Miss Townsend was “At Home”—and so were the roses, the strawberries,
all the delicate eggshell china and the old heavy silver. She was giving
her annual garden-party. And that she might entertain her guests
delicately and amply—as a Southern woman should—it had been shortened
commons at Rosehill for many a week. Not the servants—they had fared as
they always did, and so had the beggars who had gone to the kitchen
door—but the mistress of Rosehill had discontinued the late-dinner
meal—which she called “supper,” and which she liked—and had gone to
bed each night at dusk, and had refrained from lighting a candle when
sleep would not come. That had been a veritable sacrifice on the
function-altar of hospitality. Next to drinking buttermilk the thing
that Miss Julia most enjoyed was reading novels in bed—by the soft,
clear light of four or five wax candles. And she, complete hostess that,
true to her blood, she was, had imposed on herself other personal
curtailments and economies that cost her less but saved her purse more.
She had not gone to a concert or seen a play during her “retreat” of
economy. But, as it chanced, there had been no play that she much wished
to see at a Washington theater just then. She was an inveterate
theater-goer and she rarely denied herself a matinée that called her.
She always went alone, but she always sat in the best seats, and Uncle
Lysander, his dear black face shining with importance and his great
splay hands encased in snow-white gloves, always waited outside to
escort his mistress home, whether the matinée ended in the dusk and dark
of winter or in the clear light of summer—if so side-by-side a word as
“escort” can be used of his attendance close behind Miss Julia. And a
“good” concert she missed very rarely indeed. Miss Julia did not care
for classical music, but she liked to think that she did, and she and
her best bonnet, and her rose-point-lace collar, fastened carefully (not
to injure the priceless mesh) by a gold and cameo breast-pin that had
belonged to Martha Washington, were as sure to enrich the parquet seats
as Brahms or Grieg or Haydn or Liszt were to appear in the program. In
winter she wore gray or dun-colored velvet (first made in Paris for a
Mrs. Townsend before Robert Edward Lee was born); in summer
thin-textured silver or lilac silk. In winter she wore a costly Cashmere
shawl, in summer one of heavily embroidered white Canton silk. The
Cashmere shawl had a skimp, narrow, parti-colored fringe; the Chinese
one had a sumptuous, knotted fringe of its own time-deepened ivory silk.
But she always wore the gold and cameo breast-pin and the deep collar of
rose-point; she always wore gloves of delicate kid, made by a famous
French manufacturer, and exactly matching her gowns; in winter her black
velvet bonnet (always the same bonnet) nodded an ostrich feather that
matched her gown of the occasion as perfectly as did her gloves; in
summer, her bonnet of white chip paid the hue of her dress the same
ostrich feather compliment. And winter or summer, she wore
uncompromisingly thick, stout leather boots—but they were well cut and
with heels as high as a fashionable girl’s. She always took her program
home with her. She had volumes and volumes bound in limp morocco. She
often spoke of them—and sometimes she sent Lysander to purchase a piano
score of some “morceau” that had charmed her, or that she thought had.
But, to her credit, she never attempted their execution on her own
yellow-keyed harpsichord. She “liked to have them, to think them over.”
Her own greatly favorite musical compositions were “The Maiden’s Prayer”
and “Her Bright Smile Haunts Me Still.” She played them both
tenderly—if not too brilliantly. And “Dixie” was her anthem.
The day was perfect. The Potomac ran a “changeable-silk” glitter of blue
and gold. The sky, as blue as the river, was soft and fluffed with
billows of snowy clouds. The grass was almost as smooth and green as a
well-kept English lawn, and the old red house was a-nod with roses, its
very bricks fragrant from the magnolias nailed there. Great beds of
mignonette cut great swathes of gray through the green of the grass, and
lay like soft, thick rugs at the edge of the house.
Miss Julia, wearing a befrilled cream organdie delicately printed with
pink wild-roses and forget-me-nots more turquoise-tinted than growing
forget-me-nots ever are, stood under the giant juniper tree receiving
her bidden guests. The frills of her full gown were narrowly edged with
lace, and she wore Madame Washington’s brooch, pinning her befrilled
organdie fichu; but the collar and heirloom of super rose-point was laid
away in its tissue and lavender. To-day she wore brightly beaded bronze
slippers, very high-heeled, pointed-toed. At home she never wore boots;
beyond her gates she never wore anything else. A pair of shoes she did
not own, and never had. She wore many valuable rings and black lace
mitts on her fine white hands, and held in her right hand a valuable
lace handkerchief, which nothing would have induced her to use for the
purpose for which handkerchiefs are supposed to be made and bought. It
had been “in the family” for six generations, and it had never been
_used_. In her other hand she carried a tortoise-shell lorgnette which
she never used either, for she had no need to—her sight still was
perfectly good—and Julia Townsend was about the last woman in the world
to affect an infirmity that did not afflict her. She had considerable
manner, but no affectations. Her manner, always elegant, sometimes more
than a little starched, was not a pose. Her manner was she, and belonged
to her as legitimately as did the many good clothes she had inherited,
as she had it, with birthright from several generations of Virginia
ancestors. She also carried in her left hand an exceptionally fine,
long-stemmed, very fragrant rose, which she sniffed frequently. If she
shook hands with a guest, the lace handkerchief went for the moment to
keep company with the handsome lorgnette and the big red rose. She did
not shake hands with every guest that she welcomed, but to all her
welcome was gracious, and she did shake hands with each guest that bade
her adieu, and contrived to convey with the lingering touch of her old,
maidenly fingers how much she regretted the departure.
Every one she had privileged to do so had come. Almost always it was so.
Few ever missed an opportunity to visit Miss Julia at Rosehill. There
was a perfume and repose both about the woman and her home that were
strongly inviting, and that every one found strangely refreshing, and
that some also found surprisingly stimulating. And her invitations were
too scrupulously limited to be lightly disregarded. Miss Julia was
old-fashioned, and every one knew she was poor. (Indeed, she boasted of
it indirectly—too highly-bred to boast openly of anything—frankly
proud of her poverty, since it was part and piece of General Lee’s
defeat.) To be reported in the _Star_ as having been among Miss Julia
Townsend’s guests gave a social cachet which nothing in the capital
itself could give.
Every one who could be was at Rosehill today. And in several ways the
gathering was more catholic than a superficial intelligence might have
expected. It was natural enough that a poor public school teacher should
rub shoulders here with a California millionaire, and the well-known
actress seemed a not inappropriate guest, since her personal character
was as unsmirched as her complexion was natural, and the South always
has honored all the great arts. But a Jewish banker and his beautiful
daughter, a Punjabi prince and the Siamese Minister might have seemed to
some a little unaccountable.
Miss Townsend was a stanch Episcopalian, but she had no theological
narrowness. She respected Jews—if they were orthodox; she’d little
tolerance for any apostasy—“character” was the human quality she most
valued, and her love of beauty—especially the beauty of women—was
almost inordinate. That accounted for Moses Strauss and his lovely
daughter, Esther. The Siamese Minister and the Punjabi prince were not
beautiful, and neither had been in Washington long enough yet to have
established, or, on the other hand, to have lost, any great reputation
for personal or intellectual character. It was the fashion just then to
“know” all the Orientals one could—but that was no sesame to the door
of Rosehill. Miss Julia drew a very wide distinction between Africa and
Asia, and she liked to show that she did.
Four girls sat chatting idly a little way from the small
linen-and-lace-covered table they had impoverished of its cakes and
ice-creams and bonbons.
Molly Wheeler—her father was an Oregon Senator—Lucille Smith—hers was
on the supreme bench—and Mary Withrow, the daughter of the minister of
Washington’s most exclusive church—of course, an Episcopalian
church—were all dressed expensively in glistening white, as was almost
every woman here on this very hot day, and each wore a pretty and costly
hat. The fourth girl was hatless and her simpler gown was a soft but
vivid green.
“You look as if you’d grown here, Ivy,” Mary Withrow exclaimed not
unreasonably. For the English girl’s gown was just the color of the
young live-oak leaves that so interlaced above them where they sat,
great lush ferns growing thickly against the trees’ silver trunks, that
a sort of brilliant green twilight seemed all about them, although it
was scarcely a quarter past four yet.
“I wish I had,” the girl in green replied. “At least, I wish I lived
here.”
“Don’t you like Washington?” Lucille demanded sharply. The jurist’s
daughter was stanchly _and sharply_ loyal to Washington—grateful to it,
too, perhaps, for the Smiths had come to it _via_ several less pleasant
localities.
“I hate teaching kiddies,” Ivy said with an impatient shrug.
“But your own cousins are such dear little things,” Mary remonstrated
gently.
“I suppose they are,” Ivy Gilbert conceded, “dear little things, and
they certainly are my cousins—but a long way off. It isn’t the children
I object to—it’s having to teach them. I like Blanche fairly well, and
I’m fond of Dick—sometimes—and I daresay I’d be quite fond of them, if
I didn’t see them often, and never _had_ to.”
“You don’t like teaching?” Mary said, incredulously. “Oh, I’d love to,
more than anything else, if only I knew enough! And you don’t like to
teach? Truly?”
“I loathe it. You don’t know whether you’d like it or not—until you’ve
tried it. You’d know then. But you don’t have to ‘know enough’ or to
know much of anything. Education’s a very minor asset—at least for a
nursery governess, and I suspect for any other sort of teacher. There’s
only one thing you need: patience, patience, patience—and then
patience! Eternal patience! Cow-like, door-mat patience. Oh, I loathe
the whole show! Emma’s kind enough. Charley’s a dear. But I loathe it
all. I feel stuck in a ditch! And I want to move and to _be_. I want to
_taste_ life, and make some of it. But there, let’s talk about something
else!” The young, passionate voice broke off impatiently, and the girl
clutched a great fern from its root and began fanning herself with it
slowly. And the scarlet peppers she wore dangling at her breast, a
splendid splash of Oriental color on the exquisite jade of her linen
gown, shook passionately as she moved.
The other girls wore flowers—tea-roses and violets—as girls should.
But Ivy had robbed Miss Julia’s kitchen-garden of a handful of red, red
peppers, and fastened them in her gown. And odd as the garniture was, no
one had commented on it. Ivy Gilbert always was doing something “queer,”
and no one had exclaimed at her wearing of “vegetables.” And certainly
the scarlet peppers suited her. Her passionate, brunette face, with its
soft, mutinous, gold-brown eyes, its vivid, curved lips, its crown of
dark, curling hair, and its accentuation of darker eyebrows and
up-curling long lashes, looked more Spanish than English, as she sat
there in the bright green “twilight,” in her jade-green gown, and the
brilliant red peppers jolting each other at her breast.
Lucille hastened to change the subject.
“Why didn’t you come to Mrs. Trull’s breakfast?” she asked.
Ivy shrugged again.
“You don’t like Maggie Trull, do you?” Molly asked. “I do, so much; why
ever don’t you?”
“She kisses me!” Ivy said angrily, just as two men came through the
gleaming trees. “I hate to be kissed! It’s a loathsome, indecent thing.
I never can forgive any one who kisses me!”
The men had heard. The white-haired elder smiled a little under his
white mustache. But his younger companion gravely regarded the girl who
had spoken, and approval lit in his black, inscrutable eyes.
He, the younger man, too, looked a little Spanish, but less so than Ivy
Gilbert did. He was not tall, but fully of medium height: a very
handsome man, dark, beautifully built, scrupulously dressed, wearing his
good garments indifferently, the flower in his coat as red as the girl’s
scarlet peppers, his glance direct, noncommittal, a repose about him
which only many centuries of culture can give. His passive face was
clear-cut and strong and scarcely more brunette than Ivy’s own.
It was not the girl herself that arrested him first. It was what she
said—for it struck a century-old note in his being, and it answered
with a throb. He was twenty-seven, a citizen of the world. But he, too,
thought kissing an impertinence and a nastiness—and he never had
offered it, or suffered it.
Evidently a foreigner—he might have passed to many for an Italian, a
Rumanian, a Greek, a Spaniard, or a Russian—of birth. The birth was
indubitable, whatever the birthplace.
But one who had traveled far, and watched, would have recognized him as
what he was, Chinese.