OF MIXED BLOOD.
Upon crossing the threshold of the house, Derrice found herself in an
interior evidently copied from the French. The floors were of hard
wood, a few handsome rugs lay about them; there was an abundance of
carving and gilding in the drawing-room that they entered, two gilt
clocks, two mirrors, and a trio of high-backed yellow silk sofas.
A number of white and gold spindle-legged chairs stood in various
graceful attitudes about the room; there were but few hangings and
draperies, and scarcely a cushion to be seen.
"I hate dust," said Miss Gastonguay, in an explanatory way, "and
upholstered furniture and gewgaws all over parlour walls make me ill.
The Japanese are the only people who know how to furnish a house. You
like this room, don't you?"
"Very much," said Derrice, going up to an aromatic fire of small
sticks, burning on a white-tiled hearth.
"These spring winds nip like pincers," said Miss Gastonguay,
stretching out her own hands to the blaze, and stifling a yawn. "Dear
me, I wish five o'clock would come."
Derrice slightly raised her eyebrows.
"That is only the second question you have asked," said Miss
Gastonguay. "Yes, I always have tea at five,--a fashion I picked up in
England. Whether I am here, or not, the tray comes in. If I don't get
it, the twins have it."
"Ah,--you have children in the house."
"Yes, a pair, sixty-two and sixty-five,--brothers, former small and
well-to-do storekeepers in the town--ruined by drink--housed in the
asylum for the poor--rescued by me--faithful, but tiresome servants
ever since. There's one of them."
An old serving-man came tiptoeing into the room. He pretended not
to see Miss Gastonguay for an instant, then he started affectedly,
made her a little bow, and, going to a distant corner, brought from
it a tiny white table, and set it before her. Then lifting the top
of a white silk ottoman, he drew from a box inside an exquisitely
embroidered cloth, that he spread over the table.
Derrice, whose life for the last few days had been one of tedious
monotony, watched with interest this self-conscious high priest, who,
with his air of profound mystery, so slowly forwarded the ceremonies
connected with the brewing of a cup of tea.
"Has Miss Chelda come in yet, Prosperity?" asked Miss Gastonguay,
abruptly.
"No, ma'am," he said, hanging his head like a sheepish, fooling boy,
and hurrying from the room.
"Let us have the table in the window," exclaimed Miss Gastonguay, "so
we can take in the view," and at imminent danger of upsetting it she
seized the fragile article of furniture and dragged it across the room.
The gray-haired Prosperity, coming in with a tray, looked about him
in bewilderment, until, finally discovering the table near the long,
narrow window, he deposited his burden on it, and tilted himself in a
sideways fashion from the room.
Miss Gastonguay seated herself, silently pointing to a chair opposite.
Derrice obediently took up her position close to the window. A
blustering, imperial March sun was rolling a purple eye over the hills
across the river as if choosing the fittest place for his descent to
rest, and suddenly poured a sheaf of blood and yellow rays upon the top
of the highest house.
Miss Gastonguay leaned back in her chair, her face contracted as if in
physical pain. "How unearthly it is,--how pitiful are we!"
Derrice turned to her in slight surprise.
"We are nothing but earthworms," she said, vehemently, "nothing--"
and the little golden spoon in her hand trembled visibly. "Crawling
ignobly over the earth's surface. Here to-day, gone to-morrow, and
can't get what we want while we stay--Do you take sugar in your tea?"
"Thank you--"
"We are too materialistic, too luxurious in our tastes," Miss
Gastonguay went on. "I think of this great nation and tremble, so
young, so prosperous,--what is to be the end of us? Are we to follow
Greece and Rome?"
Derrice in quiet interest stirred her tea and examined the wrinkled,
composite face opposite,--at times so square, so set, so taciturn; at
others so vivacious, so mobile, so open in expression. "I have always
fancied that New England was a poor sort of a place," she said, finally.
"I dare say," observed her hostess, ironically, "you thought our towns
were desolate, our farms deserted, our young men gone West, that the
people who remained lived in slab houses with an occasional thing
called an 'apple bee' by way of amusement."
"Well, not exactly."
"I say the trouble is not poverty, but abundance," responded Miss
Gastonguay, warmly. "There are poor districts, I will not deny it,
especially in back-woods localities or away from railroads, but I do
not know that life. I have been brought up in towns. I wish I had
not. If I had my life to live over, I would choose the cabin in the
wilderness. Do you know who my most prized ancestor was?"
"No, I do not."
"Go look at him," and Miss Gastonguay waved her hand toward the
opposite end of the apartment.
Derrice put her delicate Limoges cup on the table, and sauntered away.
There was the explanation of Miss Gastonguay's mingled masculinity
and femininity. From a massive gilt frame, a magnificent specimen of
physical manhood, clad in full Indian costume, looked calmly down at
the Louis Quinze furniture of the room.
"Kanawita, a great Tarratine chief," called Miss Gastonguay, "in copper
breastplate and festoons of beads and wampum. In early days Louis
Gastonguay built a truck-house here to trade with the Indians. His son
fell in love with the daughter of Kanawita. Louis promptly shut him up
in a block-house fort to cure him of his madness, but the lad was too
clever for him, and ran away and got the girl, who was called Chelda.
He married her, and then old Louis forgave and invited them here to the
log-house that stood on the site of this château. A baby was born and
named Louis for him, and I am the granddaughter of this second Louis,
and my niece who lives with me is the child of my late brother, Charles
Gastonguay,--but do not be afraid of me, my dear, for though I am half
squaw and ought to spend a part of my time in the woods, I shall not
scalp you unless you contradict me."
She had come to stand beside Derrice, and her face now glowed with
humour and kindliness reflected from the benign, intelligent features
of the aged chief above them.
"Oh, Kanawita," she continued, after the manner of an invocation,
"benighted Indian, yet honest man, what deeds to make you blush
have been perpetrated on this spot where you used to hunt the deer
and angle for the wily fish! These Puritans,--" and she turned to
Derrice,--"these sneaking, canting Puritans, ancestors of your husband,
how I hate them. Their Bibles and psalm-books in one hand, their
measuring tapes in the other. Singing, snivelling, cheating, and
starting in horror from the French and English who drank, diced, swore,
and were honest men and not hypocrites. Are you a Puritan, my dear?"
"Not that I know of. My father once said that we were of mixed French
and American blood. We have no relatives--"
"French," said her companion, joyfully, and she acted as if she were
about to embrace her, but was interrupted by Prosperity, who came
trotting into the room.
"Mrs. Jonah Potts is coming up the avenoo."
Miss Gastonguay immediately fell into a temper. "Confusion to that
woman! Chelda isn't at home and she will ask for me. She knows I hate
her. Prosperity, tell her I'm out,--no, I won't lie for her, and if
she wants to see me, she'll force her way in, for her impudence is
colossal. But do you, my dear, escape--" and she pushed Derrice toward
the door. "Run, fly, go anywhere you like. You wouldn't like her,--a
great florid creature, whom I always imagine sitting on her children
and killing them. I assure you, she choked and smothered and dosed the
sickly creatures to death, with her perfumes and her cushions, and the
heat of her house. Faugh, I loathe her. Prosperity, if you don't go
tell her to take a ship for Tarshish, I'll dismiss you to-morrow."
The old man, with signs of suppressed excitement, withdrew to the
hall, and Derrice gazed from the inflamed visage of her hostess to
the mountain of flesh waddling in, under a high-coloured bonnet and
flaunting feathers.
Derrice slipped by Prosperity, who had his hand over his giggling
mouth, and passed into one room after another on the ground floor of
the house.
She might have imagined herself in the dwelling of a French country
gentleman. The same elegant reserve in the matter of furnishing from
a well-filled purse was everywhere apparent. There was enough for
comfort, even for luxury, but no crowding, no superfluity of ornament.
Everywhere were polished floors, handsome rugs, and carefully chosen
paintings, all on foreign subjects and all brought from the mother
country by the different members of the house. She looked into a
dining-room, where, on a huge mahogany table, undisfigured by a
covering, stood a bowl of exquisite roses from the hothouse of her
hostess. Carved cabinets stood about this room, and with a lingering
step she paused to examine some of their treasures of faience, these,
too, brought from over the sea.
Near by was the music-room, with high-backed stools, green velvet
benches against the walls, and a variety of musical instruments.
Derrice was no musician, and drawing her fingers gently over the
keyboard of the grand piano, she went past the rows of violins,
guitars, and banjos, and a recess containing a small organ, until she
reached the narrow, severely carved wooden entrance to a library.
Here she lingered for a long time, but her love for adventure being
stronger than her love for literature, she left behind her the cool,
quiet atmosphere of the room, with its faint sweet smell of leather
from the rich bindings of the books, and again made her way to the wide
hall that ran through the house.
"Do you think I might go up-stairs?" she asked, pausing on the lower
step of the staircase.
"Yes, miss," said old Prosperity, and he stopped his slow walk, and
uncrossed the hands behind his back in order to make a gesture that
would urge her on. This was an unusually favoured guest, he saw, and
one whom his mistress delighted to honour.
"Miss Gastonguay likes to have people go over the house,--that is, if
she asks them," he added.
Derrice went slowly up-stairs. She admired this house. Here, in the
midst of a New England community, was breathed the fragrance of the
Old World. It was a living expression of the tastes of the people long
passed away. There was nothing glaringly new about it, there was a
complete absence of anything deforming or ungraceful. Even the night
lamp on the bracket in the hall above was of exquisite workmanship.
By scrupulous attention to detail, a most symmetrical whole had been
obtained.
She passed the open doors of bedrooms, all long, white, cool, and
dainty, all having snowy beds draped with curtains in the French style.
Into these she did not enter, but contented herself with pacing up
and down the hall, and looking from the windows at the wintry March
landscape, until Prosperity came up the staircase and spoke to her
between the railings.
"If you go up to the cupola, miss, you'll have a fine view. There is
the staircase," and he pointed to the back of the hall.
Derrice followed his advice. A good-sized cupola had been, by some
injudicious member of the family, built like an excrescence on the
roof of the old château. Going up the dark winding stairway with her
head bent, she was on the threshold of the cup-shaped apartment almost
before she was aware of it. She heard a soft rustle, then, gazing
blindly into the soft haze of red light to discover the cat or dog
hidden in the room, found instead that she had invaded the retreat of
two people who had evidently retired here to be alone.
With a swift "I beg your pardon," she was about to retreat, carrying
with her a picture of the handsome clergyman, lounging on a red velvet
sofa in dreamy, contented ease, with one arm extended in an aimless
curve toward a tall young lady who stood calm, erect, and triumphant
between him and the doorway.
But an appeal recalled her, "Mrs. Mercer, do not go away," and Mr.
Huntington rose slowly; "let me introduce you to Miss Chelda."
So this was Miss Gastonguay's niece. Derrice shook hands with her,
looked into the long, narrow eyes that had taken on their usual veiled
expression, and watched her curiously, as she lifted a graceful arm to
draw back some of the crimson velvet curtains obscuring the windows.
Derrice sank into a low, padded seat, a contrast to the stiff-backed
chairs below. Probably this was the sanctum of the petted niece, and,
with inward disquiet, she wondered how soon she could with propriety
withdraw.
Chelda turned to her with a conventional remark upon her lips, but
it was not uttered. By mutual consent no one spoke, so touching was
the beauty of the twilight. A ruddy glow enveloped the light-roofed
town, the ice-blocked river, the blue bay, the dull and sombre wood
behind the house, and beautified even the snow and mud of the mottled
landscape beyond.
"I must go," said Derrice, rising suddenly. "It is getting late."
"Nonsense," said a brisk voice in the stairway, and Miss Gastonguay
came bustling up. "Good gracious, Chelda, I thought you were still
out,--and you too, Mr. Huntington."
"I could not tear myself away," he said, his face illumined by a
reminiscent afterglow.
"I am glad you couldn't. Did you and Chelda have your drive?"
"Yes, aunt," said the young lady.
"Then you came up here for cake and wine," said Miss Gastonguay,
glancing at a bottle in a filigree case, and a silver cake basket on
a tiny table. "You might offer Mrs. Mercer some. I don't believe she
finished her tea."
"May I?" said Chelda, gracefully.
"No, thank you," and Derrice shook her light head.
"That whale of a woman drove her up-stairs," said Miss Gastonguay.
"What do you think Mrs. Jonah wants now, Chelda?"
"I could never guess, aunt."
"To give a charity ball, to relieve the distress of the mill hands
burnt out at Indian Gardens. 'Why don't you put your hand in your
pocket, and pull out a donation?' I asked. 'What do you pretend to
be giving to them for, when all you care for is to get up a midnight
frolic for a lot of old married women who want to frisk about with
young men, in gowns they ought to be ashamed of? They ought to be home
taking care of their children. Go away with you; I have nothing for
you. What I have for the mill hands I'll send direct.'"
"You must have annoyed her, aunt."
"I did; she went away in a temper."
"It is a pity, aunt. Mrs. Jonah is the only one of the set we have not
quarrelled with this year," said Chelda, with, however, but a very
faint regret in her tone.
"She was delicious," said Miss Gastonguay, laughing. "She said, 'Jane
Gastonguay, you had better put on your peaked cap, take your tomahawk,
and point for the woods.' Now wasn't that a delicate reminder of our
ancestry, Mr. Huntington?"
"Very delicate, considering its source."
Derrice got up. "Good-bye, Miss Gastonguay, and thank you for a very
pleasant afternoon."
"Tut, tut," and her hostess refused to take the offered hand. "You
needn't try to make me think you are anxious to get back to Hippolyta
Prymmer. Dinner will be ready in an hour. You'll stay, too, Mr.
Huntington?"
The clergyman did not reply. Like one mesmerised he turned to Chelda.
A subdued pleasure lighted up her face, and, murmuring, "Of course he
will," she followed her aunt and Derrice down the staircase.