dingy-grey
+and scored with lines. Phyl got up and inspected it more closely.
+Children's heights had evidently been measured here. There was a scale of
+feet marked in pencil, initials, and dates. Here was "M. M.," probably
+Mary Mascarene, "2 ft. 6 inches. Nineteen months," and the date "April,
+1845," and again a year later, "M. M. 2 ft. 9-1/2 inches, May, 1846." So
+she had grown three and a half inches in a year. "J. M."--Juliet without
+doubt--"3 feet, 3 years old, 1845." Juliet was evidently the elder--so it
+went on right into the early '60's, mixed here and there with other
+initials, amongst which Phyl made out "J. J." and "R. P.," children maybe
+staying at the house and measured against the Mascarene children--children
+now old men and women, possibly not even that. It was in the kindly spirit
+of Vernons not to pass a painter's brush over these scratchings, records
+of the height of a child that lingered only in the memory of the old
+house.
+
+Phyl turned from them to the bookshelf and the books it contained. "Noble
+Deeds of American Women," "Precept on Precept," "The Dairyman's Daughter,"
+and the "New England Primer"--with a mark against the verses left "by John
+Rogers to his wife and nine small children, and one at the breast, when he
+was burned at the stake at Smithfield in 1555." There were also books of
+poetry, Bryant, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, "Powhatan, a metrical romance
+in seven cantos by Seba Smith," and several others.
+
+Phyl did something characteristic. She gathered every single book into a
+pile in her arms and sat down on the floor with them to have a feast. This
+devourer of books was omnivorous in her tastes, especially if it were a
+question of sampling, and she had enough critical faculty to enable her to
+enjoy rubbish. She lingered over Powhatan and its dedication to the "Young
+People of the United States" and then passed on to the others till she
+came to a little black book. It was Juliet Mascarene's diary and
+proclaimed the fact openly on the first page with the statements: "I am
+twelve years old to-day and Aunt Susan has given me this book to keep as
+my diary and not to forget to write each day my evil deeds as well as my
+good, which I will if I remember them. She didn't give me anything else. I
+had to-day a Paris doll from Cousin Jane Pinckney who has winking eyes
+which shut when you lay her on her back and pantalettes with scallops
+which take off and on and a trunk of clothes with a little key to it.
+Father gave me a Bible and I have had other things too numerous for
+mension.
+
+                                              "Signed Juliet Mascarene."
+
+with never a date.
+
+Then:
+
+"I haven't done any evil deeds, or good ones that I can remember, so I
+haven't written in this book for maybe a week. Mary and I, we went to a
+party at the Pinckneys to-day at Bures, the Calhoun children and the
+Rutledges were there and we had Lady Baltimore cake and a good time. Mary
+wore her blue organdie and looked very nice and Rupert Pinckney was there,
+he's fourteen and wouldn't talk to the children because they were too
+small for him, I expect. He told me he was going to have a pony same as
+Silas Rhett that threw him in the market place Wednesday last and galloped
+all the way to Battery before he was stopped, only his was to be a better
+one with more shy in it, said Silas Rhett ought to be tied on next time.
+Then old Mr. Pinckney came in and shewed us a musical snuff-box and we
+went home, and driving back Mary kicked me on the shin by axident and I
+pinched her and she didn't cry till we'd got home, then she began to roar
+and mother said it was my ungovernable temper, and I said I wished I was
+dead.
+
+"I shan't go to any more parties because it's always like that after them.
+Father told me I was to pray for a new heart and not to have any supper
+but Prue has brought me up a cake of her own making. So that's one evil
+deed to put down--It's just like Mary, any one else would have cried right
+out in the carriage and not bottled it up and kept it up till she got
+home.
+
+"This is a Friday and Prue says Friday parties are always sure to end in
+trouble for the devil puts powder in the cakes and the only way to stop
+him is to turn them three times round when they're baking and touch them
+each time with a forked hazel twig."
+
+Phyl read this passage over twice. The mention of Prue interested her
+vastly. Prue even then had evidently been a favourite of Juliet's.
+
+She read on hoping to find the name of the coloured woman again, but it
+did not occur.
+
+The diary, indeed, did not run over more than a year and a half, but
+scrappy as it was and short in point of time, the character of Juliet
+shone forth from it, uneasy, impetuous, tormenting and loving.
+
+Many books could not have depicted the people round Vernons so well as
+this scribbling of a child. Mary Mascarene, quiet, rather a spoil-sport
+and something of a tale-teller, dead and gone Pinckneys and Rhetts. Aunt
+Susan, Cousin Jane Pinckney, Uncle George who beat his coloured man,
+Darius, because the said Darius had let him go out with one brass button
+missing from his blue coat. Simon Pinckney--the one whose ghost
+walked--and who "fell down in the garden because he had the hiccups,"
+these and others of their time lived in the little black book given by the
+miserly Aunt Susan "to keep as my diary and not to forget to write each
+day my evil deeds as well as my good."
+
+Towards the end there was another reference to Rupert Pinckney, the tragic
+lover of the future:
+
+"Rupert Pinckney was here to-day with his mother to luncheon and we had a
+palmetto salad and mother said when he was gone he was the most frivulus
+boy in Charleston, whatever that was, and too much of a dandy, but father
+said he had stuff in him and Aunt Susan, who was here too, said 'Yes,
+stuff and nonsense,' and I said he could ride his pony without tumbling
+off like Silas Rhett, anyhow.
+
+"Then they went on talking about his people and how they hadn't as much
+money as they used to have, and Aunt Susan said that was so, and the worst
+of it is they're spending more money than they used to spend, and father
+said, well, anyhow, that wasn't a very common complaint with _some_ people
+and he left the room. He never stays long in the room with Aunt S.
+
+"I think the Pinckneys are real nice."
+
+"Mr. Simon Mascarene from Richmond and his wife came to see us to-day and
+stay for a week. They drove here in their own carriage with four brown
+horses and you could not tell which horse was which, they are so alike,
+they are very fine people and Mr. M. has a red face--not the same red as
+Mr. Simon Pinckney's, but different somehow--more like an apple, and a
+high nose which makes him look very grand and fine." The same Simon
+Mascarene, no doubt, that came to the wedding of Charles Pinckney in 1880
+as old Simon Mascarene, the one whose flowered carpet bag still lingered
+in the memory of Miss Pinckney.
+
+"Mrs. M. is very fine too and beautifully dressed and mother gave her a
+great bouquet of geraniums and garden flowers with a live green
+caterpillar looping about in the green stuff which nobody saw but me, till
+it fell on Mrs. M.'s knee and she screamed. There is to be a big party
+to-morrow and the Pinckneys are coming and Rupert."
+
+There the diary ended.
+
+Phyl put it back on the shelf with the books.
+
+She had not the knowledge necessary to visualise the people referred to,
+those people of another day when Planters kept open house, when slaves
+were slaves and Bures the home of the old gentleman with the musical
+snuff-box, but she could visualise Juliet as a child. The writing in the
+little book had brought the vision up warm from the past and it seemed
+almost as though she might suddenly run in from the sunlit piazza that lay
+beyond the waving window curtains.
+
+There was a bureau in one corner, or rather one of those structures that
+went by the name of Davenports in the days of our fathers. Phyl went to it
+and raised the lid. She did so without a second thought or any feeling
+that it was wrong to poke about in a place like this and pry into secrets.
+Juliet seemed to belong to her as though she had been a sister, her own
+likeness to the dead girl was a bond of attraction stronger than a family
+tie, and Juliet's mournful love story completed the charm.
+
+The desk contained very little, a seal with a dove on it, some sticks of
+spangled sealing-wax, a paper knife of coloured wood with a picture of
+Benjamin Franklin on the handle and some sheets of note-paper with gilt
+edges.
+
+Phyl noticed that the gilt was still bright.
+
+She took out the paper knife and looked at it, and then held the blade to
+her lips to feel the smoothness of it, drawing it along so that her lips
+touched every part of the blade.
+
+Then she put it back, and as she did so a little panel at the back of the
+desk fell forward disclosing a cache containing a bundle of letters tied
+round with ribbon.
+
+Phyl started as though a hand had been laid on her arm. The point of the
+paper knife must have touched the spring of the panel, but it seemed as
+though the desk had suddenly opened its hand, closed and clasping those
+letters for so many years. For a moment she hesitated to touch them. Then
+she thought of all the time they had lain there and a feeling that Juliet
+wouldn't mind and that the old bureau had told its secret without being
+asked, overcame her scruples. She took the letters and sitting down again
+on the floor, untied the ribbon.
+
+There were no envelopes. Each sheet of paper had been carefully folded and
+sealed with green wax, with the seal leaving the impression of the dove.
+There was no address, and they had evidently been tied together in
+chronological order. But the handwriting was the handwriting of Juliet
+Mascarene fully formed now.
+
+The first of these things ran:
+
+"It wasn't my fault. I didn't create old Mr. Gadney and send him to church
+to keep us talking in the street like that. I did _not_ see you. You
+couldn't have passed, and if you did you must have been invisible. I feel
+dreadfully wicked writing to you. Do you know this is a clandestine
+correspondence and must stop at once? You mustn't _ever_ write to me
+again, nor I mustn't see you. Of course I can't help seeing you in church
+and on the street--and I can't help thinking about you. They'll be making
+me try and stop breathing next. I don't care a button for the whole lot of
+them. It was all Aunt Susan's doing, only for her my people would never
+have quarrelled with yours and I wouldn't have been so miserable. I feel
+sometimes as if I could just take a boat and sail off to somewhere where I
+would never see any people again.
+
+"It was clever of you to send your letter by P. This goes to you by the
+same hand."
+
+There was no signature and no date.
+
+Phyl turned the sheet of paper over to make sure again that there was no
+address. As she did so a faint, quaint perfume came to her as though the
+old-fashioned soul of the letter were released for a moment. It was
+vervain, the perfume of long ago, beloved of the Duchesse de Chartres and
+the ladies of the forties.
+
+She laid the letter down and took up the next.
+
+"It is _wicked_ of you. My people never would be so mean as to quarrel
+with your people or look down on them because they have lost money. Why
+did you say that--and you know I said in my last letter that I could not
+write to you again. I was shocked when P. pinched my arm as I was passing
+her on the stairs and handed me your note--Don't you--don't you--how shall
+I say it? Don't you think you and I could meet and speak to one another
+somewhere instead of always writing like this? Somewhere where no one
+could see us. Do you know--do you know--do you, ahem! O dear me--know that
+just inside our gate there's a little arbour. The tiniest place. When I
+was a child I used to play there with Mary at keeping house, there's a
+seat just big enough for two and we used to sit there with our dolls. No
+one can see the gate from the lower piazza, and the gate doesn't make any
+noise opening, for father had it oiled--it used to squeak a bit from rust,
+but it doesn't now and I'll be there to-morrow night at nine--in the
+arbour--at least I _may_ be there. I just want to tell you in a way I
+can't in a letter that my people aren't the sort of folk to sneer at any
+one because they have lost money.
+
+"I am sending this by P.
+
+"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 sex 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 institution 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 god-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 space, 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 space 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.
+
+The garden was talking to her, the night, the very bushes that clasped her
+in a half embrace; perfumes, moonlight, the voice of the wind, all were
+part of the spell that bound her, held her, whispered to her. It was as
+though the love letter of Juliet had led her here to show her as in a
+glass darkly the vainness of love in the vainness of life.
+
+Vainly, for as she sat watching in imagination the forms of the lost
+lovers parting there at the gate, suddenly there came upon her a stirring
+of the soul, a joyous uplifting as though wings had been given to her mind
+for one wild second raising it to the heights beyond earthly knowledge.
+
+"Love can never die."
+
+It was as though some ghostly voice had whispered this fact in her ear.
+
+Juliet was not dead nor the man she loved, changed maybe but not dead. In
+some extraordinary way she knew it as surely as though she herself had
+once been Juliet.
+
+Religion to Phyl had meant little, the Bible a book of fair promises and
+appalling threats, vague promises but quite definite threats. As a quite
+small child she had gathered the impression that she was sure to be damned
+unless she managed to convert herself into a quite different being from
+the person she knew herself to be. Death was the supreme bogey, the future
+life a thing not to be thought of if one wanted to be happy.
+
+Yet now, just as if she had been through it all, the truth came flooding
+on her like a golden sea, the truth that life never loses touch with life,
+that the body is only a momentary manifestation of the ever living
+spirit.
+
+Meeting Street, the old house so full of memories, Juliet's letters, the
+garden, they had all been stretching out arms to her, trying to tell her
+something, whispering, suggesting, and now all these vague voices had
+become clear, as though strengthened by the moonlight and the mystery of
+night.
+
+Clear as lip-spoken words came the message:
+
+"You have lived before and we say this to you, we, the things that knew
+you and loved you in a past life."
+
+A step that halted outside close to the garden gate broke the spell, the
+gate turned on its hinges shewing through its trellis work the form of a
+man. It was Pinckney just returned from some supper-party or club.
+
+Phyl caught her breath back. Suddenly, and at the sight of Pinckney,
+Prue's words of that morning entered her mind.
+
+"Miss Julie, Massa Pinckney told me tell yo' he be at de gate t'night
+same's las' night. Done you let on as I told you."
+
+And here he was, the man who had been occupying her thoughts and who was
+beginning to occupy her dreams, and here she was as though waiting for him
+by appointment.
+
+But there was much more than that. Worlds and worlds more than that, a
+whole universe of happiness undreamed of.
+
+She rose from the seat and the parted bushes rustled faintly as they
+closed behind her.
+
+Pinckney, who had just shut the gate, heard the whisper of the leaves, he
+turned and saw a figure standing half in shadow and half in moonlight. For
+a moment he was startled, fancying it a stranger, then he saw that it was
+Phyl.
+
+"Hullo," said he. "Why, Phyl, what are you doing here?"
+
+The commonplace question shattered everything like a false note in music.
+
+"Nothing," she answered. Then without a word more she ran past him and
+vanished into the house.
+
+Pinckney cast the stump of his cigar away.
+
+"What on earth is the matter with her now?" said he to himself. "What on
+earth have I done?"
+
+The word she had uttered carried half a sob with it, it might have been
+the last word of a quarrel.
+
+He stood for a moment glancing around. The wild idea had entered his mind
+that she had been there to meet some one and that his intrusion had put
+her out.
+
+But there was no one in the garden; nothing but the trees and the flowers,
+wind shaken and lit by the moon, the same placid moon that had lit the
+garden of Vernons for the lovers of whom he knew nothing except by
+hearsay, and for whom he cared nothing at all.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+When Phyl awoke from sleep next morning, the brightness of the South had
+lost some of its charm.
+
+Something magical that had been forming in her mind and taking its life
+from Vernons had been shattered last night by Pinckney's commonplace
+question.
+
+This morning, looking back on yesterday, she could remember details but
+she could not recapture the essence. The exaltation that had raised her
+above and beyond herself. It was like the remembrance of a rose contrasted
+with the reality.
+
+The whole day had been working up to that moment in the little arbour,
+when her mind, tricked or led, had risen to heights beyond thought, to
+happiness beyond experience, only to be cast down from those heights by
+the voice of reality.
+
+The thing was plain enough to common sense; she had let herself be
+over-ruled by Imagination, working upon splendid material. Prue's message,
+her own likeness to Juliet, Juliet's letters, the little arbour, those and
+the magic of Vernons had worked upon her mind singly and together,
+exalting her into a soul-state utterly beyond all previous experience.
+
+It was as though she had played the part of Juliet for a day, suffered
+vaguely and enjoyed in imagination what Juliet had suffered and enjoyed in
+life, known Love as Juliet had known it--for a moment.
+
+The brutal touch of the Real coming at the supreme moment to shatter and
+shrivel everything.
+
+And the strange thing was that she had no regrets.
+
+Looking back on yesterday, the things that had happened seemed of little
+interest. Sleep seemed to have put an Atlantic ocean between her and
+them.
+
+Coming down to breakfast she found Pinckney just coming in from the
+garden; he said nothing about the incident of the night before, nor did
+she, there were other things to talk about. Seth, one of the darkies, had
+been 'kicking up shines,' he had given impudence to Miss Pinckney that
+morning. Impudence to Miss Pinckney! You can scarcely conceive the meaning
+of that statement without a personal knowledge of Miss Pinckney, and a
+full understanding of the magic of her rule.
+
+Seth was, even now, packing up the quaint contraptions he called his
+luggage, and old Darius, the coloured odd job man, was getting a barrow
+out of the tool-house to wheel the said luggage to Seth's grandmother's
+house, somewhere in the negro quarters of the town. The whole affair of
+the impudence and dismissal had not taken two minutes, but the effects
+were widespread and lasting. Dinah was weeping, the kitchen in confusion;
+one might have thought a death had occurred in the house, and Miss
+Pinckney presiding at the breakfast table was voluble and silent by
+turns.
+
+"Never mind," said Pinckney with all the light-heartedness of a man
+towards domestic affairs. "Seth's not the only nigger in Charleston."
+
+"I'm not bothering about his going," replied Miss Pinckney. "He was all
+thumbs and of no manner of use but to make work; what upsets me is the way
+he hid his nature. Time and again I've been good to that boy. He looked
+all black grin and frizzled head, nothing bad in him you'd say--and then!
+It's like opening a cupboard and finding a toad, and there's Dinah going
+on like a fool; she's crying because he's going, not because he gave me
+impudence. Rachel's the same, and I'm just going now to the kitchen to
+give them a talking to all round."
+
+Off she went.
+
+"I know what that means," said Pinckney. "It's only once in a couple of
+years that there's any trouble with servants and then--oh, my! You see
+Aunt Maria is not the same as other people because she loves every one
+dearly, and looks on the servants as part of the family. I expect she
+loves that black imp Seth, for all his faults, and that's what makes her
+so upset."
+
+"Same as I was about Rafferty," said Phyl with a little laugh.
+
+Pinckney laughed also and their eyes met. Just like a veil swept aside,
+something indefinable that had lain between them, some awkwardness
+arising, maybe, from the Rafferty incident, vanished in that moment.
+
+Phyl had been drawing steadily towards him lately, till, unknown to her,
+he had entered into the little romance of Juliet, so much so that if last
+night, at that magical moment when he met her on entering the gate--if at
+that moment he had taken her in his arms and kissed her, Love might have
+been born instantly from his embrace.
+
+But the psychological moment had passed, a crisis unknown to him and
+almost unknown to her.
+
+And now, as if to seal the triumph of the commonplace, suddenly, the vague
+reservation that had lain between them, disappeared.
+
+"Do you know," said he, "you taught me a lesson that day, a lesson every
+man ought to be taught before he leaves college."
+
+"What was that?" asked Phyl.
+
+"Never to interfere in household affairs. Of course Rafferty wasn't
+exactly a household affair because he belonged mostly to the stable, still
+he was your affair more than mine. Household affairs belong to women, and
+men ought to leave them alone."
+
+"Maybe you're right," said Phyl, "but all the same I was wrong. Do you
+know I've never apologised for what I said."
+
+"What did you say?" asked he with an artless air of having forgotten.
+
+"Oh, I said--things, and--I apologise."
+
+"And I said--things, and I apologise--come on, let's go out. I have no
+business this morning and I'd like to show you the town--if you'd care to
+come."
+
+"What about Miss Pinckney?" asked Phyl.
+
+"Oh, she's all right," he replied. "The Seth trouble will keep her busy
+till lunch time and I'll leave word we've gone out for a walk."
+
+Phyl ran upstairs and put on her hat. As they were passing through the
+garden the thought came to her just for a moment to show him the little
+arbour; then something stopped her, a feeling that this humble little
+secret was not hers to give away, and a feeling that Pinckney wouldn't
+care. Dead lovers vanished so long and their affairs would have little
+interest for his practical mind.
+
+The morning was warmer even than yesterday. The joyous, elusive,
+intoxicating spirit of the Southern spring was everywhere, the air seemed
+filled with the dust of sunbeams, filled with fragrance and lazy sounds.
+The very business of the street seemed part of a great universal gaiety
+over which the sky heat hazy beyond the Battery rose in a dome of deep,
+sublime tranquil blue.
+
+They stopped to inspect the old slave market.
+
+Then the remains of the building that had once been the old Planters Hotel
+held Phyl like a wizard whilst Pinckney explained its history. Here in the
+old days the travelling carriages had drawn up, piled with the luggage of
+fine folk on a visit to Charleston on business or pleasure. The Planters
+was known all through the Georgias and Virginia, all through the States in
+the days when General Washington and John C. Calhoun were living figures.
+
+The ghost of the place held Phyl's imagination. Just as Meeting Street
+seemed filled with friendly old memories on her first entering it, so did
+the air around the ruins of the "Planters."
+
+Then having paused to admire the gouty pillars of St. Michael's they went
+into the church.
+
+The silence of an empty church is a thing apart from all other silences in
+the world. Deeper, more complete, more filled with voices.
+
+As they were entering a negro caretaker engaged in dusting and tidying let
+something fall, and as the silence closed in on the faint echo that
+followed the sound they stopped, just by the font to look around them.
+Here the spirit of spring was not. The shafts of sunlight through the
+windows lit the old fashioned box pews, the double decked pulpit, and the
+font crowned with the dove with the light of long ago. Sunday mornings of
+the old time assuredly had found sanctuary here and the old congregations
+had not yet quite departed.
+
+The occasional noise of the caretaker as he moved from pew to pew scarcely
+disturbed the tranquillity, the scene was set beyond the reach of the
+sounds and daily affairs of this world, and the actors held in a medium
+unshakable as that which holds the ghostly life of bees in amber and birds
+in marqueterie.
+
+"That was George Washington's pew," whispered Pinckney, "at least the one
+he sat in once. That's the old Pinckney pew, belonged to Bures--other
+people sit there now. This is our pew--Vernons. The Mascarenes had it in
+the old days, of course."
+
+Phyl looked at the pew where Juliet Mascarene had sat often enough, no
+doubt, whilst the preacher had preached on the vanity of life, on the
+delusions of the world and the shortness of Time.
+
+Many an eloquent divine had stood in the pulpit of St. Michael's, but none
+have ever preached a sermon so poignant, so real, so searching as that
+which the old church preaches to those who care to hear.
+
+They turned to go.
+
+Outside Phyl was silent and Pinckney seemed occupied by thoughts of his
+own. They had got to that pleasant stage of intimacy where conversation
+can be dropped without awkwardness and picked up again haphazard, but you
+cannot be silent long in the streets of Charleston on a spring day. They
+visited the market-place and inspected the buzzards and then, somehow,
+without knowing it, they drifted on to the water side. Here where the
+docks lie deserted and the green water washes the weed grown and rotting
+timbers of wharves they took their seats on a baulk of timber to rest and
+contemplate things.
+
+"There used to be ships here once," said he. "Lots of ships--but that was
+before the war."
+
+He was silent and Phyl glanced sideways at him, wondering what was in his
+mind. She soon found out. A struggle was going on between his two selves,
+his business self that demanded up-to-dateness, bustle, and the energetic
+conduct of affairs, and his other self that was content to let things lie,
+to see Charleston just as she was, unspoiled by the thing we call Business
+Prosperity. It was a battle between the South and the North in him.
+
+He talked it out to her. Went into details, pointed to Galveston and New
+Orleans, those greedy sea mouths that swallow the goods of the world and
+give out cotton, whilst Charleston lay idle, her wharves almost deserted,
+her storehouses empty.
+
+He spoke almost vehemently, spoke as a business man speaks of wasted
+chances and things neglected. Then, when he had finished, the girl put in
+her word.
+
+"Well," said she, "it may be so but I don't want it any different from
+what it is."
+
+Pinckney laughed, the laugh of a man who is confessing a weakness.
+
+"I don't know that I do either," said he.
+
+It was rank blasphemy against Business. At the club you would often find
+him bemoaning the business decay of the city he loved, but here, sitting
+by the girl on the forsaken wharf, in the sunshine, the feeling suddenly
+came to him that there was something here that business would drive away.
+Something better than Prosperity.
+
+It was as though he were looking at things for a moment through her eyes.
+
+They came back through the sunlit streets to find Miss Pinckney recovered
+from the Seth business, and after luncheon that day, assisted by Dinah and
+the directions of Miss Pinckney, Phyl's hair "went up."
+
+"It's beautiful," said the old lady, as she contemplated the result, "and
+more like Juliet than ever. Take the glass and look at yourself."
+
+Phyl did.
+
+She did not see the beauty but she saw the change. Her childhood had
+vanished as though some breath had blown it away in the magic mirror.
+
+PART III
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+In a fortnight Phyl had adjusted herself to her new environment so
+completely that to use Pinckney's expression, she might have been bred and
+born in Charleston.
+
+Custom and acquaintanceship had begun to dull without destroying the charm
+of the place and the ghostly something, the something that during the
+first two days had seemed to haunt Vernons, the something indefinable she
+had called "It" had withdrawn.
+
+The spell, whatever it was, had been broken that night in the garden, when
+Pinckney's commonplace remark had shattered the dream-state into which she
+had worked herself with the assistance of Prue, Juliet's letters, the
+little secret arbour and the moonlight of the South.
+
+One morning, coming down to breakfast, she found Miss Pinckney in
+agitation, an open telegram in one hand and a feather duster in the
+other.
+
+It was one of the early morning habits of Miss Pinckney to range the house
+superintending things with a feather duster in hand, not so much for use
+as for the purpose of encouraging others. She was in the breakfast room
+now dusting spasmodically things that did not require dusting and talking
+all the time, pausing every now and then to have another glance at the
+telegram whilst Richard Pinckney, unable to get a word in, sat on a chair,
+and Jim, the little coloured page, who had brought in the urn, stood by
+listening and admiring.
+
+"Forty miles from here and ten from a railway station," said Miss
+Pinckney, "and how am I to get there?"
+
+"Automobile," said Pinckney.
+
+It was evidently not his first suggestion as to this means of locomotion,
+for the suggestion was received without an outburst, neither resented nor
+assented to in fact. They took their seats at table and then it all came
+out.
+
+Colonel Seth Grangerson of Grangerson House, Grangerville, S. Carolina,
+was ill. Miss Pinckney was his nearest relative, the nearest at least with
+whom he was not fighting, and he had wired to her, or rather his son had
+wired to her, to come at once.
+
+"As if I were a bird," said the old lady. Grangerville was a backwater
+place, badly served by the railway, and it would take the best part of a
+day to get there by ordinary means.
+
+"A car will get you there inside a couple of hours," said Pinckney.
+
+"As if he couldn't have sent for Susan Revenall," went on she as though
+oblivious to the suggestion, "but I suppose he's fought with them again. I
+patched up a peace between them last midsummer, but I suppose the patches
+didn't stick; he's fought with the Revenalls, he's fought with the
+Calhouns, he's fought with the Beauregards, he's fought with the
+Tredegars--that man would fight with his own front teeth if he couldn't
+get anything better to fight with, and now he's dying I expect he reckons
+to have a fight with me, just to finish off with. He killed his poor wife,
+and Dick Grangerson would never have gone off and got drowned only for
+him--Oh, he's not so bad," turning to Phyl, "he's good enough only for
+that--will fight."
+
+"Too much pep," said Pinckney.
+
+"I'm sure I don't know what it is. They're the queerest lot the Almighty
+ever put feet on, and I don't mind saying it, even though they are
+relatives." Turning to Phyl. "I suppose you know, least I suppose you
+think, that the Civil War was fought for the emancipation of the darkies
+and that they _were_ emancipated."
+
+"Yes!"
+
+"Well, they weren't--at least not at Grangersons. While the Colonel's
+father was fighting in the Civil War, his first wife, she was a Dawson,
+kept things going at home, and after the war was over and he was back he
+took up the rule again. Emancipation--no one would have dared to say the
+word to him, he'd have killed you with a look. The North never beat
+Grangerson, it beat Davis and one man and another but it never beat
+Grangerson, he carried on after the war just as he carried on before, told
+the darkies that emancipation was nigger talk and they believed him.
+People came round telling them they were free, and all they got was broken
+heads. They were a very tetchy lot, those niggers, are still what are left
+of them. You see, they've always been proud of being Grangerson's niggers,
+that's the sort of man he is, able to make them feel like that."
+
+"Silas helps to carry on the place, doesn't he?" asked Pinckney.
+
+"Yes, and just in the same tradition, only he's finding it doesn't work, I
+suspect. You see, the old darkies are all right, but when he's forced to
+get new labour he has to get the new darkies and they're all wrong, and he
+thrashes them and they run away. They never take the law of him either. I
+reckon when they get clear of Silas they don't stop running till they get
+to Galveston."
+
+They talked of other things and then, breakfast over, Miss Pinckney turned
+to Richard.
+
+"Well, what about that automobile?"
+
+"I'll have one at the door for you at ten," said he.
+
+She turned to Phyl.
+
+"You'd better go with me--if you'd like to; you'd be lonely here all by
+yourself, and you may as well see Grangersons whilst the old man's there,
+though maybe he'll be gone before we arrive. We may be there for a couple
+of days, so you'd better take enough things."
+
+Then she went off to dress herself for the journey, and an hour later she
+appeared veiled and apparelled, Dick following her with the luggage, a
+bandbox and a bag of other days.
+
+She got into the big touring car without a word. Phyl followed her and
+Pinckney tucked the rug round their knees.
+
+"You've got the most careful driver in Charleston," said he, "and he knows
+the road."
+
+Miss Pinckney nodded.
+
+She was flying straight in the face of her pet prejudice. She was not in
+the least afraid of a break down or an overset. An accident that did not
+rob her of life or limb would indeed have been an opportunity for saying
+"I told you so." She was chiefly afraid of running over things.
+
+As Pinckney was closing the door on them who should appear but Seth--Seth
+in a striped sleeved jacket, all grin and frizzled head and bearing a
+bunch of flowers in his hand. He had not been dismissed after all. When
+Miss Pinckney had gone into the kitchen to pay him his wages he had
+carried on so that she forgave him. The flowers--her own flowers just
+picked from the garden--were an offering, not to propitiate but to
+please.
+
+Pinckney laughed, but Miss Pinckney as she took the bouquet scarcely
+noticed either him or Seth, her mind was busy with something else.
+
+She leaned over towards the chauffeur.
+
+"Mind you don't run over any chickens," said she.
+
+It was a gorgeous morning, with the sea mists blowing away on the sea
+wind, swamp-land and river and bayou showing streets and ponds of sapphire
+through the vanishing haze.
+
+Phyl was in high spirits; the tune of Camptown Races, which a street boy
+had been whistling as they started, pursued her. Miss Pinckney, dumb
+through the danger zone where chickens and dogs and nigger children might
+be run over, found her voice in the open country.
+
+The bunch of flowers presented to her by Seth and which she was holding on
+her lap started her off.
+
+"I hope it is not a warning," said she; "wouldn't be a bit surprised to
+find Seth Grangerson in his coffin waiting for the flowers to be put on
+him; what put it in to the darkey's head to give me them! I don't know,
+I'm sure, same thing I suppose that put it into his head to give me
+impudence."
+
+"You've taken him back," said Phyl.
+
+"Well, I suppose I have," said the other in a resigned voice, "and likely
+to pay for my foolishness."
+
+Pinckney had said that it was only a two hours' run from Charleston to
+Grangerville, but he had reckoned without taking into consideration the
+badness of some of the roads, and the intricacies of the way, for it was
+after one o'clock when they reached the little town beyond which, a mile
+to the West, lay the Colonel's house.
+
+Grangerville lies on the border of Clarendon county, a tiny place that yet
+supports a newspaper of its own, the _Grangerville Courier_. The _Courier_
+office, the barber's shop and the hotel are the chief places in
+Grangerville, and yellow dogs and black children seem the bulk of the
+population, at least of a warm afternoon, when drowsiness holds the place
+in her keeping, and the light lies broad and steadfast and golden upon the
+cotton fields, and the fields of Indian corn, and the foliage of the woods
+that spread to southward, enchanted woods, fading away into an enchanted
+world of haze and sun and silence.
+
+When the great Southern moon rises above the cotton fields, Romance
+touches even Grangerville itself, the baying of the yellow dog, darkey
+voices, the distant plunking of a banjo, the owl in the trees--all are the
+same as of old--and the houses are the same, nearly, and the people, and
+it is hard to believe that over there to the North the locomotives of the
+Atlantic Coast railway are whistling down the night, that men are able to
+talk to one another at a distance of a thousand miles, fly like birds,
+live like fish, and perpetuate their shadows in the "movies."
+
+Grangersons lay a mile beyond the little town, a solidly built mansion set
+far back from the road, and approached by an avenue of cypress. As they
+drew up before the pillared piazza, upon which the front door opened, from
+the doorway, wide open this warm day, appeared an old gentleman.
+
+A very fine looking old man he was. His face, with its predominant nose,
+long white moustache and firm cleft chin, was of that resolute and
+obstinate type which seems a legacy of the Roman Empire, whose legionaries
+left much more behind them in Gaul and Britain than Trajan arches and
+Roman roads. He was dressed in light grey tweeds, his linen was
+immaculate--youthful and still a beau in point of dress, and bearing
+himself erect with the aid of a walking stick, a crutch handled stick of
+clouded malacca, Colonel Seth Grangerson, for he it was, had come to his
+front door, drawn by the sound of the one thing he detested more than
+anything in life, a motor car.
+
+"Why, Lord! He's not even in bed," cried the outraged Miss Pinckney, who
+recognised him at once. "All this journey and he up and about--it beats
+Seth and his impudence!"
+
+The Colonel, whose age dimmed eyes saw nothing but the automobile, came
+down the steps, panama hat in hand, courtly, freezing, yet ready to
+explode on the least provocation. Within touch of the car he recognised
+the chief occupant.
+
+"Why, God bless my soul," cried he, "it's Maria Pinckney."
+
+"Yes, it's me," said the lady, "and I expected to find you in bed or
+worse, and here you are up. Silas sent me a telegram."
+
+"He's a fool," cut in the old gentleman. "I had one of my old attacks last
+night, and I told him I'd be up and about in the morning--and I am. Good
+Gad! Maria, you're the last person in the world I'd ever have expected to
+see in one of these outrageous things." He had opened the door of the car
+and was presenting his arm to the lady.
+
+"You can shut the door," said Miss Pinckney. "I'm not getting out. The
+thing's not more outrageous than your getting up like that right after an
+attack and dragging me a hundred miles from Charleston over hill and
+dale--I'm not getting out, I'm going right back--right back to
+Charleston."
+
+The Colonel turned his head and called to a darkey that had appeared at
+the front door.
+
+"Take the luggage in," said he. Miss Pinckney got out of the car despite
+herself, half laughing, half angry, and taking the gallantly proffered arm
+found herself being led up the steps of Grangersons, pausing half way up
+to introduce Phyl, whom she had completely forgotten till now.
+
+The Colonel, like his son Silas, as will presently be seen, had a direct
+way with women; the Grangersons had pretty nearly always fallen in love at
+sight and run away with their wives. Colonel Seth's father had done this,
+meeting, marrying and fascinating the beautiful Maria Tredegar, and
+carrying her off under his arm like a hypnotised fowl, and from under the
+noses of half a dozen more eligible suitors, just as now, the Colonel was
+carrying Maria Pinckney off into his house half against her will. Phyl
+following them, gazed round at the fine old oak panelled hall, from which
+they were led into the drawing room, a room not unlike the drawing room at
+Vernons, but larger and giving a view of the garden where the oleanders
+and cherokee money and the crescent leaves of the blue gum trees were
+moving in the wind. Colonel Seth, despite the war, had plenty of roses and
+Grangersons was kept up in the old style. Just as in Nuremberg and
+Vittoria we see mediaeval cities preserved, so to speak, under glass, so at
+Grangersons one found the old Plantation, house and all, miraculously
+intact, living, almost, one might say, breathing.
+
+The price of cotton did not matter much to the Colonel, nor the price of
+haulage. This son of the Southerner who had refused to be beaten by the
+North in the war, cared for nothing much beyond the ring of sky that made
+his horizon. Twice a year he made a visit to Charleston, driving in his
+own carriage, occasionally he visited Richmond or Durham, where he had an
+interest in tobacco; New York he had never seen. He loathed railways and
+automobiles, mainly, perhaps, because they were inventions of the North,
+that is to say the devil. He had a devilish hatred of the North. Not of
+Northerners, but just of the North.
+
+The word North set his teeth on edge. It did not matter to him that
+Charleston was picking up some prosperity in the way of phosphates, or
+that Chattanooga was smelting ore into money, or that industrial
+prosperity was abroad in the land; he was old enough to have a
+recollection of old days, and from the North had come the chilly blast
+that had blown away that age.
+
+A servant brought in cake and wine to stay the travellers till dinner
+time, refreshment that Miss Pinckney positively refused at first.
+
+"You will stay the night," said the Colonel, as he helped her, "and Sarah
+will show you to your rooms when we have had a word together."
+
+Miss Pinckney, sipping her wine, made no reply, then placing the scarcely
+touched glass on the table and with her bonnet strings thrown back, she
+turned to the Colonel.
+
+"Do you see the likeness?" said she.
+
+"What likeness?" asked the old gentleman.
+
+"Why, God bless my soul, the likeness to Juliet Mascarene. Phyl, turn your
+face to the light."
+
+The Colonel, searching in his waistcoat pocket, found a pair of folding
+glasses and put them on.
+
+"She gets it from her mother's side," said Miss Pinckney, "the Lord knows
+how it is these things happen, but it's Juliet, isn't it?"
+
+The Colonel removed his glasses, wiped them with his handkerchief, and
+returned them to his pocket.
+
+"It is," said he. Then in the fine old fashion he turned to the girl,
+raised her hand to his lips and kissed it.
+
+"Phyl," said Miss Pinckney, "would not you like to have a look at the
+garden whilst we have a chat? Old people's talk isn't of much interest to
+young people."
+
+"Old people," cried the warrior. "There are no old people in this room."
+He made for the door and opened it for Phyl, then he accompanied her into
+the hall, where at the still open door he pointed the way to the garden.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+Outside Phyl stood for a moment to breathe the warm scented air and look
+around her.
+
+To be treated like a child by any other person than Maria Pinckney would
+have incensed her, all the same to be told to do a thing because it was
+good for her, or because it was a pleasant thing to do, in the teller's
+opinion, was an almost certain way of making her do the exact opposite.
+
+The garden did not attract her, the place did.
+
+That cypress avenue with the sun upon it, that broad sweep of drive in
+front of the house, the distant peeps of country between trees and the
+languorous lazy atmosphere of the perfect day fascinated her mind. She
+came along the house front to the right, and found herself at the gate of
+the stable yard.
+
+The stable yard of Grangersons was an immense flagged quadrangle bounded
+on the right, counting from the point of entrance, by the kitchen
+premises.
+
+There was stable room for forty horses, coach-house accommodation for a
+dozen or more carriages.
+
+The car had been run into one of the coach-houses and the yard stood
+empty, sunlit, silent, save for the voices of the pigeons wheeling in the
+air, or strutting on the roof of the great barn adjoining the stables.
+
+One of the stable doors was open and as Phyl crossed the yard a young man
+appeared at the open door, shaded his eyes and looked at her. Then he came
+forward. It was Silas Grangerson, and Phyl thought he was the handsomest
+and most graceful person she had ever seen in her life.
+
+Silas was a shade over six feet in height, dark, straight, slim yet
+perfectly proportioned; his face was extraordinary, the most vivid thing
+one would meet in a year's journey, and with a daring, and at times,
+almost a mad look unforgettable when once glimpsed. Like the Colonel and
+like his ancestors Silas had a direct way with women.
+
+"Hallo," said he, with the sunny smile of old acquaintanceship, "where
+have _you_ sprung from?"
+
+Phyl was startled for a moment, then almost instantly she came in touch
+with the vein and mood and mind of the other and laughed.
+
+"I came with Miss Pinckney," said she.
+
+"You're not from Charleston?"
+
+"Yes, indeed I am."
+
+"But where do you live in Charleston? I've never seen you and I know
+every--besides you don't look as if you belonged to Charleston--I don't
+believe you've come from there."
+
+"Then where do you think I've come from?"
+
+"I don't know," said Silas laughing, "but it doesn't matter as long as
+you're here, does it? 'Scuse my fooling, won't you--I wouldn't with a
+stranger, but you don't seem a stranger somehow--though I don't know your
+name."
+
+"Phylice Berknowles," said Phyl, glancing up at him and half wondering how
+it was that, despite his good looks, his manhood, and their total
+unacquaintanceship, she felt as little constrained in his presence as
+though he were a boy.
+
+"And my name is Silas Grangerson. Say, is Maria Pinckney in the house with
+father?"
+
+"She is."
+
+"Talking over old times, I s'pose?" said Silas.
+
+"Yes!"
+
+"I can hear them. It's always the same when they get together--and I
+suppose you got sick of it and came out?"
+
+"No, they put me out--asked me wouldn't I like to look at the garden."
+
+Already she had banded herself with him in mild opposition to the elders.
+
+"Great--Jerusalem. They're just like a pair of old horses wanting to be
+left quiet and rub their nose-bags together. Look at the garden! I can
+hear them--come on and look at the horses."
+
+He led the way to a loose box and opened the upper door.
+
+"That's Flying Fox, she's mine, the fastest trotter in the Carolinas--you
+know anything about horses?"
+
+"Rather!"
+
+"I thought you did, somehow. Mind! she doesn't take to strangers. Mind!
+she bites like an alligator."
+
+"Not me," said Phyl, fondling the lovely but fleering-eyed head protruding
+above the lower door.
+
+"So she doesn't," said Silas admiringly, "she's taken to you--well, I
+don't blame her. Here's John Barleycorn," opening another door, "own
+brother to the Fox, he's Pap's; he's a bolter, and kicks like a duck gun.
+She's got all her vice at one end of her and he at the other, match pair."
+He whistled between his teeth as he put up the bars, then he shewed other
+horses, Phyl watching his every movement, and wondering what it was that
+gave pleasure to her in watching. Silas moved, or seemed to move,
+absolutely without effort, and his slim brown hands touched everything
+delicately, as though they were touching fragile porcelain, yet those same
+hands could bend an iron bar, or rein in John Barleycorn even when the bit
+was between the said J. B.'s teeth.
+
+"That's the horses," said he, flinging open a coach-house door, "and
+that's the shandrydan the governor still drives in when he goes to
+Charleston. Look at it. It was made in the forties, and you should see it
+with a darkey on the box and Pap inside, and all his luggage behind, and
+he going off to Charleston, and the nigger children running after it."
+
+Phyl inspected the mustard-yellow vehicle. Then he closed the door on it,
+put up the bar, and, the business of showing things over, did a little
+double shuffle as though Phyl were not present, or as though she were a
+boy friend and not a strange young woman.
+
+"Say, do you like poetry?" said he, breaking off and seeming suddenly to
+remember her presence.
+
+"No," said Phyl. "At least--"
+
+"Well, here's some.
+
+  "'There was an old hen and she had a wooden leg, She went to the barn
+  and she laid a wooden egg, She laid it right down by the barn--don't
+  you think.'"
+
+"Well?" said she, laughing.
+
+"'It's just about time for another little drink--' some sense in poetry
+like that, isn't there? But all the drinks are in the house and I don't
+want to go in. I'm hiding from Pap. Last night when he was ratty with
+rheumatism, he let out at me, saying the young people weren't any good,
+saying Maria Pinckney was the only person he knew with sense in her head,
+called me a name because I poured him out a dose of liniment instead of
+medicine, by mistake--though he didn't swallow it--and wished Maria was
+here. So I just sent Jake, the page boy, off with a wire to her; didn't
+tell any one, just sent it. Come on and look at the garden--you've got to
+look at the garden, you know."
+
+He led the way past the barn to a farmyard, where hens were clucking and
+scratching and scraping in the sunshine; the deep double bass grunting of
+pigs came from the sties, by the low wall across which one could see the
+country stretching far away, the cotton fields, the woods, all hazed by
+the warmth of the afternoon.
+
+"Let's sit down and look at the garden," said he, pointing to a huge log
+by the near wall--"and aren't the convolvuluses beautiful?"
+
+"Beautiful," said Phyl, falling into the vein of the other. "And listen to
+the roses."
+
+"They grunt like that because it's near dinner time--they're pretty much
+like humans." He took a cigarette case from his pocket and a cigarette
+from the case.
+
+"You don't mind smoking, do you?"
+
+"Not a bit."
+
+"Have one?"
+
+"I daren't."
+
+"Maria Pinckney won't know."
+
+"It's not her--I smoked one once and it made me sick."
+
+"Well, try another--I won't look if you are."
+
+"They'll--she'll smell it."
+
+"Not she, you can eat some parsley, that takes the smell away."
+
+"Oh, I don't mind telling her--it's only--well, there."
+
+She took a cigarette and he lit it for her.
+
+"Blow it through your nose," he commanded, "that's the way. Now let's
+pretend we're two old darkies sitting on a log, you push against me and
+I'll push against you, you're Jim and I'm Uncle Joseph. 'What yo' crowding
+me for, Jim,'" he squeezed up gently against her, and Phyl jumped to her
+feet.
+
+He glanced up at her, sideways, laughing, and for the life of her she
+could not be angry.
+
+"Don't you think we'd better go and look at the garden?" said she.
+
+"In a minute, sit down again. I won't knock against you. It was only my
+fun. We'll pretend I'm Pap, and you're Maria Pinckney, if you like. You've
+let your cigarette go out."
+
+"So I have."
+
+"You can light it from mine."
+
+Phyl hesitated and was lost.
+
+It was the nearest thing to a kiss, and as she drew back with the lighted
+cigarette between her lips, she felt a not unpleasant sense of wickedness,
+such as the virtuous boy feels when led to adventure by the bad boy.
+Sitting on a log, smoking cigarettes, talking familiarly with a stranger,
+taking a light from him in such a fashion with her face so close to his
+that his eyes-- They smoked in silence for a moment.
+
+Then Silas spoke:
+
+"Do you ever feel lonesome?" said he.
+
+"Awfully--sometimes."
+
+"So do I."
+
+Silence for a moment. Then:
+
+"I go off to Charleston when I feel like that--once in a fortnight or
+so--Where do you live in Charleston?"
+
+"I live with Miss Pinckney--I thought you knew."
+
+"You didn't say that. You only said you came with her."
+
+"Well, I live with her at Vernons. I'm Irish, y' know. My--my father died
+in Charleston, and I came from Ireland to live with Miss Pinckney. Mr.
+Richard Pinckney is my guardian."
+
+"Your which? Dick Pinckney your guardian! Why, he's not older than I
+am--that fellow your guardian--why, he wears a flannel petticoat."
+
+"He doesn't," cried Phyl, flinging away the cigarette, which had become
+noxious, and roused to sudden anger by the slighting tone of the other.
+"What do you mean by saying such a thing?"
+
+"Oh, I only meant that he's too awfully proper for this life. He goes to
+Charleston races, but never backs a horse, scarcely, and one Mint Julep
+would make him see two crows. He's a sort of distant relation of ours."
+
+Phyl was silent. She resented his criticism of her friend, and just in
+this moment the something mad and harum scarum in the character of Silas
+seemed shown up to her with electrical effect. Criticism is a most
+dangerous thing to indulge in, unless anonymously in the pages of a
+journal, for the right to criticise has to be made good in the mind of the
+audience, unless the audience is hostile to the criticised.
+
+Then she said: "I don't know anything about Mint Juleps or race courses,
+but I do know that Mr. Pinckney has been--is--is my friend, and I'd rather
+not talk about him, if you please."
+
+"Now, you're huffed," cried Silas exultingly, as though he had scored a
+point at some game.
+
+"I'm not."
+
+"You are--you've flushed."
+
+Phyl turned pale, a deadly sign.
+
+"I'd never dream of getting out of temper with _you_," said she.
+
+It was his turn to flush. You might have struck Silas Grangerson without
+upsetting his balance, but the slightest suspicion of a sneer raised all
+the devil in him. Had Phyl been a man he would have knocked him off the
+log. He cast the stump of his cigarette on the ground and pounded it with
+his heel. Had there been anything breakable within reach he would have
+broken it. Her anger with him vanished and she laughed.
+
+"You've flushed now," said she.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+When they came round to the front of the house they found Colonel
+Grangerson and Miss Pinckney coming down the steps.
+
+They were going to the garden in search of Phyl.
+
+"We've been looking at the horses," said Silas, after he had greeted Miss
+Pinckney. "No, sir, I did not leave any of the doors open, but I've been
+looking for Sam with a blacksnake whip to liven him up. He left the grey
+without grooming after she was brought in this morning, and I was rubbing
+her down myself when this lady came into the yard."
+
+"I'll skin that nigger," cried the Colonel.
+
+"I reckon I'll save you that trouble, sir," replied the son, as they
+turned garden-wards.
+
+Silas had little use for "r's" and said "suh" for "sir" and "wah" for
+"war." He was also quite a different person in the presence of his father
+from what he was when alone or in the presence of strangers.
+
+In the presence of his father, past generations spoke in his every word
+and action, he became sedate, deferential, leisurely. It was not fear of
+the elder man that caused this change, it was reflection from him.
+
+The shadows were long in the garden, and away across the pastures,
+glimpsed beyond the cypress hedge and bordering the cotton fields, the
+pond-shadows cast by the live oaks at noon had become river shadows,
+flowing eastward; the murmur of bees filled the air like a haze of sound,
+and here and there as they passed a bush coloured flowers detached
+themselves and became butterflies.
+
+They sat down on a great old stone bench lichened and sun warmed to enjoy
+the view, and the Colonel talked of tobacco and politics and cotton,
+including them all in his conversation in the grand patriarchal manner.
+
+Phyl understanding little, and half drowsed by the warmth and the buzzing
+of the bees and the voice of the speaker, had given herself up to that
+lazy condition of mind which is the next best thing to sleep, when she was
+suddenly aroused. She was seated between Miss Pinckney and Silas. Silas
+had pinched her little finger.
+
+She snatched her hand away, and turned towards him. He was looking away
+over the pastures; his profile showed nothing but its absolute
+correctness. Miss Pinckney had noticed nothing, and the Colonel, who had
+finished with cotton, looking at his watch, declared that it was close on
+dinner time.
+
+After supper that night, Phyl found herself in the garden. Silas had not
+appeared at supper; the Colonel had brought down a book of old
+photographs, photographs of people and places dead or changed, and he and
+Miss Pinckney became so absorbed in them that they had little thought for
+the girl.
+
+She went out to look at the moon, and it was worth looking at, rising like
+a honey coloured shield above the belt of the eastern woods.
+
+The whole world was filled with the moonlight, warm tinted, and ghostly as
+the light of vanished days, white moths were flitting above the bushes,
+and on the almost windless air the voice of an owl came across the cotton
+fields.
+
+Phyl reached the seat where they had all sat that afternoon. It was still
+warm from the all-day sunshine, and she sat down to rest and listen.
+
+The owl had ceased crying, and through the league wide silence faint
+sounds far and near told of the life moving and thrilling beneath the
+night; the boom of a beetle, voices from the distant road, and now and
+then a whisper of wind rising and dying out across the garden and the
+trees.
+
+A faint sound came from behind the seat, and before Phyl could turn two
+warm hands covered her eyes.
+
+She plucked them away and stood up.
+
+"I _wish_ you wouldn't do things like that," she cried. "How _dare_ you?"
+
+"I couldn't help it," replied the other, "you looked so comfortable. I
+didn't mean to startle you. I thought you must have heard me coming across
+the grass."
+
+"I didn't--and you shouldn't have done it."
+
+"Well, I'm sorry. There, I've apologised, make friends."
+
+"There is nothing to make friends about," she replied stiffly. "No, I
+don't want to shake hands--I'm not angry, let us go into the house."
+
+"Don't," said Silas imploringly. "He and she are sitting over that old
+album, comparing notes. I saw them through the window, that's why I came
+to look for you in the garden. Do you know, I believe the Governor was
+gone once on Maria, years ago, but they never got married. He married my
+mother instead."
+
+Phyl forgot her resentment.
+
+The faint idea that Colonel Grangerson and Maria Pinckney had perhaps been
+more than friends in long gone days, had strayed across her mind, to be
+dismissed as a fancy. It interested her to find Silas confirming it.
+
+"Of course, I can't say for certain," he went on, lighting a cigarette. "I
+only judge by the way they go on when they're together, and the way he
+talks of her. Say, do you ever want to grow old?"
+
+"No, I don't--ever."
+
+"Neither do I. I hope I'll be kicked to death by a horse, or drowned or
+shot before I'm forty. I don't want to die in any beds with doctors round
+me. I reckon if I'm ever like that I'll drink the liniment instead of the
+medicine--same as I nearly drenched Pap--and go to heaven with a red label
+for my ticket. Sit down for a while and let's talk."
+
+"No, I don't care to sit down."
+
+"I won't touch you. I promise."
+
+Phyl hesitated a moment and then sat down. She was not afraid of Silas in
+the least, but his tricks of an overgrown boy did not please her; it
+seemed to her sometimes as though his irresponsibility was less an
+inheritance from youth, than from some ancestor ill-balanced to the point
+of craziness. If any other man of his age had acted and spoken to her as
+he had done she would have smacked his face, but Silas was Silas, and his
+good looks and seeming innocence, and something really charming that lay
+away at the back of his character and gave colour to this personality,
+managed, somehow, to condone his queerness of conduct.
+
+All the same she sat a foot away from him on the seat, and kept her hands
+folded on her lap.
+
+Silas sat for a while smoking in silence, then he spoke.
+
+"Where's this you said you came from?"
+
+"Ireland."
+
+"You don't talk like a Paddy a bit."
+
+"Don't I?"
+
+"Not a bit, nor look like one."
+
+"Have you seen many Irish people?"
+
+"No, mostly in pictures--comic papers, you know, like _Puck_."
+
+"I think it's a shame," broke out Phyl. "People are always making fun of
+the Irish, drawing them like monkeys with great upper lips--but it's only
+ignorant people who never travel who think of them like that."
+
+"That's so, I expect," replied Silas, either unconscious of the dig at
+himself or undesirous of a quarrel, "and the next few dollars I have to
+spare I'll go to Ireland. I'm crazy now to see it."
+
+"What's made you crazy to see it?"
+
+"Because it's the place you come from."
+
+Phyl sniffed.
+
+"I hate compliments."
+
+"I wasn't complimenting you, I was complimenting Ireland," said Silas
+sweetly. She was silent, a white moth passing close to her held her gaze
+for a moment, then it flitted away across the bushes.
+
+"Let's forget Ireland for a moment," said she, "and talk of Charleston. Do
+you know many people there?"
+
+"I know most every one. The Pinckneys and Calhouns and Tredegars and
+Revenalls and--"
+
+"Rhetts."
+
+"Yes--but there are a dozen Rhetts; same as there's half a hundred
+Pinckneys and Calhouns, families, I mean. What's his name--Richard
+Pinckney, your guardian, is engaged to a Rhett."
+
+"He is not."
+
+"He is--Venetia Frances, the one that lives in Legare Street. Why, I've
+seen them canoodling often, and every one says they are engaged."
+
+"Well, he's not, or Miss Pinckney would have told me."
+
+"Oh, she's blind. I tell you he is, and she'll be your guardian when he's
+married her."
+
+"That she won't," said Phyl.
+
+"How'll you help it? A man and wife are one."
+
+"He's only guardian of my property."
+
+"Well, Heaven help your property when she gets a finger in the pie; she'll
+spend it on hats--sure."
+
+This outrageous statement, uttered with a laugh, left Phyl cold. The
+statement about Frances Rhett had disturbed her, she could not tell
+exactly why, for it was none of her business whom Pinckney might choose to
+marry--still--Frances Rhett! It was almost as though an antagonism had
+existed between them since that afternoon when she had seen Frances first,
+driving in the car with Richard Pinckney.
+
+She rose to her feet and Silas rose also, throwing away the end of his
+cigarette.
+
+"Going into the house?" said he.
+
+"Yes!"
+
+"Well, you'll be off to-morrow morning, and I won't see you, for I have to
+be out early, but I'll see you in Charleston, though not at Vernons maybe,
+for I'm not in love with Richard Pinckney, and I don't care much for
+visiting his house. But I'll see you somewhere, sure."
+
+"Good-bye," said she holding out her hand. He took it, held it, and then,
+all of a sudden, she found herself in his arms.
+
+Helpless as a child, in his arms and smothered with kisses. He kissed her
+on the mouth, on the forehead, on the chin, and with a last kiss on the
+mouth that made her feel as though her life were going from her, he
+vanished. Vanished amidst the bushes whilst she stood, tottering, dazed,
+breathless, outraged, yet--in some extraordinary way not angry. Pulled
+between tears and laughter, resentment, and a strange new feeling suddenly
+born in her from his burning lips, and the strength that had held her for
+a moment to itself.
+
+In one moment, and as though with the stroke of a sword, Silas had cut
+down the barrier that had divided her from the reality of things. He had
+kissed away her childhood.
+
+Then throwing out her hands as though pushing away some presence that was
+surrounding her, she ran to the house. In the hall she sat down for a
+moment to recover herself before going into the drawing room, where Miss
+Pinckney and the Colonel were closing the book which held for them the
+people and the places they had known in youth, and between its leaves who
+knows what old remembrances, like the withered flower that has once formed
+part of a summer's day.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+They started at ten o'clock next morning for Charleston, the Colonel
+standing on the house steps and waving his hand to them as they drove off.
+Silas was nowhere to be seen, he had gone out before breakfast, so the
+butler said, and had not returned. Miss Pinckney resented this casual
+treatment.
+
+"He ought to have been here to bid us good-bye," said she, as they cleared
+the avenue. "He's got the name for being a mad creature, but even mad
+creatures may show common courtesy. I'm sure I don't know where he gets
+his manners from unless it's his mother's lot, same place as he got his
+good looks."
+
+"Why do you say he's mad?" asked Phyl.
+
+"Because he is. Not exactly mad, maybe, but eccentric, he swum Charleston
+harbour with his clothes on because some one dared him, and was nearly
+drowned with the tide coming in or going out, I forget which; and another
+day he got on the engine at Charleston station and started the train,
+drove it too, till they managed to climb over the top of the carriages or
+something and stop him--at least that's the story. He'll come to a bad
+end, that boy, unless he mends his ways. Lots of people say he's got good
+in him. So he has, perhaps, but it's just that sort that come to the worst
+end, unless the good manages to fight the bad and get it under in time."
+
+Phyl said nothing. Her mind was disturbed. She had slept scarcely at all
+during the night, and her feelings towards Silas Grangerson, now that she
+was beyond his reach, were alternating in the strangest way between
+attraction and repulsion.
+
+They would have repelled the thought of him entirely but for the
+instinctive recognition of the fact that his conduct had been the result
+of impulse, the impulse of a child, ill governed, and accustomed to seize
+what it wanted. Added to that was the fact of his entire naturalness. From
+the moment of their first meeting he had talked to her as though they were
+old acquaintances. Unless when talking to his father, everything in his
+manner, tone, conversation was free, unfettered by convention, fresh, if
+at times startling. This was his great charm, and at the same time his
+great defect, for it revealed his want of qualities no less than his
+qualities.
+
+Do what she could she was unable to escape from the incident of last
+night, it was as though those strong arms had not quite released their
+hold upon her, as though Pan had broken from the bushes, shown her by his
+magic things she had never dreamed of, and vanished.
+
+It was nearly two o'clock when they reached Vernons. Richard Pinckney was
+at home, and at the sight of him Phyl's heart went out towards him. Clean,
+well groomed, honest, kindly, he was like a breath of fresh sea air after
+breathing tropical swamp atmosphere.
+
+Strange to say Miss Pinckney seemed to feel somewhat the same.
+
+"Yes, we're back," said she, as they passed into the dining-room where
+some refreshments were awaiting them, "and glad I am to be back. Vernons
+smells good after Grangersons. Oh, dear me, what is it that clings to that
+place? It's like opening an old trunk that's been shut for years. I told
+Seth Grangerson, right out flat, he ought to get away from there into the
+world somewhere, but there he sits clinging to his rheumatism and the
+past. I declare I nearly cried last night as he was showing me all those
+old pictures."
+
+"He's not very ill then," said Richard.
+
+"Ill! Not he. It was that fool Silas sent the telegram. Just an attack of
+rheumatism."
+
+She went upstairs to change and the two young people went into the garden,
+where Richard Pinckney was having some alterations done.
+
+On the day Phyl's hair went up it seemed to Richard that a new person had
+come to live with them. Phyl had suddenly turned into a young woman--and
+such a young woman! He had never considered her looks before, to young men
+of his age and temperament girls in pigtails are, as far as the manhood in
+them is concerned, little more and sometimes less than things. But Phyl
+with her hair up was not to be denied, and had he not been philandering
+after Frances Rhett, and had Phyl been a total stranger suddenly seen, it
+is quite possible that a far warmer feeling than admiration might have
+been the result. As it was she formed a new interest in life.
+
+He showed her the alterations he was making, slight enough and causing
+little change in the general plan of the garden.
+
+"I scarcely like doing anything," said he, "but that new walk will be no
+end of an improvement, and it will save that bit of grass which is being
+trodden to death by people crossing it, then there's all those bushes by
+the gate, they're going, those behind the tree,--a little space there will
+make all the difference in the world."
+
+"Behind the magnolia?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I wish you wouldn't," said Phyl.
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Because they have been there always and--well, look!"
+
+She led the way behind the tree, pushed the bushes aside and disclosed the
+seat.
+
+She no longer felt that she was betraying a secret. Her experience at
+Grangersons had in some way made Vernons seem to her now really her home,
+and Richard Pinckney closer to her in relationship.
+
+"Why, how did you know that was there?" said Richard. "I've never seen
+it."
+
+"Juliet Mascarene used to sit there with--with some one she was in love
+with. I found some of her old letters and they told about it--see, it's a
+little arbour, used to be, though it's all so overgrown now."
+
+"Juliet," said he. "That was the girl who died. I have heard Aunt Maria
+talk about her and she keeps her room just as it used to be. Who was the
+somebody?"
+
+"It was a Mr. Rupert Pinckney."
+
+"I knew there was a love story of some sort connected with her, but I
+never worried about the details. So they used to come and sit here."
+
+"Yes, he'd come to the gate at night and she'd meet him. Her people did
+not want her to marry him and so they had to meet in secret."
+
+"That was a long time ago."
+
+"Before you were born," said Phyl.
+
+He looked at her.
+
+"Aunt is always saying how like you are to her," said he, "but she's mad
+on family likenesses, and I never thought of it. It may be a want in me
+but I've never taken much interest in dead relatives; but somehow, finding
+this little place tucked away here gives one a jog. It's like finding a
+nest in a tree. How long have you known of it?"
+
+"Oh, some time. I found a bundle of her old letters--" she paused. Richard
+Pinckney had taken his place on the little seat, just as one sits down in
+an armchair to see if it is comfortable, and was leaning back amidst the
+bush branches.
+
+"This is all right," said he, "sit down, there's lots of room--you found
+her letter, tell us all about it."
+
+Phyl sat down and told the little story. It seemed to interest him.
+
+"The Pinckneys lost money," said he, "and that's why the old Mascarene
+birds were set against her marrying him, I suppose. Makes one wild that
+sort of thing. What right have people to interfere?"
+
+"Money seems everything in this world," said Phyl.
+
+"It's not--it seems to be, but it's not. Money can't buy happiness after
+one is grown up. You remember I told you that over in Ireland; when candy
+and fishing rods mean happiness money is all right--after that money is
+useful enough, but it's the making of it and not the spending it that
+counts,--that and a lot of things that have nothing to do with money. If
+the Mascarenes hadn't been fools they'd have seen that a poor man with
+kick in him--and the Pinckneys always had that--was as good as a rich man,
+and those two might have got married."
+
+"No," said Phyl, "they never could have got married, he had to die. He was
+killed, you know, at the beginning of the war."
+
+"You're a fatalist."
+
+"Well, things happen."
+
+"Yes, but you can stop them happening very often."
+
+"How?"
+
+"Just by willing it."
+
+"Yes," said Phyl meditatively, "but how are you to use your will against
+what comes unexpectedly. Now that telegram yesterday morning took me to
+Grangersons with Miss Pinckney. Suppose--suppose I had broken my leg or,
+say, fallen into a well there and got drowned--that would have been
+Fate."
+
+"No," said Pinckney, "carelessness, the telegram would not have drowned
+you, but your carelessness in going too close to the well."
+
+"Suppose," said Phyl, "instead of that, Mr. Silas Grangerson had shot me
+by accident with a gun--the telegram would have brought me to that without
+any carelessness of mine."
+
+"No, it couldn't," said Pinckney lightly, "it would still have been your
+own fault for going near such a hare-brained scamp. Oh, I'm only joking,
+what I really mean is that nine times out of ten the thing people call
+Fate is nothing more than want of foresight."
+
+"And the tenth time it is Fate," said Phyl rising.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+Next morning brought Phyl a letter. It came by the early post, so that she
+got it in her bedroom before coming down.
+
+Phyl had few correspondents and she looked at the envelope curiously
+before opening it.
+
+                        "Miss Berknowles,
+                        at Vernons. Charleston."
+
+ran the address written in a large, boyish, yet individual hand. She knew
+at once and by instinct whom it was from.
+
+"I'm coming to Charleston in a day or two, and I want to see you," ran the
+letter which had neither address nor date, "but I'm not coming to
+Pinckneys. I'll be about town and sure to find you somewhere. I can't get
+you out of my mind since last night. Tried to, but can't."
+
+That was all. Phyl put the letter back in its envelope. She was not angry,
+she was disturbed. There was an assurance about Silas Grangerson daunting
+in its simplicity and directness. Something that raised opposition to him
+in her heart, yet paralysed it. Instinct told her to avoid him, to drive
+him from her mind, ay and something more than instinct. The spirit of
+Vernons, the calm sweet soul of the place, that seemed to hold the past
+and the present, Juliet and herself, peace and happiness with the promise
+of all good things in the future, this spirit rose up against Silas
+Grangerson as though he were the antagonist to happiness and peace, Juliet
+and herself, the present and the past.
+
+Rose up, without prevailing entirely.
+
+Silas had impressed himself upon her mind in such a manner that she could
+not free herself from the impression. Young as she was, with the terribly
+clear perception of the male character which all women possess in
+different degrees, she recognised that Silas was dangerous to that logical
+and equitable state of existence we call happiness, not on account of his
+wildness or his eccentricities, but because of some want inherent in his
+nature, something that spoke vaguely in his words and his actions, in his
+handsome face and in his careless and graceful manner.
+
+All the same she could not free herself from the impression he had made
+upon her, she could not drive him from her mind, he had in some way
+paralysed her volition, called forces to his aid from some unknown part of
+her nature, perhaps with those kisses which she still felt upon the very
+face of her soul.
+
+She came down to breakfast, and afterwards finding herself alone with Miss
+Pinckney, she took Silas's letter from her pocket and handed it to her.
+She had been debating in her own mind all breakfast time as to whether she
+ought to show the letter; the struggle had been between her instinct to do
+the right thing, and a powerful antagonism to this instinct which was a
+new thing in her.
+
+The latter won.
+
+And then, lo and behold, when she found herself alone with Miss Pinckney
+in the sunlit breakfast room, almost against her will and just as though
+her hand had moved of its own volition, she put it in her pocket and
+produced the letter.
+
+Miss Pinckney read it.
+
+"Well, of all the crazy creatures!" said she. "Why, he has only met you
+once. He's mad! No, he isn't--he's a Grangerson. I know them."
+
+She stopped short and re-read the letter, turned it about and then laid it
+down.
+
+"Just as if he'd known you for years. And you scarcely spoke to him. Did
+he _say_ anything to you as if he cared for you?"
+
+"No, he didn't," said Phyl quite truthfully.
+
+"Did he look at you as if he cared for you?"
+
+"No," replied the other, dreading another question. But Miss Pinckney did
+not put it. She could not conceive a man kissing a girl who had never
+betrayed his feelings for her by word or glance.
+
+"Well, it gets me. It does indeed; acting like a dumb creature and then
+writing this-- Do you care for _him_?"
+
+"I--I--no--you see, I don't know him--much."
+
+"Well, he seems to know you pretty well, there's no doubt about one thing,
+Silas Grangerson can make up his mind pretty quick. He won't come to
+Vernons, won't he? Well, maybe it's better for him not, for I've no
+patience with oddities. That's what's wrong with him, he's an oddity, and
+it's those sort of people make the trouble in life--they're worse than
+whisky and cards for bringing unhappiness. Years and years and years
+ago--I'm telling you this though I've never told it to any one else--Seth
+Grangerson, Silas's father, seemed to care for me, not much, still he
+seemed to care. Then one day all at once he came into the room where I
+was, through the window, and told me to come off and get married to him,
+wanted me to go away right off. I was a fool in those days, but not all a
+fool, and when he tried to put his arm round my waist, my hand went up and
+smacked his face.
+
+"We are good enough friends now, but I've often thought of what I escaped
+by not marrying him. You saw him and the life he's leading at that out of
+the way place, but you didn't see his obstinacy and his queerness, and
+Silas is ten times worse, more crazy--well, there, you're warned--but mind
+you I don't want to be meddling. I've seen so many carefully prepared
+marriages turn out pure miseries, and so many crazy matches turn out
+happily, that I'm more than cautious in giving advice. Seems to me that
+people before they are married are quite different creatures to what they
+turn out after they are married."
+
+"But I don't want to get married," said Phyl.
+
+"No, but, seems to me, Silas does," replied the other.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+One bright morning three days later, as Phyl was crossing Meeting Street
+near the Charleston Hotel, whom should she meet but Silas.
+
+Silas in town get up, quite a different looking individual from the Silas
+of Grangersons, dressed in perfectly fitting light grey tweed, a figure
+almost condoning one for the use of that old-time, half-discredited word
+"Elegant."
+
+"There you are," said Silas, his face lighting up. "I thought it wouldn't
+be long before I met you. Meeting Street is like a rabbit run, and I
+reckon the whole of Charleston passes through it twice a day."
+
+His manner was genuinely frank and open, and he seemed to have completely
+forgotten the incident of the kissing. Phyl said nothing for a moment; she
+felt put out, angry at having been caught like a rabbit, and not over
+pleased at being compared to one.
+
+Then she spoke freezingly enough:
+
+"I don't know much about the habits of Charleston; you will not find _me_
+here every day. I have only been out twice here alone and--I'm in a
+hurry."
+
+"Why, what's the matter with you?" cried Silas in a voice of
+astonishment.
+
+"Nothing."
+
+"But there is, you're not angry with me, are you?"
+
+"Not in the least," replied the other, quite determined to avoid being
+drawn into explanations.
+
+"Well, that's all right. You don't mind my walking with you a bit?"
+
+"No!"
+
+"I only came here last night, and I'm putting up at the Charleston," said
+Silas. "Of course there are a lot of friends I could stay with but I
+always prefer being free; one is never quite free in another person's
+house; for one thing you can't order the servants about, though, upon my
+word, now-a-days one can't do that, much, anywhere."
+
+"I suppose not," said Phyl.
+
+The fact was being borne in upon her that Silas in town was a different
+person from Silas in the country, or seemed so; more sedate and more
+conventional. She also noticed as they walked along that he was saluted by
+a great many people, and also, before she had done with him that morning,
+she noticed that the leery, impudent looking, coloured folk seemed to come
+under a blight as they passed him, giving him the wall and yards to spare.
+It was as though the impersonification of the blacksnake whip were walking
+with her as well as a most notoriously dangerous man, a man who would
+strike another down, white or coloured, for a glance, not to say a word.
+
+She had come out on business, commissioned by Miss Pinckney to purchase a
+ball of magenta Berlin wool. Miss Pinckney still knitted antimacassars,
+and the construction of antimacassars is impossible without Berlin
+wool--that obsolete form of German Frightfulness.
+
+She bestowed the things on poor folk to brighten their homes.
+
+When Phyl went into the store to buy the wool Silas waited outside, and
+when she came out they walked down the street together.
+
+She had intended returning straight home after making her purchase but
+they were walking now not towards Vernons but towards the Battery.
+
+"What do you do with yourself all day?" asked Silas, suddenly breaking
+silence.
+
+"Oh, I don't know," she replied, "nothing much--we go out for drives."
+
+"In that old basket carriage thing?"
+
+"With Miss Pinckney."
+
+"I know, I've seen her often--what else do you do?"
+
+"Oh, I read."
+
+"What do you read?"
+
+"Books."
+
+"Doesn't Pinckney ever take you out?"
+
+"No, I don't go out much with Mr. Pinckney; you see, he's generally so
+busy."
+
+Silas sniffed. They had reached the Battery and were standing looking over
+the blue water of the harbour. The day was perfect, dreamy, heavenly, warm
+and filled with sea scents and harbour sounds; scarcely a breath of wind
+stirred across the water where a three-master was being towed to her
+moorings by a tug.
+
+"She's coming up to the wharves," said Silas. "They steer by the spire of
+St. Philips, the line between there and Fort Sumpter is all deep water.
+How'd you like to be a sailor?"
+
+"Wouldn't mind," said Phyl.
+
+"How'd you like to take a boat--I mean a decent sized fishing yawl and go
+off round the world, or even down Florida way? Florida's fine, you don't
+know Florida, it's got two coasts and it's hard to tell which is the best.
+From Indian River right round and up to Cedar Keys there's all sorts of
+fishing, and you can camp out on the reefs; one cooks one's own food and
+you can swim all day. There's tarpon and barracuda and sword fish, and
+nights when there's a moon you could see to read a book."
+
+"How jolly!"
+
+"Let's go there?"
+
+"How do you mean?"
+
+"Oh, just you and I. I'm fed up with everything. We could have a boatman
+to help sail and steer."
+
+He spoke lightly and laughingly, and without much enthusiasm and as though
+he were talking to some one of his own sex, and Phyl, not knowing how to
+take him, said nothing.
+
+He went on, his tone growing warmer.
+
+"I'm not joking, I'm dead sick of Grangersons and Charleston, and I reckon
+you are too--aren't you?"
+
+"No."
+
+"You may think so, but you are, all the same, without knowing it."
+
+"I think you are talking nonsense," said Phyl hurriedly, fighting against
+a deadly sort of paralysis of mind such as one may suppose comes upon the
+mind of a bird under the spell of a serpent.
+
+"No one could be kinder than Miss Pinckney, and so no one could be happier
+than I am. I love Vernons."
+
+"All the same," said Silas, "you are not really alive there. It's the life
+of a cabbage, must be, there's only you and Maria and--Pinckney. Maria is
+a decent old sort but she's only a woman, and as for Pinckney--he doesn't
+care for you."
+
+This statement suddenly brought Phyl to herself. It went through her like
+a knife. She had ceased to think of Richard Pinckney in any way but as a
+friend. At one time, during the first couple of days at Vernons, her heart
+had moved mysteriously towards him; the way he had connected himself
+through Prue's message with the love story of Juliet had drawn her towards
+him, but that spell had snapped; she was conscious only of friendliness
+towards Richard Pinckney. Why, then, this sudden pain caused by Silas's
+words?
+
+"How do you know?" she flashed out. "What right have you to dare--" She
+stopped.
+
+The blaze of her anger seemed to Silas evidence that she cared for
+Pinckney.
+
+"You're in love with him," said he, flying out. The bald and brutal
+statement took Phyl's breath from her. She turned on him, saw the anger in
+his face, and then--turned away.
+
+His state of mind condoned his words. To a woman a blow received from the
+passion she has roused is a rude sort of compliment, unlike other
+compliments it is absolutely honest.
+
+"I am in love with no one," said she; "you have no right to say such
+things--no right at all--they are insulting."
+
+A gull, white as snow, came flitting by and wheeled out away over the
+harbour; as her eyes followed it he stood looking at her, his anger gone,
+but his mind only half convinced by her feeble words.
+
+"I didn't mean to insult you," he said; "don't let us quarrel. When I'm in
+a temper I don't know what I say or do--that's the truth. I want to have
+you all for myself, have ever since the first moment I saw you over there
+at Grangersons."
+
+"Don't," said Phyl. "I can't listen to you if you talk like that--Please
+don't."
+
+"Very well," said Silas.
+
+The quick change that was one of his characteristics showed itself in his
+altered voice. His was a mind that seemed always in ambush, darting out on
+predatory expeditions and then vanishing back into obscurity.
+
+They turned away from the sea front and began to retrace their steps,
+silently at first, and then little by little falling into ordinary
+conversation again as though nothing had happened.
+
+Silas knew every corner of Charleston, and the history of every corner,
+and when he chose he could make his knowledge interesting. In this mood he
+was a pleasant companion, and Phyl, her recent experience almost
+forgotten, let herself be led and instructed, not knowing that this
+armistice was the equivalent of a defeat.
+
+She had already drawn much closer to him in mind, this companionship and
+quiet conversation was a more sure and deadly thing than any kisses or
+wild words. It would linger in her mind warm and quietly. Put in a woman's
+mind a pleasant recollection of yourself and you have established a force
+whose activity may seem small, but is in reality great, because of its
+permanency.
+
+They did not take a direct line in the direction of Vernons, and so
+presently found themselves in front of St. Michael's. The gate of the
+cemetery was open and they wandered in.
+
+The place was deserted, save by the birds, and the air perfumed by all
+manner of Southern growing things. Sun, shadow, silence, and that strange
+peace which hangs over the homes of the dead, all were here, ringed in by
+the old walls and the faint murmur of the living city beyond.
+
+They walked along the paths, looking at the tombstones, and pausing to
+read the inscriptions, Phyl gradually entering into that state of mind
+wherein reality and material things fall out of perspective. The fragrant
+elusive poetry of death, which can speak in the songs of birds and the
+scent of flowers in the sunshine and the shade of trees more clearly than
+in the voice of man, was speaking to her now.
+
+All these people here lying, all these names here inscribed, all these
+were the representatives of days once bright and now forgotten, love once
+sweet and now unknown.
+
+Then, as though something had led or betrayed her to the place, she paused
+where the graves lay half shadowed by a magnolia, she read the nearest
+inscription with a little catch of her breath. Then the further one. They
+were the graves of Juliet Mascarene and Rupert Pinckney, the dead lovers
+who had passed from the world almost together, whose bodies lay side by
+side in the cold bed of earth.
+
+In a moment the spell of the little arbour was around her again, in a
+moment the pregnant first impression of Vernons had re-seized her, fresh
+as though the commonplace touch of everyday life had never spoiled it.
+
+It was as though the spirit of Juliet and the spirit of the old house were
+saying to her "Have you forgotten us?"
+
+Tears welled to her eyes. Silas standing beside her was saying something,
+she did not know what. She scarcely heard him.
+
+Misinterpreting her silence, unconscious as an animal of her state of mind
+and the direction of her thoughts, the man at her side moved towards her
+slightly, seemed to hesitate, and then, suddenly clasping her by the waist
+kissed her upon the side of the neck.
+
+Phyl straightened like a bow when the string is released. Then she struck
+him, struck him open handed in the face, so that the sound of the blow
+might have been heard beyond the wall.
+
+His face blanched so that the mark on it showed up, he took a step back.
+For a moment Phyl thought he was going to spring upon her. Then he
+mastered himself, but if murder ever showed itself upon the countenance of
+man it showed itself in that half second on the countenance of Silas
+Grangerson.
+
+"You'll be sorry for that," said he.
+
+"Don't speak to me," said Phyl. "You are horrible--bad--wicked--I will
+tell Richard Pinckney."
+
+"Do," said Silas. "Tell him also I'll be even with him yet. You're in love
+with him, that's what's the matter with you--well, wait."
+
+He turned on his heel and walked off. He did not look back once. As he
+vanished from sight Phyl clasped her hands together.
+
+It was as though she had suddenly been shown the real Silas--or rather the
+something light and evil and dangerous, the something inscrutable and
+allied to insanity that inhabited his mind.
+
+She was not thinking of herself, she was thinking of Richard Pinckney. She
+felt that she had been the unconscious means of releasing against him an
+evil force. A force that might injure or destroy him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+She came out of the cemetery. There was no sign of Silas in the street nor
+on the front of the church.
+
+Phyl had a full measure of the Celtic power to meet trouble halfway, to
+imagine disaster. As she hurried home she saw all manner of trouble,
+things happening to Richard Pinckney, and all brought about through
+herself. Amidst all these fancies she saw one fact: He must be warned.
+
+She found Miss Pinckney in the linen room. The linen room at Vernons was a
+treasure house beyond a man's description, perhaps even beyond his true
+appreciation. There in the cupboards with their thin old fashioned ring
+handles and on the shelves of red cedar reposed damask and double damask
+of the time when men paid for their purchases in guineas, miraculous
+preservations. Just as the life of a china vase is a perpetual escape from
+the stupidity of servant maids and the heaviness of clumsy fingers, so the
+life of these cream white oblongs, in which certain lights brought forth
+miraculous representations of flowers, festoons and birds, was a perpetual
+preservation from the moth, from damp, from dryness, from the dust that
+corrupts.
+
+A house like Vernons exists not by virtue of its brick and mortar; to keep
+it really alive it must be preserved in all its parts, not only from damp
+and decay, but from innovation; one can fancy a gas cooker sending a
+perpetual shudder through it, a telephone destroying who knows what
+fragrant old influences; the store cupboards and still room are part of
+its bowels, its napery, bed sheets, and hangings part of its dress. The
+man knew what he was doing who left Miss Pinckney a life interest in
+Vernons, it was that interest that kept Vernons alive.
+
+She was exercising it on the critical examination of some sheets when Phyl
+came into the room, now, with the wool she had purchased and the tale she
+had to tell.
+
+Miss Pinckney carefully put the sheet she was examining on one side,
+opened the parcel and looked at the wool.
+
+"I met Silas Grangerson," said Phyl as the other was examining the
+purchase with head turned on one side, holding it now in this light, now
+in that.
+
+"Silas Grangerson! Why, where on earth has he sprung from?" asked Miss
+Pinckney in a voice of surprise.
+
+"I don't know, but I met him in the street and we walked as far as the
+Battery and--and--"
+
+She hesitated for a moment, then it all came out. To no one but Maria
+Pinckney could she have told that story.
+
+"Well, of all the astounding creatures," said Miss Pinckney at last. "Did
+he ask you to marry him?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Just to run away with him--kissed you."
+
+"He kissed me at Grangersons."
+
+"At Grangersons. When?"
+
+"That night. I went into the garden and he came out from amongst some
+bushes."
+
+"Umph-- It's the family disease-- Well, if I get my fingers in his hair I
+promise to cure him. He wants curing. He'll just apologise, and that
+before he's an hour older. Where's he staying?"
+
+"No, no," said Phyl, "you mustn't ever say I told you. I don't mind. I
+would have said nothing only for Mr. Pinckney."
+
+"You mean Richard?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"What has he to do with it?"
+
+Phyl did not hesitate nor turn her head away, though her cheeks were
+burning.
+
+"Silas Grangerson thinks I care for Mr. Pinckney, he said he would be even
+with him. I know he intends doing him some injury. I feel it--and I want
+you to warn him to be careful--without telling him, of course, what I have
+said."
+
+Miss Pinckney was silent for a moment. She had already matched Phyl and
+Richard in her mind. She had come to a very full understanding of her
+character, and she would have given all the linen at Vernons for the
+certainty that those two cared for one another.
+
+Frances Rhett rode her like an obsession. Life and nature had given Maria
+Pinckney an acquired and instinctive knowledge of character, and in the
+union of Richard and Frances Rhett she divined unhappiness, just as a
+clever seaman divines the unseen ice-berg in the ship's track. She smelt
+it.
+
+"Phyl," said she, "do you care for Richard?"
+
+The question quickly put and by those lips caused no confusion in the
+girl's mind.
+
+"No," said she. "At least-- Oh, I don't know how to explain it--I care for
+everything here, for Vernons and everything in it, it is all like a story
+that I love--Juliet and Vernons and the past and the present. He's part of
+it too. I want to have it always just as it is. I didn't tell you, but
+when that happened in the cemetery, I was looking at her grave; you never
+told me it was there with his. I came on it by accident and she was
+seeming to speak to me out of it. I was thinking of her and him,
+when--that happened. It was just as though some one had struck _her_ and
+him. I can't explain exactly."
+
+"Strange," said Miss Pinckney.
+
+She turned and began to put away with a thoughtful air the linen she had
+been examining. Then she said:
+
+"I'll tell Richard and warn him to keep away from that fool, not that
+there is any danger--but it is just as well to warn him."
+
+Phyl helped to put away the linen and then she went upstairs to her room.
+She felt easier in her mind and taking her seat on a cane couch by the
+window she fell into a book. The History of the Civil War. This bookworm
+had always one sure refuge in trouble--books.
+
+Books! Have we ever properly recognised the mystery and magic that lies in
+that word, the magic that allows a man to lead ever so many other lives
+than his own, to be other people, to travel where he has never been, to
+laugh with folk he has never seen, to know their sorrows as he can never
+know the sorrows of "real people"--and their joys.
+
+Phyl had been Robinson Crusoe and Jane Eyre, Monte Cristo and Jo.
+
+History which is so horribly unreal because it deals with real people had
+never appealed to her, but the history of the Civil War was different from
+others.
+
+It had to do with Vernons.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+After luncheon that day Phyl, having nothing better to do, went up to her
+room and resumed her book.
+
+Richard Pinckney had not come in to luncheon, he rarely returned home for
+the meal, yet all the same, his absence made her uneasy. Suppose Silas
+Grangerson had met him--suppose they had fought? She called to
+recollection Silas's face just after she had struck him, the insane
+malevolence in it, the ugliness that had suddenly destroyed his good
+looks. Silas was capable of anything, he would never forgive that blow and
+he would try to return it, of that she felt certain. He could not avenge
+himself on her but he could on Richard. He imagined that she cared for
+Richard Pinckney. Did she? The question came to her again in Miss
+Pinckney's voice--she did not even try to answer it. As though it
+irritated her, she tossed the book she was holding in her hand to the
+floor and lay with her eyes fixed on the lace window curtains that were
+moving slightly to the almost imperceptible stirring of the air from
+outside.
+
+Beyond the curtains lay the golden afternoon. Sometimes a bird shadow, the
+loveliest thing in shadow-land, would cross the curtains, sometimes a note
+of song or the sound of a bird's flight from tree to tree would tell that
+there was a garden down below. The street beyond the garden and the city
+beyond the street could be heard, but were little more evident to the
+senses than those things in a picture which we guess but cannot see.
+
+Phyl, allowing her mind to be led by these faint and fugitive sounds, fell
+into a reverie. Then she fell asleep and straight way began to dream.
+
+She dreamed that Miss Pinckney was in the room moving about dusting
+things, a duster in one hand, an open letter in the other. There was
+troublous news of some sort in the letter, but what it was Miss Pinckney
+would not say. Then the room turned into the piazza, where Juliet
+Mascarene was standing with her hands on the rail, looking down on the
+garden.
+
+She seemed to know Juliet quite well and was not a bit surprised to see
+her there; she touched her but she did not turn. Phyl slipped her arm
+round Juliet's waist and stood with her looking at the garden, and as they
+stood thus the most curious dream feeling came upon her, a feeling of
+duality, Juliet was herself, she was Juliet. Then as this feeling died
+away Juliet vanished and she was standing alone on the piazza.
+
+Then she half woke, falling asleep again to be awakened fully by a sound.
+
+A sound, deep, sonorous, now rhythmical, now confused. It was the sound of
+guns.
+
+She had heard it once long ago on the Brighton coast, and now as she sat
+up every nerve and muscle tense, and her mind filled with a vague dread,
+it came so heavily that the walls of Vernons shook.
+
+She ran on to the piazza. There was no one there. The garden gate was wide
+open, there was no one in the garden, and she noticed, though without any
+astonishment, that some one had been at work in the garden altering the
+paths. A white butterfly was flittering above the flowers, and a red bird
+leaving the magnolia tree by the gate, flew, a splash of colour, across to
+the garden beyond.
+
+These things she saw but did not heed. She was under the spell of the
+guns, the sound rose against the brightness of the day as a black cloud
+rises across the sky or a sorrow across one's life, insistent, rhythmical,
+a pall of sound now billowing, now sinking, as though blown under by a
+wind.
+
+She sought the piazza stairs and next moment was in the garden, then she
+found herself in the street.
+
+Meeting Street was almost deserted. On the opposite side two stout,
+elderly and rather quaintly dressed gentlemen were walking along in the
+direction of the station, but away down towards the Charleston Hotel there
+was a crowd.
+
+The sight of this crowd filled her with terror, a terror remote from
+reason, an impersonal terror, as though the deadliest peril were
+threatening not herself but all things and everything she loved.
+
+She ran, and as she drew close to the striving mass of people she saw men
+bearing stretchers.
+
+They were pushing their way through the crowd, making to enter a house on
+the right.
+
+Then came a voice. The voice of one man shouting to another.
+
+"Young Pinckney's killed."
+
+The words pierced her like a sword, she felt herself falling. Falling
+through darkness to unconsciousness, from which she awoke to find herself
+lying on the cane couch in her room.
+
+She sat up.
+
+The curtains were still stirring gently to the faint wind from outside, on
+the floor lay the history of the Civil War open just as she had cast it
+there before falling asleep. The sound of the guns had ceased, and nothing
+was to be heard but the stray accustomed sounds of the city and the
+street.
+
+She struggled to her feet and came out on the piazza. The garden gate was
+closed and the garden was unaltered. She had dreamt all that, then.
+
+For a minute she tried to persuade herself that it was a dream, then she
+gave up the attempt. That was no dream. Everything in it was four square.
+She could still see the shadows of the two gentlemen who had been walking
+on the other side of the street, shadows cast clearly before them by the
+sun.
+
+The first part of her experience had been a dream, all that about Miss
+Pinckney and Juliet. But right from the sound of the guns all had been
+reality. She had seen, touched, heard.
+
+Glancing back into the room she saw the book lying on the floor, the sight
+of it was like a crystallising thread for thought.
+
+She had seen the past, she had heard the guns of the war.
+
+She went back into the room and took her seat on the couch and held her
+head between her hands. She recalled the terror that told her that
+everything she loved was in danger. When the man had cried out that young
+Pinckney was killed, it was the thought of the death of Richard Pinckney
+that struck her into unconsciousness. Yet she knew that what she had seen
+was the day of the death of Rupert Pinckney, that one of those figures
+carried on the stretchers was his figure, that her grief was for him.
+
+Had she then experienced what Juliet once experienced, seen what she saw,
+suffered what she suffered?
+
+Was she Juliet?
+
+The thought had approached her vaguely before this, so vaguely and so
+stealthily that she had not really perceived it. It stood before her now
+frankly in the full light of her mind.
+
+Was she Juliet, and was Richard Rupert Pinckney? She recalled that evening
+in Ireland when she had heard his voice for the first time, and the thrill
+of recognition that had passed through her, how, at the Druids' Altar that
+night she had heard her name called by his voice, the feeling in Dublin
+that something was drawing her towards America. Her feelings when she had
+first entered Meeting Street and the garden of Vernons, Miss Pinckney's
+surprise at her likeness to Juliet. Prue's recognition of her, the finding
+of those letters, the finding of the little arbour--any one of these
+things meant little in itself, taken all together they meant a great
+deal--and then this last experience.
+
+Her mind like a bird caught in a trap made frantic efforts to escape from
+the bars placed around it by conclusion; the idea seemed hateful,
+monstrous, viewed as reality. Fateful too, for that feeling of terror in
+the vision had all the significance of a warning.
+
+Then as she sat fighting against the unnatural, her imaginative and
+superstitious mind trembling at that which seemed beyond imagination, a
+miracle happened.
+
+The thought of danger to Richard Pinckney brought it about. All at once
+fear vanished, the fantastic clouds surrounding her broke, faded, passing,
+showing the blue sky, and Truth stood before her in the form of Love.
+
+It was as though the vision had brought it to her wrapped up in that
+terror she had felt for him. In a moment the fantasy of Juliet became as
+nothing beside the reality. If it were a thousand times true that she had
+once been Juliet what did it matter? She had loved Richard Pinckney
+always, so it seemed to her, and nothing at all mattered beside the
+recognition of that fact.
+
+Perfect love casteth out fear, even fear of the supernatural, even fear of
+Fate.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Richard," said Miss Pinckney that night, finding herself alone with him,
+"that Silas Grangerson is in town and I want you to beware of him."
+
+"Silas," said he, "why I saw him at the club, he's gone back home by this,
+I expect, at least he said he was going back to-night. Why should I beware
+of him?"
+
+"He's such an irresponsible creature," she replied. "I'm going to tell you
+something, and mind, what I'm going to tell you is a secret you mustn't
+breathe to any one: he's in love with Phyl."
+
+"Silas?"
+
+"Yes. I knew it wouldn't be long before some one was after her. She's the
+prettiest girl in Charleston, and she's different from the others
+somehow."
+
+The cunning of the woman held her from praise of Phyl's goodness and
+mental qualities, or any over praise of the goods she was bringing to his
+attention.
+
+"Has he spoken to her about it?" asked he.
+
+"I'm sure to goodness I don't know what I'm about telling you a thing that
+was told to me in confidence," said the other. "Well, you promise never to
+say a word to Phyl or to any one else if I tell you."
+
+"I promise."
+
+"Well, he's--he's kissed her."
+
+Richard Pinckney leaned forward in his chair. He seemed very much
+disturbed in his mind.
+
+"Does she care for him?"
+
+"I don't believe she does--yet. They always begin like that; girls don't
+know their minds till all of a sudden they find some man who does."
+
+"Well, let's hope she never cares for Silas Grangerson," said he rising
+from his chair. "You know what he is."
+
+He left the room and went out on the piazza where the girl was sitting. He
+sat down beside her and they fell into talk.
+
+Richard Pinckney's mind was disturbed.
+
+Only the day before he had proposed to Frances Rhett and had been
+accepted. No one knew anything of the engagement; they had decided to say
+nothing about it for a while, but just keep it to themselves. The trouble
+with Pinckney was that Frances had, so to say, put the words of the
+proposal into his mouth. Frances had flirted with every man in Charleston;
+out of them all she had chosen Pinckney as a permanent attache, not
+because she was in love with him but because he pleased her best. She
+matched him against the others, as a woman matches silk.
+
+Pinckney had allowed himself to be led along; there is nothing easier than
+to be led along by a pretty woman. When the trap had closed on him he
+recognised the fact without resenting it. He was no longer a free man.
+
+Phyl had told him this without speaking. For some time past he had been
+admiring her, and yesterday on returning in chains from Calhoun Street,
+Phyl picking roses in the garden seemed to him the prettiest picture he
+had seen for a long time, but it did not give him pleasure; it stirred the
+first vague uneasy recognition that his chains had wrought. He had no
+right to look at any girl but Frances--and he had been looking at her for
+a year without the picture stirring any wild enthusiasm in his mind.
+
+Miss Pinckney's revelation as to Silas had come to him as a blow. He could
+not tell what had hit him or exactly where he had been hit. What did it
+matter to him if a dozen men were in love with Phyl? What right had he to
+feel injured? None, yet he felt injured all the same.
+
+As he sat by her now in the lamp-lit piazza, the thought that would not
+leave his mind was the thought that Silas had kissed her.
+
+Behind the thought was the feeling of the boy who sees the other boy going
+off with the ripest and rosiest apple.
+
+And Phyl was charming to-night. Something seemed to have happened to her,
+increasing the power of her personality, her voice seemed ever so slightly
+changed, her manner was different.
+
+This was a woman, distinct from the girl of yesterday, as the full blown
+from the half blown flower.
+
+They talked of trifles for a while, and then he remembered something that
+he ought to have mentioned before. The Rhetts were giving a dance and they
+had sent an invitation to Phyl as well as Miss Pinckney.
+
+"It will be here by the morning post, I expect," said he. "You'd like to
+go, wouldn't you?"
+
+Phyl hesitated for a moment. "Is that--I mean is that young lady Miss
+Frances Rhett--the one who called here?"
+
+"Yes," cut in Pinckney, "those are the people. You'll come, won't you?"
+
+"Is Miss Pinckney going?"
+
+"She--of course she's going, she goes to everything, and old Mrs. Rhett is
+anxious to meet you."
+
+"It is very kind of them," said Phyl. "Yes, I'll come." But she spoke
+without enthusiasm, and it seemed to him that a chill had come over her.
+
+Did she know of his entanglement with Frances Rhett? And could it be--
+
+He put the question aside. He had no right to indulge in any fancies at
+all about Phyl as regarded himself.
+
+Then Miss Pinckney came out on the piazza and Phyl rose to go into the
+house.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+When Silas Grangerson left the cemetery of St. Michael's he walked for
+half a mile without knowing or caring in what direction he was going.
+
+Phyl had done more than slap his face. She had slapped his pride, his
+assurance of himself, and his desire for her all at the same time.
+
+Silas rarely bothered about girls, yet he knew that he had the power to
+fascinate any woman once he put his mind to the work. He had not tried his
+powers of fascination on Phyl. It was the other way about. Phyl absolutely
+unconsciously had used her fascination upon him.
+
+Something in her, recognised by him on their first meeting in the stable
+yard, had put away the barrier of sex. He had talked to her as if she had
+been a boy. Sitting on the seat beside her whilst the Colonel had been
+prosing over politics and tobacco, the prompting came to Silas to pinch
+her finger just for fun; when he had put his hands over her eyes that
+night it was in obedience to the same prompting, but at the moment of
+parting from her, a desire quite new had overmastered him.
+
+He had kissed a good many girls, but never in his life had he kissed a
+girl as he kissed Phyl.
+
+Something cynical in his feelings for the other sex had always left him
+somewhat cold, but Phyl was different from the others, she had in some way
+struck straight at his real being.
+
+When he left her that night at Grangersons he was almost as disturbed as
+she.
+
+He scarcely slept. He was out at dawn and on his return after she had left
+he sat down and wrote the letter which Phyl received next morning.
+
+Silas was in love for the first time in his life, but love with Silas was
+a thing apart from the love of ordinary men.
+
+There was no worship of the object; the something that crystallises out in
+the form of love-letters, verses, bouquets, and candy was not there. He
+wanted Phyl.
+
+He had no more idea of marriage than the great god Pan. If she had
+consented he would have taken her off on that yawl of his imagination
+round the world or down to Florida, without thought of the morrow or the
+_convenances_, or Society; but please do not imagine this rather primitive
+gentleman a chartered libertine. He would have married her as soon as not,
+but he had neither the genius nor the inclination for the courtship that
+leads by slow degrees up to the question, "Will you marry me?"
+
+He wanted her at once.
+
+As he walked along now with the devil awake in his heart, he felt no anger
+towards Phyl; all his rage was against Pinckney; he had never liked
+Pinckney, he more than suspected that Phyl cared for him and he wanted
+some one to hate badly.
+
+He had walked himself into a reasonable state of mind when he found
+himself outside the Queen City Club. He went in and one of the first men
+he met was Pinckney.
+
+So well did he hold himself in hand that Pinckney suspected nothing of his
+feelings. Silas was far too good a sportsman to shout at the edge of the
+wood, too much of a gentleman to desire a brawl in public. He was going to
+knife Pinckney, he was also going to capture Phyl, but the knifing of
+Pinckney was the main objective and that required time and thought. He did
+not desire the blood of the gentleman; he wanted his pride and _amour
+propre_. He wanted to hit him on the raw, but he did not know yet where,
+exactly, the raw was nor how to hit it. Time would tell him.
+
+He was specially civil to his intended victim, and he went off home that
+evening plotting all the way, but arriving at nothing. He was trying to
+make bricks without straw. Pinckney did not drink, nor did he gamble, and
+he was far too good a business man to be had in that way. However, all
+things come to him who waits, and next morning's post brought him a ray of
+light in the midst of his darkness.
+
+It brought him an invitation to the Rhetts' dance on the following
+Wednesday; nearly a week to wait, but, still, something to wait for.
+
+"What are you thinking about, Silas?" asked old Seth Grangerson as they
+sat at breakfast.
+
+"I'm thinking of a new rabbit trap, suh," responded the son.
+
+The rabbit trap seemed to give him a good deal of food for thought during
+the week that followed; food that made him hilarious and gloomy by turns,
+restless also.
+
+Had he known it, Phyl away at Charleston, was equally restless. She no
+longer thought of Silas. She had dismissed him from her mind, she no
+longer feared him as a possible source of danger to the man she loved.
+Love had her entirely in his possession to torture as he pleased. She knew
+only one danger, the danger that Richard Pinckney did not care in the
+least for her, and as day followed day that danger grew more defined and
+concrete. Richard had taken to avoiding her, she became aware of that.
+
+She fancied that she displeased him.
+
+If she had only known!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+Silas Grangerson came to town on the Wednesday, driving in and reaching
+the Charleston Hotel about five o'clock in the afternoon.
+
+The Grangersons scarcely ever used the railway. Silas, often as he had
+been in Charleston, had never put foot in a street car; even a hired
+conveyance was against the prejudices of these gentlemen.
+
+This antagonism towards public means of locomotion was not in the least
+the outcome of snobbishness or pride; they had come from a race of people
+accustomed to move in a small orbit in their own particular way, an
+exclusive people, breeders and lovers of horses, a people to whom
+locomotion had always meant pride in the means and the method; to take a
+seat in a stuffy railway car at so much a mile, to grab a ticket and
+squeeze into a tram car, to drive in a cab drawn by an indifferent horse
+would have been hateful to these people; it was scarcely less so to their
+descendants.
+
+So Silas came to Charleston driving a pair of absolutely matched
+chestnuts, a coloured manservant in the Grangerson livery in attendance.
+
+After dinner he strolled into the bar of the hotel, met some friends, made
+some bets on the forthcoming races and at eight o'clock retired upstairs
+to dress.
+
+He was one of the first of the guests to arrive.
+
+The Rhetts' house in Legare Street was about the same size as Vernons and
+equally old, but it had not the same charm, the garden was much larger
+than that at Vernons, but it had not the same touch of the past. Houses,
+like people, have personalities and the house of the Rhetts had a
+telephone without resenting the intruder, electric everythings, even to an
+elevator, modern cookers, modern stoves, everything in a modern way to
+save labour and make life easy, and all so cunningly and craftily done
+that the air of antiquity was supposed not to be disturbed.
+
+Illusion! Nothing is gained without some sacrifice; you cannot hold the
+past and the present in the same hand, the concealed elevator spoke in all
+the rooms once its presence was betrayed, the telephone talked--everywhere
+was evident the use of yesterday as a veneer of to-day.
+
+However that may be, the old house was gay enough to-night with flowers
+and lights, and Silas, looking better perhaps than he had ever looked in
+his life, found himself talking to Frances Rhett with an animation that
+surprised himself.
+
+Frances had never had a chance of leading Silas behind her chariot; to
+fool with her would have meant an expenditure of time and energy in
+journeys to Charleston quite beyond his inclination. This aloofness
+coupled with his good looks had set him apart from others.
+
+But to-night he was quite a different being; to-night, in some mysterious
+way, he managed to convey the impression, pleasing enough, that he had
+come to see her and her alone.
+
+As they stood together for a moment, he led the talk into Charleston
+channels, asking about this person and that till the folk at Vernons came
+on the _tapis_.
+
+"Is it true what I hear, that Richard Pinckney has become engaged to the
+girl who is staying there?" asked Silas.
+
+Frances smiled.
+
+"I don't think so," she replied. "Who told you?"
+
+"Upon my word I forget," said he, "but I judged mostly by my own
+eyes--they seemed like an engaged couple when I saw them last."
+
+New guests were arriving and she had to go forward to help in receiving
+them. Silas moved towards her, but in the next moment they had for a
+snatch of conversation, she did not refer to the subject, nor did he.
+
+The Vernons people were late, so late that when they arrived they were the
+last of the guests; dancing was in progress and, on entering the ballroom,
+Richard Pinckney was treated to the pleasing sight of his _fiancee_
+whirling in the arms of Silas Grangerson.
+
+Phyl, looking lovely in the simple, rather old-fashioned dress evolved for
+her by the combined geniuses of Maria Pinckney and Madame Organdie,
+produced that sensation which can only be evoked by newness, her effect
+was instantaneous and profound, it touched not only every one of these
+strangers but also Maria Pinckney and Richard. They had come with her, but
+it was only in the ballroom that they recognised with whom they had come.
+
+So with a book, a picture, a play, the producer and his friends only
+recognise its merits fully when it is staged and condemned or praised by
+the public.
+
+A _debutante_ fails or succeeds at first glance, and the instantaneous
+success of Phyl was a record in successes.
+
+And Frances Rhett had to watch it and dance. The Inquisition had its
+torments; Society has improved on them, for her victims cannot cry out and
+the torments of Frances Rhett were acute. Not that she was troubling much
+about Richard Pinckney and what the poisonous Silas had said; she was not
+in love with Richard Pinckney, but she was passionately in love with
+herself. She was the belle of Charleston; had been for the last year; and
+one of her chief incentives to marriage was an intuitive knowledge that
+prestige fades, that the position of principal girl in any society is like
+the position of the billiard ball the juggler balances on the end of a
+cue--precarious. She wanted to get married and ring down the curtain on an
+unspoiled success, and now in a moment she saw herself dethroned.
+
+In a moment. For no jeweller of Amsterdam ever had an eye for the quality
+of diamonds surer than the eye of Frances Rhett for the quality of other
+women's beauty. At the first glance to-night, she saw what others saw,
+though more clearly than they, that it was the touch of the past that gave
+Phyl her _cachet_, a something indefinable from yesterday, the lack of
+which made the other girls, by contrast, seem cheap.
+
+Never could she have imagined that the "red-headed girl at Vernons" could
+gain so much from setting, a setting due to the instinct as well as the
+taste of "that old Maria Pinckney."
+
+She had always laughed at Maria, as young people sometimes will at the
+old.
+
+When Richard came up to her a little later on, he found himself coldly
+received; she had no dances for him except a few at the bottom of the
+programme.
+
+"You shouldn't have been late," said she.
+
+"Well," he said, "it was not my fault. You know what Aunt Maria is, she
+kept us ten minutes after the carriage was round, and then Phyl wasn't
+ready."
+
+"She looks ready enough now," said the other, looking at Phyl and the
+cluster of young men around her. "What delayed her? Was she dyeing her
+head? It doesn't look quite so loud as when I saw her last."
+
+"Her head's all right," replied Pinckney, irritated by the manner of the
+other, "inside and out, and one can't say the same for every one."
+
+Frances looked at him.
+
+"Do you know what Silas Grangerson asked me to-night?" she said.
+
+"No."
+
+"He asked me were you engaged to her."
+
+"Phyl?"
+
+"Miss Berknowles. I don't know her well enough to call her Phyl."
+
+"He asked you that?"
+
+"Yes, said every one was talking of it, and the last time he saw you
+together you looked like an engaged couple the way you were carrying on."
+
+"But he has never seen us together," cried the outraged Pinckney; "that
+was a pure lie."
+
+"I expect he saw you when you didn't see him; anyhow, that's the
+impression people have got, and it's not very pleasant for me."
+
+Richard Pinckney choked back his anger. He fell to thinking where Silas
+could have seen them together.
+
+"I don't know whether he saw us or not," said he, "but I am certain of one
+thing; he never saw us 'carrying on' as you call it; anyhow, I'll have a
+personal explanation from Silas to-morrow."
+
+"_Please_ don't imagine that I object to your flirting with any one you
+like," said Frances with exasperating calm. "If you have a taste for that
+sort of thing it is your own business."
+
+Pinckney flushed.
+
+"I don't know if you _want_ to quarrel with me," said he, "if you do, say
+so at once."
+
+"Not a bit," she replied, "you know I never quarrel with any one, it's bad
+form for one thing and it is waste of energy for another."
+
+A man came up to claim her for the next dance and she went off with him,
+leaving Pinckney upset and astonished at her manner and conduct.
+
+It was their first quarrel, the first result of their engagement. Frances
+had seemed all laziness and honey up to this; like many another woman she
+began to show her real nature now that Pinckney was secured.
+
+But it was not an ordinary lovers' quarrel; her anger had less to do with
+Richard Pinckney than with Phyl. Her hatred of Phyl, big as a baobab tree,
+covered with its shadow Vernons, Miss Pinckney, and Richard.
+
+He was part of the business of her dethronement.
+
+Richard wandered off to where Maria Pinckney was seated watching the
+dancers.
+
+"Why aren't you dancing?" asked she.
+
+"Oh, I don't know," he replied. "I'm not keen on it and there are loads of
+men."
+
+Miss Pinckney had watched him talking to Frances Rhett and she had drawn
+her own deductions, but she said nothing. He sat down beside her. He had
+been wanting to tell her of his engagement for a long time past, but had
+put it off and put it off, waiting for the psychological moment. Maria
+Pinckney was a very difficult person to fit into a psychological moment.
+
+"I want to tell you something," said he. "I'm engaged to Frances Rhett."
+
+"Engaged to be married to her?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+Miss Pinckney was dumb.
+
+What she had always dreaded had come to pass, then.
+
+"You don't congratulate me?"
+
+"No," she replied. "I don't."
+
+Then, all of a sudden, she turned on him.
+
+"Congratulate you! If I saw you drowning in the harbour, would you expect
+me to stand at the Battery waving my hand to you and congratulating you?
+No, I don't congratulate you. You had the chance of being happy with the
+most beautiful girl in the world, and the best, and you've thrown it away
+to pick up with _that_ woman. Phyl would have married you, I know it, she
+would have made you happy, I know it, for I know her and I know you. Now
+it's all spoiled."
+
+He rose to his feet. It was the first time in his life that he had seen
+Maria Pinckney really put out.
+
+"I'll talk to you again about it," said he. Then he moved away.
+
+He had the pleasure of watching Frances dancing the next waltz with Silas
+Grangerson, and Silas had the pleasure of watching him as he stood talking
+to one of the elderly ladies and looking on.
+
+Silas's rabbit trap was in reality a very simple affair, it was a plan to
+pick a quarrel with Richard through Frances, if possible; to make the
+imperturbable Pinckney angry, knowing well how easily an angry man can be
+induced to make a fool of himself. To keep cool and let Richard do the
+shouting.
+
+Unfortunately for Silas, the sight of Phyl in all her beauty had raised
+his temperature far above the point of coolness. There were moments when
+he was dancing, when he could have flung Frances aside, torn Phyl from the
+arms of her partner and made off with her through the open window.
+
+This dance was a deadly business for him. It was the one thing needed to
+cap and complete the strange fascination this girl exercised upon his
+mind, his imagination, his body. It was only now that he realised that
+nothing else at all mattered in the world, it was only now that he
+determined to have her or die.
+
+Silas was of the type that kills under passion, the type that, unable to
+have, destroys.
+
+Preparing a trap for another, he himself had walked into a trap
+constructed by the devil, stronger than steel.
+
+Yet he never once approached or tried to speak to Phyl. He fed on her at a
+distance. Fleeting glimpses of the curves of her figure, the Titian red of
+her hair, the face that to-night might have turned a saint from his vows,
+were snatched by him and devoured. He would not have danced with her if he
+could. To take her in his arms would have meant covering her face with
+kisses. Nor did he feel the least anger against the men with whom she
+danced. All that was a sham and an unreality, they were shadows. He and
+Phyl were the only real persons in that room.
+
+Later on in the evening, Richard Pinckney, tired with the lights and the
+noise, took a stroll in the garden.
+
+The garden was lit here and there with fairy lamps and there were coigns
+of shadow where couples were sitting out chatting and enjoying the beauty
+of the night.
+
+The moon was nearing the full and her light cut the tree shadows
+distinctly on the paths. Passing a seat occupied by one of the sitting out
+couples, Pinckney noticed the woman's fan which her partner was playing
+with; it was his own gift to Frances Rhett. The man was Silas Grangerson
+and the woman was Frances. They were talking, but as he passed them their
+voices ceased.
+
+He felt their eyes upon him, then, when he had got twenty paces or so
+away, he heard Frances laugh.
+
+He imagined that she was laughing at him. Already angry with Silas, he
+halted and half turned, intending to go back and have it out with him,
+then he thought better of it and went his way. He would deal with Silas
+later and in some place where he could get him alone or in the presence of
+men only. Pinckney had a horror of scenes, especially in the presence of
+women.
+
+Twenty minutes later he had his opportunity. He was crossing the hall from
+the supper room, when he came face to face with Silas. They were alone.
+
+"Excuse me," said Richard Pinckney, halting in front of the other, "I want
+a word with you."
+
+"Certainly," answered Silas, guessing at once what was coming.
+
+"You made some remarks about me to Miss Rhett this evening," went on the
+other. "You coupled my name with the name of a lady in a most
+unjustifiable manner and I want your explanation here and now."
+
+"Who was the lady?" asked Silas, seemingly quite unmoved.
+
+"Miss Berknowles."
+
+"In what way did I couple your name with her, may I ask?"
+
+"No, you mayn't." Richard had turned pale before the calm insolence of the
+other. "You know quite well what you said and if you are a gentleman you
+will apologise-- If you aren't you won't and I will deal with you in
+Charleston accordingly."
+
+Phyl was at that moment coming out of the supper room with young Reggie
+Calhoun--the same who, according to Richard that morning at breakfast long
+ago, was an admirer of Maria Pinckney.
+
+She saw the two men, in profile, facing one another, and she saw Silas's
+right hand, which he was holding behind his back, opening and shutting
+convulsively.
+
+She saw the blow given by Pinckney, she saw Silas step back and the knife
+which he always carried, as the wasp carries its sting, suddenly in his
+hand.
+
+Then she was gripping his wrist.
+
+Face to face with madness for a moment, holding it, fighting eye to eye.
+
+Had she faltered, had her gaze left his for the hundredth part of a
+second, he would have cast her aside and fallen upon his prey.
+
+It was her soul that held him, her spirit--call it what you will, the
+something that speaks alone through the eye.
+
+Calhoun and Pinckney stood, during that tremendous moment, stricken,
+breathless, without making the slightest movement. They saw she was
+holding him by the power of her eye alone; so vividly did this fact strike
+them that for a dazed moment it seemed to them that the battle was not
+theirs, that the contest was beyond the earthly plane, that this was no
+struggle between human beings, but a battle between sanity and madness.
+
+Its duration might have been spanned by three ticks of the great old clock
+that stood in the corner of the hall telling the time.
+
+Then came the ring of the knife falling on the floor. It was like the
+breaking of a spell. Silas, white and bewildered-looking as a man suddenly
+awakened from sleep, stood looking now at his released hand as though it
+did not belong to him, then at Pinckney, and then at Phyl who had turned
+her back upon him and was tottering as though about to fall. Pinckney,
+stepping forward, was about to speak, when at that moment the door of the
+supper room opened and a band of young people came out chatting and
+laughing.
+
+Calhoun, who was a man of resource, kicked the knife which slithered away
+under one of the seats. Phyl, recovering herself, walked away towards the
+stairs; Silas without a word, turned and vanished from sight past the
+curtain of the corridor that led to the cloakroom.
+
+Calhoun and Pinckney were left alone.
+
+"What are you going to do?" asked Calhoun.
+
+"I am at his disposal," replied the other. "I struck him."
+
+"Struck him, damnation! He drew a knife on you; he ought to be hoofed out
+of the club; he'd have had you only for that girl. I never saw anything so
+splendid in my life."
+
+"Yes," said Pinckney, "she saved my life. He was clean mad, but thank God
+no one knows anything about it and we avoided a scene. Say nothing to any
+one unless he wants to push the matter further. I am quite at his
+disposal."
+
+PART IV
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+When Silas reached the cloakroom he took a glance at himself in the
+mirror, then putting on his overcoat and taking his hat from the attendant
+he came back into the hall. Pinckney and Calhoun had just strolled away
+into the ballroom; there was no one in the hall, and without a thought of
+saying good-bye to his hostess, he left the house.
+
+He felt no anger against Pinckney, nor did he think as he walked down
+Legare Street that but for the mercy of God and the intervention of Phyl
+he might at that moment have been walking between two constables, a
+murderer with the blood of innocence on his hands.
+
+Not that he was insensible to reason or the fitness of things, he had
+always known and acknowledged that when in a passion he was not
+accountable for his acts; he admitted the fact with regret and also with a
+certain pride. To-night he might have felt the regret without any pride to
+leaven it but for the fact that his mind was lost to every consideration
+but one--Phyl.
+
+All through his life Silas had followed with an iron will the line that
+pleased him, never for a moment had he counted the cost of his actions;
+just as he had swum the harbour with his clothes on so had he plunged into
+any adventure that came to hand; he knew Fear just as little as he knew
+Consequence. Well, now he found himself for the first time in his life
+face to face with Fate. All his adventures up to this had been little
+things involving at worst loss of life by accident. This was different; it
+involved his whole future and the future of the girl who had mastered his
+mind.
+
+Leaving Legare Street he reached Meeting Street and passed up it till he
+reached Vernons. The moon, high in the sky now, showed the garden through
+the trellis-work of the iron gate, and Silas paused for a moment and
+looked in.
+
+The garden, seen like this with the moonlight upon the roses and the
+glossy leaves of the southern trees, presented a picture charming,
+dream-like, almost unreal in its beauty. He tried the gate. It was locked.
+On ordinary nights it would be open till the house closed, or in the event
+of Pinckney being out, until he returned, but to-night, owing to the
+absence of the family, it was locked.
+
+Then, turning from the gate he crossed the road and took up his position
+in a corner of shadow. Five minutes passed, then twenty, but still he kept
+watch. There were few passers-by at that hour and little traffic; he had a
+long view of the moonlit street and presently he saw the carriage he was
+waiting for approaching.
+
+It drew up at the front door of Vernons and he watched whilst the
+occupants got out; he caught a glimpse of Phyl as she entered the house
+following Miss Pinckney and followed by Richard, then the door shut and
+the carriage drove away.
+
+Silas left his concealment and crossed the road. He paced for a while up
+and down outside the door of Vernons, then he came to the garden gate
+again and looked in.
+
+From here one could get a glimpse of the first and second floor piazzas
+and the windows opening upon them. He could not tell which was the window
+of Phyl's room, it was enough for him that the place held her.
+
+In the way in which he had crossed the road, in his uneasy prowling up and
+down before the house, and now in his attitude as he stood motionless with
+head raised there was something ominous, animal-like, almost wolfish.
+
+As he stood a call suddenly came from the garden. It was the call of an
+owl, a white owl that rose on the sound and flitted softly as a moth
+across the trees to the garden beyond.
+
+Silas turned away from the gate and came back down the street towards his
+hotel, arrived there he went straight to his room and to bed.
+
+But he did not go to sleep. His head was full of plans, the craziest and
+maddest plans. Pinckney he had quite dismissed from his mind, the
+consciousness of having committed a vile action in drawing a knife upon an
+unarmed man was with him, and the knowledge that the consequences might
+include his expulsion from Charleston society, but all that instead of
+sobering him made him more reckless. He would have Phyl despite the Devil
+himself. He would seize her and carry her off, trap her like a bird.
+
+He determined on the morrow to return early to Grangersons and think
+things out.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+Whilst he was lying in bed thinking things out, the folk at Vernons were
+retiring to rest.
+
+Maria Pinckney knew nothing of what had occurred between Silas and
+Richard. Richard Pinckney, Phyl and Reggie Calhoun were the only three
+persons in Charleston, leaving Silas aside, who knew of the business and
+in a hurried consultation just before leaving the Rhetts they had agreed
+to say nothing.
+
+Calhoun was for publishing the affair.
+
+"The man's dangerous," said he; "some day or another he'll do the same
+thing again to some one and succeed and swing."
+
+"I think he's had his lesson," said Pinckney; "he went clean mad for the
+moment. Then there's the fact that I struck him. No, taking everything
+into consideration, we'll let it be. I don't feel any animosity against
+him, not half as much as if he'd stabbed me behind the back with a libel--
+He did tell a lie about me to-night but it was the stupid sort of lie a
+child might have told. The man has his good points as well as his bad and
+I don't want to push the thing against him."
+
+"I don't think he will do it again," said Phyl.
+
+She, like Richard, felt no anger against Silas; it was as though they
+recognised that Silas was the man really attacked that night, attacked by
+the Devil.
+
+They both recognised instinctively his good qualities. Miss Pinckney, it
+will be remembered, once said that it is the man with good in him that
+comes to the worst end unless the good manages to fight the bad and get it
+under in time. She had a terrible instinct for the truth of things.
+
+"Well," said Calhoun, "it's not my affair; if you choose to take pity on
+him, well and good; if it were my business I'd give him a cold bath, that
+might stop him from doing a thing like that again. I'll say nothing."
+
+Though Miss Pinckney was in ignorance of the affair she was strangely
+silent during the drive home and when Phyl went to her room to bid her
+good night, she found her in tears, a very rare occurrence with Miss
+Pinckney.
+
+She was seated in an armchair crying and Phyl knelt down beside her and
+took her hand.
+
+Then it all came out.
+
+"I had hoped and hoped and hoped for him, goodness knows he has been my
+one thought, and now he has thrown himself away. Richard is engaged to
+Frances Rhett. He told me so to-night--well, there, it's all ended,
+there's no hope anywhere, she'll never let him go, and she'll have Vernons
+when I'm gone. She picked him out from all the other men--why?-- Why,
+because he's the best of the lot for money and position. Care about him!
+She cares no more for him than I do for old Darius. I'm sure I don't know
+why this trouble should have fallen on me. I suppose I have committed some
+sin or another though I can't tell what. I've tried to live blameless and
+there's others that haven't, yet they seem to prosper and get their
+wishes--and there's no use telling me to be resigned," finished she with a
+snap and as if addressing some viewless mentor. "I can't--and what's more
+I won't. Never will I resign myself to wickedness, and stupidity is
+wickedness, not even a decent, honest wickedness, but a crazy, sap-headed
+sort of wickedness, same as influenza isn't a disease but just an ailment
+that kills you all the same."
+
+Phyl, kneeling beside Miss Pinckney, had turned deathly white. Only half
+an hour ago when the little conference with Calhoun had been concluded,
+Richard Pinckney had taken her hand. His words were still ringing in her
+ears:
+
+"You saved my life. I can't say what I feel, at least not now."
+
+He had looked straight into her eyes, and now half an hour later--This.
+
+Engaged to Frances Rhett!
+
+She rose up and stood beside Miss Pinckney for a moment whilst that lady
+finished her complaints. Then she made her escape and returned to her
+room--
+
+As she closed the door she caught a glimpse of herself in the
+old-fashioned cheval glass that had been brought up by Dinah and Seth to
+help her in dressing for the dance and which had not been removed. Every
+picture in every mirror is the work of an artist--the man who makes a
+mirror is an artist; according to the perfection of his work is the
+perfection of the picture. The old cheval glass was as truthful in its way
+as Gainsborough, but Gainsborough had never such a lovely subject as
+Phyl.
+
+She started at her own reflection as though it had been that of a
+stranger. Then she looked mournfully at herself as a man might look at his
+splendid gifts which he has thrown away. All that was no use now.
+
+She sat down on the side of her bed with her hands clasped together just
+as a child clasps its hands in grief.
+
+Sitting like this with her eyes fixed before her she was looking directly
+at Fate.
+
+It was not only Richard Pinckney that she was about to lose but Vernons
+and the Past-- Just as Juliet Mascarene had lost everything so was it to
+happen to her. Or rather so had it happened, for she felt that the game
+was lost--some vague, mysterious, extraordinary game played by unknown
+powers had begun on that evening in Ireland when standing by the window of
+the library she had heard Pinckney's voice for the first time.
+
+The sense of Fatality came to her from the case of Juliet. Consciously and
+unconsciously she had linked herself to Juliet. The extravagant idea that
+she herself was Juliet returned and that Richard Pinckney was Rupert had
+come to her more than once since that dream or vision in which the guns
+had sounded in her ears. The idea had frightened her at first, then
+pleased her vaguely. Then she had dismissed it, her _ego_ refusing any one
+else a share in her love for Richard, any one--even herself masquerading
+under the guise of Juliet.
+
+The idea came back to her now leaving her utterly cold, and yet stirring
+her mind anew with the sense of Fate.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+When she fell asleep that night she passed into the dreamless condition
+which is the nearest thing we know to oblivion, yet her sub-conscious mind
+must have carried on its work, for when she awoke just as dawn was showing
+at the window it was with the sense of having passed through a long season
+of trouble, of having fought with--without conquering--all sorts of
+difficulties.
+
+She rose and dressed herself, put on her hat and came down into the
+garden.
+
+Vernons was just wakening for the day, and in the garden alive with birds,
+she could hear the early morning sounds of the city, and from the
+servants' quarters of the house, voices, the sound of a mat being beaten
+and now and then the angry screech of a parrot. General Grant slept in the
+kitchen and his cage was put out in the yard every morning at this hour.
+Later it would be brought round to the piazza. He resented the kitchen
+yard as beneath his dignity and he let people know it.
+
+Phyl tried the garden gate, it was locked and Seth appearing at that
+moment on the lower piazza, she called to him to fetch the key. He let her
+out and she stood for a moment undecided as to whether she would walk
+towards the Battery or in the opposite direction. Meeting Street never
+looked more charming than now in the very early morning sunlight; under
+the haze-blue sky, almost deserted, it seemed for a moment to have
+recaptured its youth. A negro crab vendor was wheeling his barrow along,
+crying his wares. His voice came lazily on the warm scented air.
+
+She turned in the direction of the station. The voice of the crab seller
+had completed in some uncanny way the charm of the deserted street and the
+early sunlight. She was going to lose all this. Vernons and the city she
+loved, Juliet, Miss Pinckney, the past and the present, she was going to
+lose them all, they were all in some miraculous way part of the man she
+loved, her love of them was part of her love for him. She could no longer
+stay in Charleston; she must go--where? She could think of nowhere to go
+but Ireland.
+
+To stay here would be absolutely impossible.
+
+As she walked without noticing whither she was going her mind cleared, she
+began to form plans.
+
+She would go that very day. Nothing would stop her. The thing had to be
+done. Let it be done at once. She would explain everything to Miss
+Pinckney. She would escape without seeing Richard again. What she was
+proposing to herself was death, the ruin of everything she cared for, the
+destruction of all the ties that bound her to the world, the present and
+the past. It was the recognition that these ties had been broken for her
+and all these things taken away by the woman who had taken away Richard.
+
+Presently she found herself in the suburbs, in a street where coloured
+children were playing in the gutter, and where the houses were
+unsubstantial looking as rabbit-hutches, but there was a glimpse of
+country beyond and she did not turn back. She did not want breakfast. If
+she returned to Vernons by ten o'clock it would give her plenty of time to
+pack her things, say good-bye to Miss Pinckney and take her departure
+before Richard returned to luncheon--if he did return.
+
+It did not take her long to pass through the negro quarter, and now, out
+in the open country, out amidst those great flat lands in the broad day
+and under the lonely blue sky her mood changed.
+
+Phyl was no patient Grizel, the very last person to be trapped in the bog
+of love's despondency. Abstract melancholy produced by colours, memories,
+or sounds was an easy enough matter with her, but she was not the person
+to mourn long over the loss of a man snatched from her by another woman.
+
+As she walked, now, breathing the free fresh air, a feeling of anger and
+resentment began to fill her mind. Anger at first against Frances Rhett
+but spreading almost at once towards Richard Pinckney. Soon it included
+herself, Maria Pinckney, Charleston--the whole world. It was the anger
+which brings with it perfect recklessness, akin to that which had seized
+her the day in Ireland when in her rage over Rafferty's dismissal she had
+called Pinckney a Beast. Only this anger was less acute, more diffuse,
+more lasting.
+
+The sounds of wheels and horses' hoofs on the road behind her made her
+turn her head. A carriage was approaching, an English mail phaeton drawn
+by two high-stepping chestnuts and driven by a young man.
+
+It was Silas Grangerson. Returning to Grangerson's to make plans for the
+capture of Phyl, here she was on the road before him and going in the same
+direction.
+
+For a moment he could scarcely believe his eyes. Then reining in and
+leaving the horses with the groom he jumped down and ran towards her.
+
+After the affair of last night one might fancy that he would have shown
+something of it in his manner.
+
+Not a bit.
+
+"I didn't expect to come across _you_ on the road," said he. "Won't you
+speak to me--are you angry with me?"
+
+"It's not a question of being angry," said Phyl, stiffly.
+
+She walked on and he walked beside her, silent for a moment.
+
+"If you mean about that affair last night," said he, "I'm sorry I lost my
+temper--but he hit me--you don't understand what that means to me."
+
+"You tried to--"
+
+"Kill him, I did, and only for you I'd have done it. You can't understand
+it all. I can scarcely understand it myself. He _hit_ me."
+
+"I don't think you knew what you were doing," said Phyl.
+
+"I most surely did not. I was rousted out of myself. I reckon he didn't
+know what he was doing either when he struck. He ought to have known I was
+not the person to hit. I'll show you, just stand before me for a moment."
+
+Phyl faced him. He pretended to strike at her and she started back.
+
+"There you are," said he; "you know I wasn't going to touch you but you
+had to dodge. Your mind had nothing to do with it, just your instinct.
+That was how I was. When he landed his blow I went for my knife by
+instinct. If you tread on a snake he lets out at you just the same way. He
+doesn't think. He's wound up by nature to hit back."
+
+"But you are not a snake."
+
+"How do you know what's in a man? I reckon we've all been animals once,
+maybe I was a snake. There are worse things than snakes. Snakes are all
+right, they don't meddle with you if you don't meddle with them. They've
+got a bad name they don't deserve. I like them. They're a lot better
+citizens, the way they look after their wives and families, than some
+others and they know how to hit back prompt--say, where are you going
+to?"
+
+"I don't know," said Phyl. "I just came for a walk--I'm leaving
+Charleston."
+
+She spoke with a little catch in her voice. All Silas's misdoings were
+forgotten for the moment, the fact that the man was dangerous as Death to
+himself and others had been neutralised in her mind by the fact,
+intuitively recognised, that there was nothing small or mean in his
+character. Despite his conduct in the cemetery, despite his lunatic
+outburst of the night before, in her heart of hearts she liked him;
+besides that, he was part of Charleston, part of the place she loved.
+
+Ah, how she loved it! Had you dissected her love for Richard Pinckney you
+would have found a thousand living wrappings before you reached the core.
+Vernons, the garden, the birds, the flowers, the blue sky, the sunlight,
+Meeting Street, the story of Juliet, Miss Pinckney, even old Prue.
+Memories, sounds, scents, and colours all formed part of the living thing
+that Frances Rhett had killed.
+
+"Leaving Charleston!" said Silas, speaking in a dazed sort of way.
+
+"Yes. I cannot stay here any longer."
+
+"Going--say--it's not because of what I did last night."
+
+"You--oh, no. It has nothing to do with you." She spoke almost
+disdainfully.
+
+"But where are you going?"
+
+"Back to Ireland."
+
+"When?"
+
+"To-day."
+
+Then, suddenly, in some curious manner, he knew. But he was clever enough,
+for once in his life, to restrain himself and say nothing.
+
+"I will go this afternoon," said she, as though she were talking of a
+journey of a few miles.
+
+"Have you any friends to go to?"
+
+Phyl thought of Mr. Hennessy sitting in his gloomy office in gloomy
+Dublin.
+
+"Yes, one."
+
+"In Ireland?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Can't you think of any other friends?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Not even me?"
+
+"I don't know," said poor Phyl, "I never could understand you quite, but
+now that I am in trouble you seem a friend--I'm miserable--but there's no
+use having friends here. It only makes it the worse having to go."
+
+"Do you remember the day I asked you to run off to Florida with me," said
+Silas, "and leave this damned place? It's no good for any one here and
+you've found it out--the place is all right, it's the people that are
+wrong."
+
+Phyl made no reply.
+
+"You're not going back," he finished.
+
+She glanced at him.
+
+"You're going to stay here--here with me."
+
+"I am going back to Ireland to-day," said Phyl.
+
+"You are not, you are going to stay here."
+
+"No. I am going back."
+
+She spoke as a person speaks who is half drowsy, and Silas spoke like a
+person whose mind is half absent. It was the strangest conversation to
+listen to, knowing their relationship and the point at issue.
+
+"You are going to stay here," he went on. "If I lost you now I'd never
+find you again. I've been wanting you ever since I saw you that day first
+in the yard-- D'you remember how we sat on the log together?--you can't
+tramp all the way back to Charleston-- Come with me and you'll be happy
+always, all the time and all your life--"
+
+"No," said Phyl, "I mustn't--I can't." Her mind, half dazed by all she had
+gone through, by the mesmerism of his voice, by the brilliant light of the
+day, was capable of no real decision on any point. The dark streets of
+Dublin lay before her, a vague and nightmare vision. To return to Vernons
+would be only her first step on the return to Ireland, and yet if she did
+not return to Vernons, where could she go?
+
+Silas's invitation to go with him neither raised her anger nor moved her
+to consent. Phyl was an absolute Innocent in the ways of the world. No
+careful mother had sullied her mind with warnings and suggestions, and her
+mind was by nature unspeculative as to the material side of life.
+
+Instinctively she knew a great deal. How much knowledge lies in the
+sub-conscious mind is an open question.
+
+They walked on for a bit without speaking and then Silas began again.
+
+"You can't go back all that way. It's absurd. You talk of going off
+to-day, why, good heavens, it takes time even to start on a journey like
+that. You have to book your passage in a ship--and how are you to go
+alone?"
+
+"I don't know," said Phyl.
+
+His voice became soft. It was the first time in his life, perhaps, that he
+had spoken with tenderness, and the effect was perfectly magical.
+
+"You are not going," he said, "you are not; indeed, I want you far too
+much to let you go; there's nothing else I want at all in the world. I
+don't count anything worth loving beside you."
+
+No reply.
+
+He turned.
+
+The coloured groom was walking the horses, they were only a few yards
+away. He went to the man and gave him some money with the order to return
+to Charleston and go back to Grangersons by train, or at least to the
+station that was ten miles from Grangerville.
+
+Then as the man went off along the road he stood holding the near horse by
+the bridle and talking to Phyl.
+
+"You can't walk back all that way; put your foot on the step and get in,
+leave all your trouble right here. I'll see that you never have any
+trouble again. Put your foot on the step."
+
+Phyl looked away down the road.
+
+She hesitated just as she had hesitated that morning long ago when she had
+run away from school. She had run away, not so much to get home as to get
+away from homesickness.
+
+Still she hesitated, urged by the recklessness that prompted her to break
+everything at one blow, urged by the dismal and hopeless prospect towards
+which the road to Charleston led her mind, held back by all sorts of hands
+that seemed reaching to her from the past.
+
+Confused, bewildered, tempted yet resisting, all might have been well had
+not a vision suddenly risen before her clear, definite, and destructive to
+her reason.
+
+The vision of Frances Rhett.
+
+Everything bad and wild in Phyl surged up before that vision. For a second
+it seemed to her that she loathed the man she loved.
+
+She put her foot on the step and got into the phaeton. Silas, without a
+word, jumped up beside her, and the horses started.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+She had committed the irrevocable.
+
+When the contract is signed, when the china vase is broken, all the regret
+in the world will not alter the fact.
+
+It was not till they had gone ten miles on their way that the regret came,
+sudden and painful as the stab of a dagger.
+
+Miss Pinckney's kindly old face suddenly rose up before Phyl. She would
+have been waiting breakfast for her. She saw the breakfast room, sunny and
+pleasant, the tea urn on the table, the garden through the open window--
+
+Then came the thought--what matter.
+
+All that was lost to her anyhow. It did not matter in the least what she
+did.
+
+She was running away with Silas Grangerson.
+
+She had a vague sort of idea that they were running away to be married,
+that she would have to explain things to Colonel Grangerson when they got
+to the house and that things would arrange themselves somehow.
+
+But now, she sat voiceless beside her companion, answering only in
+monosyllables when he spoke; a voice began to trouble her, a voice that
+repeated the half statement, half question, over and over again.
+
+"You are running away to be married to Silas Grangerson?"
+
+She was running away from her troubles, from the prospect of returning to
+Ireland, from the idea of banishment from Vernons. She was running away
+out of anger against the woman who had taken Richard. She was running away
+because of pique, anger and the reckless craving to smash everything and
+dash everything to pieces--but to marry Silas Grangerson!
+
+"Stop!" cried Phyl.
+
+Silas glanced sideways at her.
+
+"What's the matter now?"
+
+"I want to go back."
+
+"Back to Charleston!"
+
+"Yes, stop, stop at once--I must go back, I should never have come."
+
+Silas was on the point of flashing out but he shut his lips tight, then he
+reined in.
+
+"Wait a moment," said he with his hand on her arm, "you can't walk back,
+we are nearly half way to Grangersons. I can't drive you because I don't
+want to return to Charleston. If you have altered your mind you can go
+back when we reach Grangersons, you can wire from there. The old man will
+make it all right with Maria Pinckney."
+
+Phyl hesitated, then she began to cry.
+
+It was the rarest thing in the world for her to cry like this. Tears with
+her meant a storm, but now she was crying quietly, hopelessly, like a lost
+child.
+
+"Don't cry," said he, "everything will be all right when we get to
+Grangersons--we'll just go on."
+
+The horses started again and Phyl dried her eyes. They covered another
+five miles without speaking, and then Silas said:
+
+"You don't mean to stick to me, then?"
+
+"I can't," said Phyl.
+
+"You care for some one else better?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Is it Pinckney?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"God!" said he. He cut the off horse with the whip. The horses nearly
+bolted, he reined them in and they settled down again to their pace.
+
+The country was very desolate just here, cotton fields and swampy grounds
+with here and there a stretch of water reflecting the blue of the sky.
+
+After a moment's silence he began again.
+
+There was something in Silas's mentality that seemed to have come up from
+the world of automata, something tireless and persistent akin to the
+energy that drives a beetle over all obstacles in its course, on or round
+them.
+
+"That's all very well," said he, "but you can't always go on caring for
+Pinckney."
+
+"Can't I?" said Phyl.
+
+"No, you can't. He's going to get married and then where will you be?"
+
+Phyl, staring over the horses' heads as though she were staring at some
+black prospect, set her teeth. Then she spoke and her voice was like the
+voice of a person who speaks under mesmerism.
+
+"I cared for him before he was born and I'll care for him after I'm dead
+and there's no use in bothering a bit about it now. _You_ couldn't
+understand. No one can understand, not even he."
+
+The road here bordered a stretch of waste land; Silas gazed over it, his
+face was drawn and hard.
+
+Then he suddenly blazed out.
+
+Laying the whip over the horses and turning them so sharply that the
+phaeton was all but upset he put them over the waste land; another touch
+of the whip and they bolted.
+
+Beyond the waste land lay a rice field and between field and waste land
+stood a fence; there was doubtless a ditch on the other side of the
+fence.
+
+"You'll kill us!" cried Phyl.
+
+"Good--so," replied Silas, "horses and all."
+
+She had half risen from her seat, she sat down again holding tight to the
+side rail and staring ahead. Death and destruction lay waiting behind that
+fence, leaping every moment nearer. She did not care in the least.
+
+She could see that Silas, despite his words, was making every effort to
+rein in, the impetus to drive to hell and smash everything up had passed;
+she watched his hands grow white all along the tendon ridges with the
+strain. The whole thing was extraordinary and curious but unfearful, a
+storm of wind seemed blowing in her face. Then like a switched out light
+all things vanished.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+Twenty yards from the fence the off side wheel had gone.
+
+The phaeton, flinging its occupants out, tilted, struck the earth at the
+trace coupling just as a man might strike it with his shoulder, dragged
+for five yards or so, breaking dash board and mud guard and brought the
+off side horse down as though it had been poleaxed.
+
+Silas, with the luck that always fell to him in accidents, was not even
+stunned. Phyl was lying like a dead creature just where she had been flung
+amongst some bent grass.
+
+He rushed to her. She was not dead, her pulse told that, nor did she seem
+injured in any way. He left her, ran to the horses, undid the traces and
+got the fallen horse on its feet, then he stripped them of their harness
+and turned them loose.
+
+Having done this he returned to the girl. Phyl was just regaining
+consciousness; as he reached her she half sat up leaning on her right
+arm.
+
+"Where are the horses?" said she. They were her first thought.
+
+"I've let them loose--there they are."
+
+She turned her head in the direction towards which he pointed. The horses,
+free of their harness, had already found a grass patch and were beginning
+to graze. The broken phaeton lay in the sunshine and the cushions flung to
+right and left showed as blue squares amidst the green of the grass; a
+light wind from the west was stirring the grass tops and a bird was
+singing somewhere its thin piping note, the only sound from all that
+expanse of radiant blue sky and green forsaken country.
+
+"How do you feel now?" asked Silas.
+
+"All right," said Phyl.
+
+"We'd better get somewhere," he went on; "there are some cabins beyond
+that rice field, I can see their tops. There's sure to be some one there
+and we can send for help."
+
+Phyl struggled to her feet, refusing assistance.
+
+"Let us go there," said she. She turned to look at the horses.
+
+"They'll be all right," said Silas; "there's lots of grass and there's a
+pond over there--they'd live here a month without harm."
+
+He led the way to the fence, helped her over, and then, without a word
+they began to plod across the rice field.
+
+When they reached the cabins they found them deserted, almost in ruins.
+They faced a great tract of tree-grown ground. In the old plantation days
+this place would have been populous, for to the right there were ruins of
+other cabins stretching along and bordering an old grass road that bent
+westward to lose itself amongst the trees, but now there was nothing but
+desolation and the wind that stirred the mossy beards of the live oaks and
+the rank green foliage of weeds and sunflowers. An old disused well faced
+the cabins.
+
+Phyl gave a little shudder as she looked around her. Her mind, still
+slightly confused by the accident and beaten upon by troubles, could find
+nothing with which to reply to the facts of the situation--alone here with
+Silas Grangerson, lost, both of them, what explanation could she make,
+even to herself, of the position?
+
+In the nearest cabin to the right some rough dry grass had been stored as
+if for the bedding of an animal. It was too coarse for fodder. Silas made
+her sit down on it to rest. Then he stood before her in the doorway.
+
+For the first time in his life he seemed disturbed in mind.
+
+"I'll have to go and get help," said he, "and find out where we are. It's
+my fault. I'm sorry, but there's no use in going over that. You aren't fit
+to walk. I'll go and leave you here. You won't be afraid to stay by
+yourself?"
+
+"No," said Phyl.
+
+"You needn't be a bit, there's no danger here."
+
+"I am thirsty," said she.
+
+"Wait."
+
+He went to the well head. The windlass and chain were there rusty but
+practicable and a bucket lay amongst the grass. It was in good repair and
+had evidently been used recently. He lowered it and brought up some water.
+The water was clear diamond bright, and cold as ice. Having satisfied
+himself that it was drinkable he brought the bucket to Phyl and tilted it
+slightly whilst she drank. Then he put it by the door.
+
+"Now I'll go," said he, "and I shan't be long. Sure you won't be afraid?"
+
+"No," she replied.
+
+"You're not angry with me?"
+
+"No, I'm not angry."
+
+He bent down, took her hand and kissed it. She did not draw it away or
+show any sign of resentment; it was cold like the hand of a dead person.
+
+He glanced back as he turned to go. She saw him stand at the doorway for a
+moment looking down along the grass road, his figure cut against the blaze
+of light outside, then the doorway was empty.
+
+She was never to see him again.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+Outside in the sunlight Silas hesitated for a moment as though he was
+about to turn back, then he went on, striking along the grass road and
+between the trees.
+
+Although he had never been over the ground before, he guessed it to be a
+part of the old Beauregard plantation and the distance from Grangerville
+to be not more than eight miles as the crow flies. By the road, reckoning
+from where the accident had occurred, it would be fifteen. But the lie of
+the place or the distance from Grangersons mattered little to Silas. His
+mind was going through a process difficult to describe.
+
+Silas had never cared for anything, not even for himself. Danger or safety
+did not enter into his calculations. Religion was for him the name of a
+thing he did not understand. He had no finer feelings except in
+relationship to things strong, swift and brilliant, he had no tenderness
+for the weakness of others, even the weakness of women.
+
+He had seized on Phyl as a Burgomaster gull might seize on a puffin chick,
+he had picked her up on the road to carry her off regardless of everything
+but his own desire for her--a desire so strong that he would have dashed
+her and himself to pieces rather than that another should possess her.
+
+Well, as he watched her seated on the straw in that ruined cabin, subdued,
+without energy, and entirely at his mercy, a will that was not his will
+rose in opposition to him. Some part of himself that had remained in utter
+darkness till now woke to life. It was perhaps the something that despite
+all his strange qualities made him likeable, the something that instinct
+guessed to be there.
+
+It stood between him and Phyl. He was conscious of no struggle with it
+because it took the form of helplessness.
+
+Nothing but force could make her give him what he wanted. The thing was
+impossible, beyond him. He felt that he could do everything, fight
+everything, subdue everything--but the subdued.
+
+There was something else. Weakness had always repelled him, whether it was
+the weakness of the knees of a horse or the weakness of the will of a man.
+Phyl's weakness did not repel him but it took the edge from his passion.
+It was almost a form of ugliness.
+
+He had determined on finding help to send some one back for Phyl; any of
+the coloured folk hereabouts would be able to pilot her to Grangersons. He
+was not troubling about the broken phaeton or the horses; the horses had
+plenty of food and water; so far from suffering they would have the time
+of their lives. They might be stolen--he did not care, and nothing was
+more indicative of his mental upset than this indifference toward the
+things he treasured most.
+
+All to the left of the grass road, the trees were thin, showing tracts of
+marsh land and pools, and the melancholy green of swamp weeds and
+vegetation.
+
+The vegetable world has its reptiles and amphibians no less than the
+animal; its savages, its half civilised populations, and its civilised.
+The two worlds are conterminous, and just as cultivated flowers and
+civilised people are mutually in touch, here you would find poisonous
+plants giving shelter to poisonous life, and the amphibious giving home to
+the amphibious.
+
+The woods on the right were healthier, more dense, more cheerful, on
+higher ground; one might have likened the grass road to the life of a man
+pursuing its way between his two mysteriously different characters.
+
+Silas had determined to make straight for home after having sent
+assistance for Phyl, what he was going to do after arriving home was not
+evident to his mind; he had a vague idea of clearing out somewhere so that
+he might forget the business. He had done with Phyl, so he told himself.
+
+But Phyl had not done with him. He had been scarcely ten minutes on his
+road when her image came into his mind. He saw her, not as he had seen her
+last seated on the straw in the miserable cabin, but as he had seen her at
+the ball.
+
+The curves of her limbs, the colour of her hair, her face, all were drawn
+for him by imagination, a picture more beautiful even than the reality.
+
+Well, he had done with her, and there was no use in thinking of her--she
+cared for that cursed Pinckney and she was as good as dead to him, Silas.
+
+An ordinary man would have seen hope at the end of waiting, but Silas was
+not an ordinary man, a long and dubious courtship was beyond his
+imagination and his powers. Courtship, anyhow, as courtship is recognised
+by the world was not for him. He wanted Phyl, he did not want to write
+letters to her.
+
+There is something to be said for this manner of love-making, it is
+sincere at all events.
+
+He tried to think of something else and he only succeeded in thinking of
+Phyl in another dress. He saw her as he saw her that first day in the
+stable yard at Grangersons. Then he saw her as she was dressed that day in
+Charleston.
+
+Then he remembered the scene in the churchyard. He could still feel the
+smack she had given him on the face. The smack had not angered him with
+her but the remembrance of it angered him now. She would not have done
+that to Pinckney.
+
+Turning a corner of the road he came upon a clear space and on the borders
+of the clearing to the right some cottages. There were some half-naked
+pikaninnies playing in the grass before them; and a coloured woman,
+washing at a tub set on trestles, catching sight of him, stood, shading
+her eyes and looking in his direction.
+
+Silas paused for a moment as if undecided, then he came on. He asked the
+woman his whereabouts and then whether she could sell him some food. She
+had nothing but some corn bread and cold bacon to offer him and he bought
+it, paying her a dollar and not listening to her when she told him she
+could not make change.
+
+He was like a man doing things in his sleep; his mind seemed a thousand
+miles away. The woman packed the bread and bacon in a mat basket with a
+plate and knife and watched him turn back in his tracks and vanish round
+the bend of the road, glad to see the last of him. She reckoned him
+crazy.
+
+He was going back to Phyl.
+
+His resolution never to see her again had vanished. She was his and he was
+going to keep her, no matter what happened.
+
+He would never part with her alive, if she killed him, if he killed her,
+what matter. Nothing would stand in his path.
+
+He reached the turning and there in the sunlight lay the half ruined
+cabins and the well.
+
+Walking softly he came to the door of the cabin where he had left Phyl.
+She was there lying on the straw fast asleep. It was the sleep that comes
+after exhaustion or profound excitement; she scarcely seemed to breathe.
+
+Putting his bundle down by the door he came in softly and knelt down
+beside her. His face was so close to hers that he could feel her breath
+upon his mouth.
+
+It only wanted that to complete his madness. He was about to cast himself
+beside her when a pain, vicious and sharp as the stab of a red hot needle
+struck him just above his right instep.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+When Richard Pinckney came down to breakfast that morning, he found Miss
+Pinckney seated at the table reading letters.
+
+"Phyl went out early and has not come back yet," said she putting the
+letters aside and pouring out the tea.
+
+"Gone out," said he. "Where can she have gone to?"
+
+Miss Pinckney did not seem to hear the question. She was not thinking of
+Phyl or her whereabouts. Richard's engagement to Frances Rhett was still
+dominating her mind, casting a shadow upon everything. It was like a death
+in the family.
+
+"I hope she's not bothered about what happened last night," went on
+Richard. "I didn't tell you at the time, but I had--some words with Silas
+Grangerson, and--Phyl was there. Silas is a fool, but it's just as well
+the thing happened for it has brought matters to a head. I want to tell
+you something--I'm not engaged to Frances Rhett."
+
+"Not engaged?"
+
+"I was, but it's broken off. I had a moment's talk with her before we left
+last night. I was in a temper about a lot of things, and the business with
+Silas put the cap on it. Anyhow, we had words, and the thing is broken
+off."
+
+"Oh, dear me," said Miss Pinckney. The joyful shock of the news seemed to
+have reduced her mind to chaos for a moment. One could not have told from
+her words or manner whether the surprise was pleasant or painful to her.
+
+She drew her chair back from the table a little, and sought for and found
+her handkerchief. She dried her eyes with it as she found her voice.
+
+"I don't know, I don't know, I'm sure. I've prayed all night that this
+might be, and now that the Lord has heard my prayer and answered it, I
+feel cast right down with the wonder of it. Had I the right to interfere?
+I don't know, I'm sure. It seems terrible to separate two people but I had
+no thought only for you. I've spoken against the girl, and wished against
+her, and felt bad in my heart against her, and now it's all over I'm just
+cast down."
+
+"She did not care for me," said Pinckney. "Why she was laughing at me last
+night with him. They were sitting outside together, and when I passed them
+I heard them laughing at me."
+
+Miss Pinckney put her handkerchief away, drew in her chair, and poured
+herself out some more tea energetically and with a heightened colour.
+
+"I don't want to speak bad about any one," said she, "but there are girls
+and girls. I know them, and time and again I've seen girls hanging
+themselves out with labels on them. 'I'm the finest apple on the tree,'
+yet no one has picked them for all their labels, because every one has
+guessed that they aren't--That crab apple labelling itself a pippin and
+daring to laugh at you! And that long loony Silas Grangerson, a man
+without a penny to bless himself with, a creature whose character is just
+kinks. Well, I'm sure--pass me the butter--laughing at you. And what were
+they laughing at pray? Aren't you straight and the best looking man in
+Charleston? Couldn't you buy the Rhetts twice over if you wanted to buy
+such rubbish? Aren't you the top man in Charleston in name and position
+and character? Why, they'll be laughing at the jokes in the N'York papers
+next--They'll be appreciating their own good sense and cleverness and
+personal beauty next thing--They'll be worshipping Bryan."
+
+"Oh, I don't think they'll ever get as bad as that," said he laughing,
+"but I don't think I care whether people grin at me or not; it's only just
+this, she and I were never meant for each other, and I found it out, and
+found it out in time. You see the engagement was never made public, so the
+breaking of it won't do her any harm. She would not let me tell people
+about it, she said it would be just as well to keep it secret for a while,
+and then if either of us felt disposed we could break it off and no harm
+done."
+
+"Meaning that she could break it off if she wanted to but you couldn't."
+
+"Perhaps. When I went back last night and told her I wanted to be free,
+she flew out."
+
+"Said you must stick to your word?"
+
+"Nearly that. Then I told her she herself had said that it was open to
+either of us to break the business off."
+
+"What did she say to that?"
+
+"Nothing. She had nothing to say. She asked why I wanted to break it
+off."
+
+"And you told her it was because of her conduct, I hope."
+
+"No. I told her it was because I had come to care for some one else."
+
+Miss Pinckney said nothing for a moment. Then she looked at him.
+
+"Richard, do you care for Phyl?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Thank God," said she.
+
+The one supreme wish of her life had been granted to her. Her gaze
+wandered to the glimpse of garden visible through the open window and
+rested there. She was old, she had seen friend and relative fade and
+vanish, the Mascarenes, the Pinckneys, children, old people, all had
+become part of that mystery, the past. Richard alone remained to her, and
+Phyl. On the morning of Phyl's arrival Miss Pinckney had felt just as
+though some door had opened to let this visitor in from the world of long
+ago. It was not only her likeness to Juliet Mascarene, but all the
+associations that likeness brought with it. Vernons became alive again, as
+in the good old days. Charleston itself caught some tinge of its youth.
+And there was more than that.
+
+"Richard," said she, coming back from her fit of abstraction, "I will tell
+you something I'd never have spoken of if you didn't care for her. It may
+be an old woman's fancy, but Phyl is more to us, seems to me, than we
+think, she's Juliet come back--Oh, it's more than the likeness. I'm sure I
+can't explain what I mean, it's just she herself that's the same. There's
+a lot more to a person than a face and a figure. I know it sounds absurd,
+so would most things if we had never heard them before. What's more absurd
+than to be born, and look at that butterfly, what's more absurd than to
+tell me that yesterday it was a worm? Well, it doesn't much matter whether
+she was Juliet or not, now she's going to be yours, and to save you from
+that pasty--no matter she's over and done with, but I reckon she's
+laughing on the wrong side of her face this morning."
+
+Miss Pinckney rose from the table. The absence of Phyl did not disturb
+her. Phyl sometimes stayed out and forgot meals, though this was the first
+time she had been late for breakfast. Richard, who had business to
+transact that morning in the town looked at his watch.
+
+"I'm going to Philips', the lawyers," said he, "and then I'll look in at
+the club. I'll be back to luncheon."
+
+An hour later to Miss Pinckney engaged in dusting the drawing-room
+appeared Rachel the cook.
+
+Rachel was the most privileged of the servants, a trustworthy woman with a
+character and will of her own, and absolutely devoted to the interests of
+the house.
+
+"Mistress Pinckney," said the coloured woman closing the door. "Ole
+Colonel Grangerson's coachman's in de kitchen, an' he says Miss Phyl's
+been an' run off with young Silas Grangerson dis very mornin'."
+
+Miss Pinckney without dropping the duster stood silent for a moment before
+Rachel. Then she broke out.
+
+"Miss Phyl run off with young Silas Grangerson! What on earth are you
+talking about, what rubbish is this, who's dared to come here talking such
+nonsense? Go on--what more have you to say?"
+
+Rachel had a lot to say.
+
+Phyl had met Silas on the road beyond the town. They had talked together,
+then Silas had sent the groom back to Charleston to return to Grangerville
+by train, and had driven off with Phyl. The groom, a relation of Dinah's,
+having some three hours to wait for a train, had dropped into Vernons to
+pass the time and tell the good news. He was in the kitchen now.
+
+Miss Pinckney could not but believe. She threw the duster on a chair, left
+the room and went to the kitchen.
+
+Prue was still in her corner by the fireplace, and Colonel Grangerson's
+coloured man was seated at the table finishing a meal and talking to Dinah
+who scuttled away as he rose up before the apparition of Miss Pinckney.
+
+"What's all this nonsense you have been talking," said she, "coming here
+saying Miss Phyl has run away with Mr. Silas? She started out this morning
+to meet him and drive to Grangersons; I'm going there myself at
+eleven--and you come here talking of people running away. Do you know you
+could be put in prison for saying things like that? You _dare_ to say it
+again to any one and I'll have you taken off before you're an hour older,
+you black imp of mischief."
+
+There was a rolling pin on the table, and half unconsciously her hand
+closed on it. Colonel Grangerson's man, grey and clutching at his hat, did
+not wait for the sequel, he bolted.
+
+Then the unfortunate woman, nearly fainting, but supported by her grand
+common sense and her invincible nature, left the kitchen and, followed by
+Rachel, went to the library. Here she sat down for a moment to collect
+herself whilst Rachel stood watching her and waiting.
+
+"It is so and it's not so," said she at last, talking half to herself half
+to the woman. "It's some trick of Silas Grangerson's. But the main thing
+is no one must know. We have got to get her back. No one must
+know--Rachel, go and find Seth and send him off at once to the garage
+place and tell them to let me have an automobile at once, at once, mind
+you. Tell them I want the quickest one they've got for a long journey."
+
+Rachel went off and Miss Pinckney left to herself went down on her knees
+by the big settee adjoining the writing table and began to wrestle with
+the situation in prayer. Miss Pinckney was not overgiven to prayer. She
+held that worriting the Almighty eternally about all sorts of nonsense, as
+some people do who pray for "direction" and weather, etc., was bad form to
+say the least of it. She even went further than that, and held that
+praising him inordinately was out of place and out of taste. Saying that,
+if Seth or Dinah came singing praises at her bedroom door in the morning
+instead of getting on with their work, she would know exactly what it
+meant--Laziness or concealed broken china, or both.
+
+But in moments of supreme stress and difficulty, Miss Pinckney was a
+believer in prayer. Her prayer now was speechless, one might compare it to
+a mental wrestle with the abominable situation before God.
+
+When she rose from her knees everything was clear to her. Two things were
+evident. Phyl must be got back at any cost, and scandal must be choked,
+even if it had to be choked with solid lies.
+
+To save Phyl's reputation, Miss Pinckney would have perjured herself twice
+over.
+
+Miss Pinckney had many faults and limitations, but she had the grand
+common sense of a clean heart and a clear mind. She could tell a lie with
+a good conscience in a good cause, but to hide even a small fault of her
+own, the threat of death on the scaffold would not have made her tell a
+lie.
+
+She went to the writing table now and taking a sheet of paper, wrote:
+
+  _Dear Richard,_
+
+  Seth Grangerson is bad again, and I am going over there now with
+  Phyl. We mayn't be back to-night. I am taking the automobile. We will
+  be back to-morrow most likely.
+
+                                           Your affectionate Aunt,
+                                                     Maria Pinckney.
+
+She read the note over. If all went well then everything would be well. If
+the worst occurred then she could explain everything to Richard.
+
+It was a desperate gamble; well she knew how the dice were loaded against
+her, but the game had to be played out to the very last moment.
+
+Already she had stopped the mouth of slander by her prompt action with
+Colonel Grangerson's coloured man, but she well knew how coloured servants
+talk; Grangerson's man was safe enough, he was frightened and he would
+have to get back to Grangerville. Rachel was absolutely safe, Dinah alone
+was doubtful.
+
+She called Rachel in, gave her the note for Richard and told her to keep a
+close eye on Dinah.
+
+"Don't let her get talking to any one," said Miss Pinckney, "and when Mr.
+Richard comes in give him that note yourself. If he asks about Miss Phyl,
+say she came back and went with me. You understand, Rachel, Miss Phyl has
+done a foolish thing, but there's no harm in it, only what fools will make
+of it if they get chattering. No one must know, not even Mr. Richard."
+
+"I'll see to that, Miss Pinckney, an' if I catch Dinah openin' her mouth
+to say more'n 'potatoes' I'll dress her down so's she won't know which end
+of her's which."
+
+Miss Pinckney went upstairs, dressed hurriedly, packed a few things in a
+bag and the automobile being now at the door, started.
+
+It was after one o'clock when she reached Grangersons.
+
+Just as on the day when she had arrived with Phyl, Colonel Grangerson,
+hearing the noise of the car, came out to inspect.
+
+He came down the steps, hat in hand, saw the occupant, started back, and
+then advanced to open the door.
+
+"Why, God bless my soul, it's you," cried the Colonel. "What has
+happened?"
+
+Miss Pinckney without a word got out and went up the steps with him.
+
+In the hall she turned to him.
+
+"Where is Silas?"
+
+"Silas," replied the Colonel. "I haven't seen him since he went to
+Charleston to attend some dance or another. What on earth is the matter
+with you, Maria?"
+
+"Come in here," said Miss Pinckney. She went into the drawing room and
+they shut the door.
+
+"Silas has run away with Phyl," said she, "that's what's the matter with
+me. Your son has taken that girl off, Seth Grangerson, and may God have
+mercy upon him."
+
+"The red-headed girl?" said the Colonel.
+
+"Phyl," replied she, "you know quite well whom I mean."
+
+Colonel Grangerson made a few steps up and down the room to calm himself.
+Maria Pinckney was speaking to him in a tone which, had it been used by
+any one else, would have caused an explosion.
+
+"But when did it happen," he asked, "and where have they gone? Explain
+yourself, Maria. Good God! Why the fellow never spoke to her scarcely--are
+you sure of what you say?"
+
+Miss Pinckney told her tale.
+
+"I came here to try and get her back," said she, "thinking he and she
+might possibly have come here or that you might know their
+whereabouts--they have not come, but there is just the chance that they
+may come here yet."
+
+"But if they have run off with each other," said the Colonel, "how are we
+to stop them--they'll be married by this."
+
+Miss Pinckney who had taken off her gloves sat down and began to fold
+them, neatly rolling one inside the other.
+
+"_Married,_" said she.
+
+The Colonel standing by the window with his hands in his pockets turned.
+
+"And why not?" said he. "The girl's a lady, and you told me she was not
+badly off. Silas might have done worse it seems to me."
+
+"Done worse! He couldn't have done worse. I'd sooner see her dead in her
+coffin than married to Silas--There, you have it plain and straight. He'll
+make her life a misery. Let me speak, Seth Grangerson, you are just going
+to hear the truth for once. You have ruined that boy the way you've
+brought him up, he was crazy wild to start with and you've never checked
+him. Oh, I know, he has always been respectful to you and flattered your
+pride and vanity, he calls you sir when he speaks to you, and you are the
+only person in the world to whom he shews respect. I don't say he acts
+like that from any double dealing motive, it's just the old southern
+tradition he's inherited; he does respect you, and I daresay he's fond of
+you, but he respects nothing else, especially women. I know him. And I
+know her, and he'll make her life a misery. If he'd left her alone she'd
+have been happy. Richard loves her, and would have made her a good
+husband. My mind was set on it, and now it's all over."
+
+Miss Pinckney began to weep, and the Colonel who had been swelling himself
+up found his anger collapsing. She was only a woman. Women have queer
+fancies--This especial woman too was part of the past and privileged.
+
+He came to her and stood beside her and rested his hand on her shoulder.
+
+"My dear Maria," said the Colonel, "youth is youth--There is not any use
+in laying down the law for young people or making plans for their
+marriages. Leave it in the hands of Providence. The most carefully
+arranged marriages often turn out the worst, and a scratch match has often
+as not turned out happily. Anyhow, you will stay here till news comes of
+them?"
+
+"Yes, I will stay," said Miss Pinckney.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+At eleven o'clock that night, just as Miss Pinckney was on the point of
+retiring to bed the news came in the form of Phyl herself.
+
+She arrived in a buggy driven by the farmer who owned the land through
+which the grass road ran.
+
+She gave a little glad cry when she saw Miss Pinckney and ran into her
+arms.
+
+Upstairs and alone with the lady, she told her story. Told her how she had
+met Silas on the road that morning, how, tired of life and scarce knowing
+what she did, she had got into the phaeton, how he had upset it and
+smashed it, how she had sheltered in the cabin whilst he went in search of
+help.
+
+"Then I went to sleep," said Phyl, "and when I woke up it was afternoon.
+He was not there, but he must have come back when I was asleep and left
+some food for me, for there was a bundle outside the door with some bread
+and bacon in it. Then I started off to walk and found a village with some
+coloured people. I told them I was lost and wanted to get to Grangersons.
+They were kind to me, but I had to wait a long time before they could find
+that gentleman, the farmer, and he could get a cart to drive me here."
+
+"Thank God it is all over and you are back," said Miss Pinckney. "But oh,
+Phyl! what made you do it?"
+
+"I don't know," said Phyl.
+
+But Miss Pinckney did.
+
+"Listen," said she. "You know what I told you about Richard and Frances
+Rhett--that's all done with. He has broken off the engagement."
+
+Phyl flushed, then she hid her burning face on Miss Pinckney's shoulder.
+
+Miss Pinckney held her for awhile. Then she began to talk.
+
+"We will get right back to-morrow early; no one knows anything and I'll
+take care they never do. Well, it's strange--I can understand everything
+but I can't understand that crazy creature. What's become of him? That's
+what I want to know."
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+This is what had become of him.
+
+Kneeling beside Phyl the sudden sharp pain just above his instep made him
+turn. In turning he caught a glimpse of his assailant. It had been
+creeping towards the door when he entered and had taken refuge beneath the
+straw. He had almost knelt on it. Escaping, a movement of his foot had
+raised its anger and it had struck, it was now whisking back into the
+darkness of the cabin beyond the straw heap.
+
+He recognised it as the deadliest snake in the South.
+
+For a moment he recognised nothing else but the fact that he had been
+bitten.
+
+His passion and desire had vanished utterly. Phyl might have been a
+thousand miles away from him for all that he thought of her.
+
+He rose up and came out into the sunlight, went to the well head, sat down
+on the frame and removed his shoe and sock. The mark of the bite was there
+between the adductor tendons. A red hot iron and a bottle of whisky might
+have saved him. He had not even a penknife to cut the wound out--He
+thought of Phyl, she could do nothing. He thought of the bar of the
+Charleston Hotel, and the verse of the song about the old hen with a
+wooden leg and the statement that it was just about time for another
+little drink, ran through his head.
+
+Then suddenly the idea came to him that there might possibly be help at
+the village where he had obtained the food from the coloured woman. It was
+a long way off, but still it was a chance.
+
+He put the sock in his pocket, put on the shoe and started. He ran for the
+first couple of hundred yards, then he slackened his pace, then he stopped
+holding one hand to his side.
+
+The poison already had hold of him.
+
+The game was up and he knew it. It was useless to go on, he would not live
+to reach the village or reaching it would die there.
+
+And every one would pity him with that shuddering pity people extend to
+those who meet with a horrible form of death.
+
+Death from snake bite was a low down business, it was no end for a
+Grangerson; but there in the swamp to the left a man might lie forever
+without being found out.
+
+He turned from the road to the left and walked away among the trees.
+
+The ground here sank beneath the foot, a vague haze hung above the marsh
+and the ponds. Here nothing happened but the change of season, night and
+day, the chorus of frogs and the crying of the white owl amidst the
+trees.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+Miss Pinckney and Phyl left Grangersons next morning at seven o'clock to
+return to Charleston.
+
+During the night the Colonel had sent after the horses and they had been
+captured and brought back. The broken phaeton was left for the present.
+
+"I'll make Silas go and fetch it himself when he comes back," said the
+Colonel. "I reckon the exercise will do him good."
+
+"Do," said Miss Pinckney, "and then send him on to me. I reckon what I'll
+give him will help him to forget the exercise."
+
+On the way back she said little. She was reckoning with the fact that she
+had deceived Richard. Now that everything had turned out so innocently and
+so well she decided to tell him the bare facts of the matter. There was
+nothing to hide except the fact of Phyl's stupidity in going with Silas.
+
+Richard Pinckney was not in when they arrived but he returned shortly
+before luncheon time and Miss Pinckney, who was waiting for him, carried
+him off into the library.
+
+She shut the door and faced him.
+
+"Richard," said Miss Pinckney, "Seth Grangerson is as well as you are. I
+didn't go to see him because he was ill, I went because of Phyl. She did a
+stupid thing and I went to set matters right."
+
+She explained the whole affair. How Phyl had met Silas, how he had
+persuaded her to get into the phaeton with him, the accident and all the
+rest. The story as told by Miss Pinckney was quite simple and without any
+dark patches, and no man, one might fancy, could find cause for offence in
+it.
+
+Miss Pinckney, however, was quite unconscious of the fact that Silas
+Grangerson had attempted to take Richard Pinckney's life on the night of
+the Rhetts' dance.
+
+To Richard the thought that Phyl should have met Silas only a few hours
+after that event, talked to him, made friends with him, and got into his
+carriage was a monstrous thought. He could not understand the business in
+the least, he could only recognise the fact.
+
+Had he known that it was her love for him and her despair at losing him
+that led her to the act it would have been different.
+
+He said nothing for a moment after Miss Pinckney had finished. Having
+already confessed to her his love for Phyl he was too proud to show his
+anger against her now.
+
+"It was unwise of her," he said at last, turning away to the window and
+looking out.
+
+"Most," replied she, "but you cannot put old heads on young shoulders.
+Well, there, it's over and done with and there's no more to be said. Well,
+I must go up and change before luncheon. You are having luncheon here?"
+
+"No," said he, "I have to meet a man at the club. I only just ran in to
+see if you were back."
+
+He went off and that day Miss Pinckney and Phyl had luncheon alone.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+Richard Pinckney, like most people, had the defects of his qualities, but
+he was different from others in this: his temper was quick and blazing
+when roused, yet on rare occasions it could hold its heat and smoulder,
+and keep alive indefinitely.
+
+When in this condition he shewed nothing of his feelings except towards
+the person against whom he was in wrath.
+
+Towards them he exhibited the two main characteristics of the North
+Pole--Distance and Ice.
+
+Phyl felt the frost almost immediately. He talked to her just the same as
+of old but his pleasantness and laughter were gone and he never sought her
+eye. She knew at once that it was the business with Silas that had caused
+this change, and she would have been entirely miserable but for the
+knowledge of two great facts: she was innocent of any disloyalty to him,
+he had broken off his engagement to Frances Rhett. Instinct told her that
+he cared for her, Miss Pinckney had told her the same thing.
+
+Yet day after day passed without bringing the slightest change in Richard
+Pinckney.
+
+That gentleman after many debates with himself had arrived at the
+determination against will, against reason, against Love, and against
+nature to have nothing more to do with Phyl.
+
+Old Pepper Pinckney, that volcano of the past had suffered a fancied
+insult from his wife; no one knew of it, no one suspected it till on his
+death his will disclosed it by the fact that he had left the lady--one
+dollar. The will being unwitnessed--that was the sort of man he was--did
+not hold; all the same, it held an unsuspected part of his character up
+for public inspection.
+
+Richard, incapable of such an act, still had Pepper Pinckney for an
+ancestor. Ancestors leave us more than their pictures.
+
+Having come to this momentous decision, he arrived at another.
+
+One morning at breakfast he announced his intention of going to New York
+on business, he would start on the morrow and be gone a month. The
+Beauregards had always been bothering him to go on a visit and he might as
+well kill two birds with one stone.
+
+Miss Pinckney made little resistance to the idea. She had noticed the
+coolness between the young people; knowing how much they cared one for the
+other she had little fear as to the end of the matter and she fancied a
+change might do good.
+
+But to Phyl it seemed that the end of the world had come.
+
+All that day she scarcely spoke except to Miss Pinckney. She was like a
+person stunned by some calamity.
+
+Richard Pinckney, notwithstanding the fact that he was to leave for New
+York on the morrow, did not return to dinner that night. Phyl went
+upstairs early but she did not go to her room, she went to Juliet's.
+Sorrow attracts sorrow. Juliet had always seemed more than a friend, more
+than a sister, even.
+
+There were times when the ungraspable idea came before her that Juliet was
+herself. The vision of the Civil War sometimes came back to her and always
+with the hint, like a half veiled threat, that Richard the man she loved
+was Rupert the man she had loved, that following the dark law of
+duplication that works alike for types and events, forms and ideas, her
+history was to repeat the history of Juliet.
+
+She had saved Richard from death at the hands of Silas Grangerson, her
+love for him had met Fate face to face and won, but Fate has many reserve
+weapons. She is an old warrior, and the conqueror of cities and kings does
+not turn from her purpose because of a momentary defeat.
+
+Phyl shut the door of the room, put the lamp she was carrying on a table
+and opened the long windows giving upon the piazza. The night was
+absolutely still, not a breath of wind stirred the foliage of the garden
+and the faint sounds of the city rose through the warm night. The waning
+moon would not rise yet for an hour and the stars had the sky to
+themselves.
+
+She turned from the window and going to the little bureau by the door
+opened the secret drawer and took out the packet of letters. Then drawing
+an armchair close to the table and the lamp she sat down, undid the ribbon
+and began to read the letters.
+
+She felt just as though Juliet were talking to her, telling her of her
+troubles. She read on placing each letter on the table in turn, one upon
+the other.
+
+The chimes of St. Michael's came through the open window but they were
+unheeded.
+
+When she had read through all the letters she picked out one. The one
+containing the passionate declaration of Juliet's love.
+
+She re-read it and then placed it on the table on top of the others.
+
+If she could speak of Richard like that!
+
+But she could do nothing and say nothing. It is one of the curses of
+womanhood that a woman may not say to a man "I love you," that the
+initiative is taken out of her hands.
+
+Phyl was a creature of impulse and it was now for the first time in her
+life that she recognised this fatal barrier on the woman's side. With the
+recognition came the impulse to over jump it.
+
+He cared for her, she knew, or had cared for her. She felt that it only
+required a movement on her side, a touch, a word to destroy the ice that
+had formed between them. If he were to go away he might never return, nay,
+he would never return, of that she felt sure.
+
+And he would go away unless she spoke. She must speak, not to-morrow in
+the cold light of day when things were impossible, but now, at once, she
+would say to him simply the truth, "I love you." If he were to turn away
+or repulse her it would kill her. No matter, life was absolutely nothing.
+
+She rose from her chair and was just on the point of turning to the door
+when something checked her.
+
+It was the clock of St. Michael's striking one.
+
+One o'clock. The whole household would be in bed. He would have retired to
+his room long ago--and to-morrow it would be too late.
+
+She could never say that to him to-morrow; even now the impulse was dying
+away, the strength that would have broken convention and disregarded all
+things was fading in her. She had been dreaming whilst she ought to have
+been doing, and the hour had passed and would never return.
+
+She sat down again in the chair.
+
+The moon in the cloudless sky outside cast a patch of silver on the floor,
+then it shewed a silver rim gradually increasing against the sky as it
+pushed its way through the night to peep in at Phyl. Leaning back in the
+chair limp and exhausted, with closed eyes, one might have fancied her
+dead or in a trance and the moon as if to make sure pushed on, framing
+itself now fully in the window space.
+
+The clock of St. Michael's struck two, then it chimed the quarter after
+and almost on the chime Phyl sat up. It was as though she had suddenly
+come to a resolve. She clasped her hands together for a moment, then she
+rose, gathered up the letters and put them away, all except one which she
+held in her hand as though to give her courage for what she was about to
+do. She carefully extinguished the lamp and then led by the moonlight came
+out on to the piazza.
+
+Charleston was asleep under the moon; the air was filled with the scent of
+night jessamine and the faint fragrance of foliage, and scarcely a sound
+came from all the sleeping city beyond the garden walls and the sea beyond
+the city.
+
+As she stood with one hand on the piazza rail, suddenly, far away but
+shrill, came the crowing of a cock.
+
+She shivered as though the sound were a menace, then rigidly gliding like
+a ghost escaped from the grave and warned by the cockcrow that the hour of
+return was near, she came along the piazza, mounted the stair to the next
+floor and came along the upper piazza to the window of Richard Pinckney's
+bedroom.
+
+The window was open and, pushing the curtains aside, she went in.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+Richard Pinckney went to his room at eleven that night. He rarely retired
+before twelve, but to-night he had packing to do as Jabez, his man, was
+away and he knew better than to trust Seth.
+
+He packed his portmanteau and left it lying open in case he had forgotten
+anything that could be put in at the last moment. Then he packed a kit-bag
+and, having smoked a cigarette, went to bed.
+
+But he did not fall asleep. As a rule he slept at once on lying down, but
+to-night he lay awake.
+
+He was miserable; going away was death to him, but he was going.
+
+First of all, because he had said that he was going. Secondly, because he
+wanted to hit and hurt Phyl whom he loved, thirdly, because he wanted to
+torture himself, fourthly, because he loathed and hated Silas Grangerson,
+fifthly, because in his heart of hearts he knew what he was doing was
+wrong.
+
+You never know really what is in a man till he is pinched by Love. Love
+may stun him with a blow or run a dagger into him without bringing his
+worst qualities to light whilst a sly pinch will raise devils--all the
+miserable devils that march under the leadership of Pique.
+
+If he had not loved Phyl the fact of her going off with Silas for a drive
+after what had occurred on the night before would have hurt him. Loving
+her it had maddened him.
+
+He was not angry with her now, so he told himself--just disgusted.
+
+Meanwhile he could not sleep. The faithful St. Michael's kept him well
+aware of this fact. He lit a candle and tried to read, smoked a cigarette
+and then, blowing the candle out, tried to sleep. But insomnia had him
+fairly in her grip; to-night there was no escape from her and he lay
+whilst the moon, creeping through the sky, cast her light on the piazza
+outside.
+
+St. Michael's chimed the quarter after two and sleep, long absent, was
+coming at last when, suddenly, the sound of a light footstep on the piazza
+drove her leagues away.
+
+Then outside in the full moonlight he saw a figure. It was Phyl, fully
+dressed, standing with outstretched hands. Her eyes wide open, fixed, and
+sightless, told their tale. She was asleep.
+
+She moved the curtains aside and entered the room, darkening the window
+space, passed across the room without the least sound, reached the bed,
+and knelt down beside it. Her hand was feeling for him, it touched his
+neck, he raised his head slightly from the pillow and her arm, gliding
+like a snake round his neck drew his head towards her; then her lips,
+blindly seeking, found his and clung to them for a moment.
+
+Nothing could be more ghostly, more terrible, and yet more lovely than
+that kiss, the kiss of a spirit, the embrace of a soul rising from the
+profound abysm of sleep to find its mate.
+
+Then her lips withdrew and he lay praying to God, as few men have ever
+prayed, that she might not wake.
+
+He felt the arm withdrawing from around his neck, she rose, wavered for a
+moment, and then passed away towards the window. The lace curtains parted
+as though drawn aside, closed again, and she was gone.
+
+He left his bed and came out on the piazza. Craning over he caught a
+glimpse of her returning along the lower piazza and vanishing.
+
+Coming back to his room he saw something lying on the floor by his bed; it
+was a letter; he struck a match, lit the candle and picked the letter up.
+It was just a folded piece of paper, it had been sealed, but the seal was
+broken, and sitting down on the side of the bed he spread it open, but his
+hands were shaking so that he had to rest it on his knee.
+
+It was not from Phyl. That letter had been written many, many years ago,
+the ink was faded and the handwriting of another day.
+
+He read it.
+
+"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....
+
+"Sometimes I feel as if I were deceiving him and everybody. I am, and I
+don't care. Oh, 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."
+
+It was the letter of Juliet to her lover.
+
+He turned it over and looked at the seal with the little dove upon it. He
+knew of Juliet's letters, and he knew at once that this was one of them,
+and he guessed vaguely that she had been reading it when sleep overtook
+her and that it had formed part of the inspiration that led her to him.
+But the whole truth he would never know.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+A blazing red Cardinal was singing in the magnolia tree by the gate,
+butterflies were chasing one another above the flowers; it was seven
+o'clock and the blue, lazy, lovely morning was unfolding like a flower to
+the sea wind.
+
+Richard Pinckney was standing in the piazza before his bedroom window
+looking down into the garden.
+
+To him suddenly appeared Seth.
+
+"If you please, sah," said Seth, "Rachel tole me tell yo' de train for
+N'York--"
+
+"Damn New York," said Pinckney. "Get out."
+
+Seth vanished, grinning, and he returned to his contemplation of the
+garden.
+
+She must never know.--In the years to come, perhaps, he might tell her--
+In the years to come--
+
+He was turning away when a step on the piazza below made him come to the
+rail again and lean over. It was Phyl. She vanished and then reappeared
+again, leaving the lower piazza and coming right out into the garden. He
+waited till the sun had caught her in both hands, holding her against the
+background of the cherokee roses, then he called to her:
+
+"Phyl!"
+
+She started, turned, and looked up.
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Ghost Girl, by H. De Vere Stacpoole
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