THE RITUAL
"Well, it's a sensation all right, Major," said David as he stood in
front of the major's fire early in the morning after the ceremonies of
the presentation of sketches of the statue out at the Temple of Arts.
"Mrs. Matilda told me the news and helped me sandwich it into my speech
between that time and the open-up talk. People had asked so often who was
giving the statue, laid it on so many different people, and wondered over
it to such an extent all fall that they had got tired and forgot that
they didn't know all about it. When I presented it in the name of
Caroline Darrah Brown in memory of her mother and her grandfather,
General Darrah, you could have heard a pin drop for a few seconds, then
the applause was almost a sob. It was as dramatic a thing as has been
handed this town in many a day. Still it was a bit sky-rockety, don't you
think--keeping it like that and--"
"David," interrupted the major quickly, "she never intended to tell it.
She had done the business part of it through her solicitors. She _never_
wanted us to know. I persuaded her to let it be presented in her name,
myself, just before Matilda went out with you. She shrinks--"
"Wait a minute, Major, don't get the two sides of my brain crossed. You
persuaded her--she isn't in town is she?--don't tell me she's here
herself!" And David ruffled his auburn forelock with a gesture of
perplexity.
"Yes," answered the major, "Caroline Darrah Brown is here and is, I hope,
going to stay for a time at least. I wanted to tell you about it
yesterday but I hadn't seen her and I--"
"And, David dear," interrupted Mrs. Buchanan who had been standing by
with shining eyes waiting for an opening to break in on Kildare's
astonishment with some of the details of her happiness over her
discovery. "I didn't tell you last night for the major didn't want me to,
but she _is_ so lovely! She's your inherited friend, for your mother and
hers were devoted to each other. I do want you to love her and everybody
help me to make her feel at home. Don't mind about her father being
a--you know a--a carpetbagger. Three of her Darrah grandfathers have
been governors of this state; just think about them and don't talk about
her father or any carpet--you know. Please be good to her!"
"Be good to her," exclaimed David heartily, "just watch me! I am loving
her already for making you so happy by this down-from-the-sky drop, Mrs.
Matilda. And we'll all be careful about the carpetbags; won't even
mention a rug; lots of talk can be got out of the dead governors I'm
thinking. My welcome's getting more enthusiastic every moment. When can I
hand it to her?"
"She's resting now and I think she ought to be quiet for to-day, because
she has been under a strain," answered Mrs. Buchanan as she glanced
tenderly at a closed door across the hall. "Oh, I'm so glad you think you
are going to love her in spite of--of--"
"The Brown graft on the Darrah family tree?" finished David quizzically.
His eyes danced with delighted amusement across her puffs at the major as
he added, "Must have been silversmiths dangling on most of his ancestral
branches, judging from his propensity for making dollars; a million or
two, stocks, bonds, any kind of flimflam,--eh, Major?"
"Yes," answered the major as he blew a ring of smoke into the air, "yes,
just about that; any kind of flimflam. And I can not conceive of Peters
Brown rejoicing at having thirty thousand of those dollars put into an In
Memoriam to the women who sniffed at him and his carpetbags for a good
twenty years after the war. But the child doesn't take any of that in.
Those were twenty rich years he put in in reconstructing us, but when he
took those same heavy carpetbags North he took Mary Caroline Darrah, the
prettiest woman in the county with him. This girl--as I have said before,
isn't love a strange thing? And you say the populace was astonished?"
"Almost to the point of paralyzation," answered David as he filled a
stray pipe with some of the major's most choice heart-leaf tobacco. "But
we managed to open up the picture show all right. The entire hive of busy
art-bees was there in a queer kind of clothes; but proud of it. They
acted as if we were dirt under their feet. They smiled on the whole
glad-crowd of us with pity and let us rave over the wrong pictures. The
portrait of Mrs. Peyton Kendrick by the great Susie Carrie Snow
is--er--well, a little more of it shows than seems natural about the left
off arm, but it's a Susie Carrie all right. You ought to have gone,
Major, you would take with the art-gang, but we didn't; we were too
afraid of them. After we had been shooed in front of most of the pictures
and told how to see things in them that weren't there at all, Hob Capers
said:
"'Let's all go down to the University Club and get drunk to forget 'em.'
That's why Mrs. Matilda came home so late."
"And I want Hobson to be nice to her too," continued Mrs. Buchanan as if
she had not been interrupted in planning for her guest. "And Tom and
Peyton Kendrick. I'll ask them to come and see her right away."
"Don't! Wait a bit, Mrs. Matilda," exclaimed David. "Hob saw a mysterious
girl in an orchid hat out in the park day before yesterday. He says his
heart creaked with expansion at just the glimpse of a chin he got from
under her veil. Suppose she's the girl. Let him have first innings."
"David," remarked the major, "flag the sun, moon and stars in their
courses and signal time to reverse a day or a year, but don't try to turn
aside a maker of matches from her machinations."
David laughed as the major's wife shook her head at him in gentle
reproof, and he asked interestedly:
"When may we come to call, madam? I judge the lady is under your roof?"
"Soon, dear. She is very tired to-day, and I feel sure you will--"
"Miss Matilda," called Tempie from the hall, "Miss Phoebe is holdin' the
phone fer you. She's at Mis' Cantrell's and she wants ter speak with you
right away."
"Wait, wait, don't answer her right now--ring her off, Tempie! If she has
trouble getting you, Mrs. Matilda, and you keep her talking I can catch
her. Let me get a good start and then answer. Good-by! Keep talking to
her!" And with determination in his eyes David took his hurried
departure.
"Good-by, good luck--and good hunting!" called the major after him.
And with the greatest skilfulness Mrs. Buchanan held Phoebe in hand for
enough minutes to insure David's capture before she returned to the
library.
"Major," she said as she rubbed her cheek against his velvet coat sleeve,
"why do you suppose Phoebe doesn't love David? I can't understand it."
"Matilda," answered the major as he blew a little curl over one of the
soft puffs of her white hair, "you were born in a day when women were all
run into a love-mold. They are poured into other assorted fancy shapes in
these times, but heat from the right source melts them all the same. We
can trust David's ardor, I think."
"Yes, I believe you are right," she answered judicially, "and Phoebe
inherits lovingness from her mother. I feel that she is more affectionate
than she shows, and I just go on and love her anyway. She lets me do it
very often."
And from the depth of her unsophisticated heart Mrs. Buchanan had evolved
a course of action that had gone far in comforting a number of the lonely
years through which Phoebe Donelson had waded. She had been young, and
high-spirited and intensely proud when she had begun to fight her own
battles in her sixteenth year. Many loving hands of her mother's and
father's old friends had been held out to her with a bounty of
protection, but she had gone her course and carved her own fortune. Her
social position had made things easy for her in a way and now her society
editorship of the leading journal had become a position from which she
wielded much power over the gay world that delighted in her wit and
beauty, took her autocratic dictums in most cases, and followed her vogue
almost absolutely.
Her independence prompted her to live alone in a smart down-town
apartment with her old negro mammy, but her affections demanded that she
take refuge at all times under the sheltering wings of Mrs. Buchanan, who
kept a dainty nest always in readiness for her.
The tumultuous wooing of David Kildare had been going on since her early
teens under the delighted eyes of the major, who in turn both furthered
and hindered the suit by his extremely philosophical advice.
Phoebe was the crystallization of an infusion of the blood of many
cultured, high-bred, haughty women which had been melted in the retort of
a stern necessity and had come out a rather brilliant specimen of the
modern woman, if a bit hard. Viewed in some ways she became an alarming
augury of the future, but there are always potent counter-forces at work
in life's laboratory, and the kind of forces that David Kildare brought
to bear in his wooing were never exactly to be calculated upon. And so
the major spent much time in the contemplation of the problem presented.
And when she had come in after a late lunch to call upon their guest, it
had been intensely interesting to the major to regard the effect of the
meeting of Phoebe's and Caroline Darrah's personalities. Caroline's
lovely, shy child's eyes had melted with delight under Phoebe's straight,
gray, friendly glances and her fascination for the tall, strong, radiant
woman, who sat beside her, had been so obvious that the major had
chuckled to himself under his breath as he watched them make friends,
under Mrs. Matilda's poorly concealed anxiety that they should at once
adopt cordial relations.
"And so he consented to undertake the commission for you because he was
interested?" Phoebe was asking as they talked about the sketches of the
statue. A very great sculptor was doing the work for Caroline Darrah
Brown, and it interested Phoebe to hear how he had consented to accept so
unimportant a commission.
"Yes," answered Caroline in her exquisite voice which showed only the
faintest liquid trace of her southern inheritance. "I told him all about
it and he became interested. He is very great, and simple, and kind. He
made it easy to show him how I felt. I couldn't tell him much except
how I felt; but I think it has something of--that--in--it. Don't you
think so?" As she spoke she laid her white hand on the arm of Phoebe's
chair and leaned forward with her dewy tender eyes looking straight into
the gray ones opposite her.
For a moment Phoebe returned the glance with a quiet seriousness, then
her eyes lighted a second, were suffused with a quick moisture, and with
a proud gesture she bent forward, laying both hands on Caroline's
shoulders as she pressed a deep kiss on the girl's red lips.
"I do think so," she answered with a low laugh as she arose to her feet,
drew Caroline up into the bend of her arm and faced Mrs. Buchanan and the
major. "I know the loveliness in the statue is what the great man got out
of the loveliness in your heart, and the major and Mrs. Matilda think so,
too. And I'm going quick because I must; and I'm coming back as soon as I
can because I'm going to find you here--that is _partly_, Major," and
before they could stop her she had gone on down the hall and they heard
her answer Jeff's farewell as he let her out the door.
"That, Caroline Darrah Brown, was your first and most important
conquest," observed the major. "Phoebe has a white rock heart but a
crystal cracked therefrom is apt to turn into a jewel of price. Hers
is a blood-ruby friendship that pays for the wearing and cherishing. But
it's time for the nap Mrs. Matilda decides for me to take and I must
leave you ladies to your dimity talk." With which he betook himself to
his room, still plainly pleased at the result of Phoebe's call on the
stranger.
The two women thus left to their own devices spent a delightful half-hour
wandering over the house and discussing its furnishings and arrangements.
Mrs. Buchanan never tired of the delights of her town home. The house was
very stately and old-world, with its treasures of rare ancestral rosewood
and mahogany that she had brought in from the Seven Oaks Plantation. The
rooms in the country home had been so crowded with treasures of bygone
generations that they were scarcely dismantled by the furnishing of
the town house.
She was in her glory of domesticity, and as she passed from one room to
another she told Caroline bits of interesting history about this piece or
that. In her naiveté she let the girl see into the long hard years that
had been a hand-to-hand struggle for her and the major on their worn
farm lands out in the beautiful Harpeth Valley.
The cropping out of phosphate on the bare fields had brought a
comfortable fortune in its train to the old soldier farmer and they had
moved into this town house to spend the winter in greater accessibility
to their friends. Her own particular little world had welcomed her with
delight, and Caroline could see that she was taking a second bellehood as
if it had been an uninterrupted reign.
Most of the financiers of the city were the major's old friends and they
managed enormously advantageous contracts with mining companies for him,
and had taken him into the schemes of the mighty with the most manifest
cordiality.
His study became the scene of much important plot and counter-plot. They
found in his mind the quality which had led them to outwit many an enemy
when he scouted ahead of their tattered regiment, still available when
the enemy appeared under commercial or civic front. Also it naturally
happened that his library gradually became the hunting-grounds for Mrs.
Matilda's young people, who were irresistibly drawn into the circle of
his ever ready sympathy.
The whole tale and its telling was absorbingly interesting to Caroline
Darrah Brown and she listened with enraptured attention to it all. She
repeated carefully the names of her mother's friends as they came up in
the conversation; and she was pathetically eager to know all about this
world she had come back into, from, what already seemed to her, her birth
in a strange land. Two days in this country of her mother, and the
enchantment of traditions that had been given to her unborn was already
at work with its spell!
And so they rambled around and talked, unheeding the time until the early
twilight began to fall and Mrs. Buchanan was summoned by Jeff to a
consultation in the domestic regions with the autocratic Tempie.
Left to herself, Caroline Darrah wandered back again through the rooms
from one object to another that inspired the stories. It was like
fairy-land to her and she was in a long dream of pleasure. Out of the
shadows she seemed to be drawing her wistful young mother, and hand in
hand they were going over the past together.
When it was quite deep into the twilight she sauntered back to the
crackling comfort of the major's fragrant logs. A discussion with Jeff
over his toilet had delayed the major in his bedroom and she found the
library deserted, but hospitable with firelight.
How long she had been musing and castle-building in the coals she
scarcely knew, when a step on the polished floor made her look up, and
with a little exclamation she rose to her full, slim, young height and
turned to face a man who had come in with the unannounced surety of a
member of the household. He was tall, broad and dark, and his
knickerbockers were splashed with mud and covered with clinging burrs and
pine-needles. One arm was lashed to his side with a silk sling and he
held a huge bunch of glowing red berries in his free hand. They were
branches of the red, coral-strung buck bushes and Caroline had never seen
them before. Their gorgeousness fairly took her breath and she exclaimed
with the ingenuous delight of a child.
"How lovely, how lovely!" she cried as she stretched out her hands for
them. "I never saw any before. Do they grow here?"
"Yes," answered the man with a gleam of amusement in his dark eyes, "yes,
they came from Seven Oaks. The fields are full of them now. Do you want
them?" And as he spoke he laid the bunch in her arms.
"And they smell woodsy and piny and delicious. Thank you! I--they are
lovely. I--" She paused in wild confusion, looked around the room as if
in search of some one, and ended by burying her face in the berries. "I
don't know where Major Buchanan is," she murmured helplessly.
"Well, it doesn't matter," he said with a comforting smile as he came up
beside her on the rug. "They'll introduce us when they come. I'm Andrew
Sevier and the berries are yours, so what matter?"
"Oh," said Caroline Darrah in an awed voice, and as she spoke she raised
her head from the wood flowers and her eyes to his face, "oh, are you
really Andrew Sevier?"
"Yes, _really_," he answered with another smile and a slightly puzzled
expression in his own dark eyes.
"But I read everything I can find about you, and the papers say you are
ill in Panama. I've been so worried about you. I saw your play last week
in New York and I couldn't enjoy it for wondering how you were. I
wouldn't read your poem in this month's _Review_ because I was afraid you
were dead--and I didn't know it. I'm so relieved." With which astonishing
remark she drew a deep breath and laid her cheek against the field
bouquet.
"I am--that is I was smashed up in Panama until David came down and
brought me home. It was awfully good of you to--to know that I--that
I--" Andrew Sevier paused as mirth, wonder and gratitude spread in
confusion over his suntanned face.
"How did it happen? Was it very dreadful?" And again those distractingly
solicitous eyes, full of sympathetic anxiety, were raised to his. Andrew
shook himself mentally to see if it could possibly be a dream he was
having, and a little thrill shot through him at the reality of it all.
"Nothing interesting; end of a bridge collapsed and put a rib or two out
of commission," he managed to answer.
"I _knew_ it was something dreadful," said Caroline Darrah Brown as she
moved a step nearer him. "I was really unhappy about it and I wondered if
all the other people who read your poems and watch for them and--and love
them like I do, were worried, too. But I concluded that they would know
how to find out about you; only I didn't. I'm glad you are here safe and
that I know it."
The puzzled expression in Andrew Sevier's face deepened. Of course he had
become more or less accustomed to the interest which his work had caused
to be attached to his personality, and this was not the first time he had
had a stranger read the poet into the man on first sight. They had even
gone so far as to expect him to talk in blank verse he felt sure,
especially when his admirer had been a member of the opposite and fair
sex, but a thing like this had never happened to him before. It was, at
the least, disturbing to have a lovely woman rise out of the major's very
hearthstone and claim him as a familiar spirit with the exquisite
frankness of a child. It smacked of the wine of wizardry. He glanced at
her a moment and was on the point of making a tentative inquiry when the
major came into the room.
"Well, Andy boy, you're in from the fields, I see. How's the farm? Every
thing shipshape?" As he spoke the major shot a keen glance from under his
beetling old brows at the pair and wisely let the situation develop
itself.
Andrew answered his salutation promptly, then turned an amused glance
on the girl at his side.
"He isn't going to introduce us," she laughed with a friendly little look
up into his face. "I ought to have done it myself when you did, but I was
so astonished--and relieved to find you. I'm Caroline Darrah Brown."
The words were low and laughing and warm with a sweet friendliness, but
they crashed through the room like the breath of a swarm of furies.
Andrew Sevier's face went white and drawn on the instant, and every
muscle in his body stiffened to a tense rigidity. His dark eyes narrowed
themselves to slits and glowed like the coals.
The major's very blood stopped in his veins and his fine old face looked
drawn and gray as he stretched out his hand and laid it on Caroline's
young shoulder. Not a word came to his lips as he looked in Andrew's
face and waited.
And as he waited a wondrous thing and piercing sweet unfolded itself
under his keen old eyes and sank like a balm into his wise old heart.
From the two deep purple pools of womanhood that were raised to his, shy
with homage of him and unconscious of their own tender reverencing,
Andrew Sevier drew a deep draught into his very soul. Slowly the color
mounted into his face, his eyes opened themselves and a wonderful smile
curled his lips. He held out his hand and took her slender fingers into a
strong clasp and held them for a long moment. Then with a smile at the
major, which was a mixture of dignity tinged with an infinite sadness, he
bent over and gently kissed the white hand as he let it go. The little
ceremony had more chivalry than she understood.
"Its part of our ritual of welcome I'm claiming," he said lightly as she
blushed rose pink and the divine shyness deepened in her eyes. She again
buried her face in the berries.
Then with a proud look into Andrew's face the major laid his hand on the
young man's bandaged arm and bent and raised Caroline's hand to his lips.
"It's a ritual, my dear," he said, "that I'm honored in observing with
him. Friendship these days has need of rituals of ratification and the
pomp of ceremonials to give it color. There's danger of its becoming
prosaic. Jefferson, turn on the lights."