HIS GRANDMOTHER'S HOUSE
"It is rather wonderful to turn around and find _you_ here,
Peter,--and to find you so unchanged. Because you haven't changed,
really; you've just grown up," said Mrs. Hemingway, holding his
hand. Her face was excited and glad. "I should have known you
instantly, anywhere."
"I am told my legs are quite unmistakable. Some have said I appear
to be walking on fishing-poles," said Peter.
Mrs. Hemingway laughed. "They seem to be good, long, serviceable
legs," she said, gaily. "But it is your eyes I recognized, Peter.
One couldn't mistake your eyes."
Peter smiled at her gratefully. "The really wonderful thing is that
you should remember me at all," he told her happily, and his face
glowed. That her reappearance should be timed to the outset of his
great adventure into life seemed highly significant. One might
almost consider it an omen.
As if they had parted but yesterday, they were able to resume their
old sympathetic friendship, with its satisfying sense of comradely
understanding. Her heart warmed to him now as it had warmed to the
shabby boy she had first seen running after the Red Admiral in the
fields beyond the river swamp. No, she reflected appraisingly, he
had not changed. He had somehow managed to retain a certain quality
of childlikeness that made her feel as if she were looking through
crystal. She was grateful that no contact had been able to blunt it,
that it remained undimmed and serene.
Briefly and rather baldly Peter outlined his years of struggle,
dismissing their bleak hardships with a tolerant smile. What he
seemed chiefly to remember was the underlying kindness and good
humor of the folk back there in Riverton; if they had ever failed to
be kind, it was because they hadn't understood, he thought. There
was no resentment in him. Why, they were his own folks! His mother's
grave was one of their graves, his name one of their names, their
traditions and heritages were part and parcel of himself. The
tide-water was in his blood; his flesh was dust of the South
Carolina coast.
She saw that, while he was speaking. And against the vivid, colorful
coast background she caught haunting glimpses of a tireless small
figure toiling, sweating, always moving toward a far-off goal as
with the inevitable directness of a fixed law. She marveled at the
patience of his strength, and she loved his gentleness, his
sweetness that had a flavor of other-worldliness in it.
He was telling her now of Chadwick Champneys and how his coming had
changed things. But of the price he had had to pay he said nothing.
He tried not to think of the bride his uncle had forced upon him,
though her narrowed eyes, her red hair, her mouth set in a hard red
line haunted him like a nightmare. His soul revolted against such a
mockery of marriage. He could imagine his mother's horror, and he
was glad Maria Champneys slept beside the husband of her youth in
the cemetery beside the Riverton Road. She wouldn't have asked him
to pay such a price, not for all the Champneyses dead and gone! But
Chadwick Champneys had held him to his bargain, had forced him to
give his name, his father's name, of which his mother had been so
proud.
Peter smarted with humiliation. It was as if he had been bought and
sold, and he writhed under the disgrace of such bondage. He felt the
helpless anger of one who realizes he has been shamefully swindled,
yet is powerless to redress his injury; and what added insult to
injury was that a Champneys, his father's brother, had inflicted it.
Yet he had no faintest notion of breaking or even evading his
pledged word; such a thought never once occurred to him. He meant to
live up to the letter of his bargain; his honor would compel him to
fulfil his obligation scrupulously and exactly.
"And so my uncle and I came to terms," he told Mrs. Hemingway. And
he added conscientiously: "He is very liberal. He insisted upon
placing to my credit what he says I'll need, but what seems to me
too much. And so here I am," he finished.
"Yes, here you are. It had to be," said she, thoughtfully. "It's
your fate, Peter."
"It had to be. It's my fate," agreed Peter.
"And that nice, amusing old colored woman who kept house for
you--what became of her?"
"Emma? Oh, she wouldn't stay behind, so she came along with me. And
she couldn't leave the cat, so he came along, too," said Peter,
casually.
Mrs. Hemingway laughed as his uncle had laughed.
"There's an odd turn to your processes, Peter," she commented. "One
sees that _you'll_ never be molded into a human bread pill! I'm glad
we've met again. I think you're going to need me. So I'm going to
look after you."
"I have needed you every day since you left," he told her.
He didn't as yet know what deep cause he had to feel grateful for
Mrs. John Hemingway's promise to look after him; he didn't as yet
know what an important person she was in the American colony in
Paris, as well as in certain very high circles of French society
itself. And what was true of her in Paris was also true of her in
London. Mrs. John Hemingway's promise to look after a young man
hall-marked him. She was more beautiful and no less kind than of
old, and absence had not had the power to change his feelings for
her. As simply and whole-heartedly as he had loved her then, he
loved her now. So he looked at her with shining eyes. Reticence was
ingrained in Peter, but the knowledge that she liked and understood
him had the effect of sunlight upon him.
"He's as simple as the Four Gospels," she thought, "and as
elemental as the coast country itself. One couldn't spoil him any
more than one could spoil the tide-water.
"Yes, indeed! I'm going to look after you," she repeated.
He discovered, from what she herself chose to tell him, that there
had been some unpleasant years for her too. But that had all ended
when she married John Hemingway, then with a New York firm and later
sent abroad to represent the interests of the company of which he
was now a member. His chief office was in Paris, though he had to
spend considerable time in London. When she spoke of John Hemingway
his wife's face glowed with quiet radiance. The one drop of
bitterness in her cup was that there were no children.
"I hope you marry young, Peter, and that there'll be a houseful of
little Champneys," she said, and sighed a bit enviously.
At that the face of Mrs. Peter Champneys rose before her bridegroom
and the very soul of him winced and cringed. He averted his face,
staring seaward.
"I know so many charming young girls," said Mrs. Hemingway,
musingly, as if she were speaking to herself.
"They don't come any prettier than they come in Riverton," Peter
parried. "And you're to remember I'm coming over here to _work_."
"I'll remember," said she, smiling. "But all the same, I mean you to
go about it the right way. I'm going to introduce you to some very
delightful people, Peter."
Then Peter took her to see Emma Campbell and the cat.
Emma would have crawled into her berth and stayed there until the
ship docked if it hadn't been for the cat. Satan had to be given a
daily airing; he had to be looked after by some one she could trust,
and Emma rose to the occasion. She crawled out of her berth and on
deck, where, steamer rug over her knees, her head tightly bound in a
spotless white head-handkerchief, she sat with her hand on the big
bird-cage set upon a camp-stool next her chair.
"I don' say one Gawd's word about _me_, dough I does feel lak I done
swallahed my own stummick. All I scared of is dat dis po'
unforch'nate cat 's gwine to lose 'is min' befo' we-all lan's," she
told Mrs. Hemingway, and cast a glance of deep distaste at the
tumbling world of waters around her. Emma didn't like the sea at
all. There was much too much of it.
"I got a feelin' heart for ole man Noah," she concluded pensively.
When they sighted the Irish coast, Emma discovered a deep sense of
gratitude to the Irish: no matter what they didn't have, they did
have _land_; and land and plenty of it, land that you could walk on,
was what Emma craved most in this world. When they presently reached
England, she was so glad to feel solid earth under her feet once
more that she was jubilant.
"Cat, we-all is saved!" she told Satan. "You en me is chillun o'
Israel come thoo de Red Sea. We-all got a mighty good Gawd, cat!"
They went up to London with Mrs. Hemingway, and were met by
Hemingway himself, who gave Peter Champneys an entirely new
conception of the term "business man." Peter knew rice- and
cotton- and stock-men, even a provincial banker or two--all
successful men, within their limits. But this big, quiet, vital
man hadn't any limits, except those of the globe itself. A tall,
fair man with a large head, decided features, chilly gray eyes,
and an uncompromising mouth adorned with a short, stiff mustache,
his square chin was cleft by an incomprehensible dimple. His wife
declared she had married him because of that cleft; it gave her an
object in life to find out what it meant.
Hemingway studied Peter curiously. He had a great respect for his
wife's nice and discriminating judgment, and it was plain that this
long-legged, unpretentious young man was deeply in her good graces.
Evidently, then, this chap must be more than a bit unusual. Going to
be an artist, was he? Well, thank God, he didn't _look_ as if he
were afflicted with the artistic temperament; he looked as if he
were capable of hard work, and plenty of it.
People liked to say that John Hemingway was a fine example of the
American become a cosmopolitan. As a matter of fact, Hemingway
wasn't. He liked Europe, but in his heart he wearied of its
over-sophistication, its bland diplomacy. His young countryman's
unspoiled truthfulness delighted him. He was proud of it. A man
trained to judge men, he perceived this cub's potential strength.
That he should so instantly like his wife's protégé raised that
charming lady's fine judgment even higher in his estimation. A man
always respects his wife's judgment more when it tallies with his
own convictions.
The Hemingways insisted that Peter should spend some time in
England. Mrs. Hemingway was going over to Paris presently, and he
could accompany her. In the meantime she wanted him to meet certain
English friends of hers. Peter was perfectly willing to wait. He was
enchanted with London, and although he would have preferred to be
turned foot-loose to prowl indefinitely, his affection for Mrs.
Hemingway made him amenable to her discipline. At her command he
went with Hemingway to the latter's tailor. To please her he
duteously obeyed Hemingway's fastidious instructions as to
habiliments. He overcame his rooted aversion to meeting strangers,
and when bidden appeared in her drawing-room, and there met smart,
clever, and noted London.
Hemingway thereafter marked his progress with amusement not unmixed
with amazement. It came to him that there was a greater difference,
a deeper divergence between himself and Peter than between Peter and
these Britishers. The earmark of your coast-born South Carolinian is
the selfsame, absolute sureness of himself, his place, his people,
in the essential scheme of things. Wasn't he born in South Carolina?
Hasn't he relatives in Charleston? Very well, then!
In Peter's case this essential sureness had developed into a
courtesy so instinctive, a democracy so unaffectedly sincere, that
it flavored his whole personality with a pleasing distinctiveness.
The British do not expect their very young men to be too knowing
or too fatally bright; they mark the promise rather than the
performance of youth, and spaciously allow time for the process of
development. And so Peter Champneys found himself curiously at home
in democratically oligarchic England.
"I feel as if I were visiting my grandmother's house," he confided
to a certain lady next whom he was seated at one of Mrs. Hemingway's
small dinners.
"And where is your mother's house?" wondered the lady, who found
herself attracted to him.
"Over home in Riverton," said Peter Champneys. And his face went
wistful, remembering the little town with the tide-water gurgling in
its coves, and its great oaks hung with long gray swaying moss, and
the sinuous lines of the marshes against sky and water, and the
smell of the sea--all the mellow magic of the coast that was Home.
It didn't occur to him that an English lady mightn't know just where
"over home in Riverton" might be. She was so great a lady that she
didn't ask. She looked at him and said thoughtfully:
"I wonder if you wouldn't like to see an old place of ours. I'm
having the Hemingways down for a week, and I should like you to come
with them." And she added, with a charming smile: "As you are an
artist, you'll like our gallery. There's a Rembrandt you should
see."
Peter's eyes of a sudden went deep and golden, and their dazzling
depths had so instant and so sweet a recognition that her heart
leaped in answer. It was as if a young archangel had secretly
signaled her in passing.
When the formal invitation arrived, Mrs. Hemingway was delighted
with what she termed Peter's good fortune. The invitations to that
house were coveted and prized she explained. Really, Peter Champneys
was unusually lucky! She felt deeply gratified.
Peter hadn't known that there existed anywhere on earth anything
quite so perfect as the life in a great English country house. He
thought that perhaps the vanished plantation life of the old South
might have approximated it. His delight in the fine old Tudor pile,
in its ordered stateliness, its mellowed beauty, pleased his hostess
and won the regard of the rather grumpy gentleman who happened to be
her husband and its owner. To her surprise, he took Peter under his
wing, and showed himself as much interested in this modest guest as
he was ordinarily indifferent to many more important ones. It was
his custom to take what he called a stroll before breakfast--a
matter of a mere eight or ten miles, maybe--and he found to his hand
a young man with walking legs, seeing eyes, and but a modicum of
tongue. He showed Peter that country-side with the thoroughness of a
boy birds'-nesting, as Peter had once showed the Carolina
country-side to Claribel Spring. They went over the venerable house
with the same thoroughness, and Peter sensed the owner's
impersonally personal delight in the stewardship of a priceless
possession. He held it in trust, and he loved it with a quiet
passion that was as much a part of himself as was his English
speech. Every now and then he would pause before some rusty sword,
or maybe a tattered and dusty banner; and although he was of a very
florid complexion, and his nose was even bigger than Peter's, in
such moments there was that in the eye and brow, in the expression
of the firm lips, that made him more than handsome in the young
man's sight. Through him he glimpsed that something silent and large
and fine that is England.
"And we're going," said the nobleman, pausing before the portrait of
a gentleman who had fallen at Marston Moor. "Oh, yes, we are
vanishing. After a while the great breed of English gentlemen will
be as extinct as the dodo. And this house will be turned into a
Dispensary for Dyspeptic Proletarians, or more probably an American
named Cohen will buy it and explain to his guests at dinner just how
much it cost him."
Peter remembered broken and vine-grown chimneys where stately homes
had stood, the extinction of a romantic plantation life, the
vanishing of the gentlemen of the old South, as the Champneys had
vanished. They had taken with them something never to be replaced in
American life, perhaps; but hadn't that vanished something made room
for a something else intrinsically better and sounder, because based
on a larger conception of freedom and justice? The American looked
at the cavalier's haughty, handsome face; he looked at the
Englishman thoughtfully.
"Yes. You will go," he agreed presently. "All things pass. That is
the law. In the end it is a good law."
"I should think it would altogether depend on what replaces us,"
said the other, dryly.
"And that," said Peter, "altogether depends upon you, doesn't it?
It's in your power to shape it, you know. However, if you'll notice,
things somehow manage to right themselves in spite of us. Now, over
home in Carolina we haven't come out so very badly, all things
considered."
"Got jolly well licked, didn't you?" asked the Englishman, whose
outstanding idea of American military history centered upon
Stonewall Jackson.
"Just about wiped off the slate. Had to begin all over, in a world
turned upside down. Yet, you see, here I am! And I assure you I
shouldn't be willing to change places with my grandfather." With a
shy friendliness he laid his fingers for a moment on his host's arm.
"Your grandson won't be willing to change, either, because he'll be
the right sort. _That's_ what your kind hands down." He spoke
diffidently, but with a certain authority. Each man is a sieve
through which life sifts experiences, leaving the garnering of grain
and the blowing away of chaff to the man himself. Peter had garnered
courage to face with a quiet heart things as they are. He had never
accepted the general view of things as final, therefore he escaped
disillusionment.
"They thought the end of the world had come--my people. So it
had--for them. But not for us. There's always a new heaven and a new
earth for those who come after," he finished.
The Englishman smiled twistedly. After a while he said unexpectedly:
"I wish you'd have a try at my portrait, Mr. Champneys. I think I'd
like that tentative grandson of mine to see the sort of grandfather
he really possessed."
"Why, I haven't had any training! But if you'll sit for me I'll do
some sketches of you, gladly."
"Why not now?" asked the other, coolly. "I have a fancy to see what
you'll make of me." He added casually: "Whistler used the north room
over the stables when he stayed here. You've seen his pastels, and
the painting of my father."
"Yes," said Peter, reverently. And he stared at his host,
round-eyed.
"We've never changed the room since his time. Should you like to
look over it now? You'll find all the materials you are likely to
need,--my sister has a pretty little talent of her own, and it
pleases her to use the place."
"Why, yes, if you like," murmured Peter, dazedly. And like one in a
dream he followed his stocky host to the room over the stables. One
saw why the artist had selected it; it made an ideal studio. A small
canvas, untouched, was already in place on an easel near a window.
One or two ladylike landscapes leaned against the wall.
"She has the talent of a painstaking copyist," said her brother,
nodding at his sister's work. "Shall you use oils, or do you prefer
chalks, or water-colors?"
"Oils," decided Peter, examining the canvas. "It will be rough work,
remember." He made his preparations, turned upon his sitter the
painter's knife-like stare, and plunged into work. It was swift
work, and perhaps roughly done, as he had said, but by the miracle
of genius he managed to catch and fix upon his canvas the tenacious
and indomitable soul of the Englishman. You saw it looking out at
you from the steady, light blue eyes in the plain face with its
craggy nose and obstinate chin; and you saw the kindness and
delicacy of the firm mouth. There he stood, flat-footed, easy in his
well-worn clothes, one hand in his pocket, the other holding the
blackthorn walking-stick he always carried, and looked at you with
the quiet sureness of integrity and of power. Peter added a few last
touches; and then, instead of signing his name, he painted in a
small Red Admiral, this with such exquisite fidelity that you might
think that gay small rover had for a moment alighted upon the canvas
and would in another moment fly away again.
His lordship studied his painted semblance critically.
"I rather thought you could do it," he said quietly. "I usually
manage, as you Americans say, to pick a winner. You'll be a great
painter if you really want to be one, Mr. Champneys. Should you say
sixty guineas would be a fair price for this?"
"That's something like three hundred dollars, isn't it?" asked
Peter, interestedly. "Suppose we call this a preliminary sketch for
a portrait I'm to paint later--say when I've had a few years of
training."
"You will charge me very much more than sixty guineas for a
portrait, two or three years from now," said the other, smiling. He
looked at the swiftly done, vivid bit of work. "_This_ is what I
want for my grandson; it is his grandfather as nature made him. It
is as true and as homely as life itself." And he looked at Peter
respectfully, so that that young man blushed to his ears. And that
is how and when Peter Champneys painted his first ordered picture,
signed with the Red Admiral; and how he won the faithful friendship
of a crusty Englishman. It was a very real friendship. His lordship
had what he himself called a country heart, and as Peter Champneys
had the same sort, and neither man outraged the other by too much
talk, they got along astonishingly well.
"He's deucedly intelligent," his lordship explained, with quiet
enthusiasm. "We'll tramp for miles, and I give you my word that for
an hour on end he won't say three words!"
Hemingway, to whom this confidence was given, chuckled. It amused
him to watch his wife's wild goose putting on native swan feathers.
Yet it pleased him, for he knew the boy appealed to her romantic as
well as to her maternal instinct. She handled him skilfully, and it
was she who passed upon his invitations. She wished him to meet
clever and brilliant men and women; and at times she left him in the
hands of young girls, pink-and-white visions who troubled as well as
interested him. He felt that he was really meeting them under false
pretenses. Their youth called to his, but he might not answer.
Between him and youth stood that unloved and unlovely girl in
America.
Mrs. Hemingway watched him with the eyes of the woman who has a
young man upon her hands. His reactions to his contacts interested
her immensely. His worldly education was progressing with entire
satisfaction to her.
"I want him to marry an English wife," she confided to her husband.
They were to leave for Paris that night, and she was summing up the
results of his stay in London, the balance being altogether in his
favor. "A well-bred, normal English girl with good connections, a
girl entirely untroubled by temperament, who will love him tenderly,
look out for his physical well-being, and fill his house with
healthy children, is exactly what Peter Champneys needs. And the
sooner it happens to him the better. Peter has a lonely soul. It
shouldn't be allowed to become chronic."
Hemingway looked at her apprehensively. "Sounds to me as if you were
trying to make Peter pick a peck of pickled peppers," he commented.
And Peter coming in at this opportune moment, he grinned at the boy
cheerfully.
"Peter," he smiled, "the sweet chime of merry wedding-bells in the
distance falls softly on mine ear; my wife thinks you should be
altar-broke. Charming domestic interior, happy fireside clime, flag
of our union fluttering from the patent clothes-line! Futurist
painting of Young Artist Pushing a Pram! Don't look at me with such
an agonized expression of the ears, Peter!"
But Peter had no answering smile. His face had changed, and there
was that in his eyes which gave Hemingway pause.
"Why, old chap, I was merely joking!" he began, with real concern.
"Peter!" said the woman, softly. "You have had--a disappointment?
But, my dear boy, you are so _very_ young. Don't take it too much to
heart, Peter. At your age nothing is final, really." And she smiled
at him.
A flush suffused the young man's forehead. He felt shamed and
miserable. He _couldn't_ flaunt his price-tag before these unbuyable
souls whose beautiful and true marriage was based upon love, and
sympathy, and mutual ideals! He _couldn't_ rattle his chains, or
explain Anne Champneys. He couldn't, indeed, force himself to speak
of her at all. The thing was bad enough, but to talk about it--No!
He lifted troubled eyes.
"I am afraid--in my case--it is final," he said, in a low voice.
And after a pause, in a louder tone: "Yes--please understand--it is
final."
"Oh, Peter dear, I'm sorry! But--"
"You're talking nonsense. Why, you're barely twenty-one!" protested
Hemingway. "Much water must flow under the bridge, Peter, before you
can say of anything: it is final. You've got a long life ahead of
you to--"
"Work in," finished Peter. "Yes, I know that. I have my chance to
work. That is enough." At that his head went up.
Mrs. Hemingway puckered her brows. She leaned toward him, her eyes
lighting up.
"Peter!" said she, mischievously, her cheek dimpling. "Peter, aren't
you rather leaving the Red Admiral out of your calculations?"